In
A Thousand Plateaus Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari invoke H.P. Lovecraft five times. While Lovecraft is mentioned together with such literary figures as Moritz, Woolf and particularly Melville, his work has less in common with those authors than with the abstract demonology of Deleuze and Guattari’s “Becoming-Intense” (sec. 10). Deleuze and Guattari claim that Lovecraft “attempted to pronounce sorcery’s final word” (
TP 251; sec. 10), although Lovecraft has received little attention in comparison with other writers loosely grouped into the usually maligned genres of fantasy, science fiction and gothic horror. In this essay I pull out the evocations in Deleuze and Guattari’s five references to the story Lovecraft wrote with E. Hoffman Price,
Through the Gates of the Silver Key (hereafter
TGSK), and offer sketches of the ways in which becomings proliferate through Lovecraft’s work, in particular throughout his ‘cosmic horror’ writing. I argue that Lovecraft may offer an affirming philosophy of becoming that renegotiates traditional perceptions of his work as nihilistic or purely horrific. In this way I propose Lovecraft as a catalyst for a philosophical negotiation of the politics of subjectivity and alterity.
This essay is meant to present a series of possibilities and ideas and not a definitive summary of stories, so moments from stories are mentioned without explication or reference to narratives or events. Lovecraft’s work rarely privileges event and narrative, which I understand as an oeuvre of relations that at their simplest
should not be. The primary concept underpinning becomings for Deleuze and Guattari is also relations which refuse relationships that enforce resemblance. By reading Lovecraft through Deleuze and Guattari, I propose an alternate interpretation of Lovecraft’s work as expressing a vitalistic philosophy and inspiring an ethics that addresses the structures of self posited with and as socio-cultural otherness. Becomings are not commensurate with unique singularities but are produced from unlike relations. Lovecraft’s cosmic horror works are obsessed with the idea of relations that inevitably structure and underpin human existence but that remain unknown to the human. The becoming with which Lovecraft’s humans participate comes from the Elder Gods or more usually the Ancient Ones, a pantheon composed by Lovecraft from various Assyrio-Babylonian, Mesopotamian and particularly ancient Sumerian cacodemons. The Elder Gods act as gatekeepers for the Ancient Ones or Great Ones, a group of creatures associated with the terror of possibly unleashing a world of hybrid relations with humans which would either wipe humans out or, if the Great Ones entered into becomings, would wipe out subjectivity and perception as we know it. The Ancient Ones are presented in detail in Lovecraft’s
The Necronomicon, written under the pseudonym Abdul Alhazred, which can be understood together with other apocryphal texts such as
Eibon. These same demons appear in the pandemonium of Milton’s
Paradise Lost, in Satan’s fallen land, but the idea of a pantheonic pack or a multiplicity within the one and a oneness of the multiple also resonates with the Devil’s response to Jesus’s question about his identity: “I am legion, for we are many” (
Holy Bible, Mark 5:9). The dreadful realisation overcomes Lovecraft’s protagonists that they have always been in relation with and related to monstrous entities. In this context S.T. Joshi evaluates Lovecraft as an activating writer: “[R]ealism is … not a goal but a function in Lovecraft; it facilitates the perception that ‘something which could not possibly happen’ is actually happening” (33). Joshi emphasizes that Lovecraft is both and neither a writer of fantasy fiction and/nor of realism. This claim resonates with the crucial element of becoming in Deleuze and Guattari, namely that becomings are not metaphors and do not occur in a theatre of representation but rather actualize potentialities of thought.
While many of Lovecraft’s stories include the atmospheric suspense of gothic fiction and the predictive elements of science-fiction, his descriptions of fantastic states are based on a refined knowledge of physics and a commitment to immersing both the characters and the reader in the cosmic horror. I argue here that Lovecraft should be understood as a writer who is not against realism but rather who attempts to find a new realism-mobilisation. Michael Houellebecq claims that Lovecraft avoids precision “with regards to the distribution of [the Ancient Ones’] powers and abilities. In fact their exact nature is beyond the grasp of the human mind.… those humans who seek to know more ineluctably pay with madness and death” (83). Poststructuralism enables us to translate “madness” as schiz-subjectivity and “death” as the death of reified identity that is launching upon becomings. For Lovecraft, monsters are not aberrant versions of the human. They are monstrous, that is, not in form, but on the levels of perception and possibility. What emerges in Lovecraft is that the human is a vague, strategic myth for ensuring sanity and thus traditional subjectivity through a belief in like relations. The human is of, indeed perhaps created by, monsters that are horrific not only in their hybrid incarnations but also in the impossibility of their being perceived through human modes of apprehension; this shows that the human is nothing more than its own fantastical myth and the infinite possibility of the beyond which is also the within. The horror experienced by Lovecraft’s protagonists need not close off the possibility that his readers would negotiate their own subjectivity and elements of alterity as a specific system of power. Beyond authorial intent, Lovecraft can demand, perhaps radically, a dissipation of powers that are contingent on the maintenance of the category of human. This is the political context of this essay. Maligned as sexist and racist, Lovecraft ironically catalyzes the becomings of the human through infinite and abstracting paradigms, and thereby requires his readers to reorient power relations, along the lines of poststructuralist, feminist, and postcolonial strategies alike. Thus Joshi is correct to describe Lovecraft’s writing as
functional. Lovecraft himself explains that supernatural horror in literature “demands from the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity for detachment from everyday life” (
Supernatural Horror 12). As Joshi points out, however, this does not preclude realism. Poststructuralism has demonstrated that there is no simple bifurcation dividing art and thought: what we create constitutes how we perceive reality, which then contributes to what we create, but it is the indeterminable and non-transcriptive or non-equivalent nature of this causality that makes the functioning of art in life and of life in art interesting.
Along with asking what Lovecraft means, then, we also can ask what reading Lovecraft might
do. Donald Burleson premises his poststructural reading of Lovecraft – which, like Joshi’s analysis, emphasises
manner over meaning – with the reminder that authorial intent is inaccessible and presence remains a metaphysical phantasy (5-7). In his analysis of
Pickman’s Model, Burleson states that “Pickman is absent because his plural nature denies the metaphysics of presence and self-identity.… Pickman divides himself against himself” (91). If the reader does the same, can an address to alterity be mobilised? Burleson interprets “The Colour Out of Space” as offering a refutation of systems themselves; here, to see “a visible impression, not belonging to this system, is to suggest disturbance of the system and, allegorically, subversion of systems generally. What is at work here is the undoing of categorical thinking, the unravelling of any system claiming final mastery, exhaustive cataloguing, total solution, immutable results, settled ‘reading’ of reality” (108). Mastery refuses a negotiatory ethics of difference. Against the allegorical emphasis of this claim, however, I propose that the functional activating of potentiality that does not recognise metaphor as its own closed circuit shows how reading Lovecraft may challenge close/d readings and other techniques of mastering words, bodies, flesh, perception and subjectivity beyond the text into the world. Ultimately I will ask: what did Lovecraft do to perception and what can we do with Lovecraft?
This essay extends what Deleuze and Guattari call unnatural participation, understood as an impossible yet compulsory relation to the perception of cosmic horrors, in order to rethink the category of the human. The figure of gates of perception posits relation as an opening up rather than as an elliptical return to genesis. Through demonic relations Deleuze and Guattari seek abstract machines of relation that are no less real for being abstract, and argue, along with Joshi, that Lovecraft is a realist because of the function rather than the content of his work. This means that Lovecraft’s writings can be understood in a wider, political context instead of as belonging to a genre which distances itself from social life. Deleuze and Guattari connect this idea to Spinoza’s claim that ethics is produced not by commensurable relation, which privileges (usually) one form and function over another, but rather by what is produced between the two. Lovecraft’s literature offers an art event that is no less real for catalysing new gates of perception and possibilities of relation. By accessing Lovecraft’s necronomic gates toward the infinite and imperceptible but also the immanently present, we are forced to think, first, potentiality as an encounter with alterity, and, second, the political risks and imperatives of ourselves as becoming-other. This essay is structured as a series of “gates” in the sense of those bridges that Deleuze and Guattari, in
What is Philosophy, describe as creating a “new concept of perceptual space” (19). As becomings concern not what structures relationships (between two reified entities), but what is produced through unnatural relations, gates of Lovecraftian perception open what Deleuze and Guattari call unheard of becomings – not unheard of because they have never been heard before, but because they cannot be heard through established, majoritarian vocalisations.
