The strange autumn and winter of the end of the last year (and decade) felt in many ways like an end of the world, with riots across all continents, when “the logic of capital [became] visible in its catastrophic autumn.” As the Italian post-marxian theorist and media activist Franco 'Bifo' Berardi put it in his lockdown diaries, that Autumn,
the planetary body has experienced some sort of spasm. A convulsion from Hong Kong to Barcelona, Santiago, Quito, Beirut — riots everywhere. The rebellion had no unifiable objectives, and the different riots did not converge towards any common goal. The mind was unable to direct all the diverse drives, so towards the end of the year, the fever raised.
In short, a collective suffocation, a shortness of breath, a sort of hallucinatory fever, had already been in place well before the pandemic started. The apocalyptic imaginary was on the order of the day of the overheated social organism, with mass wildfires across continents, rebellions declared against extinction itself, the streets burning. The slogan of these months was, not that another world is possible, but that another end of the world is.
Bifo proposes that lockdown, the halting of the world, stopping its accelerated pace, was actually what the depressed and feverish social body vitally desired, at least on an unconscious level. To just make it all stop. The overheated and depressed social body literally summoned the end of the world, and with a success. In the moment of planetary panic, of shutting down public life and cancelling the “non-essential” economy, the world briefly ended, in a haunted experience of streets devoid of people.
By the time of the lockdown, the world was evacuated and gone, and with it the common reality as such. Everyone entered the forest — dark multiverse of the internet — alone from their rooms which were like thousand artificial caves. In that confused multiverse there was no longer any such thing as an one, common, “consensus reality”. A crazy proliferation of conspiracies, of alternative cosmologies, where literally nothing was certain any more. End of the world meant delving ever deeper into the intricate patterns of the digital jungle, up by the river. The new decade was officially launched by this end of the world and by the weirding and re-wilding it implied.
Pandemics are caused by unrestrained exploitation of animal habitats, where the uncontrollable forces of life are set free, and where the biology (or, what some call the animal spirits) intrudes into the controlled social and cultural order. Pandemic establishes what the environmental thinker Timothy Morton calls the symbiotic real — the fact of the intimate and maybe also abject interconnectedness among species. In these contagions, the civilizations are confronted with the biological limits to their “growth”, with the fact of the vulnerable bodily interconnectedness of all life, and the illusory nature of individual immortality or separateness. Pandemic etymologically shares the root with Pan, the Ancient Greek God of the earthly forces of life, as well as panic and chaos.
It's good not to forget the first weeks of the lockdown, when there was also the strongly present narrative that nature, or the “wilderness”, is taking back the streets, in a sort of apocalyptic resurgence of nature: deers and tigers, elephants and great turtles seen strolling the empty streets.
Despite the current attempts to return to the so-called normal, of containing biological chaos into the emergency biopolitics of global capitalism, we know that such a thing won’t be possible. We really haven’t seen anything yet. So that we don't turn away to other (potentially apocalyptic) topics, let's only think of the ancient bacteria and viruses frozen in the Arctic for millenia — in the ices that are now melting. The climate science portrays a vision that is hardly distinguishable from the fictions of the metaphysical horror writer HP Lovecraft: the long forgotten Old Ones, like the monstrous Cthulhu, awaken in the Arctic after the “ices of civilization melt”, inducing apocalyptic mayhem. Ancient viruses and bacteria, or the nonhuman monsters and intelligences, reveal the abject interconnected intimacy of the Earth. The emergence of Pan, at the end of time, is like the emergence of the Old Ones that Lovecraft wrote about in his prophetic texts.
Horror Politics
Lovecraft mythically captured, in his apocalyptic visions, the depressed and death-driven unconscious of the last decade, a decade that climaxed in the overheating of the social organism and the panicked lockdown. For these reasons, Lovecraft became the privileged mythopoetic figure of contemporary philosophers under the banners of Speculative Realism. These philosophies invoked the catastrophic horizon of the Monotheistic civilization's apocalypse, and the unnamable eschatological “thing” inhabiting it, emerging from underneath the ices. An archaic and alien, yet uncannily familiar, monster to be re-awakened at the end of time, when the repressed earthly demons of the geological past go out of their frozen shelter.
Such horror imagination does obviously have a similarly “horror,” and even terrifying, politics as its correlate. There indeed is a wing of realized Lovecraftian politics, fueled by summoning the imaginary Old Demons to bring upon the end of the world, namely the Accelerationism and/or the so-called Neo-Reaction (the more intellectually oriented branch of the alt-right). Both of these intellectual or political movements are close to the online underground of the millenarian Neo-Nazism, and for them, the Lovecraftian myth connects positively to their very own project. Their actively horror politics requires to accelerate the chaos, the disintegration of the “rotten modern world”, be it by means of actual terrorism or mass violence. The occult apocalyptic Neo-Nazism obviously saw a massive boost in popularity during the lockdown with its apocalyptic ambience, viral plagues and locust plagues, wildfires ravaging continents.
