#atmosphere #architecture #psychogeography #capitalism #theology #SergeiBulgakov #atmospherictheology

Introduction

Ghost hunting has once again crawled out of the ether and is haunting much of pop culture. Television shows like Ghost Adventures, podcasts on the paranormal, countless internet hubs, as well as real-life expeditions seem to have gained a second life. Some interpret this phenomenon as symptomatic of how quickly America is given to fantasy thinking and delusions from reality. Others interpret this as a renewed longing for a spiritual dimension. And of course, there's the Bob Larsons of the world who claim that it's all just demons attempting to trick America away from following Christ. However, what interests me about the phenomenon is not so much whether ghosts exist. Instead, it seems to me that ghost hunting and ghost tours present an interesting form of psychogeography and cognitive mapping of urban and suburban environments. Within this new cognitive mapping of material environments, I believe it's possible to see cracks starting to form within our truncated, secularist milieu. And even though ghost hunting itself does not necessarily purport explicit theological or religious commitments, I think there is an interesting theology of space and material environments that could perhaps emerge from or exist in dialogue with cryptid psychogeography.

My Experience on a Ghost Tour

Recently, I had the opportunity to visit the Crescent Hotel in Eureka Springs, Arkansas. It purports to be one of the most haunted hotels in America, and so, naturally, I took a ghost tour.

For background, I am not a materialist or a secularist. I am a Christian, and thus supernatural, preternatural, or spiritual phenomena are a possibility within my worldview. For example, I believe in angels and miracles. However, I'm quite skeptical about paranormal encounters. Perhaps that's a result of living in secular age or seeing firsthand how often claims of numinous encounters can be abused by church leaders. Additionally, despite having numerous religious experiences throughout my life, I have never had a ghost, demonic, or paranormal encounter of the explicit kind one would label as supernatural (at least, that I'm aware of). Nonetheless, I try to keep a critically-open mind because I do believe that the universe is filled with spiritual qualities and high strangeness.

The Crescent Hotel tour was a lot of fun. The genre of ghost tour storytelling was fascinating as well: a combination of historical narrative and the horror genre. Furthermore, the introduction of “scientific” language — such as ghost hunting technologies — is an interesting combination of more ancient spiritual phenomenology (ghosts and spirits) with modernity (technology and science), even if the “science” might make professional scientists pull their hair out.

Unfortunately, I did not have a ghost encounter. Neither did I even have an experience of the heebie-jeebies. But it was certainly fun, and the hotel is quite beautiful and features a dark academic aesthetic, which is certainly worth checking out. Additionally, the experience of navigating a material environment from the perspective of a ghost tour really got me thinking about the psychogeography involved in ghost hunting.

Psychogeography

Psychogeography is a concept that emerged in the 1950s and 1960s within the realm of avant-garde movements and cultural theory. It explores the relationship between the geographical environment and the emotions, behaviors, and experiences of individuals within that environment. Psychogeography seeks to uncover the psychological and emotional impact of urban spaces on individuals and how these spaces shape our perceptions and interactions.

The term “psychogeography” was coined by the Situationist International, a group of artists, intellectuals, and activists who sought to challenge the dominant capitalist culture and transform everyday life. They viewed psychogeography as a means to disrupt the prescribed patterns of urban life and create new forms of engagement with the cityscape.

Psychogeographers engage in a variety of practices to explore the effects of urban environments. For example, they often undertake “dérives,” which involve purposeful drifting or wandering through urban areas to uncover hidden aspects and unexpected encounters. Through dérives, psychogeographers aim to break free from predetermined routes and discover new perspectives on the city.

Psychogeography also involves the concept of the “psychogeographic map.” These maps deviate from traditional cartography and instead represent the emotional, cultural, and subjective experiences of individuals in a particular place. They may incorporate elements such as personal anecdotes, historical narratives, and symbolic representations.

