Ktismatics <
https://ktismatics.wordpress.com/>
the tohu vabohu tour
Jul 26 2009 <
https://ktismatics.wordpress.com/2009/07/26/surging-intothe-inhuman/>
Surging Into the Inhuman
I have always unconsciously sought out that which will beat me down to
the ground, but the floor is also a wall.
– Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: George Bataille and Virulent
Nihilism, 1992
The attraction for me is remote: letting go of all craft and judgment, all
reason and restraint, casting aside the distinctly human, in order to ride the
primal forces surging up through the organism. For Land there’s no liberation
here other than the liberation of the zero, of death. Going posthuman doesn’t
mean achieving some sort of superhuman freedom and power: it’s
posthumanity in the rawest sense of death and extinction. Humanity is a
blight on the planet and an excruciating burden on the individual: the sooner
it’s gotten rid of the better. Worldwide warfare might be the ultimate solution
if it could shake itself loose from controlled rational discipline and just let it
rip. For Land only an orgy of slaughter will do.
Presumably people who assert this sort of “virulent nihilism” never gain
access to the levers of destruction, and one wonders whether they’re having
too much fun talking about self-immolation actually to plunge in the knife.
Surely there’s a puerile rhetorical thrill in writing and reading about the horror
and the mayhem, the psychosis and the putrefaction, the collapse. Maybe
Land’s book should be admired strictly as a worthy exemplar of a particular
genre of philosophical writing instead of being given serious consideration as
a way of living — or of dying.
If someone came to my practice wanting to “get different” in this particular
way, would I help him? Would I encourage my client to cultivate full
commitment to this particular form of extreme difference? Or would I try to
dissuade and distract him? Again, maybe if I could reduce this posthuman
impulse to an intellectual exercise, maybe even a personal lifestyle
experiment: nothing serious, nothing he won’t grow out of eventually. Ride it
hard, get some mileage out of it, have some fun, write a book about it while
the energy lasts. After the surge exhausts itself maybe we can move on to
something else…
24 Comments
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NB
27 July 2009 at 8:36 am <
https://ktismatics.wordpress.com/2009/07/26/surging-into-theinhuman/#comment-11537>
Christ. The book sounds awful, as in crap.
“Surely there’s a puerile rhetorical thrill in writing and reading about the
horror and the mayhem, the psychosis and the putrefaction, the collapse.”
Oh yeah, you bet. Not only are we pornographically drawn to the ugly end
from the safety of our armchairs (emphasis on the safety) but – to be the
bringer of such fantasies: ahhhh, heaven.
And quite a lot of it is pretty good too: Story of the Eye; some of Burroughs’
stories like ‘Apocalypse’; passages of Bely’s Petersburg; the Revelation of St
John; er, The End by The Doors. But some of it is just purely and simply awful
– and possibly more accurately portrays the end of the world simply because
it’s so bad.
If Land’s book is as you say then it’s an example of the distinctly still-human
desperation for control over one’s life, over life. How better to control the
flux, the disappointments, the brutishness, the powerlessness, the
incomprehension, than to deny it all? Thanatos, isn’t it?
I knew it all the time: Posthuman just means dead.
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john doyle < http://ecliptics.wordpress.com/>
27 July 2009 at 9:39 am <
https://ktismatics.wordpress.com/2009/07/26/surging-into-theinhuman/#comment-11543>
It’s well written, full of fire and attitude and rhetorical flare — I suspect the
author would cite Nietzsche rather than Bataille as his stylistic and
theoretical mentor. I enjoyed reading it — got all the way to the end without
skipping huge chunks or getting bored. But a work like this needs to be
evaluated not just on the grounds of aesthetics but also in terms of truth and
justice. For me, exercising my distinctly human judgment, the book fails on
these grounds.
The End by the Doors? Did I ever mention, NB, that I saw the Doors twice in
concert? I’m always entertained when I hear a Doors oldie on the radio, but I
never play the old LPs any more.
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NB
27 July 2009 at 10:25 am <
https://ktismatics.wordpress.com/2009/07/26/surging-into-theinhuman/#comment-11547>
Well, I think I told you that I’ve read one article by Land that he wrote years
ago and I thought it was pretty good, especially in terms of being “well
written” in that Nietzschean way. Some maybe his book passes muster in the
same way as the other apocalyptic tracts I mentioned! But, I agree with you
about truth and justice.
