Fanged Noumena: Amuse-bouche

 

Urbanomic / Sequence Press (2011) 

 

'Nick Land's writings inhabit a disordered anarchitecture, 

a space traversed by rat and wolf vectors, conjuring a 

schizophrenic metaphysics.' [a]

 

 

I. 

 

What the above quote warns is that Land's work isn't exactly an easy read, nor something one can just dip in and out of on a Sunday afternoon. 

 

In fact, one is tempted to say of his philosophy what Bertrand Russell famously said of Heidegger's: "extremely obscure and highly eccentric in its terminology" - an irresponsible running riot of language [b].  

 

Of course, that's no reason to dismiss or downplay the importance of Land's thinking - and, for some of us, the excitement and allure of the work lie precisely in its libidinal occultism or what Ray Brassier later termed mad black Deleuzianism [c].  

 

 

II.

 

Published in 2011, Fanged Noumena is an anthology of writings from the twenty-year period 1987 - 2007. Edited by Robin Mackay and Ray Brassier, it covers various philosophical and aesthetic obsessions and, with a cover featuring a coloured etching by Jake and Dinos Chapman [d], it has since acquired cult status. 

 

Although I was one of the first to buy the book [e], it has taken me until now to finally learn how to engage with it. Even so, there remains a good deal of material which I still don't know how to approach. That's not due, I hope, to a lack of intelligence on my part, but rather a lack of patience to think through qwernomics, or try and make sense of a Ziigothic X-Coda [f]. 

 

Life's too short, as Larry David would say. 

 

 

III. 

 

Before discussing Land's writings in the later posts in this series, I'd like to first examine the Editor's Introduction and briefly sketch a portrait of Land, a much mythologised and much demonised - some would say hugely overrated - figure. 

 

By paying particular attention to his time at Warwick and involvement with the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU), I'm hoping to gain a better understanding of the manner in which the texts gathered in Fanged Noumena went from being complex but fairly standard works to almost impossible to read by the late 1990s. 

 

 

IV. 

 

Mackay and Brassier - both graduate students in the philosophy department at Warwick in the 1990s - rightly emphasise that Land's work "folds genre in on itself, splicing disparate sources" (1) in order to create a "dense, frequently bewildering vortex of hallucinatory conjunctions" (1-2). 

 

They intend for the volume to infect a new generation of readers interested in furthering the collapse of orthodox metaphysics into psychotic cosmogony and accelerating the "obsolescence of humankind" (2). 

 

It's philosophy, Jim - but not of a kind that Bertie Russell would recognise, nor one that many of Land's more orthodox colleagues approved of. Rooted in Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Bataille - i.e., renegade thinkers who "mocked and disparaged academicism" (2) - Fanged Noumena is a violent assault upon conventional wisdom.

 

In brief, Land was a type of punk philosopher - albeit one closer in spirit to the darkly humorous nihilism of the Sex Pistols than the social worker ethos of The Clash [g]. I suspect that is why, although he and I were never close, I always enjoyed my few brief meetings with him to discuss the progress of my own research project at Warwick in the mid-late 1990s [h].      

 

However, once Land resigned his position at Warwick (in 1998), "academic orthodoxy quickly and quietly sealed the breach inflicted in its side by his ferocious but short-lived assault, so that within the first few years of the new century, he had become an apocryphal character, more or less forgotten in philosophical circles" (4). 

 

And yet, his writings continued to inspire a small number of people; "particularly among artists and writers" (4).  

 

 

V. 

 

This is key: Land's libidinal re-materialisation of critique "reconfigures questioning as exploration, whose orienting vector runs from the known towards the unknown, rather than from the unknown to the known" (15). 

 

What that means is Land looks to venture outside the gate, rather than enclose the outside - which for Land is a fully material realm - within the framework of knowledge. Thus, there's nothing to learn by studying Land's philosophy - and much to lose (including your mental health and professional career).  

  

 

VI. 

  

Some readers will, not unreasonably, already be wondering if Land's assault on "reason, truth, and history" (21) isn't predestined for a "collapse into romantic irrationalism" (20). 

 

Mackay and Brassier think not. Conceding that his work is not entirely free of elements that are both romantic and irrational, they also argue that it resists easy reduction to such, thanks in no small part to his nomadic numbering practices (or schizonumerics) and his appeal to an alien (or machinic) intelligence that plays out within human culture but is "unattributable to human agency" (22).

 

Land may be unreasonable and irrational, but he's not crazy. And certainly not stupid.  

 

 

VII. 

 

As well as everything else, Land is a political philosopher - albeit one who dismisses politics in the traditional sense as "the last great sentimental indulgence of mankind" [i]. 

 

Like Marx, Land is obsessed with capitalism; particularly "the most extreme possibilities of techno-capital" (26) which he wishes to accelerate beyond all internal limits (whatever the consequences for man and planet). It's here that his thinking becomes increasingly fictional and speculative (or hyperstitious) in character and he leaves behind the "established norms of academic discourse" (26).   

