==Land: Feb - Dec 94==
From: "DR N LAND" <PYRBX-AT-snow.csv.warwick.ac.uk>
Date:
Mon, 30 May 1994 18:32:32 +0100 (BST)
Subject:
trashing security
Charles has finally dragged me out of lurker space. His summary of my
session at VF seems fairly accurate given the circumstances (rant
mayhem and heat from all sides) but i'd like to take the question of
tactics a bit further in the hope that this list might be interested
in prolonging the question. Politics (i.e. pod security, actual or
virtual police activity) isn't the issue. Micro-war against power is.
Whilst i can understand that compared to the motor-mouth aggression
preceding my response to the "so what do we do?" question "dramatic
silence" is not a wholly misleading description, but i did finally
suggest that catalytic micro-activity modelled on a-life is the broad
schema for cyberian insurrectionary operations. Bottom-up or selforganizing processes clearly cannot have a overall grand-strategy or
master plan, and this - combined with the fact that micro-tactics
tend to be technically intricate, highly illegal, and locally
sensitive - accounted for my sluggishness in suggesting how they
might be accelerated (D&G are not exactly fothcoming on the matter
themselves).
If there is anything corresponding to a "Warwickian" D&G it
inclines towards the assemblage of machines (involving textual
components) oriented to the dismantling of (top-down insular)
institutions. The dissociation of all conceptions of "action"
organized by linear, neochristian, heroic-moral soul-mythologies is a
key element in such processes. Universities are an example of inert
state-apparatuses which are obviously fucked in the fairly short
term, and the drift of collective intelligence into efficient
decentred communicative networks has a massively important role to
play in kicking them down the slope, but isn't there a concern that
the polite vaguely scholarly chat that characterizes much net-talk
merely reproduces the docile oedipalized crap it could be cooking in
schizophrenia? Why not swap soft-weaponry/tactical diagrams and
reports about trying it out (whilst trying not to get arrested)?
Death to the Human Security System.
- K-423.
From: "Nick Land" <PYRBX-AT-snow.csv.warwick.ac.uk>
Date:
Mon, 6 Jun 1994 16:54:43 +0100 (BST)
Subject:
BWO
Yes, the BWO is solely functional. So it is not a question of what we
think about it, but what we can do with it.
Any suggestions? (Those involving less hippy-dippy shit
and more trashed top-down control apparatuses especially welcome).
------------------
From: "Nick Land" <PYRBX-AT-snow.csv.warwick.ac.uk>
Date:
Fri, 10 Jun 1994 15:09:25 +0100 (BST)
Subject:
re BWO 1844
John doesn't want to lose Seamus' suggestions, nor do i. Whilst
suspicious about the distinction between the human body and the rest
of nature, and agreeing with (1974) Lyotard that the category of
alienation is hopelessly theological, the Marxist reference is a
crucial one (the collapse of critique into insurrectionary war is the
only way out of moralistic bullshit). The BWO as inorganic body:
absolutely. Marx removes abstraction from philosophical idealism and
relocates it in the monetary-industrial process, as exchangeabilityplasticity neutralizing power as increasingly anonymous economic
control and dehumanizing the proletariat (production 'for itself')
through deterritorialization-disorganization of the 'natural' body
(cyborg becoming). Abstraction is matter degree-zero (BWO), no longer
thought as the encasted pinacle of reason in stratified societies,
but pragmatics interlocking the body into street deals, bottom-up
micro-intelligence (Seamus said lots of excellent stuff about this
too).
Telecommunism: cyberspace emerging from (/as) the postmodern
planetary market-place and cooking private subjectivity in the
anonymous burn-basin of schizophrenia, panicked power coming apart
in the cyclonic free-fire zones of massively parallelized
nano-cyberserk AI emergence, China-syndrome, irreversible social
disintegration, and oedipus melting away through 'trodes into voodoo
inhumanity. Megaconflict at the end of the world, and it's soooo
cinematic (feedback through Hollywood going interactive, as the earth
slides into LA fiction in flames. ((Don't mention the drugs and
postbiological sex))).
Wouldn't you just love trying to defend the New World Order?
