Spinal Catastrophism: A Secret History

by Thomas Moynihan, Iain Hamilton Grant (Foreword)

The historical continuity of spinal catastrophism, traced across multiform encounters between philosophy, psychology, biology, and geology.

Drawing on cryptic intimations in the work of J. G. Ballard, Georges Bataille, William Burroughs, Andre Leroi-Gourhan, Elaine Morgan, and Friedrich Nietzsche, in the late twentieth century Daniel Barker formulated the axioms of spinal catastrophism: If human morphology, upright posture, and the possibility of language are the ramified accidents of natural history, then psychic ailments are ultimately afflictions of the spine, which itself is a scale model of biogenetic trauma, a portable map of the catastrophic events that shaped that atrocity exhibition of evolutionary traumata, the sick orthograde talking mammal.

Tracing its provenance through the biological notions of phylogeny and "organic memory" that fueled early psychoanalysis, back into idealism, nature philosophy, and romanticism, and across multiform encounters between philosophy, psychology, biology, and geology, Thomas Moynihan reveals the historical continuity of spinal catastrophism. From psychoanalysis and myth to geology and neuroanatomy, from bioanalysis to chronopathy, from spinal colonies of proto-minds to the retroparasitism of the CNS, from "railway spine" to Elizabeth Taylor's lost gill-slits, this extravagantly comprehensive philosophical adventure uses the spinal cord as a guiding thread to rediscover forgotten pathways in modern thought.

Moynihan demonstrates that, far from being an fanciful notion rendered obsolete by advances in biology, spinal catastrophism dramatizes fundamental philosophical problematics of time, identity, continuity, and the transcendental that remain central to any attempt to reconcile human experience with natural history.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, History, Theory, Science, Psychology, Anthropology

332 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2019

Reviews

[Aung Sett Kyaw Min · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is a heady task to follow in the footsteps of the CCRU tradition while staying sane and level-headed throughout. Moynihan exhumes the forgotten progenitors of speculative philosophy of the spine whose corpses were retroburied by their posterity from the future, in the process recapitulating Intelligence's torturous odyssey towards more sublimated forms of self-torment. The more complexified and ramified Intelligence becomes (life is nothing other than self-collapse), the more it accelerates into the future--the future arrives sooner. The spine tracks this odyssey. As "agglutinated Time", the spine is the crowning of the hominid brain, at which point the internal states and simulations start to spill and leak into the 'external' environment. Until at long last, intelligence becomes indistinguishable from the environment (incidentally, this is a solution to the Fermi's Paradox).
Can any of us go to bed at night knowing that our waking and even sleeping life is a traumatic and delusional dream-flower of our spinal nerve-tree?

[Jonfaith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Do we steadfastly stand only to answer the call of entropy’s dark laughter?

This is Theory-Fiction at its best. Sure I loathed aspects of it but the connective tissue is incredible, but remember much of the adhesion is invented: think Borges or (worse) Lovecraft. There’s considerable jargon for the reader to scale. For example:

What then is the spinal column, if not a megalith raised to the mineralizing trace of the organism’s diaspora into its own bloating sensorium—each level of axial segmentation a monument to further neural self-entanglement—dorsally fulgurating our cephalocaudel axis, an outward memory of inward collapse.

If this trajectory bristles, then dear reader, skip it. But if not, then please enjoy Burroughs and Bataille plotting the ascension of tadpoles informed with geotrauma as precursor to internet psychotherapy, one larded nicely with German Idealism. As we transitioned to bipeds our ancestors struggled with a new perspective, a shift from olfactory to visual and the strange disorientation of living on a sphere with the apperception of flat ground.

[João Reis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Spinal Catastrophism: A Secret History, by Thomas Moynihan.
Not exactly a philosophy book, as it doesn't contain a new theory or idea, but rather a book on historical, biological and philosophical outdated (often amusing, but silly) perspectives on the so-called spinal catastrophism. More a book of form than a book of content. Nonetheless, it's quite entertaining.

[Theo Austin-Evans · Rating 5 out of 5]

Better than any work of Lovecraft, contains theoretical formulations and trends one would actually like to pursue for their own sake (not for their rigour or truth-value etc. but just for sheer balls to the wall eccentricity/extremity) as they are a true pleasure to read. I can certainly see how one could despise this work, seeing it as a genealogy of long-dead scientific hypotheses largely from the 18th and 19th century which are almost laughable by our modern standards, containing fake authors like the notorious Daniel C. Barker (a figure conjured up by the CCRU to spout total batshit musings on ideas of geotrauma, a kind of literalisation of Freud’s assertions in his Beyond the Pleasure Principle), perhaps worst of all for its incessant neologisms (which I will perhaps find grating in a few years time - Moynihan certainly doesn’t have anywhere close to the justificatory ground that someone like Heidegger had for fashioning these novel terms). However, as somebody who has long extolled the virtues of lyrical invention over nearly any other metric, I have to say that I absolutely loved this book, I think Moynihan, despite my prior reservations, has a great style.

Moynihan’s book certainly isn’t perfect, I think his postscript is particularly bothersome and I am beyond bored by anyone who spends any real length of time contending with antinatalism/humanity’s potential self-erasure, but he has certainly done a fine job of explicating a strain of thought (by no means a secret history of course) worth digging through. Probably as good as theory-fiction is ever going to get but I haven’t touched Cyclonopedia yet so we’ll see, I could be wrong. I recommend this to anyone who has ever wanted to crawl inside a Burroughs or Lovecraft text and pause the narrative just so that they can read the fictitious tomes they mention on their shelves. I’ve also got to say that there are plenty of potential great band names in here if you’re so inclined, they line practically every page. Listening to either dissonant atonal no wave music or sleazy techno á la Tuning Circuits or some of Aphex Twin’s more intense work from the 90’s just ties the whole package up with a wonderful little repulsive bow. Actually shameless self-promo but shuffle this, consider it a lovingly made playlist I spent all night putting together just for you, the privileged reader of this truly half-arsed review:


https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5Lb...

