L Is for Lead

This text was first written in 2021, unfolding alongside the opening chapters of PGS’s Clueless Agency exhibition series. A few excerpts accompanied online documentations of these shows, like fast-forward flashes, but the whole has not seen the light of day—a proper practitioner of its dark beliefs, as will become apparent. Since the text was first incepted, some of the themes it explores have only gained intensity. With the mass advent of generative media, the dissolution of categories, the collapse of already-tatty boundaries, and the psychotic transmutations of “fact”, agency and memory on which to base any shared sense of “reality” have spiralled further out of control. Seeing patterns has never been more normal. As if presaging this messy mutability, the serpentine flow of this text deliberately stitches together themes, ideas, and concepts, thereby making connections that may seem loose or accidental and perhaps even contributing to their illegibility: flattening the reputable and the low, the factual, and the fictional, as well as past, present, and future, into one sticky plane. Any confusion is to be embraced. Anger is more welcome than disenchantment.

The Haunted House

The scorched ruins of The Boleskine House silently watch over the deep, opaque waters of the south-east side of Loch Ness, near the village of Foyers in the Scottish Highlands. Two fires have broken out in 2015 and 2019, consuming most of the manor and leaving its walls black and brooding. The legendary house, in which the controversial occultist Aleister Crowley wrote the foreword to his translation of the first book of The Lesser Key of Solomon—probably the best-known grimoire on demonology in the history of Western hermeticism—was always engulfed by strange stories.^[1] As if the very soil underneath it was soaked in something mesmerically dark.

The house was built in the 1760s on the site of a former church said to have gone ablaze during a congregation, burning everybody alive. And even before the first stone of the manor was laid, weird tales were being told, such as the one about Minister Thomas Houston and his fight over the corpses in the Boleskine churchyard, where he was supposedly having a hard time putting them back to sleep after they were raised and animated by a notorious wizard called “the circle maker”. It is no wonder that this superstition-filled air drew in someone like Crowley, who lived in the house between 1899 and 1913, preparing himself for a complicated ritual which included invoking numerous “spirits” that should “congregate”^[2] in a special lodge on the north-facing terrace. In his memoirs, Crowley states:

“I had to use artificial light even on the brightest days. It was a darkness which might almost be felt. The lodge and terrace, moreover, soon became peopled with shadowy shapes, sufficiently substantial, as a rule, to be almost opaque. I say shapes; and yet the truth is that they were no shapes properly speaking. The phenomenon is hard to describe. It was as if the faculty of vision suffered some interference; as if the objects of vision were not properly objects at all. It was as if they belonged to an order of matter which affected the sight without informing it.”^[3]

Many say that upon his departure, Crowley had left behind the spirits he conjured up, who continue to haunt the house, roaming its halls and chambers, and causing unexplainable occurrences or tragedies, such as the death of two lodge keeper’s children. Numerous other legends circulate between mouths and digits about Crowley’s practices, which were said to involve sharpening his teeth into fangs, consuming various human bodily fluids, including menstrual blood, taking heavy doses of drugs and performing diverse occult rituals at the property and in its surroundings. The internet has it that locals mentioned he had masturbated over the oldest parts of the graveyard as an offering of sacrifice, and every Sunday, he would throw a sheep into the lake as a gift for his “pet” Nessie—later widely known as the Loch Ness Monster.^[4]

The “right” question would perhaps be: how much of the myths surrounding the self-proclaimed “wickedest man in the world” are mere self-mythology? But we haven’t visited Boleskine’s walls to support or refute truth claims, and we are not even interested in Crowley himself (ideologically and ethically condemnable as he was). In the gloom of this place, sunken ankle-deep in the ashes, we might not be in search of any clues at all. What we seek instead is a certain kind of contamination, an “experience of the unproven, the foreclosure of all thought”.^[5] We wish to become the kind of detectives Sadie Plant writes about, “observing everything except the rules”, leaving our minds “open and responsive to any hints from the material” and tapping into “low intuition”.^[6] And as such, we shouldn’t fear shedding what we think we positively know. Because one shouldn’t be ashamed of singing with the folk tales. As CCRU writes: “You call it the Black Lake Legend and it sounds kind of grand.”^[7]

