Thanks so much. Thanks. What Mark has said really sets up or introduces the... I'm going to talk about Nick Lamb's work. I'm going to talk about it in a way... I'm going to talk about it philosophically because I think that's... and explain why I want to talk about it philosophically, because I think that's a key to understanding, to maybe kind of understanding what its political ramifications might be. In other words, you want to understand what the politics, if politics of accelerationism is possible, is feasible, then you need to understand the, I think you need to confront the internal conceptual intelligibility of the accelerationist program.
all of us, you know, several of us here kind of have been influenced by Lan's work in one way or another. I once had a conversation with him where the conversation consisted, the number of the disagreement with us was that I, he insisted that I kept translating what he took to be pragmatic issues, issues of what he called machinic practice into conceptual issues. In other words, he accused me of philosophical conservatism by insisting on translating what he took to be the pragmatic back into the kind of the theoretical.
But I want to insist that this is necessary because this machinic practicism that Land insisted on leads to a kind of practical impotence. So I want to insist that it's necessary to confront fundamental kind of conceptual issues before you can begin to understand what it is you're doing. And I think in that regard, I don't buy into the whole rhetoric about the need to ditch representation. And I think if you try to ditch representation, get beyond conceptual representation, etc., etc., I think you end up with a kind of...
You engender performative contradiction. Not just theoretical contradiction, but performative contradiction. In other words, a contradiction at the level of concepts manifests itself in terms of an incapacity at the level of practice. So that's why I'm going to operate in this way. And I'm going to do it by schematizing Nick's work or agenda in terms of three contrasts, three explicitly dialectical contrasts. And the point is that where a kind of machinic pragmatism insists on the need to kind of, to resist and to obviate any kind of dialectical antagonism or opposition, I think it's necessary to do that in order to be able to kind of,
to identify what its strengths and weaknesses are. The three points I want to focus on, or the three kind of dyads, are critique and materialism, critique and materialism, teleology and eschatology, and practicism and voluntarism. Okay, first of all, what makes... Well, as Mark's already said, I think, I speak here as... Robin McKay and I are editing a volume of Nix, of Land's writings, called Fan Numenau. These texts are pretty extraordinary, okay? And as Mark said, no matter how much one may detest
their kind of rhetorical kind of animus, etc., etc., it's simply kind of, it's not enough simply to kind of, to dismiss them as a kind of puerile, indulgent kind of hyper-Nietzianism. It's far more sophisticated than that, even if I do think it is ultimately kind of stymied by incoherences. And on any account, rereading those texts, I mean, these are extraordinary texts. And they certainly provide a sobering contrast with the flaccid inanity of contemporary kind of Bergsonian vitalism. And the French philosopher
Denshawm de Kahn once described Deleuze Guattari Deleuze Guattari's anti-Oedipus and Leo George's epitome economy in terms of what he calls as manifestations of what he called mad black Hegelianism an attempt to kind of find some kind of the prosecution of a kind of Marxist materialism that somehow would be kind of anti-Hegelian in the same regard, like Lann's work is a kind of mad black Deleuzeanism It's an attempt to kind of turn Deleuze's, the vitalist impetus, the affirmationist along that kind of animates Deleuze-Guacharian corpus into something much more ostensibly
kind of, you know, unsavoury, but also actually much more conceptually invigorating. And it's the great, what's really interesting, as Mark said, is that there's a kind of, What's really interesting in these texts is the way in which there's a kind of extraordinary re-elaboration of negativity, a kind of non-conceptual negativity. And these texts bristle with this kind of sublimated fury. That's what makes them really powerful. and because I'm really interested in this issue about the power in fact I want to try to show that it's possible to kind of rehabilitate the powers of the negative against what Ben Neude has called
this kind of affirmationist consensus in contemporary theory this is a moment in Land's work that I'm acutely interested in although I'll try to explain why I think he kind of he doesn't succeed in resting the negative from a kind of, from subordinating it to a kind of affirmation. Okay, these preliminaries aside. First of all, the land sets out his, he's operating under the aegis of kind of closing authorities' work. he proposes to radicalize critique, to radicalize critique, to convert the ideal conditioning of the representation of matter to the material conditioning of ideal representation.
