Cyclonopedia

A correction first. At the end of Volume 24 I placed this book at Urbanomic. That's wrong. Cyclonopedia appeared in 2008 with re.press in Melbourne, a small publisher that put its volumes online for free. Urbanomic published Negarestani's second book eleven years later, and for this volume that's the more interesting fact.

Objective

By the end of this volume you know the work in which theory-fiction found its most mature form. You know how its apparatus of invented editor, vanished author, and discovered manuscript operates, what it means to read oil as an agent, and how the hole complex connects to Barker's geotraumatics. And you know the answer to the question of whether this genre produced a masterpiece or a dead end, because its best exponent answered it by leaving it.

Exposition

Reza Negarestani was born in Iran and wrote in the early 2000s on a blog named Hyperstition, run by Nick Land and Robin Mackay after the CCRU had come apart. The net of those years knew no real names. What appeared there were handles, personae, voices without bodies. Speculation about Negarestani ran accordingly, whether he existed or whether another figure of the group was writing here, as Barker was one. The situation fits the object so exactly you couldn't have made it up.

The book begins outside its own text. An American named Kristen Alvanson travels to Istanbul to meet someone she has corresponded with for months and whose identity she doesn't know. The contact doesn't appear. In her hotel room she finds instead a manuscript. It comes from Hamid Parsani, an Iranian archaeologist who has been missing for years. Alvanson resolves to publish it. What follows presents itself as that manuscript.

The construction uses every means from Volume 12 and adds one. Alvanson is no invention. She's an artist who exists, who has published, whose works you can look at. Parsani is invented, equipped with writings, a career, a break in that career, and an effect on colleagues who don't exist. A real person publishes the work of an invented one, in a book whose author was at the time considered a rumour. The reader stands before three levels, none of which holds.

The object is oil, and Negarestani doesn't treat it as a raw material. Oil formed from the biomass of past geological ages, it's compressed sunlight from millions of years, pressed under rock, liquefied catastrophe. In his reading this material acts. It doesn't lie in the ground waiting for extraction, it presses towards the surface and uses whatever it can find to do so. The human is in this narrative the tool with which the oil frees itself and burns, and the war in the Middle East is no war for oil but one that oil is fighting. You know the figure of thought from Volume 16, there occupied by capital. Negarestani installs a substance you can touch.

The second concept is called the hole complex and connects directly to Barker. The earth appears in it not as a solid body with a surface but as something perforated from within. Pores, caves, erosion, termite mounds, boreholes, all of it belongs in the same series. A hole is neither inside nor outside. It's the place where the distinction drops out. Where Barker read the earth as a traumatised body, Negarestani reads it as one that gets hollowed out from within and in the process doesn't collapse but lives on porously. The Middle East is in this geography no territory but the place where the solid crumbles to dust, and the desert is the state everything runs towards.

The mythological material comes from the region the book speaks about. Zoroastrian tradition, Mesopotamian archaeology, Islamic apocalyptic, the Yazidis and their angel, along with an apparatus of footnotes referring to texts that partly exist and partly don't. Negarestani proceeds with that tradition as the CCRU proceeded with Lovecraft, with the difference that it's his own.

The subtitle names the stance the book demands, and it runs complicity with anonymous materials. There is no position outside. Whoever writes about oil writes with electricity that comes from combustion, on a device made of plastic, in an economy running on the same substance. The sentence from Volume 17, that the organ meant to steer doesn't stand outside what it wants to steer, returns here as a principle of construction. The book is written so that the reader finds no secure standpoint from which to judge.

The effect was considerable and took a form belonging to the matter. In 2011 a conference took place in New York dealing with Cyclonopedia, and out of it came a further volume. Participants treated Parsani as though a source lay before them. He was searched for, checked, supplemented. What the Numogram had demonstrated in small repeated itself here in public. A fiction, built densely enough, attracts people who work on it further, and the work is genuine even if the object isn't.

Eleven years later Negarestani's second book appeared at Urbanomic. It's called Intelligence and Spirit, it's thick, it has no invented editor, no vanished archaeologist, and no horror. It argues, and it argues in the wake of Hegel, of Wilfrid Sellars, of a tradition that grasps mind as something built out of rules, justifications, and practices. The human is in it no scar and no passage but something that constructs itself by owing itself an account. Negarestani left the genre he brought to completion without explanation and became a rationalist.

Core Claim

Cyclonopedia by Reza Negarestani carries theory-fiction to its densest form, in that a real person publishes the manuscript of an invented archaeologist whose doctrine reads oil as an agent and the earth as a body perforated from within. The hole complex carries Barker's geotraumatics further, the complicity of the subtitle denies the reader any standpoint outside. The book produced a conference at which participants treated the invented archaeologist as though a source lay before them. Its author left the genre afterwards and has written rationalist philosophy ever since.

Bridge to the Next Volume

This course has so far kept Land's early work separate from his late, on the grounds that two strata bearing witness to different ages are to be kept apart. Volume 26 withdraws that separation and tests it. It treats the split of accelerationism into a left and a right camp and Land's path after the breakdown, to Shanghai, into a political position many reject with good reason. The question is whether that path follows from the early thinking or whether it befell it.