ACCELERATIONISM

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Xenoeconomics and Capital Unbound.

A question remains open as to the current state of play with the unfolding trans-global
financial deleveraging and subsequent mass-governmental bank buyout: Is this a genuinely
unprecedented situation or simply the latest facet of business-as-usual, a crisis in the system,
or merely a crisis of the system? The pessimism of the intellect suggests the latter, another
arresting of the genuinely alien development of the capital-virus, in favour of the maintaining
of a stable form. The optimism of the will though suggests that there might be the basis in the
opprobrium that finance capital is now attracting (low level intensity but extremely broad in
terms of numbers) for some kind of new proletarian leftist movement. BUT, and crucially, it
is difficult to identify either a new and energised ideological/political-philosophical position
or any kind of institutional framework (party, movement, mass, guerrilla attack group etc)
with which to focus this negativity. There are certainly some limited Socialist Worker/Stop
the War associated protests, but these lack both scale and the energy of new ideas. All that is
on offer there is warmed over leftism/anticapitalism, without the energy of anywhere but back
to go (essentially a conservative-radicalism perhaps). In the bending of all history against that
impassable perimeter of the Postmodern terminus even radical leftism is fundamentally a
mere shuffling of a pre-existing deck of possibilities, hopeless, haunted, an echo, homeless,
nostalgic. It must be feared that for as long as it is thus the left remains incapable of defeating
the status quo, or achieving much beyond the establishment of briefly extant semi-
autonomous zones, all-too rapidly snuffed out.

Perhaps what this crash offers however is a chink in the armour of late capital, a Badiouian
event, evading the usual in-situational structural determinations. In a sense Badiou would not
recognise (economic) it really does give an opportunity (as did the crash of 1929) to
recalibrate both the state-market relation and the type of economic theory deployed by
governments. But this will be merely to retrench, to stabilise, to maintain the present system,
in a new form, by whatever means necessary and available. Politically it is less clear, for in
order that the potential this event offers to be fully exploited, we need a politics capable of
fully evading even the kind of generic humanism Badiou's politics (for example) proffers. For
the impasse of the end of history can only be properly surmounted by a final nihilistic
overcoming of humanism-- in a sense even Badiou fails this test, his minimal-communist
humanism not going far enough. What perhaps this might entail is a rethinking of a
revolutionary position, built on the basis of a rethinking of the very notion of value itself.
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In Speculative Realist terms, what is necessary is to think the in-itself of capitalism outside of
any correlation to the human. Ray Brassier has already hinted at this in his original “Nihil
Unbound” article on Badiou, Deleuze & Guattari and Capitalism. For surely what all analyses
of capitalism have presumed to date is the capitalist ‘for-us’ (construed in positive or negative
terms), whereas capital is ultimately a machine which has almost no relation to humanity
whatsoever, it intersects with us, it has us as moving parts, but it ultimately is not of or for-us.
Capital properly thought is a vast inhuman form, a genuinely alien life form (in that it is
entirely non-organic) of which we know all-too-little. A new investigation of this form must
proceed precisely as an anti-anthropomorphic cartography, a study in alien finance, a
Xenoeconomics. Brassier himself has shied away in the last few years from a detailed
discussion of capitalism, but I believe that the most interesting applications of speculative
realist philosophy may well arrive with precisely a re-reading of both Marx’s and Deleuze &
Guattari’s models of capitalism. Marx’s labour theory of value fails to think the capitalist in-
itself, the ability to create value ex nihilo (ie- credit, and all financial instruments constructed
from variations on this theme). For Marx credit, ‘virtual capital’ and speculation built upon it
is “the highest form of madness”. Instead we ought to think of credit-based ‘virtual’ capital as
the highest form of capital. This is not a mere semantic shift, but rather a revolutionary
inversion of the LTV, following Deleuze & Guattari in considering capitalism-as-process,
conducted upon pre-existing social forms, disassembling and reassembling them to suit its
own nefarious and presently obscure ends. As process rather than concrete ‘thing’ we must
consider its true nature to be contained in its destination, rather than the primitive building
blocks from which it originally constituted itself (ie- in the worlds of ‘virtual’ capital rather
than the alienation of human labour, which is surely merely an initial staging post).

Part of what is at stake here is the thinking of capitalism outside of alienation. For if we are to
follow Badiou’s stab at an unmitigated inhumanism, a total leap beyond the suffering animal
model of godless democratic-materialist bio-linguistic humanism, as surely we must, then a
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theory of value cannot be predicated upon this original suffering, the voodoo process of soul-
theft at the core of the alienation of labour in the commodity form. To build a model of
capitalism from a new theory of value is necessary if we are to evade the traps of both
democratic materialist commensically corrupt liberalism, and the post modern end of history.
The “blind acephelous polymorph” that is capital must be embraced, but not from the point of
view of some naïve enthusiasm or sentiment of hope that markets can deliver utopia. Instead,
as the way out of the binaries of a leftism which is utterly and irretrievably moribund, and a
neo-liberal economics which is ideologically bankrupt, we must bend both together in the face
of an inhuman and indefatigable capitalism, to think how we might inculcate a new form of
radically inhuman subjectivation. This entails the retrieval of the communist project for a new
man, AND the liberation of the neo-liberal quest for a capitalism unbound, from both its
subterranean dependence upon the state and the skeletal humanist discursive a priori which
animates its ideological forms.