In “Becoming Intense” Deleuze and Guattari describe abstract planes of consistency with reference to sorcery, Bergson, Spinoza, haecceity, plane-making, molecules, secrets, points, and blocks. None of these are abstractions or fantasies in the sense that they do not concern the material. They are abstract in the sense that the material is always concerned with planes. Majoritarian structures of perception create planes that are atrophied, adamantly heard of, and able-to-be-heard before their vocalisation arrives. Lovecraft’s reader is not confronted with what happens to whom and why, but with the unbearable reality of effectuation of unheard-of relations without perception as external, causal and commensurable apprehension, which is to say with a miasmic material reality: “a plane of consistency peopled by anonymous matter, by infinite bits of impalpable matter entering into varying connections” (Deleuze and Guattari,
TP 255), Via Spinoza but primarily as sorcerers, and through Lovecraft, Deleuze and Guattari thus offer an ethics of becomings whose main phases are: 1) relations without likeness, 2) entities without form or function, 3) relations which are nonetheless real in spite of their abstract nature and the abstracting of the entities, 4) these relations forcing alternate modes of perception without laying new structures of apprehension, finally leading to 5) the function of art as catalysing becomings in the reader by demanding alternate perceptions of relation with any and all entities. As Deleuze and Guattari point out, these all occur on the same abstract plane.
There is no leaving behind Lovecraft when we close his pages. Lovecraft’s work may be fantasy, the monsters fictive, the narratives fragmentary, but the relation to possibilities of thought through imperceptible though terrifically present entities is a gate through which the reader enters becomings that differentiate all relations on a plane of consistency. Against Joshi, Colin Wilson claims that Lovecraft was opposed to realism and particularly to materialism. What is at stake here is not whether Lovecraft personally rejected materialism but whether his negotiation of perception itself has material effects in the post-structural sense of re-negotiating signifying systems and relations of difference and otherness in the world. Wilson titles his chapter on Lovecraft the “Assault on Rationality.” Rationality has traditionally been the realm of dominant, logocentric, majoritarian systems. Wilson emphasizes Lovecraft’s obsession with the monstrous, and Braidotti the definition of
monster as any deviation from the base level zero “human.” Braidotti states that “the discourse on monsters as a case study highlights … the status of difference within rational thought” (78). Wilson points out that Lovecraft “is willing to make his setting modern, but it must be remote from civilisation, a kind of admission of defeat” (4). This tendency evinces Lovecraft’s interest in describing the connective affectivity of fantastic perception and world, rather than a non-terrestrial dystopia. For this reason the political question becomes “defeat of what?” From a politics of alterity we could argue that Lovecraft works to defeat the exertion of perception and knowledge, for the exertion of power opens the way for other forms of subjectivity to emerge.
Lovecraft’s oeuvre falls into two categories. One encompasses more familiar tales of terror found in horror stories and novels of the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries; the other is based on the great Lovecraft mythos. The stories based on the mythos address three main phases. The first, which Lovecraft calls “transition” or “mutation,” expresses the becoming(s) of protagonists as they begin to corporeally and psychologically articulate inflection with alternate genera, terrestrial teratological and alien (a division that is in fact unclear in Lovecraft). The second is the entering into the worlds, or, in keeping with his disinterest in disambiguation, the domains occupied by these creatures as gods. The third is the distortion of perception. Lovecraft was responsible for creating entire pantheons, universes, worlds, and alternate temporal realities of evolution and alien existence. The key element which differentiates Deleuze and Guattari’s almost jubilant citation of Lovecraft’s ideas is the lack of attention to what most Lovecraft commentators misguidedly call, as does Michael Houellebecq in the title of his seminal book, Lovecraft’s proclivity against life. The quality of one’s journey toward Lovecraft should take into account the definitions of such terms as “life,” “human,” and other Earthly tenets of thoughts, apprehensions of form and perceptions of states. Challenging the category of the human underpins all becomings, beginning with the most obvious falling away from the hu”Man” to woman, animal and eventually abstract particles, sonority, and inhuman planes. Apparently in contradiction with his premise that Lovecraft’s work shows a nihilistic weariness with life, Houellebecq in fact claims in his preface that through Lovecraft we can live in poetry (25). With the help of Deleuze and Guattari, this essay ultimately explores the readers’ passing through the gates of Lovecraftian perception, which involves the creation of a speech, from the unspeakable to the ‘unsayable’; incommensurable relations which take the very acts of writing and speech to their limits; accessing the outside and the unthinkable; but which are also, and in contradistinction to Wilson’s claim, is no less material for doing so. Resonant with speech of the unsayable, Lovecraftian perception is perception upon a different plane. (Burleson touches on this when he cites Derrida’s claim that “there is nothing outside the text” (10); in this case, however, I would tend more toward the work of Foucault and Blanchot, which introduce accountability and responsibility into this concept.) Lovecraft can be invigorating if read as a writer of the baroque (through, for example, Deleuze’s work on Leibniz) rather than, as many have claimed, the gothic; if read through physics as much as folklore; and as long as one reads and thinks of Lovecraft as an act of sorcery. Critics such as Siegel have claimed persistently that Lovecraft is a writer of gothic fiction (51). This tendency arises more from the resonance of trite adjectives such as ‘haunted’, ‘dark’, ‘horrific’ and so forth that are applied to Lovecraft’s work, than from the difficult task of seeing his work as phylum. Hybrid becomings, however, could help readers describe Lovecraft as a writer of the baroque rather than of the gothic (see
MacCormack, “Baroque Intensity”). Relating to themes and places more modern (though emphatically anti-modernist) than the abbey-bound turpitude of G.M. Lewis and less romantic than the occultism of F. Marion Crawford, Lovecraft’s protagonists, (who are also uninterested in Bram Stoker’s socio-political tenets of industrialisation), are neither haunted nor hounded by entities they will eventually overcome. (To be fair, however, this repudiation of the gothic is more readily found in Lovecraft’s cosmic tales than in the intimate stories of dread.)
Becomings deal not with kinds but with states. The journeys upon which Lovecraft’s protagonists, and we as readers, launch, are journeys that involve “passing through” as becomings, not the completion of a project of becoming with another element. A demonological philosophy after Deleuze and Guattari increasingly becomes less about animals and demons than about gates. Contagion, packing, proliferation alter the qualities of the passing, and each gate could be described as a mode of perception-consistency. Randolph Carter understands his journey through the gates as a “flux of impressions.… [Gates lead] from earth and time to that extension of earth which is outside time, and from which in turn the Ultimate Gate leads fearsome and perilously to the Last Void which is outside all earths, all universes and all matter” (Lovecraft,
TGSK 516-17). Carter uses the apocryphal grimoire by the Mad Arab (probably written by Lovecraft himself),
The Necronomicon. In
The Necronomicon itself (especially in “The Book of Entrance and of Walking,” “The Book of Calling,” and “The Incantations of the Gates”), the names and qualities of encounters with gods are seen
as gates, not entities; so the kind or order of the gods is also understood
as qualities of movement and
as locations that incarnate particular impression-states. Quality of flux, guided by imagination and dream over goal, opens the gates. The use of a grimoire and conjuration resonates with Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy of sorcery, not simply because the act of sorcery underpins the plane of consistency in both cases, but also because in both cases the rituals concern “modes of expansion [and]… occupation” (
TP 239; sec. 10). Occupying a place whose territories are expanded through various reorientations of impression produces an anomalous place. Deleuze and Guattari emphasize that the adjective
anomalous situates a position or a phenomenon of bordering. In this sense, gates, understood as borders of becomings, are used in this essay to describe Lovecraft’s different phases of becomings, phases which cannot be understood in terms of causality or of narrative logic. The first gate addresses Deleuze and Guattari’s three modes of animality, and Lovecraft’s idea that animality is exemplified by propagation. Gate Two addresses the shift from recognisable animal intensity to what Deleuze and Guattari call the demonic animal, which appears in Lovecraft as the Elder Gods and Ancient Ones. Gate Three explores the way, in becomings, the categorically human is crucially absent. Using Deleuze’s work on Leibniz, Gate Four begins to address the move from becomings as acts of participation with other elements, to the altering of modes of perception as such and posits Lovecraft as a writer of the baroque on account of his manipulation of the physics of perception-planes. Gate Five contextualises Lovecraft’s modes of speech, the compulsion to say the unsayable in order to access the outside – or what Deleuze and Guattari call the abstract, outside perceptions of form, function and comprehension – but within the world and found in art; in this sense the abstraction is no less material and real. Gate Six, finally, asks what ethical imperatives are presented by Lovecraft’s art.
