Reading Wark, Reading Land

I began reading Mckenzie Wark's piece on Nick Land on the Verso blog. As an intellectual figure, and author of 'Fanged Noumena: The Collected Writings 1987 - 2007' his writing holds some fascination for me. In my journal, I was noting an observation -

An argument is made regarding a homology that is noticed by Land in the kind of appropriation made by Kant and Capital respectively, though what may go unnoticed here is that one is a philosopher (who made use of apriori concepts), and the other is a concept, which may yet be constructed in a multiplicity of ways. The objects of their appropriations are experience, in the case of Kant, and 'the colony' in the case of Capital. I quote "Both posit one way relations, an arrested synthesis".

To note, the article I am reading is written by Mckenzie Wark, a professor of media and cultural studies at The New School For Social Research, and I would like to add that she probably presents the most internationally accepted one line apprehension of Capital today - "Capital distances itself from reality, hiding behind borders and police. It imports undervalued labor and exports political volatility." In terms of its functional effects on a demography, and at the price of spitting on Marx's grave, this would be the bottom line.

Yet, and this is Wark's bravery, such a conception does not rest either behind real estate, or in some kind of sublimated glorification of manual labor. She confronts the home as openly xenophobic, patriarchal and nationalistic - producing a kind of generalized incest.

I would like to interject here and add, that were we to consider a strategy for the expansion of Capital today - to be to promote, via industry, the very symptoms a new product claims to treat, then we may perhaps see how Land's conceptual apprehensions lay the ground, retrospectively speaking, for Zizek's ontology of sexual difference. I can add, with some wry pride, that such an observation holds true, even if we were to concede that today, philosophy itself is nothing more than another commodity produced under the conditions of capitalism.

Regarding this relation to alterity identified in Kant, Land has a disposition which appears contradictory to Wark. 'In Kant, the reasoning and contemplating subject precedes its risk of undoing in the sublime. For Land, it is about the sublime, just the other way around. The sublime is the traumatic primacy of the finitude of the animal.'

It is in this register, or rather precisely such a site, where the Lacanian sublation of the appearance of the symptom is itself read, not in itself, yet as an appearance within the symbolic order, which may be facing its own discursive struggles, which we may provisionally categorize as generic.

Wark makes a poignant observation regarding Land's 'escape from a philosophical persona bound to its own consistency'. The subject looses relative and stable identity, yet perhaps because of this - reality does too, or rather its externality warps with the collapse of personality, like a weird echo from victorian fiction. 'Materialism can only be the unknown itself'. This statement which is in consonance with Land's 'vision' of philosophy - as a means of deepening the unknown itself, strikes a chord - to use a common metaphor, with the Lacanian conceptualization of the real - as that which resists symbolization, and by that very gesture, presents itself as the background, and perhaps not the shared hermeneutic horizon, of ecriture itself. This aspect, which I believe has not been emphasized is curious, for Land as a writer is one who would literally use non-standard type faces, exclamation marks etc. to construct recognizable words and sentences, playing upon resemblances and differences which the human eye picks up, all while sustaining his examination and critique of western metaphysics; a critique which retains its Kantian punctuation at the price of dissolving its own historicity in symbolization. It is perhaps here, that we glean, in Land's output, traces of why his writing had to be a critique - and in its subject 'Kant, Capital and the Prohibition of Incest' - the title of the first essay in 'Fanged Noumena' - clues as to a resistance to a real which is relegated to biographical detail. The fact that he founded the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit at Warwick, developing in seminars, experimental forms of interpellation in the presence of groups cued to respond to varying names, each thinking, and perhaps mapping their own relation to the other, which ultimately presents itself in the form of a symbolic order in Lacanian terms, says something about the enterprise of the then young professor as well as the faith that those who are later referred to as the 'Cathedral' rested in him.

The writing and seminars of the early days of CCRU are worth taking up perhaps for this alone.

