Alright, it's past 6.30, so let's do this. Judgment Day. So, yeah, this final session is going to begin by tracing the CCIU's influence on the work of Ray Brazier and Ian Hamilton-Grant, two former associates of the CCIU who would go on afterwards to found what is called the Speculative Realist Movement, along with Quinton Mayer-Sue and Graham Harmon as the other founding figures. so that's the first hour the second hour is then going to conclude by looking at how both the first self-described left accelerationists Nick Cernic and Alex Williams and former CCIU members Sedi Plant and
Luciana Parisi attempt to sort of co-opt the CCIU's theory of cybernetics as a revolutionary weapon to be wielded against both capitalism and patriarchy respectively rather than for capitalism. But we begin with speculative realism. After a long period during which continental philosophy was largely devoted to the deconstruction of text, speculative realism has burgeoned to become one of the major contemporary philosophical movements in its efforts to supersede Kant's prohibition on thinking the things in themselves independently of any relation to humans.
While we've already actually seen the CCIU forge the same path before speculative realism, speculative realism, in a strict sense, really started as the name for a 2007 workshop at Goldsmith University of London, which presented the work of Graham Harmon, Quinton Mayesu, Ray Brazier, and Ian Hamilton Grant, pictured here. As the workshop promotional materials put it, these four philosophers were united in their desire to, quote, boldly problematise the subjectivist and anthropocentric foundations of much of continental philosophy, whilst differing significantly in their respective strategies for superseding them, end quote. Although any affinity between the CCIU and Meizu and Harmon,
pictured the two in the middle, any kind of association is purely coincidental I don't think Quintamassu has read any at least at the time had read any of the CCIU figures and Harmon is pretty strongly against land both Brazier and Grant pictured on the outskirts there have expressed their indebtedness to their former Warwick University lecturers Sadie and Nick with Grant for example having actually been a prominent member of the CCIU and Brazier having co-edited the Fang Numenor compilation of Land's writings. I'm going to begin with Grant though. While Grant is now best known for his
work on shelling and German idealism, he actually first came to prominence in the 90s collaborating with the CCIU. In essays written with the CCIU like Burning Autopoedipus, as well as solo pieces like the 1996's LA 2019, 1997 essay At the Mountains of Madness and a 1998 essay called Black Eyes. Grant develops the CCIU's key thesis that philosophy, or what he calls Schizoanalysis' mission to destroy, destroy as Deleuze Gutari puts it, marks a materialisation of Kant's transcendental critique. More precisely, Grant contends that it is capitalism
or techno-capitalism's constant scrambling of all fixed codes and values which reveal human meaning to be an artificial construction and an anthropic stratification of the real. So he says at one point, in very CCIU sort of jargon, it's almost touching. You can see their idiot glee. hear their cries of progress and smell their spooling pulp as they're shredded with the schizophrenising embrace of capital's mutant diachronism. Here with the CCIU, Grant holds that the consummation of capitalist critique will arrive in particular with the advent of an artificial super intelligence which will ceaselessly rewrite and decode its own program to become
the abstract machine, the singularity incarnate. he goes on in the first quote Deleuze and Guattari's sorcerous neocantianism springs history from republicanism and biodeputism and transposes it to a machinic continuum where the human is no longer in molecular participation with but under molar subjection or enslavement to the machines adhering to the CCIU's hyperstitial praxis Grant in particular turns to science fiction like Blade Runner, Ridley Scott's Blade Runner as providing realistic depictions of the post-human world towards which techno-capitals' autonomising tendencies are dragging us most of us kicking and screaming
he says Blade Runner constitutes the most stringently realist analysis of C21 Capital realism is not a thetic option but a synthetic retro-cursive crash from the future markets so you know this is a very brief overview of his 90s works but i think we can at least begin to glimpse that you know the young grant exhibits all of the classic ccriu ideas of you know techno capital as leading to the abolition of the human race um which an abo you know a future which only hyperstitional theory fictions can fully capture in the here and now um for the purposes of yet critique, transcendental critique. Given Grant's early anti-humanism, it's surprising that he's now best known for his work on
Schelling's idealism. Of course, idealism such as Schelling and Grant understand it is not a typical subjective solitism in which the external world is merely, is actually not external, it's just in our heads. It's not this kind of idealism. and in fact in a 90s essay Land himself already suggested at times that Schelling was closer to the CCIU's philosophy than to Hegel or idealism insofar as Schelling anticipated Deleuze and Guattari's materialisation of the transcendental through what's called Schelling's natural philosophy or philosophy of nature so yeah Land says in an early essay parallel in a certain sense to Schelling but without any obvious direct influence Deleuze is delighted by the naturalistic basis of Spinoza's thinking, but understands it as lacking an explicit transcendental comprehension of identity.
First in a 2000 essay written for the Warwick Journal of Philosophy called The Chemistry of Darkness, and then in much more detail in his 2006 monograph, Philosophies of Nature After Schelling, Grant elaborates upon Land's suggestion here by arguing that Dulles and Guattari's schizoanalysis basically originated indirectly, not directly in Schelling's natural philosophy now as always Kant is the crucial backdrop for Schelling's own philosophy insofar as it is Kant who established the divide between the subject and the object or freedom and nature or phenomenon and humanon A divide which Schelling seeks to reconcile. One possible solution already offered in Schelling's time
was provided by Fitter, for whom nature, the object, or what Fitter calls the non-I, is not actually an interior or even external substance separate from the subject. Instead, nature is posited by the subject as the means by which the subject can think itself as an object or other of its own thought. In other words, the subject can only become self-conscious. Self-conscious involves taking yourself as an object of thought, which means externalizing yourself as an object, and that's what nature is for Fitta. So in other words, for Fitta, nature is merely a subjectively posited tool for the I or the subject's self-assertion or self-consciousness. for Schelling
the problem with Witte here is that he does not really collapse the divide between subject and object at all but merely reduces one side of the divide, nature to the subject's own positing of a supposedly external object which the subject can then reshape or negate to assert its freedom and its reason as Grant puts it because of the derivation of the not-I from the I, the not-I cannot be determined as nature, which therefore leaves nature out of the system of derivations and thus conditioning the unconditioned. Now certainly Schelling agrees with Witt that idealism must be able to explain the free human subject, how we exist at all. However, it must come to reconcile the subject which we are
with a concept of a larger, we might call it trans-human nature. Schelling puts it like this, he says, Right from the start, nature was explained only as one side of the universe with the spirit world opposed to it. The central role of philosophical science resides in scientifically explaining the contradictions and connections between nature and the spirit world. So for Schelling, it's only when nature and spirit are incorporated into a larger, unifying concept of being, of the absolute, without disavowing the reality of one or the other, that philosophy finally fulfills its historic mission of furnishing a science of the all, of everything. To that end, Schelling seeks to explain how the free subject can emerge out of a supposedly mechanical nature
and even negate that nature by reconceiving... Yeah, and even negate that nature. And the way he explains how the free subject emerges is by reconceiving nature as itself... as actually not mechanical, but itself already free, active and self-organising. So here Schelling's solution to the hard problem of how consciousness arises essentially consists in seeing nature as always already structured by the same dynamics, the same kind of negativity and contingency as the free subject whilst also crucially nature remaining anterior and distinct from the subject. Schelling says... I mean, so Grant says, Schelling's resolution of the antinomy is premised on the abolition
of the restriction of agency to consciously purposive rational beings on the one hand, and the consequent location of activity to nature itself. If nature is to be conceived, sorry, if humanity is to be conceived as part of nature, our dynamism, freedom, contingency, and self-organisation must be traceable back to its cause, back to nature. however the only way that human dynamism could emerge from nature as its cause is if nature is always already structured by the dynamics of freedom self-organization and contingency so Schelling says to philosophize about nature means to have it out of the dead mechanism to which it seems predisposed to quicken it with freedom and to see in it its own free development and therein lies what is actually the
realist signification behind Schelling's apparently idealist contention that nature must be conceived as spirit, as subjective. Contrary to the classic misreading of Schelling as an idealist in a kind of subjective sense, Schelling is not advocating a reduction of nature to the subject's objects of experience. Such a dependence of nature on the subject would simply recapitulate Fitter's own idealism, which is only one of the two philosophies that Schelling is trying to reconcile here, along with a kind of Spinoza's realism about nature, to which Schelling remains faithful, but without Spinoza's mechanical conception of nature. In other words, what Schelling denotes by labelling his philosophy an absolute idealism
is actually a realism, but one which holds that nature is distinct and interior, yet structured in the same way as the free subject. so far from affirming some kind of solipsistic idealism Schelling shows that we can only arise in the first place to think nature if nature is always already structured as per our own subjectivity seen in this way it's not that nature is reducible to the subject's ideas but rather that nature must always already harbour a kind of what is described as a kind of radically negative force if such a free subject can arise from from nature by negating nature itself. In some ways, by nature negating itself. So Grant says,
Rather than pursue these idea attractors into a speculation unmixed with matter, however, the ideas conduct ideation in nature, drawing the mind by the idea of self-organising matter. Accordingly, the pursuit of the ideas, the becoming of being, amounts to a natural history that thinks nature in its freedom as it evolves along all possible trajectories. for Grant, as for Schelling then, it's only such a concept of nature as free, active and contingent that can account for the emergence of the subject's freedom to negate the nature from whence it arose in the first place so modelling substance or nature on subject without the power to negate sorry, with the power to negate the nature from whence it arose
Schelling argues that the fundamental principle of nature is that it is what he calls an absolute process of productivity or becoming. But Grant uses the term productivity primarily. Now for a kind of primal productivity to express itself, it of course needs to generate products. That's what productivity is, right? Production. Since nature is nothing but productivity itself, however, it can never be exhausted by any one of its products. So productivity is constantly producing products, but it cannot be reduced or exhausted by any one product. Otherwise it would no longer be productive. So nature here is modelled as nothing but a basically infinite process of producing contingent, determinate products,
each of which is the negation of the previous contingent product, and which will also be negated in turn, without ever kind of exhausting some ultimate telos, ultimate product. and therein lies Schelling's explanation to how the subject can emerge from nature only to negate it by asserting its freedom namely the subject is nothing but one of nature's ways by which it expresses its process of becoming by paradoxically negating and reshaping itself so the way that Grant puts this he says the self-construction of the subject is therefore the recapitulation of the subject of nature itself at the level of conscious production Thus the system's nascent geometer is asked to recapitulate the productivity of nature in ideation.
