0% found this document useful (0 votes)
160 views11 pages

London: Nick Land - An Experiment in Inhumanism

Nick Land

Uploaded by

Yomara Naomi
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
0% found this document useful (0 votes)
160 views11 pages

London: Nick Land - An Experiment in Inhumanism

Nick Land

Uploaded by

Yomara Naomi
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 11

12/01/2022, 18:21 Divus | Nick Land – An Experiment in Inhumanism

Go to e-shop 0 Items | 0 EUR Show basket


Search No Esperanto, but:




LONDON
|
PRAHA
|
BERLIN
UMĚLEC MAGAZINE PUNK'S DEAD
SERVICES PERLA
ABSOLUTE MIXTURE EASTERN ALLIANCE
艺术家 CONTACT

Umělec magazine 2012/1


>> Nick Land – An Experiment in Inhumanism List of all editions.
Calendar
Show list

Stu Mead

Open

Umělec magazine

Year 2012, 1

6,50 EUR

5 GBP

Send the printed


edition:

1/2012

Order subscription

Nick Land – An Experiment in Inhumanism


Umělec magazine 2012/1

27.02.2013
13:40

DIVUS LIVE (blog)


Robin Mackay
|
profile | en cs de
Show list

Like 0 04.09.2019

Slavka Kneppo:
Ohlédnutí za Art Basel
According to the present-day Nick Land, the person who
Nick Land was Pověsti o těžkých časech na trhu
a British wrote the following texts no longer exists. Yet for anyone
s uměním jsou opět velmi
philosopher but is who knew him, it is difficult to speak about these works
přehnané...

no longer, though
without recalling Land as he was then. Not because one
he is not dead. The
almost neurotic wishes to promote a personality cult around Land
fervor with which (something he himself was accused of at the time), but to
he scratched at the
scars of reality has emphasize that they are the residuum of a series of
seduced more than experiments. ‘Thought-experiments,’ but not the sort that
a few promising
academics onto the philosophers conduct from the comfort of their armchairs:
path of art that For the Land who penned these texts was one of those
offends in its few thinkers who was prepared to let thought take him
originality. The
texts that he has beyond such contemplative comforts; to put himself at
left behind are risk in the name of philosophy – even if, in the process,
reliably revolting
and boring, and he would repudiate that ancient name, along with its
impel us to traditions.
castrate their
categorization as
“mere” literature. As Iain Hamilton Grant (a former student of Land’s, now
an important philosopher in his own right) says: ‘In the
last half of the twentieth century, academics talked
endlessly about the outside, but no-one went there. Land, by exemplary
contrast, made experiments in the unknown unavoidable for a philosophy
caught in the abstractive howl of post-political cybernetics.’ Land courted
the ‘outside’ of philosophy, combining it with other disciplines – from
nanotechnology to occultism, from computation to anthropology. But he
sought the ‘outside’ in a more radical sense, for this interdisciplinary
exploration was undertaken in view of one sole aim: to escape the
anthropic conservatism of ‘philosophical thought,’ itself grafted from

New book by I.M.Jirous in English at our online bookshop.
common sense, in turn the product of evolutionary processes whose

divus.cz/london/en/article/nick-land-ein-experiment-im-inhumanismus 1/11
12/01/2022, 18:21 Divus | Nick Land – An Experiment in Inhumanism
contingencies were determined by the geological history of the planet.
Land’s struggle against what he called the ‘Human Security System’ – the
net result of this crushing cosmic legacy of ‘stratification,’ normalizing and
limiting what thought can do – made it necessary to tirelessly search for
new perspectives. How else to prosecute such an impossible combat
against thought’s incarceration in the cosmically-reactionary forms of the
social, the institutional, the personal, and the philosophical?

