NCCP 700-216 - The Concept of Acceleration, Session II

Hi and welcome to the second session of the concept of acceleration with Nick Land. I'm going to pass the mic off to him right now. Thanks. Thanks, Didoran. And I'm sorry for having been so utterly humiliated by Pacific Daylight saving time. I sort of understood and then I managed to just get myself screwed up about it again. So I'm sorry that you've all been kept hanging around. um so so this week i want to base things around the manifesto for accelerationist politics and use it as a jump off i hope that i can it's obviously a text that in some sense

i'm more averse to than any other in existence but i think it's an extremely rich text and there's all kinds of interesting material in it and not just i don't mean that just in terms of bits and pieces but i mean in terms of it structural factors that are extremely stimulating um i've attempted to divide uh my sort of comments into four broad sections which roughly uh go under the labels critique neoliberalism agency and what i'll call

templexity I know that's a horrible neologist and that might need a bit more explanation and it would obviously be nice to keep them in order but as we see that turns out to be complicated so I'll try roughly to follow that series and not not hog the thing for too long but try and treat this as a way of opening things up. So I think a close reading of the text would actually overspill our time here. So we'll sort of dip in and out of it.

And obviously anything that people find there is completely on topic for this week, especially, but I think more generally. So. Let me just start, first of all, with a few very elementary remarks. and I apologize to people if this is repetitive because I'm sure some of this is stuff I've talked about before, but I think one of the frames for this discussion is the relationship between capitalism and critique. Taking, therefore, the critique of political economy

in a strictly Kantian sense as a delimitation of metaphysics. and this subdivides into in a in a complicated way not a neat way because these elements are all enter into various relations of antagonism with each other and mutual interference but it divides into subdivides into three sections I think and the first of these is marx's own argument considered as a a critical a critical argument um which

taking a step back to what kant is doing in the most absolutely schematic in schematic way is drawing transcendental empirical difference and saying that metaphysics consists of treating a transcendental structure as if it's an empirical object. So on that level, I think this is an anchor point that can be confidently held onto. all kinds of difficulties emerge from that and they're not just difficulties at a conceptual level but they're difficulties that have a kind of propelling deep propelling historical force

and and a lot of the things that happen to to critique involve materializing it and therefore seeing these difficulties and complexities and forms of turbulence as actual historical processes not merely philosophical difficulties marxist argument constructed as critique in the kantian sense draws transcendental empirical difference in his distinction between labor and labor power so labor power is transcendental for marx it's the is the fundamental source of all productivity

and capitalism as he grasps it critically is a system in which it is a metaphysical system in a strict sense that that transcendental power is formatted as if it were an object. And that formatting as an object, monetization, and obviously in particular the central nexus of his whole theoretical endeavor, the objectification of labor as a commodity. And this is the kind of Marxist understanding

of the wage labor system understood in its philosophical structure. So I'm not going to, we can obviously return to this if people are interested, but I want to just simply say at this level that this is one of the basic articulations of the capitalism and critique relation, is the fact that Marx's analysis of capital takes this particular critical form. And this is repeated in a displaced way in Antiochus with their notion of the distinction between schizophrenia as a historical process of decoding and deterritorialization versus schizophrenia as clinical entity, as an object.

so that's that's a just a strict philosophical displacement of exactly the same the same theoretical structure that is taking place there so that's the first capital critique articulation and it's obviously relevant in the sense that i the default is to assume that that is implicit in in the position of the MAP and and so the question of exactly to what extent they remain faithful to what Marx is doing there or they want to in various ways modulate it is is obviously one of the board naturally bring to that text the second articulation of capitalism critique which directly

interferes with this with this Marxist sense of it is the function of capital itself as a critique and I think this is most kind of simply or straightforwardly understood in terms of abstract capital or capitalism itself being synonymous with the emergence of abstract capital which is critically separated from its concrete instances that's to say that any particular configuration of capital is subject to this critical

destabilization by by this emergence of increasingly abstracted capital which is which is only inadequately objectified by any particular configuration of capitalist organization so already I think in this the implicit question that is haunting the MAP is is the extent to which capital itself or the left critique of capital is able with greater profundity and practical efficacy to actually undertake the critique of concrete capital. And I think that this is very much already in play in the kind of accelerationist Marxist canon,

you know starting with the communist manifesto itself this this this specter quite another specter to the to the famous specter of that tech but this the specter extract creative destructive capital that is able more profoundly to revolutionize itself than any external revolutionary force is able to um destabilize at a greater speed i mean it becomes immediately question of speed and acceleration and I think there's lots that could be said here again I don't want to get sucked in too much this I think that the the again on topics that in previous courses we've discussed but we can certainly

return to the structure of the internet has a critical structure in terms of the elimination of privileged nodes the whole notion of network decentralization is has a critical structure in terms of not identifying the system as a whole with any node within this in the system so any particular node that serves as an inadequate objectification of the system is subject to this kind of decentralized process of critique by the system through route rounds going all the way back to to and radicalizing the notion of roundabout production that you get in boom bowack the the force of when this is looked

at in a kind of down-to-earth economic argument it's the process of disintermediation um and the elimination of trusted third parties is the way it's carried forward into the bitcoin system so i think there's an anarcho-capitalist or what's called critically the californian ideology um that is this very insistently reproduced critical um dynamic intrinsic to capital itself as opposed to something that's brought to it from outside as a as a as a critique of the left and i think the final thing to definitely mention here is um platforms

which is something that comes in a little bit elusively in MAP but platform capitalism is obviously a big interest to the authors of the piece and they articulate their project in terms of repurposing certain large platform structures of contemporary capital. And obviously a platform is something that is itself a displacement of transcendental empirical difference. It basically divides a system from particular instances, traffic within that system.

and um i think i'm going to just pass you on a link which i think is really good uh captures this very well by ellie dorado where he said the title of the piece bitcoin isn't money it's the internet of money ellie Dorado describes himself as an economist working on accelerating the pace of technological change and this just in the title it's clear I think that there's there's a kind of a displaced transcendental empirical difference during the important philosophical work in this in this piece so I'll try and

just move on from this it's something that I'm expecting these issues are obviously going to be with us to the end of the course so it's it's not a question of trying to conclude anything at this stage I think it's worth another instance that's just worth throwing in at this point is the very famous quote from Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals where he advises pick the target, freeze it, personalize it and polarize it. And this too I think has a very clear critical sense to it which is the sense that strategically

conflictually that the strategic goal is to make your enemy the object. You know, there's the philosophical question of how to locate the transcendental and empirical instances in the topic at hand has this immediate strategic sense to it. If you can objectify your enemy, if you can put your enemy on the side of the object, then you've already succeeded in establishing this position of strategic advantage. and I'm going to put just as a kind of dogmatic assertion that people can definitely pick at

of course that philosophy modern philosophy in particular is the self-apprehension of transcendental temporality so the question of time that's going to be sort of try and get a kind of deep rigorous grasp of what's meant by acceleration, I think takes us to the core of the modern philosophical enterprise. And by that, I mean it immerses us in these Kantian problems. So the next word on my list is neoliberalism. And I'll try and be even quicker about that, but in the hope again that it's something we can come back to you um and it it plays an important role in the in the map um they they're very clear they

sort of date the whole thing where they say that it's a post 1979 configuration of political economy so they're basically associating it with the sort of thatcher reagan revolution i'm assuming also Deng Xiaoping in China. All of this incredibly simultaneous sort of catastrophe in the technical sense that happened to the world order at that stage. And I know that their reading of that is very much that this is a kind of realization of certain principles that were formulated by the Pelerin Society in an attempt to put Austrian economics into some kind of practical political effect and they themselves then say that they

text as one of their of one of their three uh what they call medium-term concrete goals the first of them they say they want to produce an intellectual infrastructure that is explicitly modeled on the montpelarin society um there's really only one at this initial stage one point that i i want to make about this which is which is that it's quite clear that um the map has as a kind of unspoken expectation and it's a perhaps unspoken as a again as a matter of a political strategy that it that to to to problematize it by making

it to explicit would would be ineffective in some way or counter effective but there is an expectation that neoliberalism would be obsolescent from the left um now obviously as we saw last week to make sense the the first section of the map is uh called um let me just make sure i get it exactly right oh sorry i can't i've lost my name but here on the conjuncture yes that's right on the conjuncture and obviously this can when they say on the conjuncture there's all kinds of stuff in there which again we can come to to do with environmental collapse and

and all kinds of various types of catastrophes in the in the colloquial i think perhaps more than the technical sense but um clearly one absolute crucial structural element of the conjuncture as it is being articulated in this text is exactly this point neoliberalism it can be assumed is to be the obsolescent from the left um assumed on one level just because it is seen as being the perhaps final configuration of the enemy if there is a more if there is any hint at all about a kind of subsequent configuration

it so hazes out into horror that it doesn't take any kind of concrete form so i think whatever we make sense however we make sense of where we are now which is not an easy thing to to think through clearly but however we think of that i think at least it places us in a different conjuncture and i think if there is a certain crisis of the left happening right now it's precisely because this assumption that that the challenge to neoliberalism that mattered was going to come from the left is one that has become problematic um so i think i'll i'll move on from

neoliberalism now on to the third one which is agency um and the relation to agency is totally crucial in the MAP and and it's a huge organizational factor and I would like to argue it pushes certain questions off off the agenda as much as it puts things on the agenda, because of the fact that it's absolutely essential that a certain configuration of agency

is sustained in order to make sense of what the text is doing, as a political project, as a manifesto, as an intervention, within the politics of its conjuncture, and in no doubt a modified way, a continued intervention that continues into the present time. And .. the okay sorry because this is immediately bleeding into the next thing I should probably let it bleed straight into the next thing because the the type of construction of agency that is

necessary for the MAP to work at what seems to be its its its political intent requires a certain control of the notion of time. So they say as the first sentence of the final section of the MEP, the future needs to be constructed. Now, this is a very interesting sentence, I think, because it what is being said in this sentence clearly is that the future is less ontologically

settled than the past and they they they consolidate that by saying um the choice in the section before section 23 of the final section the choice facing us is severe so you know there is a choice it could go in either direction uh what will decide how it tips in one direction or the other is politics um the the text itself is an intervention in the political process attempting to uh make a decision in terms of this this choice presented by history why this is I think worthy of really concerted attention is the fact

that just in terms of the history of accelerationism it's obviously locking certain things down in a way that is at least questionable we can take it all the way back to Marx where who's obviously criticized traditionally from the right and then from certain elements in the left for his determinism you know the notion that the future is less ontologically settled in the past it is is a questionable proposition in terms of at least certain constructions of the Marxist philosophy.

