This essay will be posted in three installments. The visuals (following in the next installments) and the ideas have been developed in collaboration with the artist Kristen Alvanson.
If contemporary world politics inconsistently defies both holistic reading methodologies and their absence, then the Middle East to which global dynamics is blatantly flushed and from which confutations of global politics emerge entail the employment of new political analysis and intervention pragmatics. As an entity for which politics or political remobilization of its attributes precedes its geographical ontology, the Middle East should be approached or studied through methodologies which neither prioritize holistic models nor the destruction of such models. Accordingly, these models or methodologies should correspond to the socio-political formations of the Middle East for which structural or functional inconsistencies can only be addressed in a uniform way (i.e. consistently linked to each other) if they are to be taken in regard to a degenerative whole whose both partiality and wholeness are incapacitated and unable to exert control over each other. In a degenerative whole (previously referred to as ( )hole complex corresponding with the spatio-temporal unwholesomeness of Deleuze and Guattari’s holey space), consistency of events and uniform dynamism exist and can only be discovered through a poromechanical space where differentiation between surfaces (as of holes) has paralyzed the eventuation of the ground as a prerequisite basis for formative forces. In fact, poromechanics where invocation of new grounds is registered as perforation of the formation by new surfaces (or holes) corresponds to multiplex governing forces in every Middle Eastern State. Here the term guerilla-state [1] suits the Middle Eastern states or societies where the boundaries between the state and its others have already been terminally perforated.
Moreover and more importantly, despite the presence of merely one exclusive governing platform for the state (or head), the fundamental formation of Middle Eastern states are determined by multiple, often diverse or basically incompatible forces and political grounds. These political formations have to simultaneously establish their grounds inside and through the exclusive and ruling religio-political formation and abide by its ground. Unable to fully dismantle the hegemony of the state’s head formation or the ground, they attain a socio-political configuration which despite being in complicity with the governing ground, irreparably disrupts the ground’s ontological and functional consistency. By enacting their own political grounds, these political formations ontologically operate as surfaces which are not able to be registered as circumferential or visible surfaces; instead they are reinvented as subterreanean surfaces with their emergent holeyness and nested continuity. But nested continuity and holeyness effectuate a discontinuity which refuses to be ontological (in the manner of Leibnizian monads and scholastic entelechies) but rather exists as an interposition of gaps within a transcendental logic by which ontology of whole (even in terms of mereotopology) and differences can be traced or neatly isolated. While harboring the disruptions inherent to transcendence and logical ontology, nested continuity or holeyness develops a subterranean continuity or consistency that essentially undermines the consistency of the governing platform or political ground (i.e. ground as a visible, circumferential and superficial surface). The effectuation of these political grounds which by the virtue of a pre-dominant and pre-existing socio-political governing state have to continue to exist as subterranean surfaces is always in the direction of degeneration and incapacitation of the formation as a whole. As soon as the nestedness of holes emerge, the ground is only a shell or protective exoskeleton which politically feigns the autonomous subterranean consistency as superficial inconsistency. For this reason, poromechanics does not only commence the degeneration of whole as in the case of socio-political formations but also the utilization of such degeneration and corruption. In this sense, poromechanics bespeaks of decay and here a political one, because decay manifests as a limit process in which infinite putrefaction happens without triggering the complete ontological termination of the object. In decay, the object bears the burden of its ontology only to be a receptacle for the continuity of its material destiny which is knitted through perforation of boundaries and inconclusive holiness. The same can be said about a Middle Eastern political system for which formation can only exist on the level of superficial inconsistencies on the visible political ground.
