Customer Reviews

Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (Anomaly)

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(2)

 

 

Is oil an intelligent entity? Is the platform of technology upon which our civilization functions "scientific," or is it actually a kind of voodoo, controlled and constructed behind the scenes by ancient sorcerers? Is there a bizarre and esoteric shared goal that secretly unites Western global technocapitalism and Islamic militants?

Is "pink" an important philosophical concept? And where do rats fit into all of this?

After a few chapters into Cyclonopedia, even the most skeptic reader may begin to ponder these seemingly ridiculous questions. Negarestani takes fiction and theory, genius and madness, discovery and creation and builds an entire alternate universe that is so convincing and compelling, you'll never look at the Middle East in the same way again. And the horror fan will find thrill alongside theory. Ancient Babylonian demons lurk inside video games, and an unfathomable cosmic force known simply as "the Outside" hungrily waits to devour and butcher us open. Who's next?

There are too many fresh ideas to absorb in one reading. Cyclonopedia's madness is quite rigorous, reshaping concepts from Deleuze, poromechanics and military intelligence to occult numerology. It explores little-known Indo-Iranian linguistic archeology alongside fantastic folk tales of burning rain and sentient dust devils.

Throughout the book, we are gradually acclimated to see the world in the terms of a philosophical premise that Negarestani calls the "non-metaphorical" identity of concrete materials with supposedly abstract or mental phenomena. For example, the Middle East is a sentient being; thought is dust; and war itself is a Fog, an object more tangible than any Deleuzian warmachine. Somehow, this superficially inane/insane premise takes on a plausibility within these pages that rivals everyday, common-sense perceptions of reality as well as established philosophical dogmas.

Reza Negarestani has written a book so dense with concepts--oil as an evil entity, soldiers gone rogue ala "Apocalypse Now," disappearing authors who may or may not be terrorists, hapless tourists, French modern philosophy, ancient cults, gods who may be devils, decomposition, and sex, among hundreds of others--that it resembles nothing so much as a literary version of one of those massive desert sandstorms seen in the Middle East. It engulfs the reader, and that is both the novelty and the tragedy of the book. As another reviewer has pointed out, this is not a novel. It might be described as an experimental novel, with all the negative connotations of that phrase: when a book is presented as "an experimental novel," it often means that the writer was either too arrogant, too lazy and/or too manic to write a genuine novel. It also usually means that someone--either the editor, or perhaps the more dignified parts of the author's own personality--should have grown a backbone sufficient for telling the writer to sit back down and finish writing. Mr. Negarestani is obviously a brilliant man, but this is really only a set of notes for a novel. What a novel it could and should have been! It could so easily have been a novel--or novels--that would have been bigger than Harry Potter and Twilight combined, and intelligent, literary and challenging besides. Perhaps Mr. Negarestani chose not to write that. I can respect that, but this book unfortunately is complex to the point of being a Very Hard Slog. Is it worth reading? Yes, but it isn't fun, folks, and horror ought to be fun even when it's packed with brilliant and challenging concepts. One caveat: this is not a book for religious fundamentalists of any of the Abrahamic religions (Jews, Christian, Muslims) because the author not only makes these organized religions part of his evil mythos but also skewers their worst traits mercilessly. Update Feb. 2012: I found myself thinking about this book again recently--it's that type of book, that it will stick in your mind--and it occurred to me that what this book reminded me of was reading an encyclopedia. Entry after entry, full of information about a subject. It also occurred to me what that subject is: a mythos. That's what the author has written, a vast and brilliant mythos that, like the Cthulhu mythos, will (or should be) popular for years into the future. I can only hope that the author, or other writers, will now flesh out this mythos with numberless stories.

