The following essay[1] intends to address the idea of a ‘radical discontinuity’ appearing in philosopher Reza Negarestani’s development from an early theory-fictional oriented work represented in Cyclonopedia (2008), to the recent synthesis of continental and contemporary analytical philosophical perspectives found in Intelligence and Spirit (2018). With this in mind, the idea of such a ‘radical discontinuity’ in Negarestani’s work will be contested by proposing a possible continuum in Negarestani’s writing between Cyclonopedia and Intelligence and Spirit found in the explicit and implicit utilization of concepts such as: ‘the inhuman’ and ‘the Outside’. The ubiquity of these concepts will be considered as a potential bridge between Negarestani’s body of work and the philosophical concerns of what has recently been known as ‘neorationalism’ (Trafford and Wolfendale, 2019, p. 7-9). In other words, the aforementioned concepts will be seen as vectors which ostensibly show a persistent concern in Negarestani’s thought around the possibilities afforded by speculative thought and the manifestation of counterfactual entities and objects that complexify and dislocate the givenness of what we firmly take to be (as human subjects) our sensible perception of the world and in turn, the concepts we elaborate about such perceptions.
I. The Unmaking of Foundational Subjectivity
Openness is a war, it needs strategies to work
RN
In order to bridge the apparent dissimilarity in-between Reza Negarestani’s past and present work, we will first need to highlight what seems to be the overarching tenet of his overall project, which can be broadly put as the “effectuation or imposition of impossibility” (Negarestani, 2008, p. 200). This claim might seem too abstract at first, but the purpose of this essay will consist in grounding this underlying tenet by reviewing a series of concepts and means that seem to function in Negarestani’s writings as productive catalysts that make such effectuation or imposition a recurring problem. Namely, the selected concepts and means explored in this essay will be seen as connectors between the bundle of tangled narratives developed throughout Cyclonopedia and the philosophical project proposed in Intelligence and Spirit. Now that we have briefly drafted the problem present at hand, we’ll proceed to unravel what exactly the ends and means swiveling around this tenet are by posing the following question: is there a concept being problematized at hand by Negarestani throughout his work as to delimit a way toward what he calls effectuation or imposition of the impossible? If there is a concept being problematized, what role does it play on what Reza has vaguely called the effectuation of impossibility? What does impossibility mean within the context of Negarestani’s body of work?
To respond to these questions, we would need to take in mind that Negarestani consistently directs strategic assaults against foundational subjectivity in order to invoke the aforementioned tenet, thus making foundational subjectivity one of the concepts being problematized at large. Following this argument, foundational subjectivity should be defined as the dubious idea of conceiving a fixed or immutable human identity/nature[2]. However, we should be warned that the mentioned assault on foundational subjectivity is not a nihilistic proposal that necessarily builds up toward the annihilation of self, and should rather be considered as the enablement of a series of rigorous and law-like destabilizations of what we take to be our given human identity so we, as human subjects, are able to question our own status as defined by a set of rigid descriptors under such-and-such conditions -be it constraints by law of what it means to be a human subject under a the western point-of-view i.e. the entitlement of the “right” to consider oneself human/the belonging to a universal “human condition” that follows a hegemonic conception of what the human subject should be[3], or according to a set of physico-chemical conditionings that have invariably given rise to our human sentience and sapience[4]-, in order to shift our own self-conception to one that consists of being an open vessel that is under continual but not ungrounded self-modification, questioning any kind of rigid descriptors of what the human should be. In turn, this shifting of an apparently invariant perspective can give-shape and concretely manifest the new or the yet-unseen by opening the gate to the relentless influx and saturation of contradistinctive conceptual, material and practical data that threatens to haphazardly modify our current world perspectives into something that becomes profoundly alien to itself, but that is nevertheless tractable or legible in its own process of becoming. This opening of the gate to data which is yet-to-be-decrypted and that has the capability of infecting and then disintegrating our own sense of stability as human subjects can be translated as what Negarestani calls the Outside: that is to say, alien data that crashes upon us (as apparently constituted human subjects), violently eroding what we have taken ourselves to be:
“Everything excitingly schizoid, capable of attracting the merciless invasion of xeno-particles and igniting criminal excitations, happens on the borders of identity and its regimes which balefully put up their resistance against any malicious force. In order to draw schizo-lines of communication from the Outside, a rigorous course for dismantling identity is necessary, yet any serious attempt for total eradication of identity intrinsically excludes the space of xeno-excitations and ends up in autistic nihilism” (Negarestani, 2008, p. 119).
