The most significant shift in the humanities in recent decades has undoubtedly been the revolt against anthropocentrism, or rather, the shift towards an in-humanities. The pressures of the present ecological crisis are encouraging the human race to be a little less selfish and a little more selfless. And yet, at the same time, surely there is nothing more anthropocentric than the suggested naming of our current geological epoch, the Anthropocene. Others, such as the environmental historian Jason M. Moore, have instead argued that the Capitale scene is a far more appropriate name for our present moment. It is not just human activity that has caused this crisis, but capitalism as a system of accumulation and expenditure. While some may argue that this excuses human nature as a primary driver within capitalism,
focusing all of our attention on the human component ignores the extent to which capitalism has become increasingly detached from our own concerns. So is capitalism natural or unnatural? Is it human or inhuman? The problem is perhaps that capitalism moves diagonally in all directions. Indeed, we might go so far as to argue that capitalism obfuscates these distinctions altogether. Jason Moore has argued similarly, for instance, that the enlightenment dualism of nature slash society, that is our understanding of reality, consisting of humanity and then everything else, is largely what has led us to the current ecological crisis, and therefore the Anthropocene, whilst a useful term for understanding the extent of humanity's impact on its own environment, only serves to reinforce our damagingly flawed anthropocentric perspective.
As such, for more, any attempts to transcend capitalism in any egalitarian and broadly sustainable fashion will be stymied so long as the radical political imagination is captive to capitalism's either-or organisation of reality, it is necessary that we think more carefully about how these various subsections of reality correlate. This troubled correlation echoes one of the primary critiques of modern philosophy made by the speculative realists. Quentin Mayesu, for instance, has argued against such correlations, at least in their present form. Whether it be nature and society, body and mind, thinking and being, language and being, knowledge and power, or any other post-Cartesian dualism. It is the claim of the so-called correlationists, essentially every modern philosopher since Kant, that we cannot think
either side of this strange mobius strip in and of itself. We can only analyse the nature of the relationship between the two. The philosophy of speculative realism, it must be said, was hardly a coherent philosophical project. It was defined by its disagreements regarding the nature and future of correlationism rather than a cohesive argument to the contrary. Predating the accelerationist blogosphere, what these philosophers also shared was a belief in Bajou's rallying call for a new philosophy. Speculative realism was not only a new philosophy of science, it hoped to impact the realms of art and politics as well. However, the nature of capitalism as a nefariously absorptive system was too often ignored. As a result, many of its more vocal flag bearers allowed speculative realism to be co-opted by capitalist fashion flux. The philosopher Graham Harmon is arguably
the most shameful example. Representative of one minor offshoot within the wider speculative realist project, Harmon has written at great length on what he calls object-oriented philosophy, or alternatively, object-oriented ontology. His is a philosophy that tries to sidestep the fall back into subjectivism by over-egging a new objectivism. The results have been very popular, but philosophically disastrous. Harmon's move was similar to that of Timothy Morton's in this regard, whose best-selling foray into the anthropocenic discourse of new materialism, essentially an ecological anthropocentrism, has reduced speculative realism to little more than a plaything for the same capitalist fashion flux that many of the early accelerationists wanted to destroy outright. As such, many argue these branches of philosophy are popular for all the wrong reasons.
