Let's Read: Fanged Noumena

Strigix

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Over the last few weeks I’ve heard a surprising number of people ask an interesting question.

“Who is Nick Land?”

Now, I haven’t read Land’s work before, but I’ve run into people talking about him, and had people recommend I read his various works, so I’ve been aware that he exists, and somewhat familiar with his history. Land was briefly a young philosophy professor affiliated with an organization known as the Cyborg Culture Research Unit (CCRU) for a while, before he ended up going quite mad. Through the course of his descent into philosophy, madness, and politics, he produced a number of essays, which can be found in various places online, as well as collected into a single work- “Fanged Noumena.”

But what I realized while watching people ask about who Land was, and what he had written, was that I hadn’t ever really read his work myself. I’ve read articles and books talking about Land- mainly “Neoreaction, a Basilisk,” but also some others- but Land’s own work was something I haven't ever looked at. So, when I saw folks asking yet again, “Who is Nick Land,” I made a joke about doing a let’s read of his work- and then the joke quickly turned out to not be much of a joke, as you can see based on the fact that I’m actually doing it.

I also decided to ask a few people I know who are passingly familiar with Land about how to go about reading the work. These folks gave me the following links:
http://divus.cc/london/en/article/nick-land-ein-experiment-im-inhumanismus
http://www.sterneck.net/cyber/plant-land-cyber/
While they aren’t necessary for reading and understanding Land, they are apparently helpful background material.

The first link is, for the most part, a retrospective of Land from one of his former students. It covers his history in a fair amount of detail in the process of introducing Fanged Noumena as a work, and is an engaging enough read that I feel comfortable recommending it to anyone even vaguely interested. The second, on the other hand, is a collaboration between Nick Land and Sadie Plant- another member of the CCRU- and is a little bit harder to follow, in the sense that being plunged headfirst into the sea without any warning is a little bit less relaxed than wading out into a swimming pool. It is also mostly Plant’s work, rather than Land’s, and was recommended as a springing off point for Land’s later works- so I’ll be returning to it once I get to that point, specifically as a precursor to Circuitries and Mechanical Desire.

Now, with that all said, I will try to review the collected essays in Fanged Noumena quickly, coherently, and faithfully- but due to the nature of the work, the speed at which I can engage with one article might not be the speed I can engage with another article, so I don’t think I can guarantee any sort of fixed schedule. We’ll see how it goes as it goes.
 

Strigix

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The first essay in Fanged Noumena starts 55 pages in with the following statement:
For the purposes of understanding the complex network of race, gender, and class oppressions that constitute our global modernity it is very rewarding to attend to the evolution of the apartheid policies of the South African regime, since apartheid is directed towards the construction of a microcosm of the neo-colonial order; a recapitulation of the world in miniature. The most basic aspiration of the Boer state is the dissociation of politics from economic relations, so that by means of 'bantustans' or 'homelands' the black African population can be suspended in a condition of simultaneous political distance and economic proximity vis-a-vis the white metropolis. This policy seeks to recast the currently existing political exteriority of the black population in its relation to the society that utilizes its labour into a system of geographical relations modelled on national sovereignty. The direct disenfranchisement of the subject peoples would then be re-expressed within the dominant international code of ethno-geographical (national) autonomy.

This sets the tone for another 25 pages, which sweep across a broad swathe of subjects- from these south african bantustans, through the prohibition of incest, the development of early trade networks, and an analysis of Kantian philosophy. Through this process Land develops the notion of the 'outside'- an exteriority, which he contrasts with the interiority of Kantian a priori synthetic knowledge, patriarchy, and capital.

To begin, Land describes how the structure of apartheid South Africa fits within the framework of international liberal capitalism, and how the displacement of the human cost of these policies and economics- whether through segregationist policies inside a country, or through the process of offshoring- allows the illusion of a values-free technocratic system of governance to develop and solidify itself among the people.

Land identifies this state of economic affairs, through Marx, as an 'overt war against the people, (through) their forced removal from conditions of subsistence'- and states that the illusion of apolitical governance, accomplished by the dissociation from the results of that governance, could never be permanent.

Then, Land ties this to the network of kinship, familial relations as part and parcel of a system of trade relations. The 'Prohibition of Incest,' in this context, becomes part of a system of exogamy and patriarchal relations, allowing the creation of networks of marriage-alliances between familial groups, who become trading partners with the other groups.

