Category: Cyclonopedia Reading Group

This week we read the preface to Eugene Thacker’s In the Dust of This Planet as a way to ground last week’s discussion around dust. The importance of this chapter, I think, lies in Thacker’s concision when exploring the articulated scales of cognition now complicating philosophy in the twenty-first century. 

Unfortunately, another week plagued by recording issues. OBS Studio is being the most unstable and inconsistent programme for me. I need to look into some other options. As such, I’ve had to trim this week’s recording down to just my introduction. You can hear the shaky audio there but this was so much worse for everyone else coming through in the discussion. Apologies about that, but hopefully this still works as an introduction to this text.

Below are my introductory notes, as usual. These were unfinished before we started chatting and I just decided to wing it from there on out. 

These notes are followed by links to a few things that were discussed over the course of this session.

Eugene Thacker’s In the Dust of This Planet is a pretty fascinating book — not only for the blackened nature of its subject matter but how, despite this, it managed to break through into the pop cultural sphere. (Something discussed at length in an episode of Radiolab based on the book).

In many ways, what Thacker manages to pioneer, at a time when most were still just dreaming about it, is a kind of pulp philosophy. The Ccru had attempted it and Deleuze and Guattari somewhat prefigured it but I don’t think it was until Thacker wrote this book that the occulted nature of pessimistic and nihilistic philosophies actually found the market that weird fiction had done.

I think the preface to this book should get most of the credit for that. I’m quite keen to re-read Thacker’s Zer0 trilogy but I often found its eclecticism quite disorientating. He can be hard to follow, I think, as he jumps from reference to reference. But this preface is a masterpiece in concision, laying the foundation not just for his own project but summarising what it was that had preoccupied the blogosphere for much of the previous decade: “the horror of philosophy.”

Not “a philosophy of horror”, as he takes care to emphasise, but “the horror of philosophy: the isolation of those moments in which philosophy reveals its own limitations and constraits, moments in which thinking enigmatically confronts the horizon of its own possibility — the thought of the unthinkable that philosophy cannot pronounce but via a non-philosophical language.”

This is, I think, what we were introduced to last week in Cyclonopedia. Reza has now introduced the concept of “dust” and its enigmatic relationship to the slime dynamics of oil. I think how Thacker introduces the various scales at stake here goes someway towards clarifying the relationships between Reza’s various vectors and entities. He writes, for instance, that “one of the greatest challenges that philosophy faces today lies in comprehending the world in which we live as both a human and non-human world — and of comprehending this politically.” He continues: 

“On the one hand, we are increasingly more and more aware of the world in which we live as a non-human world, a world outside, one that is manifest is the effects of global climate change, natural disasters, the energy crisis, the progressive extinction of species world-wide. On the other hand, all these effects are linked, directly and indirectly, to our living in and living as part of this non-human world. Hence contradiction is built into this challenge — we cannot help but to think of the world as a human world, by virtue of the fact that it is we human beings that think it.”

The present popularity of a term like the “anthropocene” neglects such contradictions, I find, and it is perhaps a term like “cyclonopedia” which better describes our new relationship to ourselves and how capacity to know the human and non-human world. As such, Thacker’s trilogy would have very much suited the name “cyclonopedia” as well, if it hadn’t already been taken. This is because neither text functions quite like an “encyclopedia”. Though it shares the same etymological roots, the word “encyclopedia” describes an innocuous attempt to provide a kind of “general” education. It is a text that attempts to *encircle* all knowledge. 

A cyclonopedia, on the other hand, demonstrates how a text can encircle itself, going round and round and round, emphasising the etymological root between encircle and cyclone, describing a kind of destructive epistemology. In this sense, it is a general account of the knowledge we have that nonetheless addresses a question Thacker articulates as follows: “When the world as such cataclysmically manifests itself in the form of a disaster, how do we interpret or give meaning to the world?”

Links:

— “In the Dust of This Planet” on Radiolab

— Kyle Anderson, “Why You Need to Read the Horror Masterpiece, Uzumaki”, Nerdist 

— Vincent Le, “Philosophy’s Dark Heir: On Nick Land’s Abstract Horror Fiction”, Academia.edu 

— Reza Negarestani, “John Carpenter’s The Thing: White War and Hypercamouflage”, Hyperstition blog [web archive] 

— Trailer for The Void (2017) 

— Sadie Plant, “Between Shit and Architecture” 

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.

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.

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.

This week we read (or at least skim-read) the “Treatise on Nomadology — The War Machine” chapter of Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus — a final peruse of that unwieldy book to try and help us tackle that other unwieldy book, which we’ll be turning back to properly from here on out: Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia.

