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LEPER CREATIVITY

Cyclonopedia Symposium

Edited by

Ed Keller, Nicola Masciandaro, & Eugene Thacker

punctum books brooklyn, ny


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LEPER CREATIVITY: CYCLONOPEDIA SYMPOSIUM© The individual contributors and punctum books,2012.

This work is licensed under the Creative CommonsAttribution-NonCommerical-NoDerivs 3.0 UnportedLicense. To view a copy of this license, visit: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0, or send aletter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.

This work is Open Access, which means that you arefree to copy, distribute, display, and perform the workas long as you clearly attribute the work to theauthors, that you do not use this work for commercialgain in any form whatsoever, and that you in no wayalter, transform, or build upon the work outside of itsnormal use in academic scholarship without expresspermission of the author and the publisher of thisvolume. For any reuse or distribution, you must makeclear to others the license terms of this work.

First published in 2012 by punctum books, Brooklyn,New York.

punctum books is an open-access and print-on-demand independent publisher dedicated to radicallycreative modes of intellectual inquiry and writing

across a whimsical para-humanities assemblage. Wespecialize in neo-traditional and non-conventionalscholarly work that productively twists and/or ignoresacademic norms. This is a space for the imp-orphansof thought and pen, an ale-serving church for littlevagabonds.

ISBN-13: 978-0615600468

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data isavailable from the Library of Congress.

Cover image by Perry Hall, Sound Drawing 07-04,2007.


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TABLE OF CONTENTS

A BRIEF HISTORY OF GEOTRAUMA Robin Mackay 1

AN INHUMAN FICTION OF FORCES McKenzie Wark

39

ROOT THE EARTH: ON PEAK OIL APOPHENIA Benjamin H. Bratton

45

DUSTISM Alisa Andrasek

59

Q UEERNESS, OPENNESS Zach Blas

101

NON

-OEDIPAL

NETWORKS AND THE

INORGANIC

UNCONSCIOUS Melanie Doherty

115

SYMPTOMATIC HORROR: LOVECRAFT’S “THECOLOUR OUT OF SPACE”

Anthony Sciscione

131

C YCLONOPEDIA AS NOVEL (A MEDITATION ONCOMPLICITY AS INAUTHENTICITY)

Kate Marshall

147

WHAT IS A HERMENEUTIC LIGHT?Alexander R. Galloway

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BLACK INFINITY; OR, OIL DISCOVERS HUMANS Eugene Thacker

173

GOURMANDIZED IN THE ABATTOIR OF OPENNESS Nicola Masciandaro

181

PHILEAS FOGG, OR THE CYCLONIC PASSEPARTOUT: ON THE ALCHEMICAL ELEMENTS OF WAR

Dan Mellamphy & Nandita Biswas

Mellamphy

193

THE UNTIMELY (AND UNSHAPELY) DECOMPOSITIONOF ONTO-EPISTEMOLOGICAL SOLIDITY: NEGARESTANI’S C YCLONOPEDIA AS METAPHYSICS

Ben Woodard

213

. . . OR, SPEAKING WITH THE ALIEN, A REFRAIN . . .

Ed Keller

225

RECEIPT OF MALICE Lionel Maunz

255

SYMPOSIUM PHOTOGRAPHS Öykü Tekten

279

NOTES ON THE FIGURE OF THE CYCLONE Reza Negarestani

287


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A Brief History of Geotrauma

Robin Mackay

Freud, Ferenczi, Lovecraft, Bodkin, Challenger, Cane,Barker, Land, Parsani. Unilkely characters. Crackpots,every one of them. Frauds, fakes, pseudoscientists atbest. Indisciplined thinkers breeding speculative mon-


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grels. Hysteria, neuronics, stratoanalysis, schizoanaly-sis, geotraumatics.

Through misinterpretations, imaginary convergences, forced couplings and other shady maneouvres lackingin the principled behaviour expected of a scholar, they

claimed to have invented a new discipline referred toby various names at various times; but no-one clearlyunderstood what the goals, methods or principles ofthis new discipline were.

And yet, there was something important here;

something on the verge of being forgotten. Therewould have been no trace,


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the Geo-cosmic Theory of Trauma would not evenhave been a memory, if it weren’t for the work of thePlutonics Committee.

Not that it was easy. An indirect approach was neces-

sary. A contemporary advocate, a new candidate. If hedidn’t exist, he would have to be invented. And thistime, something had to get through.

The committee had its eye on the widest possible tar-get market. So the primary task was an understandingof how ideas travel—an epidemiology of the concept.


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It obviously couldn’t be an academic. Things havechanged: freaks like Land and Parsani wouldn’t evenget through the doors of a university these days. No, itwould have to be an outsider—exotic, even.

Some peculiar maverick, self-taught, no qualifications;a lone voice who comes out of nowhere.

He—or she—must be credibly unreachable, hidden

away. Somewhere on the Axis of Evil, maybe, to addsome political intrigue: A persecuted dissident scour-ing the outer reaches of the web to find other sick-minded individuals, he comes across Land,


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retired from philosophy and now promulgating con-spiracy theory and peddling neo-occultistspeculations. Land passes on the last Barker manu-script to him.

Then he discovers Parsani’s notebooks in Iran, realiz-es the Bodkin-Cane connection, and begins to piece ittogether. It could have happened that way.

Then move him to the Far East. Someplace no-one

ever goes. Not even China or Japan—Malaysia. Con-struct his writings in a kind of tortured, gnomic stylethat combines extreme etymological acuity with a sickimagination that comes of watching too many horrormovies.


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Anyhow, he’s probably sick in some way. Insomniac,

delirious, unable to function normally; sick with somekind of middle-eastern fever. That could be the case.

Invisible, his character must exude a sort of enigmatic

charisma, and an aura of exoticism. Since he comes from outside, almost anything would be credible. Keephim hidden for as long as possible, unseen but effec-tive.

Personal appearances made and cancelled. Visa prob-lems, poor health, whatever it takes. If it gets to thestage where he does have to appear, it has to be donewell—no expense spared.


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But above all, the ideas keep coming, exerting a sub-

terranean influence. All that is necessary is that heexist long enough to effectuate inception. Once theideas take, once the ideas are embedded, he can easilybe retired. Anything could happen to a freak like that.

It’s true, the Committee took risks. Carried away withtheir creation, they ventured a few unnecessarily ba-

roque twists. A fictional quantity expounding thetheory of its own hyperstitional inexistence? A puppetwho tells us what is pulling our strings?

In the end, no-one would be crazy enough to believe itwasn’t true.


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** *

Going up that river was like travelling backto the earliest beginnings of the world, whenvegetation rioted on the earth and the bigtrees were kings. An empty stream, a great si-lence, an impenetrable forest. The air waswarm, thick, heavy, sluggish . . . The longstretches of waterway ran on, deserted, into

the gloom of overshadowed distances . . . Wewere wanderers on prehistoric earth, on anearth that wore the aspect of an unknownplanet.


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– Tall trees.

– When were you born?

– So you're one of the dreamers now. You'vebeheld the fata morgana of the terminal la-goon. You look tired. Was it a deep one?

Accessing files.

The psychical material in such cases ofhysteria presents itself as a structure in sev-eral dimensions which is stratified in at leastthree different ways. (I hope I shall presentlybe able to justify this pictorial mode of ex-

pression.) To begin with there is a nucleus consist-

ing in memories of events or trains ofthought in which the traumatic factor hasculminated or the pathogenic idea has foundits purest manifestation. Round this nucleuswe find what is often an incredibly profuseamount of other mnemic material which hasto be worked through in the analysis andwhich is, as we have said, arranged in athreefold order.

In the first place there is an unmistaka- ble linear chronological order which obtainswithin each separate theme. . . .

[I]n Breuer’s analysis of Anna O, . . .under each of . . . seven headings ten to overa hundred individual memories were col-

lected in chronological series. It was asthough we were examining a dossier that had

been kept in good order.They make the work of analysis more

difficult by the peculiarity that, in reproduc-ing the memories, they reverse the order in


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which these originated. The freshest andnewest experience in the file appears first, as

an outer cover, and last of all comes the ex-perience with which the series in fact began.

Such groupings constitute ‘themes’.These themes exhibit a second kind of ar-rangement. Each of them is—I can notexpress it in any other way— stratified con-centrically round the pathogenic nucleus.

The contents of each particular stratumare characterized by an equal degree of re-sistance, and that degree increases inproportion as the strata are nearer to the nu-cleus. Thus there are zones within whichthere is all equal degree of modification ofconsciousness, and the different themes ex-tend across these zones. The most peripheral

strata contain the memories (or files), which, belonging to different themes, are easily re-membered and have always been clearlyconscious. The deeper we go the more diffi-cult it becomes for the emerging memories to

be recognized, till near the nucleus we comeupon memories which the patient disavowseven in reproducing them.

