Today on Acid Horizon, we welcome Dr. Gregory B. Sadler of Dr. Gregory B. Sadler fame to join us for a reading of Fanged Numenau by Nick Land. We use the concept of machinic desire to guide this discussion. However, we take various tangents and look at various aspects of Nick Land's work, its implications, and its impacts. Also, thank you to all the patrons who have provided both financial and moral support to us as this podcast has grown. This month, we will also hold a patrons-only seminar on the philosophy of Michel Foucault. We will look at his essay, The Analytic Philosophy of Politics.
Subscribers at the $5 level or above can join us online at the time of the seminar. any subscriber can access the recordings. Furthermore, we are currently supporting an art space in Louisiana called Yes We Cannibal. Together, we collaborated on a design for a t-shirt that they are selling to help support their space. I put a link in the show notes. Go ahead and check it out or check out our merch store, critdripp.com, also in the show notes. If you are new to our show, find us on Twitter, Instagram, or subscribe to us for as little as $1 on Patreon and access some special recordings in our patron RSS feed. Okay, with that said, let's get on to today's episode on Nick Land with guest Dr. Gregory B. Sadler.
Welcome to Acid Horizon, the theory podcast. Today, Will, Matt, Adam, and myself, Craig, have the honor of reading Nick Land's Fangnumina alongside the inimitable Dr. Gregory B. Sadler, a figure in the world of both academia and paraacademia who has been a vital and precious resource of online philosophy education. education. You may know him from the copious philosophy content he has put forward on YouTube and elsewhere. If you're a philosophy student or you have been, it is likely you have rushed to Dr. Sadler's digital domain for primers on the many philosophers he has graciously gifted to the masses. Thank you, Dr. Sadler, for taking time out of your weekend to make this happen. Oh, you're very welcome. Thanks for having me on. And that's quite an introduction. I hope I can
live up to a bit of it. I'll actually say something, you know, it looks from the outside, like I've covered a lot of thinkers and topics, but it's sort of like a spectrogram. You know, when you look at an element, there's all this black space and then there's like a line here and a line here. And that's, that's the way I look at the video channel. There's way more gaps than there is coverage. And I'm always hoping somebody else, cause I'm a bit lazy. I'm always hoping somebody else is going to come in and fill in the gaps. You actually have to admire the, I'm sure all of you know of and listen to the history of philosophy without any gaps. When that first came out like 10 years ago, more than 10 years ago, I thought, oh, that's going to be
tough to pull off, you know, because anytime that you start working on something, you start finding all these other areas, right? That it could lead into a million different rabbit holes. And, you know, people get tired of doing work. And so I was like, ah, this might make it two, three years tops. And he's still chugging along, you know, and going through each area. It's remarkable how much they get done. But when they get into like the 19th and 20th century, ooh, that's going to be tough, because I don't know if there's enough time to actually explore all the 20th century thinkers. Well, the very first thing that I want to do is give you a chance to just talk about anything that you're doing. Recently, I went on your YouTube page,
and I saw that you now have a Basics of Stoicism course. Maybe you could say something about that. Oh, yeah. So the Listenable platform. I get probably twice a month, I have a new platform reaching out to me saying, oh, you know, make your courses on here. And I did that early on. And then some of them went belly up because all of them were going to, you know, revolutionize education. During this time, we'll talk about capitalism and, you know, market forces and stuff like that. And we could actually use some of those as examples, these graveyards of digital content that are out there. And so I'm always a little leery. And I got into conversations with them. And as like most of these startups, they have kind of a skeleton crew of people, but they,
they seem like they were, you know, on point. And so I was like, okay, I'll, I'll try a course with them. And it was actually kind of an interesting experience for me just from a recording perspective, because I don't use, I don't use scripts. I do everything, you know, I get up in front of the chalkboard and just start, I've got some things on there and I start talking, or if I'm doing a book review. I've got, you know, maybe a page of notes total. And so I don't read a script, but for this, they wanted me to put together a bunch of scripts and then to record them all in one single marathon session. So the sound quality would be exactly the same. Man, is that tough? Oh, I'm sure. You know, you get caught up and start stuttering or saying the wrong word multiple
times, but writing a script actually turns out to be kind of a good idea. You know, I've pooh-poohed it a lot. It's taken you this long. Yeah. I mean, I see, I'm one of those kind of people who could get by without doing something. And then I mentioned being lazy beforehand. That's a kind of laziness, right? And so learning how to write a proper script is, you know, it's a good, it's good practice to get into. And so, so I did that and yeah, I produced this, this course. And then And it's interesting as well, because when you're producing these things, you never know if they're going to stick. You never know if they're going to get traction or not, because some of these platforms are great at talking themselves up, but they're lousy at actually getting people to check out your content. And if I have to post my content all the time, that's me having to do more work, and I don't like to do that.
So I've been very happy to see that they really have their act together, and I'm going to produce some more courses with them. The next one is actually going to be on something super simple. It's going to be words in philosophy that mean one thing in philosophy and mean something else in popular culture like Epicurean, right? It doesn't mean stuffing your face like a pig or being snooty about wines or anything like that. Or what is it to be a cynic? And I think stuff like that can be quite fun to do. So, yeah, there's that going on. and I'm teaching two classes this summer, getting ready for fall classes. I actually broke down and shot videos on the trolley problem article by Thompson,
which I'll be releasing pretty soon. I've done trolley problem memes before, but I never actually taught the trolley problem in class because it's ubiquitous. So I thought my Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design students would probably get a kick out of it. So we actually did it. And then I don't know what else. I mean, Milwaukee right now, it's a great city to be in. You know, some of you are probably aware that we might – our team might win the NBA championship. They're going to be playing just four blocks north of here in two days, two days or three days. And it's kind of pulling the city together in nice ways. So that's kind of cool to see. I don't have any hand in that, of course.
All right. Well, just tell me one thing. What's the good bar or place to eat in Milwaukee? I mean, there's all sorts of them. You know what you should do? If you want to get the old school Milwaukee experience, it's interesting. We have a food scene that is drawing international attention, in part because of all the things that have been going on here under the radar. So if you want all the trendy modernist cuisine, you can get that here. But you want to go to a supper club, like a real supper club. So you want to go online. And if you read like On Milwaukee or any of those other kind of magazines, they'll have lists of them. And then you just find the one that's closest to you that you can get a reservation at and pop over.
I was just going to add two things. One of them I need to get off my chest. um first is i thought there's an entire generation of people whose entire introduction to philosophy was basically trolley problem memes um it must be like a generation out there where we just see this meme and then they go okay but actually is it is it a meme or is this actually a problem worth thinking about yeah um the other thing and i i needed to say this was i think this must have been a couple of years back so i've been watching your videos for years actually um and i've often sort of turn to them when I need to encounter some new philosopher and I need in like three or four videos just to get like the basic sense of them. And so maybe a couple of years back, I was just starting to read, uh, Deleuze. Okay. Really interested in this thought. And I remember, I think you were doing like, um, a YouTube Q and A or chat sort of thing.
