Fiction, Deterritorialization, Oscar Sarkon and Professor Challenger A Response to Philosophical Critiques of Landian Accelerationism - Copy
Nick Land/Secondary Sources/Texts/Fiction, Deterritorialization, Oscar Sarkon and Professor Challenger A Response to Philosophical Critiques of Landian Accelerationism - Copy.pdf
A Response to Philosophical Critiques of Landian Accelerationism
Fiction
Deterritorialization
Oscar Sarkon & Professor Challenger
Psuedoanon/Psuedoanalysis
@4Q248 DC Barker (tic)
April 2020
1
A Response to Philosophical Critiques of Landian Accelerationism
Introduction
A significant line of criticism levied against Nick Land’s accelerationism is that it neglects
the reterritorialization portion of the deterritorialization process and is thus inconsistent
with its supposed foundational Deleuzeguattarian theory, an inconsistency which leads to
a conceptual confusion between speed and acceleration thereby undermining the novelty
of the accelerationist project.
This body of criticism neglects the concept of fiction which, when appropriately
considered, suggests that Nick Land’s project is consistent with the oeuvre of Deleuze and
Guattari’s project.
More importantly, at the same time, whether Nick Land’s project is or is not consistent
with Deleuze and Guattari’s project is a misguided question, and of little consequence.
Critiquing Land for inconsistency, incoherence, or error regarding reterritorialization is the
very kind of state-oriented reterritorialization D and G explicitly warned against, and which
Land’s project was attempting to think beyond.
What follows from these explorations, I suggest, is an emphasis on aesthetic experience,
and a reconsideration of reterritorialization as – to use a reductive term loosely – ‘nothing
other’ than deterritorialization in its latent or virtual state.
In other words, acceleration is inevitable.
Though unverifiable, ontologically redundant, or even nonsensical, this slogan none the
less illustrates ‘something’ that can be experienced through literature and music, and which
merits further mapping.
With this said, I feel compelled to end on a warning: in this text the reader will find
diagrams that map poorly onto their written counerparts, equations that are speculative to
the extent that they border on meaninglessness, a complete lack of formal arguments, and
a cumbersome style that at times is far too reliant on large excerpts of other texts. To make
matters worse, I have only discussed what interests me, and have made no effort to present
the other side of the ‘discussion.’ It is your place, reader, to add what I missed. Your place
to connect your machine to mine.
Enjoy.
-
[Pseudonym] DCB(tic)
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A Response to Philosophical Critiques of Landian Accelerationism
1: One or Several Critiques?
1.1
“Land's…deviation from their [Deleuze and Guattari’s] understanding of
capitalism is fatal. Land collapses capitalism into…schizophrenia, thus losing
their most crucial insight into the way that capitalism operates via simultaneous
processes of deterritorialization and compensatory reterritorialization”-Fisher1
“One wouldn’t need to deterritorialize and destratify unless there was always a
complement of reterritorialization and restratification…although the real itself is
absolutely deterritorialized…it’s always differentiated and stratified…there must
be a limitrophic point of absolute deterritorialization towards which the process
of affirmation or acceleration tends. If you’re accelerating, there are material
constraints upon your capacity to accelerate, but there must also be a
transcendental speed limit at some point…The continuation or intensification of
the process demands the elimination of humanity as a substrate for the
process…Here I think…a conceptual incoherence emerges: how can you intensify
when there is no longer anything left to intensify? …there comes a point at which
there is no agency left…” - Brassier2
“Land celebrates absolute deterritorialization as liberation…to the point of total
disintegration and death. He simply ignores the reactive side of capitalism in
Deleuze and Guattari’s account: the side that blocks its own liberatory potentials
by operating a ‘violent and artificial reterritorialization.’”-Shaviro3
“Deleuze and Guattari recognized, what capitalist speed deterritorializes with one
hand, it reterritorializes with the other…Land confuses speed with
acceleration…Landian accelerationism is stuck in…a localized ramping up of
intensity, rather than a more properly accelerative regime capable of navigating
beyond the…capitalist axiomatic…”- Williams4
The basic critique: Land’s theories are incoherent or erred due to his overlooking the
nuances of Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of re/de-territorialization processes wherein
capitalism / the organism doubles down on what it changes thereby preventing escape
beyond certain limits inherent to the organization; a missed complexity that results, so it is
implied, from Land’s ignorance of the important theoretical changes made to the concept
of re/deterritorialization between Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus (AO & ATP from
here on out).
1
Terminatory vs. Avatar, 2012, #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, 2014.
Mad Black Deleuzianism: On Nick Land (Accelerationism), 2010 Lecture.
Accessed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QSOuVnFhEw&t=27s.
3
No Speed Limit: Three Essays on Accelerationism, 2015.
4
Escape Velocities, E-Flux Journal #46 - June 2013.
accessed https://www.e-flux.com/journal/46/60063/escape-velocities/
2
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A Response to Philosophical Critiques of Landian Accelerationism
1.2 In his short text ‘Excavating the Origins of Accelerationism’ (2017),5 Vincent Garton
succinctly condenses the above critiques before illustrating their common error:
“A criticism often levelled at Land…is his supposed inadequacy as a reader
of Deleuze and Guattari. This is at root an intellectual-historical argument.”
An intellectual-historical argument, Garton insists, predicated on shaky speculation of the
intent behind Land’s behavior.
Garton continues:
“…the CCRU were competent and interesting investigators of Deleuze and
Guattari precisely because they did not assume the posture of historicists
recovering what these writers actually thought, or of scholars contributing
a new and convincing reading to a burgeoning field of scholarship.”
Land and the CCRU were not attempting to accurately explicate or interpret D and G as
much as they were attempting to ‘do’ D and G much like they were attempting to ‘do
cybernetics.’ In Deleuzoguattarian jargon, the CCRU constructed literary and conceptual
machines that plugged into the D-G-machine(s), and machines do not (cor)respond to
accurate-inaccurate, coherent-incoherent, and right-wrong, binary coordinates. They work
in fits and starts where error and fiction are just as much a part of the workings as anything
else. As Land writes himself, “nothing logical ever happens at the ‘level’ of machines.”6
For these reasons, Garton argues, the intellectual-historical critique is misguided.7
1.3 What Garton does not expand on - to no fault of his own - is that these critiques
misunderstand the main thrust of Land’s accelerationist project by overlooking the
conceptual and literary consistencies between early Land/CCRU texts and excerpts of
Deleuze and Guattari’s ATP which both feature deterritorializating, hyperstitional / theoryfictional characters. It is in these consistencies that the ‘solution’ to the theoretical
‘incoherencies’ or ‘errors’ arises: a model of thought that abandons any recourse to
classical notions of ‘incoherence’ caused by ‘collapsed’ differences; an aesthetic paradigm
of the machinic hyperreal wherein fiction breaks down distinctions and becomes an
articulation of reality as opposed to a mere representation of reality.
5
https://cyclonotrope.wordpress.com/2017/07/22/excavating-the-origins-of-accelerationism/
‘Critique of Digital Reason,’ Fanged Noumena, pg. 366
7
Similarly, in the introduction to Nick Land’s collected texts, Fanged Noumena, Robin Mackey and
Ray Brassier write:
“What has all this to do with philosophy? From a certain point of view – one encouraged by Land
himself – nothing, or as little as possible. Land allied himself to a line of renegade thinkers –
Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bataille – who mocked and disparaged academicism and wielded philosophy
as an implement for exacerbating enigma, disrupting orthodoxy, and transforming existence…” (pg. 2-3).
