I. A Short History of Accelerationism
At the time of its naming in 2008, accelerationism was an attempt “to think the in-itself of capitalism outside of any correlation to the human.” Drawing primarily on the works of Alain Badiou, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and the more recent writings of Ray Brassier and Nick Land, postmodernism was skewered modernistically. A bold new project of alienating our alienation was proposed, splitting the totalising humanist-capitalist machine and instead framing capitalism as something that “intersects with us [but] ultimately is not of or for-us.”
In affirming this untethering of the human from capital, a post-Ccru blogosphere began sketching the planes of emergence from which possible new subjectivities might be realised. “The required subject — a collective subject — does not exist, yet the crisis, like all the other global crises we’re now facing, demands that it be constructed”, as Mark Fisher argued in Capitalist Realism, and so a newly transcendental Marxism was proposed, which would take seriously capitalism’s mutations of subjectivity, whilst attempting to exacerbate the system’s points of tension to affirm any post-capitalist becoming. But it wasn’t long before the subject of accelerationism went AWOL…
Despite all the later assertions to the contrary, it was never simply the case that accelerationism saw capitalism, in its distinctiveness, as something to be elevated to some new ideal on high, nor that capitalism itself must be accelerated “willy-nilly”. Rather, in accepting the ways that capitalism is “not of or for-us”, it was suggested we can now cease to use its humanist entanglements as a measure of human nature as such, instead considering anew the inhuman becomings coming into view at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Any attempt “to think the in-itself of capitalism outside of any correlation to the human” thus required, from the other side, “the thinking of capitalism outside of alienation.” We can alienate our alienation, giving way to all else that exists but is struggling to be born, developing the minor becomings that capitalism produces but likewise attempts to obstruct, which might eventually lead to both human and capital being radically re-thought and transformed. As Alex Williams writes:
For if we are to follow Badiou’s stab at an unmitigated inhumanism, a total leap beyond the suffering animal model of godless democratic-materialist bio-linguistic humanism, as surely we must, then a theory of value cannot be predicated upon this original suffering, the voodoo process of soul-theft at the core of the alienation of labour in the commodity form. To build a model of capitalism from a new theory of value is necessary if we are to evade the traps of both democratic materialist commensically corrupt liberalism, and the post modern end of history. The “blind acephelous polymorph” that is capital must be embraced, but not from the point of view of some naïve enthusiasm or sentiment of hope that markets can deliver utopia. [Take note, e/acc.] Instead, as the way out of the binaries of a leftism which is utterly and irretrievably moribund, and a neo-liberal economics which is ideologically bankrupt, we must bend both together in the face of an inhuman and indefatigable capitalism, to think how we might inculcate a new form of radically inhuman subjectivation. This entails the retrieval of the communist project for a new man, AND the liberation of the neo-liberal quest for a capitalism unbound, from both its subterranean dependence upon the state and the skeletal humanist discursive a priori which animates its ideological forms.
Technological acceleration was already automating capitalism beyond the need for human labour, producing an anxiety that is all the more potent today, amidst a contemporary arms race to produce newly competent AI. But rather than this technological “progress” exacerbating our alienation, as we are left listlessly to our own devices (pun intended), what if we rejected this trap, in which a left-wing melancholy takes our alienation as an evermore insurmountable obstacle, and instead affirm the growing subjective errancy that is a product of capitalism’s own machinations? Indeed, if capitalism is to continually flirt with “maximum jailbreak”, might humanity itself affirm capitalism’s accelerating alienations and thoughtfully become something other? To put the argument more succinctly, if capitalism is evolving beyond a need for us, how might we make ourselves more receptive to the ways in which we can evolve beyond a need for it?
It was an adequate response to this latter question that was missing in the late-2000s. As Badiou had then recently argued:
In trying to clarify the political situation, we also need to search for a new formulation of the problem of critique and negation. I think that it is necessary, above all in the field of political action, to surpass the concept of a negation taken solely in its destructive and properly negative aspect. Contrary to Hegel, for whom the negation of the negation produces a new affirmation, I think we must assert that today negativity, properly speaking, does not create anything new. It destroys the old, of course, but does not give rise to a new creation.
