In the paper, I briefly intend to contrast two contemporary proposals of what is known as the “inhuman” through the works of Nick Land and Reza Negarestani. The aim of this contrast is to draft a critique against Land’s conception of the inhuman as a largely fallible proposal that still depends radically and even strengthens a despot image of the human[1]. Once this critique is drafted, I seek to highlight the possibilities postulated by the neo-rationalist program elaborated by Negarestani in his essay “The Labor of the Inhuman” (2014), which I argue, could in time permit a stable materialization of inorganic life-forms that actively build upon an objective deferral of the contingent qualities of biological human existence (Sacilotto, 2017). The proposed reading does not plan to blindly oppose Negarestani’s most recent theoretical proposal as an implicit point-by-point response to Land’s work, as has been argued lately (Le, 2019). What I intend is rather to view Negarestani’s proposal as measurable in terms of effect, strategy and process in opposition to Land’s ungrounded proposal of a “radical freedom” that plans to go beyond the parameters of organic human existence, ultimately failing in absence of a commitment to a specified ground or program. This opposition obliges me to subsequently elaborate on three registers of interpretation I intend to develop on the course of this paper which are as follows:
“The first register corresponds to the material entities of flesh and bone and the role they play in both proposals of the inhuman. Flesh largely appears as an unstable and abject entity that reeks of rot, decay and putrefaction in Land’s book The Thirst for Annihilation (1992), which advances a radicalized interpretation of the Freudian death-drive to achieve an apparently anarchical erasure of the human subject. This means that Land tries to theorize a means to self-dissolution through an overriding of the biological human-apparatus (the solid body liquefies itself into a condensed morass of flows and intensities, a putrefactive goo or goo-becoming) unto the inorganic-as-becoming-in-death of the inhuman. Thus, this characterization of the flesh as an abject instrument to achieve the destruction of the human subject is opposed to the bone or skeleton which conceals unwanted qualities of purity, incorruptibility and of architectural hierarchies or fixed structures” (Land, 1992, p. 126).
This brings us to a second register which would imply a level of opposition between the theoretical figures that are re-constructed by both philosophers in their respective proposals: Georges Bataille in the case of Land, and Hegel in the case of Negarestani. This opposition is brought to light in order to make explicit an analogy made by Hegel[2] that analogically links human bone-structure with spirit and intellect; we then propose in turn to think of articulated bone-structure as that which remains after we have carved out the initially unstable qualities of the flesh. In this order of ideas I’d interpret the object of flesh as a metaphor to immediateness or uttermost given in relation to human self-perception, and as that which must be reevaluated in order to proceed with an auto-perfective path in order to fix and constantly engineer our own cognitive capabilities. The analogy made by Hegel would be then paired up with the minimalist or skeletal framework that is theorized by Negarestani towards spirit or general intellect, versus the general economy of excess proposed by Bataille in The Accursed Share (1949), which in turn is taken to its extremes by Land.
Finally, the third register would be the differentiation of two important operations that might take place in both proposals of the inhuman, which are as follows: (a) Land’s interpretation of the Deleuzo-Guattarian machinic unconscious that takes the automatism of human drives to their limit and (b) a machinic conscious[3] that is underway of being constructed, a becoming-machinic of both human cognition and sociality that relies on the transcendental computation elaborated in Negarestani’s most recent philosophical output.
Crushing the Face Drawn in the Sand: The Inhuman as Abject Rot
“As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end (…) one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea” (Foucault, 2005, p. 422. Emphasis added).
Much has been already written in the last five decades about the epitaph Foucault dedicated to the abstract entity known back then as “man” or the “human subject” at the end of The Order of Things. But in the present piece I won’t be elaborating a hermeneutical reading of this much-commented fragment. I’d rather briefly highlight the claim made concerning the necessary erasure or closure of “the human subject” in lieu of an insufficiency to respond to or explain an ever changing historical context. For it was this changing historical context that in turn enabled French anti-humanism to be formulated as a direct response formulated through the theoretical camps of post-phenomenological philosophy, structuralism and post-structuralism as a continuation of this perceived insufficiency and conceptual limits of what it meant to comply to the category of “human subject” at the end of the 20th century[4].
