Reading Middle East I: Political Archeology, Architecture and Literary Theory
Reza Negarestani and Kristen Alvanson
In persuasion of modeling the Middle Eastern dynamics as an entity for which politics or political remobilization of its qualities precedes its ontology, we shall first develop models capable of reading the Middle East as a concrete text with its own peculiar approaches to distribution of time and space, architecture, narration, the outside and planetary writing systems (military campaigns, world politics, urban programming, religion, etc.). In brief, the terminally political and insurgent formation of the Middle East necessitates – as inevitable parts or consequences of its dynamics – new reading methodologies. The holistic political, religious and military readings sacrifice the autonomy of their object in favor of their environments or their global wholes. Such readings impose logics of systems which are either theoretically reductive or pragmatically disconnected in regard to their objects. As the first general model of reading the Middle East, Hidden Writing either as apocrypha scripta or steganographia will be dissected according to its internal mechanisms. The reason for this selection returns to the potency of this model to diagram the general cartography of the Middle East and the way the enigmatic architecture of the Middle East is populated and sustains its internal dynamism. One of the most prominent examples of Hidden Writing is Johannes Trithemius' treatise on black occult and scholastic astrology, Steganographia. Trithemius' work lacks a superficial coherent plot and consistency, as if it has been infested by plot holes, content and thematic losses. However, the book is in fact a massive treatise on the science of code and cryptography camouflaged and buried within the surface plot that is constituted of occult and astrology.