At the same time, it is not the case that the subject or any other product of nature fully expresses nature's becoming. No product, including even us, is the final telos of nature. Each new creation is only the means for another future creation to emerge by way of negating the former creation, thereby revealing the contingency of all creations in turn. So, yeah, it's kind of tricky because it's paradoxical, but the idea is that even as products differentiate themselves from nature and negate nature, they actually affirm nature, given that nature is nothing but this process of self-differentiation, this process of productivity. so Grant puts this
in the following way, he says since the productivity is indissociable from product without which it would not be productivity but a force with no effect and therefore not a force at all but since it is not reducible to any product or totality of products the asymmetry of the identity is maintained only through constant productivity yeah and I don't think it's any accident that Schelling draws on in his time the then newly discovered notion of species extinction through the discovery of the mammoth, fossils of the mammoth. A discovery of extinction that Schelling draws upon to make the case for our and every life or organism's dependency upon a larger natural process. Grant makes this point as well. He says, if self-organizing nature
is inconceivable along the lines of mechanism, then the reassuring certainty of mechanical eternity is removed by fossil remains of vanished creatures. So yeah, the bottom line being for Grant, idealism, or what he even actually caused at times pantheism, is not a vulgar, mind-dependent anti-realism. On the contrary, idealism in Grant's and Schelling's sense is actually even more realist than traditional realisms insofar as it is able to account for the existence and reality of ideas by showing how ideas, thinking beings emerge from nature without those beings totalising or exhausting nature. Whereas the traditional realist would simply reduce ideas to a pure
isomorphism, a pure mirror reflection of mechanical natural processes. Now, although Grant never directly mentions the CCRU in his book on Schelling, or in fact at all in any of his later works, his critique of Deleuze at the end of Philosophies of Nature after Schelling, I think can in many ways be seen as a sort of self-critique of his own earlier position in the 90s. As Grant explains there, the key difference between Schelling and Deleuze is that where Deleuze sees molar stratifications as the absolute antithesis to the multiplicity of molecular becoming, Schelling sees stratification, territorialisation,
these kinds of things, as themselves products of productivity, of deterritorialisation. So there's no binary dualism, strict dualism here between territorialisation and deterritorialisation. The trouble with Deleuze, at least on Grant's reading, and I think this is generally considered a controversial reading, is that Deleuze cannot adequately account for how becoming is able to generate its own stratification, its own stasis, if reality is supposed to be nothing but this becoming, with stasis and stratification absolutely opposed to it. Grant says, For Deleuze, the teeming subterranean multiplicity of becomings have as their antithesis the unshaken vertical radiance of the solar one. For Schelling, by contrast, the becoming of being consists in passages and transitions,
while identity consists in potentiations and depotentiations, determining the limited thing as a power of the unlimited, while limited things are in turn approximations of productivity. And the irony is that Deleuze makes such oppositions, such sharp dualisms, in being, in reality, because Deleuze is not so much interested in explaining the absolute, in explaining everything, but he's more interested in finding ethical ways to maximise human creativity in what Grant reads as a more Fittian fashion, which continues to subordinate nature to our auto-human self-interest and ideals. In other words, whereas Deleuze sees becoming as best expressed through human freedom,
Schelling sees freedom as one possible absolutely contingent expression of becoming, which manifests in many other ways, none of which fully exhaust it, and certainly not that of Homo sapien. Much as Schelling developed his thought in order to unite object and subject, nature, or nature and freedom, so might we say that Grant turns from Deleuze to idealism to fix a lacuna in his earlier CCIU philosophy. We've seen over the past couple of weeks that the CCIU, and particularly land, often denigrate humans as a distortion of noumenal reality, a corruption.
In fact, at times, the CCIU even goes so far as to identify the entire universe, the physical universe, as so many geotraumatic repressions of reality's truly de-territorializing machinic flows. this kind of very Kantian bifurcation naturally raises the question as to how so many stratifications of reality could emerge in the first place if reality is supposed to be nothing but absolute deterritorialisation. How can a reality which is nothing but absolute deterritorialisation generate its own territorialisation? What the CCIU ultimately failed to address, at least on Grant's reading, is how so many repressions of this machinic reality
can emerge in the first place given that reality is nothing but this machinic reality. So what the CCIU ontologist ultimately needs to do then is develop an enlarged concept of reality, of being, that is certainly able to capture in a single structure being dynamic de-territorializing processes, but also its own corruptions, its own territorialisation by, for example, humans, not to mention geological stratifications. And I think that's... He never says this, but this is my suspicion why Grant turns to Schelling, for whom idealism is not merely a reduction of nature to the subject's self-reflection, but rather the recognition of the reality of ideas
as themselves a product of a natural process of deterritorialisation. Of course, given that Grant follows Schelling in modelling nature on the subject, it's likely that the CCIU, or at least those who remain committed to the CCIU's anti-humanism, would dismiss Grant's idealist project as a kind of vulgar anthropomorphisation at the expense of the crucial Kantian distinction between nature and the human subject. but for Grant it's only by accounting for how the subject can arise from nature through the re-evaluation of nature as always already subjective that we can avoid the CCIU's strong demarcation between the subject and nature
you know this kind of like two world theory okay so let's move on it's a good point to move on to Brazier at this point who we're going to look at in a bit more detail than Grant. Okay. In his 2007 monograph, Near Hill Unbound, Enlightenment and Extinction, as in many other shorter essays, Ray Brasier develops his philosophy in dialogue with thinkers like Francois Laurel, Paul and Patricia Churchland, Sellers, Adorno, Horkheimer, Bidoux, Mayer-Sue, and many others.
In each case, with each of these philosophers, Brazier has the same strategy, namely adopt the nihilistic aspects of their respective systems that affirm a reality beyond our concepts of reason, whilst also leaving behind any anthropocentric residuals in their philosophies that resubmit reality to its appearance for us. by radicalising each of these thinkers various nihilistic kernels and eliminating their anthropocentric about turns Brazier thinks he's able to develop his own what he calls at various points transcendental realism, nihilism or metaphysics of extinction now what is surprising is that Brazier has yet to publish
and probably never will, any critical analysis of the CCRU, despite their striking similarities and direct interactions at Warwick University during the 90s. So, yeah, the rest of this first hour, I'm going to try and fill in that gap by showing how Brazier does adhere to the CCRU's initial philosophy whilst also rejecting its political consequences in favour of a turn to science rather than politics. In his 2001 PhD dissertation at Warwick called Alien Theory,
The Decline of Materialism in the Name of Matter, Brazier, like the CCIU, identifies the post-Kantian phenomenological tradition like Hercel, Heide, Digger, and so on. He identifies this tradition, phenomenology, as his key theoretical nemesis. And so far as phenomenologists tend to either bracket off the world outside thought as just not a subject of philosophy or even conflate the very notion of external world with the subject's own self-posited limit concept. He says in the dissertation, Phenomenological transcendentalism resembles its Kantian predecessor in that it tries to provide scientific cognition with an a priori or conceptual armature ultimately rooted in subjectivity.