By highlighting the quote above, we reiterate that Negarestani looks to go beyond an intractable and unproductive erasure of subjectivity as the representation of an abstract human essence, and rather looks toward a constructive exploration found at the edge or limit of such subjectivity in order to unmake it by turning it into a prey for the Outside. Put into less muddled words, any subjectivity that adamantly upholds self-redundancy eventually becomes the artifact of a paranoid rule precession that solicits that which can modify it from the outside-in[5]. Thus, the unmaking of subjectivity proposed by Negarestani in a certain sense can be seen as a strict step-by-step disassembly that engages in the re-assembling of the hitherto ordered parts that in the past tense stabilized the picture of a foundational subjectivity into a seemingly transparent and organic entity (i.e. the predetermined form of a given organism) that in time will unbound itself into its inorganic double (i.e. the re-arranged form of a given organism into something that is not, in fact, predetermined)[6]. This proposal can be pinpointed in the two sections that append Cyclonopedia, these being Uncharted Regions: Catalytic Spaces and Polytics: Complicity and Schizostrategies for Openness and Insurgency, and more specifically the subsection under the name of A Good Meal: The Schizostrategic Edge. Hence, our proposal is that one can clearly draft Negarestani’s intention of setting a law-abiding abyss that beckons the unmaking of foundational subjectivity by considering the aforementioned subsection as crucial to his body of work:
“Openness is not suicide, for it lures survival into life itself where ‘to live’ is a systematic redundancy (…) Openness is not the anthropomorphic desire to be open, it is the being opened eventuated by the act of opening itself. To be butchered, lacerated, cracked and laid open – such is the corporeal reaction of subjects to the radical act of opening. Accordingly, affirmation is a camouflaged strategy, a vehicle for cutting though affordance and creatively reinventing openness as a radical butchery (a radical xeno-call) (…) You can erect yourself as a solid and molar volume, tightening boundaries around yourself, securing your horizon, sealing yourself off from any vulnerability … immersing yourself deeper into your human hygiene and becoming vigilant against outsiders. Through this excessive paranoia, rigorous closure and survivalist vigilance, one becomes an ideal prey for the radical outside and its forces.” (Negarestani, 2008, p. 199)
What’s interesting of note while inspecting the content found in the aforementioned subsection of Cyclonopedia is the paranoid device that Negarestani unfolds for it to be possible to trace a route towards a schizophrenic becoming that is inextricable from the exacerbation or exaggeration of neurosis. This meaning that for Negarestani neurosis and schizophrenia are not conflicting processes[7], and we can observe the advent of the schizophrenizing of neurosis[8] or achieve a ritualistic derivation of schizophrenia by pursuing extremely rigid and agoraphobic habits in a frenzied fashion. A crucial observation to be added at this point is that the particular brand of paranoid-schizophrenic becoming that seems to be the main cog at work toward the unmaking of foundational subjectivity, and which can be categorized as a method explicitly reaching out to the inhuman, firmly differentiates itself from the related[9] inhuman proposal in Nick Land’s libidinal materialism, which contrastingly has at its center what could be considered as a corrosive anti-method which effectuates an erasure or unbinding of rules. That is to say, we need to make a clear-cut contrast between these two approaches of the inhuman in order dispute any sort of indistinctive coupling between the two authors, and thus we’ll proceed to briefly mention Land’s introductory definition of libidinal materialism found in his monograph The Thirst for Annihilation (Land, 1992 pf. xx), where we can notice a shared means in Land’s and Negarestani’s inhuman unmaking of foundational subjectivity, while having in account that the differentiating factor between these shared means is Land’s appeal to a “ruthless fatalism” that solicits a radical disassociation and alienation that leaves no space whatsoever for decisional rule-following by the human subject i.e. a philosophical disobedience that puts itself against the anthropomorphic orthodoxy of explication and responsibility. Against this, Negarestani highlights the eroding effect of explication and responsibility when driven to excessive peaks that similarly end up in alienation or disassociation in the delirious example of the hyperstitional ancient Persian cult of Druj, who have found a strategic method of effectively summoning the inhuman in opposition to the ill-adapted nihilistic philosophical disobedience that belongs to the Western tradition of thought:
“Unlike the revolts of western heterodoxy, the cult of Druj did not take depravity and irrationality as its heterodox or Satanist blueprint; they summoned the Life-Satan by undertaking a paranoid closure against the outside and by becoming excessively obsessive with their hygiene and health. By doing so, they deduced terminal insanity from the very orthodoxy of rationality and logic” (Negarestani, 2008, p. 200)
The tense confinement effectuated by the intoxicating madness of the method is what Negarestani condenses in the neologism of the schizotrategic (Negarestani, Ibid, p. 203) and which for practical purposes of the present argument will be considered anathema to Land’s libidinal materialism. For there is already a disregarded[10] critical distance with Land’s position in the development of schizotrategy and the inhuman, which we reiterate, consists in the effective unmaking of foundational subjectivity, while potentially being antagonistic to a particular tendency of the cultured white subject, a tendency that feeds upon an intoxicating yet dysfunctional obliviousness to the diagrammatic and obsessive compulsive and disciplinary patterning that lies behind the summoning of poisonous alien data mentioned by Negarestani i.e. the Outside[11]. This seems to take full force in Negarestani’s hyperstitional defacement of Middle Eastern philosophies and myths that below the rattling (Negarestani, 2008, p. 145-153) simulacra nevertheless seem to put themselves at war with the repeated and incompetent efforts of the cultured western subject in bringing about the annihilation of the self for the yet-unknown to take its place, efforts that are reflected in the genealogy of inhuman philosophical “disobedience” from Sade to Bataille and from Lyotard to Land[12]. Case in point, the consistently unacknowledged and tyrannized mystico-philosophical infrastructure of the Middle East, and of which the cult of Druj is just an epigone drawn by Negarestani, has left-behind complex navigation schemes[13] to manifest the Outside with a ‘scalpel-like precision’ for centuries:
“As a sorcerous line, schizotrategy opens the entire monotheistic culture to cosmodromic openness and its epidemic meshworks (…) To reach the schizotrategic plane of openness, one must indulge in paranoia and hygiene-Complex (overhealth). Schizotrategy involves developing the subversive logic inherent to overhealth and the capacity-oriented facet of paranoia. The Drujite cults perceived schizotrategy both· as an awakening and as a feeding ritual for Druj and its radical exteriority” (Negarestani, 2008, p. 203).
Now that we have drafted the path of a germinal continuum within Cyclonopedia via schizotrategy and the inhuman unmaking of foundational subjectivity with more clarity, we can now ask ourselves if this paranoid apparatus reiterates itself in Negarestani’s more recent work. The most explicit instance of a revamping of what we have considered to be a methodical madness[14] can be observed in the apparent theoretical crossroads of Negarestani’s thought in the essay Labor of the Inhuman (2014), which has been retrospectively catalogued under the contemporary brand of thought known as neorationalism, and more specifically under the name of a rationalist inhumanism (Trafford and Wolfendale, 2019, p. 7). While we delve into external definitions of what rationalist inhumanism is, we must remain in the field of the pervading eye of Negarestani’s paranoid precession of rules, since in this rationalist inhumanist posture it can be argued that the strictures of a productive disassociation that effectuates and imposes impossibility can be considered to be firmly in place. Regarding external definitions, Negarestani’s rationalist inhumanism can be briefly defined as the following:
“The project aims to extract the essential core of humanism by discarding those features that are consequences of indexing rational agency to the biology, psychology, and cultural history of Homo sapiens. From this perspective, reason is an abstract protocol that has been functionally implemented by the techno-linguistic infrastructure of human culture, and freedom is an “insurrectionary force” that has bootstrapped itself out of evolutionary pre-adaptations and reformatted the human species as a suitable processing platform. It is this attempt to locate an alien vector within humanism which pushes it beyond itself that calls for the prefix in- rather than anti-, post-, or even trans” (Trafford and Wolfendale, Ibid, p. 7-8).