[Michael A. · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm not sure what to make of this text. I like the orientation of it, that is, it seems to me that it is attempting an absolute decentering of the mind/subject, not just decentering, but a claim that these concepts are "non-natural" - perhaps a demystifying or destruction. It takes seriously our body/spine and our place in nature. What Moynihan is doing here is tracing a genealogy of thought, of something he's calling Spinal Catastrophism. I think a good snapshot of what this is can be found on pg 282:

"...the body is a mnemic archive of deep time .... all human experience is formed of the epiphenomenal recurrences, repercussions, and recombinations of a ramified cosmic trauma that stretches from the stelliferous all the way to the sagittal. If the universe is one giant memory, then individuality can only be understood as retrograde amnesia."

In other words, perhaps Hegel was wrong... maybe spirit actually is a bone!

Thinkers that subscribe to this view include: Ballard, Bataille, Burroughs, Leroi-Gourhan, Nietzsche, and someone called D.C. Barker (more on him below) among others. I thought the sections on Schelling and his crew were particularly good.

Unfortunately a lot of the writing I just couldn't jive with. A lot of scientific jargon and what seem to be neologisms pop up left and right. This in itself isn't inherently bad but it can jerk you out of the narrative. And to go back to D.C. Barker - this person isn't real in the sense that we typically use the word real. He was apparently created by other members of people associated with the CCRU. This ties into their hyperstition stuff, which I find somewhat interesting if entirely too self-serious. That's sort of the problem with this book - it presents itself as if it is giving you some forbidden occult knowledge or something like that ("A Secret History" is the subtitle after all), when it is really just another academic text on the market, just the same as any other in that regard. It's I think probably too far steeped into that gnostic/mystic/magical tradition of thinking that I just have a distaste for (both for rational and irrational reasons). It's not really in the forefront but I feel like it is there lurking, perhaps as it is in all rational thought....

The pessimism at the end of the text was also pretty unsatisfying and kind of stupid, I don't really think obesity has the cosmic significance as Moynihan seems to think it does, but it does follow logically I think from the general idea of the body(particularly the spine)/nature being a sort of transcendental condition for reality as such.

That being said, it did open my horizons of thought, it gave me a lot to think about, and I think it really pushed me down a path I was already going as far as immanence and nature and time. I can't ask for much more than that, even if the writing had too much jargon and had too much occult aesthetic, and probably too much pessimism (even though I consider myself rather pessimistic, it felt a bit ridiculous at times).

3/5 (Liked it)

[Myat Thura Aung · Rating 5 out of 5]

Can all the lurid sufferings of the lucid consciousness and the existential cries and crises be traced back to our rather mundane spinal disease known as the back pain ?
Take a foray into the Spinal Landscape and we'll see, the Spine is a hauntology of the geotraumatic calamities and clamours predating the Precambrian supereon, an archaeological forensic relic of unspeakable atrocities, the osteo-skeletal encryption of the Outside agonies, a convergent centre of cosmic traumas and anorganic dramas. As the blossom of the spinal nerve-tree, the CNS, the plexal nexus of feedback and feedforward calculations and simulations, frees itself from the organic psycho-somatic confines, it leaks away into the outside as the exoskeletal, external cognitive system of tools, machines and Internet of Things. The machinic tendencies accelerate and the future arrives sooner rather precariously. The unfolded existential risks might flash out the apocalyptic dreams of terrific extinctions but the mere oblivion of the conscious systems cannot save us. One might as well dream for an atavistic cnidarian return, in search of lost symmetry, to relive the ancient radial morphology of pure immanence. Yet to escape the cosmotrauma of the wounded galaxies, one might have to take the task of embodying the absolute negativity.
Isn't it the duty of a spine to destroy the Universe ?

[Alexander · Rating 4 out of 5]

"It is the duty of a spine to destroy the universe; or, a spine is the universe’s method of acknowledging this duty to self-destruct."

--

"A chilling image: intelligence—that poor player, with all its cunning and ambition—is just a self-obsolescing moment in expenditure’s cosmic cataract. It emerges to amplify and intensify universal energy dispersal by creating its own supernormal metabolic utopia, before passing on the energetic baton to less retentive and more expellent systems and thus seceding from existence in the process. This may well be the astrobiological life-cycle of Geist: It exists to make us fat and then disappear. In this account, then, the upward surge of the spine is self-cancelling. This would be the ultimate revenge of the vegetative system on the nervous system: the stomach gets the last laugh, turning on the spinal cord—rejecting its influx of nociceptive reality-function—by dragging both into a mutual oblivion of metabolic dysfunction brought on by their own collaborative success. We drink too much Pepsi to go to the stars".

How could I not love this?

Might do a proper review later.

[M · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is no law that says nature must produce beings who are happy. If the Spinal Catastrophists are to be believed, it is really quite the opposite. Sliding out of the somnolent positivity of inorganic repose and into evermore exquisite forms of determinate negation, the evolution of life—or the phenomenology of Spirit—charts nothing more than the autoproduction of increasingly complex neural systems—and their concomitant experiences of excruciation.

In many ways, Spinal Catastrophism is a brother-book to The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. Both chart an essentially pessimistic intellectual history, though where Ligotti excavates horror-fuelled melodrama from the tradition of philosophical pessimism in order to argue in no uncertain terms that life is MALIGNANTLY USELESS, Moynihan is most at home synthesising ideas from minor and forgotten figures of intellectual history and (broadly) letting the horror construct itself, showing how ideas intended to demonstrate the dignity of the human being, the beauty of Spirit’s self-construction and the organic rationality of the cosmos inevitably transform into their opposites: if rationality invades nature via the spinal crucifix, it is ultimately nothing more than a violent infestation; if Spirit requires intelligence as a testament to itself, then abiogenesis is nothing more than the birth of a hyperalgesia whose endless capacity for intensification can only inspire Spirit‘s rueful suicide.

I’d be remiss not to mention Moynihan’s book-spanning engagements with Kant. Like Land, Moynihan brings the Old Jacobin’s delightful intellectual schadenfreude to the surface. Reason is not a gentle arbiter of the conscience—it literally pulls the human body into upright poise, cursing us to skeletomuscular breakdown, aneurysms, heart palpitations, haemorrhoids, and many other maladies. In exchange, we puppets get to embody the dictates of eternal, crystalline rationality. It takes going beyond Kant, of course, to see that reason’s true categorical imperative is the destruction of the universe itself, total reality collapse, ontological extinction, so that nothing even resembling a nervous system can ever exist again.

