#Accelerate; The Accelerationist Reader II (Session 4)

Hello? I just hope we don't lose the session before we even start. I see that we're live. We're live? Yeah, it looks live to me. Okay, great. I don't... Let's do it. Hello? Can you hear me? Yeah, we can hear you. Mine still says going live. I kind of don't like it. Okay, hello everyone. Welcome to the last session of Accelerate to seminar here at the new Center for Research and Practice.

Tonight we're having Patricia Reid as our guest. Okay guys, mine says fail to go live. What is it doing on your side? It says live. It says live? Yeah, it still says live for me so it might be worth it if you try to reconnect him. Jason, I'm going to go and come back and maybe you want to test the YouTube quickly to make sure that it's working. Really sorry about this, guys. I feel embarrassed. I'll be back in one sec. Okay. On my side, it says live, too. But, yeah, I'll test. I'm just going to go and come back.

Thank you. So I'm on the website, and it seems to be streaming.

Yes. To YouTube. Yes, thank you. Hello Jose. Okay so we are on. So tonight we are going to start the session with Jessie doing her presentation on Patricia Reed's text in the reader. Then we are going to have Patricia with us to sort of like help us go over the her piece but also what she thinks of the whole concept of acceleration and the kind of relationship she finds between her work both as a writer and a thinker but also as an artist with the whole movement.

So I'm going to pass the mic to Jessie but I just want to say this is the order I thought is the best to go about it. We're going to do Jesse and after Jesse we're going to talk with Patricia and after Patricia we will pass the mic to Jose to give us his ideas on Ray Bracier's piece. After that we're going to go to Robert's. So after that I'm going to present on the manifesto and then we're going to end with Robert, right? That's kind of like the order.

Okay, so Patricia, you can start. Sorry, Jessie. I'm really sorry. No problem. And Patricia, feel free at any point to jump in and speak to any of these things. I'm not sure if people would prefer to just look at the images on their own or if you want me to share my own screen. I don't know if there's a preference. I like it when you can share the screen. I think that works really well in this setting, personally. Yep, I can. Probably is when I've done it. Sure. I can definitely do that. So in reading Patricia's piece, I was really interested in this kind of critique in some

ways that she presents of the manifesto and these new kind of aphorisms that she presents in relation to these prescriptions, the seven prescriptions of accelerationism. And so as I was reading through, I was thinking about the idea of practice and what these might look like in practice in a way and I myself am both a pedagogue and an artist so I wanted to try and put this into a format that I could potentially share which relates to some of the prescriptions themselves. So easy to share, easier to communicate maybe and a chance to experiment with some of the writing so I created this little graphic guide in the style of I'm sure you've seen some of them before some like

different ways of understanding theory so I will try and share this now and see if it works I haven't done this before but I think you go over the green button to the left and you click on it and then it allows you to screen share cool good yes it's gonna take Yeah, there we go. I see it. Okay. I can see it. I can see it. Awesome. So, yeah. These are all open to discussion. I was thinking that this would be a nicer way to present these things instead of me just kind of rehashing exactly what was said and kind of working towards this kind of effectuation of a collective thought.

This is something that really resonated with me with Patricia's writing. I feel so strange because Patricia's right there. So, hello. Okay. And so, yeah. We start, I guess, with the first prescription here. Have you been in class with Patricia before? She's really nice. No, I sent her a message to introduce myself, and I'm hoping to take the one with her and Diane in the spring, so I'm looking forward. She's really good in class, so I wouldn't be nervous. She's real cool. Okay, cool. So yeah, the first kind of prescription is this idea of reorientation or reorientate. And I think what Patricia is trying to do is actually reorientate the notion of accelerationism in this kind of first section.

And she references the kind of title and the hashtag, which is really interesting to me because when I first started seeing this, I too was like, what's going on? And kind of would read back and forth on Facebook or on Twitter and thought it was, well, sometimes when I see these things, I can't help but think it's like a pissing contest. And unfortunately, when there could be really, really interesting things happening within these new, I guess, articulations. So she mentions this in the first section and how kind of initial response to accelerationism is either kind of situates itself on these two poles between either, you know, just rehashing, so to speak, or using a hashtag underneath

anything that might be interpreted as accelerationism, or else kind of treating it as this neo-futurist fascist travesty as she writes. So I started with this little fictionalized Twitter conversation here. And really in each of these sections she kind of puts forward some, yeah, recommendations, some ways to proceed. And so in the first section here she talks about making the idea of accelerationism a verb, so it's accelerate, it's kind of in motion as all politics is a doing of thought. It's not a connotation of novelty, which I think some people might read it as, but rather an imminent re. And I think this relates to our past conversation around the idea of accelerationism hasn't yet occurred, hasn't happened, but everyone

is potentially an accelerationist. And direct existing energies in as yet inexistent directions, which we've also been talking about in terms of the kind of overarching aim of accelerationism. So this is our first image. I don't know if anyone wants to... I wanted to bring out this important thing here in the text. What is so significant about going from is to could be or what Patricia calls the out to be, right? sort of like that very minimal difference there is like makes the world of difference, right? Because like what you were just saying, it announces that the Accelerator project hasn't even kind of started.

It ought to be rather than is, right? But also kind of put a lot of this other emancipatory sort of like demands into a more sober sort of like place, right? Like imagine, even when you say like all lives matter, right? It's actually all lives ought to matter and all lives actually don't matter because if they did matter, you will need to go and say all lives matter. When you say women are equal to men, it's kind of a little bit of a false setting because if they were equal, there would be no need for an equality movement or feminism, right? So it's like women ought to be equal to men.

Pay to women ought to be equal to men. And this little distinction here is immensely useful in sort of like knowing where you stand with things by not kind of like assuming things and then building wrong false assumptions on top of this sort of like temporal kind of disjunction. Go ahead. Yeah, I think that it comes up in multiple sections, this idea of the world as it is versus as it could be or as it ought to be. And I often think of this as the world as if, so this speculation kind of is important. Of course, we'll get to that as well. So yeah, kind of recognizing that there may be some, not issues, but some ways that this

kind of title, this label has to be dealt with I think is the first section and it involves kind of a reorientation in terms of how philosophy is thought in a lot of ways and kind of can't depend on these ways of knowing that maybe we have articulated in the past. And so that leads to the second part which is eccentricate. And so Patricia says that although there's maybe some issues here, we need to preserve some of the attributes of this term. There's a reason why it's kind of caught on or become popularized. And she kind of maybe suggests that it's because acceleration is already operating. And I really liked this kind of this image of the spinning amusement park

ride. So like a spinning amusement park ride with our bodies immovably glued to the edges, we may be whirling nauseatingly fast, but we haven't really moved an inch. So we have this kind of this this thrilling ride and all of these changes that are happening and this kind of you know change itself has changed with this acceleration in our contemporary moment but it's not gone far enough and I think that's another theme that we keep coming back to is that we haven't gone far enough and maybe philosophy hasn't gone far enough and so it's here on the kernel of stasis, Patricia writes, this kernel of stasis that the call to accelerate needs to take hold, dislodging stagnant conceptual orientations in favor of eccentric, out-of-center

attractions where we may discover trajectories of a vectorial and not rotational or circulatory sort. And so, yeah. Sorry? At the end of your second part, I would like to say a few words. That's all. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, any interruptions? I mean, the words are all there. I basically tried to take some of the kind of prescriptions out and list them almost in a way. So this idea of a call to eccentricate would be like dislodging stagnant conceptual orientations in favor of those things that I just said, new coordinations, generating impetus by magnetizing new norms, and decalcifying trajectories of known orientations. So again, I think this is a nice kind of summation of some of the ideas we've been talking about

with the other articles. Yeah, this metaphor of going around the circle faster and faster, which is sort of like the new liberal or capitalist acceleration versus a vectorial one, right? Has been in a lot of people's sort of like mind. It's a great sort of like way of distinguishing between capitalist acceleration and like a more sort of like productive acceleration. But also, it's... Like a circular as opposed to a spiral. Mm-hmm. A spiral or like going somewhere or always returning to the same place, right? And only going faster and faster. But also it's a good way of sort of distinguishing between left and right acceleration

that conflates the circle with victoral. The only thing I add to it is like lately it's like a downward spiral too. It's like it's getting faster. It's not even returning to where it was, but it's just returning to like a past. It's like sort of like we're almost like in a circular movement towards the past, you know, so which makes it even like more crucial to do something about it, to put it on a right, to put this on a forward trajectory. So that's all I wanted to add at the end of the second part. Yeah, I would just like to say also that if you kind of imagine this rotation, I mean, the image that you have is quite perfect because you have this kind of, yeah, you could almost see it like a solar system or so.

So basically what the argument is is that this kind of kernel, although we're kind of going around quickly, the kernel hasn't changed. And if you actually look at the proper definition of acceleration, it's not about speed exclusively. It's about the rate of change. so you cannot qualify pure speed in a sense as just I mean, yeah, what am I trying to say if that kernel of normativity has remained the same around which you revolve, then nothing has changed, you've just sort of like increased the velocity but you haven't actually accelerated before so that's just a kind of also important distinction in the metaphor of that kind of whirling around.

Can I ask a question? Go ahead. Or should I wait for later? If your question's for Jesse, ask it now, otherwise you can wait later. Well, I think when it comes to acceleration and speed, Jason has written a lot about how there is like a topology of speed, like in his engagement with Aurelio. And in a way, acceleration is almost like a redistribution of that speed or an eccentrication in this vocabulary of speed.

So Jason might have something to say about that if you didn't want to move on. Yeah, I can just say real quick, in Virilio that's referred to as the hierarchy of speeds, that there's, you know, kind of the wealthier you are, the more powerful you are, the higher speeds you tend to move at. Think of like supersonic jet, traveling by airplane and things like that as opposed to traveling by greyhound or having to use public transit, that there is a hierarchy of speeds that's directly connected to political economy. One thing I really liked about Patricia's piece was that it really made a distinction between speed and acceleration. Acceleration does not just simply mean moving faster,

because right now that's kind of hierarchically distributed. So we have the hierarchy of speeds. Go ahead, Jessie. Yeah, and I think that that gets built out a little bit more in relation to temporality, especially in the last section, like the abstractify, so we can talk more about speed, I think, in relation to time in that little section as well. Okay, so this is great too, so like any input is awesome. This is hopefully what the piece was meant to do. Okay, so we have our next one here, which is speculate, and I've spent a little bit of time writing on this idea of speculative futures in relation

to education, so this is something I was really interested in. So I kind of created a bit of a ridiculous figure here. This person, who happens to be a man, is currently projecting an eccentric future, which involves something that is not nostalgic nor based on impending doom. It departs from threat of cataclysm, employing techniques instead of speculation. It's a prognostication beyond vague assertions, a becoming possible of the impossible, a thinking-doing matrix that goes beyond, oops, typo, it's fast, there's no E because you have to read it fast, beyond pure diagnostics or historical exemplification. And then there's a direct quote here that says, remaining in the temporality of what

is or what was clouds the very futurity that could or ought to be uncancelled. And I think that's a direct reference to the manifesto, which states, you know, the future is cancelled. Instead the future is prognostic and its tense must evolve towards the anticipatory. So I suited this guy up with the necessary things to project into such an eccentric future and a speculative future. So Patricia kind of outlines the idea of risk, playing with sets of givens, a fidelity to calculability, a divorce, I like this idea, the divorce of possibility from probability and an ethics of non-presentness. And I don't know, I think for me it would be interesting

to hear maybe from Patricia especially, I'm sure she'll talk about it more after, so, but I'm curious of this idea of non-presentness. I don't know if you wanted to speak to that a little bit, Patricia, or if anyone had any other questions or comments here. I was going to add something. The difference between sort of like wild speculation and more like sober speculation has to do with like speculation as an enchanting sort of like pseudo-technology or speculation as an actual tool.

