To the point that if human beings have a destiny, it is rather to escape the face, to dismantle the face and facializations, to become imperceptible, to become clandestine, not by returning to animality, nor even by returning to the head, but by quite spiritual and special becomings-animal, by strange true becomings that get past the wall and get out of the black holes, that makefaciality traits themselves finally elude the organization of the face—freckles dashing toward the horizon, hair carried off by the wind, eyes you traverse instead of seeing yourself in or gazing into in those glum face-to-face encounters between signifying subjectivities. ”I no longer look into the eyes of the woman I hold in my arms but I swim through, head and arms and legs, and I see that behind the sockets of the eyes there is a region unexplored, the world of futurity, and here there is no logic whatsoever… . I have broken the wall…. My eyes are useless, for they render back only the image of the known. My whole body must become a constant beam of light, moving with an ever greater rapidity, never arrested, never looking back, never dwindling…. Therefore I close my ears, my eyes, my mouth.” BwO.
(Deleuze & Guattari and Henry Miller in “A thousand plateaus”)
Nick Land’s writings inhabit a disordered anarchitecture, a space traversed by rat and wolf-vectors, conjuring a schizophrenic metaphysics. Advanced technologies invoke ancient entities; the human voice disintegrates into the howl of cosmic trauma; civilization hurtles towards an artificial death. Sinister musical subcultures are allied with morbid cults, rouge AIs are pursued into labyrinthine crypts by Turing cops, and Europe mushrooms into a paranoia laboratory in a global cyberpositive circuit that reaches infinite density in the year 2012, flipping modernity over into whatever has been piloting it from the far side of the approaching singularity.
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Land concludes that nothing in stratoanalysis prohibits the pursuit of desire beyond a point incompatible with the imperatives of self-maintenance: DNA, species, civilizations, galaxies: all temporary obstacles are dispensable coagulants inhibiting death’s unwinding.
(Robin Mackay and Ray Brassier in the editor’s introduction to “Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007”)
“Spittle… through its inconsistency, its indefinite contours, the relative imprecision of its colour, and its humidity, the very symbol of the formless, of the unverifiable, of the nonheirarchized. It is the limp and sticky stumbling block shattering more efficiently than any stone all…
The frightening, inarticulate tone that Nietzsche heard behind his back hums in the ears themselves. What does not speak as people speak would be called (if it could have a name) “Nietzsche.” The autobiography demonstrates this for Nietzsche’s own beginning: “At an absurdly early age, at seven, I…
The road to continental science fiction leads through a Lovecraftian reading of phenomenology. This remark is not meant as a prank. Just as Lovecraft turns prosaic New England towns into the battleground of extradimensional fiends, Husserl’s phenomenology converts simple chairs and mailboxes into elusive units that emit partial, contorted surfaces. In both authors, the broken link between objects and their manifest crust hints at ‘such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age’ — or preferably, revive a metaphysical speculation that embraces the permanent strangeness of objects. If philosophy is weird realism, then a philosophy should be judged by what it can tell us about Lovecraft. In symbolic terms, Great Cthulhu should replace Minerva as the patron spirit of philosophers, and the Miskatonic must dwarf the Rhine and the Ister as our river of choice.
(Graham Harman - On the Horror of Phenomenology: Lovecraft and Husserl)
That is: how to make thought without a body possible. A thought that continues to exist after the death of the human body. This is the price to be paid if the explosion is to be conceivable, if the death of the sun is to be like other deaths we know about. Thought without a body is the prerequisite for thinking of the death of all bodies, solar or terrestrial, and of the death of thoughts that are inseparable from those bodies. But ‘without a body’ in this exact sense: without the complex living terrestrial organism known as the human body. Not without hardware, obviously.
(Lyotard - Can Thought go on without a Body?)
Wiener is one of the great modernists, defining cybernetics as the science of communication and control; a tool for human dominion over nature and history, a defence against the cyberpathology of markets. His propaganda against positive feedback - quantizing it as amplification within an invariable metric - has been highly influential, establishing a cybernetics of stability fortified against the future. There is no space in such a theory for anything truly cyberpositive, subtle or intelligent beyond the objectivity required for human comprehension. Nevertheless, beyond the event horizon of human science, even the investigation of self-stabilizing or cybernegative objects is inevitably enveloped by exploratory or cyberpositive processes.
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Viruses are tangible transmission, although you only know about them when they communicate with you: messages from Global Viro-Control. Viruses reprogram organisms, including bacteria, and even if schizophrenia is not yet virally programmed it will be in the future. Viral financing automatisms escaped the 19th century critique of political economy, just as viral infections escaped 19th century germ theory. They slip through nets at the cellular scale, passing through the biosecurity membranes.
The linear command pathway from DNA to RNA is the fundamental tenet of security genetics. The genotype copies God by initiating a causal process without feedback. But this is merely a superstition, subverted by retroviruses. Viral reverse transcription closes the circuit, coding DNA with RNA, switching the cybernetics to positive.
Tim Scully compares LSD to a virus. Incapable of autonomous replication, it must reprogram the human nervous system in order to propagate itself. Hofmann discovers LSD whilst working on a number of ergot derived chemicals, and writes of a ‘peculiar presentiment’ that guides him back to number 25: delta Iysergic acid diethylamide. In the control of this alien programming he synthesized it with tartaric acid and consumed a dose of 250 micrograms. His first interpretation of the onset of LSD was to think he was being attacked by a cold virus.
Well, first of all one has autocatalytic chemical systems that are subject to code control by RNA. When RNA begins to complicate enough to start exhibiting various kinds of lateral interference and experimental deviations, it becomes overcoded by DNA. The absolute crucial event in the whole history of the planet is the point at which the earth’s bacterial life system – which is very loosely code controlled, comparatively – is subjected to exterminatory gassing by oxygen-emitting, massively highly structured securo-maniac metazoan organisms. Many of the bacteria disappear except insofar as they are captured as productive subcomponents of highly organised, nucleated, concentrational systems which are now what dominate all life on the planet and have done for five hundred million years.
“The ultimate speed limit is not a limit at all for Nick, it’s death, it’s cosmic schizophrenia.”
(Ray Brassier on Nick Land and accelerationism)
Yet thanatropic mimicry is the symptom of a non-conceptual negativity which is already at work among objects independently of their relation to subjectivity; a non-dialectical negativity which is not only independent of mind but realizes the indistinction of identity and non-identity outside the concept.
