Oceanic Acceleration ism
Ben Woodard
The environmental activist, conservationist, and marine biologist Rachel Carson once
said that when life came ashore millions of
years ago it brought a piece of the ocean with
it. One of the strange constructive constraints of being on a land filled with things
was the eventual birth of trade and debt.
Economics, broadly construed (and schizoanalytically eyed) threatens to, in a theorytheoretical sense, speed us back to the sea
through a technological progress unbound in
the form of the capitalist accelerationism of
both. Under this metaphorical construction,
technology and capitalism broadly grasped
are those privileged fields that take us to a
world of pure fluidity, but is there a madwoman or madman of theory up to the task
of navigating these waters?
Many contemporary theorists (Sadie Plant,
Luciana Parisi, Nick Land) have soaked up
the 'flow frenzy' of a hyperbolic Deleuzianism, suggesting a material, and not merely
libidinal (a Ia Lyotard) saturation to the
solution. They embrace the call to run naked
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into the world of theory and experiment
like swimmers who have forgotten about the
resistance of the water. Liquid capital-or
financial capital-are the castle in the sand
at the edge of the flood. Plant inhabits this
territory in her push and pull between ultra
fluidity and radical essentialism. Land,
however, was more than aware of the threat
of the oceanic. The desert as Body without
Organs in Land is flooded by cyberfeminist
oceans. He re-draws the Kantian schema as
a rotting oil derrick in the face of a sublime
tidal wave.
The signs of a flood are everywhere; a tsunami is how Carl Cederstrom and Peter
Fleming begin their text Dead Man Working.
[1] Drawing from a work by Franco Berardi,
they describe a world in which the worker
of post-Fordist capital inhabits an emotionally deadened waiting game, unsure of when
and if the end of capital will come --an end
which may in fact coincide with the end of
life. This uncertainty comes from a massive capitalist fluidity that crashes against
locality. For financial capital, shaving milliseconds from trades also means the blasting of tunnels for fiber-optic cables linking
city to city, a physical ungrounding of the
land itself. The effects of capital have fully
saturated not just the economic conditions,
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but also the very material conditions of life.
It is not just a threat of precarity that we find
ourselves under, but the possibility of expulsion from life itself.
Luciana Parisi describes how the materialization of the capitalist ocean have altered
even the biological conditions of life. This
arises in the effects the flows of capital has
on the terms of the specific sexual exchanges
of genetic material. She outlines Elaine Morgan's adaptation of Allister Hardy's theory
of the aquatic ape, in which a shore-like
existence leads to vaginal migration and the
erasure of the visible and olfactory signs of
sexual excitement. The tidal wave of capitalism washes away these biological signs
in obscurity and re-codes them in cultural
practices, practices that all too often result
in a virulent sexism that simultaneously
praises and rages against the fluidity of the
feminine.
Yet, in Zeroes and Ones Sadie Plant ironically
recasts this Edenic fall as a wave of possibility: we were once in a kind of oceanic
happiness and then things went wrong, but
how facetious is she being, since the fall she
describes is now life itself? Capitalism is the
form waiting for life; it is that which made
possible exchanges beyond our own little
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ecologies. Plant convincingly demonstrates
that the technological and material changes
wrought by capitalism do not necessarily have to follow the restrictive ideals of a
masculine ideology. Capital is the sufficient
but not the necessary means of some fluidic
regime, a regime which, if not in a panic with
the associated sublime horror or monstrous
feminine-- is simply the enemy of reason-that which erodes the shores of rational
discourse. One could argue that masculinized capital is a parasite on the potentialities
of the feminine which then must deny and
shore itself of any inherent (or non-obvious)
teleology. But would a change to a more
feminist ecological exchange threaten the
nature of capitalism?
The exaggerated (maybe necessarily so?)
move of the accelerationist is to hyperbolically/hyperstitionally enhance the spectral
thing or system that is capitalism into a
xeno-monstrosity, an alien that has been
waiting for human hosts. [2] We (those
human, all too human humans) seem torn
between futilely swinging our swords at the
incoming waves like mad berserkers rushing
to our own drowning, or we seem committed
to celebrating capitalism's destratification of
all forces and all things. The revolutionary
struggle has been miscast as a war against,
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and as a choice between, the apocalyptic
costs of a masculanized capitalism, or areturn to utopic pre-capitalist feminist ocean.
