Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007 (Urbanomic/Sequence Press)

Product Information

In General Intellects there was only space to cover twenty-one influential theorists. I'm often asked why this or that figure is not in it. Land's work in the CCRU was an attempt similar to Nietzsche's Will to Power; to discard judgement and critique in an attempt to come up with a philosophy of pure immanence. However, unlike Nietzsche, Land is armed with Deleuze, cybernetic theory, amphetamines, techno nightclubs, and cyberpunk novels. With such immense potency, will he create the work which will transform god? Or will he just devolve into worthless technobabble?

Fanged Noumena - Urbanomic Nick Land, Fanged Noumena - Urbanomic

Land had the most brilliantly seductive and meteoric mind, endlessly imaginative and capable of adopting, inhabiting and discarding any philosophical position. With him - and rightly so - philosophy infected every area of life, and sheer vitality of life reverberated in his thinking. In Kant, and later in more elaborate form in Lévi-Strauss, alterity is captured and contained in a system of rules. And what a strange rule-set capitalism is! There’s a disjunction between filiation and alliance. The ancient bond between trade and marriage dissolves. A rift opens between what Chantal Mouffe calls the liberal and the democratic. The other side of free trade is the shared substance of the demos, with its frequently racist and patriarchal policing of who gets what share and who decides. Land: “The increasingly rigorous differentiation of marriage from trade, or politics from economics, finds its ultimate conceptual definition in the thought of a moral agency which is utterly impervious to learning, communication or exchange.” (73) Both Kant and capital run on the submission of outside to inside, nature to idea. “What falls outside this recognized form is everything that resists commodification.” (71) If there are places to which we are forbidden to go, it is because they can in truth be reached, or because they can reach us. In the end poetry is invasion and not expression. The opening of Bladerunner. They are trying to screen out replicants at the Tyrell Corporation. Seated amongst a battery of medico-military surveillance equipment, a doctor scans the eye of a suspected ‘skin job’ located at the other side of the room, searching for the index of inhumanity, for the absence of pupil dilation response to affect: In what turned out to be a timely provocation, Land castigates western Marxism for its sad affects, its wallowing in alienation and despair. Meanwhile: “The Superiority of Far Eastern Marxism. Whilst Chinese materialist dialectic denegativizes itself in the direction of schizophrenizing systems dynamics, progressively dissipating top-down historical destination in the Tao-drenched Special Economic Zones… The left subsides into nationalistic conservatism, asphyxiating its vestigial capacity for ‘hot’ speculative mutation in a morass of ‘cold’ depressive guilt-culture.” (447-8) The non-western agent finally appears, not as decolonial revolution, but as Chinese communist-sponsored hyper-production. “As sino-pacific boom and automatized global economic integration crashes the neocolonial world system, the metropolis is forced to re-endogenize its crisis.” (449)Land coined the term "hyperstition", a portmanteau of "superstition" and "hyper", to describe something which "is equipoised between fiction and technology". [15] According to Land, hyperstitions are ideas that, by their very existence as ideas, bring about their own reality. [16] Later work [ edit ] Brennan, Eugene (2017c). "The Politics of Excess and Restraint: Reading Bataille alongside and against Accelerationism". In Stronge, Will (ed.). Georges Bataille and Contemporary Thought. Bloomsbury. ISBN 978-1-4742-6869-1. Land “Only proto-capitalism has ever been critiqued.” (340) Socialism can’t quite grasp what for Land is capital 2.0, or for me the vector. “The forces of production are going for the revolution on their own.” (341) By now Land has firmly diverged from any Marxisant path, the farewell to which is side-eye at transcendental miserablism: “the decaying Hegelian socialist heritage clinging with increasing desperation to the theological sentimentalities of praxis, reification, alienation, ethics, autonomy and other such mythemes of human creative sovereignty.” (294) The various flavors of western Marxism gave up on an affirmative counter economics. Wallowing in a limitless cosmic despair in its place. “Transcendental Miserablism constitutes itself as an impregnable mode of negation…. [W]ith economics and history comprehensively abandoned, all that survives of Marx is a psychological bundle of resentments and disgruntlements.” (624) accelerate Accelerationism adaptation adaptivity affect agency anarchism anthropocene anthropology art assemblage biopolitics capital capitalism catastrophia climate change cognition collapse communalism communism corporeality cosmopolitics critique design desire ecognosis ecologistics ecology economics emergence episteme ethics existence existenz extinction governance infrastructure machinics materialism media methods nihilism ontography ontopunk patchwork perception politics polity postnihil postnihilism praxis psychiatry resistance sapience sentience speculation techne technics theoria theory thinkers thinkers Archives the attempt to read Deleuze (and Guattari) without the vitalism of Bergson and instead with this Nietzschean anti-vitalism (of the will) is a fascinating failure. the well-rehearsed productions with cyberpunk and neo-Lovecraftian toy kits are nothing more than disorientation before the exit sign in postmodernity's hall of mirrors, self-satisfaction oozing out between the panes. as much an experiment in non-standard thought as a child courting a throw-up is a dervish.