In thinking how to deliver this subjectivation, an unbinding towards the absolute, an absolute
adequation of post-human subjectivity to capital, the crucial concept must be that of
institutionalisation- agglomerative masses of power (including states, corporations, NGOs,
religions, discrete humans) all of which need to be dissolved. In a sense this is a continuation
and merging of both Marxist-Leninist Communism and Neo-liberal capitalism, but where
there is no need to take over the state, but rather to utilise capitalism as an engine with which
to obliterate nation states. However, to merely do this would be entirely insufficient, as the
state function within capitalism would simply be taken over by institutional figures such as
corporations, which must therefore also be dissolved. But this is merely to think at the scale of
large institutional actors, we must also continue this drive towards dissolution, (to be powered
by the pure force of a nihilistic capitalism-unbound) towards what Foucault termed, in a
Nietzschean manner in The Order of Things, ‘man’ (clarified by Deleuze as the ‘man-form’
the kind of self-conception dependant upon the foldings of the analytic of finitude). The
question also needs to be asked of how to recalibrate this alien lifeform towards forms of
dissolution which do not immediately restructure with conservative/familial types of
subjectivation. Our contention (following Deleuze) is that this is intrinsically bound up with
the metabolic rate of capitalism, currently constrained by its symbiotic relationship to the
state, which maintains the expansion of capital within a homeostatic formula sufficient to
prevent its most destructive potentials from being actualised. What is necessary (breaking
with Deleuze) is to utilise the stuctures of capitalism against the state, in an entirely terroristic
fashion, so as to transform the very nature of the nightmarish Lovecraftian creature itself.
Finally, we might consider that the maxim of the politics which results from such
xenoeconomical analyses to run as follows: "capitalism against the human".
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http://leniency.
blogspot.com/2
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ationism.html
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Accelerationism

This is a term I've coined (unless someone out there proposed it w/o my knowledge) to
describe the kind of strategy beautifully conveyed here. In a sense it has a fairly impeccable
pedigree as one of the "spirits" of Marx, especially the oft-quoted passage from the Manifesto
on "all that's solid melts into air". To quote myself, this is "an exotic variant of la politique du
pire: if capitalism generates its own forces of dissolution then the necessity is to radicalise
capitalism itself: the worse the better. We can call these positions accelerationist."

Unsurprisingly I'm made more than a little nervous by these attempts to argue "the path leads
only over the dead body of capitalism" (Brecht, see below). A "red thread" can be traced from
Marx, via Brecht, down to the libertarian current of the early 1970s. Rather than seeking the
subject of revolt as the marginal to capital, the subject of revolt is the subject in capital
(although the dangerous elision is that the subject of revolt simply is capital). As Lyotard,
whose Libidinal Economy is the book of accelerationism, puts it: "in the immense and vicious
circuit of capitalist exchanges, whether of commodities or ‘services’, it appears that all the
modalities of jouissance are possible and that none is ostracized."

Interestingly, in a previous post titled 'Against Hauntology' Splintering Bone Ashes (SBA)
sketches two options:

Firstly (if we believe the hauntologists discursive a priori), as I have hinted at above, we
might think a more nihilist aesthetic which seeks not merely to foreground the processes of
postmodern audio-necromancy, but rather to accelerate the system to its ultimate demise, to
speed up the rate of fashion-flux to a point of irredeemable collapse. Rather than an act of
reverence, of mourning, of touching at impossible universes from a distance, this would be a
deliberate and gleeful affirmation [option a]. Alternatively, we might consider Badiou's
analysis of the emergence of the new, which would entail a more strategic examination of
precisely where the pop-musical evental sites and historical situations exist within our current
time: those regions which appear, from the in-situational point of view, to be marginal, and
properly undecideable. [option b]
Obviously I'd choose option b, and in a sense, although departing from Badiou precisely on
the grounds of his "affirmationism", this is the argument of The Persistence of the Negative.
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The later post firmly chooses option a. While this is one way to cash out the politics of
speculative realism, and hence admirable, I'm not sure it exhausts those possibilities or is the
only such politics extractable.

In terms of artworks I find a lot to agree with in the critical remarks concerned with
hauntology, and can certainly see the jouissance of the nihilistic embrace of capital qua
accelerator. Much of the shock of Detroit Techno in its initial phase (to show my age) was its
choice to embody the robots of the production lines of Ford (which had obviously been a
factor in the devastation of Detroit), rather than the "humanism" of Motown. In a way this it is
impeccably Brechtian.