For me, and you know what I mean, when you encounter speculative writers or people who consider themselves speculative realists or speculative, you know what I mean, all sorts of people who associate with that term, you can easily see these kind of like distinctions that I've made for myself. You know what I mean? The enchanting speculation which is kind of like wild and crazy and then speculation that is sort of like grounded in some idea of inventing a future and understands how sort of like risk and risk and hegemony or risk and hype the way Nidzon and Bichler put it play a hand in hand role in kind of like managing the sort of like the managing the risk. You manage

the risk with hype. Because you need to be able to sort of like, speculation is not just like speculating, but it's about how you're going to use the act of speculation to benefit or to move the speculation where you want it to go. But go ahead. What were you saying? Oh, I was just saying, yeah, I've been really interested in that idea. And Lazzarato writes about the idea of belief, and this comes into Patricia's notion of maybe the fictionalization and this idea of belief not being necessarily an ideology or a value system, but a disposition to act. And so when I think about this speculative action, I think it's this idea of belief that

Lazzarato puts forward and that is that there's some sort of action attached to it. Yeah, so So that's one thing that I was thinking about too. I don't know, Patricia, do you want to comment here? I think, I mean it's kind of funny because I wrote this maybe about almost a year ago now, or yeah, several months ago, and then I've had like a lot of introduction to other sort of, let's say, reintroduced to kind of a lot of elements of analytic philosophy that I was ignoring before being a kind of very continental French aficionado so there's certain things like when I read this kind of an and when it's when the quotes are taken out it even like I'm like oh

God did I say that okay because I'm kind of worried in this I think I would have to update a few of these assertions to have them read a little bit less theologically like when I read here fidelity to incalculable future and divorce possibility from probability these are in some ways I would still like of course stand by these words but I think that they would need some more qualification because they could end up just turning into some like random leap of faith which does not help you which has nothing to do with calls for epistemic acceleration for example. So that's just like a self critique that I would point

out that this would be a move. If I were to write it right now and today I think I would have to very much qualify some of these terms to help them get out of that trap of a purely theologically sounding imperative. So just to point that out that I will update myself as well. But I think that's one of the exciting things about any of this speculative writing is that it is open. It's very hard, I find, especially in these kinds of things, like these registrations, like when I might, if I've been recorded or these kinds of things, there's like a closeness that happens and makes it difficult to, because these articulations, yeah, I think are meant

to be moving as you said, these are meant to be verbs in a way, like INGs of the idea, so I understand. But speaking of theological speculations, do you want to move on to the next one here? I made a beautiful little poster here. Oops, sorry. So fictionalize. You may You may recognize this image or something similar. And so it was written, we must learn from the successes of the theological itself, for it is belief that is necessary for the construction of speculative futures. And here I think is where that idea of belief might be, could probably be worked out.

But the question is, what sort of future do we want to see performed? Such a question calls for imaginative experimentation and an unprovable belief in something other. excavate a discursive space for such fictions for the soul or will of collective passions." So in the section called Fictionalize, Patricia kind of talks about this idea of in order to build on the so-called success of the enemy entails not just an establishment of counter think tanks or redirection of production towards other ends, but also a learning of the successes of the theological itself. So I thought this was pretty interesting. I'm just reading through my notes here. I kind of condensed some of the, or tried to condense some of the thoughts,

of course, in a bit of an ironic sense in this little poster. But what I think is interesting here is Patricia starts to kind of talk about this idea that a fiction needs to be unleashed upon ossified norms, so relating back to that kind of kernel of stability that we talked about, and one of the things she starts to bring up is the idea of trying to get away from even this idea of the human powers, human modes of being, and so there's a call to create a friction that lacerates and opens the subject toward what awaits on the periphery of epistemic certainty. Yeah, so that's the little summation of that section.

Comments? Yeah, I was going to say, can you hear me? Yeah. Yeah, I had some comments too after. Sure. The qualification that it's like, I mean I'm going to be a general because I'd like just like put the idea of time and time into it, right? And this relates more to maybe what Ray's essay is about but like speculation is like it involves history, it involves past and present and future, right? It's like you got like and the way to qualify the speculation is basically knowing the, having a metric for recognizing what was accomplished from a certain point to a certain point,

and what can be accomplished, knowing this distance, understanding and measuring this distance, and then knowing how to use risk and faith, or risk and hype, risk and hegemony, to kind of like go where you want to go, right? So it's not like a speculation that is not based on information about present and past, and it's just speculation, it's just speculation, right? But the qualified speculation that I'm talking about is entangled with the idea of present and past and has a metric for knowing how we got from A to B and then how to use this sort of like what we know from this temporal shift

and how to put that information, how to put risk and hype in the service of that information and then desire and move forward. So that's sort of like what I was thinking of how time gets implicated in this. But Petra also wanted to say something, but maybe after Patricia, go ahead. Yeah, just to kind of reiterate what you were saying, There's a fairly recent-ish book called Speculate This by an anonymous collective, like Uncertain Comments is the name of the thing. And they more or less, they kind of just distinction, yeah, because we have this term has been kind of hijacked by the finance industry.

So it only speculates on, it kind of conflates ontology with epistemology and speculates on what it can wager on, like risk management or so on, something like this. So the point of, and the uncertainty comments, people named this as, you could say, affirmative speculation, so this would kind of allude to what you were saying as a sort of, let's say, unspeculative speculation in the end. Whereas the relation, of course, it's not just riding on a blind leap of faith, because that's just kind of fanaticism, which is a nice distinction Toscano writes about. But it's not basically foreclosing on the possibilities afforded by new systemic perturbations,

be that epistemic, be that evental, or what have you. So just to point out that there's also a really nice resource too that maps out the history of speculation in that Okay, Petra, you wanted to say something? Sure. I think that the term norms came up, and that has been very interesting to me in terms of norm core and a little project I have of a spectrum of norm core, and it connects to feminism course too where we were talking about the nature of norms and like what that maybe

there's like um another position to take to norms like a recuperation of normativity in a way we think is interesting so if you had anything to say about norms as such I think we would all find that useful. That's all I have to say. Alright, are you asking Patricia? Or I can comment and then maybe Patricia can comment too, because I'm interested in that as well. In my thesis, there was a chapter on creativity, I called it the C word. It was an Arrested Development reference, I don't know if anyone... No? Not funny? Okay. Yeah, no, no, no. No, no. I'm just kidding. So, yeah, in education, creativity has become this new, you know, the new savior.

This is what will save us. And lots of people write about it in education, but also in the world of business, which then happens, you know, makes its way into education, like the Daniel Pink's of the world. And so, yeah, I tried to kind of write about this in relation to my problematic and looked at the idea of normcore as an expository kind of example in relation to capitalism and how capitalism, you know, is this difference engine, so constantly creating these new differences which can then be capitalized on. And so I talked about it more in terms of this, like, creation of another, yet another difference, but that is, I guess, a difference that is sameness itself so making sameness a difference in order to capitalize on it

so it's a little bit maybe of a different I think you're talking about the maybe generative capacity or potentials of reclaiming norms or I mean we don't even know what we're talking about we're just trying to maybe find something so I mean whatever you want to say is good for me oh yeah cool well I can and I can send you some just the little writing that I did on it I also just think it's a really interesting process how these trends get created and that maybe this relates to the question of speculation in that these like K-Hole was the kind of group that created this normcore trend and you know speculates about it's their they say it's the answer to mass envy or hipsterdom which is this idea of you know difference is the new commodity so you know the more different you are the more status you have

these kinds of things. So they actually propose it as a... Do you think that is what they're saying? I mean, I've read, I've gotten into that text a lot, and I think that it's more about, I guess, you know, I'd love to hear that that is what they're saying, but the way I read it was closer to that it is, I guess, a temporary useful form of camouflage in in like you know a temporary condition maybe I was going to comment that like that like what there's there's like there's like norm and normativity as part of like new rationalism and then there's the norm

core the way the way Cahill understands it and actually to give credit to myself my mother was a fashion designer and I grew up around clothing and I'm very much interested in the idea of fashion. And I've kind of jab, jab, jab. Not to interrupt, but everyone should open the link Jesse just linked because it's like essential for this conversation. So sorry, go ahead. But to me from the get-go, my idea of fashion was not as a placeholder for identity. I never really believed that. And I never really thought of fashion as a place where you express who you are or like you uphold some form of like selfhood.

But quite contrary, and this is sort of like confirmed what Petra was saying, that like fashion is a camouflage in which you reinvent yourself. of. Because most people assume that what's on the surface have some form of like direct or you know what I mean, direct relationship to what's under the surface. So that allows you to utilize the surface to do what you want. And then in case of norm code what happens is it's a break from that idea again of fashion as a place to display your difference. So a place to display your difference. So it becomes sort of like a camouflage of hiding and becoming generic so you can actually create some form of alienation in which you can then

be, develop who you are or become someone that is not sort of like constantly flashing out who they are but they're kind of like working on it or like they're evolving inside this shell, which is this generic shell. And I think that's the strength of K-Hole. So we should move on because Patricia also want to talk to us. Can I just add something about norms quickly? Just to kind of get back to what you know, like the distinction between the norm core and then this kind of like neo-rationalist discussion about norms. I think the main point about the norms that is very convincing to me is you could say there's been a tendency in a lot of poststructuralist or pre-poststructuralist political theory

that has been making so much emphasis on the margins and on the marginal and so on and so forth as if that's a strategy. Whereas with accelerationism, it's a turn to reoccupy the center, which means the fabrication of a new headwhip. This is like straight from the mouths of Nick and Alex. So it's about fabricating a new hegemonic project, which would require as well the construction of new norms. So it's not about like lamenting norms, as was the kind of case in a lot of my art education or something like that. It's about actually constructing new ones in the service of a new hegemonic. So I'll just say that.

Yes, do you want to continue? Yeah, and I think that was a beautiful transition and also kind of a nice summary of that little discussion. So speaking kind of I guess of this norms, this idea of kind of reconstructing or recapitulating norms, we have the call to geometricize. So I pulled out some kind of key questions that Patricia asks here. where she sets the tone or the setting, I guess, the scene of us living within this period of history classified as the Anthropocene, and I'm sure we're all a little bit familiar with different writings in relation to this. And so she talks about how this has produced a rift in what it means to commit to humanity,

and so these questions, is it a commitment to the humanity of the now or humanity of species, and also identifies that social and political processes, especially like parliamentary processes, are based on a timeline that's kind of hinged on this individual human scale, which yields myopic and limited responses to self-sustaining processes that might evolve at a scale of temporality evading human perception. And so this kind of distinction between the anthropocentrically centered, I guess, timeline of how we perceive time and how we perceive life within that time and then those outside of that anthropocentric thought. So the recommendations or prescriptions here are to acknowledge a radical asymmetry of

temporal scaling, to perceptually engineer cognitive and effective openings with this in mind, adopting a geometry that augments phenomenological constraints where we can perceive objects beyond analytic isolation so bringing in maybe some more object-oriented thinking here and then expand perceptions of time beyond metric units and so I don't know Mo that if you want to even I was thinking about this when you were talking about time and how in speculating we have to be aware of these kind of movements of time in the past or how time or sorry how things have unfolded in relation to time in the past and And there's this assertion here that maybe this might be limiting in a way or that this

thinking of time in terms of this kind of linear metric unit might actually limit some of the ways that we might think ontology to subject. I'm just going to like, I'm just going to give an example. Igor wrote some interesting stuff on the site. It's from Reza. So I don't know if you guys want to pay attention to that too. You just have to kind of keep an eye on so many different things. But basically, you know, like one of the things that I've been interested in, you know, living in New York, you get to go to see like, like I go to see like the European painting halls at the Met quite frequently. And I love to go to the MoMA's permanent collection because I'm working on a project.

Hopefully one day it'll be realized, which involves sort of like doing a history of art, but from a particular point of view or position, right? So when you look at sort of like the changes that happens to painting after the introduction of photography and after the breakdown of sort of like historical painting and realism, which is what was happening like before then, what you notice is some of the stuff that, some of the stuff or like sort of like similar stuff to what Patricia is talking about here. You see sort of like artists are actively sort of like saying like, okay, now we got this machine that does a realist thing. How can I extend or how can I create new geometries? Basically,

that's what they're doing. If you go from Seurat to from Van Gogh, from like post-impressionism from Impressionism to Post-Impressionism, what really they're doing, I mean, what they're doing, I don't mean they're consciously doing that, but what they're also doing on top of what they think they're doing is that they're precisely doing this kind of work, which is they're saying like, okay, let's extend what it means to approach the world. and since the perspectival way of looking now is being outsourced to technology, we can do other stuff that is going to extend and expand. And that's precisely, I think, what Patricia is talking about here.

