Nick Land
Nick Land
Nick Land | |
|---|---|
| Born | 17 January 1962 |
| Residence | Shanghai, China |
| Nationality | British |
| Era | Contemporary philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy |
| School | Continental philosophy[1] Accelerationism Speculative realism Dark Enlightenment |
| Institutions | University of Warwick |
Main interests |
|
Notable ideas | Accelerationism Hyperstition |
Influenced
| |
Nick Land (born 17 January 1962) is an English philosopher, short-story horror writer, blogger, and "the father of accelerationism".[2]
Land is also known, along with fellow neoreactionary thinker Curtis Yarvin, for developing in his latter works the anti-egalitarian and anti-democratic ideas behind neoreaction and the Dark Enlightenment.
Nick Land | |
|---|---|
| Born | 17 January 1962 |
| Residence | Shanghai, China |
| Nationality | British |
| Era | Contemporary philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy |
| School | Continental philosophy[1] Accelerationism Speculative realism Dark Enlightenment |
| Institutions | University of Warwick |
Main interests |
|
Notable ideas | Accelerationism Hyperstition |
Influenced
| |
Work
Land was a lecturer in Continental Philosophy at the University of Warwick from 1987 until his resignation in 1998.[3] At Warwick, he and Sadie Plant co-founded the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU). In 1992, he published The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism.[7] Land published an abundance of shorter texts, many in the 1990s during his time with the CCRU.[5] The majority of these articles were compiled in the retrospective collection Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007, published in 2011. Land and the other members of the CCRU saw themselves as outsiders to traditional academic philosophy. One CCRU conference, Virtual Futures 96, "was advertised as “an anti-disciplinary event” and “a conference in the post-humanities”. One session involved Nick Land “lying on the ground, croaking into a mic”, recalls Robin Mackay, while Mackay played jungle records in the background."[8]
He currently works as an editor at Urbanatomy in Shanghai. Prior to that, he taught at the New Centre for Research & Practice through March 2017.[9] Land's work is noted for its unorthodox interleaving of philosophical theory with fiction, science, poetry, and performance art.[6] He has recently started writing psychological horror fiction.
Land is founder of two electronic presses, Urbanatomy Electronic and Time Spiral Press, the latter with Anna Greenspan.
Concepts and influence
Land's work with CCRU, as well as his pre-Dark Enlightenment writings, have all been hugely influential to the political philosophy of accelerationism. Kodwo Eshun, a prominent UK afrofuturist theorist, has asked "Is Nick Land the most important British philosopher of the past twenty years?"[10] Mark Fisher wrote that "Land was our Nietzsche – with the same baiting of the so-called progressive tendencies, the same bizarre mixture of the reactionary and the futuristic, and a writing style that updates nineteenth century aphorisms into what Kodwo Eshun called 'text at sample velocity.'"[11] Along with the other members of CCRU, Land wove together ideas from the occult, cybernetics, science fiction, and poststructuralist philosophy to describe the phenomena of techno-capitalist acceleration.
Land's philosophy with the Dark Enlightenment opposes egalitarianism and is sometimes associated with the alt-right or other right-wing movements. Land believes democracy restricts accountability and freedom.[14] Shuja Haider notes, "His sequence of essays setting out its principles have become the foundation of the NRx canon."[12] Land insists, however, that “as a populist, and in significant ways anti-capitalist movement, the Alt-Right is a very different beast to NRx.”[15]
The exact relationship between Land's earlier work and his later neoreactionary work is a matter of ongoing debate.