Transmission

I've been playing around with this idea for a while, and it eventually cohered into this. I'm quite pleased with it, as I don't write fiction very often (hopefully none of you will get to the end of this and say 'I can see why!'). So, here it is, my first real crack at weird fiction. Enjoy.

*

The house was dark and cold. It was haunted by the smell of damp and cigarettes. The old soldier, wearing a thick jacket and wrapped in a heavy blanket, explained that he was behind on most of his bills, and had never really bothered to maintain the place anyway. The curtains were drawn, blotting out the grey late-evening sky. I shivered, and gratefully accepted the offered cigarette.

‘Mark told me you have an interesting story for me,’ I said. ‘I’m a collector of interesting stories.’

Mark was our mutual acquaintance. A conspiracy freak and self-described ‘guerrilla occultist’, he made a living from pulling together diverse threads of weirdness, tying them together into something interesting and selling them on. I made a point of sitting down with him every couple of months to see if he’d anything new for me. He could be easily plied with drink, money and a little flirting, and he never seemed to hold back much information. Two nights ago, in an authentically grim pub, he told me that he’d met someone who, he said, had been involved with the 70s-80s incarnation of a certain military unit, one that has a tendency of cropping up in conspiracy circles.

‘How the hell did you manage that?’ I asked.

He tapped his nose and grinned. ‘Can’t be sharing trade secrets with you, now can I?  I’ve mentioned to him that I’ve got this friend who’s very keen on meeting people who’ve had certain experiences. And he’s keen on relating those experiences to someone. If you’re interested, and I’m sure you are, I can let you know what his address is.’

Two-hundred pounds later, there I was, sitting in the living room of a man out of modern myth.

His drawn face, coated with several days’ growth of stubble, was briefly illuminated as he lit his cigarette, drawing from it deeply. He might have been handsome once. He looked at me intently, like he was examining me. There was a coldness in his eyes that frightened me a little.

‘Yeah. I’ve got a story.’ His voice was almost without accent, but I thought I detected a trace of the North in it. ‘What’s Mark told you?’

‘That you were in the special forces a long time ago.’

‘He say when?’

‘Late 70s, early 80s.’

‘That’s right. What else?’

‘Not much, just that you wanted to tell someone your story.’

‘He mention I’m dying?’

I drew on my cigarette for a moment. ‘No. Is that why you’re telling me this? A confession?’

‘Partly. Yeah. I guess.’

I put the digital recorder on the table between us. Mark had assured me that this guy was comfortable with me using it, though he regarded it with suspicion.

‘What are you going to do with that afterwards?’ he asked.

‘I’ll write up a transcript of this to store in my private archives. It won’t be published elsewhere, if you don’t want it to be.’

‘Not much fussed really, but wait until they’ve stuck me in the oven until you print it, if you’re going to.’

‘How do you want to do this?’ I asked. He shifted in his seat a moment, pulled the blanket a little tighter around him.

‘I’ll talk. You want to know something in particular, you ask.’

I nodded.

‘I dunno when this happened exactly. They gave us all a drug, you see, so it’s difficult to remember. My theory is, they didn’t kill us in case they needed us again. Me and the boys, we were a special unit. Not SAS or SBS or Royal Marines, but drawn from all three, as well as the regulars. Idea was that we were reliable, tough bastards. That wasn’t all of it though, we’d all…we’d all seen something, or been involved with something we weren’t meant to talk about. Difficult to remember any of it with much detail, but…yeah.’

‘Tell me about the drug.’

‘I think they gave it to us after this last one, the one I wanna talk about. They must have dissolved the unit afterwards, or kept it going with other people… I only started remembering this stuff in the last few years.’

‘How did that happen?’

He lit another cigarette. He didn’t offer me one this time.

‘I was out on a walk, in the countryside, out there,’ he nodded towards the window. ‘And I lost track of time, it got dark and I realised I didn’t know where I was. Still, wasn’t exactly the first time I’d slept rough, so I was looking for somewhere to kip, and I noticed a light in the distance, miles away it was, on one of them big hills. I’ve no idea what it was, but I knew there wasn’t anything on that hill, no antennas or nothing. Suddenly, things  started to jolt out of place in my head. That’s when it started.’ He was quiet for nearly a minute.

‘I started getting these dreams, but not just when I was asleep. About a light in the sky, something…something coming down out of the light…and then one day, I was in fucking Tesco’s getting my shopping when it happened, it just all came crashing down into my head again. They thought I was having a fit, called the ambulance, but I managed to get out and get home.’

