The Rhythm of an Informal Encyclopedia
Seminar Script for <An Eye for an Eye, an Ear for an Ear>

I find something romantic in the idea that fear could make people move—or fail to move—in a particular way. Hobbes’s political-anthropological view that only through death does everyone finally attain perfect equality is, in this sense, less pessimistic than optimistic, in that it assumes the possibility of complete annihilation through a single event called death. Conversely, when one says that something does not die even after death, that something persists beyond death, we usually highlight the positive aspect of overcoming finitude—but in fact, it can be pessimistic in that it recognizes the impossibility of death. If we think about suicide, for instance, it seems closer to a failure of death. If one succeeds in killing oneself, one does not disappear but remains as “someone who committed suicide,” leaving behind those who survive with a pain that may diminish in intensity over time but never truly ends. If so, the belief that one can vanish by dying may turn out, not to be the result of despair about life, but an extraordinarily optimistic conclusion. In this sense, the skeptic who whispers that our belief—for example, the belief that death = annihilation—may simply have formed by sheer good fortune, might be doing more to prevent suicide than the nihilist who insists that everything merely returns to nothing.

In Cyclonopedia, death is repeatedly redefined in order to grasp the “non-annihilatory” character of decay. We cannot be completely erased, destroyed, or exterminated through death. Death betrays death and defers annihilation; instead of returning everything to nothing, it draws all things into “incomplete combustion,” into the impossibility of extinction. In this process of decay, the very “capacity to disappear” is lost, and therefore no creation, no cosmogony is possible. If there is anything eternal, it is only the process of decay that keeps things from being erased and keeps them “alive,” but only via “deviation and derailment.” The soft, indecisive state of dissolution—the “sogginess” the translator renders as “mulleong-mulleong”—does not “accord with the amorphousness of nature,” for the latter ultimately tends toward recycling and redemption, and that is not the essence of decay. The theme of absolute expenditure also resonates well with Bataille’s discussions of gift and consumption.

The theory of rot in Cyclonopedia is rewritten in “Undercover Softness: An Introduction to the Architecture and Politics of Decay.” Negarestani maintains the earlier premise that death is impossible but deploys this premise to concede, in a way previously denied, the possibility of “creation.” This is not because death is newly deemed possible, nor because theological motifs like resurrection are brought in. The author asks: if death cannot arrive, can the surviving object never be exteriorized? He regards neither the vitalism that makes it impossible to think any outside, nor the utopian naïveté that assumes an outside is always available through death, as an adequate answer. Instead, he proposes a spatial model for “ex situ architecture,” a form of architecture that can be neither inhabited nor grounded in any way. The point is that decay is a kind of “vector alignment” that “constructs” its decaying object in a subtractive manner. The stance has shifted somewhat, but Negarestani’s engineering and mathematical vocabulary still serves as a useful tool for both describing facts and constructing fictions. In this text, ex situ architecture is where spatialized fiction operates, as in the description of “structures that cannot be grounded or inhabited in any manner whatsoever.”

Writing, as an endlessly renegotiated and twisted fictional space, may be writable only by mixing “cyclone” and “encyclopedia,” as the title Cyclonopedia suggests. When the focus leans toward cyclone, the encyclopedia is riddled with holes; when encyclopedic will is pushed to the fore, the cyclone stabilizes into an architecture of its own. The tension between the two continues without end. Negarestani’s rewritten theory of decay thus feels like an architecture of cyclone. As far as I can tell, among books dealing with Bataille, the ones that vibrate with these two keywords at their respective centers are Nick Land’s Thirst for Annihilation and Denis Hollier’s Against Architecture. If we attend to their rhythms, we see that the authors write not so much about Bataille as with Bataille. By contrast, for the authors of Formless: A User’s Guide, Bataille becomes a curatorial tool, something that can finally be narrated from a distance. On the surface, the book is organized as a series of entries arranged in alphabetical order; it is more convenient to navigate by index than by rhythm.

Here the alphabetical arrangement of entries follows the “Critical Dictionary” Bataille published in Documents, but the selection and composition of terms is wildly arbitrary and brazenly irreverent. Yve-Alain Bois observes that this sort of practice strategically adopts the dictionary form only to convert the dictionary into a collection of rude belches—words that turn the dictionary into one big “squawk.” “The arbitrariness of alphabetical order has been replaced by an unjustifiable bewilderment. […] It is no accident that the first article of the ‘Critical Dictionary’ was devoted largely to architecture; for Bataille writes, ‘A project of attacking architecture is indispensable because architecture is ultimately a project of attacking man.’” He then goes on to describe the role played by the entry “formless” (informe) in the dictionary; as one might expect, “formless” becomes the central gravitational point that organizes the encyclopedia-like Critical Dictionary.

