K-Time — Investigations, part2
Tactics in a Time War
K-tactics is not a matter of building the future, but of dismantling the past. It assembles itself by charting and escaping the technical-neurochemical definciency conditions for linear-progressive palaeo-domination time, and discovers that the future as virtuality is acessible now, according to a mode of machinic adjacency that securitized social reality is compelled to repress — Nick Land (CCRU) — Meltdown
In part 2 of this series of articles, we will look at another term that incorporates the concept of a millennial time war — K-tactics. In this post, we will briefly take a stab at decoding some of the ideas underpinning the term in relation to some of Land and the CCRU’s other concept of time and time anomalies. Once again, this is an attempt to investigate their writings, so apologies in advance for any errors in interpretation.
First, we would recommend you watch this interview here with Nick Land. It’s not the best quality and is far more recent than the 1997 time stamp on it. It was likely recorded in China at some point post-2008.
Land in this interview gives a pretty clear break down relating to how time is investigated through his philosophical lens, which of course matches up with some of the concepts we find explored by the CCRU in the 1990s.
In short, he discusses time anomalies which can be thought of as reverse currents of time. Land uses the 1982 movie “The Thing”, a John Carpenter cult classic that has often be compared with Lovecraft's approach to horror to explore this idea. Incidentally, “The Thing” is a rather good instrument to have in your toolbox when exploring some of the other concepts of the CCRU and Land. If you haven't watched it, stop here, go do so and return.
As a recap. At the beginning of the movie we see a Norwegian sled dog running across the frozen tundra, in hot pursuit is a helicopter. At this point in time, we do not know that the dog, is in fact not a dog at all. We presume so, as our mental model tells us so. However, over the course of the movie, we learn otherwise, as we reach the apex of the movie, what we thought was happening, simply wasn’t. The dog is rather the assimilation of the Norwegian scientific team's canine companions by an unknowable mutating Alien entity. Humans, dogs and other organisms are merely vessels that this creature uses as it spreads and assimilates without care for its hosts. This horror that has laid buried beneath the Arctic for millennia, draws comparison to an eldritch beast from the pages of At the Mountains of Madness.
So, in the context of K-tactics as the movie progresses, we realize what we thought we saw happening at the outset of the movie was not happening at all. That grain of the future was always there, just incomplete (we cannot see that the dog, is not a dog, but some other being). Thus in the future, we de-construct the past with our knowledge in that yet to come present. However, as “The Thing” is in many ways a representation of the Outside, even our ability to understand it is constrained by our own human tools.
“The Thing”, Terminator and other movies that Land and the CCRU reference across their work act as images or symbols of time anomalies. Think of media as somewhat deficient ways to explain the future leaking into the present.
These stories thus allude to a form of time travel. Not literal physical time travel. But something that has retro-temporal casual characteristics. i.e. brings itself into being. The element exists in the past and the “causal tentacle” from the future is here.
William Gibson is alleged to have said the future is here just not evenly distributed. We can play on this and say the future is here, just not temporally obvious, just like the dog in the opening scenes of “The Thing”. By this we mean those granules of the future and the self-assembling mechanism that gives rise to the future are already around us. Whether in hyperstitional form or as a deterministic process. The past is thus infested with retro-casual influences. From the future, we can look back and deconstruct the past narrative with this knowledge that the future was hiding there. The bricolage already existed and the future constructed itself from these disparate parts.
From a CCRU influenced angle, we could say time anomalies can’t be thought of from the view of the Outside only through the forms of the Interior, whether science, art or the trappings of Modernity. These tools (movies, books, virtual reality, the internet, empirical methods) merely give us an understanding of the assemblages created by the Outside (but not the Outside itself). You could argue this is a fairly post-modern approach to the application of epistemology. There is no grand narrative just hyperreality and the Outside. It’s why Lovecraft’s writings are seemingly popular by those interested in this field. We see the byproducts of the Elder Gods, we can investigate them through the scientific method, but we can never truly know them. To attempt to leads to madness.
Therefore turning to other sections of the CCRU work we could in parallel consider “the market” intervention from the Outside as well. The self-assembling of networks and processes born from a complex system, that in turn give rise to the complex forces we view through the lens of capitalist terminology. The market, AI, and time thus all feed into one another creating feedback loops.
Summary
So we can partially think of K-tactics (with the K derived from Cybernetics) as the mechanism that describes time anomalies where aspects of the future are here in the present, construct the future from themselves and re-write our understanding of the past.
K-tactics will be explored a little more in future posts in relation to the CCRU writings, however, next, we will look at Hauntology, Mark Fisher's work and their references to time.
