 Cover of the first edition | |
| Editor | Maya Kronic andRay Brassier |
|---|---|
| Author | Nick Land |
| Cover artist | Jake and Dinos Chapman |
| Language | English |
| Subject | |
| Published | 2011 2012 2014 2018 |
| Publisher | Urbanomic / Sequence Press MIT Press |
| Publication place | United Kingdom |
| Pages | 666 |
| ISBN | 978-0-9553087-8-9 |
| Preceded by | The Thirst for Annihilation |
Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987–2007 is a 2011anthology of writings by English philosopherNick Land, edited byMaya B. Kronic andRay Brassier. It was first published by Urbanomic—founded by Kronic prior—with Sequence Press and later republished by theMIT Press.[1][2]
The anthology collects essays and texts, initially published and previously unpublished, spanning various philosophical and aesthetic interests—as well as unorthodox writing styles that have been dubbed "theory-fictions"[3]—explored and utilized by Land over the titular time period. The book has obtained acult following[4] and has subsequently been credited with influencing the rise in popularity ofaccelerationism.[5][6]
When I contacted Land about the republication of his works, he did not protest, but had nothing to add:It's another life; I have nothing to say about it—I don’t even remember writing half of those things … I don't want to get into retrospectively condemning my ancient work—I think it's best to gently back off. It belongs in the clawed embrace of the undead amphetamine god.[7]
As an anthology primarily aiming to cohere Nick Land's conjunctional reinterpretation ofcontinental philosophy andmodernist poetry in the 1990s—what British writerKodwo Eshun described as a dramatization of "theory as a geopolitico-historical epic"[8]—and his subsequent "theory-fictions" which exploredcyberpunk media,Gothic themes andesoteric systems while utilizing unorthodox and disorderedexperimental writing styles,Fanged Noumena consists of essays andprose texts written by Land during multiple periods, compiled by Michael Carr,Mark Fisher, David Rylance andReza Negarestani, with their sequence being edited by Kronic and Brassier.[8]
The sequence begins during his time as a lecturer for theDepartment of Philosophy of theUniversity of Warwick,England from 1987 until his resignation from his academic post in 1998, progressing onto his contributions to themythopoeia of "hyperstitions"[9] of theCybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) as it was maintained within the university,[7] and concluding withblog posts written between 2004 and 2007 in his residency inShanghai,China.[8]
The progression displayed in Land's work, according to Kronic and Brassier, is essential to the presentation of the book as a response to "an incapacity to believe that Landactually meant what he said—[his] writing was indeed nothing but a machine for intensification", and that rhetorically, "if this volume infects a new generation, already enlivened by a new wave of thinkers who are partly engaging the re-emerging legacy of Nick Land's work—it will have fulfilled its purpose."[10]
Kronic and Brassier noted that the emergence of accelerationism in Land's work is marked by the idea that philosophically, "it is no longer a matter of 'thinking about', but rather of observing an effective, alien intelligence in the process of making itself real, [and is] a matter of participating in such a way as to continually intensify and accelerate this process."[11] In a lecture for a conference on accelerationism given in 2010, Brassier referred to Land's philosophical project as "mad blackDeleuzianism",[a] referencing a criticism given by French philosopherVincent Descombes of the work ofDeleuze and Guattari andJean-François Lyotard as "mad blackHegelianism".[12]
The term denotes theanti-vitalism of Land's reinterpretation of Deleuze's philosophy,[4] distinguished by its "unsavory" orientation towards the paradox of "will[ing] the impossibility ofwilling"[13] and an activematerialist interest ("no longer a pretext for critiquebut a vector of exploration")[14] in, according to Kronic and Brassier, "the impersonal and anonymous chaos ofabsolute time".[12]
These themes are consistent in the writings featured inFanged Noumena, with a turn in the 1990s towards "the 'inconceivablealienations' outputted by the monstrous machine-organism built bycapital" according to Kronic andArmen Avanessian,[15] and a further turn into the 2000s towards "ever more abstract planes of an alien Outside's absolutedeterritorialisation of reason and sense", according to Vincent Le.[16]
The sequence ofFanged Noumena begins with "Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest: A Polemical Introduction to the Configuration of Philosophy and Modernity", initially published forThird Text in 1988. Land has since retroactively dismissed the essay for its inaccuracies.[17][18] "Narcissism and Dispersion inHeidegger's 1953Trakl Interpretation", initially published in 1990, analyzes what Land identifies as Heidegger's suppression of the effectivity of theDionysian tropes in Trakl's poetry,[19] which Kronic and Brassier identified as Land's "mounting impatience" with Heideggerian philosophy, leading to a resolution of the "exit problem" where "the manner in which the (failed) insurrectionary attempts at 'escape' made by artists each open up the prospect of [a] heterogeneous space that subverts order"[20]