Wark notes however, perhaps in a fatalistic tone 'the poets expose themselves to contagion by it, but cannot work in or on it' - is she referring to matter itself?

Amidst these forces which threaten to 'dissolve' the inside in complicity with anonymous exterior forces, it is an immanent danger that the original instructional purposes that philosophy was put to, its pedagogy - may be forgotten. Wark frames the situation here beautifully, 'Romanticism conquers the west with the barbarian hordes of the west's own imagination.' - a drama if there ever was one which depicts the gaze looking out into the unknown, finding, theorizing, looking yet also witnessing the migrations from developing to developed economies.

Yet, what of the West's own attempts to apprehend the 'Outside', incidentally a word which is part of Nick Land's twitter handle. Kant proposed a distinction between the phenomenal world, or the world as it appears to us - phenomenal experience to put it better. And the 'thing in itself', or the aspect of an entity which is not present to human perception.

Here, Wark presents us with a genealogy of Land's influences. Deleuze and Guattari are cited of course, and we are reminded that instead of reading them through Bergson's vitalism, they are read through (whatever that means) Nietzsche's will to power. There seems to be a maneuvering of terms here which at first may not be completely transparent to the reader. When for instance, the thesis which is negated is that 'the opposite of the phenomenal world is not the true world', are we perhaps sidestepping the very literal conception of the Kantian thing in itself? Or, to appeal to the French tastes of my readers, the Lacanian real, to draw from a figure who is curiously absent in Land's oeuvre? Notwithstanding any of this, let us return to what Wark is actually saying. For Nietzsche, the opposite of a phenomenal world is not a true world but another phenomenal world, "a formless and chotic one". Here, regarding a thinker whose sensitivity to encounters between contrasting personalities, indeed to contrasting or even contesting events, read as the truth of these personalities, can we not see in this other phenomenal world 'formless and chaotic' as it may be, a resonance of the psychoanalytic Other? The only objection which I concede here, is that Nietzsche never concedes, like Lacan, to the other, the privilege of an autonomous symbolic order. Before Althusser, before vitalism - his prose still stands, for any to read, as an example of what an anthropological aestheticization of an encounter can be. Anthropological in the sense of the meaning of the word - relating to the study and development of man, starting with his faculties and sensibilities. It is this man, or rather such a set of sensibilities, that is appealed to by Nietzsche, as a writer. Such a man, who is also an other, perhaps even at a greater yet more intimate distance than the encounter, parable or aphorism which is represented and it is perhaps this distance which lends Nietzsche's prose their endearments.

Returning to Wark's own characterizations however, I really do appreciate her representation of Land's prose "The exploration can go in any direction: to the mountains, to underground, crypts, wilderness. Its a search for portals to what elsewhere I call xeno-communication, although for not just contact but contagion from an alien land." And I do admit, such an account invites me to read a little more on what Wark means, and how she intends to find xeno-communication or opportunities for it. I quote here and with a ear to the resonance that Land searches for in philosophy. 'The poetry of subaltern figures is of value only as routes to the unknown".

Wark notes, perhaps not at her most writerly moment, the punk alliance against priests and philosophers, whose 'moral agency' prevents (us?) from trusting them with 'true poetry's' portal. An inverted Platonic bar if there ever were one. Yet she also does note the poets to be the heroes, negative or otherwise, of the Situationist International, a movement which I do declare I'm not very familiar with. Land however, she notes, does not see them as avatars of a collective agency:- "a consummate libidinal materialism is distinguished by its complete indifference to the category of work. Wherever there is labor or struggle there is repression of the raw creativity which... seems identical with dying."

Less elucidating to me are the brief extracts, and I do mean less than a sentence long... of labor's alienation and 'machinic' compartmentalization as it were, though this is clarified to an extent with the other, and here I mean instrumentalist point of view - of labor or work not as a humanizing or spiritualizing project but one among other properties, to be organized by a meat grinder capitalism into a useable resource.