Gate 1. Orders of Animals, Orders of Demons
In Deleuze and Guattari’s work, becomings pass through stages which can generally be described as devolutionary, and which Deleuze and Guattari call “neoevolutionary.” The majoritarian subject “man” (which is to say, all human subjects) enters into relations with primary elements of minoritarian alterity, becoming-woman, becoming-animal, and other, a-human forms, toward more refined, ambiguous expressions of content. The animal, however, is the primary node for inhuman or a-human becomings. Deleuze and Guattari demarcate three orders of animality. The first is the Oedipal animal, the puppy-baby (Freud). Second is the symbolic or archetype animal, which creates and immobilises itself upon a metaphoric structure of signification (Jung). The third animal is the demonic animal, in which two elements must be present – the animal here is itself a phenomenon of bordering, hybridity, and metamorphicity. Demonic animals are defined as “pack or affect animals that form a multiplicity, a population, a becoming, a tale” (TP 241; sec. 10). Vampires, werewolves, and demons belong to this third order of animality. Because they are both familiar and unfamiliar to us, however, they seem to resonate with the negotiations of what a human-animal could be, both when it is mistakenly read through the first two orders of animality, and when its becomings are overlooked. It involves a relation with an abstract animal. Oedipal animality – the family puppy-baby – manifests its narcissism through subjective ownership – “‘my’ cat, ‘my’ dog” (TP 240; sec. 10). Oedipal animals affirm the self through the construction of an anthropomorphising family system in which the animal is allowed to emerge only through conditional love that fulfills the parameters of the substitute child. Since the animal is inferior in both its structural position and its species, it resolves the woman’s penis envy and the man’s castration anxiety. The second order of animals is the archetypal animal who is invested with human qualities and effectively only has, or represents, human qualities. These animals are extricated from animality, but the range of their symbolic function is almost limitless. Both systems in no way include animals, just human, signifying systems. We need to develop the critique further here, however, so that the werewolf/demon/vampire is not misunderstood as some uncanny, gothic entity. Lovecraft claims that he seeks “to make the flesh creep” (qtd. in Wilson 3) more than to unfurl narrative through characters. This focus on flesh directly challenges metaphor and the distance between reader and text. As a kind of physio-cerebral affectivity, it dissolves metaphor and makes the text politically accountable for its catalyzing of different modes of thinking.
Demons thus belong to the third order of Deleuze and Guattari’s animal taxonomy. Becoming through a pact-pack with the demon also describes the first phase of Lovecraftian sorcery. One of the remarkable contributions Lovecraft makes to literature is his formulation of a pantheon of gods. Unlike other fantasy writers, however, Lovecraft creates gods within this world, which is also folded together with worlds outside of time and space. As Gates, Lovecraft’s gods are responsible for the horror of altering modes of being in the world, and they do so by creating the pure immanence of multiple worlds. Taxonomies of monsters, orders of gods, worlds demarcated as fantastical or real are absent in Lovecraft, and it is the very absence of these demarcations which causes horror. Lovecraft’s gods lack the signification and subjectification that, according to Deleuze and Guattari, facilitates majoritarian power, which in turn sanctions the emergence of subjects. The entities with which the protagonists enter becomings are abstract and ambiguous (as emergent entities they are always there but not entirely apprehensible). Becomings in Lovecraft are also compulsory – the protagonists have no choice, but while horror is thereby irrefutably catalysed, it comes from the loss, and not from the destruction, of the self. These monsters destroy through alliance rather than murder. Lovecraft emphasises that becomings are already available and that we always already choose the extent to which we resist or submit to the everyday alliances we make. In this way he demonstrates that retaining reified subjectivity is as much an act as would be letting go of it. Deleuze and Guattari use the concept of demons to expand the intersection of the hybrid with the animal. Aesthetic and apocryphal demons such as werewolves and vampires are single expressions of human-animal elements, inherently metamorphic and part of packs. Since demons must be invoked after first being imagined as fabulations, thinking becoming-demon for them requires a philosophy of sorcery. Lovecraft’s lower gods are fabulations of demons, inter-species hybrids with orders of non-mammalian animals, and this Deleuzio-Guattarian index is where Lovecraft’s a-human becomings begin. Deleuze and Guattari do not offer aesthetic, cinematic or literary examples of their demons – the devil, werewolves and vampires – because these arise as particle verb bands rather than as infernal monsters or as metaphorical, figurative, or symbolic entities. When examples are offered, they resonate around becomings which are not as familiar to us as those of the werewolf and vampire. Precisely because these monsters emerge through so many varied examples of actualised virtualities, however, they remain abstract potentiality, whereas the specific literary citations of Woolf’s becoming-monkey, Ahab’s becoming-whale, and so on, are examples of singularities before the formation of new threshold packs.
Gate 2. From Demonic Heredity to Abstract Alliance
Gate 2 focuses on the demonic in Deleuze and Guattari’s elements of becoming, as abstract animal entities. This Gate explores the liminal band between a-human, animal elements and the demon that is beyond animal-element perception. Lovecraft’s gods are not monsters; they do not belong to extra-human orders from which they threaten to slaughter the demarcated human, and they do not reside in the entirely external fantasy worlds that are found in many traditional horror stories. Ancient Ones and Elder Gods are beyond Frankenstein’s creature and Dracula, and they are too earthly present to be classified along with the alien gods and monsters of fantasy novels. For the renegotiation of our becomings, it is important to note that we cannot categorise them as outside, either in form or in world. They are immediately present but also without presence since they are not recognisably other or antagonistic. The qualities of Lovecraft’s gods and entities are, furthermore, always themselves in states of becoming. They include multiple intensities and mobile qualities of many animals, particularly cephalopods, fish. and insects, as well as a bacterial forms of bubbling, molecular viscosity. As the gods are in their own states of becoming, their function as an anomalous, allied term is already beyond our capacity to name them. As hyper-hybrids, they also occupy territories that could be described as having their own becomings – water-land worlds, outer-space-within-this space and so forth, what Deleuze and Guattari call a “Universe fiber” that is “strung across borderlines” (TP 249; sec. 10). In addition, since they cannot be destroyed, their states of “life” are tentative. They are incapable of killing humans, but only change their state of life, as they are neither dead nor alive. The thresholds and gates Lovecraft’s monsters force us to negotiate are resistant, not only to being destructive monsters, but also to being hybrid entities that we could demarcate for our becomings. Their qualities of contagion, as hybrids or outside entities, preclude them from being monsters, and thus resonate with Deleuze and Guattari’s terms for elements of becoming, from wolf-whale-rat to demonic dimensionality and borderline propagation. The Ancient Ones are described physically as threshold creatures – both fish and fowl, flesh and fur, a kind of sentient, amphibious nebula from a pre-human, pre-historical time that is both more civilised and intelligent than the human time, and barbarically uncivilised. Inevitably and most horrifically, the Ancient Ones reproduce the limit restricting even hybrid animality from a pure abstraction-becoming. The animal elements of the Ancient Ones, while residually named as animal, are in fact cephalopodan, insect and other adamantly non-mammalian forms. Cthulhu is seen in bas-relief as a squid dragon, “an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature… [whose] pulpy tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings” (Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu,” hereafter TCC, 63). Dagon is a fish-man-god (Lovecraft, “Dagon” 16). The encounter between protagonists and their becoming-Ancient Ones reflects this threshold. Cthulhu lives a threshold consciousness, lying dead but dreaming. The geography of Cthulhu’s fallen cities of R’lyeh lies at the threshold of the mountains of madness, at immeasurable depths beneath the sea (apparently near New Zealand). Randolph Carter’s becoming is “human and non-human, vertebrate and invertebrate, animal and vegetable” (Lovecraft, TGSK 526), and the unnamed protagonist of The Shadow Over Innsmouth is a man-froglike-fish or fishlike-frog, “flopping, hopping, croaking, bleating” (Lovecraft, TSI 454). “Propagation by epidemic, by contagion, has nothing to do with filiation by heredity.… These combinations are neither genetic nor structural; they are interkingdoms” (Deleuze and Guattari, TP 241-2; sec. 10). In “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” the kingdom of immortal creatures of the sea arises to infect the citizens of Innsmouth with molecular intensities, merging land with sea and human with frog-fish-flesh. The narrator shares a family line with these hybrid worshippers of Dagon and Cthulhu, but genealogy produces a unique specificity of hybridity. He tells us that “them as turn into fish things an’ went into the water wouldn’t never die” (414).
