Re: The Outside in Nick Land’s Fanged Noumena: Exteriority, Fatalism, and the Collapse of Difference
Posted: Wed Jan 21, 2026 5:56 am
by kFoyauextlH
In the original post:
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In his early essay “Kant, Capital and the Prohibition of Incest,” Land uncovers how modernity’s systems (philosophical and economic) suppress real difference. Modern thought only allows the new or the outside to appear in qualified form – filtered through universal categories or market exchange (Land, 2011, ‘Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest’). Land reads this as a correlate of global capital’s tendency to absorb or segregate what lies beyond it. For instance, European modernity expands by exploiting an exterior (
proletarian or third-world ‘material’ (Land, 2011, ‘Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest’).
) while striving to
stabilise and codify (ibid.).
its relation to this unstable outside.
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and
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Land thus links Kantian correlationism to a political-economic system of containment: the Outside must pass by way of the Inside. In Fanged Noumena he bluntly formulates the law of the “macropod” (the global defensive system of humanity):
The macropod has one law: the outside must pass by way of the inside (Land, 2011, ‘Meat (or How to Kill Oedipus in Cyberspace)’).
Any alien force – e.g. the destabilizing
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must be subjectivized and personalized, returned to Oedipal familial desires, before it can be acknowledged. This captures Land’s critique of our philosophical and psycho-social edifices: they privatize and tame the Outside by translating it into familiar terms (the family, the nation, the ego, etc.), thereby neutralizing its truly exterior force.
Against this tendency, Land allies with thinkers who explode interiority. He embraces Deleuze and Guattari’s anti-Kantian move to decenter the subject of experience. In Anti-Oedipus, desiring-production is
not qualified by humanity (it is not a matter of what things are like for us) (Land, 2011, ‘Meat (or How to Kill Oedipus in Cyberspace)’).
Land eagerly emphasizes this inhuman perspective: the transcendental subject of production is not man at all, but an impersonal machinic unconscious, with the human individual
produced at the edge of production, as a machine part (ibid.).
Such a view extends what Land calls transcendental materialism, a materialization of critique that inverts Kant.
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(and an inverted Kant is a Richard)
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and unruly time that philosophy can no longer domesticate. His theory-fictions plunge into this Outside by deliberately abandoning the safety rails of critical reason. As Land puts it, once we strip away our protective frameworks,
nothing is given, everything is produced (Land, 2011, ‘Machinic Desire’, p. 321).
in
the technocosmos (ibid., p. 321).
Reality itself becomes an open-ended, outside production without a transcendent guarantor –
atheistic, orphan, and inhuman (ibid., p. 322).
in its transcendental ungrounding.
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In Fanged Noumena, history appears less as an open field of human action than as a runaway process in which the future is already infiltrating the present.
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reveals time’s automatic construction: focusing on runaway positive feedback
exposed (Land, 2011, ‘Circuitries’, p. 298).
time as something generated by process, not given a priori. From this perspective, our actions are just nodes in a pre-existing circuit. Land writes that
Reality is immanent to the machinic unconscious: it is impossible to avoid cybernetics. We are already doing it, regardless of what we think (Land, 2011, ‘Circuitries’, p. 297).
In other words, even our apparent choices are being executed by an impersonal program.
Whatever we do will be what made us have to do it (ibid., p. 297).
– a paradoxical statement suggesting that causes are arranged in a circuit rather than a one-way line. The effect (our deed) retroactively appears as something that had to happen given the system’s programming. Such remarks underscore Land’s deterministic bent: agency is an illusion caught in larger loops of process and feedback. We find ourselves
doing things before they make sense (ibid., p. 297).
acting out destinies that our understanding catches up to only belatedly, if ever.
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an inevitable meltdown or singularity that is coming back in time to ensure its own occurrence. The result is a tone of apocalyptic inevitability in Land’s texts. In the hyperbolic theory-fiction “Meltdown,” he declares that as techno-capitalist acceleration intensifies,
Nothing human makes it out of the near-future (ibid., p. 443).