In Formless, Bois and Krauss survey not only the practices to which Bataille directly contributed—such as pre- and postwar informel— but also the entire history of twentieth-century art that followed him, including artists with whom Bataille had no direct temporal or geographical contact. Much of the content reads like an expanded sub-project of Art Since 1900: even when an artist did not work with Bataille in mind, they are discussed whenever they suit the project’s keywords. One might set aside, at least for the moment, the fact that Bois and Krauss’s critical trajectories themselves function as an encyclopedic canon in contemporary art discourse—and the fact that this encyclopedia can only ever be composed as a biased “list.” For example, Formless treats in exhaustive detail the practices around Documents, which was published for only a single year between 1929 and 1930, while showing relatively less interest in the secret society Acéphale or the activities of the College of Sociology a decade later—presumably because these contexts were less helpful for their stated aim of commenting on the “conditions of modernist art.”

Even so, the fact that Formless uses Bataille as a tool rather than as the object of analysis feels like one of the book’s virtues. The authors even feel free to point out Bataille’s “aesthetic limits”: namely, the charge that he never abandoned figuration, an attachment to form. This criticism is fair; one need only look at André Masson’s drawings for the headless secret society to see it. The claim that Bataille cannot move beyond the traditional metaphor that likens architecture to the human body because he cannot give up his obsession with the human figure is also valid. Yet this contradiction is also well suited to his ambition of “escaping the project through the project.” Here “project” refers to a humanistic project grounded in a Vitruvian image of man—a project that encompasses man, architecture, and the architecture of man. To escape the project through the project is thus to escape the human figure through that very figure. Exiting the image by intensifying figuration; if one is to allow metaphor, then exploiting everything metaphorically… This project could be filled with the rhythm of an infinite squawking, but I myself cannot go there. For us there is no Summa—no scholasticism of the thirteenth century that built a cathedral of knowledge from tables of contents and outlines (as Hollier traces in his search for the origins of the “book” as a presentational model)—nor is there an encyclopedist movement of the eighteenth century seeking to reorganize knowledge in totality through reason. There is no encyclopedia to stain with squawks and blots of ink—or else it exists in some other fashion.

It is well known that Bataille’s rejection of metaphor influenced deconstruction. But as I noted above, this rejection would not have taken the form of a subtractive practice such as “speaking without metaphor”; rather, it would have been realized by exploiting everything as metaphor. The same goes for architecture: by condemning architecture wholesale, he paradoxically reinforces the architectural human figure. We may not know whether every head deserves decapitation, but we can be sure that decapitation requires a head. The image of the headless man is the first image I suggested we discuss in this seminar. At first glance, it evokes death, but on reflection, not quite. The acéphale actually looks closer to a “recycling model,” something Negarestani considers impossible. The secret society of the headless (Secret Society of Acéphale), which provided the source for these drawings, existed along with the College of Sociology for a mere four years, from 1936 to 1939. Its members, grounding themselves in Gnosticism, explored dark magic and human sacrifice, and it is said that they divulged almost nothing about the meetings until their deaths. They denounced the fascism, communism, and Christianity prevalent at the time as a three-headed (tricephale) monster, and, following the examples of Sade, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, sought a “moral” revolution.

Below is a text Bataille wrote upon receiving Masson’s drawing:

“Man has fled from his head as a condemned man escapes from prison. He discovers beyond himself a being who is not the God who forbids crime, but a being ignorant of all prohibition. Beyond the being that I am, I encounter a headless being who makes me laugh. He frightens me as well, for he is composed of innocence and crime. In his left hand he holds a steel weapon, in his right a flaming heart like the Sacred Heart. He is not man. Nor is he God. He is more than I am. His entrails are a labyrinth in which he loses himself with me and in which I discover myself as him, that is, as a monster.”

