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

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Puerile or profound? I tend towards the latter. This tome is quite difficult to categorize, it eludes ready description as the contents are protean and dense to say the least. 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 ] Land in the middle of this book is quite the void worshiper. This book is basically a schizoanalytic art project that at its fever pitch manifests as a quite serious death worship. Space echoes like an immense tomb, yet the stars still burn. Why does the sun take so long to die ?” 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.

Fanged Noumena?” and the loose term Meaning of the title “Fanged Noumena?” and the loose term

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. This is almost, but not quite, where Land is heading: “matter — or Spinoza’s God — expects no gratitude, grounds no obligation, establishes no oppressive precedent. Beyond the gesticulations of primordial spirit it is positive death that is the model, and revolution is not a duty but a surrender.” (287) The substitution of the death drive for vitalism is challenging, but in the end shares the same problem, of erasing the far more interesting territory of the relation between life and non-life. For Land, death is time-in-itself. “Beyond its oedipal sense as end of the person, death is an efficient virtual object inducing convergence. No one there.” (370)

The point is that organically individuated human subjects cannot position themselves vis-a-vis this circuit or this process. It’s happening without you anyway. It doesn’t need you. The very concept of agency is stripped out. There’s a quote of Land’s: “it’s happening anyway and there is nothing you can do about it.” Something is working through you, there is nothing you can do about it, so you might as well fuse. This is a philosophical problem. It’s a retention of this romantic, Schopenhauerian idea of fusion between the personal and impersonal, the individuated subject and cosmic schizophrenia, the impersonal primary process. But for Schopenhauer it still makes sense to postulate that. The moment at which the will turns against itself governs Schopenhauer’s whole ethical and practical philosophy. Circuitries’ marked the point where Land’s disturbed catastrophizing had actual deleterious effects on my mental health; not to be melodramatic, but the violent misanthropy & shatteringly nihilistic gnosticism started to overpower my ability to metabolize them. This is the essay where the ‘preposterous humanism’ of the Hegelian-socialist tradition is chewed up between a rictus grin, humiliated as a doddering senility; to be conceptually usurped by ‘cyberpositivity’ a tactical acceptance of Land’s prophecy of post-singularity human extinction & the triumphant ascendancy of machine Archons. If geist, spirit, dasein, the subject of history, etc. ever existed, they are not implanted in the frail human subject any longer. But the terminus of anthropoid civilization as plugged into world-historical meaning & significance will probably only be evident when we die screaming in the clawed hands of cyber-Azathoth. Mark Fisher, a British cultural theorist and student of Land's, argued in 2011 that Land's greatest impact so far had been on music and art, rather than on philosophy. The musician Kode9, the artist Jake Chapman, and others studied with or describe their influence by Land, often highlighting Land's inhuman, "technilist," or "delirious" qualities. Fisher underscores in particular how Land's personality during the 1990s could catalyze changes in those engaging with his work through what Kodwo Eshun describes as a manner "immediately open, egalitarian, and absolutely unaffected by academic protocol" which could dramatise "theory as a geopolitico-historical epic." [6]

Fanged Noumena - Wikipedia

Even those poets who can be the personae of alterity are ones who conform to a recognizable philosophical category: the sublime. In Kant, the reasoning and contemplating subject precedes its risk of undoing in the sublime. For Land it’s still about the sublime, just the other way around. The sublime is the traumatic primacy of the finitude of the animal. The work of Kant’s artist-genius is the situation where alterity might break through, where seething, writhing, intensive matter finds its own forms. 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)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. So let’s return to the dynamic sublime. Land: “philosophers feast in the palaces of reason, and luxuriate in the screams that reach them from the dungeons of sublimity.” (141) Philosophy desires the supremacy of that part of the human that likes to think it is akin to angels, by sacrificing that part that is kith to the animal. Reason is built on the scaffold that sacrifices the synthetic capabilities of the imagination, the body’s animal cunning. “The Kantian moral good is the total monopoly of power in the hands of reason…. The categorical imperative presupposes vivisection.” (141-2) 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. 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.

Fanged Noumena by Nick Land - Penguin Books Australia Fanged Noumena by Nick Land - Penguin Books Australia

Learning surrenders control to the future, threatening established power. It is vigorously suppressed by all political structures, which replace it with a docilizing and conformist education, reproducing privilege as wisdom. Schools are social devices whose specific function is to incapacitate learning, and universities are employed to legitimate schooling through perpetual reconstitution of global social memory. Because of this Land's reading of Deleuze and Guatarri's philosophy, that which he bases about 50% of his work on, is, in my opinion, quite prejudiced. Fanged Noumena gives a dizzying perspective on the entire trajectory of this provocative and influential thinker’s work, and has introduced his unique voice to a new generation of readers.Theory as cyberpunk fiction: Land‘s machinic theory-poetry parallelled the digital intensities of 90s jungle, techno and doomcore, anticipating ‘impending human extinction becoming accessible as a dancefloor’.