Fanged Noumena is a collection of the writings of British philosopher Nick Land from between 1987 and 2007. This is the period when he developed the core ideas of his "Accelerationism" ideology, but prior to his creation of the Neo-reactionary (NRx) movement and collaboration with Curtis Yarvin (pen name Mencius Moldbug). His writing is heavily influenced by the work of Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Georges Bataille; many concepts in his writings are directly poached from their work and so reference to these authors may be useful.
A separate commentary will be provided for each chapter. I will also
conclude these notes with my thoughts on the anthology overall and Nick
Land's thought, as expressed in this work. The book can be roughly separated into two sections: general philosophy and Accelerationism. The first eight chapters of the book are academic articles on philosophy and/or poetry, they provide a background for Land's thinking but they are commentaries on other thinkers and writers and do not represent any new innovations in philosophical thought. For those interested in Land's unique contributions to philosophy, I recommend skipping to the second section of the anthology, beginning with the essay "Circuitries".
"Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest"
Land makes several arguments in this essay that, while they are connected, might be better thought of as several separate arguments about the world that overlap in particular ways. One of these arguments, and his core one, is three-fold:
- Capitalism is an awful system to live in and people will not move from a non-capitalist subsistence system to capitalism unless compelled to do so through force (e.g., the imposition of taxes paid in cash, requiring participation in wage labor)
- Forcing people to participate in the capitalist economy and submit to market forces is politically unpopular and requires repression and violence
- It is an essential characteristic of global capitalism that most of this repression and violence is contained within poor nations, effectively allowing the metropole to 'export' the political turmoil inherent to capitalism to the Third World periphery
His second argument is about patriarchy and identity. He notes that capitalism is fundamentally at odds with traditional kinship structures. Capitalism is a universalizing and "exogamic" system, because under capitalism all humans are just economic units, being someone's cousin or sibling or parent or co-ethnic doesn't matter to capitalism, all that matters is that person's labor output. This is in stark contrast to traditional kinship networks, in which trade and economic relations are regulated by family connections and marriage; e.g., you trade with a family because you have intermarriage with them. These traditional kinship structures cannot persist within capitalism, as there are strong economic forces dissolving them. The response of societies to the inherent universalism of capitalism is to focus on larger "family" in-groups, like race or nation, as a way of preserving the sense of collective identity that would otherwise be destroyed by capitalism.
Land thinks that the division of the global economy into a core and a periphery is deeply rooted in the nature of Enlightenment thought and particularly in Kantian philosophy. He thinks that the metropole in a colonial or neo-colonial system interacts with the periphery in a manner enabled by Kant's idea of 'synthetic a priori knowledge'. This is the idea that knowledge can be both 'synthetic' (created through pure logic without interaction with the real world) and 'a priori' (existing prior to an experiment or interaction), which is knowledge about how to categorize things when you do interact with them. Land believes that the idea of being able to create synthetic a priori knowledge is inherent to the logic of capitalism, as capitalism interacts with the world through the a priori categories of monetary value and ownership. This belief in synthetic a priori knowledge is important to the ability of the metropole to interact with pre-capitalist societies because it allows for categorization, and thus interaction, without accepting the validity of alternative systems of categorization or worldviews.
The last section of the essay is about feminism, which Land thinks should be much more violent and revolutionary. Land talks a lot about 'femininity' and 'masculinity' in this essay, but his meaning has little to do with actual men and women, he is instead discussing 'femininity'/'masculinity' as abstract concepts that he has coded with specific meaning: for this essay, all ethnic/racial/national identity is 'masculine' and a lack of said identity is 'feminine'. Land believes that the chain holding together the nation-state is the 'patriarchal' attachment to inherited nationality.
Land thinks that the world is heading towards capitalism destroying nation-states and he would prefer that we would get it over with already and destroy them quickly, so that the global proletariat can resist market forces together as a global de-nationalized community -- this is the first glimpse of Nick Land as an Accelerationist. Accordingly, Land would like for 'feminists' (it is unclear to me if he means actual feminists as most people would understand the term or a group of people dedicated to destroying the 'patriarchal' concepts of ethnicity and nationality) to be much more revolutionary, maybe kill a few people, and drive nation-states towards collapse so that the global proletariat can be united.
"Narcissism and Dispersion in Heidegger's 1953 Trakl Interpretation"
This essay is exactly what it sounds like: a dissection of Heidegger's commentary on the poems of Georg Trakl. I have not provided a detailed commentary on this essay because it is primarily a discussion of Martin Heidegger's worldview and Georg Trakl's poetry and I have no present interest in either of these topics.
"Delighted to Death"
This essay is a discussion of Immanuel Kant's theory of the sublimation of the "imagination" by reason. This is the first of multiple chapters discussing elements of Kant's philosophy. Understanding Kant is important for reading the remainder of this book because Nick Land absolutely hates Kant and also believes that his philosophy is crucial to the existence and function of the modern State. In Kant's worldview, humans possess both 'divine' reason and 'animalistic' sensibility -- the use of 'divine' should be taken literally; Kant believed in the Christian God. Sublimation is the victory of reason and logic over sensibility, which also included our flawed intuition and perceptions; and, additionally, it is the act of realizing the supremacy of reason and choosing it over sensibility.
Sublimation gives rise to the "sublime pleasure", which is the pleasure derived from denying base instincts and crushing the animal portion of the self. Kant believes that this sublime pleasure is greater than all other pleasures and that the joy of experiencing it through sublimation is the only thing standing in the way of destructive hedonism eating up our lives.
