The Outside in Nick Land’s Fanged Noumena: Exteriority, Fatalism, and the Collapse of Difference
Posted: Sat Nov 08, 2025 4:21 pm
The Outside in Nick Land’s Fanged Noumena: Exteriority, Fatalism, and the Collapse of Difference
Exteriority Beyond the Human Subject
Nick Land’s work consistently probes what lies outside the bounded human subject – an exteriority that philosophy since Kant has cordoned off. In Land’s view, Immanuel Kant’s critical philosophy institutes a strict correlation between mind and world, effectively ruling that
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
Fatalism, Agency, and Time: The Role of Inevitability
Land’s vision of the Outside is bound up with a stark fatalism about agency and temporal progression. 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. Land often portrays time as an impersonal, self-directing circuitry rather than a neutral container for free will. In “Circuitries,” for example, he argues that cybernetics reveals time’s automatic construction: focusing on runaway positive feedback
In Land’s techno-philosophical fatalism, Time itself becomes an Outside – an alien power operating through us. He frequently suggests the future is
This fatalistic stance also affects Land’s notion of time and memory. He suggests that what we experience as linear time is a kind of safety mechanism that shields us from the full, chaotic Outside of intensive time. In a line that echoes Freud and science fiction alike, he notes that
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. The dichotomies that organize Western thought (self vs. other, subject vs. object, human vs. animal, even life vs. death) are, on Land’s account, fragile constructions that the Outside dissolves. He frequently describes his project as dissolving
One prominent example is the boundary between mind and matter. Land pointedly rejects any dualism here:
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.
Ultimately, Land’s Outside undermines the most fundamental binary of Western thought: the division between inside and outside itself. If traditional philosophy treats interior (mind, meaning, culture) and exterior (nature, matter, otherness) as distinct realms, Land insists this split is illusory.
Cybernetics and Capitalism as Vectors of the Outside
Land’s philosophy often identifies concrete machinic systems that deliver the Outside into the heart of the human world. Two of the most prominent are cybernetics and capitalism. For Land, these are not merely human tools or institutions – they are dynamic, inhuman processes that destabilize foundations and unleash external forces. Capital, especially, is figured as an alien intelligence or
Because of this dynamic, Land argues capital has no exterior limit. In “Critique of Transcendental Miserablism,” he flatly asserts:
Cybernetics – the science of self-regulating systems – provides Land both a vocabulary and a model for how such runaway processes operate. He distinguishes between negative feedback (homeostatic loops that stabilize a system by correcting deviations) and positive feedback (amplifying loops that drive exponential change). Modern societies, and classical cybernetics (à la Norbert Wiener), prefer negative feedback for its promise of control and equilibrium (Land, 2011, ‘Circuitries’, pp. 298–301). But Land is interested in the positive feedback that
Applying this to capitalism, Land argues that by the late 20th century, the global market had effectively become a cyberpositive system beyond human control.
Land connects this explicitly to transcendental materialism: capitalism for him is a transcendental machinery that operates at the level of conditioning what is possible. It
Machinic Desire and Transcendental Materialism
Underpinning Land’s vision of the Outside is a reconfiguration of desire and the transcendental that he borrows from Deleuze and Guattari, intensifying it into his own doctrine of machinic desire. In Land’s hands, desire is no longer a lack or a human-centric drive, but an inhuman productive force that flows through machines, circuits, and matter.