Right, I’m going to throw any credibility out of the window now… I still like The
Doors quite a lot. I got into them when I was about 12 and thought they were
great. By the end of my adolescence I thought they were pretty bad, pretty
much a joke. Then, I started listening to them again in my mid-20s. And I just
started enjoying the music, enjoying Morrison’s frequently silly lyrics. And I
realised that I really did like them. They’re the last word in phallic rock, you
might say, and they do it well. Certainly by the end, Morrison realised the (no
doubt unintentional) comedy in The End. I’m particularly fond of The Soft
Parade album, where they’re clearly parading themselves – and having fun
with it. They mean it, man. They also sound like no one else, despite sounding
very much of their time. And I would have definitely gone to see them live.
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john doyle < http://ecliptics.wordpress.com/>
27 July 2009 at 2:33 pm <
https://ktismatics.wordpress.com/2009/07/26/surging-into-theinhuman/#comment-11556>
“When I was back there in seminary school…” I’m glad to hear about your
Doors enthusiasm, NB. I didn’t mention that I don’t listen to the records
anymore because I sold all my vinyl and turntable when we moved to France.
On our last trip to Paris we took a little soft parade of our own past the place
where Jim Morrison died — didn’t visit the grave though. A lot of French rock
aficionados like the Doors too, and expressed l’envie forte when I told them
I’d seen the Doors play live. I probably listened to the Waiting for the Sun
album more often than any of the others.
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John Hannon
20 August 2009 at 1:13 am <
https://ktismatics.wordpress.com/2009/07/26/surging-into-theinhuman/#comment-11802>
I used to know Nick Land before he went off to live in China, and would say
that he was one of the most intellectually charismatic and intriguing
characters I’ve ever met. (Up there with Terence Mckenna)
His work following “The Thirst for Annihilation” was a delirious sp(l)icing of
Deleuze & Guattari with virology and cyberpunk sci-fi, which he was able to
get away with largely by being such a brilliant prose stylist – although
eventually he became interested in esoteric number theory (describing
himself as a “freelance technosatanist trying to relearn how to count”) and
his writings became utterly impenetrable.
However, for those few years in the 90s when he was the star attraction at
Warwick University’s annual “Virtual Futures” conferences, he made
philosophy more exciting and fun than it’s ever been before or since.
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john doyle < https://ktismatics.wordpress.com/>
20 August 2009 at 7:36 am <
https://ktismatics.wordpress.com/2009/07/26/surging-into-theinhuman/#comment-11804>
I agree about Land’s prose: keen and attention-grabbing. Odd that he got into
number theory, since he expressly states in The Thirst that he’s not much at
maths. No doubt a charismatic figures with an attraction to apocalyptic
nihilism can keep a place hopping.
I’m aware of Nick Land as a sort of legendary figure from the blogosphere’s
deep past (i.e., early 200s), before I started reading and writing and
commenting on them. Apparently his Hyperstition site was a big point of
convergence for a number of theory bloggists, with k-punk being in effect a
protege of Land’s. The CCRU was another legendary occupant of blogspace
involving some of these people. Did you run in these circles, John?
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John Hannon
21 August 2009 at 9:35 am <
https://ktismatics.wordpress.com/2009/07/26/surging-into-theinhuman/#comment-11805>
Yes, although I’ve never studied at university (being merely a philosophical
hobbyist), I attended all the Virtual Futures conferences and also various
Ccru related events such as the 1999 SYZYGY hyperstition happening
which they produced in collaboration with the digital arts collective
Orphan Drift.
Being so very much of its time in its intimate connection with 90s premillennial cyber-rave/drug culture, Land’s post-Annihilation work can
admittedly seem somewhat dated now, but – for me at least – it once
really did feel like the future.
For a good account of Land’s presentation of his apocalyptic “Meltdown”
paper at the 1994 Virtual Futures conference and the discussions
provoked in its aftermath, see the “Rhizomatics of Cyberspace” chapter in
Charles Stivale’s book “The Two-Fold Thought of Deleuze and Guattari.”
