The real energetic liberty which annihilates the priest's cage of human freedom is refused at the level of the political secondary process during the precise period in which the economic primary process is slipping ever more deeply into its embrace. The deep secret of capital as process is in its incommensurability with the preservation of bourgeois civilization, which clings to it like a dwarf riding a dragon. As capital evolves, the increasingly absurd rationalisation of production for profit peels away like a cheap veneer from the positive feedback destination of production for production.
This is a critical violence of information. It's violent because what happens there is the murder of the queen, the vanishing point of reality. Let's not have a disorder landing here. is at the bending here. University. We at least textually looked at making it with death remarks on Thanatos,
desiring production from Nick Land. But I think we're going to delve into a little bit of lore, let's say, of Nicholas's experiences at Warwick. But Nicholas, we're so pleased to have you on. And thank you so much for joining us this evening for you, I believe, right? Just to give some background on the genesis of this podcast, this is something that I think is just really interesting relative to Twitter because I hadn't even realized that I wasn't aware of you at all and that you were following the account and so forth until you commented on my quarterly post about how libidinal economy is a great work of literature. So I just have to just throw this out as an example of where Twitter can actually have some positive impacts, just as the way that Taylor and I wouldn't know each other if it wasn't for Twitter.
So just to. Yeah. Twitter bringing people together rather than tearing them apart. It's a rare occurrence, but when it happens, it's wonderful. Economy Libid now means a lot to me because I was there when Ian Grant was translating it. Excellent. Was kind of my best friend at the time when I was studying at Warwick. And we were both taking French classes to try and improve our French. We had to read a lot of French philosophy because we were doing PhDs in French and German philosophy. neither of us were particularly great linguists so we were taking courses in philosophy french for philosophers okay slowly reading the outsider by camu and i think he said you're kind of fuck this i'm going to i'm going to translate economy libid now which we yeah we'd only been introduced
to kind of a week before by nick land i heard of it nick land is one of the few that i've seen write on libidinal economy, at least in English. And, you know, there is that interesting temporality where Léasar kind of recants or maybe distances himself from that period of his writing. But at the same time, it obviously has, it obviously comes at a time in French philosophical thinking that is so important. You know, there's these years after the failed revolution in May 68, also kind of in dialogue, not explicitly, but implicitly with Antioedipus. And so libidal economy is, I mean, it's definitely been a work that Cooper and I spent a lot of time working through and it's so rich and so dense, but also kind of frustrating because it's not
necessarily, Lyotard doesn't want to make a declarative statement. It's really for us to to even question wanting to take theoretical implications, right? We lost you there for a moment. You might want to back up and start over. Oh, I was just saying that, that Leotard, even in that work is even questioning the value of trying to extract theoretical implications at all and, and questioning that, that move of theory. So there is something frustrating about it. And yet at the same time, so rewarding. Yeah. I just think the relentless blow of the right. I mean, it's just madness of the pen. It's incredibly relentless, just beautifully done. Sorry to cut you off, Nicholas. Go ahead. I saw you quoting bits were quoted from it,
and it really brought back, looking over Ian's shoulder as he was translating it. He did a fantastic job. Oh, yes, he did. He did. I guess it was important for Nick Land. I mean, I can't speak for how Nick Land's, the genesis of Nick Land's thought, but he did seminars on economy libid now believe i certainly remember him talking about it a lot and the idea that and marches critique that's entirely positivist with only you know only positive nodes no dialectics no negativity i mean that's that is his um whole project really isn't it it was there in that cold open the um yes positivist feedback loop this way in which
what production for profit is is tenuously tied to this feedback loop of production for production's sake that is an interesting theoretical implication and and it's it's right there at the very beginning of anti-edipus right the laying out the syntheses in any case i guess that why don't we um go back You've mentioned you're taking classes with Nick Land. You've mentioned your friendship with Ian Hamilton Grant. But we would like to know about sort of your own introduction into philosophy and what motivated you. Maybe what are some of the texts that grabbed your attention, that sealed the deal, that made you want to go deeper into philosophy, into literary theory? You know, tell us a little about your intellectual story. I'd left school at 16.
it wasn't a particularly good school and I got bored and I went to local art college but oh wow I was always always had ambitions to be a novelist so going to art college was just a way to kind of hang out you know artists and yeah neither be forced to go and work and there weren't really any there were very few jobs around anyway especially for an uneducated um a 16 year old there wasn't really any work around I didn't want to be forced into work and I didn't want to It kept my parents on my back staying in education. Yes, exactly. And art college was a huge amount of fun. By the time I'd started a degree course in fine art at Middlesex Polytechnic, as it was then in London, I'd just exhausted any interest that I had in art.
And I always was quite academic and began thinking about what I wanted to do, what I wanted to do with fiction. My favorite novelists were all quite conceptual, like B.S. Johnson and Nutello Calvino. Okay. And novelists that I kind of had a problem with, which at that point, for some reason, I don't know why, I had a problem with Kerouac and Lawrence. And I was thinking, well, part of my problem is they're a bit thick. Yeah. Obviously, they're not thick, but this was my thinking at the time, that I've got to do a much more conceptual, take a much more conceptual track here. I fixated on doing philosophy and literature. and it was one of the places that offered this, almost the only place that offered it. So I went to, I managed to get in there with very, very poor exam results,
but they had a little exam that was almost jokey, set by an American expat called Rick Garkowski, who's now a rare book dealer and crime writer. But back then he was the professor there. He set this kind of jokey, jokey little exam And I got in and it was, you know, it was so fantastic that I kind of lost interest. I never lost interest in writing novels, but I lost interest in the literature side a bit and got much more interested in the philosophy side. Interesting. And so he was there. Well, the professor was David Wood at the time, who was a Heideggerian, Husserlian, hermeneutician, you know, that kind of guy that there's nothing wrong with him. And he was obviously an inspiring professor, but he just wasn't my kind of person.
Yeah. But I found out about the whole landscape of Continental Sports. And there was a much more influential guy on me. It was Andrew Benjamin, who is an Australian, and he's gone back to Australia. So I did a course with him where it was so unpopular. There were only two of us, I think, doing the course. Okay. on Hegel's Rite. So we just basically read Rite, Rite and Fichte and something else. I think Pat Schelling very, very slowly for an entire year. Yeah. I've got a very good grounding in German idealism, thanks to that. And he also taught Walter Benjamin. I think that was the coincidence of the names. Yeah.
