Futures of Accelerationism (3)

Radical Philosophy, 2015

99 pb., 978 0 95752 955 7. Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics is reprinted in the Reader. Page references are given in the main text as AR and MV, respectively.

In contemporary theory, no speculative gesture from the Left has come under more scrutiny and reaction than that of Accelerationism. A response to the impasses of the present – that, to quote Thatcher, there is really is no alternative – Accelerationism looks to conjure a new politico-philosophical programme, one that can break the shackles of neoliberal, late-capitalist society and propel us into a post-capitalist milieu of a world without work. Behind the political economies of thinkers such as Srnicek and Williams and the more divergent rhetoric of figures such as Nick Land, lies a genealogy of thought originating in the wake of May 1968 and the work of philosophers such as Deleuze and Guattari and Lyotard. Arguing that there can be no outside of capitalism, these arguments tether their understating of contemporary politics as one that must work through capitalism in order to achieve its goals, using the methods and qualities of a global, abstract and complex system against itself. The purpose of this dissertation is to explore first the genealogy of this thought and its ramifications on contemporary thinkers. But also, to explore the trajectories of what may lie in pursuit of an Accelerationist Aesthetic, and whether it is possible to imagine a practice that would reflect the priorities of a truly Accelerationist agenda.

Filozofski vestnik, 2018

Accelerationist writing has tended to focus on aesthetics and technology rather than capitalism’s tendencies of motion. This may be because of accelerationism’s catastrophic implications: in an era of generalized social crisis, speeding up capitalism appears counter-intuitive. An alternate perspective, left-accelerationism, has defined it as using technological potentialities for social, rather than private ends. However, to break with the death spiral of neoliberalism’s stagnant profit rates, it is necessary to bring a critique of political economy to bear on accelerationism. This can be best formulated using Marx’s study of capitalism’s central dynamic: the conflict between the forces and relations of production, which drives the crisis-ridden expansion of the system as a whole. Efforts to show that capitalism develops solely on the basis of technological progress cannot be maintained theoretically or empirically. This was most clearly shown by Bill Warren, whose attempt to build a historically progressive role for imperialism failed to account for macro-trajectories of development in the Global South. This suggests that an accelerationist political economy must begin from the conflict between the forces and relations of production, rather than an ahistorical, additive account of development factors. An anti-determinist accelerationism remains possible, providing capitalist development is understood as a political struggle over the creation of value.

Let me start with a caveat: my paper engages with sub-and lowbrow cultures only indirectly. I am interested in the relationship between technophile subcultures, especially cyberpunk fiction/films, and the recent theory current called "accelerationism." My interest goes in both directions: on the one hand, I want to show how accelerationism uses cyberpunk's subversive imaginary as inspiration for its politics. On the other hand, I would like to discuss in the seminar what potentially uneasy questions the appropriation of sub-/lowbrow culture by accelerationism pose to us.

International Conference 'Radical Future and Accelerationism' with keynotes Mark Fisher and Nick Srnicek Jagiellonian University 18-19.06.2016

2014

This paper is a reworking of considerations of the attempt by contemporary accelerationism to grasp the present moment, epistemically and politically. It takes issue with these claims through a consideration of the problematic nostalgia for the future at work in contemporary accelerationism and the tensions of how relations of production are embedded in forces of production.

Introducing my book Malign Velocities, this talk explores the fantasy structure of accelerationism in a series of moments: the financialized present, the texts of Marx, the Soviet Avant-Garde, and "Manhattanism". In probes the effects of deceleration, congestion, and sedimentation on which accelerationism tries to operate and transcend.