I mean, I gave a literal example, but there's many, many different ways of going about this. But in relation to art, which is some place I come from, And some people here in the class are either interested in being in art or, like Patricia, they're already in art. So I thought this example might help. Robert, were you going to say something? Okay. You're mute. Anyways, you can't say anything. Okay. I had a question. Go ahead. Okay. So you mentioned the limited individual scale versus, like, humanity as such. I'm thinking about that, like in those two abstracts, right? Do I have that right?

Yeah, and Patricia, you can probably, well, you definitely could speak to this more a little bit. These are my interpretations, so. Yeah, it was basically... Yeah, go ahead, sorry. Oh, yeah, I was just wondering if whoever wanted to or whoever would prefer to, if you could say more about those two together, the limited individual versus humanity as such. And I guess I suppose I'll say in what context I'm interested in it briefly is thinking about why global warming is a catastrophe, even though the largest part of the catastrophe is going to be beyond the lifetime of most of these limited individuals, and it is a catastrophe instead of humanity as such.

Whatever you had to say about that. Yeah, I think, I mean, I think that, I mean, obviously there's no resolution for this concept in this very short text, and I don't think anyone has a particular resolution to this. It was more about pointing at the sort of inconsistencies. Because there was a kind of, yeah, so obviously like you don't want to put one to have a tyranny on the other, because we still have to live in a kind of, you know, in a kind of present, but at the same time just to look at how the infrastructure of our current like, you know, say democratic political cycles are not congruent with anything that would, like anything beyond a very

myopic perspective. So, this is like quite a dangerous move I think. And it also, you know, speaking to Reza over the summer as well, it becomes clear that a lot of these projects are speaking about a multi-generational perspective, if not more. And how would we develop an infrastructure of politics that could take that into account? Is it something that we want to commit to? And just kind of to throw out those questions. So obviously there's no resolution here, but it's just to point out that inconsistency, and of course, you know, with this kind of state of contemporary politics, particularly in places like the US and Europe and so on and so forth, they're just kind of enacting decisions to be popular and get votes.

This has no consequence for any sort of like long term, I mean, I would have a really hard time to imagine any contemporary politician today making a speech, promising that what we're going to do today is going to yield amazing results in 80 years. No one would vote for them. So it's just to point out that a certain infrastructure is not ideal or optimized for certain conditions that we're facing that are like you said, concerning generational time span. I was thinking of this idea that I've been having and it's kind of like we talked about it I think prior to going live on a first class which is the most effective way

the most effective way when you look back at the history of our species the most effective ways that change has been implemented or changes have taken good changes have taken place or even bad ones but we are interested in good ones have been not necessarily true politics but through a long duray of changes that are mostly a result of science and changes in worldview that are way deeper than changes affected by politics, right? And what politics is is basically a sort of like a shortcut to sort of like guarantee some kind of change.

or sort of like put in proper use the good knowledge or the good paradigmatic change, guarantee it, put it in use, activate it, you know, update bad knowledge with good knowledge in a shortcut way, right? So really what we're talking about here is how to put the shortcut in the service of the long term without it sort of like, without the shortcut being able to cancel itself and not really be a shortcut, right? See, really, that's what you're talking about when you say a politician, a politician, let's not put the present under the tyranny of the future, right? Or like how a politician has to sort of like navigate that, right?

How to set infrastructure plans that will still get them elected for the next four years, right? But also make us, make you think of changes we can do to the political system so politics is not so much of a shortcut all the time, which is like a medium cut rather than a shortcut. And you know there's also secrecy, right? And secrecy is one of those things that Nick and Alex and others as a concept Reza have dabbed into, right? Like Interstellar movie, right? In Interstellar they built the spaceship hiding it from a democratic infrastructure because they know they won't be able to get money for it or budget for it, right? So basically it becomes a secret project to sort of like make sure that it gets funding. So they have to funnel money. So that also opened up a whole bunch of Pandora boxes about like is that a way to go or not?

Is secrecy part of this or not? So Jesse, you want to continue on? Sorry, yes, I will. Okay. And I think all of these, I guess, pieces can and should be read together. Maybe presenting it like this in kind of a linear sequence, it's not enough. But because I think what we were just talking about relates to the next two sections as well. well. So this idea of the common, so common eyes. And so again, I pulled a quote on the left here that I thought was really pertinent. So, accelerationism recognizes that retreating solely into concrete localization or exploring blips of negation will not suffice, for neither

can endure nor fabricate the processual and affirmative nature of grand systemic re-engineering necessary and reorienting our course and modes of life. So I think that actually is a recapitulation of what maybe Mo was just talking about in a way, and this kind of like, not the shortcut, but a middle cut, which I kind of like. And so the prescriptions here are a call for a situated universality. And so this section I'd really be curious to hear more about, especially from Patricia, because it kind of critiques the manifesto in terms of this kind of leaving out of the violence and injustices of a universalist or modernist project, like what that actually project did.

And also something that I'm interested in, how this manifesto is kind of coming out of mostly Euro, white, male discourses. And so maybe I think it's taken on a different, I guess, speed or a different dialogue since then, but I'd be curious to hear more about that original thought. So here, yeah, there's a call for a situated universality, a sort of doing that effectuates thought, a production of a generic thought. and here I think of this in terms of maybe this Deleuzian notion of generality, and a site qualified as infinite and consumable, where success is dependent on imitation, assimilation, and shareability,

as opposed to the idea of success dependent on propriety, so owning something. And so, again, even with creating this little piece, I was interested in something that could be shared in its creation. So yeah, any comments, thoughts there? I'm kind of rambling all over the place, sorry. Was this the last slide or you have one more? I think there is one more. Okay, so maybe we should go to the second one too and then we'll just like leave it to Patricia to kind of wrap it up. That's great. She's already been with us almost like an hour, so. Yeah, for sure. And so the last one, abstractify, and so again I just pulled out a few notions here that

this idea of abstraction shapes new modes of existence. So the section actually starts with how, talking about how abstraction can be potentially, I guess, limiting in certain ways, like abstract processes of value extraction, for instance, in contemporary capitalism, but also that abstraction is what produces existence, new modes of existence, so the question is how can abstraction be deployed towards alternative modes of life, distributions of exchange, production, etc. And the recommendation or prescription here is that abstraction must be accelerated so as to accommodate new ontological positions and it kind of acts as a mode of affirmative violence which produces a separation from what is towards what could be. So this kind of takes us back to the beginning or to different points of the piece, this

distinction between what is and what could be or what ought to be. That's all. I just want to say a couple words about abstraction and then we can go to Patricia. And what I want to stay, again, let's take it back to art, right? And let's take it back to our understanding of the world, which is there is no knowledge that is not abstract already. The whole act of creating new knowledge means a form of abstraction. whether this knowledge is like produced, whether this world produced by you in your head when you wake up in the morning and take a look at the world.

So the question is not abstraction or not. All realistic paintings are abstraction as much as they're realistic. It's just that they use this geomorphism of reality of the world to hide what abstract element is included. In fact, when you look at the history of art, you basically are looking at the history of abstraction. All of it is abstraction. And again, the question is what kind of abstraction do you want or what kind of abstraction suits your need and what kind of abstractions are tenuable, what kind of abstractions are possible and what are they going to do, what is the impact, the ramification of a particular abstraction and where is it going to take you.

And you know what I mean? There's so much Marxist stuff coming from Marx, which is on the negative aspects of abstraction in economy. That really, a different type of abstraction is the only way to move forward from this bad abstraction of capitalism. What else is going to like, we can never return to any kind of non-abstracted time, even if it's like the prehistory. I just don't understand. Anyways, Patricia, do you want to like, if there's any kind of like wrapping up notes, because, you know, we did it in a way with you in an interactive way, and we spent the time. You've already done a lot of like what you wanted to do.

It's just that there's any other stuff you want to talk about. Maybe a little bit of like how is it useful in your art practice, and how has it been useful in your writing practice, and also a little bit of if you think it's good. history of you becoming familiar with this scene how did you arrive at this scene and you are Canadian and you know we come from a particular background yeah sure um I'm gonna share some slides with you that is that cool yes I'm gonna make you the presenter and then you can do whatever you want okay um because these are some of diagrams that I made I always make diagrams when I have to do diagrams that were made in relation to the texts.

Yeah, so, sorry, what was your question? How did I come to it? Well there's one philosopher here, Armin Abhanissim, the co-editor of the Accelerationist book, had been organizing a lot of talks and discussions from people associated with this now defunct speculative realism term. So I just kind of got introduced by participating in a lot of these sort of things, you know, Prila is a spectator, and just kind of had a similar perspective of many people who say, say, okay, how can we see these innovations and thought that are produced here, and what

is their kind of logical consequences when mapping them, like politically or socially or economically. So that's kind of was a sort of motivation to get very lucky to be in Berlin where there's a lot of free stuff to do, lectures to go to. There was also a quite well-known conference here on accelerationism. And I guess that's what prompted the text contribution that I did, which was initially just some kind of rant on Facebook. Excuse me. because I either saw people mainly from the art world just trashing it or people kind of taking it on, you know, it's like the beginning of the text,

taking it on board without really kind of reflecting on the nuances of it and the problems. So that's what kind of this kind of rant then turned into something slightly more formalized in the book itself. So that's kind of the outline of, yeah, my particular interest in it, I would say. Or how it came to be. Do you want to talk more about the diagrams or do you have other stuff to add? Not so much. I mean, I don't know if it's helpful to send these diagrams because they kind of illustrate some of the... points sections in the text I know they are because we're doing a glossary

and we might be able to use some other in the development of the glossary so if you don't mind if you email me I'll share them privately on the classroom so like the Google classroom environment with people in the classroom will be lovely yep no problem um yes I like how that's coming for this is it whenever I have to write text I have to diagram things in advance because that's That's just how I kind of, the arguments start to make sense. So, hence everything has a design. Also the graphic design for the cover of the book. Yes. Yes. Right. No, because I work as an artist, designer and writer. So it's kind of nice when these three things come together. And I actually think that a lot of the communities that are starting to assemble around some

of these ideas also tend to be a little bit like polymorphous individuals, like people that aren't just doing one thing, they have this other foot in this sort of like pragmatic space and I kind of enjoy the affordance of this kind of community that seems to be assembling around certain ideas, that is not like Jessie said, just turning into a pissing contest of just like purely isolated philosophical ideas, but because they are precisely arguing for a certain like infrastructural or structural tractability, that means to me that it is a massively collaborative project that no one field is going to be able to tackle. So it's about like how we can use certain capacities to kind of

build these strange amalgams of doing that and the news center is also part of that strategy as well I would say like and we have to start experimenting with it and get implicit basically. These are examples where like people talk about like oh they're just a bunch of white straight dudes they don't realize that you know it might have started that way but the whole multiplicity thing that Alex and Nate talk about in the manifesto has really shown itself in practice to actually work because the thought has attracted people from all

sorts of ranks and places and has not been sort of like rejecting them or trying to remain sort of like a puritan or some form of like a clique. You know, from a bunch of Facebook notes to getting up in a conference speaking to writing a piece for the reader next, right? It's like that's how, that's also like, I hate the word organic because there's thoughts and things. But that's how you sort of like became part of something. Sure. Meanwhile, maintaining your own sort of like practice as an artist, as an educator and whatever else you're doing. And that's how I feel. or like, you know, the way me and Amy kind of like connected was through like another acceleration, a conference in New York, right?

I just got upset, a few things, Amy liked it, she contacted me, and then we became kind of like friends. And yeah, so it's like, you know what I mean? The way me and Jason met was very sort of like similar to this. Right. Yeah, well, it's been great having you. You know, I don't know if you guys know or not, but like both Amy and, both Amy and Patricia are on a board of directors of the new center so they are sort of like part of our team in a way, sort of like supervising what we do and legislate what things we can and cannot do and they're great and we're grateful to have them well thanks for having me today it was really we invited you guys because we wanted you on the team thanks Jesse also for your very

yeah I'm very humbled by your work. So thanks for all your effort. No, thanks. It's really shocking to see it. Okay. Patricia's approachable through her News Center email. Patricia.read at the News Center.org if you guys want to keep in touch with her. That will be the email. Thank you so much for your participation. Yeah, my pleasure. So I will, should I sign out then now? You can sign out, but please make sure to email me the images so I can post them to the classroom. I will. I'll do that right away before heading off to bed. Thanks, guys, and have a great rest of the class. Yes, this is our last class. Bye.