I've also got a huge grounding in the origin of German tragic drama, which is a phenomenally difficult text, but again I read it very very slowly with Andrew Benjamin um I really enjoyed my my time there I was still in bands and I toured for part of my third year I was touring touring the UK with a hip-hop band and that kind of fell apart at Christmas just you know musical differences yeah I realized that I would actually like to get a good degree and I had to had to really work non-stop for from Christmas till June to get a good degree and it became obvious that I was going to get quite a good degree and I might even get a first so um I applied to do a doctorate and
I it all worked out doing post-grad philosophy has really kind of shaped my whole life even though I've not never been an academic philosopher I never never taught philosophy I've taught a little bit as a PhD student but I've never really taught right right and I've never written it but it's been the kind of the thing that's changed my life the most that's shaped my life the most and it just got it got even more exciting in the postgrad years just before we came on I looked at Nick Land's Wikipedia page and it said that he came to work in 87 but I'm fairly sure that's wrong I'm fairly sure it was after I'd finished my first degree okay so it must have been like 89 or something so as i finished nitland came and that suddenly opened up a whole new world because
oddly i just i don't think i'd even heard of dollars i'm not quite sure why but um there wasn't a specialist there i'd done a little bit of nature some can't i hadn't done any dollars we'd looked at leotard because of the post-modern condition but i'd never heard of it right that makes sense so nick opened up a whole new world and and had a very kind of programmatic view of what this world was which was a his own reading of cant and his own reading of deleurs and very quickly he set up a series of seminars that were that basically taught anti-edipus and thousand plateaus from his particular standpoint that it was a version of canting critique i'm not
sure that I can even comment on that now how true that is but it was incredibly it was a forceful series of a forceful reading and it meant that we all got really quite a good grip of anti-edipus which is yeah it's a fairly difficult it's a very difficult text yeah and it makes sense that around that time Logic of Sense would only come out in 1990 and Difference of Repetition wouldn't come out till 94 so it makes sense that at that time A Thousand Plateaus would have just come out in translation from Misumi in what, 87, 88. So it makes sense that capitalism schizophrenia would be the center point more or less for a, if you will, a systematic exposition of what Deleuze is getting at. It was an incredibly systematic exposition. And because we just weren't able
to get hold of really any other texts by Deleuze, he was able to, he had a free hand to tell us what it really meant um and it's i think he's right in emphasizing de l'oeuvres's debt to count he simultaneously gave us a picture of de l'oeuvres as the philosopher of the outside which i don't think is is really you know quite correct it was it was always nick wishing this it was a wish fulfillment thing. I mean, I can remember him say, as he got frustrated with Derridian in class one day, he said, well, what's the big deal about thinking the outside? Just step outside, just be outside. He always thought that, he always seemed to think the outside was just very
easy to think. Some of his papers that I remember well but I can't seem to find anywhere. There was one called Putting the Rat Back in Rationality which was trying to look at the whole history of philosophy as a kind of plague rather than you know a rational process more a kind of infectious pestilence that was attacking the body politic from outside and one of the heads of the department who was an anglo-american philosopher the peace and a methodist oh gosh we say what i don't understand this at all i mean How does this relate to human consciousness? And Nick Lang was saying, well, human consciousness obviously is a very important thing to study,
like unicell organisms or spermatozoa or whatever. But it's not the only thing to study. And I'm going to study the outside. I'm just not interested in humanity, human consciousness. And, you know, the guy was obviously aghast. But there's a certain Nietzschean ring to this notion that that consciousness is a plague, for example. Right. That it's it's it's the most superficial. It's a herd instinct, blah, blah, blah. Right. You know that you can kind of see radicalizing or taking further or continuing that line of thought from Nietzsche's some of the things he says about consciousness. yeah that that really is ringing bells with me that's the way that nick was talking about uh nietzsche at the time yeah koop did you do you have a reaction i i may have cut you off there
maybe you'd like to back up and hear about your hip-hop project nicholas if you're whatever you're willing to discuss because i think this is i mean just you screenwriting a novelist interested in philosophy a hip-hop career like this is this is just incredible i think i'd always played in bands they were punk bands in the end there were just two of us and so we had to kind of be a punk kind of folk band it wasn't practical to have more people but just having two of us meant that we could always get on the bill with other people we we didn't have to sound check we were happy to turn up places so we played a lots of gig lots of gigs around the place especially with a band called Big Flame, which is named after a radical libertarian socialist party of the 60s and 70s.
But Big Flame, incredibly choppy, atonal, punk style band in the early mid 80s in Manchester. But then hip hop was coming in and we were getting more and more interested in hip hop. And in the end, we just switched to hip hop. I mean, partly, I guess, under the influence of the Beastie Boys. We were getting there as they were coming over. This is before their first album came out. And we were just, you know, we were paying like £10 for a 12-inch single. And obviously LL Cool J and Public Enemy from that kind of deaf-diamper period. So we switched to being a hip-hop band. We had an advantage. There was a pop star in our hometown who'd been to school with the guy playing guitar
and later programming drum machines, a pop star called Lisa Stansfield, who had a big hit with Around the World or something in the late 80s. And she had a recording studio in her garage, which she kind of outgrown. So we were able to borrow that. We did a recording. We sent it to the local record company, which is Factory Records in Manchester. So we signed to Factory Records. They were the label for bands like the Happy Mondays and New Order and have been for Joy Division. Gotcha. then we toured that but it didn't last very long but I did a gig last summer actually that was the first time in 30 years oh wow although it didn't last long the record label also owned a nightclub and being part of the label meant that I got into the nightclub tree so that turned out to be the great advantage as acid house and rave culture took off in
Manchester I had free entry into the into the nightclub in Manchester that was the part of it in the UK. And this was while I was doing my PhD, I'd been at Warwick, because I did my undergraduate at Warwick. Yeah. I got a bit fed up of living around there after three years. So I moved to Manchester for the first two years of my PhD and hung out at the Hacienda and just commuted to Warwick and then had to move to Warwick in order to move back to Warwick in order to finish it. Yeah. And I guess this is relevant only to the extent that acid house was a kind of influence on that became an influence on the schizopolitics schizoanalysis type of tip we were all heading along because there was just an enormous amount
of drugs all of a sudden and there was a new way of a kind of new language that the language of madness seemed more appropriate all of a sudden uh we've all come out out of what seemed like a very long economic depression right moments were changing very rapidly so i think everyone all philosophies have been in for all two economics to a degree since adam smith or hume or earlier yeah particularly persons at that time i can't speak for nick land but certainly listening to nick land at that period and reading economy libidin all it all seemed incredibly appropriate that it was drugs madness economics a new version of marxism i don't know how how much
you've touched on bataille when you've been talking about machine the machinic unconscious but i mean nitland was actually working on his book on bataille virulent nihilism or is that or thirst for annihilation yeah and so don't think it's really freud at all it's just pure Bataille. Interesting. Freudian coating on it. And that was incredibly important. You know, it was because it was economics again. He was talking about, Bataille was talking about general economy. And just at a personal level, Brunge was starting too. And there was a big song, Black Hole Sun. Yes. That's a nice tie-in to Bataille, right? Just a nice happy coincidence. Yeah, I'm sure they weren't reading Bataille. It almost
felt as though they were. I mean, I mean, what we were doing was reifying energy, whether it was the libidinal band from it now, or whether it was just this kind of huge, excessive production of Bataille, or whether it was the schizofloes across the body without organ of Deleuze. It's an energetics. Yes. It's possibly a metaphysics of energetics. That would be the criticism of it. And I read some Vincent Dacomb around this time, who'd also been in the same political party as a leotard, Socialism or Barbary. I think, I believe leotard was kicked out of the group for writing Economy Libiden now. Oh, really?
So this was the Libertarian Socialist Party. And to be kicked out of the Libertarian Socialist Party for writing this scandalous book. But Dekom has a criticism of it, that it's an energetics. It's just saying all energy is good. Wherever energy goes is good. You know, where is the critique? It's just reifying energy and destruction. And there always was that element to it. And it really needs the Kantian critique side or a Nietzschean critique side to kind of bat away, though, that kind of criticism. I think that that's probably a straw man of libidinal economy, but we don't have to get into the weeds of it, especially since Leotard later disowns it to a certain extent.
