Nathaniel Metz's Blog

#postmodernism #aesthetics #capitalism #atmosphere #NickLand #Kant #Lovecraft #liminal #space

The Backrooms is a popular short story that went viral on the Internet with endless adaptations, memes, games, and short films. I think it's an ingenious bit of short horror fiction that sounds like something from the Twilight Zone. The story postulates that, at certain points in our world, one can make a wrong step and accidentally “no clip” out of reality. This language of no clip or clipping out is borrowed from video games in which there are certain points within a map where the game developers forgot to add barriers. If the player reaches those points, he or she “no clips” out of the map and into undeveloped digital landscapes (or perhaps falls into an infinite void).

The original post that created the basic lore is as follows: “If you're not careful and noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you'll end up in the Backrooms, where it's nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in. God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it (...) has heard you.”

Creepy, right? Most people think so, which is one reason why it went viral online. The basic structure allows for a lot of creative reimagining, and the liminal aesthetics allows for plenty of interesting artwork. But I also think the story's popularity rests in its ability to capture something about our postmodern condition. I'm not the first to point this out. In fact, there's a great video essay by Clark Eleison that talks about how the Backrooms captures our fear of loneliness and isolation (especially when considering how the story took off during the pandemic).

[Link] (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fonsUaFURPI)

But I also think the story presents a fascinating illustration of the postmodern and capitalist material environments, landscapes, atmospheres, and architectures that we now inhabit. It shows the horrifying artificiality of these material environments, revealing how our spaces are constructed for the flourishing of capitalism itself rather than God's Creation.

The Backrooms represent a terrifying “outsideness.” What if, behind the borders of your house, workplace, and city, lies an infinite expanse of burning fluorescent lights, musky carpet, and ugly office hallways? It's like being trapped in the waiting room for a doctor's office from hell.

When I think about this outsideness, I'm reminded first of Immanuel Kant and his distinction between how we perceive the world and what lies beyond that perception. According to Kant, when we perceive the world, we do so according to internal categories and schematisms of the psyche, which arrange the raw sense data of experience into categories of understanding. When I look at a desk, I do not see the individual particles and atoms, but instead, I experience the desk according to how my brain is wired to recreate the input of visual stimuli. An entirely different creature, like a bat, might have an entirely different mental representation of the desk. Kant called this sort of stuff “phenomenal” experiences.

But what about the stuff that lies beyond, behind, or “outside” of the phenomenal? This stuff would be the thing-in-itself, and Kant called this the noumenal or noumenous. Our brains, rationality, and cognitive capacities are wired for decyphering phenomenal categories, but we cannot speak with any certainty about the noumenal realm other than to say it's out there. I can talk about, for example, my desk — its design, colors, and object parts — but I cannot talk about what the desk is like, in-itself, outside of my experience—according to Kant; of course, this is philosophy, so that has been subject to much debate. And even if we talk about the atomic structure of the desk, that is still talking about how the atoms appear to us, not necessarily the atoms in themselves.

In recent times, the professionally insane philosopher Nick Land has coined the term “fanged noumena.” Working under the influence of Kant, Deleuze, and Guatarri (and methamphetamines), Land used “fanged noumena” to refer to that “outsideness” which breaks into our world and rearranges things—sometimes in catastrophic ways.

Fanged, here, is to be taken in a Marxist-Lovecraftian sense. For Marx, capitalism is vampiric: “Capital is dead labour, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.” In the writing of H.P. Lovecraft, cosmic, extra-dimensional monsters exist in a manner that is beyond the comprehension of humans, leading to madness, destruction, or both. Land combines these notions and thus theorizes capitalism as a type of Lovecraftian monster rearranging our world in order to be devoured; it is fanged noumena.

In my previous post, I talked about something similar to this fanged noumena in the work of Deleuze and Guatarri in their conception of time. Here is what I said:

To give an over-generalized summary: in a more classic theological understanding, there is a distinction between Eternity (the realm of God) and time (the temporality of creation). Eternity is transcendent to time. However, for Deleuze and Guatarri, there is no transcendent Eternity. Instead, they speak of an “Aeon,” which is a concept inspired by Kantian philosophy. In Kant's philosophy, there is a distinction between how we experience the world (phenomenal) and how the world is in-itself (the noumenal). Deleuze and Guatarri place Aeonic time into a type of material, noumenal reality that is on the same ontological status as our experience of time, “but it does not manifest itself in time. Though it is itself composed of singular events – which can be precisely dated and named – these events compose a virtual plane of intensity that positively avoids climactic actualization. Deleuze and Guattari call these Aeonic occurrences plateaus and show how they constitute an exteriority that haunts the successive order of extensive temporality” (Anna Greenspan, “Capitalism's Transcendental Time Machine,” page 17).

Notice how this Aeonic time is like a ghost (or even a Lovecraftian monster) sitting just outside our periphery, occasionally breaking into our world and leaving haunting traces of itself. The Backrooms seem to have a similar function. It is a realm of pure liminal space that is outside of our periphery or perception, and yet something about this reality conditions our world — or at least what the Backrooms represent conditions us.

The Backrooms are the pure form of a capitalist atmosphere that is devoid of subjectivity, existing neither from humans nor for humans. Indeed, it doesn't really exist for anything so far as we can tell. It is a material environment devoid of telos. It is artificial and yet not generated solely by human effort. This aspect of an artificial material environment without a telos or sole human origin is similar to Nick Land's famous description of capitalism in his famous essay “Meltdown”:

“The story goes like this: Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity as renaissance rationalitization and oceanic navigation lock into commoditization take-off. Logistically accelerating techno-economic interactivity crumbles social order in auto-sophisticating machine runaway. As markets learn to manufacture intelligence, politics modernizes, upgrades paranoia, and tries to get a grip.”

The Backrooms spatially represent this noumenal or transcendental quality of capitalism as an alien force conditioning our world and vampirically sucking Creation's lifeforce to empower itself— a type of spiritual warfare if you will. And we see quite well in the Backrooms meme how this noumenal capitalism manifests itself in space: through the desubjectivizing atmospheres of postmodernity, such as office spaces, shopping malls, Time Square, and suburban sprawl. In a sense, all of reality is now suburban sprawl, and the Backrooms are the horrific psychogeography of that labyrinth that pushes us toward alienating individualism rather than communal flourishing.

Of course, much of what I've written in this post is imaginative speculation and intellectual experimentation. I'm not exactly convinced that this is the best way to understand the ontology of capitalism. But at the very least, I think the Lovecraftian lens of Land is an intriguing perspective because it would potentially allow for Christians to view capitalism as a “principality and power” (Ephesians 6:12) and thus under the category of spiritual warfare.