"Art as Insurrection"
This is another essay exploring the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. It follows the development of Kant's idea of "genius" across multiple philosophers, particularly focusing on Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, as well as what all of these philosophers thoughts about art and aesthetics, which are closely tied to Kant's concept of "genius".
To Land, "genius" presented a core problem in Kant's philosophy and demonstrated the futility of that philosopher's attempt to subsume the entire world into a logical framework based on reason. "Genius" is the chaotic and spontaneous creative energy essential to human life and which generates new ideas, forms, and thoughts, including art. Land argues the existence of genius undermines Kant's argument that existence can be subordinated to reason because genius is fundamentally irrational and yet still exists. Furthermore, genius is essential to life; any attempt to suppress genius is flawed because the orderly categories imposed on reality by reason are but a pale imitation of the chaotic 'genius' of actual reality.
I have not read either Arthur Schopenhauer or Friedrich Nietzsche, so I am forced to depend upon Nick Land for an interpretation of their beliefs. According to Land, both philosophers support Land's view on genius undermining Kant's work. Both philosophers echo Land, believing that genius was the essential spark of life within humanity and that to try to control this genius through reason was to destroy what is so great and beautiful and terrible about life itself.
This essay is also where, by way of Nietzsche, Land first raises another major critique of Kant's philosophy of reason. Whereas Kant insisted that categories and frameworks about reality could be created through an exercise of pure reason, Nietzsche contends that the imposition of reason upon reality (by creating categories, frameworks, rules, etc.) is itself a fundamentally irrational and creative process. Choosing what categories in which to sort things and what goes where are fundamentally creative exercises without a basis in reality. Colors are a good example of this: the idea that blue and green are categories into which we can sort color is totally arbitrary and invented by humans, as shown by the fact that many languages, like Uzbek, do not have a historic distinction between these colors. In other words, nature (reality) is infinitely diverse and choosing where to draw the line in making divisions is ultimately a creative process.
Land's vitriol for Kant is evident in this essay and only increases throughout the anthology. Land will continue to develop this theme of the impossibility, pointlessly, and wrongheadedness of attempt to impose categories on reality, and indeed to make sense of the 'real world', throughout the rest of his essays. In particular, this idea will be developed here and in his other work, and in those of his colleagues like Mark Fisher, as a criticism of the "no alternative" vision of capitalism as the 'end of history', which Land believes in essentially Kantian in nature.
"Spirit and Teeth"
This essay is a critique of the field of philosophy known as Phenomenology and of the thought of Georg Hegel in particular. Land argues that Phenomenologists have difficult dealing with the existence of the unknown and anything that exists outside of their systems of thought, including knowledge. He discusses two forces that challenge the schema of the Phenomenologists: werewolves and rats.
'Werewolves' are the challenge posed by ideas and people who reject the fundamental precepts of your philosophy. They undermine logical and rational systems by simply ignoring them and living outside of them. Pulling from the poetry of Georg Trakl, he characterizes these people as 'werewolves', animals in the forms of men. To put in bluntly, these are the kind of people who say, "yeah, you're right and all, but have you considered that I don't care. Fuck your system, fuck having good reasons, fuck civilization, and fuck you".
'Rats' are the more interesting of the two challenges, in my opinion. 'Rats' are the doubts that remind you that reality can be categorized and structured in a million different possible ways and that the system you choose is arbitrary. The rats remind you that there is another way to categorize the world and maybe that other way is better and maybe your system is wrong and pointless.
Both of these challenges can be read as part of Nick Land's developing thesis that attempting to impose categories or structures onto reality is a fruitless endeavor and that reality will defy whatever schema is imposed on it.
"Shamanic Nietzsche"
This essay is a rabid diatribe against all universal systems of knowledge or claims to actual truth about reality. Nick Land's anti-Kantianism reaches its fever pitch in this essay, although an opposition to Kant's philosophy and to institutions based upon the same remains throughout his work. The core argument here is that all systems of belief are false because it is impossible to be certain in any knowledge about reality.
In consequence of this fact, Land rails against any and all systems that claim to possess the truth about reality, particularly Christianity, because, as it is impossible to know the truth, any worldview making this claim must be lying. He also takes time to criticize almost all Western philosophers, again singling out Kant for special scorn, for having 'quasi-Christian' philosophies that still cling to the idea of a universal truth or rationally-discoverable morals.
Land injects a moral argument here, stating that believing in someone else's lies about the nature of life and reality is bad because it limits the ability of each individual to create their own path and shape their own conception of reality. Land believes that recognizing that there is no objective truth or reality would be radically liberating, allowing each person to create their own meaning in life. This perspective reminds me very strongly of both Albert Camus and Frederick Nietzsche in its emphasis on making your own meaning in a world without objective meaning.
"After the Law"
This essay argues that the law, as an institution, is rooted in the values of the society in which it exists, and that the law undergoes drastic transformation when the character of society changes. The historic change Land has in mind is the transition from feudalism to capitalism during the Early Modern period and most of the essay is an examination of the law during this time. Land further believes that we are undergoing another such radical transformation at the present.