I don't think it's necessarily energy is good in and of itself, right? Or that it's kind of like you see critiques of this with Antioedipus, that it's, you know, desire for its own sake. It's more about it's liberating desire and these other things when it's actually much more complicated. And it doesn't simply fall into like Foucault's critique of the repressive hypothesis, right, that we just need to liberate desire and everything will be good. I think that it's actually much more nuanced. And I see the same with Leotard. It certainly wouldn't be good because, you know, things like the death drive, it's quite destructive. Yeah. But riding that, well, again, this cold open that we did, it's riding that dragon seemed to be all we were interested in. But you need the critique on top of it, and we can decide how much teeth the critique has and how it works.
I mean, in the 90s, it would have been a totally different beast. I mean, I think even as early as a few, as recent as a few years ago, you know, I guess just the way that the outlook for the future seems to be affirming this stance on the zero, on death that Nick is talking about in this piece, to be honest, whether that's, I feel sort of like he's vindicated to some degree in some of this. Now, I don't know about his steps on making oneself a Nazi or whether policing the Nazi in your head is bringing you in closer proximity to Nazism than destratifying too quickly. I don't know if I would necessarily say that, but I think in terms of superorganizable death drive seems to be where we're kind of heading as humanity is concerned.
I do remember this paper making it with death from back in the day. But it was interesting reading again that he does talk about, he does anticipate criticisms by talking about the Tucson de-stratification. So Deleuze warns that, you know, if we de-stratify too fast, we risk a more savage recoupment. If you think that Deleuze has white holes in black space, if we de-stratify too fast, we'll just collapse into a black hole and it's going to be much, much worse for us. Nick is already anticipating he's taking issue with that isn't he and say no no that's really not de-stratification not going to be the problem so you can see you the piece anticipates accelerationism much more than I expected oh yeah yeah and he anticipates what might have been a
delirging objection to accelerationism and and he's addressing it already back in this piece which must have been and is it dated I would guess it's 92 or 90 I think it's 92 it's around that 92 93 three, I believe. Yeah. You asked me whether Nick Lang was the PhD advisor from hell. He wasn't at all. He was a great PhD supervisor. I've got this enormous affection for him, even though I'm kind of appalled by the right wing term that he took, as Ian is, Ian Grant is too. But the Nick Lang that we remember, I mean, you know, he's not really much older than I am. I think is it would only be three years older so having a phd supervisor who's only three years older than you who is so articulate so into his stuff he was very very geeky i mean you did feel
that you you were dealing with somebody who just stepped out of his bedroom and hadn't done anything else other than read nietzsche and kant and deleurs and i think he went he was almost crazy you know he was released and he came out like a whirlwind, like a Tasmanian devil. But his only problem as a PhD supervisor was that he became an incredible stoner. So he really could be completely stoned. So yeah, huge dope smoker. So is that what he needs is maybe a little bit less of the methamphetamines, more of the marijuana? Is that particularly? I don't know to what extent he did take a lot of speed. I mean, he was a speedy guy.
And I would imagine that he smoked dope as a kind of... Even you out? Yeah, to even himself out or to deal with anxiety. Because also... Of course. He was in an academic structure that he really wasn't cut out for at all. It was amazing he got the job. And there was a lot of discussion about who's going to get this job. It's one of the plunge up. There's very few continental philosophy jobs in the whole of Britain at that time. They were only going to be at three universities, which was Essex, Warwick and Sussex, or maybe Middlesex. There was just no jobs. And he got the job. And it was because he was regarded as the most brilliant, brilliant guy of his generation. He came from Essex. He was very close to a guy called Jay Bernstein, who I believe is back in New York now.
is a Hegelian Adorno type of philosopher. Incredibly charismatic lecturer, but an Adorno expert. And I know that he'd recommend Nick Land to David Wood. And I think the department thought they were going to get, in many ways, a Heideggerian. A Heideggerian, yeah, because of his dissertation. Yeah, I've never read the dissertation. On treckels, poetry and whatnot, right? So he seems like a hermeneutic Heideggerian. Yeah, absolutely. But I was surprised it was on Traycle because my memory was that it was, I mean, it must be on the Traycle because that's its title. Yeah. But my memory is that it was on the Hilderland essay. Interesting. Okay. 43 as much as any. So, you know, there is that touch of fascism already there.
Yeah. Yeah. He seems like he would fit into the safe continental, right? Yeah. Yeah. And I think it was a big surprise that he went. He was a very popular lecturer and incredibly energetic, charismatic and nuts in some really appealing way. Yeah. Yeah. Because we were all nuts at that time. Right. You kind of already mentioned that with the rave scene, with your artistry background. And that was the time of, for better or worse, in DeLiziana, if you want to use that phrase, which I know is weird, but in DeLizian studies at that time, with capitalism and schizophrenia being the principal text, there is this schizo writing that is perhaps too much privilege, but that kind of dates some of the literature.
And I think that what's interesting about Land's writing is how much he sort of both undercuts that and takes it to an extreme at the same time without sort of glorifying the mode of presentation for itself. I think he definitely takes his style from leotard and libidinal economy, I would say, quite a bit. That's kind of the impression that I get reading everything is that it's sort of like drawing from that relentlessness of that work or rather. yes and there's also you know the more sword and sorcery end of Nietzsche and also I guess Lovecraft that yeah yeah these weren't things that I was very interested in I mean I always I always thought that my taste in literature was you know far far superior to to Nick Lanz whether
that's fair or not I mean I really did think Christ you really are a kind of sort of sword and sorcery nerd although I like his writing my memory is that his lectures were even better because he could come out with these phrases and if they were great they would appear in in the writing it was kind of less dense it was always happy to take questions I mean he really is super bright and certainly was super bright at the time and he just knew the text so well so his seminars were really quite open but would contain these phrases that were just you know jaw-dropping and would illuminate illuminate a text then when he got down to
writing it was maybe too dense or maybe too you know yes a bit too much i mean i can't even pronounce cthulhu but yeah a little bit too much of that for my taste it does make sense that uh You know, I've mentioned this before, but, you know, it does make sense that someone like Deleuze would draw you in. I mean, we've talked about, you know, Coop has already praised Lyotard's writing, but there is a sense in which Deleuze doesn't get, at least oftentimes, in at least the philosophical circles. I know there are texts that counteract this, but a lot of times Deleuze doesn't get enough credit for the prominence with which he treats literature. You can see this from the start in Antioedipus, you know, his treatment of Michaud, of Beckett, Joyce, of a lot of the Anglo-American writers, Lawrence, you know, as you already mentioned.
So I could see how someone, even just like the three novellas plateau from A Thousand Plateaus, I could see how someone like Deleuze would be a breath of fresh air for someone who also privileges the creative aspect. Yeah, I already knew Seisha Massot, for instance. I knew him quite well just because of the Velvet Underground song. So I'd read the book and then I discovered that Deleuze had actually written on the book. So that's a very, very important essay for me. But I was always interested in literature, aesthetics, politics. And because I'd done literature and philosophy, you would expect that. what changed meeting Ian Grant, who had done his undergraduate degree somewhere else,
so started his PhD at exactly the same time as me. So we started together and realising immediately that Ian had absolutely no interest in these questions, aesthetics, ethics, politics. He was only interested in, you know, what's the basis of reality? What's the start of the universe? And it sounds crazy for me to say it now, because, you know, philosophy has always dealt with these questions. Yes. I've never met anybody who was interested in that. He was absolutely the first person to be interested in that. And you can see why he became a speculative realist. He was really looking for it. And why he responded so strongly to Nick Lang, because Nick Lang always wanted to think the outside. Yeah, yeah.