They are all too easily assimilated by the bourgeois mechanisms of the art world and its theoretical impotence. This, in turn, is arguably just a symptom of its fidelity with a well-established liberal politics, rather than helping to birth something truly radical and new. This may just be a question of perspective, but it remains true that much of what has been produced in the name of new materialism, or object-oriented ontology, exists for the sake of hollow academic shilling, giving rise to the final form of an outdated 70s eco-humanism, rather than a new philosophy for our so-called new dark age. In this sense, the populist strain of speculative realism has fallen back on an era of philosophy many of its contributors distinctly intended to move beyond. We might argue that this is very much a new philosophy for a new age,
but it is a philosophy that has been ingratiated into capitalist dynamics rather than offering anything new beyond them. As is the case with speculative fiction, the nature of our blind reaching over an imagined horizon often tells us a great deal more about the present than what the future might actually be. If this is true of speculative realism, what is revealed to us about now is nothing that we didn't already know. In hindsight, as interesting as these debates can be, we might ask ourselves, what hope does the new have of emerging in the way Biddu envisioned it, when political debates are often caught between, in the case of new materialism most explicitly, a repressive Marxist orthodoxy and a reheated hippie humanism. Put another way, what use is the Anthropocene when all it does is update our
present geological understanding of the world in which we live, rather than updating it to make good on the new cosmic perspective that more recent science provides? In this sense, the term Anthropocene becomes the end of history for ecologists, symptomatic of a melancholy covered over by a hot new buzzword. It destroys the old, but does it produce the new? It is because of this that much of what emerged after this blogospheric moment of speculative realism came in for some reflexive critique. Indeed, the first blogosphere's Anthropocene versus Capitalocene moment came in the form of a split between speculative realism and accelerationism. Whilst the assumption for many is that this split was inaugurated by the resurgent popularity of Nick Land's 1990s works, it would perhaps be more accurate to say that it was Ray Brassier
who most directly inspired accelerationism's emergence from respective realist tension. Brassier's 2007 book Nylon Bound proved hugely influential in the blogosphere of the late 2000s. Even more influential was the work done prior to its publication that had circulated around the internet. In particular, his article of the same name originally published in the essay collection Think Again Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy. Here Brassier describes Badiou as perhaps the ultimate late capitalist correlationist. He notes, for instance, that Badiou's philosophy is grounded upon a fidelity to the Paramedian axiom, it is the same thing to think and to be. This argument is, for Badiou, essential to any materialism. To think the subject and its object in themselves is, as we have seen, the foundation of a Hegelian
idealism. A Marxist materialism, on the other hand, notes how this relationship is innately reciprocal, and is therefore on the side of the void that exists between the two. It is only by analysing this void, that is, by privileging the singular multiplicity of the subject-object that we can then act in a way that not only describes the world but can also change it. However, beyond the arguments of speculative realism, the problem for Brassier is that Badiou uses mathematics to argue his case. Brassier writes,
Boudou's materialism emphasises that thought does not possess an ontological sovereignty in this regard, but it is precisely this ontological sovereignty that allows this thought to be had. For Boudou, it seems this feedback loop is positive rather than negative, but how can we make sure of this beyond superficial deferral to a belief in a philosophical process? This leads Brassier to ask, what are the conditions of this gesture? What are the conditions that give Boudou's philosophy of politics, poetry and mathematics, a fidelity to the truth he hopes to describe. The nature of Brassier's argument is highly technical. For the purposes of this lecture series, I don't want to go into this terminology in too much detail, and to do so would warrant another course unto itself. Suffice it to say that in Boudou's mathematical ontology,
being takes on the figure of the void. Being is zero. Difference, then, is measured by other numbers. Difference is a promiscuous term within philosophy. In the broadest terms, we might say it is a category for thinking things which can be differentiated. For instance, if being is zero, as an indeterminate void of existence, personal identity is one. Alternatively, if matter is zero, then we might understand a chair as one and a table as two. These two objects are both made of matter, but they are nonetheless categorically different in kind. Immanuel Kant argues much the same thing in the Critique of Pure Reason. It is the difference between quality and quantity. For Brassier, our understanding of plurality and numerical difference in this regard
is complicated by capitalism's overarching influence on subjectivity. We have explored this previously through Marx's analysis of the law of equivalence. Under capitalism and its mechanisms of abstraction, everything can be reduced to a commodity and therefore given its place within the law of equivalence. The issue with this, however, is that our thinking of things in terms of the wholeness of one of one obfuscates the role of zero, of the void. Therefore, for Brassier, the condition of Purdue's philosophical gesture, no matter how much it may seek to ground itself in a mode of thought that is beyond the strictures of capitalism, is nonetheless capitalism itself. As Brassier writes, capital, the historical medium for subtractive ontology, unbounds nihil from the fetters of presence, pulverising the domain of phenomenological sensefulness
and exposing the insignificant neutrality of the multiple as ground of presentation. In other words, capital emphasises that zero is a worthless nothingness rather than the ground from which all value emerges. Zero becomes the absence of value rather than the overwhelming ubiquity of ontological presence. This is what detaches truth from its ground and allows capital to both hold up the illusion of a limit whilst constantly moving its own goalposts. Think about that famous priceless ad campaign run by Mastercard. What is the message of that ad campaign? Objects have a price, but experiences are priceless. You can't put a price on a life lived to the full. This is arguably an anti-consumerist message. It is an incredibly simplified version of the argument above,
which notes how the numbers in your bank account and those that appear on the receipts of things you buy can all too easily obscure that which they are put in service of, being. And, as we have seen, being is zero. It is the alpha and omega of the law of equivalence. You cannot put a price on life, but this is nonetheless a value judgment that can go both ways. Life is a limit for capitalism, in that it treats life as both worthless and priceless. And yet capitalism then absorbs this critique within itself, giving rise to a whole new abstract economy, the experience economy. There's an ad campaign that contains a cynically Orwellian message in this respect. All lives are equal, but some are more equal than others. The more money you have, the more experiences you can afford, and the more fulfilled your being is.