Are Deleuze and Guattari to blame? Do the
hyperbole of accelerationism and cyberfeminism point to the rotting potato roots
of their project? In 'Becoming Animal. . .'
Deleuze and Guattari say: "So experiment."
[3] But as Land points out in his stimulated
analysis, this leads to an excess of tactics
without strategy. [4] The problem is this:
what capitalism seems to be doing-embracing all tactics to profit off of them-is
accompanied by the necessity of applying a
cost and this exposes an underlying strategy
which is as obvious as it is gross: life itself is
reduced to profit over cost. High speed trade
and liquid assets have made an ocean out
of capital and populated it with creatures
(algorithms)which behave together in ways
we fundamentally cannot predict (a firm
unleashed alghorithms on its own company,
managing to make it insolvent in less than a
second). So if it is not even a jungle, but an
ocean, and experimentation still requires
breathing (underwater), then it is tempting
to pollute. The trick of sustaining capital is
that the costs incurred may be as or more expensive than its relatively positive creations.
That is, the cost of experimentation is the
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affordability of allowing any given capitalist
sea monster to expand its territory and keep
swimming, without too much risk of drowning the whole enterprise.
What is required is a pollution that is mindful of the ecology of the whole, sea, including the life that dwells beneath, and not any
one particular monster.
To be slightly less metaphorical, the ocean
is calling: excess pollution (caused by excess
consumption, excess buying, excess production) is melting the frozen parts of the world,
filling things up with water. It becomes a
game of all or nothing: life or capital? As
Zizek has noted, it is harder to imagine a
subtle shift in capitalism than it is to imagine
the end of the world. The problem is, as has
already mentioned, that capital absorbs the
basic ecological logic of life (profit over cost,
eat enough to keep existing) and expands the
cost of existing to the cost of perpetuating
capital, and to sustain an endless production
which is, in itself, a material impossibility.
The accelerationism of capital does not
merely mean intensifying it further, but
opening it to the exorbitant outside that it
has refused to absorb. It means making it
less selective in its own internal assignment
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of cost when it refers to entities outside of
it. It means engineering a permanent liquidity crisis. In a broad sense this is nothing particularly new to feminist critique,
as it highlights the exclusion of particular
cost in any exchange, an exclusion which
has historically focused on women, on the
contingent, the mad, the unpredictable, the
amphibious maidens. Maybe this is why for
Land the only proper revolutionary subjects
are lesbian vampires.
Peter Watts in his Rifters series of Novels
(Starfish, Maelstrom, Behemoth and Behemoth
Max) documents a motley crew of individuals sent to watch over power stations on an
ocean bottom rift, one of the last reliable
sources of power on future earth. These
people are strikingly posthuman, adapted
biologically and technologically to work
in their new environments and therefore
chosen not for their scientific expertise but
for the personality flaws that allow them to
handle abuse and isolation.
In Starfish, the forces of capital are unable
(albeit barely) to control the posthuman
workers they have created. It is important to
distinguish posthuman from posthumanist
and transhuman. The posthumanist holds a
stance in which we (whatever strange col86
lective that designates) should move beyond
the human in its humanist sense and foster
deeper relations with our own components
and the components of our wider ecologies (our pets, our plants, the other various creatures and inanimate powers, texts,
and things which vibrate in our presence).
Transhumans, following thinkers such as
Ray Kurzweil, believe that the human can be
technological or biotechnologically surpassed with one popular end goal being the
achievement of the uploadability of all of
human consciousness.
With the concept of the posthuman, both
humanism and the human are moved away
from, without a teleological bettering nor
with the certainty that supposedly long held
human characteristics will remain after a
material shift in the human body. There is no
clear sense of improvement, but a different
kind of adaptation. The rifters eventually
come to refer to themselves as vampires as
they are emotionally cold creatures meant
for working in the dark without empathy or
desire to be amongst humans.