Star Wars, I.
  01.01.2000 | Open

When I arrived, in 1992, at Warwick University – a dour, concrete campus


set in the UK’s grey and drizzling Midlands – I was a callow and nervous
teenager, also filled with the hope that philosophy would afford me access
to some kind of ‘outside’ – or at the very least, some intellectual
adventure. Almost entirely overcome with disappointment and horror at
the reality of academic life within weeks, it was a relief to meet one
lecturer who would, at last, say things that really made sense: Think of life Recommended book
Open
as an open wound, which you poke with a stick to amuse yourself. Or:
Philosophy is only about one thing: making trouble. Land was tolerant of
my hanging out in his office smoking and drinking coffee, as he (habitually
hyperexcited and quivering with stimulants) worked on his comically
antiquated green-screen Amstrad computer, and eagerly relayed the latest
insights he had garnered from molecular biology, nanotechnology or
neuroscience. One could not help but be impressed by the sense of a man
whose entire being was invested in his work; for whom philosophy was
neither a nine-to-five affair nor a straightforwardly life-affirming labor; and
who took seriously the ridiculously megalomaniacal aspiration of
philosophy to synopsize everything that is known into a grand speculative
framework. He was uniquely able to open up students’ minds to the
conceptual resources of the history of philosophy in a way that made
philosophical thinking seem urgent and concrete: a cache of weapons for
‘making trouble,’ a toolkit for escaping from everything dismal, inhibiting Umělec 2013/1

and tedious.
Latest Articles DIVUS
Show list
Before I met Land, I already knew of him through the gossip of new
undergraduates taken aback by what they had heard on the grapevine: Did DIVUS INTERNATIONAL: Divus
at Unearthing the Music in
Land really claim that he had come back from the dead? Did he really think Lisbon

he was an android sent from the future to terminate human security? In


person he belied these outrageous claims (both of which he did indeed DIVUS LONDON: My Itinerary
Has Been Monotonous for
make in writing), being thoroughly polite and amiable and, above all, Quite a While

willing to engage in earnest conversation with anyone. He had paid his


DIVUS LONDON: Zinovy Zinik:
philosophical dues and could hold his own in a discussion with any On Sound Monsters

professor; these discussions often turning vituperative, however, as Land


railed against the institution and its conservatism. But he preferred to
Categories of interest
spend his time in the bar with undergraduates, always buying the drinks, Show list
smoking continually, and conversing animatedly (and where possible,
vehemently) about any topic whatsoever. u-sobě
new faces
focus
theory
The End of the
Land was perhaps not the greatest teacher from the point of view of Western Concept
in transition
theory
commentary
comics
editorial
q & a
obtaining a sober and solid grounding in one’s subject – but more
new face
media
info
reviews
importantly, his lectures had about them a genuine air of excitement – news
japan
essay
performance
more like Deleuze at the Sorbonne in ’68 than the dreary courses in theme
interview
review
artist
exhibition
q&a
art project
public space
Epistemology one had to endure at a provincial British university in the
art projects
war
profile
90s. Not only was the course he taught pointedly entitled ‘Current French
Philosophy’ – a currency otherwise alien to our curriculum — more
importantly, Land’s teaching was also a sharing of his own research-in-
progress. This was unheard-of: philosophy actually being done, rather than
being interpreted at second-hand?! He would sweep his audience into a
speculative vortex of philosophy, economics, literature, biology, technology,
and disciplines as-yet unnamed – before immobilizing them again with
some startling claim or gnomic declaration. And as Land spoke, he prowled
the classroom, sometimes clambering absentmindedly over the common-
room chairs like an outlandish mountain goat, sometimes poised squatting
on the seat of a chair like an overgrown mantis.


New book by I.M.Jirous in English at our online bookshop.
divus.cz/london/en/article/nick-land-ein-experiment-im-inhumanismus 2/11
12/01/2022, 18:21 Divus | Nick Land – An Experiment in Inhumanism

For Land, everything began with Kant – whose ‘critique’ he read as a kind
of unconscious dramatisation of the confrontation between social
conservatism and the corrosive powers of Capital; and continued through
the savage outgrowths of Kantian critique developed by Nietzsche,
Schopenhauer, and Bataille, who prioritised problematisation and
troublemaking over order. He had been intensively schooled in Heidegger
and deconstructive thinking, which he was liable to be dismissive of,
although their basic ambitions continued to inhabit his work. But he would
find his chief inspiration in Deleuze and Guattari’s ambitious ‘universal
history of contingency,’ Capitalism and Schizophrenia, which he sought to
extract from its French-philosophical, soixante-huitard political matrix.
According to Land, this work packed a conceptual charge fit to blow apart
its still too traditionally ‘political’ ambitions.