By following this definition, rationalist inhumanism considers extracting and highlighting certain functional features afforded by the organic constitution of the human subject[15], which can alternatively work as a gateway to something stranger or something that goes beyond our merely given conditioning as a species, while not being external to such conditionings. We can forward this idea more succinctly by recapitulating it in the following way: rationalist inhumanism proposes the speculative task of moving beyond the human subject not by escaping, critiquing or negating the rigid descriptors that have defined it under the exclusionary parameters given by the Western world, but rather by closely dissecting the techno-linguistic infrastructure that has given shape to our sentience and sapience under these very parameters and that, we should note here, are usually considered to be born out of an apparently precise and fixed biological and cultural evolution, so that we can research unexplored terrain within the plasticity of these parameters as a way to open the door to controlled contingencies that can potentially displace the aforementioned rigid descriptors of what we are supposed to be. In other words, the fact that rationalist inhumanism carries human techno-linguistic infrastructure to its ultimate consequences does not mean there is a complicit allegiance toward an immobile definition of what the human subject has been until now, since this infrastructure is utilized as a tool of pervasive displacement that loops itself into alien lands, while never being external but immanent to the human subject. At the same time, we would have to take into account that our techno-linguistic infrastructure in the future will no longer rely on what we presently are since the elements that compose it will be possible to be extricated from within and then allocated to other non-human entities and contexts[16]. Thus, the rationalist inhumanist posture does not merely paint the picture of a positive injunction to the reassuring heights of Western technical progress or reason, but instead embeds the endeavor of human reason with a Nietzschean flavor[17] that brings along with it a necessary encounter with the barriers and challenges that come along with the disenchantment of what we are, or rather, to the virulence that possesses us when we subject ourselves to the critical revision of the apollonian ideology we have whimsically defended all along and unbeknownst to us.
In a certain sense, rationalist inhumanism implies a corrosive and dislocating gesture within rationality and its association to the project of Enlightenment, a project that is overly-emphasized, baroquely exaggerated or taken to its limits[18] and that is then driven to a speculative end that seeks to find concrete conditions, that is to say, conceptual and practical routes that ostensibly go beyond the human subject. This implication is also mentioned in another external reading of rationalist inhumanism, as was momentarily defined by Alex Williams as a form of epistemic accelerationism before the more recent coining and usage of the former term. In Williams’ own words, we can find the idea that there is a conscious highlighting of the catastrophic but not ultimately nihilistic effects of rationality when dislodged from any comforting qualities and ideological dogmas while in turn becoming a dislodging agent itself:
“The twin thinkers of epistemic accelerationism are Ray Brassier and Reza Negarestani. Accelerationism in this guise is the project of maximizing rational capacity—the contents of knowledge about the world—and enabling the ramification of the conceptual space of reason. For both Brassier and Negarestani, this process is one which proceeds via alienation (…) Enlightenment, rather than entailing an edifying reassurance of the humanistic order, instead gradually but irreparably modifies the manifest image of ourselves-in-the-world, stripping back the comforting homilies of humanism to reveal, Terminator-style, the gleaming bones of Wilfrid Sellars’s empty, formalist, rational subject lying beneath (…) Epistemic acceleration then consists in the expansion and exploration of conceptual capacity, fed by new techno-scientific knowledges, resulting in the continual turning-inside-out of the humanist subject in a perpetual Copernican revolution” (Williams, 2013).
Casting aside the sardonic commentary where Williams intends to amusingly breed together the cybernetic eschatology of Land’s infamous accelerationist cyberpunk writings[19] and the modernist pragmatics of the Pittsburgh lineage that branches out from Wilfrid Sellars and which has been appropriated by the rationalist inhumanism of Brassier and Negarestani, with the hints given above we could anticipate pace Williams and Negarestani themselves a rather strange continuity with schizotrategy or the schizophrenizing edge of rationality. At this point we dare to elaborate that the unmaking of foundational subjectivity that was previously explored in Cyclonopedia has now been overhauled and brought through the fore by implementing a well-oiled mechanism that breeds together contemporary analytic philosophy, recent philosophies of mind and ongoing developments in techno-science[20] which have replaced Negarestani’s hyperstitional mystico-philosophical patchwork of the Middle East while seeking to reach similar exhilarating repercussions. And with this we can add that the continuity also lies in the surreptitious[21]defacement of Western tradition from the inside out[22] to evoke the catastrophic strands unbound by rationality, and their subsequent effects on the human subject, effects which have been shun away from the all-too-hygienic space of orthodox exegetics and the undying scholasticism belonging to the obstinate messengers of dogmatic reason. The commitment to the catastrophe of rationality, and where we can observe the switching of gears from the paranoid ritualism found in Cyclonopedia to the paranoid schizophrenizing of rationality, is silently inoculated in the essay Revolution Backwards (2015), of which we highlight Negarestani’s ductile interpretation of mathematician Rene Thom’s concept of catastrophe in order to suggest the existence of temporal discontinuities that rupture the irreversible arrow of time associated to the progress of reason. The suggestion done by Negarestani uses the example of an event whereby a simulacra (the signifier) is produced by an original (the signified), an event that is usually considered as irreversible, but where we would nevertheless find a certain disjunction of the time-continuum as the original (the signified) can hypothetically be modified and remade by the simulacra (the signifier), a paradoxical situation transforming what was initially a temporally irreversible event, a reversible temporal discontinuity (Negarestani, 2015, p. 149). The emphasis made on the element of catastrophe conjured by rationality in relation to temporal disjunctions (i.e. the past that gets catastrophically rewritten by the future) in turn gets implicitly emphasized in Labor of the Inhuman as can be read in the following fragment:
“Rationalism as the compulsive navigation of the space of reason turns commitment to humanity into a revisionary catastrophe, by converting its initial commitment into a ramified cascade of collateral commitments which must be navigated in order for it to be counted as commitment. But it is precisely this conversion, instigated and guided by reason, that transforms a commitment into a revisionary catastrophe that travels backward in time from the future, from its revisionary ramifications, in order to interfere with the past and rewrite the present. In this sense, reason establishes a link in history hitherto unimaginable from the perspective of a present that preserves an origin or is anchored in the past” (Negarestani, 2014, p. 450-451)
