[D66] A Further Fragment on Unconditional Accelerationism: What is Anti-Praxis?

[R.O.]

  A Further Fragment on Unconditional Accelerationism: What is Anti-Praxis?

By
xenogothic
xenogothic.com
30 min
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<https://getpocket.com/redirect?url=https%3A%2F%2Fxenogothic.com%2F2020%2F09%2F14%2Fa-further-fragment-on-unconditional-accelerationism-what-is-anti-praxis%2F>

It is clear that the concept of anti-praxis within unconditional 
accelerationism remains woefully misunderstood. Regularly confused with 
Nick Land’s brand of horrorism — “Do nothing” — many still believe that 
“anti-praxis” is some pretentious way of expressing the same sentiment. 
I doubt even the most insufferable of accelerationists would think such 
a position warranted a term so pretentiously over-specific to describe 
something as basic as inactivity.

My own attempt to rectify this, by emphasising Deleuze’s call to “make 
yourself worthy of the process” in a previous post 
<https://xenogothic.com/2018/04/22/fragment-on-the-event-of-unconditional-acceleration/#:~:text=We%2C%20as%20%E2%80%9Cactors%E2%80%9D%2C,uselessly%20as%20%E2%80%9Chyperstition%E2%80%9C.)> 
from 2018, had caught on more than I was aware but, given that old 
post’s fragmentary nature, it is a clear that it hasn’t done a great 
deal to unmuddy the waters.

Recently discussing this in a Discord server, I thought I’d turn back to 
this old post and attach some more recent research to it, in order to 
(finally) articulate with some more clarity just how this Deleuzian 
adage works in practice (if not in praxis).

------------------------------------------------------------------------

    What we call an instinct and what we call an institution essentially
    designate procedures of satisfaction. On the one hand, an organism
    reacts instinctively to external stimuli, extracting from the
    external world the elements which will satisfy its tendencies and
    needs; these elements comprise worlds that are specific to different
    animals. On the other hand, the subject institutes an original world
    between its tendencies and the external milieu, developing
    artificial means of satisfaction. […] There is no doubt that
    tendencies find satisfaction in the institution: sexuality finds it
    in marriage, and avarice in property. The example of an institution
    like the State … does not have a tendency to which it corresponds.
    But it is clear that such institutions are secondary: they already
    presuppose institutionalized behaviors, recalling a derived utility
    that is properly social. In the end, this utility locates the
    principle from which it is derived in the relation of tendencies to
    the social. The institution is always given as an organized system
    of means.

    — Gilles Deleuze, “Instincts and Institutions”

What we talk about “praxis”, in the context of unconditional 
accelerationism, it is a term perhaps best understood as designating an 
/institutionalised practice/. We might call anti-praxis, then, a kind of 
/de-institutionalised practice/.

A critique of institutions was always baked into the meaning of the 
“unconditional” in unconditional accelerationism (u/acc) 
<https://xenogothic.com/2019/03/04/a-u-acc-primer/>, as far as I’m 
aware. The splintering of accelerationism into left and right variants 
in the mid-2010s had, at that point, done nothing but put different 
coloured carts before the same horse. /Institutionalising/ 
accelerationism was a mistake; this philosophy was always an attempt to 
untangle and critique the institutions that passed themselves off as the 
rightful home for certain instincts under capitalist realism, whether 
they be political institutions or — as later became a focus for many — 
even ontological categories like (clock) time. To feed accelerationism 
back into the institutions it sought to short-circuit only 
short-circuited accelerationism itself.

It is a point that always bears repeating: accelerationism was first of 
all a call to rethink the political landscape of the late 2000s, already 
defined by leftist melancholy, now-familiar parliamentarian deadlocks 
and a woeful “democratic” impotence. This was most true following the 
financial crash, when it was clear that those in power, no matter their 
political affiliation, would have bailed out the bankers no matter what; 
it remains true following the last two US presidential elections — or, I 
should say, the previous one and the current one — where the choice, to 
many on the left, has been one of backing the lesser of two evils.