And, um, I knew that in the past you'd expressed interest in sort of some, some sort of French post-structuralist thinkers and so on. Um, and I remember, um, I asked you if you were thinking of doing any videos on Deleuze and I immediately knew that I was being that guy I was being that guy that was like hassling you about like which which thing is he going to do videos on when is when is it coming um so sorry about that one no no that was kind of a common thing in AMAs um I'll say something too I I like Deleuze as a thinker I don't really like Deleuze plus Qatari. I find him to be, you know, they really loved each other. It's very clear. And Deleuze thought that he was a great influence on him. And I see it almost like the opposite. So I want to,
you know, if I, like I did some Deleuze videos recently from essays, critical and clinical. Okay. Yeah. And I'll probably do more of that and probably get into, you know, logic of sense. I don't know that I'll, I mean, maybe I'll do stuff down the line on anti-Oedipus, but I don't, I just don't, you know well, we'll talk about that in this I just don't like this freewheeling like throw everything out there kind of I think he's more rigorous when he's on his own I just needed to get that off my chest for being that guy I mean, that's the Hegelian answer isn't it usually people who have studied a lot of Hegel who've read Deleuze Guattari think, well, he's just Deleuze well, this Guattari guy kind of messes him up a little bit but this Deleuze guy he's basically one of us G. Jack, Todd McGill.
Yeah, I mean, I don't think you have to be a Hegelian to see it like that. I mean, you could just like – I mean, Deleuze does some really interesting history of philosophy stuff on his own, right? So I got – I mean, I got introduced to him way back in undergrad when – and I actually did a video about this guy, this Japanese student who gave me a whole bunch of continental philosophy books. He was a rich guy. His family was in real estate in Tokyo, so he had money to burn. But he was not confident about his ability to explain things in English. So he was like, here, I'm writing a paper for this class. And he wrote like a 70-page paper. And he's like, can you present it for me? I was like, yeah, okay. And then he's like, here, you'll need these books to help you out.
And it was like Bakhtin's Dostoevsky book and Anti-Oedipus and some BART stuff and all that. And the funny thing was that my undergrad, so this is like 1993, the professors there had no idea what contemporary continental stuff was. They thought it was existentialism and maybe a bit of Marxism. And so it was a real fortuitous thing that this guy threw these books in my lap because I wouldn't have been introduced to them otherwise. and then you know i went on in grad school and i read the the nietzsche book that the loose has and you know the leibnitz book and i was like well this guy's really really quite good you know it's clearly not not straight nietzsche he's presenting or leibnitz but the stuff that he
has to say is really really cool you know and then there were delusians at that time and you count on the delusians to be like the really weird wacky guys always guys no there weren't any women speech comm or philosophy students into Deleuze at that time. And, you know, I'd hear them talk about stuff and I'd be like, I'm not sure if we're reading the same guy, you know? And speaking of weird Deleuzean guys, today we are reading. That brings us to the book. And I know who Dr. Greg Sadler was, you know, ever since I saw his first videos. And then when I saw that people had pushed Nick Land on you
online, I was like, you know what? People were pushing, like, when are you guys going to do the Nick Land episode? And I didn't want it bound up with all of the online politics. And when I saw that you were engaging with the book, it was like the heavens opened. And I was like, this is the time to reach out to Sadler. With that said, we can kind of kick off our discussion. We centered everything more or less around the concept and the essay entitled Machinic Desire, although we're going all over the book. How would you present this material if you were giving it to a class of freshman philosophy students or sophomores? How could you even do that? Or what's the Sadlerian approach here? Yeah, that's a great question. I'm going to do a review of Fang
Numina. And that's going to be tough to do because it's such a big book, right? And there's so much really different content in it. And then I thought maybe I would do like pick a couple essays and do some core concept videos on it or something like that. But if I was teaching it to a class, I think I would have to adopt a different approach. Most of the students that I have are not, they're the most challenging students. They're not graduate students. Graduate students are super easy to teach. You basically just throw stuff at them and have them do some presentations and then, you know, nod and say, oh, you missed this thing over here. You need to understand this and they'll lap it up, you know, but teaching undergrads who are not philosophy
majors and have no intention of majoring in philosophy and don't have any background, that's That's where the real, that's where we really have to work hard. And, you know, there's so much kind of presupposed in these essays coming from multiple fields that I think part of what I'd have to do is, like, figure out what do I want them to read before coming to this that won't break their minds, you know, and take up half the semester. um but they you know i mean they definitely have to read a bit of kant and some schopenhauer and some nietzsche and that's just the earlier stuff right um maybe some some bataille um and then then
we got to start getting into like where's all this other stuff coming from as we get deeper and deeper into it um so we'd have to you know we'd have to draw on other fields what does he mean by cybernetics, for example. I guess, you know, it would be helpful that since he makes reference to things that are historical events and he makes reference to popular culture to, you know, like direct them to that, like, you know, when he's talking about Philip K. Dick, okay, that's kind of a known quantity out there that some of the students in a given class might already have some exposure to, if only through seeing movie versions of Dick's stories, right? So, yeah, I mean, and then there's also like some, and maybe we can do some of this in this session.
There's also some of like the contextualization, like what is this guy really after in writing these things? And why is his style the way it is? I'll admit, when I first started reading this, and I started reading it because the publisher sent it to me, because one of the people saw online that I said, hey, if somebody wants to send me a copy, I'll review it. I was kind of disappointed when I first started reading the essays because I was like, why does this guy have such a mystique about him? I'm looking for what the special sauce is. There are some philosophers like Hegel, for example, or Spinoza, around whom there's a similar mystique.