His early work already displayed philosophical brilliance and an energetic


sense of purpose (impatience, even) in relation to these philosophical
sources. But at a certain point in the mid-90s, it was as if someone had
thrown a switch, rerouting Land away from any known circuit of
philosophical study, and sending a new energy coursing through his writing
that changed its form, style and content – making the three virtually
indistinguishable, in fact. Increasingly alien elements were amalgamated
with his philosophical argumentation, which increasingly drew on the more
extravagant exponents of post-structuralism (Deleuze and Guattari,
Lyotard’s ‘Libidinal Economy’), giving rise to an entirely new genre of
‘theory-fiction.’ Through this new form, Land effectively reignited what he
saw as being the fundamental stakes of Heideggerianism, structuralism
and poststructuralism: the staging of a ‘break-out’ from the history of
Western thought. A renewed effort that was necessary since, despite
themselves, those philosophical movements had delivered their nascent
antihumanism back into the comfortable hands of an institutionally-
sanctioned priesthood – that precious, contemplative, delibidinized
francophile cult of ‘Continental Philosophy’ that emerged triumphant in the
Anglophone academy of the 1990s.

Land’s search for another way to think thus took the form of an
experimentation with writing; but it also went beyond writing. The quest
for some ‘signal’ that was not merely the repugnant narcissistic reflection
of the Human Security System would demand a total disregard of
normative method. Land sought channels of communication with the
‘outside’ not in an interminable and internal critique of philosophical texts,
but in popular culture: in the sensibilities of the first generation to have
grown up surrounded by technology; in the cyberpunk extrapolations made
by authors such as William Gibson who observed that generation’s
‘reprogramming’; in the futureshock narratives of movies such as
Terminator, Bladerunner and Videodrome; and in the rhythmic re-
formattings of the body in dance culture and the hybrid, cut-up
antilanguage of the digitised sonics that fueled it (especially Jungle, just
emerging in the mid-90s). In these practices Land saw thanatos – the
death-drive, the unknown outside – insinuating its way into the human by
way of eros. The unbridled production of new brands of erotic adventure
within capitalism ushered in a transformation of the human, cutting its
bonds with the (cultural, familial, and ultimately biological) past and
opening it up to new, inorganic distributions of affect. Compared to the
known – the strata of organic redundancy in which ‘the human’ was
interred – such unknowns were to be unhesitatingly affirmed. And
philosophical thought also had to hook up with eros if it sought to engage
with these new possibilities. Consequently, rather than simply writing
about these things, Land proposed to unlock the forces of dehumanisation
they mobilised, and to distil them in the form of ‘experimental
microcultures’: to intensify capitalism’s undoing of language through new
practices of writing, speaking, and thinking, but also by reconnecting the
body to its ‘molecular’ undercurrents, loosening-up the physical and vocal

constitution that locked it into the regime of signification.1


New book by I.M.Jirous in English at our online bookshop.
divus.cz/london/en/article/nick-land-ein-experiment-im-inhumanismus 3/11
12/01/2022, 18:21 Divus | Nick Land – An Experiment in Inhumanism

In taking this approach, Land not only renounced the respect of his
academic peers, but many times even lost the confidence of his
supporters, as he sought by any means possible to drill through the
sedimented layers of normative human comportment. Strange scenes
ensued: A seminar on A Thousand Plateaus where a group of nonplussed
graduates were encouraged to ‘read’ the chapter titles of the book by
turning them into acronyms that were then plotted as vectors on a diagram
of a QWERTY keyboard (‘qwertopology’); A three-week long experiment in
refusing to speak in the first person, instead referring to the collective
entity ‘Cur’ (comprising the hardcore participants in ‘Current French
Philosophy,’ who extended the lectures into a continual movable seminar);
and, most memorably, a presentation at the conference Virtual Futures in
1996: Rather than reading a paper, in this collaboration with artist

collective Orphan Drift, under the name of ‘DogHead SurGeri,’2 and


complete with jungle soundtrack, Land lay behind the stage, flat on the
floor (a ‘snake-becoming’ forming the first stage of bodily destratification),
croaking enigmatic invocations intercut with sections from Artaud’s asylum
poems. In this delirious vocal telegraphy, meaning seemed to  disintegrate
into sheer phonetic matter, melting into the cut-up beats and acting
directly on the subconscious. As Land began to speak in his strange,
choked-off voice (perhaps that ‘absurdly high pitched ... tone ... ancient

demonists described as ‘silvery,’ which he later reports being taunted by),3


the disconcerted audience begin to giggle; the demon voice wavered
slightly until Land’s sense of mission overcame his momentary self-
consciousness; and as the ‘performance’ continued the audience fell silent,
eyeing each other uncertainly as if they had walked into a funeral by
mistake. Embarrassment was regarded by Land as just one of the
rudimentary inhibitions that had to be broken down in order to explore the
unknown – in contrast to the forces of academic domestication, which
normalised by fostering a sense of inadequacy and shame before the
Masters, before the edifice of what is yet to be learnt.