‘How much had you forgotten?’

‘What do you mean?’ He seemed annoyed.

‘Did you remember being in the military at all?’

He nodded vigorously. ‘Of course I did, yeah. Thing is, they told me that I’d had a head injury and that I’d lost a couple of years of memory. Not likely to come back.’

‘How did you get involved in this unit?’

‘Sorry love, I need to take a piss before we carry on.’ He pulled away the blanket and dragged himself up out of the chair, stumbling out of the room. While I was on my own, I had a quick look around. He wasn’t a quiet man, so I was confident I wouldn’t be taken by surprise. There were piles of old newspapers, mostly tabloids, littered around the room, along with conspiracy and paranormal magazines, and notebooks. Dozens of notebooks. I picked one at random and leafed through it. It was full of scrawled writing, impossible to decipher in the light, and drawings, little sketches: flying saucers, stars, churches, symbols from some occult alphabet I didn’t recognise. I slipped it into my coat pocket as I heard the toilet flush.

I was sitting down again as he came in. He sat down heavily.

‘Me and some boys, we were out on patrol. Peacekeeping thing in Africa. We saw this light shining, deep in the jungle. We advanced towards it, and…I don’t know what happened next. I…I remember being able to remember it but I don’t…I don’t know, now, it was too long ago.’ His voice was becoming pained, sounding almost as if he was going to weep with sheer frustration. I kept quiet. He smoked another cigarette silently. I was about to speak when he began to talk again.

‘After that, I remember training in this camp somewhere cold, I think it was on an island off the north coast somewhere, Scotland way. Then there’s bits of memory. Missions all over. Middle East, Australia, Eastern Bloc, America. Can’t remember too much about any of it. Just fragments. Little snapshots. Something getting washed up on a beach somewhere, that did…did something to the town near. A mine, somewhere, where they’d found a skeleton that was too old, too far down. No details. More like when you half-remember a dream from the night-before. There’s one though, one I remember more than the others. I think it was probably my last one. It’s that one I want to talk to you about.

‘It happened here, in the UK. I know that. I have a feeling it was in the South East somewhere. We were on guard duty, on a base. Had this big warehouse thing in it off to one side, to try and make it look a little out of the way. But that was where it was really happening. They brought us in rather than having the usual boys there, that night. I mean, the usual boys they had on the base, on guard. I don’t think they really knew what was going on, and the high-ups knew they could rely on us not to freak out. We’d…some of the things we’d seen, that I remember…no one should see that kind of stuff. Violence, killing, that’s one thing, I saw plenty of that before Africa, but…some of the things, out there, that they know about…’ I could see tears in his eyes. I stayed silent for a while.

‘Do you want to stop?’ I ventured.

‘No! Just…just be a bit patient, alright?’

I nodded. He didn’t smoke this time. He just sat and stared at the curtained window. He got up suddenly, walked over to it and opened the curtain. There was only a suggestion of light now. He sat down again without drawing it.

‘In this warehouse, they’d been digging.’ His voice was perfectly steady now. ‘There was a circle of stones, about ten metres down. They’d only half-dug them out, they stuck up out of the soil. Looked a little like teeth. There was this big antenna tower in the middle of it, like one of those big TV or phone antennas you see. Really tall, came out of the pit. All covered in gadgets and stuff, and big cables running all over the place, to machines around the pit, to bits of metal looped around the stones. There were two dishes. Satellite dishes, one on the top, pointing straight up, the other underneath it, pointing down.

‘I was stationed on the top edge of the pit when it happened. They didn’t tell us what to expect, just to be ready. They opened the roof of the warehouse, it slid open and you could see the stars. It looked wrong, really wrong, but I couldn’t tell why at first. Then I realised the sky was too bright. There wasn’t a full moon, and it was nearly midnight, but it looked too bright, like it was only just past sunset. There were too many stars. It was like someone had taken a picture of the night sky and scattered salt on it. A humming sound started. It was coming from everywhere, all at once. The stars I was familiar with started to fade out and then there were just these other stars, different stars, and they were shinning bright, so bright.

‘That’s when they brought this kid out. He looked about sixteen. He was dressed all in white, clinical like. His head was shaved. He wasn’t struggling or anything, they just took him down this little metal staircase they had going down the side of the pit.’

‘They?’ I asked.

‘Two men. Not soldiers, just wearing suits. They held his arms and lead him directly under the antenna, beneath the dishes, in the middle of the stone circle, and left him there. He just stood still.

