Patron before me decided to smash a spider between the cover and the first page for the next patron to find. Nice one.
Incognitum Hactenus
Kristen Alvanson travelling to Istanbul to meet 2 (unpronounceable). Passes out on plane after drinks+ pills. 2 unresponsive.
(xii) “I remember 2‘s email when he said that being in the Middle East and facing its cultures and languages will be so foreign to me; it is like suddenyl falling into the holes of a smoothly narrative story I have been reading for years — suddenly page numbers warp and things go missing.”
KA finds Cyclonopedia manuscript under bed along with ephemera and partial PGP key. (How much of this stuff matters?)
KA researches Negarastani. Pages temporarily unavailable. Interacts with other Hyperstition contributors, who suggest that KA get in touch with RN’s Iranian friends. Suggestion that RN is a fictional invention. def. hyperstition. Mentions Cold Me, looks dead, but I have no idea anymore. Postcard → Beyoglu bookstore. Text Farsi? Old Turkish? Note to S mentioning ancient Greek/Latin play scripts — characters characterized by exit-level.
Chthululike dread/monstrosity, minus sex. Masturbation. Frustration with game.
(xvi) Clues or evidence are the most relentless plot holes; they can even linger after a story fades away.
(xvii) I wonder what this manuscript’s shape of writing is.
Lol http://tinyurl.com/54wvo6 (NY/Tehran time conversion) https://students.cs.byu.edu/~charlajw/Woodbury/givenNames.dict (dead)
List of pink things. Xenopoetics. What do // mean? poetry? code? Endless references exploding out. What is the point of writing like this or Ulysses? (Liz talked about this once, I think).
Breadcrumbs [Excerpt from Homo.Stasis (RN + Land)] [Collegium]
RN, Mark Fisher, Nick Land, CCRU.
Paleopetrology
Hamid Parsani, Cross of Akht. Why such minute description of an artifact? Jesus this is going to be a slog.
In his notes, Parsani personifies the Cross of Akht as an inorganic demon[4], a sentient relic with the ability to numerically grasp all the undercurrents and inconsistent events of the Earth as modes of narration.
delineates the activities and ontogenesis of global dynamics according to the lubricating chemistry of oil or petroleum, i.e. it grasps all narrations of the earth through oil.
13
The good stuff seems to be in the footnotes. Love this idea of the inorganic demon, reads like a particularly well fleshed-out tvtropes entry.
I’m just going to start dropping keywords as I read. This seems like a good book to analyze by counting words.
What was missing was some vehicle for transporting the theoretical carriers in their expedition, a narrative line with the appropriate authority to mobilize the fictional side of the project (15-16).
blobjectivity, or the logics of poetropolticial undrcurrents [narrative lube]
Abrahamic + technocapitalist war machine. This is so bad. It reads like Clash of Civilizations + reverse geohumoral theory.
X A lot to deal with here. Crude summary: Oil as
– Narrative organizer, definitely (heart of gloopy darkness). Parsani comes up with the idea that there is no darkness in this world which has not its mirror image in oil. The end of the river is certainly an oil field;
– Cybergothic convergence – demonic / technomic lube;
– Oil cult: pomo-leftist conspiracy-mongering greases into archaic slithering rites (Petro-Masonism and its trans-historical tentacles).
Z: Also don’t forget that petroleum and fossil fuels exemplify another Telluro-conspiracy towards the Sun’s solar economy: trapping the energy of the sun accumulated in organisms by means of lithologic sedimentation, stratification, anaerobic decay and bacteria in highly stratified sedimentary basins. In this sense, petroleum is a terrestrial replacement of the onanistic self-indulgence of the Sun or solar capitalism. Earth dismantles the hegemony of the sun on a subterranean (blobjective) level. [Bataille?]19
Is this what I’m going to be writing against? Cybernetics, oil, digital, machine? Remember cyanarchism. See note below re: sensorium and Neuromancer.
Missing theoretical context
literary modernism (not here, obviously but what was literary modernism before postmodernism, and how is theory fiction related to postmodernism?)
Theory here is not about laying out a prediction that can be tested with experimentation, rather it is an attempt to narrate empirical experience.
[…]In short, this method was built from the understanding that our ideas about reality, our theories of it, came out of fictions. Fictions we used to act and shape reality. However, formany of theory-fiction’s practitioners, the fictions that we lived with in the 90s and even now had not kept pace with our strange new world.
[…]This is madness. But madness that should not be confused with uselessness. Especially when the object you are trying to describe is, for most of us, incomprehensible. Rather than pretending it was possible to “make sense” of a world in the process of technologically dissolving the boundaries that defined the individual and underpinned the late capitalist culture that persisted after the end of the cold war, with these texts CCRU shifted theory into a fictional register so as to approach a field of research that was both tantalisingly obvious but also beyond the analytical tools of quotidian discourse
http://arkbooks.dk/the-terrifying-ambivalence-of-theory-fiction/
Is this what they’re trying to do at /r/sorceryofthespectacle? Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island mentioned above sounds interesting. (Or not).
theory fiction (Arkbooks primer)
theory fiction: “The world is so chaotic that no overarching theory can ever hope to explain it. So, the form itself leaks and cracks” (Sellars)
Mark Fisher, Flatline Constructs intro. Gothic, cybernetics. Which has me wondering — what is the role of the environment in cybernetics? What about the Gothic? Is the sensorium in Neuromancer potentially useful here?
- the Gothic flatline: a plane where it is no longer possible to differentiate the animate from the inanimate and where to have agency is not necessarily to be alive.
- What if we are as ‘dead’ as the machines?
- Gothic Materialism: concerned with a plane that cuts across the distinction between living and nonliving, animate and inanimate [anorganic continuum as province of the Gothic]
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