The Philosophy and Politics of Accelerationism - Promo Discussion with Matt Colquhoun (Xenogothic) (128kbit AAC)

So welcome to the promo video for mine, MetaNomad, and Matt Cahoon, Zenogothic. The course, The Philosophy and Politics of Accelerationism, which is a course we should be releasing this Friday coming, which is the 24th of July, 2020, if you're watching this video a long time from now. So this is going to be sort of an hour-long promo, just chatting about accelerations and what we were hoping to achieve with the course. So I'll start just by briefly saying that my philosophy lectures I'm doing, and Matt's doing the politics lectures, the philosophy lectures are largely based off my thesis, accelerationism, capitalism and critique, but they do serve as a big expansion on that, especially with regards to desire.

So the philosophy lectures are sort of underlying the philosophical process and what we mean when we say accelerate the process. And I'm sure there'll be big connections to Matt's work. But Matt, what huge question, what were you sort of trying to target with the politics lectures? Yeah, I feel like that, I mean, for me, especially, and I think maybe for everyone, when it comes to talking about politics of accelerationism today in 2020 there is the long shadow of a lot of the quite horrible stuff that's been done in its name in more recent years and I guess my starting point was to think how the politics of accelerationism can sort of stand on its own two feet with that with that association and what happens that how it got

from a sort of blogosphere point of niche philosophy and politics, even more so than it is now, and then end up with mass shootings. And yeah, so my half of the course, which is basically new research for me, is that the initial moment of emergence for accelerationism seemed to be regarding what Alain Badiou called a crisis in negation. that everything that initially emerged from the blogosphere before any of the publications came out in sort of the late 2000s was talking about how we escape this moment of apparent cultural and political stasis and avoiding, yeah, what Deleuze and Guattari call that process of deterritorialization

and the inevitable re-territorialization. And what became quite ironic to me in researching this was that the sort of far-right accelerations that we've seen in the last few years that's, you know, depending on who you are, has kind of dealt a fatal blow to this conversation is just resembles, taking this long perspective, looks like this sort of re-territorialization. It is turning accelerationism into the very thing it first set out to critique. And a lot of people have said that online in the aftermath. and I guess this course just goes deep and tries to excavate what that means it shows the receipts basically for that claim okay yeah I mean there's a real inherent problem with the

sort of why every time accelerationism is mentioned in the media now which is increasingly you know it's a lot it's coming turning up time and time again as sort of a signifier of like radical right-wing terrorism basically or it's sort of the the new equivalent of more of a more extreme fascism um and i guess for any of those following the the news their definition seems to be that accelerationism is they've made a sort of for me and a transcendental mistake in that they're understanding accelerationism just from phenomena so they are they understand accelerationism basically as people who want to accelerate the worst parts of society so society

just crashes and burns this is the the the mainstream media's definition of accelerationism and one of the the real inherent problems is is that we can't actually ignore this definition because it is still part of the process so like like nick says nick land says who's sort of ironically called the father of accelerationism even though he's he is right wing which doesn't help matters um the point is that what comes from the actual transcendental process of accelerationism can still be said to be it but it's a symptom so it's like well it's interesting to look at the way in which accelerationism is evolving but whatever caricature it takes in that moment that isn't it in in its substance in its essence you know that isn't it completely so it's like

Yeah, it might be this now, but that's a symptom of something happening on a far deeper level. So what is it that led people to want to push things in this direction? And why is the underlying direction taking it to this point? Whether or not that point is ideologically charged isn't really the point with respect to the actual process. The process is how and why are things moving and in what direction are they moving? So it's sort of just a confusion of confusing like what's going on on a societal level with what's going on underneath that, which is sort of the difficult thing because if you're not philosophically literate, shall we say, then you're never going to get to that level.

