If the end of the previous lecture was an unsatisfying cliffhanger, this is largely because accelerationism has never moved on from this moment. The questions of what is to be done have persisted. As something of a masochist, I am more inclined to find this persistence interesting rather than depressing. These are big questions, arguably the biggest political and philosophical questions of our time. That we have not yet found the correct answer to them only emphasises this fact. What is hopefully clear by now at least is that no one in the original blogosphere prophesied a trajectory towards our inevitable doom. Williams' left-landinism may have at times come close, but as Land demonstrated in his own post on horrorism, even at its most terroristic, accelerationism takes the question of what is to be done very seriously.
Most specifically, this is a question that hopes to ask, what is to be done so that we might welcome a new form of inhuman subjectivation under post-capitalism? The far-right accelerationists view this process with fear, but perhaps they also intuitively understand the dynamics of capitalism as a result. Their violent attempts at deterritorialisation are in pursuit of nothing but a hard-line re-territorialisation. They push for a race war to strengthen white supremacy. It is a radical conservatism if ever there was one, but a conservatism nonetheless. For the original accelerationists, the process of de- and re-territorialisation, at the level of politics especially, was not a goal but a starting point. How do we overcome this process? How do we resist capitalism's self-correcting tendencies? How do we negate
the negation? The far-right accelerationists have forgotten this. I'd argue they never really knew it. They simply affirm the negation like all good capitalists. They encapsulate Martin Amos's horrorism absolutely. They turn the force of capitalist stasis into a violent spectacle. they have transformed accelerationism into the very thing it hoped to critique. For what it is worth, I think the best response to the problems of accelerationism emerged even before the term came into wider usage. If we recall Deleuze's deinstitutionalised affirmations, as explored by Stephen Shaviro in response to Zizek's contrarian Marxist-Leninism, he made the point that we cannot condition the categorical imperative, otherwise we betray it absolutely. To refresh our memories, he writes this of Zizek's argument.
tendencies. Discipline, the spirit of sacrifice and the embrace of terror also function as a sort of grotesque parody of the categorical imperative, the result precisely of betraying it by institutionalising it. The issue for accelerationism is that this process of institutionalisation goes all the way down. What is the institution of the human, for instance? By placing our analysis upon the imperatives of a well-established humanism, are we not again limiting the potentials of the process? what is an imperative without limits? Is such a thing even possible or worth pursuing? It is my view that since Deludan Guattari advised that we must accelerate the process of deterritorialisation rather than withdraw from it, we have assigned too much human agency to this we, as if the propulsive teleology of such a process
were open to affectation by us at all, as if time itself was susceptible to our wills. Theirs is instead a call to enter into the process itself, to become imminent to the de-territorialising processes of immanentisation in themselves. If we are to have any hope of weathering or even influencing the process, we must first view ourselves from within the depths of things in order to fully recognise the flows that flow through, with and around us. Our task is, as Deleuze writes in Logic of Sense, only to make ourselves worthy of the process. This is the kernel of a leftist praxis that I see hard-baked into Williams' accelerationism. His horrorism was wholly co-opted by Nick Land, but if there is any bridge between their two provocative explorations, beneath all the references to Islamic terrorism, it is this.
We must make ourselves worthy of the process. In this way, Deleuze and Guattari are already, ahead of Bidou and ahead of time, considering the event of acceleration, rather than acceleration in and of itself as an object of study. The contemporary prevalence of the latter has nonetheless taken hold, arguably occasioning the very conditioning of acceleration into a dichotomy of isms on the political left and right. When we consider acceleration as an object before us, something for us as subjects to interrogate, we ignore the true perspective, which is of acceleration from within. We are in the depths of things, not across the table, rehearsing a left-right good cop-bad cop routine. This tendency towards a placing under condition
has done well to legitimise and personalise that which is inherently impersonal. In conditioning acceleration, we restrict it to a univocity which is in fact a denial of its nature. We, as actors, too often disengage acceleration from its abstract line, as if to hold it in our hands, manhandling it in such a way that it loses itself, becoming an object for us. In this way, acceleration has been manhandled as uselessly as hyperstition. Whilst this may resonate with Shaviro's pre-accelerationist musings, it is similarly a line taken by the second accelerationist blogosphere. The writings of Vincent Garton and Edmund Berger, for instance, who together formulated an accelerationist antipraxis, similarly attempted to think acceleration without condition.
Garton, for instance, made repeated attempts to rehabilitate the inhumanist bent of a speculative Buddhist philosophy, reaching out to new thought that was worthy of our present moment. Restricted to the virtues of a humanism, he writes that thought is assimilated entirely to the objective of negotiating the problems that are held to confront humanity. Philosophically, it is concerned with epistemological understanding, founded implicitly or not on the centrality of a coherent human subject. Critically, it reduces the world to the relations of power practiced by humans towards humans. Politically, it immerses itself in defining or putting into motion a better human society. Thought is rendered finally as a series of technical questions that constitute a tactical mapping of a topography whose ultimate form is placed beyond dispute.