Thanks, Patricia. We'll see you. Bye, Amy. See you soon. See you. Yeah. Okay, so why don't we just move to Jose and try to get, in my opinion, this piece and Reza's piece are like the two philosophical grounding of the whole Accelerate and Prometheanism. So maybe, I'm sure Jesse has done great work preparing for that. I don't know if you think it's necessary to give a biography of Ray Bracier or a trajectory of what did he do and where does he come from? Do you have any Any notes on Ray? I mean, the brief biographical information I know is that he was a student at Warwick,

loosely associated with the one conference on spec realism. He actually put it together. Ray and Alberto Toscano put that conference together. Okay. And invited a bunch of people to sort of like think about what the limitations of continental philosophy at the turn of the 21st century and what what directions or what possibilities are available to philosophy and so like the term speculative realism was was invented for that conference mm-hmm you know so hell was at the conference he said because he was like a goldsmith so he kind of like went to the conference and then a lot of people sort of like a lot of people were there either in the audience or they're presenting or they

around it you know like people like Diane Bauer are people like Amanda Beach they all remember it and in this moment that like something something happens but of course it doesn't last long because people have different projects and as Ray talks about it in the postscript to Peter Wolfendale's book it wasn't really a movement or really set at the way acceleration is it really wasn't even like that because it didn't have an agenda, it didn't have a manifesto or nothing. It was just like a conference and maybe other people can add stuff to this later but go ahead. No, yeah, I mean that was way more informative than what I had. He wrote his first book that came out, Neil Unbound. I don't know exactly when it came out but it deals from Sellers

to Badiou, Heidegger, Deleuze, Nietzsche, really trying to work out the status of the concept of nihilism from a point of view of the history of philosophy. And we actually see some of this come out in the Prometheanism essay, Ray's interest in nihilism kind of surfaces towards the end. So I don't know how much time I have, Mo, and I don't know how much preliminary stuff you want me to do, because I think I mentioned to you I could give a brief kind of summary on how Prometheanism relates to the Enlightenment. Please do. We can beat it up, but do, because this is very important. Sure. Okay. So basically, I'm just going to do three things then. So first, I'll just remark on what's the relationship

between the Enlightenment and Prometheanism, as Braze has it. Then I'll give an exegesis of Braze's essay. And then finally, I'll summarize by kind of teasing out the implied conclusions in the final pages of Brasier's essay. Okay, so since we're beginning with Enlightenment, we have to go back to Kant. So in Kant's short essay, What is Enlightenment? in 1784, he lays out one of the clearest positions of Enlightenment rationality and humanism and can serve as a clear reference point for our reading of Brasier. So what does Kant say? He opens his essay with this claim about the Enlightenment, which I have a quote, so I'll post it in the chat so people can see it for themselves.

This client says, reason. This is the motto of the Enlightenment. So according to Kant, it is through our use of reason that we emerge out of our self-incurred tutelage, from our dependence upon others for the reasons for thinking and acting in the world, and so forth. The upshot of Kant's essay in the context of Enlightenment thought is essentially that what is necessary for the freedom of individuals is first their freedom from their intellectual and epistemic

dependence upon others. In other words, we need to be able to give ourselves via reason the laws that regulate our action in order for us to be free in any meaningful sense. It is in this sense that Kant will talk about the autonomy of reason, where autonomy, which comes from the Greek auto meaning self and nomos meaning law, is when the individual is the one who gives the law of action to themselves. It is in this sense that autonomy is equated with freedom for Kant. So actually, about 200 years after Kant publishes this essay, Foucault takes up the same theme in his essay What is Critique? And for Foucault, the project that began with Kant's conception of enlightenment has been seen to be a project that aims to link up thought and rationality with truth and dispense with any false ideas rationality has of itself and its functioning in the world.

And Foucault here has a mind delta in Habermas. As a supplement, Foucault offers his own reading and thinks that what is at stake in emerging from our self-incurred tutelage is a question of how we navigate spaces where knowledge and power are imbricated. So I raise these connections primarily to make note of how from Kant to Foucault we see the development of the idea that to make use of our capacity for reason is linked to how we are subject to forms of power which can either aid or restrain rational activity. Here one can rightly be reminded of what Reza writes in his essay in the reader, that inhumanism as a project has important implications for thinking social and political activity, and what characterizes, for instance, the kitsch Marxist is the inability to construct norms based on updating rational activity. So the kitsch Marxist and kitsch Marxism is a contemporary

form of self-incurred tutelage, as Kant defined it. So in this light we can say that the Enlightenment began with the idea of using reason to extricate us from a position of epistemic indebtedness to others in the game of giving and asking for reasons. Then we move from the acknowledgement that rational discursivity operates in and through power dynamics and therefore certain forms of reasons may be given privilege over others at the expense of others. And ultimately this brings us to the present with people like Reza and Brazier who call for the rehabilitation of reason in an updated form which can take into account these previous insights. So all of that to say, in the background, whenever you see Brazi say Prometheanism is an extension of the Enlightenment, those are some of the ideas and themes that he has in

mind. So Brazi begins his essay by stating the impetus for conceptualizing Prometheanism. What does it mean to orient oneself towards the future, he writes. Quote, is the future worth investing in? In other words, what sort of investment can we collectively have towards the future, not not just as individuals but as a species. This comes down to a very simple question, what shall we do with time?" And that's like the opening paragraph. The ambition of Prometheanism, which is the project of remaking ourselves in the world, has received criticism from both the right and the left. From the right, it is because of the lessons of history and the failed projects which sought to create a future for humanity that the best we can hope for is a return to old divisions and hierarchies that replicate a presupposed natural or divine order. From the left, it is because the same projects

to construct universality based on ideals of equality and justice actualize themselves as the complete opposite that we should avoid the Promethean ambition and aim to establish quote-unquote local, temporarily fleeting enclaves of civil justice. It is against both these lines of thought and critique that Braziers positions himself. Thus, Braziers will begin by returning to what he calls the cardinal epistemic virtue of the Enlightenment, in order to show how what is discovered about rationality holds important implications for how we think about all the possible ways of investing in a collective future. And this quote comes from 469 leading on to 470 in the reader. Quote, The cardinal epistemic virtue of the Enlightenment consists in recognizing the disequilibrium which time introduces into knowing.

Knowing takes time, but time impregnates knowing. In the sense, the rationalist legacy of the Enlightenment affirms the disequilibrium of time." It is important to underscore that this disequilibrium that characterizes thought's relationship to the world is of ontological status. That is to say, the fact that knowing takes time constitutes the nature of the activity of thought itself. So whatever we want to say of thinking, this disequilibrium is something that we cannot voluntarily opt out of in so far as we are thinking. And it is because disequilibrium is the very condition of possibility for thought and knowledge itself that we can say that the disequilibrium that exists in the world itself has just as much reality as the activity of reasoning itself.

So this insight will allow Braziers to critique mainly Dupuis but also Arendt and Heidegger for their insistence that there are certain a priori aspects of the world which are restricted from human interaction. Here we can already see how this set of thinkers are important to understand the criticisms of Prometheanism, where the common thread is that because there are certain operaried limits to humanity, the grand ambitions of creating a future for ourselves and transforming ourselves in the process become suspect. It's for these reasons Brazier will turn to Heidegger and Dupuis because it is with Heidegger, according to Brazier, that we get the most significant representative of the critique of metaphysical voluntarism. And voluntarism is just basically the idea that what is most significant in the privileged of subjectivity is our will, that we can will things into being and that that is right.

So Dupuis takes up the same position as it is also voiced by Arendt, the position being a critique of this metaphysical volunteerism, and develops a critique of Prometheanism through his analysis of this report from the US government in 2002. This report, to be brief, basically confirms that we have reached a point in nano, bio, and information technology and cognitive science, which I'll just call NBIC, that will bring about a veritable transformation of civilization. As Brasier rightly highlights, this is a Prometheanism of the right, since its proponents are allied with the demands of neoliberal capitalism. However, what is most disturbing for Dupuis is the deeper ontological claim that we have reached a point in the history of human society that we have the means, in Brasier's words, for, quote, the

technological re-engineering of human nature." It is due to this study that claims to have the means to alter human nature that Dupuis will set out his criticisms of Prometheanism. For Dupuis, the study conflates epistemic uncertainty with ontological indetermination. That is to say, there is nothing that solicits our thinking of these new discoveries and technological advancements as inherently good or virtuous simply because they exist. I'll just cite Braze here, this is on 472, quote, it sometimes happens that human creative activity and the conquest of knowledge proves to be a double-edged sword, and here he's citing Dupuis, but it is not that we do not know whether the use of such a sword is a good or bad thing, it is that it is good and bad at once.

Thus, Dupuis's criticisms of NBIC tech stems from the fact that technological innovation does not pose an epistemic problem for us. Rather, what NBIC tech poses is an ontological problem, the likes of which verge on violating something that is fundamental to the relationship between human beings and the world. So it was due to Dupuis's position that Brazier invokes Heidegger, because with Heidegger we received the distinction between human existence and human nature, or essence, where the latter is a definable set of differences from other beings. However, human existence, which is not simply definable or is not in any way an essence, it can't be determined through differences with other entities. That is, the category of existence for Heidegger and for Dupuis constitutes another difference

at the heart of humanity. The continuity between Heidegger and Dupuis rests on their acceptance of the difference between human existence and human nature, and it's important for Heidegger because The nature of being is essentially time, and it is because we are the kinds of beings whose own most proper possibility is death. And that to take away death as our own most possibility takes away what constitutes human existence and what is only proper to us. Now, I have a question. Yep. You were sort of like going over the Hannah Arden part a little bit too fast, and I wonder, what do you think then? because you told us what do you think of the role of Heidegger in a text and what is the role of Dupree, right? I'm actually getting to the right part,

but you can keep going. Why do you think Hannah Arden is quoted more frequently in the text than the other authors mentioned? And what kind of like sort of like political role does bringing Hannah Arden pay into this? And what do you think? I mean, there's one thing that like the actual philosophical sort of like role of Hannah Arden in sort of like creating the argument for pro-Prometheanism. But then there's also like why Hannah Arden and not so many other people who have had similar opinions, similar to Hannah Arden. Well, I guess a few answers. one answer comes from, I guess, just

raised on text where he says, Dupuis is indebted to Arendt, who's indebted to Heidegger, so that's why Ray will pick that kind of set of thinkers, but also I think Arendt is important here because there's a quote that Ray brings up where Arendt says, and I'm going to get to this later, but where Arendt says, even though we can know certain things in the world, we can know the natural world, objects in the world, whatever, it is we can't know ourselves in the same way and so that claim on Arendt's part holds certain ontological and epistemological implications for the project of their critique of Prometheanism because Prometheanism will not grant them that much

they'll grant them that there are differences but they won't grant them that we can't know ourselves in some deep metaphysical what I want to interject your presentation with is the political dimension of bringing Arne into conversation. Which means, you know, Heidegger is a figure that is divisive and controversial, especially among the left and the Marxists. Because of not just his involvement with the Nazi party, but basically his religious views. And basically, this is about the return of God, in a way, sort of like back into the discourse. Even clearly, as Ray points out in the text, right? but but how long has a role to play he's a she's in between

she's a connection between Heidegger and Benjamin historically mmm she she comes from a Heideggerian so like background but she's the person who who brings Benjamin out in English world and so like connects or like she's the she's the averaging over of a Heideggerian idea finitude and then the Marxist idea finitude right And she's got respect on both sides of the political divide. Liberals and people who believe in capitalism have a certain respect for Hannah Arden because of her insistence on a type of ethics. But also the left has taken up her cause. And she's kind of like a, she's not a divisive figure.

