So, Nicholas, at this time, we'll kind of pivot the discussion a little bit. We'll open up a Q&A for all of the patrons who are in here. And I just wanted to say thank you for appearing on the show. And the following bit of the conversation will be on Zero Books Patreon account as a sort of parrot room discussion. And so I invite any of the patrons at this time, if you want to hop in the chat and ask your question and kind of queue up, we'll ask questions to Nick. And this will be more of an informal discussion. And I wanted to start it off with something a little bit lighthearted, if you didn't mind. I've recently taken interest in the British hip hop scene with respect to
Pete and Boss and the Northern Boys. Have you seen these videos? No, I haven't. I was hoping you did. I should have sent it to you. These guys are in their late 50s, early 60s in some cases. 70s, honestly. 70s? Oh, really? yeah yeah and they're doing like horrorcore um and yeah all kinds of uh i i guess i reformed the band last summer and did a did a gig and immediately got covid at the kick oh you did well that's what i was going to ask because i've done music too have you ever thought about going back into music and maybe you wanted to talk about those experiences a little bit um my band was uh kind of three people we go a guy programmed the drum machines i wrote the raps and a guy who'd
been in a band called big flame did the guitaring over the top of it and last summer we did we did kind of reform and play an indie gig so it was people it was kind of shoegazing in england there's there was a genre called c86 uh which were the bands that appeared on a cassette released by the in the mid 80s and so we there was a little festival of that and we were adjacent to that because big flame were on it we played a gig with all these other bands and immediately got covid it was a fun gig i think that's that's online actually that's on youtube if anyone wants to look at meat mouse oh yeah feel free to send this to me yes please i was trying to find it actually before we got started yeah well the band was called meat mouth and this the song is called
meat mouth is murder which is right on um did any any of the patrons just want to hop in i mean you can just hop right in the discussion i don't see anyone queued up in the chat but perhaps there's some questions for nicholas yeah we can just unmute and go for it there's a there's no biggie otherwise i'll pass it to adam maybe adam you probably wanted to ask more about Nick Land I kind of cut it short now I think I've always I'll just send it to a bit of a bit of a rant about Nick Land because I read too much cyberpunk I mean I guess I mean I guess I mean yeah how I just I guess how is this sort of do you think there's any sort of way in this kind of a stage of you so much in terms of how you're writing in terms of like the cyberpunk
sensibility in terms of how you approach fiction because one of the interesting things that the CCI really brings about is the advent of so-called theory fiction and where it's it's ambiguous as to what it is in the same way that you know neuromancer is very fiction you know theory fiction in terms of the new ways it speculates about the future of technology actually you know yeah a question about fiction and how it's so do you but before we get to that I noticed James has a question I'll let them get to it first yeah go ahead James go ahead and unmute thank you um I guess I have I sort of asked on mute because I don't have it fully formed yet as a question, but I've just finished rereading Flatline Constructs and something that, you know,
and also reading Machinic Desire for this, I wonder is if Fisher is saying, you know, where, where does this like all powerful force of deterritorialization come from? It's not purely capital. I guess I wonder then what is his kind of answer to like the alternative source? Because if he's not going to say full territory, deterritorialization by capital and the way land might really lean into that is there another sort of process that like fisher says here's the alternative here's here's something that's going alongside capital that we can see and i guess that's where i kind of see like maybe the gothic or like the weird and the eerie come back because there are these like supernatural i guess and you know to use that word but un-understandable forces that are outside just purely capital does that make sense as a question
Yeah, I think it does. I'm not a big expert on Mark Fisher, but I did do my PhD on Derrida and economics. And the year that I finished it, Derrida then brought out a book on economics, marks and economics, which kind of ruined any chance I had of getting my PhD published because Derrida had topped me. But the idea of hauntology came from that Derrida book. Mark Fisher picked it up, which surprised me because there was this animosity between Deridians and Deleuzeans to an extent, whether it was justified or not. And as I understand it, and I'm sure people know Mark Fisher better than I do, Mark picks up ideas that were closed down by Thatcherism and by capitalism, ideas that now haunt us.
