Boards of Canada’s ‘Prophecy at 1420 MHz’: Spinoza, Bataille, Nasr, and the Aesthetics of Prophetic Transmission
Susurrations of Cosmic Consciousness or Notes Toward a Hydrogen Communism
My ‘Introit’
An exhilarating sequence of events has unfolded over the past several weeks for Boards of Canada fans around the globe. After a series of mysterious VHS tapes began arriving at fans’ doors in early April, followed by an international poster campaign from April 10th, more than a decade of unmet yearning was finally satisfied on April 16th when the band quietly released “Tape 05” on their YouTube channel—a catalytic event that culminated in the announcement of their fifth LP, Inferno, scheduled for release on May 29th.
The news set aflame the worlds of music journalism and social media alike. Fan appreciation posts, celebratory short-form videos on Instagram and TikTok, and speculative pieces on Substack—like this one—continue to populate feeds in anticipation of the album. Things reached a fever pitch with Warp Records’ pre-sale of limited edition vinyl, the announcement of exclusive global listening parties, and the official release of “Introit” and “Prophecy at 1420 MHz,” the tracks that lead off the latest addition to the Boards of Canada catalogue.
For those who have followed my work, whether here or on the Acid Horizon and LEPHT HAND podcasts, my shameless status as a BoC superfan will come as no surprise, nor will the ways I have both intentionally and accidentally inserted myself into the attentional mass forming rhizomatically around this release. If this is your first time reading my blog, whether as a kindred spirit in the Boards of Canada universe or simply someone curious about the title, I suggest beginning with my piece “Corduroy Psychedelia: On Boards of Canada, Hauntology, and the PBS Unconscious,” a philosophical retrospective on national broadcast culture and its connections to BoC’s corpus. I had written it belatedly; it comprises years of inchoate thoughts and nostalgic ruminations on the band and the politics of retro culture. When I published it on March 27th, I was unaware that we were only days away from the launch of Inferno‘s promotional campaign.
Since that fateful day, I have chased the ecstatic energy surrounding the album with some abandon. I recorded not one but two podcast episodes on Boards of Canada, re-released my specialty deck Vintagia: I Ching Oracle of Psychogeography and Creative Discovery, a hacked oracle partly inspired by the band, and had the pleasure of collaborating with Fredd-E of bocpages and Jack Chuter of ATTN Magazine (who has been commissioned to write a book on BoC) to author an article about BoC for Crack Magazine. I also pre-ordered the album, bought all the merch, and—not to inspire envy—secured a ticket to the May 22nd official listening party in New York City.
The resonance generated by the original blog piece—and the conversations and connections that followed in the wake of the Inferno announcements—has prompted me to consider a series of essays on the album, weaving reflections on the music into the theoretical and philosophical work I pursue here and elsewhere. The apocalyptic and eschatological themes running through Tomorrow’s Harvest and Inferno have long been a tangential research interest of mine, and the return of Boards of Canada has honed my willingness to pursue them in earnest.
As a preface to this piece and any others that may follow, I share with my new friend Jack Chuter a relative disinterest in any alleged orthodox understanding of the themes, motifs, and cryptic messaging put forward by the band, preferring instead the heterogeneous associations, feelings, memories, and moods individual listeners derive from the music. The overlaps and synergies are exciting, but so are the divergences—this music should take you somewhere both uncannily familiar and welcomingly alien.
Seat of C-Consciousness
As with “Tape 05,” I had the good fortune of having an opening during the scheduled release of “Prophecy at 1420 MHz” and the affordance of a studio listening environment where I could pare down distractions. I suspect many reading this move through their world harboring an interpassive fantasy similar to my own—of days and weeks finally disconnected from the deluge of digital notifications in which we instead cultivate more nourishing personal and aesthetic habits. New music from Boards of Canada was a call to be my best self in that regard. The moment impelled me to prepare an encounter with the work that was both intentional and sustained: lights dim, volume up, singular focus.