‘The humming was getting louder, it was more like the roar a machine would make. The sky was very bright now, and one of the stars in particular was glowing like a spotlight. Right above the satellite dish. Then the humming just stopped. It was silent for a moment, and then there was this shrieking sound, not like anything I’d ever heard before. I looked down at the kid in the pit and he stood rigid, his head tilted back slightly. It was too bright to look at the star anymore, it was as bright as the sun. But…then I saw something, it was like a heat haze, and it just rushed down, out of the sky, down the antenna and onto the kid, and it was gone. And that was that.’

When he didn’t speak for a moment, I asked: ‘That was that?’

‘The sky was normal again. No lights, no funny stars, no noise, no nothing. It was over. The kid was standing there, the two men came back from above the pit to collect him. And then I heard one of them say something about “the transmission.”’

‘What happened next?’

‘I dunno really. My memory fades out again there. Guess that must have been around when they decided to get rid of us, give us the drugs and retire us. See, I think that maybe they’ve got another drug or a hypnotising machine or something that could snap us out of it, make us remember again. In case they need us, you see?’

He didn’t speak for nearly five minutes. I was about to thank him and head on my way when he spoke again. ‘You see, I think I know what was happening that night. Not all of it, but what I think is, they called something down, but it wasn’t a demon or something, like you read in those horror stories, a star-demon. What they got, and I don’t know where from, or from who, but what it was: I think it was information. Knowledge. Buggered if I know what it was knowledge of, or why it took a kid who looked comatose to receive it. I think they’d scrubbed all his memories out, see? Like how they’ve played around with mine.’ He tapped his head.

I didn’t know what to say for a moment. Then, on immediately regretted impulse, I asked: ‘How do I know you’re telling the truth?’

He smiled. ‘I don’t even know if I’m telling the truth. All I know is that these things,’ he waved at the cigarettes on the table, ‘have caught up with me, and I’ll be gone before the year’s out. And I’m ok with that.’

I turned off the recorder, thanked him, and left.

Russian Cosmism: A (brief) Summary

I finished George Young's superb little book on the Russian Cosmists a couple of days ago. The Cosmists will be the subject matter of the first episode of a podcast a friend and I are working on, so I thought I'd get the ball rolling and present a summary of them here.

Only known portrait of Nikolai Federov

Cosmism is the name given to a broad intellectual tradition in Russia that was initiated by Nikolai Fedorov in the 19th century. Understood at its broadest, Cosmism is the belief that humanity can and should actively take control of its evolution. The eccentric librarian Nikolai Federov is present in the background of virtually every development of Cosmist thought. Fedorov was a philosopher and Orthodox theologian who advocated the use of advanced science and technology to subjugate and direct the forces of nature to be in the service of humanity, and in so doing perfect the Fallen world. This is to occur in the context of a grander project, the 'common task': the resurrection of the dead. Federov advocated the progressive revitalisation of all previous human generations, going all the way back to Adam and Eve (who he believed where buried in the Pamir mountains). The subjugation of nature and, indeed, the very literal conquest of the universe was a necessary step on the path to completing the common task, in order to deal with both the increase in population size as the dead return to us, and to spread life throughout the lifeless cosmos.

Federov's techno-utopianism also carries within it a distinctively reactionary and authoritarian quality. The common task can only be initiated after the unification of the nations of the world under the benevolent autocracy of the Tsar and the leadership of Orthodox Russia (Russian Orthodoxy has often been noted to have a peculiar messianic concept of nationalism- the Russian Empire as the only legitimate successor to the authority of Rome and Constantinople, and thus the last imperial bastion of the true Christian religion). Indeed, a major theme in his conception of the resurrection of our ancestors is that this would involve a return of true, patriarchal authority. Humanity would collectively rediscover its roles as sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, in the true human family with the return of each lost generation, and find freedom in obedience to proper authority.

Pavel Florensky (in white) and Sergei Bulgakov

For Federov, this is the fulfilment of God's mission for His Church and for mankind. What is offered in the liturgy of the Church is of vital importance, but it is not sufficient to bring about of God's Kingdom. The symbols of resurrection used in liturgy should motivate us to action outside of the walls of the church. There is no conflict between 'science' and 'religion' for Federov, though he is extremely wary of the risks of scientific developments that do not go alongside religious/spiritual developments (and vice versa). A strange fusion of spirituality and high technology runs through the entirety of the Cosmist project: notable Cosmists Pavel Florensky and Sergei Bulgakov were both ordained priests of the Orthodox Church (though Bulgakov had to dodge accusations of heresy); Vladimir Solovyov was a Christian mystic devoted to Divine Sophia; although the secular Cosmists were often hostile to established religion, many, especially Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, may be not-unjustly characterised as Gnostics.