A third kind of arrangement has still to be mentioned—the most important, but theone about which it is least easy to make anygeneral statement. What I have in mind is anarrangement according to thought-content,the linkage made by a logical thread whichreaches as far as the nucleus and tends to

take an irregular and twisting path, differentin every case. This arrangement has a dy-namic character, in contrast to themorphological one of the two stratificationsmentioned previously. While these twowould be represented in a spatial diagram by


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a continuous line, curved or straight, thecourse of the logical chain would have to be

indicated by a broken line which would passalong the most roundabout paths from thesurface to the deepest layers and back, andyet would in general advance from the pe-riphery to the central nucleus, touching atevery intermediate halting-place—a line re-sembling the zig-zag line in the solution of a

Knight’s Move problem, which cuts acrossthe squares in the diagram of the chess- board. . . .

We have said that this material behaveslike a foreign body, and that the treatment,too, works like the removal of a foreign bodyfrom the living tissue. We are now in a posi-tion to see where this comparison fails. A

foreign body does not enter into any relationwith the layers of tissue that surround it, alt-hough it modifies them and necessitates areactive inflammation in them. Our patho-genic psychical group, on the other hand,does not admit of being cleanly extirpatedfrom the ego.

Its external strata pass over in every di-rection into portions of the normal ego; and,indeed, they belong to the latter just as muchas to the pathogenic organization. In analysisthe boundary between the two is fixed pure-ly conventionally, now at one point, now atanother, and in some places it cannot be laiddown at all. The interior layers of the patho-

genic organization are increasingly alien tothe ego, but once more without there beingany visible boundary at which the pathogen-ic material begins. In fact the pathogenic


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organization does not behave like a foreign body, but far more like an infiltrate.1

The theory of trauma was a crypto-geological hybridfrom the very start. Darwin and the geologists had al-ready established that the entire surface of the earthand everything that crawls upon it is a living fossilrecord, a memory bank rigorously laid down over un-imaginable aeons and sealed against introspection;

churned and reprocessed through its own material, but a horrifying read when the encryption is broken,its tales would unfold in parallel with Freud’s, liketwo intertwining themes of humiliation.

Abandoning the circumspection with whichFreud handles what he still supposes to be ‘metaphor-ical’ stratal imagery, Dr Daniel Barker’s Cosmic Theoryof Geotrauma, or Plutonics, flattens the theory of psy-

chic trauma onto geophysics, with psychic experience becoming an encrypted geological report, the reper-cussion of a primal Hadean trauma in the materialunconscious of Planet Earth. Further developing Pro-fessor Challenger’s model of ‘generalisedstratification’, Barker ultra-radicalises Nietzscheangenealogy into a materialist cryptoscience.

Who does the Earth think it is? It’s a matterof consistency. Start with the scientific story,which goes like this: between four point fiveand four billion years ago—during the Hade-an epoch—the earth was kept in a state ofsuperheated molten slag, through the con-version of planetesimal and meteoritic

1 Sigmund Freud, The Psychotherapy of Hysteria (1895), invol. 2 of Standard Edition of the Complete PsychologicalWorks of Sigmund Freud , ed. and trans. James Strachey(London: Hogarth, 1953-1974).


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impacts into temperature increase (kinetic tothermic energy).

As the solar system condensed, the rateand magnitude of collisions steadily de-clined, and the terrestrial surface cooled, dueto the radiation of heat into space, reinforced

by the beginnings of the hydrocycle. Duringthe ensuing—Archaen—epoch the moltencore was buried within a crustal shell, pro-

ducing an insulated reservoir of primalexogeneous trauma, the geocosmic motor ofterrestrial transmutation. And that’s it. That’splutonics, or neoplutonism. It’s all there:anorganic memory, plutonic looping of ex-ternal collisions into interior content,impersonal trauma as drive-mechanism. Thedescent into the body of the earth corre-

sponds to a regression through geocosmictime.

Trauma is a body. Ultimately—at itspole of maximum disequilibrium—it’s aniron thing. At MVU they call it Cthelll: theinterior third of terrestrial mass, semifluidmetallic ocean, megamolecule, and pressure-cooker beyond imagination. It’s hotter thanthe surface off the sun down there, threethousand clicks below the crust, and all thatthermic energy is sheer impersonal nonsub-jective memory of the outside, running theplate-tectonic machinery of the planet viathe conductive and convective dynamics ofsilicate magma flux, bathing the whole sys-

tem in electromagnetic fields as it tidallypulses to the orbit of the moon.Cthelll is the terrestrial inner nightmare,

nocturnal ocean, Xanadu: the anorganic met-al-body trauma-howl of the earth, cross-hatched by intensities, traversed by thermic


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waves and currents, deranged particles, ionicstrippings and gluttings, gravitational deep-

sensitivities transduced into nonlocal elec-tromesh, and feeding volcanism . . . that’swhy plutonic science slides continuously in-to schizophrenic delirium.2

Let’s retell the story.At the birth of the solar system, deviating from

the protoplanetary disk that is to become the central body, a tiny, uniform spherical mass emerges from thesolar nebula. Within 500 million years, a sudden sink-ing of matter into a dense metallic core—the ‘IronCatastrophe’—precipitates the formation of a differen-tiated, layered planetary structure, its molten innermatter surrounded by a thin rocky mantle and coldcrust. This brittle surface seals into the depths the re-

pressed secret of Earth’s ‘burning immanence with thesun’.

But the face of Earth does not remain still. Theshifting visage of the planet results from the combina-tion of external processes—climatic denudation anddeposition—and internal processes—the movement ofigneous or magmatic fluids. These two groups of pro-cesses transform the surface of the earth and shape thedestiny of everything upon it. Their energy sourcesare, respectively, the sun, and its repressed runt sib-ling, the inner core of the earth. Thus, the thin crustdestined to shield the inhabitants of Earth from itsprimal trauma, wears on its face the continually-shifting expression of the helio-plutonic bond.

Periodically, the pressure of magma in depth im-

pels it to move in the direction of least resistance:repressed energy erupts onto the surface, forming ig-

2 Daniel Charles Barker, “Barker Speaks,” in Nick Land,

Fanged Noumena (Falmouth/NY: Urbanomic/Sequence,2011), 497-9.


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neous intrusions through the crustal rocks. The terres-trial symptoms that crystallise around these periodic

outbreaks of plutonic catharsis are far-reaching andramified.

Resident Alien; The Insider. Trauma is at once atwisted plot, a geological complex, and a heavily-encrypted file-system. The archives come to the sur-face only to be churned and folded back into thedetritus of their own repression. The tendrils of the

‘pathogenic nucleus’ merge imperceptibly with ‘nor-mal tissue’. And every living individual that everexisted is a playback copy, drawn from the recordingvaults, trapped in a refrain that sings the glory ofCthelll.

Beyond the restricted biocentric model outlinedin Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Barker’s theory ex-tends trauma to encompass the inorganic domain. The

accretion of the earth is the aboriginal trauma whosescars are encrypted in/as terrestrial matter, institutinga register of unconscious pain coextensive with thedomain of stratified materiality as such.

It is not known whether Barker was ever in directcontact with Dr. Bodkin, although the latter developedhis work while serving on the covert research missionthat preceded ‘Project Scar’. In any case, among thefeatures their theoretical works share is a reworking,through this radicalised Freudian theory of trauma, ofthe discredited biological notion that ‘ontogeny reca-pitulates phylogeny’. If the biological is but a torturedincantation of Cthelll’s seething inner core, genealogy,stratoanalysis and information theory promise a cryp-

tography of this cosmic pain; and Haeckel’srecapitulation thesis provides a suggestion for how anhysterico-biological filing-system might be formatted.

Cryptography has been my guiding thread,right through. What is geotraumatics about,


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even now?—A rigorous practice of decod-ing.3

How would such a cryptography proceed? It’s not aseasy as opening files, unpacking cases. Freud knowsthe core can’t be reached by so direct a route. The re-verse-file-system, continually encrypted by its ownaccess log, cannot be unpacked directly, but onlythrough an experimental engagement with the twisted,

rhizomatic plotlines that emerge from it . . .

not only . . . a zig-zag, twisted line, but ratherto a ramifying system of lines and more par-ticularly to a converging one. It containsnodal points at which two or more threadsmeet and thereafter proceed as one; and as arule several threads which run independent-

ly, or which are connected at various points by side-paths, debouch into the nucleus.4

Needless to say, trauma belongs to a time beyond per-sonal memory—Evidently, Geotraumatics radicalizesProfessor Challenger’s insistence that schizoanalysisshould extend further than the terrain of familial dra-ma, to invest the social and political realms; pushing

beyond history and biology, it incorporates the geolog-ical and the cosmological within the purview of atranscendental unconscious. The root source of thedisturbance which the organism identifies accordingto its parochial frame of reference—mummy-daddy—or which it construes in terms of the threat of individ-ual death, is a more profound trauma rooted in

physical reality itself. Trauma is not personal, and thetime of the earth is recorded, accreted, knotted up in-side us. All human experience is an encrypted

3 Barker, “Barker Speaks,” 494.

4 Freud, Psychotherapy of Hysteria.


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message from Cthelll to the cosmos, the scream of theearth.

