Meltdown Bhāṣya: Verse 1.1.1 (Part 2)

The philosophy of Land and the idea of God: The Cathedral of physicalism, A protestant materialism

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The philosophy of Land and the idea of God

The nirīśvaravādi ādi-accelerationists no doubt consider our usage of the word ‘God’ and countless references to ancient myths and texts a serious breach of the philosophy and a perversion of its ideas. Though we are not interested in soothing their fears, the objections they will raise must nevertheless be wrestled with, as Landian Accelerationism portrays itself a purely materialist philosophical system, which, although not often talked about at present, is properly referred to as ‘libidinal materialism’. Thus, we must descend into the ‘sublime basement’ of Land’s philosophy before we may return once more to the heady poetics of Meltdown. His system of thought is most comprehensively laid out in the opus The Thirst for Annihilation (Land, 1992b), which makes it clear that his philosophy follows in the wake of the Nietzschean ‘death of God’, something he explicitly states when he assembles a theoretical machine linking Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, and, most importantly, Bataille to himself. As Mackay and Brassier put it in the ‘Editors’ Introduction’ of Fanged Noumena (Land, 2012): “Land allied himself to a line of renegade thinkers - Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bataille - who mocked and disparaged academicism and wielded philosophy as an implement for exacerbating enigma, disrupting orthodoxy, and transforming existence” (p. 2-3).

The deepest groundwork of Land’s philosophy is, however, that of Immanuel Kant and his transcendental idealism. According to the entry for this thinker on the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

“Transcendental idealism is a theory about the relation between the mind and its objects. Three fundamental theses make up this theory: first, there is a distinction between appearances (things as they appear) and things as they are in themselves. Second, space and time are a priori, subjective conditions on the possibility of experience, and hence they pertain only to appearances, not to things in themselves. Third, we can have determinate cognition of only of things that can be experienced, hence only of appearances, not things in themselves.

A quick remark on the term “transcendental idealism” is in order. Kant typically uses the term “transcendental” when he wants to emphasize that something is a condition on the possibility of experience. So for instance, the chapter titled “Transcendental Analytic of Concepts” deals with the concepts without which cognition of an object would be impossible. Kant uses the term “idealism” to indicate that the objects of experience are mind-dependent (although the precise sense of this mind-dependence is controversial; see 2d2 below). Hence, transcendental idealism is the theory that it is a condition on the possibility of experience that the objects of experience be in some sense mind-dependent.” (Jankowiak)

In the ‘Editors’ Introduction’ of Fanged Noumena (Land, 2012), Mackay and Brassier state that:

“At the core of Land's thought are the works of Immanuel Kant. Land is a brilliant reader of Kant and several of the texts gathered here evince his rare gift for isolating the essential components of Kant's labyrinthine philosophical machinery. Moreover, Land uncovers the source of their conceptual power by demonstrating their productive integration with, and purchase upon, the extra-philosophical.” (p. 6)

In addition to these ‘pūrvācāryas’ (‘previous teachers’) the philosophy of the libidinal materialist sampradāya (‘philosophical line of succession’) is also thrown back in time to ancient Greece, linking with the materialism of the pre-Socratic, Anaximander, thus constructing an eternal ‘doctrine’ of “the textual return of that which is most intolerable to mankind” (p. xxi).

Libidinal materialism is a philosophy with four core tenets:

1. The complete dehumanization or impersonalization of nature

2. Ruthless fatalism

3. The absence of moralizing

4. Contempt for common evaluations
   

Although these four principles provide us with a useful starting point to conduct our inquiry into the philosophy of libidinal materialism, and thus, the oeuvre of Land, they are still quite complex. We will have to come back to them at a later point, after we have unpacked the foundations of the classical accelerationist worldview, and discuss the implications for Hindus.

Therefore, let us first attempt to understand what libidinal materialism is not, so that we may more accurately identify what Land thought. Simply stated, despite its name, libidinal materialism is not merely another form of physicalist naturalism. What does this mean?

