Technological Singularity as Idea (Pt. 2)
Review of/reflection on the first class with Michael Downs "Land, Zizek, and Singularity" course
This past October in The Portal we hosted underground theorist Michael Downs of The Dangerous Maybe for a month dedicated to the ideas he has developed related to “fault line theory” between Nick Land and the CCRU, and Slavoj Žižek and the Ljubljana School, as well as how this fault line informs the idea of technological singularity. Below you will find an edited transcript of our first session, an edited public version of our first session, as well as links to the full recorded course.
To access the Land, Žižek, Singularity recordings, see:
To access the recordings as part of a larger course dedicated to “Marxist Spectres”, see:
For the first article related to Technological Singularity as Idea, see:
Last: The opening for “Land, Žižek, Singularity” with Michael Downs of The Dangerous Maybe focuses on the “Technological Singularity as Idea”. This will be a deep philosophical investigation into the concept of technological singularity, which usually only gets approached through the lens of engineering, computer science, or physics. Oftentimes, I am surprised at how little attention this concept has received in philosophical circles, which is why I consider the work by Michael Downs inspiring “Land, Žižek, Singularity” to be of high importance.
Downs refers to this work broadly as “fault line theory”, which he claims traces the two major fault lines in the underground theory scene, inspired by the differences between Nick Land and Slavoj Žižek.
Downs: I am really psyched because, while I’ve taught on Žižek and Land in the past, I’ve never taught a course focuses on the two of them together. How did I get into this weird thing called “fault line theory”? For me it started when I was getting into both Žižek’s work and Deleuze and Guattari’s work, around the same time, about 10 years ago now. I didn’t have a formal education, I didn’t even have a high school diploma.
However, the guys at the New Center for Research and Practice were cool enough to let me in and start taking classes. And it is just because I had become friends with certain philosophers online that I knew about the courses they were teaching. I had become friends with Levi Bryant, and he was teaching Deleuze and Guattari courses at the New Center, and I just knew that I wanted to learn about Deleuze and Guattari. I didn’t know at the time that the New Center was really an accelerationist school, especially left-leaning accelerationism. I didn’t know what accelerationism was or anything, I just knew that it was this thing that everybody was into there, and I was just more naive and innocent in a sense, just wanting to learn Deleuze and Guattari.
The good thing with Levi Bryant was that he is not only into Deleuze and Guattari, but also a trained Lacanian analyst, and an avid reading of Žižek. Then I learn about this “Land guy” who everyone at the New Center kept talking about, which led me to the work of Mark Fisher, the CCRU, and that whole school. So through all these connections I started to pick up stuff about both Deleuze and Guattari and its connections to Land and the CCRU, as well as Lacan and Žižek, and its connections to Todd McGowan’s work with Why Theory.
Now I only realised retrospectively, that back 10 years ago, I was thinking at the intersection of a fault line, which grew into my current engagements with Land (the D&G accelerationist side) and Žižek (the Lacanian analytic side). Once I realised I was working at a fault line, all this thinking just started to coalesce into me seeing “wow, when I go online, whether it’s on Instagram or whatever, wherever there is theory online, there are two main trends: Zizek and the Ljubljana School and Land and the CCRU or the different CCRU affiliates. And the more I followed the threads of thought, the more I started to see this growing tension between the two, because there’s the tension between, on the one side, Hegel and Lacan, and on the other side, Nietzsche and Deleuze. This whole divide really started to fascinate me the more it became explicit to me.
However, what unites them, perhaps, is that these two philosophical groups were the first two major groups to emerge in the post-internet era. I mean to say that they were both developing as philosophical groups as the internet is taking over our day-to-day lives. So somehow in this mix I was intrigued by how these two groups were attempting to think through the impacts of the internet, on our minds and society.
The CCRU side was obviously way more focused on cybernetics and new technology in comparison to either Žižek or Zupančič, but now they are also both attempting to think it as well. But if you go back to Žižek’s Plague of Fantasies, he has always been talking about computers and video games, or whatever, it has always been there.
Last: What was the thing that made you more aware of specifically a fault line between these two groups? Was there a specific distinction?
Downs: I think the fault line itself is bigger than either Žižek or Land, Ljubljana School or CCRU. I think I have come to understand the fault line as operating between capital versus subjectivity. Land and the CCRU see capital as this AI machine system that is going to eventually, in some way shape or form, bring about human extinction. It could, you know, but that doesn’t mean AI is just going to emerge and drop the nukes on us. Land is very clear on this, he does not believe in a “Terminator” scenario. However, for Land and CCRU, with the Deleuze and Nietzsche influence, you don’t really build your theory with an understanding of the subject. For this line, you understand that there is the effect of subjectivisation, but you don’t think there’s a real kernel of subjectivity.
In contrast, what Žižek has done, starting with The Sublime Object of Ideology, and maybe even prior to that in his other work, you have a defence of subjectivity. And that’s where I have been thinking this divide.
I think Land is right about capital in the sense that it’s an AI system sent from the future, the whole thing, right. I buy that.
But I also do not believe that we’re just the coagulation of wild forces that somehow comes to have this illusion of self retroactively. I believe there’s a hard kernel of subjectivity. I think that kernel resists the different tendencies of capital. So I am not ready to say, as Land seems to be, that the human is conquered once and for all, yet.
Maybe we will be conquered, but I think subjectivity is this point of resistance and challenge still. The hard core Landians would just go, nope, that’s bullshit. Landians don’t buy the Žižekian theory of subjectivity. Some people claim that the Landian direction just ends up in this Schopenhauerian pessimism, and I used to think that too; but once the Nietzchean light went off for me, I was like, “no, he is just a Nietzschean”. Land is a Nietzschean who affirms radical overcoming into something more beautiful, avoiding the fall into this pessimistic despair, at least from his perspective. Land would claim that the real pessimistic despair is on what he calls the “transcendental miserablist” side of things (which he basically equates to the entire post-Marxist tradition, the Frankfurt School, the modern Left, and so forth). For Land, I am a transcendental miserablist.
