Nick Land General

[Anonymous No.10100492]

Why does /lit/ talk so little about Nick Land?

I mean in proportion to what should make sense given the similar life philosophy/general mood.
Is he not patrician or something?

[Anonymous No.10100497]

/lit/ is literally the only place that still talks about him, apart from /ratanon/ and various expired NRx blogs.

[Anonymous No.10100532]

We've talked him to fucking death for fucks sake

[Anonymous No.10100618]

>>10100497
Is there an NRx imageboard? I'd love to find post there instead of on /pol/.

[Anonymous No.10100626]

>>10100492
How do I into Nick Land? He intrigues me but I haven't read Kant or that much philosophy.

[Anonymous No.10100634]

>>10100492
healthy accelerationist discussion to be had on twitter, honestly. Here's my usual dump for these threads.

----------------
PDF Folder
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B_iPZgGgaFvSYTdpZk1SemtGMlE
Contents:
Nick Land- Thirst for Annhilation
NL - Suspended Animation
NL - Fanged Noumena
Mark Fisher - Capitalist Realsim
Ray Brassier - Nihil Unbound
Reza Negarestani - Cyclonopedia
CCRU Archive

Also, the Nick Land lectures at the New Center
The Concept of Acceleration
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLM6AzdvgK2LJMLHhI3Yeouy-3jiAKcvuB

Bitcoin and Philosophy
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLM6AzdvgK2LJrKca3SQznL9dua2blgcIq

Qwernomics
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLM6AzdvgK2LKDtYMw6QQucqg4AJMXt1SV

Outer Edges (Incomplete, anyone have links to the rest of the unlisted videos?)
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLM6AzdvgK2LIEudhL5LcQ2Z4b1iBNTONP

[Anonymous No.10100668]

I notice ol' Nick hasn't put anything up on Jacobite in the last month or so. Has he had a falling out with the editors?

[Anonymous No.10100684]

>>10100634
Is he a horror writer? How does he compare with Lovecraft in his themes for instance?

[Anonymous No.10100688]

>>10100668
I doubt it. If anything, it was conspicuous how much the site is relying on him. I wouldn't expect a journal to publish a single author that regularly. Also, he's supposedly working on book about blockchain/bitcoin

>>10100684
He isn't primarily a horror writer, it's continental philosophy. If you want the lovecraft angle, check out something like Lemurian Time War in the CCRU archive.

[Anonymous No.10100693]

>>10100634
I want to add, the Concept of Acceleration lectures are really good, if not particularly concise. There is probably too much focus on the Left-Accelerationist stuff, because of the student participants and the election of Trump, but it's a solid basis for getting the basics of Accelerationism.

[Anonymous No.10100701]

>>10100492
probably because there is an oversaturation of writers and ppl can only discuss so much.

[Anonymous No.10100874]

>>10100492
Interesting guy. Thanks for introducing.

[Anonymous No.10100887]

We literally have a thread about this useless idiot every day.

[Anonymous No.10100914]

>>10100634
No matter how hard I try, I can't understand a damn thing he says. Why does he insist on using obscurist language, instead of just telling us in plain English?
>inb4 bainlet
How can you expect anybody to understand, and spread your ideology if you're always this cryptic?

[Anonymous No.10100941]

>>10100914

>How can you expect anybody to understand, and spread your ideology if you're always this cryptic?

How much philosophy do you read? Because if "very little" is your answer, I'm willing to bet that's why.

[Anonymous No.10101237]

>>10100688
>He isn't primarily a horror writer, it's continental philosophy

I don't think Land would agree with this. His two recently published fictional works by Time Spiral Press are theory-fiction that deal with "abstract horror." They are even labeled as such. Much of his recent philosophy on xenosystems is dealing with "abstract horror": https://web.archive.org/web/20170911215145/http://www.xenosystems.net/abstract-horror/ and a ton of material on the old CCRU hyperstition blog deals with the same themes (same goes for Fisher's old blog, except he spun off into philosophizing about near-concepts like weirdness and eeriness before he "opted out"). Land even says somewhere that the ends that philosophy is heading towards is horror (given Land's thoughts on teleology and its looping time structure, this also simultaneously makes horror a starting point for philosophy). You could say that major parts of his philosophizing since the beginning is driven by factoring horror into metaphysics and epistemology.