The goal of psychogeography is to challenge the mundane and passive experiences often associated with urban spaces. By encouraging exploration, critical observation, and subjective engagement, psychogeographers aim to transform our relationship with the built environment and inspire new ways of perceiving and interacting with our surroundings.

Paranormal Psychogeography

It seems to me that ghost hunting and ghost tours represent a peculiar type of psychogeographical experience. Modern urban spaces are often not designed around spiritual matters, but rather upon the flows and accumulation of capital. One is meant to navigate an urban environment as primarily a cog in the machine of capitalism: either a consumer or a laborer. Of course, this is not entirely the case for every square inch of a city because one could contend that spaces like parks are centered around human interests more than capitalism. But these respites of human interest are still relegated to confined areas rather than permeating the urban space as a whole. The point of psychogeography is then to find ways of navigating a city in a way that brings a sense of the truly human, rather than a machine or zombie-like consumerism.

It seems possible to me that ghost hunting could be one such example of this alternative navigation — especially because ghost tours provide an alternative cognitive mapping of one's urban environment. A cognitive map is a mental representation or internalized image of a person's spatial surroundings, including landmarks, routes, and relationships between locations. It is essentially the way in which landscapes and urban geography — perhaps even one's own culture — exist within one's mind.

Thus, instead of one's cognitive map only being filled with points of consumerism, such as shopping malls, retail stores, and even necessary locations like grocery stores, ghost hunting creates new data points on one's cognitive map. Regardless of whether these places are actually haunted by paranormal forces, ghost hunting adds a sense of spiritual mythology to one's material environment. There is, at the very least, a potential for spiritual places, “thin places,” or locations of high strangeness to break through the cracks of the secular materialist mind into which we are all conditioned.

Ghost hunting trains one's brain to look for the spiritual dimension of a material environment. Even if there is no such thing as a location haunted by a ghost, the very act of delving into the mythological histories of haunted locations and contemplating the relationship between possible spiritual forces and one's material environment can be a means by which we leave open the door for religious materialism.

The Spiritual Dimension of Material

“Religious materialism” is a term I learned about recently while reading the essay “Relics” by the 20th-century Russian Orthodox theologian, Sergei Bulgakov. Bulgakov wrote the essay in response to vandalizes who had desecrated sacred relics of saints. Bulgakov uses the topic of relics to articulate the vitality of the material world from a religious perspective and how, from his perspective, there is no such thing as dead matter.

Sergei Bulgakov's theory of religious materialism proposes that the material world is intrinsically connected to and infused with divine energies and attributes. According to Bulgakov, creation is not separate from God but rather a manifestation of God's presence and creative activity. Bulgakov emphasized the sacredness and spiritual potential inherent in the physical world, rejecting the dualistic notion that matter is inherently sinful or separate from the divine. Instead, he argued, based on the Orthodox doctrines of the Incarnation of Christ and deification of humanity, that matter is a vehicle for divine revelation and the realization of God's purposes, of which the Incarnation of Christ and sacraments like the Holy Eucharist are prime examples. As he wrote, “The spiritual bread, the heavenly, food, is also bodily bread and food; by no means does the spiritual sacrament become incorporeal — rather, it is corporeal to the highest degree, corporeal par excellence. [...] [Christ] came not to destroy the world but to save it. Therefore, in the gracious life of the church, all that is spiritual is corporeal [...].” (Bulgakov, “Relics,” page 9, Boris Jakim translation).

For Bulgakov, the materiality of the world is not dead, but rather something sacred, given that it is thoroughly infused with divine life. However, this picture contrasts sharply with our Cartesian-capitalist paradigm in which matter is a dead resource waiting for exploitation. Material environments, human spaces, and urban buildings become little more than cogs in a wider machine. However, from a Bulgakovian perspective, a psychogeographer can resist such a truncated imagination and cultivate a way of seeing the city as a spiritual entity as well. And perhaps ghost hunting — the investigation of haunted places — might be one means toward that goal.