We need to bear in mind that the account presented to us is from the nineties and apprehensions of what artificial intelligence could be entirely echo certain anthropomorphic embodiments; "Artificial intelligence is destined to emerge as a feminized alien grasped as property; a cunt horror slave chained-up in Asimov-Rom". We are informed that the property question is a turn not pursued; perhaps left to certain background processes... in any case I still find noteworthy Land's own practice of psychohistory.

The question of philosophy's relation with phenomenology is one which has animated my thought. There may be two ways to represent this : -

1.) A creative act, in its moment of alienation from the real, draws on and inscribes a facet of resistance into the product, whatever that may be.

2.) This product itself however may be nothing more than a gesture, or perhaps even mere consumption, an act advertising is replete with.

As moments, we may argue that the second is a response to the first. A populist, yet perhaps humanitarian account may even claim that the second causes the first, perhaps not unlike how Avital Ronnel claims that ressentiment is the 'motor of history'. In such considerations what is easily invisibleized is the question of form and its construction.

This, in a weak nebulous sense represents why certain rationalist structuralist strains in philosophy were critical of later French phenomenology. And, in a sense, I see Land's work, as partly a reaction against a valorization of immanence that even radicals such as Badiou champion, though I will add the caveat that in his case the immanence in question may indeed be a radical situationist one - engaged in the construction of axioms, theorems, arguments or hypothesis expressing contradictions immanent to the order that is.

When I read a sentence such as 'Land sees labor as complicit with phenomenology, rather than as a displacement of it.' at first glance the gaze in question cannot but strike me as one guided by the lens of capital - as it does not even recognize the concreteness of the act in question inasmuch as that which labor forms is left unnamed - in Land's case perhaps the genesis of the movement Wikipedia today calls the Dark Enlightenment. This, may not rest simply as a desire to read too much into the category of labor. The category of labor hinges on the act it labors towards, even if it is nothing more than the construction of the human subject. Without this it becomes a mere garment meant to conceal something it wishes to hide, and as such cannot be entertained without the strictest scrutiny.

This is why, in reading the second sentence which Wark quotes - "There can be no conception of work that does not project spirit into the origin, morally valorizing exertion..." I am curious to know of the context in which Land presents this argument. Who was he reacting against? The workerist Marxists? These to me are live questions, yet perhaps as importantly, movements in thought which have histories that call on our study if we were to make any adequate assessment of their contemporary deployment. In any case, they point to my own desire to better acquaint myself with Land's writings.

Wark however, does address the root of this problem - citing a break in the early humanistic and later scientific Marx; and how these two orientations envision labor differently in relation to the world. The question of when and the extent of his break with Hegelian idealism will arise... a question which deserves its own analysis and addressal, perhaps one already charted out to some extent in Zizek's work as he raises properly philosophical questions such as 'Is abstract labor universal?'

Wark continues to the Spinozan god which Land is getting at, but not quite yet. I would like to pause here and cite Land himself - from the same essay who says something which many an undergrad might have felt yet struggled to put precisely as such, 'Critique belongs to capital because it is the first inherently progressive theoretical procedure to emerge upon the earth... avoiding both the formal conservatism of the natural sciences and the material conservatism of dogmatic metaphysics.'

Can one ask here why, even before stating its characteristics, Land posits critique as belonging to capital? Is this question mistaken because it does not see in the following proposition, the reason for the stated belonging? I do not think so, yet - without explaining the historicity at play, will add that such a statement, and indeed characterization of capital itself is in consonance with Marx's own reading of capital as wealth in the form of money's progressive function in the breakdown of the feudal order. His next sentence here, to me, perhaps presents the most succinct characterization of the value of theory, if not philosophy itself. "In the case both of the mode of production and of the mode of reason what is evident is the self-perpetuating movement of deregulation, whose tendency is towards an increasingly radical prioritization of the interrogative impulse." The essay where this is from 'Making it with Death: Remarks on Thanatos and Desiring Production' was written in the year 1993, I presume while he was still teaching in Warwick, two years prior to the formation of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit. In terms of its principle and schema I believe it is as, if not more - relevant a disposition to guide our present work today, in this age, post the emergence of social media platforms and online retailers, than it was in the pre dotcom bust era.