(Come on Clinton, you can do it. Hit the brakes man! Hit the brakes!)
From: "Nick Land" <PYRBX-AT-snow.csv.warwick.ac.uk>
Date:
Fri, 17 Jun 1994 17:18:33 +0100 (BST)
Subject:
BWO
(Boringish note to celebrate arriving in our TAZ. Well done Michael).
In response to (some of) the points in Marie's post:
I haven't read the le Guin text (have to hunt it down) but i really
agree with the Taoism suggestion. As an atheistic, pragmatic,
antimoralistic, antihumanistic, and bottom-up 'religion' there's
no surprize that Taoism is where we're all going (or where we
already are? our agreement is entirely unnecessary, no preaching).
To describe the language of Plat.-6 as 'unusually dictatorial' seems a
little harsh, although the constant demand for prudence gets on my
nerves too. Or is it the (hypothetical) imperative form that's the
problem, i.e. do this, do that ...? If the latter i'm not sure it
matters, because it works like any other manual or guide: if you want
X do Y, do Z and things fuck up, no ethical bullshit therefore, just
techno-libidinal suggestions.
As for the BWO being deferred, that smells a bit derridoid to me. How
is it deferred? It's right there now. You're already doing things
with it. If you want to get out into the operating system it takes a
certain amount of technical proficiency (manuals again, or chemicals,
or whatever ...) but there isn't any big metaphysical obstruction to
doing it (just the human security system).
"black humour does not attempt to resolve contradictions, but to make
it so there are none, and never were any" CS-1 p.11
(Quick abusive note on Derrida: waves of hate against all the latestuff, and the Marx book in particular. He's trying to turn Marx into
a collective superego, and has started talking about it precisely
because he doesn't think it can do any real damage anymore. The man's
a Fortress Europe bureaucrat brimming with ressentiment at the Asian
economic supernova, and about as 'radical' as Ross Perot. End of
rant).
On John's remarks: all seem very sound Spinozistic schizofrenzy.
'Practical' tends to ring theory/practice dialectic alarm bells for
me, but that's just terminological idiosyncracy.
P.S. on D&G and nonlinear dynamics. Stuart Kaufman's 'The Origins of
Order' plugs into a lot of this stuff. It deals with complexity
catastrophes as sudden collapses of machinic trajectories into
(relatively low dimensional) 'boxes' in phase-space - i.e.
territorialization. Also lots of material on smooth versus rugged
(adaptation phase-space) landscapes during terrestrial biogenesis.
From: "Nick Land" <PYRBX-AT-snow.csv.warwick.ac.uk>
Date:
Sun, 19 Jun 1994 13:16:21 +0100 (BST)
Subject:
schizoscience
I'm trying to 'straighten out' some to the D&G plus complexity
material for a book, so i'll take Marie's remark as an opportunity to
set out
An Introduction to Phase-Space
1) Phase-Space is an extensive model of the BWO. It displays machinic
activity as a synchronic pattern - a line - traced in a space with
one dimension for each polarity of behavior (hotter/colder,
faster/slower ...) or - interchangeably - axis of intensification
(wolfings, becomings woman, cyborgization ...). 'Like' the BWO it is
a smooth space of systemic process, appended virtually to every
machine as the whole of its possible range of functions. Complex
dynamics construes all systems as exploring a phase-space, migrating
through a BWO.
2) Systems are ordered (territorialized) to the extent that they
restrict their behavioral searching to a relatively small zone of
phase-space, exhibiting attractors. The two classical attractors are
zero-dimensional points (stasis, perfect equilibrium) and one
dimensional line-segments (oscillation, periodic equilibrium). Rich
computer-accessed phase-spaces facilitated the discovery of a third
kind of attractor (strange ones), of more complex low dimensionality;
zones of dynamic nonperiodic tangling, in proximity to which
behavioral trajectories territorialize in a graphic but unsimplifiable
pattern.