But I think it gets more thoroughly unsettled if we take it in two directions. I think sorry I'll change that and say the basic direction that makes it is is returning to the question of critique and insisting upon a radically transcendental apprehension of time which I think is also for accelerationism a transcendental cybernetics in which time circuitry is primordial or ultimate

and is not reducible to some object-level transcended sphere of objectivity. according to you know what might be called a naive realist conception of of science and technology so this yeah I'm not I'm gonna I'm gonna stop seeing this two two things I want to say to to kind of dig into this a little further at this stage. So the first is that I think the MAP itself has a much more intricate relation to time

than it is actually happy with having. And there are some sentences I think are deeply emblematic of that. But if I go back to the level that seems closest to their manifest intention. Sorry, one second. they say,

sorry, I'm trying to find the thing where they say about, I think it would be better if I just look at the text for a second, one minute. So I want on accelerationisms. Yes. so so on accelerationism is dealing with this question um in in chapter two i is the thing that i have my most uh as might be expected my most severe kind of problems with this text and i and i think that they it's the most botched level of their philosophical discussion um

and what they're trying to what they're doing here is they're trying to separate a capitalistic notion of speed they're not very explicit about wanting to kind of critically delimit it but but it could be taken in that sense from what they they have they want to use the word acceleration as something that is uh well i will say transcendental but what their actual words is and acceleration, which is also navigational and experimental process of discovery within a universal space of possibility. And then they go on in the next paragraph to say, even worse, as Deleuze and Quartari recognized from the very beginning with capitalist speed, what capitalist speed de-territorializes with one hand, it re-territorializes with the other.

so there is a progressive and a regressive that is inseparable within capitalism and they're treating this as a critique this is why capitalism is a form of constraint for them because of the fact it can't escape this this double pincer if I'm gonna use Deleuze and language with this um of these two different uh impulses and then they end this section by saying that's right reagan reagan deregulation sits comfortably alongside victorian back to basics family and religious values so that's the concrete instantiation of this and i think you know

tracking it forward a little bit you can say it you know you take this this dynamic this from a certain perspective double pincer you you get something that is like near reaction you know you get something there's simultaneously a a futuristic and regressive program but then and this is why I think they are are saying more than they want to say there is a truly fantastic sentence i think it's my favorite in the nap where they say in section three part 22 um we need to revive the argument

that was traditionally made for post capitalism now this is an absolutely fantastic phrase i'm I'm sure. I mean, it's so time tangled. It's absolutely unbelievable. It's a revival. It's a return to tradition. It's an invocation of post-capitalism. It's absolutely templex in this sense of being deeply ambiguous or schizoid in terms of its temporal structure. And I think this goes deep into their project, that the project of left accelerationism, as outlined in the MAP, is retro-progressivist.

and actually it has exactly the same retro progressivist time structure as right accelerationism in the sense that it is both a kind of hyper futuristic and drawn back particularly to something like the 1920s you know it's like art deco it it's a return to the to this point at which modernization was lost you know obviously from the right that's from uh it's lost because of the new deal and the and the kind of uh the destruction of of classical liberalism from the left it's lost by the disappointments of soviet communism and the and the and the uh

betrayal from from that point of view of of these uh socialist dreams of contemporary with the bolshevik revolution um so it doesn't seem to me even though the map wants to say it has an unambiguous unambiguous futurist orientation it has an unambiguous sense of what modernization would mean in terms of being forward-looking rather than backward looking I don't think the text itself supports that I think I think that they there is no difference in terms of the degree to which this retrospective

element of retrieval is operating in the MAP and as it is operating on on the right side of the accelerationist checked and so I'm going to just round off this it's I'll say one more thing about that and then get to my final my final point so for everyone who wasn't there or even people who were there as a as a reminder when we were looking at um on the geology of morals in the in the last in the chronomics course there's this complex uh process that is happening in the direction of absolute

de-territorialization in the text. It's exactly trying to get, it's exactly trying to indicate something on the far side of the relative de-territorialization that is captured by their phrase, perfectly, perfectly unobjectionable gloss of Deleuze and Quotari to quote them again, what captures to be de-territorialized with one hand, it re-territorializes the other. And as we saw in that text challenger the protagonist the the the the pseudo human interlocutor of that text in the process of this um engagement with this double this double pincered system in the direction

of deterritorialization acquires claws you know he he himself becomes this claw-handed double pincered being precisely because the vector of absolute deterioration requires that there is a simultaneous of these two of both sides of the double pin set that the double pins as we discussed in that course the double pincer works by the fact that you're only on one side or the other of the double pin at any particular time and it's and it's it's being able to simultaneously get those two different those two different tensed complementary

double pins of structures uh and package that is a mark of uh within the strata of a line of absolute de-stratification or a tendency to absolute de-territorialization and in temporal terms it has to be noted that the transcendental philosophy of time cannot privilege the future as anything less ontologically settled than the past. To do that is precisely to fall into a metaphysics of time.

Absolute transcendental temporality cannot be any more real in the past than the future. The differentiation of past, present and future, the articulation of time is transcendentally simultaneous. It's not something that can privilege one particular temporal orientation over another. So we would expect that transcendental temporalization would exactly manifest itself within the strata, within the complementary system of deterritorialization as something like a retro

progressivism or a neoreaction or a cyber gothic or any of these other terms that that capture the profound ambiguity of time um and i i want to say map is doing that just as much as thatch right reagan uh proton reaction or whatever you want to call it or any other system of re-territorialization deterritorialization the the the structure of retro progressivism is absolutely basic and structural to to the map so the final thing um in these in these talking points i want to say is is

taking obviously anti-Oedipus as a kind of as a kind of stimulus to that is to is to is to say a little thing about Oedipus which it's obviously the the most inane level of reading that text is basically saying let's forget about Oedipus, Oedipus is not interesting. I want to say Oedipus is extremely interesting. Oedipus is all about this templex structure. Obviously we know from the myth that Oedipus' action is guided by the fact that there is a prophecy about what will happen to him,

that he will kill his mother marry his sorry kill his father marry his mother um that prophecy then becomes an incentive uh to action that is self-fulfilling so um the the figure of the sphinx is a figure of of of of transcendental temporality within the oedipus myth and oedipus that the tragedy of Oedipus is tied up with this structure of templexity absolutely integrally. You cannot read the play at all, the play is the myth, the structure there at all, without this temporal complexity being

essential to him and this is this is obviously i i won't simply say devastating because i think that makes it sound too one-sided and and simple but it's it's massively complicating of any notion of agency it certainly makes the notion uh to go back to this quote the future needs to be constructed which is a a fantastically convenient platform for political action hugely complicated you know oedipus cannot be uh assembled as a political agent in in the kind of way that the map wants to constitute a political agency um because of the fact that the future is already operative on the past the

future is no less ontologically past and um so the situation of edipus which is the situation of any uh any subject caught in time anomaly is is a situation of transcendental time circuitry um it's it's a situation in which uh no way to uh de-realize the future in order to make it a completely uh plastic object for political praxis in a way that's kind of fundamentally um

distinct from the past um of course you know if once you once you go into that terrain then then what you mean by politics what is what you mean by political possibility their their term again being um a universal space of possibility these are concepts that become uh usable at a first order level they have to be fed through this through this transcendental philosophy of time and undergo some kind of drastic revision of a kind that i don't think the map uh wants to do for intelligible purposes um so i treat i'm going to treat that as a as a

a stopping point and see and see what responses people have to this in general of course not might not just my suggestive lines of inquiry into the text can i just hop in and say some like first reaction to the sort of like this notion of time as both Sort of a unified structure where the past is as unchangeable as the future Seemingly or inversely. Oh, yeah, sorry. No, you're saying about the version that they Are wanting to hold on. Oh, no, no. Oh, maybe I'm misunderstanding you. It's inversely