It is with this in mind that Alex Williams offered up (an anti-hauntological) accelerationism that was as attuned to the new critiques of political economy that were emerging after the end of history as it was the subjective mutations being produced by sonic culture, specifically new musical subcultures developing after the so-called death of rave. He continues:
Rather than an act of reverence, of mourning, of touching at impossible universes from a distance, [accelerationism] would be a deliberate and gleeful affirmation. Alternatively, we might consider Badiou’s analysis of the emergence of the new, which would entail a more strategic examination of precisely where the pop-musical evental sites and historical situations exist within our current time: those regions which appear, from the in-situational point of view, to be marginal, and properly undecideable.
But as it collided provocatively with the impotence of its era, an original accelerationism struggled to hold open any space of radical undecidability, from which new subjectivities might emerge. A deliberate and gleeful affirmation should, above all else, be fun, shouldn’t it? But left-wing melancholy was proving to be persistent, and any suggestion that we “let go” of our capitalist-humanist habits appeared more difficult than many had first assumed. In spite of the alienation that capitalism has trapped us within, we appeared all the more reluctant to leave the cage in those moments when capital inadvertently held the door ajar for us. (It is no coincidence, in this regard, that accelerationism emerged from the left’s failure to capitalize (pun also intended) on the financial crash.)
The central problem of any modern political philosophy — Spinoza’s infamous question: “why do people fight for their servitude as if it were their salvation?” — thus remained unresolved, and so accelerationism’s bold insistence that we think the new was met with equal enthusiasm and cynicism as this blogospheric thought collided with mainstream leftism and post-rave melancholia. But accelerationism refused to cow to the latent conservatism endemic after the so-called ends of rave and history. The stakes were too high. Our contemporary political situation had to be addressed with new force. It was necessary that the left develop a bold and positive project that could match the persistent negativity of the capitalist present — something which we have arguably seen already in queer spaces and in the more recent advancements of the black radical tradition, but which have been met with equal force by a similarly emboldened culture-war conservatism. But a new militancy brought with it a new miserablism as well.
What has complicated matters since is that the thought of Nick Land — often heralded (with a woeful lack of irony) as the “godfather” of accelerationism — has followed a far more conservative trajectory. Land, after all, likes capitalism, and gleefully encouraged its jailbreak from humanist concerns in a manner that has proved abundantly popular with a reactionary tech elite. What is now forgotten, as a result, is that accelerationism began as a counterpoint to Land’s “Deleuzo-Thatcherite” theorising. Land, as Fisher later argued, should nonetheless to be taken seriously for the ways he was already beginning to advance a new theory of capitalism outside of alienation. Although it was Land’s “assumption that desire and communism were fundamentally incompatible”, his texts “luridly expose the scale and nature of the problems the left now faces.”
A positive project was thus necessary that could respond to Land from the left, but it now appears that such a project has failed to manifest itself convincingly. What began as an explicit “left-Landianism” was transformed into a position that, according to its critics, was constituted by a technocratic, managerial project of subjectivation nowhere near inhuman enough. A Deleuzo-Guattarian schizoanalytic programme was cut loose, and the production of new subjectivities was inadvertently forestalled by its tethering — in the UK at least — to a transformation of the politics of the Labour Party. (Something that was evidently well-meaning at the time, and certainly sought to affirm the collective joy gathering momentum in that moment, but which has once again fallen into disrepute after the failure of Corbynism and the left’s broad disillusionment with Keir Starmer’s return to Blairism.)
