Welcome to lecture three on the process and philosophy of accelerationism and this is the lecture where we can begin to clarify and build and assemble the previously extrapolated and articulated components of the previous two lectures and we can begin to put them together and by the end of this lecture we should be able to understand what the process of accelerationism is. So this is sort of just the beginnings of clarifying the process and outlining it. So we can begin, people can take this and they can take a trajectory from it and begin to understand things from it. Prior to this, I want to theorise towards what it is specifically that
the accelerationist outlook sort of emphasises philosophically. As we understand, man is this entirely passive, desiring machine who can and who is getting possessed, synthesising this living present in relation to retained and anticipated desires. This synthesis, as we know, is in relation to both the Deleuzean critique, the three syntheses of time, and is of the inside, of the Kantian critique of representation, of re-presenting our reality. External to this, on the outside, is this alien force. And this is where the alien force of production is found, of production in itself, the force that comes in and possesses man. It possesses man via these machinic means,
via the processes of capitalism, via profit and loss-oriented dynamics, which have the functionality of zero to orient themselves from and this force makes man an agent of capital and and it also makes him capital quite literally and for anyone who's thinking about the more intricate ways in which man quite literally becomes capital i recommend michelle froucault's the birth of biopolitics which is a great text on how that process happens and why it happens the process then of deterritorialization and re-territorialization draws the virtualities in from the body without organs which are then actualized into society or into the inside via
man's synthesis and this is the process of possession of man being targeted at capitalist dynamics capitalism as a dynamically fluid system can consistently adhere this possession to its ability to withstand breaks. So capitalism, as we know, is the only system which can withstand the undifferentiation of the body without organs. So that which is de-territorialized and is re-territorialized into the mechanical clock time of capitalism is instantly immanentized into capitalism's runaway mechanisms, targeted towards productivity for capitalism, as opposed to having its own sort of aim. In this manner, capitalism quite literally constructs reality,
not metaphorically, but within the realm of physics. As Nick Land states, Deleuze and Guattari's machinic unconscious diffuses all laws and all law into automatism. And thus, this construction of reality, of the body without organs being perpetually de-territorialized and re-territorialized by capitalism is the immanentization of a forever middle. There's never a beginning. It's this constant building. And the machinic unconscious then never really has this bang. It's this constant productive process. And there's plenty of arguments and theorizations in contemporary accelerationist philosophy with regards to what the teleology of capitalism is now this is not really the purpose of this lecture to outline
what the teleology of capitalism is that is actually more to do with politics and that will probably appear in mac cohoons lectures i'm outlining just the the foundational philosophy here so as for what we can definitely say the teleology is we don't know the specific ends but we do know the means we know that it's a positive oriented system which is just targeted its own growth and this process of this this whole process that we've been talking about all the processes i've just outlined there this is the machinic unconscious the machinizing of virtual temporality into actuality as a runaway productive mechanism that's the machinic
unconscious. The reality of the inside never begun in any original or originary manner. It just exists in a sporadic indexing of intense construction. So we don't have this linear sequence of time, we just have productive potentiality index next to each other, directed by the productive forces of the machining unconscious, which come in from the outside, or put quite complexly by Nick Land in Fang Numenah he states Oedipus or transcendental familialism corresponds to the privatization of desire its localization within segmented and anthropomorphized sectors of assembly circuits as the attribute of a personal being
anti-Oedipus aligns itself with the replicants because rather than placing a personal unconscious within the organism, it places the organism within the unconscious. And this, for me, is going back to the idea of a Copernican revolution in philosophy. And there's much debate around what's meant by a Copernican revolution in philosophy. And really, this is Kant altering the entire way in which we view ourselves in relation to things. So, you know Copernicus and this idea of a Copernican revolution is a decentering of man and once it's accepted that the human subject is no longer the pre-Copernican or pre-Cantean subject or
