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American Book Review, Volume 33, Number 3, March/April 2012, pp.

10-11 (Review)

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DOI: 10.1353/abr.2012.0062

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http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/abr/summary/v033/33.3.blas.html

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 Bellamy continued from previous page

be critical of his own. The novel contains many all of the limitations of this form of imagining the is that a smart post-apocalyptic novel is closer to an
small signs of the end—hints at the depletion of oil, future. It never names the source of these small signs intelligent utopianism than a stupid utopianism, and
increasing cancer rates, and massive, alternating of the end. This occlusion is both its strength and Amsterdam’s resourceful, post-apocalyptic novel is
rainy seasons and droughts. As a product of this its weakness: naming the object of representation just that.
environment, the narrator’s logic of individual runs the risk of naming the wrong object and
survival belies its own limits and blockages. missing the mark, but not representing the source Brent Bellamy is a Ph.D. candidate whose work
The limit of Amsterdam’s narrator becomes provides no answers for those craving a solution to focuses on the intersection of post-apocalyptic
clear: the recognition of a state of permanent crisis these problems. Parsing together the end of oil, the fiction and late capitalism. He currently teaches a
is the limit he cannot see beyond. Things We Didn’t massive environment changes, and the stark division class on 1980s apocalyptic fiction, and his review
See Coming recognizes the formal necessities of between city and country does not even fully map of Evan Calder Williams’s Combined and Uneven
the post-apocalyptic and reflects on them through out the source of this destruction. One lesson about Apocalypse (2011) recently appeared in Reviews in
the narrator’s witty prose, yet it remains subject to the future to be learned here, to steal an aphorism, Cultural Theory.

Hidden Writing
Zach Blas

as their relation to the contemporary War on Terror.

Parsani writes about bacterial archeology, polytics,
Cyclonopedia: Complicity with the Tellurian Omega, and Xerodrome, producing a
challenging codex though which to think about the
Anonymous Materials Middle East. Throughout Cyclonopedia, Negarestani
Reza Negarestani employs Parsani’s corpus to explore warfare,
Re.Press demons, decay, and the destruction of the Earth.
http://re-press.org Crucially, Parsani and Negarestani shift the locus of
268 pages; paper, $15.64 political agency in their work to nonhuman materials.
Thus, when war in the Middle East is discussed, one
must account for dust; or when political power is
considered, one must account for material decay. As
Parsani says, “The Middle East is a sentient entity—it
Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia: Complicity
is alive!” Parsani/Negarestani’s words read like a
with Anonymous Materials is weird, not only because
materialist geo-philosophy meets horror novel.
its monstrous and nonhuman tenor resonates with the
weird fictions of China Miéville and H. P. Lovecraft,
or the weird realities conjured by the philosophers Negarestani delivers an enigmatic
of speculative realism; Cyclonopedia ungrounds and horrific mix of theory-fiction as
and mutilates the very genres of horror, philosophy,
and author, leaving in their wake what some have archaeological ungrounding.
called para-academic theory-fiction. It is precisely
the weirdness of both Cyclonopedia and Negarestani Cyclonopedia begins with a nonhuman topic of
that has captivated so many—the text has become an interest to Parsani at the time of his reappearance in
inspiration to academics and intellectuals, spiraling 2000: the Cross of Akht, an ancient Zoroastrian relic
out into the disciplines of media theory, continental that is able to mathematically process and diagram
philosophy, queer theory, and political thought; the “planetary events of epic proportions in the form
creative industries of architecture and the arts have of various modes of heterogeneous or anomalous
also embraced the text (Artforum International narration.” Negarestani explains that oil for the Cross
listed Cyclonopedia in its Best of 2009 issue), either of Akht is its supreme “narration lube,” grasping Attending to nonhuman, or anonymous,
making work as a direct response to Cyclonopedia or “all narrations of the Earth through oil.” Here, oil materials in Cyclonopedia reveals not only new
collaborating with Negarestani. A 2011 Cyclonopedia becomes a powerful political agent, depicted as the political formations and schisms but also provides an
symposium at The New School in New York City only nonhuman element that can narrate all events original contribution to the so-called nonhuman and
brought these splintering engagements together, on Earth. Oil’s role in the Cross of Akht permits speculative turns. These philosophical movements
demonstrating the profound and varied impact the Negarestani to elaborate several points on politics typically center on the question of how to gain
book is continuing to make. and war. Importantly, political models and global access to that which exists outside of the correlates
Arguably more perplexing than the text is the dynamics cannot be viewed as whole; they always of human being and world. For example, French
enigmatic figure of Negarestani himself. An illusive have oil flowing through them at a subterranean level. philosopher Quentin Meillassoux (in After Finitude:
persona based in Iran, Negarestani maintains an active Negarestani calls these flows “plot holes,” and they An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency [2010])
blog and Facebook profile, yet debates have raged on reveal a “blobjective” point of view. This viewpoint, uses mathematics to achieve this, and media
as to whether he actually exists: Who or what is/are which is oil’s, tells a new political narrative: with theorist Ian Bogost (in Alien Phenomenology, or
Reza Negarestani? Is he real or an invention? This the aid of Western Technocapitalism and Eastern What It’s Like to Be a Thing [2012]) develops an
anxiety over the existence of Negarestani is exactly Monotheism, the Earth is moving toward total alien phenomenology. While these projects all raise
how Cyclonopedia begins. In the foreword, Kristen degradation by attaining a “burning immanence” slight methodological and disciplinary concerns,
Alvanson documents her journey to Istanbul to meet with the sun and unleashing the Earth’s “burning Cyclonopedia exhilaratingly radicalizes this with a
an online friend. As she searches for this ultimately core.” Of course, it is not hard to associate a burning practice called Hidden Writing.
unlocatable person, she discovers a manuscript immanence with the sun with contemporary battles Negarestani claims that the Middle East
labeled Cyclonopedia by Reza Negarestani. After waging around the use of fossil fuels and the ozone requires a new political analysis, one that is material
several unsuccessful attempts at making contact layer, or the exposure of the Earth’s burning core and concrete. Following this, he proposes Hidden
with Negarestani, Alvanson returns to the U.S. with with continued digging for oil. Negarestani explains Writing, described as a model of complicity with
Cyclonopedia, intent on publishing it—or so we are that the West is complicit in this process because it Parsani’s conception of the “( )hole complex,”
told. satisfies its hypercapitalist drive for consumption suggesting that stories be read only through plot
Cyclonopedia is an examination of the works and mobility, while from the Jihadist perspective, holes. This writing involves both inauthenticity,
and writings of the fictional Dr. Hamid Parsani, a these acts speed up “the rise of the Kingdom.” In which Negarestani associates with interference from
former archaeology and mathematics professor at its first pages, Cyclonopedia offers a new political collective writing practices, and steganography,
Tehran University, who was exiled for “insufficient conception of politics with oil as the major actor and a technique in which the main plot is designed to
scholarship” and soon after mysteriously disappeared. also suggests that to not engage the blobjective is to camouflage other plots. Hidden Writing, therefore,
Parsani’s bizarrely esoteric research explores Middle fundamentally fail in addressing war and religion
Eastern theologies and ancient occult relics, as well today. Blas continued on next page