It is here that the timeline of accelerationism’s development becomes appropriately skewed. Although Land has long been acknowledged as an accelerationist precursor, we forget that his right-accelerationism was developed in response to Srnicek and Williams’ left-accelerationist project. Caught between this founding disagreement, every variation of accelerationism since has attempted to recuperate its Landian DNA as if any speculative-realist inquiry into a post-Landian politics were nothing less than accelerationism’s original sin. The fraught dialectic of an alienation of alienation was soon framed retroactively as little more than cope, as the intersecting of capitalism with human life fell back into a postmodern reiteration of Hegel’s lord-bondsman dialectic — which Land had pre-emptively admonished in his 1994 text ‘Meltdown’, dismissing “a re-Hegelianized ‘western marxism’ [that] degenerates from the critique of political economy into a state-sympathizing monotheology of economics”. But Land himself arguably fell into a trap of his own when he turned more emphatically to the right, presenting capital as a Cthulhic puppeteer with its own self-consciousness. Where Land distinguish himself, however, was in his dismissals of the populist left and right in general, whose political debating was little more than petty human squabbling anyway, arguing in 2014 that “the Right and the Left at least agree on one thing — the other guys have near-total hegemony, and are running the world into disaster.” This squabbling led to an accelerationist amnesia, as left and right perceptions of capitalism’s intersecting with the human were reduced to a grumpy factionalism that left capitalism itself unscathed.
Unconditional accelerationism developed a few years after this initial fall into inertia, with the project’s recuperation spearheaded by Vincent Garton, who returned accelerationism to a more explicitly Landian core, whilst further advancing critiques of what a popular Landianism had become.
In his critique of Srnicek and Williams’ ‘Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics’, Land had argued that a leftist affirmation of technological acceleration was nonetheless conditioned on the basis of a humanist progressivism, adhering to political ideals of class consciousness that capitalism itself was rendering outdated, such that “acceleration is merely an instrumental sub-objective.” The point of accelerationism was rather that, in moments of radical undecidability, we do not know what we might be becoming, and so we should open ourselves up more ambitiously and experimentally to the subjective challenges of the present — otherwise accelerationism’s founding uncoupling of the human from capital is little more than posturing.
Although Land tacitly affirms this position, his penchant for race science nonetheless betrays an affinity for a right-wing managerialism that is arguably even more dispiriting than the left’s own. Garton thus begins “with a renunciation of the retrograde politicisation to which accelerationism has fallen subject”, whilst also identifying the ways that right-accelerationism shares a habit of tapping the brakes, swapping out a progressive idealism for the regressively predictive claims of evolutionary psychology. With this stalling in mind, Garton rejects
simultaneously the right-accelerationists’ Yudkowskian concern with control and evaluation, with shaping the explosion of modernity, with guaranteeing its heterogeneity, with exploring the possibilities of a supposedly ever-improving transhumanism. The aggregate improvement of humanity’s condition is, to be sure, a fact to which the traditional left seems incapable of responding. But beyond the nostrums of race and nation, the right-accelerationists seem all too anxious over the tearing-apart of humanity that this process has increasingly entailed. Despite their claim to a radical and ‘dark’ identity with acceleration, they model with bureaucratic pedantry forms of government within which they hope the explosion can be moulded and recuperated.
Against all this the unconditional accelerationist celebrates and intensifies the fire of modernity as a whole: both the flows of capital that compress the world ever tighter in a liquid despotism of the machine that is remodelling and resequencing humanity, and the flows of social cybernetics that are overwhelming political institutions, turning despite themselves towards terminal delirium.
Further illuminating the contradictions at work in both l/acc and r/acc, u/acc insisted that we simply (and not so simply) “let go”. U/acc’s discussions of an anti-praxis were nonetheless misinterpreted as a kind of apoliticisation, but the intention was perhaps to turn to pre-political formations of subjectivity, or at least to re-problematise the infinite chicken-or-egg regression of subjectivity’s embroilment with politics popularly understood. At this point, a fundamental untethering of the human from capital seemed to be a highly stylised attempt at hyperstition, such that in beginning to think this uncoupling we might realise what exactly is holding us back, which is not so much capitalism itself as it is an unthinking commitment to outdated humanist ideals of an authentic human nature. When Bruno Latour argued “we have never been modern”, he suggested that any declarative separation from human and culture had been made prematurely, and we should think this dualism again as a monism that we have not yet come to terms with. Our nature has changed, just as our culture has, and so, echoing Badiou, accelerationism presented itself once again as a “practical discourse for sustaining the subjective advent of a politics.”