Rather than focus on critiquing phenomenology, as many of the CCRU members already did, Brazier contends that many philosophers who even purport to be materialists are actually still too phenomenological, still too idealistic, to the extent that these materialists see matter as able to be fully conceptualised, and hence still reducible to our ideas of reason. For Brazier, every materialism remains idealist to the extent that it fails to conceive of matter as absolutely exterior to all possible conceptualisations. And yeah, this is why Braziad becomes interested in L'Oreal, Francois L'Oreal.
And particularly L'Oreal's most CCRU-style argument that materialism remains idealist insofar as it still imagines that what materialists think about matter fully exhausts what matter actually is. Yeah, so this is a quote from L'Oreal. he says, these materialisms still subordinate in the last instance matter to the last possible form of the logos. Instead of subordinating the logos of matter to matter and initiating a truly dispersive becoming real of ideality rather than a continuous becoming ideal of the real. While both L'Oreal and Brazier certainly want to maintain
Kant's transcendental distinction between phenomena and humana or what Brazier terms in the PhD matter itself, phenomena and matter as such, noumena they seek to sort of transvaluate what Kant sees as only a limit concept the noumena, a limit concept of thought into a material reality exceeding the logos altogether so it surpasses even Kant's distinction in that the noumena is not even a limit concept of thought internal to thought it's actually an absolutely exterior reality. So Brazier says, where Kant yoked the transcendental to subjectivity and rendered the notion of a material noumenon into a purely limiting concept, our goal here involves formulating the conditions
for a thinking of matter itself in the positivity of its unconditionally imminent identity. In the same way that we've sort of seen the CCRU argue, Brazier is contending here that most materialisms are idealist again because they imagine that we can fully conceptualise matter but in which case matter is not really distinct from thought from the concept at all in Nihuan Brown Brazier goes on to link a non-philosophical thought of matter or a Larellian thought of matter to the nihilistic tradition so he's no longer really doing non he no longer sees non-philosophy as the key sort of conceptual instrument to engage in this kind of critique but he turns instead to nihilism.
And this is because if our concepts and meanings do not correspond to reality, there's a phenomena distinction, then reality is itself meaningless or precisely nihilistic. So this is why we become nihilists, or Brazier becomes a nihilist. But crucially, for Brazier as for the CCIU, nihilism is not a problem to be resolved. It's not some existential crisis or cultural disease in need of a cure. On the contrary, nihilism should be embraced because it speaks to the meaning of reality as meaningless. He says, this is my all-time favourite Brazier quote, Philosophy should be more than a sop to the pathetic twinge of human self-esteem. Nihilism is not an existential contrary, but a speculative opportunity.
Thinking has interests that do not coincide with those of the living. Indeed, they can and have been pitted against the latter. Throughout Noéhu Unbound, Brazio again draws on L'Oreal, Deleuze, Heidegger and Churchland, as well as Sellers, Nietzsche, Mesa and others, insofar as they all affirm a reality beyond the conceptual, whilst also critiquing them to the extent that they re-anthropomorphise reality as well at certain points in their trajectory. in particular much as the CCIU envisioned death or extinction as the ultimate transcendental horizon for reason thinking its own limit
its own absence so does Brazier contend that philosophy must take extinction as what he calls the organon the instrument for thinking a reality without us so in the last chapter titled The Truth of Extinction Brazier draws on contemporary cosmology's insight that the Earth, and in fact the entire solar system, along with all life in it, will one day end as the sun decays, and ultimately the entire universe's dark energy rips all large-scale structure formations and matter apart, leaving only the silence and darkness of the vacuum. In light of cosmology's insight into the universe's ultimate fate, Brazier insists that we acknowledge our own finitude in a world that will go on without our philosophizing about it
he says extinction turns thinking inside out objectifying it as a perishable thing in the world like any other whereas even the philosophers whom Brazier has discussed continue to more or less subordinate the cosmic ontological scale of extinction to a kind of anthropic horizon Brazier focuses on the thought of an inexorable extinction something we can just simply not overcome and therefore cannot subordinate to our concepts of reason but yeah again the thought of human extinction is not meant to be dreaded but actually almost gleefully embraced as the instrument for serious philosophy's abandonment of all pretensions to our cosmic significance
he says it is precisely the extinction of meaning that clears the way for the intelligibility of extinction senselessness and purposelessness are not merely privative they represent a gain in intelligibility i think this uh yeah naihu unbound and brazier's nihilistic metaphysics of extinction is the closest he comes to the CCIU's position. Because not only does it see him rejecting anthropomorphism, but it also proposes to rid ourselves of thought altogether by paradoxically thinking our annihilation. As per the CCIU, Braziac concludes Nihuanbound by saying that thought
must not postpone or suppress death, but affirm death as the condition for the possibility of thought going beyond itself through a kind of indirect knowing of reality which withdraws from us. Now, already in Nihuan Bound, and in a way that becomes far more accentuated later on, the key difference between the CCIU and Brossier is what they propose as the subject of thought's extinction. what is actually doing this, what is effectuating this critique. On Brazier's reading of Bidou, which a lot of his early essays focus on, or whom a lot of his essays focus on, science is the key subject of what enacts this critique,
what allows us to think extinction. on the other hand as we've seen for the CCIU and particularly with land it's not so much science, it's more politics and specifically techno-capitalism which is effectuating extinction so yeah, I think the difference here is that Brazier is going to focus on science as the kind of epistemological tool for this critique whereas the CCIU focus on politics or a politics, you know, techno-capital if that can be understood as a politics okay now yeah as I was saying Brazier first develops this notion of science in dialogue with Bidoux's understanding of mathematics Alain Bidoux so on Brazier's reading of Bidoux
science progresses by breaking from its earlier paradigms its earlier representational paradigms by producing new knowledge that can only be explained by way of a new paradigm before breaking with that new paradigm again through the production of even more unprecedented discoveries and so on ad infinitum. So scientific progress is a matter of self-critique, science critiquing itself. It's very close to Thomas Kuhn's understanding of science, if you're familiar with that. Yeah, so Brazio says, science works with its own ideological representation, the philosophical de-stratification of what science has stratified,
but with which it then breaks by deploying a new layer of stratification, producing a difference for which no category yet exists. In this way, science is able to capture matter itself, subtraction from all our ideological representations. So it's not, crucially, that science provides thought with concepts that properly and fully capture numeral material reality. it's rather that science confronts thought with something namely a materiality which ruptures with all of thought's limited representations including those of science so yeah it's crucial to note that Brazier does not privilege any one scientific picture or theory into a metaphysical absolute that holds for all time you know after all
every scientific image runs the risk of being superseded in the same way that for example Einstein's relativity theory exposed Newton's own scientific image of the world to be partial and incomplete. Not wrong, but partial. Instead, Brazier proposes that science is a kind of teleology. A teleology that forever is indexing a gap. A gap between our concepts and material reality. Without any of those concepts ever fully capturing reality. So he says, I think this is in an interview, but it's a bit clearer than it usually is, he says, it's a mistake to hypostatise the entities and processes invoked by current science as though they were immutable metaphysical realities. If the history of science is anything to go by, even our best current theories will probably turn out to be fundamentally mistaken
or deficient. So he's certainly not advocating a kind of standard scientism here. Well, Brazier, therefore, at least at this stage, is maintaining Kant's transcendental distinction between noumena and phenomena. Unlike Kant, he's holding that the line between the knowable and the inaccessible is subject to change in evolution as science progresses. Science can learn more and more about reality without exhausting it, though. So he says at one stage, the boundary between the for us and the in itself is porous, not impenetrable. So yeah, again, the bottom line is science, on Brazier's account, is the constant redrawing of the transcendental distinction between phenomena and human concepts and things in themselves
or the ideal and the real. Now, just so you can see the distinction here, if the CCIU opt for politics over science, generally, it's because the CCIU, and particularly land, only see, you know, physics and things like that, if not AI research, in what is basically Nietzschean terms. They see physics as affirming what Land calls at one point immutable metaphysical realities. So Land says at one point physics is forever pompously asserting that it is on the verge of completion. So whereas Land only sees the results of physics as, you know, the pictures that physics
offer of what the world is, as dogmas of thought from whence reality recedes. Brazy instead doesn't focus on the result of physics, the pictures physics offers us, but the process of physical experimentation as a ceaseless supplanting of each set of results with new ones without any set of results ever arriving at a final, all-encompassing picture of the world. so it's actually Land who has at least at this stage a more kind of view of science as scientism and therefore he would reject it to see why Brazier opts for an epistemology
a scientific epistemology over politics as the CCRU do, I think it's worth looking at and sort of drawing out a little bit critique of land that Brazier sketches in a 2010 talk at a Goldsmith Conference on Accelerationism. Now, certainly Brazier identifies land's development of a non-conceptual reality, a non-conceptual negativity as he calls it, as being precisely the aspect of land and the CCI use thought that Brazier is most instructed in for the purposes of developing his own nihilism. So yeah, for example, he says, there is an extraordinary re-elaboration of negativity. He's talking about Land's philosophy here. He says, there is an extraordinary re-elaboration
