The following is the first of five in the Surface Rot series. They are taken from essays I wrote in 2020. They were written as a provocation for a history and theory seminar led by former politician Dennis McShane: No Empire, No Europe, Soon No United Kingdom? The Coming Crisis of Britain’s Future at the Architectural Association in London.

Cyclonopedia This article uses Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials, as a starting point to place decay at the core of a series of peripherals: Brexit, Infrastructure, Export, neutrality and Earth systems as well as various histories and theories that orbit them. Cyclonopedia is a text without Earth, Zack Blas in the American Book Review2 wrote of Negarestani’s text:

Cyclonopedia ungrounds and mutilates the very genres of horror, philosophy, and author, leaving in their wake what some have called para-academic theory-fiction.

One argument within the many alternate narratives of Cyclonopedia is a shift in political agency of materials from human oriented control to non-human actors. The text operates as both index and journey: for example, when considering the Middle East, we are obligated to reconsider the role of dust and processes of decay. It is an entwining of the mechanics of the various world systems operating as both technical and natural structures simultaneously.

Decay is difficult to observe with any exactitude without remote sensing and scientific instruments, we can only nod towards the instruments that operate in the murky gaseous modes.

Infrastructure as concept:

Anthropologist Algol Gupta conceptualises infrastructure in relation to maintenance, questioning the relationship between infrastructure of decay and the decay of infrastructure.

Infrastructure can be understood as a system that allows other systems to work, and to Gupta decaying modes can be positioned and conceptualised by two understandings:

1. Decay purely as material. Secondly as infrastructures of the industrial revolution; Rail, Roads, Dams, Farm land, Bridges. Similarly, there are two main narratives of the Anthropocene, the first being that of development – of economics, growth, enrichment and spectacle.

2. A dystopian alternative – decay and ruinification, ecocide, colonial plunder, mass slavery, genocide and world wars.

To grossly simplify history, the British through their colonial, post-colonial and post-truth lives have been heavy players in both. As hydrocarbons have been used to accelerate the planet to an irreversible brink of ruin, Infrastructure becomes central to any progress when questioning how these systems are maintained.

Decay is not a concern only in failure of maintenance. It needs ongoing repair. Infrastructure exists precisely because of maintenance, they are intimate.

• Algol Gupta, Infrastructure of decay / Decay of infrastructure 2020

The temporality of infrastructure focuses entirely on the process of construction. Together, we will focus on the birth and afterlife of such structures.

The prior is a matter of classification, archaeology and historical importance, once it has been broken down into pieces both materially and analytically. To start to draw a comparison, Brexit was relentlessly analysed prior, during, and will undoubtedly be studied forensically forevermore. Yet there is a void in knowing what Brexit means (other than the obvious).

Infrastructural development and its eventual demise (for there will be one) is more important to the modernist commitment to progress than that of maintaining it once it arrives. That is to say that the heroic overcoming of obstacles, both social and natural, is part of a grand narrative forever in development. In order for the structures of the European Union to fully operate, the work of maintenance needed to become a routine.

Since Margaret Thatcher’s neoliberal reform, Britain had lacked and avoided heroic gestures of progress, instead opting for murkier roles in development on distant shores. The population that voted Brexit is not entirely relying on a nostalgic vision of lost Empire, but is wishing to continue it’s modern project – to engineer it’s future with an inflated story of self-worth.

In this post we have not delved into our relations and systemic geopolitical dependance on the United States. The next post will operate as a quick analysis of the British support in introducing federal policy to Iraq, and how our understanding of grand narrative creation is lost– not in translation, but by other modes of adaption.

Reference

1. 1  Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous, (re.press Melbourne, 2008)
2. 2  Zack Blas, Hidden writing (American book review, 2012)
3. 3  Algol Gupta, Infrastructure of decay/ Decay of infrastructure, (Danish Institute for Internation Infrastructure as concept al Studies via zoom, Wednesday 7th October 2020).