Accelerationism

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.

"A double is haunting the world--the double of abstraction, the virtual reality of information, programming or poetry, math or music, curves or colorings upon which the fortunes of states and armies, companies and communities now depend. The bold aim of this book is to make manifest the origins, purpose, and interests of the emerging class responsible for making this new world--for producing the new concepts, new perceptions, and new sensations out of the stuff of raw data.

A Hacker Manifesto deftly defines the fraught territory between the ever more strident demands by drug and media companies for protection of their patents and copyrights and the pervasive popular culture of file sharing and pirating. This vexed ground, the realm of so-called ""intellectual property,"" gives rise to a whole new kind of class conflict, one that pits the creators of information--the hacker class of researchers and authors, artists and biologists, chemists and musicians, philosophers and programmers--against a possessing class who would monopolize what the hacker produces.

Drawing in equal measure on Guy Debord and Gilles Deleuze, A Hacker Manifesto offers a systematic restatement of Marxist thought for the age of cyberspace and globalization. In the widespread revolt against commodified information, McKenzie Wark sees a utopian promise, beyond the property form, and a new progressive class, the hacker class, who voice a shared interest in a new information commons.

An Open Access anthology edited by Matteo Pasquinelli forthcoming (Fall 2015) for Meson Press, Leuphana University Lüneburg. With texts by Benjamin Bratton, Orit Halpern, Adrian Lahoud, Jon Lindblom, Catherine Malabou, Reza Negarestani, Luciana Parisi, Ana Teixeira Pinto, Michael Wheeler, Charles Wolfe and Ben Woodard. Dutch edition forthcoming for Leesmagaziijn, Amsterdam.

L’immaginario politico e l’idea di futuro sembrano oggi cancellati dall’imperativo dell’austerity. Ma quale sarebbe il vero passaggio rivoluzionario, si chiedevano un tempo Deleuze e Guattari: ritirarsi dal mercato globale o, al contrario, andare ancora più lontano, “accelerare il processo”? L’economia è in crisi, ma la tecnologia continua a evolvere sotto i nostri occhi: i social network sono sempre più pervasivi, la logistica delle merci sempre più veloce e digitalizzata, servizi segreti e finanza usano algoritmi sempre più sofisticati per analizzare e prevedere i comportamenti di massa. E se l’impasse politica fosse legata all’incapacità di comprendere le nuove astrazioni del capitale e del lavoro, gli algoritmi che controllano le relazioni sociali tanto quanto il tempo collettivo congelato dalla finanza in futures e derivati? Un nuovo nomos tecnologico sembra prendere forma a livello planetario, dove i poteri tradizionali degli Stati nazione si intrecciano con le grandi corporation della rete. Un ex direttore della Cia lo ha riassunto in modo cinico ma efficace: “Uccidiamo persone sulla base dei metadati”. Rispondendo al recente Manifesto accelerazionista e rilanciando la tesi del capitalismo cognitivo, gli autori del presente libro sostengono che lo sviluppo tecnologico possa essere ridisegnato in senso rivoluzionario, che l’astrazione più estrema dell’intelligenza debba diventare arma politica e che il futuro sia da riconquistare come terreno visionario.

Traditionally aesthetics has been associated with phenomenal experience, human apprehension and an appreciation of beauty - the domains in which human cognition is rendered finite. What is an aesthetics that might occur ‘after finitude’?

The fifteen essays in this anthology are positioned in our increasingly abstract, complex and rapidly dehumanising present. They constitute new trajectories of artistic and theoretical practice that have arisen alongside thinkers such as Quentin Meillassoux, Ray Brassier, François Laruelle and Reza Negarestani, whose work seeks to divest philosophical writing of its critical and subject-bound dimensions, while giving full weight to a politicised aesthetic. Aesthetics After Finitude explores these rigorous and speculative modalities of thought.

