This week we read two more chapters from Cyclonopedia — “The Dead Mother of All Contagion” and “Excursus IV”. Brief introductory notes below, along with some links to topics discussed.
Dust-to-dust, Reza writes, and so we find that dust is an entity capable of standing in for just about anything. It is everything, quite literally — the by-product of material shedding; conceptually, it is capital, the process of deterritorialisation and the sadomasochism of reterritorialisation, it is the germination of the desert, it is entropy, it is “xero-data”, a plague waiting for a reactant to eviscerate.
This chapter feels particularly resonant right now, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. So many people have made the cliched comparison between going viral on social media and being a superspreader but memes in themselves, for Richard Dawkins, were already an example of information and media taking on a biological essence. Deleuze and Guattari arguably make much the same argument, in drawing our attention to the ways that the new logics of late capitalism echo the latest scientific knowledge, especially within biology and the other earth sciences. Here, Reza epitomises all of this and more, through a heavy metal vector of blackened naturalism.
Suddenly, oil becomes all too terrestrial in its lubrication of earth-capital’s flows. Dust is corpse-matter to oil’s corpse-juice. To take the two together — earth’s dried and flaky crust with the devil’s liquid — is to create that most horrific of blobs; the ultimate “mess”. Oil from the desert is one thing; biological matter cross-contaminating in a wet market is likely another. Both are examples of what Reza called “Tiamateritalism” — from Tiamat, the ancient Babylionian entity, representative of the abyssal chaos of primordial creation, and materialism, that promiscuous philosophy of matter.
Links:
— “Botanists unearth new ‘vampire plant’ in UK carpark”
— “Physarum polycephalum” wiki
— Jay Owens’ “Dust” newsletter
— “Phoebe Bridgers Is the Spooky Prophet of End Times America”
Books discussed included Eugene Thacker’s In The Dust Of This Planet, Ben Woodard’s Slime Dynamics, Felix Guattari’s The Three Ecologies, Keith Ansell Pearson’s Germinal Life and various essays by Thierry Bardini.