Suits You, Sir!

 1984 1992 2006

  

I. 

 

The modern suit - regarded in the early days as informal daywear comprising of jacket, trousers and, if a three-piece, a waistcoat  - has been around since at least the late 19th-century. 

 

Indeed, some fashion scholars trace the history of the suit back to the 17th-century and credit Charles II with being instrumental in bringing together the key components. Others think the main man was Regency dandy Beau Brummel, who helped establish Savile Row as the home of bespoke men's tailoring. 

      

Personally, I tend to think that the suit as we know it owes more to the rise of the Victorian business class and the industrial revolution. And what really interests me is how the suit developed in the 20th-century, particularly in the United States in relation to youth-driven popular culture - but that's a story for another day, another post. 

 

Here, I just want to briefly reflect on the memories triggered by the three suits I can be seen wearing in the image above: the first by Jane Khan, one half of Birmingham's best and brightest designers Khan & Bell; the second from the Italian high-end fashion house of Armani; and the third by punk Dame Vivienne Westwood. 

 

 

II.

 

Kahn & Bell was a fashion label and boutique established by Jane Kahn and Patti Bell in Hurst Street, Birmingham, in 1976; much loved by those who simply had to dress up in order to mess up.

 

By the mid-'80s, however, they'd decided to go their separate ways and Khan sans Bell was trading at the Great Gear Market [1] under the brand name of Khaniverous. 

 

And it was at Khaniverous, in April 1984, that I bought my first suit; a loud and colourful check design featuring a teddy boy style jacket with padded square shoulders and black velvet lapels. 

 

It was the kind of theatrical (some might say clownish) punk look that I adored. The suit also reminded me of one worn by Johnny Rotten when fighting his High Court case against Malcolm McLaren in February 1979. 

 

According to my diary from the time, Miss Khan was very friendly and the suit cost £75 (which is about £300 in today's money).  

 

I'm not sure I was ready to take on the world in that suit, but wearing it always made very happy. It was given it's final outing on my wedding day (20 October 1988); after that, the jacket was appropriated into my wife's wardrobe (along with my favourite Zorro style black hat).  

 

 

III. 

 

By the beginning of the 1990s, not only was I approaching 30 and so no longer to be fully trusted, but I was increasingly tired of the tartan-clad Jazz persona invented ten years earlier. And so, whilst still pretty much subscribing to the same anarcho-nihilistic philosophy of punk, it was time for a radical change of image, beginning with the purchase of a heavy linen suit bought from Giorgio Armani.

 

In other words, the Armani suit was not a belated attempt to become a yuppie and I had no desire to turn rebellion into money [2]. Indeed, part of the joke was to look rich whilst being poor; to be dressed as if keen for success whilst all the time celebrating failure.

 

I remember once wearing the suit to Warwick University for a meeting with Nick Land, in an attempt to make the point that being a mad Deleuzian doesn't necessarily oblige one to always dress in oversized black jumpers. 

 

Of course, Land was no more persuaded by my arguments in favour of expensive designer fashion than he was taken by my suggestion that the Ccru should retitle their magazine ***collapse as Stand Up! [3] 

 

To be fair to Nick, however, I don't think I was ever entirely convinced by my own arguments on this point either and, ultimately, this new Armani look never really worked. Thus, I almost inevitably drifted back to more avant-garde designers, including Vivienne Westwood ... 

 

 

IV.

 

This brings us to the final suit pictured above; an unstructured, linen/cotton design featuring a Prince of Wales check, from 2006. 

 

This suit always reminds me of happy days spent with my beautiful friend Dawn Garland, hanging around a bar in Bloomsbury (see photo below) before attending a series of lectures at Birkbeck by the (hugely over-rated) public intellectual Slavoj Žižek, on topics including Lacanian psychoanalysis and neo-Marxism. 

 

The suit - far more sober than the two drunken suits (one wool, the other silk) that I'd also purchased from Vivienne Westwood during this period - nevertheless always attracted attention when worn (particularly if I was accompanied by Miss Garland, who had her own unique style); some negative, but mostly positive and that's always welcome. 

 

For one doesn't wish to be too flamboyant and standoutish, but neither does one want to fade into the background or be just another face in the crowd; imperceptible, yes - indistinguishable, no thanks. 

 

 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] The Great Gear Market was located at 85 King's Road, London. It was a place known for its punk and alternative fashions and was where many young designers started out and many musicians shopped for outfits. Long closed now, it's perhaps not as well-remembered (nor as well documented) as Kensington Market.

 

[2] As Ian Trowell writes of Heaven 17's decision to wear expensive suits at the start of the 1980s, it was a look designed to confuse those whose anti-conformity simply meant conforming in another direction to another sartorial code or subcultural uniform. 

      See Trowell's article in SIG News #4 (UAL, September 2025); 'Let's All Make a Bomb: Heaven 17 and the Yuppie 1980s'. To read my take on this article, see the post on Torpedo the Ark dated 2 July 2025: click here. 

 

[3] The Cybernetic Culture Research Unit - styled as the Ccru - was an unorthodox, unsanctioned, experimental (and in-part imaginary) collective growing like some malignant tumor in the philosophy department at the University of Warwick in the mid-1990s, whose posthumous reputation far exceeds its actual accomplishments. Key members included Nick Land, Sadie Plant, and Mark Fisher. 

      The Ccru published a zine entitled ***collapse for which I once provided some artwork, even though I didn't particularly care for (or fully understand) much of the content. My idea was that we were already among the ruins - that pretty much everything that might collapse had collapsed - so it was time to build new little habitats and encourage people to stand up and find a way beyond the ruins: We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen, as Lawrence once put it. 