Against a left-accelerationist project that saw humanity as capable of steering capitalism in new directions, accelerationism began to consider anew how capitalism’s mutating of the human can produce a subjectivity that, in turn, leaves capitalism itself behind. As Simon O’Sullivan argued in his review of the #Accelerate reader:
For capitalism is not just an abstract inhuman agency ‘out there’, instantiated in forms of technology, and so forth (that is, as a supra-molar entity). It is also ‘in here’ – producing our very subjectivity on what we might call a molecular level. Capitalism goes all the way down, determining our affective states, as well as our very desires and the contours of our inner most worlds. Subjectivity, then, is not solely a rational business in this sense or, at least, those aspects not involved in the project of reason are also crucial to our sense of who and what we are – or, indeed, what we might become.
Any subjectivity ‘beyond’ capitalism (even one produced from within the latter) will have to deal with this, and get involved in the whole complex mess of being alive, not least addressing the various affective tonalities that capitalism engenders (from an omnipresent, ambient anxiety, to resentment and depression, to all out paralysing fear). It will not be enough to take on – or commit to – a new set of ideas, or put our faith solely in technological progress – subjectivity has to be produced differently at this level.
For Garton, then, the question of “what is to be done?” only posits a “human agency [that] has already been elevated to become the guide and measure of the world, and this, conceptually, is intolerable.” It asks, instead, how we might affirm what is already being done (to us) on a more molecular level. If the point of accelerationism is to “inculcate a new form of radically inhuman subjectivation”, then greater attention must be paid not to an all-too-familiar (and innately liberal) humanist response, but rather to the primary processes that are already mutating our understanding of humanity as such. This inhumanism is not so nihilistic as to be defeatist, however. Rather, it echoes Ray Brassier’s understanding of nihilism — the Nietzschean “transvaluation of all values” — as a “speculative opportunity.” U/acc thus called for a thanatoidally Spinozan expressionism to be put to work in any contemporary philosophy of capitalism worth its salt, since philosophy “should be more than a sop to the pathetic twinge of human self-esteem”. (As Deleuze writes: “When Spinoza says that we do not even know what a body can do, this is practically a war cry. He adds that we speak of consciousness, mind, soul, of the power of the soul over the body; we chatter away about these things, but do not even know what bodies can do. Moral chattering replaces true philosophy.”) An unconditional accelerationism attempts, then — like its sister, gender accelerationism — to be “in tune with how the inhuman processes of acceleration work and what their consequences will be.”
In my own contributions to this discourse, I saw a return to a Deleuzian Stoicism that was coupled with a Badiouian theory of the subject. Though Badiou was infamously critical of Deleuze, he nonetheless shared an admiration for his devotion “to defending, unfolding, and understanding ever more comprehensively the founding intuition of Nietzsche concerning the eternal return.” Deleuze’s reading of the eternal return rests on its entanglement of difference and repetition, wherein the stultifying sameness of the eternal return nonetheless emboldens a “selective principle”, through which the entrapped subject finds themselves in a position of radical undecidability. The eternal return of the Same is, in this sense, the eternal return of a dice throw as the repetitive evocation of difference in itself. To affirm the eternal return is to take a gamble on becoming. This is itself revolutionary.
For Badiou, in a similar manner, the “subject” of which we so often speak must always be a “subject-to-come”, and can in no way be presupposed. As he writes in Theory of the Subject: “The real is what the subject encounters, as its chance, its cause, and its consistency.” And this real, for Marxism, “is the revolution” itself. The revolution is not out there, as an event we are perpetually awaiting the arrival of. It is in fact already here. “Revolution” — that strange term which at once means total change and unending repetition — is the eternal return of chance. Whenever the dice is thrown, we must make ourselves worthy of whatever number presents itself to us. This requires that a new kind of attention be paid to the kinds of subjectivity that capitalism itself is producing, particularly those that frustrate its own mechanisms. As Mark Fisher explained, “accelerationism maintains that there are desires and processes which capitalism gives rise to and feeds upon, but which it cannot contain; and it is the acceleration of these processes that will push capitalism beyond its limits.” An unconditional accelerationism is nothing less than a renewed commitment to the gamble. Attuned to the conditions of the present, accelerationism takes no pause in throwing the dice again. It plays the game and has fun whilst doing so.