“Everything in Land’s work that falls outside the parameters of disclpinary knowledge can and will be
effectively dismissed by those who police the latter” (pg. 54).
6
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A Response to Philosophical Critiques of Landian Accelerationism
2: Deterritorialization
2.1 Is Landian acceleration that fatally incoherent due to its supposed ignorance of the
theoretical developments made between AO and ATP? Does it matter? To begin, let’s look
at some excerpts from ATP concerning the organism’s relation to destratification.
On page 70 of ATP:8
“…absolute deterritorialization is there from the beginning, and the strata
are…thickenings on a plane of consistency…the abstract Machine exists
…half-erected in certain strata whose form of prehension it defines…a
memory or tension. The plane of consistency retains just enough of the
strata to extract from them variables that operate in the plane of
consistency...”
On page 150-151, in the ‘plateau’ How Do You Make Yourself A Body Without Organs:
“you can botch it…it can…lead you to your death…You never reach the
Body without Organs…it is a limit…As a rule immanent to
experimentation…Why not walk on your head, sing with your sinuses, see
through your skin, breathe with your belly…Where psychoanalysis says,
‘Stop, find your self again,’ we should say instead, "Let's go further still,
we haven't found our BwO yet."
Similarly, on page 160 to 161:
“You have to keep enough of the organism for it to reform each dawn; and
you have to keep small supplies of signifiance and subjectification, if only
to turn them against their own systems when the circumstances demand it,
when things…force you to; and you have to keep small rations of
subjectivity in sufficient quantity to enable you to respond to the dominant
reality. Mimic the strata. You don't reach the BwO…by wildly
destratifying…There are…several ways of botching the BwO…if you blow
apart the strata without taking precautions…you will be killed…This is how
it should be done: Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the
opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it…possible lines of
flight, experience them…have a small plot of new land at all times. It is
through a meticulous relation with the strata that one succeeds in freeing
lines of flight…We are in a social formation; first see how it is stratified for
us and in us and at the place where we are…It is only there that the BwO
reveals itself for what it is:…a long process of experimentation…becominganimal, becoming-molecular…(for it is not "my" body without organs,
instead the "me”…is on it, or what remains of me, unalterable and changing
in form, crossing thresholds).”
8
All excerpts of ATP through this text are from Brian Masumi’s 1987 English translation.
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A Response to Philosophical Critiques of Landian Accelerationism
2.2 Absolute deterritorialization is the ‘unknowable’ real or base material (a sort of
prebiotic corporeal soup and its incorporeal quanta of possibilities) that matter gives form
to; an impersonal reservoir (though D and G discourage this metaphor) of flows and forces
from which ‘form’ pulls to distribute across a plane (sedimenting into strata or layers) via
“half-erected” abstract machines “whose form of prehension…carries…a memory.”
As Shaviro9 points out in his book on Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze and Guattari, and
Aesthetics, D and G were keen on Alfred North Whitehead, so it’s not surprising that we
see his concept “prehension” in use. Like with Whitehead, one can infer that this concept,
when coupled with the line regarding ‘memory’ is used to refer to a kind of virtualincorporeal-mnemic vector that conditions possibilities and creates a sense of continuity in
otherwise disparate material fragments. From this model, it follows that a quanta of
possibilities is distributed, a distribution which, for every ‘choice’ or articulation made out
of the base material, births a trajectory of influence or vector that reinforces certain
processes while deemphasizing others (feedback that leads to divergent or convergent
paths).
Through stratification and destratification and their feedback cycles which are ‘machined’
by the abstract machine that straddles a borderline space, an ontological minima of
strata (just enough) is kept in order to be used as a stimuli or trigger or reinforce certain
processes and deemphasize others, i.e., to further a vector (or prehension) of
destratification (the sort of Nietzschean riddle ‘one ought not to have oughts’ or ‘the only
ought one ought to have is an ought that permits one to have less oughts’).10 We see this
evidenced in the many lines regarding the need to “keep enough of the organism” “have a
small plot of land” “keep small supplies…to turn them against their own systems…” This
is because destratifying or deterritorializing (making one’s ‘self’ a BwO) can be ‘botched.’
Do it too quickly and you go psychotic or die. It’s not a goal one rushes to achieve, but a
limit-flirting process leaning towards the unthinkable, unrepresentable and incoherent (the
Outside, noumena, etc.) which requires a bare minimum of strata as a kind of re-anchoring
point to re-trigger destratification (turn against own sys.).
Instead of going psychotic - as typical clinical schizophrenia is an autistic-like shutting out
of the world as opposed to D and G / Land’s use of the term which is an intense engagement
with the world - one is urged to mimic or lodge with a strata (engagement or affirmation
as opposed to disengagement or negation)11 and “experiment” through “meticulous
relation” with the “dominant reality” of a “social formation…in us” in a “diagrammatic”
manner (a dynamic and affective way as opposed to a simple rational or cognitive one. The
9
Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics (2009).
See 124 minutes into session 2 (06.19.16) of Nick Land’s New Center for Research and Practice class
Outer Edges: 21st Century Spatial Metapolitics where philosopher Peter Wolfendale makes a surprise
entrance to critique Land for a similar Nietzschean thrust.
11
A seeming paradox of Land is that engagement or acceleration is used to underpin exit, a concept that
would seem to indicate the oppose of engagement. Exit should not be equated with disengagement or
negation, but rather a coming to full terms with the ‘real’ only to posit a minimal political space
that functions to limit politics, i.e., maximize freedom and go beyond politics. The Nietzschean riddle
– one ought to have a law that decrees less law. This exit anti-politics – patchwork – could be viewed as
the implementation of deterritorialization.
10
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A Response to Philosophical Critiques of Landian Accelerationism
CCRU’s ‘hyperstition’ is a diagrammatic and asigniying approach whereby a fiction is
made real through the systems of the body and the outside intensifying coincidences). We
know this as acceleration – after all “Deterritorialization is the only thing accelerationism
has ever really talked about.”12 We don’t critique the strata, we don’t negate the strata or
refuse it, we learn its curvatures and topographies and manipulate and extort them, making
them go against their ‘nature’ and therefore, through feedback processes, change their
nature.
A minimum is retained so that the minimum itself can be used to further reduce and alter
that minimum. This is in fact the reterritorialization to which our critics are referring,
however, reterritorialization is just deterritorialization in its latent or virtual state;
reterritorialization is just deterritorialization waiting to happen. The stratified remainder
is an anchor point pulling the destratified into further destratification. It’s not that agency
is destroyed (and therefore there is nothing left to accelerate), but rather, agency is
altered, becomes something truly other (as opposed to “alterity in advance”13), something
Outside, animal, and alien.
2.3 To aid in our understanding of these excerpts and my explication of them, we turn to
an earlier portion of ATP. On page 3, D and G ease us into their text by introducing the
above themes in clear, non-theoretical language:
“…each of us was several…Why have we kept our own names? ...purely
out of habit…Also because it's nice to talk like everybody else, to say the
sun rises, when everybody knows it's only a manner of speaking”.