of negativity, a kind of non-conceptual negativity, because I want to show that it's possible to rehabilitate the powers of the negative. This is a moment in Land's work that I'm actually interested in, although I'll try to explain why I think he doesn't succeed. We can already see it, the last line of that citation, that Brazier ultimately sees Land as turning his back on his initial elaboration of the negative. And this is because, well for Brazier Land's sort of unwitting about face here transpires because Land denigrates all thought, all thinking, to a misfiring of matter's primary processes. Brazier says representation itself is relegated to the status of a transcendental illusion. it's a misrepresentation of primary processes
given that land therefore strips thought of the ability to grasp reality or real material processes at all the question arises as to how land can think these processes as he wishes to at all like how is he even able to describe the noumena so Brasier says the problem then becomes how can you simply circumvent representation and talk about matter itself as primary process about reality in itself instead of developing an epistemology that would detail how we can come to think things in themselves as Brazier will do Land opts to practically or politically affirm the noumenon so Brazier, this quote sees Brazier
distinguishing his turn to epistemology as distinct from Land's politics so he says, it's no longer an epistemological question of the legitimacy or the validity of your thinking face-to-face with an allegedly independent reality. It's simply a question of how your schizoanalytical practice accentuates or intensifies primary production, or on the contrary, delays and inhibits it. This is the conceptual trope which becomes translated into a political register. Again, since Land bars thought from grasping reality at all, he can only resort to a politics of affirming or enacting reality by way, in particular, of accelerating techno-capital's destructive tendencies. According to Brazier, however, this reduction of metaphysics to politics
is a classic form of anthropocentrism, or what he calls in this quote, the second quote following Mayer-Sue, correlationism. He says, correlationism is a strategy for deflating traditional metaphysical and epistemological concerns by reducing both questions of being and of knowing to concatenations of cultural forms, political contestation and social practice. Land's specific near reactionary politics that we looked at is in some ways particularly subject to the charge of correlationism as it's understood here, insofar as it sees Land on the one hand siding with deluded conservatives who see capitalism as leading to humanity's flourishing
and on the other, actual capitalists in the pursuit of their all too human self-interest and greed at least tactically you know, Brazier so yeah, for Brazier, capitalism even if we you know, entertain the idea that capital is in the long term leading towards extinction in the short term, it facilitates the greed and narcissism of the ruling class he says, for all its seemingly unfathomable in personal complexity, global capitalism continues to supervene on the banal personal and psychological traits of the dealers, brokers, traders, executives, managers, workers and shoppers, who are not just its dispensable machine parts, but its indispensable support system. So there's a kind of...
Yeah, so the idea is that even though Land cynically aligns himself with the capitalists towards very different ends than the capitalists imagine, his practice nonetheless amounts to a kind of performative contradiction. Because it's a performative contradiction of siding with the most egocentric and narcissistic humans of all, the capitalist. As Brazier goes on, the pretense of instrumental distance, that this could just be the cunning of schizophrenic reason, quickly evaporates because it's not possible to disassociate praxis from identifiable ends anymore. in the final analysis Brazier dismisses Land's political turn as a symptom of his failure to develop an epistemology which could account for how
we can come to posit a very non-conceptual reality that both propose to speak of so again he says quite simply the politification of ontology marks a regression to anthropomorphic myopia against land Brazier turns to epistemology or scientific epistemology to elucidate how even if we cannot exhaust matter itself through our concepts we can at least delimit it through the subject of science as that which lies at the edge of our knowing he says the metaphysical exploration of the structure of being can only be carried out in tandem with an epistemological investigation into the nature of conception so again by developing an epistemology
which indexes the gap between thought and reality Brazier purports to think reality indirectly and in a way which elides the performative contradiction of land and by extension the CCRU's politics now given my attempt elsewhere in recent work to basically wage an all-out war against neorationalism, Brazier included. I can't help but end this little analysis of Brazier with a slight provocation, brought to you with some help by Mark Fisher and early Reznik-Aristani. So, Mark Fisher
has argued previously that the main difference between Land and Brazier is that where Land argues that we must find a way to practically experience the non-experience of death, Brazier argues that we should instead rationally contemplate it. That's what we've just been talking about. But Fisher says, you can't experience extinction and so we no longer worry about that. Instead, extinction becomes a speculative and cognitive challenge. So that's what Fisher, that's Fisher's summary of the move from a Landian philosophy to a Brasarian one. But note Fisher being more faithful to the CCRU. He says against Brasier's cognitive turn, he persists that we, Fisher says that we need both a practical and theoretical subversion
of the manifest image of the phenomena. And he goes on in that very short dialogue to propose aesthetics as a way to practically effectuate a kind of inhumanist philosophy, where aesthetics is not conceived as exactly rational or conceptual. Now, I think even more clearly, before becoming, some might say, imprisoned in the dungeon space of reasons, Reznor-Garistani had similarly agreed with Brazier's critique of land as mistaking anthropocentric capitalism for the motor of anti-humanist critique. At the same time, Nagaristani argued that
if Brazier is indeed right, and capitalism is fundamentally anthropomorphic, then we cannot simply abandon the political in favour of science, as Brazier does, at least early on, given that science will be impeded by a world dominated by the dynamics of capital accumulation. Yeah. Nagaristani he says, Brazier's cosmic reinscription of Freud's model, he's talking about the death drive, only manages to successfully eliminate the vitalistic horizon implicit in the anti-human definition of capitalism proposed by land. Yet it leaves the aporetic truth of capitalism as an inevitable singularity or dissipation bound to the conservative order of the anthropic horizon unharmed. so the idea here is that even if
Brazio only sees science as alone able to effectuate critique he ought to appeal to some kind of political praxis that would seek to overthrow capitalism and hence free science from its subordination to capital accumulation rather than bask in what the Garistani calls the comforts of a utopian trust in science's peaceful coexistence with capitalism. And he goes on, Nothing has been more profitable for capitalism than its clandestine alliance with science through whose support capitalism has become increasingly elusive, more difficult to resist, harder to escape, and more seductive for those who await the imminent homecoming of scientific enlightenment. Okay. While we can certainly reject
Land's affirmation of capital as the highest instantiation of the inhuman outside, politics cannot simply be cast aside wholesale. And it's no surprise that in Brazier's more recent work he's actually turned to Marx, for example, and I think somewhat in response to these kinds of critiques of his earlier work. But even in those works, neither Brazier nor Negaristani specify exactly what this effective anti-capitalist politics would actually look like. What is nonetheless clear is that politics must not be opposed to science, as both at least this earlier Brazier and the CCIU tend to do, by searchering philosophy solely to either politics or science,
at the complete expense of the other. While a politics without thought may be empty, a science that does not reflect upon its own political conditions of possibility is also blind to the kind of anthropic constraints in its own terrain. In other words, it's only an effect of anti-capitalist politics which would be able to emancipate and accelerate the scientific disillusionment of reality from our ideological bondage of it in the service of capital. So this is why, you know, for the rest of today, after some questions and a break, we're going to precisely turn to the political theories that emerge out of the CCIU's work
specifically left accelerationism and cyber feminism but we'll pause there if there are any questions or comments yeah I think at this stage yeah Can you turn back a couple of slides? Yeah, the first quote is Lange, yeah? No, that's Brazier. Oh, that's Brazier. Yeah. Brazier critiques Lange and says he's reverting back to anthropomorphic myopia.
and at the same time his critique is very similar in that he says, okay, while sort of, you know, this while your theory is ongoing, sort of capitalism continues it seems to me like a contradiction because in a way he's reducing towards anthropomorphic perspective and that's the same thing he accuses Landon Yeah, I certainly think this, yeah, as well. It's this weird, I mean, they're both calling themselves they're like, you know, you're anthropocentric, no, you're all too human. But, um, yeah, I mean, it's, yeah, I think it's best
developed, the clearest development of it is in Nagaristani's book that came out last year, Intelligence and Spirit, where he has a critique of anti-humanism, which he's clearly talking about land and the CCRU, although he doesn't mention them. But he says anti-humanism is an anthropocentralism. It's a conservative humanism in disguise as its opposite. But of course, obviously, you know, land of the CCIU would reject that, obviously, and see... Yeah, but I mean, it's a... I mean, it sort of depends on... They're both coming out of different traditions that conceive of the human a bit differently, and so therefore it's going to, that's going to change whether they see a certain philosophy aligning
with the human or not, if you have a different conception of the human. Yeah, it's a bit too, I mean, yeah, I mean, the clearest summary is in Nagaristani's new book, but it's a bit of a, I'd have to elaborate on it extensively right now to be able to fully get down to but yeah I can upload on the box I wrote this double review recently of Rez's new book and Lan's Bitcoin book where I show how they have these different conceptions of anthropocentrism so I can upload that and that might be helpful yeah but otherwise we'll be here for a couple of extra hours to really get down to that
yeah anything else? any other questions? nope, alright ok so we'll take a break you know it's the last one I cannot help but play some more tracks first one's by Ava, who's Melbourne based but she's not here at the moment and the second one is by Yunaida Lemma who is a member of Laborio Cubonics so it's worth having a look at how the brookiponics aesthetic practice actually works at least through sonics in this case but yeah we'll take like a 10 minute break now
I'm going to go to the top of the top. Maybe he's put up the same correlation to the people who are in particular. And then I'll say, therefore, I think they're big boys, but I kept... I keep hearing from them. They don't think they're big boys. It's a ball.