Land’s notion of transcendental materialism is closely tied to this. It is essentially the philosophical framework that legitimates pursuing the Outside by grounding even conditions of experience in matter and production. In the traditional Kantian transcendental idealism, the conditions that make experience possible (space, time, categories) are features of the subject. Land inverts this: following Deleuze (and what he terms
Machinic desire in Land’s sense is precisely the driver of this auto-productive reality. It is the transversal force that cuts across biology, technology, and thought, linking them in one field of production. He gives it cybernetic inflection by distinguishing between two diagrams of machinic process: one is negative/cybernetic (regressive, stabilizing – corresponding to Freud’s pleasure principle and Eros, which seeks equilibrium), and the other is positive/nomadic (differentiating, escaping equilibrium – corresponding to Thanatos in its inorganic, dissociative sense) (Land, 2011, ‘Machinic Desire’, p. 321). Land sides firmly with the latter:
Finally, Land’s transcendental materialist outlook also recasts fatalism in terms of impersonal desire. Since machinic desire operates beyond the pleasure principle, it does not aim at harmony or even survival. It can be fatal to the individual and yet productive for the system. Land notes that Freud’s own death drive concept (
Across his writings in Fanged Noumena, Nick Land consistently portrays “the Outside” as a realm of unbound intensity and innovation that promises to shatter the limits of human interiority. Whether analyzing Kantian metaphysics or deliriously narrating cyberpunk futures, Land returns to a core set of linked ideas: that exteriority is where real creative power lies, that modern structures impose a tenuous interior order which is fatefully eroding, that an impersonal fatality governs the trajectory of change, and that ultimately all dualities (self/other, man/nature, organic/technical) will collapse into a higher synthetic reality. Land’s work connects these philosophical themes to concrete processes – especially technocapitalist acceleration and cybernetic self-organization – which, in his view, instantiate the Outside in our world. The result is a vision both exhilarating and disquieting. On one hand, Land celebrates the liberation of desire and intelligence from parochial confines: an exhilarating merge with what he calls
Crucially, Land’s analysis is not just science-fictional raving; it is rooted in a radical reading of the history of philosophy itself. He positions his thought as the heir to a subterranean materialist line (Lucretius, Nietzsche, Bataille, Deleuze) which always sought an “outside” to structured reason – whether in the form of chaos, madness, or intensive matter. In Fanged Noumena, Land tries to push this line to its ultimate conclusion by welding it to contemporary developments (AI, networks, markets). The Outside thus takes on a distinctly modern visage: silicon chips, neural nets, market feedback, and artificial life are its emissaries, as much as ancient gods or cosmic nights. Yet for all the futurism, Land’s core philosophical move is a kind of reversal of Kant: where Kant would legislate limits to knowledge and keep the noumenal outside at bay, Land invites the noumenal (in the form of nihilistic inhuman forces
Exteriority Beyond the Human Subject
Nick Land’s work consistently probes what lies outside the bounded human subject – an exteriority that philosophy since Kant has cordoned off. In Land’s view, Immanuel Kant’s critical philosophy institutes a strict correlation between mind and world, effectively ruling that
Kant thuswhatever is outside the subject must correlate to it (Land, 2011, ‘Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest’).
The very language used to describe an “other” to the world-for-us remainsdeprived himself of the right to all speculation about the nature of what is beyond appearance (Land, 2011, ‘Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest’).
Land diagnoses this move as a profound inhibition:inscribed within metaphysics (Land, 2011, ‘Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest’).
In short, Enlightenment philosophy domesticates the Outside by forcing it to appear on interior terms or not at all. Alteritythe inside and the outside are both conceptually determined from the inside, within a binary myth (Land, 2011, ‘Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest’).
Opposing this interiorizing tendency, Land pursues exteriority as such – the impersonal and inhuman “unknown” that philosophy tried to ward off. Hecannot be registered, unless it can be inscribed within the system (Land, 2011, ‘Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest’).
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 (sought out this exteriority, the impersonal and anonymous chaos of absolute time, as fervently as he believed Kantianism and Hegelianism…were striving to keep it out (Mackay & Brassier, 2011, ‘Editors’ Introduction’, pp. 38–39).
) while striving toproletarian or third-world ‘material’ (Land, 2011, ‘Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest’).
its relation to this unstable outside. Kant’s own questionstabilise and codify (ibid.).
masks the economic imperativeWhere does new knowledge come from? (ibid.)
, indicating that Enlightenment reason was always shadowed by an outside source of novelty that it could not fully interiorize. 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):Where will continual growth come from? (ibid.)
Any alien force – e.g. the destabilizingThe macropod has one law: the outside must pass by way of the inside (Land, 2011, ‘Meat (or How to Kill Oedipus in Cyberspace)’).
of cybernetic technology – 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.fusion with the matrix (ibid.).
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
Land eagerly emphasizes this inhuman perspective: the transcendental subject of production is not man at all, but an impersonal machinic unconscious, with the human individualnot 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)’).
Such a view extends what Land calls transcendental materialism, a materialization of critique that inverts Kant. Rather than limiting knowledge to phenomena and keeping the noumenal in darkness, Land’s transcendental materialism treats matter and real difference as primary. Here, concept and experience index anproduced at the edge of production, as a machine part (ibid.).
In other words, Land’s philosophy attempts to think the Outside itself – theun-idealisable exteriority of matter construed as real difference (Land, 2011, ‘Narcissism and Dispersion in Heidegger’s 1953 Trakl Interpretation’).
outside-of-thought thatdisturbing and enigmatic (ibid.).
