H.P. Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu" as Radicalizing Assemblage: An Anglo Materialist Nightmare

In H.P. Lovecraft's universe, assemblages matter. Quite literally, Love-craft's tales involve material configurations of human bodies, occult energies, and cosmic beings, which coalesce into a narrative tapestry known as the Cthulhu Mythos. These networks illustrate Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's concept of assemblage, a "multiplicity […] [whose] only unity is that of co-functioning" (Deleuze and Parnet 24). However, in the story "The Call of Cthulhu," assemblage also matters politically, as it frustrates an attempted exaltation of racialized ontology. In defying the author's intent to install race as the foundation of being, the Cthulhu-assemblage warrants attention from new materialist scholars who, through their study of matter's dynamic and relational capacities, seek the emancipation of bodies, places, and the planet itself.

Bracketing the question of whether "assemblage" is even an adequate translation for Deleuze and Guattari's original agencement (Buchanan, "Assemblage Theory, or, the Future of an Illusion" 457–58), one can begin to understand the concept through Martin Müller and Carolin Schurr's description of "a collection of relations between heterogeneous entities to work together for some time" (219). Such relations emerge from affects, defined simply as "the capacity to affect or be affected" (Fox 306). Assemblage's salience to new materialism can be seen in Jane Bennett's description of an electrical grid, an ephemeral collection of bodies, objects, and forces in which components act and are acted upon: "coal, sweat, electromagnetic fields, computer programs, electron streams, profit motives, beat, lifestyles, nuclear fuel, plastic, fantasies of mastery, static, legislation, water, economic theory, wire, and wood—to name just some of the actants" (25). In highlighting an arrangement in which all materials are "aquiver with virtual force" (57), Bennett voices new materialism's rejection of "the terminology of matter as an inert substance subject to predictable causal forces" (Coole and Frost 9).

Neither accidental nor the exclusive effect of any one constituent, the assemblage is an "arrangement that creates [and is created by]" the agency of the whole (Müller and Schurr 28).¹ The agency of the assemblage has literary implications. Its precariousness ensures that authorial intent only exerts limited influence on the whole, whose dynamism makes it "impossible to anticipate all of the effects a material configuration may have" (Leong). Such a concept surely bears upon a text like Lovecraft's, in which a fluctuating web of human and nonhuman agents becomes legible via the equally contingent relations binding author, narrator, narratee (the unnamed character(s) bearing witness to the narrator), and reader (the actual person reading "The Call of Cthulhu").

For all the attention recently lavished on Lovecraft, little to no scholarship focuses on the importance of assemblage to his work, or its implications for the work's political stakes.² In the past decade or so, "speculative realists" have recruited Lovecraft as their "poet laureate" (Harman 32). Positing a world in which humans, animals, and things exercise the same degree of autonomy, Lovecraft appeals to philosophers for whom objects and humans share equal ontological status. However, in championing Lovecraft's vision of a "world without us" (Thacker 5), speculative realists underrate one of assemblage theory's key insights: that matter subsists in a web of heterogeneous relations, in which bodies enjoy uneven degrees of freedom. Because racism exerts real power on the stuff of Lovecraft's fiction, it transforms Thacker's monolithic "us" into a diverse group, whose oppressed constituents, long before the intervention of alien horrors, already find themselves treated as objects. Insofar as posthumanist philosophers downplay racism's power, they ignore the fact that, for this poet laureate of Things, "all lives may be meaningless but some are considered more meaningless than others" (Sederholm and Weinstock 445).³ Conversely, other scholarship has focused on critically assessing Lovecraft's racism. Taking a psychoanalytic approach, such studies tend to isolate the nonwhite bodies that populate Lovecraft's fiction to glean insights into the author's attitudes about race.⁴ The stories' white bodies and the dynamic relations through which they attempt to subdue...