Accelerationism

Accelerationism, in its Landian formulation, has always mobilised a diachronic coupling of techonomic velocity and occult methodology as its propulsive dynamo. Land's declaration that 'poetry is invasion and not expression' invites the examination of occultation at the level of poetic form and the concurrent identification of an aesthetic sensibility by which a peculiar set of technologically embedded twenty-first century literary practices might be grasped as an accelerationist poetics. Hyperstition, camouflage, ( )hole complex, cryptography, cybertextuality and algorithmic processing are indicative of an arsenal of occult formal technologies that have acquired new possibilities in the context of ubiquitous digital communication. If you rub semantics hard enough, the data begins shows through. In its reckless adherence to the modernist dictum that novelty is to be generated at all costs, accelerationist poetics privileges formal experimentation over human preservation, locking technique onto an inhuman vector of runaway automatisation that, for better or worse, charts the decline of human values as modernity hands the latter over to its machinic successor in final, fatal phase shift. This text proposes a dark celebration of twenty-first century poetics as it rides the digital death drive into terminal data night.

Full text online: https://www.urbanomic.com/document/poememenon/

Video: https://vimeo.com/139684251

Paper delivered at the Prague Colloquium on Philosophy and the Social Sciences. Political inertia is the tendency of institutions to become rigid, entrenched or ossified and to resist development or adaptation to changing circumstances. It is often argued that the political systems in the US and EU are currently inert in this sense. On the other hand, Hartmut Rosa and others have argued that social and technological change is accelerating, and that this acceleration is causally related to the experience of political inertia. In this paper I analyze the notion of political inertia with reference to work by Rosa, Francis Fukuyama and David Graeber.

Architects have a role to play in interplanetary space that has barely yet been explored. The architectural community is largely unaware of this new territory, for which there is still no agreed method of practice. There is moreover a general confusion, in scientific and related fields, over what architects might actually do there today. Current extra-planetary designs generally fail to explore the dynamic and relational nature of space-time, and often reduce human habitation to a purely functional problem. This is compounded by a crisis over the representation (drawing) of space-time. The present work returns to first principles of architecture in order to realign them with current socio-economic and technological trends surrounding the space industry. What emerges is simultaneously the basis for an ecological space architecture, and the representational strategies necessary to draw it. We explore this approach through a work of design-based research that describes the construction of Ocean; a huge body of water formed by the collision of two asteroids at the Translunar Lagrange Point (L2), that would serve as a site for colonisation, and as a resource to fuel future missions. Ocean is an experimental model for extra-planetary space design and its representation, within the autonomous discipline of architecture.

Examining trends towards acceleration and deceleration in recent contemporary art and curatorial practice and recent political theory. Referencing work by Alex Williams & Nick Srnicek, Holden Gallery, Plastique Fantastique and Suzanne Treister.

Produced for FALL/OUT programme, curated by Pluck Projects (Sarah Kelleher and Rachel Warriner), at Cork Midsummer Festival 2021. Five artworks — by Jessica Akerman, Pádraig Spillane, Anne Ffrench, David Mathuna & Andrew McSweeney, and Vicki Davis — were selected, with this catalogue consisting of individual textual responses to each.

Individual essay titles:
+ Pattern Recognition; response to Jessica Akerman's Cork Caryatids
+ Hyperaesthetics; response to Pádraig Spillane's Define Silver Lining
+ Time's Inhuman Nature; response to Anne Ffrench's To Hold Still
+ Cosmic Systems; response to David Mathúna & Andrew McSweene's As Above, So Below
+ A Machine, Just Like Me; response to Vicki Davis' Meatàn

Any conjunction between aesthetics and politics (for a political aesthetic, an aestheticized politics, a geopolitical aesthetic, a politics of aesthetics, and so forth) is necessarily fraught by estranged agendas, and even more so should we conceive of their inter-activation from a willfully ahumanist perspective. Aesthetics and/or politics of what and for what? The cascade of Anthrocidal traumas—from Copernicus and Darwin, to postcolonial and ecological inversions, to transphylum neuroscience and synthetic genomics, from nanorobotics to Queer AI—pulverize figure and ground relations between doxic political traditions and aesthetic discourses. Before any local corpus (the biological body, formal economics, military state, legal corporation, geographic nation, scientific accounting, sculptural debris, or immanent theology) can conserve and appreciate its self-image within the boundaries of its preferred reflection, already its Vitruvian conceits of diagrammatic idealization, historical agency, radiating concentric waves of embodiment, instrumental prostheticization, and manifest cognition are, each in sequence, unwoven by the radically asymmetrical indifferences of plastic matter across unthinkable scales, both temporal and spatial. But while the received brief for political aesthetics is denuded, abnormal assignments proliferate.