Because of this, any attempt to shoehorn accelerationism back into our 
increasingly inadequate political demarcations is a confused step 
backwards that ignores the questions this mode of thought initially 
posed — specifically, what defines the political “left” and “right” 
following the (supposed) ultimate victory of capitalism? This isn’t to 
say that accelerationism is wholly incompatible with a left- or 
right-wing politics, but folding it into our present understandings of 
either wing is to ignore the critiques at its heart. Perhaps the most 
pressing critique can be framed as the following question: With many of 
the arguments central to the left’s existence apparently cast into the 
trash fire of history by capitalism’s final hegemonic ascendancy, then 
what is left for the left to do? What is required of us to update our 
understanding of capitalism — arguably, Marxism itself 
<https://twitter.com/thewastedworld/status/1303119461591867392?s=20> — 
so that it can account for and reflect the complexities of our 
postmodern moment? Whilst the accelerationist response has been derailed 
for many years, u/acc was an attempt to reassert it. In attempting to 
hook our understanding up to old measures of progress and comprehension, 
we ignore the extent to which subjectivity has already been changed. The 
response to this from u/acc sounds simple enough but, in reality, it is 
anything but. It is a response that might go something like this:

/Institutionally speaking/, political thought is in the gutter. We might 
do well to trust our instincts.

This no doubt sounds naive. For one, we do not live in 2008 anymore and 
there are plenty of interesting political thinkers involved at the party 
political level. Whilst we may despair at the state of political 
bureaucracy in the twenty-first century, do we really need to eject 
bureaucracy outright as a way to get things done? Is the answer /really/ 
something so vague and empty as “follow your little leftist hearts”? The 
point is, rather, to consider how our desires are vetoed from the very 
start by the institutions of capitalist realism. This was a difficult 
task in 2008; it remains one in 2020.

For example, whilst we might think confidently that the impotence of 
Occupy is far behind us at the level of popular leftist thought, just 
last week on Twitter Extinction Rebellion — as spokespeople for what 
they (rightfully) call the most important sociopolitical issue of our 
times — tweeted this:

David Graeber — who it has just been announced passed away on the day I 
am writing this (RIP) — put it best:

Clearly, as far as mass movements go — and that /is/ the scale we all 
want to be organising at, surely? — the left still has a lot of work to 
do regarding not just how it acts but how it thinks and responds to 
current events. In this sense, capitalist realism is alive and well, 
even at the top of our most celebrated and presently iconic activist 
movements. For the accelerationists of the late 2000s, there was a 
similar frustration.

Extinction Rebellion’s tweet, at its worst, represents a kind of 
capitalist apologism. The point of a statement like “socialism or 
extinction”, for anyone who knows their anti-capitalist / Marxist 
history / theory 
<https://www.marxists.org/archive/fromm/works/1961/man/ch06.htm>, is 
surely to say “postcapitalism or bust”. Sure, we can argue about the 
finer points of whether socialism (as an ideological institution) is the 
best successor to capitalism but, generically speaking, it’s long been 
the stepping stone towards something other than /this mess/. The issue, 
of course, is that this mess has been pulling harder and harder away 
from the left and towards what Mark Fisher called a “frenzied stasis” 
for a number of decades now. For many, this is a bad sign because 
capitalism has clearly passed its best. Whilst its continued dominance 
will allow those it benefits to continue lining their pockets, for the 
rest of us — and, indeed, for the planet — the persistence of business 
as usual, and the forestalling of progress whereby capitalism is not 
allowed to morph into something else (as it seems to be yearning to do — 
for better or worse) isn’t going to work out well for anybody.

Following the financial crash, it was clear that this issue wasn’t 
simply down to a totalitarian bourgeoisie enforcing capitalism upon us. 
It was an issue of ideology. The planet, in essence, is beholden to 
capitalism through a kind of Stockholm Syndrome. Whilst our /instincts/ 
show us to be a species in peril, pacing back and forth like zoo 
animals, we are /institutionally/ blinded to any sort of alternative, 
instead relishing our own oppression and loving our habitual consumption 
of the shit of capital. That doesn’t mean we’re not having fun but it 
raises questions about what we might be straining to become, and what 
the impact of the stunting of our growth by panicking capitalists might be.

This isn’t necessarily a nod to some sort of posthuman utopia. Even at a 
more mundane level of society as it is now, we know the relation between 
instinct and institution /can/ change quite radically over the course of 
a lifetime. Consider Deleuze’s examples quoted above. How might we think 
the unfurling of human sexual desire out of the institution of marriage? 
I’d have to agree with the Bible bashers on that one — marriage ain’t 
what it used to be, and thank goodness. Various forms of sexual relation 
have flourished over the last century but we still find other ideals 
through which to institute our own satisfaction — through the family, 
for instance — which seem less likely to crumble under a collective 
willpower. It raises interesting questions though. Considering how 
complex the social development of sexual relations has been over the 
last few centuries, how might be consider the constant flux of 
capitalism in the same way? (Mark Fisher made much the same point in an 
essay for /eflux/ 
<https://www.e-flux.com/journal/46/60084/a-social-and-psychic-revolution-of-almost-inconceivable-magnitude-popular-culture-s-interrupted-accelerationist-dreams/>, 
notably about accelerationism as well.) Indeed, when we look at the 
history of sexuality — a relevant example, no doubt, considering the 
centrality of desire to both love and money — can we find a set of 
praxes here to emulate?