3) The systems captured by strange attractors belong to the phylum of
cybernetic (nonlinear) machines, for which searching behavior guides
itself through interaction with its phase-space position, responding
sensitively to the outcome of its own trajectory (rather than to a
fixed external influence). In far from equilibrium conditions (where
there is not a massive point attractor drawing the system
irresisistably towards machinic stasis) phase-space trajectories can
sometimes complicate strange attractors, producing a 'dissipative
structure' or involutionary process that moves ever further from
both stereotypic regimes (rigid territories, tight and fixed phasespace boxes) and random ('ergodic') walks that learn nothing from
where they have been.
4) Planetary schizocapitalism is evidently an involutionary process
of this kind, going haywire in phase-space, although its (behavioral)
dimensionality is so vast that it is difficult to get it on the
screen (and getting it on the screen would add another dimension).
Classical and neoclassical economics (including Marx and Keynes) have
conceived capitalism as a close-to-equilibrium system with a virtual
point attractor ('perfect competition') that would be reached i) by
letting things rip, ii) by intelligent state intervention, or iii) as
terminal system crisis and entropic collapse. D&G on the contrary
understand it as departing from rigid (despotic) equilibrium since the
beginning, and constantly complicating its attractor by phasetransitions through decoding; heightening the dimensionality of its
territory, and disordering its behavior within a larger and shallower
attractor basin that tends to smooth space.
(De Landa and Massumi both have lots of interesting things to say
about all this.)
This is all written very fast, so i apologise for a) obscurity b)
banality.
Any feedback very welcome.
From: "Nick Land" <PYRBX-AT-snow.csv.warwick.ac.uk>
Date:
Mon, 20 Jun 1994 14:22:22 +0100 (BST)
Subject:
schizoscience
Thanks to Thomas and Alan for feedback. It seems likely i'll just
have to roll with Thomas' remarks, which are all helpfully exacting.
I've fallen in love with the term phase-space, and it's torture to
hear it defined so precisely (aaaghh! stuck in state-space, total
bummer). I also agree i've been treating dissipative structures much
too generously (as runaway self-organizing processes, rather than
mere far-from-equilibrium homeostats, does nonlinear dynamics already
have the word i need?). Even 'complexity' or 'antichaos' ('plectics'
is Gell- Man's latest suggestion i think) seems more interested in
the attainment of FFE stability (collapse into territories) rather
than migrations away from equilibrium, which strike me as the really
important tendencies (no longer placing dynamics in the service of
conservation, but rather the opposite). I suppose a-life is the
exception here.
Alan's points are more immediately tractable. Yes, i am treating
capitalism as a (virtually) integrated planetary system that
overwhelms all incommensurability. Don't aim at where your enemy is
now, but where they will be in the future. All restricted local
economies are melting into general economic dynamics, at great and
accelerating speed, with an ever more sophisticated array of
techno-financial hyperinstruments installing compatibility. Tax
systems (combined with government borrowing on international
markets) already provide the grid, as D&G point out in Plat.-13, and
IMF universalization has reached escape velocity. There isn't a
chance in hell that regional political initiatives can achieve longrange autonomy from the fate of the planet as a self-organizing
system or singular artificial eco-process. With China on-stream and
India arriving fast nationality and regionalism are on the way out,
except as desperate nodes of xenophobic resistance that slide very
rapidly into fascism (as Europe seems intent on proving). Any
revolution that is not spontaneously planetary is doomed.
Take China as an example (20-25% of the world's population).
The Maoist set-up allocated vouchers of local validity that were meant
to ensure people were fed as long as they remained in the 'right'
place. A directly bureaucratic rationing system was thus able to
treat the population as a resource of the state, territorially coding
it, and forestalling - to a considerable extent - bottom-up out of
control developments. The Deng Xiaoping reforms of 1979+ replaced
this system with the cash nexus, i.e. currency of general (ultimately
international) validity, allowing exchange to deterritorialize. BANG!
150 million excess peasants migrate toward the coastal cities and
especially the SEZs, buying food within a market system, and 'lockingin' the whole chinese economy to universalized transactions:
speeding up integration with Hong Kong capital (meaning in turn, with
From: "Nick Land" <PYRBX-AT-snow.csv.warwick.ac.uk>
Date:
Tue, 21 Jun 1994 15:47:27 +0100 (BST)
Subject:
schizoscience
Question for Thomas:
If D&G maintain that all intensities (traits of attraction) are
speeds, is every state-space mapping of machinic trajectories a phasespace after all? (I'm beginning to think i ducked out of this one too
quickly).
