complicity with anonymous materials

Other Endings

by Nick Land

This compilation of Reza Negarestani's writings is made available to an international audience at a moment in history when the Orientalist taboo, having only recently consolidated its mastery over discussions of Near-Eastern culture and politics, has been propelled by events into spectacular – and almost certainly lethal – convulsions. Negarestani's name, pre-occupations and matrix of socio-historical emergence can only further inflame this situation. He arrives as a tourist in hell "carrying a jerry-can of gasoline."

Negarestani's first, perhaps even preliminary, provocation is his complete indifference to the Orientalist role, with its appeal to deferential political correctness or any other morbid spiritual masochism of distinctively Christian cast. He entirely, and with the utmost casualness, disdains the platform of 'the Other'. His 'otherness' - while allowing partial and complex identifications - is not a marker of identity politics, less still a token of victimological credibility, nor even a sustainable category. It is an otherness situated beyond the threshold of a gate – of multiple gates – opened by meticulously selected words from a wide variety of sources and tongues, invoked by a dark cacophony of terrible and incoherent names. Even to speak of it – of them – in such terms, in such a context, is to cling to a position framed by an already devastated project of domestication, for purposes that are strictly pedagogical and evanescent. Better by far – or worse beyond imagination – to have already forgotten 'the Other' and be shifted into the dazzling rigorous obscurities of the Thing, the Blob, the Z-crowd, Mistmare, GAS, Anonymous-until-Now with its disease-drenched tails and Druj, Mother of Abominations.

From a certain perspective – an ultimately untenable one – what occurs in these writings is indistinguishable from a systematic confusion of boundaries, with the outside perpetually re-encountered on the inside, an inside that has always come from without. The very prospect of appropriate positioning undergoes prolonged, elaborate analysis, in order to demonstrate its essential inadequacy and ineliminable insecurity. The outside has already and ultimately taken over, and what remains - the relics and ruins meticulously unearthed by Negarestani the archaeologist, ethno-historian and excavator (for he is all these things too) – are testaments to a comprehensive pan-cultural catastrophe, leaving only violently decentralized 'polytics' in its wake.

Western readers can expect their peculiarly schizoid condition to be "butchered open" by this work. At once desensitized to visceral multiplicity by the 'Nietzschean' desecration of the Christian God's corpse, and simultaneously prostrated before strange gods - intimidated by the conspiracy of piety woven between Western multiculturalism and Islamist bombast - they are likely to find nothing in Negarestani so shocking as the Islamic apostasy of his writings, an apostasy which is itself virulently, profoundly and anomalously Islamic, without the comfort of distantiation, bypassing every impulse towards mere rejection and instead taking the form of an absolute intellectual radicality, exposing an Islam which no longer tolerates cultural conformity because it has been stripped down to a cosmic-historic event. These writings are neither Islamist not anti-Islamic, but rather hyper-Islamic or trans-Islamic, decoded from an ulteriority that neither politically and culturally instantiable Islam nor any determinable alternative to Islam can ever make its own. More distressing still, this orthodoxy to the point of black howling blasphemy feeds a pathos of long-lost and perhaps never consistently attained comedy, an understated comedic register of corrosive epistemological vitriol.

Consider a grotesquely reductive, violent, comic yet still suggestive thesis: Islam is to Negarestani what Marxism is to Bataille. Everything is gathered at the brink of a limit, enveloped by a totalization of unsurpassable subtlety and comprehensiveness, within which every guile and stratagem of history finds itself anticipated, drained utterly of implication and potentiality. Yet this absolute absorption, this theomorphic black-hole, nevertheless receives only the most tangential – even mocking – attention, not only because it is assumed, pre-integrated (true otherness at last!), but far more significantly because 'everything' happens beyond the limit, returns from beyond the limit, as inappropriable yet operative excess overflowing the Omega-configuration of Being. This is the double register continuously in play in Negarestani's texts, a doubling that incarnates Shi'a 'taqqiya' ("Islamic hypercamouflage") across all conceptual and thematic domains, as a simulacrum of "concrete nomadism." It can easily be missed, since everything is restored, almost unchanged, except for a sinister, nebulous, ultra-conceptual and sub-psychological insinuation. What previously enjoyed the unchallenged authority of elementary fact now transpires as puppetry, rhythmically jolted by the reverberations of accomplished apocalypse – a formulation which itself remains comically misleading unless the dramaturgy of revelation is itself glimpsed askance, as if from the other side, staged out of the unimaginable.

Communist futurology has become merely ridiculous and in doing so it has ceased to be comic. If anything it has become more frightening to those who most ardently revile it, precisely because – as a refuge of enraged impossibilism – it no longer indicates anything beyond itself. From being the anticipated limit of social possibility, communism has decayed into the impossible, thus appropriating the implacable nihilistic rage that is eternally allied with impossibility. As an indefensible position, it has become unassailable. Unbound from the vulnerability of the real, it persists only as a testament to the abstract negation it once disdained.

The fact that the virtual Caliphate organizing global Islamist agitation could so easily succumb to the same fatality, invested by the same forces – often exactly and empirically the same forces – of grim negativity, serving only to consolidate the dutiful vigilance of its opponents, makes the Negarestani intervention exceptionally important. One might easily, although ironically say 'uniquely' important. It is precisely by re-polarizing this fatality, approaching it – more precisely emerging from it – with an unprecedented seriousness that is indistinguishable from the black excess of an extreme, posthuman comedy, that it becomes entirely consistent with the "holocaust of freedom" of the Cthulhu cults. A world enthralled by Islam, even, or especially, in its animosity, is freed into the timeless nightmare of the 'Qiyamah' or Islamic Apocalypse, where unity finds its consummate condensation and critical perfection, simultaneously combusting into a pestilential redistribution of heretical disorder and eternally unassimilable contagion.

