The Schiziocrats: Nick Land Value Theory

In the 2010s, a time before hyperpoliticization solidified, it was nearly impossible to be on political corners of the internet and not at some point come in contact with acolytes of Nick Land. Each Landian poster: someone whose head swelled so much with bile that it spilled over the keyboard and coloured every word they typed. His philosophy felt tinged with danger; it was clear these thoughts makes you angry. And so, I never bothered reading his work because it seemed like it must be for cranks and cranks only—that did not stop me, however, from purchasing a copy of his collected works, Fanged Noumena, years prior.

This all changed about a week ago when I finally picked up my copy of Fanged Noumena off of my bookshelf and decided to dive into whatever the hell Nick Land was all about. The book collects an eclectic assortment of thirty philosophical essays, sci-fi short stories, musings, and manic ramblings published throughout his relatively short-lived career both during and after his stint in academia between 1987 and 2007. They range from lucid deep-dives into Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Deleuze to esoteric, speed-driven ravings about the kabbalah and numerology. The decline starts around 1992 with Circuitries and takes a massive plunge by Hypervirus and never returns to anything close to "readable". This is a book that really should only be read cover-to-cover by those curious about the fringes of philosophy or by true, dyed-in-the-wool psychos.

Land's major influences are the standard fair for any late 20th century nihilist: Nietzsche, Bataille, and Cioran. These sorts are the ones that get Land writing things like, "the enhancement of life is intrincially bound to its abolition," and "it is pain that spares life for something other than an immediate and annihilating delight."¹ He affectionately refers to these thinkers, alongside poets like Trakl and Rimbaud, as werewolves—fellow travelers of the philosophically extreme. Land announces²:

"Werewolves are dissipated within a homolupic spiral that distances them utterly from all concern for decency or justice. Their feral physiologies are badly adapted to the depressive states conducive to ethical earnestness. Instead they are propelled by extremities of libidinal tension which fragment their movements, break up their tracks with jagged discontinuities, and infest their nerves with a burning malaise, so that each gesture is baked in a kiln of ferocity. Creatures of epidemic rather than hermeneutics, werewolves tend to be very crude, but then, they don't live as long as deconstructionists. The luxury of delaying the problem of animality is not open to them."

Put simply, "werewolves" are those who are willing to cast aside morality and brutalize their opponents. Nietzsche bemoaned the slave morality of the Christians, Bataille saw the world as a means of immolating excess, Rimbaud lost himself in Africa, etc. The latter point is particularly interesting considering the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU), of which Land was a leading member in the late nineties, had two foundational texts: Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and its film adaptation Apocalypse Now.³ For Land, the world is a place which "wants to steal your soul and vaporize it"⁴ and philosophy "is a ghoul that haunts only ruins, and the broken croaks of our hymns to sickness have scarcely begun."⁵

The real Land flavour, however, comes in the form of his absolute slavish devotion to Delueze. The index of names has him "only" appearing across 43 pages of the 630+ page collection, by name or reference, but nearly every single idea is dripping with Deleuzian concepts. Why does Land like Deleuze? Well, "Deleuze's power stems from the fact that he succeeds in detaching himself from Parisian temporality much more successfully than most of his contemporaries…the time of Deleuze's text is a colder, more reptilian, more German time, or at least, a time of the anti-German Germans of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche in particular, for whom millennia were to be scanned with scorn."⁶ Just like the likes of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, Deleuze was a werewolf—he punctured a wound in philosophy with a unique set of jargon and rigid demands on how one views the workings of the world.

The most consequential idea which Land returns to again and again is the idea of the "body without organs", perhaps one of the most (deservedly) maligned and ridiculed concepts in all of continental philosophy. Deleuze explains that "the body without organs is nonproductive; nonetheless it is produced, at a certain place and a certain time in the connective synthesis, as the identity of producing and the product: the schizophrenic table is a body without organs."⁷ Additionally, "the body without organs is an egg: it is crisscrossed with axes and thresholds, with latitudes and longitudes and geodesic lines, traversed by gradients marking the transitions and the becomings, the destinations of the subject developing along these particular vectors. Nothing here is representative; rather, it is all life and lived experience: the actual, lived emotion of having breasts does not resemble breasts, it does not represent them, any more than a predestined zone in the egg resembles the organ that it is going to be stimulated to produce within itself. Nothing but bands of intensity, potentials, thresholds, and gradients."⁸ Confused yet? Deleuze takes the psychoanalytic concepts of "desire" and "cathexis", drains them of their Freudian and Lacanian "lack", and functionally merges them into something akin to Schopenhauer's impersonal Will, creating a theoretical framework that aligns production along a metaphysical, anti-subject plane. It is a theory of pure immanence—a reaction to the transcendental styles of Kant and Hegel, the former of which is the target for much of Land's earlier essays.