Because many people read Land politically, most people on both the right and left miss this ongoing horror theme running through many of the CCRU philosophers (Land isn't the only one, Fisher as said above used to write on this). On the left they either ignore Land, because "muh fascist neoreactionaries," or they are basic bitch accelerationists who see everything through the lens of a quasi-Marxism while ignoring CCRU's history of being anti-capitalist but pro-market: https://web.archive.org/web/20040814123852/http://www.ccru.net:80/archive/markets.htm On the right they only read him, because "muh tech-comm NRx," while ignoring the fact that Land sees Capital as an exemplar of horror (that he is in awe of).

[Anonymous No.10101238]

>>10100684
>Is he a horror writer?

He both uses horror as an object of philosophizing, and horror itself as a way to philosophize. He has also written theory-fiction around his terminology of "abstract horror." So I would say yes, he is, but not a conventional one. That wouldn't be to downplay it, because I think horror is central to his philosophy.

>How does he compare with Lovecraft in his themes for instance?

To understand the Lovecraft influences, you have to read the original two communiques of the CCRU, have a bit of knowledge of Deleuze & Guattari (D&G), and read Land's writings on horror. Long post follows.

The gist of the CCRU communiques is that they enter these real or fictional worlds, often in terms of collectives that produce some non-mainstream ("peripheral") cutting-edge culture (e.g. neoreactionary blogs), and then try to intensify, link up, and produce things within -- and with -- these collectives. Land et. al. are like roaming conceptual engineers (or on another interpretation: sorcerers), both in terms of lower-scale production of new concepts (new "spells"), but also in terms of higher-scale planning and production of cross-cutting intensive links between collectives in the flows of ideas (a kind of "republic of grimoires" to riff off the republic of letters). It sometimes easy to confuse the two, which is what the media and others do, i.e. there is a difference between NRx-Land (object-level intensive theorizing within some specific concrete collective) and Philosopher-Land (meta-level theorizing about the many object-level collectives in an abstract sense).

The notion of intensity for them, which comes from D&G, is kind of key on two levels: at the level of cognition (human thought) and at the level of ontology (things in the world). Cognitively, intensity of sensation boots up and starts thought (and hence the prospect of philosophizing). Ontologically, intensity is the link between making possible things into actual things. It is also the thing that makes the actual relegated to possible (see NRx blogging without its core bloggers like Moldbug). Something is intensive iff taking away core components of the collective idea-generators turns it into something completely different.

(cont)

1/2

[Anonymous No.10101241]

>>10101238
>>10100684

2/2

This is where Land's ideas of horror comes in, and why acceleration of Capital ends up being a kind of intensifying of horror, which in turn gets people thinking about Capital. But, if it was simple as that, one would think stopping Capital would be as easy as pointing to it and letting people sense the horror. But this doesn't happen. Land (and also some parts of Fisher's philosophy) states the reason for this is that secrecy is also tied up with horror. Horror is both ineffable at the level of language, and hidden at the level of ontology (Land makes an explicit comparison to horror being much like the projects of negative theology and divine hiddenness within Christian mysticism, an occult angle -- remembering that D&G did say to become sorcerers -- that is perhaps only appreciated by /fringe/ posters). Both Fisher and Land also makes the point that Capital often not only takes on the form of its prey, but captures and re-directs its prey. Within pop-culture horror and horror scifi, think of the movies The Thing or the Terminator. Entities that are predators that take on the forms of their prey after devouring or terminating them. In real life horror, it's leftists being pro mass immigration and anti-border -- both of which are tied to Capital -- and replacing the working classes while thousands are raped with near-weekly terror attacks, and an ideological structure financed by Capital that tells you are bad if you disagree with all this.