Fast forward seismology and you hear theearth scream. Geotrauma is an ongoing pro-cess, whose tension is continuallyexpressed—partially frozen—in biologicalorganization.5

Nietzsche suggested that the structure and usage of thehuman body is the root source of the system of neurot-ic afflictions co-extensive with human existence; butthis is also a planetary neurosis. Geotraumatic cryp-tography must proceed as ultra-genealogy, accessingthese memories deep-frozen and imprinted in the

body and determining the planetary events which theyindex.

Vertigo’s dramatization of hysteria may seem tolinearise Freud’s topologically-twisted model, suggest-ing that the core may be reached, repetition escaped,through linear regression, through an accessing of per-sonal memory, a peeling back of layers. Perhaps it isonly the exigencies of visual entertainment that take itoff the couch, outside the therapist’s office; but it intu-its the kinship of the system of hysteria with non-human systems of memory; and (very possibly Hitch-cock was reading Bodkin as well as Freud) it seestraumatic regression activated not through introspec-tion but through return to a former environment, withthe unconscious tacked onto geography in the form ofaffect-triggers. Tall trees.

Hence we return to Haeckel’s recapitulation the-

sis. In his formulation of ‘neuronics’, Bodkin sought tounderstand the unconscious as a time-coded spinalmemory, a series of evolutionary chemical-responsetriggers sensitive to climatic conditions. Neuronics



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sets out to empirically map the relation between psy-chic organization, biological phylogenesis, and

environmental stimuli. Bodkin’s disconcertingly pres-cient theory discusses the prospect of an inundation ofthe planet, during a runaway climatic shift, causingtropical heat and oceanic expansion. His experimentschart the resulting modifications of the unconscious,as climate change triggers the shutting-down or rea-wakening of behaviours belonging to prior

evolutionary stages of the human.Notwithstanding the ‘discredit’ of Haeckel’s the-sis—that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, that everyindividual being, in its development, reiterates thestages of evolution of its remote ancestors—like Bark-er, Bodkin discerns a theoretical potency beneath thelinear simplicity that allows its easy dismissal. If ma-jor evolutionary changes are the result of catastrophic

shifts in the planetary environment—the onset of iceages, changes in the atmosphere, the parting of tecton-ic plates, significant rises in temperature—then the

biological can be understood, in geotraumatic terms,as a map of geological time.

Along these lines, the emergence of Barker’s theo-ry of ‘spinal catastrophism’ makes the necessarycorrections and provides a model for geotraumatic di-agnostic procedure:

I was increasingly aware that all my realproblems were modalities of back-pain, orphylogenetic spinal injury, which took me

back to the calamitous consequences of theprecambrian explosion, roughly five hun-

dred million years ago. . . .Erect posture and perpendicularizationof the skull is a frozen calamity, associatedwith a long list of pathological consequenc-es, amongst which should be included mostof the human psychoneuroses. . . .


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The issue here—as always—is real andeffective regression. It is not a matter of rep-

resentational psychology.Haeckel’s . . . Recapitulation Thesis . . .

is a theory compromised by its organicism, but its wholesale rejection was an overreac-tion. [Bodkin’s] response is more productiveand balanced, treating DNA as a transorganicmemory-bank and the spine as a fossil rec-

ord, without rigid onto-phylogeniccorrespondence.The mapping of spinal-levels onto neu-

ronic time is supple, episodic, anddiagonalizing. It concerns plexion between

blocks of machinic transition, not strict iso-morphic—or stratic redundancy—betweenscales of chronological order. Mammal DNA

contains latent fish-code (amongst many oth-er things).6

On the basis of this ‘diagonal’ model, Bodkin’s exper-imental studies record the effectuation ofarchaeopsychic ‘regressions’ in his subjects throughextreme environmental triggers, noting the extra-mental, trans-individual vector of such regression:

What am I suggesting? That Homo sapiens isabout to transform himself into Cro-Magnonand Java Man, and ultimately into Sinan-thropus? No, a biological process is notcompletely reversible.

The increased temperature and radia-

tion are indeed alerting innate releasingmechanisms. But not in our minds. These arethe oldest memories on Earth, the time-codescarried in every chromosome and gene. Eve-

6 Barker, “Barker Speaks,” 500-1.


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ry step we've taken in our evolution is amilestone inscribed with organic memo-

ries—from the enzymes controlling the car-carbon dioxide cycle to the organisation ofthe brachial plexus and the nerve pathwaysof the Pyramid cells in the mid-brain, each isa record of a thousand decisions taken in theface of a sudden physico-chemical crisis. Justas psychoanalysis reconstructs the original

traumatic situation in order to release the re-pressed material, so our subjects are beingplunged back into the archaeopsychic past,uncovering the ancient taboos and drivesthat havebeen dormant for epochs. The briefspan of an individual life is misleading. Eachone of us is as old as the entire biologicalkingdom, and our bloodstreams are tributar-

ies of the great sea of its total memory. Theuterine odyssey of the growing foetus reca-pitulates the entire evolutionary past, and itscentral nervous system is coded time scale,each nexus of neurones and each spinal levelmarking a symbolic station, a unit of neuron-ic time. . . .

The further down the CNS you move,from the hind-brain through the medulla in-to the spinal cord, the further you descend

back into the neuronic past. For example, thejunction between the thoracic and lumbarvertebrae, between T-12 and L-1, is the greatzone of transit between the gill-breathing fishand the airbreathing amphibians with their

respiratory rib-cages . . .If you like, you could call this the Psy-chology of Total Equivalents—let's say‘Neuronics' for short—and dismiss it asmetabiological fantasy. However, I am con-vinced that as we move back through


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geophysical time so we re-enter the amnioniccorridor and move back through spinal and

archaeopsychic time, recollecting in our un-conscious minds the landscapes of eachepoch, each with a distinct geological ter-rain, its own unique flora and fauna, asrecognisable to anyone else as they would beto a traveller in a Wellsian time machine.Except that this is no scenic railway, but a

total re-orientation of the personality. If welet these buried phantoms master us as theyre-appear we'll be swept back helplessly inthe flood-tide like pieces of flotsam.7

If infantilism were all the past had to offer, then psy-choanalysis would be time-travel, and the futurewould be well-balanced. Announcing themselves as

hyper-Freudianism, Neuronics and the Cosmic theoryof Geotrauma shift from the imaginary familial circuitto the lagoons of deep time. They introduce diago-nalised matter-memory in order to study the twistedindexing of the Geo-Archaeo-Psychic.

As to Land, perhaps what he found most valuablein Barker’s work was the extension of geotraumatictheory into human culture and to language in particu-lar, via this keying of the geotraumatic body-map toenvironmental stimuli; and the potential for develop-ment of modes of decoding of cultural phenomenathat escape the signifier. Bipedalism, erect posture,forward-facing vision, the cranial verticalization of thehuman face, the laryngeal constriction of the voice, arethemselves all indices of a succession of geotraumatic

catastrophes separating the material potencies of the body from its stratified actuality. Just as the bipedalhead impedes ‘vertebro-perceptual linearity’, the hu-man larynx inhibits ‘virtual speech’. One cannot

7 Dr. Bodkin’s Journal.


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dismantle the face without also evacuating the voice.Perhaps inspired by Parsani’s invocation of the Mid-

dle-Eastern vowel-less battle-cry against solar empire,Land affirms that, in geotraumatic terms, the humanvoice itself is—via the various accidents of hominidevolution—the enfeebled expression of geotrauma:

Due to erect posture the head has been twist-ed around, shattering vertebro-perceptual

linearity and setting up the phylogeneticpreconditions for the face. This right-angledpneumatic-oral arrangement produces thevocal apparatus as a crash-site, in which tho-racic impulses collide with the roof of themouth. The bipedal head becomes a virtualspeech-impediment, a sub-cranial pneumaticpile-up, discharged as linguo-gestural devel-

opment and cephalization take-off.Burroughs suggests that the protohuman apewas dragged through its body to expire uponits tongue. It’s a twin-axial system, howlsand clicks, reciprocally articulated as a vow-el-consonant phonetic palette, rigidlyintersegmented to repress staccato-hiss con-tinuous variation and its attendant

becomings-animal. The anthropostructuralhead-smash that establishes our identitywith logos . . . 8

For Land, therefore, as for Bodkin, the schizoanalytic‘treatment’ of geotrauma, the discovery of the ‘innatereleasing mechanisms’, is a matter of ‘real and effec-

tive regression’, which can only be carried out on anexperimental and empirical basis, on the basis of acertain hypothesis concerning the relation betweentime, matter and trauma.