Intelligence runaway and temporal acceleration are exactly the same. This is as true for Our Own Personal CNSes as it is for the superorganic global brain inexorably capturing us from our tailbones to our skulls. It could never have been different, and it never will be. Far from being a tale of the accidental “locking on” of intelligence onto technological singularity, human cognition does nothing more than waste the very time it makes in increasingly extravagant fashion—nothing alien, perverse, or fundamentally interesting is happening here. There’s no use protesting. What Burton said of melancholy, we could say of the spine: “Get thee gone hence if thou canst not brook it.”

Of course, this is the cheapest, most unambitious solution. The destruction of the local, fleeting, individual spine is a petty palliative. Even Ligotti’s dream of the depopulation of the Earth and the arrest of its rotation brings little comfort when we reflect on the possibility of an entire universe populated by trembling vertebrae. What explosive could blow the universe apart? What machine could permanently secure the sleep of cosmic annihilation? There’s a project worth pursuing. One can certainly dream.

[Holden Rasmussen · Rating 4 out of 5]

My favourite book of 2019. Moynihan has obviously performed tireless research, spent countless hours thinking through various historical texts and documents, and manages to synthesise them into a coherent yet deranging narrative.

Edit: I read this for a secone time with a close friend. It was still an informative and crucial book, but upon my second reading I did grow tired of Moynihan's style. I also disagree with aspects of his understanding of Georges Bataille, which does shade much of his analysis of other thinkers who view uprightness in disparate ways. That may be pedantry on my part, though. In any event, I still highly recommend this book. I cannot change that it was my favorite book of 2019.

[Adam Holm · Rating 5 out of 5]

Finishing this book, standing up, walking outside. Cars blaze past in rush hour fury as I walk home in the dark. Their headlights pass over my eyes with a mechanical rhythm. The world has never felt so cold and empty. For 20-some minutes, I don’t even listen to music.

Never before has the labor of Sisyphus felt so pronounced. In the midst of this dissociative fog, moments seem to lose their connection to each other, falling away before the cosmic weight of deep memory.

Later at dinner, I can’t manage to convey to friends the significance of human memory, of the spinal cord. This book is filled with technical references to phylogeny and such, but it’s heavy-handed poetry in the vein of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. It ties together the airy and philosophical with the earthly and empirical in a deeply engaging journey through various disciplines.

It’ll leave an impression, guaranteed. Just don’t be surprised if it’s a nihilistic one.

[Leo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book with many interesting ideas. Conclusion of the author is an interesting proposition to say the least. I disagree with the general attitude of the book that life is inherently so painful that we should strive to rid the universe of it. I also don't believe that even if all the ideas are true about the universe described in this book that we should necessarily strive to destroy it all. I really liked the idea of the spine and it's different levels having their own consciousness.
Highly recommended book.

Here are some quotes I liked (didn't necessarily agree with them, but they were interesting still):

“Straus continues: ‘Animals move in the direction of their digestive axis. Their bodies are expanded between mouth and anus as between an entrance and an exit, a beginning and an ending. […] Man in upright posture, his feet on the ground and his head uplifted, does not move in the line of his digestive axis; he moves in the direction of his vision. He is surrounded by a world-panorama, by a space divided into world-regions joined together in the totality of the universe. Around him, the horizons retreat in an ever-growing radius. Galaxy and diluvium, the infinite and the eternal, enter into the orbit of human interests.’ “

“Yet another proclaimed that, given these premises, it would be wrong to presume that the amphiocus, a small marine animal that possesses a spinal cord but no head, ‘has no consciousness because it has no brain’, and that, if it thus ‘be admitted that the little ganglia of the invertebrate can form a consciousness, the same may hold good for [our] spinal cord’. Which allows us to finally give an answer to the question ‘What Is it Like to Be a Back?’: it is like being an amphioxus–which, indeed, is just another way of saying that we all have a lancelet lodged in our lumbar spine.”

“Kant’s comparison of self-legislating reason to the globe’s antipodal self-enclosure captures, in an image, the fact that the very possibility of knowledge is secured by a kind of closure or infolding. It is only by generating its own limits—imposing its own rules upon itself—that knowledge becomes possible.”

“There is no sense of time’s movement without concomitant desire to speed it up: to be aware of time moving is to anticipate the oncoming future, which invariably causes it to arrive earlier and earlier. A sense of the new, by changing present behaviour, causes the new. Thus the very experience, or consciousness, of temporal movement provides the conditions for history’s acceleration.”

“Given that intellect tends towards environmental manipulation, then, any sufficiently advanced intelligence becomes entirely indistinguishable from its own environment.”

“For if time is an ejaculate of the nerves, then to alter an organism’s nervous system is to move it forward or backward in organic time.”

“The implication being that, if time is emitted by CNS-architecture, then there are other possible receptivity profiles, other workable organizations of time: organizations which, from within our current CNS-architectonic, can only appear to us as instances of time travel, as contortions of unilinearity: precocious futures or recidivist pasts.”

“Burroughs, who was also fascinated with the loops between ‘inner space’ and ‘outer space’, himself saw the vertebral column as a writhing inner bone-centipede. Nerves, along with all other control systems, were his sworn enemy… Yet the major control system was not the nerves per se, but what they enabled: language.
‘Burroughs suggests that the protohuman ape was dragged through its body to expire upon its tongue’, Barker recounts. For Burroughs, language is a ‘parasitic organism’ that possesses the speaker’s nervous system. ‘The word’, Burroughs characteristically wrote, ‘has not been recognized as a virus because it has achieved a state of stable symbiosis with the host’; and we have ‘no way of ascertaining’ the invasion in such cases of ‘latent virus infections’.”

“Citing Alsberg’s conviction that artificial exteriorization triggers somatic atrophy, Blumenberg notes that parasites, also, gradually lose their own organs of self-sufficiency by way of piggybacking upon inputs from the host-organism. ‘Man likewise becomes a parasite within the technological sphere of life’: foregoing sensory ‘reality-contact’ (Wirklichkeitskontakt)–undergoing attenuation of its indigenous nervous chronotrope–in pursuit of artefactual-ectopic replacements. ‘The question is, whether there will be a persisting residuum, or limits to the degeneration of our resilience’, he observes.”

