Firstly, there's some kind of irony that I'm... I coined accelerationism as a term of critique. I'm anti, if you like, accelerationist, and now there's all this tech stuff surrounding me, as an ironic comment on my position. Instead of completely going through what I was going to do, I wanted to kind of reply to the first two papers first, and then talk about the connections, I think, between accelerationism and neoliberalism. So firstly, Mark had kind of three key statements, which obviously I disagree with each. That everyone is an accelerationist, I'm not. And I think there are plenty of other people who aren't accelerationist. I don't think not being an accelerationist implies that one is a primitivist or an anti-Siv on the kind of US position.
I think there are coherent ways to be anti-accelerationist. I may be able to talk about in the questions more than paper. So I don't think everyone is. If Mark is suggesting that a kind of phantasmatic return to the organic or to the land is a kind of capitalist fantasy, then I would equally, symmetrically suggest that accelerationism is a capitalist fantasy. Second, it's never happened as a political program. Yes, it has. In a number of different contexts and places, the Italian futurists, the Russian futurists, In both the interest in the context of modernisation and what is called primitive or originary accumulation on the socialist model in the case of the Soviet Union or in the fascist model in the case of Italy, which may say something interesting about forms of accelerationism and not making any kind of equivalence totalitarian argument,
that particular historical points of accumulation seem to me to be linked to accelerationism as an ideological fantasy or function, which was why one could argue it returns in the 1970s in France. Not, I don't think, in anti-Odipus or libidinal economy an experience of political victory, but I think already an experience of political defeat, mistaken as an experience of political victory, personally. thirdly that marxism is accelerationism again no i don't think it is uh firstly obviously probably witness to the heterogeneity of marxism itself um but i think accepting that capitalism is the condition for communism does not require the absolutization of capitalism
as communism. It's a mistake to conflate those two positions. Then just in relation to what Ray was saying about the conceptual incoherence of Nick Land's position, that it relies on a fundamental dualism that is incoherent. And this is why I encountered Nick Land's work when I was researching on Bataille in the 90s. that's why I never accepted it at all as a position because of this problematic and incoherent dualism so I think that's one reason it's not red that it's wrong and it's possible to be wrong and be red well I won't name thousands of names of people I don't like
but I think there is this kind of incoherence and I understand where people are coming from but unlike Mark I don't think there's something particularly noble about inhabiting a wrong position so it's wronger and wronger more and more false can be but I'm not sure in this situation so I think and completely the affirmation of the impersonal this sense of why do you need a subject I mean this is one of the key points I make in the book where I don't talk about Nick Land but more about Lyotard you know Lyotard at some point says in the liberal economy ironically that we haven't seen the good hippie that's going to be this kind of bearer
of the new regime and in a way I think the same thing could be argued with that accelerationism, the good anti-hippie the good inhuman terminator subject that just doesn't turn up so you end up as Ray said with capital as a subject and if you want to cheerlead and support capital that's perfectly fine you know, you're on the winning side So congratulations. However, I personally do not regard that as a, should be mistaken for a left political strategy. That's my kind of responses. and just to I've already lost track when I started but I'll talk for very much longer particularly they're interested in this correlation between acceleration and neoliberalism
which has been mentioned I was discussing with Ray a couple of days ago and as Ray pointed out to regard accelerationism as a symptom of neoliberalism is a kind of falsity because it accepts neoliberalism certainly in Nick Land's version it's articulated as a radicalisation or a deepening of neoliberalism. So it's not simply enough to say it's a symptom. You have to more precisely analyse it. But I think there is a problem of its congruence with neoliberalism that it cannot think. And I think this particularly relates to its inability to firstly understand the neoliberal project and secondly to understand capitalism itself. At least I think it's been more convincingly articulated by others. so obviously in the landian form and in the other forms we've discussed that the 1970s french moment
it incarnates a state phobia this is foucault's terms from his excellent lectures the birth of biopolitics which i had a big section discussing that you'd be better off reading them yourselves it incarnates a state phobia now that's common to neoliberalism it also accelerationism in the Landian form also agrees with the necessity to subject all elements of society to the market, and it promulgates a vision of the person, or the anti-person, or the non-person, or the inhuman, as a multiple and differentiated enterprise. And in Foucault's lectures on neoliberalism, he has some quite amusingly snide moments where he kind of refers to neoliberalism in terms of the machinic, and the way neoliberalism constructs the kind of machine of the enterprise and the
subject to the market. So we've already got Nick Lance. Of course, accelerationism then goes fully with the tide of neoliberalism. Now, of course, the critical corollary that it claims is that in the language of Marx, this acceleration of neoliberalism will lead to a point of incompatibility with a capitalist integument, which will then burst asunder. It presumes a fundamental incompatibility of the market with capitalism, derived from a Braudelian position, and also often tends to presume a fundamental incompatibility of technological forces, especially cybernetic and currently more neurobiological with capitalism. Of course, markets have pre-existed capitalism and could post-date it, and there is no simple,
essential or necessary reason why cybernetic or neurobiological forces are capitalist, or could not be reassembled, to use Nicol Pepperell's formulation, for socialism or communism. That said, to repeat my point, it seems to me accelerationism fundamentally misunderstands neoliberalism as a particular form of capitalist governmentality and capitalism itself as a social form and so reproduces them or their own idealised image. the fundamental schema i would suggest which obviously extends to people like negri as well and others is to suppose that capitalism is in the style of the young marx fundamentally parasitic and in the style of the late marx but it has penetrated through real subsumption
