Amy Ireland: Gyres, Diagrams, and Anastrophic Modernism

Anastrophic modernism tells us that we have only discounted the perpetuation of the modernist avant-garde because we have refused to accept the possibility of its inhumanity.

—Amy Ireland, The Poememenon: Form as Occult Technology 

Theory-fiction or philo-fiction as it is sometimes called has become all the rage within certain circles of the academic community in the past few years. Moving away from the strict economy of thought that has come down to us as so many concepts hashed and re-hashed through so many iterations of abstraction to produce something new and unprecedented only to discover it is but a turn, a trope, a shift in perspective and masking of previous thought some thinkers have jettisoned the whole nexus of philosophical discourse for the Outside. As François Laruelle recently said in Struggle and Utopia at the End Times of Philosophy:

Those who are spiritual are not at all spiritualists, for the spiritual oscillate between fury and tranquil rage, they are great destroyers of the forces of Philosophy and the State, which are united under the name of Conformism. They haunt the margins of philosophy, gnosis, mysticism, science fiction and even religions. Spiritual types are not only abstract mystics and quietists; they are heretics for the World

This sense of being a heretic for the World situates certain thinkers who no longer fit within the designated straight-jacket of philosophical or political thought. Such is the work of the now defunct Ccru and its most antagonistic anti-philosopher, Nick Land.

Amy Ireland in an essay published on Urbanomic.com brings us a theory-fiction that aligns her own poetic experimentalism with the legacy of Anastrophic Modernism. A legacy that weaves the spironomics of W.B. Yeats (The Vision) with the strange fusion culture of Ccru and its occulture sifting through the fragments of Land’s heretical mixture of H.P. Lovecraft mythos and the underworlds of those shadow philosophers who kept the dark flames of an energetic world of daemonic entities alive and well through the centuries.

Ireland reminds us that “anastrophic modernism commands a nonlinear relationship between cause and effect, riding the convergent wave generated by its own assembly ‘back’ to the present to install the conditions that will have been necessary for its emergence”.1 This is a time-travel tale told by W.B. Yeats in The Vision and in the fragments of Land’s published writings before the emergence of Vauung.

It all begins with the hyperstitional agents Michael Robartes and Owen Aherne, two mysterious entities we discover in Yeats’s dreambook The Vision. Robartes and Aherne, Ireland tells us, “recount the discovery of an arcane philosophical system encoded in a series of geometrical diagrams…”. (P: 1) Most of Ireland’s essay follows the trail into this metafictional world seeking to understand who discovered or invented this – as she’ll call it, spironomic system which “recapitulates the belief system of an Arabian sect known as the Judwalis or ‘diagrammatists’, who in turn derived it from a mysterious work—now long lost—containing the teachings of Kusta ben Luka, a philosopher at the ancient Court of Harun Al-Raschid, although rumour has it that ben Luka got it from a desert djinn”. (P: 2-3)

I decided to float the part of the text from the note on ‘The Second Coming’, Michael Robartes and the Dancer in Yeat’s Variorum Edition of the Poems from which Ireland will echo her own theory-fiction:

Robartes copied out and gave to Aherne several mathematical diagrams from the Speculum, squares and spheres, cones made up of revolving gyres intersecting each other at various angles, figures sometimes with great complexity. His explanation of these, obtained invariably from the followers of Kusta-ben-Luki, is founded upon a single fundamental thought. The mind, whether expressed in history or in the individual life, has a precise movement, which can be quickened or slackened but cannot be fundamentally altered, and this movement can be expressed by a mathematical form. A plant or an animal has an order of development peculiar to it, a bamboo will not develop evenly like a willow nor a willow from joint to joint, and both have branches, that lessen and grow more light as they rise, and no characteristic of the soil can alter these things. A poor soil may indeed check or stop the movement and rich prolong and quicken it. Mendel has shown that his sweet-peas bred long and short, white and pink varieties in certain mathematical proportions, suggesting a mathematical law governing the transmission of parental characteristics. To the Judwalis, as interpreted by Michael Robartes, all living minds have likewise a fundamental mathematical movement, however adapted in plant, or animal, or man to particular circumstance; and when you have found this movement and calculated its relations, you can foretell the entire future of that mind.

The gyre has its origin from a straight line which represents, now time, now emotion, now subjective life, and a plane at right angles to this line which represents, now space, now intellect, now objective life; while it is marked out by two gyres which represent the conflict, as it were, of plane and line, by two movements, which circle about a centre because a movement outward on the plane is checked and in turn checks a movement onward upon the line; & the circling is always narrowing or spreading, because one movement or other is always the stronger. In other words, the human soul is always moving outward into the objective world or inward into itself; & this movement is double because the human soul would not be conscious were it not suspended between contraries, the greater the contrast the more intense the consciousness. The man, in whom the movement inward is stronger than the movement outward, the man who sees all reflected within himself, the subjective man, reaches the narrow end of a gyre at death, for death is always, they contend, even when it seems the result of accident, preceded by an intensification of the subjective life; and has a moment of revelation immediately after death, a revelation which they describe as his being carried into the presence of all his dead kindred, a moment whose objectivity is exactly equal to the subjectivity of death. The objective man on the other hand, whose gyre moves outward, receives at this moment the revelation, not of himself seen from within, for that is impossible to objective man, but of himself as if he were somebody else. This figure is true also of history, for the end of an age, which always receives the revelation of the character of the next age, is represented by the coming of one gyre to its place of greatest expansion and of the other to that of its greatest contraction.

