Crash and Burn:
Debating Accelerationism
Alexander Galloway in conversation with Benjamin Noys.
(https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am//crash-and-burn-debatingaccelerationism/malign-velocities-cover-3/)
Cover image of Malign Velocities, courtesy of Dean Kenning
Accelerationism emerged as the latest theoretical trend with the publication of Nick
Srnicek and Alex Williams’ #Accelerate Manifesto for an Accelerationist
Politics (http://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/05/14/accelerate-manifestofor-an-accelerationist-politics/) in 2013. The book was quickly translated into
at least seventeen languages, including German, French, Portuguese, Russian,
Turkish and Korean. In 2014 came the publication of #Accelerate: The
Accelerationist Reader (http://www.urbanomic.com/pub_accelerate.php),
edited by Robin Mackay and Arman Avanessian, and during this period a series of
public events, seminars and discussions on accelerationism took place, including in
Paris, New York, Berlin and London. This appropriately accelerated discussion has
often taken place in relation to the art world, including a special issue of the
journal e-flux (http://www.e-flux.com/issues/46-june-2013/), and has been
characterized by heated polemic.
This interview brings together one of the leading critics of accelerationism,
Benjamin Noys, who coined the concept as an object of criticism and has just
published his critique Malign Velocities (http://www.zerobooks.net/books/malign-velocities) (Zero, 2014), with Alexander R.
Galloway, an author and programmer working on media theory and contemporary
French philosophy. In the discussion they explore the battles over the definition of
accelerationism, the role of the negative, questions of abstraction, and the appeal and
perils of fantasies of acceleration. The interview was conducted by email and in
person between 23 October 2014 and 3 November 2014.
AG: You have a new book titled Malign Velocities: Accelerationism &
Capitalism (http://www.zero-books.net/books/malign-velocities). This is an
occasion to celebrate, in any event. And I wonder, even in the spirit of
recapitulation, if you might simply define “accelerationism” for us and
explain why you decided to return to this concept from your previous book,
only now as an “enemy”?
BN: One of the difficult issues in discussing “accelerationism” is that so
much of the debate has turned on what exactly that term means. I would say
in light of the most recent articulations a simple one-line definition might
be: “Accelerationism is the engagement and reworking of forces of
abstraction and reason to punch through the limits of an inertial and
stagnant capitalism.” Whereas previously much of what I called
“accelerationism”, especially in the early 1970s work of Gilles Deleuze and F
élix Guattari, Jean-François Lyotard, and Jean Baudrillard, involved a
qualified playing with the “accelerated” forces of capitalist production, the
current forms stress the need to find new forces that can act against a
capitalism that no longer seems to deliver on the “promise” of acceleration.
The key figure here is Nick Land
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Land), once an academic at the
University of Warwick and now a journalist in China. Land’s work in the
1990s provided the most extreme statement of an endorsement of capitalism,
or tendencies in capitalism, as mechanisms of acceleration and
disintegration. In many ways contemporary accelerationism defines itself
against Land, although he still exerts a certain fascination. His recent interest
in neo-reactionary thought (http://www.thedarkenlightenment.com/thedark-enlightenment-by-nick-land/) makes this fascination problematic, to
put it mildly.
(https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am//crash-and-burn-debatingaccelerationism/roger_zelazny_lord_of_light_panther/)
In terms of my new book I should say I have always been highly skeptical
about “accelerationist” strategies, of whatever variety. It was the fact that
what I had coined as a term of criticism – although I later found the word
occurs in Roger Zelazny’s 1967 novel Lord of Light
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_of_Light), which I had read – was now
being celebrated that was one of the drivers for the new book. The return of
interest in strategies of acceleration at a time of capitalist crisis is not
surprising, especially when that crisis is taking a long-drawn out and often
highly uneven form. In the face of calls for austerity, which almost always
fall on the victims of the crisis, signaled in the popularity of the “Keep Calm
and Carry On (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keep_Calm_and_Carry_On)”
meme in the UK, a counter-reaction is obvious. While I share the hostility
to demands for sacrifice and austerity I think that accelerationist strategies
too often feedback into a desire for a return to a, supposedly, productive
capitalism. This is what I have called “capitalist Ostalgie.” If “Ostalgie
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostalgie)” was nostalgia for the lived
experience of “actually-existing socialism”, capitalist Ostalgie is a nostalgia
for the images of capitalist dynamism, especially that of the new
technologies during the 1990s.