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A noteworthy outcome of this hypothesis is a cer-tain deepening of pessimism: Ultimately, nothing

short of the complete liquidation of biological orderand the dissolution of physical structure can suffice todischarge the aboriginal trauma that mars terrestrialexistence. A collective becoming-snake of human civi-lization would be only the first step.

When, in the 1990s, the Cybernetic Culture Re-search Unit—probably, it is thought, through the

agency of the aged Anatole Alasca, once assistant toProfessor Challenger—disinterred the by then all-but-hermetic Daniel Barker from his lab at MVU for thatlast CCRU interview, Nick Land embarked upon hisshort-lived revival of the Geocosmic Theory of Traumathrough a series of experiments in microcultural des-tratification, documentation of which has recently

been rediscovered.

Land was a relay, keeping the signal alive, but ofcourse he didn’t last long, he burnt out just like Barker

before him. In 99-2000 Parsani joined us, but he wastoo far gone to be of any help. That’s why the Commit-tee needed a new candidate.

So where is ‘Negarestani’ supposed to go withthis?

He begins by elaborating on the story so far: theconspiracy to return Cthelll, the earth’s core, repressedrunt sibling of the sun, to immanence with its solarmothership; the plotting of the return of the Tellurianinsider; and the agency of oil as tellurian lube. All thiswe know and approve of.

But what is important is this: Ultimately, a theorythat locates the source of the ills of the human psyche

in the accretion of the earth 4.5 billion years ago is—obviously—far too parochial for the purposes of theCommittee. It owes its local inhibitions to Land’sfondness for Bataille and his disproportionate atten-tion to Freud’s later, flawed model of trauma inBeyond the Pleasure Principle.


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According to Bataille’s ‘solar economy’, the most basic economic problem is not scarcity but the exorbi-

tant excess of solar energy; all movements on thisplanet, from the basest physical processes through tothe highest sophistications of life and culture, consistonly in labyrinthine detours of one and the same vec-tor—the profligate expenditure of energy by the sun.The secret of all apparently stable and economicallyconservative being is that it is already pledged to solar

abolition, it already belongs to the sun and its radicalhorizon of death.Negarestani recognizes the just alignment of Ba-

taille’s notion of the Solar Economy with Freud’sspeculative thesis concerning the nature of organiclife: According to ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, thepreservation of a lifeform in relation to the excessiveenergy source it draws upon, demands the sacrifice of

a part of that lifeform: the creation of a mortified outersurface or crust—‘a special envelope or membrane re-sistant to stimuli’—that protects it from its exorbitantsource of energy. Thus, the survival and individualityof an organic lifeform, biological, psychic or cultural,is based on the repression of an originary trauma inwhich it encountered, in all its naked power, thesource of energy that would also be its death.Lifeforms are lagoons, repressed pockets of forgetting,temporarily protecting themselves against the outsidethat created them and will destroy them.

Thus we can say that all forms of life are solu-tions to the same problem; managing the excoriatingexcess of solar energy which will eventually consumethem in death. As modes of life become more complex

and more numerous, their dependence upon the ex-cessive power source only grows stronger; asNegarestani argues, there is a mutually-reinforcingsymmetry between the plurality of life and the mon-ism of death. Another way to put this is that, from thepoint of view of the securitised individuated lifeform


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closed up against its traumatic encounter with solarexcess, the sun inevitably becomes the single and ab-

solute horizon or vanishing point for all life.This development of what Negarestani will call

the ‘monogamous model’ of the relation between ter-restrial life and the sun, is relayed in the cultural andeconomic forms of capitalism. Capitalism appears as acrazed thanatropic machine, unlocking the earth’s re-sources—in particular, the fossil fuels that were, in

more optimistic times, referred to as ‘buried sun-light’—to release them to their destiny of dissolution,and thus accelerating the consumption of the earth bythe sun.

by tapping the Carboniferous Formation andspewing it up into the sky, we’ve become avolcano that hasn’t stopped erupting since

the 1700s.9

Mankind is the first lifeform to contemporaneouslycommunicate with geological time; a gigantic volcano,a holocaust of consumption, a fault in the file-system.Yet this unbridled consumption also manifests itselfculturally in an ever-increasing complexification andelaboration of multiple ‘ways of life’ and supposedlyinfinite possibilities and differentiation.

To break thought out of its capture by the monog-amous model, even though the propaganda of the solarempire runs through the entirety of biological life andhuman culture—including the flawed variants of ge-otrauma theory . This is Negarestani’s first mission—To broaden still further the theory in rescinding the

status of the sun as sole ‘image of exteriority’, as ulti-mate singular horizon for all life. The sun is not theabsolute or the abyss, but only a local blockage, a re-

9 Alan Weisman, The World Without Us (New

York: Thomas Dunne, 2007), 40.


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striction, a blind spot that obscures the opening of theearth onto a more general cosmic economy which

produced it and which will consume it, along with thesun.

In 3.5 billion years, the core of the aging sungrows hotter, causing a severe greenhouse effect thatsterilises the entire biosphere; its outer surface cools,expanding to engulf the inner planets. In 7 billionyears, the earth slips out of orbit but, outside the small

chance that it could be flung out into the ‘icy desola-tion of deep space’, is dragged into the core of the Sunto be evaporated, its only legacy a small amount offuel for the red giant’s farewell glow. The sun becomesa ‘small block of hydrogen ice’; 100 trillion years intothe future, all the stars go out, followed by an era pop-ulated only by the ‘degenerate remnants’ that survivethe end of stellar evolution. 1040 years, the cosmic ca-

tastrophe of proton decay ushers in the era of blackholes, where the only stellar objects left are blackholes ‘convert their mass into radiation and evaporateat a glacial pace’, and then the scarcely-conceivable‘dark era’ populated by atomic waste products enter-ing into desultory, increasingly rare and fruitlesschance encounters.10

The cosmic abyss is deeper than the solar fur-nace. Earth’s monogamous relationship with the sun isjust one chapter in a weird epic narrative that does notfind its climax in annihilatory conflagration.

And therefore, the terrestrial plots that play out inthe human psyche must be traced back beyond thepaltry 4.5 million year lifespan of the planet. Thetrauma is deeper still, and more weird, than Challeng-

er, Barker or Land had imagined.

10 See F. C. Adams, “Long-term astrophysical processes,” in

Global Catastrophic Risks, eds. N. Bostrom and M. M.Cirkovic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).


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To contemplate these icy, inevitable vistas ofcosmic time is in a certain sense already to go beyond

geotrauma. The viewpoint of an ecology radicalenough to take in these extra-solar eschatologies notonly breaks through terrestrial concerns, but alsothrough the ‘solar horizon’ that has governed ourthought on and of the earth.

As Negarestani will say, ‘to be truly terrestrial isnot the same as being superficial’. To be truly terres-

trial is to embrace the perishability of the earth, andits implication in the universe, beyond the local eco-nomics of the relation between the sun and thesurface; to replace the monogamous relation between acontingent earth and the necessary and absolute sunaround which its planetary path winds, with a relationof multiplicity between this planetary body and thecosmic contingencies which led to its formation, a

cosmic chemical conspiracy that works through theearth, and which finds its dissolute destiny beyondthe sun. Chemophilosophy; geotrauma unearthed.

** *

So now you know. It was all a twisted plot. For years,they thought they were making all this up. But theCommittee was telling them what to write . . .

The ‘Speculative Realist’ racket provided a per-fect opportunity; capitalizing on the vogue forimagining one can subtract theoretical thought fromthe human imaginary, from narrative and from sense,through Negarestani we are able to inject it, precisely,

with the narrative element that is, as paradoxical as itmay seem, an integral part of the procedure. Significa-tion cannot be crushed without following plots thattell ever-new stories of the earth. It’s not a matter ofusing science or a new metaphysics to eradicate suchtales, but of constructing a science of real plots, which


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is what Geotrauma—in Negarestani’s hands— becomes. The compulsive-repetitive symptoms that

are human culture cannot be overcome simply by pre-cipitately stripping them down to a reductivephysical, metaphysical or relational states. The insti-gation of a collective schizoanalysis must proceedthrough the development of the experimental meansfor ‘real, effective regression’, for meticulous decryp-tion.

it is quite hopeless to try to penetrate direct-ly to the nucleus of the pathogenicorganization. . . . We ourselves undertake theopening up of inner strata, advancing radial-ly, whereas the patient looks after theperipheral extension of the work.

We must get hold of a piece of the logi-

cal thread, by whose guidance alone we mayhope to penetrate to the interior.11

Unpick the individual, travel down her spine, into therocks, through the iron core, attaining a burning im-manence with the sun, and exiting towards theunknown.