And it's important to kind of like even indirectly show sort of like how basically how a line of thought from Western Marxism and the left is somehow is in a pact in all this. And then when you said earlier on that like how people from a left and a right despite of their differences, I think the rejection of Prometheanism actually shows the commonality between the left and the right. this particular left and a particular right so it's important to kinda like remember that that is not like all true like these are two completely opposing things they actually overlap when it comes into so like the rejection of prometheanism and acceleration and this is the historical condition of why they oppose it

and here's a commonality of the way they had finitude that makes them both even though they're coming from different political or even philosophical so like attitudes when it comes to this their response is similar. And Arden is kind of like a figure that crystallizes all that. Yes. No, I mean, I think we're in agreement. Mo, can I jump in on this? Yes. Yeah. I want to bring up the Arendt text that Brassier quotes from, because I'm not an expert on it, but I know it well enough. I mean, why Arendt is so important here is not just because Dupuis is citing her rather than citing Heidegger, but because she deliberately tries to make this kind of anti-humanist

ontologizing of finitude a political program. And I think, I want to go back and read this book now. You can kind of read her as like the programmatic anti-accelerationist thinker in some ways. She has a lot about work. She separates work and labor. Has a lot about sort of the idealizing the sort of phenomenological experience. She basically, this is where she's most influenced by Marx, and she has this very anti-humanist Marx who is all about alienation. But moreover, her linking of the anti-humanist Marxist tradition and the Heideggerian tradition

is what makes her so important. This is what sort of Reza and Reyes separate critiques, kitsch Marxism on the one hand, and the sort of Heideggerian post-structuralist tradition. the other she brings together really clearly. So I think that text, if we wanted to look at it further, would be really useful for defining inhumanism. Are you reading something? Me? No. I'm just going from the Un-The-Human Condition is the book that I'm... Yes. So should we go back to Jose or do you have more to say? So let's go back to Jose. Okay, Jose, it's you again.

Okay. No, that's fine. No, that's great, because I'm just going to start talking about Arendt. Thanks for the comments. So, yeah, when Brase pairs Dupuis' comments with Arendt's distinction between the given and the made, where the given is something primary to the human, prior to the human and natural, natural, and the made is that which is humanly created. Then Brazier then cites Dupuis's claim that it's still possible, according to Arendt's distinction, to maintain the equilibrium between the given and the made. And then here comes in Brazier's own reading of Dupuis's comment. So for Brazier, Dupuis's claim is shot through with an implicit moral argument that we should respect this equilibrium, that respecting this equilibrium is somehow

virtuous in its own right. This idea is furthered by Arendt's argument that it is unlikely that even though we can have knowledge of the objects of the world, and this is something Moe you were saying, we cannot have the same kind of knowledge about ourselves. And then Brazier cites Arendt on 475, quote, nothing entitles us to assume that man has a nature or essence in the same sense as other things, end quote. And so here we can see the Heideggerian themes in Arendt also. So what ties together Dupuis, Arendt, and Heidegger is their argument that to reify the transcendence of existence, or in plain terms, to treat our existence as being fundamentally the same as other entities in the world, constitutes science's fundamental error.

And here Braze will mention everything from psychology to sociology. It is for this reason that Braze's main point in this exegesis of Dupuis and Heidegger is to underscore how their commitment to a difference between the human and the natural world leads them to hold a position which claims that although you can cognitively objectivize and therefore know entities in the world, human beings cannot know themselves in the same way as they know other objects. So therefore, Braze will say, because of this prohibition on self-objectivation, human existence transcends every attempt to limit its core by a series of objective determinations. And so that's an important counterpoint to the idea of being pro or even being open to the idea of human enhancement and the Promethean Project and all these other things.

Now two things that come up is like that he quotes from Arendt are, you know, like that this equilibrium needs to be established, or like equilibrium needs to be violated or disturbed between what's given and what's made, right? Like these two gets repeated throughout the text. Yes. It's still the same thing you were saying, but like I think it's important to kind of what used is two very simple and basic ideas of nature being the given and nature being human made.

Basically technology, technique and nature, right? Yes. And how this equilibrium has to be violated. And the algorithm for that violation is objectivization of objectivization itself which is what Aron is against. It's not within our capacity to objectivize the process of objectivization. Because if you do that, then you can apply to humans. So this is really what sort of like the Heidegger Dupree RN point sort of like directly or indirectly suggests that we're unable to or we should not objectivize objectivization. Yes. Go ahead. But yeah, so after Brasey runs through all this, Brasey will then ask, so what's so bad

about Prometheanism on Dupuis' account after all these arguments? And then Brasey will cite Dupuis citing Ivan Illich because that's where Dupuis gets his criteria. And so for Dupuis, we will never eliminate pain, never cure all disorder, and we'll certainly die. Thus, the criteria for determining when we have overstepped our bounds or disrupted this equilibrium and into the terrain of the given is when humanity itself attempts to transform these supposed absolute constants of pain, disorder, and death. Braset's problem with Dupuis's position, then, stems from Dupuis's acceptance of these three conditions as absolute limits that can never be overcome, even in the fullness of time. Thus, the Promethean position, which posits the idea of human beings as those creatures

which have the capacity to create the given and the made, is seen as a rationalism that terminates in irrationalism, or in Brase's words, reason is unreasonable. However, problems arise for Dupuis' own position, since if we are to accept that pain and suffering are absolutes, which we cannot escape and must learn to be comfortable with, a set of moral and political questions arise, which Brase states in the following way, and this is on 479, quote, how much suffering are we supposed to accept as ineliminable features of the human condition? and what kinds of suffering qualify as inevitable. It is by raising these questions that Brasey highlights how Dupuis's position ultimately rests on a theological framework regarding the relationship between the made and the given. As Dupuis notes, the symbolic health of individuals and society comes from their ability to form

a culture which aims to cope with and confer meaning to, the ineliminable threats that humans face. However, as the story goes, once science and reason replace traditional cultural systems, we not only lose the sense of the limits of human activity, but more importantly, lose the very capacity to make sense of our relationship to the given itself. So it is for all these reasons that Brasey characterizes Dupuis' position as inherently theological, since in Dupuis' eyes, suffering is meaningful. And Brasey writes this rather nicely in 481, quote, At the root of all religion lies the claim that suffering is meaningful, not just in the sense that it occurs for a reason. Religion is not about rationalizing suffering, but in the sense that suffering is something to be interpreted and rendered significant.

So the error on Dupree's part is to substitute what is a meaningful condition of human existence currently, provisionally, which is pain, suffering, death, for what is the condition of all meaning for all time. In a way, then, we can say that the theological underpinning of Dupuy's position functions by taking what is a relative given or what is relative to our present existence and making it an absolute. So by understanding the theological overtones of Dupuy's thought, we come to understand the fear that lies behind his arguments. The fear here is the deflation of the status of the human from a being which stands above and distinct from other beings and is taken to be one object among many. For Dupuis, according to this line of thought, we increasingly become, quote, less able to

determine ends or purposes for ourselves, end quote. Here we can note that this fear of Dupuis is a fear of the realization of something that Nietzsche called the death of God. So if we take Dupuis' concerns to their final conclusion, we arrive at a position where we will increasingly lose the reason or purpose for understanding ourselves, since the idea of the human, as one being among many, erodes the prior conceptions of the purpose of human life as it is indexed to God or a divine nature. I think Brasier's statements about the epistemic-slash-moral implications of the consequences of Dupuis lays out drives home the point, so I'll just cite it here. And this is Brasier's own conclusion about Dupuis's argument and his fear.

And it's on 484, and Brasey writes, quote, The difference between man-made or factual truth and divine or essential truth is jeopardized. The true and the made become convertible to the point when only what has been humanly made can be truly known. So this is the disturbing conclusion of the Promethean project, according to Dupuy. By taking the human to be one being among many and espousing a project which seeks to create both the made and the given, given, Prometheanism risks eliminating any meaningful difference between man-made truth and divine or natural or essential truth, the latter of which has previously served as the basis for both epistemic and political normativity. However, Brasey does not stop here. The final critique against Dupuis is Brasey's argument that even though Dupuis establishes

the relationship between the made and the given and argues for their equilibrium, Dupuis Dupuis fails to give us the reasons for why disturbing this equilibrium is inherently problematic. It is because Dupuis simply posits the disequilibrium between the made and the given as human vice that Brasier will make the following remarks. This is on 485. Quote, What I want to suggest is that it is precisely this assumption of equilibrium that is theological. It is the claim that there is a way of the world, a ready-made world, whose order is simply to be accepted as an ultimately unintelligible proof given that is objectionally theological. It is this theological positing of a primordial equilibrium that gives rise to the conservative claims that one must accept the world as it is, and that any attempt to fundamentally

transform the world is a project doomed to failure and morally reprehensible. In a sense, to abandon the project of Prometheanism then would mean the complacent acceptance with the way the world is, with the quality of human lives as they are in the present, without any aspiration for radical change. Okay, it's either that, it's either that, or what's at the heart of claims that, you know, we were just talking about it earlier, when you say, political claims that put the ought in terms of is, is a form of political project that sees like, that camouflages construction into a return to some natural state, you know what I mean? you say men and women are equal or women, or woman is equal to man. What does that mean?

That means like somehow the natural order puts men and women equal and we've kind of like, we've deviated from that and then the political demand to say men and women are equal, a kind of like a return to some natural order in which men and women were always already equal, right? Whereas men and women ought to be equal acknowledges that that's not the natural order. We want it to be the natural order. We want it to be the new order, not the natural order, but the new order, right? And we're going to construct that. Or when you say like homosexuals are equal to heterosexuals, again, it's the same story. Or any kind of claim where like isn't out or conflated, it kind of like shows the philosophical dimension of this political demand that is a return, return to a natural order rather

than a construction. Return to a given that we've deviated from, which normally, to me, it's just completely like not the case. No, no, exactly. Yeah, I think that's what Ray was mentioning in the beginning when he was talking about the critics on the right, the critics of Prometheanism from the right. But also I think this is something that really comes out in Mark Fisher's piece that we did last week, at the end where he talks about we should remember Jameson's quote about understanding capitalism from a point of view of beyond good and evil. And there the claim is kind of like if you want to return to a time where things were quote unquote equal or whatever, you won't find it. Because the history of capital is the history of violence and all these modes of oppression.

and abstract. You know, a little of the blame has to go to Marx himself because his conception of history, it always begins with some initial form of primitive communism. You know what I mean? Which always sort of creates this problem that as if we already had some form of utopian life, which then we deviated from, right? And kind of like put at least in language on par a constructivist project of building a building a better world as conflating it with some return to some already natural world that was, you know, perfect. It's like, it's a Christian Judeo-Islamic Christian myth of the

heaven and the fall from heaven, right? It's like, it's kind of like the initial, I don't know how you guys translate it into English, but like, the idea that like, the original commune they call it, or initial commune in Marxist conception of history. I don't know what is the proper English term for it. But that kind of equates the Garden of Eden, right? And how man falls from the Garden of Eden. And now the job of communism somehow is to recreate those perfect conditions, but in a technologized industrial proletarian context rather than its original context, right? Yeah, no, that's exactly it. And it reminds me of Berardi in his book, After the Future.

That's how he characterized it. In conceiving the future, there have been different ways historically to conceive it. And under a Judeo-Christian framework, you would see your progression in the future as going further and further away from perfection and divine communion with God. But then the Enlightenment thought and modernity is the task of not saying, oh, we've fallen from grace, but yet we can achieve utopia in the present in this world. And so the Enlightenment kind of no longer looks back to the past but towards the future. And then that's, and then, yeah, now we're talking about Prometheism. I think there's an interesting cycle. Like, unless anyone wants to move on, I think that there's, like, a tributary here that is relevant and interesting.

but I understand if there's not time for it. What were you going to say? Well, okay, so I think that there is, from what I know, and probably some of you know a lot better, that Hegel was really involved in a kind of Christian theology that posited the true death of God, that God had died quite literally and so in a sense history was maybe the vestiges of God's plan and it had to be carried out in a certain way and that comes through in Marx

even only, I don't know, crypto-theologically in a way that I think is interesting and that still remains part of the discourse of a more generalized, not necessarily Marxist, but Marxoid, Marxoid kind of politics that, you know, charity and like a general altruistic and unionized community politics that maybe don't draw from Marxism but draw from the same legacy of post-Christian post-dead god Eden

speculative politics of a new Eden that is related to accelerationism. So that's all I have to say about it. We can move on. Can I suggest a way we should read this in Marx? I mean, I think... Yeah, totally. Go ahead. Yeah, it's just... Marx is sort of just following in the tradition of pretty much all of political philosophy up to this point, Plato onwards, but that philosophy sort of coming from a definition, sort of anthropological definition. Human beings are this, and this is the way to organize a society around how human beings are to create sort of the ideal.

