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Available
Call number
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Collection
Publication
Seddon ; London : re.press, 2008.
Description
At once a horror fiction, a work of speculative theology, an atlas of demonology, a political samizdat and a philosophic grimoire, CYCLONOPEDIA is work of theory-fiction on the Middle East, where horror is restlessly heaped upon horror. Reza Negarestani bridges the appalling vistas of contemporary world politics and the War on Terror with the archeologies of the Middle East and the natural history of the Earth itself. CYCLONOPEDIA is a middle-eastern Odyssey, populated by archeologists, jihadis, oil smugglers, Delta Force officers, heresiarchs, corpses of ancient gods and other puppets. The journey to the Underworld begins with petroleum basins and the rotting Sun, continuing along the tentacled pipelines of oil, and at last unfolding in the desert, where monotheism meets the Earth's tarry dreams of insurrection against the Sun. 'The Middle East is a sentient entity - it is alive ' concludes renegade Iranian archeologist Dr. Hamid Parsani, before disappearing under mysterious circumstances. The disordered notes he leaves behind testify to an increasingly deranged preoccupation with oil as the 'lubricant' of historical and political narratives. A young American woman arrives in Istanbul to meet a pseudonymous online acquaintance who never arrives. Discovering a strange manuscript in her hotel room, she follows up its cryptic clues only to discover more plot-holes, and begins to wonder whether her friend was a fictional quantity all along. Meanwhile, as the War on Terror escalates, the US is dragged into an asymmetrical engagement with occultures whose principles are ancient, obscure, and saturated in oil. It is as if war itself is feeding upon the warmachines, leveling cities into the desert, seducing the aggressors into the dark heart of oil ...… (more)
User reviews
LibraryThing member JimElkins
A very interesting book. The back cover copy makes it sound like it's science fiction, and Jess Martin's review (on this site) makes it sound like some generic mysticism. One of the endorsements in the book describes it as "an uncategorizable hybrid of philosophical fiction, heretical theology,
The author, Negarestani, has been reading a lot of Deleuze and Guattari, and also a wide range of political theory ("Empire" has a similar rhetoric in places). Many chapters could almost be presented at philosophy conferences; there are analyses of oil, machinery, war, camouflage, and other subjects that are in line with some eccentric Deleuzian readings that have long been acceptable in academic contexts. The fictional part comes partly in the book's claim that "the Middle East [is] a sentient and living entity... in a very literal sense of the word," but more in the book's many poetic analyses of its leading concepts--analyses that draw on Deleuze but also on popular culture, from H.P. Lovecraft to John Carpenter's "The Thing." (And again, that's commensurate with contemporary Deleuzian and cultural studies.)
The best passages of the book are imaginative analyses of particular concepts. There is a spectacular long footnote explaining the concept of the "inorganic demon," ranging from "The Exorcist" to "Doom III." (p. 223 ff) There is a very good page on the survival of pre-Islamic ways of writing "Allah." (p. 173). There is an excellent poetic analysis, reminiscent in its way of Bachelard's ruminations on elements, but also of Lautréamont, on the subject of the Babylonian demons Enkidu and Puzuzu (the latter familiar from "The Exorcist"). (p. 113 ff) That analysis includes a description of "Rammalie," "an Arabic word for communication with other worlds and aeons through patterns on pebbles and desert sand."
The book has a glossary, with well-developed theoretical concepts. In that regard it resembles Latour's book on nature, or Rancière's book on politics. Negarestani has invented, and defined, an entire vocabulary for interpreting the socio-political, historical, and psychological state of the Middle East: Double Numbering, hypercamouflage, polytics, heresy-engineering, Druj literature, Tellurian blasphemy, schizotrategy... they could all be used in discussions outside the book.
