Oil and Dust

19 Oil and Dust Theorizing Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia Melanie Doherty Reza Negarestani’s 2008 work Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials has been described as a work of “theory- fiction” and “Geotrauma” by those who have worked to theorize the text.1 An enigmatic work by an enigmatic Iranian philosopher and writer, Cyclonopedia employs a mix of fictional prose, academic critique, and observations culled from technology studies, global political theory, and contemporary philosophical debates to assemble a Deleuzian critique of global capitalism and petroleum politics. Negarestani’s previous work has been featured on CTheory.net, an online journal edited by technology theorists Arthur and Marilouise Kroker,2 as well as in the independent journal Collapse, edited by Robin Mackay, which features essays that “bring together a mix of philosophers and theorists, artists and scientists to explore fundamental themes and ideas which academic philosophy, in its tendency towards specialisation and partisanship, increasingly fails to address.”3 Cyclonopedia was published in 2008 by re.press, an Australian open-access publishing house devoted to contemporary philosophy and fiction. Accessible in print and digital format, the hybrid text has gained a wide and heterogeneous following of technologically savvy scholars, independent philosophers, and artists. As Zach Blas notes in a review of Cyclonopedia, “The text has become an inspiration to academics and intellectuals, spiraling out into the disciplines of media theory, continental philosophy, queer theory, and political thought; the creative industries of architecture and the arts have also embraced the text . either making work as a direct response to Cyclonopedia or Copyright © 2014. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. of Minnesota Press. © 2014. University Copyright collaborating with Negarestani. A 2011 Cyclonopedia symposium at The New School in New York City brought these splintering engagements together, demonstrating the profound and varied impact the book is continuing to make.”4 366 Barrett, R., & Worden, D. (Eds.). (2014). Oil culture. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from uhm on 2017-11-27 04:59:57. Oil and Dust 367 In what follows, I will address Cyclonopedia as an experimental attempt to outline an alternative theoretical perspective on oil, petrocapitalism, and oil- based American foreign policy, a perspective that playfully engages the tenets of Speculative Realist philosophy and Middle Eastern mythology and contests the imperial discourses and dominant media narratives underpinning American oil imperialism. As we will see, the various components of Cyclonopedia (fictive narrative, assembled documents, communiqués, republished web content, and so on) advance a nonanthropocentric imagining of oil, the extractive landscapes of the Middle East, and the oil wars pur- sued by the United States. Urging us to take a step back from semiotics to readdress the material conditions of our world, the text uses the trope of the “blobjective” to reimagine oil as a nonhuman entity invested with its own agential power. At the same time, Cyclonopedia uses the trope of “dustism” to refigure the Middle Eastern land- scape as a radically autonomous being. The text employs the theoretically charged theme of the cyclone, finally, to conjure the specter of a massive war effort spinning free of its national origins. Considered together, these three textual impulses yield a new outlook on oil that diverges from, and attacks, the ideologies of technological mastery and imperial militarism that drive contemporary petrocapitalism. Pursuing these impulses through a range of tenuously connected textual forms, Cyclonopedia assembles a cacophonous account of the oil economy and petropolitics that works simultaneously to counter the linear narratives and one- way soliloquies that comprise dominant media discourses on oil. In following out these various imperatives, Cyclonopedia draws on the theoretical insights of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. In part, Cyclonopedia theorizes itself as a work of Deleuzo- Guattarian minor literature that attempts to transform the geo- political narratives of the contemporary oil- driven global economy by burrowing into its plot holes and exploding them from within. Deleuze and Guattari define the three characteristics of minor literature as “the deterritorialization of language, the con- nection of the individual to a political immediacy, and the collective assemblage of enunciation.”5 A minor literature “doesn’t come from a minor language; it is rather that which a minority constructs within a major language.”6 A major literature has smooth and fixed identities, often in line with the leading hegemonic ideologies of its moment, while a minor literature actively scrambles the very concept of any fixed identities. In a similar way, Cyclonopedia functions less as a traditional novel with pre- dictable psychological characters or linear plot lines slouching toward resolution, Copyright © 2014. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. of Minnesota Press. © 2014. University Copyright and more as an act of schizoanalysis undermining and reorganizing the reader, par- ticularly Western readers, using language that is weaponized, in a very literal sense, as a minority- literature counterattack on the state language of the U.S.- occupied Mid- dle East. Barrett, R., & Worden, D. (Eds.). (2014). Oil culture. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from uhm on 2017-11-27 04:59:57. 368 Mel anie Dohert y At the same time, the text functions as a complex assemblage that problematizes its own status as an “encyclopedia” and works instead as a “cyclonopedia,” emphasizing the cyclonic process that not only undermines any singular readings of itself as “theory” or “fiction,” but also underscores the cyclonic power of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the War Machine, which argues that war becomes a self- propelled machinic force that eventually exceeds State identities to take on a life of its own: “We have watched the war machine grow stronger and stronger, as in a science fiction story; we have seen it assign as its objective a peace still more terrifying than fascist death . we have seen it set its sights on a new type of enemy, no longer another State . but the ‘unspecified enemy.’”7 In the glossary of Negarestani’s text, this concept of War- As- Machine is questioned as politically dangerous: “The model of war-as- a- machine evades discourses which institutionalize war as a social, economical and political object within the anthropocentric judicial system. War has an economy, a politics, a socius and a population of its own.”8 Continuously invoking theorists whom the text will also inherently critique, Cyclonopedia unfolds as a shifting, paradoxical, and hetero- glossic work, and this may be one of its primary tactics. As Deleuze and Guattari note in their discussion of minor literature: “How many styles or genres or literary move- ments, even very small ones, have only one single dream: to assume a major function in language, to offer themselves as a sortof state language, an official language.”9 They suggest instead that an idealized minor literature does not allow itself to be co- opted by the languages of power: “Create the opposite dream: know how to create a becoming- minor.”10 Cyclonopedia does this by simultaneously positing itself as a narrative of oil and also critiquing the forms of culture, power, and politics made possible by oil. After meeting the metafictional Reza Negarestani online and following a series of mysterious messages, the American character Kristen Alvanson travels to Istanbul to meet the elusive Negarestani, only to discover instead a manuscript in her hotel room: the eponymous Cyclonopedia. This text turns out to be an oddly cobbled-together collection of notes from a recently disgraced professor at Tehran University, “archae- ologist and researcher of Mesopotamian occultural meltdowns, Middle East and ancient mathematics, Dr. Hamid Parsani,”11 as well as war communiques from a Delta Force deserter, Colonel Jackson West, who descends into madness as he sides with nomadic insurgents and depicts the Middle East as a “sentient entity” made of oil and dust. Along with these texts and figuresat the interstices of fiction and theory, the reader also encounters the writings of an online research team, the Hyperstition Col- Copyright © 2014. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. of Minnesota Press. © 2014. University Copyright lective, which is described in the first lines of the manuscript: 11 March 2004. Somewhere amid the fog of the Net, behind a seemingly forgotten web- site, in Hyperstition’s password-protected laboratory—a location for exploring a diverse Barrett, R., & Worden, D. (Eds.). (2014). Oil culture. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from uhm on 2017-11-27 04:59:57. Oil and Dust 369 range of subjects from the occult to fictional quantities, from warmachines to bacterial archeology, heresy- engineering and decimal sorceries (Qabalah, Schizomath, Decimal Labyrinth and Tic- xenotation), and swarming with renegade academics, pyromaniac philosophers and cryptogenic autodidacts— there is a tumultuous discussion.12 The “Hyperstition laboratory” and its heated online debates weave in and out of the interstices of the text, and the URLs provided by Alvanson in the prologue allow the reader to view

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