The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.330: Ccru Writings 1997-2003

The Cybernetic Culture Research Unit constitutes a somewhat notorious moment in the recent history of British academia; a liminal, quasi-official entity based out of the University of Warwick’s philosophy department, the Ccru produced a techno-occultural melange of philosophical high-weirdness in which the work of Lovecraft played a not insignificant role.

The Ccru was not, however, without its casualties - both psychological and cultural: like Lovecaft, Nick Land - one of the key early figures in the Ccru - has gone on to become a cultural icon of the alt-right.

If you want to know what all the fuss is about, check out Ccru Writings 1997-2003. As an indication of what one typically encounters when delving into the archives of the Ccru, the blurb from the publisher’s website is instructive:

‘The texts collected here document the Ccru’s perilous efforts to catalogue the traces of Lemurian occulture, bringing together the scattered accounts of those who had stumbled upon lagooned relics of nonhuman intelligence—a project that led ultimately to the recovery of the Numogram and the reconstruction of the principles of Lemurian time-sorcery—before disintegrating into collective schizophrenia and two decades of absolute obscurity. 

Meshing together fiction, number theory, voodoo, philosophy, anthropology, plate tectonics, information science, semiotics, geotraumatics, occultism, and other nameless knowledges, in these pages the incomplete evidence gathered by explorers including Burroughs, Blavatsky, Lovecraft, Jung, Barker, J.G. Ballard, William Gibson, and Octavia Butler, but also the testimony of more obscure luminaries such as Echidna Stillwell, Oskar Sarkon, and Madame Centauri, are clarified and subjected to systematic investigation, comparison, and assessment so as to gauge the real stakes of the Time-War still raging behind the collapsing façade of reality. 

One of the most compelling and unnerving collective research enterprises to have surfaced in the twentieth century, the real pertinence of the Ccru’s work is only now beginning to reveal itself to an unbelieving world. To plunge into the tangled mesh of these conspiracies, weird tales, numerical plagues, and suggestive coincidences is to test your sense of reality beyond the limits of reasonable tolerance—to enter the sphere of unbelief, where demonic currents prowl, where fictions make themselves real. Hyperstition.’

Nice.