We can see then that unmaking of subjectivity presented until now doesn’t drift far from Cyclonopedia in the sense that the realization of what hitherto was considered unimaginable or impossible from the perspective of the present by being catastrophically altered by that which presents itself from the Outside via temporal distortions allocated in the future, generates a reversible erasure and modification of the present, and most importantly, of any whimsical anchoring to any kind of foundationalist characterizations of human subjectivity whatsoever. And the task of making the impossible concrete, or rather the task of making the irreversible reversible, depends on us following a strategic commitment to the scathing discipline that lies behind it. This meaning, that in effect, Negarestani’s underlying tenet remains untouched while the method to achieve it gets remodeled in the augmentation of the paranoid schema of schizotrategy that now depends on us navigating and committing ourselves to the destabilizing and restabilizing ripples of the techno-linguistic infrastructure found within the oft-repeated Sellarsian space of reasons and its positioning within the project of the artificialization of the cognitive capacities of the human species via the functionalist thesis of the mind instigated within mid-century modernist philosophy[23], “by implementing—step by step, function by function, algorithm by algorithm—the functional picture of the mind in machines” (Negarestani, 2015, p. 149). In turn, by learning, implementing and deepening the rules found in human techno-linguistics and their respective affordance of concrete cognitive processes, we will also encounter the means to take them further from the comforting shores of any kind of ideological instantiation of the human, and more specifically, to extricate them from situated white and hegemonic prejudices condensed in the name of a neutral humanism and the uniform category of the human which has been barred from those who don’t conform to its pacifying hegemony. In this way, we can open a gate to heretically betray the hegemony of western rationality by parasitically infecting it from within while simultaneously sophisticating a strict framework of normativity that unravels the rifts and fractures in the seemingly smooth surface of the epistemological safeguard belonging to contemporary techno-scientific intellect. Most importantly, it seems that these rifts and fractures can (and they must) be calculated, explained and expanded upon. In outline, these are just some of the various strategies that Negarestani spouses to emphasize the complex writhing of the rules that underlie the streamlining of time, and which seem to work more in favor of it being an overarching agent of unmaking.
And once again, we have to consider that this concern is not a novel one. The eroding of fixed constitution unleashed thanks to perverse temporality plays a central part in a trilogy (Differential Cruelty, Undercover Softness and The Corpse Bride) of essays that highlight an ancient Etruscan torture known as Nupta Cadavera/Nupta Contagioso and the necrotic operation of subtraction (Aphareisis) and then posterior abstraction of human constitution that can be considered an abject reading of the Platonic/Aristotelian/Neo-Platonic remainder of the One (The Good/Nous)[24]. What Negarestani wants to pin down in the exploration of this procedure is the order of reversibility of time on matter: if the torture known as Nupta Cadavera has a concrete goal in the application of a brutal method that results in the corruption of living matter by the forced ransoming of a corpse that slowly rots firm flesh into its soft decaying double, we will be surprised to find a deviation from a programmed end within this particular binding toward death. What rather unfolds is a process of decomposition that derives in transitory and differentiated states of matter which in turn unbind themselves from any presumption that evidences the transparence of death[25]. Thus, the telos we usually ascribe to death gets shattered within the non-linearity of time expressed through the distorted prism of the function of rot. Ultimately, we might find that the telos pictured in the inception of a becoming-toward-death or toward-extinction glows with conservatism as it relies on the fulfillment of time reaching a hypothetical logical end, but when we are confronted with putrefaction gnawing away on matter, we might find time mocking sealed calculations, predictions and outcomes when a sanitized path toward the fulfillment of necrosis is discarded, while littering it with vile deviations along the way.
That is to say, we see something stranger making itself concrete as matter comes apart, a reversibility of states (i.e. the past and present images of what matter was/is are radically altered by future states of decomposition) that relies on the immanence of matter distorting itself toward yet-undecided oblivion. In this process of abjection, any legible form which was held on to on the past is now gone, warped beyond the point of semblance while the idea of the telos of death gets defied when the past defiles itself into an unknown which projects itself indefinitely into the future. For Negarestani, this might underline the uncanny idea of time as subversive element which defies not only the promise of human agents being stubborn representatives of a myriad of fixed states and their respective stabilities, but also the scatological promise of extinction and the idea of the Outside as an external and anarchic force which has the mission to unbind our organic shape into a barely concealed wish for theological rapture in the idea of an end-time event. That is, even those philosophies which preach the singularity of anarchic currents of thought depend on time as a unilateral agent that complies with the flat premonitions of extinction without showing recourse to complexity and/or deviation from a norm[26]. Thus, if there is to be a subversion of the conservative ideas underlying the aforementioned apocalypticism of Western strands of anti-philosophy, we must also consider the malleability and inconsistency of time itself: time drawn as the harbinger of the unforeseen, expectant with aberrations that splice the rigidity of the arrow of time into limitless courses of becoming to which we are subjected to without the blind drive that “thirsts for annihilation” taking any part in it. One can be reminded of the paradoxes of pure becoming that preface Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense, especially when the proof of transitory descriptors assigned to determinate subjects, made evident by time itself, gets explained by way of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, and has the consequence of the losing of a proper name:
“Hence the reversals which constitute Alice’s adventures: the reversal of becoming larger and becoming smaller – “which way, which way?” asks Alice, sensing that it is always in both directions at the same time, so that for once she stays the same, through an optical illusion; the reversal of the day before and the day after, the present always being eluded – “jam tomorrow and jam yesterday-but never jam to-day”; the reversal of more and less: five nights are five times hotter than a single one, “but they must be five times as cold for the same reason”; the reversal of active and passive: “do cats eat bats?” is as good as “do bats eat cats?”; the reversal of cause and effect: to be punished before having committed a fault, to cry before having pricked oneself, to serve before having divided up the servings. All these reversals as they appear in infinite identity have one consequence: the contesting of Alice’s personal identity and the loss of her proper name” (Deleuze, 1990, p. 3)
Therefore, we can find echoes of Deleuze’s paradox of pure becoming embedded in the idea of time as a dissolving agent. And even more so, time elaborated as a non-linear strategy that is set to work as part of the unmaking of foundational subjectivity when contesting the very nature of the human subject and also the givenness we picture when trying to contain the expiration of its own organic materiality. This might be in a sense a strategic implementation of amnesia, a dedicated forgetting which is made concrete when showing the effects of time on matter, a puncturing of the clarity of self and the banality of irreversible one-way effects by showing the fluctuation of time as the ultimate infiltrator impairing causes (what we have been, what we are) and effects (what we will be), rearranging our presumptions and making us paranoically retrace our own steps since they have become irrecoverable. We are left to scramble up the pieces and reconfigure them anew when confronted with the prospect of pure becoming, or rather, with the view from the nowhere and the nowhen[27].