We spoke about the concept of the war machine quite explicitly, then moved onto parkour and free running (again), rave culture, “the militarization of peace”, class struggle and etiquette.

Below is a short point made by Max in the Discord about the relation between Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the machine and Manuel DeLanda’s. I’ve included this here for context as we discussed these points off the bat.

Below that are my obligatory notes constituting something of an introduction to the chapter and the oddly promiscuous concept of the “war machine”. 

Max writes:

An interesting point for me would be to understand more explicitly the machine. At the moment my reading of Deleuze is still influenced by DeLanda. DeLanda’s explanation of the machine is again via the modelling technique of state spaces. In a state space you look for dimensions with degrees of freedom (e.g. you can describe a pendulum as a two dimensional state space: one dimension for its place that can change and one dimension for its momentum). Another example is a simple model of growth (of a population). This can be modelled with the logistic function. This function has some interesting properties (you can play around with this function here). 

You have r as grow rate and x0 as initial condition (the size of the population in regard to the annihilation factor — the size where the population dies out. Therefore x represents a fraction and has always a number between 0 and 1). The interesting point is, that depending on r the function has different properties. If r is smaller than 1 (r < 1), than the population dies out after some time; independent of the initial condition. Between 1 and 3 there is a point attractor. For example if r = 2, the point attractor is 0.5; independent of the initial conditions. Around r = 3 the equation reaches a critical value and a bifurcation occurs. The attractor is no longer a point attractor, but a period-2 one (try it with r = 3.2). The ratio in which these bifurcations occur can be measured by the so called Feigenbaum constant. The growth function is big abstraction, but there are other examples with the same ratio of bifurcations: convection rolls; the dripping of a faucet (r; the control parameter is the pressure of the pipe); and so on. This phenomenon is called universality. A mathematical structure shich occurs in many different mechanisms. The “classic” causality is the physical mechanism behind the concrete individual process.

But for DeLanda the distribution of attractors and bifurcations is also a causality or in his words a quasi-causality. According to DeLanda the term machine in Deleuze describes exactly this quasi-causality. (read the pages about abstract machines at the end of thousand plateaus and it makes a lot of sense with this context. Singularity is another word for attractor. In this sense it starts to make sense that machines are singular, but abstract; that they are more than the simple mechanism and so on). DeLanda’s Assemblage Theory goes so far that social entities can be described as state spaces. You have to find the parameters (or dimensions) with their degrees of freedom (he actually shows this with the war machine example in his Assemblage Theory book; the newer one with exactly this title not the A New Philosophy of Society one). But in the virtual (for DeLanda the structure of state spaces that determines the distribution of singularities/attractors) there are structures.

Sorry for the long text, but I think it helps to pose my questions. First: Is this the only way to think about machines? Is Deleuze using the word machine only in this mathematical / physical sense or are there more connotations of the word that can be applied to his texts and still make that much sense as the mathematical one? Second: Let’s stay within DeLanda’s explanation. If the virtual is the structure that is not actualized but has effects on the actualization of possibilities, what exactly is the virtual of a war machine? Are there different virtuals? Can they be thought as the same, that changes depending on a parameter and critical values?

Another interesting point is the application of war machines in Reza’s contribution to collapse 1. In this text he uses the concept of affordability (a concept i understand only faintly). It would be very helpful for me to get a grasp on affordability. Especially what this concept can explain that terms like tendencies and capacities can’t.

I hope that wasn’t too much text. I wanted to present a few thoughts, because I can only be part of the chat for a short time today.

First of all, apologies that I changed tack on this a little late in the day for anyone to realistically devour a 90-fucking-page chapter. But, as is common with Deleuze and Guattari, we’re not aiming for full comprehension here. However, at least an awareness of what Deleuze and Guattari call “the war machine” is probably necessary before we jump back into Cyclonopedia. On a cursory glance through the chapters ahead, it is a huge focal point for Reza. I think it might be worth us dwelling on for a session before we get back to the task at hand and, perhaps, finish it!

So, what is the war machine? Geopolitically, it is perhaps quite easy to understand. It is a military or para-military force that exists on the border of, or wholly outside of, state apparatus. With particular relevance to Cyclonopedia, we can perhaps consider the relation of America’s international military presence to the confines of America the state. What is the function of America’s presence in the Middle East if not to perpetuate what Deleuze and Guattari call this “war without battle lines”. And furthermore, can we really limit the movement of the American military-industrial complex to the preservation of American state interests? As Reza demonstrates throughout Cyclonopedia, America isn’t just serving itself; it is serving capital. It is, in a way, a kind of militia employed to service the real war machine — oil. 