In fact as I read this essay, Land's - I cannot but recommend it enough, let me cite a passage which put down in a sentence almost the very form of rendering the Anglophone world conceives when confronted by the two major post-structuralist French philosophers of the 20th century. "Whilst both Deleuze and Derrida critique illegitimate articulation, the former tends towards a consummate materialism, in which intensive substance is transcendentally released from its paralyzation in extension, while the latter prosecutes a Judaic meditation, marked out in theo-graphisms, infinitely radicalizing an anti-iconic relation to the absolute."

Further and of note to scholars of the history of French philosophy, Land notes that the true counterpole to Deleuze's anti-nomadic ventures is not Hegel's social managerialism but rather the 'non-exclusive polity of deconstruction or cruder neo-Kantian liberal theories, with their abstractly recomposable humanities. There is a truth to this whose depth will be felt by those who have tread the paths of certain questions in the development of our discipline.

Such a gesture is perhaps the true contemporarising of Deleuze for us, lifting him from the French sixties to a now. A reconstellation as it were.

Of personal interest to me is Land's identification of 'the obsessional neurosis' of ethical thought in its attempt at consolidating a transcendental principle of justice... I recommend that you read this passage in full yourselves. Perhaps not least because Land does present his own reading and analyses of Capital, while elsewhere asking Marx's clarification of the transformation problem, if the labor theory of value is to be entertained.

Reading Land, is to at once acknowledge a familiarity with the political thrust of the thinkers he draws on while also witnessing the engagement of their ideas in a terrain of contemporary cosmopolitanism. A bridge in New York, a stock trading floor, are the scenes of immanence his thought draws its characteral becomings from. He makes the mistake we are warned against, such as the personification of economic and political tendencies for instance in the figure of the bum, the coked trader, the zombie as the immanent becoming of the worker in capitalism, to stage a point we may otherwise miss, of the incarnation of his critique in the plane of social life itself.

What is noteworthy here, indeed vital - is that Land, unlike certain Marxian apologists, does not provide us a phenomenology of alienation, of deprivation as fetish - but a retrenchment of the lines of antagonism, once the function of the Party in a Leninist register, in terms which pin capital to the point of its own limit - that force its confessions, not of anti-humanism, for the human who is a battery is a pliable resource, but its hatred for thought itself.

In sustaining our comparison with Marxian forms of organization, particularly anti-Leninist Operaismo and their thinking on the interface of humans and machines; we see that in almost both instances humanism slips away as any recognizable form of sociality; a discovery as it were unearthed via the surfacing of desiring production. This is the question we are left with to consider, besides explanations which collate data from a sample to study its interaction with a structure, the explanation of a tendency, at a phenomenological level is what we are left to confront. If man is a plug-in-port to a machine in the horizon of capitalism, which melts away into an 'undead desiring production', can we not see the machining of habit itself? Its hijacking as it were by an undead agency? "Cognition becomes inhuman. There is no dialectics between social and technical relations... but only a mechanism that dissolves society into the machines while deterritorialising the machines (and might I add installing their sublated modifications of drives, a machinic unconscious as it were ala Guattari) across the ruins of society.

This machining of thought, indeed this circuitry does make itself apparent in Wark's prose as well - "This cybernetics dissolves judgement, instrumentalizes critique... Domination is just inefficient circuit design. Emergent control does not come from a plan but explores a space..."

