Text page
ŠUM#7 ‘The Only Thing I Would Impose is Fragmentation' - Interview with Nick Land
A compact but important interview that makes fragmentation into the clearest available shorthand for later Land's political and philosophical method.
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 make the later-Land phase visible as more than a set of notorious political opinions. They show a sustained attempt to think fragmentation, teleoplexy, and systemic intelligence through fragment, interview, and compiled archive rather than through the old Warwick-era essay form.
Collection, interview, and reception formats all matter here because they stage later Land as an ongoing infection or distributed relay. Serial form, conversation, and editorial packaging become part of the philosophy rather than neutral containers for it.
That matters because this is the best route into later Land's post-Warwick distinctiveness. The archive needs these pages to show how the Xenosystems line reorganizes abstraction, temporality, and political order after the CCRU moment.
How to read this text
Read for the recurrent language of fragmentation, intelligence, infection, and teleology before trying to reduce the page to one ideological verdict.
Track how form changes the argument. Collection, interview, and memoir structures are doing a large share of the conceptual work in this cluster.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 1
Jun 2017 ŠUM#7/ ‘The Only Thing I Would Impose is Fragmentation’ – Interview with Nick Land ‘The Only Thing I Would Impose is Fragmentation’ Interview with Nick Land by Marko Bauer and Andrej Tomažin (in print: ŠUM#7: move 37. June 2017) * In your 2014 book Templexity: Disordered Loops through Shanghai Time you write: ‘“What happened to America?” is the Cyberpunk question par excellence’.
Definition · paragraph 1
25. Jun 2017 ŠUM#7/ ‘The Only Thing I Would Impose is Fragmentation’ – Interview with Nick Land ‘The Only Thing I Would Impose is Fragmentation’ Interview with Nick Land by Marko Bauer and Andrej Tomažin (in print: ŠUM#7: move 37.
Definition · paragraph 19
There’s nothing suicidal in any fragmentation, I could be only and surely protected by it. I don’t have a sense of being protected by large Anglophone states. It’s not that I am claiming persecution by them, but it would definitely be on that side of ledger if anything.
Definition · paragraph 19
I have that point made a lot, but I doubt it. The one thing I explicitly and strategically would want to impose is fragmentation. Everything else is in the tactical relation to that.
History · paragraph 8
Or maybe you are its termite, sooner or later moving onto something completely different again. Perhaps similarly to the viewpoint of the Legacy of Nick Land conference, which is going to take place this year and which, as organizers tell us in advance, is not going to promote NRx ideas.
Appears in sections
Nick Land After Warwick Primary section
Shanghai, Xenosystems, later reactionary turns, and the post-Warwick afterlife of Land's public writing.