Hello everyone, welcome back to Zero Books and Repeater Media. I am Craig from Acid Horizon, and I'm also joined by our co-host and sometimes host, Adam here. And today we have the pleasure of speaking with Nicholas Blinko, who is an English author, critic, and screenwriter. He has written for British radio and television, including episodes for BBC TV series. And you might be interested to know that Nicholas also had a career in the late 1980s as a hip-hop artist. However, the reason that we have brought him here today to Zero Books and Repeater Media is to discuss his work as a philosopher, as a PhD in philosophy who studied at Warwick in the 1990s, where he was the mentee of Nick Land, who supervised his PhD on Jacques Derrida
and the relationship between political science and economic theories. And we actually discovered Nicholas on a recent episode of the Machinic Unconscious Happy Hour, where he details many of his experiences as a graduate student. But also, we brought him in today to talk about the actual work of Nick Land as it relates to Mark Fisher, the concept of accelerationism. No doubt we'll talk about Kant, Deleuze and Gattari, Leotard, and other figures. But Nicholas, I just want to welcome you to Zero Books and Repeater Media, and thank you very much for coming on the show. It's a real pleasure. I'm looking forward to it. Great. And so I offer you the opportunity to give us your own introduction. And I was wondering, and perhaps rolled into your introduction, could you tell us why?
I know that Machinic Unconscious Happy Hour reached out to you, or there was an exchange on Twitter that you had with them that ultimately led to you being invited on their show. And given that you have this resume in media, BBC, why did you come into the theory space again? You know, what brought you to us? Why would you do that to yourself? And maybe say how this may be like either peaked or restoked your interest in getting involved with this sort of thing. I think it's like that quote from The Godfather. Just when I thought I was out, they keep dragging me back in. I follow some things on Twitter and I noticed somebody was talking about Nick Land so I jumped in and that led to a discussion
and I was very happy to appear on the Machinical Unconscious Happy Hour I'm still in touch with some of my friends from Warwick Ian Grant who translated Economy a little bit now who was kind of my closest friend at the time I don't think too much these days but we are in touch other friends who went to work at St. Martins and were still in kind of philosophy adjacent things still who else Harry Cundrew the novelist was at Warwick just after we became friends and I spoke to him this week to ask him what he remembered about the cybernetic research unit
because he was there at that time yeah so it's been it's such an important part of my, if you've done philosophy you're never out of it, it's such an important part of my life and the continuing interest in this in the reading of Deleuze and Gattari that Nick Land kind of began and Nick Land I mean I don't know if it's an unusual reading of Deleuze and Gattari but this reading that says it's a version of critique by Kant, that it's about economics, foremost about economics, that economy libidinale is kind of coextensive with Antioedipus. And that I guess it's a version of Marx
that isn't the very kind of cogev, inflected version of the master and slave dialectic negative dialectic Marx that was that I think was really the the inbogue reading for the entire 20th century almost and it's a different reading of Marx and it's a reading of Marx that's entirely positive that there are no there are no negative things in the unconscious and it's just a machine The Capitalism Machinic Unconscious, that version of Deleuze and the Tory, which I noticed Mark Fisher takes exception to. But yeah, I was bowled over by this at the time.
And it's had this continuing life for good and bad. I'm curious because the one thing that I got from the Machinic Unconscious Happy Hour episode was that you were truly in that moment. You were absorbing the zeitgeist. It's on the heels of the collapse of the Soviet Union. You have these theories, you know, that are reinterpreting Marx. You have Deleuze and Guattari and all of the French post-structuralists coming onto the scene. Could you just say more about the sort of feeling and vibe that was happening at Warwick? And, you know, maybe how does it specifically relate to Nick Land and his presence? What did he and the CCRU emanate that really made them seem radical, in your opinion or your experience? As you say, things like the collapse of the Soviet Union forced us to think about Marxism in different ways.
the not success of Thatcherite, but the kind of, the fact that a Thatcherite political landscape had really dominated, that Labour and Socialism was out of the picture electorally in England, that things like the Big Bang, which is a term for an economic revolution where the big banks opened their own trading floors and no longer had to send stockbrokers to a room to make bets. But everything happened globally on trading floors and via, I guess, via versions of the internet or something.
