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

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The expo is perhaps the most archetypal mass art form of modernity, with its enthusiastic mingling of colonial products and advanced machinery within the envelope of national triumph. For a while, it evolved with every leap in the forces of production, particularly electrification. But the expos also express the internal tensions of modernity. In Paris in 1937, the Soviet and Nazi pavilions, “extolled totalitarian solutions to the decadence of modernity, and the sweeping clean of a ruined world.” (107) MIT Press began publishing journals in 1970 with the first volumes of Linguistic Inquiry and the Journal of Interdisciplinary History. Today we publish over 30 titles in the arts and humanities, social sciences, and science and technology. Land achieved notoriety in recent years as a prophet of Neo-reaction. I’m not going to say much about those texts, although they do pose questions for reading the early work. I’m not inclined to read Land, or anyone, through a teleology in which the later positions were always present in embryo. I think writers careen through a garden of forked paths, where each decision opens up onto others, and others in turn. A position is just one possibility out of many for where a line of thought might stagger. So let’s return to the dynamic sublime. Land: “philosophers feast in the palaces of reason, and luxuriate in the screams that reach them from the dungeons of sublimity.” (141) Philosophy desires the supremacy of that part of the human that likes to think it is akin to angels, by sacrificing that part that is kith to the animal. Reason is built on the scaffold that sacrifices the synthetic capabilities of the imagination, the body’s animal cunning. “The Kantian moral good is the total monopoly of power in the hands of reason…. The categorical imperative presupposes vivisection.” (141-2)

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This is the Land golden age: we got all the classics here. The original schizoposts are here: texts like Hypervirus descend into literal gibberish as Land explores William S. Burroughs' idea of language as a virus in a digital context - but only does so literarily, not philosophically, even if he deluded himself enough to think he was doing the latter. 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.

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Land is also known for later developing the anti-egalitarian and anti-democratic ideas behind neo-reaction and the Dark Enlightenment, which he named. Accelerationism: how a fringe philosophy predicted the future we live in". The Guardian. 11 May 2017 . Retrieved 20 November 2021.

Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings, 1987–2007 - Goodreads Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings, 1987–2007 - Goodreads

Because of this Land's reading of Deleuze and Guatarri's philosophy, that which he bases about 50% of his work on, is, in my opinion, quite prejudiced. Even those poets who can be the personae of alterity are ones who conform to a recognizable philosophical category: the sublime. In Kant, the reasoning and contemplating subject precedes its risk of undoing in the sublime. For Land it’s still about the sublime, just the other way around. The sublime is the traumatic primacy of the finitude of the animal. The work of Kant’s artist-genius is the situation where alterity might break through, where seething, writhing, intensive matter finds its own forms. Land taught at the New Centre for Research & Practice until March 2017, when the Centre ended its relationship with him "following several tweets by Land this year in which he espoused intolerant opinions about Muslims and immigrants". [13] When you realize that Land's phantasmic anti-human style is rooted in simple pseudoscientific simulacrum, Fanged Noumena loses a lot of its edge Land “Only proto-capitalism has ever been critiqued.” (340) Socialism can’t quite grasp what for Land is capital 2.0, or for me the vector. “The forces of production are going for the revolution on their own.” (341) By now Land has firmly diverged from any Marxisant path, the farewell to which is side-eye at transcendental miserablism: “the decaying Hegelian socialist heritage clinging with increasing desperation to the theological sentimentalities of praxis, reification, alienation, ethics, autonomy and other such mythemes of human creative sovereignty.” (294) The various flavors of western Marxism gave up on an affirmative counter economics. Wallowing in a limitless cosmic despair in its place. “Transcendental Miserablism constitutes itself as an impregnable mode of negation…. [W]ith economics and history comprehensively abandoned, all that survives of Marx is a psychological bundle of resentments and disgruntlements.” (624)Land had the most brilliantly seductive and meteoric mind, endlessly imaginative and capable of adopting, inhabiting and discarding any philosophical position. With him - and rightly so - philosophy infected every area of life, and sheer vitality of life reverberated in his thinking. The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism". Archived from the original on 10 December 2021. 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] Gray, Rosie (10 February 2017). "The Anti-Democracy Movement Influencing the Right". The Atlantic. Archived from the original on 30 June 2019 . Retrieved 16 August 2019. {{ cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown ( link)