He was camping at the bit for this, you know, against the Kantian spectacles. I guess you would call it. Whereas I hadn't even noticed I was wearing them particularly. I was just interested in talking about literature. Or how philosophy is already always already entangled with all of these other disciplines, all these other creativities. I mean, even with what is philosophy, Deleuze is thinking philosophy as creation, as concept creation, rather than even if he always claimed to be a metaphysician. he's not performing these traditional platonic gestures, for example, of, you know, of the wonder that there is something rather than nothing or something about the origins. Because for Deleuze, the origins is always already repeated. They're similar to Derrida, but perhaps in a different way.
So I think those kind of questions get... Contrasting Derrida and Deleuze would really get at what I'm talking about. I immediately liked Derrida. because he was, I actually don't like any of the literature Derrida likes. I just don't like his taste in writing, but he's a very careful reader. And he was a professor of history of philosophy. And this was very much where I was coming from. I was interested in text and I was interested in the history of the text and their historicity. and then suddenly I was being confronted by Nick Land, Ian Grant who were interested in you know the machine you come conscious how are these things material yeah how is thinking
material how is writing material how is desire material especially how is desire material I do like that and with books like Economy, Libid, and El there were very strong answers to it You could go Hegelian and say, well, it's material because it will, because thought is the only process of history. But clearly that's kind of crazy. A cop-out? Yeah, it's a cop-out. But it's so wrong-headed. But fanatically interested in pop music. Well, why is something a hit? And it's because people run out and buy it, because they have to buy it. You know, production and desire meant something to me immediately, but I'd not put it into a philosophical context.
Yeah. And it commonly been now did that. There's that phrase from the doors, the little girls in the stands, and the cramps reused it. And it's that idea that, you know, we're all men stroking our chin talking about philosophy, but what's really happening here, and it's, you know, it's things like girls running out to the record shop and buying this stuff. Or in our case, it's we're little girls running to Libgen downloading thousands of PDFs that we'll read very little of. That's a good way to put it. And you help concretize, because I was thinking if Ian was so interested in these questions about the origin of reality, blah, blah, blah, why would he translate these two texts
from Liatar and Bojard? But you were able to square the circle and bring it back to the materiality of whether it be desire or the libidinal band etc you described your writing as being conceptual in terms of i'm assuming you mean as far as your novels are concerned but perhaps that extends to writing for the screen as uh as pretentious as this is going to sound you know i i kind of think of myself more i think of a storyteller than than anything I mean, I think that's really, for me, where it's at. But I think storytelling as a methodology of doing philosophy is what really grabs my imagination. And so narrativizing theory, working in that sort of milieu is what I personally really enjoy.
That's why I find something like I've been like browbeating Taylor with all these Dune references to Deleuze and Guattari, etc. And that's because I just, I don't know, I just, that's kind of where the way that I work through things. So I'm just kind of curious as someone who is credited as the founder of a literary movement, New Puritanism, I'd just be interested to hear about, you know, your writing, your approach, etc. How philosophy works into that, whether it be, like I said, novels or for the screen, etc. My early novels are crime fiction. So I'm as interested in genre as you, but I was not interested in science fiction. And what crime fiction did for me, going back to the 80s, it's a way of describing cities, describing cities, especially cities at night, cities collapsing, changing.
Crime fiction was appealing in a kind of postmodern way. It's got rules. It's a genre. You can make it deconstruct itself. Right. But on top of that, it's always about the polis. And my PhD thesis is on the relationship between politics and economics. And I borrowed a bit of Derrida where he says that something like the dialectics is always a detour in sight of the truth. The economic process of the dialectic is always a detour inside of the truth. And I took this as a kind of, not quite facetiously, but not entirely genuine either, to say that Derrida is arguing that he's doing economics,
and everyone who does economics is trying to do politics through the back door. Interesting. Because politics is an impossible project. trying to think of the city which is of the state is so complex there's so much happening there you can't get a hold of the forces that make it when you look at economics and you you think well these are the forces that make it but you're always trying to make these forces come back around and return to politics and they probably won't do it would be the battalion aspect of that but also a Marxian aspect. And I guess also a Nick Landian side, because Nick Land is arguing that, and I got this off a podcast last week, he was saying that there's this huge reactor core that's going
to burn and the police or the society is just always trying to damp it down. That's what a society is. It's damping it down. I guess I had an image like that in my head when I was saying that we're trying to wrestle these economic forces, these dark economic desires, and trying to make them mean a stable city, but they're never really going to quite do that. It's always metastable, right? It's always sort of out of sync with any equilibrium. And this reminds me of a thousand plateaus when they define societies in terms of their zones of power, which are meant to prevent flows from leaking, right? Meant to prevent desire from leaking. But the other thing I was thinking of was... I think that's where Nick Lamb probably got it from. Yeah, yeah. And insofar as I was writing crime fiction,
I was thinking, you know, I'm writing about cities at night, I'm writing about cities that are violent. Well, crime fiction became a way of describing Manchester, basically, because Manchester was going through this huge upheaval. We had Acid House. One of the bigger things was that we also, the gay village in Manchester, which has existed since the 1950s, had been very much underground, but quite large. I mean, there were quite a lot of clubs and bars that were part of the gay village and were known about. But throughout the 80s, they were continually raided by the police. So you got a very, you kind of got a violent confrontation in the nighttime. And by the mid 90s, the gay village, the police had been beaten back by the town council,
by a new understanding of gay culture, by the success of things like Acid House. Yeah. factory records and we got rid of our particular police chief and suddenly the underground became the engine of change that's great people came to manchester purely because it had a gay village and then our mardi gras was the best mardi gras and you know the nights out in the manchester gay village were the best nights out and seedy bars turned into quite chic nightclubs all Interesting, interesting. So that was certainly two of my three early crime novels, but just purely about that. How did the underworld become the engine of change and how did the city change do that? And crime fiction felt to me the best way of doing it,
but it was always shot through with these economic... I mean, I would have been writing about economics anyway. I'd probably put my... Well, I'd certainly put together the idea in my PhD before I met Nick Lambs. but then meeting Nick Land and reading Economy Living now and spending so much time with Ian Grant and other people. There were people who went on to teach at Central St. Martins like Jamie Brassett, John O'Reilly. I'm trying to think who else was there. It was quite a big department, but those are the people I was closest to. We were all writing about Baudrillard, economics, space, the city. That's how we came out of the Nick Land experience. I mean, this is great because I'm also thinking of in the preface to Difficult Repetition, Deleuze is talking about a good book of philosophy should be part science fiction, which obviously tickles Coop's taint, and part detective novel, because it is about investigating.
