Nick Land and people like that

[Twit 2]

Argh, I accidentally fell down a rabbit hole of looking into this guy. Buttgammon warned against it in this thread which I haven't bumped.

Some of my thoughts are in response to this article:

http://readthis.wtf/writing/nick-land-an-experiment-in-inhumanism/

I don't really want to talk about any of his theories. Mainly, I refuse to engage with philosophy written so incoherently and with so much posturing jargon. However I find the person, or rather, the personal trajectory fascinating. He's hard to summarise if you've never heard of him and don't follow the abstruse subsection of philosophy he resides (resided?) in but it seems he was in a crowd of academics who were mixing a lot of primarily French critical theory with emerging trends in technology and the culture industry. From what I've gleaned he has 2 phases: drug-taking, cult-leader like, down-with-kids lecturer at Warwick who treated academia like a Dada art project and, well, the godfather of the alt-right and one of the worst people in the world.

I am sure he touched on some valid stuff in among all the insanity but my overriding impression/suspicion is of someone having an extended mental breakdown conducted in jargon. There's a long tradition of philosophers trading in bleak themes and either going mad or topping themselves or both. I think you can crudely divide them into two camps: those who were just decent people, if anything so lovely and sensitive that the world just broke them (Holderlin decades-mad in his tower; Philip Mainlander, who used stacks of his just-published nihilistic masterwork to hang himself from; more recently, Mark Fisher whose humanity and compassion shined through the jargon) and those who allow their forays into nihilism to make themselves and the world worse (in this category I'd include anyone who pursued a right agenda as a result of their studies, or writers who the right appropriate - eg Ayn Rand - or misappropriate - eg Nietzsche). Land certainly seems to be in that 2nd category.

I was hoping some of the contributors to the above-linked thread might be au-fait with his work and have something to say about him. This thread doesn't really have much point other than me noticing that Nick Land is nuts and then finding it sad that their pathology and trajectory is so common among a certain kind of disaffected mentally ill man. Done right, making bracing nihilistic pronouncements about man and society is an art form.

The gold standard for me is Cioran, who early on showed signs of tipping into right wing fervour and derangement but ended up writing beautifully clear, precise, poetic and strangely humane and compassionate works which also happen to be a) funny and b) some of the greatest most beautiful writing ever written. And that's what fucks me off about people like Land. No clarity, no poetry. Ah, but content dictates form and he is simply mirroring the cybernetic wigwam of our techno-funk or whatever. Nah, life's too short. I've seen what good writing is and it ain't that.

I suppose the other person Land reminds me of is Dominic Cummings: all that knowledge but put to such shitty ends, written in a style that's disconcerting, but not in a good way.

And post.

[chveik]

never heard of this dark enlightenment stuff before. what a bunch of clueless cunts. 

[imitationleather]

My supervisor got him his first article published. Boy does he regret that now.

[hermitical]

I listen to a podcast called General Intellect Unit, they do love to have a pop at Nick Land

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

I wonder for all their supposed insight why they never stop to think 'hmm, mainly comfortably off white men aren't we?' '... Something in that probably'

[bushwick]

He is a fucking weird Lovecraftian ghoul who took too much whiz and couldn't handle it. Ultimately he's a nerd who got lucky. I work at a university and it beggars belief to hear stories about his eccentric tenure at Warwick (playing jungle tapes at lectures while laying on the floor speaking in tongues, something like that) - that stuff would not happen anywhere nowadays (although the modern right wing seem to think all universities are hotbeds of that sort of thing and need Toby Young to sort them out).

I read some of that cybernetic council stuff when I was a young raver and thought "you fucking nerds, I bet you smoke a joint and wave your hands around like you're tripping".

Mark Fisher went one way, may he rest in peace, and Land went the other. No matter how Nietzschean and powerful NL thinks he is, I would have seen him coming in 1992 and sold him a paracetamol for £15.

[object-lesson]

When you completely repudiate the Enlightenment you end up believing in anything - it happens on left and right and they come together in irrationalist authoritarianism. Nick Land's psychosis is just a token of a much wider problem and unfortunately its opponents like Pinker and Boghossian fall prey to their own forms of mythology and aren't helping at all.

The world needs to go back and read the first ten Theses on Feuerbach and start again from there.

[Mr_Simnock]

I listen to a podcast called General Intellect Unit, they do love to have a pop at Nick Land

[bushwick]

I would love to see an Odd Couple-type sitcom with him and Big Jordy Peterson sharing a flat, can you imagine it? Zizek comes round to borrow some sugar and the audience all cheer like when the slaggy landlady woman comes on in Two Broke Girls.