people use the book as a referent without having actually read much of it because it's supposed to embody something like the phenomenology of spirit for Hegel or the ethics for Spinoza. Schopenhauer's world is will and representation, I think, is another one that people carry around more than actually read. And you can say, okay, well, what's the shtick here? What's actually going on when we do read it? And when you, you know, Hegel, nobody reads him for his great style or anything like that, whereas you can read Nietzsche or Schopenhauer, even Spinoza to some degree. Once you get past the weird Moray geometrical stuff, you can read it for its weird, wacky style. But there's a lot of interesting, worthwhile stuff going on in the
Hegel. And when I read through the first couple essays, which are a bit more, you could say, mainstream, I was like, well, this is just typical continental philosophy stuff that we used to do at, you know, SPAP or other venues and publish in journals back in the 90s. What's so special about this? I mean, in Kant Capital and the Prohibition of Incest, okay, talks about apartheid, which is, you know, a bit dated, but kind of a cool application. But you say, well, why do people think this is such an amazing text? And then you read on and you start seeing, um you get deeper into it you get to like machinic unconscious or the essay that that precedes it right and you're like okay well here's where the de luce stuff is really coming in hard
now now it's no longer like bataille and schopenhauer now it's it's de luce and gattari and where's he going with with this stuff um and i think that's something we really do have to talk about is this just um you know basically like the equivalent of artist statements blown up cool stuff to say and read? Or does it pertain to our existence, our future? What our possibilities for agency or self-development are? And I think the answer is, well, kind of sometimes it is. And sometimes it's blind alleys. I guess knowing why it's blind alleys is good. And then you get
to kind of, I mean, this is probably going to tick off some of your listeners, but you get to some of the stuff towards the end and you're like, ah, come on, you know, like the, the, uh, the Galathic X Coda cooking lobsters with Jake and dinos. And you're like, ah, I see what you're doing there, but. It's very edgy, Mr. Land. Yeah. Well, it was edgy once, but you know, if you've read Avital Ronell's stuff before that, she was doing lots of cool monkeying around with, you know, the code and all that, making her books, you know, non-standard sizes. And, you know, there's a limited mileage you get out of that, right? Whereas some of the stuff, like, you know,
my favorite piece in the book is actually this one, and I don't know the history of it because I haven't researched it at all, but the one where Barker speaks. Was Barker a real person? I don't actually know. It's a great piece, you know? It's sort of putting us humans in the context of the planetary development. Let me throw this question out there. Since I don't have an answer to this, how did this guy wind up with this kind of aura or mystique that allowed it to become important that he then moved to China and became a neo-reactionary? Why did people care? You just made Adam's day, by the way. Yeah, I have a lot of answers to this question. The thing about Nick Land, or could he just go
on twitter now nick the thing about nick is that he he came about in this kind of moment in which the internet was just the kind of thing people it just died out the idea that we could enter this new space into this very horizontal kind of new online space of anonymity which no one had ever seen before we could you know tear yourself apart into these new personas and that you could rip identity apart and during this period at warwick university he started up with sadie plant who is a great philosopher in terms of the ones and zeros, her book, messing about with code, you know, a little bit better in land in some respects. And they were doing this idea of trying to experiment with new forms of culture in the wake of this sort of grand flattening that was happening in the wake of cybernetics and its growth into the internets and new forms of electronic music
like jungle and stuff like drum and bass and stuff like that. And they were incorporating both theory and fiction. So D.C. Barker is a fictional entity, but they're trying to speak something through him. They take a lot of influence from William S. Burroughs and the idea of the ghost lemurs of Madagascar. And they had this whole thing about Lemurian lemurs, people from the land called Lemuria coming from the future to tell us about their gods. But essentially what we get to see with Fang Newman is a man getting gradually more into this dissolution of himself through the Internet. and then towards the end we get to see and there's not any way of any way of saying this he was on a lot of methamphetamines at the time this is well recorded a lot a lot of amphetamines you could see sort of descent into this self-dissolution of the cybernetic culture and gradually i mean even his
lectures you see that there's always these fantastic stories of his lectures where he would come in and just turn on some jungle music start screaming into a microphone over some noise on rolling about on the floor and then apparently someone stood up and said you know some of us are still marxists you know and walked out and you get to see this gradual descent and there are some artistic statements in there so cooking lobsters with jake and dinos that's um jake and dinos chapman who are friends of this cult cyber culture research unit and they did the cover but you get to see land in this moment of great cybernetic opportunity where all of these market forces are producing the internet, producing cyber culture. Siberia refers to a chain of internet cafes,
the first in the UK, started by a weird libertarian sect called the Revolutionary Communist Party. You can see him getting absorbed into all of this. And it's building up until he's losing himself in the fiction in a way that comes kind of predictive. And so you see this in Meltdown, because it gets you all these years in sequence, then it ends at 2011, then dot, dot, dot. So he's playing with the Mayan prophecy somewhere. He thinks this great flattening is coming, this blazerun society where the revolutionary replicants take over. The problem with all of this, and I think this is where Nick became more of an NRX person, is that it didn't happen. Some of it did, but it didn't happen. Oh, yeah, yeah.
But I mean, a lot of it didn't happen in the way that he's talking about. I mean, let me sort of like recontextualize it. So the stuff that you see happening in here and all the stuff that you're saying that he was doing in these stories. So people were doing that sort of thing in Carbondale, Illinois, around the same time. And that wasn't any place special. That was just where I happened to go to graduate school. And there were artists who were doing kind of similar goofy performance things, you know. And we'd host philosophy conferences where there'd be some serious papers. And there'd be some stuff that's, you know, you're like, well, this is clearly just this person working out their life problems using some theory in a rather arbitrary way.
And then everything in between. I think you can see similar kind of stuff going on in here. I mean, he's dealing with some really fascinating ideas like, well, where the hell are we going? And does capitalism have any limits to it? And he's bringing in heavy hitters like Deleuze and Guattari or Bataille or other thinkers to talk about this stuff. But it all seems kind of flat and just strung together for me. I'm not one of those like, where's the argument kind of guys. You know, I'm willing to like let a text go for a long time without that. But when you just kind of throw stuff together, I want to know why that particular stuff is thrown together.
And that's what I'm missing in a lot of this. So like here's from Machinic Desire, right? He's got this section where he says only proto-capitalism has ever been critiqued. And I was like, well, that's not true. Um, it's, it's, I mean, we critique capitalism all the time, but I can get what he's saying in that we're, we're always criticizing past forms of capitalism, even when we think that we're critiquing like the most present form. Like, you know, if we look at what, if we, we get really granular and we say, all right, what kind of shape of capitalism are we in now? Given that not only do we have insurance companies screwing things up for people's medical stuff all across the way, but hospital groups, because of deregulation, can become these gigantic entities, which then are owned by venture capitalist firms.
So that's like a real question about what stage of capitalism we're in. And the very fact that we can say, well, that's what's happening and here's how we got to that and that's bad for these reasons but also potentially good for these reasons, we are talking about a past form of capitalism in that we can formulate it. But it sure as hell isn't proto-capitalism. And then, you know, like he goes on and he says, to appeal to extrinsic interests, aspirations or bonds, to have an extrinsic authenticity, integrity or solidarity, to authoritative community, tribe, custom belief or value. So when you, and I'll finish that sentence, but notice what he's doing there rhetorically. It's this, this trope where you, you string together all these cool words. And I'm not saying that it's all bullshit or anything, um, cause they could actually
have intrinsic connections with each other. Right. But those have to be established and that never happens in, in any of these pieces. And then he goes, is to rail against a germinal anticipation of commoditocracy. There's a word he makes up. Flailing ineffectively against the infancy of the market, which capital wants to bury too. Socialism has typically been a nostalgic diatribe against underdeveloped capitalism. Okay, so you can read that and you'll be like, well, yeah, that's true. A lot of socialists and Marxists are aiming at the wrong targets. um that's that's clearly the case in in a lot of cases and that's why you know marxists in fight again with each other about what their target ought to be um i don't know about the commoditocracy i
don't know what that that actually means it sounds cool but i think i can explain it to be honest i think i think the commodity form is so i think fundamentally all of this is a critique a big critique of Kant. The commoditocracy is the form of the object as such. And his whole thing throughout all these pieces seems to be attacking the Kantian transcendental and the way it is fundamentally trying to productive. It's eminently productive, but it's always self-limiting. It's always restricted by this residual humanities, residual form of government, which hasn't been fully... I think by that time, he's way past Kant, though. I mean, you could say that like that, And he does say that it originates in Kant, but then what Schopenhauer and Nietzsche are doing is adding to it.