Readers who are looking for new thoughts and concepts will find some unprecedented ideas in Cyclonopedia. For example, in one place Negarestani challenges Deleuze and Guattari's concept of war machines in relation to war. In another place he builds a different philosophy of becoming. He analyzes the politics of the Middle East through the eyes of a mad archeologist who has discovered connections between monotheism, petroleum and geology. These are just a few things that stand out for me after my first read through. I plan to go back chapter by chapter for a slower read to take in the many more themes he has presented.

I think there are a couple reasons why this book might be difficult for some readers though-

1. For readers who are expecting a novel, Cyclonopedia works like a theory book and for those who anticipate a philosophy book, it may read like a novel. My thought is that it would be best to read it as a philosophy or theory book which uses different or alternative ways for thinking. Negarestani doesn't strictly abide by philosophy or politics in order to discuss politics and philosophize about the world, but instead opts to also use a wide variety of speculative tools to make points (i.e. occult, archeology, Islamic theology and even current culture such as video game and literary studies).

2. At first, readers might feel alienated from Cyclonopedia. One of the reasons for this estrangement may be due to a lack of a parallel works to compare it with. Cyclonopedia like every other book has references and influences, but it is hard to give a coherent list of similar books. The closest and most helpful example which comes to mind is A Thousand Plateaus by Deleuze and Guattari. The influence of Deleuze is obvious throughout the book and the narrative resembles the chapter 'The Geology of Morals'. Deleuze and Guattari have incorporated experimental writing into a work of philosophy (for example, every chapter a is 'plateau' covering every topic imaginable) in much the same way Negarestani uses experimental narration and 'plotholes' throughout the book to create a work of experimental writing opposed to an academic philosophical work. While this sounds like a Deleuzian book it should be noted that Negarestani's ideas are independent of Deleuze and sometimes transcend them. Another reason for Cyclonopedia's eccentricity is that it is inherently Middle Eastern, it uses alternative resources and concepts related to different forms of thought, politics, cultures and people. In my opinion, it is what makes Negarestani's work so compelling.

I first read about this book on a blog and what attracted me to it was the list of blurbs it has received. Cyclonopedia contains the most promising compilation of blurbs I have seen for any work, starting from the pulp bestseller China Miéville to the cult director Elias Merhige and philosophers such as Graham Harman. The diversity of blurbers initially struck me as a compilation of random reviews and haphazard promotion which can be an indication of a not-really-great book. I began to read Cyclonopedia. The plot is revealed in the first pages, 'The Middle East is a living force'. Imagine Lovecraft's Abdul Alhazred writes a contemporary version of Necronomicon which is politically relevant to our time and perhaps even more horrific and maddening. Make no mistake this book is not a surreal academic parody like Nabokov's Pale Fire or a pulp hybrid novel disguised as pop theory and jargonized continental philosophy, it is originally philosophical and in a weird way rigorous. What makes Cyclonopedia akin to horror and science fiction more than anything is the way it reconstructs our contemporary world as the way it really is, but we are too afraid to look at it. Everything is meticulously and inventively analyzed through a fine blend of philosophy, theology, occult, archeology, military science, and ethnography. It is at this point that the blurbs start to make sense; they hint at what is to come. The most striking characteristic of Cyclonopedia is that it has a 'world' in it, and it is unlike anything I have read. And finally while a demanding read, this is a book everyone can latch on to one way or another.

I was very excited to read this book, everything I read about it made it sound incredibly interesting and exactly the type of thing I would enjoy. Don't be fooled though, this book is a complete waste of time and an absolute piece of trash.