and it seems in some ways that he's returned to a kind of negative dialectics where the the possibilities that didn't happen the desires of of the people of the slaves that were trampled by the masters keep coming back and keep haunting us and have this have a real effect in the world despite kind of not happening um it's a weird way of hovering between hegel and positivism the things that didn't happen have a huge effect because besides because they didn't happen that they haunt us i don't know whether that quite answers your question james but um i think that's a really good way to put it that's a really fantastic way
I thought that was an option. That's it, because it is the alternative to where the positive feedback loop is, where the auto-generating thing will melt down the limits is of our current situation, is rather than capital itself. Because, you know, in Machinic Design, Lanz says that only proto-capitals have been criticized. We haven't seen anything yet. for Fisher is the continuum of all of the utopian desires for a plenty that have been continually repressed from, especially given the example, say, of Chile, the idea of a cybernetic democracy for the working class. So the alternative will be the working class and the capital culture in tandem.
And the sort of the Landian temporality is almost inverted, yes, So rather than from the future, it's from the past, because in order for capital to survive as it is, it has to constantly repress these things because they are a threat to it, not because they aren't. They may be defeated, but they still have a virtual capacity, which we need to tap into and then spiral that out of control, but not unconditionally, as Lamb would say, but in the condition that, yeah, we want it. We don't want, we don't, we want Red Plenty. We want a kind of post-capitalist, post-work kind of desire. It's basically one that's more in touch with the human face, I guess. I would add to that, too. I think the work of Lukasz and Nancy Hartsock really plays a big role for Mark Fisher, especially towards the end of his life.
the articulation or the cultivation of class consciousness through what would have been acid communism. The image of Mark Fisher that, you know, my sort of like the thumbnail that I have in my mind when I think of Mark Fisher is the post-capitalist desire essay where he talks about people lining up around Starbucks. And I forget who the name of the British commentator was who basically denigrated them on the air because they went to Starbucks after a protest. And it's pretty clear for somebody like Fisher that the reason that we convene in these spaces to study quietly amongst each other over $7 and $8 venti-sized coffees is that we have
these repressed intensities that when given the proper sort of articulation can come out of their chaff and develop into the kinds of politics that were left behind in the wake of socialism and communism's defeat. So I don't know if that's the last word in Fisher's work, but I think what I'm saying kind of jibes with what Nicholas and Adam is saying too. So I don't know if that helps James. I think that that does help. And I think that makes sense for a lot of the stuff Fisher gets up to later in his career. And then you can see it sort of, in the psychoanalytic terms he uses, it kind of makes more sense to think of hauntology in that way because why have a venti after the protest?
It's because of this repressed desire and then that as, I guess, a location for generation of some kind of process that's outside necessarily capital because it's sort of baked into like the changing of subjectivity and things not expressed and lost futures and all that. Yeah. And let's face it, some ventis are pretty tasty. And so that the expenditure, you know, the collective expenditure around those things. And it's interesting too, that shame and guilt is mobilized by the ruling elite, you know, to keep us from, from doing that sort of thing. It's, it's, it goes hand in hand with those people on, on Fox news who will criticize people buying cookies on their ebt card it's like we you are not allowed to enjoy until you meet certain criteria
under the rule of the ruling class and uh yeah so anyway that's that's just a rant that i don't want to get into but um oh we have um we have some people on camera right now sam how you doing how you doing i'm all right um all right go for it sam i was just um something nicholas mentioned at the start about the fall of communism and sort of that being kind of I guess I guess the way I see this is I'm not I'm not a Deleuze-Guatari person really like I've read some but I don't like I'm not I'm not invested in I'm not even I'm not even into philosophy in the same sort of I'm not in an academic position with philosophy at all so this is kind of like a hobby for me
