Skip to main content

Note on accelerationism (and the Accelerate manifesto)

I was thrilled to find Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek's Accelerate Manifesto which has been around for about a month. Less thrilled to read it. Not only the discussion is very sketchy (no concrete proposals) but also not to the point. I take that the Accelerationismusstreit is not really about favoring or not technology (or technological advancement) or defending horizontalism or local action. The issue is really about whether a desired post-capitalism is brought about by instituting a device that accelerates the speed of the flows within the socia. The issue is, I take, of whether we should struggle for further deterritorialization or we should rather resist the drive of capital to speed interactions up. It is a many faced issue: the ontological discussion has to do with whether to think in terms of flows or production and registration is to think in terms of a scheme of work and goods, as Benjamim Noys points out, and maybe to break with capitalism requires also a break with this scheme. Other discussions have to do with whether the internet flow of sharing (including the internet of things which is coming up) is a flow that overtakes capital (as Negrians once maintained - and I believe Neonegrism is a likely development to be seen in the near future). This has to do with the very issue of whether devices of alternative economics - oxydating money, gift-giving etc - can scale up (an idea that systems of holoptic credit are playing with, in ideas such as Jean-François Noubel's). I guess a point can be made in favor of accelerationism in all these debates and the Manifesto is silent about most of them. To be fair, they do mention D&G's point that capitalism de-territorializes while re-territorializing, which is a crucial point to discuss Nick Land's hopes and to understand the crux of the matter in an accelerationist criticism of capitalism (and not only of neoliberalism). I believe that capitalism reinforces elements of the economic family, privatizes and medicalizes deliria and other politically relevant subjective states (D&G's point in the Anti-Oedipus) and, most important, depends on the human induvidual - the agent of economic action. The accelerationist criticism of capitalism should look for something that de-territorializes what capitalism keeps well in place.

But the Manifesto also talks, strangely enough, about planning (The Plan married to The Network, it says). I guess planning is something that accelerationism makes us think about. To be sure, some planning is probably part of an accelerationist conspiracy against capital. But planning as such strikes me as too slow, too overtaken by capital itself and too human to be part of an accelerationist toolkit. Also, planning is based on information misdistribution, as Wark points out in Celerity, a good criticism of the Manifesto. The very idea of planning needs an accelerationist critique.
Also, Benjamim Noys contrasts accelerationism (and all its consequences) to planning. In any case, the unqualified appeal to planning in the Manifesto seems to make the whole proposal dangerously close to pre-accelerationist anti-capitalism. Further, it is not enough to prescribe a marriage (between planning and networking). It seems just like a centrist proposal, as Wark points out. Something about the dowry should also be mentioned...

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Dismantling absolute contingency

I´ve been wondering about whether we can formulate something about contingency along the lines of a principle of irreduction: aucune chose n´est par elle-même contingent ou necessaire . The principle asserts that necessity is always contingent on underlying fixed things: something is physically necessary (or contingent) given the fixed laws of nature, something is deontically contingent - allowed - or necessary - mandatory - given the fixed ethical rules (or laws of the land). Finally, something is logically necessary (or necessary simpliciter) given a fixed logic. The irreducible diversity of ethical rules, the absence of eternal laws of nature and the plurality of logical systems, if accepted, makes necessity relative to those parameters. An aggiornamento of Heraclitus would have that nothing is necessary comes what may. Surely, of couse, if there is no absolute necessity, there is no absolute contingency. We can then say that in a broader, more abstract level, things are up for grab...
6 comments
Read more

Necropolitics and Neocameralism

It is perhaps just wishful thinking that the alt-right seemingly innovative and intrepid ideas will disappear from the scene as Trump's reign comes to an end. They have their own dynamics, but certainly the experiences of the last years, including those in the pandemics, do help to wear off their bright and attractiveness. Neocameralism, what Mencius Moldbug and Nick Land with him ushered in as a model of post-democracy that relinquish important ingredients of the human security system, is one of these projects that is proving to be too grounded in the past to have any capacity to foretell anything bright beyond the democratic rusting institutions. It is little more than necropolitics - which is itself a current post-democratic alternative. Achile Mbembe finds necropolitics in the regimes were warlords take over the state-like institutions (or mimick them)  to rule on the grounds of local security having no troubles killing or letting die whoever is in their path. Neocameralism pos...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Cathedral and the axiomatics of capital

Today in my Cosmopolitics of Capital class, instead of discussing Lyotard´s evil book in connection to Moldbug and Land´s ideas, as planned, we spent hours considering bits of The Anti-Oedipus under the light of Neo-cameralist ideas and some remarks Land makes about the horror that is often triggered as an emotional response to (Neo-cameralist) statements about the Cathedral. We concentrated on the bit of chapter 3, section 10 where Deleuze and Guattari talk about class struggle and the bourgeoisie as a class eroder. There they describe how capitalism decodes the flows of castes, orders, and classes in the sense of feudal aristocracy, serfdom and peasantry. The erosion affects also the proletariat that is never associated with a specific job or type of service but rather a decoded abstract worker. This decoding is precisely what makes the proletariat universal and directly linked with the productive forces - which means, for Deleuze and Guattari, that they are potentially the schizo, ...
Post a Comment
Read more