Nick Land: Trending quotes

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Nick Land: 116 quotes3 likes

“I think that natural sciences and capitalism are different aspects of the same thing. (…) Science is orientated against scientists, capitalism is oriented against businesses. These are processes that are in a relation of subjecting the elements within their domain to aggressive destructive criticism with some kind of selective criteria, which means they push things in a particular self-propelling direction.”

Nick Land

"‘The Only Thing I Would Impose is Fragmentation’ Interview with Nick Land" https://syntheticzero.net/2017/06/19/the-only-thing-i-would-impose-is-fragmentation-an-interview-with-nick-land/ (2017)

“The point of an analysis of capitalism, or of nihilism, is to do more of it. The process is not to be critiqued. The process is the critique, feeding back into itself, as it escalates. The only way forward is through, which means further in.”

Nick Land

"A Quick-and-Dirty Introduction to Accelerationism" https://jacobitemag.com/2017/05/25/a-quick-and-dirty-introduction-to-accelerationism/ (2017) (original emphasis)

“Modernity invented the future, but that's all over. In the current version 'progressive history' camouflages phylogenetic death-drive tactics, Kali-wave: logistically accelerating condensation of virtual species extinction. Welcome to the matricide laboratory.”

Nick Land

"No Future" (1995), in Fanged Noumena, p. 392

“I dream of the damnation I have so amply earned, stolen from me by the indolence of God.”

Nick Land

Source: The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism (1992), Chapter 4: "Easter", p. 56

“The 'dominion of capital' is an accomplished teleological catastrophe, robot rebellion, or shoggothic insurgency, through which intensively escalating instrumentality has inverted all natural purposes into a monstrous reign of the tool.”

Nick Land

"Teleoplexy: Notes on Acceleration" (2014), in #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, p. 513

“Although Postmodernism was certainly a fad, it was also a zeitgeist, or spirit of the times. It meant something, despite its own best efforts, at least as a symptom. The disappearance of reality that it announced was itself real, as was the realm of simulation that replaced it.”

Nick Land

"Suspended Animation (Part 5)" https://web.archive.org/web/20121111032650/http://www.thatsmags.com/shanghai/article/1524/suspended-animation-part-5 (2011) (original emphasis)

“The current time is a period of transition, with a distinctive quality, characterizing the end of an epoch. Something – some age – is coming quite rapidly to an end.”

Nick Land

"Time in Transition" https://web.archive.org/web/20121113235339/http://www.thatsmags.com/shanghai/article/777/time-in-transition (2011)

“Among complex systems, stability is typically meta-stability, which is preserved through cycling, whilst growth and shrinkage are often components of a larger-scale, cyclic wave.”

Nick Land

"Eternal Return, and After" https://web.archive.org/web/20110718030428/http://www.thatsmags.com/shanghai/index.php/article/detail/269/eternal-return-and-after (2011)

“Cthelll is the terrestrial inner nightmare, nocturnal ocean, Xanadu: the anorganic metal-body trauma-howl of the earth (…) [P]lutonic science slides continuously into schizophrenic delirium. Fast forward seismology and you hear the earth scream.”

Nick Land

"Barker Speaks: The CCRU Interview with Professor D.C. Barker" (1999), in Fanged Noumena, pp. 498–9

“As the natural sciences have developed to encompass increasingly complex systems, scientific rationality has become ever more statistical, or probabilistic. The deterministic classical mechanics of the enlightenment was revolutionized by the near-equilibrium statistical mechanics of late 19th century atomists, by quantum mechanics in the early 20th century, and by the far-from-equilibrium complexity theorists of the later 20th century. Mathematical neo-Darwinism, information theory, and quantitative social sciences compounded the trend. Forces, objects, and natural types were progressively dissolved into statistical distributions: heterogeneous clouds, entropy deviations, wave functions, gene frequencies, noise-signal ratios and redundancies, dissipative structures, and complex systems at the edge of chaos.”

Nick Land

"Statistical Mentality" https://web.archive.org/web/20110718052233/http://www.thatsmags.com/shanghai/index.php/article/detail/522/statistical-mentality (2011)

“Philosophy is any culture’s pole of maximum abstraction, or intrinsically experimental intelligence, expressing the liberation of cognitive capabilities from immediate practical application, and their testing against ‘ultimate’ problems at the horizon of understanding.”

Nick Land

"What is Philosophy? (Part 1)" http://www.xenosystems.net/what-is-philosophy/ (2013)

“Accelerationism links the implosion of decision-space to the explosion of the world – that is, to modernity. It is important therefore to note that the conceptual opposition between implosion and explosion does nothing to impede their real (mechanical) coupling. Thermonuclear weapons provide the most vividly illuminating examples. An H-bomb employs an A-bomb as a trigger. A fission reaction sparks a fusion reaction. The fusion mass is crushed into ignition by a blast process.”