 

Things become deterritorialised, delirious, and deathly (or thanatropic). Rejecting Deleuze's vitalism, Land radicalises Freud's death drive and posits death as the zero-degree of an absolute deterritorialisation and the primary productive matrix:   

 

"Thus, remodelling the schizoanalytic programme in line with his own militant and fervidly anti-vitalist objectives, Land violently repudiates A Thousand Plateaus' sage warnings against the dangers of a 'too sudden destratification' [...] To Land's eyes, A Thousand Plateaus' newfound caution [...] is a lamentable step backwards from Anti-Oedipus' most audacious innovations, and fatally lays open the latter's unequivocal declaration of war on the strata to the classic compromise-formations and policing of desire that they had previously so effectively challenged." (30) 

 

Land is the exterminating angel called for by Deleuze and Guattari, but he's not quite as they imagined him and he has no interest in preserving organic existence.   

 

 

VIII.

 

For Land and his disciples, cyberpunk - or, encoded in their own jargon, k-punk - wasn't just a literary subgenre, it was a "textual machine for affecting reality by intensifying the anticipation of its future" (33). In other words, it provided a model for their own theory-fictions and hyperstitions [j].

 

I remember that one of the books I was persuaded I simply must read after entering the philosophy department at Warwick in 1994, was William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984). A seminal and quintessential cyberpunk text, it remains second only to George Eliot's Silas Marner (1861) on my list of most boring novels I have ever had to slog through.

 

My negative reaction to this book was only matched by my aversion to the headache-inducing jungle beat of darkcore and a preference for the Schwarzenegger movie Twins (1988) over The Terminator (1984). Together, these aesthetico-intellectual shortcomings were probably enough to ensure I would never be considered a suitable candidate for Nick's inner circle or invited to participate in the CCRU ...     

 

  

IX. 

   

"The inception of the amorphous and short-lived Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) - established at Warwick University in 1995, shortly before Land's departure from academia, but immediately disowned as an undesirable parasite by the institution to which it was precariously affixed [...] - marks yet another important phase-transition in Land's work." (39)

 

And the key term of this phase-transition: geotraumatics - a concept via which Land makes an "audacious attempt [...] to characterise all terrestrial existence, including human culture, as a relay of primal cosmic trauma" (39).   

 

Pop-reggae specialists UB40 were worried that the earth might die screaming, but Land is here to tell us that, actually, it was born 4.5 billion years ago in absolute fucking agony. 

 

The retraction of its molten outer surface and its "subsequent segregation into a burning iron core" (39-40) is described by Land as "the aboriginal trauma whose scars are inscribed, encrypted, throughout terrestrial matter, instituting a register of unconscious pain coextensive with the domain of stratified materiality" (40) beyond anything that Freud - or even Deleuze and Guattari - ever imagined.     

 

For Land, all structure is repressive and everything - from the smallest cell to the largest terrestrial body - is seeking a release from its organisation: "Nothing short of the complete liquidation of biological order and the dissolution of physical structure can suffice to discharge the aboriginal trauma that mars terrestrial existence." (41)

 

Some will see this as a radical furthering of pessimism; others - like Brassier - will speak of nihilism unbound. Either way, it's a pretty challenging and uncompromising way of thinking - and entirely logical. It's also one of the reasons that I still find myself attracted to Land, despite our many differences. 

 

Like Sid Vicious, he just never saw a red light, only green, and no one can accuse Land of not having taken his mad, bad and dangerous project "as far as he possibly could" (53).     

 

 

X. 

 

Critics - and he has many (particularly on the miserabilist left) - will say that Land's philosophy was always going to terminate in neoreaction and/or a "puerile capitulation to neo-liberal 'realism' shrouded in mysticism" (51). 

 

Everything in his writings that "falls outside the parameters of disciplinary knowledge can and will be effectively dismissed by those who police the latter" (54) 

 

But as Mackay and Brassier conclude:

 

"The challenge of Land's work cannot be circumvented by construing the moral dismay it (often deliberately) provokes as proof of its erroneous nature, or by exploiting the inadequacies in Land's positive construction as an excuse to evade the corrosive critical implications of his thought." (53)

 

Land's thought-experiments have made crucial contributions to "the diagnosis of the cosmic, biological, evolutionary, and cultural genealogy and nature of the human" (53). And, more than this, he has given us the tools - and weapons - with which to launch future assaults "against the Human Security System" (54), should we choose (or dare) to do so.  

  

  

Notes

 

[a] Robin Mackay and Ray Brassier, 'Editor's Introduction' to Nick Land's Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987 - 2007 (Urbanomic / Sequence Press, 2011), p. 1. Future page references to this book will be given directly in the post between round brackets.   

 

[b] Bertrand Russell, Wisdom of the West: A Historical Survey of Western Philosophy in its Social and Political Setting, ed. Paul Foulkes (Macdonald, 1959), p. 303. 

 

[c] Mackay and Brassier explain what's meant by this in their 'Editor's Introduction' to Fanged Noumena: "Land seized upon Deleuze-Guattari's transcendental materialism [...] and subjected it to ruthless cybernetic streamlining, excising all vestiges of Bergsonian vitalism to reveal a deviant and explicitly thanatropic mechanism." (5)

      Despite this, it's important to remember that at the core of Land's thought "are the works of Immanuel Kant" (6) - something which is, I think, often overlooked or not understood by those readers who think everything starts with Nietzsche or only come for the Lovecraft.   

 

[d] The cover image by Jake and Dinos Chapman is from Disasters of War IV (2001); a hand-coloured etching with watercolour (24.5 x 34.5 cm).

