Text page
McKenzie Wark - On Nick Land
"McKenzie Wark - On Nick Land" treats capital as an abstract process of mutation and escape rather than as a merely managerial or institutional system.
Archive condition
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Core idea
The central claim is that capital should be understood as an inhuman process of abstraction rather than a humanly steerable institution. Meltdown names the way this process outpaces moral or political containment.
These texts work by describing markets, media systems, and social life as channels for accelerating abstraction. Capital behaves less like a policy object than like a self-intensifying circuit.
That matters because the section is trying to show how deterritorialization becomes historically real rather than remaining a philosophical slogan. The page belongs here when abstraction is presented as an operative force.
How to read this text
Read for the vocabulary of abstraction, escape, and process first. The page usually becomes clearer once capital is treated as a circuit rather than a classically economic object.
Notice where the argument leaves institutional critique and starts describing systems that exceed human command. That turn is the hinge of the section.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 18
It’s an arrested synthesis of capital and nation, but with more emphasis on the arbitrary sovereignty of capital than on the law of the state. As in Manuel De Landa, there’s a bit of petit-bourgeois celebration of the market.
Definition · paragraph 4
Land: “The increasingly rigorous differentiation of marriage from trade, or politics from economics, finds its ultimate conceptual definition in the thought of a moral agency which is utterly impervious to learning, communication or exchange.” (73) Both Kant and capital run on the submission of outside to inside, nature to idea.
Definition · paragraph 18
It’s an arrested synthesis of capital and nation, but with more emphasis on the arbitrary sovereignty of capital than on the law of the state. As in Manuel De Landa, there’s a bit of petit-bourgeois celebration of the market. There’s a salutary hostility to the residual dominance of Anglophone imperial states, but there is no longer a dependence on chaotic disruption alone.
Mechanism · paragraph 18
Verso https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3284-on-nick-land[9/23/2017 12:48:00 PM] city.” (59) It’s the node from which to understand “a profound shift in the order of the world.” (56) By some odd twists and turns, we end up here with a 2.0 version of things Land started out attacking. It’s an arrested synthesis of capital and nation, but with more emphasis on the arbitrary sovereignty of capital than on the law of the state. As in Manuel De Landa, there’s a bit of petit-bourgeois celebration of the market.
Stakes · paragraph 15
Verso https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3284-on-nick-land[9/23/2017 12:48:00 PM] Acker really did try to mobilize the figure of the colonial other as a revolutionary one, a fork Land does not take. But Land had antennae for what was coming: “Modernity invented the future, but that’s all over.
Appears in sections
Capital, Meltdown, and Cybernetic Modernity Primary section
Capitalist abstraction, deterritorialization, cybernetics, and the archive's account of runaway modernity.