The Innsmouth Look: Further Intimations of the Kingdom in H.P. Lovecraft

Life is a hideous thing, and from the background behind what we know of it peer daemoniacal hints of truth which make it sometimes a thousandfold more hideous. Science, already oppressive with its shocking revelations, will perhaps be the ultimate exterminator of our human species — if separate species we be — for its reserve of unguessed horrors could never be borne by mortal brains if loosed upon the world. If we knew what we are, we should do as Sir Arthur Jermyn did; and Arthur Jermyn soaked himself in oil and set fire to his clothing one night.

H.P. Lovecraft

Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family

In a recent post, Twinglebrook-Hastings wrote:

"Many readers of Lovecraft have been struck by his motivation of banal facts of geology, architecture, genealogy, history and science combined with repeated cliches about "unutterable horror" to provide a truly upsetting result...
"Madness and death are in Lovecraft two views on one thing, for the materialist message of the Ancient Wisdom is that to understand something is to be it, thus his narrators are constantly discovering the horrible truth lies in their own biological history, either as the foundation for all human life on earth or in their genealogy."

I hope here briefly to elaborate on the status of lineage and history in Lovecraft's work.

While contemplating a photograph of the Great Pyramid at Giza taken during the ill-fated Cuddler-Shelton expedition of 1894 I, too, was struck by Lovecraft's morbid fascination with genealogy and his horror of duration.  The image of Shelton, in native dress, staring purposefully at the great enigmatic mass of stone as Cuddler squats balefully half out of the frame always evokes poignant meditations on the discontents of permanence and heredity; four months after this photograph was taken, Shelton's body was forever lost down a previously unknown vertical shaft within the Great Pyramid which has yet to be re-discovered, and Cuddler had disappeared up the Blue Nile searching, it later emerged, for his illegitimate half-breed son.  These two features of Lovecraft's work substantiate the impression that he is, if not a proto-symbologist, at least profitably interpretable by the same critical structures which have been evolved for understanding symbology.

Lovecraft's protagonists are often engaged in genealogical research, and it is typically this activity which leads them to the hideous revelations they uncover (whether directly, as in The Shadow Over Innsmouth, The Rats in The Walls, and Facts Concerning The Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family, or indirectly as in The Picture in The House).  While the hapless genealogist of Picture finds himself sheltering in the home of a freakish pre-revolutionary cannibal seemingly by chance, more often than not the unwitting researcher is drawn into ultimate horror necessarily by his investigation.  He discovers not only that the fabric of reality is infinitely more horrifying than he could ever have supposed, but that he is implicated in the newly discovered unspeakableness by heredity.  Arthur Jermyn is the miscegenated progeny of a man and a white ape; Delapore's forebearers were the cannibal shepherds of domesticated anthropoids; the narrator of Innsmouth realizes that he is slowly turning into an blasphemous amphibian.  This leads one to suspect that the protagonist of Picture's position vis a vis his cannibal host is not, in fact, coincidental to his engagement with genealogy, but that the pursuit of lineage per se draws one inexorably towards nightmare and madness.

Lovecraft also reserves a special and incongruous loathing for long spans of time.  Examples are too ubiquitous to bother enumerating here.  The antique is invariably "hideously" old.  This initially seems strange, since permanence was regarded by most authors of the period as a positive, or at worst neutral, characteristic.  I want to suggest, however, that the "hideousness" of age and the irrepressible horror of genealogy are both products of an attitude towards historicism and diachrony in general has clear analogues in the epistemology of the symbological novel.

Modern symbology, particularly as exemplified by Dan Brown, functions efficiently to generate the illusion of knowledge production at the same time as it operates to constrain knowledge and contain potentially threatening avenues of inquiry.  Most recently, in The Lost Symbol, Brown proffers "The Ancient Mysteries" and "Noetic Science" as immensely fecund, esoteric fields of study which have the power to generate truly efficacious knowledge that will fundamentally change the social, economic, political, intellectual, and physical world.  In the course of the novel, however, the ostensible object of inquiry bifurcates; the cacognostic continues to pursue the literal truth of the Code and is utterly destroyed, and the symbologist, choosing orthognosis, opts for an epistemology in which the esoteric knowledge (which for Brown includes anything not comprehended in the discursive world of USA Today) is replaced by trite ideological commonplaces which, through a kind of legerdemain, retain investiture with the mystique originally accorded the esoteric knowledge they have replaced.  Common sense is thereby substantiated and rejuvenated, and the subject of ideology re-contained.

Lovecraft's attitude to time and lineage can be seen to produce an analogous result.  His stories open with the suggestion that genealogical research is intrinsically fascinating and worthwhile; after all, the well-educated and sympathetic young protagonist is travelling all over New England doing it.  But invariably, it leads to the sort of revelation to which self-immolation is the only conceivable response, and after which we long only "to flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."  Likewise the hideousness of age; the only products of inquiry into the remote past are the remnants, and the revenants, of beings who as merciless and hostile as they are powerful and alien.