But this argument itself contains within it a mirrored critique. Mastercard's emphasis on the value of a life lived with large amounts of capital inversely widens the gap between the haves and have-nots. Life is priceless, and if you can't afford the priceless, your life is worthless. These are the goalposts that capitalism constantly shifts. In this sense, the conditions of Boudou's mathematical ontology are inverted. It is not being a zero that binds a sense of difference and value, but capitalist value and difference that unbind being a zero. This argument regarding capitalism's capacity for adaptation finds its most succinct expropriators for Brassier in Deleuze and Guattari. summarising and indeed translating a passage from their famous work A Thousand Plateaus
notably in the terms of Badiou's own philosophy Brassier writes that integrated global capitalism is a machine and a machine is nothing other than an automated axiomatic system but an astonishingly supple and adaptive one singularised by its fluidity, its metamorphic plasticity wherever it is confronted by a limit or anomaly capitalism has the wherewithal, the intelligence, to invent a new axiom in order to incorporate the unexpected, constantly reconfiguring its parameters by adding a supplementary axiom through which it can continue expanding its own frontiers. Far from being stymied by its incompleteness, the capitalist axiomatic lives off it. Far from being threatened by its
contradictions, capitalism thrives on them. It is an open system, an aleatory axiomatic, continually redefining its own structural boundaries, perpetually living off its own impossible limit. The problem for Brassier is that Badeu's highly adaptive system of mathematical ontology mirrors capitalism's absolutely. Whilst it may assist us in systematically thinking the numerical world of capitalism, it is also at risk of complying with it absolutely. Again, Brassier makes his argument as follows. 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 regularisation. Capital names what de Luz and Grattu recall the monstrous thing, the cancerous antisocial anomaly, the catastrophic over-event 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. This is to say that capitalism, for Badiou, is too readily attached to other political phenomenon. He believes he can account for its mechanisms through its attachment to the state, for instance. But state capitalism, while certainly a form of capitalism ripe for analysis,
is only a condition of capitalism and not capitalism in itself. As such, Brassier writes that Badiou seems to miss the quasi-truth of capitalism revealed by his own analysis, that it is a condition for conditions, rendering the philosophical identification of being as void not merely possible but imperative. This leads Brassier to ask perhaps the key question of the speculative realist pre-accelerationist blogosphere If capital functions as the real condition through which philosophy simultaneously identifies the void of being abjures its ontological pretensions and becomes the harbinger of truths might this automated randomness not only function as that unnameable thing which produced philosophy cannot acknowledge the unthinkable determinant for its own identity as void?
Perhaps the condition for Purdue's subtractive ontology is a thought of capital, or more precisely, an acknowledgement that capitalism, blind, monstrous, asephalic polymorph, thinks. What if it were precisely the thought that this thing thinks that was still unthinkable for this philosophy? These questions do not find an answer in Brassier's own 2000s philosophy. Brassier's 2007 book, Nile Unbound, for instance, while sharing its name with this article from 2004, is distanced from this analysis of thinking capitalism. Instead, Brassier provides a far more rigorous philosophical background to the nature of the problem, but he resists providing any final theory to the problem just described. This is perhaps because of the avenues down which this question leads at present,
avenues that become clear in Alex Williams' first post on xeno-economics in the blogosphere. Taking his lead from Brassier, Williams argues that what all analyses of capitalism has presumed to date is the capitalist for us, construed in positive or negative terms, whereas capital is ultimately a machine which has almost no relation to humanity whatsoever. It intersects with us, it has us as moving parts, but it ultimately is not of or for us. Capital properly thought is a vast inhuman form, a genuinely alien life form, in that it is entirely non-organic, of which we know all too little. A new investigation of this form must proceed precisely as an anti-anthropomorphic cartography, a study in alien finance, a xeno-economics.