Encountering these intimations of diffuse shape without form or substance, strangers even to God, filtering unimpeded through curtains that closed for ever upon the end of the world, there is every opportunity for bafflement and exultation, for slowly unfolding ethnographic enlightenment and for sudden, vertiginous descents into unillumined chasms of sacred horror. But most of all, at least, most consistently, there is relief from the suffocating pieties of our age – in all its dimensions – and for a peculiar delight that is only to be found in the midst of unexpected extravagances of utter incorrectness.

Read Negarestani, and pray ...

Edited by blinkandwheeze (Feb. 11, 2012 09:52:10)

In favor of Islamic Apocalypse: an overseas coup d’état against caliphs’ militarism

The thrilling apogee of liberation: All endeavors of Western democracy and American liberalism in particular extricate the leering head of Islamic Apocalypse (Qiyamah) from the repressed heart of caliphate-restrained Islamic militarism instead of emancipating what rapidly grows as Umma, the oppressed crowds of Muslims.

It is more than 1250 years that what can be ambiguously defined as Islamic militarism has been forked to two contradictory but essentially entangled military threads, one with a semi-organized and exposed military power, and a twisted obsession with the West and Western infidelity, an obsession whose occasionally utopian rage converges upon the crusade from another side of monotheism; the other one is headless, without face, omnipresent, silent and enshrouded in the recesses of the legitimated Islamic heresies where the reign of caliphs does not exist; it is motivated by a self-devastating zeal in immortalizing itself as the last religion – the sole opening to the glorious encounter with the all-consuming generosity of Qiyamah (Islamic Apocalypse) and its Desert. But since the outer surface of Islam is confined and mainly governed by the caliphs-like Order whose seemingly corrupt and precarious existence is actually a protective layer for the fragile outer world, this clandestine devotee of Qiyamah has to tear this obstacle and shield apart to submit the outside world in its self-immolating path towards Qiyamah. Not sufficiently awake to notice this ramification of the Islamic militarism after hundreds of years mainly because of being in a distracting and grueling crusading exchange with the outer layer of Islamic militarism or the caliphs-like order of Islam, Western capitalism has blindly begun to topple, undermine and threaten the existence of this caliphate-dominated sphere whose role is protecting the outer world from an inner threat not the other way around. This caliphate-dominated sphere is mostly populated by the Sunnis and other Islamic revivalists whose inclinations move in the direction of past, a vitalized, empowered, anti-infidel Islam but without the unspeakable fury of the Islamic Apocalypse. Once this protective layer is deteriorated, the legion of Qiyamah – restricted by caliphate order – will pour toward the outer world and fulfill the apocalyptic task always repressed by the conservative but alert caliphs and Islamic revivalist working positively to hinder the Islamic Apocalypse on the one hand and acting retrogradely in the sense of Islamic acceleration toward the complete unfolding of itself as the Last Religion on the other hand.

If the Sunnite order has always been revivalist even from the dawn of Islam with a morbid fascination in blooming Islam not yet inflamed by the doctrine of Qiyamah, Shia flourished the religions-ending scenario of Islam and its campaign in the Desert of Qiyamah alarmingly fast. With an extreme hatred mixed with a manipulative calculation towards the reign of caliphs, Shia soon spread a military network marked by secrecy, misuse, decentralization and lack of detectable formation whose speed and passion was and is still guaranteed by its fervent progress through the chain of Imams to the point that the last omnipresent yet absent Imam of Shia is taken as the ever-fighting human counterpart of Qiyamah (the Islamic Apocalypse) itself. While the Sunnite brotherhood heads for the harmless past, the time of exporting Islam and eradicating idolatry, Shia’s strategic militarism leads everyone and everything – no matter if they have united with Islam, Infidels or Pagans – towards a future not built upon the past but the suspension of time where Qiyamah awaits on the growing chain of Imams. West has mistaken Shia Imams with saints, fundamentalists or the Shia twins of caliphs; but Imams are the gradient of Islamic Qiyamah, they do not lead to each other, they merely pass and convey the Islamic Qiyamah. Beguiled by conventional strains of monotheism, Western capitalism can only perceive Shia’s enthusiasm for Qiyamah as a furiously evangelistic version of the Kingdom comes but Shia Apocalypticism has been built upon secularism thus it lacks the romantic passion of evangelism; its cold and strategic nature makes it a perfect vehicle for submission to the Desert of Allah whose Being will never be revealed to man, a pure exteriority which extinguishes all traces of heroic evangelism. Looking at the decentralized and deeply meshed clandestine army of Jihad, the technocapitalist hegemony blinded by the localized anti-infidel spectacles never suspected if these military activities really correspond to the Sunnite revivalist and molar caliphs’ militarism or a fluid militarism of an entirely different kind seething behind the exotic surface of Islam. Misguided by its wrong impressions of Islam and the distracting spectacles, America and its allies struck hard at the heart of caliphate crowds, regimes and everything connected with Islamic revivalism; they even ignored the suspiciously inept reactions and impotency of caliphs-militarism in War on Terror, and finally let the inner space of Islam pass and erupt through the caliphs’ safeguard, a gate protected more than 1000 years vigilantly, faithfully.

Bestowing western democracy upon Shia crowds in Iraq turned the ultimate western democracy into a democracy for reaching the Islamic Apocalypticism, a democracy prerequisite for Iraqi Shias joining their neighboring Shia country and blending within the strategic militarism of Islam; the liberation of the Shia population from the oppression of a caliphs-like regime in Iraq was nothing but the first major step in liberating the Islamic Qiyamah, the ultimate desert, not by ragtag armies of Muslims but by perfectly armed forces of the US and its allies.

Pour more Shias into the countries liberated by the West. More and faster before the Sunnite shield is entirely consumed and the Islam’s true form of militarism exposed, before we run out of our revivalist brethren.

Edited by blinkandwheeze (Feb. 11, 2012 04:47:43)

From my conversation with Mehrdad Iravanian, Iranian architect, winner of international stone architecture, Italy-2002, together with Mario Botta. The conversation is originally in English. I've skipped my long questions and responses (one of which is Pestis Solidus article at Maraka Project) in the following text. The subject is 'landscaping automobile, human system, prosthesis and crash.'