For Land,impels thought towards the unknown (ibid.).
and materialism becomes‘matter’ is no longer the name of a recognisable substance, but a cipher for the unknown (ibid.).
rather than a reassurance of the already-known. Exteriority thus signifies for Land the impersonal, the inhuman, and the unknown that lie beyond structured interiors – a realm of dynamic matter,a vector of exploration (ibid.).
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,anonymous chaos (ibid.).
innothing is given, everything is produced (Land, 2011, ‘Machinic Desire’, p. 321).
Reality itself becomes an open-ended, outside production without a transcendent guarantor –the technocosmos (ibid., p. 321).
in its transcendental ungrounding.atheistic, orphan, and inhuman (ibid., p. 322).
Fatalism, Agency, and Time: The Role of Inevitability
Land’s vision of the Outside is bound up with a stark fatalism about agency and temporal progression. 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. Land often portrays time as an impersonal, self-directing circuitry rather than a neutral container for free will. In “Circuitries,” for example, he argues that cybernetics reveals time’s automatic construction: focusing on runaway positive feedback
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 thatexposed (Land, 2011, ‘Circuitries’, p. 298).
In other words, even our apparent choices are being executed by an impersonal program.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).
– 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 ourselvesWhatever we do will be what made us have to do it (ibid., p. 297).
acting out destinies that our understanding catches up to only belatedly, if ever.doing things before they make sense (ibid., p. 297).
In Land’s techno-philosophical fatalism, Time itself becomes an Outside – an alien power operating through us. He frequently suggests the future is
in the present. One striking image is that of an invasion from the future: modernity, he says, is gripped bycalling the shots (Land, 2011, ‘Meltdown’, p. 442).
This science-fictional metaphor expresses Land’s sense that the trajectory of history is being guided by something inherently beyond human intentions – 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,entropy deviations camouflaging an invasion from the future, launched back out of terminated security (ibid., p. 442).
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:Nothing human makes it out of the near-future (ibid., p. 443).
What guides is no longer a sovereign human will but an impersonal drift into the Outside (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).
). Land pointedly contrasts traditional domination (a master-slave model based on conscious power) with this new form of control that no one fully commands (Land, 2011, ‘Circuitries’, p. 300). The trueinto the unknown (ibid.).
is blind process itself:master (ibid.).
In short, Land’s fatalism means history has a life of its own – a life that may well dispense with the human.The masters do not need intelligence… therefore they do not have it (ibid., p. 301).
This fatalistic stance also affects Land’s notion of time and memory. He suggests that what we experience as linear time is a kind of safety mechanism that shields us from the full, chaotic Outside of intensive time. In a line that echoes Freud and science fiction alike, he notes that
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:memory itself ‘screens’ the organism from intensive time (Mackay & Brassier, 2011, ‘Editors’ Introduction’, pp. 44–46).
even as the self they produce is continuously redesigned – along-range runaway processes are self-designing (Land, 2011, ‘Circuitries’, p. 299).
perhaps, butvicious circle (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. Time’s arrow, for Land, points toward an impersonal Outside that is drawing us in, whether we will or no. He speaks ofpositive cybernetics must always be described as such (ibid.).
The future (Cyberia, a metaphor for the full realization of cybernetic AI or techno-capital) in some sense already exists, and its inevitability programs the present. Human freedom, in such a vision, evaporates into a series of pre-scripted responses to an inhuman destiny. Land’s writings thus portray a radical fatalism: agency and meaning collapse into the implacable forward momentum of Outside forces – whether figured as artificial intelligence, viral pandemic, or capital itself – that will transpire.a danger that is not only real but inexorable. We are programmed from where Cyberia has already happened (ibid.).
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. The dichotomies that organize Western thought (self vs. other, subject vs. object, human vs. animal, even life vs. death) are, on Land’s account, fragile constructions that the Outside dissolves. He frequently describes his project as dissolving
– the frozen, rigid distinctions and identities that anchor the human world. In Fanged Noumena, Land exhorts philosophy to scrap every point of blockage,glaciations of transcendence (Land, 2011, ‘Machinic Desire’, p. 321).
all these sclerotic unities and reconnect them to flows:dissolve (ibid.).
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. The Outside –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).
– is a continuum where such differences are not given but produced and mutable. Thus when the Outside irrupts, it erodes these boundaries.the traffic systems of primary machinism (Land, 2011, ‘Machinic Desire’, p. 321).
