Some people know me on Twitter solely for my Libidinal Materialism, Kabbalah, Energy Drinks, and the 30 Year Old Boomer article. It's one of my earliest blog posts and its riddled with typos and bad writing, but the idea is gold (there's an updated and expanded version of it in my upcoming CCRU E-Book which I have been working on way too long...).
The idea? A zero calorie energy drink called Monster Ultra Zero is the cultural manifestation of occultural demonic forces; a good example of libidinal materialism at work.
That is, Zero is significant to the CCRU and its members Mark Fisher, Nick Land, and Sadie Plant (who I don't mention in the original article) who all explore the number in their own ways.
Fisher discusses Zero in his dissertation Gothic Constructs as an uncanny space where the organic and inorganic meet. A (flat) line curved into a (feedback) loop. A death drive. And in his final book The Weird and the Eerie it is also the magic of capitalism, where something comes out of nothing.
Land shares these notions throughout his first book Thirst of Annihilation: George Bataille and Virulent Nihilism:
"zero is immense" (pg. vii, 131); "cosmic energy reservoir (0)" (pg. 49); "uninhibited flow; the intensive zero...positive end of religion (as zero)" (pg 87); "...the nihil from which creation proceeds, the undifferentiable cosmic zero...positive zero" (pg. 109);"dark thirst" (pg 30); "Like zero, money is a redundant operator, adding nothing in order to make things hum...Marx...surplus production comes out of nothing..." (pg. 91); "an uninhibited wastage that returns energy...whose zenith form is that of the capitalist bourgeoisie" (pg. 33); "Bataille...Marx...the energy produced is superior to the energy necessary to its production" (pg. 49)"
Plant has her iconic book Zeroes and Ones which cannot be easily summed here. However, considering Fisher and Land were students of plant and pulled from her work, it seems their exploration of zero is Plantian in that Plant conceptualizes zero as an active, full, nothingness. Presence and absence synthesized.
The interesting thought my piece tried to tackle in relation to the above thinkers is how something without anything in it creates something out of nothing, so a significant part of my article's 'argument' - or exploration really - rests on the fact that the energy drink has zero calories and yet creates so much energy in my body.
What I recently noticed was that the energy drink is no longer zero calories. I googled this to make sure I wasn't imagining things and found a reddit discussion talking about a monster energy drink of the same line (but of a different flavor) changing from 0 to 10 calories, and was able to check on Monster's website itself where it lists the Monster Ultra zero as "zero calorie" despite it now saying '10 calories' on the can.
0 to 10 is significant.
In my article I end by comparing the Monster energy drink logo to Kabbalah and the Numogram.
As it is made clear in the CCRU and Land's essay Qabbala 101, the tree of life of Kabbalah/Qabbala/Jewish Mysticism centers around 10, while the numogram - which resembles the tree of life - centers around 9 and does not acknowledge 10.
1+8=9
2+7=9
3+6=9
4+5=9
5+4=9
6+3=9
7+2=9
8+1=9
10 = 0+1 or 1+0
Whereas 0 is significant, 10 is redundant, and diagrammatic inductors - like the numogram - do not work with representational redundancies!
Religion - territorialized, centralized Oedipal human-security-systems - begin with an arbitrary 10 and work backwards. The Outside - deterritorialized, decentralized, time loops - they start with zero and work through various 9s. Zero is the base material flow of the plane of immanence. The drain that inhuman forces circle.
So the Monster Ultra Zero went from 0 calories - consistent with the numogram, libidinal economics, etc., - to 10 calories, and seemingly without any notification from Monster as a company. No ad campaigns, no disclaimers, even the website still claims 0 calories. And it went from 0 to 10 after I wrote my piece Libidinal Materialism, Kabbalah, Energy Drinks, and the 30 Year Old Boomer.
I believe I dragged numogrammatic forces into the light of day, making some powerful people - or creatures - too aware of the occultist program of monster, and the libidinal zero was transformed - likely accidentally - into a impotent 10 to prevent the libidinal resonances from overflowing and running amok in our culture.
My article may have hyperstitioned a 0 into a 10 by making it known. And for that I am sorry.
