Both Neoreaction: A Basilisk and Postcapitalist Desire try to act as a vaccine against the Nick…

Both Neoreaction: A Basilisk and Postcapitalist Desire try to act as a vaccine against the Nick Land infohazard, but what i’ve found more effective is actually The Vision Of Escaflowne. (ymmv)

I think the mistake Nick Land makes is the same one as evil Isaac Newton / Emperor Dunkirk. It’s the same mistake that Scott Alexander makes in the second half of Meditations on Moloch. In complex systems, black swan situations are always possible and can create radical and permanent change.

Land has inured himself to a system he recognizes as horrible, and even writes an apologia for it, because he has convinced himself (by analyzing abstracted eye-of-god dynamics) that it’s inescapable. But escape always comes from the unknown & the unknowable.

Land (by failing to pay attention to the possibilities of minor literatures) has locked himself into a reductive view of alterity: his outsideness is always not just inhuman but antihuman in exactly the same mechanical way as capitalism. Real alterity engages the high weirdness of strange loops with consciousness.

(The key is that Escaflowne really leans into the way divination opens the door to high strangeness and time paradoxes.) And Hitomi learns that trying to control dynamic systems in a top-down way is counterproductive, and that instead she should be surfing the dynamics of the system of which she is a part.

Land talks about dynamic, diverse, and unpredictable systems but he always talks about them as though from an outside perspective, through a lens of predicting them based on a simplified aggregation. A serious engagement with cybernetics will involve Stafford Beer, who shows this can’t work.

I’m not thinking of Hitomi as a really alien element in Escaflowne. Even if there are no alien elements, it’s a mistake to expect the average or expected behavior to always win over time.

The world always contains innumerable minor currents, invisible from a bird’s-eye-view perspective. While each one has an infinitesimally small chance of changing general tendencies in a measurable way, one or another frequently ends up shifting the whole world order dramatically, at which point we retroactively treat it as important.

The apparent immortality and inevitability of global capitalism could be taken down by something as trivial and everyday as a love triangle, a tarot spread, a dropped penny… These things operate by material logic but cannot be predicted ahead of time because it is a waste to measure at that granularity.

Instead, we only reconstruct what *did* happen retroactively, once the changes are irreversible, at which point it becomes inevitable. (This is why Hegel emphasized the dynamics of history as a process that always constructs the story of history backwards from the present.)

In other words: the outsideness (like the devil) is always-already present in the details too apparently trivial to measure or calculate.

Those things that are not reproducible because they involve reactions and interactions too improbable to model — even when operating by known material laws, these anomalies are the natural domain of magick.

Land isn’t really concerned with the impossibility of novel combinations so much as the impossibility of *dominant* combinations of novel components — which is to say that he cannot imagine, ahead of time, a single specific system guaranteed to successfully supplant capitalism. Which means he’s not a great Deluze scholar, & missed the point of minoritarianism.