[6] As an anthology primarily aiming to cohere Nick Land's conjunctional reinterpretation of continental philosophy and modernist poetry in the 1990s—what British writer Kodwo Eshun described as a dramatization of "theory as a geopolitico-historical epic"[7]—and his subsequent "theory-fictions" which explored cyberpunk media, Gothic themes and esoteric systems while utilizing unorthodox and disordered experimental writing styles, Fanged Noumena consists of essays and prose texts written by Land during multiple periods, compiled by Michael Carr, Mark Fisher, David Rylance and Reza Negarestani, with their sequence being edited by Kronic and Brassier.
"[10] In a lecture for a conference on accelerationism given in 2010, Brassier referred to Land's philosophical project as "mad black Deleuzianism",[a] referencing a criticism given by French philosopher Vincent Descombes of the work of Deleuze and Guattari and Jean-François Lyotard as "mad black Hegelianism"; the term denotes the anti-vitalism of Land's reinterpretation of Deleuze's philosophy,[3] distinguished by its "unsavory" orientation towards the paradox of "will[ing] the impossibility of willing"[11] and an active materialist interest ("no longer a pretext for critique but a vector of exploration")[12] in, according to Kronic and Brassier, "the impersonal and anonymous chaos of absolute time".
[3] Responding to the assertions made in the essay, Brassier theorized that while if "schizoanalytical practice is fuelled by the need to always intensify and deterritorialize, there comes a point at which there is no agency left: you yourself have been dissolved back into the process", the difficulties appearing in Land's initial approach could be amended by further deviations by future subjects.
"[28] "K-space" was the first concept of Land's to use the "K-" prefix, a shorthand for "cyber(netic)", with his concept of "K-war" guiding his later abstract prose texts; Kronic and Brassier clarified that this shift in Land's focus expresses that "the insurrectionary basis of revolution now lies at the virtual terminus of capital—the future as transcendental unconscious, its 'return' inhibited by the repressed [alternate] circuits of temporality", concerned more with intensity and spontaneous intensive spaces than with ideal orders,[29] at a point of "increasingly autonomous technics' pursuit of their own self-replication without any interest in serving human use-value" according to Le.
[30] The dialogue "Cyberrevolution", initially published in the first issue of Kronic's journal ***Collapse, features a scenario where figures speaking on a fictional dystopian news broadcast attempt to understand the cause of mass riots in multiple continents, before escalating into a passionate argument over the relevance of critical theory to the situation; it serves as a hyperstitional explanation of the failure for acceleration to be commonly understood.
[8] Alongside the stylistic influence of Gibson's novels, in these texts, "Land's anti-humanist speculation is combined with an evident enjoyment of wordplay and a renewed appreciation for the anthropological, mythological and psychoanalytical sources of Capitalism and Schizophrenia", according to Kronic;[6] the unpublished conference paper "Cyberspace Anarchitecture as Jungle-War" contains these elements in addition to a clearer focus on the cultural relevance of the complexity of jungle music inspired by Kodwo Eshun's concurrent writings and lectures, and the potential for a "K-insurgency".
A full-length music video tape was created for "Meltdown" by London art audiovisual collective Orphan Drift, featuring cyberdelic visuals, an ambient techno soundtrack and the text being read by processed Apple MacinTalk text-to-speech voices.
[32] From the point of Land's de facto leadership of the CCRU onward, he "disintegrated into the number-names of a hyperpagan pantheon, syncretically drawing on the occult, nursery rhyme, anthropology, SF and Lovecraft, among other sources", according to Kronic and Brassier.
[6] "A zIIgºthIc–==X=cºDA==–(CººkIng–lºbsteRs–wIth–jAke–AnD–DInºs)" is an abstract prose text incorporating themes of the Oedipus complex that utilizes superscript symbols that was written for a 1996 exhibition of art by British visual artists Jake and Dinos Chapman; a later artwork by them is featured on the cover of Fanged Noumena.
"Non-Standard Numeracies: Nomad Cultures" is an arrangement of fragmentary invocatory texts, similar to "KataςoniX", where Land's concept of geotraumatics and his mythological research presented elsewhere in the writings of the CCRU are both used to convey the Outside breaking into human conventions.