This essay was an informal commission which led to nothing, so I’m publishing it here. It’s really only for people who have an interest in Nick Land, Curtis Yarvin, accelerationism and postmodern ‘philosophy’. Everyone else, skip it, because the whole thing is a nonsense.
Does Nick Land, controversial anti-philosopher, believe that the decay of Western cities is due to ‘white flight’? Does he believe that it better to be rational and obnoxious, rather than irrational and agreeable? How committed is he to the philosophy usually associated with his name, ‘accelerationism’,1 that we should make everything as bad as possible (or ‘intensify capitalism’), as quickly as possible, in order to bring the system to a crisis, so that radical social change can happen? Or to the idea, offered by fellow anti-egalitarian and anti-democratic writer Curtis Yarvin (a.k.a. Mencius Moldbug), that we must raise up authoritarian monarchs, strong men or, Yarvin’s preferred organising force, militarised, capitalist, corporate power? Does Land believe that we will become cybernetic superman, a fusion of human and machine? Is this Land’s utopia, rule by Optimus Prime Tremendum?
Probably. It’s hard to say for certain, because Land rarely commits to a definite statement or sustained argument for any easily identified position, at least not for much longer than a paragraph. Like Yarvin, Land is a modern middle-class professional who decries fuddy-duddy values like truth and consistency, or even, in Land’s case, intelligibility, at least insofar as meaningful thought is concerned, which he prefers to express in a turgidly obscure style, occasionally ‘surfacing’ as it were, to clearly express a few simple, sarcastically critical, ideas. He is like a drunkard, reeling about in self-indulgent incoherence, sobering up when the cops arrive, then, when they leave, he’s off again with his ‘poetry’ and ‘philosophy’.
Here are two examples of Land’s radical genius, both from Dark Enlightenment.
It is not communicative isolation that is essential, but a functional dis-solidarization of society that tightens feedback loops and exposes people with maximum intensity to the consequences of their own actions.2
By cropping out all high-frequency feedback mechanisms (such as market signals), and replacing them with sluggish, infra-red loops that pass through a centralized forum of ‘general will’, a radically democratized society insulates parasitism from what it does, transforming local, painfully dysfunctional, intolerable, and thus urgently corrected behavior patterns into global, numbed, and chronic socio-political pathologies.3
As you can see, we are in the company of a Deep Thinker. Who else would use such crazy, original language but (blows out cheeks in wonder) a writer? His work used to be even deeper, but Land has reined in his profundity since the nineties, when he was laying these jewelled eggs;
Any lexicographic system allowing interminable strings has a code potential (cardinally) equivalent to Aleph-0, with an infinity of virtual Dedekind cuts (entry insertions) between any two terms, however close, and virtual isomorphy between any segment of the list/archive and the whole. It thus attests to a ‘literate’ infinity isomorphic with that of mathematics, drawing upon a common but culturally obscured digital source.4
The transcendental unconscious is the auto-construction of the real, the production of production, so that for schizoanalysis there is the real exactly in so far as it is built. Production is production of the real, not merely of representation, and unlike Kantian production, the desiring-production of Deleuze-Guattari is not qualified by humanity (it is not a matter of what things are like for us).5
Land’s students at that time encountered a teaching method that was quite as fantastic as his writing style, one that eschewed merely being ‘about something’, seeking rather to be critical in its very nature. For example;
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,’ 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.6
If you are wondering what the point is here, you’re sadly misguided I’m afraid. Land’s writing, like his teaching, is not ‘about’ anything. The point here is the style of the text, not its content, which in its absence breaks down the reader’s rational defences, opens her up to new forms, new ways of ‘evoking’ truth, new ways of ‘interrogating’ a text. The only full-length book Land has written, Thirst for Annihilation, ‘interrogated’ German idealism and the philosophy of George Bataille in a similar manner, by paying little attention to the meaning of any of the thinkers involved. Land’s reading of Kant and Schopenhauer, for example, is facile, but this doesn’t matter, because philosophy is irrelevant before the ‘limitless’ and ‘unknowable’—words which are interpreted by Land as synonyms for gibberish—along with ordinary moral, semantic or formal constraints, including the expectation that one should present a coherent case for one’s utterances. These intolerable restrictions simply don’t apply to Land, who should really be considered a superman, an Übermensch, just as the Nazis considered Friedrich Nietzsche, Land’s insane hero.