This concept is explored further in the subsequentliterary criticism essays "Art as Insurrection: the Question of Aesthetics inKant,Schopenhauer, andNietzsche", "Spirit and Teeth" and "Shamanic Nietzsche", which were published prior to and following the 1992 publication ofThe Thirst for Annihilation:Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism (An Essay in Atheistic Religion), Land'sstudent thesis for the University of Warwick.[21]
Prior to these, "Delighted to Death" extends from his research conducted forThe Thirst for Annihilation, identifying regulatory and repressive principles ofChristian morality inKant's ethical system, and elements ofmartyrdom in the experience of thesublime. On the contrary, Land also focuses on the history of the concept ofgenius as an "a contingent, impersonal creative force" according to Kronic and Brassier, a theme which reappears in the aforementioned essays.[22]McKenzie Wark characterizes this essay as focusing on the appearance of "a priori forms as constants for novel experiences" in Land's topics.[4] The 1993 essay "After the Law" also extends from Land's then-present philosophical research, analyzing theApology of Socrates and Bataille'spolitical anti-philosophy to focus on exceptions to themoral law that similarly creatively escape judgment.[4]
"Making it with Death: Remarks on Thanatos andDesiring-Production" marks Land's first thorough engagement with the theory of Deleuze and Guattari, including the formative proto-accelerationist speculations made inAnti-Oedipus and especially their practice ofschizoanalysis (also referred to by Land as "stratoanalysis"), while also further developing a philosophical history of Deleuziandifference and thebody without organs that had previously been articulated in the conclusion of "Art as Insurrection"; Kronic and Brassier summarized this development as Land's assertion—rejecting Deleuze and Guattari's disavowal ofFreudiandrive theory—that "all temporary [existential] obstacles are dispensable coagulants inhibiting death's unwinding."[23] Land also referred to this philosophical interest during this period as "libidinal materialism".[4]
Responding to the assertions made in the essay, Brassier theorized that while if "schizoanalytical practice is fuelled by the need to always intensify anddeterritorialize, there comes a point at which there is no agency left: you yourself have been dissolved back into the process", the difficulties appearing in Land's initial approach could be amended by further deviations by futuresubjects.[13] Kronic and Avanessian described the 1992 essay "Circuitries"—which incorporates abstract and impersonal prose—as observing "a darkness" descending "over the festive atmosphere of desiring-production envisaged by"post-structuralists associated with accelerationism; whereas these prior thinkers envisioned "the transfer of all motive force from human subjects to capital as the inauguration of an aleatory drift", Land hails accelerationism as instead "gleefully explor[ing] what is escapingfrom human civilization", with emphasis on the deregulation of "runaway" processes.[24]
The essay links the concepts present in the influence ofAntonin Artaud's experimental writing on Deleuze and Guattari, especially with regards to the body without organs and Artaud's "antihumanism", to the principles ofcybernetic science andthermodynamics.[25] "Machinic Desire", initially published in 1993, continues this interest while displaying "popular investment in dystopian cyberpunkSF, includingWilliam Gibson'sNeuromancer trilogy and theTerminator,Predator andBladerunner movies";[15] Land began, from this essay onward, to redefine cyberpunk as a "textual machine for affecting reality by intensifying the anticipation of its future", incorporating its dynamic concepts of posthuman progress into his re-envisioning of philosophy.[26]
"CyberGothic" is the first published text by Land to extensively use multiple contemporary cultural reference points that would become fixtures in his work, includingpostmodern literature and its authors' concepts, especially Gibson's 1984 cyberpunk novelNeuromancer and the concept ofcyberspace, as well asdigital financial speculation, emerging forms of complexelectronic dance music such asjungle music anddrum and bass, andcyberdelichacker culture.[27] Alongside a reinterpretation ofNeuromancer and its concept of cyberspace as "K-space"—anamoral model ofimmanent existential interactions "that melds gleaming abstraction[s] to eldritch portent[s]"[28]—in relation to the Deleuzian body without organs, Land proposes a "cybergothic" model of a philosophy of death that Kronic and Brassier noted resulted from Land finding parallels between his own preceding developments and Gibson's novel, culminating in his philosophical identification of the novel's character Wintermute as "a new type of intelligence: aggressively exploratory, incommensurable with humansubjectivity and untethered from social reproduction."[29]