I'm not quite sure how the big bank happened, but it meant that London suddenly became global. and then the we all went from handwriting our essays in 1989 to using computers to kind of in 1989 I mean that which was a huge change reading the essay Machinic Desire which you sent me starts with Nick Lann trying to rewrite Blade Runner but there were also a huge influence in other science fiction other science fiction writers this anticipation of the virtual world and the virtual reality was huge um and also it was the year era acid house so that had i was living in manchester
for my enjoying my ma year and like the first year my phd and just commuting back to war because i'd lived there since i'd done my undergraduate degree there so and i was fed up but i went back to Manchester which is where I also had a hip-hop band and was signed to Factory Records which didn't really go anywhere but gave me access to a nightclub called the Hacienda so I had free entry into them and then that became the one of the centers of Acid House so at the same time the world seemed to be changing economically, politically and technologically because we all suddenly had computers we didn't really know what to make of them but we owned that we'd taken out student loans to own computers. We were taking, well, most people were taking acid, ecstasy,
certainly at the weekend, raving, which was a huge explosion. You wouldn't believe how exciting that was. It's very difficult to explain how exciting it is to be at the epicenter of a kind of youth, a youth explosion, but it sounds like the Happy Mondays, the Stone Roses, DJs, that whole DJ culture was just starting which again was um felt i guess postmodern through recycling older songs into new uh digital ways we're making music in new digital ways the midi technology was entirely new guitars were kind of disappearing we felt so it did feel as though everything was changing we needed a philosophy that that talked about this change and uh nick land arriving
at warwick just warwick needed i guess some kind of reinvigoration and they hired a young new tutor there was a lot of excitement about it i mean there were no jobs in contentable philosophy in the country so there was an enormous excitement about who what warwick would appoint and we got this guy who had written his PhD on Heidegger. So it seemed like, well, you know, we were very Heideggerian department because our head of the department, David Wood, was a very kind of woo-woo, slightly mystical Heideggerian. He taught Heidegger without mentioning anything about politics. It was actually a surprise to me after studying Heidegger for two years to discover he was a Nazi. It just wasn't mentioned. You just felt that Heidegger was the benign hippie.
So we got this... So we didn't know what Nick Lound was, but we knew that he was young and he'd just been appointed. And he just arrived kind of like a whirlwind because he wasn't yet 30. I'm not quite sure how old he was, but I mean, he was only in his late 20s. He dressed like a lot of people dressed at the time, in black, so he looked like a follower of a band called Crass. you know black jumpers that hung down to his knees and tight black trousers um he looked as though he cut his own hair so he did look punkish and he talked incredibly quickly uh and he was also quite geeky but he was clearly someone who hadn't done almost like a guy who'd done nothing other than
read philosophy and talk philosophy for his entire life and he was exceptionally on top of the things he was on top of. He really knew stuff inside out. A very charismatic lecturer, a great, great, great lecturer on this kind of his version of Deleuze and the Tory. Those tutorials started virtually from day one. There was a tutorial on anti-Oedipus and it was anti-Oedipus is critique. It's a Kantian critique and it's a positivist critique. I'm curious because now with the retrospective on the work of Nick Land and the CCRU and the more recent developments of Nick, and I also want to bring in this sort of classic image
of Nick Land on the stage screaming into a microphone and the whole, some of us are still Marxists, incident amidst the sort of Thatcherite atmosphere of that time. What were other radicals, like traditional Marxists or anarchists, how were they—I mean, you get a sense that there was some tension with this new movement that was considered to be on the left with Nick and Mark Fisher and so forth. But often, we get the sense that if we are on that team, the accelerationist team, the CCRU team, that this other tradition appears more stodgy.