And I'm hoping that our course will sort of say, look, here's what it was before it got sort of tarnished because obviously something so controversial and like an absolute stoppage like no one wants to say no one wants to sort of when you have something so abhorrent as right-wing terrorism and a shooting no one wants to be the person to say like let's look at this in a different light because you instantly come across this kind of like hang on are you sympathizing with it it's like no no no but but when we strip away the aesthetic here and what's going on at societal level there's a there's point that we were talking about years and years ago which has now been overtaken because this thing is so monolithic that you don't you know people hand it with kiddie kiddie gloves because they don't want to go near it but it's like that isn't really what it is but you know it's always a

horrible thing to say it's like when you start saying that isn't what it is you're coming across as someone who's like i know accelerationism is and we're sort of i think we're trying to finally outline the beginning points i think so yeah yeah well that's what i found really interesting in going back right to the beginning um because i always had the um at least in terms of its blogospheric emergence i always had this idea that accelerationism kind of grew out of what was called hauntology and it was kind of a reaction to it um so mark fisher writing about hauntology in on his blog in the mid-2000s and then there was a backlash to that and then accelerationism kind of emerged as this new revitalized thing it's interesting to think

of it like that because what seemed to happen with hauntology was that you had this group of thinkers online that were responding to something that they were seeing at a social level as you say like you know this this sense that nothing culturally new is being produced why is this you know is that just a superficial reading or is this a symptom of something deeper down and then you get this weird irony where the very people that a lot of these writers are talking about um who they see is sort of like uh they describe as hauntological a lot of them just assume that what this blogosphere is doing is just compartmentalizing their cultural activities and sort of trying to you know hauntology is not turn it just rather than being like kind of

symptomatology of of our cultural post-modern moment it's just another way to you know throw a novel new genre at something that's trying to stay clear of this kind of capitalist process of appropriation which yeah the great irony of that is that yeah hauntology then becomes seen as the very thing it was trying to critique and it's kind of interesting to see that happen and then accelerationism basically the same thing um and it's not to say that yeah not to say that this new far acceleration isn't accelerationism um it's just like the it's like the meeting point of this oeroboros process it's the it's the it's the starting point biting the

tail um uh and that in itself i think you know that's that that seeing that culturally i think is it makes it easier to apprehend what's happened to the kind of cynical and cyclical capitalist level but yeah that in a way that image um i assume uh is you know is a great starting point for getting into actually a lot of deeper philosophical questions yeah i mean this is the thing that nick land does outline in a quick and dirty introduction to cap uh to accelerationism is that you know the very nature of accelerationism is if you think you've caught the thing you know if you outlined like you said with the uh oroboros there if you outlined the the head

biting the tail and said that's it that's the final loop it's like no no no you've found one iteration of this process what we're trying to do is go one level deeper and say you know where's this process come from what is it that's pulling the strings of the process in itself any sort of symptoms or reactions or emanations that come from the process are certainly interesting to look at you could sort of say well why did that happen and draw it back and say oh the pro you know this is happening with the process this got re-territorialized or things along these lines but but if you take one of those as the definition of the whole system itself then you're going to get very muddled and i think this is sort of the big um the big problem is sort of with especially with the aesthetic of accelerationism something we just chatted about briefly before we started

this it's like with the aesthetic accelerationism and and the attitude and the culture which is certainly very clear it's sort of very highly online at the moment um big influence from 90s cyber culture very sort of accelerative in the actual traditional definition of like techno-economic um spacex you know just bring everything new in and that attitude which sort of came around with the beginnings of accelerationism as a very coherent relatively coherent idea in 2017 people still see that as the as like the attitude and the the culture of it but it's like well no but that's there certainly because the actual the actual process of accelerationism is this extremely um well sounds dumb but accelerative thing so you sort of look people

I think locked onto the social culture which was closest to an understanding of that so it's like what's the culture we know which is you know super fragmenting super atomized and it is that's why I think it's adhered to a sort of very highly online um just atomized culture where you sort of feel like you have this freedom to just go down any avenue and accelerate it and go into the most sort of deep balladian depths of accelerative absurdity and i think that's why there is these why it's adhered to it that's why it adheres to the most radical notions of everything it touches is because it does accelerate it so it's never going to be part of some sort of relatively calm system because the very nature of it is always going to push it to the point where you something

almost breaks and you've reached the point of like wow you know that really is radical but the problem is at that point is when it sort of dissipates and goes off somewhere else and this is sort of the process of schizophrenia with Deleuze and Guattari which I touch on um so yeah I don't know I don't know if that comes up in your political in the politics lectures yeah I mean not so in the background for sure I mean I definitely don't go so deeply into it because these are kind of things that I yeah I've gladly rightly assumes that you were you're covering in your size um And I guess it's that I guess it's interesting that why I guess it's why I find it interesting the way that we've done this in terms of you covering philosophy and you covering politics.

