Out of time/out of control: speculative modernism and the limits of thought

This thesis maps the territories of futures by investigating the works of H.P. Lovecraft, William S. Burroughs, and the ‘dead but dreaming’ genre-without-organs that is ‘theory fiction’. By framing these texts with a creative use of the works of Deleuze and Guattari, I suggest that we can both come to understand the texts as new territories of becoming and as tools with which to instantiate further becomings. Becomings, I suggest, violate control systems just as futures violate presence – in each case with ‘demonological’ force. What is at stake here is futures as a topos of difference rather than generality – the texts in question offer a means of thinking-with-writing that conjures such difference by way of appeal to formal and thematic interventions that develop radical violations of narrative space. The overarching claim is that without futures of difference, there is no future at all. Throughout, I work to develop a means of ‘overcoming’ the limits of thought – materialism, language, philosophy – and through this overcoming, illustrate (not explain) futures-as-difference. I name this method ‘Speculative Modernism’ for its constituent components – literary modernism, speculative fiction, and speculative philosophy. As the thesis proceeds, I move from ‘standard’ literary criticism towards a theory-fictional model of criticism in which thought arrives from the ‘outside’ of the text.

Chapter one introduces the theoretical apparatus to be used throughout, working through the importance of absence and multiplicity when conceptualising futures as a site of difference. Chapter two takes up the problem of value as Outsideness in the works of H.P. Lovecraft. Working in a ‘modernist’ mode wherein the irrationality of reality is exposed, Lovecraft violates language and genre to present a world rather different from those of traditional supernatural horror stories, instead offering a ‘hyper-materialism’ that arrives rather than lingers. Chapter three continues the investigation of the Weird and the Outside by looking to the formal interventions of William S. Burroughs. While Lovecraft provided a thematic and generic backdrop on which to think the Outside, Burroughs’ ‘cut-up’ method demonstrates what must be done to think outside of control, especially the control system of language. Chapter four turns to a thematic/formal synthesis of Lovecraft and Burroughs, looking to the ‘theory fictions’ of Land, Negarestani, and Ccru. Here, I suggest that for philosophy to overcome its formal limits and properly grapple with questions of futures, fiction is a necessary element for the project of invoking the ‘Outside’. The point here is not necessarily to find answers, but to develop further questions. Philosophy – and thought – I claim, have become too enamoured with answers and forgotten that love is a matter of the chase of wisdom rather than its possession.