um but yeah just how Nick Lann's work coming at that sort of that that sort of pinnacle of facturism and the death of communism and the death of alternatives I guess I mean this is where I see him and Mark tied together very much so in their thought is like something is something has gone away uh for land it's a positive and affirmative force where it becomes everything becomes i guess well like you were saying plan doesn't really see things historically he sees it as a as a sort of i guess a metaphysical thing that's always been around that's this sort of propensity of matter to to be free or to to to be um i guess sort of self-constructing and
self-organizing and or self-disorganizing maybe um so so he sees it as this sort of continual process where I guess he gets that from the others uh and but Mark Mark I think Mark does see it much more historically and I think he looks at things more in a more historical way um but I think that point like that that's there was something um on the verso blog um with uh Mackenzie Wark wrote something about um land um where I think they saw it as um a kind of a sort of distillation of that moment like land's philosophy was a distillation of what was happening
in the 90s with all this sort of okay we've lost this big alternative path now there's only this path left and this is this must be the path that's that's the future um so I'm kind of on a ramble here but I mean what I'm what I'm kind of getting at is that I see him and Mark connected in these two things but I think Mark obviously takes the very historical line on it he takes to this is this is a moment in history and I think to some extent I wouldn't say land has been proved wrong but i would say land has been uh had his his story interrupted by 2001 first you know the human security system very literally did come back in a big way in the term in the sense of america going to war everywhere you know in this sort of trying to re-establish some sense
of control um and then 2008 where everything just fell to bits and massive amounts of retail i guess re-territorialization in the delusian qataris sense like a restructuring finance to make sure that we couldn't have this this rapid collapse and yet we're in we're now in this kind of this kind of like limbo state of nothingness and leaping from crisis to crisis where nothing things are happening but they're not affecting humanity in the sense of there's no continuum, there's no future to get to anymore. I guess that's a very Fisherian kind of idea. I'm sorry.
But you have reminded me that at the time that Fukuyama had bought out the book The End of History and although nobody actually wrote essays on it, we were acutely aware of it and we were wondering, you know, it was clearly a Hegelian book and it was taking Hegel seriously and saying that well if there's no more progress and communism is defeated, history, if the two big conflicts are over then history is at an end and we kind of took these ideas to heart that we didn't know how to do politics and this from the late 80s through to the 90s we were
looking for something. And in the end, Mark Fisher has tried to reinvigorate Marxism. There have been a lot of people on the same trajectory as Nate Land turning from a version of Marxism into a version of kind of really repressive fascism. And the big, you know, you wonder where the big ideas are, but the big ideas have been, I guess, ecology, Black Lives Matter, um i don't know what people feel that where the hope has come from i i see that fisherian futurologist has a question but i have a very quick follow-up to that um and maybe i i hope
it doesn't go too long but you know given the moment that has transpired with the early nick land and the ccru and and what sam brings up with the sort of fresco of crises that now marks the early part of the 21st century, where do you see, oh, how, and you don't have to put all your cards on the table here, but how have your politics evolved, you know, considering the people who worked with Nick and like folks like Ray Brassier, who I see kind of going more back to a traditional Marxism right now, how has that impacted your views over time? Or were there ever moments that, Are there moments that you remember where maybe you sort of transformed out of your thoughts from that time?
Well, my politics went strange because I was in Bethlehem, during the invasion of Bethlehem in 2002. So I became heavily involved in Palestinian issues. And then back in England, I just wanted Palestine to have a better, after the wake of Tony Blair's Iraq war, I just could not contemplate a world where we went to war for no reason. And we weren't listening to issues like the Palestinian question that didn't impact on our politics. So what happened was, with no way to make these arguments in the Labour Party, which was very kind of neocon at the time, I went to the Liberal Democrat Party, and I became a speechwriter for the leader, Nick Clegg.