Just as the symbological novel gives the illusion of being a source of knowledge and intrigue while functioning as an abattoir for both, Lovecraft gives the impression of antiquarianism, but on examination his stories uniformly imply that the only possible result of historical inquiry, genealogical or otherwise, is the discovery of things whose concealment was the condition of the investigator's existence.

All of the foregoing may be read as a further articulation of Twinglebrook-Hastings' astute observation that "Kingdom's characters are Brownian people in a Lovecraftian universe."  Nancy Kelly is a character more Brownian than Brown himself has yet produced.  Katherine Solomon is a pale emanation of her determined orthognosis (or, "orthognosis(f)" as we should probably call it in order to distinguish the permanent, natural orthognosis of the female subject of symbological knowledge from the vulnerable and hard-won orthognosis(m) of the male subject).  Indeed, it is difficult to resist the conjecture that Kingdom is a programmatic exploration of what a symbological novel in which the only protagonist is constantly orthognostic(f) might look like.  But where does her quest for her surrogate father lead her?  Towards a horrifying realm of unimaginable antiquity where, in fact, human immolation is a regular and hallowed practice, which occupies precisely the relation to humanity that Nature (broadly construed to include Nyarlathotep, Chthulhu, etc,) does, and whence the object of her quest was drawn by the search for his own father.

Thus Martin, ever the synthetic genius, draws together the anti-epistemological function of the classic symbological novel and Lovecraft's anti-diachronism to produce, in our final view of Nancy Kelly, a subject who has successfully rejected both knowledge and diachrony and can bask eternally in a present which is identical with ideology and simultaneously considers itself utterly sui generis.  He has achieved the final object which Brown and Lovecraft indicate: idiocy ex nihilo.

"Avatar": Orthognosis and the Late Imperialist Imagination

The controversy elicited by James Cameron’s latest multimillion dollar cinematic extravaganza, “Avatar,” which has been lauded by critics and flocked to by audiences, has thus far unfolded along predictable lines.  Conservatives have attacked the film as covert environmentalist propaganda, harking back to the days when their predecessors sought hidden communist messages in Hollywood productions – somehow ignoring the fact that Cameron has been quite explicit about the film’s ostensible ecological agenda.  Meanwhile, the left, broadly defined, has debated whether the film’s presumably benign and laudable earth-hugging message is marred by its patronizing representation of the Na’vi, the natives of the planet Pandora, which has been invaded by rapacious humans eager to exploit its rich supply of a substance called “unobtanium.”  The Na’vi look like a cross between E.T., the Maasai, and the Mohawks, cannot seem to open their mouths without uttering a barrage of portentous metaphors, and the film’s portrayal of them generally consists of a predictable pastiche of National Geographic clichés.  Certain critics have seized on the fact that these benevolent, nature-loving natives evidently require the paternalistic intevention of the film’s hero, crippled ex-Marine Jake Sully, to save their primordial ecotopia from the ravages of the technocapitalism that has, in the film’s futuristic scenario, already laid waste to the Earth, as proof of the incurable racism of the Hollywood imagination.

My purpose here is to suggest the fruitfulness of certain of the insights developed within our burgeoning but still marginal field for a more satisfying account of the film’s obvious contradictions, about which I think few of any political persuasion or cinematic tastes would have any doubt.  First of all, let me be as clear as possible about these contradictions, which have already been discussed in the body of criticism generated since the film's release: we have in “Avatar” a film that is perhaps the supreme recent aesthetic product of postmodern technocapitalism, the spectacular sophistication of whose seamless integration of computer generated imagery with sequences involving human actors few would dispute, which nevertheless claims to articulate a radical and thorough rejection of postmodern technocapitalism as a necessarily monstrously sadistic, genocidal, and ecocidal catastrophe to which the only appropriate ethical response is violent revolution.  Moreover, its protagonist completes his repudiation of his origins by abandoning his humanity altogether in order to exclusively occupy his prosthetic Na’vi body, which, however, was genetically engineered for him by the scientific research apparatus whose work the film explicitly exposes as instrumental to the strategies of domination of interplanetary capital.  Finally, the film has been variously identified as undertaking a critique of the Bushian War on Terror by way of its emphasis on the heavy-handed tactics of the cartoonishly malign Colonel who heads up security for the mining company exploiting Pandora's resources, even though it is more or less impossible to read its romantic portrayal of the anti-imperial revolt of the Na'vi, correspondingly, as a flattering account of the Iraqi insurgency.  

