London: Nick Land - An Experiment in Inhumanism
London: Nick Land - An Experiment in Inhumanism
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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
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common sense, in turn the product of evolutionary processes whose
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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
and tedious.
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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
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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.
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
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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
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
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
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backbone of an essentially bycombination
‘Landian’ I.M.Jirousof in Englishrigour
conceptual at our
andonline bookshop.
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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.
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
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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
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
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.
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philosophy’s incarceration within ‘the text,’ are returning to the question of
‘thinking the outside.’
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:
[...]
(‘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)?
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.
8 London: Routledge.
9 http://www.thatsmags.com/shanghai/news-features/urban-future-blog.
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Comments
Proto | 04.01.2016 00:07
"disturbing"
pa | 23.01.2015 00:41
agree with David!
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