(It can also be found on the net somewhere or other)
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Carl < http://carldyke.wordpress.com/>
22 August 2009 at 4:56 pm <
https://ktismatics.wordpress.com/2009/07/26/surging-into-theinhuman/#comment-11806>
“Again, maybe if I could reduce this posthuman impulse to an intellectual
exercise, maybe even a personal lifestyle experiment: nothing serious,
nothing he won’t grow out of eventually. Ride it hard, get some mileage out of
it, have some fun, write a book about it while the energy lasts.”
Nice.
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john doyle < https://ktismatics.wordpress.com/>
22 August 2009 at 7:54 pm <
https://ktismatics.wordpress.com/2009/07/26/surging-into-theinhuman/#comment-11808>
Here’s a bit from Stivale’s book referenced by John Harron:
“David Porush continued in the preceding vein: he said that Land unleashed a
lot of pleasure in his “meltdown,” self-marginalizing subversive text, but also
apocalypse: that the text urges and embraces the apocalypse at the same
time as warning against it. Porush said that such pleasure might turn quickly
to other things, and that there is something irresponsible in unleashing this
apocalyptic view as a form of pleasure. Land said he had a lack of sympathy
with responsibility as a concept, that it constitutes a crushing form of
stratification. He asked, further, at the end of the day, does being responsible
really put you on the side of the angels? We’re so sedimented with years of
responsibility, but this is merely a way to hang onto a sense of control, which
itself is a part of the problem, not part of the solution.”
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Marcus Welsh
23 August 2009 at 3:52 am <
https://ktismatics.wordpress.com/2009/07/26/surging-into-theinhuman/#comment-11811>
It’s ironic, but not unexpected given his gloriously contradictory attitude to
the question of praxis, that Land should go on to change his characterization
of the “Apocalypse” (i.e. the techno-capitalist singularity) from a quasimetaphysical fatum that humanity can neither prevent nor effectively
forestall (as in “Meltdown” and other papers and lectures from around that
time) to a sacred politicomilitary task to be prosecuted in the face of
potentially fatal opposition from a resurgent Islam and European leftists!
> he made philosophy more exciting and fun than it’s ever been before or
since.
To philosophy students who’d far rather be doing something other than
philosophy, yes.
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john doyle < https://ktismatics.wordpress.com/>
23 August 2009 at 8:39 pm <
https://ktismatics.wordpress.com/2009/07/26/surging-into-theinhuman/#comment-11814>
So did Land become a neocon? A hyperstitionist who expands the fiction of
an American century until it fills the world? Or is he Chinese neocon now?
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Marcus Welsh
24 August 2009 at 2:03 am <
https://ktismatics.wordpress.com/2009/07/26/surging-into-theinhuman/#comment-11817>
> So did Land become a neocon?
Yes, and a rabid one at that, sucking up to at least one prominent neocon,
enthusing over racist crap about “Eurabia” (albeit with a twist: he’s been
known to aver the racial superiority of Han asians!).
> A hyperstitionist who expands the fiction of an American century until it
fills the world?
On one occasion he stated that there was no (one supposes, “machinic”)
inconsistency involved in the coexistence of, on the one hand, a militarily
adventurous United States, and on the other China as a politically repressive
economic powerhouse.
Whether you consider any of that “intellectually charismatic” would
obviously be a matter for your intellectual conscience.
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John Hannon
24 August 2009 at 2:35 am <
https://ktismatics.wordpress.com/2009/07/26/surging-into-theinhuman/#comment-11818>
I blame the drugs
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Marcus Welsh
24 August 2009 at 4:43 am <
https://ktismatics.wordpress.com/2009/07/26/surging-into-theinhuman/#comment-11819>
Yes, huge quantities of acid and speed aren’t always helpful when it
comes to formulating clear and precise arguments.
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Carl < http://carldyke.wordpress.com/>
24 August 2009 at 7:23 pm <
https://ktismatics.wordpress.com/2009/07/26/surging-into-theinhuman/#comment-11821>
There’s nothing charismatic about clarity and precision.
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Marcus Welsh
25 August 2009 at 2:14 am <
https://ktismatics.wordpress.com/2009/07/26/surging-into-the-
inhuman/#comment-11824>
> There’s nothing charismatic about clarity and precision.
I hear Bertrand Russell used it to wow all the ladies.
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NB
26 August 2009 at 5:48 am <
https://ktismatics.wordpress.com/2009/07/26/surging-into-theinhuman/#comment-11831>
“> There’s nothing charismatic about clarity and precision.