And with Kant, I mean, he'd be better to target Hegel in that respect. With Kant, you've got these essentially a priori structures that we can delineate, and it's all very static. And plenty of people have critiqued it and then said, no, no, history, where we are in history matters. hegel's one of the first to do that in a coherent way i mean you can say that that shelling is doing that and fict is doing that too um and then the the question is okay what what does condition where we are right and so by the time that you get to a guy like land it seems like he's saying okay all the previous people including de luz and gattari who are still too humanistic for me they're they're kind of right and they're kind of missing out on what it is you know as we go
further into it it's it's capitalism and then ai that's at the end right as the the limit condition for us to go back to like well what would you tell students i guess that's that's part of what you try to tell them and then they'd probably by that point their eyes would be glazed over though i i read this passage the one that um you were just uh quoting from about um extrinsic interests authoritative community, tribe, custom belief. I feel like in a way this paragraph sums up at least the way that I read Nick Klan's work, which is that in a certain way, he starts from a reading of Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, where Deleuze and Guattari are going to insist that every de-territorialization is always followed by a re-territorialization.
Capital will, on the one hand, drain you of any kind of traditional religious authenticity, but then it will also find ways of rehabilitating those views and selling back to you basically in a certain way. If Deleuze and Guattari are going to insist that each de-territorialization is always followed by a re-territorialization, I think Nick Land is going to say firstly, what if it doesn't? And secondly, what if that's exactly what capital does? If it It just continues towards basically absolute deterritorialization. And that's basically the point of the redundancy of humanity, the point of AI and singularity, and so on. It's kind of this reading of Deleuze and Guattari, but you kind of take one strand of it and go all the way with that rather than the way they see them.
Yeah, I guess when I think about that and I try to imagine what these terms are referring to in social processes, I find them like super abstract. And the one thing about like total detortization, that would just be meaninglessness. There's nothing there other than, you know, I mean, and that could be a catastrophe that we wind up with, with, you know, whatever it's going to be like total complete machinic desire, which has nothing to do with humans. But then who cares? you know we're not part of the picture um it's and the other thing it seems to me like this with the losing guitar um there's this valorization of the nomad and de-territorialization and all
this sort of stuff that was was really easy to to latch on to at a time that was quite repressive you know and people would read it but i think in a lot of cases we're like no I actually want some more re-territorialization like I'd like to know where the hell I stand you know when um I can't actually get a mortgage you know and why why is it I can't get a mortgage that was a lot of like Lacanians responses to to anti-Oedipus is a lot of them in the 80s read it and they were like doesn't it kind of don't you kind of want that comfort of your territoriality right within that triangle after you read this and the model of de-territorialization is like well, it's that of death, right? Yeah. And I think this is where, again,
there's a valorization of it. And I think it would have to get more, you'd have to actually, is this a good re-territorialization or a bad one? Then you have to figure out what the criteria for that are. And that kind of goes out the window. And with land, it seems like there's almost like a fatalism about it. Well, this is going to happen. Whereas with the loser Gattari, there's more of a let's do this kind of imperative to it. Well, we were reflecting on, we just saw this stray passage from The Logic of Sense getting passed around on Twitter recently, and it really factored into our reading of Land's work recently, which in view of what Deleuze says in Logic of Sense, I mean, either Nick is kind of just going his own way with these terms, or he made an error
in interpreting Deleuze. What Land ultimately presumes or presupposes is that all that solid melts into cybernetics. What cybernetics will do and what the technical domain will do is melt down all social code and so forth. But what Deleuze says is there's a third term. There's a gap between the technical and the social, which is, and for Deleuze, in Logic of Sense, he says it's almost like this interstice where the revolutionary lives. There's a space that between that which is deterritorializing and that which re-territorializes. There are things that we as a society, we as individuals, we as agential entities or what have you, we have this capacity to say no. We don't have to affirm this constant deterritorialization that what Deleuze and
Guattari are doing is they're articulating a sort of functionalism. They're not implanting any sort of ethical axiom, as we might understand it in Kantian terms, they're kind of giving us the sort of blueprint, the outline, this is how this works. This is the way that capital works. And if we're forced to accelerate with capital, it might provide us with the impetus or the sort of deboarding point to take that schizoidal energy and then turn it into something else, rather than, okay, we just have to follow this thing all the way. That's not what Deleuze and Guattari are saying. Yeah. And I think that there's many ways of saying no. Kind of reminds me of like in what is metaphysics when Heidegger is talking about annihilation, right? And he says, it's not just negation. Negation isn't even like the most paradigmatic
mode of bringing the, in his case, the nothing to bear, right? There's also a refusal. There's, there's you know sort of resentment there's all these different things that one can do and that's just in the negative range i think when when you think about reinterpretation of um capitalist de-territorializing processes there's a lot of ways to at some point you know it doesn't just have to be like the the big money investor who gets to decide how these things are applied or worked out, people find ways to turn them into things that weren't intended by the designers or the investors. Very often, they're just kind of swept along, of course. I mean, you think about
what social media did in suckering people onto it. And I'm certainly somebody who uses social media a lot. So I'm not criticizing in the sense of being Puritan here, but, you know, it's there to sell us ads. And we know that the algorithms determine a lot, and we have no control over those, but, you know, we can, we can decide, you can still tinker around with your settings, you know, within a limited range, of course. You asked a little bit earlier about, you know, how did this guy become this huge figure where, you know, he has this strange sort of early history and then it gets even stranger, right? Because he goes off to China and then he sort of reemerges
as this sort of neo-reactionary figure and so on. And the only explanation I've been able to come up with which joins up for kind of the Nickland of Fandumina and the Nickland that, you know, is out there today on Twitter, posting is that to the extent that much of Fang Numen is concerned with see where capitalism is going in the future um although we certainly have things like AI much of the time you know when you think of AI like it's like Siri on my phone or something right they haven't reached anywhere near the sort of stage that even Land thought it would be by his point and so the problematic for Nick Land I think becomes well if that's what the process sort of if the process wants to do more than that what is it that's sort of getting him away there what's stopping it and
so Nick Land re-emerges and his answer is basically democracy hence the link over straight straight over into neo-reactionary thought where um democracy in particular is this issue of cutting off some of these processes before they can be fully uh expressed I think that's that's best reading i've been able to give i mean it's always easy to you options just to say well there is no connection right it's just a different set of ideas um you know early nick land and late i could develop on that just in the historical sense i think this historical path you can trace on that logic i'm sorry i think it's because you can talk about the idea of there's always a re-territorialization and i think in sort of the in a set the failure of this great flattening that