A war machine, in this sense, becomes more of an abstract concept for that kind of entity that traverses and is simultaneously entangled with smooth space and striated space, which we discussed last time. As such, it is not just an entity that moves through “space” as such. Striated space, for instance, is not only determined by infrastructure but also by ideology. I mentioned this in the last session but I think it remains a compelling analogy — think about the difference between “parkour” and “free running”. Although these two sports are increasingly entangled and inseparable, parkour is a name for a kind of militarised Situationist movement — getting from A to B quickly and efficient, through a kind of movement that wholly undermines a suggested or instructed usage. 

Free running is less practical, in that regard, and we might also say less explicitly “political”. It is all about flamboyance and flair — it is more about the aesthetic qualities of the movements made rather than their efficiency, but the interrelation of these two sports is very telling I think and brings us to what I’d quite like to discuss today.

If this chapter is overlong and difficult, it is for much the same reason as the rest of the book and, indeed, Cyclonopedia itself — it is constantly doing what it is trying to describe. Wassim’s discussions around “epistemic trespass” remain super interesting here to me. Epistemic trespass, as far as Deleuze and Guattari are concerned, might be described as a kind of epistemic parkour or free running. Their logics are disciplined but inventive, rigorous but irreverent. This makes A Thousand Plateaus something of a war machine in itself. 

But is that equivocation dangerous? What are the implications of this kind of trespass or parkour, in which the political slides into the aesthetic? Plenty will decry this manoeuvre as being a red flag for fascism. As Walter Benjamin famously noted, “fascism tends towards an aestheticization of politics”, but can’t neoliberalism similarly be defined by the de-politicisation of the cultural? Of the regimenting of the aesthetic to the point that it becomes a archetype? Instead, we might ask, what is an aesthetics of the multitude or the commons? In this sense, the American military-industrial complex has learnt lessons from its opponents. At the time of writing, Deleuze and Guattari are arguably nodding to the guerrilla warfare epitomised by South Vietnamese militias rather than the hard-headed arrogance of American interventionism, or even to the nomadology of the counterculture that would later reach its peak in the form of rave culture and the free parties of the ’80s and ’90s when unrestricted public space was exploited to pursue desires. 

In this sense, Deleuze and Guattari’s tendencies have almost suffered an inversion. And this was, arguably, always planned. For instance, in the UK, everyone is no doubt familiar with the concept of “anti-social behaviour” — meaning behaviour that is contrary to social norms or accepted social standards. It was a term coined specifically to counter rave culture, when the relaxing of laws that prohibited basic access to open land for working people faced the ultimate backlash. The Young Communist League’s trespassing on Kinder Scout in the 1930s paved the way for rave culture and the New Age Travellers that would become a moral panic fifty years later. The argument often made here, of course, is that rave and the hedonism of collective congregation and celebration are long-standing social behaviours. However, they have been gutted by the hatred of intimacy that is defined by class war.

This is something I learned the other day. Did you know that the concept of “etiquette”, as a code of good behaviour, actually predates human understanding of germs and the transmission of diseases? Today, because etiquette already comes pre-packaged with a squeamishness around bodily function, it persists as a good way to ward off germs. But, originally, it was nothing more than an over-regulated statue of good behaviour that’s sole purpose was to signal your immersion in the upper class and its tastes. Here we find an instance where class politics and aesthetics are fundamentally entwined, and it is entanglement that allows the suppression of alternative social behaviours and desires to continue. And yet, these practices persists, precisely because they exist on the outside of striated spaces. They cannot be contained and, therefore, they cannot be defeated. There are sleeper cells everywhere for the good life. But these governing and authoritarian structures have nonetheless appropriated the war machine from the nomads, as Deleuze and Guattari argue, and it is perhaps this that has led us to the moment of stasis from which we seem incapable of escaping.

This week we read “The Smooth and the Striated” chapter from Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. 

Introductory notes below.

“The Smooth and the Striated” is a complex chapter, but it might be the ultimate example of that tendency we’ve discussed at length in recent weeks — describing at the same time as you enact what you wish to describe. 

This chapter essentially dramatises the various relationships that Deleuze and Guattari are attempting to critique and give form to but also to articulate just how interrelated they are. 

I think the key passage here is, arguably, the very last paragraph where they write the following:

Even the most striated city gives rise to smooth spaces: to live in the city as a nomad, or as a cave dweller. Movements, speed and slowness, are sometimes enough to reconstruct a smooth space. Of course, smooth spaces are not in themselves liberatory… But the struggle is changed or displaced in them, and life reconstitutes its stakes, confronts new obstacles, invents new paces, switches adversaries.