overarching synthesizer whose reality is the true reality but is actually synthesizing within a pure time inclusive of an inside and an outside of which they are on the inside alterations occur regarding classical structures of order. The personal unconscious is revealed to be another transcendental illusion, another mask hiding no face, or an actuality within the socius which just acts as this illusory form of agency, functioning in relation to an underlying productive process. Lann states again, in the unconscious there are no protectable cell structures, but only populations, groups, and machines. A productive unconscious then, which, in relation to syntheses, is, as land states again, not considered to be merely, not considered to be
not merely imminent to their operation, but also imminently constituted or autoproductive. This autoconstruction and productive element is explained in terms of physics within Antioedipus. Deleuze and Cotori state, but in reality the unconscious belongs to the realm of physics, the body without organs and its intensities are not metaphors but matter itself a machine works according to the previous intercommunications of its structure and the positioning of its parts but does not set itself into place any more than it forms or reproduces itself so the auto constructive process of the outside of production in itself is the machinic unconscious as i've stated the positive oriented construction of this temporal productive index from the outside in
not only within the machinic unconscious but from it and of it and it quite literally is it the idea that these things should be separated in some form is sort of a human illusion Deleuze and Quintari state again or it might be to go in the opposite direction to go still further that is in the movement of the market of decoding and deterritorialization perhaps the flows are not yet deterritorialized 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 anything yet
this quote of course forms the name accelerationism and it's where we take the motto of the accelerationists to accelerate the process the process defined then is the culmination of all the aforementioned parts into a coherence in relation to a quasi-unification the primary components however are time production and capitalism it is of note to those still sort of stuck here, that humans here, as desiring machines, are imminently demoted to the inside of the transcendental split, and as such, they only work in coordination to a primary force, the primary force of production in itself. The shortest description, then, of the process of acceleration,
the one which Deleuze and Quartari say should be accelerated, is as follows. Let the outside in. let me just crack this open and lay its parts out now we can thoroughly examine them unto their own merits in relation to one another time is understood in this mode of delersian critique of delersian synthesis it is a time of imminence and via delers man is demoted to the object material side of the transcendental split he's of the inside he's the thing that's possessed he's the thing that's being controlled. We name this side the inside for man is within a much larger pure time due to the fact that he must synthesize his reality. So he processes the inside. He's the one who's stuck in with phenomena and actualized material. And this acts as a sort of lock-in.
The outside then is the transcendental. It is the conditions of experience. It is pure time and production in itself but if we to let the outside in there needs to be a mode of connection or communication or even a method of possession and this is where the the dynamic or the theorization of the actual and the virtual comes in wherein the actual exists within the material realm the inside and the virtual exists in time in the outside but also in connection to man because everything which is actual has its own body without organs which is a connection of a collection of virtuals. The actual and virtual then is the link of physicalization but how is it processed? How is there some function here which allows a communication? The function of course
is zero which acts as the functional means for retention of surplus production value over time. That is to say that zero in its inherent characteristics understands what it is to go up, to have a greater quantity, to have a profit, but it also understands what it is to come back down to zero and to have a negative quantity. That is a surplus production value over time and zero understands this as a function. For there to be a continuation perpetually we need the overarching system of capitalism in all its fluidity. Now why is this? All other systems, if they tried to use these functions and they tried to use the transcendental, get locked into their own principles. They're not fluid, they're striated. Whereas capitalism thrives on contradiction.