happens with the escape of the market into cyberspace the deterritorialization was there in the creation of the internet in these new spaces this vast great new sort of jungle pun intended the music but it was re-territorialized in places like silicon valley and i think that's where nick has thrown his lot in with the neoreactionary crowd because the fundamental argument of the neoreactionary position is well the only thing we haven't applied the market to is the production of states itself. So in order to finally unleash the market forces into their highest position, you need to apply the idea of markets to the production of states. And this is where you get the neo-reactionary slogan, par excellence, which is no voice, free exit. You have no democratic voice,
but you can exit anytime you want. And it's the idea of the democracy of the consumer. I mean, fundamentally, the problem with this is that it tries to reject hegemony, organization, governmentality, but it just it just it maintains the governmentality of of um of exchange as such but i think you can definitely see this element of democracy democracy is this final limiter is its final residual kind of humanism that restricts the productive power of i mean for me i think it's the kantian transcendental imagination this thing which posits all the categories all these symphases but then can't reels it back to possible experience and you can trace this developmental power, even through people like Schelling, in which it's no longer really part of us, and developing through into a will to power, the machinic unconscious, the desiring production,
which is this intelligent, self-positing, self-reaffirming kind of technology, and expanding it into all its lovely, marketable, dissolving frames until we get to the final re-territorialization, which happens after this book, which is the tech billionaire. And this is why it's such a popular ideology among certain strands of technological thinkers today. I mean, you can definitely see this trajectory throughout Blann's book, confirming just exactly that sort of hypothesis you're putting out there, Matt. Yeah. And I guess it links up with the chapter on the critique of transcendental miserablism, right? Because this is sort of the challenge that he poses to, I'll say the left, but frankly, it's frankly posed to anyone who isn't, you know, exactly on his side is, well,
If you have a problem with capital, with capitalism, if you have some leftover beliefs in Marxism, communism, socialism, etc., where do you go from here then? He sort of raises this, what's your route out? I just want to set up that maybe there's a connection there between some of the thoughts we've already had on land and that particular chapter if anyone wants to chip in. There's a strange sort of tendency with Nick Land where in preparation of this episode, obviously there's always a really important sensitivity you have to have with engaging with this guy, frankly, because it's important to contextualize his work around this more contemporary manifestation of his political philosophy.
And what frustrates me when I read this, and it could just be like my own philosophical insufficiency going into it. I find myself sometimes overwhelmed by the positing of all these different conceptual frameworks that he jumps from perpetually. And again, I'm not a give me an argument kind of guy, right? Like I'm a Foucault guy. Like I'm fine with these really continental things. But on one end, I am made to believe that the techno-capital singularity is already here, right? It's already being delivered to us by the model of the clinical schizophrenic as a conceptual figure that comes from the future that is already decoding all of these flows, that already tends towards the singularity.
But then at the same time, the human security system is what's thwarted this. The human security system all throughout Fang Numino looks like it perpetually can't do anything. It's entirely inept. It fails to protect the pod. It fails to maintain the Oedipal Triangle. And yet it's democracy that stood in the way of this. For me, Nick Land's entire career is just conceptual framework failure after failure after failure, even in this more right-wing manifestation. I'm supposed to believe that this is what's preventing it? At that level, I think sometimes I struggle to find it compelling, even though philosophically it can be very fascinating. I kind of think that when we're talking about democracy here, it's being used as if it's a univocal term when really it's not even an analogical term. It's got several different meanings to it.
Because if what stands in the way – I mean, to begin with, there's another thing I want to say. I mean, how the hell do we know it's going to be a singularity and not just a bunch of other rival things, you know? Like it's always been through history. Why this belief in – I mean, he criticizes theistic frameworks, but you can't get more theistic than talking about a singularity. um but let's say that there is going to be like some some big process and ai is behind it and capitalism is the way that it's it's managed to get its what its hooks into everything okay great so democracy if we're talking about that in the sense of like you know robust um lived you know experience in which almost like a dewey and you know like if john dewey had his wet dream come
true, you know? Well, that doesn't exist. It didn't exist in Dewey's day. That's why he was arguing for it all the time. And it sure as hell doesn't exist in our day. So that's clearly not standing in the way. And then we've got sort of like local operation of, you know, what we could call, it's not pure democracy at a local level, but it's a lot closer to it. Like if I want to go to a Milwaukee Common Council meeting, now that we're out of COVID mask time, I can walk in there. And before that I could get on their Zoom calls and be a pain in the ass to them. I'm not a common council member, but I can have participation that way. Is that what's standing in the way of this great thing? Well, that only exists at certain points, and most people don't get to indulge in that. So what is democracy? Is it conterminous with this thing that he's picking up from mold
bug and calling the cathedral? No, because it's not. It's not because the cathedral is just sort of like the elites and then it trickles down and they get to tell us what to do. And that's not democracy. That's a form of all sorts of hegemonies. And that's the way our political system basically works. Most of the representative seats are not competitive. They're like soaked in lobbyist money and people who go to the right schools. And there is a political class that's got different flavors. And then you get, you know, Mavericks like Bernie every once in a while coming along and thumbing their nose at it, but they're largely ineffective. So is that what's standing in the way? I mean, the cathedral does get identified as what is standing in the way,
but that sure as hell isn't democracy. So what's the boogeyman democracy that's actually getting in the way here? Is it that people get to vote on things that don't mean anything? I mean, when I teach business ethics, we talk about voting with your wallet. We get a lot more chances to do that than we do any sort of political vote. And that's much more widespread because you could be in a totally non-competitive place like Idaho, you know, which isn't going to go Democratic anytime soon, or Massachusetts, which isn't going to go Republican anytime soon. And you can buy your, you know, if you're in Massachusetts, you can buy your ideological coffee.
You know, I forget exactly what the black rifle or something. That's right. And if you're in Idaho, you could buy, I don't know, a bunch of Bernie dolls or something and line them up around your place. That's where you actually have a lot more agency. Is that what's standing in the way? No, it seems to be like part of the capitalist process, you know. It seems to be, though, too, that to bring it back to the cathedral, Land in the early 2010s will be pretty sympathetic to that whole blogosphere, right? And he'll play a big role there. And there are still figures that are popular on the internet that ruin many a decent grad student. But – and so he'll be sympathetic. But like you still kind of get that here when he's just talking about basic market regulation, right?