Not really… Surely, the lesson to be learned is that we must follow our 
instincts and allow our institutions to adapt accordingly. Indeed, that 
we must preserve some room for adaptation. Capitalism may adapt along 
with us, but it might also “adapt” into something else in the process. 
We should also be prepared for the realisation that we do not want 
exactly what we say we want, and that the best way to satisfy our needs 
and desires may not look how we imagine it to in our minds.

Deleuze takes up this problem explicitly in his essay on “Instincts and 
Institutions”. He writes:

    The problem common to instinct and to institution is still this: how
    does the synthesis of tendencies and the object that satisfies them
    come about? Indeed, the water that I drink does not resemble at all
    the hydrates my organism lacks. The more perfect an instinct is in
    its domain, the more it belongs to the species, and the more it
    seems to constitute an original, irreducible power of synthesis.

The point to made here, following Herbert Marcuse, is that, whilst 
capitalism implores us to see it through a series of biological 
foundations, these are but institutions it has attempted to subsume into 
the deepest levels of the organism.

Deleuze continues:

    But the more perfectible instinct is, and thus imperfect, the more
    it is subjected to variation, to indecision, and the more it allows
    itself to be reduced to the mere play of internal individual factors
    and exterior circumstances — the more it gives way to intelligence.
    However, if we take this line of argument to its limit, how could
    such a synthesis, offering to a tendency a suitable object, be
    intelligent when such a synthesis, to be realized, implies a period
    of time too long for the individual to live, and experiments which
    it would not survive?

    We are forced back on the idea that intelligence is something more
    social than individual, and that intelligence finds in the social
    its intermediate milieu, the third term that makes intelligence
    possible. What does the social mean with respect to tendencies? It
    means integrating circumstances into a system of anticipation, and
    internal factors into a system that regulates their appearance, thus
    replacing the species.

Understood in relation to some sort of utopia, we might see this 
intelligence as a relation to come, yet to be fully realised. We might 
also understand it as already being here, with the age of social media 
inaugurating capitalism’s ultimate integration of technology 
circumstances with the anticipation of its continued survival. Somewhat 
ironically, with regards to the climate crisis, we lack this level of 
social intelligence. Capitalism has the monopoly on smart.

This is where the accelerationist version of “what is to be done?” 
enters into consideration. The classic version of this question is one 
that U/Acc blogs have often poked fun at — largely because the 
handwringing of the twenty-first left, at its most melancholic, is 
symptomatic of its constant looking for something to do, to the extent 
that it starts to resemble a widow trying to keep themselves busy — but 
it is a question that persists regardless. Considering the circumstances 
described above, however, another set of questions emerge to complicate 
this Leninist call to action.

Praxis is, of course, not just the other side of the political coin from 
theory; it is also /an accepted mode of action/ — instituted by the 
Party, for instance, in a Marxist-Leninist sense. It is action /backed 
up/ by theory. But when the party as a political entity has fallen into 
such disrepute, what remains of praxis today? How are we supposed to 
talk about rectifying our institutions when they are in such a dire 
state of disrepair? Without top-down recommendations, do these forms of 
political action default to popular opinion? What is popular opinion 
when social intelligence is rotten with capitalist realism? Is 
horizontalism an effective alternative? Many would argue that simply 
negating our institutions doesn’t solve anything but is affirming them 
anything more than masochism at this point? What is to be done about the 
question of what is to be done?

I’m persistently playing devil’s advocate in asking these questions but, 
for what it’s worth, I think Jodi Dean’s writings 
<https://www.versobooks.com/books/2802-crowds-and-party> on a new sense 
of the “party” are very illuminating. We need to rethink a lot of what 
we take for grated. This is not to abandon all that came before but nor 
is deferring to some sort of theoretical canon going to solve anything. 
Marx is still useful and so are many other theorists. But this does not 
solve our problem — the problem of a /new/ thought and politics that can 
respond to our present crisis in negation 
<https://www.lacan.com/baddiscipline.html>.