Perhaps as a result of this maximally broad conception of ‘philosophy,’ of


my fellow students of the time only a few now hold academic positions
(and usually in precariously marginal positions, or at art schools rather
than in philosophy departments). On the other hand, I can count among
them novelists (Hari Kunzru, James Flint), musicians (Kode9, one of the
progenitors of ‘dubstep’), and writers such as Mark Fisher (blogger ‘K-

Punk,’ author of Capitalist Realism).4 Others have sought out Land from
afar, like Iranian writer Reza Negarestani, who tracked him down on the
web and began a long-running online conversation which led to the writing

of the extraordinary book Cyclonopedia.5

At the time, the happenings at Warwick also attracted interested parties


from outside the student body: Russell Haswell, now a renowned sound
artist and DJ, remembers being drawn in from the nearby city of Coventry
by rumours of the strange ideas that were being aired by Land and others.
Now-globally-acclaimed artists Jake and Dinos Chapman discovered Land’s
work and in 1996 commissioned him to write a text for the catalogue of
their first major show at the ICA in London. One of their prints now
(dis)graces the cover of Fanged Noumena.

In 1995, with the arrival at Warwick of Sadie Plant (author of situationist


history The Most Radical Gesture and ‘cyberfeminist’ manual Zeros and
Ones), Land’s experimental activities found a temporary institutional base
in the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU), a student-run research
group of uncertain status, and which, upon Plant’s rather swift departure,

the Philosophy department would deny had ever existed.6 Both within the
university and elsewhere, the CCRU organised events and interventions –
‘Virotechnics,’ ‘Swarmachines,’ ‘Afrofutures’ – in which theory was used as
an element alongside music, art and performance, but always with the

New book
backbone of an essentially bycombination
‘Landian’ I.M.Jirousof in Englishrigour
conceptual at our
andonline bookshop.
divus.cz/london/en/article/nick-land-ein-experiment-im-inhumanismus 4/11
12/01/2022, 18:21 Divus | Nick Land – An Experiment in Inhumanism
experimental method. They self-published an eclectic pamphlet series
Abstract Culture – described in music magazine The Wire as ‘a flow of
conceptual disturbance in which unforeseen recognitions flash up like alien
snapshots of a familiar world.’ One of the Abstract Culture series
(‘swarms’) included Land’s classic text ‘Meltdown,’ with its invocation of
apocalyptic planetary techno-singularity – its dark anticipative delight a
nihilistic riposte to the ascendant Californian cyber-optimism of Wired
magazine.

Land, increasingly claiming that he was inhabited by various ‘entities’ –


Cur, Vauung, Can Sah – joined the CCRU in developing a number of quasi-
lovecraftian mythologies or ‘hyperstitions.’ These included a fictional
personification of the CCRU collective itself, in the shape of cryptographer
Professor Daniel Barker. Barker, a descendent of A Thousand Plateaus’
Professor Challenger (himself a ‘hyperstitional’ appropriation of a Conan
Doyle character) was said to have developed the ‘Cosmic Theory of
Geotrauma,’ which combines Freud’s theory of trauma with a syncretic
perspective on the natural history of the planet. A sketch of a fictional
speculative system, ‘geotraumatics’ draws on everything from geology and
microbial evolution to human biology and vocalisation, reinterpreting
Earth-history as a series of nested traumas of which human subjectivity is
the symptom. ‘Barker’ sought to hybridize Nietzschean genealogy,
DeleuzoGuattarian stratoanalysis and information theory in order to
‘decipher’ this cosmic pain: creating a schizoanalytic geocryptography to
replace oedipal psychoanalysis.