This xeno-economics is considered as a worthy offshoot of a speculative realist philosophy. Despite the fact that, as Williams acknowledges, Brassier himself has shied away in the last few years from a detailed discussion of capitalism, the most interesting applications of speculative realist philosophy may well arrive with precisely a re-reading of both Marx's and Deleuze and Guttery's models of capitalism. Part of what is at stake here, Williams continues, is the thinking of capitalism outside of alienation. This is a problem that has so far stalked the background of this course. What is alienation? Alienation is the psychological or social experience of the difference between correlates. It is at its most immediate, it is our sense of the void between
self and other. We know that the self and its other are both joined in the experience of being, but our inability to share subjective experience imminently keeps us apart from one another. Therefore, the difference in kind that separates one person from another produces a kind of dissonance that complicates and arguably obscures being as a universal category. Capitalism only exacerbates this alienation. Through its combination of all of the processes we have so far described, the law of equivalence and the valorisation of the worker in particular, and their more contemporary complications in the realms of subjectivity and cultural production, we are left beached on the shores of capitalist alienation. Alienation, in this sense, is the foundation of capitalist individualism. But if capitalism is now moving beyond its previously intrinsic bond with the human,
which will supposedly lead to capital's eventual autonomy, this frees the human in turn to a mode of development that is detached from capitalism's indifference. However, as we have also seen, it is arguably our own futile attempts to hang onto the leash that have led to our present cultural drag. This leaves the ball in our court. If there is a political practice to be extracted from this realisation, it is how we dismount the beasts without injuring ourselves any further. In Alex Williams' Inchoate Accelerationism, we can perhaps use capitalism to this end, encouraging its pull towards the inhuman so that we might be freed from its binds. He writes, For if we are to follow Bajou's stab at an unmitigated inhumanism, a total leap beyond the suffering animal model
of godless democratic materialist biolinguistic humanism, as surely we must, then the theory of value cannot be predicated upon this original suffering, the voodoo process of soul theft at the core of the alienation of labour in the commodity form. The blind asifalus polymorph, that is capital, must be embraced, but not from the point of view of some naive enthusiasm or sentiment of hope that markets can deliver utopia. Instead, as the way out of the binaries of a leftism that is utterly and irretrievably moribund, and a neoliberal economics which is ideologically bankrupt, we must bend both together in the face of an inhuman and indefatigable capitalism to think how we might inculcate a new form of radically inhuman subjectivation. This entails the retrieval of the communist project for a new man, and the liberation of
the neoliberal quest for a capitalism unbound, from both its subterranean dependence upon the state and the skeletal humanist discursive a priori which animates its ideological forms. Interestingly, no doubt due to Badiou's lingering in the background of this analysis, Williams sees a role for the Marxist-Leninism that Badiou and Zizek championed in their original discussion of what is to be done, prior to and then following the financial crash. However, it still seems that for Williams, as with other members of the blogosphere, Zizek's over-reliance on the spectre, if not the actual form of statist militancy, does not go far enough. Nor does Perdue's appeal towards a mathematics that is all too easily co-opted by capitalism itself. Nevertheless, Williams writes that his vague outline for a new politico-philosophical project
is a continuation and merging of both Marxist-Leninist communism and neoliberal capitalism. The difference is that under this inhumanist model, there is no need to take over the state. We can instead utilise capitalism as an engine with which to obliterate nation-states. Many have theorised something similar on both sides of the political divide between left and right, that is, the ways in which corporate models can be repurposed in order to drive more of a wedge between humanist politics and inhumanist capitalism. As Williams insists, this would be entirely insufficient, as the state function within capitalism would simply be taken over by institutional figures such as corporations, which must therefore also be dissolved. This is to say that, in an all-too-predictable fashion, capitalism could easily dissolve the state and implement its own market preferences.
