Reza Negarestani
Revolution Goes Ferric:
Notes on the Deeper Traumatic History
of the Industrial Revolution
To further penetrate the twisted depths of the Hydroplutonic
Conspiracy, it should be pointed out that the iron-richness of the
earth—and thus the bustling vibe of the industrial life on the surface
of the planet—posits Earth ironically as the Planet of Death rather
than the Planet of Life, given the fact that all this metal wealth was
inherited and accumulated from iron implosions marking the end of
life for massive stars which once outshone the sun in size and glory.
When a massive star begins to die, in the process of silicon burning
as the result of ferociously consuming all the carbon in its core, the
dying star begins to decay from the inside, producing in its core
heavy isotopes of metal such as nickel, iron, and zinc. These metal
isotopes are spewed forth in the last hours and minutes of the dying
star as both its matricidal offspring and post-mortem relics. Since the
production of such metals consumes energy without releasing any,
these metallic offspring asphyxiate their mother whilst they are inside
its womb. The giant star falls into an irreversible process whereby
everything that is in its core as well as its last traces of life (oxygen,
neon and magnesium) turn into iron. A collapsing iron core is born
that mortifies the star like an agency of death whose weight brings
down the solar mass in a matter of a day. Right after death, the
superficial layers of the dead star explode into space, showering
everything in the vicinity with metal-rich asteroids which continue to
decay—even after the death of the star—into an isotope of iron,
enacting the iron relic as the materialised personification of stellar
death par excellence.
Just as the sun in its hellish excess is not really the source of
terrestrial climates—nor is it a model of unrestricted economy—it is
not the bottom of the Hydroplutonic Conspiracy either. The iron
wealth of the sun is only evidence of a solar trauma: Just as there is
a geotrauma from which the dreams, memories, fictions, realities
and nightmares of the earth emerge, there is also a heliotrauma, that
is to say, a traumatised and unconscious realm within the solar
horizon of the sun itself. The regressions, repressions, fictions and
nightmares of the sun surpass those of the earth in magnitude and
intensity simply because the sun is far more traumatised in its
formation than the earth. The hegemony of the Solar Empire is only
a symptom of its traumatic formation, upon which too much
psychoanalytical time has been wasted. The richness of iron as the
relic of stellar death residing within the earth testifies to the traumatic
formation of the sun and the solar system. The richness of metal in
planet Earth insinuates that the sun must have formed much later
than the other stars in the galaxy. In other words, the profusion of
metal in the sun and the solar system and consequently in the earth
points to the concentrated and strong presence of alien—and not
heliotopically indigenous—cosmic iron isotopes during the formation
of the sun and the solar system.
This means that the Hydroplutonic Conspiracy extends further than
the earth-sun collusion, to a far deeper and darker complicity
between the earth and alien depths which predate and postdate the
life of the sun and the solar model of emergence (thus bringing about
a narrative or psychoanalytical profiling of the earth from the
‘nethermost’ point of view). This is another way to say that the urtrauma of the earth (Otto Rank’s idea of birth as the primal or urtrauma) finds its true expression in yet another trauma which the
Hungarian psychoanalyst Sandor Ferenczi called the pre-primal or
archi-trauma (ururtrauma). The archi-trauma is in this case the iron
trauma of the sun as a belatedly born star that was exposed to and
traumatised by alien cosmic matters and forces during its embryonic
development. Therefore we can say that, as far as Kernovian
Syndrome is concerned, the unconscious of the earth is haunted by
a trauma that precedes even the iron catastrophe and the birthtrauma of the planet—one that takes the earth into the unconscious
of the sun and straight from there to outer nightmares that vex our
star and its energetic identity with vistas of alien exteriorities.
If iron is the relic of stellar death, the unconscious of the sun which
is projected into its formation, models of climate making, energy
dissipation, and patterns of emergence is saturated by the memory
of stellar deaths. The iron wealth of the sun does not reenact the sun
as the centre of all wealth but strips this young hegemon of its
glorified position by drawing an explicit connection between its
belated galactic birth and the death of its long-lived and formidable
predecessors only the iron relics of which have remained to be
inherited by the sun. (Although in this stellar dynasty, our sun is not
significant enough to stage a super explosive spectacle, over the
course of billions of years, it will become a white dwarf, shrunken,
cold, humiliated, and shunned by its planetary acolytes.) On the
other hand, for planet Earth as an apparent follower of the sun, iron
wealth is both a token of this heliotrauma and, if we are
unreasonably lucky, a possible lead for ‘terrestrial thinking’ out of the
solar economy of thought and its restrictions toward the radical
freedom of alien and starless cosmic depths.