Land identifies the present system of law as being based on 'rationality' and state interest, with some combination of these two serving as the rationale underpinning present legal systems. He points out that this is historically contingent and that pre-modern systems of law did not always have these features and were often arbitrary or served no state interest. The creation of modern rational law is therefore a historical project and one that occurred in Europe at the same time as the construction of the modern state apparatus and the rationalization of many other societal institutions.
Land goes on a number of tangents -- most of them fairly boring -- to demonstrate the difference in the understanding of law in pre-modern versus modern societies, as reflective of the character of those societies. Of these, his discussion on Medieval Europe and the French serial killer Gilles de Rais is worth noting. Land uses Gilles de Rais as the focal point for a discussion on how the concepts of continuity and the accumulation of wealth are innovations of modernity. Historically, many societies developed some way to uselessly dissipate their surplus wealth; in Medieval Europe, this took the form of endless war as a sport for a parasitic nobility. Gilles de Rais was a perfect symbol of this pre-modern mode of life: he was born with a fortune, spent it all non-productively on entertainment or war, and indulged in murder (both on and off the battlefield) for no other reason that because he liked killing people. He is thus a great, and fun, example of the non-rational mindset that Land claims governed pre-modern society.
Just as when the arbitrary system of law in pre-modern society lost legitimacy and was replaced as society modernized, Land thinks our present system is in the process of collapse. He says state interest is no longer viewed as a compelling or legitimate basis for a legal system -- he points to drug laws as an example -- and that the legal system will collapse as its basis is viewed as illegitimate. The new system of law will instead be build for a society in which the only recognized societal goods are efficiency and the freedom to engage in market competition without impediment.
"Making it with Death"
This essay is the first major engagement with Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, who are the philosophers most central to Land's thought and from whom he borrows a great number of concepts, including 'reterritorialization', 'deterritorialization', and the 'body without organs'. Unfortunately, Land also deliberately copies Deleuze's writing style, which is deliberately cryptic and confusing. The entire first section of this essay is an engagement with the philosophy of Deleuze, Guattari, and Spinoza, especially with Deleuze and Guattari's idea of the 'body without organs' and Spinoza's 'single substance'.
Nick Land never bothers to explain these concepts in a comprehensible way, but it is worth understanding the 'body without organs' (sometimes shortened to 'BwO', or 'Cso' based on the original French 'corps sans organes'), as it appears throughout Land's work. Deleuze, infamously, also hated being clear in his writing, so bear with me here. To the best of my understanding, the body without organs is something that is pure and undifferentiated. To bring in Land's engagement with Kant, the body without organs has no categories or labels, it is the pure form of reality. The body without organs exists in contrast to the 'body with organs', which is something that has had categories imposed upon it. Part of this contrast, which I think helps to clarify a body without organs, is that a body without organs exists in a state of pure potentiality; a body without organs has the potential to be anything. Deleuze and Guattari refer to the body without organs as in a permanent state of "becoming", it is capable to becoming anything but does not take that step into actually "being" a recognizable thing that can be labeled and named. To apply this to the example of a person, a body without organs could do things and be things without having those traits or activities define them; A body without organs can put out a fire without being a firefighter, they have a height without being tall or short or having it measured, they can pick up litter without being a garbage man, they can sleep in apartment 52B without being 'that person who lives in apartment 52B'. These activities or traits are instead referred to as "intensities" and the important difference is that, unlike a body with organs, they do not define, label, or help categorize that thing. If you like, another preferred metaphor for this concept is an egg. When something is inside an egg, every aspect of it is mixed together and cannot be differentiated as it is in the process of "becoming" whatever the egg hatches into. A body without organs is the state of the thing while it is in the egg. It is a confusing concept, I hope that at least one of these explanations makes sense.
The second section of this essay is a critique of how Deleuze and Guattari applied their classification of ideologies into 'revolutionary' and 'fascistic'. This classification is based on how the ideology approaches human desire: revolutionary ideologies seek to destroy the social structures that repress desire (they are 'deterritorializing'), whereas fascistic ideologies want to create or reinforce social structures that repress desire (they are 'reterritorializing'). Land's issue with this system is that in their second book, A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari classify Nazism as a revolutionary ideology because they felt it wanted to unleash the desire for destruction and mass death. Land thinks nothing could be further from the truth; Nazism is the fascistic ideology par excellence. Under Nazism, every facet of human existence is subordinated and every desire suppressed in support of the goal of race war, making it a fascistic ideology.
In this second section, Land also lays out his understanding of capitalism within this framework. Capitalism is neither purely revolutionary nor fascistic, instead, it can adapt and coexist within both types of ideology. Revolutionary ideologies benefit capitalism by destroying the social structures that inhibit market forces, helping to reduce all people to atomized economic units. Fascistic ideologies build the social structures that are necessary to impose market discipline on labor and prevent the success of anti-capitalist forces. Land ends with the claim that, due to its adaptability, capitalism has become the dominant force in modernity and the essence of modern life is the subordination of human society to the inhuman goals of capital, productivity and efficiency.
"Circuitries"
This is the first chapter that contains really novel thought by Land. It is also the most important text in the entire book for understanding his ideology of Accelerationism. All other works in this book are derivations or developments of the ideas expressed here. The essay revolves around three themes: cybernetics, technology, and "schizophrenia".
Cybernetics are the main idea here and are core to the rest of Land's work. Prior to reading this, I thought that 'cybernetic' just meant related to computers but I'm was very wrong about that. It actually describes systems that incorporate feedback loops, as in they recalibrate their future actions based on the response to their previous actions.