(https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am//crash-and-burn-debatingaccelerationism/keep-calm-and-accelerate-10/)
AG: Today’s intellectual current seems to be forking in two distinct
directions. The dominant fork is, as you suggest, a kind of technophilic,
network affirmationism. But there is an alternative path evident in some of
your writings, a path that leads through the negative. Curiously, that
erstwhile paragon of progressive theory, Gilles Deleuze, appears now as
something of a villain. I recall you use the term “Deleuzian Thatcherism” at
a certain point. Can you describe your interest in the negative? Why are
you calling for a return to the negative? And what might it offer for the
future?
BN: I used “Deleuzian Thatcherism” in the ’90s to describe Nick Land’s
work and what I saw as the convergence between his work and certain
hyper-Thatcherite currents, which someone referred to at the time as
“Thatcherism in its Maoist Phase”. I think, now, a more accurate but
inelegant characterization would have been “Lyotardian Thatcherism”, as
Land seems to take a lot more from Lyotard’s 1974 book Libidinal Economy
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libidinal_Economy), with its argument that
there is only one libidinal economy and that this is capitalist. While it’s true
that the work of Deleuze, and especially that of Deleuze and Guattari, has
never been to my taste, when I wrote on him for my book The Persistence of
the Negative (http://www.euppublishing.com/book/9780748638635) I found
more appreciation for his work. There is, if we like, a “negative Deleuze”.
Also, I think the debate about accelerationism has sharpened positions and
I’ve had interesting and supportive responses to my critique from those who
are sympathetic both to Deleuze and to Guattari.
In terms of the negative my interest really emerged out of noticing how
easily it was being dismissed and how much of contemporary thought
defined itself as affirmative or positive, which is what I called, borrowing
from Badiou, “Affirmationism”. Obviously we could include
accelerationism, with its positive attitude to technology, reason and
abstraction, within this broad category. At the same time, despite
misunderstandings, this turn to the negative was not simply a matter of
miserabilism or “negativity”, in the common use of the word, on my part.
I’m not sure whether I qualify as a “happy person”, but my aim wasn’t to
celebrate the virtues of depression. Instead, negativity interests me as a way
to define a practice of contestation and rupture, and not least to disrupt all
the calls to embrace the positive, to embrace “things as they are”, as William
Godwin put it. So, a return to the negative is a return to rethinking the
negative, not as a “pure” state, but as intertwined with affirmative moments
and as a means of thinking change. It is actually the case that “affirmative”
thinking is often accompanied by a celebration of hyperbolic and extreme
negativity, by a stress on suffering and misery, but only as moment
subordinate to a sudden transformation.
(https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am//crash-and-burn-debatingaccelerationism/calebwilliams/)
Accelerationism stakes a lot on its ability to imagine the future, especially
with the acid test of accepting the future need for space travel (with moon
gulags, in the joke, for dissidents). Within the provocation and
technological utopianism I think there is something to the accelerationists’
stress on not imagining a future communist society as merely ameliorating
capitalist barbarism with what Marx called a “barracks communism”. What
concerns me, which is another reason I turn to negativity, is not the
difficulty in imagining the future, but the difficulty imagining how we
might get there. For this reason I have stressed negativity as a form of
struggle that operates within a horizon of past struggles, which must be
affirmed, in the attempt to decommodify the world, as well as to break with
other forms of state power and other forms of oppression and violence.
AG: Along those lines, what is the connection, if any, between negation
and nihilism, a philosophical tendency that has rebounded in recent years?
I’m thinking of the “wider field” of speculative realism stretching from Ray
Brassier to Eugene Thacker. We seem to be in the middle of a kind of
Existentialist Revival.