“Inasmuch as their knuckle-dragging existence is some kind of ugly ‘halfway house’ between horizontal and vertical modes of carriage, primates are cast as some kind of partway antithesis on the stepwise ascent to mankind’s upright ‘nobility’: a dialectical step between horizontal and vertical, the monkey is awkwardly diagonal.”

“’Only human beings’, Bataille notes, ‘tearing themselves away from peaceful animal horizontality’, have ‘succeeded in appropriating the vegetal erection’, surrendering themselves to exquisite upwards collapse towards outer space’s solar enormities and fluxions.”

“And yet, as Bataille notes, this upward-thrusting ‘liberation of man’ is somewhat end-stopped or bottlenecked by the skull’s right angle. Like the swell of a kinked hose, the perpendicular brain-cap is a ballooning instability. Along with Reich and Ferenczi, Bataille notes that in laughter, coitus, and torment this blockage in the solar-spinal surge is relieved: we assume free-flowing continuity with celestial potlatch. He wrote that ‘human life is bestially concentrated in the mouth’: […]”

“The telegraph, then, provides the global sensorium within which humanity can reflect itself unto itself, thus becoming aware of itself as a massified cosmopolitan community. From here, from this massification of history via neural transcontinental prostheses, come the world-shaking revolutions of a time of unceasing geopolitical upheaval and time-space compressions (in other words, ‘Neuzeit’ or ‘modernity’). It is only by assembling a planetary-scale brain that we began to think like a planet.”

“’Different kinds of insanity are different local dissolutions of the highest centres’, he inferred, and the type of affliction is thus ‘dependent on disease at various levels from the bottom to the top of the central nervous system’. Insanity is a question of vertebral echelon.”

“To counteract this and reiterate the non-natural nature of rationality, Kant would take extreme measures, urging that rationality didn’t arise because of uprightness, but that (reversing the teleology, to sinister effect) uprightness arose because of rationality. And the proof? Precisely that uprightness, from the vegetative organism’s perspective, was profoundly and overridingly cataclysmic, a total organic disaster acceptable only from the perspective of reason’s unnatural supererogations; not something that any natural system would desire or undertake. Standing upright is something that could be occasioned only by reasons and never by causes–this is Kant’s gambit on the matter. He emphasised that orthograde locomotion develops in spite of nature–a chronic symptom of reason alone¬–arriving, therefore, from without and beyond and in conflict with organic interests. Borrowing from the opinions of the Italian anatomist Pietro Moscati (1739-1824), Kant unfurls his arsenal of orthograde pathologies, almost taking a sadistic delight in cataloguing their overabundance (it is rare that Kant indulges, but here he does): ‘upright gait’ is ‘contrived against nature’, a ‘deviation’ and detour from pronograde bliss, the source of ‘discomforts and maladies’ uncountable. The litany of back problems reads like a page from Elaine Morgan’s later inculpations of bipedalism. Uprightness compresses our intestines, squishing the intrauterine foetus; causing ‘haemorrhoids’, ‘varicose veins’, ‘hernia’, and ‘aneurysm’ via never-ending gravitational drag. Our ‘blood has to rise against the direction of gravity’, which causes ‘tumors’, ‘palpitations of the heart, and dropsy of the breast’. Upon standing up, haemodynamic ‘influx into the head’ arises as a ‘vertigo’ before being’s extraterrestrial vistas (upward plunge into space): this grants us the gift of an ‘inclination [to] stroke, to headaches, and madness’. Anthropos is the animal that ‘looks up’, and instantly regrets doing so.”

“The intended aim? To end the atrocity exhibition that is the nervous system, and to do so once and for all.
To carry out this duty, however, we cannot rely merely on destroying our own nervous apparatus, as Schopenhauer argued, or even just our biosphere, as Odoevskii had imagined. These therapeutic solutions are parochial in precisely that sense that Kant’s moral rigorism was designed to oppose. To become categorial, the injunction must become much more embracing. We must remove all potential for any other future nervous systems. Only this would constitute the ultimate therapeutic.
A theory of Spinal Catastrophism demands an ethic of soteriological therapizing, as Barker well knew. Priest and suicide: our solemn task is thus to become the universe’s way of killing itself; for we can’t just destroy ourselves, it is our duty to destroy everything. This, Hartmann expatiates, is the apotheosis of all cosmic striving–‘from primitive cell to the origin of man’–and is the pinnacle of ‘utmost world-progress’.

And finally, all of the last chapter is quotable. Here is a part of it:

