Text page
Land - Book Reviews in Textual Practice (1995)
"Book Reviews in Textual Practice (1995)" uses criticism or review form to turn capital, abstraction, and modernity into a problem of tone, scene, and conceptual pressure.
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
Definition · paragraph 4
Reviews 'concensual hallucination', to use William Gibson's definition of cyberspace. (P. 20) Postmodernity recycles situationism as contemplative sociology, cinema, and dystopian-masochistic cultural programming: the most nightmarish movie you ever saw.
Definition · paragraph 6
Reviews marxohumanist nightmare with a smile on its face, schizomarket- ization dissolving into microbotic swarms, matter gone insane. Com- plexification burns-out planning into anarchy as machines and software came to life, exhibiting a 'supercompatibility between evolu- tion and computers' (p.
Definition · paragraph 2
Reviews ollary is an 'analysis of capitalism' that seems to consist entirely of people being unnecessarily nasty to each other, anecdotally supported by accounts of waste dumps on Native American reservations.
Definition · paragraph 6
Reviews marxohumanist nightmare with a smile on its face, schizomarket- ization dissolving into microbotic swarms, matter gone insane.
History · paragraph 1
Textual Practice Nick Land Scott Bukatman, Terminal Identity: the Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1993), 404 pp., £15.99 (paperback) Kevin Kelly, Out of Control: the New Biology of Machines (London: Fourth Estate, 1994), 472 pp., £16.99 (hardback) Carol A.
Appears in sections
Capital, Meltdown, and Cybernetic Modernity Primary section
Capitalist abstraction, deterritorialization, cybernetics, and the archive's account of runaway modernity.