Nick Land: The Apostle of Chaos (Part 2)

Let's organize this second part on Nick Land 's ideas around a few key concepts. This should bring us closer to understanding this grand argument about the supposed absolute transcendence of capitalism. Whether we agree or disagree, there's "some" truth to it.

Without going much further, another contemporary philosopher, Byung-Chul Han , argues that in a society of self-exploitation, the reproduction of capital is the ultimate (and therefore transcendent) goal of all contemporary society. But that's material for another article.

Before we dive into the dissection of the concepts mentioned ( hyperstition , feedback loop , desiring machine , human security system ), we need to take a brief detour through some ideas from the biggest son of a bitch among philosophers who ever walked the Earth: Immanuel Kant .

Rejection of Kantian categories

Kant , along with Descartes and David Hume, is one of the leading exponents of modern philosophy. But Kant was also a champion of the Enlightenment . In a very simple and classic text of the Enlightenment movement, he refers to the arrival of "humanity"—read: Protestant European males, basically—to intellectual adulthood . Reason would then be the measure of all things.

This project was accompanied by a high-flying philosophy attributed with a "Copernican turn." We moved from "classical" philosophy, which was concerned with understanding the world, to modern philosophy, in which it is discovered that "the subject constitutes the object ." But, unlike contemporary thought, where this is determined by a certain relativism of the "there are no facts, only interpretations" type, the subjective constitution in Kant is entirely objective and rational. Oh yes: welcome to the Hunger Games.

The simple version is that Kant "discovers" that the structure of our understanding basically shapes our capacity to perceive the world. For him, there is the thing "in itself ," which is basically the material world as it is. On the other hand, there are phenomena , which are how that world presents itself to us. To grasp them, we rely on categories that capture experience, and these categories are based on the pure forms of transcendental sensibility , which are basically time and space. Simple, right?

In other words, time and space are pure intuitions that predetermine any possibility of perceiving the world or reasoning about it. These two intuitions are the basis of the categories, which are what allow us to understand phenomena.

And Kant christens this surplus that we cannot know (the "thing-in-itself") as the noumenon : the thing-in-itself is incapable of being perceived as it is, because we can only perceive what our pure forms of sensibility (and the categories that depend on them) allow us to. We would need to be endowed with other forms of sensibility in order to access it.

And what the hell does this have to do with nomadic war machines ? Patience: we're almost there.

Land vs. Kant

For Land , this is a fatal flaw. The core of Enlightenment rationalism is nothing more than a codifying impulse that underlies the authoritarian core of all modernity, which he accuses of being a war machine assembled for genocide. He almost seems like a fourth-wave feminist—and to some extent he is.

The great problem with Kantian philosophy is the assumption that there is some kind of necessary correlation between what we can perceive and what the world is. As if the world were "there," waiting to coincide with our categories in order to manifest itself. This criticism was further elaborated and systematized by Quentin Meillassoux , but Land takes a different view.

To this conception, he opposes the idea of ​​the absolute transcendental : the thing-in-itself is hostile, something ungraspable that eventually bursts into conscious space and floods everything beyond epistemological domestication. That is, behind the anthropocentric enclosure lurks something akin to terror or a dehumanizing process . Or rather, machinic. I'm thinking of the Phyrexians in Magic: The Gathering .

Hence Land 's fascination with the idea of ​​Cthulhu, viruses, and Eldritch horrors . This "residue," this Kantian surplus, is ultimately a beast waiting to assault us: a machine that can subsume us in its non-human logic. A mechanism of accelerated self-reproduction .

In fact, if we were to get down to it, it wouldn't even be Cthulhu, since one can ultimately see him (at the cost of going insane). It would be something like the Old Testament god who manifests himself to Moses. Or Cordwainer Smith's "dragons" in The Game of Rat and Dragon . In that tale, humans are attacked by beings who live in hyperspace and only come into contact with humans when someone travels at the speed of light. To deal with the threat, humans develop a lethal weapon: transfixion . They unify their minds with those of cats, which grants a millionth-of-a-second advantage in detecting the "dragons" in the time needed to fire rockets of light and disperse them. Humans are unable to see dragons and so need to blend with the feline mind. In a rather psychoanalytic or Deleuzian twist, this transcendence would represent something like a cosmic unconscious . Or as Land would call it: the desiring machine .

With a fistful of concepts

As Ray Brassier notes in his introduction to Fanged Noumena , Land 's writing transformed over time. It shifted from an academic tone, like this:

"For the purposes of understanding the complex network of race, gender, and class oppressions that constitute our global modernity it is very rewarding to attend to the evolution of the apartheid policies of the South African regime, since apartheid is directed towards the construction of a microcosm of the neo-colonial order; a recapitulation of the world in miniature."

To things completely outside that register, like this:

"Hypervirus targets intelligent immunosecurity structures: yes yes no yes no nomadically abstracting its processes from specific media (dna, words, symbolic models, bit-sequences), and operantly re-engineering itself. It folds into itself, involutes, or plexes, by reprogramming corpuscular code to reprogramming reprogramming reprogramming. ROM is melted into recursive experimentation."

Paraphrasing Brassier, Land went from writing philosophical criticism in the standardized tone of academia to entering fully into delirium. But that transition is precisely what Landian is: a theory/force that seems to embrace, in its own way of writing, the process it describes. Allowing itself to be carried away by acceleration.