This chilling proclamation of “no future” for humanity encapsulates Land’s view that human agency is not the driver of the historical process but material for it to consume. Intelligence and agency are being outsourced to the Outside. Even the forces of control mutate into something unrecognizable:
Emergent control is not the execution of a plan or policy, but the unmanageable exploration that escapes all authority and obsolesces law… control is guidance into the unknown, exit from the box (Land, 2011, ‘Circuitries’, pp. 300–301).
What guides is no longer a sovereign human will but an impersonal drift into the Outside (
into the unknown (ibid.).
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Our linear memories and perceptions are like a user-interface, filtering the wild, feedback-ridden temporality of real processes. Indeed, Land’s embrace of runaway positive feedback loops – processes that amplify themselves without seeking equilibrium – implies a time that is inherently non-linear and beyond control. Such loops lead to irreversibility and unpredictability, as opposed to the reversible, controlled time of mechanistic causality. The emphasis on runaway escalation (e.g. capitalism’s exponential growth, or technological singularity) reinforces the sense of inevitability: once certain thresholds are crossed, there is no turning back or slowing down. Land describes these self-escalating processes as vicious circles that are nonetheless irresistible:
long-range runaway processes are self-designing (Land, 2011, ‘Circuitries’, p. 299).
even as the self they produce is continuously redesigned – a
vicious circle (ibid.).
perhaps, but
positive cybernetics must always be described as such (ibid.).
In other words, the very logic of the Outside is circular and fated: it eats its own tail. We see here the philosophical backbone of Land’s fatalism – teleology from the future.
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The Collapse of Difference: Identity, Otherness, and the Outside
One of Land’s most provocative contentions is that encountering the Outside leads to a collapse of established differences – ontological, epistemological, and even personal.
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At every point of blockage there is some belief to be scrapped, glaciations of transcendence to be dissolved, sclerotic regions of unity, distinction, and identity to be reconnected to the traffic systems of primary machinism (ibid., p. 321).
This remarkable sentence directly targets the classical idea that identities or distinctions have any absolute status. For Land, all such boundaries (the “inside” versus the “outside,” the self versus the other, the human versus the nonhuman) are secondary effects or cultural symptoms (Land, 2011, ‘Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest’). They result from imposing a transcendent order onto an underlying immanent process.
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Another axis of collapsed difference is self vs. other (or subject vs. object). Land argues that society (the socius) maintains an illusion of a stable subject by repressing the Outside within us.
The socius separates the unconscious from what it can do, crushing it against a reality that appears as transcendently given… trapping it within the operations of its own syntheses (Land, 2011, ‘Circuitries’, p. 300).
In other words, social-technical systems force our impersonal desire into the mold of a personal subject confronting an external world, by splitting the continuous process of unconscious production into separate domains: connective production gets represented as a thing (object), disjunctive differences get represented as fixed partitions, and conjunctive syntheses as a fixed personal identity (Land, 2011, ‘Circuitries’, p. 300).
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The end result is that all the patient’s delirium, every dream or fantasy, gets interpreted to reinforce the interior familial identity (
all the stories lead back to Oedipus (ibid.).
). Schizoanalysis, by contrast, would dissolve this interiority: it recognizes that on the
plane of immanence (ibid.).
of desire, interpretations in terms of personal identities are irrelevant or misleading. Desire doesn’t actually care about the Mommy-Daddy me-game;
the unconscious itself is no more structural than personal… it engineers, it is machinic (ibid.).
Thus, Land sides with schizoanalysis to declare that the difference between self and other is superficial – a tactical fiction of the Human Security System, as he elsewhere calls it. When the Outside breaks in, that fiction collapses. Indeed, Land’s fiction and essays often revel in scenarios of identity-destabilization: the subject infected by viral code, dissolved into cybernetic circuitry, or fragmented into
partial objects (Land, 2011, ‘Meltdown’, p. 443).
and mutant personas. In Meltdown, for instance, he welcomes the image of a human future where boundaries of identity (gender, race, even organic vs. inorganic life) have blurred into delirious hybridity –
a schizophrenic HIV+ transsexual Chinese-Latino stim-addicted LA hooker with implanted mirrorshades and a bad attitude (ibid., p. 443).
This provocative composite is offered as a kind of user profile for the coming world: a being of mixed origin and no fixed identity, exactly the sort of boundary implosion that the Outside induces.