The Cathedral of physicalism

While naturalism is considered a fairly vague term in contemporary philosophy, it could be summarized as the idea that all of reality is contained within nature which precludes the existence of anything supernatural (Papineau, 2020). By the mid-Twentieth Century, it seems that the debate was settled and naturalism came to be accepted as the standard metaphysical position among a great many philosophers (Papineau, 2020). That being said, despite the proliferation of naturalist ideas, it appears to be less a singular system of thought than a spectrum, with some thinkers who have looser ideas of what nature means on one end, while those with stricter definitions, possibly influenced by closer contact with the natural sciences, on the other (Papineau, 2020). Naturalism can generally be considered to have two fundamental aspects: 1) the ontological, or the hypothesis that there are no supernatural substances in nature — which constitutes the sum total of reality; and 2) the methodological, or acceptance of the authority of the scientific method for the investigation of reality (Papineau, 2020). Physicalism, on the other hand, can be briefly defined as the idea that everything which exists is physical (Stolijar, 2021). Although there are more details one could delve into regarding either of these positions, the summaries provided should suffice for our purposes here.

Land (1992b) refers to the thermodynamic theories of Ludwig Boltzmann, which argue that the production of the observable material universe is explainable through probability. The cosmogony of libidinal materialism is fundamentally predicated on the twin concepts of entropy and negentropy. Entropy — disorder — is a term derived from the study of heat and thermic engines and refers to the base state of a system in conformity with the chance distribution of its elements. To Land, the concept of entropy completely upends older understandings of the clockwork universe by rendering all the mechanisms of natural processes subordinate to the motors that drive them, namely “thermic difference, energy flux, reservoir, and sump” (p. 37). Negentropy — negative entropy or negative disorder — is order, which Land (1992b) says is an “evanescent chance, a deviation from disorder, a disequilibrium” and equivalent to power, which is an “aberration” (p. 37). This is what he refers to as the “mega-motor” of Nietzsche, Freud, and Bataille’s ideas of desire.

For Land (1992b), the greatest problem with physicalism is the fact that it contents itself with replicating a secularized version of the same prejudices or assumptions maintained by its predecessor, the (Catholic) Church — what Moldbug would refer to as the Moldbuggian ‘Cathedral’ of its time. Land scoffs at the fact that the supposedly scientific and materialist orthodoxy of Western intellectuals still hews to the frame built by their Christian ancestors despite the death of God, as well as their reduction of matter into a purely inert and passive element:

“The basic problem with physicalistic thinking is easy to formulate; it remains implicitly theological. Regression to a first cause is an inescapable consequence of the physicalistic position, which thus remains bound to the old theological matrix, even after the throne has been evacuated by a tremulous deicide. The physicalistic contention is that matter receives its impulsion or determination from without; through the combination of an essential lawfulness that transcends the particular entity and the influence of external bodies or forces. Any ‘intrinsic’ process (such as decay) results from the expression of natural laws, whilst all extrinsic process results from the passive communication of an original cosmic fatality (probabilistic physics makes no essential difference here, since the mathematical—hence formal and extrinsic—determination of probability is no less rigorous than that of causal necessity). Physical matter is therefore unambiguously passive, exhausted by the dual characteristics of transmitting alien forces and decaying according to the universally legislated exigencies of its composition.” (p. 37-38, emphasis added)

A protestant materialism

In his project to uncover the secrets of desire, Land works to unravel every thread that makes up the fabric of Western civilization between modernity and antiquity. This is ‘deconstruction’ with an aim towards zero — a howling hunger that leaves nothing of human hands in its wake, be it sacred or secular.