The book's weaknesses have to do with Negarestani's shortcomings as a fiction writer, and also her shortcomings as a theoretician. The former become apparent when the reader moves from the brief introduction, which tells the story of the discovery of the manuscript, into the manuscript itself: at that point it is clear that the introduction is poorly, incompletely imagined fiction (it consists of very brief vignettes). Before the reader makes the transition to the body of the book, it appears that the fragmented descriptions in the introduction are a deliberate strategy; but there are no other fictional strategies in the book. The latter weakness, concerning theory, becomes apparent whenever the writing is too close to its models in Deleuze and Guattari. In those passages, the text can read like an unintentional parody of Deleuze or other poststructuralist theorists, the kind of parody written intentionally by disaffected graduate students. An analysis of the semiotics of the rat (p. 229) is an example: it has a kind of grim humor, but it is humorless about the fact that it is a pastiche of any number of such analyses in authors as diverse as Barthes and Serres. In other passages, neologisms proliferate in the way that used to be called "Derridadrivel," for instance in this chapter opening: "In the mid-eighties, before succumbing to his petromantic nympholepsy..." (p. 195). There are also passages that read like unintentional pastiches of popular film and novels, as in this chapter opening: "By the time Colonel West turned into a renegade and deserted Delta Force's Special Tactics and Rescue Squad..." (p. 129). This is knowing, but not in control of the fact that as it continues it begins to appear inadvertent or unreflective about its sources.
These two weaknesses -- regarding fiction and theory -- are both very common, but usually they are found in different kinds of writing: the first occurs in novels everywhere, and the second in academic philosophy. It is extremely unusual to have them together in one book, written by a person with an understanding of Middle Eastern languages, history, and archaeology. I read the book at first as an attempt at academic fiction (as in Borges), but again as an attempt to seriously theorize the Middle East, and especially the meanings of oil. In that respect, the book is spectacular.
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aberrant demonology and renegade archaeology." That is a bit sloppy, because the book is only philosophical fiction in the sense that it is invented, à la Borges or Lem. And heresy isn't its point. "Cyclonopdia" is an imaginary philosophic treatise about a fictional authority on the Middle East, supposedly discovered by a woman in a hotel room. The author, Negarestani, has been reading a lot of Deleuze and Guattari, and also a wide range of political theory ("Empire" has a similar rhetoric in places). Many chapters could almost be presented at philosophy conferences; there are analyses of oil, machinery, war, camouflage, and other subjects that are in line with some eccentric Deleuzian readings that have long been acceptable in academic contexts. The fictional part comes partly in the book's claim that "the Middle East [is] a sentient and living entity... in a very literal sense of the word," but more in the book's many poetic analyses of its leading concepts--analyses that draw on Deleuze but also on popular culture, from H.P. Lovecraft to John Carpenter's "The Thing." (And again, that's commensurate with contemporary Deleuzian and cultural studies.)
The best passages of the book are imaginative analyses of particular concepts. There is a spectacular long footnote explaining the concept of the "inorganic demon," ranging from "The Exorcist" to "Doom III." (p. 223 ff) There is a very good page on the survival of pre-Islamic ways of writing "Allah." (p. 173). There is an excellent poetic analysis, reminiscent in its way of Bachelard's ruminations on elements, but also of Lautréamont, on the subject of the Babylonian demons Enkidu and Puzuzu (the latter familiar from "The Exorcist"). (p. 113 ff) That analysis includes a description of "Rammalie," "an Arabic word for communication with other worlds and aeons through patterns on pebbles and desert sand."
The book has a glossary, with well-developed theoretical concepts. In that regard it resembles Latour's book on nature, or Rancière's book on politics. Negarestani has invented, and defined, an entire vocabulary for interpreting the socio-political, historical, and psychological state of the Middle East: Double Numbering, hypercamouflage, polytics, heresy-engineering, Druj literature, Tellurian blasphemy, schizotrategy... they could all be used in discussions outside the book.
