To understand the militarization of oil and the dynamism of war machines in

War on Terror, one must grasp oil as an ultimate Tellurian lubricant, or a

vehicle for epic narratives.

I kept thinking of Terminus, the Roman god of boundaries while plowing through this
book. Sure the prose as such was the epitome of opaque and dense: thus a sheer
alternative to the smooth spaces of the Warmachine and the Lines of Immanence. I read
somewhere recently that the Israeli Defense Force has begun incorporating Deleuze and
Guattari into their combat manuals. This could only be a pregnant coincidence with
respect to this narrative -- one where petroleum is a sentient evil, at war with the Sun and
hoping for an inevitable Lovercraftian return of Lost Gods or some such. Along the way
we are guided by a Col. Kurtz of the Delta Force in Iraq and an eerie caress of John
Carpenter's The Thing. The glossary of theory-ese at the end is great fun as well. Despite
the heavy lifting and a wonky Farsi perspective, this was great fun, though hardly for the
uninitiated.
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Maeby: No, deep is good. People are going to say, “What the hell just happened? I better
say I like it.” ’Cause nobody wants to seem stupid.
Rita: I like it!

Somewhere, in some beautiful alternate universe, some years ago the young Iranian
student Reza Negarestani was denied entry to the graduate school of the University of
Warwick and, crushed, never received any academic training in the field of philosophy.
After wallowing in disappointment for a few years, he channeled his despondency
intoCyclonopedia, a beautiful and despairing horror novel that densely wove together
critical theory and the story of an American artist stranded in Istanbul to re-imagine the
geopolitics of oil in the Middle East as an occult attack by ancient Lovecraftian horrors
out to turn the entire Earth into a desert.

In our humdrum reality, though, Negarestani did go to grad school and did become
impressed with how many ridiculous theoretical neologisms he could create and so just
tricked someone into publishing his notes for said novel. That or he wrote an
essay/article that was not accepted anywhere so he plopped it into a "frame story" (ie 5
pages and a few footnotes) and published it as a novel. I don't know. This would be a good
joke if Negarestani (and apparently everyone else on goodreads?) didn't take it so
seriously.

I mean, here are his philosophical interests:

"Subsurface Political Geography; Surface Globalization; Underground Facilities and

Chthonic Militarization; Archeology as the Science of Military Education in 21st Century;
Tora Bora and the Cappadocian Complex; Worm Factor; Middle Eastern Necropolises
and Underground Nuclear Facilities; Petropolitics, Guerilla-states and Architecture of
Holes; Videogame Rhetoric and Memory as the Models of Alien Incursion;
Poromechanics of War."

This is what informs his fiction, which would be fine, except that I lied and there's no
fiction being informed by anything here - that list, with some conjunctions and
prepositions tossed in, is pretty much what this book is. Seriously, this is the most
unreadably pretentious nonsense I have ever encountered and man, I can usually get into
some embarrassingly pretentious nonsense. Not to mention the fact that it's also flatly
and awkwardly written. There is no art to any of it.

LOOK AT THIS:

In both Drujite and Lovecraftian polytics of radical exteriority, omega-survival or

strategic endurance is maintained by an excessive paranoia that cannot be
distinguished from a schizophrenic delirium. For such a paranoia - saturated by
parasitic survivalism and persistence in its own integrity - the course of activity
coincides with that of schizo-singularities. Paranoia, in the Cthulhu Mythos and in
Drujite-infested Zoroastriansim, manifests itself as a sophisticated hygiene-Complex
associated with the demented Aryanistic obsession with purity and the structure of
monotheism. This arch-sabotaged paranoia, in which the destination of purity overlaps
with the emerging zone of the outside, is called schizotrategy. If, both for Lovecraft and
the Aryans, purity must be safeguarded by an excessive paranoia, it is because only
such paranoia and rigorous closure can attract the forces of the Outside and effectuate
cosmic akienage in the form of radical openness - that is, being butchered and cracked
open. Drujite cults fully developed this schizotrategic line through the fusion of
Aryanistic purity with Zoroastrian monotheism. The Zoroastrian heresiarchs such as
Akht soon discovered the immense potential of schyzotrategy for xeno-calls, subversion
and sabotage. As a sorcerous line, schizotrategy opens the entire monotheistic culture to
cosmodromic openness and its epidemic meshworks. As the nervous system of
Lovecraftian strategic paranoia, openness is identified as 'being laid, cracked,
butchered open' through a schizotrategic participation with the Outside. In terms of the
xeno-call and schizitrategy, the non-localizable outside emerges as the xeno-chemical
inside or the Insider.
... 'If openness, as the scimitar blade of the outside, seeks out manifestations of closure,
then in the middle-eastern ethic it is imperative to assuage the external desire of the
Outside by becoming what it hungers for the most' (H. Parsani)."

Schizotrategy. This is a book that uses the word "schizotrategy" seriously. This would
work as a brief essay satirizing the absurdity of the field, but as a serious book-length
meditation...

This is meta-fiction with the fiction removed, an exegesis without an actual foundational
work... it's like if, instead of publishing stories, Lovecraft just threw caution to the wind
and wrote "I was walking in the forest one day. I found a book. It was the Necronomicon."
and then proceeded to give the reader 200 pages of intentionally opaque character-less
occultist nonsense cribbed from Hermes Trismegistus (that actually sounds more
enjoyable to read than this was).

It's like if Dictionary of the Khazars was just an actual dictionary.

It's like if House of Leaves was an actual architectural treatise (or, even better, just a
blueprint rolled up inside a book cover).

It's like if... well it is ACTUALLY like White Noise because there is no subtlety or
symbolism or allegory or (again) art to its reflection on theory - we're just supposed to be
impressed that the subjects in question were brought up in the first place. The difference
is that White Noise is a better read because there's an actual novel in there, and that's
saying something because I hated White Noise and thought that the novel in there was
crap.

I'm still grasping at straws about how to categorize this, which I suppose is the point, but
if so then it was a point that no one needed to tackle. Theory fiction? Fictional theory? I
am leaning now towards "fiction in theory" because

1) this book's whole M.O. is embedding fiction in a dense web of critical theory (or vice
versa? fuck it, man, I don't know)
2) in theory this is a book-length work of fiction, a "novel" if you will, but in practice it's
just... philosophy that no actual philosophers would take seriously so it was repackaged
as a work of fiction.

I almost respect the fact that this book does kind of reflect Negarestani's approach to
philosophy. I think it's trivial nonsense, but the man has clearly devoted himself to it and
most people are buying it hook, line, and sinker. It's kind of impossible to know where the
fiction ends and reality begins with this work: Kristen, the American artist of the
introduction whose discovery of the metafictive Cyclonopedia sets the "plot" in motion, is
a real person who actually wrote the introduction for Negarestani. Hamid Parsani, the
Iranian academic author of the metafiction within the novel, is fictional, but there really
is a "Hyperstition Laboratory" at the University of Warwick that Negarestani was a part
of. Did the online discussions about the false author attributed to academics "X" and "Z"
of said laboratory actually take place? Who knows.

I get that this is supposed to a "fun" introduction to "speculative realism" or whatever

dumb philosophical school he is trying to reclaim Deleuze and Guattari for or an
exploration of the usefulness of his mode of critical theory even when further divorced
from reality but I don't give a shit about philosophy (especially anything that isn't strictly
materialistic and ESPECIALLY this kind of ultra-insular neologism-mad self-satisfied
baloney) and as a novel (or any kind of fiction) this fails spectacularly. (less)