Was there a conflict there? I mean, what was your own personal perception of that sort of politics at the time? Because clearly, as you're saying, there's this kind of cultural effusion, this explosion of acid house, computers and all of that happening that seemed to have intoxicated the intelligentsia at that time. How was that crowd perceived? Did you experience any of that tension yourself? There was a generational tension. I mentioned again that our head of the professor was David Wood and he called me the Thatcherite youth at one point, which just meant that I was both hardworking but wanted to finish my degree in a certain amount of time, PhD in a certain amount of time because my grant would run out.
And so even thinking in terms of time, money seemed to him to be just way too much of a breadhead, I guess. You would think there would be a big tension between traditional Marxists and us, but it wasn't apparent that Nick Land was going to be... The word neoliberal didn't really exist. as far as I know it was coined as modern usage by David Smith the geographer and I did read him at the time but it hadn't really percolated through there was just, there was monetarism which was a Thatcherite philosophy of monetarism
which we were anti but in a sense if you were anti the markets it seemed to be like anti-oxygen there just wasn't socialist solutions just weren't winning any arguments. So we had to kind of reinvigorate our critique. And in many ways, Marx was still the inspiration because Marx was saying that everything was economics. I wrote my own PhD on economics because everything was economics. Again, I didn't know Mark Fisher and he came to worry when I'd already finished my PhD but his critique is uh his criticism as far as i as i understand it is that
de l'eux and de tory aren't saying that everything is economics and niland is wrong to make capital the the driving force but i think it did seem to us that that was the case that capital was the driving force but we had to look at it differently partly because technology was suddenly getting so exciting and was changing the world so rapidly. And partly because it seemed that older versions of Marxism really weren't cutting it. Because it came from Essex, which had a much more Hegelian perspective, and there were the Rose sisters who were both, Gillian and Jacqueline Rose, who were both in their own ways into negative dialectics. there was that kind of really crunchy, violent,
Kojave-inspired Marxism that focuses on the master and the slave and the class conflict. And obviously Nick Landon wrote his first book on Bataille. But I always got the sense that he wanted just to turn Bataille into a French Nietzsche. Bataille didn't come first for him. I mean, in the Mark Fisher reading, there's first Bataille and then the Talaise and the Tory, but that just wasn't the case at all. He was writing a book on Bataille because there was some money in it. He'd got commissioned to write it. But he was completely into Deleuze and Gattari from this Kantian standpoint, which made reading Bataille slightly difficult because Bataille is coming from this,
is coming out of Kojeb's lectures, as far as I understand. The 1930 Surrealist camp would go into Kojeb's lectures And it's a very Hegelian, Bataille is a Hegelian thinker. Absolutely. Yeah, the more you read Bataille, I went in thinking, oh, here we have this Nietzschean thinker. But I think more that Kojevian Hegelianism comes out the more you read it. Yeah, absolutely. So he loved Bataille, but he loved Bataille because Bataille is a very good writer. And he'd never really felt all that Bataille. and he had to turn Bataille into a French Nietzsche to finish that book, Annihilation. So, yeah, there was a Marxist tradition
that was heavily kind of negative dialectic inflected. And I think Essex was much more so even than Warwick. And Middlesex was probably the same. And I think Nietzsche was perhaps reacting against that, But there was a feeling that there had to be a new kind of Marxism. And it wasn't just happening there. There were book magazines like Living Marxism. Marxism Today in England was on that same kind of journey. TV shows that my girlfriend, the woman called Janet Leigh's TV producer, she was working for the Late Review at the time, which was a television show that went out at kind of midnight, four days a week. And everybody on that was trying to talk about postmodern culture
and how the world was changing. And they were talking Foucault every single night on the BBC. So it wasn't that we were in conflict with all the Marxists. It was more that a lot of people were thinking Marxism isn't working, and that led some people into being more and more and more neoliberal. I mean it's it's quite funny in a ways that how much the trajectory of uh Nick Land's political dispositions has trailed with the trajectory of as you mentioned living Marxism who are now a collection of Tory advisors and fascist apologists working with the Hungarian government and the Koch brothers but um just to go back to sort of the stuff talking about I think it's very much a great link you draw between the the Hacienda I mean the Hacienda I mean there was