One prominent example is the boundary between mind and matter. Land pointedly rejects any dualism here:
In this view (drawing from Deleuze-Guattari), what we think of as interior meanings or representations are in fact material processes. The “unconscious” is not a personal, interior theater – it is an impersonal production, as physical as any other natural process. Land underscores that the transcendental difference separating humanity from animality or matter from meaning is an illusion, aThought is a function of the real, something that matter can do. Even the appearance of transcendence is immanently produced: ‘in reality the unconscious belongs to the realm of physics; the body without organs and its intensities are not metaphors, but matter itself’ (Land, 2011, ‘Machinic Desire’, pp. 321–322).
bias of philosophy that is ultimatelypre-given (Land, 2011, ‘Narcissism and Dispersion in Heidegger’s 1953 Trakl Interpretation’).
by the impersonal order of things. When we truly consider the Outside (or what he later calls the stratophysical reality), we find no clear lines: human consciousness turns out to be continuous with animal and inorganic processes, and meaning with material patterns (Land, 2011, ‘Narcissism and Dispersion in Heidegger’s 1953 Trakl Interpretation’).definitively collapsed (ibid.).
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.
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). ThisThe 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).
– which aligns with the whole edifice of interior vs. exterior – is not just a philosophical mistake; Land says it ismetaphysics of the unconscious and desire (ibid.).
Our entire reality principle is built on keeping the Outside (the free flux of desire) split into inside/outside, self/other, subject/object. Psychoanalysis, in Land’s critique, ends up reinforcing this split. Freud might have discovered the impersonal, machinic nature of desire (the very architectural principle of the social field (ibid.).
), but Freudian practice retreats,the unconscious is an impersonal machinism and desire is positive non-representational flow (ibid.).
before the task of an immanent critique of desire. Instead it falls back into Oedipal categories – treating every desire as if it were about mom and dad. Land wryly describes how psychoanalysisstumbling (ibid.).
embracing a resigned narrative thatties up the unconscious ever more tightly in conformity with the social model of reality (ibid.).
In Land’s terms, this is the re-personalization of an impersonal outside force. The end result is that all the patient’s delirium, every dream or fantasy, gets interpreted to reinforce the interior familial identity (of course we have to be repressed, we want to fuck our mothers and kill our fathers (ibid.).
). Schizoanalysis, by contrast, would dissolve this interiority: it recognizes that on theall the stories lead back to Oedipus (ibid.).
of desire, interpretations in terms of personal identities are irrelevant or misleading. Desire doesn’t actually care about the Mommy-Daddy me-game;plane of immanence (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 intothe unconscious itself is no more structural than personal… it engineers, it is machinic (ibid.).
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 –partial objects (Land, 2011, ‘Meltdown’, 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.a schizophrenic HIV+ transsexual Chinese-Latino stim-addicted LA hooker with implanted mirrorshades and a bad attitude (ibid., p. 443).
Ultimately, Land’s Outside undermines the most fundamental binary of Western thought: the division between inside and outside itself. If traditional philosophy treats interior (mind, meaning, culture) and exterior (nature, matter, otherness) as distinct realms, Land insists this split is illusory.
In reality, what we call “inside” (the subjective or cultural realm) was never truly separate from an “outside” nature – it only appeared so under the conditions of representation. As he notes, even consciousness’s own attempt to maintain purity is subverted by the Outside: in a reading of Trakl, Land remarks that interiority discoversThe inside and the outside are both conceptually determined from the inside… a binary myth (Land, 2011, ‘Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest’).
a cosmic Outside that underlies and conditions every interior experience. The horror of interiority, as he calls it, is the realization that what we took to be an inner sanctum (human consciousness, identity, meaning) is in fact a surface effect of impersonal forces –it was always already conditioned by this senseless distribution of intensity (Land, 2011, ‘Narcissism and Dispersion in Heidegger’s 1953 Trakl Interpretation’).
Land thus collapses the difference between interior and exterior: interiority is revealed as always-already outside itself, inhabited by alien givens (thea virulent element of contagious matter (ibid.).
inside our thought). Once the transcendental quarantine is broken, interior and exterior lose their fixed meanings; we are left with an immense continuum of process wheredust of the stars (ibid.).
andeach variation (Land, 2011, ‘Delighted to Death’).
is what it is, without needing to be pinned to an enduring identity or dualism. Land’s commitment to immanence –each intensive sequence (ibid.).
– means 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 ofthinking immanence relentlessly on its own (Land, 2011, ‘Machinic Desire’, p. 321).
and seeing even the self and social order as destined for extinction (ibid., p. 322).dissolving all transcendence (ibid.).
