The Filatory: Compendium I. gnOme. 2016.
read it at Google Books
This collection marks new experimental domains for The Filatory, an unidentified circle that operates with the intent of concealment: re-creating the impulse of secret societies in an age of instant exposure to all kinds of thought. The specific offering found here is a joint effort of several international factions, textual fragments that are both offered in original English and translated into such. The Filatory: Compendium I generates ideas that displace expression, taking on a life and clearing a space of their own.
CONTENTS: Strands. Book I: Secrecy, Suspicion, The Writing of the Haunt, Architectonics, Counter-Prayer, Collection, Artificiality.
Book II: Smoothness, Bones, Laceration, Threading, Layers, Emblems, Apparatus, Saturation, Residue, Slippage, Estrangement, Pockets, Gestures, Distractions, Dreams, The Call.
“This Compendium is a pandemonic response to the apollonian data-networks. Swarm-written by a legion of damned souls crawling their way through Negarestanian worm-holes to gather in a global conspiracy for committing a multitude of sins, The Filatory Compendium will kindle an ambivalent worldwide revolution of darkness, despair and joy. Inspired by the ancient arts of commentary, collection and murmuring, the writings weaved by this secret society are directed to those few ‘endangering individuals’ onto whose bodies ‘the effects of secrecy are inscribed’ —so they can act as non-ingenuous transmitters of the deepest vibrational pleasures of sin. ‘The secret reveals much more than it conceals at times,’ whispers the acephalous, multi-tendriled beast. The gates of Hell have been ajar for a while, and the old sinners of wisdom—the ones who once witnessed Dante passing by— are walking among us in disguise. Weaponize si(g)ns. The thread is out there . . .” — Germán Sierra
While the past few gnOme releases have either reeked of contrivance or been written in styles too simple and stiff to sufficiently match the often esoteric subject matter, The Filatory thankfully exemplifies what this acephalic press does best: the presentation of texts that force the reader to take the content on its own terms via negations or obscurations of authorial identity. Being both the product of multiple, anonymous international sources--minding the work's spirit, I refuse to say "authors"--this volume has been written, quite relevantly, in an interstitial mode often effectively shifting between prose and poetry (sometimes entering prose-poem territory); this high fidelity of form to content, true of all vital writing following post-structuralism, makes this book far more successful than the majority of gnOme's previous publications.
The first chapter of the first book focuses on Secrecy, and, in a meta-manner typical to the many chapters to come, demonstrates the oblique manner that one must assume when writing about what only ever reveals itself darkly and indirectly, in whispers and shadows. Being itself the condition of certain forms knowledge which cannot be known, or, at best, known on highly exclusive terms--and even then only peripherally--Secrecy is best accepted as aconceptual; that is, resistant to any definitive mental assimilation by nature, similar to Bataillean forces such as sovereignty and transgression. This first chapter seems to establish Secrecy as a context in which to approach the excesses of both actual and virtual realities not yet--and perhaps never to be--fully correlated via direct, visceral experience or impersonal intellection; in essence, a context in which to approach the aconcepts presented by the chapters to come.
The second chapter, perhaps the most lucid one of the entire compendium, focuses on Suspicion. Obviously relating to Secrecy, this chapter almost could be a condensation of the history of human knowledge as an advanced form of distraction, as well as the corresponding half-conscious refusal to accept the possibility of a larger context which could very well trivialize anything one can claim to know: Writing becomes a subjugation of the mind to the restless movement of the hand; the body itself conspiring to expand its shadow over the probing mind so that it may never know "too much". And if this inversion of the usual assumptions about mind-body relations weren't devastating enough, there's a perspective offered that the writing hand is not merely a particularly complicated spasm--a nervous tic--but instead is the generator of the idea-tools to be used as fodder for the impending ascendancy of a supra-human order (AI, aliens or something else altogether? Take your pick). If you are familiar with Lovecraft's famous quote on the merciful inability of the human mind, at least as of now, to correlate its contents, you will likely sense that this chapter had emerged from a mindset similarly fraught with barely pronounceable suspicions.
A few of the less effective chapters in the first book are The Writing of the Haunt and Artificiality; the former, with its sustained macabre and spectral metaphors for the impossibility of writing about a past secretly entwined with the present and future, will begin to reek of heavily exerted effort to some readers; the latter chapter, despite the self-acknowledging openness of its artifice, seems to fail in establishing any strong meta-textual purpose, unless you think starting every sentence with, "this is the writing of...", achieves a kind of incantatory effect which draws attention to the emptiness of form in lieu of any real content most likely expected by the average reader.
