...the theoretical. But I want to insist that this is necessary because this machinic practicism that Land insisted on leads to a kind of practical impotence. So I want to insist that it's necessary to confront fundamental kind of conceptual issues before you can begin to understand what it is you're doing. And I think in that regard, I don't buy into the whole rhetoric about the need to kind of ditch representation. And I think if you try to ditch representation, get beyond conceptual representation, etc., etc., I think you end up with a kind of, you engender performative contradiction, not just theoretical contradiction, but performative contradiction.
In other words, a contradiction at the level of concepts manifests itself in terms of an incapacity at the level of practice. So that's why I'm going to operate in this way. I'm going to do it by schematizing Nick's work or agenda in terms of three contrasts, three explicitly dialectical contrasts. And the point is that where a kind of machinic pragmatism insists on the need to kind of resist and to obviate any kind of dialectical antagonism or opposition, I think it's necessary to do that in order to be able to kind of identify what its strengths and weaknesses are. The three points I want to focus on, or the three kind of dyads, are critique and materialism, teleology and eschatology, and practicism and volatrism.
Okay, first of all, what makes, well, as Mark's already said, I think, I speak here as Robin McKay and I are editing a volume of Nix, of Lann's writings, called Bang Numenau. These texts are pretty extraordinary. And as Mark said, no matter how much one may detest their rhetorical animus, etc., etc., it's not enough simply to dismiss them as a kind of puerile, indulgent kind of hyper-Nicheanism.
It's far more sophisticated than that, even if I do think it is ultimately kind of stymied by incoherences. And on any account, rereading those texts, I mean, these are extraordinary texts. And they certainly provide a sobering contrast with the kind of flaccid inanity of contemporary Bergsonian vitalism. The French philosopher, Dens-Hondé Combe, once described it as Guattari's anti-Egyptus and re-charge of the middle of the economy as manifestations of what he called mad black Hegelianism. and attempt to find some kind of prosecution of a kind of Marxism, materialism that somehow would be kind of anti-Hegelian.
In the same regard, like Lannes' work is a kind of mad black Deleuzeanism, Deleuze-unism. It's an attempt to kind of turn Deleuze's, the vitalist impetus, the affirmationist a long, that kind of animates Deleuze-Betarian corpus, into something much more ostensibly kind of, you know, unsavory, but also actually much more conceptual invigorating. And it's that the great, what's really interesting, as Mark said, is that there's a kind of, what's really interesting in these texts is the way in which there's a kind of extraordinary re-elaboration of negativity, a kind of non-conceptual negativity, and the kind of, these texts bristle with this kind of, you know, sublimated fury, and that's what makes them kind
of really powerful. And because I'm really interested in this issue about the power, In fact, I want to try to show that it's possible to rehabilitate the powers of the negative against what Ben Noyes has called this kind of affirmation of consensus in contemporary theory. This is a moment in Land's work that I'm acutely interested in, although I'll try to explain why I think he doesn't succeed in resting the negative from subordinating it to a kind of affirmation. Okay, these preliminaries aside. First of all, Land sets out his, he's operating under the aegis of kind of the Resulatory's work.
He proposes to radicalize critique, to radicalize critique, to convert the ideal conditioning of the representation of matter to the material conditioning of ideal representation. So that in the Landian kind of apparatus, matter becomes, materiality is construed solely as the production of production.