Cosmism after Federov branches in many directions, but always maintains the broad theme of perfecting the world through spiritually enlightened science. Emphasis does shift at many points though: Solovyov had little interest in science and was more concerned with utilising the occult to create a new form of androgynous human, and Bulgakov writes not of conquering nature but of developing a spiritual 'economy' of all things, understood more in the sense of husbandry than ownership and control. The overtly religious characteristics of Cosmism were essentially dismissed or actively down-played during the Soviet era, with more focus being put on the idea of engineering a new form of socialist human and perfecting the environment through central control and mass labour projects. Florensky's religious convictions were tolerated largely due to his technical brilliance, playing an important role in the electrification of Russia, though he'd ultimately be executed.

Contemporary Cosmism is still substantially more secular than it was in the past, but there has been a revived interest in the spiritual and occult writings of the Cosmists; this is perhaps because so much of their scientific thought can now be falsified (for example, Federov calls for us to build great cones that would allow us to direct the Earth's electro-magnetism and pilot the planet around the universe in pursuit of the dust of our ancestors), while the esoteric dimensions of Cosmism are something that can be taken as being 'beyond reason', and thus outside the clutches of positivist science.

The sheer optimism and vitality of Cosmism, and the surprising ease with which it combines ancient tradition with futurism, science with spirituality, is deeply appealing. It is difficult to not be thrilled by Cosmist thought, even if this is only in an aesthetic sense. In particular, the utopian (though often totalitarian) ideal of taking complete control of our own destiny and environment is intoxicating, even if it is misguided in many ways. Ultimately, the foundational ideal of Cosmism is that life can conquer death, and even if that isn't an ideal we can ever accomplish, it is very difficult to resist the urge to try.
  

True Detective: Some Thoughts

Caution, spoilers

Although its most direct references to weird fiction are, of course, to Robert W. Chambers and Ambrose Bierce (namely 'Carcosa' and 'The King in Yellow'), it is the spirit of H. P. Lovecraft that most pervasively haunts True Detective. Now, Lovecraft of course appropriates the names 'Carcosa' and 'The King in Yellow' for himself and his own cosmo-mythology, but that's not what I'm talking about here. True Detective is the most purely Lovecraftian thing I've ever seen on television.

The Lovecraftian elements are not arrived at through simple name-dropping, though that certainly helps. Something much more subtle and clever happens in True Detective. It hardly needs to be said that much of Lovecraft's legacy is derived from the new pantheon of monstrosities he gives us, but it should also be remembered that he was far more than a simply pedlar of novel beasts and terrors: what Lovecraft does with great skill is endow the familiar with an otherworldly atmosphere. The very soil beneath our feet becomes infested with entities of unspeakable age and power. Lovecraft is able to warp the world we take for granted into something profoundly different and disturbing. He can twist things, take what you know and turn it inside out, force you to recognise how limited and illusory your understanding of the world is.

On a level of sheer aesthetics, True Detective is certainly able to achieve something like that. It implants the idea in the viewer's mind that behind the ordinary is something abnormal and threatening. As well as that, there is just something about the way TD is shot that makes the landscape, the endless swamps and always-in-the-distance industrial edifices unsettling, and I'm not sure what. It feels as if there is a quintessential element within the environment that just makes it wrong somehow, an element that cannot be easily defined. It's just there. 

The show's cosmic pessimism and nihilism is very much worth mentioning here (the ending not withstanding). Cohle does more-or-less literally quote Thomas Ligotti (imagine a more disturbed H. P. Lovecraft, and you've got an idea of what Ligotti is like), who is possibly the most pessimistic writer I've ever come across. One of Lovecraft's most important characteristics is that his monsters are not 'evil' as such, they generally don't hold any direct malice towards humanity: they're just indifferent towards us, utterly so. To them, we're prey, or a nuisance, or occasionally entertaining playthings- but they are so far beyond us, so different, so purely alien that their motives cannot be grasped, and using words like 'good' and 'evil' to describe them is as absurd as calling the sun 'cruel' for giving you skin cancer. Cohle is a character who has grasped the uncaring nature of the universe, the absence of purpose, of grand narratives, of moral absolutes. That is where much of Lovecraft's horror lies: Cthulhu doesn't want to drive you mad, he just will. 

