The Collective

Objective

By the end of this volume you know the other heads of the CCRU, the people who alongside Plant and Land carried the group and who later became formative in their own right. You know who Mark Fisher, Kodwo Eshun, Steve Goodman, Robin Mackay, Luciana Parisi, and Iain Hamilton Grant were and which line each of them drew into the present. With that you grasp the CCRU as what it was, a collective whose force lay in the interplay, and you can see ahead to the threads the later volumes on its aftermath will take up. This volume closes the module on the group itself.

Exposition

One misunderstanding needs clearing first. Narrow the CCRU down to Nick Land and you miss its nature. It was a collective, and its significance arises less from a single genius than from the friction and amplification of many voices. The anti-humanist stance you have come to know devalues the individual author, and the group lived that stance by working collectively and often anonymously. The actual proof of that working form's fertility lies in what became of its members. Out of a small, half-tolerated circle at an English university came thinkers who shaped the cultural theory, the music, and the intellectual publishing of the following twenty years. This volume introduces them one by one, but you should see them at the same time as a weave whose threads crossed in the group and afterwards ran in different directions.

Start with Mark Fisher, because he became probably the most influential voice to emerge from the CCRU. Fisher was part of the group in the nineties and shared its obsession with theory, music, and acceleration. His own path later led him to a joining of cultural theory and political diagnosis that worked far beyond the academic circle. Under the name k-punk he ran a blog that became a gathering point for an entire generation of theoretically interested readers, written in a clear, accessible language that left Land's hallucinatory style behind. His book Capitalist Realism of 2009 coined a term you will meet at length in Volume 23, the diagnosis of a present that can no longer imagine an alternative to capitalism. Fisher drew the political, melancholic, socially critical line out of the CCRU's inheritance. Where Land affirmed the inhuman, Fisher asked after the human costs, after depression, exhaustion, and the lost capacity to think a future. His death in 2017 made him for many the tragic central figure of this entire milieu.

Turn to Kodwo Eshun, who drove the connection of theory and music in a direction of his own. Eshun was interested in Black music, in jazz, dub, techno, and jungle, and he read that music not as an expression of feelings but as a machine that produces the future. His book More Brilliant Than the Sun of 1998 designed an Afrofuturist materialism of sound, which you will meet at length in Volume 21. Eshun brought into the CCRU the attention to Afrofuturism, to the way the African diaspora designed foreign, future subjectivities through its music. He thereby drew a line connecting the group's anti-humanist thinking with the concrete cultural production of Black music. Later he founded, with others, the collective The Otolith Group, which works in the field of visual art and film.

Steve Goodman stands close to Eshun, but he went a step further by not only writing the theory but practising it in the music itself. Under the name Kode9 he became a producer and DJ, and he founded the record label Hyperdub, which decisively shaped the bass music of the following years, from dubstep to related forms. At the same time he stayed a theorist. His book Sonic Warfare of 2010 develops an ontology of vibration, a theory of how sound acts on body and affect beneath meaning, which you will meet in Volume 22. Goodman embodies like no other the fusion of theory and practice characteristic of the CCRU. In him thought is not separate from sound, both are aspects of the same doing. He thought by making music, and he made music by thinking.

Robin Mackay drew another, equally consequential line, that of the mediator and builder. Mackay became an editor and publisher who gave the thinking of the CCRU and its milieu a lasting infrastructure. He founded the press Urbanomic and the journal Collapse, which became central platforms for a new, speculative theory. It's to him that we owe the collection of Land's early texts in the volume Fanged Noumena you met in Volume 10. Mackay's significance lies in his having cast the fleeting, scattered matter of the CCRU into fixed form, into books, journals, translations. Without that publishing work much would have been lost or stayed inaccessible. He is the one who made a legible body of work out of a dispersed movement, a point that returns in Volume 24 under the heading of infrastructure.

Luciana Parisi and Iain Hamilton Grant complete the circle, each with a theoretical line of their own. Parisi developed a thinking at the interface of technology, biology, and abstract structure that later circled questions of computation, algorithms, and artificial intelligence. She drew the CCRU's line into the theory of computation, into the question of how calculation itself forms reality. Iain Hamilton Grant turned to philosophy in the narrower sense and became an important voice in a current you meet in Volume 24, speculative realism, which posed anew the question of a reality beyond human access. Both show that the CCRU was no closed doctrine but a starting point from which paths of thought branched into quite different fields.

Now step back and look at the weave as a whole. Out of a single small circle several strong lines ran into the present. The political and culturally critical line through Fisher. The musical and Afrofuturist line through Eshun and Goodman. The publishing and infrastructural line through Mackay. The philosophical line through Grant and the line of computation through Parisi. That fanning out is itself an argument. It shows that the CCRU left behind less a fixed doctrine than a way of thinking, a manner of interlacing theory and cultural production that could be translated into many shapes. The group was fertile precisely by scattering. You remember the thought from Volume 8, that a movement living off unbinding unfolds its force not in persisting but in scattering. The careers of these people are the evidence for it.

One last thought places this module in the arc of the course. You have now seen the place of the CCRU, its para-academic position, its founder, its centre, and its circle. With that the question of the who and the where is answered. What remains outstanding is the what and the how, the method and the theories themselves. It's remarkable that most of the names given here unfolded their real effect only after the group dissolved. The CCRU as an institution decayed, but as a network of people and ideas it went on working and does so to this day. Exactly that aftermath is the subject of the fifth module. Before that, though, you have to understand what the thinking consisted of that connected these people, and that leads you to the heart of the whole thing, to the method of theory-fiction and to the concept of hyperstition.

Core Claim

The CCRU was a collective whose force lay in the interplay of many voices. Out of its circle came Mark Fisher with his political cultural criticism, Kodwo Eshun and Steve Goodman with their theory and practice of sound, Robin Mackay with his publishing infrastructure, and Luciana Parisi and Iain Hamilton Grant with their philosophical lines. The group left behind less a fixed doctrine than a way of thinking that branched fruitfully into many fields, and it unfolded its effect above all after it dissolved.

Bridge to the Next Volume

Place, founder, centre, and circle are now known. With that the module on the group ends, and the journey pushes on to the core of its thinking. The third module treats the method, which is already the actual thesis. Volume 12 begins with theory-fiction and shows why the CCRU did not describe but constructed, why it invented sources and spoke through personae. From there the path leads to the group's own central concept, hyperstition, in which method and object fully interlock.