Why is the headless man a project that strengthens the human in order to escape it? One answer emerges when we relate him to the Flammarion engraving. This anonymous woodcut is believed to have been included by the nineteenth-century astronomer and science-fiction writer Camille Flammarion in his book L’Atmosphère: Météorologie populaire. Today one often encounters it in New Age–style occult literature. As one wanders through such texts, one comes upon Hermetism, a branch of Gnostic practice whose mythical origin is Hermes, the god of communication, conveyance, and dispersion. When Bataille writes that “the animal imprisoned in each human being is locked up like a convict,” he is continuing an old Gnostic message that goes back to the Corpus Hermeticum, compiled in late antiquity. In Book VII of the Corpus Hermeticum, we read:

“I must tear apart the cloak that envelops you. It is the garment of ignorance, the foundation of evil, the chain of corruption, the barracks of darkness, the living death, the sentient corpse, the tomb that you yourself carry… You wear these enemies as a cloak; this cloak suffocates you so that your eyes cannot turn to the upper world to contemplate the beauty of truth, and it prevents you from hating the malice of the enemies who lay snares for you and drag you down to the lower world.” (Corpus Hermeticum VII, 2–3)

The Gnostics held that the human soul “falls into a state of slavery according to the will of the First Father” and is “imprisoned in the fleshy body until the world of the aeons comes to an end.” If Gnostic doctrine traverses both the acéphale image and the Flammarion engraving, then the headless figure is an image of a human who has achieved total combustion in the earthly realm and, released from bodily imprisonment, is led into the world “beyond.” In this sense, the headless man is also the most ideal model of communication. The movement and conveyance of a subject toward perfect communication is a complete death, a death that can be recycled and sublimated. Such a death is always possible only fictionally—an “impossibility.”

In Cyclonopedia and Thirst for Annihilation, communication is used to mean an act of wounding or perforation that breaks the discontinuity which guarantees subjectivity, thus destroying individuality, autonomy, and isolation and opening being up to a community of meaningless expenditure. This is the same principle that structures Bataille’s discussion of eroticism, in which subjectivity, ensured only through a sense of discontinuity, is forcibly rendered continuous by death. “Violent death causes a rupture in the discontinuous being. Silence falls over the assembly, and what is experienced there by the witnesses of the sacrifice is the continuity of being that the victim has attained.” But this continuity is not architecturally aligned by a synthetic mind; it is a kind of human centipede, a continuum squandered in utter meaninglessness. Negarestani may be showing that, within such processes of excessive construction, it is more productive to attend to the subtractive side of construction.

By contrast, Denis Hollier’s Against Architecture is concerned with why architecture cannot help but represent impossible death. At first, because death must neither occur nor be seen, tombs, pyramids, and monuments occupy the place of death and perform it in its stead. The tomb substitutes for death and stages it. So long as death is the sole means of guaranteeing continuity, architecture becomes continuity’s greatest enemy. By introducing a third term, Hollier rightly grasps Bataille’s de-sublimating view that any pursuit of synthesis ultimately yields to idealism by stripping matter of its living state. Michel Leiris expresses the difficulty of a non-dialectical, low materialism in the following words: “It is no easy task to keep what is low in a fallen state […] nothing can be dismissed as merely ugly or disgusting; even shit is beautiful.”

If only the bones that remain after defleshing endure decay and persist, then architecture is always the act of erecting such a skeleton. Yet as Negarestani’s theory of rot shows, there is a damp, un-dried state that indefinitely interrupts defleshing, weathering, and petrification. Continuity, therefore, must be imagined otherwise.

A second hint may come from Roger Caillois’s reflections on insect mimicry. In Korea Caillois is often introduced mainly in relation to play theory or game theory, which makes this dimension of his work seem less familiar. But in the 1930s it was highly unusual, even reactionary, for ethology to reject survivalist explanations and entertain the idea that mimicry aims at nothing beyond itself. In “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,” Caillois writes: “The individual breaks the boundary of his own skin and takes over the sensations of the other. He comes to see himself from the standpoint of any given space whatsoever […] He no longer resembles something, he simply is similar.” The moment we refuse to believe that the astonishing mimicry of insects serves mere survival, the surrealist’s challenge to Darwinism begins.

But what about militarized mimicry? This connects to a host of problems. The modern, urban taqiyya that Cyclonopedia proposes can be read as a story about such camouflage. In order for the terrorist to lie in wait as a continuum indistinguishable from civilians, the head of the infidel is required. Taqiyya anticipates continuity between individuals not through death but through “double betrayal”:

“Modern taqiyya transforms into the practice of concealing one’s own belief by adopting the beliefs and practices of others, thereby inducing the enemy’s society at large to overreact paranoically in its attempts to locate the true believers among its members. […] The principle of taqiyya and jihad turns civilians into ambiguous allies, which proves worse than the enemy itself.”

