Cthulhu, Capital and Absurdity
How are we to view capital? Is it a purely mechanistic process, a 'blind idiot god […]
encircled by his flopping horde of mindless and amorphous dancers'? [Lovecraft]
The Old Dark Ones of which Cthulhu is merely the most well known, are vast unfeeling
beings beyond the comprehension of the human mind and with as much interest in or
understanding of the human world as we have of the minds of insects. They are
awesome, transcendent, interstellar creatures beyond good and evil who are worshipped
by foolish humans in the belief that they will past on their knowledge of the stars to their
followers. In reality this has the same outcome as a colony of ants moving into your
kitchen because they wish to be close to your divine presence.
Lovecraft’s Cthulhu could be a material devil, with the same ambiguity as the devils of
the medieval play or Iblis; the satan who refused Allah's command to bow down to Adam
in the Garden of Eden, one should only bow before Allah, and was cursed for it. During
carnival and medieval market feasts the role of the devils was taken by the poorer
members of the community, in the run up to the feast they were allowed (almost) free
reign to run amok in costume causing all forms of mischief and devilries. To the
medieval mind there was nothing, no power nor authority, which could not be mocked at
its appointed time. Here we have the mystery play devil and the Erle King [Bakhtin], the
fool/trickster/joker/anarchist, the lustful and gluttonous Harlequin, and finally Mr
Punch – 'the only character of note in the canon of western literature who has got the
better of the devil' [Drummond]. The devil and at the same time the one who fools the
devil, the Trickster god, the Lord of Misrule.
Between 1525 (the German Peasant’s War) and 1618 (start of the Thirty Years War)
everything went wrong in Europe – the free gap between dying medieval feudalism and
the emerging Westphalian state was systematically crushed. This was the period of
Bruegel and Rabelais, Copernicus and Jan of Leiden; and the discovery that in the 'New
World' there lived 'people without god, law and king' [Clastres], but who, according to
Hans Staden, ate their enemies. This is presumably compared to the Christians, who
merely tortured them to death and then exposed their mutilated corpses in iron cages,
hung from the cathedral, as a warning the subjugated population. 'No one looks at
them. The past hangs over their heads. And if they try and lift their heads too far, the
cages are there as a reminder.' [Luther Blisset]
The failure of capitalism to integrate a spiritual dimension, the split in the Reformation
between the revolutionary/ecstatic and the conservative/pragmatic strands of
Protestantism, represented respectively by Thomas Müntzer (d. 1525) and Martin Luther
(d.1587), is an ambiguous problem.
The all encompassing, amoral, mechanistic
materialism of capital might be acceptable; if it was accepted that the imperatives of the
market have as much interest in us as they have in the minds of insects, rather than
their being made into a new ethical focus.
It is, arguably, in the elevation of this profoundly mechanistic (and in that sense
perversely innocent) system to a position above all other moral, philosophical and
political values and considerations that humankind displays most convincingly both
its present intellectual immaturity and - through grossly pursued selfishness rather
than the applied hatred of others - a kind of synthetic evil. [Banks]
Jonathan Trayner (2011)
-Bakhtin M. Rabelais and his World, 1984, Indiana University Press
Clastres P. Society Against the State, 1987, Zone Books
Cohen N. The Pursuit of the Millennium, 1970, Paladin
Drummond B. & Manning M. The Wild Highway, 2005, Creation Books
Lovecraft H.P. The Dunwich Horror and Other Stories, 1984, Arkham House
Luther Blisset, Q, 2004, Arrow Books
Tawney R.H. Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, 1969, Penguin Books
Banks I.M. A Few Notes on the Culture, 1994
(from http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm)
Staden H. The True Story of His Captivity... 1557
(from http://www.jrbooksonline.com/HTML-docs/staden%20part%201.htm)
Weber M. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 1905
(from
http://www.ne.jp/asahi/moriyuki/abukuma/weber/world/ethic/pro_eth_frame.html)