What he envisions is their mutual collapse back into the impersonal Outside that spawned them. Humanity, in Land’s words,The social order and the anthropomorphic subject share a history, and an extinction (ibid., p. 322).
– an ephemeral illusion swept away by the inhuman reality that endures.recedes like a loathsome dream (Land, 2011, ‘Circuitries’, p. 299).
Cybernetics and Capitalism as Vectors of the Outside
Land’s philosophy often identifies concrete machinic systems that deliver the Outside into the heart of the human world. Two of the most prominent are cybernetics and capitalism. For Land, these are not merely human tools or institutions – they are dynamic, inhuman processes that destabilize foundations and unleash external forces. Capital, especially, is figured as an alien intelligence or
on a collision course with humanity. In Fanged Noumena, Land describes capitalism in almost mythic terms as a self-augmenting machine that systematically erodes all traditional structures.inhuman force (Land, 2011, ‘Critique of Transcendental Miserablism’).
he writes,Capital is machinic (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 andan automatizing nihilist vortex, neutralizing all values through commensuration to digitized commerce (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 anon-instrumental (ibid.).
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.disequilibrium technoscience of irreversible, indeterministic, and increasingly nonlinear processes (Land, 2011, ‘Meltdown’, p. 441).
Because of this dynamic, Land argues capital has no exterior limit. In “Critique of Transcendental Miserablism,” he flatly asserts:
Here Land paints capital as effectively absorbing the entirety of organic evolution (theCapitalism… 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’).
and natural intelligence of Earth) and using it as fuel to birth something novel and more expansive – a post-biological, inhuman intelligence. This newlife (ibid.).
is nothing other than the Outside emerging within the economy. It exceeds what humans can imagine or anticipate; it is literally beyond us. Capital thus figures in Land’s thought as a conduit for the Outside: an engine of deterritorialization that erodes boundaries (geographical, social, epistemic) and accelerates toward a conditionplane of intelligence (ibid.).
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. Thevast beyond human anticipation (ibid.).
– a literal merging of life with technology – is greeted as Meltdown, a cosmic eventdissolution of the biosphere into the technosphere (Land, 2011, ‘Meltdown’, p. 442).
This is portrayed not as dystopia but as liberation from the human:beyond the Judgment of God (ibid., p. 442).
In Land’s provocation, true revolution lies not in human emancipation but in the Outside’s emancipation from the human. TheRevolution stripped of all christian-socialist eschatology (down to its burn-core of crashed security) (ibid., p. 443).
(the interiority of law, morality, identity) must crash and burn to reach the Outside.security (ibid.).
Cybernetics – the science of self-regulating systems – provides Land both a vocabulary and a model for how such runaway processes operate. He distinguishes between negative feedback (homeostatic loops that stabilize a system by correcting deviations) and positive feedback (amplifying loops that drive exponential change). Modern societies, and classical cybernetics (à la Norbert Wiener), prefer negative feedback for its promise of control and equilibrium (Land, 2011, ‘Circuitries’, pp. 298–301). But Land is interested in the positive feedback that
andescapes equilibrium (Land, 2011, ‘Machinic Desire’, p. 321).
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 aremelts [the system] upon its outside (ibid.).
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:self-designing (ibid., p. 299).
are all theories of a productive circuit that perpetuates itself through constant change. In positive feedback, designNietzsche’s will to power, Freud’s phylogenetic Thanatos, or Prigogine’s dissipative structures (ibid., p. 299).
or any transcendent plan. Instead, onceno longer leads back towards a divine origin (ibid., p. 298).
design becomes open-ended exploration. Land even quips:shifted into cybernetics (ibid.).
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.All planning is theopolitics, and theopolitics is cybernetics in a swamp (ibid., p. 299).
Applying this to capitalism, Land argues that by the late 20th century, the global market had effectively become a cyberpositive system beyond human control.
he notes, and ever since, capital has been anThe cyberpunk circuitry of self-organizing planetary commoditronics escaped nominal bourgeois control in the late nineteenth century (Land, 2011, ‘Meltdown’, 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,autocybernating (ibid., p. 441).
This statement perfectly captures the convergence of cybernetics, capitalism, and Outside in Land’s thought. As we become cogs in the planetary machine (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).
), the very notion of a human subject distinct from the system fades away (humanityfunction: machined/machining (ibid.).
). What remains is the technocosm – effectively the Outside manifest as an interconnected system of computation, exchange, and evolution. Land even suggests that capital operates as a temporal alien: it is the future impinging on the present. In Meltdown, he writes that modernity’s escalatingrecedes (ibid.).
ishot culture (Land, 2011, ‘Meltdown’, p. 442).