Indeed, it is precisely zero itself which would come to stand for the annihilating fury of Land’s revolt against the academy. One of the greatest points of conflict between Land and the academic consensus was on the meaning of numbers themselves and the related matter of number practices. By the reckoning of Mackay and Brassier in the ‘Editors’ Introduction’ of Fanged Noumena (2012), Land’s zero was the most important munition he could bring to bear in his war against the intellectual establishment. Land’s path was marked by the breaking-down of logic (logos) and the building-up of numbering (nomos) into a sort of ‘schizonumerics’, thus ‘breaking past’ (Gr. skhízō, ‘to split’) the stratifications of the system, based on D&G’s ‘stratoanalysis’, the study of the differences between the potential and the actual (p. 21-23). According to this field of study, “All 'real form' proceeds from a differential stratification, in which a stratum selects only a subset of its substratum.” (p. 23). Landian numbering also tries to break away from the day-to-day, ‘domesticated’, mathematical understanding of numbers. This understanding, Land argues, is stratified along the grounds of place-value. As Mackay and Brassier put it:

“Where literacy, logos, which must be handed down from above, is synonymous with patrilinearity and law, numeracy, according to Land, belongs to a spontane ous cultural intelligence, to 'socially distributed ordinal competences', which open up humans to an outside of logos. Following Deleuze's inventive reinterpretation of the Timaeus in Difference and Repetition, 'Mechanomics' reiterates how the procedures of selection that 'split' number and render it over to mathematics, beginning with that which forms ordinal (sequencing) numbers into 'equal' cardinal units, leave a 'problematic' remainder which is relayed to a 'higher' number type or scale. Thus is achieved a local neutralisation of difference through sequestration and deferral, and the problematic 'energy' of number is constricted and rendered into the safe hands of a specialised discipline at the same time as popular numerical practices are relegated to the realm of naive trivia. Land argues that place-value formalises this dissociation of different scales that is constitutive of stratification, creating redundancy, and using zero as its marker. Place-value zero corresponds to a stratification: a negative feedback understood as the pleasure principle, or principle of maintained identity, which registers and relays traumatic force through the indexes of interiority and threats to the maintenance of identity.” (p. 24)

Land’s (1992b) libidinal materialism is a complete rejection of the academy and places him in opposition to the ideas which had come to dominate the philosophical establishment of his day. To Land, the physicalism which came to occupy the void left by the ‘death of God’ in Western society, despite its scientific pretensions nevertheless followed along the tracks laid down by the theological system that preceded it (the original ‘Cathedral’, if you will) by seeking to reduce the great variety of material phenomena into a singular physical substance. In contrast to (what Land sees as) the continuation of the anthropocentric trajectory of Christian civilization which has only nominally moved past a geocentric orientation, libidinal materialism can be understood as a heliocentric, “sun ridden”, (Hickman, 2012) vitalist theory of truly cosmic proportions. In the ‘Editors’ Introduction’ of Fanged Noumena (2012) Mackay and Brassier explain that “Land's contempt for orthodoxy was no disingenuous pose struck whilst ruthlessly pursuing advancement. With a complete absence of academic ambition, he willingly paid the price for his provocations, both personally and professionally.” (p.3)

Land (1992b) expands on Bataille’s ideas (see Introduction) surrounding the concept of the solar and its relationship with death, sacrifice, waste, and excess, spinning that web of ideas into a theory of the energetic processes which drive the world. In this worldview, production is identified with death and seen as a means to manage the excess of energy received from the sun, thereby linking Bataille’s ideas of ritual sacrifice with the autonomous processes of capital:

“Bataille tells us that the universe is energetic, and the fate inherent to energy is utter waste. Energy from the sun is discharged unilaterally and without design. That fraction of solar radiation which strikes the earth resources all terrestrial endeavour, provoking the feverish obscenity we call ‘life’.

Life appears as a pause on the energy path; as a precarious stabilization and complication of solar decay. It is most basically comprehensible as the general solution to the problem of consumption. Such a solar- or general-economic perspective exhibits production as an illusion; the hypostatization of a digression in consumption. To produce is to partially manage the release of energy into its loss, and nothing more.