But as quickly as he brings the subject up, he drops it and moves on- This time to the central idea which he intends to explore, that is, the context of Kant and his philosophy, and the implications of his philosophy.

Kant, according to the still-young Land, is the culmination of Western bourgeois philosophy- a culmination which attempts to strangle the idea of exteriority by defining a priori both what exteriors are allowed to exist and the ways in which these exteriors can be engaged with- thus removing the 'exterior' as a concept, by placing it entirely in the realm of the interior.

Speaking somewhat retrospectively, this concept of the exterior- of the 'outside' and 'outsideness'- is one that will become central to Nick's future work, and so it's interesting to see what I presume is one of his earliest explorations of the idea. Based on some cursory net surfing, this essay was written in 1988, which means that (given Fanged Noumena is a collection of essays from 1987 to 2007) it is one of the earliest works in this book chronologically. It's a lot easier to understand, reading this, how Land ended up inspiring leftists and feminists, even though it clearly frames 'the left' as being something exterior to himself- which is intriguing, given how openly he leans on marxist analysis at several points through the piece.

The most interesting part is how smoothly and rapidly Land weaves all these different areas together into a coherent whole. From the title, I had expected this essay to be all over the place, but the different strands are woven together so deftly- blending marriage with immigration, capital accumulation with patriarchy, and the Kantian ultrarationalist project of a priori synthesis subjugating the experience of the external to the inference of the internal- that it's honestly hard to criticize him for this.

And, of course, there's the beautiful closing shot as well:
Victorious Third World struggles, so long as they have been successfully localized, do not lead to realistic post-capitalist achievements, and certainly not to postpatriarchal ones, since the conservation of the form of the nation state is itself enough to guarantee the reinsertion of a society into the system of inhibited synthesis. For as long as the dynamic of guerilla war just leads to new men at the top -with all that this entails in terms of the communication between individuated sovereignties - history will continue to look bleak. For it is only when the pervasive historical bond between masculinity and war is broken by effective feminist violence that it will become possible to envisage the uprooting of the patriarchal endogamies that orchestrate the contemporary world order. With the abolition of the inhibition of synthesis - of Kantian thought - a sordid cowardice will be washed away, and cowardice is the engine of greed. But the only conceivable end of Kantianism is the end of modernity, and to reach this we must foster new Amazons in our midst.

I'll almost certainly come back to this essay again, later- I feel fairly sure that I've missed a lot of the complexities on this first read which I'll pick up after having digested it's content for a while. But for now, I think that'll be all.
 

Strigix

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This essay is a review of a review- which, as I am now reviewing it, makes this at least 3 layers deep of reviewing, like a game of telephone played through essays over the course of a century, and taking place in two different languages.

Still, I'll try my best to avoid misrepresenting any of the layers- from Trakl's poetics, Heidegger's analysis thereof, or Nick's meta-analysis of Heidegger's analysis. Fortunately, while Nick's analysis in here plays with ideas that he'll develop further later on, it does so in relatively understated ways compared to Kant, Capital, and Incest.

The symbolism in Trakl's work seems like something that has, if not seeped through into Land's work directly, still presented an eerie mirror to some of what Land thinks. The discussion of alterity- outsideness- focuses on the stars, the moon, and on the figures of the 'wild'. Land's analysis focuses both on the nature of the 'beast,' and how Heidegger conceptualizes it in context to humans, and on the struggle which Heidegger has with the ostensibly random and disorganized nature of the stars- which is not adequately resolved, at least not in the work Land analyzes.

Both of these feel like they are connected to Land's ideas of alterity- but I'll be honest, while the essay called to mind both Derrida's discourses on 'The Beast and the Sovereign,' and the lovecraftian aesthetic of Bloodborne, I had a hard time pinpointing any particular angle Land was attempting to press with his analysis, and after a few reads I've come to the conclusion that he was basically just trying to wrap his head around what Heidegger's thought was.

That's not to say that it hasn't been a somewhat insightful read as to Land's own philosophical development- I can see ways in which the overlap of analytics and poetics might have influenced Land's later work, given what I know of Land's later work- but unfortunately, I can't think of much to say about this one. Rather than spend a few more days overanalyzing the essay, I'll just say that it was a somewhat interesting look into the mind of a philosopher that I've never been very exposed to, and leave it at that.
 
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Strigix

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Reading Delighted to Death is the process of watching Land chew his way through the body of Kant's work, and then- having gnawed the bones clean- assembled the skeleton into a collage upon which he paints a self-portrait.