Ghost Hunting and Numinous Experiences

Related to this notion, I think ghost hunting shows how many individuals within our society are still searching for religious experiences or “numinous experiences” as the theologian Rudolf Otto called them.

If you want to read a full engagement with the topic of ghost hunting as chasing the numinous, you can read this great article by Daniel Wise from the Journal of Gods and Monsters linked here: https://godsandmonsters-ojs-txstate.tdl.org/godsandmonsters/article/view/28

To give a shorter summary, Rudolf Otto invoked the term “numinous” to refer to a transcendent and mysterious quality encountered in religious experiences. It represents a unique and awe-inspiring encounter with the divine that elicits a sense of fascination, awe, and even fear in individuals. The numinous is characterized by its 'wholly other' nature, going beyond the ordinary and mundane. Otto described the numinous as a sense of creaturely finitude when confronted with the divine. He emphasized that the numinous experience includes both a tremendous sense of mystery and an irresistible attraction. It involves a paradoxical combination of both fascination and trembling before the divine presence — a type of theological sublime.

Ghost hunting is, for many individuals, both scary and exciting — terrifying and supernatural. To encounter a spiritual entity in the world is to encounter the numinous.

Paranormal Psychogeography as Cruciform Cognitive Mapping

Most likely, however, one will not encounter a paranormal entity whilst ghost hunting or walking a ghost tour — if such an encounter is even possible. Nonetheless, adding “haunted” locations to the cognitive map of one's environment can still be a worthwhile endeavor because the stories behind such hauntings often contain historical-mythological narratives of one's city beyond the conventional narrative of capitalist expansion. Instead, the stories often testify to the underlying trauma of our cities, focusing on the exploited and marginalized individuals who were failed by society.

For example, the Crescent Hotel's foundation for being (allegedly) haunted rests primarily with the original history of a wealthy con artist named Norman Baker selling a “miracle cure” for cancer. Of course, it was a total sham, and many people died horrible deaths under his watch while he shamelessly exploited their illnesses for personal profit. It's a horrific story of exploiting the most vulnerable for greed and profit. The hotel is thus haunted, if not by ghosts, by the history of America's failed medical system and our society's continued apathy toward the mistreatment of those who have illnesses. The full story is way crazier than I could describe, so I'll link the Wikipedia here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_G._Baker

The Cresent Hotel is not the only building in America haunted by tragedy. Cities are often built on trauma: environmental devastation, pollution, exploited labor, racism (such as red-lining), and even genocide (such as the treatment of First Nation and Indigenous Americans). Furthermore, there is tragedy and violence all around us, such as violence and poverty. Often in paranormal lore, places of tragedy and trauma are most likely to be haunted. Thus, by engaging with these stories — even if they are mostly mythological — one can develop a perception of one's material environment that pays special attention to those who need it most.

In this sense, ghost hunting or paranormal tours can possibly witness toward a cruciform hermeneutics of the city. Within the tradition of Christian liberation theology, there is a strong emphasis on God's special concern and favor toward the poor, marginalized, oppressed, and suffering. The crucifixion is often pointed to as a testimony to how God, in Christ, willingly enters into the suffering of humanity in order to co-suffer with them and bring about their liberation from the condition contributing to that suffering.

In a tangentially related vein, ghost hunting and ghost tours often focus on stories of suffering, tragedy, and trauma that happen within the modern city. Death in the workplace. Domestic violence. Murder. Depression. Suicide. Natural disasters. The prison industrial complex. These are all common phenomena associated with hauntings. Indeed, even if ghosts do not exist, our towns and cities are haunted by these tragedies. Ghost hunting and ghost tours ask us to confront these hauntings existing all around us. Now, I'm not claiming that ghost hunting is a form of liberation theology, but there might be a resonance here when both are applied to an analysis of the tragedies produced by human systems.