One way to see Land is that he is just life-affirming about all the changes brought about by the Singularity. However, there is a difference between Land and someone like Kurzweil. If you want the preservation of the human in some transhumanist sense, it would be Kurzweil. But I think Land is on some level positing that the Singularity will not care about preserving humans in anyway shape or form, especially if you go back to the Fanged Noumena writings. For Land, while he respects Kurzweil’s technical understanding, projecting and forecasting, he does not share Kurzweil’s humanism; for Land, the Singularity could just view us as meat.
Last: Kurzweil’s contributions to forecasting and projecting the future trends of technology are indispensable, but at the same time, he is not philosophical.
Downs: Neither is Bostrom. The two most important “pure AI theorists” are Kurzweil and Bostrom, but what they both have in common, is that they don’t understand the role capital is playing. This is where Land reaches the peak moment of his theoretical insight. I think Land is right. I don’t think it is a matter of whether you like what he posts on Twitter or you don’t think dig the “Dark Enlightenment” stuff. But I think the key is this Landian thesis: capitalism is artificial intelligence. That is where Land’s most important contribution is at.
For me, Bostrom and Kurzweil, as great as they are as pure AI theorists, are blind to capital, and Land is pinpointing it.
Last: And I think the Žižekian point is that they are all, Bostrom, Kurzweil, and Land, are blind to politics. Maybe that is where your work is also, because I see your work, Capital vs. Subjectivity, as a kind of political treatise.
Downs: I’ll say this for Land, early in the 90s, his thought about politics was that it was just reduced to manipulation by capital. However, somewhere along his path, he becomes more of a political thinker. It is just that he turns out to be politically on the right. However, at the same time, he has this view that there is just going to be a total meltdown of all society… but that is not something that you can sell people as a political program. I like to say that you’re not going to sell soccer moms on an AI mediated meltdown of society, you’re not going to sell anyone on the Robo-Cthulu future. In this context, I think Land had to figure out a way that politics could camouflage what he’s really or ultimately about. That is where he finds Mencius Moldbug (Curtis Yarvin).
I basically think that Land’s politics is against any notion of a human security system. For Land, his accelerationism would welcome the wild noumenal forces to destroy the human security system. I guess I am saying that there are these political problems in Land’s work between the “Old CCRU Land” and the “New Neo-Reactionary Land”.
Last: I think that’s a great overview as an opening framing for discussing technological singularity. Now I think it’s important that we get this concept right, to make sure we all know what we are talking about. When we talk about the technological singularity it can become a concept that is too open to wild speculation, in need of more rigorous framing. At the same time, one of the most attractive things about the technological singularity idea, is that perhaps more than any other idea, it lends itself to philosophical speculation.
The original concept, I think, can be traced in a lineage that stems from I.J. Good, with the idea of the intelligence explosion. I think the idea of the intelligence explosion is the kernel or the core axiom. After Good, thinkers like Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil came to think of the intelligence explosion as representing a singularity. This idea revolves around an intelligence that could recursively improve itself, which leads one to thinking about an entity that can alter its own source code. If such an entity were to emerge, then eventually it will be able to manipulate and transcend itself to the point where humans won’t be able to understand what it is doing.
I think this idea is so powerful, not only because it emerge at the origin of cybernetics, but because contemporary AI researchers are starting to see this in their own work. AI researchers are starting to see AI or LLMs as machines that can learn from its own mistakes and improve itself. In that sense, some people are already saying “isn’t the Singularity already here?”
I think it’s a blurry territory, because when Kurzweil proposes dates like 2029 for human-level language, some people already claim that has been achieved. This would mean the accelerationist trend is ahead of Kurzweil’s anticipation. Kurzweil’s other famous prediction of collective computation capacities that exceed the human species collective intelligence by 2045 represents the point that, for Kurzweil, the evolutionary process will have handed itself over to another agent. However, now I am seeing more and more AI theorists who think it will happen even faster than Kurzweil’s predictions.
How do you understand this core idea of a feedback loop that bootstraps itself beyond the human species?
Downs: I think that is this core thing to understand about Singularity. Land’s approach to AI is that he wants to emphasise “cyber positivity” (or “positive feedback loops”). For the founder of cybernetics, Norbert Wiener, in contrast to Land, it was always about the negative feedback loop.
Now if we wanted to connect these ideas to the Žižekian side, and perhaps especially the Freudo-Lacanian angle, negative feedback loops are essentially the pleasure principle, and positive feedback loops are essentially jouissance and death drive. What negative feedback loops seek to do is bring a system to a relative homeostasis or stability. In contrast, positive feedback loops amplify the system to the point that it can’t maintain stability, the system becomes overloaded and ruptures.
That is what Land thinks capital is. Land thinks MCM prime (Money-Commodity-More Money), that famous Marxian formula for capital, is this cyber positive feedback loop amplifying itself. That is why Land connects AI to capital. Land thinks this intelligence explosion is baked into the loop of capital accumulation, or MCM prime. That’s what makes it unstoppable, this is what makes it inevitable.
I should clarify, if you go back to Adam Smith’s invisible hand, for Land, that is a form of AI. It is a type of intelligence. No individual human or even collective of humans understands all the workings of the market. The market is a virtual system that has its own internal logic and functioning. Because of that, Land sees the Singularity in larval form in the invisible hand. For Land, if you want to stop the emergence of what you and I are talking about with technological singularity, you would have to stop capitalism, and he thinks no one is capable of doing that.