Land's reading of capital is then Deleuze's reading of capital. "It no longer seems plausible to assume that the relation between capital and desire is either external or supported by immanent contradiction, even if a few comical ascetics continue to assert that libidinal involvement with the commodity can be transcended by critical reason. Capitalism is not a totalizable system defined by the commodity form as a specifiable mode of production…It is a convergent unrealizable assault upon the social macropod, whose symptom is the collapse of productive mode or form in the direction of ever more incomprehensible experiments in commodification, enveloping, dismantling, and circulating every subjective space. It is always on the move towards a terminal nonspace, melting the earth onto the body without organs…"⁹ The monad of Deleuze-Land's philosophical system is the "body without organs" which produces because it must. Capitalism is the most obvious mode of production which replicates itself in what appears to be the exact same manner (production for production's sake). Land rejects the notion that capitalism is an economic formation which produces for profit—the body without organs produces unconditionally. "When we discuss capital in its historical concreteness, we are simultaneously discussing a frustration of the cultural tendency of human societies towards expansive exogamy."¹⁰ Idealist, neurotic impulses stood in the way of true capitalism. "Capitalism is still accelerating, even though it has already realized novelties beyond any previous human imagining. After all, what is human imagination? It is a relatively paltry thing, merely a sub-product of the neural activity of a species of terrestrial primate. Capitalism…has no external limit, it has consumed life and biological intelligence to create a new life and a new plane of intelligence, vast beyond human anticipation…It's still nothing but change."¹¹

Once Land sheds the skin of "tortured academic" and molts into a new suit of the "CyberGothic" variety it becomes clear what his true philosophical project is. He thinks that cyperpunk art is very cool. This can be easily shown with some of his more fanciful attempts at literature¹²:

"The Rataille reconstruct is waiting for you in the bar. Calm hallucinations paint Orestes over his features. Eyes blotted-out in nihilism, lagoons of greenblackness re-running Kurtz at the end of the river. Skin plastic-surgery taut. Smile like a butchering instrument gently stroking your throat. To your vampiric sensitivities, he seems to smell of his mother's blood, intolerable intimacy, and devastation. He passes you a tumbler of me zeal.

'So, it's all over,' you mumble weakly. He shrugs, emptying his glass, and refilling it. Metal flexes beneath vatgrown skin. Hard jungle hacks through blue gloom." (p. 399)

and¹³:

"Sphinx's inhumanly agile fingers take the slight weight from yours, poising it between you, your eyes intersecting in technodeath. 'If you're operating it manually - which you would be - this is the trigger. It's active when the indicator icon appears positive. Here, see it?' You nod, feeling … dread? Exhilaration? 'Now there's a pressure micro catastrophe … a slight springiness …'. She coaxes you into testing it. 'Beyond that point … and it's a mess. OK? New clips slot in here, release mechanism here, you can input data here, but I don't suppose you'll need to. You have it. Bad news for the Pod.'"

Many of these essays are filled with quotations from William Gibson's Neuromancer and references to Bladerunner and other such media properties. This is a philosophy written by a nerd (a bitter, angry nerd).¹⁴

I'll finish this discussion out with a few choice selections of gibberish:

"Rich food occupies the position of women within a marriage system regulated by patrilineal exogamy, with its producer renouncing it for himself, and thus echoing the prohibition of incest. What is of particular philosophical interest, however, is that it also marks a distinction between the 'rational' (analytic) and the 'empirical' (synthetic), and thus defines a terrain upon which we can sketch an economy of knowledge."¹⁵

"A cybernegative circuit is a loop in time, whereas cyberpositive circuitry loops time 'itself', integrating the actual and the virtual in a semi-closed collapse upon the future."¹⁶

"Spatial engineering (echoing cosmic expansion) subverts transcendental humanism, launching K- space matrix invasion from real terrestrial time zero, a singularity, or transition threshold, encountered when the density of data flow triggers a switch into a self-organizing cyclonic system, displayed to humanoids by way of cyberspace deck."¹⁷

"Anti-Oedipus is an anticipatively assembled inducer for the replay of geohistory in hypermedia, a social-systemic fast feed-forward through machinic delirium."¹⁸

If someone indicates that they are a follower of Nick Land, run, don't walk, away!