That said I feel there are definite problems with this as political strategy (as well as artistic -
cf. the late Warhol - Jeff Koons - Damien Hirst line). Instead, unsurprisingly, I prefer the
position of Benjamin: "Marx says that revolutions are the locomotives of world history. But
the situation may be quite different. Perhaps revolutions are not the train ride, but the human
race grabbing for the emergency brake."
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Some examples of accelerationism:

Brecht
Behaviourism is a psychology which begins with the needs of commodity production in order
to develop methods with which to influence buyers, i.e., it is an active psychology,
progressive and revolutionizing kathode (Kathoxen). In keeping with its capitalist function, it
has its limits (the reflexes are biological; only in a few Chaplin films are they already social).
Here, too, the path leads only over the dead body of capitalism, but here, too, this is a good
path.

Roland Barthes
There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present-day society: to retreat ahead of
it.
Pleasure of the Text (1973)

Galloway & Thacker

One must push through to the other side rather than drag one’s heels.
The Exploit: A Theory of Networks (2007)

____
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http://k-
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Spectres Of Accelerationism

Two more stimulating posts from Splintering Bone Ashes, indicating that the cracking pace
that Alex has set shows no signs of letting up. Here are some quick responses...

To take the hauntology one first... I think the difference here lies in our different ideas of the
status and purpose of hauntology. For me, hauntology is best conceived of not as some
political aspiration, but rather as a zeitgeist, something which is already in place and which
demands critical commentary (and extrapolative extension). Hauntology is not something that
is aimed towards, so much as where we are starting from (the End of History and its escape).
Hauntological theory is an attempt, for instance, to account for why the Burial records have
captured a mood, a malaise, this decade. The claim is not that hauntology is ultimately
preferable to some accelerationist model of culture (although the Burial records are in many
respects actually superior to the accelerationist Jungle they spectralise). On the contrary, one
of the things that you can hear in hauntology is the spectres of accelerationism itself. To turn
Alex's question about the political correlate of hauntology around - what is the cultural
equivalent of accelerationism now? It was precisely the lack of any cultural exemplars of
accelerationism that led to spectrality in the first place. The paradoxes that Alex refers to are
not a problem for hauntology; or rather, the problems they indicate are constitutive of a
hauntological moment which makes the only resistance to the nostalgia mode look like a
nostalgia for modernism. Hauntology is not, therefore, opposed to accelerationism; rather, it is
the only way, at the moment, that culture makes any kind of contact with it. Neither is there
any opposition between "the return of modernism" that Alex decries and "the arrival of a new
(perhaps, or at the very least) a currently properly unthinkable temporo-cultural episteme"
which he calls for. What is modernism if not that which generates a "properly unthinkable
temporo-cultural episteme"? Modernism (and Badiou's theory of the event has been
characterised as a late arriving philosophy of/ for modernism) can return as a recirculated
obsolete style, but it cannot 'return' as the unthinkably novel without puncturing a hole in
postmodernity. Certainly, the issue is how can we bring about a break of this sort, which
returns us to the question of agency, the central issue in Alex's other new post.

If the problem with hauntology is its association with a defeated (and defeatist) leftism, the
problem with accelerationism now might be that it has no political correlate at all. This might
be because "left Landianism" risks being an impossible confection. Landianism staked
everything on the obsolescence of human agency: Capital was the only agent worth the name,
so any human attempts to intervene in the process of planetary meltdown would necessarily
be futile and irrelevant. Since politics was tied up with (human) agency, the 'political' itself
was defined by forms of prohibition and resistance to Capital's "horrifying and utter
negativity" (it was a case of an insipid, security-orientated anthropomorphic negativity trying
to contain the sublime, unqualified, inhuman negativity of Capital). But what would it mean
to reconfigure this picture so that human agency played a role? Would this make any sense at
all? Alex comes up with a striking image:

The irresistible inverse image of 9/11 presents itself: Instead of flying the planes into
symbols of western capitalism, we plunge the financial-capitalistic contents of the
towers into the human world itself, dissolving, sundering, shattering…

(I can't help hearing this as a mirror image of Virilo's recent claim that, rather than capitalism
nearing its end, "the end is nearing capitalism".)
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But who is the pilot in this analogy (or anticipative diagram)? The question of what a party of
inhuman negativity would look like requires further elaboration, to say the least. (For more on
this, see Plamonenology's very useful post.)

Nick Land needs to be counted as a speculative realist theorist, if only because he provided a
version of Deleuze and Guattari evacuated of any "pseudo-biological vitalist ethology" (but
also because Metzinger's account of identity as a systemic illusion generated from cybernetic
feedback sounds like a detailed elaboration of concepts sketched in texts such as "Meltdown"
and "No Future"). Behind all these discussions, of course, is the issue of speculative realism's
relationship to politics, if any. (See Speculative Heresy's call for debate on this.) Is there a
way of commensurating the necessarily human focus of the political with the nonhuman
perspective opened up by SR that will not betray or compromise its fundamental insights?
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http://leniency.
blogspot.com/2
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ationism-ii.html
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Accelerationism II.2

Two excellent posts by Owen and Mark, which demonstrate the 'general intellect' at work.