Consequently, Land thinks that as long as capitalism is doing its thing, its going to constantly give rise to increased productivity and efficiency of automation. These are tendencies baked into what Marxists have long understood. I think it’s this Marxist influence on Land that made him, in my opinion, the most important thinker of AI, because he’s the one who realised, via Marx, that this thing with the emergence of AI is connected in a specific way to our modes of production. The intelligence explosion is really, in a sense, the culmination of the capitalist mode of production.
Last: Could we say, then, that what cyberneticians are identifying here, like Good, Vinge and Kurzweil, is the moment where capitalism no longer needs humans to repeat MCM prime?
Downs: Yes, you very well could interpret it that way. I mean I don’t think the cyberneticians would frame it like that. But you can. In Marxist terms you can start talking about a circuit that takes the commodity out and it’s just M to M prime. Here you get into finance and speculative capital. Finance and speculative capital doesn’t seem to go through production, wage labour, commodity consumption. All of that seems to be bracketed out in those specific forms. You could say that there is this tendency to just bracket out the level of concrete human involvement in the process of MCM prime. If you take the C out, the commodity in the formula, then you take out the human, because that is where we operate in capitalism. When you move from M to C, you purchase wage labour or human labour power, in order to invest in commodity production geared towards capital accumulation.
However, if the capitalist system is ultimately based around just using itself to build itself and then discards us, well, then we seem to be on the way out.
Last: I am trying to think what is the conversation that needs to happen at this distinction between the way you and Land are understanding MCM prime, and the way Chris Cutrone is claiming that MCM prime is not capitalism, but rather the failure of capitalism in bourgeois society. I think Cutrone would be saying that MCM prime is the way bourgeois ideology makes sense of its relationship to capitalism, but it’s not capitalism in itself. In contrast, you are saying, and I think Land is saying — correct me if I am wrong — that capitalism can remove the C for a more efficient loop.
Downs: Yeah, I think you nailed it. I don’t agree with Cutrone on this one, I’m with Land. Marx names that formula of capital, and I think that circuit is the basic circuit of capital as a cyber positive feedback loop. Capital is not about selling us commodities, it does that in as a means to an end, it does that to corral us into working for it, to build itself. But ultimately capitalism doesn’t care about commodity production.
What the circuit of capital cares about is the exponential reification of itself, which for Land is the production of robotics, making more and more efficient and productive machines. That’s why Land talks about MCM prime, not just as the liberation or emancipation of capital, but as the emancipation of the means of production themselves. It is the technological infrastructure spurred on and developed by capital accumulation that is the real in and for itself for this process. For Land, this is teleological. Land is very much a teleological thinker.
Land’s basic teleology is an example from the end of “Terminator 2”, where the T1000 gets frozen in carbonate, shatters, and then all these little pieces get pulled back together again. He thinks that is what’s happening. The Singularity, what I call Robo-Cthulu, is pulling itself together from the future. Ultimately this will end with an intelligence explosion. Whatever that means, and how the end looks, nobody knows, of course. But he thinks that intelligence explosion is inevitable based on the loop of capital. And more and more this machinic process is going to have less and less need for us. In one way, shape or form, we’re going to be out of this equation.
Last: I think here we need to introduce the distinction between teleology and retroactivity. How might that change the way we think about the relationship between capitalism and politics? I think someone like Žižek would say, ok, if you’re accepting MCM prime, if you’re accepting the mechanism as a kind of eternal structure which is going to surpass human beings, then you can identify with the teleology of it. But I think Žižek would say there could be a space in the failure of MCM prime where a political intervention could be made, where an alternative mode of production, or an alternative political economy could develop, which is not based on MCM prime, and which retroactively changes what we think about the future.
How do we get at that distinction between teleology of capitalism versus the space where there could be a political intervention, which retroactively changes what we think about the future.
Downs: I think this is the issue, right? Both Land and Žižek are approaching this stuff with different ontologies, different metaphysics. For Land, being a Deleuzo-Guattarian, he doesn’t view lack or contradiction or negativity as constitutive of reality. Land views capital as locked into its own cyber-positive feedback loop. Capital as what accelerates the cyber-positive feedback loop of nature itself. Nature produces new things. This is the Deleuzo-Guattarian desiring production. You can call it assemblage ontology, you can say it’s the philosophy of difference. There are different ways to talk about this but what is fundamental is the irreconcilable point between the two.
Žižek does think negativity is part of reality. Žižek does think contradiction is part of reality. This is because he’s a Hegelian. So this is where fault line theory has all this rich philosophical background. Deleuze, of course, is inspired by Spinoza and Nietzsche; Žižek is inspired from Hegel. Both are inspired by Kant.
Ultimately, however, the difference is that Land does think there is a space of negativity, but his negative is really like the pure body without organs, which would be the pure virtual. It is not, however, the type of dialectical negativity Hegel is talking about. If you ask Land, he would say his negativity is pure imminence, it’s a Deleuzian thing. Deleuze and Guattari, Deleuze especially, did not like his work being thought of as representing negation or nothingness at the heart of it. He would not go for that at all. The negative for Land has to do with the fact that he just believes in this radical acceleration towards the zero point of pure virtuality (which is positive), not dialectical negativity.
This is maybe getting a little bit wordy and jargon-filled, but what it boils down to is the fact that Land does not think there are pockets of negative resistance towards either capital or nature. And the Hegelian, Lacanian, Žižekian perspective would say “yes there are”. Alenka Zupančič has this way of talking about how we are cut away from nature. That is where Deleuze and Guattari and Land would totally want to puke. They think that is some kind of metaphysical transcendence talk. But when you follow the Lacanian logic, it makes a lot of sense from the perspective of death drive via the signifier, how we are derailed from how other organisms operate. Because we are derailed from the basic functioning of the organism, in nature. It opens up a space of freedom, of negativity, of subjectivity in us that is irreducible. It is emergent. So it is not like we are doing some Cartesian dualism. If you ask Žižek, he is going to say I am not doing metaphysical dualism, Žižek has always maintained the status of dialectical materialism.