The reality is that this ultimate form is precisely what must be disputed. Both left and right accelerationisms claim to have the ultimate perspective on the process, but the truth of the matter is that we have no perspective at all. We remain inside it whilst the process leaks out onto a new plane to which we do not have access. As such, capitalism for us is slipping away from our grasp, and so a new blogosphere hoped to think accelerationism without institutionalising its resulting imperatives. Somewhat unfortunately, and ironically, unconditional accelerationism, or UAC, has precisely become a new institution to pledge allegiance to. It is worth noting that no one who theorised UAC in the blogosphere would be silly enough to place it in their Twitter bios, reducing this attempt to reconcile politics with a new philosophy to yet another flag to wave.
Nevertheless, prior to this moment of blogospheric supremacy, Edmund Berger wrote the following on the blog Deterritorial Investigations. While left accelerationism, or right accelerationism, seek to recompose or re-territorialise Leviathan in accordance to each of their own political theologies, UAC charts a course outwards. The structures of Oedipus, the cathedral, Leviathan, what have you, will be ripped apart and decimated by forces rushing up from within and around the system, which in turn mobilise the entirety of the system towards its own dissolution point. UAC, in this sense, clearly argues that this accelerative process is decimating our socio-political allegiances. The institutions of family party state, and many more besides, are all disintegrating, but we don't need new ones to
replace them. Rather, what we need are new praxis that allow us to, for lack of a better phrase, go with the flow. As glib as this may sound, this again returns us to Shaviro's Deleuzian ethics. What is available to us, if anything, is the possibility, as Deleuze writes again in Logic of sense, of becoming the quasi-cause of what is produced within us. There remains much which is inherently outside us, but we should stop attempting to drag this outsideness under condition. All we are able to produce by doing this are surfaces and linings in which the event is reflected. In accelerating the process then, Deleuze and Guattari nod purposely back towards Nietzsche, and in light of the limits of what we are able to produce, we should remember that what is key for Deleuze and Nietzsche's thought is his amor fati, his love of fate. Fate for Nietzsche is not
our theistic destiny in the hands of God, but the affirmation of a life caught up in its own flows. It is in this way that Deleuze writes of becoming worthy of the event, of a life made impersonal. For Deleuze, a life is everywhere, in all the moments that a given living subject goes through and that are measured by given lived objects, an imminent life carrying with it the events or singularities that are merely actualised in subjects and objects. A life is that force which is outside the subjects and objects, the institutions and allegiances that we reduce our lives to. As such, this mere actualisation is inherently superficial relative to the impersonality of a life in itself,
which is to say that these actualised events or singularities are entirely different to the actualisations of the event in the depths of things which is without subject or object in its deterritorialisation. In living a life as opposed to my life privileging the imminently impersonal over the segregated and territorialisingly personal the sociality of life versus the individualism of late capitalism the task is to become worthy of what happens to us and thus to will and release the event, to become the offspring of one's own events, and thereby be reborn, to have one more birth, and to break with one's carnal birth, to become the offspring of one's events and not of one's actions, for the action is itself produced by the offspring of the event. This is, as de
Luz and Gattavis suggest, the revolutionary path, to become imminent with the acceleration that already occurs in the depths of things impersonally, without condition. In a 2011 interview with Polish magazine Kronos, Ray Brassier shared a damning appraisal of the blogosphere. Asked about his love affair with the speculative realist movement, that is, his vague association and then disavowal with its aims and goals, he showed no interest in pulling punches. He explained, I don't believe the internet is an appropriate medium for serious philosophical debate, nor do I believe it is acceptable to try to concoct a philosophical
movement online by using blogs to exploit the misguided enthusiasm of impressionable graduate students. I agree with Liddell's remarks that ultimately the most basic task of philosophy is to impede stupidity, so I see little philosophical merit in a movement whose most single achievement thus far is to have generated an online orgy of stupidity. Looking over the current state of accelerationism today, it is hard not to feel like Brassier has been largely vindicated. From the institutionalisation of Williams' left-landinism to left and right accelerationisms, to the transformation of UAC into a Twitter badge for identifying an allegiance to a philosophy wholly misunderstood, in all of its incarnations the blogosphere has seemed terminal as it struggles to resist the re-territorialising processes inherent within its own target audience.
Considering the ultimate re-territorialisation of accelerationism into its far-right mode, perhaps this infuriating process has finally proved fatal. And yet what remains clear is that for all its work in progress flailing and meandering, when viewed with the benefit of hindsight, the blogosphere is far more consistent than it is often given credit for. It has persistently attempted to address these questions of how to forestall its own capture, and even though it has failed, not once but twice, the political stakes of its questioning have only gotten more prescient. If accelerationism is to have any relevance whatsoever for a future political philosophy, it must always start again from this question of the crisis of negation. This is not just a crisis within accelerationism, but a crisis within philosophy and politics as a whole.
accelerationism and its violent irony has only served to demonstrate how disastrous this process of critique can be if it does not remain vigilant to the very process it hopes to critique this is to say that if accelerationism's greatest achievement is the generation of an online orgy of stupidity this is largely down to its own accelerative nature this philosophy's initial questions and the secondary problems attached to them have fallen wholly by the wayside thanks to a process of abstraction that the accelerationists themselves are clearly not in control of. But there is nonetheless a great consistency to be found in the blogosphere, despite its reputation to the contrary. But with a blogosphere so disparate and fast-paced, and a publishing
industry so oversimplified and slow, it is difficult to curate a middle ground where this orgy of stupidity, nothing less than capitalism's own hegemony of mediocrity, can be kept at bay. This is the problem of accelerationism, found both inside and out.