Three years after this post and the discussion on Optimaes I realize how much I changed my views on the topic. I do tend to believe in agents although they ought to be infinitely responsible. I still believe erosion is the way to go but suspect capitalism has always been reactionary. I now tend to grant more force to the second alternative among the three I sketched. Still, there are many things I still agree. In the meantime (and I guess ever since the crisis of 2008) the devastating, totalitarian, conformist and hypocritical nature of capitalism has been more disclosed. Here is the 2013 response to Phil in Optimaes:
Interesting way of putting things. Now, Phil and I in conversation considered responses to the (pro-capitalist, maybe libertarian) challenge that can be expressed like this: “to be against capitalism is to be a conservative”. This challenge can responded in three different ways that we can sketch like this:
Bite the bullet and embrace a conservative discourse (trying to preserve the institutions that capitalism chews up, or the planet as we suppose it was before the arrival of Mr K.) This would amount to say that there is nothing wrong about conservatism provided that we are defending conservation of what is worth conserving.
Dissolve the challenge by saying that there is not a single-track road, and to fight against the erosion of institutions by capital is not necessarily to preserve these institutions but rather to defend changing them in a different way. Religion and community institutions do certainly need to be reformed, but not simply bought up by capital. In other words, it is not about opting only between going either one way or the other in a single given line (or faster or slower) but rather to choose which road to go through – in which line to proceed. Otherwise, one just buy into the single-track vision that makes capitalism always win.
To accept the challenge and respond to it by conceiving an anticapitalism that is not conservative, but rather erodes institutions faster and better than Mr K. Such a New Eroder would attack not only the institutions that capitalism attacks but also the ones that capitalism explicitly or implicitly has to defend in order to proceed in its (eroding) business. Capitalism consumes institutions but do so by being itself conservative of some other institutions it has to hold on to in order to make sure its flows. One then can defend a non-conservative anticapitalism where more institutions are being eroded (eroded in the very same sense that capitalist erodes) and more inconvenient (oppressive, unfair, suspicious or undesirable) institutions are being eroded instead (say private property, centripetal economic units, individuals understood as pockets with reliability etc.).
I think accelerationism is in the third way to react to the challenge.
But a proviso is needed from the start. Different layers of acceleration can produce different results. So, erosion of institutions leaving behind impoverished masses and greedy concentrating corporations could be a result of a level of acceleration (call it the K level). So, more acceleration doesn’t mean bringing up more destruction. Destruction could be a product of the individuals (or pockets) that are left conserved by K-level acceleration. A K+n acceleration level, in contrast, could bring up the erosion of individuals in favor of singularities (where there is no continuity in time, no mnemonic devices, no forced reliability). It could bring a different system altogether. So, to hold on to a non-conservative anticapitalism like accelerationism is not necessarily to expect more of the same, different acceleration levels could bring something altogether different.
This leaves open the path for a Noys-like criticism: accelerationism buys into the ontology of capitalism: production, registration, flows etc. This could be the case – maybe even there is no way to get rid of these things if alternative 3 above is chosen. But perhaps the capitalist terms are also terms that make sense given the K-level of acceleration. In any case, the accelerationist can argue that these terms are probably the best ones to analyze and forge the way out of capitalism. Not that a capitalist ontology has to be embraced, but rather that it ought to be embraced to fight capitalism.
And finally, something about dividuals. I believe the individuals are the ultimate territory to be preserved by capitalism. (I’m not convinced that the oedipal structures are ultimately dispensable for K either, but let us assume familism can be eroded by a surviving capitalism.) What do I take to be individuals? Basically, individuals are pockets with a credit (that is, they are pockets capable of making promises). They have to hold on to some accountable future – and to some responsibility for their past. They are not just nodes in a network, they are credible units that, say, don’t just swallow money but produce something out of it.
Individuals are, therefore, workers in a very general sense. Proletarians are individuals that input money and output an appropriate (or inappropriate) amount of labor because there is nothing else they can output. In a sense, most people are in these condition, especially if we consider how work can be extended to most of what humans live these days. Now, dividuals, whatever they are, can be individuals if that microstructure recapitulated the macrostructure they constitute. They can be credible units, workers. But these dividuals won’t erode individuals, they would rather multiply them. What can erode individuals is something akin to Simondon’s singularities (and also close to Deleuze’s singularities). These are not workers, not credible units, not pockets capable of promises but rather just glimpses of action, gestures, operations: a bath in the river, a look through the window, a chewing of a plum etc. They are maybe like patterns. Anticapitalism should try and come up with an economic structure that afford these gestures and operations that stabilize human life (or something broader). An economic system that doesn’t operate in terms of whos that are fixed, but rather in terms of mobile, flexible, nomadic agents that could be bunches of people or parts of a person but not individuals. I believe here lies (in a sketch) a genuine possibility of erosion of capital. After all, anticapitalism is supposed to be able to provide a revolution (in the sense that capital revolutionizes) against capital.
