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The Genealogy of Nick Land's Anti-Anthropocentric Philosophy: a Psychoanalytic Conception of Machinic Desire

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The Genealogy of Nick Land's Anti-Anthropocentric Philosophy: a Psychoanalytic Conception of Machinic Desire The genealogy of Nick Land's anti-anthropocentric philosophy: a psychoanalytic conception of machinic desire. 1 2 The genealogy of Nick Land's anti-anthropocentric philosophy: a psychoanalytic conception of machinic desire. Stephen Overy Submitted in fulfilment of the degree Doctor of Philosophy Philosophical Studies, University of Newcastle July 2015 3 4 Abstract In recent years the philosophical texts of Nick Land have begun to attract increasing attention, yet no systematic treatment of his work exists. This thesis considers one significant and distinctive aspect of Land's work: his use of a psychoanalytic vocabulary, which is deployed to try and avoid several problems associated with metaphysical discourse. Land's larger project of responding to the Kantian settlement in philosophy is sketched in the introduction, as is his avowed distaste for thought which is conditioned by anthropocentricism. This thesis then goes on to provide a genealogical reading of the concepts which Land will borrow from psychoanalytic discourse, tracing the history of drive and desire in the major psychoanalytic thinkers of the twentieth century. Chapter one considers Freud, his model of the unconscious, and the extent to which it is anthropocentric. Chapter two contrasts Freud's materialism to Lacan's idealism. Chapter three returns to materialism, as depicted by Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus. This chapter also goes on to consider the implications of their 'schizoanalysis', and contrasts 'left' and 'right' interpretations of Deleuze, showing how they have appropriated his work. Chapter four considers Lyotard's works from his 'libidinal period' of the late sixties to early seventies. These four readings, and the various theories of drive and desire they contain, are then contextualised in relation to Land's work in chapter five. This final chapter considers Land's theory of 'machinic-desire', and evaluates if his construction of the concept, via psychoanalysis, offers a superior approach to anti-anthropocentric positions constructed in metaphysics. The role of psychoanalytic thought in constructing Land's cosmological theory of thermodynamic entropy and extropy is also considered. 5 Acknowledgements Thanks to my parents, grandparents, and Heather, without whose support this thesis would not have been possible. Thanks to the staff of Philosophical Studies at Newcastle University, who have allowed me the space to peruse this line of research. I especially thank my supervisor Lars Iyer, who has borne my various periods of enthusiasm and indolence with good humour, and has helped me to craft this thesis into its present form. I would also like to thank Kenneth Smith and Joris De Henau for their help reading though various drafts, particularly Joris' ability to spot a missed diacritic with almost perfect accuracy. 6 7 Contents 0. Introduction 13 ◦ The Philosopher of the Outside 14 ◦ A Philosopher Without Friends? 24 ◦ The Metaphysical and the Psychoanalytic 30 ◦ Outline of the Thesis 40 ◦ The Trap of Anthropocentricism 44 ◦ Anti-Anthropocentricism and Anti-Academism 47 1. Freud: the Constitution of the Unconscious 51 ◦ Discovery and Populations 55 ◦ Topographies 71 ◦ Processes: Instinct, Drive, Desire 75 ◦ Anthropocentricism and the Death Drive 96 ◦ Conclusions 107 2. Lacan's Return to Freud 109 ◦ Objectives 111 ◦ Structural linguistics: Metaphor and Metonymy 114 ◦ Lacanian Desire 130 8 ◦ The Lacanian Drive 139 ◦ Lacanianism 144 3. Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus: A Theory of the 149 Productive Unconscious ◦ The authors' Intended Purpose of Anti-Oedipus 152 ◦ The Dangers of Oedipus 165 ◦ Schizo-Desire is Materialist Psychoanalysis 177 ◦ The Implications of Materialist Psychology: Deleuze and 184 the Virtual, Desire, and Difference ◦ The Left Deleuzian and Right Deleuzian Positions. 201 ◦ Reconciling Deleuze-Guattari with Freud-Lacan: Desire, 208 Desiring Machines, Drives, Assemblages. 4. Lyotard: Towards a Libidinal Economics 218 ◦ The 'Figure' 221 ◦ The 'Libidinal Period' 225 ◦ Key Readings 231 ◦ Libidinal Economy 238 ◦ The Death Drive Revisited 249 ◦ Summary: Emma and Drive Theory 252 9 5. Land: Machinic Desire 256 ◦ Wintermute and Neuromancer 256 ◦ Land's Philosophical Project: Encoulage 264 ◦ The Drive Economy on the Edge of the Subject 272 ◦ The Desire Economy of Objects 282 ◦ Deploying Libidinal Materialism 289 294 ◦ Critique of Land at Accelerate ◦ What is Left for Philosophy? 301 ◦ Bibliography 305 10 Figures 1. Outside In 2. Psychoanalytic and Metaphysical Genealogies 3. Desire is no longer a property of the subject 4. Condensation: the overlapping part of the chain 'Picnic' and the chain 'Paris' is 'Brie'. 