Many on the left and right have provocatively advocated for such a model, one that would become increasingly relevant to accelerationism in the late 2010s, in terms of patchwork theory and one of its central elements, the SovCorp or Sovereign Corporation. But just as Marx saw socialism, the state ownership of the means of production, as a stopgap on the way to communism, full social ownership, so too did Williams' argument advocate for the continual dissolution of capitalism's shape-shifting static forms. This requires the vigilance that we are still lacking. As Williams put it, the question also needs to be asked of how to recalibrate this alien life form, capital, towards forms of dissolution which do not immediately restructure their conservative familial types of subjectivation.
This tendency to restructure along these lines, which has clearly been exacerbated in more recent years following the rise of a populist right wing, comes from the extent to which capitalism is currently constrained by its symbiotic relationship to the state, which maintains the expansion of capital within a homeostatic formula sufficient to prevent its most destructive potentials from being actualised. And so we must instead utilise the structures of capitalism against the state in an entirely terroristic fashion, such as to transform the very nature of the nightmarish Lovecraftian creature itself. This final declaration pushed the limits of what many in the blogosphere were willing to accept. Whilst Williams' analysis is wholly grounded in many Marxist theories of the day, and backed up by the latest innovations in spectator of his philosophy, broadly speaking,
his fallback on a call towards terroristic action ignored much of the debate that had come before. Williams acknowledges, for instance, this dramatic call is contra Deleuze, perhaps in much the same way that Zizek's analysis of 300 was, although Deleuze was clearly not a reference to Zizek. You might recall Chaviro's argument to the contrary in light of this. His argument that an affirmation of capitalist deterritorialisation could be a deinstitutionalised categorical imperative, rather than an explicitly Marxist-Leninist party-led insurrection. The form that William's terroristic insurrection might take requires some considerable consideration. It was this oversight that led Benjamin Noyes to liken William's position to his nascent accelerationism of a worst-case politics, or a politique de pierre.
however over on his k-punk blog mark fisher saw the deeper potential here instead of responding to williams with a fear mongering concern he instead acknowledges the lineage that williams is extending into the present and asks some further questions that might give williams post-capitalist terrorism a less reactionary form However, it is this lineage that remains a cause for concern today. Fisher rightly describes William's nascent position as a kind of left-landinism. He combines the affirmative politics of Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus with the virulent negativity of Jean-Francois Lyotard's Libidinal Economy, a book that Benjamin Noyes rightly identified as the book of accelerationism. It similarly deals with many of the questions regarding alienation we have asked ourselves already,
albeit from the perspective of the 1970s. Nick Land, of course, similarly emerged under the euphoric, inhumanist influence of both. In another post, published a few days later, Fisher focuses on Lyotard's influence a little more explicitly. It is worth turning to this slight detour before we continue. Whilst Fisher maintained a troubled relationship with Land throughout the rest of his life and writings, he did share Land's fascination with Lyotard's supposedly evil book. He notes on his blog how Leotard effectively gave rise to that xenogothic figure of a Promethean proletariat, using its perverse fidelity to capitalist processes of valorisation to machine a new inorganic body for itself, capable of not only enduring, but enjoying the inhuman conditions of the factory.