Interesting way of putting things. Now, Phil and I in conversation considered responses to the (pro-capitalist, maybe libertarian) challenge that can be expressed like this: “to be against capitalism is to be a conservative”. This challenge can responded in three different ways that we can sketch like this:
Bite the bullet and embrace a conservative discourse (trying to preserve the institutions that capitalism chews up, or the planet as we suppose it was before the arrival of Mr K.) This would amount to say that there is nothing wrong about conservatism provided that we are defending conservation of what is worth conserving.
Dissolve the challenge by saying that there is not a single-track road, and to fight against the erosion of institutions by capital is not necessarily to preserve these institutions but rather to defend changing them in a different way. Religion and community institutions do certainly need to be reformed, but not simply bought up by capital. In other words, it is not about opting only between going either one way or the other in a single given line (or faster or slower) but rather to choose which road to go through – in which line to proceed. Otherwise, one just buy into the single-track vision that makes capitalism always win.
To accept the challenge and respond to it by conceiving an anticapitalism that is not conservative, but rather erodes institutions faster and better than Mr K. Such a New Eroder would attack not only the institutions that capitalism attacks but also the ones that capitalism explicitly or implicitly has to defend in order to proceed in its (eroding) business. Capitalism consumes institutions but do so by being itself conservative of some other institutions it has to hold on to in order to make sure its flows. One then can defend a non-conservative anticapitalism where more institutions are being eroded (eroded in the very same sense that capitalist erodes) and more inconvenient (oppressive, unfair, suspicious or undesirable) institutions are being eroded instead (say private property, centripetal economic units, individuals understood as pockets with reliability etc.).
I think accelerationism is in the third way to react to the challenge.
But a proviso is needed from the start. Different layers of acceleration can produce different results. So, erosion of institutions leaving behind impoverished masses and greedy concentrating corporations could be a result of a level of acceleration (call it the K level). So, more acceleration doesn’t mean bringing up more destruction. Destruction could be a product of the individuals (or pockets) that are left conserved by K-level acceleration. A K+n acceleration level, in contrast, could bring up the erosion of individuals in favor of singularities (where there is no continuity in time, no mnemonic devices, no forced reliability). It could bring a different system altogether. So, to hold on to a non-conservative anticapitalism like accelerationism is not necessarily to expect more of the same, different acceleration levels could bring something altogether different.
This leaves open the path for a Noys-like criticism: accelerationism buys into the ontology of capitalism: production, registration, flows etc. This could be the case – maybe even there is no way to get rid of these things if alternative 3 above is chosen. But perhaps the capitalist terms are also terms that make sense given the K-level of acceleration. In any case, the accelerationist can argue that these terms are probably the best ones to analyze and forge the way out of capitalism. Not that a capitalist ontology has to be embraced, but rather that it ought to be embraced to fight capitalism.
And finally, something about dividuals. I believe the individuals are the ultimate territory to be preserved by capitalism. (I’m not convinced that the oedipal structures are ultimately dispensable for K either, but let us assume familism can be eroded by a surviving capitalism.) What do I take to be individuals? Basically, individuals are pockets with a credit (that is, they are pockets capable of making promises). They have to hold on to some accountable future – and to some responsibility for their past. They are not just nodes in a network, they are credible units that, say, don’t just swallow money but produce something out of it.
Individuals are, therefore, workers in a very general sense. Proletarians are individuals that input money and output an appropriate (or inappropriate) amount of labor because there is nothing else they can output. In a sense, most people are in these condition, especially if we consider how work can be extended to most of what humans live these days. Now, dividuals, whatever they are, can be individuals if that microstructure recapitulated the macrostructure they constitute. They can be credible units, workers. But these dividuals won’t erode individuals, they would rather multiply them. What can erode individuals is something akin to Simondon’s singularities (and also close to Deleuze’s singularities). These are not workers, not credible units, not pockets capable of promises but rather just glimpses of action, gestures, operations: a bath in the river, a look through the window, a chewing of a plum etc. They are maybe like patterns. Anticapitalism should try and come up with an economic structure that afford these gestures and operations that stabilize human life (or something broader). An economic system that doesn’t operate in terms of whos that are fixed, but rather in terms of mobile, flexible, nomadic agents that could be bunches of people or parts of a person but not individuals. I believe here lies (in a sketch) a genuine possibility of erosion of capital. After all, anticapitalism is supposed to be able to provide a revolution (in the sense that capital revolutionizes) against capital.
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