Negarestani, however, deftly avoids defining the subject as the reflection of the Other’s image. For any organism, “the Other already exists as a permanent and inseverable part.” In any case, the Bataillean communication model that presupposes a relation of identity between communication and violence seems to remain intact. Precisely because any attempt to describe such communication can itself only be staged as a form of violence, it is difficult to convert the model into practical motivation. It is here that I truly resonate with the “need to amplify fiction”: I began to think that this might provide a possible way out of the cul-de-sac in which we circle endlessly around the problem of the violence of representation and the representation of violence.

At this point, I would like to move, as the translator suggests, to the “utility of horror fiction.” Lovecraftians enjoy mocking humans’ search for plausibility, but that is a slightly different issue from the fact that what is implausible and surreal in one context can be entirely plausible and realistic in another. When Sarah Kane’s brutal play Blasted was first staged at the Royal Court, critics attacked it less for its horror and terror than for its inconsistency and implausibility. I was struck by the fact that Joanna Russ’s theory of horror, as cited in the afterword to the Korean translation of Cyclonopedia, takes the form of a conditional sentence: “If there were a perfect world in which I did not need to be a feminist or a queer activist, I would want to spend the rest of my life there talking about Lovecraft stories.”

In a theater where time is limited—indeed, in most spaces where communication is performed—“blowing up” the theater and the audience in order to externalize the interior is a time-honored method. And if it has truly been blown up, if communication has really taken place, then it would be an “impossible community,” like the one Blanchot recollects in speaking of the headless secret society. When no model of a possible and functioning community is available, the impossible is easily imagined as a kind of ecstasy. But it may be that it has simply been kept secret because it is too filthy and repulsive. Perhaps it is an impossible community, not because we cannot imagine what happens within it, but because we do not wish to imagine it.

If one did not need to be an activist, one might devote oneself to imagining—or even partially realizing—such a vile impossible community. Yet in the face of the ugliness of reality, the impossible ceases to be the explosion of rationality and instead becomes the world in which basic rationality is still in force. I know that I need a rational world in order to preserve my life, and yet I live with the sinister desire that, inwardly, I want it to explode. I wander this indecisive forest path, ruminating in essayistic fashion, practicing the art of stealth in hopes of an explosion, wishing for a lucky mis-surfacing, only to return to the beginning. Perhaps this is the architecture of the indecisive labyrinth, the architecture of an atypical encyclopedia.

Is the writer of an encyclopedia able to stand outside the dictionary, or is that like the barber’s paradox? After rewriting his theory of rot, Negarestani begins to construct and design by harnessing the impossibility of death itself. He describes in the greatest possible detail what remains after death, from the perspective of “an infinitesimal persistence that approaches zero infinitely but never effectively becomes zero.” He understands that the heterogeneity Bataille sought may in fact be a form of disguised sameness, a continuity under the modern conditions of camouflage that, at best, requires the presence of the prostitute in order for a theory of gift to stand, and that rests upon anthropomorphic preconceptions about animal existence. In our present, such a framework is useless. What matters, I think, is how these premises have been transformed and how they persist, and how we might “rudely” recycle their underlying logic.

Since Formless is a book published as an exhibition catalogue, I would like to conclude with the two artists who appear in the entry “Threshhole” under T. Throughout the book, Bois contrasts the weight that architecture carries in the work of Robert Smithson—known for his so-called site-specific Land Art—and that of Gordon Matta-Clark, who died at the age of thirty-five. His point is that if Smithson generated entropy in order to deal with the entropy produced by architecture, Matta-Clark treated architecture itself as garbage. Trained as an architecture student, Matta-Clark began by imitating Smithson. But unlike Smithson, he had a “bill to settle” with architecture. Consequently his interest in architecture was not temporary, as Smithson’s was, and he could not be satisfied with the sort of patchwork that elevates into public discourse the private schoolboy jokes one senses in Smithson’s work.

In the end, Matta-Clark began cutting holes into abandoned buildings. To his eyes, economically useless plots of land put up for auction were already holes in themselves, requiring no further perforation, and junk was already architecture. / July 2021