BN: What’s interesting in the recent articulations of nihilism is that they
tend to evacuate or even annihilate the subject, unlike classical
existentialism. While I have some interest in nihilist thinking, dating back
to readings of Re/Search (http://www.researchpubs.com/) as a teenager and
then through my work on Bataille, I think this hyperbolic nihilism often
ends up circling back to affirmation – in this case the affirmation of a
universe which has no need of subjects. In my terms, thinking of negation, I
would like to distinguish negativity from any hyperbolic negativity or
nihilism, by stressing that negativity is a practice that engages with points of
contradiction and violence. My view of negation is a deflationary one,
trying to shift out of the desire to contemplate or even wallow in some
collapse of all values, to consider the tensions of negation.
In terms of accelerationism nihilism carries different values. It was obviously
crucial to Nick Land, who deployed a nihilism developed from Bataille and
Schopenhauer to annihilate the ego. In this vision, we embrace what
Nietzsche called “European nihilism”, embodied in the nihilist drive of
capital to reduce everything to value, as the means to overcome humanism
and to become fully disenchanted. Contemporary accelerationism
sometimes tries to weaponize nihilism as almost a therapeutic device, while
other currents stress the need to reinvent norms out of an “inhumanism”
that can recreate and take the human beyond itself. I’m skeptical of the
invocation of a “hard-edged” nihilism, which seems to me to abandon a lot
of crucial questions by invoking a “levelling” of values that is, at best, highly
uneven. It may even be, ironically, that a radical nihilism is consolatory –
giving us a weird sense of security by reaffirming our pointlessness. In this
there is a risk of the return of the subject as the one who is able to proclaim
the nihilist “bad news” and so remain somehow superior or immune – a
kind of cult of non-personality.
AG: One of the classic debates in leftist theory is that of orthodoxy. Lukács
famously asked: What is orthodox Marxism? And his unorthodox answer
ironically helped solidify a new kind of cultural Marxist orthodoxy in the
decades since. Reza Negarestani has labeled this a form of “kitsch” Marxism
(http://www.e-flux.com/journal/the-labor-of-the-inhuman-part-i-human/),
suggesting the need for a renewed critique of orthodoxy. How best can we
square the necessarily dialectical movement of history with certain
foundational categories like justice, democracy, or the people?
BN: I would almost certainly fail any test of Marxist orthodoxy, or even
unorthodoxy. This is not because I regard myself as original or dissident,
but due to my lack of thorough knowledge of Marx and Marxism and my
own formation, which owes something to anarchism, a lot to the
Situationists, and more than a little to my maternal grandfather’s
straightforward socialism and his stories of his life as a union representative
while working on the railways in London (I perhaps also owe something to
my paternal grandfather’s ad hoc practice of the “refusal of work”). The
result is that my “Marxism” is probably more suspicious of a belief in the
productive forces than some of the classical forms and more geared to a
suspicion of the category of labor.
In terms of Reza’s characterization there is a truth to the claim that certain
forms of postwar Marxism tended to an extreme pessimism, as every
undergraduate who does cultural studies usually learns. I have more
sympathy for this trend – I think Adorno’s Minima Moralia
(http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/adorno/1951/mm/) is a brilliant
book. But, of course, a characterization of capitalism as completely
dominant, a characterization of all life and culture as completely determined
by capital, leaves little to do (and I think very few actually said this). On the
other hand, the accelerationists’ critique seems to me to bend the stick too
far in the other direction, implying too much acceptance of contemporary
technological and cultural forms that does not really consider how they are
shaped by capitalism. Presenting capitalism as a parasite (I always think of
Futurama‘s brain slugs) implies that we simply shrug off the parasite to get
back to a neutral technological or cultural possibility. I think capitalism
shapes our context and existence in subtler ways than that, although it is
always a contradictory social formation. While I would say there is no simple
“outside” to capitalism, I don’t think this is a counsel of despair because I’d
attend to the contradictions and struggle that always and everywhere exist
within this social relation.
(https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am//crash-and-burn-debatingaccelerationism/brain_slug_party/)
AG: Let’s talk in particular about abstraction. Abstraction has always
presented something of a problem within critical theory. Yet today many
on the left are taking up the question of abstraction again with renewed
energy. How do you understand the role of abstraction today? Do you
think of abstraction in philosophical terms or in, shall we say, strictly
material terms?