With this in mind, I’d like to now focus on the response elaborated by anti-philosopher Georges Bataille and then link that response to Jean-Francois Lyotard’s libidinal philosophy in order to show how a step was made from a dematerialized anti-humanism that still didn’t get fully rid of an increasingly abstract imperative of the human[5] to a violent, materialist de-subjectification channeled through Lyotard’s inhumanism and which in turn was eventually taken to its limits by Nick Land. To begin, I claim that Bataille appears as an anomalous surge in the aforementioned time-frame, since even though he didn’t technically belong to the previously listed post-phenomenological, structuralist and post-structuralist philosophies, his oeuvre has nevertheless been characterized with pursuing an early anti-humanist point of view (Geroulanos, pp. 184-194). I’d consider this distinction as one intending to pursue a materialist approach towards the erasure of the image of the human, but one that still remains entrenched in a negative theology. Now, this would entail that Bataille’s view of human existence doesn’t seek an ascension of sorts purely through reason, or through an idealist program that has the finality to transcend human contingency (as in a theological telos). Instead, it incentivizes a plundering into the cavernous depths of abject decadence, that is, a downward motion which is to be interminable once we begin the punishing task of uncovering the layers upon layers of material strata cobbled together in order to construct the “human subject”. In this process, Bataille seeks to inadvertently unleash a myriad of untamed transgressions that are birthed from malignant subterranean exhumations in order to destroy any sense of abstract morality or security towards the humanist project. In other words, we are lead toward an entrapment inside the multiple and intoxicating ineffables and unknowns that are the effect of this heretical drilling of abyssal chasms. Ungraspable materiality then becomes once again another name of the sacred:
“…not submitting oneself, and with oneself one’s reason, to whatever is more elevated, to whatever can give a borrowed authority to the being that I am , and to the reason that arms this being. This being and its reason can in fact only submit to what is lower, to what can never serve in any case to ape a given authority (…) In the same way today certain plastic representations are the expression of an intransigent materialism, of a recourse to everything that compromises the powers that be in matters of form, ridiculing the traditional entities, naively rivaling stupefying scarecrows.” (Bataille, 1985, pp. 50-51).
Bataille baptizes this approach of submitting oneself to the opaque and destabilizing uncertainty of human unknowns as “base materialism” (Bataille, Ibid, pp. 45-52), an investigation towards the uncertain that is then further expounded through a labyrinthine shattering of ipseity enabled by the hysterical exacerbations[6] of affect that are fuel to the decomposability of being (Bataille, Ibid, pp. 171-177). Being is thus for Bataille a porous entity, constantly poked at from inner voids that multiply in excess once we are confronted with the inconstancies of a common terra firma or a shared universal project, of “…that which opposes the summit of imperative elevation to the dark abyss that obliterates all existence” (Bataille, Ibid, p. 177). The prominence given to the obliteration of human existence through preposterous existential doubt as an explicit and radical conjuration of anti-humanism, gets further developed as a key element to the dynamics of a general economy exhibited in The Accursed Share (1949), where Bataille vaguely sketches a debased principle for the energetic exuberance of terrestrial life, viewed here as a chain of “wasteful consumption” where any type of biophysical form or body gets permanently drowned out by an uncontained drive to self-annihilation: there is never a finality, or ultimate goal to be achieved by utilizing the energetics of terrestrial life, or a barren void left after the natural decay of a biological singularity, but rather an ecstatic production of a surplus of life-forms that are in turn cyclically obliged to be consumed unto the unavoidable flux of death (Bataille, 1988, pp. 180-182).
The functionalism of this abstracted and all-encompassing economy of terrestrial life was shortly given a second-life by Jean-Francois Lyotard in his maledicted book, Libidinal Economy (1974), albeit in an arguably more anarchical and nihilistic optic that was directly inspired by the concrete philosophy of desire illustrated two years before by Deleuze & Guattari in Anti-Oedipus (1972). Nevertheless, the approach taken by Lyotard ultimately diverges from the economics of both Bataille and Deleuze & Guattari, in the sense that libidinal economy takes anti-humanism to a breaking-point, inaugurating the inhuman as such[7].It does this by radicalizing[8] Sigmund Freud’s drafting of a machinic theory of drives in his Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), whilst placing an adamant emphasis on how the tellurian struggle between the organic and the inorganic, taken to its logical extremes, becomes an assaultive strategy to eradicate the human subject from within.
Before proceeding to explain how this struggle is handled by Lyotard, I’ll briefly go back to Freud’s definition of the inorganic:
“…it must be an old state of things, an initial state from which the living entity has at one time or other departed and to which it is striving to return by the circuitous paths along which its development leads. If we are to take it as a truth that knows no exception that everything living dies for internal reasons becomes inorganic once again then we shall be compelled to say that ‘the aim of all life is death’ and, looking backwards, ‘that inanimate things existed before living ones’ (Freud, p. 32).
It is such then that for Freud, the inorganic is an initial state of inanimate non-being to which a living organism strives to arrive during its lifespan, whilst the organic is a set of conservative instincts (i.e. the instinct of the reproduction of life) that struggle to regulate and temporarily dissolve this craving for complete dissolution (Freud, 1961, pp. 31-32). This means that desire can be mainly seen as a desire for death (propelled by the rapturous death-drive) and we are mechanically policing ourselves to not fully give-in. Following this order of ideas, it can be argued that existence can be seen as subordinated to non-existence: “What we are left with is the fact that the organism wishes to die only in its own fashion. Thus these guardians of life, too, were originally the myrmidons of death”, (Freud, Ibid, p. 33). Lyotard takes this somewhat anti-vitalist view to heart, in utilizing the inorganic as a potency to disassemble the security systems programmed to cordon-off the thresholds of desubjectification that appear when we finally embrace the inevitability of the inorganic condition:
“The organic body, is the body that suppresses polymorphous perversion and partial objects (…) an organic body suffers the repressing of partial drives, which are subordinated to the predominance of sexuality; and we can clearly see that one can articulate a libidinal economy, one of jouissance along with a political economy, one of reproduction, (the simple reproduction of workforce): during the moments of jouissance, of expenditure, -vocabulary used without any reservations-, of the expenditure of energy” (Lyotard, 1973).
