Inhumanism

Mackay's name for Land's experiment

Inhumanism is Robin Mackay's retrospective name for Nick Land's attempt to turn philosophy into an experiment against the human conditions of thought. It is more specific than doctrinal antihumanism. Mackay presents Land's writings as residues of experiments whose object was escape from the anthropic conservatism of philosophy, common sense and the evolutionary contingencies fixed by Earth's geological history. Land calls their combined constraint the Human Security System: social, institutional, personal and philosophical forms that incarcerate possible intelligence (Nick Land: An Experiment in Inhumanism, pp. 1–2).

The experiment alters medium as well as thesis. In the mid-1990s Land's philosophy begins to fuse with cyberpunk, horror and electronic dance music, producing theory-fiction and practical microcultures rather than conventional commentary. Films such as Terminator, Blade Runner, Predator and Videodrome, William Gibson's fiction and jungle's digitized sonics are treated as channels through which the unknown insinuates itself into human organization. The purpose is not cultural interpretation but the unlocking and intensification of forces of dehumanization already carried by capital, technology and eros (Nick Land: An Experiment in Inhumanism, pp. 3–4).

CCRU as microculture

The CCRU gives this inhumanism a collective laboratory. Its events combine theory, art, music and performance; Abstract Culture and Meltdown oppose an apocalyptic technosingularity to Californian cyber-optimism; geotraumatics relocates human subjectivity within nested planetary traumas. Mackay describes the anonymous collective writings and their entities as the successful production of a microculture in which the line between real and hyperstitional is deliberately smeared (Nick Land: An Experiment in Inhumanism, pp. 6–7).

The editors' introduction to Fanged Noumena supplies the philosophical trajectory. Land's cyberpositive model identifies runaway feedback, rather than controlled equilibrium, with critique and capital; his later geotraumatic work treats organism, voice and language as stratified symptoms to be decoded through tics, extralingual phonetics and numerical practices (Fanged Noumena introduction, pp. 38–45; cyberpositive; tic systems). Inhumanism therefore joins a metaphysics of exteriority to techniques of writing, voicing, numbering and collective disindividuation.

Failure as evidence

Mackay does not narrate the project as a triumphant transcendence of the human. Land's breakdown makes it impossible to distinguish access to the transcendental from the derangement of a psyche at its limits; the experiment becomes evidence of the human headcase's resilience (Nick Land: An Experiment in Inhumanism, pp. 8–9). The Fanged Noumena introduction likewise ends by calling the wager experimentally failed while retaining its diagnoses of the human, number, time and modernity, and its textual machines for reopening suppressed lineages (Fanged Noumena introduction, pp. 51–54).

CONTRADICTION: Inhumanism requires treating apparent breakdown, embarrassment and loss of subjective control as possible routes outside the Human Security System; Mackay's retrospective account concludes that these same events supplied no reliable criterion of escape. The experiment's practical radicalism and its epistemic failure cannot be separated (Nick Land: An Experiment in Inhumanism, pp. 4–9).