W4/WQ—Accelerationism
Accelerationism is the belief that we must drastically intensify capitalism's growth and power to allow it to reach its breaking point. That is a very reductionist and simplified definition. The Wikipedia page for it is not bad for a brief overview. This week is definitely one for me, not a one for you. My bad!
For the future I’ll try doing these weekly quotes more similar to how I did this, with a broad theme tying them all together. Hope you enjoy the hard to enjoy below. I even included a poem at the end!
Ghosts of My Life — Mark Fisher (2014)
It might seem strange to describe a culture that is so dominated by past forms as being amnesiac, but the kind of nostalgia that is now so pervasive may best be characterised not as a longing for the past so much as an inability to make new memories.
Fredric Jameson described one of the impasses of postmodern culture as the inability ‘to focus on our own present, as though we have become incapable of achieving aesthetic representations of our own current experience.’
The past keeps coming back because the present cannot be remembered.
Cyberpositive — Sadie Plant & Nick Land (1994)
Capitalism is not a human invention, but a viral contagion, replicated cyberpositively across post-human space. Self-designing processes are anastrophic and convergent: doing things before they make sense. Time goes weird in tactile self-organizing space: the future is not an idea but a sensation.
The Dialectic of Sex — Shulamith Firestone (1970)
Just as the merging of the divided sexual, racial, and economic classes is a precondition for sexual, racial, or economic revolution respectively, so the merging of the aesthetic with the technological culture is the precondition of a cultural revolution.
Accelerate — Robin Mackay & Armen Avanessian (2014)
This assumption that we are at the beginning of a political project, rather than at the bleak terminus of history, seems crucial today in order to avoid endemic social depression and lowering of expectations in the face of global cultural homogenization, climate change and ongoing financial crisis.
Confronting such developments, and the indifference of markets to their human consequences, even the keenest of liberals are hard-pressed to argue that capitalism remains the vehicle and sine qua non of modernity and progress; and yet the political response to this situation often seems to face backwards rather than forwards.
A Quick and Dirty Introduction to Accelerationism — Nick Land
The suspicion has to arrive that if a public conversation about acceleration is beginning, it’s just in time to be too late. The profound institutional crisis that makes the topic ‘hot’ has at its core an implosion of social decision-making capability. Doing anything, at this point, would take too long. So instead, events increasingly just happen. They seem ever more out of control, even to a traumatic extent. Because the basic phenomenon appears to be a brake failure, accelerationism is picked up again.
Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work — Nick Srnicek & Alex Williams (2015)
The most important division in today’s Left is between those that hold to a folk politics of localism, direct action, and relentless horizontalism, and those that outline what must become called an accelerationist politics at ease with a modernity of abstraction, complexity, globality, and technology.
Cyberpositive — Sadie Plant & Nick Land (1994)
Catastrophe is the past coming apart. Anastrophe is the future coming together. Seen from within history, divergence is reaching critical proportions. From the matrix, crisis is a convergence misinterpreted by mankind.
The media are choked with stories about global warming and ozone depletion, HIV and AIDS, plagues of drugs and software viruses, nuclear proliferation, the planetary disintegration of economic management, breakdown of the family, waves of migrants and refugees, subsidence of the nation state into its terminal dementia, societies grated open by the underclass, urban cores in flames, suburbia under threat, fission, schizophrenia, loss of control.
No wonder the earth is said to be hurtling into catastrophe. Climate change, ecological and immunity collapse, ideological upheaval, war and earthquake: California is waiting for the Big One. This is an age of crack-ups and melt-downs.
Rotted by digital contagions, modernity is falling to bits. Lenin, Mussolini, and Roosevelt concluded modern humanism by exhausting the possibilities of economic planning. Runaway capitalism has broken through all the social control mechanisms, accessing inconceivable alienations. Capital clones itself with increasing disregard for heredity, becoming abstract positive feedback, organizing itself. Turbular finance drifts across the global network.
