This week we read two short chapters from Cyclonopedia: “An Assyrian Relic” and “Excursus III”. Below, as ever, are a few introductory notes.
Strategy as a radical outsideness can perhaps be understood as a form of action that is outside what your opponent is capable of anticipating. To be one step ahead is to know what your opponent is likely to do and either adapt to, thwart or take advantage of their predictability. It is this that I think Reza is referring to when he writes that “strategy is diagrammed by intrinsic escape from those military configurations which simultaneously provide warmachines with survival and destruction.”
But how are we to make sense of this sort of strategy? Are we even supposed to? It all sounds too good to be true — a needlessly complicated attempt to flatten out what is in fact quite simple. Indeed, Reza calls it the “Axis of Evil-Against-Evil”. Is this a case of fighting fire with fire? Or a way of describing the fraught equilibrium that constitutes a horseshoe theory of global geopolitics? Is it a kind of “both sides” rhetoric? I think it is both simpler and more complicated than this. What we are attempting to grapple with here is what the Hyperstition crew, in an adapted report by Colonel West, call the porous interplay between “the state’s occultural programs and occultural entities from the outside”. It is, in some ways, a kind of superficial logic, albeit in a truly Deleuzian sense.
In his Logic of Sense, Deleuze writes at length on the paradoxical nature of surfaces. Depth, he writes, is a misnomer. It is when we stay on the surface that things get strange. The surface, after all, is where humour happens — when I make a pun, I am using a word superficially to gesture towards a multitude of meanings. Geometrically, surfaces are also strange. Think about a Mobius strip, that most elusive yet simple shape, wherein two surfaces become one with the help of a twist. Here we can perhaps begin to see the relation between inside and outside in relation to the state and to capitalism, but also the strange nature by which these things function. Just as in Deleuze’s study of sense and nonsense, it is precisely the rule of a form that allows it to be transgressed, but forms are adaptive and can learn to contain a new sense within the old. This is as much a vector for change as it is for tyranny. Perhaps the ultimate lesson of Cyclonopedia is that, following the tumult of the twentieth century, the fog of war is all-encompassing and we are left, if not shooting blanks, at the very least shooting blind.