I'm saying that the notion that the future is less ontologically settled than the past is transcendently unsustainable position. It's a metaphysics of time in a strict critical sense and it's convenient for political orientation but it's not a philosophically sustainable commitment. so the question is once you allow obviously a prophecy is an action of the future upon the past once you once you allow this this basic i'm not going to say symmetry i think that maybe

simplifies it too much but this circuitry that that is that is irreducible that there's that it's not that there is a kind of one-way temporal flow within which empirically circuits can be inscribed for technical purposes but the but the diagram of the circuit is fundamental and irreducible and and coincident with with temporality um so yeah i'm just trying to grasp this fully i think that on the one hand there's this seeming development happening or at least change happening um but on the other hand there's this really rigid parmenidian

notion of time in a way right um well it may it may i think to say rigid parmenidian that is one line of approach you could take to it but that is itself perhaps one-sided i mean you could say you could say about the parmenadean approach that what he does is he takes the empirical model of the past and tries to impose that on temporality as a whole um so you know it too is a kind of a kind of a lopsided a lopsided philosophical approach I think attempt to

transcendental temporality you could just as much do the other way around and destabilize the past from from the side of the future right great what you can't do yeah sorry oh i i'd happily let you continue no no no i'm just saying that you know what you can't do is is reduce the circuit to a mere empirical object within time right it's the the circuit is a is is a transcendental structure and that and and i think accelerationism i would want to propose that acceleration is transcendental cybernetics before we even mention capitalism or

any of these points of division that inevitably are going to come on that that seems to me the most fundamental definition of what um accelerationism is and i think the map is is sucked into that despite itself i mean even though on one level of political convenience it's the last thing that they want to do on the other hand there are all these strange little rhetorical clues and and and and structural elements in the text and and around the text that that are recomposing this transcendental time circuit that then complicates the notion of agency far more than they want

that notion to be complicated. Nick, could you perhaps comment a little more on, you know, this isn't really a subject I'm familiar with, but your conception of time circuitry working from the future backwards Other than kind of getting into like the, you know, Oedipus analogy of, you know, almost prophecy. You know, what would be the mechanisms of, you know, how time could kind of go backwards in a cause and effect type of manner? Well, there's lots of different ways to take this. I mean, one book that I'm sure I have, I think that this topic came up in the last course.

and I recommended a book by Hugh Price. Now, it's not for me a philosophical resting point. You know, I'd want to raise questions about this. Here, look, this is a link to this book. But I but I think it's an absolutely crucial correction to prevalent assumptions Sorry one second. I'm just going to put this in the sidebar. Okay, this is Hugh Price's book. It's called times arrow and

Archimedes's point Um And his project is to is to eliminate is to theoretically eliminate time asymmetry. He says, you know, classical physics is completely asymmetric. You can run any mechanical equation forwards or backwards to say that time is running in one direction rather than the other direction is completely arbitrary. You can take any big Newtonian structure of celestial mechanics or anything you like, flip it completely over in terms of its time direction, and you can't tell.

There's nothing that allows you to say which is the right way around and which is the wrong way around. There's perfect asymmetry. And what he price does in this book is he goes through all the difficult cases for this Which is in particular? all everything associated with thermodynamics which seems to install this Asymmetric structure of time in terms of unidirectional entropy increase and Even more at the heart of his own interest is quantum mechanics and this notion of a kind of collapse of wave function only in one direction of time which is associated with

sorry one second that the thing that i just want to mention with this is that that the arguments in the early stage of of the formulation of quantum mechanics interestingly were very tied up with agency like you know in a way that i find very surprising to be honest you know there were scientists saying well look we can't do the kind of things which would allow us to have perfect um symmetry um between uh forward and backward causality in quantum mechanics because that would eliminate free will they actually use that word um and

hugh price's position basically he says that he's not doing this and that he's he's defending some compatibilist notion of free will but he but he's basically says look the notion that some poorly formulated notion like free will could get in the notion of a neat consistent physics is completely crazy and so he he just washes right through and says that you know you can produce an extremely neat um completely symmetrical micro physics that that captures the entire content of of quantum mechanics and and he says also can deal with all of the thermodynamic difficulties so so this is what this is so against kind of standard

intuitions and i would take it so against what um the map wants to maintain certain sense beyond question you know that that time asymmetry for them is something so essential to the possibility of political action that it's pushed off the it's pushed off the boundaries of their discussion and so you know on one level i think their text becomes philosophically thin in this area i mean the notion of time if you say well what is the conception of time in in the m.e.p it's it is quite thin um it's not it's not transcendentally dense it's not open to these

kind of questions about whether time asymmetry is something we can rely upon unproblematically so yeah sorry this is very brief the point is this is is huge and disconcerting topic so I hope that we will stick with it rather than me try to wrap it up in some in some rapid way um i wonder whether this question about uh time can be mapped onto the map as a political project

because one thing that strikes me is that it almost seems to me like despite themselves what what Cernicek and Williams are constructing is actually a kind of moment within the time circuit, rather than an actual conception of acceleration as such. They're very concerned with particular moments of development, like the Montpelerin Society, or like basically what I see as developmentalism, as trying to marry the plan and the network. And so I wonder whether one way of looking at it might just be that they are looking at constructing constructing a articulate kind of conception of one specific moment. But now when you say one specific moment, do you think that that is the same as on the conjuncture?

That's the moment. Do you think the sort of introduction to the text is describing and framing that moment, or are you wanting to locate it differently? I don't think so. I think my focus is more on the kind of the third section of the text when they're kind of presenting a political program. The moment that they're mapping is a kind of abstract moment in the process of capitalist development, not what they see as the current conjuncture but a particular kind of process that has happened in the past through things like developmentalism, through things like even the Soviet experience and stuff like that. yeah I'm inclined to ask you to say say a bit more on this on this moment I mean how what give

me some sort of coordinates to to to locate it well what they so their concern politically seems to be to kind of accelerate development in a way that capitalism seems not to be able to manage on on its own, at least from their perspective. And this seems to me basically to be the kind of process that you see in, firstly, when Marx talks about primitive accumulation, but in general this idea that you have some kind of process whereby capital accumulation is forcibly restarted. And Cernacek and Williams talk about how, quote, the command of the plan must be married to the improvised order of the network.

And that seems to be roughly how these phases of accumulation have happened historically. But this isn't a specific current conjuncture, this is just an abstract moment in the development process. Yeah, I think this ties in with something that I thought was also an interesting line of discussion on this. I'd see whether you think it connects, which is that... there's obviously if we go back to this this almost one way you can do is just go back to the selinsky quote and say you know that the the strategic level of this is about actually objectifying your enemy so obviously the the the goal what defines it as a left project from there

is that the enemy to be objectified is capital um and capital is the the thing they do not want is for capital to be located in this transcendental into the to the question they're asking but you could sort of conceive that coming maybe from there something that would at least position itself to their left or describe itself as coming from their left um it's not something that would be necessarily a right-wing objection at all, someone could say, well, look, wouldn't actually the kind of self-propelling,

modernizing mechanism that you're wanting to constitute actually be a reconstitution of capital in the actual interstices of this. You know, that if you take, if you understand capital with sufficient abstraction as this self-regenerating abstract quantitative element that actually gives a vector to growth within the system considered, then what you're trying to do is actually just is is to is to use your terms is to reboot capital reinstall capital or uh

reinitiate reignite a certain type of capital in something that was calling itself a left planning socialist even project and it's obviously sort of that ties up with a kind of trotsky criticism of of the soviet union and and you know this accusation of state capitalism or on the other side this mao's mao's sort of motivation for the culture revolution of this kind of you know insidious uh tendency of capital to reconstitute itself within any kind of what they call socio-technical machine or socio-technical circuit yeah i mean one thing that i find interesting is that you there are these readings which

basically say for example that the soviet union certainly in its stalinist phase basically was a way for industrial capitalism to emerge in russia despite itself or even maoist china laid the dengist reforms so i wonder whether these just kind of add up to a particular moment is yeah that's my general kind of thought on this yes and but just to one last thing to try and just get this nail done as much as possible when you when you say a moment you're particularly referencing a kind of moment of primitive accumulation of a kind of a moment of capitalist reignition is that is that right yes yes yeah that's right yeah kind of coercive accumulation yeah

so I'll just hop in and say one more thing I I'm probably just misunderstanding you um but on on the one hand it seems like you're saying there's like this time agnosticism where we can't necessarily point towards any direction that time has or any direction that causation has. And on the other hand, there's this argument that says, well, capitalism tends towards this direction. And that direction is sort of a snowball, a cumulative faster towards entropy almost.

so how do those two versions stand together or correct me if I'm misinterpreting no no it's not it's not the sort of zone that could be about misinterpretation because because it's a it's a it's a problem you know it's on one hand it is the problem of transcendental philosophy um and then concretely it's it's problem of exactly that the kind um that you're talking about here and for instance um hugh price who i my suspicion is that his account is kind of you know one-sided um so you know i'm

not saying it's exactly palmedidean but it's but it's an analogous the kind of reservations i would have about palmedidean solution to this is the same kind of reservation i've got about hugh price's project but because it's contrarian in its one-sidedness i i i highly recommend it and and and it is really interesting um and what he would say about this is you know there's an extremely straightforward way of reconciling those two things is that is is is time symmetric so so we can agree that that capital by definition is cumulative perhaps however you're wanting to define that a negative entropy accumulation is is one typical way of doing that um

you know that that's the same as calling it an evolutionary process it when people fuse uh darwinism and thermodynamics um but in saying that um and in saying that you can uh you can tell it defines a direction of time in the sense that that unlike our newtonian mechanics if you had a video of a process of biological evolution or a process of capitalist development um and played it in two different ways people could work out the arrow of time um and and tell you look this you're playing at backwards you know it would be it would be clear

to people that that was happening but that he says doesn't tell you actually anything about the line of causality at all you know you can you can see even once you've started playing this video the right way around you can just as much say that uh the outcome of this process as causally imposes upon the past the precursors required to uh bring about that process as you can say the other way around you know mechanically that the precursors of the process cause the process later to emerge so it's obviously the classical the classical distinction between