Toward the Fatal Composition

By Mehrdad Iravanian

The Moulds dominate the history of architecture. Artificial solids have become more important than the space they create. This hegemony of mould is the natural result of our visual ability and literacy (actual disability and illitracy). The environment lives in the invisible side of NEGATRIUM.


1. AUTOMOBILE

Automobile is a building with an instable volume of negatrium. It always captures (when acting functionally) new locations, occupying new immediacy. It has a sense more than transparency. It is a devouring creature consuming space without trace: a matter of memory of location; an anti historical attitude. An automobile gives a sense of invisible entity that is very difficult to follow. it is a building; similar to caves that reminds me of the silence of a crashed car. A halted phenomenon gaining a new form by concentration or deformation of an original cliché form, which may be called, altered.

Automobiles are the magnetite volumes; last of a group loyal to Cartesian coordination attached to a determined surface for following an objective: a known limited random movement, in other word a limited autonomy presented by environment as an affordable media. They are relevant to surface but ironically the host should not create a stable situation but rather a repulsive one; so an automobile becomes volatile matter for immediacy.

The so-called force dynamic border is the actual property of an automobile. The whole existence of automobile is mobility; other than that it is a mere composition: an alienated building with minimum of border with despotic surface. When dynamic border forced to be a statical one under none of the discussed condition by ... the objectivity of an automobile gains a new dimension more or less statical or rather obstacle one; then what is an automobile, when it is not there; and if it is, it is a forceful bad chemistry of different materials trying to create an image of peaceful coexistence. Add to this, live pulse of human system which always is avoiding the cold metallic surface in quest of animal imitated substitute: leather, a semi-matrix for adaptation to environment. There are always a mediator between two concepts, man and machine: the part.

When act of touching happens the unity of matter will start; the coexistence of physics, one concave, the other convex (considering the complexity of their behavioural pattern). Concavity is the nature of machine; an incompleteness of dimension; always extendable by means of vomiting or devouring a capacity totally differentiated from its physic. Human, the key, gas, liquid, air are parts of convex of context. Human is a part of the contextual composition; the bad chemistry between dead position and liveware. A moment later the separation begins that ends up to objectivity of one: the movement of concave, the release of convex.


2. What is the most similar building to Automobile?

A vast parking lot, the land of minimum connection; fills with mere compositions. Neighbourhoods is not an appropriate term for such arrangement; there is no sense of neighbouring. The volatile dead machine loses its place and disappear; soon it replaces with another object. In a short period of time many factor changes: colour, size, shining capacity, elements of reflection, voice tone, when they gain their objectivity and after that lose their raum. More or less a parking lot reminds me of a time-accelerated city with rapid changing obstacle-moulds (a full scale intolerable prostheses -a palinode to last pieces); a stronghold that relay on volatile condition: automobiles can’t produce images of a building since they edited to be mobile and when they stop and lose their function it seem they are unwanted-object and not appropriate for dwelling. They are fine elements for wasteland; the replica of stability in an accelerated dimension.

3. AUTOMOBILE AND PROSTHESIS

I would say automobile is a primitive prosthesis with regard to its relevancy to a tensile, aged, handcrafted surface, on which it rolls on - limitation of flexural members for rapid dislocation and loss of its property as soon as it stops. I rather Consider boats a mere sophisticated media. They are always at slant (slope) status (when they slide on a surface). The crystal groundless under it has a opulent inter-dimensional identity. Penetrative volumes with a complex velocity. There is no sudden breakage of movement. The boat can penetrate two media in one time (water and air). We experience the same thing when we stop the car at a gas station to fill in the tank.

The car dies, the inter-course starts. In one moment there is a liquid connection between Stage set and dead composition.

We can’t experience new space with our limited sense of infiltration. This is one of those underground movements that hide from daily obvious experience.

But a search for a real plug-In definition actually happens in driving cinema.

Driving cinema IS more or less like parking lots, but with a linkage of common information between members. So the definition is close to a city, it’s not an accelerated in time but rather information:
The automobile dies. The voice plugs in: information for decoding the picture. Then what kind of prosthesis the automobile is? When it is static and mere composition and lots of movement happening in front of screen and the user is linked with a cable and having the same experience at the same time as the others.

4. AUTOMOBILE, CRASH AND HUMAN: How do you consider the architectural sphere of a human system in a car crash?

I think I have been pushed to the '- without organ' manifestation of a final episode. What actually happening is two parallel volumes move inside the set, all inside each other and surfacing each other; for ground and background, even though different systems moving toward final composition (fatal composition). All balance forces turning to a drastic change: the systolic and diastolic forces at the same time of crash changing the relation between two moulds and final shape negatriums. This situation reminds me an oriental sculptor who carves his sculpture inside sculpture (maybe several of them); the autonomy of form inside form inside form, but some how untouchable. For visual realization, there is a craving for destruction: step by step. Each step a crash: loss of total primary form, achieving the reminder; And again and again. Finally the product is memory and segment. The segment is still the perfect form even if it is assembled or carved out of surrounding, and by itself it is an identical matter. Are we going toward breaking the other shells and touching the inner system?



CRASH: FIRST EPISODE: THE VOLUME
The matter of disposition of volume. What we call natural relations or positions are subjected to change. A crash is new relationships of mould's surfaces. The negatrium experiences sudden closure, seismic movement; a type of shock of uncertainty that prevents accuracy, silence, and statical calculation. Moments later the disposition can be measured: volume inside volume inside volume.

THE CAR, THE HUMAN, THE LANDSCAPE


CRASH: SECOND EPISODE: THE COLOUR
The primary tasks of colour in crash is negation of system borders, even if the volume reminds as Programmed ............. The representative of containers will loose its shape in a very expressionistic manner, creating flattened volume, a very geometric polygon or island: sum of whole, the oil, the gas, the blood. Black-stain-red.