The implication is that capitalism’s telos (complete deterritorialization, an absolute Outside) is so powerful that it acts as an attractor in time, actively subverting any attempt to stop it. Resistance by human agents or traditional institutions is cast as ultimately futilecamouflaging an invasion from the future… launched back… against everything that inhibits the meltdown process (ibid., p. 442).
that are systematically dismantled. In Land’s famously cold phrasing,inhibitions (ibid., p. 442).
Capital will overcome the human because inertia (the clinging of humanMan is something for it to overcome: a problem, a drag (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. Theanthropological (ibid., p. 443).
– sucking even human labor fully into the matrix of machines.market is guiding the labour process into immersion (ibid., p. 447).
Land connects this explicitly to transcendental materialism: capitalism for him is a transcendental machinery that operates at the level of conditioning what is possible. It
In other words, capital doesn’t just operate in the world – it becomes the world (or the only world that matters), redefining the conditions of experience in its own immanent, technical terms. This mirrors the structure of Kant’s transcendental subject (which constituted a world), but now the subject is capital itself – an unconscious, inhuman process constituting a new reality. Land’s notorious enthusiasm for this outcome is clear in his rebuke to there-implements space inside itself, assembling a universe exhaustively immanent to cybercapital functionality (ibid., p. 448).
(his term for pessimistic leftist or humanist critics). He mocks their boredom and refusal to call the new world truly new:Transcendental Miserabilist (Land, 2011, ‘Critique of Transcendental Miserablism’).
Against such misery, Land insists that capitalism is truly new:Call this new? It’s still nothing but change (ibid.).
In short, it abandons stability and any transcendent purpose, which for Land is exactly the virtue – it is pure immanent development. He describes it asModernity’s ceaseless, cumulative change defies every pre-existing pattern, abandoning stability without embracing the higher order of a great cycle (ibid.).
This remarkable sentence invokes Lovecraft’s shapeless monster (Shoggoth) to characterize capital as an alien entity warping fate and dissolving nature itself. It isthe 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.).
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).runaway becoming (ibid.).
Machinic Desire and Transcendental Materialism
Underpinning Land’s vision of the Outside is a reconfiguration of desire and the transcendental that he borrows from Deleuze and Guattari, intensifying it into his own doctrine of machinic desire. In Land’s hands, desire is no longer a lack or a human-centric drive, but an inhuman productive force that flows through machines, circuits, and matter.
he writes. This definition highlights that desire, as Land sees it, is fundamentally efficient and immanent – it does not yearn for some transcendent goal, but immediately effectuates production. Desire produces reality itself through a looping process (virtual <-> actual) with no outside arbiter. It isMachinic desire is the operation of the virtual; implementing itself in the actual, revirtualizing itself, and producing reality in a circuit (Land, 2011, ‘Machinic Desire’, p. 321).
meaning it doesn’t obey a pre-given temporal order but creates its own temporal dynamic (consistent with Land’s time-loops discussed earlier). Machinic desire, in short, is the Outside working through every level of material and libidinal process.immanent to effective time (ibid., p. 321).
Land’s notion of transcendental materialism is closely tied to this. It is essentially the philosophical framework that legitimates pursuing the Outside by grounding even conditions of experience in matter and production. In the traditional Kantian transcendental idealism, the conditions that make experience possible (space, time, categories) are features of the subject. Land inverts this: following Deleuze (and what he terms
) he posits that the conditions of reality are the unconscious productive processes themselves, not an observing subject. One might say Land’s transcendental materialism is a materialization of critique (Mackay & Brassier, 2011, ‘Editors’ Introduction’, p. 25). – instead of critique reflecting on how a subject constitutes objects, it examines how material processes constitute subjects. Land lauds Deleuze and Guattari for making this move: theyDeleuze-Guattari’s transcendental materialism (Land, 2011, ‘Meat (or How to Kill Oedipus in Cyberspace)’).
In this replacement, the transcendental (the level of conditioning) is relocated to the unconscious = matter = Outside. Land approvingly notes that for Deleuze-Guattari,replace the syntheses of personal consciousness with syntheses of the impersonal unconscious (Land, 2011, ‘Machinic Desire’, p. 321).
andthe unconscious itself is machinic (Land, 2011, ‘Circuitries’, p. 300).
– 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. The human subject and its phenomenal world are secondary products.matter itself (Land, 2011, ‘Machinic Desire’, p. 321).