efficient and final causality or mechanical and final causality and obviously modernity has sided massively against final causality generally speaking but i would say the same thing about that as i would say about the map that it doesn't really manage to conjure away this demon and all these structures of teleology or final causality constantly re re-emerge in modernity and in fact ironically an irony basically is transcendental philosophy as a as a rhetorical device ironically the

extermination of technological thinking becomes itself this guiding teleological process in in modern in modern science um so you can almost you know from a certain perspective you can say how how radically modernized the scientific devices come by the degree to which it has extirpated teleological teleological thinking and therefore actually installed this highly efficient teleological dynamic? I mean, my first thought is that seems so pre-Kantian. It seems like Kant's idea of time and of agency would want to prevent the scholastic

version of the final cause yes and and that's I think why deontology and duty is so important for Kant but the transcendental subject is not subject is in time so we know it cannot be the case that the the pure subject of practical reason cannot actually be within a time series only the empirical egos and the time series um but but on the other side i think it's really crucial for sure what you're saying here and i i think the point that has to be made is

the critique of teleology is absolutely crucial you know like teleology like anything else is is prone to metaphysics and as soon as the telos is constituted as an object then you have a metaphysical teleology and so and so just the radical prosecution of the critical enterprise in that sense is anti-teleological it's certainly anti-scholastic um even if I'm sure those defenders of scholasticism would say that if I can bracket bracket that so you know I sort of I want to have both in a sense it's a that the

critique of teleology does not mean that you are just left neatly and conveniently with mechanical causation it's rather that you're you're you're left with a comprehensive critique of both mechanical and teleological causality in which in which time is not and it's not it's not reduced to an object in terms of uh in a finalistic form as a t loss or as it a uh as a um mechanical form as a as an original primal course both of those would be pre-critical errors and metaphysics of time

I think the second section in the manifesto is named interregnum. idea of suspension is right it seems seems to be I'm not quite sure how to it's like the problem of suspension right within the within the mod within the modernist project or or the other kind of it the way that the that the

present becomes suspended as a problem for the left is constructed by the left through its commitments to the kind of extension of a modernist sense of time. I don't know whether that's making any sense yet. No, it is. It's very interesting because I haven't sort of taken that word seriously prior to the to you pointing out and obviously it is absolutely fascinating that the actual on acceleration isms uh is is put in this interregnum position um definitely

um so that whole discussion is as you say in some strange sense bracketed isn't it um but it seems to be the short it's like a short circuit within i mean it's implicit what seems to be the implicit suggestion is that it's somehow undecided isn't it um that this interregnum is the fact that there's a a decision about the meaning of acceleration that we're awaiting. And that once that decision is made in the direction recommended by the MAP, then things move forward into this, so their final section on the future.

So you restore the movement into the future once you resolve this dilemma on the correct meaning of acceleration. But yes, it is really interesting. I wonder if this idea of suspension is also some kind of positive program in the sense that it might tie in with this whole Benjaminian idea that time is kind of piling catastrophe on catastrophe and you need to call a halt to it as some kind of radical emancipatory moment. Right. That certainly ties up with this extremely excited rhetoric of the first,

even maybe you see it best in the first two sections, isn't it? You know, global civilization faces a new breed of cataclysm, these coming apocalypses. They've got a whole thing about these annihilations. so that it starts definitely with this sense of absolute yes the sort of apocalyptic content of the trajectory that we're on which I guess sets that then the political problem that the MAP is setting itself

um i mean it is it is very interesting this the role of this text as a kind of exhortation isn't it because it's you know after setting out this kind of dismal apocalyptic it then moves into this whole discussion of how deeply the left has failed you know it's a kind

of it's cast the left has been castigated for its failure to adequately address itself to this scale of the of this problem and and obviously what will then go into their critique of folk politics and all of this kind of thing so there's this definite sense of this the the necessity of this exhortation in the sense that that there's been a complete default or deficiency so in this way it's a real sort of there's a kind of symmetry to a certain kind of construction of a right accelerationism where rather than saying there's this there's this motor that is

just automatically generating this revolutionary potential or the same then in in a certain kind of marks where you know you've got this rolling kind of this rolling inevitability of a kind of socialist insurrection coming from the mechanics of history and the dynamics of capitalism there's something very different in in this which is seeming to say that things have to be just booted up from the start and from the left side you know every that all the resources to be gained and to be exploited and to be repurposed are coming up from the capitalist side and from the left side there's only this kind of sad morass

a kind of loss of a sense of a future a kind of relapse into folk politics you know this this kind of failure that is being diagnosed on the left side. So all the optimism of the text from its own political point of view comes from the possibility of reversing and changing direction of this basically collapse of an adequate left response to the catastrophic momentum of capitalism. Does that sense of the kind of lost future, when is that an expression that, is that something

that only the left feels? Is there a sense that the future is lost in right accelerationist thought? I think that this is an interesting question and I think that it's easy yeah it's it's very complicated I I think that going back to this question about neoliberalism um what again as a sort of it's a structural political necessity for that tech that neoliberalism will be obsolescent from the left. So from the point of view,

and I think in this sense it speaks very widely for a certain sort of left intellectual constituency. It's taken as kind of given that the right must be happy about what is happening. It's like they're saying anything that is so upsetting to us surely has to be absolutely euphorically exciting and and whatever to our enemies you know because we couldn't feel that we're being beaten up so badly without them thinking that they're winning this fight but i don't think that that's very clear i mean i think i think a lot of the

things that have happened on the right on again quite a wide swathe have been based as you're sort of suggesting on a symmetrical despair about neoliberalism and i think that you know obviously um from the position you know by sorry this is all it's all a bit complicated untangled because by saying that what neoliberalism is the attempt to put austrian economics into interaction you sort of left almost with the necessary conclusion that of course the right have to treat this as a triumph. I think that probably is true for a very short time in the early 1980s. I think that that would totally capture the balance of affect. But I

think that faded out fast, and neoliberalism on the right became a sign. It's not that they would use the word very much but the same constellation of political and economic forces was a source of absolute despair on the right too you know and a lot of the things that have happened i think are a response to that to that despair the fact that conservatism has basically just combusted is because it is seen on the right as having totally failed um and you know in the in the recent the recent transition if you were to say well who was the neoliberal candidate in the american election say or who was the neoliberal camp in the brexit referendum

people would say it was the remainers who were the neoliberals in the in the brexit referendum and it was hillary clinton who was the neoliberal candidate in the american election i mean is that Isn't that right? I do think there has been this. I won't say it's as simple as just flipping over, but I think there's been an exposure of how guided the optic of the MAP is in this respect. And I think it's one-sidedness that is very, very prevalent on the left. And part of what I think has been the trauma of recent events is this notion that it was unthinkable that you could have anything worse than neoliberalism.

You know, it's like neoliberalism. You could have neoliberalism or you could have it collapsing into the climate change and more and more disorder and more and more inequality and all of these degeneracies as far as they're concerned, all of which are already folded within neoliberalism. liberalism so all that you're saying is neoliberalism is getting worse so the notion that there could be an insurrection against neoliberalism from the right is was off the radar entirely and I and I think you know deeply traumatizing and and I didn't want to say that simple I mean like we were saying last week I don't think it's clear you know how none of these things are simple

in terms of you know what is the brexit constituency to the right of the remainers or you know to what extent what is the right wing orientation of Donald Trump none of these things are straightforward but I do think that there is this sense that the notion that neoliberalism sort of filled out the whole space of right political economic possibility is is something that has just collapsed and left us in what is it not the conjuncture that is being described at the beginning of the MAP I think one of the things that makes it so

I guess difficult is the ways that Barbrook and Coe, in that expression that you've used, the Californian ideology, that the same, in a sense, the same model of time, the kind of ninefold manifold of time complexity is at work in both left and right accelerationism and in neoliberalism. I mean is that is that is that wrong that we're the words we're sharing that

that's that same model of time well I think that's an interesting suggestion and it's obviously it's but it's obviously at least partly what I want to wanted to suggest in the way I laid things out here in that I think but what you're seeing you know this structure of time um is the impression of a transcendental incursion you know as it is as it is you know the basic symptom of that transcendental incursion is exactly like professor challenges crab hands it's it's all of these split time concepts i mean as i say you know retro progressivism near reaction cyber gothic

i'm sure it could be it could be added you know neo-traditionalism you know the whole set of terms uh a famous one is this this french philosopher guillaume phase archaeo-futurism you know i think you could compile a big list of these terms um all of which are to me symptomatic of a transcendental incursion they they the fact that you have this seemingly paradoxical um time structure being evoked is is is a sign that something is coming diagonally into the temporal order that that can't be sorted or ordered neatly in terms of

sort of the most convenient notions of past present and future that the metaphysics of time would would tolerate In that vein, I thought it was interesting that you mentioned Brexit there, because it seems like Brexit very much has the structure of one of these temporal circuits in a way that's specifically modified by being empirically fixed to a particular point at its beginning, and then having this spread of possibilities repeating it at its putative end. Once you voted to leave, it still may not be the case that you ever actually leave because

of various political forces that happen in the interim. What happens in the interim affects what the consequences of actually leaving are, the chances of actually leaving, and that continues to roll back and affect the decisions that people are making politically and economically. At every point, in the most gross way, whether the market rises or falls after a vote for is something that's washing back from that uncertain repetition five years away. And so inside of that interval, it seems like, you know, we're seeing, I guess that's my question, is whether, are we literally seeing something that recapitulates the larger temporal circuit structure of capitalism's acceleration? Are we seeing that, you know, by that sort of partially empiricized recapitulation,

