Turing-cops and cyborg cat-women
By Carl Cederström.
(https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am//wpcontent/uploads/2014/11/475218816_640.jpg)
(image above from “#accelerate”, Diann Bauer, 2014, A single screen video work produced for
the launch of #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader published by Urbanomic, 2014. The
format of the video is inspired by Spritz high speed reading technology.)
Benjamin Noys, Malign Velocities, Zero Books 2014
I’m not sure we ever got into a conversation or not, but he used to sit there,
each Friday, in the corner of the bar, reading a book, waiting for the place
to fill with the chatter of disgruntled office-workers. Actually, thinking
back more carefully, we could never have spoken, because I don’t think I
ever saw him without his headphones on.
He went by the name of Horatius, and he was a local celebrity in the
Swedish city Malmö (now immortalized by the detective television series
The Bridge). Horatius was known for one thing: Operation Turtle, which
took place in 1993. It was a politico-philosophical protest—he would
ostentatiously argue—expressed by his pulling the emergency brake on the
then relatively new fast train X2000. In the aftermath of the operation he
made a few strategic appearances on TV shows, explaining his philosophical
message: we need to slow down.
Around the same time as Operation Turtle, the philosopher Nick Land took
up a position at Warwick University. While it’s hard to capture the spirit of
Land in one sentence, perhaps it would work, as a shorthand description, to
say that he was a universe apart from Horatius. Or maybe he was like
Horatius turned inside out. An inversion of someone who, desperate to gain
media attention, would engage in a publicity stunt in order to express
platitudes about the derailing nature of a society defined by blind progress.
Land wasn’t just avoiding that sort of media attention—at the end of his
time at Warwick he’s said to have only rarely left his office—he was also
looking at speed from a radically different angle. In the face of a capitalist
train about to lose control, Land wouldn’t want the train to slow down, and
to get back on track, but to speed up, and be left to its own machinic
power.
Accelerationism—the idea that the appropriate response in the face of
capitalist deterritorialization is to speed up rather than to slow down—goes
back to Marx, and has since had a complicated conceptual history, passing
through Nietzsche, Deleuze and Guattari, Baudrillard and Lyotard before
culminating in Land. Accelerationism has an unmistakably excessive
character. There is something slightly mad about it—but no madder, one
may argue, than the world we’re up against. It is madness against madness.
Deterritorialization against deterritorialization. It is, in Land’s words, a
machinic revolution that goes against socialistic regulation, seeking ever
more marketization so that the social field can be brought down from
within.
Benjamin Noys’ new book, Malign Velocities, provides a thoughtful and
critical examination of the story of accelerationism. “To be clear from the
start”, Noys writes in the preface, “I don’t agree with this story”. One might
expect that what follows will be a frontal assault, a furious smack-down of a
long line of straw men. But Noys’ book is nothing like that. On the
contrary, much of it consists of discussions of rather irresistibly interesting
characters. One such character is the proletarian poet Aleksei Gastev, who
unreservedly celebrated speed, enthusiastically championed the immersion
of the human animal into the machine, and was eager to “plunge into the
‘whirlpool’ of a new epoch”. Despite his best efforts to be a good
communist, Gastev was disliked by those in power. He was charged with
counter-revolutionary terrorist activities, and killed. Noys nicely sums this
up, using a quote from Ustryalov: “The revolution is merciless not only
toward those who lag behind it but also those who run ahead of it”.
This register of accelerationist pundits includes many other exciting
personalities, including Victor Tausk. William Gibson, Thomas Pynchon,
and Jean-Luc Godard. Each of them is examined with nuance and care, as
figures who express different accelerationist inclinations. However, the
more radical accelerationists, including Land, are treated less favorably, and
are held accountable for two fundamental vices. The first is that they
subscribe to a quasi-Marxist idea that “the very worst will produce the
‘good'”. This, Noys argues, is a fatal misunderstanding:
Marx welcomed worker struggles to reduce the working day and
to struggle against the despotism of the factory; he did not argue
that it would be better if factory conditions got worse so workers
would be forced into revolt. The fact that history advances by the
bad side does not mean we should celebrate the ‘bad side’, but
rather recognize this is the ground on which we struggle, which
must be negated to constitute a new and just social order.
