Somebody Wants to Take Down Nick Land – Jacobite
SOMEBODY WANTS TO TAKE DOWN
NICK LAND
Jonty Tiplady - May 14, 2018 -
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Somebody Wants to Take Down Nick Land – Jacobite
Top
Photograph by Sam Weinstein
Do you know that entanglement is given in the raciality of the concept, as
such?
—Fred Moten
Stop thinking about things for a long time without saying what you think
—Kanye West
Back to early 2017 again, then, whether you like it or not. But because those events never
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Somebody Wants to Take Down Nick Land – Jacobite
stopped happening, which is to say because they were never fully read at the time (and so
could never fully happen), we are already back there. We never left. We are already and
forever 2017.1.
The take-down atmosphere of that time persists, and has mutated into even more fierce signs
and symbols. Civilizational sexual hysteria is not the least of them, and hardly to be explained
away; rather than a cover for the extinction drive, that hysteria is the only cover now available.
It pushes the symptom itself one step too far.
Such is the atmosphere now and such was the atmosphere then: call out or be called out, maul
or be mauled. Leave your name lying around and it will be taken. By summer 2018 signs recur
and propagate. A certain abstinence of the example is useful. But the rules are clear:
A large number of online events are now subliminal panic rooms.
The locales of shunning resonate like empty wounds and tombs.
The attempt to kick each other out of thought deprives thought itself of its chance.
Violent disagreement has no opportunity as it goes under and is confused with rage.
Safety in numbers and collective slamming and in-group/out-group atmospheres are
dominant keys of the Oedipal Internet.
Recursive occlusion/machinal apophenia/platform disindividuation/heuristic
abstraction/”paint-shaming.”
Even Marxists understand that Kanye West does not have to read Nick Land to
understand him better than anyone else.
In the 2017.1 signscape, the name of “Nick Land” crops up as a failed exorcism. Not only has
“Nick Land” not vanished but his name, once purged of the disturbing atmosphere it attracted,
becomes fully automated. Envisaged as a hermeneutic traitor to the species by la petite
gauche—just like Kanye, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and de Man—he stands non-heroically as one
of the ongoing tests. The remaining challenge to thought is this: perhaps the real reason Land
was attacked in early ’17 was the sensitivity of his thought to the specter of extinction.
***
We will not take sides then. Or rather, we will not only take sides. Those who talk about the
“right side of history” or play the ablution game are already off the scent. They will be unable
to analyse the whole scene. Virtue and vice-signalling are merely dialectical halves. A space
might be imagined where neither is indulged. Where an empty tension is risked.
We will therefore have to repeat the opening of François Laruelle’s lesser-known Nietzsche
contra Heidegger and re-write it for our own times. We might say, for example, that the reader
will be challenged by the idea that Land is at first appearance a fascist thinker, but that he is
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Somebody Wants to Take Down Nick Land – Jacobite
ultimately a thinker of the subversion of fascism; that Land makes himself fascist to overcome
fascism; that Land has taken on the worst forms in order to hand them over to a different
process; that there is something sacrificial in this bargain. Laruelle writes that,
We are all fascist readers of Nietzsche; we are all revolutionary readers of
Nietzsche. Our unity is a contradictory relation (hierarchy without
mediation), just as the unity of Nietzsche is a contradictory and autocritical unity.
We will repeat the same, and find our unity here in this act of accelerative reading that gives
the form of every accelerationism to come. We will affirm that there is such a thing as a fascist
reader, and that there are ontological modes of fascist thought. This is hardly about you, as
reader, says Laruelle, since you are split—you are split between the poles of mastery and
rebellion the name “Nietzsche” or the name “Land” or the name “Kanye” represents.
Once you adopt this position, which is already the position that adopts you, you are ready to
move beyond both vice and virtue and into the worst. It is here, where the worst takes place,
that perhaps nothing changes even when change takes place inside change itself. The absolute
worst is possible and that is what a rejected name usually says.
