Had cast him out from Heav’n, with all his host
Of rebel angels, by whose aid aspiring
To set himself in glory above his peers,
He trusted to have equaled the Most High,
If he opposed; and with ambitious aim
Against the throne and monarchy of GodJohn Milton, Paradise Lost
As far back as I can recall, I have had a strongly rebellious instinct. I have been doing a highly evocative belly-breathing practice for the last months and it regularly takes me back into a sense of being in my mother’s womb, close to the time of my birth. I am fighting for breath, afraid, and in some kind of deep rebellion about being cast into this realm. As a punk, in my twenties, the Ramones’ song I’m Against It seemed to sum up my whole attitude.
Yet, my rebellion was always kept in check by my fear. I can recall being at a protest march in the City of London in the mid-eighties. A line or two ahead of me, young men in black bandanas, hiding their identity, faced off against a line of riot cops outside the Bank of England. The cops would charge into them with their shields and batons. I stayed back. I didn’t want to get battered with the batons. I wanted to be there, to take part. I wanted to be present. But I was viscerally afraid of being hurt.
Over the years that I was a punk, a squatter and a general drop-out, I began to see the issue with being a rebel. The act of rebelling against the System, the State, the Patriarchy, the Mainstream, or whatever it was, gave us a sense of purpose, identity and power. Those things have an addictive quality to them. By rebelling we acquired kudos, status, maybe even some sex. So, in a sense, the System became our dealer, our pusher. Without the System to rebel against, we would be nothing - no power, no status. Of course, we told ourselves that we wanted to destroy the System, to stand with its twitching corpse beneath our heels. But we didn’t really. The junkie will never kill his dealer.
I am reading Nick Land’s Thirst for Annihilation and early on he recognises this issue. The rebel ends up becoming a part of the system, actually sustaining the system. By creating the notion of deconstruction, or of antiauthoritarianism, the writer becomes beholden to the system he opposes, which is named after the prefix he chooses to apply. That prefix chains him to his opponent, which then sucks on the libidinal energy, that he has conjured into his oppositional endeavours, using it to maintain and empower itself. The system gives him status as its opponent and he willingly becomes its junkie.
Understanding this relationship between the System and its Opponents, the dealer and the junkie, what then is the way forward for those who seek to rebel? What do we do if we want to push back, but don’t want to become either the System’s junkie or sustain it with our libidinal energy?
I can see two possibilities, those pursued by two absolute arch-rebels of the modern era - the way of Nick Land and the way of the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh.
Aside from these two alternatives, which I’ll get into shortly, there is also a third - wait for the System to collapse. All Systems, all empires, have their day and at some point seem to start haemorrhaging energy, failing where previously they’d succeeded without effort. So one could legitimately wait for this to start to take place and then steam in at the last moment, rather as the Visigoths sacked Rome in the early fifth century.
Assuming that this doesn’t appeal, let’s look at the other two.
The Nick Land Option
As we’ve seen, Land recognised early on the issue with using prefixes like “anti” or “de” when constructing one’s philosophy. He didn’t want his libidinal, oppositional energy to end up nourishing the system he so hated. It wasn’t his goal to seek an established, long-term tenure as a professor of philosophy at a leading university. He didn’t wish to end up on the academic treadmill - writing eloquent treatises for his PhD colleagues to faun sycophantically over, in the knowledge that he would, at the right moment, reciprocate. He wanted to rebel effectively. He actually did want to overthrow the system.
Land latched onto the emergent cyberculture of the early nineties and sought to steer it, through his writing, towards the end of destroying the establishment in its myriad forms. He saw that capital could be regarded as a liberational force that could ultimately overturn hierarchical power structures. He wanted to accelerate this process. His focus sustained by long-term use of amphetamine, forever the chosen drug of the rebel, he tried to create of his writing a self-fulfilling prophecy - a hyperstition - that would feed the fire for rebellion in the minds of the emerging tech billionaire class, and direct it in a way that would deterritorialize power globally.
Land began to understand that the key to such a form of opposition was the devastation of the personal ego, which would lead to the recapture of its primal essence, sometimes called the prima materia - the raw, unstructured force from which manifest form is believed by spiritualists to proceed. This process of ego-dissolution, sometimes known as nigredo in medieval Alchemy, would be necessary to stop rebellion from becoming mere sustenance to that which is being rebelled against. If there is no longer a self that can addict on power and status, then rebellion could be true and effective.