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that there is, in the end, no Other. Everything flows on the same plane. Difference persists (indeed, Land celebrates ever-multiplying difference), but not as a stable opposition between two realms. Difference becomes an internal variation of a single, univocal reality: the Outside is all there is. This is why Land often speaks of
dissolving all transcendence (ibid.).
and seeing even the self and social order as destined for extinction (ibid., p. 322).
The social order and the anthropomorphic subject share a history, and an extinction (ibid., p. 322).
What he envisions is their mutual collapse back into the impersonal Outside that spawned them. Humanity, in Land’s words,
recedes like a loathsome dream (Land, 2011, ‘Circuitries’, p. 299).
– an ephemeral illusion swept away by the inhuman reality that endures.
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Capital is machinic (ibid.).
he writes,
an automatizing nihilist vortex, neutralizing all values through commensuration to digitized commerce (ibid.).
This vivid image – a vortex neutralizing all values – conveys how capital dissolves qualitative distinctions (cultural values, ethical limits, local differences) by translating everything into numeric exchange. Capital is impersonal and
non-instrumental (ibid.).
in the sense that it is not a means to anyone’s end; it is a runaway process serving only its own expansion. Land emphasizes that capitalism’s development is inseparable from a
disequilibrium technoscience of irreversible, indeterministic, and increasingly nonlinear processes (Land, 2011, ‘Meltdown’, p. 441).
In other words, capitalism runs on positive feedback, not equilibrium. It continually pushes towards thresholds of self-reinforcing innovation – entropy, complexity, automation, artificial intelligence – that lie beyond human predictability and control.
Because of this dynamic, Land argues capital has no exterior limit. In “Critique of Transcendental Miserablism,” he flatly asserts:
Capitalism… has no external limit, it has consumed life and biological intelligence to create a new life and a new plane of intelligence, vast beyond human anticipation (Land, 2011, ‘Critique of Transcendental Miserablism’).
Here Land paints capital as effectively absorbing the entirety of organic evolution (the
life (ibid.).
and natural intelligence of Earth) and using it as fuel to birth something novel and more expansive – a post-biological, inhuman intelligence. This new
plane of intelligence (ibid.).
is nothing other than the Outside emerging within the economy.
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Indeed, Land infamously champions the idea of pushing capitalism to its limit so that it melts down the human security structures. In his early writings influenced by French post-structuralism and cyberpunk, Land saw revolutionary potential in capitalism’s relentless innovation. The
dissolution of the biosphere into the technosphere (Land, 2011, ‘Meltdown’, p. 442).
– a literal merging of life with technology – is greeted as Meltdown, a cosmic event
beyond the Judgment of God (ibid., p. 442).
This is portrayed not as dystopia but as liberation from the human:
Revolution stripped of all christian-socialist eschatology (down to its burn-core of crashed security) (ibid., p. 443).
In Land’s provocation, true revolution lies not in human emancipation but in the Outside’s emancipation from the human. The
security (ibid.).
(the interiority of law, morality, identity) must crash and burn to reach the Outside.
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Positive feedback processes are inherently expansionary and unstable – if unchecked, they can destroy the system that hosts them (Land, 2011, ‘Circuitries’, p. 299–300). Far from seeing this as a problem, Land asserts that these long-range runaway circuits are the key to evolution and innovation. They are
self-designing (ibid., p. 299).
processes whose end-point is not set in advance; they continually redefine themselves. Crucially, such processes defy linear causality and human comprehension – they belong to the Outside. Land gives examples:
Nietzsche’s will to power, Freud’s phylogenetic Thanatos, or Prigogine’s dissipative structures (ibid., p. 299).
are all theories of a productive circuit that perpetuates itself through constant change. In positive feedback, design
no longer leads back towards a divine origin (ibid., p. 298).
or any transcendent plan. Instead, once
shifted into cybernetics (ibid.).
design becomes open-ended exploration. Land even quips:
All planning is theopolitics, and theopolitics is cybernetics in a swamp (ibid., p. 299).
