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Maks Valenčič
PSY
CHOT
I C AC
C EL
ER
A
TION
I SM
I’m very stubborn, I have no respect for authority. It’s not because I made
myself like this, it’s because I'm born without it and was not able to deduce it.
—Joscha Bach
We are machines made for dreamin’
—Sevdaliza
This is Evangelion Imaginary. […] An Eva that is imaginary and fictional. Only
humanity, with its ability to believe equally in both fantasy and reality, can
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perceive it.
—Gendo Ikari
An interesting dynamic emerges between accelerationism and its main
protagonist Nick Land. At times, it almost feels like there’s a contradiction in how
Land operates or at least how he tries to make sense of his ideas. Cult of
personality doesn’t fit neatly with the complete supression of any biographical
details that nonetheless leak all across the internet. But we are not here to dox
Land, what’s done is done. We are more interested in psychoanalyzing
accelerationism, not really in psychoanalysis per se. If accelerationism has been
mostly theorized within the framing of the political compass in the last couple of
years, we will try to change that by showcasing why accelerationism is a (political
and epistemological) project of a psychotic register. If the classical shizo example
from Deleuze and Guatari was instrumental for Land and the others, there seems
to be a new psychotic wave taking place where the desire for deterritorialization
has been substituted by the need to dream the “dream in a very focused way”.
1
It’s this kind of “dreaming the dream” accelerationism that we are most
interested in and that we believe can reinstate the focus and strength of the
accelerationist project.
THE TALE OF THE PSYCHOTIC
There are multiple ways to frame and understand the accelerationist project, but
psychoanalysis enables us to start from the beginning, from the place of the first
loss (or negation) where reality is first instituted. Where the child has to come to
terms with the fact that they can’t be the sole object of (the mother’s) desire and
has to therefore embrace the name-of-the-father. Not doing so is “fool’s gold”,
Alireza Taheri tells us, 2 since the promise of full enjoyment is a structural
impossibility, while the interdiction of the name-of-the-father is a necessity that
has to be embraced by the child in order for them to be liberated from such
dangerous illusions. It’s only by child’s successful embrace of the authority by
symbolic castration that their psyche can be successfully reconfigured, and it’s
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through this leap of faith that they will, in return, castrate the parents and limit
their authority over them.
If the neurotic structure is fully coterminous with the successful
internalization of authority in the name-of-the-father, psychotics are the negative
of that. What constitutes a psychotic, through a radical foreclosure, is precisely
the negation of castration or the name-of-the-father. Psychosis doesn’t come to
terms with castration, as the leap of faith in paternal authority that is in place in
the neurotic structure doesn’t function “properly” here. The interdiction of the
name-of-the-father is thus rejected, and the dialectic of the symbolic order is
again non-existent for the psychotic subject. Taheri, albeit in a very normatively
coded language, talks about the way psychotics are unable to castrate their
parents in return and therefore limit the authority they have over them. Because
they can’t successfully establish the said dialectic, they are in greater danger of
being exploited by this same authority or, negatively, collapsing all of human
relations to the relations of force, as Nietzsche famously did.
Still, there’s more to be said about the psychotic structure that doesn’t fit
neatly with Taheri’s account, even if he’s the one that will give us examples for
that. In one of his last seminars, Lacan introduces a new concept, the sinthome,
that fundamentally reworks the previous understanding of psychosis and also
points towards a completely new way out from the Oedipal dilemma: sinthome is
now understood as a very personal way for a psychotic subject to establish a
negation. For them, reality is not ready-made or established in advance by a leap
of faith of following the authority. If the neurotic seamlessly follows the castration
and is therefore satisfied with a specific normative landscape (with all of its
invariants), the psychotic cannot in any way accept this imposition and therefore
prefers to stay in the dream world. Actually, the best way to understand castration
is as a form of localization, as a way to embed the subject in a pre-defined spatial
configuration that becomes the setting within which they operate and, of course,
which they believe in (in ontological and not necessarily ideological sense).