Mixed blood in this context clearly has more to do with disease and infection than with reproduction, while “reproduction” has to be understood not as a project of reproducing, but rather as the production, at each stage, of a unique generation of unrepeatable combinations. Hybrids, in science, are sterile and cannot reproduce, but like Cthulhu they also cease the need to reproduce because they become eternal. Houllebecq (problematically) reminds us that “most novelists consider it their duty to present an exhaustive picture of life” (61). In contrast to literature’s traditional compulsions to re-present endlessly, Lovecraft’s work and his monsters produce only singularities, thereby forcing readers to confront alterity and defamiliarization. What is at stake here is whether the reader chooses a liberation of ideology through this defamiliarization, or a stubbornly clings to powers of signification that maintain dominant subjectivity. Could we argue that minoritarian readers would, contra Houellebecq, find life in this liberation?
Neither Carter nor the narrator of “Innsmouth” narrator enters into a desiring union as part of his transformation, but instead is propagated through hereditary disease (demonic reproduction) or geographical proximity to threshold kingdoms. Each relation between the protagonist and his seemingly inevitable fate as part of a family of singular hybrids forming a heterogeneous, seething, contagious collective ends with resignation, joy, liberation or an unqualified loss of perception. Lovecraft’s protagonists rarely prevail, they cease to be protagonists at all, and their fate is the packing-pacts of becomings. The population of the Innsmouth Order of Dagon pack are specific phyla which appear as unique entities due to their unpredictable combining of interkingdom coalescence. This is the Outsider that Deleuze and Guattari, following Lovecraft, describe as neither/both an individual nor/and a pack, which is to say as a “phenomenon of bordering” (TP 245; sec. 10). Bordering lines inflect at different and mobile angles. In Lovecraft’s “The Nameless City” (TNC), which makes the first reference to The Necronomicon, the unnamed narrator encounters half-transparent, chaotic devils, hybrid demons of crocodile-seal-man but “more often nothing of which either the naturalist or the palaeontologist ever heard.… But strangest of all were the heads, which presented a contour violating all known biological principles.… I thought of comparisons as varied as the cat, the bulldog, the mythic satyr, and the human being” (136). Eternal creatures lose the need for Oedipal or hierarchical structures because they no longer need familial or gender striation. Their condition as a pack is thus neither serial (based on equivalences demarcated through political, isomorphic binaries of gender, age or race) nor structural (based on arboreal hierarchy and genealogy). In addition, their immortality, like their genealogy, should be understood not as a chronology without end, but rather as time without duration, simultaneity including constant differentiation. The contemplation of this concept-state is often the catalyst for the protagonists’ madness, but only while they remain in the human world, with its modes of spatial disambiguation and unfurling temporality. We hear in TNC the much-cited couplet maxim of the Ancient Ones, also found in The Necronomicon, that “That which can eternal lie/And with strange aeons even death may die” (142).
Gate 3. Inhuman Becomings
The majoritarian, it could be argued, belongs to no category other than the particular species of the “human.” After becoming-woman, through which women must also pass, Deleuze and Guattari call to the human “becoming-animal.” The shift from being woman to becoming woman (a deeply problematic, precariously fetishistic concept for which Deleuze and Guattari have been maligned) is a movement from a category emergent only through majoritarian expression, as lacking and oppressed, to woman as a singularity or territory with no opposite. The very fact that Deleuze and Guattari posit woman as the first, surely horrific step for the majoritarian male to take in his relinquishing of power endows this politics of alterity with the mood of Lovecraft’s protagonists who, ultimately, fear becoming-nothing, a status to which minoritarians have long been relegated. The becoming-cosmic, however, shows that nothing is everything, just as many feminists, such as Irigaray in An Ethics of Sexual Difference, have argued that woman, in “lacking,” is both less than and more than one. From the definite politics of feminists of difference, we come to the larger paradigm of the human itself. While Lovecraft’s characters do not pass through a becoming-woman, they do leap to a becoming-animal that is neither human nor animal, and both. Insofar as the animal is nothing except the not human, becoming animal begins the ablation of the category of the human. As Lovecraft’s protagonists extend toward becomings that offer no recognisable elements, they can no longer be organised as hybrids of relations between two, whether animal/human or human/demon. Through abstract gods, this stage of becoming is able to erode entirely all residue of the human. Beyond the notion of the “post-human,” which suggests an “after,” Lovecraft’s becoming-inhuman is within so-called humans, immanently available, and indeed inevitable and compulsory. No longer hybrid with exo-kingdoms, the primary term “human” can no longer be described as becoming. The divisibility of becoming entities becomes increasingly difficult. This section explores the conception of relations of a-human or inhuman, non-differentiated, nebulous becomings as baroque. Lovecraft’s monsters are unto themselves not scary, the events not frightening, compared with facing the ultimate horror of losing subjectivity to the very molecular level of the human, the mammal, the invertebrate, the plant, the bacterial.
In Lovecraft’s tales events are associated with phases of relation and production, not presented in increments of narrative evolution. For this reason I would extend Deleuze’s work on Leibniz and argue that both Deleuze and Guattari’s werewolves/vampires/demons and Lovecraft’s work deal with the baroque. Like the baroque, Lovecraft’s work consists not of collisions between forms but rather of acts of relations between substances, or, as Leibniz puts it, the power to act and be acted upon (81). The baroque is important for the politics of difference in my argument because Leibniz argues here that bodies depend on their affective relations with other bodies in order to define themselves. Techniques of subsumption and oppression through the reification of dominant identities amount to uneven relations without participation. Instead of perpetuating domination or subordination through refusal and extrication, attention to the affects and fluidity of bodies in proximity with and inflected through one another requires that our apprehension of those bodies negotiates the possibility of differing ourselves. For Leibniz, all bodies are modification or extension, existing as fluid aggregates, and their reality is not an essence within these bodies but rather, as Leibniz writes following Democritus, “they depend for their existence on opinion or custom” (69).
Critics have accused Lovecraft of nihilism, pessimism (Lévy), paranoia (Carter) and, from an esoteric angle, qualities of negativity and poverty-stricken intangibility (Pasi, Hanegraaff), even if the critics have not necessarily presented these qualities as bad. More celebratory explorations have suggested that Lovecraft’s art allows encounters with the sublime (Ralickas). As a phenomenon of encountering an excess of signification that is no less material for being so, the sublime offers a jubilant reading of the ultimate dissipations that Lovecraft’s protagonists undergo. In direct reference to a politics of feminist alterity, Kristeva’s Desire in Language proposed the sublime as an integral element of the a-signifying systems encountered in becoming-woman. Lovecraft also has been utilised in queer theory and as a catalyst for activism (MacCormack, “Unnatural Alliances”), in illustration of Joshi’s point that his is a writing of function. Goodrich has explored Lovecraft as a mannerist, and has pointed to the plastic-artistry of his literary style. It is crucial to find joy in Lovecraft, as it is here we find liberation from dominant signifying systems. The question then becomes, “who benefits from maintaining these systems?” Reading Lovecraft as a baroque writer, we can find voluminous material (indeed all too material) becomings. The horror perhaps comes from the fact that these becomings are not metaphors; they are instead all too real and in fact invert metaphorisation, with no recourse to meaning. Far from disappearing or being consumed, Lovecraft’s characters are unable to escape, through death or victory, the reality of their metamorphoses. Leibniz states: “A corporeal substance can neither arise nor perish except by creation or annihilation… Consequently things which have souls do not arise or perish, but are only transformed” (92). Carter and Charles Dexter-Ward, among others, neither live nor die, and at best theirs is not a fear of transformation but of an irresistible “beckoning” (Lovecraft, TGSK 505). Whatever is annihilated is human. Indeed perhaps these stories are nihilistic for the human, always and only lacking or against only human life, the human understood as that which Leibniz’s ethics repudiates – an entity as a unified one. Becoming-inhuman is not death, “for no substance perishes, though it can become quite different” (Leibniz 43).
