Okay, politics, writes Nick Land in a 1992 essay entitled Circuitries, is obsolete. This is one of the central thematic strands running throughout his brief corpus. Politics is not simply absurd, but archaic, a human nicety which history, and on his account the history of techno-capitalism in particular, has rendered ever increasingly irrelevant. Politics, he continues, is the last great sentimental indulgence of mankind. For a continental philosopher this seems a curious statement. So habituated are we to the co-mingling and determination of the ontological by political priorities and by the supremacy of various subspecies of Marxism, of paper politics of high piety, a textual struggle to maintain moral capital in a competitive academic ecosystem.
It also puts us perhaps on our mettle, understandably so. We might worry that this is to be perhaps another tired, cynical liberal in the mould of John Grey, for whom politics is to be abjured for the very reasons of its disasters. But I think nothing could be further from the case. I want to deal with the question of accelerationism and politics in two ways. Firstly, I will examine what capitalism actually signifies for that, and how, when coupled with the notion of acceleration, results in a series of near-terminal paradoxes. Secondly, I'll take a rather different and more substantially speculative approach and look to resolve some of the antinomies of Landian accelerationism in a political register. In part, here I will seek to invert the work of post-autonomist political economist Massimo DeAngelis,
The pivoting point between these ostensibly divergent treatments is in the notion of affordance or economical binding, as outlined by Reza Negrostani. In the preface to Land's Thirst for Annihilation, he delineates an eerily prescient manifesto for the future of philosophy. Though he believes this system of thought to go by the name of libidinal materialism, to our contemporary eyes it strongly foreshadows what has come to be known as spective realism. for land the singular criterion of taste as he puts it in philosophy is to avoid the vulgarity of anthropomorphism hence nature must be dehumanized and the human personality itself is deemed to be little more than the excrement of matter a ruthless fatalism rules with no room for decisions responsibilities actions intentions and as a result rules out the very possibility of
morality, ethics and politics. This position is admitted to be above all massively irresponsible, which is impossible to ever actually occupy fully, and that can only be suffered as an abomination, a nauseating rage of thought, which ruins the minds of those who think it and reduces them to husks. Capitalism is the name under which Land thinks this ruinous erasure of the subjective. Capitalism, as Land defines it, is, quote, not a totalisable system defined by the commodity form as a specifiable mode of production to be determinately negated by a proletarian class consciousness. Instead, it is a convergent, unlocalizable assault upon the social, whose symptom is the collapse of the productive mode or form in the direction of ever more incomprehensible
experiments in commodification, enveloping, dismantling and circulating every subjective space. Moreover, capital is not an essence, but rather a tendency, the formula of which is the progressive subordination of social reproduction to technocommercial replication. Capital in this sense is only by dint of its contingent origins based upon a productive accumulative matrix. As tendency rather than substance its true nature resides in its vector, a poem where it's heading towards, which for land is always in the direction of ever more inexplicable experiments in commodification and crisis. Such a concept of commodification is implicitly, rather obviously, opposed to the Marxian one and can be seen to be more clearly expressed in the form of the concatenations of contemporary finance than the so-called productive economy. Capital,
Land clarifies, only retains anthropological characteristics as a symptom of underdevelopment. As he puts it, it reformats primate behaviour as inertia to be dissipated in self-reinforcing artificiality. Man is something for it to overcome, a problem, a drag. What can only temporarily be achieved in thought within the form of philosophy can be achieved in fact through this movement, a form of anti-subjectivation simultaneous with the expansion of an alien mode of intelligence. Land's accelerative notion of capitalism effectively stands in for an only partially successful philosophically mediated death drive. Okay, so I now want to sort of clarify land's position um to clarify his position we might profitably compare him to a greatly more
popular pulp proponent of capitalism ayn rand who's already been mentioned by alex rand the gruesome favorite of american right-wing youth is principally an apologist for capitalism and indeed a moralist albeit a highly distasteful one rooted in a crude pseudo nietzschean egoism capitalism for ayn rand is essentially moral construct which must be rendered as laissez fair as possible so as to better reward those who, in her misguided view, create wealth. Hers is a worldview which is ultimately unremittingly humanistic, though of the most sour sort, and ruled by a twisted kind of morality. Land differs, since he abjures morality in favour of utter fatalism, the naturalistic is instead of the hectoring ought. Moreover, he is clearly not
an apologist for capitalism, since his conception of it offers nothing intelligible to an anthropocentric agenda, bar the thrill, perhaps, of a technologically mediated extinction. Indeed, this very lack of apology is what makes him both fascinating and indigestible. Further, Landian accelerationism, in spite of its neoliberal facade, is entirely hostile to any kind of methodological individualism, since in his sense capitalism is the logic of subsumption of human-centred reality, in the name of the ultimate erasure of the very conditions of individualism itself, an autonomous human subjectivity. Strangely then, Land must be considered as an explicitly post-Marxist thinker. We perhaps get to somewhere a bit like Land's position if we follow Marx but remove the proletariat as the subject of history, leaving only capital as the non or alien subject