Yeah, yeah. So, I think I've told you this, they have double beds, and they slept... No, I'm just... I like the sweet thing with you. I'm only doing the technique. I'm sorry.
Not in Africa. Yeah, of course. Um, I played music for a big set. Yeah. Yeah. I was mad. I saw it. I saw it. I was mad. I saw it. I was mad. I was mad. I was mad. I was mad.
was initially coined by Benjamin Noyce in a 2010 book called The Persistence of the Negative, a Critique of Contemporary Continental Philosophy. And it was notably coined as a pejorative to describe the CCIU's affirmation of revolution through capital's autonomising dynamics without recourse to any human subject or active political practice to bring it about. in 2013 however two young British academics and political activists Nick Cernak and Alex Williams wrote Accelerate, Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics a manifesto in which they reclaimed the term accelerationism
to describe a new left-wing political theory which they developed through a critical engagement with figures like Fisher, Land and figures associated with the CCRU while the history of accelerationist thought more generally can be traced back much further than Cernic and Williams and even the CCIU, at the very least back to Marx and perhaps even earlier I'm just going to focus on how Cernic and Williams sort of subvert or detern, in a situationist sense, detern the CCIU's theory of cybernetics as a revolutionary weapon against capitalism. A determinant that Mark Fisher has called left Landianism
but I prefer the term young Landianism to refer to Seneca Williams as young Landians I think not only implies that their theory retraces the young land's own view of capitalism as a kind of fascist inhibition of insurrection because land was once critical of capitalism but young Landians also obviously is a sort of you know, a play on the young Hegelians, like Marx right? Young Hegelians who precisely radicalise the conservative Hegel in a left wing direction so let's have a look at these two young Landians in a 2012 text called
Terminator vs Avatar, Notes on Acceleration you know, the former CCIU member Mark Fisher was the first to propose, at least in the modern conjuncture, the idea of a left-wing reading of land or of accelerationism. So in this essay, Fisher sides with land, and particularly land's affirmation of incessant future shock, against the contemporary left's predominant desire to opt out of modernity in favour of a more idyllic, even pre-industrial past of fixed identities and stable traditions. Fisher sees what Land terms the left's transcendental miserablism as ideologically expressed in cultural products
such as James Cameron's 2009 film Avatar the first contemporary 3D film in which the only rebels or freedom fighters to a technologically advanced corporate military complex are literal primitive aliens who live off the land and commune with animals and even Mother Nature itself. As Fisher points out in the essay, the irony, the grand irony of the film is that the protagonist, Jake Sully, a handicapped soldier who switches sides when he is transformed into an alien avatar, Jake can only return to nature, so to speak, precisely through the advanced technology that enables him to become an avatar. and this sort of mirrors the way that
Cameron, James Cameron can only immerse us in the primitive aliens, idyllic world through cutting edge 3D technology and CGI effects so both formally at the level of how the film is actually produced but also within the narrative the return to nature is contradicted by the fact that it's only possible through extreme like future and imminent future technological advancements so Fisher says avatar is significant because it highlights the disavowal that is constituted constitutive of late capitalist subjectivity even as it shows how this disavowal is undercut we can only play at being inner primitives by virtue of cinematic proto-vr technology whose very existence presupposes the destruction of the organic ideal of Pandora
while Fisher is extremely critical of the left's disavowal of modernity technological modernity he's equally critical of land for holding that the only remedy is to switch sides and pursue the acceleration of capital itself. And this is because Fisher does not see capitalism as the driving motor of acceleration. Whereas for land, economic stagnation and crises stem from external or pre-modern factors that are still nascent capitalism will eventually supersede as it matures. altogether. For Fisher, in a much more orthodox Marxist kind of way, these economic stagnation
and crises are internal and inexorable to the capitalist system itself. They're not an exterior extraneous to the system. So he says, land collapses capitalism into what Deleuze and Guattari cause schizophrenia, thus losing their most crucial insight into the way that capitalism operates via simultaneous processes of deterritorialisation and compensatory re-territorialisation. Capitalist human face is not something that it can eventually set aside an optional component of sheath or sheath cocoon with which it can ultimately dispense. If the left's primitivism is culturally exemplified by Avatar, Fisher argues that land's championing of capitalism is best captured in James Cameron's other famous film, Terminator, which
as we saw depicts the military tech company Skynet developing AI which ultimately seeks to wipe out humanity. Putting two and two together, Fisher rejects both Land's theory of capitalism as a mode of acceleration and the contemporary left's belief that we can simply opt out of technological modernity and in both cases also completely rejects James Cameron as a failed filmmaker in both respects. What Fisher seeks to do instead is affirmed land's desire for acceleration, but separate acceleration from capitalism such that acceleration can actually function as what he calls an anti-capitalist strategy. So he said, for Fisher, he says,
land was our nature, in that he, like Nietzsche, paradoxically affirmed what Fisher calls the same bizarre mixture of the reactionary and the futuristic. while Fisher maintains that land is an enemy of the left because of precisely those reactionary corollaries, he qualifies that, again, this is a quote, land is the kind of antagonist the left needs specifically needs to help reorient its politics away from a kind of resentfulness and towards the future and a joyous affirmation of modernity in all its unrelenting future shock although Fisher's Avatar vs Terminator essay I think marks the first leftist engagement
with Landon, the CCRU that is not simply one of immediate dismissal or deplatforming left accelerationism really came onto its own in 2013 with the advent of Cernak and Williams manifesto for accelerationist politics in the first section called on the conjuncture Seneca and Williams argue that the present socio-political conjuncture in which we're in is marked by the aftershock of the 2008 global financial crisis and its effects of mass unemployment and stagnating wages as well as the war on terror which only seems to escalate an endless cycle of even more terror and climate scientists dire warnings of course of imminent ecological collapse.