The book's weaknesses have to do with Negarestani's shortcomings as a fiction writer, and also her shortcomings as a theoretician. The former become apparent when the reader moves from the brief introduction, which tells the story of the discovery of the manuscript, into the manuscript itself: at that point it is clear that the introduction is poorly, incompletely imagined fiction (it consists of very brief vignettes). Before the reader makes the transition to the body of the book, it appears that the fragmented descriptions in the introduction are a deliberate strategy; but there are no other fictional strategies in the book. The latter weakness, concerning theory, becomes apparent whenever the writing is too close to its models in Deleuze and Guattari. In those passages, the text can read like an unintentional parody of Deleuze or other poststructuralist theorists, the kind of parody written intentionally by disaffected graduate students. An analysis of the semiotics of the rat (p. 229) is an example: it has a kind of grim humor, but it is humorless about the fact that it is a pastiche of any number of such analyses in authors as diverse as Barthes and Serres. In other passages, neologisms proliferate in the way that used to be called "Derridadrivel," for instance in this chapter opening: "In the mid-eighties, before succumbing to his petromantic nympholepsy..." (p. 195). There are also passages that read like unintentional pastiches of popular film and novels, as in this chapter opening: "By the time Colonel West turned into a renegade and deserted Delta Force's Special Tactics and Rescue Squad..." (p. 129). This is knowing, but not in control of the fact that as it continues it begins to appear inadvertent or unreflective about its sources.
These two weaknesses -- regarding fiction and theory -- are both very common, but usually they are found in different kinds of writing: the first occurs in novels everywhere, and the second in academic philosophy. It is extremely unusual to have them together in one book, written by a person with an understanding of Middle Eastern languages, history, and archaeology. I read the book at first as an attempt at academic fiction (as in Borges), but again as an attempt to seriously theorize the Middle East, and especially the meanings of oil. In that respect, the book is spectacular.
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LibraryThing member iansales
Recommended by Jonathan McCalmont and, to be honest, I didn’t really get the joke. It’s written as a cod academic text, and probably does an excellent job of spoofing its material, but I’m not familiar with the sort of academic arguments it uses. It did remind me a lot of some of the Nazi
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occult science mythology – especially those books published by Adventures Unlimited Press – which create entire secret scientific programmes out of the flimsiest of evidence. The plot, such as it is, describes the War on Terror as an emergent phenomenon of humanity’s exploitation of oil, which is itself an inimical intelligence determined to rid the planet of humans. Or something. Show Less
LibraryThing member fractal_oblidisk
High-density philosophy-horror. The book draws on folklore, pop-culture, psychology, and obscure and frightening philosophy to present the argument that oil is alive and pure evil. Every "dark side" to every religion and every "evil" in every work of fiction, every war, and all human endeavors are
It's hard to read, and the ideas are complicated, spliced with the narrative about an unhinged professor who's obsessed with these oily ideas, gone missing as he searches for artifacts.
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rooted in oil's desire to oppose the sun.It's hard to read, and the ideas are complicated, spliced with the narrative about an unhinged professor who's obsessed with these oily ideas, gone missing as he searches for artifacts.
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LibraryThing member jonfaith
To understand the militarization of oil and the dynamism of war machines in War on Terror, one must grasp oil as an ultimate Tellurian lubricant, or a vehicle for epic narratives.
I kept thinking of Terminus, the Roman god of boundaries while plowing through this book. Sure the prose as such was the
I kept thinking of Terminus, the Roman god of boundaries while plowing through this book. Sure the prose as such was the
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epitome of opaque and dense: thus a sheer alternative to the smooth spaces of the Warmachine and the Lines of Immanence. I read somewhere recently that the Israeli Defense Force has begun incorporating Deleuze and Guattari into their combat manuals. This could only be a pregnant coincidence with respect to this narrative -- one where petroleum is a sentient evil, at war with the Sun and hoping for an inevitable Lovercraftian return of Lost Gods or some such. Along the way we are guided by a Col. Kurtz of the Delta Force in Iraq and an eerie caress of John Carpenter's The Thing. The glossary of theory-ese at the end is great fun as well. Despite the heavy lifting and a wonky Farsi perspective, this was great fun, though hardly for the uninitiated. Show Less
LibraryThing member whitewavedarling
I fear I had to DNF this about a third through. I was attempting it with my book group, but generally feeling like I was reading overly jargony academic-speak in a niche discipline I had zero familiarity with. A few moments of language were lovely, but in terms of meaning, this feels more like an
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experiment than a complete work of fiction to me, and I just don't have the energy to try to parse my way through it. I may try again some time, but for now, I'm calling it a DNF. Show Less
LibraryThing member mkfs
If there is an award for unreadable fiction, this book should get it.