A theme that arises here, though in other words perhaps, is the disappearance of historicity, or that milieu which provides a stable frame of referents for our symbols. A theme any Marxist would be familiar with. Yet, instead of a dialectical antagonism pointing to the contours of an emergent (or ossified) totality; we are presented with the sites of its blockages, a psychic study of social communication as it were, is this schizoanalysis? Its molar corelates are yet recognizably territorial despotic or the capitalist social form. Or "beyond sociality is a universal schizophrenia whose evacuation from history, appears inside history as capitalism."

There is a sense where Land seems to actively prefer the banality of a language of reaction "clinical schizophrenics are POWs from the future... their nervous systems are the free fire zones of an emergent neo-eugenicist cultural security system" :- Land refuses to recognize this procedure as genealogy, unlike Lacan who sublates the asexual relations between an individual and society or perhaps between an interpretation and a symbolic order, creating something he may prefer to refer to as his teachings.

Land uses history as irony via the placement of his cognitive cartography vis-a-vis the high brow but not quite singular reference invoked by posterity.

The ur-frame as it were is "it is not a matter of what is wrong with them, but of what is wrong with life, with nature, with matter, with the pre-universal cosmos".

In sentences such as "The death of capital is less of a prophesy than a machinic part" we sense that beside facile accusations of teleology - we also witness the putting to work of a futurity determined by the coordinates of capital, by capital itself, to reproduce its present. The fear and danger of the instrumentalising of critique was not merely apparent, but alive here... When the history of philosophy is considered and one searches for the point where idealism (German or otherwise) snapped - we will have to contend with capital, perhaps even in its biological or familial forms, to mark the site where transcendent identity snaps or is vulgarized, the bonds of sociality animated by reason dissipated. Schizoanalysis does appear to be the diagnostic protocol apparent to a mode of production which is geared towards its own reproducibility. The question of attachment, or rather bondage cannot be easily separated from this however. When a form of life identifies absolutely with a rule designed to govern it - it cannot but lend itself to its reproducibility, perhaps even at expense to itself. This is the impasse that French structuralism had to contend with, and perhaps the beginning of what Althusser would call theoretical anti-humanism.

There is a sense in which the congruence of such a movement and what would later come to be known as accelerationism comes to surface. When we read however that "...the only agent is capital and what it accelerates is death." I cannot but ask, the death of which subject? What is to become of such a death? And if that which dies is not predicated in any manner how may we sublate the movement?

Schizophrenia in such an account is read as a symptom from the future, inasmuch as the turn between competing or conflicting viewpoints, undertaken by the subject is indicative of the criteria that may be used to formalize such turns in a time to come, and perhaps with assistance from capital. Is my insistence here on the category of the subject a mere anachronism? No, inasmuch as Land still acknowledges the taking place of a death - following which it may be worth predicating or specifying that which has died, lest we forget any vital links or functions accomplished by such a subject. Wark here provides us some answers "The romantic characters change into the wardrobe of cyberpunk black, practitioners of the production hyperstition, myth extruding from the future, experimentally simulating what the real could be - and sometimes becomes."

She invokes a transcendental position which such characters are to appeal to, a transcendental unconscious as it were, which we presume is somehow aware of the impasses of modern philosophy. These subjects - "deadly orphans from beyond reproduction" could indeed be a characterization which can refer to any of us who have witnessed the subsumption of disciplines in the modern academy. The question to me, at least tactically is how may we make our communication, our ever so slightly French complicity in this endeavor, organizationally stable? What forms of cultural production may be adequate to such a stage? The cyberpunk movie from Hollywood, certainly - but what of literature? At the cost of stumbling let me blunt the question which such a scenario begs: - will no Hegelians address Nick Land?

Yet, no sooner that I put these thoughts on paper, am I met with calls of damnation: a cognition, or perhaps information which exceeds the human.

Steven Shaviro is cited and we read tidbits like "thought is a function of the real, something that matter can do". This sacrificing of the thinking subject as it were is something I find unnerving coming from a philosopher, and as a tendency, do wonder what it may be reflective, expressive, or representative of in Land's work.

