Cthelllic Tendrils

Follow the plummeting line downwards, Professor Barker tells us, past the rigid lithosphere where the tectonic plates crush together in howling grind, beyond the asthenosphere’s lurid flux of solid and molten matter, and downwards still through the mesosphere where this flux becomes chaotic, battered by seismic shockwaves and the pressure builds to insanity. Propelled into crushing depths at a screaming velocity we arrive at the outer core: an immense monster of energy, this swirling and churning ocean of liquid iron and nickel. Turbulent flows rocked by seismic shocks producing electrical loops generating the earth’s magnetic fields. Blacker than the frozen cosmic void: Cthelll, the schizophrenic heart of burning matter.

[T]he interior third of terrestial mass, semifluid metallic ocean, megamolecule, and pressure cooker beyond imagination… Cthelll is the terrestrial inner nightmare, nocturnal ocean, Xanadu: the anorganic metal-body trauma-howl of the earth, cross-hatched by intensities, traversed by thermic waves and currents, deranged particles, ionic strippings and gluttings, gravitional deep-sensitivities transduced into local electromesh, and feeding vulcanism…

Trauma-core. The Planomenon. When Cthelll hits the the borderlands of the mesosphere its anything but nonlinear. It’s a jagged internal coast that “contains troughs and swells, deeper than the Grand Canyon and higher than Mount Everest, spread across continent-sized areas.” In this zone – referred to as the D” layer – heat flows and matter are channeled together in great plumes that rush upwards, piercing each successive geological strata before rupturing at the surface in volcanic activity. Volcanic behavior, magnetic fields, the drift of continents – all find their motor in the immobile movements of Cthelll.

If there is a fateline that plummets to these depths, it is the Gothic line introduced by Wilhelm Worringer and elaborated upon by Deleuze and Guattari. From the geological veins of metallic mineral pumped up into the crust of the earth to the biological veins carrying iron-dense blood (a remnant of the iron-dense ocean that once covered the planetary surface before sinking into the dark depths) to magnetic field overhead to civilization’s reliance on the tapping into each of these flows, the metal radiance of Cthelll crisscrosses everything that takes place far above it. Speaking of the Gothic line, Deleuze and Guattari write that

metal is the coextensive to the whole of matter… Even the waters, the grasses, and the varieties of wood the animals are populated by salts or mineral elements. Not everything is metal, but metal is everywhere. Metal is the conductor of matter… Metal is neither a thing nor an organism, but a body without organs. The “Northern, or Gothic, line, is above all a mining or metallic line delimiting this body.

For Mark Fisher, the Gothic line is an affair of Gothic materialism, another name for which is hypernaturalism: “In the move from Naturalism to hypernaturalism, the old distinction between vitalism and mechanism – which, [Norbert] Wiener says, had been rendered illegitimate by cybernetics – collapses.” Hence the focus on uncanny technology that has been focused on in this blog. In hypernaturalism, there is nothing idiosyncratic or distinct about human or animal behavior that separates it from that of the machine, or the machine from the so-called ‘natural’ system. Instead of rising all things up to a human level (arrogantly presupposing human superiority) or pushing everything down to a base level (presupposing non-human inferiority), hypernaturalism charts a diagonal line away, into an indeterminate zone where these value judgments no longer hold sway. Here singularities, intensities, haecceities reign supreme.

Two of diagramming tools that Deleuze and Guattari lend to hypernaturalism are abstract machine and the machinic phylum. The first of these, the abstract machine, is the force that engenders the ecumenon – that is, the strata, or plane of organization – atop the planomenon, the plane of consistency. In the latter, the flows of matter are completely unformed and unorganized, yet become organized through being distributed into substances and forms by this abstract machine. Cthelll is an oscillating planomenon; that which organizes from this Entity – and slips back towards it – is an ecumenonical organization.