Fanged Noumena by Nick Land: 9780955308789 Fanged Noumena by Nick Land: 9780955308789

if there is anybody on board who can impersonate a pilot / it would be of comfort to the other passengers If I insist on quoting Land's work here it's because I genuinely think that it's infinitely more illustrative than any way of calling it obscurantist gibberish) Such notions are intensely frightening, and also act as a potentially valauble hermeneutic to anyone still up for revolution. the attempt to read Deleuze (and Guattari) without the vitalism of Bergson and instead with this Nietzschean anti-vitalism (of the will) is a fascinating failure. the well-rehearsed productions with cyberpunk and neo-Lovecraftian toy kits are nothing more than disorientation before the exit sign in postmodernity's hall of mirrors, self-satisfaction oozing out between the panes. as much an experiment in non-standard thought as a child courting a throw-up is a dervish.Capital propagates virally in so far as money communicates addiction, replicating itself through host organisms whose boundaries it breaches, and whose desires it reprograms. It incrementally virtualizes production; demetallizing money in the direction of credit finance, and disactualizing productive force along the scale of machinic intelligence quotient. The dehumanizing convergence of these tendencies zeroes upon an integrated and automatized cyberpositive techno-economic intelligence at war with the macropod. The point is that organically individuated human subjects cannot position themselves vis-a-vis this circuit or this process. It’s happening without you anyway. It doesn’t need you. The very concept of agency is stripped out. There’s a quote of Land’s: “it’s happening anyway and there is nothing you can do about it.” Something is working through you, there is nothing you can do about it, so you might as well fuse. This is a philosophical problem. It’s a retention of this romantic, Schopenhauerian idea of fusion between the personal and impersonal, the individuated subject and cosmic schizophrenia, the impersonal primary process. But for Schopenhauer it still makes sense to postulate that. The moment at which the will turns against itself governs Schopenhauer’s whole ethical and practical philosophy. In General Intellects there was only space to cover twenty-one influential theorists. I'm often asked why this or that figure is not in it. The opening of Bladerunner. They are trying to screen out replicants at the Tyrell Corporation. Seated amongst a battery of medico-military surveillance equipment, a doctor scans the eye of a suspected ‘skin job’ located at the other side of the room, searching for the index of inhumanity, for the absence of pupil dilation response to affect:

Fanged Noumena : Collected Writings 1987-2007 - Google Books Fanged Noumena : Collected Writings 1987-2007 - Google Books

Mark Fisher, a British cultural theorist and student of Land's, argued in 2011 that Land's greatest impact so far had been on music and art, rather than on philosophy. The musician Kode9, the artist Jake Chapman, and others studied with or describe their influence by Land, often highlighting Land's inhuman, "technilist," or "delirious" qualities. Fisher underscores in particular how Land's personality during the 1990s could catalyze changes in those engaging with his work through what Kodwo Eshun describes as a manner "immediately open, egalitarian, and absolutely unaffected by academic protocol" which could dramatise "theory as a geopolitico-historical epic." [6] These extraordinary texts, superheated compounds of severe abstraction and scabrous wit, testify to a uniquely penetrating intelligence, fusing transcendental philosophy, number theory, geophysics, biology, cryptography and occultism into startlingly cohesive but increasingly delirious theory-fictions.My answer is usually that I think people could make their own lists and do their own attempts at compression to create brief, functional accounts of key concept-makers. The cyber-texts are what made Land famous, and I read them with fascination, but some part of me mourned the coherence & rigor, not to mention the (generally) agreeable political animus, of the earlier work. On the level of formalism, I may have lowkey conservative values because occasionally I’d find the Mad Scientist quality of the later essays ugly & unpleasant, perhaps more for their experimental, chaotic disorganization than the cryptofascist politics. Frankly, I like academic philosophy and sentences like ‘Techno-commercial interaction between planet-scale oceanic-navigation and zero-enabled mathematico-monetary calculation machinically singularises modernity or sol-3 capitalism as a real individual’, made me miss wrestling with Hegel; I mean, any essay after the halfway point is just aggressively perforated with hyphens. These jumbles of portmanteau words cannot be comprehensively glued together into the rhythm of reading, so you’re left to disrupt the flow of language to slowly ingest every bizarre neologism, or read at your normal pace and only get a sketchy outline of the complexity. I tend toward the former, but there may be something to recommend reading Land as an impressionist. The MIT Press has been a leader in open access book publishing for over two decades, beginning in 1995 with the publication of William Mitchell’s City of Bits, which appeared simultaneously in print and in a dynamic, open web edition.