Baroque transformation is bordering, infinitely and infinitesimally fractal, aggregate plurality, subdivision, “modification as extension” (Leibniz 68). The specificities of each of these qualities are not antagonistic, and unlike relations offer an ethics of difference that is crucial to minoritarian studies and becomings. The unnamed entity (probably Yog-Sothoth) that concludes “The Dunwich Horror” (DH) speaks half in English and half in imperceptible – and olfactory – utterances. It “has been split up into what it was originally made of, and can never exist again. It was an impossibility in a normal world. Only the least fraction was really matter in any sense we know” (Lovecraft, DH 151-2). The entity is called a “human blasphemy” (152), not because it is evil or aberrant, but because it could not be perceived and thus known as part of the “normal” world occupied by phantasies of human and other demarcated entities. Politically, minoritarians – women, queers, racial others and so forth – have been considered in this way, and in response have demanded a philosophy of re-negotiating signifying systems. Faith here is not belief in God but in the human and its associated qualities of singularity, reified subjectivity, and unified, homogenised expression of substance.
Continental philosophy frequently emphasises that art first involves letting go of the category of the human. For Lyotard, art makes us become-inhuman (2). Deleuze states that desiring machines only occur between the non-human and the human (Desert Islands 243), and Deleuze and Guattari define art-affect as man’s [sic] non-human becoming (What is Philosophy? 172). For Guattari, the most important of the three ecologies of environment, social relations, and human subjectivity, is the rupture of human subjectivity through an entirely different logic (The Three Ecologies 28, 56). From less than human becomings – hybrid animal – to abstract hybrid becomings – demonic relations – baroque becomings now reach the inconceivable outside of all human thought – the unthinkable. Guattari claims that his third ecological register of aesthetic-ethics, the reterritorialization of subjectivity, is the most crucial, while Foucault shows that thought which is itself outside can, through art, offer access to an outside subjectivity, but within the world and art’s ecstasies.
A thought that stands outside subjectivity, setting its limits as thought from without, articulating its end, making its dispersion shine forth, taking in only its invincible absence… regain[s] the space of its unfolding, the void serving as its site, the distance in which it is constituted and into which its immediate certainties slip the moment they are glimpsed.
(Foucault 15-16)
It is imperative to let go of the human in order to encounter and fold with art, which unfolds the self toward infinity and pure potentiality without genesis or destination. This unfolding is an ethical opening that sacrifices majoritarian access and expression to the powers of the human. Mrs. Gardner’s madness in Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space” (TCOS) presents her as screaming “about things in the air which she could not describe. In her raving there was not a single specific noun, but only verbs and pronouns. Things moved and changed and fluttered, and ears tingled to impulses which were not wholly sounds” (250). The “monster” of TCOS is a quality of luminescence and bubbling of ooze that is threatening as affect and not as act. Like an encounter with art that appears to come from outside, the encounter with this entity resists the annexation of adjectives to nouns, and results in no more than vague fragments of descriptions of events, through what Deleuze and Guattari describe as a variety of sensation-compounds: vibration, the embrace or clinch, withdrawal, division, and distension – two elements drawn apart but together by the light, air, or void; they emphasise that “Affects are precisely these nonhuman becomings” (What is Philosophy? 168). For Lyotard, Foucault, Blanchot, and Rancière, art mandates letting go of the category of the human. In contradistinction to the assessment of Lovecraft as against life, perhaps we can celebrate him as a philosopher of alterity, even if he is, ironically, his own first victim (consider this alongside his ignoring women to a large extent and his xenophobia, both of which have been written on extensively). Of course such a celebration would be anchored by Joshi’s claim that Lovecraft’s work is about what we do with it: if Lovecraft’s work presents a political philosophy of alterity beyond authorial intent, it does so only in the way that it is utilised and not simply in what it says.
Through becomings, “The Call of Cthulhu’s” Johansen and others are literally swallowed up, ingested into the Lovecraftian world. To be swallowed is to be ingested into the folds of the monster. The self becomes inherently part of the folds and foldings-in of these worlds, until all perception is enveloped within a plane of Lovecraftian monsters and hybrids. The folded self cannot become extricated from this plane, and instead becomes willingly infected by the contagion of the monstrous other planes, including those of other becomings such as woman or feminism. Thus we come to realise that Cthulhu is not a creature or form but purely a mode of (actually imperceptible) perception: “There were certain proportions or dimensions which I did not like” (Lovecraft, TNC 130); “Horrors of a form not to be surmised” (Lovecraft, “The Dream-Quest” 392). The baroque is infinite and indefinite becomings of form, and thus emphasizes the impossibility of apprehending anything except through aspect, turn, or intensity. Demons require the repudiation of humanity, and Deleuze and Guattari’s demonic bands first require getting rid of human classifications: “Lovecraft applies the term ‘Outsider’ to this thing or entity” (TP 245; sec. 10).
In order to enter into this beyond-humanness we must act as sorcerers, which requires Deleuze and Guattari’s four stages of demonic pact-making. The first is the alliance with a demon, through which the human passes into the pack, which is the second phase. The third sees this pack create a borderland with another pack, which then allows the borderline to guide the future(s) of the human-animal collective pack intensities. The fourth stage is presumably the stage of ethics, creativity, and thought, as it involves the production of directions that most benefit each particle of each pack-pact, and always changes the micro- and macro- “things” within and between the borderline. The werewolf, demon, and the vampire, as not knowable but thinkable fabulations, are waves or bands and not figures or concepts – or, as in What is Philosophy?, they are pre-philosophical. Werewolves, demons, and vampires include elements similar to the human and to animal elements, but form strange, new, mobile, and what Deleuze and Guattari call unnatural participations (TP 242) and what Lovecraft perhaps would call “disturbing combinations” (TGSK 537). They are not uncanny, as they are not symbolic forms sewn together into demarcated half-half mythic monsters. According to a new grammar of becoming, it is not a cobbling together of two nouns, but rather the movement-combination-aspect of the familiar, or the verbing, that creates the hybrid: “But in the text itself it did indeed reek with wonder; for here was no script of any wholesome age, but the laboured strokes of mediaeval darkness, scarcely legible to the laymen who now strained over it, yet having combinations of symbols which seem vaguely familiar” (Lovecraft, “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward” 283).
If we think the borderline as a plane of immanence, then the borderline “implies a sort of groping experimentation and its layout resorts to measures that are not very respectable, rational or reasonable. These measures belong to the order of dreams.… To think is always to follow the witch’s flight” (Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy? 41). In “Dreams in the Witch-House” Brown Jenkin, the hybrid rat-human (nicely resonant with Deleuze and Guattari’s citation of the film Willard) and his witch-ally Keziah Mason seduce Walter Gilman toward “lines and curves that could be made to point out directions leading through the walls of space to other spaces beyond, and [she] had implied that such lines and curves were frequently used at certain midnight meetings” (306). The borderline is one dimension cut from a plane of consistency.
Gate 4. A-Perception
Lovecraft’s protagonists initially shift their modes of perception to dreams and memories that do not belong to their history or imagination. This already implies the suspension of any recognisable modes of apprehension, and compels us to read in a similar way. Dreams, memories and imagination are not opposed to reality but belong to different orders of perception that nonetheless effect alterations in subjectivity and show reality to be a quality. The question is not so much what we read in Lovecraft but how we read. Lovecraft’s is an impossible project of describing the indescribable, speaking about the unsayable and explicating events which are beyond our capacity to follow. His words are not complex, so that if both writer and reader lack words for the unsayable, and if they are open to art as outside and to the inhuman becomings that literature invokes, this lack is precisely the ethical point of creating new relations of production between art and reader that cannot be set down, structured, or understood as preceding the event of reading. The decision to open toward a revolution in perception is the point of becomings. Deleuze and Guattari describe a novel as populated by the multiple perceptions of the characters and the shadowy but ubiquitous perception of the writer. Lovecraft, however, knows neither his own perception nor those of his characters, because in his work perception itself is the character, content and narrative. Perception, in this world and in the palimpsest worlds within and outside of it, is an incandescent, fantastical reality. Examples of unbearable, wondrous perception of the present as ordinary/extraordinary are found in Lovecraft’s beloved Arthur Machen. In “A Fragment of Life,” within and beneath London there emerges an arcane, natural world, a “New Life” in which, along with “unheard-of joys, there are also new and unheard-of dangers” (Machen 98), and which thus exemplifies Deleuze and Guattari’s unheard of becomings.
