I’m juggling quite a lot of stuff at the moment and I’m quite looking forward to actually having a break this Christmas and not doing much of anything. But, before the year is out, I thought it’d be nice to share with Patreons the opening preface to my next book project. I’m some 60,000 words into it so far but there is a lot of work left to do. It doesn’t have a settled title yet but, for now, I’m referring to it as: “Accelerationism and the Future of the New.”
I’m very excited about it and have been for some time. In the new year, I’m hoping to actually demonstrate some discipline and get a first draft to Repeater Books. (I had told myself I’d do that before the end of this year but that definitely isn’t happening…)
It is clear that I need to give myself some time to work on it. If that happens, I hope you’ll forgive a slowdown in blog productivity, but I look forward to sharing a few sneaky peeks of what I’m working on.
Without further ado, here’s that first sneaky peek.
It is a difficult task, for the philosopher, to pull names away from a usage that prostitutes them.
— Alain Badiou, Ethics
This book is about accelerationism. Chances are, if you have heard that term before, you don’t think too highly of it. Few do. But even fewer people seem to know what it’s claims are, and that’s including many of those who self-identify as “accelerationists”.
This book has a single aim: to explore the emergence of the term “accelerationism” as it happened — that is, to explore how this strange concept, and the myriad philosophies attached to it, have developed over the last two decades — in an attempt to clarify its claims about the future but also, and perhaps more importantly, its implications for our present.
To understand these implications, we must track accelerationism’s knotted trajectory, from its initial moment of emergence in 2007 to its fall into disrepute in 2019. In so doing, we will gradually answer a seemingly simple question: What happened? We will have good reason to ask a far more complicated question soon afterwards: What happens next?
It is necessary that we first consider who the initial adopters of the term “accelerationism” were and what they hoped to achieve and say with it. Briefly summarised, we might describe this initial version of accelerationism as a kind of methodology — a mode of thinking that begins from an ostensibly left-wing observation regarding the ways that capitalism is “speeding up” and what the effects of this acceleration might be on human subjectivity; effects that we might be able to take advantage of for new (and, notably, postcapitalist) political aims.
More recently, however, accelerationism has come to mean something quite different within the popular imagination, particularly in the United States. According to the Southern Poverty Law Centre, for instance, accelerationism is a rallying cry “to push beyond capitalism by bringing it to its most oppressive and divisive form, prompting a movement to build a just economic system in response”; “the accelerationist set sees modern society as irredeemable and believe it should be pushed to collapse so a fascist society built on ethnonationalism can take its place.”[1]
To consider accelerationism’s beginnings and its ends side-by-side reveals a shocking disparity between our potential understandings of the term. Some of accelerationism’s critics will declare that the latter understanding was always already present in any initial discussion of this half-baked political philosophy; and that may very well be the case. Nevertheless, there is a story here that has barely been told.
To understand the unsavoury brushes that the term “accelerationism” has been tarred with, we must necessarily return to its initial moment of emergence from an online blogosphere. This is so that we might approach the term without preconceptions or preconditions. Accelerationism requires a back-to-basics approach. However, somewhat paradoxically, the announcement of such an approach does not allow us to jettison the most pressing questions facing accelerationism today into some conclusionary beyond. In fact, there is no better way to demonstrate why such an approach is necessary than by first discussing the contradictions that define accelerationist discourses in the present; in short, how the term has been transformed from a pet project for a left-wing blogosphere to become an ideological lynchpin for far-right terrorism in the West.
What this book hopes to demonstrate is that accelerationism’s beginnings nonetheless remain hugely relevant to its ends. Despite many claiming that it has been transformed almost beyond all recognition, the concerns that this strange philosophy first sought to address remain unresolved and increasingly relevant to its more recent uses, associations and appropriations. This will become clearer as we progress. For now, let it suffice to say that if accelerationism was intended to be a diagnosis of our contemporary moment, it is a mode of thought that has begun to show symptoms of the very disease it first sought to diagnose and describe.
This book does not wish to emphasise this process in the hope of compartmentalising these different approaches to accelerationism, in some naïve attempt to rehabilitate a “good” accelerationism and restore its reputation. What this book hopes to consider, instead, is the extent to which accelerationism has fallen on its own sword. If we are to understand accelerationism as a philosophical thought interested in the intensification of capitalist affects, we might argue that accelerationism itself has since fallen victim to the very processes of intensification that it first sought to describe. Accelerationism, then, finds itself encased within a contradiction, but this has not stopped its proliferation online. One of the founding principles of accelerationist thought, after all, is that “nothing ever died from contradictions”.