I mean, whether this is in Hobbes or in Russo, I mean, Marx is specifically coming from Rousseau, who also has this idea of a sort of pre-social or pre-civilized sort of working society that then we have to go back to. And I think this is what's so interesting about the Inhumanist project. Wait, to step back a minute. So sort of most politics has anthropological sort of foundations in it. And this is what makes Marx and Enlightenment political philosophy so interesting, is that humanity then becomes a project. And so in early humanist Marx, we have primitive communism and sort of future communism that sort of goes back to primitive communism.

And this is why we have anti-humanist Marxism, people like Officer, who sort of make this point that capital isn't just sort of identifiable with human, that class relations shape the relations of what it is to be human, and so on. And sort of this whole anti-humanist tradition that right now Brassier is critiquing comes both from a Marxist and a Heideggerian background. I mean, this is also, you could say, Adorno in dialectic of enlightenment is exactly the same kind of enlightenment as totalitarian, is domination from the beginning, and so on. And so what the Inhumanist project does,

or what this Promethean project does, is say, no, we can define human as this material mechanistic thing, but also we're defining it as something else that we can then work with. So it's an interesting sort of going back to this original humanist ambition. In a way, there's been a humanist jam that inhumanism becomes really an extension of what held maybe existentialism behind, which was that it was still inside of the essentialist human concept. And inhumanism allows from my engagement of it,

it allows, you know, a humanist relationship with the algorithm, for instance, like, that becomes far more productive and less involved in, like, a politics of the individual. Yeah. To tie it back to what we were discussing before about the individual versus the, I don't know, the distributed or something. No, I think that's exactly right. I mean, I think Reza's sort of enlightenment humanism identifies human with mind, sort of Reza's redefinition of mind as a distributed social practice and reason as a sort of distributed social practice is sort of an updating of that.

Yeah, it'll be really cool to learn more about that next semester when Reza... When Reza himself will be here. Yeah, it's going to be like, let's see who's going to be there because the class is packing. I mean, I don't know. Do I take the class or would I let somebody else take the class and then watch the videos later? But anyways, Jose, go ahead. Sorry. No, no, it's okay. I can just briefly conclude. Yes. So what can we make of this vision of Prometheanism? In my estimation, Braze's Prometheanism should be seen as the continuation of Dupuis's claim that rationalism unbound necessarily leads to irrationalism.

However, what marks the tenability of the project of Prometheanism is that it arrives at reasons' irrational conclusions, that the world is inherently meaningless, it was not made for us and without reason or purpose, and takes these conclusions as the occasion for rethinking the conceptions of the human, the world, and a politics geared toward the future. It's for this reason that Brazi writes, quote, Prometheanism is the attempt to participate in the creation of the world without having to defer to a divine blueprint. It follows from the realization that the disequilibrium we introduce into the world through our desire to know is no more or less objectionable than the disequilibrium that is already there in the world. So, contra the Heideggerian impulse, Prometheanism is a commitment to a form of rationalism that defines reason as

rule govern activity as opposed to a supernatural faculty. And if reason is simply ruled govern activity, the very concepts and rules generated by reason itself are never set in advance or deduced from an a priori condition. Rather, the concepts and rules that arise from rational activity are themselves historically mutable, subject to change and subject to time. Thus, we can see how Braze's Prometheanism takes up the charge of the irrationality of rationalism, and exposes the theological underpinnings of such a critique. Additionally, we can see how once we have dispelled the theological assumptions about a proper equilibrium, or proper order between the given and the made, we end up in a situation where both rationality and the world are, at the end of the day, characterized by disequilibrium. Thus, the true merit, in my opinion, of Braze's essay is his attempt to take seriously the

new chain injunction of the death of God, that is, we could no longer assume the equilibrium between the given and the made, and not to despair in the face of nihilism, but to take seriously the situation of nihilism for thought. I was interested at the very end in how he rescues a little bit of Padue, and how he finds a place for subjectivization through an evental process, right? And how sort of like... how that like how subjectivization is still part of the project but is a subjectivization without something what is it a subjectivization without this novel that the stuff like what suffer you have subjectivization without the

selfhood right so like a point is a collective subjectivization or like a selfless subjectivization right and how so like leaves room for for for us to carry a little bit of bad you into this project because the reading of the all the readings of all the all the dominant readings of if there being an event they all lend themselves to a sort of fetishization of local action and localism or the ones I've encountered right you know like the way the way and you know but do himself tend to do that because he did that whole thing on Arab spring and all that you know and it's like so I I like how how Ray is rescuing

Badu from Badu himself my guys by the way there was an important talk tonight by Badu in New York which I was so tempted to sort of like ask you to delay the class one day I can go to that event but then I thought what we're doing is really more interesting and I just decided to just like miss it seven o'clock but we just began speaking at a gallery in Midtown about so like that was the idea of contemporary art and I just hated myself to go there and kind of like be the one to have to get up and say please don't put your foot in your mouth because you basically have no more room. No, Mohamed, it's much better. Wasn't it like Schopenhauer like scheduled his lectures against Hegel or something like and nobody came to Hegel or like I mean how many of us are in here?

There's like what 12, 13 of us in here. Yeah but don't worry that room is packed because like the email was going on and all my friends and everybody I know in New York who's interested in contemporary art is right now sitting in a room listening to see what this is all. Hearing stupid, worthless nonsense. No, we don't know because he's never really commented on contemporary art. I mean, he has, but the lecture is called The Tasks of Contemporary Art or something. It's one of these philosophical engagements with something as trite as contemporary art. And I'm not talking about all art. I'm particularly talking about what we call contemporary art. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it would be nice to kind of like go there and sort of like be the black duck

or like get up and just go like, actually, I don't think so. But, you know, I decided to just like forget it and be here with you guys and have the class on time like we were supposed to. But anyways, you know, Igor, do you want to add something to this? because I know you were posting, oh, my friend just texted me that, like, it's so funny, Facebook. My friend just texted me saying, like, Badoo just started. Let me see, what does he say? But you... Yeah, I actually was looking the whole time. I finally found it on the floor. It's Reza's torture concrete little thing, which is amazing. It's really good. He says he wrote it quickly, but, you know, probably it's got on really well. Guys, we just got news from Badoo's talk, and my friend is typing and saying, like,

Badoo is stating the same accelerated idea to use all the technological benefits of capitalism against itself. So we just heard, and you know, this just came without me planning it. Like, I wasn't, like, trying to pull this. It's just like, as we're talking about Badoo, my friend who was a curator messaged me from the other room. So, see, it's not as bad as we thought it could be, but I'll hear about it later. Go ahead. That is bad. No, no, no, that is bad. I'm sorry to interrupt, but that's bad news. We have to figure out how to get in there in a way that we don't become the Timothy Morton to Badoo's Zizek here. We've got to find our way in before Badoo does. We've got to get it out there.

Okay, I'll let Igor go. Go ahead, Igor. Yeah, Patricia as well, how she wrote a thing about a year ago, and it's funny how a lot of, now with Reza and Brzez, a lot of it's brought us closer to analytic tradition as well. Without, you know, I like that theory that the news center's logos and and, because it's not like now you have to choose continental or analytic. It's like, fuck that. But if we're talking about epistemic acceleration, then the analytics provides some really good stuff, and she mentioned, I think she talks about her terminology, which was a bit theological, and yes, that made me think of Bado and his fidelity to the event, which seems to me to be quite theologically informed as well.

So yes, fidelity to the future, but then how do we go about that? And I recently posted the Alienation piece from Braziers, and immediately... is good, is it now like war is freedom or you know peace is war sort of 1984 but Breza and Brezio both really work on this concept and alienation was good, I was really discussing this previously with a Marxist, alienation was good originally in describing some of the symptoms of capitalists, the capitalist form of labor, the way a worker is alienated

from their labor. However, we're then back to this kind of ontologization of non-alienation. So just like Jason critiques the situationists in critiquing the society of the spectacle, they kind of posit that there is a real non-spectacle. Same thing with alienation. So the real exploitative facts of cattle are real. No one is discounting that. No one is saying, it's great. We can just work in factories all day long. It's just that posits that then there is a non-alienated state in nature of Amazonian tribes. And similar to like I once mentioned with Petra, the Holy Motors film is really it's

of Baudrillardian orders of simulacra. It's like here he's showing you pure spectacle, but he's not saying, oh look at me just playing with pastiche in postmodernism. He's saying, look at the power of the spectacle. Again, look at the power of alienation and abstraction. This is as real as anything else. I can make you cry, I can make you weep, I can make you laugh, even though you know entirely the whole time through this film that it's all spectacle. watching this film going through all these emotions and the final scene is like he goes home to his wife and kids and they're monkeys, you know, and you know it's a spectacle but you're still like almost brought to tears with this music. So this means we mustn't discount the power of alienation and abstraction and the spectacle which is all we know today

and this mediated electronic forms of communication or fashion as well. Fashion is, as we were mentioned previously it seems yeah it really they're all important there's no real way to dress nowadays so yeah my my thing is my thing is alienation gave us like a classic class struggle without alienation there'll be no class struggle one of the problems of today's young professionals of all fields whether they're like chefs or they're shoemakers or they're like cab drivers is that they're not alienated from their work. They love it. They want to do more of it. And they don't care for class struggle. I see people that are like totally in love of what they do and they totally are attached to it

and totally define themselves in terms of what they do. Completely like unbearable. I can't stand them. And they're happy because they're doing what they want to do. yeah this type of relationship with work will never give you any kind of space of alienation to then do something else anyway just like you know what I mean like absolutely right like they're speaking of the artisan you know or something and I know friends are like small business owners architects they love that they love those though you're like guys are the least politically potential people I am whereas when you work inside a big organization in multinational it's alienating but it gives you the most space for realizing

the power of that and how that needs to change yeah okay so are we done are we done with brace here other people want to talk about brace here so we can move on to the actual accelerate manifesto because we have half an hour and me and Robert are gonna have to like fill up this half an hour I so Robert let's just do like a like a you and me just talk right like because maybe you can kind of like interject and like I say something and you say something I'll bring up some background on accelerate manifesto and then you kind of like talk about Negri is that cool yeah sure I've got some notes here I can okay everybody's familiar with Negri I don't think we need like a biography of negative, but basically what I wanted to do was sort of like give a little bit of a background

on Alex and Nick. Now my, and my relationship with the Accelerate also because my research project with Cyclone Space, which sort of like a, which led to the Incredible Machine Conference began as sort of like a, someone who was some sort of a, I was skeptical of the transformation of human subjectivity by technology. But being someone who always thought along the same lines even though these ideas were not even articulated, it didn't take me long to sort of like understand what are the main

arguments here and how crucial and important it is to support these arguments and then support them in my curatorial practice. So this is how I became kind of like familiar with the whole movement and with the whole group of people. And for Alex and Nick who wrote the manifesto, things began with the financial meltdown in 2008 and how they kind of like, they were both speculative realists back then and they were both bloggers and they were kind of like doing stuff around the speculative idea. Nick used to run the website called Speculative Heresies with Ben Woodard and Alex had his

his own blog which I have the name just something about ashes anybody if you remember you can bring it up but it was something of ashes for me I have the name I can bring it up but anyways and they kind of like realize that oh my god things are really like things are really screwed up at the at the base level and we got to go back to to political economy and and and then But nobody on the left was offering anything that could explain what was going on with the meltdown or could kind of like open up a path to like what the left should do. So really, really, really, the encounter between the financial meltdown of 2008

and the speculative bloggers created the necessity for Alex and Nick to work together and produce the manifesto. And this will all be sort of narrated by them in an interview I did with them for the Philip magazine, which is kind of like currently on its way to the printer. And it will be published soon. Now, I can give you guys synopsis or like what is important about the manifesto, right? But really what's important about the manifesto is that not only it's like a critique of the neoliberal order, but a critique of the failures of the left to deal with this, to deal with the problems.

