Text page
Nick Land An Experiment in Inhumanism - Robin Mackay
A widely circulated Mackay text that recasts early Land through the language of inhumanism rather than through later blog-era notoriety.
Archive condition
The page uses the canonical extracted text as its reading layer while preserving the original file paths as the archival source of record.
Core idea
These pages matter because they do the phase-separating work in public. They translate early Land into a vocabulary of inhumanism, philosophy-fiction, and historical periodization without collapsing everything into later persona.
Interview and interpretive essay form allow a more explicit account of method and period than the compressed primary texts often provide. The framing is part of the scholarly value.
That matters because readers often meet Land retrospectively. These pages are some of the best available tools for resisting that flattening and restoring Warwick-era specificity.
How to read this text
Read for the distinctions being drawn between periods, styles, and conceptual stakes before following any biographical detail.
Track how the page names early Land's key problem-space - inhumanism, Bataille, acceleration, or theory-fiction - and use that as a map into the primaries.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 2
Topics: Accelerationism, Nick Land, Philosophy, Schizophrenia Written for Umelec magazine, vol 16, appeared in English, Czech, and German. Also appeared in Finnish in Ninn & Nain 73, in Russian at Sygma, in French in Fission, and in Spanish in the forthcoming Fanged Noumena vol.
Definition · paragraph 2
On the republishing of Nick Land’s work (Fanged Noumena, Falmouth/NY: Urbanomic/Sequence Press, 2011) For anyone who knew the author of these texts, it is difficult to speak about them without recalling Nick Land ‘himself’ (taking into account the fact that, according to the present-day Nick Land, the person who wrote them no longer exists).
Stakes · paragraph 2
Land, by exemplary contrast, made experiments in the unknown unavoidable for a philosophy caught in the abstractive howl of post-political cybernetics.’ Land courted the ‘outside’ of philosophy, combining it with other disciplines—from nanotechnology to occultism, from computation to anthropology. But he sought the ‘outside’ in a more radical sense, for this interdisciplinary exploration was ← PREVIOUS NEXT → ROBIN MACKAY
History · paragraph 8
One of their prints, paying homage to Land’s influence, now (dis)graces the cover of Fanged Noumena. In 1995, with the arrival at Warwick of Sadie Plant (author of situationist history The Most Radical Gesture and cyberfeminist manual Zeros and Ones), Land’s experimental activities found a temporary institutional base in the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU), a student-run research group of uncertain status, and which, upon Plant’s rather swift departure, the Philosophy department would deny had ever existed.
History · paragraph 14
Nick Land: An Experiment in Inhumanism – Robin Mackay http://readthis.wtf/writing/nick-land-an-experiment-in-inhumanism/[3/30/2023 4:09:20 PM] outside personal or collective human intention, and which we can no longer pretend has anything to do with reason or progress. 1. See , Fanged Noumena 493–505.
Appears in sections
Nick Land Before the Break Primary section
Early philosophy, Warwick-era writing, and the phase of Land most central to the CCRU's emergence.