It's not only about creation, but the creation is always already tied to an investigation of problems and of sort of elaborating problems and determining them in cases of solutions. Well, actually, that would be my problem with science fiction. Not all science fiction, but it does seem books that I really don't like, like 1984, for instance, it sets up a problem as an allegory, describes it, and the book itself is the proof of concept. Interesting. It seems to me that bad science fiction just isn't literature. It's a kind of facsimile of literature. Interesting. because it's just setting up a problem that it that it then proves its way of talking is right it can be to use a kind of modern word it can be mansplaining it can actually feel
mansplaining i've changed my mind about science fiction but only really quite recently because i've seen i've come in contact with arab futurism and afro futurism yeah i can see that if there's absolutely no way of describing your historical reality because it's being squashed out by colonialism or racism or something then switch becomes incredibly powerful interesting but it's not powerful really describing a problem it's this kind of machinic way of forcing people to to see problems differently or yeah yeah seeing things there's a fantastic afro-futurism display at the moment. And I was married for a long while to a Palestinian filmmaker called Leila Sansor,
and her sister, Larissa Sansor, is getting quite well known as an Arab futurist. And that's really changed my mind about science fiction. I can see just how powerful it is. But in the past, I've been kind of a bit snotty about it. Sorry, Cooper. One thing that you mentioned, Nicholas, that I thought was kind of interesting, and I think sort of applies to me is like, if I'm writing or if I'm making a film, I think what I'm really, what I'm really doing is trying to sneak the philosophy in the back door. And I think if that's not done very deftly, then it can become this very, like you said, wrote machinic didactic process, which I think even, you know, Frank Herbert's writing or approach can get into that. I think particularly in like a couple of the works are very much sort of him just using these
characters as a mouthpiece for his own sort of personal philosophy although it does it does ask some interesting questions i think i think particularly in relative in relation to like these machinisms right because one sort of interesting thing about the universe that duna said in is that there's this aversion they had the butlerian jihad so they outlawed machines and it's not only machines due to fear of like an ai takeover but this process of the human becoming instrumentalized and taking on the characteristics of the machine and losing touch, which I think is just an interesting approach. You don't really get that perspective so much, particularly with science fiction, right? Typically, there's sort of a utopian element or there's other things
going on. It's not really digging into the way that history moves, the way that societies and institutions evolve. And that is what I think is so very compelling about Dune, broadly speaking. I just don't know Herbert that well at all. I don't know the Dune universe. I would be thinking about the more Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe style angle where you know the guy is just elaborating. Christianity. Yeah, Christianity. Yeah, Lord of the Rings as well. In the same way. But actually, and I should have said this much earlier, William Gibson was hugely important at the time. Everybody was reading William Gibson in the department. we were barely writing on computers you know i didn't get a computer until until the 90s and
before that if you wanted to use a computer you had to book time in the math department and use oh wow yeah the mainframe computer so suddenly in the early to mid 90s we were suddenly all all had email accounts the world that gibson had already been describing suddenly seemed real so that right you know the world did seem to be accelerating in that kind of way it really was happening overnight we nobody had a computer most people were writing their essays longhand because in england there's no tradition of men typing really interesting okay absolutely none at all women learn to type at school if they're going to be secretaries so even intelligent you know not intelligent but your middle class women who've gone to good schools don't learn to type
only working class women learn to type absolutely nobody types so we were still handwriting all of our essays and then suddenly overnight we all had well absolutely horrible computers that you won't have heard of made by a company called Amstrad but um we were suddenly had computers and we thought we were living we thought we were on the verge of the William Gibson world and yeah in fact we probably were yeah now this is a fascinating point that you're making and it's something that I think is easily forgotten and something that I didn't know. And so I couldn't even forget, I just didn't know this, but this is something we talked about. Was it with John Roof, Cooper? It doesn't matter, but we were discussing the fact that when, you know, the opening line to A Thousand Plateaus, when they were talking about being a crowd, being a sort of a collective
assemblage, one of the things that John Roof brought out, and I believe it was John, if it was someone else and I apologize but anyway the fact that Fanny DeLiz's wife was the one who would receive the manuscripts and type them out from Guattari so she was a part of that assemblage too and she gets kind of sort of left out of the picture when in fact she's a dynamic third to their writing assemblage yeah the woman type is it's a horrible image isn't it but I believe it was a, you know, a fantastic relationship. It makes sense. And it goes to like, I'm thinking of one of the more recent historical depictions of the rise of computer science with, for example, what the biopic with Alan Turing and whatnot,
and you kind of see, and also just depictions of women at like switchboards and a lot of that history that's sort of been forgotten or just been ignored or taken for granted comes out with more salience when we really do think about these underappreciated contributions, these sort of trends in labor power. That was just an aside. I don't have anything to link it to, but I think that's fascinating. Yeah, it really is. I think part, and this is a different aside entirely, but I think part of the problem with Derrida and the honorary degree at Cambridge, the person who organized the petition against him was an American logician. And virtually the only American logician, I've forgotten her name, which is a bit unfortunate.
She's one of the only American logicians who was taken seriously by the American Academy at Harvard and Yale. Gotcha. And she'd been ludicrously patronized by the man and Derrida when he came along. Interesting. And the man dies, and it turns out that he was a Nazi. Yeah. Well, the woman, and I really wish I remembered her name, but her parents were socialist Jewish trajunists in New York. She's a self-made woman from a socialist background, manages to claw away through American academia and get respect for her work on the identity of indiscernibles and that kind of philosophy. and she's patronized by the analytic group
and she's patronized by Paul de Manon and she finds out Paul de Manon's a Nazi and she just goes ballistic and, you know, de Manon is dead but she really goes for Derrida but there's no, there also seems to be no aware Her anger comes out of a kind of I believe out of a history of being patronized and blinds her to, maybe blinds her to the way to who Derrida is. And certainly, you know, she didn't seem aware that he was Jewish himself. Is it Ruth? Yes. Park and Marcus? No, that's it. That's her. Okay, I just wanted to look it up just to clear that because I didn't want you to have that, you know, play. Yeah, I don't know how good an aside that is, but, you know, she was absolutely furious
at the way that the man patronized her. And she saw Derrida as being this charlatan in the demand mold. Yes. But putting that petition together, she was asking people to sign the petition who had patronized her all her life because she was the only female logician. Right. Or, you know, one of only two, pretty much. I know that there was a period of, let's call it scandal. At least I know there was some sort of, I don't want to say shame, but you have to think about Derrida, you know, first Heidegger, that a lot of this comes more to the fore. I mean, even Liézhar wrote a book on it, right? And then with the wartime journalism that comes out about De Man, who was one of the ones
who helped to popularize deconstruction to a certain extent, at least in the Anglo sphere. I think he's absolutely key. And Derrida owed him, I've certainly felt he owed him so much. And then it must have been absolutely devastating for Derrida to discover to what extent De Man had an incredibly shady past and continually reinvented himself. And in each reinvention, kind of buried things that were utterly shameful. Doda tried to deal with that in his own way, and I don't think particularly successfully, but it must have been an utter shock to him. I agree. And it's, DeMond's techniques of reading, his techniques of reading rhetoric, allegory, and it's all against the type of totalitarian framework of hermeneutics and
these other things. So, I mean, I'm not sure. I've kind of read conflicting accounts. Obviously, you can just frame him as a Nazi and there is something historically relevant to that, but there's the sort of methodologies afterwards that he tried to work out, seem to try to either, you could say whitewash or try to, you know, forgive himself for that, but they move in a totally contrarian direction from the types of fascistic totalitarian readings that one would assume. So there is this, you know, I'm not trying to forgive Derrida. I mean, I don't think there's anything to forgive. It's just that the types of methods that deconstruction foster are completely counter to at least the political tendencies, you know. Yeah, but Paul DeMann,
his work in America clearly isn't any kind of fascism, but it's a kind of urbane, liberal, He will make a text say something different and then make it mean something that still then again is still humanist. And these kind of things we were aware of and we were champing at the bit about. And, you know, you can really see that fury in Nick Lamb, perhaps more than anyone else, that he didn't want this humanist humanism to return. So he'd smuggle it back in. Yeah. Yeah. The recoding that he that he discusses. Yes, absolutely. I think it's interesting relative to, because he does sort of, maybe I should even read this bit of text here. Let's see. Land seems to have a lower estimation of Guattari than I sort of anticipated.