Fanged Noumena - Urbanomic Fanged Noumena - Urbanomic

These extraordinary texts, superheated compounds of severe abstraction and scabrous wit, testify to a uniquely penetrating intelligence, fusing transcendental philosophy, number theory, geophysics, biology, cryptography and occultism into startlingly cohesive but increasingly delirious theory-fictions. Long the subject of rumor and vague legend, Land’s turbulent post-genre theory-fictions of cybercapitalist meltdown smear cyberpunk, philosophy, arithmetic, poetics, cryptography, anthropology, grammatology and the occult into unrecognizable and gripping hybrids. Beginning with Land’s radical rereadings of Heidegger, Nietzsche and Kant, Fanged Noumena terminates in Professor Barker’s cosmic theory of geo-trauma and neo-qabbalistic attempts to formulate a numerical anti-language. The meltdown of metropolitan education systems in the near future is accompanied by a quasi-punctual bottom-up takeover of academic institutions, precipitating their mutation into amnesiac cataspace-exploration zones and bases manufacturing cyberian soft-weaponry. MIT Press began publishing journals in 1970 with the first volumes of Linguistic Inquiry and the Journal of Interdisciplinary History. Today we publish over 30 titles in the arts and humanities, social sciences, and science and technology.Such notions are intensely frightening, and also act as a potentially valauble hermeneutic to anyone still up for revolution. Beginning with Land's early radical rereadings of Heidegger, Nietzsche, Kant and Bataille, the volume collects together the papers, talks and articles of the mid-90s—long the subject of rumour and vague legend (including some work which has never previously appeared in print)—in which Land developed his futuristic theory-fiction of cybercapitalism gone amok; and ends with his enigmatic later writings in which Ballardian fictions, poetics, cryptography, anthropology, grammatology and the occult are smeared into unrecognisable hybrids. If the desiring machines are at the bottom of capital's infinite proliferation, how can capitalism possibly squash desire out of existence without dying? How can it be decentered from humanity? Desire is the essence of man says Spinoza, and this line is practically the germ of Deleuze's thought for the entirety of Capitalism and Schizophrenia. If all this sounds absurd - and it often reads like nonsense, it's true - one should bear in mind that all these neurotic reflections arise from purely rationalistic philosophical reflections. The first half or so of the pieces in this collection read like surprisingly formal Derridean deconstructions of the systems of Kant, Schopenhauer, Marx, Nietzsche, and even Heidegger and other such "postmodern" thinkers - this, despite Land's apparent disgust with Derrida's controlled contemplative habits. He's always looking for hints of an uncontrollable irrationality boiling beneath the surface of transcendental systems. Instead of taking these hints as examples of the différance that moves the Logos, however, Land gradually builds them up into the above-described monstrosity of the indomitable force of unreason as the intensive ground of all rational organization. This transgression of the limits of rationality, however, will not confine itself to "critique", to challenging certain philosophers: eventually, all of the natural sciences, from genetics to geology, from physics to abstract mathematics, will be rewritten in the terms of this unthinkable primordial intensity.

Fanged Noumena by Nick Land: 9780955308789 Fanged Noumena by Nick Land: 9780955308789

Land sees labor as complicit with phenomenology, rather than a displacement of it. “There can be no conception of work that does not project spirit into the origin, morally valorizing exertion…” (287) But this need only apply to the early Marx, not the later, where, as Wendling shows, a thermodynamic conception of work is starting to trouble Marx’s Hegelian praxis of spirit humanizing the world. The other path there is to reverse it, to see work not as the human spiritualizing the world but as the world materializing labor, an incomplete project of opening through labor toward a world that remakes species-being as nothing special, as one organization of matter, energy and information among others. One could read Haraway as taking this turn. Machinic Postmodernism: Complexity, Technics and Regulation (with Keith Ansell-Pearson& Joseph A. McCahery) (SAGE Publications, 1996) Beginning with Land's radical rereadings of Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Kant, and ending with Professor Barker's cosmic theory of geo-trauma and neo-qabbalistic attempts to formulate a numerical anti-language, Fanged Noumena rescues from obscurity papers, talks and articles some of which have never previously appeared in print. Long the subject of rumour and vague legend, Land's turbulent post-genre theory-fictions of cybercapitalist meltdown smear cyberpunk, philosophy, arithmetic, poetics, cryptography, anthropology, grammatology, and the occult into unrecognisable and gripping hybrids.For Land, there is no longer any kind of fulcrum for the point of reversion, the conversion from secondary to primary process, because there are no individuated bearers left any more. This convergence does not unfold at the level of experience. In that regard, the whole vocabulary of intensification and disintensification becomes redundant. The paradox is simply this: under what conditions could you will the impossibility of willing? How could you affirm that which incapacitates all affirmation?"