"K-space" was the first concept of Land's to use the "K-" prefix, a shorthand for "cyber(netic)", with his concept of "K-war" guiding his later abstract prose texts; Kronic and Brassier clarified that this shift in Land's focus expresses that "the insurrectionary basis of revolution now lies at the virtual terminus of capital—the future as transcendental unconscious, its 'return' inhibited by the repressed [alternate] circuits oftemporality", concerned more with intensity and spontaneous intensive spaces than with ideal orders,[30] at a point of "increasingly autonomoustechnics' pursuit of their own self-replication without any interest in serving humanuse-value" according to Le.[31]
The dialogue "Cyberrevolution", initially published in the first issue of Kronic's journal***Collapse, features a scenario where figures speaking on a fictional dystopian news broadcast attempt to understand the cause of massriots in multiple continents, before escalating into a passionate argument over the relevance of critical theory to the situation. It serves as a hyperstitional explanation of the failure for acceleration to be commonly understood.[4] Meanwhile, the abstract prose texts "Hypervirus" and "No Future" utilize themes of virality and depersonalization alongside Land's interest in runaway processes to create the effect of what Kronic and Brassier described as "full-blown delirium".[9]
Alongside the stylistic influence of Gibson's novels, in these texts, "Land's anti-humanist speculation is combined with an evident enjoyment of wordplay and a renewed appreciation for the anthropological, mythological and psychoanalytical sources ofCapitalism and Schizophrenia", according to Kronic.[7] The unpublished conference paper "CyberspaceAnarchitecture as Jungle-War" contains these elements in addition to a clearer focus on the cultural relevance of the complexity of jungle music inspired by Kodwo Eshun's concurrent writings and lectures, and the potential for a "K-insurgency".
The literary criticism essay "Meat (or How to KillOedipus in Cyberspace)", extending from this concept, uses a comparative speculation made byWilliam S. Burroughs between theKurtz ofJoseph Conrad's 1899 novellaHeart of Darkness and theColonel Kurtz ofFrancis Ford Coppola's 1979 film quasi-adaptationApocalypse Now as a starting point for a reinterpretation of Deleuze and Guattari's use of anthropology. It uses the distinction between the cyberpunk concepts of cyberspace andmeatspace to suggest that as the processes of civilization and globalization continue, uncivilized and primitive social elements reemerge and are absorbed in a process of deterritorialization.
"Meltdown" was published as the opening essay in the first issue of the CCRU's magazineAbstract Culture in 1995; Kronic proclaimed that it was an "invocation of apocalyptic planetarytechno-singularity",[7] while she and Brassier summarized the text as making the "claim—both apocalyptic and performative as hype—that the compression-phases ofmodernity, beginning the final phase of their acceleration in the sixteenth century with Protestant revolt, oceanic navigation, commoditisation and its attendant (place-value) numeracy, constitute a 'cyberpositive' global circuit of interexcitement".[32]
The essay uses multiple reference points to convey an ongoing history of acceleration, including European history,Don DeLillo's 1985 novelWhite Noise,sociology andnanotechnology research, and a refracted, strongly terminological writing style. A full-lengthmusic video tape was created for "Meltdown" by London art audiovisual collective Orphan Drift, featuring cyberdelic visuals, anambient techno soundtrack and the text being read by processedApple MacinTalk text-to-speech voices.[33]
From the point of Land'sde facto leadership of the CCRU onward, he "disintegrated into the number-names of a hyperpagan pantheon, syncretically drawing onthe occult, nursery rhyme, anthropology, SF andLovecraft, among other sources", according to Kronic and Brassier.[34] With the collective, he began to develop the Numogram, a hyperstitional occult system ofdemonic interactions and invocations, serving as the model for the process of what the collective identified as "cultural production".[33] In addition to this development, Land began utilizing experimental writing styles and diagrammatic forms of presentation, with his creativity increasingly drawing from his use of stimulants, especially amphetamines.[7]
