Christopher Nosnibor in conversation with S F Grimm
In tandem with the release of the collection Clinical,
Brutal... An Anthology of Writing with Guts Christopher Nosnibor
will be interviewing some of the contributors to the book about their
contributions, their writing methods and their outlooks more broadly.
S F Grimm is nothing if not enigmatic: as much unknown on account of his capacity for evasiveness as he is known for his work, Grimm’s career is the epitome of the avant-garde principal of (self-)erasure. Having at one stage destroyed his own entire output and refused to produce or publish further, or give interviews for a number of years afterwards, questions were asked regarding his sanity, and he was even rumoured to be dead. As one of the first to adopt email as a means of reinventing Mail Art, Grimm’s destructive tendencies were again evidenced in his circulation of viruses and attachments that would automatically delete themselves after a certain period of time. While some contend that he has spent a lifetime squandering or otherwise misdirecting his fierce intellect, I was elated when this reclusive writer agreed to contribute a previously unpublished work to the Clinical, Brutal anthology, and similarly joyous when he agreed to an interview. It was on his own terms, of course, and the following exchange is reproduced under the strict direction that there should be no editing.
CN: To open with a banal softener, what are you reading right now, and what books and writers would you consider the primary influences on your work, and your life more broadly? Who do you rate that’s writing now?
SFG: I'm reading The Evolution of Co-operation by Robert Axelrod and The Diffusion of Innovations by Everett Rogers. I'm also on the third volume of Kenny's New History of Western Philosophy. I'm trying to reconcile a neo-Newtonian corpuscular conception of social change with a kind of post-Aristotelian holism. What books and writers have influenced me? I believe we are all born with a lens. That lens, how we see the world can be twisted, pulled, stretched. Can become focused or blurred. It can be moved to other vistas. Each man's lens is unique and to a great degree, fixed. Determined, it the strongest sense, by the structure of the universe. I am therefore seeking, by my own innate intentionality, only confirmations of what I already know. That makes me sound like a Platonic intuitionist, so be it. If you see an intuitionist on the road, kill him. Then take his wallet.
A selection of books that have influenced my work, and my life more broadly are: The Problems of Philosophy by Bertrand Russell, Simple Heuristics that Make us Smart by Gird Gigerenzer, The Hedgehog and the Fox by Isaiah Berlin, The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini, Meditations by Descartes, Critique of Pure Reason by Kant, Philosophy of Mind by Jeagwon Kim, Republic by Plato, Propaganda by Edward Bernays, Systems Management and Change by Ruth Carter, Weird Ideas that Work by Robert Sutton, The Cognitive Neuropsychology of Schizophrenia by Christopher Frith, The Social Atom by Mark Buchanan, The Origin of Species by Darwin, Finite and Infinite Games by James P. Carse, On Liberty by JS Mill, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding by Hume, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn, Systems of Survival by Jane Jacobs, The Two Dogmas of Empiricism by WVO Quine and Consciousness Explained by Daniel Dennett, and of course Godel, Turing, Heidegger and Nietzsche.
There's only one thing that both my reason and my experience has confirmed - above even the radical skeptic's reductio absurdum of solipsism: 99.999% of everything is shit. If an age appears 'Golden', it is a mere statistical blip. Therefore, writing is as good, or as shit as it has ever been.
CN: What else beyond literature would you say has been influential or otherwise had a profound effect on you, your life, your outlook?
SFG: Alcoholism definitely. To be an addict is to be privy to an exquisite paradox. The desire for the bottle, is not a desire for the thing-in-itself - for it is a desire to escape it. To retrodict why I stopped is to willingly entertain an illusion. I have stopped - QED. My time in prison, also. It was short - three months. But long enough to realise that masculinity is still the strongest force in social life. Though the manifestations of aggression and selfishness are made physical by the average criminal at the bottom end of the human food chain, they are purely reflections of aggression and selfishness made meta-physical by the average criminal at the top. My time in Berlin and Russia too. The striking differences underscore the similarity of the inevitable perils of philosopher kings. My early 'Ubermensch as State' was a seminal work for me - it has shaped my further writing significantly.
CN: Your biography reads like a catalogue of wildness and near successes. It could be perceived that you have some kind of biological mechanism that’s predisposed to self-sabotage. How accurate would you say this describes your career to date?
SFG: There are some important areas to highlight. Firstly, I have no interest in converting anyone. Secondly, I have no interest in telling anyone anything. Thirdly, I have no interest in entertaining, distracting or engaging with anyone. Fourthly, I have no interest in the material gains possible from any literary endeavour. So I am, as far as I'm consciously (in the post-Jungian sense) aware, not trying to destroy any career archetype - or indeed sublimate it through any other style-of-life. However, as works in-and-of-themselves, my writing is mere ephemeral epiphenomena. For me that means that means if I didn't attempt to destroy (and destroy I very much mean - as to simply subvert is still to in some way simply condone) my work, it wouldn't be fully realised as work at all.
Some of your writing stands as a clear precursor to the principles of clinical brutality. What is it, for you, that is interesting about extreme violence? And what purpose the amalgamation of seemingly incongruous genres and modes of writing? It is just a branch of postmodernism, or something more?