1. Owen makes the important point that 'accelerationism' doesn't have to be an ultra-leftist
catastrophism but can involve the rational re-use of capitalist developments in constant capital
to reduce variable capital, if we destroy the capitalist relation of accumulation (which is of
course the proverbial big 'if'). This would, of course, be different from the capitalist reduction
of variable capital through 'social exposure' (ie dumping workers into the reserve army of
labour or out of the monetary relation altogether). Interestingly, I was reading this exact point
being made by Richard Brenner in his essay on "Karl Marx's Theory of Crisis".
If we were to hypothetically leave out of the account real social relations of production today
(capitalism), then improved technology and increased labour productivity would tend
naturally towards the reduction of working time. Mechanisation would help convert the
worker from semi-slave of constrained by a rigid division of labour into a supervisor of
production, someone able through the progressive and sustained reduction of the lenght of the
compulsory working day to participate in supervision and planning of ever wider spheres of
production, distribution and consumption (socialism).
(p.53)

2. On Mark's post, just to say almost complete agreement... It was Landianism I had in mind
with 'Deleuzian Thatcherism'; as for my choice of Lyotard as the text of accelerationism this
was due to his outbidding of Deleuze & Guattari and his almost complete embrace of the
consequences (I particularly like his sarcasm directed at Baudrillard concerning the lack of the
'good hippies' of symbolic exchange...).
It's slightly uncanny but Mark's three points were floating around in the cesspool that is my
'mind' and on the fantasmatic of capital permit me to refer to Mark's article in Film-
Philosophy (a pdf).
In light of Mark's work I was thinking of the hyperstitional as a means of probing the 'real
abstractions' of capital; especially as sketched by Roberto Finelli and Alberto Toscano.

3. One issue here (raised implicitly by Mark) is that of reterritorialisation as essential co-
dynamic of capitalist deterritorialisation; [correction follows] Eric Alliez argues that the
problem of Badiou's reading of Deleuze is that inscribes a constant and necessary relation
between reterritorialisation and deterritorialisation. In doing so Alliez argues that he produces
'Capitalism and Paranoia', not 'Capitalism and Schizophrenia' - in which every
deterritorialisation is immediately recuperated by reterritorialisation. For Alliez, we have to
always fold capitalist deterritorialisation onto absolute deterritorialisation - hence, to quote
Deleuze on Bergson - 'Dualism is therefore only a moment, which must lead to the re-
formation of a monism.' This then is the sticking-point between Mark's formulation that 'it is
was Deleuze and Guattari who proved to have the better handle on capitalism, precisely
because they insisted on reterritorialization as the necessary counterpart of capitalist
deterritorialization.' (which correspond to Badiou's position - and my own inclination) and
SBA's position, which is more classically Deleuzian.
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4. This is where the problem of agency comes in (again). I chose Lyotard as the exemplar
because he seems pretty explicit that capital is the subject (of revolution): "[Capital] is the
unbinding of the most insane pulsions" (138). If we want an alternative then we have to find
some 'good hippies', or otherwise get into that various sub-Baudrillardian gestures of
embracing the market that seemed to have a mercifully brief flowering in the 1980s/90s. Mark
has made further comments on Lyotard here. In a sense this re-makes my point - Lyotard is
the examplar because of this disappearance of the critical. This is exactly the point on which
he departs from Deleuze and Guattari. Of course Lyotard's later political evolution - traced by
Perry Anderson (see my comments here) - doesn't exactly make one convinced by this
position of capital as absolute subject (subject as substance and subject?).

5. SBA has commented further on agency here, and re-iterating a strong accelerationist
position rather than the previously canvassed Badiouian alternative. The action particularly
takes place at the end of the post:
Outside either a vitalist ethology of ‘natural’ auto-self-maximisation, or some kind of
Marxist-Hegelian dialectical drive towards the elimination of contradiction in the same, how
might we be able to ground the very need for an inhumanising desubjectivation at all? Though
we might wish to create a system which has had done with judgement, to ground the praxis
(and here we return to the “sticky” issue of agency) necessary to arrive at this state requires
the illegitimate use of the very devices the praxis seeks to erase.
This seems to imply a kind of reverse Munchausen effect - instead of the subject pulling itself
up by its hair it destroys itself by a 'self'-erasure. This may be formulated along the lines Reza
suggests as an exposure to being 'butchered open' (see Reza on hauntology in relation to
SBA's posts here). The difficulty is the passivity implied in this sense of agency - to be
butchered by the processes of capital do we have to do anything more than just live and await
our demise? How could we acclerate this process (and if so why)? Then, also, which
particular humans would perform this self-destruction of the human?

