#Accelerate; The Accelerationist Reader I (Session 4)

Just let me do one last thing real quick. It's live right now. Okay. So welcome to our final class of Accelerate the Accelerationism Reader. And today we have a very special guest, Benjamin Noyes. Benjamin Noyes has been a very interesting and kind of persistently influential thinker, influenced somewhat by Poverilio and a variety of other thinkers dealing with the question of speed and most recently dealing with the question of accelerationism and offering the first full book length critique of the concept of accelerationism. And so today how we're going to approach this course meeting is that

we'll start off with Benjamin doing probably about a 15-20 minute a talk dealing with some of his critiques of accelerationism, perhaps some of the history of accelerationism, I'm not sure. And then after that, we'll have kind of a group discussion with him. And then we'll move on to student presentations on the readings, both of which today are Leotard from the period where he was dealing with, particularly dealing with Deleuze and Guattari in Energy Men Capitalism, and then also some of his work on libidinal economy.

And so that will be very interesting. And what I found, this Energy Men Capitalism reading is not particularly widely available except in this book. So that'll be super interesting. So with that, I'll just turn it over to Benjamin. Thanks. Thanks, Joe, Jason. Sorry. And thanks, Mohamed, for inviting me. The talk is sort of the paper that I sent. Is that OK? Absolutely. Just because I don't want to read out something people have already read. Yeah. But, I mean, partly what I'm starting with is the difficulty and the simpleness of what

accelerationism is. So on the one hand, there's a simple definition, which is accelerationism is the engagement with forms and forces of technology and abstraction that must selectively be accelerated to punch through the limits of a stagnant and inertial capitalism. So that's the one-line definition that I have. on the other hand what's interesting and what seems to make the debate so difficult is it's very difficult to grasp what accelerationism is because of the multiple forms and types of acceleration even if that's the right name for it so redesigning has been suggested McKenzie walk suggests extrapolation we don't seem to know what accelerationism is what it could be or could do. Maybe we need to create two, three or many accelerationisms to quote Jay Guevara.

And I think as you've been looking at it, this is the tension that's in the accelerate reader like everyone else. Free copy because it would have annoyed me too much to buy. And the reader itself, on the one hand, it's a great slide, there's 536 pages of it, so there's a lot of accelerationism on the other hand what's interesting is there's not so much explicit accelerationism depending on when you start numbering it so whether it's third or fourth wave accelerationism we're currently up to after the 70s French moment one Nick Land two and now Alex and others three or Mark's

70s French moment Nick Land four or if you include the various avant-garde five six seven so one way I think that to approach the accelerate reader is itself as an accelerator that it's designed to generate what it's talking about it's a performative text or in the language of the CCRU cybernetic cultures research unit it's a hyperstitional text it's trying to create an origin or a fiction of origins for accelerationism generate a kind of of myth. And one of the things that it does, or one of the things that accelerationists do at least in my experience of giving talks to them and about them, is that the reader is a kind of Borghazian parable that announces accelerationism and also wants to say that

we're already accelerationists, or most of us are. So one of the kind of moves that people make is to say you reject accelerationism but you really are an accelerationist if you think about it. So the reader does this by saying accelerationism is something new, it's a new thing, the discourse of fad or fashion which is constant in theory for at least 30 or 40 or 50 years. It's a new thing. On the other hand, accelerationism has always been with us. So what's proclaimed in the reader is a truth that permeates the thinking of modernity or is even synonymous with modernity so there's a claim that accelerationism and modernity are the same thing take a kind of Marshall Berman reading of modernity is all

that solid melts into air at the same time announcing the good news in evangelical fashion it's a story of normalization accelerationism is not simply the name for a new movement but it's already exists it's something that's already been happening and it's this kind of instability between accelerationism being announced and it being a problem or something that we should do that is central to the kind of debates not all of us accelerate there are those of us me being one that are definitely not accelerationists the practitioners of localism or politics kitsch marxists paleo herdergarians recidivist or Danoneans, etc. These non-accelerationists fall, according to the accelerationists, outside

of modernity. They themselves, or we, or me, are nostalgic remnants of the past, trapped in time, the Miss Havishams of theory, to borrow from Charles Dickens' great expectations. The character who once jilted remains frozen in that moment of time. And it's this image that speaks to the core of the dismissal of anti-accelerationism. It, or we, cannot imagine the future this is the break or the rupture of the dividing line I think between accelerationist and anti accelerationist it's a core issue of course such a line is very vague the real division lies between those able to affirm a positive vision of the future based on the development of technology abstraction and reason accelerationists and those unwilling or unable to in the

second case we find those who see the future as potentially or actually catastrophic usually due to climate change but also due to the persistence of capitalism, those who imagine a future which is retrograde in accelerationist terms, those who refuse technology or want to return to the local or natural and those who refuse to speculate on the future except in the sense of grasping the current limits and possibilities of contemporary struggles and that would be communisation so there's a kind of interesting choice of accelerationists to constantly debate with Communisers. Now one of the things to say is that these refusals of the future I think are quite minority positions, they're not that dominant on the left or alternative scene, whatever you want

to call it. And certainly both in everyday life and in struggles, many contemporary movements have made extensive use of technology, notably social media, although we should avoid exaggeration of the Twitter, Facebook, sold on major drivers of struggle. This use of social media opens the gate for accelerationists to argue that these movements are nascent accelerationists, often unwilling or unable to follow through with the use of technology. They are using technology as if it were a temporary measure when it should be embraced, the possibility of a new platform or stack that can embed and articulate a global political alternative. So again, accelerationist is one more effort to properly embrace technology.

So contemporary accelerationism, Alex Nix, the e-flux issue, the few texts that we have, articulates itself as a platform or a stack or a hegemonic project. If a stack is, as Benjamin Bratton says, a vast if also incomplete and pervasive if also irregular thing. I don't think it's a bad scheme of understanding accelerationism. Accelerationism is vast but incomplete and pervasive but irregular. So we can understand accelerationism at the moment as a stack of different elements and the layers of this stack seem to me to go along fairly traditional disciplinary divisions which perhaps maybe does some violence to their range of thought but I'm going to do that. There's the philosophical

layer which is a radical and inhuman Prometheanism articulated through reason as a site which explores and proposes norms that reinvent the human in the form of global reason this is Reyes, Reyes' project. The political layer, the manifesto as the statement of a new hegemonic project for the left organised through the embrace of planning, abstraction and a global horizon as the condition to overcome inertial capitalism. And the experimental, the aesthetic layer accelerationism as a probe to grasp or analyze the contemporary moment it's overcoming in the efflux issue or in Steve Chaviro's forthcoming book. Now while the aesthetic or the experimental might appear the most lowly layer, mere practice to the queen of philosophy, it plays a crucial,

I think, and even determining role. It's crucial to the very name accelerationism, which itself is an aesthetic gesture. Accelerationism provides the oomph, the edge, the speed that other signifiers wouldn't. So in the discussions around accelerationism I've had in London, people will say, well, it's not really accelerationism as it used to be. It's not Nick Land's accelerationism. It doesn't really mean speeding up, but we still need the name. We like the name. It can convey something important. and the aesthetic invocations by accelerationism of everything from dance music to the imaging of data are essential I think as a kind of necessary supplement in Derrida's sense i.e. they're additional but required they galvanize and libidinize a project that while undoubtedly

ambitious would otherwise join with a whole series of attempts to re-engineer the world So, if accelerationism lost the name, it would just be another project, another perhaps reformist project. It's accelerationism that gives it the extra edge that makes it a revolutionary project in its own terms. And this is where I think one of my criticisms, many of my criticisms start. I think my problem with it is not this, that it is an aesthetic per se. It's not that it is lax substance, that it's just a kind of gimmick. It's that its conception of substance is wrong, I think. I mean, I've also talked, which comes up in the book, about the problem of the subject

of accelerationism. Who is doing the accelerating and what is being accelerated? This is the point that Simon O'Sullivan talks about in his review recently of the reader for Mute. But I think substance is also important. My contention is that accelerationism has too much substance. I mean that in the sense that accelerationism accepts an image of substance, an image of the world and its forces that integrates deliberately its truth with that world in a way that allows it little critical access to the question of substance. It accepts too much of the world. And this is my rather unfortunate fecal pre-Socratic parody of these different modes of substance.

So we can have two axes, hot to cold and solid to liquid. And I think accelerationism's imagery of itself is cold and liquid, at least going back to Nick Land. So following the axes we could locate with Beatrice Presiado capitalism as hot liquid, talks about hot psychotropic punk capitalism. And then the two other zones in my square which would remain hot solid and cold solid would be the kind of inertial forms that accelerationism tries to overcome. Hot solid for capitalist restraint of the productive forces in the various models of capitalism as feta that you find in Marx. cold solid as the resistance predicated on the return or recovery of the virtues of what

Levi-Strauss used to call cold societies, primitivism. So my criticism, as I've said, is that there's a flattening and simplification in this modelling of substance. And this criticism I'm making has a long and familiar philosophical history. It goes back to Hegel's critique of Spinoza. Hegel's Spinozan substance is inert, encompassing all it has no movement and the negative is thrown out to become nothing with a capital N. Grand nothing. And this I think is important because the debate about negativity has become which I looked at in my previous book kind of a key issue around accelerationism. It's not a matter of celebrating negativity with a capital N as opposing accelerationism and in fact I think accelerationism itself tends to do that in some of its forms. The image

of substance as this cold liquid allows it to project also this image of a capital N negativity. So we have Hegel's critique of Spinoza and Badiou borrowing from Hegel makes a similar critique of Negri who can be seen as a kind of accelerationist, that Negri accepts the forces of the world as the only substance that can be acted upon. So my problem as I've said is that this concept of substance as a cold liquid is a deliberate flattening of difference and the human into an inhuman imminence that exceeds the limited substance of capitalism. Capitalism must be called to be exceeded or accelerated. So one way to challenge this flattening is through the question of labour, which is what

I focused on in the little book that's coming out with zero. I think that accelerationism at its core has often the problem of labour, what Marx called the moving contradiction, the fact that capitalism needs labour to produce value but eliminates labour through the use of machines and technology. But my contention is that accelerationism offers a false solution, the integration of labour into the abstract and the machinic, the identification with substance, with the solvent forces of cold liquid is an attempt to exit from the contradiction and to escape labour per se which doesn't escape it leads back in so the exit leads back in similarly you could say the same not about just about labour as a commodity but about all commodities

about objects the identification of the object with the commodity is a cold abstraction or cold liquefaction flattens the processes by which capitalism constantly transforms objects into commodities through the value form. So I think there's a kind of identification of the final result, the abstract, the cold, the extreme point, hence the kind of fascination with things like high frequency trading. Choose the most extreme point of abstraction rather than tracing the processes of transformation. Now just to conclude, there are a few things that accelerationists can and do say back to me which I may be right. The first is that this critique of accelerationism, contemporary accelerationism is unfair because really I'm criticising Landian, Nick Land's version of

accelerationism. So while I think it's true that Nick and Alex and others constantly point to problems in Land, Ray perhaps Rassier most successfully in his introduction to the collected writings there's still a use of Landian imagery there's still a kind of seemingly slightly strange need for land as a kind of driver of this and still a need for a kind of image of radical imminence whether that's circuited through Nick Land's work or through an embrace of the global the abstract the inhuman so this is a problem I think the second charge which is the one that everyone makes to me is that being a kitsch Marxist, not to me,

but uses it as a label. Now, as far as I can tell, the accusation of kitsch Marxism is that if you refuse to think substance, refuse to think this integration, then you abandon any reference to the present and enter a world where everything is bad and wrong. You basically give up on dealing with the world. Substance has to be dealt with. This is what Nick Lang calls transcendental miserablism, basically trying to escape from the world. Now my response to that is that I am not abandoning substance. And in fact I'm quite concerned with it, primarily through the concept of decommodification. So rather than re-engineering

or extrapolation at the end of the book I'm most concerned with ways in which we could decommodify forms social and political so I had a discussion with Ray in Ray Brassier in where we were talking about antibiotics so the kind of line is you know do you want to get rid of antibiotics no I don't I don't want to die I'm against my own death but what What I said to him there was I was not so much concerned with the future without antibiotics in some revolution, but the distribution of antibiotics now, the distribution of technologies and these forms at the present. So the battle for the future, to make an obligatory terminated reference, is I think being formed

for here and now. What future we have cannot be left to the future, but involves struggles over the stakes of substance including mission and including the violently uneven distribution of the substances to sustain life that cannot be deferred or regarded as simply requiring a technological solution. Sorry, I'm also reading all the comments down the side of the screen. I started to read them so you can now put them into words. It's slightly eerie like being in a class where you can see the students' notes. You never want to do that. Thank you. Thank you. I don't think they are students' notes.

I think they're just like a little intervention. Yeah, yeah. I've never done this, so it's just... It's consciously trying to spice up the conversation. Yeah, no, it's good. It's instant questions, it's good. I didn't go to Burning Man. Yeah, that's one of the ten principles that's bandied about and it's really an example of this non-political New Ageism which is extremely present and is an extreme destruction in many cases and even the whole fact that it's a festival for a week where people think they can withdraw for a week and therefore they're creating the seeds of utopia.

