Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007 (Urbanomic/Sequence Press)

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In what turned out to be a timely provocation, Land castigates western Marxism for its sad affects, its wallowing in alienation and despair. Meanwhile: “The Superiority of Far Eastern Marxism. Whilst Chinese materialist dialectic denegativizes itself in the direction of schizophrenizing systems dynamics, progressively dissipating top-down historical destination in the Tao-drenched Special Economic Zones… The left subsides into nationalistic conservatism, asphyxiating its vestigial capacity for ‘hot’ speculative mutation in a morass of ‘cold’ depressive guilt-culture.” (447-8) The non-western agent finally appears, not as decolonial revolution, but as Chinese communist-sponsored hyper-production. “As sino-pacific boom and automatized global economic integration crashes the neocolonial world system, the metropolis is forced to re-endogenize its crisis.” (449) Of course, Land is advocating a cessation of all barriers & limitations on the acceleration of granular materiality, coded here as ‘the production of production’; biographical details of Land’s burnout & breakdown in the late 90s suggest bodily limitations regarding advocacy of this project) Beginning with Land’s early radical rereadings of Heidegger, Nietzsche, Kant and Bataille, the volume collects together the papers, talks and articles of the mid-90s—long the subject of rumour and vague legend (including some work which has never previously appeared in print)—in which Land developed his futuristic theory-fiction of cybercapitalism gone amok; and ends with his enigmatic later writings in which Ballardian fictions, poetics, cryptography, anthropology, grammatology and the occult are smeared into unrecognisable hybrids. Capitalism as a mind-virus that has captured humanity and is willing its evolution into existence from the future. Runaway processes in a network that overpower any counterforce. Societies of Control are PROGRAMMATIC. The universe. Is. Programmatic.

On Nick Land – Verso

The meltdown of metropolitan education systems in the near future is accompanied by a quasi-punctual bottom-up takeover of academic institutions, precipitating their mutation into amnesiac cataspace-exploration zones and bases manufacturing cyberian soft-weaponry. Circuitries’ marked the point where Land’s disturbed catastrophizing had actual deleterious effects on my mental health; not to be melodramatic, but the violent misanthropy & shatteringly nihilistic gnosticism started to overpower my ability to metabolize them. This is the essay where the ‘preposterous humanism’ of the Hegelian-socialist tradition is chewed up between a rictus grin, humiliated as a doddering senility; to be conceptually usurped by ‘cyberpositivity’ a tactical acceptance of Land’s prophecy of post-singularity human extinction & the triumphant ascendancy of machine Archons. If geist, spirit, dasein, the subject of history, etc. ever existed, they are not implanted in the frail human subject any longer. But the terminus of anthropoid civilization as plugged into world-historical meaning & significance will probably only be evident when we die screaming in the clawed hands of cyber-Azathoth. Land's work in the CCRU was an attempt similar to Nietzsche's Will to Power; to discard judgement and critique in an attempt to come up with a philosophy of pure immanence. However, unlike Nietzsche, Land is armed with Deleuze, cybernetic theory, amphetamines, techno nightclubs, and cyberpunk novels. With such immense potency, will he create the work which will transform god? Or will he just devolve into worthless technobabble?

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As in Steven Shaviro, some version of cognition, or perhaps information, exceeds the human. “Information revolution has nothing to do with ideas.” (405) And: “Thought is a function of the real, something that matter can do.” (322) Virtual materialism becomes a project to realize artificial intelligence. “Far from exhibiting itself to human academic endeavor as a scientific object, AI is a meta-scientific control system and an invader, with all the insidiousness of planetary techno-capital flipping over.” (236) Fanged Noumena gives a dizzying perspective on the entire trajectory of this provocative and influential thinker’s work, and has introduced his unique voice to a new generation of readers. Further down his fork, capital itself starts assuming sublime qualities. “Capital propagates virally in so far as money communicates addiction, replicating itself through host organisms whose boundaries it breaches.” (338) And bcomes the sublime itself: “Capitalism is not a totalizable system defined by the commodity form as a specifiable mode of production, determinatively negated by proletarian class-consciousness. It is a convergent unrealizable assault upon a social macropod…” Beginning with Land's early radical rereadings of Heidegger, Nietzsche, Kant and Bataille, the volume collects together the papers, talks and articles of the mid-90s—long the subject of rumour and vague legend (including some work which has never previously appeared in print)—in which Land developed his futuristic theory-fiction of cybercapitalism gone amok; and ends with his enigmatic later writings in which Ballardian fictions, poetics, cryptography, anthropology, grammatology and the occult are smeared into unrecognisable hybrids. The next article, Machinic Desire, ups the ante at once, as it begins with literal, actual Blade Runner fanfiction:

Theory as cyberpunk fiction: Land‘s machinic theory-poetry parallelled the digital intensities of 90s jungle, techno and doomcore, anticipating ‘impending human extinction becoming accessible as a dancefloor’. a b Haider, Shuja (28 March 2017). "The Darkness at the End of the Tunnel: Artificial Intelligence and Neoreaction". Viewpoint Magazine. To reporter Dylan Matthews, Land's Dark Enlightenment philosophy (also known as neo-reactionary movement and abbreviated NRx) opposes egalitarianism, and is sometimes associated with the alt-right or other far-right movements. Matthews states that Land believes democracy restricts accountability and freedom. [17] Shuja Haider notes, "His sequence of essays setting out its principles have become the foundation of the NRx canon." [15] Land disputes that the NRX is a "movement", and defines the alt-right as populist and partly anti-capitalist, and therefore distinct from the NRx. [18] Land sees labor as complicit with phenomenology, rather than a displacement of it. “There can be no conception of work that does not project spirit into the origin, morally valorizing exertion…” (287) But this need only apply to the early Marx, not the later, where, as Wendling shows, a thermodynamic conception of work is starting to trouble Marx’s Hegelian praxis of spirit humanizing the world. The other path there is to reverse it, to see work not as the human spiritualizing the world but as the world materializing labor, an incomplete project of opening through labor toward a world that remakes species-being as nothing special, as one organization of matter, energy and information among others. One could read Haraway as taking this turn.