Is it what I've found in my side is that those in a lot of ways, the very question for politics, the politics of celebrationism is why is there a distance or how do we correct this distance between philosophy and politics? the politics can be just brought down to the question of what is to be done we have this, we've diagnosed this problem, we've seen to some extent the deeper machinations of it, so what do we do in response if anything and yeah the way that question then becomes removed from philosophy in the sense that you know I think that's kind of the the and I've heard some people

talk about the sort of right wing the far right the far right for well calling it far right I almost feel like it's better to call it like a 4chan accelerationism be honest about where it's emerged from but in a way it's like that I've also heard people call that like a non-philosophical accelerationism which I find like an interesting thing to call it as if to say does that mean it purely political but then you know to what extent is there even a politics there if it's not informed by some sort of deeper um analysis of what's going on um so it's that again it's also that sense of to what extent that distancing of these two things is also part of this process that that is being a uh that we're trying to critique uh this accelerated process um as if to say it's

sort of like a g-force thing like if you i just um you know you put two things in a you know in a fastly um uh a fast spinning sort of i don't know uh i've just got the vision of like a roundabout in my head um it was like a kid with a moped wheel stuck on the side uh you know you sit two people either side of that and you attach a moped wheel to it they're going to fly off in different directions and part of the politics i think deals with that quite explicitly so yeah you get that kind of schizophrenic sense of uh there's yeah it's easy to to gather a schizophrenic understanding of things there but again yeah i guess my side it's more of like what's the actual experience of that beyond the the the the deep down sort of philosophical analysis what does it actually feel

like but yeah the impact of that process like at a sort of material like or even like i guess what does that mean in immediacy is one question too that i think my my side wants to ask um what is immediacy uh in a marxist sense um being you know the the that which is immediately apparent to us and to what extent is that immediacy more or less an illusion yeah i guess that is it's that metaphor in that sense you know it's like what are the what's the material outcome of this process um that makes us feel wholly out of control and yeah what if anything is there to do about it what's no what's interesting that you outline there is one of the problems with one of the really interesting things about accelerationism with regard to the politics and with regards to

the philosophy is that there's this sort of strange moment where all politics combines in that all sides are agreed upon one thing which is like we're not going in any direction that any side wants so like you know nick outlines this as well when he says that capitalism is this system that no one really wanted in its current form but it's what we've got it's like we're not moving in an in a an actual conservative direction you know we're not conserving anything we're not moving in a communist direction because well um i'm sure you you can comment on that great great than i i can but it doesn't seem to be that we are we're not moving in a fascist structure but at the same time there's seems to be tiny snippets from each of these being used sporadically in random places which is a really interesting thing and i think that it's that problem of something that is

actually connecting all of these in the problem of stagnance which is where it connects to the philosophical because the philosophy is about how on a philosophical or specifically transcendental level do limits get broken and do we break into other things and it's this problem of well what is what if there is something such in this point in this in the example of accelerationism which is capitalism which can adhere to all systems at once and this is like the big problem right yeah yeah um yeah the one thing that is kind of the the main background for my side of the course is basically marxism um but also kind of crises that happen within marxism so yeah talking to the point of this where you know is there any possibility that they're heading towards

communism um in a way that's also one of those early accelerations questions um for marx the the the assumption was that um capitalism will inevitably lead to socialism or communism um because it can't help but um this was again when when when baju talks about a crisis of negation uh he's talking about what marx calls the negation of the negation and marx talks about this in terms of like uh individual property so feudalism uh completely abjures the sense that anyone can and well the proletariat especially can own their own home and then capital as we transition to capitalism this glimmer of uh the possibility of owning your own home kind of comes

back into the fore, the sense that you're not just paying a kind of, you're not working specifically for a feudal lord, but you kind of abstract that process where you go to work and then you still, you pay the landowner. But yeah, capitalism as a way to kind of keep itself going has to then, you know, negate its own negation. It has to reintroduce this idea of individual property. And for Marx, the interesting result of this could be, you know, if individual property is universal, if everybody owns everything that they own, then you don't have individual property anymore. You have social ownership. So, yeah, so for Marx in that sense, the negation of the negation, which we see capitalism doing, leads to socialism.

But the problem then you get later on in the 20th century is there's already this awareness that this isn't quite, you know this isn't quite uh gonna go so smoothly capitalism has a tendency to well again re-territorialize to kind of to uh to implement a certain drag on itself to hold on to as much as it pushes and and drives itself towards progress so it doesn't you know exceed its own bounds it places a certain amount of drag so that um it can remain in some sort of static form and you see that now where we don't necessarily have the idea of individual property is again being negated even further.