The second critique that Noys levels against accelerationists is that they
have an unfortunate tendency to confuse fantasy with the Real. Or, to be
more precise, they collapse the former into the latter. Accelerationists, Noys
says, are misguided by “a fantasy of the end of fantasy”—a dream of an
unmediated encounter with the ‘Real’, where man, as he becomes machine,
gives rise to new productive forces. The fundamental problem with this line
of reasoning, Noys goes on to argue, is that it fails to consider the extent to
which accelerationism itself is subject to libidinal fantasies.
These allegations have been made before, especially in relation to Žižek
and Badiou—both of whom have been accused of slipping into a ‘passion for
the real,’ and thus forgetting that the real should be understood as a
limitation, a reminder that we are not just incomplete in our own petty
subjectivity but that there is an irredeemable limitation at the heart of the
social.
This suspicion is justifiable, but perhaps it presents itself too readily—almost
by default—whenever the word ‘revolution’ is uttered. Nick Land’s vision of
the revolution doesn’t involve a serious examination and contestation of its
own libidinal attachments—that’s undeniably true—but such a contestation
would distort the Landian project into something very different.
It’s hard to disagree with Noys’ reservations about what he describes as
“accelerationist fantasies.” He doesn’t take any cheap shots, and presents his
critique in a tempered and sober fashion. Nonetheless, this kind of critique
disregards one of the defining features of Land’s work—namely its style; its
relentless formal experimentation, which produced a fascinating sort of
theory-fiction. Reading Land is an exhilarating experience, as his writing
doesn’t just mimic but merges with the processes it tries to describe. This
inventive style was one of Land’s two indisputable ‘heresies,’ says Robin
Mackay, co-editor of his collected writings, Fanged Noumena, published in
2011. The second heresy, Mackay continues, lay in Land’s “dedication to
thinking the real processes of Capital’s insidious takeover of the human,” and
his “admitting the laughable impotence of ‘man’ in the face of this process”.
These aspects of Land’s philosophy don’t get much attention during Noys’
otherwise perceptive examinations. We get the well-known quote where
Land remixes Deleuze and Guattari:
Machinic revolution must therefore go in the opposite direction to
socialistic regulation; pressing towards ever more uninhibited
marketization of the process that are tearing down the social field,
‘still further’ with ‘the movement of the market, of decoding and
deterritorialization’ and ‘one can never go far enough in the
direction of deterriorialization: you haven’t seen anything yet’.
This has become a mini-manifesto of accelerationism. What we don’t get
here is Land’s much more satirical vision of what comes next, when the
marketplace withers away and we step into cyberspace. This is what Land
sees: “The terminal social signal blotted out by technofuck buzz from
desiring-machines”. And he goes on, inimitably:
Suddenly it’s everywhere: a virtual envelopment by recyclones,
voodoo economics, neo-nightmares, death-trips, skin-swaps,
teraflops, Wintermute-wasted Turing-cops, sensitive silicon,
socket-head subversion, polymorphic hybridizations, descending
data-storms, and cyborg cat women stalking amongst the screens.
How should we approach these visions? To be sure, it isn’t easy to subject
them to a sober academic analysis, and that’s the mounting difficulty that
Noys must have faced and wrestled with as he was working on this book. If,
to quote Elvis Costello, “writing about music is like dancing about
architecture,” then what is it like to write about Nick Land? It’s challenging,
no doubt. About as challenging as talking sense to Turing-cops, and
persuading them that going on a death-trip might not be a good idea.
If we wish to view accelerationism as a story with a set of distinct
philosophical premises, based on the assumption that humans can be
liberated only by becoming-machine, then it’s a story that calls for
suspicion. A world defined by machinic jouissance, ‘descending data-storms’
and ‘cyborg cat-women’, is certainly not for everyone. But is the sole point
of accelerationism to present a totalitarian metanarrative, characterized by
utopian/dystopian visions of the future? When I read Land, I see something
else. I can’t help seeing the work of a satirical mind—one which invents
outrageously excessive strategies for resistance. In Post Cinematic Affect,
Steven Shaviro writes—and I would agree with this—“when we are told that
There Is No Alternative… then perhaps there is some value in the
exhaustive demonstration [of accelerationism] that what we actually have,
right here, right now, is not a viable alternative either”.