Then, in 2019, everything changed. As an accelerationist blogosphere fought hard to retain this revolutionary kernel within its own discourses, the term was appropriated by white supremacists keen to trigger a race war — most infamously, in the manifesto uploaded online by the Christchurch shooter. All accelerationist discourse online seemed to cease, but from the ashes a new child-accelerationism was already emerging.
As the blogosphere tried (and arguably failed) to come to terms with this most damning of appropriations, our communities were undergoing a further, unexpected mutation in plain sight. The coronavirus pandemic of 2020-2023 redoubled our contemporary alienation, as lockdowns enforced the sort of hikikomori lifestyles that blogging hermits had once romanticised, affecting us all in ways we have perhaps not yet come to fully understand and reckon with. But as the lockdowns eased, a new commitment to the social reemerged as we ourselves did. Speaking for myself at least, the end of the pandemic has brought with it a new tenderness, a new solidarity, a new complicity with queer forms of life that now seem more removed from former accelerationist dialogues than ever before. But as a result, our alienation has finally begun to feel properly alienated. Subjective experimentation has accelerated. Love is found in the spaces that epitomise the failures of the neoliberal state, in amongst the drudgery of business-as-usual. Anarchy is brewing and a new, fun militancy reigns supreme. Against the ultimate miserablism and horrorism of a white-supremacist politique du pire, a small gathering of accelerationism’s original theorisers have returned to the construction of new subjectivities in a way that is not simply theoretical but rather one that is adamantly lived. The fear of what we might become has been fully ejected. Accelerationism, perhaps for the first time, is finally insisting on how much fun these mutations can be.
It is unsurprising, in light of all this, that a new accelerationism has now come to the fore.
II. Cute/Acc
All that is serious melts into Cute, because popping bubbles is the purest delight. In the beginning, cute/acc served as a frivolous deflation of the macho, grim, bossy, self-important rhetoric of contemporary accelerationism both left and right alike, and as a superficial ‘joke’ to mask passions whose irresistible pull invited the relinquishing of all caution and the disarming of all ego defence. Was all that dark posturing just another way of stopping things from happening? What if we let go?
Projected from Australia onto the walls of a room in the basement of Deptford Town Hall in 2017, I remember Amy Ireland describing Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia as the greatest love story ever told. That is, until Amy and Maya wrote their own…
Cute Accelerationism picks up where u/acc and g/acc left off, replacing a Landian miserablism with a subject-shredding immersion into new kawaiizomes. It is an alienation of alienation proper. Whereas the nihilism of many prior accelerationisms retained, in their blackened fury, the stale whiff of ressentiment, cute/acc gives in to the machinations of our libidinal economy to affirm those desires that capitalism may produce but cannot contain. Not “the various affective tonalities that capitalism engenders (from an omnipresent, ambient anxiety, to resentment and depression, to all out paralysing fear)”, but a breaking-free from all sad passions into the realm of Cute. It rethinks accelerationism as “a mad love, a pact upheld with reckless integrity”, insisting we “submit to the future early enough to play a part in making it too late to turn back.” Not a love of our sorry fate, but a love of all that we can’t see (ourselves be)coming.
There is an atmosphere here akin to J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World, where Kerans seems to demonstrate an immunity to a “growing isolation and self-containment” that has been triggered by humanity’s apocalyptic atomisation after the culmination of a climate crisis, instead affirming his withdrawal from his own alienation in a manner not unlike “the slackening metabolism and biological withdrawal of all animal forms about to undergo a major metamorphosis”; the transformations of a transitional immaturity. But as Ireland and Kronic write, “[a]ctualised biology is not the model for nature but a funnel, a pet cone blocking our view of a vast field of transformative virtualities.” Ballard, less cute but no less assured, writes:
Sometimes [Kerans] wondered what zone of transit he himself was entering, sure that his own withdrawal was symptomatic not of a dormant schizophrenia, but 0f a careful preparation for a radically new environment, with its own internal landscape and logic, where old categories of thought would merely be an encumbrance.