So that now rent is kind of like a norm, not just in terms of you rent where you live, but you also rent culture. You have a Netflix subscription, a Spotify subscription, where you don't own any of the media that you're enjoying. You subscribe to access to it. And this sense of what I think Peter Frey has caused this, rentism, that this is one option of a post-capitalist future where capitalism as this sort of a moment of tension completely dissipates and we just have this static rentism where you rent everything. And that causes real problems for Marxism then. It brings to the fore this problem of agency, which is shared absolutely with accelerationism.

um you know is it a case that we do nothing because the system's going to go a certain way on its own or is there a sense that you know capitalism needs a bit of assistance from us to become something new um and that's a question that's asked in 2007 before the acceleration is really there before most of the books are published on it and that's the question that we're still arguing about yeah i mean what not to well we can touch on conclusions because there's never really going to be a conclusion what is your direction with that with respect to human agency actually being able to do something with capitalism um i mean i'm i think personally i'm on the side of that um we have to do something uh i know this is uh you know

um my sense is not quite clean not quite so clear cut but maybe comes from what um ray brassier used to write in terms of his Prometheanism, whereas to say that his nihilistic vision of the universe is fundamentally a scientific one. Science increasingly reveals to us that nature is indifferent to us and has no interest in our survival. Again, that's no longer just a nihilist position, but a realist position. But Brasier kind of points out that even if that's the case, that doesn't mean that we shouldn't do anything. As a species, we've always intervened in our own destiny through inventions and scientific progressions

that have fundamentally changed how we understand these supposed givens of human existence, specifically birth, suffering, and death. We know that we're all going to be born, we're all going to suffer, we're all going to die, but uh how horrific those experiences are have changed radically even within the last 50 years you know you're not born the same way as you once were it's not quite as dangerous it used to be um so those sorts of things are like uh you know that that's for brassier is to say that the the universe isn't different to us but that doesn't mean we shouldn't do anything it kind of it makes doing something an imperative and i feel like personally i think that no response to capitalism is the same thing we can acknowledge that capitalism is wholly indifferent to our survival and that's precisely why it's up to us to you know we that gives us an imperative to

do something what that something is i have no idea um and uh it's but it's interesting i think for me to to sort of track how that very question has been going on for 15 years and i think it's easy to say that the fact that it hasn't had an answer is quite depressing but also you know the fact that it hasn't had an answer and hasn't gone away kind of shows that it's quite, you know, it's a persistent question that, you know, again, a lot of accelerationist discourse at the moment kind of focuses on that and ridicules it. And it's like, well, yeah, we've been talking about this for 15 years. We're not we're not unaware of this problematic. It's if anything, it's the core problem. And, you know, thinking about it.

Yeah. thinking about it is part of the imperative right to actually address this issue is a starting point um so yeah that's that's how i feel anyway and i hope yeah this side of the course um gives a certain background as to why that is an imperative and should be well yeah it does strangely mirror my side of the cause in the in the sense that with deleurs he outlines oh sorry they outline this sort of relatively not watertight but coherent system with respect to how schizophrenia works and how um the schizophrenia takes a line of flight and with regards to the same and difference but there's always this underlying question of well how does difference

happen it's sort of explained how it comes in and the and the mechanisms which allow that and the the alterations of time which allow that but there's always this question of like well how do we channel schizophrenia? How do we get in contact with it? How do we actually use this? Because we're talking about this problem here with regards to, in philosophical terms, the same, right? It's like the return of the same, and that's the frustration. So what we're looking for is difference in itself. And this is the big question, I think. It's almost the same question seen from two different angles, one political and one philosophical, which is, well, how the hell do we find and use the difference in itself? And, you know, this is where I think certain this is probably why a lot of the ccriu's work can be considered accelerationist because

they're sort of saying well things such as william burroughs cut-up technique alternative means of doing philosophy alternative ways of doing things and perceiving things and to a certain extent sort of mind altering drugs to a certain degree or anything which is sort of altering your perception reality can allow difference in but it's not controlled and this is one of the problems is with you know and this is why the question is still there is because it's such a big question of well you know you can't just go out and go i'm going to make something different because i'm reminded of the bergson thing of like when someone said to henry bergson which you know this came up in a recent chat so i can't take credit for knowing this someone recently mentioned this to me but someone said to Bergson oh you're an intellectual you know um you um you read a lot