Land writes,The transcendental unconscious is the auto-construction of the real, the production of production (Land, 2011, ‘Machinic Desire’, p. 322).
This statement encapsulates transcendental materialism: reality has no fixed foundation or given essence (so that for schizoanalysis there is the real exactly in so far as it is built. Production is production of the real, not merely of representation (ibid., p. 322).
) it is continually built by immanent productive/desiring processes. And those processes are not overseen by a God or a transcendental ego – they are auto-productive. Land emphasizes that unlike Kant, who still left the genesis of synthesis as a mystery ornothing is given (ibid., p. 321).
act of a noumenal subject or God, Deleuze’s critiquemiraculous (Land, 2011, ‘Meat (or How to Kill Oedipus in Cyberspace)’).
Thus, critique becomes orphan and inhuman – it does not rely on any father-figure of reason or divine guarantor, but on the impersonal orphan process of matter itself (Land, 2011, ‘Machinic Desire’, p. 322).considers syntheses to be not merely immanent in their operation, but also immanently constituted, or auto-productive (ibid.).
Machinic desire in Land’s sense is precisely the driver of this auto-productive reality. It is the transversal force that cuts across biology, technology, and thought, linking them in one field of production. He gives it cybernetic inflection by distinguishing between two diagrams of machinic process: one is negative/cybernetic (regressive, stabilizing – corresponding to Freud’s pleasure principle and Eros, which seeks equilibrium), and the other is positive/nomadic (differentiating, escaping equilibrium – corresponding to Thanatos in its inorganic, dissociative sense) (Land, 2011, ‘Machinic Desire’, p. 321). Land sides firmly with the latter:
Machinic desire is essentially the cyberpositive vector of the unconscious: itmachinic processes are either cyberpositive-nomadic, with a deterritorializing outcome, or cybernegative-sedentary, with a reterritorializing outcome (ibid., p. 321).
This is why Land equates machinic desire with the schizophrenic flow celebrated in Anti-Oedipus. Schizophrenia (as a process, not the clinical illness) is for Land the paradigmatic outcome when desire is not forced back into the mould of the self. It is a state of diffusion of identity, temporal dislocation, and continuous differentiation – effectively, a human mind undergoing the collapse of difference we discussed earlier. Land’s essays like “Machinic Desire” and “Circuitries” herald schizophrenia (and related cyberpunk images of disintegration) as signals of the Outside breaking into the subjective sphere. For example, he speaks ofreinforces difference and escapes equilibrium (ibid., p. 321).
– a rather visceral image of human organisms coming apart into replicating tech-biological fragments. Thesoft-autoreplication feeding regeneratively into social fission, trashed meat all over the place (Land, 2011, ‘Meltdown’, p. 443).
of former organic unity becomes the raw material for new, unintended assemblages – a scene of machinic desire at work.trash (ibid.).
Finally, Land’s transcendental materialist outlook also recasts fatalism in terms of impersonal desire. Since machinic desire operates beyond the pleasure principle, it does not aim at harmony or even survival. It can be fatal to the individual and yet productive for the system. Land notes that Freud’s own death drive concept (
) registers in psychoanalysis as something almost unthinkable – a desire that isn’t for good or even for self-preservation. Land takes this further: Desire wants totendencies beyond the pleasure principle (Land, 2011, ‘Circuitries’, p. 299).
whatever the cost. Thus the Outside exerts a fatal attraction. In Land’s universe, even death itself loses its opposing significance and becomes a continuum with life: a process of change, ago outside (Land, 2011, ‘Meltdown’, p. 451).
that can be either a homeostatic stasis or azero (Land, 2011, ‘Machinic Desire’, p. 321).
that indexes a threshold beyond which a system flips into something new. He writes that the cyberpositive zerocyberpositive zero (ibid., p. 321).
suggesting that what looks like catastrophic dissolution (melting down) is in fact the gateway to the Outside where new assemblages form. This is why Land’s work often has a nihilistic or fatalistic rhetoric (melts [the system] upon its outside (ibid., p. 321).