Above all, Negarestani’s ‘universalist’ reconstruc-tion of the theory of trauma, and his continualrethinking of ‘The Insider’ in yet more xeno-economical terms, must be understood in the wake ofthe committee’s recent reappropriation of Ferenczi’swork for the cause. For Ferenczi, trauma is not a holepunched into the organic by exteriority. This modelwould only reflect—all too-closely—the empirical oc-

casioning cause of the theoretical recognition oftrauma. Nor is it, even (as in Beyond the PleasurePrinciple) a founding event synonymous with the con-stitution of the organic individual per se, and which

11 Freud, Psychotherapy of Hysteria.


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constricts its path to death. Trauma is a perennial bor-ing or a vermicular inhabiting of the organic by the

inorganic:

the inassimilable presence of the universalcontinuum within the regional field, a resi-dent yet alienating presence that has been

bored and nested into the horizon from dif-ferent angles, contingently, gradationally,

infinitesimally. We call this resident yetinassimilable index of exteriority that canneither be expelled nor reintegrated withinthe interiorized horizon, the Insider.12

Ferenczi’s traumata are plotholes that must beplumbed, outward itineraries that must be travelled.The time of trauma is altered. Geophilosophy was al-

ways a chemophilosophy: just as it needed to explodethe constricted space of the individual and escape tothe political surface of the earth, and just as it wasthen necessary to understand the apparently stablesurface as an arrested flow and to penetrate to thedepths, the cosmic theory of geotrauma now needed topass through the core of the earth only to escape itsinhibited mode of traumatic stratification and to carryits interrogation further afield, or rather according to anew mode of distribution.

The Committee’s question is: which practices,conspiracies, theories, insurgencies, setting out fromthe local surface, will ‘assist the earth in hatching itsinner black egg’; which plots will assist in decryptingthe addresses of traumatic agents no longer under-

stood as foreign bodies that assault the protective

12 Reza Negarestani, On the Revolutionary Earth (un-

published); subsequently published as “Globe ofRevolution. An Afterthought on Geophilosophical Re-alism,” Identities 17 (2011): 25-54.


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membrane of the organic individual, nor even as a re-pressed fragments of a greater exuberance; but as

xeno-chemical insiders, Old Ones waiting to be awak-ened. What stimuli will key into the triggers that willattach us to a Kurtz-gradient, disintricating the tangledthemes that surface as reality-symptoms, allowing usegress into dreams where the lagoon of personalmemory drains into a sea of cosmic trauma?

Guided by his dreams, he was moving back-wards through the emergent past, through asuccession of ever stranger landscapes, cen-tred upon the lagoon, each of which seemedto represent one of his own spinal levels. Attimes the circle of water was spectral and vi-

brant, at others slack and murky, the shoreapparently formed of shale, like the dull me-

tallic skin of a reptile. Yet again the soft beaches would glow invitingly with a glossycarmine sheen, the sky warm and limpid, theemptiness of the long stretches of sand totaland absolute, filling him with an exquisiteand tender anguish.

He longed for this descent through ar-chaeopsychic time to reach its conclusion,repressing the knowledge that when it didthe external world around him would have

become alien and unbearable.13

How can the revolutionary subject, throughdeepening and widening its traumas, attaintopological and categorical equivalence with

the universal absolute? Likewise, how canthe regional horizon—as a relatively open setexcised from the universal absolute—find itsequivalence with the absolute through deep-

13 Dr. Bodkin’s Journal.


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ening its geophilosophical synthesis andstretching its nested traumas by dilating and

twisting them?14

It’s a question of writing, but also of mapping. That’swhere Cane comes in. Once you see the Atlas you’llknow where to go.

The Plutonics Committee had to exert some pres-sure, to get things moving.

There is nothing for it but to keep at first tothe periphery of the psychical structure. We

begin by getting the patient to tell us what heknows and remembers, while we are at thesame time already directing his attention andovercoming his slighter resistances by theuse of the pressure procedure. Whenever we

have opened a new path by thus pressing onhis forehead, we may expect him to advancesome distance without fresh resistance.

After we have worked in this way forsome time, the patient begins as a rule to co-operate with us.

15

It therefore remains for us to see how, effectively,simultaneously, these various tasks of schizoanalysisproceed.

** *

14 Negarestani, On the Revolutionary Earth.15

Freud, The Psychotherapy of Hysteria.


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It was over. Only later would all of this take on con-crete meaning. The double-articulated mask had comeundone, and so had the gloves and tunic, from whichliquids escaped. Disarticulated, deterriorialized, Ne-garestani muttered that he was taking the earth withhim.


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An Inhuman Fiction of Forces

McKenzie Wark

The work is the death mask of its conception.– Walter Benjamin

‘The Domain of Arnheim’ is a strange story by EdgarAllan Poe, in which a young man who inherits an in-credible fortune decides to spend it, not on buying art

but on fashioning a landscape. Poe also imagines the

Earth seen from space as itself a complete work of art.He anticipates the real ends of modernism.Is not the totality of all our endeavors, all our so-

cial relations, tending towards the making over of theplanet as a total work of art? This theme of a secular,aesthetic destiny has its roots in Romanticism, butlately it has lost its more optimistic cast. What if thework of art into which the word turns excluded the

presence of its own makers? What if its creation de-stroys the biological possibility of human life on theplanet?

What light does aesthetics as a branch of thought,and art as a creative practice, shed on the (possible)end(s) of the world? What if we consider the end ofthe world as the finished product of aesthetic moder-nity? The blue ruin of earth is the total work of art atthe end of history. The earth will be buried at sea.

These matters are too serious to leave in thehands of technological optimists and apocalypticdoomsayers. Nor is moral scolding about doing therecycling either effective or adequate to conceiving of


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the whole picture of climate change and its conse-quences. Rather, it calls for an aesthetic sensibility

oriented to the whole picture rather than this or thataspect.

There is a certain popular delight in imaginingthe modern world in ruins. It’s a theme Walter Benja-min identified early in the 20th century. In the shad-ow of the bomb, the Beats and their contemporariesoccasionally gave it an incendiary cast. But what if we

push beyond the picture of atomized cities to imaginenot what passes but what is created at the end of hu-man time? Our permanent legacy will not be architec-tural, but chemical. After the last dam bursts, after theconcrete monoliths crumble into the lone and levelsands, modernity will leave behind a chemical signa-ture, in everything from radioactive waste to atmos-pheric carbon. This work will be abstract, not figura-

tive.Grasping this as a total work means understand-

ing two tendencies in relation to each other: the globaland the molecular. The tendency toward the globaland the tendency toward the molecular are combinedin work such as the Center for Land Use Interpreta-tion’s guided tours of urban LA oil rigs or nuclearwaste dumps in the salt flats, where the tour bus is aninside out vitrine. In the wake of the vast oil spill inthe Gulf of Mexico, the artist duo übermogen.com an-nounce: “oil painting has evolved into generative bio-art… an oil painting on an 80,000 square mile oceancanvas…” It’s simply a matter of taking the next step,of extending the parameters of the molecular aestheticto the planetary limit.

While there are tendencies in contemporary artthat are helpful for thinking about the blue ruin, thereare perhaps fewer resources in literature. CormacMcCarthy’s The Road presents a reverse passion play,the passing of the sacred out of the earth, but its ratherhuman-centric. On the other hand, is Ian McEwan’s


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Solar the worst book so far of the 21st century? Climatechange exists as a plot device for some jokes about

some old white guy. This is the context in which RezaNegarastani’s Cyclonopedia emerges for me as the on-ly worthy successor to ‘The Domain of Arnheim’ inthe contemporary scene.

Let me say that I doubt the existence of an authornamed Reza Negarastani. What is named Negrastani isa practice of détournement, or what Cyclonopedia it-

self describes thus: “Hidden Writing can be describedas using every plot hole, all problematics, every suspi-cious obscurity or repulsive wrongness as a new plotwith a tentacle and autonomous mobility.” It “be-speaks a crowd at work” of “autonomous authordrones” (61). It doesn’t matter whether the body ofReza Negarastani exists or not. If it does, its just thehost for a fiction of forces that writes through it.

Cyclonopedia not a novel. It can of course be readas one, but only at the expense of making the categoryof novel meaningless. Cyclonopedia is heretical theol-ogy. Heresy plays out certain structural and rhetoricalpossibilities of a given authorized corpus. “To do rig-orous theology is to perforate the Divine corpus withheresies” (62). The weird beauty of Cyclonopedia comes not least from its diving in and out of the plotholes in certain geopolitical narratives. As in theology,its characters are inhuman. They are centrally the fig-ures of earth and sun, and within earth, of liquid anddust, where the liquid is oil and not water.

I’m interested in water myself, but I appreciatethis attempt to make a hole in the narrative of waterand earth, to dig down to another, about oil, which

challenges the “onanistic self indulgence of the Sun”(19). Oil is the agent which brings a time of the aeons,a geological time, through a hole in historical time. Oilis an agent of the xenodrome, from ‘xeno’, or stranger.“Xenodrome is the Earth of becoming-Gas or crema-tion-to-dust” (17).