Lyotard commands us to be overtaken by the death-drive, for us to reproduce the inorganic no longer as something to be delimited but something that can become an all-enveloping force[9] that literally shatters the image of the human subject to pieces, as is pretended on the opening chapter of Libidinal Economy: the physiological aspects of the organic human-body are violently torn apart, all the mysterious recesses considered by Bataille are now overexposed in a gargantuan diagram (or as Lyotard calls it: a libidinal band that acts as a Möbius strip with no clear beginning or end), and where we can crudely register the uncensored details of our abject condition: the remnants of fecality, the mucus bathing the spread out tissue of our sexual-organs, the material and immaterial impetus of our desire, etc. all mixed up indistinctively in a patchwork were negativity is aggressively affirmed and polymorphous perversion is sculpted into a body. Where no lack or absence exists in order to cool down the thirst of our ever overarching desires, and where the human subject as a closed-off index within a frame or as a distinct referent ceases to exist (Lyotard, 1993, pp. 1-42).
Now, what I rescue from this acephalic formalization of the inhuman, which in any case discards the complexity contained in biological singularity for a formless morass of affects, is the destruction of lack/absence as a regulator of drives and perversions. In this regard, he even goes further than Deleuze & Guattari who construct “zero”, not as lack of affect or desire under the terms of orthodox Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis (Deleuze & Guattari, 2000, pp. 56-68), but rather as a material threshold where one can become either an inorganic entity (the full body without organs) that is deeply catatonic and imprisons any possibility for constructive desire to take place (Ibid, p. 329), or as a regulative matrix of desire (the body without organs) which sprouts gradients of intensities directed towards unlimited becomings that are mediated in turn by a vitalist and constructive desire (Ibid, p. 330). For Lyotard, the conception of zero must be abolished as lack, as a cooling-down effect and a mediator for desire and intensities. Thus the productive must be indistinct to the destructive, and zero is in itself is its own destiny: “…the passage through the zero is itself a particular libidinal course, that the position of the Signifier or of the Other is, in the concentratory dispositive, itself an enjoyable [jouissive] position (…) we most model ourselves an affirmative idea of the Zero” (Lyotard, 1993, p. 5).
The rescuing of this zero as an unconstrained force-in-itself leads us to how the inhuman is further articulated in an exorbitant manner by Nick Land in The Thirst for Annihilation (1992). On Chapter VIII, titled Fluent bodies: A digression on Miller (Land, 1992, pp. 121-132) Land explicitly opposes the figure of the zero to the transcendence of the one, the one also meaning the representation of the our abstracted “human subject”. This opposition appears in the context of a critique elaborated by Land surrounding Henry Miller’s literary work, and more specifically on to how Miller consistently portrays a misogynistic fear of dissolution when being confronted by sexual difference, thus the subsistence of the transcendence of the one is also the subsistence of the transcendence of the phallus: “Phallus is the great security of male-dominated culture, and beyond it lies an ocean of loss as desolate as zero” (Land, Ibid, p. 125).
This dissolutive and differentiating zero is characterized as a gate to where the organic systems of human life get carried away with no resistance whatsoever, destroyed by the metaphorical and material hydraulics of the flows of death: “Upon zero or utter continuity everything flows without resistance (…) Zero is the vortex of a becoming inhuman that lures desire out from the cage of man onto the open expanses of death” (Land, Ibid). The consideration of the inorganic as being sufficient enough to destroy the fixity of the human image is still not enough, however, since in the arrival of death we find a strong figural permanence of the human via the skull and the skeleton as a non-polluted transfiguration of the organic body, a transfiguration that still remains within a recognizable domain: the skeleton is therefore the affable mascot of humanist narcissism, lurking behind the prison bars of time as an oppressive transcendental structure, in order to receive the generous pampering of a human hand.