These broad thematic strokes aside, the two most direct nods towards Lovecraft are somewhat blended together: the heavy hints at degenerate heredity and atavism, and the presence of a cult. The show is littered with references to Devil worship in the woods, of peculiar blends of Voodoo and folk-religion (and the use of mainstream religion to mask dark esotericism), culminating in Cohle's encounter with the bizarre and never-explained idol of The King in Yellow in the equally bizarre and unexplained Carcosa. Exactly what is it that motivates the killings? How does Childress have such a powerful affect on people? Why is any of this happening? At the end of the show, all we have are a few culprits, a few bad people who were doing bad things: but their motivations are never explained, not even remotely. It is obvious that a substantial conspiracy, going all the way up to high-office, is involved throughout the State, perpetrating and covering up murder, abduction and child abuse, and although sexual perversity is certainly part of the motivation... that just doesn't feel like the whole story, does it? Something more was going on there, in that house, in those tunnels. Something that cannot be grasped except at the expense of sanity. Cohle certainly glimpses it with his vision of a great vortex in outer space, and the thought of it disturbs Marty sufficiently that he has no desire for the details of what was found there, what that family had been doing there for so long.

It was absolutely the right decision for the show to not tell us why any of this was happening, what these people sort to accomplish with their deeds, if anything. The feeling it leaves behind is that we, the viewers, have been shown a glimpse at a hidden world, one just behind the veil of convention and assumption, containing a presence we simply can't believe exists, and yet is sharpening its claws and eyeing us intently.

Don't Worry, Still Here- Apologies and News

As it's been an embarrassingly long time since I last posted anything on here, and I'm still getting at least a few hits every day, it feels worthwhile to at least twitch and moan a little to prove I'm still alive. 

I haven't written anything new because I haven't thought of anything interesting to say. Most of my spare time has been going on trying to learn German and, for no real reason other than curiosity, reading up on Buddhism. I'm also still working on stuff for the ever-enjoyable Project Praeterlimina (we have Things You Can Buy). I've also been working my way through a nice fat collection of essays on Accelerationism in preparation for a talk I'll be giving in September at The Catalyst Club. I'll post my notes on here too, and I'll try to get something I feel worth sharing on here together in the next few weeks. I'm also half-considering trying to *takes deep breath* reading Being and Time all the way through, and trying to keep notes on it as I go. If I do manage to do this, I will try and post things up here relating to that.

In other news, for those of you who wonder what my voice sounds like, rejoice! A friend and I are planning on starting a podcast later this year, hopefully around November time. The general plan is that we'll pick a topic and try to talk about it in as interesting and entertaining a way that we can. Whether not not we'll succeed at it- I have no idea, but it will give me something to do.

Topics we've decided upon in advance include: Anti-Oedipus, Accelerationism and Heidegger. Feel free to make other suggestions in the comments, if you are so inclined.

Finally, some of my friends and I are vaguely planning a new writing project in which we'll explore the now mostly dead genre of, as we are provisionally calling it, British Science Weird. This should be an exploration of the peculiar mix of the provincial and cosmic in British SF, fantasy and horror over the last century, for example in the works of John Wyndham. There's literally no time scale for this at all, but when something does happen, I'll let you all know.

That's essentially it right now. As ever, stay tuned.

Amateur Applications of Anti-Oedipal Thinking

After a long and difficult journey, I finished Anti-Oedipus the other day. I might, might write a kind of book review of it in a while, but I thought it worth throwing a few thoughts out there (partly because I'm desperately trying to blog more often) following reading an essay of Nick Land's: 'Making It With Death: Remarks on Thanatos and Desiring Production', about Deleuze & Guattari. I decided to have a crack at it as I made the obvious mistake before of trying to read an essay about Deleuze & (to a lesser extent) Guattari without having actually read any Deleuze & Guattari. And, although it will require some closer reading at some point, the most potent remarks came towards the end, in which Land looks at the shift in emphasis in DeleuzoGuattarian thought away from the absolute, raw deterritorialisation of Anti-Oedipus in its follow-up: A Thousand Plateaus. In a word, Deleuze & Guattari fear that ripping up all the strata of moralising repression may result in the release of the sheer suicidal horror that is Nazism (which is contrasted with, one might say, in borrowing D & G's terminology [which is borrowed from Marx in this case, I believe] the relative Asiatic coolness of the Fascist State). Speaking purely for myself, I would certainly sympathise with that line of thinking, but at present that is neither here nor there.

