Nick Land doesn’t really understand anything about speed, or about the science-fiction way of looking at things. I’ve actually told him this, at least with regard to science-fiction, on his blog a few years ago. He didn’t contest the assertion. Whatever nonsense he did back in the 1990s, was already passé, two decades before. I knew that, even before starting to write in philosophical contexts.
Alvin Toffler introduced the notion of future shock at the outset of the 1970s. Bruce Sterling, the Texan science-fiction writer, radicalised that concept, giving it a considerable ‘acceleration’, whilst doing so, far beyond, incidentally, what Land and his regressive cadre were attempting to rehash, a decade after.
In the early 1990s, the original and innovative thinkers of speed, were obviously people like Paul Virilio, and Sol Yurick, who dealt with the topic, as a matter of course, quickly and without tendentious fetishisation, on his way to more interesting insights.
The primary issue or problem, is the wrong kind of regression, the mainstream commodifications of adventurous thinking that lead to simplistic and formulaic banality of the worst kinds, where liberatory insight is merely converted into callous, socialised convention; what I have often called ‘holding patterns’, in the new century.
There’s no doubt that my cultural references and assumptions are not those of the general, mainstream academia and culture, now occurring. From the perspective of those references and assumptions, that mainstream culture, almost all of it, is a backward, reactionary, and somewhat dystopically aberrant formation. I understand why, all of the considerably complex structural explanations for that formation, but it’s one that cannot be catered for, any more than has been the case. It’s a pernicious development, ‘against the grain’ of which, it’s important to go, at least somewhat. ‘Against the grain’ is a phrasal theme I produced in the last century, for precisely the pernicious eventuality I describe here.
It’s not anyone’s responsibility to lock themselves in the game of pandering explanations, in the service of deliberately recalcitrant understandings, content to rest on their backward substantialisms. Such tendencies of pernicious recalcitrance merely persist in disingenuous ignorance, choosing only to reinvent their characteristic forms of malice in whatever crevices of the new conditions they are able to perceive. If malicious consumption is the dominant sign of the times, whatever other banners it might wave and surround itself with, then it is precisely that hegemonic signification and all its expressions, that become an object susceptible to precisely the full range of transactions and operations which its insular hypocrisies have always attempted to deny.
The objectification of the victim, no matter how indirect and clothed in hypocrisy, is the objectification of the victimiser, as well. The victim has nature on its side in the form of desire for liberation, it doesn’t need the victimiser; whereas the victimiser has only the nature and need of domination, for which it requires a victim. The more intrigues and masks it throws into the abyss in pursuit of such a requirement, the more the abyss can see the victimiser’s each and every tiresome susceptibility.
Sheltering in malicious projections of its own invention, hiding in exhausted claims of undemonstrated exception, the victimiser always seeks to justify its chosen economies of victimisation. With spurious games of superficiality, the victimiser habitually evades the question of its chosen exploitations, for which it takes no responsibility, offering only to the abyss the most delicate tapestry of both its culpability and vulnerability. The question, then, is what does the abyss do with this unwanted opportunity?