So that in the Landian kind of apparatus, matter becomes, materiality is construed solely as the production of production. and transcendental materialism which is to say Glendianism in its Glendian version becomes a materialization of critique the Kantian critique of metaphysics of which there are several versions which is kind of supplemented in various configurations of 20th century this Kantian critique of metaphysics is converted into a metaphysics of critique, a materialist metaphysics of critique, by collapsing the hierarchy of the transcendental and empirical.
The first move, the really interesting move, and in fact the key to understanding the Deroz-Guacharian concept of destratification in Ladinism, is that the first thing that needs to be destratified is the empirical transcendental difference, which is seen to be the enabling condition for critical philosophy. But what's interesting is that this is no longer a kind of Hegelian or dialectical sublation of this difference. It's kind of non-dialectical. It's a reduction of the difference to matter because the Landian claim is that you can always understand how matter, thinking is a function of materiality, and a representational thought, which is to say kind of conceptual categorization,
and even on this account, even the logic of the dialectic itself is simply a kind of circumscribed or depotentiated version of a kind of functional potency that is generated by matter itself. so the claim is that matter itself is synthetic and productive matter is primary process everything that unfolds at the level of conceptual representation is merely secondary and derivative synthesis is primary and productive and all synthesis is the conjoining of heterogeneous terms what Land proposed to retain from Kant
was the emphasis on the transcendental efficacy of synthesis the primacy of transcendental synthesis, but it's no longer the synthesis of empirical items, of objects of experience, anchored in a constituting subject. It's the synthesis, it's the autosynthesis, or the self-synthesizing potency of what he called intensive materiality, intensive matter. This becomes the key term in, in other words, it's a brilliant explicitation of the logic of the operation that Deleuze and Guattari carry out vis-à-vis Kantianism in Antioedipus. The name of matter is nothing but kind of machinic production, self-differentiation,
and all then the fundamental binary that organizes I think all of this this kind of this just materialist metaphysics is that between what he calls intensive materiality which he identifies with the body without organs and death this moment of absolute indifference is absolute difference. And the link is also kind of, Land is quite explicit about the link to a version of Schillingianism here. He explicitly links the Rosengotari to Schelling. The binaries between what he calls zero, intensive zero as
matter in itself, and every kind of conceptual binary between concepts and objects or representing and represented okay so the claim is that you buy by leveling this fundamental dualism the dualism of transcendental form and empirical content you get this materialism in which you explain home matter itself generates its own representation it generates its own representation on on this account its own kind of illusory state representation itself is relegated to the state as a transcendental illusion some misprision all primary process
at the level of merely secondary processes and cool so but this much he was going to go transcendental disease for this is a much easier to transcendental I think reproduces then the critical problem of the connection between thought and reality. Why? Because the problem then is, okay, if this, you know, if you, how is it possible for you to, given that, you know, how can you simply kind of circumvent representation and talk about matter itself as a primary process, reality in itself. This process, which is obviously the problem that kind of underlies
Kantian critique in the first place, re-emerges in an exacerbated form in this materialist subversion of Kantianism. But the problem is particularly acute, and this is where Land's difference, the Landian elimination of the Bergsonian components in Deleuze's thought becomes awkward or generates a difficulty for him. Why? Because in many ways you can align the Deleuzean critique of representation with the Bergsonian critique of representation. Okay, Bergson, much of what Deleuze says is problematic about the categories of representation. Representation is kind of this mediating framework that kind of segments and kind of parcels out
