This week we read two chapters of Cyclonopedia — “The Thing: White War and Hypercamouflage” and “War as a Machine”.
Introduction below.
For Reza, the Middle East is stranger than fiction. As a result, pulp becomes a cogent reference point. Why not?
Taqiyya is understood as the “adherence to the logic of the Thing” — hypercamouflage; becoming a double within the society in which one lives, feigning belief in hegemonic practices to hide one’s true belief. However, what differentiates this from normal camouflage is that, under Taqiyya, like the Thing itself, the believer still retains an evangelical practice; a drive to convert the infidel that they feign themselves to be. As Reza writes, “it is not the Thing … which is targeted as the object of eradication and assault, but its potential hosts, or the positions (niches) which it might occupy.”
This is how the war machine functions for Deleuze and Guattari. Their slippery concept is hard to parse in being both historical and aesthetic, and not the property of the state whilst deployed as the state, and in fact set up in opposition to the state but capable of capture by the state. Reza’s use of the Thing and the Muslims under Taqiyya becomes a useful analogy. Just as Deleuze and Guattari argue that desert nomads can be taken in and captured by state apparatus, we see how Muslims under Taqiyya can embed themselves into a hostile society and render themselves, for all intents and purposes, as citizens. In our never-ending present moment of Islamist paranoia, this example feels quite potent and uncomfortable, but surely this is true of any immigrant individual or community? You subsume yourself into the larger whole for the sake of your own survival, feigning loyalty to the state from within, and yet, all the while, your very presence and the shadow of your historical and aesthetic upbringing slowly mutates the new culture of which you are a part.
This is a sort of classic Landian reversal of reason. The logic of bigots — of the Great Replacement — is inverted. It is arguably still negative, in being made analogous to the Thing, but this mutant and innately Western perspective is affirmed. Why? Perhaps because an awareness of this Othering only makes one’s Thingness more powerful. As Reza writes, “In the presence of a warrior under Taqiyya who just tries to survive, becoming the native civilian of the hostile society not only renders the fact of ‘being a civilian’ (civilian status) menacing, but also forms a polarity in the society” between state and insurgent.
This feels somewhat prescient, looking back. In orbit of the recent US election, I’ve seen many writers acknowledge, now with four years of hindsight, how liberal democracies, in their very adherence to lacklustre and hollow conceptions of the “social” — not “socialism” but what Foucault calls a kind of “sociological governance” — have emboldened the Thing in their midst. A sociological government does not support its citizens according to the tenets of socialism but instead requires its citizens to support government infrastructure — less state intervention and more voluntarism, less social cohesion and more individualism. (Think David Cameron’s “Big Society.”) But in deferring a superficial and soft power to the citizenry, as a kind of cynical deployment of democratic principles, we see the Taqiyya warrior — or any other form of war machine (which needn’t be so racialised in every instance, we might add, though it is often the case in a white supremacist society) — begin to move and stir the pot. In hollowing out the very concept of citizenship, a society becomes more susceptible to Thingification. The right-wing populists of the present find themselves reaping what they have sown.
It is in this sense that Reza makes one of his more famous critical arguments, also rendered elsewhere in an essay for an essay issue of the Collapse journal, regarding “the militarization of peace”. It is this same dynamic, at a more abstract level, that peace, more so than war itself and the battlefields on which war plays out, “is a space radically open to being populated by warmachines”.
A similar sort of logic is hard-baked into our understanding of contemporary Jihadist Islamism. Europe in particular is repeatedly terrorised by ISIS “sleeper cells” but the primary function of a sleeper cell is, of course, to sleep. These periods of sleep are far more responsible for the militarization of European peace than the times they spend awake — a sleep, in the case of many suicide bombings in particular, that is only interrupted for a singular catastrophic instance. It is the terror of when the next attack will come that unbounds society far more than the instances of attack themselves, which provoke hardened responses and often an intensification of nationalistic sentiments. But here again the use of such tactics is necessary, because it is precisely these moments of hardening that weaken the warmachine of the enemy itself.