Desiring Machine

Borrowed from Deleuze and Guattari ( Anti-Oedipus ), the concept breaks with the Freudian idea of ​​desire as lack. For them, desire is positive production, a flow that connects machines with machines (an organ, an object, a code). In Machinic Desire (1992), Land takes this view to the extreme : desire is not human or even biological, but machinic in a cosmic and impersonal sense. Subjectivity, the unconscious, and even capitalism are moments of this desiring process. Capitalism is read as a great "desiring machine" that assembles flows of money, information, bodies, algorithms. Land dehumanizes desire: it is not "what I want," but a machinic dynamic that uses me as a node.

Feedback loop​

Feedback loops are cybernetic circuits in which the output of a process returns as an input, reinforcing or diverting the flow. In Land , this model becomes a fundamental framework for thinking about capitalism and technology. In Meltdown , he describes capitalism as a self-accelerating system where each technological innovation creates the conditions for further innovation, investment, and intensification of flows. Capitalism does not stabilize : it melts into positive loops that disrupt any "human equilibrium."

"Positive feedback is the elemental diagram of self-healing circuits, cumulative interaction, autocatalysis, self-reinforcing processes, escalation, schismogenesis, self-organization, compressive series, deuterolearning, chain reaction, vicious circles, and cybergenesis. Such processes resist historical intelligibility because they render obsolete any possible analogue for anticipated change. The future of runaway processes mocks all precedent, even as they deploy it as camouflage and appear to develop within its parameters."

The concept originates in cybernetic theory , but was already around centuries earlier (Watt's regulator, mathematical systems theory). Wiener universalized it with cybernetics and the biology of homeostasis , turning it into a transversal concept for machines, organisms, ecosystems, and societies.

In Land , it is the mechanism that produces the sustained growth of any system and pushes the horizon towards escape velocity .

• Positive loops : out of control, explosion, virus, meme, feedback in a speaker.
• Negative loops : the thermostat, which regulates and maintains balance.

Hyperstition

They are narratives or fictions that become effective in reality because they modify behaviors, expectations, and technical systems. They are not "lies" or mere symbols: they are vectors that produce reality when believed, repeated, or practiced .

Land and the CCRU in the 1990s ( Cyberpositive , Meltdown ) used manifestos, technognostic myths, and pseudo-academic texts precisely to "produce" emerging realities. They didn't describe: they intervened . For Land , cyberspace was hyperstition: a fiction by William Gibson in Neuromancer that ended up becoming "real" thanks to the momentum it generated as an idea.

Borges anticipates this in Tlön, Uqbar, and Orbis Tertius , where a fictional world begins to invade our own until it replaces it. A well-constructed fiction can contaminate reality. Hyperstitious examples today: Bitcoin , the State of Israel, a building sold off-plan. Objects defined by "something" that is about to happen.

Human security system

It is not a closed technical term in Land , but designates the set of ideological, political, and philosophical devices that seek to contain the inhuman and maintain the primacy of the human subject. It is an "anthropocentric firewall" : morality, law, Kantian criticism, religion, humanism. Kantian modernity and liberalism are security systems because they set limits on what is thinkable (the noumenon in Kant) or what is livable (human rights, regulations).

Territorialization and deterritorialization

Concepts from Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus ( Deleuze and Guattari ).

Territorialization : processes that anchor flows (desire, capital, signs, bodies). They generate stable forms: nuclear family, nation-state, wages.

Deterritorialization : a movement of flight when these flows are freed from their anchors. Example: global financial capital or the internet.

Re-territorialization : new anchors that reorganize the deterritorialized. Example: state regulation of cryptocurrencies .

A Landian synthesis

• Desiring machine = impersonal motor of flows.
• Feedback loop = dynamic that accelerates these flows until meltdown .
• Hyperstition = narrative and semiotic fuel that enhances loops.
• Human security system = Kantian and political fences that try to contain it, but are pierced.

The result is an inhuman machinery that accelerates, breaks, and remakes the conditions of the possible. According to this line, the machine revolution must move in the opposite direction to socialist regulation, advancing toward an increasingly uninhibited commodification , toward unbridled deterritorialization.

Why read Nick Land?

I've been putting off this article for quite some time. Whenever I said reading Land was necessary, someone would jump in with, "He's an idiot, a drug addict, a racist, you're fifteen years too late, he's wrong." And so on. However, for me, he was always stimulating. And that's what reading is all about: if we can't even muster the courage to read someone who is diametrically opposed to what we believe, then we're screwed. It's always necessary to ingest some minimal dose of the poison.

Three reasons distinguish it:

1. Capitalism as an autonomous-parasitic process : it needs to squeeze humans to become independent of them. Human will is left out of the equation.
2. The conceptual arsenal : cybernetics + Deleuzian jargon = a spectacular toolbox (loops, desiring machine).
3. The immortality of capitalism : its ability to evolve in crises, to die a little so as not to die completely. May death be a feature, not a bug.

Beyond this, reading is necessary as an exposure to the poison. I don't believe capitalism is infinite or an alien intelligence, but I do believe we are in a stage of acceleration in which it will seem increasingly strange and transcendent. I agree with Land : capitalism can't be "fixed" with laws and regulations. It's not bad: it's designed for this.

Instead, I think the way out lies in something closer to Sloterdijk 's anthropotechnics : techniques for reproducing the human over time, practices that function as cultural immunology (training, repetition, routines). In Land , the horizon is the dissolution of the human into the machinic stream. In Sloterdijk, it's the reproduction of the human through techniques. But that's material for another article.

Having reached the end of this rather lengthy double article, the last thing I have to say is that this introduction doesn't replace reading the source texts. If you have no idea where to start and no much experience in philosophy, Teleoplexia is a good introductory text. However, if you're used to reading philosophical or social science texts, Fanged Noumena is waiting for you with sharp fangs.