Text page
Stephen Overy - The genealogy of Nick Land's anti-anthropocentric philosophy; a psychoanalytic conception of machinic desire (Thesis)
"Stephen Overy - The genealogy of Nick Land's anti-anthropocentric philosophy; a psychoanalytic conception of machinic desire (Thesis)" uses feedback, automation, or machinic desire to describe modernity as a recursive system rather than a human-centered project.
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 key claim is that cybernetic process and capitalist abstraction belong to the same field. Feedback, machinic desire, and recursive automation describe how modernity runs through distributed systems rather than sovereign subjects.
These pages make recursion operational by tying desire, signal, and control to technical process. Cybernetics becomes a vocabulary for understanding how abstraction feeds back through bodies, media, and institutions.
That matters because the archive's account of meltdown depends on feedback rather than simple linear progress. The future arrives here as recursive escalation, not as planned development.
How to read this text
Begin with the page's account of feedback or machinic desire, then move outward to its claims about culture or politics.
Track how automation, recursion, or systems language displaces centered agency. That shift usually reveals why the text sits in this section.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 3
3 The genealogy of Nick Land's anti-anthropocentric philosophy: a psychoanalytic conception of machinic desire.
Definition · paragraph 33
This thesis considers whether Land’s reading of psychoanalysis provides a valid foundation of his theory of ‘machinic desire’, which is a crucial component in his reaction to Kantian philosophy. This is necessitated by the fact that in Land’s writings there is not a great quantity of critical analysis of the genealogy of these concepts and terminology he borrows from psychoanalysis.
Definition · paragraph 33
This thesis considers whether Land’s reading of psychoanalysis provides a valid foundation of his theory of ‘machinic desire’, which is a crucial component in his reaction to Kantian philosophy.
Stakes · paragraph 147
I shall go on to consider Land’s reading, as a 'Black Deleuzian' who takes up Deleuze's ideas of impersonal and machinic production and marries them to cybernetic and teleological circuits of accelerative production. This synthesis of Deleuze and cybernetics provides the basis for Land’s reading of the transformative power of modernity.
Method · paragraph 146
I shall contextualise Anti-Oedipus in relation to Freudianism and Lacanianism, before considering Deleuze and Guattari's positive theory of productive desire, and the schizoanalytic register in which they attempted to track and describe its productions. Land's reading of Deleuze and Guattari, and his use of schizoanalysis in the construction of machinic desire will be contrasted with alternate readings of Deleuze which produce a more anthropocentric view of his commitments.
Appears in sections
Capital, Meltdown, and Cybernetic Modernity Primary section
Capitalist abstraction, deterritorialization, cybernetics, and the archive's account of runaway modernity.