The vampiric, as De leuze and Guattari
explore in "Becoming Animal" through the
widespread Vampire Hysteria of the early
1700s in Eastern Europe, is a particular form
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of becoming yet they do not address its
noble lineage. While the zombie has become
(starting with at least George Romero's
films) the monster of capitalist disquiet, the
vampire traditionally represents the lords
of crumbling castles, of business people
attempting to live out their retirement. As
Marx puts it in the tenth chapter of Capital:
Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like,
only lives by sucking living labour, and lives
the more, the more labour it sucks. The time
during which the labourer works, is the time
during which the capitalist consumes the
labour-power he has purchased of him.[s]
But Watts' vampires are the downtrodden
worker. The trouble is that on the one hand,
there seems to be no limits to the changes
that capital writ large can incur in life-both
life as everyday existence and life as actual biological existence. This is illustrated
respectively by the increasing difficulty in
getting 'out' of the office, and, as highlighted
in hyperbolic terms by Watt's novels, with
suicide seeds and copyrighted agricultural
genomes. Yet there remain common barriers: one stressed by the limits of social
connectivity and the other by material
resources.
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As the oceanic metaphor makes clear, being immersed in capital it becomes nearly
impossible to diagnose our environment
no matter how much economic friction
remains. Economic crisis appears simultaneously too real and too abstract as either riots
in the streets or as computational errors to
be corrected by those officials with access
and the capability.
How does one accelerate (in) a fluid medium?
Let's restate the problems:
1 -Technological capitalism (more than mak-
ing all that is solid melt into air) makes solid
or gives an extra layer of self-awareness to
the creatures living in it. In this sense, capital becomes an ocean in which we swim, life
seems unlivable without out and, the outlying bound of capital (which is the purely
ideal impossible dream of limitless production) appears indistinguishable from the water at hand, from day to day life. Capitalism
"has no external limit, it has consumed life
and biological intelligence to create new life
and a new plane of intelligence, vast beyond
human anticipation."[6]
2 -Because of this illusion the cost involved
in local exchanges is measured against not
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only the local terms but against the far
horizon of capital, while appearing ideally
limitless is considered hyper-fragile in the
intimacy of the exchange.
3- This second issue is compounded by
the history of practices of exogamy which
demonstrate the simultaneous worth and
worthlessness of women in patriarchal
culture. Furthermore, the side of worthlessness can be equated with pure form or maybe
even formlessness, that of the productive yet
strangely undivided ocean.
4 -The ocean is populated with monsters ...
this is what Plant means with her something
went wrong but that wrongness, that mistake is life itself. Or maybe the wrongness
already registers once we achieve consciousness as Thomas Ligotti argues in The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. The violence
between organisms may make it seem that
capital is merely a more civilized way but it
actually just expands the killing floor to the
end of time. As Land writes: "Capital is not
overdeveloped nature, but underdeveloped
schizophrenia." [7]
5 - For all of these reasons the acceleration of
capitalism seems impossible. The only possible options seem to be to drown or embrace
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the catastrophe (and the catastrophe of the
sea is the tidal wave, the tsunami). But it may
very well be that the wave, as Cederstrom
and Fleming put it, may never come.
One can watch the wave, as a sublime monstrosity in the properly Kantian way (thinking my schema will protect me) or hope that
it will peter out and bring new playthings
like it did for the children of Nietzsche's
Zarathustra. But this assumes that the ocean
will serve and not, eventually, absorb more
and more of the sun in its darkened complexion (having lost its reflective ice) and will
flood the shores.
It is that challenge which requires the separation of technological accelerants from
capitalist ones. Land writes that Nature (a
cold indifferent nature)[8] is not opposed to
cybernetics but to the industrial.[9] Schizoanalysis, the strange pragmatics of an
anti-molar deregulation of all existence is at
once the expansive capacity of capital that it
cannot disavow[ IO ], as well as that which is
capable of luring capital into liquidating its
"fall back positions." [I I]
Nick Land hits on a basic twofold thought
for thinking the crux of capital and politics
(a politics beyond that world being used
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descriptively in an academic setting). This is
the gendering of both capital and politics in
the territory of the active and the passive.