There is some sign of dwelling after crash: the relation we are trying to establish as outside / inside, and distinction between memory and present.


5. CRASH

Crash is a final stage of producing chain. The realization of exaggerated components and departments. Somehow, it seems the crash product is an error or contradictory to the established aim since it can’t fulfil the primary program but the object is capable of reprogramming according to the new status. It’s not an automobile (as soon as it stops running) but rather a composition of elements. We usually reprogramming the buildings ....A crashed car is under the title of rehabilitation ; it means a program after an actual event. The architectural analysis of the car totally depends on the type of crash and consequently the type of product that comes out of the crash.
When I am pointing to the crash as an entity, I compare the matter with the relativity theory and the subject of an observational entity which is based on coincidence of two or more point-objects at a particular instance of time. Somehow these definitions remind me of the effective and necessary elements for happening the so-called crash; that is time, space, points, line, and surfaces collide in a very particular and exclusive manner which (by present dimension of analytical ability counted obscure and untraceable) contributes a unique behaviour each single time to a crash object’s elements. After a crash many dynamic element appear that won’t follow the known linear movement; so many parts broken and live in a suspense situation that can move naturally by means of turbulence. So the crash is not the end of flexural movement but could be the beginning of different types of none linear operations (operandum).

An automobile can’t impose any location prior to that moment. It loses its linear movement. As soon as it stops, it’s not more than a crash machine: a mere composition that can simulate a building, a hole, a cave, an anchor object.

Iranian account of Gog-Magog Axis
By RN

Recorded History. Masonry in Iran began its activities in the mid 1850s-early 1860s with the formation of an unaffiliated, unofficial lodge of Faramoosh Khaneh, a puzzling word means ‘The House of Oblivion’ (this Persian term coined for Masonry in the late 18th century India). It was founded by Mirza Malkom Khan Nazem-al-Dawla, an enigmatic reformist with secret connections with Russia and Britain. At the first steps, Faramoosh Khaneh tried to attract the most influential political figures especially Qajar princes.

Later, the lodge was re-established as the Lodge of Biedaari by one of Malkom Khan’s disciples, and played an important role in (especially against) the Constitutionalist Revolution in 1907 as well as the economic / military / cultural poverty of Qajar dynasty (there are many documents that the British presumably regarded the Masonic link to the Qajar princes as potentially useful if it ever proved necessary to use them as a means of pressure on the Persian reformist government).

According to documents: “it is no exaggeration to speak of a Masonic network, linked to the French Grand Orient, having come into being among Persian diplomats in Europe during the second half of the 19th century; the Masonic lodges provided a venue where they could congregate with European statesmen as well as with each other. A second ambassadorial initiation into the lodge Sinceàre Amitie‚ took place on 28 February 1860. Those initiated on this occasion were the ambassador, Hasan-Al Khan (later ambassador in Istanbul), Mirza Sadeq Auqa, and Nazar Auqa (later himself to become ambassador to France). The initiation of Mirza Farrokò Khan two years earlier was recalled, and his devotion to Freemasonry praised as inspiring his contribution to the regeneration Persia was allegedly undergoing "through impregnating itself with the spirit and genius of France" (Bulletin du Grand Orient de France 15, 6850 (=1860), pp. 396-97). From this statement can be derived the conclusion that the motive underlying the French propagation of Freemasonry among Persian diplomats was not so much political as cultural, an expression of the megalomaniacal mission civilisatrice that was proclaimed by both imperial and republican France. (Le Monde maçonnique 15, 1873, pp. 174-81)”

However, I should add the first Masonry Lodge in Iran was not connected to any European lodges ... it was totally unaffiliated; even it had its own ranks; when people accused Malkom Khan of subverting Islam and Shia, and characterized the Lodge for its dark secrecy, he explained, this was precisely because prudential concealment (ketman) is a well-established principle of Shia religion in Islam, and the goal of masonry was nothing other than establishing fraternity among the believers (the goal of Shia).

During Pahlavi dynasty, however, the Lodge was transformed to Homayuni Lodge received direct orders from Shah and Pahlavi family. Esmaiel Aien in his superbly documented book (in three volumes) discusses how the Lodge played one of the main roles against Mohammad Mosadegh’s government. (Iran’s prime minister who canceled all oil contracts with Britain and nationalized oil production).

There are so many details and documents around Masonic movements in Iran, especially after the publication of Aien’s controversial work entitled ‘Faramoosh Khaneh and Freemasonry in Iran’. Apart from historic documents on Masonic secret missions in Iran, and how they strengthen the rise of some of the most problematic sects in Shia religion (after the revolution, this was the main reason that the Islamic government chased down, banished and imprisoned Masonic figures) to undermine the foundations of Shia in Iran, there is also another approach to Masonic conspiracies in Iran especially discussed by Shia Islamists and it returns to Shia interpretations of Quran and Hadith; in Surah Al-Naml (The Ant), the lineaments of Masonic Fraternity correspond with the secret missions of The Brotherhood of Nine (Brethren of the Craft?) whose murders, conspiracies and perjuries destroyed the once rich and prosperous city of Tahmud. In Hadith the Masonic characteristics correspond with Dajjal who disguises as the Christ and the righteous ones, and Gog-Magog conspiracies for spreading darkness and annihilating humanity.