into the very biological and physical substrates of humans and the earth in a sense which portrays a debt to marx and i identify in the book accelerationism is a Marxist heresy, denying its link to Marxism. Capitalism is presented as a sorcerer's apprentice that unleashes its forces it cannot control, not in the figure of the proletariat, but within its own productive forces. Once we have shucked off this parasite, we can get on with the business of fully inhabiting inhuman capitalist suizance. What I want to suggest, and only really suggest is that this kind of argument radically underestimates that the domination of capitalism operates through the value form which is not simply an external parasite
but rather the self-positing of capitalism as real abstraction. The reason that I think that accelerationism often misses capitalism is that it poses it as a kind of external power, or in Bruno Latour's formulation, a formatting regime. Capitalism is something kind of out there above that comes down, and grids or formats a kind of great ontological richness of existence. Capture, this is where you get the kind of weird congruence, because obviously Latour is completely right-wing, this weird congruence of Latour and kind of certain forms of left modelling of politics. This presumption that there is this massive, rich ontological reality, capitalism sucks. Now, of course, capitalism is a pumping out of value,
but I want to suggest that the real or practical abstraction of the commodity, and especially the commodity of labour, is crucial to this penetration and shaping of existence. It's not simply exterior, it functions through the self-positing of labour as its condition. Now, of course, on the other hand, accelerationism can always reply that it accepts this positing and tries to explode or accelerate it. But again, I think nothing is grasped at the forms of production accumulation and the market which shape these forces. Forces, the forces of production, as Marx notes, are capitalist through and through. In return to a debate in the history of Marxism. capital absorbs labour
transposes it into production as a form or relation of production as Marx discusses in the Grundris also in this valorisation of production coded as ontological power or power unleashed nothing is grasped as a fundamental stasis of capitalism how its accumulation is not fundamentally creative but rather an inertial drift in these paired arguments capitalism is at once deflated into a mere integument, a skin we can burst through, and inflated in its creative power. I think this is the antinomy of accelerationism. In terms of the more precise context of neoliberalism, the dimension of governmentality
is missed. I think the market is treated as a merely neutral social form without any thought about its conditions and the constant action on those conditions. The market becomes hemmed as the social mechanism. As Ray was saying, this kind of transist, or this historical kind of processes of intensification, in which case the market kind of stands for. The blind idiocy of the market is translated into an azothotic imminence. Again, this kind of relates to the absence of the subject. There's a constant hemming of processes that are blind, automatic carry on without us in which case I just can't see how it can be fundamentally linked to any kind of left-wing project which I presume at a minimum assumes some power of human
self-determination ability to control or have rational action over forms of social life I don't know if it's a controversial argument seems to me that's you know something like that is what the left wanted to do. Also in its conception of the state, I think accelerationism again treats the state as an exterior parasite rather than the fundamental condition of markets. The state is not external. The minimal state of neoliberalism is taken as a given and only retains interest to accelerationists in terms of its function as a harnesser of war machines, which leads to me to a rather distasteful fetishisation of military ideology and technology.
Again, a kind of inflation of the powers of military techniques. Finally, the enterprise form is valorised, but the enterprise of self-deconstruction or self-extinction, whether that's caused in neurological retooling, biological reformatting or cyberspatial redistribution, what I've taken to calling a bloated anti-Oedipus. We're expected, in the name of de Luzo-Gautarian anti-fascism, to embrace capitalism as a nihilist machine that has no purpose because purpose equals fascism, while forgetting that neoliberalism appeared in Germany as the form of governmentality that would immunise us against fascism
by trading the political for the economic. So a complete missing of the conditions. Neoliberalism gained traction in Germany precisely on the grounds that it was not political. It was just the market would do its work, we wouldn't have to worry. So we are expected then to accept and welcome neoliberal state intervention whilst repeating the mantra that no new deal is possible and rejecting Keynesian social intervention because Keynesian social intervention is quasi-totalitarian. No putting on the brakes as we can only accelerate to the future. Now, alarmingly, just to finish and counterintuitively,
to me, the context of the current financial crisis has done nothing seemingly to alter the popularity of this schema. At least this brief moment of its emergence, although I'm just surprised everyone's been so much more critical than I expected. Acceleration may be into the abyss, but acceleration must be maintained. Social abstractions may have become frozen into morbid and malignant forms, but they must be restarted by another round of hyper-creative destruction. What is not a fault, it seems to me, for accelerationism is capitalism, but its impurities. In a repetition of the mantra of those one-time masters of the universe, turn temporary beggars for handouts.
Accelerationism takes on the form of an unearned nostalgia for the recent past, the very recent past. a capitalist hostalgie, or neo-Orientalist fantasies of Sino-capitalism with unrestrained biotechnology and no Judeo-Christian hang-ups. Operating in the mode of a macho, hard-edged realism, what accelerationism tests to, for me, is the poverty of a theoretical imagination, unable to reconstruct any rationality in the present and instead content to wallow in the phantasmatic residues of capitalism's own irrationalisms. Thank you.