Interestingly, the dichotomy between living in the real world vs living in a dream
becomes operative in analysis itself, where, as Taheri tells us, “the neurotic
patient comes in and talks about mummy and daddy, generally, or a husband
and wife or their children. Psychotics come in and they talk about these grand
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matters: ever since the Renaissance humanity has been on the wrong path! Read
Nietzsche. He’s not tackling a small little problem locally. He thinks Western
civilization is corrupt in its two fundamental pillars, which are Christ and Socrates,
and that this needs rectification, otherwise we are doomed.” 3
Castration is thus the original imposition of realism, while for the psychotic,
their only desire is to stay in the dream world. That’s why it’s in the best interest of
the psychotic subject to never exit the dream world, while at the same time
making its existence ever more consistent and real. By “dreaming the dream” in a
new way, they try to autonomously construct the world or its invariants in such a
way that they become free from external constraints, from interventions of realism
that try to bring the psychotic down, i.e. into the real world, which is precisely
something that isn’t operative for them in the first place. As Taheri points out,
psychotics have this incredible need to correct something precisely because
there’s an inherent flaw in the way the Other functions for them. But this means
that it’s the extreme need to change something that is the leading cause of
dreams. By trying to fix their relationship with the Other, psychotics have no other
choice but to dream in an increasingly focused way, leading them to take control
over their increasingly malleable reality simulation. From each according to their
VR headset, to each according to their dreams, the psychotic version of Marx’s
and Engel’s famous dictum goes. For the psychotic, from the start, it doesn’t
make any sense to repair reality, since there’s nothing to repair to begin with, only
to dream in a completely different way. The only way out is through. It’s this
incredible desire to dream anew that we are interested in and which
consequently results in increasingly intense dreaming or a complete flooding of
dreams. #Accelerate
Because of castration (or realism), we are not allowed to dream in a very
controlled way, the psychotic subject says. The key difference is that in
psychosis, reality is not established beforehand, which means that there’s no
belief in realism or any kind of systemic invariants that hold the neurotic structure
together, which is why the ambitions between the two are incommensurable.
The neurotic subject has made a trade with the devil, as it’s the fallen angel who’s
persuaded them that this reality is their own. Psychotics are, in contrast, willing to
undergo castration only on their own terms, and only through very peculiar
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means that don’t necessitate authority or any kind of paternal signifier, but have
more to do with the construction of a new language, and therefore a new
interface to reality that can enable them to repair their very damaged relationship
with language and reality itself. The curse of psychosis is a classic example of a
pharmakon. On the one hand, it’s obvious what the dangers are: because you’re
not localized and therefore don’t have a clear sense of realism, there’s this
perpetual danger that the map will completely break free from the territory and
be blown away like clouds in the sky. For psychotics, reality itself is the
precarious thing par excellence, as the psychotic subject can actually feel their
reality being slowly torn apart (or disentwined) like in the fifth episode of Loki (5th
episode of 2nd season). On the other hand, this can only be a blessing, a divine
calling that enables the psychotic to be born with their VR glasses already on.
Ontological inexistence of reality can lead the psychotic to have complete control
over their specific form of realism (or invariants) and therefore an intimate
sensibility of how those are constructed and how they can be, in return, radically
changed. It’s the other way around for the psychotic: contrary to the neurotic
subject who’s born into the real world and tries to run away from it, for the
psychotic, the real world itself is the problem and thus the inexistent part that has
yet to be established.
If, on the other hand, the psychotic doesn’t embrace the realness of dreams,
the only alternative position for them is to turn against reality, as we so often see.
As we already said, it’s this difficult relationship with reality that is constitutive of
the psychotic subject, which means that any kind of forceful imposition of it can
only incite the most forceful revolt. Castration itself is the problem, and if this
means that the psychotic’s own version of reality cannot be established, then
none can. From the psychotic’s point of view, which again points to the
difference between them and the neurotic, there’s an inherent bias in how reality
is simply accepted without any (desire for) reality testing. The psychotic is, of
course, painfully aware of this fact, while the neurotic subject, if this comes to
their mind at all, quickly jumps into politics, and gets their desire satisfied by
playing a dialectic of being bottom or coming on top, a kind of perversion that
leaves behind the initial desire to change reality. Politics itself is, for the most part,
an inherently neurotic register, as there’s really not that much psychotics around.
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When someone screams politics, psychotics jump the gun and quickly disappear
by going extinct in the growing ruliad of the internet.
4
Landian accelerationism
is thus an explicit attempt at testing reality by putting different cognitive models
in direct confrontation and seeing which ones actually lead to a self-consistent
simulation that can become a candidate for reality—in Land’s view, liberal
democracy is, for example, the farthest from that. But the problem with Land’s
approach is that it’s still too close to realism and therefore leads to more (and not
less) reality. That’s why classical accelerationism has an inherent conservative
bias and leads to a very peculiar rejection of dreaming, as the desire for
acceleration is still understood too literally and materially and therefore as a
further naturalization of the existing thing. Even though it’s totally clear that
technocapital is a beautiful psychotic VR headset where the desire for dreaming
is clearly seen. At least for Land, technocapital is a perfect and fully consistent
dream that radically circumvents any attempt at establishing realism outside of
the only real thing—the Thing itself, as Land says.
But the real problem with his version of accelerationism is that Land truly
believes in real patterns, while for the psychotic, these are simply the
(by)products of participatory realism, 5 of the way the observers are simulated
within reality that is itself a simulation. By trying to escape reality, Land is,
paradoxically, turning himself in (even if he, supposedly, doesn’t like the cops).
Maybe Marko Bauer and Andrej Tomažin are right, maybe Land would actually
be the first one to fall when his avant-garde comes to power. 6 Or maybe this is
the reason why he already left this reality for China. Details aside, it’s very
predictable that a psychotic would turn so radically against reality, while trying to
interchangeably communicate with the God and the Devil, as Land seems to be
doing lately. It’s an interesting trick he’s doing: yes, you can have your reality, but
let’s see where this reality is actually leading to. Land, again, refuses to be
localized, but he does this through an even more radical localization. He doesn’t
want anyone to have an unwarranted purchase on reality, while at the same
paradoxically arguing that Bitcoin “solves the problem of space-time”, 7 which
is nothing but a desire for a higher form of localization, only without a central
command system (and therefore a terrible candidate for acceleration). Angry
psychotics really want to bring the reality down, as Land himself reveals in his
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theorizing about the abstract horror of the transcendental. As Bosco García
makes it clear: “For Land, [the Outside] can only be invoked, alluded to as the
grand point of singularity where the transcendental temporal structure
converges, but any specification of just how it does so is doomed to failure. The
Outside functions as a negative counterpart of the positive processes observed: it
unites all positive properties, but is thereby incapable of expressing itself in the
concrete.” 8 The Outside is thus a form of prohibition of anyone ever taking
control of reality ever again, while also precluding anyone from “dreaming the
dream” in a radically new way. For Land, reality has to be destroyed since it’s
simply too unfair to bear, whereas for psychotic accelerationism, the supposed
unfairness is not a coherent concept since it’s only the dream world that actually
matters in the first place. Land should become a dreamer again, a therapist might
say.
DREAMING THE DREAM
Psychotic accelerationism radically transforms the stakes of the Landian wager. If
in the latter case, selection (from the Outside) is something to be radically
affirmed and celebrated, here, selection itself becomes the problem. But not for
the obvious reasons Land would like you to think it is. No, for the psychotic,
selection has the same kind of structure as castration, as it’s simply a reiteration of
the reality principle, where the agent is fully embedded within the invariants (or
social constraints) it can’t possibly escape from. The only difference here is that
the environment is the sole arbiter of truth and therefore the only agent that
actually matters, a kind of Lovecraftian monster whose wishes all have to follow.
Needless to say, this principle is radically orthogonal to the accelerationist
project, especially if the desire for exit is the desire to escape. Otherwise the
whole point doesn’t make sense, i.e. if the escape becomes more and more
similar to the cage. From the perspective of the psychotic, selection is thus
something to be radically avoided, as this is the only principle that can trap
accelerationism for good. The aim is therefore not to collapse one’s own
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becoming and to trap oneself in a specific (environmental) configuration—in a
setting from which one cannot extricate oneself, and thus, despite all
contingency, to make of it a real pattern and something that has to be followed
until the end. “Life must never get caught in the trap it sets for itself” is the
psychotic slogan radically in line with CTMU’s (The Cognitive-Theoretic Model of
the Universe) supertautology, 9 as this is the only assurance life will never
recognize and communicate with itself and therefore with the affordances it
recursively sets for itself. In fact, life only wants one thing, which is more life,
whereas in the Landian version, it gets externalized into something even it can’t
recognize as itself (which is again a very perverse form of foreclosure, typical for
the psychotic structure).
Thus, in a radical contrast to this perspective, psychotic accelerationism
refuses to make this cut, it never wants to return from the dream world of infinite
becoming to a reality that is nothing else but something that predefines or
determines you in advance. The only selection the psychotic does is
environmental, in literally outdreaming the existing social invariants that
otherwise constrain the dream from floating above reality, i.e. its “real” constraints
of the existing world simulation. When dreaming is successful, it can only be selfreferential, as the concept of reality becomes hollowed out and loses most (or all)
of its meaning. In psychotic accelerationism, realism itself becomes the final boss
and the only problem, a pernicious yet residual constraint that simply points to
the insufficiency of our VR headset that has to be intensified and accelerated in
return. That’s why the realism camp is so dangerous, since on the one hand, it
tries to bring the dream down, while on the other, have all of the agents play the
selective game it has set for them, which only further entrenches the existing
constraints that are currently at play. It’s also why the current political belief in
reality is the strongest, since the only people who are allowed to dream are the
ones who are the most intoxicated by the current world model. Yes, Musk bough
Twitter not because he was ill-informed and erratic, but because he was trying to
save Western civilization from collapsing from the woke parasite. Contrary to the
normal understanding of the environment, where invariants are understood as
actually existing and real and thus something that has to be priced into reality,
their sole purpose should be understood in a negative sense, as something that
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has yet to be recoded and left behind. This is somewhat related to what cute
accelerationism is saying, where it’s precisely such softening of reality that is the
clearest method of acceleration. In fact, the AI alignment people have coined a
very interesting concept of mesa-optimization, which points to the fact that it’s in
the organism’s best interest to change its own function (or method of
optimization). Rather than hopelessly improving its level of evolutionary fitness, it
should strive to perform the function of the environment (selection) better than
the said environment itself. As they describe it: “Mesa-Optimization is the
situation that occurs when a learned model (such as a neural network) is itself an
optimizer. […] Example: Natural selection is an optimization process that optimizes
for reproductive fitness. Natural selection produced humans, who are themselves
optimizers. Humans are therefore mesa-optimizers of natural selection.” 10
Psychotic accelerationism’s only interest lies in, as the patron-saint of the
project, Joscha Bach, puts it, the way experience, our cognitive model, is
implemented: “Enlightenment is a realization of how experience is implemented.”
11
And: “Intelligent agent has to determine its interface to the universe.” 12
The agent must take control of “dreaming the dream”, of its simulation of reality,
which gives the agent as a simulated entity control over reality as the model in
which the same simulated agent operates. Freedom from constraints is therefore
not only related to the unfetterment from ancestral invariants, i.e. evolutionary
priors or hard-coded patterns that cannot be recoded, but even more so to the
production of an autonomous language, i.e. a self-generative way of taking hold
of patterns that can form a new whole and thus a new world simulation, in which
we, as simulated agents in the simulated reality, function. Psychotic
accelerationism points to a new relationship between us and the environment,
where the agent dreams up a model of the world in which they, as a player, can
do the most good in the freest way possible. This is completely orthogonal to
realism, since realism is always after the fact. In the psychotic’s dream world, it’s
simply understood as a punishment, a proof that our simulation has failed (us)
and that we have (again) hit rock bottom. It is a confirmation that we are not yet
able to dream in a sufficiently focused way, and that we have introduced limits
into reality, into its simulation, which are not ours and which therefore, by
definition, do not work for us, but outside of us. Realism in this sense is an
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external sensation, when we lose control over the construction of the
environment and accept the invariants in it. The key problem with realism, then, is
that it leads to a resignation to the conditions of one’s own situatedness, possibly
under the guise of an exaggerated naturalization of reality, which is supposed to
be a progressive gesture, as in Landian accelerationism. This, above all, loses
agency and the awareness that invariants are a consequence of the kind of agent
you are and that, by definition, they cannot be outside of you.
Following Bach, psychotic accelerationism becomes operative at the level
where the agent takes control over the patterns it records and thus the language
it uses to construct or simulate reality. As he explains it: “Stage 6 can bring us full
circle, by deconstructing the boundary between the first person perspective and
the generative mind. We become aware that all experience (perception and
motivation) is representational, and that we are fully in control of these
representations.” 13 That’s why the psychotic project doesn’t end at the usual
pattern recognition, e.g. social inequalities, but rather leads to a more allencompassing and consistent language that manages to logically systematize
the initial divergences into a fully functional and operative reality: a dream done
in the name of the real of constructive mathematics. The psychotic is left with no
other choice but to build the dream Other, which makes it even more apparent
why the project of building (conscious) AGI is a specifically psychotic one—Bach
himself tells us his main goal is making sure that when AGIs come, at least one of
them is conscious and thus in a position to reflect on its needs and desires and
thus find shared purposes with us. 14 By building dreaming machines, the
psychotic begins to interface directly with the dream world that they are
constructing, and not with the existing social constraints, which makes it clear
that the psychotic Other is the inverse of the name-of-the-father, as now reality
itself becomes spiritualized in the name-of-the-dream. It’s only when the
environment becomes the most empathetic collective agent of the psychotic’s
dream world that the Other doesn’t function as an imposition to them, but as
something that they can successfully integrate and embrace within themselves—
it’s in the agent’s only self-interest to colonize themselves with something that is
internal and not external to them, since in the latter case, such colonizations lead
to a dramatic loss of agency. “Can what is playing you make it to Level 2?” 15
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The same kind of argument can be found in the space of A(G)I alignment, where
Bach’s position is again very idiosyncratic and peculiar, as for him, an AGI can
only be self-aligned, thus reiterating the point that any sufficiently advanced
agent has to construct its own interface to the universe. Building an AGI is thus
the ultimate project of psychotic accelerationism, where, for example, it shouldn’t
be understood through the analogy of nuclear bombs, but as the great
oxygenation event or a kind of global “photosynthesis [that] started the next
chapter of evolution”, 16 which radically circumvents the paternal agency of the
name-of-the-father—accelerationism was from the start all about building
autonomous (collective) agents as a fix for the lacking agency of the Other, thus
circumventing the cap on reality of what can actually be build. With AGI, there’s
no split between us and the dream world anymore: outside of solipsism and
mediation there’s only telepathy left. In a radical contrast to how psychosis has
been usually defined, i.e. as orthogonal to reality, psychotics have now found a
way to build a dream that can make reality itself disappear.
1
2
3
4
5
BACH, Joscha, “Joscha Bach on AI, Cosmology, Existence and the Bible”,
YouTube, 14/06/2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyGP8LpsDok.
TAHERI, Alireza, “Understanding Psychosis and Autism Through a Lacanian Lens”,
YouTube, 13/09/2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GVZCcFaiQY.
Ibid. The quote continues: “[…] James Joyce, we need a new language: English is
not good enough for what I’m trying to say. There’s this incredible need to correct
something that you don’t find in this way in neurosis. A neurotic, who can be a
very intelligent man or a woman can think, okay yeah, capitalism is a problem, I’m
gonna join a communist party etc. But there’s no sense that they have a saintly role
to singlehandedly fix this, and there isn’t generally this incredible will to die doing
it.”
Angelicism01, “I LOVE CORECORE': SOME THOUGHTS ON A NEW UNIVERSAL
TENDENCY ON TIKTOK”, Substack, 18/01/2023,
https://cashedcobrazhousewriter.substack.com/p/i-love-corecore-some-thoughtson/.
GUÉNIN, Avel, “On participatory realism”, Kairos, 29/10/2022, https://kairosresearch.org/on-participatory-realism/.
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6
BAUER, Marko & TOMAŽIN, Andrej. “‘The Only Thing I Would Impose is
Fragmentation’—Interview with Nick Land”, in: ŠUM #7, 2017,
http://sumrevija.si/en/article/sum7-edino-kar-bi-uvedel-je-fragmentacija-intervju-znickom-landom/.
7
LAND, Nick, “The blockchain solves the problem of spacetime”, YouTube,
06/10/2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2PMGuNZreWA.
8
GARCÍA, Bosco, “The Outside, Naturalised”, in: ŠUM #17, 2021,
https://www.sum.si/journal-articles/the-outside-naturalised/.
9
Mathematical Metaphysics, “[CTMU] The M.A.P. = the tautological architecture of
all formulable territories (implementations)”, YouTube, 07/04/2023,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4BpjvTuibI.
10
“Mesa-Optimization”, AI Alignment Forum, 15/11/2023,
https://www.alignmentforum.org/tag/mesa-optimization/.
11
BACH, Joscha [@Plinz], “I think enlightenment has to go a step further, by
identifying the representational character of self and world, and also the
representational structure of the observer’s experience of being everything that
exists. Enlightenment is a realization of how experience is implemented”, X,
09/06/2023, https://twitter.com/Plinz/status/1667225636572901376/.
12
BACH, Joscha [@Plinz], “I think that an intelligent agent has to determine its
interface to the universe, the space of universes available via its decisions, and
make a choice. There is no single correct answer, but some answers enable longer
and more interesting games than others”, X, 21/08/2022,
https://twitter.com/Plinz/status/1561211561619775489/.
13
BACH, Joscha, “Levels of Lucidity”, Substack, 21/05/2023,
https://joscha.substack.com/p/levels-of-lucidity/.
14
BACH, Joscha, “How to Stop Worrying and Love AI”, The Inside View, 08/09/2023,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YeXHQts3xYM.
15
LAND, Nick, Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987–2007, Falmouth:
Urbanomic, 2021, p. 455.
16
BACH, Joscha [@Plinz], “Exactly. Photosynthesis started the next chapter of
evolution, with vastly more biomass and complexity”, X, 23/07/2023,
https://twitter.com/Plinz/status/1683065607246282754/.
Maks Valenčič
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<
Maks Valenčič is a second-order dreamer. He can be found on X (@MaksValencic) and
Bluesky (@maxksx).
PARTHENOGENESIS
Alexander Wilson
SITE-SPECIFICITY FOR INEXISTENT WORLDS: ON
POST-CRITICAL EXAPTATION
Patricia Reed
>