* * *
Apocalyptic bonds between Masonic conspiracies,
The Brotherhood of Nine and Gog-Magog conspiracy of the Apocalypse:


Tes’a -- Noh -- Nine
The Brotherhood of Nine as narrated in Al-Naml was actually secret groups consisting of 9 members. Also, Masonic rituals are commonly performed by 9 elected Knights who use nine roses, nine lights, and nine knocks in the ritual. The number 9 is possibly the most insistent number in Islam, recurrently ciphering events as well as bonding the critical figures and events to each other. The Arabic letter Toin or (Ta) is the 16th character in Arabic alphabet but in Abjad system (1), Ta is the 9th letter with numerical value equal to 9. Ta is also among the Horoof-e (letters) Muqattaat which are used as the opening verses of 29 chapters in Quran. According to Abjad system, 9 is the highest number which is also the numerical value of Ta. There are many numerological discussions around Ta and 9 among which, I can point to:

Actually 4 chapters of Quran start with letter Ta and in each of these chapters the first person introduced is Musa (Moses); In Al-Naml (the Sura which also narrates the story of the Brotherhood of Nine):

“Now put your hand into your bosom and it will come forth white without stain (or harm): (these are) among the NINE Signs (you will take) to Pharaoh and his people: for they are a people rebellious in transgression.” (Quran: Al-Naml, chapter 27)

: Nine (= Ta) signs were given to Moses for taking to Pharaoh. Also, the first occurrence of the letter Ta as a Muqattaat Letter is in Chapter 20. Looking at chapter 20, the first mention of Musa is in verse 9 (=Ta). Where did Musa go in pursuit of the fire in Chapter 20? The sacred valley of Tuwa: Ta + Hamza (A Letter which stands for Musa).
Al-Naml or Chapter 27 (2+7 = 9)
Creation according to Quran has 9 signs and 9 stages.

1 Wet earth
2 Drop
3 Clot
4 Lump
5 Bones
6 Flesh
7 Another Creation
8 Death
9 Resurrection

As you see, 9 (= Ta) is the resurrection or the sign of Qyiamah (Ghiamat or universal awakening) or Islamic Apocalypse.

Mohammad has the numerical value of 92 (92 according to Abjad is Ta + Be or the word Teb meaning CURE for human illnesses. Also other names for Mohammad suggested in Quran start with the letter Ta (= 9).

And only 99 names of Allah have been revealed to Man.

Other cool aspects of 9 (according to Gematria and Mayan Tzolkin matrix): for investigating 9 as the key number see ‘END TIMES Alphanumerics’ (highly recommended) at http://hometown.aol.com/codeufo/endtimes_1.html (check other pages as well).



* * *


Gog and Magog Axis
The story of Gog and Magog (or Yajooj and Majooj according to Quran) in Quran:

(18:93) When he reached the valley between two palisades, he found people whose language was barely understandable.
(18:94) They said, "O Zul-Qarnain, Gog and Magog (Yajooj and Majooj) are corruptors of the earth. Can we pay you to create a barrier between us and them?"
(18:95) He said, "My Lord has given me great bounties. If you cooperate with me, I will build a dam between you and them.
(18:96) "Bring to me masses of iron." Once he filled the gap between the two palisades, he said, "Blow." Once it was red hot, he said, "Help me pour tar on top of it."
(18:97) Thus, they could not climb it, nor could they bore holes in it.
(18:98) He said, "This is mercy from my Lord. When the prophecy of my Lord comes to pass, He will cause the dam to crumble. The prophecy of my Lord is truth."
(18:99) At that time, we will let them invade with one another, then the horn will be blown, and we will summon them all together.

(Note: Zul-Qarnain; most of Islamic interpretation consider Zul-Qarnain as Cyrus, the Persian King, founder of Achaemenid dynasty.)

Following Hadith, Islamists frequently connect Gog-Magog to Dajjal and The Brotherhood of Nine who will join the Apocalypse for eradicating humanity from the Earth. In Islamic Conspiracy, Gog and Magog are supported by Masonic movements.

Ibn Khatir in his work Al-Bidayah wa'l-Nihayah (The Beginning and the End) writes:

“Gog and Magog are two groups of Turks, descended from Yafith (Japheth), the father of the Turks, one of the sons of Noah. At the time of Abraham, peace be on him, there was a king called Dhu'l-Qarnayn. He performed Tawaf around the Ka'bah with Abraham, peace be on him, when he first built it; he believed and followed him. Dhu'l-Qarnayn was a good man and a great king; Allah gave him great power and he ruled the east and west. He held sway over all kings and countries, and travelled far and wide in both east and west. He travelled eastwards until he reached a pass between two mountains, through which people were coming out. They did not understand anything, because they were so isolated; they were Gog and Magog. They were spreading corruption through the earth, and harming the people, so the people sought help from Dhu'l Qarnayn. They asked him to build a barrier between them and Gog and Magog. He asked them to help him to build it, so together they built a barrier by mixing iron, copper and tar.

Thus Dhu'l-Qarnayn restrained Gog and Magog behind the barrier. They tried to penetrate the barrier, or to climb over it, but to no avail. They could not succeed because the barrier is so huge and smooth. They began to dig and they have been digging for centuries; they will continue to do so until the time when Allah decrees that they come out. At that time the barrier will collapse, and Gog and Magog will rush out in all directions, spreading corruption, uprooting plants, killing people. When Jesus, peace be on him, prays against them, Allah will send a kind of worm which kill them.”

(Note: The Worm(s) as a Savior is one of the signs of Qiyamah (or Islamic Apocalypse); compare it with the Nemats (the huge Gluttonous worms at the temple of Moloch / Molekh / Malec; or the worms / nemats germinated on Zahak’s shoulders)

In prophecies of Ezekiel (chapters 38-39) Gog is addressed as the prince of Rosh (Russia), rising from the north with the support of many nations and invade "the mountains of Israel", spreading out "like a cloud that covers the land".

In later interpretations Gog and Magog are considered as Khazar Jews. Ibn Khatir also, writes: Yajooj and Majooj (Gog and Magog) are the people who traditionally inhabited the area between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea: the Khazar Kingdom.

(Also according to Islamic Encyclopedia: “Hasdai ibn Shaprut (the treasurer, court physician and minister of (Caliph) Abdar-Rahman III (912-961 A.D.) in Spain) asked in his letter to (Khazar) King Joseph was whether the tribe of the Khazar Jews had any connection with the ‘lost’ ten tribes - that is, the ten tribes of the Tribe of Israel who, as we have already seen, became known as the Israelites (as opposed to the other two, who became known as the Judahites), and who were disowned by the Judahites, and who 'disappeared' after becoming conquered by the Assyrians (in 721 B.C.).

