The revolutionary path, or what came after revolution, or a new kind of strategy, would be to somehow accelerate capitalism to the point where it kind of went beyond itself. this got revisited this moment in a sort of equally forgotten period in the 90s in UK philosophy in a moment that is almost entirely forgotten now which is in particular associated with the work of Nick Land his name has really disappeared in lots of ways from awareness
even though his influence is very high his influence on people like myself and Ray and beyond sort of theory also in cultural production by Steve Goodman aka Code 9 there's a number of reasons why Nick's work got lost and that's part of what we can talk about today but yeah okay so that's just the brief overview the first panel will consist with me and I'll go straight over to
Ray Brassier and after the two of us have spoken we'll open it up to a discussion Okay, so this is called Terminator vs. Albert Einstein. Why political intellectuals do you incline towards the proletariat? In commiseration for what? I realise that a proletarian would hate you. You have no hatred because you are bourgeois, privileged, smooth-skinned types. But also because you dare not say that the only important thing that there is to say,
that one can enjoy swallowing the shit of capital, its materials, its metal bars, its polystyrene, its books, its sausage pâtés. The sausage pâtés are crucial. Swallowing tons of it till you burst. And because instead of saying this, you lean forward and divulge, ah, but that's alienation. It isn't pretty. Hang on, we'll save you from it. We will work to liberate you from this wicked affection for servitude. We will give you dignity. And in this way, you situate yourself on the most despicable side, the moralistic side, where you desire that a capitalised desire be totally ignored. You, you have to tell yourselves.
How they must suffer to endure that. and of course we suffer, we the capitalised but this doesn't mean that we don't enjoy nor that what you think you can offer us as a remedy for what does not disgust us even more we abhor therapeutics and it's Vaseline we prefer to burst under the quantitative excesses that you judge the most stupid and don't wait for our spontaneity to rise up in revolt either In his introduction to his 1994 translation of Lyotard's Le Vigdon economy, from which the above extraordinary outburst comes, Ian Hamilton Grant referred to a certain maturity of contemporary wisdom. According to this maturity, Grant observed, economy Le Vigdon
now was a minor and short-lived explosion of a somewhat naive anti-philosophical expressionism, an aestheticising trend hung over from a renewed interest in Nietzsche, prevalent in the late 1960s. Grant groups Lyotard's book with three others, Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus, Looser Rigorised Speculum of the Other Woman, and Baudrill's Symbolic Exchange and Death, which came out just before it and just after. Le Bidon economy has in general drawn little critical response, Grant continued, save losing Lyotard many Marxist friends. Indeed, with a few exceptions, it is now only Lieta himself who occasionally refers to the book, the poor new scornment, calling it his evil book, the book that everyone writing
and thinking is tempted to do. This lies in your mind the case, I think, until Ben's persistence of the negative, which which positioned Leviton economy and Antioedipus, despite what he called the accelerationist moment. A couple of quotes from these two texts immediately give the flavour of the accelerationist gambit. From Antioedipus. But which is the revolutionary path? Is there one? To withdraw from the world market, as Samir Amin advised third world countries to do, in a curious revival of the fascist economic solution? Might it be to go in the other direction, to go further still, that is, in the movement
of the market, decoding and deterritorialisation? For perhaps the flows are not yet deterritorialised enough, not decoded enough, from the viewpoint of a theory and a practice of a highly schizophrenic character. Not to withdraw from the process, but to go further, to accelerate the process, as Nietzsche put it. In this manner, the truth is that we haven't seen any of what. And from the Beaton Economy, the one passage from the text that was remembered in the intervening period, if only for us to know to write the team. The English unemployed did not have to become workers to survive. They, hang on tight and spit on me, enjoyed the hysterical, masochistic, whatever exhaustion it was, of hanging on in the mines, in the foundries, in the factories, in hell.