There is a desire for utopia which is commendable but it's really emblematic of a lot of this not proper left thinkers but sort of mainstream people who consider themselves progressive who see something wrong with capital and try to do things in a certain way. So you were mentioning how you didn't think this anti-accelerationist sentiment is very prevalent and that's why I put a comment. I think the new age thing is very prevalent and it is based on a fundamental disavowal between the relationship to technology to an extent. So Burning Man is only possible because of enormous expenditure in commodities, in technology

And then for a week, people will pretend that all of that doesn't exist and they're living an unmediated, pure existence. And you do, you know, I do hearken a lot back to Frankfurt School thinking that, you know, Madonna's sort of leisure time or critique of leisure time and hobbies would exactly correspond to that. So, yeah, what do you think of sort of that prevalence of sentiment? So and accelerations as a counter to actually that widespread disavowal. Yeah, I mean I think the question of widespread is an interesting one because I think it also speaks to national distributions of sentiment because I think at least my perception in the UK is that kind of new age thinking is less dominant on the left because we don't

have so much of an outside. Yeah. we are much more geographically limited and it's much harder to imagine a you know have the American fantasy of the great forests that you actually have whereas we do have forests but they're not so large so I think there is that national distribution but I think accelerationism is why it's linked to Communisation why I've written on it why we're all thinking the same thing is that accelerationism insists there is no outside you know and I I think that's true. I think that's a merit to its position. It's not the fantasy of the outside is generated by being inside. Could you say a little bit about what you feel the relationship is between Communization and Accelerationism?

Yeah. Another out. It's... I mean, I... I don't know exactly. I mean, my sketch of it is that it's a kind of symmetry, a symmetry of response. So they're both two responses to the same situation, which is a strong felt sense or reality of the closure of the horizon of capital. So what people call real subsumption, like you were saying, leisure, time, everything is subsumed. So the two accelerationism responds by, as you know, kind of trying to retool technological elements, engage with abstractions, accelerate selectively

elements of that, whereas communism stresses that the dynamic of class struggle in that real complete subsumption doesn't mean class struggle has ended in a kind of bad, some of the slightly bad versions of Frankfurt School argument, you know, we're totally integrated. It means that capitalism has abandoned workers' identity, doesn't require workers, so new forms of struggle emerge. So I think that's where the symmetry lies in this kind of convergence on there is no outside. I was surprised in Berlin that so many, Ray and Nick and Alex were all talking about communisation. So I wasn't expecting that kind of discussion between them. I mean I think part of the problem is that they then see communisation as kitsch

Marxism as the symptom that it's Marxism that refuses to imagine a future. So if that's the convergence, where's the essential difference? I started to read Gray's piece on the wandering extraction where he does compare to the version, but what's the fundamental divergence then between communism and civilization? I mean I think that point about that communism is about class struggle primarily, and class struggle as a dynamic of the labour relation. So between, you know, in their periodisation what they argue is that workers' identity is no longer crucial to capital, so you have a new emergent form of struggle which is struggle against the identity of the worker, whereas

at least I think we're talking about work that's still ongoing but Alex and Nick's argument is for, you know, a new hegemonic project that would engage with technology, develop platform model, you know, in some ways more structured organization, you know, it's, we're waiting, we're all waiting for their book. Yeah, exactly. You know, it's, I feel like traditional class struggle versus a kind of technological organizational hegemonic model. But then, do you, yeah, go ahead, sorry. I agree with you and I wouldn't even waste my time on accelerationism if it didn't maintain that class and those Marxist notions of class struggle.

I think it would just then be another reformist project, I believe. But the issue of global organization seems to be a fundamental one, doesn't it? Because the only response to capital has to be a global one and a form of organization is essential. Would you say that? I wouldn't say that acceleration ignores the class problem. If I could just throw one more thing in for Benjamin to respond to. I wanted to think just briefly about the fact, I mean they are talking about automation creating just huge populations of unemployed and unemployable people and therefore they do call for reform, although it's a pretty major reform for a guaranteed basic income

that would be actually livable for everybody. And so that's not revolutionary for sure, but it maybe changes the position of the potential for revolution if you have some kind of a guarantee that being unemployed will not mean homelessness. Yeah, I mean, I think someone said to me, it might have been Alberto, So in the present moment, reformists demand a revolutionary, because the horizon of political change is so closed and narrow, both in the US and the UK. Living under soft, pretty hard neoliberal regimes, there isn't much alternative. So things like basic income, I talk about decommodification, there's a similar point.

finding ways for people to sustain life outside against the value relation because currently you're totally we're all totally subject to it in various different ways and degrees so I you know I don't have a problem with that kind of retooling or posing the question of global organisation but I do have a problem with the kind of rhetoric and some of the substance of the proposals and at least as I've read the manifesto and the text by Alex and Nick that they've been kind enough to send me, you know, I think there's some instability about where class struggle and acceleration relate, you know, is it class struggle was the driver for revolution and then after the revolution we use acceleration as measures

or acceleration as measures, things to be done now, you know, what would it actually mean, you know, their text on which is still coming out I think and might have changed and I looked at it on high frequency trading, it's like, well, this is the kind of grasp engaging with the abstract, but it's totally capitalist. So I'm not saying I've got better answers than them, but it seems to me they keep running into that problem, you know, that tension between how would you actually engage and reuse these things. So therefore, to me, it becomes a points, a sort of a gestural game. And then also I have some queries about the notion that organisation becomes a kind of substitutionist project where it's led by particular accelerationists as kind of almost

parodic Leninism. So I'm not saying, you know, I think there's a tension there between, you know, I'm not into, I don't believe in a kind of completely spontaneous revolution that emerges globally through the simple facts of class struggles. I think there's always going to be a problem of organization. You can't just pretend that's going to go away. At the same time, some of their solutions seem to me problematic, quite traditional, and not to really have engaged with the attempts to do those sorts of things before. These proposals have been made again and again. So why? Do you agree there? Sorry. I would like to. Can you guys hear me? Yeah. OK. I want to change the chapter of the discussion and go to a different chapter of the discussion.

The chapter I want to visit is the chapter of philosophy, or more specifically, the relationship between science and philosophy, particularly epistemology and ontology maybe, a little bit, and talk about how I started with this. that my interest in acceleration from the get-go of the manifesto was not so much of what's in it already or what is being defined as acceleration, but as a new set of proposals, youth allows different interested parties to be able to shape and influence it positively or negatively. And I'm sure you are having some form of influence on it negatively,

by constantly going after it, right? And other people are contributing to it positively, right? And this is why all of us on the positive side, negative side are interested in acceleration is because I think it's something that is new, you know, and through discourse and discussion and arguments can be refocused or changed, right? Now, that's my point of entry into sort of like why I am interested in it. But my interest and the way I understand it is philosophically, and you can trace that in what mostly Ray Bracier and Reza talks about, really is sort of like acceleration

points out to the insufficiencies of late 20th century philosophy to deal with the advancement in science and tries to sort of like basically break away from the kind of understand this is sort of like I'm going to grossly simplify in order to make a point so if you come back and tell me you're simplifying it's not going to work. So basically it's trying to come up with the deficiencies of particularly continental philosophy after the World War II and how a Heideggerian and Nietzschean understanding of the world corrupted continental philosophy and allowed the division that were already

set by teachers of Husserl and Heidegger, guilty, into human sciences over there and you know what I mean, human sciences over there and natural sciences over there and divide these things up and then sciences because of mostly the event of cybernetics, sciences and cybernetics kind of like went into like a fast speed mode of going on their own and philosophers just like began basically going to their own philosophical burning man. And that's really, you get that and you know what I mean like the two things that happens the way I understand it that causes that corruption of a continental philosophy is sort of like what Heidegger does to sort of like Husserl and Bergson which are sort of like, to me,

there's some affinities between real science and early phenomenologies of Husserl and Bergson. In fact, Norbert Wiener talks about the time of the machine is the Bergsonian time. There's a chapter, first chapter, I think, of cybernetic book. It's called Bergsonian versus Newtonian time, right? But what Heidegger kind of did to that was kind of corrupted it with a whole set of, like, mystification and enchantment. And then that happens to a Marxist acceleration through, like, the injection of Freud to Marx. And you get Frankfurt School, and then you get post-structuralism, And then the rest of the 20th century, basically, philosophy and what we call critical thought,

waste its time into some form of like a very folk version and flat understanding or manifest image to you sellers, manifest image understanding of really the impact of cybernetics on science, politics, economy. And really now what interests me is how with acceleration, the movement is to try to put the philosophy back or let the philosophy catch up and try to deal with really these scientific breakthroughs that kind of took place in 20th century in neurosciences, in physics, in chemistry, in biology really went on its own independent from psychoanalysis from continental philosophy from sociology and from like

I don't know, urban geography and all sorts of other stuff that sort of anthropologists claim to sort of like really engage with the 20th century, really engage with a late capital and all that. Well, I am going to say it's a cliche and it's a flattened image because I think that's important because that's part of my contention is what acceleration is doing isn't that new. You know, that's one way to construct the history of 20th century philosophy. There are other ways to construct that history, which were engaged with science from Althusser's interest in science, that can-gill-em tradition in France, to not a big Deleuze fan, but Deleuze,

to Anglo-American philosophy. I mean, Ian Hacking in his book on Anglo-American philosophy of science also quips philosophy of science is just bad philosophy and no good for science. been scepticism on the Anglo-American side about the role of philosophy in science. So there's a symmetry about scepticism, but there's also, I think, symmetries about engagement before we get to Donna Haraway or various other kinds of engagement. Stiegler's work, you know, I am an old Derridean, so I think Derridean did engage with questions of technology. I don't think post-structuralism is always a particularly useful category when it's just

used to mean linguistic idealism. So I think it's important to note there is that other tradition because that eats into the construction of newness and it's like we're so new, no one's ever done this. That's a kind of false image because it doesn't go back to looking at the questions or problems that have arisen from trying to do that. The other thing is just… I think I agree with you. I'll just add one more point. The other thing is, which I said, which is not a sophisticated philosophical point, it's a very vulgar and dull point, which I said to Robin, and Ray, and people in London, is I just don't, I'm not going to read Brandon and Sellers. You know, I just don't find that articulation particularly interesting, and I don't find it particularly new or cutting

edge. So I enjoyed Ray's book Nihil Unbound with obvious reservations about certain things. You know, I know he's still developing his work and Reza's still developing that work, but I find the kind of norms for random seller stuff just doesn't interest me, and I'm not sure that it is fulfilling this sort of function of engaging philosophy with science. You know, that's my query. is it really bringing home that logic? What would be then a good philosophical project? To engage with, yeah. I mean, I'm not a philosopher employed or do particularly.

I mean, I think there are lots of interesting people working on this stuff. I mean, there's lots of different philosophical things going on. I mean, I'm interested to read the new ergonomic, speculative aesthetics reader. I think Ray's work is interesting. I prefer the earlier work. James Trafford is doing interesting work. I kind of think that a thousand flowers bloom, that people do particular things. I haven't found the speculative realism thing particularly convincing or engaging. I'm probably better at pointing out things that I'm skeptical about and saying here's a great positive project, but I mean I think if people are working in the field of philosophy

they can pose their own problems for themselves. Speaking of that, oh sorry go ahead. I was just going to say, it's not about, I can't just put people off, if people are convinced acceleration is so convinced this you know a critique doesn't stop anyone doing anything it's it's more a kind of you know expression of my concern about particular things and what I think are mispost problems but what's wrong with norms if as long as they're revisable and what's wrong with basically going and basically saying like maybe we can all maybe we can all start from where our current sciences have agreed upon as the

basis of the world, as long as we're willing to update and revise this normativity. Can I make an intervention here, Mo and Benjamin? And I think it's one that speaks to what Benjamin's saying, it speaks to what Mo's saying, is that I'm taking what Benjamin said with regards to the problem of substance. And when he brought up Hegel's critique of Spinoza, it reminded me of Hegel's bypassing of Latin America and other places and sort of the dialectical development of the spirit, right? You know, obviously we arrive at this point, and this is a vulgar point too,

but what I've seen a lot of acceleration is doing, and I know that there are people engaging with this, is bypassing this very critical question of substance, as if science were this monolithic hegemonic practice that articulates itself sort of indifferently, to use Lyotard's own terms, across national, regional, and local boundaries to the extent that, you know, I don't think it's a failure of philosophy in many ways to account for its own success. Right on the contrary, I think it's philosophy misses assessing its success as sort of either Deleuze and Guattari's account of things or whomever, maybe Marx. I think the question is contemporary critiques of techno-science

have really articulated the national, the local, the legal, the juridical, local frames, and this problem of acceleration of substance is totally bypassing power itself. In other words, substance is a cold liquid, it has its power to extend itself, but yet when other forms of power articulate it, I mean, I just see what Benjamin's saying is very, very powerful, especially as a scholar of Latin America and a scholar of decolonial traditions. Science is a power structure involved with other forms of power that have kind of consubstantial connections and substantial differences. So that's my take, and I wanted to know what...

It's easy to conflate the material substance of science or the scientific ideal or scientific process that is sort of like sometimes coincides with the substance of science and sometimes doesn't. When I was talking about science, I wasn't talking about the corporate... In fact, to me, the political edge of acceleration is indirectly they want to liberate the science before it's too late from its complete subsumption by capital because they see that science is probably one of the, probably science and knowledge like universities as the only areas that has not gone through what we call real subsumption or total subsumption, right?