capitulation that is an opportunity for intervention against neoliberalism at like in some sort of specific and privileged way and then in that sense of having a lost future for uh for leftism is that lost future analogous to or in what way different from the sort of empty superpositional future of what brexit real brexit future brexit yeah yeah extremely it's extremely interesting i mean part One aspect of it is this whole massive role that prediction plays in all of these things, isn't it? Like so much of this current, you know, if we're in a new conjuncture in some sense, one of the defining features of that is all of the voices of expertise saying,

we called it totally wrong. You know we had an absolutely confident prediction that X was going to happen and here we are in Why and you hear that over and over again, you know, I I called brexit right called the American election right called it wrong It's inescapable for everyone do it but the prediction markets called it wrong that maybe the financial markets called it wrong on one level then you say well you know doesn't that show that that in what you're dealing with here is just is simply prediction you know that you don't have a time scrambling structure prophecy

at work in this at all you know you have a notion of prediction that is just empirical forward oriented and the fact that it can be completely collapsed like this by by an unexpected event is a sign that any suggestion that you have this actual time circuitry work has been proved to be illusory and so there's a certain very very rigorous collapse of the future that happens with that and I think what's being what the contour that's being shown here is exactly the contour between the strata and the zone of

de-territorialization of destratification it's the limits of relative of deterritorialization it's the distinction between it's a distinction between capital as object and capital as transcendental structure there's there's a line that's being drawn which is the line of whether you actually have efficient, efficient, if processes operating upon the past from the future, is that is the future and operating as an efficient, an efficient object.

and I think that it's necessarily it's necessarily ambiguous it's it's never that you're going to be able to say except with a certain kind of dogmatic hyperbole that you're that it's one way or another I mean there's very strong reasons of just rigorous transcendental philosophy they push it in one direction there's very strong reasons from sort of the continuous reconstitution or empirical common sense to to run it the other way and the question is is the trend of capital or the trend of technology moore's law would be a good example or any of these things the the tendency to the decentral to internet decentralization the the reconstitution

continuously of the californian ideology at higher levels of intensity are those things merely empirical historical products or are they actually showing us the contours of this large scale retro chronic impact okay I was just going to say but what would it even mean to say tendency in that sense I guess like tendency Makes it seem as that if it's moving with an incentive Towards a certain direction no, or are you saying that that's one perspective to think about it in terms of like an incentive motive?

Whichever whichever direction you run it in I think you can use that that language for sure like if If there is a an efficient Futural hyper object shaping the structure of history um then it will obviously manifest itself through powerful tendencies you know it's a it's it's like um the way that often is is good to do this and i think everyone does it who price also or uses this language very much is this thing about um convergent and divergent waves if you actually have a convergent wave so that you know you you throw a pebble into the pond

the ripples go out then you reverse the film all the ripples are heading in towards this singularity in the middle of the pond and then you say yeah the reverse the reverse footage is the one that actually shows us the structure of history you know so we're we're seeing a we're seeing a convergent wave and that's why we can we're back to this question of prediction this is why we can predict or even prophesy um um certain historical patterns is because because it's the convergent wave that is actually the the uh primary one in this case And I think capitalism is at least massively persuasive as a simulation of teleology.

So even if you end up wanting to say, look, it's all a kind of illusion, and all you really have is divergent waves, there aren't really efficient convergent waves in history. it's still the case that um understanding the let's say pseudo technological structure of capitalism allows you to make extremely strong predictions about its general trend just as if it was a convergent wave i mean the internet bitcoin these funds these thresholds are That's absolutely predictable on an abstract level. I mean, of course, no one predicted Bitcoin in terms of its detail, but everyone who was paying any realistic attention to capitalism

predicted Bitcoin in terms of its basic architecture and its basic social function. And the fact that it would be decentralized, anonymous, it would lack controlling nodes, everyone knows that that is the capitalistic telos. that capitalism likes things like the internet it likes things that are decentralized commercial flat systems without without dominant nodes and it will end up doing something down the road more like that than anything we've seen so far and people who've made that bet always always win now people would say to me oh you know that's an illusion i mean i know they have to say yes you know from a certain empirical position of course you can you can say that but it

seems to me that that capitalism stimulates prophecy by its own extremely plausible at least pseudo-teleological structure so I I think this sort of relates this comment I put in the sidebar that says well the whole the whole notion of the Darwinian economic model, which is based on incentives and drives to survive, is made more problematic by the poor parameter-less definitions that it uses. It wraps up so many things at once. Increasing complexification of organisms with the gradual inevitable breakdown and decomposition through entropy. It wraps up being and non-being,

survival and death, production, anti-production, de-territorialization, re-territorialization, Dionysus, Apollo. It seems like all of these terms are not necessarily synonymous. Obviously, death is not the same thing as non-being, right? Unless we're talking about some sort of spirit entity, but, and then, and the other obvious dichotomy is being and becoming. And being obviously isn't the same thing as just survival. I'm not sure exactly how this maps on to this conversation of time,

but I think it maps on really well to the conversation about causality. just say a little bit more about that mapping sure yeah I can try well I think that the way that I understand Deleuze and Guattari and Nietzsche as well to sort of characterize how things take place in the cosmos is by making these two poles and for Deleuze and Guattari it's the re-territorializing or the de-territorializing hand of capitalism followed by the re-territorialization. It's like there's no pure de-territorialization every de-territorialization is actually

another re-territorialization and yet it tends towards pure de-territorialization. So my question is in that model where you have these two poles It doesn't seem that those two poles are the same thing that the Darwinian model is using to talk about when it's talking about the growing complexity of living organisms. And it doesn't strike me as the same thing as when we talk about entropy, when we talk about the two poles of organization towards disorganization. I'm not sure that they're the same or I'm not sure how they could be the same My my sort of translation matrix would would obviously be run through

Cybernetics on this which was which is that the the two poles you're talking about are the two poles of your cybernetic circuit so if they have a negative link so you have a stable system then you have complementary de-territorialization and re-territorialization so the system drifts on the on on one pole and is re-stabilized on the other pole and the system is reversible so you can if they're complementary you can within any such complementary stratix double pincer system you can you can actually say

either either is the de-territorializing or re-territorializing pole the important thing is they're complementary so there's drift and counter drift and it doesn't matter which you which you call which a line of absolute de-territorialization would be a pure positive feedback circuit which is uncompensated drift and obviously as p as critics of this sort of notion say or or at least suggest, because I'm not wanting to say that they're simply right, what they want to suggest is that there is actually always a compensatory,

an invisible compensatory pole when it seems that you have this pole of absolute drift. So, you know, you have a musical feedback or whatever, and it will go up to a climax in screeching howl and something will bring it back down on the other side. You know, it will explode, it will crash, it doesn't go to infinite volume. Or like we were talking last week, John Michael Greer's whole philosophy of history is like this. You know, you see these apparently lines of continuous, absolute de-territorialization uh you know in his terms they're things like energy consumption

economic growth progress modernization and his to use the map language his wager is that there's always a complementary you could say re-territorializing complementary pole that that produces when you see the whole diagram of the system that that produces a homeostatic um stratic system this is obviously not his language so so that's the that's the matrix that i would use to try and uh cross link these various systems um so

for organisms you know there are certain lines that look like a form of uncompensated drift and if you and if you pan out um into the into the uh deep history and ecological structure of those systems do you find some compensatory system so i mean there are obvious examples all through evolutionary biology the the most the neatest examples and probably i would say i would hazard the guess most prevalent are arms races so you know some animal evolved some

mutation in a direction that seems to guarantee this open horizon of of of troll propagation and some compensating element in terms of predator species or food supply limits but i'll leave that because that's complicating it some some competitive competitive species will adapt in a way that restores the system to equilibrium so the system as a whole is a higher level homeostatic even when it seems to be populated by these vectors of uncompensated drift or mutation

and capitalism capitalism is the first thing that we've ever seen that at least throws into a very serious question the compensatory side of the equation I mean well I it gets into something huge as well could you go into that more I was well I think that one of the one of the basic left-right accelerationism this questions is this thing about you know have left-in my text

ocean just a stay mobilization rhetoric and all of this stuff I just we just lost you for about 40 seconds can you repeat it yeah just just saying if if you had left and right accelerationism at a blackboard and someone said just draw your diagrams you know what i mean quit the political squabbling from it and just show me the diagram that you're trying and i think the right accelerationist diagram as the left accelerationists i think are perceptive enough to see basically has the left as the compensatory re-territorializing element.

