Volume 248 min read
Urbanomic and Speculative Realism
Module V · The Aftermath
Objective
By the end of this volume you know the least conspicuous form of aftermath and the most effective. You know what Robin Mackay built with Urbanomic and why the CCRU's texts would have vanished without that work. You know speculative realism, its objection to philosophy since Kant, and the fact that this school never existed. And you see why a press does the same thing Volume 13 described as a mechanism.
Exposition
The CCRU left no body of work. It left journal contributions, talks, fanzines, a website from the early years of the net, pieces in collections that were out of print before anyone went looking. Land had written a lot in the nineties and little of it in places you can later find. Around 2005 most of it was practically inaccessible. To read the texts you needed acquaintances, photocopies, luck.
Robin Mackay had studied at Warwick and belonged to the circle. After the group's end he worked for some years outside the university, among other things in business, and in 2006 founded a press in Falmouth that he called Urbanomic. Falmouth lies in Cornwall, at the far south-western tip of England, several hours by train from London. The choice was no embarrassment. A place without a faculty, without a scene, without a conference circuit, where you can work instead of being seen.
In the same year the first issue of a journal titled Collapse appeared. It looked like a scholarly periodical and behaved like none. Alongside philosophical essays stood contributions from mathematics, chemistry, art, occasionally something you can only classify as theory-fiction. The volumes are thick, carefully set, and appeared in small print runs. The second volume, from 2007, carried the contributions from an event held that April at Goldsmiths College in London, which gives the second part of this volume its name.
Ray Brassier had organised that event. Four people spoke, Brassier himself, Iain Hamilton Grant, whom you know from Volume 11, Graham Harman, and Quentin Meillassoux. Brassier gave the whole thing a name, speculative realism, and the name stuck.
Their shared opponent bore a term Meillassoux had coined the year before, correlationism. What's meant is a basic assumption that has governed philosophy since Kant. We have no access to being as it is in itself, and none to thinking as it would be for itself. What's accessible is only the relation between the two. Every statement about the world is a statement about a world as it appears to a consciousness, and whoever believes they've grasped the thing in itself holds only a further appearance. That assumption is so deeply anchored that it hardly registers as an assumption any more. It counts as the point behind which it would be naive to go back.
Meillassoux attacked it with an argument proceeding from a finding of natural science. He called it the arche-fossil. Radiometry dates the formation of the earth to roughly four and a half billion years and the appearance of the first living creatures considerably later. Those statements are well supported, and they are about a world in which no consciousness existed for anything to appear to. The correlationist can only let that sentence stand with an addition that bends it. They have to say the earth formed four and a half billion years ago, for us, measured from here, within the frame of our conditions of knowledge. Meillassoux counters that the scientist means precisely not that. They mean that it was so when nobody was there. And a philosophy that can no longer permit that simple sense has a problem it doesn't solve with a nuance.
Whether the argument holds has been contested for nearly twenty years. For this course, what counts first is why it belongs here. Correlationism is the philosophical form of what anti-humanism has been fighting since Volume 4, the position of the human at the centre. What the CCRU claimed about capital and machine, Meillassoux formulates as a question of knowledge. Is there an access to a world that doesn't need us.
The alliance didn't last long. A second workshop took place in Bristol in 2009, after which the thing fell apart. The four had agreed on little except the opponent, and their paths diverged widely. Harman built from his position a direction of his own, concerned with objects, that found adherents in architecture and art. Brassier distanced himself sharply, and his reasons are remarkable enough to record. He held the whole thing to be a product of the blogs, a brand kept alive by people writing about it online instead of working. The man who had invented the name discarded it because it worked too well.
Mackay's actual work lay elsewhere, and it's the reason for this volume. In 2011 a volume titled Fanged Noumena appeared at Urbanomic, edited by Mackay and Brassier, gathering Land's texts from twenty years. What had been scattered and unfindable now lay there as a book, set, dated, with an introduction tracing the trajectory. In 2014 came the accelerationism reader Volume 18 dealt with, edited with Armen Avanessian. In 2017 the collected texts of the CCRU from 1997 to 2003 appeared. In between lie translations from the French, Meillassoux among them, and the volumes of Collapse, which kept coming.
Look at what that work brought about. Before 2011 Land was a rumour, a name mentioned by people who had been there. After 2011 he was a book you could buy, read, cite, and attack. One is a legend, the other an object. The same holds for the reader. It gathered a lineage from Marx into the present, and whoever opens it sees a line that didn't exist before the book. The volume made the tradition visible by producing it.
With that the point is reached, and it connects back to Volume 13. A press that makes a selection, orders it, dates it, and puts it into circulation does exactly what the group understood by hyperstition. It doesn't claim a tradition exists. It builds a book that only makes sense if one does, and the readers do the rest. The difference from the Numogram is that here nobody calculates or incants. There are contracts, typesetting, copy-editing, rights clearance, shipping. The most effective hyperstition of this course is a small press in Cornwall.
Core Claim
Robin Mackay founded the press Urbanomic and the journal Collapse in Falmouth in 2006 and thereby converted a fleeting milieu into infrastructure. Out of Collapse came speculative realism, whose objection to correlationism supplies the philosophical form of anti-humanism and whose alliance fell apart after two years, with the inventor of the name discarding it himself. The actual effect lies in the editions, since Fanged Noumena turned a rumour into a book and the accelerationism reader made a tradition visible by producing it.
The Critic
Whoever collects decides, and the decision disappears into the result. Fanged Noumena is a selection from a larger holding, made by two people with a view of what matters in that work. What was taken in has been Land ever since. What's missing practically doesn't exist. A book looks like a find and is a construction, and the editorial care distinguishing it strengthens that appearance rather than lessening it. The same question arises with the reader in sharper form, because there a lineage was built whose members would never have agreed with one another.
The account that speculative realism emerged from the CCRU doesn't survive scrutiny. Grant came from there, Brassier stood close to the milieu. Meillassoux and Harman have nothing to do with Warwick, and their paths would have been the same without that workshop. What lies before us is an occasion and no descent. That Brassier later dismissed his own name as a brand kept alive by blogs belongs in the picture. The case is thereby a lesson, though a double one. It shows that a name produces a thing, and it shows that the thing so produced falls apart the moment those involved stop playing along. Volume 18 celebrated the first part and passed over the second.
The yield is nevertheless the most practical of the whole module, and it's independent of any thesis. Ideas don't survive because they're good. They survive because somebody collects, sets, prints, stores, and ships them. A body of thought without a press is a rumour, and a rumour is gone in ten years. The CCRU had its effect because a man in Cornwall spent twenty years making books, and that's the least glamorous explanation available for this aftermath. It also carries an irony nobody intended. A body of thought that held the human to be a transitional stage owes its persistence to the patient handwork of a few individuals who signed contracts, read proofs, and packed parcels.
Bridge to the Next Volume
In 2008 a book appeared that brought the theory-fiction of Volume 12 into its most mature form. Reza Negarestani presented, with Cyclonopedia, a philosophical treatise built as a horror narrative, with an invented archive, an invented editor, and an object that can't be grasped, oil. Volume 25 turns to that work and to the question of whether the genre the CCRU founded produced a masterpiece or a dead end.