However, it's not the case that ghost hunting and ghost tours are the anti-capitalist praxis par excellence. Like everything, capitalism is perfectly capable of appropriating the supernatural into its system. A guided ghost tour costs money, and businesses often exploit the “haunted” label in order to attract more customers. But these seem like minor problems compared to other major issues within capitalism, such as climate change, supply chains, and privatized healthcare. Furthermore, visiting haunted locations, embarking on ghost hunting expeditions, or following ghost tours does not necessitate spending money. These activities can be co-opted quite easily through self-organized tours and independent research on the Internet. Doing so even opens up the possibility of meeting more people in one's community.

Against the backdrop of an ever-suffocating and truncating secularist materialism, I think it's great to imagine new ways of engaging with high strangeness so that the spiritual might break through the rusting machinery of modernity. Ghost hunting and ghost tours might be one small tool within our arsenal as we seek to move out of the secularist ennui. And the cherry on top is that developing a new cognitive map of one's urban environment is something that one can begin today. So start researching, start wandering, and let yourself feel a little spooky.

Appendix: As a final thought, I think it's important to mention how sacred spaces should not be neglected when it comes to developing a post-secularist cognitive mapping of material environments. Sacred spaces such as cathedrals, church yards, and prayer gardens (which are often neglected but more common than one might think) can likewise be spaces of high strangeness. Sometimes, they even overlap with ghostly hauntings. At least speaking for myself, I have stepped into several cathedrals and sacred spaces that were so beautiful that it was as if I stepped into another world.

#atmosphere #consumerism #capitalism #architecture #psychogeography

In the famous novel “House of Leaves” by Mark Z. Danielewski, a family moves into a new house that, at first, appears unremarkable from the outside. But soon, the family begins to notice strange and unsettling things about the architecture: the house is filled with shifting and expanding dimensions, which seem to defy the laws of physics. The family discovers that the interior of the house is much larger than the exterior, with rooms and hallways that seem to appear and disappear at random. The walls of the house also seem to be made of shifting and unstable materials, with staircases that lead to nowhere and corridors that twist and turn in impossible ways. As the family explores the house, they become increasingly disoriented and paranoid, with each member experiencing the house's strange properties in their own way.

I was reminded of this story during my most recent trip to IKEA. There is something about the staging and atmosphere of IKEA that gives it a similar feeling to the house in Danielewski's novel. The winding, labyrinth-like journey through which one must travel takes on a surrealist or “psychotronic” atmosphere as each region of the store is staged with faux living rooms, kitchens, and bedrooms that continuously shift in design and affect.

The way in which one must navigate the terrain in an unconventional manner — the long, snaking path weaving through seemingly every crevice of the building — creates an effect that, to me, feels as if the building is larger on the inside than the outside. Of course, the building itself is large to begin with. However, if the labyrinth were not there, it would only take a couple of minutes to get from one end of the building to another. But in its current design, it can take perhaps more than an hour to get through the store. The labyrinthian interior staging is also combined with an element of questing. People go to IKEA looking for bedding, furniture, decor, and interior design inspiration.

To me, the element of questing/searching combined with a winding labyrinth structure creates a dreamlike, quasi-surreal atmosphere. I say “quasi” surreal because I would hesitate to call the atmosphere fully surrealist. Surrealism, in my use of the term, refers to a deliberate effort to create art within the genre of surrealism and requires a well-honed skill in the craft of artmaking. This genre of surrealism is usually characterized by non-sequiturs, archetypal imagery, and the breakdown of rational logic, resembling the logic of dreams more than conventional reality. Or, more properly, it is the combination of dream and reality into a higher reality — a sur-reality.

However, it is also possible to accidentally create something that produces surrealist affective responses, which I call “psychotronic.” Psychotronic is a term used in the film world to describe films that often include bizarre or unconventional content and are typically characterized by low budgets, over-the-top acting, and a cult following. They often feature elements of horror, science fiction, and exploitation films and are intended to elicit strong emotional responses from viewers. I once heard psychotronic films described as “naive surrealism” (I tried to track down the original source of this to credit them, but I could not find it). In other words, a psychotronic film is one that is so bizarre, jarring, or poorly constructed — along with disjunctive, visceral affective qualities combined with long periods of nauseating boredom — that the film creates a dreamlike atmosphere, though completely unintentionally.