The recognizable corduroy texture of “Introit” evokes the iconic PBS ident of the collective national broadcast unconscious—its pitch-perfect imperfectly pitched melody paired with spellbinding ghostly halation, rendered masterfully by visual artist Robert Beatty. All begins with the warmth and innocence of a summer bible school promo or the civic realist’s here-to-serve optimism. Things shift quickly, reminding us that the halcyon past is bygone: apocalyptic energies surge beneath the phosphor noise and dead channel static, before an antiseptic “photo-psychic” trigger warning unveils “Prophecy at 1420 MHz.”
From the darkened dawn, “Prophecy” arises as a serpentine incantation, an Arabic scale uncoiling from a distant flute, its melody dotted by a shamanic pulse of sparing percussion, all summoning the long-tailed splash of silvery guitars evolved from the band’s earlier The Campfire Headphase. The armature of the track grows firm as it gains inertia, its crystalline bed slowly shaped into a “machine funk” upscaled from BoC’s earlier grooves. Seasoned listeners will acknowledge the palimpsest-like quality of Inferno‘s second track, with its superimposition of familiar tones and textures drawn from across their historical catalogue.
Then it speaks: the vocoded voice of God—the inchoate energy system which has long lurked beneath the band’s body of work, the “final boss of the Boards of Canada universe” as one YouTube commenter put it—surfacing at last in its full refulgence. In Beatty’s imaginal, the voice emanates from sphincteral Chladni figures pulsating within a hexagonal sun, drawing immediate parallels to philosopher Georges Bataille’s solar anus: the sun as the unyielding giver, the immemorial font of its own accursed share.
Prophecy at 1420 MHz
End
Nothingness
Comes to a greater awareness of itself
The divine intellect
I am the truth, extinction
Diversion of reality
Consciousness
I am God, the ultimate resonance
The spirit and the soul, or the psyche
Unconscious, transcendent source
Seat of c-consciousness
Power
It is, in a sense, the religion of the modern world
The scientific view of nature
Synchronicity
Consciousness has operational еffect
Cause and effеct
Nothingness, the absolute truth
The utterances of the sun god comprise a cryptic bricolage drawn from a 2003 Dudleian Lecture at Harvard Divinity School—Seyyed Hossein Nasr’s “In the Beginning Was Consciousness.” Nasr asserts the primacy of consciousness over matter as the fundamental and primordial reality. Modernity’s ambition toward technological mastery demotes cosmic consciousness to a biological epiphenomenon. Amid our shared cosmic alienation, the yearning for contact with the inhuman does not abate but transforms: arms that once reached for angels turn toward elusive UAPs and the perennial prospect of extraterrestrial life. Our protracted endeavor to operationally define consciousness fails on its own terms: our conceptual tools, suffused with the very ontological substance our methods seek to distill, break down at the moment of contact. This, for Nasr, is proof of consciousness’s primacy and pervasiveness throughout the cosmos. The modern paradigm, insufficient to its own contradictions, is consigned to perish through accelerating self-exhaustion. Be that as it may, susurrations of primordial cosmic consciousness shall seep through modernity’s ongoing ruination.
What we moderns might view as Boards of Canada’s aesthetic détournement of Nasr’s lecture is, more precisely, an interpretation: a series of philosophical fragments about prophecy reconfigured into a prophetic message. The track presents itself as an aesthetic negotiation of the divide between prophecy and prophetic theory proper—a distinction and task to which we will return later. This is a strong claim, perhaps, given that the lyrical content of the track may have all been arranged simply for the vibes! A prolepsis, then: even if the fragments of “Prophecy at 1420 MHz” were assembled ironically—or simply for maximum aesthetic flourish—the prophetic act does not require the prophet’s intention to authorize it. The transmission remains indifferent to the transmitter’s sincerity and, to speculate, finds an apt conduit in the ubiquitous fiberoptic of ironic communication that modern culture so readily indulges. Admittedly, this is not a strong set of premises on which to hang the authenticity of any prophetic message. In the imaginal register, however, the resonant force of an image or transmission depends neither on strict adherence to established truth values nor on the fabrications of the ego. Given the force of the images at hand—images that invoke the prophetic within the figure of inferno, served up by one of the most mysterious musical artists of our time—the lyrical cipher of “Prophecy at 1420 MHz” feels like a transmission to be received, one that moreover invites the cultivation of a mode of receptivity Nasr sees as in decline.
