Undercurrent: Remarkable posts at Undercurrent.
(a) Adventures in Solipsism: A long and intentionally inconclusive post on various subjects among which I can point to Hollow Earth theories and related hyperstitions.
This post intrigued me to write some irrelevant comments and mix them with a piece I was writing on Doom 3. Has anyone played Doom3?
(b) Undercurrent has started an excellent project on his blog and it is translating Michel Houellebecq’s work on H.P. Lovecraft (Contre le monde, contre la vie: Against the world, against life). I’ve already read a part of this long essay in Farsi, a friend of mine translated a part of it along with Gabrielle Wittkop’s controversial novel Le nécrophile and 50-60 pages of Pierre Guyotat’s tour de force Eden Eden Eden (which was better than the English translation), of course these translations were not supposed to be published in Iran. I read Lovecraft very late; well, because the monstrosities in his stories have been always too inspiring for Hollywood superpowers. Finally some essays on Lovecraft (including Houellebecq’s essay) and Nick’s intriguing and as always exciting comments on Lovecraft overcame my resistance.
As Undercurrent mentions, what Houellebecq suggests is some kind of nihilism on/of life. I think like many writers with similar trends, Houellebecq has mistaken the process of survival or live-ing (libban, liffan: leaving life) or what we generally call life with Life as a germinal space in which survival should be appropriated as a fluxional and at the same time grounding process to simultaneously feed on Life and simply endure or survive from its unlife (a process of appropriating based on an economical openness towards life). The unlife of life as a radical abyss of openness is external to survival economy. Therefore, all communications of survival process or live-ing to Life are confined within the sphere of affordance and capacity since survival cannot digest radical openness unless through appropriation or filtering processes, it can only transform openness to affordance, the process from which it guarantees its survival, and eventually death. The communication of survival economy (again, what commonly believed as life) with Life should essentially be channeled through capacity which is the foundation of survivalism (the so-called pro-life). The functioning of capacity or boundary as horizon does not narrate the closure of Survival Economy, on the contrary it depicts the economical openness of boundary: boundary (horismos) starts from the edge to the outside not to communicate with the outside but to accommodate it. In the same way, pro-life is actually a pro-survival position, a pacified and passive position to conservatively interact with the (Un)life itself. Anti-Life, predictably, falls in the same trap; it becomes an agent of survival economy and economical openness as soon as it mistakes live-ing with Life. I’ll discuss all this soon in a long essay on Sorcery and Necromancy.
The other issue, I think Houellebecq’s view on Lovecraft’s racism (it is too visible to be ignored) is arguable. I have discussed it in the fully updated version of A Good Meal which will be posted here before I make it online again or publish it in an anthology.
Undercurrent also talks about the necromantic invocations of the Old Ones when he speaks about the consequence of Lovecraftian cosmic nihilism; this will be also discussed in the essay about Necromancy and Sorcery. Does necromantic call is the consequence of this cosmic nihilism or it is an entirely different undercurrent which is too complex to be demarcated as sorcery and narrated through the dynamism of lines of flight? (Will be discussed in the essay)
Anyway, many thanks for this great project … I know that free translations always need encouragements (let aside donations) so I ask other bloggers to encourage Robin Undercurrent. The process of translating must be exhausting so only warm encouragements can fuel the translator.
(c) A very funny post on Norwejian Ommellete and D&G
thanks! Actually I'm just finishing the next part ('techniques of attack') which will be posted later today. The worst bit is that since I don't have a volume of Lovecraft's letters I have to translate them (with all adjectives) back from French, you can imagine how much fun that is, lol!
I do think this is a remarkable book, a book that I could only dream of existing (like Thousand Plateaus). It's as if someone is describing the morbid reveries of my childhood back to me...! And now having read some of his other stuff has proved to me that Houellebecq is a writer who has developed (at least) an original and fascinating articulation of nihilism, obviously inherited in part from this early involvement with Lovecraft.
I'd also like to respond to your comments on life/Life/anti-life soon Reza. I realise I have skirted the issue (partly because I don't have a quite clear understanding of it). I recognise the distinction though.
As for Norwegian Omelette, there are plenty of other similar things in ATP that need decoding too...but meanwhile it gives the clone-army of Deleuze scholars some ideas for their nice dinner-parties ;)
and btw I was an addict of Doom for many years...nick can tell you my first 'academic paper' was delivered to a drum&bass soundtrack and projected backdrop of Doom!
Posted by: undercurrent at October 25, 2004 10:42 AM>>> I do think this is a remarkable book, a book that I could only dream of existing (like Thousand Plateaus). It's as if someone is describing the morbid reveries of my childhood back to me...! And now having read some of his other stuff has proved to me that Houellebecq is a writer who has developed (at least) an original and fascinating articulation of nihilism, obviously inherited in part from this early involvement with Lovecraft.