As such, it can utilize all virtuality and it can target it towards a sole objective without destroying it because it allows hypocrisy it allows paradox it actually uses these things as a fuel continuation of capitalism which happens via continual production or capitalism aim is production of production for its own production the machinic mechanisms of capitalism clock or industrial time these are an alien force acting upon man and they alter him quite literally into a machine which in combination with the passive leotardian desire that's outlined in lecture one fundamentally changes man into that which can be possessed by forces of the outside man is imminent
to the process itself here time takes effect for this entire process is happening within the temporal mode of the eternal return as such upon the return of the cycle of the eternal cycle a cut happens this is de leuze's third synthesis and the new is brought forth via time and this process the the process of the new being brought forth via the third synthesis of either cut in time can be described described quite plainly without this temporal linkage as the process wherein the productive schizophrenic and deterritorializing capabilities inherent to capitalism are accelerated, which without prior articulation of the problematic nature of
capitalism's limit in relation to schizophrenia, time and process, seems clear. To begin at the start again, and I do this again just for clarification, I noted that time plays a major role in the process itself. The relation between Deleuzean philosophy of time and accelerationism is the clearest route to articulating the process in depth. The classical definition of accelerationism posits one idea, the continual push for the new. To accelerate is never to return, or at least never to return to the previous same state. To accelerate to 80 miles an hour is not to return to 20 miles an hour once you've hit 40 miles an hour. The definition of acceleration in relation to accelerationism, however, is a little more tricky, and it sort of works with the classical definition but there is there is far more philosophy on top of this i'll come to this
shortly for now i shall focus on acceleration in relation to the delersian philosophy of time before we get to the definitions to accelerate now in the sense of acceleration ism is to allow the past no continuation it is to play no part in the past and the past sort of striated and stagnant territory except where in the past is utilized by schizophrenia and taken upon a line of flight and deterritorialized back into the virtual and processed by zero and then re-territorialized once more as an actual back into the socius as something new so the schizophrenic pushes the limit of its present it pushes the limits of its current socius in its within the passive second synthesis it pushes this and in the in pushing the limit something is de-territorialized
and something is re-territorialized in the new limit and there is a cut on the eternal return and something new comes in and this is to a certain degree what we can what we can consider acceleration and this is much a process to avoid the stagnation of the past because the past is trapped in the machinery which is sort of imposing on humanity a stagnation. Primarily, as I've stated, accelerationism is concerned with the third synthesis in its relation to novelty, the new difference, the future. The future has to be different for it to be a true new future. So the process in this manner is the way in which the pure form of time posited by Deleuze is sort of abused or is used to maximum efficiency by the inherent capability of capitalism
to be fluid. That is, due to the inherent nature of capitalism system as that which avoids definition, any mode of thought or epoch, external system, internal system, or defining capability that attempts to mould capital to its will is either subsumed into the dynamics as an illusory form of its previous self or is left as a stagnant relic external to capitalism and left to rot due to its exclusion from the only productive hegemony that sounds complicated but what do i actually mean by that what i mean by that is capitalism is the overriding system here it lets things in and it works with things which can be productive for it and it will suffocate and alienate and exclude things which aren't productive for it okay acceleration is not synonymous with speed it
should be evident by now that the idea that one or an or even an eye or they could actively speed up capitalism as a mode of practice would be a transcendental error because time doesn't work in the way that that we understand it to speed and duration are primarily understood within linear time so they don't make sense in the transcendental time of capitalism an error wherein one would mistake the speed of phenomena or of the actualized of like entrepreneurship or techno economic innovation of high profit rates on the inside as accelerationism and that's incorrect in this manner i would argue that the entire canon of left accelerationist writings fall flat on their incorrect readings of accelerationism in relation to time whereby they believe that
accelerating capitalism will lead to a means of emancipation of the worker in the future via automation etc this belief is posited on the notion of anthropocentric material and praxis and is an error in time though matt will look more into the politics obviously from this i can put forth and posit that acceleration is not synonymous with speed in the classical sense of miles per hour etc because that's in the inside as i've stated The question then is how to define the acceleration of accelerationism. I've thus far made it clear that accelerationism is primarily a philosophy of time. It's understood as a continuation of critique and attends to the transcendental framework of time as primary. The connection between capitalism and time is where we find the different definition of what it is to accelerate.