It is in a similar sense that Isabelle Stengers suggests we must “discover how to be compromised by magic”^[8] to cure ourselves from the persisting illusion of the world where everything can be measured, divided, and “explained away”.^[9] Not that we literally practice witchcraft (with or without blood-drinking), but that we stop looking down on the supernatural and “relieve ourselves of the sad, monotonous little critical or reflexive voice whispering that we should not accept being mystified, a voice that relays that of the inquisitors”.^[10] Let us then say that we enter this house not to understand but to take a leap, to hunt neither facts nor witches, but to get lost, get dirty—get “compromised”.

The In-Between

The Victorian era was marked by unprecedented scientific development, introducing technological inventions, curing deadly diseases, and illuminating the first houses with electricity. And yet, there seemed to be something else holding the hand of progress. As if the accelerating pace of the industrial revolution, hastily assembling itself into modernity, cast a sneaky shadow over the triumph of “reason”. The steamy breath of steel machines surging from the spreading factories was shrouding something—a “fundamental chaos lurking in the tiny lawless spaces between things”,^[11] a reek of the paranormal, supernatural, occult.

Diverse fortune-telling practices drew popular interest, such as crystal-gazing, cartomancy, palmistry, and tasseomancy or molybdomancy, a metallurgical divination which, in resonance with the world increasingly chewed up by metal particles, predicts the future from shapes of molten lead quickly solidifying in cold water. As if each invention gave birth to more than what the scientists could explain. The belief in mesmerism, which proclaimed the existence of an “invisible, universally distributed fluid that flows continuously everywhere and serves as a vehicle for the mutual influence among heavenly bodies, the earth, and the living things”,^[12] was widespread, as well as the excitement for electro-biology and spiritualism (one of the many passionate adherents of which was the famous detective novel author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle). Many new secret societies and orders were established, including the famous Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, whose founder, Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, co-authored Crowley’s translation of The Lesser Key of Solomon and, coincidentally, also married Mina Bergson, the sister of philosopher Henri Bergson.[13]

These forces refused to let science wash off the spirits, to sterilise the space between the spinning wheels and organic tissue. Even Darwin’s evolutionary theory wasn’t spared its shadow twin, found in Samuel Butler’s anonymously published book Erewhon, depicting an inverted land with inverted name(s)—“Erewhon” being a backwards-spelt “nowhere”—a place where machines are believed to possess autonomous intelligence, using humans only as a temporary helping force in an evolution of their own. In the book’s chapter titled “The Book of the Machines”, Butler asks: “But who can say that the vapour engine has not a kind of consciousness? Where does consciousness begin, and where end? Who can draw the line? Who can draw any line? Is not everything interwoven with everything? Is not machinery linked with animal life in an infinite variety of ways?”[14]

Moreover, the discovery of electricity “threw new light on the question of materiality itself, liquefying the boundary between matter and energy, solid structures and radiating forces, pulsations. The world became a beating heart, a space of circulating flows”^[15] that no theory could tame, forecasting Karen Barad’s much later observation that “‘[b]etween’ will never be the same”.^[16]

