Thread by @dynamic_proxy

“Land - inventor of eugenics concepts like accelerationism and ‘hyper-racism’…”

Leaving aside the chumpery of “inventor”, and the fact that neither term was in circulation in the period in which Land and Fisher collaborated, neither is properly speaking eugenicist either

https://twitter.com/BerlantBro/status/1455913546341040136

Eugenicism is about convergence on a model of racial “health”, carving away “dysgenic” elements (people) in the service of a teleological model of human function: this, and only this, is what being alive is “for”; life not oriented towards these ends is unworthy of life.

Both “accelerationism” and “hyper-racism” (I mean yuck, obviously, but let’s at least try to be precise) are concerned with divergence, deterritorialisation, the explosion rather than constraint of optionality. Fabian eugenicists would be horrified by both.

I din’t want to say much more about “hyper-racism” because I think it’s stupid and repugnant on its own terms, at least in part because there is an underlying drive towards optimisation - let the variants slug it out, so their arms races produce enhanced badassery

which is a teenage boy’s social darwinism with added face-tentacles - the later Dune books are clearly enchanted by a vision of cosmic strife between (inevitably racially-coded) species pushing forward into an exotically posthuman future, etc

But anyway, the point stands: not eugenics as such. And I think the obsession with optimisation - “optimise for intelligence” etc - comes along a bit later in Land. Land in the 90s just wants to explode the highly-territorialised political imaginary and pursue lines of flight

i.e. the “thirst” is for “annihilation”, not the realisation of some sort of omega-point AI singularity. Fisher, likewise, in the early 2000s just feels comprehensively stifled and is looking for the exit (to put it infelicitously)

I think one of the dangers of even early-Landian “inorganic vitalism” (libidinal energisation, deterritorialisation, intensity, lines of flight: good; delibidinisation, reterritorialisation, interpassive stupor etc: bad) is that it can summon a “natural aristocracy of the spirit”

- this is basically Badiou's contention with Deleuze, that underneath all the multiplicitous clamour of differences there's a quite Nietzschean valorisation of whatever or whoever can "go to the limit", fracture identity, become something other than itself, and so on

Something like the "natural aristocracy of the spirit" notion is useful to underdogs: it motivates self-possession, self-transformation, a refusal to be ground down into conformity, and so on. It's a very active notion in punk, New Romanticism, all things Mark loved.

It can get you into trouble later on when you find yourself convinced that, e.g. Russell Brand is a natural aristocrat of the spirit - the very embodiment of proletarian wit and creativity, etc - and the glamour channelled through such a figure is being dulled by "grey vampires"

At a certain point in your politics, in your thinking about how life is to be lived with others, you have to place in brackets the mythology which enabled the necessary self-assertion to activate you as a political agent - historicise, sweep out into a wider context

I think of Owen’s deft analysis of Pulp’s “Misshapes” here - yes, this is all very consoling and empowering, but a politics built around identification as a righteously clever outsider is going to lead you wrong in the long run

(my reaction to that was and still is “aw, but can’t I have a *little* identification as a righteously clever outsider, as a treat?”)

Another thing that strikes me here is how poorly the late-90s/early-00s UK context is understood by many people reading it back through, of all the benighted things, Land's subsequent bedazzlement by HBD and neoreaction.

Post-'89, and during the subsequent collapse of the USSR, there was a lot of post-Marxism about, a lot of re-orientation around the apparent triumph (and noisy triumphalism) of neoliberalism, and this coincided with the first wave of popular cyber-culture.

My encounter with this was through things like the online journal PMC (Postmodern Culture), a mailing list called Cybermind run by the polymath artist/poet/theorist Alan Sondheim, the Buffalo poetics mailing list, etc - a somewhat febrile milieu

The appearance of the word "cybernetic" in the naming of the CCRU was *incredibly* of its moment. And there were creeps, scoundrels, chancers, charlatans, wannabe gurus etc aplenty in that milieu - but also a lot of excitement, a feeling that great things were afoot, etc

Moribund things were to be cast away: nation states, rigid identities ("on the internet, nobody knows you're a dog"), nostalgic attachments to defunct political forms (like, say, communist parties), the general notion of "the human"...

Mark in the early 2000s was talking contemptuously of the "human security system" as a kind of symbolic protection racket, keeping us locked into docile selfhoods attached to well-fed egos, tortured apes in hell persuaded that this was the happiest possible state -

an accursed local optimum that could only be escaped through a radical programme he described as "cold rationalism". If you wanted to be ungenerous you could compare this with contemporary rhetoric against "welfare dependency", in favour of "shock therapy" etc

but he wasn't picturing it in terms of a social program, something you'd inflict on people, making their lives worse on purpose so that they'd experience some sort of liberating subjective (and, er, objective) destitution. It was more a sort of appropriation of that scenario,

a repurposing of its terms of reference to describe a very idiosyncratic project of getting outside of your own head (a miserable place to be, especially for him as someone who'd been through multiple seriously derailing depressive episodes) in search of new forms of agency

To be honest, it always was primarily a (de-)personal(-ising) and aesthetic project, whose ramifications at the level of collective social organisation were mainly pictured in terms of negation: capitalist cybernetic control mechanisms are conditioning us not to do this, so let's

But to be cartoonish about it, the three "progressive" political options I was aware of at the turn of the century were a) modish pomo cybernetic anti-communism, b) an absolutely deathly boring preachy Chomskyism, and c) Trots

In the event, the k-punkosphere ended up being friendlier to the Trots than it was to the Chomskyists - a road forever untravelled

Anyway, there is plenty to cringe about, and some things to engage in more searching self-criticism about, in that period: much silliness, much gaucheness, many untenable postures adopted. Some wilful ignorance of things we should have taken seriously sooner. All of that.

But, while "accelerationism" doesn't even get a *mention* on the k-punk blog before *2008*, the Lando-Deleuzian current in Mark's thinking (one strand amongst many) was primarily about aesthetic experiences which shattered consensus reality, and made alternatives visible

It was also about the kinds of *collective* (distributed, feedback-loop-creating) experiencing that could strengthen the sense of alternative social possibilities, bring them within view and within reach

So...maybe try to feel your way a bit into why something like that might have felt urgent and necessary, why the particular conceptual means chosen happened to be the ones at hand, how the thing played out in practice, before cluttering the landscape with more junk genealogy /fin

It's rare that I get to the end of a thread of this length without having slipped in, or on, a phrase from Geoffrey Hill somewhere - this one's is "natural aristocrat of the spirit", but Hill's drawing there on D. H. Lawrence ("the only true aristocracy is that of consciousness")

I had @xenogothic very much in mind at this juncture: doesn't Lawrence inhabit the same problematic, the desire for the limit experience that splits the world apart and expands the ever-widening circle of consciousness, underwriting an aestheticised hierarchy of subjectivity?