As noted, capitalism has a critical understanding of time and finds within it its ability to act as an auto-construction between and over temporal events. Capitalism is existing in pure time, in the transcendental. Capitalism is transcendental within accelerationist philosophy. Instead of being divided into temporal offshoots or temporally constructed neologisms, cyber gothic, post-modernism, neoreaction, etc., of its own system, we find that capitalism itself never fragments in time. Capital is always already temporally one step ahead. It's this great abstract machine of living presence that has not produced this system of time itself. It has inherent to its mechanisms an ability to produce from and with it. The passive syntheses of time
are drawn into the system of capitalism which acts as their undercurrent, their temporal mediator. Man stands as a material for the communion of capitalism, as an empty domino. The internal dynamic of capitalism is a positive feedback loop targeted at production, targeted at production of production. The philosophy of accelerationism is just not empirical. So these modes of production are not traditional classical profit dynamics, though that comes into, that's a way of understanding it from the inside. These from the inside are all masks hiding their faces, more quasi illusions atop the production in itself of the outside. One big digression here would be to understand
Nick Land's theory of numbers in the transcendental sense. So one thing that Land states, in fact, Numenor actually, is that when numbers go from the inside to the outside, they move from a metric to a diagram. And what does that mean? Well, on the inside, numbers get striated, they get suffocated and they just become these empty sort of digits like any other phenomena but because they're mathematical and because they have a way of because of via kantian critique they allow us to attend to synthetic a priori knowledge we can understand them as drawing something new in from the outside so when they the the workings
of mathematics are computed on the inside a diagram is happening on the outside so when we think about profit dynamics and material growth rates and say resource extraction rates these are masks hiding no faces on the inside these numbers do seem empty but they are allowing us to have a diagram on the outside within the transcendental and and and that can be seen that diagram can be seen in terms of production in itself as a direction of accelerationism and in this manner to accelerate is not to go faster but is to allow capitalism to enact its inherent capabilities regarding perpetual acquisition of the new not to speed up but to be novel uh not to
yeah not to speed up in terms of traditional acceleration but to philosophically allow further de-territorialization and re-territorialization. The two-factor form of positive feedback which makes up the process of accelerationism is as follows. The productive output that capitalism as positive oriented is targeted at is a transcendental form of production. Profit rates are on the inside of the transcendental but they're communicating the potential for growth to the outside as a diagram. So the true productive capability comes from the outside which is computing all these computations from the inside to the outside and actually understands them and understands what should be fired back in which could also be stated as working with a body
without organs in its most general sense as this bank of virtualities to be re-appropriated in a novel way by zero and actualized through man. So the cyclical nature of Deleuzean time in relation to the eternal return states that the eternal return is the return of difference the return is the future but the return of the same is a circle going on its own so we always need this cut we always need this novel thing to change the circle so that so that when the circle returns it's cut it fires off from its decent point and comes back anew and that's the decentered circle which starts another cycle from a different center point. Without this decentering, or this out of
joint nature of the eternal return, the return would always be the same. A connection is to be found here between the eternal return and the body without organs. Deleuze states, drawn from the real present object, the virtual object differs from it in its nature. It does not only lack something in relation to the real object it subtracts itself from, it lacks something in itself by being half of itself where the other half is posited as different and absent. What does this mean? Well the virtuality's half of itself is that which is returned to the body without organs, the loss part of it, its perpetual potentiality for difference, for reappropriation, the part which returns to the atemporality of the body without organs but is not locked to the object of an event as the actual
is and can return to be reused as a whole process the virtual can always return in the sense of both its indexing within the pure past and as part of this difference on top of all of this the process unto which the virtuality is thrown is into the pressure of either non- or pro-productive difference and this is entirely unconscious so de leuze and quattari state a machine works according to the previous intercommunications of its structure and the positioning of its own parts but does not set itself into place any more than it forms or reproduces itself in this manner the industrialized mechanized and quantified attributes of capitalism's internal dynamics act as a numeric thresher regarding the productive output of temporal kazuras as re-territorialized
pure past sent in from the outside what does that mean when things are sent in from the outside capitalism because of its inherent dynamics can assess these and push them through a thresher which is targeted at one thing which is targeted at production and it alters the future in relation to the output of this algorithm okay to expand upon this what let's expand upon one instance of this process okay so the eternal return cycles one turn there's a kazura a break in time which inherently acts as a cutting of temporality which then forms a before and an after and in turn