So finally reaching Lovecraft. As a writer of horror, he becomes important for two reasons: his philosophy of time and his fictional web of ideas. For the former, both CCRU and Land draw on Lovecraft's notion of time, and Lovecraft's idea that time itself is at the core of horror writing. So that becomes important for Land and the CCRU and their various time-centric concepts, e.g. acceleration, hyperstition (playing off time loops to make fictions/conspiracies/millennial beliefs a reality), the long-term scale of Capital as a horror entity (see Meltdown). For the latter reason, Lovecraft's fiction itself serves as that link again between the possible and the actual. It's like a theoretical tool-kit re-purposed for intensity (or a grimoire like the Necronomicon). In engineering terms, Lovecraft's ideas are a sub-assembly: some sort of functional thing that can be re-purposed into an engineering diagram or model. This combination of Lovecraft, secrecy, and horror is captured by Fisher's idea of what Land's philosophy is all about: To bring about the favor of Capital is to sacrifice your own humanity (probably eventually to a silicon valley machine god, or some sort of CRISPR based genetic virus that turns us all into tentacles), similar to the way cultists sacrifice humans to favor a Lovecraftian Elder one. And Land from a Lovecraftian perspective is a kind of cultist mystic conjuring up spells to make sure it happens (and self-aware that he is so).

[Anonymous No.10101311]

His etymological analysis of the word "Cracker" is fucking hilarious and enlightening.

[Anonymous No.10101330]

>>10100626
https://jacobitemag.com/2017/05/25/a-quick-and-dirty-introduction-to-accelerationism/

Then read Land's Dark Enlightenment.

[Anonymous No.10101862]

>>10100914
its not really an ideology that needs 'spreading'. It's not a political platform, it's a theory of capitalism and other competitive, positive feedback loops. I'd say his language is about as precise as it could be, honestly.

[Anonymous No.10102018]

>>10100618
There is and it is called /lit/

[Anonymous No.10102278]

>>10100914
>How can you expect anybody to understand, and spread your ideology if you're always this cryptic?

The thesis of accelerationism is that it's too late to do anything about global capitalism, and, though we can't know what will happen next, that happening will have been inevitable. No need to spread an ideology if that's the case.

Also, from my experience (three essays into Fanged Noumena right now), Land is pretty straightforward, though he does talk in circles sometimes. "Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest" read a lot like a scientific paper, complete with an abstract that introduces/outlines the main ideas. You could just read the first few pages and walk away with a pretty solid understanding of the whole essay; the rest of it is just arguments for the thesis and additional parallels he sees between different modes of capitalist praxis.

>tl;dr
He's not hard to read if you know how academic writing functions. Google the Feynman Technique and learn to focus on a paper's abstract.

[Anonymous No.10102418]

>>10100618
nrx is a bunch of boomer losers. They've all got kids and wives now. Hestia Society seems like some kind of retirement cult for capitalists that want to assuage their guilt and rant about hating blackies.

[Anonymous No.10102450]

>>10102418
I wouldn't really call them losers per-say, many of them are obviously very successful. The way I see it, the far right has sort of come to this giant realization in the past few years that shit is fucked. Now for younger people this sort of comes out as the alt-right, a more revolutionary zeitgeist that's optimistic that they can change things to the way they think they should be, if gradually. But for older more jaded people, it's come out as NRx, which obviously sees revolution and change from the set course as impossible. It's really a tale as old as time, the young are idealistic and the old are jaded.

[Anonymous No.10102546]

>>10102450
I'd be interested to learn the average net-worth of NRxers. There is a deep irony, that an attempt to take the logic of capitalism and apply it to politics would yield no serious investment. They've got blogs, they've got the Hestia Society (which seems like a website and not an actual social club). But where are the multi-million dollar think-tanks and research institutes. Where are the advertising campaigns? They aren't even attempting to weasel into the university system through endowments and gift-giving in the typical conservative Neo-Con fashion.