I hear Bertrand Russell used it to wow all the ladies.”
Ah, how times have changed… Years ago “making love” meant whispering
sweet nothings to your loved one in the arbour. Now it means getting fucked.
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David Johnson < http://www.davidjohnson.org.uk>
7 September 2009 at 9:22 am <
https://ktismatics.wordpress.com/2009/07/26/surging-into-the-
inhuman/#comment-11858>
John Doyle is right that bataillean ecstactic ruination is just a ride for the
connesoir of such things. For one, you need something to expend in the first
place, despite the myth of solar abundance, as Bataille himself knew (there is
little concern for the paradoxes that haunted Bataille in Land’s book, nor in a
great deal of the Bataille industry). The fact that you need hard assets – the
gold standard of pleasure – in order to be soveriegn, rather than a mere
attitude of reality defiance, is the true ‘inhuman’. I have been attacking the
ecstacy ruin equation since 2001, with ‘The Time of the Lords: An Attack on
Bataille’s Slave Aesthetic of Transience’, and ‘The Myth of Transience'(2005).
Not a attack on Land alone, although he largely ‘inspired me’: he was my
lecturer at Warwick when I was there in 90-91. His book largely de-politicises
and de-problematises Bataillean expenditure; he says in essence ‘Bataille’s
extreme, but I’m worse’. He was certainly charismatic, I have no problem
there…
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tony
7 September 2009 at 10:07 am <
https://ktismatics.wordpress.com/2009/07/26/surging-into-theinhuman/#comment-11859>
‘he fact that you need hard assets – the gold standard of pleasure – in order
to be soveriegn, rather than a mere attitude of reality defiance,’
That’s on the money all right. But the “attitude of reality defiance” is
impressive in its own right, because it is self-propelling, but always turns in
on itself. The desire to find only the ‘non-boring’ becomes boring. It does try
to totalize, and that’s the attraction, this malignant force, but you lose
interest in it when the epistolary-documented attraction to snakes, etc.,
becomes a little more than purely social.
And this: ‘Land said he had a lack of sympathy with responsibility as a
concept,’
That hasn’t changed, given that he’s hardly inaccessible, to say the least. Only
last week he threatened to be unable to provide me with a ‘torrent of
logoglyphic wonders’ due to hecticism (my word this time (lol). But do look at
the old Hyperstition site, I’m sure he’d love you to email him, it’s an
‘urbanatomy’ mail he’s got under his Shanghai guide. I’ve always been crazy
about him, he’s one of the cutest people in the world, but too devoted to
‘proud psychosis’ for my taste ultimately, and the eclipse of official neocon
power seems to have made him revert to Working Class Hero mode. Not
unlike other sea changes done when the Gold Standard called, I imagine.
‘I’m aware of Nick Land as a sort of legendary figure from the blogosphere’s
deep past (i.e., early 200s), before I started reading and writing and
commenting on them.’
Yes, he’s working some new gigs now, but don’t expect to find them in the old
places, and I don’t think it’s the BlackGlama ads, i.e., ‘What Becomes a
Legend Most?’ Not that I don’t think he’d do one.
‘said that such pleasure might turn quickly to other things, and that there is
something irresponsible in unleashing this apocalyptic view as a form of
pleasure.’
If that isn’t the truth, and it quickly turns into pain as Land doesn’t bother
with that ‘gold standard of pleasure’ for himself. He likes to be talked about,
you can be sure of that. I can’t imagine he has enjoyed any thread more than
this one. But DO email him, I’m sure you’d get results. All you have to do is tell
him what a great writer he is, and he’s yours (unfortunately, lol) for life.
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The Land Girls
8 September 2009 at 4:37 am <
https://ktismatics.wordpress.com/2009/07/26/surging-into-theinhuman/#comment-11863>
So who’s his designated Useful Idiot this time around, Tony?
