P.E.S.T.
Philial
Epidemic Strategy
Tryst
Black Metal Theory Symposium
Date: Sunday 20 November 2011, 14.00-Close
Location: The Pint Bar, Eden Quay, Dublin, Ireland
2.00-2.15 Opening: Michael O’Rourke
2.15-3.15 PHILIAL
- 2.15-2.30 Zachary Price
- 2.30-2.45 Karin Sellberg
- 2.45-3.00 Nicola Masciandaro
- 3.00-3.15 Q & A
3.15-3.30 Drinking Break
3.30-4.15 EPIDEMIC
- 3.30-3.45 Aspasia Stephanou
- 3.45-4.00 Scott Wilson
- 4.00-4.15 Q & A
4.15-5.15 STRATEGY
- 4.15-4.30 Steven Shakespeare
- 4.30-4.45 Ben Woodard
- 4.45-5.00 Vincent Como
- 5.00-5.15 Q & A
5.15-5.45 Drinking Break
5.45-6.30 TRYST
- 5.45-6.00 Paul Ennis
- 6.00-6.15 Diarmuid Hester
- 6.15-6.30 Q & A
6.30-7.30 Refreshments
8.00-11.00 LIVE ACTS
Eternal Helcaraxe and Wound Upon Wound
ABSTRACTS
The Mutual Pestering of Black
Metal and Theory
Michael O’Rourke
If Black Metal
Theory in all its incipience and not-yet-here-ness involves a mutual
enblackening, then it also necessitates a mutual openness and pestering. That
is to say that theory must open itself up to its parasitical outside (which is always already inside) and black metal
too must open itself up to its own parasitical outside (which is always already inside). In order to
fashion, however provisionally, a black metal theory, a moving-back-and-forth
between black metal and theory, one needs what Deleuze called “intercessors”,
forces which come from the outside attracted by incipient conditions for their
coming in and feeding on. The forces which this paper activates—from diverse
fields including ecology, literary theory, art, politics, and philosophy— are a
series of cuttings-in or inter-scissions which create trouble, a thickening cloudiness, a smudging which bridges both
black metal and theory and their participations with a shared outside. These reverberations or resonances—openings
to, butcherings open by, the outside— are attuned to the temporality and politicality
(and by extension the ethical stakes) of a Black Metal Theory which is always
to-come.
“Destroy Your Life For Satan”:
A Buddhist Exploration of Black Metal Toward the Establishment of Necroyana
Zachary Price
The American
Nihilist Underground Society (ANUS) once published a piece sketching the
apparent affinity between death metal and Buddhism. The article recounts the
story of a man who, focusing all of his attention on death, learns the Buddha’s
open secret. “Only death is real.” Total awareness of death brings death metal
into a space where it may begin to realize the Buddhist path to enlightenment;
it is, after all, what set young Siddhartha on his path to become the Buddha.
Simply recognizing death is only the beginning, however. Without a liberatory
practice, death metal stalls and binds itself more deeply to illusion. Looking
is not enough. One must “taste and see.” Where its forbears have only gazed,
black metal insists on going. It relies on active dissolution, as evidenced in
common lyrical themes, production values, and even on-stage mutilation. In
Tibetan Buddhism, as well, many practices—for instance, the phowa, or
transference of consciousness—involve enacting a dissolution of the body, a
grinding down into is constituent elements, as well as a dissolution of the
mind. These overlapping methods demonstrate that black metal is a practice of death, just as Buddhism
essentially consists of the practice of death in meditation. Thus, it is also a
meditative practice. Practicing death, like all meditative practices, is a
liberatory process. It frees its practitioners from the illusion of life—which is
to say, it unearths and makes present the truth that we are always already
dying and rotting away. Therefore, black metal is akin to the yanas of Buddhist
practice, a vehicle for the realization of enlightenment. It is necroyana, the
vehicle of death itself, a body of practices against the body. A “massive
conspiracy against all life.” Not a diamond, but a femur pestle. A rope portal to the actualization of the
empty essence of mind. [References: “Destroy Your Life For Satan,” Mütiilation,
2001; Buddhism and Death Metal,” ; Psalm 34:8; “Massive
Conspiracy Against All Life,” Leviathan, 2008]
Dead
Gifts
Karin Sellberg
“Take thou some new infection to thy eye / And the rank poison of the
old will die” (Shakespeare, Romeo &
Juliet, 1.2.49-50). The Norwegian/Swedish word ‘gift’ connotes both married
bliss and poison. It also shares a common root with the English ‘gift’. The OED
tells us that a gift is something bestowed without the expectance of anything
in return. Giving, in its ideal form, is thus a pure expenditure or expression,
but as George Bataille reminds us gift exchange often harbours more complex
structures. Whether passionate or poisonous, most gifts are imbued with a vein
of sacrifice – and the lacerations following its sacral thrusts contract the
giver to his gift. Black Metal lore is full of sacrifices and ‘sacred’ gifts.