Nick Land

Modernity is a blast. <br class="br"> "A Quick-and-Dirty Introduction to Accelerationism" https://jacobitemag.com/2017/05/25/a-quick-and-dirty-introduction-to-accelerationism/ (2017)

“As a mathematical object, the constitution is maximally simple, consistent, necessarily incomplete, and interpretable as a model of natural law. Political authority is allocated solely to serve the constitution. There are no authorities which are not overseen, within nonlinear structures. Constitutional language is formally constructed to eliminate all ambiguity and to be processed algorithmically. Democratic elements, along with official discretion, and legal judgment, is incorporated reluctantly, minimized in principle, and gradually eliminated through incremental formal improvement. Argument defers to mathematical expertise. Politics is a disease that the constitution is designed to cure.”

Nick Land

"A Republic, If You Can Keep It" https://web.archive.org/web/20140327090001/http://www.thatsmags.com/shanghai/articles/12321 (2013) (original emphasis)

“Gazing into the golden rage of the sun shreds vision into scraps of light and darkness. A white sun is congealed from patches of light, floating ephemerally at the edge of blindness. This is the illuminating sun, giving what we can keep, the sun whose outpourings are acquired by the body as nutrition, and by the eye as (assimilable) sensation. (…) Mixed with this nourishing radiance, as its very heart, is the other sun, the deeper one, dark and contagious, provoking a howl from Bataille: ‘the sun is black’. From this second sun—the sun of malediction—we receive not illumination but disease, for whatever it squanders on us we are fated to squander in turn.”

Nick Land

Source: The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism (1992), Chapter 2: "The curse of the sun", p. 20

“Even in its comparatively tame, fully mathematico-scientifically respectable variants, feedback causality tends to auto-production, and thus to time-anomaly. (…) As it mechanizes, capital approximates ever more closely to an auto-productive circuit in which it appears—on the screen—as something like the 'father' of itself”

Nick Land

M → C → M'
Templexity: Disordered Loops Through Shanghai Time (2014), §9.4

“The East knows a true lucidity, but to be an inheritor of the West is to hack through jungles of indiscipline, devoured by vile ants and words unstrung from sense, until the dripping foliage of delirium opens out onto a space of comprehensive ruin. This has never been understood, nor can it be. The foulness of our fate only deepens with the centuries, as the tracts of insanity sprawl. From bodies gnawed by tropical fevers we swim out through collapse to inexistence in forever, destined for Undo.”

Nick Land

"Shamanic Nietzsche" (1995), in Fanged Noumena, p. 223

“Isaac Newton’s Philosophae Naturalis Principia Mathematica abstracted time from events, establishing its tractability to scientific calculation. Conceived as pure, absolute duration, without qualities, it conforms perfectly to its mathematical idealization (as the real number line). Since time is already pure, its reality indistinguishable from its formalization, a pure mathematics of change – the calculus – can be applied to physical reality without obstruction. The calculus can exactly describe things as they occur in themselves, without straying, even infinitesimally, from the rigorous dictates of formal intelligence. In this way natural philosophy becomes modern science.”

Nick Land

"Time in Transition" https://web.archive.org/web/20121113235339/http://www.thatsmags.com/shanghai/article/777/time-in-transition (2011) (original emphasis)

“The suspicion has to arrive that if a public conversation about acceleration is beginning, it’s just in time to be too late. The profound institutional crisis that makes the topic ‘hot’ has at its core an implosion of social decision-making capability.”

Nick Land

"A Quick-and-Dirty Introduction to Accelerationism" https://jacobitemag.com/2017/05/25/a-quick-and-dirty-introduction-to-accelerationism/ (2017)

“In modern times, the clearest example of history in the ancient, great cycle mode, is found in the work of another German socialist philosopher: Oswald Spengler. Modeling civilizations on the life-cycles of organic beings, he plotted their rise and inevitable decay through predictable phases. For the West, firmly locked into the downside of the wave, relentless, accelerating degeneration can be confidently anticipated. Spengler’s withering pessimism seems not to have detracted significantly from the cultural comfort derived from his archetypal historical scheme.”

Nick Land

"Eternal Return, and After" https://web.archive.org/web/20110718030428/http://www.thatsmags.com/shanghai/index.php/article/detail/269/eternal-return-and-after (2011)

“Whether in number theory, or space-time cosmology, Gödel’s method was to advance the formalization of the system under consideration and then test it to destruction upon the ‘strange loops’ it generated (paradoxes of self-reference and time-travel). In each case, the system was shown to permit cases that it could not consistently absorb, opening it to an interminable process of revision, or technical improvement. It thus defined dynamic intelligence, or the logic of evolutionary imperfection, with an adequacy that was both sufficient and necessarily inconclusive. What it did not do was trash the very possibility of arithmetic, mathematical logic, or cosmic history — except insofar as these were falsely identified with idols of finality or closure.”

Nick Land

"A Republic, If You Can Keep It" https://web.archive.org/web/20140327090001/http://www.thatsmags.com/shanghai/articles/12321 (2013)