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A Marxist Heresy? Accelerationism and Its Discontents

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A Marxist Heresy? Accelerationism and Its Discontents DOSSIER FUTURE STASIS A Marxist heresy? Accelerationism and its discontents David Cunningham In his study of the semantics of historical time, ‘the accelerations of an always globalizing capitalism’ Reinhart Koselleck proposes that ‘two specific deter- produce what Marx identified in the Grundrisse as minants’ characterize modernity’s ‘new experience that ‘constant continuity’ essential to the temporali- of transition: the expected otherness of the future ties of circulation at a world scale – particularly via and, associated with it, the alteration in the rhythm an intersection of the increasing ‘velocity at which of temporal experience: acceleration, by means of new products emerge’ with the pace of technological which one’s own time is distinguished from what development and of its penetration into everyday went before’. If the concept of acceleration is thereby life – this is generative, today, of what appears as central to the emergence of a qualitatively different ‘a time without time’, an ‘ever more congealed and modern or new time (Neuzeit) around the latter half futureless present’.3 Cut loose from historical nar- of the eighteenth century, it is also at this ‘epochal rative, the felt experience of the present is one of an threshold’ that history itself, in the collective sin- ongoing state of transition, which tends to present gular, comes to be first perceived as ‘in motion’ – a itself less as a sense of possibility of the truly new perception that Koselleck locates in a divergence than as a paradoxically frenzied sense of repetition, between the ‘space of experience’ and the ‘horizon with a consequent depoliticization of the ‘dynamic of expectation’. There would thus seem to be good and historical force’ accorded by earlier political mod- reason to argue, as Hartmut Rosa does in his recent ernisms to time itself. Acceleration become the mark book, Social Acceleration, subtitled A New Theory of not of ‘progress’ but of the paradoxical temporality of Modernity, that acceleration just is the fundamen- a ‘frenetic standstill’.4 tal temporal experience of modernity as a whole: This is ‘one familiar story’, as Benjamin Noys ‘the decisive and categorially new foundational puts it. But there is ‘another, stranger’ one that has experience of history, and the [basis of the] rapid re-emerged over the last few years: ‘of those who establishment of the concept of modernity’ itself. think we haven’t gone fast enough’, who think that Such a ‘transformation of the experience of history the way out of the ‘frenetic standstill’ of accelera- lies at the root’, as Rosa notes, ‘of the reconceptu- tion’s ‘futureless present’ is to accelerate through alization of the role and status of the political in and beyond such (capitalist) acceleration itself. First modernity’, according new temporal meanings to named by Noys himself in a critical vein, in his 2010 such pivotal terms as ‘revolution’, ‘utopia’, ‘progress’ book The Persistence of the Negative, where it appears or ‘conservatism’.1 as a subset of the more pervasive ‘affirmationism’ It is all the more striking, therefore, that recent of contemporary continental theory, the idea of an accounts of capitalist modernity have tended to stress accelerationism has subsequently been valorized as in acceleration’s ‘alteration in the rhythm of temporal the basis for a re-politicization of leftist thought experience’ not, in fact, so much the opening to the today.5 If contemporary politics is beset by a ‘paraly- alterity of the future, but what Paul Virilio – the cur- sis of the political imaginary’, in which ‘the future mudgeonly godfather of all such accounts – describes has been cancelled’, write Alex Williams and Nick as a ‘futurism of the instant that has no future’, and Srnicek in their 2013 Manifesto for an Accelerationist of an increasing ‘shrinkage to the present’.2 Thus, for Politics, the ‘political left’ must disinter what they Jonathan Crary, to take another recent example, if call its ‘supressed accelerationist tendency’. And if RadicaL PhiLosoPhy 191 (may/juN 2015) 29 confirmation were needed that an accelerationist he, too, places particular emphasis on an enthusiasm turn will thus have to be added to the sequence of for ‘the machine’ as the central organizing trope in all those other (dismally accelerating) recent ‘turns’ this respect. The first chapter of Malign Velocities in contemporary theory, the appearance of Noys’s is thus focused on Futurism before moving on to own extensive critical treatment in his Malign Veloci- what Noys terms the ‘communist accelerationism’ of ties: Accelerationism and Capitalism, along with the the Bolshevik embrace of a ‘proletarian Taylorism’, 500-plus-page #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, exemplified artistically in the technical utopianism should suffice to allay any doubts.