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 Mackay 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 Mackay 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." Mackay 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 Mackay 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 Mackay 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 Mackay 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 Mackay 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"; Mackay 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. Mackay 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.
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 Mackay 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; Mackay 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 Mackay'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 Mackay and Brassier described as "full-blown delirium". Alongside the stylistic influence of Gibson's novels, in these texts, "Land's anti-humanist speculation is combined with an evident enjoyment of wordplay and a renewed appreciation for the anthropological, mythological and psychoanalytical sources of
Capitalism and Schizophrenia", according to Mackay. The unpublished conference paper "Cyberspace
Anarchitecture as Jungle-War" contains these elements in addition to a clearer focus on the cultural relevance of the complexity of jungle music inspired by Kodwo Eshun's concurrent writings and lectures, and the potential for a "K-insurgency". The literary criticism essay "Meat (or How to Kill
Oedipus in Cyberspace)", extending from this concept, uses a comparative speculation made by
William S. Burroughs between the
Kurtz of
Joseph Conrad's 1899 novella
Heart of Darkness and the
Colonel Kurtz of
Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 film quasi-adaptation
Apocalypse Now as a starting point for a reinterpretation of Deleuze and Guattari's use of anthropology. It uses the distinction between the cyberpunk concepts of cyberspace and
meatspace to suggest that as the processes of civilization and globalization continue, uncivilized and primitive social elements reemerge and are absorbed in a process of deterritorialization.
"Meltdown" "Meltdown" was published as the opening essay in the first issue of the CCRU's magazine
Abstract Culture in 1995; Mackay proclaimed that it was an "invocation of apocalyptic planetary
techno-singularity", while she and Brassier summarized the text as making the "claim—both apocalyptic and performative as hype—that the compression-phases of
modernity, beginning the final phase of their acceleration in the sixteenth century with Protestant revolt, oceanic navigation, commoditisation and its attendant (place-value) numeracy, constitute a 'cyberpositive' global circuit of interexcitement". The essay uses multiple reference points to convey an ongoing history of acceleration, including European history,
Don DeLillo's 1985 novel
White Noise,
sociology and
nanotechnology research, and a refracted, strongly terminological writing style. A full-length
music video tape was created for "Meltdown" by London art audiovisual collective Orphan Drift, featuring cyberdelic visuals, an
ambient techno soundtrack and the text being read by processed
Apple MacinTalk text-to-speech voices.
Late 1990s—late 2000s From the point of Land's
de facto leadership of the CCRU onward, he "disintegrated into the number-names of a hyper
pagan pantheon, syncretically drawing on
the occult, nursery rhyme, anthropology, SF and
Lovecraft, among other sources", according to Mackay and Brassier. With the collective, he began to develop the Numogram, a hyperstitional occult system of
demonic interactions and invocations, serving as the model for the process of what the collective identified as "cultural production". In addition to this development, Land began utilizing experimental writing styles and diagrammatic forms of presentation, with his creativity increasingly drawing from his use of stimulants, especially amphetamines. "A zIIgºthIc–==X=cºDA==–(CººkIng–lºbsteRs–wIth–jAke–AnD–DInºs)" is an abstract prose text incorporating themes of the Oedipus complex that utilizes superscript symbols that was written for a 1996 exhibition of art by British visual artists Jake and Dinos Chapman. A later artwork by them is featured on the cover of
Fanged Noumena. "KataςoniX" is an invocatory text intended to be read aloud that was written for a multimedia presentation by
***Collapse and Orphan Drift at Virtual Futures '96, which was presented at the University of Warwick. It incorporates quotations of
glossolalia from the notebooks of Antonin Artaud, combining nondescript phrases and occult descriptions with "sub-linguistic clickings and hissings". The first text in the selection of Land's CCRU texts in
Fanged Noumena, "Barker Speaks: The CCRU Interview with Professor D.C. Barker", is a fictional interview conducted between the collective and the titular character—an
author surrogate for Land—whose study of "geotraumatics" and "tic-systems" extends from his appropriation of cosmic
pessimistic speculations made by Deleuze and Guattari in
Capitalism and Schizophrenia, as well as previously by Freud in
Beyond the Pleasure Principle; Wark identified Land's preceding interest in positive feedback loops and
autopoietic patterns as an influence on the concept of geotrauma. "Mechanomics", published in 1998, is a paper on "schizonumerics" detailing speculations on the anthropological history of numeracy, prevalent
logocentric attitudes to numbering, the Deleuzoguattarian interpretation of numbers as
multiplicity, and Land's own reinterpretation of
set theory and
combinatorics where the mathematical proofs of
Georg Cantor and
Kurt Gödel "open up humans to an outside of
logos" in which notions of quantity proceed past limits of comprehensibility: "for Land", according to Mackay and Brassier, "the interest of Gödel's achievement is not primarily 'mathematical' but rather belongs to a lineage of the operationalisation of number in coding systems that will pass through
Turing and into the technological mega-complex of contemporary techno-capital." "Cryptolith" is a narrative text written by Land as part of the CCRU in collaboration with Orphan Drift, extending the character of Professor Barker and the concept of tic-systems. "Non-Standard Numeracies: Nomad Cultures" is an arrangement of fragmentary invocatory texts, similar to "KataςoniX", where Land's concept of geotraumatics and his mythological research presented elsewhere in the writings of the CCRU are both used to convey the Outside breaking into human conventions. "Occultures", a set of cybergothic narrative texts that explore the past and present hyperstitional subcultures and in-universe characters of the CCRU, was later featured on the "Syzygy" section of the CCRU website. "Origins of the Cthulhu Club" is another selection of Land's collaborative writing within the CCRU, featuring a fictional correspondence extending off of Lovecraft's
Cthulhu Mythos. In 2004, "Introduction to Qwernomics" was published online on Land's first blog, Hyperstition. It explores the occult and logical implications made by the specific setups of typographic systems, especially in consumer technology, and their application for "the
qabbalistic tracking of pure coding 'coincidences'." Similarly, "Qabbala 101" is an essay written for the first volume of
Collapse, Mackay's reboot of her earlier journal of the same name, exploring the history of kabbalah, the logic of its
cosmogony and the further occult and mathematical implications of its numeracy. "Tic Talk", "Critique of Transcendental Miserablism" and "A Dirty Joke" were published on Hyperstition. The first text is a schizonumeric conclusion to the character story of Professor Barker wherein every number is written as its factors. The second is an accelerationist
polemic that explores a wide variety of sources to propose a
fatalistic model of capitalist society. The third is an autobiographical text written as a confession of both the "failure" of Land's experimental career and the success of its longevity beyond his work. The anthology concludes with several pages of schizonumeric, typographic and geotraumatic diagrams from Land's notebooks, dated between the 1990s and 2000s. ==Reception==