You know, so when the MAP says, you know, capitalists be de-territorialized without having re-territorialized with the other, the other four right accelerationism is the left, and the map like is the re-territorialization um which i i guess is it's an irony but i think it's one they they they're aware of um sorry they have a line they have a line that shows that they totally understand that that is the criticism that is being is being made um sorry I won't waste our time by trying to find it right now whereas obviously for the for the left

accelerationists it's rather that there is they're wanting to locate what they call the true agent acceleration outside capital and capital itself at a certain stage at least that they think we have now reached they explicitly say is it self-acting as the compensator and and working to I mean there's probably 20 quotes that we could use for this but they say if capitalism is a system that holds back process progress our technological development is being suppressed by capitalism and as much as it has been unleashed so um so you know i think you'd be drawing the same circuit diagrams and

you'd just be putting different different terms on that um but and i'm not saying it's a trivial thing or at least this nomenclature issue it just goes down to some some trivial issue but but i I think that there is a level of, there has to be a level of fundamental agreement at the level of transcendental cybernetics, that what you're drawing, if you left off all the labels, what you're drawing as a diagram of an accelerating process, a process of absolutely territorialization, an uncompensated process of drift, is the same. So I think that's why at the end it's still despite everything and despite all the massive

disagreement about what these terms mean that there is such a thing as accelerationism that crosses this crosses all of these partisan battle lines. It seems like that means there also has to be a difference in conceiving of the role of desire and anxiety in driving the de-territorialization. like that what's something that i i feel like i don't totally understand about the left accelerationist view is that um without without all the competition and anxiety and desire what what continues to drive the process forward like that you know like that seems like like the

key variable is sort of the like the sense of impending doom and like like uh you need to you know gain that's what sort of generates the new things yes I mean I look I could I'm the last person who should sort of pretend to be able to adequately represent their response I would assume that they would say that there is a kind of a distortion and perversion of this libidinal structure of production and technological production within capitalism and that it can be driven by a

configuration of desire that is fundamentally cooperative in nature that is not sort of tuned by anxiety and and such such like but I'm sure that as people who could who could do a better job of that than I could yeah hence the perhaps the emphasis on law-like structures too on their side yes yes on on the left right well what about the law like structures I well I guess I would see the law like structures as as like a within the dialectic that we're

talking about as like sort of a a way of directing channeling forces in a potentially more egalitarian structure towards a more egalitarian structure so the aim of the law is to somehow create that I think there's what Vince Vincent meant but create that moment I'm not sure if I don't want to speak for you but yeah I don't think Vincent's rising to the bait at that point yeah just sort of following up on something I said in the sidebar

It just seems to me like just utterly obvious, regardless of where in this sort of supposed spectrum, partisan spectrum of accelerationism you are, that and pivoting and so forth, the other aspects of what is like technically acceleration, so any direction, had as like tools in the toolbox of tactical concerns of any kind of acceleration. because if the context of what we call accelerationism is like, it accelerated all around as something initiated by the Industrial Revolution or whatever, there are wildly different, for any possible politics, aspects of that acceleration that have wildly different variances. So the acceleration of disruptive environmental catastrophes

or flows of mass migration in the world, and the acceleration of our ability to cognitively predict what's going to happen 10 years or 10 minutes from now, all of those things. Like if you can't, if you uniformly can't differentiate between the ways of responding to those different things, so that one thing you might, you know, your task is to decelerate this process locally as opposed to globally, and then in other cases to accelerate this process to contradiction, then you have no way to navigate or to actually like see the environment of acceleration gradients. This sort of confusion of everything is accelerating around us, therefore our politics is sort of like directly a mirrored

reflection of this particular kind of acceleration. That just seems like an elementary mistake, like of almost the exact same kind as pre-Brexit all these prediction markets and Nate Silver and who the hell ever, right, who are only able, I mean I'd argue, to have predicted that the Brexit vote would go remain because their entire basis for prediction was a theory of incentive, namely a neoliberal one, under which it would never make sense for the constituents of any market to do a thing like voting for Brexit. And so that leads to when the Brexit vote actually happens to encounter this giant bifurcation in history that requires a reorganization of the theory of prediction alongside the reorganization

of the material basis for what's being predicted and that if we want to avoid being blindsided the way neoliberalism and the left, et cetera, have been, we have no choice but to think of acceleration on our part as a broader field than just like colloquially increasing speed. Just that. I think there's a lot of different things going on there, directions to go from. one of the things that i think i'll just if i can just take two minutes to be most time i tactically sort of bypassed it but i think i should just mention it is obviously when i was uh dissing this particular section of um the map it's because of this line where they say

uh it's criticizing confuses speed with acceleration um and you know this attempt to i think that acceleration becomes very hazy and speed becomes over concrete and and hyper objectified and obviously you know the immediate thing i i go with that is the fact that for for de leuze and qatarie speed is an intensive quantity you know it's it's like a speed or a temperature is their kind of way of introducing um um into introducing intensive quantities they are heterogeneous they you know they it totally is not using speed

in a way that makes sense coming out of that lineage at all. And it takes us into this then question about, well, what's this minimal sensible definition of acceleration? And the minimal sensible definition of acceleration that everyone accepts as completely uncontroversial is as, let me just get it completely right. Sorry, one second. I don't know how I've managed to lose this.

but it's the second derivation of position, isn't it? Like, velocity is the first derivative of position in time, and acceleration is the second derivative. So it's velocity subject to this pros of nonlinear self-complication, in a certain sense it's already tending towards a kind of mode of non-linear thinking and it's obviously that all the things that line up in terms of the invention the simultaneous invention of the calculus by newton and leibnitz is because because history was demanding the calculus arise

at this point because of the fact that you're entering the epoch of acceleration and and acceleration needs a kind of rigorous mathematical definition and um that definition is going to be quantitative in order to make it techno-scientific and it's completely i think um inadequate to treat that quantification of acceleration as if it somehow holds it on the side of objectivity as a pre-critical illusion which is the kind of um is the implicit move that the map is making about that that there's something there's something

inherently philosophically inadequate about intensive quantities um but the other thing very quickly to say about about or respond about what the english maybe is more in tune with what what you're saying is this thing about these intensifying flows and the two examples you know the the the uh accelerating process of various types of uh ecological uh transformation the the accelerating flows of migration and i think it seems to me to be notable and and also heavily ironic and and goes weirdly non-linear that the the people who primarily criticize one particular dimension of modernistic acceleration do seem to have systematically

an implicit uh diagram that is saying oh but that accelerating process is actually uh self-cancelling you know so so that for instance the the the ecological people in saying they're always saying when they say they say look we this is terrible what's happening they think this can't go on aren't they you know that if you if you have this process of ecological uh change it's going to undermine the foundations of economic life it's going to undermine the very foundations of the of the economic and technological and social process that is making it happening in some drastic fashion like i think in their minds like the uh amplifier feedback that leads

to the system actually exploding or becoming dysfunctional and i think it's just the same on the right with the whole question about migration flows that what's being said i think implicitly in those arguments is also it is a it's a self-cancelling process i think i think if they thought that it was actually a fundamental acceleration, that these flows of migration were actually self-propelling and self-propagating and strengthening and intensifying the modernistic process, it would look very different, the critique that is being made. But I think the critique that's being made is that the kind of socio-technological and economic foundations of societies that are that are involved in these extreme accelerating demographic flows are being

undermined by them and so they're not they're not a sustain self-sustaining process it all seems like you know one could thread the needle by um you know and even synthesize those two's perspectives by kind of considering the relevant range against kind of what you're graphing as acceleration, i.e., you know, and this is something I struggle with in general in thinking about it, but when we're talking about an exponential growth curve, if you have any kind of materialist conception, you know, of the universe, atoms, bits and bytes, exponential growth, I mean, it simply can't continue. There's literally not enough atoms combinations whatever in the universe

So I mean at some point you do need to truncate it and maybe that's that's just where they're coming in They're saying you know these processes Yes constrained at some point Yes, I think that that's that's that's kind of tautologically True at that at the mathematical level which of course we should never leave behind but it's very easy again to to to to do what is not only analogous to but it's perhaps strictly a pre-critical error and think that you have an objective image of the limit of the process under consideration so for instance you know one one example might be to say

within within the plausible bounds of the system considered there's only a certain amount of matter available um and leave out of the equation the possibility of the system as it exponentially grows abstracting itself to the degree that it could miniaturize in certain radical ways that it could go nanotechnological and femtotechnological or in various other ways you know abstract itself beyond the limiting frame that it obviously not indefinitely or when i say obviously i i'm happy to accept not indefinitely but certainly way beyond the horizon that is being sketched out for originally like for instance a topical example of this obviously a peak oil

phenomenon this now where um of course it's tautologically true that fossil fuels are a finite resource there must be peak fossil fuel consumption if but you get into this zone of of a kind of metaphysical construction of that when you become overly objectified on what actually you're talking about about the resource in question and leave out the you know leave out there for all possible kinds of technological uh boundary expansions of that of that system so you know i know it's a heated topic and i'm not wanting to make a dogmatic claim one way or

the other on the way this is working out but the whole fracking thing has obviously sort of radically expanded what people had assumed was the relevant horizon of system expansion for fossil fuel consumption and so you know if you if your reading of peak oil had very firmly ruled out the possibility that it was going to expand beyond relatively easy accessible liquid hydrocarbon deposits then you would have been sideswiped by that and I think that kind of sideswiping is not trivial I mean it seems to Greer's entire paradigm I haven't seen it mentioned anywhere at least but

it kind of ignores the feedback aspect of the price system you know scarcity is kind of introduced yeah prices regulate that definitely that's one element and he also is very quite explicitly resistant to radical technological solutions so you know it's almost a mantra for him you know new no fusion power no no space travel no artificial intelligence without an argument that can possibly exist in principle um it's an argument that i think he's very dependent on because he wants to be able to draw relatively constrictive boundaries around you know for the horizon of this exponential process and

and allowing for those kind of extreme technological breakthroughs would just expand the horizon of it to such an extent that it becomes historically unpredictable. But it's a really key question of course. And if you turn to the other side of the, you know, someone in Kurzweil who just has no sense of a boundary at all for his model. thinks that we've been on an exponential curve since the big bang and that that law of accelerating returns is the fundamental law

so what's his he gets very theological when he kind of responds to your question doesn't he that you know you meet Jesus at a certain point or something like that basically yeah so I wanted to re-raise the specter of capital self propagation that you talked about this other specter in Marx and just maybe put some material on the table rather than pose a question see how it relates so the movement from the