 

[e] The book was originally published in a 1000 numbered copies; mine is 278. 

 

[f] Critics suggest that even Land didn't really know what he was trying to say - or, if he did, didn't mean it - but that seems unfair and mistaken. Nevertheless, it's amusing to note Land's initial response to Mackay's request to republish his old writings: 

      "'It's another life; I have nothing to say about it - I don’t even remember writing half of those things … I don't want to get into retrospectively condemning my ancient work - I think it's best to gently back off. It belongs in the clawed embrace of the undead amphetamine god.'"

      See Robin Mackay, 'Nick Land: An Experiment in Inhumanism', (2013): click here.  

 

[g] For readers who want a more detailed explanation of the difference between the Sex Pistols and The Clash (and why my allegiance is to the former rather than the latter), see the post dated 2 August 2018: click here.   

 

[h] I was doing my PhD in the philosophy department at Warwick between 1994 and 2000, and Land was assigned as my Graduate Progress Committee member during my first year. 

      I have to confess, however, that I had no real interest in what the CCRU were up to. My thinking on Nietzsche was far more influenced by Keith Ansell-Pearson's work than Nick's (Keith being my supervisor). That said, I did appreciate Nick's career advice, which encouraged me in the view that it was better to flip burgers from the back of a van than pursue a position in academia.    

 

[i] Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism (Routledge, 1992), p. 197. 

 

[j] See my post of 18 May 2026 in which I discuss the term (and concept) of hyperstition: click here. 

 

 

For the first post following this taster - on 'Nick Land and the New Amazons' (1 June 2026) - click here.

 

 

On Nick Land and Albert Camus: From Hyperstition to Absurdism

Accelerating the Absurd 

(Portrait of Nick Land and Albert Camus) 

(SA/2026)

 

 

 

I. 

 

We closed a recent post on hyperstition by suggesting that Nick Land's theory might be understood as a form of post-irony - a conceptual space in which the virtue of sincerity returns, albeit in a compromised (impure, less naive) form. 

 

This yields an amusingly paradoxical result. It becomes possible to speak of the absurd in all seriousness: "Not because you forgot it was absurd, but because you no longer believe that absurdity disqualifies meaning." [1] 

 

By invoking fictions to manufacture reality, hyperstition ultimately abandons us in a world shaped by indifferent, chaotic forces. And by treating reality as an artificial construct, Landian philosophy builds the ultimate Absurd landscape. 

 

Could it be, then, that Nick Land (inadvertently) returns us to Albert Camus, albeit with a dark, cyberpunk twist? 

 

This is the question we will (briefly) address here ... 

 

II. 

 

This is not a question we would have been permitted to ask during the mid-1990s, when the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) was aggressively exerting its quasi-occult influence over the philosophy department at Warwick University. 

 

As a PhD student there at the time, I always found Land extremely polite and personable, despite his Mephistophelian reputation. Yet, to the CCRU's zealous inner circle, Camus was a philosophical enemy and I recall being condemned by one of Land's followers for daring to quote from L'Homme révolté (1951) in my doctoral thesis [2]. 

 

The CCRU wanted to dissolve human agency into the techno-capital matrix. Camus, by contrast, insisted on human defiance in the face of a meaningless void. For the Warwick avant-garde, this made Camus an old-fashioned moral humanist clinging to the dignity of Man.  

 

That might be true. But, whilst I may not have shared all of Camus's politico-philosophical prejudices, the fact is that L'Étranger (1942) remains a far more enjoyable read than William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984). 

 

And, well, as Elaine Benes would say, Camus was just so good-looking [3] ...

 

 

III. 

 

In Le mythe de Sisyphe (1942), Camus defines the Absurd as the gulf between the human desire for meaning and the sheer indifference of the universe. 

 

Nick Land's cybergothic philosophy has a similar pessimistic starting point and, like Camus, he strips away the comforting illusion of any logic or purpose. For Land, human intentions, morals, and desires are entirely irrelevant; history is driven by the alien and artificial forces of techno-capital. 

 

There is, therefore, a degree of structural affinity between their respective philosophies. One might even compare the Landian subject - trapped in hyperstitious feedback loops and techno-myths determining reality - with Camus's figure of Sisyphus, forever pushing his rock up the mountain. 

 

Both are obliged to accept their fate over which they have no control (which, in fact, controls and engineers them). 

 

Indeed, both are encouraged to affirm their fate and, in the case of the Landian subject, accelerate the inhuman processes unfolding not in order to be happy, but so that they might be erased, as Michel Foucault famously wrote, "like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea" [4].        

  

Notes

 

[1] Victor Stones, 'Hyperstition and Nick Land's Accelerationism: A Deep Reflection', medium.com (18 Nov 2024): click here. 

 

[2] My thesis - Outside the Gate (University of Warwick, 2000) - dealt with the political character of Nietzsche's philosophical project and I quoted Camus on several occasions on the question of revolutionary violence, state tyranny, etc. 

 

[3] Seinfeld, season 6, episode 5: 'The Couch' (dir. Andy Ackerman, written by Larry David, 1994). 

      The point is, it doesn't always matter what someone's views are. You can forgive a good deal when someone is attractive and Camus is widely considered one of the most handsome of all philosophers, celebrated for his physical features, his sharp sense of style, and his air of iconic coolness. No wonder Sartre was envious of him and their friendship eventually ended in tears.   