Make no mistake, this is not a novel in anything but the loosest definition of the term. Many reviews have had a hard time classifying this book, is it a novel? is it philosophy? Anyone looking for a novel though will be annoyed that they spent their hard earned cash on this. The "story" is about a girl who goes to Istanbul to meet a mysterious stranger. In her hotel room she finds the eponymous manuscript. Sounds good? Don't be fooled, this part of the book is totally phoned in and consists of about 10 pages of diary entries the girl made during her trip. By the time I finished this brief section my hopes for this book were totally sunk, they are truly that awful. Why is the girl going to Istanbul? Because some dude sent her a message on the Suicide Girls website and it made her horny. You read that right, the mysterious stranger is not some Lovecraftian proto-human cultist with dangerous insights into the nature of reality, he's just some nerd harassing women on the suicide girls website. Wow. Apparently the author of Cyclonopedia couldn't even be bothered to write this section himself and had to have somebody else do it for him, and boy did she do a bad job. There are really transparent attempts to shoehorn in sexual content, where the woman writing the diary talks about how she was turned on to the mystery and masturbates while thinking about how mysterious everything is (I'm not kidding), as well as a bunch of banal references to pop culture where the woman informs the reader about what movies she watched and how she listened to Death From Above 1979 on her ipod. It's awful. She never ends up meeting the mystery man, instead she finds a copy of the Cyclonopedia under her bed along with several clues. The woman makes an incredibly unsatisfying and half hearted attempt to piece together these clues, but fails and returns to America in order to cash in on her discovery. Is this the author's way of telling us that this book is a total put on? Is he warning us not to even bother trying to find any meaning here? I should have taken his advice and put down the book, but alas.

The manuscript itself, which takes up the book's remaining pages, is nonsense. This is not some unholy occult book, this is not some mystical manuscript that unravels the structure of the universe, this is not some supernatural tome written by demons or madmen. Cyclonopedia consists of the rantings of pseudo intellectual wannabes on an internet message board. The manuscript reprints "insightful" chats the posters had about B-grade horror movies and airplane fiction. It doesn't appear that there's any actual mystery as to who wrote the manuscript or where it came from. None of that really matters, it's just a trashbin manuscript written by cyberpunk posers. Content-wise, the thing is a mess. Occasionally the author will strike upon something of interest, or conceptualize something in a unique or enlightening way, however most of the time the observations don't ring true and consist of the type of armchair theorizing that is rightfully mocked. The author suggests at one point that Islamic terrorism has as its goal the destruction of all phallic objects. You can see how he dug up that idea, terrorists attack skyscrapers, so he goes off on it. But it's so laughable, it shouldn't strike anyone as true, it's clearly not the goal of terrorism, terrorists seem to blow themselves up in crowds of people on the street more often than they bring down skyscrapers. It's just not a useful way to conceptualize what terrorists are or what they do, rather it's just a little bit of sneering intellectual absurdity on the part of the author. The whole manuscript is full of nonsense like that, and just when you begin to get a sense of something edifying and intelligent he runs off on another tangent, gets distracted, contradicts everything he just said, reinvents all his concepts, and gets lost in the thicket of his ramblings. It's so poorly written that it just becomes tedious to wade through. In the first chapter he attempts to describe the properties of a certain relic, but he just rambles on and on and on for pages and does a horrible job of giving the reader any sense of what the relic is or why it's important he just blabs on forever in half-baked attempts to construct numerological significance based on how you add up the object's numbered hinges. It's so incredibly boring and poorly written that the reader simply doesn't care. You think describing a mysterious ancient relic would make for interesting reading, but you'd be wrong.

There are a few bits where the concept shines through, mostly when the author sets aside his fascination with continental philosophy. Throughout the book we hear bits about the careers of fictional characters, like an Arabic scholar who vanished while on the trail of a ancient mystery. The author tantalizes us with little bits talking about his life and career and it's in those sections where the book actually succeeds and begins to live up to the hype. However these sections are underdeveloped and for every page or two or enjoyable content you have to wade through 20 of aimless academic posturing. This book is a great concept with a dismal execution. The author could have done so much more with this if he had cut out 50-75% of the Cyclonopedia and developed the frame story instead. If you're worried you might not like this one, if you're expecting a novel or a story or something truly engaging you're better off skipping this book.