Ultimately, this is the point at which accelerationism enters the fray. 
It was a mode of thought explicitly concerned with the failure of praxis 
in 2008 and the left’s inability to think of alternatives — alternative 
futures (theoretical ideals), on the one hand, and alternative forms of 
action on the other. Anti-praxis becomes relevant here as a way to think 
praxis and the crisis of negation together, whilst also acting against 
the institutions that would typically define these terms. It is also, 
arguably, a way of playing the so-called “long game.” Whilst praxis, 
particularly at present, means giving yourself over to the weather-vane 
of contemporary (party) politics, anti-praxis becomes a way of halting 
our inane flailing and looking beyond to another form of action 
altogether. Again, this isn’t necessarily a rejection of party politics, 
but it is an attempt to think at a different scale. It is a form of 
action that looks to the bigger picture, beyond the localism of party 
politics and personal grievance and instead towards an almost cosmic 
perspective — a perspective all the rage in the era of the 
“Anthropocene”, but one which most humanities departments are 
ill-equipped to actually respond to. (Mark Fisher’s joke that he wanted 
to set up a ‘Centre for the Inhumanities’ comes to mind here.) It is a 
way of taking the personal (which capitalism loves to amplify) and 
making it impersonal.

This is not to denounce institutional critique, of course, which is a 
very important and productive praxis in specific contexts, but it is 
rather to try and consider how this differs and relates to spheres 
outside our workplaces or local modes of political organising. What kind 
of thought speaks to a scale beyond that? What kind of thought speaks to 
capitalism /as a whole/? Not to alternatives /within/ capitalism, but 
postcapitalist discourses? Is such a thought even possible anymore? What 
does it look like now and what might it look like in the future?

Vincent Garton’s anti-praxis takes this kind of perspective broadly in 
its sights and, whilst his position sounds woefully nihilistic (in the 
worse sense of that word), it also speaks to a new kind of freedom that 
emerges from feeling our size amidst capitalism’s great totality — a 
kind of productive nihilism that may emerge following the realisation 
that, whilst our local actions make us feel good, they are unimportant 
before the “colossal horror” of the capitalist system at large. As he 
writes on his old blog 
<https://cyclonotrope.wordpress.com/2017/06/12/unconditional-accelerationism-as-antipraxis/>:

    On its very terms, human agency has already been elevated to become
    the guide and measure of the world, and this, conceptually, is
    intolerable. It is precisely against this view that accelerationism
    defines itself as ‘antihuman(ist)’, and against the fundamental
    question of praxis that it offers ‘antipraxis’. This can hardly mean
    ‘Do nothing’, of course: that would mean not just to return to the
    fundamental question of praxis, but to offer perhaps the most numbly
    tedious answer of all. The unconditional accelerationist, instead,
    referring to the colossal horrors presented to the human agent all
    the way from the processes of capital accumulation and social
    complexification to the underlying structure, or seeming absence of
    structure, of reality itself, points to the basic unimportance of
    unidirectional human agency. We ‘hurl defiance to the stars’, but in
    their silence — when we see them at all — the stars return only
    crushing contempt. To the question ‘What is to be done?’, then, she
    can legitimately answer only, ‘Do what thou wilt’ — and ‘Let go.’

Personally, I have reason to differ with Garton’s old position somewhat. 
Whilst it resonates with more positions than many are willing to 
generously conceded — a more hubristic brand of environmentalism, for 
one — his argument here is an explicit reaction against the so-called 
“managerialism” of Srnicek and Williams; the impotence of their 
“left-accelerationism”, which arguably turns its back on their initially 
revolutionary proposals once the opportunity of institutional influence 
asserts itself. Their /Inventing the Future/ certainly seems to be 
something of a retreat (at least on Williams’ part) from the initially 
inhumanist provocations described as “accelerationist” by Benjamin Noys. 
(For those unaware, in a now-deleted blogpost 
<https://web.archive.org/web/20100805021724/http:/splinteringboneashes.blogspot.com/2008/10/xenoeconomics-and-capital-unbound.html>, 
it was Williams who first asked perhaps the foundational accelerationist 
questions that Garton expands upon here, specifically: “What is 
capital-in-itself?” and “What is capital-/for-/itself?”)

If I have reason for quibbling the hostility against Srnicek and 
Williams, it is because this seems to be a narrative that has long been 
spun in their absence. I’m personally quite interested in talking to 
either/or about how they view their old writings and political actions 
since, and whether they felt they necessarily climbed down from prior 
provocations or whether it was the runaway train of glib accelerationist 
thought that has betrayed their positions since.