the world into kind of discrete, parcels out the flux of duration into discreetly individuated objects. The claim is that you have an experience, there's something, there's a sub-representational layer of experience that it's possible to access. This is the kind of through intuition. In other words, the Bergsonian critique of metaphysics and the kind of destitution or the kind of the sidelining of representation proceeds on the basis of the primacy of intuition. You can intuit the real differences in being, you can intuit the real nature of time duration in the Bergsonian register. There's a problem here for Langianism
because he can't do this. He supplanted representation but he wants to supplant this Bergsonian kind of you know, kind of this kind of vitalist phenomenology that kind of underlies Bergsonianism for a kind of unconscious thanatropism. And the point is how do you access the machinic unconscious? You can't get it's not simply given. It's not simply given. And Lanz insists time and time again, nothing is given, everything is produced. okay so the problem is is that is that lands kind of you know kind of materialist kind of liquidation of representation also wants to kind of because it doesn't want to kind of
reaffirm the primary say of allegedly sub-representational experience okay which Bergson and Phenolology do in various ways, he has to explain what it is he's talking about. Okay, what he's talking about, because he's doing a kind of materialist metaphysics, and there's an issue about what kind of traction this kind of, this extraordinarily sophisticated conceptual apparatus you know can gain upon the you know the process of primary you know the real as intensive difference primary production matter in itself whatever you want to call it okay now this is so this is an initial kind
of philosophical difficulty and it's a difficulty okay which interestingly like which Land himself trying to kind of, well, in conversation, trying to kind of dismiss by saying, well, you have to understand that it's no longer... The key to understanding this is that thinking itself becomes no longer a question of kind of representational congruence between concepts and objects, between ideas and things, but it itself becomes a productive process. And the discussion of mapping, machinic mapping versus representational tracing in the opening plateau rhizome is very important here.
The claim is, Dalazan Guattari claimed that schizoanalysis or rhizomatics or whatever you want to call it, is itself a form, is a praxis. It's a doing. So therefore, and it's a doing through which, in other words, there's a positive feedback loop between what you're talking about, what you're thinking about, and your thinking. So that your kind of conceptual practice is somehow, it's no longer tracing kind of intelligible structures from an allegedly pre-existing or ready-made reality. it's actually tracing movements and tendencies in material processes.
So it becomes self-legitimating in this sense. The question then becomes one of intensification. Okay, it's a, any kind of, it's no longer a question of, an epistemological question of the legitimacy or the validity of your CVs, you know, in contrast to an allegedly, you know, kind of independent reality. It's simply about the extent to which your machinic practice, your schizoanalytical practice, accentuates and intensifies primary production or on the contrary delays and inhibits.
So everything becomes converted. Instead of having truth and adequacy versus falsity and inadequacy or misrepresentation, you have a question about whether what it is you're doing when you think is intensificatory or de-intensificatory. And this becomes a dyad that organizes all lands. It becomes about, you must, and this is the key kind of conceptual trope that is then translated into a political register. In other words, it's because at the level of your, of what it is you're doing as a kind of machining materialist, you are, it's about kind of intensifying primary production, that then this translate into a kind of a practical...