Land’s enlightenment is only really ‘dark’ in the sense that a shadow cast by a
scary cut out is. Once illuminated, it vanishes.
As I say, Land appears to have largely turned his back on all this extraordinary depth, but the groundwork laid during the haze of amphetamine he wrote Fanged Noumena in7 remains the foundation of his work, which radically embodies the subject that outmoded philosophers of yore merely wrote about. Land does not need to be consistent, logical or reasonable, and so he can almost instantly drop concepts that he has introduced without further explanation. He doesn’t have to offer his own ideas or be responsible for them, and so he can rely on huge chunks of quoted text from other authors while eliding his own stance, which is diffused through his work like a neon gas (vaguely evoking the literature of William Gibson, Star Wars and similar such masterpieces of world culture). Land doesn’t even have to assume there is a listener on the other end of the phone. When she asks him what he means he can just wibble his lips and make bah-bah-bah drooling noises, or just hang up. Why not?
Land presents no real argument, makes no attempt to grapple with meaningful questions, has no real point, no real meaning, expresses no real quality, and offers nothing beyond jaded sarcasm, context-free references to pop-culture and naked power. He is, therefore, superbly successful in expressing the postmodern subject, the radically isolated subjective self. Such a self presents itself as the possessor of megalomaniacal power, but the king is bounded in a nutshell, the inner walls of which are fairground mirrors, alternatively raising up the subject to the status of a god and then shrinking it down to a paranoid pea. Like all schizoaffective solipsists, Land considers himself to be alternately a Lord of Creation and a persecuted victim, like them he sees himself existing on a plane that is beyond ethical constraint, while, at the same time, limited by the obsessively stared-at pseudo-reality of his own mind and its abstract productions. This is why he, like other writers of his ilk, loves empty word games and is ‘concerned with language’, because, really, all he has is words.
Pomoid schizo-mentation is, for the most part, the preserve of the over-educated (meaning highly institutionalised), postmodern (or ‘continental’), bourgeois thinker, for whom meaning is at best an insult, more often than not a naive irrelevance. They do not explain or defend their views because ‘the very concept of “truth” itself is part of the metaphysical baggage which [they] seek to abandon.’8 When one seeks to extract a meaningful statement from the pomo author, he dances away, waving his arms around, or he spits a little tight-lipped ironic acid. His face, like his writing, rarely expresses much human feeling or warmth. He does not speak about real things or people or qualities that actually exist, that ordinary folk might recognise, he does not offer explanations or arguments, he provides no expression of inner passion, inner beauty, inner faith. He says nothing which, when understood, does not instantly reveal its own refutation, which is why the best argument against Land is to simply to quote him. Try this;
whAt–Does–he–wAnt–to–heAR¿?––thAt–IoUR– phonIng–the–Cops––oR–thAt–hIs–sweet–lIttl–DAughteR– wAnts–hIm–toRAmRoD–heR–All–the–wAI–Into– WAgneR–AnD–ChoRuses–of–Angels¿?–––WhIlst– unDeRneAth–Its–howlIng–ImpeRsonAI–CIIbeRnet ICs–buRnIng–supeRn…9
This is not to say that Land’s ‘creative’ refutation of humanism doesn’t contain a germ of truth (most writing does, after all, even the half-baked speculations of the second-rate essayist). The enlightenment project to build heaven on earth has indeed produced nothing more substantial, or meaningful, than a house of rational cards erected on a lake of lava. Its metaphors — of time, space and mechanical causality — notwithstanding their prodigious use, are as empty as the world that its heirs have created. In fact the extreme subjectivism of postmodernism and the extreme objectivism of scientism entail each other, and terminate in precisely the same solipsism, which is why the two groups are constantly at loggerheads, as all unhappy siblings and locked in cell-mates are.