“In a paper entitled ‘The Intelligence Paradox’, a team of nutritional scientists propose that intellection is essentially self-cancelling. Referring to hormesis, they claim that continual environmental stressors are behind the evolution of intelligence: intermittent perturbations provoke the organism–as homeodynamic system–to adapt via feedforward and anticipative control, producing ever more resilient responses to the perturbing environment. This is connected to Croft’s idea of phylogenesis of chronognostic range (see section C4) and therefore to the centralization and encephalization of cerebrospinal nervous systems across macroevolution. As ever, it is a tremoring and quaking–Erschütterung–that forces the self-interested system to assert stability and develop robustness. And this is precisely where we began our Cervical Prospectus: In responding to this environing and aboriginary trauma, precisely by developing increasingly long-range behavioural stratagems and cunning plots, the organic system tends toward a reformatting of its environment. Intelligence, as the terrestrial pinnacle of this creeping process of incremental chronognostic range, then ensconces itself through psychozoic activities, capturing the whole earth system in its intentional energy dispersal systems, collapsing the ‘natural’ into the ‘artefactual’. Chronotopic escapement into time allows organic function to spill out into space. This, the authors of ‘The Intelligence Paradox’ argue, reaches a level of aptitude (a ‘tipping point’) in technologically mature civiliazations when intelligence essentially alleviates the environmental stressors–or hermetic perturbating factors–that, in the first place, drove its evolution and, moreover, maintain its persistence (in the sense that big brains are energetically expensive and thus their evolutionary persistence is not necessarily given). In our modern lives, we no longer experience much hermetic stress: everything we desire (or at least, simulations of it) is readily available.
Intelligence is self-limiting: it erases the very contexts that create and maintain it. The authors link this to the rising pandemic of metabolic illness, mitochondrial dysfunction, diabetes, and obesity throughout the developed world (causative of depression and the denudation of intellect). Generalizing this ‘intelligence paradox’ across exo-biospheres, they then argue that the absence of SETI detections, the ‘great silence’ may be explained by the fact that technologically advanced civilizations do not become spacefaring because they follow this preordained path, and invariably become ‘too fat for space’. The authors point to the skyrocketing costs of healthcare here on Earth: extrapolating that ‘coupled with resource depletion and environmental damage’ it ‘could potentially lead to increasing internal conflict and societal destabilisation’. ‘All of this’, they infer, ‘would reduce or halt interstellar exploration’. Calculating global healthcare costs for obesity, they claim that we are potentially already spending too much on palliation and healthcare to ever afford to go to space. It may well already be too late. The adipose apocalypse has already taken place. […] And so, talking of ‘entropy’s dark laughter’, Nunn et al. conclude that it belongs to the nature of intelligent neuro-systems–here and elsewhere–to remove the very hermetic factors that facilitate their existence:
Throughout evolution the need to adapt has been driven by a stressful environment, suggesting that if intelligence ever evolved to a high enough level, it would alter the environment to remove the stress. This would thus remove the driver for further development of intelligence and adaptability (and hence longevity). However, if it reached a high enough level, it may well also fulfil the original driver for life itself: acceleration of entropy. Thus, it is possible that mankind, or ET, may be reaching a point where the original driver for entropy is still occurring through technology, but the individual driver for intelligence and adaptability has been removed. The universe could be playing a very cruel joke on us.
A chilling image: intelligence–that poor player, with all its cunning and ambition–is just a self-obsolescing moment is expenditure’s cosmic cataract. It emerges to amplify and intensify universal energy dispersal by creating its own supernormal metabolic utopia, before passing on the energetic baton to less retentive and more expellent systems and thus seceding from existence in the process. This may well be the astrobiological life-cycle of Geist: It exists to make us fat and then disappear. In this account, then, the upward surge of the spine is self-cancelling. This would be the ultimate revenge of the vegetative system on the nervous system: the stomach gets the last laugh, turning on the spinal cord–rejecting its influx of nociceptive reality-function¬–by dragging both into mutual oblivion of metabolic dysfunction brought on by their own collaborative success. We drink too much Pepsi to go to the stars.
Milan Cirkovic, in a brilliant turn of phrase, calls this proposed solution to Fermi’s Paradaox the ‘galactic stomach ache’, a cosmic dyspepsia.”

[Mike Polizzi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hopscotching between aspects of neurology, anthropology, geology, astrobiology, biology, literary and philosophical theory, Thomas Moynihan provides a Krang’s-eye view lurching from our earliest beginnings to our potential futures. In the post thermo nuclear world, is our great Dadaist enterprise to recollapse the Big Bang? Is it an analgesic to consider universal destruction as our purpose or a preemptive treatise to cauterize the terror that human reason brought to bear? Both aggrandizing and minimizing- I wished for a little more synthesis, especially with some thoughts contrary to the core of the secret history or to deal with human intelligence as a pure artifact of evolution (rather than stretching the Burroughsian and Ballardian metaphors of self-alienation).
A great bibliography - inconsistent plumbing and priming- a theory retrofitted to meet the ends.

[The Final Song ❀ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Do you suffer from back pain?
Do you fear getting infected by the virus known as language? (Sorry that is for some other time, look you are getting infected as you read this)
Look no more! Dr Barker method just fixed my spine and all the problems associated with it.
Now as an amorphous blob of meat I am on my way to look on how to destroy the source of all of this.

[George Gulliver · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5

Strange book, but a good book.

What I got from it:
The human spine as a historical record of evolutionary and geological trauma that can be read as a gradual ‘sealing-off’ of creatures from an immediate sense-relation to the world (Leading to Kant’s separation from the thing-in-itself and the manifestation of transcendental idealism).
A more immediate relation to the world retreats upward though our perpendicular vertebrae and loses itself in the proliferation of nerves and brain folds, creating sense organs. Simultaneously the history of this traumatic escape is recapitulated in neuroses, migraines and afflictions of the spine.
Ultimately a tale of ‘the universe creating the capacity for its own suffering’ where the human being is pained by the trauma of thinking and feeling as an upright being possessing a brain and vertical spine, and as the only creature able to ‘think like a planet’.

Very well researched but it has to be if you are writing this sort of stuff

[Ethan · Rating 5 out of 5]

"in order to treat the wound of existence, we must destroy not only the nervous system but the very principle of productivity that creates it"

[Colling]

Giving this 5 stars even though I can’t wrap my head around a lot of the ideas presented here, but they were still exhilarating to read and unlike anything I could’ve imagined myself.

[Edward · Rating 5 out of 5]

5 Stars for the sheer freakshow of it. Weather the adenoidal grad student jargon and it's a trip back to "the Future" (Capital "F") when all manner of woo was sanctified with the imprimatur of "science," from Hegel to the racial beliefs of the Nazis to Marx (as historian Paul Johnson notes in INTELLECTUALS, communism is still enshrined as "science" in the founding documents of its nightmare states). This includes Freud's psychoanalysis—no small actor in SPINAL CATASTROPHISM—the product of his bromance with EarNose&Throat quack Wilhelm Fliess, who believed the nose was connected to the genitals and produced "biorhythms" responsible for all manner of wrongs from migraines to miscarriages, you need merely examine your snot. Freud ran with it minus the schnoz, making the genitals the chakra seat of the soul. Freudian psychoanalysis was completely rejected by the universities and it is why Freud, like Marx, franchised it out to cultish groups and "institutes" complete with gurus and fawning female acolytes. Max Graf gives us an account of the religious atmosphere:

"The gatherings followed a definite ritual. First one of the members would present a paper. Then, black coffee and cakes were served; cigars and cigarettes were on the table and were consumed in great quantities. After a social quarter of an hour, the discussion would begin. The last and decisive word was always spoken by Freud himself. There was the atmosphere of the foundation of a religion in that room. Freud himself was its new prophet who made the heretofore prevailing methods of psychological investigation appear superficial."