famously a swarm machine's live performance of the ccri at the hacienda but i think it's really great to link the idea of the the acid the acid house culture the rave country specifically as well the jungle jungle and jungleism really to the ideas that i think links a lot of the ideas in machinic desire text which is depersonalization through technology the idea that i mean i remember listening in the machinic unconscious happy hour episode you talked about how before to get into a computer you had to break into the master path or no ask them to be sure not break in uh to actually have access to them and this is the idea of the computational sphere uh which is something you know we have cyberspace you can become anonymous you can somewhat have this sense of becoming depersonalized through this new sort of idea of artificial intelligence or cyberspace or
anonymous identities in a very similar way to what it's like getting out of your heads uh you know tuning out, tuning out, dropping out, as Timothy Leary used to say, on some acid, or going to a rave and completely losing yourself in this giant positive swarm of bodies. And it does feel like, especially thinking about Machinic Desire and the overall thesis, I guess, of Lan's work, where I think he gets more intense as it goes on, is the idea that, you know, positive feedback, the idea that the self-reinforcing system or a self-producing system, which may melt down all the limits that it comes across, is something that he thought we were seeing in this moment where computers are breaking out of the particular controls of, in the way, on one hand, the market is breaking out of the control of the state,
as it seems, at least, from the Fatterite period. But at the same time, there's this DIY aesthetic of the hacker aesthetic, where computation, where information itself is breaking out of the constraints of this hierarchical mode of containing it, say, within an archive or within the mass departments to withhold all computers. As computation spreads out, even through these other projects like Siberia, the internet cafes that were actually started by some living Marxism people, Keith Ter, I believe. And I think that's when it gets to name Siberia, maybe. But it's this idea of an accelerating technological process is spiraling out past the limits that humans, as we know them, have imposed upon them in positions
of, you know, you have to be the person that you are in meatspace, you're on your computer. No, you don't. You can, at least it seems at the time, you can go out into these, as Lan calls them, new Amazons. And I think this is really the overarching, I think he takes them to Lers and Guattari, which is the idea that capital is just, is the same thing as schizophrenia, which is what Fisher I think rightfully critiques Landon but the idea is it's constantly melting down building up this monstrous fungal infection of the world which is depersonalizing everything because I remember in the recent interview Land talks about capital like a mushroom because he thinks that capital now is any self-reproducing process and I guess this really comes into it in its sort of nascent stage or sort of almost fetal stage in how he tries to rewrite Blade Runner
in the opening of machining desire. The Voigt-Kampf test, something that tests you in terms of your emotional connection to these very human forms of identification. And then, of course, the person administering this test to the replicants, the one who is not born, that is not part of this Oedipal familial triangle, says, I'll tell you about my mother, and then pulls out a gun and shoots the person who's trying to contain this cybernetic sort of nomad, this nomadic cyborg. I just wanted to ask, what did you think about this, in this text, this attempt to it's not really rewriting a Blade Runner, it's like the opening scene but what do you think was the impulse, this science fictional impulse to identify to use a term which may contradict the entire thing, with these cyborg escapist kind of entities
escaping into this, you know, diving into the screen almost like in a video drone Well I think you're right that the Acid House era helped us think about machinic desire because repetitive beats, there was a new law brought in by the Dutch government against repetitive beats, which was the way to outlaw raving, illegal rapes. So if the music played at an event had repetitive beats and the police could close it down. so if you were just having a party at the young farmers playing rock and roll that was fine but if it was the noise coming out of the tent was repetitive beats the police could close it down
so that was an integral part of the law and repetitive beats obviously were important we categorized music by the number of beats per minute we were you know thousands of people completely off their heads dancing together so you had a sense of the swarm which became a really big important idea and the people that were coming to auric certainly after me and forming the cybernetic research unit with with nick were even more the generation of ravers so um that i think that i think you're right in saying that was incredibly important the new kinds of science fiction and it wasn't just Blade Runner it was I've just forgotten the name of the book but uh