'Incomparable. Post-genre horror, apocalypse theology and the philosophy of oil, crossbred into a new and necessary codex.' (China Miéville, author of Perdido Street Station and The Scar)

'Reading Negarestani is like being converted to Islam by Salvador Dali.' (Graham Harman, author of Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things)

'It is rare when a mind has the courage to take our precious pre-conceptions of history, geography and language and turn them all upside down, into a living cauldron, where ideas and spaces become alive with fluidity and movement and breathe again with imagination and wonder. In this great novel by Reza Negarestani, we are taken on a journey that predates language and post dates history. It is all at once apocalyptic and a beautiful explosive birth of a wholly original perception and meditation on what exactly is this stuff we call "knowledge".' (E. Elias Merhige, director of Begotten and Shadow of the Vampire)

'This brilliant and exhilarating work is a forensic journey across the surface territories of the Middle East and into the depth of its sub-terrain. The earth is produced as a living artifact, gutted and hollowed out by nomadic war tactics, the practices of extreme archaeology and the logic of petroleum extraction. Inventing a radical new language and reconceptualizing the relationship between religion, geology, and ways of war, Reza Negarestani philosophically ungrounds thus the very grounds of contemporary middle-east politics.' (Eyal Weizman, author of Hollow Land)

'Cyclonopedia is an extraordinary tract, an uncategorizable hybrid of philosophical fiction, heretical theology, aberrant demonology and renegade archaeology. It aligns conceptual stringency with exacting esotericism, and through its sacrilegious formulae, geopolitical epilepsy is scried as in an obsidian mirror.' (Ray Brassier, author of Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction)

'Reza Negarestani's Cyclonopedia is rich and strange, and utterly compelling. Ranging from the chthonic mysteries of petroleum to the macabre fictions of H. P. Lovecraft, and from ancient Islamic (and pre-Islamic) wisdom to the terrifying realities of postmodern asymmetrical warfare, Negarestani excavates the hidden prehistory of global culture in the 21st century.' (Steven Shaviro, author of Doom Patrols)

'The Cyclonopedia manuscript remains one of the few books to rigorously and honestly ask what it means to open oneself to a radically non-human life - this is a text that screams, from a living assemblage known as the Middle East, "I am legion." Cyclonopedia also constitutes part of a new generation of writing that refuses to be called either theory or fiction; a heady mixture of philosophy, the occult, and the tentacular fringes of Iranian culture - call it "occultural studies." To find a comparable work, one would have to look back to Von Junzt's Unaussprechlichen Kulten, the prose poems of Olanus Wormius, or to the recent "Neophagist" commentaries on the Book of Eribon.' (Eugene Thacker, author of Biomedia and The Global Genome)

'From the city of Poetry and Roses in Iran comes this bloody bypass surgery on the heart of darkness.' (David Porush, author of Soft Machine: The Cybernetic Fiction)

'Negarestani's Cyclonopedia meticulously plots the occult matrices of an archaic petrochemical conspiracy that has set the earth on its carbon-cycle feedback loop to Hell.' (John Cussans, Chelsea College of Art and Design)

'Western readers can expect their peculiarly schizoid condition to be 'butchered open' by this work. Read Negarestani, and pray.' (Nick Land, author of The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism)

Crude oil meets refined philosophy in this enigmatic meditation on the Middle East. If you want to find out how black, gooey stuff from the earth pumps in your veins and your car runs on blood, check it out!

Brilliant! Insightful! Horrific!

Reza Negarestani's vision is complex, intense, and 'voidal'. Read with caution for the pleasure it offers is terrifying!

A PYROTECHNIC REVOLUTION IN THE WRITTEN WORD, NEGARESTANI HURTLES US INTO THE FUTURE USING THE DUSTIEST, MOST PRIMEVAL TOOLS IMAGINABLE: THE MIND, THE EARTH, THE ANCIENT CODES.

The premise of a recovered document that sheds light on the history of oil, the Middle East, etc. (a la 'Blairwitch Project') seemed promising, but I was wrong.