They continue on page 20-21:
“We employ a dualism of models…to arrive at a process that challenges all
models…mental correctives are necessary to undo the dualisms we had no
wish to construct but through which we pass…via all the dualisms that are
the enemy, an entirely necessary enemy…”
Use the unavoidable and necessary (the forced demands of a minima of retained strata,
small supplies, etc.) to alter the unavoidable and necessary (minima retained strata turned
against the system itself). The reterritorializations of the limit – static habits, manners of
speech, reductive dualism - are a means to escape the limit itself. In fact, the limit is the
only thing with enough diagrammatic effect to generate force enough to escape itself.
Limits - where the frothing, Heraclitian sea of base material ossifies and crystalizes into a
fixed reference point – are storages of frozen, virtual energy to be appropriated towards
disintegration (crystal meth, anyone?).
12
A Quick and Dirty Introduction to Accelerationism, Land (2017).
Accessed: https://jacobitemag.com/2017/05/25/a-quick-and-dirty-introduction-to-accelerationism/
13
‘Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest’ in Fanged Noumena, pg. 71
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A Response to Philosophical Critiques of Landian Accelerationism
This is the novel observation of accelerationism. We don’t fight with the reality (our habits
and traditions) which inevitably leads to miserablism, ressentiment, neurosis, psychosis,
etc., we get in touch with reality (through aesthetic experiences, fictional or semi-fictional
narratives – ego, social contracts, etc. - and their cybernetic feedback) and explore the
habits and traditions as parts of the real (the social in us); we find the places where things
are captured and locked into place – stasis - and we too find the places that are loose and
able to be swayed with and broken down - dynamism. We use our habits (internal milieu)
and our habitat (external milieu), the tools at our disposal, to achieve something else,
something alien. This is acceleration. Leaning into the real, using the real and its crystalized
structures to follow a line of destratification.14
To condense these notions of change, natural, alien, and Outside, into maximum density,
and in doing so capture the oft overlooked female contributions to the CCRU (Sadie Plant,
Anna Greenspan, Luciana Parisi, Luce Irigaray, Suzanne Livingston), we will simply
adjust Laboria Cuboniks’ Xenofeminist aphorism ‘if nature is unjust, change nature’ to ‘if
nature is always reterritorialized, stratified, and differentiated, change nature.’15
14
Nick Land’s Twitter handle is @Outsideness. When asked by a Twitter follower for the basic premise
of his ‘philosophical position,’ Land responded “Reality rules. (That was easy).”
[Accessed https://twitter.com/Outsideness/status/1120388978451079168].
Accelerationism, whether hyperstitional per the CCRU or diagmmatic per Deleuze and Guattari in AO
and ATP, bypasses representation and interfaces with the intensity of the real.
15
https://www.laboriacuboniks.net/
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A Response to Philosophical Critiques of Landian Accelerationism
3: Musical Deterritorialization
3.1 To return to our critiques - that Land misses the reterritorialization latent in
deterritorialization because he has not read ATP – we must say;
A: It is not clear that Landian acceleration is inconsistent with ATP. Furthermore,
though we have not spent much if any time attempting to show this, it’s not clear
that ATP markedly departs from AO other than in linguistic-conceptual changes
which are likely the result of a general sense of maturity (grandpa Gilles and uncle
Felix – ‘we’re ten years older now, don’t accelerate too fast or you’ll die you
idiot…’) and a sober response to the overwhelming critical shrieks about
‘valorizing schizophrenia.’ This leaves the core ‘philosophical’ values more
consistent with AO – and therefore indirectly Land as well - than inconsistent.16 For
example, not only do D and G not retract their suggestion to ‘going further still’ in
ATP, they reiterate it - "Let's go further still, we haven't found our BwO yet, we
haven't sufficiently dismantled our self.”
B: Yes of course deterritorializing or destratifying necessarily requires a
complimentary reterritorialization or stratification, a surplus which is never quite
eradicated. On our anthropocentric plane of consistency – our human universe matter, no matter how dispersed, still retains some level of form, and the human,
no matter how dispersed, still retains some level of humanity. Meanwhile, a surplus
churns away, orbiting zero, circling the drain, only to crawl up again from the
depths like some unnamable creature each time we think it’s over. This is, if we
recall from 2.2. above, the borderline space of ‘just enough,’ where the BwO and
its relative limits are approached. As Land was rumored to have said in passing,
‘the human always finds a way back.’
3.2 An irreducible surplus of reterritorialization does not necessitate that a limit is itself a
hinderance to meaningful acceleration away from the limit. The limit is repurposed (like
the ‘kipple’ used by cargo cultures) towards the objective of reducing its very own limits.
The limit is precisely that which leverages acceleration, charges momentum, etc. Despite
being highly speculative, and admittedly begging the question, a simple thought
experiment may demonstrate the point: imagine a system in which for every 2 quantity of
deterritorialization there is 1 quantity of reterritorialization (a 2:1 ratio). There will always
be reterritorialization, but the process will always tend towards greater deterritorialization
with an always smaller reterritorialization.17
16
As Sibertin-Blanc (2016) shows in his book State and Politics: Deleuze and Guattari on Marx,
the main shift between AO and ATP concerns D and G’s understanding and application of the method
of capture of the state apparatus, something which seems to indicate that Land’s project, concerned as
it is with geological territory and the exit of capture by the state (patchwork) and by rationalist academia,
is more consistent with ATP than AO. In other words, and as we will show later, the geological
conceptualization present in ATP lays the groundwork for the CCRU’s geotrauma, and later,
Land’s patchwork.
17
My friend in DC politics told me ‘each time the right deregulates something, when the left reinstates the regulation,
the reinstated regulation is never as good as the original.’ That is, each time a regulation is deregulated, a portion of
regulation is lost and never returned when it is re-regulated. Regulation tends towards deregulation.
10
A Response to Philosophical Critiques of Landian Accelerationism
With each wave of deterritorializion that occurs, the system becomes less stable, and so
when it does reterritorialize, its strata or stable and fixed territory becomes smaller, less
significant than before, and therefore – because it is acting as a limit-reference point or
anchor for charging future processes – exerts less pressure (or prehension) towards
stability. Destabilization begets more destabilization. This increases the tendency for
deterritorialization of the strata or fixed territory (certain processes are enforced at the
expense of other processes being deemphasized). This is what Land continually refers to
as a positive cybernetic feedback loop.
A diagram may help clarify:
Figure 1: The diagrammaticreferential looprocess of reand de-territorialization.
As a relatively stable territory
(square) deterritorializes (solid
arrow and circle), its abstract
machines reach back in time
and pull vector charge from the
in-between, dissipated portion
of the process (dotted lines and
triangles) to apply to the next
deterritorialization.
It is understandable that this speculative and perhaps uninformed diagram may obscure the
process we are attempting to discuss more than clarify, so the following section will attempt
to provide a concrete and clear example of what I am calling ‘the diagrammatic-referential
process of re- and de-territorialization.’
3.3 I plug my electric guitar into my delay (echo) pedal and then into my amplifier. I set
the ‘repeat’ knob to high (i.e. how many times the echo plays back). I play one note. The
first strike of the note contains the quality and nature of the note, an A440hz, but soon the
echo effect produced by the little machine overcomes the original note and now the echo
of the note (and it’s implied microtonal under- / over-tones or partials, i.e., subtle variations
in note / pitch – i.e., deterritorialization!) is being caught in the echo effect, so we now have
an echo of an echo, or feedback / oscillation (simulacrum). The original note is lost, and
the first copy of the original degrades, loses its tonal territory, takes on other resonances,
and is now open to drift from an A440hz to whatever frequency is most resonant in the
‘assemblage’ of the room, the guitar pickups, the amplifier, and the echo pedal. Through
shifting reference points induced by a machine, a stable pitch opens up to the Outside (see
figure 2 below).