***
No doubt the scandalization of Nick Land goes back a long way. His name has always been
somewhat folkloric, given to legend and misconstrual. Famed for his drug-fuelled exploits at
Warwick in the 90s and for a death-driven book on Bataille, and then for his supposedly
straightforward turn to the right, there is perhaps nothing newly shocking in his name. In terms
of the controversy in early 2017—let’s call it “the Nick Land affair” just to see what happens
—an exact moment of inception might at least be given, even if the content fails to be new. It
is the moment in the piece “Is It OK To Punch a Nazi (Art Gallery)?”, written in February
2017 by the unknown “O.D. Untermesh,” when Land’s work was associated with an “aura” of
“racism.” The essay was about the art gallery LD50 and its so-called promotion of a number of
“extreme” and “neoreactionary” thinkers including, in the eyes of the piece, Land himself. In a
sort of appendix to the essay, there is a clarification of Land’s relation to the sort of “fascism”
and “racism” the essay is about and criticizes. This part of the article was the moment of
inception:
Nick Land: One can split hairs by saying that Nick Land isn’t a white
supremacist and is just into eugenic selection for intelligence so we can
survive the coming AI singularity. However, a close reading of his recent
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Somebody Wants to Take Down Nick Land – Jacobite
writing reveals he just doesn’t like immigrants and black people. He likes
Asians because they are deemed to be smart and polite, and he likes
Japanese because they’ve resisted immigration. Racism is an aura around
all his other pronouncements.
An essay exists by Rene Girard called The First Stone, which describes the Epheseus stoning
recounted in The Life of Apollonius of Tyana by Philostratus, in which Apollonius leads a
crowd to the theatre to stone a beggar when the city is threatened by the plague. Certain
aspects of this scapegoat structure are well-known: for example that through the stoning the
city is temporarily purged and in this sense the act becomes a socially necessary function and
even a sort of miracle. Girard lingers with the account given by Philostratus and notices what
happens very early on, at the very beginning, “before the first stone is cast.” He notes how
“Apollonius refrains from mentioning the first stone by name” since if he did this “might
increase the resistance to the properly mimetic and mechanical impulse which he wants to
trigger.” The mechanism is, in other words, to a large extent automated and accelerative. It is
triggered and triggering. And once triggered, there is something unstoppable about it. Not
only that, the mechanical drive depends for its power on the unsaid, on the fact that it does not
name itself as scapegoating, or as a mechanism to trap and manipulate the crowd. It involves,
as it were, a lack of reading and a lack of attention. Scapegoating is itself an accelerative
technology.
If the case of Nick Land in early 2017 is to be imagined as a historical persecution text then
O.D. Untermesh plays the role of Apollonius. The small paragraph on Land is in many ways
deceptive, even if “well-intentioned” and backed up by correct outrage. The reading implied
threatens to be a fantasy: if one does the work of following the implied references, one finds
oneself in a maze of Tweets and little else. Liking Asians because they are deemed to be smart
and polite is not something easily tractable in any of Land’s theoretical texts even though it
can be gleaned from moments of idly humorous vice-signalling Twitter threads. No real lesson
can be drawn here: Land gladly risks losing points to provoke thought; the left risks inaccurate
thought in its attraction to nostalgic activism. Both may be haphazard at the level of mutual
code incompatibility.
To remain at the level of structural analysis, the paragraph acts as the first stone, and the
awkwardness of the first stone is that it has to begin the imitative process, what Girard calls
mimeticism but which might now easily translate as memeticism. Its sleight of hand is to insert
Land’s work into a list of other thinkers such as Peter Brimelow and Brett Stevens who appear
to be the same but are really (so we are told) also much more straightforwardly “fascist” and
“evil.” The paragraph appears to know what it is talking about (“a close reading of his recent
writing reveals”) and yet self-evidently does nothing to offer that “close reading” or guide the
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Somebody Wants to Take Down Nick Land – Jacobite
reader to where it might have occurred. One can go further and say that as if in close alliance
with O.D. Untermesh’s mechanism, at no point during the “trial” of Nick Land in early 2017
did close reading actually take place. The case against Land would have been a function of
lack of reading and was itself about lack of reading. Because O.D. Untermesh skips the
responsibility of reading, everyone else was allowed to do the same and there is a kind of lockin where argument by passive association and projective scapegoating take the place of actual
confrontation.
The importance of this is not that O.D.’s reading of Land was wrong or right, but that in
immediately and reactively coming down too heavily on one side, and reducing the tension in
Land’s work in advance, it both denies the reader the chance to discover different aspects of
his work, and, more importantly, prevents us imagining what all of this means as a cultural and
accelerative sign. In other words, whatever position one takes, there is no space for nonprejudicial thought. Imagine what might have been prohibited here for the “well-intentioned”
reader herself, especially in regard to the thanatography central to Land’s work. One question
insistently occluded is, and here we take the mechanism to be civilizationally totemic: what is
the relation of every contemporary politico-aesthetic scandal to the thinking of death and
extinction?