One of the great enthusiasts of mesmerism and other electro-magnetic forces passing through the body was a young woman called Ada, the Countess of Lovelace. The daughter of mathematician Anna Isabella Milbanke and the poet G. G. Byron, she came to be known as “the Enchantress of Numbers”^[17] and the author of what can be viewed as the very first computer algorithm, written for the mechanical general-purpose computer—Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine. A strong advocate of animal magnetism and a regular user of significant amounts of laudanum to moderate her shifting mental states, she embodied the confluence of reason and fantasy, science and poetry. She tried to develop a “calculus of the nervous system”, a theoretical model that would unite mathematics with feelings, hoping to elicit the contributions of famous physicist Michael Faraday and electrocrystallization pioneer Andrew Crosse, dubbed “thunder and lightning man” for his explosive experiments. The latter became a controversial figure after having reported living insects had been born out of the electricized crystals in his laboratory, for which he was said to have inspired Mary Shelly’s character of doctor Frankenstein, as she had visited his lecture on “electricity, the gasses, and the phantasmagoria”.^[18] It was later found that Crosse’s samples were likely contaminated with insect eggs. What was more than real was the number of threatening letters he received from people accusing him of trying to artificially create a living being—what a blasphemy! Some things just “make themselves real”,^[19] one way or another.

Without doubt, the early experiments linking human, animal, and (in)organic flows filled the air with a taste of “heresy of irrationalism in the post-Enlightenment era”.^[20] As if every step of science conjured a new ghost into being that no number of refutations could exorcise. Human skin is too porous to pose a threat to the flows of energy. François J. Bonnet points out that spiritualism and other “pseudo-scientific” methodologies were not trying to access any separate world of the dead but to “re-establish the unity” of worlds by “blurring the material boundaries between bodies and things just as it blurred the threshold between the perceived world and the real world”.^[21] In a book which extrapolates the links between the life and work of the already mentioned siblings Henri and Mina Bergson (the first being a philosopher, the other an occultist), John Ó Maoilearca suggests the concept of “supernormalization” as a possible “exit from the stark duality of natural and supernatural, or of the normal and the paranormal”. As he explains, to supernormalize does not mean to simply accept “spooky” or “paranormal” phenomena as real but to engage in a “thought experiment that asks, if such phenomena were real, how would we naturalize them”?

In this sense, there is an important lesson of unlearning in spirit photographs, paranormal tabloid stories, and “Frankenstein’s insects”; a voice whispering into our ears, even as they wear wireless earbuds, that vegetables might possess invisible forces, that “machines receive their impressions through the agency of man’s senses”,^[22] and that there perhaps still remain “things that knowledge cannot eat”,^[23] creeping from the wide-open gates of “the infra-world”: a shadowy realm not somewhere spatially beyond but very much in-between the seemingly organized “world of utility”.^[24]

The Black Lake

Isabelle Stengers explains that we have “an obscure fear of being accused of regression as soon as we give any sign of betraying hard truth by indulging soft, illusory beliefs”.^[25] But the dividing line between the normal and “abnormal” is itself a matter of belief.[26] Throughout his work, French philosopher François Laruelle has criticised that the history of Western thought is a history of binarity, with philosophers “forever transiting between shadow and illumination”,^[27] trying to “shed light” on the dark areas of the unknown. But to him, this self-proclaimed “illuminating potential” is inherently “arrogant”,^[28] because it presupposes that philosophy can position itself as the chosen light-bringer in the first place. To grant oneself such a position would necessarily denote the ability to stand on a stable viewpoint above the slimy quicksand of the real, from which one could observe, frame, and qualify. But such an observatory doesn’t exist. Moreover, the very idea of “bringing to light” comes with an unquestioned assertion “that blackness is a case that can and must be solved”.^[29]

Who then has the right to claim this illuminating power? Who stands outside of the black lake’s waters—intact, dry, and objective? In our morphing, generatively fast-forwarded present, it is more obvious than ever that there is no island to watch the sinking boat from. We have always been channelling forces below the threshold of conscious perception (have Erewhon’s machines been using our senses to see and hear for all that time?), but current computational infrastructures, and increasingly even the artefacts of human visual culture, sink ever deeper into opacity. Any assumption of an achievable distance crumbles under the onslaught of this irreducible darkness—“the real is opaque, an immanent blackness that humanist philosophy has forgotten or foreclosed in its decision to bring to light a World”.^[30]