and humanity as a kind of mere excrescence. Is subjectivity a sick cosmic joke? Crucially, Land refuses to render capital into a correlational positivity, or in other words to adopt a more conventionally neoliberal ideological position which would be contend at least minimally that an expansion of lightly regulated markets creates economic growth and associated rises in gross domestic product per capita or else perhaps even more minimally still that it at least benefits some persons albeit a vanishingly small class of financial capitalists. Instead, Lamb maintains the fully gothic Marxian imaging of capital as self-augmenting vampiric force but perversely advises us to side with the vampire against its victim ourselves in a curious form of suicidal Stockholm syndrome. Capitalism he clarifies is a headlong lurch into
the abyss and humanity a petrified fiction hiding from zero. Land's capital is as much a stand-in for the self-realisation of cosmic ruination that is only partially possible through philosophical channels as it is a political economic conceptualisation. The emphasis on desubjectivation, hinting at the horrifying neurophilosophy of illimitivist materialism, intent on unveiling the reality of selfhood as a sham. Okay, so the central paradoxes of Land's thought are twofold. Firstly, his vision of capitalism and human intelligence is demonstrably a fantastical one. The actually existing nature of what we term capitalism would seem to consist of a variety of nested anti-markets run as oligopoly by a series of corporations deeply imbricated with state support
and fighting a declining marginal profitability with a combination of outsourced semi-slavery and readily available credit. These socio-economic systems serve very clearly to advance what Deleuze and Guattari would surely describe as an oedipolising cultural agenda where every radical break with the past is hamstrung with a childish re-territorialisation which endlessly shores up our imperiled notion of individualistic subjectivity. a highly curious absence from land's writing is any serious consideration of the corporation as a part of capitalism uh the corporation is obviously a very real inhuman agent um acting as a definite blockage as much as any human to the kind of annihilative accelerationism that land would envisage um inhuman but self-preserving at all costs um and constitutionally so moreover as
Mark Fisher has ably demonstrated, a landy infiguration of capitalism as liberatory but apocalyptic engine is undercut by the everyday expansion of bureaucracy, where rather than any form of self-organising post-human intelligence, we find a misfiring attempt at cybernetic control and a vast expansion of authoritarian bureaucratic managerialism. Capitalism as it stands, it would seem, remains all too human. Secondly, the disembowelment of politics leaves no way of moving from the reality of actually existing capitalism towards his dreamed of accelerated force. Indeed, it necessitates a form of politics, of human action at least, to restructure these blockages which restrict its force, which is in a sense a slight return to Marx to the extent of requiring human activity to work towards a kind of subjective auto-erasure. But how can this
politics be made to be coherent with the criterion of taste, which he delineates towards an unremitting anti-anthropomorphism. This is a question whose resonance extends far beyond the interpretation of Nick Land's work. Raisa Negrostani and Ray Brasir both emerged strongly influenced by Land's conceptualisation of speculative possibilities for thought opened up by accelerationism. Brasir, through a very different set of philosophical reference points, emphasises more strongly the naturalistic implications, or perhaps we should rather say in reverse the nihilistic implications of a thoroughgoing naturalism, whilst refusing an obvious political or economic instantiation. Negristani in turn seeks to criticise both land and brosir. On his account, respective opportunities opened up in the wake of cosmic extinction, of subjects, of life,
perhaps of all matter, are limited by the energetic frame of reference in which it's couched. Negristani's argument, such as I understand it, runs that if such openings for thought, where the thinkability of the great outside appears only in the form of a binding of death, only in the form of a binding of death then the limits imposed on such a binding by a restricted economy in terms of the economical affordability of such an extinction limit the possibility of thought itself, limit the possibility of it binding death in other ways. It's always determined by the limited horizon of interiority. So in preference to what he terms, what Negrostani terms the enchanted figures of technology
stroke capitalism for land and science stroke philosophy for Brasir which work to strategically operationalise the outside with an ultimately affordable economical theoretical regime, Negrostani tries to, or he points towards, gestures towards instead alternative models which he states are ways by which exteriority breaks and enters into the interiorised horizon on its own terms. As apart from any regime of affordability, these generate their own fields of complicity, mobilising their contingencies through the intricate topologies that they simultaneously occasion and degenerate. I believe it is here that politics can be brought to re-enter the Landin notion of accelerationism, in terms of a theory of what might be termed perhaps left-Landinism or political accelerationism. Here's where I become slightly more speculative.