In the wake of political decay or disintegrating religious or political grounds, the application of global political orders, political analyses, theoretic and pragmatic confrontations (whether from the inside or the outside) have all proved hopeless or ineffective other than in contributing to the holeyness and convolution of the Middle East. The reason for this so-called failure – only pertinent in terms of their utilitarian and ultimately holistic efficiency – is dismissing or gleefully ignoring the processes and political dynamics at work in deteriorating the socio-political formations already emerged and established around the world. Here, the case is not the emergence of formations inherent to geo-politics of the Middle East as a geographic region of the earth with its own attributes to which world politics and contemporary political analyses are alien. The case is rather the realization of Middle Eastern political dynamics as processes emerging out of the preexisting political formations and the so-called global orders, processes which are inherent to deterioration and decay of such formations or orders. If the Middle East is geographically obscure, it is because it is really shared by world politics and orders, hence dissolving into the global continuum. Yet the Middle East is only connected to world politics as their own intensive collective destiny, that is to say, it is only shared by world’s political formations in decay and through a degenerative whole where no formative power can be effectively perpetuated. There is nothing more revolting for the vitalist ethos of the contemporary politics or global socio-political formations than to face their own degenerating and uncontrollably differentiating selves in the form of a geo-political obscurity named the Middle East. Today’s most inflexible, malfunctioning and inconsistent socio-political systems around the world can be presented as the inevitable unfolding of world’s dominant political formations through decay where the formation is nothing but a vehicle for anomalous recombinations and limitropic but perpetual differentiation. The seemingly literal depiction of this is the recurring portrayal of corpse in medieval culture, where human or animal carcass germinates outlandish animals and creatures which are only different from the original configuration through a gradient of porous and blurring boundaries. Yet this still is a teleonomic relief because according to medieval natural philosophy the form of an animal once it is a corpse can overlap with the form of another animal in life (cf. Henry of Langenstein). The latitudes of form associated to a decaying political formation, thus, can overlap with the latitudes of form belonging to a presumably integrated, wholesome or autonomous political system. The idea of truly collective political terror is insinuated here not only by the ability of a decaying political system in overlapping a reformative or even revolutionary politics but also the panorama in which a responsible and robust politics can in fact be the rottenest one. The Middle Eastern political dynamics is the realization of global political systems in their inevitability to be terminally collectivized and differentiated at last, namely, to decay. Although decay unfolds in the future as a material infinity circumscribed in the past (coinciding with the rise of the system or the birth of the object), yet its true channel is present where the object or system is assumed to have attained formative stability or establishment. Therefore in a more accurate sense of time, Middle Eastern political dynamics simultaneously separates from and returns to world’s political formations as their intensive destiny in decay. But in decay such a destiny is perpetual and limitropic, meaning decay will continue indefinitely in regard to a limit which is the ontological endurance of the object or system, even if it is the object in its most minimal and fundamental form. For this reason, the infinity of political decay is guaranteed by the persistence of world’s political formations. Yet more radically political, through decay, world’s politics is stripped to its bare foundations, that is to say, its most fundamental and vitally necessary traits – its ‘progressively becoming true’ form.
The rigid but erratic incompatibility of Middle Eastern political systems to world politics corresponds with the existence of the Middle East as an obscure geographical region which narrates the collective and inconclusive destiny of global political systems whose in deterioration resist their original configuration but occasionally coincide with their former selves. This narration, however, cannot be conducted through a dominant plot or grounding socio-political platform but rather through the logic of decaying formations and degeneration of whole, or in other words, through what can be called plot holes. The obsession with relevancy or irrelevancy of a political analysis or pragmatics is the characteristic of a formation as a whole or dominant narrative plot where the distribution of consistencies and inconsistencies should always be consistent. For plot holes or degenerative political formations, relevancy as an extraneous access does not exist because the idea of a true relevant access to such poromechanical or deteriorating entities is only possible by adapting analyses conforming to their degenerating logic and perpetual mal-formations. By mimicking the porous logic of degenerative whole, the supposed relevant analysis cannot exist out of the idea of decaying or perforated formation where the distribution of consistencies does not follow a transcendental logic and thereby, relevancy enforces the breaks and fissures in transcendence. In short, either within the poromechanics of holey space or degenerative wholeness or decaying formation, relevancy is transcendentally nonexistent because it exists immanently by contributing to an unwholesomeness which presupposes the extinction of relevancy. Accordingly, relevancy becomes autophagic by taking a position which is participative in regard to its degenerative object which implements the lacunae of transcendence and consequently, the annulment of relevancy. In regard to a decaying political system or perforated formation, relevancy only exists immanently as an agent of participation through which the idea of a transcendental access (hence the dilemma of relevancy or irrelevancy) is profoundly confounded.
A narrative plot or a grounded politics always distributes narrative or political entities in a way to preserve its wholesomeness, a consistently (according to the ground that is) distribution of entities and events can generate formative forces which reinforce the whole. Since Middle Eastern political systems exemplify degenerative whole and the logics of poromechanics, methodologies for investigating the Middle Eastern dynamics must conform to their enigmatic logics and crypto-formation. We shall attempt to outline the elements required for modeling such methodologies by elaborating modes of analysis or reading which are based on defective structures, degenerative whole and poromechanics. In this regard, the literary genealogy of plot holes in writing will be elaborated in conjunction with peculiar archeological methodologies which themselves are utilized in contemporary Middle Eastern politics. To this end, literary theory of archeology and archeology of politics will constitute the next installment of this post.
[1] On guerilla-state, see The militarization of peace in Collapse vol. I, Oxford: Urbanomic, 2006.