Lovecraft’s task becomes impossible in the final phases of the becomings he catalyses, when perception itself resists becomings. Between the a-human and thinking the pure plane of consistency in Lovecraftian becomings, a-perception navigates this impossible but nonetheless actual task, just as the becoming itself is increasingly difficult to negotiate. Recalling Deleuze and Guattari’s emphasis on abstraction as no less real, we can say that a-perception is the no less material experience of becoming beyond description or apprehension. A-perception is crucial for thinking outside established thought and acknowledging the reality and transgressive potential of what we cannot know but must nonetheless experience, just as the minoritarian is forced to experience oppression by virtue of remaining unknown and unknowable in a majoritarian economy. Indeed it is precisely because the potentiality of a-perceptive becomings cannot be deferred to knowledge or apprehended as concept-object, but instead is always within this real, material plane, that it is necessary for mobilizing subjectivity through art, which demands perceiving differently. It is no accident that these shifts of perception in Lovecraft’s work are the most difficult to read and the points at which the protagonists lose their minds or, properly speaking, their humanity and subjectivity. They, as we, must learn to perceive differently, and the “we” is the first casualty.
Alliance through becomings and packing creates both communal or shared folds between – the threshold – and new folds within the singular self (an alternation of Deleuze’s habitus, which he borrows from Leibniz). This requires alteration in perceptions through alterations in being, the threshold of which perhaps we could describe, as Lovecraft does in “The Unnamable,” as a “hybrid nightmare” (232). “Every perception is hallucinatory because perception has no object… but from the haze of dust without objects the figures themselves raise up from the depths and fall back again” (Deleuze, The Fold 93-94). Peaslee loses his ability to distinguish between his dream existence and his terrestrial one and thus his ability to distinguish actuality from hallucination: “Indeed it seemed to the doctors that I lost interest in my proper personality as soon as I found the case of amnesia accepted as a natural thing” (Lovecraft, “The Unnamable” 468). He experiences perception as fragmentary and fractal, as a series of perspectival inflections of the fold (and therefore out of time, because linear time is created through micro and macro shifts rather than through a serialisation of acting objects). Joe Slater in Beyond the Wall of Sleep forsakes his becoming-Dagon for a pure imperceptible perception: “At this point the thought waves abruptly ceased and the pale eyes of the dreamer – or should I say dead man – commenced to gaze fishily” (Lovecraft, BWS 47).
Along two trajectories, through their becomings and their entrance into the geoplanes of the Ancient Ones, Lovecraft’s protagonists transform gradually, not through their being or location but through their perception. Their becomings shift from alliances to being-apprehension-simultaneity with all particles, and so are beyond the need for space and time. “Memory and imagination shaped dim half pictures with uncertain outlines amidst the seething chaos, but Carter knew they were memory and imagination only” (Lovecraft, TGSK 517). To propose Lovecraft as a writer of the baroque is also to point to the chaos that is a key element of his renegotiation of non-Euclidean physics. Deleuze and Guattari likewise describe philosophy, science, and art as wanting to “tear open the firmament and plunge into chaos” (What is Philosophy? 202). Philosophy, according to them, gives us variations, science variables, and art varieties. As sorcerers of baroque demonology, Lovecraft and his protagonists begin with becoming and with seeing various forms of hybrid monsters. They then shift through variants of the metamorphic mobility of self and monster in action, and reach their pinnacle as actualised perceptions of virtual potentialities. Here, the protagonists shift their thinking from seeing and from being infected by the molecules of monster variants, toward infernal, seething forms, to aberrant angles of being and apprehending. This may also be the point at which Lovecraft himself shrugs off the fetters of gothic writing and creates the hybrid, folklore-physics systems through which becomings occur. “Non-Euclidean calculus and quantum physics are enough to stretch any brain; and when one mixes them with folklore… [Gilman] began to connect his mathematics with the fantastic legends of elder magic” (Lovecraft, DWH, 306).
Lovecraft calls his blind, mad god Nyarlathotep the crawling chaos. Gilman fears alighting in the “spiral black vortices of that ultimate void of Chaos where reigns the mindless demon sultan Azathoth” (DWH, 343). Nyarlathotep and Azathoth, in addition to many of the other Ancient Ones (including the dead but dreaming Cthulhu), are blind, mindless and dead only when evaluated according to human modes of signifying perception and qualitative states. In Lovecraft’s rarely cited poetic work, Nyarlathotep’s “idiot chaos blows Earth’s dust away” (“Nyarlathotep” l. 14) even though “throngs pressed around, frantic for his commands” (“Nyarlathotep” 5). And then,
Out in the mindless void the demon bore me
Past the bright clusters of dimensioned space
Til neither time nor matter stretched before me
But only Chaos, without form or place.
(“Azathoth” 1-4)
The beautiful, brief poem Azathoth invokes dreaming, bat-things flopping, and monstrous chance-combinings. These abject blasphemers, beyond the cares of dominant systems and their heads, are sorcerers who betray their positions as heads of pack; “‘I am his messenger’, the demon said / and in contempt he struck his Master’s head” (“Azathoth” 13-14). Lovecraft’s moments of horror occur when discursive systems such as Azathoth’s powers (which have their own demonic, hybrid philosophy) or, (if read as desire), Deleuze and Guattari’s unnatural nuptials (TP 240) express a possible chance-combining of the three orders of chaos’ emergence that are described in What is Philosophy?
Gate 5. From the Unspeakable to the Unsayable
Lovecraft’s is a task of writing the un-writable. Like other “fantasy” writing, Lovecraft’s prose is often evaluated as simultaneously lacking in substance and hampered by melodramatic overuse of adjectives. He depicts the madness of TCOS‘s Mrs. Gardner by groping for affects, adjectives and pronouns without his language alighting on form, nouns, or entities apprehensible through human perception. Wilson, along with many other critics, claims many of his stories are “atrociously written” (4).
Maligning Lovecraft for his florid and enflaming adjectives and for his non-existent narratives fails to address the indescribability of what he is compelled to describe – palimpsest worlds beyond apprehension, selves incapable of speech, becoming-polyvocal but not in any language distinguishable by humans, and existence outside time. In “The Unnamable,” in spite of Manton’s vague knowledge that
the mind sometimes holds visions and sensations of far less geometrical, classifiable and workable nature, he believed himself justified in drawing an arbitrary line and ruling out of court all that cannot be experienced and understood by the average citizen. Besides, he was almost sure that nothing can be really “unnamable”. It didn’t sound sensible to him.
(227)
In his attempt to encounter these worlds, Lovecraft is compelled to use language that Deleuze and Guattari more sympathetically describe as “grandiose and simplified” (TP 251). In pursuit of thinking the unthinkable and perceiving the imperceptible, Lovecraft offers his literary art as writing the un-writable, which is to say as speaking the unsayable. Such language must be used in becoming-inhuman, because description or speech that interiorizes entities with genesis and destination, content and limits of possibility, is the language of knowledge and the limited syntax of experience. If we can speak we speak “as” subjects. Foucault claims that speech coming from the outside is a mode of desire because “one is attracted precisely to the extent that one is neglected” (31). As long as literature affirms and reifies the known, this mode of art denies us becomings. Speaking, hearing, and reading, as events of literary-affect, bring together a-perception, the fold, and becoming-inhuman. Encountering the outside involves the ecstasy of being neglected – of being present without being a recognisable presence – and this is precisely why Peaslee finds his body harassing when it coalesces his abstract consciousness with recognisable being.
The ethical relation to becomings through literature are measurable to the extent that we gift ourselves to the outside. Perhaps our coming to Lovecraft can reflect our opening to the outside. Yes, Lovecraft’s are “horror” stories, but the question is “horror of what?” or more precisely: how does negotiating inhuman becomings cause horror affects and what jubilant becomings-states emerge simultaneously? While not wishing to vindicate Lovecraft’s prose style, I propose that his act of writing may indicate that he is a plane maker. Deleuze and Guattari define a plane thus:
The plane can be a hidden principle, which makes visible what is seen and audible what is heard, etc., which at every instant causes the given to be given, in this or that state, at this or that moment. But the plane itself is not given. It is by nature hidden. It can only be inferred, induced, concluded from that to which it gives rise.… [The plane] always concerns the development of forms and the formation of subjects.
