The Pleasures and Pains of Accelerationism

RUDN Journal of Philosophy

Modern types of social reality require updated ways of comprehending them. The research is devoted to a new analytical form of understanding modernity that has recently emerged - accelerationism, still rarely discussed in Russian philosophy. The representatives of accelerationism call for a radical and rapid acceleration of socio-economic and technological processes in capitalist societies. The article reflects some ideas of the Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics by Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek, after which the accelerationist trend in philosophy and social sciences intensified and gained clear theoretical guidelines. The Manifesto’s ideas about accelerating technological evolution as a means of resolving social conflicts, about unleashing all the latent forces of capitalist production to achieve a state of post-capitalism, denying a return to the Fordist type of production and calling for the restoration of the future as such, are highlighted. The Manifesto and the works o...

In 2010, critical theorist Benjamin Noys coined the term accelerationism to denote the argument that the only way to overcome capitalism is to intensify exploitation and expansion to the point of collapse. Since Noys’ coinage of the term, several thinkers have attempted to present more positive and celebratory cases for accelerationism. In their “#ACCELERATE: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics,” Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams define accelerationism as the basic belief that existing technological tendencies “should be let loose by moving beyond the limitations imposed by a capitalist society.” They expand on this basic premise in their 2015 book Inventing the Future, in which they reframe accelerationism as the demand for the establishment of a post-work, post-scarcity, postcapitalist society. Before Inventing the Future was published, literary theorist Steven Shaviro asserted in his book No Speed Limit: Three Essays on Accelerationism that accelerationism must be an aesthetic program before it can become a political one. Shaviro defines accelerationist aesthetics as the representation of a post-apocalyptic, accelerated form of capitalism. In this thesis, I propose four alternative characteristics for an aesthetics of accelerationism that accounts for the developments and changes in Srnicek and Williams’ political program: melting, mutation, hyperstition, modernity. I then apply these characteristics to the works of three contemporary artists and artist collectives—British installation and video artist Benedict Drew; Japanese artist collective Chim↑Pom, and the British filmmakers known as the Otolith Group. These characteristics present the transition from capitalism into postcapitalism in an aesthetic form, rendering the arguments and ambiguities of accelerationism more recognizable and understandable.

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.

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.

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

2014

This article highlights the politics of accelerationism as a political antagonism in cyberspace. Social and economic conditions which are structurally shaped by digital technology can produce at least two scenarios in consequences; maintaining a current condition or disrupting it. On the first scenario, accelerationism is meant to rapidly produce things, images, and products in cyberspace in concord with a requirement of the late capitalism. This, in effect, culminates in consolidating a status quo of the late capitalism. Accelerationism in this scenario is substantiated as an unchanged image for the future. It can be termed succinctly as ‘modernity in linearity’. In contrast, the politics of accelerationism in the second scenario is inspired by Karl Marx’s ‘Fragment on machines’ and other prominent thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze and Jean-Francois Lyotard. Therefore, the second scenario shows a very nature of antipathy and difference that contributes to a disruption of the linearity. In terms of its antagonism, this initially marks recalcitrance to the late capitalism in favour of different futures and imaginations. Given a significance of the second scenario, the article examines subjectivity of the accelerationists who are in compliance with this setting in a Lacanian psychoanalytic perspective coupled with a philosophy of technology. The inquiry is that what would be the image of the subjectivity of those whose aim is to disrupt the late capitalism, for a revolutionary direction, but does not necessarily progress towards post-capitalism?

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.

FUTURE PROSPECTS ON POLITICS, CULTURE AND GOVERNANCE The 2 nd Annual Meeting and International Conference of the Consortium for Research in Political Theory (CRIPT), 2018

With reference to the accelerationist approach to diverse reflections of capitalism especially introduced by Williams and Srnicek, this study handles the crisis of capitalism. Along with a critical interpretation of accelerationism, this paper also draws upon the current considerations Deleuze and Guattari's reading of the relationship between schizophrenia and deterritorialization. Accelerationist capitalism, in general, implies that political attitudes are now subject to lose their ideas. In these conditions, accelerationism is introduced as an alternative means for generating modalities of “counter-power” relations. By analyzing the general characteristics of a universal silence on the increasing symbolic disaster that remains from capitalism, this paper intends to provide the framework of systemic crisis. Under the circumstances of this systemic crisis, the course of generating hope for the future is lost. Capitalism can survive only within the contradictions of this systemic crisis utilizing the reproduction and recollection of a "symbolic misery", in Stiegler's words. For Deleuze and Guattari, on the other hand, capitalism is a system that we cannot avoid, and there is no exit from such a systemic crisis that involves all parts of life. This paper introduces a reading of capitalism not only by focusing on the destruction of all existing codes of living but also by following the trace of various means for reproducing diverse forms of psychic and collective schizophrenia. KEYWORDS: Accelerationism; schizophrenia; crisis; power; reproduction

This essay by Edmund Berger is already a classic! Out on 3rd October 2015 in Berger’s blog Deterritorial Investigations Unit, the essay immediately received a positive echo in the internet ac- celerationist blogosphere, tackling the international debate on the accelerationist philosophy and culture by consolidating the perspective of the post structuralist thought - Deleuze, Foucau- lt, Guattari, Lyotard and others - in 70’s in America. Moreover Grungy Accelerationism ampli es the perspective of what we de- ne as «quantic» or «pulsional accelerationism» that we offer in the series of books «The Strong of the Future» by Rizosfera. Edmund Berger (author), Paolo Davoli and Letizia Rustichelli (editors), Gabriele Fantuzzi (graphics).