The most infamous example is possibly the suicide of Mayhem’s vocalist Dead
(Per Yngve Ohlin), after which the rest of the band members were said to have
feasted on his brains and made ‘special gifts’ out of fragments of his skull.
The brain stew was later claimed to be a false rumour, but the band has
confirmed the existence of skull amulets. Whether true or not, the myth of both
these omophagic philiations pose a number of interesting questions: is there a
particular allure to Dead’s discarded physical remains? What type of power are
the Dead Gifts invested with? Bataille and Reza Negarestani offer us a few
clues. Death is both contagious and cathartic. As several of the Mayhem members
attest to, Dead always saw himself as dead: “That is the reason he took that
name. He knew he would die” (Occultus), but in death Dead became something more
elevated and universal. He became the image of Death – its allegorical
counterfeit. As his bones were shattered by the force of the gunshot, his body
grew steadily more formless and molar. When Dead came to personify Death, Death
itself was split open. The Medieval saint Angela de Foligno recognises that the
ingestion of Death (in her case through a mouthful of leprous pus) opens her
body to Christ and infinity. Dead’s gifts of Death allow their recipients to
commune with transcendence.
On the Mystical Love of Black
Metal
Nicola Masciandaro
“Deep in the
shadows wings take to flight through clouds of chaos where stars die” (Inquisition,
“Across the Abyss Ancient Horns Bray,” Ominous
Doctrines of the Perpetual Mystical Macrocosm). “That which neither creates
nor is created . . . is classed among the impossibles, for its essence lies in
that it cannot be [cuius differentia est
non posse esse]” (John Scotus Eriugena, Periphyseon.
The love of black metal twists toward absolute cosmic exteriority along a
mystical path of intensive inversion. Ordinate mysticism takes an inward and upward path to God as the source and goal of everything,
withdrawing from the exterior phenomenal world in order to ascend beyond it to
the One in a movement that is anabatic, apophatic, and anagogic (Plotinus, Enneads, 4.8.1; Augustine, Confessions, 7.10,16; Pseudo-Dionysius, Mystical Theology, 1.1). The love of
black metal, reversely and contrarily, leads downwards and outwards
into a paradoxically disordered and multiple cosmos that is no less divine,
pursuing a musical path that is catabatic, cataphatic, and apogogic (a path,
however, that necessarily twists these terms according to its own essential
negativity). Where music traditionally aims to mimetically ascend to
hyper-central divine truth through the harmony of the celestial spheres, black
metal’s noisy anti-modern sonic drive coordinately plunges into the depths only
to release and radically fly upon the infinite centrifugal power or negative
cosmic wind of sound itself. Crucially, this distinction, between the ordered
mystical love of God and the disordered mysticism that love of black metal
inescapably is, is not a pure opposition. Like the Petrine Cross that at once
marks the temporally separate twin foundations of the terrestrial ecclesia and
the heavy acosmic kvlt, black metal love is a most intimate transposition of
its spiritual precursor, a dissemblance that exacerbates and intensifies the
still, unmoving point of identity with what it inverts. This point, the secret
moment or punctum around which black
metal assemblies anarchically gather, is perversely legible in moments of black
metal complicity with essential ‘disordering’ counter-movements within medieval
mystical discourse, for instance, Richard of St. Victor’s representation of the
God-enflamed soul as spontaneously sinking
into the divine will like liquefied black metal (On the Four Degrees of Violent Charity), Mechthild of Magdeburg’s
exaltation of the soul’s descent into the night of separation: “O blissful
distance from God, how lovingly am I connected with you!”, and Meister Eckhart’s
prayer to be rid of God. Arguing that the modern love of black metal is,
willy-nilly, a profound and fresh form of mysticism, a desperate contemplation
of the divine manifesting the ‘desire to be everything’ (Bataille), this
lecture will demonstrate, with special reference to the works of Inquisition
and John Scotus Eriugena, how black metal and mysticism are lovingly united in
the dark pestilential space of excessive and compound negativity, a new realm
of the not not God.