Last: Žižek’s materialism is a materialism of deepening negativity. I think for Žižek the human being represents a significant deepening of negativity. We call that freedom in the distinction between biological life and say life that inhabits the symbolic order. When you compare a newborn of almost any other species versus a newborn of the human species, there is just a level of negativity that the human being expresses that is inherent to our nature, which it seems like other organisms don’t have to tarry with. It’s that primal impotence, it’s that prolonged weakness, it’s that uncontrolled body, it’s that submission to the symbolic order, which no other species has to deal with. This dimension is at the same time the dimension that provides us with this space of freedom, which I think is the space of freedom that we presuppose is large enough to also have a historical dimension in the fight against capitalism, for example.
Downs: Yeah, I mean I totally agree. It is just that Landians would critique us for believing in some radical metaphysical transcendent dimension, something that cuts away from nature, or talking about a Cartesian subject that is not reducible to the material components of our body. That is their straw man of us.
The point for me, though, is that subjectivity is an emergent negativity insofar as you don’t have the Lacanian-Žižekian negative subject without a brain, without language. The thing that emerges from the brain and language together is a new negativity, it is not anything with specific positive characteristics. I think most Landians would say that is just bullshit.
Last: I came from an evolutionary school that was non-reductionist, it was emergentist. But this school always thinks about emergence in positive terms. So I think that is also where the Žižekian, the Ljubljana school moves in regards to even most emergentist evolutionary thinkers. I see most emergentist evolutionary thinkers identifying with a positive space of “metamodernism”, for example. But they don’t identify the negativity of the subject. So I always feel like it falls flat, literally, because you are not able to actually work with what subjectivity is fundamentally.
Downs: I agree. I mean this thing is we are pointing towards the logic of the positivity of negativity. That is really what we are doing. This has a long history. We can even find it in Heidegger: the nothing “nuths”, that nothingness is constitutive of being. Before Žižek was a Lacanian he was a Heideggerian. Before I was a Lacanian, I was a Heideggerian.
Last: Although Žižek has stated explicitly that he wants us to burn his Heideggerian book.
Downs: Fine, yeah, fair enough. But the point though is Heidegger’s Being in Time points out how there are nullities baked into the very ontological fabric of Dasein, of the human’s being-in-the-world. And in an essay called What Is Metaphysics?, he talks about how the “nothing-nuths” or “nothing-nothings”, and it attributes a kind of activity towards the nothing. The analytic philosopher Rudolph Carnap had major problems with this and just thought it was complete nonsense. For Carnap, nothing cannot do something, nothing cannot have an active role. Nothing is nothing, dummy. That is how a lot of analytic philosophers reacted to this continental stuff.
But on the side of the continental lineage, really starting with Hegel, starting with his concept of dialectical negativity, and on to Heidegger, Sartre, Lacan, Žižek, McGowan, like that whole lineage, they attribute an ontological status to negativity. Philosophers like Spinoza are not going for that, Nietzsche is not going for that, Deleuze and Guattari are not going for that, and Land is not going for that. So this is where you see another core divide in the fault line that goes back in the history of philosophy.
Last: I think you have clearly identified what I would call two philosophical phalli. In terms of this Landian lineage and the Žižekian lineage, where the Landian lineage can be traced through Deleuze, Guattari, Nietzsche, Spinoza; and the Žižekian lineage through Lacan, Hegel, and probably also Descartes.
Is there a third lineage? A fourth lineage? The Landian lineage is like this positive excess, the Žižekian lineage this absolute negativity, and maybe there is a third lineage focused on a traditionalist orientation. I see embodiments of that in someone like Peter Sloterdijk, where it is more of an emphasis on orbits, perfect circles, which are somehow also eternal forms. It is not positive excess or absolute negativity, it is more about eternal forms, which perhaps generationally reflect, allow us to contemplate the orbits from our birth in the womb up to civilisational construction.
Downs: I think someone like Spengler is in the background there?
Last: Yeah, absolutely.
Downs: I think if we want you could take Spengler, Sloterdijk, and Dugin would probably fit in there roughly. Heidegger’s got to be in there, whether or not he would want to be, but this idea of these “world spaces”, these cultural designs, these local clearings. Heidegger obviously is at work in that. And so, Spengler, Heidegger kind of lay the foundation for that. And if you believe that your world clearing is local and particular and it’s something you as a member of find worth fighting for, it is going to intrinsically be geared towards a kind of right-wing or conservative type of politics.
Last: Now I think we need to just isolate this image showing the difference between an exponential curve and an sigmoid curve.
Before going into this distinction, we should emphasise that there are very famous thinkers — from the physicist Stephen Hawking, to the tech-entrepreneur Elon Musk — that have all commented on artificial superintelligence as an existential threat. But one of the biggest pushbacks against this idea, and this is all based on the technological singularity idea we just covered with positive feedback through recursive self-improvement, is that it ultimately leads up to some sort of superintelligence which transcends the humans.
The biggest pushback I received in my doctorate about the technological singularity as exponential was a big idea, and there are many papers trying to develop this idea, that what we are looking at as an exponential growth process leading to superintelligence could also represent some sort of sigmoidal growth curve that will actually plateau at some point.