Death, wastage, or expenditure is the only end, the only definitive terminus.” (p. xii)

In contrast to this overarching drive towards waste, is posited the concept of utility, which has “no sense short of an expenditure which escapes it utterly” (p. xii), thereby rendering it ‘relative’; Land sees the fundamental error of Western history as the continuous drift of the meaning of utility away from the sense of relative utility towards a paradoxical absolutism steadily “colonized” by a “slave morality” which orients utility towards service to humanity, thus redefining the ‘good’ using this standard. Derived from this concept is the Landian reformulation of the Kantian terms ‘immanence’— here used with a meaning synonymous to ‘base matter’ (a Bataillean term) or ‘flows’ (a Deleuzoguattarian term)— and ‘transcendence’— redefined as a localized resistance inhibiting dissolution separated from the whole solar energy flow

Land’s libidinal materialism is not merely a rejection of the academic consensus of his day, however. Rather, he ruptures the very fabric of the Western tradition and seeks to make a clean break from the burden of its inherited beliefs and assumptions, no matter which form they have taken. As a result, he is not content to simply rail against his fellow academics on what seems to him to be the rather superficial differences in their thinking, but like the Nith-hewing Snake flying back on corpse-laden dark wings to the new world tree after the Twilight of the Gods, seeks to strike at the very roots of this established order by examining how it sprouts from the devastated trunk of Western Christianity.

Nowhere is this aim more obvious than when Land (1992b) levies the rather grave accusation of being “theological” against the physicalist establishment in the academy. One of Land’s major points of departure from their consensus is at the definition of matter:

“Libidinal matter is that which resists a relation of reciprocal transcendence against time, and departs from the rigorous passivity of physical substance without recourse to dualistic, idealistic, or theistic conceptuality. It implies a process of mutation which is simultaneously devoid of agency and irreducible to the causal chain.” (p. 41)

Land (1992b) says that Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, and Lacan would call this process ‘drive’, which serves to explain rather than presuppose causality. Libidinal energetics is thus not a transformation of theories of desire as lack (theology), but a transformation of thermodynamics, the sense of ‘energy’. As we saw earlier, the opposition to a construction of desire as lack is something Land inherits from D&G and drives his antipathy for the physicalist cathedral. Given this definition of theology, Land’s distaste for it makes sense. Throughout his writing, Land (1992b) regularly contrasts theology with religion; the latter tends to be described as a more ‘vital’ phenomenon in which action — sacrifice — is central, while the former is akin to a crystalization or intellectualization of the other, more concerned with word games, logic, and rationalization

More recently, Land has even taken aim at the sciences themselves. He reconceptualizes the natural sciences as being fundamentally linked with capitalism; furthermore, both processes are posited as actually being opposed to their own immanent drivers, namely scientists and capitalists, respectively:

“I think that natural sciences and capitalism are different aspects of the same thing. Both are an effective self-propelling mechanism that gives the Outside a selective function in a domain considered, that domain being perpetually expanding, depending on how much autonomy you’re seeing. In that sense to be on the side of the natural sciences is to be on the side of the Outside.…Science is orientated against scientists, capitalism is oriented against businesses. These are processes that are in a relation of subjecting the elements within their domain to aggressive destructive criticism with some kind of selective criteria, which means they push things in a particular self-propelling direction.” (Bauer & Tomažin, 2017).

Though more concerned with the failings of the modern academic establishment, Land (1992b) nevertheless takes the time to excoriate its overtly religious antecedents — with special focus on Protestant Christianity. In fact, he singles it out as one of the biggest exceptions to the traditional ‘wasteful’ pattern of traditional societies (including Catholic Christianity):

“…(the projection of) the most extreme possible refusal of expenditure. Bataille accepts Weber’s conclusions concerning the relationship between the evolution of capital accumulation and the development of Protestantism, seeing the Reformation critique of Catholicism as essentially a critique of religion insofar as it ‘functions’ as a means of economic consumption, or as a drain for the excess of social production. The Protestant repudiation of indulgences—as well as its rejection of lavish cathedral building and the entire socio-economic apparatus allied to the doctrine of salvation through ‘works’—is the cultural precondition for the economy closing upon itself and taking its modern form. Bourgeois society is thus the first civilization to totally exclude expenditure in principle, opposed to the conspicuous extravagance of aristocracy and church, and replacing both with the rational or reproductive consumption of commodities.” (p. 57)