King Joseph categorically stated in his reply that there was no such connection whatsoever. In providing a genealogy of his people, King Joseph, writes Arthur Koestler in his book, The Thirteenth Tribe, "cannot, and does not, claim for them Semitic descent; he traces their ancestry not to Shem but to Noah's third son, Japheth; or more precisely to Japheth's grandson, Togarma, the ancestor of all Turkish tribes."

The Jewish Encyclopedia says that the Judaist scholars had no doubt as to the genuineness of this correspondence, in which the word Ashkenazi first occurs as denoting this sharply-outlined, hitherto unknown group of "Eastern Jews" and as indicating Slav associations.

This answer of King Joseph is very significant, not only because it demonstrates conclusively that the Khazar Jews are not Semitic but also because of the following details (2), the uncle of Togarma, according to Genesis 10.2-3, was Magog.”

After 1979 Revolution, ‘Gog and Magog’ has been continuously considered as ‘the East and the West’ supporting Israelis. The famous Iranian Slogan of ‘Nah Shargi, Nah Gharbi’ (No East, No West) shows that the militarized, political and economical movements of Islamists are all against this Axis which is called ‘Gog and Magog (Yajooj and Majooj) Axis’ here; actually, George Bush’s notion of ‘Axis of Evil’ was a less complicated modification of ‘Gog-Magog (Yajooj-Majooj) Axis’ already suggested by Shia Islamists, a re-modification which can be easily digested by the masses.

Within Shia religion, there are many powerful sects among which some of them are enthusiastically trying to expand the dimensions of Islamic Apocalypticism and align all their political / cultural / economical / religious strategies according to Islamic Apocalypse (Qyiamah or Ghiamat) or more precisely engineer strategies to speed the Rise of Qyiamah (triggering the Apocalypse); this is why they eagerly try to lure ‘Gog-Magog Axis’ out of its temporal peace (“luring the beast out of its cage, releasing it whether by means of cooperation or by means of terror”), forcing it to accomplish its final mission: starting its irreversible World War on the globe.


Notes:

(1) ABJAD is an acronym derived from the first four letters of Hebrew / Arabic / Persian alphabet. It refers to the use of letters as numbers or numeric values. With the introduction of Indian numerals and the rise of Algebra, Astronomy, etc in Islamic countries, the communicative use of letters declined and ABJAD persisted mainly in astronomical tables (Persian Zij), astrological horoscopes (Ostorlaab) and chronograms until the modern age. ABJAD numerical values are also applied to magic squares, talismans, and sacred books (ex. Horuf-e Muqattaat in Quran). The credit of working with ABJAD in the most extreme fashion for deciphering the words of Allah, diagramming mysterious cosmologies, etc returns to Horoofi sect in Islam (Horoof means letters) founded by Fazl-l’allah Astarabaadi. (You can check this on the net)

(2) I have removed all details to shorten the text. Here more materials cited in Genesis and Ezekiel’s prophecies:

(Genesis, 10:2-4): The sons of Japeth: Gomer, and Magog, and Madai, and Javan, and Tubal, and Meshech, and Tiras. And the sons of Gomer: Ashkenaz, and Riphath, and Togarmah. And the sons of Javan: Elishah, and Tarshish, Kittim, and Dodanim.

(Ezekiel 18:6): Gomer and all his hordes; the house of Togarmah in the uttermost parts of the north, and all his hordes; even many peoples with thee. (Ezekiel 37:28) Then the nations will know that I the LORD sanctify Israel, when my sanctuary is in the midst of them for evermore. (Ezekiel 38:1-4) The word of the LORD came to me: Son of man, set your face toward Gog, of the land of Magog, the chief prince of Meshech and Tubal, and prophesy against him and say, Thus says the Lord GOD: Behold, I am against you, O Gog, chief prince of Meshech and Tubal; and I will turn you about, and put hooks into your jaws, and I will bring you forth, and all your army, horses and horsemen, all of them clothed in full armor, a great company, all of them with buckler and shield, wielding swords

ANTHROPOPHAGOUS, Zombie and the Outside

By RN

I eat everything: people, buildings, stars, trees. I am a maggot, a cancer, a plague from Saturn. I consume but I produce nothing, not even a fertilizing shit, only an unfertilizing shit, an alien shit. There is nothing growing in my wake.

Attractors of the Outside. Moderate techno-capitalism, pseudo-flux economy (post-industrial solid), and horror genre have understood the potentialities of Zombie well; early Stelarc's works are suggesting Zombie as a machine engineering "unexpected ways of accessing, interfacing and uploading the body". The idea is that Zombie is not fertilizing by any means as you suggested. However, it is an extended site to an extreme and senseless degree of superficiality on whose plastic anomaly control cannot be scaled but commits a moderate suicide, gaining a phantom movatar capable of uprooting the remnants of monolithic solid and transforming them to liquid interfaces which do not avoid the anonymous intensities of outside but prepare themselves for them; they prepare themselves for the moment that the anonymous intensities of the Outside impact upon their surfaces; this is the exact moment in which the whole impact (Call it encounter with the alien) is triggered within the panorama of Genesis. Here is no moderation, domestication of intensity or Capture process at work but potentializing a horizon in which the intensity becomes a 'free' and 'desiring' partner in engineering the Genesis Project. The conventional horror genre as the knowledge of the Outside is very well aware of the involuntary fertilizing lines of the Outside and how it is possible to panoramize or landscape (without direct domestication or control) the Outside and its horror in regard to Genesis Project and its appropriated/ing (architectonic) intensities.