Extreme violence is real. That is the first thing. Violence is a secondary concern for me. The issue is our concept of extremity. I believe my attempt is set and then to crack the code of an entirely imaginary adversary. I look at it as a collection of Bodhidharmaian koans - to remind us that the patterns we overlay on experiences that are all unique is transcendentally arbitrary. The amalgamation is part accident - we live in interesting times, and part deliberate. Postmodernism of course has waxed illyrical many times about the infinite voices in infinite texts. But I think it almost always misses the point. That is where the clinical brutality comes in. Clinicality - 'the removal of all that is not' and brutality - 'the removal of everything', can only exist as a true statement based on false premises. Therefore, I think post-modernism has it's cake and eats it by definition. Clinical Brutality starves itself.
CN: The advent of postmodern writing and the recent resurgence of the Burroughs/ Gysin cut-up method can be broadly perceived as the practical manifestation of Barthes’ theoretical ‘death of the author.’ Meanwhile, you seem to have taken this concept almost literally by your deletion and destruction of works that predate the new millennium and in refusal to publish conventionally and by circulating your more recent works by email alone – like mail art for the digital age. Is this an attempt to make an artistic statement of sorts, like a reaction to / against the global village?
SFG: I am reminded of Hegel's 'perfected sinfulness'. There is a kind of Gnostic synthesis in the cut-up method and I would say my deletion/destruction of work as alluded to in a previous answer does touch on the destruction of myself as person as much as author. We are aware of the post-romanticism prevalent in much cut-up work that seems to reinforce the primacy of experience. And again, as technology moves and changes, it becomes a greater point on the triptych of dependence I've written about. While trying to avoid an overly Hegelian sense of historicism, postmodernism was at least some way necessitated by the gradual secularisation of epistemology. I think most writers have a love/hate relationship with postmodernism. Because it's dealing with meaning in a totally unrestrained sense, work under its name is almost necessarily meaningless. But that said, the work is often simply stupid. If stupidity exists at one end on a continuum of intelligence, it does so by virtue of intentionality. Without a teleology, intelligence is meaningless. So, if a stupid man makes a meaningful statement, it was, by definition, luck. But the exercise itself, or at least the concept of the exercise is not worthless. To argue that because postmodernism is self-defeating it is therefore worthless is missing the point. You could argue that 'This statement is false' is 'self-defeating' - it's clearly not worthless. The reason it's OK to be self-defeating is that postmodernism is a theory of theory. And that makes people paradoxically forget what people are - they are things that exist OUTSIDE the things they describe. Post modernism isn't externally consistent, but that's fine. Instinctively we know that that problem (though it still is ultimately and ontologically - at least in the Fregian sense - a problem) doesn't undermine the strength of the theory's quiddity as a tool to theorise about other theories. Kamikaze pilots still defeat their enemies. Just because all post modernism's victories have to be phyrrhic doesn't mean they're not victories..
CN: Obviously, this strategy of limited distribution imbues your works – which are, in real terms, few in number – with a rarefied quality, and makes them highly sought after. What of these restrictions on distribution? Is it in a similar vein to Whitehouse’s limiting ‘Right to Kill’ to just 300 copies prior to the supposed loss of the master tapes, thus forging a clandestine aura and mystique around the work? It’s certainly done your cult reputation no harm (and, indeed, a fair few people think you’re a complete cult).
SFG: Cult. a strange and ever moving concept. There was a film, that I've never seen called The Boondock Saints. In the Wikipedia article, it quotes a review that says it is 'a film undeserving of cult status'. I find that hilarious. It doesn't even deserve ANYONE liking it. But you're absolutely right. Number is critical. In my essay 'Ideology as Technology - the engineering of values', I touch upon the issue of cult beliefs and cult values. But more critically, a cult is a relative term - a ratio. I did some research for an upcoming article in Der Erste Schlag recently that uncovered that roughly 1.618% of the population at any one time are deemed to be members of recognised cult. The golden ratio of cults.
CN: How would you respond to the accusation that you’re a misogynist and a misanthrope?
SFG: I don't think you can be one without the other, can you?
CN: At every turn I feel as though I’m presented with evidence that the end is nigh. I’m not simply referring to global warming and economic collapse, I mean that I feel as though humanity is slowly de-evolving and that our reliance on technology is counter-evolutionary in physical terms, in that we’re slowly but surely losing our capacity for survival. As a species, we can no longer hunt, we can barely walk or breathe and we sure as hell can’t think for ourselves. What do you think the future holds? Is there even a future?
SFG: Victor Frankl in Man's Search for Meaning wrote (about his time in Nazi concentration camps) "To attempt a methodical presentation of the subject is very difficult, as psychology requires a certain scientific detachment. But does a man who makes his observation while he himself is a prisoner possess the necessary detachment?" There is an underground movement of sorts focused on the 'singularity', frequently inspired by a book by Ray Kurzweil. The movement is most commonly populated by geeks (some smart, most dumb as fuck). It essentially argues that technology will progress to the point that a new intelligence will be born. I think it's a movement very much of our time. The progression is seen as inevitable by almost everyone. As you know, my chapter in 'Perfect Bound' was about the uniting of all anti-pagan fundamentalists with the end-is-near survivalists in a (successful, though subject to the laws of wildly unintended consequences) attempt to destroy all technology across the globe. What is the future? Interesting.