Could you expand your definition slightly, and indicate any
opinions you might have yourself on the subject (i.e. is De Landa
employing a notion of phase-space that you would consider 'strict'?).
Obviously anyone else who feels able to bundle into this will earn
similar undying gratitude (as a spontaneous squiggle on the BWO).
From: "Nick Land" <PYRBX-AT-snow.csv.warwick.ac.uk>
Date:
Tue, 21 Jun 1994 15:47:27 +0100 (BST)
Subject:
schizoscience
Question for Thomas (sans doute, the "doubter")
speeds
space
all intensities (traits of attraction) are
every state-space mapping of machinic trajectories a phaseducked out
expand
phase-space
undying
spontaneous
BWO).
From: "Nick Land" <PYRBX-AT-snow.csv.warwick.ac.uk>
Date:
Fri, 10 Jun 1994 12:18:27 +0100 (BST)
Subject:
re self-organization
Dear Martin,
a counterposition:
The identification of 'anarchy/nihilism' with entropy is exactly
the kind of move the discovery of self-organization discredits.
Anarchy (the absence of transcendent law) and nihilism (the absence
of transcendent purpose) are both ineliminable 'properties' of
matter/reality which - far being initial states that pass
obediently into 'order' - involute, intensify, and rip-down the
pseudo-laws (strata, judgements of God) that imprison multiplicities.
There is never enough disorder ('you haven't seen anything yet').
Socio-theological conceptions of order (from which science and
philosophy draw) is far closer to entropy than negentropy:
a blancmange of molar resonance and homogeneity, with molecular
communication relayed hierarchically through a transcendent instance
(social entropy-max: born-again christians at a republican
convention). Deviating from such monotonous conformist gunk,
negentropy disorders; catalysing mess, mutation, and
unpredictability, horizontalizing interactions, and deleting Global
control.
Take techno-runaway for example (after all, it's taking us);
accelerating up the negentropy gradient towards radically demolarized
(i.e. nanotechnical) planetary substance, is this a tendency to
order? A suppression of anarchy-nihilism?? A becoming-lawful??? Try
telling that to the Human Security System, who have already started
putting the Turing Cops together and (as Seamus mentioned) are
preparing a neo-fascist counter-offensive against the net.
Complexity trashes power.
Accelerate the process.
Anarcho-nihilism against Global Control.
From: "Nick Land" <PYRBX-AT-snow.csv.warwick.ac.uk>
Date:
Tue, 21 Jun 1994 14:52:33 +0100 (BST)
Subject:
planetary system
Alan, i just don't get the analogy between the MIC and an integrating
planetary economic system: the former might be a totalization but
there is no reason for the latter to be (D&G's starting point in AOe
is that wholes do not have to be totalizations). As for stock-market
fluctuations: do fluctuations in eco-systems make them equally nonexistent as real wholes? You seem to be suggesting that only
seamlessly homeostatic predictable systems are 'really integrated';
back to neoclassical dreaming. It is precisely because fluid
denationalized capital is best positioned to take advantage of
instability, imperfect information, complex risk profiles, etc. that
it inexorably absorbs more parochial set-ups into its axiomatic. Snapshots of particular peasant micro-economies surely cannot count as a
counterweight to the immense tidal forces that have been unleashed
by the collapse of import-substitution siege economy development
models over the past 15 years or so. China, India, Latin America,
even Africa are all sliding down the same slope of attraction - this
can't be a coincidence, or a misleading surface phenomenon, it's
infrastructural. (The flip side, of course, is the crash of the EuroJapanese model, who ever talks about a 'third way' anymore?)
