The William Buckley debates was political discourse at its finest. Although watching Norman Mailer throwing shade at Gore Vidal is entertaining, James Baldwin taking Buckley to task holds a special place in our hearts. Baldwin defending his, and by extension, the black underclass’ right to exist With persuasive reason and eloquence is a relic of a bygone era. Gone are the nuanced with engagement with your opponent, self-gaslighting is on trend these days.
“I don’t know too much about Karl Marx, but there was this man who wrote The Decline of the West, Spengler— he had another book that’s a little lesser known, called The Hour of Decision.” - Malcolm X on Oswald Spengler.
Nick Land is a smarter, poorer Martin Shkreli. A comic book villain with an over-inflated ego. He understands post-truth very well, and at this point, he’s just a versatile rhetorician. The Kellyanne Conway of the Marxist academia. His reactionary defection has been theatre and pure hyperstition. At one point, his “Dark Enlightenment” read as a prophetic dead canary to the Left: a prognosis of what type of program lies ahead.
Sometimes we suspect even he’s confused by his right wing hyperstition and oscillating between having no real politics and being a cryptofascist. Whatever the case, we believe refusing to engage with him or his work will not get to the crux of what is going on right now.
The rise right-wing populism in the 21st Century shows a significant portion of the population is open to postmodern, authoritarian demagogues like Trump or Le Pen. Until we confront the historical demons and pathological deterritorialization that brought us here, we will continue to see this problem evolve.
Land himself even remarked that the Alt Right is a mass political movement against capitalism incubating, unexpectedly, from the right. Don’t get the wrong impression, this is no apologia for Nick Land. He is, indeed, the enemy, politically and philosophically. He deserves to be indicted, but not in the court of public opinion. Attack him in the academy, then shit on him over Twitter when seminars end. That’s what we do every weekend.
Some of us, the members of Anon, have been attending Land’s seminars at The New Centre for Research & Practice. The virtue of taking his seminar on Accelerationism gives us a chance to engage with him directly and challenge him in a way that is rare and helpful. The seminars have a flexible structure, structure and accommodate multidirectional conversations. Thus, we seize every opportunity available to both learn what we can from him and others attending the seminar while protesting and pushing back on his ideas when necessary.
As leftists, we should learn to engage with materials that make us uncomfortable at times, if only to better learn how to effectively resist. The “shut it down,” no platforming culture has its own limits and is partially responsible for the emergence of the Alt-Right as a mobile online force.
The marriage of the memetic SJW to tactless AntiFa is a hurdle the Left needs to overcome. Our first document skewers the “woke” Left because, a). they are our cohort, for better or worse; and b). the Left should feel more culpable for the state of affairs than it does. Thank you, AntiFa and SJWs, for proving us right. Congrats, on shutting down the LD50 gallery! But when are you going to take on The Whitney for Dana Schutz’s crass painting? Does the spectacle of LD50 hide the fact that there are left wing galleries that are far more complicit in gentrification, worker exploitation, misogyny, and racism?
ANON is a collective of “Other.” Some of us are sex workers, some immigrants, many of us queer. There are even a few privileged white cucks amongst us. Nevertheless, ANON is largely the work and brainchild of People of Color (PoC). Our social disciplines are as varied as our identities, from journalists to dominatrixes. ANON are the intellectual cousins of #BlackLivesMatter divorced from liberalism. All inquires should be directed to: xenochan@protonmail.com