(TP 265)
The hidden principle, which for Lovecraft is his “cosmic” principle, is hidden not in the sense that it can be revealed. Its nature is hidden, and to speak of it produces a gate of the unsayable that is nonetheless written and spoken, and a gate of the incomprehensible encountered as a gate of the act of reading as an act of art. Lovecraft’s is a language from the outside, “a meticulous narration of experiences, encounters and improbable signs, speech about the invisible side of words.… fiction consists not in showing the invisible, but showing the extent to which the invisibility of the visible is invisible” (Foucault 25, 24). For Lovecraft the cosmos is a principle of organisation through which these intensities, forms, or what Deleuze and Guattari call haecceities emerge. The plane gives haecceities. Lovecraft’s stories become most abstract when he attempts to encounter the plane through the exquisitely minimal, imperceptible haecceities, but of course the plane cannot be encountered. Things emerge through the plane, but the plane does not exist unto itself. Deleuze and Guattari say of music that “there is a transcendent compositional principle that is not of the nature of sound, that is not ‘audible’ by itself or for itself. This opens the way for all possible interpretations” (TP 266). The horror of Lovecraft’s cosmos comes because “it” is not. Through access to the different organisational principles of the cosmos, his protagonists are faced with the truly voluminous and thus mind-shattering infinity of variations and immanent-interpretations (not reflections) of states of perception.
The reduction from the perceptible though nonetheless horrific cosmos – a cosmos occupied by monsters – reaches its zenith when emergences are almost imperceptible and the self is part of those imperceptibilities. An example is silence as a vertiginous “sound”:
For the first time Carter realised how terrific utter silence, mental and physical, may be. The earlier moments had never failed to contain some perceptible rhythm, if only the faint, cryptic pulse of the earth’s dimensional extension. But now the hush of the abyss seemed to fall upon everything.… But the moment of silence was broken – the surgings were speaking to him in a language that was not of physical sound or articulate words.
(Lovecraft, TGSK 524)
The cosmos is not the organising principle of sound. Instead, sound is one element of the real organising principle of Lovecraft’s cosmos, namely, a new principle of conditions of perception that constitute states of (if we can still call it thus) “existence.” The unsayable is expressed in the speech of Lovecraft’s monsters as the sounds of viscous bubblings, whirrings, chirpings, or the musicality of Eric Zann, whose “frantic playing had become a mechanical, unrecognisable orgy that no pen could ever suggest” (“The Music” 343). The visual, aural, sensorial and affective are non-differentiated and cannot be expressed. Lovecraft does not see this as a problem, however. His protagonists are horrified by what they cannot describe, not that they cannot describe it. Lovecraft compels an encounter with meaning that is not present but always to come, a waiting without arriving, so that the time of reading is one of delay without resolution. Just as he cannot speak what nonetheless demands to be expressed, so we cannot understand what is t being experienced hrough the event of reading, a voluminous void, an abstract materiality.
Cthulhu does not hunt. Although s/he (Cthulhu’s gender is not specified) calls to the Antarctic explorers, a key element of the horrors of the Elder Gods and Ancient Ones is not that they pursue mankind but that they are disinterested in them. Blanchot claims that in pure literature the writer is haunted by an ineffable image or meaning, that literature has no relationship with anything as a preceding “before” and is thus incapable of being a work “about.” It is, rather, a Mare Tenebrarum (sea of darkness). The work is always the beyond of itself, labyrinthine, “this attraction that carries it out toward a point infinitely exterior [which] is the movement that carries it back toward the secret of itself” (Blanchot, Book 90). The secret of literature does not seek revelation. The question it asks cannot be answered: “It was from the poets and artists that the pertinent answers to the questions came, and I know that panic would have broken loose” (Lovecraft, TCC 68). It is a secret that constitutes the work. Along with his protagonists, we meander around Lovecraft, but his is a labyrinth with no centre. In his tales, investigation, corroboration and comparison are always frustrated. Each event of writing and speech is incomparable to anything and thus its own opening toward the beyond of itself. The stories are not narratives as they seek no end, the speech silent and unheard because it cannot reveal the solution to the secret of the unsayable. “We constantly pass from order-words to the ‘silent order of things’, as Foucault puts it, and vice-versa” (Deleuze and Guattari, TP 87). The stories must nonetheless be written and read. Deleuze and Guattari point out that content is neither described nor limited by expression, but is rather expanded by expression. Lovecraft’s language encounters the outside of material content as expression and encounters self as an expressive, thus unspeakable, unspeaking but always expressing entity.
Gate 6. Beyond the Gates
Folding of desire for monsters is an invaginating turn of the libidinal band “where a second glance showed concavity after the first showed convexity” (Lovecraft, TCC 94). Leviathan, the supreme demon of The Necronomicon, literally translates as dragon-serpent from the Hebrew and probably derives etymologically from “liwyah,” that which gathers itself into folds, twists, and turns, and recombines. When it is encountered, the squid-dragon Cthulhu is “a darkness with a positive quality… It moved anomalously in a diagonal way, so that all the rules of matter and perspective seemed upset” (Lovecraft, TCC 95). Pure colour from out of space or colour as phosphorescent intensity rather than hue; buzzing, whirring and recorded sounds which cannot be heard; and voluminous darkness are Lovecraft’s examples of matter that must be perceived alternately, in rudimentary resonance with Deleuze and Guattari’s becoming-colour, – music, and so forth. But while these offer lines of flight and alternate trajectories, what happens when the lines prevent perception through sensorial agitation? What happens when they instead cut along entirely different phyla, when physical and perceptive trajectories become gates? Peaslee’s “disturbances were not visual at all but concerned more abstract matters” (Lovecraft, TST 477). Can the protagonists be caught up without perception?
Lovecraft describes worlds becoming-fold and folding this dimension to reassemble all perception. “Lovecraft’s hero encounters strange animals, but he finally reaches the ultimate regions of a Continuum inhabited by unnameable waves and unfindable particles” (Deleuze and Guattari, TP 248). After loving monsters, Lovecraft’s protagonists achieve a particle perception, a flattening out of all time and space where, instead of the perception of a fold being perspectival for each fold, perception becomes total and simultaneous. Cthulhu’s “nebulously recombining” eventually achieves “eldritch contradictions of all matter, force and cosmic order” (Lovecraft, TCC 99, 97). “Men think of time only because of what they call change, yet that too is an illusion. All that was and is and is to be exists simultaneously” (Lovecraft, TGSK 521). The base distortion of the horizon into no horizon apprehended through any familiar perception reconfigures all angles of perception. Those who cannot cope become the atrophied Body without Organs, while those who allow themselves to dissipate into their dream worlds scatter into particles – a schizo-madness. Bodies are more than fluid, becomings more than alliances. The self goes beyond being a point at its limit, as Leibniz claims, to becoming proliferated points that are not mingled with other powers but are simultaneous. Consciousness (external apprehension) and perception (internal apprehension) are, furthermore, not simultaneous but non-differentiated, as they are from the consciousness of other particle-entities or forces. The Elder Gods are able to apprehend the infinite past and future in a vague immanence, but this seems more like an eternal presence than like contraction – “all that was and is and is to be exists simultaneously” (Lovecraft, TGSK 531). At the same time, memories that constitute the past self are ablated and fears of possible futures disappear. Peaslee’s dreams unfold in non-sequential sequence. Perception is defined as texture, and entities as partly matter, partly something indescribable as matter. Being “wholly and horribly oriented” causes Peaslee great trauma until he finds himself “in [his] conical non-human body again” (Lovecraft, TST 542).
