The final sentence of Nick Land and Sadie Plant’s text titled Cyberpositive (1994)—written one year before the CCRU (Cybernetic Culture Research Unit) came into existence and before Plant left it in 1997—seems, to say the least, debatable: “Only the enemies of immuno-identity populate the future.” For as it has developed since this text was written and continues to unfold before our very eyes, the future is teeming with immuno-identitarians.
What the authors call “anastrophe,” “the future coming together,” has in fact nothing to do with the Derridian “à-venir”—what is to (à) come (venir)—which is always of the order of the deferred future, and never fully realized. The à-venir (the future that is always yet to come) is what undoes the prevailing hyperstition that Land and Plant describe in Cyberpositive: it is the gaping hole in self-fulfilling predictions; it is the hetero-realization of the Savior who always comes “like a thief in the night,” while everyone has their eyes closed (Matthew 24:43). But nothing in their text seems to me capable of separating the toxic future that is unfolding day after day from a counter-future—a minority one, alien to the world and its logic (capitalist, viral, etc.)—that would break away from it.
What prevents this text from leaving room for a counter-future?
1) Perhaps, first of all, the viral conception of capitalism: “Capital clones itself with increasing disregard for heredity, becoming abstract positive feedback, organizing itself.” Furthermore, cloning can be either natural or artificial, but the two merge in viral capitalism—a celebration of this fusion found as much in Mark Fisher’s dissertation as in Land’s texts such as Meltdown. Yet this fusion of nature and technology and this viral transfusion make it impossible to understand the specific logic of the techno-logical and of capitalism—and therefore to even imagine a technological future that would escape AI capitalism;
2) Because there is no room for “nature”—call it the non-synthetic cosmos if you prefer, or the naturing aspect (natura naturans) of the universe: “The outside of the city is no longer a naturally inherited past, but a digitally transmitted future.” In such a short-circuit, indeed, everything melts down; everything is conceptually fused, and David Cronenberg will reveal its terrible face in his films (The Fly, for example, in 1986)—but why expect anything “positive” from it, then?
3) This vicious cycle—this short-circuit—makes any ecological perspective unlikely, for even the negative is positive: “patriarchy prolongs the ice age of mankind,” which is bad, but “global warming melts the ice, raises the seas, subverts the glaciers,” which seems to be good enough, right, since it destroys patriarchal solidity. Admittedly, Sadie Plant takes a completely different approach to the hydraulic perspective in Zeros + Ones in 1997 (see the “Wetware” section, which draws on Luce Irigaray, James Lovelock, and Dorion Sagan) by adopting the hypothesis of “hypermer” (M. A. McMenamin & D. L. S. McMenamin), according to which terrestrial life is a continuation of the marine fluid by other means; yet, this is not the case in this text, which notes the existence of a “sudden transition from ice to water, phase change.” Deleuze and Guattari had, however, warned in A Thousand Plateaus against sudden “destratifications,” phase changes that lead only to death.
All of this is undoubtedly because what Plant and Land seek above all is to oppose positive feedback to cyberneticist Norbert Wiener’s predilection for the negative feedback of control. But within this liquidated, de-delimited framework, only a boundless immanence asserts itself; everything that happens and everything that opposes what happens is caught up in the same logic, and what seeks to immunize itself against the viral effects of techno-capitalism merely confirms those effects: to defend oneself is to contribute to the viral.
It is therefore pointless, the two authors suggest, to pay too much attention to the ongoing “catastrophe,” for in the end it is nothing more than “the past coming apart”—farewell to the unfulfilled promises of the past, according to Herbert Marcuse and Walter Benjamin: farewell to the prophecies whose call for justice persists precisely because one prevents these prophecies from becoming reality; all that matters is the anastrophe in which everything will melt away and give rise to the realm of “self-designing processes,” where the immuno-identitarians will eventually—so it is written, we are assured, we are told to believe—dissolve.
But since the authors of this text seek to be an integral part of these processes and invent a “cyberpositive” style of writing that maintains absolutely no distance from the ongoing anastrophic processes —that can only accelerate— they have no way to counter the techno-fascists’ immuno-identitarian future—which will be the last to melt away, once the rest of humanity has already perished. To counter this future, it would be necessary to break the vicious cycle.
This means finding another kind of positivity, an affirmation outside the loops—at their center, where nothing moves, that Parmenidean place of greatest capacity. Detaching heterogeneous practices from hegemonic processes. Reintroducing a non-synthetic (subtractive, analytical) cosmological dimension. Defending ourselves against what harms us: not all immunopolitics is bad. Accepting that we are like strangers in this world that rejects strangers.
Then the friends of strangers will populate time.
Bibliography
Sadie Plant and Nick Land, “Cyberpositive”, in Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian (eds.), Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2014.
Frédéric Neyrat is Professor in the English department of UW-Madison (USA). He is a French-American philosopher with an expertise in environmental humanities, contemporary theory, and media culture. He is co-editor of the electronic platform Alienocene and a member of the editorial board of the journal Les Temps Qui Restent. Traumachine: Intelligence Artificielle et Techno-Fascisme (MF, 2025) is his latest book (coming soon from Becoming Press). Website: Atopies (http://atoposophie.wordpress.com); Instagram: The Outernational.
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