The Book That Reads Oil Back

In 2008, at the height of the War on Terror, a small press in Melbourne published a book about the Middle East written in English by a young Iranian philosopher. The press, re.press, was known for open-access continental theory, not current affairs. The book was Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials, and its opening move was to reject the shared premise of everything else written about the region. The war, it proposed, was not about oil. The oil was telling the war.

Cyclonopedia presents itself as the recovered manuscript of Dr. Hamid Parsani, a Persian archaeologist who vanishes under unclear circumstances, leaving behind a dossier that mixes real scholarship with invented scholarship until the seams stop mattering. Archaeology collides with Islamic theology, occult demonology, nomadic war tactics, and the logistics of petroleum extraction. Oil appears under a string of names that no energy minister would recognize: Tellurian lube, hydrocarbon corpse juice, pipeline crawler, narrative lubricant. The Middle East itself is treated as a living being, a sentient body whose anatomy runs through dust, holes, and crude.

Strip away the horror idiom and a serious argument remains. The standard accounts of the region, from oil-security primers to campaign memoirs, all treat petroleum as inert stuff that states compete over. Negarestani's counterproposal is that the oil organizes the competition. It finances the war it invites, selects the alliances, draws the maps, and writes the evening news. Every serious person concedes the metaphor and then refuses to follow it anywhere. Cyclonopedia follows it for two hundred pages, on the theory that a metaphor carried further than its owners intended will sometimes arrive at places the sober literature cannot reach. Call it a model with the sign flipped: instead of explaining the war by the oil, explain the oil by granting it agency and watching what it does.

Negarestani was born in Shiraz in 1977 and came up through the theory internet of the 2000s, in the orbit of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, the Warwick collective whose most durable coinage was hyperstition. A hyperstition is a semiotic production that makes itself real: a fiction that behaves like a position in the market, believed hard enough that it calls its own conditions into being. The idea sounds exotic until you notice that it is the operating assumption behind every currency peg and every campaign that wins by first describing its victory. Cyclonopedia is the concept's showcase. It is a fiction about the way fictions about the Middle East hardened into policy, and it refuses on principle to say where its own scholarship ends and its invention begins, because its subject is exactly that refusal, practiced at scale by governments.

The reception was improbable and real. China Mieville, Graham Harman, and Nick Land supplied blurbs; Harman compared reading him to being converted to Islam by Salvador Dali, and Land's line, that Islam is to Negarestani what Marxism is to Bataille, either sells you immediately or saves you the trouble. Artforum named Cyclonopedia one of the best books of 2009. In 2011, faculty at Brooklyn College and the New School convened a symposium on it, published by punctum books as Leper Creativity. In 2012 his collaboration with the composer Florian Hecker appeared at dOCUMENTA (13). Negarestani himself then walked away from the genre he had made: his 2018 book Intelligence and Spirit is an austere functionalist treatise on intelligence, about as far from demonology as philosophy gets. The author moved on. The book did not. Artists keep returning to it; the audio-visual performance nine-sum sorcery, built directly on its vocabulary, toured years after publication.

The reason it lasts is that the world moved toward it. In 2008 the claim that fictions make themselves real was a provocation aimed at seminar rooms. In 2026 it is the daily brief. Narrative warfare is doctrine. Meme-driven markets reprice companies in an afternoon. Conspiracy frameworks are governing coalitions. The institutions that manage information for a living now assume, as a matter of routine, that stories call realities into being. Cyclonopedia said this about the most consequential region on earth while the bombs were still falling, and it said it in the only register that fit: a ghost story with footnotes. What looked like an elaborate joke about scholarship was a wager that the official accounts were fictions too, just timid ones that refused to admit their genre.

There is a temptation, writing about a book like this, to crown it. To call it the strangest or the most prophetic or the only honest book about the Middle East. The publisher calls it the first horror and science fiction book to come out of the region, which is their claim to make. The safer and more interesting observation is about method. Cyclonopedia does not ask anyone to believe that oil is alive. It asks something harder to dismiss: that the categories were the fiction, that commodity, region, and resource war were the filing system the serious people brought to the desert. The people paid to be right about the Middle East arrived with spreadsheets and were surprised by a dust storm. Negarestani arrived with a Ouija board and got closer to the weather. That is the case for theory-fiction, and underneath it the older case against hubris: when the world declines to behave like your model, the first thing to examine is the instrument, and the second is your certainty that the instrument is neutral.

Sources:

• re.press, "Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials" (publisher page, 2008), for publication facts and the blurbs quoted. (https://re-press.org/title/cyclonopedia-complicity-with-anonymous-materials/)

• Wikipedia, "Reza Negarestani", for the biography (born Shiraz, 1977), the Artforum best-books-of-2009 citation, the dOCUMENTA (13) collaboration, and the bibliography through Intelligence and Spirit (2018). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reza_Negarestani)

• Hyperstition, "Polytics" (June 7, 2004), for the CCRU-era definitions of hyperstition as semiotic productions that make themselves real. (http://hyperstition.abstractdynamics.org/archives/006777.html)

• FACT Magazine, "LABOUR Presents: nine-sum sorcery, Part One" (August 28, 2020), for the reading of oil as a sentient being and the book's vocabulary of pipeline crawlers and Tellurian lube. (https://www.factmag.com/2020/08/28/labour-presents-nine-sum-sorcery-part-one/)

• Project MUSE, "Leper Creativity: Cyclonopedia Symposium" (punctum books), for the 2011 Brooklyn College and New School symposium. (https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/319/oa_monograph/book/76420)