Smooth spaces, then, are chaotic but productive; striated spaces are organised but oppressive. The most difficult thing for us to come to terms with, especially in our present century, is that progress needs both. It is a double articulation. Neither side exists, as it were, without the contrast of its opposite. But, it must also be said that these things are not in themselves whole. To think of the smooth and the striated as a dichotomy is to keep them encased and tied to one another.

This summary, which opens up one of the supporting documents I put in the chat — I can’t find the original source of this quotation — makes the point very well I think: 

Deleuze does not come up with a definition of the nomad, but puts the word into play in different contexts, and such that it never acquires a definite meaning, but rather is intended to serve as a conceptual nomad: an agent in unfinished philosophical, political, artistic and other business.

Deleuze’s concept of the nomad, then, is akin to Negarestani’s oil. It lubricates. To think of it in itself is to image a kind of black void of powerful nothingness that oozes and seaps through strata. It is corpse juice. It is the very end point of life. But when put to use by capitalism it becomes a lubricant for state-capitalist forces.

This is similarly an example of the smooth and the striated that we might draw upon. Striated space is occupied by state-capitalism. The enclosure of a bordered nation gives a space for a national economy to circulate. It is limited in scope and tied to a certain piece of land. Globalised capitalism, however, has a very different nature. It flows over borders and interacts and ebbs and flows. It is, quite literally, a kind of abstract sea that flows to and fro against the borders of other nations. And oil is perfectly placed to be that abstract sea. It is oil that flows around the world, powering local businesses and movements along the striated infrastructure of roads and urban environments. It is as if striated spaces borrow flows from the smooth. But we can similarly look at the world the other way. We can note how the earth is 70% water. It is, for the most part, smooth space, but the striated points that occupy that last 30% provide the smooth space with points of reference and intervals around which to define itself. 

It is for this reason that Deleuze and Guattari must add that we should “Never believe that a smooth space will suffice to save us.” If the earth was even more of a smooth space, we’d be living in Ballard’s Drowned World. But the thing is, is that the striated forces of this world do everything that they can to keep the smooth at bay. It is certainly true that we need both but the striated attempts to keep the smooth on a leash. State-capitalism attempts to restricted world capitalism; it attacks nomads, migrants, travellers; it attempts to eradicate free action in favour of work; it attempts to enslave rather than let roam. Even though it speaks so highly of the smooth and bows down to it, it has to keep it at arms length. 

What Deleuze and Guattari do here, then, is demonstrate how just about everything under the sun — even the sun itself — is implicated in this kind of relation. This isn’t just two Continentals going off on one. We can find this dynamic in art, mathematics, fashion, physics, etc. And this is why capitalism is so pernicious. It is everywhere and in everything. 

This week we read Robin Mackay’s essay “A Brief History of Geotrauma”. 

I’m having repeat problems with audio recording at the moment — not sure where the problems are coming from (everything was running smoothly before and now it doesn’t want to play ball; I blame this heat wave) but I’ll have these issues figured out soon enough. 

So, please be aware that, once again, the desktop audio was not recorded correctly and, unfortunately, most of the discussion was lost. All that has been salvaged is my ramblings, which I’ll cut together into a kind of decontextualised collage (feat. my intro and responses to a couple of questions). There are some jumps here and there but that’s just me cutting out what are now silences and inaudible interruptions. I’ve also included the last sections of our discussion about monster movies and Bob’s obligatory and always helpful signing-off summary.

Below, as ever, is the text used to structure my introduction to the text.

This is quite a straight-forward essay, considering all that we’ve been pouring over in the last few weeks. It covers a lot of distance but hopefully these things that are covered all make sense to people now. It feels less like a cascade of references and perhaps more like a knitting of much of what we’ve read so far.

First, we have Robin sketching out The Invention of Negarestani, half truths and whole lies giving form to this unknown author, extending the reach of the Ccru.

This might just be a pedant’s point to make, but it always surprises me how often Reza is lumped in with the Warwick crowd. Reza was never a member of the Ccru. He was the first post-Ccru avatar, discovering their writings online, after the fact, and building on top. Reza just how a blog, hosted on some obscure German server mostly used for pornography, and found himself entangled in these unfurling personas. 

I think Robin clarifies why that’s important here. It’s important that Reza was an outsider who discovered Land and the Ccru not unlike the rest of us did, by following breadcrumbs. Whenever I see someone talk about Reza as part of the Ccru, folding him into that moment in a British university whilst he was, in fact, far away in Iran, I feel like some of the magic has been lost. Reza is the outsider. He’s not like the others and that’s why he matters. 

