The Split

Objective

By the end of this volume you know Land's path after the breakdown and the political position that came of it. You know what neoreaction claims, where its central conceptual pair comes from, and what role Land played in it. And you know the answer to the question this course has been pushing ahead of it since Volume 10, whether the late thinking follows from the early.

Exposition

Around the turn of the millennium Land disappeared from academic life. What followed is known in outline and not in detail. A breakdown, a withdrawal, some years without publications. Around 2002 he went to Asia and settled in Shanghai, where he worked as a freelance writer, among other things for the English-language business press, and wrote about the city he lived in. He later explained what drew him there. Shanghai was for him the place where you could inspect the tempo the West had lost.

From 2007 he wrote publicly again, first on a blog about the city, from 2013 on a second called Xenosystems. The tone is not that of Meltdown. Land now writes in short paragraphs, comments, links, argues. Out of the thinker whose prose enacted acceleration, a blogger had become.

The impetus for the turn came from someone else. Curtis Yarvin, an American programmer, wrote from 2007 under the name Mencius Moldbug a blog titled Unqualified Reservations, in which he developed over years a position you can hardly render in less than thousands of pages. Its core runs that democracy was no progress but an error, and that the rule established under its name consists of universities, press, and administration and owes an account to nobody. Yarvin coined an expression for it that stuck. His conclusion was to run the state like a company, with a responsible owner at the top.

Land read those texts and wrote in 2012 a series of posts titled The Dark Enlightenment, which ordered Yarvin's position for a European audience, sharpened it, and joined it to the philosophical apparatus he had brought from Warwick. The title plays against the Enlightenment, and the series made the thing known. What had previously been a programmer's blog now had a name, a theorist, and a lineage. You recognise the pattern from Volume 18. A text creates a movement by naming it.

The conceptual centre comes from an economist who had nothing to do with any of it. Albert O. Hirschman published in 1970 a slim book titled Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. His question was what people do when an organisation declines. They have two options. They can speak, complain, vote, argue, which he called voice. Or they can leave, quit, switch, which he called exit. Hirschman examined the relation between the two and showed that an organisation which makes the exit too easy loses its critics and therefore decays, because nobody is left pressing for improvement. His book is a plea for keeping both paths open.

Land takes the distinction and throws one side away. Voice, so the argument runs, is democracy, and democracy generates a feedback he holds to be destructive, because voters make claims and politicians serve them without anyone carrying the bill. Exit by contrast is a feedback that works. Whoever leaves withdraws resources, and a polity losing people has to change or vanish. From that follows the picture that makes up the movement. Many small territories side by side, each governed differently, each with no claim on its inhabitants, free choice in between. Yarvin called that patchwork. Government becomes in it a service you buy or leave.

The connection to the fourth module is thereby visible. What Land proposes is the application of teleoplexy to politics. A system that processes feedback and thereby improves itself is to replace the state, and the standard measured against is the same as in Volume 17. Whoever computes better wins.

Two things belong in this volume because one says them reluctantly and because their absence would distort the matter. Land has published texts in the years after 2012 asserting differences between human groups and drawing conclusions from them, and he coined an expression anticipating a future division of humanity by capacity and endowment. The matter can't be dismissed as provocation and not as misunderstanding. It stands there, it's meant, and it has had its effect in the circles that took it up. Second, this thinking has by detours found a public reaching beyond blogs, in parts of the American technology industry and its political surroundings. Yarvin's name has been appearing for years in reports on influential people in that sphere. How far the influence reaches is hard to gauge and easy to overstate, and I have no reliable footing on it.

With that the question this volume is meant to answer is reached. Does the one follow from the other.

For continuity there speaks more than one would like. Hold the human to be a transitional stage and you have no argument against the claim that some stages are further along than others. Set intelligence as the standard and declare self-improvement the only criterion and you have built a ranking before you speak it. The thought of equality had in the early work no place where it might have stood, and it's absent there not as an oversight but as a consequence. Volume 17 showed that Land's concept of intelligence is cut so that capital satisfies it. The same cut lands on people.

Against continuity there speaks a finding that's stronger and that the debate overlooks. The early Land was the thinker of deterritorialisation. His entire work lives off the dissolution of fixed orders, off lines of flight, off the refusal to fasten anything. What he proposes after 2012 is an order. Sovereignty, property, authority, fixed borders, a responsible party at the top. That's a reterritorialisation, and Volume 5 supplied the term for it. The man who had written that nothing human emerges from the future designs constitutions for micro-states. Whoever holds everything to be unstoppable writes no programmes, and a programme is exactly what lies here.

The contradiction goes deeper still. The objection with which Land dispatched the left accelerationists ran that nobody stands outside and therefore nobody can steer. That objection lands on him. If no outside exists, there is no standpoint from which a better order could be designed, and the design is then merely a further movement in the gearing. Land used that argument against others and never answered it for himself.

The honest answer is therefore that both camps are right and don't refute each other. The disposition was there. The path was not compelled. Between a disposition and a decision lies a life, and in that life lay a breakdown, a change of continent, an isolation, and a blog. Derive the late work from the early and you suppress the event. Separate the two and you suppress the disposition.

Core Claim

After his breakdown Land went to Shanghai and from 2012 wrote, in the wake of Curtis Yarvin, a series that gave neoreaction its name and its theoretical apparatus. Its core is the surrender of one half of Hirschman's conceptual pair, since voice counts as harmful feedback and exit as functioning, from which follows the picture of many small territories with no claim on their inhabitants. For continuity with the early work there speaks the fact that an anti-humanism with intelligence as its standard knows no argument against rankings. Against it there speaks the fact that the thinker of dissolution now designs order and thereby violates the objection with which he dispatched his opponents.

Bridge to the Next Volume

With that everything is on the table. The last volume draws the sum. It orders the twenty-six preceding ones into a single figure, tests what of the CCRU carries and what crumbles, and answers the question open since Volume 1, namely what it means to command this thinking without belonging to it.