 

[4] Foucault was writing in Les mots et les choses (1966), translated into English as The Order of Things (1971), p. 387. 

      That's the crucial difference between Camus and Land: the former leaves his readers with the thought that Sisyphus ultimately finds a way to be happy (that his task is itself enough to fill his heart with joy); the latter offers no such comfort and doesn't give a damn about the happiness (or survival) of humanity. Land knows that civilisation is ultimately designing the technology that will replace us. 

      A friend of mine once put it this way: Camus recognises life is an absurd comedy but he still hopes man can provide the punchline; Land thinks of things more as a Lovecraftian horror story and chooses to side with Cthulhu.   

 

What's In a Word: Hyperstition

Image of Nick Land by Victor Stones

The Brazilian Mutt [1]

 

 

I. 

 

Despite Michael Scott's belief to the contrary, the seven-letter assemblage s-t-i-t-i-o-n is neither an actual word in itself, nor even a suffix as such [2]. 

 

And apart from superstition and interstition, I think even Susie Dent - Countdown's resident lexicographer and etymologist - would struggle to come up with any other terms ending this way. 

 

Unless, that is, she happens to be familiar with the writings of rogue philosopher Nick Land who developed (and weaponised) the term hyperstition in the mid-1990s, when guiding spirit and chief theorist of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, at the University of Warwick.  

 

 

II. 

 

Hyperstition is a rather lovely neologism and a crucial concept within Land's work and the thinking of those who were in some manner influenced by him - such as Mark Fisher and Simon O'Sullivan, for example [3]. It can, surprisingly perhaps, be defined quite simply and clearly: 

 

Hyperstition is the idea that theory, fiction, or memetic ideas can manifest and bring about their own reality via feedback loops and cultural momentum. [4]

 

It is, if you like, a more dynamic and active form of superstition that can materially change things. For example, cyberspace originated as a purely fictional concept in William Gibson's novel Neuromancer (1984). But it inspired engineers, investors, and cultures to build the actual Internet [5].

 

Another example is provided by Bitcoin, which started as a highly technical (if somewhat speculative) proposal posted on an obscure forum. As traders bought into the narrative of a decentralised cryptocurrency, however, their collective belief created the multi-billion-dollar market we see today [6]. 

 

But hyperstition isn't just the science of self-fulfilling prophecy - it's also a way of playing with time; of telling stories about the future in order to retroactively affect the present. In other words, by articulating tomorrow, you change how people act today to make that future happen. This is what gives science fiction its potency. 

 

It all sounds a bit like magical thinking and I'm sure that's how friends at Treadwell's would interpret the theory. But it's not quite that - even if Land himself often discussed hyperstition in occult language borrowed from Lovecraft; he would, for example, call it a coincidence intensifier or speak of invoking the Old Ones [7].  

 

Such framing, of course, serves to highlight the idea that when collective narratives take hold of a society they seem to possess an autonomous life of their own, becoming forces independent of human agency. 

 

And so we arrive at Land's other big idea - accelerationism, or the virulent logic of techno-capitalism. The key point is this: don't fool yourself that mankind is master of events or will determine its own destiny (and don't think all knowledge is empowering). 

  

 

III.

 

In sum: whilst there are many criticisms one might make of Land's theory - it depends, for example, "on a concept he never properly defines: non-human intelligence" [8] - the idea of hyperstition is always going to appeal to those who are searching for a form of post-irony; "a cultural condition in which sincerity returns [...] but returns transformed, self-aware, no longer naive" [9]. 

 

For this has the amusingly paradoxical result that it becomes possible to say something absurd but in all seriousness: "Not because you forgot it was absurd, but because you no longer believe that absurdity disqualifies meaning." [10] 

 

Could it be that Nick Land takes us back to Albert Camus (albeit with a dark twist)? That suggests an interesting post for another day ... [11]

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Victor Stones (aka Victor Alfons Steuck) is a Brazilian writer, artist, and musician with a deep interest in philosophy, language, and the evolving role of technology in society. He explores many thought-provoking topics on his website, blending critical thinking with creativity.

      His excellent essay 'Hyperstition and Nick Land's Accelerationism: A Deep Reflection', in which he introduces the concept of metastition as a diffractive counterpoint, can be found on his website linked to above or on medium.com (18 Nov 2024): click here. I will refer to this essay in the main text and quote from it in the notes below. I have also borrowed and adapted (a detail from) the amusing image created by Stones featuring Nick Land (and, originally, Michael Scott).    

 

[2] The sitcom character Michael Scott - played brilliantly by Steve Carell in The Office (US version) utters the immortal line 'I'm not superstitious, but I'm a little stitious', in the season 4 two-part episode titled 'Fun Run' (written and dir. by Greg Daniels): click here to watch on YouTube.

      Interestingly, Victor Stones argues that stition is effectively a real word - even if it has been extracted as a grammatical phantom from superstition - as it refers to the "underlying scaffolding of beliefs that helps us navigate reality" and would include ethical principles and cultural norms. But he also insists that Land's 'stition' is not truer than Michael Scott's; "it is simply dressed in theory" and coined knowingly.   