In his essay “On the Black Universe”, Laruelle describes the World as an illuminated space, our own construction, which we so often mistake for the Universe, ignoring “the thinking force before all thought”, which exists within us as material beings without the need for any philosophy or ontology.^[31] Laruelle invokes the equalising power of the black Universe, untouched by our attempts to divide it with limited rays of light. Black Universe is not opposed to light; it is blackness without negation, “an opaque and solitary thought, which has already leapt through man’s shut eyes as the space of a dream without dreaming”.^[32] For Laruelle, the black Universe is not something to reach out to, to discover, or to penetrate, but rather to be flattened with, to get lost in, to give up claims for. “Black is entirely interior to itself and to man”,^[33] it is the very material we are made of, which surrounds us, which we think through, and which thinks through us (as Eugene Thacker writes, “thinking the hair, mud, and dirt that thinks through me”).^[34] But to tap into this material, we must turn off the lights and shut our eyes. Because the orientation in this fluid darkness requires a specific regime of vision, “a tool-kit for dabbling in the dark”.^[35] This “vision-in-black” is not an enhanced vision, nor can the darkness be chased away with a stronger source of light. On the contrary, we can start “seeing” in the night exactly when we “abandon perception” and embrace a certain “visionary vision that looks without looking”.^[36] But how do we tap into what we can’t see, touch, or hear? Simon O’Sullivan writes that Laruelle’s non-philosophy implies “a form of gnosis or even ‘spiritual’ knowledge”.^[37] The spiritual “haunt[s] the margins of philosophy”, letting in something which makes it “related to gnosticism”^[38]—a secret.

A secret is that which “has never been the predicate to knowledge”^[39] nor logos and which we need to invoke if we seek to bring “the emotion of the Universe […] [i]nto the World of narrow-minded thoughts”.^[40] It is not knowledge but non-knowledge, since “only the secret sees into secret, like Black in Black”.^[41] As Laruelle notes elsewhere, it is not about introducing the notion or concept of secret into our thinking but about introducing thought “to the hermetic experience of truth”.^[42] On such a search, one must respect the unknown and “dive […] right in”.^[43]

The Spiral Mirror

The shedding of light is closely connected to the process of “reflection”—the idea that everything can and should be reflected upon. But something strange has happened to the mirror. A classical metaphor for critical thinking, the mirror was once seen as an image of the world, and whoever held it could frame, analyse, and interpret this image and reflect the beam of light back onto the face of the World. But its metaphorical power started to wane. The more we were “sinking into the pitch-black waters of a groundless world”,^[44] the more the mirror seemed to lose its lustre. If, as Karen Barad notes about the ontological implications of contemporary quantum physics, “[t]here is no fixed dividing line between ‘self’ and ‘other’, ‘past’ and ‘present’ and ‘future’, ‘here’ and ‘now’, [and] ‘cause’ and ‘effect’”, ^[45] then any attempt to frame individuals and “propertied objects” in a reflect-able way seems absurd. Barad famously mobilises quantum entanglement—proclaimed “a spooky action at a distance” by none other than Albert Einstein—suggesting it was recently demonstrated to work even “beyond the grave”, after the connection between particles is broken.^[46] The ends of “time’s arrow”^[47] has coiled into a spiral—and as we know, “spirals always have loose ends”.^[48]

But the mirror-image started to morph long before. Deleuze & Guattari called for “the abolition of all metaphor”,^[49] pointing out how late the reflection comes, boasting a mere cut-out of an infinitely complex “world [which] has become chaos”.^[50] Stengers ironically notes how frightening we find the possibility of giving up “critique, the only defence we have against fanaticism and the rule of illusions”.^[51] But deep down, we know that reflection is too slow, too frozen, too stable: a method designed only for “an ontology exorcised of ghost”.^[52]

In his dissertation, Mark Fisher has noticed this darkening: “[W]e will no longer pass through to ‘the other side’, we encounter the ‘flat’ surface of the black mirror.“^[53] Such a mirror cannot reflect, mimic or project—it is an opaque surface where the image and the world, as well as fact and fiction, conflate: a portal to different nonlinear time-spaces. There is no metaphor, only metamorphosis. As in the horror movie Constantine, where Keanu Reeves used to capture demons through their mirror reflection and send them back to hell. But he didn’t expect they could physically cross to the other side and walk the earth. The portal had been opened.