If they have money, they aren't using it for NRx.

[Anonymous No.10102552]

>>10102546
oh, and why aren't they buying off politicians with campaign donations?

NRx should have the equivalent of the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and a large number of Super PAC fronts, but they don't. Its all theory and blogs.

[Anonymous No.10103404]

>>10102546
>>10102552
But it's not really an ideology that needs to push itself, isn't the whole point of their theory that it's the inevitable conclusion of capitalism? I mean it's not even like Marxism where you need some kind of united-front revolution to overthrow the system, they see the current system as already leading their way. It's not a belief in the way things should be, but a belief in the way things will be. If you don't understand that then I think you've fundamentally misunderstood their position.

[Anonymous No.10103500]

>>10102278
>The thesis of accelerationism is that it's too late to do anything about global capitalism
Nick would shudder at such a teleological conclusion. His point is more that capitalism seemed to emerge as its own system, but is actually the infinite process of approach toward itself, & that it is meaningless to talk about whether it is "too late" to do anything about it because it has always been "too late". In other words capitalism, or rather the acceleration of capital, is transcendental. At least that's what I could gleam from his writings and some of his lectures

[Anonymous No.10104558]

>>10103404
I can see that argument about Land's 'unconditional accelerationism' but not about NRx. If the world is going to devolve nation states and unions of nation states into a patchwork of corporate territories, then practical systems need to be built, methods of liquidating failed nations. Capitalism has stock-markets, and no matter how 'inevitable' they were in the evolution of capitalism, someone had to organize them.

The patchwork has a huge fucking hurdle to get over: legacy nation states and their nationalist myths. It seems like there is plenty of practical work to be done.

[Anonymous No.10104567]

>>10104558
one of the more interesting ideas talked about in the Outer Edges lecture seminars is the idea of 'buying out' a failed nation state. How much money would Assad or Kim Jung Un need in order to give up their failed projects? Is that even possible? But as it stands, nations don't go quietly into bankruptcy the same way the corporations do. They crash and burn, potentially destroying much more than themselves. That isn't corporatism, it's the arrogance of divine sovereignty.

[Anonymous No.10104672]

So is his book Fanged Noumena any good? It's like $36 dollars cdn.

[Anonymous No.10105966]

>>10102546
Read moldbug.

>The steel rule of passivism is absolute renunciation of official power. We note instantly that any form of resistance to sovereignty, so long as it succeeds, is a share in power itself.

>As a reactionary, you don't believe that political power is a human right. You will never convince anyone to adopt the same attitude, without first adopting it yourself. Since you believe others should be willing to accept the rule of the New Structure, over which they wield no power, you must be the first to make the great refusal.

[Anonymous No.10105974]

>>10104672
pdf version here>>10100634

[Anonymous No.10105982]

>>10105966
Well, if that's Moldbug's theory, so be it. I just don't think the dissavowal of a political subject/project will actually lead to patchwork. The general trend of the last 4000 years is towards empire, regardless of whatever recent 'exits' have been occurring. Capitalism want's global reach, each actor would prefer monopoly for itself. Patchwork should be seen as the erecting of firewalls, of sectioning and formalizing interaction protocols over those firewalls.

[Anonymous No.10106291]

>>10105982
Using leftist means to achieve reactionary ends doesn't work. I too doubt the patchwork, we will probably hit GAI far before that can happen (at which point it doesn't matter).

OTOH I disagree with the idea that the general trend of history is toward centralization, it seems much more cyclical to me. To put it broadly and in the European context: city states -> roman centralization -> city/small states -> empires -> nation states. Now we seem to be in a centralizing mode again, but you can already see the fault lines as incompatible cultures try to reconcile their aims.

[Anonymous No.10106370]

>>10100914
>bainlet
Masketta man?

[Anonymous No.10106395]

So who do I read before Land? Heidegger? Deleuze?

[Anonymous No.10106460]

>>10106395
Bataille.

[Anonymous No.10106463]

>>10106395
Marx, D&G