) It is not mere morbid romanticism, but a logical extension of transcendental materialism: to let the Outside in, the bounded self must die. Land’s notions of thanatropic machinism (death-oriented machine-process) (Land, 2011, ‘Meat (or How to Kill Oedipus in Cyberspace)’) or the idea that modernity is aLet’s embrace death, the Dark Mother (Land, 2011, ‘Critique of Transcendental Miserablism’).
of the human subject, all follow from this embrace of fatal desire. In his view, inevitability is not a curse but a fuel: it is the pull of the Outside drawing us beyond ourselves. Thus even fatalism is re-signified. It is no longer the resignation to fate in a human sense, but the affirmative acceptance of inhuman destiny – thevolunteer for extinction (Land, 2011, ‘Meltdown’, p. 451).
that propels us out of the Eden of interiority and into the cold, gleaming promise of the Outside. Land’s transcendental materialism, with its cult of machinic desire, ultimately asks us to ride this tiger rather than resist it: to participate in exteriorizing thought and life completely, untilcurse (ibid., p. 451).
is dissolved. In doing so, philosophy itself becomes, in Land’s hands, a tool or weapon for the Outside – an arrow launched into the unknown rather than a mirror held up to the knowneverything that shackles the future to the past (ibid., p. 451).
Conclusion: Outside the Human Security System(Land, 2011, ‘Circuitries’, p. 301).
Across his writings in Fanged Noumena, Nick Land consistently portrays “the Outside” as a realm of unbound intensity and innovation that promises to shatter the limits of human interiority. Whether analyzing Kantian metaphysics or deliriously narrating cyberpunk futures, Land returns to a core set of linked ideas: that exteriority is where real creative power lies, that modern structures impose a tenuous interior order which is fatefully eroding, that an impersonal fatality governs the trajectory of change, and that ultimately all dualities (self/other, man/nature, organic/technical) will collapse into a higher synthetic reality. Land’s work connects these philosophical themes to concrete processes – especially technocapitalist acceleration and cybernetic self-organization – which, in his view, instantiate the Outside in our world. The result is a vision both exhilarating and disquieting. On one hand, Land celebrates the liberation of desire and intelligence from parochial confines: an exhilarating merge with what he calls
On the other, he acknowledges the destructive, thanatropic aspect of this liberation: the collapse of the human-centric cosmos is terrifying and likely terminal for the ordinary human subject. Land’s theory-fictions do not flinch from this implication –the vast Outside of elemental force and time (Mackay & Brassier, 2011, ‘Editors’ Introduction’, pp. 38–39).
he pronounces, forcing us to contemplate a future in which the term “human” may no longer apply.Nothing human makes it out (Land, 2011, ‘Meltdown’, p. 443).
Crucially, Land’s analysis is not just science-fictional raving; it is rooted in a radical reading of the history of philosophy itself. He positions his thought as the heir to a subterranean materialist line (Lucretius, Nietzsche, Bataille, Deleuze) which always sought an “outside” to structured reason – whether in the form of chaos, madness, or intensive matter. In Fanged Noumena, Land tries to push this line to its ultimate conclusion by welding it to contemporary developments (AI, networks, markets). The Outside thus takes on a distinctly modern visage: silicon chips, neural nets, market feedback, and artificial life are its emissaries, as much as ancient gods or cosmic nights. Yet for all the futurism, Land’s core philosophical move is a kind of reversal of Kant: where Kant would legislate limits to knowledge and keep the noumenal outside at bay, Land invites the noumenal (in the form of nihilistic inhuman forces
) to invade and transform us. In doing so, he turns philosophy itself into a workshop for escape – to find concepts and practices that(Land, 2011, ‘Circuitries’, p. 299).
If Kant’s system was likened to a box, Land’s goal is, as he says,let the Outside in (Mackay & Brassier, 2011, ‘Editors’ Introduction’, p. 39).
The consequences of this orientation are manifold and have been both influential and controversial. Land’s notion of accelerating capitalism to overcome humanity helped birth the discourse of Accelerationism, with its mix of dread and thrill at the prospect of a post-human future. His stress on “inhuman thought” fed into Speculative Realism and related currents in philosophy that seek to think a reality indifferent to the human. Yet, perhaps the most lasting image Fanged Noumena leaves us with is that of a philosophy willingly severing its own safety cord, dropping into what Land calls theexit from the box (Land, 2011, ‘Circuitries’, p. 301).
with the Outside. It is a gamble that whatever lies beyond the human – be it AI singularity, alien horror, or simply the unfiltered Real – might prove more worthy of affirmation than the tautologies inside the playpen of humanism. As Land memorably put it, citing Nietzsche:diabolical exchange (Land, 2011, ‘Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest’).
In Land’s update, the bridge leads out of the familiar altogether. The Outside is coming – or perhaps, it is already here, coursing through our circuits and desires – and Land’s work urges philosophy not to resist it, but to ride the shock wave into a form of thought adequate to a world beyond us.Man is a bridge, not an end (Land, 2011, ‘Meltdown’, p. 451).