This claim originates in the 1972 book Anti-Oedipus by French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. In their wide-ranging analysis of desire under capitalism, they introduce a notion that has haunted political philosophy ever since: “The death of a social machine has never been heralded by a disharmony or a dysfunction; on the contrary, social machines make a habit of feeding on the contradictions they give rise to, on the crises they provoke, on the anxieties they engender, and on the infernal operations they regenerate.”[2]
It is capitalism that Deleuze and Guattari hold firmly in their sights, but critiques of capitalism are by no means immune to their own insights. This is true of accelerationism most explicitly, but it is a process we can see unfolding all around us. In disentangling this political philosophy from the mess it has made for itself, returning to its core questions — questions that the accelerationists of today must, first of all, ask themselves before they can hope to ask them of others — we may find ourselves newly vigilant to this process as it engulfs other ideas and ideals. In so doing, we may not salvage accelerationism from the twisted wreckage, but we might finally allow ourselves to better understand the obstacles facing the production of new thought and new politics in the twenty-first century.
This was accelerationism’s initial attraction for many — it was a political philosophy that spoke to, and hoped to midwife, a new world; a new political reality. As a contemporary evaluation of our desires and the currents that parasitise them in the twenty-first century, accelerationism was an uneven attempt to combat the valences of late-capitalism that were precisely suffocating “the new” in every instance of its emergence.
This crisis of the new — which we will come to call, following Alain Badiou, our “crisis of/in negation”[3] — has been discussed by many over the years, and in many different contexts. It refers to the claim that, whilst we are very capable of destroying the old — culturally, politically, etc. — we struggle to produce new vectors down which to travel. This crisis has stalked us since before the turn of the millennium, since the so-called “end of history”, particularly in the arts, which had previously prefigured political change in the West for over a century, but which now demonstrate a tendency towards self-referential pastiche and nostalgia for a lost modernism — a melancholic nostalgia that has locked us into a kind of “frenzied stasis”.[4] Whilst controversial in some fields, it is an observation that is as relevant to the present day as it was to the year 2001, when the future first failed to arrive and a new age of fear truly began.
This book, then, hopes to track an ironic trajectory — how did accelerationism begin as an attempt to usher in the new, only to become associated with the most reactionary impulses present in society? We find ourselves faced, almost immediately, with a feedback loop. It may give this book the appearance of an ouroboros, beginning at its end; beginning with the term’s worst impulses and influences. Rest assured that the following introduction’s twists and turns may be easier to follow once we have reached this book’s conclusion, but it is necessary for us to address the stakes and dangers of a project such as this at the first opportunity.
Given the mess that accelerationism is in at present, we will find ourselves providing definitions and then, very soon afterwards, contradicting them. But we must start from this place of uncertainty regardless, because this book has been birthed on the back foot, written at a time when the term it dedicates itself to describing, precisely for this tendency to collapse onto its own sense of itself, has never been more controversial and maligned. And so, the first task at hand is to convince you, reader, that this unruly thought is still worthy of your time and attention. This is no easy task. However, it is my hope that, in attempting to do so, methodically — and, most importantly of all, accessibly — that some futuristic philosophy of late capitalism may still have a future all of its own.
[1] Cassie Miller, “‘There Is No Political Solution’: Accelerationism in the White Power Movement”, Southern Poverty Law Centre, 23 June 2020: <https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2020/06/23/there-no-political-solution-accelerationism-white-power-movement>
[2] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, Helen R. Lane. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013, 177.
[3] John Van Houdt, “The Crisis of Negation: An Interview with Alain Badiou”, Continent, issue 1.4 / 2011: <http://continentcontinent.cc/index.php/continent/article/view/65>
[4] This phrase, attributed to the late Mark Fisher, will be invoked throughout this text. It captures the paradox of late capitalism, which accelerationism sought to intervene in, perfectly. Fisher had previously used to phrase when talking about “Boring Dystopia” — a Facebook group set up for people to share and debate the quotidian inefficiencies of late capitalism. Through this cascade of imagery, revealing sad robots and broken self-service checkouts, Fisher argued that dystopia wasn’t some spectacularly brutal future to be imagined by science fiction writers; dystopia is already here and it is mundane. As he explains in an interview with Roisin Kebard for Vice: “‘The point is always made that capitalism is efficient, people say ‘You might not like it, but it works.’ But Britain is not efficient. Instead it’s stuck in a form of frenzied stasis.’” See: Roisin Kiberd, “The Rise and Fall of ‘Boring Dystopia,’ the Anti-Facebook Facebook Group”, Motherboard, 22 December 2015: <https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/aekd5j/the-rise-and-fall-of-boring-dystopia-the-anti-facebook-facebook-group>