In works from this period, Land’s anti-humanist speculation is combined


with a delight in wordplay and a renewed appreciation for the
anthropological, mythological and psychoanalytical sources of Capitalism
and Schizophrenia. He delighted in ‘melting’ into the CCRU collective, and
the latter undoubtedly succeeded as a ‘microculture.’ Their unattributable,
arcane writings, telling of strange inhuman entities, hyperstitional
personages and syncretic pantheons, are uniquely disturbing and
compelling: it is as if the group had collectively accessed hitherto
undiscovered realms of bizarre archetypes. They successfully smeared the
line between the real and what they called the ‘hyperstitional’: fictions that
make themselves real through collective practice.

Eventually, however, Land would peel off from CCRU, as all of this
intellectual hybridisation and microcultural activity found a concentrated,
schematic form in a thinking and a practice of what Deleuze and Guattari
had outlined, rather vaguely, in A Thousand Plateaus, as ‘nomad
numbering.’ Digital technology, according to Land, unveiled a side of
numbers that subtracted them completely from the power-structures of
meaning and signification that made language a prison-house for thought;
it even removed numbers from the stratified realms of mathematics, into a
pure, flat plane of immanent materiality inhabited only by ‘tics.’
Accelerating ‘in-silico’ Capital’s planetary experiment of ‘tacking’ human
culture onto these tic-numbers so as to tear it apart, Land believed, would
allow him to complete what deconstruction could only gesture at in its
endless cycles of philosophical titillation: It would dismantle the power
institutionalized in language and sense, and open up a reliable
communication line with something unknown – a pure material dispersion
not preprocessed by models derived from the past.

Land would increasingly be found, having taken the very minimum amount
of sleep possible (by this point he lived in his office), pursuing intense
‘mechanomical’ research involving shuffling symbols endlessly on the green
screen of his obsolete machine into the depths of the night. From a
romantic vision of escape through collective libidinized action, he had
seemingly arrived at a cold and largely unproductive abstract practice,
pursued in isolation. Or, one could say, he had returned to a kind of poetry,
albeit a poetry subtracted from all expression and all meaning. And yet it is
a mark of what Mark Fisher has called Land’s ‘reckless integrity’ that, once
he had whittled down his problematic to this minimal kernel, he gave

New book by I.M.Jirous in English at our online bookshop.
divus.cz/london/en/article/nick-land-ein-experiment-im-inhumanismus 5/11
12/01/2022, 18:21 Divus | Nick Land – An Experiment in Inhumanism
himself up entirely to it. He would eagerly impart his latest numerical
findings to those who still listened; but invariably they did not follow.

Let’s get this out of the way: In any normative, clinical, or social sense of
the word, very simply, Land did ‘go mad.’ Afterwards he did not shrink
from meticulously documenting this process, as if writing up a failed

experiment.7 He regarded the degeneration of his ‘breakthrough’ into a


‘breakdown’ as ultimate and humiliating proof of the incapacity of the
human to escape the ‘headcase,’ the prison of the personal self.
Wretchedly, for Land, it was no longer possible to tell whether his
speculative epiphanies had been (as he had believed at the height of his
delirium) glimmers of access to the transcendental – or just the pathetic
derangements of a psyche pushed to the derisory limits of its tolerance.
The experiment was over.

When I contacted Land about the republication of his works, he did not
protest, but had nothing to add: It’s another life; I have nothing to say
about it – I don’t even remember writing half of those things ... I don’t
want to get into retrospectively condemning my ancient work – I think it’s
best to gently back off. It belongs in the clawed embrace of the undead
amphetamine god.

Land had published one book during the brief career that ended when he
was ‘retired’ from Warwick in the late 90s. In 1992 there had appeared The

Thirst for Annihilation,8 a book on Georges Bataille that could better be


described as a book with Bataille. Spending a good amount of the first
chapter excoriating secondary scholarship for its timidity, Land goes on to
chart his own ‘inner experience’ in communing with Bataille’s lacerating
thought. Throughout the book, philosophical analysis disintegrates
periodically into poetry, self-loathing and atheistic rants. Thirst remains
well-regarded in certain circles, and is even talismanic for some who come
across it in their search for fierce, transgressive literature. It is certainly a
unique and powerful book. For many of us, however, it never captured the
breadth and inventiveness of Land’s work during the mid- to late 90s. With
Fanged Noumena the disparate works written during this period were at
last brought together, and for the first time the trajectory of his thought
could be charted and its philosophical import appreciated. Writing the
introduction together with Ray Brassier (also a former student of Land’s, a
penetrating and original philosopher, and one who has never disowned the
‘embarrassing’ legacy of Land’s influence), I realized how much Land’s
charisma and reputation – and his own tendency to dismiss philosophy tout
court at every opportunity and to bait his enemies with hyperbole – had
prevented any systematic philosophical appreciation of his work. As
discussed above, his work may have exerted most of its influence in other
spheres. But it should be recognized that this influence is ultimately rooted
in the penetrating and original nature of his rethinking of how to do
‘philosophy.’