Land begins by examining the concept of intolerable pleasure. He quotes the following passage from Kant's Anthropology:
Satisfaction is the feeling of the promotion; pain that of the obstruction of life . But life (of animals) is, as doctors have already noted, a continuous play of the antagonism of the two.

Thus before every satisfaction there must first be pain; pain is always first. Because what would proceed from a continual promotion of living force, which does not let itself climb above a certain grade, other than a rapid death from delight?

Using this framing as his baseline, Land examines Kant's moral and philosophical frameworks as being an ascetic of denial- the renunciation of individual pleasure as an inherently self-destructive characteristic.

Kant pairs this philosophy of self-denial and discipline with the accumulation of capital and material wealth- not for the purpose of expending it, but for the purpose of disciplining ones self by the denial of the fruit's of one's own labors. This is explicitly linked to the act of capital accumulation by Kant, but it is not much of a stretch to see it justifying the exploitation of workers as well- as, if those workers were to be given the full value of their labor, they would not have a 'proper balance' between pain and satisfaction- that is, a masochistic balance coming down firmly on the side of pain and excruciation, whether by one's own hand or the invisible hand of the taskmaster.

Land links this framework to Christian mysticism, and the glorification of the martyr- those who sacrifice themselves, through acts of pious devotion, in hope of their earthly suffering being met by spiritual rewards. Kant was inspired by these martyrs- but where the martyr sought to obey divine law, Kant sought to create a humanist mysticism, taking the fire of the gods and infusing it into human-built frameworks of law and morality.

In order to develop the individual's mystic rationalism, and to imbue them with the moral framework of Kant's beliefs, they must first have the need to strip themselves of their animal selves- their more intuitive understandings of what 'right and wrong' might be- and develop in it's place a perverse anti-pleasure, a pleasure taken in the rejection of pleasurable things.

To quote Land's own summary of this,
Reason is something that must be built, and the site of its construction first requires a demolition. The object of this demolition is the synthetic capability that Kant refers to as the imagination, and which he exhibits as natural intelligence or animal cunning. This is the capability to act without the prior authorization of a j uridical power, and it is only through the crucifixion of natural intelligence that the human animal comes to prostrate itself before universal law. Kant is quite explicit about this in the second Critique; only that is moral which totally negates all pathological influence, for morality must never negotiate with empirical stimulation. The Kantian moral good is the total monopoly of power in the hands of reason, and reason finds its principal definition as the supersensible element of the subject, and thus as fundamentally negative. In other words, morality is precisely the powerlessness of animality. This is not the discourse of civil jurisdiction, because it presupposes the prior silencing of the defendant. It is more like the discourse of military strategy in the grand style, which insists upon utterly vanquishing the enemy before dictating terms, and for which the very idea of negotiation already smelt of humiliation and defeat...

...
Those with a taste for the macabre can find this theme obsessively reiterated within Kant's practical philosophy. It is hard to imagine that it could be controversial to suggest that the categorical imperative presupposes a vivisection.

I am, quite frankly, not familiar enough with Kant to pass any sort of educated judgement of whether this is an accurate reading of his work. The essay is peppered with enough quotations and citations for the reading to at least appear authoritative. What is, perhaps, more interesting is the tone that Land takes when approaching this subject.

Land appears unable to decide whether he should condemn Kant for the brutality of his thought, or whether he should be celebrating that same brutality. He seems to harbor a romantic longing for death- whether it be the death of the self, induced by a ascetic rationalism, or a death by pleasurable consumption.

The reader is left with a skeletal framework, and no easy answers.

And so we must start by eating the bones.

---
AN: Apologies for the delay on this one. I've been busy with other stuff for a little while, and hadn't been sure of how to approach reviewing this. I'll almost certainly revisit it later, because it feels like something that will be reflected in Land's later works, but I haven't read those works yet, so... yeah.
 

Strigix

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I worry, a little, that I’ve failed to get across something of the works I’ve read so far.

I’ve read a fair amount of philosophy. Some of it is engaging. Some of it is dry. But I don’t think I’ve ever run into philosophy constructed like this before. A lot of philosophers write as if they’re constructing a reading test- something challenging, to force the reader to grapple with what they wrote- to force a struggle with the work, which, in turn, forces the reader to engage with the ideas in the work.

Land is… not like that. His writing pulls you in, as if he were writing a mystery, a thriller, a horror story- something that leaves you on the edge of the page, waiting for what’s next.