Land even claims that the permanence of “the skeleton” as a transparent image of death, is also an obsession, an osseology that has permeated human civilization since its beginnings (Land, Ibid, p. 126), a fascination that erects a cult to the rigid structures of the bone and discards the literal fluidity of the heavily polluted decaying layers of meat that are resistant to unwavering and sacred atemporality, a crushing and progressive disfiguration that renders human as an ever inconspicuous entity: “The skeleton is thus conceived of as an invisible harmonious essence, an infrastructure beneath the disturbing tides of soft pathology. It is the prototype of intelligible form, contrasted with the decaying mass of the sensible body (…) Washing about the rigid parts of the body are the swirls of ecstasy and filth whose only fidelity is to zero” (Land, Ibid, pp. 126-128). Radicalizing Land’s gesture, Negarestani takes the possibilities of formalizing a dynamics of rot to its logical extremes:
“The subtractive dynamism of decay is generated on the basis of a complicity between space and time which allows for the chemical loosening of the horizon of interiority along nested inflections that are simultaneously extensive and intensive to the horizon. The dynamism of decay utilizes the complicity between space and time as the principle for an unconstrained deformability where loosening and softening – the lytic functions of chemistry and the smoothing functions of differential calculus, i.e. mathesis – are intertwined and unbound” (Negarestani, 2010, p. 408).
What we are left then is with the view of the inhuman as a form of abject rot that as we have seen, initially derived from anti-humanism unto its own distinctive path in order to aggressively attack and destabilize the essentialist and abstracted image of the “human subject”. We must ask ourselves then, what dangers lie further down this road? Can the affective disruption of fluxes and putrefactive nihilism be enough to robustly dismantle what was beforehand insufficient and non-dynamic with respect to the ever accumulating dimensions produced by world-externalities and events? Or is this form of the inhuman lacking as a response and even accessory to a despotic retrogression of “the human”?
The Nightmares of Blind Automatism
We must be cautious about the limits that appear once the inhumanist affectivity proposed by Land et al. is put into action; I’ve decided to blatantly utilize the Deleuzo-Guattarian register of the operatives of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, merely for making an illustrative order of these limitations. Up to this point, it can be said that the inhuman has been cooked-up as a deterritorialization in excess of the territorialized human,. And it seems that Land, up to this point has been obstinate enough in ignoring the undeniable junction[10] that exists when one of these two operations of reterritorialization and deterritorialization are put to work: “In short, there is no deterritorialization of the flows of schizophrenic desire that is not accompanied by global or local reterritorializations, reterritorializations that always reconstitute shores of representation” (Deleuze & Guattari, 2000, p. 316). Therefore, it can be inferred that even if an initial movement of deterritorialization of the human was attempted, there naturally would be an equivalent response elaborated by a despotic regime that awaits to close off the valve opened up towards the inhuman.
And nevertheless, Land decides to pursue further down the road of the inhuman with the formulation of a dystopian machinic-ontology that is the end-result of exaggerating the theoretical gesture of the machinic unconscious unfolded by Deleuze & Guattari in Anti-Oedipus: “…desire is a machine, a synthesis of machines, a machinic arrangement –desiring-machines. The order of desire is the order of production; all production is at once desiring-production and social production” (Deleuze & Guattari, 2000, p. 296). Land attempts to make this machinic gesture one which can be materialized in extremis without any regard to a transcendental unconscious that restrains its corresponding becomings[11]. In other words, Land considers the machinic as an anti-transcendental and radically inorganic function: “In order to advance the anorganic functionalism that dissolves all transcendence (…) Things are exactly as they operate, and zones of operation can only be segregated by an operation. All unities, differences, and identities are machined, without transcendent authorization or theory” (Land, 2011, p. 323. Emphasis added). This machinic operation is of course unmediated, since the remnants of human subjectivity get wasted away without any reservations when subjected to the white hot fissionary coupling of machines, thus, there is no constructive finality to this process but the total extinction of human agency and subjectivity[12].
In this case, the Freudian theory of drives and the reference to “zero” as a threshold capable of breaking subjectivity are re-interpreted by Land through the filters of Weinerian cybernetics, in such a way that the machinic strives for a non-homeostatic and boundless channeling of positive feedback (the melting core of a cyberpositive zero), intending to destroy any attempts at self-organization and equilibrium that might be brought upon by the dissipative function of negative feedback which would consider zero as a transcendent operation that predictively enforces the destructive surges of an energetic overflow (Land, 2011, pp. 329-331). The manifold chaos that characterizes the machinic inhuman and the diffusion of all transcendental law or rational autonomy into automatism (Land, Ibid, p. 322), soon became an obsessive leitmotiv for Land and his associates at the University of Warwick (under the collective name of the ‘Cybernetic Culture Research Unit’, abbreviated as ‘CCRU’) in order to achieve a form of “absolute” deterritorialization, but as we will soon see, this leitmotiv could be seen as its own Achilles heel.
The glossy machinic inhuman proposed by Land eventually becomes subsumed by a blind automatism characterized by the reckless movement that composes the anonymous cyber-guerrilla collectivity known as swarmachines: “Only multiplicities, decolonized ants, swarms without strategies” (CCRU, 2014, pp. 323-324. Emphasis added) or, “Things aren’t happening in the field of vision but are ‘flowing on a blind, mute, deterritorialized socius’” (CCRU, Ibid, p. 325), and the elements of tic xenonotation (Land, 2011, p. 607-622) unfolded by the theorico-fictional entity known as Professor Barker (Land, Ibid, pp. 493-505), as a notational set of telegraphic nanospams destined to collapse western logography: “…it suffices to remark that the broad research context within which tx emerged was a highly abstract seti-oriented investigation into minimally-coded intelligent signal, without presupposition as to origin (e.g. ‘xenobiological organisms’) or theme (e.g. ‘cosmo-chemistry’)” (Land, Ibid, p. 610).