As those who have attempted to defend the film from accusations of racism and stereotyping have insisted, the Na’vi are emphatically not human beings, but rather somewhat conventional cinematic aliens, at least if you take away their feather headdresses, bead breastplates, breachcloths, and so on.  Nevertheless, it is worth pointing out that one could set the same storyline in, say, the Amazon, Indonesia, or the Congo, with few significant alterations, and you would have a relatively realistic, if schematic and manichean, representation of the very real and very contemporary catastrophic impact of the extraction of raw materials on small-scale subsistence communities, the complicity of technoscience in such forms of exploitation, and the use of quasi-military mercenary force by transnational corporations.  In fact, the 2000 documentary “The Coconut Revolution” tells a by no means dissimilar story about how the beleaguered inhabitants of the island of Bouganville managed to expel the Rio Tinto mining company and achieve political autonomy.  If part of the point of the film's focus on a twelve-foot tall, blue skinned race of quasi-feline, quasi-simian humanoids rather than an exotic society somewhere in the tropics is that it is not really a celebration of, say, the armed groups in Nigeria which blow up oil pipelines or Yemeni pirates, even though it might initially appear that way, why does Cameron seem so determined to give the appearance that it might be a heroic representation of violent resistance to transnational capital, even while, by giving the film an interplanetary setting, he produces a convenient disavowal of the literal implications of this appearance?

It is here that I believe some of the terms we have developed to characterize some of the narrative motifs and operations of the admittedly distinct but overlapping sphere of symbological fiction and film may prove useful.  Prandleforth (forthcoming 2010; see also Bremselhäcker 2008) has formulated a promising model of orthognosis as the largely absent but necessary structuring term of all symbological narrative and thought.  Furthermore, the Generative Grammar (Bremselhäcker 2009) has opened up new possibilities for the exploration of symbological narrative as a variant within a broader continuum of popular narrative genres (see also Prandleforth's Reilly: Hack Novelist, Symbologist, Asshole [2009] for a cogent account of the continuities and ruptures between symbological fiction and Cold War spy fiction).  The Na'vi, whatever their resemblance to traditional objects of ethnographic study, are familiar enough for anyone aware of the basic terms of our field of study: they are what we might call the Orthognostic Other.  This prodigious but liminal figure appears in different form in many of our canonical texts: we need think only of Poimandres and his presumable Copt brethren, of the assumed but never explicitly named peoples of the utopian feminist pre-Christian Mediterranean as imagined in the Da Vinci Code, or for that matter, of Riane Eisler's Minoans and Shlain's pre-alphabetic, image-centered, matriarchal peoples of prehistoric Southern Europe.  The distant, ineffable Orthognostic Other, qua sujet supposé savoir, overlaps partially with the equally significant figure of Woman, basking in her sublime indifférance (Catherine, Katherine, Nancy, etc).  The important point about the Orthognostic Other is that, unlike the positions of Mythognostic and Cacognostic, it is not even a temporarily available position for reader or protagonist, whom the novel ultimately must reconstitute as the effectively re-contained subject of late capitalist hegemony.  The remoteness and unattainability of this exotic form of consciousness reassures him of the appropriateness, nay the necessity, of his acquiescence to the obviousnesses of his culture, and it instead remains present in its necessary absence as a flattering spectral projection of his own inert apathy. 

"Avatar" differs from its strictly symbological relatives in that, first of all, it dwells extensively on the elaboration of the Orthognostic Other, while completely leaving out its mythognostic and cacognostic counterparts.  The film's hero, Jake Sully, proceeds from a subject position that is not even cacognostic or mythognostic, and indeed, neither of these subject positions are available in "Avatar."  Its best candidate for a mythognostic is Dr. Grace Augustine, a Jane Goodall-esque scientist who has lived among the Na'vi as well as developed the eponymous "avatar" program at the center of the film's drama, in which prosthetic Na'vi bodies are generated for humans to occupy (ostensibly because humans cannot breathe Pandora's atmosphere, but also so as to facilitate a benign, paternalistic colonialism in which the Na'vi are taught English and generally persuaded to cooperate with the corporation in their displacement from their sacred territory).  However, her strong mythognostic credentials - she seems, in essence, to think that the Na'vis' orthognostic union with nature is a matter of great "scientific" interest, but that it has no implications beyond satisfying her personal curiosity - are compromised by the film's insistence on the instrumentalization of knowledge by corporate interests.  The mining corporation which has colonized Pandora only funds her research because of its direct utility to their techniques of domination and exploitation, and its representatives are quite explicit about this fact.  What the foregoing should suggest is that the dominant subject position of the film, that occupied by the corporate hegemons and their military henchmen, is not even cacognostic, because, for all their avowals of the instrumentalities of knowledge in the pursuit of power, this pursuit is ultimately not invested in any mediating symbolic forms whatsoever.  They are, in short, creatures of vulgar economic determinism, driven exclusively by the accumulation of capital, fully aware of the fact and prone to articulate it incessantly in a forthright, exaggeratedly demystified manner.