We can put it this way: the Ccru weren’t canon. They were philosophical or literary or cinematic canon in any respect. They were a Thing that emerge from a combining of all this cultural pulp, like a Swamp Thing. But they found a certain amount of fame. Reza was someone who kept their momentum going along a new vector. The Ccru weren’t canon but they became a canon of their own. Reza wasn’t part of Ccru canon but he was successful in inserting himself into that demoralised post-Warwick trajectory, lighting up the blogosphere. And so,  says a lot about the forces they are up against when he suddenly loses his outsider status.

But this raises some interesting questions, I think. What is canon? What is legitimate? Should we accept all spiralling extensions simply because they exist? There’s certainly bad Ccru fan-fiction. Reza seems to have a dual understanding of things. He understands the ins and outs of the Ccru and he also understands the ins and outs of his own maligned culture (at least from a Western perspective) and so he plays on both of those things. 

So, as much as it is outside, it is grounded. Ccru fan-fiction today seems to miss this grounding. It grounds itself on myth rather than cultivating myth from a hidden grounds… if that makes sense. It is the difference, perhaps, between good postmodernism and bad postmodernism. Reza and the Ccru diagnose, whereas others simply take to enjoying their symptoms.

This difficult relationship to culture and thought is something that I think Robin is articulating in a very interesting way here. 

“Trauma belongs to a time beyond personal memory”, he writes, and that is perhaps the key thing to note here. What is being investigated here is something prehistorical — and I mean that in an etymologically literal sense: something pre-writing; pre-narrative. A narrative is something that we build on top. Extending the narrative has its uses but, at a certain point, all we are doing is repressing that which we are trying to describe. This is, arguably, why Deleuze and Guattari and the Ccru and Reza all try to describe and enact simultaneously. It’s a kind of writing in your own blood. It is a kind of traumatic writing, it is triggering. It drives stakes down beneath the text to those things we dress up in philosophy only to forget them.

Robin also draws attention to Hitchcock’s Vertigo here — the scene amongst the redwoods in which Judy is taken over by her alterego Madeliene. “Alterego” is an interesting word in this context. To alter something is to change it but, as a prefix, it takes on a far more structural connotation — a change in the composition of something, as if it is a variant buried in the strata. It is not an extension but a kind of enclosure within the superego. 

Amongst the redwoods, Judy’s hysteria scales up this alterego to a geological scale. Madeliene is a variant within the timeline, erupting into the present, like pressurised magma erupting through a fault. 

There’s a strong foreshadowing of Thomas Moynihan’s Spinal Catastrophism book here too, which is making me think we should add a chapter from there to the reading list at some point. But, as a side note, I think how that book is very interesting in this regard. Tom isn’t so much just writing on these theories via the Ccru but inserting himself as another avatar. He isn’t relying on myth here but entwines myth with fact seamlessly.

It is telling, I think, that it is not discussed as a post-Ccru text when it is perhaps the best example of one we’ve had since Cyclonopedia. It’s not fan fiction, in that it is knowing non-canonical. It is an outsider writing themselves into the inside by excavating the neglected intellectual strata. It uncovers through abstraction; it explodes as like column of magma onto the surface of thought and then calcifies itself through an impenetrable rhetoric crust.

Why all this extra-textual context is relevant is that this process is also analogous to the geotrauma being discussed. This kind of intellectual speciation and progression, this trespassing between canonical and non-canonical thought, between pop and pulp, authorial and fan-fictional. Calling philosophy “footnotes to Plato”, for example, is grossly accurate, in this sense. Philosophy is the proliferation of fault lines beneath the surface of the text. Footnotes are subterranean junctures, asides, interjections, etc.

This week we read pages 37-67 — the “Excursus I (Incomplete Burning, Pyrodemonism and NAPALM-Obsession)” and “The Machines are Digging” chapters — of Cyclonopedia.

There was a lot to cover here and we may return to some of themes later, particularly the discussions of warmachines, etc. For this session, we focused mainly on the concept of ( )holey space and found ourselves falling down plenty of rabbit holes of our own…

XG introduction below, as usual. It rambles off a bit at the end but we ran with it in the discussion that followed…

NB: I had a minor recording malfunction around the 80-90 minute mark where only my side of the conversation was captured and then it cut out all together. We later recovered but apologies for the gaps and jumps.

As we push forwards with Cyclonopedia, it may become increasingly apparent that Negarestani is continuing his heretic translation of Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. This produces an odd relation but one which might help us to understand this chapter better.

