The first volume of COLLAPSE is concerned with mathematics and mysticism, each the other’s evil twin. Discussions of Jung, Qabbala and Hassan i Sabbah are interwoven with various sorts of abstract nonsense; such implausible entities as Riemann zeroes and topological spaces are diversely connected to the operations of terrorist camouflage and the unbearable, inhuman alienness of physical reality.

The result could well have been a brain-curdling abomination (and Lovecraft does indeed get a mention, in Nick Land’s essay on Qabbala, as the writer who “understood the epistemological affinity” between the scientific will-to-knowledge and the unholy, feline-imperilling curiosity of the “programmatic” occultist), but for the most part the contributors are disquietingly lucid.

Alain Badiou grumbles about the wanton empiricism of biology and cognitive science, and suggests that the obscurity of the primes is due to a “deficiency of thought on the algebraic side”: it is not number itself, but “the operational dialectic of multiplication and addition” that “has yet to arrive at its true concept”. Matthew Watkins takes the contrary view that the primes manifest the “vibrations of a mysterious ’something’ underlying the number system”, and offers an intriguingly partial glimpse of the mythos of this “something”.

The editors’ after-the-fact rubric for the first volume is given as “numerical materialism”, which I take to be the bastard offspring of the aforementioned evil twins. It is in the domain of number that mathematics is most readily intuited as taking hold of the concrete, and mysticism can be defined as the belief that this hold extends “all the way down”: that what at first presents itself as an abstract order, separate from appearances, in fact permeates appearances and nourishes them from within. For the gnostic and the qabbalist, mathematics functions as an occult rationale, and the madness of mathematical reason – its inhuman productivity – is posited as the ultimate source of the apparent irrationality of things.

Even Badiou, who takes great pains to demystify the matheme and disavows any notion of mathematics as “foundational” for the sciences, deploys mathematical themes precisely in order to conjure up the “generic” and the “unnameable” as that which – through the agency of a local truth – diagonalises and ultimately wrenches apart the logic of any given world. Thus, while physical reality may not be, for Badiou, the realisation of a “never-ending math equation”, it is nevertheless the case that mathematics alone provides the means for a formalisation of the problem of the Real.

I admit that I got nowhere with Thomas Duzer’s “On the mathematics of intensity”, which seemed somewhat long on aphorism and somewhat short on either mathematics or logic; it may repay a second look. Reza Negarastani’s “The militarization of peace” is most compelling on the subject of the “takfiri under taqiyya” as the lethal bearer of a specifically Islamic heresy, in which the entire cosmos is defined in advance as a holy space to which the various Quranic injunctions concerning the defence (in extremis) of Islamic territories therefore apply at all times and in full force. According to this heresy, the “return to Islam” is thus a movement of global desertification, a thorough-going purification of reality. It may well be that the proper response to such a heresy is not at all a “moderate” and “tolerant” Islam, but rather an uncompromisingly “intolerant” assertion of orthodoxy.

Gregory Chaitin’s “Epistemology as information theory” is as delightful as the interview with Nick Bostrom, “Existential Risk”, is sobering. I enjoyed especially Bostrom’s concluding remark:

Widening people’s thinking, to me, has the feeling of a cliche, I don’t know if there’s a systematic bias towards narrowness in people’s thinking. There might be in specific cases. But maybe some people’s thinking ought to be more focused rather than widened.

Given the context – Bostrom directs a research program on “the future of humanity” – one is ominously reminded of Johnson’s saying that “when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully”…

COLLAPSE 1 also features art by Keith Tilford, and an “introduction to ABJAD” by “Incognitum”, and costs all of six quid. I am rather looking forward to volume 2.

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