Text page
Plant - Mobile Mutations interview with Chris Land (Ephemera V.3[1] 2003)
"Plant - Mobile Mutations interview with Chris Land (Ephemera V.3[1] 2003)" stages capital and acceleration as a public argument, making abstraction and runaway process legible through interview form.
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
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
Stakes · paragraph 6
Chris Land: Your research covers a wide range of topics, from the relationships between the Situationiste Internationale and postmodernism, gender and IT, drugs, writing and international political economy, and more recently, the mobile phone and patterns of social behaviour.
Stakes · paragraph 10
SP: Drugs have indeed been historically important to the development of capitalism and international law: the opiates can be seen as vanguard commodities, establishing markets and trade routes on which other goods would later circulate, and legislation to control their production, distribution, and consumption was at the heart of the earliest international laws.
History · paragraph 5
59 exhibits ephemera critical dialogues on organization Mobile Mutations Sadie Plant and Chris Land Between May 2002 and March 2003, Chris Land conducted an email conversation with Sadie Plant, in which they discussed topics ranging from life and work outside the institutions of academia to the future of the human species.
History · paragraph 21
© 2003 ephemera 3(1): 59-67 Mobile Mutations exhibits Sadie Plant and Chris Land
History · paragraph 24
Burroughs to interrogate the idea of the (post)human. Address: Industrial Relations and Organizational Behaviour Group, Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, Coventry, CV4 7AL, UK E-mail: christopher.land@warwick.ac.uk
Appears in sections
Capital, Meltdown, and Cybernetic Modernity Primary section
Capitalist abstraction, deterritorialization, cybernetics, and the archive's account of runaway modernity.