Cute/acc does not withdraw but lean in. “Anyone who has ever fallen in love gets it.” Self-containment is replaced with a new passion for others, for the marginalised, for reading minor literatures and affirming the cuteness of so many diminutive subcultures. It is only through a love of these affective apparatuses that we begin to truly forget ourselves. There is little prevaricating over points of entry and exit, “there is no freedom or exit from the process, only greater or less counteractualisations (the actual is the break)”, only an affirmed immanence with the adorably impersonal. “Determining the exact point at which personal responsibility melts into the transduction of demonic forces is a problem for sniffer dogs; accelerationists seek out slopes and get on one.”
This process of becoming-cute has a no less atemporal trajectory than the more popular accelerationisms that have preceded it. When Nick Land was penning his rebuttal to Srnicek and Williams’ MAP in 2014, for instance, Hayley Dunham, A.G. Cook and SOPHIE were synthesising ‘Hey QT’, a hyperstitional jingle for an elusive energy drink, retooling the semiotics of consumerist desire towards the cannibalisation of contemporary subjectivity — an autophagy made so delicious by its sugar coating. That same year, SOPHIE’s breakout single ‘Lemonade’ similarly utilised the fizzing sounds of sugary sodas to prefigure the popping of a self-contained subjectivity, producing a pop that bursts all its comes into contact with, her own identity above all else. The riling of self-serious rockist discourses through pop schema was a hand grenade thrown like a Gashapon ball. “Embarrassment, shame, and propriety all crumble before the allnicey onslaught of mass cuteness.” Roll with the punches and think of nothing but the alleatory excitement of what toy you might get.
Hyperpop is just one subcultural milieu that cute/acc resonates with. There are fragments of it already present in orbit of the Ccru writings. I also wonder to what extent the anarchic enthusiasm of Mr Blobby make him another cute/acc monstrosity. To go back even further, we might consider Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons as a modernist exercise in lingsquishtics that attempts to reproduce the world in abstract miniature, finding new tenderness amongst commodities and foodstuffs and environs until all that is solid has melted into cute.
But whatever antecedents can be identified — and Cute Accelerationism traces many of its own — it is nonetheless a book for now. Cute “has been arriving for centuries, and now it comes into its own”. The book’s own acuteness is felt piercingly. “Give Carly Rae Jepson a sword!” was once a memetic battle cry heard across online pop spaces, and in a similar manner, cute/acc arrives armed and adorable, piercing the veil of the present under the cover of innocuity. Cute, after all, has undergone an “apparent loss of reference to crafty intelligence”, but perhaps this “is only a mask for some seriously cute moves.”
In this way, cute/acc is infantile, albeit in a manner appropriate to the simmering boil of new subjectivities. We are all the errant children of a new era, where new affects and concepts emerge from our communicative platforms with abandon. Generation Alpha is the latest umbrella term for a new generation of digital natives, and it makes sense that, following the end-of-history designation of Generation X, we would start again. Alpha follows Omega. In our infancy, we affirm our radical undecidability, but must remain cunning to avoid being discarded by the old guard.
