Chronosis (by Reza Negarestani) book review
A dilettante ventures some words
Dragonsphere Report
Spoilers follow.
Chronosis is a text that gets better the more times you read it. My initial impressions were mixed, but subsequent readings have given me additional insight into the story and its meaning. While I still don’t have a complete grasp of everything that is meant, and while I can’t tell whether that’s because the pieces don’t add up or because they add up via interpretative tools I don’t actually have, my overall impression is positive now.
My only prior experience with Negarestani is, unfortunately, via the CCRU Writings from 1997-2003, and via sporadic tweets that appear on my twitter timeline and associated podcast appearances and other such things. As such I am missing large chunks of probably necessary context. But then that is nothing new with me, that’s sort of how I operate, which is actually somewhat thematically appropriate as we will see going forward.
The central premise of Chronosis, the pillar that seems to bear most of the weight theoretically, is that time is not just relative to speed, not just distorted by gravity wells and so forth, but that it has multiple, perhaps even infinite arrows: that is, where we perceive matter and its chains of cause and effect as going in one direction, there may be endless other perceptions of direction. The appendix at the end of the text helpfully invokes the concept of block time, which is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the events depicted in the text to take place. Block time essentially means that time is constituted substantially and at every moment simultaneously, rather than conjured moment by moment as is often more conventionally assumed. From here, aliens of two different types are introduced, solving the Fermi paradox by supposing that these “tribes” or different manifestations of corporeal intelligence are spread thin throughout all the conflicting timelines in such a way that discernible evidence is rarely left by which one “tribe” can discover another.
There is one alien race in particular called the Monazzeins who have mastered the art of manipulating time after being confronted with the sentient personification of time itself. The Monazzeins, for reasons that are more religious than anything else, then use this time technology to attempt to unravel and scramble all the competing timelines in such a way that normal life becomes impossible for the other “tribes”. Their motives, aside from being set on this course by a supreme being, are somewhat opaque, but seem to consist in the belief that entanglement in the chaotic interstices of time itself is more preferable inherently than travel along a single vector or timeline. To each their own I suppose.
The text then goes off the rails a bit by introducing a plotline with a human Alex Jones-alike on earth, an unrealistically hyper successful peddler of conspiracy theory and pseudoscience. While this character is relatable, the theoretical substance of his appearance in the text revolves around the revelation that his brain is calcifying from the inside out. This sort of attempts to tie the psychology of subjective time perception into the physics of time itself so far propogated by the book, in a way that was foreshadowed in the opening of the text but not with sufficient clarity for me to decode.
It is thus here that I don’t know whether the pieces add up or not, when the rectification of subjective time and literal time are handwaved away by placing them analogously next to each other. There are some very interesting thoughts that I found myself having, mostly about confabulated experience in people with brain damage or dementia: when the brain cannot fall back on memory, it invents memory. Could time itself be damaged and then retroactively confabulated in a similar way? There seems to be nothing in the text or the supplementary theory it alludes to that could prevent this, but the hard work of bridging subjective phenomenal perception with physics is still not quite accomplished here. All we have is an analogy. A metaphor that simultaneously plays out figuratively and literally in the text.
There are other minor symbolic analogies in the text, between the calcification of the human’s brain and a similar organic to inorganic transformation earlier in the text, for example. I am unable to proceed much farther in honest analysis as anything else I’m liable to read into the text is probably a result of the miswiring of my own brain, which sees everywhere delusions of reference and of sense that I have to exercise diligence to prevent from overwhelming me.
I will say that the idea of two Monazzeins hop-skipping through time while altering, expunging it, and so forth it is reminiscent of a lot of video game writing, most recently Undertale’s, in which the Fallen Child and Asriel Dreemurr take turns playing the role of arbiters of “the anomaly”, a mysterious force that is capable of resetting, reloading, and altering time. It may also be a subtle reference to the Numogram’s decimal twinning or any number of other things, but these ideas are not fertile for me so I see little reason to waste time trying to decode such aspects even if they are present and not hallucinated.
Little to say about the visuals, which are nice but which I have no specific competency to make judgements about, or the writing itself, which was enough for me to enjoy the story but not life changing. I would certainly say the story is worth reading if you get the chance. Sound off in the comments if you think I’m dramatically off base about anything or missing something critical about the story.
Thus ends another Dragonsphere Report