Unknown Lands - Lecture 4

Provenance

Self-transcribed from the recording's audio/video with Whisper ASR, then drawn from the frozen curation of the CCRU oral archive. The identifiers below fingerprint the exact source transcript files.

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Adjudicated APPROVED 2026-07-11 (basis: owner ruling 2026-07-11: institutional recordings released except fee-charging course content; lane recent-institutional -> recent-institutional-released). Series: Unknown Lands. Source: audio original (.mp3).

Timestamped map

These jump targets come from timestamps preserved in the source transcript, so they work as navigational anchors rather than editorially invented section labels. Timings are approximate — they mark where a passage begins, not exact word timing.

• 00:00:00

  Okay, so that was just a sample from Nick Land's essay Meltdown, set to audio-visuals by the art collective Orphan Drift, with whom Land worked and the CCRU worked extensively throughout the 90s. So the last two weeks of this course are basically going to be breaking down what the hell was that kind of thing. Okay…

• 00:15:13

  So Land says about Freud, instead of rebuilding reality on the basis of the productive forces of the unconscious, psychoanalysis ties up the unconscious ever more tightly in conformity with the social model of reality. All the stories lead back to Oedipus, so you want to fuck your mother. So in reality, against this…

• 00:29:19

  So that's the form of... the innovation of the form of money. And then the second innovation is that capitalism is only able to produce an abundance of new goods and services through a large global labour force. So to that end, capital has to emancipate or, you know, so to speak, emancipate, or abstract workers from…

• 00:43:59

  Yeah. Into fixed identities. In terms of the, so yeah, we'll look at that more after the break. Well, kind of, do you want to, can you flesh out a bit what you kind of mean? So capitalism seems sort of like always to increase profit, sort of profit like money, sort of equivalent to power, so in a way capitalism…

• 01:05:11

  On Land's reading capitalism does not originate in individuals psychological trait of greed which would assume that they have agency over the process. On the contrary capitalism disrupts the pursuit of greed by obliging capitalists to sacrifice billions to the invisible hand only so as to produce more billions…

• 01:19:16

  They say the worst is not to stay stratified, organised, signified, subjugated, but to precipitate strata in a way that is not stratified, but to precipitate strata in a suicidal or demented meltdown. So at this stage there are now not just one, there are three bodies without organs in de Lisonguitari. There's firstly…

• 01:32:57

  I think the mature Land recognises two kinds of socialism. On the one hand, as per the De Lusian Guattari of A Thousand Plateaus, sorry, of Anti-Oedipus, socialism is the critique of capitalism in the name of a greater productive force that capitalist dynamics supposedly impedes. To this Land objects that what…

• 01:46:42

  But, yeah, not an eternal return to, um... Um... To, um... Territorialisation. Um... Yeah. Except... Except to the extent that oil passes... Oil is part of the dynamics of capital accumulation. Yeah. In which, um... Territorialisation is still around. Yeah. Um... Any last questions or comments? Yeah. Um... I think…