of books what will the the works the big works in 2050 100 years look like and he said well if I knew they'd already be done and this is the problem which Leotard outlines and he says well if you have a frontier if you have a limit you no longer have a limit because you understand to have a limit you have to understand both sides of a limit so we're sort of stuck in this point of like it's like a non-frontier you know we understand there's this limit but it's so elusive it's like this non-limit which isn't there so we almost need to find this way of definition or defining things and then we can finally move beyond it but it's this first limit which we can't move beyond because something else is in control of how it moves and this is the you know there's the big problem which we've been talking about so i think yeah like you said it's sort of

redundant when people say oh you've been struggling with this for years it's sort of like saying well people have been struggling with the meaning of people have been struggling with epistemology for years it's the same thing it's um yeah it's a big question and big questions are good questions i guess that's that's it right and it's and and too often explanation is reduced to a small question but i think that's yeah that's that came up in my side too there was a it was a definition that um i mean yeah i think especially for the early blogosphere leotard's the original economy in particular is sort of acknowledged as like this gray, um, the book of accelerationism, um, at least from the perspective of the seventies. And then there was, and there was a, there was a post that Mark Fisher wrote sort of, uh,

expanding on, um, his love of that book or his sort of perverse admiration for that book. Um, no doubt from, you know, yeah, the influence of Nick land at Warwick. And he has this definition where he says that, um, capitalism is a is a is not really uh it's not a it's formless but you know it's it's a name for attention and not attention but a kind of tension um where um you know we can understand that this process of pure capitalism as a dissolution without limits um but at every step of the way that that process is in tension with inhibition um and how do you you know what

if if you manage to disarticulate the link between this dissolution without limits and inhibition um you get something new and arguably you don't even have capitalism anymore you have something else um uh and that seems to be yeah you sort of frames that as being leotard's argument that you You know, if you, to remove this, to remove a sense of capitalism's own sense of its limitless limit or limited limitlessness, when you remove that paradox, you kind of, yeah, you end up dealing with a whole, the kale of fish. And that in itself is interesting, as if to, you know, to truly have some new kind of defining process of social relation is enough of a starting point for a lot of those accelerationists, rather than it being, you know,

it doesn't necessarily have to be socialism or communism some kind of post-capitalism some new form um that we haven't seen before um is better than this stasis um and i think yeah you know politically it's that same it's yeah it's that it's our argument marriage if you know what it if you know what it looks like um uh yeah probably got less chance of getting there i was well i guess i was interested to know one of the things that is not so prevalent in my size but which i was anticipating was prevalent for you was this notion of time yeah yeah yeah well yeah this is a difficult thing because when we begin to talk about accelerationism it's so caught up with the sociological context now and the political context but the the sort of non-philosophical

political context the everyday mainstream very quick news snippet type context that it has sort of been removed from its i would argue home as a theory of time it was sort of you know dare i say originally a theorization of time and it's a philosophy of time and how time has this sort of strange pressure and with you know this is why i utilize deleuze Deleuze's three syntheses so much is because that there's something very interesting in the way that they can actually compute what we how we're understanding accelerationism politically even though I don't touch on this but you know just to think about the Deleuze's first synthesis where

your your present is simply the past retained and the future anticipated but you're completely passive to it that present is what you can sort of understand as the the white supremacist understanding of accelerationism or the 90s cyber culture you know that's a single present and in doing that you're passive to it and you're getting caught up in something which is still moving without you or well it's moving moving you and but you're getting caught up in one single present and then when you begin to look at the second synthesis and begin to have this aimed memory of looking back at these different nodes that's when you can begin to understand that there's there is this differentiation and once you can sort of step back from that and understand there's these modes where it's become different things at different times well then you can start

to see well hang on there must be some underlying thing which is actually controlling all of this which is sort of what we're on about and that's when the third synthesis comes in which is really important which i consider basically the the entire structure of how what it is to accelerate And what the actual process is, is the cut on the cyclic eternal return, where something different comes in and something new comes in. And we're sort of stuck in this weird conjunction where it's like, I would sort of push to say that very, very briefly, what Deleuze is arguing is that you have the Nietzschean eternal return, which is just a circle of time, which Deleuze sort of sees at certain points as the return of the same. so the same thing is returning whether or not it's aesthetically different we don't know