6. Finally to try and clear up the Achcar matter (on which I was perhaps rather unclear), I'm in
agreement with this point by Owen:
"Mind you, for that I don't subscribe either to the Gilbert Achcar view - it's always relative
privation which causes revolt. The starving might not start revolutions, but the only
insurrection during a boom I can think of is the abortive May."
A couple of things to add, first this can involve psychic immiseration, which I'm sure Owen
includes in relative privation. This was the situ point about the misery of everday life qua
accumulation.
Second, I posted the Achcar comment more for a reflection on the 'accumulation of struggles'
as precondition for agency, hence I was going back to the 60s/70s. Mark and Owen, and
everyone else who said, is perfectly right that (a) booms don't necessarily need to revolution (I
have no 'one size fits all model of revolution', anything would be nice), and (b) the recent
'boom' hasn't. Of course that's because that 'boom' involved the massive decomposition of
working-class power in a waning cycle of struggle. What concerned me was the mechanisms
to translate disenchantment and privation into struggle, and whether (as Mark points out) the
crisis is more likely to lead to barbarism than socialism in the absence of such accumulated
struggles.
It seems appropriate that I should have to write a couple of lectures on Dickens, as he is a
writer of catastrophism, and has his own version of accelerationism in 'free circulation' (he
hated blockages of all kinds). Mercifully for the students this won't be much discussed by me.
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http://splinteri
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Post-Land: The paradoxes of a speculative realist politics.

To answer some of Mark K-Punk’s questions (original posts here and here):
1. Is this pure capital not a phantasmic projection? Yes, absolutely, one which does not exist
at present but which, as the powerful fiction of a completed truth, (to horribly misuse Badiou)
might be able to actualise its own reality.
2. The problem of Agency: A more difficult question undoubtedly, but one which I hope to
answer in part below, though with certain problems.
3. How to evade a fall into neo-liberalism…

To distinguish left-Landianism from Land’s own (surely now firmly rightward in its
orientation), we might make two points:

1. Capital in its present form is incapable of delivering anything but inertia, or at least that
parallax between a interminable rush of change at the level of fashion and an eerie stasis in
terms of innovative cultural or political forms it seems incapable of throwing up. Hence there
is a need for a very real praxis upon it (and its articulation with institutional forms). Land's
position is a shadowy obverse to that of the Multitude(s)/Autonomia group, that "we are
already (almost) there". He forgets that capitalist relative deterritorializations are always
usually accompanied by an immediate reterritorialization, as determined by the capitalist
axiomatic. It is this that needs to be worked upon, the shifting of the balance of de/re-
territorializations.

2. To evade the dark/banal fall into mere neo-liberalism, we must maintain a firm belief in the
horrifying and utterly negative nature of capital. It is in this meaning of the term "left-
Landian" then that we might position this accelerationist reading of capitalism- as a
preservation of the critique of the left, and the praxis of the right, the preservation of capital's
negative dimension, and its absolute valorisation for this very reason. For the form of politics
this demarcates comes closest to what the literary buffoon Martin Amis termed "horrorism"-
part of the nomenclature he used in his pitiful misreading of islamist terrorist activities. I
certainly enjoyed the term, if not its application, for it conveyed something of what a less
literal terroristic praxis might consist, in the sense of what a non-dialectical amassing of
negativity might mean, a horror piled upon horror, a critical mass capable of pulling the
subjectivity attached to the organic human substrate through to some nether-zone of
dissolution, a Deleuzean becoming crucially without affirmation. Outside of a vitalist notion
of an inhuman jouissance, (shared by the libidinal economists) the market delivers not a
utopia of free-flowing desire but rather a perfect dystopia of the genuinely inhuman, a non-
affective cold-machinism truly adequate to capital-in-itself. The irresistible inverse image of
9/11 presents itself: Instead of flying the planes into symbols of western capitalism, we plunge
the financial-capitalistic contents of the towers into the human world itself, dissolving,
sundering, shattering…

The question of what form the praxis necessary to destabilise the current state-capital bond
has already been answered in part- a kind of meta-terrorism, operating on the plane of capital
itself (ideally, in the conception which has obsessed me for some time, in the form of a
capitalist surrealism, the exploitation of credit based financial systems for their primary
destructive potential. This destruction is not merely to be thought on the ability to trigger vast
crashes, which is readily apparent, but further their capacity to destabilise the consistency of
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value itself). That this consists in taking more seriously the claims of finance capital than even
its own agents is the very point itself, and is in a sense an actualisation of Lyotard's gestures
towards a 'nihilist theory of credit'. Further we might conceptualise the collective forms
necessary to actualise this praxis as being very much in the mode of the kind of Maoist party
delineated by Badiou in Théorie du Sujet, an institutional actor capable of allowing the
ephemeral vanishing term of history (now surrealist avant-capital, rather than the proletariat
of course) to cohere, for as long as required to enable it to achieve the absolute dissolution of
all structuration, including itself.