The state arguably knows this — this is why it engaged in proxy wars in the Middle East. The real war is arguably in Europe but it is a war that the state is too afraid to engage in, because it knows that to engage there is to give up the “White War”, as Reza calls it — with white being “the white of thick impenetrable fog and the color of peace.” This is to say that to wage war at home is to shatter the illusion and reveal the terror that governs Western states. It is to dismantle, in one fell swoop, the illusion of liberalism and its warmachines. Warmachines need room for manoeuvre, after all. Warmachines are at their least free when they are at war. As Reza writes: “The fragile character of warmachines in war is the result of their not having the capacity to exceed a certain quality or quantity of activities (getting more heated) and not being able to be silent (obligation to undertake activities).” This is to say that warmachines are at their least warmachinic when actively engaged in war itself. And so, the state must combat sleeper cells by deploying sleeper cells that contain its own fascistic tendencies.
Here we maybe start to see Reza’s twisted argument. In playing up to this terroristic and cunning image of the Muslim citizen, he begins to unearth the shadow image of the state itself. Quoting Parsani, Reza writes:
If people as numbers and numeric contagions constitute the foundations of democracy, ordinary people as dormant warmachines form the floods of revolution. The Jihadi under Taqiyya overlaps the civilian so as to detail the society against the state, and instigates the state against its own society.
This mutates, as the Thing does, the figure of the sovereign individual as the lynchpin of a sociologically-governed society, “for the individual becomes a military collective through Taqiyya, which connects and overlaps the individual and the collective”; the very concept of Taqiyya “contaminates the individual with an expanding collectivity” — just as the Thing “does not come in a pack but as one dog, a loner whose individuality and separate existence as a singular is hugely questionable.”
It is notable that, following this provocative affirmation of Jihadist strategy through Western body-horror, Reza folds a further cultural example into his narrative. The following chapter, “War as a Machine”, extends these arguments but by deploying a figure wholly other to the Jihadist Other. Instead, Reza turns to Colonel West — Cyclonopedia‘s very own Colonel Kurtz. West is not a Jihadist under Taqiyya but Western military personnel who has swapped military strategy for a becoming-warmachine. No longer satified with being one among many “payroll officers and servicemen”, he wants to reclaim his “astute voracity” and so vows to become a kind of mutant persona who is far beyond the realm of citizenry but has also nullified all the principles of military discipline. He, like Kurtz, slips out to a new beyond. His is not hiding in plain sight but affirmation himself as an aberration.
Colonel West / Kurtz, then, seeks to become like war itself — that is, war-in-itself. Following the (il)logic of the warmachine, war as it is defined by states and bodies like the UN is a strange attempt to produce a law-abiding lawlessness. It is a way to muzzle and contain this otherwise wholly amorphous and autonomous global force. Consider how Kurtz, in Apocalypse Now especially, is deemed to be a war criminal for simply going with the flow of the Vietnam War’s twists and turns. The man who gives himself over to the war completely is seen as a villain by the state that declared war and invaded in the first place.
This inverts the Deleuzo-Guattarian warmachine, as Reza notes. For Deleuze and Guattari, war is the conclusion of the warmachine. As the warmachine breaks down, militarisation takes over. Here the opposite is the case. The collapse of the war effort in Iraq or Vietnam or the ivory trade in the Congo (depending on which version of Heart of Darkness you wish to focus on; Reza’s, Coppola’s, or Conrad’s) concludes in a new warmachine that takes possession of Kurtz.
At the heart of each darkened warmachine, we should note that there is a material foundation. For Conrad, it is ivory that lubricates the war machine; for Coppola, it is arguably the military-industrial project in itself; for Reza, of course, it is oil — and behind them all lies a noumenal capital. This material dimension complicates the warmachine as not simply being a human endeavour but a more broadly terrestrial or cosmic one.
Perhaps we can say here that the warmachine is a kind of becoming-slime — a becoming-complicit with these anonymous materials. What is striking is that Reza shirks his elusiveness here and provides us with a quite clear program for experimentation and deterritorialisation. A “how-to” guide not for becoming a warmachine but instead channelling war as a machine.