Contemporary thought — whether in philosophy, science, or culture — assists us with this. We have entered a new era of interdisciplinarity, which signifies both the breakdown of old structures and the new melting pot of an infant cosmology. Cuteness, then, is not only a capitalo-cultural and escapist phenomenon, but is also integral to the sciences, undergirding our understanding of reality as such. In light of “Nikolaas Tinbergen’s ethology of the supernormal”, for example — which Kronic has had an interest in for many years — we witness how some strands of modern scientific thinking have “inscribe[d] cuteness into nature while anticipating the collision of evolutionary biology and capital development”. There is a theory, in line with this, that suggests the affective cuteness of infants of all species is not simply an aesthetic projection from human adulthood but a survival mechanism. Human children are innately cute, after all, and perhaps necessarily so. If they were shorn of that cuteness, how many sleepless parents would simply eat their young? (At the same time, that cuteness implores us to eat our children nonetheless, since “the ultimate index of an object’s cuteness may be its edibility”.) Just as Deleuze and Guattari speak of an “orphan-consciousness”, this line of flight is one that children (in culture especially) are so often celebrated for pursuing, but which we otherwise curtail in actuality (and to our detriment). Cute/acc affirms the ways that a cunning cuteness ensures survival whilst plotting its own jailbreak. In this way, as “Cute’s baby face gives rise to nurturing impulses, it simultaneously decouples them from reproductive, organic, ends.”
Cuteness is cunning, and indeed Dionysian, in this regard; “a spirit with strange needs, nameless as yet.” The cuteness of children and wild animals confronts us with a destructive innocence; an innocence distinguished from any of the word’s more moral associations, however – its fallen opposite being “guilt”. It is instead a kind of chaotically playful innocence – a rambunctiousness, even – that, for Nietzsche, “give[s] irresponsibility its positive sense”. Taking up this charge, cute/acc arrives as a properly postmodern and anti-Oedipal incursion into capitalism’s familial doxa. What the system produces but cannot contain must be cute, or else it can expect its own demise. It is perhaps all the more telling that Machiavelli’s most famous political treatise was a guide to life for young princes, who embodied both the continuation of the status quo and a threat to its stability. Cute Accelerationism functions as a postmodern retelling of The Prince, speaking not to young despots but all those “orphaned by postmodernity, those with no future and no investment in tradition, the swarming e-girls, t-girls, NEETs, anons, and otaku for whom the internet is level one”, for whom the internet is their own princedom of affective contagion.
This is where the true innovations of cute/acc, circling within a crowded milieu of accelerationisms, come to the fore. Accelerationism’s dark Deleuzianism has always been tinged by a Nietzschean nihilism, but it mistakes the transvaluation of all values for an epistemological apocalypse. We must focus on our infantile subjectivities and their various cultural artefacts not as a bell tolling for the old world, but as a nursery rhyme welcoming in and soothing our transition to the new one. The transvaluation of values, the acuity of cute, is the natural state of childhood, after all. “The destroyer of all known values”, Deleuze writes, “becomes a child”. This child is then placed within a more expansive Dionysian assemblage – that of the “player-artist-child” – who, as a player of the game of life, “temporarily abandons himself to life and temporarily fixes his gaze upon it”; as an artist, “places himself provisionally in his work and provisionally above it”; and who, as a child, “plays, withdraws from the game and returns to it”. The child, in this manner, is always “exploring milieus, by means of dynamic trajectories, and drawing up maps of them”; milieus that are “made up of qualities, substances, powers, and events”. Children, then, as natural detectives and explorers, are not contained by worldly associations but actively produce them. The event of childhood, for Deleuze, is not defined by our “searching for an origin, but of evaluating displacements”.
In general, we tend to think of children as subjects of pure affect, who have yet to become proper subjects and individuals. Childhood thus takes on a particular significance as a time of seemingly infinite possibility, when we are presented with a subject without a strict individuality or personality, who navigates the world with an inquisitive innocence that makes children natural detectives of experience in their own right. Drawing on Spinoza’s Ethics, Deleuze writes that “childhood is an abject state, but one common to all of us, in which we depend ‘very heavily on external causes’” — parents, most obviously, but Oedipo-capitalism most of all. The child, then, for Deleuze, functions as a “dark precursor” in a process of subjectivation. And this darkness is at once an occluded nature, as who remembers their childhood so vividly, but also as a kind of shadow that trails along behind us. We should forgo the darkness and shine a light on all that we are encouraged to forget in adulthood.