Cybernetic Culture — CCRU -> Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (1996)
The first offspring of this marriage of cybernetics and the organism emerged in the bionics labs. ‘In 1960 a new concept was created to denote the cooperation of man with his self-designed homeostatic controls in quasi-symbiotic union: the cyborg’.
Cyborgs are just human beings with knobs on. Still carbon copies. Cyborg politics encourage you to dissasemble your identity in the comfort of your own text: don’t worry, it’s only a metaphor.
Get real.
That is, get synthetic. The Real isn’t impossible: it’s just increasingly artificial.
Circuitries — Nick Land (1994)
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 intelligence 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 reservoir, into ‘dehumanized landscapes…emptied spaces’ (Deleuze) where human culture will be dissolved.
Just as the capitalist urbanization of labour abstracted it in parallel escalation with technical machines, so will intelligence be transplanted into the purring data zones of new software worlds in order to be abstracted from an increasingly obsolescent anthropoid particularity, and thus to venture beyond modernity.
Human brains are to thinking what mediaeval villagers were to engineering: antechambers to experimentation, cramped and paraochial places to be.
Circuitries — Nick Land (1994)
Schizoanalysis was only possible because we are hurtling into the first globally integrated insanity: politics is obsolete. Capitalism and Schizophrenia hacked into a future that programs it down to its punctuation, connecting with the imminent inevitability of viral revolution, soft fusion. No longer infections threatening the integrity of organisms, but immuno-political relics obstructing the integration of Global Viro-Control. Life is being phased-out into something new, and if we think this can be stopped we are even more stupid than we seem.
How would it feel to be smuggled back out of the future in order to subvert its antecedent conditions? To be a cyberguerrilla, hidden in human camouflage so advanced that even one’s software was part of the diguise? Exactly like this?
Circuitries — Nick Land
the doctor’s face seems to swim in and out of focus
you see the pores in his skin
scrobicular arrays
and then—
suddenly
without dissolve
crossing the threshold
filmic cut
a circle of homogeneous flesh tone
nostrils sealed against the deluge
eyes shut and switched off forever
lips
teeth
tongue migrate downwards out of shot
the disk receding at speed towards a point of disappearance
in the centre of the screen
the old reality is closing down
passing through mathematical punctuality
the dot winks out in pixel death
we apologize for the loss of signal
there seems to be a transmission problem
we are unable to restore the home movie
you were three years old
wearing a cowboy hat
standing in the paddling pool
mummy and daddy smiling proudly
but your parents have been vaporized into a dot pattern
shapes and colours collapsed into digital codings
we have come to the end of the series
and there will be no repeats of daddy the doctor and mummy
the nurse
there has been a terrorist incident in the film archives
the Western civilization show has been discontinued
hundreds of gigabytes
God-daddy the unit
death-mummy the zero
stink of excrement and burnt celluloid
you must remember
one scrabbling at zero like a dog
it’s the primal scene
you were warned not to play with the switches
now schizophrenia has adjusted your set
flies crawl out of the eye-sockets of black babies breeding the dot patterns
—and for your special entertainment
we have turned you into a TV guided bomb
daddy is a North American aerospace corporation
mummy is an air-raid shelter
bit parts melt in the orgasm—
body fat burns
conception
you are minus nine months and counting
don’t be scared
take twenty billion years and universal history is on the screen
big bang is to be redesigned
hydrogen fuses under the arc-lights
the camera angles can be improved
outside the studio schizophrenics drift in green and black
you feel that you’ve been here before
11.35 on a beautiful capitalist evening
runaway neon
traffic of sex and marihuana
your death window is rushing up
almost time for you to climb into the script
which when you’re inside
is remembering where you came in
we’re afraid it’s impossible to take you live to the impact site
this report comes from beyond the electro-magnetic spectrum
if you climb out through the electrodes
the oxygen mask will descend automatically
please extinguish all smoking materials
deposit syringes in the tray provided
there will be a slight jolt as we cross over
thank you for flying with transnational commodification
we shall shortly be arriving in mayhem
if there is anybody on board who can impersonate a pilot
it would be of comfort to the other passengers