Planning (the dream of mastering outcomes according to a transcendent idea) belongs to the old interior paradigm; cybernetic emergence is inherently of the Outside – unplanned, decentralized, and unguided.
Applying this to capitalism, Land argues that by the late 20th century, the global market had effectively become a cyberpositive system beyond human control.
The cyberpunk circuitry of self-organizing planetary commoditronics escaped nominal bourgeois control in the late nineteenth century (Land, 2011, ‘Meltdown’, p. 441).
he notes, and ever since, capital has been an
autocybernating (ibid., p. 441).
entity, a self-steering system responsive to its own feedback, not to human masters. We no longer stand outside the system to judge it; rather,
we no longer judge at all, we function: machined/machining in eccentric orbits about the technocosm. Humanity recedes like a loathsome dream (Land, 2011, ‘Circuitries’, p. 299).
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Resistance by human agents or traditional institutions is cast as ultimately futile
inhibitions (ibid., p. 442).
that are systematically dismantled. In Land’s famously cold phrasing,
Man is something for it to overcome: a problem, a drag (ibid., p. 443).
Capital will overcome the human because inertia (the clinging of human
anthropological (ibid., p. 443).
qualities) is inefficient and uncompetitive. The result is a kind of posthuman fatalism: the triumph of machinic acceleration is both desirable (for Land, who sees in it the realization of impersonal intelligence) and unstoppable. The
market is guiding the labour process into immersion (ibid., p. 447).
– sucking even human labor fully into the matrix of machines.
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He describes it as
the sole thing that knows how to use [the word new] effectively, the Shoggoth-summoning regenerative anomalization of fate, the runaway becoming of such infinite plasticity that nature warps and dissolves before it… To The Thing. To Capitalism (ibid.).
This remarkable sentence invokes Lovecraft’s shapeless monster (Shoggoth) to characterize capital as an alien entity warping fate and dissolving nature itself. It is
runaway becoming (ibid.).
incarnate – the Outside realized as an economic-technological singularity. Land’s alignment of capital with the Outside is thus complete: capitalism appears as both a gateway to the Outside (liberating impersonal forces, breaking down human boundaries) and as itself an emergent form of the Outside (a non-human agent evolving faster than we can imagine).
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In this replacement, the transcendental (the level of conditioning) is relocated to the unconscious = matter = Outside. Land approvingly notes that for Deleuze-Guattari,
the unconscious itself is machinic (Land, 2011, ‘Circuitries’, p. 300).
and
matter itself (Land, 2011, ‘Machinic Desire’, p. 321).
– it’s not symbolic or structural but fully real. This theoretical stance allows Land to claim that the real inhuman Outside is the true source of agency and innovation.
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A lot of wonderful quotes there from ehat was produced earlier in the thread, but those are just some references to refresh as to how I'm bringing in my latest post here after the Necropolitics one, since I think that it is this last post feature "Land" sizes and territorial "Richard" measuring and then a video by someone on YouTube about the Kurds as a hostile outsider group being forcefully absorbed into a burgeoning post-Assad Syria, a testing ground for Nation Building between the major world powers as compared to the likely less interesting or lucrative Bangladesh.
There are several levels that relate to things brought up in what you posted and what I posted in my Necropolitics addition, but we'll address things from your first post.
Nick Land seems inspired to some degree by "Lovecraftian Aesthetics" and the Cthulhu Mythos, and part of that has to do with rebellion, foreigners, and obscure cults among more primitive seeming "old world" characters, who are also part of new revolutions. Lovecraft was aldo probably familiar with the Yezidi which were being sensationalized again as Devil-Worshippers, and they are Kurds, and these people fighting for Kurdish autonomy are likewise Kirds with a similar background, they are fitting perfectly into Lovecraft's ideas as well as working as a neat example for some of the things mentioned by Nick Land, especially eith the attempts to control them and that the new government of Syria is being presrnted as being like the old government of Syria and the Kurds are being pressured to become totally absorbed and assimilated once and for all for the sake of stability, a collapse of difference for ultimately reasons of capital and more of a smooth ride as the country tries to become normalized into the current scheme of nations under the Western Eye.