[bushwick]

the Sheldon bloke as Nick Land and Kelsey Grammar as Peterson. Zizek would be Matt Berry or Seth Rogen.

[Astronaut Omens]

The only book he published during his down-with-the-kids phase, "The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism" is a useful part of the puzzle if you're interested in his trajectory, since, compared to either the techno stuff or the racist stuff, it's both more mainstream: as the title implies, it's ostensibly a study of a literary figure, and its unusual bits are obviously modelled on Nietszche's rantiest bits; and less mainstream in that these unusual bits are a bit....not very nice.
e.g., on the Virgin Mary:
"How was it possible for her to forgo the delight of hacking God's fruit from her womb? (There was a chance for religion)."

There's a lot of bits like that in the book you can either read as someone trying a bit too hard to be transgressive, or actually becoming unwell- some of it is explicitly claiming the latter:
"Ah!Such abysses of disease open before me. I decay, transfixed upon abolition"". But note the slightly pseudo-19th century tone which suggests he was putting it on.

I read it a few years ago, before Land resurfaced in his new shape as a racist. At that time, I expected it to have something in common with the other CCRU books that actually came out- Kodwo Eshun's book on black music and Sadie Frost's books on technology and drugs, all of which are fun, creative and forward thinking. Not knowing what was coming next from him, I quite enjoyed bits of Land's book: the many, many rants against other academics are funny, as is some of the Bataille stuff he quotes:
e.g. "Rire" ('Laughter')

Laugh and laugh
at the sun
at the nettles
at the stones
at the ducks

at the rain
at the pee-pee of the pope
at mummy
at the coffin full of shit

But reading it was also the point where I reached a reached a kind of exhaustion with transgressive stuff. Land's book is really part of a mini-industry of academics fascinated with people like Bataille and de Sade, writers who essentially wrote torture porn. It's a bit one-note. What's so good about being bad?

[bushwick]

But reading it was also the point where I reached a reached a kind of exhaustion with transgressive stuff. Land's book is really part of a mini-industry of academics fascinated with people like Bataille and de Sade, writers who essentially wrote torture porn. It's a bit one-note. What's so good about being bad?

^^this is it in a nutshell, I feel. My incredible reductive theory about this tendency is that these people are just basically goths but they know that is uncool and daft. World would be a happier place if they'd just embrace that fact and hang around in parks drinking cider being moody, instead of dressing it up in nonsense intellectual techno-racist gubbins.

(I was talking about a power electronics edgelord type I knew to a friend from Greece. Was describing the 'dark enlightenment' vibes to him and said "what, you mean goths?". I later called said dude a goth and he didn't like it.)

seriously though, my problem with nihilistic philosophy is that people cannot live like that, with an equal amount of hatred/disdain for EVERYTHING, without eventually seeing other groups as lower than themselves. always a gateway to fascism. see the trajectory of Goad and all that Apocalypse Culture shite.

[marquis_de_sad]

I remember a lot of the CCRU people used to really hate Donna Haraway. Could never work out why, as her work seems of a piece with theirs. This review of Haraway's Primate Visions (nominally an analysis of the science of primatology) that I came across on wikipedia sums them all up:

There are many places where an editorial hand appears absent altogether. Neologisms are continually coined, and sentences are paragraph-long and convoluted. Biography, history, propaganda, science, science fiction, and cinema are intertwined in the most confusing way. Perhaps the idea is to induce a slightly dissociated state, so that readers can be lulled into belief. If one did not already possess some background, this book would give no lucid history of anthropology or primatology.

[Blumf]

So is this a follow up to the Randian attempt to justify excessive wealth and stomping on the less fortunate?

[sponk]

Nick Land? Is he from Israel?

[Astronaut Omens]

It really annoys me that people get given continental theory to read on English, creative writing, and arts courses. The effect is always bafflement for exactly the reasons described in the quote about Haraway above. People who've never had any basic philosophical training, have never read any Plato or even heard of Kant, are given, without much context, the most convoluted and diffuse bits of Lacan, Deleuze and Foucault, and they either correctly surmise that they can't understand it and decide philosophy's not for them (a real shame), or they parrot it (an even bigger shame, because their intellectual development has been curbed).

And as for the academics who end up mentally ill:well, given the massively wide-ranging nature of the major texts of this genre, isn't it inevitable that a lecturer on the subject might feel like a bluffer and a phony? It's possible to really know your stuff about a mainstream academic topic like, say, 18th century maritime history. I don't think the same can be said about books like "The Order of Things" and "A Thousand Plateaus"- those two titles alone have bibliographies culled from scores of different disciplines that would take a lifetime's reading to get your head around.

