‘[T]he lone survivor from an earlier world.’
If we could only pattern-recognise a perfect storm of theory. Retcon some uniquely specific old story & claim it pre-emptive coagulum of the trendiest currents. We’d be geek giddy. But it, our found ur-text - could it rebuke those paradigms we (in philistine misprision) deemed its progeny?
What narrative could possibly be adequate? It would labour under such demands. It would have to be so fecund, so evocative of so many later moments. We might require of it that it let us take, say:
- from Gnosticism, our universe as a flawed, broken, buggy echo, its creation not preceding but the result of a Fall;
- from the intoxicating if rapidly moribund Salvagepunk, a commodity-inflected version of the vision, a garbage world, & a political subjectivity of the wreckscape;
- from Darwinism, an awesomely amoralised, desperate & contingent niche-struggle (rigorously antipathetic to Nietzschean monkey-spanking);
- from Speculative Realism (which, though precipitously kitsch & still smarting from a brutal smackdown by one of its erstwhile pin-ups, has a few years to run as favoured hipster text-cluster), fascination with i) the arche-fossil, that remnant from before the very possibility of thought, & ii) slime;
- from every single current cultural artefact, an obedient predilection for eschatology, apocalypse porn;
- & from the Weird, that evasive, indispensible aesthetic of crisis-midwifed monstrous, backwashed sublime, formlessness & radical alterity - the abcanny - troth-pledging to incomparably the most important animal in the history of philosophy & the world.
Had we access to such a template, what then might we do?
***
From Oceanic Mythology by Roland Burrage Dixon.
Take a moment.
This is wreck & ruin of an earlier world. & only the octopus remembers.
We, not octopus, read & reread & reread it, chests fucking hollow with awe.
Problems of salvage. 1: Ancestral shame
The young paradigm of salvagepunk - philosophical junk-suturing, a conceptual hotwiring of long-fucked engines, anti-nostalgic skip-diving of the mind, tinkering in broken crap with aggressive uninterest in original usages - faces challenges. They do not necessitate despair, but its enthusiasts must acknowledge them.
The extent to which the ‘-punk’ can kink the ‘salvage-’ (or wants to) is debatable. Of the various of the prefix’s insinuations, that of reclamation might be celebrated by radicals, while those of vulture-capitalism and monetised asset-stripping abjured. But capitalism itself is ineluctibly & always a system of salvage. It does not sweep away the ‘muck of ages’ (that task is yet to be carried out) but squats in it, shapes & is shaped by the shit in which it sits. It cobbles itself together from wreckage. It is uneven & combined.
In its dreams of itself, capitalism indeed maunders salvage. Its fondly conjured & worshipped ancestor figure, ‘individual & isolated’, its monadic social atom, that ‘unimaginative conceit[…]’ Crusoe, constructs his early bourgeois milieu not ex nihilo, but, famously, through colonialism on the one hand;
and, less notoriously, on the other, from salvaged debris. With the discards of the ship.
How radical can mere salvage be when it is a constitutive activity & grundnorm of capitalism’s dream subject? Here, salvage = ‘entrepreneurialism’, that idiot propagandistic shibboleth vacuity. If the perpetrator of such salvage is a punk, s/he is as radical as Johnny Ramone.
Diaphanisation
Few things are more pressing than the improvement of investigative techniques.
What enzymes & immersion will render transparent the corpus of an enspecimened quotidian? What will stain any no-longer-hidden structures? Its organs? The entrails of the world are blue, bones unbloody red. Filaments that tether everything might be trace-visible & in places bits & meat pieces could be black & like writing.
Diaphanise other things. Make the body a window.
Key texts for a future philosophy
‘[I]f all matter in the universe except the nematodes were swept away, our world would still be dimly recognizable, and if, as disembodied spirits, we could then investigate it, we should find its mountains, hills, vales, rivers, lakes and oceans represented by a thin film of nematodes. The locations of towns would be decipherable since for every massing of human beings there would be a corresponding massing of certain nematodes. Trees would still stand in ghostly rows representing our streets and highways. The location of the various plants and animals would still be decipherable and, had we sufficient knowledge, in many cases even their species could be determined by an examination of their erstwhile nematode parasites.’
- Nathaniel Cobb, ‘Nematodes & their Relationships’, Yearbook of the US Department of Agriculture, 1914.
‘[I]t is of old rumour that the soul of the devil-bought hastes not from his charnel clay, but fats and instructs the very worm that gnaws; till out of corruption horrid life springs, and the dull scavengers of earth wax crafty to vex it and swell monstrous to plague it. Great holes secretly are digged where earth’s pores ought to suffice, and things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl.’
- H.P. Lovecraft, ‘The Festival’, Weird Tales, 1925.
After hauntology. Ontology pre-considered as post-itself; form as not-yet rot (decay as a building process); substance as nutrition for post-substance; the present as ineluctible succumbing to voracity-with-memory; materialism as pre-mulch melancholy; objects as variegated, specific & writhing-edged outlines of wormfood to come: vermiformalism.