Replace the genitals with the spine and you have SPINAL CATASTROPHISM. The spine is biological history and destiny in this book, but extrapolated out to Terence McKenna levels of mushroom madness. Like some bony Yggdrasil, it has roots in the primordial yet rises toward an apocalyptic future. Those familiar with the PREDATOR movies will instantly recall the alien apex predator ripping out the spine w/ skull attached and roaring over his trophy. Standing in for him, a motley crew of "thinkers" is assembled here, from J.G. Ballard to Burroughs, Wyndham Lewis, Coleridge, and Bataille—you half expect to see the City Light's logo on the book's (forgive me) spine. The jargon is laid on thick. "Pharyngeal Phantasy & Spinal Polyptoton" is a typical heading and the text is rife with this endlessly alliterative argot, but it's still more bearable than a typical "postmodern" essay by some college schmuck enamored of French theory junk. Regardless, you can't help but feel a lot of googling went into the Amazon jungle of jargon you have to hack through.

Esoteric thinking plays a central role here. It's not for nothing the book is called A SECRET HISTORY as it is steeped in a Hermetic cloud, just given a veneer of "science." It is like you stepped into a strange museum off a side street devoted to the "miasma" that Victorians thought originated diseases. Predictably, what the 'great thinkers' say about the spine says more about them. Ergo, for Engels it is the dialectical armature whose role is to bring about the limbs' development for labor and the concomitant revolutionary eventuality. The next time you see a chiropractor, explain that to him. For a Frankfurt School theorist academician, its role is to act as progenitor of the brain, which will grow to absurd sizes shaking off the limbs and spine altogether until we become floating brain jellyfish utterly divorced from work or anything other than theorizing—just like the professor! For J.G. Ballard, a third-rate Late Romantic Decadent author whose regressive fantasies make Shelley look like an Augustan Poet, the spine is an upright interloper standing in the way of the languid horizontal bliss of so many embowered knights in Pre-Raphaelite paintings, for we are told:

"In the ‘Voices of Time’, Ballard describes a mutated cnidarian—a genetically radial sea anemone—prematurely wrenched from spherical immersion via genetic modification; it develops a ‘rudimentary notochord’, or proto-spine; the creature soon self-destructs, however, violently rejecting the phaneroscopic perversity of a spinal axis."

What Camille Paglia wrote about Swinburne can be easily applied to Ballard: In his work, men go down to the sea without ships. Both are completely un-conflicted in returning to the still waters of the Ur-Mother's womb and mixing with her. His novels are little more than apocalyptic wish-fulfillment dreams where the Great Mother returns so her forlorn son can sink his head, stupefied, into her soft lap, a scenario he handles with all the pulp ham-handedness at his disposal, as in this excerpt from THE DROWNED WORLD:

‘Perhaps these sunken lagoons simply remind me of the drowned world of my uterine
childhood…’

I can almost hear the Mystery Science Theater 3000 peanut gallery yell "Explication!" in unison. Note to novelists: Show, don't tell. In fact don't even show... imply it. The reader gets it or they do not. Ballard's true calling was probably that of a surrealist painter. Vision overwhelms his pulp narrative and he exposes himself like the Wizard of Oz working his own bellows of the afflatus. He would've been better off painting soft watches than writing them. Not a good trait in a man who wants to turn Conrad on his head by regarding civilization as "The horror" and longs to disappear into the jungle to the sound of tom-toms. If you want to regress to Humanoids from the Deep, H.P. Lovecraft is your man.

High points in SPINAL CATASTROPHISM: the section with Bataille and the one with Ferenczi (probably the originator of Ballard's regressive liquid death wish), Freud's fish guy:

"Blumenberg, when he defined bipedalization as a traumatogenic expulsion from any determinate biotope, similarly cited Ferenczi’s notion of terrestrialization as a calamity frozen within our
neurons. For Ferenczi, indeed, the individual’s ontogenetic desire for uterine retreat collapses into phylogenetic thalassotropism, itself merely the iterated permutation of an abiogenetically-instigated desire to allow the inorganic to compulsively ‘recapitulate’ itself through our extinction. This of course is Freud’s death drive: that ‘old state’ toward which life ‘strives to return
through all the detours of evolution’. ‘Ururtrauma’ accordingly becomes, for Ferenczi, existence’s vanishing point."

The morbid fantasies of the regressive crowd nicely offset those of the utopians, who predictably dream about a future hive-consciousness collective sailing at warp speed across the universe or, like the Frankfurt School prof, long to be big floating brains divorced from corporeal exertions (as if they weren't already). SPINAL CATASTROPHISM is a very weird sideshow you do want to step into. And like all carnival sideshows you may find yourself lingering at the Disembodied Laughing Head revolting against "cranial perpendicularity" as it self-regresses back to sea worm, or the Uroboros spine with a head at both ends. You may brush by the Aquatic Ape (seen it before) only to stand spellbound at the shit-throwing monkeys seen in every zoo, but this time seen through Bataille's storied eyes, exposing

"their ‘anal projections’ like ‘excremental skulls’. Inasmuch as their knuckle-dragging
existence is some kind of ugly ‘halfway house’ between horizontal and vertical modes of carriage, primates are cast as some kind of partway antithesis on the stepwise ascent to mankind’s upright ‘nobility’: a dialectical step between horizontal and vertical, the monkey is awkwardly diagonal.
(Primate posture thus inhabits a kind of uncanny valley—from which Bataille derives much titillation.)"

Mercifully, because this is a collection of essays you can always ingress to the Egress rapidly if the jargon becomes as oppressive as a late Henry James novel. Like the backbone, the book's structure is segmented. So when you are hit with:

"World-enclosing telegraphy is a pandemic neurulating the terrestrial surface in an inorganic film of intertwined bad news and infection vectors"

just remember Moe's advice at the end of The Simpsons: Pokey Mom (Season 12, Episode 10):

Forget it, Homer. It's Chiro-Town.

[michal k-c · Rating 3 out of 5]

Back pain is actually just a manifestation of cosmic dysphoria and so on, you get it.

definitely fascinating in a way that a lot of philosophy/theory is not, but it’s also incredibly insular in that i can’t imagine “using” spinal catastrophism as a lens to view anything other than itself

[Mickey Smith]

Grand. Apostrophic. Searingly bleak. Infectious and parasitic in a way that has prevented me from thinking about much else for weeks.