***
One speculates that the first stone thrown by O.D. Untermesh was not just the beginning of
memetic contagion and a mimetological response to the atmosphere created by Trump, of what
Tom Cohen calls “mass resentimentalization,” but also a token of resistance in the tradition of
what I want to thanatocentrism. The clickbait racist controversy consumer is invited to the
interpassive online delicatessen according to the following script: go ahead, focus on the
tasteless aspects of this or that person’s thought if you like, but if the essential prize of that
thought is dawning awareness of the extinction(s) now happening and accelerating towards us,
and if that awareness has to be prohibited elsewhere, there will always be a counter-force of
reading. There will always be what is now called backlash. The placement of Trump as a
mediatic scapegoat (who himself scapegoats and creates scapegoaters) has a sort of tidal wave
effect of micro-mimetological incursions, little waves of almost molecular aggression and
lateral distribution of blame, and all of this to assure that death is kept hygienically small.
Discourse itself is soaked by the laws of fake reading and projective accelerationism, and is a
function of denied extinctophilia. This itself is the technology of the hyperpharmakon that
splits 2017 into 2017.1., 2017.2., . . .
When O.D. Untermesh pirouettes out of their paragraph by asserting, “Racism is an aura
around all his other pronouncements,” there is an exacerbation of this already complex
situation. One may query the tidy generalization of “all his other pronouncements,” but more
interesting may be to reflect an unthought raciality in the very speed of such a judgement and
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Somebody Wants to Take Down Nick Land – Jacobite
to wonder how that relates to the possibility of extinction. In the example of Apollonius a
stoning shall occur precisely because information has been withheld, and for Girard this
always has to do with the denied presence of “collective murder.” It is not far from here to the
presence of an altogether more collective and universal murder, ongoing and hard to track—
and yet flagrant, the extinction drive itself, or the hysteria flagrante delicto of sexual
accelerationism—and again for Girard this does not have to be said as such to be there. A
working definition of raciality — and I mean the conceptual and experiential feints and
occlusions that form all judgments, and how they may now be automated and so impossible to
stop — is provided not by the thematic drift of O.D. Untermesh’s essay but by their reading
style in this one paragraph. Such a definition of raciality would involve first of all a lack of
reading, and the very presence of the projective scapegoating mechanism this brief
engagement with Land sets in motion, together with a repressive attitude to different and alien
definitions of death.
The question will be why focus on the noxious — again we do not simply mean “racist” here,
since there is no conclusive answer in this respect (unless you are Nick Land’s analyst) and we
may be dealing with a projection—aspects of Land’s work if as a whole it does not have some
other resonance, and what if not every statement of his has or could have a racist aura? What
if, in fact, the main thrust of his work has an entirely other aura and atmosphere, an
atmosphere of cold objectivity that always invites the lack of reading here described, which is
to say to scold it? Is a certain conceptual raciality set up to shut up, shut down and occlude this
something else that Land’s work names in advance? To what extent is racism fundamentally a
denial of personal extinction at the level of reading choices, or even of the fluidity of possible
universals? In other words, many aspects of the attempt to criticize Land may themselves be
conceptually biased in the way they occlude, ignore, refuse to read, and display contempt prior
to investigation of what the other is saying and has said about (and this is not just an example)
expanded thanatos.
Moreover, if there is a raciality in and of the concept itself, which is to say the presence of
juridico-theoretical violence and bias not just in the way we depict other races but in the ways
in which we conceptualize the very act of depicting the other’s racism, what repercussions
does this have, conceptually and experientially, for how someone’s body of work relates to
itself, early and late, and for how online critique works and fails to work as we go from year to
year?