you know the book that is supposed to have started the idea yeah Neuromancer Neuromancer was incredibly important everybody read it um so these ideas were buzzing around and Nick Land did like the um the sci-fi fantasy elements of Nietzsche which I never really understood his appeal at all but he absolutely loved it when i said it sounds a bit dungeons and dragons to me he was just angry you know i just never seen him go yeah he was quite laconic most of the time and the kind of steam came out of his ears when i said that um so he did like that element the fantasy element of of nature and uh he saw how it could be turned to science fiction which again was
has become more of a defining feature of our culture. The science-based fantasy are so much more important than they were. No, sorry. I was going to address another point, but I can't remember what it was. So if you take it up again. Well, I just wanted to emphasize just for everyone, just there was, I mean, there was really a, I mean, even in, for example, the earlier essays of land, like Kant's Capital and the Prohibition of Incest, as well of course the person hanging over all this whose work I think really needs to big up at this point from Zeros and Ones, Sadie Plant who was really the first person to found the CCRU and then left Vorik and then sort of land came in and made it more of a Cthulhu style boys club to some extent but there was this
feminist impulse depersonalisation I did want sorry I'm jumping over the game but that was something that I thought that I felt I should talk about But the CCRU did feel much more feminist and queer than it seems to be remembered these days. As you said, Sadie and Nick had a relationship, so they were kind of the John Lennon and Yoko Ono of that group. Sadie was a very important thinker. There were other women. I know a novelist called Mets Packer was at university at the time. and part of that. And plenty of other women. It's just like, it's so long ago, I forgot people's names.
So it did feel that Helen Sisu was a really important philosopher at the time. Fluid economics. When Nick Lan talks about hydraulics, things like the certain systems or hydraulic systems, I mean, a lot of that was coming from Helen Sisu and the girls, the women that were reading Helen Sisu at university at the time. I guess I'm bringing all this up because one of the questions that we keep returning to with Nick Land is, we say he's a libertarian, but in what sense is he a libertarian? Who's he liberating? What's he liberating? What's being liberated here? and the whole Deleuzean angle on becoming and making that blight, that blight of desire and the desires of
becoming, it was women it was women and queer impulses that were defining it at the time it wasn't this simply leaping to the end as it lands into later just leaping to the end and saying it's dead, it never was that it was inventing all kinds of desiring machines, all kinds of becoming, there was a much more multiplicity of desire. And I've got my daughter who decided to jump in with his own desiring machine. Anyway, you get my point. Everybody had their own ideas of it, and there were multiplicities. And it wasn't quite this kind of let's head to death, let's head to Thanatos in the way that Nick Land's own papers seem to be.
I mean, absolutely. I mean, this is, it's in a way sort of part of the tragedy of the CCRU. A lot of people look back to it looking for the origins of this, I mean, this post-speed adult racist in Shanghai. Now, rather than the emancipatory sort of futurisms of, I mean, this is really the greatest critique, really. I mean, you watch that, there's a great video of Sadie Plant lecturing about the futures of cybernetic futures, and then you see it pans to Nick and he's asleep. it's yeah it's but i think this is the um i think this is the the critique we get from fisher which is that positive feedback in and of itself isn't emancipatory the idea that i think there was there's very much this impulse of if we let these machines take over they will depersonalize
ourselves if we if we liberate these machinic processes we will no longer be we won't have we don't have to liberate ourselves we know we will no longer have to be ourselves and i think this is very much the notion of the human security system because it feels a sense of security is for the sake of maintaining human which for him is Oedipus, this familial unit and absolutely I mean it goes back to someone like Shula Smith's Firestone the idea of or xeno-feminism as a accelerationist future yeah I mean what do you think of this notion of the security the human security system does he think it really is this getting is it is kind of taking away repetitive beats. Capital wants you to listen to rock and roll, wants you to be fully stuck in the family, in dad rock, maybe we can say.