It is crucial to note here that this figure, the subject of vulgar economic determinism, is largely absent from symbological fiction, an absence made interesting by the important relation this figure bears, in "Avatar," to its ostensible opposite, the Orthognostic Other.  The Na'vi and the interplanetary corporate conglomerate backed up by brutal force turn out to be marked by an extensive series of resemblances and correspondences.  Take their respective power structures: the triangular structure of power among the human protagonists, with interplanetary capital supplemented by the male-dominated RSA of the Colonel and the female dominated ISA of Augustine, is identical in form to the tribal hierarchy of the Na'vi, where the male chief is backed up by a male head warrior and female shaman.  The extensive human installation in technological prostheses is similarly parallel to the Na'vi's relationship to their animal prostheses, horse and pteradactyl-like beings into which they plug a tendril-like supernumerary limb in order to control their movements.  The total integration of mind and nature always already achieved in the Na'vi's orthognostic inertia is also the explicit goal of both Augustine's research and the military technologies used by the Colonel to bring Pandora under the more effective control of corporate power.  Meanwhile, one of the consequences of their position of absolute orthognosis is that the cultural practices of the Na'vi appear to have no necessity - since they enjoy unmediated psychic integration with their surroundings and seem to exist as a unified collective mind, it is unclear why they would need to possess language or rely on sign systems at all, much less engage in the complex symbolic mediations of ritual.  If all symbolic action is therefore rendered entirely supplementary and decorative, their situation is, in fact, identical to that in which the deracinated, "wired" subject of late technoscientific capitalism perceives himself to be.  

The originary orthognosis of the Na'vi, then, is quite clearly global techno-capitalism's spectral image of itself.  The Na'vi harmony with nature, which permits them to instrumentalize its abundance without conflict, violence, or resistance, is the corporation's domination of nature minus the contradictions it generates.  Orthognosis, similarly, turns out to name the way that the imaginary relation to knowledge into which we are installed must appear to us, at least in certain prevalent narrative forms.  The Orthognostic Other reminds us of the necessity of our assuming this position by allowing us to forget that we are assuming it.       

 

Bookwatch 2009: The Magic Continues!

The Amazon blurb for this recently published collection joyfully announces: There is only one Dan Brown—and there is only one Secrets team that has achieved worldwide bestselling success by providing curious readers with compelling and authoritative explorations into the thought-provoking ideas that lie behind Brown's bestselling novels. Once again, Dan Burstein and Arne de Keijzer have gathered a wide range of world-class historians, theologians, scientists, philosophers, symbologists, code breakers, art historians, experts on the occult, and writers and thinkers of all types who give readers the essential tools to understand The Lost Symbol.

The panel of luminaries includes, among many others, Karen Armstrong, Richard Dawkins, and (naturally) Lynne McTaggart. 

The fundamental conceit of the work is explicitly stated in the blurb: it is by appeal to recognized experts in the subjects to which Brown makes reference that one can understand The Lost Symbol.

Our work, of course, is animated by exactly the converse claim.  It should be self-evident to any careful reader of TLS, DVC, or A&D that reading around any of these texts is antithetical to their project.  This project, generally stated, is that of naturalizing ideology and containing resistance through a sort of formulaic puppetry which employs caricatures of historical events, works of art, well-known narratives, and social criticism to mouth the words of the Obnoxious Other.  To elaborate on these caricatures as though they were participant in anything other than a simple exercise of ideological re-containment can be amusing, but only because it reveals their appalling simplicity and the transparent relationship of their form to their function.

Burstein and Keizjer imagine that by eliciting tangential commentary on TLS they can illuminate its subjects, e.g. Freemasonry, religion, noetic science, etc.  In truly symbological fashion, Brown's narration is assumed to be consubstantial with pre-existing academic and journalistic discourses on the same subjects and, through the clean window of scholarly prose, with the objects themselves.  To read Dawkins discussing his position on "religion" as characterized by Brown, we are apparently to believe, will illuminate the actual object, religion.  As Mal'akh incessantly murmurs, "It's buried out there, somewhere."

In fact, when undertaken earnestly such commentary simply functions to misclassify the function of the plot-elements of the symbological novel.  Noetic science, for instance, does not function in TLS (its description in the text notwithstanding,) to expand the possibilities of human ontology; rather, it works precisely to constrain it to the range of obviousnesses already available to the reader qua subject of late American/Western European capitalism by, for instance, confirming that there is something fundamentally efficacious about will as manifested in faith and patriotism.