BN: I think the crucial category here is Marx’s “real abstraction”, or more
precisely Alfred Sohn-Rethel (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_SohnRethel)‘s formalization of Marx’s comments to define this concept. The
paradox of “Real Abstraction” is crucial, in that abstractions, notably
“abstract labor”, are very real and very abstract at the same time. In this way
abstraction is brutally material in the way, for example, it violently
homogenizes all forms of labor into the category of abstract labor, which is
geared to value production. Keston Sutherland (pdf here
(http://www.worldpicturejournal.com/World%20Picture/WP_1.1/KSutherland.pdf)
has written very nicely on how Marx’s German word “Gallerte“, usually
translated as “congealed”, refers to boiled down animal products (blood,
bone, connective tissue, etc.). When our labor is congealed into abstract
labor we become mere “ingredients” and, as Sutherland says, we are
processed into abstract “stuff”. I think this usefully expresses how the usual
oppositions of abstract and concrete or abstract and material don’t quite
capture this process. The abstract is concrete or pseudo-concrete.
This is why, in what’s becoming a theme of this conversation, I think
accelerationists are right, but for the wrong reasons. They are right to draw
attention to abstraction as a crucial process, but they disengage it too rapidly
from this horizon. This is why I think there is a tendency in their work to
fetishize abstraction by choosing its most extreme forms to focus on, such as
High-Frequency Trading (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highfrequency_trading). While this form of algorithmic trading expresses,
almost too perfectly, a kind of terminal point of commodity fetishism, in
which all we have are ghostly circulations of value, it too requires a brutal
series of interventions into “material” forms (as Alberto Toscano
(http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/gaming-plumbing-highfrequency-trading-and-spaces-capital) has explained). I’d add that this
attention to the extreme forms of abstraction also risks missing the more
prevalent global forms of real abstraction that, as with abstract labor,
dominate and pervade our experience.
It’s for this reason that I also suggest we need to traverse abstraction and
can’t simply leap out of abstraction into some “good” alternative. The very
search for such alternatives, such as the valorization of the concept of “life”
as an excessive force, seems to me to create another abstraction. My problem
with accelerationism is that it embraces and then abandons this ground of
abstraction. Certainly it does not seek an outside point, a cozy “warm
abstraction”, but in its embrace of “cold abstraction” as a global force it
neglects these effects of “processing” and the material becomes disembodied
in the fantasy of full integration with the abstract.
AG: From abstraction to culture: you also have a keen interest in art and
culture. But culture is so unfashionable today! The Linguistic Turn, with its
focus on culture and ideology, has been targeted by a number of new
schools of thought, including speculative realism and new materialism.
Hermeneutics and other interpretive methods, once so dominant, are
suffering in the academy at the hands of “distant reading” and other
positivistic approaches. What is your relationship to those once stalwart
critical methods? I’m thinking of allegory in particular, which you also
deploy.
BN: I think this is also a question about the abstract and the material. It
seems to me that the general “turn” in the humanities to the material – and
my day job is teaching literature – is part of a longer historicist turn that
goes back to the 1980s. While everyone tends to think of the humanities as
dominated by a “linguistic” post-structuralism (a false image, in fact), the
reality I find is a common historicism that constantly invokes the density of
“materiality”. This I call a “pop Burkeanism”, as it repeats Edmund Burke’s
counter-revolutionary stress on the social as a “dense medium”, but now
translated into the form of material artefacts – everything from book covers
to letters, from publisher’s offices to architecture, to “material culture”.
This drift is not only politically problematic, but also the general invocation
of the “material” often seems fatally abstract. It seems to me that the new
materialisms and the various forms of “distant reading” share a paradoxical
structure in which the attention to material specificity is coupled with the
capacity to skim over or pick and choose between “objects” treated as equal.
In what is perhaps a crass allegory I see this as symptomatic of the omission
of the commodity-form, which is a form that at once equalizes all
commodities as measurable by value and insists on their specific value
within this frame. That’s why I have generally tried to explore the
continuing possibilities of critique and question this turn to a “post-critical”
way of thinking. Critique, I hope, can attend better to the constant
processes of transformation of the material to the abstract and vice versa.
In terms of accelerationism I think culture is a central element, which can’t
simply be wished away. I often say I think we should have all debates about
accelerationism in terms of dance music, and this isn’t a (probably bad) joke.