      I suspect I was seen as a bourgeois reactionary - in an Armani suit - hoping to reterritorialise on old ideas at a time when the Ccru wished to radically accelerate the process of deterritorialisation; although, to again give Land his due, he was always friendly with me and his suggestion about the direction my Ph.D should take (less philosophical and more literary in character) was extremely helpful.

 

 

For a follow up post to this one - on enclothed cognition, etc. - please click here.  

 

On the Politics of Accelerationism Contra Slowness

Jamie Reid, Nowhere Bus (2005)

giclee mounted cotton rag print (79 x 90.5 cm) 

bonhams.com

 

 

I. 

 

As everyone knows, the Sex Pistols were going nowhere - but they were going nowhere fast! Speed was the very essence of punk; even if travelling by bus [1]. Indeed, one might argue that Malcolm McLaren and Jamie Reid both subscribed to a political strategy that is now termed accelerationism ... 

 

In other words, theirs was a revolutionary project founded upon the idea that radical social and political change could only be achieved via an injection of speed (or chaos) into the current system in order to destabilise it and thus accelerate its demise. 

 

When everything is rotten and on the point of collapse, the task is not to try and reform or improve the situation, but, rather, to push the process of decay further and faster beyond the point of no return. Ultimately, the Sex Pistols wanted to make things worse - not better; McLaren and Reid believed in the ruins of culture, not its grand monuments. 

 

II. 

 

I'm not sure from where (or whom) McLaren and Reid adapt this line of thinking - one which attracts extremists on both the far-left and far-right - but, for me, it has its roots in the Nietzschean idea of pushing (or kicking) over that which is already falling [2]. 

 

One is also obliged to mention the work of Deleuze and Guattari in their seminal two-volume study Capitalism and Schizophrenia, in which they speak of accelerating the processes of the former all the way to a singular outer limit [3], effectively injecting Marxism with a little madness and speed.

 

And of course, it was from his idiosyncratic and delirious reading of Deleuze and Guattari, fuelled by amphetamine, that the British philosopher most associated with the theory of accelerationism, Nick Land, drew many key ideas in relation to his own brand of techno-nihilism that affirms rapid advances in artificial intelligence, biotechnology, human enhancement (or replacement), etc. [4]

 

 

III. 

    

As dangerously exciting as the idea of accelerationism is - and despite my own long advocacy of speed over slowness: Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! - I find myself now increasingly drawn toward the idea that it might, in fact, be advantageous and desirable to slow things down; that slowness is another softly-spoken S-term to be added to the list that includes silence, secrecy, and shadows ... [5]   

 

Of course, this might just be a sign that one is getting older, but not necessarily any wiser: I'm very aware of the fact that it was only when he had passed 60 years of age and approched the end of his life, that Malcolm McLaren also embraced the idea of slowness in various cultural forms, including slow art and film [6].

 

Thus, for example, when discussing his series of 'musical paintings' entitled Shallow 1-21 (2008), he was very keen to explain how they were based upon the idea of slowness; that speed and the idea of going nowhere fast wasn't attractive to him any longer; that Damien Hirst's spin paintings were essentially boring [7]. 

 

McLaren now wanted individuals to take their time; to focus on things and delight in the nuances and details; to enjoy the moment that leads up to the event or action as much as the event or action itself; to appreciate that Jamie Reid's bus destination could, with but one stroke of a pen, be transformed from Nowhere to Now/here - i.e., an immanent utopia that exists in the bonds between people, not the dissolution of those bonds.   

A still from Malcolm McLaren's Shallow 1-21 (2008) 

showing a woman slowly eating some grapes
Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art

   

   

Notes

 

[1] I'm referring of course to the Jamie Reid artwork used to promote the Sex Pistols' single 'Pretty Vacant' (Virgin Records, 1977) which featured two buses; one headed to Nowhere and the other destined to terminate in Boredom. 

      This amusing image, however, pre-dates punk; Reid was reworking an earlier graphic produced for his radical Suburban Press, having appropriated the buses idea and design from a 1973 pamphlet published by the American situationist group Point-Blank! In 2010, the activist David Jacobs, founder of Point-Blank!, claimed that he was the one who should be credited with the original concept and design. 

 

[2] In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche writes: 

      "O my brothers, am I then cruel? But I say: That which is falling, should also be pushed! Everything of today - it is falling, it is decaying: who would support it? But I - want to push it too!" 

      - 'Of Old and New Law Tables' (20), trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Penguin Books, 1969), p. 226.

 

[3] In Anti-Oedipus, for example, Deleuze and Guattari advocate an acceleration of the forces and flows that capitalism has itself unleashed: "To go still further, that is, in the movement of the market, of decoding and deterritorialization." [239]

      It should be stressed, however, that whilst they think capitalism "produces an awesome schizophrenic accumulation of energy" [34], this also acts as its limit, which is why "schizophrenia is not the identity of capitalism, but on the contrary its difference, its divergence, and its death" [246]. 

      Page references are to the English edition, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (The Athlone Press, 1994).

 

[4] Readers interested in knowing more about Land's thinking in this area might like to see his essay 'A Quick-and-Dirty Introduction to Accelerationism' (2017), which can be located as a five page pdf on the Internet Archive: click here. 

      Ultimately, for Land, capitalism is something akin to an alien form of intelligence and a means of opening up the future. Thus, philosophers truly interested in change have a duty to affirm such regardless of the consequences to humanity or the planet. 