In short, the apocalypse — the Lovecraftian imaginary — accurately expresses the tormented soul of the Neo-Reactionary (or the Neo-Nazi), his innermost desire. The French anarchist collective Invisible Committee identify the apocalyptic pessimism as the quintessence of White Western reactionary imagination. The Accelerationists' thirst for annihilating all life reveals the truth of the bourgeois repression, in all its depressed and impotent rage, embodied by the figure of the incel. As Invisible Committee put it,
Only universal destruction, the death of everything, comes close to giving the suburban employee the feeling he’s alive, since he’s the least alive of all the creatures. “To hell with it all” and “let’s pray that it lasts” are the two sighs heaved alternately by the same civilized distress. An old Calvinist taste for mortification has a part in this: life is a reprieve, never a plenitude. The discussions of “European nihilism” were not vain talk.
Seven angels with seven plagues, God casting wrath on the sinful: the politics of mass murder & suicide. As Deleuze and Guattari put it, “in fascism, there is realized nihilism.”
In short, if the Accelerationist or Neo-Reactionary nihilism — with its Lovecraftian, apocalyptic horizon — is the truth of the afflicted era we live in, it might be better looking for very different narratives and new myths. Nevertheless, if we want to genuinely move past any Accelerationist tendencies “in each one of us” (Foucault), there is no other way around it than by saying — the end of the world has already happened, it is past us — now in 2020 — as the default starting point, no longer to be summoned, but rather, lived.
In this vein the contemporary environmental philosopher Timothy Morton dismisses the reactionary apocalyptic imagination (shared also by much of the ecological movement), arguing that we shouldn’t try escaping the confines of the destructive Monotheistic civilization by nurturing its very own myths. Despite himself being under the banner of Speculative Realism, there is not much space for Lovecraftian pessimistic fatalism in his writings.
Instead, he says, the ecological age comes always-already after the end of the world, after the conclusion of its linear historical time. The end of the world is the end of the human, single world, where nonhumans were seen only as a dead and inert background to the correlating activity of the human mind. The Lovecraftian hyperobjects (as he calls them), like climate heating, make it impossible to incorporate the planetary real into the limited cocoon of the human world. The ecological real intrudes from all sides, making it clear that the planet is animated by a life of its own (and not only by the activity of the Anthropos). In this sense, the end of the world functions like a positive opening of the doors of perception, and of thought, into symbiosis with all kinds of nonhuman entities. As he puts it,
What is left if we aren’t the world? Intimacy. We have lost the world but gained a soul — the entities that coexist with us obtrude on our awareness with greater and greater urgency. Three cheers for the so-called end of the world, then, since this moment is the beginning of history, the end of the human dream that reality is significant for them alone. We now have the prospect of forging new alliances between humans and non-humans alike, now that we have stepped out of the cocoon of the world.
In other words, going through the apocalypse, by letting go of the world, of one unified and human world, means entering a forest animated by thousand nonhuman eyes.
Fungi at the End of Time
If the Speculative Realists like Morton contemplate philosophically on possibilities of contact with the entities populating the non-human Outside, it was arguably the pulp underground psychedelic prophet Terence McKenna, who experimentally practiced this contact. Rather than grounding his teaching in philosophical theories, he might arguably be seen as someone who, avant la lettre, put Speculative Realism into praxis. He established a personal contact with the nonhuman entities of the Outside, in psychedelic trance after high doses of psilocybe mushrooms — a trance at the end of time.
Influenced also by Lovecraft, McKenna too saw a rapidly approaching eschatological object, at once archaically old and uncannily familiar:
History is the shockwave of eschatology. Something is at the end of time and it is casting an enormous shadow over human history, drawing all human becoming toward it. All the wars, the philosophies, the rapes, the pillaging, the migrations, the cities, the civilizations-all of this is occupying a microsecond of geological, planetary, and galactic time as the monkeys react to the symbiotic, which is in the environment and which is feeding information to humanity about the larger picture.
But rather than seeing the end of the world bleakly — as the end, as the destruction of everything — he saw it optimistically, as on opening into something radically new. At the end of the world (guarding the border to something other), there was the fungi, the mushroom, what he called the symbiont. The fungi opened up dimensions: in the mushroom tryptamine trance, the time of linear history was gone. Mushroom, or the “transcendental object at the end of time,” was in fact a gateway, a portal, opening up into an awesome multiverse of realities (the hyperspace) inhabited by all kind of strange entities, nonhuman others, like the infamous self assembling machine elves. Spirits or deities that you make symbiotic pacts with, strike up alliances — cartoonish and bizarre, but also carrying a message of an ecological or biospheric consciousness.