The tools to understand The Lost Symbol, then, are found precisely in resisting the urges to elaborate on the elements of Brown's plots, to critique the accuracy of their representation vis-a-vis established discourses respecting them, or to elicit expert commentary.  To understand TLS, one must allow it to enact its dumbshow, whose only real allusions are to subject-structuring obviousnesses which transcend demarcations like "noetic science" or "freemasonry."

Towards a Metasymbology (Click to Enlarge)

Intimations of the Kingdom in H.P. Lovecraft

Here at the Cascadia Institute for Symbological Research, we do our best to avoid the unpleasant rigors of "serious" literature and instead to focus our research on the apocalypse of cultural flotsam that is the advance of symbological theory. But such is the power of our theoretical matrix that we reluctantly admit among our Browns, Reillys, Martins and Shlains, the occasional figure from the canon of Western literature. As above, so below, said the Goddess, and we listened! We cannot help ourselves: Economy of method demands that we respect the sacred symmetries of the Ancient Wisdom and proceed mutatis mutandis from the Mystery & Suspense rack at Hudson News to the Department of Very Good Literature at All Souls. Whatever methodological principles apply to the Brownian corpus, those same principles must be expected bear fruit in the gardens of the literati. And so they do! For, as we say around the cafeteria, Symbology is the thoughtful component of thought.

Following on Dr. Bremselhäcker's Generative Grammar and Dr. Benway's work on Matthew Reilly's Temple—an unparalleled sacrifice for scientific symbology (see Matthew Reilly: Theorizing Among The Cacognoscenti)—I turn to the question of H.P. Lovecraft as the surprising author of symbological novels. Lovecraft's modification of the symbological matrix is simple:

1. The Facile Wisdom of the Ancients is sympathetic to cacognosis, not orthognosis. The Truth about the cosmos is that underneath the stupid veneer of human civilization lies a boiling and unlawful abyss of matter composing material intelligences beyond the comprehension of human beings. Ultimate reality is either indifferent or hostile to fragile human bodies and refractive to human cognition. The cacognostic is right: the Code is properly understood literally, not metaphorically, and those ancient horrors it indexes are disastrously relevant to the fate of human individuals and civilization. The Wisdom of the Ancients in Lovecraft is just as facile as it is in Brown. Many readers of Lovecraft have been struck by his motivation of banal facts of geology, architecture, genealogy, history and science combined with repeated cliches about "unutterable horror" to provide a truly upsetting result. The corrosive character of the Ancient Wisdom is magnified by its stupidity, not modulated: it is made all the more undeniable by its simplicity.
2. The cacognostic subject position can only be occupied by Nature. Cthulhu, Azathoth and Nyarlahotep are the ultimate agencies and intelligences of the world. Violent, insane Nature (understood as the other of human beings) is capable of comprehending itself in itself and in human beings, but it so transcends the human perspective that only it can comprehend itself adequately. Occupying the cacognostic subject position—seeing the world aright—must mean either the abandonment of limited human cognition for cognition capable of seeing the horrible truth (madness) or material return to Nature (death). Madness and death are in Lovecraft two views on one thing, for the materialist message of the Ancient Wisdom is that to understand something is to be it, thus his narrators are constantly discovering the horrible truth lies in their own biological history, either as the foundation for all human life on earth or in their genealogy.

The reorientation of the Facile Wisdom toward the cacognostic causes the foreclosure of the orthognostic subject position, which has proven to be both wrong and itself irrelevant. Combined with the incompatibility of humanity and cacognosis, the only subject position left to Lovecraft's human characters is the mythognostic. If the basic movement of the symbological novel is the progression of the mythognostic symbologist to the orthognostic through the cop-out, then what becomes of the symbologist in Lovecraft? The movement from mythognosis to "orthocacognosis" is impossible and is short-circuited through an event analogous to the Brownian cop-out. Yes, what he has learned so far is nullified in the face of the truth, but instead of attaining the naive peace of harmony with his initial ideological intuitions about the ethical and metaphysical nature of his life, the movement toward cacognosis arrests the development of the symbologist. The symbologist's education in the truth is thus his destruction by an insane, violent, literal world. He loses his sanity, is killed, is dragged into the abyssal or is transformed into the shambling horrors that lurk behind the stupid veneer of human perception.

(There are other effects of the foreclosure of the orthognostic. Consider the absence of real women from Lovecraft. Because the symbological orientation toward the Code is gendered, the foreclosure of the orthognostic prevents woman from coming on the scene as anything but an empty space. What few women there are are so hollow as to make Robert Langdon seem lifelike and concrete.)