      See also Robin MacKay and Armen Avanessian (eds.), #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader (Urbanomic, 2014). 

 

[5] See the post 'In Defence of Isis Veiled' (9 Sept 2023), in which I suggest what a practice of occultism might mean today in an age of transparency: click here. 

 

[6] On the other hand, it's possible that this wasn't a sign of age, but an attempt by McLaren to get with the times and create a contemporary space for himself. For the slow movement as a cultural initiative encouraging individuals to reject the hustle and bustle of modern life, had, by the early 2000s, been (ironically) gathering pace for a number of years. 

      The core idea at the heart of the slow movement's philosophy is that faster is not necessarily better and that one should learn to relax a little so as to enjoy the moment and be able to appreciate and reflect upon things without feeling hurried or distracted. 

      The slow movement has found expression in many different areas; from slow art and photography, to slow fashion and food. There is also a political aspect to the movement; one that calls for local governance models that are inclusive and centered on deliberative democracy and community empowerment. 

      All this sounds very nice, but one suspects that this is essentially a middle-class movement; that the working class can't afford to take things slowly and lead a more leisurely lifestyle.

 

[7] I'm paraphrasing McLaren speaking in conversation with Prof. Jo Groebel, Direktor of the Deutsch Digital Institute, Berlin, at the American Academy in Berlin (29 Oct 2008): click here. Malcolm introduces the concept of slowness at 42:10. 

      For those who may not be familiar with the work, Shallow 1-21 is an 86-minute video consisting of 21 'musical paintings' that combine (but do not synchronise) musical snippets with short film clips - the latter appropriated from old sex movies - into a slow moving and hypnotically layered work of art.

 

 

For a follow up post to this one on making haste slowly and learning how, as an artist, one might be quick, even when standing still, please click here. 

 

Révéroni de Saint-Cyr: Modern Perversity and Old School Pessimism

Illustration for Pauliska ou la Perversité moderne (1798)  

by Jacques-Antoine Révéroni de Saint-Cyr [1]

 

"L'amour est une rage; il peut s’inoculer par la morsure ..."

 

 

I.

 

The Marquis de Sade may be the best-known aristocratic French author writing dark Gothic fiction with a sexually explicit flavour, but he wasn't the only one. 

 

And I'm slowly getting round to read Révéroni de Saint-Cyr's two-volume novel Pauliska ou la Perversité moderne (1798); finally translated into English, by Erik Butler, and published by Tartarus Press (2018) [2]. 

 

 

II. 

 

Considered a (minor) classic of its kind, the work tells the story of a young Polish countess, Pauliska, as she travels around Europe, à la Sally Bowles, "inch by inch, step by step, mile by mile, man by man" [3], and misfortune by misfortune [4].

 

Combining supernatural elements with those of an erotic nature, the book is essentially a fatalistic meditation on desire, depravity, and the accursed nature of a life determined more by chance and random events, than moral law or human reason.

 

The suggestion is therefore given that we are all just helpless playthings, or, if you prefer, victims awaiting our own senseless death, rather than free-willing agents who can shape what happens to us and build an orderly world.     

 

Pauliska, is thus a deliberate slap in the face of those philosophes promoting the ideals of the Enlightenment, which is perhaps why Foucault seems to be such a fan of the work ...

 

 

III.

 

Writing in a text entitled 'So Cruel a Knowledge' [5], Foucault delights in the novel's opening where we encounter Pauliska fleeing a burning castle, as invading soldiers rape and disembowel the chambermaids; their screams reverberating in her ears as she makes good her escape:

 

"Pauliska abandons her scorched lands to the Cossacks [...] her countrywomen bound to the pale trunks of the maples, her servants mutilated and their mouths covered with blood. She seeks refuge in Old Europe [...] which sets all its traps for her at one go. Strange traps, in which it is hard to recognise the familiar ones of male flattery, worldly pleasures, scarcely intended falsehoods, and jealousy. What is taking form is an evil much less metaphysical [...] an evil very close to the body and meant for it: A modern perversity." [6]

This, obviously, is not good news for Pauliska, who encounters all kinds of terrifying men belonging to all sorts of strange sect, secret society, or criminal gang: political fanatics, libertines, counterfeiters, mad scientists, religious mystics, she is misfortunate enough to meet (and fall victim) to them all. 

 

Foucault writes: 

 

"In this underground world the misfortunes lose their chronology and link up with the world's most ancient cruelties. In reality, Pauliska is fleeing a millennial conflagration, and the partition [of Poland] of 1795 casts her into an ageless cycle. She falls into the castle of evil spells where the corridors close up, where the mirrors tell lies and watch what passes before them, where the air distills strange poisons [...] It is a paradoxical initiation not into the lost secret but into all those agonies that man never forgets." [7] 

 

This initiation into suffering - into evil - is achieved, says Foucault, through silent myths and wordless complicity; Pauliska is kept in the "harsh and monotonous condition of the object" [8]. 

 

And what is it she has to learn? 

 

That mankind will never establish a world of peace, justice, and freedom, because the savage truth is this; "man is nothing but a dog to man; law is the appetite of the beast" [9], and we're all trapped inside a giant cage from which there is no escape (for even death, as Nick Land reminds us, is at best, a temporary pause or refreshment before the inevitable return to the compulsive dissipation of life) [10].

 

Alternatively, dear reader, if you prefer we end with a different metaphor ... 