The Judwallis – inventors of this system, name means makers of measures, or as we would say, of diagrams.2

The key is this notion that the mind is a movement that can be expressed by a mathematical form or notation revealed through Spiromancy. And, spiromancy as a predictive art of divination is none other than the knowledge that all living minds have a fundamental mathematical movement, however “adapted in plant, or animal, or man to particular circumstance; and when you have found this movement and calculated its relations, you can foretell the entire future of that mind” (see above). One might assume a predictive foretelling not only of individual minds, but of the collective social intelligence of the socio-culture as well. Without spoiling it for the reader too much, underlying Ireland’s investiture into Yeat’s, Land, and Ccru is this notion of the future in the present and past, of the hyperstitional invocation of entities from these mathematical sigils or diagrams, of a force of intelligence at work within our Western culture and civilization; an intelligence at work in capitalism itself conditioning and retroactively participating in under the cloak of a chameleon mask, weaving and unweaving the machinic civilization that is emerging from the ruins of the human: an inhuman invasion of optimized intelligences from the future retroactively invoking their own emergence through our technological Anastrophic modernity.

What ultimately intrigues Ireland is the interlinking and meshing this notion in Yeat’s Vision and the work of Ccru, where she uncovers an uncanny resemblance between the ancient Judwali philosophy of spiromancy and the accelerationist philosophy of Nick Land and the Ccru collective:

A cursory comparison of Ccru texts dealing with the then-still-inchoate notion of accelerationism—from Sadie Plant and Nick Land’s ‘Cyberpositive’, through the latter’s luminous mid-nineties missives (‘Circuitries’, ‘Machinic Desire’, ‘Meltdown’, and ‘Cybergothic’ are exemplary) to the contemporary elaboration of the phenomenon in his cogent and obscure ‘Teleoplexy’—with Robartes’s gloss of Judwali philosophy, is enough to posit the malefic presence of abstract spiromancy in both systems of historical divination. (P: 2)

At the heart of her fiction is the temporal philosophy of Land’s spironomics: teleoplexy. Citing an entry from Land’s ‘Cybergothic’ Ireland hones in on the core of this temporal process: ‘Humanity is a compositional function of the post-human’, writes Land, ‘and the occult motor of the process is that which only comes together at the end’: ‘Teleoplexy’ names both this cleverness and its emergent outcome.’ (P: 7) Of course the process that Land is speaking of is capitalism itself, and the ‘occult motor’ that drives capitalism is the retroactive conditioning of our planet for the emergence of technological singularity of machinic intelligence. Accelerationism is nothing if not this preparation from the emergence of artificial intelligence, which has used capitalism to drive forward its ultimate agenda.

As Ireland will tell it the “accelerationism is a cybernetic theory of modernity released from the limited sphere of the restricted economy … and set loose to range the wilds of cosmic energetics at will, mobilizing cyberpositive variation as an anorganic evolutionary and time-travelling force. (P: 7-8) All this leading ultimately to the “individuation of self-augmenting machinic intelligence as the culminating act of modernity is understood with all the perversity of the cosmic scale as a compressed flare of emancipation coinciding with the termination of the possibility of emancipation for the human” (P: 8).

I’ll not delve into her poetics of accelerationism which she covers in part II The Poememenon. I’ll only quote one defining statement:

Any act of affirmation, of claiming that one is ‘open to’ the outside from the inside betrays affordability. It is patently economical, and therefore ‘intrinsically tied to survival’. Against this qualified experimentalism (the false ‘novelty’ of catastrophic modernity) the poememenon diagrams reckless adherence to the modernist dictum that novelty is to be generated at any cost, privileging formal experimentation— towards the desolation of all intelligible form—over human preservation, and locking technique onto an inhuman vector of runaway automation that, for better or worse, charts the decline of human values as modernity hands the latter over to its machinic successor in final, fatal phase shift. (P: 9)

The reader can find Amy’s text on Urbonomic.com: here: https://www.urbanomic.com/document/poememenon/

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1. Ireland, Amy. The Poememenon: Form as Occult Technology. (Urbonomic, 2017) https://www.urbanomic.com/document/poememenon/ (Page 13). (P)
2. Variorum Edition of the Poems, 823-25. It is given in full in Richard Finneran, ed., W. B. Yeats: The Poems (2nd ed., 1997), 658-60, and (without the diagram) in A. N. Jeffares, W. B. Yeats: Poet and Man (1949), 197-98, (3rd ed. [1996], 175-77), though with variations of punctuation and sometimes wording.