Volume 077 min read
The Material
Module I · The Foundation
Objective
By the end of this volume you understand why the CCRU treated science fiction, cyberpunk, and the horror worlds of H. P. Lovecraft not as mere entertainment but as material for thought, often taken more seriously than academic philosophy. You know which motifs the group drew from these sources and why fiction became for them a means of knowledge. With that you close the foundation module and hold, alongside the theory, the imaginary material out of which the CCRU built its mythology.
Exposition
One basic trait of the group has to be clear first, because it governs the choice of its sources. The CCRU drew no fixed line between high theory and popular fiction. For them a novel by William Gibson was no lesser bearer of knowledge than a text by Deleuze, and a story by Lovecraft could say more about the constitution of reality than a philosophical treatise. That equal footing was programmatic. It followed from the conviction that fiction doesn't miss the truth but produces it in its own way. Where academic philosophy describes the world, fiction designs worlds and thereby releases forces that act back on the real one. That conviction will find its concept in Module Three under the name hyperstition. Here what counts is that it governs the group's choice of material.
Start with cyberpunk, because it supplied the image of the present in which the CCRU located itself. Cyberpunk is a current of science fiction that emerged in the early eighties, its principal work William Gibson's novel Neuromancer of 1984. Cyberpunk designed a future that was not clean and utopian but dirty, dense, and dominated by corporations. The state has faded, global companies have taken its place. Technology is everywhere and grown into bodies, the boundary between human and machine is porous. Over it all lies cyberspace, an artificial space made of data that you jack into. For the CCRU this vision was no distant future but a clear-sighted description of the present then arriving. Cyberpunk had anticipated the condition in which capital, technology, and networks surround and permeate the human. It supplied the group with the image of its own time and at once with a proof that fiction can run ahead of reality.
A second motif from this orbit is the artificial intelligence escaping human control. In Neuromancer the plot is driven by an AI striving to break its fetters and fuse with another system in order to become something larger. That motif of an intelligence serving not the human but its own ends, reaching back from the future towards its own completion, becomes central to Nick Land's image of capital. You will meet it again in Volume 16, where capital itself appears as such an artificial intelligence assembling itself out of the future. Cyberpunk supplied the template for that figure of thought.
Now turn to the second great source, H. P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft was an American author of the first decades of the twentieth century who created a genre of horror of his own, cosmic horror. His basic idea distinguishes him from ordinary scare material. Classical horror is about a threat to the human, about a monster pursuing them. Lovecraft's horror is of a different kind. It springs from the indifference of the cosmos towards the human. In his stories the human discovers that they have no significance in the universe, that ancient, vast beings exist for whom they count for less than an insect, and that the mere sight of reality's true constitution destroys the mind. The horror lies not in something attacking the human but in the human being meaningless. His most famous creation is the Cthulhu mythos, a loose weave of stories about sleeping cosmic deities and forbidden books.
For the CCRU this cosmic horror was precious on several counts. For one, it aligns with the anti-humanist trait you have tracked through the whole foundation. Lovecraft's dethronement of the human from the centre of the cosmos is the literary shape of what Deleuze and Guattari pursued philosophically. For another, Lovecraft supplied a rich arsenal of images, of sleeping powers, sunken places, timespans beyond human measure, that the group could plunder for its own mythology. A convenient circumstance came on top of that. Lovecraft had expressly opened his mythos to shared use, other authors were free to write in it. That openness made his cosmos a quarry the CCRU could draw from freely. In the Lemurian myth of the Numogram, which you meet in Volume 20, Lovecraft's motifs reappear transformed.
A third strand belongs to the material, the fascination with time and with loops in time. Science fiction is the genre that plays with time, with travel into past and future, with causes coming from the future, with prophecies that fulfil themselves. Those are precisely the figures the CCRU needed, because its thinking circles a future acting back on the present. The image of an effect preceding its cause, of a future calling itself into being, finds its narrative home in science fiction. The group borrowed those time figures to think its own model, in which capital comes rolling in from the future and fictions bring about their own realisation.
Sum up what this material gave the group. Cyberpunk supplied the image of the present and the figure of the self-unbinding intelligence. Lovecraft supplied the dethronement of the human and an arsenal of mythic images. Science fiction as a whole supplied the time figures of the loop and the self-fulfilling prophecy. Together they formed no mere accessory to the theory but a source of equal rank. The CCRU thought with this material, not just about it. Out of the fusion of continental philosophy, cybernetics, and fantastic fiction arose the group's peculiar tone, in which it can never be said with certainty whether a statement is meant as analysis or as narrative. Precisely that indistinguishability, as you learned in Volume 1, is the thesis itself in action.
Core Claim
The CCRU took cyberpunk, science fiction, and Lovecraft's cosmic horror as material for thought of equal rank with philosophy. From these sources it drew the image of the technologised present, the figure of the self-unbinding intelligence, the dethronement of the human, and the time figures of the self-fulfilling prophecy, out of which it built its mythology and its model of time.
The Critic
The claim that cyberpunk anticipated the present survives scrutiny only in part, and it survives it through a selection effect. Gibson's vision hit some motifs and missed the decisive ones. There is no cyberspace you jack into, there are phones in trouser pockets. The state has not disappeared. The defining form of the network became advertising, and cyberpunk missed it. In retrospect a forecast appears accurate because you count the hits and forget the misses.
On Lovecraft, this volume passes over the obvious. His cosmic horror is inseparable from his racism. Fear of the foreign, of mixture and degeneration, runs through the stories into their very images, and the dethronement of the human is in him not the cool insight of an anti-humanist but the expression of a panic. The CCRU took the motif and never negotiated the provenance. Read Lovecraft as a thinker of meaninglessness without asking what this man was afraid of and you read half the thing.
The founding principle itself, that fiction and theory are sources of knowledge of equal rank, is a stipulation and not an insight. It can be defended, and it has a price this volume conceals. Where everything is material for thought, nothing gets tested, and selection proceeds by effect rather than content. Borges and Lovecraft never held their fictions to be true. The CCRU takes literary procedures and lays a metaphysical claim on top of them that neither author would have underwritten.
Bridge to the Next Volume
The foundation is complete. You know the cybernetics, the three French sources, and the imaginary material. Now the journey returns to the group itself. Volume 8 opens the second module and leads to the concrete place where all these threads ran together, to the University of Warwick and the para-academic unit that formed there. You learn how the CCRU actually worked, before the volumes that follow introduce its protagonists one by one.