All your practices is kind of governed by the imperative to intensify, accelerate, and to ruthlessly demolish anything, every obstacle, anything that threatens to delay or inhibit this. okay now I think there's a I think there's a problem here and the problem is this the concept of intensity becomes fatally equivocal here in this register There's an equivocation between the Kantian talk about intensity at the level of appearances
and the Bergsonian talk about intensive difference as qualitative difference in the experience of duration. When Bergson is talking about intensity, he means precisely, you know, kind of intensive difference as a difference in quality that can never be mapped onto or correlated with any kind of magnitude or quantity it can't be measured at the level of extensity that's the difference between the intensive and the extensity but this experience of intensity is correlated with has a kind of phenomenological correlate something you experience you experience intensity so hence vitalism is all about
the intensification of experience and about having intense experience but Landianism cannot avail itself of any kind of register of intensification because he's not talking about, he's not interested in phenomenological subjectivity and he's not interested in experience in so far as it is the experience of a subject or in the kind of the Deleuze-Guatarian kind of register of an organism that is an organism with a face and a personal identity, etc. These are all the things that are supposed to be you know that require destratification. So my claim is simply
that this the claim that you can kind of you can dispense with the need for any epistemological legitimation for your metaphysics by simply saying that it's not about truth or falsity, it's just about intensification. And the intensification of the primary process, it's incoherent because matter itself, matter's primary production, or death, is not translatable into any register of affective experience or effective intent so this is why I find this kind of this account unconvincing or this move unconvincing the claim that you can just keep on
intensifying and intensifying and that and the second problem arises here is that this is where a kind of affirmation or an imperative to affirm re-emerges because the claim is that you must, in mapping kind of processes, movements of de-territorialization and partial re-territorialization, you're mapping activity itself because it is, you know, it's nested upon the strata. It occupies an imminent position vis-a-vis these material processes. so you no longer have the transcendent exteriority between theory and world,
theory itself is implicated in the reality it's describing, then the issue is, it becomes unclear. In other words, this is where there's a kind of replacement or the substitution of a kind of sublimated materialist eschatology for all forms of rationalist teleology. In other words, the question is that the imperative to intensify is driven, it seems to be,
why intensify? Why keep intensifying? Because there's always a surplus of stratification. You wouldn't need to intensify, de-territorialize, de-stratify unless there was always a complement of re-territorialization and re-stratification. You only need to de-stratify because there's strata. So why is there stratification in the first place? This is because there's an organizing dualism here. In other words, the claim is that although the real itself is the absolutely de-territorialized or the degree zero of absolute intensity, it's always differentiated and stratified, sedimented in various kind of complex ways.
But then once thinking itself becomes subordinated to the imperative to intensify and de-stratify, it's clear that there must be a point, a kind of a limitrophic point of absolute deterritorialisation towards which the process of affirmation or acceleration tends. What is it that you're, if you're accelerating, there's two things. One, there's material constraints upon your capacity to accelerate, but there's also a kind of, there must be a transcendental speed limit at some point. and the ultimate speed limit is not a limit at all for Nick, it's death it's cosmic schizophrenia so that's the ultimate horizon
and here again he's simply unabashedly endorsing this kind of remarkable thesis in Antioedipus but really stripping it from all its kind of vaguely, these kind of palliatives about, you know, kind of how this might be, this might generate new forms of, you know, creative existence, etc, etc. It's just at the end of the process is death. Cosmic schizophrenia. Now, so there's a problem here, is that it's okay to kind of, the question is, practically, and the title of one of Nick's paper is called Making It With Death.
Okay? And it's a brilliant title, okay? So the claim is that because death is inherently productive. Death is the motor, is the kind of the moment of anti-production that generates all production, the production of production. the claim making it with death is not just that death is and this is simply kind of Freud the kind of beyond the pressure principle it's not just that life itself and that all vital differences are a unilateral deviation from intensive death the claim is that you can have a moment of convergence convergence with absolute intensity or absolutely territorialization what is the well what
is this who would be the bearer what vehicle okay will continue to exist to be the bearer of this kind of this fanatropic kind of acceleration in Well, not the human species, certainly. The claim is that kind of... The claim is then that all terrestrial history is a history of intensification. Human social organisation and the development of advanced technological capitalist society is merely a kind of a moment or a phase in this process.