But could prophecy have a secular afterlife in the wake of modernity? In a piece I published last month entitled “The Absolute Casinofication of Everything,” I drew on Federico Campagna’s distinction between prediction and prophecy to argue that we are collectively losing the capacity to speak from outside the current world-order, defaulting instead to the predictive mode: extrapolation, probability, the futures market. Campagna’s prophet, by contrast, speaks from a position the current world cannot fully accommodate, which is precisely why the prophet stammers. The prophetic voice cannot achieve fluency in the language of the world it addresses because it draws on a frequency that world has not colonized. The stammer is not a failure of articulation but a structural feature of prophetic transmission as it moves toward new epistemological, ontological, and political terrain.1
In view of the current hypertrophy of prediction markets, prophecy—or even the capacity to perceive something genuinely outside the clamor of modern life—has emerged once more as an object of theoretical urgency. But must we concede to the religious idiom in rediscovering importance in the prophetic expression? Prophecy should not be denied a secular accent. Let’s allow ourselves to imagine a form of prophecy that precedes and exceeds its religious institutionalization, one that does not rest on the presupposition of supernatural machinery, and one that does not terminate in mystifications that preempt philosophical inquiry or foreclose scientific analysis. Then again, why would prophecy concern us at all if it were denied its vital alterity to the pursuits of philosophy and science? Doesn’t prophecy engender a form of indeterminacy that challenges the conceit by which we believe we know the world in its current form? The secular and the cosmological versions of this question are not as far apart as they might appear—both identify something that the dominant paradigm cannot contain, something that exceeds the terms of its own legitimation. These questions find their most urgent cosmological formulation in Nasr, who avers that in the 21st century we are on the “cusp of the curve”: the moment when the dominant paradigm can no longer fully contain what is trying to penetrate it, when the prophetic signal begins to break the medium of transmission.2
During my first listen to “Prophecy at 1420 MHz,” one thing caught my ear and inexplicably sent chills up my spine. When the vocoder god utters the fragment “seat of c-consciousness,” we hear Campagna’s prophetic stammer born electric: the voice stutters on the word “consciousness” because it must. Human language is an impoverished channel through which the prophetic signal reaches a receiver—a conduit necessarily too attenuated for prophecy to pass with full continuity or clarity. When the voice names what it transmits—consciousness—both the medium and the message begin to break down. The signal fractures the channel at the precise moment it nominates what the current paradigm, in Nasr’s view, has foreclosed. For the vocoder god, language functions as a flipped ghost box: the vocoder god does not “reach for the dead”; rather, it calls to the living through stuttered phonemes, static interference, the wanderings of wow and flutter, and the murmured mondegreens one might hear through convulsed analog—all transmitting what has been progressively lost to us since the dawn of the modern era.
The Hydrogen Line
So, what does 1420 MHz have to do with prophecy? In 1959, physicists Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison, colleagues at Cornell University, published “Searching for Interstellar Communications” in Nature as part of the emerging field of SETI—the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.3 Recognizing the spin-flip resonance frequency of hydrogen and noting the ubiquity of the element throughout the cosmos, they deduced that other technologically advanced civilizations would similarly attempt to transmit messages on what they termed “the hydrogen line.” In effect, the scientists had identified a pre-civilizational cosmic commons: the hydrogen envelope enshrouding the Big Bang’s host of celestial bodies, cosmic detritus, and all potentially existing lifeforms beyond planet Earth—an open field for interstellar communication held in common before any civilization arrived to claim it.
In 1960, Frank Drake conducted the first practical SETI experiment, Project Ozma, training an 85-foot radio telescope at Green Bank, West Virginia on two nearby Sun-like stars. Drake was briefly convinced he had made contact when a strong pulsed signal arrived at exactly 1420 MHz before the anomaly was revealed to be a high-altitude aircraft. On August 15, 1977, an astronomer at Ohio State’s Big Ear observatory picked up an intense signal at the hydrogen spin-flip frequency of such force that a volunteer scrawled “Wow!” in red ink beside the printout—a signal that has never been explained and has never repeated itself since.
