I've been reading a lot of Nick Land recently and I know he's something of a controversy because he's been recruited by the alt-right (or his ideas have) since his 'ousting' from academia. But to be honest this is on brand for him.
If you don't know Land was a contemporary of Mark Fisher, the Capitalist Realism guy, and if Land didn't invent accelerationism then he definitely mainstreamed it (or took it as mainstream as you can when you're a fringe-cultural-theorist-cum-contemporary-philosopher). By accelerationism I mean the idea that the only way to transcend capitalism is to unleash all of it's self-destructive potential by leaning radically into it's fundamentally suicidal tenets, deliberately exacerbating it's more incendiary systematising to trigger a cataclysm; from the ashes of which a surviving remainder (cyberpunks and occultists?) can create a new world.
I first discovered the guy when I picked up a pretty-looking book at the library, recently published; a collection of the anonymous writings of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, which Wikipedia will tell you existed as a cultural theorist collective at Warwick University in England from 1995 to 1997. Land's involvement in the CCRU was minimal, the Unit being more of an online forum for critical exploration of his thinking by alumnis and acolytes. What's even more interesting about the CCRU is how it's contributors have remained anonymous, tying in with Land's narrativising of late-stage disaster capitalism as a faceless force of profoundly omniscient/omnipotent and prophetic annihilation. Hyperstition he called it; the collective realisation of apocalyptic 'hunches' proliferated through a rabidly decentralised media, giving material force and self-fulfilling potential to mere superstition through the internet's connective ability to create swarms (plagues?).
Like Land's, the CCRU writings fixate on the eschatological mythologies of H.P. Lovecraft and his subterranean horde of Elder Gods, nightmarish forces which lie dormant in a netherworld but which are slowly waking up. At the time Lovecraft's convention of cosmic horror was a xenophobic expression of his more personal horror at the prospect of immigration in a newly-industrialised (and decentralised) world. This more than anything probably obfuscates Land's work as covertly racist, making possible it's ideological high-jacking by violent conservatives and traditionalists.
More than anything this cleaving to Lovecraftian mythology shows capitalism and it's myriad death-dealing flows as abject, as within Land's work capitalism establishes the conditions by which the Elder Gods (a legion lead by Lovecraft's own demon-god-king Cthulhu) finally awaken and unleash unholy retribution on the cultural hubris of the developed world. Even more interestingly, and further bolstering Land's defensive case, racism and the animosities it invokes within Land's eschatological schematic can be read as symptoms of capitalism's self-annihilating potential, in which case (maybe not so defensibly) he can be seen as (ironically?) querying Charles Manson's purge-like Helter Skelter, in which a race war would cleanse contemporary society of it's performative hypocrisies and in doing so hasten it's own end. Perhaps Charles Manson can be cited as the original accelerationist, and Nick Land merely a doe-eyed follower transplanting Helter Skelter's unwieldy motivations in an academic setting.
What was infuriating for high-browed academia at Land's work was how it dipped into theatricality, posturing itself as conspiracy only to demonstrate the notion of hyperstitiality (prophetic self-fulfilment) that he cited within entropic capitalist systems. His work took theory and reflexively performed the socio-cultural mechanic it alleged to be critiquing/theorising, INSIDE the theorising. The result was a reimagining of theory as much more plastic, fluid, and dare I say fun, than academia has any right to be. Running wildly with an academic register and extending it's possibilities.
By modelling his work as the pseudo-religious writings of a cult, stealing from such academically counterintuitive genres as science-fiction, cosmic horror, and the occult (specifically a cyber-punk Kabbalah), Land presented his idea of capitalist tendencies towards fanciful (apocalyptic/dystopian) world-making by DOING that world-making; so that his critique of capitalism's inherent barbarism retains an extra-dimensional didacticism which more conventionally executed critiques lack.
It's a dismantling of a capitalist-mythic (perhaps a counter argument to Fisher's Capitalist Realism), by generating an equally insidious capitalist-mythic.
But even without Land's dark whimsies, the Cthulhu Club (a fictitious cult which the CCRU monitor through their collected writings) is still operable as a metaphor for the inherent 'boom-and-bust' of capitalist systems. In a century of capitalist experimentation every 30-40 years produces a crisis, as if on a timer. In the 1930's it was the result of real-time production catching up with unbridled financial speculation (which let's be honest is still a fucking blight), in the 1970's it was the collapse of Fordism, and in the late 2000's it was the implosion of willy-nilly lending schemes around sub-prime mortgages.
If anything, Land's schematising of the Elder Gods is as the mythic embodiments of capitalism's tendentious curve towards crisis. So far though, the crises experienced tend to be more Keynesian than Marxist.
To explain; economist Maynard Keynes alluded to capitalism being sustainable with just enough fiscal strong-arms to bring us back from ruin at every systemic depression (which inevitably occurs when growth's winners hoard capital), seeing crisis as almost necessary for re-shuffling social relations and replicating market forces in a sturdier and more egalitarian form. Call it a programmed learning curve towards which the fluctuating unemployment levels of any society is a critical barometer; keep the little hand on green or yellow and we're sweet, let it drop below red and the Elder Gods awaken.
Marx on the other hand denounced the economic necessity of cyclical crises and urged the working masses (whose labour hoarded capital undermines) to exacerbate the potential for radical rupture in each scheduled collapse. In this way, capitalism's systemic crux potentially affords the means towards substitutes and alternatives.
In light of this you could say Karl Marx was the very first accelerationist, though cultural Marxists prefer a more bespoke version with community gardens and genderless divisions of immediately productive labour. It makes you wonder; has anyone even read Marx?
I feel like Nick Land actually has; what's more, he presents a radical Marxist playbook which looks a lot like psychopathic scheming against the corporatised state by full-immersion in (satanic) capitalist flows.
Sounds fun.
No comments:
Post a Comment