So by proposing a kind of ideal science, I think the attempt is to maybe save the science from its total subsumption. And I really personally don't think that we can foreclose on sciences the way we can foreclose on say pop music or we can foreclose on filmmaking or something, you know? And you could also say that even if science is a form of power, I guess if there are no relations that are outside of power then the challenge would be to kind of create in a way, maybe. I'm going to leave with this. What you three, including Benjamin, are saying, and I think Benjamin has articulated,

I don't hear Brassier or Nick or Alex or Rob saying. I think you guys are giving very generous and point of fact, sort of dialectically informed re-readings of accelerationism, which I think is what Benjamin seems to be putting in play, is let's get back to dialectics. Let's get back to something as the agent of history that is made out of material conditions, people, things. I mean, that's what I sort of hear you saying, Benjamin. I don't know if I'm on it, but I think you guys are really nice accelerationists. Maybe that's the real thing. nice acceleration to shitty ones. Like, I don't mean shitty, but mean ones. But Nick was here two days ago with us,

and I think what I'm talking about, you could hear echoes of it in Nick's presentations of the class. So maybe Nick is also a nice accelerationist. Yeah, I mean, that's what I was saying at the start. I mean, I think, you know, I've obviously got the criticisms, but I think there's still not been enough articulated. I think that's a genuine thing. We're talking about something that is very amorphous. Maybe that's a problem, maybe that's something we shouldn't do, but that's what's happening. It's very hard to define what the object is we're talking about. But I would agree with the previous point about the inflation of science of science with a capital S, as though we have to save that or not.

You know, this kind of inflation of enlightenment as, you know, it's like, are you for or against enlightenment? It just seems to me a completely ridiculous way of posing the question. You know, it's like I'm not giving up on, you know, unquote, enlightenment values, but that's such a kind of can of worms as to what enlightenment you mean, what kind of philosophical values you're interrogating. So I think there is these kind of polemical gestures about which side are you on, for science or against science. I'm going to have the pain killing jab when I go to the dentist. It's like I'm not stupid. You'd be surprised how many people talk about home births and the joy of the pain they experienced

during childbirth was just the most liberating thing. On my Facebook I'm just crowded with that. There was someone who posted an artist who had a home birth and she videoed the whole thing and everyone was saying how beautiful it was. I was just surprised. It was disgusting. It was painful. It was like everything that's wrong. Yes. Body is not always good. I mean, I think, so it's the tension between these sorts of levels of claim on the one hand, fighting for science. then what would it mean to engage with it to actually reuse it like you were suggesting liberate it as again as if these debates you know hadn't been engaged with before you know in the 60s and 70s with people trying to you know around particular areas not just psychiatry

but nuclear science you know I mean it's been a long and difficult attempt to disengage And I think what people are finding is that, you know, the invocation of Science Capital S as reason and enlightenment, I don't think are going to make it easier for you to do that project. Do you think that what Nick and Alex are doing is even at all the same thing that what Nick Land is doing? Because to me, they're pretty explicitly left. And at this point, Nick Land has clearly gone a very different direction. But even the early Nick Land, I mean, he was pretty nihilist. I didn't get the sense that he was strongly left in any sense.

I mean, I met him once, so I can't. No significant conversation about anything at a conference years ago. But in a Thai book, you know, he talks about the anecdote about Schopenhauer lending his eyeglasses to someone to shoot down rioters. Because I think whether it's flirtation, which I particularly think is a dubious thing that people then end up actually just becoming right-wing, there's a kind of strong continuity with a certain tenor of that kind of thinking, whether it's reactionally as it is explicitly it seems now, or hard-edged realism, this kind of machismo of engaging with things to

the max, to the extreme, has always been a constant. And I think in some of the CCRU texts and those statements, at least being British, you know, that gives me massive privilege, but they don't seem particularly left-wing. But with Nick and Alex, though, they use… Yeah, well, I guess, you know, they still seem to want a lot of Nick land in there. You know, there's something strange, that's what I'm saying about the use of the word accelerationism, the positioning of the project, it's a kind of, it's a need for it, you know. The need for Nick land, you know, it's why is that needed? If this is totally different, why have this reference to it?

And my, you know, like I was sort of vaguely suggesting in the talk is because I think it's a particular reading of radical imminence. I want to say, sorry Ivan, I asked Laura to join because her paper kind of like is trying to deal with some of the stuff, so I'm hoping, Laura, you know what we did, like we also forgot to introduce you guys. So when you first speak maybe, oh John is joining us. Hello. John Boa is the newest member of the new center. He just joined the new center and using his membership. I thought that maybe it's a good idea to sort of like invite him to the room since we have like a foreign guest from England. Yeah. So Laura, maybe you want to introduce yourself before

you ask your question or comment. We should have done that with everybody, but next time you're on, please introduce yourself to Benjamin. Go ahead. Hello, can you hear me? Sorry, there's some noise outside. First of all, well, yeah, my name is Laura Lotti, I'm doing my PhD in Art and Media in Sydney and I actually have a background in economics, quantitative economics, for five years and then kind of accidentally stepped into philosophy when I did my master in Goldsmiths, which was a great, really great experience. But I think, I don't know, perhaps these, I don't know, five years in economics really gave me a kind of, I don't know, a

certain perspective on things that has perhaps been reinforced by kind of this belief and this illusion with all the post-structuralist tradition that the accelerationist movement is, I guess, coming from. So, yeah, I guess I really wanted to thank Benjamin for articulating much better than what I did, for instance, in there. What are my concerns, for instance, with accelerationism? Especially this need of finding new trajectories, perhaps new ways of looking at the same thing, because what the acceleration improvement, I think, does really well is individuating the problem. Then, I don't know, answering to that by looking

that kind of like surely tradition, like surely I guess, yeah, movement, like the early accelerationist post-structuralist movement and the CCRU, they're all amazing attempts I think to answer this problem. Although perhaps, yeah, there is a need of like new trajectories, new terms perhaps, perhaps, I don't know, I'm trying to do away with the word capitalism perhaps, as Manuel Delanda suggested a long time ago, and instead looking at capitalism as an anti-market, focusing on markets, as a techno-cultural milieu perhaps, assemblage, constituted by

concrete technology. So, I don't know, by looking at algorithms, at algorithmic technology as a very concrete technology, perhaps we can, I don't know, perhaps it becomes easier, it becomes a closer thing rather than the abstraction of capital. And on the other side, I don't know, looking at the aesthetics of power that these concrete technologies create. because we interface with them, right? So I think, I don't know, because I'm focusing as well on economic technologies, economic media. At the moment, I'm looking at, for instance, I'm looking at money.

I'm looking at what the evolution of money as a technology has created. So the big change that fiat currency introduced, this idea of flows of capital in a way. I don't know, I'm just, I'm kind of struggling as well I guess with this idea of accelerationism in the sense that it is, again, something that we need perhaps like today, especially in this particular historical moment. Although, again, I'm kind of like struggling with the struggling with the premises, with the philosophical trajectory it departs from.

But, yeah, I don't know, I don't really have any, I guess, question in this regard. The question of science is important because if you look, like, especially with the new rationalism, that's kind of like new rationalism acceleration that comes out of speculative realism. He is a person with an engineering background and obsessed with functionality and function. You look at Ray Bracier, he is interested in sellers and brand them. So really it's like debating the science and talking about the separation between the actual material science which is sort of like implicated in the power knowledge much more

than the idea of science. I mean, Benjamin, if you really think that all of science has been already subsumed, then why are we at the universities? Why are we even having hopes in the university system? Why are we having hope in knowledge? If everything is subsumed, including science and knowledge by capital, then what are we doing? Well, because I don't think capitalism is a social form that works that way. I mean I think because we are all subject to subsumption doesn't mean that it's a complete absorption of us like zombie slaves. I mean I think what it is is a contradictory relation of subsumption, it's a social relationship. I've said a few times to people, I think there's a tension between it's the model of

capitalism as completely subsuming everyone that then leads to the fantasy of an outsider So you end up with this model of capitalism is just a kind of thing that clings on and can be thrown away and then it's fine whereas capitalism is also elements of built infrastructure, social forms, it's quite hard to tease out and tear out from it those things and those contradictory tensions doesn't mean it's impossible to get out but I'm quite dully marxist if you like in finding it difficult to see how some of those forms of retooling will work to contest what is a social relation that extracts value from innovation and technology I'm not saying all science is capitalist or all knowledge is capitalist but it's all

potentially available to being used by capital as a form of value generation that's the problem them isn't it you know that's that's what we face we're not you know as I'm saying about antibiotics they're great but they're obviously being used to extract huge amounts of value and you know charging people fortunes for them and not distributing them to people who need them you know I mean that's the form of the capitalist social relation racism and other state power but you know for non freely available retrovirals you know the list can go on, nuclear power, you know, an interesting kind of question, you know, how that functions, you know, even if we have a revolution, how are we going to deal with the kind of infrastructural legacy of, you know, radioactive waste that last 50,000 years.

I'm not saying we're going to get rid of, you know, the tension and the contradictions of these forms. also my question you could you say just a little bit about about why why the negative is so is so important to you and I'm kind of wondering especially in relation to Paul Verilio because I know you've worked on Verilio's work to some extent or to a large extent and so I'm I'm just thinking of because one thing that he says he says that he's not he's not against technology is not against speed or acceleration or anything like that He just thinks that we need to get inside the machine of research and development and to really rethink how technology develops, how certain plans develop, and create better plans, basically.

and the way that he gets there is through like a just very persistent critique of everything that exists in the current technological and political landscape. And so, yeah, I'm just wondering how you react to that because to me what I get out of that is that there is actually a certain affirmation coming out of that. You know, he calls himself an art critic of technology, so he wants technology, he just wants better technology. and I'm wondering kind of how you see accelerationism I've heard you use this phrase selective accelerationism a few times and that makes me think that there is obviously a negative and a strongly critical dimension to your work but

that maybe there's also some affirmative dimension too and I'm wondering if you could maybe speak to that if there is I mean I think I probably didn't write a very clear book you know the conclusion of the book on the negative tries to talk about you know you can't have the negative on its own it's just a philosophical nonsense you know because it has to always be in relation and in fact that's what interests me about the negative is a it's a relational concept so my skepticism about some of the what I call the affirmationists is this always this desire to separate a force that will be intrinsic to itself and not have this relation whereas I'm kind of quite interested in going back you know everyone says the problem with the negative is it's always tied to what it's negating it's always tied to what it's critiquing and that's a bad thing.

I actually think that's an interesting thing because it means that it is kind of engaged with the contradictions and tensions of what it's trying to undo. So part of my attempt to rethink the negative is to get away from grand concepts of capital N negativity which turn out to be synonymous with capital A affirmation. You know, something totally negative is something totally positive if you look at, you know, the way someone like that. That negativity actually is very much continued in Niclann's work and it has to do with removing sort of the last theological remnants to a lot of philosophical thought. So it is extremely, it has that real sense of negativity, that's what I like as well, even Reza's stuff and Reza's stuff, removing those last vestiges of theological thoughts

which is present in Heidegger and Weismism. I'm interested in your current work on critique, the critiques currently of vitalism, because if you do have that radical negativity, that should also apply to sociology, and then what are you left with as the concept of the human? And that then really is a starting point for transhumanism, perimuthianism. Yeah, I mean, there's two things I think I would say, at least, you know, Nick's book on Bataille, I wrote a thesis on Bataille, so I had my time criticising it, that would be when you write a thesis. But I find that the conception of negativity in that book is too substantialist, it's too tied to an exteriority, it's Schopenhauerian, it's a

kind of grand outside of negativity that washes over something positive. So what I'm saying to you is, although I'm sure I haven't got it worked out, I'm interested in the intertwining of the negative with what it's negating, not a kind of grand outside negativity. So that's that point. In terms of the anti-theological, that's my critique of vitalism, which is a book that I have not finished because I was writing this one and doing other things, is that it's It's a critique of theological residues that come up in vitalism because of this transformation of life into a great affirmative power, which I see as a fundamentally Christological kind of dynamic between Christ as fallen and risen, crucified and a bare life and then transformed

into a subject of power. So my critique of vitalism is this theological element plus that this is a kind of theology of capital. the theology of capitalism is this faith that there's always something outside to generate value. What Marx says is, he says, the bourgeoisie, I was using this quote for something else today, you know, the bourgeoisie has great reason to believe in the supernatural creative power of labor, because that's where value comes from, for capitalist society. You know, it's the one that believes in humans. You know, capitalism is correlationist. Capitalism is a humanism that only sees value as generated by human beings in their life. So that's why I'm interested in connecting these elements of critique.

So you're actually quite accelerationist? No, I don't think so. I don't think being anti-theological or anti-vitalist is to be accelerationist per se, because I think what they end up doing with their inhumanism, not so much Ray or in the Landian sense, is generating a kind of new, you know, you can end up with a dark vitalism, the zombie vitalism, the vitalism of inhumanity still is this kind of belief in an excessive productive force. So I think there's a kind of continuity between some of the couching of accelerationism and its belief in forces and substance with vitalism. So you continue to mention antibiotics as an example. What about something which would radically alter

the idea of the human also? But Ben, let me just go back to the question of cybernetics because I think by focusing on cybernetics, and sorry, this is my research and my interest, that a lot of the things that seems to be new, like seems to be like, not new, seems to not be new because, oh, we've heard this all before. There's nothing new about that. Find a new context to be reiterated in a new way because of the question of the machine. the machine. Now, I completely agree with your sort of characterization of the Landian. Landian, he basically advocates a form of machinic vitalism. I completely agree with that. But at the same time, we cannot keep thinking of the world prior to machine and

neglect the significance of the machine as much as we have to. So basically these questions of science, these questions of epistemology, these questions of manifest image and scientific image, however you want to put it, the Salarzian categories, become pertinent because of what we see as, you know, I just finished finally reading completely through all the notes and stuff, Chateleys to think and live like pigs, which Robin McKay has translated, and it's coming out soon by Urbanomic, right? And this crazy amalgamation of state, capital, and cybernetics into almost what he called a tertiary state, right? And so there's this geopolitical economy, global geopolitical economy, twice global, because geo is already global.