What has been of great interest to me in recent months is my personal 
realisation that the ground from which accelerationism first emerged 
(prior to the apparent climb-down of /Inventing the Future/) still 
retains a shade of anti-praxis. Alex Williams’ writings in particular — 
although his deletion of his blog suggests he no longer agrees with his 
former self — is a long-neglected starting point for accelerationist 
thought. It is with him, not Land, that accelerationism proper should 
look to for its foundation. This is to say that accelerationism wasn’t 
just a continuation of Landian thought but an attempt to complicate its 
implications with the circumstances of a new decade that veered 
considerably from where Land himself had predicted it would go. 
Unconditional accelerationism, in this sense, is not just Landian 
accelerationism before all the factionalism; I think it makes a lot more 
sense when seen as an extension of Williams’ “post-Landianism” — his 
articulation of Land’s machinic desires alongside a critique of Badiou’s 
post-Marxist-Leninism and aligned with Brassier’s unbound nihilism.

It is the (negative) influence of Badiou especially that makes the 
question of what is to be done so central for the early 
accelerationists. The best person to turn to to understand this 
foundatio, however, other than Badiou, is probably Steven Shaviro.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Shaviro’s books on accelerationism are certainly worth reading but I 
also find — as is often the case with too many of those initial forays 
into post-blog publishing (Noys’ book on accelerationism for Zero is 
similar) — that they lose some contextual foundation in being removed 
from the blogosphere. This is to say that, in an oddly backwards 
process, the books are often more reductive than the blogs.

For instance, the questions first asked by the “accelerationists” in 
2008 seem to emerge almost from nowhere but Shaviro’s blog does well to 
ground their answers within the original crises of the financial crash 
and an already frequently critiqued impotence in philosophy (discussed 
and dissected by the likes of Zizek and Badiou). Whilst there is a great 
deal of value in mapping out how these questions are related to previous 
countercultural movements, whether found in the development of 
cyber/technofeminisms or afrofuturisms, it is nonetheless true that this 
original galvanising moment, which articulates the acute relevance of 
accelerationism to the twnety-first century, has long been overlooked, 
and it is with Shaviro, moreso than anyone else, who was seemingly 
asking all of the right questions 
<https://xenogothic.com/2020/06/09/the-crisis-of-the-negative-the-relativist-right-never-change/> 
at that moment.

What I find particularly interesting about this, having spent a great 
deal of time blog-spelunking in recent months, is that I think Shaviro’s 
position still contains a great deal of mileage, and even describes an 
approach to the financial crash in 2008 that seems wholly resonant with 
the U/Acc blogosphere of 2016-18. Before we explore Shaviro’s 
foundation, however, it is necessary to provide a sort of caveat.

Shaviro’s position — when we come to it — may sound more humanist than 
some accelerationists are used to, but what is worthy of note, I think, 
is that this position is not incompatible with an inhumanist view of 
capital that has come to dominate — indeed, a view that many 
accelerationists have since fetishized and reified into a kind of edgy 
idiocy, before which they are left agog, mouths agape, before their new 
techo(g)nomic deity. In this sense, despite first appearances, Shaviro’s 
position resonates nicely with Ray Brassier’s “post-Landian” nihilism, 
which acknowledges the scientific truth about our existence — that we 
live in an indifferent universe — and, perhaps, a tandem economic truth 
as well — we live in an indifferent economy. Acknowledging this 
indifference is not an argument for inactivity either; it is an 
acknowledgement that frees us to consider possibilities we may have 
never considered before, subsumed, as we are and have long been, under 
the God-fearing auspices of an apparently God-given universe — the 
theological equivalent of capitalist realism.

It is important to linger over the full implications of capital’s 
indifference to us and why this is another foundational accelerationist 
position. Its critics denounce accelerationism through this suggestion 
as nothing more than a reheated catastrophism, but accelerationism is 
instead the observation that capitalism /itself/ is catastrophist — to 
conflate this obversation with what humans should do is to misunderstand 
how capitalism functions and how we relate to it (at least according to 
Deleuze and Guattari — arguably the last wholesale critique of 
capitalism to still matter since Marx). As Brassier writes:

    Integrated global capitalism is constitutively dysfunctional: it
    works by breaking down. It is fuelled by the random
    undecidabilities, excessive inconsistencies, aleatory interruptions,
    which it continuously reappropriates, axiomatizing empirical
    contingency. It turns catastrophe into a resource, ruin into
    opportunity, harnessing the uncomputable.

Capitalism, then, is a confounding foe precisely because of its 
algorithmic indifference to human activity. Indeed, to place it under 
human condition is a fallacy. We do not control it; if anything, it 
controls us. However, again, this is not to assign capitalism with some 
sort of benevolent agency. We are simply caught up in its currents and 
flows.