As Morton and Speculative Realists would be quick to point out, these amazing entities might be real and autonomous of the human mind, yet accessible only indirectly — and we cannot know what they in fact are “for themselves”. They are without a doubt also constructed psychologically or culturally, from the biographical and mythological, science fictional, or other materials. The Kantian in itself is accessible only from these personal perspectives, yet nevertheless autonomously real of the human mind. Contact with these nonhumans after the end of a world, the symbiosis, was at the beginning of healing the human history's trauma.
The McKennian entities somehow remind the Old Ones of the somber metaphysical horror writer. As in a mushroom trance, the Old Ones were also surrounded by primitives with drums and flutes, in an “unholy” delirium of the end of the world. But what was more like a bad trip for Lovecraft, a vision of “primitive evil” as seen by a Civilized White Male, attained a much more vital and optimistic charge for McKenna, as a happy revival of the archaic freedoms and pleasures, of the great Pan banished by the civilized people, of the Eros forgotten by the Western civilization. McKenna remained optimistic in his eschatological prophecies, despite his pronounced fear that the whole experiment of history will come to a catastrophic abortion, indeed in an irreversible planetary extinction.
The French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have a notion that is similar to the mushroom at the end of time: at the end of the linear historical time (the Ancient Greek Chronos), there is a rhizome, an underground complex meshnet of interconnected roots, similar to fungus mycelium. Rhizome is multidimensional, consists of a plurality of plateaus, of human and nonhuman perspectives. In a sense, rhizome simply represents a more serious manner to talk of the cartoonish multidimensional hyperspace of McKenna, but the point is ultimately similar. Rhizome too is a non-human symbiosis, an instance of witchcraft, of becoming-animal. It lies beyond the end of a single human world, rather like a multi-dimensional dark forest of interspecies coexistence.
Arguably, the eschatological object at the end of history opens itself up to what the Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro calls, following Deleuze and Guattari, indigenous multinaturalism. After the end of the one human world, there emerge many realities, a polyrhythmic pluriverse of many strange human and non-human realms and temporalities.
Such rhizome announces itself, according to Deleuze and Guattari, literally as a contagion or an epidemics, and in this way induces a becoming-other. This becoming is neither regressive, nor evolutionary, but performs a paradoxical movement of involution, which lies beyond anthropocentric history, but also, arguably, beyond any detached notions of capitalist economic “growth.” The involution is creative, as they say: it enables real creativity, real becoming, or a real transformation. But this is only so because it lies after the world of growth, of “work”, of productivity — of both alienated drudgery of senseless jobs and mass consumerism. After the end of the world, there might finally be time for more pleasure, or care.
In other words, rhizome is a lived eschatology, symbiosis among human and nonhuman kingdoms, among entities, after the growth and the limited anthropocentric world. Involution requires a slowing down, immersing in the mycelium, becoming. It is not a regress (or the so called decline of the West of the reactionaries), but a positively non-modern transformation. The mushroom or the rhizome, at the end of time, opens up into a multiplicity of natures, into a groundless Earth, that is dangerous and volatile, but maybe also less depressed — and to the contrary, more magic.
Unlike what the unfortunate crowds of Jordan Peterson-loving psychedelic neo-conservatives of our times would imagine, according to McKenna, the end of the world was also the end of millenia of grim patriarchal oppression — a reason for joy. He called this, in connection to the feminism of his times, the “resurrection of the Goddess” — a liberation of sexuality repressed by the White Morality. As the contemporary Brazilian reggaeton collective desculonización puts it: “el fin del mundo es el fin del hombre, es el fin del macho, es el fin del miedo.” The end of the world is the end of Man, and therefore also of fear, of hierarchy. Even the famous reactionary “taste for self-mortification” gets melted, so to say, in the heat of the warming planet.
Clinging upon this world — either in an attempt to “return to normal” after the pandemic, or to destroy it in an Accelerationist manner — is how the solipsistically human world can still manage to destroy everything that exceeds it (and ultimately also itself). Instead, according to people like Morton, McKenna, Deleuze, Guattari, or the neo-reggaeton artists, the infamous decline of the West should really be seen as a creative involution that opens up more nourishing forces, long banished from the white consciousness: the abject Old Ones celebrated by deformed and abnormal dances (for whom is this a horror-like bad trip?). As desculonizatión put it, a happy new era.