A question that might be posed here is that of how the ururtrauma
of iron accumulation stirred the Hydroplutonic Conspiracy that
eventually ushered in the terrestrial cataclysm that we currently know
as the Industrial Revolution. The answer to this question involves the
intervention of water, as that which not only thickened the
Hydroplutonic Conspiracy by extending it into an iron-saturated
trauma, but also drove the iron intrusion of stellar death into
exceedingly twisted ends. Associated with iron-water reaction at high
pressures and temperatures, which is a decisive factor in the
evolution of the earth, iron catastrophe can be taken into account as
the main factor for the transformation of the earth into a relatively
closed hydro-cycle that ensures a prolonged interaction between
water and iron on the one hand, and iron and other metals on the
other. Whilst theories of the origin of water on the planet are many
and diverse, all of these theories can be associated and linked to the
ururtrauma of iron intrusion. For example the iron catastrophe—
whereby the nickel-iron components sank into the centre of the earth
and constituted the core—is believed to have tremendously
increased the temperature of the protoplanet and as a result thawed
the solid water inside the protoplanetary components. The
interaction between the awakened water and iron turned into a
chemical reaction that produced heavier and lighter compounds of
iron through the earth. Thus iron became a vehicle for distributing
the hydrogen and oxygen elements of water perpendicularly through
the body of the earth. Produced by the iron-water reaction, iron
hydride carries hydrogen to the core, fuelling it and initiating its
churning motion. It is this churning motion of the metal core that
accounts for the moderate gravity of the earth which allows water to
exist in forms other than solid.
The activation of the iron core begins to wrap the earth inside its
magnetic cocoon. And now the formation of the atmosphere—
brought forth and facilitated by the gravity and the magnetic currents
of the iron core—generates the ultimate positive condition for the
complicities between water and iron by preventing water from being
blown away into space by stellar winds. Accordingly, iron remobilises water at different stages as a fully fledged element of
complicity that unfolds the iron-trauma inherent to stellar death within
the terrestrial environment. Iron-water complicities probably begin
with the transportation of the hydrogen element of water into the iron
core, and are completed with the establishment of the planetary
atmosphere, a perfect hydro-cycling machine that preserves water
and continuously reintroduces it to other elements and components
of the earth. The iron-stirred motion and polymorphism of water drive
the chemical intimacies of iron and water to new and ever more
convoluted extremes. Yet such hydrological activities eventually go
beyond the iron-water bonds, as water acts as an intermediate
chemical agency between the iron-trauma and other elements in the
earth. Ultimately, water begins to mobilise and unearth other metals
on its own, expanding the legacy of the stellar death within the earth
through all that terrestrially exists. It is in this sense that terrestrial
life, both in its green vibrancy and (post-)industrial commotion, is
pasted upon the ferric face of death as a perplexedly boisterous
mask.
As the Industrial Revolution tapped into the iron-trauma of the earth
and the Solar System under the influence of the Hydroplutonic
Conspiracy, it elevated the minerals of the earth to the surface and
from there melted them into the air. This mineral ascension from the
surface of the earth upward was characterised in the form of the
smog that became an indisputable marker of civilisation and wealth
in the Industrial Age. John Playfair’s interpretation of James Hutton’s
plutonic theory of the earth seems to be more than anything a fitting
observation of the iron-traumatised human civilisation wherein the
Industrial Revolution is reinscribed not as a point in the life of the
human race on the planet, but as a twisted apex in the history of the
earth and its traumatic reliving of stellar death. The iron-trauma of
stellar death is indifferent to the sociopolitical traumas of the
Industrial Revolution, its progressions and regressions leave no
trace of human traumas. By virtue of being a traumatic regression (or
binding) of the pre-primal iron-trauma, or more accurately, the
trauma of stellar death, the Industrial Revolution left no trace of
humans in the form of new fossils—hence the current postindustrial
necropolis whose graves have been emptied of human remains:1
[A]ll the hard substances of the mineral kingdom, when elevated into
atmosphere, have a tendency to decay, and are subject to a disintegration and
waste, to which no limit can be set but that of their entire destruction; that no
provision is made on the surface for repairing this waste, and that there, no
new fossil is produced; that the formation of all the varied scenery which the
surface of the earth exhibits, depends on the operation of causes, the
momentary exertion of which are familiar to us, though we knew not before the
effects which their accumulated action was able to produce.
— John Playfair, Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth (1802)
1. Here the hydro-cyclic efficiency of the earth testifies more than anything to a
terrestrial impulse to relive the iron-trauma of stellar death, not only because the
cycling motion of water within the planetary atmosphere is conditioned by the iron
core of the earth, but also because in its vitality this cycle brings the remains of
wasted minerals—smog—back onto the surface of the earth over and over again.