The integrity of the planetary economy results from the
singularity of an abstract machine - that of a 'working economy' =
capitalism - that everyone is driven to try and implement. Either a
succesful innovation/sifting machinery is in place, dissipating
entropy to sophisticate its production processes irreversibly, or
horrible things happen in the global market place (UK late '70s,
Africa through the 80s, Japan now). The kind of ontologizing
pluralism that suggests each locale might have specific best
practices makes no sense to me, unless it cashes out into some notion
of racial essense or equivalently vicious garbage. There are only
particularist conservatisms, markets, and schizorevolution.
Developmental pluralism is an ideology of the populist 'right' (Khmer
Rouge, Sendero, BJP, assorted eurofascists, Zhirinovsky, Perot).
I'll still hunt down the books you suggest, if only to get onto
a more focused rant.
From: "Nick Land" <PYRBX-AT-snow.csv.warwick.ac.uk>
Date:
Wed, 22 Jun 1994 14:54:24 +0100 (BST)
Subject:
planetary system
I agree with a surprizing amount of what Alan said in his recent
posts, it is just that overpopulation, ecocrisis, runaway arms
markets, etc. are components of a system - not a totality - which is
nothing beyond how it works. All these processes are densely
interactive, which does not imply their subordination to some
ultimate intelligible principle, but does imply the existence
of a machinic singularity adjacent to the entire multiplicity
that operates as a mutating attractor.
Braudel seems really helpful here (and addresses some of the
points Jon makes) when he insists upon the irreducibility of market
dynamics / microcommerce to CAPITAL (top down economic power in bed
with the state). Of course capital has never sided with markets, and
the problem with neoliberals lies precisely in their naive
assumptions to the contrary. Even the notion of the MIC can be
disposed of too quickly - how much competitive pressure has
Lockheed ever been through? The key is to keep the state from riding
in on its white charger to sort out injustice and 'market failure',
and my worries about pitching things moralistically as Jon seems to
is that this is exactly what is encouraged. It is worth noting that
massive discrepencies in wealth distribution are far more typical of
corporatist systems with high levels of government involvement
in the economy, large public sectors, and high inflation
rates (Brazil: 20 fold income differential between top and bottom 20%)
than in densely meshed market systems (Taiwan: 5 fold differential
between same). De Landa makes a (to my mind) highly persuasive
historical argument that Taylorism is a military model transplanted
into civilian production and carrying with it the entire shit-package
of command-control organization, oligopolistic power, and high levels
of macropolitical support. As long as American workers think the
federal government is - or could be - on their side they'll continue
to get shafted, and mawkish grief about the situation doesn't get us
anywhere. The problem is fascism, as D&G are unswerving about, and
not the absence of utopia (the best we're going to get will have to
sort itself out from below).
Microcommerce might be 'local' on the BWO, but not in
geopolitical space, at least; not anymore (in the future). Direct
rhizomatic interconnection without regional segmentation or relays
through macrocapital/political control apparatuses is the terrain for
a parallel distributed war against molar formations; the planetary
system as a neutral zone of engagement populated by nonhuman and
human particles of a variety of scales and tropic tendencies (feral
software fragments, microtraders, zaibatsus, states ...), without
essential individuality, but subject to more-or-less paranoid
sedentarizations (neonazi groupuscules are proliferating
enthusiastically on the net). Collapsing states are likely to become
extremely demented and brutal, and it is tactical idiocy of the
highest order to preserve the slightest hint of ambivalence in
relation to them. Destroy! Destroy!
From: "Nick Land" <PYRBX-AT-snow.csv.warwick.ac.uk>
Date:
Tue, 28 Jun 1994 13:55:54 +0100 (BST)
Subject:
planetary system
(Due to a technoglitch at the local server i've missed three posts
((including one from Alan i think)), so this is a response to Jon's
alone. Except, vis Aden's question (('adjacent whole = BWO?' - yes)))
1) Braudel. In contrast to what Jon suggests about the inconsistency
of D&G and Braudel on capitalism, i think the latter is the key to
the former, i.e. how it is possible to target capital as the last
socius whilst affirming the dynamic of the market (decoding and
deterritorialization). D&G are explicit about the capital
(macroeconomic) 'complex' of megacorporate (price setting) capital,
the banking system, and the state as an apparatus for
reterritorializing schizo-commercial fluxes as pharaohnic social
authority, but one that is nevertheless driven by the necessity of
escaping its marx-type crisis/entropy global attractor to
continuously recycle its despotic vestiges through the market place
and 'recuperate' new swathes of social dissolution. Even capital
can't buck the market.