For instance, when Reza unpacks his “( )hole complex”, we might think he is translating Deleuze and Guattari’s writings on the smooth and the striated. Smooth space, for example, is a plane for nomad forces. It’s slippery and always moving. At its most obvious, we might say that the sea is the ultimate smooth space – and Deleuze and Guattari acknowledge this for themselves. At sea, we are always moving. Throw an object into it and it is tossed to and fro by waves and dragged around by currents. And yet, as human beings began to take to the oceans, we couldn’t just give ourselves over to these forces every time we set sail. We’re not used to that. We live on land, in nations, in territories and kingdoms and neighbourhoods. We live in striated spaces – spaces of “sedentary capture”, as Deleuze and Guattari put it. Movement is less fluid here and even discouraged. We are encouraged, instead, to put down roots. And so, when we set sail on the seven seas, we brought our tendency to territorialise with us, throwing down anchors, mapping out the oceans and giving them boundaries, naively attempting to fix in place that which is constantly moving.

But we are, of course, not completely stuck either. We can move and change and adapt. Whilst the sea may be the ultimate smooth space, there is no such thing as an ultimate striated space. We might think of their example of the rhizome here. Even when we put down roots, we have the opportunity to twist and turn as we do so. Striating space is a human neurosis, in this regard, for putting arbitrary restrictions on nature. And so, Deleuze and Guattari make the point that we live in spaces that are both smooth and striated, to varying degrees of complexity. The desert, however, is perhaps the most complex of all. Particularly in the Middle East, it is smooth and striated in equal measure – a combination of tensions between nomadic principles and state forces. And it is this becoming-desert that Negarestani is dramatizing (and translating) here in Cyclonopedia. 

Negarestani’s concept of a ( )hole complex, central to this chapter, is, in this sense, Negarestani’s translation of a combined smooth and striated space. And it is, notably, a space lubricated by oil. Thinking back to our discussion of content and expression last week, we can understand this on a kind of meta-level. Cyclonopedia lubricates A Thousand Plateaus with the contemporary politics of the Gulf, less pressing to Deleuze and Guattari in their time. Negarestani uses the contemporary politics and tensions of the Middle East – that is, its geopolitics, histories, archaeologies, populations, languages, etc. – to lubricate Deleuze and Guattari’s text by redeploying and translating their terminology into a new context. Cyclonopedia, then, is itself a kind of DeleuzoGuattarian corpse juice. Long since stratified into Deleuze Studies, Cyclonopedia is a kind of fracking process enacted upon D&G’s text. It excavates the oil from deep within it.

Textual analysis aside, we might say that Negarestani’s ( )hole complex to the earth as leper creativity is to Parsani – both name a “degenerate wholeness”. Similarly, Reza makes literal the DeleuzoGuattarian concepts of grounding and ungrounding. Whereas Deleuze speaks of grounding as a kind of a priori condition of thought, a precondition upon which thinking takes place, recalling the Nietzschean geophilosophies we discussed last week, Negarestani extends Deleuze and Guattari’s question of “Who does the Earth think it is?” to newly interrogate how a so-called “New Earth” is possible under contemporary circumstances. If the desert, as they argue – perhaps betraying a certain Orientalism — is this pregnant space of geopolitical and philosophy possibilities, Negarestani holds up this argument to the reality (and irreality) of the Middle East today. 

Of course, Negarestani can’t do this straight. He has to invoke strange creatures and horrors; Lovecraftian worms devouring the grounds upon which we stand. 

Again, the text starts to do what we might otherwise expect it just to describe. On the surface, this chapter starts to feel repetitive, but in repeating and folding over on itself, Negarestani gives form to what he calls a “pattern of emergence”. Anything can happen and nothing can happen. “Things leak into each other according to a logic that does not belong to us and cannot be correlated to our chronological time” (p49). There’s something interesting about this here though. We’ve spoken about this tendency a few times now, of doing rather than describing, of contaminating content and expression. Negarestani goes someway towards articulating the horror of this process here. Within the realm of academia, we might find it innocuously squeamish. Wassim has talked about this already in recent weeks, in relation to his upcoming event on “epistemic trespassing”. Negarestani uncovers the productive horror of this trespassing here. Whether that is the thinking mind becoming entangled with the thinking earth or historiography and archaeology, as innately gothic sciences, entangling past, present and future. Negarestani articulates it cryptically (and, yes, pun absolutely intended) when he says: “What horrifies the living is not an empty tomb but a messed-up and exhumed tomb” (p51). I’m sure our resident archaeologist can tell us something about this but I always think about it when I walk around Nunhead cemetery, one of London’s major burial sights that isn’t far from where I live. The earth there moves constantly. Ancient graves are opening up and shifting all the time. There is always a new part of the cemetery cornered off for repairs as the earth has opened up and, rather than swallowing what exists on the surface, it spits out what has been encased within it. We don’t always think about the earth acting in this way. We prefer the chthonic horror of sink holes and caves to the more frequent reality of exhumations. Why? As Negarestani puts it, “Exhumation is wholly criminal and immoral, but further, it is basically polluting and infecting as it undergoes surface collision, necrotizing the architecture, proliferating hot and cold surfaces into each other, letting the cold space of a tomb evaporate and reek the bodies rise up…” (p51).

