“1) Wherever there is impersonality and chance, introduce conspiracy, lucidity, and malice. Look for enemies everywhere, ensuring that they are such that one can simultaneously envy and condemn them. Proliferate new subjectivities; racial subjects, national subjects, elites, secret societies, destinies.
“2) Burn Freud, and take desire back to the Kantian conception of will. Wherever there is impulse represent it as choice, decision, the whole theatrical drama of volition. Introduce a gloomy atmosphere of oppressive responsibility by couching all discourses in the imperative form.
“3) Revere the principle of the great individual. Personalize and mythicize historical processes. Love obedience above all things, and enthuse only for signs; the name of the leader, the symbol of the movement, and the icons of molar identity.
“4) Foster nostalgia for what is maximally bovine, inflexible, and stagnant: a line of racially pure peasants digging the same patch of earth for eternity.
“5) Above all, resent everything impetuous and irresponsible, insist upon unrelenting vigilance, crush sexuality under its reproductive function, rigidly enforce the domestication of women, distrust art, classicize cities to eliminate the disorder of uncontrolled flows, and persecute all minorities exhibiting a nomadic tendency.”
I have not read much by Nick Land, I admit, but I looked up today his essay on interpretations of fascism in Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, which is called "Making It with Death." Although I would be interested, maybe it’s not worth asking if you agree with Land that Deleuze and Guattari do lose the plot in the 1980s, at least concerning their conception of fascism. That would help me to understand precisely what argument about the death drive Land has with them. But, also, is his guide sound? Will it work for me?
>Will it work for me? Is this what you want OP? Sounds dumb. It should be obvious this is a caricature, which should never be taken seriously. You sound like you're seething about something and hoping other people will comfort you by caricaturing themselves.
Despite being online for most of my life, I've never figured out the right tone for online discussion groups. I hoped this question would invite comment in a more creative way than simply requesting, "Give me your thoughts on Nick Land's definition of fascism." He cautions against couching all discourses in the imperative form, after all. Since we're in the early days here, this is just testing the atmosphere with general queries, seeing if, for example, anyone had any thoughts on what I was reading, about Deleuze and Guattari on totalitarianism, contemporary definitions of fascism, or ways of reading early-days Nick Land.
>>1343 Fair enough. I was triggered by another jew/nazi baitposter and lumped you in. I haven't read his early work, but Land's contempt for fascism and socialism of all kinds is uniquely radical and interesting. He says fascism basically won the war, not overtly but as the most politically adaptive system which the successful post-war powers all converged on. Fascism being defined roughly by this powerful national state that uses propaganda to herd the population into industrial and (para-)military mobilization. Notably, he thinks this characterizes our own situation just as well as the more stereotypical fascist powers. To the extent that we turn away from that, we seem to lose, but it is itself a fucked up situation for various reasons.
Ironically I think the best reading of land is a fascist reading using him as a productive foil against the worst tendencies to stupidity and narcissism (typified by your OP quotations). He shares with fascism a view that one is either submitting oneself and optimizing oneself to the hygiene of existential struggle, or degenerating into worthlessness. The difference is he takes semi-sovereign corporate competition for resources within "capitalism" as the primary hygienic struggle with AI as the archetypal ubermensch, where the fascists take the national statist competition for blood and soil in war and politics to be primary, with the ubermensch archetype being some kind of uniformed warrior. Fascism and national socialism differ in their respective emphasis on the state and the blood.
In that reading of Land, there are some very interesting challenging questions for what the proper unit of existential competition is, what psychological disposition is appropriate to life in that society (Land thinks "cold", but I think he's wrong), and the humanity of the ubermensch. Responding to Land forces a maturation of the worldview that I have found to be quite helpful. Hard to go into details in general. Will be easier when we re-read Xenosystems and discuss particulars.
About definitions of fascism, though, I think they are all basically worthless caricatures. Another reason I was triggered by OP. I am basically not interested in hearing about fascism from anyone who isn't a particularly thoughtful and sincere fascist. Hence my thought on how to read Land.
The only sacred cows that haven't been utterly slaughtered at this point are the contemporary leftist sacred cows (BAP is right to focus on this), so further critique and analysis and caricature in this wasteland of dead beef gets boring. At the end of the day we need living sacred cows, so the more interesting ideas are the sincerely felt constructive ideas, even to the point of dangerous reverence for dangerous ideas.
That was helpful. I like the suggestion to read Land as a way to sharpen one's own answer to what the "proper unit of existential competition is" and appropriate "psychological disposition" to that.
I'm not sure it's worth it to try to put into words a few other aimless thoughts, not all in response to your post. It seems that his negative account of Nazism in particular is because he refuses to find under Nazism the sources of schizo-excessive energy, or what he imagines to be the "proper unit of existential competition." He thinks it's absurd that a system of complete paranoid repression might work with Deleuze and Guattari's conception of Nazism as schizophrenizing, driven by death and creativity, by "letting go" (they separate Hitler's regime from a more conservative totalitarianism, while Land wants to put them together, as in his "How do you make yourself a Nazi?" list above, but that is an even less interesting debate now than it was three and four decades ago, when the texts under discussion were written).
>>1372 Despite being possibly the most analyzed ideology ever, NS seems to be a sort of Rorschach cypher, always revealing more about its commentator than itself. Everyone's account is different and incommensurable, where it isn't pro-forma boilerplate, and is the product of his own weird ideology and personal relationship with Adolf Hitler. Again this means critical analysis of it is basically useless; there are better ways to articulate your own weird ideology, if that's all you're doing.
(you can click on someone's post number to quote it properly. Alternately, don't insert a space between >> and the number.)
>>1380 > ... there are better ways to articulate your own weird ideology ...
This is the key point. There's almost never a good reason to take national socialism as a starting point for future-oriented reflection. (And I say this as a fan of German "conservative revolutionary" thought.)
To the people in other threads floating the idea of moving closer to DC, I live here and this is what it's like. This could almost be an anthropological account of Northern Virginia.
>>1349 >He says fascism basically won the war, not overtly but as the most politically adaptive system which the successful post-war powers all converged on. Fascism being defined roughly by this powerful national state that uses propaganda to herd the population into industrial and (para-)military mobilization.
I didn't know Land said this, very interesting. In the 1970s many people feared that the US was adopting the domestic security state model of the USSR. Some historians have concluded that this kind of convergence was inevitable.
Soviet model was itself a convergence with that of NS Germany.
Important to remember that the state has been growing in power for as long as civilization has records.
Taking the power of the state, and the empowerment that technology gives to smaller groups of people, I sometimes wonder if the progress of human civilization is moving toward an increasingly small and increasingly powerful state-backed elite. Seems that this class would be the last of humanity to survive if AI were to eventually wipe us out.
>>1349 > [Land] says fascism basically won the war, not overtly but as the most politically adaptive system which the successful post-war powers all converged on. Fascism being defined roughly by this powerful national state that uses propaganda to herd the population into industrial and (para-)military mobilization.
The better known version of this thesis is Burnham's Managerial State, which many think would more precisely be called the administrative state. That some version of this is true is pretty uncontroversial in our circles. Calling it "fascism" is a kind of poetic synecdoche, one that I would avoid, as it brings in polemic notes that muddy the analysis.