As a demonic entity, “the Devil is a transporter” (Deleuze and Guattari, TP 253), and the gates through which The Elder Gods and Ancient Ones pass are powerful thresholds catalysing journeys, neither seeking nor sealing off, but present in immanent space and time. The power to act, to enter into relation, the effectuation of folding through relations of celerity, force and affectuation, is extended to a point of pure immanence, a trembling but not an atrophy. Demonic invocation, which traverses the fish-frog-winged-cephalopod, enters through the necronomic gates, doors which Deleuze and Guattari claim are a journey. Such journeying determines measure, like the political tactics of Spinozan mediative ethics, without need for referents but using symbols as variable signs constituted not by signifieds but by infinity. Like Gilman’s project of combining physics and mathematics with folklore and magick, these symbols are a mathematical language. Guattari’s languages of asemiosis in Soft Subversions – “like music, painting, mathematics” (149) – are separate from signifying systems born of capital, family, and church because “the [asemiotic] signifying script has not yet taken possession of the image” (151). Guattari poses a challenge here because asemiotic language is a language of liberation, not of Houellebecq’s nihilism, and it contradicts Houellebecq’s claim that Lovecraft was obsessed with the evils of the world which inspired his creation of evil interior worlds. That certain paradigms of modernity, especially, as Houellebecq points out, sex and capitalism, particularly horrified Lovecraft does however create connections and resonances with those systems Guattari maligns.
In his tales and The Necronomicon Lovecraft’s system is its own hybrid of art, philosophy, and science, so that the symbols are varieties without examples, variables of a process and variants of chaos. The symbols of The Necronomicon are steps more than symbols, variations that range toward becoming-imperceptible through losing the need for symbols to be of anything. They are not exemplary; instead of referring to memories or to futures they refer to a loosening of form, place, state, and belonging. These symbols unlock a gate, “not indeed the Ultimate Gate, but one leading from Earth and time to that extension of Earth which is outside time, and from which in turn the Ultimate Gate leads fearsomely and perilously to the Last Void which is outside all earths and all time” (Lovecraft, TGSK 516-17). The Necronomic symbols extend beyond an incremental journey, creating a palimpsest (or a palimpsest, neither increasing nor decreasing but converging) which extends out toward the fifth, sixth and n dimensions. We can understand these dimensions, with the aid of a hint of which Carter receives, as a plane of consistency (Deleuze and Guattari, TP 251). In “Call of Cthulhu” “Johansen swears he was swallowed up by an angle… an angle which was acute but behaved as if it were obtuse” (Lovecraft 96). His (admittedly non-consensual) pact with the demon Cthulhu is a pact with the fourth order of sorcery, that of creating new formations of imperceptible plane-packs, but at the limit in Lovecraft, these formations are simultaneously everything and nothing – “abysses… by no means vacant but crowded” (Lovecraft, DWH 311).
Cthulhu calls, but the Mad Arab gives us The Necronomicon to call to the Ancient Ones, evincing an irresistible fold of desire already mobilised, but seen through a confusion of forms and qualities – variants which create a desire “of the sensory, a being of sensation, on an anorganic plane of composition that is able to restore the infinite” (Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy? 202-203). Michel Serres claims sense is the only constant when chaos is redeemed from being repetitive disorder to being a limit (146). Carter passes
amidst [both through and around] backgrounds of other planets and systems and galaxies and cosmic continua; spores of eternal life drifting from world to world, universe to universe, yet all equally himself… His self had been annihilated and yet he – if indeed there could, in view of that utter nullity of individual existence, be such a thing as he – was equally aware of being in some inconceivable way a legion of selves.
(Lovecraft, TTGSK, 526-527)
The localism of the Carter-facet or Carter-fragment is a variety of desire that exploits the inevitable infinity of desire, but most enigmatically in Lovecraft, that exploits desire for the aberrant in the move toward becoming-infinite. This becoming is not immortality though. Just as Deleuze and Guattari affirm becoming has neither origin nor destination, nor even “an absence of an origin” (TP 293), so Carter’s becoming implies neither immortality nor lack of immortality. In this way Lovecraft’s protagonists move from becomings, to molecular perception, toward a state of pure existence-perception outside of both linearity (time) and aspectival apprehension (space), a multiple and infinite unification, becoming-gods as the Elder Gods, the pure “one.” Lovecraft desperately attempts to describe Carter’s infinity as terrestrial/non-terrestrial, living/dead, many headed, many tentacled, but he cannot describe it because it is neither perceivable nor conceivable. The best we can have is an encounter with the perception of the imperceptible: the non-binary that Deleuze and Guattari call the Dogon, and that Lovecraft might have called the post-Dagon egg.
Deleuze and Guattari tell us that “minor authors are foreigners in their own tongue. If they are bastards, if they experience themselves as bastards, it is due not to a mixing or intermingling of languages but rather to a subtraction and variation of their own language achieved by stretching tensors through it” (TP 105). The difficulty in placing Lovecraft within one (or any) “appropriate” genre reflects his characters’ trauma at finding they are both bastards without human genealogy and progeny of collective, unseen, and a-genus monster gods. It can be argued that Lovecraft’s literary forefathers, just as his protagonists’ outer-dimensional ones, are at once alien to him and unconsciously influential (especially in the case of, for example, Machen). Deleuze and Guattari point out that minor literature can only be found in what cannot be perceived but which can be accessed and encountered within this language. Rosemary Jackson argues that Lovecraft’s project “makes explicit the problem of naming all that is ‘other’” (39), citing Lovecraft’s claim that “I am not even certain how I am communicating this message. While I know I am speaking, I have a vague impression that some strange and perhaps terrible mediation will be needed to bear what I say to the points where I wish to be heard” (qtd. in Jackson 39-40). Interestingly, Jackson places the literature of Blanchot and Lovecraft within the same argument, suggesting that Lovecraft could be considered a poststructural as well as a fantasy author. In minor literature the “problem” of naming the other catalyzes a disturbance in language which stretches, contracts and turns the tensors toward a minor literature, precisely because the other, so ubiquitous in continental philosophy, is the minoritarian. Minor literature can access the variables and distributions that are and are caused by the minoritarian “as a potential, creative and created, becoming” (Deleuze and Guattari, TP 106). Lovecraft pleads for the reception of his language as a mediation rather than as a description. Deleuze emphasises that mediation is the point where truth is insignificant in the face of relevance and necessity (Negotiations 130). He also writes that minority discourse is created by mediators (Negotiations 126), among which he includes both the writer and the reader, or precisely, the encounter and the pursuit.
It may seem ambitious to suggest that Lovecraft could be useful for negotiating problems faced by feminism, postcolonialism, and minoritarian trajectories of desire. Just as Pelagia Goulimari attempts to rescue Deleuze and Guattari’s minoritarian politics from scathing criticism by certain corporealist feminists, so I suggest that the event of encounter with Lovecraft’s work is neither real nor fantastic, but is its own concrete, abstracting territoriality. Goulimari says that Deleuze and Guattari’s minoritarian politics might appear to be “totalising abstractions” that “ignore the concrete particularity of very different territorialities” (115). However, Goulimari argues that “Particularity manifests itself in action, in the various majoritarian and minoritarian processes at work within and between territories. Particularity itself becomes process and invention: invention of artificial territorialities and minoritarian becomings” (115). Lacking genesis and destination, family and familiarity, Lovecraft’s monsters are singular particularities, and each demands a mobile encounter that is unlike any other. Our encounters with Lovecraft’s works and worlds are frightening not because of their population but because of the ways we are forced to populate the vertiginous vectors upon which they launch the creative act of thinking through reading. Horror becomes ambiguous at best and trite at the worst; the political question is “of what are we afraid?” Becoming-minoritarian is frightening. The final element of becoming is the encounter with the imperceptible but nonetheless so terribly present, from which point we access the beyond-becoming, the absolute potential without any minoritarian destination, even though in becoming we know we will never arrive. Our encounter with Lovecraft’s cosmic horror requires the ethical turn that becoming requires, to be part of a community that is neither real nor perceptible but that irrefutably and (irresistibly – in reference to the crucial role desire plays in becoming) becomes our pack. Deleuze affirms that “whether they’re real or imaginary, animate or inanimate, you have to form your mediators… I need my mediators to express myself and they’d never express without me: you’re always working in a group, even when you seem to be on your own” (Negotiations 125). When our pack is defined by movement, quality, and the capacity to perceive their alterity, we are becoming-minoritarian. Lovecraft stretches this limit and finds therein both wonder and horror. In our encounter with this particular mediator, we express ourselves as limit-minoritarians; and through the terrifying creativity that Lovecraft’s work demands of its readers, we find an imminent opening out.
