... Land draws a 'diagonal' between pre-modern versions of time, which are cyclical, and the time of modernity, which is linear time. What gets us beyond each of these? Time as a spiral, which contains both cyclical temporality ("time of return") and linear temporality ("time of escape"). This time spiral for land is compressive and involutionary—it cycles 'inward' the further we move down the line of time, and this is where acceleration is taking place.
But what does it mean to reconcile linear time, which is future-oriented, with cyclical time, with is aimed at a restoration of the past? You get a kind of schizophrenic picture, where the deeper we get into the future, the most the ancient and archaic seems to be reborn. My sense is that Land tends to read these temporal dynamics as 'deposited'—or more properly, 'indexed'—within culture. Think of the 1990s early tech culture: cutting edge experience, the future perceived as unfolding, but there was a cultural rush of 'techno-primitivism', talk of network tribalism, the resurgence of shamanism, 'technocculture'. Past and future, together.
Glad you enjoyed the post, and what a great question! I'll try my best to answer... apologies for an incoming novel. So first off, the coincidence of patchwork appearing in Deleuze and Guattari in the 1970s and then Nick Land—very very well read in D&G—picking up on patchwork via NRx is a very...
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