The role of dance music and electronic music in shaping accelerationism
goes back to the work of Nick Land and the Cybernetic Culture Research
Unit (http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/004807.html) (CCRU) at
Warwick, which drew heavily on jungle
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldschool_jungle) and drum and bass
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drum_and_bass). These forms of post-rave
dance music, which deployed sped-up breakbeats, were taken as aesthetic
examples of the power of accelerationism. I was also an avid follower of this
music, combined with my ongoing interest in Techno. I belong to the same
generation as many of the original accelerationists and so we share, to some
degree, a common cultural formation. The crucial role of music in the
formation of accelerationism, along with a related visual culture, means that
the “aesthetic” reception of accelerationism isn’t simply a category error. In
my work, while I don’t deny the energy and acceleration of these forms I’m
also interested in how they reflect on elements of friction, both to generate
this sense of acceleration and in the way this friction incarnates attempts to
transcend or leave behind the body and its labors. The body on the dance
floor is both detached from labor, but also experiences a new form of labor,
or the repetitions that at once mimic and take to an extreme the repetitions
of work.
(https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am//crash-and-burn-debatingaccelerationism/metalheadz-logo/)
The logo of the “Metalheads” music label
To treat accelerationism aesthetically is often seen as dismissive, but I think
it has to be placed in the context of various avant-garde attempts to
instantiate what Badiou calls “the passion for the real
(http://www.lacan.com/divide.htm)“: this is the attempt to not only
represent social forms, but to intervene or create something by cutting into
those forms. The modernist impulses of accelerationism make it heir to this
task. The problem I find, again!, is this misplacing of this problem and a
collapsing of the difficulty of representation. This is why I also think the
psychoanalytic category of fantasy is crucial, as a social or ideological
fantasy, to grasping the accelerationist desire. In terms of accelerationism
this is a fantasy we could have done with fantasy, which I think is the final
fantasy.
Accelerationism turns on fantasies of integration and immersion, with
capitalism, with the machinic, and with the abstract. While these fantasies
register our experience of the pains of labor and the threats of
unemployment, they also transform them into the dream of ecstatic
enjoyment – jouissance. I think the task today is to resist this sort of pleasure,
which also involves pain, in a kind of masochism, but not through the
dismissal of enjoyment. Instead of a new asceticism I think the task is to
articulate and politicize pleasures that resist and interrupt our immersion in
contemporary capitalism. This requires neither the appeal to a “pure”
outside nor the demand for complete immersion, but a practice that engages
with the contradictions and violence we confront.
(https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am//crash-and-burn-debatingaccelerationism/noys-2014-image/)
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWEE
Benjamin Noys teaches at the University of Chichester and his recent
publications include The Persistence of the Negative: A Critique of
Contemporary Theory
(http://www.euppublishing.com/book/9780748638635) (Edinburgh, 2010)
and Malign Velocities: Accelerationism & Capitalism (http://www.zerobooks.net/books/malign-velocities) (Zero Books, 2014). He is currently
writing a critique of vitalism in contemporary theory.
(https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am//crash-and-burn-debating-
accelerationism/galloway/)
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ABOUT THE
INTERVIEWER
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Alexander R. Galloway teaches at New York University. His latest book is
recent posts
Laruelle: Against the Digital (http://www.upress.umn.edu/booktumor rerum (on(Minnesota,
fellini’s satyricon)
(https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/tumordivision/books/laruelle)
2014).
rerum-on-fellinis-satyricon/)
crews: an american tragicomedy (https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/harry November 4, harry
2014(https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/2014/11/04/)
crews-an-american-tragicomedy/)
fiction submissions: open until february 28
(https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/fiction-submissions-open-until-february-28/)
poem brut #148 – fruit bags (https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/poem-brut-148fruit-bags/)
you see, i am perfectly fine (https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/you-see-i-amperfectly-fine/)
i fear my pain interests you (https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/i-fear-my-paininterests-you/)
tallangatta (https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/tallangatta/)
poem brut #147 – ogham (https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/poem-brut-147markrutter/)
minute 9: racist reasoning, antiracist resistance
(https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/minute-9-racist-reasoning-antiracistresistance/)
art school orgy (https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/art-school-orgy/)
(http://3ammagazine.com/3am/3am-for-sale/)