Last Halloween, I finally read Lovecraft.
Like any self-respecting pretentious self-loather, I’d been meaning to get to his point in the canon for years. While he died in miserable obscurity, mostly having written for pulp horror magazines (being Weird Fiction’s most prominent writer), Lovecraft has since been declared the founding father of modern horror. Name a horror trope and, chances are, it originated with him. Dogs with a sixth sense for evil? Lovecraft. A crazed unreliable narrator? That’s Loveyboy, right there. Zombies? Arguably the L man.
But his main contribution to the horror genre is cosmic horror, or Weird fiction. Think Cthulhu; think ancient beings that defy comprehension; some terrible knowledge that will drive you to madness the minute you hear it. This is where humanity is brought up to the limit of itself, comes into contact with something it can never understand. A typical Lovecraftian technique in this vein is what China Mieville calls a ‘militant adjectivalism’: the protagonist rattles off descriptors to paint a picture of the monster they’ve seen, but they never directly name it, only talk around it. Lovecraftian monsters cannot be described because to describe something is to capture it. Reify it. Make it safe and approachable.
Description proves that language is adequate for understanding the world. And, by extension, that human civilisation has a monopoly on objective reality. This is the radicalism of Lovecraft, the intrusion of philosophical pessimism into respected literature. In evading language, Lovecraft’s monsters become the gulf between our experience of the world and the world-in-itself (to use Eugene Thacker’s phrase), or the noumenal (to use Kant’s).
So yes, fun stuff. And despite all these genuinely unsettling philosophical underpinnings, I really was having fun reading Lovecraft last Halloween. I picked up At the Mountains of Madness, a short novella thought to be his best work. We listen to an arctic expeditioner writing in warning against an upcoming expedition to the same area he and his team visited years ago. Telling the story, the narrator recounts stumbling on an ancient alien civilisation, where he discovers a tableau recounting their history; they crashed to Earth, set up cities around the globe, developed scientific knowledge that rivals ours. They went to war with other alien races, forged peace treaties, committed genocide.
It’s a great read. Certainly pulpy (take a shot every time the mountains are referred to as ‘mountains of madness’ and you won’t finish the book), and that gives it a quaint charm. That’s one of the reasons it’s not exactly scary, but the main reason is that it’s so direct. Like I said, the power of Lovecraft is in his ability to bring you to the edge of your comprehension, and Mountains doesn’t really do that. Once the protagonists discover the hieroglyphics (that’s not the right word for them, but I forgot what is) that describe, in great detail, the history of the ‘Old Ones’, a lot of the tension is deflated. Oh, ok, they had, like, pets and shit. Spooky.
That’s what I was thinking until the end. See, mentioned quickly in the hieroglyphics is the existence of Shoggoths. They were slaves for the Old Ones, bred as half-sentient malleable blobs to follow any order given. That’s how they’re described at first… right before Lovecraft mentions their revolt. It’s weird. Not Weird exactly… just weird. If they’re barely sentient, why would they revolt? Slave revolts don’t just happen. They grow out of a carefully built strategy, a forging of common bonds between the oppressed. Describing the Shoggoths as barely alive, but capable of coordinated rebellion… doesn’t exactly make sense. Lovecraft’s picture of them is an incoherent one.
Which makes sense, given Lovecraft’s… let’s say, pOlItIcAl LeAnInGs. If you know anything about Lovecraft, you’ll know he was wildly racist. And not just ‘of a different time’ racist, but ‘named his cat a racial slur’ racist. Homophobic, xenophobic, misogynistic, antisemitic; it’s honestly ridiculous how reactionary the man was. When you read on through Mountains, you realise that the Shoggoths are the true villains of the piece, which makes sad sense given these reactionary leanings. Of course this asshole would locate his sympathies with the slave-owning Old Ones. That the final evil is a goddamn slave rebellion is disturbing. Not oooh disturbing oooh… more pathetic disturbing. The way the Turner Diaries or a Piers Morgan broadcast is disturbing.
But unlike those examples, there’s still something fascinating in this. The interesting nugget of Mountains comes in the affective power the Shoggoths hold as, in the final sequence of the book, that famous Lovecraftian terror finally shows itself.
The protagonists venture further into the ruins to find that the hieroglyphics devolve into a strange parody of themselves, an imitation that lacks the skill of the original — much in the way that the Shoggoths ‘speak’ by poorly imitating the language of their masters. Shortly after, we hear a sympathetically painted Old One devoured by something unseen, which sends the narrator and his partner running. In the novel’s climax, they glance back and see it: onrushing black with countless eyes.