There is a significant question which remains unanswered, one which was touched upon by
Schoolboyerrors in the comments box of the previous post:

“To what end accelerationism? In order to provoke a crisis, as you say, in the system, but for
what? For the future of humanity? Is this inhumanism, then, merely a deferral of pathos until
such time as revolution has been achieved?”
Accelerationism more generally might be considered to take a number of forms, fitting into
two kinds of category, broadly being “weak” accelerationism, and “strong” accelerationism:

1) Weak Accelerationism: By driving capitalism towards an accelerated position, the

conditions for something resembling a communist revolution might be engendered. In this
(limited) sense accelerationism is merely an anti-ameliorationism, which sets the conditions
for revolution by undoing the improvements in living conditions which western capitalism (in
part) produces, mainly through the state, in order to further its own continued existence within
its homeostatic form. Whilst we would not want to fall into a total economic determinism
here, it appears relatively obvious (as it did to Lenin in What is to be Done) that soft leftist
activities (socialist parties, unions etc) far from being agents of genuine change merely arrest
the situation as it stands, frequently operating as part of the axiomatic machinery ensuring the
stability of the homeostatic form of capitalism. In this sense then accelerationism opposes
ameliorative leftism by acting to foreground the structural privations of the capitalist system.
Further the utilisation of capitalist institutions for their primary negatory character would
work to undermine the consistency of capitalist ideology. We might think of the current
financial crisis as perhaps giving us such an opportunity, though we have already noted our
cynicism as to the lack of an effective political organisation to capitalise upon this.

2) Strong Accelerationism: Unlike the “weak” model of accelerationism, which maintains the
thesis that capital shifted beyond its current homeostatic form entails a collapse or
fundamental catastrophe, suitable for the inculcation of some kind of neo-Marxist
revolutionary communism, the “strong” form of accelerationism entertains the notion that far
from ushering in the downfall of capitalism, acceleration beyond a certain point radically
alters the nature of the processes of capital itself. Here acceleration is not a means to a crisis
in the system, but rather a radical mutation of the system itself, along with it the kinds of
subjectivations made possible.

Certainly the revolution which the “strong” accelerationist model has in mind can be far from
merely a humanist pathos postponed, an inhumanism in the service of the ultimate utopian
destiny of the human, or of some kind of vitalist maximisation of what these particular
(human) bodies can do. Instead we might think of it as the process necessary to erase the
human altogether (as a form of subjectivation), to actualise something close to the dissolution
of subjectivity (and the initiation of what might resemble a Guyotadian political economy).
ACCELERATIONISM's QUICK READER 19

But there is a more serious, and

perhaps intractable question which underlies this: How might one ground a politics which
aims towards an inhuman becoming (or perhaps we ought to say de-subjectivation) outside of
a discourse of either alienation or alternately some kind of pseudo-biological vitalist ethology
such as Deleuze’s appropriation of Spinoza’s conatus? This is really the problem which lies at
the core of a speculative realist politics (and ethics and aesthetics also). In other words of how
to apply a skilfully de-correlated philosophy to the always correlated domains of the subject,
(even if our intent is to ground a politics whose aim is towards the erasure of the very
dimension of the subject itself). For surely there seems to be a presumption of the
continuation of the problem of alienation (or at least, that the incommensurable nature of the
current form of subjectivation with capitalism is itself the reason for our need to close the
gap). Part of what I am looking for is a way to ground the Deleuzo-Guattarian model of
capitalism (which even their harshest critics such as Peter Hallward and Ray Brassier hold is
the finest conception of capital since Marx) outside of a faulty affirmative vitalism. That
capital operates via a (largely state-mediated) axiomatic, controlling relative
de/reterritorializations of flows seems too useful a model even for Brassier himself to give up
on (indeed he uses it unproblematically in the original article of ‘Nihil Unbound’ to call one
of Badiou’s silent a prioris into question). But even if such a regrounding were to be possible
(upon a speculative realist xenoeconomics, as I think will need to be the case) the aim of the
exercise, to re-introduce this into the social field in order to enable a radically new form of
politics to become thinkable, the fundamental problematic remains. Outside either a vitalist
ethology of ‘natural’ auto-self-maximisation, or some kind of Marxist-Hegelian dialectical
drive towards the elimination of contradiction in the same, how might we be able to ground
the very need for an inhumanising desubjectivation at all? Though we might wish to create a
ACCELERATIONISM's QUICK READER 20

system which has had done with judgement, to ground the praxis (and here we return to the
“sticky” issue of agency) necessary to arrive at this state requires the illegitimate use of the
very devices the praxis seeks to erase.
Posted by Alex at 23:41
ACCELERATIONISM's QUICK READER 21

http://blog.urba
nomic.com/cyc
lon/archives/2
010/05/acceler
ationism.html
   
ACCELERATIONISM's QUICK READER 22

Accelerationism and the problem of (un)binding

If the aim of Landian accelerationism is to fulfill 'the repressed desire of capitalism for
meltdown' (Land), how can accelerationism detach itself from the embedded energetic model
of dissipation inherent to conservative-dissipative, antiproductive-productive structures which
are only capable of binding unilateral negativity or inflect upon death by means of an
economical model of energetic dissipation or dying that they can afford? In other words, how
can accelerationism bind exteriority or draw upon the so-called speculative opportunities of
extinction in ways which are not already interiorized by conservative structures as economical
'models for affording' the exorbitant truth of exteriority? If accelerationism simply aims at
accelerating the rate of dissipation, then its 'speculative opportunities' (Brassier) are limited to
the most immediate source of exorbitant or traumatizing energy that the interiorized horizon
has come into contact with. This is because in an interiorized horizon, the accelerative
degradation of energy cannot bind or see anything beyond the very exorbitant index of energy
(which means another interiorized horizon or 'source' of energy) whose model of dissipation
has been at once partially repelled and economically adopted. Therefore, acceleration in this
ACCELERATIONISM's QUICK READER 23

sense reinforces a restricted economical correlation which has never been more than a
blockage against exteriority.