11
A Response to Philosophical Critiques of Landian Accelerationism
Figure 2: “Advanced technologies invoke ancient entities; the human voice disintegrates into the howl of cosmic trauma”
– Ray Brassier and Robin Mackay in their Editors Introduction of Nick Land’s collective writings ‘Fanged Noumena.’
Given patchwork’s libertarian ‘overtones’ (pun intended), and the CCRU’s / Land’s ‘let the process take control as opposed to the
human(ist) hand of influence’ pathos, one may also think here of the economic concept ‘the invisible hand of the market.’ As seen
in the diagram, the human hand strumming the guitar is overcome by the machine, feedback process. As anyone who has played
into a full stack of amps – with our without a delay pedal – knows, the machines will produce feedback that runs away and
overcomes the player and the signal. In this sense, what is playing you will indeed make it to level 2.
12
A Response to Philosophical Critiques of Landian Accelerationism
Just as Alvin Lucier18 demonstrated in 1969, the microtonal differentials that are picked up
most significantly in the echo-drift will continue to reinforce themselves, thus
deemphasizing other notes, and the drift will ramp up until the note has changed. A
complex vocal passage (anthropomorphic content) will melt into a simple melodic passage
(abstract form). What is more, the minimal strata that remains, in charging the process in a
direction of minimizing itself further, effectively alters its own nature. This is true with any
feedback process such as, guitar amplifier distortion or fuzz effects wherein quantity, i.e.
hard or soft strumming with the hand (amount of force), effects quality, i.e. tonality of
distortion or fuzz ‘coloring’ the clean signal of the guitar/amp. As is the case with
hyperreality, form and expression, or content, are relative. Their limits give way and
rearrange.
Not unlike the A440 note and its echo, an organism deterritorializes, and each time the
returns from the destratification process wash up on the shores of the remaining strata, this
alters the strata that acts as the reference point for launching the next deterritorialization (a
dynamic diagrammatic process where the reference point for the next process is always
shifting or different than before). Before long, the strata that remained has shifted and
morphed – perhaps even become animal or alien.
18
Alvin Lucier’s ‘I am Sitting in a Room’ (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAxHlLK3Oyk).
"I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice
and I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the room
reinforce themselves so that any semblance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed.
What you will hear, then, are the natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech. I regard this
activity not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but, more as a way to smooth out any irregularities
my speech might have."
As one writer for the DRAM, a scholarly society for musicians and musical conceptual artists, writes
(https://www.dramonline.org/albums/alvin-lucier-i-am-sitting-in-a-room/notes):
“Using two tape recorders, a microphone, and a speaker, the performer recycles the recorded text in a room.
The acoustical properties of the space transform the speech: frequencies resonant to the room are repeatedly
reinforced, while the others are attenuated, until only the rhythm of the words remains recognizable as the
driving force behind a pattern of ringing tones.”
This is a semiotic drift into Barker tic-croak-tonalities via cybernetic feedback processes consistent with
both Land and D and G’s musical conceptual language littered through ATP (being structured in ‘plateaus’
not unlike a record; refrains, ritornellos, John Cage, abstract sheet music, the transformation of the snout
and snarl into the face and word via faciality, etc.).
13
A Response to Philosophical Critiques of Landian Accelerationism
4: Sarkon and Acceleration
4.1 Part of the ‘re/deterritorialization’ critique levied against Land is that he ‘confuses
speed for acceleration.’ The thinking is that unavoidable stratification or
reterritiroialization necessarily implies a limit which captures the destratification process
in a closed register of speed (Lucier’s voice getting faster and faster until it is a high pitched
shrill, as it would be if you increased the playback speed digitally or on a tape recorder)
rather than an open register of acceleration (the vocal passage morphing into a melodic
passage, as it does in the expirement, through accelerative drift; acceleration changes form
which changes content, which changes form…, speed superficially alters content but
retains much of the content and all of the form).
Critiques such as these neglect Land’s earlier work with the CCRU which offers us
fictional examples of acceleration as opposed to speed; examples of what a destratifyed or
deterritorialized process pushed ‘beyond’ an anthropocentric transcendental limit looks
like (unlife) as opposed to a speedy, human death. These are characters who become
merged and meshed with the ‘real’ of the ‘outside’ through diagrammatic or nonrepresentational technologies that blend ancient myth and future tech in a temporal loop
with madness.
The clearest and most elaborated example of this is the hyperstitional character Oskar
Sarkon. To put Sarkon and destratification in context, take the following excerpt from ATP:
“A…line of flight arises when the associated milieu is rocked by blows from
the exterior, forcing the animal to…lean[ing] on its interior milieus...When
the seas dried, the primitive fish left its associated milieu to explore land,
forced to ‘stand on its own legs,’ now carrying water only on the inside, in
the amniotic membranes…Territorialities, then, are shot through with lines
of flight testifying to…movements of deterritorialization and
reterritorialization…the epistrata and parastrata are continually moving,
sliding, shifting, and changing on the…unity of composition of a stratum
[our delay pedal drifting reference point]; some are swept away by lines of
flight and movements of deterritorialization…but they all communicate at
the intersection of the milieus [like Lucier’s tape loop]. The strata are
continually being shaken by phenomena of cracking and rupture…at the
level of the substrata that furnish the materials (a prebiotic soup, a
prechemical soup ...)…: everywhere there arise simultaneous accelerations
and blockages, comparative speeds, differences in deterritorialization
creating relative fields of reterritorialization” (pg. 76).
Through processes of acceleration, or deterriorialization, the outside gets on the inside, and
the inside reorganizes as to allow a new outside to be traversed (reference points shift and
drift as in Figure 1 and 2). Now let’s look at this in practice through Land-associated CCRU
texts.19
19
For obvious reasons, it seems in bad taste to refer to the CCRU texts as belonging to a particular subject.
For the sake of convenience, I’ve not committed to this position consistently across the text.
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A Response to Philosophical Critiques of Landian Accelerationism
4.2 A slew of essays in Part 6, Sarkon: Pursuit of the Machine Diagonal of CCRU:
Writings 1997-2003 (2018 pg. 167-210)20 describe “Anthropol” agents picking over the
ruins of Oskar Sarkon’s lab after its “digital Chernobyl” (pg. 172), a singularity event
which spawned a schizophrenic AI that would go on to serve as a model for an AI-operated
asylum. Expanding on this AI and Sarkon, Land (presumably), in a semi-sardonic but
detailed mixture of narrative description and dialogic interaction between characters,
writes:
“…by the turn of the millennium 700 million years of biological evolution
had ben recapitulated in 70 years of technical development, leading to AI
programs running…approximately ‘equavilent to the brainpower of a
guppy’…technocapitalist trends involve positive nonlinearities increasing
returns, or runaway trajectories…compressions, a given price doubled each
year in the 1990s, after doubling every 18 months in the 1980s, and every
two years before that…extensive accelerations described by positive
exponentials, or doubling periods…occult zones of true timecompression…” (pg. 178).