To begin with, it is a collection of incoherent essays that attempt to create a new mysticism based on oil and the Middle East. By incoherent I mean that not only are the chapters independent of one another, but that the
It's hard to tell whether the bad writing on display here is intentional, or the writer is incompetent. This is because the contents are presented as a "found work" with some introduction and footnotes by the actual author(/protagonist, but ultimately who cares), so making the thing unreadable makes it more realistic. Except that the found-work is an academic study of another source-work, so already we're at two removes from the incompetent writer (assuming academics can write well, which I am inclined to believe despite ample evidence to the contrary). This source work, written by yet another Mad Arab, is quoted liberally throughout, but the inept typesetting and the refusal to use traditional methods of quoting makes it difficult to tell where the source-work ends and the found-work begins. Is this intentional, or incompetent? Who cares! It's rubbish either way.
The content itself, that is the ideas, are the sort of nonsense you see plastered to lamposts or left in laundromats. The sort of etymologically-ignorant ("what do bugs have to do with anything?") and rhetorically-suspect word association used in Five Percent Nation building and second-wave feminism ("history is HIS-story and should be replaced with HER-story") makes great propaganda, but poor argumentation. This is buttressed by the most inept numerology one is likely to encounter outside of Madonna's Kabbalah circle: if the numerical values of a word's component letters cannot be coerced into a desired value or combination,then change the spelling of the word, and claim without evidence that this is the true spelling of the word (before or after transliteration from the original alphabet, as needed)!
But yeah, okay, oil is a Force, Gog and Magog are two ends of an Axis (unclear why these names were chosen), Decay is a Mystic Process, and so on. There is a lot of asserting in this book, but very little explaining, and ultimately no conclusions. X is this. Y is that. Why should we care? Nobody bothers to say, nor to provide any evidence that the scholar isn't just making all of this up as he goes along (and if that's intentional, does that really improve things?).
An attempt is made at the beginning to provide a framing story, like in House of Leaves: a preface describing, however unbelievably, the discovery of the scholar's manuscript, followed by an exchange of views in the footnotes. This exchange peters out pretty early on, and eventually is replaced by footnotes that are in code. It's not a hard code, just a simple substitution cipher, one you could probably do in your head, though after determining about 1/3 of the words in a footnote it becomes clear this is just more garbage, so why bother finishing. The narrative supposedly winds up in the end notes, but spoiler, it doesn't, they are just more garbage, and the book has no narrative after the prologue.
So why 3 stars instead of 1? Good question. I did enjoy reading a few of the schizoid rants, such as the Telluro-Magnetic Conspiracy Towards The Sun and Decay (the Excursus sections were all borderline unreadable, and the stuff on geopolitics was pretty naive). Usually while smoking a cigar outside on a sunny day; they were somewhat amusing to contemplate as possibilities. So, for those that want to mix things up at the expense of enjoyment, reading this is an option.
I want to be clear though: I do not in any way recommend or endorse reading this book. Maybe it's an art project attempting to re-create the unreadable work of a schizophrenic, maybe it's a collection of drug-addled screeds written in the timeless small hours, maybe it's the catalogue to accompany an unidentified modern art exhibit. Regardless of the author's intended purpose for this work, absolutely no indication is given of why this should be considered reading material.