produces novelty the the future as difference the return is now going towards something different and not the same as such the eternal return is now the eternal return of difference and becomes this motor of acceleration. This return of difference is a new virtuality or a new re-territorialization of reality to be both de-territorialized from its originary temporal load, temporal location in time and re-territorialized until complete burnout in the sense of capitalism's machinic unconscious acts as this productive thresher. It extracts all productive potentiality from this new virtuality, from that which is sent in from the outside via the process of the return and that is what it means to accelerate the process of the return is the
content of accelerations of acceleration it is that which comes closest to a theoretical outline of that which has been or is accelerating the eternal return of difference being instantly re-immunitized body without organs to schizophrenia back to zero back into the dynamics of capitalism capitalism utilizes all difference as a means for its own expansion upon the instantiation of transcend transcendental capitalism the eternal return fundamentally alters for much akin to the body without organs a return as a form of difference in an act of repulsion against the same much like the repulsion of overcoding from the undifferentiated within difference
also the same is the way in which capitalism can adhere to that which is theoretically eternal for only that which can remain undisturbed in itself throughout incessant change can continue eternal namely capitalism nothing changes it nothing sticks to it it can use all manner of temporal hypocrisies the return of the circle is another force of the outside another novelty to be aimed at its continuation. As much as the aforementioned entire could be stated as conditions, the process under which one has to deal with is unconditional. Thus, to direct, or to attempt to direct, or even to theorise a direction of the process, is always already a dead strange and terrifying abstraction, because we're working once again from the inside, and it's not entirely sure
in what way we're communicating. Within this is a direct assimilation of productive potential regarding the pure form of time. The pure form of time in the event or the katsura or the ka of the third synthesis is one, an event unto itself, but also two, fragmentation, a variation, a splitting or divide. Both of these are in time. This mode of breaking, wherein a break imposes a serialization, a before and an after unto time poses an implicit problem for every other system other than capitalism in this manner the system of capitalism either formed itself respective of de l'erzian time or such a mode of time evolved capitalism this is not something i can answer here each
temporal event has its own symbolic image underneath it as such feudalism monarchism communism these are all passive temporal forms which cling to a symbolic event they cling to locked in temporal imagery of a single cut there's this one cut and then the the the following return which is happening there is this singular ism that's not what capitalism is and what's more they fear that there's going to be a further cut because the kaiser brings with it an effect unto which their event would change so you can't have cuts within these capitalism on the other hand is the great temporal thresher it hoovers up all this productive it hoovers up all the productive capability of any serialization of time and assimilates it all back into its system
and it simulates all these new virtualities and all this difference back into its temporal domain so what's accelerationism then what is it to accelerate with regards to all that has been assembled it is the temporal assemblage of the dynamics of capitalism transcendental temporality and de l'erza guattarian production it is passivity in relation to this trio and understanding that once the auto construction that is the machining unconscious is underway that within its inherent nature it targets itself a continual production of production and as such accelerationism begun as soon as capitalism begun the cosmic evolutionary utilization of the return of difference as a means to compound greater production regarding the future the process of acceleration
is a multiplicity of functions of process-based assemblages interconnecting into this cosmic productive thresher it is the transcendental conclusion of man as passive desiring machine which in concordance with the process of capital makes him capital in himself man is made imminent to the system itself the anthro is dissolved accelerationism is transcendental evolutionary production cosmic production threshold of the outside targeted foremost at time itself the process of accelerationism or accelerate the process is a semantic mistake for to accelerate presumes a form of agency, a form of direction. Whereas the reality of the process is one of an
ever-changing reality. Acceleration is always disjointed. Neo ahead, disappearing. As Land states, anyone trying to work out what they think about accelerationism better do so quickly. That's the nature of the thing. It was already caught up with trends that seemed too fast to track when it began to become self-aware decades ago. It has picked up a lot of speed since then. Accelerationism as a piece of terminology is sort of a pithy joke. To define an ever-evolving machinic unconscious leviathan is so didactically laughable. To work it out is only ever to work out the processes or functions of its nature, never to find a comfort or control. Because as soon as you've pinned it down, you haven't pinned it down. Because if you've stopped, that's not the thing. So what conclusion can we actually take here?
