Like this:

Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia narrates a history of the earth from the position of its subterranea. This is not a chronology: chronological time is a surface phenomenon, but events find their meaning in a rising-to-the-surface. Equating life with the surface biosphere is an unfortunate consequence of solar despotism:

‘A complex of hole agencies and obscure surfaces unground the earth and turn it to the ultimate zone of emergence and uprising against its own passive planetdom. Once freed from its solar slavery, the earth can rise against the onanistic self-indulgence of the Sun and its solar capitalism … (44)

Cylconopedia is a history of planetary emergence, the rising-to-the-surface of things, which is also an uprising of the earth itself. The time of emergence is not chronology: ‘things leak into each other according to a logic that does not belong to us and cannot be correlated to our chronological time’ (49). But it becomes possible to tell a history through these leakages, which seep up through holes, cracks and fissures and corrode the consistency of the ground. This dualism of surface and ground is one for surface dwellers only. When thought attempts to think the ground as such it must bore holes in it, so that the ground ceases to support us, crumbles away into multiplicity. The earth rises up against wholeness, totality. Axelos writes that for Greek thought

‘the world, the totality of everything that is in becoming, remains One: Physis illuminated by Logos, Logos animating the language and thought of mortals. … Man is a being of physis … The men of Hellas know how to face the threat of nonbeing, of a nothingness which as threat does exist. Now and then they dare find words for it, without for all that inquiring into the power of nothingness itself and questioning the foundation of being’ (Alienation, Praxis, and Techne in the Thought of Karl Marx 9).

The Christian tradition marks the first great movement of ungrounding, because in it man has his being in Logos, and the One as ground is created ex nihilo. Through the subordination of Nature to Spirit, the nothingness, the void, is allowed in, and the unground enters by way of depth. If the Christian tradition kept the unground locked up in hell, modern thought unleashes demons that tear at Logos and dissolve forms. As Land remarks, Kant built philosophical dungeons but the screams of torture victims were still able to reach the palaces of reason (Fanged Noumena 141). Once the ground becomes an object thought it no longer functions to ground but to unground. But this catastrophe presages a liberation, new mode of differentiation, a freedom from the restraint of empirical distinctions according to ground vs. figure. Empirical distinctions are subordinate to and dependent on a primary difference in which the ground distinguishes itself autonomously as unground. Deleuze writes:

‘instead of something distinguished from something else, imagine something which distinguishes itself – and yet that from which it distinguishes itself does not distinguish itself from it. … It is as if the ground rose to the surface, without ceasing to be ground. … The Platonists used to say that the not-One distinguished itself from the One, but not the converse, since the One does not flee that which flees it; and at the other pole, form distinguishes itself from matter or from the ground, but not the converse, since distinction itself is a form.’ (Difference and Repetition, 28).

‘Void excludes solid,’ writes Negarestani, similarly, ‘but solid must include void to architectonically survive. Solid needs void to engineer its composition’ (44). All space is an accommodation to holes, cracks and fissures, and it is through such spaces that life worms. Solidus wants to compose, but to do so it must sacrifice some of its consolidation. In order to survive, solidus must accept the void, it must accommodate itself to the void’s contaminating presence:

‘It is through survival (the incapacity of the solid to reject the void) that solid participates in ungrounding itself. By correcting its consolidating processes, the solid sells its integrity (soul) to the abyssal convolutions inspired by the void, through which the pathological survival of the solid becomes the most basic factor in its irreversible lysis and degeneration.’ (44)

Degeneration is the price solidus pays to free itself from stasis in which it is locked as pure consistency or uncomposed consolidation. The principle of emergence or differentiation is vermicular, vermiform, denoting the sinuous movement of worms or nematodes that engineer boreholes, burrows and crawl-spaces in order to compose individual solids out of pure solidus. Deleuze and Guattari write that ‘holey space itself communicates with smooth space and striated space’ (ATP 415). The hole-borers are both deep and superficial, passing through sedentary and nomadic spaces, they are paranoid-fascist and schizo-revolutionary.

The first lesson of planetary thought is that the earth is dislocated, non-identical with itself, ‘the planetary is not the same thing as the world’ writes Deleuze (Desert Islands 157). But if planetary thought is a rupture or break, and this break is ‘in time’, then the time marked by this break must be, in Peguy’s sense, ‘in eternity’: ‘an eternal foundation does not exclude the need to begin anew’ (Temporal and Eternal, 91). Beginning anew in eternity, this is how to compose a historiography of the New Earth:

‘can the Unground — where the hegemonic wholeness of the Earth is incapacitated — still be called Earth? And then, according to what chronological current, based on what calendar, according to what gradient of becoming, which point of reference addressed by space-time coordinates, can it be mapped as the New Earth? For the Unground is a shadow outside of time and space.’ (Cyclonopedia 43)

Negarestani is concerned with tracing this single history of temporal break and eternal continuity. The American-led resource wars in Mesopotamia provide Cyclonopedia with its immediate historical milieu, but Negarestani’s historiography is based firmly in the geological eternities embodied in oil. Today’s petropolitical war machines ride the slick of oil, which lubricates their cutting edges, but the war machines themselves can be seen as merely the parts by which oil engineers its escape from the depths. Oil and petroleum thus narrate a sort of subterranean emergence of the unground, a new form of writing that Negarestani will call ‘demonogrammatic’: ‘Oil, with its poromechanical zones of emergence in economy, geopolitics and culture, mocks the Divine’s chronological Time with the utmost irony and obscenity.’ (58)

Deleuze says that planetary thought as logos has a corresponding pathos suggesting an affective mode of ‘disarray, disequilibrium, indifference … which is bitter, but joyful by dint of a particular strangeness’ (158). This is similar to what Heidegger was getting at when he said that philosophy is dominated by a feeling of homesickness (Heimweh). But what needs to be emphasised is the feeling of being unilaterally out of place, errant, wandering or estranged without being alienated, without wanting to ‘return’ anywhere. Nick Land’s concept of geotrauma expresses this pathos of planetary thought by conceiving of how the terrestrial biosphere ‘emerges as an escape, an immense spasm of deterritorialisation’. This is a pathos, a literal suffering, a ‘planetary trauma’, or ‘geotrauma’ (Fanged Noumena 335). Land refers us to the Cairns-Smith hypothesis which argues that organic life began on earth through a ‘takeover’ by genetic material of the processes by which clay crystals self-replicate. Organic life, in this sense, is a usurpation of an inorganic process that subsequently dispenses with its inorganic scaffolding once it has figured out how to reproduce itself. The earth engineers an escape, from the ground to the surface. ‘Life’ is nothing other than this engineering. Land writes:

‘as the solar system condensed, the rate and magnitude of [meteoritic] collisions steadily declined, and the terrestrial surface cooled … During the ensuing – Archaen – epoch the molten core was buried within a crustal shell, producing an insulated reservoir of primal exogenous trauma, the geocosmic motor of terrestrial transmutation’ (Fanged Noumena 498).

The buried energy of the core seeks an escape, cracking open the surface. If the biological organism is an expression of this process then it is also perilously susceptible to it. Freud described psychic trauma as a puncturing of the barrier between interior and exterior world formed by the ego. Desire is nothing other than the process by which the barrier is traversed, and the replication technology serving it revolutionised accordingly. All desire – the thirst for oil, war, religious salvation – needs to understood according to what Negarestani calls ‘the demonogrammatical decoding of the Earth’s body’ (18).

Advertisement