Following the failure of the counterculture in the 1960s, a nascent neoliberalism, which engendered capitalism's apparently final form, nonetheless helped construct its own nemesis. An amnesiac proletariat that's absolutely devoid of nostalgia for the earthly cyclicity of peasant life, enjoyed its anonymous pubs, concrete arcades and synthetic foods. It's also worth noting that Lyotard's book was not only an attack on a failed counterculture, but also the failure of theory to support its aims. If the biddenal economy is inspired by Deleuze and Gautawi's great book of the May 68 uprising in France, it is largely a negative. Leotard indirectly damns them and their cohort for only exacerbating the growing distance between an avant-garde counterculture and the proletariat it claimed to support
And yet, as Fisher writes, in the end, it was Deleuze and Guattari who proved to have the better handle on capitalism precisely because they insisted on re-territorialisation as the necessary counterpart to capitalist de-territorialisation This is to say that Deleuze and Guattari anticipated the postmodern condition, not the informatic model proffered by the later, insouciant, mature Lyotard, but the impasse described by Frederick Jameson. Capitalism as a future shock absorber, as well as a scorched earth terminator of all traditions and archaisms, operating in a time of anachronistic conjunctions, genetic engineering labs next to lovingly reconstructed 19th century village greens. The Frankensteinian surgeon of the cities would inevitably disguise its hideous suturings
and improbable juxtapositions behind all manner of airbrushings and recyclings. Nevertheless, perhaps William's innovation, his conjoining of Lyotardian jouissance with, rather than against, Deluso-Guitarian analysis, taken in part from Brassier, will find a way to put Land's nihilism to work in the 20th century. As with Brassier, for whom the nihilism of contemporary science and the philosophy of science does not abjure our agency, but rather inject it with a newly Promethean imperative, perhaps Williams' accelerationist left-landianism will similarly open up a new space for reasoning and agency within this crisis of negation. Perhaps it is through Land's virulent nihilism that we might remove the negativity of leftist impotence and instead enjoy capitalistic territorialisation anew. Perhaps in so doing, we will reaffirm the processes of negation that
leftist politics as lost, unable to forestall the processes of re-territorialisation that Deleuze and Guattari so accurately describe. Fisher seems to view William's position positively, encouraged by his attempt to salvage something from the writings of his controversial former lecturer. Nevertheless, he is all too aware of how Land's writings fall back all too readily on that which the left found so nauseating in Leotard's writings, known less nauseating today. He writes,
as planetary artificial intelligence would liquidate the illusion of human agency. You either submit and enjoy, or act out the dead drama of your own impotence. The very vividness of Fisher's prose seems to indicate his persistent fascination with Land's project, but his lack of any explicitly positive affirmation seems to simultaneously betray his own agnosticism. It was clear soon enough that Fisher had his reservations. He raises three points of concern, which we will address here, along with William's responses to him, in turn. Fisher's first question is perhaps a familiar one. To what extent is any attempt to give humanity's impotent flailing over to a pure capital, not just a fantasy of aligning human
agency with chance, with a noumenal randomness? After all, the very problem of anti-capitalism is that it often cannot overcome capital's illusionary formlessness. As Fisher argues, the very nature of its productivity and the retention of its control over humanity comes from the fact that it is essentially constituted by the tension between dissolution without limits and inhibition. Capitalism flies down the hill whilst we tentatively tamp the brakes. In our attempts to keep it under control, we doom ourselves, as Fisher puts it, to acting out the dead drama of our own impotence. However, Fisher also acknowledges that this might be the point. If the fetters and buffers were removed from capitalism's internal dynamics, we would no longer be dealing with capitalism at all. This certainly seems to be Brassier's point in his original article.
Here he 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 re-appropriates, axiomatising empirical contingency. It turns catastrophe into a resource, ruin into opportunity, harnessing the uncomputable. Williams concurs. Reframing Fisher's question as asking whether pure capital is not a phantasmatic projection, he responds, yes, absolutely, one which does not exist at present, but which, as the powerful fiction of a completed truth, to horribly misuse Bajou, might be able to actualise its own reality. Pure capital, then, as a kind of capitalistic fiction, may work hypostitially upon itself.
A vague response, to say the least, but one which does have some chance of emergence, particularly if something like Bitcoin can effectuate a new level of abstraction within capitalism as a whole. This is to say, once capital itself has been commodified, what is left over? Fisher's second and third questions are somewhat entangled. His third question is, how is it possible to utilise the structures of capitalism against the state in a way that does not repeat neoliberalism? This is directly related to the second, which concerns the problem of agency. The difference between Williams and Land's forms of accelerationism, Fisher observes, is that whilst Land believes that capital is the only agent of note, Williams believes that capital must be assisted to become something else. So, what form would this assistance take?
