Nick Land: An Experiment in Inhumanism

About this digest

This essay is in copyright, and so is its Russian translation by Pavel Borisov, so this page is not the essay. It is our summary of its argument, with a few short quotations from the translation. Robin Mackay, the founder of Urbanomic, wrote it around the publication of Fanged Noumena (2011), the collection of Nick Land’s writings from 1987 to 2007 that he edited with Ray Brassier. The essay appeared in English in Divus in February 2013.

The thesis in one sentence: Land’s texts are the remains of a real experiment, not a pose: an attempt to drive philosophy out of its “contemplative comfort” toward the outside, at the cost of the philosopher himself.

The experiment

Mackay opens by admitting that it is hard to write about these texts without writing about the man, since, by the present-day Land’s own account, the man who wrote them no longer exists. Iain Hamilton Grant, another of Land’s students, put the contrast this way: academic philosophers of the late twentieth century talked endlessly about the outside, but none of them went there.

Land crossed philosophy with nanotechnology, the occult, mathematics and anthropology, but not for the sake of being interdisciplinary. The aim was to escape the “anthropic conservatism” that philosophy inherits from common sense, which is itself a product of evolution and the planet’s accidents. His enemy he called the “Human Security System”: everything that normalises and limits what intelligence can become.

Warwick, 1992

Mackay arrives at Warwick in 1992, a nervous teenager in a concrete campus in the grey Midlands, and is rescued from disappointment by a lecturer who says things that mean something. Two of Land’s lines he remembers: philosophy’s only task is to make trouble, and life is a gaping wound to poke with a stick for fun.

The portrait is affectionate and exact. Land works at a comically outdated green-screen Amstrad, wired on stimulants, and shares the latest thing he has found in molecular biology or neuroscience. In person he is polite and friendly, ready to talk to anyone. He can hold his own against any professor, but quarrels with the institution itself, and would rather be in the bar with students, buying the drinks. His course was pointedly called “Current French Philosophy”, and he taught his research while it was still in progress, prowling the lecture hall and crouching on chairs “like an overgrown praying mantis”.

From Kant to theory-fiction

For Land everything began with Kant, read as an unwitting staging of the struggle between social conservatism and the corrosive forces of capital, then continued through Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Bataille. His deepest source was Deleuze and Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia, which he tried to pull free of its 1968 political frame.

In the mid-1990s something switched. Form, style and content of his writing became nearly indistinguishable, and a new genre appeared: theory-fiction. Continental philosophy, in Mackay’s account, had returned the anti-humanism of Heidegger and post-structuralism to the safe hands of an academic priesthood. Land looked for the outside instead in popular culture: cyberpunk and William Gibson, Terminator, Blade Runner, Videodrome, the dance floor, and the cut-up rhythms of jungle. There he saw thanatos, the unknown outside, slipping into the human through eros. Rather than write about these forces, he proposed to distil them into “experimental microcultures”.

The episodes

The method cost him the respect of colleagues and, often, of his own followers. Mackay recounts a seminar on A Thousand Plateaus in which chapter titles were turned into acronyms and plotted on a keyboard (“QWERTopology”); three weeks in which participants gave up the first person for a collective entity called Cur; and the 1996 Virtual Futures conference, where Land, performing with the collective 0rphan Drift as DogHeadSurGeri, lay on the floor behind the stage croaking incantations over jungle and fragments of Artaud. The audience giggled, then fell silent, as if they had walked into someone’s funeral by mistake.

The CCRU and hyperstition

From Land’s circle came novelists (Hari Kunzru, James Flint), musicians (Kode9, a founder of dubstep), and writers such as Mark Fisher (k-punk, Capitalist Realism). Reza Negarestani found Land online, and the exchange led to Cyclonopedia. Jake and Dinos Chapman commissioned a catalogue text from him; one of their prints is on the cover of Fanged Noumena.

With Sadie Plant’s arrival in 1995 the experiments found a temporary home: the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU), a student-run group whose existence the philosophy department later denied. It staged events where theory sat alongside music, art and performance, and published the Abstract Culture pamphlets, which included Land’s “Meltdown”, a dark celebration of a coming planetary techno-singularity and a nihilist answer to Wired’s California optimism. With the CCRU, Land built pseudo-Lovecraftian mythologies, “hyperstitions” (fictions that make themselves real through collective practice), including the invented Professor Daniel Barker and his theory of “geotrauma”, which reads the Earth’s history as a stack of traumas whose symptom is human subjectivity.

Breakthrough, breakdown

Land drifted from the collective into solitary numerical work: shuffling symbols on the green screen through the night, sleeping as little as possible, living in his office. Digital numbers, he believed, could strip meaning and signification out of language entirely and open a line to something unknown. Mackay is blunt: Land lost his mind in every normal, clinical and social sense, and later documented the process like the record of a failed experiment. He took the slide from “breakthrough” to “breakdown” as final, humiliating proof that a human cannot escape the prison of the self. “The experiment was over.”

Afterword

Asked about the reissue, Land neither objected nor wanted to add anything. Those texts, he said, belonged to another life, and he would rather step away quietly than judge them.

His only book from those years, The Thirst for Annihilation (1992), on Bataille, is still prized, but Mackay argues it never caught the range of the mid-to-late-1990s work that Fanged Noumena finally gathers. Land wrote about biotechnology, radical Islam, the internet as an addictive drug and the rise of China while his colleagues talked of poetry, Presence and the history of metaphysics. His lasting point, Mackay concludes, is not refuted: the task of thinking life on a planet run from the future by something that comes from outside personal or collective will, and that we can no longer pretend has anything to do with reason or progress.

Read the original

• Robin Mackay, “Nick Land – An Experiment in Inhumanism”, Divus, 27 February 2013.
• Nick Land, Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987–2007, ed. Ray Brassier and Robin Mackay (Urbanomic/Sequence Press, 2011).