Thoughts on Eric Wilson's *The Republic of Cthulhu*

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An intriguing concept: to use the work of H.P. Lovecraft to map the aesthetics or poetics of the "parapolitical". Assuming that there is a subterranean political order (i.e. clandestine agencies, criminal enterprises that intersect with deep state functions, the tendency to imagine conspiracy), Lovecraft's fiction is supposed to provide the aesthetics of this order due to its obsession with eldritch conspiracies that lurk below the level of appearance. Lovecraft's "cosmic horror" thus becomes a useful "mytho-poetics" for explaining the meaning of the parapolitical.

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The conception of the parapolitical is not, to my mind, the most meaningful problematic. While it is indeed the case that the appearance of a given state is mirrored by the reality of multiple levels of clandestinity (intelligence agencies with their intrigues, criminal enterprises sometimes drawn upon by these clandestine institutions), the assumption that this constitutes a "dual state" or a "parapolitical order" separate from the state-qua-state seems to result from a misunderstanding of what a state is. Wilson, and the parapolitical theorists he draws upon, begin by accepting that all theories of the state are akin to the normative liberal theory that mistakes the sphere of exoteric government and civil society as the state itself. Although this is an excellent critique of liberal state theories, and I find the empirical work this branch of radical criminology explores highly important, its entire conception of the state is unfortunately overdetermined by the liberal theory it is meant to critique.

Because a Leninist conception of the state theoretically accounts for the lacuna parapolitical theorists claim to address: the state is nothing more than the sum-total of the apparatuses that ensure the power of the dominant class in a given mode of production. The sum-total of these apparatuses form a complex and messy assemblage, a general machine whereby one class suppresses/represses other classes. The apparatuses of the state assemblage accumulate over time, many becoming institutionalized and developing a self-determining power, and sometimes end up in tension with each other as elements of the ruling class are in tension with each other. The goals they pursue, sometimes clandestinely and sometimes openly, are in the interest of prolonging what I have called elsewhere the state of affairs of a given mode of production. In the case of capitalism, which is the dominant mode of production parapolitical theorists discuss, where the bourgeoisie has been enshrined for centuries and unleashed multiple forces of production unheard of in previous modes of production, it makes sense that its state of affairs would have accumulated deep levels of state apparatuses as different factions, and different avatars, of the ruling class come and go. Such apparatuses are determined endogenously by: i) the struggles between the bourgeois and proletariat; ii) the contradiction between competing bourgeois factions and individuals. They are determined exogenously by: i) the struggle between imperialist states and oppressed nations; ii) contradictions between competing imperialist states. Civil society, elections, the appearance of democratic governance and society is just the level of appearance according to the Leninist (or "instrumentalist") conception of the state. What is called parapolitical is not separate from the political, according to this conception, but just one level of a complex state of affairs determined by the class contradiction(s) of an economic system. To assume otherwise would be to imagine that the state is autonomous from class struggle which is anti-scientific.

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Wilson recognizes, as essential to Lovecraft's epistemology, a commitment to racism. Indeed, Wilson centre's Lovecraft's mytho-poetic conspiracy according to this racism with all of its Spenglerite bile. The common imagination of conspiracy, the way that the parapolitical is normatively understood, in fact doesn't break from this imaginary, which is why Lovecraft may in fact provide the poetics of the common sense conception of parapolitics: the majority of conspiracy theories do not draw on Lovecraftian cosmic horror (and are in fact far more pedestrian) but they generally depend on the same racist epistemology. If the conspiracy theorist is a racist paranoiac par excellence then "[c]osmic horror would seem to be the only form of 'high art' that [it] can possibly take." (93) Against multiple attempts to obscure or explain away Lovecraft's racism, Wilson makes it a central focus in his operationalization of Lovecraft for an aesthetics of the parapolitical.

Against attempts to sanitize Lovecraft that are proffered, ad infinitum, from his fans––to separate his work from his racism, to argue that he was a "product of his times" (as if this can magically erase the virulent chauvinism in his stories)––Wilson argues that Lovecraft's racism cannot be separated from his works. That is, those works that are considered Lovecraft's "highest" expressions of literary craft are simultaneously the highest expressions of racism. The parapolitical conspiracy narrative that Lovecraft develops as central to his mythos cannot be separated from his racism: "[r]acism and paranoia is the true meta-narrative thread of the later works, providing the thematic and stylistic unity of the seminal Mythos." (123)