It’s a masterfully written sequence that struck me intensely as I read it, and it’s the main reason I recommend the book: because there’s something to be salvaged here.
Much of Lovecraft’s work dealt with his feelings of being an outsider — just read his early short story, The Outsider. His childhood was defined by tragedy and madness, his grandparents dying early, his parents being institutionalized. He wrote of severe depression and suicidal ideation, of an isolating hatred of everything and everyone. If there’s a theme that defines his life, it’s alienation.
This is what draws people to his work today. Take a look at 2017s The Shape of Water, that classic girl-meets-fish-boy love story. The film contains many references to Lovecraft’s work, with the part-scaly-part-sexy love interest possibly being inspired by the ‘Deep Ones’ from The Shadow Over Innsmouth. This isn’t just Del Toro’s characteristic strangeness. This is a tactical recasting of Lovecraft into a queer allegory. Simultaneously a fuck-you to his reactionary beliefs and an empathetic linking of his traumatic alienation to the experience of marginalization.
Breadtube icon hbomberguy has a much better video on this than anything I could contend with, but here, I’d like to focus specifically on the Shoggoths. So Lovecraft doesn’t understand marginalised people, that’s for sure. It’s hard to separate that from his decision to cast the slave race in Mountains as the unnameable evil, and the colonising Old Ones as sympathetic victims. But what’s fascinating is their aforementioned incoherence. It’s as if in the Shoggoths, Lovecraft confronts his own noumenal — that is, the subjectivity of the marginalised — and fails to comprehend it. The noumenal that haunts At the Mountains of Madness isn’t cosmic; it’s intersubjective. It’s his own empathetic deficiency.
Which is why, as frightening as the novella’s ending was, my main affect wasn’t terror, but vindication. I was almost elated at the Shoggoth’s victory. Their ritual beheading of their fallen masters and their bastardization of their art and history. In Del Toro fashion. we can read the Shoggoths not as a great evil, but as role models.
Two other writers that contend with the limits of Western knowledge and human comprehension are Deleuze & Guattari. French philosophers from the 70s-80s, so, y’know, fucking insufferable. Their writing is among the most frustrating you’ll ever read, never quite defining terms, never making its focus clear. Even more irritatingly, this is intentional. In their landmark text, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, they essentially redefine all of Western philosophy, recasting philosophy not as a lofty logical uncovering of the objective rules of the universe but as art. Philosophical concepts become art works, not entirely objective, not entirely subjective, but the point at which that distinction falls apart and the point becomes to express a context above all.
It’s a way of conceiving philosophy that rightfully undermines the aim of the Enlightenment: to institute a clearly definable objectivity. One that, given the entanglement of the Enlightenment with capitalism and the imperial nation-state, is inextricably white, Western, and male. As Timothy Morton puts it, the goal of the Enlightenment and the broader white western historical project is to construct a ‘weird transit lounge outside of history’, form which everything can be seen from high enough a vantage point as to pretend to an ideal of clean removal.
But let’s recast this metaphor slightly. Imagine an eye — a giant, Sauron-like eye, resting on a pedestal high above a city. The eye is said to see all, but the entire point of it is that it doesn’t. It has a very narrow field of vision, shining a spotlight on specific things. What it sees is what we can believe is real. That is, ‘legitimately’ real. ‘Objective’ truth. Mark Fisher in Capitalist Realism talks about the ‘big Other’ — the legitimizing force that defines what we’re allowed to consider true. His example is Soviet Russia. Even when official knowledge was that everything in Russia was hunky dory, people knew that wasn’t true; they couldn’t access food, housing was a nightmare, the NKVD ran terror with impunity. Everyone knew this, but nobody knew it. It wasn’t real knowledge, and if anyone official asked, they’d repeat the official line.
The same logic defines our day to day lives. We all know the rich are parasites. We all know the UK is institutionally racist. We all know Donald Trump and the Conservative Party are criminals. But we don’t know these things. It isn’t official knowledge; it isn’t knowledge that the eye sees. It doesn’t necessarily deny it, but it doesn’t see it.
You see it in action in arguments all the time. Say you’re debating with a parent about whether or not Britain is a good country. ‘Of course it is’, they say, ‘we have easily accessible luxuries, low crime rates, technology. Why do you think they want to come here’. And you say ‘Ok, but what about the fact that capitalism necessitates poverty, starvation, and death? What about the legacy of colonialism? What about Stephen Lawrence, Sarah Everard, Lucy Meadows, Brexit, the Tories, Farage, etc, etc?’ And they’ll do that thing. You know exactly what I’m talking about, that thing. They’ll roll their eyes, tut a little, go ‘Well, yeah, but…’, and make the same argument once again. They’ll refuse to properly engage with your argument. Why? Because it’s not a real argument. These aren’t official facts. The deaths you mentioned aren’t real deaths, of real people. The eye hasn’t cast its legitimating gaze over them yet. Maybe it will one day, but be patient, you’ll just have to wait, we’ll get to them soon.
