Category: Cyclonopedia

XG Reading Group 1.19:
“Cursed Be the Cheesemakers”

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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.

XG Reading Group 1.18:
“Calvinist Realism”

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This week, in what is likely our penultimate session on Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia, we read pages 145-160, covering the chapters “Telluro-Magnetic Conspiracy Towards the Sun I: Solar Rattle” and “Five Billion Years of Hell-Engineering.”

No written introduction from me. In fact, the best introduction to Negarestani’s tellurian insurgencies already exists in the form of Georges Bataille’s The Accursed Share, Vol. 1. I can’t recommend that enough for further reading. Moreso even than A Thousand Plateaus, it allows much of Cyclonopedia to slot into place.

Thanks to Wassim, as ever, for coming up with this week’s punny title, following our discussion around capitalism and religion.

Unfortunately, the audio recording fucked up again. Why it does this remains wholly inexplicable to me. This is a huge shame as ever, and I’m genuinely really gutted when it happens, because I really enjoyed this discussion, which was focussed mainly on how we can understand capital as an “eerie entity” (in Mark Fisher’s sense) and also the various infra-capitalist sentiments that ground the world religions and their denominations.

I had attempted to reconstruct this session as I did in a previous week but it feels like too much is lost. Apologies for that. 

In two weeks’ time, we’ll be reading pages 181-191; the chapters “Decay” and “Excursis XI”. Swing by for that and maybe we’ll have some holiday bevs to make it a drunken one to see out both the year and this bastard of a book.

XG Reading Group 1.17:
“Between the Thing and Kurtz”

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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.

XG Reading Group 1.16:
“Anthropessimism, or Slimulacra and Slimulation”

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This week we read “Slime Metaphysics?”, the conclusion to Ben Woodard’s 2012 book Slime Dynamics. No introduction from me — we talked about the ethics of horror, occulted metaphysics, the politics of outsideness (both progressive and fascist-adjacent) and, inevitably, H.P. Lovecraft.

Kudos, as ever, to Wassim for coming up with the neologisms in this week’s title.

I am once again mortified that OBS failed to properly record the Discord session this week and only recorded my microphone input, despite levels and settings all being correct and seeming to function properly during the session. This is maybe the third time this has happened now so I am taking the hint and will be abandoning that software from here on out and looking for something much more reliable. (I think Reaper will suffice from now on, since it has a much better, clearer and more intuitive UI.)

I am especially disappointed about this failure as I felt this week’s session was particularly interesting and productive, taking us from an understanding of some of the strange materialisms Negarestani’s is working with in Cyclonopedia and the political implications of this thinking as well, concluding with a discussion of the afropessimism of Frank B. Wilderson.

Given it was such a productive session, I have done by best to reconstruct it with summaries of what I can remember of the various discussions. It means there are 80 minutes of just me rambling on this week but hopefully it gets most of the talking points across from what was a really excellent Sunday.

XG Reading Group 1.15:
“All That Is Solid Melts Into Aer”

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This week we read two short chapters from Cyclonopedia — “Mistmare” and “Excursus V (Fog Oil: A Retrospection on Obscurants)”. 

No written intro or notes from me this week. My main takeaway from these chapters was the tension between Reza’s obscurantism and his account of the history of philosophy, demonstrating — once again — how this book so often does what it is trying to describe. Between its content and its mode of expression, the book continues to play chicken with its own dissolution. In Cyclonopedia, all that is solid melts into “aer”. 

XG Reading Group 1.14:
“No Dust Jackets for Pulp Philosophy”

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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” 

XG Reading Group 1.13: “Paraslime Shift”

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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.

XG Reading Group 1.12: “Polytical Pollution”

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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.

XG Reading Group 1.11: “Capitalism and Islamism”

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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.

XG Reading Group 1.10: “The War Machine”

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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.