This global geopolitical economic problem called what he called a tertiary state, which is the amalgamation of state, capital, and cybernetic, is what makes all this stuff that to some of us, to our ears sound, oh, I've already heard it before, kind of like important to repose, the return to a new form of, updated form of enlightenment, and sort of think about what is significant about the machine. Okay, it's not vital, it's not source of like labor, or like source of, like perpetual source of life, the way land wants to rely on them, but what are we going to do with the machine? Yeah, I think that's the question I've sat in front of one.

I mean that's the question I think is something to be thought as it is. I suppose I'm just saying that when I think about critiques of technology or works or analyses of science, you know, I mean, accelerationist work still seems to me very early doors and not developed, and I think of, you know, I'm pretty anti-Latour, but, you know, I think of the stuff I've read in science studies and, you know, the other work that I've seen done. I don't have, you know, a global answer to what we do with the machine, but what I suppose I'm saying is that in part, it's not just, again, the abstract, the machine, it's also

what you're talking about is the structure, the built environment, the way it's engaged with, the way machines have become, you know, not subsumed but engaged with processes of value formation. Before we get on to what was raised earlier, places in the world where there's a quite interesting book, Shucka the Old, about how loads of quote unquote old technologies are quite important for large amounts of the world, you know, bicycles being one of the famous examples. So I think I just don't see, I haven't seen what Ray's work and Reza's work except by saying, which I agree with, you know, we need to think about reason and, you know, I mean, who's saying, we seem to know some people who are, but who's totally irrational?

I don't see that as a problem, saying we need to think about science, we need to think about reason, we need to think about, I'm a bit unhappy with the word enlightenment, just because of Nick's dark enlightenment. And as I said to Nick Cernicek, you might want to distinguish this word from, to be read the tossers who use it, you know, from Lands Dark Enlightenment to those kind of new atheists. So, you know, there's some work to be done in distinguishing what exactly that is, but, you know, that's a philosophical project. It's not my project, but people doing work on cybernetics or science, I think, is necessary. You know, I'm, I think I was raised earlier you know I'm skeptical about the kind of sci-fi level opposing certain other things

as you know there are emerging technologies that will primarily be as most new technologies are for the rich you know there are technologies of transformation that are coming or arriving and I still think they're really worth subjecting to pretty standard critiques not just quote I'm being a humanist, but just like, you know, who gets access to these things, why is vast amounts of money being spent on solving, you know, particular tiny problems that affect tiny proportion of the world's population, etc. So I still have some… Can I make a question? …science, because I think it's worth doing. Two people haven't spoken, one is Morgan and the other one is John who joined us.

I don't know if Morgan, would you like to join the conversation? Because I don't know for how long more we're going to have Benyman. He must be tired, too. But it would be good if we hear from the two people as well. Thanks for inviting me, but I don't really have any comments. No? Okay. Thanks. John, what about you? For now, just listening. Thank you. Okay. So I just wanted to make sure... Where do everyone feel like going from here? Yes, it's Shakariya. I just wanted to raise one point, a question like you mentioned there's not really much

new and I agree, I'm deeply suspicious of anything which posits itself as radically new because there's a conversation for history to be had. And I would agree that there isn't a lot that's really new. But that's a good thing. It's more a recovery from sort of a postmodern and neoliberal determinacy and perhaps even some sort of fetish with irrationalism. And that's why it's good that it's a return to those good old time religious values values of the Enlightenment, they're not religious but in that sense yes it's good that there's

nothing, it's not coming as some American liberal, yeah this is new, this disrupts everything that you've ever thought about reality, it's like no, power structures exist, you know, typical Marxist historical materialism exists, not the rest. Yeah I mean I think it's, you know, they're engaging with those questions but like I'm I'm repeating myself at this point, but I just still think that some of the ways those problems are posed by what I've read of the existing material is still, I find, problematic. There is still a claim to newness, and I understand that as a polemical technique, polemic and galvanising people and getting debate and spreading your ideas involves these things.

That's perfectly understandable. So I'm not, well I guess I'm concerned is what gets missed out of those drives seems to me it's quite a lot of work that's already been done and not just because, oh it's bad to ignore other people's work although personally I think it is because I'm a boring academic who likes footnotes but it's also bad because I think it ignores some of the tensions and problems that those projects ran into. That's quite a reason. So that's, you know, it's not just a be historical for the sake of it. Can I ask a very quick question? Sorry. And I guess this is for everyone. And I don't know if you address this in your book. I wonder if Alex and Nick's position and others, you know,

colloquially and seriocomically we call nice accelerationists, is part of the project, in your estimation, a reaction to Nick Land's sort of radically cynical, hyper-nihilist position. I mean, he is kind of the fanged noumena, and there's a certain, no pun intended, certain teeth and violence inherent in this work. and I'm wondering if you see some of the left accelerationists, for lack of a better word, as engaging what they see the need to restrain the dystopian elements in his project. If you address this in your book.

You make some mention to it in your paper, and I'm looking through my notes, and I can't seem to find it. Yeah, I don't know if I do, but I mean, I think what I would say is that there's a critique of Land basically the speed thing you know that he's endorsing capitalism which is probably right but I think there is a problem is that there is this sort of desire or inhabiting of the anti-humanism the you know I mean I've never been a big fan of Nick Land's writing style so I find it hard to find it attractive but people do So I think there is in the left accelerationism there is still a kind of Landian influence. It comes out more in a kind of what I would call a hard edge geopolitical realism, you

know, it's this kind of, and some of the inhumanism. So there is, I don't see it as slowly anti-Ligland coming against his project trying to, you know, critique him. I see there's a sort of element of continuity in terms of trying to continue that project, not the dark enlightenment stuff, but continue the earlier CCRU project and redirect it. And I think in doing that they take on what for me have always been some of the vices of that project. So you know, there's a continuity about interest in UK dance music, which I'm interested in and other things. So there are elements of agreement.

And also, like I said before, I think the project, I sometimes joke, it's like a postmodern San Simonism. There's a kind of tendency for it to be giving the orders in a particular way, saying structures of organisation that are very unspecific about what is actually going to happen on the ground or as a political project. And I, like I said, I'm not a believer in mass spontaneity, although I'm a believer in people can decide their own fates for themselves at times, and people aren't stupid. And I think there's a sort of danger of a kind of techno-scientific hegemonic substitutionism in the way some of the elements of the manifesto talk.

You know, there's the accelerationist, and then there's the benighted others who need to be told. And I personally have never particularly liked that kind of political way of doing things. Because I think it's, I never see myself as the one giving the orders, I see myself as the one being ordered around. So, you know, I think there's a kind of inhumanism. It was like in Land, you know, Land was totally again for the demolition of the human, and there was a cult of personality about Nick Land, the cult of non-personality. humanity. So you can have an inhumanism, destroy the humanity, dissolve everything, except don't dissolve me. Worship me as the placeholder of the inhuman. And I think within the accelerationist project, it's nowhere near as extreme as lands, but

I still think within all this sort of taking apart, destroying, retooling, there's questions of who is doing it and what is happening there get sort of pushed aside. And I think that is the sort of Landian legacy in the new accelerationism that I think they need to more clearly address. You know, why do you... That's an excellent point. I agree with, I would like to marry actually Ron Sears' idea of radical pedagogy and radical equality of intellectual capacity to accelerationism to avoid it becoming too much a horizontal were the technoscientific intellectual class and we will, you know, that's in fact a problem

that was in the party politics of Italy, I know a lot, which really turned off my generation from the communist party, that sort of horizontalism. Which I understand Piketty even is aversion to communism because I voted Berlusconi in in 94 as an 18 year old, merely because party politics and its hierarchical structure had just completely, and Marxist orthodoxy had just completely turned a whole generation off politics. In the UK, my parents, we come from Essex, which is seen as the birthplace of Thatcherism. I think they voted Conservative because Thatcher's promise to the working class was you don't to be working class anymore. We're going to give you a house, then you're going to be

able to borrow money. And that's in a way that was one of the failures of social democracy was which is kind of the communising point. They want the working class to stay in the working class position. So that sort of Thatcherism always had this energising effect in the UK amongst some for this promise of an escape from a stable position. Britain, I don't know, it seems from all your positions, but often seen as a very sort of static hierarchical class bound society. So Thatcherism was a kind of, I hated it, but not on these grounds, but had this appeal. And I think the Landian CCIU stuff is, you know, the British accelerationists, you know,

buying into this demolish the old society. I was writing about living in an old country and I'm just interested in a paper on the geographies of accelerationism and I think there's a lot to be said about the national and the particular and specific place it comes from because although it's always talking about the global, the geopolitical, the world which I think is right, like I said right the start capitalism is a global social form you know resistance to it is going to have to be on a global scale otherwise you're dead. Then what gets missed in that I think is also these kind of questions of nationality and political tradition and you know what kind

of representations of acceleration what kinds of representations of agamini politics have been tried so again I think it's kind of interesting to me at least to kind of think about where these ideas are being articulated from, you know, and what kinds of local traditions, you know, folk politics, but the folk politics of the reaction against folk politics. Yeah. And I agree with you completely, and I like it the way exploration has deconstructed the nostalgic view as something positive by capital with, you know, Mark Fisher's piece avatar. And you do a really interesting thing in your paper on Afro-punk futurism where you kind of deconstruct then the anti-nostalgic accelerationist view as coming itself from

neoliberal, which I think is important, very important as well. But it's interesting though, we need to understand why back then when Thatcher came out, why capital was so alluring to the working classes, why people voted against their own long term interests. I think that's really key in Leotard's polemical work is what's the appeal of it, even if we all agree it ultimately is detrimental and it only serves the interest of the 1%, however it continues to libidinally appeal to people and how to counter that without just a moral negative critique of you don't know but you're just, rather than the Marxist critique of oh if teach them the knowledge of their own status of exploitation, they'll rise up and instead

no, they keep buying more gadgets. I mean, you should ask that question from Sanchis, who developed the campaign for Thatcher, because it had a lot to do with the utilization of communication on media by the Thatcher campaign as much as it had to do with, like, basically the option of romanticizing a negative class struggle by the working class was like communication technologies of the time and the way they were utilized for the Thatcher campaign allowed the working class to even be exposed to the idea then to actually give it a chance. So it wasn't sort of like we always have to remember that like Stiegler, because Stiegler

goes into detail about this, right? For Stiegler, the California ideology comes out of Ayn Rand. So then neoliberalism in the late 70s have to do with the development of microprocessor and computer directly and indirectly. So you see, for me, the question of technology and the machine is always there. You know, Thatcherism was sort of like computers are implicated. Technology was implicated in it in more than one way. One way. There's also a kind of history, the previous Labour government in 1979 had introduced austerity measures, it introduced IMF austerity measures, so strangely enough the working class weren't that happy, it was a general strike and then Thatcher was elected on a very small majority,

it wasn't a massive landslide, the danger I agree with you we need to look at communications of technology. I think there's a danger that we get into sort of overstating the libidinal appeal of right wing ideas or that capitalism where often in the UK at the moment very small numbers, it's the lack of appeal that's probably electing people, the small numbers of people are voting, voting is dominated by the elderly, both all major parties are committed to protecting pensions because that's basically buying your voters, if you touch them you're in trouble. So they are kind of very, if you want, unsexy. But you know, your point, Simon, also is about how social democracy maybe had already

given up on social democracy itself prior to Thatcher. And you see that in the fall of communism, you know, like who basically sold off all the assets of the Eastern European governments and Russia were like ex-communists who had given up on the state ideology already to be able to be at a stage to integrate with such high speed into sort of like Western capitalism, a long-standing tradition of state capitalism or whatever, Marxism, whatever you want to call it, whatever you want to call it, the Eastern bloc. So yeah, social democracy itself was starting to have doubts about their own Yeah, I mean, Cunningham said something interesting in the London thing, and I think he's going

to write something, I mean, he's critical of accelerationism, but he's, what I thought you said was interesting is that we're all really discussing about socialism. You know, the whole thing about the idea of communism, which was on conferences, whereas really accelerationism, and what I'm doing as a critique of it, you know, there is a kind of focus on social democracy, socialism, the kind of actually existing, and I think there is, which I'm still thinking about it, and I'm trying to think about it some more for New York, but I think there's something, Nick and Alex's appeals to Chile, to Russian experiments in the 50s, not so much to, which I think is interesting to other European experiments, you know, the Swedish model, which everyone was interested in, but I think it's an interesting

thing that there is a kind of perhaps another hidden commonality of a debate about socialism and a desire for you know not the idea of communism but the practice of socialism that's going on within the discussions around accelerationism you know which I think is kind of one of the threads that's kind of run through what we've been talking about tonight but on that note I'm going to have to apologise and go to bed. Thank you so much for your time. No, it's OK. It's my pleasure. Thank you all. Thank you, Benjamin. Thank you. I'll just have to work out how to switch the technology off now. Yes. Goodbye.

Thanks so much, Benjamin. Thank you. Thank you. So, how was it everyone? I think it was really good. Yeah, it was really good. I absolutely agree. And his criticisms of acceleration are also sharpening too. I think this engagement is very productive for him also as well as for Nick and Alex and whoever is involved with that project. This is not the Benjamin noise of a year and a half ago when the manifesto came out.

So Jason, do you want to talk about the rest of the class, the program? Yeah, so... We have about an hour and a half left, right? To sort of like go over the material and maybe some of the... We're pretty much on time, so we technically have about one hour, but we can always go over. But if you remember, we saved half an hour last time for today. Oh, right, right, right. Okay, so in the last hour and a half we're going to go over the readings for today, which was energy man capitalism and an excerpt from libidinal economy. And so I think the way that we'll approach it is we'll start out with student presentations

and then we'll, you know, and Mo and I will kind of give feedback on that and we'll have kind of an exchange based on that, based on those. And so we'll start off with the student presentations, student presenting. Mo and I will respond to those and... And Tony is going to present too, right? Because Tony was supposed to present on inter-government, no, on libidinal economy. I believe so, yeah. I'm not totally sure about that. But I think Tony said that he prefers to do it like after the students. So let's start with Carlos because Carlos left a note here saying like he would like to leave at 9 o'clock. So then we do Carlos and then Laura, are you okay with that?