We can return again to our talk of geophilosophy from last week and the relevance of geotrauma to trauma as we more typically understand it. The post-structuralists of the twentieth century (Deleuze and Guattari, of course, but also Foucault and innumerable others) became fascinated with the history of madness in this regard. Why do the traumatised traumatise us? Why do we lock the mad away? It is arguably for this same reason. Emotional trauma acts upon the mind like geological trauma acts upon the earth. It brings faults and horrors to the surface. It exhumes. It ungrounds the conditions on which we have built a civilisation – most notably, reason. 

I’m wondering, at this point, if it’s worth us pausing here before we dive into the second half of this chapter. There is a lot going on here. (This is the risk of assigning a reading before having done it for myself.) I don’t want to gloss over this talk of warmachines and Middle Eastern geopolitics and hidden writing. But it is at this point that are reading may become a bit convoluted. I haven’t mentioned the Excursus yet on “incomplete burning”. But this is where it becomes relevant. “Oil is fair in love and war” might be the Negarestani mantra here. Cyclonopedia’s blobjective perspective comes to the fore…

This week we read “10,000 B.C.: The Geology of Morals” chapter from Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, as a way of providing the first chapter of Cyclonopedia, which we read last week, with some necessary background. 

Below is a transcript of my introduction to the chapter.

NB: A slight issue with recording of this session. Voice channel is oddly doubled. My fault no doubt in messing up settings. Apologies!

When Deleuze and Guattari ask “who does the Earth think it is?” they are extending a question first asked by Schelling: “How does the Earth think?”

Schelling was a post-Kantian who inaugurated what he called a Naturphilosophie – a way of thinking the relation between appearances and things as they are without us perceiving them. This is to say that, for Kant, we cannot know things in themselves; we cannot know things outside of experience. What is a table without my experience of the table, i.e. in itself? I cannot say and I cannot know. 

This dichotomy between what Kant calls phenomena and noumena suggests that there is an absolute gap between a subject and its object. This, in turn, leads to other post-Cartesian dichotomies, most damagingly perhaps is the distinction between nature and society. Society being the collective agency and experience of humanity as a species and nature being everything else.

But plenty of philosopher prior to Kant have made the case against this position. A few weeks back we read Spinoza, for instance. Spinoza makes the distinction between nature naturing and nature natured. The suggestion here is that we cannot know things in themselves in any capacity because nothing can be removed from its worldly relations and placed in a vacuum. We, as a species, try to do this – we nature nature by putting it in museums, for instance – but we are also nonetheless a part of nature. We can never removed ourselves from the process of nature naturing.

Schelling makes this same point. For him, nature naturing is “productivity”, which is to say that nature is a ceaselessly productive process. When we try to consider the Kantian dualism of things in themselves and appearances, we have to necessarily eject this productivity. We are only considering “products” rather than the process of production itself. 

So, when Schelling asks how the Earth thinks, he argues that the Earth thinks in much the same way we do – through processes. 

It was Nietzsche who later made good on this argument. If nature thinks how we do, then that inversely means that we think like nature does. And so Nietzsche takes Schelling’s Naturphilosophie and raises him a “geophilosophy”. 

Nietzsche’s philosophy was directly influenced by the new advances in biology of his time. Nietzsche was essentially writing when we first came to think about the biological concept of nutrition. The phrase “you are what you eat”, in this sense, was hugely influential on his philosophy, and Nietzsche said this most explicitly. “To choose one’s diet is to plan one’s essence”, he once wrote. But for Nietzsche this wasn’t just some appeal towards wellness and mindfulness. Your diet is a question of history as much as it is a question of your future. He makes the point that Germans probably think the way they do because they eat so many sausages. 

This sounds like a silly and glib comment but what Nietzsche is suggesting to here is essentially that thought – more precisely, what we think – is shaped by our relationship to the planet. Cultures aren’t just generic customs and opinions formed through chance. Cultures emerge quite literally from the ground. The nature of the landscape on which we live, the animals that live there, the food that grows there, the weather patterns, the types of rock, etc. etc. All of this has an impact on culture and so, it is in this sense that Nietzsche makes the point that so much of what we understand to be “experience” is devoid of a history. History, in this sense, and indeed archaeology, remains a fledging science because there is so much that it must account for.

It is this idea that leads Nietzsche to write his Geneology of Morality. He suspends the notion of Christianity being the foundation for all moral law and instead turns to the Earth itself, to history proper, to understand a new archaeology of thought. (This is something that Michel Foucault would famously run away with, developing a more rigorous approach to what we might know call sociology.)