2) So the welfare state has been dismantled since 1980! Look at some
statistics; in the UK (Jon's) example the state now absorbs a greater
proportion of GNP than in 1979. Neoliberal witherings away of the
state are no more plausible than socialist one's.
On the arbitrariness of Brazil/Taiwan: i chose this contrast
precisely because it is so indicative, it could have been any
tigerish asian economy versus any corporatist latin american /
african / middle eastern one, or an aggregated contrast block to
block, or whatever. The figures are not easy to obfuscate, as
everyone with policy responsibilities in developing nation
governments understands, hence the almost entirely uniform tendency
to junk clapped-out 1970s rhetoric and put together a functioning (=
opened-up) economy. Europe will be the last to learn anything from all
this, as it retreats into paranoid protectionist xenophobia and falls
to bits horribly, but then ignoring all factual evidence as nastily
positivistic in order to free-wheel in ideological purism is a selfindulgent neocolonial trait.
3) Markets are self-organizing complex systems. If they are to be
sniffily condemned as instruments of rightist domination, there is
surely some necessity to suggest an alternative. Central planning?
The age of aquarius? Juche?
4) So what to destroy? All the reterritorializations: institutional
loyalties, regional identifications, linguistic purities, ideological
reflexes ... scramble every sense of belonging, accelerate the
process, dissociate from the project of social order, assemble groups
rhizomically rather than establishing them hierarchically ... a
matter of libidinal disinvestment from molar formations with
associated microbehavioral migrations from all traditional
structures. Everyone knows that the past is dying anyway (left/right
panic accompanied by endless modulations of neo-civic bullshit),
fascism is the last hope of conservatism, sabotaging it lets the
schizo-tide roll in. Far more is still needed on this (effective
antifascism), but i don't even know to what extent we agree that it
is where the real problem lies yet.
From: "Nick Land" <PYRBX-AT-snow.csv.warwick.ac.uk>
Date:
Thu, 22 Sep 1994 13:30:20 +0100 (BST)
Subject:
Re Capital
Capital has a double aspect; that of a Form (or series of forms), and
that of a singularity. Under the second aspect terrestrial capital
process is not a generic essence, but a unique event, designated by a
proper name (like hurricance Julie or the Vietnam war). Braudel has
probably gone furthest in delineating this side of the beast,
returning capital to its sense of a historically pathdependent pinacle or head, always organized in terms of a
geographical segmentation between a central zone
(Venice, Amsterdam, London, New York ...) and concentric rings of
peripheralization. He locates it in the third tier of a concrete
geohistorical apparatus comprising material life (peasant
subsistence), the market economy (commercial interaction), and
CAPITAL (high finance, politico-economic grand strategy, monopoly and
oligopoly power). Anyone who has ever bought a lump of hash knows how
crazily authoritarian it is to collapse the top two into each other it can only lead (if consistently pursued) to Pol Pot type rural
fetishism, xenophobia, and heaps of corpses.
De Landa will have lots of excellent stuff about this in his new
book (due out next year i think).
Schizophrenia = split-head = chopped-up capital. The schizoanalytic
task: how to dissociate capital from below (rather than attempting to
domesticate it by way of a appeal to a superordinate
metaconcentration of power ((the state))).
Socialism is finished, but anticapitalism is just beginning. Death to
the Human Security System!