The question then becomes, and there is some obscurity on this point in the book, what is the aesthetic function intended by Wilson? Is the Lovecraftian mytho-poetics meant to explain the racist paranoiac apprehension of the parapolitical or is it meant to explain the parapolitical itself? In the case of the former the analogy, as aforementioned, is quite clear. In the case of the former the aesthetic paradigm is also productive: Wilson mentions, at multiple points, how the parapolitical theorist Peter Dale Scott consistently emphasizes the racist genocides and exterminations that are at the foundation of dominant political orders only to be relegated to the para- level because they cannot be accepted by common sense as normative––Lovecraft centres these narratives but then displaces them by making them the conspiracy in a racist "reverse colonization" discourse… That is, the anxiety that the colonized will get their revenge by expunging European civilization, but an anxiety that is also coded as the collapse of human civilization (since "white" is treated as simultaneous with "human" and "civilization")––an anxiety that, as Wilson notes, is experienced and represented by Lovecraft as extreme paranoia. Wilson treats to this paranoid racism as an aesthetic "migrat[ion] into the domain of the parapolitical" where the "literary work of racism… must necessarily invoke the stylistic techniques of the conspiracy narrative." (124) But how does the aesthetics of the racist paranoiac, the conspiracy theory stereotype, explain the larger domain of the parapolitical? At best it seems to explain only how the so-called parapolitical is apprehended by disaffected white men who understand that there is something wrong with the world but, intent on keeping their historical status, blame it on a conspiracy of immigrants and women. In this sense Lovecraft is identical to an AM radio host, Alex Jones, or David Icke––just with more florid prose and more creative conspiracy fiction.

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In light of the above thought, it is troubling that S.T. Joshi and Michel Houellebecq given authoritative status without critique. While it is indeed the case that Joshi is the authority on Lovecraft's work it is also the case that he has actively suppressed criticisms of Lovecraft's racism from authors who were both appreciative and (even mildly) critical of their inspiration: Brian Keene and Laird Barron spring to mind. Joshi has a history of denying the significance of Lovecraft's racism, despite being South Asian and thus someone that Lovecraft would have written into the cult of Cthulhu, and it would have made more sense for Wilson to incorporate him into this parapolitical aesthetics.

Houellebecq also wrote a popular analysis of Lovecraft, so I get why it's cited, but let's be honest: Houellebecq is a racist and misogynist hack whose novels are Islamophobic diatribes, and ur-MRA apologetics, and so his contribution to any political analysis should be treated as immediately suspect. Anti-racist aspects of Wilson's work are immediately undermined by the incorporation of Houellebecq who himself sees, like Lovecraft, immigrants as a clandestine assault on civilization.

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And what of Victor LaValle? The fourth chapter deals with "The Horror at Red Hook" and yet does not talk about the recent and acclaimed detournement of this [most racist] Lovecraft story: LaValle's The Ballad of Black Tom. I would argue that it is impossible to even think this specific Lovecraft story outside of the lens of LaValle's novella, especially since this novella is being made into a mini-series. And yet Wilson seems to be oblivious of LaValle's intervention which, considering the importance Wilson places on racism and this specific story, is rather odd. Anyone who has read LaValle's novel can no longer think this specific Lovecraft tale according to its original claims; it has been irrevocably altered by the intervention.

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Wilson's reading of the event of 9/11, its refraction through the parapolitical, and the subsequent War on Terror is somewhat troubling. He defines the War on Terror as "a war of images and sounds, rather than objects and things." (120) By reading it as an aesthetic event he obscures its material reality; he reads its meaning as a subject within imperialism who cannot think imperialism except according to deep strata of conspiracy and parapolitics. But the War on Terror actually was and is a war of "objects and things" in its actual deployment, particularly how it is experienced by its victims. Over 15 years of unrelenting violence levelled upon the people of Afghanistan and other nations is not a matter primarily of "images and sounds", of media shock and awe and the obfuscation that this is a real war with real lives lost and infrastructure ruined. A child who has grown to adulthood in occupied Afghanistan knows this war for what it is: naked imperialist violence where imperialist soldiers kill your family and friends, bombing your existence into rubble. Hence when Wilson declares that "9/11 collectively brutalizes us through terror and simulation" and declares this experience "collective trauma" that forces us to "experience 'reality' in an irrational dream-like state," (121) his "us" and "we" represents the delirium of the victimizers, not the victims, and victimizers have always produced justifications and coping mechanisms for their culpability. The actual brutalization and collective trauma is visited upon the people of Afghanistan, Iraq, and the many regions claimed by this war without end. Or is this part of his point, an implicit nod to the ways in which the conspiratorial register obscures the real? Do the aesthetics he attempts to lift from Lovecraft obscure this or, because they are primarily racist, explain how this could be the case?

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Despite the confusion of using Lovecraft for the poetics of the parapolitical (mentioned above) there is an interesting analogical device Wilson deploys. Under the signifier of 9/11 Wilson examines Scott's inability to grasp this event according to his own parapolitical research outside of a state of mourning. In the face of the unleashed and monstrous War on Terror the theorist Scott laments the shock that "reality" has received and becomes like Francis Wayland Thurston in Call of Cthulhu. And the unfolding of this event produces its own Randolph Carter: Edward Snowden. Interesting… but, as discussed above, Wilson's inability to decide between the registers of poetics (Lovecraft as racist conspiracy theorists or Lovecraft as general language for parapolitics) renders this reading somewhat incoherent. In the next few pages he again emphasizes Lovecraft's status as a racist paranoiac: if this is the case why should we care about this Thurston/Carter analogical deployment? If Lovecraft's poetics are essentially racist then their ability to illuminate anything other than racist conspiracy should be treated with suspicion.