Page 10 American Book Review

Blas continued from previous page

encourages exhumation, but, as Negarestani Cyclonopedia’s critical intervention becomes of war in the Middle East, but there are also stories
explains, exhumation always defaces. This suggests the lesson that an archaeological method cannot of media, queerness, art, and architecture. What
that there is an important political link between follow or maintain fidelity to any particular Cyclonopedia assures is that oil will always be found
the anonymous, nonhuman, and blobjective to the discipline because the blobjective does not respect running though these stories, keeping them weirdly
human, interpretative and critical. Negarestani cites professionally determined terrains of thought. holey and inauthentic.
this as an issue of archaeology; quoting Parsani, Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia is a work of Hidden
“‘archaeology, with its ingrained understanding of Writing. By using collective authorship and a hidden
Hidden Writing, will dominate the politics of future story of our present embedded in ancient heretical
and will be the military science of twenty-first texts and relics, Negarestani delivers an enigmatic Zach Blas is an artist-theorist working at the
century.’” Thus, Hidden Writing maintains a political and horrific mix of theory-fiction as archaeological intersections of networked media, queerness, and
fidelity to the blobjective, but this can alter when ungrounding—but there can and must be other ways. the political. He is a Ph.D. student in literature,
exhumed or interpreted—hence, the archaeological This, in fact, is why Cyclonopedia is so popular: it information science and information studies, visual
dimension. begs to be exhumed itself. Underneath lies a story studies, and women’s studies at Duke University.