* of the poet Aleksei Gastev. Where these different genealogical tracks meet The story so far is in 1970s’ France, and in particular in the work Accelerationism might only have been recently of Deleuze and Guattari and Jean-François Lyotard. named, but both books are concerned to uncover Politically, such writings are to be understood, Noys the ‘supressed accelerationist tendency’ across a much plausibly argues, as responses to ‘the new libertarian longer history. For Robin Mackay and Armen Avanes- mood induced by May ’68’, each of which came to sian, the editors of the Accelerationist Reader, this is claim that, as against ‘traditional’ socialist aspira- mainly a question of providing a kind of intellectual tions to rational state-led planning, ‘desire’ could prehistory for Williams and Srnicek’s Manifesto, as be liberated not by regulating or controlling but well as providing a selection of recent texts presented only by radicalizing the ‘deterritorializing’ forces as the work of fellow travellers, including ones by of capitalism itself in such a way as to ultimately Tiziana Terranova, Benedict Singleton and Luciana ‘exacerbate [it] to the point of collapse’.6 If capitalism Parisi, along with Ray Brassier and Reza Negrastani. is going to ‘perish’, as Lyotard asserts in 1972, it (The kinship with speculative realism is especially will not do so of ‘bad conscience’, but only ‘through important to Mackay and Avanessian; and, indeed, excess, because its energetics continually displace Srnicek was one of the editors of the 2011 collection its limits’: ‘Destruction can only come from an even The Speculative Turn.) The Reader also includes two more liquid liquidation’ (AR, 183, 203). Deleuze and direct responses to the 2013 Manifesto – sympathetic, Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus may have provided much if not uncritical – by Patricia Reed and Antonio of the vocabulary for such a position, but its most Negri (one source of the ‘lively international debate’, extreme (and bracingly ‘posthuman’) manifestation as Mackay and Avanessian term it, to which the comes in Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy (1974), with its Manifesto has given rise). Notably not included is notorious account of nineteenth-century proletarian anything by accelerationism’s principal antagonist, experience as a form of jouissance in which the worker Noys, although this absence is compensated for by ‘enjoyed the hysterical, masochistic, whatever exhaus- the more or less simultaneous appearance of the tion it was’ of industrial labour and the anonymity of excellent Malign Velocities, which, while only directly the metropolis as an emancipation from the organic engaging Williams and Srnicek’s appropriation of his body and from the claustrophobia of village life (AR, originally critical term in its conclusion, can also be 212–13). read as offering a certain prehistory of its own. If this constitutes the first wave of accelerationism Conforming to its technophilic and ‘posthuman’ ‘proper’, accelerationism mark 2 is to be found in the orientation, Mackay and Avanessian’s Reader sets out later re-embrace of these writings in the somewhat its ‘construction of a genealogy’ by beginning with altered context of the UK during the early 1990s in Marx’s ‘Fragment on Machines’ and Samuel Butler’s the work of Nick Land and the CCRU (Cybernetic 1872 Erewhon, before charting a course through Thor- Culture Research Unit).7 While Deleuze and Lyotard stein Veblen’s 1904 ‘The Machine Process’ to Shula- wrote against the backdrop of May ’68, Land and mith Firestone’s The Dialectics of Sex. By comparison, his compatriots, drawing on cyberpunk and rave Noys places more weight on those ‘elements of the culture, took up the accelerationist call in a context avant-garde’ in the early twentieth century for whom of an increasingly triumphant neoliberalism credo ‘the vanguard desire for the future’ was broadly con- of ‘no alternative’. Noys terms the result a ‘Deleuzian gruent with ‘a time of acceleration’ (MV, 27), although Thatcherism’, and certainly the CCRU’s arguments, * Benjamin Noys, Malign Velocities: Accelerationism and Capitalism, Zero, Alresford, 2014. 117 + xii pp., £9.99 pb., 978 1 78279 300 7; Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian, eds, #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, Urbanomic and Merve Verlag, Falmouth and Berlin, 2014. 536 pp., £14.99 pb., 978 0 95752 955 7. Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics is reprinted in the Reader. Page references are given in the main text as AR and MV, respectively. 30 while still claiming that the post-humanist embrace Contemporary accelerationism is, then, in the dif- of capitalist deterritorialization would ultimately ficult position of trying to resuscitate something of generate ‘a cybernetic
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