What conclusion can we make from such an assemblage of functions and processes, the entirety of which are within the auto-construction of the machinic unconscious. Any conclusion can only be articulated in a non-conclusionary form. Due to accelerationism's inherent transcendental characteristics, which have been thoroughly extrapolated here, one understands that any notion of an accelerative finality is not possible. Such a possibility only exists on the inside, and even then it only exists as an illusory form of finality, a stagnant, decided upon by the Zara machine. In this manner, I'll take this opportunity within the conclusion to make a prescient point regarding the entirety of what is known contemporarily as accelerationist politics. This is my sort of overview in relation
to the politics of the philosophy. The conclusion that one can draw about a statement such as accelerationist politics, considering these lectures prior theorisations, is that any notion of politics in relation to accelerationism in any traditional sense isn't instantly recognised as a categorical transcendental error. No amount, no type, no redefinition of politics can alter it in such a manner that it can affect the primacy or the primary of the outside. Further to this, I would argue that the trajectory of unconditional accelerationists is not incorrect as much as it's terminologically ambiguous. For I've outlined certain conditions which culminate into the process of accelerationism and accelerationism itself in relation to the entirety of the transcendental there are conditions functions and processes which all auto catalytically interact
however vague and free-floating and fluxing these conditions are they all need to be in place for there to be such a theory of time as acceleration however i will admit that in relation to the inside accelerationism is unconditional that is there is never anything or never was anything we could do to become schizophrenic is not something you can just suddenly target yourself on. So where one can say the process of acceleration will continue into and what will come of it, such an answer can admittedly only be purely speculative theorization in that it may be that capitalism continues in one of two directions. Either it continues its runaway mechanism towards singularity, which would take such a form that one just wouldn't comment on it, how could I? or it takes the other direction it continues its runaway mechanisms and continual ignorance of the
finite nature of the inside and crumbles under its own nature in the first conclusion is like a is a dark marxist transformation wherein the means of production are not given over to us but escape from us this is the landian conclusion in the second direction anthropocentric and inside centric perspective will once again take to the fore if capitalism crumbles under its own weight via resource over extraction etc then we no longer would have the dynamics of capitalism to solve our problems that we might struggle on this is a difficult one to say what would happen at that moment um and then the the communications with the outside would be far different because we wouldn't have this inherent system there is a sort of cause i conclusion to the theorizations of accelerations however in that is arguably the first philosophical effort of or critique in which
the human truly stands alone i'm sure people would disagree with this but i think it's one of the first prior to accelerationism all notions and articulations of what it is to be human have either come from the inside and as such have been transcendentally incorrect or they have a bias or they come from pre-cantian rationalism which in keeping with the theory of this essay is also incorrect though can and those philosophers working with critique makes man play make man's place in the world clear as different and non-anthropocentric they only do so in a manner of placement as opposed to definition to place man on the inside is not to define him it is only to locate him in relation to acceleration man is both transcendentally demoted to the inside and has entirely inhuman or non-human forces reacting possessing controlling him as such
via accelerationism we can begin to posit man humanism not in itself as a form of self-congratulately conservative bias but as a reaction against an artificiality uh which it most definitely isn't and you know this is something that nick talks about is that accelerationism and the singularity might be the thing that finally defines humanism because you can't posit something without having it's negative to a certain extent you know a lot of philosophers would disagree with that but but the the the the form of ai that that land is foreseeing is he understands it as such a reaction against humanism that will finally allow us to define humanism um the process of acceleration is extremely complicated philosophically extremely complex um and i would
urge you to go over these notes go over the recommended reading um time and time again on the little sections that you you found complicated but i've done my best with this these lectures and the original essay which i've drawn this from to articulate what it means philosophically and i hope you've learned a lot from it and for those of you who are in the seminars um i'll see you then and anyone who would like some clarification on certain bits or clarification on certain themes or theorizations feel free to email me but thanks for listening to these lectures and thanks for um taking this course