The horror of the Outside or the Outside as an avatar of horror are frequently visualized through such extended and dynamic surfaces such as movatar, telematic scaling of subjectivity, or the Zombie genre in which self becomes a skin, a shedding skin, a grotesque dynamic ground, unconventionally irrigating itself by the anonymous intensities coming from the Outside -- alien. Such a ground makes extremely versatile architectonic lines, that is to say 'desiring slopes' out of the anonymous intensities of the outside, traveling on an undefined slope (Äy/ 0) whose missing coordinate is covered by ground through the Genesis Project (Äy/Äx).
I've discussed the entire panorama in Pestis Solidus article; here a part of discussion (skip the following passage if you've read Pestis Solidus):
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The halftone of two pulsional principles: The diametric discourse of this and not-this is assembled through the appropriation of a processing intensity (comes from without) triggered at the threshold of a surface; traveling on an undefined slope, namely, horizontic sphere or a slope with a missing coordinate: Äy / 0 'coming from the Outside'. As the processing intensity edges at the threshold of the surface, it sparks and the surface recoils back to a regulating intensity (not necessarily regulated), and a surfactant, an active surface or a liveware (the appropriating ground). The surfactant concentrative engine is accustomed to enter an atmosphere of resistance through the heart of the impact panorama.

This resistance toward the processing intensity unfolds as micro / macro slopes and spreading out circular configurations through which the diametric discourses are initiated. Here it goes, the entire of this panorama recoils and deposits in Genesis. Genesis is assembled through both surrendering and resisting attitudes toward anonymous intensities coming from the Outside, the economy of 'solidus-in-circulation' tries to both exploit and resist the processing intensity. While the regulating sphere renders the intensity as a regulator (appropriator: fertilizer) appearing in polar (positive or negative) coordinates, the resisting sphere exploits this appropriator (+/-) as a trigger to configure the whole Genesis Panorama through diametric (polar, inclusive/exclusive, dynamic, genetically configured) discourses. In Genesis, everything is under the Solid essence of these regulating mechanisms that propel solidity as the surplus value of the entire panorama (Genesis). Plunged into the Genesis panorama, solidity appears as framing (but dynamic) molds (mold and cast process of solidity) ... molding (genetically configure: Origin) compositions in the form of slopes ... making them work through slopes. What we call rigidity is the off-threshold or the most insignificant part of this 'panorama i.e. Genesis or 'Solidus-in-circulation' ... or when the undulating slopes of the pseudo-flux become stagnant ... or when the appetite of solidity for Genesis and origination steps down.

----------------------------------------------------

I'm both a heretic and a renegade in the schizoanalytic approaches toward outside and its horror (See Death as a Perversion). Blinded by the immensity and pestilential bonds of Druj-, I've lost all my faith in the horror whose germinating (un)ground is merely outside (so all its avatars: aliens, viruses, etc.); instead, I've been possessed by the schizotrategic maneuvers of paranoia (including that maneuver toward the Outside), and the strategic horror of Druj- working through p/0 (consider p for paranoia, power, puissance, etc); Vaaung's Meltdown Plague diagrams such a darkness fibroproliferating the anonymous intensities disloyal, untrustworthy and treacherous to all dimensions but where in its epidemic and 'cruelly open' sense.

On the other hand, the conventional zombie survives at all cost (as what portrayed by Fulci, Romero, Franco, et al.) to be unsummoned by the Holy Water at last; it has a close affinity with Holy Water; it advertises holy water like a billboard in a desert advertising Coca Cola. My favorite Zombie is the one in Joe D'Amato's poorly directed but inspiring movie, ANTHROPOPHAGOUS; (He)it is a fake Zombie (a pretentious zombie); the riddle of (his)its terrible hunger (the story of the movie) is enriched by 'what comes out of this hunger': undoing (him)itself, trying to eat (him)itself but just leaving a mess behind while visualizing the horror of his(its) ultimate hunger before his(its) speechless anthropomorphic preys.

and video games

>> Yes, I agree with your argument about the "sphere of game-systems" as a prosthetic art-writing? but why did you mention gambling, Francis Bacon, etc? Why not video game as a terminally genre-bombarded writing?

I'm not sure if anyone on this board is really interested in video games; but the recent products (especially on PC and PS2 platforms) have proved themselves as the unique works of total border collapse between genres, modes of writing, etc. Following, the emergence of video games for a long time, I've seen how video germinating fundamentally bizarre entities of power, narration, art, etc within such unlocalizable horizons of writing which are not really visual and in a similar way, disloyal to all forms of classic and even avant-garde narration or writing. An anonymous space incubating characters, power formations and concepts utterly disloyal to our innocent avant-garde horizons in cinema, literature, etc. It's frightening to think where they have all come and how they manage to disseminate themselves through such dangerously creative spaces.

I'm sure you have noticed the undeniable influences of videogames on contemporary cinema (esp. Hollywood products and Japan SF / Pulp-horror cinema), SF literature and even painting (painters such as Demetrios Vakras, Trevor Browm, Kawaguchi, ...); the only problem that disturbs me is that philosophers and critics are still trying to conceal the rise of these new entities of power, narration methods, cinema, politics, art-writing, border collapse, etc, in a purely paranoid and crypto-conservative manner, merely considering video-games as the symptoms of marketing, capitalist youth culture or the rest of Jameson / neo-Marxian critiques in the most ridiculous and boring ways ... arguing about camera's POV in First person shooters as a masculine inspection to Self, and the third person POV in Tomb Raider series as a feminist anti-perspective view; that's pitiful.

: Totally agree, but don't you think these incredible potentialities have all been withering in recent years?

Well, I don't think so ... I accept there are numerous titles out there imitating each other and transforming to art or even university projects but there are plenty of titles which are taking the creative ruin-architecture of the old games on PS-1 (silent hill, etc.) or Pentium 1 pc (System Shock, Blood, Ultima, ...) to somewhere else, anonymous to all current trends in art and literature (maybe, it's a reason for our collective perplexed attitudes toward recent V-games). I'm currently writing a reply to MS, about three definitely dangerous games, one Warcraft 3: Reign of Chaos and its wonderful, but heavily bombarded by critics, expansion pack, Frozen Throne; the second title is a long RPG entitled Never-winter Nights, and the third one is a technically beautiful RTS (Battle Realms). The first title is a bit too complex, too disappointing for a gamer (it rewrites the whole cosmogony and Genesis project of Paranoia and its survival economy on a new level of cosmophagic orgy) to be possessed but you shouldn't miss it.
Action games, too, are following this video-writing insurgency ... look for Sacrifice, Deus Ex, System Shock 2 (and even Thing which is a true sequel to Carpenter's Thing) or forthcoming Half-Life 2, Doom 3, etc.