Like his Martinian counterpart, the Lovecraftian symbologist is motivated only by the ineluctable agency of the Code, but whereas in Martin and Brown this constructs a jubilant revelation of the obvious, in Lovecraft it clashes with mythognosis, which as the only subject position open to human beings has become coterminous with Culture. Lovecraft's narrators exhibit a brand of incongruous ignorance like the symbologist's, but motivated by the necessity of resisting his cacognostic transformation. He is a sort of dilettante historian, a creature whose features are essentially those of the symbological scholar insofar as the code is understood to reference something real, but its significance is metaphorical. E.g., in "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," the narrator plies the mad Zadok with whiskey in the hope of learning the true history of Innsmouth.

Curiosity flared up beyond sense and caution, and in my youthful egotism I fancied I might be able to sift a nucleus of real history from the confused, extravagant outpouring I would probably extract with the aid of raw whiskey.

The symbologist assumes that the story is metaphorical, as in fact all language is for the symbologist. The symbologist will hold this mythognostic line as long as he can, even when it forces him to draw the strange conclusion that Zadok's eyewitness accounts are "historical allegory." As the tension mounts, the symbologist must reassert the irrelevance of what he's hearing, even as the truth is destabilizing his subjectivity and pushing him toward the cacognostic.

The insane yarn I was hearing interested me profoundly, for I fancied there was contained within it a sort of crude allegory based upon the strangeness of Innsmouth and elaborated by an imagination at once creative and full of scraps of exotic legend. Not for a moment did I believe that the tale had any really substantial foundation; but none the less the account held a hint of genuine terror if only because it brought in references to strange jewels clearly akin to the malign tiara I had seen at Newburyport.

This kind of talk and an interest in the symbologist's neutered scholarship persist long after it should in Lovecraft's stories. (When the Great Old Ones are coming for you, why stop to check out the architecture? Yet Lovecraft's narrators persist in their amateurish archeological, architectural and geological observations.) The Lovecraftian symbologist's struggle is to prevent the disastrous switch of his epistemological modality from a metaphorical understanding of the Code to a literal one. In other words, he must deny the direct truth of what he has learned and even of his own sense perceptions to keep from understanding a truth that will destroy him.

It is not just his own life and sanity he is fighting for, but that of the human civilization he stands in for. I said above that mythognosis has expanded to cover the entirety of the human perspective. The mythognostic nature of culture actually directly theorized by Lovecraft's reflections on the nature of the conventional. E.g., in "Dagon" where the narrator uses the curious word "conventionalized" to refer to the hieroglyphs decorating the monolith he finds in the valley that rises from the middle of the ocean. The symbols have been transformed by human influence from literal signs directly referring to the Ancient Wisdom to conventional signs. "Conventionality" for Lovecraft is the specific form of human discourse and craft; it is the perspectival dilution on the truth that distances human beings from the horror that surrounds them. In his vocabulary, it connotes a degeneracy of a specifically human sort: it is primitive and metaphorical, lacking in the dangerously literal significations of the real that threaten the sanity and health of his narrators.

What counts as "degenerate" in Lovecraft is marvelously relative and ambiguous. Primitives, Blacks and the poor are primitive, yes, but viewed aright everything is degenerate. Conventionality, the realm of the human, is a diminution of the full power of the literal truth. The result of Lovecraft's anti-anthropomorphic relativism is the narrator's discovery is of horror, not peace. Racism and orientalism are therefore specific instances of a generalized trend in inter-species relations. One might even imagine a culture of sophisticated degenerates from the South Seas who refer to "humanism" much as we refer to "orientalism"—as a myopic projection of a particularly human perspective onto that which fully occupies its own subject position.

The result? The Lovecraftian symbologist deploys culture itself in the form of mythognostic obfuscation in an increasingly failed attempt to deny the movements of the real agents of the cosmos. Those agents are real, present and beyond our comprehension. The identity of mind and matter is so strong that the clear and distinct perception of these monstrous agents is enough to drive witnesses immediately insane through the dissolution of the symbolic order in which Culture has been erected against the blackness. Denial is inadequate, of course, and so things inevitably end badly for the symbologist.

I will close with three theses on symbology which open doors to future investigation.

1. We can understand the strange world of Tom Martin's Kingdom as a sort of Brown-Lovecraft hybrid. Kingdom proceeds along the symbological track as though the orthognostic were an available subject position. The cop-out is the discovery by the characters of the foreclosure of orthognosis and the inversion of the Ancient Wisdom. Kingdom is the novelistic performance of the two principles I outlined initially. Kingdom's characters are Brownian people in a Lovecraftian universe.
2. The Lovecraftian modification of the symbological matrix is of more than taxonomic interest. Once we see how mythognosis behaves when acting for itself, we may revise the formula I gave above to Symbology is the cultural component of culture. In other words, our extension of symbology to Lovecraft illuminates the function of the symbological novel in the shimmering mythognosis of early 21st c. consciousness.
3. A great deal is left to be said about the Kingdom/Lovecraft ontology. It must be brought to delight because it is in dialectical conflict with the Brownian ontology on the question of the harmony between illusory human agency and the real forces of time and space, of history and the world. Brown's insidious quietism is countered by Martin's horrifying exposure of the hollowness of the form of life so salutary and medicinal to Brown and Reilly's readers. Many of the details of this novelistic critique of ideology remain to be brought to light in the intellectual laboratories of the CCSR and our sister institutions around the globe.