For the terrestrial sphere, this source or illusory exteriority is the sun. So, is accelerationism
only capable of thinking exteriority and extinction in terms of a model of solar expenditure
and thermonuclear decay (Bataille’s solar economy) or is it really capable of thinking
extinction in terms of radical exteriority (i.e. ancestrality, deep space, material disintegration,
asymptopia, …)? Is it possible to think of accelerationism in terms of alternative (i.e. plural
and perhaps even multiversal) ways of binding exteriority? So far the Cartesian dilemma as
the territory of philosophical thought has been about determining the course of life one should
take, namely, the freedom of alternatives in life. But how can we shift the question to the
radical freedom of having alternatives in binding exteriority and inflection upon death: instead
of 'what course in life shall I take?' (Quod vitae sectabor iter) one should be able to ask 'what
way out shall I follow?' (Quod exitūs sectabor iter)

The bastardized Cartesian speculation 'What way out shall I follow?' is meant to emphasize
the freedom (in thought and action) of having plural or alternative options of binding
exteriority or inflecting upon extinction. However, this question should be further corrected as
it still seems to erroneously imply that the unilateralizing truth of the outside is dependent
upon a subjective decision or desire.

The main focus of accelerationism should be shifted from the act of acceleration itself to
'what is accelerated', because if acceleration coincides with the dissipative or energetic
economy of the organism, then it is simply a restricted project. Why? Because what is
accelerated is the very economical form of binding which is determined by the exorbitant
source of energy but is unsuccessfully adopted by the organism as an affordable yet traumatic
consumptive solution that inscribes circuitous paths for dissipating into that exorbitant index
of exteriority (whether it is the exorbitant truth of extinction or the sun). As Freud argues,
dissipative regression into the exorbitant or traumatizing bedrock of the originary is
numerically monistic and functionally exclusivist by nature. The conservative organism does
not have any choice regarding binding or not binding the exorbitant source of energy since the
binding is unilaterally imposed by the exorbitant index of exteriority. However, the way
binding is effectuated corresponds to the conservative economy of the organism according to
which the exorbitant index of exteriority must be afforded by the organism in order to
circuitously transform the unbindable excess into conservable yet dissipative – at an
accelerative rate – energetic spaces (umwegen). Accordingly, the exorbitant exteriority
(extinction, sun, ...) is inexorably bound but only in a way that is affordable by and for the
organism. This is why the organism is inherently vulnerable to traumas: Traumatic binding of
the exorbitant exteriority is not as much an 'unsuccessful binding' because it is energetically
unbindable as it is unsuccessful because such an index of exorbitant energy should be
economically afforded by the organism and correspond to the consumptive-dissipative rate
dictated by the organic economy. Therefore, although the exorbitant index of exteriority is
bound, this binding never naturally happens outside of the economical correlation with the
organism.

The aim of all life is death but dying (binding death) happens only in a way that the
interiorized expression of life can afford. This affordable way of dying registers itself as an
economical correlation between the organism and the exorbitant index of exteriority. And it is
this economical correlation that manifests itself as the dissipative rate of the organism. Since
this economical binding or affordable correlation is energetically dissipative, it tends to
ACCELERATIONISM's QUICK READER 24

generate new energetic spaces, that is to say, it moves toward emergentic processes and
increasing complexification on semi-stable, local and transient levels. Landian
accelerationism – especially by adhering to an escalated technocapitalism – seeks to intensify
this dissipative rate that simultaneously coincides with an intelligenic complexification and
the dissolution of organic conservatism on behalf of an exorbitant index of exteriority (viz.
capitalism as an off-planet or planet-consuming event). However, as argued, the dissipative
rate is energetically conceived as an economical (and hence, restricted) correlation; its
existence is dictated by the exorbitant index of exteriority but its modi operandi are
conditioned by the affordability of the interiorized horizon of the organism.

Therefore, as Freud maintains in BPP, the organism binds the exorbitant index of exteriority
only in a way that it can afford. Or in other words, the organism wishes to die only in one
fashion, which is another way to say, it wishes to die only in one fashion because such a
fashion captures the inevitability of death in terms of the economical capacity and energetic
requirements of the organism. Any other way of dying or binding the exorbitant index of
exteriority (that is to say, alternative ways of binding unilateral negativity or inflecting upon
extinction) are vigilantly staved off because they pose a fundamental threat to the economical
– rather than passive – correlation of the organism with death. Since it is the economical
correlation with the exorbitant index of exteriority (sun, meltdown, etc.) that determines the
courses of life for the organism, this correlation is regarded as an irreproachable and
axiomatic foundation that must be safeguarded by any means possible. For this reason, we can
say that even in its most self-dissolving or schizophrenically emancipative moments, the
organism conforms to a conservatively monistic regime of returning to the precursor
exteriority or binding death. Monistic not only because it is the one and only one way that the
ACCELERATIONISM's QUICK READER 25

organism affords but also because it is a necrocratic way insofar as it actively precludes the
possibility of other fashions or courses of binding exteriority and inflecting upon extinction.