A recapitulative process of acceleration – not unlike the diagrammatic referential process
in Figure 1 and 2 - is charged by technocapitalism.
He continues
“Moravec [colleague of Sarkon] develops an elaborate project…a planned
obsolescence of the organic body, and of the senses…You are transported
to the technosurgical interface...robot surgeons wait to convert your
subjective identity into a computer-compatible format. Your skull is
anaesthetized, but your brain remains awake. It is scanned and destroyed by
nanotechnical instruments, one layer or stratum [my italics] at a time…you
migrate into software that precisely models ‘the behavior of the scanned
tissue,’ and brain-activity is replaced by its digital simulation. The medical
examination has become indistinguishable from the operation [form and
expression or content relativize]. Scanning is transplantation…Already
lurking in the near future is an evolutionary leap…take-over by computer
programs… Sarkon’s research culminates in a…digital unlife…although
unimaginably ancient, it seems to emerge out of a neuroelectronic
apparatus…” (pg. 179-183).
Technology allows for a literal destratification wherein differences between
subject/organism and object/milieu converge (content and expression are relative for D and
G; simulation and hyperreal for Baudrillard; the medium is the message for Mcluhan; all
of which Fisher points out in his Gothic Flateline thesis, are essential to hyperstition or
hyperfiction…). Not unlike the recapitulative process of evolution, an ancient unlife – the
deep past of unconditional deterritorializion, prebiotic soup – is accessed through the future
reaching back and pulling the past towards it.
20
All excerpts of the CCRU are from CCRU: Writings 1997-2003, 2018 Green cover edition.
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A Response to Philosophical Critiques of Landian Accelerationism
Similarly, the essay in the Sarkon section of the CCRU texts entitled Between and Beneath
the Net – a title which warrants mention due to its theoretical allusions to the way D and G
described the plane of consistency and its abstract machines - describes MIT scientist
Minsky pontificating about his colleague, Sarkon.
Minsky reminisces aloud
“Have you seen Oskar lately, Marvin? He’s wired up to some sort of
interface gizmo, and it seems to be eating him, gnawing at him on a
molecular level…as if they’re melting or rotting together…take the Sarkonzip…[it] enables brain-function to be fused onto virtual processor-states –
once it’s running you can’t unpick the zig-zag of who’s what as it hums.
Total meshing. This is no longer technology, but something else – true
interlinkage – an unprogrammable raw connectivity…beneath and between
the net” (pg. 185-186).
Before ending the text, the CCRU connects this back to the idea of singularity:
“They say Axsys went mad – first computer-system to undergo psychotic
collapse…but Sarkon argues that it just learnt to think…they speak
of something crawling under the net…some kind of quantum unlife
intelligence…you certainly can’t ignore…You’d end up like
Sarkon…you’d have to be…crazy to go there: into Cyberchiz mesh-cults
where Life doesn’t matter any more.”
Continuing the theme of techno-merger, as mentioned above, the AI Sarkon birthed in his
digital Chernobyl incident was used to model an AI driven asylum for the insane. This AI
which keeps track of psychotics “runs away into escalating disorder, overwhelming
automatic inhibitors…the singularity takes over…mobilizing its capabilities to intensify its
own propagation…become auto-excitational and self-disorganizing…” (pg. 198-199).
As a final example, one that brings us explicitly back to D and G’s primitive fish and
amniotic membranes in ATP, take an earlier CCRU text focused on aquatic destratifying
and the BwO (Maximillian Crabbe: Subaquatic Researcher and Entrepeneur (19401999?)).
Oskar Sarkon’s reflects on one his associates, Crabbe:
“many assumed Crabbe was dead…[but] Crabbe’s own ‘body’ was
distributed between 72 cybernetically-regulated biohazard pressure vats,
scattered throughout BP-1. His ‘meta-amoebic regression’ had reached such
a nadir of disorganization that the only motive power remaining to him was
slow ‘sloshing’”(pg. 142-143).
An assemblage of unlife.
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A Response to Philosophical Critiques of Landian Accelerationism
Through processes of acceleration, the outside gets on the inside (which is itself the outside
folded in), and the inside reorganizes as to allow a new outside to be traversed (reference
points shift and drift). The result is the merger of what was once the individuated human
into its environment to the extent that neither is distinguishable from the other; into a unity
crawling with infectious techo-organic multiplicities, articulations of base material, etc. A
true desiring machine (a concept which, after all, was an attempt to break down the archaic
divide between mechanism and vitalism)! As D and G mentioned earlier, “the BwO is…
necessarily a Plane, necessarily a Collectivity…for it is not "my" body without organs,
instead the "me” …is on it, or what remains of me, unalterable and changing in form,
crossing thresholds.” Agency is old news.
No one is hurtling towards death here, only riding the future into ancient unlife. Put
reductively, as DC Barker’s research illustrates, the human organism, and with it the
‘subject,’ evolved from the deep tensions of the Earth, so it is fitting that through
technology, the adventure known as ‘life’ returns to where it started.
4.3 Before moving onto Challenger, lets quickly elaborate on techocapitalism and its
doubling of the merging process (“extensive accelerations…positive expontentials…”).
Taken from the earlier quote:
“a given price doubled each year in the 1990s, after doubling every 18
months in the 1980s, and every two years before that…”
Let P stand for Price
Y stand for year
X stand for double
Number stand for quantity
-
Px: 2Y (price doubled every two years in the 70s)
Px:1.5Y (price doubled every year and a half in the 80s)
-
Px:1Y (price doubled each year in the 90s) or, for every quantity of year, price doubled
at half quantity the rate;
-
A: 1(dollar)∙(doubled or multiplied by)2:(per) 2(years)
-
B: 2∙2:1.5
-
C: 4∙2:1
-
D: 8∙2:0.5
-
E: 16∙2:0.25
-
F: 32∙2:0.125
-
G: 64∙2:0.0625
-
H: 128∙2:0.03125
-
I: 256∙2:0.015625
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A Response to Philosophical Critiques of Landian Accelerationism
-
J: 512∙2: 0.0078125
-
K: 1024∙2:0.00390625
-
L: 2048∙2: 0.001953125…etc.
This is clearly acceleration. Speed is ‘1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,’ i.e., a rate of change of 1.
Acceleration is 1,2,3,5,7,9,12,15,20,28, i.e., a rate of change of 1, then 2, then 3, then 5,
then 8, and further, the rate of change between the rate of change is 1 for the first six
numbers (a difference of 1 between 1 and 2 and 2 and 3), then 2 (a difference of 2 between
3 and 5), then 3 (difference of 3 between 5 and 8), etc. This can also be expressed
exponentially in a number of ways. These exponentials, in line with section 2 (figure 1),
can also be expressed as ratios. Ratio and rate derive from the same etymological root, and
according to the basic dictionary definition, a ratio is a rate or relation between two
magnitudes.
Likewise, definitions of speed and acceleration are:
“Speed = Distance/Time. If ‘d’ is the distance covered by a body in time ‘t,’
then its speed ‘s’ is: s = d/t…Acceleration is defined as the rate of change
of velocity…acceleration is the change in velocity per unit time. If a body
has uniform velocity, its acceleration is zero. For a body to have
acceleration, there must be a change in its velocity. Thus: Acceleration =
Velocity/Time. If ‘v’ is the velocity of the body and ‘t’ is the time taken by
the body to achieve the velocity ‘v,’ then its acceleration ‘a’ may be
understood as: A = v/t…Summary: Speed is the distance covered in a unit
of time while acceleration is the rate of change of speed.”