With a real ire in machinic desire, passing references in circuitries and then clearly in transcendental miserablism. Um, so I, I think a lot of it really is just, uh, there are all of these, these systems that are both completely inept, right? In the face of, of the de-territorializing power of capital, but also, uh, at like actively standing in the way. So it seems, uh, to, to be like a really, a really strange combination. Does that, I mean, doesn't, doesn't capital basically go around them though, when they stand in the way, they stand in the way of one mode of, of capital. capitalism and then there's like some other thing on the side that comes in which they're cool with
i mean i know i don't have something to say but i wanted to just expand a little bit because i was why i was one who raised i raised the question of democracy like i need to i think i need to say a little bit more there about that because land doesn't like say this explicitly um but if you read and i don't recommend this but um the manifesto that he wrote about the the dark enlightenment um which is oh i read that was actually i think that was one of the first things i think that i read by him not registering that it was land that's his sum up of yeah mold bug right yeah yeah yeah um yeah last time i checked this i just don't i just went control f on it there's something like 130 references to democracy in that and the vast majority of all at the start like his first question really is of democracy and how we can get away from it basically
it's all about liberty and libertarianism and the development of capital um it's less explicitly like cybernetic and futurist and so on as as than you know it's less fat than fang numen is that's the only way i can sort of try to piece together what's going on in the early land and then the later land see there's some kind of continuity there is there's this some there's some kind of force which is getting him away here and he needs a program to be able uh which is capable of getting That's my own, my own. I mean, is, is, is the force there, if we think about democracy in a very broad sense, as needing to get consent of people and working that out through like deliberative means, right? rather than just focusing on voting, being on juries, all those sort of like prerogatives of
democracy. And we think about it more as a process. Is it that, well, these damn people with their, you know, different points of view, you know, you got to convince them of things. Wouldn't it be better if we just got, you know, if they were just told what to do? So you got, you know, like the sovereignty principle, or if they don't do it, then you don't pay them or, you drive them out of their houses, then you get the market point of view. Is that what you think is going on? It's the first one. Because if you turn to the Barker Speaks, Barker's entire scientific thing is undermining what people think of as the need for subjectivity. It's this idea of the subject from Antioedipus. It's really just something residual that isn't particularly necessary
to the actual power underlying it. And in the dark enlightenment stuff, his problem is that it's all about the voice. It's all about people producing, competing to brainwash each other. It doesn't represent anybody. Representation is just a fiction, as Deleuze also says. And it's the idea that you waste all this time trying to produce subjectivities. And it's a wasteful way of doing it because you're still doing a market competition, almost like Joseph Alba Schumpeter's capitalism, socialism, democracy. the idea that you're doing a market competing for votes but actually you're producing the voter so i think his idea is you know given that it's already a government corporation because we have all these lobbyists and we're just trying to brainwash people why don't we just you know stop doing this inefficiency and just do it directly you have a governmental corporation the gov corp
but and you have any say in it because it's not trying to produce you the subjectivity it's trying to sell itself to you and you're like if you don't like if you don't like it you can leave you know They're still simple. I think that's where he's trying to go. He's a hidden hatred, not hidden at all, a hatred of the function of subjectivity is something that is always very restrictive and binding. My problem with Landon, we have to do the last majority widely, is I don't think they quite understand the plastic capacities or potentials of subjectivity, which I think you get a lot of that in Hegel. So I tend to err on the general idealist side there. I think you get a lot of that if you have a functioning family life or if you've ever had a relationship, you know, a romantic relationship that stood more than a couple months
or you relate yourself to an animal for a while, you know? I mean, so if this point of view that is being portrayed by land and according to you also Deleuze and Guattari, and I think maybe Deleuze and Guattari together, I don't know about Deleuze himself, were right, then we'd be like in false consciousness all the time. We don't really have any idea what's going on. We just sort of like paste together these bullshit subjectivities that are always in process. And none of our relationships mean anything. And actually, none of the media products that we produce and consume like novels, plays, TV shows, because those are all characters who are subjects. None of those mean anything either.
it's a pretty drab world, you know, and it makes you, you know, going back to that last essay, the miserablism one, you know, he's got this thing at the end where he says, the transcendental miserablist has an inalienable right to be bored, of course, call this new, it's still nothing but change. What transcendental miserablism has no right to There's the pretense of a positive thesis. Well, who's he to say that? I mean, I don't actually. So he's criticizing the Marxist dream of a dynamism without competition was merely a dream. And maybe so, but that doesn't mean that everything is just utopian fantasies. and maybe you know the notion of like having a decent relationship with a other person that
doesn't have to be just you know thrown aside as oh you're being you know i mean here's here's the retort you give oh you're being crazy you're being silly you're being naive well there's me there right and we don't have to be like cartesian you know uh about that we get to say well you know it's an intersubjective me. And yes, it is. You know, I live in a capitalist system. And yes, I do live in a world that's permeated by the internet. But yes, I'm also still a subject. Well, to be fair, to the Deleuzians out there, I will say this is that, at least in terms of the family, for example, the risk, of course, is to succumb to the transcendent figure of Oedipus, to be constrained by that. And in fact, I think what Deleuze and Deleuz and Guattari want is,
is to explode those categories to allow for the fluidity of the family subjectivity, but also to acknowledge what actually exists out there, the kinds of family arrangements that are actually in reality. Yeah. I mean, Lacan recognized this. He says in one of his seminars that the Oedipus complex is at best something that applies to bourgeois families. And if we go into other cultures, we're not going to see anything remotely like this. And I've always Even Freud himself says, well, the Oedipus thing is something you get past. You're not always Oedipalized. I don't know where all these theorists got this unless maybe the French psychoanalytic establishment that Lacan was constantly bumping heads with were super doctrinaire about, well, you know, I mean, like the stereotype, you know, lay on the couch.
We're going to talk about how you love your mother. I mean, that doesn't seem to be – I mean, you can find families where there is like the patriarch and, you know, this very traditional structure. But you've got to kind of work hard to find an ideal family like that. Most of what we've got is, you know, blended together and people where, you know, there's always like an uncle who's struggling with addiction. And he's like part of why your family's not working together well. And then you've got like, you know, political rifts and things like that. And yet people can like, you know, come together and family relations can still be felt to matter. You know, I mean, especially if you're poor, you know, your family is very often your, your what you draw upon for capital.