In other words, what we see as an exponent in a vertical process leading to infinity, could actually plateau as more of an “S-curve” growth. And I think that is a significant idea, I think it is an important distinction to reflect. Because Kurzweil bases his projections on the exponential. But if it were exponential, really, and Kurzweil is just right, then it seems like the world we are entering is, obviously some sort of post-human process, which even if it does not lead to our extinction, certainly sidelines us cognitively in terms of the key evolutionary agents of the progress of cosmic complexity or something like that.
But if the S-curve model is correct, then it would lead to the idea that we are actually going to plateau at some new higher level of technological complexity. And then maybe you get the idea of a world that could be built out of this new level. It would not just go on forever beyond the human.
What might the political consequences of this idea be?
Downs: I have not had a chance to discuss this with you, but I love that you’re already thinking about this because the first thing that came to mind when you sent me these slides was the distinction between, on the exponential side, we have Land, but on the S-curve side, we have what left accelerationists are really hoping for.
So basically, look, if I say I’m a “left accelerationist”, then people will just go, “oh, Downs work is an extension of Inventing the Future, or Accelerate Manifesto. So I am hesitant to do that, but I would be lying if I said that I did not have deep affinities with the left form of accelerationism. I think Mark Fisher, Alex Williams, Nick Srnicek, Reza Negarestani, are a whole side of left accelerationism. But to keep it just like the mindset of the Accelerate Manifesto, by Williams and Srnicek, the idea is that we should accelerate technological capacities spurred on by capital so it is to benefit humanity, free us from work, free us from wage labour, and establish a surplus of goods. Then people would be free to pursue whatever really motivates them, to discover their true passions. Williams and Srnicek call for demanding full automation, universal basic income, which they see as demanding a future.
Last: And that is how you end your book Capital vs. Subjectivity.
Downs: Right, so I mean, look, there are all kinds of Marxists that will have a problem with universal basic income (UBI). They’ll say this is just another form of control for capitalist politics. I get it, but ultimately, what the left accelerationists are saying, is let’s have an economy where the humans don’t have to work, or if they do work, it is very very little throughout the week. UBI gives people money to buy what they need, and you’re able to have a future because you’re able to decide what you want to do with your life, precisely because wage labour isn’t in that type of future. That is certainly the kind of future I would prefer to live in, but that would entail finding a way to either control AI or AI reaching a plateau.
Consequently, left accelerationism wants to use AI to have a kind of algorithmic communism. What was the problem with the Soviet Union? What is the problem with all these communist experiments throughout the 20th century? Central planning. Central planning doesn’t work. Well, if you use AI to centrally plan an economy, you have that kind of computational power, when then now what’s on the table as far as social possibilities? That’s the left accelerationist hope.
However, you also have to realise that AI wouldn’t be Robo-Cthulu. It wouldn’t be Bostrom’s paper clipper. It wouldn’t be Kurzweil’s Singularity, where we all transcend our bodies. It would be a robust AI but also managed AI that enables us to remain human.
For Land, that is a sweet little dream, because capital is never going to be contained like that. And you have to explain how it would become a reality, you can’t just wish it or hope for it. You have to explain how politics is going to get a hold of capital and bend it to the human will, which nobody has ever been able to do as far as he is concerned. And so that’s his critique of left accelerationism: it is wishful thinking. It sounds cute, it sounds great, but you’re never going to be able to pull it off.
Now whenever Land or Landians in particular do this whole thing of like: “it’s already set in stone, you can’t undo it, it’s all inevitable”, I think of Thanos claiming that his will is inevitable, but Iron Man still persisting in his belief that humanity is not down and out yet. That’s the difference between me and Land. If we do view this in ideological terms, let’s ask the Leninist question: who benefits from us throwing up our hands and giving up and agreeing with Land that capital has already won?
Capital!
I am going to be stubborn. I am fucking human. I’m not willing to say capital has won yet. So at the top of the S-curve model of the Singularity, I am saying we should write “left accelerationism?”. Left accelerationism towards “technologically automated luxury Communism”.
Last: I suppose we should also add that it could be techno-feudalism.
Downs: Totally, it could be some kind of hells cape where the AI plateaus and we still cannot do anything politically to organise an economy for humans.
Last: Maybe that is more likely.
Downs: Maybe. I mean that seems to be the direction we are heading into. So let’s not act like the S-curve is just pointing towards an emancipatory future. These are virtual futures to use the name of the old CCRU conference. There are virtual futures. As of now, I cannot speak for everyone, but I certainly don’t feel like I have a future. This is where I remain with Mark Fisher. The question is: what would it be be to have a future? There’s never just going to be one future.
Maybe this is where I go into the whole Žižekian critique of Land. Žižek’s critique of Land is that he claims Land is too optimistic. One way to interpret that is to say Land really thinks there is this one future and its inevitable, even if that one future sucks for us humans, it is still optimistic because we know what is going to happen.
Žižek is sitting there going, it’s not nearly set in stone or open and shut. There are a bunch of possibilities alive here. We don’t know what the hell the future holds, and we’re only going to retroactively understand it. This Landian idea, in contrast, is that we can traffic with the future directly via the occult, via hyperstition, via theory fiction. Žižek would say “no you can’t traffic with the future”. For Žižek, all you can do is retroactively understand what happened, and that’s a difference in approach there. I just want to speculate that the top of the S-curve, the plateau in AI, could be something great for us, or of course, it could be something even worse than our current situation.
Last: I just think that this is a practical representation of the difference between teleological and retroactive thinking. With teleological thinking, you just think that this growth is just inevitably going to keep going in the direction it is. But with retroactive thinking, it could go that way, but it could also go this other way. I think it is the philosophically honest position.
Last weekend I was at an event where I met some Landians, and they were talking about hyperstition and teleology. I just think that they way they think is anti-philosophical, it is even dishonest. From my perspective, they were just identifying with the present moment of their own imagination.