With the case shown above for blind automatism, the non-strategical, disorganized cyber-pulsations and nano-spasms proposed by Land and the CCRU were however not strong enough to successfully forecast and counter the arrival of the white faced, retrogressive and fascistic humanist despotism that, as was warned earlier, is necessarily implied in the operation of reterritorialization: in the dark regions of jungle-warfare, the State slithers into an imperceptible apparatus of death, a phantom-becoming itself disassembled into partial object-vectors that weaponize the black heart of Kurtzian space in its totality. The headless swarms of cybermaggots try to flee to the Outside, but stand no chance when getting crushed under the sonorous and multiplicitous grinding of the black boots. No one can hear you writhe into the anonymity of the void. Liquefied military schizotechnics have melted into futurity: your turn.
The nightmares of this inductive machinism could had been countered by a strategic prognosis and by acting upon a warning that was given to Land in situ after publicly presenting his momentous “Meltdown” installation during the Virtual Futures encounter in 1994. To show how these nightmares were predicted back then, I’ll quote a fragment of the synopsis made about this encounter, where a discussion taking place between Land and philosopher Manuel DeLanda is recounted:
“…if we want to transform this world into something a little less homogeneous, our resistance has to become more pragmatic, and not destratify too fast lest the strata fall on us harder than ever, i.e. avoiding a careless destratification/acceleration that might provoke re-stratification with a vengeance. Here, Land vociferously contested the subject positions and intentionality that DeLanda was attributing to AO/ATP, i.e. D&G as constituted subjects, vs. (what I’ll call) a de-subjectified, destratified understanding of these works as ‘texts’, not necessarily attributable to subject-specific intentionalities” (Stivale, 1994. Emphasis added).
The above points made by DeLanda about the limits of the destratification of human subjectivity can be traced back to Deleuze & Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (1980), a book not very fond to Land but where the following warning is claimed: “…you have to keep small rations of subjectivity in sufficient quantity to enable you to respond to the dominant reality. Mimic the strata. You don’t reach the BwO, and its plane of consistency, by wildly destratifying (…) they had emptied themselves of their organs instead of looking for the point at which they could patiently and momentarily dismantle the organization of the organs we call the organism.” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, pp. 160-161).
Considering all of the above, Land appears a victim of his own headless yearning for the mechanized abortion of humanity The lack of a general program, or an applicable praxis in order to spread and construct upon the machinic inhuman, in time thawed and limited any further excursions into dystopian cyber-punk anti-philosophy and numerical demonology. From this, we can observe that the operative of reterritorialization was smoothly put to work on Land’s most recent essays and dispersed publications on the internet, where he has argued for a regression to a “Hobbesian recognition and normalization of sovereignty” (Land, 2013), that in turn is deeply mingled with silicon valley techno-economics, turning governance into a shareholding entity with the appointment of tradable CEOs under the name of gov-corp (Ibid). In this bashful-turn, Land included a theorization of a fringe political entity known as the neoreactionary (abbreviated as NRx), which pretended to mesh regressive ideologies from the far-right with neoliberal cyber-capitalism (Ibid).
As a conclusion to the visible limits exposed on the subject of the blind automatism proposed by Land via the machinic inhuman, I’d like to refer to what Deleuze & Guattari call neo-archaisms and their complicity with the operative of reterritorialization:
“…they are archaisms having a perfectly current function, our modern way of ‘imbricating,’ of sectioning off, of reintroducing code fragments, resuscitating old codes, inventing pseudo codes or jargons. Neoarchaisms as Edgar Morin puts it (…) others are organized or promoted by the State, even though they might turn against the State and cause it serious problems (regionalism, nationalism). The fascist State has been without doubt capitalism’s most fantastic attempt at economic and political reterritorialization” (Deleuze & Guattari, 2000, pp. 257-258).
We intended to escape the human security system in order to be aggressively corralled and locked-up by neo-archaic regulators. Nevertheless the execution of the inhuman non-program as a material entity was already in order, and it was only a matter of time until a reconstruction of its initial postulates under a programmatic guise was made evident. In this case, I find that a robust response to the apparent dead-end in which the inhuman was allocated, is to be found in Reza Negarestani’s most recent work and more specifically in his essay “The Labour of the Inhuman” (2014), where many of the blind-spots that appear in the lineage of the inhuman are indirectly disputed and re-assessed as a rationalist and constructive program. Before lodging into Negerastani’s rationalist inhumanism, it is crucial that a backward-motion is put in place to one of Land’s previous remarks regarding one of his philosophical nemeses, which I will elaborate in the following section.