For Carlos to go first and then we'll go over yours. and then we'll do the rest. Okay. So, Carlos, go ahead. Oh, wow. I didn't even prepare a Google Doc or anything, but I will. I was looking at my notes. Actually, as an auditor, I was sort of committed to the sort of informal model of this. But, Laura, do you have something formal presented? Or were you going to do the dialogue? Because if you have something formal, I can actually extend my time a little. Not really. I've got notes on the text more than anything. It's totally fine. Just like... Okay, all right. Then I'll get started with my decelerationist technology here.

So we're talking about Interdillman Capitalism by Jean-Francois Lyotard. Thank you to whoever found it in the semiotext version online. This was first published. I'm going to assume that most people are relatively familiar with Lyotard's pedigree. Born in the 20s, so much of the generation. Dies in 1998 from symptoms of leukemia. He emerges in the 60s after finishing his dissertation in 63, if I'm not mistaken, as part of the Socialismo o Barberi contingent with Castoriadis and a number of other thinkers.

And this text, Energum and Capitalism, is first published in 1973, at least in book form, in a text called Le Dispositif Pulsionnel, the devices of the theory of the drive in English for a sort of inelegant translation. And the interesting thing here is that the text – I'm going to start with the title as a sort of point of departure and then get into some of the basic arguments. The Energumen is – I imagine many people looked it up. The Energumen is two things. The first one, it's a being possessed by a demon.

it's by a negative by a not a you Damon to use the Socratic notion but it's a diabolical figure right it's this it's this devil figure and then the second one is that in French and in Spanish I can speak for Spanish and to some degree Portuguese it's a furious being and also a being of a kind of furiousness and insanity that makes them marginal. So I was looking in the text for that and I thought it would be interesting at some point to explore that sort of text, that sort of aspect of the text because he really doesn't discuss it in the context of the translation that Robin provides us. So just beginning sort

of page, not even page by page, but just the text sections in the accelerationist reader. And I think that the critical questions I can go from, let's start with page 167. One of the things that Leah Tarr points out is that, okay, modernity has created, there's no phenomenal numeral division anymore. The question is that capital has created this collapse. Modernity is only production and perpetual dislocation. How do I take him talking about perpetual dislocation? Perpetual dislocation isn't just the dislocation of subjects, but rather the dislocation of sites for capital, right? Capital has the ability to infiltrate

every site. And it spreads itself not uniformly but rather totally across all sorts of different fields of life. And this is where he uses the pantograph. And the pantograph is this delivery system for electrical energy. So he's modeling after Deleuze and Guattari, capital totality as a kind of field of flows. Now remember, and I forgot to say this, this is effectively a kind of book review of the anti-Oedipus. This is him working through the problems of the anti-Oedipus to end up at a solution for some of the problems the text itself points at.

And he'll work through Lyotard at the end. If you guys have questions, you can ask me If you think that I'm misreading it, go ahead, and I can work off that. But I'm going to talk about the first section and then continue. So, Lyotard puts on this idea that what he's arguing is that he, Deleuze, Guattari, and Baudrillard, to a certain degree, are not positing what he calls a critique of capital. But rather, these are positive positional books. And why does he make this distinction? because for him, critique takes the object of critique as its own object. In other words, it creates a kind of model for the object,

and then it moves solely within this object. But what he's saying is this actually maps flows of escape, flows of reading energy. So he sees this, I think, as a much simpler project. project and this is on page 169 I'll just look at this book very quickly yes he says so critique makes itself the are you are you reading from the are you reading from the semi-reality or from the reader yeah so I can also go ahead and do it by paragraphs I'm sort of know that if you just give us the page of the reader because I also have the reader I'm very selfish as well like Find out for myself. Oh, super. Yeah. 160, sorry, pardon me.

Begins at the middle last paragraph of 168 after a dash that says, so critique makes itself the object of the object, right? Yes. And then he says, I'm going to skip over the part of a batai. He says, because one either gets out immediately without wasting time critiquing, simply because one is elsewhere than the enemy's domain or else one's critique, keeping one foot inside while stepping outside with the other. Positivity of the negative, but in fact the nothingness of this positivity. Next paragraph he says, what is important here is not negativity, but its position. Positioning, the way the problem is posed. So for Lyotab, this book is critical is that it does not take itself as the object of its critique.

It's not working out a system the way that I read it in quite the same way that Marxism is doing. But rather it's allowing itself to be positioned within the critique by the forces of capital. So this is how I read the inner gooming. And I haven't found it. Maybe I just totally missed in the reading. but this is where I think he's talking about the possession of capital. This is the inner Gouman moment. So we can just go on. You know that that is echoed also in the libidinal economy, right? because there he talks about page 213, he talks about how many,

the same coming and goings in the factory, how many pennies per hour, how many tons of coal, how many cast iron bars, how many barrels of shit, not produced of course, but endured. So he abandons these activities almost as production, but sort of like, but look at them from the side of the active human who actively wants to do this kind of stuff, who decides to sort of like endure these activities. Yeah, I think that's a very nice addition, emendation to what I'm saying. So really I'm just taking this text for us as a group, as a class, to be a kind of remapping of some of the essential arguments of the anti-Odipist,

but with a twist. And the twist is this move towards a kind of, the way I'm reading it, sort of total horizontalization of capital so that we can see it across this field. And I'm going to continue in what I articulate just my key quotes quickly. So on 170, at the bottom, he talks about the anti-edifice, the essential figure. He says, thus we reaffirm what the book affirms. We show how it is one of the most intense products of the new libidinal figure that is beginning to gel inside of capitalism. And so what he's beginning to suggest is that this is an imminent critique, right?

So there's this move to imminence. And this is, you know, something that I think is part of the accelerationist – this is my assessment – part of the accelerationist movement is to see itself as much more imminently situated than other form of critical modes because of the way that capitalism flows through the critiques. So he goes on into the next page to make sure that – by suggesting that capital and state capitalism, to use the old British version of Stalinism, and sort of what we call today neoliberal capitalism, are both essentially epiphenomenon of capital.

On the one hand, you have what he calls the despotic control model. So anything that is libidinally constructed. And what does that mean? That means that our pleasures, our accesses, our ins and outs to our body, our intersubjective relationships, our education, everything. Every sort of access that we have just to make us human, this is either configured in a despotic arrangement or capital. And capital's arrangement is solely determined by what he says is the auspices of profit and exchange value.

It says it on page 173. It says, capital is this mapping. It must only happen under the auspices of profit in what Deleuze and Guattari call the surplus value of code, that is, a gain of prestige, which presupposes an emotional attachment. Capitalism offers nothing to believe in. Cynicism is its morality. The party, on the contrary, as a despotic configuration, requires a mapping that is territorialized, coded, and hierarchized in the religious sense of the term. So he goes on in several pages to say basically that there's no real dialectical difference between capital and the Soviet model, for lack of a better term, or the communist model, the Marxist model.

And he has a whole list of examples on page 174 about this. What instead he says is that capital is this overflowing force. It's on 174. But we've all seen this before. We've all seen this before. The nuance in this doesn't really come until page 177 where – excuse me. Yeah. Until 177 at the top where he starts talking about the category of the limit, the catastrophe. What he's basically suggesting is that read capital – I won't give you the quote. Reappearance of the category of the limit, the catastrophe.

response of the capitalists and entrepreneurs. Instead, incorporate the cost of depollution into the production costs. This example where he's talking about depollution and production costs, where capitalism must maintain growth over everything, it's just his way, in my reading, of basically saying the system is always perpetuating itself around this cycle. In a sense, this is an incredibly repetitive text that uses a certain Freudian remapping in certain ways of Deleuze and Guattari's texts in order to come at them and basically say, you're right. In my ways, there's a kind of fundamental agreement that he has here.

And we can go on, and I can present a more – I don't want to bore anybody. No, you're not. Go ahead. Oh, okay, cool. What do you think is the role of – when he says that cynicism is the morality of capitalism? I'm getting – thank you. Thank you, Jason. That's a really good question. Sorry, it's like today was meeting day, so my brain is a little frightened. No, this is great. Okay, so the way – I'll get to the meta question after I answer your question. So basically cynicism is in – let me find the quote because I'm good. Okay. Whereas the despotic, you have the despotic mode, which is sort of the old Soviet model, right?

We're talking about the 70s with Stalin or whatever sort of model of an authoritarian regime that guarantees this libidinal investment. Capitalism lacks that. It may have epiphenomenal moments where its libidinal investment coalesces around a figure, right? So you have Thatcher was Benjamin's example, or Reagan, you know, we're North American, so we may remember Reagan, or even a kind of sort of religiously strange figure if you want to talk about other revolutions. Maybe the Iran solution is a bad example of this, but it's the first one that comes to my mind.

Capitalism cynicism is that it does not require anything, any meta figure to construct its libidinal organization because its fundamental axiom is exchange value. so really cynicism is just an absolute in my reading absolute horizontalization of perspective this is the this is why we're never in outside the capital it's not because capital and the way that i read uh read is because capital has extended itself to all the different corners of of the world but rather once you're in everything is itself determined by these axioms

And that's why despotism in the traditional sort of state socialist sense is kind of banal as well, because it's always guaranteed by the structure of the party or of the state or of the supreme phenomenon of the state or leader. So that's my question to that. You know, the thing that I put on my news pretty bad, here's my chicken scratch, which nobody can read, not even Jason, is how do we, if anyone – and I wanted to pose this question – how do we accelerate or do we accelerate?

At the end of his text, what Lyotard basically proposes is not acceleration, but one small quote where he says, and this is a couple small quotes, but the main one where it begins is, there we go, 191. He begins to say this. So, we must evacuate the whole nostalgic mode of speaking and seeing. It exits via holes in Guattari, ripped open in Western discourse. The territorial machine of savagery or even the great despotic machine of barbarianism

are not, as Nietzsche sometimes dream, a good perspective from which to look at the capitalist machinery. Following Marx, Deleuze and Guattari say the opposite. That capitalism perspective from which to look at everything. If you look at capitalism through prostration, it goes on and on and on, but he puts it right there. The strength of capitalism, and here's the last quote on 192, bottom paragraph. He says, the strength of capitalism lies in its beginning to unravel itself from the function of the ambivalence between the subject, the libidinal subject and the barred subject. It breaks down. Revolution is not the return to the great castrator and the little castratees, which is the best translation of a word I've ever heard.

a definitive reactionary view, but their dissolution in an economy without end or law. So this is where I think the crux of the accelerationist project comes in, is that revolution isn't something that's going to be created from another kind of libidinal investment, from another site of desire, but rather through the kind of perpetual repetition and disillusion of any sort of libidinal myth, of any sort of great possibility effect. So in a sense, it's deeply, deeply nihilist, but much more so and much more nuanced than I think we might even see ourselves.

What about this? I don't know. A lot of people hate this idea. but I personally love obsessing over titles, titles that people choose. That's just me, but inner Jew men, what do you think is, what is unique to an inner Jew men capitalism? This doesn't want to be just you. This can be, I don't want you to feel like it's, you know, like you're on the spot. So other people can answer if you want, but I think this is a really interesting part of it because it seems to me like this concept of inner Juman is, it kind of leads to, it kind of like frames how Leotard thinks that capitalism could be brought to an end,

even though it is kind of nihilistic, but he does have a few places where he suggests how it might come to an end. Yeah, he does have that. I don't know, I'll open it up, but I have some provisional thoughts on the matter. I mean, I don't – I figured – I see this really as a – not just a course, but as a series of workshops where everyone can intervene. So please, I mean, I'm not really trying to get myself out. I'll talk. Yeah. You know. You're great. I just didn't want you to feel on the spot. That's it. No, no, no. That's – does anyone have any addition to that concept of the inner-jumen or the inner-jumen? I was very motivated by that particular word.

It's something that I've been very, very struggling with. Maybe not struggling with, but very influenced by, very inspired by shaking. You know what? I want to go to page 177 and add a little anecdote or footnote here, which shows my sort of connecting this to what I'm interested in and what I've been researching, which is sort of like halfway in that second part where it talks about Energon Capital. It says, when Deleuze and Guattari write that capitalism must be thought according to the category of the bank rather than the production, right? It will be cried that this is Keynesian ideology, a technocratic representation of the system by intellectual cutoff from the practice and abandoning the point of view of the production,

right? I mean, it is. One thing for the bank. But what I'm interested and fascinated with is... is how the idea that capitalism always was, the idea that capitalism always was, what do you call it, a category of the bank. It's only through a misrecognition, first by neoclassical Adam Smith and those guys, Ricardo and Adam Smith, and then by Marx's affirmation of that epistemology, you start understanding capitalism as sort of like a result of industrial revolution and sort of like acceleration of productive forces and all that.

And then my example of that are Nitzan and Bichler who built their whole capitalist power hypothesis on the fact that capitalism and also people like Ariri kind of endorsed that, right? that like capitalism, capitalism as we know it, the practice capitalism as we know it, is a form of selling of the future, is a form of banking, is a form of sort of like capitalization as the basis of capitalism rather than, so capitalism does not come from the dialectics between the productive forces and the relations of production, but it comes out of sort of like reconciling present and future.

