The Lemurian Myth

Objective

By the end of this volume you know the mythology the CCRU erected around its diagram. You know who Daniel Barker is supposed to be and what his doctrine of geotraumatics claims, you know the provenance of the name Lemuria and the conflict the group described as the time-war. And you understand why this myth is the place where the CCRU put its own thesis to the test.

Exposition

Professor Daniel Charles Barker never existed. The CCRU nevertheless equipped him with everything that makes a scientist, with a career, with institutes, with a break in that career, and with a doctrine that carried him to the margin. His path led through establishments of signal research, where one looks for signs from outside, and ended in the marginal standing that falls to thinkers who occupy themselves with the wrong things. In a text set up as an interview, he speaks himself. The group cites him, refers to his writings, and treats him like one source among others, never marking that an invention is at hand.

His doctrine bears the name geotraumatics and begins with a shift that at first appears as mere image. The earth gets thought not as a planet but as a body to which something has happened. Its history then consists of a series of catastrophes that inscribe themselves and are never worked through, because a planet can work nothing through. The crust over the molten core appears in this optic as a hardening around a wound, and the strata of rock become something you can read like the traces of a repression. Geology is then no longer earth science but a diagnosis.

The step that distinguishes this reinterpretation from a mere metaphor concerns the human. Barker claims that the earth's traumas are stored in the bodies of the creatures that arose on it. The decisive structure is the spine. The path from fish through the crawling animal to the upright gait was no ascent but a chain of impositions, each forced by a change in the environment, each a contortion of the previous blueprint. The upright human carries that chain inside them, back pain is its reverberation, and what the psychoanalyst looks for in the head lies in truth in the spine and reaches back millions of years. An author named Thomas Moynihan later devoted an entire book to that thought and made the phrase coined for it, spinal catastrophism, his title.

What's remarkable about this doctrine is its consistency with everything you learned in the foundation. Deleuze and Guattari took the family away from the unconscious and made it a factory. Barker takes the factory away too and gives it to geology. The unconscious is then no longer the workshop of desire but a deposit in which the earth tells of itself with nobody listening. The anti-humanism you've tracked since Volume 4 arrives here at a point behind which there is nothing. The human is not merely dethroned, they are a scar.

The continent that gives the myth its name has a prehistory that itself already belongs to the matter. Lemuria comes from a British zoologist named Philip Sclater, who in 1864 faced a puzzle. Lemurs live on Madagascar and in India, but not in Africa in between. Sclater explained the finding with a land bridge that had once connected both areas and sunk in the Indian Ocean, and he named it after the animals whose distribution it was meant to explain. It was a serious hypothesis of its time, advanced by a respected researcher, and it was later made superfluous by plate tectonics. The continents had moved, no sunken bridge was needed.

At that point the name might have vanished. Instead it was taken up by theosophy, that occult movement of the late nineteenth century which turned the sunken land into the home of an earlier humanity. Lemuria survived its own refutation and migrated out of science into mythology, where it lives to this day, in novels, in esoteric doctrines, in films. So the CCRU found no empty name but one that had already demonstrated what a word is capable of. A description of something that didn't exist had detached from its originator and moved on. That's exactly what the group calls hyperstition, and Lemuria was the evidence before the CCRU used it.

Out of that material it built a sprawling narrative. The Lemurians are in it no inhabitants of a land but something running through time, and their counterpart bears the name of an order administering the end of history. The conflict between the two is called the time-war, and the expression is meant literally. It gets fought not in time like other wars but over it. What's at stake is whether time runs straight, from a beginning towards an end, or whether it knots itself, reaches back, calls itself into being. One side wants a chronology with a close, the other a time full of loops in which the future works on its own arrival. You recognise here the question from Volume 16, now as a narrative. The dispute Land conducts conceptually in his model of time finds its figures in the myth.

One text of the group connects that war with William S. Burroughs, and the choice is no whim. Burroughs held language to be a virus that has infected the human and steered them ever since, and he developed a procedure against it, the cutting up and reassembly of texts. Whoever cuts a text, so his claim, sometimes finds in the fracture lines something that hasn't happened yet. For Burroughs the cutting was no literary game but an intervention in time. The CCRU read him as someone already fighting the time-war without possessing the map, and placed its own practice in that line.

Around the Numogram a population grew in this way. Every zone received a being, the totality of those beings an order, and alongside them came researchers, collectors, institutes, an archive, a university borrowed from Lovecraft's stories. What was at first a scheme of calculation now had a history, names, and a quarrel. And the construction worked in both directions. The myth gave the diagram a sense, the diagram gave the myth a mechanics in which the narrative couldn't be spun on arbitrarily but had to calculate.

With that the question of purpose is reached, and the group's answer stands in Volume 13. If a fiction that is believed produces its own truth, then that's a claim you can test by building a fiction and waiting. The Lemurian myth is that test. The CCRU erected it with everything that makes up a reality, with sources, contradictions, datings, and an apparatus of references, and it omitted every marking that would have relieved the reader. It didn't believe in its beings. It wanted to know what happens when you take a fiction as seriously as you otherwise take only facts.

Whether the test established anything will be answered differently by different people. What it brought forth can be inspected. The myth has outlasted its builders, gets written on, surfaces in novels, in music, in art exhibitions, in academic papers treating it as though it had an object. Reza Negarestani made a book out of the same construction, to which Volume 25 belongs. The beings have not become real. The myth has.

Core Claim

The CCRU erected around the Numogram a mythology with the invented Professor Daniel Barker at its centre, whose geotraumatics reads the earth as a traumatised body and the human spine as a recording of geological catastrophes. The name Lemuria comes from a nineteenth-century scientific hypothesis that survived its own refutation and migrated into mythology, thereby already demonstrating the group's thesis. The time-war between the Lemurians and the order of the end gets fought not in time but over its constitution. The whole myth is the test on which the CCRU tried out its claim about the effective force of fictions.

Bridge to the Next Volume

With that the esoteric zone is crossed. The last two volumes of the fourth module lead back into a field where the group's thinking can be checked without having to believe in a diagram. Volume 21 turns to Kodwo Eshun and his theory of sonic fiction, which reads Black music from dub to jungle not as an expression of experience but as a machine that produces foreign subjectivities. Afrofuturism brings a question into the course that has been missing so far, namely who actually needs anti-humanism and who can afford it.