And also, to bring about some of the other things we talked about earlier, Accelerate Manifesto also deals with issues that are more than just politics and have to do with our species and a longer period of humanity as such, right? And basically, the challenge of climate change and how we've kind of destroyed the planet and how all of this requires a new kind of look at the world and a new kind of politics. And the word MAP is the manifesto for accelerationist politics is a real name for the manifesto. It's usually like MAP is what is like the acronym for the manifesto.

Now I'm going to go back to my manifesto notes here in the actual book and see what we can ... God, where is it? I went back and forth and back and forth. There we go, just before Negri, of course. Now the manifesto, the structure of the manifesto is also kind of interesting, right? It begins with six points of why we're in shit, right? And then it provides, in the second section, which is called intergnum, it provides 15

or 16 or actually more. 24 type of like changes of attitudes that will then help us get out of the condition that they set in the original six. Of course the six are sort of like the end of the future, the cancellation of the future, climate change, inability to generate new ideas, that's number three. the new liberalism has dominated and there's nothing else out there. Left here is complicit in all that and in the absence of, last one, in the absence of

a radically new social, political, organizational and economic vision, the hegemonic power of the right will continue to be able to push forward their narrow-minded imaginary in the face of any and all evidence. At best, the left may be able for a time to partially resist some of the worst incursions, but this is to be canute against an ultimately irresistible tide. To generate a new left, global hegemony entails a recovery of lost possible futures and a new recovery of the future as such. So that's how the first part ends. And the second part begins with sort of like what we really need to be doing.

To get closer to some of those more practical parts of it, let's go to, if you guys have the book, go to page 354. We believe, like the manifest on the future, we believe in the most important division in today's lefties between those that hold to a fault politics of localism, direct action, and relentless horizontalism, and those that outline what must become called an accelerationist politics at ease with the modernity of abstraction, complexity, globality, and technology. Then, the second proposal is to, we want to work less, we want to eliminate work along

the lines of how technology will eliminate work. Okay Igor, see you soon. We don't want to return to Fordism. We want to unleash the productive forces within capitalism. We want to salvage something out of capitalism. And then number eight, planning is a big part. All of this requires planning. And like what was just reported from the Badoo's talk, we must take advantage. Number nine, to do so, the left must take advantage of every technological and scientific advance made possible by capitalist society.

Experimentation is encouraged. Number ten. Number eleven. The left must develop socio-technical hegemony, which we were talking about before. Assertive ideas and claims that then beliefs can be formed around them and promoted rather than only working on a premise of doubt and critique, a positive construction of beliefs and hegemony. Number 12, against, not against, but like pointing to the insufficiency of direct action and localism. Number 13, fetishization of the process of democracy and democracy as process, rather

than looking at democracy as a system that also must produce equal, emancipatory results rather than a process that might go either way. Number 15, that this is not about building a single party, this is about what they call and comes up in Negri an ecology of organizations, a pluralism of forces resonating and feeding back on their comparative strengths. Number 16, basically they say we first need an intellectual infrastructure. So like what we've been doing here, right?

I just realized that I think maybe the screen has been just like left because Igor was presenting to people and then I don't think Jason really changed my screen to me so I'm just doing it right now so the video is correct. Number 17, we need to construct a wide scale media reform. These three are kind of important. First, an intellectual infrastructure. Second, a media reform. And then third, that we need to reestablish some form of class power and class like out of the existing class dynamics globally, we need to reconstitute some form of class and

class struggle. And that these efforts are not like chronological, even though they say first and second, but that they feed into each other. And then the 20 is like a hint towards thinking of ideas that capitalism has used like finance, distribution and all that and the role of that in in in in Promethean politics and then reconceptualization of capitalism as an unjust and perverted system that holds

back progress rather than a speeding up system that needs to be stopped and then number number 23, which I kind of like has made an amendment, and in an interview it comes up as I get into it, that the choices facing us are severe, either a globalized post-capitalism or a slow fragmentation towards primitivism. Perpetual crisis and planetary ecological collapse and more war. That's like my addition to it. And then the Peircean idea that runs through what great talks about, that future is something that you construct. It's not something that you wait for it to arrive and then you understand it, but it's something you take part in creating.

Now, in my conversation with this discourse, the way I think about it, what still needs to be accounted for is that neoliberalism has a police and military aspect that has not been taken up by acceleration. And in my conversation with Nick and Alex, I always stress that Althusserian idea of repressive state apparatuses, right? It's that the whole acceleration manifesto is built only on the ideological state apparatus side of neoliberalism and forgets that when the push comes to shove, there's always a possible and we see this rearing its head globally in the kind of wars that have been,

even though we live in probably the most peaceful time of the last century and a half, but we've seen an increase in the level of violence both geopolitically and locally. And how if the push comes to shove we are going to see the militarized side of neoliberalism and that acceleration has to be able to have a position on the militarization. So that's one of my, sort of like, one of the shortcomings I've identified in. And then the second one is that the project for, the project has to become explicitly non-European and non-Western precisely by imagining solutions that don't seem to either

start first in the Western world and then extend to other places or could realistically only be applied to post-industrial and informational societies like the idea of universal basic income. That's the real problem with… And maybe this is a good time. I'm just going to move on because I really want to give a chance to Robert to also bring up because as we see in Negri's piece, he also put a lot of emphasis on this type of cognitive labor and saying like the future of crass struggle is in cognitive labor, right? Basically not talking about those not super accelerated people that are sort of like living

in other parts of the planet that are not operating on the level that we in the West operate and their entrance into the global political economy is still at the disciplinary level which is factory work, production and the entire world is not operating based on cognitive labor for us to only have solutions for cognitive labor. Now I'm going to pass it on to Robert and see how Robert wants to sort of like present the Negri's piece. And then I'm going to interject with Robert and go back to the manifesto. Okay, so Negri, to go back to the engine apparatus, he insists that the ecology of organizations is the main driving force, that a framework of multiple forces work in parallel

and result in collective decision making. He understands that the manifesto's reworking of cognitive surplus to mean that we first have to mature the whole complex of productive potentialities of cognitive labor in order to advance a new techno-political hegemony. And he goes on to say that the main aspect is informatization. So through cognitive work and social knowledge, informatization becomes extremely valuable fixed capital. And he says, Informatization remains the most valuable form of fixed capital, and it can potentially be reappropriated by the proletariat, rather than being swallowed up by a capitalist organization. And he goes on to say that the manifesto doesn't discuss the currency of the common.

And that's a theme that he stresses at the end of the article. It consists of advancing the proletarian reappropriation of wealth towards creating a hegemonic power based on the common, which is accomplished by extracting value from labor and then a universal translation into money. So Negri agrees that the manifesto's assertion that money is a driving force of change, but he thinks it must be reworked to be a part of the common. And he considers the idea of monetizing the productive surplus of cognitive labor and giving it back to the proletariat because of the time saved by algorithmic automation must translate into higher incomes and improve quality of life. I believe he, this is my opinion, I think he's referring to this ideally causing a ripple

effect of innovation against capitalist and sovereign demand. So I don't know what you want to add to that. Well generally, generally he comes across as a pro acceleration. Mostly, yeah, but he just comes up with, he says the currency of the common isn't mentioned. Currency of the common is not mentioned. Yes. Okay, tell us what page you read that.

Let's go to that. I have the online version. God. It's the currency of the common and the refusal of labor. It's the refusal of ordering the physical version. Yes. See, my note, you know, like the cracks in the way, you know, the cracks in the way he looks at it all starts at like page 366 when he talks about biopolitics against biopower, right? When he says, this is not about a reversal of a state form in general, rather it refers

to potentiality against power, biopolitics against biopower. It is under this premise that the possibility of an emancipatory future is radically opposed to the presence of capitalist domination. And here we can experiment with the one divides into two formula that today constitutes the only rational premise of a subversive praxis rather than its conclusion. Now, being an old man, he's still looking at it from the point of view of the 20th century. And I think those problems that you identify, it all sort of like comes out of like this lens through which he's looking at. But we have to kind of like give it to him that like even though he is from 20th century,

but he sees what is at stake and how the manifesto kind of tries to sort of like resolve some of the problems and move forward. But to me, the whole thing that you talked about and how he talks about like technology has fixed capital, the cognitory and the the the intellectual labor and all that all points to the so like in problems that are actually are not so accentuated in the in the manifesto but then he makes me think of them and then make them into questions for Alex and Alex and Nick that like what a like I already said I'm not gonna repeat myself that like this is not the overall condition of the

world and you cannot build you cannot build a new form of class struggle based on a condition that's only prevalent in the Western world and his interest in common as you know has to do with with his work with with Michael Hart on the second volume of Empire called, no the second one, no the third one, Commons, which came out just a year or two before the manifesto was published, right? So his demanding of where is the place of common is sort of like a, basically he wants to see more of himself reflected in the manifesto. But as we see, the collectivized idea of acceleration is

already there it's in Reza's is in Ray and it's alluded to in the manifesto and Patricia kind of like dealt with that for us in her in her piece right so I think it's there it's just it just he just wants to see more of it but he talks about a monetization of it like you want to read a little bit more okay Do you want me to go on about the monetization? Yes. I've already done those paragraphs, but it was a short part of his little article.

I wish I had the online one too so to quickly go to them because if you bring it up, the comment, maybe it's good to kind of like get a little bit deeper into it. Right, yeah, but yeah, I don't have much deeper than what everybody mentioned. So let me just get back to some, then I'm just going to get back to what I was talking about in terms of the manifesto, right? So discuss the manifesto a little bit more in depth with like the problems or like the stuff that is still not resolved in the manifesto.

The other problem that one can identify with the Accelerator project is that two things are kind of still missing in this mix. One is, thank you Jesse, this is the E-Flux version. One is a proper aesthetics or aesthetic strategies for acceleration. The other one is a political economy for acceleration. So the aesthetic side of it, I kind of argue that the aesthetics that we do have that is acceleration is it either comes from jungle music, drum and bass, which is sort of like

what Nick Lang was talking about when we were reading Nick. And then it's about the language used by some of the more accelerated speculative realist philosophers like Reza's language and the way Reza writes itself is aesthetic. I mean, we all know that. Writing is aesthetic. And that's where you can find sort of like acceleration. In like these new types of writing like Cyclonopedia. Or like even like the way Reza performs philosophy on stage. That to me is sort of like itself has a quality to itself that is aesthetic. And you can argue that that's part of the acceleration aesthetic. And then these artists here and there who are kind of making work, their work somehow fits into acceleration.

but really we still don't have something that you can kind of put your hands on and say that, that. And then Alex in his piece in E-Flux talks about data visualization and kind of like new ways of data as aesthetics of acceleration. But to me one thing that really sort of like resonates with the aesthetics of acceleration or sort of like hasn't even arrived yet is how machines will be involved in the generation of these aesthetics rather than humans. And how machines are not only involved in the generation of these aesthetics, but in its understanding and consumption and in its interpretation.

And it's sort of something that I'm kind of working on. I'm writing a piece about this process in which machines take over not only the job of making images out of data, but also understanding it and classifying it and interpreting it. The other aspect that I just talked about was a lack of a clear political economy. And a lot of the confusion and opposition to acceleration has been caused by the fact that the manifesto uses terms that are familiar to the left and the Marxist left, but they try to use it in different ways or they don't really mean those words the way these words have been historically used.

So this type of borrowing literature from Marxism and then repurposing them for the accelerationism has caused a bunch of confusions, but also this like ambivalent relationship with Marxism and Marx that's sort of like it's at the heart of this lack of political economy. Now this is nothing to kind of like brag about or like blame Alex and Nick on because it's a new idea and this intellectual infrastructure has to be set up, these philosophies need to be worked their way through and sometime somewhere between interaction between philosophy and politics, a political economy will be formed.