 

We're all bound - virtuous and wicked alike - naked on an enormous electric wheel; just like Pauliska at the end of  Révéroni's novel. And when this diabolical object par excellence begins to turn, sparks will fly and we'll cry out in endless agony. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Born in 1767, Jacques-Antoine Révéroni de Saint-Cyr belonged to an Italian family that followed Catherine de' Medici to France in the 16th century. Unhappy with his less-than-glittering military career, Révéroni decided to try his hand as a writer. Sadly, despite writing a large number of plays, novels, and essays, Révéroni never quite established himself as a man of letters and when he died, insane, in 1829, he was already more or less forgotten.  

 

[2] Readers who wish for a recent French edition of Révéroni Saint-Cyr's novel might like to see the one edited by Antoine de Baecque (Payot & Rivages, 2001). 

 

[3] Lyric from the song 'Mein Herr', written by Fred Ebb, with music by John Kander, for the film Caberet (1972), directed by Bob Fosse. The character Sally Bowels was famously played by Liza Minnelli. 

 

[4] Pauliska is clearly indebted to Sade's novel Justine, ou Les Malheurs de la Vertu (1791), although it arguably possesses its own unique charm.  

 

[5] Michel Foucault, 'So Cruel a Knowledge', in the Essential Works 2: Aesthetics, ed. James Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley (Penguin Books, 2000), pp. 53-67.    

 

[6] Ibid., p. 54.  

[7] Ibid.

 

[8] Ibid., p. 56. 

[9] Ibid., p. 57. 

[10] See Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism (Routledge, 1992), p. 180. 

Who is Mencius Moldbug?

Photo of Curtis Yarvin 

By David Merfield (2023) 

 

'It is much easier to delude others if at the same time you delude yourself.'

 

 

I. 

 

Curtis Yarvin is one of those shadowy intellectuals who looks a little creepy and in fact is a little creepy (all that long-flowing hippie hair doesn't help).

 

Unfortunately, he isn't someone who can just be dismissed as a creep or ignored as a crank; not when he seems to have the ear of some powerful figures in the incoming Trump administration, including vice president elect J. D. Vance [1], who has spoken approvingly of some of Yarvin's ideas. 

 

Steve Bannon, who briefly served as the White House's chief strategist during Donald Trump's first administration, (before being unceremoniously fired by the President), is also a Yarvin fan.    

 

 

II. 

 

Also known by the pen name Mencius Moldbug, Yarvin (b. 1973) is an American writer (ironically from an educated secular liberal background) who - along with the British philosopher Nick Land - is credited as being the founder of the neo-reactionary movement (NRx) or so-called Dark Enlightenment - about which I will be speaking at Kant's Cave next month [2].  

 

In brief, Yarvin argues for a post-liberal, non-democratic America led by a powerful individual who is somewhere between an old-fashioned monarch and a tech-savvy corporate CEO. If you can imagine Elon Musk dressed in ermine, you pretty much get the picture.

 

Yarvin's early influences include those libertarian thinkers associated with the Austrian School of Economics, such as Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard, although he's taken their ideas in an increasingly authoritarian direction.

 

In 2007, he started a blog - Unqualified Reservations - in which he set out his (formalist) political vision and announced his aim of destroying progressive ideas and illusions. This blog - which influenced Nick Land's thinking - was formally abandoned in 2016. 

 

As of 2022, Yarvin blogs on Substack under the page name Gray Mirror, where he continues his assault upon the Cathedral (his name for the liberal elite who determine what passes for the Good, the True, and the Beautiful today via the media and higher education) and advocates for a hard reset of society along neo-cameralist lines.  

 

III. 

 

Ultimately, whilst some may be seduced by Yarvin's utopian vision of Singapore or Shanghai über alles, I'm not. Nor am I convinced that Yarvin really believes what he says and he's clearly not above trolling and provocation for its own sake (which is not to say that we shouldn't take him seriously).

And, given the choice, I'd sooner go down the pub with Old Nick than Mr Moldbug. 

 

Partly, that's for old time's sake - Land was briefly my co-supervisor at the University of Warwick, in the 1990s, when working on my Ph.D. - but it's also because there are significant philosophical differences between the two that incline me towards the former.     

 

As Elizabeth Sandifer rightly says:

 

"The differences between Land and Moldbug, however, are vast. Moldbug is at his heart a utopian, his vision of neoreaction rooted in a Silicon Valley-style idealism that clever people can just engineer solutions to everything. Land, on the other hand, gave his big essay on the matter the deliciously gothically overripe title 'The Dark Enlightenment' and peppers his work with imagery of tentacled horrors and grim eschatology." 

 

Sandifer continues: 

 

"Indeed, what's really interesting about Land is that he presents his take on neoreaction as a logical extension of his earlier work. To him, the point is not so much that neoreaction is 'correct' in any sense, but rather a sort of cynical pragmatism that views reactionary tendencies as an inevitable force that can be harnessed productively for his larger goal of accelerating towards the bionic horizon where we all grow face tentacles." [3] 

 

In other words, Yarvin seems to retain a certain American optimism; whilst Land is a nihilist at heart and thinks that nothing human will make it out of the near-future ... [4]  

  

Notes

 

[1] See Jason Wilson's profile of Yarvin in The Guardian (21 Dec 2024): click here.

 

[2] Essentially, this post is a teaser for my upcoming paper on the Dark Enlightenment: see the TTA Events page for details: click here. Alternatively, visit the Philosophy for All website and go to the section on Kant's Cave: click here. 