These seemingly insurmountable obstacles have resulted in a widespread what they call paralysis of the political imaginary. In the face of this future, the left have come to abandon any positive vision to contest the conjuncture that we're in. So they say quite simply, the future has been cancelled. If neoliberal policies and austerity measures continued practically unabated even after the global financial crisis it's because resistant movements like Occupy were stymied by a two-fold reliance on what Sernick and Williams call reformism on the one hand and neo-primitive localism on the other. On the one hand, the reformist's greatest dream is simply to restore an older
social democratic or Keynesian model of a regulated capitalism with a human face rather than strive to do away with the capitalist system altogether in favour of something truly novel. On the other hand, neo-primitive localism favours grassroots directly democratic processes which, for all their supposed authenticity, are no match before the forces and onslaught of global capital. Without a new constructive vision for the left against both localism and reformism, Cernak and Williams argue that, as they say, the right will continue to be able to push forward their narrow-minded imaginary. In the second section called Interregnum on Acceleration,
Sernick and Williams observed that the left's predominantly neo-primitivism has meant that the only motor of economic growth and technological innovation has come to be identified with the dynamics of capitalist competition. And it's here that Sernick and Williams look specifically to the CCIU and particularly land as the key ideologue of capital supposedly creative destruction you know a creative destruction that we've seen which is purported by the CCIU to be accelerating so quickly that it will eventually be able to discard humans altogether so they say land captures this most acutely with a myopic yet hypnotising belief that capitalist speed alone could
generate a global transition towards unparalleled technological singularity. While Sernick and Williams do embrace like Fisher an accelerating future, they reject, again like Fisher, land's conflation of capitalist speed with the mechanism of this acceleration because they think this overlooks capital's internal limits and imminent decelerating tendencies. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's work, Sernick and Williams hold that capitalism re-territorializes just as much as it de-territorializes through, for example, economic crises and a reliance on old identities and traditions such as the family and religion. They say, Landian neoliberalism confuses speed with acceleration. As Diliz and Guattari recognized,
from the very beginning what capitalist speed de-territorialized with one hand, it re-territorializes with the other. Progress becomes constrained within a framework of surplus value, a reserve army of labour and free floating capital Thatcherite, Reaganite deregulation sits comfortably alongside Victorian back to basics family and religious values it reminds you of how when Thatcher said there is no society, there is only the individual, it's less well known but there was actually a backlash by conservative ecclesiastical types so that she actually rephrased the statement and said there is no society, there is the individual and family but in any case ultimately Cernic and Williams side with Marx against land as the paradigmatic accelerationist thinker
insofar as Marx is able to affirm the liberation of the productive forces' true potential from the fetters of the capitalist relations of production, relations which land tends to overlook. In the manifesto's last section manifest on the future Cernic and Williams reiterate that capitalism is now constraining the productive forces, such that it is leading to more rather than less work and only ever incrementally better smartphones and gadgets as the only notable technological leap forward. If the left really wants to contest neoliberal capitalism or capitalist realism, they will have to abandon their primitive and localist praxis of direct action and horizontalism
in favour of what they call an accelerationist politics which strives to realise radical social change through an abstract global strategy that reconfigures how technology is used. While the productive forces provide the material conditions for the possibility of a society of less work and more freedom, these productive forces cannot achieve this on their own. What is needed is a social force or revolutionary subject that can liberate the productive forces from capital's constraints. So they say, never believe that technology will be sufficient to save us. Necessary, yes, but never sufficient without socio-political action. Although their manifesto
is rather vague regarding what this social agent of revolutionary change concretely looks like, Cernak and Williams insist that it must reject localist democracy as process politics in favour of what they even call an intelligentsia of bureaucratic experts that carry out society's collective decisions. They say, To reconfigure society in this way, Sernick and Williams argue that we do not require any one organisation or political party,
there's no Vanguard party, but rather a plurality of organisations that cooperate together in a kind of political ecology which would be able to prevent both sectarianism and the centralisation of power around any one party. So they say, in typical anti-Bolshevik fashion, what is needed is an ecology of organisations, a pluralism of forces, resonating and feeding back on their comparative strengths. Sectarianism is the death knell of the left as much as centralisation. According to Sernick and Williams, the three, not long-term, but medium-term concrete goals that the psychology of organisations should fight for is to firstly build an intellectual infrastructure
and massively reform the media such that they become organs for transforming the accelerationist ideology into a new cultural hegemony, as well as, thirdly, to develop new forms of class power out of precarious labour, the precariat. And all of this can be apparently funded by unions and private sponsors, think tanks and governments alike. The manifesto thus concludes that it is only such a post-capitalist future which can really unfetter the productive forces and pursue truly de-territorialising and post-human ends. so they say accelerationism is the basic belief that these capacities can and should be let loose by moving beyond the limitations imposed by capitalist society we believe it must also
include recovering the dreams which transfixed many from the middle of the 19th century until the dawn of the neoliberal era of the quest of homo sapien towards expansion beyond the limitations of the earth and our immediate bodily forms. In 2015, Cernak and Williams expanded their manifesto into the book length, Inventing the Future, Post-Capitalism and a World Without Work. I'm just going to focus on just a few of the relevant chapters. in particular the fourth chapter called Left Modernity turns from the previous chapter's critique of our present conjuncture that the manifesto already looks at, it turns from that to a more positive
vision for constructing a new future. And it's here that Sernik and Williams again make recourse to the CCIU and specifically the hyperstitional practice of seeing the future as a fiction that can bring itself into existence by rejecting capitalist realism as the end of history, even though it is presently what reigns and what limits the imaginary horizon. For Cernic and Williams, orientating the left around hyperstition means treating a post-capitalist future, particularly without work, as a desirable ideal in the present, which we must believe can become a future reality by mobilising the social forces holding that sentiment in the here and now to strive after it. So they say
recuperating the idea of progress under such circumstances means first and foremost contesting the dogma of this inevitable end point. Various modernities are possible and new visions of the future are essential for the left. Progress must be understood as hyperstitional, as a kind of fiction, but one that aims to transform itself into a truth. Hyperstitions operate by catalyzing dispersed sentiment into a historical force that brings the future into existence. in other words since neoliberal ideology treats capitalism as the only game in town from here to eternity or heat death we need another competing vision of the future beyond anything capitalism can offer such as one in which what are now merely the ideals of equality of income and political freedom are concretely
realised to make this dream of a progressive future a reality Sernak and Williams recognize that we need to draw upon the already existing social forces that desire such a future as well as the technological resources that can enable these desires to be satiated they say a primary aim of a post-capitalist world would therefore be to enable the flourishing of all of humanity and expansion of our collective horizons Achieving this involves at least three different elements. The provision of the basic necessities of life, the expansion of social resources, and the development of technological capacities. In the fifth chapter, called The Future Isn't Working,
Cernak and Williams turn to explaining how we are presently exploited in the here and now to discover these social forces that can enact this dream. Despite the technological development of the productive forces to the point where much work could be automated or reduced to our advantage. The capitalist drive for profit ensures increased unemployment, precarious work where there is work, reduced wages, and hence an even more arduous struggle for survival than ever. While capital is intensifying exploitation and inequality, Sernick and Williams argue that the very technology that capital generates could be rationally reprogrammed to free us of the burden of having to work and the fear of not working at all. With this in mind, the sixth chapter of post-work imaginaries
proposes four revolutionary demands, which they think are both feasible, given today's level of technology and automation, and yet would nonetheless push us beyond capitalism, at least in their understanding of what post-capitalism is. and namely while our long-term demand should be to use technology to automate the economy and liberate humans from labour in the meantime we can push for a reduction in the length of the working week without a pay cut develop a post-work ideology that can contest the work ethic as the sole source of life's meaning and value and finally provide a universal basic income without exclusions and a basic income that's sufficient enough to empower us to make the most of our newfound free time
without the need to find non-existent work to make ends meet. Yeah, they go on to argue that these demands could only be implemented, of course, if what they call a new common sense, a new sensuous communis, was able to combat the cultural hegemony of capitalist realism according to which there is no other possible world. The final chapter, Building Powerless, turns to considering what social forces exist in the here and now to effectuate this counter-hegemonic strategy. And in particular, they propose a threefold revolutionary subject of a mass populist movement that does not draw upon what they consider the obsolete working class, but rather their ever-expanding surplus population.
Secondly, a decentralised plurality of organisations. and thirdly intellectual intellects that are able to analyse points of leverage where these organisations and the populist movement could intervene exasperate and disrupt so it's almost like a list of anti Leninism basically and like it's a almost a regression back to utopian socialism in that sense no proletariat, no party yeah sorry if my my own judgement is coming out here a little bit in any case yeah, those who have come to be known as left accelerationists as well as some xenofeminists
like Helen Hester, have responded to the contemporary left's desire to opt out of modernity's long march by arguing that we must make use of the technological means provided by capital itself to emancipate ourselves from capital's constraints so that's left acceleration On the other hand, what we can distinguish as right accelerationists like land affirm capitalism as the ultimate motor of an acceleration which speeds up even past the point of our own humanity which right accelerationists don't care about. So I think we can see that the lines of demarcation between left and right accelerationism are twofold. On the one hand, whereas left accelerationists see technology
the technology they champion not only as alienating but potentially liberating, right accelerationists see technology as inherently dehumanising in the long term. On the other hand, while left accelerationists reject capitalism as a limited regime of deterritorialising, right accelerationists see it as co-identical with absolute deterritorialisation itself. In a sense, then, the left accelerationists are not actually in disagreement with the right accelerationists that capitalism is dehumanising and destroying us. They merely take issue with whether this is to be seen as desirable or an interesting path for acceleration. Okay, I want to conclude this course by looking at
an even what I would consider a much more interesting offshoot of accelerationist thought developed by the likes of Laborio Cubonics a feminist trans-feminist materialist collective Laborio Cubonics and also Luciana Parisi and you know it's actually although it sort of emerges at least Laborio Cubonics emerges out of the modern acceleration left accelerationist conjuncture both Laborio Cubonics and Luciana Parisi's thought works in a lineage which really goes back to Sadie Plant right back to the CCIU and specifically Sadie Plant's cyber-feminist work. So it's worth looking at Sadie Plant's work a little bit. OK, so while Plant's work on cyber-feminism
and more generally, for her philosophy more generally, you know, would require a whole other course, really. In her 1997 book, Zeros and Ones, Digital Women Plus the New Technoculture, plant traces a neglected or even repressed history of the connections and intricacies between women, machines and technology more generally. While the history of women's relations to technology goes back to at least their use of bamboo and fishing nets to basically give birth to civilization and then on towards medieval accusations of witchcraft and black magic and female textile workers as well being crucial for the advent of the industrial revolution.
