Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987–2007 is a 2011 anthology of writings by English philosopher Nick Land, edited by Maya B. Kronic (formerly Robin Mackay) and Ray Brassier. It was first published by Urbanomic—founded by Kronic prior—with Sequence Press and later republished by the MIT Press.
The anthology collects essays and texts, initially published and previously unpublished, spanning various philosophical and aesthetic interests—as well as unorthodox writing styles that have been dubbed "theory-fictions"—explored and utilized by Land over the titular time period. The book has obtained a cult following and has subsequently been credited with influencing the rise in popularity of accelerationism.
Summary
As an anthology primarily aiming to cohere Nick Land's conjunctional reinterpretation of continental philosophy and modernist poetry in the 1990s—what British writer Kodwo Eshun described as a dramatization of "theory as a geopolitico-historical epic"—and his subsequent "theory-fictions" which explored cyberpunk media, Gothic themes and esoteric systems while utilizing unorthodox and disordered experimental writing styles, Fanged Noumena consists of essays and prose texts written by Land during multiple periods, compiled by Michael Carr, Mark Fisher, David Rylance and Reza Negarestani, with their sequence being edited by Kronic and Brassier.
The sequence begins during his time as a lecturer for the Department of Philosophy of the University of Warwick, England from 1987 until his resignation from his academic post in 1998, progressing onto his contributions to the mythopoeia of "hyperstitions" of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) as it was maintained within the university, and concluding with blog posts written between 2004 and 2007 in his residency in Shanghai, China.
The progression displayed in Land's work, according to Kronic and Brassier, is essential to the presentation of the book as a response to "an incapacity to believe that Land actually meant what he said—[his] writing was indeed nothing but a machine for intensification", and that rhetorically, "if this volume infects a new generation, already enlivened by a new wave of thinkers who are partly engaging the re-emerging legacy of Nick Land's work—it will have fulfilled its purpose."
Kronic and Brassier noted that the emergence of accelerationism in Land's work is marked by the idea that philosophically, "it is no longer a matter of 'thinking about', but rather of observing an effective, alien intelligence in the process of making itself real, [and is] a matter of participating in such a way as to continually intensify and accelerate this process." In a lecture for a conference on accelerationism given in 2010, Brassier referred to Land's philosophical project as "mad black Deleuzianism", referencing a criticism given by French philosopher Vincent Descombes of the work of Deleuze and Guattari and Jean-François Lyotard as "mad black Hegelianism".
The term denotes the anti-vitalism of Land's reinterpretation of Deleuze's philosophy, distinguished by its "unsavory" orientation towards the paradox of "will[ing] the impossibility of willing" and an active materialist interest ("no longer a pretext for critique but a vector of exploration") in, according to Kronic and Brassier, "the impersonal and anonymous chaos of absolute time".
These themes are consistent in the writings featured in Fanged Noumena, with a turn in the 1990s towards "the 'inconceivable alienations' outputted by the monstrous machine-organism built by capital" according to Kronic and Armen Avanessian, and a further turn into the 2000s towards "ever more abstract planes of an alien Outside's absolute deterritorialisation of reason and sense", according to Vincent Le.
Late 1980s—early 1990s The sequence of Fanged Noumena begins with "Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest: A Polemical Introduction to the Configuration of Philosophy and Modernity", initially published for Third Text in 1988. Land has since retroactively dismissed the essay for its inaccuracies. "Narcissism and Dispersion in Heidegger's 1953 Trakl Interpretation", initially published in 1990, analyzes what Land identifies as Heidegger's suppression of the effectivity of the Dionysian tropes in Trakl's poetry, which Kronic and Brassier identified as Land's "mounting impatience" with Heideggerian philosophy, leading to a resolution of the "exit problem" where "the manner in which the (failed) insurrectionary attempts at 'escape' made by artists each open up the prospect of [a] heterogeneous space that subverts order"
This concept is explored further in the subsequent literary criticism essays "Art as Insurrection: the Question of Aesthetics in Kant, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche", "Spirit and Teeth" and "Shamanic Nietzsche", which were published prior to and following the 1992 publication of The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism (An Essay in Atheistic Religion), Land's student thesis for the University of Warwick.
Prior to these, "Delighted to Death" extends from his research conducted for The Thirst for Annihilation, identifying regulatory and repressive principles of Christian morality in Kant's ethical system, and elements of martyrdom in the experience of the sublime. On the contrary, Land also focuses on the history of the concept of genius as an "a contingent, impersonal creative force" according to Kronic and Brassier, a theme which reappears in the aforementioned essays. McKenzie Wark characterizes this essay as focusing on the appearance of "a priori forms as constants for novel experiences" in Land's topics. The 1993 essay "After the Law" also extends from Land's then-present philosophical research, analyzing the Apology of Socrates and Bataille's political anti-philosophy to focus on exceptions to the moral law that similarly creatively escape judgment.
