493. The cauldron (X)

It could be said that Nick Land is the ultimate feminist; his early interest in the power to be found in zero (in “the hole”, the woman) came from an anti-capitalist direction. The power found in the feminine—in the empty cataract (0) that drives a typhoon—needed to be directed towards everything masculine, Apollonian, and classical. You could say the masculine is “1” and the feminine is “0”—the “1” is the penis, the one God, and the “0” is the feminine to be penetrated. Land hoped that the feminine could be used to dissolve everything solid: the patriarchy, capitalism, Christianity, and the state—all the “1s”. Initially, he thought this flow would be instantiated in refugees, gays, and “the marginal”; a typical post-Marxist outlook, a coalition of the oppressed—the watery oppressed, the feminine refugees penetrate the masculine borders and undermine the imperial metropolis.

However, Land took it too far; he discovered that the most watery entity that can be found is not refugees or women—it is capital itself. It turned out that the entity that flows most freely was the enemy he sought to undermine—capitalism. This is why I say he is the most feminist feminist; he recognised that capital is the most feminine entity in existence and so transferred his allegiance to capital. Capital is “the big 0” because it depends upon, for example, double-entry bookkeeping and cybernetic feedback processes that cannot function without zero. Hence Land wants to unleash capital to fulfil her potential; the market is war, it is a Darwinian struggle that is bootstrapping, through brutal selection, something into existence at the end of time—although time is itself an illusion created by the flow of energy, and cultivated by various priestly calendar systems.

To facilitate this process, Land accepts a truce with fleshy capital (human capital), with the nightwatchman state that is only concerned with security and warfare, in order to protect and expand markets—hence Land becomes an ultra-Thatcherite. Races, nations, and borders are not Apollonian ends in themselves for Land, merely necessary ignition centres that capital requires to gather the energy to turn into something else—she will then step over these old patriarchal institutions. Hence Land reverses his early critiques as regards South African Bantustans, where tribes were parcelled out into quasi-autonomous homelands, so as to create patchwork—the idea that we should fragment into new anti-entropic units, whether tribal or voluntary associations.

However, he still retains a hostility towards tradition; for example, in his early anti-capitalist work he notes with satisfaction that Bangladesh, ruled by the patriarchal Islam (for which there really is only 1), faces liquefaction due to feminine typhoons—typhoons driven by 0; the vagina, death, melts the penis—melts the One God. It is a feminist revenge upon the patriarchy; and Land retains strict hostility towards Islam to this day.

The general approach chimes with a 20th-century movement in European esotericism to reanimate the “forgotten feminine”; it can be seen in Graham Hancock, Robert Graves, Gerald Gardner, and Terence McKenna—and even in Himmler, who celebrated the lost European witch tradition. Technology itself is generally associated with the feminine, with Sophia.

Hence Land supports China as the most marketised society on Earth. This extreme identification with techno-capital would, for a Traditionalist, chime with the Kali-Yuga: family relations are broken down, everything is marked (by the Beast, with a price tag), and violent competition dominates all. Land is married to a Jewish woman, and the Chinese are “Asian Jews”—a feminine commercial people, guided by expedience and deception. Land lives among them. Does neo-China represent the future? Around 1960, the esotericist Evola prophesied that the Uighur would destroy Communism in China—perhaps the occult branch of the Chinese secret service knows that, hence their concern to exterminate the Uighur today. Similarly, bin Laden predicted that he would slay the USSR and the USA—and it seems America will also fall soon. Perhaps there is life in the Big Dick yet.