Land hints at all this, but his analysis soon melts and runs through the reader’s fingers. Returning to the Dark Enlightenment, his most recent work, its principle idea is that democracy, along with multicultural ‘tolerance’ (‘hysterical sanctification of plus-good race-think’), modern left-liberalism (‘a devotional relation to the State’) and a commitment to ‘equality’ (a word that Land doesn’t seem to understand very well) all terminate in ‘soft-totalitarianism’. The ‘nonsensical formula’ that democracy depends on, that ‘only tolerance is tolerable’ has, he writes, ‘progressed to such a degree that it has become a social police function, providing the existential pretext for new inquisitional institutions’.
It’s not a penetrating analysis, but it’s hard to disagree. Democracy does indeed ‘consume’ progress. Maggots consume rotting meat too, but that doesn’t mean that either one is edible. Is democracy the problem here, or the only problem, or the most pressing to address? What about technology, does that bludgeon people? Does it enslave people? Coerce them? Land does not ask these questions. He is a techno-enthusiast of the most extreme kind, envisaging bodiless utopias of autonomous and adaptive social structures. We are to become, he tells us…
…technoplastic beings, susceptible to precise, scientifically-informed transformations. “Humanity” becom[ing] intelligible as it is subsumed into the technosphere, where information processing of the genome – for instance — brings reading and editing into perfect coincidence. To describe this circuit, as it consumes the human species, is to define our bionic horizon: the threshold of conclusive nature-culture fusion at which a population becomes indistinguishable from its technology.10
Land does not address, anywhere in his work, serious criticism of this horror. He doesn’t question the totalising demands of technology, its ruinous ecological and social cost, its effect on conviviality and genuine human culture. Such things are of no concern to him. He is a member of the management class and a shill for the owner class and so, like all socialist liberals and capitalist republicans, he simply takes a technolotrous world view as a presupposed given. He has no interest in the validity of this assumption, or how his bizarre fantasies will practically play out, or what fusion with a machine world means and is likely to mean. He simply indulges is adolescent fantasies picked up reading Philip K. Dick under the influence of speed and11 cannabis.
So much for technology, but what of civilisation itself? What of that? Does that stupefy men and women? Domesticate them? Does it strip the earth bare of life and reduce human beings to operative units in a vast social machine? Does it lead us closer to social and spiritual harmony with ourselves and with each other, or, actually, infinitely further away? Again, we wouldn’t know from Land’s writings. For Land, the problem is democracy and tolerance, and so the solution is not democracy and not tolerance, which is to say, authoritarian control. Criticism of civilisation itself, its assumptions and its nature, do not concern Land. He writes, quoting Yarvin, that ‘progressivism has no enemies to the left’.12 None that he is aware of, certainly.
Land’s philosophy, whatever that really is, is shifted onto a pseudo-objective description of the titular Dark Enlightenment, which he pretends to be inspecting as if it a natural phenomenon, like mould. He quotes theorists he appears to be sympathetic with, some of whom do have, to be sure, intelligent things to say about the problems of democracy and left-liberalism. Some of the totems of woke theorising are given a bit of a rinsing, with a few inconvenient quotes — such as a nice little list of anti-democratic ideas from the founding fathers — and inconvenient truths — such as the fact that subjugated slaves of yore were better cared for than ‘free’ democratic subjects, for whom nobody is responsible. But there is no talk of doing away with civilised slavery, and its domesticating prerogatives, with industrial technology and its reduction of man to a rational node — rather finding a more efficient way to manage the masses than the vote.
Land doesn’t tell us what this is though. He’s not really interested in what might lay outside of the problem he delineates because he lies entirely within the coordinates of the system which produces it. His work, spewed out like an insane ‘language model’, is pure depthless, affectless, mindless, borderless surface; the perfect capitalist product, which is why, faced with the irritations of the world he justifies and reproduces, he contents himself to recommending that the state limit itself to ‘stopping and reversing pretty much everything it has been doing for over a century, excepting only scientific, technological, and business innovation,’13 and hand its operations over to private companies. This ‘neo-cameralism,’ the ownership of the state by a private company, will automatically, magically we might say, solve all our problems.