To begin with, it is a collection of incoherent essays that attempt to create a new mysticism based on oil and the Middle East. By incoherent I mean that not only are the chapters independent of one another, but that the
Show More
paragraphs of these chapters are unconnected, and indeed many times the sentences within each paragraph bear no relationship to each other. It's a pretty basic aspect of writing, but one which modern authors seem to have forgotten, that each sentence follows from the previous, grouped as a sequence into coherent paragraphs, and that each paragraph is a consequence or a clarification of the preceding paragraph, unless an explicit transition is provided. There are various justifications for not doing this, such as subverting the narrative expectation of the reader, breaking the constraints of traditional structure, making the reader aware that they are reading a book, and so on - but really it is just bad writing.It's hard to tell whether the bad writing on display here is intentional, or the writer is incompetent. This is because the contents are presented as a "found work" with some introduction and footnotes by the actual author(/protagonist, but ultimately who cares), so making the thing unreadable makes it more realistic. Except that the found-work is an academic study of another source-work, so already we're at two removes from the incompetent writer (assuming academics can write well, which I am inclined to believe despite ample evidence to the contrary). This source work, written by yet another Mad Arab, is quoted liberally throughout, but the inept typesetting and the refusal to use traditional methods of quoting makes it difficult to tell where the source-work ends and the found-work begins. Is this intentional, or incompetent? Who cares! It's rubbish either way.
The content itself, that is the ideas, are the sort of nonsense you see plastered to lamposts or left in laundromats. The sort of etymologically-ignorant ("what do bugs have to do with anything?") and rhetorically-suspect word association used in Five Percent Nation building and second-wave feminism ("history is HIS-story and should be replaced with HER-story") makes great propaganda, but poor argumentation. This is buttressed by the most inept numerology one is likely to encounter outside of Madonna's Kabbalah circle: if the numerical values of a word's component letters cannot be coerced into a desired value or combination,then change the spelling of the word, and claim without evidence that this is the true spelling of the word (before or after transliteration from the original alphabet, as needed)!
But yeah, okay, oil is a Force, Gog and Magog are two ends of an Axis (unclear why these names were chosen), Decay is a Mystic Process, and so on. There is a lot of asserting in this book, but very little explaining, and ultimately no conclusions. X is this. Y is that. Why should we care? Nobody bothers to say, nor to provide any evidence that the scholar isn't just making all of this up as he goes along (and if that's intentional, does that really improve things?).
An attempt is made at the beginning to provide a framing story, like in House of Leaves: a preface describing, however unbelievably, the discovery of the scholar's manuscript, followed by an exchange of views in the footnotes. This exchange peters out pretty early on, and eventually is replaced by footnotes that are in code. It's not a hard code, just a simple substitution cipher, one you could probably do in your head, though after determining about 1/3 of the words in a footnote it becomes clear this is just more garbage, so why bother finishing. The narrative supposedly winds up in the end notes, but spoiler, it doesn't, they are just more garbage, and the book has no narrative after the prologue.
So why 3 stars instead of 1? Good question. I did enjoy reading a few of the schizoid rants, such as the Telluro-Magnetic Conspiracy Towards The Sun and Decay (the Excursus sections were all borderline unreadable, and the stuff on geopolitics was pretty naive). Usually while smoking a cigar outside on a sunny day; they were somewhat amusing to contemplate as possibilities. So, for those that want to mix things up at the expense of enjoyment, reading this is an option.
I want to be clear though: I do not in any way recommend or endorse reading this book. Maybe it's an art project attempting to re-create the unreadable work of a schizophrenic, maybe it's a collection of drug-addled screeds written in the timeless small hours, maybe it's the catalogue to accompany an unidentified modern art exhibit. Regardless of the author's intended purpose for this work, absolutely no indication is given of why this should be considered reading material.
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Language
Physical description
xx, 244 p.; 23 cm
ISBN
9780980544008