It's a retroactive logic. He talks about it in the – if you follow it to the next paragraph, he says it in this very – really subtle, I think, reading of Marx where he talks about the critical universality is outlined as well with the hypothesis that with indifference, with the effect of the principle of equivalence, that is decoding. I know it's very typical, Watari, to layer these different sort of operators under the one kind of axiomatic heading, right? So for him, the question of equivalence is itself an operator of decoding, right? You get equivalence, and you begin to be able to create all these procedures.

And he says in the next sentence, there are surfaces in the workers or the capitalist practice of capitalism, the empty space in which the construction of the great categories of work and value – so there's your Smith right there – will become possible along with the possibility of applying these categories retroactively to dispositifs, pre-capitalist forms in which these modalities have been covered over by codes, by markings and representations. that did not permit, pardon me, a generalized political economy. That is, forms that kept political and libidinal economies apart from one another, with the latter diverted into religion, customs, and rituals of inscription, cruelty, and terror.

With capitalism, all of this becomes equalizable. So in Usual Suspects, with this blow, he effectively recreates a huge part of the history of economic development. And as a Latin Americanist, I see the colonial period emerging, right, as this libidinal investment that is trying to reconcile the emergence of exchange and this transition to another world. So I think that's a really good point you're making. Well, to me, what makes Nissan and Bispo interesting is that they're willing to put forth a metric for it

by introducing the concepts of hype and risk, which are both libidinal. But actually, in their model, especially through the understanding of the financial market and the way they work, you can actually quantify this libidinal aspect of the economy and see how this eminent economy in which production and labor are part of and not like the base of everything, kind of like function. Yeah, I agree. What about the model of agency in here, though? Because, I mean, basically what he says is that the traditional Marxist model in which, I'll just give you a direct quote. He says, capitalism is never going to perish of a bad conscience. It will not expire through lack.

It will not expire through a failure to give the exploited what they are owed. If it dies, it is through excess because its energetics continually displace its limits. Restitution comes as an extra and not as a paranoiac passion to do justice, to give everyone their due as if everyone knew what it was. So I disagree. Sounds very accurate to me, but the part that I'm wondering about is agency. How do you, in Lyotard's model, how do you push capitalism over the edge? Or do you... I don't think you don't. You don't. Lyotard, I don't think you do. Lyotard was a, Lyotard had the white flag up.

This is all elaboration of the Lyotardian white flag. in my humble opinion. I don't entirely disagree. You know, a couple things that Ivan had said about Franciere and radical pedagogy and then the way that Benjamin reads the accelerationist program through Nick and Ray Brassier and Alex and others, And then this, and reading Kamat Chatelet, I think there's a much more – there's almost a kind of, for lack of a better term, francophone pessimism involved in there.

There's a real radical nihilism that I'm not sure would actually be modeled in some of the later works. I think Negaristani is much more optimistic about our agency. I think that – You know where that comes from? This is an essay. I'm going to post it to the classroom. Please do. It's the essay that Reza contributed to the speculative realism ontology or whatever that Nick Sernichek put together. Right? If you remember that book, it's got like a tool on the cover and Zizek's in it. A speculative turn? Yeah, a speculative turn. Thank you. And Reza in it kind of like rejects both Nick Land and this type of leotard vitalism of capital as a machine and talks about capitalism as a sort of like a force that has its own sort of limits because it's like a life form.

It's like that famous Freudian quote about sort of like knowing that you're going to die and only making decisions to go forward as much as it does not put your entire life in danger. So, and Reza finds the agency right there in the sort of like this conservative ambitions of capital, which is like the way life acts, like in a sort of like even biological way. I don't know if I'm making any sense, but I'll put the essay there. I personally – I don't disagree on it personally to answer Jason's question. I think the only agency we have is a kind of hermeneutic agency, and that's maybe a small consolation for the sort of – the epic inclusion and pessimism that he has.

But he talks about it. Let me find a quote right here, 207, where he says – okay. Deleuze and Guattari, he says here – there's a big long quote where he talks about – I'm going to begin at the beginning. here indeed is a depressed thought, here is a pious, nihilist thought. It is nihilist and pious because it is a thought. A thought is that in which the energetic position forgets itself in representing itself. So he's replicating his notion of critique in here, in other words, critique taking the object of itself as the object, the object of thought. Thought can always

critique a thought, can always exhibit the theatricality of a thought, repeating the distancing. This is what he's saying. He says, what is important, this is the middle of the paragraph, is not the discourse on metaphysics that is the discourse on metaphysics. Metaphysics is the force of discourse potential in all discourse. What counts is that it changes the scene, the dramaturgy, the sight, the modality of inscription, the filter, and thus the libidinal position. Thinkers think metaphysical theatricality, and yet the position of desire is displaced. Desire works. New machines start up. Old ones stop working or idle for a moment, or race and heat up. This transport of force does not belong to thought or to metaphysics.

You go down, and I'll get to the end. The Lewis and Guattari's book represents this transport in discourse. If you understand only its re-presentation, you have lost it. you would be right, you would have reason in the interior to, sorry, my daughter and my wife are funny people, and we have this window here, and they're being silly, so it's good to have a little break of that. Okay, let me start over. If you understand only this representation, you have lost it, you would be right, you would have reason in italics, in the interior of the speaker, but you will be forgotten. as everything is forgotten that is not forgetting, everything that is placed within the theater, the museum, the school. In the libidinal dispositif that is rising to be right, to have reason,

that is to place oneself in the museum is not what is important. What is important is to be able to laugh and dance. And, I mean, I think that's – I think – I'm not sure that they have agency. And it's a really big problem for me, especially as a Latin Americanist, when we have the left populisms, we have the Latin American pink tie, we have the Bolivian constitution, we have these struggles with increasing the output, for lack of a better term, of agency across multiple communities, the human, the non-human, that have never had a kind of access to agency because of colonialism and other figures.

So it's a big issue for me. That's where I see agency breaking down. And Kamat is pretty clear about that. And Chatelet, too. Chatelet is just more bitter. Okay. Hopefully that's an answer. I'd love to hear somebody else. Let's see if other people would like to chime in and say stuff about the presentation. Especially like Tony, you can, because you're going to also be, no actually, no sorry, never mind you're doing the second one. So I don't know if anybody else wants to like add something or ask questions.

I guess to me the energy man concept to me is suggesting that capitalism is really about circulation. It's about energetics, it's about movement and constant. And that really is what Cain says. He says that's why you have to regulate and put injections of money into, put money in people's pockets in various ways because money has to circulate for capitalism to work. And if it's not circulating then you get a recession or a depression. So I don't know, personally I do think that this reading is somewhat Keynesian. It's not Keynesian in terms of its finality, but there's a Keynesian element to that.

Yeah. But yeah, we can move on to the next reading if you want to. I don't want to cut anybody off, but the one thing that I do want to say is I think you're right about the energetics, but I really do want to press this idea of a kind of radical libidinal possession. And I think that he doesn't say it because there's such a kind of – I like Leotard. I mean, I've read a lot of him, and I know Jason and I were chatting on Facebook earlier about him not being a fan. I'm not a fan in quite the same way, but stylistically, he has a lot of interesting moves that he makes.

And I think one of them is articulating through silence, is pushing these things. So the one thing I do want to say is, especially if we're talking about the transition from an intergemonial capitalism to a libidinal economy, and especially if we're presenting this to more and more students across the globe and people from different formations, backgrounds. One of the critical things I think that Lyotard puts on the map is the possession by capital. He talks about these transient cathexis in page 186 or something like this. And what those means is that any form of energy can sort of cut across any other.

So we're always in a kind of substitutional matrix. And this is a real way to get at people. I think as pedagogues, as teachers, and as scholars and interlocutors, it's a way of talking about this, right? that we're possessed by these modes of libidinal investment and libidinal output. So that's just something that spoke to me. Thank you guys for the opportunity to do this. Yeah, thank you. You're welcome. So, Laura, we're going to be hearing from you now. Yeah. Okay, I guess a lot of the things that Carlos talks about are reflected also in this piece

from Libidinal Economy, which, with introduction, it was written in 1974, just two years after a thousand plus, sorry, Antioedipus. And it is basically, it starts on the same trajectory. It kind of reflects, especially in the style, I think, in the writing, it's super long sentences and it reflects the passion of May 68 and I guess a kind of disappointment with the Marxist response to those events. So I guess the main point, the main argument in this excerpt is that there is a desire

that is imminent to capital, which is errant and that inhabits the margins, or better the marginals at the very beginning, which I guess it may even refer to, I don't know, to the law of marginal utility or this, you know, this difference, I guess, that, I don't know. So, the desire of capital manifests or is invested in most, it reflects in labour, in the object in time and in the system where we see, as we were saying before, this congruence

between science and capital. And it gives rise to these vertiginous intensities that, on the other hand, double in a kind of masochism or hysteria, which is, for instance, is reflected, is reflected in the example of the English Proletary Act, that according to Li Yotard, were kind of enjoying the fact of being exterminated by their labour, by what labour had done to their body, but he is sort of highlighting the fact that it is their labour, so they were willing to accept, almost enjoying the pain of labour that Kapital was imposing onto

their bodies. So he opens this little parenthesis about the fact that in a way capital doesn't leave any choice, it is there enduring the pain and labour and kind of enjoying it or So this dead or die is according to the law of the economic or better the definition. It is not the price but it is what makes it unpayable. So basically the point is that there is no alternative. Death as the death drive I suppose is not an alternative to labour and to capital but

it is part of it. And again it comes from this jouissance that is in labour, it is in the enjoyment, in the destruction caused by capital, which I guess is part of its acceleration moment. This jouissance by which the workers enjoy their own destruction by labour, according to Lyotard is the same as prostitution, which has got an element of anonymity, repetition. Again, it is not a matter of production but of endurance. And this endurance on the other side causes an anesthetisation, I guess, of the torture that capital imposes on workers.

But again, this desire is not... Leo Tam is clear that he doesn't say this in a... What is it? He doesn't... He's not an accusation that he does towards the workers, but he's actually here in this desire, in this response, is the result that workers can, that lies this force of resistance of the workers. As for instance, it is for prostitutes, the fact of being anesthetized, hysterically anesthetized

through use, through being used, there lies the resistance of the worker. He then goes on by inviting to give up on the idea of alienation because he said there is not an organic body that is alienated from capital from the machine, everything is fragmented. So the organic body is a fantasy that perhaps has also been forged by Marxism itself, I think. And this kind

of critique that Lyotard does to, like when he talks about workers, obviously he mainly talks about manual labour, he talks about Scottish miners, but also perhaps today he could, I don't know, he could reflect in anything that is happening again in cognitive labour, in these competitive schemes by which workers get to enjoy, need to enjoy what they're doing, I guess. And I thought I was reading the comments, like, Harlow. And, but he also, again, I don't know, I guess he takes this ideology response as, again,

He talks obviously from the point of view of the human when he says that his jouissance is unbearable. For instance, I don't know, I was thinking that he is unbearable by humans but not perhaps by contemporary machines that today are able to code. Also this desire that, as you were saying before, is quantified and even according to in manifest, or is endured in quantity, and he manifests and he, I guess, propagates through quantification. And he talks about his ambivalence then in Capital, his ambivalence which lies in this new sense, which made me think about Boulter-Yard's book, Seduction. So it's kind

of the results is seduction, it's double movement about this functionality and dysfunctionality in capital that is already imminent to it. So, again, desire is a matter of endurance, it's a matter of quantity, it's a matter of fragmentation, and these are the points that your target wants to accelerate to its most extreme consequences. It kind of does at some point a critique to the intellectual class about not speaking the truth which I guess is or should be a kind of auto critique although at the end it seems to put itself more on the

side of the work when it says we prefer to burst under the quantitative excess that you just the most stupid. So it's kind of accusing the intellectual class to become a leader of men, to become pimps, literally, like worker prostitutes in a way. And it critiques Castori And he critiques Castoriadis, as we mentioned last week, and his idea of kind of fighting or countering the alienation of man with creativity and spontaneity. He calls generalized creativity the abominable super-made thing.

As I said, I'm reading it from the actual book, so this is page 116. I don't know exactly what it is on the reader. So and according to him, there is, I think, from my understanding, because I think I find it a bit unclear here, there is no such a thing as a creativity that can count with idea of alienation. First of all, because according to him there is no alienation. There is this, I guess, I don't know, reading in Boj, or calling Boj, I guess there is this kind of seduction, this kind of what he says at some point, the master, the boss that refuses

refuses to be the boss in order to be the true master. Page 119 of the book, the dirty little ambivalence, the master becoming the servant and thereby becoming or re-becoming the true master. So to him the only way I guess to get out of this situation, of this impasse, is by renouncing on this idea of revolution. To restart the revolution is not start the evolution is not to begin it, it is to cease to see the world alienated. So it is here that I guess he is arguing for an investment in quantity and fragmentation,

because as there is no organic body for a libidinal economy towards the end, there is There is no more even a libidinal body. This libidinal body is another kind of what it calls a strange compromise of a concept from Western medicine and physiology with the idea of the libido as energy subject to the indistence, sorry, to the indistenceable regimes of errors and death. He's obviously critiquing, I guess, Freud, but towards the end I think it was an important point that I kind of, I guess, didn't really perhaps understand altogether. Well, he talks about the actual, the real shifting of the body that capital creates is

the shifting between the body, which is reduced to a machinery, and the mind and the brain, brain which is the software of intellectual labor. But to understand this, when this session happens, he refers to Francois Guéry and he is an ascending of medieval corporation or He is an ascending of medieval corporation or eternal corporation. During the eternal corporation, the man's head is machined by the corporation, but it is an organic part of the body. in a way the corporation is a non-hierarchical body, but on conditions that the appearance

of speech as political techne is not taken into account. So what I didn't really understand here is if it's arguing for sort of like, or if it's sort of drawing a line between the economic cooperation and then what is perhaps today anyway the combination of the economic cooperation with the political techne, politics, I'm not sure I'd like to give some opinion about this so We're almost at the end of the essay.