Something more interesting in this kind of reading occurs when Wilson examines The Shadow Over Innsmouth. In this story, which is clearly an expression of racist anxiety over miscegenation, the cosmic conspiracy (which is a metaphor of a race conspiracy) is "textually 'disrupted' by the irruption of clandestine agencies of the State." (130) That is the actual parapolitical intrudes upon the metaphorical with Innsmouth being cleared out by government agencies and this intervention being suppressed. Wilson cannot help reading the present moment into this narrative, treating it as a metaphor of the parapolitical control of immigrants and other racialized populations. That these populations are treated as monstrous by Lovecraft, and thus the parapolitical intervention depicted as necessary, does not necessarily matter: this is precisely how the ideologue defending ICE or the FBI would understand such events. "Incredibly, what we are witnessing is Homeland Security in full operation exactly seventy years early." (131) The fact that the narrator himself is implicated in this parapolitical intervention, related as he is to the Innsmouth other, and is thus implicated in the story. Does this also express Lovecraft's fear of being not racially pure enough? Is this an example of the racist paranoiac's anxiety at being implicated in his own racial ontology? Hard to say.

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I'm unsure about the necessity, in this particular project, of exploring the poetics of Lovecraft in relation to German aesthetic philosophy. Although thinking the aesthetic categories of Kant, Hegel, and Schopenhauer might be useful for a literary treatment of Lovecraft this exploration seems tangental to the express purpose of The Republic of Cthulhu, which is to provide a language for the parapolitical. Is the philosophical language of German Idealism (and Pessimism) required for this project? Maybe, and its exploration is certainly interesting, but there does not seem to be a rigorous argument that justifies this aspect of the book in light of its main thesis.

As a philosopher who has read multiple "philosophical treatments" of Lovecraft (Eugene Thacker and Graham Harman, to name two philosophers also cited by Wilson) I have, to be honest, found the importance placed upon him not that interesting––partially because of the intrinsic racism that Wilson himself identifies, partially because the "philosophical problems" we can locate in Lovecraft belong to the kind of idealist speculation which was (to my mind) already backwards by the dawn of the 20th Century. What I found gripping in Wilson's project was the political dimension, the analogical use of Lovecraft to think the [para]political. Hence the parts of The Republic of Cthulhu that centre these old philosophical concerns are the book's least interesting aspects. But maybe that's a problem of personal preference.

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In the passage where Wilson connects his analysis to Debord's theory of the spectacle the awkwardness of his political insight becomes acute. "The late 1920s," he writes, "was also the period when both Stalinism and fascism grasped the revolutionary potential of the new media technologies for political propaganda." (164) Aside from the fact that "Stalinism" is an empty signifier that has emerged from a combination of Cold War and Trotskyist discourse, the equivocation of "Stalinism and fascism" is somewhat troubling, especially when Wilson uses fascist thinkers––Schmitt and Heidegger––without criticism. To juxtapose communism and fascism in a throwaway sentence intended to force synonymity is troubling but unfortunately a product of ideological common sense. Much more radical theorists, such as Mbembe, also draw upon Schmitt while lazily using the term "Stalinism" and accepting the Cold War discourse. Outside of this problematic, however, there is the fact that every stable state in the late 1920s "grasped the revolutionary potential of the new media technologies"––this was not something limited to those states that occupied the opposing ends of the horseshoe theory! Jonathan Crary, who is cited by Wilson in this section, in fact locates the rise of new media political propaganda in the US. We don't need to drift into tired theories of "totalitarianism" to understand the concept of spectacle, which Debord also located in capitalism's strongest states.

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In the end Wilson presents us with a set of linked topoi for the parapolitical: weird fiction, detective fiction, crime fiction: "Weird Noir." (172) The mapping is interesting insofar as it presents us with a landscape of literature ripe for analogical use––and arguing for its analogical use-value––to describe the so-called "parapolitical". In order to be politically effective in the sense of praxis, however, further studies would have to: a) link the analogical to concrete political sequences, treating it only as analogy rather than a tangental curiousity; b) demonstrate the material efficacy of the concept of "parapolitical" by figuring out a theory of the state that is not only in opposition to the [normative] liberal theory. The first problem is easily overcome when we consider the ways in which philosophy has used literature to explain its propositions rather than be assimilated by the aesthetic dimension: my upcoming book with Benjanun Sriduangkaew, Methods Devour Themselves, is such an exercise but in another theoretical register. The second problem can only be solved by, as I argued above, connecting the concept of the "parapolitical" to an instrumentalist theory of the state: all worries about liberal misapprehensions, no longer misunderstood according to Schmittian fascist thought, dissolve once we properly understand the meaning of the mode of production and its state of affairs. If using Lovecraft analogically can shed some light on the meaning of this state of affairs, then so be it, but at the end of the day I prefer his weird fiction critical inheritors: Victor LaValle and Cassandra Khaw.