I’m glad I stopped myself right at the thoracic drop when reading the first time. My surface-level reading wouldn’t have had me ready for the horrors that lie at our geotraumatic sacral core.

I need to collect my thoughts here so that when people ask me what this book is about I can answer without being put in a psych ward. Ultimately I think the methods for this book are what it’s about as much as what is actually said by the author using those methods.

Thomas Kuhn talks about there being essentially two different phases that scientific history can be in: periods of puzzle solving and periods of revolution. Puzzle solving periods entail working within an established framework or mental model of the world that has been largely unchanged for a long time. Revolution periods entail the restructuring of what we think we know and creating a completely new framework/mental model which will serve as a base for the next puzzle solving period. Periods of scientific revolution rarely come about from rote puzzle solving. Instead they almost always come from tracing our steps back like Danny Torrence in the hedge maze of thought or reason and finding a new place to branch off from somewhere we’ve already been.

My confidence in mentioning Kuhn so extensively to capture this book’s methods comes from the author citing him twice in the glossary of persons: once within the first chapter of the book, and again listing him at the final page /after/ the indices where no actual footnote exists (this is one of those books where even reading the indices and bibliography is kind of fun, for example SpongeBob is cited at one point as Robert Sponge). Kuhn is the cited footnote for the entire book and you can feel while reading that the author is attempting something like a seance to reformat our philoso-scientific world. He desperately begs history for a retreading of our scientific refuse so that he or someone else can hold up a garbage-covered diamond.

This book is a beautiful recapitulation of Western thought in the form of pseudoscience, science fiction, and philosophy. Almost every Wikipedia article I had to read to keep things in context in this book ends its first paragraph with the phrase, “their ideas have been largely discredited and are widely acknowledged as [pseudoscience](link to my recently most read article).” Moynihan uses the history of thought related to the spine and nervous system as his scaffolding to try to bring about some revolutionary thought, and it’s mostly a blast to descend with him along the way down our backbones. And who knew that basically every philosopher in western history has written pretty extensively and specifically about the spine?

Some cool thought experiments along the way are: nervous systems as simulation machinery (then are we perhaps contained within the nervous system of some encompassing greater being whose ganglia simulate our entire experience of reality?), the human genome as exo-archeological artifact (did aliens exist and leave behind our own genome as an attempt to communicate? [shoutout Prometheus for, I think, being centered around a very similar idea]), and upright human posture resulting from pre-existing rationality in an obscene act of universal defiance (are we enmeshed in a cybernetic self-correcting and rational feedback loop holding our heads upright similar to a rocket tuning thrusters so that it can fly accurately?).

I won’t spoil the ultimate thrust of the book’s argument and it’s final “so what” just in case at this point anyone is either still reading or is still interested in reading this CCRU-sprouted manic metadocument. However I do feel impelled to give my only possible protozoic rebuttal thought that stands minuscule in front of the terminal thesis of Spinal Catastrophism.

It comes from Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning:

“When a man finds that it is his destiny to suffer, he will have to accept his suffering as his task; his single and unique task. He will have to acknowledge the fact that even in suffering he is unique and alone in the universe. No one can relieve him of his suffering or suffer in his place”

Ironically I wrote most of this on a plane so my spine is suffering quite a bit.

[Morgan Woodfall]

i'm splitting this into 3 parts of uneven distribution and no particular order - 40%, 40% and 20%.

- 40% is some very good 'faithless' reimagining of kantian metaphysics, casting the great Koenigsbergian as an unwilling prophet of spine-bound nightmares, an 'ought' that tried to be greater than an 'is' and fell out of the sky under the blazing of its own overweight cranium. good shit, still chinese.
- 40% is biographical and still faithless reimagining of philosophers/writers who i have not read but sound very interesting. my bet is that moynihan is doing deranged lying about most of them but nonetheless it was very fun and essentially indefeasible. i especially liked wyndham lewis and elaine morgan, i will probably read them both.
- 20% of it... well this is where the real meat lies. moynihan, as i see it, is attempting to smuggle one thesis inside another, or more accurately, in the gap between two related theses. thesis one: epistemology and by extension ontology are structurally determined by our upright spines, and said uprightness was not merely an accident, a sudden cataclysm at time t (to get all Bergsonian about it), but was in fact a creative expression of pre-existing geological and biological procedures, in particular the ways in which creative evolution involves a history that entails the particularities of that thing we call life. thesis two: spines suck, and more generally, life sucks. these are both fine, i have no issues thus far. what i struggle with is that for all his CCRU-nonsense anti-rationalist inclinations, i can't help but understand spinal catastrophism, the theory, as a cosmically large attempt to post-facto rationalise those two co-occurent theses. in other words, yeah man, spines suck and a creative procedure of uprightness orders our perception, but in what way do those things causally implicate one another? i think moynihan presents some good reasons why, if you are so inclined, they might; but, and here's the kicker, it doesn't work for me, because i don't have any back pain. i'm 21, my posture is decent, i am phone-addicted in a mostly normal way. eventually the curse of the spine will get me too, i'm sure, but until then, i am nothing like the imaginary construct barker - i don't find that the substance of misery which is beholden to the universe in a most fundamental way and nonetheless expresses in novel modes for every one of us, takes the form of back pain at its most basal and mundane. some people do, but, sadness is not an argument. i'm sure that when my lower back starts to get me, parasite that it is, i will suffer greatly, but likewise i will suffer meaninglessly. the creative expression of my verticality may have, in some objective sense, a historical content, but right now, and then, in the primal duration of my suffering, it is without meaning or purpose, explanation or reason. so yes, even this profoundly pessimistic nightmare of a hypergenealogy is cope, optimist in a tangled and freakish way, hoping to blame spines on the way we are. i find it equally likely that god elected to give some pretty interesting and smart creatures these stupid and mundane problems, just because it was funny, or to see what they would do about it.

80% good is quite good, and i read it very quickly and enthusiastically so there. i do like this book, even when i tried not to, even though i am a nihilist about trauma on a good day. i just don't find its pessimism to be inescapable, and given the competition, that is still a failing.

[Caroline Taylor]

I want to rate this book, but I don’t think I deserve to give it a justified rating.