[hermitical]

What's your fucking problem with that? Marxists using a Marxist term

[sevendaughters]

I remember a lot of the CCRU people used to really hate Donna Haraway. Could never work out why, as her work seems of a piece with theirs. This review of Haraway's Primate Visions (nominally an analysis of the science of primatology) that I came across on wikipedia sums them all up:

this is the definition of a bit fucking rich.

[Astronaut Omens]

Another weird turn in the story was that there used to be a lot of fairly bland travel journalism online about Shanghai written by Land, which he wrote post drugs but pre fascism. -from the only article I can find now you see the weird prose style he couldn't really shake off even when doing hackwork

"Shanghai has claims to a spectacular lineage of its own. The city's location at the mouth of the Yangzi, where it communicates between the vast Chinese interior and the open horizons of maritime commerce, makes it the natural shop window of an emerging industrial giant. History and geography intersect in Shanghai to produce a national display case, where the obscure immensities of China's past, present and future are artfully presented to foreign eyes, and no less to eyes that merely feign foreignness, in order to revel in the exotic pleasures of cosmopolitan detachment."

[object-lesson]

But reading it was also the point where I reached a reached a kind of exhaustion with transgressive stuff. Land's book is really part of a mini-industry of academics fascinated with people like Bataille and de Sade, writers who essentially wrote torture porn. It's a bit one-note. What's so good about being bad?

Of all the concepts that came out of certain French theorists and that migrated to the anglosphere in the 1990s 'transgression' as a good in itself may be the most harmful and dangerous in multiple ways. That along with the related loss of material reality and the idealist notion that everything is discursively constructed.

[The Boston Crab]

Entry level cunt tier bifida dogshit

[Astronaut Omens]

^^this is it in a nutshell, I feel. My incredible reductive theory about this tendency is that these people are just basically goths but they know that is uncool and daft. World would be a happier place if they'd just embrace that fact and hang around in parks drinking cider being moody, instead of dressing it up in nonsense intellectual techno-racist gubbins.

I totally agree, but I suppose the problem is that some intellectuals are actually incapable of enjoying the kind of simple pleasures you're describing. Stuff that isn't complex, that doesn't involve abstraction and theorizing is inaccessible and not fully comprehensible to them- their special abilities are also, effectively, special needs. And, when it comes to their attitudes towards other people,  they're damaged by the fact that those special needs are not the needs of everybody else

[Astronaut Omens]

I wonder for all their supposed insight why they never stop to think 'hmm, mainly comfortably off white men aren't we?' '... Something in that probably'

They never see it that way because they think of themselves as the victims. They see the establishment, government, mainstream media as dogmatically anti-racist and commiteed to multiculturalism. They see themselves as a minority, ostracised and excluded for the crime of telling the truth. The usual fascist paranoia.

[Astronaut Omens]

Of all the concepts that came out of certain French theorists and that migrated to the anglosphere in the 1990s 'transgression' as a good in itself may be the most harmful and dangerous in multiple ways. That along with the related loss of material reality and the idealist notion that everything is discursively constructed.

I think we'd still have had edgelords, crappy films about serial killers and ironic racism without the influence of continental theory, but note that one of Land's books has a painting by those talentless bastards the Chapman Brothers on the cover.

[object-lesson]

I think we'd still have had edgelords, crappy films about serial killers and ironic racism without the influence of continental theory, but note that one of Land's books has a painting by those talentless bastards the Chapman Brothers on the cover.

Indeed, but the influence of those trends in academia have had a significant effect on graduates all over the political spectrum. 'Transgression' and ideas about the discursive construction of reality have had more influence on nominally left people than the right. And these ideas do insinuate themselves into wider public discourse, even to people who are unaware of their origin, the specific theories behind them and so on. They are very important helpmates of the present phase of capitalism, though they shouldn't be mistaken for the primary cause.

I have to demur at the common use of the phrases 'continental theory' and 'continental philosophy'. They cover a huge range of thinkers whose ideas are often in radical opposition to each other in many ways and are very useful for analytic philosophers and a variety of thinkers (using the term loosely) like Dawkins and Jordan Peterson to confuse and conflate very  different kinds of thought.

[marquis_de_sad]

this is the definition of a bit fucking rich.

Just to clarify: the review wasn't written by a CCRU-related person or a postmodernist philosopher of any kind. Sorry if that wasn't clear. It was written by a palaeontologist, hence her bafflement at what passes for academic standards in Haraway's subfield.