I will withhold commentary about the second book because it basically continues the same half-revealing and half-concealing approach toward its subject matter as demonstrated in the first book; motivated readers can find out the details for themselves. But mainly, The Filatory is an admirable attempt to write of what lingers as floaters in the mind's eye and phantom limbs along the body's periphery without abandoning the spirit of Secrecy as a kind of methodology for approaching the aconceptual. Yes, there are the usual flaws prevalent in much contemporary theory: syntax either too fragmentary or voluminous, obfuscatory passages and overworked conceptualizations. However, in a time when writers seem to be putting more time into social networking than actual writing, it's refreshing to read a publication that blatantly denies popular indulgences of authorial identity—and gnOme should be much appreciated by readers-on-the- fringe for this unique agenda of literary abnegation! - J.D.G.
While the past few gnOme releases have either reeked of contrivance or been written in styles too simple and stiff to sufficiently match the often esoteric subject matter, The Filatory thankfully exemplifies what this acephalic press does best: the presentation of texts that force the reader to take the content on its own terms via negations or obscurations of authorial identity. Being both the product of multiple, anonymous international sources--minding the work's spirit, I refuse to say "authors"--this volume has been written, quite relevantly, in an interstitial mode often effectively shifting between prose and poetry (sometimes entering prose-poem territory); this high fidelity of form to content, true of all vital writing following post-structuralism, makes this book far more successful than the majority of gnOme's previous publications.
The first chapter of the first book focuses on Secrecy, and, in a meta-manner typical to the many chapters to come, demonstrates the oblique manner that one must assume when writing about what only ever reveals itself darkly and indirectly, in whispers and shadows. Being itself the condition of certain forms knowledge which cannot be known, or, at best, known on highly exclusive terms--and even then only peripherally--Secrecy is best accepted as aconceptual; that is, resistant to any definitive mental assimilation by nature, similar to Bataillean forces such as sovereignty and transgression. This first chapter seems to establish Secrecy as a context in which to approach the excesses of both actual and virtual realities not yet--and perhaps never to be--fully correlated via direct, visceral experience or impersonal intellection; in essence, a context in which to approach the aconcepts presented by the chapters to come.
The second chapter, perhaps the most lucid one of the entire compendium, focuses on Suspicion. Obviously relating to Secrecy, this chapter almost could be a condensation of the history of human knowledge as an advanced form of distraction, as well as the corresponding half-conscious refusal to accept the possibility of a larger context which could very well trivialize anything one can claim to know: Writing becomes a subjugation of the mind to the restless movement of the hand; the body itself conspiring to expand its shadow over the probing mind so that it may never know "too much". And if this inversion of the usual assumptions about mind-body relations weren't devastating enough, there's a perspective offered that the writing hand is not merely a particularly complicated spasm--a nervous tic--but instead is the generator of the idea-tools to be used as fodder for the impending ascendancy of a supra-human order (AI, aliens or something else altogether? Take your pick). If you are familiar with Lovecraft's famous quote on the merciful inability of the human mind, at least as of now, to correlate its contents, you will likely sense that this chapter had emerged from a mindset similarly fraught with barely pronounceable suspicions.
A few of the less effective chapters in the first book are The Writing of the Haunt and Artificiality; the former, with its sustained macabre and spectral metaphors for the impossibility of writing about a past secretly entwined with the present and future, will begin to reek of heavily exerted effort to some readers; the latter chapter, despite the self-acknowledging openness of its artifice, seems to fail in establishing any strong meta-textual purpose, unless you think starting every sentence with, "this is the writing of...", achieves a kind of incantatory effect which draws attention to the emptiness of form in lieu of any real content most likely expected by the average reader.
I will withhold commentary about the second book because it basically continues the same half-revealing and half-concealing approach toward its subject matter as demonstrated in the first book; motivated readers can find out the details for themselves. But mainly, The Filatory is an admirable attempt to write of what lingers as floaters in the mind's eye and phantom limbs along the body's periphery without abandoning the spirit of Secrecy as a kind of methodology for approaching the aconceptual. Yes, there are the usual flaws prevalent in much contemporary theory: syntax either too fragmentary or voluminous, obfuscatory passages and overworked conceptualizations. However, in a time when writers seem to be putting more time into social networking than actual writing, it's refreshing to read a publication that blatantly denies popular indulgences of authorial identity—and gnOme should be much appreciated by readers-on-the- fringe for this unique agenda of literary abnegation! - J.D.G.
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