And this is the positive feedback that is going to break us out of dad rock. It's going to break us out of Led Zeppelin. Now we can all go be junglist. And I love this idea of jungle. It comes from other CCIU adjacent theorists like Kojo Eshin. He says it's the libidinalization of anxiety. you're being chased by this in a song like Terminator or Cylon you're chased by the cybernetic machine and actually you like it because when it gets you you won't have to be yourself anymore you won't be living in Britain I think thinking about Kojo is a good example of this that Kojo took the same ideas but helped to explain what Afro-Puturism was via these things and there
it's clearly a kind of liberation. It's a black liberation and an Afro-futurist idea. But it's difficult to say what Nick Land is liberating as a group or as a class. So with Kojo, it's clear what the class is. It's both Ghana, Africa, looking at the slave trade again. But with Nick, what is it? And I think that both Brassier and Mark Fisher are trying to tease out this. So Mark Fisher says, well, no, it's what it is. It's cosmic libertarianism. Yeah, yeah. And I can't even watch maybe Brassier defined it as, but he kept teasing away at this thing that you're asking,
you're saying that there's an imperative to affirm. and he's saying but you know where is that pragmatic moment who's the person what's the thing that's making that pragmatic decision to the must affirm the must see the positive and seek affirmation i i'm not sure and i have the same problem with what is nitland's work about and i would suggest that it it's a kind of a realism of the future they said just saying that this is the way that humanity is going, you know, get, understand that this is real. And if you don't, if you think that it's working some other way, you're fooling yourself and that,
that fooling yourself is what critique is all about. I don't, does that make sense? No, it, I mean, it absolutely is. I mean, this is, I, there was a, I think this is why it's so, it's such a frustration element to this because he, eventually goes into this, rather than it being about feminist liberation or queer liberation or depersonalisation it eventually comes down to and this is very much clear on his essay called a rough and ready introduction to accelerationism where it's unconditional. What's the fucking point then? And then naturally as we get closer to the later stuff it's not unconditional at all, it's liberating the cybernetic model he takes of the line of flight, he translates it into explicitly
white flight. And I'm like, well, then he's always constantly bouncing. Yeah, in the dark and light, he says the model is white flight. I'm like, I'd rather think, I think this is, what do you think in terms of, you know, how this relates to Fisher's critique? The idea that what he misses is the fact that whilst capital may sweep away a billion limits with one hand, it imposes them again on the other. This idea of negative feedback, because the idea of regulation. I think this is where Ray Brassier is like, yeah, it is facteurism in a way. I mean, positive feedback can have, you know, positive feedback, I guess there are some, it's interesting really, he puts positive feedback against reproduction because the process of giving birth is a positive feedback mechanism through the production of the intensity of,
one, oxytocin, and two, the intensity of muscle contractions. And also another fantastic positive feedback mechanism we've had to deal with for the past three years. COVID, a cytoskeying storm, is a positive feedback loop on the immune system. I was like, you know, I would say to, you know, Lanza, you look at all of the piles of dead, but he would say, oh, that's fantastic, and, you know, sit there with an evil smile and say, it's just as planned. Mark Fisher's criticism slightly took me aback that he's saying that Nick Landon associates capital and schizophrenia, and this is wrong, and it's not in Deleuze and Gattari. And that slightly took me aback because I thought it was. So I had to kind of rack my brain.
And there's certainly a reading of Deleuze and Gattari that comes from Economy Libid Now, and I wonder whether we overemphasized Economy Libid Now in our reading of Deleuze and Gattari. But I don't think so really. I mean, because Deleuze and Gattari are coming from a Marxist tradition, they are saying that capital is everything. And Mark Fisher's criticism of that, putting capital in the other category. So, you know, in Dilettigatory, you've got the state and the war machine, or you've got the white space and the black holes. I mean, it's clear that where all the movement's happening, where all the outside is happening, that's the war machine, the schizophrenia, and also capital.