Taylor pointed out, you know, not a lot of Guattari had been translated at this time. I think there was one thing as far as I know. Land writes, Deleuze's power stems from the fact that he succeeds in detaching himself from Parisian temporality much more successfully than most of his contemporaries, including even Guattari, which I think Guattari is much more of the type of accelerationist. If you want to, I think we have to qualify that remark a little bit, but I think you can, especially Contra de Luz, I think there's a much more accelerationary, I guess, vibe to Guattari. And I'm just curious, even just as an aside from this, if Guattari is someone you've looked at any of his solo work. You know, obviously, like I said, the materials were probably not around during your PhD, but later on, have you engaged with any of his solo projects?
No, I haven't really. I mean, I am interested in, you know, the history of Lacanian psychoanalysis post-Lacan. I'm good friends with a woman called Anoushka Gross in England, who is one of our leading Lacanian analysts. And it's oddly Lacanian psychoanalyst does seem to be the richest form of just Freudian analysis these days. I don't know how schizo that is because it's actually quite respectable. It's becoming the academy in a sense. Yes. These are good, hardworking, respectable analysts, and they're Lacanians. No, I don't know enough about Grattori to comment on this, but I do want to comment on it a bit because I'm not sure why Nick Lann says this,
and I don't think he's got any basis for saying this whatsoever. He certainly wouldn't have had at the time. So just by claiming that, it's a conceit, it's a fiction, in order to smuggle his own reading of the Lers. into the mainstream, not into the mainstream, but into the seminars, into the literature. And it relates to something I said earlier, that he's saying that you can just think the outside. There is absolutely no problem in just thinking the outside. And Deleuze is already doing this. Because if you think death, and for him at this moment, there's no problem whatsoever thinking death as this indifferent heat death of the universe.
You can already write from that. And even though it's in the future, it's already controlling everything. He's getting it from Bataille. I mean, I don't know to what extent he ever understood physics or does understand physics, but he gave an extraordinary talk on entropy in a friend's flat where he drew all over the wall and talked about, you know, at the end, there's just going to be heat death and that's indifference and that's the death of everything. So it was already there. And this would have been 91 or 92. But I don't think that's in Deleuze. I don't think it can be in Deleuze because Deleuze is an empiricist and he's reading things quite carefully. When he's, if I can just, I hope this doesn't sound too naive.
I'll just backpedal and give my idea of what I think Kant's doing and then what Deleuze is doing. Kant's not interested in talking about things. is interested in talking about the relationship between things and these are the human spectacles so it's a fantastically powerful critique of the world but it keeps returning us to the human spectacles and de l'oeuf is doing something different because his becoming never returns us to humans but it returns us to things that he's actually pointing to empirical stuff, whether it's a masochist or whether it's a becoming rat or whether it's, you know, any of the various, the masochistic in my head, because that's one of the books I know the best. One or Many Wolves and the Rat Boy. So he's always talking about becomeings,
but they're empirical becoming. So critique allows these new becomeings that are lines of flight. I didn't always feel but I came to feel that Nick Lang was just leaping over this empirical bit where you actually look at stuff and read stuff and just leaping straight to death and say well it's all death capital it's all this death in the way that I understand it which is capital how empirical is that I think you skipped over the empirical bit but maybe perhaps you you would disagree with? Well, it might be to emphasize the transcendental aspect over the empirical aspect, right? And to make death that, to give death the last word does seem to be perhaps an ethical, political paradigm. But to use a Lacanian term, I feel like this
mention of Guattari is a kind of extimacy. There's a, you include Guattari to exclude him in order to focus your essay on Deleuze. It's an interesting move because usually Guattari is just left out even when capitalism schizophrenia is the focus. So to bring up Guattari and then to just eject him immediately leaves room for never mentioning him again in the essay. And to make all of A Thousand Plateaus and Anti-Oedipus, the text that he cites from, and these reflections on death, that leaves any, that kind of wipes your hands of saying, well this is all Deleuze but it's yeah I think Nick Lang couldn't do that because I don't know how great how good his French was and so I don't know what what else he was reading the only other
text by Deleuze that was really out there was the book on Nietzsche which Nick Lang didn't like interesting yeah so he loved Antioedipus and he loved Thousand Plateaus and they're Deleuze Guattari, they're DG, they're always DG and there just wasn't anything else and also if you're saying schizopolitics, schizoanalysis that's never going to appear in Deleuze because he's not a psychoanalyst he's never going to use that language whereas Guattari is going to use it all of the time because he's a revolutionary and a psychoanalyst and Deleuze kind of jettisons even the term schizoanalysis even when Guattari is still tearing with it. So, you know, I think shortly after... The theory of Guattari were, it would never have occurred to the last million years, would it?
Yeah, yeah. Even with his interest in Artaud, it's just that's not necessarily where he would have gone with it. And he calls into question the viability of schizoanalysis, I think, in between the volumes or right after A Thousand Plateaus. But even one of Guattari's last works, schizoanalytic cartographies, you can see that Guattari is still trying to give cachet to this notion. So I think there is an interesting move of excluding Guattari while including him, you know, or... Exclusive disjunction. Yeah, there's something going on. But in any case... Personally, I find Lacan to be one of the most creative thinkers. So I think it's interesting that land has an aversion to Lacan and kind of wraps up his whole project as turning Psycho-Nallis
into a structuralist parking lot. And he kind of goes against this claim from Guattari that it's Lacan that really, I think, schizophrenizes the signifier or whatever. Guattari takes this idea, the objet petit a, and derives the machinic a from that, for example, which I think, to me, I think has a lot of relevance. And I think it's interesting, like just on the, it's that Lan being such a fan of Nietzsche would not be find Lacan himself fascinating because I think maybe if, if not the sort of theoretically speaking that in his personal life, to me, in my opinion, Lacan is definitely a Nietzschean. Like he is probably, he's one of the closest things we've had to sort of this uber mention in quite some time and i think he's really
fascinating like i may even grant people that lacan is a charlatan but what he was able to achieve as a charlatan is something it's that's a great artistic achievement like it is this nichian thing that he's achieved to make himself lacan exceeds himself this character that becomes lacan is like this larger than the man the map escapes the territory to some degree i think Yes, I think you've got to understand how little we knew of Lacan at the time. Interesting. But the bigger lectures just hadn't been translated or published even. The four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis would have been out in 78 or so. And then there might have been encore in the 80s. But what you may have had some selections from McCree, but for the most part, you're right, there wouldn't have been a lot.