And then, after he hooks you, he feeds you the problematic- the question, the idea, the thought he wanted to introduce- and you’re forced to come to grips with what you just read, in and of itself.

The early writings of Nick Land are fascinating and exciting, and not necessarily in a good way. You can’t tear your eyes away. You’ve thought the thought. It can’t be unthought, now.

Either stare down the basilisk, or be eaten by it.

In Art as Insurrection, Land explores the idea of ‘genius’, of the outside, of the construction of reason, of Dionysus and Apollo, and- in a generally abstract and easily missed manner- about the end of the world. In some ways, it is an expansion on and sequel to the last essay- Delighted To Death- but it doesn’t really rely on the prior essay to do any of the heavy lifting.

The essay begins with Kant, and more specifically his second and third critiques.

Far from having been domesticated by the transcendental forms of understanding, nature was still a freely flowing wound that needed to be staunched… Kant’s ‘reason’ is a reactive concept, negatively defined against the pathology with which it has been locked in perpetual and brutal war. In the third Critique all inhibition is lifted from this conflict; it becomes gritty, remorseless, cruel.

Land frames Kant’s philosophy and the construction of reason as being, at it’s core, a reactionary response to the existence of a nature which is not a tightly controlled extension of it’s own transcendental rationality. Kant’s quest, then, is to erase all need for an existence preceding the essence of the sublime, transcendental being of ordered thought which he desired to bring into the world.

Kant was unable, despite his most dedicated efforts, to succeed in this task. But his attempt, and critical theory, did create a problematic- establishing a humanism which distinguishes the natural from the artificial, and the primal animal from the synthetic human.

This division plays through the essay- and, I suspect, will remain a common theme in the rest of Land’s work.

According to Land,
Where Kant distorts, marginalizes, and obscures the thought of the unconscious, Schopenhauer emphasizes and develops it… Reason is no longer thought of as an autonomous principle in reciprocal antagonism with nature, but as a film upon its surface.
Schopenhauer expands upon the division, and thus reaffirms it’s existence- although it’s not clear whether this is intentional, or merely a chance happening.

In either case, the idea of genius is expanded; Where Kant leaves the ‘genius’ as a defeated admission that he cannot conquer prefigurative nature in its entirety, Schopenhauer expands genius and artistry to become the will of not even the unconscious mind, or the biomechanical animal structures of the brain, but of the peculiar configuration of minerals which construct the human.

It is no doubt comforting to speak of ‘the genius’ as if impersonal creative energy were commensurable with the order of autonomous individuality governed by reason, but such chatter is, in the end, absurd. Genius is nothing like a character trait, it does not belong to a psychological lexicon; far more appropriate is the language of seismic upheaval, inundation, disease, the onslaught of raw energy from without. One ‘is’ a genius only in the sense that one ‘is’ a syphilitic, in the sense that ‘one’ is violently problematized by a ferocious exteriority. One returns to the subject of which genius has been predicated to find it charred and devalued beyond recognition.



For Schopenhauer the body is the objectification of the will, the intellect is a function of a particular organ of the body, and genius is the surplus of that functioning in relation to the individual organism in question. Genius is thus an assault on the individualized will that erupts from out of the reservoir of archaic preorganized willing. It is a site of particular tension in his thinking, caught between a vision of progressive redemption, achieved through humanity as perfected individuality in which the will is able to renounce itself, and regressive unleashing of the preindividual will from the torture chamber of the organic specificity, ego-interests, and personality. Schopenhauer’s attachment to the first of these options is well known, but the possibility of an alternative escape from individualization – by way of dissolution into archaic inundating desire – constantly strains for utterance within his text.

Enter Dionysius and Apollo- the mad god and the god of order. These are introduced as Nietzsche’s expansion upon the problematic, and they characterize the problematic in terms of a mythic grandeur which Land revels in.

And it’s at this point, I suppose, that I talk a little bit about the end of the world.

Early in this essay, Land says of Kant that he thought
If history could no longer be avoided, at least it could be brought swiftly and meticulously to its end.

In order for Kant to bring history to it’s end, he would have to bring around a world whose order was so hegemonic- so taken for granted- that opposition to it was not possible, could not even be thought of- where the transcendent reason of critical theory creates a society which is as sublimely masochistic and perfectly universal as the categorical imperative.

Interestingly, unless I misread the information on the first appearances of these essays, Art as Insurrection was initially released in 1991. This means that it was published around two years after Francis Fukuyama wrote his essay on ‘the end of history,’ and a year before Fukuyama’s book on the subject was released. It seems reasonable, therefore, to assume that in some ways, this essay was meant to be a response to Fukuyama.