As per Mario Tronti's question about the left after the demise of the workers' movements, what group subject could emerge which would be both willing and able to offer assistance to capital? In the lack of a collective agent, wouldn't we be back to a kind of theoretical parlour game that has no consequences? Here again, accelerationism, in the very moment of its emergence, comes up against the crisis of negation. Intriguingly for Fisher, this puts accelerationism and ontology in direct correlation with one another, in spite of Williams' prior dismissal of the latter. Fisher writes that although a ontology is not a political strategy, it is nonetheless a theoretical response to what is there, or about what absently insists in what is there, i.e. progress. This is perhaps to say that ontology, as a kind of quasi-genre or form of culture,
is akin to a kind of generalised dub music, negating the negation of late capitalist cultural capture, as if placing the echo chamber of late capitalism in its own echo chamber, much like how the dubbed pioneers turned their studios into a world of echo, dissolving reggae music into a new form altogether by exacerbating the destructive force of the genre's own bass frequencies. But because hauntology does not prescribe a particular mode of creative practice, instead just responding to cultural activity, Fisher confirms that it is best conceived of as a symptomatology, cultural rather than political, where culture is very much read, naturally, as a political economic effect. He confirms that Williams is therefore right to characterise hauntology as a kind of good postmodernism, the cultural logic of capitalism turned against itself.
Whilst Fisher remains clearly loyal to hauntology's gesture in this regard, he also recognises that this cultural diagnosis has hardly had much of a positive effect on music beyond the blogosphere. Since many of the musicians in their theoretical sights saw nothing more than the quasi-capitalist attempt to compartmentalise their activities, hauntology's philosophical symptomatology fell on its own sword. Much as I wish it weren't the case, Fisher mournfully concludes, it seems clear now that it isn't possible to bring back modernism by force of will alone. No matter whether we hope to affirm capital or negate it, the question we started with remains intact. What is to be done? Williams nonetheless has a response to Fisher's somewhat mournful critiques. He imbues the nihilism inherent to both hauntology and accelerationism's modes of critique
with an agentic imperative, much like Brassier does. Capital in its present form is incapable of delivering anything but inertia, he writes. Hence, there is a need for a very real praxis upon it, and its articulation with institutional forms. Whilst we might not yet know what to do, it is clear that something at least has to be done, and can be done. Even Land's philosophical position, whilst seemingly taking no interest in praxis, contains a kind of political encouragement in that it declares that we are already almost there. The problem with Land's philosophy for Williams, however, is that despite his apparent fidelity to the Lewis and Guattari's analysis of capitalism, he forgets that capitalist relative deterritorialisations are always usually accompanied by an immediate re-territorialisation, as determinate by the capitalist axiomatic.
Land may like capitalism, but, according to Deleuze and Guattari's own critique, capitalism will always tend towards some form of stasis. If capitalism's occasional tendency towards re-territorialisation is something to be supported, according to Marx's dialectical materialism, this is something to be effectuated by the proletariat. The shadow of Marx's Leninism is long in this regard. Williams continues that if we are to evade the dark banal fall into mere neoliberalism, we must maintain a firm belief in the horrifying and utterly negative nature of capital. As a form of politics, what this suggests is something similar to what the literary buffoon Martin Amis termed horrorism. Amis, writing for The Guardian on the fifth anniversary of 9-11, coined the term horrorism to describe a kind of maximum malevolence. Terrorism,
by contrast, it's an active process. Horrorism is something else. This is to say that terrorism is no longer just an act of paramilitarist guerrilla warfare attached to a set of demands. It is a full-blown psychic assault through which horror amounts to an unthinkable but also unforgettable spectacle. 9-11 is perhaps the primary example. An endless succession of barbaric executions on the web only further piles on the horror. The horror. This is the super-terror inspired by suicide mass murder. Just whisper the words and you fatally trample a thousand people. Williams says that he certainly enjoyed the term, if not its application. For him, horrorism conveys something of what a less literal, terroristic praxis might consist,
in the sense of what a non-dialectical amassing of negativity might mean, a horror piled upon horror, a critical mass capable of pulling the subjectivity attached to the organic human substrate through to some nether zone of dissolution, a Delusian becoming crucially without affirmation. A strange Ballardian jouissance asserts itself in the postmodern psyche. Terrorism moves beyond a political praxis and instead becomes an assault on our very sense of subjectivity, which horrifies us but which we cannot look away from. When William says he dislikes the term's application, he is arguing that the term is not useful if all it hopes to do is elevate the praxis of a group like ISIS to a privileged demonic pedestal within the Western subconscious. Horrorism is instead better put to use as a word for the psychic assault waged upon