This is perhaps all a little difficult to follow. From what I understand, the fear grows in D & G's hearts and minds that the call for a radical, radical freedom of identity and discovery that decoding and deterritorialisation issues forth, one that would rid of us what Nietzsche calls 'moralic acid', has the awful potential of becoming the shrieking nightmare of civilisation. That is, there is nothing to restrain the decoded flows from recombining into the racialist, paranoiac-reactionary mechanisms of an Nth Reich. This tendency, this possibility of pushing deterritorialisation too far, is something that needs to be routed, and justifies the rigorous policing of thought.

Some further background for all this.

I have a piece vaguely planned, the working title of which is 'Is Nietzsche's Hammer Left-Handed?' Emphasis on 'working title' there. Anyway, it will be a probably quite superficial discussion about the loss of vitality in the Left, but it's a hell of a long way away as I want to actually try and put some real effort into it. But the thought that accompanies it is, essentially, that there is a puritanical streak in a lot of Leftist thinking, the example par excellence being Social Justice, that strikes me as being not-at-all-dissimilar to the anti-life that Nietzsche diagnosis in Christianity (not a position I entirely agree with, though he certainly latched onto something of enormous importance which I don't believe Christianity has ever made a wholly successful rebuttal to). It is possessed of an obsession with moral purity, in contrast with the evil false-morality of its opponents on the right, typically as exemplified in the nebulous notion of 'privilege'. 'Privilege' implies preference, bias, difference, hierarchy, as opposed to equality and fairness. As has been well-documented, this often includes fanatical attempts at self-policing, at attempts at expunging all trace of 'privilege' from its ranks, including from the souls of its constituent members.

From the above mentioned essay of the good Mr Land's, I present the following observations:

'[Leftist m]orality has become the complacent whisper of a triumphant priest: you'd better keep the lid pressed down on desire, because what you really want is genocide. Once this is accepted there is no limit to the resurrection of prescriptive neoarchaisms that come creeping back as a bulwark against the jack-booted unconscious: liberal humanism, watered-down paganism, and even stinking relics of Judaeo-Christian moralism. Anything is welcome, as long as it hates desire and shores up the cop in everyone's head.' [Fanged Noumena, Urbanomic, 2014, p. 280]

And...

'Trying not to be a Nazi approximates one to Nazism far more radically than any irresponsible impatience in destratification.' [p. 285]

And...

'...Nazism is morality itself, heir to Europe's respectable history: that of witch-burnings, inquisitions, and pogroms. To want to be in the right is the common substratum of morality and genocidal reaction...' [Ibid.]

That is, if I've read this correctly: the Left's obsession with ideologico-spiritual-moral purity is of course NOT identifiable with the Nazi obsession with racial purity, but its attempts at policing itself and expunging all tendency that can be classed as a manifestation of 'privilege' is a suicidal tendency, one that will transform the liberating, revolutionary potential of the Left into nothing more than a paranoiac-reactionary mechanism that will do nothing but replace one system of domination and control with another. The pseudo-Christian theology of Original Sin that SJ seems to deploy against itself, as well as vicious processes of public-shaming and condemnation, all stink of these resurrected 'prescriptive neoarchaisms.' Love and equality and fairness are all very well for us, but as for them...

It is, of course, lazy and inaccurate reasoning to compare the Left with the Nazis, but that is not the point Land is making (if he is, well, it's not the point that I'm making). It should be clear from the fact that Land identifies his 'Nazis' (who are, of course, not the historical Nazis, or at least not entirely) with the 'moralic acid' that the DeulezoGuattarian revolutionary motion is attempting to rid itself of, that the Left's attempts at purifying itself are and will be futile. Its desire to rid itself of impurity (preference, hierarchy, control) makes it little different from what it combats. To paraphrase Nietzsche, it has become what it is battling. Attempting to purge 'Nazi' elements makes nothing but 'Nazis'.

This is an old, old song that I'm singing. It's not an original insight (Land called this in the 90s), but it's one that's worth making. D & G make several passing remarks at how, when one attempts to determine where the Russian Revolution or psychoanalysis went 'bad,' that is, became about control and not liberation, one always ends up going back further and further and further... When did the Left end up like this? When did it become about making us all more afraid, more poor, less happy, less free?