And I tried to find ways to reinvigorate the centre, because the centre is where I'm told the centre is where politics are won and lost. and I thought well we've got to reinvigorate the centre so I became a Liberal Democrat and I by the time I was working with Nick Clegg I was fairly sure that there would be a coalition a government which there was so he became Deputy Prime Minister and I was still I was still writing not so much speeches but supplying metaphors for him so my politics went completely centrist and the coalition didn't really work out and I don't really have a political
home at the moment but that's my story that I was you know I regard myself as being queer bisexual I don't want to lie about my past I want I want to tell stories of the the cities and but I also want a world where you know social justice matters where we can tackle issues in a practical way like climate change and I think well you've got to reinvigorate the center but reinvigorate in a way that people like me and people who have a much much harder job than a middle-aged white man like myself can get into the center but I have no fucking idea how to do that anymore i'm slightly i'm slightly lost but yeah to answer your question was i
i became centrist okay great uh just quickly just quickly if we get fishier and visualist i'll bring them in but it's also quite ironic that nick leg then went to work for meta as one of their and became anyways a more of a landian cybernetic integrational kind of figure i believe he's number two in meta now isn't he Yes, he's more on the Landian path maybe, but Fischer and Futurologists, sorry, absolutely, go for it. I noticed in the late Mark Fischer essays that he has this sort of riff on the death drive where he says that if you are on Twitter and you're riding your car and you want to send out a message or whatever, it's like the literal death drive.
and because you want to get out this message but you you're risking your life and um there's a similar uh sort of way of seeing things i think in the machinic desire essay yeah i agree where where land um he talks about replicators and reproducers and uh what's the third thing um that there are hang on um like he says that there are these uh uncoded um reproducer units and they can become replicants or they can become um reproducers and that the outside is sort of
in camo and you think that you are getting addicted to what i see would later be algorithmic stuff like i don't know youtube trends or tiktok or whatever but it's actually the outside coming in and connecting with your erotic impulses but it's actually death that's making you become the algorithm so to speak so i think that this is actually what happens today in a lot of ways but he thought neglected that that would simply mean that if we become
algorithmic um and he also take there's a lot of freud in the machining desire essay with um where he talks about like the big x and freud and that the big x is sort of coming in through the depth drive um but there's not actually innovation today when when the algorithms take over because it's the same stuff over and over again and that's where mark fisher i think um has it right and i think that nick land also noticed this i saw this i heard this interview with him where he says that like facebook when it came on the scene he got very disillusioned
by by seeing how we get back into our face I think he thought it would be like the addiction would be like if you're at a rave and you dance to the repetitive beats and then you slowly lose your identity and like the algorithms would do the same thing you become addicted to the computerized world and then you would lose yourself in the cyberspace like in Neuromancer or whatever, but the opposite happened. That's my take. Go ahead, Nick. I saw the same
essay by Nick Lander. He was just absolutely appalled by the face in Facebook. He expected something else to happen. I'm going at a complete tangent to you for sharing and futurologists but that reminded me of of a story about Deleuze that you know when when Deleuze was a kid you know like 15 16 17 20 he was a huge Sartre fan and so was everyone else they were you know Sartre was the thing that was happening they were all existentialists and they wanted freedom to rewrite their future on a blank slate and make their own possibilities for the future. And then Sartre wrote the essay
Existentialism is a Humanism. And they go, what? We're just talking about humans again. We're just going back to count to count's little box and you know i think delers's horror at the human recurring is the same horror of nick land at the face recurring that that the kind of future that they wanted they felt utterly let down by their followers although um i think delers is a thoroughly outstripped Jean-Paul Sartre. Rachel you have a question. Yeah I actually it's a half-formed question so apologies in advance but I think at Omute we're getting towards something around
theory fiction and its you know place in this world and I of course I'm interested in the place of like science fiction of the late 80s and early 90s. And we'd mentioned like Neuromancer and we mentioned kind of like the work that kind of came out of the crises from this era and how important they are to a lot of the theory comes out of the CCRU, et cetera. And so I think you just mentioned kind of like, what are the grand ideas of the current state and like the future, like what are these visions of the future? And I actually don't know if there's like a parallel or if like a parallel fiction or