The 1420 MHz band is now protected by international convention, reserved strictly for the reception of potential transmissions and restricted from commercial or terrestrial use. The hydrogen line is thus shuttered to the appropriations of what Bataille terms “the restricted economy.”4 In our secular scientific world, the hydrogen line serves as the part of the frequency spectrum humanity holds open for contact with inhuman realms—the technological correlate of those channels through which, in Nasr’s multi-leveled cosmos, the voices of angels once moved freely before the paradigm closed them off. Through this aperture, humanity keeps vigil for what, in Nasr’s eyes, was never truly abandoned: a consciousness that recedes but cannot be fully lost.
The hydrogen line identified in Boards of Canada’s latest album finds an analogous cultural expression in the communion that gathers around the band’s music and aesthetics. Fans occupy what seems to be a protected frequency, maintaining a predilection for intimate receptivity that persists amid historical conditions actively hostile to the aesthetic universe they collectively indulge. The shared excitement around the latest releases—and the remarkable close-knittedness of strangers who share a love for their music, which I previously described as both “depersonalizing and deeply personal” and a “communion of atmospheres” (a phrase coined without yet knowing anything about “Prophecy at 1420 MHz,” and without anticipating the associations this piece would draw from it)—has fostered bonds that seem to challenge the socially and politically fragmented world we inhabit.
It is with some caution that I attempt a political distillation of these events, intent on locating the potentially transformative core those bonds seem to engender. The synchronicity of the recent BoC releases alongside my own burgeoning interest in the relationship between philosophy and prophecy is, however, too ripe to leave hanging. Fortunately, there exists a philosophical precedent in one of the later works of someone who navigated the divide between prophecy and philosophy, and what was politically at stake in negotiating between their respective powers and potentialities: Baruch Spinoza. As we will see, Spinoza’s philosophical appropriation of prophecy becomes a work of liberation fraught with its own complications, particularly as it attempts to reconfigure the prophetic for a modernist political project.
The Alembic of Spinoza
In his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, Spinoza asserts that philosophy must interrupt its preoccupation with contemplative life to confront the nature of religious and political authority in the real world. Once philosophy has checked its own navel-gazing tendencies, it transforms itself into hermeneutics, embodying a new method of scriptural interpretation that, for Spinoza, opens a path across the gap between the rational and the ostensibly irrational dimensions of human life, chief among them the power of prophecy. Spinoza observes the almost incontestable strength and allure of the prophetic voice as the font of religious, political, and social power throughout human history: from the ability to interpret divine revelation flows all institutional authority. Spinoza’s methodology neither rejects prophetic power nor adopts a resentful critical standpoint to castigate its creative tendencies. Rather, Spinoza presupposes the historical grandeur of prophecy while transmuting its power through a philosophical reading. His radical move is the insistence that scripture be read as nature is read: empirically and immanently, deriving meaning from the text itself on its own terms rather than from external theological authority. In the spirit of the Cartesian revolution, Spinoza applies a skepticism to prophetic power that strikes at the conceit of those who claim to be gatekeepers of divine revelation.
The following account of Spinoza's relationship to prophecy draws heavily on Norman O. Brown's essay "Philosophy and Prophecy: Spinoza's Hermeneutics," collected in his final work Apocalypse &/or Metamorphosis (1991)—a book preoccupied, as its title suggests, with precisely the eschatological and transformative themes that animate the later Boards of Canada. The irony, as Norman O. Brown notes, is that in its turn toward scriptural analysis, philosophy assumes the mask of the prophet: interpreting divine revelation in an immanent mode is still interpretation, and interpretation of scripture, by Spinoza’s own definition, is an act of prophecy rather than philosophy proper. The application of the philosophical idiom to scripture inevitably draws thought into a mode of discourse that abandons the priority of demonstrative proof, preferring instead an exercise of creative imagination, rhetorical persuasion, and moral certainty. The prophetic mode, moreover, engenders what Brown calls “accommodation”—revelation is always shaped so as to be made intelligible through a conjunction of contingent cognitive, historical, and linguistic frameworks. Prophecy only becomes legible through the filter of images, voices, forms, and conceptual apparatuses capable of mediating its raw force (e.g. the vocoder god). Nonetheless, the event of revelation maintains an aspect always heterogeneous to the existing social order, one that resists full circumscription by any interpretive act.