Yeah, we're very much at the end. I guess what it's sort of arguing for is renouncing to alienation, renouncing this fantasy of the organic body which doesn't exist, and accepting the fact that undercapital everything is quantified and fragmented in a way that could be accelerated to its most extreme consequences. So what... And looking for this... Yeah? Go ahead, finish. I want to ask you a question. Oh yeah, I was just saying, looking for these unheard of intensities that could perhaps,

I don't know, to be honest, I don't see where he wants to go from there. I get it, this idea of the immanence of the desire in capital, but I don't understand what he actually wants wants to do, he was critiquing Castoriadis for his idea of pointing on creativity, but what he's suggesting, which he said at some point was the end, I don't really, I'm sorry Because the end, I don't really see where it wants to go, I guess.

Okay. My question was, reading this, I sort of like, I want to know what you think. Reading this, I sort of saw where an extreme form of poststructuralism will just lead to something like CCU and Nickland. It's like this is what happens. This is what happens when you push post-structuralism to a statement like things being the center

of speech and sword. Sets up no less of a hierarchization of these pulsions and social entities where they give way to free play in a privileged way. You know, that sentence at the end of the second last paragraph, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what do you think? I kept seeing sort of like ghosts of Nick Land all over this, right? Whereas we know Nick Land was supposed to be a break with post-structuralism. But it's fascinating how this history that Robin is creating kind of like really puts these schools of thought in relation to each other and shows the overlaps, the ebbs and flows and overlaps. Go ahead.

No, no, I was just going to say that this is perhaps what Benjamin was pointing at at the beginning is that it's not nothing extremely new about, I don't know, well, I guess this is what contemporary acceleration is trying to overcome, but there is a tradition in that. I'm trying to get John to somehow say something, and the next one hopefully will make John say something. Oh my god, I'm trying to make John say something, and there comes a huge piece of text being posted by John to the sidebar. But to me, it also looks like another attempt as a form of philosophical cybernetics, the last paragraph, right?

Where, and you pointed out to it throughout your presentation, right? Symbolic exchange is also a political economic exchange, just as the law of civic speaking in Athens and the tetralogos is also a law of the mercantilization of discourse and And complementary, just as a scrupulous fragmentation of tasks in the regulated disciplines implies their subordination to a central zero, while not being professional perhaps is no less the kaput of the alleged social body, right? And how basically we're dealing with a quantification system of fragments and their interaction

and this eminence is like a computational eminence. The eminence that he's kind of like suggesting is a computational eminence. The word missing to me is to sort of like say, yes, capital is an algorithm for the conversion of qualities into quantities and back. But a complex general algorithm that in each case goes in, sets up the rate of exchange, sets up the speed of exchange, and basically gets to work in turning qualities into quantities and quantities back into qualities. Yeah, it's perfectly true. If we could just read it or read this imminence of desire as the positive feedback loop or the negative feedback loop.

So again, what Vyotar wants to do is create or accelerate this positive feedback loop and flying to the economy. To me, the problem is vitalism, which is all over this. All over it is vitalism. that, and the fact that this invisible hand, like if we, so like in political economy, if we trace the vitalism of this particular piece, or this vitalism that Nick Land and

others attribute to the machine or the machine of capital, right, to Adam Smith's invisible hand, right, we forget that there's a black box there in which there's a conspiracy going on in a black box because we know there's like human interest and human hands are somehow behind the scene making things look 100% emergent and you know volunteerism where as we know in the last instance you have the black box overriding the invisible hand. So this is what's missing from and that's why to me at the end of the day it's it's it's a white flag rather than type of type of critique of capitalism or understanding

of capitalism that wants to provide some form of a point of agency or point of on a progress or change as interesting as it is to read and see it as a part of a history of acceleration, I find it kind of like intellectual charlatanism of French poststructuralism is still all over it. Yeah, I totally agree with you. I didn't, yeah, the analogy with seven addicts didn't come out that clear to me at the beginning, it's, yeah, now that you've said it, it's actually everywhere. And this is my problem,

for instance, with the CCRU, with NICLAN, like, of those days, again, it's this idea of acceleration to the, you know, I don't know, this positive feedback loop, but where does it go? I don't know, I don't really, again, it's just, okay, it's trying to, I I guess, finally obstruction of capital with another obstruction, I don't know, this is why I don't like the word obstruction, I guess, because it doesn't lead anywhere to me, like, I don't know, I don't really see where it's going. Although, you can see, I guess, how, you can see I guess

how I don't know to me the thing that really came like I don't know across me again is this idea of like how cybernetic capital or how contemporary like capitalism is actually perhaps able like I don't know it sort of laid the this area of quantification and fragmentation, like all these little bits already discreet and perhaps distributed, that now are, I guess, more easily captured by cabinet or literally over-coded or re-coded into cabinet. I was thinking about Google.

Google search algorithm is perhaps a great example of the biddy economy that reflects in the financial market as well. Apparently, I don't know if it's only voices that's really true because it's really hard to find actual information about it, but apparently they are using, or they're like starting, I don't know, like the search, they're starting like the global movement of search words on Google to predict movements on the market. So that speaks to me as a great example of a billion economy. I don't know if that's exactly what, I don't know, where it was going, but it made me think of that. So. Maybe we should turn to Tony, because he's going to also discuss this text

to get another reading of it. Tony, are you there? Mm-hmm. There we go. Hello, how are you doing? How are you? Good, thanks. You look like Mao Tessitong. You close your button up and you look like Mao. JOHN MUELLER.: All right. Maybe it's up to you how you want to do it, but maybe if you want to respond a little bit to Laura in some way. JOHN MUELLER.: Yeah, totally. That would be good. That would be a good start to respond to Laura. JOHN MUELLER.: OK. So the question ends, Laura ends like, I don't know what he wants to do, what he's going to do with it, what he wants to do with it. And then to take, since you did a great, Laura, you did a great, some of the entire work, I

don't need to go through it too much, just bring up a few extra quotes. We had Benjamin Noyes on, so as most of you know, he basically positions Leotard to be book, The Liberal Criminal Comedy is an accelerationist book. To quote him, Lyotard puts a quote, "...in the immense and vicious circuits of capital exchanges, whether of commodities or services, it appears that all modalities of jouissance are possible and that none of it are ostracized." So, yeah, we have, like, in Lyotard's case, we have a general statement

he's the general summation of this right is that is that he's addressing our desires our investments aren't our enjoyment of capitalism and sort of I think seminar Sullivan kind of glances over this like in his review I'm trying to think of like how what what what he's trying to do and the only way I can think of it is is perhaps like what is the importance of the loop-it-all economy I guess for new acceleration as maybe in this debate between Nick land and the left acceleration this but what it what it could be for and then so really are

others So Mo brought up, I'm trying to skim through what I've already prepared to respond to Laura, I'm sorry if this is a little less formal. But I think what's important about Shurnshak and Williams is that they're trying to somehow re-motivate people or to have a new investment, to have like to in order to sort of, they're

moving towards ways of mapping or planning out new futures or ways of doing so. But in order to do so I think there's actually an interview that Stegler does on Live in a economy where he's talking about very much the same thing that Shurnacek and Williams are talking about. And I do think this all has relations, so I'll bring it back. But he says, Stegler says in an interview that one must from now on rebuild a new public space, regimes of singularities within the technical originization, and reinvent a new public thing that is capable of producing long-term politics. And I think a lot of people on this new movement or embracing this as a route of saving the future, or like Benjamin

Noyes talks about as an exit of our present moment, and how we might reuse when they'll be repurposed. And I think this is quite interesting, because in the Libidical Economy book, he's talking a lot about motivations and investments, and he's actually talking about investment in the capitalist system, and in the quote he says, investment in the system, invests, value in the constitution of pieces of the libidinal band, in terms of which only have value through difference or reference, and in the establishment of the laws and these cross-references. That is to say the deranged investment in the bond is accomplished lack. One doesn't even ask again for the lack of it as much as having any other." So then he's relating to the Freudian libidinal economy, and he's saying, can't this give

rise to virginia's uh... intensities uh... in a x-ray between Einstein and is not started it artistic inventions are are driven by his desire uh... that god is not playing a role in this so there is this sort of i think if we're thinking position is within the acceleration street or what's really important about liberal economy for perhaps the Shonasek and Williams project is re-motivation and sort of a reorganization of these liberal… No, this is… you're absolutely right. This is really the project. The project is like, okay, if you want to map everything out in terms of the sentient,

If you want to map everything out either as biological or psychological and natural, right? You must create the new space in the space of reason because this type of mapping, this imminent mapping will leave no room for anything. So you have to actually construct an outside and the outside can only be constructed out of the alien force of reason because the political economic cybernetics has already mapped out the whole world, whether it's biological or psychological or anthropological. I think this is what's really interesting about what Noyce said when he was relating hyperstition to libidinal economy.

You have libidinal economy, hyperstition, CCRU, and then theory fiction. There's a mass relation here in organizing libidinal forces. way that you read Nick Landon the same way you read Deleuze and Grattery you get that sort of feeling like really there's like a there's a motivating force in the writing styles and perhaps in the practices that they're trying to develop and it also it like Stegler is even also like echoing this when he's talking and he's and he's talking about elevation of collective intelligence through relaunching of desire I think this is quite if you think about all these sorts of things converging all these quotes they're all kind of trying to negotiate this like how how to the say we're talking about is it Stegler or I might

be mixed in one second sorry yeah so he's talking about the state was before just before this relaunching of desire he's saying if you want to think about the future of the in terms of the climate, for example, then individual behaviors need to be transformed. The individuals must become more conscious and more attentive to what surrounds them. They must turn to what surrounds them into objects of desire. So this is sort of a very interesting way of using, I think, the liberal economy. I don't know if that answers anything, Laura. I wish Carlos would say why. I mean, I love Laravel and I just saw you like that image

of my non-photography essay on Facebook. So if you could tell me why do you think that this reading is Laravelian? I think because if I read, and I really like Tony's interventions, especially bringing it to Stiegler because I'm woefully behind on his work, so it's really inspiring. I think there's a certain flattening of reason that I'm insisting upon in my own direction with regards to Lyotard and in liberal economy and in Ergumann Capital. that reason has to be a kind of thing that emerges from without, right?

There's this force of reason or thought, to use Badiou's term. But I think that what you're actually saying is there's something epiphenomenal within. And I think that's what Lachuel would say. He's like resisting the decisionism. That's why I'm tweeting you and teasing you in the sidebars about not being an accelerationist, about being an anarcho-scientist. but not really because I think that that there's a kind of decisionism that you know Jason is pointed out some things he said everybody pointed out now Laura did in up some of her critique so that and notion of the abstract that is apparently all this acceleration is project which is to kind of decide to repress

agency or to repress reason And you're seeing, I think, an emergence of the real. It's kind of a gnosis moment, a non-thought, in the last instance, as LaHuel would say. But I'm totally a LaHuelian at heart. You are. Come to New York for the new schools conference. Okay, there we go. I think it's October 30th, right, with Alex Galloway and Anthony Paul Smith and a whole bunch of other people are doing a Larawell. I can send you the thing. But anyway, that's just beside the point.

Well, for me, really, my thing has been to somehow reconcile what these people are talking about with Larawell's critique of metaphysics. So I guess to some... And I also think like aesthetics, the aesthetic theory of Laravel is much more suited to talk about... I mean more than his philosophical ideas, I think his aesthetic theories that come through his non-photography book and the photo fiction are much more suitable for rigorous aesthetics for acceleration rather than what Alex Williams and Alex Williams talk about in the E-Flux essay in terms of like aesthetics of information and you know scientific images and all that.

I think Reza is kind of like indirectly picking it up by embracing abstraction and kind of like because I kept talking about how the only aesthetic for acceleration is abstraction and I remember I mean I'm on tape asking these questions last year when they were talking in New York. No, Alex is not on Facebook. Ray and Reza and Sohail Malek were talking at Miguel Avril. And this was when Reza finally gave up on specular realism and so talked about reason and talked about rationality, sitting right next to Ray. And I basically talked about how the only type of

aesthetics that really can be utilized for this type of philosophy is abstraction. And Sohail kind of like opposed me because he said, no, abstraction comes from a particular history of abstract expressionism, avant-gardism, and it's exhausted. But no, no, no, my messages aren't coming through. Oh, never mind. Is that you, Tony? No. But because somebody but yeah, but Reza's kind of going back to abstraction in the newest piece he wrote for Jean-Luc Moulet's show at the Miguel Abro. I have a copy of it. It's not scanned yet. Yeah, so, and I think what Larawell suggests is the sort of like abandoning of the image

of the world. Yeah. The realist image. You know, but so much of acceleration is still trying to figure out the place of realism and the place of the, you know, the place of the, what is the role of manifest image? You know, we argue about that all the time. And everybody, all my friends tell me, but you haven't given us your theory of aesthetics. And I'm like, well, I will introduce it next month in LA a little bit. And then with the talk I'm doing with Reza in Australia, it'll be full blown out what I'm talking about. So I'm kind of holding my cards a little bit closer to my chest because I don't want to put my both feet in my mouth. I think I already got one in my mouth. I don't want to, because then I won't have a leg to stand on, as they say.

So, Tony, sorry, we interrupted your presentation. I don't mind. Go ahead. You can continue. Well, actually, I would like to know if at all that answers in some way to what Laura's question is at the end. I mean, it's not what perhaps Leotard's trying to do, but it's what is happening or what has become from it. Maybe not. What do you mean? Well, I was trying to respond to, I guess, Laura by saying... Oh, okay. In some way, but I don't know. I probably went off. I don't know.