Near the opening of Fukuyama’s essay, he says the following:
The triumph of the West, of the Western idea, is evident first of all in the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism. In the past decade, there have been unmistakable changes in the intellectual climate of the world's two largest communist countries, and the beginnings of significant reform movements in both. But this phenomenon extends beyond high politics and it can be seen also in the ineluctable spread of consumerist Western culture in such diverse contexts as the peasants' markets and color television sets now omnipresent throughout China, the cooperative restaurants and clothing stores opened in the past year in Moscow, the Beethoven piped into Japanese department stores, and the rock music enjoyed alike in Prague, Rangoon, and Tehran.

We know, of course, that the end of history wasn’t. But at the same time… we are living in an era where, to steal a phrase, ‘it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.’

The structures of international capital are as omnipresent as ever. The state form, intertwined as it is with capital, appears equally omnipresent- to the point where even suggesting that a non-state option could exist typically receives confusion and hostility as a response. The only possibilities seen by people are the incredibly specific and somewhat peculiar institutions we already have- or to have nothing at all, an empty wasteland, ‘a world that has ended’.

And yet, ‘the world’ will end regardless.

No structure can last forever. Capital and the State aren’t existences outside of time- they replaced systems which came before them, and they will one day be replaced with a new system which comes after.

The attempt to maintain the current form for all time is doomed to failure. The structures we build cannot be immortal- no more than we, ourselves, can be. Our social constructs will only remain ‘real’ so long as we take active effort to prop them up. The transcendent reason of the critical theorist and the omnipresent structures of the capital-state complex are structures created by us, towering edifices built on sand. For them to remain, we must constantly put our efforts into shoring them up- we must constantly reaffirm, generation after generation, that nothing else is possible, and that we must dedicate ourselves to the creation and re-creation of these systems.

And yet, imagination still exists. We can still dream of a better world- and of ways to exist, outside of the structures imposed upon us. To create an unchangeable, unchallengeable edifice, we would not only have to create that edifice- we would have to snuff out the spark of life and dreams from our minds, and the minds of all future generations.

How does desire come to desire its own repression? How does production come to rigidify itself in the social straitjacket whose most dissolved form is capital? It is with this problematic, inherited from Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Reich, that Deleuze and Guattari orient their work. In our terms here: how does art become (under-) compensated labor? Their answer involves a displacement of the problem into a philosophical affinity with Kant’s paralogisms of the pure understanding, rethought in Anti-Oedipus as materially instantiated traps for desire. A paralogism is the attempt to ground ‘conditions of possibility’ in the objectivity they permit, or creativity in what it creates. This is, to take the most pertinent example, to derive the forces of production from the socio-economic apparatus they generate. Sociological fundamentalism, state worship, totalitarian paranoia and fascism, they all exhibit the same basic impulse; hatred of art, (real) freedom, desire, everything that cannot be controlled, regulated, and administered. Fascism hates aliens, migrant workers, the homeless, rootless people of every kind and inclination, everything evocative of excitement and uncertainty, women, artists, lunatics, drifting sexual drives, liquids, impurity, and abandonment.

Philosophy, in its longing to rationalize, formalize, define, delimit, to terminate enigma and uncertainty, to cooperate wholeheartedly with the police, is nihilistic in the ultimate sense that it strives for the immobile perfection of death. But creativity cannot be brought to an end that is compatible with power, for unless life is extinguished, control must inevitably break down. We possess art lest we perish of the truth.

To conclude is not merely erroneous, but ugly.
 

Strigix

Verified Xeno
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Animality is not a state, essence, or genus, but a complex space cross-cut by voyages of all kinds. Trakl explores this wilderness terrain with an excruciating vulnerability. The animality which Trakl finds has its dead-ends and stagnant stumps, it has its humanistic and theological becomings, but it also has its channels of open flow; becoming multiple, fluid, unpredictable, becoming an enemy of mankind, lupine and murine becomings of all kinds…An unfathomable abyss of regression or recurrence protracts itself epidemically into Trakl’s body. ‘I am all the vermin in history.’ Indecent precipitation.

‘Spirit and Teeth’ explores Land’s perspective on animality, among other things. In this essay, Land uses two primary animal motifs- the wolf, and the rat- to explore his ideas of the outside.