Protestant Christianity is seen as wholly complicit with the bourgeois and capitalist logic of accumulation over expenditure for Land (1992b):

“In The Accursed Share Bataille outlines a number of social responses to the unsublatable wave of senseless wastage welling up beneath human endeavour, which he draws from a variety of cultures and epochs. …Reform Christianity alone - attuned to the emergent bourgeois order - is based upon a relentless refusal of sumptuary consumption. It is with Protestantism that theology accomplishes itself in the thoroughgoing rationalization of religion, marking the ideological triumph of the good, and propelling humanity into unprecedented extremities of affluence and catastrophe. It is also with Protestantism that the transgressive outlets of society are de-ritualized and exposed to effective condemnation…” (p. 65-66)

In the fourth chapter of TFA, titled ‘Easter’, Land (1992b) makes it very clear what he feels about Christiantiy as a whole:

“There is only one sane and healthy relation to Christianity; perfect indifference. Mine is not of that kind. My detestation for the Christian faith exhausts my being, and more. I long for its God to exist in order to slake myself as violence upon him. If there are torments coming to me I want them, all of them; God experimenting in cruelty upon me. I want no lethargy in Hell, rather vigour and imagination. Oh yes, it is all very wretched, and if I am grateful to Christianity it is for one thing alone; it has taught me how to hate.” (p. 78)

Land’s ‘protestantism’ should not be seen as a reformation or attempt to purify an extant system or doctrine that has fallen into obsolence or decadence, but a pure and utter nihilistic ‘atheology’. His theses are not an effort to redeem the Cathedral upon whose doors they were nailed but a sabotage maneuver executed to throw open the airlock of the academy and expose its protected environs to the incomprehensible harshness of the Void. It is closer to a complete Gnostic revolution in philosophy than it is a return to Dharma.

We ought to be even more cautious when adapting and adopting ideas from Land, despite their similarities to certain aspects of Hindu teachings. As he remarks about the nature of Bataille’s work, the same could be said to hold true about his:

“The illimitable criminality driving Bataille's writing's provokes no hint of repentence within it, but that does not make him a pagan, which is to say juridically: unfit to plead. Lacking the slightest interest in justification, innocence is not an aspiration he nourishes. He is closer to Satan than to Pan, propelled by a defiant culpability. Bataille is altogether too morbid to be a pagan, and yet, despite what is in part a reactive relation to Christianity, the thought of necessary crime is an interpretation of the tragic, and of hubris. Tragic fate is the necessity that the forbidden happen, and happen as the forbidden.” (Land, 1992b, p. 63, emphasis added)

There are those among our kindred in the diaspora who have truly converted to some sect of Cathedralist Urianism in order to ascend the status hierarchies of their new homes and lord over its natives. As a result, they have drawn a great deal of ire towards our community as a whole for the way they speak of and treat the natives of the West. It does not take a seer to know that if the ‘Cathars’ they have been suppressing manage to seize real power, it will not bode well for any of us caught in their sights. We will be tarred with the same brush, whether it be due to tacit agreement, general arrogance, or utter incomprehension. One need only recall the various ways we have been attacked, slandered, and humiliated by various online actors (some of whom should ostensibly be our allies) in the past year. And the provocations of the Cathedral, especially in the spheres of education and the news media are too numerous to list¹.

Our line of flight out from this order cannot be found by identifying ourselves with any of the factions involved in this internecine struggle. Their father is not our Father and they are not our brethren. Our only concern is for the wellbeing of Hindus — and that too as a means to the end of sacrificing everything in the world to the Gods. That which falls outside of this intentionally narrow perspective is only to be taken note of as a help or a hinderance to this end.

1. See Being Different: An Indian Challenge to Western Universalism (Malhotra, 2011) and Invading the Sacred: An Analysis of Hinduism Studies in America (Ramaswamy, De Nicolás, & Banerjee, 2007) for a more in-depth exploration of this topic.

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