Here was a young lecturer, working in arguably one of the most staid
disciplines in the academy, who in the mid-90s energetically addressed
issues that at the time were decidedly outré, but are now a staple of
debate: biotechnology, radical Islam, the internet as an addictive drug, the
rise of China as an economic power – all make appearances in Fanged
Noumena, in texts penned while Land’s peers rattled on about (at best)
poetry and painting, Presence and the history of metaphysics.

Land opened up new possibilities at a time when ‘Continental Philosophy’


was beginning a sclerotic decline into institutional factions, each with their
respective masters and their voluminous Bibles, their initiation rites and
liturgies. He gave us another way to read the history of philosophy that
made it fierce, communicative, connective and alive. Of course, his
eventual collapse was occasion for the system to move in and heal the
wound, in effect erasing all trace of this other path. But it is being

New book by I.M.Jirous in English at our online bookshop.
rediscovered by a new generation of thinkers who, grown tired with

divus.cz/london/en/article/nick-land-ein-experiment-im-inhumanismus 6/11
12/01/2022, 18:21 Divus | Nick Land – An Experiment in Inhumanism
philosophy’s incarceration within ‘the text,’ are returning to the question of
‘thinking the outside.’

Land’s uncompromising work also had – and retains – the power to


polarize. On the one hand, leftists find indigestible its reckless aspect – the
celebration of capitalism for its power to dismantle tradition, hierarchy and
organisation. But by this token it presents a bracing alternative both to
pious, benighted humanist ethics and to the voluntarist politics of the
miraculous ‘event’ peddled in recent years by Badiou and others. On the
other hand, rightwingers equally deplore Land’s irresponsibility and his
abandonment of the pretense that the vector of capitalism is linked
constitutively to any positive human program.

Now working as a journalist in Shanghai (‘neo-China’ as he used to write,


in the days when its futuristic skyline was but a fevered anticipation on his
part), Land still occasionally issues online commentaries, formulated in a

unique journalistic-speculative alloy.9 And they still attest to his unique


talent for addressing the surface of the contemporary globe in direct and
informed terms, without renouncing the philosophical ambition to construct
a ‘universal history’ of this global insanity.

One of Land’s more memorable theses has it that, owing to the positive-
feedback process of capitalism’s artificialisation of the Earth, this process
doubles its intensity in ever-decreasing periods:

Converging upon terrestrial meltdown singularity, phase-out


culture accelerates through its digitech-heated adaptive
landscape, passing through compression thresholds normed to
an intensive logistic curve: 1500, 1756,1884, 1948, 1980,
1996, 2004, 2008, 2010, 2011 …

Nothing human makes it out of the near-future.

[...]

Garbage time is running out.

Can what is playing you make it to level 2?

(‘Meltdown’)10

For Land, such theoretical propositions were also machines for excitation,
devices to meld with and accelerate the planetary intensification that would
finally allow the ‘body without organs’ to shed its human skin. If Philosophy
thereby becomes a species of hype (or ‘hyperstition,’ according to the
CCRU’s neologism) then are Land’s detractors (now, as then) right to say
that his outlook is ultimately indistinguishable from a passive acceptance of
a ‘neoconservative’ agenda – that his theoretical advocacy of the
‘acceleration’ of the capitalist process, in practice, simply endorses the
maintenance of capitalist power structures rather than their dismantling
(whether revolutionary or ameliorative)?