***
One can suspect that the recoil of O.D. Untermesh, representing as it does a certain ideology of
the British Marxist left, is now broadly diagnostic. The actual identity of O.D. Untermesh
remains unknown, but one can pencil it in as both collective and talismanic, or at least
representative of a shared thinking. There are not only traces of semio-xenophobia, with Land
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Somebody Wants to Take Down Nick Land – Jacobite
taking his place in a long line of names read badly by an old boys network of English theorybaiters, but effects of a generational tendency freeze-framed in wheel spin. This ideology
traces back on the English scene to one invariant, which is the idea of the enemy-existence
whose extinction is worth anything. In its setting on Mute, the article by O.D. Untermesh
recalls not just the return of the repressed social underdog, the untermensch, but the
spectacular failure of the dominant radical Marxist and often poetic praxis in the UK to mark
and self-read the inoperativity of its own desires. Hex, bait, sacrificial victim, stupid Tory,
fuck the cops, and so on: however socially necessary these enemies may feel, none of them
have worked to stave off any future destruction more broadly. However sophisticated the
aesthetic movements that accompany nostalgic activism, their theorization now feels
inoperative.
It can be noted that O.D. Untermesh’s text also aligns with the attempt of a certain ideology to
atone and sublate itself out of its limitations through a turn to racial politics, but in this case a
conceptual limit persists and perplexes itself. Nobody understands the need to socially cohere
through targeting better than Girard, and yet here, as in Girard, the very addiction to having a
target comes into a heavy and belated crisis. Is O.D. Untermesh our own mirror image (so say
the English) or Theresa May in Vivienne Westwood drag? Isn’t there something a bit too 80s
about all this punk rebellion? But the situation is mixed: Land himself was in the beginning
utterly English in his adherence to a modernist prose tradition, that of Wyndham Lewis say,
and yet is also thoroughly continental (or French) in that particular way that the British
Marxist tradition has often found hard to stomach or understand. Perhaps vice-signalling itself
is simply part of an aborted colonial-punk contract. Combine this with trace-elements of a
provocative theory of eugenics (speed-read) and one can understand the online car crash.
***
Land’s work from early to late is insistent on the idea that death is never just death, and so may
in fact be “A-death,” where the “A-” names a muted shift from death to extinction. He has
always written close to the near end of man, fueled by ateleological scattergram, with an
intense awareness of “apocalypse market overdrive” and the collapse of the long-term into a
near-term that bears no resemblance to the reefed schizophrenias of various waning socialisms.
Why wait to say death, why wait to say extinction? The Landian critique of the discourse of
death and its attempt to expand thanatography (in recent work this has taken the form of an
emphasis on “the Great Filter”) means that his writing demands resistance, and that the more
legitimate the reasons for resistance (“authoritarianism,” “evil,” “racism”), paradoxically, the
more that the resistance may cover over. Looking back to early 17, the fact that it so much
mattered to proclaim that Land did not matter was but evidence of the extent to which Land’s
writing is, in effect, a writing that matters.
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Somebody Wants to Take Down Nick Land – Jacobite
The critique of thanatography is hard to bear because it always costs recoil and severe
adaption. The critical question astir is whether the breakthrough may be achieved without the
heroics of a techno-eugenicist Übermensch that consign the untermensch to second place,
hence inviting recoil and industrialized ressentimentalization and the imploding theatricality of
overdose (O.D.). If there are two Lands, one who constitutes this breakthrough and one who
indulges tasteless appendages, is it possible to hope, based on where we are, that at some point
in the future, which is to say now, the two Lands as indexes will be dissociable? The current
rage of la petite gauche seems reason enough to doubt it. The English avant-gardists are so
blinded that they can’t even see their proximity to the Cambridge Landianism of Vincent
Garton. One can wish for a better index, but this is where we land. The name given, however
violent, needs to be read.
***
Our contention is that Land’s treatment in early 2017 may be indulged as what Rene Girard
calls a historical persecution text. In a very profound sense, Land was a scapegoat for certain
pressures and ongoing occlusions that coalesce to make up “the Trumpocene.” This statement
should be read carefully, with two invisible hands. It does not mean Land necessarily suffered
or needs to be defended, for instance. It does not mean we refuse anti-racism as a discourse.