Spirit as Bone: The Inhuman as a rationalist program
Returning to Chapter 8 of Thirst for Annihilation, one of the underlining registers implied in Land’s critique of the human subject is the turbulent animosity and admiration Bataille directs to Hegel’s philosophical dialectics (Bataille, 1985, pp. 105-115). This is also adds depth to Land’s critique of the rigidity of osseological structures, since the opening quote of the aforementioned chapter refers to Hegel’s associative analogy of spirit to the osseous. Thus it might be said that Land considers that the pristine and incorruptible map of bone-structure is for Hegel also a figurative shape of spirit as intellect, and that which ought to be discarded against the damning but exquisite mysteries of decaying flesh (Land, 1992, p. 121). The critique made to Hegel via Bataille is actually made explicit in certain parts of the chapter: “Structure, bilateral articulation, reciprocal exclusion, and determinate negation all belong to bones and not to soft tissues. That structure comes to the fore is a matter of the momentary dominion of the profane” (Land, Ibid, p. 123. Emphasis added). And isn’t this aberrant exclusion of a program, a structure, and even more so, of Hegelian determinate negation that (as was mentioned in the last section) which in a certain sense hexed Land’s further explorations into radical emancipatory anti-philosophy?
With regards to the above, could we then pursue a scenario where reason can be placed in a position to be subversive in response to the limits and failures of execrable “freedom”? Negarestani himself has both reflected on the limits of aberrant freedom without a local constraint, and the possibilities offered by considering reason and structuration as a subversive element:
“…thinking is a subversive activity in the broadest possible sense, not only against socio-cultural conventions but also against the most cherished dogmas of the human species. To become the vehicle of this cognitive subversion, one should, at least in the domain of theory, commit to semantic resoluteness or perspicuity in favour of syntactic or stylistic revolutions. This is because the latter, as I implied, is susceptible to safeguard the most conservative, conformist forms of thought in the name of radicality, polysemy, creative ambivalence and the so-called righteous fight against the tyranny of meaning and collective norms of thinking” (Negarestani & Gironi, 2018).
So before delving into Negarestani’s assessment of the inhuman as both a rational and subversive program, it would be advisable to also direct ourselves to the movement that has been recently made toward Hegel in search of the sense of spirit as a skeletal structure and the operation of determinate negation as a constructive element that is to be found in Negarestani’s actual work. For this, let’s oppose Land’s machinic-inhuman with Hegel’s dialectics, the former considered as a hyper-immediate operation that acts within a domain of indeterminate negativity, where every formal element found inside a material environment becomes unstitched to the brink of absolute demise, and no other level of construction is to be awaited. And the latter considered as a mediated operation, which directs a constructive ascension of hierarchical platforms of conscience towards the cultivation of absolute intellect or spirit (Hegel, 2018, p. 54). It is in Hegel’s dialectics that determinate negation is used as a tool to contradict human immediateness or fixity by self-alienation, and then onto an expanded re-construction of ourselves and our surrounding material environment, this meaning that one exits oneself as a sedimented ‘I’ in order to become a self-improving artifact of intellect, instead of drowning in the overcast draught of an absolute zero:
“…it so happens that thinking becomes entangled in contradictions. It loses itself in the fixed non-identity of its thoughts and in the process does not attain itself but instead remains caught up in its opposite. The higher aspiration of thinking goes against this result produced by thinking satisfied with merely understanding [verständiges Denken] and is grounded in the fact that thinking does not let go of itself, that even in this conscious loss of being at home with itself [Beisichsein], it remains true to itself, ‘so that it may overcome’, and in thinking bring about the resolution of its own contradictions” (Hegel, 2010, p. 39. Emphasis added).
The contingent acquires shape and is molded through determinate negation. We don’t have to sit tight in aeternum inside the grotesque chambers of our grotto to see if something or if anything happens. The negative is capable of its own constructive plasticity toward something else: “Skepticism which ends with the abstraction of nothingness or emptiness cannot progress any further from this point, but must instead wait to see whether something new will present itself and what it will be, in order that it can also toss it into the same empty abyss. By contrast, while the result is grasped as it is in truth, as determinate negation, a new form has thereby immediately arisen” (Hegel, 2018, p. 53. Emphasis added). Considering all of the above and going back to the theme of spirit as bone, a total receding to the contingent can also be warded off through the firmness of the skeletal, not so much a rigidity of the skull since Hegel warns us that the osseous structure can be thought-in-itself inoculated from the contingency of the sensible in its most immediate stage (thought localized inside the skull), and we can’t rely purely on the skeletal as it immediately appears to us since the un-risk of ossification is encountered. It is rather the case that we should see beyond the limits of the skeletal which Hegel has warned us, without skeptically avoiding the subject of the skeletal in order to re-assess it as a flexible articulation open to constructive possibilities. To see the sensible as ripe to be synthesized both as complex thought processes and emancipatory practices which are conjoined through a web of robust dispositions: “…the individual can be something other than what he internally originally is and even more than what he is as a bone” (Ibid., p. 197).