II. Nowhere and Nowhen: The Erasure of the Tape
Namely, we need to rewind the tape back to Land’s inhuman proposal in order to expound on the conceptual conservatism at the heart of his lavish promise of matter unilaterally coming apart at the seams by the hammerings of transcendental temporality[28]. This backward step is necessary in order to understand the response formulated against the smoothening of the complexities of time by Negarestani which in turn serve as one of the themes reiterated both in Cyclonopedia and Intelligence and Spirit. With this in mind, if one of the salient aspects found in Land’s so called anti-philosophy is the univocal conceptualization of the imperative annihilation of human subjectivity by the outer forces of time, why should we consider this resolution a radical one? We could accuse Land’s proposal as that of fabricating glimmering certainty under the omen of an irreversible (but ultimately shallow) outcome: a one-way function disguising itself as a shadowy infiltrator[29] seeking to disintegrate the linearity of temporal events onto supposedly divergent outcomes, which results in the paradoxically undermining of the emergence of complexity by pushing forward the fulfillment of a flat conclusion (intelligence explosion, unbinding of human subjectivity, capitalism as a tautological self-reproducing circuit, etc.[30], an all too predictable catastrophism).
Land’s proposal therefore looks toward the outer rims where the supposed abstract infinity of transcendental temporality lies while conceiving it under a fairly orthodox, anthropomorphized and teleological light. This meaning that our destiny as species has been underwritten in advance and in terms we supposedly fail to understand since they are initially ungraspable within our given empirical register (in contrast to the transcendental law of time), but to which at the end of the day we, as human agents, recognize how they conveniently unfold, that is, of the all-too familiar drive toward dissipation which is only but the beginning of a process that Land clips advertently to turn it as an end that feeds onto itself. In contrast to the scenario of transcendental catastrophe intently secured by Land, we can transpose a set of strategies directed toward the reversion of a clear end in various instances found in Cyclonopedia, be it through the conceptualization of narrative undercurrents that puncture the uniformity of human representations of space and time, the complexification of disordered time loops as presented by the terror Feedback Spiral[31] (the crashing of the fidelity of time-events reproduced by a mangled recording apparatus[32]), and inorganic entities that transect transcendental temporality while not lying fully outside of determinate material conditions (the inorganic demon[33] of oil i.e. transcendental law gnawing onto meatspace). In short, we reiterate the overturning of Landian inhumanism found in the divergence of the effects carried out by the occult transcendence of time, a divergence condensed in the conspiratorial dismantling of self-ascription or de se and the determinateness that goes along with it, even including the one found in the forced debasing of the present and the past in catastrophe and the coming together of futurity in anastrophe[34], under labyrinthine, viscous and paranoid circumstances which overturn the lucidity of the empirical register of human subjectivity, or the demonological intentions of inorganic entities that become concrete when funneling themselves from a transcendental register; summoned with compression and data loss included when presented in our empirical ground (the repercussions from the forgetting of self and implementation of alien will in possession, which include the scarring of human tissue, body data coming apart and hemorrhaging anew when subtracted[35]). In this sense, the twisting and obscuring of the determinations of time in Cyclonopedia contrast specifically with the discussion developed by Land on the directionality of the arrow time toward entropy and self-dissolution with the help of Ludwig Boltzmann’s thermodynamics as an analogy to naturalize Freud’s theory of drives in Thirst for Annihilation (Land, 1992, p. 27-57).
From the aforementioned chapter, we could rapidly highlight the following passage as proof for Landian conservatism condensed within the fate of living matter cast into stone:
“…the propagation of disorder is always more successful than the deviation (…) Any process of organization is necessarily aberrational within the general economy, a mere complexity or detour in the inexorable death-flow, a current in the informational motor, energy cascading downstream, dissipation. There are no closed systems, no stable codes, no recuperable origins. There is only the thermospasmic shock wave, tendential energy flux, degradation of energy” (Land, 1992, 43).
As a consequence to this, self-regulating organisms under the rubric of life are seen as an aberration or abnormality to a generalized tendency of the flow of time onto death, that is, we get exposed to the most common time event to which all living forms are subjected to rather than exposure to something more sinister or stranger waiting in the ravaging fangs of time. Negarestani’s intentions then lie in formulating a beyond to the orthodoxy of the common base via alternate time flows, as made explicit in the fourth chapter (Some Unsettling Kantian News) of Intelligence and Spirit’s reframing of the discussion on Boltzmann and thermodynamics to demonstrate that the idea of that the general tendency of entropy is just a such viewed from our own human-all-too-human psychological perspective[36] and that this problematically brings us to the task to challenge the entrenchment of the caged perspective of the human toward possibilities that flagrantly contrast against our current empirical register:
“Directionally temporalized history represents the ultimate limitation imposed by intuitions, or the fundamentalist attachment to a locally constituted experience over the form of the Concept and thus that of history. Once we unconditionally cast off this forced limitation step-by-step, dismantle this cursed raft plank-by-plank, history transforms into a medium for the expression of time as the formlessness that conditions any possible form (…) maybe the best solution is to go entirely outside of this world and analyze it from a viewpoint that is both possible and fecund with further possibilities.” (Negarestani, 2018, p. 246-248)
The task at hand if we are to deepen the idea that Negarestani subverts any type of foundational subjectivity without falling to the confinement of the facile lines of flight proposed by apocalyptic anti-philosophy, would consist in Negarsetani questioning every given fact surrounding both stable and unstable states of matter, becoming and unbecoming, etc. And with this questioning we can branch out toward the problem of counterfactuals and alternative frames of reference in relation to the complexity of time, and which are the final strategies to be highlighted here to form continuity (pace Negarestani) between the broken off connectors and traces that Negarestani, the author, has tried to adamantly conceal. It is apt to say, that we will now turn to the idea of hidden writing, and how this concept in particular announces the recent shift to counterfactuals and alternative frames of reference which are the product of the influence of analytic philosopher Nelson Goodman’s, and to a lesser extent, David Lewis’ conception of possible worlds, which will only be touched upon very briefly.