Another really important thing about cybernetic systems is that they are self-perpetuating because they create their own incentives distinct from the purpose for which humans established that system.
In case that's abstract or unclear, Nick Land thinks the most important cybernetic systems are capitalism and technology. Of them, I think capitalism is the clearest for explaining cybernetics.
Humans made capitalism to increase living standards, but the incentives created by capitalism don't actually promote behavior that necessarily improves living standards, it promotes behaviors that increase the rate of return on capital. And increasing that rate often conflicts with the human goal of having better lives. So even though you wanted it to do one thing, now the cybernetic system produces its own incentives and everyone follows them and reproduces those incentives while doing so and now we're all trapped pursuing a goal none of us actually want to pursue.
I don't think technology is really a cybernetic system as described here, but Land calls it one anyway. To me, his arguments mirror those of Ted Kaczynski. Uncle Ted pointed out that we made technology to serve a need (like stop lights to prevent accidents) but then conditioned ourselves to respond to them so now they serve a different purpose and control us (regulating driving behavior even when the road is empty). It's the same general idea of humanity created a tool and now the tool regulates/controls human behavior. Nick Land thinks the future is entirely cybernetic systems governed by feedback loops and he thinks they're impossible to escape.
Also, I have been reading a commentary to the book on a forum and someone there had a very interesting point about why humans would reproduce cybernetic systems that they know are harmful to them:
If I have an idea of how society works, I'll act in accordance with that idea, even if I don't think it's how society should work. But if society's structure is dictated by how we believe society is structured, then by simply holding and propagating that worldview I'm unintentionally contributing to the very thing I don't want. (link)
I thought the way he talks about technological development is pretty interesting. Land says traditional history looks at the rise of technology and machinery as humans exercising more and more control over nature. But then Land reframes it as humans creating machines and then gradually losing more and more power to machines while also themselves being reduced to machine-like roles. So, not gaining control over nature but gradually losing control to machines.
Then there is a third theme about schizophrenia but I found this part confusing because I don't think either Land or Deleuze are talking about actual real schizophrenia. It's more like both of them are using schizophrenia as a metaphor for non-linear, illogical, and unplanned systems. And, to tie it up, the prime case of a "schizophrenic" system is a cybernetic one.
So basically, self-perpetuating systems are the enemy and they are going to enslave us all and replace us with machines.
"Machining Desire"
This essay continues the discussion of cybernetics from the previous essay.
Easily the craziest idea in the essay is conceptualizing cybernetic systems as viruses or parasites with human society as their host. The ideas that regulate human behavior are mind-viruses that we spread through our actions. We get infected with an idea and then that idea changes our behavior in order to change social conditions so that more people are infected with that idea and so that the original idea-host remains infected. Nick Land writes weird, so it is hard to tell how serious he is about cybernetic systems being "alive" versus it all being a metaphor.
Either way, the argument is the same. Cybernetic systems -- and Land is really just interested in capitalism here -- act like (or are) mind viruses/parasites. It plays into the idea of the incentives of cybernetic systems cause outcomes that no individual participant wants -- Land has conceptualized the cybernetic system as an external entity that has hijacked human society in order to reproduce itself, which is the only goal of the "virus".
And, of course, Land says this is the craziest way possible:
What appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy's resources
In essence, Land is saying that humans respond to external stimuli and cybernetic systems produce stimuli that condition human goals and desires. Specifically, cybernetic systems condition humans to have desires that make them act so as to reproduce the cybernetic system. In this sense, the desires people experience within capitalism aren't their own, but are the desire of the cybernetic system expressed through them, or "machinic desire"
That whole process turns man into a "machine" that reproduces the social conditions for capitalism and turns all of human society into the same type of "machine".
It doesn't really feed into any of his other points, but Land also conceptualizes the interactions between society and the human psyche as a cybernetic system. He bases this off Freud, so I don't think it is an accurate description of the human mind, but it is still an interesting discussion of Freud's theory of the mind as a cybernetic system. The psyche has these desires or impulses, we act in a way to fulfill those desires, society then changes in response to our actions (feedback), and those changes conditions new desires in the pysche (change in response to feedback). Pretty neat and maybe makes "machinic desire" make a bit more sense.
Around the middle of the essay, Land actually tries to frame his ideas about capitalism within sane, normal cybernetics theory. This part made the most sense and was the easiest to read.
They are several ways in which cybernetic systems can respond to feedback loops. The most common is by regulating their behaviors in reference to an equilibrium value. To make it less abstract, you can do something like take a thermostat and set an equilibrium value of 75 F. That system will try to maintain the equilibrium value. Perhaps it is cold so the system runs a furnace for 15 minutes, which raises the temp to 80 F, the system responds to that new temp reading (which it helped created by running a furnace) by running an A/C unit and recording that the furnace should only run 10 minutes next time. This is an example of a cybernetic system that runs based on equilibrium or homeostatis.
Land explains all that to say that this is clearly not the case for capitalism. There is no equilibrium state for capitalism. Capitalism is a different type of cybernetic system. Instead, capitalism sustains its own reproduction through different responses to positive and negative stimuli.
An important thing to reinforce here is that capitalism reproduces itself in that same incentive to maximize the rate of return on capital exists; so long as that goal exists, the system remains capitalism. I mention this because one of the points of this section is that capitalism is very adaptable, it can coexist with most social conditions (slavery, monarchy, industry, state systems, traditional families, religion, etc.), so I think it's helpful to keep in mind the part of capitalism that isn't changing and is reproducing itself.