The need for re-articulating the task of the negative is to be found in Negarestani’s essay “The Labour of the Inhuman” (2014), where one of the premises is to empty out softened or airy descriptions of the human in favour of an ever constructible definition that is nevertheless firm, skeletal and articulable: “…the conflated and the honorific meaning of man is replaced by a real content, minimalist yet functionally consequential…” (Negarestani, 2014, p. 428). I’d like to highlight that Negarestani intends to put this skeletal framework in operation by making an explicit re-appropiation of Brandom’s grounding of a global and navigational space of rational commitments and entitlements, which in turn imply flexible roads or ramifications from human sentience to human sapience within a collective but normative field of discourse enabled by pragmatics (Ibid, pp. 433-438). This communal ‘We’ as mode of being[13] is always upgradable and constructible, doesn’t depend on essentialist fixities and is always apt to be revised when encountering new ramifications via those rational commitments or when norms are no longer compatible with our space of navigation (Ibid, p. 448). It is in this way that Negarestani breaks with the ways of an abstracted human subject utilizing strategic rationality, meaning that we can use the frameworks of reason to become affixed, opening the gates toward an outside view of ourselves when we actively branch out even further of the initial deontological norms we have collectively elaborated, in order to constantly blur and re-adjust the collective image of the human and using existential risk to our favor as in the Hegelian operation of determinate negation.
By positing this initial drafting of the rationalist inhuman program into a domain of the actual, we might find the key to understand how we can simultaneously learn and build upon our contingent and organic-selves, and transplant or synthesize reason regardless of our its own initial conditionings. Negarestani’s skeletal framework functions as an-ever-modifiable model ready to articulate the normative possibilities toward a concreteness of parallel-intelligence[14] while still recognizing that an automation can be made out-of discursive reason and, contra-Land, recognize that it is not only the nano-spasms of the machinic unconscious that can be synthesized into alien bodies or non-human systems: “The functional autonomy of reason is then a precursor to the self-realization of an intelligence that assembles itself, piece by piece, from the constellation of a discursively elaborative ‘us’ qua open source self” (Ibid, p. 457). The mutilated spine as the war-relic thrashed aside by our cavernarian inhumanist precursors must be rescued in order to assemble an artificialized skull as spirit. Instead of dismembered swarmachines, we can now find a twofold (strategic/political) response that could be inscribed under the potency of the machinic conscious, a potency that might be actualized in the form of computational swarmachines.
An Excursus Into Synthetics and Computational Swarmachines
As a conclusion, I’d like to bring back the issue of the inorganic and pose the question if it is through Kantian apperception applied to the inorganic that we might find a future possibility to also synthesize and embody extra human-intelligence. This will be left as an open question and not a full-on point by point rigorous digression on the subject. For this, I’ll start with a possibility that might be heretically forced on Kant’s premise that a synthetic judgment leading to an objective thought can also be built upon empirical grounds, this means that thought can be constructed from the outlook offered by an a posteriori rather than the a priori of pure reason (Kant, 2002, p. 63). This fits into Negarestani’s recount of Kant’s threefold syntheses (synthesis of apprehension of the intuition [a], synthesis of reproduction in imagination [b], synthesis of recognition in the concept [c]) in which cognition is organized in a hierarchical “multi-level construction” that begins from the translation of raw empirical data into sensory intuition and ending on objective thought that is no longer dependent to its original data referent to enable the construction of cognition as understanding (Negarestani, 2018, pp. 159-163).
What I’d like to rescue from the above, is synthesis as a process where raw empirical data can have an output that is no longer dependent of contingent distortions or restrictive tellurian references in order to achieve the formalization of a concept. If there is a synthetic judgement to be achieved from empirical grounds, can it not be thought of a future embodiment of non-human intelligence using the principle of synthesis to elaborate a form of xenomorphism that enables the existence of alien subjects (concept as embodiment itself) starting from the synthesizing of initially inanimate inorganic entities? Of course, in the consolidating field of synthetic intelligence we can observe the opening of possibilities directing to the expandability of contingent human constraints, this means, a self-regulating disincarnate intelligence that can go beyond the feeding level of human brain data-processing:
“…the capacity of thought to undertake a systematic exploration of itself and the world through ever exacting procedures for mapping the mediations and relations between theoretical structures and their corresponding empirical substructures becomes the essential lever by virtue of which representational function frees itself not only from the ‘here and now’ by the explicitation of distinct pragmatic-theoretic modalities encoded as implicit norms, but as it constructively aspires to capture its own operational unfolding and structure, mapping the objective modal structure of the world, including the structural dynamics of a synthetic intelligence which eventually promises to go beyond its contingently evolved, materially constrained forms of intuition as well as its operationally constrained forms of cognition” (Sacilotto, 2017).