Música que é tantas vezes destruída na selva e recordou o house doce e alguns clubes mudos em Ibiza, é aqui transformado em um instrumento musical, que proclamou a destruição de qualquer ser humano neste mundo. (Miéville 1998) Cyberpunk incendiar ficção em intensidade, que consiste de fluxo de caixa mutilado, technocompresado, a voz de diversos jargões e colocado tanto no futuro próximo para se conectar: selvada da comercialização hipertrófica, a morte de calor sócio-política, hibridismo cultural, feminização, sistemas programáveis, hipercrime, conectividade neural através de uma interface, inteligência artificial e espaço, o comércio com a memória, os transplantes de personalidade, modificações corporais, vírus soft-e wetware, processos dinâmicos não-lineares, engenharia molecular, drogas, armas, esquizofrenia. (Land 2007) O romance de China Miéville King Rat (1998) gira os mitos de fundação de o flautista de Hamelin. Diz a lenda particularizei seu jogo percepção auditiva de espécies individuais e estabeleceu a necessidade de distinção ou-ou (matar crianças ou exterminacao dos ratos), enquanto particularizei como seu lugar de enunciação, quando escreveu lugar Hamelin ou foi falado pela boca de seus pais quando eles essas crianças estão cantando uma canção de ninar. Assobiando de Mieville esta o êxtase apocalíptica da música, onde a intensificação máxima de elec-engenharia acelera até (Land 2007) "iminente extinção da humanidade torna-se acessível como um piso clube de dança." Universalizada univocalidade tal unanimidade que através Duns Scotus e Deleuze no plano de imanência se conectar com antiderrapante sinal de igual, carrapato, que é Deus, que é o banco, onde "uma só voz afirmou gritando para ser" ecoa através de técnicas de amostragem modernos. A ativação de faixas de áudio multitrilhado multiplicado melodias a tal ponto que o flautista de Hamelin não é mais apenas a lenda de partículas e sua execução propriamente dita, mas vestindo a coroa de toda a criação. (Beep torna-se inadmissível na sua totalidade.) DAT e os últimos tiros assobiando pelo DJ gira ao mesmo tempo, levar a meia-ratinho meia-hominídeo que um traço indivíduo não afetam, a lógica descritiva por alguns momentos não funciona mais. Há uma queda na cara, o que é mais do que isso. O rosto é singular-onde este é um ponto singular do excesso, uma rara e encadernação-plano de prazo para o tipo mais refinado, que é mais forte do que os outros sistemas de marcação. Ou "sem rosto esta nada." O rosto é a primeira e mais importante materialidade. Cristo pregado na cruz e sinal sonoro, que beep sob ele. Como Spinoza diz: Facius totius universi. (A face do mundo inteiro.) A face do sofrimento monitora duplicado aleijado artaudiano. No auge da luta, quando o Alarme apenas a poucos passos de distância de vitória total dentro de melodias contrapontísticos ocorrer dissonância, que para o momento suspenso de flautista e univocalidade e pulverizado até que seja meia-ratinho meia-hominídeo na corrida final não está superada, e desaparece de volta em sua particularidade: em Hamelin. Pode também: na não-espaço. Com a agricultura veio há mais padrões de assentamento permanente e mais estruturas de poder formal, bem como a crescente consolidação dos perímetros da cidade e círculos concêntricos em torno do não-espaço

L'accélération, signe de l'entrée dans la modernité, était promesse de progrès et d'émancipation. Mais l'accélération s'est autonomisée, elle est devenue une contrainte systémique à laquelle il faut s'adapter par l'urgence permanente. Nous serions ainsi condamnés à nous précipiter frénétiquement vers nulle part… Recensé : Hartmut Rosa, Accélération. Une critique sociale du temps, La Découverte, « Théorie critique », traduit de l'allemand par Didier Renault. 2010. 480 p., 27, 50 €.