New Proposals: Journal of Marxism and Interdisciplinary Inquiry, 2022

Left accelerationism and the transhuman subject who embodies this movement's political potential have multivalent relations to Marxism. Whilst recent interventions such as Srnicek and Williams' #Accelerate: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics and Bastani's Fully Automated Luxury Communism (FALC) situate themselves within the Marxist tradition (typically relying heavily on the "fragment on machines" section of the Grundrisse), immediately apparent is a problem of both politics and epistemology. In positing a transhuman subject that resolves ontologically the antagonism between labour and capital, left accelerationism flattens and dehistoricizes the specific and contingent historical and material conditions that make possible the thinking of this subject at all, and lapses from a properly dialectical mode of thought in its breathless rush to adumbrate the "inevitable" conditions for this subject's emergence. Here, we are close to Althusser's notion of history as a "process without a subject" (Althusser 1969), and a similar lack of dialectical rigour can be discerned. E.P Thompson's polemic against Althusser reminds us of what is at stake in a Marxism that is fundamentally antagonistic to a thorough engagement with-and immersion in-history, specifically history as lived and made by real human subjects, and we can likewise trace in left accelerationism's idealised transhuman a subject for whom history offers no socially embedded place, only an abstract theoretical subject-position. In short, despite the inventiveness and optimistic constructivism evident in Bastani and Srnicek and Williams' manifestos, these very qualities speak to the lack of a properly and consistently dialectical epistemic framework: they thus implicitly reject what Jameson describes as "the austere dialectical imperative" necessary to think capitalism as "progress and catastrophe all together" (Jameson 2000, 226). Drawing on Noys, Brassier, Wood, Thompson and Jameson, this paper will critique left accelerationism's consistent divergence from a materialist dialectic, and show how these lapses elide the contingent and always in-process nature of the political struggles that determine who the subject/s of any future historical period will be or can be. Left accelerationism contains seeds of radical political potential, however the lapses into idealism and techno-utopianism to which it is so prone result precisely from an abandonment of dialectical materialism in the very instances where a generic transhuman subject is articulated: in conceiving class relations thus, an inattention to "the hard lesson of some more genuinely dialectical way to think historical development and change" (Jameson 2000, 225) is revealed. The paper will contrast Srnicek and Williams and Bastani's manifestos with the Xenofeminist Manifesto, arguing that this latter offers a more promising basis for an emancipatory class politics precisely because it demands serious and sustained engagement with the forces and relations of production at the level of their bounded and contingent historical specificity. It is only by resisting the abandonment of the dialectic in order to imagine the future that we might seriously arrive at a useful picture of our destination.