Most notably, this is to acknowledge that not even the capitalists have 
control over capital. They accumulate it and hoard it but they are not 
in control of the system itself. Economists are, as Mark Fisher has 
remarked, little more than weather forecasters. In his /Postcapitalist 
Desire/ lectures 
<https://repeaterbooks.com/product/postcapitalist-desire-the-final-lectures/>, 
he explains:

     From the point of view of capital, then — capital is certainly an
    ideological construction, but it’s less ideological than you are —
    the human bourgeoisie are just a means of its being produced. The
    big Hegelian story, in this respect, is of human potentiality, of
    human production being split off… The products of human activity are
    being split off from the humans who produced them, and coming back
    as a quasi-autonomous force. It might sound complicated, but it’s
    fairly simple, isn’t it? What is the economy if not that? […] Nobody
    — including and especially capitalists — can will the financial
    crisis of 2008 away, and yet, absent human beings from the picture,
    there is no financial crisis. It is entirely an affair of human
    consciousness, the economy, in that sense, and yet humans have no
    power to effect it. It’s like weather — the economy is like weather.
    There are people who can be experts in what the weather is going to
    be and profit from it, but they can’t change the weather. Not on a
    fundamental level. This is part of what’s being pointed to: it’s
    fundamental.

    But what is capitalism? Capitalism, then, would be this system
    whereby this alienation — to use that term — of human capacities is
    taken to its absolute limit. It’s a monstrously, prodigiously
    productive system, yet it’s also one which seems to — and does —
    exploit and oppress the majority of the population, and which even
    the minority have limited capacity to alter.

In the heat-fucked nihilism of Brassierese, that sounds like this:

    If capitalism is the name for that curiously pathological social
    formation in which ‘everything that is bound testifies that it is
    unbound in its being, that the reign of the multiple is the
    groundless ground of what is presented, without exception’, it is
    because it liquidates everything substantial through the law of
    universal exchangeability, simultaneously exposing and staving off
    the inconsistent void underlying every consistent presentation
    through apparatuses of ‘statist’ regularization. ‘Capital’ names
    what Deleuze and Guattari call the monstrous ‘Thing’, the cancerous,
    anti-social anomaly, the catastrophic overevent through which the
    inconsistent void underlying every consistent presentation becomes
    unbound and the ontological fabric from which every social bond is
    woven is exposed as constitutively empty.

For Fisher and Brassier both, understanding capitalism in this way does 
not abjure our capacity to act. This is not declaring “the economy works 
in mysterious ways” and then being done with it; this is not deferring 
to theoretical thoughts and economic prayers. And yet, acknowledging 
this truth — that much of the universe (and the economy) swirls in a 
chaos beyond our own disinterestedness — /does/ allow us to dismiss 
certain modes of action outright. Boiled down to its essence, we can 
regain our understanding of a foundational striving that flows 
underneath the ideological chaos of bourgeois posturing. We can retain a 
fidelity to this indifference and to the revolutionary principles that 
persist underneath the compartmentalising of neoliberal party politics.

For Shaviro, this is what it means to “make yourself worthy of the 
process” (although he doesn’t use this phrase himself); to retain a 
fidelity to human action in the face of fanged noumena. To return to 
Deleuze on instincts and institutions, this means that our relationship 
to capitalism becomes similar to the current relation between animals 
and humans. As Deleuze writes:

    In the end, the problem of instinct and institutions will be grasped
    most acutely … when the demands of men come to bear on the animal by
    integrating it into institutions (totemism and domestication), when
    the urgent needs of the animal encounters the human, either fleeing
    or attacking us, or patiently waiting for nourishment and protection.

Isn’t this how we find ourselves acting before capitalism? Can nothing 
more be done?

Whilst capital might begin selecting for vegan options on the menu in 
response to our own shifting attitudes, that doesn’t mean capitalism 
itself is showing any less of a thirst for human flesh. For Deleuze, 
perhaps the issue is that we can seldom differentiate between demanding 
a seat at the table and demanding a place on the plate. (Perhaps an 
analogy a little too close to home given the UK’s recent “Eat Out to 
Help Out” scheme and the second lockdown expected to follow it.) In 
light of this, we must implore each other to think differently and 
beyond the institutions that cannot and will not ever satisfy our needs, 
and which are arguably set up to use us to fuel something else. This is 
to say that institutions are power stations run on instinct, but we’ve 
got a problem when they start to look like slaughterhouses for new ways 
of being.

Before I tied myself up in even more awkward analogies, we should turn 
to Shaviro, who translates this problem into more general terms (whilst 
still drawing on Deleuze’s theory of the institution). Indeed, he writes 
on this at length <http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=638>. The resulting 
essay is, I think, one of the best blogposts to emerge from the 
proto-accelerationist blogosphere, expressing a sentiment that many of 
the first accelerationists would pick up on and run with. Here, he 
skewers the impotence of an overly humanist Marxism which attempts to 
transform Marx into Christ, building up a church through which to defer 
to the human body of the messenger rather than the inhuman forces he 
channelled and described. It is this post that I would like to end on. 
I’m still digesting much of this but, as far as I am concerned, this is 
the thought that later gives rise, through a complex process of osmosis 
and distillation, to u/acc’s anti-praxis. (I hope to write on this more 
soon.)