The mirror’s blackness seems to have “become fluid, and much darker”.^[54] Its surface, which may have once been able to “flip over”^[55] time, has turned into a sort of liquid swirl on a black lake where we always already float. Laruelle writes that the Universe “is not reflected in another universe, and yet the Remote is accessible to us at each of its points”.^[56] His black mirror would perhaps be both outside and inside, remote and within—a fractal spinning outside of our frame. The black mirror is not an object but something we see in each other, in ourselves, and which sees through us. It is the darkest immanence that “no longer differentiates between surfaces and depth […], a non-conceptual thought and the radical indivisibility of the body”.^[57] Not only is the portal open, it is undivided.

Ours is a frameless ontology where boundaries “do not sit still”.^[58] It is by no means exorcised of ghosts; rather, it seethes with what the Gruppo di Nun collective calls “spectral materialism”: an almost “magical” force operating in “a confused grey area between superstition and irony”, shattering the “vision of science as the luminous triumph of reason over matter”.[59] In the Universe’s blackness, there can be no candles lit, and no images reflected. All matter is dark and haunted.

A Wishful Thought

In the same sense as the mirror, divination is not reflective of the world but productive of it. Once the lead drips into the water, the world is never the same. Such is also the logic of Crowley’s concept of “Magick”, distinguishing the dark “art of causing Change”^[60] from a mere theatrical trick. Whereas illusion is often enjoyed exactly because both sides are aware it is not real, magical thinking resides in the power of belief. Such a thought places something into the matter of the world—not a reflection but rather a movement, a doing, a practice. That is why CCRU can claim that “every act of writing is a sorcerous operation, a partisan action in a war”.^[61]

Ada Lovelace famously said that the “Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns, just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves”. This understanding of the poetics of science and technology, an urge “to weave daydreams into seemingly authentic calculations”,[62] and the strong sense for letting herself be “enchanted” by the machines is why she accompanied us at multiple points throughout this text. In a letter to her mother, she wrote: “You will not concede me philosophical poetry. Invert the order! Will you give me poetical philosophy, poetical science?”^[63] Perhaps philosophical poetry would be to talk about the secret, whereas poetical philosophy-science keeps its eyes shut against the illuminating despotism of reason.

We are deemed to fail in pinning down “diffracted spatialities and diffracted temporalities, entangled ‘across’ space and time; past, present, future threaded through one another”.^[64] One cannot brighten the darkness of the night by painting the room white. In the haunted ontology of technologically enhanced “spacetimemattering[s]”^[65] and increasingly forged or entirely fictional memories, we might need to adopt a “vision-in-Black” which would allow us to “speak with the ghosts”^[66] and see the Universe transform with every shape of lead. Perhaps if we start to notice the smoke coming from the stake, we will one day spot a witch crossing the high noon sky. “Superstition is a modality of being-in-the-world.”^[67]

So, what did we find among the scratched-up walls of the haunted house above the opaque waters of the lake? Not knowledge or a direction but a sensibility to the supernormal—a refreshing belief in the fundamental instability of the World engulfed and permeated by the Black Universe. Recalling Bergson’s account of paranormal perceptions as “veridical hallucinations”, Ó Maoilearca points out that for Laruelle, all thought that “gives itself the authority to pronounce on the essence of reality” is in fact based on a hallucination: “a hallucinated outside—a view from nowhere”.[68] Couldn’t we then, by the same token, take “superseriously” the delirious coincidences, monstrous connections, and invisible flows that link us together? As the saying goes, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you. And if we never know whether wishful thinking works, do we dare to whisper into the black mirror?