vector of MCM to MM is what I'm particularly interested in because I think it was Vincent last week had put on the table chapter 15 from capital 3 the development of the laws internal contradictions where Marx talks about the rate of profit as the spur of capitalist production and valuation of capital as being its sole purpose so I was wondering that if I could just read a half page or a page from capital I think it's really beautiful passage that addresses this that's all right with people of course I'm certainly would be thrilled so this is this is chapter 24 interest bearing capital is the superficial superficial form of the capital relation if you have it so he

says in interest bearing capital the capital relationship reaches its most superficial and fetishized form here we have mm money that produces more money, self-valorizing value, without the process that mediates the two extremes. In commercial capital, MCM, at least the general form of the capitalist movement is present, even though this takes place only in the circulation sphere, so that profit appears as merely profit upon alienation. But for all that, it presents itself as the product of a social relation, not the product of the mere thing. The form of commercial capital still exhibits a process, the unity of opposing phases, a movement that breaks down into two opposite procedures, the purchase and sale of commodities. This is obliterated in MM, the form of interest

bearing capital. So I just want to pick up, he moves right to the vector MM, right? Yeah. Here we have the original MM, here we have the original starting point of capital, money, in the formula MCM reduced to the two extremes MM, where M equals M plus delta M, money that creates more money. This is the original and general formula for capital reduced to a meaningless abbreviation. It is capital in its finished form. The unity of the production and circulation process, and hence capital yielding a definite surplus value in a specific period of time. In the form of interest-bearing capital, capital appears immediately in this form, unmediated by the production circulation processes. Capital appears as a mysterious and self-creating source of interest

of its own increase. The thing, money, commodity value, is now already capital simply as a thing. The result of the overall reproduction process appears as a property devolving on a thing in itself. Yada, yada, yada. Self-valorizing value. No, it's a excellent fascinating passage for sure. Yeah Definitely so like I said no question. I just want to put this sort of on the table as a yes It's great. It's really fascinating. I Mean I think that can I just two very quick responses to that passage because One interesting question is about how substantive

He's seeing that as being Like, is it that he's saying this sort of almost short circuit of self-reflection of capital, immediate self-cultivation of capital is something substantial? or is he saying it's an analytical mirage that can appear in the perception of capital that is actually, you know, a kind of mystified apprehension? Because obviously, well, it's intriguing if you try to be concrete about what that process is because the language of the financial, the high-level financial services industries

that would get closest to actually manifesting this, almost, it would be fascinating to put their brochures against that passage because they talk about products and assets in the most concrete sense. So, I mean, they would never say anything like, you know m to m delta it's always you know we produce a financial product which we which we provide to our client and you know there's the full circuit of exchange with these abstract products and services that that that complete this circuit that is strictly analogous to the circulation through the concrete commodity so sorry I in turn don't really

know what I'm I'm saying about that I think it's a really it's an excellent passage and it opens up some very germane questions I don't make don't let me hog this I mean if other people have a have a response they'd like to Mike. What interesting tie-in might be Tomah Piketty's kind of research a few years ago, whereby he claims R is greater than G in relation to m squared, m times m. And one of, I think, probably the most solid criticisms

of work that i've seen is the fact that you know over time capital has not accumulated at that exponential rate in anyone in particular's hands i.e via destruction in wars or some other kind of feedback um you know it's not been allowed to snowball kind of in that way and i'm not exactly sure the point i'm making i just yeah but it's super it's extremely relevant it's extremely relevant and it is again to do with the the transcendental empirical difference between um what as mark in marx's language capital and capitals isn't it like um for any particular capital which is obviously because it's graphic and concrete and objective it's the thing that triggers the most social concern um which requires sort of a cognitive effort to

generalize into this systemic critique, then it is subject to all kinds of processes of concrete limitation that can't be applied to the system as a whole. So that I mean, I think, and again, I don't want to be dogmatic about this, because it's a relevant empirical fact, and it's not something to dogmatize about. But I think it's certainly the case that in terms of companies, there is the process of systemic acceleration is accompanied by a compression of average corporate lifetimes.

So if you kind of go back in history over, say, the American S&P 500, the amount of time that any particular company would remain as one of the top 500 companies in the united states is steadily shrinking um so it's a kind of weirdly there's a weird process of inversion happening that as the actual a systemic capitalism intensifies the the lifespan or the ability to continually preserve an exponential process of accumulation for any particular capital is being steadily squeezed.

So, yeah, I mean, I think that is connected, doesn't it, with your point and with the whole Piketty discussion too. Well I think also this passage ties into something that I've been interested in Mark's, which I've spoken about to you before Nick, this idea of capital taking over from capitalism, because at the end of this chapter he says that the problem is that this kind of automated process, and he says it's a kind of inherent secret power as an automaton of creating surplus value in geometrical progression. It is a kind of geometrical progression, but the only problem is that it's not creating surplus value. Because, of course, Marx's theory of labour, labour theory of value, sorry, is this idea that only living labour can create value.

Right. So, the fact that capital is becoming more automatic, becoming more kind of concentrated in the dead labour side of things, means that less surplus value is being created even though it is a kind of exponential process so what happens is capital takes over from capitalism because surplus value isn't being generated even though something is yes no i think this gets to a really deep issue that tends to get muddied because these arguments of course are so ideologically intense that it that that it tends to be very distracting and put everyone into a kind of ADHD on it but there's obviously a certain sense where the whole apparatus of the labor theory of value is an accounting protocol

so you know you can consistently allocate productivity across the labor supply of necessity it's kind of just a mathematical operation that's taking place and you know the sort of suggestion that maybe there's something a bit weird about the operation comes in like uh you know jay who had this whole series of interesting tweets about this issue where he's talking about the density of labor. And so, you know, you can have a declining labor time and increasing density of labor, meaning or intensity,

he uses both words, I think, because of the fact that as capital becomes technologically intensified, the productivity of labor associated with that machinery is automatically increased and so um so it's quite possible for the same worker to go to work you know one day and and the next and there's been a some technological upgrading has happened in the apparatus involved in their production process And suddenly the intensity of their labor and their production of surplus value and the rate of exploitation and all of these accounting dimensions of what's happening to them economically have been totally transformed.

Just because the fact that they're now interacting with another machine and maybe the other machine is hidden behind an interface so that they're doing exactly the same thing that they were doing before. but they're now doing it within a kind of expanded complicated technological circuit that means that their actual productivity has been completely transformed so you know of course as an accounting procedure it doesn't change anything you still say we know you just take the aggregate production subtract capital depreciation and distribute the the remainder across the across the labor force but it's obviously at this point very hard to see what

is being tracked in terms of a real process or a real event and it does seem to be just a kind of convention that that is being employed rather than anything more penetrating sorry are you wanting to get in there I yeah so I just wanted to give a time check to that we're 10 minutes till the end of class but I'm happy to run longer if people would like to and if Nick is up for that too right yes let's just see what whether people have so how much they still got okay well there was one thing i i wanted briefly to kind of throw in here which i know we

could talk about forever but nick you give a really interesting definition of accelerationism in in teleoplexy as the critique of the primacy of the secondary and i was wondering if you could and on that here yes well this takes us back I think I don't know I probably will simple I probably will inevitably lead to a kind of a kind of simple simple-minded reconstruction because but I think it goes back to the stuff we've been talking about today in terms of these basic these two basic feedback loops of explosive loops and traps and obviously there was a certain kind of transcendental necessity that compensation is

actually the secondary process you know you can't you can't i'm sorry i'm gonna i've got to avoid trying to put it into naive temporal terms and i will put it in naive temporal terms with a with an ironical warning that it's in naive temporal terms but but the a a control loop of a system of capture a compensated system has to be produced and it can't produce itself it can only it can only capture something or stabilize something it what it captures has to have come out of a more primary runaway drift dynamic that's to say it has that

absolute de-territorialization is always primary in related relation to relative de-territorialization if we're using kind of de l'esquitari language um but equally inevitably um the stabilized system is becomes the foundation upon which any imaginable subjectivity is going to be initially constructed so it's always that there is a kind of cosmic production of this metaphysical illusion that always of necessity positions the process of absolute de-territorialization

as the anomalous derivative situation and the cosmically derivative, cosmically secondary, cosmically produced situation of the stabilized, captured, reciprocated system as the fundament. and i think uh this is something that is very trans-partisan and trans-ideological in the sense that i think you know the what what i think i call i i'm not i'm going to forget my own

vocabulary at this point but but you but you see in the left we see in left and right critiques of disruptive modernism, let's say uncompensated historical transformation, exactly the same patterns. At the fundamental systemic cybernetic level of diagramming what's happening and turning it into a kind of social criticism, it's exactly the same whether you go, you go to kind of a certain kind of right-wing traditionalism or you go to a kind of equal sort of

aggrieved left humanism that they both they both express the same resistance to uncompensated change from the position of a disrupted pseudo primordial situation or community but I I don't think I'm sorry I I know I'm not I'm not saying anything that is adding to what's there in that thing. Yeah, I think in terms of, like, Theodore's question,

which is about this, I think you have to say yes. No, sorry, absolute re-territorialization. I mean, yeah, that's an interesting question. Because I guess what I'm trying to say is, on the one hand, we're saying, like, oh, the telos of existence is absolute pure de-territorialization. But that already has this sort of natural teleological direction. So it seems like the time agnostic would say, well, actually, the ripples converge upon this stone. It's towards absolute re-territorialization. I would at the time agnostic the the other the other perspective sorry

Yes, sorry. No. No, it's good. I would I would turn that a little bit inside out I think people and say you know I that if you expressing a tendency to absolute de-territorialization as if it were teleological then you're totally right and and you're submitting it to a metaphysics of time, and it's completely one-sided, and you're therefore just on one side of a double pincer, and therefore you're in the strata. So the absolute deterritorialization can be no more teleological than it is mechanical.