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This “hydrocarbon corpse juice”, this “blackcorpse of the sun” (26) is a chemical weapon of earth

against sun, unwittingly let loose by human agency.Strikingly, oil is the subject here. Everything belong-ing to historical time is just minor characters. Here’sthe ()hole plot summary of the book: “petroleum poi-sons capital with absolute madness” (27). It is as if oilwas waiting for some McGuffin to set it in motion. Oilis capital before there are even humans, waiting for a

host. The host reinvents the earth as an oil-shittingmachine. Oil that is just masticated life, which is itselfjust sun-cum.

“Oil, with its poromechanical zones of emergencein economy, geopolitics and culture, mocks Divinechronological time with the utmost irony and obsceni-ty” (58). I’m not so interested in that, frankly. I havenothing to say about Islam. It is not in relation to Islam

that Cyclonopedia creates heresies. And nor does capi-tal need a genealogy of its will to desertification. It’senough to think how it is not oil that fuels capital butrather the reverse. Capital is just oil’s vector.

We need a narratology of the elements, a way ofwriting that does not just treat the chemical world as ifit gave rise to subjects equivalent to the humans, godsor monsters that usually populate narratives. A way ofwriting that does not make the chemical world merelyambient, either. And can we have done with the or-ganic vanity of biopower? Why should the biologicallevel of organization take precedence over any other?Rather an elemental narratolology, which opens on theone side to the ancestral subatomic world, and on theother to the elements and their molecular combina-

tions.Nor am I all that interested in Gog and Magog,Bush and Bin Ladin, tweedledum and tweedledee, thedrama of sockpuppets animated by oil. Oil is always(re)animating new sockpuppets. The rise of HugoChavez; the fall of Libya. It also occurs to me that the


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emerging narrative is not oily but gaseous. Imaginedigging through the hole in the Cyclonopedia narra-

tive to another one, about so-called natural gas. Frack-ing is a water and air story, not an oil and dust one.

What Cyclonopedia calls “occult derivatives” arethose conspiracy theories that gum up the channels ofpolitical communication, impoverishing the state’scommunication through time. Its an attack on thestate’s territories of time. That’s the strategy of Cy-

clonopedia, and not a bad one. What are the others?Can we see this book as a point in a space of possiblewritings that are xenowritings. An inhuman fiction offorces. Rather than “truth is stranger than fiction,” wemight say that Xenowriting is the true stranger in fic-tion.

Xenia is what the Greeks called the hospitalityowed to strangers, and xenia is what I think we owe to

Cyclonopedia. Which is to say we become its hosts.And in its own metronymic fashion, this small part ofthe hosting of the stranger helps spread the occult de-rivatives which block a certain sedentary order of lifeand yet at the same time opens vectors for inhumanparticles to inhabit thought.


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Root the Earth: On Peak OilApophenia

Benjamin H. Bratton

I. PEAK OIL APOPHENIA; OR “THE ANUS OF FORESIGHT”

After the end of the world, what is the polity ofthe inhuman? What is its government of energy? It isprogrammatic reconfigurability: a general economy ofplasticity. It extends around the anthropomorphic

physiognomy of architecture and toward an acephalicgeography emerging in the image of strong computa-tional equivalence. The prototype of an indeterminatefuture government is positioned by an encounter be-tween that equivalence and the numinous decay ofecological entropy and negentropy: oil as body of theworld, and the “worlding” of the body of oil. Peak oil,and after.

Reza Negarestani’s own program in his theoreti-cal-novel, Cyclonopedia, is both geography andgeophilosophy, yes, but also geopolitics, in the specif-ic sense of a Jamesonian geopolitical aesthetic.1 I wishto instrumentalize the text and to de-metaphorize itsobsessions, and to link these to those of another shorttext of my own: “The language of utopia has shifted.

The cybernetics of scenario planning has given way tothe apophenia of eschatology. Is geopolitics but a DarkSide of the Rainbow effect? With this shift, infor-

1 Fredric, Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and

Space in the World System (Indiana University Press, 1995).


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mation becomes unmanageable, non-linear, associa-tive, arbitrary. Anything is enrolled into the local

rhetoric of conspiracy . . .”2 Invention is the transposition of one phase state

to another, of one resonance on top of another, and itexpresses therefore the deep recomposability, indeeddeep recomputability, of worldly substance. CatherineMalabou speaks of the world’s plasticity as a condi-tion of its futurity.3 When or where? Less than deep

recomputability causes a genuinely new condition toemerge ‘later in time’ simultaneous to some postponedevent, it does so ‘here’ in the recombinancy of an infi-nite synchronic field of the longest possible ‘now’.This is the absolute contingency of mathematics col-lapsing into the mortal contingency of stuff. That is,does everything that has ever existed continue to existnow, in the molecular transformation of geo-

programmatic recycling, and also, does everything thatwill ever exist already do so in another larval, disor-ganized distribution?

Consider the Greek plastikos, Latin plasticus, andin 1630’s the English, plastic , and then finally Leo

2 This fragment is from my text, “Plastic Futures Markets,”

written as part of the exhibition, MADE-UP: Design Fic-tions,” curated by Tim Durfee at Art Center College ofDesign, Pasadena, CA, January, 2011. The Dark Side of theRainbow, “refers to the pairing of the 1973 Pink Floyd album The Dark Side of the Moon with the visual portion ofthe 1939 film The Wizard of Oz . This produces momentswhere the film and the album appear to correspond witheach other. The title of the music video-like experience

comes from a combination of the album title and the film’ssong ‘Over the Rainbow.’ Band members and others in-volved in the making of the album state that any relationship between the two works of art is merely a coincidence”(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Side_of_the_Rainbow).3 See Jean-Paul Martinon, On Futurity: Malabou, Nancy and

Derrida (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).


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Baekland’s “plastic,” a hard light-weight material syn-thesized in 1909. The concept of plastiticty predates

the industrial-era invention of plastic and its epidemicstandardization of the chemical phylum. Now themassive scale oil extraction and distribution that mostdifferentiates the 20th century as the time of the An-thropocene has made possible the ongoingreplacement of the things of world by their plastic ver-sions. But plastic is not only mutability and mimesis,

it is mutation, a speciation of objects.And that is oil’s own career as a terrestrial pro-cess. For Earth, the rendering of organic life on thesurface of its crust into subterranean mineral fossilfuels is a core vascular labor. As oil, plastic is life re-recycled. So that the plasticity of plastic—the realcompression-deformation effect of oil as the ultimatefate of the living thing—long predates the physical

possibility of its composition by animals (humans) asthe chemicals we call “plastics.” That futurity is an-cient. This transmutation from some things andtoward other things, the recycling churn of geotraumaand geodesign, translates the situated flux of planetarymolecular recombinancy into the generic assemblageswe recognize as cities, civilizations, languages, anddiscursive registers of authority and knowledge.

But that ubiquitous conversion far exceeds ourcognitive faculties to map its local causality, effectivi-ty, and relationality. That excess can render the worldin the inchoate, premature resolution of a “sacred con-spiracy,” one which awards critical agency tophantom actors, histories and numerologies, withinwhat are instead, utterly secular, if also inconceivably

complex, non-linear systems.Now the geopolitics of peak oil is necessarily thefabrication and negotiation of an image of the worldfrom which Modern plastic has been withdrawn, be-cause soon it is no longer feasible to manufacture. Inthat world, existing plastic retrieved from landfills can


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only be re-re-recycled. But to imagine the world de-nuded of new plastic first requires a model in which

the agency of oil has been conceptualized and formal-ized, such that effects of the agency of oil (nowsubtracted through the imminent exhaustion of pre-Holocene deposits) can be differentiated, perceivedand predicted. But because Plastic and plasticity arealready deeply pervasive, foundational procedures ofthe world, that abstraction of agency, while absolutely

necessary and critical, is nevertheless indissociablefrom arbitrary eschatology.This occult theory of geosystems, and the drama-

tization of untraceable molecular genealogies throughtheir promiscuous recyclings, is apophenia. It is a div-ination of rhythm from the unfoldings of perceptionitself, and a reading of these affects as if they were de-liberately authored and specifically significant. This

spiritualism is perhaps another kind of correlationism,this time not between subjects and objects, but sys-tems and their effects. It is counterpart to the role ofconspiracy theory in the Jamesonian geopolitical aes-thetic. It a collapse of correlation into causation, afiction of resolution through a perceptual trick of jux-taposition, as the Kulsehov effect is for the narrativeexperience of film. For Abrahamac monotheism, tex-tualist eschatology is always apophenia, as history ismapped across a sacred telos, such that correspond-ence between current event and its foretelling isguaranteed in advance. For our Peak Oil predicament,geopolitical illegibility provokes and precedes thetheologic envelope of revelation: the anus of foresight.