I feel that maybe this is, again, one of those areas where the essay, the critique of transcendental misalism, sort of re-enters the picture, which is that one of the things I suppose we've presupposed here is that the ongoing sort of development and unfurling of this capitalist techno-singularity, etc., isn't inevitable, right? There are forms of resistance, of refusal, of perhaps, you know, in a utopian sense, democratic accountability. Try not to laugh. And these options are on the table. Right. And I guess what Land is going to argue here is that if we still think that capital is within our control,
we haven't caught up yet to where it already is, let alone where it's going. That would be the, I think the land position is that it's already out of our control. And I guess if I was trying to sort of, you know, defend his point there, I guess, you know, isn't this the problem that much, for example, much of the left right now is trying to deal with is that in an age of globalization, where finance capital rules, national sovereignty is undermined, etc. You know, this seems to be the question, right, is how would we be able to subject capital to forms of resistance or control or refusal? So I guess I'm sort of trying to back up. There is at least perhaps something in this challenge. Oh, yeah. I mean, I think we can say that capitalism as a whole complex set of processes, different in different places at different times, we don't control it.
Every once in a while, we pull on a lever and we produce some sort of effect, but it is mostly out of our control. And the people who potentially could do something usually don't care because they're happy with it or they've got their own little quirks that they want to do. I don't see that as – that's sort of like saying, well, we live in a natural disaster. We still have options with a natural disaster what we're going to do. It doesn't mean that we're inevitably subsumed into it as subjects. I mean, we could say that like 99% of our psyche is the product of forces outside of our control. We'd still have the capacity to do something with that 1%, maybe leverage it so we can get it to 5%.
And maybe there's – and Land would be standing on top of that saying, you're not even entitled to that 1%, as far as I can see. The enemy's too much credit. I mean, I think the subjectivity is always constantly failing, like spirit in the phonology of spirit, eventually, until it gets to absolute knowledge. Subjectivity is in even itself most of the time. And he's thinking about these subjects always being recuperated. This is, I think, where you get Deleuze is a bit more optimistic than Land, well, much more optimistic, in that he's trying to seize these processes of making subjectivities, you know, in a similar way that Hegel's trying to seize the concept, seize the process of subjectiviation, the production of subjects en masse and then like really wrong with it whereas land is like no this this production is wasteful he leaves a bit of this residual productivity out the way because
i mean and you can sort of see this in the internet stuff because you do lose yourself in the rave the jungle if you do lose yourself and i think there's that literally an ecstatic moment of being out of yourself which he's trying to tie into i think the reason why he's so big on internet is because he ties into that affect of getting out into your screen for a bit but i think with Deleuze, you need to take back a bit of yourself because otherwise you give the enemy too much credit. I mean, you do have a choice. I mean, I'm just, yeah. Yeah. You know, it's interesting with Hegel's phenomenology. It's, you're right. It is a record of failures and then how to get past some of the failures and some of them remain failures. Right. And it's also a document that is sort of like survivorship bias and encoded because it only describes where
there's been an advance. And Hegel himself thinks that in most places at any given point in time where a particular dialectical dynamic is being enacted, it doesn't succeed and people stay stuck at that point in time. And his philosophy of history is mostly, it's pretty crude and it's also really racist and there's all sorts of problems with it. But I think he is right that you know, we get into backwaters, right? It's really easy to, to look at the, to read through the phenomenology and you're like, oh, this is amazing. I read through this whole dense book. Now I understand at least like how Hegel thought things happened up to about 1807.
That's, that's a real accomplishment. But you think, you think about like, well, what does Hegel think about Spain? Well, Spain managed to proceed up to a certain point, but they didn't go through the French Revolution. And they're basically just a cultural backwater. What does he think about Italy? What does he think about – it's basically the nation states of France, whatever's coming together in Germany under Prussia, Austria, Bavaria, England, and maybe the United States that Hegel seems to care about. I was going to say, with land going to China, Is that part of where you're going with this? You know, like, well, you know. I was going to kind of bring it back and say that, you know, there's a very apparent irony when we look at the whole history of Land's writing here.
In giving up and poo-pooing subjectivity, whole cloth, in favor of this inhumanism, he ends up affirming the most crass inhumanism that has underpinned the Enlightenment project and shot back to this eugenicist mode of thinking. You know, a form of sovereignty that's akin to Hobbes' vision of the world. You know, like, is this really where we want to end up? I've cast a pretty broad stroke here, but I think that's what we get at the end. A valorization of a form of governance, of a form of domination that demands the subjugation of a kind of inhumanity. inhumanity. There's a very strong interpreter of Deleuze named Claire Colbrook. I'm not sure if you've looked at any of her work. An essay by her that I go back to quite often is one called Face
Race, where it says, in order to establish the humanistic project of the Enlightenment, what was required was a subjugation of certain kinds of humans to be put in the cast of inhuman, you know, as we get with slavery and as we get with a colonialist project. And that's exactly what we get with land. I mean, he even wants to overcome the sort of minarchism that today's libertarian would advocate for. In the wake of not being able to achieve that, he goes full-fash, slingshotted all the way to the far right. You know, this is a bit of a digression. So when I first read Mensis Moldbug, I was like, well, this isn't really very new at all. I mean, it's adopted for an internet age and it's talking about some newer stuff and he came up with his own jargon.
But this is not different than traditionalism post-revolution in French writing with, you know, de Meister and de Bonalt and people like that, Lamine. And it's not that different than like later thinkers along those lines. and um the same you say the same thing with like a more popular figure like steve bannon um he's basically charles morat who was uh you know uh he became important by writing the drafus affair and organizing action francais which is a proto-fascist organization in france didn't call itself fascist but called itself integral uh integral nationalist and provided a blueprint for what we often call fascist regimes, which actually called themselves
integral nationalist in other places. And you see this with a lot of these, I don't know what you want to call them, neoreactionaries, alt-right. They're not doing anything that's radically new. They're reinventing a wheel that's been around really since the French Revolution. um it just takes on different terminology and different um stuff and and and so for nick land to lapse into that with the addition of like saying well you know china is the place to go for this um it's sort of i mean i i don't want to say that this this stuff was like the you know the voice of the future or anything like that but but it seems like a real to use a word that they would use a
real um degeneration or real um decadence i mean not not that is a tangent now's a good time that we can kind of start wrapping it up um i would like to know uh from you dr sadler first of all greg thank you for coming on the show it's it was super awesome to have you and in fact i would love to have you back at some point for something else to talk about somebody who happened exactly Exactly. Hagel episode. Please. It's been so long. Yeah, we'll do a Hagel episode and you and Adam can be good friends. Okay, cool. Yeah. But what, for you, is the big takeaway from this? I mean, philosophically, ideologically, like, what can we grab onto and, like, use in our own philosophical project?
