This is our final session reading from Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia. This week we read the chapter “Decay”, and afterwards just hung out before reconvening in the new year.
This chapter introduces one of Reza’s central concepts within Cyclonopedia — that of “undercover softness”. What this concept is actually about is may be hard to parse here, precisely because, as usual, Reza is conflating various different scales and perspectives. Also as usual, our best introduction to the concept can probably be found elsewhere.
In the sixth volume of Urbanomic’s Collapse journal, Reza writes on “undercover softness” in very similar terms as in Cyclonopedia. In fact, his argument in Collapse feels like a total recapitulation of his argument in Cyclonopedia, deploying many of the same references and points but in such a way that the overall form of the argument is more clear.
This rewrite is strangely apt. To look at the arguments in reverse — from Collapse to Cyclonopedia, rather than vice versa — we see precisely the sort of metaphysical indeterminacy produced by decay that Reza is discussing in these two essays.
In Collapse, Reza writes about how “putrefaction creates a differential productive field in which natural evolution is transmogrified into a sinisterly putrid inter-species production line.” It is as if decay reverses the recapitulating process of gestation. Throughout time, there have been theories of recapitulation, which argue that all the stages of a species’ phylogenetic development are passed through again in the womb. For instance, to watch a baby human develop in utero is to watch the human species fast-forward through all the various stages of its evolutionary development, from fish to ape to human.
Decay reveals this process in reverse. In both his essay for Collapse and the chapter of Cyclonopedia, Reza draws on the proto-scientific writings of Henry of Hesse the Elder, who “poses a ludicrously bizarre yet metaphysically troubling question regarding the possibility of the generation of one species from the putrefying corpse of another species: that of whether a fox can spontaneously be generated from a dog’s carcass.” In the present day, we know this not to be true. No amount of decay would mutate the genetic markers that differentiate species, but it is intriguing to note that, on a surface level, it can often be difficult to visually distinguish between a rotting dog and a rotting fox.
Reza extrapolates this point outwards and uses it as a classic gothic-Reza analogy for the dissolution of nation states and geopolitical systems. “If political systems are constituted of formations — both in the realm of ideas and in concrete structures”, he writes, “then, like living species, they also are subject to the troubling deformities brought about by the process of decay.” This seems quite obvious to us now, at a time when the decomposition of capitalism has already led to many talking about a prospective neo-feudalism. Are the social relations that defined feudalism really returning to the fore in late capitalism? Or is capitalism’s decay, its undercover softness, not simply revealing its conceptual phylogeny?
In Cyclonopedia, Reza gives this argument a different emphasis. He isn’t talking about the Middle East as an entity that has started to decay. The Middle East is nothing but decay. It is a zombie nation that doesn’t cover over its undercover softness like the West does but embraces its decay and makes it a part of its very existence.
This decay is not limited to the fundamental liquefaction of bodily form, however — which is precisely how oil is produced. Instead, it is more subtle — it is Reza’s becoming-dust (discussed a few weeks ago). This form of decay doesn’t “wipe out or terminate; on the contrary it keeps alive.” Reza goes so far as to argue that “decay misdirects — in the sense of a permanent derailing — the processes of terminus.”
The question for us, perhaps, is does this amount to some new revolutionary plane of immanence; “a laboratory slab upon which base-necrophilia … is germinated”? Or is the misdirection of the processes of terminus just another way of describing the frenzied stasis we’re already familiar with?
This chapter, in its grotesqueness, reminds me of Bataille’s Blue of Noon, which I previously wrote about in Egress. Bataille sees any kind of political activity as necrophilic — you cannot be politically active if you are not already in love with death. There is a hopeless in Bataille’s novella, which he himself found too cynical once the Nazi death camps were unveiled across Europe, but there remains a certain truth to it. Politics inevitably involves a kind of “making it with death”, as Nick Land put it, but to accept that morbid reality is, perhaps, to end up where Reza is in 2008: death is not the end; decay is fertiliser, from which a thousand flowers may blossom. Reza’s argument is, perhaps, that it is hard to grow much of anything in the desert.