theory fiction that is like, or a continual line that is being like from, from say, like Neuromancer forward that you see kind of continuing through the 1989 kind of vision. But I'm curious as to if this is continual or unique to that period, I suppose. I'm not sure what other people in CCRU were reading. I know that I was actually reading crime fiction. I was, and I wrote crime fiction. I wanted to write the history of Manchester. where the thing, I mean, it seemed to me the story of Manchester was that things that have been very underground since the 1950s
and were completely detested by the police, you know, gay clubs and things were raided all the time right through the 80s. And then suddenly it just flipped and the underground became the engine of Manchester's regeneration and the gay village became a tourist attraction. So something that was utterly mired in shame became, well, you know, via both capitalism, but also desire and just an enormous change in society. it became it became the engine by which manchester became a big glamorous city drugs too you know we we sold the drug experience and that sort of again something that was illegal became
um something that was sold as a tourist attraction which was good and bad so i wrote crime fiction because crime fiction seemed to me to be the way that you told the stories of cities and i wrote a couple of novels that did quite well at the time. I mean, I won the crime writer Silver Dagger with a novel called Manchester Slingback, which dealt with this. So I was looking to crime fiction and writers like James Ellroy, who was trying to tell the history of America, as he said, from the gutter to the stars. So I read less science fiction, but everyone read Neuromancer. everybody read Ian Banks everybody watched Blade Runner you know
and the links between I mean it's probably hard to imagine now just how computer illiterate we were at the end of the 80s in order to print an essay you either typed it and you know nobody learns to type in England so we were typing like that um so or you printed it out by writing it or writing it on the word processor but the word processing program was on the mainframe we had to book time in the math department and because it was completely booked up the only time we could book was kind of midnight so if you wanted to if you were dyslexic or your handwriting was terrible or you felt that word processing program was going to help you you had to book time in the middle of the night to write in the math department
and if it crashed you lost your whole essay which it frequently did and we had genuine floppy disks so you had to walk around with these things that look like flick you know singles flexi discs um and suddenly we were given money by the university as grants to buy computers i mean at the time um you know what we had money to we had money we you know we didn't take out big student grants at the time we we could manage but we took out student grants to buy computers so suddenly we all had computers we were we were aware that changes in music changes in filmmaking and changes in our actual essay writing and novel writing were changing so rapidly and so
especially neuromancists seem to describe the world that was happening and And I think the reason that we remember CCRU now is that they do seem prescient. They were trying to tackle things when it just wasn't clear that that's the way the world was going, but something was happening. I'm sorry I can't name more books for you, and I'm sorry that I was reading crime fiction. But Neuromancer, I think if you'd speak to somebody else who was more into science fiction, they can give you a reading voice. It makes a lot of sense that you went into Neuromancer in a way because it is a noir pirate detective story. I think that's one of the things I think that's very underrated with Neuromancer as actually a piece of crime fiction where people go to something like Snow Trash.
And I mean, Rachel, just in terms of just to add something into that, actually, in terms of where the theory fiction went, at least on Land's side, it went into more esoteric William Burroughs kind of Lovecraft kind of stuff. But really, at the time, you said Cyclonopedia by Resenegar Astani, which is very much a geological kind of thing. Or Harry Gunzaru mentioned before we started recording the book Red Pill. But also, especially with Mackay and Negar Astani, it's comics. It's comics. It's chronosis. But ultimately, I think that's less. I think in terms of theory fiction, I don't think land's the dominant tendency now in a post-CCR era. It's Grant. it's Ian Howleton's Grant's work on shelling which is the which is it doesn't begin with a
quote from the nurse it's all about shelling I think I think this is the shelling but before I start rooting shelling too much Craig oh no um I just wanted to make sure that there are no other questions I don't want to monopolize too much of your time Nicholas you've been fantastic and and I'll only say that before we we log off that I hope to have you back on our other podcast acid horizon sometime in the future maybe you can talk to us about derrida or something else that you're working on or what a pleasure um before we go is there anybody who wanted to register a comment question or anything thanks rachel for for your question and thanks fisherian futurologist and um james uh anybody else have something thank you oh we do have one more thing
