Ahistorical Immaterialism

A Secret History of the LOUTS Research Unit

Ahistorical Immaterialism is a temporal theory about the way that immaterial forces make impacts on the physical plane and manifest throughout human society at all levels. First postulated by ancient shamans, mages, priestesses and priests in times immemorial, the idea that forces of the unseen beyond the ken of the rational mind might just have something to do with the way history appears to play out from our time-bound perspective, has once again been gaining traction as the limits to rationality come into the sight of society at large.

One of the key ideas of Ahistorical Immaterialism is the postulation that events on higher planes of reality do not need to have “happened” or will “happen” in the same “time zone” of physical manifestation to have an impact on things that are happening in what human’s experience as “now.” The energy from a supernova that exploded thousands of light years ago may just now be hitting our planet after all. Its effect is no less apparent in the day-to-day goings on of your average shop keeper, but it still remains. The same is true of those beings gathered inside the timeless inner library of the upper astral plane, who might release a book down into the dreamworld, from what in our perspective, might have been a thousand years ago, but it takes an artist or scribe until “now” to pluck the relevant ideas out of the aether and brings them to fruition in so-called present time through the work of the quill.

But where did the theoretical underpinnings of Ahistorical Immaterialism come from to begin with? (Besides the proverbial psychedelic campfires and shaman sessions of the ancient past.) In order to satisfy the rational mind about irrationality, a theory was needed and to that end, a group of dissident fringe intellectuals came to the fore and answered the call. These new-yet-timeless ideas about Ahistorical Immaterialism started to sprout around the end of the last millennium and in its first decade, but only in a small group of weirdos who liked to hang out on online message boards.

Theorist and researcher Sardaku Sawai was a formative member of this renegade group who became something of a cybernetically inclined research unit when they all started working together. He was teaching at the Free School of Momentary Cognition in Gary, Indiana when he met Amity MacHale. The Free School had been set up by wealthy folks who had escaped from the Chicago suburbs to start a new life for themselves in a place most other people were actually trying to get out of, but who did not want their kids to go to the local public schools. But that’s another story. In Saradaku’s free time, tired from leading field trips into the ruins of the Midwest rust belt, she would go online to try and find people who shared their quirky interests. Eventually they stumbled across Amity.

Amity was a historian without a job, but was supported by her wealthy parents who were corporate lawyers in Bentonville, Arkansas. She had recently published a livejournal post called Slaking the Thirst for Rational Cause and Effect in Historical Analysis. This was just the kind of thing Sawai was interested in and the two hit off, and started chatting on IRC.

Even though they met through cyber systems, they were quick to realize the Internet itself was not all it was cracked up to be, even as it allowed the spread of their ideas and the finding of the others.

Slaking the Thirst became the driving force in determining the methods and ideas that would synchronistically converge around the strange attractor of what came to be called Ahistorical Immaterialism.
Music critic and redoubtable raver from Detroit, Marc E. Piscator, also started logging on to the webwork of messages boards that became the initial hub for the movement. His analysis of so called “Hauntological Graffiti” (and his paper of the same name) became another node in what was an emerging field of research. A few other intellectuals, inside and outside the academy, came to be a part of the loose association, and it wasn’t long before they formalized their emerging group as the LOUTS, Lurkers Outside Time/Space.

The LOUTS held their first virtual conference in October of 2001. It was not lost on them that a hole in the pattern of the future had been ripped open by the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. What came in its aftermath, particularly the further enforcement of the burgeoning surveillance state, in the U.S., was a focus of much of their research at the time. They were also interested in the negative effects of corporate capitalism, and what to do about it in their version of the then present, but they were also just as averse to crony communism, and so the theories of Marx and Engels held virtually no appeal. It was their search for something else that led them further explorations of Wilhelm Reich’s orgone energy. This was because quite a few of the members had been dissident psychoanalysts. They were far more attracted to the lineage of Carl Jung and Wilhelm Reich in psychology than that of B.F. Skinner and his reductionist worldview.

While they deeply respected the work of Wilhelm Reich and his formulation of the life force as orgone, they weren’t always as convinced about his avowed socialism. Yet it was while they were doing some charity work bringing orgone accumulators to the inner-city urban gardens of Gary to help boost vegetable production that Stevie Brooks had an out of body experience. His spirit guide during the experience transported him to a realm of oracle scrolls where the words and messages were not written at all in any kind of linear order, but were instead made by a more metaphysically advanced form of William S. Burroughs cut-up method. Brooks returned from this voyage with a seed planted inside him and from that he wrote the book Clockwork Cronyism in Corporate Capitalism and Communism. It was also at that point he could no longer deny something existed inside of him beyond just his physical body.
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A complete kundalini awakening experience then unfolded with the blossoming of his third eye.

The book starts from a consideration of how time is completely different on the astral plane and in the dream world, and how yet the astral and the dream world still have major effects upon events in the material world. From their it is argued that immaterial events outside of time and space have direct impacts upon what is perceived as time and space now. Only this isn’t how it really is, only how are brains sort it out so we don’t get fried by the overload of too much sensory input. As other hangers on of the movement started adding their own writings and critiques it led to the further development of Ahistorical Immaterialism within this strange milieu. Another key aspect of the book was how the creation of clocks had balkanized the minds of humans to accept the working conditions brought on by both capitalism and communism.

To get out of this conundrum, the LOUTS investigated various ways to move beyond the limits of the dialectic. Asger Jorn’s triolectic system was tried out, and once it was tied in with homemade analog ternary computers, the fun really got cracking and cranked up among the LOUTS. Triolectical Immaterialism thus became a subfield of the research and activity.

Ahistorical immaterialism thus dispenses in many cases with logic altogether, yet at other times, goes beyond the polarizing rhetoric associated with binaries, and applies the logic of triolectical immaterialism to human civilization. This then began to have economic implications.

All human beings must engage in economic activity for the necessities of life.​

In the writings of Karl Marx he identified four modes of production that humanity has already used: hunting and gathering (sometimes called primitive communism), slavery, feudalism (serfdom), and capitalism. Then his big idea: communism. He hadn’t foreseen, however, that just as capitalism created a new class of people, industrial workers and their CEOs, the communist also created their own social order with their apparatchiks who never did any work. He also never foresaw how many trust fund kids doing bong hits and playing video games would be the main promoters of communism.
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Clearly a different way was needed. This was when the LOUTS realized since a lot of stuff didn’t make sense anyway, surrealism would be a potential model for a new economic theory and practice. The whole area of “automating” became fruitful, especially when applied to car culture in the United States. (Automating is as much about cars and other vehicles joining together in sexual congress as it is the “absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern” in the process of picture making.) Automating thus became the real “motor of history” for the LOUTS.

In the aggregate, surrealist economics means that every society relies on unconscious eruptions for injection of new ideas into the modes of production. The LOUTS had decided that both capitalism and communism were pretty damn boring, and the use of other methods employed by the surrealists, such as frottage or the exquisite corpse had not yet been explored enough in their application to money, trade and organization of the workforce.

When the numbers on Wall Street get used as stimulus for the creation of abstract electronic music, for instance, new possibilities are liable to emerge that no businessman would ever be liable to think about. As the LOUTS continued their work, the theory of Ahistorical Immaterialism caught on in fringe artistic groups, such as the steamwave movement, trash sculpturists, and among anti-foodie diner denizens, among myriad others along the fractal fringe. The fact that history is not solely caused by economic activity has liberated a generation of intellectuals who are now free to pursue other ideas and systems outside of those that have been handed down.

Who knows what yet might happen. The LOUTS were only the beginning.

.:. .:. .:.

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