Drawing back the skin of “what is to be done?” to get to the problem of 
the subject that is doing the “doing”, Shaviro writes:

    … there is a good reason why recent Marxist theory is so concerned
    with the problem of the subject. It is a way of raising the question
    of agency. What is to be done? How might capitalism be altered or
    abolished? It’s hard to give credence any longer to the
    old-fashioned Marxist narrative, according to which the “negation of
    the negation,” or the “expropriation of the expropriators,” would
    inevitably take place, sooner or later. Neither the worldwide
    economic collapse of the 1930s, nor the uprisings and radical
    confrontations of the 1960s, led to anything like the “final
    conflict” of which generations of revolutionaries dreamed. Today we
    are no longer able to believe that the capitalist order is fated to
    collapse from its own contradictions. It is true that these
    contradictions lead to turmoil, and to misery for many. Yet the
    overall process of capital accumulation is not necessarily harmed by
    these convulsions. If Capital could speak, it might well say, in the
    manner of Nietzsche’s Overman, that “whatever does not kill me,
    makes me stronger.” The genius of capitalism lies in its ability to
    turn to its own account whatever destabilizes it, and whatever is
    raised against it. In the absence of that old militant optimism, we
    are left with the sinking feeling that nothing works, that nothing
    we can do will make any difference. This sense of paralysis is
    precisely the flip side of our “empowerment” as consumers. The more
    brutal the neoliberal “reforms” of the last thirty years have been,
    and the more they have taken away from us, the more they have forced
    upon us the conviction that there is No Alternative.

    This crushing demoralization is itself a testimony to Marx’s
    prescience. How else but with a sense of utter helplessness could we
    respond to a world in which Marx’s insights into the tendencies and
    structures of capitalism have been so powerfully verified? From
    primitive accumulation to capital accumulation, from globalization
    to technological innovation, from exploitation in sweatshops to the
    delirium of ungrounded financial circulation: all the processes that
    Marx analyzed and theorized in the three volumes of /Capital/ are
    far more prevalent today, and operate on a far more massive scale,
    than was ever the case in Marx’s own time. By the late 1990s, all
    this had become so evident that Marx’s analytical acumen was
    admired, and even celebrated, on Wall Street. As the business
    journalist John Cassidy wrote in a widely-noticed and
    frequently-cited article in /The New Yorker/ (1997): Marx “wrote
    riveting passages about globalization, inequality, political
    corruption, monopolization, technical progress, the decline of high
    culture, and the enervating nature of modern existence — issues that
    economists are now confronting anew. . . Marx predicted most of
    [globalization’s] ramifications a hundred and fifty years ago. . .
    [Marx’s] books will be worth reading as long as capitalism endures.”

     From this point of view, the problem with Marx’s analysis is that
    it is just /too/ successful. His account of the inner logic of
    capitalism is so insightful, so powerful, and so all-embracing, that
    it seems to offer no point of escape. The more we see the world in
    the grim terms of capital logic, the less we are able to imagine
    things ever being different. Marx dissected the inner workings of
    capitalism /for the purpose of/ finding a way to overthrow it; but
    the very success of his analysis makes capitalism seem like a
    fatality. For the power of capital pervades all aspects of human
    life, and subsumes all impulses and all actions. Its contingent
    origins notwithstanding, capitalism consumes everything, digests
    whatever it encounters, transforms the most alien customs and ways
    of life into more of itself. “Markets will seep like gas through any
    boundary that gives them the slightest opening” (Dibbell 2006, 43).
    Adorno’s gloomy vision of a totally administered and thoroughly
    commodified society is merely a rational assessment of what it means
    to live in a world of ubiquitous, unregulated financial flows. For
    that matter, what is Althusser’s Spinozism, his view of history as a
    “process without a subject,” but a contemplation of the social world
    /sub specie aeternitatis/, and thereby a kind of fatalism,
    presenting capitalism as an ineluctable structure of interlinked
    overdeterminations whose necessity we must learn to dispassionately
    accept?