      The paper is based on a four-part series of posts published on Torpedo the Ark back in July 2024: 1: On the Politics of Hate; 2: On Exiting the Present; 3: On the Zombie Apocalypse; 4: On Rejecting Universalism.  

 

[3] Elizabeth Sandifer, 'Haunt the Future', Art Against Art, Issue 3 (Winter 2016/17): click here to read online.  

 

[4] See Land's essay 'Meltdown' on the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit website: click here.  

It is But Death Who Comes at Last

Keith Haring Untitled (For James Ensor) 1 (1989)

Acrylic on canvas (36 x 72 in)

The Keith Haring Foundation

 

Apparently, having penetrated the object of their desire, the average male lasts between four to eight minutes before ejaculating. Many men may like to believe they last longer - and many female partners may wish that were the case - but, according to those who have studied the matter, it simply isn't so.     

 

Of course, some men climax much more rapidly than four minutes; expelling semen and experiencing orgasm soon after initiating sexual activity and with minimal stimulation [2]. This is often characterised as a form of male sexual dysfunction, although there is no universally agreed definition amongst the experts about what constitutes ejaculatio praecox; some say anything under a minute is premature, whilst others don't think there's any real issue if the man can last over fifteen seconds before jizzing [3].

 

On the other hand, there are men who can last much longer than the average time; although for some delayed ejaculation is problematic rather than pleasurable and can also cause discomfort for their partners [4].     

 

Either way, and whatever the ejaculation latency time one averages out at, it's crucial to remember the following wise words of Sir Walter Scott: 

 

And come he slow, or come he fast, 

It is but Death who comes at last. [5]

 

I don't think even Bataille could have put it better ... [6]

 

Notes

 

[1] Shortly before his death in February 1990, Keith Haring produced a number of works with an erotico-thantological theme, including this work depicting a skeleton ejaculating on a flowerbed. It formed the first panel of a diptych (for James Ensor). In the second panel, thanks to the dead man's sperm, the flowers have grown and are in full bloom, much to the delight of the skeleton.

 

[2] The 1948 Kinsey Report suggests that three-quarters of men ejaculate within two minutes of penetration in over half of their sexual encounters.

 

[3] The belief that premature ejaculation should be considered a medical condition (or an indicator of neurosis) rather than a normal variation, has been disputed by some sex researchers, including Alfred Kinsey, who viewed it as a sign of masculine vigour and pointed to the fact that in the natural world male mammals often ejaculate rapidly during coition in order to increase their chances of passing on their genes. 

      It would seem to me that any coital imperative which posits an optimal-time to ejaculate, merely contributes to the pressure on men to perform like machines and furthers the pathologisation of male sexuality in the modern world.    

 

[4] Delayed ejaculation - which is far less common than premature ejaculation - refers to a man's persistent difficulty in coming, despite his wish to do so and even if he is sexually stimulated. Whilst, as we have discussed, most men reach orgasm within a few short minutes of active thrusting during intercourse, a man with delayed ejaculation either does not have orgasms at all or cannot have an orgasm until after a prolonged period of huffing and puffing.

 

[5] Sir Walter Scott, Marmion (1808), canto 2, st. 30, lines 567-568.

      This historical romance in verse consists of six cantos, each with an introductory epistle and extensive notes. It concludes with the Battle of Flodden (1513). Those who are interested can find the work on Project Gutenberg: click here.  

[6] Bataille famously explores the relationship between Eros and Thanatos in his work, demonstrating how the idea of orgasm as la petite mort is not merely metaphorical. As Nick Land notes: 

      "Orgasm provisionally substitutes for death, fending-off the impetus toward terminal oblivion, but only by infiltrating death into the silent core of vitality […] The little death is not merely a simulacrum or sublimation of a big one […] but a corruption that leaves the bilateral architecture of life and death in tatters, a communication and a slippage which violates the immaculate [otherness] of darkness." 

      In other words, when we come, we open ourselves onto this otherness and to the possibility of personal annihilation; losing identity in a spasm and an exchange of shared slime. It is, as Bataille argues, a betrayal of life as something individual and distinct.

      See Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism (Routledge, 1992), p. 136. And see also my post of 21 September 2016 on orgasm and the will to merger: click here. 

Dark Enlightenment 4: On Rejecting Universalism

Nick Land (Gargoyle Philosopher)

Immanuel Kant (Architect of the Cathedral)

 

 

I. 

 

According to Nick Land [1], the dominant faith of the modern world is Universalism ...

Which is ironic, because if you examine the idea closely - historically - you'll discover that it's a very particular way of looking at the world that merely "asserts its own universal significance whilst ascending to a state of general dominance that approaches the universal".

 

In other words, Universalism - which determines the direction and meaning of modernity - is revealed "as the minutely determined branch or sub-species of a cultic tradition, descended from 'ranters', 'levelers', and closely related variants of dissident, ultra-protestant fanaticism". 

 

It owes very little to philosophers and their model of reason, which is why the Enlightenment can be understood more as a religious event than a philosophical one. 

 

Or, as Land notes, the world's ruling creed - radically democratic and egalitarian in character - is something that emerged amongst a specific people at a particular time and then spread "along identifiable historical and geographical pathways, with an epidemic virulence that is disguised as progressive global enlightenment". 

 

Land finds this all very amusing: "The unmasking of the modern 'liberal' intellectual [...] as a pale, fervent, narrowly doctrinaire puritan, recognizably descended from the species of witch-burning zealots, is reliably - and irresistibly - entertaining."