Capitalism has a tendency to destroy and dismantle all social structures that in any way inhibit the penetration of markets and the transformation of every action into a commercial transaction. But Land argues that this tendency is regulated in response to positive or negative stimuli. The stimulus in question is basically how society reacts to capitalism at that moment: is the reproduction of the social conditions necessary for capitalism under threat?
The response to positive stimuli is an acceleration of capitalism's destructive tendencies, dismantling social structures, etc. This is all a process of "deterritorialization". Capitalism reacts to negative stimuli through "reterritorialization", which is the creation or reinforcement of social structures (which it will at some later point destroy) in order to defend capitalism from some threat.
Land ends the essay with extended doomposting about how absolutely everything, down to our basic biological functions, will end up being commodified in the future. But in that doompost, he keeps claiming that this future is inevitable and I just do not understand why. He brings up socialism, but just dismisses it out of hand:
Markets are part of the infrastructure - its immanent intelligence - and thus entirely indissociable from the forces of production. It makes no more sense to try to rescue the economy from capital by demarketization than it does to liberate the proletarian from false consciousness by decortication.
"Cybergothic"
Most of the essay is a very confusing summary of the plot of the novel Neuromancer by William Gibson, which I have not read but which I understand as creating the cyberpunk genre. Once Nick Land is done talking about the novel, the essay becomes total gibberish; he starts talking about the meaning of zero and how information is lost when switching from analog to digital, but none of the ideas connect to anything.
Land also briefly touches on a number of other ideas in the essay -- people will try to resurrect weird old ideologies to try to provide some alternative to capitalism; capitalism destroys social institutions; postmodernity is a time of immense change as capital erodes institutions while also appearing stagnant because core beliefs are some uniform and unchallenged (this theme is the focus of most of Mark Fisher's work) -- but he doesn't really develop any of them, with the exception of cyberspace.
To Nick Land, 'cyberspace' just means interacting online, especially through a graphic user interface (remember that he wrote this in the mid-1990s). He is interested in two aspects of cyberspace:
- You can be anyone who want on the internet, you can go larp with any identity you want to adopt
- The Internet is not a physical location, therefore cyberspace interactions function to lessen geographic and national barriers
Taken together, Land thinks this means cyberspace will come to be the dominant mode of interaction and also be a way for humanity to return to the state without fixed identities or roles, a state of pure potential or a 'body without organs'.
"Cyberrevolution"
This chapter isn't really an essay, it's just a short story and, as a result, much more enjoyable than the rest of the book. Land writes a fake cable news segment interviewing some experts on the 'nihilists' or 'cyberrevolutionaries' who are working to subvert everything in society to enable the growth of markets and capitalism. It is an interesting choice of topic for a man who seems to side with the cyberrevolutionaries.
"Hypervirus"
This chapter is basically unreadable. Large chunks of text are replaced with binary code or DNA markers (TGAC) and the lines of text in between them don't make much more sense.
"No Future"
This essay is another that is borderline unreadable. It is more like poetry than a coherent exploration of ideas. It was very hard to get anything from this essay.
Land did repeatedly mention that the world is becoming more chaotic and less understandable, which makes it more difficult to subject to centralized control. It seems like, to Land, this is the breakdown of not only the actual mechanisms of control, but also the entire Kant-inspired logic of control and classification.
I didn't feel like much of what Land wrote actually touched on the title of the essay. He had a little bit in the beginning on how past obligations constrain the future, but that's it.
"Cyberspace Anarchitecture as Jungle War"
This essay explores two metaphors for capitalism: capitalism as a virus infecting modern states, and capitalism as an insurgency against modernity.
For both of these metaphors, I say 'State', but Nick Land doesn't really mean just a single government. He is using 'State' as a stand-in for the entire modernist order of imposing centralized control, regulation, and classification on things.
Previous discussions of capitalism as a virus have looked at individuals or society as the host for this virus. This chapter instead looks at the modern State as the host. This perspective gets rid of a lot of the ideas about cybernetic feedback loops that make Land's work unique and it ends up as a pretty common Critical Theory interpretation of the State.
In this metaphor, the "body" of the modern State (all of the physical infrastructure and social institutions that support its existence) is infected by capitalism and is trying to fight off the disease. At the same time that the State is trying to fight off capitalism, its "body" provides the infrastructure for the existence of capitalism. The State tries to save itself from capitalism by protecting its "core institutions", which are the social constructs which that society views as central to its identity, and it does this by creating new social structures.
All of that fits nicely into a Critical Theory reading of the modern state as enabling capitalism while being simultaneously threatened by it. In fancier terms, it recognizes that capitalism is simultaneously "deterritorializing" (destroying social institutions) and "reterritorializing" (driving the creation of new social institutions). Nick Land has talked about these tendencies before, but I think this is the first time he acknowledges they occur simultaneously.
The second metaphor is way more interesting: capitalism as an insurgency fighting a Nam-style "jungle war" against the State. I like this one because it actually explains the individual people are waging this "war" on behalf of capitalism. In the "jungle war", the economic incentives of capitalism are constantly pushing people to ignore social institutions (national loyalty, family obligations, religion, etc) and pursue economic gain instead, transforming them into "insurgents" against the State. Every time you act in a way that makes it hard for the State to control and categorize you, you are an insurgent undermining that same system of control. The State trying to come up with new ways to categorize individuals and their behavior, which are then also subverted, is the essence of the jungle war.