Yeah. And also things like big A, little a, it's clearly Hegelian. Interesting. Yeah. Nick Land, I think he's got such an affinity with Hegel. He will tell the history of the world and say where everything's pretending. He knows that he doesn't want to do it through dialectics. He wants a positivist account. So I think he just ignored him. I mean, even his version of Bataille, which, you know, Bataille, all of his understanding of Hegel comes from those Kojev seminars of the 1930s. And I think Niklan managed to expunge those from, you know, expunge that master slave from his account of Bataille.
if he's ignoring Lecant I think it's because he's trying to ignore that Kojave legacy of master slave through Bataille through Lecant you know it's still there in Derrida which would be again the humanist reading of Hegel yeah it's quite a savage reading of Hegel isn't it you know it's putting conflict at the heart of Hegel and I mean I guess the Hegel of the phenomenology is a kind of wild young man, but he's quite a civilized guy by later on in his life. But Kojev, if I'm pronouncing his name correctly, which I'm not. I think you are. Because he's Lithuanian or Russian. But anyway, go ahead. I think that was also a pen name. Interesting. I didn't know that. He was a very odd character.
I don't even know what his background in philosophy was. He was kind of weird diplomat, but incredibly influential with these papers. It influenced Safra too. So that Bataille, Kojev is saying that violence is at the heart, violence and alienation is at the heart of Hegel. And this becomes a way of understanding Marx, too. And that's a way of understanding Marx. For me, the reason Marx is materialist is because he puts violence into everything. It's not the economics, it's not moving stuff around the world or producing stuff, really, that makes it material. We're literally having class war all the time. Yeah. So I like that. I personally like that, that violent way of reading Hegel, which I don't think is necessarily very Hegelian, but that's the most influential one that you find in Bataille. And he's definitely there in Lacan. It's a very violent conflict between, you know, the triumvirate of the self.
it's also explicit in Walter Benjamin you know reading the and you can see this in Derrida's reading of the force of law right that there's this founding violence and then there's this perpetuating violence and they're sort of in tandem in order to keep the let's say the state apparatus or whatever you want to call it functioning I didn't actually know that in Walter Benjamin but yes I mean and you can see that in Otter there yeah yeah who is hugely influential but people didn't tend to really write about we'd all read their essays and we're all influenced by them we all all thought that ideology would just recoup everything maybe nitland's fear of humanism is just repeating that fear of ideology yeah reifying ideology right yeah they will always recoup we'll always be back in the box as the kind of victims
of the of the power structure well not the victims but the you know philosophy just ends up always being the spokesman of the most powerful people, even when we don't realize that we are. Yeah, the university discourse, you were saying like how the Lacanians have become this respectable school, and that would be privileging the university discourse over the analytic discourse, which would be to sort of mobilize a kind of parodying, not parodying, but a revealing and sort of undermining of master signifiers. But I think this gets us to anti-Oedipus for a moment, at least, where you see this also continue in A Thousand Plateaus, where there is a, even if Deleuze was influenced by, say, Reading Capital and Althusser, there's consistent
jettisoning of ideology as a conceptual category that I think is very against the grain and against the sort of time in which they're writing where ideology critique, the hermeneutics of suspicion would have been sort of climaxing to its height. And the way I've always tried to understand this, and I'm not sure whether this is a Nick Klan or if this is something that you engaged with in your studies, but the way I try to understand getting rid of ideology is that there's something in that that hides the play of desire or what they want to call desiring machines, right? There's desiring production. There's something that ideology explains away too much and almost presupposes itself. And so it's not a concept that is crystallized enough to determine problems in
such a way to kind of get at the heart of what they are trying to articulate with this notion of there's desire in the social and nothing else, for example. I didn't entirely follow all that and you did drop out. I'm sorry. I'm not sure how to go back on that bit. I just meant that the Liz and Guattari moving away from ideology as an explanatory category and a concept in order to sort of, if you will, dig deeper into the sort of machinic, the social and desire as the two functions of reality. There's something more radical, if you will, by going against the grain and jettisoning the notion of ideology as an explanatory category. that was the attraction then and it still is the attraction that you mentioned hermeneutics of
suspicion yeah i've heard that from vincent dacomb and from paul recur i'm not sure who invented it if you're always doing hermeneutics of suspicion you can end up being a bit of a conspiracy theorist that yes you think that that's happening but actually this is happening but certainly at their best delusion gatoria saying you think that ideology is commanding everything but no desires and we can show you how. We can show you, you know, you think that the state is stable, but all these other things are in a state of becoming, finding lines of flight. And there's just much more, I would say, liberation going on there. There's much more freedom going on than a strict reading of the power of ideology
would lead us to believe. If we were just all kind of Althuzer, Balibar and Machere, we might think that we could never escape anything but the lures and guitar show that we're always escaping and if if we can grab hold of that it's a liberationist project for me and i noticed i believe nitland has a lot of problems these days with that kind of language of liberation and emancipation and you know political projects of that kind which i still hold on to i vote in elections i campaigned political parties i signed petitions all the stuff that recoups no i i mean you hope that being a political activist has meaning and deleuze and the tory for me show ways that it can have meaning and they at least guatari if not deleuze as much deleuze would have
been more of the maybe the nick land type staying in in one's room and dropping out to a certain extent, but, you know, he did sign petitions as well. Maybe he didn't, he got tired of, uh, of going to communist meetings, but Guatari never flagged on that. That was something that I think energized him and kept him engaged. Even if he never stuck with any one coalition for a long amount of time, you know, he was, he was sort of always on the move and always sort of reforming, recreating different organizations and sort of involved on all kinds of different fronts. And I think that's part of why dropping out the Guattari, just to get back for a second, with what Nick Land does at the beginning of the essay, it kind of, it softens the edge
that Deleuze found with Guattari. It softens that politically engaged edge, even if in deficit repetition and the critique of the image of thought has political implications. there's a sense in which Guattari makes Deleuze's political engagement and his theoretical contributions much more practically concrete, in my opinion. I was talking with Cooper via email about when Nick Land in this particular essay, Making It With Death, says rapid de-stratification isn't a problem. And then it becomes, he has to engage with Deleuze and Guattari talking about fascism. He's saying, well, this won't become fascism, right, it won't become Nazism. But Deleuze and Grattari are giving a very concrete, specific link, account of how Nazism arises out
of fascism, that Nazism is maybe fascism with a death drive. It's a very specific observation, which is rooted in French and German history, and in their own experiences as boys, you know, kids in the wartime France. It's very, very specific. And as you say, Guthrie was all about the specifics. In Nick Land's hand, he takes seriously that Nazism is about death and then just runs with it as though it's no longer got any specificity, no relationship to a history of fascism or it's just another transcendental concept that is going to flog, right? Flog to death
because everything has to be flogged to death. At the very moment when he's saying rapid de-stratification isn't a problem, he kind of shows why it might be. Yeah, that's good. Very Hegelian, right? It was very interesting, his argumentation about this whole, like, if you try to not be a Nazi, then you're just kind of doing a type of dialectics there, right? Which I thought was ironic. I never did Hegel with him. And I suspect that he had been a huge Hegelian who rejected it all. Yeah. I feel about it. A reformed Hegelian. Yeah, a reformed Hegelian. Especially if he was close to Jay Bernstein, who's very much a neo-Hegelian. Not to bring out the elephant in the room, but if we go by something that Nietzsche says,
where a philosopher's life should be the greatest example, I mean, just as you mentioned in passing, the sort of far right turn that Nick Land has been on for, I'm not sure, the last decade, the last decade and a half. Yeah, about 10 years or so, roughly. Then that is kind of indicative of perhaps this, you know, taking too seriously this notion of sort of not combating the Nazi in your head or de-stratifying too wildly. I mean, I think that just to get back to the theoretical level, what Nick Land finds egregious in A Thousand Plateaus is an emphasis on relative de-territorialization over in Antioedipus, the seeming, maybe even romantic idea of absolute de-territorialization, this accelerated
de-territorialization. And he doesn't like the caution that they keep bringing up in A Thousand Plateaus. But when Deleuze talks about this in interviews, like in the Abysadere, he's talking about this notion that anti-Oedipus could have led to a kind of, again, romanticizing of debauchery or romanticizing of almost a kind of hedonistic nihilism, which I think is a wrong reading, but in the wrong hands can lead to that type of reading and that type of condemnation. And so a lot of what they're arguing for in their caution when destratifying is sort of it's not about sort of an unrestrained hedonic down spiraling which is the sort of normal stereotypic path of what
happens when one engages on that kind of line of flight is that it turns in on itself becomes suicidal right and i think that that's part of the at least on the liza side i don't know as much on Guattari's reflections on this, but on Galoza's side, he talks about in the Abbasidair, with this very pain look where he's like, look, I hope I didn't sort of promote this type of dissolution. He's like, look, if old men go on, they're hedonic, they're benders and end up, at least they've had a life. But he's like, he's lamenting the fact that it's the young of the generations, the post-60s generations that sort of end up in the kind of nihilistic self-destruction. That for him is something that he really seems to have moral compunctions about.