Maybe the answer can be found in the nascent field of biohybrid systems which until now have shown a material proof of Land’s machinic unconscious through the slow stabilization of artificialized robotic entities that respond through external stimulus conducted by minimal shocks of electrical currents. Nevertheless we can observe us going full-circle when the inorganic is reproduced in a second-life environment to achieve the assembling of the synthetic:
“Synthetic biology seeks to build devices and systems from fungible gene parts. The fundamental organizational scheme of synthetic biology combines parts (gene systems coding different proteins) integrated into a chassis (i.e. induced pluripotent eukaryotic cells, yeast, or bacteria) to produce a device with properties not found in nature (…) Synthetic biology, in contrast, is based on the forward engineering of novel devices and systems from genetic parts. The DNA coding parts specify particular proteins and their regulatory mechanisms. Modularization of parts allows a “LEGO” approach to integration of biological systems to create living cells with capabilities not found in nature” (Ayers, 2018, p. 485).
Negarestani as of late has utilized the principle of toy philosophy in order to tinker with the re-engineering of the capabilities of human cognition by attaching to it the increasing influx of the artificial computation of intelligence within an expanded field of knowledge. Can we not eventually think this same Lego approach as largely applicable to other domains as well? As is the case when Ayers draws a similar approach for the achievement of a synthesis of both properties and capabilities that enable conceptual frameworks to be summoned as verifiable shapes in techno-bioforming? What would happen if both the inhuman as a rational program and the animation of the inorganic via biohybrid systems were successfully integrated in the near future? And what could we humans learn from the controlled integration of both elements into the engineering of parallel spaces of navigation that can be endlessly theorized from a promethean point of view but yet unforeseen?
[1] A blind spot that could be argued to be rooted in the collaborative work of Deleuze and Guattari. This is made more evident in Land’s particular reading of Anti-Oedipus. See, Land (2011, pp. 319-344)
[2] “The meaning of the skullbone is generally that of being the immediate actuality of spirit”. (Hegel, p. 194, 2018)
[3] I must elaborate that this is not Negarestani’s view but a personal interpretation of the possibilities offered by his rationalist inhumanist proposition.
[4] It must be reminded that the general insufficiency of humanism has to be localized within the scope a general crisis of western values in the historical context of postwar Europe (Geroulanos, 2010, pp. 1-33), a crisis which in turn constructed multiplicitous responses intending to destabilize and overturn the transparent applicability of the term “human”/”humanity” and its corresponding properties such as moral values, ethics, etc., with various degrees of success.
[5] “Incapable of salvaging its pertinence without resorting to a concept of crisis occasioned by theology, and unsuccessful in extracting human significance by disentangling the pathological conflation between real import and glorification, antihumanism is revealed to be in the same theological boat that it is so determined to set on fire” (Negarestani, 2014. Emphasis added).
[6] The hysterics of laughter, physical tics of violence leading to absurdity: “Laughter intervenes in these value determinations of being as the expression of the circuit of movements of attraction across a human field. It manifests itself each time a change in level suddenly occurs: it characterizes all vacant lives as ridiculous” (Bataille, Ibid, p. 176)
[7] As described by Iain Hamilton Grant on the preface of Lyotard’s book: “The Industrial Revolution machines new ‘inhuman’ potentialities, a different affective range, a generalized metamorphosis which sweeps away the pious, missionary fiction of the alienated and oppressed constant subject, displacing the orientation of this struggle from the ‘white terror’ of theory to the ‘red cruelty’ of Acephalization” (Lyotard, 1993, p. xxvii).
[8] See, M. Roberts. Philosophies of Desire: Lyotard, Deleuze and Guattari (1992).
[9] In this regard, the recent remarks of Iain Hamilton Grant in reference to Libidinal Economy are devastating: the philosophies of difference/desire fall into a metaphysical absolutism of an undifferentiated non-linearity that implicitly intends to envelop reality as a whole. See, Volksbühne Berlin. (2019). Armen Avanessian & Enemies #51: Ray Brassier & Iain Grant Myth or History, Nature or Reason? Retrieved from: https://youtu.be/YSPot3c-zOg
[10] For a complement to this movement, also see the Batesonian double-bind reinterpreted as the oedipal double-bind (Deleuze & Guattari, 2000, p. 75-84)
[11] This is in reference to the rescuing Deleuze & Guattari make of Kant’s transcendental apperception in order to build an immanent and transcendental unconscious that enables machinic becomings of desire (Ibid, 2000, p. 75)
[12] Here I refer to one of Land’s most famous quotes: “Nothing human it out of the near-future” (Land, 2011, p. 443).
[13] Negarestani borrows this conception of the “We” from Brandom’s normative pragmatics. See, R. Brandom. Making it Explicit (1998)
[14] Parallelism is here proposed as an alternative that might be toyed with from now on, rather than the weary Landian paradigm of hyperstitional ‘Outsideness’ or ‘the Outside’.
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