A Philosophical Topology

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ear the end of his life, Schelling criticized the varieties of Post-Kantian philosophy (including his own early work) for privileging the perspective of thought and reason over and against the actuality of the world of nature. In his famous 1809 essay Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom he argued that  “the entire new European philosophy since its beginning with Descartes has the common defect that nature is not available for it and that it lacks a living ground” (Schelling, 2007). By contrast, Schelling sought to understand the element of ground “that precedes all thinking” (Unvordenkliche). The material ground, he believed, had a substantial influence on western thought and the material force of grounded nature both gave rise to our human subjectivity and provided the conditions for the evil, decay, and disease.

Schelling’s understanding of nature retrieved the secluded elements of nature from “beneath” and “beyond” the ground of the Earth. Their hidden primordial dynamism broke through the order of reason. It is the dynamism of such elements that guides Woodard’s topological journey in his new book On an Ungrounded Earth.

While the material vitalism of Schelling’s philosophy has already been object of study (see, for example, Iain Hamilton Grant’s 2006 groundbreaking book), Woodard’s project is to uncover the “dark side” of Schelling’s vitalism, for, suggests the German philosopher, when thinking about nature “everything begins in darkness”. Woodard's strange dark dynamism can only best be described as a "Gothic Materialism”. Writer Simon Reynolds explains that such a materialism is a ferro-vampiric, cultural activity which flirts with the inorganic and walks the “flatline" between life and death (Reynolds, 2005). Woodard's mode is one directly inherited by the influence of the renegade philosopher Nick Land who wrote theory by bending fiction, philosophy, and outlandish nihilistic autobiography into cryptic accelerated texts while directing the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit in the 1990s. During his short professorship at Warwick, Land influenced a number of postgraduate students, including Iain Hamilton Grant, Ray Brassier, and from afar had great influence on the Iranian writer Reza Negarestani. Woodard, who is greatly influenced by Grant, Brassier, and Negarestani, can almost be seen as a third generation student of Land. As such, Woodard’s take on Landian horror-philosophy is that of the geophilosopher, “one who philosophically experiences rather than flees the earth, who passes through by remaining with it. Geophilosophical experience entails facing, more and more deeply, the fact of earth as the place of philosophy, and more profoundly, experiencing the earth as facticity itself, the site of thought’s passage to the absolute" (Masciandaro, quoted in Woodard, page 1).

Throughout the book examples from philosophy, literature, film or video games are used to draw out the strange implications of the tension between internality and externality of the abyssal dynamism of the ground and its agencies. The author begins his investigation by discussing the importance to think about decay, rotting, digging, and other planetary demolishment as forces of abyssal dynamism of ground. As he writes, “the first task is to construct, through somewhat strange means, a theory of ungrounding, both internally and externally. A realist theory of ungrounding, following Negarestani, must engage with decay, with the intensive interaction between forces and bodies, without allowing either to abject or exterminate the other” (page 18). 

Woodard then turns his attention from the activity of decay to the agent of decay: the worm.  His investigation of the worm and its ability to decay the internality of the earth produces a sequence of strange examples and perspectives. The small function of decay of the tiny earthworm (within the carcass or the soft soil) meets the colossal destruction of the worm in the manifestations of speculative literature, films, and videogames. With the Riftworm (from Gears of War), the Antlions (Half Life 2), the sand-worms of Dune, the graboids from Tremors, the cytidic Mongolian death worm, Edgar Allen Poe’s Conqueror Worm, as well as H.P. Lovecraft’s and Thomas Ligotti’s various horrific utilizations of worms both large and small, the worm has enjoyed—and continues to enjoy— a lively speculative life on an ungrounded earth. To get a strong grasp of the oddness of internal ungrounding, Woodard  passes through the lairs of the worms (page 18).

The externality of astral dimensions is discussed next. Here Woodard shows how the sun and other sidereal matter has always been at the forefront of western philosophy. Plato and Socrates both metaphorically spoke of the sun as the source of “illumination”, but Woodard  instead privileges Bataille’s sun, a dark sun, with the pre-written necessity of self-destruction. This black sun degrades the ground of thought with the promise of its inevitable total catastrophic death. Here Woodard quotes Brassier:

“Solar death is catastrophic because it vitiates ontological temporality as configured in terms of philosophical questioning’s constitutive horizontal relationship to the future. But far from lying in wait for us in the far distant future, on the other side of the terrestrial horizon, the solar catastrophe needs to be grasped as something that has already happened; as the aboriginal trauma driving the history of terrestrial life as an elaborately circuitous detour from stellar death” (Brassier, 2007: 223).

Overall, On an Ungrounded Earth represents a “dark” attempt to develop a philosophy based off the strange element of the material world. The reading is far from smooth. Woodard quickly switches between thinkers, ideas and materials, and the reader often finds himself or herself navigating through a disordered and disjoint account scattered with obscure quotes and shadowy terminologies. This spasmodic adventure construes Schelling's philosophy as science fiction alongside the likes of H.P. Lovecraft and Ligotti but in so doing the reader is left at the end trying to piece together a narrative that lacks a erudite reading of these figures while at the same time failing to comprehensibly articulate any philosophical direction. In this way, the book achieves its goal as a dark void by providing the reader with nothing less than complete and total decay. Both one part sci-fi-philosophy text and one part strange speculative media criticism, the book takes the reader on a bizarre journey through complex subterranean topologies—of giant worms, of buried cities, of nuclear waste, of demons and hell—, yet ultimately ending in the dark void of space. 

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References

Brassier R (2007) Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Reynolds S (2005) RENEGADE ACADEMIA. abstract dynamics, [blog] 20 January, Available at: http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/004807.html [Accessed: 26 Jan 2014].

Schelling FWJ (2007) Philosophical Investigations Into the Essence of Human Freedom. J Love and J Schmidt (trans) New York: State University of New York Press.

Woodard B (2013) On an Ungrounded Earth. New York: Punctum Books.