Separate from these two metaphors, there is another section talking again about cyberspace as the, "whole peripheral space-potency that is nothing beyond what it does." Which is pretty cool and ties into Deleuze's idea of a "body without organs". Unfortunately, Land doesn't really integrate it into this essay.
"Meat (or How to Kill Oedipus in Cyberspace)"
The basic idea of the next essay is that humans are simply animals or 'meat', but that we have all these social structures and ideas that allow us to draw lines dividing us from other animals and making us sacred. Capitalism, however, erodes those practices and social structures, de-sacralizing humanity, and making us just "meat". The difference is that now humans are not animal-like, but machine-like, since we are valued only for our labor-power.
Most of the chapter is devoted to a discussion of this concept of mankind becoming sacred and then being reduced to a mere machine. The focus of that discussion is cannibalism and incest, both practices which involve treating humans as 'just meat'. He talks a lot about the 'shamanistic' practice of cannibalism and incest which makes these acts sacred, demonstrating how even societies that perform these acts have social structures are designed to prevent us from recognizing ourselves as 'meat'. It was interesting, but philosophers have a terrible tract record when it comes to correctly understanding any other field, so I assume the anthropology is dead wrong.
This chapter doesn't discuss any other big ideas, but Nick Land does drop two little things that are interesting.
Firstly, he claims that, "As the State atrophies, the family unit will become the locus of social reproduction". I was really surprised by this. Even when he was writing in the late 1990s, it seemed pretty clear that the nuclear family was disintegrating; fewer intact families, more childcare being sourced to wage labor, parents being less involved in raising their kids, etc.
Secondly, he states that the imposition of order, control, and classification by the modern State is really bad for the human spirit. This idea is not explored in this essay, but it does signal that *maybe* Land thinks the cyberpunk dystopia is good because it destroys modernism and allows us to exist as uncategorized beings of pure potential (Deleuze's bodies without organs). But, like I said, this thought isn't explored so I am still unsure if Land thinks the cyber-dystopia is a good thing and, if so, why.
Lastly, this chapter gives us the first fleshed-out description of that dystopia:
The replacement of the Republican and Democratic Parties by two new governmental servicing corporations run by Coke and Pepsi has massively reduced corruption, pork-barrelling and foreign policy machismo. Determined to maintain the most hospitable possible international marketing environment and the lowest possible domestic transaction costs - while disciplined by the minute surveillance of a competitor waiting in the wings - government has been subsumed under the advertising industry, where it can be cybernetically controlled by soft-drink sales. Since both companies are run by ai-based stock-market climates human idiosyncrasy has been almost eradicated, with the state's share of gdp falling below 5 percent. All immigration restrictions, subsidies, tariffs and narcotics legislation have been scrapped. A laundered MichaeI Jackson facsimile is in the White House. Per capita economic growth averages an annualized 17 percent over the last half decade, still on an upward curve . . . America's social fabric has entirely rotted away, along with welfare, public medicine and the criminalized fringe of ghetto enterprise (Phillip Morris sells cheap clean crack). Violence is out of control. Neo-rap lyrics are getting angrier.
"Meltdown"
This essay is an exploration of an idea introduced in earlier chapters, that capitalism is locked in an arms race with the Kantian State. Capitalism keeps subverting the categories that the State uses to exercise control and the State remakes itself to better control a slowly disintegrating society. The core idea in the chapter isn't new, but Land does introduce some other minor points here that are worth mentioning:
- The distinction between the metropole and the periphery will break down. Historically, colonial and neocolonial systems have used the periphery to absorb economic issues like overproduction, recession, fiscal crisis, etc. Further economic integration will make it impossible to shield the metropole from economic turmoil and crisis
- The transmission of culture from old to young is dying out. Reproduction is being reduced to a merely biological act. Parents are increasingly not passing down traditions, values, or cultural practices
- No modern political project has a plan to counter the cybernetic virus of capitalism. Anti-capitalist political projects are reduced to repression of capitalism through national autarky, which Land does not think is a long-term solution, particularly if the result is just a mixed economy
"A zIIgQthIc-==X=cQDA==-( CookIng-IQbsteRs-wIth-jAke-AnD-DinQs)"
The whole essay is written is freaking leetspeak or some such nonsense. I skipped it, do not have time for messing with fonts and whatnot. The Deleuze-inspired prose is already difficult enough to read without inserting random ascii characters.
"KataςoniX"
This chapter is some kind of weird poem. Beyond recognizing that there are a lot of references to Neuromancer and to Apocalypse Now, I can't make heads or tails of it.
"Barker Speaks"
This essay takes the form of a fake interview with a fake professor in Massachusetts. Which is good because everything this fake guy says is nonsense.
The interview has two subjects on which 'Professor Barker' speaks: numbers and signals theory, and "geotraumatics". The connection between these is that Barker had a mental breakdown conducting work on the former and then got interested in the latter.
I do not understand what is being said about signals processing beyond the suggestion that repeating signals do not necessarily imply interaction with intelligent life. Maybe it is because I lack the requisite math knowledge or maybe it is because what is written is nonsense, I can't tell.