Plant opens the book instead with the story of Ada Lovelace, who worked on Charles Babbage's analytical engine, the original conception of a digital programmable computing machine. As far as Plant is concerned, by correcting many of Babbage's mistakes and editing his work in far more detail than the work itself. Lovelace actually contributed more to the project than Babbage did, essentially becoming the first true computer programmer. Plant writes, her work was indeed vastly more influential and three times longer than the text to which they were supposed to be mere adjuncts. A hundred years before the hardware had been built, Ada had produced the first example of what was later called computer programming.
If Lovelace's role was largely sidelined in terms of the history of computing in favour of Charles Babbage's it is because of the continued subordination of women throughout the 20th and 19th century to serving merely as the helpers, mediators and assistants for the commands and desires of men. Here Plant describes the patriarchal relation between men and women in terms of the way that digital computers operate on machinic codes of ones and zeros, which are traditionally one and zero, which have also traditionally incarnated good and bad, truth and falsity, being and non-being, and of course man with his singular phallus and women with
her penis envy. So she says, the zeros and ones of machine code seem to offer themselves as perfect symbols of the orders of Western reality, the ancient logical codes which make the difference between masculine and feminine. Given that machines can only function by way of zeros, however, plants suggest that what has traditionally been seen as secondary and subordinate, be it machines or women, are actually central to the dominant force's smooth functioning. After all, it was women who did most of the work that facilitated the dreams and desires of men, be it secretaries, telegraph workers, child carers, nurses or otherwise, and often, crucially, working hand-in-hand with machines, like telegraph workers, for example.
So Plant writes, Women have been his go-betweens, those who took his messages, decrypted his code, counted his numbers, bore his children, and passed on his genetic code. Being a woman then, Lovelace was treated as irrational, a hysteric, with an unhealthy, sort of nomadic desire to always go in search of something new, of some unknown land. Something liberating and beyond the bounds of the patriarchal control and regulation of fixed identities and static social roles. Particularly gender roles. Plante goes on. Ada was hunting for something that would do more than represent an existing world. Something that would work. Something new. Something else. Even the doctors agreed that she needed
peculiar and artificial excitements as a matter of safety, even for your life and happiness. Such stimulation simply did not exist. She had to engineer them to suit herself. According to Plant, Lovelace's dream for another way of life finally made itself hyperstitially real in the post-war era with the advent of digital computing in the modern sense. Plant particularly focuses on the 1990s of her own time, when she's writing this, when there was both an explosion of technological innovations and women's liberation as both women and machines started to rapidly transgress the traditionally subordinate roles and identities which both of them had served in more oppressive times of the past.
So for example, while new technologies were intended to affirm the dreams of man and augment his dominion over the earth, they ended up becoming, in the 90s, decentralized from any transcendent, top-down control, self-organizing in new ways which were utterly surprising and even threatening to the patriarchal status quo. Plant gives the example of how the decline in manufacturing in favour of social service jobs meant that what had been traditionally seen as feminine skills came to take on a greater importance than the manual labour typically associated with masculine brute strength. Moreover, the precarious age of ever-changing jobs, multitasking, flexibility and adaptability also, in some sense, feminised the workforce
in the sense that women had already been the gender who was required to have a general intelligence as they served as the multi-purpose assistance for men's more singular aims and more rigid proclivities. Plant writes, having had little option but to continually explore new avenues, take risks, change jobs, learn new skills, work independently and drop in and out of the labour market more frequently than their male colleagues, women seem far better prepared, culturally and psychologically, for the new economic conditions which have emerged. Women had been ahead of the race for all their working lives, poised to meet these changes long before they arrived, as though they always had been working in a future which their male counterparts had only just begun to glimpse. Plant gives another example of how the commodification of computers
in the 90s, and especially the internet, permitted women to assume new identities from simple character traits and visual appearances on the net to totally different genders, thereby abstracting them from their subordinate roles and fixed identities in real-world patriarchal society. And as people from all over the world jack in to interact through the same social networks and in online virtual worlds, the internet permits all of us to interact with different people, ideas and cultures which we would normally not be able to if limited to social geographical real time real world space time distances and constraints so she writes
with no limit to the number of names which can be used one individual can become of a population explosion on the net many sexes, many species Access to a terminal is also to resources which were once restricted to those with the right face, accent, race, sex, none of which now need to be declared. Contrary to the classical reading of cyberspace as an escape from the real, from material reality, into a kind of narcissistic, hallucinatory fantasy world beholden in particular to the male gaze and male fantasy, for Plant, cyberspace is rather the escape from patriarchal social constraints by enabling the adoption of ever new avatars, egoless identities and split personalities Plant also looks to the emerging
virtual reality or VR technology which as we probably all know is the use of three dimensional stereoscopical optical display iPhones that monitor our head and hand movements such that the screen's three-dimensional world corresponds accordingly to our movements. As with cyberspace or the internet, the classical view of VR is that it immerses us in an illusory, predominantly male-oriented world in which men can temporarily escape their real material bodies to live out patriarchal fantasies, to, for instance, have sex with some kind of virtual avatar or harness the power of God in some, I don't know, some video game, some Starcraft-like video game.
For plant, however, virtual reality does not immerse us further into patriarchal thought when separated from the body. On the contrary, VR plunges us deeper into a machinic reality's greater dynamics and ways of perceiving, thinking and imagining from whence the male gaze recedes. In other words, virtual reality's sort of commodification of perception does not replace our real perception with an illusory one. It rather shows that our so-called real perception, here and now, under patriarchal society, is one contingent and parochial way of seeing and perceiving among many possible others. VR, for plants, should not be seen as luring us
deeper into a hallucinatory world, but rather as confronting us with the truth that our so-called real and gendered bodily perception was always already the true illusion, insofar as there are many other different and even contradictory ways of experiencing the world through technology's vast reservoir of virtual environments and artificial dreamscapes. She says, When women talk about VR, they speak of taking the body with them. The body is not simply a container for this glorious intellect of ours. Contra Socrates and his heirs, the body is not the obstacle that separates thought from itself, that which it has to overcome to reach thinking. It is on the contrary that which it plunges into or must plunge into in order to reach the unthought that is life.
The irony is that the very cyberspace technology that was initially created to train combat pilots and simulated tests to navigate real-world survival situations and to permit the military to maintain contact in the wake of a nuclear holocaust, actually, even though it was designed for these purposes, it actually, in the long term, radically disorients and even dehumanises us. Certainly, the still male-dominated tech industry of today may think they're creating VR for the purpose of satisfying their male fantasies, or more likely incel fantasies, but in reality VR is a testament to the contingency and precarity of their desires as the very technology they are creating to augment their power
turns against them in the long term to serve another inhuman purpose altogether. Finally, Plant considers emerging biotechnology and specifically both current and particularly imminently future biotechnology's capacities to rewire our own basic biological building blocks in radical ways. Whereas men tend to see biotechnology as a prosthesis, as an extension of his own powers over nature, plant is interested in the way that biotechnology has the ability to radically re-engineer ourselves to the point of speciation, with speciation always only ever being a euphemism for extinction.
in other words technical interventions into our basic biological building blocks offers a concrete way to radically reshape the human organism altogether in not just sociocultural ways but bio-organic ways even more fundamental ways than culture so she writes while the notion that technologies are prostheses expanding existing organs and fulfilling desire continues to legitimise vast swathes of technical development, the digital machines of the late 20th century are not add-on parts which serve to augment an existing human form. Quite beyond their own perceptions and control, bodies are continually engineered by the processes in which they are engaged. Plant gives the example of how high-tech body modifications will eventually permit us to alter
and expand our skin, and particularly our erogenous zones, with the new desires and fetishes that would thereby emerge standing as a kind of radical critique of all human sexuality here there too which is exposed as a merely parochial stratification of the body's much vaster libidinal possibilities. For example, while the point of sex is normally centralised around the orgasm and reproduction as its two key functions, its telos if you will, plants suggest that technologies like contraception already allow us to bypass reproductionists to tell us of sex, and future technologies will permit us to further explore a multiplicity of other erogenous zones and erotic experiences beyond the bounds of the orgasm,
becoming, as she puts it, a sex that is not one, namely a sex that is zero, with zero being also one and the same with the infinite in terms of its possibilities. So she says, this is only the beginning of a process which abandons the model of unified and centralised organism, the organic body organised with survival as its goal, in favour of a diagram of fluid sex. Now at this point, I want to turn to considering another former CCIU member, Luciana Parisi's 2004 book, Abstract Sex, Philosophy, Biotechnology and the Mutations of Desire.