and the inside where the repression is happening, that's state, politics, the black holes, paranoia. That's where politics is happening that's kind of different to capital. And so I thought Mark Fisher was just kind of wrong there, but he's kind of right about, well, what happens when you just lionize capital in that way? and he also brought in history which again I felt that he was probably wrong because he was giving a very kind of programmatic history so he was like Marx he was trying to save an old fashioned version of Marx where he says well pre-capital there was feudalism and pre-capitalist forms
and so there's a real human history to it but as he also said the whole idea of history is up for grabs in Antioedipus. And the schizophrenic reading of history just isn't linear like that. It puts that kind of version of time and space really under question. And what you've got in it land is, the only version of time you've got in it land is deterioration. The universe is heading towards heat there. And you've got this other thing in him, which is that things can be materially affected by the future. because if you get if you got rid of a notion of desire as emptiness that we just want to keep
filling ourselves so the dialectics are negative is always having an influence on us because we desire what we don't have them get what we don't have and then we move on if you if you think that that's wrong you've got to have a different version of desire as the full body that's moving and moving all the time and i noticed in this machine of desire he talks about addiction which is and And that's something that's programmed from the future. I'm not really completely sure what he means by that, but that is his idea. He's got two versions of time, one where the future is determining us and the other one that the entire universe is spiraling towards heat death. But what he doesn't have is this social history where there was a pre-capital, which Mark Fisher's trying to bring back and saying,
well, a capital is just this particular structure for the industrial age and the post-industrial age, maybe the last 200 years, and it's just a structure that hasn't always existed. Well, perhaps it's not always existed, but it seems to be wrong that more officials put it on that, put it on the black hole state end of the equation rather than the white space war machine and schizophrenia end of the equation. But again, what do you think about that? Am I wrong in criticizing Mark Fisher in that way? No, I actually think you're correct. Although the direction that I pivot might be different than what you might be going towards.
And I actually had a kind of bundle of questions and concerns with all of this, and you can react to any number of them. As I understand it, Deleuze and Guattari's work in the hands of Nick Land kind of made him the sort of centerpiece of the intellectual hegemony of that body of work. And I was wondering, as others read Deleuze and Guattari, if they did not pick up on certain—I mean, even as early as the logic of sense, we get this sense of the reintroduction of subjectivity. The basic thesis is this, is that never does a movement of deterritorialization occur without re-territorialization. So the problematic is that the subjective or the flow of subjectivity, they don't understand subjectivity as encapsulated as such.
They interpret it as a kind of flow. And I'm thinking, for example, like Deleuze's essay, Nomad Thought, where he invokes the very thing that they invoke in Antioedipus in the Accelerationist fragment about Nietzsche, which is that the European man is the one that is constantly decoding amidst modernity. And the question is, where does this decoded subjectivity go? How does it condense? What is the character of this condensation and its incessant deterritorialization and re-territorialization of itself? And I think Nick is just pivoting completely away from that with the notion of market immunization. And I tend to go back to Bataille.
I think of this idea, like I think Nick is correct in recasting the body without organs. But the thing that the outside to capital, the nomos outside of the logos of capital, which is undergirded by the state and the concept of private property, is something that's going to be heterological. And that's going to be crime. And there's all kinds of crime. There's bourgeois crime. There's the idea of delinquency, like whether it's being delinquent with rent, for example. So, you know, living in a time where mortgage interest rates are super high and that's pulling up rental rates that throws people who are indigent populations immediately into this category of either being delinquent or a crime as a result of the expansion or flow of capital in certain kinds of directions.
And so I don't think you can have the manifestation or new articulations of capital as such without the creation of the nomos around it in the form of criminality of all kinds of sorts. And so this is the thing that I think we're forced to deal with. And Bataille says this in no uncertain terms. It's a surprise to me that Nick did not see that in Bataille, but it's even more of a surprise that he loses the thread that we see in nomad thought with relation to Nietzsche and this, what I would call a more general, remain true to the earth sort of ethos of Nietzsche that's picked up by Deleuze in the Nomad Thought essay. That this idea of subjectivity as man, as the human being, as the human experience is always going to be redeposited in the space that capital has cleared.