In fact the history of philosophy has consistently remained an accomplice in promoting the
social and political consequences of organic necrocracy by corroborating the monistic regime
of binding exteriority as an axiomatic and untouchable foundation of earthly thought. As far
as the politics of exteriority is concerned, philosophy has not gone further than relocating –
rather than disposing of – the organic economical teleonomy. Even the most passionate
proponents of nihilism (Nietzsche, Bataille, Land, et al.) hold that life is determined by an
exteriority irreversibly outside of the interiorized horizon without questioning the restricted
economy or the monistic regime of binding such exteriority. For them having or thinking a
unilateral and exorbitant index of exteriority is sufficient to break away from the conservative
ambits of the organism and infringe the confines of our interiorized horizon. But what is
really at stake here is the way the exteriority is bound: Is it bound only in a way that the
organism can afford (therefore, it conforms to an ultimately conservative economical
correlation between the interiorized horizon and the exteriority) or is it emancipated from
such restrictions by being able to alternate between modes of binding because it does not
conform to an emphatic economical correlation any longer? For example, Ray Brassier
maintains that speculative opportunities of philosophy can be unfolded simply through the
traumatic binding of extinction. In claiming so, he conforms to the traditional limit of
philosophy whose object of critique is the unilateralizing power of extinction (manifesting as
the inevitability of death of both thought and matter) and not the economical correlation
between the organic conservatism and the exorbitant truth of extinction which is presented as
a restrictively monistic regime of binding exteriority and inflecting upon death. In other
words, by holding that the cosmological reinscription of the death-drive (anterior-posteriority
of extinction) is sufficient to unbind the speculative opportunities of philosophy qua the
organon of extinction, Brassier fails to question the ultimate comfort zone of the organism.
Since a fundamental question still lingers: To what extent can the traumatic or rudimentary
binding of extinction situate itself outside of the economical correlation with death that the
interiorized organism conservatively remains committed to because it is the very affordable
(and hence unsuccessful) way of binding extinction?

It is not the unilateralizing power of extinction that demolishes the comfort zone of the
interiorized horizon; for such comfort zone is punctured precisely by those plural and
multiversal ways by which the exteriority of extinction can be alternatively bound in order to
abolish the monistic and economical system of binding exteriority that restricts the
speculative opportunities of binding extinction to terms and economic conditions of the
organism or the interiorized horizon. In short, the speculative vistas of extinction are only
unlocked when extinction can be bound or inflected upon in plural or alternative ways.
Positing the exorbitant truth of extinction alone as the apotheosis of enlightenment does not
fulfill the conditions for unbinding the speculative power of philosophy since the exorbitant
truth of extinction has never been repelled by the conservative economy of the organism in
the first place; instead the organism is forced to 'economically afford' and bind such a
disjunctive truth by any means possible, that is to say, by its own energetic capacity and
economic conditions. Therefore, the emphatic positing of extinction (viz. conceiving
extinction as an exorbitant index of exteriority) is usually doomed to be trapped within the
axiomatic restricted economy of the interiorized horizon according to which binding
exteriority should only take place in the fashion the organism can afford. It can be argued that
accentuating extinction without questioning the monistic regime of binding inherent to the
ACCELERATIONISM's QUICK READER 26

organism is tantamount to abetting the organic necrocracy in warding off alternative ways of
binding exteriority and thereby trammeling the speculative opportunities of thought.

As long as accelerationism works on behalf of an exorbitant index of exteriority or operates

according to an energetic-dissipative model, it risks abiding by the monistic regime of binding
whereby the unilateralizing excess of the exteriority must be economically afforded at all
costs. Respectively being in conformity to the monistic regime of binding means all other
possible ways of binding exteriority (viz. alternative ways of inflecting upon extinction and
binding exteriority) which harbor the speculative power of exteriorization must be thwarted. If
as Land suggests Capitalism is imbued with courses of life (complexity and emergence), it is
because capitalism as a process that conforms to the monistic regime of binding finds its
plural and alternative expression not in binding exteriority or extinction but the interiority of
life that is energetically made possible by the economical correlation that the organism
utilizes to energetico-dynamically afford the exorbitant index of exteriority. Capitalism is
abhorrently inflated with life-styles and courses of life precisely because it abides by a
monistic regime of death. If philosophy should indeed hunt the speculative opportunities of
thought, then its ambition should be shifted from investing in alternative courses of life to
searching for alternative ways in binding exteriority, for it is the freedom of having
alternatives in the latter that turns thought into an asymptote of cosmic exteriorities.

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