Matthew Reilly: Theorizing Among The Cacognoscenti

Matthew Reilly is widely recognized as a total asshole - but surprisingly little theoretical work has been done to elucidate the variegated determinants of this fact.  I will here briefly offer one (of undoubtedly many) explanations of why he is such a jerk.

Bremselhäcker, (in press) during the 2009 meeting of the International Association of Neurosymbologists proposed an extremely fecund formalist approach to the subject of symbological knowledge.  Previous work had generated the categories of orthognosis (typified by characters like Professor Kent or Peter Solomon), mythognosis (the position of Langdon, Rutherford, Miguel, etc.) and cacognosis, (Mal'akh, Teabing, Bezumov, etc.) but these had been inadequately related to one another.  Bremselhäcker's elegant solution was the so-called Generative Grammar, a simple table which produces subject postions based on binary choices in ontology and epistemology, as follows:

 

                            Onto             Epi

Orthognostic       O                  O

Mythognostic      X                  O

Cacognostic         X                   X

For ontology, one can read something like "status of the Code's referent" and for epistemology, something like "significance of ontology;" for each, there are two possibilities, metaphoricity and literality.  Thus, for example, Peter Solomon in Brown's The Lost Symbol is ultimately resolved as an orthognostic, since he knows that the object of the code is metaphorical (the Bible in TLS is simply metonymy for the Ancient Wisdom) and that the significance of whatever is implied by the actual referent (in this case the text of the Bible) is also metaphorical.  Langdon always exemplifies the orthognostic; he believes in the literal reality of the object of the code, (say, the Illuminati in Angels and Demons,) but he is forever incongruously convinced that its only significance can be metaphorical.
Mal'akh, in TLS, is a perfect cacognostic: he believes in the literal reality of the code's referent, and in its literal significance - as he incessantly says, "it's buried out there somewhere," and he cannot imagine an alternative to "it"s literal transformative power.

This schema is immensely powerful for understanding the action of the classical symbological novel, which, it is seen, consists primarily in the trajectory of the symbologist from a position of stable mythognosis ("it exists, but it doesn't really matter") to a dialectical struggle with cacognosis ("it exists, and it really matters") which is ultimately resolved by his transition to orthognosis ("it doesn't exist, and it doesn't really matter").

The general significance of this framework for the critique of symbology will be discussed in later posts.  For the moment, I want only to point out how it can revitalize exploration of how Matthew Reilly can possibly be such a total fucking douche.

In Reilly, there is one class and one position, that of the male cacognostic.  The female characters are vapid sources of sexual contamination, and the orientals are comprehensively primitive basically mute.  The position of the mythognostic is empty, as is the position of the orthognstic.  There are no Catherines in Reilly, no Poimandres.  All the characters are cacognostics who believe in the literal significance and relevance of the code.  Because of this, there is no progression from mythognosis through cacognosis to orthognosis - i.e., there is no plot, and no cop-out.

Instead, there is merely an endless blood-bath.  The Reillyan world is a perpetual agon of cacognostics who are only really morally distinguishable by their physiognomy, since their practices and motivations often clearly commensurate.  In Temple, for instance, the motivations of the "Nazis" and the Americans are completly identical.  This explains Reilly's fascination with terrorism (domestic and otherwise) and his apparent belief that the world is saturated with highly organized terrorist groups that operate at approximately the level of complexity of small nation-states.  There is, for him, actually just a continuum of size between the terrorist group and the state, and the state often contains sub-units which operate exactly like terrorist groups. 

For the same reason the Oedipal dimension of the conventional symbological novel is missing from Reilly.  The Father and Daughter functions disappear with the categories of orthognosis and the feminine, leaving only the symbologist who now has no reason to range between mythognosis, cacognosis, and cultivated orthognosis, and therefore collapsing all characters into a boring pleroma of violent cacognostics.

