This week we (finally) read the first chapter of Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia: “Paleopetrology: From Gog-Magog Axis to Petropunkism”.
Below I have included my few introductory notes but this session was essentially Bob and I going deep into the vortex and teasing out the book’s strange double-dealing habits — habits that are illuminating but which also have unnerving consequences for our current political moment (whether that’s related to global capitalism or the latest Twitter drama…).
It feels like we’ve been all over Cyclonopedia by now and now we’ve arrived at chapter one… Hopefully, by now, we’ve got some context for what this thing is trying to do and how and why and with whom. This chapter starts off with some potentially familiar references. It grounds itself firmly as a post-Ccru project, dropping a bunch of Landian terminology, that probably feels more confusing for those who are coming to this book as its own entity, but it isn’t — it is always entangled with the Ccru, Land and the Hyperstition blog.
We’re also introduced to Negarestani’s primary conceptual personae. The Ccru had them and so did Deleuze and Guattari. Dr. Hamid Parsani is Reza’s and he is something like the Thing — a fictional entity who is a grotesque and leperous amalgamation of Reza himself, Nick Land and also a sort of Persian translation of Professor Challenger, who Deleuze and Guattari steal from Arthur Conan Doyle and make a puppet for their history of geotrauma. But he is perhaps most similar to Land — he’s the author of one controversial book, seemingly about cultural history of apocalyptic nihilism, and he has also entered into a period of academic exile, but not before establishing a para-academic research institute for further exploring his nefarious interests.
Treating this simply as a translation would be reductive, however. This chapter is, arguably, an exercise in resonance. Vincent Garton, writing about what Land called a ‘libidinal materialism’, once noted that whilst this “drive to posit” this ‘jangling of the nerves’ “in specifically philosophical form is perhaps peculiarly influenced by Western tradition. The sensation itself is not.” In this sense, Cyclonopedia is not an Iranian translation but an Iranian expression.
This chapter is complex though. Summarising it doesn’t really get us anywhere. The other day I wrote on the blog about a new right’s abuse of esotericism and Cyclonopedia feels like one of the last instances where this kind of writing retains a certain productivity. It is esoteric in a very classic sense. But there are also a lot of finer details here that reveal a quite complex and grotesque world lingering underneath the surface of the text. This is not Derridean postmodernism; this is a para-academic Lovecraftianism. Summarising the narrative thrust of the chapter skips over these strange figures — worm-like creatures with acephalic mouths, leper creativity, demons summoned by earthquakes, strange footnotes left by Kristen Alvanson, templexity and an acutely Islamic neoreation, transposed Zoroastrian numograms, exnominated blog comments, not to mention strange contradictions and twists in logic, all emerging from oil — fossil fuels that leak into into the political imaginary and bring capitalism to us from the depths like an ancient, blob-like Skynet. This isn’t just a technological conspiracy, however; it is a purely material one and therefore all the more terrifying.
So, all that being said, I’d like to kick the ball over to you. There is a lot to cover here, but are there any particularly weird or irritating passages anyone wants to discuss? No judgement here. When reading a book like Cyclonopedia, picking apart the finer twists is sort of the point. I’ll admit that much of the end of this chapter gets lost on me, but maybe we can work more of it out together.