In a series of theses, Andrew Culp considers the varieties of accelerationism as dialectical responses to capitalism. He identifies three main approaches: the boomerang pattern of the rebound, the fascist addiction to speed, and the techno-scientific dream of a technological fix. The second section is dedicated to critical oversights of the cybernetic approach of recent accelerationists, especially their purported project of Promethean mastery. The piece concludes with a renewed call for Deleuze and Guattari's war machine and an elaboration on how the partisanship of communism is better suited than a political project of global hegemony to defeat capitalism.

Le capitalisme est un objet de haute abstraction, le commun est une force d'abstraction supérieure. La notion marxienne de « travail abstrait » a identifié le moteur interne du capitalisme, à savoir la transformation du travail, en un équivalent général 1 . Alfred Sohn-Rethel a bien vu la relation stricte qui unit l'abstraction du langage, celle de la marchandise et celle de la monnaie 2 . Dans l'introduction des Grundrisse de 1857, Marx clarifie le statut de l'abstraction au coeur de la méthodologie qui émergera dix ans plus tard dans Das Kapital. Chez lui, le concret est un résultat, le produit du processus de l'abstraction. La réalité capitaliste, et spécifiquement la réalité révolutionnaire, est une invention : « Le concret est concret, parce qu'il est la synthèse de beaucoup de déterminations, donc unité du divers. C'est pourquoi le concret apparaît dans la pensée comme le procès de la synthèse, comme résultat, non comme point de départ, quoiqu'il soit le véritable point de départ et par suite le point de départ aussi de la perception et de la représentation. » 3 L'abstraction est à la fois la tendance du capital et la méthode du marxisme. Le

Era il 12 marzo 1989 quando, presso il CERN di Ginevra, l’informatico britannico Tim Berners-Lee presentò al suo supervisore Mike Sendall il primo progetto del World Wide Web. Furono necessari due anni per
rendere il progetto operativo e, nel 1991, uscì dal CERN per raggiungere prima gli addetti ai lavori e poi la maggior parte del globo. Poco meno di sette mesi dopo la presentazione della proposta da
parte di Berners-Lee, un altro fondamentale evento ha radicalmente rivoluzionato le vite degli individui. Il 9 novembre del 1989 viene picconato il Muro di Berlino che per ventotto anni aveva diviso non soltanto una città, ma l’intero globo. In quella data non è crollato soltanto un muro che divideva in due la città di Berlino, ma è stato aperto un varco verso la possibilità di un mondo globalizzato. Se questo era il sogno di chi ha picconato quel muro, la realtà che si è andata a sviluppare successivamente non ha visto nella globalizzazione l’unione dei popoli, piuttosto l’avvento di una fluidità generatrice di nuovi meccanismi di biopotere.

Paper aims to reconstruct the neoreactionary ideology present in the US alt-right circles. Reconstruction is done by using three methods: analyzing the genealogy of this movement in the context of concrete sociocultural circumstances allowing it to appear, presenting the main representatives of neoreactionary thought (Mentius Moldbug, Michael Annisimov, Nick Land) and their reception; considering the postulates of neoreactionaries by using the notion of utopia. The main argument of this paper is stating the straight connection between neoreaction and capitalism, which is shown by the example of Land’s supposed way of thought from the accelerationism to neoreaction. As the result I state that the future projected by neoreactionaries does not have an utopian nature – it is rather post-apocalyptic and the neoreactionary thought is rather the survival guide after inevitable (according to them) fall of the liberal democracy, but not the capitalism.

In his book, Capitalised Education: An Immanent Materialist Account of Kate Middleton, David R. Cole thoughtfully and thoroughly engages in an analysis that extends beyond the modern era to take into account a multiplicity of events and forces, which in their encounters produce social and cultural phenomena. Cole’s work is explicitly political as he engages in applied philosophy to elaborate upon the flows of capitalism and the emergence of Kate Middleton as a media object. The book, in its entirety, both is and is not about Kate Middleton. Through detailed and beautiful storytelling, Cole explores various historical plateaus (e.g., the death of Princess Diana, and monarchies of King George VI, Henry II and Lady Eleanor, the rise of industrialism, attitudes towards and about teaching) and describes the ways in which those plateaus are still at work, in some cases almost one thousand years later, to construct a capitalised education. Elaborating on the notion of capitalised education, Cole describes his project as a consideration of “the ways in which the factors analysed and revealed...come together and produce palpable social and cultural effects through Kate Middleton as media object” (p. 2). In his elaborations, Cole develops an immanent materialist analysis that is informed by the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s notions of assemblage, the rhizome, desire, and the Body without Organs, to name a few, though Cole does not get bogged down in explaining the theory itself. Rather, Cole embodies a Deleuzoguattarian ontology as he seeks to move beyond origins and causation and instead focuses on the at times more unfamiliar, but ever-proliferating intensities that impact the ways in which we emerge with that which we encounter, at times unconsciously. Students of philosophy, history, and education, and researchers who are interested in Deleuzoguattarian-influenced work will find Cole’s work both compelling and thoroughly enjoyable. ~ anonymous, Amazon site
The pomp and ceremony of a royal wedding might seem a strange anachronism in a world of global finance and cyber-capitalism. Yet, as David Cole demonstrates, the two are folded intricately into each other. Through an immanent materialist analysis that brings together key recent and historical moments or ‘plateaus’ in the emergence of capitalism, liberalism, and constitutional monarchy, and culminating in Kate Middleton’s 2011 marriage to Prince William, Cole’s wide ranging and provocative work reveals the complex and subtle ways in which capitalism’s decoding and deterritorialization go hand-in-hand with the continuation of social privileges and hierarchies. Along the way he speaks to the major political movements of the last century (liberalism, communism, fascism, empire, and decolonization), the globalization of media, the 2008 financial crisis, and more. Linking these to both established and emerging theories of radical political action, Cole traces the moments of rupture that might allow another politics to come to the fore. ~ Nathan Widder, Royal Holloway, University of London
Kate Middleton is an international celebrity, as well as a crucial figure in the biological, economic, and cultural reproduction of the British class system. In this book, David R. Cole offers us a multifaceted analysis of Middleton as "media object." Touching on topics as diverse as courtly love in medieval Europe and derivatives markets in contemporary finance, Capitalised Education traces a web of far-flung relationships that fatally lead us back to the absurdities of our collective fascination with the British Royal Family. ~ Steven Shaviro, Wayne State University
Cole has produced a masterful and critical evaluation of how the British Monarchy continues to assert and grow its influence in the 21st century. He significantly contributes to an almost muted discourse which critically explores how this influence is achieved and what is risked and gained in its attainment. The reader can’t but be left with a desire to question whether we should be comfortable with the process and effects this has on our behaviour, development and socialisation. ~ Roberto H. Parada, University of Western Sydney

Broadly speaking, it is possible to distinguish two apparent trends relating to the figure of the artist as inherited from modernism; the avant-gardist thinker of futurity and the individual hero. While the avantgardist has fallen out of favour, the individualism of the artist figure has been, across many spectrums and in many ways, maintained. Ratified by the political and economic nexus of neoliberalism, 1 the subjectivity created by and privileged by art, prioritises, on the one hand, an individualism and on the other a cleavage from the universal (the capacity for art to produce axiomatic claims across the broad spectrum of the episteme). If art necessitates and is given meaning by a personal response, is created under the aegis of an authorial figure and produces forms of subjectivity that prioritise multiple individuals occluded from interpersonal connection, art is precisely the form most favoured by the current prevailing conditions. As such, it is important to ask whether the very structure of art itself will preclude a thinking of the future aligned with the common task of creating a better world. 2 For this to occur we need to attend to both the way art is made and the way it is viewed. The way art is made can become a model for action, indexing a set of tools, it is a processural prototype that articulates a set of normative methods for the structuring of society. In the modernist model above, what is narrativised is the lone artist, separated from society, creating works of individual genius. These works are then presented as evental sites for the re-ordering of thought through subjectivation. As we are aware, recent art practices have included all sorts of communal or collective activities, many of which draw people and ideas together in real or fictional groups. These collaborations articulate commonality and, as is often the case, consensus -the flattening of disagreement into a singular outcome, which operates at the level of the one off artwork as event. If every occasion of art operates at a symbolic level, that is it tells us something about the world or the way it should be, then these practices seem to legislate for the continued operative mode of consensual governance. That is, the occlusion of particularity in favour of the hegemonic manufacturing of consent. This can be seen as a foreclosure of politics in the name of pre-determined agreement. While many collective practices struggle with these very issues, I am interested in ways to make evident the complexity of multiple competing positions in the production of exhibitions.

This brief intervention considers the problem of acceleration in relation to capitalist time. While capitalism is often taken as imposing a linear time of progress, it has also been theorised as imposing a cyclical time of 'eternal recurrence'. In relation to this deadlock of time I critique the turn to impose further acceleration as a solution, which remains within the tracks of capitalist time.

Décélérer pour apprendre ? C'est la question que nous avons posée au sociologue allemand Hartmut Rosa qui a particulièrement bien saisi certaines des caractéristiques fondamentales de la période contemporaine à travers la notion d'accélération, développée dans deux célèbres essais traduits en français, Accélération (La découverte, 2010) et Aliénation et accélération (La découverte, 2012). Pour Hartmut Rosa, il ne s'agit pas tant de décélérer que d'entrer dans un nouveau rapport au monde marqué par une relation de résonance avec lui, permettant au monde d'entendre et de parler. Nous percevons dans cet entretien 2 l'ancrage théorique d'Hartmut Rosa dans la théorie critique de l'Ecole de Franckfort comme dans celui des Geisteswissenschaften (Sciences de l'esprit) allemandes. Les ressources de l'univers notionnel allemand et du concept de Resonanz (résonance) récemment produit par Hartmut Rosa sont des outils précieux pour penser l'avenir dans la période contemporaine. Le récent ouvrage Resonanz d'Hartmut Rosa (paru en allemand en 2016 aux éditions Suhrkamp) est en cours de traduction pour une publication à La découverte. Une autre interview avec Hartmut Rosa traduite en français paraîtra en juin 2017 dans la revue en ligne Bildungsforschung. Nathanaël Wallenhorst : Les nouvelles technologies, les changements professionnels et familiaux, ou la nécessité de saisir des situations imprévues qui arrivent très rapidement nous invitent à apprendre tout au long de la vie. Est-ce que nous pouvons dire que l'accélération nous contraint à apprendre et qu'il s'agit d'une opportunité pour les apprentissages ? Qu'apprenons-nous dans la période contemporaine marquée par l'accélération ? Hartmut Rosa : Je crois effectivement que c'est exact. Nous vivons dans une société qui se développe et se modifie de façon dynamique, dans laquelle tout s'accélère. Notre société ne se stabilise pas, elle doit accélérer le mouvement pour continuer à exister et elle exige en permanence des nouvelles formes de connaissances. Goethe avait déjà dit cela – ça ne date pas d'hier – il avait appelé son époque « veloziferisch » (à partir des mots « Velocitas », vitesse, et Lucifer). De son point de vue, son époque était caractérisée par la vélocité. Il a expliqué cette tendance par le fait que nous devions toujours faire évoluer nos connaissances et changer notre façon de penser. Pour Goethe, il était normal que la génération suivante apprenne (à faire des choses, à travailler, à construire une cabane, à chasser des animaux, à procéder à des rites…). Mais surtout, il était évident pour lui qu'après quelques années il faille rafraîchir ses connaissances. C'est étonnant que Goethe lui-même dise déjà cela. Cela correspond à mon diagnostic personnel : l'époque contemporaine se caractérise par le fait qu'elle doive évoluer pour assurer son existence. Cela a effectivement conduit à la notion d'apprentissage tout au long de la vie. Nos savoirs et savoir-faire doivent être enrichis après quelques années. L'utilisation d'un ordinateur et de ses logiciels évolue et devient rapidement 1 Une première version de cet article a été publiée dans le n°21 de Chemins de formation consacré à la thématique « Décélérer pour apprendre ? » (2017). Nous remercions Chemins de formation qui a accepté que cet entretien soit repris pour ce n°215 d'Education permanente. 2 Cet entretien a été réalisé en allemand par Nathanaël Wallenhorst, enregistré par Christian Jamet. La première version a été traduite par Sophie Paré puis réécrite et mise en forme par Nathanaël Wallenhorst.

This book argues that Marxist theory is essential for understanding the contemporary industrialization of the form of artificial intelligence (AI) called machine learning. It includes a political economic history of AI, tracking how it went from a fringe research interest for a handful of scientists in the 1950s to a centerpiece of cybernetic capital fifty years later. It also includes a political economic study of the scale, scope and dynamics of the contemporary AI industry as well as a labour process analysis of commercial machine learning software production, based on interviews with workers and management in AI companies around the world, ranging from tiny startups to giant technology firms. On the basis of this study, Steinhoff develops a Marxist analysis to argue that the popular theory of immaterial labour, which holds that information technologies increase the autonomy of workers from capital, tending towards a post-capitalist economy, does not adequately describe the situation of high-tech digital labour today. In the AI industry, digital labour remains firmly under the control of capital. Steinhoff argues that theories discerning therein an emergent autonomy of labour are in fact witnessing labour’s increasing automation.

We are told our lives are too fast, subject to the accelerating demand that we innovate more, work more, enjoy more, produce more, and consume more. That’s one familiar story. I want to tell another, stranger, story here: of those who think we haven’t gone fast enough. Instead of rejecting the increasing tempo of capitalist production they argue that we should embrace and accelerate it. Rejecting this conclusion, Malign Velocities tracks this 'accelerationism' as the symptom of the misery and pain of labour under capitalism. Retracing a series of historical moments of accelerationism - the Italian Futurism, communist accelerationism after the Russian Russian Revolution, the 'cyberpunk phuturism' of the ’90s and ’00s, the unconscious fantasies of our integration with machines, the apocalyptic accelerationism of the post-2008 moment of crisis, and the terminal moment of negative accelerationism - suggests the pleasures and pains of speed signal the need to disengage, negate, and develop a new politics that truly challenges the supposed pleasures of speed.

This paper consider the experience of intoxication as one of immersion in immanence, rather than transcendent escape from reality. It critically traces the attempt to achieve experiential immanence in Deleuze and Guattari, Nick Land, and Beatriz Preciado. My claim is such attempts involve the fantasy of the dissolution of fantasy in immersion in 'real' production.

Ever get the feeling that life's a game with changing rules and no clear sides, one you are compelled to play yet cannot win? Welcome to gamespace. Gamespace is where and how we live today. It is everywhere and nowhere: the main chance, the best shot, the big leagues, the only game in town. In a world thus configured, McKenzie Wark contends, digital computer games are the emergent cultural form of the times. Where others argue obsessively over violence in games, Wark approaches them as a utopian version of the world in which we actually live. Playing against the machine on a game console, we enjoy the only truly level playing field--where we get ahead on our strengths or not at all.

Gamer Theory uncovers the significance of games in the gap between the near-perfection of actual games and the highly imperfect gamespace of everyday life in the rat race of free-market society. The book depicts a world becoming an inescapable series of less and less perfect games. This world gives rise to a new persona. In place of the subject or citizen stands the gamer. As all previous such personae had their breviaries and manuals, Gamer Theory seeks to offer guidance for thinking within this new character. Neither a strategy guide nor a cheat sheet for improving one's score or skills, the book is instead a primer in thinking about a world made over as a gamespace, recast as an imperfect copy of the game.

This talk considers and criticises the speculative imagination of the future at work in accelerationism. It argues that while dependent on the city for images of speed, contemporary forms of accelerationism either adopt a science fiction version of the city detached from actual cities or overplay the global at the expense of engaging with the city. I suggest the city be viewed as a terrain of struggle, rather than a site of acceleration.

Les compositions romanesques de l’écrivain nigérian Chinua Achebe mettent en évidence la façon dont la colonisation a tenté de juguler un rapport accélérationniste à la temporalité par l’imposition d’un schème développementaliste global. Contrairement à une lecture souvent proposée de la trilogie africaine d’Achebe, mon hypothèse est que le récit de la colonisation en pays ibo ne raconte pas l’accélération d’un processus déjà engagé de décomposition de la société ibo traditionnelle, mais le blocage de toute dynamique accélérationniste par une temporalité impériale verrouillée au nom de la civilisation et du progrès.

Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies. China Miéville’s novel The City & The City (2009) presents the city as a massively ramified ecosystem that comprises humans, other species, and objects, and is also embedded in larger systems like capitalism and environmental catastrophe. Cities are so deeply textured, and so continually scattered by the circulations of their component parts, that we cannot perceive them as a whole; the borders we use to define them are ultimately arbitrary. I argue that this perceptual disorientation, or aesthetic crisis, embodies the politics of the novel. Miéville depicts the continuous crises of urban existence—chemical spills, refugees seeking asylum, even a weed growing in the wrong place—as so many possibilities for metonymically grasping the larger ontological and political reality. Crisis does not entail a specific political (or artistic) response, however, since it can traumatize into complacency and xenophobia just as easily as expand one’s commitments. The same kind of aesthetic crisis is provoked by the novel itself, because it frustrates expectations and eludes a clear genre, and readers can respond in analogous ways: with the urge to impose allegorical meaning and genre borders, or with a more refined perceptual sense. Thus, the form of the novel cleverly reflects its content and, in both cases, we are pushed to renew our sense of wonder at the strange alterity that inheres in the familiar and proximal.

This dissertation argues that ‘PC Music’, a label, artistic collective, and genre world, animates musical relationships to time and the political philosophy of accelerationism, a theory that seeks to speed up in order to escape the processes of capitalism. With a transdisciplinary approach, which combines historical and ethnographic empirical data with theoretical abstraction (via queer theory), this thesis is the first critical cultural analysis of this contemporary popular-experimental label to establish that it purports to ‘aggress the present’. A wider genealogy of this Internet-mediated collective, and an analysis of the discourses it has generated, makes this contemporary-oriented temporal logic clearer, meanwhile ‘on the ground’ knowledge of the aesthetics the label nurtures is provided through an ethnography of a virtual festival hosted by the label in 2020. From the performances of queer and queer of colour artists at this event, which I take to be at odds with the present-centred discourse of the label, my analyses draw out the queer temporalities actualised by these performances.

Queer (of colour) artistic practices are analysed as a means of demonstrating (a) that queer relations to time and temporality escape the normative directions of time’s arrow in such a way that musically energises a queer critique of accelerationism and (b) that such a line of escape demonstrates that the queer artistic practices at this event do not just ‘aggress the present’, but do so in a way that seeks to snap normative temporal trajectories. Queerness, as analysed here, engages a utopian politics that reimagines the coalescent possibilities of the future. Queering accelerationism and PC Music thus constitutes a wider critique of cisheteronormative time, where a plurality of temporalities and destinations entails an ethical obligation to queer (renavigate) time through cultural processes that are worth speeding up and intensifying.

This paper critiques the purposes to which Marx’s Fragment on Machines is put in postoperaist thought. I suggest postoperaist readings wield influence on contemporary left thinking, via postcapitalism, accelerationism and ‘Fully Automated Luxury Communism’. Changes in labour lead proponents to posit a crisis of measurability and an incipient communism. I use the New Reading of Marx and Open Marxism to dispute this. Based on an analysis of value as a social form undergirded in antagonistic social relations, I argue the Fragment’s prognosis runs contrary to Marx’s critique of political economy when the latter is taken as a critical theory of society. This theoretical claim bears implications for contemporary left political praxis.

This article explores the emphasis on usefulness in contemporary art, focusing on social practice art in the United States and Europe through Cuban artist Tania Bruguera’s establishment of the ‘Asociación de Arte Útil’ in 2011, and the rebranding of the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (mima) as a ‘useful museum’. The article addresses the affirmation of usefulness and ‘use values’ within these case studies and beyond in relation to Marxist, post-Marxist, and feminist theories of social reproduction and the state. By attending to issues of citizenship, race, and migration, the article asks how we should approach the aesthetic and political stakes of artworks that strive to be ‘useful’ through performing tasks associated with social reproduction as they have historically taken place in the home or via the welfare state.

DIWO (Do It With Others) is a distributed campaign for emancipatory, networked art practices instigated by Furtherfield in 2006.

A DAO is a Decentralised Autonomous Organization, effectively a corporation or a charitable trust implemented in networked computer code.

A DAOWO would be a combination of the two ­ Decentralised Autonomous Organization With Others.

( Designed and published by Furtherfield - http://www.furtherfield.org/artdatamoney/debate/ )

Accelerationism is a theoretical movement that seeks to mobilise reason and technological development as a strategy for moving beyond capitalism. The first wave of accelerationism took the effects of capitalism at their most pernicious and suggested that they have not gone far enough. More recent work has complicated this project and explored political, epistemic and aesthetic accelerations. The central push to accelerate, and therefore to manifestly alter time, has consequences in terms of how one understands temporality in education. This article outlines the development of accelerationism and examines whether this theoretical movement can aid critical analysis of the growing presence in education of commercial technology providers, new modes of data analytics, and the application of machine learning algorithms to analyse data. These developments provide a useful example in relation to which a critical question can be asked: is it possible to accelerate technological development in education separate
from its capitalist development?

Desde los inicios del nuevo siglo se han ido sucediendo una serie de tentativas que comulgan con una poética mutante de la literatura y que exigen una aproximación a partir de planteamientos diferentes a los acostumbrados. Ahora bien, no se contempla únicamente desde la vanguardia mutante el signo de un nuevo tiempo literario: una parte importante de la narrativa española actual, incluso en su vertiente más convencional como en el caso de Pilar Adón o Julio José Ordovás, es muestra por igual de la consolidación de un concepto diferente de la escritura como arte verbal más allá de lo literario, el cual se caracteriza por transgredir a todas luces principios poéticos tales como unidad, estilo o género, y por responder además a un modelo de crítica alter-nativo articulado en la fragmentación, el grado cero y la hibridación como fundamentos. Así pues, el propósito de este artículo no es otro que poner de relieve los principales avatares y dilemas que determinan en la actualidad el debate literario con el fin de analizar la deriva de la teoría y crítica del arte verbal en el siglo XXI. Palabras clave: postliteratura; mutacionismo; pensamiento dé-bil; literatura del siglo XXI; estética postcontemporánea.

A series of attempts has occurred since the beginning of the new century in the light of a mutant poetics of the literature, which requires an approach from perspectives different to the usual one. However, the sign of a new literary age is not only regarded from the mutant avant-garde: an important part of the Spanish narrative nowadays, even in its conventional aspect as in the case of Pilar Adón or Julio José Or-dovás, is equally example of a different conceptual consolidation of the writing as verbal art beyond the literary idea. This new poetic concept is characterized by clearly breaking principles such as unity, style or genre and also responding to an alternative model of literary criticism articulated in the fragmentation, the degree zero and the hybridity as foundations. Therefore, the objective of this article is to highlight the main avatars and dilemmas that affect literary debate today in order to analyze the drift of the theory and criticism of verbal art in the 21st century.

As a singular witness and actor of the tumultuous twentieth century, Ernst Jünger remains a controversial and enigmatic figure known above all for his vivid autobiographical accounts of experience in the trenches of the First World War. This article will argue that throughout his entire oeuvre, from personal diaries to novels and essays, he never ceased to grapple with what he viewed as the central question of the age, namely that of the problem of nihilism and the means to overcome it. Inherited from Nietzsche’s diagnosis of Western civilization in the late nineteenth century to which he added an acute observation of the particular role of technology within it, Jünger would employ this lens to make sense of the seemingly absurd industrial slaughter of modern war and herald the advent of a new voluntarist and bellicist order that was to imminently sweep away timorous and decadent bourgeois societies obsessed with security and self-preservation. Jünger would ultimately see his expectations dashed, including by the forms of rule that National Socialism would take, and eventually retreated into a reclusive quietism. Yet he never abandoned his central problematique of nihilism, developing it further in exchanges with Martin Heidegger after the Second World War. And for all the ways in which he may have erred, his life-long struggle with meaning in the age of technique and its implications for war and security continue to make Jünger a valuable interlocutor of the present.

The debate about accelerationism has been violent and vituperative. Here I want to consider the battle over the notion of the future. Accelerationism, in its various forms, has often claimed a monopoly on the future. The argument is that only by engaging with capitalist forms of technology and abstraction can we envisage a future beyond capitalism. Neoliberal capitalism only provides more of the same, while accelerationism can force a new future into being or even invent the future. Restating and developing my critiques of these claims I probe the problems of the subject, time and politics in left and right accelerationism. I also consider the difficulties on coming to terms with reactionary, if not fascist, alternative 'futures' as one of the stakes of the present moment. In conclusion I try to develop a left response to these problems.