Here we find accelerationism’s forebears in two of the most widely-cited 
Marxists of the twentieth-century, as if denouncing accelerationism 
today is prostrating the sacrificial lamb before a normative politics 
that does not truck with any of the political analyses of the previous 
century but is incapable of registering why and what should replace 
them. It is a sentiment most wittily captured by Zizek in /The Ticklish 
Subject <https://www.versobooks.com/books/349-the-ticklish-subject>/: “A 
spectre is haunting Western academia, the spectre of the Cartesian 
subject.” (A haunting that, according to Shaviro, Zizek has arguably 
since lost sight of.) Shaviro continues:

    All this explains why cultural Marxism turns away from Marx’s own
    “economism” and back to the subject. It seeks after some /voluntary/
    principle: some instance that is not just passively determined, that
    is capable of willing and effecting change, and that escapes being
    caught up in the redundancy of capitalist circulation. By
    rehabilitating agency, and by foregrounding particular practices of
    resistance, cultural Marxism hopes to find some sort of potential
    for overcoming capitalism. This reinvention of the subjective
    element takes many forms. At one extreme, there is Zizek’s
    hyper-voluntarism, his fantasy of enforcing a rupture with
    capitalism, and imposing communism, by dint of a sheer, wilful
    imposition of “ruthless terror.” At the other extreme, Adorno’s
    ultra-pessimism, his hopelessness about all possibilities for
    action, is really an alibi for a retreat into the remnants of a
    shattered interiority: a subjectivity that remains pure and
    uncontaminated by capitalism precisely to the extent that it is
    impotent, and defined entirely by the extremity of its negations.
    Despite their differences, both of these positions can be defined by
    their invocation of the spirit of the negative. Adorno’s and Zizek’s
    negations alike work to clear out a space for the cultivation of a
    subjectivity that supposedly would not be entirely determined by,
    and would not entirely subordinated to, capital. For my part, I
    cannot see anything creative, or pragmatically productive, in such
    proposals. Neither Zizek’s manic voluntarism nor Adorno’s
    melancholia is anything more than a dramatic, and self-dramatizing,
    gesture. That is to say, in spite of themselves they both restore
    subjectivity in the form of a spectacle that is, precisely, a
    negotiable commodity. In the world of aesthetic capitalism, critical
    negativity is little more than a consoling and compensatory fiction.

    On the other hand, it is hard to say that those variants of cultural
    Marxism that present agency and subjectivity affirmatively, and
    without recourse to negation, do much better. J. K. Gibson-Graham
    tell us that the Marxist image of capitalism as a closed, voracious,
    and totalizing system is an error. They offer us the cheerful sense
    that a plethora of inventive, non-capitalist economic and social
    practices [that] already exist in the world today. This means that
    we have already, without quite realizing it, reached “the end of
    capitalism (as we know it).” Indeed, Gibson-Graham come perilously
    close to saying that the only thing keeping capitalism alive today
    is the inveterate prejudice on the part of Marxists that it really
    exists. Apparently, if we were just a bit more optimistic, we could
    simply think all the oppression away.

    For their part, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri are by no means so
    obstinately cheerful. Nonetheless, I am a bit taken aback by their
    insistence that globalized, affective capitalism has already
    established, not only the “objective conditions” for communism, but
    also the “subjective conditions” as well. The latter come in the
    form of the multitude as a universal, creative, and spontaneously
    collective class, ready to step in and take control of a world that
    has already been prepared for them. This is really a twenty-first
    century update of the messianic side of Marx’s vision: “The
    centralization of the means of production and the socialization of
    labor reach a point at which they become incompatible with their
    capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell
    of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are
    expropriated.” Thus we have come full circle, back to the position
    that we initially rejected: one according to which the restoration
    of agency is not needed, for the internal dynamics of capitalism
    themselves lead inexorably to its ultimate abolition.

These are the crises in negation that feel wholly unsuited to the 
present. Enter accelerationism, which takes these blockages as dead ends 
and looks for a third way. What is most striking to me, however, in 
ready Shaviro’s appraisal, is that accelerationist discourse today, 
through its own impotence and amnesia, has fallen back on these same 
coordinates.

This new thought, that was seen to be a new vector, beyond the Adorno’s 
and Zizek’s and Negri’s and Gibson-Graham’s, falls back on variations of 
their own positions. When we speak of anti-praxis we speak of a series 
of negations, of anti-affirmations, where wishful thinking and 
self-assurance becomes the foundation for any kind of praxis. 
Psychologically speaking, hope — and even confidence — is a powerful 
thing. But this should not give way to misplaced faith in an unwise 
indifferent process. It is a process we should make ourselves worthy of, 
in the sense that it isn’t going to make itself worthy of us.

There are serious theoretical questions buried here, in what otherwise 
still sounds like an all too subjectivist handwringing, but once we get 
past this, then we can really start talking business…


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