This week we read / listened to Ray Brassier’s critique of Nick Land — unofficially(?) referred to by the title “Mad Black Deleuzianism” — given at a one-day symposium at Goldsmiths, University of London, in 2010.
The symposium was the first public event to discuss accelerationism, in light of what were then two forthcoming publications: Benjamin Noys’ The Persistence of the Negative and Fanged Noumena, the collected edition of Land’s writings edited by Brassier and Robin Mackay.
Brassier’s critique is incredibly dense but worth picking apart. As he argues, “If you want to understand if a politics of accelerationism is possible or feasible, you need to confront the internal conceptual intelligibility of the accelerationist program.” We have tried to unpick Brassier’s critique in this session and my notes below hopefully provide some initial expositions that help lay out the stakes of each of his points of contention.
You can read a transcript of Brassier’s talk here or listen back to a recording of it below. The rest of the talks given as part of the symposium are also online here, featuring Mark Fisher, Alex Andrews, Benjamin Noys, Nick Srnicek, and Alex Williams.
(Also RIP no punny title from Wassim. A few clashes this week. We’ll endeavour to find a better night that works for others next time!)
In the Landian apparatus, materiality is construed solely as the production of production. Transcendental materialism in its Landian version becomes a materialization of critique.
Historical materialism, in a Marxist sense, is the argument that history is driven by matter — that is, by developments in material conditions. Material conditions create consciousness, not the other way round. If consciousness created material conditions, that would be idealism.
But idealism is still complicated by its relationship to matter, especially in Kant. Consciousness might produce material conditions, but that doesn’t mean that we retain access to those material conditions. Kant calls this transcendental idealism.
For instance, we can understand Kant’s notion of a thing-in-itself in a rudimentary way by thinking about a table. I understand what a table in, what it feels like, what it is used for. I have an understanding of “tableness”. I can even learn how to take wood and turn it into a table. But even that level of mastery over what a table is doesn’t allow me to know what a table is in-itself. No level of knowledge about tables allows me to think a table outside of my perception of it. And that’s Kant’s transcendental idealism. There is always a gap. No matter the extent to which I am able to master a “thing” and create “things”, I cannot know those things in themselves.
Land makes an interesting twist here. If Kant has a transcendental idealism, then what is a transcendental materialism? Isn’t that something quite horrific and eerie? I can accept that I can’t possess absolute knowledge of the things my ideas produce. That’s quite humbling, actually. There’s something quite Romantic in the idea that I can be a master sculptor but still not have absolute knowledge of the things I create. It’s quite liberatory.
But what Land suggests is that I cannot possess absolute knowledge of the things that produce my ideas. We retain Kant’s transcendental gap and may think we’re doing the right thing in folding it into a Marxist framework, but what we end up with is the realisation that we are at the mercy of things to which we do not have direct access to. Deleuze and Guattari similarly make this point in “The Geology of Morals”. But Land turns desire less into a question for geology as a horror story about puppeteer capitalism. Capitalism, through his texts, becomes a set of material conditions that create consciousness and they are conditions that we cannot really intervene in. We cannot understand or hope to grasp capitalism-in-itself.
Land’s inversion of Kant goes a little bit further than this too. We might note that critique, for Kant, has a very specific meaning. It is a process through which we can ascertain the limits of humanity. That is why he has three critiques of our capacity to reason. There are limits of what we can know, which in turn place limits on what we can do, and it is reason’s job to ascertain where those limits are and what becomes possible within them.
Land’s transcendental materialism shifts the stakes once again. It’s not a question of the limits of our own thought but the limits of capitalism. And since we cannot attain absolute knowledge of capitalism as a material process, then it’s not such a stretch to say that capitalism knows more about us than we know about ourselves. Capitalism, then, is a form of critique — quite literally, in how it valorising our labour and all the rest of it. Capitalism is an autonomous inquiry into the nature and value of human life. When Brassier talks about the “materialisation of critique”, that’s what he’s talking about. Critique itself is a material process carried out by capitalism, according to Land.
The problem with this for Brassier, though, seems to be that we end up in a wholly impotent feedback loop. Whilst that may, in part, be Land’s point about capitalism, it is already effectuated at the level of thought itself. It short-circuits philosophy, boiling down to an admission that the Lord works in mysterious ways. It is deferring to appearances, or lack thereof. I think this is what Brassier is nodding to when he says that, for Land, what needs to be “destratified is the empirical/transcendental difference.” When you realise that the nature of appearances is constituted by a pair of capitalist blinkers, how do you take the blinkers off? But the problem is that these blinkers aren’t just something to be discarded, like the sunglasses in They Live. They are being actively produced by capitalism, and we do not have access to that production process. As Brassier says, capitalism “generates its own representation, and by this account, representation itself is relegated to the status of a transcendental illusion. It’s a misprision of primary processes; it’s at the level of merely secondary processes.”
That present a problem for accelerationism, doesn’t it? If we’re supposed to be “accelerating the process”, how is that supposed to work if that process, in its materiality, is accelerating us. We’re not at the wheel; we’re the car and something else has its foot on the gas pedal. Brassier suggests that, for Land, this becomes a question of intensification. We might not have full control over that which is driving us, but we can either lean into it. We can lean into the death drive, for instance, and attempt to “make it with death”, as Land says, or we can try and frustrate that process and cause it to change tack.
To do this we’re supposed to try and engage with our machinic unconscious. This isn’t the institutionalised unconscious that Freudian psychoanalysis tells us about, and which Deleuze and Guattari ridicule — a sort of internalised mother-father that means all our problems can be traced back to some primal scene. It is that part of the unconscious that is still accepting of inputs, and is, in fact, responsive to the world around it. So, the question becomes, for Brassier: “how do you access the machinic unconscious?”
Brassier draws on Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalysis here. It is a praxis intended to get you in touch with the machinic unconscious, which is a “conceptual practice [that] is no longer tracing intelligible structures from a pre-existing, readymade reality, it’s actually tracing movements and tendencies in material processes.”
But then, how is this supposed to work with regards to accelerationism? It may have a bearing on a kind of clinical practice at the level of an individual subject, but are we not utterly detached from our own stakes at this point? At the level of the social and of history, is this not a form of idealism intervening in materialism? Precisely what we’ve been told we cannot do? I start to get lost on the finer points of Brassier’s argument here, and want to spend more time with them before professing to have an explanation, but the key lies in his explication of the Landian paradox:
The paradox is simply this: under what conditions could you will the impossibility of willing? How could you affirm that which incapacitates all affirmation?
Perhaps those are the best questions for us to try and unpack together tonight.