III. Counterfactuality: Hidden Writing and Alternative Frames of Reference.
To understand Negarestani’s key strategy of transgressing the given order of temporality, which as we have seen until now can be interpreted as a critique to the universal unbinding or unbecoming which ends unleashing a tautological turn, we would need to understand Cyclonopedia as a text of circuitous routes. This is a text that collapses at every turn as if maliciously following the materiality of analogies such as archeology, exhumation and the arcane[37]. These are analogies not to be confronted lightly, for when the initial layer of noise presented in the text is apparently given form by the reader subjected to it, there is always the possibility of falling through new layers of unreliability regarding the subject’s retelling or excising of ciphered passages found thought the book, be it these passages composed by a first person (Kirsten Alvanson’s and Negarestani’s scattered footnotes, commentaries, love-letters, codes etc.) or a third person (Hamid Parsani fading into erratic hypotheses, physical illness and madness). Any intent of regaining ground by part of the interpreter/reader becomes futile, each layer of closed interpretation coming off as the flakes of skin are shed from the leprous body –leper creativity-; tearing through collaged theoretical discourse, cruel erotics, intense Silent Hill quotations, Adrian Gargett’s (AG in Incognitum Hactenus[38]) PhD thesis (A Sextant in Dogtown) as a complicit agent rerouting the path of future lovers that are estranged from each other, all proliferating spores of clues explaining nothing and leading nowhere: “Exhumation transmutes architectures into excessive scarring processes” (Negarestani, 2008, p. 52). Charred mappings, paranoia splintering onto psychoses, the exegete spins out of control by the shards of unfamiliarity hurled about by simulacra.
And with these material analogies we find other forms to shed out of the base empirical register associated to the human subject, such as by transgressing the factuality of memories when ground onto constricted doubt. This is where counterfactuality comes in: put plainly, analytic philosopher Nelson Goodman traces the problem of inductive hypotheses which can either act in a law-like manner (this meaning, confirming what is predicted by putting it to test via fact of matter), or in a contingent or accidental manner (Goodman, 1979, p. 70-73). Any inductive hypothesis can wryly turn accidental or contingent, even if the statement implied in the hypothesis is internally consistent, when the justification or verification is not initially fulfilled, and what was previously a matter of fact based on observable regularities (i.e. striking a match and expecting the matchstick to burn when the match head makes contact with a dry surface) can ostensibly become false (the surface is wet, or, there is not enough oxygen for the match head to burn, etc.), or on the contrary, a statement which hitherto was taken to be false can become true if and only if certain conditions are given for it to be true (Goodman, Ibid, p. 3-17). Isn’t this idea of counterfactuality exactly what is put to play in Cyclonopedia when any sense of security of what is factically held as true either by the narrator(s) and the reader(s) suddenly becomes ungrounded and constantly obscured? Where what once was considered as evident (historical references to the War on Terror[39] and stylistic marks that seem to securely fit into the legacy left behind by Western anti-philosophers, or the abstract horror of Lovecraft) suddenly becomes voided when confronted to the paradoxes of alternate events behind the screening composite of a “linear” narrative outcome (the inorganic demons possessing War Machines for their own ends deviating from the flat temporality of the War on Terror[40], or the immanent critique to the Western fetish of the Outside[41]).
Regardless of how much we tread with care, the floorboards holding us below will snap. We must be careful of assuming too much about the demeanor of time, of whatever is hijacked by it and the superficial consequences of this hijacking, be it encounters with material entities and the compliant retelling of these encounters using our spurious means of representation as that which either constantly reassures the primacy of human subjectivity, or on the contrary, can conceivably transgress this reassurance. In short, what if what we deem as highly inconsequential and accidental is given the means to become a fact and whatever we took for as a fact suddenly became unstable, false? This is the underlying theme of the strategy of ‘Hidden Writing’ used in Cyclonopedia: the sinister torsion of events onto evermore horrifying and non-falsified complexities, leading onto an aperture of counterfactual events that have the capability of taking the ground apart (an ungrounding):
“Hidden Writing can be described as utilizing every plot hole, all problematics, every suspicious obscurity or repulsive wrongness as a new plot with a tentacled and autonomous mobility. The aftermath of this utilization manifests itself as an act of writing whose effect is to deteriorate the primary unified plot or remobilize the so-called central theme and its authority as a mere armature or primary substance for holding things together (…) a main plot is constructed to camouflage other plots (which can register themselves as plot holes) by overlapping them with the surface (superficially dynamic plot) or the grounded theme. In terms of such a writing, the main plot is the map or the concentration blueprint of plot holes (the other plots). Every hole is a footprint left by at least one more plot, prowling underneath.” (Negarestani, 2008, p. 61)
The counterfactual events that appear as occult or alternate plots and that spur out perversely and indefinitely, while nevertheless remaining inside a “main” plot and simultaneously altering previous interpretations of it, seem compatible with the concept of possible worlds that Negarestani integrates from analytical philosophers Nelson Goodman and David Lewis onto Intelligence and Spirit (Negarestani, 2018, p. 424-429). Put in a very simplified manner, Nelson Goodman in his book Ways of Worldmaking (1978) defines the concept of possible of worlds as the sum of contrasting frames of reference that do not cancel each other out. In turn, frames of reference can be described as truth-statements about the world that are consistent under certain dispositions and that are structured by a determinate system of knowledge, thus meaning that we can find differing ways of explicating our world, giving way to world-versions but not to differing worlds per-se (Goodman, 1978, p. 1-6). The interesting part of Goodman’s proposal is that there is a procedural task that takes place in the elaboration of different world versions (or possible worlds) that consists in subtracting and classifying elements and particularities from a whole (decomposition) as to orderly compose the mentioned frames of reference: “…dividing wholes into parts and partitioning kinds into subspecies, analyzing complexes into component features, drawing distinctions; on the other hand, of composing wholes and kinds out of parts and members and subclasses, combining features into complexes, and making connections” (Goodman, Ibid, p. 7).