and there's this sort of strange stagnance with regards to the politics is where it's very difficult to discern what's returning and in what sense and whether or not something that's returning is the same or different we're on about this stagnance but everything seems so different and this is why i think you know what when de leuze says there's a cut on the eternal return and this is the point where it starts to um structure time so if you have a if you cut the eternal return you can have a before and then an after and you suddenly have this event and then you have a new future and the point that i try to make is that with this third synthesis of deleur's where there's this cut is that it must be in this that something temporal is happening with accelerationism because to accelerate you need this new future and then you need another new

future which is all it you know continuously accelerating and obviously if you think of the the eternal return when it's cut it's sort of de-centered from its circle so it begins to spiral which is how i understand nick land's time spirals and you know there's just a lot of problems here with regards to the temporality of what whether whether or not something that's returning is different whether or not it's the same and in what sense is there being a new future produced from the cut and acceleration in that sense is the production of the future and it's building upon these produced futures but as you you know as is clear at the moment what's being produced seems to be caught up in something that's already happened

on a on a political level so that is you know that's the the temporal theory of it and then of course you with regards to the temple theory that connects quite directly to each political outlook so the left accelerationism is you can sort of run every form of political accelerationism through this towards what an almost preferred like a time preference they would have you know so the left accelerationism has this almost low time preference where they just want these relatively immediate technological innovations which are one of the depressing things about left accelerationism is that like we were talking about limits and frontiers earlier is that

everything that they're envisioning which is going to emancipate people is actually already here because it's like we could have ubi everywhere so it's like we've already know conceptually what ubi is so this isn't a future and the same with automation is like they're not thinking or conceptualizing of automation in any new way it's like we could have more automated tills or more jobs could be automated so it's like you're still within this certain structure which we're stuck within but people are have this pseudo form of emancipation in it so it's like this limit that they haven't gone beyond so it's quite it's actually their futures are actually as far as i'm concerned present because of the things they're on about are already here in certain forms um i think that's probably key whether the unconditional accelerationism and left accelerationism differ is that the unconditional accelerationists are at least

dealing with um what isn't here yet what hasn't arrived um and obviously to a certain extent right right accelerationism you know it's just that's just touch your waters isn't it i mean we don't um i always put that just down to the singularity but people have started renaming that the singularity accelerationism landian accelerationism which i think is a bit more apt as for right accelerationism I just I've yet you know there needs to be an outline but yeah that's the yeah that's the temporal theory really I mean does that connect in with what you're doing yeah I think so a lot more than I expected actually not well not in the not expected from your side but actually that's some things for me yeah that's I mean it's kind of the

there's a there's a chapter on yeah the relationship between accelerationism and tauntology and it is essentially um understanding them as a spiral and essentially described really um there's a sense that you know the alex williams once described hauntology as as um a theory of good post-modernism as if to say that um you know that the hauntology is a isn't a the hauntological moment in bloggers was an attempt to describe how this negative feedback leap of the what was it Frederick Jameson called the cultural logic of late capitalism, this negative feedback loop suddenly starts to become positive, where these musicians and artists that are using,

they're kind of enjoying their stasis, this kind of cultural dementia that we're going through. And in the process of trying to capture that feeling, they produce a new kind of creative moment. And then the strange irony again said earlier that, you know, in calling it hauntology, then the polarity, you know, despite trying to emphasize the positivity of that feedback loop and giving it a name, they kind of, yeah, inverted the polarity and made it negative again. people turned away from it and accelerationism also seems almost seems to start the other way where it's uh you know it's it's a it's a it starts off as emphasis affirming the positive

feedback loop of late capitalism um at least the the the the brief moments where it rears its head and yet again and then in naming it it goes negative and then there's now this sort of struggle for the last sort of maybe five ten years to try and make it positive again um and i think yeah part of this naming process is an interesting one um like uh yeah people referring to i mean yeah i think unconditional accelerations and sometimes called landing accelerationism um alex williams being the initial first person to um actually try and provide a uh a theory of accelerationism um for 2007 uh refer to it as a left landing is it before taking the name from