The drone is the signature object of the contemporary moment, incarnating a quasi-theological power to see and to kill. The danger of trying to analyse the drone is that we reproduce the image of this theological or metaphysical power, embracing the discourse of techno-fetishism that surrounds it. Here I analyse this discourse primarily through a series of literary, visual, and philosophical discourses that while pre-drone predict and probe the metaphysics of drones. This metaphysics toys with the possibility of a fully-automated or subject-less weapon, which integrates and deploys the human. Counter-drone discourses have tended to emphasise the human element in the “kill-chain” to disrupt this discourse of technological perfection. This is necessary, but my concern is with how notions of integration, acceleration, and “loading” suggest the drone “assemblage” is one which constantly includes the human through transforming the human into a dream of transcendence. The attempt to stress the banality of the drone as just another weapon does not counter this metaphysics, which aims to integrate the messy materiality of the human into “autonomous acceleration.” To resort to messy materiality as a counter remains within the ambit of drone metaphysics and instead, I suggest, we have to attend to the disruption and negations at work within the discourse of transformation and acceleration that surrounds and finds its destination in the drone.

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

This article aims to clarify the question of speed and intensity in the thoughts of Simondon and Deleuze, in order to shed light on the recent debates regarding accelerationism and its politics. Instead of starting with speed, we propose to look into the notion of intensity and how it serves as a new ontological ground in Simondon's and Deleuze's philosophy and politics. Simondon mobilises the concept of intensity to criticise hylomorphism and substantialism; Deleuze, taking up Simondon's conceptual framework, repurposes it for his ontology of difference, elevating intensity to the rank of generic concept of being, thus bypassing notions of negativity and individuals as base, in favour of the productive and universal character of difference. In Deleuze, the correlation between intensity and speed is fraught with ambiguities, with each term threatening to subsume the other; this rampant tension becomes explicitly antagonistic when taken up by the diverse strands of contemporary accelerationism, resulting in two extreme cases in the posthuman discourse: either a pure becoming, achieved through destruction, or through abstraction that does away with intensity altogether; or an intensity without movement or speed, that remains a pure jouissance. Both cases appear to stumble over the problem of individuation, if not disindividuation. Hence, we wish to raise the following question: in what way can one think of an accelerationist politics with intensity, or an intensive politics without the fetishisation of speed? We consider this question central to the interrogation of the limits of acceleration and posthuman discourse, thus requiring a new philosophical thought on intensity and speed.

This chapter sets out from a critique of Enlightenment modernity informed by recent developments in continental realism, focusing particularly on the work of Nick Land. For Land, the modern critical subject is haunted by Kant’s enumeration of the transcendental conditions of human experience in the Critique of Pure Reason which effectively enforces an epistemological limit on thought, thus consolidating modernity’s most profound anxiety: human finitude. While, for Kant, transcendental mediation constitutes the human subject, underwriting the clarity and objectivity of its judgments, for Land it constitutes a veiling. In the latter’s writing, Kant’s a priori forms are betrayed as agents of distortion and obfuscation. At the threshold of human experience, in the very instant it attempts to commune with the outside, the transcendental human subject cannot but jam its own signal. The ontological condition of the moderns is akin to what is known in information theory as ‘noise’. However, unlike the noise that disrupts a signal by means of non-signification, transcendental noise, following its Landian inversion, disrupts communication by means of signification itself. A representational prohibition necessarily subtends this epistemological one, and it is in the context of the former that this text will suggest that it is the twentieth century avant-garde, beginning with the Futurists, who go the furthest in mobilising an alternative representational modality with which to disrupt the signifying noise of transcendental mediation on the symbolic battleground of artistic representation. More profoundly, however, this modality can be understood as a species of noise itself, but a productive, primary noise that precedes any mediation by the human. Here, the avant-garde is reconsidered as a vector of a formless noise of non-signifying matter, actively deploying a performative non-savoir, a thanatropic negation of the negation that constitutes representation, invoking, as Joseph Nechvatal has put it, ‘an exaltation of the void and the melting of unstable frontiers’, namely, those intervening between thought and its outside, the human and the nonhuman.

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.

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

This paper examines Nick Land's "numbering practices" for opening up language to modernity's increasing technological entanglement beyond human comprehension. I begin by examining Land's attempt to override our linguistic systems with machinic code and binary symbolism in a way which mirrors modernity's technological future shock. I then consider his appropriation of Cantor's set theory and Gödel's incompleteness theorem to plot ever greater degrees of reality's excess to all anthropic logic. The third section looks at Land's use of qabbalistic numerology to uncover the absolute contingency of all our most strongly held beliefs, truths and values. The fourth section considers Land's radicalisation of qabbalism through his own particularly abstract and inhuman notational "gematria." I conclude by looking at Land's interest in the computer keyboard's lock-in to the QWERTY layout for proffering a glimpse of modern technology's increasingly dehumanising meltdown of our anthropocentric delusions of grandeur.

The recently published Xenofeminist Manifesto re-fashions accelerationist politics into radical feminism. Arguing for a universalist xeno-politics borne out of alienation, xenofeminists see in nature an arch-enemy, aligning with the algorithmical intelligence of technology instead, celebrating artifice and strangeness as the foundation of revolutionary politics to come. In this paper, I argue that nature is but a phantom limb tied to the decaying body of post-Enlightenment modernity. Following the ontological turn in anthropology, I argue that by legitimizing constructed dualisms of nature and technology, xenofeminism fuels the very logic that it seeks to overrun. Enlisting only with nonhumans that it perceives as technological, xenofeminism excludes a number of allies, such as nonhuman animals. Passing beyond the limits of this nature/culture dualism could open xenofeminism up to a full spectrum of nonhuman confederates and lay foundation for speculative aesthetics for all alien subjects.

The paper will discuss two projects which explore the territory of discrete or digital material organisations in an architectural context. Taking inspiration from the field of Digital Materials, this paper presents an approach to architectural design which is fundamentally "digital"-not just in the process but also in its physical organisation. The use of discrete and digital materials in architecture is argued for from both an architectonic point of view, as well as from efficiencies related to automation of construction. Experiments with robotic assembly are caught between on the one hand the desire to increase speed, and on the other hand increased complexity. This paper argues that robotic assembly on the scale of architecture is only feasible and scalable in the context of digital materials and discrete computation, which has a limited set of connectivity problems. The two projects are a first attempt to translate the concept of Digital Materials to the domain of architecture. The result is an architecture which is digital in its physical organisation. It demonstrates how differentiated, complex and heterogeneous spaces can be achieved with just serialised, discrete elements.

If the concept of the human has a fundamental feature that remains more or less constant from antiquity to the present day, it is the idea that humanity is something more than one species of animal amongst others. Western culture was founded upon myths that sever us from the animal order, reinforced by their formalisation in philosophical and theological accounts of the natural order, and consolidated by their elaboration in classical humanism. This supplement is articulated in

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.

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.

For Marx, the touchstone of labour and, therefore, the production of value is the human being. In Capital, he argues that labour is a condition of human existence and is an exclusively human characteristic, which he connects to the human faculty of imagination and creativity (284, 290). Moreover, the substance of value is abstract human labour. In Marx’s political economy, it is an axiom that only living, human labour can create value. The hypothetical emergence of so-called “strong” artificial intelligence (AI) with the same generality of human intelligence, however, challenges this axiom. What if an AI, say in android form, could all the things that a human being could do? What if AI could labour? And if AI could labour, would they be productive of value? Would AI be able to appear in other social forms than that of fixed capital? What would be the consequences of the possibility of non-human labour?
This paper argues that although strong AI undermines Marx’s argument that labour is exclusively human, the existence of such AI is compatible with the labour theory of value. The paper argues that AI could produce value and thus become exploited workers, but that this eventuality would lead to human beings becoming obsolete in the capitalist mode of production. To support this argument, the paper draws a peculiar passage from Grundrisse where Marx argues for the possibility of the “invention of more perfect machines which would rob it of the character of being a machine” (766), considers the creativity of AI, stresses the social over the substantialist interpretation of value, and, argues that like individual humans, individual AIs can also be personifications of economic categories.

From ubiquitous surveillance to drone strikes that put “warheads onto foreheads,” we live in a world of globalized, individualized targeting. The perils are great. In The Eye of War, Antoine Bousquet provides both a sweeping historical overview of military perception technologies and a disquieting lens on a world that is, increasingly, one in which anything or anyone that can be perceived can be destroyed—in which to see is to destroy.

Arguing that modern-day global targeting is dissolving the conventionally bounded spaces of armed conflict, Bousquet shows that over several centuries, a logistical order of militarized perception has come into ascendancy, bringing perception and annihilation into ever-closer alignment. The efforts deployed to evade this deadly visibility have correspondingly intensified, yielding practices of radical concealment that presage a wholesale disappearance of the customary space of the battlefield. Beginning with the Renaissance’s fateful discovery of linear perspective, The Eye of War discloses the entanglement of the sciences and techniques of perception, representation, and localization in the modern era amid the perpetual quest for military superiority. In a survey that ranges from the telescope, aerial photograph, and gridded map to radar, digital imaging, and the geographic information system, Bousquet shows how successive technological systems have profoundly shaped the history of warfare and the experience of soldiering.

A work of grand historical sweep and remarkable analytical power, The Eye of War explores the implications of militarized perception for the character of war in the twenty-first century and the place of human subjects within its increasingly technical armature.

First, I'm going to talk about why machine learning is a different type of automation from previous forms. Then I will show how the labour of producing machine learning tech is being automated and briefly discuss the relations of workers towards it. I will argue that AutoML complicates critical theorizations of automation from two Marxian schools of thought: labour process theory and post-operaismo. Finally, I will suggest that AutoML indicates the need for a conceptual shift from automation to autonomization.

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

In measure to the development of projectile weaponry, the conduct of modern war has accorded perception with destruction, marshalling and enfolding human vision into ever more sophisticated sociotechnical assemblages of targeting. Drawing upon Paul Virilio’s notion of a “logistics of perception”, this article charts the four successive orders of targeting constituted by the alignment of the line of sight with the line of fire (aiming), the measurement of distance to a target (ranging), the trailing and prediction of a target’s movement (tracking), and the directed navigation to a target’s position in space (guiding). Alongside the functional specification of each of these orders are concurrently drawn out the accompanying corporeal regimentations of the living organisms thus imbricated. With its capillaries now spanning the wider ranges of the electromagnetic spectrum, the contemporary war machine has simultaneously extended its sensorial reach far beyond the confines of its original human strictures. Its culmination may well lie in the advent of laser technology and the promise of a weaponisation of light through which the definitive coincidence of perception and annihilation will be realised, even as it dispenses with the ocular orb that initiated their convergence.

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.

In Nihil Unbound and other shorter works, Ray Brassier develops his contemporary transcendental realism by adopting the nihilistic aspects of thinkers such as Laruelle, Sellars and Badiou, while leaving behind their anthropic residuals. What is surprising is that Brassier has yet to publish any critical analysis of Nick Land despite their striking similarities and interactions at Warwick University (notwithstanding Brassier's introduction to Land's collected writings and a 2010 talk on Land). This paper aims to fill in this gap by showing how Brassier adheres to Land's initial philosophy of the negative while rejecting its humanist political corollaries in favor of an epistemological turn to science. I will first show how Brassier adopts Land's idea that we must come to terms with our future extinction as the transcendental condition for thinking a non-conceptual reality beyond our anthropic delusions of grandeur. Unlike Brassier, however, Land goes on to identify capitalism's destructive processes as the organon for death's transcendental critique. Consequently, Land's recent work develops a pro-capitalist, neoreactionary politics with deeply narcissistic tendencies insofar as it rests on gratifying individuals' basest passions and greed. Conversely, Brassier maintains Land's initial notion of death as the transcendental critique of anthropocentrism, but instead links it to cosmology's insight into the solar system's eventual demise beyond anthropic political processes within our control. Although Brassier thereby believes that he is able to appropriate Land's useful conceptual resources for de-anthropomorthizing philosophy while stripping him of his humanist political remnants, this paper will conclude by drawing on the suggestions of Mark Fisher and Reza Negarestani to proffer a Landian rejoinder to Brassier: even if capitalism is anthropomorphic, it is necessary to politically fight against it rather than abandon politics altogether in favor of science, if only to rid science of its ideological servitude under the reign of capital.

This article argues that the turn to the animal is a return to mythology. By reading multispecies scholarship as narrativization of contemporary mythology, I claim that the field voices anxieties about human futures through figures of animal others. Multispecies ethnography implicitly grapples with an apocalyptic mythos prevailing in the wake of modernity’s seemingly abandoned dreams (e.g., geopolitical peace, postcolonial development, environmental consciousness, economic prosperity, public understanding of science). I reconsider the cultural function of multispecies research through two moves. First, I read Thom van Dooren’s Theory, Culture & Society article on ‘Authentic Crows’ as such a quasi-allegorical account. Second, I develop how animal anthropology captures the contemporary mythos in an ‘affirmationist’ register that counters the pessimistic affect of late industrialism. Ultimately, the critical politics of such research may be redeemed through efforts to work closely with scientists and to render explicit the accounts’ situatedness within late-industrial mythology.