Thus we find ourselves waist deep in postmodernism at its capitalist apogee, a philosophy which obliterates the inner and the outer so that what remains, the pure affectless, Warholian image, presented in all its imperial purity, can be bought and sold. This ghostly projection of sense is founded, on the one hand, on Kant’s transcendental idealism, which claims that the thing-in-itself — reality, we would call it — is unknowable and incommunicable, and, on the other, on Nietzschean ‘perspectivism’, which claims that facts are inseparable from perception. Both of these solipsistic ideas have led to (and, if you think about it, had to lead to) libraries, infinite libraries, of empty theorising and deranged jibber-jabber, a process which began with Hegel and his followers, and led directly to the mind-blowingly vapid output of continental philosophers, none of whom have ever offered a reasonable defence of the truth-content of their arguments for the simple reason that truth no longer exists for them. It is, at best, inaccessible to speech, which is why, to express it, one must either refuse to speak or say things like, ‘compositional strata are quarantined from logical differentiations; ghettoized in the sordid slums of a creation that is paternalistically comprehended by divine reason.’14
Thus, just as Land yearns for the end of an expectation that he might have to explain himself, or make sense, or use words, or perhaps even have a mouth, so he looks forward to the obliteration of the human, the longed-for ‘singularity’, in which all our sins will be erased in an orgasmic uprush of mind-data, framing this orgaistic rapture as a heavenly singularity of depths, when in reality it is a hellish multitude of surfaces, each data-point related to every other as the contents of a modern art gallery or social media feed are; which is to say, not at all. All they have in common is that they exist in the system, or through the market, or on a hard drive.
It should now be clear why Land is so shifty in his presentation, and why his prose is, at key points, so self-indulgently opaque. It’s because to reveal his ideas is to refute them. Land’s enlightenment is only really ‘dark’ in the sense that a shadow cast by a scary cut out is. Once illuminated, it vanishes. There is certainly truth in a darkness beyond the strip-lit nightmare of the enlightenment, and meaning too. The void is fecundity itself. But in its rationally elusive nature the abyss necessarily admits charlatanism, which is how middle-men like Nick Land can claim to take possession of it.
How then can we tell the difference between those who speak for the mystery of life and those who merely ape the ineffable? By their fruit (and their faces) shall ye know them. In Land’s little box, dark indeed, we find an orange rind and a Pop-Tart; nothing but unpalatable and, to the extent they can be digested, ridiculous ideas. A colourful turn of phrase here and there, a good point, from time to time, but nothing really profound, nothing really inspiring, just a shoddy, self-indulgent and needlessly provocative pseudo philosophy. There is no more need to seriously counter this than there is the belief that, say, evil hamsters are in charge of the world and must all be destroyed. Once such an idea is visible and understood, it is clear that only the insane can believe it. What we need to do is protect ourselves from the insane, not waste time arguing with them.
If you liked this review, my essay The Nightmare of Postmodernism, will appeal to you. It’s in my recent collection of essays, Ad Radicem.
Other reviews on this substack include David Graeber’s Dawn of Everything and Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror.
More famously associated with Gilles Deleuze who, with his collaborator, Felix Guattari, wrote two epic-length celebrations of rootless, bodiless, borderless accelerationism before recanting in 1990, writing a famous recantation and then throwing himself out of his apartment window and killing himself.
Nick Land, Dark Enlightenment.
Ibid.
Nick Land, Fanged Noumena.
Ibid.
Robin Mackey, Nick Land: An Experiment in Inhumanism.
‘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.’ Quoted in Ibid.
Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
Nick Land, Fanged Noumena.
Nick Land, Dark Enlightenment
Allegedly. ‘He had good drugs.’
Quoted in ibid.
Ibid.
Nick Land, Thirst for Annihilation.