[D66] Cyberpunk Phuturism: The Politics of Acceleration

[RO]

/Presented to Anarchai group, Brasilia, Brazil (1 October 2012)/




Cyberpunk Phuturism:

The Politics of Acceleration




Benjamin Noys (2012)




There would seem to be no place for the modernist linear-dynamics of 
progression and acceleration in the dispersed and slackened forms of 
postmodernity. Whether futurists, capitalists, or communists, the 
avant-garde ‘passion for the real’, to use Badiou’s term (Badiou 2007), 
that tried to accelerate us to new human types seems quaint, kitsch, and 
politically dubious. And yet the dream and reality of speed machines is 
not merely the province of dubious nostalgia, to be found in the 
remnants of ‘petrolhead’ macho excess, or in the fetishization of 
contemporary military technologies. Acceleration, today, passes from the 
car, the quintessential technology of mass speed and modernity, to the 
computer. If the car, as Enda Duffy argues (2009), was the lived 
experience of modernist time for many – a new mass aesthetic, when 
modernism tended to the hermetic – then the computer plays that role 
today. It is the computer, especially for those who work with them, that 
embodies the ‘speed-up’ of labour, as each new model becomes faster and 
faster (or that is the promise). The Internet provides the ‘one-click’ 
solution, computers speed-up and slim down, seemingly providing one of 
the last utopian remnants worthy of any commodity fetishism; the very 
frustration of a computer slowing down or freezing-up indexes our own 
internalized demand for speed. The computer also now vectors the 
alliance of speed and war, as the acceleration of computer processing 
permits the rapidity of ‘fire-and-forget’ warfare, the drone attack, the 
militarization of civilian space, and, in US-military jargon, the 
‘compression of the kill chain’.

So, the integration of the man-machine does not simply disappear, but 
mutates. Fredric Jameson remarks on:

the fact that there are no great utopian texts after the widespread 
introduction of computers (the last being Ernest Callenbach’s /Ecotopia 
/of 1975, where computers are not yet in service). Instead, we have the 
freemarket deliria of cyberpunk, which assumes that capitalism is itself 
a kind of utopia of difference and variety. (Jameson 2012: 125)

Undermining his own point, we could summarize that cyberpunk /is/the 
utopia of capital and of acceleration. It is that ‘utopia’ I want to 
explore, which is rather more durable and robust than Jameson’s off-hand 
dismissal might suggest.

This new aesthetic can be thought of as the attempt to recapture the 
energy of the classical avant-garde in the slackened time of 
postmodernity. It is not simply the repetition of that avant-garde, but 
a mutated and modulated futurism, which, in typical postmodern fashion, 
straddles between genres, forms and cultural domains. This is what I 
will call ‘Cyberpunk Phuturism’. Certainly ‘cyberpunk phuturism’ has an 
anachronistic and kitsch ring. ‘Cyberpunk’ did not really recover from 
Billy Idol’s album of that title, released in 1993. ‘Phuturism’ is my 
adaptation via the Chicago Acid House practitioners Phuture, whose ‘Acid 
Tracks’ (1989) has a claim to be the first Acid House record. That said, 
perhaps the kitsch element, as we’ll see, reflects something of this 
aesthetic.

My account of this ‘cyberpunk phuturism’ will be more impressionistic 
than exhaustive, and more critical than celebratory. I will focus on 
three moments: cyberpunk fiction, Detroit Techno, and their synthesis in 
‘Cybertheory’. This critique, however, will not be the usual one of 
disenchantment with the avant-garde and celebration of chastened 
conformity to the ‘democratic’ protocols of the present. Rather, I aim 
to probe the attraction of this aesthetic as a response to the mutations 
and continuities of capitalism and, in particular, to the contemporary 
moment of capitalist crisis. My contention is that this aesthetic is not 
simply an historical curiosity but one that continues to exert a 
gravitational pull on the present, one which is exacerbated in the 
moment of a decelerating capitalism.




*Thrill & Threat of Dematerialization*

The Ur-text of cyberpunk phuturism is William Gibson’s 
/Neuromancer/(1984), which is perhaps its most effective manifesto and 
predictive of all its later mutant forms. /The/novel of ‘cyberpunk’ 
science-fiction, and to my mind the only successful work of this form 
(along with its sequels), it tracks the new shifting forms of cybernetic 
embodiment. The very technology of ‘jacking-in’ to cyberspace is rooted, 
within the novel, in the frame of military technologies: ‘“The matrix 
has its roots in primitive arcade games,” said the voice-over, “in early 
graphics programs and military experimentation with cranial 
jacks.”’(Gibson 1984) Also, the well-known description of ‘Night City’ 
as ‘a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored 
researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button’ 
(Gibson 1984), prefigures the neoliberal future, and the compulsive 
attachment to the speed that promises to break the shackles of social 
confinement. The simile suggests, in the figure of the ‘bored 
researcher’, that this deregulatory fantasy has more than an element of 
(anti-)planning and direction, contrary to fantasies of the acephalic 
market. While speed is the promise of the opening to a new 
deterritorialized fluidity of social and virtual space – beyond the 
Fordist social-compact and the ‘static’ segmentations of social 
democracy – this is no blind process. The historical significance of 
Gibson’s novel (leaving aside aesthetic judgements) lies in the fact 
that it is poised between anxiety and endorsement, critical distance and 
immersive /jouissance/, in its vision of cyberspace, augmentation and 
the accelerative disembedding of social relations.


[...]



https://www.academia.edu/2197499/Cybernetic_Phuturism_The_Politics_of_Acceleration


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