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Abstract
An examination of how the Accelerationist imagination has failed in its deviation from Nick Land's radical metaphorics of an Artaudian and Bataille-esque signifying “economy without reserve” to a neo-Sovietised bureaucratic plan for the post-Anthropocene, per Benjamin Noys et al. Given a positivistic guise, futurology of the latter kind almost always masks a return of apocalyptic humanism. The fantasy of a species unified in solidarity, in full view of its techno-evolutionary obsolescence, seeks to magically transform the history of alienation into some transcendental “means” of global post-production: but what this amounts to in fact is the phantasmatic extension of the Situationist spectacle into a “collective” dream of living on beyond a “global” extinction event which, in reality, will have been nothing but that of an ideology.
disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Per “Accelerationism”:
Roughly speaking, there's two camps: those like Nick Land who think Capitalism will speed up and evolve into something else out of its own internal differences; those like Benjamin Noys who think that Capitalism has to be confronted and negated from without by a radical social force. Where I differ from both schools of thought is that both seem to think this can still be described as “Capitalism.” (“McKenzie Wark | Information-Commodification,” interview with Marvin Jordan, DIS Magazine (2016), <http://dismagazine.com/disillusioned/discussion-disillusioned/56968/mckenzie-wark-information-commodification/> (accessed 8 Sept. 2017))
2 McKenzie Wark, “Accelerationism,” public seminar, <http://www.publicseminar.org/2013/11/accelerationism/> (accessed 8 Sept. 2017).
3 For Walter Benjamin, the dissolution of aesthetic autonomy is less the work of the historical avant-garde than an upheaval in the techniques of mass media (“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1995)).
4 Benjamin H. Bratton, “Some Trace Effects of the Post-Anthropocene: On Accelerationist Geopolitical Aesthetics,” e-flux 46 (June 2013), <http://www.e-flux.com/journal/some-trace-effects-of-the-post-anthropocene-on-accelerationist-geopolitical-aesthetics/> (accessed 8 Sept. 2017).
5 See Jacques Lacan, “A Materialist Definition of the Phenomenon of Consciousness” in The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book II: The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954–1955, trans. S. Tomaselli (London: Cambridge UP, 1988) 46.
6 Bratton.
7 Wark, “Accelerationism.”
8 Not quite Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Philosophische Untersuchungen), trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (London: Macmillan, 1953) 223.
9 Not quite Nick Land interviewed by Delphi, “Hyperstition an Introduction” (2009), <xenopraxis.net/readings/carstens_hyperstition.pdf> (accessed 8 Sept. 2017). “Functioning as magical sigils or engineering diagrams, hyperstitions are ideas that […] engender apocalyptic positive feedback cycles” (Carstens).
10 Benjamin 242; translation modified.
11 They (D&G) couldn’t help themselves, they had to know what daddy thought of their little castration joke – so of course they sent a woman to find out.
12 The “pure historical consciousness” of The Thing as such?
13 Wark, “Accelerationism.”
14 Bratton.
15 Wark, “Accelerationism.”
16 Land's quasi-paradoxical future-as-thanotonic-afterlife was indeed already anticipated in Marx's Grundrisse, and is simply one more anachronism in the belated form of an “accelerationist” rhetoric, leaving the passing impression of a déjà vu like a crank on the corner with handpainted sign proclaiming THE END IS NIGH. Which, of course, it is, and always has been. But some ends are more nigh than others. But what if we gave the crank a quantum computer instead, with a built-in improbability drive and virtually infinite horsepower?