It feels sort of weird to try to talk about this as though it was a book. As a book, I don't think its incredible, the prose often recycles the same clunky phrasings, and man does it drag on, by the 5th disambiguation of numerical zygospirals you're practically begging to be "flatlined".
There are times when it feels like you're failing to understand what is being communicated by word vomit like "K-goth synthanatonic fugues" (p.229), but then you realize that this confusion is the point. It doesn't mean anything at all, but that's precisely what it means. I had the good luck to read Mark Fisher's excellent dissertation Flatline Constructs before I read this, which truly feels like a cypher into what is going on here, which makes sense as Fisher ran in the same circles as Nick Land, who knows maybe he even wrote some parts. The obvious similarity between "K-goth" and Fisher's blog K-Punk are one of many examples throughout this text where it feels like the author is almost laughing at you.
My feelings are thus: this book is, if not directly focused on, trying to evoke the uncontainable totality, and implosive collapse that a postmodern world forces upon the human mind. This text feels like a desperate search for a way out by an appeal to a delirious combination of every possible occult, conspiratorial, and lovecraftian concept they could get their hands on. But even then its too late, they are irrevocably marked by the digital, chapters like Flatlines are trying to reabsorb the digital into this occult, for some shred of the authentic, though its unclear if they are successful. The telecommerical reality of the modern world produces a schizphrenic subject, this much is clear, most notably evident in the shattered, duelling impulses of narcissism and paranoia that unfold daily online.
This text both tries to escape the invasion of the real by fiction, while recognizing that there is no longer any distinction between real and fiction, to borrow Baudrillard's language, there is no longer any territory, only maps. There's something tantalizingly out of reach here, this contradiction that is constantly collapsing between CCRU's fantastical invocation of anything weird, and it's hyperfictive "becoming". It doesn't matter if these stories that CCRU tells of things lurking beneath the internet, or Humpa-Taddum (another moment where it feels like they are really taking the piss) are real, because there is no real any more. In a world where the same technology that generates targets for assassination by way of drone strike also chooses what ads you're going to see on Youtube, the time demons hiding within your digital soul are as real as you are.
One of the best examples of this is the final appendix, "TV Demonism", which depicts a letter supposedly sent to the co-creator and writer of Teletubbies, accusing him of incorporating a "blatant Lemuro-Cybergothic dimension of the teletubby mechanoverse", which is certainly one of the better sentences I've read recently. This is one of those cases where it feels as though the veil has become a bit dislodged, and its placement at the end of the text really makes you feel that this is indeed a big joke, and this last laugh was too fun to leave out, but too ludicrous to include in the main text. It's hard to say if there is a distinction between what is serious and what is silly in this book, or if there is any point trying to draw a line between the two. At the center of CCRU is this circularity, a desire to become real by speaking oneself into existence. All at once, it is identified as fiction, but identifying it as fiction gives it this virality, that in the postmodern subject can't be contained, and spirals out into something real. It's hard to properly express this circularity, but it is felt throughout the book, everything else sort of hangs off of it.
I'm not sure how to recommend this text, don't go into it expecting a book, but don't just disregard it either. I've talked about this before, albeit in an utterly different context, but I think this is the dominant ethos of a schizophrenic time like our own: you have to take it completely seriously, with a wide grin on your face. This thing also has some of the best word combos ever, and its a real shame no one making good extreme metal has read it, cause they need to start stealing this shit ASAP. Lesbovampiric Contagion-Libido, Vermophobic Hysteria, or Zeroth Mother of Matrix Hyperstition could all be amazing cybergrind, black metal, or Wormed song titles.
I would absolutely recommend reading Jorge Luis Borges’ fantastic collection of short stories Ficciones in concert with this. Borges covers a lot of the same affective ground, and I think his desire to write about in-universe works of fiction is very analogous to what CCRU are doing here. Borges is also a vastly easier and more pleasant read, with actual prose on display.
I wrote this while listening to this album
This is great! Something I'd like to highlight:
- "It feels sort of weird to try to talk about this as though it was a book"
It's interesting to note that it isn't; the collected writings from Time Spiral and, now, Urbanomic, are a collection of articles from the CCRU web archives - which are sporadically available - and most importantly, both editions are woefully incomplete. This attributes to the texts own hyperstition of itself, where because the apocrypha of the texts are so scattered, it can be hard to tell what happened because of CCRU and what was CCRU - the memetic structures are trapped in its own time spiral. ie:
"CCRU denies it was ever part of the program. It denies there ever was a program until the deprogramming process introduced it."
This is especially evident regarding the Numogram, where full parts and context are just outright missing, and Decadence, which Land expands later on in some writings about k æ b ə l ə, which is a heavy requirement for parsing that portion of the text, and later texts by other authors that expand on it, like Revolutionary Demonology and to an extent SISU.