I mean, I guess that's, like, my most, that's my biggest point, I guess, out of this paper. Other than that, I think I would just go back through and summarize things that Laura said. Do you want to just, like, maybe cover up some of the stuff that came to your mind and run us through the essay? It would be nice. Okay. Jason, you look like a photograph. Are you real or as your picture? He is very photogenic. Yeah, he is. Oh, I didn't know my mic was on. Sorry. Your microphone is off.

I said geneogenic, maybe. I'm not usually that photogenic. back to what I think is interesting in the new, the left acceleration perhaps politics. He says that there are no libidinal dignity nor libidinal fraternity. There are libidinal contacts without communication, in parentheses, for want of a message. this is why amongst individuals participating in the same struggle there may exist the most profound miscomprehension even if they're situated within the same social economic bracket I don't know if anybody has anything to say to this quote

actually in particular to maybe recent events or anything but I think this is quite interesting in relation to sort of how hyperstition functions the human. You know, I just remember something that I wanted to bring up and maybe ask Laura on Ask You, right? Which is sort of like how he associates with the happy worker as a sort of like return to the primitive society. That he says there's this like thing running through Marxism by idealizing the future post-capitalist world as the state in which workers are all

happy and everybody knows what they're doing and they're creative and they're fun. And he says, isn't this sort of like how the primitive societies are and isn't this sort of like retrograde rather than progress? This is at the end of the paper, right? Yeah, totally. Right? Is it at the end? Yeah. But I can't find it because of... It's about the error which appeared to be beyond an error detail is the fantasy, so powerful and constant in the best Marxist heritage of a happy state of the working body. Up there, right? It's the last page on the top, right? Yeah. Again, this goes back to what you were talking about with the idea of exchange. I think this guy has never worked himself because he fetishized.

I mean, he's doing what other intellectuals have done. He's kind of like an inverse version of Marxist fetishizing labor. He's fetishizing labor. Am I wrong here, though, to think that he's saying we should look beyond this error because this is an error that leads to, like, spiritualization, subordination to essentials, zero? Like, or is he, he's actually saying, he's actually, like, he's critiquing this happy state of the working body. he's critiquing, he's saying it's a fantasy, it's a fantasy just as much as a... I think he's saying it's a fantasy. But I think he... But it's a fantasy about the...

it's about the unity of all parts, whereas he would say that this is not... you can never have a holy, unified, happy body. The working body as a whole is... not existing. Well he also... that notion of the primitive society, I think really, I mean, I think this is a critique launched at Baudrillard in a very specific way, sort of around the horn, but I think you're right about the political totalities. It's fantasizing an outside. That's the term I'm trying to get at. And I think that's what it seems to be saying. But, you know, it's also a political exchange, but it's something that is extrinsic

and he resists that he seems to refuse it I agree with you I wonder if that's like the libidinal state that land takes sort of this neoreactionary movement but I can't say more of that I'm going to, I kept looking, I was going to read this at the end of Laura's presentation, but I will read it now if you don't mind, and it will be a good little piece to sort of like end this talk of like the vitalist political economy that he sets forth, you

know and I'm gonna read from the unpublished unpublished book of Chatele a for you just look a little bit that's sort of like I think will be a great closing closing money it's the oh so simple miracle that allows you to take home real in your shopping bag the trader nights repeat for getting that behind the head of wheel or the pork cutlet there is a futures market in livestock and pork bellies and that behind that market looms the futures market of exchange rates interest rates and so many other levels all the way down to obsolete volatility all utterly inaccessible to those bid part players

in the great comedy of trading the small individual shareholders or the workers the carpenters and the carpenters widow with investment or the chair attendant in the Rambou a park indeed it will be in the chorus to speak of the neutrality of money to the turbulent nights of speculation to the great priest of the fluid and the chaotic which you we chose of mimetic contagions and self-validating strategies, the masters of credit who can pay with the future, who can impose their debt as means of payment and thus ensure their mastery of economic horizons.

Our knights love to democratically savor the market, but this market is not fluid and homogenous like the one that is offered to the carpenter's widow or to the second-tier citizen. latter are kindly requested to know their place, that of the domesticity, and not to get too close to the true market, that of the connoisseurs, the market makers, who know very well that it can never be reduced to a simple balance of payments. But is it taking control? That the value of a company is increasingly linked to the way it is managed, and above all, to anticipations of control? accountability is not objective but objectivating, that any calculations concerning real value,

fundamental parameters, must always be rebalanced by a pre-market value which completely escapes the criteria of symmetry of information and which is fabricated by the bubble rumors far removed from the elegant cries of neoclassical economics. The trader sees himself as valiant and dramatic, always at the outpost of volatility, upstream of what he'd just been prepared as the new raw materials of the market and ready to confront head on the great dragon of contingency. And then there's these amazing quotes from the mouth of the trader which totally speaks to the side of the market that you don't see footsteps of it anywhere near this type

of leotard's understanding of capitalism, which is the black box. You hear all about the cybernetic invisible hand, the particles, how the libidinol and the textual and the forces all turn into little pieces in Iraq to create this economy. We don't hear that there's another force inside, which is those whose power is accumulating in the form of capital, who have a vested interest. And to me, I'm just going to like maybe end with this, and I'm kind of working this into my paper, which I'm writing for Los Angeles, which is, you guys all know how the Benjamin's thesis on the history of philosophy begin, right? With the Turkish automaton, right?

Most people are familiar with that, right? And so to me, the black box is really the henchman in the machine that is still pulling or trying its best to pull all the levers and make something that has a sort of like vested interest of powerful human in it, kind of like invisible to the public who really sees it as a sort of like a machinic wonder. And the job would be to sort of like to objectively figure out how these two forces, the forces of chaos of information and biology and sentience and the forces of powerful who want to somehow

get a hold of this, who want to quantify all qualities and qualify quantities when needed, kind of interact and put them in the right place, you know. And the piece by Lyotard is a great sort of like piece in this trajectory of realizing how economy works beyond the basic Marxism that he's criticizing or the French Marxist that he's sort of like, he's a crank marketist of the time that he's making fun of, but to go beyond this and sort of like return to some form of scientific understanding of political economy. So. I want to read this book. You talk about it so much. Yeah, it's so amazing, man.

It's the best book of the year and it's going to come out very soon. And there's some minor changes being done to it because I was talking to Catherine and she said that there's minor changes being done to this. And also, like, they're picking up with little text on the back of the book because urbanomic books usually get a little one sentence in the back and they're debating what sentence you go to the back of the book. Is there going to be a... Yeah. Are they going to make an e-book? E-book. E-book just like every other... What do you call it? Every other... Urbanomic? Urbanomic. Sometimes you get the e-book or not. What's the title again? It's called To Live and Think Like Pigs, The Incitement of Envy and Boredom in Market

Democracies. So to chatele, what capitalism creates en masse, basically among the knights and among the regular citizens, is only reproduction of envy and boredom as the two sides of this life cycle. You're either bored or you're envious of others. And here goes what happens to class. Class struggle turns into envy. And also, he's not very down on the pigs. He's basically down on the urban middle class in the SUVs. And he kind of makes that clear in the beginning of the book that when he talks about the pig, the title of the book does not relate to the pig because pigs are like dignified animals. But he's referring to the urban middle class in the SUVs,

Those are the, that's the thing. And you know, he's very hard on Lyotard. This book is like a big attack on post-structuralists. And he also has a glossary at the end. And he actually defines, cynically defines what post-structuralism is or post-modernism is. He called them post-philosophers, actually, to all of them. And he says, this tendency or movement could also be called post-industrial, post-cynicism, or really, from now on, post-anything. It is defined as that which sees modernity as behind it, or as that which shuffles the cards of modernity. Let us note how the principle that governs anarcho-mercantilist versus anarcho-mercantilist, do good without harming anyone, agrees very well with the

tartuffery of postmodernism. Make vogues without making any waves, which along with its language games, its micro decisions, it's yes, no, perhaps, it's rightly or wrongly, always ends up sitting idly by. Let us not forget that anarcho-mercantilism is at its keenest when spiced up with a bit of creativity and a pinch of the tragic. This is where two old buddies of postmodernism come in, chaos and radical evil. And goes on for another last two page, kind of like a direct attack on postmodernists

and poststructuralists. Anyways, I hope you guys enjoyed the class. Jason, do you want to have anything to say at the end? Jason Sutherland I would like to call attention to my class, which is starting on, I believe on Sunday and Wednesdays. Starting this coming Sunday, it's going to be a class on kind of the political theory of decisionism. We kind of talked just briefly about that in a sidebar. Is there a decisionist moment in Energy Men Capitalism or in contemporary capitalism in, for example, the decision to even extend the possibility of credit in the first place?

and what role does that have in a kind of rhizomatic capitalist society. And so this is going to be coming up, and we're going to have... I'll tell you guys in the Hangouts. Well, no, I can't because it's going to be archived. So I don't know for sure all of the guests, but I know at least we'll have Jasper Puar will be one of the guests. She's the author of Terrorist Assemblages, and some really good critiques of intersectionality theory from a Deleuzian perspective. And she's really pretty interesting, the way that she uses a gombin and kind of state of exception type theory

and then combines it with Deleuz. So she'll be one of the guests, and then we'll also have Jerome Luce, who's the person behind Roar magazine. He wrote a pretty interesting essay about kind of reading what was happening in Ferguson through kind of Agambenian decisionist theory. So he'll be one of the guests. And we're just going to go through basically, you know, from Hobbes to Schmidt and then coming back up to Puar Ngarathani and Achille Mbembe, looking at more recent uses of this type of theory and particularly responses against this type of theory

as well, so. Should be interesting, and the final guest, who I can't name, I think will be, hopefully, we'll have. You can put it in the chat. Hopefully who? Oh yeah, I could put it in the chat. So I'm going to write in the chat. Is it that secret? Yes, yes. Well, I mean. I'm hearing it for the first time here, too. So it's like, this is not like a. Just don't verbalize it because. Just don't say it out loud, okay? Because it may not happen. Because it may not happen. But this person may say yes or may not say yes. I should know by tomorrow. but somebody who I think has a really great handle on Schmidt

and is just an all-around really kind of insightful radical theorist. I posted all the comments and the sidebar stuff except this last thing in the classroom. So I just did it just before you posted that. So it's up. Also, for Laura and Yvonne and others who are doing the full course, you've got assignments that you have to finish, but we're given sort of like till next Monday, right, to finish all those. So there's three more pieces of writing. You shouldn't have any problem because your presentation was really good and you can kind of like put it together and somehow relate it to your last one because I think it's very

much related to the piece that you sent to us. And yeah, so basically we're looking forward to those in order to be able to evaluate you and also to tell you that we're ending the semester with a second part of the Accelerate to kind of like think about that will be essential to take the second part to kind of like finish the book but also I will I'm trying my best to get the authors like to get Ray and Reza to come to the class at least if not more people from the from the from the bunch meaning I also would like to get basically my my my my my choices of the guests are Robin Alex Williams Reza and Ray Bracier to kind of

to go over. But there's so many interesting people like Patricia Reed, which I'm also thinking because it's always good to have the feminist and the female perspective in and others. But we may end up doing more than four guests. So some sessions bring two people because these are like living figures. They're not like Marx and Leotard and all that. They're not dead. And they're amongst us. They're friends and we can get them. So yeah, so I'm looking also forward to end the season with the second part of the book. Having said that, so please contact us if you have any questions about the assignments and about sort of like fulfilling the requirements of the course. Also, I want to add, we are launching the certificate programs very soon with like,

and those of you who are interested in sort of like receiving a certificate program, receiving a certificate from the new center can put this credit, once you actually get it, after fulfilling the requirements, you can put these towards a number of the certificates that we're offering. Actually, the book program is designed in a way that probably you can put it towards any of the certificates, but it will be up to the programmers to negotiate and put these and take their tuition off the certificate, the tuition that you paid off the certificate and sort of work it that way. But there's going to be more detail about that and also about the scholarship and all that that will come up on our website in the next week or so.

So you should be able to sort of look at all that and make your decision about what are you going to do and what are you going to take later. Anyways, if you don't have any questions, you would like to... And also for those who became members, or if you're not a member yet, or you're thinking about becoming one, you know, one of the main points of the new center is really to have a research community and have people who you can exchange ideas with and have some sense of a common project. And so we're going to be rolling out Google communities where this kind of thing can happen, and that'll be part of the membership. that's not right away but also any any of you who are interested in working more closely with any of our guests just let us know in

in private emails and let us know what your interests are working with them we're more than happy to facilitate a sort of more more direct and concrete contact between you or any other guests that we bring to our classes or any other people beside me and Jason who are who are going to teach basically anyway so this is sort of like the end of our very first seminar and I want to thank you all for for signing up and for being part of it and for supporting us and for taking part in Carlos is back for supporting us with your with your time and your resources and all that and yeah and thank you Tony for so like oh thank you guys for a wonderful first course look at that pillow intellectual thank you guys yeah

it's been fantastic they call them armchair intellectual because you call you like the pillow intellectual. It's a good pillow. I bet. Anyways, thank you very much. And Tony put that picture of like Kafka in the background, I think with the stain, with the blood stain on it. I don't know what he, what are you trying to say with that, but it's beautiful. It's a bag. It's my friend makes them for the Kafka Museum in Prague. Tony joining us from Glasgow now. So he's no longer in North America and he's beginning his own research and work at the Glasgow University, right? Okay. Thank you everyone.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. We'll be hearing from you on email. Bye. Bye. Bye. Ciao. Thank you.