 

[3] I'm assuming most readers will be familiar with the name Mark Fisher, if only because I have written many posts about his work on TTA: click here. As for Simon O'Sullivan, he's a philosopher and artist working at the intersection of these two practices who regularly writes about hyperstition as an experimental methodology.

      Other thinkers influenced by Land who have developed his theory of hyperstition in their own work include Austrian philosopher Armen Avanessian, who co-directed the documentary Hyperstition in 2016; Iranian philosopher Reza Negarestani, who, in his seminal theory-fiction book Cyclonopedia, utilised the concept to describe petroleum-based mythologies that alter geopolitical realities; and the Australian xenofeminist Amy Ireland, whose work frequently explores the hyperstitional properties of language, logic, and poetry.   

 

[4] Nick Land helpfully described hyperstition himself as 'an element of effective culture that makes itself real, through fictional qualities functional as a time-travelling device'.   

 

[5] As Victor Stones reminds us, in a similar manner "many technologies initially imagined in science fiction, such as Artificial Intelligence or Virtual Reality, have transitioned from speculative fiction into practical innovation because of their hyperstitional power". See his essay linked to in note 1 above. 

      This is why we should not only be careful what we wish for, but cautious about what we dream, fantasise, or imagine.   

 

[6] It is important to remember, however, that for every Bitcoin, "a thousand crypto-narratives collapsed" and one of the criticisms of Land's theory is that it doesn't account for this: "It notices winners and retroactively calls them inevitable; survivorship bias dressed in cybernetics." Empirical claims about how narratives become real should always be treated with caution for as long as they remain untested or are in fact untestable. Again, see Victor Stones, from whose essay I quote here.

 

[7] As Stones says, the CCRU deliberately wrote about "time-warps and Lovecraftian magic" for a good reason; it induced readers of their philosophy to act as if these things were real: "And acting-as-if, for Land, is indistinguishable from reality." 

 

[8] "Land writes as if capitalism or the market 'thinks', processing information, selecting trajectories, and 'manufacturing intelligence' without human direction. Yet he provides no operational criteria to distinguish such intelligence from stochastic noise, homeostatic feedback, or simple anthropomorphic projection."

      Quoted from Victor Stones, 'Hyperstition and Nick Land's Accelerationism: A Deep Reflection' ... See link provided in note 1 above. 

      Stones goes on to accuse Land of being a crypto-theologian when it comes to this question of non-human intelligence; one who has fooled himself (and his loyal followers) into thinking he's making strictly analytical assertions, when he is actually making faith claims or expressing his own ideological preferences. 

      Ultimately, the practice of metastition proposed by Stones is a conscious, reflective intervention into the blind feedback loops of hyperstition and rooted in old school sincerity; strong, but not naive and with nothing post-ironic about it. Politically, it allows for (and encourages) accountability and responsibility, whereas the politics of hyperstition and accelerationism promoted by Land ushers in a radically inhuman future via a post-democratic period he terms the Dark Enlightenment (which I have written about on TTA here).          

 

[9] Ibid.

 

[10] Ibid.

 

[11] That day is now here.

 

Retromania: Reviewed and Reassessed - Part 5: Tomorrow (Chapters 11 and 12)

Simon Reynolds: Retromania
Cover of the German edition (Ventil Verlag, 2012)

I.

In chapter 11, Reynolds - a former sci-fi fanatic - indulges in nostalgia for the Space Age; a time of giant steps and final frontiers, as he describes it. 

 

He also mourns the "absence of futuristic-ness" [a] in the fabric of daily life and says neostalgia became an increasingly widespread feeling during the opening decade of the 21st century, though, I have to admit, I didn't feel this "pang for the future that never arrived" [362]; perhaps because I preferred The Flintstones to The Jetsons [b] - or maybe because I hate motorists at ground level and the last thing I would want to see is flying automobiles blotting out the sky. 

 

Whatever the reason, I'm not particularly disappointed the future didn't arrive - for I never really expected or wanted it to. And when it has interfered with the present in the form of advanced (and alien) technologies, it's not been entirely advantageous - are we really any happier or better off now that we experience the world via a series of screens or have outsourced our thinking to AI? 

 

I don't think so: and Reynolds isn't particularly impressed by the digital age, which he describes as more decadent in character than heroic. He wants the world of Star Trek and to be able to beam on board the USS Enterprise - not the future glimpsed in Blade Runner in which it rains all the time, or the grotty on-board conditions of the commercial starship Nostromo, as seen in Ridley Scott's Alien (1979).  

 

 

II.  

 

Sooner or later, Reynolds was always going to relate this idea of nostalgia for the future to the world of popular music - which I guess is fair enough, considering he's a music journalist, critic and author. 

 

But, if I'm honest, it gets a little boring reading about bands and DJs and genres of music I've never heard of and I can't help wondering at the kind of books Reynolds might have given us had he spent a little more of his time reading literature and philosophy and a little less listening to records ... [c] 

 

III.

Is nostalgia chiefly a "not feeling at home in the here-and-now, a sensation of alienation" [370]? That seems to view it as tied to a model of deficiency and/or lack; a model which, as a Deleuzian, is obviously problematic for me. 

 

Might we not think nostalgia as a form of desire; something positive and productive? By tying nostalgia to the (socially constructed) idea of lack, Reynolds views it as the pursuit of a missing (ideal) object, which is all very Freudian and Lacanian, but is that really where he wants to go? 