 

Not that he sees many others laughing; in fact, as the Cathedral extends and tightens its grip upon everyone everywhere, the response it triggers is often anything but humorous:

 

"More commonly, when unable to exact humble compliance, it encounters inarticulate rage, or at least uncomprehending, smoldering resentment, as befits the imposition of parochial cultural dogmas, still wrapped in the trappings of a specific, alien pedigree, even as they earnestly confess to universal rationality."

 

The Muslim world, for example, doesn't often stop to appreciate the irony of the situation. For them, Universalism is Western imperialism and they don't like it; they don't find the truths being foistered on them to be as self-evident as we do. "How could anybody who was not already a believer be expected to consent to such assumptions?", asks Land.  

 

Of course, those sophisticated globalists of the Cathedral are embarrassed when obliged to admit that their progressive political agenda has a religious origin; they pride themselves on their secularism and desperately seek to direct attention away from "the ethnically specific, dogmatic creedal content at its core".

 

As Land writes in a brilliant line: "Paleo-puritanism must be derided in order for neo-puritanism to flourish ..." [2]

 

 

II.

 

Obviously, I'm sympathetic to Land's neo-reactionary nominalism directed against the Cathedral and its project of Universal Enlightenment. In a sense, that's what the phrase torpedo the ark might be understood to mean; i.e., a rejection of the ideal fantasy that the entire human race might be caught up in single becoming: One World, One People, One Law.   

 

I instinctively hate this line of thinking and always have. 

 

One of the reasons that the notion of a dark enlightenment attracts is because it rejects the myth of progress (or the internal teleology) at work in the philosophy of those such as Kant and Hegel and opposes any attempt to centralise into oneness, encouraging rather what D. H. Lawrence would describe as "a vivid recoil into separateness" [3].

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Nick Land, the Dark Enlightenment (Imperium Books 2022). The essay, written in 2012, is also available online: click here. Note that I am quoting from the fourth and final part of this online version.

 

[2] Similarly, as Land goes on to note, neofascists of the New World Order can't be vocal enough in condemning white nationalism and other forms of what they call 'far-right extremism': 

      "Just as the ratchet progress of neo-puritan social democracy is radically facilitated by the orchestrated pillorying of its embryonic religious forms, so is its trend to consistently neo-fascist political economy smoothed by the concerted repudiation of a 'neo-nazi' (or paleo-fascist) threat. It is extremely convenient, when constructing ever more nakedly corporatist or 'third position' structures of state-directed pseudo-capitalism, to be able to divert attention to angry expressions of white racial paranoia ..."

[3] D. H. Lawrence, ‘Future States’, in The Poems, ed. Cristopher Pollnitz (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 526.

Dark Enlightenment 1: On the Politics of Hate (4 July 2024): click here. 

 

Dark Enlightenment 2: On Exiting the Present (5 July 2024): click here. 

 

Dark Enlightenment 3: On the Zombie Apocalypse (5 July 2024): click here. 

Dark Enlightenment 3: On the Zombie Apocalypse

 

'Democracy is as close to a precise negation of civilization 

as anything could be, short of instantaneous social collapse into 

murderous barbarism or zombie apocalypse (which it eventually leads to).'

 

 

I. 

 

According to Nick Land [1], it's not only popular culture that ends up eating itself, but democracy too becomes self-devouring in what he refers to as the zombie apocalypse, which is why, as we saw in an earlier post, those who can are already searching for an exit and regard flight as a matter of imperative.

 

But what, exactly, does Land mean by this phrase; one that derives from a subgenre of horror fiction in which an overwhelming plague of undead zombies results in the total breakdown of society and leaves just a small group of individuals who have been unable to flee struggling to survive. 

 

That's what we are going to discuss here ...

 

 

II. 

 

If the idea of a zombie apocalypse entered the popular imagination thanks to George A. Romero's 1968 classic movie Night of the Living Dead, it's Land who places the idea within a neoreactionary political context [2] - although, it's true of course, that many other artists and theorists have used the phrase to metaphorically express various cultural anxieties and social tensions.   

 

Land - who, as a philosopher, is kind of a cross between Thomas Hobbes, Georges Bataille, and H. P. Lovecraft - conceives the dynamics of democratisation as fundamentally degenerative; "systematically consolidating and exacerbating private vices, resentments, and deficiencies until they reach the level of collective criminality and comprehensive social corruption". 

Bound together by a circuit of reciprocal incitement, democratic governments and the people who elect them push one another further and further towards "ever more shameless extremities" including cannibalism. Idealists call this progress; neoreactionaries, however, see only voraciousness and fear that the authorities will ultimately be unable to "spare civilization from frenzied, ruinous, gluttonous debauch" - i.e., the zombie apocalypse. 

 

As the democratic virus works its way through society, says Land, then concern with the past and long-term planning into the future both die away and are replaced by "a sterile, orgiastic consumerism, financial incontinence, and a 'reality television' political circus". As we are trapped in a perpetual present at the end of history, it makes perfect sense to "eat it all now". 

 

III.