Though I wouldn't necessarily call IKEA shocking, I do think it exhibits something of a psychotronic and naively surrealist atmosphere. In a sense, it's like a capitalist parody of a holy site. IKEA is not on every corner like Walmart. Thus, for many people (such as myself), one has to make a long pilgrimage to reach a towering warehouse (like a cheap parody of a cathedral) wherein one traverses an eerie and unpredictable landscape to the point of physical exhaustion — all in order to acquire a new TV stand.

Perhaps this is all a stretch, but I think it showcases how many of our spaces of consumerism mimic sacred spaces of worship. It's as if our drives toward the holy and sacred have been co-opted and redirected toward consumerism. This is something I've written about previously, so if you'd like to know more about this, I'll link the article below.

https://write.as/nathaniel-metz/non-places-muzak-and-george-bataille-losing-oneself-in-atmosphere

#horror #filmanalysis #capitalism #theology #Moltmann #NickLand #Deleuze #JasonHickel #JacquesEllul #SpiritualWarfare

In this article, I'm going to create a rough sketch for a modern notion of spiritual warfare by providing a narrative of the networks and systems in our world that auto-create themselves through a traumatic parody of divine providence. For lack of a better term, I will refer to this auto-organizing system as “Capitalism,” while also acknowledging the limitations of that term, given that what I will say applies also to Sovietism and Maoism. Again, this is a blog where I experiment because I find that often it's only through writing that I'm able to make connections and study new ideas.

What is Spiritual Warfare?

The Christian concept of spiritual warfare generally refers to the belief that there is a realm phenomenologically experienced but outside of our direct perception in which believers are engaged in a constant battle against evil forces, who are trying to oppose the will of God both through systemic superstructures of oppression and violence as well as through more individuated “temptations,” such as corruption, vice, greed, and not loving others the way one ought to. This concept is based on various passages in the Bible, such as Ephesians 6:12, which states “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.”

Christians have interpreted this in a variety of ways. Some think Satan and demons are, in some sense, real. Others take this language to be more metaphorical about how corruption, oppression, and violence can be destructive forces in the world, moving us toward a different end than the Kingdom of God.

Why am I Talking About This?

Reinvoking the language of spiritual warfare might seem like an odd and slightly crazy decision. After all, it’s an old Christian concept that, unless you are in certain Christian circles, is not talked about very much. But I have a hunch that the language of spiritual warfare might be fruitful for a narrative of Capitalism as opposed to the Kingdom of God.

I think we need a deeper sense of myth and narrative in our world today. However, by using the language of spiritual warfare, we might be able to build a bridge for conversation with more evangelical or even fundamentalist Christians, for whom critiques of Capitalism sound like Marxism, which immediately turns them off and prevents dialogue. Furthermore, the language of spiritual warfare allows us to bring in more scriptural resources to talk about the state of the world today, which could help preachers more easily address issues like climate change from the pulpit. Finally, I think our cultural analysis and critique could potentially be bolstered by spiritual warfare theory.

Opening Illustration: Stranger Things and the Upside Down

In the TV show, Stranger Things, there is a parallel dimension called the Upside Down harboring evil creatures against which the main characters must fight, which occasionally requires the characters to traverse inside the strange new dimension. The Upside Down is a decrepit parody of the real world, where, instead of humans, the town of Hawkins is filled with monsters, toxic air, and rhizomatic vines. This dark, parallel dimension is tethered to the real world but is also distinct from it. It is a conditioning force in the real world, but most people don’t have direct experience with it except for rare occasions. But even when people don't experience it directly, the Upside Down still lingers as an outside force breaking into the real world, creating violence and trauma. Several monsters within the dimension, such as Vecna and the Mind Flayer, want to break into our realm and corrupt or 'de-create' all of reality to be under their control — kind of like Lord Sauron with the One Ring of power in Lord of the Rings.