But it does mean that we open a space to mark the limits of anti-racism as a mode, and that any
body of work that follows through on the thought of a death that is not just that — death now is
predominantly extinction —will now always be shunted sideways and produce vivid signals of
transference. Historicist names the enclosure whereby an underestimation of linguistic
irreversibility, and a kind of viral thanatocentrism that dresses itself up behind the
correlationist fantasy of criticism, serve, and here is the irony Girard and others tee up for us,
to accelerate into inoperativity militant political efforts themselves. The meaning of the victim
or even epochal gimp threatens to simply escape again and again into the light of the screen,
thus victimizing the need of meaning itself and of new names. We forget ourselves and our coimplication through all the rerouting; we forget the status of humans insofar as they are
capable of thinking as Land does, and as the non-homogenous Alt-Right does, and this itself
seems part of the accelerative bargain. Girard himself locates in the process of victimization a
crisis-response and a type of primitive acceleration that closes out:
When a society breaks down, time sequences shorten. Not only is there an
acceleration of the tempo of positive exchanges that continue only when
absolutely indispensable, as in barter for example, but also the hostile or
“negative” exchanges tend to increase. The reciprocity of negative rather
than positive exchanges becomes foreshortened as it becomes more visible,
as witnessed in the reciprocity of insults, blows, revenge, and neurotic
symptoms.
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Somebody Wants to Take Down Nick Land – Jacobite
One might draw up a rule here: the less people take the time to analyse what happens each
time a problematic name is called out, the more automated (or accelerated) the phenomenon
becomes, as if the mechanized agon of the left (angelology) and the right (demonology) were
itself part of the way ‘time sequences shorten’. Here is Girard again, sounding like a protoLand:
We must think of the monstrous as beginning with the lack of
differentiation, with a process that, though it has no effect on reality, does
affect the perception of it. As the rate of conflictual reciprocity accelerates,
it not only gives the accurate impression of identical behavior among the
antagonists but it also disintegrates perception, as it becomes dizzying.
The monstrous point and the point of the monstrous is that one starts not to see at all. What’s at
stake is the pain of thought as it attempts to shut out thought through a blizzard of ablution and
scandal that replicates what it approaches; call this for example the addiction to Trump itself,
the T-function. Land’s work, for all its lapsing early on into lurid Bataille fanfic, for all its
strategic proximity to vice-signalling, is indexical of this lack of angelic English equanimity,
stating where we land now. Here is Girard once more:
Once set in motion, the mechanism of evil reciprocity can only become
worse for the very reason that all the harm which does not exist at that
precise moment is about to become real. At least half of the combatants
always believe that justice has been done since they have been avenged,
while the other half try to reestablish that same justice by striking those
who are provisionally satisfied with a blow that will finally achieve their
vengeance.
One sees the virus of “mass ressentimentalization” that accompanied the key epigenetic
moment of the Trumpocene in early 2017, the multiplication of online targets, the mutilation
of names that don’t cohere with a central and patrolled “radical” sense, and all of this as part of
a broader accelerative tendency that takes in both Land’s followers on Twitter and those who
pretend to be able to oppose him. This mechanism, Girard says, ‘can only become worse’, and
what it constantly represses is the vulnerability of the human itself and its tentative hold on
life. What is denied away is the one who if they are not who they are (immigrant, racist,
theorist, racial other, human, unconditional accelerationist) will be punishable by effective
(internet) death — and yet who they are is freighted with such human vulnerability that its
meaning is threatened by the attempt to push it out of discourse (and so the attempt is selfhttps://web.archive.org/web/20220517110021mp_/https://jacobitemag.com/2018/05/14/somebody-wants-to-take-down-nick-land/[3/26/2023 11:05:07 AM]
Somebody Wants to Take Down Nick Land – Jacobite
feeding).
The scapegoat is by definition the one who cannot not be the one who they are — at least not
before semantic conversion— and so their accusation always portends a crisis of meaning and
its covering over. To write of this disavowal-machine is not to hope for its lifting — there
seems no sudden surge into positive avowal available — but it is perhaps to know with Land
and Girard and others that ‘mimetic contagion of collective murder’ is already real enough to
reach a saturation point of enforced ignorance and non-consciousness. Girard’s The Scapegoat
is already in a sense a post-A.I. text and a description of the degenerescence within the laws of
human compassion. Even knowing this may be part of an accelerative epistemology readying
itself to be hacked by absolute disavowal, since (Girard again) ‘the acceleration of this vortex
produces the “victimage” mechanism that brings about its end.’ We represent already a drive,
an extinction drive (Aussterbestrieb), towards a unilateral end of the world, and yet in saying
so there is only metaphoric equality and a production of terms. Extinction abstracted from its
differences becomes a form before which we are all the same, a Generic Extinction. “Nick
Land” is one name, among others, for what that meant.
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Somebody Wants to Take Down Nick Land – Jacobite
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