The essay explores the ‘animal’ as lesser- but it is worth noting that, prior to doing this, it clearly frames this in terms of the ‘animal’ being perceived as lesser by society.
To be a werewolf is to be inferior by the most basic criteria of civilization.
The wolf, or werewolf, is therefore not necessarily inferior in and of itself- it is inferior within the context of a society which deems it inferior.

In some ways reading this work felt like reading a fascist tract, denouncing the animality of the inferior. On the flip side, other parts of the work feel more like an attempt to reclaim that animality and alterity- to look the frameworks of fascist thought and propaganda in the eye, smile, and say ‘you’re right about me, but being right won’t stop me.’ Regardless of Land’s own opinions at the time of writing, however, I think there are still thoughts and problematics worth scavenging here.

While the (were)Wolf is a more romantic figure than the Rat, I can’t help but feel that the examination of the rat is the more interesting of the two here. Wolves may break through the gates, may exist in societies that reject them- but the rats do not merely exist in society. Rats reclaim the architecture and infrastructure of their surroundings for themselves- they infiltrate and subvert the structures of society and use them for their own ends.

This feels like an important element of Land’s thought, especially the concept/ideology of acceleration. Acceleration isn’t revolution or reform; it’s subverting systems to accomplish the accelerationist’s own goals, without concern for what the intended purpose of those systems might have been.

There are the teeth, clawing and biting. But where is the ‘spirit’?

I’ve put most of my focus on Land in terms of materialism, and perhaps that is unfair. Land’s philosophy seems as much an esotericism as it is a materialism.

Consider Land’s words here:
Phenomenology is a programmatic denial (reduction to the personal) of exteriority which, after becoming a quasisolipsistic knee-jerk of self-assertion, wonders with genuine naivety why alterity has come to pose such problems. If spirit largely disappears between Hegel and Husserl it is because, compared to the transcendental ego, it seems a little too complicit with the outside.
What does he mean, when he says ‘Phenomenology is a programmatic denial of exteriority’? I am certainly not an expert in Phenomenology myself, but wikipedia breaks the subject down as such: “In its most basic form, phenomenology attempts to create conditions for the objective study of topics usually regarded as subjective: consciousness and the content of conscious experiences such as judgements, perceptions, and emotions. Although phenomenology seeks to be scientific, it does not attempt to study consciousness from the perspective of clinical psychology or neurology. Instead, it seeks through systematic reflection to determine the essential properties and structures of experience.[3]”

Using this as a baseline, we can suppose that Land is opposing himself to the systemic reflection on and determination of ‘the essential properties and structures of experience,’ which he frames as the denial of exteriority.

There does seem to be something a little offputting, when you step back, about a school of philosophy attempting to classify all thought and experience into an ‘objective’ framework- something which allows the creators of that framework to take subjective personal experience, and say that it is not real because it does not match their supposedly objective framework for classifying what can be experienced. It is reminiscent of the earlier criticism of Kant, and the idea of a priori knowledge- an idea which is brought up again, through a different thinker this time:
We always already have the meaning of being built into the structure of existence, Heidegger suggests, it is merely that we do not yet know that we know. Questioning is remembering. Socrates smiles.


Thus Spirit becomes the outside; an existence opposed to rationalist a priori knowledge, the collection of thoughts and experiences shoved outside of society.

Interestingly, Land’s own marriage of the esoteric to the material in this way serves much the same function as the philosophical sects he derides; it takes the noumenal and routes it through society’s dispossessed, reframing the ‘exterior of what is possible to experience’ to ‘exterior to what a certain cadre of elite academics have experienced’, thus transforming it from something truly outside of human experience to a set of human experiences which are punished by hegemonic structures.

Or at least, that’s what I’m getting from this. I feel like I need to revisit this subject later, probably after gaining a much stronger grounding in academic philosophy, so I’ll have better tools to analyze what Land is trying to get at.
 

Strigix

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…the existence of God would be an even greater disaster for him than for us. How infinitely trivial the cricifixion of Jesus appears beside the degrading torture of being God, after all, existence is so indistinguishable from defilement that one turns pale at the very thought of an eternal being’s smell.



It is not only due to the inquisition that all the great voyagers have for a long time been singed. For well over a century all who have wanted to see have seen: no profound exploration can be launched from the ruins of monotheism unless it draws its resources from damnation.
It is a fairly straightforward thing to say that we cannot go back in time. The sequence of historical events will remain unchanged- and we cannot undo that past. Moving forward requires engaging with the world as it is, and will inherently have to move onwards from the current state of affairs, rather than resetting things to an earlier state.

The notion of the eternal recurrence, taken in that context, seems trivially disprovable- at least, on any timeframe beyond the cosmic. For history to exist as a circle, we would have to take a view so broad that the events in the life of any given individual are as specks of dust floating in an infinite sea.

But stepping away from painful literalism for a moment, the idea that history has its recurring cycles, it’s ebbs and flows, is not so easily disprovable. We can’t undo the past, but the past doesn’t have to define what has to be.

God is dead. The authority of the priest granting divine truth and insight has declined, usurped by the philosopher’s search for divine truth- but what if no such truth exists?

Nick Land pits Nietzsche (and all other such explorers) against both the monotheistic paradigm of an absolute divine authority and the philosophical search for a new pseudo-divine authority to replace the decaying corpse of God. The eternal recurrence, in this context, means that the death of God is a return to the time before God- i.e., a return to the formless chaos of creation.

But although ‘God is dead,’ we cannot simply escape the past. God’s corpse is all around us- and in order to leave, we must tear our way out, staining ourselves in it’s blood.

And having done that, what water is there to clean ourselves?

Land, unlike Nietzsche, seems unconcerned with the smell: “We creatures of shadow… await God with greed, scavenging at Christ like wolves at an animal they have not killed.”
 

MagnificentLilyWitch

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I think one of my big issues with western philosophy is that assumption that there has to be an absolute and monotheistic divine authority at all.
 

Strigix

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When Land titles this essay ‘After the Law,’ I am under the impression that he means that in two very distinctive ways. Firstly, that it is talking in a literal way about the gradual loss of a justification for ‘law’, as it is gradually surpassed in relevance by the mechanical tools of management and control. Secondly, in an abstract way, it is talking about what happens ‘after the law’ has passed its judgement on the convict- that is, death.

I will admit, I am really not sure what to say of this essay. I’m not sure there really is anything to say. Land compares the death of Socrates, and the recording of that death and it’s context, to the death of Gilles de Rais, its records, and it’s context. He positions this conflation of philosopher and madman as a joke; but I don’t think I got the punchline.

Maybe I’ll find out what’s so funny later. If I do, I’ll come back to this one then.

(I doubt I’ll be coming back to this essay.)
 

Strigix

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This is the first essay I’ve read from Land where it felt like I was reading a capitalist.

In prior essays, Land had worked with a framing that was, if not leftist, at least seemingly influenced heavily by Marxist and Feminist frameworks. This essay, on the other hand, either signifies a shift or a doing away with pretense- Land builds a philosophical framework for a sort of marxist capitalism, a capitalist ideology of recuperation, which begins with the recuperation of marxist-derived critiques of the capitalist idea.

Along the way, Land explores and expands on a number of ideas that he has already put forward- the outside becomes dissolution, an acid bath dissolving the gunk and leaving clean and lifeless parts. The libidinal, animal urges of becoming are recuperated into the processes of capital/fascism. People have told me that Fanged Noumena would be inconsistent between essays, but in this case, it is inconsistent within the essay- not quite reaching the point where it is willing to engage with the fact that it has positioned capitalism as a cycle of death (revolution) and recuperation (fascism) and then tried to absolve death/revolution from the structures of fascism it would lead to. I’ll grant that he appears correct that the drive to revolution is not the same as the drive to fascism, but when this argument is used in context of statements like this,
Capital cannot disown schizoanalysis without defanging itself. The madness it would fend off is the sole resource of its own future; a fringe of desocialized experimentation which corrodes its essence and anticipatively mocks the entirety of the currently existing modes of civility. The real energetic liberty which annihilates the priest’s cage of human freedom is refused at the level of the political secondary process during the precise period in which the economic primary process is slipping ever more deeply into its embrace. The deep secret of capital-as-process is its incommensurability with the preservation of bourgeois civilization, which clings to it like a dwarf riding a dragon. As capital ‘evolves,’ the increasingly absurd rationalization of production-for-profit peels away like a cheap veneer from the positive feedback detonation of production-for-production.
Such projective eschatology completely misses the point, which is that death is not an extrinsic possibility of capital, but an inherent function. The death of capital is less a prophecy than a machine part.
All the supposedly alien sources of disorder which capital represents as the exteriority of its end, such as working class agitation, feminism, drugs, racial migration, and the disintegration of the family, are as essential to its own development as the attributes of a substance.
it is hard to take that positioning seriously.