We highlight the aspect of decomposition and composition as proposed by Goodman[42], as it also seems compatible with one of the strategies related to ‘Hidden Writing’, which is the ‘( )hole complex’, or the unity/foundation that comes apart to give way to subterranean influxes that recompose the ground in a contingent manner: “In a degenerative whole or ( )hole complex, the consistency of events and their uniform dynamism exist through a poromechanical space where differentiation of surfaces (as of holes) has paralyzed the eventuation of the ground as the prerequisite basis for formative forces and coherent establishments (…) where an invocation of new grounds is registered as a perforation of the formation by new surfaces (or holes)…” (Negarestani, 2008, p. 60).
A less tenable proposition of possible worlds that can also be compatible with ‘Hidden Writing’ is the one held by David Lewis, who takes the idea of truth-statements which are self-consistent but not predictable within our world, but rather, which can be self-consistent on hypothetical worlds outside of ours. This position is known as modal realism, and Lewis explains it succinctly in the following way: “Are there other worlds that are other ways? I say there are. I advocate a thesis of plurality of worlds, or modal realism, which holds that our world is but one world among many. There are countless other worlds (…) There are so many other worlds, in fact, that absolutely every way that a world could possibly be is a way that some world is. And as with worlds, so it is with parts of worlds” (Lewis, 1986, p. 2). Thus, Lewis not only considers the idea of world-versions that result from being under the influx of a particular frame of reference that is used to explicate the world, but also the possibility of alternate worlds which give way to even more contrasting frames of reference to the ones we as humans subjects currently have. We can then speculate that these hypotheses could result attractive to Negarestani as a way to temperately mirror the paranoid ungrounding of a transparent temporal resolve as it is found in Cyclonopedia’s ‘Hidden Writing’. As such, we would have to remind ourselves of the digression about time proposed in Intelligence and Spirit, where we find a resolute questioning of the conviction that there is a univocal frame of reference that feeds back to a univocal temporal flow, and instead we precisely find alternate frames of reference which take-off into yet to be explored conventions that can be used as means to destabilize and reconfigure any kind of presumption established around foundational subjectivity. If we jump ahead to Negarestani’s most recent work, we can find an even more clear continuity of these intentions, specifically in the ending remarks of his short essay Unidentified Gliding Object (2019), where we can read the following experiment on alternative frames of reference that have the capacity to profoundly stir our own ground:
“The construction of new alien worlds, therefore, comes hand in hand with our capacities for dehabituating ourselves with respect to the use of the so-called natural or entrenched predicates which display the characteristics of our rooted perceptual-noetic poles. This dehabituation process is already underway in the field of cognitive sciences, particularly Artificial Intelligence, where perceptual-noetic elements can be modified and reconfigured, for example, by restructuring the constructive memory or introducing new artificial languages with higher logico-computational capacities. From the elements of the old sensory-conceptual world, alien worlds of perception and cognition—new ways of knowing— can be made. These are worlds in which crows can be blite (black-white), the earth’s sky can be bleen (blue-green), an apple tastes francid, and a stone feels sord (Negarestani, 2019, p. 1653-1654).
Dehabituation, alienation and the unreliability of what we have taken all along as a fact go hand in hand with the project of making our world stranger than the one we are currently habituated in, and in the wake of this becoming strange by summoning a demonic overturning of time events and the legibility we make of them via memory and the perceptual capabilities pertaining to our empirical register, we arrive at a productive ungrounding toward something hitherto unseen, something that can sinisterly deviate from our flat expectancies. We are then confronted with a schizophrenic plane of becoming that treads all the way from our initial remarks about schizotrategy, of rules slyly contorted to construct paradigms that challenge the ones we have held along surreptitiously. The continuity we have shown in Negarestani’s body of work is an affront to both to the annihilative fetish that paints possibility under the rigid monotone of entropy and the religious wash of eschatological promises found at the end of the human. And most importantly, the core of the strategy carried against foundational subjectivity has remained the same while precisely being recomposed under a different frame of reference; here lies the obscured connectedness in Negarestani’s project as a spirit of displacement fueling what he (still) mysteriously puts to print, inviting readers to decrypt plot holes and pitfalls that are independent of his particular persona. Thus, we must subject Negarestani to the effects produced beyond the superficial lacquer of a stable narrative and of an official interpretation. The following excursus has been an unofficial interpretation and does not seek to stay true to the authoritative discontinuities manufactured by the own author, as it intended to follow the underground continuities where we gradually see a preposterous picture take form. This is an alternate picture that is as actual as the one that the persona of Negarestani wishes to invoke, in order reinforce his world-version, against other world-versions that can ravage the tabula rasa anointed to his name. Impersonality is the realm of the possible, an abject detachment and rupture of any foundation that is “never exhausted by its present”[43], past or future.
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[1] Note: This essay was originally written for the open seminar “Theory, Fiction, and Narrative Manipulation: Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia– Complicity with Anonymous Materials” at the Humboldt University in Berlin, led by Carmen Schmöl and Ringo Lukas during the intense start of the covidian age from 2020–2021. I would like to thank Hyperspekulation, Carmen and Ringo for unearthing these ideas and making them collectively available.
[2] “Nature is not a block of wax ready to be molded, nor is it fixed or stable. It offers the greatest forms of resistance and its parametric space enlarges as we begin to scrutinize it or intervene in it. The global projection of detected local regularities of phenomena becomes less and less straightforward, and topologically nontrivial. As our cognitive access extends to new sectors of natural phenomena, the principle of inductive simplicity that globally projects local regularities becomes ever more fragile (…) The loss of innocence, comfort, and simplicity, both theoretical and practical, is the unavoidable price we have to pay for both the complexification of our cognitive access to nature and our uncovering of the complexity of nature” (Negarestani, 2018, p. 122)
[3] See, Ferreira da Silva, 2017.
[4] See, Brassier, 2007, p. 12-13 and Churchland, 1981.
[5] “…strategic approaches unfold radical openness as an internal cut- gaseous, odorless, with the metallic wisdom of a scalpel. Openness emerges as radical butchery from within and without” (Negarestani, 2008, p. 199).
[6] Negarestani, 2008, p. 224
[7] Here following Deleuze and Guattari’s proposal that one can trace an escape route from neurosis onto schizophrenia and vice-versa. See: Deleuze and Guattari, 1983, p. 122-137.