Downs: I have thought a lot about this. This whole thing about retroactivity is important to understand. For Žižek, yes he is a dialectician, but for him dialectics is always a contingent process. For Žižek, there is no necessity in a the Stalinist sense where you think this necessity is baked into history. Žižek does not use dialectics to develop a roadmap of necessary developments related to the one future. He thinks that things happen contingently. He thinks that retroactively, one the thing happens, you can come to see the necessity of how you got there. But in it-itself the process is open-ended, not deterministic. Along the way there will be all these wild twists and turns.
For Land, he believes in retroactivity too. He would call it “retro-chronic-temporality”. But both Land and Žižek believe in this retroversion when it comes to time. The difference is Žižek’s retroactivity is dialectical, it is always in the symbolic, it is always in language. It is in how we understand things, how we conceptualise things. Land toys with retro-chronic-temporality being part of nature itself or being part of the universe, similar to the movie “Tennant”. Why does he do this? Because Land thinks there are disincarnate intelligences within or outside the universe. He believes in the lofty powers, a.k.a the demon lemurs. And what are they? They are superintelligences that have escaped the confines of time and for whatever reason, are always intervening retroactively in history. Now people say, well, how much of this is just hyperstitional mythology? How much of this is what he actually believes?
In a conversation with Nance and myself, Land talks to us at length about the numogram. The numogram is his main occult diagram. But that’s where this thing with Land becomes incredibly bizarre, to say the least. When you talk about Land’s theory, there is capitalism, it spurs on technological development, there is an intrinsic necessity to it, it is far reaching because nobody can stop it, but then, at some point, the demon lemurs come into the equation. And yeah, he believes in these occult superintelligences. I believe they’re just AIs, but some people think, no, they’re actual ancient spirits that want to take on technological forms. I’m not sure even on how to answer that, because basically the only person who can tell you that is Land himself, and even with the three-hour discussion we had with him, some of this stuff he won’t go into. That’s where the actual, not just the symbolic retroactivity and necessity, but actual real retro-chronic-temporality comes into play.
Last: Can we isolate this distinction you made between Žižek and Land on the symbolic order, the universe, and retroactivity? I think that is this move which to me is the Kantian move. After Kant, there is this way in which we can no longer believe we know the universe outside of the coordinates of the symbolic order. In other words, everything we know about the universe is through the coordinates of the symbolic order, and so what we know about the real is the symbolic-real. But we can no longer labour under the delusion that we have some sort of knowledge of the noumenal in-itself, so to speak.
Downs: Peter Wolfendale has famously made this critique of Land. So have other left accelerationists. Wolfendale and others say that Land can’t keep saying that the outside is noumenal. By definition we can’t say anything about the noumenal. We have no idea what it is. It is completely outside of human cognition, human experience. Land even early on defines the noumenon as that wherein the subject is absent. But if you start talking about 45 demon lemurs, and you start talking about capital, and you start talking about de-territorializing intensities as “fanged noumena”, aren’t you talking about noumena in a very specific positive determination? That is one of these problems that a lot of people have seen with Land and his theory. The paradox with Land is that, noumena, what you by definition cannot speak about, he apparently has a lot of say about it!
At the same time, people will tell me that I cannot conflate the Lacanian Real with the Landian Outside. But here is the thing, it depends on how we want to interpret the Lacanian Real. Sometimes Lacanians will act like the Real is that which is just radically Outside the symbolic order. More nuances interpretations, especially from Lacan in Seminar XX, he talks about the Real like a glitch in the formalisation of the symbolic. The point is, if the Real is just a glitch, a contradiction, an impossibility within the symbolic itself, then it’s not radically exterior, even though it evades symbolic registration. So you can’t mentally process it, you can’t interpret it. It resists symbolisation. Nonetheless, the Real is dialectically or intrinsically related to the symbolic.
In contrast, the Landians want the Real to be Outside, to be radically Outside any human symbolic orders. The example Land gives from Fanged Noumena is a cyclone. You stand back and think for a second, would a Kantian accept that as a noumenon? Kantians would probably say, no, a cyclone is part of the empirical plane, it’s phenomenal.
Last: I am imagining an example from the movie “Twister”, where the main characters are chasing tornadoes externally for them whole movie, and they are trying to get footage of the inside of the tornado, and then at the end of the movie, they are inside the tornado itself. It is like the difference between seeing the tornado externally and being on the inside of the thing itself.
Downs: Landians would like that idea, but okay, in that example, I mean are they truly 100% absent subjects? It seems to me like the Landian “fanged noumenon” is an instance of the Lacanian Real, because even though the Lacanian Real is impossible, and it resists symbolisation, what analysis does is bring dimensions of the Real into a space of interpretation where you do make sense of these traumas from your past. And they do resist symbolisation, but can you never bring them into the symbolic? Well, yes you can. Not all of it, but you can integrate some of it into the symbolic. So this is a whole thing of semantics. What words do we want to use for what, to make what distinctions?
My example of the Landian “fanged noumenon” is the heat of the core of the sun, which is like 20 million degrees. This is in my book, Capital vs. Subjectivity, and you’ve heard me say this before, but sorry, we can say that, there is some part of us that can mentally process some abstract understanding of the core of the sun, but can we understand that in the same way we understand that it is basically perfect outside at 70 degrees, or a bit chilly at 45 degrees, or that its freezing at 10 below zero? My point is, the human sensorium has the ability to integrate an understanding on the level of temperature within a range of intensities.
Last: I think that the Kurzweilian imagination would be something like “future transhuman beings waking up the universe would be able to experience everything in the universe, even the center of the sun”. I think Kurzweil’s vision of the transhuman is that it is outside of the transcendental categories. I think the transhuman being would be beyond, so to speak, Kant’s categories of the understanding. It would be in that sense something completely other to us.