"Making it with Death: Remarks on Thanatos and Desiring-Production" marks Land's first thorough engagement with the theory of Deleuze and Guattari, including the formative proto-accelerationist speculations made in Anti-Oedipus and especially their practice of schizoanalysis (also referred to by Land as "stratoanalysis"), while also further developing a philosophical history of Deleuzian difference and the body without organs that had previously been articulated in the conclusion of "Art as Insurrection"; Kronic and Brassier summarized this development as Land's assertion—rejecting Deleuze and Guattari's disavowal of Freudian drive theory—that "all temporary [existential] obstacles are dispensable coagulants inhibiting death's unwinding." Land also referred to this philosophical interest during this period as "libidinal materialism".
Responding to the assertions made in the essay, Brassier theorized that while if "schizoanalytical practice is fuelled by the need to always intensify and deterritorialize, there comes a point at which there is no agency left: you yourself have been dissolved back into the process", the difficulties appearing in Land's initial approach could be amended by further deviations by future subjects. Kronic and Avanessian described the 1992 essay "Circuitries"—which incorporates abstract and impersonal prose—as observing "a darkness" descending "over the festive atmosphere of desiring-production envisaged by" post-structuralists associated with accelerationism; whereas these prior thinkers envisioned "the transfer of all motive force from human subjects to capital as the inauguration of an aleatory drift", Land hails accelerationism as instead "gleefully explor[ing] what is escaping from human civilization", with emphasis on the deregulation of "runaway" processes.
The essay links the concepts present in the influence of Antonin Artaud's experimental writing on Deleuze and Guattari, especially with regards to the body without organs and Artaud's "antihumanism", to the principles of cybernetic science and thermodynamics. "Machinic Desire", initially published in 1993, continues this interest while displaying "popular investment in dystopian cyberpunk SF, including William Gibson's Neuromancer trilogy and the Terminator, Predator and Bladerunner movies"; Land began, from this essay onward, to redefine cyberpunk as a "textual machine for affecting reality by intensifying the anticipation of its future", incorporating its dynamic concepts of posthuman progress into his re-envisioning of philosophy.
Land uses four feminine figures, which he sees as agents for accelerating the transcendental critique of both anthropocentrism and phallocentrism: the slave turned lesbian; the sister; the sexborg; and the Sphinx. cite journal |last=Smith |first=Claire |year=2016 |title=“Slave, Sister, Sexborg, Sphinx: Feminine Figurations in Nick Land’s Philosophy” |journal=Hypatia |volume=31 |issue=2 |pages=329–347 |doi=10.1111/hypa.12226 |url=https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/hypatia/article/abs/slave-sister-sexborg-sphinx-feminine-figurations-in-nick-lands-philosophy/F6A12A29EFEBEF9A6735331E4022B9EE
Mid-1990s "CyberGothic" is the first published text by Land to extensively use multiple contemporary cultural reference points that would become fixtures in his work, including postmodern literature and its authors' concepts, especially Gibson's 1984 cyberpunk novel Neuromancer and the concept of cyberspace, as well as digital financial speculation, emerging forms of complex electronic dance music such as jungle music and drum and bass, and cyberdelic hacker culture. Alongside a reinterpretation of Neuromancer and its concept of cyberspace as "K-space"—an amoral model of immanent existential interactions "that melds gleaming abstraction[s] to eldritch portent[s]"—in relation to the Deleuzian body without organs, Land proposes a "cybergothic" model of a philosophy of death that Kronic and Brassier noted resulted from Land finding parallels between his own preceding developments and Gibson's novel, culminating in his philosophical identification of the novel's character Wintermute as "a new type of intelligence: aggressively exploratory, incommensurable with human subjectivity and untethered from social reproduction."
"K-space" was the first concept of Land's to use the "K-" prefix, a shorthand for "cyber(netic)", with his concept of "K-war" guiding his later abstract prose texts; Kronic and Brassier clarified that this shift in Land's focus expresses that "the insurrectionary basis of revolution now lies at the virtual terminus of capital—the future as transcendental unconscious, its 'return' inhibited by the repressed [alternate] circuits of temporality", concerned more with intensity and spontaneous intensive spaces than with ideal orders, at a point of "increasingly autonomous technics' pursuit of their own self-replication without any interest in serving human use-value" according to Le.
The dialogue "Cyberrevolution", initially published in the first issue of Kronic's journal ***Collapse, features a scenario where figures speaking on a fictional dystopian news broadcast attempt to understand the cause of mass riots in multiple continents, before escalating into a passionate argument over the relevance of critical theory to the situation. It serves as a hyperstitional explanation of the failure for acceleration to be commonly understood. Meanwhile, the abstract prose texts "Hypervirus" and "No Future" utilize themes of virality and depersonalization alongside Land's interest in runaway processes to create the effect of what Kronic and Brassier described as "full-blown delirium".