Prophecy and philosophy have always existed in historical tension, but—as Brown argues, and as Spinoza’s inquiry gradually reveals—they are not opposed. “Philosophy needs the plane of history in order to unfold as enlightenment: then prophecy can be seen as praeparatio philosophandi, preparing the way for philosophy. The power that sets in motion the civilizational process, the progress toward perfection, is not philosophy but prophecy, not reason but imagination.”5 For Spinoza, this progress finds its pivot in Jesus Christ who, as the mouth of God, mutates the nature of the prophetic act, breaking with the historical flickering of the collective imaginal toward the clear and distinct ideas of universal moral law, which Christ inscribes upon “the fleshy tables of the human heart.”6 Spinoza’s tryst with prophecy thus culminates in the marriage of prophecy with the rationality and universal moral religion of Christ, a move which makes the light of prophecy common to all—but at the cost of losing the dark, imaginal richness from which prophecy emerges.
Spinoza’s treatment of prophecy introduces a host of complications and contradictions with rich implications for the future history of the prophetic tradition—and, not incidentally, for how we might understand the aesthetics of prophecy employed by artists like Boards of Canada. Spinoza’s turn to Christ as the eminent mouth of God may appear a betrayal of prophecy’s imaginal richness, but it is perhaps better understood as a sublation: the prophetic absorbed into the privileged rationality of modernity, at once preserved and cancelled in the same stroke. Even so, Spinoza does not fully disavow the necessity of accommodation and prevarication—his own phrase Deus sive Natura (God or Nature) indulges the familiar equivocation of the prophet, mutually suspending philosophical and theological forms of revelation in a single utterance. Spinoza is himself a product of historical contingency, forced to contend with the emergent forces of humanist rationality amid the lingering dominion of religious authority. On that basis, his philosophical intervention into the prophetic becomes an imaginative act, one necessary to extricating prophecy from its institutionalization in irrational forms of authority and creating the conditions under which new forms of life can be realized.
What Spinoza performs philosophically, Boards of Canada perform sonically: a liberation of prophetic content from the institutional forms that have enclosed it. The aesthetic fascination with cults in the work of Boards of Canada can be cast similarly—the venal authority of the modern cult is not to be emulated, but through an aesthetic simulation of the cultic and a détournement of its failures and tragedies, we become enveloped in an atmospheric remainder that activates our collective need for a line of flight. This line of flight is not a pure escape from the wreckage of history. Closer to Deleuze and Guattari’s own conception, a line of flight involves wrenching prophetic power from the hands of entrenched authority and cultic enclosures.
From Spinoza’s alembic arises the notion that prophecy culminates in political freedom—a world in which we become our own prophets. That we might collectively engender prophetic power finds its ultimate expression in democracy as a political ideal. Spinoza cites Moses’ exclamation from Numbers 11:29: “Would to God that all the Lord’s people were prophets.”7 The ultimate transcendence is transcendence of our reliance upon the forms of authority desiccated from prophecy by the political priests of the old order. Brown interpolates Spinoza’s doctrine accordingly: “That government is best, the most natural, in which dependence on prophetic authority is transcended by all together being their own prophets, as is the case in the theoretical ideal of democracy.”8 With the sacrifice of Christ comes the prospect of internalizing the light of reason whereby each becomes a rational lawgiver in a community of equals. The prophetic function—interpreting divine revelation for those who cannot know directly—is no longer the privilege of a specialist caste but the latent capacity of every modern subject.