Downs: I guess my whole thing is to put on a Žižekian twist on it. What I mean by that is, okay, the more that we increase our ability to cognise and experience everything the universe has to offer, there is always going to be a deficit, because what you’re not going to be able to experience is lack. That lack itself, like the lack of timenergy, lack of money, lack of health. These are real experiences, right? And so the more that you positivise, there is this weird intrinsic way you also negativise insofar as, okay, the more you feel all these lacks, the more you negate the positive experiences of lack itself. And so you’re not actually making all things possible, in a positivist world, I want to say, it’s going to be full, complete, and harmonious in experience. It would be God’s experience of things. I would just say, no, what you are completely undermining is the positive reality of the human experience of lack.
Last: Let us go deeper into Land first. I think the idea of transcendental miserablism is obviously the key idea throughout your whole book, Capital vs. Subjectivity. I think the thing that I appreciated the most in your tarrying with Land is the way in which he brings out this disposition coming from the Frankfurt School, and which colours the whole political left in the real breakdown of any positive utopian vision of communism. The whole political left becomes overwhelmed by a doomerism about capitalism and it seems to me like Land just says “your doomer position is in some sense existentially correct, but I’m just going to identify with capitalism, which is the thing that is making you a doomer, whereas I can celebrate the way in which it makes the human irrelevant”.
Downs: Right, so Land has this short essay in Fanged Noumena called “Transcendental Miserablism”. The essay is towards the end of the book. Basically, Land says that leftists typically have an experiential default setting that can only view everything in negative terms. Land says the left is default doomerism, especially when it comes to capitalism. And the problem is that with using this term “transcendental”, this Kantian term, he is acting like it’s something that imbues leftist politics with a certain type of experiential essence. In other words, leftists cannot warm up to capitalism in any way, shape or form. And it’s because of this basic existential default setting that the left cannot really think or do anything new, for Land; perhaps best exemplified by someone like his old buddy Mark Fisher from the CCRU.
In fact, if you go into Land’s “Transcendental Miserblism” essay in Fanged Noumena, and you look at it closely, the version has been modified slightly at the beginning. In the original blog post he wrote in response to something Fisher wrote, and it starts off acknowledging that he is basically responding to Fisher. The editors took that out for context, because they weren’t going to include Fisher’s piece in the edited volume. But it was basically Fisher laying the foundation of lost futures, hauntology, and so forth. Land’s response is basically like “leftists are sad”. And because they’re sad, and because they’re sad, they blame capitalism for everything. For Land, that is leftists problem, not capitalism’s problem. And obviously, I don’t agree with that.
Last: But at the same time, it is almost like the perfect tarrying, right? Like, you identified someone that’s perfect to tarry with. I think that is your point in engaging Land so specifically, right? Isn’t your point that leftists who say we should not even engage Land are disabling their own theory? In other words, leftists should critically engage Land’s work as an effort in really reinventing political theory.
Downs: Mark Fisher was like a card-carrying Landian, a CCRU guy, and then he becomes the Fisher we all know now. Fisher says its because he started reading Žižek. This puts an interesting dimension into fault line theory, where Žižek left-pilled Fisher. Fisher came to realise that it’s capitalism that’s making us so fucking depressed. It’s capitalism but then we are fed all these depression and anxiety pills. We never address the way in which our society puts blame on us, and pathologizes us, but it is capitalism, the issue is the mode of production that we are all forced to exist within. So I am just going to disagree with Land on this point: sorry dude, the reason we are all depressed is because we work our asses off, and we can barely pay our fucking rent, barely pay our mortgages, barely buy shit at the grocery store. I just don’t think Land has faced those issues and certainly hasn’t faced them recently. So I just don’t think he is tapped in to what a lot of us are dealing with. There are concrete economic realities caught up with wage labour that he plainly ignores, it is the blind spot in his thinking.
Last: One of the problems with woke ideology is you’ll have someone from India or from Africa, and they’ll say, you can’t theorise about Africa or you can’t theorise about India because you’re not India or you’re not Africa, right? So, it just essentialises the subject position in a particularist way. I guess what worries me with Marxism is falling into the same essentialist trap. For example, if you have never struggle economically, or if you have always had a stable comfortable job, then your theoretical position has this blind spot. I don’t know, it is hard to navigate that because I obviously think it is true that someone’s experience in a certain class can make them blind to the parallax of class difference as such. I feel that in my experience as well, coming from a working class background, I see how deeply it has effected my experience and thinking about life, society, the world as a whole. I feel like Kurzweil’s privilege in some sense does lead him to having this blind spot regarding politics and economics as well. But how do we walk that tension?
Downs: I think the Lacanian-Žižekian angle helps, there are limits on how much we can relate to somebody else given their specific facticity, right? We’re also all negative subjects. None of us are identical to our identities. None of us are fully reducible to our ethnicities, or to our class position, to our positive social features. And this blank spot within all of us, which is subjectivity, enables us to bond with each other on the basis of this non-identity to our identities.
In other words, I don’t want to do “workerism” either.
Last: Perfect. Now we can finally say something about Žižek and the “wired brain”. For me, I think this does bring out a theological dimension in the technological singularity. The way Žižek frames the situation is that technologists are trying to close the gap/lack in our being, and in contrast to this position, which he claims is impossible anyway, he emphasises for us to stay with the gap/lack. Žižek is basically saying, in trying to close the gap/lack, technologists are trying to collapse the mediation of desire into the immediacy of desire. The brain machine interface, or “wired brain”, would be the reality of the collapsing the mediation of desire into the immediacy of desire, where our brains would be directly connected to whatever we think we want. It would be like the iPhone “50” as this microchip that you just plug into your brain allowing direct immersive access to the internet as a part of your natural sensory experience without a physical screen.