But really what's at stake here is a new political economy that is not necessarily Marxist even though, and this is my opinion, and we had a huge spat about it online because my friend, colleague and board member of the news center, Sohail Malek, has just published wonderful new piece of writing that's going to be in the next are issue or collapse and I posted this quote from so he'll about acceleration and it caused a lot of back and forth thing and because the journal is not out that's the title of it is called the ontology of finance price power and archa derivative archa derivatives or what so Hale talks about

and I'm going to read it for you is that left accelerationism must abandon its admittedly ambivalent attachment to Marxian and labor-based determinations of capitalism and political economy, because these are not the prerequisites of capital power in general, but tendentious misapprehensions of it. If such positions are not wholly incorrect with regards to the anthropological concerns they serve to articulate, nevertheless, the latter are only incidental and partial consequences of capitalization and not at all its operative or theoretical truth.

The proposition advanced here is rather that the routes to post-capitalism and what that condition and its political economy can be need to be instead determined in relation to the most advanced theoretical tools available today. In practical terms, this now means finance in general and derivatives in particular, not Marxism. Now, we don't want to get into what really Sohail means here by we need to construct a political economy for accelerationism in terms of derivatives and market and not labor and Marxism. But really what we see here is that these things are hinted at the end of the Accelerate Manifesto, the need to sort of understand how money works, how finance and debt work.

But really, at the same time, this relationship of how this is going to get worked out into the legacy of Marxism, that Nick and Alex both kind of insist that forms part of acceleration and what separates left acceleration from right acceleration has not been worked out. And I'm hoping that Nick's class with us next semester, which is called Marx and Technology, will be really a good place to sort of like bring this conversation to like some form of like research fruitation, some kind of work can come out of that if people are interested in being there for it. It's like a really amazing moment where like Nick will be going back to Marx and trying to figure out what is it about Marx and Marxism that can be maybe incorporated or needed for this project of technologized acceleration, left acceleration.

So these are sort of like my notes on or like what I want to talk about, what I wanted to talk about in terms of what I see kind of like unclear or missing or and the way I kind of deviate like how Patricia had her own qualification. These are like the way I kind of like deviate or problematize Nick and Alex's manifesto and see my place as someone who thinks along the same lines to contribute and act. Really a more rigorous engagement with the idea of globalization really and really like thinking outside of this industrial, post-industrialized West, cognitive labor, remembering that militarization

and militarism is on a rise, is not decreasing, and that we need to account for the global impact of all this and how a new political economy and new aesthetics need to be sort of like thought of and and to move forward with the project from where we are because very soon manifesto is going to be two years old anyway this was sort of like the stuff I wanted to say I think we can basically open up for conversation and then have like it's already we already passed our time it's 8.02 we began kind of on time at 5.30 but if you guys want to add because it's like a last remarks and then I have a couple of things to say to wrap up the class. Anybody

wants to talk? Yeah, Mo I had a question. So when you interviewed Nick and Alex did they talk, I mean I think the concerns about the global limits of the manifesto that you raised are good ones that need to be dealt with. But I was also curious if they ever talked about surveillance technology. Just because if they're going to envision some type of global ideological hegemonic project. Well those are all the questions. I asked them like what do you think about the Snowden and how Snowden gets factored into acceleration. But I also kind of don't want to give away all their answers because we go into heated debates about this stuff. And kind of interesting, you know.

Give up all the answers because there are so many different answers and you'd rather not just present your own. No, I'm just selfish and I want to create anticipation for the actual Philip magazine to come out. I'm a little bit vain. It's more vain. The reasons are more vain than what you think. So, yeah, secrecy. But not... Not today. And I can neither confirm nor deny that I have an answer to your question. Yeah, actually, Jason, you should have maybe mentioned that Mark was ill and couldn't come, but anyways. Yeah, do you want me to say something about that a minute? Sure. Okay, so basically... Actually, maybe.

maybe let's talk when we talk about the research research group maybe bring it up then yeah sorry about that so yeah so but but basically lots of interesting ideas came up but I basically my point was that what is this this this idea that like West is losing its Western Western neoliberalism is losing its prominence and like we're moving towards a sort of multipolar world it's kind of like a little bit too optimistic because what really is happening is that Western hegemony is trying to do its best to use all sorts of levels to remain the number one hegemony.

Even though it tries to project that its days are already over, that could be a cover. But clandestinely, Western capitalism is trying its best to sort of like remain the hegemony. And from this angle, we need to look at the way geopolitics are played out in the public of the planetary public today. And I had this quote actually, which I kind of like found in one of Latour's lectures. And I sort of like brought it up to them and they never encountered it. But I basically, Latour calls this cosmopolitics, right?

In his, in his, I'm going to read Latour's quote for you because it's really, really interesting. The way Latour puts the 21st century sort of like dilemma. He says, after having registered the Southern new weaknesses of the former West and trying to imagine how it, meaning the West, could survive a bit longer in the future to maintain its place in the sun, right? Now my scrolling is going crazy and now my text is just like off my face. Bye, Amy. Thanks for coming. Thank you.

He talks about how maybe we need to do crazy stuff and engage in something called cosmopolitics. And I asked Nick and Alex that the kind of crazy geopolitical stuff that's happening, do you guys see that as kind of an attempt by the Western world to extend its place in the sun, rather than kind of accepting this multipolar world and move away from the place in the sun to share the sun with other sort of like emerging powers, whether it's BRIC or it's Russia, China or other places, right? I think I can, if that's a question, I have something to say. Yeah, go ahead. Well, I think that what a real cosmopolitics would take

is not, if it's, if it is, you know, what did you say about an extension of the Western something? How did you word that? Hegemony. Western hegemony, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. If the Western hegemony doesn't open up to, like, multi-hegemony of what really would be cosmopolitical, which is to say like a post-UN kind of multi-polyvalent, like how do I put this, non-exclusive bordering. Maybe the EU is a kind of interesting example, but also a problematic one.

But it would take... My question from them was that we cannot, in the absence of social democratic governments that are actually interested in moving forward, how would you expect that the current neoliberal sort of like plethora of governments that are in power in the West, how could you see them move towards a better type of cosmopolitics than this kind of like dark cosmopolitics we have these days? Dark cosmopolitics, that's a good way to put it. So yeah. A political dark matter. I don't think anyone has an answer for that, but like, these are sort of like the problems I see with like not problems that are inherent and make the text of the Accelerate Manifesto kind of contradictory or like unusable,

but things that still need to be worked out, things that need to be factored in, like the way Patricia was saying that like she would like to factor things in and change things, right, and add things and play things around in her text, right? So this is sort of like how I see I'll be pushing against the accelerate myself. These are areas from which I will be. And I've tried, I mean, Aaron, you came to that event at the white box, right? I think I saw you there, right? Yes. Yeah. Something, you know what I mean? Like the way I try to deal with like a, I did an accelerated history of 21st century, right? And I try to talk about like, you know what I mean? like there's things going on.

To me, that type of dark cosmopolitics is what was going on in the summer in Gaza. To me, that's part of Latourian cosmopolitan. I must have read that quote too, right? I think I read Latour's quote in that piece I wrote for that day because I really think this is a sinister quote. I don't read this quote as something sweet and nice, but because Latour openly says, what can we do to extend our hegemony? That's what he's saying. what kind of things we need to do in order for the West to remain in power. But to me, a real type of cosmopolitics, like Petra was saying, is about the acceptance that those days are over. And this post-capitalist future cannot be built on preconditions only existing in the Western world

and or with the leadership of these Western nations. It just can't be. But it's there is a very particular kind of how do I put this like Tom's shoes or actually health goth actually presents an interesting, sorry if I shouldn't go to health goth tell me now tell me now we have a couple more minutes so why don't you talk about whatever you want to talk about and then dark democracy dark democracy is what we have yeah dark democracy I think But we want a democracy that's light, but maybe hiding underneath a dark democracy on

the surface. I like that. Light democracy, light democracy, like L-I-G-H-T and L-I-T-E democracy, typology of accelerationist democracies. That's interesting. Should I not go into health goth? Time is really running out. Okay, so I won't. That's fine. I can save that for somewhere else. I was just going to add really quickly, too. There's been some work I've been kind of interested in, like, what a dark Deleuze might look like. So in relation to this, and there's some people working on this idea of a dark Deleuze. So instead of the kind of orgasmic, productive kind of Deleuze,

one that's more about, like, withdrawal and transformation and the destruction of worlds and indiscernible. I can post a little thing if anyone's interested, but I think that this kind of relates to some of these ideas. Thank you. Jose, do you have any... Yeah, that would be great to have that one too. I thought you were going to say something, Jose. Do you have something to add to the end? No, no. I just...I'll save comments for Facebook. I just wanted to say that, like, your paper was really, really good, really good and I wrote it on the side and I think we should if you give it to us we'll work with you on top of the glossary in addition to glossary we're also open to kind of publishing these presentations if you guys have notes on it but yours today in particular was really

well put together and I think it will be helpful for others who are trying to like crack this text to access it. Sure thanks. A blog will basically like if you want to work on it with me I'm willing to take it on and help you edit it and put it together and finish it and have it as part of like a what when we go online in early January it will be on the blog with your name and everything and there's very interesting pieces by Benjamin Noyes like people who taught or guests are giving us pieces but also like we're all like I did a couple of presentation in the previous accelerator class which I want to use and yeah so basically we have a lot of like interesting things that would like be published any of you you want to like publish your turn your notes into like some writing doesn't need to be long as long as it's like 300 words it can be published so you're gonna have like a journal and a more

like a blog site so if it's longer and more serious we put in a blog and also what I was going to tell you is that me and Jason want to form out of this class and the first class there's some overlapping in a number of people who participated in these classes but also divergence because some people were in the first part and some people were in the second part only. But we want to create an accelerated research group for the new center which means we just can carry on working outside of the seminar setting and have events and produce and research work around it whether it's art or humanities or whatever it is. So feel free to sign up for it when we announce it in January because that's when we announce a bunch of the research groups that are coming out of the seminars.

I'm also heading another one. This one will be with Jason but the other one will be exclusively for the curatorial practice. But it's not only open to students or to classes in these things but we open them up to the members and to the community and we set up different types of technologies. And then there's also we're doing one for which we're actually going to develop software in them. If everything works out with Benedict Singleton and Igor and Tony are heading that research group, which will be kind of interesting because we will be actively developing extensions and things to add to our website and to extend and go along the line of like we need to produce new media and new ways of mediating from the manifesto. That research group will just be

working mostly on innovative interfaces and code and technology and ours can interact and interact and intersect with that how much time do we have go ahead I'm just copying the text on the sidebar go ahead um I've been working on trying to do some soft like some program theory in a way like um I don't know if he goes here anymore. No, I guess he left. But there's an Ethereum, and Amy left, but we've been talking about as part of our Xeno Feminism class forking the Bitcoin project and doing like a Xeno coin project. And I'm not sure what that would be, but

I guess I don't know why. I think Benedict Singleton at some point blocked me. but he would be if anyone could let him know that that's something we should work on together I think that would be interesting and if anyone in here has any interest in like the Ethereum project or Bitcoin or the blockchain and like trying to utilize that in the context of this accelerationist theory you should get in contact with me on Facebook Definitely Definitely. I'm posting the notes in the classroom. And just remember, we still have the project to work on, particularly for enrolled students

who want to finish their project and get a mark. And then other sorts of customized arrangements that me and Jason have with some of the students for some of these particular other projects, which have to do with writing. me and Robert are working on something you guys will may or may not hear about it and others there's other arrangements so just remember we're on some type of like agreement with each other to work on the glossaries and we'll be contacting you and the holidays are great time to kind of like work on that so keep in touch with us and we'll keep in touch with you and thanks for being here and And yeah, so I guess Jason, you can kill it. If you have nothing to say.

Let me just say the last thing, which is that it was unfortunate Mark Fisher couldn't make it today, but he really did want to. He got the flu, and so he's just not in a condition to really do it today. But he does want to do a special event sometime probably between now and New Year's. And it would just be like a short event, be about the same length as what he would have done today to discuss his contribution. So keep on the lookout for that and we'll update you on that. We'll email you too when it happens. I posted the notes and I received both the bad newspaper by Amy and Patricia's slides.

And I'm going to add those also tonight to the classroom. And yeah, we're here to help you finish up your glossaries. And me and Jason will be writing an intro to the glossary as well. Thank you all. Great. Yeah, thanks. Thank you. Thank you all. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Thank you, everyone. It's been great.