I’m someone with very little philosophical knowledge, and therefore entered this book extremely blindly. Due to that, I found most of it going over my head. However, I found this to be such a page turner! My mind could barely comprehend half of the complex vocabulary used, yet I kept feeling compelled to continue!

What made me pick this book up was the interesting name “spinal catastrophism”, and the cool cover.

Anyways, I initially decided that I would make this a book I’d read again at 25, when my frontal lobe fully develops, etc. but after reading this, and the information Moynihan provides regarding homosapiens past the age of 25, I’m not so sure if I want to. I’ve been hearing this be referred to as “horror philosophy”, at first I found that dramatic, but once I entered the Lumbar section and beyond, I began to understand why it could be given that title.

All in all, this was a page-turning, horrific, philosophical book that touches base on so many different philosophies. I’m sure if I dived deeply into each branch, I’d spend years trying to fully comprehend this book. However, I think I might prefer to remain in a form of rose-tinted bliss, as I’m not sure if I would like to know the true horrors behind the body. Especially under Moynihan’s terms…

If I were to rate this, I would likely give it a 3.5-4.5 star rating. I just don’t think I comprehended this enough to give it a truly justified star rating. Honestly, I’m not even justified to give this a review, but it’s more for personal documentation at this point.

[Cosmictimetraveler · Rating 5 out of 5]

Near the very end of the book I was ready to cast it into the flames as it descended into anti-natlism (the lamest ideology in a world that includes the idea that fat people are granted unreachable knowledge based on their fatness (the only thing unreachable about fatness is deep space as the author writes: "we drink too much Pepsi to go to the stars")), however I will give the author the benefit of the doubt that his inclusion of the worst philosophical idea of all time was descriptive rather than prescriptive.

I also give the author the benefit of the doubt that his obviously forced and often made-up vocabulary (he doesn't speak on podcasts with nearly the same complex words as with which he writes) was more of an artistic license than a genuine attempt to signal his own intellect. The book is a near-monumental effort that would have been just as impressive, if not more so, if he would have written it even 20% more concisely.

It is easy to get swept into the grand narrative of the book, which is an unexpected katabasis back to Anthropocentrism, which was supposedly done away with by Nicolaus Copernicus hundreds of years ago, and despite the tenor of the book being unbelievably dismal the idea that the entire universe is a function of human brains (or perhaps that the fate of the universe is unavoidably entwined with human brains) is somewhat hopeful despite whatever this guy thinks:

[Alex Obrigewitsch · Rating 2 out of 5]

While the theory of spinal catastrophism bears an interesting (and certainly not secret) history (extending further back even than the Nature-Philosophers of the 19th century; Moynihan gives not even a word to Empedocles, for example), this text loses its drive after the first handful of chapters, where it shifts away from philosophical questions towards a historical review which is piecemeal and lacking in explication and valuable intrications. One can find examples for any topic anywhere if one has the entirety of history (and beyond) at hand. Finally, the text lacks any purposeful relation to the history which it parasitizes. Should the theory of spinal catastrophism be true, what matter? Moynihan offers no ends toward which the thought might tend - he merely presents a theoretico-fictive idea, and then leaves it as a vestigial remainder, akin to the spine itself. Wherefore this suffering? Nihilism without an end (though not interminable) hasn't been fashionable since high-school (and even then it remains in question, at least).

[Jesse Hilson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book a while ago, need to reread it and refresh. One of the oddest books I’ve ever seen. I sort of see it as a complicated piece of mental gym equipment for you to work out with. The science, philosophy, history, literature it draws on to make its idiosyncratic points all seem ultra-valid and yet the ideas are far out and bonkers. It was a fun book to read although the final position of the book seems to be that homo erectus was a colossal mistake and we should all nuke ourselves and go extinct. And standing upright and putting our skulls at the top of our spines, looking out over the landscape from an elevated POV was just the tipping point that spells species-doom. Read it and see what I mean! In the meantime get pumped up on the brain-weights, you dumbbell.

[Jeff Gburek · Rating 5 out of 5]

Simply mind-blowing. Eventually, I will post further reflections upon this book which, even if such phrases seem like cliches, it truly is a game-changer. At least it has been for me. It initiates a whole new approach to the vocabulary of biological existence by taking us into all the imaginaries of our our own vertebration and our verticaly -- from standing erect primate to sky-scraper and astronaut -- and it has some sobering reflections on the hauntological scale showing us that we clearly had an imagination that we might become extinct -- and how soon it can be avoided depends on becoming conscious of where our verticality ideologies derived.

[Flannthony · Rating 4 out of 5]

Trying to use this app more this year. Here’s the first book I finished in 2025. It was tight as fuck. Wasn’t expecting it to appeal so much to my historical interests in Romanticism and the history of science. But I think it is held back by its hyperstitional/theory fiction/accelerationist-ish baggage. The time stuff is the weakest part, but that might just be my lack of knowledge in that field. Still working out what was really the point of the Daniel Barker stuff. A wholly fictional element introduced as a way to disavow the more playful ideas in the book? Interested in others’ thoughts on that. Also curious if that preface was comprehensible to ANYBODY???

[Jędrzej Machtyl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting retelling of history of thought and natural history in general with some futurology sprinkled in. Could've been perfect if not for the occult vibe the text exudes and quoting people that literally don't exist. Don't get me wrong I love how goth this philosophy book is.

Anyways, gonna lie down, laugh have an orgasm, roll into a perfect sphere, open my pineal eye and kill myself and everyone else. Cya!

[Cadaver Scribe · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm not much for philosophy but I really enjoyed Moynihan's thoroughly researched insights into the history, future, and esoteric implications of the nature of our spines. Orthograde posture as a result of a traumatic past and the ramifications of our evolution into bipedalism is not just unique as a line of thinking; it is a reflection of our very existence unto itself. Needless to say, I've got a rabbit hole I'll never get bored of exploring.

[Eris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not really what I was expecting. It's sort of a more boring The Conspiracy Against the Human Race and not so much an expansion of ideas presented by the CCRU.

[Ogden Nesmer · Rating 5 out of 5]

a beautiful and terrifying work of theory-fiction that pulls influences from (and pushes the reader towards) other strange and incredible books. great for fans of philosophy with a sense of humor and an appreciation for artistry, it feels like a relic from a different world.