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tony
8 September 2009 at 8:30 am <
https://ktismatics.wordpress.com/2009/07/26/surging-into-theinhuman/#comment-11866>
John–typically, I got stuck in the comments and hadn’t seen when you first
posted this. I’ve only read excerpts of this book, it’s frankly weirdly
melodramatic in tone–‘good of kind’, as used to be said in Parents’ Magazine,
but the writer himself went on to a thoroughly ‘respectable’ lifestyle, married
with children, etc.–so I assume he took your therapeutic advice before you
formulated it. His most recent Magnum Opus, a guide to Shanghai, contains a
pun or two, otherwise his wife writes the shopping news, he did some of the
history, I believe. I had thought there might have been ‘huge quantities of
acid and speed’, because there’s that colleague who wrote ‘Writing on
Drugs’. I’ve read that she’s the more user-friandly of that early duo.
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noir-realism < http://darkecologies.com>
13 February 2014 at 1:29 pm <
https://ktismatics.wordpress.com/2009/07/26/surging-into-theinhuman/#comment-21338>
What’s weird in your comments and most of the comments above is that I
wonder how deeply they actually read Land’s book? Land’s work although in
the tradition of Nietzsche and Bataille was also a veritable critique of the
whole Kantian internalization of philosophy into its fictional constructivism.
One finds that against such irrationalism as portrayed above in comments,
that Land himself and his ‘virulent nihilism’ was very much in the tradition of
radical enlightenment philosophe’s in the sense that La Gaya Science of
Nietzsche was a reactionary war cry against the decadence of Wagner and
the Romantics. Land even today is a traditionalist, even as he was then and
was actually a reactionary against the Kantian turn which led ultimately to
the dark contours of a fascist mentality: the extremes of reason become
illogical and objectivity turns inhuman.
I’m going to do a post on this, but will share what he terms on page 168 as
the central issue of western philosophy up to the time of Kant who he sees
as the culmination of the epistemological tradition: “the question that
remains repressed in the history of Western Philosophy up to Kant is not that
of the articulation between subject and object, but that of the difference
between the subject/object distinction itself (knowing) and inarticulate or
non-objective materiality (unknowing).” He then pursues this problem
through a series of diagnosis.
Land was not and is not some mindless rabid irrational creature; or, as some
try even now to name him “the mad deleuzian”. In fact he never once
mentions Deleuze in this book, which for a thorough scholar would have been
a mark against him. One sees him deal with certain concepts such as
difference but from another angel than Deleuze. I’m not sure who first coined
that epithet and placed it on Land but it is erroneous…. even if I disagree with
Land’s politics (his neo-reactionary stance in traditionalism ), I too question
the progressive tradition… and, even though I’m more of a ultra-leftist I still
get perturbed at the unreasoning reasoning of people that make shallow
assumptions of a philosophers work without truly digging down into the base
threads of the system itself. Where I see Land as deeply committed to the
philosophical traditions, others seem to see him as some rabid monster or
irrationalism situated outside the gates barking like Diogenes. I may have my
disagreements with his notions but I do at least try to tease out what he was
actually doing. Commentary for me is a duplicitous mode of doubling the
work of philosopher which is already an incestuous affair as Deleuze himself
once mention in relation to his histories of philosophy.
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noir-realism < http://darkecologies.com>
13 February 2014 at 2:23 pm <
https://ktismatics.wordpress.com/2009/07/26/surging-into-theinhuman/#comment-21341>
Addendum: The major point I’m trying to make is that many confuse Land for
promoting or espousing Virulent Nihilism when in fact his critique of
Kantianism and its traditions actually leads to this form of nihilism (i.e., this is
his Critique of Kant and those that followed in his wake.). As he says over and
over our investment in finitude is the problem, not the solution: we are the
virulent nihilists who seem to wallow in the morbidities of the heat death of
the universe and our trivial lives within it. Whereas for Land as for his reading
of Bataille, death has no sting, its all a matter of “scales” of “strata” of layers
in our ontological capacity to know. “Being would be other to death – either
annihilated by it or left immaculate – were there not scales”.
“What could be more pitiful than the romantics with their sobs of
aspiration?” Land asks. In his logic:
Humanism: capitalism and patriarchy is the same thing as our prison.
Personalism: is a trap because to believe that some of what one was holding
onto will be taken care of by another being is irreligion.
What lies beyond humanism and personalism, the traps of capitalism bound
to the theological ‘first cause’ (i.e., God), or the hope that we will be saved
from ourselves? Something else… yet, to be defined. This was Land’s book
against the contemporary cesspool of both Continental and Analytic
philosophy…
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