 

(I think perhaps he does, but I don't.)

As for alienation ... Why bring in a dated 19th century concept like this; one that relies on the very deficiency model rejected above? Further, if there's no human essence - and there is no human essence - then how can a subject ever really feel or be alienated? 

 

Perhaps Baudrillard is right to say (rather amusingly) that we are today alienated from alienation and that we have moved beyond the dramas of alienation played out in modernity. Either that, or that alienation is now total within an age of simulation in which the individual is fully codified. 

IV.
 

"In recent decades, nostalgia for the future has gradually lost its vagueness and become tied to a specific idée fixe: an archaic and sometimes comically ossified idea of what the future is going to be like." [370] 

 

In other words, it's become a retro-futurist emotion, stimulated by popular culture and in particular a vision of the future that was in large part invented by the Disney Corporation: 'Tomorrowland' (1955) providing the material blueprint for the plastic utopia to come. 

 

Amusingly, Tomorrowland is now a museum - and, after visiting, Reynolds came to much the same conclusion as Bruce Handy writing in Time in 1998: The future isn't what it used to be - i.e., it's "desperately uninspiring and lugubrious" [372] - which is shit in anybody's language. 

 

But is the fault less Disney's and more ours? Have we lost the ability to dream as a culture and "to come up with visionary goals to aim for" [372]?

 

Possibly. 

 

But again, let's enter a note of caution before throwing ourselves on the floor and bewailing our own inability to imagine the future. For mightn't it be a sign that we have wised up a little as a culture; that the postmodern abandonment of grand utopian visions - particularly when these are tied to dangerous political ideologies - is something we should be proud of. 

 

I certainly don't wish to resurrect the myth of rational progress and recommit to a single telelogical future; I rather like the ambiguity of the present and have no desire for a better world. I believe in the ruins of The City of Tomorrow and if that makes me a cynic, or a pessimist - or even a defender of capitalist realism - well, so be it. 

  

 

V.   

 

Moving on ... and essentially skipping a couple of sections, we come to the end of chapter 11, in which - to my surprise - Oswald Spengler again puts in an appearance; just what is Reynolds's fascination with this historically significant but intellectually marginal (and marginalised) figure? 

 

He refers us to the Faustian spirit identified by Spengler in his 1931 work Der Mensch und die Technik - a spirit which, says Reynolds, "is the dynamic behind modernism and modernisation, the impulse that propelled both the space race and twentieth-century music's exploration of sonic space through electronics" [394]. 

 

That may or may not be true, but this Faustian spirit is also tragic in nature and Spengler is adamant that there can be no prudent retreat into the past - not even one made in order to recover a lost future. He also dismisses optimism as a form of cowardice [d], so, ultimately, I can't see the appeal of his work for Reynolds, though he has clearly been influenced by the latter as this paragraph illustrates:

 

"When you look at the culture of the West in the last decade or so - the dominance of fashion and gossip, celebrity and image; a citizenry obsessed with decor and cuisine; the metastasis of irony throughout society - the total picture does look a lot like decadence. Retro culture would then be just another facet of the recline and fall of the West." [394-395]          

 

Reynolds suggests that this leaves opens "the possibility of the new coming from outside the West, from regions of the globe where culture is less exhausted" [395]. He specifically mentions China and India - "set to be the economic and demographic powerhouses of the century" [395] - and two cultures which, interestingly enough, Spengler also regarded as high-level, equal in spiritual greatness to the West. Obviously, both are ancient cultures and yet, paradoxically, they "feel 'younger' than us at the moment" [395].    

 

I have to admit, I have my doubts (and concerns) about the idea that the economic and geo-political future belongs to Asia; for there are multiple factors (including some we cannot foresee) that might prevent the global dominance of China and India. 

 

Nevertheless, Reynolds also seems to pin his musical hopes on the non-Western world, now that the "Anglo-American pop tradition is all innovated out" [396]. But again, I'm not sure the Chinese Communist Party will allow an explosion of "popular energies and desires" [396] amongst the young. 

 

And the last time they encouraged such it resulted not in the Summer of Love, but the atrocities of the Cultural Revolution, so those who advise the West to simply rest and outsource the future to Beijing should be careful what they wish for.    

 

 

VI. 

 

I smiled to hear that even William Gibson has given up on the future; that he prefers these days to speak of atemporality and the digital Now. 

 

When I was in the philosophy department at Warwick in the 1990s and the CCRU was a thing (if it ever was a thing), Gibson's 1984 novel Necromancer was required reading. Unfortunately, I found it to be one of the most boring books I have ever attempted to read - right up there with Naked Lunch (1959) and Silas Marner (1861).   

 

However, I agree with Gibson that the 21st century is richer, stranger and more complex than any imaginary future and that science fiction, therefore - at least in the traditional speculative sense - is now redundant: the future is here already and our task today is to explore the alien present [e]. 

 

Reynolds, however, isn't of this view: "Gibson's perspective is so completely other to my own that I'm flabbergasted." [397] I'm sorry about that, although it's always nice to see a piece of 18th century British slang being used.

 

 

VII. 

 

And now, the end is near - chapter 12 - the final chapter: 'The Shock of the Old' ... Time for Reynolds to address those questions he posed, but perhaps failed to fully address along the way. 