And so this is what we must contend with. We're always ensconced in this political exigency of what to do with us as human beings. So I'm curious what you think of all that. And maybe you could react to my interpretation too. I think you're dead right that Nick Land had a hegemony. Hegemony, hegemony, yeah. He had that kind of influence, and that was for very specific reasons. There wasn't very much translated by Deleuze and Gattari. It was coming out during this period. He was about the only person who read it, and he was teaching people who were new to it.
So, I mean, we listened to him and he taught it from his own angle very, very well. But then things like Logic of Sense came out and other books came out and I think we began to question it, that it wasn't about becoming a swarm immediately. It was more about finding group identities in different ways. perhaps, you know, like different forms of criminality or different forms of outsideness. I think there's a much gentler way. I mean, Deleuze wrote a book called masochism, becoming masochism, becoming kinky, becoming freaky, becoming queer, all these type of things are there,
and it's a much gentler way of understanding liberation. but it was never Nick Lang's angle on it because Nick Lang was really trying to write something that was much more, at the time it seemed that he was heading off towards physics for a while, that he was going to try and get his head around physics and write about cosmology. So we began to understand that maybe that this wasn't the be-all and end-all of Deleuze-Vertori. But it did take a while because we just hadn't read the books. As I said, Ian Grant had to translate Economially Binal. We were having tutorials that drew on it when it was only in French,
and we were struggling to read it. And Ian translated it. I'm not sure if you're familiar with the work of Nick Thoburn. He wrote a book on Deleuze and politics back in the early 2000s. And I think he gets it right, or he's a lot closer than Nick Land was. The de-territorializing edge of capital is constantly cutting through the social field like butter. And in virtue of doing that, it's creating a minor politics. You have displaced, dispossessed populations and all kinds of sort of particles flying off the re-territorialized social. speaking to me immediately that that's how i would be reading delirious right well otherwise
you get this trust i mean i mean we've got an accelerated culture at the moment we've got extreme libertarian neoliberals and and they can't hold the state together so the land's whole thing would have been you know take away the top rate of tax let capital be free and melt us all down into this post-human sludge capital doesn't you know the bourgeoisie may not know that capital's doing this but we know it's going to do this because we understand cybernetics and then capital capital shit itself as soon as negative the negative feedback capitalism was taking it back and he would say unconditionally now at least yeah accelerate the process but this is i think there is a kind of there's a reputation here in terms of the desire i think that leads to which is a desire for emancipation whereas now it's a desire to kind of work with this non-human
uh entity that's because you know it ultimately becomes this i always like to read the science fictional aspect which i think you're right to say is very dungeons and dragons that the kantian conditions of experience have been implanted with us from the future by this this giant neuromancer style ai and if we work with it we can integrate with it and it'll all be yeah we won't have to be ourselves anymore as you'll be stuck as a human then the cosmos will eat you alive i mean it's only a small point but again picking up the fact that we hadn't we were reading as the books were coming out Raymond Brazier's critique of Nick Land leans really heavily on on what's he called, the French
philosopher, the late 19th century, early 20th century of Louis Proust, who wrote on time Bergson, yeah, leans really heavily on Bergson, but none of us had read Bergson, Nick Land showed no, had no knowledge of Berkson at all. And we didn't realize Berkson was important to Deleuze until the cinema books came out, which was a while later. So you can overstate how much we knew about Deleuze and Guattari. We were extrapolating from very small amounts of material. Well, two large books, but that was it, really. Absolutely. So, Nicholas, at this time, we'll kind of pivot the discussion a little bit. We'll open up a Q&A for all of the patrons who are in here. And
I just wanted to say thank you for appearing on the show. And the following bit of the conversation will be on Zero Book's Patreon account as a sort of parrot room discussion. And so I invite any of the patrons at this time, if you want to hop in the chat and ask your question and kind of cue up, We'll ask questions to Nick. And this will be more of an informal discussion. And I wanted to start it off with... any of the links in the show notes to extend your support.