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.