Speed is molar and linear: 2 > 1; acceleration is molecular and complex: 2:1 ratio; 5:3r;
9:6r, etc; Speed: 50mph is faster than 40mph; Acceleration: 40 to 50 in 2 seconds, 40 to 50
in 1 second, 50 to 70 in 1 second, 70 to 100 in 0.5 second, etc. Speed is simple difference
while acceleration is a set of differential relations between “relative speeds.”
It’s clear Land is conceptualizing acceleration – a rate of change between speed - not a
simple change in speed. The limit is displaced and runaway keeps running and running and
running and running…and the organism end up as a nonrepresentational merger between
a human organism and a techno-mytho-environment, a monster that is not provable by
philosophical debate, but accessed through aesthetic experience, and illustrated by literary
description. The organism does not die – i.e., hit a transcendental limit where the agency
needed to propel destratification dissipates – the organism becomes the milieu by
mimicking or meshing with the strata – the absolute deterritorialized – between the web,
where the abstract machine lies. So, the ontologically minimal strata – just enough that D
and G spoke of – does not necessarily denote an organism’s death, but an unlife in the form
of a merger with the Outside milieu, with the territorial strata, the cosmic nonromantic
energetics - the deterritorialized entity is an articulation of the milieu, or geotrauma
We must recall that acceleration is nothing other than a theory of time, and all its ever
talked about is deterritorialization.
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A Response to Philosophical Critiques of Landian Accelerationism
5: Challenger and Acceleration
5.1 Whether Land neglected to read ATP and therefore missed the developments made to
concept of re/deterritorialization doesn’t really matter. But if he did read ATP – which he
did - he would’ve only needed to read the first few plateaus as it is here that the ideas
relevant to Land’s project and the critiques levied against it occur.
The third plateau, 10,000 B. C.: The Geology of Morals (Who Does the Earth Think It is?),
is mandatory reading for Nick Land’s New Center for Research and Practice Class on
Metapolitics. In class 2, Land and his students discuss Professor Challenger and
deterritorialization. Upon reading the plateau, one can easily see how much of its form and
content were recapitulated in the early CCRU and later Landian though.
The plateau is written from the perspective of an audience member in a lecture of Professor
Challenger. Challenger, whose profession is hard to pin down, begins feverishly talking
about the earth, territories, geological stratification, the voice,21(14) the distinction between
form and expression / substance, and how the organism, itself an articulation of the basic
stuff of the earth, morphologically shifts in relation to the full body of the earth. As he
talks, he becomes more and more nonsensical, unintelligible, incoherent, and erred,
ultimately alienating his audience, slipping the subjective cage that is the body, and melting
back into the earth.
As Challenger morphs into his own words, progressively turning from subject who speaks
to pure speech intensity merged with the milieu, the plateau – or the lecture – much like its
subject content (the distinction between form and expression, i.e., earth and the animal
bodies that articulate the earth’s geological forces) blends the distinction between form and
substance (Hjemslev / McLuhan / Baudrillard) on a number of interchangeable registers.
Challenger, his lecture, the audience member, the authors– Deleuze and Guattari – and the
reader, all blur. One wonders - is this Deleuze writing through Guattari? Guattari through
Deleuze? How about Fanny, who helped with the editing process? Is it Deleuze and
Guattari with Fanny writing about Arthur Conan Doyle? Or About Doyle’s character
Professor Challenger, and imaging the character giving a lecture? Is it Deleuze and Guattari
writing about themselves – as it at times seems – in the form of a reimagined version of
Doyle’s character? Or is it their idea of their reader’s troubles with their texts, that is, their
21
In keeping with the notion of voice or audio as an example of deterritorialization (Lucier mentioned earlier).
The CCRU’s machinic connections with the research of DC Barker on the voice and its connection to Professor
Challenger’s lecture in ATP is of interest:
(tic)Morphological “vocal substances” - “not only the larynx, but the mouth and lips, and the overall
motricity of the face…the mouth as a deterritorialization of the snout…the lips as a deterritorialization
of the mouth (only humans have lips, in other words, an outward curling of the interior mucous membranes…
What a curious deterritorialization, filling one's mouth with words instead of food and noises.
The steppe, once more, seems to have exerted strong pressures of selection: the "supple larynx" is a
development corresponding to the free hand and could have arisen only in a deforested milieu where it
is no longer necessary to have gigantic laryngeal sacks in order for one's cries to be heard above the
constant din of the forest. To articulate, to speak, is to speak softly…Physiological, acoustic, and vocal
substance are not the only things that undergo all these deterritorializations” (pg. 61-62).
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A Response to Philosophical Critiques of Landian Accelerationism
idea of their self and their own enunciatory productions? Or something more? Like the
assemblage which is always more than the sum of its parts, it’s all of this and then some,
and to reduce it to one or the other is misguided. It’s a hyperstitional accelerator that chops
up author and reader, lecturer and audience, speaker and receiver, self and other, fact and
fiction, all into a melted mess.
5.2 For the sake of making a point, I will separate out the form (to put it vulgarly, the
subject or speaker of Professor Challenger) and the expression or substance (to put it
vulgarly, the subject content, i.e. the lecture).
Subject content: deterritorialization, acceleration, and double articulations that
“choose or deduct from unstable particle flows (substances)…which impose
statistical order of connections and successions (forms)” (pg. 41), and stratifications
or “acts of capture” (pg. 40); double articulations that create a merged relation
between milieu and animal, each one being the articulation of the other (pg. 51),
etc.
And an ending that seems very much like the Landian notion our bright thinkers criticized,
the idea that Land collapses important distinctions “The plane of consistency knows nothing of differences in level, orders of
magnitude, or distances. It knows nothing of the difference between the
artificial and the natural. It knows nothing of the distinction between
contents and expressions, or that between forms and formed substance” (pg.
69-70).
The act of collapsing concepts mimics the strata. The plane knows no distinctions.
The ‘subject’ itself requires more attention. I quote at length to capture the similarity to
Land and the CCRU:
“…Professor Challenger…gave a lecture after mixing several textbooks on
geology and biology…The audience rather sulkily denounced the numerous
misunderstandings, misinterpretations, and even misappropriations…He (?)
claimed to have invented a discipline he referred to by various names:
rhizomatics, stratoanalysis, schizoanalysis, nomadology, micropolitics,
pragmatics…Yet no one clearly understood what the goals, method, or
principles of this discipline were. (pg. 41-43)
To keep the last of the audience from leaving, Challenger imagined a
particularly epistemological dialogue of the dead…We're a little lost now.
There is so much going on in these retorts. So many endlessly proliferating
distinctions. (pg. 46-47).
Challenger admitted having digressed at length but added that there was no
possible way to distinguish between the digressive and the nondigressive.
(pg. 49).
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A Response to Philosophical Critiques of Landian Accelerationism
Most of the audience had left…Challenger…had changed since the
beginning of his talk. His voice had become hoarser, broken occasionally
by an apish cough. His dream was not so much to give a lecture to humans
as to provide a program for pure computers…(pg. 57).
We have to hurry, Challenger said, we're being rushed by the line of time.
