Nick Land

Contextual Quote

"If before encountering otherness we already know what its relation to us will be, we have obliterated it in advance…. Kant still wants to say something about radical alterity, even if it is only that it has no relevance to us, yet he has deprived himself of the right to all speculation about the nature of what is beyond appearance…. [This]... delimitation of alterity... sets up the modern form of the ontological question: ‘how do we know that matter exists?’ That the very existence of materiality is problematic for enlightenment thought is symptomatic of the colonial trading systems that correspond to it. Alterity cannot be registered, unless it can be inscribed within the system, according to the interconnected axes of exchange value (price)… in other words, as a commodity….

– Nick Land, (1988/2011) “Kant, Capital, and The Prohibition of Incest” (p. 64; 71).

Description

Zachary Stein:

The controversial philosopher, Nick Land, is often associated with the new schools of post-Kantian metaphysics known as speculative realism and object-oriented ontology. His political philosophy of “Accelerationism” and his writings on the “Dark Enlightenment” have been widely influential and tied into the resurgence of anti-postmodernist right-wing radicalism, as exemplified by the “alt-right” in the United States. .. His thinking and its impact are signs of the metamodern “return” to metaphysics currently demanded by the exhaustion of postmodernism and related major transformations in economic conditions. Right-wing and authoritarian political thought is resurgent today because of the absence of reasonable discourse about metaphysical realities during a time when exactly these realties are being called into question due to the apocalypse of global capitalism and the accompanying planetary transition into the Anthropocene (Stein & Gafni, 2015)."

(http://integral-review.org/issues/vol_14_no_1_stein_love_in_a_time_between_worlds.pdf)

Discussion

1. Joshua Citarella:

"I didn’t know much about philosopher Nick Land before I went down this multi-year rabbit hole. I knew he was associated with Accelerationism and that he had a pretty pessimistic outlook on technology. He was one of those cyber-punk guys. It wasn’t really my thing.

Land was a professor at Warwick University in London and co-founder of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) with Sadie Plant in the mid 90’s. Various art world and art adjacent figures passed through the group, including Mark Fisher (my personal favorite), Ray Brassier and Jake and Dinos Chapman, among others.

Burnt out from a drug induced mental collapse, which involved taking speed and long binge-writing sessions in the middle of underground Jungle raves, Land disappeared from public life. He resurfaced a few years later in Shanghai as a prominent Fascist thinker. Land’s new theory is the Dark Enlightenment. DE is the guiding philosophy for the Neo-Reactionary movement (NRx), the high-brow and even more radical contingency of the Alt-right. His new work is largely based on the writings of pseudonymous silicon valley blogger Mencius Moldbug aka Curtis Yarvin. Yarvin first gains mainstream media attention when he is protested for speaking at a tech conference in Missouri in 2015. Steve Bannon places the story on Breitbart, covering it as an issue of free speech. Yarvin is a friend and political advisor to Peter Thiel, who is also the primary investor in his company. The web extends ever outward.

While he was in London, one might have characterized Land’s work as anarchist, insurrectionary or possibly nihilistic, but certainly anticapitalist. Today, he furiously tweets and blogs, openly advocating for eugenics and the abolition of democracy.

Knowing of him mostly through the far-right, I am surprised to encounter Land’s earlier work within the Post-left community. The type of racism and fascism he now represents is the complete and polar opposite of their beliefs. I guess enough time spent marinating in techno-nihilism will do strange things to the way you think. The Post-left enjoys his mania and appreciates the analogy of capitalism and the death drive. Land’s theory of “hyperstition” is easily retrofitted onto Stirner’s conception of property as a phantasm in the mind of the beholder. Both thinkers have a interest in occultism which occasionally makes an appearance in their work.

I can’t pretend to understand or summarize Land’s position. The levels of contrarianism run deep beyond trolling. He speaks in 20-minute monologues. His work is dismissed by most mainstream institutions but thrives online. In the case of Politigram, Landian thought is perfect fuel for anti-establishment teens.

In these online communities, the philosophy of accelerationism is split into largely two camps; Left and Right. R/Acc is associated mostly with Land and Yarvin. L/Acc describes thinkers like Nick Srnicek, Alex Williams and Paul Mason. Various niche groups have collected around the term U/Acc (Unconditional Accelerationism) in an attempt to revive popular interest for Land’s earlier work. All manner of Accelerationists agree with Marx’s fundamental idea that technology, at the hand’s of capital, capital, is the force which shapes human society and moves history forward. This preoccupation with technology often metastasizes into a dark and nihilistic worldview."

(http://joshuacitarella.com/_pdf/Politigram_Post-left_2018_short.pdf)

2. Corpus Noeticum:

“The internet in the early 2000s brought forward an underground intellectual movement known as the dark enlightenment. This movement described itself as a neo-reactionary school of thought that affirmed the discoveries of the scientific revolution, but rejected the principles of democracy, equality, and social justice. The name itself comes from an essay by Nick Land titled the Dark Enlightenment which summarises his perspective of neo-reactionary thought. Land’s intellectual development has since undergone a fascinating transition: If only his neo-reactionary works are known, then one may be surprised to hear that he was once considered a leftist and to this day is well-respected in some left-wing circles (admittedly a more fringe version of leftist thought). His earlier works were written during his time at the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit at the University of Warwick. Other than his particularly cryptic and incomprehensible style of writing, his works gained attention due to their explicitly post-humanist or even anti-humanist undertones.

Land has also undergone all of the leftist paradigm-shifts within philosophy: Whilst sentimental conservatives still advocate the sovereignty of the individual, promulgated by classical liberalism, many leftist thinkers have undergone a structuralist or post-structuralist turn. The human, sovereign individual, or nation is no longer at the centre of theory, with rather a more distinctly systemic, or machinic approach having taken precedence. On the left, one of Land’s main influences, Gilles Deleuze is arguably one of the last great metaphysicians, who worked on synthesising Spinoza, Nietzsche and Marx into an idiosyncratic theory about capital, schizophrenia, and the body without organs. Nick Land has gone along this entire journey of philosophical shifts within the leftist sphere of thought, only to end up abandoning the sphere altogether. Once the notion of the human has been abolished, as well as grand narratives about the fate of humanity, we are left with pure production.

Nothing human makes it out of the near future. - Nick Land

The human being is eradicated by the ever-accelerating process of techno-capitalist production. Even the critique of capitalism is itself a feature of capitalism that seeks to revolutionise its own modes of production by abolishing the prevailing ones. What remains is the pure production and reproduction of a system of so-called desiring machines. As a result, machines and humans are not to be regarded as separate from one another. Instead, an interwoven network of cybernetic entities will employ (or already employs) neo-eugenicist methods to reproduce humanoid organisms according to the desires of its own processes. The rediscovery of eugenics in this age of bio- and neuro-technologies constitutes a significant shift away from traditional ideologies, often rooted in a notion of human dignity and value.”

(https://corpusnoeticum.substack.com/p/three-principles-of-complex-evolution)