Ireland Amy
Ireland Amy
Anastrophic modernism tells us that we have only discounted the perpetuation of the
modernist avant-garde because we have refused to accept the possibility of its
inhumanity.
—Amy Ireland, The Poememenon: Form as Occult Technology
Those who are spiritual are not at all spiritualists, for the spiritual oscillate
between fury and tranquil rage, they are great destroyers of the forces of
Philosophy and the State, which are united under the name of Conformism.
They haunt the margins of philosophy, gnosis, mysticism, science fiction
and even religions. Spiritual types are not only abstract mystics and
quietists; they are heretics for the World
This sense of being a heretic for the World situates certain thinkers who no longer
fit within the designated straight-jacket of philosophical or political thought.
Such is the work of the now defunct Ccru and its most antagonistic anti-
philosopher, Nick Land.
It all begins with the hyperstitional agents Michael Robartes and Owen Aherne,
two mysterious entities we discover in Yeats’s dreambook The Vision. Robartes
and Aherne, Ireland tells us, “recount the discovery of an arcane philosophical
system encoded in a series of geometrical diagrams…”. (P: 1) Most of Ireland’s
essay follows the trail into this metafictional world seeking to understand who
discovered or invented this – as she’ll call it, spironomic system which
“recapitulates the belief system of an Arabian sect known as the Judwalis or
‘diagrammatists’, who in turn derived it from a mysterious work—now long lost
—containing the teachings of Kusta ben Luka, a philosopher at the ancient Court
of Harun Al-Raschid, although rumour has it that ben Luka got it from a desert
djinn”. (P: 2-3)
I decided to float the part of the text from the note on ‘The Second Coming’,
Michael Robartes and the Dancer in Yeat’s Variorum Edition of the Poems from
which Ireland will echo her own theory-fiction:
The key is this notion that the mind is a movement that can be expressed by a
mathematical form or notation revealed through Spiromancy. And, spiromancy
as a predictive art of divination is none other than the knowledge that all living
minds have a fundamental mathematical movement, however “adapted in plant,
or animal, or man to particular circumstance; and when you have found this
movement and calculated its relations, you can foretell the entire future of that
mind” (see above). One might assume a predictive foretelling not only of
individual minds, but of the collective social intelligence of the socio-culture as
well. Without spoiling it for the reader too much, underlying Ireland’s investiture
into Yeat’s, Land, and Ccru is this notion of the future in the present and past, of
the hyperstitional invocation of entities from these mathematical sigils or
diagrams, of a force of intelligence at work within our Western culture and
civilization; an intelligence at work in capitalism itself conditioning and
retroactively participating in under the cloak of a chameleon mask, weaving and
unweaving the machinic civilization that is emerging from the ruins of the
human: an inhuman invasion of optimized intelligences from the future
retroactively invoking their own emergence through our technological
Anastrophic modernity.
What ultimately intrigues Ireland is the interlinking and meshing this notion in
Yeat’s Vision and the work of Ccru, where she uncovers an uncanny resemblance
between the ancient Judwali philosophy of spiromancy and the accelerationist
philosophy of Nick Land and the Ccru collective:
I’ll not delve into her poetics of accelerationism which she covers in part II The
Poememenon. I’ll only quote one defining statement:
Any act of affirmation, of claiming that one is ‘open to’ the outside from the
inside betrays affordability. It is patently economical, and therefore
‘intrinsically tied to survival’. Against this qualified experimentalism (the
false ‘novelty’ of catastrophic modernity) the poememenon diagrams
reckless adherence to the modernist dictum that novelty is to be generated
at any cost, privileging formal experimentation— towards the desolation of
all intelligible form—over human preservation, and locking technique onto
an inhuman vector of runaway automation that, for better or worse, charts
the decline of human values as modernity hands the latter over to its
machinic successor in final, fatal phase shift. (P: 9)
More
Like
This entry was posted in New Trends In Philosophy by S.C. Hickman. Bookmark
the permalink [https://socialecologies.wordpress.com/2019/02/15/amy-ireland-
nick-land-w-b-yeats-and-anastrophic-modernism/] .
ANASTROPHIC MODERNISM”
mpanchuk
on February 16, 2019 at 11:46 pm said:
Like