If this sounds oblique, consider Manuel Delanda’s unpacking, in War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, of the abstract machine by way of the study of self-organizing processes. Building on a conversation about turbulent liquid, crystallization, and metal’s transition from non-magnetic to magnetic, he writes that

all these different processes, at the onset of self-organization, have turned out to have similar mathematical structures. The process through which the photons in a laser undergo a spontaneous organization and become coherent (all “cooperating” to emit light of the same phase) has been found to be essentially similar to that of molecules in a liquid ”cooperating” to form eddies and vortices, or in a different case, crystalline structures. Since the actual chain of events that leads to the spontaneous formation of new patterns and structures in different media must be completely different, all these transitions from chaos to order are said to be “mechanism independent.” Only the mathematical structure of these transitions matters, as far as their self-organizing effects are concerned, and not the concrete ways in which the organization of molecules (or photons) is carried out. For this reason these mechanism-independent, structure-building singularities have been conceptualized as ”abstract machines”: that is, single “mathematical mechanisms” capable of being incarnated in many different physical mechanisms.

The singularities referenced here refer to points which trigger self-organization. Something can pass through a series of states – a succession of intensities like stages of temperature, for example – but when it enters into the proximity of the singularity the abstract machine takes over. Water goes from a consistent, unorganized room temperature to boiling to evaporation after passing through different singularities which, in turn, trigger the molecules to enter into self-organization that ultimately culminates in widespread systematic shift.

The second tool Deleuze and Guattari provide is the machinic phylum, which is itself synonymous with the metallic Gothic line. The phylum is nonorganic life: it is not only the unification of the organic and nonorganic under the rubric of the abstract machine’s functions that rupture the boundaries between the two, but the implication – proceeding from this – that nonorganic things and forces can adopt the attributes of biological life.

Vital impulse? Leroi-Gourhan has gone the farthest toward a technological vitalism taking biological evolution in general as the model for technical evolution: a Universal Tendency, laden with all of the singularities and traits of expression, traverses technical and interior milieus that refract or differentiate it in accordance with the singularities and traits each of them retains, selects, draws together, causes to converge, invents.

The machinic phylum is the Cthelllic tendrils radiating out from the geocosmological compression chamber, rhizomatic burrows making their way through time and space, cutting up and down different scales, acting the bleeding edge of deterritorialization through disrupting the stable ground of a tool, a social configuration, even the human body (Lyotard’s inorganic proletarian bodies warped, broken, and remolded by the machinic arrays they are inserted into, for example). From the perspective of Delanda’s robot historian – one that is writing the historical of its species’ genesis through the nonlinear meanders of matter and process – “the notion of a machinic phylum blurs the distinction between organic and non-organic life, which is just what a robot historian would like to do. From its point of view… humans would have served only as the machine’s surrogate reproductive organs until the robots acquired their own self-replication capabilities. But both human and robot bodies would ultimately be related to a common phylogenetic line: the machinic phylum.”

Deleuze and Guattari divide the great, nocturnal Cthelll line of the machinic phylum into two different lines: a phylogenetic line and a ontogenetic line. “At the limit there is a single phylogenetic lineage, a single machinic phylum”, but this line itself becomes cut by the assemblage; that is, but a composition of forces that have entered into mutually transformative process – the orchid and the wasp, the worker and the machine, all the way up to the scales of culture and historical stages. It is this entering into of relations that cuts the phylum: one extracts something from the phylum and the extracted line extracts something in turn (hence why it is deterritorialization’s bleeding edge). The cut of the phylum produces many distinct phyla, both indistinguishable from the machinic phylum itself yet distinguishable by want of its specific attributes. From Cthelll to veins of iron ore to the various Iron Ages to the lineages of tools and weapons internal to them: snaking passages from the phylogenetic line down to the ontogenetic.

[At some future, yet very soon date, I’ll pick up where this leaves off: tracing the operations of the Cthelllic tendrils on human societies through a succession of figures – Shaman, Sorcerer, Smith.]