5. The censor as a barrier 6. Positions of the censor 7. The censor in three models 8. A topography of the process of the psyche 9. A physiological stimulus 10. An instinctual impulse stimulus 11. The path of the drive 12. The Remains of Troy 13. Relationship between Pleasure Principle, Reality Principle and Death Instinct 14. Axis of Metaphor 15. Axis of Metonymy 16. Components of Lacan's Signifying Chains 17. Signifying Chains – The Hyper-linked Notions 'Diana's Death' → 'Government' 18. Balls on a Rubber Sheet 19. Avoiding the Freudian Censor 20. 'Chained' Stations 21. Freudian Displacement 22. Psychoanalysis' Position Between Two Tendencies of Philosophy 23. The Graph of Desire (1) 24. The Graph of Desire (2) 25. The Graph of Desire (3) 26. The Graph of Desire (4) 27. The Cybernetics of Foxes and Rabbits 28. A Positive Dynamic Between Theory and Practice 11 29. Anti-Oedipus 30. The Intersection of Casework and Metapsychology 31. The Triangular Structure of the Complex 32. Deleuze and Lacan's Methodology 33. Epistemic Directions 34. Actual → Virtual 35. Actual → Actual 2 36. Responses to Deleuze 37. Water on a Hydrophobic Plane 38. Rivulets on a Beach 39. Pressure on the Actual 40. Land's 'Black' Deleuzianism 41. Time as a spiral 42. Major Theorists of Drive/Desire 43. Deleuze/Guattari and Lyotard on the Unconscious 44. Cybernetic Versus Serial Repetition 45. Kurzweil's Countdown to Singularity (I) 46. Kurzweil's Countdown to Singularity (II) 47. Land's Time Spiral Tables 1. Land's Philosophical Projects 2. Key processes in Freud's three hypotheses 3. Opposing characteristics of the primary and secondary processes 4. Characteristics of Freudian drives 5. Comparative Terms in Freudian and Lacanian Models of the Unconscious. 6. The Four Propositions 7. The Two Poles and Their Relationship to Deleuzian Concepts 8. A Summary of Lyotard's Libidinal Period 12 Introduction The transcendental unconscious is the auto-construction of the real, the production of production, 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, and unlike Kantian production, the desiring production of Deleuze/Guattari is not qualified by humanity (it is not a matter of what things are like for us).1 Thematically, this thesis is predominantly about the development of psychoanalysis in the twentieth century and the various formulations of the theories and desire and drive by its key proponents: Freud, Lacan, Lyotard, and Deleuze and Guattari. It might therefore seem strange to begin with this introduction about Nick Land, a relatively obscure philosopher from the end of that century. Yet I hope to show how Land's philosophy utilises this lineage of psychoanalytic thought for a specific purpose, and this thesis will be a discussion of the extent to which psychoanalysis is capable of fulfilling the requirements he places on it. Land is a philosopher whose body of work, by the standards of the genre, is not a substantial one, and though he is still writing today, there is little prospect of any significant additions to this corpus, as: “According to the present-day Nick Land, the person who wrote [his philosophical] texts no longer exists”.2 The task of contextualising Land’s work in relation to the greater history of philosophy is therefore a task which has been left to later scholars who come across his work. This thesis will consider one of the fundamental questions which is left unanswered in Land's work, which is about the suitability of psychoanalysis for fulfilling the role which Land assigns to it. I shall show how Land treats Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis, and its conceptions of desire and drive as a modular 'plug in', which he imports into his philosophy as if both concepts are fixed and unproblematic, when in fact there was a century of heated debate about the nature of both. I shall go on to argue that 1 Land, N. Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, 2011) pp. 321-322 2 Mackey, R. 'Nick Land – An Experiment in Inhumanism' (available at http://divus.cc/london/en/article/nick- land-ein-experiment-im-inhumanismus) 13 Land's deployment of psychoanalysis is a strategic gambit to escape the tendency of metaphysics to degenerate into idealism. However, psychoanalysis has its own tendency towards idealism, found in Lacan’s reading of Freud. This raises the question which the present thesis addresses, about the validity of this transplantation of psychoanalysis into Land’s philosophy, given its own internal contradictions between a mechanistic, materialist and positive conception of desire and its converse, which posits desire in terms of negativity, idealism and language. This thesis considers whether Land’s reading of psychoanalysis provides a valid foundation of his theory of ‘machinic desire’, which is a crucial component in his reaction to Kantian philosophy. This is necessitated by the fact that in Land’s writings there is not a great quantity of critical analysis of the genealogy of these concepts and terminology he borrows from psychoanalysis. This thesis is therefore neither an open-ended overview of drive theory in the twentieth century, nor an overview of Land’s philosophical system in general, but is limited in scope to an evaluation of how drive theory is used by Land in part of his larger philosophical project. Such a choice of a psychoanalytic genealogy implicitly involves the rejection of a metaphysical approach to the topic.
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