It is indeed true that Land’s attempts to reach the intensive burncore of


the planetary process, by hooking up conceptual thought to libidinising
cultural energy, was always balanced between a romanticism of abolition
and a dubious desire to identify with the ‘exciting’ and ‘intense’ phenomena
presented by capitalism. Land gradually abandoned as too-conservative
even Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘cautious’ division of capitalism into a ‘good’
destratifying or deterritorialising side and the ‘bad’ mechanisms of
reterritorialisation. In the name of a non-negotiable hatred for the fetters
of the human, he may have risked wholesale capitulation to the new
powers (all-too-human) that take hold of the earth as soon as its old power

New book by I.M.Jirous in English at our online bookshop.
divus.cz/london/en/article/nick-land-ein-experiment-im-inhumanismus 7/11
12/01/2022, 18:21 Divus | Nick Land – An Experiment in Inhumanism
structures are dismantled – and which make use of every base reflex of
homo sapiens for their own, ultimately banal, ends.

But to take this point of view is to avoid confronting the most potent
aspects of Land’s thought. His heresy was twofold: it consisted not only in
his attempt to ‘melt’ writing immanently into the processes it described,
but also in his dedication to thinking the real process of Capital’s insidious
takeover of the human (and the legacy of this process within philosophy) –
and in admitting the laughable impotence of ‘man’ in the face of this
process. In this respect he has not yet been ‘proved wrong,’ despite a
recent upsurge in wishful thinking. His work still poses acutely – in a
variety of forms – the challenge of thinking contemporary life on this
planet: A planet piloted from the future by something that comes from
outside personal or collective human intention, and which we can no longer
pretend has anything to do with reason or progress.

1 See ‘Barker Speaks,’ Fanged Noumena, 493-505.

2 ‘Katasonix,’ Fanged Noumena, 481-91.

3 ‘A Dirty Joke,’ Fanged Noumena, 632.

4 London: zer0 Books, 2009.

5 Melbourne: re.press, 2008.

6 On the CCRU, see Simon Reynold’s article ‘Renegade Academia’:


http://energyflashbysimonreynolds.blogspot.com/2009/11/renegade-
academia-cybernetic-culture.html

7 See ‘A Dirty Joke,’ Fanged Noumena, 629-34.

8 London: Routledge.

9 http://www.thatsmags.com/shanghai/news-features/urban-future-blog.

10 Fanged Noumena, 443.

Recommend 0 27.02.2013 13:40

Send to e-mail
Print

Comments
Proto | 04.01.2016 00:07
"disturbing"

he'd probably like that.

Furoa | 26.02.2015 22:10


agree with David! [2]

His neoreactionary works is really disturbing.

pa | 23.01.2015 00:41
agree with David!

View all comments

Add new comment

Jméno Doplň Email @


New book by I.M.Jirous in English at our online bookshop.
divus.cz/london/en/article/nick-land-ein-experiment-im-inhumanismus 8/11
12/01/2022, 18:21 Divus | Nick Land – An Experiment in Inhumanism
Napište Váš názor

3 krát 5 Doplň
Odeslat

Recommended articles
Terminator vs. Avatar: Notes on Accelerationism
Why political intellectuals, do you incline towards the proletariat? In
commiseration for what? I realize that a proletarian would hate you, you have no
hatred because you are bourgeois, privileged, smooth-skinned types, but also
because you dare not say that the only important thing there is to say, that one
can enjoy swallowing the shit of capital, its materials, its metal bars, its
polystyrene…

My Career in Poetry or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and


Love the Institution
An American poet was invited to the White House in order to read his
controversial plagiarized poetry. All tricked out and ready to do it his way, he
comes to the “scandalous” realization that nothing bothers anyone anymore, and
instead of banging your head against the wall it is better to build you own walls or
at least little fences.

Tunelling Culture II

African Vampires in the Age of Globalisation

"In Cameroon, rumours abound of zombie-labourers toiling on invisible


plantations in an obscure night-time economy."

Where to go next?

out - archeology australia Lithuania reportáž


Spaghetti Sauce On Your
Moo Shoo Pork
Charlie Citron

Read more...

S.D.Ch, Solitaires And Road Trip Lithuania Under The Shadow Of


Periphery Culture (A Heroes
Arunase Gudaitas
Generation Born Around
Alena Boika
1970) Aš menininkas — Aš save
Josef Jindrák myliu Vincent van Gogh in Read more...

Who is S.d.Ch? A person of one letter to his brother


many interests, active in described a café as a place
various fields—literature, where one could easily go
theater—known for his comics insane. The café in the Center
and collages in the art field. A for Contemporary Art (CAC) in
poet and playwright foremost. Vilnius is such a place. Insider
A loner by nature and connoisseurs of the local
determination, his work scene consider it “very
doesn’t meet the current bohemian” and, indeed, in
trends. He always puts forth contrast to traditionally
personal enunciation, lackluster and overpriced
although its inner structure eateries in museums, the
can get very complicated. It’s atmosphere in the CAC…
pleasant that he is a normal
Read more...

person and a…

Read more...


New book by I.M.Jirous in English at our online bookshop.
Books, video, editions and artworks that might interest you Go to e-shop

divus.cz/london/en/article/nick-land-ein-experiment-im-inhumanismus 9/11
12/01/2022, 18:21 Divus | Nick Land – An Experiment in Inhumanism

Art & Editions


/ Pen And Ink Art & Editions
/ Art & Editions Books & Magazines
/ Umelec Books & Magazines
/ Umelec
(Small) Magazine Magazine

Mike Diana - Santa Claus is Ibra Ibrahimovic: Tovární Umělec 2013/1 Umělec 2012/1
Cumming ulice v Ústí nad Labem -

2000, 30.5 x 23 cm, Pen & Ink bř


Tovární ulice v Ústí nad Labem, Back to Roots Issue American Issue
Drawing 2016, 225 x 150 cm, print on
vinyl

More info... More info... More info... More info...

334,80 EUR
580 EUR
6,50 EUR
6,50 EUR

280 GBP 485 GBP 5 GBP 5 GBP


1 pieces 1 pieces 1 pieces 1 pieces

Studio

Divus and its services

Studio Divus designs and develops your ideas for projects,


presentations or entire PR packages using all sorts of visual means
and media. We offer our clients complete solutions as well as all the
individual steps along the way. In our work we bring together the
most up-to-date and classic technologies, enabling us to produce a
wide range of products. But we do more than just prints and digital
projects, ad materials, posters, catalogues, books, the production of
screen and space presentations in interiors or exteriors, digital work
and image publication on the internet; we also produce digital films
—including the editing, sound and 3-D effects—and we use this
technology for web pages and for company presentations. We
specialize in ...

Citation of the day. Publisher is not liable for any mental and physical states which may arise after reading the quote.

“ Enlightenment is always late.

CONTACTS AND VISITOR INFORMATION The entire editorial staff contacts

DIVUS LONDON DIVUS

  NOVA PERLA

STORE
Kyjov 37, 407 47 Krásná Lípa

Arch 8, Resolution Way, Deptford


Czech Republic

London SE8 4NT, United Kingdom


divus@divus.cz

Open on appointment +420 222 264 830, +420 602 269 888

 
Open daily 10am to 6pm

OFFICE

and on appointment.
7 West Street, Hastings

 
East Sussex, TN34 3AN, United Kingdom

DIVUS BERLIN

Open on appointment

Potsdamer Str. 161, 10783 Berlin

 
Germany

Ivan Mečl

berlin@divus.cz, +49 (0) 1512 9088 150

ivan@divus.org.uk, +44 (0) 7526 902 082



New book byonI.M.Jirous
Open appointment. in English at our online bookshop.

divus.cz/london/en/article/nick-land-ein-experiment-im-inhumanismus 10/11
12/01/2022, 18:21 Divus | Nick Land – An Experiment in Inhumanism
 
DIVUS WIEN

wien@divus.cz

DIVUS MEXICO CITY

mexico@divus.cz

DIVUS BARCELONA
barcelona@divus.cz

DIVUS MOSCOW & MINSK


alena@divus.cz

NEWSLETTER DIVUS NEWSLETTER SUBSCRIPTION @ Subscribe to

COPYRIGHT DIVUS 2022 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.


New book by I.M.Jirous in English at our online bookshop.
divus.cz/london/en/article/nick-land-ein-experiment-im-inhumanismus 11/11

You might also like

pFad - Phonifier reborn

Pfad - The Proxy pFad of © 2024 Garber Painting. All rights reserved.

Note: This service is not intended for secure transactions such as banking, social media, email, or purchasing. Use at your own risk. We assume no liability whatsoever for broken pages.


Alternative Proxies:

Alternative Proxy

pFad Proxy

pFad v3 Proxy

pFad v4 Proxy