Accelerate

* Book: Accelerate. The Accelerationist Reader. Editors: Robin Mackay, Armen Avanessian. Urbanomic, 2014

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Discussion

McKenzie Wark:

"Thinking futures for natureculture is even more a problem, given the general collapse of any theory of history that might be synthetic and empirically grounded. When even supposedly Hegelian thinkers such as Zizek start dancing around the bonfire of ‘apocalypse’ then we’re really up a dead end.

I had hoped that the accelerationists would come to our aid here. The publication of the #Accelerate anthology however shows both the potential but also the flaws in the attempt to reboot the theory of history by thinkers gathered under this banner.

There are some excellent texts in this anthology. (Those by Luciana Parisi and Benedict Singleton are for me the stand-outs). But there is also far too much that is more retro than accelerating, indeed may be accelerating thought backwards toward outmoded ways of working.

There is a general tendency to take the current moment of more-or-less openly acknowledged slow-motion crisis as an excuse to double-down on very old fashioned modes of thinking.

The most common form of this reactionary response is religious fundamentalism, with its denial of science and insistence on scripture. A rather more high-minded version of exactly the same thing is philosophical fundamentalism, with its rather comic attempt to think the world through the repetition of the reading of its own canon of scriptures. The #Accelerate anthology contains its own old testament, including some supposedly ‘heretical’ texts. But there is no doubting the orthodoxy of the kinds of reading practices of such texts the book promotes.

A fine example of this would be the very first text of its old testament: Marx’s, ‘Fragment on Machines’, of 1858. In typical traditional fashion, in #Accelerate this founding text is either (a) ignored, as if it were just enough to reprint it. Or (b) treated as holy writ. No actual engagement with it takes place throughout the whole book! We can discover quite a bit of what is unthought – even unthinkable – in accelerationist discourse simply by opening this famous text up and reading it. This will help with understanding a later moment in the anthology, where the rather provincial world of English accelerationist writing tries to make common-cause with Italian autonomists, for whom this Marx text is quite central. But we quickly discover that what these two tendencies are aligned in is precisely there errors of judgment. (The Negri text in this book is particularly unfortunate).

Marx’s interest in this fragmentary text is in the passage from the use of simple tools to machine systems. In other words he is trying to grasp the advanced industry of his day, which is to say the backward industry of our own times. He starts with a phenomena in the world – machine systems – and brings thought to it. This is of course the opposite of how Marx is now usually read: starting with his thought, in the form of texts like this one, and interpreting the phenomena through the text.

If one understands the difference between these two approaches, it is not hard to see how the now more common one results in the discourse of eternal capital, which is where most ‘Marxists’ seem to want to reside today. Marx is taken as revealing a deep philosophical essence of capital through the study of its historical and phenomenal forms. In this approach, it is admitted that capital is historical only to the extent that it may take on new historical forms, but its essence remains eternal and unchanging.

In this traditionalist, old testament Marxism, this eternal form then awaits its negation by that which is in-and-against it, labor. Among more Spinozist forms of Marxism, of which accelerationism is one flavor, there is no force of negation. Rather, the continual transformation of its appearances leads in the end to a qualitative change in its essence – in the end.

But there is a tension in this mode of thinking. It wants to hang on to some way of using the category of eternal capital. It does not quite want to admit that if capital is indeed continually mutating and self-modifying, then it has no essence, and ‘appearances’ need to be taken seriously as not mere phenomenal forms but as actual forms in the world. In short: there can be no ‘Marxism’ as a philosophy produced by means of philosophy, which takes the essence of capital as its subject. The modifications in so-called phenomenal forms need to be understood as more than mere phenomena, and that requires a more modest approach to the forms of knowledge of those modifications.

In short, Marxism could only be a collaborative practice of knowledge among different but equal ways of knowing, where philosophy is not the ruling party. Or to put it in a quite different language. The statement “the essence of technology is nothing technological” is fundamentally untrue and a barrier to thought. Technology really does need to be understood through the collaboration of specialized knowledges of what it actually is and does. The attempt to make philosophy a ruling ‘technology of essence’ is retrograde. The technology of essence is nothing essential. Philosophy can only set itself on a useful path once again on the basis of this humility, and as a low theory rather than a high theory." (http://www.urbanomic.com/pub_accelerate.php)