Future’s Past
Gerry Canavan

lupi’s The Windup Girl (2009), the end of oil similarly

Julian Comstock: A Story entails a return to the past; the novel is set several
of 22nd-Century America hundred years after the end of oil, which has come to
be retrospectively recognized as the end of both glo-
Robert Charles Wilson
balization and U.S./Western hegemony and the start
Tor Books of a century-long period of breakdown and disaster
known as “The Contraction.” To the people of this
http://www.tor.com
distant future time, the oil age is remembered as a
416 pages; cloth, $25.95;
distant “golden age”—but one that is permanently
paper, $8.99; eBook, $8.99
and hopelessly in the past, never to return.
Robert Charles Wilson’s Julian Comstock, too,
envisions the post-petroleum world as the return
In The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852) of obsolete historical social forms. Wilson’s previ-
Karl Marx notes G. W. F. Hegel’s claim that “all ous novel, the Hugo Award-winning Spin (2005),
facts and personages of great importance in world imagined a universe in which time begins to move
history occur, as it were, twice”: first as tragedy, too fast; mysterious aliens sealed the Earth inside a
then as farce. For Marx, the Roman affectations of stasis bubble, condemning us to watch years pass by
the French Revolution represented precisely this sort in minutes, millennia in months. Julian Comstock,
of uncanny repetition—as did the Old Testament in a way, poses the opposite problem: a history that
interests of Cromwellites during the English Civil has lost any ability to progress at all, that indeed has
War and the French Revolution of 1848’s aping of begun to move backwards. The contemporary era
the previous revolutions of 1789 and 1793–1795, has come to be remembered by the people of 2172 as
“[i]n like manner a beginner who has learnt a new the “Efflorescence of Oil,” the word “efflorescence”
language always translates it back into his mother describing the evaporating of water that leaves behind
tongue.” History repeats, the thinking goes, not as a thin layer of salty detritus. Here, that detritus is the
some inevitable law of the universe but as a basic ruined remains of our own twentieth- and twenty-
tendency of human nature—history repeats because first-century lives: the hardship and dislocation of
our impoverished imaginations can only very rarely global collapse, the inscrutable plastic junk that litters
conceive the truly new. More commonly, in attempt- their countryside, their myths that man once walked idea of philosophy is considered an official heresy,
ing to look forward, we find ourselves instead simply on the moon, a generally ruined world. American life where Tim LaHaye (author of the Left Behind series)
looking backward. has become much more technologically constrained; is thought of as a theologian on par with Augustine
New York is considered the greatest city in the world or Aquinas—truly, a fallen world.
Julian Comstock envisions the in part because it still manages electrical illumina- Julian Comstock, the title character, is the
tion for four hours every day. American democracy son of a dead general and nephew of the current
post-petroleum world as the return has been completely transformed: the presidency is President—an echo of Hamlet that is of course
of obsolete historical social forms. now an inherited, aristocratic office; the House of deliberate and played with throughout. The chief
Representatives has apparently been abolished; elec- protagonist, Adam Hazzard, our narrator, is his
This principle seems particularly important in tions are purely symbolic, empty rituals, primarily childhood friend and eventual biographer. The two,
recent science fiction that attempts to depict the world enacted for the purposes of military recruitment in having grown up together in rural obscurity, become
after Peak Oil. As Imre Szeman, among others, has an endless series of imperial wars; the first amend- swept up by the draft into the latest war against the
noted, cheap, easily extractable petroleum is now so ment has been altered to protect only “Freedom of Dutch for control of Newfoundland in hopes of
central to the workings of contemporary capitalism Pious Assembly” and “Acceptable Speech”; and a controlling the global-warming-opened Northwest
that almost no aspect of the present system could destroyed Washington, D.C. is perpetually in the Passage. The events of the war catapult Julian into
function without it. Consequently, as Szeman writes, process of “restoration” that never quite material- the public fame—and the public rivalry with his
“Oil capital seems to represent a stage that neither izes. (Parodying the American right’s devotion to uncle—he has never wanted, throwing him ultimately
capital nor its opponents can think beyond.” In the the fantasy of an immortal, unchanging constitution into the imperial presidency itself. (This is not to give
absence of some sufficient substitute for oil’s energy despite all this upheaval, Americans of the twenty-
anything away; we learn from the first page of the
miracle—in the absence, that is, of a future that is second century nevertheless speak in reverent tones
prologue, before we know anything else about him,
both prosperous and possible—the only solution for of their “Debt to the Past” and thank Providence
that the kind and bookish Julian is eventually known
the imagination seems to be to cast itself into history that U.S. governmental institutions all survived the
to history as “Julian Conqueror.”)
in search of the secret of what’s to come. For James end of oil “intact.”) The unholy combination of the
Here, then, is what science fiction looks like
Howard Kunstler (a leading Jeremiah of the coming end of oil with global warming has decimated the
without (or after) the future: the twentieth century
post-oil “long emergency”), the title of his 2008 world’s population through starvation, deprivation,
is envisioned not as the launching pad for a glorious
novel World Made by Hand suggests what he sees and disease; the society that has ultimately emerged
technofuture but as an anomalous moment of
as the only conceivable alternative to the global oil out of the disaster has abandoned science, reason,
prosperity and historical possibility that quickly
economy: a return to the hyperlocal artisan economy and democracy in favor of superstition, theocracy,
of the early nineteenth-century U.S. In Paolo Baciga- and authoritarianism. This is a world where the very Canavan continued on next page

March–April 2012 Page 11