Positioning forces and politics exterior to capital as part of the cycle of capital places the impulse to revolution within a firmly capitalist context. In this framework, the revolution does not, and can not, bring about the end of capital- but it can accelerate the process of dissolution/reconstitution.

The disappointing part is that, while I knew all along that Land was going to argue for capitalism in a way similar to this, as that is one of the central features of the ‘Acceleration’ he helped define, this appears to be Land accepting the process he has until now opposed.

I don’t really want to come back to this one, but I probably should, later- a lot of Land’s arguments were based around philosophical constructs I am not familiar with, particularly the ‘Body without Organs,’ which like… It’s described in the essay, sort of. I still don’t think I understand it right? If what I’m picking up about it is right, though, it’s a deliberately obtuse way of talking about a straightforward idea in order to make it seem more profound because it is more difficult to follow. (An unfortunately common problem in philosophy.)

So I'll call that it for this one, with the note that I might revisit it later, after doing a bit of digging on the BwO.
 

Strigix

Verified Xeno
Administrator
Thanks for the resources; I can't really go through them right now, but I'll give them a look later.
 

Strigix

Verified Xeno
Administrator
If time was progressive schizophrenics would be escaping from human security, but in reality they are infiltrated from the future. They come from the body without organs, the deterritorium of Cyberia, a zone of subversion which is the platform for a guerrilla war against the judgement of God.

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So. This is, in some ways, Nick Land’s first foray into the more… esoteric aspects of his philosophy of acceleration, specifically the aspect of time.

You see, part of Land’s philosophical platform is that time is, well, neither linear nor progressive. This helps to inform one of the more interesting ideas from the CCRU- the ‘Hyperstition’.

The qualities of a hyperstition- which Land describes elsewhere- are as follows:
  1. It is an element of effective culture that makes itself real
  2. It is a fictional quality functional as a time travelling device
  3. It is a coincidence intensifier
  4. It is a call to the ‘Old Ones’

There is, I’ll be honest, an urge to laugh in disbelief at this. The definition is absurd, makes absurd claims, and is obviously, on it’s face, batshit crazy.

(Remember how I mentioned Land literally driving himself mad, just to see what it’d be like?)

That said, the idea of a hyperstition has been taken out of this… let’s be honest, batshit insane context, and given a makeover, primarily focusing on qualities 1 and 2.

By taking the idea less seriously as a whole, we’re able to find useful elements of hyperstition, and dissolve the rest away. Once we do that, we have the following qualities:
  1. It is an idea which creates a feedback loop around itself.
  2. This feedback loop is oriented towards a goal, IE, it is purposeful: the intent is to bring a particular future into existence- the future of the idea.
  3. It effects groups of people- it is a contagious idea, which spreads through groups.

Thus, hyperstition is something like a meme, in the original sense of that word- an idea which spreads itself virally- but it’s more particular than that. It is a meme with an agenda, and this agenda is creating ‘itself’ in the world- or rather, the physical manifestation of that idea.

Of course, once you remove the aspects of ‘time travel’ and ‘calling forth the dark gods’, it becomes pretty obvious that what we’re looking at is… having a goal, acting towards it, and persuading other people that it’s good.

Not a particularly impressive accomplishment, and it only gets to that point when we remove about a thousand layers of esoteric posturing and bullshit from the equation.

This essay has a similar issue. It talks a little bit about Deleuze and Guattari’s work in ‘Capitalism and Schizophrenia’- but most of this is positing that ‘Schizophrenia’ is such a hyperstitional object, that it is literally a timeless entity which is in the process of creating itself, with capital and madness being two aspects of it’s existence.

And at the end of the day, I just have a hard time taking this sort of thing seriously:
How would it feel to be smuggled back out of the future in order to subvert its antecedent conditions? To be a cyberguerrilla, hidden in human camouflage so advanced that even one’s software was part of the disguise? Exactly like this?

Still, I suppose that it's interesting to read this just to see Land's weirdness developing. How many other philosophers can you say bamboozled themselves into thinking that the elder gods were reaching back in time to drive them mad with cursed knowledge about how the future would be a cyberpunk dystopia?
 

Strigix

Verified Xeno
Administrator
I think this is going to be my last entry in this Lets Read for a while.

I'm feeling a little burned out on Land, and while I might come back to read more of his stuff later... For now, I think I'm going to move on to other writers.

So, consider this thread on indefinite Hiatus, while I read other stuff.
 
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