The work is the death mask of its conception.
– Walter Benjamin
‘The Domain of Arnheim’ is a strange story by Edgar Allan 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 the planet as a total work of art? This theme of a secular, aesthetic destiny has its roots in Romanticism, but lately it has lost its more optimistic cast. What if the work 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 the planet?
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 of the world as the finished product of aesthetic moder-nity? The blue ruin of earth is the total work of art at the end of history. The earth will be buried at sea.
These matters are too serious to leave in the hands of technological optimists and apocalyptic doomsayers. Nor is moral scolding about doing the recycling either effective or adequate to conceiving of
LEPER CREATIVITY the 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 contemporaries occasionally gave it an incendiary cast. But what if we push beyond the picture of atomized cities to imagine not what passes but what is created at the end of hu-man time? Our perhu-manent legacy will not be architec-tural, but chemical. After the last dam bursts, after the concrete monoliths crumble into the lone and level understand-ing two tendencies in relation to each other: the global and the molecular. The tendency toward the global and the tendency toward the molecular are combined in work such as the Center for Land Use Interpreta-tion’s guided tours of urban LA oil rigs or nuclear waste dumps in the salt flats, where the tour bus is an inside out vitrine. In the wake of the vast oil spill in the 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 ocean canvas…” It’s simply a matter of taking the next step, of extending the parameters of the molecular aesthetic to the planetary limit.
While there are tendencies in contemporary art that are helpful for thinking about the blue ruin, there are perhaps fewer resources in literature. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road presents a reverse passion play, the passing of the sacred out of the earth, but its rather human-centric. On the other hand, is Ian McEwan’s
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Solar the worst book so far of the 21st century? Climate change exists as a plot device for some jokes about some old white guy. This is the context in which Reza Negarastani’s Cyclonopedia emerges for me as the on-ly worthy successor to ‘The Domain of Arnheim’ in the contemporary scene.
Let me say that I doubt the existence of an author named Reza Negarastani. What is named Negrastani is a practice of détournement, or what Cyclonopedia it-self describes thus: “Hidden Writing can be described as using every plot hole, all problematics, every suspi-cious obscurity or repulsive wrongness as a new plot with a tentacle and autonomous mobility.” It “be-speaks a crowd at work” of “autonomous author drones” (61). It doesn’t matter whether the body of Reza Negarastani exists or not. If it does, its just the host for a fiction of forces that writes through it.
Cyclonopedia not a novel. It can of course be read as one, but only at the expense of making the category of novel meaningless. Cyclonopedia is heretical theol-ogy. Heresy plays out certain structural and rhetorical possibilities of a given authorized corpus. “To do rig-orous theology is to perforate the Divine corpus with heresies” (62). The weird beauty of Cyclonopedia comes not least from its diving in and out of the plot holes 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 and dust, where the liquid is oil and not water.
I’m interested in water myself, but I appreciate this attempt to make a hole in the narrative of water and 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. Oil is 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 “black corpse 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’s the ()hole plot summary of the book: “petroleum poi-sons capital with absolute madness” (27). It is as if oil was waiting for some McGuffin to set it in motion. Oil is capital before there are even humans, waiting for a host. The host reinvents the earth as an oil-shitting machine. Oil that is just masticated life, which is itself just sun-cum.
“Oil, with its poromechanical zones of emergence in economy, geopolitics and culture, mocks Divine chronological time with the utmost irony and obsceni-ty” (58). I’m not so interested in that, frankly. I have nothing 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’s enough to think how it is not oil that fuels capital but rather the reverse. Capital is just oil’s vector.
We need a narratology of the elements, a way of writing that does not just treat the chemical world as if it gave rise to subjects equivalent to the humans, gods or monsters that usually populate narratives. A way of writing that does not make the chemical world merely ambient, either. And can we have done with the or-ganic vanity of biopower? Why should the biological level of organization take precedence over any other?
Rather an elemental narratolology, which opens on the one side to the ancestral subatomic world, and on the other 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, the drama of sockpuppets animated by oil. Oil is always (re)animating new sockpuppets. The rise of Hugo Chavez; the fall of Libya. It also occurs to me that the
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emerging narrative is not oily but gaseous. Imagine digging 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” are those conspiracy theories that gum up the channels of political communication, impoverishing the state’s communication through time. Its an attack on the state’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 possible writings that are xenowritings. An inhuman fiction of forces. Rather than “truth is stranger than fiction,” we might say that Xenowriting is the true stranger in fic-tion.
Xenia is what the Greeks called the hospitality owed 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 of the hosting of the stranger helps spread the occult de-rivatives which block a certain sedentary order of life and yet at the same time opens vectors for inhuman particles to inhabit thought.