Perhaps snatches of this may be gleaned from Land's approach "...what appears to humanity as a history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from the enemy's resources." This is not the position of the industrial proletariat in the 19th and 20th century. Nor is this one of somebody being deprived of information (or resources) it would appear - but perhaps of sovereignty itself, if this archaic word is still indicative of the kind of freedom and world-construction, forms of life today aspire to.

In the horror of this predicament, where the subject seems to have becomes chance affinities between converging bodies, or minds: capital, in whose apparent defense Land presents his argument becomes nothing more than a convergent yet unrealizable assault on a social macropod. What we really see in such moments of 'insight' is the use that Land can make of the limits of a literary form, theory in this case to posit an invocatory readership - a congregation it may appear, by hypothesizing their founding myth just beyond the near future as opposed to the past, and placing its coordinates just outside the semblance of humanism which has become so many fronts for the furthering of an enterprise which at its core remains merely monetary.

Mckenzie Wark's question - 'what if this is not capitalism anymore?' does interest me - however, the kind of question, perhaps yet indicative of the forms of reasoning adequate to reality, questions such as 'What if the superseding of capital has already begun?' 'What if a more abstract form of commodification has begun yet again?' 'What if, once again, it depends on extracting a surplus, this time in information, from a subordinate class? These do indicate that if nothing else there would appear to be strong corelates in the forms of exploitation deployed in capitalism - and whatever this new totality may be whose emergence Wark is indicating.

An example of the kind of economies in play here are provided. "AT & T for instance will let you trade in your old cellular devices, or other electronics for credit. It may even give you credit in advance were you to pledge your device to them. The real that is emerging here is the commodification, or rather the warscaping of communication where the cut of the other is apprehended as an interception of signals. It does appear curious however as to why Wark argues that collective agents can't form in Land's world; merely individual and dividual ones. The only thinking which seems compatible with such convictions is one which seems assured that any emergent collective would of necessity be exploited.

In trying to situate the genre this may be operative within we are presented the example of Kathy Acker and William Gibson who, like Land, share in a punk intellectual rebellion of some sort. "Punk arises within the culture of universal prostitution and laughs at the death of the social." I may hold reservations against the categorizing of Land's work as a non-rational poetics however, yet am encouraged by the assertion that both her, Acker - and Land seek to pass the inside from the outside. Land, we are told does not see the colonial other as revolutionary. Here, I would like to object. Does not Land, in 'Kant, Capital and the Prohibition of Incest'. provide perhaps the most contemporary and indeed modern reworking of the coordinates of the Centre and the periphery? Also, does he not provide us with a revolutionary vector, the image of Amazonian women penetrating the capitalist metropolis from the colonized outside? We are provided citations to the contrary, yet, perhaps reflective of my own unfamiliarity with the totality of Land's work - I cannot claim to follow them to a point where the above referred to model is negated.

Stylization aside there is a sense in which I still do recognize Land offering a critique of capitalism, but in the language of capital, or rather the forces deployed by capital, yet freed from its framework. Read this "The forces of production are going for the revolution on their own". In a plane where capitalism infinitely fetishizes and valorizes the means (as in means of production) - this does appear to be the revolutionary thing to do.

And apart from rhetorical dismissals of Marx (..."all that survives of him is a psychological bundle of resentments and disgruntlements) ; the act of thinking human movement as a mode, and charting contradictions in their animosity within an immanent limit are at least two thematic congruities which the critiques of Land and Marx share.

What is not shared is what Deleuze would call the historical grandeur of the latter's work. Bear in mind, without taking anything away from efforts inspired by the former, even today Land is writing to a place, a gap in our collective symbolic apparatus which anticipates incongruities which do arise, collectively at a geographical level and affectively at the level of our relationships which often arise after great punctuating movements of a life, a voyage to a new land, a marriage, coordinating remotely with a prospective employer to get a job. Situations which the party form, at least in its traditional structure is not equipped to handle.