For Žižek, if we do close the gap, it would not be utopia, but apocalypse. It seems like his basic question is whether it would be apocalypse with or without Kingdom.
Downs: And all this does have obvious theological implications and association, “the fall that made us like God”, right? Žižek is talking about Adam and Eve. The point though, is that in Eden, God did not actually give Adam a choice. We all know how this story goes: Adam and Eve chose sin. In a sense, they chose freedom, right?
But it’s a weird thing: if Adam and Eve weren’t free before the fall, how could they freely choose to be free? It is like God gave them this inking, this possibility of freedom, and they went in the direction of sinning. And through sin, they felt they no longer could be fully identical to God’s mandate.
Here’s the problem: sin is the theological name for the psychoanalytic terms jouissance and death drive. We are split subjects because we are sinners, because we are not fully identical with the Name of the Father, with God’s mandate. So fast forward to the Book of Revelation, those who make it out and eat of the tree of eternal life, what do they become? They become symbolically identical to God’s mandate. Sin and death are cast into the lake of fire, which means to say that the whole Bible is working towards us no longer being split subjects, no longer being constituted by negativity, no longer being tapped into jouissance, no longer having death drive, and that’s the theological aim God aspires to.
God wants us, in psychoanalytic terms, to be absolutely identical with our symbolic identities, to not have any excess remainder of subjectivity, to not be oriented around death drive and jouissance, to only work in accordance with the pleasure principle and the reality principle. God is basically de-subjectivising us as the aim of the Bible itself. This whole thing of wanting to overturn lack or fill in the gap that Žižek is critiquing technognostics about, it’s there in the Book of Revelation too.
Last: Žižek always says “I’m a Christian atheist, but don’t worry, I’m really an atheist”. You know, I think he’s more strategically using Christian atheism to deepen atheism.
Downs: I know that, and you and I, we have had these long private chats about this topic, Christian atheism vs. fundamentalism. But look, if we take the Bible at its own word if we read the Bible to the letter, so to speak, it contradicts what Žižek is trying to do; Žižek is not going to sit there and talk about the whole Bible, he is going to talk about the thing with the cross and the father: “Father, why have you forsaken me?”. Žižek is not going to talk about the Book of Revelation.
I was born and raised Baptist. And I know how the Book of Revelation ends. The quilting point of the book is God finally creating a multitude of human beings that are fully identical to this symbolic identity that he bestows on them. Sin is freedom, and God does not want us to be free. And the book ends with God creating a race of neo-humans that aren’t constituted by sin, that aren’t constituted by freedom. And these neo-humans are perfectly identical to what God wills them to be.
Last: The way Žižek interprets it is actually that Chris is the embodiment or the affirmation of split subjectivity, and emphasises that we stay with that as an ethical injunction.
Downs: Okay, but when Christ was down here he was to go through all things, tempted on all fronts. He is the Son of God, but also the Son of Man. Once he’s resurrected, all these coordinates are different. Žižek doesn’t go into this aspect of Christianity. Christ ends up at the “right hand of God”, he is identical with the Trinity. At the end of the story, Christ is not a split subject. At the end of the story, Christ has paid for our sin debt.
Last: We are definitely going to have to discuss this at length at one point. But let’s end with your book, Capital vs. Subjectivity. What I want to emphasise is that your book is an important contribution because I think it does bring us to the concrete political program as a question. Your book leaves us with a challenge, the political challenge of technological singularity. You use the signifier of timenergy to emphasise that the Singularity you’re looking for is the emancipation of human timenergy, using Land as an antagonist and ultimately using Žižek to critique his idea of teleology and ideology.
Downs: Yeah, I mean, ultimately, if I am an accelerationist, it would be some kind of “timenergetic” accelerationist. The way I view it, timenergy is just the condition for the life of passion. If one has timenergy it enables one to actually cultivate and develop the activity or the passion in your life that you want to repeat, that gives your life meaning. It also gives you a lot of problems along the way. So death drive is involved fundamentally with living out a passion. It is certainly not all perfect self-harmony. It is a passion, the way that you can go about deepening your own contradiction to yourself, never being fully identical with yourself in a repetitious manner that leads you to affirm your life opposed to denying your life.
So ultimately, I would be an accelerationist for passion. If anything I want an automated economy as much as it can be an automated economy so that timenergy is accessible to human beings universally, so human beings are free to explore their passions. And cultivating a passion is not really something you do in isolation, it is something you end up doing with others. Cultivating my passion has led me to be here with all of you, to be close with Nance, and the work I am doing here with Last.
The cultivation of passion is something that leads to a contribution to society. So I view passion as my existential master signifier. And I think from the beginning of human history, we have all been stuck in fighting for the basic reproduction of our lives via necessary labour, whether it was slave labour, feudal labour, or wage labour. I think the goal is to overcome labour as much as we can, because I want to see humanity as a universal collective with universal timenergy. That would be a Singularity. What happens if that threshold is crossed? None of us would have to work anymore, and we would not be stressed by economic necessities. What would we become in that situation? That is what I would like to see in the future.
Last: I think that is the fight ahead of us politically, and it’s just very real, the politics of technological singularity.
This past October in The Portal we hosted underground theorist Michael Downs of The Dangerous Maybe for a month dedicated to the ideas he has developed related to “fault line theory” between Nick Land and the CCRU, and Slavoj Žižek and the Ljubljana School, as well as how this fault line informs the idea of technological singularity.
To access the Land, Žižek, Singularity recordings, see:
To access the recordings as part of a larger course dedicated to “Marxist Spectres”, see:
For the first article related to Technological Singularity as Idea, see: