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Mark Fi s h e r

2012
 Why political intellectuals, do you incline towards the proletariat? In
commiseration for what? I realize that a proletarian would hate you,
you have no hatred because you are bourgeois, privileged, smooth­
skinned types, but also because you dare not say the only important
thing there is to say, that one can enjoy swallowing the shit of capital,
its materials, its. metal bars, its polystyrene, its books, its sausage
pates, swallowing tonnes of it till you burst-and because instead of
saying this, which is a/so what happens in the desires of those who
work with their hands, arses and heads, ah, you become a leader
of men, what a leader of pimps, you lean forward and divulge: ah,
but that's alienation, it isn't pretty, hang on, we'll save you from it
we will work to liberate you from this wicked affection for servitude,
we will give you dignity. And in this way you situate yourselves on
the most despicable side, the moralistic side where you desire that
our capitalize desires be totally ignored, brought to a standstill, you
are like priests with sinners, our servile intensities frighten you, you
have to tell yourselves: how they must suffer to endure that! And of
course we suffer, we the capitalized, but this does not mean that we
do not enjoy, nor that what you think you can offer us as a remedy­
for what?-does not disgust us, even more. We abhor therapeutics
and its vaseline, we prefer to burst under the quantitative excesses
that you judge the most stupid. And don 't wait for our spontaneity
to rise up in revolt either.1

In the introduction to his 1993 translation of Lyotard's Libidinal Econ­

omy, lain Hamilton Grant refers to a certain 'maturity of contemporary
wisdom'. According to this 'maturity', Grant observes, Economie
Ubidinale was 'a minor and short-lived explosion of a somewhat naive
anti-philosophical expressionism, an aestheticizing trend hung over

1. J.-F. Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, trans. l.H. Grant (London: Athlone, 1993), 116. See
this volume, 218.
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from a renewed interest in Nietzsche prevalent in the late 196os'.2

Grant groups Lyotard's book with three others: Deleuze and Guat­
tari's Anti-Oedipus. Luce lrigaray's Speculum: Of the Other Woman
and Baudrillard's Symbolic Exchange and Death. 'Libidinal Economy
has in general drawn little critical response', Grant continues. 'save
losing Lyotard many Marxist friends. Indeed, with a few exceptions
it is now only Lyotard himself who occasionally refers to the book, to
pour new scorn on it, calling it his "evil book, the book that everyone
writing and thinking is tempted to do".'3 This remained the case
until Ben Noys's The Persistence of the Negative, in which Nays
positions Libidinal Economy and Anti-Oedipus as part of what he
calls an 'accelerationist' moment.4 A couple of quotes from these
two texts immediately give the flavour of the accelerationist gambit.
From Anti-Oedipus:

But which is the revolutionary path? Is there one?-To withdraw

from the world market. as Samir Amin advises Third World Countries
to do, in a curious revival of the fascist 'economic solution' ? Or might
it be to go in the opposite direction? To go further still, that is. in
the movement of the market. of decoding and deterritorialization?
For perhaps the flows are not yet deterritorialized enough, not
decoded enough, from the viewpoint of a theory and practice of a
highly schizophrenic character. Not to withdraw from the process,
but to go further, to 'accelerate the process,' as Nietzsche put it: in
this matter, the truth is that we haven't seen anything yet.'5

2. Lyotard. Ubidina/ Economy, xvii.

3. Ibid .. xviii; quoting Lyotard's 1988 Peregrinations: Law, Form. Event.
4. B. Noys, The Persistence of the Negative: A Critique of Contemporary
Continental Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 2010).
5. G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans R. Hurley, M. Seem, H. R. Lane
(London: Athlone, 1984), 239-40. See this volume, 162.

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And from Libidinal Economy-the one passage from the text that is
remembered, if only in notoriety:

The English unemployed did not have to become workers to survive,

they-hang on tight and spit on me - enjoyed the hysterical. maso­
chistic, whatever exhaustion it was of hanging on in the mines. in the
foundries. in the factories. in hell, they enjoyed it. enjoyed the mad
destruction of their organic body which was indeed imposed upon
them, they enjoyed the decomposition of their personal identity, the
identity that the peasant tradition had constructed for them. enjoyed
the dissolutions of their families and villages. and enjoyed the new mon­
strous anonymity of the suburbs and the pubs in morning and evening·6

Spit on Lyotard they certainly did. But in what does the alleged
scandalous nature of this passage reside? Hands up who wants
to give up their anonymous suburbs and pubs and return to the
organic mud of the peasantry. Hands up, that is to say, all those
who really want to return to pre-capitalist territorialities. families and
villages. Hands up, furthermore. those who really believe that these
desires for a restored organic wholeness are extrinsic to late capitalist
culture. rather than fully incorporated components of the capitalist
libidinal infrastructure. Hollywood itself tells us that we may appear
to be always-on techno-addicts. hooked on cyberspace, but inside,
in our true selves. we are primitives organically linked to the mother/
planet, and victimised by the military-industrial complex. James
Cameron's Avatar is significant because it highlights the disavowal
that is constitutive of late capitalist subjectivity, even as it shows how
this disavowal is undercut. We can only play at being inner primitives
by virtue of cinematic proto-VR technology whose very existence
presupposes the destruction of the organic idyll of Pandora.

6. Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, 111. This volume. 212.

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And if there is no desire to go back except as a cheap Hollywood

holiday in other people's misery-if, as Lyotard argues, there are no
primitive societies (yes, 'the Terminator was there from the start,
distributing microchips to accelerate its advent'); isn't, then, the
only direction forward? Through the shit of capital, its metal bars,
its polystyrene, its books, its sausage pates, its cyberspace matrix?
I want to make three claims:
1. Everyone is an acce\erationist.
2. Accelerationism has never happened.
3. Marxism is nothing if it is not accelerationist.
Of the 70s texts that Grant mentions in his round-up, Libidinal
Economy was in some respects the most crucial link with gos UK
cyber-theory. It isn't just the content, but the intemperate tone of
Libidinal Economy that is significant. Here we might recall Zizek's
remarks on Nietzsche: at the level of content, Nietzsche's philosophy
is now eminently assimilable, but it is the style, the invective, of which
we cannot imagine a contemporary equivalent, at least not one that is
solemnly debated in the academy. Both lain Grant and Ben Noys follow
Lyotard himself in describing Libidinal Economy as a work of affirma­
tion, but, rather like Nietzsche's texts, Libidinal Economy habitually
defers its affirmation, engaging for much of the text in a series of
(ostensibly parenthetical) hatreds. While Anti-Oedipus remains in
many ways a text of the late 6os, Libidinal Economy anticipates the
punk 70s, and draws upon the 6os that punk retrospectively projects.
Not far beneath Lyotard's 'desire-drunk yes' lies the No of hatred,
anger and frustration: no satisfaction, no fun, no future. These are
the resources of negativity that I believe the left must make contact
with again. But it's now necessary to reverse the Deleuze-Guattari/
Libidinal Economy emphasis on politics as a means to greater libidinal
intensification: rather, it's a question of instrumentalising libido for
political purposes.
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If Libidinal Economy was repudiated, but more often ignored, the gos
theoretical moment to which G rant's own translation contributed
has fared even worse. Despite his current reputation as a founder of
speculative realism, Grant's incendiary gos texts-sublime cyborg
surgeries suturing Blade Runner into Kant. Marx and Freud-have
all but disappeared from circulation. The work of Grant's one-time
mentor Nick Land does not even draw derisive comment. Like Libidi­
nal Economy, his work. too. has drawn little critical response-and
Land, to say the least, had no Marxist friends to lose. Hatred for the
academic left was in fact one of the libidinal motors of Land's work.
As he writes in ' Machinic Desire':

Machinic revolution must therefore go in the opposite direction

to socialistic regulation. pressing towards ever more uninhibited
marketization of the processes that are tearing down the social field,
'still further' with 'the movement of the market, of decoding and
deterritorialization' and 'one can never go far enough in the direction
of deterritorialization: you haven't seen anything yet'.7

Land was our Nietzsche-with the same baiting of the so-called pro­
gressive tendencies, the same bizarre mixture of the reactionary and
the futuristic, and a writing style that updates nineteenth-century
aphorisms into what Kodwo Eshun called 'text at sample veloc­
ity.' Speed-in the abstract and the chemical sense-was crucial
here: telegraphic tech-punk provocations replacing the conspicuous
cogitation of so much post-structuralist continentalism, with its
implication that the more laborious and agonised the writing, the
more thought must be going on.

7. N. Land. Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings ( Falmouth and New York:

Urbanomic/Sequence Press, 2010). 341-2; embedded quotations from Deleuze
and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 239, 321).
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Whatever the merits of Land's other theoretical provocations (and

I'll suggest some serious problems with them presently), Land's
withering assaults on the academic left-or the embourgeoisi­
fied state-subsidised grumbling that so often calls itself academic
Marxism-remain trenchant. The unwritten rule of these 'careerist
sandbaggers' is that no one seriously expects any renunciation of
bourgeois subjectivity to ever happen. Pass the Mer/at, I've got
a career's worth of quibbling critique to get through. So we see
a ruthless protection of petit-bourgeois interests dressed u p as
politics. Papers about antagonism, then all off to the pub afterwards.
Instead of this, Land took earnestly-to the point of psychosis and
auto-induced schizophrenia-the Spinozist-Nietzschean-Marxist
injunction that a theory should not be taken seriously if it remains at
the level of representation.
What, then, is Land's philosophy about?
In a nutshell: Deleuze and Guattari's machinic desire remorselessly
stripped of all Bergsonian vitalism, and made backwards-compatible
with Freud's death drive and Schopenhauer's Will. The Hege\ian­
M arxist motor of history is then transplanted into this p ulsional
nihilism: the idiotic autonomic Will no longer circulating on the spot,
but upgraded into a drive, and guided by a quasi-teleological artificial
intelligence attractor that draws terrestrial history over a series of
intensive thresholds that have no eschatological point of consum­
mation, and that reach empirical termination only contingently if
and when its material substrate burns out. This is Hegelian-Marxist
historical materialism inverted: Capital will not be ultimately unmasked
as exploited labour power; rather, humans are the meat puppet of
Capital, their identities and self-understandings are simulations that
can and will be ultimately be sloughed off.
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Two more text samples establish the narrative:

Emergent Planetary Commercium trashes the Holy Roman Empire,

the Napoleonic Continental System, the Second and Third Reich,
and the Soviet International, cranking-up world disorder through
compressing phases. Deregulation and the state arms-race each
other into cyberspace.8

It is ceasing to be a matter of how we think about technics, if only

because technics is increasingly thinking about itself. It might still
be a few decades before artificial intelligences surpass the horizon
of biological ones, but it is utterly superstitious to imagine that the
human dominion of terrestrial culture is still marked out in centuries,
let alone in some metaphysical perpetuity. The high road to thinking
no longer passes through a deepening of human cognition, but
rather through a becoming inhuman of cognition, a migration of
cognition out into the emerging planetary technosentience reser­
voir, into 'dehumanized landscapes ... emptied spaces' where human
culture will be dissolved.9

This is-quite deliberately-theory as cyberpunk fiction: Deleuze­

Guattari's concept of capitalism as the virtual unnameable Thing that
haunts all previous formations pulp-welded to the time-bending of the
Terminator films: 'what appears to humanity as the history of capi­
talism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space
that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy's resources,' as
'Machinic Desire' has it.1° Capital as megadeath-drive as Terminator:

8. Land, 'Meltdown', Fanged Naumena, Ll-'11.

9. Land, 'Circuitries', Fanged Noumena. 293. This volume. 255.
10. Fanged Noumena, 338.
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that which 'can't be bargained with, can't be reasoned with, doesn't

show pity or remorse or fear and absolutely will not stop, ever'.
Land's piratings of Terminator, Blade Runner and the Predator films
made his texts part of a convergent tendency-an accelerationist
cyberculture in which digital sonic production disclosed an inhu-
. man future that was to be relished rather than abominated. Land's
machinic theory-poetry paralleled the digital intensities of gos jungle,
techno and doomcore, which sampled from exactly the same cin­
ematic sources, and also a nticipated 'impending human extinction
becom[ing] accessible as a dance-ftoor'.11
What does this have to do with the Left? Well, for one thing Land
is the kind of antagonist that the Left needs. If Land's cyber-futurism
can seem out of date, it is only in the same sense that jungle and
techno are out of date-not because they have been superseded
by new futurisms, but because the future as such has succumbed to
retrospection. The actual near future wasn't about Capital stripping
off its latex mask and revealing the machinic death's head beneath;
it was just the opposite: New Sincerity, Apple Computers advertised
by kitschy-cutesy pop. This failure to foresee the extent to which
pastiche, recapitulation and a hyper-oedipalised neurotic individualism
would become the dominant cultural tendencies is not a contingent
error; it points to a fundamental misjudgement about the dynamics
of capitalism. But this does not legitimate a return to the quill pens
and powdered wigs of the eighteenth-century bourgeois revolution,
or to the endlessly restaged logics of failure of May '68, neither of
which have any purchase on the political and libidinal terrain in which
we are currently embedded.
While Land's cybergothic remix of Deleuze and Guattari is in
so many respects superior to the original, his deviation from their

11. Ibid., 398.

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understanding of capitalism is fatal. Land collapses capitalism into

what Deleuze and Guattari call schizophrenia, thus losing their most
crucial insight into the way that capitalism operates via simultaneous
processes of deterritorialization and compensatory reterritorializa­
tion. Capital's human face is not something that it can eventually
set aside, an optional component or sheath-cocoon with which it
can ultimately dispense. The abstract processes of decoding that
capitalism sets off must be contained by improvised archaisms. lest
capitalism cease being capitalism. Similarly, markets may or may not
be the self-organising meshworks described by Fernand Braudel and
Manuel Delanda, but what is certain is that capitalism, dominated by
quasi-monopolies such as Microsoft and Wal-Mart, is an anti-market.
Bill Gates promises business at the speed of thought. but what
capitalism delivers is thought at the speed of business. A simulation
of innovation and newness that cloaks inertia and stasis.
For precisely these reasons. accelerationism can function as
an anti-capitalist strategy-not the only anti-capitalist strategy,
but a strategy that must be part of any political program that calls
itself Marxist. The fact that capitalism tends towards stagflation.
that growth is in many respects illusory, is all the more reason that
accelerationism can function in a way that Alex Williams characterises
as 'terroristic'. What we are not talking about here is the kind of
intensification of exploitation that a kneejerk socialist humanism might
imagine when the spectre of accelerationism is invoked. As Lyotard
suggests. the left subsiding into a moral critique of capitalism is a
hopeless betrayal of the anti-identitarian futurism that Marxism must
stand for if it is to mean anything at all. What we need, as Fredric
Jameson-the author of 'Wal-Mart as Utopia'-argues, is now a
new move beyond good and evil. and this. Jameson says, is to be
found in none other than the Communist Manifesto. 'The Manifesto,'
Jameson writes. 'proposes to see capitalism as the most productive
moment of history and the most destructive at the same time, and
issues the imperative to think Good and Evil simultaneously, and as
inseparable and inextricable dimensions of the same present of time.
This is then a more productive way of transcending Good and Evil
than the cynicism and lawlessness which so many readers attribute
to the Nietzschean program.'12 Capitalism has abandoned the future
because it can't deliver it. Nevertheless, the contemporary Left's
tendencies towards Canutism, its rhetoric of resistance and obstruc­
tion, collude with capital's anti/meta-narrative that it is the only story
left standing. Time to leave behind the logics of failed revolts, and to
think ahead again.

12. F. Jameson. Valences of the Dialectic (LDndon and New York: Verso, 2010), 551.