and the continuation of the process or the intensification of the process demands the elimination of humanity as this partial substrate for the process. Now, the question is this, under what conditions? Now, here's a fundamental contradiction, or I think a conceptual incoherence emerges in that. How can you, at what point, how can you intensify when there's no longer anything left to intensify? What's left to intensify? If you, if your kind of schizoanalytical practice is kind of fueled by the need
to always intensify, destratify, deterritorialize, okay, there comes a point at which once you've, you know, you yourself, there's no agency left. You've been dissolved back into the process. so that it's once secondary production has been reintegrated or kind of feeds back into primary production then what ironically what you have is this kind of bizarre kind of mimesis of the serpent of absolute knowledge except this time it's kind of the serpent of absolute production but it's no longer but the point is this, the point is that organically individuated human subjects cannot position themselves
vis-à-vis this circuit or this process. Because the point is it's happening without you. It doesn't need you. It doesn't need you. And in fact, the very concept of agency gets stripped out of this account. There's nothing... There's a quote. I won't find it. There's a quote where it says, it's happening anyway and there's nothing you can do about it. The key claim is that you are being you know something is working through you there's nothing you can do about it so you might as well kind of fuse and this is where there's a retention and it's this is not a kind of this is a philosophical problem the philosophical problem is that there's the retention
of this kind of romantic kind of Schopenhauerian kind of moments of you know, kind of a fusion between the personal and the impersonal, okay, between the individuated subject and the, you know, cosmic schizophrenia, the impersonal kind of primary process. And, but it's still, for Schopenhauer, that, it still makes sense to postulate that because it's still something, the moment, the point where the will turns against itself is a moment that governs the whole of Schopenhauer's ethical and practical philosophy.
But with land, the problem is that the point is that you no longer have any kind of fulcrum for the point of reversion, for the point of conversion from secondary process back into primary process because the whole point is that there are no individuated bearers left anymore. And secondly, this, simply this convergence doesn't unfold at the level of experience, okay? Simply doesn't unfold at the level of experience and it's simply, and in that regard, the whole kind of vocabulary of intensification and disintensification becomes redundant, okay? So, the paradox is simply this, is that under what conditions could you will the impossibility of will?
How could you affirm that which incapacitates all affirmation? This is a conceptual problem, but it has interesting, I think, practical and political consequences. because Nick became ever more, and it has a political veil inside, I think because I think it explains Nick's kind of trajectory, political trajectory from a kind of radical radical kind of ultra-left anarchism from a point where in a paper called Can Capital and the Prohibition of Incest a polemical introduction to the configuration of philosophy and modernity. He says, the state apparatus
of an advanced industrial society can certainly not be defeated without a willingness to escalate the cycle of violence without limits. And he says, and interestingly in this paper, it's a radical militant guerrilla lesbian feminist who are the only kind of revolutionary subjects. So he moves from this moment where he's perfectly willing to kind of endorse or affirm radical... He thinks kind of... His critique of the Marxist left is that it's not radical enough, not revolutionary enough, not critical enough. This moment... And then five or six years later,
he comes to a point where he realizes that... or he seems to realize that there is no bearer of revolutionary intensification left, and therefore politics must be displaced, or it must be kind of deputized, and all you can do then is endorse or affirm those impersonal processes that are going on, at least harbour the promise of generating or ushering in the next phase of de-territorialisation. What does this mean? It means affirming free markets, affirming free markets, deregulation, the capitalist desecration of traditional forms of social organisation, etc., etc.
Why? but not because he thinks it's promoting individual democracy and freedom. So he has to instrumentalize neoliberalism in the name of something that is allegedly far more darker and more potentially corrosive. But he, in the process, it seems that you end up... like, you know, if your enemy's enemy is your friend, the dangerous point is when you forget what it was, you know, the conditions under which you made this strategic alliance. Okay? And the reason is because you can no longer see, it's no longer possible to identify the goal anymore. So you end up
endorsing, in fact, you end up embracing a kind of neoliberal politics, neoliberal ideology, and the pretense of instrumental distance, the claim that this could be a kind of a cunning of schizophrenic reason in some sense, quickly evaporates. Quickly evaporates because it's not possible to dissociate praxis from identifiable ends anymore. In other words, once you dissociate, there's a famous kind of distinction between tactics and strategy.
Strategy is teleological, transcendent, representational. Tactics is imminent, machinic, etc. But if you don't have any strategy, all the tactics you deploy are ultimately always going to be co-opted by some kind of implicit. Someone with a strategy will soon accommodate your tactics. in other words even if you think you're someone who knows what they want and who knows what they want to realise will start using you in other words you become a pawn of another kind of impersonal force but it's no longer the glamorous and seductive impersonal force that you hoped to make a compact with it's a much more kind of cynical it's cynical kind of libertarian capitalism I'll just talk.