On Dark Enlightenment, by Nick Land
Book review
I was greatly fond of Nick Land's writings in Fanged Noumena, at least those which rigorously argued for his Bataillean reading of Kant and his revisions to Deleuze & Guattari, as well as some of his eschatological prophetic prose poems such as Meltdown; true to what he argued there, Land has in the twenty years devoted himself to cyberspace, in the form of blog- and shit-posting, and gotten himself caught up in a variety of trends that have arisen in the meantime. While, from my limited awareness, it appears that many of Land's disciples and colleagues have continued a more predictable project of academic (or adjacent thereto) writings trying to link technological accelerationism to a variety of favorite communist & intellectual subjects, Land has, very wisely, completely eschewed academia both in association and in ethos, and instead devoted himself to more obscure, Terminally Online matters.
This book is, from my awareness, a compilation of blogposts forming together a single essay from early 2012, and is his basic overview of what is now called Neo-Reactionaryism, or NrX, and is effectively in three parts. The first, and most substantial, is a summary of the works of Curtis Yarvin, then known under his pseudonym Mencius Moldbug, about the flaws of liberalism with a special focus on the inefficiency of democracy as a form of government; the main argument is that because universal suffrage permits politicians to gain power by catering to the whims of whatever coalition of voters is easiest to bribe, and maintain self-serving power by continually stringing along these demographics, all the while rarely or never actually undertaking the project of governing adequately. Yarvin's solution is what he calls neo-cameralism, often taking the form of monarchism or a more charitably revised form of illiberal fascism, where an unilateral regent or small group assumes power and governs efficiently using an intellectual power unfettered by the contortions of popular votes.
The second part is a lengthy discussion of race in the western world, which Land seems to have derived in part from Yarvin but also appears to have researched principally himself from “Race Realist” and “Neo-Nazi” blogs, illustrating the common ways that racial conflicts and disparities have defined democratic governments. Land oscillates between extremely racist characterizations of inner cities and minoritarian on political/intellectual levels, and more neutral meditations on the way that liberal governance has encouraged these scenarios (namely, by providing to minoritarian demographics campaign promises that perpetuate the crime & poverty cycles). The final part of the essay is a brief vision of the future, written more as utopian fantasy rather than political speculation, where a new type of cyber-feudalism is able to reign and transhumanist experiments resound on both the physical and cultural level.
This essay is somewhat disappointing (although it seems to have ended elliptically, in media res, as though more parts could have been written) in that it does not explicitly connect Land's new fixation with the online right to his older (and, judging from interviews, contemporaneous) larger philosophic portrait; it seems to me possible to construe Yarvin, from this perspective, as a sort of schizo-analyst in the style that Land finds appropriate, distancing himself from the “Molar” reifications of Human Rights and Universal Suffrage into a more mechanical, self-absolutizing form of governance in Neo-Cameralism, which is coherent if we are to accept the basic axiom of schizo-analysis / accelerationism that anything intellectually cogitable is arbitrary and that more functionalist & ad-hoc systems of thought should be preferred to the more illustrious & self-proclaimedly special concepts that have permeated western thought from Kant & Plato.
More difficult to reconcile with such metaphysics is the abundant joy in flagrant racism with which Land appears to have become infatuated; while I think a person wanting to seem inoffensive could make a fair stab at translating Land's arguments here into a more equitable analysis of the racial hostility sparked by the desiderative element in liberal politics (ie, exploiting the wants & anxieties of each demographic to gain power while inflaming differences), Land seems to have a different intention with these writings. While not a concept here expounded, Land has elsewhere proposed a theory entitled “hyper-racism”, which argues that the trans-humanist society of the coming singularity should try to parse away what he feels to be the “inferior” races, such that the post-biological course of an interstellar humanity can proceed more efficiently (accelerate more rapidly) without having to be slowed by the supposedly inferior intelligence of other races. This ethos seems to have made Land one of the more racist voices I've seen in the present, being totally disinterested in a rational argument for the efficacy of white supremacy but rather in a single-minded resolution to discriminate away the races he feels are lesser.
In a way, while still attempting to make arguments and develop notions, Land's accelerationist philosophy requires a necessary irrationalism and arbitrariness; his main philosophic claim is that we are near to a point where technology will rapidly inflate the scope of theoretical knowledge & structure to the extent that all concepts and distinctions will be effectively unintelligible, either to humanity, to machines, or to the indistinguishable mess floating between, and that, as such, no definitive theory of human knowledge can be furnished nor would be desireable; rather, his philosophy is effectively (and, in some writings, explicitly) a sort of messianic suicide cult, who is mostly interested in preparing humanity for the eschaton outlined in Meltdown. As such, he rides an interesting line of being necessarily indifferent to truth / cogency, and yet having a vested interest in the material circumstances that will determine the aftermath of technological singularity. Therefore, a book like this represents a perhaps-awkward synthesis of making earnest attempts at politico-cultural analysis, and yet feeling them to be inherently arbitrary and mostly important for whatever de facto effects their exhortations might inspire.
Prima facie, as here characterized, this book would therefore seem fairly stupid, as it seems exceedingly silly to think that this particular essay (that only a small number of people seem to have read in its decade since publication) would have any sort of influential impact; this book seems to serve more as a brief exposee of the movement Land feels is gesticulating. In some sense, there do appear to be firm networks of influence from Land through Yarvin through Peter Thiel through JD Vance, who appears to have a fair chance to become president of the US sometime in the next four years. I have a number of criticisms about NrX and Yarvin, and how I think this political philosophy is at heart mostly rhetorical & metaphorical, and reduces back in the ultimate analysis to something not radically different from other forms of liberal conservatism, but I will try to find some other place to espouse these ideas. The same goes, if to a lesser extent, for the claims of an imminent singularity advocated by Land and the wider varieties of schizo-analytic philosophy underpinning it, which I also want to try & write in a blog-post of their own. In general, I feel this precise book by Land is OK as an exposee of this ideology, if primarily for its shortness.