I at least understood the section on "geotraumatics", but it is total bullshit. The 'theory' is that all human trauma and psychosis is a reflection of (and, somehow, the expression of) the physical trauma suffered by the Earth during its creation. So, neurosis and repression developed because the turbulent core of the Earth is repressed under the crust and mantle.
The concepts introduced here were bizarre and I frankly do not know what they have to do with the rest of Land's philosophy.
"Mechanomics"
This essay also didn't make any sense to me, but it is definitely on me this time, not Nick Land.
It is a chapter on the philosophy of math. I can't even do calculus. He is talking about numbers and how they work and the significance of how we use numbers. Nearly all of the mathematical terminology he is referencing is unknown to me and requires a significantly higher level of knowledge than I possess. I would need to know a lot more math to understand the philosophical points he is making here.
"Cryptolith"
This chapter is a (very) short story featuring the fictional professor, Richard Barker. He is now employed at Miskatonic University (from Lovecraft) and is still talking about that crazy geotrauma stuff. Barker picks up a rock and accesses some ancestral memory about being a scared monkey preyed upon by giant insects. It's fun and I enjoyed it, but the story really doesn't say anything about Nick Land's philosophy.
"Non-Standard Numeracies"
This chapter is really more free association poetry than an essay. It touches on a lot of the themes in Land's work (geotrauma, deterritorization, capitalism, dichotomies, incest and cannibalism as taboos and ritual practices, imposing categories and labels as intrinsically violent), but none of these are developed because it's just a poem.
"Occultures"
This is a collection of short stories roughly based on 'cybergothic' cultures, especially conspiracy theories and occult practices. These theories and practices focus on the worship of non-human entities that defy logic and human understanding, which in the light of the rest of Land's work makes them good stand-ins for his idea of techno-capitalism.
These short stories, both in this chapter and before, have increasingly frequent references to the works of H.P. Lovecraft. And it's easy to understand why: Lovecraft wrote about the profound ignorance of humanity and the existence of entities so alien that knowledge of them could shatter the psyche. That is exactly the vibe that Nick Land wants to capture when discussing the cybergothic future. He wants the reader the imagine the future and the AI created in it as so profoundly un-human as to escape our understanding and drive us insane.
I particularly like his characterization of the gut reaction to contact with a non-human intelligence as an "immune response". In one of the stories, Dr. Barker submits to NASA evidence of communication from an alien entity and the immediate reaction is ignoring the data and sectioning Dr Barker. Why? Because the NASA scientists have a cognitive immune response to the information, their brains immediately recognize that knowledge as harmful and insanity-producing, and reject it. The idea of hidden and damaging knowledge is one of my favorite themes in Lovecraft and I really like this new take on it.
"Origins of the Cthulhu Club"
This is an short story told in the form of letters between an academic and a soldier returning from deployment in WWII in the Pacific. The soldier, Captain Vysparov, reports that he was meant to conduct a psy-op to incite a Sumatran tribe against Japanese occupation by appealing to their belief in witchcraft. To his shock, the tribe's sorcery works and, by driving themselves mad, the witches also drive the Japanese insane. Eager to learn more, Vysparov has written to this academic and to Lovecraft, eager to learn of the Cthulhu worshiped by the tribe.
On the surface, it is a fun story within the Cthulhu mythos and I enjoyed it. It is included in this collection because Nick Land is using Cthulhu as his new metaphor for deterritorializing capital. The Old Ones call themselves into being, just as capitalism creates its own future through cybernetic feedback loops. Cthulhu's awakening will draw humanity back into a primordial and abyssal state, just like Land thinks cyberspace-capitalism will destroy the entire framework of social constructs and categorization and return humans to being animal-like and 'just meat' and Deleuze's 'bodies without organs'. It is probably the worst for effectively explaining his ideas, but I think Cthulhu is my favorite metaphor for techno-capital.
"Introduction to Qwernomics"
This chapter is the segue into two additional chapters on numerology, mathematics, and the Kabbalah.
This one is short and briefly discusses some of the patterns you can make manipulating the QWERTY keyboard. Land also touches on some interesting aspects of the culture of technology, like how the QWERTY keyboard is kind of arbitrary in its arrangement of keys, which has made it resistant to change in favor of a more efficient keyboard because QWERTY never claimed to be efficient.
The beginning of the article also brings in Ted Kaczynski's perspective that using the QWERTY keyboard has spawned a culture around its use as humans adapted their behavior around a machine.
Land never actually gets around to discussing what those cultures of use are, though, because the rest of the article is doing math using the keyboard.
"Qabbala 101"
To my surprise, this chapter is pretty good and surprisingly lucid despite the esoteric subject matter. Land doesn't seem (at least in this chapter) to be endorsing the Qabbala, just discussing the philosophical implications of the practice.
Qabbala involves assigning numbers to words through a number of different methods and trying to discern patterns in the resulting numbers. I was not familiar with Qabbala, so Land's example was very useful: count the number of letters in the English words 'zero' through 'nine'. The result is a pattern where the pairs 5:4, 6:3, 7:2, 8:1, and 9:0 all sum to 9 as numbers and each pair has a combined letter-count of 8. The Qabbala practitioner then reads meaning into that neat little pattern.
Land likens Qabbala to the empirical sciences because there is no belief or hypothesis underlying it, just a set of practices to use numerology to interpret signals and patterns. Even experts don't know why it works, they just think it works. Land really emphasizes Qabbala being content-neutral, with the practitioner being the one imbuing the practice with meaning.