I'm reminded of the old joke:

The Communist Party Central Committee are having a meeting. The General Secretary stands up and says 'Comrades, when the revolution comes, there will be strawberries and cream for everyone!' All his comrades cheer, except for one who says 'But, comrade, I don't like strawberries and cream.'

'Ah,' says the General Secretary, 'that's the beauty of it. When the revolution comes, you will like strawberries and cream.'

*

For the sake of fairness, it should be observed that this is obviously present in Neoreaction. Putting aside the 'Darkside Deleuzianism' of the techno-commercialist current of Neoreaction, with its rampant desire to overthrow regulation of the capital flows and all that can limit the processes of the market, we find something very puritanical and controlling. A lot of Neoreaction is terrified of entryism, and disgusted at the thought of being co-opted by disaffected Cathedral loyalists (the most obvious example being the almost comical response some have at the popularity of Justine Tunney, a transwoman, who is sometimes taken as a kind of unofficial spokesperson for post-Moldbug thought). How about monarchism, neofeudalism, ethno-nationalism and traditionalist Catholicism as 'neoarchaisms' that are terrified at what has been unleashed by the deterritorialising tendencies of modernity?

Deleuze and Guattari's most important observation has already been mentioned above: when one fights, one resembles one's opponent. I'm not a Neoreactionary, but I certainly sympathise with the desire for Exit a lot these days. 

In Defence of Moderation and Reasonableness

ADDED: the link to The Federalist below contains a transphobic remark. I don't endorse this remotely, as I'm not a transphobe (and I don't mean that in a wish-washy libertarian way either, I actively endorse gender-transition as a legitimate response to one's socially determined gender identity). Just wanted to make that clear.

With the general election only a few days away now, I think it prudent to talk a little about the value of talking. A friend of mine is a Catholic, and at university we often talked about our conflicting opinions on religion, the Church, spirituality and so on. Well, I say 'talked'. Often he'd be irritatingly moderate and reasonable (title drop!) while I'd try and turn him into a kind of socially-conservative straw-man I could then try and rip apart. Try, and usually fail. Again: damn moderate, damn reasonable.

In particular, when same-sex marriage was being debated in Parliament a couple of years ago I was somewhat insistent that it probably wasn't something that we could really discuss, on grounds (call it lazy Wittgenstein-ism) that we inhabited two very different worlds and our definitions of marriage would basically just pass one another by. He, however, would have none of that, and held that there was no good reason at all to try and shut down discussion of the matter just because we came from different religions traditions (I was brought up in a mainline Protestant church and now attend an Anglo-Catholic church, somewhat ironically). And, of course, he was right and I was wrong. There was never any reason to avoid having a serious, moderate and reasonable discussion about what legal redefinition of marriage might entail, for good or ill. 

But there is a worryingly noticeable trend in politics these days that seems hostile towards discussion, towards dialogue. This often feels particularly true of the Left. Indeed, it almost feels as if the Left considers having to explain itself to be an imposition. One sometimes observes almost religious horror when the Left encounters different opinions, as if only monsters could posses them. None of this is exclusive to the Left, of course, there has been much character assassination courtesy of the right too. But I do definitely feel that the single greatest failing of the modern Left is its refusal to feel uncomfortable, its refusal to consider potential flaws in its own arguments. The title of this article from The Federalist says it all- The Paradox of Dogma: How the Left is Crippling Itself. 

Of course, the tone of both the pieces I've linked to suffers from the same problem- they both are, to a greater or lesser extent, attempts to rubbish the Left by accusing it of profound irrationality and intellectual cowardice. They are, of course, wrong to suggest that this is a universal quality of Leftism, but they are right to acknowledge that the tendency is present and, in my experience, the Left is not doing enough to combat this plea for silence rather than conversation. All attempting to avoid dialogue does is miss the opportunity to examine how water-tight one's principles are. If one's principles do not survive their encounter with an opponent in debate, how do you expect them to survive their first brush with reality?

I am picking on the Left here, though. What I am talking about is true of of the Right as well. I just tend to notice it more on the Left, probably because I'm looking out for it and, frankly, because I don't know many conservatives. It does worry me, though, that many people I know who are around my age and come from the same background as I do are Left-wing almost as a matter of course. Another friend of mine, when I was telling him once about Neoreaction, asked me how I could tolerate 'those people'...

Accepting dogmatic Left-wing principles simply because they are in opposition to conservative thought is an act of un-thinking, and nothing more. And, again, this does obviously apply to the Right as well. One wonders if this would have happened if the Right had been more willing to reflect upon its own received wisdom, rather than merely shaking its fist at modernity because it is different.