 

Questions such as: Given that I enjoy many aspects of retro, why do I still feel deep down that it is lame and shameful? [403 - italics in the original].

 

I'm tempted to suggest it's because, Simon, you still labour under the illusion of psychic depth. If you were a little less soulful - became a little more floral - you'd miraculously find much of the shame you experience (which seems more moral than instinctive in nature and which often serves to hinder your enjoyment) simply fades away. 

 

Of course, becoming-flower isn't easy. But, if a wasp can manage it, I'm sure you'll be able to find a way (and can always turn for advice to Deleuze and Guattari writing in A Thousand Plateaus).  

 

 

VIII. 

 

Reynolds admits that his understanding of rock and pop is very much infused by the "belief that art has some kind of evolutionary destiny, a teleology that manifests itself through genius artists and masterpieces that are monuments to the future" [403]. The funny thing is, he says this in part due to the fact he was born in 1963 - 'The Year That Rock Began'. 

 

But I was born in the same year, and my understanding of popular culture isn't weighed down by this belief. Perhaps that's because I was born under a different star sign [f]; or perhaps it's because I took the work of postmodernists such as Lyotard more seriously than Reynolds and have made terms such as irony, incredulity, and insouciance watchwords rather than belief, teleology, destiny, etc.        

 

Again, by his own admission, his obsession with and loyalty to music served only to consolidate his outmoded ideas and beliefs:

 

"Although by the early eighties modernism was thoroughly eclipsed within art and architecture, and postmodernism was seeping into popular music, the spirit of modernist pop carried on with rave and the experimental fringe of rock. These surges of renewal served as a booster shot for me, reconfirming the modernist credo [...]" [404] 

 

That's a really rather terrible admission of bias; superhonest, but shocking. And for me it confirms Jamie Reid's idea that music prevents you thinking for yourself [g]. 

 

Reynolds continues: "There is an argument that the linear model of progress is an ideological figment [...] [404] - well, yes, I made exactly this argument earlier in this post. 

 

But despite having his belief in progress badly shaken by recent events, Reynolds sadly chooses to avoid the argument and instead just doubles-down on his position: "As a died-in-the-wool [sic] modernist [...] I would find it hard to break the habit of a lifetime [...] Giving it up would feel like giving in, learning to settle for less." [404]  

 

Again, that's honest, but disappointing: he sounds like one of those Japanese soldiers stranded on a Pacific desert island for many long years and refusing to accept the war finished long ago. I know some people admire holdouts - and perhaps there is something admirable about an act of defiant resistance - but ... well, there are surely better hills to die on than that of popular music. 

 

 

IX.  

 

Reynolds doesn't like flatness and so he won't think much of Pancake Tuesday, Jane Birkin's physique, or the Deleuze and Guattari text recommended earlier. 

 

For as the title suggests, Mille plateaux is all about flat terrain and molecular politics, rather than mountain peaks and what Reynolds describes as the momentous and by which he refers to molar events and the idea that these alone bring about significant historical change or progress. 

 

As an object-oriented philosopher, I subscribe of course to a flat ontology, which is to say, to the idea that all objects exist on the same plane of reality and I can't help suspecting that Reynolds would not care for this model of being; that he rather likes hierarchical structures that allow for judgement. 

 

Or perhaps he just has a fear of feeling emotionally flat and this explains his need of newness and constant stimulation, including, during his rave days, the entactogenic drug ecstasy [h].

 

 

X. 

 

Another thing Reynolds does not like is stillness; he wants things to keep moving - and moving forward at pace. But hasn't he heard that sometimes one can be quick even when standing still (that speed and intensity do not necessarily require movement)? Stillness isn't synonymous with stasis and stagnancy.

 

I refer him once more to Deleuze and Guattari, and their notions of lines of flight and deterritorialisation; neither of which are progressive ideas - there's no linear movement from A to B - but both of which allow for radical change and the breaking away from established habits, structures, and identities so as to invent new ways of thinking and acting. 

 

Stillness is a keyword for me now; as it became for Roland Barthes in his late work on the Neutral  and I'm pretty sure the latter also writes in praise of flatness too.  

 

 

XI. 

  

This couple of sentences made me smile: 

 

"This attachment on the part of young people to genres that have been around for decades mystifies me. Don't they want to push them aside?" [408]

 

Apparently not! 

 

But is it any more mystifying than why the author of Retromania should wish to cling on to ideas from the late-19th and early-20th centuries to do with progress and making everything new.   

 

Maybe young people don't give a shit anymore about when a genre was first invented and don't feel that "vague nostalgia [...] for a lost golden age when music had power and integrity" [410] that Simon and Sandi Thom think they should. 

 

Maybe they prefer music that is less potent and less meaningful, but also doesn't demand that they adhere to it with fanatic loyalty and at the exclusion of all other interests; maybe they don't need mythical rock gods (or even the NME) to tell them what to think and feel any longer [j].     

 

 

XII.

 

Reynolds's closing remarks on the economics and politics of pop culture in an era of postproduction were provocative. I particularly like the bit about meta-money and meta-music being connected at some fundamental level (although I don't know if it's true outside of Marxist analysis):  

 

"Culture, as the superstructure to the economy's base, reflects the gaseous quality of our existence. The insubstantiality of the economy revealed itself, horribly, a few years ago. We are still waiting for the music-about-music bubble to burst." [420-421]

 

For Reynolds, it is fashion which provides the "nexus between late capitalism and culture" [421] - the point where they intermesh. If video killed the radio star, fashion killed popular music; infecting the latter with its "artificially accelerated metabolic rate, its rapid cycles of engineered obsolescence" [421].