Contagion
and Solipsism
Aspasia Stephanou
This paper will examine the possibility of contagious proliferations in
Black Metal, as well as the vampire/monstrous self as an enclosed capsule at
the centre of the black metal universe. While black metal narratives open up
the self to horror and epidemic contagion, dissolving boundaries between the
self and other, between the self as a good meal for the other, at the same time
the monstrous persona of black metal refuses to be eaten or eat with the other,
sustaining thus the boundaries between a dominating self and a submissive
other. Such a relationship is always imagined in terms of a masculine voice and
imaginary self who invites the female other, in order to deny her her own jouissance, retaining thus his integrity
and wholeness. As Joan Copjec writes, the vampire represents our overproximity
to the object of the breast, the objet
petit a, which the vampire now possesses but as a source of jouissance (36). For Copjec, vampires
are male and their victims are female. Similarly, the vampiric black metal self
dominates the female other, even when such contagious transactions occur,
re-establishing thus limits and hierarchies. If the vampire messes up meal and
its economies, as Negarestani argues, it also functions as a fictional prop to
conjure up the horror of pestilence through the masculine prerogative to
consume without the possibility of exchange or openness towards death mess and
necrophilic contamination.
Musca
amusica and the sound of Satan’s
ascension
Scott Wilson
“Halo of Flies Over
My Head / I am decaying Satan’s Wrath / The one to walk planet earth / alone / Spreading
disease, death and war” (Impaled Nazarene, ‘Halo of Flies’ All That You Fear [2004]). “Attractive
to the flies ... I am their mephitic trough ... a buzzing which engulfs all ...
Through compound eyes / I envision eternity” (Lugubrum, ‘Attractive to Flies’, De Vette Cueken [2004]). Flies are a
frequent trope in both black and death metal. For the latter, buzzing flies
pullulating over a rotting corpse lyrically figures death metal’s pulverizing
a-subjective affections of the body; for the former, flies are related to a
metaphysical problem bound up not so much to the paradoxical notion of the
death of God but the death and deification of Satan. The ultimate reference
(perhaps since Iron Maiden and across numerous genres) is to Satan as ‘Lord of
the Flies’, or as Malkuth put it, ‘Great Black Goat God (Lord of the Flies)’
(1994). But as this reference to Golding’s famous novel suggests, Satan is
already, here, a rotting animal’s head: the sacrificial offering to the Beast
misperceived as the Beat itself. Or rather become
the beast through the hideous teeming acephalic noise of the flies that swarm
about its decapitated head. The process of self-identification and
self-transcendence that holds the God-Satan-Man triad together is transformed
through parasitic consumption. Flies, not Man, maketh the Beast, but first
through turning the flesh into ‘a mephitic trough’, a Styx of digestive liquid’
(Lugubrum) in which ‘Transformed man [is] dethroned’, Nominon, ‘Hordes of Flies’
(2005). For Nominon, then, the process of complete post-parasitical
transformation – ‘Innate insects part of me /Parasite inside eating me / Host
of flies born inside – sees the Satanic ‘Beast’ (the satanic multiple)
resurrected from the swarming darkness of base matter where death has no
dominion: ‘Absence of life I am the lord
of flies’. Companion species, no doubt, since the migration of homo sapiens
from Africa, musca domestica have lodged in the margins of human
civilization, incubating and pupating in its shit and garbage, feeding on
wounds and rotting flesh, defecating and vomiting waste matter teeming in
deadly bacteria and viruses: typhoid, cholera, dysentery, tuberculosis. In
black metal’s buzzing, its musca amusica,
flies are both the locus of amusical
ex-sistence and figure of Satan’s divine inexistence and ascension. ‘Through
compound eyes / I envision eternity’.
Into the
Vomitarium: Diseased Sacraments
Steven Shakespeare
Thomas
Aquinas’ Summa Theologica has been
likened to a ‘cathedral’ of thought. It is striking, then, that its final
article deals with sacramental dilemmas such as: what happens if the
eucharistic host decays, or is eaten by mice? What happen if the priest goes
insane during mass, or throws up after receiving communion? An image is
spawned: at the consummation of the cathedral’s mass, a priest lurches outside
to vomit the infected host. Satanic black metal pursues this corruption of the
holy through scenes of violation, deliberately perverting sacramental imagery.
This paper traces the ambiguous relationship it maintains with Christian
eucharistic theology, focusing particularly on the work of Deathspell Omega. In
their hands, black metal becomes a tool for pursuing the kenosis of God to its
ultimate end in an identification with diseased flesh, a supplement which
ungrounds the sanctity and wholeness of the divine. Whilst their earlier work
is still encumbered with a normative misogyny which replicates the failure of
Christian orthodoxy to follow the logic of incarnation to its decaying end,
from 2004, Deathspell Omega realise the strangely liberating corruption of
transubstantiation (the ‘of’ to be taken utterly ambiguously). Emblematic of
this shift is the appropriation, on ‘Diabolicus Absconditus’, of Bataille’s
image of the whore as God. The paper
ends by turning to the queer theology of Marcella Althaus-Reid to further
subvert the unholy alliance of narratives of sanctity and rape. Althaus-Reid
affirms an unstable, scavenger God, constructed through the material, sexual
lives of the excluded, celebrating “a Eucharist in which Christ’s
transubstantiation depends on a discarded piece of rotten bread.” In this
encounter, orthodox Satanic mimesis of Christianity becomes, neither echo nor
reversal, but an intimate, putrefying communicatio
idiomatum.