 

Finally, to help readers understand how we got where we are today, i.e., stuck in an age of relentless state expansion, spurious human rights, and mind control ensuring defence of a universalistic dogma, Land provides a convenient guide to the main sequence of modern political regimes, that I think it worth reproducing here [3]:

 

 

Regime 1: Communist Tyranny 

Typical Growth: -0% 

Voice / Exit: Low / Low 

Cultural climate: Pyschotic utopianism 

Life is … hard but ‘fair’ 

Transition mechanism: Re-discovers markets at economic degree-zero 

 

Regime 2: Authoritarian Capitalism 

Typical Growth: 5-10% 

Voice / Exit: Low / High 

Cultural climate: Flinty realism 

Life is … hard but productive 

Transition mechanism: Pressurized by the Cathedral to democratize 

 

Regime 3: Social Democracy 

Typical Growth: 0-3% 

Voice / Exit: High / High 

Cultural climate: Sanctimonious dishonesty 

Life is … soft and unsustainable 

Transition mechanism: Can-kicking runs out of road 

 

Regime 4: Zombie Apocalypse 

Typical Growth: N/A 

Voice / Exit: High (mostly useless screaming) / High (with fuel, ammo, dried food, precious metal coins) 

Cultural climate: Survivalism 

Life is … hard-to-impossible 

Transition mechanism: Unknown 

 

 

IV.

 

The question, I suppose, is: How seriously should we take Land's thoughts on these matters? 

 

Well, when I first encouraged readers of Torpedo the Ark to accept the challenge of his writings on dark enlightenment back in October 2015 - click here - I have to admit that I didn't take them as seriously as I do now. 

 

The world has changed dramatically in the last decade, however, and changed in a manner which, it seems to me, only lends credence to Land's analysis. One worries more now about the fate of the West than one worried ten years ago  and it seems to me that offensive strategies are required urgently if we are to avoid a zombie apocalypse (that defensive strategies, such as quarantine, just won't do the trick).

 

Although, if I'm honest, I suspect it's already too late and the election of Keir Starmer's Labour government with a huge majority here in the UK hardly fills me with hope for the future ...

 

Notes

 

[1] See Nick Land, The Dark Enlightenment (Imperium Books, 2022). The essay, written in 2012, is also available online: click here. Note that I am quoting from the first and third parts of this online version.

 

[2] Having said that, one might recall the 1940 film The Ghost Breakers (dir. George Marshall, 1940), starring Bob Hope as Larry Lawrence who delivers a hilarious line concerning zombies and democrats: click here. 

 

[3] Note that by Voice / Exit Land refers to freedom of speech contra the far more substantial autonomy of the sovereign individual (i.e., the freedom to act without state interference and the freedom to leave when state interference in and control over one's life becomes intolerable). And note also that for all regimes, growth expectations assume moderately competent population.

 

 

Dark Enlightenment 1: On the Politics of Hate (4 July 2024): click here.  

 

Dark Enlightenment 2: On Exiting the Present (5 July 2024): click here. 

 

Dark Enlightenment 4: On Rejecting Universalism (6 July 2024): click here.

 

 

Dark Enlightenment 2: On Exiting the Present

Nick Land contemplates taking an exit provided 

by the photographer Florian Reinhardt [1]

 

 

I. 

 

According to Foucault, Kant defines Aufklärung in an almost entirely negative way; as an exit, a way out, or an escape route from the past, which he thinks of as marked by darkness, barbarism, and man's immaturity [2].

Funny enough, although Nick Land thinks of his own neoreactionary philosophy as an intrinsic contradiction to the process of enlightenment, he too is looking for ein Ausgang - only he wants an exit from modernity and from the age of Enlightenment [3]. 

 

Realising, however, that there can be no turning back, Land says that any form of conservativism is thus pre-emptively (and ironically) condemned to paradox – i.e., destined to become a kind of retrofuturism; projecting something vital - but also something lost, or forgotten, or denied that existed in the past - into the future.

 

 

II. 

 

D. H. Lawrence, who also sought an exit from the 20th-century and wished to step away from the light, understood this paradox better than most. His novel The Plumed Serpent (1926), for example, attempts to loosen the "aura of necessity and sanctity surrounding categories of the present" [4] and find some clue as to how we might live yesterday tomorrow.

 

Nietzsche too provides philosophical justification for taking what he calls a retrograde step once man has attained a certain level of enlightenment and emerged from superstitious fears and religious concepts. In other words, he has to recognise the importance that resided in old ideas and traditions and that "without such a retrograde step he will deprive himself of the best mankind has hitherto produced" [5].    

 

Good people - the enlightened, who are afraid of the dark - will say this lapsing back into old life-modes that have been surpassed is a form of evil. Whilst that mightn't worry a Nietzschean, Lawrence was at pains to stress that this wasn't a "'helpless, panic reversal'", [6] but was, rather, something performed consciously and with care.

 

And, to reiterate: it's not a return so much as an exiting of the present into the past in order to enter the future.   

 

 

III.

 

Returning to Land, we find a contemporary thinker who is prepared to express his disillusionment with the "direction and possibilities" of the democratic political order born of the Enlightenment. For Land, as for many neoreactionaries and libertarians, freedom - in the classical liberal sense - is no longer compatible with democracy and the expansion of a voracious welfare state. 

 

And many of these people have ceased to care; for them, "democracy is not merely doomed, it is doom itself" and they are now searching for "something else entirely: an exit".  

 

When you risk being eaten alive in what Land thinks of as a coming zombie apocalypse, then flight becomes the ultimate imperative. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] During a period of almost ten years, German filmmaker and photographer Florian Reinhardt snapped over a 1000 pictures on his iPhone of exit signs all over the world. Readers who are interested can find them in a book entitled Exit published byHatje Cantz (2021). Click here for further information on Reinhardt and his work; or here to visit his exit.art website. 

 

[2] See Michel Foucault's essay 'What is Enlightenment?' in The Foucault Reader, trans. Paul Rabinow (Penguin Books, 1984), pp. 32-50, in which he discusses Kant's 1784 essay 'Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?' (usually referred to in English simply as ‘What Is Enlightenment?’).   