I do not know much of Land's more recent work since his relocation to Shanghai yet do concur with Wark that his calling out the depressive tendencies in Western Marxism was timely... The hope that in our mourning we may discover a revolutionary collectivity is a passion which, whatever else it may have led to, has not brought much happiness and here I look favorably into the openly apocalyptic and prophetic work of Ernst Bloch and Slavoj Zizek. The integration of the non-west as sino-pacific boom forcing the metropolis to reenergize is to my mind a productive and progressive historical resonance of the Cultural Revolution.

The discerning eye of Mckenzie Wark does treat us to historical becoming armsdealers of poets, though Land unlike Rimbaud before him deals only rhetorical weaponry in the east (thankfully). Land's engagement with Shanghai and world expos and their histories is a chapter which is yet to be completed, if it is to be, though we are left with references to follow through on. Though what interests me as a writer is the search for a milieu of historical becoming, an aspect Land no doubt has in the back of his noxious and stimulant induced mind; like Rimbaud before him, like Conrad, and yes like Walter Benjamin and Charles Baudelaire.

I'd like to comment here that the publication of 'Fanged Noumena' by Urbanomic Press does seem more fitting now that we see a real engagement by the author in the question of modernization in China, apart from his cartography of the western metropolis, histories more intimately linked in the epoch of globalization than earlier. Thematically as well it is telling that Hollywood often uses the Shanghai skyline these days as the backdrop to its sci-fi movies as apposed to New York perhaps and I can't quite help but ask - is this a case of the West looking to the once agrarian east for dreams of its own future?

Wark reads the later Land through the author's earlier work, an advantage I do not have, yet do follow her sense in which, with his embrace (read commissioned job) of covering industrial expos he no longer wagers on pure destratification. Perhaps the imperial Chinese skyline is not far in this picture. Yet, we are told that he does maintain an 'ironic play' with the 'avatars of neo-reaction'; a description I might add which would fit nicely as a tag on many a minister in the Indian parliament.

In an interesting borrowing from dietary language, we are told that there is no lack of paleo-reaction, and Land does openly refer to a 'Kurtz process...' The philosopher Nick Land once tried to subvert images of nationalistic racism endemic to old empires. The reconfiguration of capitalism positions us in an apparently faux Hegelianism "those who 'succeed' are 'selected' and must have always been genetically superior. Enough cannot be said about the straightheadedness with which Land addresses the 'racial' question in philosophy. To not let it remain a mere 'cover for action' - the operating status of so many 'fronts' in the world today, and to explore the procedural language of selection, reaction and targeting, while using its elements to subvert their systemic enterprise is perhaps his most noteworthy accomplishment.

Personally, the example of JBS Haldane, offered as a precedent for a strong anti-imperialistic tendency within empire catches my eye, as does the possibility of an egalitarian social-technical order that may survive Nietzschean scrutiny ... where precisely Jack Haldane addresses this however in not marked with a citation.

When I read of Land's resistance to the 'cathedral' of whom we are told that he does not believe they built the internet, I can't help but wonder where does the cause of this stated antagonism arise? Did something happen at Warwick in the early days of the CCRU which made perhaps the most fluent mind in the Anglophone world, in continental philosophy , militantly resist Hegelian sublation, systems theory, and even the study of narrative form, without speaking of religiously or congregationally informed lineages in philosophical thought? The early writings of the CCRU do call to me here. And I can't help but wonder, suspectfully - that there may, there might be a congruence in why JBS Haldane, Nick Land, and the character from the refugee Polish novelist - Kurtz, chose to leave England, and not come back. In another thought, perhaps my own, incomplete reading of 'Fanged Noumena' shines through here - particularly the 'Critique of Transcendental Miserableism', whose title however, I confess does sound like a daddy-becoming of the professor. However, I do see that in its project, and in my eyes this continues to be so, Land's writings continue to offer more promise than any study of ressentiment directed against the power of the 'Cathedral'.

Chennai, 28.08.2021