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<h1 class="css-19v093x">A Further Fragment on
Unconditional Accelerationism: What is Anti-Praxis?</h1>
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<div class="css-7ol5x1"><span class="css-1q5ec3n">xenogothic</span></div>
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<p>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.</p>
<p>My own attempt to rectify this, by
emphasising Deleuze’s call to “make
yourself worthy of the process” <a
href="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.)"
rel="noreferrer noopener">in a previous
post</a> 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.</p>
<p>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).</p>
<hr>
<blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
<p>— Gilles Deleuze, “Instincts and
Institutions”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>What we talk about “praxis”, in the
context of unconditional accelerationism,
it is a term perhaps best understood as
designating an <em>institutionalised
practice</em>. We might call
anti-praxis, then, a kind of <em>de-institutionalised
practice</em>.</p>
<p>A critique of institutions was always
baked into the meaning of the
“unconditional” in <a
href="https://xenogothic.com/2019/03/04/a-u-acc-primer/"
rel="noreferrer noopener">unconditional
accelerationism (u/acc)</a>, 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. <em>Institutionalising</em>
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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 — <a
href="https://twitter.com/thewastedworld/status/1303119461591867392?s=20"
rel="noreferrer noopener">arguably,
Marxism itself</a> — 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:</p>
<p><em>Institutionally speaking</em>,
political thought is in the gutter. We
might do well to trust our instincts.</p>
<p>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 <em>really</em>
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.</p>
<p>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:</p>
<figure></figure>
</div>
<p>David Graeber — who it has just been
announced passed away on the day I am
writing this (RIP) — put it best:</p>
<figure></figure>
<p>Clearly, as far as mass movements go — and
that <em>is</em> 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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/fromm/works/1961/man/ch06.htm"
rel="noreferrer noopener">anti-capitalist
/ Marxist history / theory</a>, 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
<em>this mess</em>. 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.</p>
<p>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 <em>instincts</em>
show us to be a species in peril, pacing
back and forth like zoo animals, we are <em>institutionally</em>
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.</p>
<p>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 <em>can</em>
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 <a rel="noreferrer noopener"
href="https://www.e-flux.com/journal/46/60084/a-social-and-psychic-revolution-of-almost-inconceivable-magnitude-popular-culture-s-interrupted-accelerationist-dreams/">in
an essay for <em>eflux</em></a>, 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?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Deleuze takes up this problem explicitly in
his essay on “Instincts and Institutions”.
He writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Deleuze continues:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>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?</p>
<p>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.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Praxis is, of course, not just the other
side of the political coin from theory; it
is also <em>an accepted mode of action</em>
— instituted by the Party, for instance, in
a Marxist-Leninist sense. It is action <em>backed
up</em> 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?</p>
<p>I’m persistently playing devil’s advocate
in asking these questions but, for what it’s
worth, I think <a
href="https://www.versobooks.com/books/2802-crowds-and-party"
rel="noreferrer noopener">Jodi Dean’s
writings</a> 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 <em>new</em> thought and
politics that can respond to <a
href="https://www.lacan.com/baddiscipline.html"
rel="noreferrer noopener">our present
crisis in negation</a>.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <em>as
a whole</em>? Not to alternatives <em>within</em>
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?</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://cyclonotrope.wordpress.com/2017/06/12/unconditional-accelerationism-as-antipraxis/"
rel="noreferrer noopener">he writes on his
old blog</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>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.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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 <em>Inventing the Future</em>
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
href="https://web.archive.org/web/20100805021724/http:/splinteringboneashes.blogspot.com/2008/10/xenoeconomics-and-capital-unbound.html"
rel="noreferrer noopener">a now-deleted
blogpost</a>, 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-<em>for-</em>itself?”)</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <em>Inventing the Future</em>)
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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<hr>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://xenogothic.com/2020/06/09/the-crisis-of-the-negative-the-relativist-right-never-change/"
rel="noreferrer noopener">asking all of
the right questions</a> at that moment.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <em>itself</em>
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:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a rel="noreferrer
noopener"
href="https://repeaterbooks.com/product/postcapitalist-desire-the-final-lectures/"><em>Postcapitalist
Desire</em> lectures</a>, he explains:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In the heat-fucked nihilism of Brassierese,
that sounds like this:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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 — <em>does</em> 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.</p>
<p>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:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Isn’t this how we find ourselves acting
before capitalism? Can nothing more be done?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=638"
rel="noreferrer noopener">writes on this
at length</a>. 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.)</p>
<p>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:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>… 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.</p>
<p>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 <em>Capital</em> 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 <em>The New Yorker</em>
(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.”</p>
<p>From this point of view, the problem with
Marx’s analysis is that it is just <em>too</em>
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
<em>for the purpose of</em> 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 <em>sub
specie aeternitatis</em>, and thereby a
kind of fatalism, presenting capitalism as
an ineluctable structure of interlinked
overdeterminations whose necessity we must
learn to dispassionately accept?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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 <em><a
href="https://www.versobooks.com/books/349-the-ticklish-subject"
rel="noreferrer noopener">The Ticklish
Subject</a></em>: “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:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>All this explains why cultural Marxism
turns away from Marx’s own “economism” and
back to the subject. It seeks after some <em>voluntary</em>
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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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…</p>
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