Benjamin Noyes so in that sense yeah it's strange that this is something that I've kind of it's shifted my own perspective on accelerations in a way of sort of thinking that you know this I always had my I've always I've always been a card-carrying unconditional accelerationist and yet it's the sense of you know what what kind of progress is that if we're going back to the start is it sort of say well you know these questions for me I feel like a lot of the initial questions of accelerationism politically speaking have been obscured um no doubt in part you know uh alex williams blog posts from 2007 would i think shock a lot of people now um when when they are left when they when it's said that it's a left landing is it's it's it's that in its most in the most provocative sense and he deleted most of them later on you can only now access that blog by

the way back to him but it's interesting to you know see that that mode of accelerationism is then rejected and left acceleration as we kind of know it is sort of seen as a as a tempering of that initial moment of um you know what what i think someone called a kind of theoretical entrepreneurship on his part and yeah every turn there seems to be a case of you know people accidentally killing projects they're trying to embolden or um or emboldened you know inadvertently emboldening the projects that they want to dismiss. And there's all these paradoxes caught up. But again, it's like it's this interesting – well, I find this interesting problem

where there needs to be a certain level of hubris where any person that is working with accelerationism – it's not to say that because you or I have an interest in understanding these dynamics, we're somehow above them. um there's this kind of really frustrating sense that the more that you become aware of these dynamics the more you see them undermining your own projects or before you can even you know get to a kind of settled or not even settled but a kind of really you know a propulsive conclusion and i find that more interesting maybe because i'm a masochist but i find that a lot more interesting than depressing um yeah i mean this is why um with my original thesis and with the

my lectures is that once again i begin from the from the human and which is sort of a strange thing for a continental to do because continental usually begins from conditions but for me it was actually more interesting and this is like probably my my disagreement with land is that i still think that the human is important in relation to the process um i think it's silly to say otherwise um you could of course argue that well it's just that the human is the most important capital asset that it has right but i think you know beginning from the human and moving out is like and and you know that i understand the human as the smallest kernel which we can understand accelerationism from and i think beginning from the conditions beginning from

how accelerationism is in itself is sort of silly because you can't understand that without understanding how it's pulling our strings because we have to assess it in a kantian mode from like we can only understand it once again it's almost like a new way of understanding the thing in itself but in a different format um so we have to understand it in that manner and yeah you know i just think that's lan said something which i really really loved um with regards to what you were saying about when you're doing these projects it masochistically you realize that acceleration is there all the time and it's coming in and one of the really sort of now i think of it very morbid things that land says is that we're in this is in fang new mena from one of his really old essays he says we're doing things before they make sense and that's basically what we have to do now is

like if something you're doing is making sense it's already within this so this was for me that quote sort of encapsulates where we might be able to begin to find accelerationist process sorry accelerationist praxis we're doing things before they make sense you almost like have to do what land was doing in warwick which is just let yourself be overtaken by the flows of sort of whatever it is you want to be overtaken by and commune with the outside let the outside in and then we come back to the question of how the hell do we do that so yeah sorry you were going to say um no i mean that's really interesting um because yeah i mean i was going to say the i guess to the first half of what you were saying the part of one question that comes up briefly in my side of course is um you know how how we can actually define capitalism um i mean in terms of like

categorizing it is it the result of human uh you know is it just the product of human greed or is it a purely inhuman process is it human or is it inhuman is it natural is it unnatural um and part of the very you know that the difficulty of trying to um deal with capitalism i think is because it does kind of slip between those kind of uh those kind of kinds of understandings and the kind of various levels. But yeah, I think that's part of, you know, part of, you know, it's a kind of like the starting point for the course, for me, which I was actually very surprised by, I'd never expected to start in this moment, but was with Alain Bidou, who I had not really read too much of before actually starting the research for this project.

But I found, you know, there's a lot of the initial speculative realist philosophies that were kind of a precursor to accelerationism in a way, took his charge very seriously, which was that philosophy doesn't exist on its own. It doesn't progress. We don't have philosophical progress by philosophy's own merits. It doesn't move just through its own activities alone. And he has these four pillars that surround philosophy and influence it, and that philosophy influences in turn, which is science, politics, art, and love. And which I'd kind of just interpret, I mean, I don't know what he means by love. I guess that's kind of like intersubjective kind of understandings. But, you know, he says that in every turn, philosophy is,

a new philosophy has been needed to birth a new science. So he points to like Plato and mathematics, Hegel and Marx and history, um Nietzsche Bergson and Deleuze and biology um you know each of these philosophical these major figures in philosophy have helped you know fundamentally change how we view a certain type of science and so he says that you know we there's a new philosophy needed now that can um you know uh uh help us come to terms with this Nate this this beast called capitalism that yeah as you say we're doing things before we understand them we don't really as much as you know Karl Marx left us this mammoth unfinished work of capital