II. THE SOLAR ANUS AND THE SOLAR MOUTH The “devil’s shit,” oil, is a totality of rot. Fossil

fuels are the planetary archive of putrification andcumulative decrepitude: dead plankton, micro andmacro-organisms, flaura and fauna, become mineral

body, plants become peat, rock. Oil is Meat.


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Consider then how Negarestani frames the earlyscientific pseudo-controversy over the ultimate origins

of oil in the fragment, “Outlines for a Science Fictionof the Earth as Narrated from a Nethermost Point ofView.”4 A geopolitical—and perhaps metaphysical—imaginary is at stake in the opposition of biogenic andexogenic theories of oil, each constitutional of a dif-ferent biopolitics, and different conditions for thespeculative geo-materialist comprehension of moder-

nity, indeed geology and history, as an expression ofoil’s own desire. Negarestani writes, “according to the biogenic theory of fossil fuels, petroleum was formedunder pressure and heat in the absence of oxygenwhile sadistically counting organic death tolls for mil-lennia. Under such extreme conditions, petroleumgrew a satanic verve for reanimating the dead andpuppetizing the living on a planetary scale. A precur-

sor to blobjective narratives, (this) imagery grasps the‘Thingness’ of oil as a singular inorganic body fuelingthe Conradian journey ‘up-river,’ from the gas stationto the chthonic oil reservoir via the tentacled edificeof oil pipelines . . . from a nethermost point of view,Bush and Bin Laden are merely petropolitical puppetsconvulsing along the chthonic strings of the blob justin the same way that a Chinese plastic toy and equallyan American predator drone are brought to life by thestrings woven from the hydrocarbon corpse juice.”

So the labor of Earth is not only orgiastic recy-cling but an incessant authophagia, auto-cannibalization: planet as molecular war machineagainst itself. The Anthropocene Age of Plastic is butan instant whereby the cumulative subterranean min-

eral corpse of the planet’s initial millions of years oflife, now rendered into mineral gas and fluid by the

4 Reza Negarastani, “Outlines for a Science Fiction of the

Earth as Narrated from a Nethermost Point of View,” WorldLiterature Today 84 (2010): 12-3.


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Earth itself, is given another zombie life in the animat-ed forms of worldly Plastic: oceans of plankton resur-

resurrected as skyscrapers, trillions of trees hauntingthe world as textiles, as food additives, artificialhearts, and even as fake plastic trees spinning in cir-cles through the Pacific garbage gyre. Here “Peak Oil”represents a clock measuring the speed by which thepresent can consume the past and a linear, indexicalquantification of how much of the past remains for

future consumption. It measures time, of how muchmore future there is to be. Biogenesis is carnivore in-frastructure, an eating of the world. This is a restrictedeconomy version of Bataille’s Solar Anus, one forwhich the cosmos provides, in its open expenditure,the energy of construction, circulation and exchange,

but for this closed planetary loop, and like the Sadeaneconomy of fluid exchange, there is less and less piss

and shit to be eaten every time it goes around. TheAnthropocene spasm of transposing the past into thegeneric chemicals we call Plastic is the Earth re-eatingitself all in one go, consuming the full archive in onemomentary spasm. In this, the animal becomes miner-al.

To open the loop, that economy needs to be ex-tended off-planet in an expanded communication withanother archive. That expansion is the crux of the ex-ogenic theory of oil, for which Earth is already parcelof a cosmic economy of hydrocarbons, and for whichthe Anthopocene represents an apotheosis ofnegentropic complexity. For the xenogenesis theory,oil is not the liquid corpse of the local past, it is themineral body of the alien present. Negarastani writes,

“Although the theory of fossil fuels underwrites thenarrative coherency of oil as a psychopath that runson blackened blood, its depth and longevity are con-strained by the life of organisms . . . In order to deepen. . . and broaden . . . the potencies of Earth’s futurities,the avatar of petroleum as the Blob or the Thing must


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also be extended outside of what the astrophysicistThomas Gold calls the ‘myth of fossil fuels’. For Gold,

petroleum has its origin in alien hydrocarbons of deepspace, which have been trapped in the bowels of theearth. Since these alien relics are in flux within theplanet, the patterns of oil distribution are susceptibleto change. In this sense the science-fictional visioninherent to the terrestrial architecture of industrialcivilizations becomes contingent upon Plutonic migra-

tions of these alien inorganic demons. Eluding biological origins, oil is not of this place but of es-tranging depths; it has already infested the earth as anInsider for which scenarios of alien invasion are butmelodramatic redundancies. If petropestilence hasalready invaded and colonized the earth, the entirehistory of terrestrial life is an era of postoccupation,and our postindustrial, oil-driven achievements that

ground the foundations of our science-fictional imagi-nation are simply exploits of a radical outsider in

building its own porous earth.”Here, Earthly substances are merely hosts and

shells for oil, the alien control parasite, like the para-satoid fungus, Cordyceps unilateralis, which infectsthe brain of a species of ant and directs its zombie tocrawl to the precise height in the jungle canopy suita-

ble by temperature and humidity for the fungus tofully spore, and where the ant husk becomes a factoryfor further production of the fungus. We can imaginethat the ant dies happy, but will we? The poetry of thealien theory of oil is toward an extroverted decapita-tion of the restricted economy of capitalrationalization, and the de-differentation of economies

of embodiment and signification from the mineral andenergistic processes of ground. Body and site oscillatein a gestalt shift of figure and ground. It is not simplythat we do the aliens’ bidding, but that we are animat-ed by a chthonic force that consumes us, a praxis ofthe inhuman, a general economy of possession. Our


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consumption of time, which becomes by the death ofour own decay, the prosthetic productive economy of

a parasitic mandate that arrives from beyond our solareconomy. Alien hydrocarbons are much more subter-ranean than the “Old Mole” and refer to a wider menuof orifices than the Solar Anus: instead, here is theBlack Sun, the carnivorous orifice, the Solar Mouth.Parallel to our own real primordial mineral origins,here the mineral becomes animal.

To eat or to be eaten: what is infrastructure? Whatis infrastructure’s economy of geologic cannibalism?The Solar Anus, and the biogenic theory of oil is aconsumptive model of energy infrastructure for whichthe production-of-decay/decay-of-production is predi-cated on the Earth eating the sun and human historyeating the Earth, and in turn for which the Earth eatshistory, and regurgitates it back as fossil fuel.Time

eats, and so thereby in turn, time is eaten. The BlackSun and the xenogenic theory of oil privileges thecosmos eating the Earth through the prosthesis of oil,and the Earth eating us through the robot program ofthat alien. Time is eaten, and so thereby in turn, timecan eat.

III. “GOD BOWS TO MATH”5

Peak Oil geopolitics demands geophilosophy, assurely as apophenia demands conspiracy. The subtrac-tion of oil from the milieu of everyday life is theprophetic horizon against which the plastic (post-Plastic) futurity of geopolitical eschatology of is meas-ured. The ultimate effect of that withdrawal, abrupt orgradual, is beyond the comprehension of normal sce-

nario planning models, and threatens to returnthought to superstitious conversions of religion, ener-gy and geography. But what other possibilities?

5 “God Bows to Math” is a song title from Double Nickels On

The Dime by The Minutemen (1984).


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My conclusion is a departure from the paranoidmethods of the Bronze Age, because the materialism at

stake for Peak Oil apophenia is ultimately secular, farmore secular than we have as yet had to encounter,precisely because the sacralized inter-relation of ener-gy, religion and geography is so deeply woven intoeconomic discourse. Let me quote Adorno, “the ten-dency to occultism is a symptom of regression inconsciousness. This has lost the power to think the

unconditional and to endure the conditional. Insteadof defining both, in their unity and difference, by con-ceptual labour, it mixes them indiscriminately. Theunconditional becomes fact, the conditional an imme-diate essence. The veiled tendency of society towardsdisaster lulls its victims in a false revelation, with ahallucinated phenomenon. In vain they hope in itsfragmented blatancy to look their total doom in the

eye and withstand it . . . deranged and bemused, theoccultist throws away the hard-won knowledge of it-self in the midst of a society which, by the all-encompassing exchange-relationship, eliminates pre-cisely the elemental power the occultists claim tocommand. . . . The offal of the phenomenal world be-comes, to sick consciousness, the mundusintelligibilis. It might almost be speculative truth, justas Kafka’s Odradek might almost be an angel, and yetit is, in a positivity that excludes the medium ofthought, only barbaric aberration alienated from itself,subjectivity mistaking itself for its object.”6

Instead the necessary location of Peak Oil as thepivotal problematic of geopolitics and geopolitical aes-thetics, as well its attendant ecological collapses and

post-petroleum revitalization, must go beyond the dy-namics of war as a machine and of each mechanical

6 Theodor Adorno, “Theses Against Occultism” (1946-47),

included in Stars Down to Earth and Other Essays on theIrrational in Culture (London: Routledge, 1994).