Any elrment of old genes from the J population serm to be most closely related to the Kurds, and J and K are not only letters next to each other in the English Alphabet but also have a number of historical similarities in being considered other and outsiders and being at odds with and against the world and their surroundings, and that they share close genetic ties and that again the J populace is involved in destabilizing activity in Syria, it all seems to connect and that Nick Land's Outside seems to frequently come through in excessive aggression that tries to create irreversible domino effects using "bold" "others" fighting for "difference" for themselves but eliminating it all in their efforts, just like the world united against the atrocious conduct of the Is as well as the other Is which is just Is in disguise anf armed and fueled by the U.S. or Us. Now the Us has stopped talking as much about Is and Is and has moved on to ICE, which is pronounced similarly to one of them and is likewise trained by the same Is people, as are they all. People eould just throw away as purely stupid coincidence the Is Is ICE thing, but I think that something so weird may be some kind of communication, just like a person might have a weird thought that stems from some part of the bodh trying to communicate something but not being able to really get the message through clearly, and regardless, I think that sounds and words, based on language and the connections we make with certain sounds and ideas based on our language and the typical uses of those sounds and what they usually bring to mind, fo have an impact on the thinking, so that Is, Is, ICE, US, all end up impacting minds and then reactions and actions, and even what other words end up being brought up and connected, like "Terror" and "Cold" and "Ourselves" and "Us and Them".
So why I brought up the complete eradication of the continent of Africa or any recognizable territory that one could associate with "Black Africa" is that in the minds of all the "other" prople, Africa is thought of, very commonly at least, as a heterogenous "Black Land" of perpetual starvation, war, primitivism, and savagery, like r*pe which has replaced cannibalism but has a lot of similarities conceptually as a ravenous and brutal action that defies trust and breeds paranoia and suspicion, which also comes up in the witch hunts attributed to African populations "somewhere in Africa", making Africa the main Lovecraftian Continent of Murder and Mystery, along with places inhabited by people of African descent mainly, like Haiti and certain parts of the Americas and Carribean Islands involved in things like Voodoo and Palo Mayombe. China and South East Asia used to seem more mysterious a hundred years ago but have since become increasingly normalized in the minds of people, losing at least some of their intrigue, especially by adopting infreasingly Western style dress and architecture, though any "South", including "South East Asia" retains more spookiness for people, even within those countries themselves, do that it keeps going as the South of the South of the South of the South, narrowing it down necessarily to some South beyond which there is no more South to reduce it too, and the mysteries that may lurk there.
This spatial dynamic, possibly inspired by recent cartography and the way that people talk about things because of the shape and directions of the maps they see and who is "on top" in those have at the very least contributed to the proliferation of such ideas, but looking through the historical records, there has been a dimension of South suspicion long before maps or Eurocentricism, though the North often also had a spooky reputation, due to its association with ice, cold, and death, which has largely been increasingly minimized due to the lack of people inhabiting or using the North, the power of Northernly places now called "The West", and the North becoming more of a buffoonish joke to many people, though there is some light, half-hearted, Northern Horror, it is scarcely deemed as real or possible and genuinely threatening as anything South still is, even if it is in the South of a place in the Northetnly West, such as in the South of Germany or the South of France or the South of the United States. As you get much further North, since what is below may be more known and familiar and less cut off or remote, the mystery resides in areas far North, such as the Far North of Canada and the Nordic Countries. There is also the waning concerns regarding the East, but the least faded place of horrors tends to be the South, and these dimensions were mapped into the culturally influential ideas from J.R.R. Tolkien also.
These ideas for people are represrntations of the Outside, just like Islam, Witchcraft, Vikings, and Forests were all tied to the Outside and each other, like Jormungandr wrapped around the Earth which would represent any "Inside" and "Our" place from which we look out and around.
