This week we read pages 37-67 — the “Excursus I (Incomplete Burning, Pyrodemonism and NAPALM-Obsession)” and “The Machines are Digging” chapters — of Cyclonopedia.
There was a lot to cover here and we may return to some of themes later, particularly the discussions of warmachines, etc. For this session, we focused mainly on the concept of ( )holey space and found ourselves falling down plenty of rabbit holes of our own…
XG introduction below, as usual. It rambles off a bit at the end but we ran with it in the discussion that followed…
NB: I had a minor recording malfunction around the 80-90 minute mark where only my side of the conversation was captured and then it cut out all together. We later recovered but apologies for the gaps and jumps.
As we push forwards with Cyclonopedia, it may become increasingly apparent that Negarestani is continuing his heretic translation of Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. This produces an odd relation but one which might help us to understand this chapter better.
For instance, when Reza unpacks his “( )hole complex”, we might think he is translating Deleuze and Guattari’s writings on the smooth and the striated. Smooth space, for example, is a plane for nomad forces. It’s slippery and always moving. At its most obvious, we might say that the sea is the ultimate smooth space – and Deleuze and Guattari acknowledge this for themselves. At sea, we are always moving. Throw an object into it and it is tossed to and fro by waves and dragged around by currents. And yet, as human beings began to take to the oceans, we couldn’t just give ourselves over to these forces every time we set sail. We’re not used to that. We live on land, in nations, in territories and kingdoms and neighbourhoods. We live in striated spaces – spaces of “sedentary capture”, as Deleuze and Guattari put it. Movement is less fluid here and even discouraged. We are encouraged, instead, to put down roots. And so, when we set sail on the seven seas, we brought our tendency to territorialise with us, throwing down anchors, mapping out the oceans and giving them boundaries, naively attempting to fix in place that which is constantly moving.
But we are, of course, not completely stuck either. We can move and change and adapt. Whilst the sea may be the ultimate smooth space, there is no such thing as an ultimate striated space. We might think of their example of the rhizome here. Even when we put down roots, we have the opportunity to twist and turn as we do so. Striating space is a human neurosis, in this regard, for putting arbitrary restrictions on nature. And so, Deleuze and Guattari make the point that we live in spaces that are both smooth and striated, to varying degrees of complexity. The desert, however, is perhaps the most complex of all. Particularly in the Middle East, it is smooth and striated in equal measure – a combination of tensions between nomadic principles and state forces. And it is this becoming-desert that Negarestani is dramatizing (and translating) here in Cyclonopedia.
Negarestani’s concept of a ( )hole complex, central to this chapter, is, in this sense, Negarestani’s translation of a combined smooth and striated space. And it is, notably, a space lubricated by oil. Thinking back to our discussion of content and expression last week, we can understand this on a kind of meta-level. Cyclonopedia lubricates A Thousand Plateaus with the contemporary politics of the Gulf, less pressing to Deleuze and Guattari in their time. Negarestani uses the contemporary politics and tensions of the Middle East – that is, its geopolitics, histories, archaeologies, populations, languages, etc. – to lubricate Deleuze and Guattari’s text by redeploying and translating their terminology into a new context. Cyclonopedia, then, is itself a kind of DeleuzoGuattarian corpse juice. Long since stratified into Deleuze Studies, Cyclonopedia is a kind of fracking process enacted upon D&G’s text. It excavates the oil from deep within it.
Textual analysis aside, we might say that Negarestani’s ( )hole complex to the earth as leper creativity is to Parsani – both name a “degenerate wholeness”. Similarly, Reza makes literal the DeleuzoGuattarian concepts of grounding and ungrounding. Whereas Deleuze speaks of grounding as a kind of a priori condition of thought, a precondition upon which thinking takes place, recalling the Nietzschean geophilosophies we discussed last week, Negarestani extends Deleuze and Guattari’s question of “Who does the Earth think it is?” to newly interrogate how a so-called “New Earth” is possible under contemporary circumstances. If the desert, as they argue – perhaps betraying a certain Orientalism — is this pregnant space of geopolitical and philosophy possibilities, Negarestani holds up this argument to the reality (and irreality) of the Middle East today.
Of course, Negarestani can’t do this straight. He has to invoke strange creatures and horrors; Lovecraftian worms devouring the grounds upon which we stand.
Again, the text starts to do what we might otherwise expect it just to describe. On the surface, this chapter starts to feel repetitive, but in repeating and folding over on itself, Negarestani gives form to what he calls a “pattern of emergence”. Anything can happen and nothing can happen. “Things leak into each other according to a logic that does not belong to us and cannot be correlated to our chronological time” (p49). There’s something interesting about this here though. We’ve spoken about this tendency a few times now, of doing rather than describing, of contaminating content and expression. Negarestani goes someway towards articulating the horror of this process here. Within the realm of academia, we might find it innocuously squeamish. Wassim has talked about this already in recent weeks, in relation to his upcoming event on “epistemic trespassing”. Negarestani uncovers the productive horror of this trespassing here. Whether that is the thinking mind becoming entangled with the thinking earth or historiography and archaeology, as innately gothic sciences, entangling past, present and future. Negarestani articulates it cryptically (and, yes, pun absolutely intended) when he says: “What horrifies the living is not an empty tomb but a messed-up and exhumed tomb” (p51). I’m sure our resident archaeologist can tell us something about this but I always think about it when I walk around Nunhead cemetery, one of London’s major burial sights that isn’t far from where I live. The earth there moves constantly. Ancient graves are opening up and shifting all the time. There is always a new part of the cemetery cornered off for repairs as the earth has opened up and, rather than swallowing what exists on the surface, it spits out what has been encased within it. We don’t always think about the earth acting in this way. We prefer the chthonic horror of sink holes and caves to the more frequent reality of exhumations. Why? As Negarestani puts it, “Exhumation is wholly criminal and immoral, but further, it is basically polluting and infecting as it undergoes surface collision, necrotizing the architecture, proliferating hot and cold surfaces into each other, letting the cold space of a tomb evaporate and reek the bodies rise up…” (p51).
We can return again to our talk of geophilosophy from last week and the relevance of geotrauma to trauma as we more typically understand it. The post-structuralists of the twentieth century (Deleuze and Guattari, of course, but also Foucault and innumerable others) became fascinated with the history of madness in this regard. Why do the traumatised traumatise us? Why do we lock the mad away? It is arguably for this same reason. Emotional trauma acts upon the mind like geological trauma acts upon the earth. It brings faults and horrors to the surface. It exhumes. It ungrounds the conditions on which we have built a civilisation – most notably, reason.
I’m wondering, at this point, if it’s worth us pausing here before we dive into the second half of this chapter. There is a lot going on here. (This is the risk of assigning a reading before having done it for myself.) I don’t want to gloss over this talk of warmachines and Middle Eastern geopolitics and hidden writing. But it is at this point that are reading may become a bit convoluted. I haven’t mentioned the Excursus yet on “incomplete burning”. But this is where it becomes relevant. “Oil is fair in love and war” might be the Negarestani mantra here. Cyclonopedia’s blobjective perspective comes to the fore…