Yet there is a problem latent in Spinoza’s transmutation of prophecy into the democratic ideal that the work of François Laruelle allows us to bring to the surface. Laruelle formulates the axiom that “philosophy is the capital within thought, the capital-form of our general relations to the World”—and, more pointedly, that it is impossible to struggle against this capital “by means drawn from it: philosophical means or neighboring means to the philosophical: politics, ethics, etc.” Democracy, in other words, is a “neighboring means” to the philosophical conceit and cannot involute the operations that flow from its own establishing gesture. As Laruelle observes, we recognize the philosopher when they seize a knowledge produced outside philosophy’s conditions, capture it, and “submit this knowledge to the constraints of a transcendent decision in view of making it produce another thing than knowledge.”9 This is precisely what Spinoza does to prophecy: diverts it from its matrix of production and compels it to yield democratic theory rather than prophetic transmission. The criteria for traditional prophecy are thereby fixed at the moment of Spinoza’s founding philosophical decision: rational-moral universality, democratic accessibility, the natural light of reason common to all. A prophetic event occurring beyond the bounds of the democratic context could not legitimate itself under these terms—the imaginal vision, the Corbinian encounter, a Hillmanian seeing-through, the modes of consciousness Nasr insists modernity has foreclosed. Spinoza’s democracy inherits philosophy’s more general problem of adequation: it claims to be the final and adequate form of prophetic life while dismantling the conditions of reception that would make prophetic life possible. Prophecy poses a peculiar threat to philosophy in its privileging of ambiguity and receptivity over philosophy’s insistence on decision, assertion, and total legibility. The question remains whether a better philosophical decision could stand in genuine relation to ways of seeing and knowing heterogeneous to the enterprise of philosophy.
The Cusp of the Curve
Between the theses of Spinoza and Nasr, we face a conundrum, despite the asymmetries in their respective problematics. The Laruellean critique has already placed Spinoza’s democratic resolution under pressure from within; Nasr arrives to confirm that pressure from without, diagnosing in the actually existing modern world precisely the atrophied conditions of reception (also partially intimated by Laruelle’s analysis). Their points of convergence and departure are legible enough. For Spinoza, prophecy finds its evolution in the disavowal of gatekeepers of esoteric knowledge, delivering us to a world where sovereign power is distributed to all in equal share. For Nasr, this is a move that reduces the prophetic register to a simple allocation of political sovereignty while dispensing with—or detrimentally sublating—the substrate from which creative imagination flows. Spinoza’s view prefigures democracies to come while failing to perceive their future failures—not to mention the libidinal conditions that have either precipitated the collapse of democracy in the modern world or reveal the inadequacy of our operative notions and poor enactments of the secular democratic ideal. Nasr, having the benefit of centuries of modernity in view, diagnoses the modern subject’s failures (democratically oriented or otherwise) in terms of a tragic evacuation of cosmic receptivity: the capacity for prophetic reception not merely enclosed by or condensed upon institutional structures, as Spinoza assumed, but diminished by the modern world’s systematic dismantling of the very conditions that made reception possible in the first place.
Nasr’s position, however, occupies a relatively safer vantage that risks remaining perpetually vindicated in the absence of any marked shift in political or socioeconomic conditions: as long as the wreckage of history continues to pile up without intervention, the lament of lost traditions only gathers more appeal. His position raises other questions. How would we confirm the restoration of collective receptivity at any given point in the struggle to extricate ourselves from the trap of modernity—and what would that struggle even look like for Nasr? In the lecture, Nasr himself concedes that transformation on any significant scale will likely require “some kind of catastrophe waking us up”—a tragic realism that is neither quietist nor activist in character.10 Could the fury of a righteous violence against modernity’s many oppressions register, in Nasr’s terms, as a revival of our capacity to receive what he identifies as primordial forces? Or does the very nature of that receptivity resist the organized, mobilized, democratized forms that collective political struggle requires? While the Promethean conceit of modernity may be the cause of its many ills, an idle wait for the right apocalyptic flashpoint hardly seems a viable alternative.
Hydrogen Communism or Hydrogen Barbarism?
For those intent on reclaiming prophecy for secular ends, we should reject the idealism of Nasr while nonetheless pursuing something like a negotiation of the divide between Spinoza’s immanentist transmutation of prophecy into politics and the demand for a consciousness receptivity exceeding the human image that Nasr’s work keeps alive. I am going to call this hydrogen communism.