The accelerationist strategy, then, consists in demonstrating this deadlock
and introducing a sense of inevitable disruption. This is the same kind of
strategy that Adam Kotsko employs in Why We Love Sociopaths: the
problem is not that we are sociopaths, but that we are not sociopathic
enough. Another example is Ivor Southwood’s claim, in Non-Stop Inertia,
that we should not disconnect ourselves from the rituals of the workplace
but instead act them out, fully and with no discernible distance, so that their
untenable nature is exposed. Such strategies acknowledge our laughable
impotence in the face of capital’s takeover, and respond with increased
impotence. If we are told to be sociopaths, then we will be furiously
sociopathic.
I have much more sympathy for these strategies than Noys does. For him,
accelerationism is not just a strategy for resistance. It is an ideological
fantasy of misery and nostalgia—one which refuses to let go of its libidinal
attachment.
This fantasy must be resisted, and as the book draws to an end, Noys begins
sketching an alternative. What we need, he says, is a new political sensibility
that breaks with fantasies of the Real. The hero of this story is Walter
Benjamin. In his essay ‘On the Concept of History’, Benjamin invokes the
figure of the emergency brake—although not the same kind of brake that
Horatius pulled. Horatius was a forerunner of the ideology of the slow,
arguing that we need to calm down, become mindful, spend more time in
cafes, grow organic vegetables and cultivate our culinary senses. (For the
Swedish election in 1998 Horatius even launched Bakpartiet, a political party
that was fighting technological progress by immersing themselves in
baking). Needless to say, Benjamin’s emergency brake has a rather different
meaning. Instead of nostalgically trying to invoke a bygone era, he used the
brake as a figure of interruption. This gave way to a form of interruptive
politics that remained attentive to productive forces, and particularly wary,
Noys adds, of those forces “that have gone off the rails”. So we should not
speed up, and accelerate into destruction. But neither should we simply stop
the train and bake cupcakes (we’re all familiar with the spread of “cupcake
fascism”). Instead, Noys suggests, we should jump the tracks, in the name of
the new. Exactly what “the new” would look like is unclear but one place to
start, he suggests, is with the “struggle for decommodification of our lives”.
These suggestions sound reasonably plausible to me. I agree that there
might be better ways to respond to the ‘horror of work’ than with the
‘jouissance of machinic desire’. But Noys only tentatively points towards a
way forward, suggesting, for example, that the “struggles over the state and
condition of labor… have to be fought now”. This is less a book about
alternatives to accelerationism, more an attempt at tracing and exposing its
fantasmatic core.
Malign Velocities works well as a critical introduction to accelerationism, and
is a perfect complement to Mackay and Avanessian’s #Accelerate: The
Accelerationist Reader. It deftly combines academic erudition with a
journalistic eye for unexpected details. Accelerationism is not immune from
criticism, and Noys’ book is a helpful reminder of that. Still, approaching
accelerationism from an academic perspective is problematic. In particular,
treating Land’s theories from this standpoint risks overshadowing what we
may call his method. “Theory”, Mark Fisher perceptively writes about
Land’s approach to philosophy, “wasn’t being ‘applied’ here; it was being
plugged in”. As a result, the academic voice was displaced and the homeland
of thought blown to pieces.
The work of Nick Land and Sadie Plant at the Cybernetic Culture Research
Unit (CCRU), was conceived against academia. Simon Reynolds describes
CCRU as a rogue unit, “the academic equivalent of Kurtz: the general in
Apocalypse Now who used unorthodox methods to achieve superior results
compared with the tradition-bound US military.” It was perhaps no surprise
that the philosophy department at Warwick pushed Land out in the late
1990s. His work was an assault on self-serving academics, who Mark Fisher
fittingly calls “careerist sandbaggers”. That isn’t simply an incidental detail;
it’s a crucial contextual factor. What Land was part of inventing in the
1990s, and what his followers continued to act out in various contexts,
should not be reduced to a libidinally confused and miserable group of
postgraduates trapped in wild machinic dreams of overthrowing capitalism.
It’s also an intensely imaginative para-academic movement, a fascinating
reaction to the professionalization of higher education, a wild force that
ceaselessly pushed the limits of thought. Sadly, Land’s recent flirtation with
the neo-reactionary work of Mencius Moldbug has made these insights,
which are as relevant today as they were then, in the 1990s, all the more
difficult to discern.
(https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am//wpcontent/uploads/2014/10/unnamed.gif)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Carl Cederström
(http://www.carlcederstrom.com/Carl_Cederstrom/Welcome.html) is
Assistant Professor at Stockholm University, and co-author of Dead Man
Working (Zero Books) and The Wellness Syndrome (Polity Press).
November 4, 2014(https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/2014/11/04/)
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