Land writes:
Wherever there is labour or struggle there
is a repression of the raw creativity which
is the atheological sense of matter and
which -because of its anegoic effortlessness
-seems identical with dying. Work, on the
other hand, is an idealist principle used as a
supplement or compensation for what matter cannot do. One only ever works against
matter, which is why labour is able to replace
violence in the Hegelian struggle for recognition.[I2]
In November 1935 Bataille gave a speech at a
gathering of Contre-Attaque called "Popular
Front in the Street", in which he derided the
overly parliamentary tactics of the Popular Front the synthesis of communists and
socialists, that had recently taken over the
street in France. Bataille's group ContreAttaque set out to, in a sense, co-opt fascistic
protocols and sharpen the teeth of the politics in France.[ 13]
Bataille says that he does not want to cause
political change but calls for "a different nature."[ 14] Bataille ends his speech: "This All
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powerful magnitude, thus human ocean ...
only this ocean of men in revolt can save the
world from the nightmare of impotence and
carnage in which it sinks!' [15] The fluidity of
the ocean of workers is betrayed by Bataille's
own machismo-he does not know whether
he wants fluidity or solidity but is only sure
in his vaguely Nietzschean overtones.
Land gives us an excellent response:
If feminist struggles have been constantly
deprioritized in theory and practice it is
surely because of their idealistic recoil from
the currency of violence, which is to say,
from the only 'definitive 'matter' of politics.
[... ]It is a terrible fact that atrocity is not the
perversion, but the very motor of of such
struggles: the language of inexorable political will. A revolutionary war against a modern metropolitan state can only be fought in
hell.[ ... ] For it is only when the pervasive
historical bond between masculinity and
war is broken by effective feminist violence
that it will become possible to envisage the
uprooting of patriarchical endogamies that
orchestrate the contemporary world order
[... ] we must foster new Amazons in our
midst.[16]
An oceanic accelerationism, wired through
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Plant and Luce Irigiray, is a marine violence,
what Lennie Clarke, the anti-hero of Watts'
tales learned by surviving domestic abuse,
genetic manipulation, and attempted murder by a corporation.
To end on a strange aside: In the Marvel
Comic universe there is a creature, an ancient self-aware bacterium from the oceanic
depths, that possesses beings at will and sets
out to erase all genetic mutations from the
earth in order to be secure in its biologically
rooted power. The name that this creature
chooses for itself is sublime. This is the masculine impulse of capitalism personified,
falsely positing itself as the transcendent
sublime, in a brute attempt to deny the fluid
mutations of the outside.
In one ridiculous gesture the weakness the
ego in the face of nature becomes apparent
(the Kantian schemata splitting the horrific
from the sublime). The material vibrancy
of the ocean will have the final judgment as
long as we are complacent everywhere churlish masculinity is not. We must see capital as
a great invention through which we can actively navigate uncertain waters, rather than
as a sea monster, different from our own life
only in its artificial provenance. Send out the
distress call for cyberfeminism.
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[1] See Cederstrom, Carl and Flemming, Peter, Dead
Man Working, London, ZerO, 2012
[2] See Thacker, Eugene. "Oil Discovers Humans", in
Leper Creativity, New York, Punctum, 2011
[3] Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari, "Becoming
Animal...", A Thousand Plateaus, Minneapolis, Minneosta University Press, 1990
[4] On this point see Brassier, Ray, "Introduction to Nick Land", http://moskvax.wordpress.
com/2010/09/30/accelerationism-ray-brassier/
[5] Marx, Karl, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Modern Library Classics, New York, Random
House, 1906,p.257
[6] Land, Nick, "Transcendental Miserablism", Fanged
Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007, eds.
Brassier, Ray and Robin Mackay, London, Urbanomic,
2011,p.626
[7] Land, Nick, "Circuitries", Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007, p. 313
[8] Land, Nick, "Making it with Death", Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007, p. 261
[9] Land, Nick, "Circuitries", p. 313-314
[1 0] Land, Nick, "Making it with Death", 2011, p. 265
[11] Ibid., 287
[12] Ibid. 278
[13] Stoekl, Allan, "Introduction", Visions of Excess:
Selected Writings of George Bataille, Minneapolis,
Minnesota University Press, 1995, xviii
[14] Bataille, George. "Popular Front in the Street",
Visions of Excess: Selected Writings of George Bataille, Minneapolis, Minnesota University Press, 1995,
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