Folding a Cadaverous Scream: The Disharmonious Flesh
of Recombinant Horror
Ben Woodard
This essay aims to harvest a
philosophical provenance for recombinant horror – a particular form of body
horror (or biohorror) that focuses on contagions that rearrange bodies both
internally and externally with examples being Dead Space, Resident
Evil, Parasite Eve, and others. This form of horror I argue indexes the
strange mathesis of Leibniz (and Deleuze’s reading and Negarestani’s response
to that reading), Nick Land and Bataille’s discussion of the Labrynth, as well
the tension between biological and architectural models of thought in Kant’s
archtectonic. Black Metal will be stitched through this form of horror through
the odd complicity between music and architecture in Bataille’s pornographic
rallying against the former, Land and Negarestani’s howling inorganics, and the
sickly biological upsetting the prestablished structure of Kant’s thought. By
looking at instances of biohorror in music I will attempt to discern how
lyrical approaches coalesce or fail to demonstrate the nonstructural but
structure-dependent horror of recombinant horror. In the end the guiding
question will be if the sickly noise of the inorganic can be sufficiently
absorbed by the intentional sonic and how this informs the mediation between
pattern in flow in the gross inevitability of a dark vitalism, in which
fecundity and negativity are inseparable, in which the body is twisted into a
labyrinth, in which the inorganic screams with the pain of its self-induced
flailing.
Tune In, Turn On, Curse Out
Vincent Como
The artwork/imagery
being used to promote this, the third Black Metal Theory Symposium, is from a
series of 23 works based on ancient Defixiones, or Curse Tablets, which apply
an invocation—for good or ill—toward another party most often with whom you are
either besotted, or who has wronged you in some matter of business or personal
relation. In speaking about the works
in this Hexe series, we will summarize the traditional role of the curse
tablet and how these particular works are constructed in order to achieve
similar results through a structural analysis and an exploration of their
material properties in relation to Hermetic traditions. This will then allow us
to move beyond the physical object of power and discuss intention and the
psychology of belief as an entity in its own right, which leads directly into
the overarching theme of PEST. One’s complicity with the complex and
layered structure that is belief is such that when encountering the intentions
of another, it ultimately challenges the insular domain of one’s very being;
destroying the barrier of the self, and forcing an engagement with the realm of
an other. This, then, turns virtually
all human interaction into a psychic attack being perpetrated by and upon
everyone at all times. Existence, as we will come to understand, is a
relentless barrage of intentions, ideas and the surplus of decaying belief systems
being recycled from the beginning of time to the present. This perpetual
assault goes predominantly unnoticed until it is tapped into and channeled by
an object, person, or collective group, at which point the focused intention
may cut through the omnipresent universal static to fulfill its purpose, to
cause affect upon a receiver.
“The Hopeless
Soul Keeps Mating”: Notes on Black Metal and Contemporary Fiction
Diarmuid Hester
This contribution considers the recent interest in black metal amongst
writers of experimental American fiction. Utilising a conceptual framework
derived from Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza, we will demonstrate that the
conduction of black metal themes, cadences and intonation through fiction
conforms to the Deleuzo-Spinozist outline of a disagreeable or poisonous
relation. Black metal’s encounter with writing does not bring forth
amplification, accretion or combination to form a higher power but is, rather,
corrupting and pestilential: decomposing and diminishing what we might call
fiction’s subordinate –and therefore constituent– relations e.g. the range and
affective capacity of character, plot, syntax, etc. This reflection obliges us
to reassess the merit of a Deleuzo-Spinozist ethology and to pursue the
vitalist prejudice which circulates at the very heart of this system.
Bleak Theory
Paul J. Ennis
In this paper I set out to show how contemporary continental realisms,
especially the more nihilistic strands of speculative realism, are not quite
black, but bleak. I tease out this subtle difference from the launching pad of
Eugene Thacker’s recent monograph In the Dust of This Planet which
includes a sustained engagement with black metal theory. From there I intend to
enter into a discussion of the theme of the impersonal and the unhuman as it
manifests throughout the post-Kantian tradition (with an emphasis on Kant,
Hegel, Heidegger, and Meillassoux, etc.). In the end, my hope is to demonstrate
that continental philosophy has always been if not black, then a little bit
bleak, and so finds a natural ally in black metal theory.