The hydrogen line, which I characterized earlier as a pre-civilizational commons, might be better cast as an “outside” to civilizing force, one through which science continues to grasp at yet-to-be-discovered cosmic affinities from a position of modern terrestrial alienation. The irony should not be lost on us that humanity has collectively reserved this singular channel for the reception of an otherworldliness through which only a handful of anomalous blips has ever been received. Amid the crumbling of the present, we have outsourced this receptivity to a legally bounded frequency spectrum and the machines that monitor it, while devoting every other frequency band, real and metaphorical, to reproducing a social and political context that has long foreclosed the liberated form of life Spinoza envisioned.
The precondition to envisioning and actualizing new forms of life is, as Nasr suggests, bound to our relationship with the imaginal—something akin to what he identifies as cosmic consciousness, though it need not carry a strict metaphysical inflection, whether secular or religious. As for its secular variant, we are once again at the nexus of a familiar problem, perhaps most aptly intimated in Mark Fisher’s unfinished essay “Acid Communism.” While Fisher would almost certainly have erred on the side of Spinoza, the acid communist project nonetheless risks repeating Spinoza’s troubled appropriation of imagination, potentially enslaving the imaginal register to a definite political will. Spinoza nonetheless rightly identifies the problem with leaving prophecy unblemished by critical approaches: without such intervention we risk reverting to a world where religious authority and the cultic configuration colonize the very spaces from which the otherworldly speaks. This question haunts whatever interventions Nasr might endorse.
Rather than rush to flesh out a full-blown philosophical concept of hydrogen communism, we should allow it first to thrive as a mere image, one for the time being unmarred by the axe of philosophical decision. Perhaps the image is best cast against an implied opposite of sorts: hydrogen barbarism.
Hydrogen barbarism is, simply put, the image of the total immolation of life, civilization, and the conditions for their possibility through nuclear annihilation. It evokes a political ontology of pure decimation. It finds among its precursors the hydrogen fusion at the core of thermonuclear weaponry. The image of hydrogen barbarism emerges through operationalizing hydrogen into a weapon: a triggered chain in which one annihilation ignites another, each explosion calling forth a greater one. The bomb is civilization’s own image returned to itself as pure destruction—the forced fusion of isotopes that exist freely throughout the cosmos, here compressed into a totality beyond all resistance, difference itself annihilated in the service of constituted political sovereignty. It is here that we must interrogate the rational sovereignty at the heart of Spinoza’s democratic project: is the form of reason in which the authority of Spinoza’s demos has been grounded a potential vector for the deprivation of life and imagination through the idiom of the constituted civil order? Is it possible to think the freedom we impute to the democratic ideal apart from the march of civilization? Does civilization, and the processes that comprise its development, necessarily tend toward the precipice of a one-button war of attrition? Is politics itself the self-annihilating terminal displacement of those forces and entities deemed alien or irrational to the constituted order?
I raise these questions rhetorically, to spark the possibility of an alternative: that we think toward an enlivened form of being together beyond the totalizing circumscriptions of wholly rational social organization.
Consider how we might aestheticize the image of the SETI project—its standing apart from the ordinary forms of productive expenditure—as a gesture toward an outside for collective receptivity. It offers an apt metaphor for thinking through and feeling through how we might begin to move beyond the long conjuncture of modernity. On one hand, the SETI project is an egregious, galactic-scale form of non-productive expenditure: an endeavor intent on making contact with beings yet unknown, while our own epistemological orientation toward the world we already inhabit remains marked by internal alienation. It is here that Nasr and Bataille nearly find common cause: we have offloaded an intimate dimension of experience to a function that mechanistically rummages through scattered data strewn across the cosmos. The reclamation of this function would be, in the first instance, aesthetic—as this piece has attempted—a wrenching back open of the imaginal aperture that Spinoza closed when he announced the triumph of reason through Christ. Yet, to Spinoza’s credit, we would want to leave intact the prophetic equality espoused in his democratic intervention.