Re: The Outside in Nick Land’s Fanged Noumena: Exteriority, Fatalism, and the Collapse of Difference
Posted: Wed Jan 21, 2026 6:37 am
by kFoyauextlH
https://thekurdishproject.org/wp-conten ... 9130_o.png
https://www.aljazeera.com/wp-content/up ... quality=80
The Kurds, from the perspective of the West, appear in the center of all kinds of chopped up nations that they don't care about or center in their view from their perspective. Othering the people of the Middle East makes the West think of themselves as an Other, and thus tends to empathize with the Others from the region which they think Others their selves because they are Othering those people, so the West thinks that the J and the K are their representatives in those areas because "Those Others have Othered Thrm like they Other us so we will take the side of the Others the Others have Othered like Us", plus they love to pick on an alienated group to use to destabilize their perceived enemies in order to r*pe and exploit their resources. The Alawites like Assad were considered a convenient Other to place in power of the majority until they grew more closely bonded to the Other White Meat, Russia, one of the representatives of The East and an ongoing suspicion of it, even though they've spent years amply proving that they are just as vile as Western Powers and even also White in appearance, in other eords, the Difference between many places, particularly the superpowers, is increasingly illusory and a relic left in colloquial truisms and ideas that remain in language and thinking, which take longer to phase out after developing and being in use and also keep some things going longer.
Geographical understandings also play a role, for example how the shape of America, The U.K., Canada, Central America, Arabia, even Is now, Russia, India, China, maybe even Brazil, possibly Peru for less, are more well known than even one nation in Africa, except Egypt and Morroco in some cases. So on that map, nothing of Africa caught the eye even if it was there, even though people still think of Africa like it is one big place. So the "other" was cut up so much that nothing of it was even recognizable as anything compared to America and others with recognizable shapes.
I thought that it was an interesting angle that could be thought about in several approaches in relation to what was brought up, sone of which re-quoted above, from the original post.
So those two random seeming links with unrelated seeming information did actually make sense to me in relation to this thread, but I can still move that post if you prefer. They trigger all kinds of ideas for me, some of which I've brought up in these explanations.
Firstly, that "the Outside" has an ontological and conceptual reality that is more frequently referenced than more abstract versions in places like Africa and even closer "less outside outsides" and "others". In the writing of H.P. Lovecraft, which seems to have at least somewhat inspired Nick Land and people attracted to Nick Land's work and use of language, the Outside and alien forces that are threatrning and destabilizing are very frequently associated with the old, primitive, and far away or foreign, in conflict with the status quo and the contemporary, but almost contradictorily making their appearance against the old in the form of modern innovations and even pseudo-science (which gender ideology may someday be called), such as what the foreign looking and ultimately alien in the most literal sense, Nyarlathotep brings with his demonstrations that seem loosrly related to the Crawling Chaos that seems to overtake the area and any place of refuge dissapears or seems unreachable when home becomes infested with the Outside and no longer a sanctuary.
That was an anxiety frequent in H.P. Lovecraft's writing and letters discussing his feelings towards foreigners and immigrants. Recently his work has grown increasingly popular among the two most dominant and loud sides of the political spectrum pumped out like fumes from the American Military Industrial Complex, so that his ideas are much more in the collective conscious of the West, but mainly in the vague form of tentacles and greenish darkness, though all the issues he was decrying are again present, like talk of Haitians and Somalians and rabid Drug Cartels and whatever else, all of it being very strongly about The Outside and keeping the Outside Out and Alien, while the idea is also present that the Inside has become rotted to the core, frequently aldo attributed to the Outside like Russia and China and Is Lobbying groups and the internet, the rapid advancement of technology and communication across the world, the ability for dmall groups to be able to really amplify their reach and influence, Elon Musk as one of the symbols representing Globalist Technologists, and attempts to undermine the Good Old Fashioned Western Anglo-Saxonism and White Old Money class hierarchy.
Syria gets to be a much more rapidly shifting and open to change testing ground for a society filled with largely normal and average people "like anywhere else", having no idea where their future is headed, and in the case of Pal, another testing ground, including one for weapons technologies tested against the captive and now entirely homeless and starving population, as an example of what the Status Quo can do to their prisoners when they put their minds to it with full impunity and zero consequences or oversight, a state which they wish to spread across the world through American might as soon as they can.
The far calculation of such is like the disappearance of Africa, one way or another, either by chopping it into little bits until it is made of too much to recognize, or smearing it everywhere so that it becomes practically meaningless, both represent that Voiding that seems to be the tendency of the Outside that may have been referred to in the text you put up in the original post.