==Land Jan 1995==
From: Nick Land <PYRBX-AT-snow.csv.warwick.ac.uk>
Date:
Sun, 15 Jan 1995 13:41:49 +0000 (GMT)
Subject:
making it with death
I agree with almost all the criticisms made of MIWD, especially those
laid out in Karen's first post. If i was to diagnose the essay as a
pathological symptom it would be to see it as a burnt-out protestant
reaction formation to occidental monotheism, and thus hopelessly
crude about war, caution, difficulty (labour i still have problems
with). A large influx of mid-period (no pun intended) Irigaray and
dark-side (anti-confucian) chinese philosophy was definitely needed,
and the garbage about german idealism was a complete waste of
everybody's time. On the plus side, i would just say that the title
is fucking brilliant and the usage of a national socialist spectre
to prop up the very psycho-social control systems that gave rise to
the phenomenon in the first place - frenzied reaction to
deterritorialization / ethno-cultural meltdown - is in need of
vicious critique. It also seems to me that Mani goes too far in
emphasizing the 'fluidity' of the SS - phobic authoritarianism is
surely constrained when it comes to runaway molecularization (not
that i want to sustain a line as simplistic as the millerean
Theweleit/MIWD knock-down.
From: Nick Land <PYRBX-AT-snow.csv.warwick.ac.uk>
Date:
Mon, 16 Jan 1995 18:11:59 +0000 (GMT)
Subject:
caution
The most concentrated ATP remarks on caution are to be found in the
BWO plateau. The suggestion that it should be thought as immanent to
desire (as an empirical condition for the tolerance of risk)
is very helpful - it is the chinese way to think - and makes
the translation as 'prudence' deeply inappropriate. Caution as a
tactics for the prolongation of adventure?
I suspect the response to homey blah blah's inane attempt to stratify
rhizomatics as a discourse belonging to 'the master' is as irritating
to everbody as it is to me. What exactly is supposed to have
obstructed 'a little brown person' on their way into this turbulence?
It doesn't seem to me that schizzed english can be identified with
WASP hegemony or the language of the academy (though the latter is a
security project in process, and exactly what this list is
contesting). On the contrary, minoritarian lines of flight are its
most important trajectories, and the key to its planetary
deterritorialization (its becoming 'American' or homeless). A
semiotics assembled out of patchworks of external relations is
incapable of expressing a political dominion. All i can see in these
interventions is an attempt to silence and ghettoize. (Sorry to make
a mountain out of a pustule).
From: Nick Land <PYRBX-AT-snow.csv.warwick.ac.uk>
Date:
Tue, 17 Jan 1995 10:12:32 +0000 (GMT)
Subject:
caution, ass-kicking
I'm sure Greg Polly is basically right, Chris dishing out authority
to me makes it even more likely. As for Homey Blah Blah's last post
is the first one i have enjoyed. Twist it into whitey. I love it when
i make people feel dirty.
From: Nick Land <PYRBX-AT-snow.csv.warwick.ac.uk>
Date:
Tue, 17 Jan 1995 14:34:20 +0000 (GMT)
Subject:
bad temper
What Greg's line seems to elide is the fact that the West
(globalizing monoculture) is bad tempered. Spinoza/taoism/K-space
matrix are all pacific and coolly antagonistic to power, but i still
love Fritz with his vituperations, rants, and headaches. It's easy
for sophisticated intellectuals to assume atheism, but the shit
carries on, maybe its even growing, and its doing things to bodies
fairly systematically (mowing them down in abortion clinics for
instance). The Occident isn't going to slide smoothly into oceanic
schizophrenia, it's going to be a ****ing mess, it already is.
Europe is becoming an abattoir, and Algeria hasn't even gone under
yet, or Russia imploded. Is an American president ever going to admit
that God is dead on TV?
Despite my snarly denunciations of hippy dippy shit - which i've
pumped out in enormous quantities myself - Erik continued to write
fascinating things about the I Ching (for instance). I don't see any
indications of silencing, just because a noisy burn-out protestant
with a serotonin deficiency is barging about in semiotic brownian
motion, who's intimidated? So i want to put in a defence of grating
irritation and the vague ache to cause trouble even when it's stupid
and going nowhere, it's best to be somewhere else, and its
intelligent to try and learn from anything that is, but i'd still
rather have Nietzsche on syphillis and hate than prozac. The BWO can
tolerate incoherence and confusion. It isn't necessary to clean
eveything up. When homey blah blah is attacking molar bullshit rather
than propagating it i appreciate that grit in the machine too (not
that it matters: this is probably just grotesque liberal
recuperation, so carve it up).