The Upside Down itself is somewhat confusing and the rules of how it works are not fully parsed out. Visually, it’s full of rhizomes, vines, and creatures that humans don’t fully understand, who exhibit strange powers not accessible to (most) humans.

While watching the show, part of me couldn't help but think of Gilles Deleuze's and Nick Land's transcendental materialism. Deleuze was a French philosopher who developed the concept of “transcendental materialism” as an alternative to traditional forms of materialism and idealism. Deleuze's theory is a form of ontology that asserts that reality is composed of an interrelated and constantly flowing multiplicity of immanent, dynamic processes or “flows” rather than fixed, substantial entities. Deleuze argues that traditional materialism, which posits that there is a single, underlying physical reality that can be objectively known, is limited in that it does not account for the ways in which reality is constantly in flux and shaped by human perception and thought. Similarly, he argues that traditional idealism, which posits that reality is a product of mind or consciousness, is limited in that it does not account for the ways in which the material world shapes and constrains human perception and thought. Instead, Deleuze's transcendental materialism posits that reality is a constantly flowing multiplicity of immanent processes that are both shaped by and shape human perception and thought. He emphasizes that reality is not a fixed, objective thing, but rather a constantly changing process that is both shaped by and shapes human subjectivity. He also emphasizes the importance of understanding how these flows or multiplicities are connected, relational, and mutually affecting each other, which he calls a “rhizomatic” structure.

The idea that reality is a constantly flowing multiplicity of immanent processes that are both shaped by and shape human perception and thought is (with some exception) a decent metaphor for the Upside Down. The rhizomatic vines, storms, and sludge of the Upside Down are constantly flowing, fluxing, and transforming; however, the work of humans also impacts what goes on in the Upside Down. I'm sure Deleuze would object to how easily distinguished the two realms are from one another, but the inter-penetrating and mutually corrupting nature of the realms might be satisfactory enough. The Upside Down is thus, in a sense, a sinister aesthetic depiction of a transcendental materialism that has gone into darker territory, especially when we consider how Nick Land (and the CCRU) developed Deleuze's theory.

Nick Land is highly influenced by Deleuze’s transcendental materialism and coined the term “fanged noumena” to describe the monstrous, destructive, and uncontrollable forces that he believes are unleashed by the acceleration of technological progress and the intensification of global capitalism. Fanged Noumena is a combination of Marx, Kantian transcendental philosophy, and H.P. Lovecraft. For Marx, capitalism is vampiric: “Capital is dead labour, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.” In the writing of H.P. Lovecraft, cosmic, extra-dimensional monsters exist in a manner that is beyond the comprehension of humans, which is like the Kantian concept of “noumenous,” the reality that exists independently of our phenomenological experience and thus cannot be “known” directly but only inferred (according to Kant). In Lovecraft, this outsideness and beyondness leads to madness, destruction, or both. Land combines these notions and thus theorizes capitalism as a type of Lovecraftian monster rearranging our world in order to be devoured; it is fanged noumena.

Even more broadly, fanged noumena refers to the idea that the world contains monstrous entities that exist beyond human comprehension and control. These forces are not only beyond human understanding, but they are also hostile to human life and well-being. Land sees these forces as emerging from the acceleration of technology, capitalism, and the intensification of global processes, representing a growing threat to human civilization. Fanged noumena are a product of the intensification of global capitalism, which creates a situation in which the economy, technology, and culture are all in a state of constant and rapid acceleration. Land believes that these forces are breaking down traditional forms of social organization and creating a new reality that is fundamentally different from anything that has come before. These forces are pushing humanity towards a state of hyper-modernity and a new form of barbarism — a situation in which traditional forms of morality, ethics, and humanism will be no longer applicable.