 

[3] Nick Land, The Dark Enlightenment (Imperium Books, 2022). The essay, written in 2012, is also available online: click here. Note that I am quoting here from the first part of this online version.  

[4] William E. Connolly, Political Theory and Modernity (Basil Blackwell, 1988), p. ix. 

[5] Nietzsche, Human, all Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge University Press, 1993), I. 1. 20, pp. 22-23. 

[6] D. H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent, ed. L. D. Clarke (Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 138.

 

 

Dark Enlightenment 1: On the Politics of Hate (4 July 2024): click here. 

 

Dark Enlightenment 3: On the Zombie Apocalypse (5 July 2024): click here. 

 

Dark Enlightenment 4: On Rejecting Universalism (6 July 2024): click here.  

Dark Enlightenment 1: On the Politics of Hate

Hate, as Nick Land rightly says, is a word worth considering: one which "testifies with special clarity to the religious orthodoxy" [1] of an age obsessed with hate speech and hate crime. 

 

With reference to the second of these things, Land writes: 

 

"Perhaps its most remarkable feature is its perfect redundancy, when evaluated from the perspective of any analysis of legal and cultural norms that is not enflamed by neo-puritan evangelical enthusiasm." 

 

That's true: for what is a hate crime - if any such thing exists - other than just an ordinary crime with the word 'hate' attached? 

 

And, one might also ask: "what is it exactly that aggravates a murder, or assault, if the motivation is attributed to 'hate'?" 

 

 

II. 

 

In response to these questions, Land says that, firstly, a hate crime "is augmented by a purely ideational, ideological, or even 'spiritual' element, attesting not only to a violation of civilized conduct, but also to a heretical intention."

 

Hate, in other words, is an offense against what Land and his fellow neoreactionaries term the Cathedral [2]; "a refusal of its spiritual guidance, and a mental act of defiance against the manifest religious destiny of the world".

 

Secondly, Land asserts that a hate crime is something that only those on the right can commit; the left is far too enlightened - or far too woke as we would say now - ever to hate; they are passionate about a cause, or morally outraged about an issue, or justifiably angry about some form of behaviour deemed offensive, but never hateful. 

 

For theirs is the politics of Universal Love; a decadent creed which "with its reflex identification of inequality with injustice, can conceive no alternative to the proposition that the lower one's situation or status, the more compelling is one's claim upon society, the purer and nobler one's cause". 

 

Being one of the wretched of this earth is thus a "sign of spiritual election [...] and to dispute any of this is clearly 'hate'". 

 

I think that's correct and I'd like to see Taylor Swift, or anyone else for that matter, just shake off the truth of Land's analysis of slave morality and the manner in which hate functions for some not merely as a form of political incorrectness or criminality, but as sin.   

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Nick Land, The Dark Enlightenment (Imperium Press, 2022). The essay, written in 2012, is also available online - click here - from where I am quoting (see Part 3). 

 

[2] In brief, the Cathedral is an overarching body composed of universities, mainstream media outlets, and many other institutions.

Dark Enlightenment 2: On Exiting the Present (5 July 2024): click here. 

 

Dark Enlightenment 3: On the Zombie Apocalypse (5 July 2024): click here. 

Dark Enlightenment 4: On Rejecting Universalism (6 July 2024): click here. 

On the Philosophical Comeback

jakelikesonions.com / @jakelikesonions 

 

 

 

In philosophy, as in comedy, there have been many great comebacks, ranging from the retort courteous and the quip modest to the reply churlish and countercheck quarrelsome, to borrow, if I may, some of the seven categories humorously established by Shakesepeare in As You Like It [1].

 

Personally, I've always liked Karl Popper's response when challenged by a poker-wielding Wittgenstein to produce an example of a moral rule: Not to threaten visiting lecturers with pokers [2]. It's an amusing and (a quite literally) disarming response; Wittgenstein threw down the poker and stormed out the room after Popper delivered this zinger.

 

But I think my favourite debate-ending comeback involving philosophers is one reported on by Nicholas Blincoe and involves Nick Land leaving a fellow member of the faculty at the University of Warwick speechless when confronted by his inhumanism:

 

"Every month staff would give readings from work-in-progress. Nick's first talk was entitled: 'Putting the Rat back Into Rationality,' in which he argued that, rather than seeing death as an event that happened at a particular time to an individual, we should look at it from the perspectives of the rats carrying the Black Death into Europe; that is, as a world-encircling swarm, without any specific coordinates, or any sense of individuation. An older professor tried to get his head round this idea: 'How might we locate this description within human experience?' he asked. Nick told him that human experience was, of course, worthy of study, but only as much as, say, the experience of sea slugs: 'I don’t see why it should receive any special priority.'" [3]

You can't argue with that. 

 

Nor can you come to any kind of agreement with a thinker like Land, who, of course, gave up on that idea a long time ago. Like Deleuze and Guattari - and to his credit - Land is more concerned with the creation of provocative concepts rather than entering into interminable discussion [4].    

 

Notes

 

[1] See Act V, scene IV.  

[2] See David Edmonds and John Eidinow, Wittgenstein's Poker: The Story of a Ten-Minute Argument Between Two Great Philosophers (HarperCollins, 2001). 

[3] Nicholas Blincoe, 'Nick Land: the Alt-writer', in Prospect (18 May 2017): click here.

[4] See what Deleuze and Guattari say about genuine philosophers having a horror of discussion in What Is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. 28-29.