Nick Land (born 17 January 1962) is an English philosopher who has been described as "the Godfather of accelerationism".[2] His work has been tied to the development of speculative realism,[3][4] and departs from the formal conventions of academic writing, incorporating unorthodox and esoteric influences.[5] Much of his writing was anthologized in the 2011 collection Fanged Noumena.
Land resigned from Warwick in 1998. Following a period of amphetamine abuse, he suffered a breakdown in the early 2000s and subsequently moved to Asia.[10] After several years, he remerged as a figure on the political right, becoming a founding thinker in the neo-reactionary movement known as the Dark Enlightenment. His related writing has explored anti-egalitarian and anti-democratic ideas.
Biography
Land obtained a PhD in 1987 in the University of Essex under David Farrell Krell, with a thesis on Heidegger's 1953 essay Die Sprache im Gedicht, which is about Georg Trakl's work.[11] He began as a lecturer in Continental philosophy at the University of Warwick from 1987 until his resignation in 1998.[5] In 1992, he published The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism.[12] Land published an abundance of shorter texts, many in the 1990s during his time with the CCRU.[6] The majority of these articles were compiled in the retrospective collection Fanged Noumena, published in 2011.
At Warwick, Land and Sadie Plant co-founded the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU), an interdisciplinary research group described by philosopher Graham Harman as "a diverse group of thinkers who experimented in conceptual production by welding together a wide variety of sources: futurism, technoscience, philosophy, mysticism, numerology, complexity theory, and science fiction, among others".[13] During his time at Warwick, Land participated in Virtual Futures, a series of cyber-culture conferences. Virtual Futures 96 was advertised as "an anti-disciplinary event" and "a conference in the post-humanities". One session involved Nick Land "lying on the ground, croaking into a mic", recalls Robin Mackay, while Mackay played jungle records in the background."[14] He was also the thesis advisor of some PhD students.[15] Following his resignation, the CCRU continued meeting under his leadership. In the early 2000s, Land suffered a breakdown after a period of "fanatical" amphetamine abuse.[16]
Land taught at the New Centre for Research & Practice until March 2017, when the Centre ended its relationship with him "following several tweets by Land this year in which he espoused intolerant opinions about Muslims and immigrants".[17]
Land's work with CCRU, as well as his pre-Dark Enlightenment writings, have all been influential to the political philosophy of accelerationism, an idea resembling that of the "fatal strategy" of "ecstasy" in the earlier work of Jean Baudrillard, where "a system is abolished only by pushing it into hyperlogic, by forcing it into an excessive practice which is equivalent to a brutal amortization." Along with the other members of CCRU, Land wove together ideas from the occult, cybernetics, science fiction, and poststructuralist philosophy to try to describe the phenomena of techno-capitalist acceleration.
Land coined the term "hyperstition", a portmanteau of "superstition" and "hyper", to describe something which "is equipoised between fiction and technology".[19] According to Land, hyperstitions are ideas that, by their very existence as ideas, bring about their own reality.[9]
Later work
Land's Dark Enlightenment philosophy (also known as neo-reactionary movement and abbreviated NRx) opposes egalitarianism. According to reporter Dylan Matthews, Land believes democracy restricts accountability and freedom.[20] Shuja Haider notes, "His sequence of essays setting out its principles have become the foundation of the NRx canon."[19]
His writing has variously discussed themes of scientific racism and eugenics, or what he briefly called "hyper-racism".[21][22][23][24] Land's current version of accelerationism incorporates explicitly racist views; since late 2016, he has increasingly been recognised as an inspiration for the alt-right.[25]
Land disputes that the NRx is a movement, and defines the alt-right as distinct from the NRx.[26]
Reception and influence
Mark Fisher, a British cultural theorist and student of Land's, argued in 2011 that Land's greatest impact so far had been on music and art, rather than on philosophy. The musician Kode9, the artist Jake Chapman, and others studied with or describe their influence by Land, often highlighting Land's inhuman, "technilist," or "delirious" qualities. Fisher underscores in particular how Land's personality during the 1990s could catalyze changes in those engaging with his work through what Kodwo Eshun describes as a manner "immediately open, egalitarian, and absolutely unaffected by academic protocol" which could dramatise "theory as a geopolitico-historicalepic."[6]
Nihilist philosopher Ray Brassier, also formerly from the University of Warwick, stated in 2017 that "Nick Land has gone from arguing 'Politics is dead', 20 years ago, to this completely old-fashioned, standard reactionary stuff."[27]
↑ Mackay, Robin; Avanessian, Armen (2014). "Introduction". In Mackay, Robin; Avanessian, Armen (eds.). #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader(PDF). Falmouth: Urbanomic. pp.1–46. ISBN978-0-9575295-5-7. Archived(PDF) from the original on 27 December 2014. Retrieved 2 January 2015.
↑ Burrows, Roger (10 June 2020). "On Neoreaction". The Sociological Review. Archived from the original on 21 December 2020. Retrieved 11 June 2020.
↑ Topinka, Robert (14 October 2019). ""Back to a Past that Was Futuristic": The Alt-Right and the Uncanny Form of Racism". b2o. Archived from the original on 28 October 2019. Retrieved 28 October 2019. Land proposes an acceleration of the "explicitly superior" and already "genetically self-filtering elite" through a system of "assortative mating" that would offer a "class-structured mechanism for population diremption, on a vector toward neo-speciation".
↑ Burrows, Roger (2018). "Urban Futures and The Dark Enlightenment: A Brief Guide for the Perplexed". In Jacobs, Keith; Malpas, Jeff (eds.). Towards a Philosophy of the City: Interdisciplinary and Transcultural Perspectives. London: Rowman & Littlefield.
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