"A zIIgºthIc–==X=cºDA==–(CººkIng–lºbsteRs–wIth–jAke–AnD–DInºs)" is an abstract prose text incorporating themes of the Oedipus complex that utilizes superscript symbols that was written for a 1996 exhibition of art by British visual artists Jake and Dinos Chapman. A later artwork by them is featured on the cover ofFanged Noumena. "KataςoniX" is an invocatory text intended to be read aloud that was written for a multimedia presentation by***Collapse and Orphan Drift at Virtual Futures '96, which was presented at the University of Warwick. It incorporates quotations ofglossolalia from the notebooks of Antonin Artaud, combining nondescript phrases and occult descriptions with "sub-linguistic clickings and hissings".[34]
The first text in the selection of Land's CCRU texts inFanged Noumena, "Barker Speaks: The CCRU Interview with Professor D.C. Barker", is a fictional interview conducted between the collective and the titular character—anauthor surrogate for Land—whose study of "geotraumatics" and "tic-systems" extends from his appropriation of cosmicpessimistic speculations made by Deleuze and Guattari inCapitalism and Schizophrenia, as well as previously by Freud inBeyond the Pleasure Principle;[35] Wark identified Land's preceding interest in positive feedback loops andautopoietic patterns as an influence on the concept of geotrauma.[4]
"Mechanomics", published in 1998, is a paper on "schizonumerics"[9] detailing speculations on the anthropological history of numeracy, prevalentlogocentric attitudes to numbering, the Deleuzoguattarian interpretation of numbers asmultiplicity, and Land's own reinterpretation ofset theory andcombinatorics where the mathematical proofs ofGeorg Cantor andKurt Gödel "open up humans to an outside oflogos" in which notions of quantity proceed past limits of comprehensibility:[36] "for Land", according to Kronic and Brassier, "the interest of Gödel's achievement is not primarily 'mathematical' but rather belongs to a lineage of the operationalisation of number in coding systems that will pass throughTuring and into the technological mega-complex of contemporary techno-capital."[37]
"Cryptolith" is a narrative text written by Land as part of the CCRU in collaboration with Orphan Drift, extending the character of Professor Barker and the concept of tic-systems. "Non-Standard Numeracies: Nomad Cultures" is an arrangement of fragmentary invocatory texts, similar to "KataςoniX", where Land's concept of geotraumatics and his mythological research presented elsewhere in the writings of the CCRU are both used to convey the Outside breaking into human conventions.[38]
"Occultures", a set of cybergothic narrative texts that explore the past and present hyperstitional subcultures and in-universe characters of the CCRU, was later featured on the "Syzygy" section of the CCRU website. "Origins of the Cthulhu Club" is another selection of Land's collaborative writing within the CCRU, featuring a fictional correspondence extending off of Lovecraft'sCthulhu Mythos.
In 2004, "Introduction to Qwernomics" was published online on Land's first blog, Hyperstition. It explores the occult and logical implications made by the specific setups of typographic systems, especially in consumer technology, and their application for "theqabbalistic tracking of pure coding 'coincidences'."[39] Similarly, "Qabbala 101" is an essay written for the first volume ofCollapse, Kronic's reboot of her earlier journal of the same name, exploring the history of kabbalah, the logic of itscosmogony and the further occult and mathematical implications of its numeracy.[40]
"Tic Talk", "Critique of Transcendental Miserablism" and "A Dirty Joke" were published on Hyperstition. The first text is a schizonumeric conclusion to the character story of Professor Barker wherein every number is written as its factors. The second is an accelerationistpolemic that explores a wide variety of sources to propose afatalistic model of capitalist society. The third is an autobiographical text written as a confession of both the "failure" of Land's experimental career and the success of its longevity beyond his work.[40] The anthology concludes with several pages of schizonumeric, typographic and geotraumatic diagrams from Land's notebooks, dated between the 1990s and 2000s.[33]
In a 2014 review ofFanged Noumena for theReligious Studies Review journal, Jeremy Biles called the book "a bevy of aggressively strange, virulently antihumanistic essays engaging issues including postmodern capitalism, cybernetic culture, madness, monotheism, and law", saying that "this book will intoxicate."[41] In a 2017 retrospective article written forThe Guardian on the CCRU,Andy Beckett referred toFanged Noumena as a text "which contains some of accelerationism's most darkly fascinating passages."[5]
Eugene Brennan referred to the book as a collection which "show[s] Nick Land's waning interest in Bataille, turning increasingly to the more libertarian thought of Deleuze and Guattari to develop his accelerationist philosophy", clarifying that much of the early work in the book extended fromThe Thirst for Annihilation.[42]