Oh, that's a great question. um i you know there's there's not an awful lot here thematically that i can say okay this is something that because i'm i'm a philosophical eclectic right sort of a ciceronian eclectic i it's not a smorgasbord eclectic where i'll take like little bits of everything and somehow cobble them together and you know like french bricolage it's more systematic so like there's stuff i like from the Stoics or the Aristotelians or from, you know, Lacan or people like that. And there's, there's very little that I can say that I found in here that's going to become part of my toolbox or my, is going to get sucked in because it seems like a lot of the stuff that's particularly good and on point that doesn't have to do specifically with late capitalism or cyberspace
is already there. And the people he's referencing like Bataille or like Nietzsche or people like that. So why not just go straight to the source on them? The thinking about what are we going to do in the next, you know, in our lifetime? Maybe I've got another 40 years or so. I think all of you are a good bit younger than me. So you've probably got maybe another 70 years or so. What is the world going to look like? How are we going to make sense of things? Are late capitalist processes just going to get worse and worse and worse? Add that to climate change, which is going to really throw a lot of things into crisis and the revolution of AIs and logistics and robotics and what he's
calling cybernetics in here. Those are things to think about. But I don't know you have to think about them through Nick Land. What do the rest of you think about that idea? He's raising important topics, but he's not raising them in the right way. The sources that he is drawing from, Deleuze and Gattari in particular, I think are important here because I think their philosophy has brought to bear in many ways. We haven't seen, you know, we have seen capitalism cover the earth, much like a Sherman Williams paint can, right? And it seems like there's no stopping. So I think as people invested in finding a kind of politics that are going to overcome the inadequacies of parliamentary
democracy, of the kinds of localism that we're trying, and the abject failure of globalism as we see it now, we do need something else. And I think Deleuze and Gattari do offer some important tools for that. And I'll say this, in all fairness, you won't see me defend the real Nick Land. However, I will defend Fang Numina insofar as he is an excellent interpreter of Deleuze and Gattari, at least on the point of the body without organs, the death drive. I mean, this is like top-tier secondary literature on that. And I think there's a way in which we can fold that analysis back into our reading of Deleuze and Guattari and people like Leotard and so forth. And, you know, even carry the failures with us in the sort of Hegelian sense of things. Very good. I knew Adam would love that. But anyway, you know, that being said, I think there is something
valuable for the readers of Deleuze and Guattari for sure. I mean, just Nick Land on his own here, there are parts of this book where I'm just like, hell yeah, you know, but then we get to critique of transcendental miserableism and i'm like i don't know man you know there's well i've got a thought which is but i guess what i what i always take away from nick land at least in at least in fang numina is that so if marxism and obviously not every marxist will necessarily agree with this but if we take a kind of if marxist take marxism takes a sort of stagious view of history in which we proceed from certain determinate mode of production one to the next and at a certain point we hit capitalism that's what we have now and then at a certain point we you know raise ourselves to a higher level and reach um socialism slash communism
obviously they're going to disagree on even that capitalism per se um i think nick land sort of asks the question which is that if we've lost the belief in a kind of teleology of history in this sense, of this development through distinct stages. Then I think Land sort of poses the challenge of, and particularly in the critique of transcendental misalism, what would a post-capitalism look like? I think that's sort of the challenge that he raises, is that one of the sections about that chapter, he says, or claims that the left have given up the idea that they could be a more productive form of society,
and that's why they don't, you know, well, we didn't want growth anyway. Now it's all about ecology and so on. I don't think he's necessarily right there, but I think it poses a challenge for thinking through, for anyone on the left trying to think through what is it that we want, right? What's the positive project here that would have to evolve? And that's the way I see Land, the kind of antagonistic character sort of pushing, people like myself to try and articulate what that would look like and think it through properly. At least if we've most left behind that sort of view of history. That might be where I see it. I think it's simple. I think Nickland is the enemy. I don't read Nickland as anything other than that. I find in a certain sense that, like Craig said, there may be some explanatory material,
but I'd rather you read Eugene Holland than Fang Numina. I will push as much as possible against all of the tendencies that are present in this work. And I think that his intellectual and personal political developments are natural byproducts of this work. So I think Nick Land is the enemy. So I've had a long history of reading Nick Land because he has a certain kind of aesthetic pleasure to him for a certain kind of you know kind of uh lover of the goth let's say he's a very gothic kind of guy he's like the black metal in a way i know black metal and goth aren't the same but yeah he's like the black metal of here he's this you know this evil
dark side which has this slightly possibly useful past that you can always tap into it so actually now i'm reading the earlier land and there's a certain thing the land i always love reading i I love his critique of Kant because I like this idea of unlocking the fundamental productive power that produces the categories and then letting it rip and trying to make some sort of new civilization out of what the Enlightenment has always held back. I mean, I get it more from certain contemporary readings of Hegel than the land, but I think it's quite good to get into it. I mean, the problematization of the relationship we have to temporality is something we find in the critique of trans-Settlemental miserableism here. but it's just as easily defined in Nietzsche's Dustbakes Arafustra. Land, for me, is mainly someone who people go back to, or I go back to, really, in looking at his philosophical descendants,
Mark Fisher, Reznor Garastani, the Cyclonopedia, the post-exeratious milieu, which find their roots in land. I think he has a lot of value in going back to them for that. But really, I think a friend of the show, Matt Cahoon, reduces Land quite well in summing up as the look for an exit. Land just doesn't like the world as it is, and he doesn't want to find a new voice, a new kind of, and vote for a new party. He wants an exit. And he's willing to go into these very dark Gothic corners that become very aesthetically attractive because they feel like a total outside. But fundamentally, the historical moment has gone. The moment of fact, Numa has gone. Siberia was a complete and total. It wasn't the emancipation we all got there was no great flattening and in trying to found a new horizontal horizontality
end of governmentality really he just remains in the hegemony of these kinds of fundamentally capitalist transactions and i know a lot of people mentioned to this and think you know we're calling this a bad faith but i really enjoy reading land but for some people land is like your favorite black metal band you can point out there's a whole bunch of nazis who burnt down churches for for years and i'll go oh well you would say that wouldn't you but apart from that you know you read land i'm not going to say don't read land i think he does a great way of pulling us out a certain kind of marketized logic to his extremes um stop giving him attention on twitter though he really seems to like it and it's just kind of you know he's not he doesn't do anything particularly interesting these days um stop recommending him animes for god's sake he has
kids to look after let him let him let him let him just vibe or leave him alone that's yeah greg any final thoughts you know i don't actually have any any particular final thoughts i have a lot of things to think about um but i i don't have any well-formed uh thoughts to sum it up I will say, you know, it's nice that out of the blue, the publisher reached out to me and sent me a free book. Thank you, Robin, for sending Greg the book. Hey, that sounds good, right? Robin McKay, if you're listening, send me some Urbanomic. We'll take a look at it, maybe even do a show on it. In the meantime, if you want more Asset Horizon, find us on Patreon.
We have an upcoming seminar on Michel Foucault, like I said earlier. also find us on Twitter find us on Instagram support us in any number of ways we appreciate it also check the links in the show notes below our next episode will be an episode of inner experience on the work of James Hillman and how that work is being used in conjunction with the idea of mutual aid should be an interesting episode in any event we'll see you next time We'll see you next time.