And I think this is what Deleuze and Qatari are constantly trying to do. Do you know that there's a seemingly paradoxical notion that desiring machine? I'm seeing if they're deliberately coupling a teleological and a mechanical term and just fusing them together because Because you cannot privilege either the the mechanical or teleological side of that without without submitting to the to stratification or or metaphysics Yeah, I think you're meant to. Sorry. Yes. So I would just say, you know, I would, it's kind of, there has to be a mathematical transformation of what you're saying into, into what I'm saying, but because I'm just juggling the terms around to get rid of the problem that

you quite rightly point to. And I would hold on to absolute de-territorialization, but insist upon the fact that a one-sidedly teleological or future oriented description of that is stratic or metaphysical. Yeah, there's that really interesting passage towards the end of Anti-Oedipus where they're talking about the Samuel Butler's, what's it called, the book on machines or something? Book of the machines, yeah. with the machines and they make the distinction between the vital forces and the mechanistic levers and essentially they say well neither of these are sufficient in and of themselves

we have it's it's more they give this it's almost compatibilist in a weird way but I I'm hesitant to say that because I it's not doesn't fit as easily with notions of will yes i mean i'm not sure that's quite right either i think it i think it's um because the thing with compatibilism is it sort of says you've got both right doesn't it um and i don't think that they're saying there's actually a fully mechanical and a fully teleological process and you know you can map them onto each other and something just tracks through both of them equally.

I think they're saying that, you know, absolute deterritorialization is no more mechanical or no less mechanical than it is teleological or the opposite. I mean, those two finalistic and original causation are products of the metaphysics of time. their products have stratified perception and and so not it's the diagonal line that is that is that cuts between them and I think diagonalization and compatibilism are not doing the same kind of philosophical work

I'm afraid I haven't kept up with the sidebar at all. I'll have to peruse this. I'll have to peruse this later. Yeah, the sidebar took off. That was huge. The full sidebar of these things is like, it's psychopedic volume.

That image of the diagonalization too is I think really made clear in the passage that John read. Or no? No, I'm not disagreeing, but I'm interested in why in why you say that oh I mean, I think you could easily Make a little four square With the say the M In the bottom left quadrant and the M Delta in a upper right quadrant and and just draw an arrow, right? Right. It'd be good to see that filled in, actually.

And what's in your two empty quadrants? Yeah, that I'm less sure about. It might just be the line rather than a diagonal. I'll think about it. So does anyone have any... any points to make about the things that are we haven't necessarily at all finished with the map

i mean there's no reason why people can't talk about in the future but uh definitely broader questions about accelerationism time capitalism um are going to be running forward word um so does anyone have anything specific about the the map that they that they think definitely needs to be tagged tagged in right now or should we is what do people think about derek derek has um Do you think we should I sort of call a close? I sort of wanted to say one more thing about

accelerationism perhaps Yeah And it sounds like what you're saying is that left accelerationism hasn't fully grasped the implications of accelerationism general generally to think that you can somehow direct the bus that has its pedal to the metal is just absurd. And then I guess this is what I was trying to get at last week about, well, the unconditional accelerationist perspective, yeah, fundamentalist accelerationism

is a, it seems like a metaphysical commitment to make. And even though I know that you're arguing that it's the most critical commitment, I'm apprehensive to sort of put all my eggs in that basket just yet. Yeah. I mean look I think there's there's two levels to that at least one of them is as a kind of an empirical argument about the extent to which this the capitalism can be steered and all kinds

of i think not uninteresting questions about sort of what politics can do how you know what are resilient systems or incentive the capacity of capitalism to root around certain kinds of intervention all of these things come in on that level but the more fundamental question is i think about time which is to say you know well the formula that i i'm using here which i think is kind of germane is that if you think that the future is less ontologically settled than the past then you're not thinking time transcendently that you're caught within a

metaphysics of time because it simply cannot be that a the nature of time is subdivided by by time itself like um you know things in time of course can be organized in terms of past present and future and all of these time structures and durations and all of this thing if you say you know something like how long does time last or it's even you just go back to kant's antinomies about you know is time eternal or not kant just says look you can't ask that question um you're treating time as if it was an object time is a

is a is a transcendental form of intuition um so you're engaged in metaphysics when you when you ask questions about time as if it were itself a thing in time and treating treating um the future as if it was just something that hasn't happened yet that it's like that it has totally different that time future is distinguished from time past in this absolutely fundamental way by its position in time is exactly the same metaphysical error that Kant is dealing with in his antinomies.

It's just simply a, you know, it's thoroughly critically diagnosed. And so it can't be something that one does without philosophical objection, I think. Yeah, I mean, I think as my understanding of Kant, though, is that that sort of agnosticism is almost, you can't hold that position very long. And Kant sort of, he sort of like goes into a spiral of paranoia moralism. Yes. And that's, I mean, the late Kant is incredibly rigid moral structures that are developing.

And like, if you don't see Christianity in those later structures, I think you're just ignoring them. But not you specifically, but any reader. No, no, no, totally, yes. Yeah. But I'm not sure. Yeah. So I'm not sure that the, it seems like an either or argument. You can't have the agnosticism. You either have the sort of I want to say like the Nietzscheanism or the Hegelianism Well, look, I don't think it's any coincidence this whole language of schizophrenia that Deleuze and Quartari I think it's probably absolutely right to say the only rigorous critical thinking

uh you know is it is impossible in that in that in that sense it is it is psychotic um and and um you know as stratified beings always revert to metaphysics um which i think you know that's what fuels this whole sort of turbulent dynamic of kind of critique in a modern pomo sense you know the fact that metaphysics will always reconstitute itself you've never finished deconstructing it all of that kind of turbulence which is a kind of theoretical a theoretical echo of this perpetual tumultuous creative destruction that's happening at the level of the

socio-technological economic um plane um but i think the fact that that's that's happening and The fact that you can't, you know, the Kant and capitalism have this incredibly tight relation precisely because they aren't fixably identifiable. If you try to fixably identify them, which, of course, anyone who positions themselves as their enemy has to do, I would say, probably just highly controversially, the inevitable result is uh is eventually a kind of trauma um that

that by their very nature they are constantly sort of uh emerge out of uh an extreme abstraction that it that escapes the the objectification that that you've tried to apply to them. And so, you know, every critique of concrete capitalism, everybody wants to critique capitalism as such, at least since Marx, of course, because you want to capture the whole beast. But you inevitably, just like reading Kant or Kant reading himself or constituting himself, you have an inadequate, ironized, concrete facsimile of the truly critical system and the truly critical system whether you're talking about

the philosophical system of critique or the socio-economic system of of capital accumulation is is always sufficiently remote through transcendental empirical difference from the concrete instantiation that it eludes the net that you try to throw over there if that's still attached to your yeah I think it I think it is I'm trying to connect more limbs to it as well I think my understanding of sort of the Nietzschean

epistemological position is that it says, you know, you can cash your epistemological check immediately. This is it. Like, that's the closest thing you get to the absolute. And the Hegelian position is, well, you know, hold on to the epistemological market while we sort of, or hold on to your shares in the epistemological market. It's getting better or something. I kind of wonder as well about how this maps onto Deleuze's argument that Nietzsche is the kind of cunt turned in on himself, the kind of radical conclusion of the Kantian

critique. Yes. No, I think that would definitely be something I would see as highly plausible. the same sort of patterns like um you know there's the kind of in a way baroque delusian reading of eternal return as the eternal return of difference and all that kind of thing but i think there's just a much more just brutalistic straightforward thing about eternal return that it's um it's an objectification of transcendental time circuitry you know and when you try to say well what is that you know what's that what's this object you know you you end up with these kind of ironized kind of inadequate images you know like uh that delers obviously then ironizes the kind of

the the old will mill wheel you know that these kind of um sort of tedious and and clearly inadequate sort of cosmological objects mega objects um but i think that you know that doctrine that he clearly sees as the kind of final kind of capstone of his whole thinking is because he sees that transcendental time circuitry is a is a philosophical necessity it you know has to be And the fact that then it's imaged inadequately is a kind of secondary derivative Effect

Okay, look everyone's leaving yes yeah so yeah i so i've missed the chance to say thanks to the people who've already gone but thanks to those of you who are still here uh it was great i hope i haven't rabbited on too much i've probably been a bit over over infused this was great um so so for next week i just wanted um clarify so next week uh we're still on daylight savings times so we'll should we plan on meeting an hour earlier for Shanghai. Yeah, that would be great. I'm sorry. I do apologize for that. And I will now, I now understand the whole thing and I'll be on time. Okay, sounds great. Yeah. Okay. And I'm sorry that the syllabus

is just appearing in these little bits. I'll try and stay a couple, slowly expand and get some more stuff in so we're a few more weeks ahead with that. That sounds perfect. Okay. Wait, yeah. What are we looking at next week? Well, I thought we'd look at a whole bunch of kind of spin-off spin-off left acceleration accelerationist. Okay. But I was confused as to what also which piece from Mo you were talking about. Oh, he said he was going to put it on the schoolroom. So if he hasn't, I'll make sure he does that because he promised he'd do it. I'm sure he will. Last week he said he was going to do it. If it's not there now, I'll harass him about it. Yeah. Okay.

Sounds good. All right. Have a good week, everyone. Yes, definitely. Thanks, Theodore, for keeping things on the rails. Yes, of course. If they have stayed on the rails. OK, great week, everyone. Bye. Bye.