When was he talking, giving these interviews? Well, that would have been in 89 with Claire Parnay. It was supposed to be televised after his death. So he's reflecting back almost 20 years on the initial reception of Anti-Oedipus. That would be my generation, really. And there were boomers had a life that looked as though we weren't going to have because unemployment was just so high yeah certainly in the early 80s and there was i mean i i'm was always reasonably enthusiastic about drugs but there was a huge dark side that heroin was an enormous problem the afghan war just flooded europe with heroin cheap heroin eventually i guess you got in america
with the grunge artists. It's touching that Deleuze was worried about the darkness of our generation and how you could give an optimistic revolutionary account again, which has clearly been a struggle. We haven't particularly given one. There isn't really an optimistic revolutionary movement afterwards, or at least I haven't particularly seen one. In certain countries, you had certain indications like the Arab Spring, but those are exceptions. Yeah. The rule, if you will. And obviously I'm older than you. I've become technically generation X. I mean, I guess you're also digital natives in a way that I'm not. Half right. Yeah, right. I mean, I think we're both mid. I mean, I didn't have the internet until I was 1997 or so.
I was like a freshman in high school, sophomore before I even had a computer. But I mean, we were somewhat lower middle class or upper lower class or something. Yeah, but see, unlike you, Coop, my dad was a computer scientist, so I always had computers in the house. I had internet, email by the time I was 10. Well, I'm also a few years older. I'm like, what, three years older than you? Yeah, three years older. Well, this leads me to a question about accelerationism. Do you think that acceleration is happening? I'm never sure that I actually believe it, but I come from a generation that's prior to that. I'm writing at the moment about an ancestor of mine who became famous in the 1830s because of the boom in publishing.
So there was an enormous explosion. There was a kind of a first information revolution in the late 1820s, 1830s. Yeah, yeah. My ancestor became famous as a kind of figure of the working class. He was a kind of example of a working class man who'd had it tough. And in many ways, that's the birth of popular culture through the first information revolution. And I do wonder whether we haven't really stepped out of a notion of popular culture. Is it really accelerating so fast? Are we really in an accelerationist world? Oh, I think so. I don't know how people would feel who are younger than me. I absolutely think so. I mean, just to look at my lifetime, very germane to the details I was just discussing, you know, I've gone from going to the mall to shopping online from a computer to shopping
from my, while I'm on the go from my device and a one touch purchase. So, I mean, that's a banal example, but I think relative to something like, I mean, something like Twitter, for example, I mean, all the things, all this Trump, the phenomenon, January 6th, climate change, all of this stuff. I mean, I think the whole world seems to have blinders on relative to me. We've gone off the cliff. It's like the coyote and roadrunner. We haven't even realized that we've totally left any sort of solid ground. And that's what is absolutely terrifying is the inertia of history. The centrifugal force of capital is the only thing keeping the whole thing from totally crumbling in upon itself. The speed that it moves, if it's slowed down for a moment, that's it. It's over, I think.
Well, I'm going to have to think about that, but that's an eloquent way of countering me. I mean, I think about this relative to environmental destruction. I mean, you can see it happening on the fringes of empire. Those are going to be the first dominoes relative to climate. We are headed towards legitimate civilizational level collapse, in my opinion. It's just a matter of what timescale. Well, we're talking about Nick Land. I mean, how are we going to get dark, right? I mean, come on. No, but I would add to what Cooper said, if anything intelligent can be added to it, because it is, I think it is a dark confrontation. I think that's why the tendency is to sort of acknowledge it, but exclude it. I'm thinking of, for example, someone like Jordan Peterson, who wants to sort of say climate change.
Well, that's just that's just the natural order of things. And I think that that is there's nothing more insidious, perhaps, than a naturalizing of of acceleration in that sense, especially in the sense in which Cooper brought it up, which was in the in the terms of capital, you know, that that it's just a natural consequence of human flourishing or some rosy color romanticizing. My only thing would be that it does seem, I mean, in terms of you bringing up one of your ancestors and this notion of the information age, it does seem that if there is a sort of absolute tendency towards acceleration, as maybe Nick Land would say, there are, we can also kind of look at relative, relative bubbles or frames of acceleration that can be at least somewhat differentiated, you know, and obviously form a continuum, but they have discrete emphases.
I mean, you know, bringing up Twitter and this just the social media boom is one example of accelerated communication and interaction. You know, obviously, I don't think something like metaverse is going to be the next thing. But, I mean, this is part of the merit of science fiction is it helps us to perhaps project outward, you know, and loosen our constraints of reality, which, as Zizek likes to say, it's easier to think of the end of the world than the end of capitalism. I think that part of the thought experiments that speculative realism foments, for example, that kind of science fiction is perhaps more necessary than ever to think these things through and extend the line of thought.
And including stuff that you're talking about with crime fiction, because what is the ultimate crime than humanity? The murder of the real. The murder of the real on humanity's suiciding itself, right? Do you mind if we end on that point? Yes. Let me wrap up with this. I'll say that I think what Nick does, what he sees is that I think he sees capital as the ultimate pressure, the ultimate genetic predator. And I'm aping from Frank Herbert here a little bit because the God Emperor refers to himself as the ultimate predator. So he's really fixated on this Freudian notion of the death drive and the pressure. Raising the stakes to their absolute utter limits is the only way for humanity to sort of escape death. The pressures have to be absolutely relentless. And that's the only way you're going to be able to escape this this trap of death, perhaps. But anyways.
Optimistic. This has been a real pleasure. So thanks for that. Absolutely. We appreciate your time and sorry for keeping you longer than anticipated. It's always the time flies oftentimes. Yeah. I mean, we had such a great engagement and just really enjoyed talking with you. I didn't even know two hours had passed, but I do think that a light note to end on, if you will. At the end of this, I'll send Cooper Ian Grant's email. There you go. That'll work. That would be excellent. Once again, thanks to Nicholas Blanco for joining Taylor and I on this week's edition of the Machinic Unconscious Happy Hour.
It's violent because what happens there is the murder of the real, the vanishing point of reality. Let's not have a misunderstanding here. What I did the following With nothing left but to recycle Whitewashed, lobotomized people As in the blockwork orange