Best,
Reza

Neverwinter Nights (the first episode in Neverwinter Nights video game series) pushes this occultural conspiracy of The People of the Eye and their secret brethren to something more playful (see the pictures). The People of the Eye (the Oculites) and their apparently mason brethren are into something deeper, the Awakening Project.

Playing on The People of the Eye and New World Order (as in the ancient pahlavi texts called the Zahakian Age) on another level: exploring the ancient Persian demonology, one can stop and see the surprising similarity between Baphomet and Ashemogha (also Ashemaogha or Ahemogh) the ever-mutating demonic entity through which Druj- (The Mother of Abominations) performs its terrestrial projects. Ashemogha is not a name but a unique combination of Asha + Mogh (Persian original word for Mage), the false or unholy mage or simply the False Teacher, also known as the Deceiver in Vendidad. In Avesta and ancient Persian texts it is portrayed as the Great Camel (Zoroaster also means the Great Old Camel) or serpent-camel; a camel-demon with skeletal wings and winged feet, the origin of winged feet returns to earlier mythologies than Mercury who has winged feet (Alipes) too; winged feet are diabolical machines of flight possessed by Fallen Angels or Demons of Death and the Underworld. While angels take the lines of flights vertically and horizontally, winged feet provide demons and Fallen Angels with a diverse range of inter-dimensional lines of flight. Skeletal wings also are well-known because of their ability to synthesize sounds at the background of flight, musical machines making an infernal music out of the flight itself. Zohar one of the great text of Qabalah presents Ashemogha as the great camel-serpent who seduces Eve at the Garden of Eden. Ashemogha is all Baphomet with one exception: its head has been replaced by a goat’s head; possibly because in later cultures (during Sasanians) the camel was not the god of war and falseness any longer. In Persian texts, Ashemogha appears to Zahak or Dahak (Dah + Aak: ten plagues) at a place between Syria and Iraq according to modern maps, where also Dajjal, (Dahak + Druj?), the deceiver, rises (see An-Nuwas ibn Sam'an’s commentaries on this): “He will appear on the way between Syria and Iraq, and will create disaster left and right.” The last mysterious part (disaster left and right) obviously corresponds with two giant worms growing at the left and right shoulders of Zahak (earlier called Bivar-Aspa: A Thousand Horses, an animal multiplicity) after being kissed by Ashemogha (the great Camel ) on his shoulders, becoming One with Druj-; the giants gluttonous worms (nemat: thread) are supposed to feast on human brain until the annihilation of humanity. Ashemogha appears to Zahak to tell him about a great project for scouring humanity from the earth and finally Zahak starts to spread his New World Order (the Zahakian age or the age of ten plagues) by crowning himself as the Persian king after Jamishid (according to texts, he is still living at Mount Damavand in Iran). Ancient Persian Satanists (as Zoroastrian renegades) for the first time, discovered the drujih machinery working through Zoroastrianism, considered Zarathustra (the great camel) and his monotheism as the most faithful prophet and prayer of the dark mother (Druj) . Persian Satanists as the people of the Eye (the eye of Dajjal or deceiver) have diagramed the strategic (drujih) affirmation of Zarathustra to Druj in the most brilliant way. Through a very creative approach to darkness, they even crawled in the society of magi undercover, promoted the so-called orthodox practical / intellectual instructions of Zoroastrianism in the most frantic ways as it can be traced in Vendidad (the book of the law against Demon or anti-Druj law). This monotheism industry (complicated by the hands of Persian Satanists or the cult of Druj: later Yazidian) is the one immense plateau on which Judaism, Christianity and Islam have been germinated.

Qabalah as another creative approach to Druj-diagrams concocted by The People of the Eye has been developed under direct and indirect influences of Zoroastrianism; there are certain documents of the great influence of Zoroastrian magi (the cult of Druj) over Pythagoras (although there are rumors of a meeting between Pythagoras and Zarathustra himself; but it is not historically evident) who has empowered Qabalah with his insights into magic geometry, cosmology and numerology (cf. the Pythagorean magical pentagram held by Baphomet) ... there are also many documents of the influence of ancient heavily ciphered Persian calendar on Qabalah understanding of Cipher (the cult of Siphr or Zero: The Eye) ... this is the very Persian calendar which has not been deciphered yet and ends with (or according to Persian scholars: “is mapped according to”) the second rise of Zahak, the second Zahakian Age, the New Pest Order.

Zarathustra (the old camel) is Ahemogha (the great camel), the deceiver or the Strategist, the mastermind of monotheism, who becomes one with Druj, gives birth to Zahak (Dahak), ten plagues.

Edited by blinkandwheeze (Feb. 11, 2012 11:24:58)

shennong posted:
intensity vs coldness????

badcrumble posted:
ive seen pics of reza negarestani irl, he exists and hes a big guido

http://www.mace.manchester.ac.uk/postgraduate/research/projects/current_recent/li_sheikh/Negarestani/index.html

http://www.linkedin.com/pub/dir/Reza/Negarestani

Crow posted:

badcrumble posted:
ive seen pics of reza negarestani irl, he exists and hes a big guido

http://www.mace.manchester.ac.uk/postgraduate/research/projects/current_recent/li_sheikh/Negarestani/index.html

http://www.linkedin.com/pub/dir/Reza/Negarestani

the idea that one of the most renowned contemporary philosophers both looks like that & spent years posting horror obsessed esotericism on the same site as people who did shit like this is basically the funniest thing in the world to me right now