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<font face="Garamond, serif"><i>Presented to Anarchai group,
Brasilia, Brazil (1 October 2012)</i></font><br>
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<font face="Garamond, serif"><font style="font-size: 18pt" size="5">Cyberpunk
Phuturism:</font></font><br>
<br>
<font face="Garamond, serif"><font style="font-size: 18pt" size="5">The
Politics of Acceleration</font></font><br>
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<font face="Garamond, serif">Benjamin Noys (2012)</font><br>
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<font face="Garamond, serif">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’.</font><br>
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<font face="Garamond, serif"> So, the integration of the man-machine
does not simply disappear, but mutates. Fredric Jameson remarks
on:</font><br>
<br>
<font face="Garamond, serif">the fact that there are no great
utopian
texts after the widespread introduction of computers (the last
being
Ernest Callenbach’s </font><font face="Garamond, serif"><i>Ecotopia
</i></font><font face="Garamond, serif">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)</font><br>
<br>
<font face="Garamond, serif">Undermining his own point, we could
summarize that cyberpunk </font><font face="Garamond, serif"><i>is</i></font><font
face="Garamond, serif">
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.</font><br>
<br>
<font face="Garamond, serif"> 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.</font><br>
<br>
<font face="Garamond, serif"> 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.</font> <font face="Garamond, serif">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.</font><br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<font face="Garamond, serif"><b>Thrill & Threat of
Dematerialization</b></font><br>
<br>
<font face="Garamond, serif">The Ur-text of cyberpunk phuturism is
William Gibson’s </font><font face="Garamond, serif"><i>Neuromancer</i></font><font
face="Garamond, serif">
(1984), which is perhaps its most effective manifesto and
predictive
of all its later mutant forms. </font><font face="Garamond,
serif"><i>The</i></font><font face="Garamond, serif">
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 </font><font face="Garamond,
serif"><i>jouissance</i></font><font face="Garamond, serif">,
in its vision of cyberspace, augmentation and the accelerative
disembedding of social relations.</font><br>
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<p>[...]</p>
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<address><br>
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<address><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.academia.edu/2197499/Cybernetic_Phuturism_The_Politics_of_Acceleration">https://www.academia.edu/2197499/Cybernetic_Phuturism_The_Politics_of_Acceleration</a></address>
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