Neoliberal education reforms, most markedly No Child Left Behind and Race To The Top, have codified such initiatives as privatization of public education, testing and accountability measures, and the transformation of teaching from a dynamic relationship of art to one of technical proficiency. Yet resistance to neoliberalism, and its education reforms in particular, have yielded no victories, despite the economic crises of the past decade; rather, neoliberal tenets seem more entrenched than ever. The purpose of this paper is to present an alternate response to neoliberalism, in the form of accelerationism, that does not rely on a return to a primitivist localism or direct action (such as that of the Occupy movement). Briefly stated, accelerationism does not try to reform neoliberal tendencies by going around them or from “within”; rather, it argues for accelerating those forces so that we can go through the free-market system, and thereby arrive at a post- capitalist future. The theoretical framework employed in this paper is accelerationism. Originating from Marx’s (1993) analysis of labor power and surplus value in terms of technology and machinery, and developed further by Deleuze and Guattari (1983) in their call to turn away from a folk politics and move instead towards welcoming the means of capitalism (through its consequences of both deterritorialization and reterritorialization), accelerationism is a political argument that the effects of capitalism cannot be ameliorated or diminished, but rather that they should be increased and accelerated so that we can push through to a post-capitalist future. The term accelerationism was coined pejoratively in 2010 by Benjamin Noys, but was picked up by Williams and Srnicek (2013), who called for a repurposing and recovery of a democratic future. Capitalism, and specifically the neoliberal financialization of capital, which Williams and Srnicek trace back to the Thatcherite (and later Reagan) moment beginning in 1979 and which gained new importance after the economic crises of 2007-2008, paradoxically produces the very conditions of scarcity and precarity that its promises of surplus and infinite growth claim to resolve. Neoliberalism has no future; its only path is to a cataclysm of resources and ecology. Direct action does little to nothing in the face of market forces. The prescription, then, is to accelerate the processes of neoliberalism in order to reach possible, post- capitalist, futures. While accelerationism as presented by Williams and Srnicek is not a perfect prescription, it is important to not dismiss the idea, as Noys (2014) does by tracing it back to Italian futurism/fascism and to the neo-reactionary and inherently pessimistic work of Land (2011). To be clear, accelerationism is not a matter of speed, wherein, like with Italian futurism, the point is to drive a car as fast as you can (with predictable results); rather, acceleration “is also navigational, an experimental process of discovery within a universal space of possibility” (Williams & Srnicek, 2013, para. 02.2). In this way accelerationism is a positive force, one that is a productive philosophical perspective that is most useful as an exercise in speculation. That is, what would accelerationist interventions today look like tomorrow? How can we appropriate the spoils of late capitalism in the form of (posthuman) technology in order to stake a claim to the future? The mode of inquiry used here is what Shaviro (2015) refers to as an accelerationist aesthetics. Shaviro points out that accelerationism does not work as a practical political philosophy, since an acceleration of neoliberal market forces, in which there are already more losers than winners, would at worst no doubt exacerbate that fact on the backs of those least able to weather such an onslaught, and likely result in an antihumanism as advocated for by Land (2011). Conversely, accelerationism “offers us, at best, an exacerbated awareness of how we are trapped” (Shaviro, 2015, p. 34). Instead, Shaviro argues that accelerationism is best understood and utilized as an aesthetic philosophy, wherein “Speculative fiction can explore the abyss of accelerationist ambivalence, without prematurely pretending to resolve it” (p. 21). To that end, the most effective aesthetic form that we currently have to begin to comprehend – and repurpose – the neoliberal nexus is that of science fiction. As Rucker (1983) explains, “The tools of fantasy and [science fiction] offer a means to thicken and intensify realistic fiction. By using fantastic devices it is actually possible to manipulate subtext” (n.p.). It is through the aesthetic of science fiction that I will consider the various accelerationist pedagogies already available to us, and what they tell us about speculative futures. In this way, echoing Deleuze and Guattari’s (1983) description of capital as a “body without organs,” we can deploy a speculative science fiction discourse analysis as an avenue through which to play with accelerationism as an aesthetic philosophy, one that is “effectuated through fiction, a fiction that maps vectors of the future upon the present” (Reed, 2014, p. 529).

Paper given at V2, Rotterdam, Holland. 19 April 2015.

A Structural-Anarchism Critique of Left-Wing and Right-Wing Accelerationism, arguing that the only way to do away with capitalism is not through speeding up capitalist techno-processes but by doing away with the instrumental-rationality of the Enlightenment in favor of poly-rationality.

Uneven Earth, 2017

Degrowth and accelerationism, two increasingly popular terms on the left, have more in common than I initially thought—both in practical terms (policies and strategy), and in their general ideological positions. And they have a lot to learn from each other. What follows is a bit of a report: a conversation between the two proposals. There will be some critique, but also some cross-pollination. My discussion revolves around a couple of themes: the importance of utopian thinking, technology, economy, and political strategy. If there is commonality there is also difference. How is it possible that, considering so many agreements, they have such an oppositional framing of the problem at hand? By way of a conclusion, I suggest that the notion of ‘speed’—and their divergent views of it—is fundamental to each position.

We need to revive the argument that was traditionally made for post-capitalism: not only is capitalism an unjust and perverted system, but it is also a system that holds back progress. Our technological development is being suppressed by capitalism, as much as it has been unleashed. Accelerationism is the basic belief that these capacities can and should be let loose by moving beyond the limitations imposed by capitalist society.