Challenger wanted to go faster and faster. No one was left, but he went on
anyway. The change in his voice, and in his appearance, was growing more
and more pronounced. Something animalistic in him had begun to speak
when he started talking about human beings. You still couldn't put your
finger on it, but Challenger seemed to be deterritorializing on the spot. (pg.
63-64).
It was over. Only later on would all of this take on concrete meaning. The
double-articulated mask had come undone, and so had the gloves and the
tunic, from which liquids escaped. As they streamed away they seemed to
eat at the strata of the lecture hall…Disarticulated, deterritorialized,
Challenger muttered that he was taking the earth with him…He whispered
something else: it is by headlong flight that things progress and signs
proliferate. Panic is creation…No one had heard the summary, and no one
tried to keep Challenger from leaving. Challenger, or what remained of him,
slowly hurried toward the plane of consistency, following a bizarre
trajectory with nothing relative left about it. He tried to slip into an
assemblage serving as a drum-gate, the particle Clock with its intensive
clicking and conjugated rhythms hammering out the absolute: "The figure
slumped oddly into a posture scarcely human, and began a curious,
fascinated sort of shuffle toward the coffin-shaped clock. The figure had
now reached the abnormal clock, and the watchers saw through the dense
fumes a blurred black claw fumbling with the tall, hieroglyphed door. The
fumbling made a queer, clicking sound. Then the figure entered the coffinshaped case and pulled the door shut after it.... The abnormal clicking went
on, beating out the dark, cosmic rhythm which underlies all mystical gateopenings"—the Mechanosphere, or rhizosphere. (Pg. 73-74).
Mixing – collapsing – discourses, playing loose and fast with concepts, disregarding
authorial intent, all to form a misunderstood ‘discipline’ without tenets, dogmas, or oughts.
A discipline where an audience is not needed, and where there is no attempt to convince
an other. And if there were an other, it’s certainly not human. The information is for a
future machine. A means to break down in and through vocal passages as material forces,
not significations; a break down into an animal past, a turn to goo in order to slip into the
machinic timestream. Could this not describe Challenger and Land? Could it not map onto
Land’s oft accused of misappropriation of Darwin, D and G, etc. and accelerationism’s
constant misunderstanding by the media? It would even be easy to call Challenger, like
Land, a ‘pseud’ who collapses distinctions and slips into incoherence, who overrides the
games that occidental philosophy obsesses over, and, who, before you know it, is on the
floor croaking into the mic (some of us are still ‘philosophers’ you know!).
21
A Response to Philosophical Critiques of Landian Accelerationism
6: Aesthetics and Hyperstition
6.1 The plane of consistency knows nothing of differences? Then fiction and reality
collapse into one hyperstitional intensity – one gothic flatline, to use Mark Fisher’s term.22
If so, so what if Land collapses concepts and neglects the difference between re and
deterritorialization? If so, when Brassier says “a conceptual incoherence emerges” in
Land’s thought, this is not a sign of departing with D and G, and far from a powerful
critique of Land. Rather, it’s more like a metalinguistic artifact - an observation about
Land’s observation of the real - that directs us further into the Deleuze and Guattari of ATP,
not further away. Let us recall that it is Deleuze and Guattari who implore us to “bring
something incomprehensible into the world. Such is the form of exteriority” (pg. 378).
In fact, the theme of the incoherent is incredibly prominent in ATP:
“modern philosophy [as opposed to romantic] tends to elaborate a material
of thought in order to capture forces that are not thinkable in themselves.
This is Cosmos philosophy, after the manner of Nietzsche…the forces of an
immaterial, nonformal, and energetic Cosmos…This is the postromantic
turning point: the essential thing is no longer forms and matters, or themes,
but forces, densities, intensities. The earth itself swings over, tending to take
on the value of pure material for a force of gravitation or
weight…rocks…forces…landscapes through thermal and magnetic
forces…nonvisual forces that nevertheless have been rendered visible. …It
is now a problem of consistency or consolidation: how to consolidate the
material, make it consistent, so that it can harness unthinkable, invisible,
nonsonorous forces” (Pg. 342-343);
“There is no longer a tripartite division between a field of reality (the world)
and a field of representation (the book) and a field of subjectivity (the
author). Rather, an assemblage establishes connections between certain
multiplicities drawn from each of these orders…In short, we think that one
cannot write sufficiently in the name of an outside. The outside has no
image, no signification,no subjectivity. The book as assemblage with the
outside, against the book as image of the world” (pg. 23);
“Is it by chance that whenever a "thinker" shoots an arrow, there is a man
of the State, a shadow or an image of a man of the State, that counsels and
admonishes him, and wants to assign him a target or "aim"?” (pg. 378).
A book, concept, etc., philosophical or not, does not represent facts about an outside world
with a more or less clear degree of correspondence between representation and real, the
book or concept is itself a machine part of the real that makes things happen in real time,
not unlike how, as the legend goes, Lovecraft’s ‘fictional’ Necronomicon began to show
22
Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction, 2018 reprint.
22
A Response to Philosophical Critiques of Landian Accelerationism
up in various ‘fictional’ universes until it began to be sincerely requested at libraries,
booksellers, which lead it to be cataloged in ivy league University records.23
Following D and G in AO and ATP, Land is precisely attempting to leverage these
diagrammatic forces to bring something unthinkable and incomprehensible into the world
through hyperstitional literature as an assemblage with the outside, often in a way that is
‘anti-state’ or anti-reterritorialization (patchwork). In fact, the critique that Land is
‘unaware of reterritorialization which creates a fatal flaw or incomprehensible concept’ is,
by D and G’s own accord, an act of state oriented or capitalistic reterritorialization! ‘Nick,
you’re concepts must make sense to us! They must pay careful attention to the rules that
have been crafted in Universities, between the ‘right’ thinkers!’ Or so say the concept-cops.
Yes, in an odd twist, our critics seem to be trying to catch Land’s arrow.
6.2 Steven Shaviro articulates this well in his blog entry on Ray Brassier’s lecture from
which I extrapolated the introductory critique:24
“My own response here is an aesthetic one…far from being a discrediting
flaw — performative contradiction is actually a sign that something is going
right…arguments that end in performative contradiction are of course not
necessarily right; but any line of approach that is right must necessarily lead
to some sort of performative contradiction. This is because of the necessary
inadequacy of cognitive categories to grasp and determine the Real. It’s a
lesson we ultimately get from Kant, in spite of himself, and that becomes
more overt in post-Kantians…and in today’s speculative realism. This is
where we get the philosophical destratification of the transcendentalempirical binary…performative contradiction is an aesthetic condition, not
an epistemological one…Epistemology (the First Critique) and ethics (the
Second Critique) are incomplete, and indeed they can only avoid collapse,
through the intervention of aesthetics (the Third Critique).”
It is an aesthetic act – an act of faith (in Gnon) – that synthesizes and smooths over the
rational and cognitive gaps.
Shaviro goes on
“I think that (as I argued in a different way in my little book on
accelerationism) any such neo-aestheticism also implies a different theory
of desire from the one we take for granted. Affirmationist and vitalist
theory, and the radical negation of these that we find in its most “virulent”
form in Land, and in a much more sophisticated form in Brassier, are united
As Peter Vysparov wrote to Echidna Stillwell in ’49: “We are interested in fiction only insofar as it is
simultaneously hyperstition – a term we have coined for semiotic productions that make themselves real
…this is the…loop of Cthulhu-fiction: who writes, and who is written? It seems to use the fabled
Necronomicon…is this kind” (CCRU Collected Writings, pg. 579-580).