Absolutely … this book goes into my listmania in which books like A Thousand Plateaus, Blind Owl, Thirst for Annihilation, Artaud’s final works, Heroes and Tombs, and even the complete works of Plato and many other titles have already rested.
>>> I'd also like to respond to your comments on life/Life/anti-life soon Reza. I realise I have skirted the issue (partly because I don't have a quite clear understanding of it). I recognise the distinction though.
It was just a pathetic remark … think I should develop it in this long essay about sorcery / necromancy. It’s 12 pages but still I’ve not started the section about necromancy yet.
>>> and btw I was an addict of Doom for many years...nick can tell you my first 'academic paper' was delivered to a drum&bass soundtrack and projected backdrop of Doom!
Curious, what do you think about Doom? I liked Doom but my favorites were Ultima and System Shock. Doom 3 however, despite all flaws and silly parts is truly a great work. For a long time, I was trying to look for a way to develop a narration-module based on videogame’s narration diagrams (mainly PC games) together with Nick. Finally we gave up, the narration in videogames is embedded within interfaces and interactions and it loses many of its features as soon as we try to domesticate it by writing; however, we could come up with a couple of interesting narration-modules to fictionalize Mecca-nomics, Gog-Magog Axis and Petropolitics hyperstitions. I remember you once discussed (possibly here) that story-based videogames suck. That’s true especially for playstation games; what I think stinks about playstation games is that they directly impregnate the videogame with traditional narration-modules, they work horrible with interacting machinery of videogames. However, in recent years, PC games have succeeded to scramble traditional stories in videogames by different narration-modules and simulating techniques. The results are quite astonishing, I think. PS2 has also started to imitate the current trend of successful PC games (see The Suffering for example). Doom 3 has intentionally selected the old plotless ‘shoot n run’ style but it simultaneously forges exciting poly-plotlines at its margins while you blindly run through corridors and sectors, killing everything that pops up behind or in front of you. The developers have used a very simple but effective trick to immerse the gamer within a real story (Since as you know in Doom-style videogames, every narration is a setback in the game’s architecture, a disruption in speed and timeless interaction): You have a PDA, you can connect it to all computers in the complex and download all data stored in PDAs of engineers, scientists, guards and workers; this includes their emails, spams, voice logs, reports, diaries, etc. Actually you must obtain some of them to unlock doors, shut down mal-functioning systems or get weapons and ammo. However, you are always tempted to search for all PDAs in a sector and figure out the puzzling story.
what a bookshelf ;)
Quickly - I just hate narrative in videogames ; that is, forced narrative (that's why, although I enjoyed it as I'd enjoy a film, I was never really _possessed_ by system shock as I was by Doom). IMHO the strength of doom is that it is less a _story_ than an annexation of the Human Perceptual Operating System.
As we know, Doom was very much constructed as an OS, so that players could create new levels, monsters, etc. It was an open system, like the diametric opposite of a top-down agatha-christie operation such as Myst.
And in all great videogames (space invaders, mario, pacman) , the nervous system comes first. The 'story' soon disappears when you become a twitching electrified insectoid, and any ensuing attempt at narrative intervention, puzzles, will always weaken this. Of course this makes the games of 'limited interest' (although each game, because of its intensive coordinates and mappings is extremely different) but this is the price of their experimental purification.
sorry, I didn't reply about recent games, just because I haven't played any of them. I just got totally disillusioned with the whole genre.
Posted by: undercurrent at October 28, 2004 11:52 AM>>> What a bookshelf ;)
Well actually I should say, it is just a listmania, I massively give my books to friends and never take them back so there is no actual bookshelf ;)
>>> Quickly - I just hate narrative in videogames ; that is, forced narrative (that's why, although I enjoyed it as I'd enjoy a film, I was never really _possessed_ by system shock as I was by Doom).
Yes, I can understand; maybe the reason that I didn’t enjoy Doom very much at the time it released was playing it without sound. Years later, I returned to it but after playing hundreds of games, it had not the same effect. Plus, I should add I was not possessed by neither System Shock nor Ultima, the only game that really possessed me was Thief: The Dark Project; for the first time AI leaked into your nervous system and tried to mess with your cognitive patterns by a neither-quite-digital-nor-completely-real intelligence. You could sympathize with pulp-horror movies that diagram videogames AI as something truly hideous trying to step into your nervous system, not merely suck you in as a digtal swarm but eating your intelligence or radically render it artificial; to play thief, you should always try to simulate your intelligence according to the AI and not vice versa (not like other videogames trying to imitate your cognitive patterns). Plus, Thief, I think, was the first bug-based videogame: you do not play, you just attempt to be part of the AI which in most cases is full of bugs, inconsistencies, crash-based behavior. The weak point of Thief was the lack of multiplying option; I always wished to see how collective playing works with this game.
Open games: well, today, almost every game has an open editor with many parameters you can modify; neverwinter nights series, for example. So, it is not a very exciting feature nowadays.