This week we read pages 68-72 of Cyclonopedia — specifically the two short chapters “Excursus II (Memory and ( )hole Complex)” and “Pipeline Odyssey: The Z Monologue”.
Unfortunately, there were more recording issues today… I will have a better and more stable set up once I’ve moved house at the end of this month, when the new Patreon goals of better quality recordings and more varied audio content will be in full swing.
This week I dropped my stupid USB-C headphones and mic into a bowl of oat milk and could not use any alternatives because 3.5mm jacks just aren’t a thing anymore, I guess. Because I could not record with headphones, there is a doubling of channels in the recording. I figured out I was fucking it up about 40 mins in but the solution — fading out my mic when not talking — wasn’t an ideal solution. Sorry about that. I hope it’s not too annoying to listen to.
Introductory notes below as always.
Now we’ve been around the houses and possibly read more of not-Cyclonopedia than we have of the actual book itself, in our own very roundabout way I hope this book feels like it has opened itself up to us a bit more.
Getting back to the text and coming to these short few pages feel right, I think, especially this discussion of memory and the ( )hole complex, which feels quite relevant to how we’ve approached things here. You’d all be forgiven for forgetting where we’ve been and how we’ve arrived at where we are but that’s sort of the name of the game.
If memory holes cause such accessibility problems for the subject, it is because they have been specifically designed for being accessed from the other side. In this sense, memory holes are accessible not for the subject and its integrated self but for that which is exterior to the subject and has no self (no one).
We can feel this in our own reading of the text, in Reza’s own writing of the text, and in the various plot holes that emerge from the text itself without Reza or us.
I like the footnote here too — another hole — which mentions Tell-Ibrahim, an archaeological site in Iraq. I won’t pretend to be any expert on this but even the Wikipedia page is telling. It tells a potted history drawn from many, many sources and fragments and histories and stories and legends. It’s the sort of ancient site that tickles the Western imagination in its elusiveness but I think what Reza hopes to emphasise here is that, although the Western mind might find the mysteriousness of this site and many others like it to be fascinating, through the lens of Orientalism, the mystery is taken as a given without any consideration of the fact that the mystery emerges from Western forgetfulness, and it is through these memory gaps that oil, Islam and the Middle East seap in. As he says, “memory gaps are the instruments of their homecoming.”
In a way, I feel like this is Reza affirming the horror of those classic ghost stories about Egyptian curses and mummies’ tombs. In the next short chapter when he talks about Jihad as a kind of defensiveness, that’s what I imagine — traps, curses and zombies put in place to keep graverobbers at bay. I imagine, at Reza’s hyperstitional and geological scale, these deterrents are eternal. They are as much deterrents for the modern Western man with his sticky fingers as they are for any more local thieves from antiquity.
Is this not also how oil functions? This kind of liquid gold lurking in tombs that makes graverobbers’ eyes glisten and disregard their own safety for the sake of cupful. And it is not a trap left by man but by the earth itself. It is in this sense that it is a war machine. It is the earth’s war machine as a kind of blobjective immanence and, as we are of the earth, all that we are as a species — our cultures, ideals, aggressions and concerns — are swept up in its global flows.
I suppose what might be interesting for us to discuss here and try and pull out of this short chapter — which hopefully makes a bit more sense now that we’ve sort of tackled war machines last week — is how exactly are we to understand this collapse of capitalism and Islamism onto each other in oil? What are the implications of this? How are we to think it in a way that helps us progress through this book but also how does this shift our own sense of East and West? These are questions that we might find, if not answered, at least fleshed out in later chapter, but I’m interested to know what you all think.