So that’s the Enlightenment, and ‘reality’ under capitalism. It’s why the left, since the crowning of neoliberalism, has been making the same arguments over and over again for half a century. Why we have to repeat reality to ourselves endlessly, through arguments and slogans. Why when I talk to socialists, we just say the same facts and experiences over and over again, the unstated intent being to validate reality to ourselves. Because the eye’s true power is gaslighting, and a gaslit victim is trapped in a loop of trying to validate their reality to themselves ad infinitum.
Which is, again, why Lovecraft’s writing was genuinely radical. He took figures of scientific knowledge and confronted them with the absolute limits of comprehension. The point at which empiricism, objectivism, the system of representation, all collapsed. The sad thing is that he did it from a reactionary standpoint. But the great thing is that in doing so, he revealed the limitations of his own knowledge. He created his own undoing in the incoherence of the Shoggoths, the half-defined, malleable black ooze with countless eyes.
Returning to the inscrutable dream team Deleuze & Guattari, they lay out a means of true resistance in their concept of schizo-analysis. To plow on with confidence having only read them indirectly, D&G lay out spheres of knowledge, or territorialities. Draw a circle, and label it ‘your body’. Now draw another around it, and label it ‘your psychology’. Now another around that — ‘your social world’. Another — ‘the political world’. And another — ‘the world and history’ (or world-historical). This is the standard model with which we approach the world, clearly defined territories in which you can speak. Each have their own authorities. The authorities of the body are doctors; the mind, psychiatrists; politics, politicians/intellectuals; and so on. They act as mini-Sauron eyes, defining legitimate knowledge. What leaves capitalism untouched by criticism — elevates neoliberalism to capitalist realism — is the fact that politics stays in its own zone, while capital crosses territories unhindered.
D&G confront this problem with the figure of the schizophrenic. Schizophrenic thought (as they understand it) is also defined by its inability to be constrained by any of these boundaries. ‘I have a cough because ancient aliens put poison in my water’ (from the body to the world-historical); ‘My friends don’t understand me because the government is controlling them’ (the social to the political). The schizophrenic destroys these boundaries, habitually, reflexively. This type of thinking — schizo-analysis — upsets the dominant territories that leave capitalism untouched.
We’re not talking about craziness for craziness’ sake here. We’re talking about making real, affecting connections that allow you to actualize capitalism. Take your phone, or, more precisely, your addiction to your phone. There’s a biological neurochemical basis for the fact that you can’t go a day without checking Snapchat and Instagram, or why you finally feel satisfied when you get a text message. Schizo-analysis connects this affect in your body, this biological reality, to the world-historical dimension of neoliberal capitalism’s technological hard-on, and makes that abstract economic relation a felt experience. You can also connect that phone addiction to the racialised labour of Indigenous women that the Fairchild plant that paved the way for digital technologies (read Lisa Nakamura’s Indigenous Circuits article for more); here, the exploitation of Indigenous American women echoes through your own neurochemistry. ‘I can’t think straight because the government is forcing Indigenous ghosts to control my mind!’ Schizo-analysis isn’t crazy; it reveals the interconnection of everything in endless enlightening ways.
And, crucially, it evades the gaze of the eye. It ties whatever the eye is looking at to everything it refuses to look at. In evading reification through representation, staying malleable, it gives you the power to make your reality real, whether the eye looks at it or not. It institutes eyes everywhere.
In evading capture so well, schizo-analysis turns the mechanisms of power against itself, much the way Del Toro turns Lovecraft’s work into queer emancipation. And it’s analogous to what Deleuze & Guattari refer to as ‘becoming-animal’. It’ll take a while to explain their understanding of ‘becoming’, but we can understand ‘becoming-animal’ basically as staying nomadic, evading representation, ignoring the eye.
But come on. Animals, schizophrenics. As usual, D&G are veritable metaphor mixologists. This has its benefits, always evading simple definition. But for now, let’s draw this under a single model: becoming Shoggoth.
In the Shoggoths, Lovecraft created something that terrified him — an unnameable, racialised Other that collapses the power of the big Eye. We can salvage from his approach to horror a weaponization of the noumenal. In the same way the Shoggoths parody their masters’ voices, we can turn Lovecraft against himself. We can set up camp in the gulf between the thinkable and the unthinkable, morphing, mutating, mimicking, until we get close enough to behead power.