the West by capitalism itself. The market, after all, has not delivered a utopia of free-flying desire, as the 70s pro-structuralists predicted, but rather a perfect dystopia of the genuinely inhuman, a non-effective cult mechanism truly adequate to capitalists in itself. Al-Qaeda on 9-11 brought a new heat to this cold world, a heat hot enough to melt steel beams. For Williams, whilst acknowledging that al-Qaeda are a horrific aberration, we can nonetheless admire their symbolic target, capitalism. Their hatred of Western capitalism, as far as Williams is concerned, mustn't cause a reactionary defence against it from within. We should take an inverse approach. Instead of flying the planes into symbols of Western capitalism, we should plunge the financial capitalistic contents of the towers
into the human world itself, dissolving, sundering, shattering. Williams seems to be slipping into a kind of Zizekian contrarianism here. His call for a kind of metaterrorism, operating on the plane of capital itself, is clearly untenable, and we might know that Williams later deleted much of his blog a few years later, these posts included. By the time that Williams published his most influential work, Inventing the Future, written in collaboration with Nick Cernick, he seems to have rejected this horrorism absolutely. Nevertheless, it is worth noting that despite this later recanting of his blogospheric nihilism, the title of his post is tellingly post-Land. Williams is looking for a way to move decisively beyond the edgelording of Land's 90s work. In a perverse development a few
years later, however, Land, retaining his strange fidelity to Delos and Guattari's description of a de- and re-territorialising capitalism, attempted to re-territorialise Williams' de-territorialisation of his own work. He later affirms the term horrorism absolutely, adopting it as his own. This horrorism takes the question of what is to be done firmly in its sights. Whilst he puts his horrorism firmly within the grasp of a pro-capitalist right-wing politics, it nonetheless encapsulates far more clearly Williams's form of antipraxis. He writes, Rather than resisting the desperation of the progressive ideal by terrorising its enemies, horrorism directs itself to the culmination of progressive despair in the abandonment of reality compensation. It demobilizes, demassifies and de-democratizes through subtle singular
catalytic interventions oriented to the realization of fate. The cathedral has to be horrified into paralysis. The horrorist message to its enemies. Nothing that you are doing can possibly work. What is to be done is not a neutral question The agent it invokes similarly strains towards progress This suffices to suggest a horrorist response Nothing Do nothing Your progressive praxis will come to naught in any case Despair Subside into horror You can pretend to prevail in antagonism against us But reality is your true and fatal enemy We have no interest in shouting at you we whisper gently in your ear, despair, the horror.
Here, Landry territorialises Williams' horrorism and uses it to gloat. But a horrorism from above, as far as Williams is concerned, is business as usual for capitalism. Nothing that you are doing can possibly work is the primary drive behind a deep-rooted left-wing melancholy. To do nothing is the best response for the neo-reactionary radical conservative, who may as well sit back and relax as a depressive leftism rips itself apart. A horrorism from below, however, may well be a kind of metaterrorism exercised by the proletariat against the bourgeoisie. You need us, and nothing you are doing can possibly eradicate us or our discontent. This certainly seems to be the message behind ISIS's maximum malevolence. Two decades on from the declaration of the war on terror, and far longer since the West first intervened in the Middle East,
It is clear that there is nothing the West can do that will remove the threat of insurgency from the desert landscape. The result is that this exoticised space of otherness now takes up considerable real estate in the West's military minds. What chance does the proletariat have of exercising a similar psychic takeover that similarly results in the bourgeois turning on itself from within, turning its back on the very principles it claims to be waging a war to protect? Despite the provocative contrarianism of this kind of horrorism, which looks to ISIS as a strange model for political praxis, Williams' goal nonetheless remains either communism, or more provocatively, an as-yet unknown form of post-capitalism. By driving capitalism towards an accelerated position, the conditions for something resembling a communist revolution might be engendered, he suggests.
However, this cannot be achieved through anything presently resembling leftist praxis. What he calls soft left activities, socialist parties, unions etc, merely arrest the situation as it stands, frequently operating as a part of the axiomatic machinery, ensuring the stability of the homeostatic form of capitalism. Instead, we should entertain the notion that far from ushering in a downfall of capitalism, acceleration beyond a certain point radically alters the nature of the processes of capital itself. ISIS's horrorism has certainly achieved this in the West. In what other ways might we encourage a radical mutation of the system itself, perpetually effectuating a radical mutation of the kinds of subjectivations that capitalism makes possible?