So what is to be accelerated? The question of what is to be accelerated is the correct question to ask of accelerationism. Thought in the abstract, accelerationism as a diagram is no different from dialectics. It's simply a mechanism which can be theoretically applied to anything. I think, as kind of Nick has partly talked about but not quite the same extent, that the answer is commodification, which is the thing which is to be accelerated. To some extent, this is already a part of the underlying logic of actually existing capitalist processes. However, such processes are always partial. I think we have to crucially rule out the kind of assessment of economic modernity as being one wherein something called capital has entirely subsumed all of reality.
This is important since it is the very partial or asymmetrical nature of commodification that effectively operates as a kind of life support system for capitalistic systems and processes. The post-autonomist thinker, Massimo de Angelis, has written extremely eloquently in his book The Beginning of History on the competing array of divergent value practices which necessarily exist besides those associated with capitalism the most important of these being the world of unwaged work which supports wage work Another instance of such asymmetrical commodification would be the ability of certain outputs to be priced via markets for example the products of a factory while some of the other outputs such as pollution are not. Both production and accumulation by dispossession operate at least to some extent under a logic of
being able to externalize costs be they inputs or outputs. By commodity here I do not mean to imply the market's understanding of ossified and alienated dead labor but rather an interoperable reified fragment of the real capable of receiving a price and hence of being traded. The important remedy to Landianism must be that markets and capitalistic processes are creatures which at least for now are amenable to human intervention, to the extent that it is political juridical activity which determines what counts as commodity, i.e. what can be given a price and hence can be traded. It is precisely the control of market techno-economic dynamics by limited numbers of elite interests which puts a block on the kind of technological and economic accelerations which Lann's notion of capitalism stands in for. If one genuinely accounts for value and cost, which are
properly metaphysical and political questions, then the system which we describe by the noun capitalism today, as Nick has partly talked about, will to some extent cease to exist. What is phrased here in economic terms is, of course, a political struggle. Only a genuine kind of ecosophical conception would be capable of this task, one capable of commodifying and rendering tradable everything, including human neuroses, crack addiction, teenage pregnancy rates, collapsing social welfare systems. Such a form of what might be termed post-capitalism would entail a genuine transition, i.e. development from capitalism at its most extreme, i.e. most extreme and deterritorialised, i.e. not the restricted and humanistic form of present. A system capable of fragmenting the life world into a billion pieces, a shattering of the false totalities of organic, inverted commas, nature, to make the world a broken place of
fragments. A place where even the self itself can be necessarily broken apart and made tradable. It is this form of assault upon the conventional structuration of the social and the experimental development of alien processes of commodification which best matches political activity to what might be called a Landian accelerationism. Of course this opens up the question of who or what is to act. For Land he abjures what we would consider to be the very conditions for political activity. in the post in the strong post-Sartrean register which currently seems to rule the world of continental understandings of politics the subject acts as something like a cut in the world self
initiating rational starting point from which radical transformations can be enacted here negativity codes for resistance or refusal as ontological ground of antagonism and the core of the return of politics. But such a model is obviously completely out of place with the Landian notion of virulent anti-anthropomorphism. And we're over, we could say, an egregious example of folk psychology. And this is the final piece of the puzzle which I'm attempting to resolve. But I think that in the same sense that Land thinks about capitalism as a kind of puppetry of humans by inhuman, and impersonal processes, I think that we can perhaps make the leap towards thinking about
politics in the same sense. There is no necessary reason by which an inhuman politics cannot operate outside of a strictly anthropomorphic logic, even though it is built, just as capitalism is built, out of moving parts which are themselves human. Already our everyday political reality is partly determined bi-political networks which exceed not just our understanding but our ability to even readily conceptualize them in the kinds of categories which more traditional emancipatory politics holds dear. So I guess this is the point where my work is at the moment and this is where I guess we can kind of work to consider politics in an inhuman or anti-anthropomorphic conception in two ways, which Graham Hum would call overmining and undermining of the, in this case, the human subject.
So we can, on the one hand, we can look downwards towards sub-personal processes, but we can also look outwards towards complex interlocking networks of interaction and activity emerging across complex assemblages. perhaps the solution from this sort of Landian perspective Landian point of view to such an impact can come in considering politics itself outside of its correlational structure and also necessarily outside of any strategic necessities simply because the political is made of a material of humans at least in part need not mean it is necessarily a purely correlational affair I think this is the point which land raises and which Negrostani aggravates almost to the point of
incomprehensibility which is this idea which is this idea of if you want to begin to think outside the anthropomorphic form or outside any kind of human frame of reference then to what extent can you still engage in an approach based around strategy, based around ends that make any sense to humans at all. And I think that you probably and necessarily cannot.