As he said in his famous essay “Meltdown,” “The story goes like this: Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity as renaissance rationalization and oceanic navigation lock into commoditization take-off. Logistically accelerating techno-economic interactivity crumbles social order in auto-sophisticating machine runaway. As markets learn to manufacture intelligence, politics modernizes, upgrades paranoia, and tries to get a grip.” For Land, capitalism is a cybernetic, self-organizing system created by a Lovecraftian Artificial Intelligence from the future.

Wow. Yeah, I know, but stay with me. Again, this is narrative-building, and whether or not Land truly believes this as a literal picture is beside the point.

What’s interesting to me about Land’s theory-fiction is that it is a type of parody or “shadow” of eschatological ontology. In the eschatological ontologies of theologians like Jürgen Moltmann, God’s transcendence is not primarily one of space, but of time. The total and complete redemption of all things being reconciled to God in Christ (Colossians 1) is a future reality that is breaking into the present, shaping our world to bring about the Kingdom of God. It’s like the common saying in theology: The Kingdom of God is both here and not yet. God’s Being — the highest form of reality, reality itself — is both immanent and transcendent to Creation, and is the ground of our being providing the ultimate conditioning factors upon our existence.

Now, compare Moltmann to Land.

God’s Kingdom is manifest through peace, justice, reconciliation, and, above all, the work of the Holy Spirit. Contrarily, Land’s Lovecraftian AI kingdom is manifest through destruction, death, acceleration of autonomous technique and technology, as well as the meltdown of reality into the control of the transcendental monster of techno-capitalist singularity. To quote Land's Meltdown essay again:

“The body count climbs through a series of globewars. Emergent Planetary Commercium trashes the Holy Roman Empire, the Napoleonic Continental System, the Second and Third Reich, and the Soviet International, cranking-up world disorder through compressing phases. Deregulation and the state arms-race each other into cyberspace. By the time soft-engineering slithers out of its box into yours, human security is lurching into crisis. … Converging upon terrestrial meltdown singularity, phase-out culture accelerates through its digitech-heated adaptive landscape, passing through compression thresholds normed to an intensive logistic curve: 1500, 1756, 1884, 1948, 1980, 1996, 2004, 2008, 2010, 2011 ... Nothing human makes it out of the near-future.”

To bring us back to Stranger Things, there's a sense in which, Capitalism, from a Landian narrative, is like the Mind Flayer — a monster from another realm breaking into our world to re-create the Earth according to its own vision. It is a type of fanged noumena conditioning our world through violence, destruction, and trauma. Just like how creatures from the Upside Down want to break into the world and transform it according to their own purposes, capitalism wants to manifest itself through the acceleration of horror. In the virtual sphere, television displays more horrendous material than we could imagine through cable news coverage and some forms of popular entertainment. When this wasn’t enough, the internet pushed the pedal to the floor, showing us every form of depravity and violence known to humanity. Imagine what could be next.

In the non-virtual spaces, the fanged noumena system exerts its manifest destiny through trauma and violence in even more hideous forms. It is not just the traumatization of humans via colonialism, slave labor, alienation, etc., but also the traumatization of the non-human facets of Creation via slaughterhouses, factory farms, deforestation, and climate change. All of Creation gets reterritorialized into these new traumatizing and brutalizing systems. This is also why Soviet and Chinese communism ultimately fell into similar plights: they exerted a manifest destiny of trauma via mass executions and brutal, merciless rule. The communist goal for the end of Capitalism ( a type of immanent and materialist Kingdom of God or heaven on earth) was sought after through means and techniques similar to the techno-capitalist system itself, such as mass violence and brutality. Thus, it’s no wonder that “brutalist” architecture was one of the core icons of Soviet communism. In this sense, we can see that “capitalism” isn’t a broad enough term because both Stalinism and Capitalism operated under this “traumatic providence.” Both are instances of spiritual warfare.

