The Resurrection of LD50: Propositions on Not Reading Nick Land in DMs, or, the Algo_chains and Anthropology of Non-Reading
2017 text republished on the 4th anniversary of the 'LD50 affair'.
If someone wants to tell you they dislike Nick Land they will normally tell you in FB DMs with the caveat ‘obviously I haven’t read Land in detail yet’. The form of this structural alibi is algorithmic and interesting as follows: ‘obviously I confirm everything Land says by not saying it and denying it by protesting my subjectivity even though I obviously haven’t read Land and so sound like a robot, just what we obviously want to prevent, am I wrong?’
Another way of saying this is to say that non-reading is at the vanguard of AI as a force of semiotic invasion installed in advance in what was never human to begin with. The contemporary lack of reading is a form of AI, or rather, one may say that if anyone is ‘on the side of Land’ it’s those who fight or resist before they read.
The question of ‘Nick Land’s racism’ becomes just that: not a matter of reading but of comfort- or hate-reading others’ opinions about ‘Nick Land’s racism’. The prejudice involved in holding an opinion about someone while knowing nothing about them is not only incorrigible but part of the super-jouissance of being online and of the destiny of what Land indexes: atavistic abomination becoming the main vanilla deism of technic predation.
Yet another way of saying this is to say that ‘not reading Nick Land’ and saying that you ‘dislike Nick Land’ is the least sure sign of having ‘not read Nick Land’ and of ‘disliking Nick Land’. This folding to the ‘Nick Land effect’ of not reading him is one sign that you have understand the far reaches of what Land says and are already securely beyond the bionic horizons of not wanting or needing to read him. At some point one must admit: maybe these yahoos are better replicants than me!
De Man said it best: what we really forget is how bad we are at reading and just how important reading is, and yet how little difference it makes to say anything at all and expect it to be read. And then, of course, as if by coincidence, the LD50 gallery, whose speculative purge extended to Land himself, reopens (but was it ever shut?), and its exhibition–which I, as automaton beyond reading, have no need to attend–happens to consist of reading the internet: of images and prints of online content to be parsed and edited at will. It is here, whether one likes it or not, that ‘Corporeality’ has to be a coup since it raises the machine-stakes of what reading on the internet is. It dissolves the technics of reading back into the real that negates it in turn.
This is why when @Outsideness comments ‘LD50 has completed aesthetic modernism, to general consternation’, they simply mean what they say and are automatically right. The fact is that nobody can boycott reading, or that the refusal to read is in any case a machination and candy factory of self-resistance. In fact, as has been made clear to the now-impossibilised resistance (anyone remember O.D. Unter-whoever?), if you’re reading this it’s already too late. If you go to LD50 to read you are already reading what you say should not be read, and yet if you don’t go you are allowing-to-be-read what is already on the internet for all to read in any case or allowing yourself to not read what you already know full well should be banned (according to you). The more you destroy reading the more there is to read and the less need to read it.
What ‘Corporeality’ produces first of all is the need not to go to an exhibition that is at the same time about reading and the possibility of printing Twitter out as an auto-archive to be scissored. Reading the internet opens one to a sort of infinity of Vereinfachung (dialectical simplification) within the chrome detail of scanning that Twitter itself just is and that withdraws contemporary efforts: one can dispute the lack of reading of Land at the same time as refusing to read and not going (or going) to the exhibition itself–and the ‘who cares?’ that may be added here is relatively rigorous and a priori.
And yet, to finally read ‘The Dark Enlightenment’–as well–is to read an undeniable piece of prose and know that one is in the middle of a historical movement of thought: as with any great satirist since Swift or Marx, the whole point is that if I think I know what side I am on I am already lost to the robot fatherlode of clunky denial, the very thing I tell myself I am heroically preventing. To say that Land is a racist is to read too well or not at all. I mean, what gallery are you in?
The question of ‘Nick Land’s racism’ is in some ways boringly simple, a problem of appearance and not content: he dares to read where drive-by media collusion angels now blank. Instead of being pro-white or anti-racist, perhaps he wants to know what the ‘dialectic of racial terror’ or ‘the racial terror dialectic’ looks like. If debate stops with the confession that ‘I am not racist’ or ‘you are racist’ very little happens. This extended commentary on Mencius Moldbug is no more shocking than the Star Wars prequels (except that the content of the Star Wars prequels is actually seriously shocking, as Isiah Medina has shown).
Land blows the top off the online archive where immense hate has already incubated as a ‘menace’, a phantom menace now more troubling than any noticed and then turned back into the same win-lose churn by retro-Marxist droids. If Land has a problem it is a problem of association: to lift the lid on this dustbin is always to smell somewhat of trash. But who else thoroughly lifted the lid on this particular black-bin-bag-lined electric pit? The issue remains the impossibility of molecular racism’s disappearance and the appearance of its acceleration, and the ways in which an abolitionist discourse is simply part of the Whig Marxist historiography that deepens the predicament long term, and to no avail. The extinction dose of LD50 is still there. Either way, you are read in advance.
2017. Originally published on Lucia Diego’s now-deleted LD50 site, in the ‘Reading’ section.