This poverty of subject-positions also determines the ideological commitments of the Reillyan universe - there is no cop-out, and thus no re-containment - merely a momentary lull in the unending storm of violence between groups of cacognostic terrorists.  The only recognizable arc in the novel is that of the hero from symbologist to soldier: the mythognostic starts out as a sweater-vest wearing academic who eyes the bulging muscles of the Green Berets jealously, resents their confidence with the ladies, and thinks of them as elementary school bullies.  This would be par for the course in setting up for a rapprochement between the ISA and the RSA where he realizes that actually many of them are quite sensitive and they had his best interests at heart all along, but this is not where Reilly is going: his symbologist does have these realizations, but only in parallel with his own evolution into a gun-toting, body-armor wearing, plane-hijacking, tank-driving foul-mouthed macho-man.  The effect, then, is not the denoument of the ostensible Ideological State Apparatus/Repressive State Apparatus opposition, but the actual transformation of the ISA into the RSA.  This makes sense, since once the possibility of being a mythognostic is foreclosed, it isn't clear what conceivable role the ISA could have in Reilly's world.

It has been said (Twinglebrook-Hastings, The Lost Symbol Midrash, 2009) that "the symbological subject is divided between differently stupid characters."  The Reillyan subject, I have argued, is concentrated in a single subject-position, effectively amplifying the stupidity of any given subjectivity in his "novels."  I intend this observation as no more than a prolegomenon to the study of Riellyan idiocy - further work is obviously demanded by such an expansive subject.

Note:

This entry presumes some familiarity with my plot summary of Reilly's Temple (presuming familiarity with the actual text would be...unfair) which is available upon request.

On Symbology as Such and On The Symbology of Man

Every expression of human spiritual life can be instinctually understood as a kind of symbol, and this understanding, in the manner of the ancient method and the method most recently discovered by our finest scientific minds, extinguishes all questions and all questioning. The symbol lies in eternal repose and so only elicits from man action insofar as his finite and temporal struggle will lead him to infinite repose, against which his worldly actions are nothing and come to nothing. As the symbol is whole and non-discursive, it is possible to talk about symbols only provisionally and with an eye to their finite dissolution into unity, but the existence of symbols is coextensive with the existence of absolutely everything and so some connotation of ancient balance lingers in all corruptible things as trace of what cannot be said or thought. There is nothing that is not a symbol of the ancient wisdom. Not only every mural, fresco, statue, painting, carving and book but also every toaster, turtle, and rock. This use of the word “symbol” is in no way metaphorical, for insofar as all things symbolize they communicate only the ebb and the flood of pre-original primordiality. That all is one is immediately intuitable at every point and in all things. The overflowing of the Eternal Feminine into the world and the return of the world to the origin is immediately present in all things and retained forever in them, subject only to the relative illusion that is the low tide of Being and which obscures balance and unity temporarily as power, materiality, masculinity, greed, interpretation and diversity. We live at the cosmic low tide and even now all things rush back into one, carried along by connotative chain toward their own identity. This is symbology as such, but within this incorruptible truth another thing is called “symbology” and manifests itself as the same drive in all stages of history, from its roots in the sages of the Orient to the alchemists of the Dark Ages to the physicists in their labs today.

As above, so below. The ancient teaching of symbology is the mirror image of that perfect and immobile symbology that is also the fountain of overflowing and return. Thus there is a superabundance of worldly symbology called the symbology of man that is the intuition of the world and the passage from worldly symbology to symbology as such. This worldly symbology consists in the cursory and expressive passing over of worldly things towards a docility that resembles the primary docility of the truth. As symbology as such takes away all questions and questioning the symbology of man gives obvious answers to unasked and unaskable questions through the superficially varied adumbration of what is already known. Every time the worldly symbologist turns his hand and eye to the disclosure of symbology in some speculative science or entertaining fiction, symbology irrupts with theory. What is theory? Toward what end this apparent entrance into the discursive field? This passage through the abyss is necessary in one sense since all things can be shown to be all things immediately and obviously, non-existent in another, for while the symbologist too must talk to his neighbor and buy his groceries he is also aware of the etymology of “theory.” The greek world for “theory” is θεωρία and does not mean theory at all but “vision” or, better, “intuition,” for it is the kind of vision that man receives when he looks at a painting of a familiar sunset or rural domestic scene. All worldly symbology is in the end the same and its appearance of superabundant variation in content and terminology hides a primary connotative identity: it is all the same in the end since it all leads to the same place. The mystical Zohar is understood side by side with marine biology, quantum mechanics, and Buddhism through the uncovering of certain core tenets of ancient wisdom. But to whom does the symbologist communicate?

Before this question can be eliminated, we must again inquire: How does the symbologist communicate himself? The answer is: badly. For the symbologist does not wish to give the impression that there lie in things any difference that makes a difference, but wishes to “communicate” the identity of all things before their origin, and so the symbologist puts in place of one term another and then switches them back and around again, each time moving from known to known through the casual association of term with term. Thus symbology communicates nothing definite in all its theoretical diversity, but in theorizing symbology the symbologist communicate nothing but the truth. That is to say, worldly symbology therefore communicates nothing but symbology itself. All symbology elicits a passage to itself that is no passage at all. Symbology is itself. Symbology is symbology.