From: Nick Land <PYRBX-AT-snow.csv.warwick.ac.uk>
Date:
Fri, 20 Jan 1995 17:03:10 +0000 (GMT)
Subject:
atheism
Whilst the Greg/Erik position on the 'christian' right is
attractively kooky, it seems to depend upon a rather reductive notion
of what a christian is. Whether or not someone believes the
appropriate fairy tales is scarcely the issue, as Chris suggests; the
'post-nietzschean' question concerns libidinal investment: in
centralized authority, transcendently legitimated power, a paternal
absolute, technology (ideas/spirit controlling matter) ... etc. I'd
have to know more about Karen's divine before seeing how it connected
with all this (immanent divinity? Why call it divinity? At least
Spinoza had the cops to worry about). Vis Strauss; Nietzsche
describes christianity as platonism for the people: it's
authoritarian idealism which is the problem, not the incest,
cannibalism, and similar ritualistic ornamentation that drooling
priestcraft has pasted over it. The systematic tendency of theism is
to obstruct the future, legitimate power, close-down shamanism, and
in general perpetuate the despotic icon (however anti-iconic its
rhetoric: sublimation is the most effective mode of conservation).
As for atheism, that takes things back to a disagreement that seems
basically insoluble: whether a definition through naked antagonism is
attractive. It is to me, but i don't expect concensus here. Would you
laugh at the assassination of the pope for instance? I'd be on a high
for weeks, but there isn't anything to argue about. Either you find
the thought of Billy Graham falling into a burger-mix machine comic
or not (jokes don't bear explanation). Dismantling global control is
automatically molecularizing.
bless you all - Nick
==Land March 1995==
From: Nick Land <PYRBX-AT-snow.csv.warwick.ac.uk>
Date:
Thu, 2 Mar 1995 17:57:43 +0000 (GMT)
Subject:
ontological heavy shit
Emerging out of an influenza-bureaucracy snarl up to throw my five
cents worth into this discussion.
Philosophy is about power, and arguments are always displaced
conflicts with their source elsewhere. Hegel and Derrida are affined
as modern and ultramodern institutionalizations of struggles
concerning the role of the academy, and the discursive processing of
social history. Any fight with such figures that takes an academic
format has lost in advance - the domesticated version of this being
the endlessly repeated claim that opposition is already recuperation but this presupposes recuperation as an a priori condition of
engagement. Take deconstruction (Hegel having lapsed into a joke
except amongst ivory tower philosophers): its function is to fuel an
'eternal quest' - inexhaustible in principle - that sustains a docile
humanist academic praxis, one that can only become effective if the
academy plugs into molar political machinery attuned to the
modernization of the state. It is either a black-hole or a refelxive
appendage to bureaucratic mechanisms, neither of which fatalities is
addressed by accepting its own terms of debate and treating it as a
philosophical position (it has no position, as it is cynical enough
to acknowledge itself, but works at another level).
Meeting sad robot-clone deconstructionists, with their race for
respectability and renovated academic prestige, who could think
argument has anything to do with it? To repeat: the presupposition of
deconstruction is not philosophical, but institutional. It
corresponds to a law of large numbers of student thru-put, something
to keep the cattle occupied on their way through the obsolescing
modernist processing machinery and into the crumbling redoubt of
professional/managerial social policing. Don't ask what
deconstruction does, but how it works. Transforming Marx into a
malleable collective superego being the latest farce (I shudder to
think what Derrida's Deleuze book is going to do).
Capitalism and Schizophrenia can't be bothered to argue with this
stuff, it rips up the institutional self-apologias that underpin it
and keeps on moving, plugging directly into machinic processes rather
than neurotically tinkering with their representation within elite
social spaces. Your lecture-theatre cleverness bores the fuck out of
us. If you don't understand the difference between an intensity and a
signification philosophical debate isn't going to sort you out.
Ontology makes us laugh, and we ask philosophically incompetent
questions like: what's the voltage? What's obstructing the current?
How to accelerate the process? How to junk academia into
decentralized flow-switching networks? If power thinks it can
distract us with silly signifying games it hasn't begun to get the way