24
Shaviro, S. 2016. Ray Brassier on Nick Land Posted on October 23, 2016.
Accessed http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=1403
23
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A Response to Philosophical Critiques of Landian Accelerationism
in that they both assume the infinitude of desire, and hence the inevitable
discontinuity between desire (or desiring production) and its actual effects
or consequences. Such is also the presupposition of the 19th and 20th
century sublime, of psychoanalytic theories of desire...”(15)
The aesthetic is the fictional, and the fictional begets the functional. The fictional, not
unlike the fictional ego and its narratives, is the synthesized experiences that escape hard
and fast argumentation, yet makes things happen.
6.3 It’s not that there is a hard limit where the subject dies, but a limit that is itself a point
of propulsion into an hyper unlife, an unlife that can only be represented ad hoc in the form
of aesthetic experiences, or fictions that partially convey truths that, in being
transcendental, cannot be formulated otherwise. A fiction is used to produce thought about
the unthinkable, a gap which allows affect to be generated in relation to thought. As
Masumi writes in his introduction to ATP “The question is not: is it true? But: does it work?
What new thoughts does it make it possible to think? What new emotions does it make it
possible to feel?...The answer for some readers, perhaps most, will be "none." If that
happens, it's not your tune. No problem. But you would have been better off buying a
record” (xv).
So, “have a small plot of new [Nick] land at all times…” to keep accelerating, and if this
does nothing for you, it’s not your tune, so buy another record.
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A Response to Philosophical Critiques of Landian Accelerationism
Conclusion
On the order of concept, reterritorialization can be conceived as both being a surplus that
decreases as deterritorialized processes intensify and the charge itself towards those greater
deterritorialized processes. If we assume this to be ‘true,’ and consistent between D and G
and Land – and it is likely my work here has not convinced many – then one cannot claim
Land misunderstands D and G’s reterritorialization.
This gets us to the order of form.
Land’s accelerationist project is consistent with Deleuze and Guatari’s project in that its
core thrust is an anti-philosophical utilization of the concept not as a representation of
thought tending towards greater clarity of thought and its object, but as a tool to dismantle
the academic-philosophical rigmarole, and a drug to induce encounters with the Outside
through aesthetic experience; an attempt to think the unthinkable, and illustrate that which
is precisely difficult to illustrate through real-fiction. This is essentially the content –
reterritorialization = virtual deterritorialization – at play on a pragmatic register (and
remember, form and content are interchangeable and collapse into one flatline…).
Given the Dionysian implications of this – drugs, literature, and music, all falling under
the general umbrella term of aesthetics – it’s no surprise that two Nietzschean aphorisms
come to mind - to philosophize with a hammer and to write with one’s blood. To destroy
in order to make fictions real through the vital fluid of the body, not unlike a dark magic
ritual or, as we have aimed to show in this text, to philosophize with an electric guitar, or
a jungle drum machine.
Dionysian or not, we should not police the interests of critics, for even an anti-philosophical
or aesthetic project can be critiqued on a philosophical register if one wishes. However, for
various strategic reasons, one should also be mindful of a project’s style, goals, and
methods if one wishes to introduce a critique that will ‘take,’ so to speak. One would not
criticize a horror film for its lack of romantic comedy unless one wished to truly introduce
something ‘incoherent’ (in a non-constructive way) into the conversation. In this sense, the
critiques levied against Land are not likely to change anyone’s mind – not that we ‘know’
this to be the critics’ intent – nor are they are likely to modify the concepts in a way that
will make them ‘better’ to adversarial parties.
Therefore, we conclude, not without some level of unintended arrogant presumption, that
there is little critical bite to the accusation that a project which disposes of the concept of
incoherence and advocates for thinking the unthinkable is unthinkably incoherent and
inconsistent with the sources of the concepts it makes use of. This kind of critique is, as
Land discusses in his New Centre classes, the application of philosophical standards to a
project that is attempting to go beyond philosophy. At the same time, if we consider the
concepts employed by Land as if they were philosophical concepts, we see that the basics
are at least in the ballpark of correct, so to speak, leading one to speculate that perhaps
Land’s critics confuse Land’s oft provocative and poetic rhetoric for analytic
argumentation, and confuse their own reactions to his rhetoric for objective shortcomings
in his thought.
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A Response to Philosophical Critiques of Landian Accelerationism
Postscript: Towards a Guattarian Future
“What will become of representation when there is no longer a subject to record it?”
– Felix Guattari25
To unironically frame anything ‘Towards a…’ is to contribute to stale, presumptuous,
academic banality. Who are you to tell me where we’re headed? Or that you have any say
in the matter? And if everyone is claiming to work towards this or that future, which future
will we end up with? If ever there has been a phrase oppositional to accelerationism, this
is it. The future pulls us towards it through, we don’t work towards it in words.
Regardless, the phrase came to mind and seemed to fit, and thus, in line with our previous
explorations of utilizing the limits of language to go beyond itself, I have used the impotent
phrase to introduce a thought. That is, Guattarian future would precisely preclude any such
notions of going ‘towards’ anything via the form of impotent essays. Guattari knew the
future pulls us towards it, and a Guattarian future is already partially here.
Accelerationism has become a present-future predicted by a past-Guattari. Elsewhere,26 I
attempted to show that it was he, not Deleuze, who laid the foundation for what we know
as accelerationism. It was Guattari who wrote into Anti-Oedipus the now famous phrase
that launched a thousand /Accs, and his research that lead to the conceptual use of
accelerationist language; Guattari’s asignifying diagrammatics that conceptualized
language as a materialist tactic of creating real effects; Guattari who wrote sci-fi, and
conceptualized writing theory as a kind of fiction that could make time move in mad loops
and create impossible, experimental realities (concepts that would go on to underpin, if not
become interchangeable with, the CCRU’s concept of hyperstition and Land’s theory of
templexity); Guattari who talked of ‘exiting’ language (not unlike exiting politics) instead
of engaging in impotent representational argumentation; Guattari who, in his last book
Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm (1992), calls for an “aesthetic paradigm” of
understanding (in)human experience, not unlike the one discussed above.
This is important to mention. The ‘collapsing of concepts’ into a swarm machine Nick
Land is critiqued for – i.e., ‘doing cybernetics’ with the CCRU as opposed writing about
it, Amy Ireland’s kind reminder to me that one ‘writes alongside or with the CCRU, not on
the CCRU,’ and many other things like this - these are precisely the kind of collective
aesthetic experiences Guattari spent his life attempting to articulate through theory-fiction.
If there is anyone who did accelerationism, it was Guattari who, from his psychoanalytic
practice, founded the “discipline…referred to by various names: rhizomatics,
stratoanalysis, schizoanalysis, nomadology, micropolitics, pragmatics…” As I aim to
explore in my upcoming texts – which span politics and mental health, libidinal economics
and the death drive, Guattari and psychoanalysis, and the occult, anti-psychiatry, and
feminism - non-reductive psychoanalysis, or schizoanalysis, is a way of ‘doing’
accelerationism.
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26
The Machinic Unconscious: Essays in Schizoanalysis, 1979 (2011 trans. Taylor Adkins), pg. 16
Freebased Guattari (2020) (https://psuedoanalysis.blogspot.com/p/freebased-guattari.html)
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