Oh, yes. So we'll let Fisher and futurologists do the last question. One simple question. What exactly is the death drive? Because the simple question I've been reading these texts by Land and a little bit of Freud and the Mark Fisher. What's it called? Antivital. And he's very confused about it. and in land uh like the death drive is machinic desire is zero is pure imminence is like it's the body without organs it's all the same thing in a way it's the end of the marketplace it's the absolute time it's the future the most far away um so if i were to
become death the death drive as fish as uh nick land would want it what exactly would i have to do because obviously it's not going to be clicking through tiktok or whatever it's it has something else now it's closer to that than you may think i'm not sure a person can become the death drive because it is it's the utterly impersonal I nobody knows what the death drive is it's the thing that's beyond the calculations we make every day to keep sane and keep ourselves together but I guess when you hear the thoughts and the blood pounding in your head and absolutely gripped by anxiety you're also aware that thoughts aren't just about ideas and making connections thoughts
are actually material processes too and nick lan certainly is using the death drive to think of you know a kind of psychic materialism if that makes sense it's a drive to depersonalization it's the kind it's the same drive that makes you want to get out of your head or merge your screen lose your identity in the same way the body of our organs is it's disconnecting yourself from the ways you have been organized and then flowing about on this free space for these other organs uh it's it's it's jacking in to cyberspace in the um in the romancer is that kind of thing pure depersonalization and and i would just add to that the the one problem that i think remains that leotard de leuze and gottari even mark fisher we we can't really solve or ultimately get our
heads around is you know what is it that truly mitigates the tension between the positive and negative feedback loops, you know, that which pushes us forward to depersonalize versus that thermostat that has the cutoff. I mean, this is ultimately Jouy Sans at the end. And I think this is where Fisher ends up. And he prefers the sort of Lacanian reading of the death drive is that it's a kind of complication. And so, you know, following this sort of thread between, you know, Freud, Lacan, and Indulas and Gattari, and even Leotard, like in this little trifecta or quadrant of figures, the question is, what is the limit? And how can we transcend that limit without
completely losing ourselves? I mean, it almost seems aporetic. How does one depersonalize without losing the person? And I think the impersonal nature of the forces is the one thing that we ultimately can't get our heads around from an individual privatizable perspective, which Nick Land says is that there is literally a multiplicity of forces pulling and tugging at us all the time. We are all bound by microplastics, which are probably disintegrating us from the inside at the same time. So there's a bit of the death drive in that when we think of it, Not just thoughts, not just impulses and affects, but there is a real material out there that is not just a byproduct. It's not just a negative externality of our desire bound with capitalism.
It is a function of it that we must live within and upon which our experience as human beings condenses upon the very conditions of our own degradation over time in the system that seems like it cannot be changed. And hence, we're trying to find this outside. So I don't know, maybe. It seems to me that if you have trauma or if you are addicted to some technological processes, these things, what Freud describes as the death drive, what Len thinks takes us outside. these things do not destroy your personality they force you into your personality because
if you have some trauma whatever you you are like i'm i'm trapped in this state where i have to repeat the trauma it seems to me like like eros would be like the the one that would get you outside of yourself no like where you're not where you where you create things and you are not in a repetitive pattern trapped yeah um gosh adam do you have something for that this is this is just this is just because uh like the clans of the goth and this is very goth the intersection of goth and jungle this is why we like dark wave jungle in that way this is very much the i mean you can get into a dialectical thing of saying that that they're both a similar movement from opposite sides but i think this
de lersi and impulses you can say you know if i'd be a gaily and one could say that nick land's reading was one-sided but at the same time it's because this yeah as you may be saying the entire time nicholas it's because this book's really just coming out it was in a sense of its time but at same time it being incredibly prescient and reaching beyond itself and this is why we could still have these new discussions today i mean i really enjoyed this discussion but i'm afraid i do have to run now okay yeah we didn't want to keep you but uh you were excellent nicholas we hope to have you back um and i just want to thank everybody all the patrons for contributing and and i'll be in touch with you uh again either later tonight or tomorrow to say thanks again thank you all the best thank you so much all right take care everyone thank you you everyone