[8] See Negarestani’s seminar on this subject for The New Centre for Research and Practice https://thenewcentre.org/archive/man-knew-nothing-neurodiversity-practical-schizophrenia/
[9] On Land’s influence in Negarestani’s work, see Colquhoun, Matt (2019, January 25). Patchwork Epistemologies (Part 2): Another Lego Brick in the Wallhttps://xenogothic.com/2019/01/25/patchwork-epistemologies-part-2-another-lego-brick-in-the-wall/
[10] See: Bourdeleau, 2016 and Le, 2019.
[11] In reference to Negarestani’s critique of Lovecraftian horror and western eugenics (Negarestani, 2008, p. 209-215)
[12] See Moynihan, Thomas (2020, March 15). Cosmic Fichteanism vs. Cosmic Sadism http://sumrevija.si/en/thomas-moynihan-cosmic-fichteanism-vs-cosmic-sadism-on-catastrophes-and-great-filters-their-uses-and-abuses-as-a-critique-of-omnicidal-reason/
[13] “In order to navigate in this desert, first we have to inject a designated instability into it so as to disturb or qualitatively excite the epistemologically opaque homogeneity of this space. This designated instability and local disturbance generates the first opportunity for organization and navigation in a space which is not there to tell us a story or guide us through its mysteries” (Negarestani, 2013).
[14] “Negarestani’s new project intends to systemically (dis)orient the project of rationalism and knowledge of reason into something that is entirely unreasonable, a mode of new knowledge which will; ‘accelerate the dislocating and renegotiating power of the modern system of knowledge by which the human is humiliated at each and every turn’”. See Jackson, Robert (2012, December 2). Algorithm and Contingency/Negarestani, Computing and Knowledge https://web.archive.org/web/20130106202611/http://robertjackson.info/index/2012/12/negarestani-computing-and-knowledge/
[15] In particular, the taut enclosing of our techno-linguistic infrastructure which consists in the development of technological tools that function as extensions of our corporeal and the enhancement of sense-data into concepts by using the tools of language and representation. See Hui, 2019, p. 161.
[16] “…the normative appellation ‘The Human’ becomes a transferable entitlement, a right that can be granted or acquired regardless of any attachment to a specific natural or artificial structure, heritage or proclivity since being human is not merely a right that can only be obtained naturally at birth through biological ancestry or inheritance (…) Liberate that which liberates itself from you because anything else is the perpetuation of slavery. Giving rise to that which liberates itself from us is as much an ethical injunction as it is the ramification of maintaining and broadening our autonomy by being rational agents. It is the very definition of being a human”. Negarestani, Reza (2018, April 8). The Inhuman (a quick read) https://toyphilosophy.com/2018/04/08/the-inhuman-a-quick-read/
[17] In reference to the Dionysian approach to the enterprise of reason and which Negarestani makes a pledge to (Negarestani, 2018, p. 1-5).
[18] Brassier, 2007, p- 32-48
[19] “Our human camouflage is coming away, skin ripping off easily, revealing the glistening electronics. Information streams in from Cyberia; the base of true revolution, hidden from terrestrial immuno-politics in the future” (Land, 2011, p. 292)
[20] Negarestani, 2015, p. 139-154.
[21] In reference to the radical betrayal of the Trison. Negarestani, 2008, p. 31-37.
[22] “And once this poison starts to take effect, we will tear apart Western philosophy and build philosophy anew; we will turn into that thinking and scheming Other of which Western thought had every right to be afraid” (Negarestani, 2018, p. 408).
[23] Buechner, 2008, p. 14-41
[24] Negarestani, 2008, p. 137-138
[25] Negarestani, 2010, p. 382-383
[26] “For example, Ray Brassier maintains that speculative opportunities of philosophy can be unfolded simply through the traumatic binding of extinction. In claiming so, he conforms to the traditional limit of philosophy whose object of critique is the unilateralizing power of extinction (manifesting as the inevitability of death of both thought and matter) and not the economical correlation between the organic conservatism and the exorbitant truth of extinction which is presented as a restrictively monistic regime of binding exteriority and inflecting upon death.”. See Negarestani, Reza (2010, May 2). Accelerationism and the problem of (un)binding https://www.urbanomic.com/accelerationism-and-the-problem-of-unbinding/
[27] “…a view from nowhen—the pure formlessness of time that is expressed by discursive rationality as a project that takes time” (Negarestani, 2018, p. 246)
[28] “…the rivers flowing into us are an irresistible urge to dissolution, pressing us into the inhumane. Beneath the regulated exchanges of words we howl and gnaw at our fettered limbs. An impersonality as blank and implacable as the sun wells up beneath us, a vermin-hunger for freedom” (Land, 1992, p. 131)
[29] The dark insider sabotaging linear temporality from within. See Ireland, 2017.
[30] Ver, Land, 2021, p. 27-38.
[31] Negarestani, 2008, p. 34.
[32] “…Trihexyphenidyl”, see also implications to footnote in Negarestani, 2008, p. 39.
[33] Negarestani, 2008, p. 224.
[34] Land and Plant, 2014, p. 305.
[35] Negarestani, p. 189-191.
[36] “In view of the arguments made above, images of time as an endless flow that underlines the insignificance of the human and its paltry concerns turn out to be antihumanist veneers upon a subjectivist account of time which, far from breaking from the dogmas of humanism, reinforces a deeply conservative form of humanism.” (Negarestani, 2018, p. 237)
[37] Negarestani and Masciandaro, 2010, p. 260-261
[38] Negarestani, 2008, IH (Incongnitum Hactenus), p. x.
[39] Ibid, p. 16-25.
[40] Ibid, p. 129-142.
[41] Ibid, p. 209-217.
[42] Also given importance by Negarestani in the aforementioned section of Intelligence and Spirit: “Composition and Decomposition are operations by which things are taken apart and put together to make ever more new part-whole relationships, taxonomies, classes, and subclasses of entities and their features whose combination results in the construction of complexes and the specific connections they afford” (Negarestani, 2018, p. 246).
[43] “…a view from nowhere and no when, as the impersonality of reason and as a history that is not exhausted by its present. It imagines possible worlds that seem impossible from the perspective of the status quo, from what looks to be the inevitable course of its history. But in their very possibility, these otherworlds are as actual as the seemingly actual world of the present. They are just not its world, in that they are causally detached from its world” (Negarestani, 2018, p. 497).
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