Deleuze and Guattari, in this chapter, take all of this philosophical history and combine it together. They even hope to take it one step further. They want to reconsider this Schellingian Naturphilosophie, Nietzschean geophilosophy and this Spinozistic conception of an immanent nature and update it to now, because things are more complicated in the next century than they were for Nietzsche. 

It is worth mentioning that, if we’re going to talk about how our relationship to the Earth configures how we think, German philosophy is the perfect example. Take the University of Freiberg, one of the most famous institutions within the history of philosophy, where Heidegger, Arendt, Gadamer, Carnap, Husserl, Hayek and Weber (amongst many others) all taught and/or studied. Freiberg is also home to the world’s oldest university of mining and engineering. For Nietzsche, it would be absolutely no coincidence that a German city is known for its excellence in both philosophy and mining. 

In this chapter of A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari are playing with this association absolutely. They are essentially treating mining and philosophy as a kind of double helix, but rather than sequencing this genome – that is, looking at geophilosophy in itself, as an entangled product of philosophy and mining – they are instead considering the productivity of their relation and they are bringing in a lot of other things besides.

This chapter is, in this sense, the perfect demonstration of what Deleuze and Guattari mean by a rhizome – and, again, the fact a rhizome is a kind of geological relation, of nature naturing with geology, is worth noting. Philosophy and mining, as much as they penetrate one another, also penetrate many other things. This includes Conan Doyle’s character Professor Challenger, who appears in many stories that explore the strangeness of geophilosophy through science fiction. Most explicitly, this includes the story The Day The Earth Screamed, in which Challenger drills downs into the Earth’s core but instead of finding a molten centre, he finds a strange sort of brain down there, like the Earth is not a ball of rock flying through space but is actually some sort of sea anemone in space. Challenger also appears in the story The Lost World, in which he and an expedition of people stumble upon a time fault out in the jungle; a plateau that has somehow remained unchanged since prehistoric times.

All of Conan Doyle’s Challenger stories dramatize the geophilosophical questions that Deleuze and Guattari and their predecessors are interested in.

Alongside the geophilosophy and the science fiction, they also drag in semiotics. This is perhaps the most challenging part of this chapter and once which I struggle to get my head around but it is also a part of the chapter that we’ve discussed in a previous session – this thrilling but confusing tendency that a lot of these texts (A Thousand Plateaus but also Cyclonopedia) have of doing what they want to talk about rather than deconstructing it and laying it out flat to pour over. But the reason for doing this is important. As we’ve discussed, it’s an attempt to make a text into a process rather than a product. This is Derrida’s preferred way of working – turning everything into a text; that is, turning everything into a product to be deciphered. But for Deleuze and Guattari, this is to separate out what is the content of a text and what is being expressed. The importance of their post-structural approach to linguistics is that these two things cannot be disentangled. The relation is precisely the point and that relation is productivity. But not just productivity, in the Schellingian sence. Deleuze and Guattari add a new psychoanalytic depth here and instead speak of a kind of “desiring-production”. Productivity, in this sense, is a sort of conscious process that expresses a kind of libidinal content. I want to eat so I produce some lunch. Production is the process but it is informed by a lower level process of desire. And, following on from Schelling’s Naturphilosophie, if that’s how we act, it is also how the Earth acts. So if nature naturing is a process of production, then what does nature want? Nature naturing, then, for Deleuze and Guattari, is informed by a second order process: desire desiring. 

I don’t really have an end to this introduction. I’m hoping that makes some sense and we can perhaps untangle anything that remains unclear but I’d like to first draw this back to Cyclonopedia.

When we think about a book like Cyclonopedia, this process that Deleuze and Guattari describe is fully realised on the page. These tensions between Gog-Magog and what have you – what are these if not an expression of the Earth’s life and death drives? How has capitalism entangled these processes and monopolised them? Oil, as capital’s blobjective avatar, is, for Negarestani, the lubricant to this process. It is raw unfiltered formless history commodified and fuelling the earth’s death drive. It’s a kind of amorphous unconscious, a kind of brain fluid with its own agency, parasitizing this process. Oil, then, is the blackened side of nature naturing, as sun-powered corpse juice, that seaps out onto the surface and feeds back into that second order process of desire desiring.

It’s this kind of horrifying Lovecraftian capture that gets into everything, from car engines to our very patterns of speech. 

This week we read Lovecraft’s “Through the Gates of the Silver Key” and part 0 and 1 of Amy Ireland’s series for the Vast Abrupt, “The Revolving Door and the Straight Labyrinth”. 

The diagram discussed at the beginning, relating to “content” and “expression” is embedded below: