Angelaki

Journal of the Theoretical Humanities

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Slow Down

Jason Barker

To cite this article: Jason Barker (2016) Slow Down, Angelaki, 21:2, 227-235, DOI:
10.1080/0969725X.2016.1182743

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 ANGELAKI
journal of the theoretical humanities
volume 21 number 2 june 2016

M atthew Arnold didnt share Burkes dim

view of the French Revolution. And yet
by no means did he oppose Burke in theory.
[W]hat distinguishes [Burkes] writings,
Arnold writes in his Essays in Criticism, is
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their profound, permanent, fruitful, philosophi-

cal truth.1 Their bigotry if indeed bigotry
there was was irrelevant in comparison to what
might positively be described as the theoretical
motivation of Burkes writings. Witness the
unique occasion on which critical mania was REVIEW ESSAY
morally admissible for Arnold, and certainly
not to be chastised as an instance of the philis-
tine mind-set: jason barker
This is what I call living by ideas: when one
side of a question has long had your earnest
support, when all your feelings are enraged, SLOW DOWN
when you hear all around you no language
but one, when your party talks this language
on benjamin noys critique
like a steam-engine and can imagine no other,
still to be able to think, still to be irresist-
of accelerationism
ibly carried, if so it be, by the current of
thought to the opposite side of the question,
and, like Balaam, to be unable to speak any- abstraction, of theoretical practice; and that, in
thing but what the Lord has put in your the case of theorists from Arnold to Louis
mouth. I know nothing more striking, and I Althusser, theoretical practitioners will them-
must add that I know nothing more un- selves be alienated or seized by the power of
English.2 their own practice. Explicitly for Arnold, phi-
losophical truth is unthinkable without its
attendant and relatively dened mania, as in
from philosophy to theory Kantian enthusiasm, where the French Revolu-
Arnolds inuence in contemporary philosophy tion is the abstract idea willed by its spectators.
is effectively nil. But as a theorist he is far Needless to say that by the time we reach Marx
more contemporary than one might imagine, the labour attendant upon critical theory will
given the prevailing attraction, sometimes involve interrogating philosophys (disavowed)
mania, of living by ideas. What distinction historical role, its pretension to seize problems
am I making between philosophy and theory? which originate from the outside, along with its
Simply that where philosophy is thinking in scandalous elimination of everything of hetero-
the abstract, theory involves the labour of geneous origin. For (the very early) Althusser
ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN 1469-2899 online/16/020227-9 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2016.1182743

227
 review essay
a simple glance at history reveals that philos-
ophy is merely the science of problems solved.3
In the early 1960s Althusser will (tempor-
arily) drop his adherence to non-philosophy
in favour of philosophy as meta-theory, or
uppercase Theory uncontaminated by politics,
which ironically reinstates a very un-Marxist
and hierarchical relation of philosophy to
science beyond the unwelcome scrutiny of the
party. Despite Althussers renunciation of
Theory and his conversion, by the end of the
decade, to philosophy as theoretical practice
in the form of politicized science: the rep-
Downloaded by [University of Nebraska, Lincoln] at 07:40 30 May 2016
resentation of politics with the sciences4
today anyone claiming to practise theory to
the letter might be said to be engaged in an
anti-philosophical struggle against the ideo-
logical abstractions of institutionalized prac-
tice(s) as such.5 Here I am thinking
especially of Gilles Grelet, who afrms the
point in extremis in announcing to his jury,
prior to the defence of his doctoral thesis in
2002, that defence is the order of the day
in light of the attack [on his work] by the uni-
versity.6 Grelets combat against philosophys
intellectual neutrality, its Enlightenment
rationality, its refusal to take sides is the
most recent and original attempt by a theorist
to counter the abstractions of philosophy as
master discourse, forever in league with univer-
sity discourse, the hegemonic of Lacans four
discourses of psychoanalysis; the one embodied
by science, or the knowledge variable, S2. Like
the late Althusser, Grelet commits himself to
breaking the theoreticist link between philos-
ophy and science whilst retaining the autonomy
of lowercase theory, which Grelet for his part
dubs theorisme (in French the word is a near-
homophone of terrorism).7 And yet what
Grelet also refers to as theorie-rebellion an
ultimatum addressed to those who do not
work or work no longer toward an inven-
tive, demanding, decisive, jubilatory
thought8 also recalls uppercase Theory, or
theory envisaged as a kind of subterranean
practice in theoretical form, such that, as
G.M. Goshgarian puts it, in order to do prac-
tice it is enough to do theory.9 Is this con-
ception of a critical method whose object is
absolutely divorced from it, or whose aim is
to abstract itself from the worldly totalization
of given reality, merely to revert to a form
of political idealism in the high Althusserian
mode?
Benjamin Noys is yet another example of an
English or un-English critical theorist
struck by the French theory bug. Like this
author, a corresponding member of the Organis-
ation Non-philosophique Internationale
(ONPhi) founded by Grelet, Ray Brassier and
Franois Laruelle in 2002,10 Noys has written
enthusiastically on Bataille and other transgres-
sive subjects whilst resisting, like Arnold and
Grelet in their respective ways, theorys practi-
cal excesses.11 As Noys writes in The Great
Refusal, his 2006 contribution to Grelets
(now-defunct) sans-philosophie.net:
On the one hand, the asceticism of philos-
ophy now leads a hidden existence, concealed
within the fastidious technical research pro-
grammes of analytic philosophy. On the
other hand, we have the embrace of desire,
perversion, and jouissance by libidinal mate-
rialists, certain Lacanian liberationists, and
all those thinkers of excess, transgression
and subversion; slogans as perfectly at
home in modern advertising as they are in
thought. The great refusal is precisely a
refusal of these two symmetrical and comp-
lementary orientations. In fact they must be
regarded as two deviations from the correct
line of theory: the right-wing deviation of
an attenuated asceticism and the left-wing
deviation of a triumphalist but hollow cele-
bration of desire.12
Malign Velocities: Accelerationism and Capit-
alism is Noys latest attempt to take down the
prophets of desire. In keeping with his former
theorist13 position, Noys book treads the ne
line between deviations from theory, albeit
this time with the aim of inaugurating an aes-
thetics attuned to the friction or resistance
of the body against integration into uxes and
ows,14 thus serving to hamper the accelera-
tionists those contemporary promoters of
capitalisms creative destruction in their
theoretical ights of fancy. It was Noys who
rst coined the term accelerationism, we
228

learn, in The Persistence of the Negative,
whereas its Sturm und Drang pyrotechnics
owe their theoretical origins to Nick Land and
the long-since defunct Cybernetic Culture
Research Unit (Ccru) of Warwick University.
In turns out, Noys remarks, that the term
occurs in Roger Zelaznys sci- novel Lord of
Light (1967), which Id read. The unconscious,
as usual, works in mysterious ways.15
Like Arnold, Noys is an accomplished expo-
nent of the essay form. No irony is intended
with this comparison between Arnold, whose
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works would be sketched out in the train
waiting rooms of provincial towns, and Noys,
whose latest offering bears the stamp of his par-
ticipation in journees detudes, university
theory laboratories and art conferences held
throughout the United Kingdom and further
aeld. For Althusser recall that the essay is situ-
ated as an objective condensation (sometimes
explosive) of a singular idea or problematic.
The philosophical monograph (e.g., Reading
Capital) is not primarily interested in support-
ing such interventions in theory, which in the
case of the essays published in 1965 as For
Marx (collected together exactly as originally
written, without any corrections or alterations)
would have had a cumulative effect through
serial publication (between 1960 and 1964, in
the form of articles in French Communist
Party journals).16
Despite his adherence to the essay form, the
formalism, to coin a phrase, is not taken
nearly far enough in Malign Velocities. Aside
from acknowledging Lands search for a new
post-human state beyond any form of the
subject, along with his Deleuzian Thatcher-
ism,17 Noys shies away from an adequate exam-
ination of the Landian unconscious. Lets pause
and re-read Land at his post-cinematic best:
The coked-out futures dealer passing a drunk
on a Manhattan street translates the destiny
of class difference into an immanent intensity
traced on a smooth surface of social disap-
pearance. The bum inhabits the social zero
preferred by capital as the vanishing point
of pre-modern legality, from which the coke
rush is repulsed as an anonymous distance
of death. There is a becoming a rich bum,
229
barker
becoming a derelict on coke, which is integral
to the cynicism of frontier capital. This is the
advance modernity of Beckett, where high
culture is immanently differentiated from
inarticulacy, absolving itself from ontological
specier. It is thus that there is a becoming-
zombie of the bum just as there is a becom-
ing-wired of the real managers of the social:
the skagged-out housing estate as base line
for the effervescence of the stock market
oor. It is quite inaccurate to suggest that
yuppie nanciers are oblivious of depri-
vation, since the limit oblivion of an absolute
proletarianization is consumed with each
bubble of champagne.18
Having eagerly devoured Malign Velocities
from cover to cover I am sadly no nearer to
understanding precisely what might have pro-
duced that, or at least to gaining a sense of
what the members of the Ccru were actually
on. How should the theorist respond to such
mania? With the aloofness of an outsider? Or
is the aloofness to be explained by the fact
that Noys simply wasnt involved in the Ccru,
didnt speak their language, and that where a
former associate might have chosen to write an
empirical case study, Noys, for whatever
reason, felt no inclination to explore its insti-
tutional dynamics?
Psychoanalysis claim to fame, notes Bruce
Fink, does not reside in providing an archime-
dean [sic] point outside of discourse, but simply
in elucidating the structure of discourse
itself.19 Given that there is no metalanguage,
one has to wonder at Noys preferred strategy
of countering accelerationist mastery with
knowledge, rather than subverting its hysteria
through analysis. It might have been for lack
of reliable rst-hand sources20 that Noys
decided to take his critical distance from the
clamour of theoretical accelerationism.21 In
any case the book alternates between themed
observations of the accelerationist modelling of
capitalist dynamics on one hand, and Noys cri-
ticisms on the other.
My aim is not to offer an exhaustive account
of accelerationism, Noys concedes, but rather
to choose certain moments at which it emerges
as a political and cultural strategy.22 Accelera-
tionism could be seen as a result of the defeat
 review essay
of the hopes inspired by the revolutionary
events in France, which are condensed in the
signier May 68.23 Noys seems at ease with tradiction, is an attribute to be constructed.
the failed revolt thesis of May 68,24 whose
cultural debris is read as the symptom of
social crisis and transition. But this orthodox
Marxist interpretation surely ies in the face
of theorys asceticism. Contrary to the super-
cial conception of revolution as the Great
Deluge (in large part the legacy of Burkes hys-
terical take on the sublime) it is the theorist who
composes the grand narratives; a grandeur
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without which there would simply be no narra-
tives at all. Arnolds theorist is the dramatist
or critical power poised in the wings (of the
event), ready to ignite the creative power of
revolutionaries and other creative artists.25
Grelets theorist is also a dramatist of sorts,
albeit one who directs a non-theatre closed to
the public (Jean-Luc Godard remarks some-
where that the public is a National Socialist
invention). In topological terms the theorist
stands between man, or he who is radically
immanent, or that which is real-and-nothing-
but, the real in person, and the people,
which is simply non-thetic transcendence or
the cutting edge of a thought-without-subject
(as angelic as it is anti-humanist).26
Much like George Peyrol aka Alain Badious
rejection of the angelic narrative of May 68, and
of the Cultural Revolution as an exercise in self-
agellation,27 Noys rejects theoretical accelera-
tionism in the form of ecstatic suffering, of
jouissance, experienced in our deepening
immersion into a capitalism without
horizon.28 However, note how, for Grelet, the
horizonless topology immanence provides
the a priori guarantee for the theorists emer-
gence. Glossing somewhat, if there is determi-
nation in the lonely hour of a last instance that
never comes then who better than the theorist
to decide in the rst instance?29 In effect,
the theorist decides into existence the see-
mingly intractable social contradictions
between capital and labour an intractability
that renders May 68 the signier of defeat
by setting such contradictions before the
people for its decision. The determination, in
other words, is radically reversed, such that
the dyad of labour/capital, public/private,
state/capital, rather than being an a priori con-
Let the masses educate themselves in this
great revolutionary movement, declares Mao
in Point 4 of his Decision, let them learn
to distinguish between the just and the unjust,
between correct and incorrect ways of doing
things.30
What Grelets theory would have enabled
Noys to work through is the extent to which
accelerationism, rather than being a symptom
of the defeat of May 68, is in fact the triumph
of the critical imagination in search of revolu-
tionary practice la hauteur. For if we are duty
bound to defend lost causes, as Z izek insists,
then why should we be obliged to admit the
defeat of the hopes inspired by the revolution-
ary events in France, which are condensed in
the signier May 68? Shouldnt we instead
be ready to dene May 68 as the beginning,
rather than the end, of the revolutionary con-
densation inducing the dissolution and resol-
ution of the whole, that is, a global
restructuring of the whole on a qualitatively
new basis?31 Had Noys adopted a strictly theor-
ist position then it might have changed his mode
of attack, convincing him that his narrative
needed to be written in the future anterior,
not the past perfect, with the gure of Mao sub-
stituted for Thatcher, the former the accelera-
tionist ventriloquist of the latter, and of a
wholly other history.
disorders
Noys is at his combative best when he takes
on accelerationist impotence by way of its
seeming aporias and equivocations, such as the
Deleuzian trope of innitely prolonged desire
or (be)coming:
While accelerationism might promise an inte-
gration of desire and labor in a machinic
synthesis, to accelerate the boredom of
work it disguises the boredom of desire.
Accelerationism wants to enchant sex as
something accelerative and machinic away
from the iterative reverie of fantasy.32
230

Broken promises and botched desire. It might
talk the talk but when it comes down to it accel-
erationism is just a metaphysical prick teaser. In
the books most persuasive chapter on War
Machines Noys mounts a sustained attack on
accelerationisms disturbing and disturbed ante-
cedents, the Italian Futurists. We visit the
futurist prophet and poet Gabriele DAnnun-
zios villa on Lake Garda, in whose gardens the
bow of the Italian warship Puglia has been set
into the hillside, making for an unsettling lake-
side fantasy. This techno-pastoral gures the
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desire to infuse the forces of technology into
nature and to give life to technology through
the integration of nature.33 The same mystical
reconguring, Noys reveals, is advocated by
Walter Benjamin, whose strange cosmic phan-
tasmagoria imagined the First World War as a
botched bloodbath, one that failed to compre-
hend the cosmic powers of technology, and
whose future would need to be seized as
second nature, into a new conguration. Noys
quotes the following passage from Benjamin:
In the nights of annihilation of the last war
the frame of mankind was shaken by a
feeling that resembled the bliss of the epi-
leptic. And the revolts that followed it were
the rst attempt of mankind to bring the
new body under its control. The power of
the proletariat is the measure of its convales-
cence. If it is not gripped to the very marrow
by the discipline of this power, no pacist
polemics will save it. Living substance con-
quers the frenzy of destruction only in the
ecstasy of procreation [Rausche der
Zeugung].34
Two observations strike me as important
here. The rst is the authors use of the term
machine in the sense of relentless mechaniza-
tion and machine work. Despite encapsulat-
ing Noys narrative (of the rapid intoxication
of technology giving way to the inevitable
reach for the emergency brake) Walter Benja-
min feels rather dated when it comes to postmo-
dern or immaterial capitalism and to the
spread of computers, given Alan Turings de-
nition, already in 1936, of the computer in
terms of universal computation, which at the
time had nothing to do with particular hardware
231
barker
technologies or software applications, but was
the name Turing gave the algorithmic procedure
by which its possible to compute any comput-
able sequence of numbers.35
Second, I wonder if Noys is too literal in his
treatment of war machines. However dubious
the concept might be in the hands of the accel-
erationists, doesnt the war machine feature in
Deleuze and Guattaris work as an occasion for
abstracting free-thinking machines from
state apparatuses of capture (political, cultural,
economic )? Recall how Arnold remarks at
being struck by the profound, permanent,
fruitful, philosophical truth of Burkes writ-
ings on the French Revolution, which contain
the true philosophy of an epoch of concen-
tration,36 without remotely sharing in
Burkes political assessment of it. Noys
account again leaves me wondering quite why
such theoretical abstraction need be fanatical.
(Note that for Grelet, as well as for Arnold,
theory is never fanatical in the Kantian sense.)
Noys atly rejects what he perceives as accel-
erationisms hollow extremism and political
one-upmanship. Accelerationism is the modern
equivalent of the left communism the
radical rejection of parliamentary elections and
unions as sites of struggle that Lenin labelled
an infantile disorder. I would describe con-
temporary accelerationism, Noys declares, as
a postgraduate disorder.37 But Noys refuses
to entertain the possibility that this infantile
theory may have mature or rational designs.
Permit me to take the following detour. Pre-
viously I mentioned the essay form and how
the essays comprising For Marx were, as
essays, intended by Althusser as theoretical
interventions: these philosophical essays do
not derive from a merely erudite or speculative
investigation. They are, simultaneously, inter-
ventions in a denite conjuncture.38 Now, the
fact is that these carefully calculated moves
in a campaign to conquer the PCF for left
anti-Stalinism might be considered, with the
benet of hindsight, to have been completely
deluded, pandering to [Althussers] own fanta-
sies about himself.39 But lets dispense with
hindsight. Althusser was far from completely
deluded. By January 1966 his essay-
 review essay
interventions or theory-bombs had been landing
with timed regularity on the enemy stronghold
for no less than ve years. Consider their cumu-
lative impact besides that of the simultaneous
theory contagion of unpublished texts of
secret meetings, lectures, reading groups
and the like in and around the E cole
Normale. In response, an assembly of commu-
nist philosophers was convened by the PCF
Central Committee at Choisy-le-Roi, providing
for the ultimate showdown between Althusser
and Roger Garaudy, the PCFs chief
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theoretician.40
Was Althusser deluded to think he could
crack the communist citadel with theory? Or,
on the contrary, as G.M. Goshgarian suggests,
Was he not training up a mass of theoreti-
cians in whom Theory would one day take
esh, acquiring the historical existence that
neither Party nor class had yet succeeded in
[providing]?41 Consider other militant arms
of his theory revolution: the School for Theor-
etical Formation set up by normaliens in
which the classics of Althusserian Marxism
stood high on the syllabus. The abstract gulf,
Althusser would admit in 1967, separating
these intellectuals without organic (in the
Gramscian sense) links to the workers move-
ment [ ] by no means precluded their sallying
forth from the world of reection to revolutio-
nize the political world.42 For Althusser the
limitations of politics were no impediment to
the power of Theory. Land might well have
agreed.
In light of the above would Noys not agree
with me that the idea of theory in search of a
revolutionary practice or in search of a
method of public salvation as Grelet prefers
to put it43 may not be quite so deluded after
all? Noys description of a postgraduate dis-
order, he tells us, is not just a reference to
the subjective position of contemporary accel-
erationists, and neither is it mere name-calling
or ad hominem argument:
Im referring to the specic position of the
postgraduate on the edge or cusp of the job
market. The postgraduate possesses,
usually, signicant cultural capital, but they
confront full immersion in the labor market
fairly late in life. Of course, in the UK and
US, student nancing already forces them
into a future life of debt servitude. Also,
many are working, trying to get ahead or,
more often, stay aoat. That said, this
merely adds to the fact that the world of
labor is confronted as one of future horror
endless and trivial. Accelerationism pro-
vides an answer by turning the horror of
work into the jouissance of machinic immer-
sion. We may face a life of labor, but we can
try and face it kein Schmerz, kein Gedanke
without feeling, without thought.44
This reads far too much like an endorsement of
Peter Starrs failed revolt thesis to be credible.
I simply dont buy it, and nd it difcult to
believe Noys does. What intellectual situation is
he actually describing here? And far from avoid-
ing an ad hominem argument, isnt Noys mor-
alizing tone that accelerationism threatens
postgraduates with machinic immersion also
paternalistic? Did Althusser lead his normaliens
astray? Should he have been more of a career
advisor? (Some of them did very nicely for them-
selves! Note also how Land is fondly remembered
by his students as a multimedia Svengali respon-
sible for launching dozens of careers!45) Or, since
this isnt an argument ad hominem, should
theory come with an ofcial government health
warning or disclaimer from Warwick University
or the E cole Normale?
For everything thats thought-provoking in
Noys book and I applaud the heuristic
nature of his observations and
criticisms its author seems far
too eager to close the case
against accelerationism and its
theory experiments. Why the
rush?
disclosure statement
No potential conict of interest was reported by
the author.
notes
Title page image: Carnival Nights 4 (oil on board) by
Salah el Moncef.
232

1 Arnold 17.
2 Ibid. 1819.
3 Althusser, Chacun peut-il philosopher? 331.
The text was first published in 1958.
4 Althusser, Lnine et la philosophie 53: La philo-
sophie reprsenterait la politique dans le domaine
de la thorie, pour tre plus prcis: auprs des
sciences [].
5 There is inadequate space to develop the point
but this is the direction in which Althussers non-
philosophy was arguably heading, as is revealed in
Downloaded by [University of Nebraska, Lincoln] at 07:40 30 May 2016
his posthumous works of the mid-1970s. See
Althusser, Initiation la philosophie pour les non-phi-
losophes; tre marxiste en philosophie; Goshgarian,
A Marxist in Philosophy.
6 Grelet, Soutenance de Nanterre 1.2.
7 See n. 43.
8 Grelet, Thorie-rbellion 5.
9 G.M. Goshgarian in private correspondence
with the author, 25 October 2015.
10 Originally conceived as a collective research
enterprise, the organization has declined in
recent years to the point of being little more
than a bulletin board for Laruelles back catalogue.
See <www.onphi.net>.
11 See Noys, Georges Bataille; The Culture of Death;
The Persistence of the Negative.
12 Idem, The Great Refusal n. pag. First pub-
lished in 2006 at <www.sans-philosophie.net>.
13 See Grelet, Son of Man, Brother of the People
in which the author distinguishes between theorism,
theoreticism, and theorrorism. Profoundly anti-phi-
losophical in the sense of ante-philosophical:
Theorism, which operates on the basis of the
radical elucidation of the real (which is the
unsurpassable achievement of non-philos-
ophy), refuses the amphibological practice
and semi-worldly violence of theorrorism,
just as it refuses theoreticisms indifferent
and negatively domineering force (of)
thought. (5.4.1.)
14 Noys, Malign Velocities 10304.
15 Ibid. xi.
16 Althusser, For Marx 9.
233
barker
17 Noys, Malign Velocities xxi.
18 Land 26667.
19 Fink 137.
20 2015 saw the publication of the entire Ccru
archive as Ccru: Writings 19972003.
21 Noys, Malign Velocities 7.
22 Ibid. xii.
23 Ibid. 6.
24 See Starr.
25 Arnold writes in Essays in Criticism:
Thus [the critical power] tends, at last, to
make an intellectual situation of which the
creative power can properly avail itself. It
tends to establish an order of ideas, if not
absolutely true, yet true by comparison
with that which it displaces; to make the
best ideas prevail. (12)
And:
the French Revolution derives from the
force, truth, and universality of the ideas
which it took for its law, and from the
passion with which it could inspire a multi-
tude for these ideas, a unique and still living
power; it is it will probably long remain
the greatest, the most animating event in
history. (16)
26 Grelet, Son of Man, Brother of the People
2.2.1.2.2.2.
27 See Peyrol.
28 Noys, Malign Velocities 7.
29 Grelet, Dclarer la gnose 80: If we cant deny
the enemy the last word, then at least we can
deny it the first.
30 Central Committee of the Chinese Communist
Party 8; translation modified.
31 Althusser, For Marx 216.
32 Noys, Malign Velocities 47.
33 Ibid. 14.
34 Walter Benjamin qtd in ibid. 19.
 review essay
35 See Turing. I attempted to highlight some philo-
sophical implications of Turings work in a recent
special issue of diacritics, edited by G.M. Goshgarian
and myself, which was devoted to Althussers post-
humous writings of the mid-1970s; see Barker.
36 Arnold 17.
37 Noys, Malign Velocities 93.
38 Althusser, For Marx 9.
39 Goshgarian in private correspondence with the
author, 25 October 2015.
40 Goshgarian, Introduction xxx.
Downloaded by [University of Nebraska, Lincoln] at 07:40 30 May 2016
41 Ibid. xxxii.
42 Ibid. xxxiixxxiii.
43 See Grelet, Le Thorisme, mthode de salut
public. The books title is a play on words of
Maurice Blanchots essay Le Terrorisme,
mthode de salut public (1936).
44 Noys, Malign Velocities 93.
45 See Fisher.
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Jason Barker
Department of British and American
Language and Culture
School of Global Communication
Kyung Hee University
1732 Deogyeong-daero
Giheung-gu
Yongin-si
Gyeonggi-do 17104
South Korea
E-mail: lmsnoirs@gmail.com