Land says being content-neutral makes Qabbala superior to other systems of numerology, which use numbers as signifiers (1 = jupiter or something) because those systems run into issues like why does '5' have a set meaning but not '545' or '6.71'? They come off as very arbitrary. In fact, Qabbala actually defies the imposition of a system of fixed meanings for numbers through the fact that every word can be expressed in numbers and every number as a word, meaning that the Qabbala never stops. In the above example, deciding 1 = jupiter opens up that 'jupiter' has 7 letters, each of which could also be given an individual value based on its order in the alphabet. You can then interpret patterns in those numbers or in the numbers formed when the names of those numbers are themselves converted into numbers. The layers of potential hidden meaning in Qabbala never end.
Land also likes the Qabbala because he thinks it doesn't reduce numbers to representational forms. There are no sets or abstract math terms in Qabbala nor are numbers always ordinal (marking relative size); they are just numbers. To someone who understood Deleuze's philosophy of mathematics, I'm sure this would have significance.
"Tic-Talk"
This essay is sort of a continuation of the short stories about Dr. Barker and his work for NASA, but it takes an in-depth dive into the numbering system Barker develops and that part seems more like Land's philosophy of mathematics than a short story.
Land's system is called Tic Xenotation and represents each number as a multiple of its prime factors. He also has a way to represent this using only colons and parentheses.
The majority of the essay is a discussion of the features of such a system, especially how it doesn't have a backwards or forwards order. I admit that some of the other features and the philosophy of how we represent math probably went over my head.
"Critique of Transcendental Miserablism"
This is the penultimate essay in the book and it almost seems like it should be written by Mark Fisher, not Nick Land. It has all the same themes of Fisher's 'Capitalist Realism', although with a much more pessimistic outlook. For both thinkers, capitalism is all around us and presents itself as inevitable now and in the future. The difference is Nick Land seems to think that capitalism really is inevitable and unstoppable; there is no hope for an alternative.
Something I've been struggling with throughout these essays is why exactly Land thinks this is true. The allusions to why socialism will fail and capitalism is impossible to escape are always vague, which is frustrating to me. In this essay and others, Land implies that capitalism becomes inevitable when machines start taking on executive functions, but I can destroy a supercomputer with a hammer so I don't get how the end of capitalism becomes impossible just because machines are now involved.
Anyway, this essay isn't actually trying to prove capitalism is inevitable, that's just something that's implied. The actual point of the essay is that the Left has lost its moxie and can no longer even imagine a world in which it out-competes, out-innovates, and out-grows capitalism. The result is that Leftist critique no longer offers an alternative and is relegated to complaining that everything bad is capitalism's fault -- which, in a world so suffused by capitalism, is true, but meaninglessly so. Land sums this up in the refrain: "The polar bears are drowning, and there's nothing at all we can do about it."
This essay is interested in light of Land's rightward turn in the late 2000s and onward, culminating with his foundation of the Neo-reactionary movement. Land's core criticism of the left both here and in later works is that contemporary leftist is fundamentally anti-creative and conservative; leftism's goal to halt progress that it views as harmful to the interests of the working class, whereas Land wants to envision an entirely new world radically changed by technology. This is the basis for his current opposition to "the Cathedral", a term for the left-liberal world order coined by Curtis Yarvin.
"A Dirty Joke"
The last chapter in the anthology is an autobiographical essay reflecting on his amphetamine abuse while writing the rest of these essays. Mostly it's the same kind of story you hear at NA meetings: I went insane, I thought the drugs made me better but they made me worse, I mistreated those in my life because they tried to stop me from destroying myself, etc.
The essay, and thus the anthology, ends with a reflection on his own writings. Land remembers writing them believing he was simultaneously morally reprehensible and blessed with hidden revelatory knowledge. He doesn't like to re-read them because he knows he was right about being an evil man then, but he hopes that he was also right about them containing some useful knowledge.
This essay, and the short stories as well, remind me that Land is actually a really talented writer. If only he didn't copy Gilles Deleuze in trying to be intentionally confusing for most of this book. As evidence the man actually can write, here is a funny exchange in this essay:
In the car it listened to the radio for the whole journey. Each song was different, the genres varied, the quality seemingly above average, the themes tending to the morbid.
"This is a cool radio station," it said to its sister.
"The radio isn't on," its sister replied, concerned.
Overall, I'm glad I read the book, but the deliberately confusing writing style employed in many of the chapters meant it wasn't enjoyable (and I'm a bit annoyed because I know he is capable of clearly expressing his ideas). To anyone else is interested in directly engaging with Land's work, I would recommend the essay "Circuitries" as capturing his core ideas. Some of the short stories are also good, but don't say much about his philosophy.
Reading this anthology, I have struggled to reconcile Land's vision of the future with his Accelerationism. The future Land paints is hellish, so why on Earth does he want to get there faster?! After reading a lot of commentary on his work, I've come to the conclusion that Land and I simply have very different views of what a good life looks like. For whatever reason, he likes the sound of something that to me sounds like the worst of all possible futures.
Understanding Land's position as an Accelerationist, his turn towards Neo-reaction makes a lot of sense to me. If you want to make capitalism go fast, I have to agree with Land that an autocracy elected by the nation's largest shareholders (as proposed by Curvis Yarvin in the form of a "techno-monarchy") is probably the best way to go about doing that.
-- Eunice Noh, December 2025
No comments:
Post a Comment