Parting ways with Warwick University, his Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU), began to pursue Land’s aims in increasingly extreme ways, utilising diverse subcultural practices such as dub music, chaos magick and drug use to break down the ego. The project finally fell apart when Land himself succumbed to some form of drug-induced psychosis in the late nineties and, upon recovery, took himself out of the scene.
These days, Land is semi-reclusive but still lucid when he does talk. He has spoken of his utter dejection at seeing the huge, liberating potential of cyberculture seemingly fade back under corporate control - platforms like Facebook or Google being examples of how capital, briefly liberated, became reterritorialised and returned to the purview of the established hierarchy.
The Bhagwan Option
The Indian mystic Bhagwan Rajneesh, Osho, is not really a popular character in modern culture. Perhaps he’ll have a revival one day. Nevertheless, I suspect that he saw clearly the perils of Land’s approach to the issue of rebellion. At his peak, he had something like one hundred thousand followers. And he most certainly did urge them to take part in practices similar to those of Land and the CCRU. Cathartic meditation techniques and self-inquiry were fundamental to his path. And no one danced like the followers of the Bhagwan - all day and frequently all night. Yet I think that somewhere he also understood that you could not simply barge into heaven.
Central to Bhagwan’s way was self-knowledge - the need to investigate one’s inner world and come to understand the forces and events that have shaped your thinking and behaviour. Personal psychology, essentially.
In the context of rebellion, this means that, aside from throwing stones at the forces of the System, you also need to investigate that rebellious instinct deep inside yourself. Did it start with your dad demanding subservience but not showing love? Or was it something else? The objective is not to one day come to a conclusive origin for your rebelliousness. But to continue to look. This inner journey has to accompany the outward manifestation of our rebellious nature.
Conclusions
Land overcame the first hurdle that most rebels fall at - that of not feeding the system with your libidinal energy and becoming its servant. He grasped for the prima materia and certainly went deep into the rabbit hole of human consciousness. Yet, whilst I’m a long way from reading all of Nick Land’s writing, I see little evidence that he also took the path of self-investigation. Did he and his fellow CCRU members sit and share amongst themselves about why they felt such hatred for the system? Did they try to track that impulse to rebel within their own history, their own mind? It doesn’t look that way to me. I suspect that they would have ridiculed the idea. And that, on some level, what bound them together was the desire to avoid doing just such inner work.
Land, like so many in philosophy, seems to have quickly negated the possibility of personal psychological reflection being valuable, preferring to see the world more objectively and thus perhaps keep personal woundings at arm’s length.
I regard Land as a genius philosopher with a huge poetic gift for literary stylism. But I don’t think that you can finally avoid the personal aspect. Time and again, I have seen the human mind, certainly including mine, construct a vast, all-encompassing, awe-inspiring philosophy, filled with delights… on top of a heap of unexamined shit.
Humanity’s ongoing love relationship with reason and rationality can only proceed in relative darkness. Just one instant of sunlight will reveal our lives for what they are - utterly pointless. As creatures, we seek blindly to simply continue, driven on by base, vegetative impulses forged throughout aeons of natural selection. There can be no point in human existence. Just a few moments of clear assessment will confirm this. We merely learn behaviours that grant us brief, neurochemical respites from the grinding nihilism that we fear would otherwise consume us.
Our intellectual mind, in one way, is like an exciting toy that we might receive for Christmas, all shiny and promising much. Yet it has a flip side, one that is revealed to us as soon as we point it back towards the processes of life.
Nihilism is the price we pay for utilising our intellect. We can put off repayment for a while, using the money we gain from our intellectual pursuits to buy ourselves distractions. But make no mistake, the debt is accruing. The Grim Bailiff will knock on our door one day, grab that shiny tool and point it back at life itself. And then we will stagger, and fall.
Land saw with clarity the nihilism and did not try to escape it, understanding that the path of distraction would undermine his integrity. Yet his unexamined attachment to rebellion seems to have become the millstone that hindered his passage through. The Bhagwan passed through the whirlpool and came out to the other side.
"Time and again, I have seen the human mind, certainly including mine, construct a vast, all-encompassing, awe-inspiring philosophy, filled with delights… on top of a heap of unexamined shit." Love this hahaha, it's so true...