They enjoyed it. enjoyed the mad destruction of their organic body which was indeed imposed upon them. They enjoyed the decomposition of their personal identity, the identity that the peasant tradition had constructed for them. Enjoyed the dissolutions of their families and villages and enjoyed the new monstrous anonymity of the suburbs and the pubs in morning and evening. Well, Spitz and Leotard certainly did. But in what does the alleged scandalous nature of this passage reside? hands up who wants to give up their anonymous suburbs and pubs and return to the organic mud of the peasantry hands up that is to say all those who really want to return to pre-capitalist territorialities and friends and villages hands up furthermore those who really believe that these
desires for restored so-called organic wholeness are extrinsic to late capitalist culture rather and fully incorporated components of its sub-edital infrastructure. Hollywood itself tells us that we may appear to be always on technomatics, hooked on cyberspace, but inside our true selves we are primitives, organically linked to the mother planet and victimised by the military industrial complex. This is the story of Avatar, which is significant because it highlights the disavowal but is constitutive of late capitalist subjectivity even as it shows how this disavowal is undercut. We can only play it being in a primitives by virtue of the very cinematic proto-VR
technology whose very existence presupposes the destruction of the organic ideal of Pandora. And if there is no desire to go back except as a cheap Hollywood holiday in other people's misery, if as Lyotard argues, there are no primitive societies. Yes, the Terminator was there from the start distributing microchips to accelerate its advance. This event... If it isn't all of this, then isn't the only direction forward, through the shit of capital, metal bars, polystyrene, sausage pâtés, and cyberspace matrix. So briefly, I just want to make three claims that I can't really defend but maybe we'll
get into in the discussion. One, everyone's an accelerationist, really. Two, accelerationism has never really happened as a political position. Three, Marxism is nothing if it is not accelerationist. Of the texts, the 70s text that Grant mentions in his sort of roundup, the vegan economy was in some respects the most crucial thing. if in a way more subterranean, with the 90s UK cyber theory. It wasn't just the content, but the intemperate tone of Libyan economy, which is significant here. Here we might recall Zizek's remarks on Nietzsche. The love of content, Nietzsche's philosophy, is now eminently assimilable, but is the style, the effective, of which we cannot imagine a contemporary equivalent,
at least not one that is solemnly debated in the academy. Both Ian Grant and Ben follow the attack in describing libidinal economy as a work of affirmation, but rather like Nietzsche's texts, libidinal economy habitually defers its moments of affirmation, engaging for much of the text in a series of ostensibly parenthetical hatreds. He's always going to get to his moments of affirming, but actually he's going to hate something first. And actually what I'm saying is the hatred is the interesting thing about it. The affirmation is boring. While Anti-Oedipus remains in many ways a text of the late 60s, Libidian economy anticipates the punk 70s and draws upon the 60s that punk retrospectively projected. Not far beneath Lyotard's desire drunk yes lies the no of hatred, anger and frustration.
No satisfaction, no fun, no future. It is these results of negativity that I believe the left must make contact with again. But I think crucial to that is to really reverse the emphasis that came out of that 70s moment, where the emphasis seems to be on politics as a means to greater libido intensity. I think the question of libido for politics must now be instrumental. How do we generate the libido that's going to get us towards our political goals, rather than the other way around? If the medieval economy was repudiated, but more often ignored, the 90s theoretical moment to which Grant's own translation contributed has fared even worse. Despite his current reputation as a founder of speculative realism, Grant's in century
90s texts, sublime cyborg surgeries suturing Blade Runner with Kant, Marx and Freud, have all disappeared from circulation. The work of Grant's one-time mentor Nick Land does not even draw derisive comments. Like the libidinal economy, it too has drawn little critical response, and Land, to say the least, had no Marxist friends to lose. Hatred for the academic left was in fact one of the libidinal motors of Land's work. This is a quote from Machinic Desire, which is in the Erbenon collection. revolution must therefore go in the opposite direction, to socialistic regulation, pressing towards ever more uninhibited marketisation of the processes that are tearing down the
social field. Still further with the movement of the market of decoding and deterritorialisation. And one can never go far enough in the direction of deterritorialisation, you haven't seen anything yet. You notice that embedded into that some of the quotes from Anti-Odipus. Land was our nature, with the same baiting of the so-called progressive tendencies, the same bizarre mixture of the reactionary and the futuristic, and a writing style that updates 19th century aphorisms into what Kojo Eshan called texts at sample velocity. Speed in the abstract and the chemical sense was crucial here. Telegraphic tech-punk provocations replacing the conspicuous cogitation of so much post-structurist continentalism, with its implication that the more laborious and agonised the writing, the more thought there must be going on.
Whatever the merits of Land's other theoretical provocations, and I'll suggest there's a very serious problem with it, and I know Ray and Alex will also be looking at some of these problems quite closely. Land's withering assaults on the academic left, or the emborghossified state-subsidised grumbling, that so often calls itself academic Marxism, remains trenchant. The unwritten rule of these careerist sandbaggers, to use Graham Harmon's wonderful phrase, is that no one seriously expects any renunciation of bourgeois subjectivity to ever happen. No one seriously expects it at all. Pastor Merlot, I've got careers worth of quibbling critique to get through. So, you know, we see ruthless protection of petty bourgeois interests dressed up as politics. Instead of this, Lann took seriously to the point of psychosis and auto-induced schizophrenia
– the Spinoza-Nietzian-Marxist injunction that a theory cannot be serious if it remains the level of representation. What then is Lann's philosophy about? In a nutshell, Deleuze and Guattari's machining desire remorselessly stripped of all Bergstorian vitalism, and made backwards compatible with Freud's death drive and Schopenhauer's will. The Hegelian Marxist motor of history is then transplanted into this postional nihilism. The idiot autonomic will, not now idiotically circulating on the spot, but upgraded into a drive, which is guided by a quasi-teleological artificial intelligence attractor that draws tell your terrestrial history over a series of intensive thresholds, which have no eschatological
point of consummation, and which reach empirical termination only contingently if and when its material substrate burns out. Hegelo-Marxist historical materialism inverted, capital not ultimately be unmasked as exploited labour power, rather humans are the meat puppet of identities and self-understanding simulations which can ultimately be sloughed off. And two more text samples establish this narrative. From Meltdown first, Emergent planetary commercium trashes the Holy Roman Empire, the Napoleonic Continental System, the Second and Third Reich, and the Soviet International, cranking up world disorder through compressing phases. Deregulation and the state arms race each other into cyberspace.