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machines as a little war that eats oil. Instead what re-mains is a open assignment of designing the

governance of energy as the governance of a communi-ty of forces that inhabit each other through it, ageography which after Deleuze and Guattari’s “Ge-ophilosophy” chapter, “wrests history from the cult ofnecessity in order to stress the irreducibiliy of contin-gency, it wrests it from the cult of origins in order toaffirm the power of a ‘milieu’” and which provides

what we most lack, which is not communication, butresistance to the present.”7 But can we conceive of thisgeography which is always a kind of geo-governance(a nomos), even as it is immanent and resistant totranscendental figuration, and which is sober and fear-less in its willful self-composition in the shadow ofthe actual peak and extinguishment of the petroleumlifeblood of industrial objects, and which does not,

however, derive its sovereignty from a framing ofecology as an ambient and permanent emergency, orfrom a morality of absolute conservation. On the later,Brian Massumi, characterizes the profile of such a de-ranged biopower, “the overall environment of life nowappears as a complex, systemic threat environment,composed of subsystems that are not only complex intheir own right but are complexly interconnected.They are all susceptible to self-amplifying irruptivedisruption. Given the interconnections, a disruptionin one subsystem may propagate into others, and evencascade across them all, reaching higher and widerlevels of amplification, up to and including the plane-tary scale.”8 The geophilosophy of “irreducible

7 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy? ,

trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York:Columbia University Press, 1995), 85-116.8 Brian Massumi, “National Enterprise Emergency: Steps

Toward an Ecology of Powers,” Theory, Culture & Society 26(2009): 153-185.


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contingency” cannot be defined by this cybernetics ofrisk.

That contingency may come, however, into somepartial focus through provisional accidents of digitaleconomics. In applied computational equivalence, thedigitalization of anthropomorphic matter can effect anextinguishment of its extrinsic exchange value, and ageneralized transference not from private to publicdomain but into uncoded reservoirs of intellect re-

sistant to capture. For some writers, that leverage ispositioned romantically as an opposite of primitiveaccumulation (instead of the absorption of the com-mon into capital, capitalization is exploded into un-exchangeability), but I think the hole in the ground isdeeper than that. Integral to this aspect of digital capi-talism is the transposition of cognitive labor intodigital forms and the extinguishment both of the effec-

tive exchange value of digital assets and of thearchival accumulation of these which have no invest-ment utility beyond their immediate execution: thecirculation of substance-as-information, not the com-pression algorithm of money but the Omega bit-stringof binary equivalence.

9 However, this liquefaction of

one Modernity of money may just as well necessitatethe appearance of other sovereign currencies forwhich now uncompensated cognitive labor is forceful-ly remunerated.

We might counterpose that liquidity with thestrong equivalence of another computational material-ity, one which, after Turing, Wheeler, Wolfram et al.,provides a parallel strong program of algorithmic con-tingency as the form of energy and the information

9 See for example, Matteo Pasquenelli, “Google’s PageRank

Algorithm: A Diagram of the Cognitive Capitalism and theRentier of the Common Intellect,” in Deep Search, eds. Kon-rad Becker and Felix Stalder (Innsbruck: Studien Verlag,2009).


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and world-making. How so? Seth Lloyd hypothesizesthe total information space of the universe as “no

more than 10120 ops on 1090 bits.”10 In the conjunctionof bits and atoms for a potentially acephalic form ofstrong governance within and for a post-oil ecology,and for the constitution that would reflect both ani-mal-into-mineral and mineral-into-animal, the “smartgrid” is but the calculability of a system of materialsymbols, now both monetary and algorithmic at once:

electrons. Its scope is global, but the interfaciality ofthe machine, the visible diagram of its work, is alwaysonly partial; just as the recombinancy of any singlesubject effect is only, in the arc of decay-that-is-production, discrete to itself only in passing.

The “Geophilosophy” chapter concludes that “thecreation of concepts in itself calls for a future form, fora new earth, and people that do not yet exist.” A new

Earth and as its precondition, a new population for it.Of what part of that new people are we? What mereol-ogy for such a replacement? Theseus’ Paradox refers tohow an object, once it has undergone complete re-placement of all its components, piece by piece, whileno longer the same material, is still somehow the samething, the self-identical haecceity. Does the same prin-ciple operate at the level of what Kim StanleyRobinson calls “comparative planetology,” and anEarth for which the eventual, immanent plane of re-combinant flux is thorough?11 Even assuming theclosed loop of biogenic energy, the poetry of oil is onethat allows the Precambrian live with us and as us,and which makes the plasticity of the future, the post-

10 Seth Lloyd, Programming the Universe: A Quantum Com-

puter Scientist Takes On the Cosmos (Knopf, 2006).11

See “Comparative Planetology: An Interview with KimStanley Robinson,” in BLDGBLOG , posted December 19,2007 at http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2007/12/comparative-planetology-interview-with.html.


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Anthropocene, already virtually present in any re-sorting of the extended ‘now’ (instead of deferred to

the alibi of tomorrow’s revelation, a community thatwill not “come” because it is already here and yetdoes not yet exist). In this, the cosmopolitanism ofcomputational equivalence finds its analog analoguein the auto-cannibalization of oil and the sloppy trans-lations of decay into the substance of production, aSadean school of information theory. The refrain once

again in recapitulation, “revolution is absolute deterri-torialization even to the point where this calls for anew earth, a new people.” For “our” post-plastic fu-ture, and for the Earth that will re-place our own, bit

by bit, ultimately in total, this means absolute recom-putability. Our geopolitics is not yet ‘Turingcomplete’, and until it is, no viable post-Anthropocene, only posturing, only oblivion and folk-

lore. Root the Earth.


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ries, dust particles express particulars of different fields and territories in terms of universals. (88)

If the morphology of weapons has to undergo a revolu-tion in the War on Terror, that revolution can onlytake place through morphing into dust and spores,

providing weapons with a cutting edge compatibilitywith the socio‐ political sphere, belief-dynamics, peo-

ple and geography of war. (95)

Dust is the master of collective insurgencies . . . (89)

Dust simultaneously emerges as the alpha and omegaxero‐ data; there is no signal or message other than thecompositional insurgency of dust, whose syncretismand obscure polytics of creation can be effectivelyregistered or rooted on a flux of dust . . . (89)

DUSTISM

//NEGARESTURING PAVILION / 2011_ biothingAlisa Andrasek + Jose Sanchez_ principal designersin collaboration with DshapeInitial study with students was conducted during theWorkshop at DRL AAConsulting: Lawrence Friesen and Enrico Dinidedicated to Reza Negarestani and Alan Turing

Alan Turing’s “The chemical basis of Morphogenesis”was published in 1952, describing a speculative chem-ical reaction that could generate symmetry breaking,

deriving dynamic blueprint of stable patterns out of aninitially uniform mixture of chemical compounds. In

the consequent reaction‐diffusion system based onshort‐ranged activation and long‐ranged inhibition, itwas possible to maintain symmetry breaking instabil-ity as the driving force of development of the organ-


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architectonic fabric, could be understood in a contextof cobordisms (topological, categorical, processual,

programmatic equivalences) between the continuousand discontinuous. The fabric of architecture acquiresmalleability and resilience through its eccentric transi-tional qualities. The semiology of architecture be-comes ambiguous, boundaries turn fuzzy and tertiaryforms or functions are produced.

This project is a collaboration with Dshape in order toexplore limits of a tectonic, structural and organiza-tional language of architectural fabrics generated outof the space of possibilities of this particular produc-tion process. The “brain” of the machine is derivedfrom the study of Turing patterns and their ability toproduce heterogeneous flow of matter far from equi-librium, and the theoretical ground resonating in the

roots of the structure is laid upon Reza Negarestani’sreading of behavioral tendencies in Biothing’s workand numerous passages found in Cyclonopedia.

( )HOLEY COMPLEX

In ( )hole complex, on a superficial level (bound tosurface dynamics), every activity of the solid appearsas a tactic to conceal the void and appropriate it, as a

program for inhibiting the void, accommodating thevoid by sucking it in to the economy of surfaces or

filling it. (48)


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The d_shape building process is similar to the “print-ing” process because the system operates by straininga binder on a sand layer. This is similar to what an inkjet printer does on a sheet of paper. This principleallows the architect to design fantastically complexarchitectural structures. The process takes place in anon-stop work session, starting from the foundationlevel and ending on the top of the roof, including

stairs, external and internal partition walls, concaveand convex surfaces, bas-reliefs, columns, statues,wiring, cabling and piping cavities. During the print-ing of each section a structural ink is deposited by theprinter’s nozzles on the sand. The sol

leper creativity

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