Objections

I’m sure many are rolling their eyes right now, which is fine. Again, I’m writing this more experimentally than dogmatically to see if this line of thought is fruitful or not. There are, of course, the obligatory notes about Land not being a good person and who should not be idolized, and I should note that I denounce his racism, political views, and his gun-ho endorsement of these traumatizing forces. It’s as if he sees the horror of techno-capitalism, but then endorses it, which is crazy to me. He's like someone who learns about Cthulhu and then joins the cult to worship him. Likewise, I’m skeptical about whether one should introduce Landian theory to American White Evangelicals, who, at least at this time, are quite prone to losing themselves in conspiracy theories.

Putting Land’s misanthropic character aside, the first object to all of this techno-capitalist fanged noumena mythos is simply that it is more like science fiction than actual analysis. One can get so caught up in a mythology of capitalism as a monster from Lovecraftian fiction that one ends up ignoring the real world around us.

I’m sympathetic to this objection. After all, Nick Land lost his mind worshiping what he thought was the coming techno-capitalist singularity as if he was in the cult of Cthulhu. Plenty of impressionable people on the internet follow in Land’s footsteps, and it seems that many of them are losing grip on reality, which can be seen in how they so willingly give themselves into every kind of conspiracy theory. It’s a type of self-induced schizophrenia (which, in a way, almost proves their theory).

Nonetheless, I don’t want to entirely dismiss this line of thinking only on the grounds that it is mythological and narrative-driven. I think humans need more myths, if by “myth” we mean something like our deepest meanings and understandings of the world set in narrative form. Developing a myth allows one to relate to complex phenomena, and myth is especially important when trauma is involved because trauma is, by its nature, difficult to talk about. (Neurologically speaking, trauma shuts off or slows down many of the language-making parts of our brain, which then makes the traumatic event difficult to verbalize).

However, even if we insist on more empirical analysis, it seems to me that the fanged noumena myth of techno-capitalism isn’t too far off from the truth. If we look back on the history of capitalism, from the death of feudalism, through colonialism, slave labor, industrialization, and to the present day, we see enormous amounts of death and destruction. Of course, death and destruction existed before Capitalism, and many important and life-saving innovations have come about through Capitalism, but it certainly has not been a peaceful walk into utopia.

Jason Hickel in his book “Less is Moore: How Degrowth will Save the World” provides a fantastic analysis of capitalism and its history of violence. Hickel’s work is quite empirical and I recommend it as a companion piece to this writing. As a general summary, Jason Hickel wrote that the origins of Capitalism can be traced back to the 16th century, after the violent suppression of peasant revolts during the death of feudalism and when European colonizers began to extract resources and labor from colonized territories. He argues that the accumulation of wealth and resources through colonialism and imperialism created the conditions for the rise of capitalism as we know it today. According to Hickel, the wealth generated through colonialism and imperialism allowed capitalist economies to grow, and this in turn led to the development of new technologies and the expansion of markets. To feed these expanded systems, Capitalism utilized a foundation of systemic racism and exploitation, particularly through the enslavement of millions of people of African descent, and the genocide of indigenous people in the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Australia. Furthermore, as an example, the colonization of British imperial capitalism led to the death of around 100 million in the years 1880 to 1920, which is greater than all the famines that occurred under communist governments combined (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X22002169?via%3Dihub). The legacy of imperialism and exploitation continues to shape the global economy today, and it is a major factor behind the persistent inequality, poverty, and devastating environmental conditions that exist in the world today.

What I like about Hickel’s work, in contrast to Land, is that Hickel sees Capitalism as related to systems of production and the manner in which resources are extracted and then commodified within an economic system that demands constant growth. A system that requires infinite growth using finite, fragile resources — including transforming colonized humans into resources — is bound to generate major problems, such as the current climate crisis. Hickel notes that phenomena such as markets and trades existed well before Capitalism and are not necessarily the problem. So the