Second quote from Circuitries, It is ceasing to be a matter of how we think about techniques only because techniques is increasingly thinking about itself. It might still be a few decades before artificial intelligence surpasses the horizon of biological ones, but it's utterly superstitious to imagine that the human dominion of terrestrial culture is still marked in centuries, let alone in some metaphysical perpetuity. The high road to thinking no longer passes through a deepening of human cognition, but rather through a becoming inhuman of cognition, a migration of cognition out into the emerging planetary technoscience reservoir, into dehumanised landscapes and emptied spaces, where human culture will be dissolved. You might know some of the pre-echoes of speculative realism.
This is quite deliberately theory of cyberpunk fiction. Donof Qatari's concept of capitalism as the virtual, unnameable thing that haunts all previous social formations pulp welded to the time-bending of the Terminator films what happens to humanity land rights and machinic desire as the history of capitalism what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligence space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy's resources capital as mega-death drive as Terminator. That which can't be bargained with, can't be reasoned with, doesn't show pity or remorse or fear and absolutely will not stop ever. Lamb's piratings of Terminator, Blade Runner
and the Predator films made his text part of a kind of convergent tendency. An accelerationist 90s cyber culture in which digital sonic production disclosed an inhuman future that was to be relished rather than abominated. Land's machinic poetry paralleled the digital intensities of 90s jungle techno and doomcore, which sampled from exactly the same cinematic sources, and also anticipated impending human extinction becoming accessible as a dance floor. What has this to do with the left? Well, for one thing, Land, I would argue, is the kind of antagonist the left needs. If Land's cyberfuturism can seem out of date, we're only in the same sense that all the jungle and techno are out of date, not because they've been superseded by new
futurisms, but because the future as such has succumbed to retrospection. The actual near future wasn't about capital stripping off its latex mask, revealing the machine death's head beneath. It was just the opposite. New sincerity, Apple computers advertised by kitschy juicy pop. And this failure to foresee the extent to which pastiche recapitulation and a hyper-edipalised neurotic individualism would become the dominant cultural tendencies of the last decade is not a contingent error. It points to a fundamental misjudgment about the dynamics of capitalism and its relationship to culture. While Land's cyber-gothic remix of Deleuze and Quesari is in many ways superior to the original, its deviation from their understanding of capitalism is fatal.
Land collapsed its capitalism into what the Erzengasawi call schizophrenia, thus losing their most crucial insight into the way that capitalism operates by simultaneous processes of deterritorialisation and immediate compensatory re-territorialisation. So therefore capital's human face is not something that it can eventually set aside an optional component or sheet cocoon with which it can ultimately dispense. the abstract processes of decoding that capitalism sets up must be contained by improvised archaisms lest capitalism cease being capital similarly markets may or may not be the self-organising meshworks described by Fernand Brodel and Manuel Valander
but what is certain is that capitalism is an anti-market dominated by quasi-monopolies such as Microsoft and Walmart Bill Gates promises business at the speed of thought, but what capitalism delivers is thought at the speed of business. A simulation of innovation and newness covering over inertia and status. It's just these reasons that accelerationism can function as an anti-capitalist strategy. Not the only anti-capitalist strategy, other anti-capitalist strategies are available as it were, but a strategy that must be part of any political program that calls itself Marx. And here's why I sort of disagree with some of Ben's screwing of accelerationism.
The fact that capitalism tends towards stagflation, that growth is in many respects illusory, is all the more reason that accelerationism can function in what Alex Williams characterises as a terroristic way. What we are not talking about here is the kind of intensification of exploitation that a knee-jerk socialist humanism might imagine when the spectrum of accelerationism is invoked. As Lyotard suggests, the left subsiding into a moral critique of capitalism is a hopeless betrayal of the anti-identitarian futurism which Marxism must stand for if it is to mean anything at all. What we need is Frederick Jameson, the author of Walmart as you take it. And a kind of nuanced accelerationist, I would argue,
remember, argues, is that we need a new kind of beyond good and evil. And this, Jameson writes, is to be found in none other than the Communist Manifesto. The Manifesto, Jameson argues, proposes to see capitalism as the most productive moment of history and the most destructive at the same time, and issues the imperative to think good and evil simultaneously, and as inseparable and inextricable dimensions of the same present of time. This has been a more productive way of transcending good and evil than the cynicism and lawlessness which so many readers attribute to the Nietzsche programme. Capitalism has abandoned the future because it can't deliver it. Nevertheless, if the left is continually locked into a tendency towards Canutism, towards a
rhetoric of resistance and obstruction, this colludes with Capitals' anti-meta-narrative that it is the only story left standing. It's time to leave behind the logics of failed revolts and think ahead again.