 

The logic of fashion has polluted the sweet river of time that once flowed gently but inexorably from past to future. Or as Reynolds writes: "Fashion - a machinery for creating cultural capital and then, with incredible speed, stripping it of value and dumping the stock - permeates everything." [422]

 

As a philosopher on the catwalk, I smiled at this. But I also feel I have to push back a little - even if Reynolds himself slightly qualifies the above by conceding that the fashion-isation of the world "can't totally explain the rise of retro rock" [422].

 

Firstly, it's a little surprising that a self-professed modernist like Reynolds should so dislike fashion - the most modern of all modern phenomena. But then lacking any telos - any final purpose - I suppose fashion was always going to seem trivial and superficial to Reynolds. 

 

One might have imagined, however, based on the experimental and radical nature of the music he privileges, that he'd rather approve of the manner in which fashion ruptures the order of referential reason, dissolving old values and conventions. It may only provide the illusion of change, but there is a genuine passion at its heart: the passion for empty signs and cycles and for making the insignificant signify and it's this which makes it of interest (to me at least). 

 

 

XIII.    

 

If fashion is for Reynolds is a non-starter and if "it is now pretty clear that pop is living on borrowed time and stolen energy" [422], then where do those who care about cultural vitality and rescuing lost futures go from here?   

 

Reynolds says he'd "love to nominate hauntology" [423] as the answer to this question and as "the alternative to the curatorial model of art" [423]. But he can't bring himself to do it. For he knows that in many ways even those figures he admires working in this area, such as Ariel Pink [i], "are postproduction artists too, rummaging through the flea market of history and piecing together the audio equivalent of a junk-art installation" [423].    

 

By his own admission, this leads to a tricky question for Reynolds as an Ariel Pink fan and champion of the hauntological in general: what exactly is this music's contribution? 

 

"In fact, what in today's musical landscape is rich enough, nourishing enough - which is to say, sufficiently nonderivative - to sustain future forms of revivalism and retro? Surely, at a certain point, recycling will just degrade the material beyond the point that further use-value can be extracted." [424]. 

 

That seems a fair observation. But surely then, when this point is reached is precisely when people will - from necessity - create new sounds. So he should find comfort in this idea - and that thing he cherishes called hope. 

 

And indeed, he does: concluding his study with a line that might have come from Fox Mulder's bedroom wall: "I still believe the future is out there." [428] 

 

So, there was really nothing to worry about all along ... 

 

  

Notes

[a] Simon Reynolds, Retromania (Faber and Faber, 2012), p. 362. Future page numbers will be given directly in the text and refer to this edition. 

 

[b] Strangely, however, I prefer Lt. Ellis in her silver mini-skirt [click here] to Loana in her fur bikini, although I'm not blind to the appeal of prehistoric women: click here.  

 

[c] His brief reading of Fernando Pessoa's Book of Disquiet on page 369 is excellent and I only wish Mr Reynolds wrote more on Portuguese poets and French thinkers such as Baudrillard - whom he mentions several times, but never really engages with - and spent a bit less time discussing rap music, rave culture, and obscure electronic groups from the 1990s.     

 

[d] Oswald Spengler, Man and Technics: a Contribution to the Philosophy of Life, trans. C. F. Atkinson, (Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1932), p.103.  

 

[e] That's really not such an outlandish view; J. G. Ballard said much the same thing way back in the seventies; i.e., that sci-fi should stick to exploring the all-voracious present and mapping inner space and the impact of modern technology on the human psyche. For Ballard, in sum, the job of the writer is to invent reality as we already live inside a fictional world order. See the Preface to the French edition of his novel Crash (1974): click here.  

 

[f] I was born on 13 Feb and that makes me an Aquarian; Reynolds was born on 19 June and that makes him a Gemini (and so more prone to belief and less sceptical in character) - or so I'm told by someone who takes this kind of thing seriously.  

 

[g] I'm referring to Jamie Reid's 'Stratoswasticastor' design: click here for details on punkrocker.org.uk 

 

[h] See Simon Renolds, Generation Ecstasy (Routledge, 1999), in which he takes the reader on a tour of the world of rave culture and techno music as a dosed up and blissed out insider. For Reynolds, MDMA was the essential ingredient or catalyst; the magic pill that allowed for a communal and transformative experience bordering on the spiritual (although he does also acknowledge its more troubling aspects).   

 

[i] Reynolds names the American musician and singer-songwriter Ariel Pink as (probably) his favourite artist of the 2000s, even if his hypnogogic sound is "woven out of blurry echoes of halcyon radio pop from the sixties, seventies and eighties" [xxiii] - i.e., the "grand period of primary pop productivity" [423].  

 

[j] As a father of children, Reynolds recognises that younger people do not think the same way that people of his generation think; do not care about the same things: "they're not the least bit interested in the capital 'f' Future, barely ever think about it" [425-426] and their urge to escape the present is satisfied "through fantasy [...] or digital technology" [426].  

 

 

Other posts in the Retromania series can be accessed by clicking here.