To be sure, hydrogen communism is not a political program—but this is not to say it lacks a political dimension. It would be disingenuous for me to assert that the notion of hydrogen communism does not emerge out of a sensibility which imagines a liberation more radical than a constituted democratic order. Hydrogen communism could also be imagined as incendiary as its more cruel counterpart, but also as ambient and ubiquitous as the element itself. To get on the hydrogen line entails a form of attunement that is at once familiar and alien—it presupposes a mode of communication that suspends outbound transmission so that forms of alterity might appear in its most sublime field. As an aesthetic posture, it could certainly afford us new perspectives—perspectives themselves are cheap though; in the first instance, hydrogen communism would cultivate a sensitivity to a general cosmic pathos. A bold claim, perhaps: there is no transformation of this world without an aestheticization of our shared wounds. Post-Spinozist prophets are receivers of sublime transmissions and transmuters of the shared wound. If there are any good politics, they begin here.
While I am in no position to deploy a fully developed theory of hydrogen communism here, I feel more impelled to indulge further the aesthetic associations sampled in this piece. I am most inclined, however, to return to the initial impetus for this exploratory essay: I witnessed in the return of Boards of Canada a festival and sense of community rarely found in political spaces online—robust in its indulgence of mystery, ludic joys, and a measured sense of shared vulnerability amid the sentiments exchanged between the band’s adherents. The quasi-religious character of this celebration, which essentially welcomed the return of hallowed prophets of our age, continues to raise questions I hope to explore in future writing.
Coda
If you made it this far—thank you. Receiving responses to my first essay on Boards of Canada was uniquely exciting, and I can hardly imagine replicating those resonances as future writings on Inferno move deeper into the weeds of philosophy. My goal nonetheless is to probe thoughtfully the references the new album so eagerly invites, drawing connections to thoughts and images that extend beyond the record itself.
Followers of the Split Infinities blog (the name itself a quiet tip of the hat to BoC) will already be familiar with the Acid Horizon and LEPHT HAND projects, which in their distinct ways broach the political and the psychedelic through theoretical intervention. My musical project SEREPTIE emerged within the atmosphere of BoC’s autochthonic energies—imagined as the eventual aftermath of Boards of Canada: a lo-fi ambient world both inebriated and asphyxiated by the detritus of the apocalypse BoC heralds.
In this essay appears an image from Vintagia: I Ching Oracle for Psychogeography and Creative Discovery—an oracle deck I developed as a tool for navigating creative and spatial experience through the hexagrams of the I Ching. As I mentioned in the introduction, a second limited run of the deck will be printed in July. If you’d like to support my work, please purchase a deck.
An even better way to support the network I am helping to build is to take a course at Acid Horizon Research Commons. We offer rigorous, accessible courses at the intersection of philosophy, politics, and various other forms of theory.
Federico Campagna, Prophetic Culture: Recreation for Adolescents (London: Bloomsbury, 2021).
Seyyed Hossein Nasr, "In the Beginning Was Consciousness," Dudleian Lecture, Harvard Divinity School, 2003. Available on YouTube.
“Searching for Interstellar Communications” — Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison, Nature 184 (1959), 844–846. DOI: 10.1038/184844a0. Full text at http://www.coseti.org/morris_0.htm
Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1988). See also “The Notion of Expenditure” in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927–1939, ed. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), for Bataille’s earlier formulation of the restricted and general economy.
Norman O. Brown, Apocalypse &/or Metamorphosis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), p.102
Brown, Apocalypse &/or Metamorphosis, p.100.
Baruch Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, trans. R.H.M. Elwes (1883), Chapter 17. Full text available at Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/989/989-h/989-h.htm. Spinoza cites Numbers 11:29.
Brown, Apocalypse &/or Metamorphosis, p.111.
François Laruelle, “Science and Philosophy: A Global Re-Evaluation,” in En tant qu’un: la ‘non-philosophie’ expliquée aux philosophes (Paris: Aubier, 1991), 79–115. Translated by Jeremy R. Smith.
Nasr, “In the Beginning Was Consciousness”.
Halfway through because I was so excited to read your take on these BoC drips and related visual overstimulii! Will give a proper read I the morning, fantastic to see this depth already. Thanks for the BOC consciousness content bounty and shared excitement!
Exceptional, first time here. 📡