that seems to you know predict and describe capitalism's dynamics in kind of incredibly prescient detail we nevertheless kind of don't understand its effect on us as subjects on the world at large on our perceptions of reality and time and you know it's as if to say that in a way we have new sciences at our disposal that are helping us come to terms with this uh our sort of new cosmic perspective on the planet earth kind of allows us this newly in human view of our own activities um things like quantum mechanics uh you know uh kind of uh give us a better understanding of of of contingency i guess but you know where's the philosophy that kind of combines these new scientific developments in a way that actually

complements these new perspectives of ourselves and the planet that we live on. And he doesn't seem to think that that exists yet, not in a way that it has done for these other developments. And it's, yeah, the speculative realists take up this charge very seriously. And it seems to me, at least from the research that I've been doing, that accelerationism was one way of doing this. It was a way of looking at capitalism in itself to try and bring about, to kind of almost hyperstition into existence this idea of a pure capitalism. that's kind of this phantasmatic figure that doesn't really have any definition, but maybe the very idea of it is what can bring it into existence. And that again, yeah, in encouraging this separation between the human and capitalism

by kind of exacerbating that sense of alienation that we have, um new modes of thinking new philosophies literally might you know emerge from that process and yeah i guess now i've kind of lost where the my original point was your question i was getting on the tangent i was all about the human subject right yeah um so yeah like been able to been able to separate you know been able to actually um understand what capitalism is doing to us, maybe that can inaugurate a new way of thinking about how we can act for ourselves without capitalism. As if to say, encouraging capitalism to go off and be its own thing is in some sense

seen as just like, it's just to start pretending that we're holding on to any sort of leash. Again, it's the sort of Promethean thing. To acknowledge that we have no control over this strange economic system doesn't necessarily, you know, there's no abdication of responsibility. Rather, it means that we should stop trying to be responsible for the system and actually take responsibility for ourselves. And in that sense, you know, the acceleration of the human subject alongside the acceleration of capitalism, both those processes can be disentangled. and that's kind of something that comes up in the course too this cultural sense that you know technologically capitalism is is is is progressing at an alarming rate um

but culturally it's as if we we know we kind of we kind of hate this speed we hate the fact that a new iphone comes out every year or something so we you know we kind of uh we kind of pull we we do we do a certain amount of drag on that system culturally um i make the example of video games you know the fact that i think i've bought three four video games this year and all of them are remakes from like the 1990s um uh and and having this sense that you know it's actually quite nice to just see something to you know it's we have a desire for the familiar um uh and i don't think that's necessarily a reactionary um like a part of reactionary nature it's just to say that technology is accelerating far faster than our memories are. So it's actually the familiar

is far more fleeting than the new. So we hold on to the familiar rather than kind of embracing the potentials that might come from this rapidly accelerating technology that is far exceeding our bounds, being able to actually get familiar with new products before the new one comes along. if we can detach capitalism from that very our need for whatever that emotion is called, that need for nostalgia that frees us up as well I think that's a good place to finish up with the chat if we just say a few things about the course, so the course as I said should be

coming out this Friday on the 24th. So it's going to be 10 lectures. So I've got three lectures, but mine are a bit longer than Matt's. So I've got about three, three and a half hours of content and Matt's got about five hours. So you're looking over eight hours of content, 10 lectures in total with the transcripts. So then the pricing is going to be just for those course materials, be a hundred pounds. for those course materials and a seminar, which there'll be four dates put up, all on weekends, one session at roughly 10 a.m. GMT and one at about 7 p.m. GMT, two of them.

Each, that'll be £150 for that one. And then for all of that, plus a one on two with me and Matt, it'll be £200. pounds um so this uh promo video will be going on youtube um on the tuesday and then i'll put the links in the description for those interested in the course um after the fact once it's released um but it will also be on about it and sharing it on um twitter and all social media and things like that um so if there's something that um interests you or you know you want to enroll in just find the links or if you have any questions then feel free to message me or Matt so it's MetaNomad on Twitter or Xenogothic on Twitter

Is there anything you want to add? No, just it sounds great, I'm really looking forward to doing this and yeah, excited for more Accelerationist chats with even more people Yeah, okay Yeah, see you guys there