*

Some final, hopefully both moderate and reasonable points. 

None of the following should ever be considered synonymous with 'Left-wing', 'Right-wing', 'conservative' or 'progressive':

• Stupid
• Intelligent
• Good
• Evil
• Always correct
• Always incorrect
• So obviously correct we don't need to discuss it
• So obviously wrong we don't need to discuss it

To refuse to enter into dialogue with your opponent is rarely a sign of intellectual virtue. 

In Review: Putin vs Putin by Alexander Dugin

In a rather strange twist of fate, it turns out I went to university with someone who now works at Arktos Media. A while ago, I got a message from her asking if I'd be interested in reviewing the new Dugin book, Putin vs Putin. Alexander Dugin is someone I was, of course, very much aware of, and I approached the opportunity to delve a little into his world with curiosity and, to be honest, trepidation.

What an odd, odd book this was to read. It is constructed from several years of work assembled thematically (I assume). As these individual papers were often written years apart, the experience of reading the book is a very disjointed one. Further to that, Dugin has written much of it with the (understandable as these were all originally published in Russian) assumption that the reader will already be largely aware of most of the events and individuals he's discussing. To the credit of the fine folk responsible for editing and translation, the copious footnotes are able to resolve this, but having to work through long lists of Russian names at the bottom of almost every page to figure out who Dugin is attacking or praising is a laborious task.

It was not a fun read. Indeed, considering its short length, it took me an embarrassingly long amount of time to read it, with many pauses in which I fled to read more accessible books, or made serious in roads into equally strange but somewhat more palatable books. A serious problem was that it was consistently substantially more interesting when it wasn't actually talking about Vladimir Putin. The digressions Dugin takes to discuss the various competing schools of radical conservatism, his geopolitcal theories, his defence of Russian Christian nationalism and, of course, his robust assertions of Tradition and the Fourth Political Theory are all compelling and fascinating (though I think it a good idea to state at this point, just to avoid any ambiguity, I do not agree with him), while his long discussions on what Putin's actions mean, what the people around the President want, and so on, and so on, became rather tedious. This tedium was likely more to do with, as I've said above, the unfamiliarity the reader is likely to have with many of the individuals that Dugin devotes his attention to. Only a student of contemporary Russian politics is likely to be able to follow the paths that Dugin takes around these people and events.

However, the single biggest problem with the book is that it simply shouldn't exist in the format it does. Like I said, this is put together from over a decades worth of separately written pieces of work. As such, this book should have been compiled in one of two ways, either as an anthology of these pieces with notes on the context of the writing of each one (perhaps with Dugin's comments on whether or not he still agrees with the position presented in each piece), arranged chronologically, or thematically maybe; or, these original texts should have been taken as the substance for a new, original work, in which Dugin would chart how his opinions on Putin and the Russian situation have shifted over the years. In so writing, the repetitions and contradictions could have been easily resolved through simple editorship and contextualisation. It seems that (I imagine this is the fault of the editors or publishers of the original Russian edition) the book is attempting to be the latter, but this wasn't properly or fully executed.

As to whether or not it's worth reading: with hesitation, I would say 'yes'. How much the reader's life is likely to be enriched by the experience, I cannot say. Probably reasonably little. This being said, the book is a valuable reminder that the liberal order is not as secure as many of us, myself included, would like to believe. A substantial number of very powerful people consider our paradise to be their hell. That is the hard lesson of the 21st Century for the West, and Dugin seems to almost delight in it.

Some final words. Dugin's shifting portraits of Putin are confounding, as the picture blurs frequently into something new, but that is indeed exactly the point. Putin, Dugin concludes, is a sheer pragmatist. He is the ultimate postmodern politician, he is a liberal and reformer and a moderniser and an imperialist and a patriot and defender of Christendom, all at once, depending on the time of day. This pseudo (super?) position is emphasised by the apparent lack of personality of the man. What can we say about Putin's character? Nothing. All we can speak of are his deeds, which are rarely enough to satisfy Dugin's vision of a new, masculine and sacred Russia, a vision it is by no means clear Putin shares any more than it is politically expedient for him to share. Because of this emptiness, Putin can become Dugin's almost-messiah and the West's monster without necessarily really being either.

Despite all this, I could not ever quite shake the thought from my head that Dugin failed to entertain one important possibility: is Putin maybe simply in it for himself?

For some, power is an ends in itself.