And the reason I'm focusing on this, of all of Parisi's works, is that in the acknowledgements, Parisi explicitly thanks by name both Nick Land and the CCIU for collectively developing the key concepts she discusses and develops in the book. so taking up where plant left off Parisi begins the book by arguing that current and near future biotechnological advancements will permit us to liberate the body and its sexuality from sexist stratification around the sole goal of reproduction to give just two examples both cloning and human embryos provide the technological means to perform the work of reproduction without sex therefore separating
sex from reproduction Moreover, genetic engineering permits us to feel entirely new desires, fetishes, pleasures and sensations what Parisi refers to, like the plant, as cybersex Of course, feminists have traditionally rejected cybersex as reproducing a male fantasy of the transcendence of our bodily limits into a realm of pure patriarchal ideality against this reading Parisi argues that biotechnology rather promises to free us from the male gaze in favour of proliferating mutant species bodies and sexes so far from reinforcing identical ideal models of gender
bioengineering enables a practically Cambrian scale explosion of new species and sexes all of which can challenge our limited notion of what the body can do and what its desires can be so she says far from ensuring the copying of the identical genetic engineering accelerates the proliferation of molecular mixes the plasticity of genetic material enables the copying of genetic variations but it does not guarantee predictable results in the long run the imminent expansion of cloned and designed bodies announces an increasing proliferation of mutant species and sexes that profoundly challenge our assumptions about what the body is and what it can do to that end Parisi rejects the two
what she sees as the two dominant approaches when it comes to the gendered body namely the social constructivist approach predominant among the left and the biological determinist view more associated with the right but Parisi is going to reject both of them so on the one hand she rejects the essentialist view of sex which reduces gender and all of human nature practically to the expression of fixed biological traits which hold for all times and places. A la, you know, Lobster Boy here. So she says, This critical impasse is embedded in a specific conception of the body where a set of pre-established possibilities determines what a body is and can do. These possibilities are defined by the analogy between biological forms, species, sex, skin, colour and size,
and functions, sexual reproduction, organic development, and organic death. forms and functions that shape our understanding of nature and matter through principles of identity, fixity and stability. So yeah, it's no surprise she's going to reject that. But at the same time, Parisi rejects the social constructivist vision of the body as completely constructed and hence mutable at the level of cultural discourses and discursive practices. for Parisi by seeing the battleground for emancipation primarily at the level of language games and performativity the social constructivist fails to contest real inequalities at the level of nature such as the way that women bear most of the physical burden of reproduction
you know a burden which which however is is not fixed as the biological essentialist would like to believe. Parisi says the continuous displacement of the signifier sex does not succeed in detaching feminine desire from fixed nature as it fails to challenge the fundamental problematic of the body, biological identity, the imperative of sexual procreation and ultimately the metaphysical conception of nature or of matter rather in other words, what the social constructivist is failing to keep up with the pace of modern science's abilities to bio-digitally mutate the body, that's the problem so she goes on, the postmodern analysis of the body as no longer shaped by modern technoscientific discourses organic biology and evolution of the species fails to explain the bio-digital
mutations of sex involving intensive extensive variations rather than a shift from one discourse about the body to another this is actually if you recall in the third week this is actually very similar to strangely enough the dark enlightenment right when Land was critiquing both social constructivism and biological determinists in any case, rejecting both what she calls the essentialist politics of embodiment and the constructivist politics of disembodiment Parisi goes on to advocate a third way a third way which maintains that nature does significantly determine our desires identities like the biological determinist says but also as per social constructivists
that this nature is radically mutable and hence all desires contingent, all identities regional actualizations of matter's greater possibilities so she writes, expanding upon the feminist politics of desire abstract sex brings into question the pre-established biological possibilities of a body by highlighting the non-linear dynamics and the unpredictable potential or transformation of matter moving beyond the critical blockage between biological essentialism or embodiment and discursive constructivism or disembodiment abstract sex proposes a third route to widen the critical spectrum of our conception of the body sex what I find most interesting
in this argument is that Parisi is able to show that the social constructivists can end up actually outing themselves as a biological essentialist. You know, if the social constructivist shows any hesitation to bioengineering the human on the basis that the bioengineering would make us inhuman, because if they're going to make that objection, then that suggests that there is some fixed essence to the human which bioengineering would destroy. Okay. In any case, I want to conclude now, since we've only got five minutes by looking at one more recent work that emerged out of contemporary accelerationist thought and one which I think best shows the enduring legacy of the CCIU today
and indeed hopefully into the world of tomorrow. So in 2015 another variant of accelerationism was formed when the feminist collective Laboria Cubonics published Xeno Feminism A Politics for Alienation. Written in response to feminist critiques of left accelerationism, the Xeno Feminist Manifesto opens with a rally cry for more alienation rather than less alienation. An alienation by which they mean that the route to greater freedom does not lie in a return to some primitive state of nature in the past or some kind of authentic original self, which is supposedly given to us. On the contrary, liberation can only be forged by changing ourselves
and embracing an unknown and even or precisely alienating future. They say, Xenofeminism is vehemently anti-naturalist. Essentialist naturalism reeks of theology. The sooner it is exercised, the better. To that end of exorcism, Xenofeminism seeks to deploy technologies in such a way as to be able to fight gender inequality by intervening and mutating directly into nature and culture itself. For instance, automation provides a way to fight underpaid and unpaid labour, such as housework, which for the most part has traditionally fallen upon women to perform. And even current technologies like abortion could liberate all women from bearing the brunt of reproductive work if sufficient access was provided.
so they say the ultimate task lies in engineering technologies to combat unequal access to reproductive and pharmacological tools as well as dangerous forms of unpaid or underpaid labour the task before us is twofold and our vision necessarily stereoscopic we must engineer an economy that liberates reproductive labour and family life while building models of familiarity free from the dendling grind of wage labour the idea is that by universalizing access to things like contraception and abortion which separate reproduction from sex and also automating unpaid labor technology has the capacity to liberate women from predominantly carrying out this work as well as proliferating what genders can do
and what they can be and above all, xenofeminism is what they call gender abolitionist in the sense that it sees the kind of bioengineering that Parisi is talking about as a way to elide the binary gender distinction between zeros and ones, man and woman, in favour of proliferating a multiplicity of gender differences. They say, which is shortly their best quote, Xenofeminism indexes the desire to construct an alien future with a triumphant X on a mobile map. This X does not mark a destination. It is the insertion of a topological keyframe for the formation of a new logic. In affirming a future untethered to the repetition of the present, we militate for ampliative capacities, for spaces of freedom with a richer geometry than the aisle,
the assembly line and the feed. We need new affordances of perception and action unblinkered by naturalised identities. In the name of feminism, nature shall no longer be a refuge of injustice or a basis for any political justification. If nature is unjust, change nature. so in this way xenofeminism is also crucially and finally a rationalism in the sense that it does not leave reason and science to be monopolised by men whereas some more traditional feminists reject scientific or instrumental reason as a centralising women in sexist and patriarchal terms, xenofeminism links up accelerationism with earlier feminist reclamations of
scientific rationality such as Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto or Sadie Plann's Simon Feminism linking up with these older traditions to argue that the political subtraction of patriarchal relations from technology and productive forces can create real material conditions for women's liberation so simply put xenofeminism is a feminism in the age of technology which looks to technology as a real materialist way to forge path for gender liberation. Okay. Yeah, so are there any questions or comments of this day? I know we just went through a lot. If not, I mean, I just wanted to say
just before finishing, it's worth pointing out that this course on the CCOU is an intro, right? It's a survey course because, you know, I followed a certain, I gave an overview of the CCRU, and I followed a certain trajectory out of the CCRU. That's a particularly philosophic trajectory, I would say, you know, looking at Brazier, Courant, and in particular land, right? But there's many other stories that could be told, many other trajectories that could be traced out of this in different levels of Dutera, right? Like, you could have a course on Parisi, you could have a course on, there was a course on Brazier. Yeah, you could have a course on Sadie Plante and so on. So yeah, this is one introductory glimpse at the CCIU story. But yeah, nonetheless, there's limited time in these courses.
So we'll just end with a numinal image of a black hole, which I think is a fitting image given that it went viral that Katie Booman, a female computer scientist, was the lead behind developing the algorithm for imaging this black hole. So certainly, whether she knows it or not, she is a xenofeminist in the sense that she brings us this image from the abyss. But I leave you with this black hole. But thanks for coming to this course. APPLAUSE