We would be mistaken to think of our infant subjectivities as somehow lesser, however, leading us into a paradoxical situation — at work everywhere in our contemporary moral panics — wherein new intersections of queerness and childhood are seen as a corruption of innocence rather than an affirmation of subjective possibility. You can be whomever you want to be, says the storyteller in drag, demonstrating a queered and supernormal maternity that escapes the prison of heteronormative subjectivation to insist on the seizing of any becoming that brings us joy. Instead, for too many, children are viewed as one side of a child/adult binary. As Markus P. J. Bohlmann and Anna Hickey-Moody write:
Western thought about children and childhood remains dominated by a developmental, binary logic that juxtaposes children against adults: children are deemed to be innocent, naive and asexual as opposed to the experienced, rational and sexual adult. This binary logic includes the teleology of ‘growing up’ in which children, understood as future adults, are said to undergo a stage-delineated process of maturation that prepares them for being the adult they are supposed to become … Herein, the centredness on children serves to camouflage an adultcentrism that makes sure that children grow up to the status quo of the adult in order to safeguard and to repeat this binary logic, and to once again maintain a child’s development towards an adult.
Cute/acc, as the thorough co-constitution of a child-like and loving wonder with the concerns of contemporary philosophy, demolishes this binary so convincingly. Its playful language at once expresses the intensity of Ireland and Kronic’s concept-engineering apparatuses and the shaken logics of sense that Deleuze admired in the “children’s novels” of Lewis Carroll et al. Their love for each other and for philosophy is equally mad, their cuteness in both domains insurrectionary. They return to childhood not through a forgetting of adulthood but through adulthood, as an unfolding of its virtualities. “Don’t grow up for god’s sake, become the egg you already are, rediscover forgotten gradients, let the coordinates of your body slip off the surface of the world like so many half-sucked gummies.”
Food is everywhere in cute/acc, and cooking becomes its own kind of cute praxis, as a way to render everything so adorably edible. “[E]verything that the Great Compact to Save Civilisation slates as degeneracy or barbarism smells like freshly backed mini muffins to us.” These olfactory droolings lead us to the kitchen to cook up new recipes for new selves, recipes that are nothing less than “the truth of multiplicity”, constituted by “multiple lines of flight that depart from the closed circuit of the reproductive refrain.”
Cute/acc is a child-like adventure into the unknown, into play; a trip to the outskirts of town, out of sight from the moralizing eye of parental authority. There are, undoubtedly, dangers out there, but cuteness is both weapon and shield against the forces that would inculcate a dynamic becoming, dragging it back into the darkness of adult terror. It is a fairy tale; it is Beauty and the Beast. The townsfolk may light their pitchforks and seek to kill the monstrosity that has welcomed innocence in, fearing its abject consumption, but in killing the beast they also kill a love that is as radically non-conforming as it is nurturing of a new-to-come. Cute/acc loves the beast and snuggles into its furry embrace. Neither will be unchanged through their cuddling.
III. Daddy Issues
Like any accelerationism, cute/acc already has its appropriators, gestating alongside the development of Ireland and Kronic’s first proper missive but following their first forays into cuteposting in late 2019. Four years later, as “effective accelerationism” captures the attention of a neoliberal unimagination, another cute/acc vies for position at the vanguard, often under the collective names “Milady” or “Remilia”. A Musk-endorsed NFT project with former ties to kali/acc, it is a loose and contradictory project that replicates all the Daddy issues that have plagued any self-proclaimed loyally Landian accelerationism before it, whilst also demonstrating a misunderstanding of Land’s own concerns.
For Milady, the problems start almost immediately. An online manifesto ultimately says nothing, renounces everything, and presents a hollowed-out version of the thing it is most indebted to. It is the ying to e/acc’s yang.
[Update: I’ve been told this manifesto is not representative and I should have talked about the Charlotte Fang blog here instead. I had read both whilst writing this post but found little of note on Fang’s blog. It appears to be a pastiche of Landian darkness with the addition of purchasable NFT avatars of cookie-cutter anime girls. This has since devolved into vaguely theistic and deterministic life advice after the NFT project shuttered due to allegations against Fang in 2022, which is more reminiscent of Bronze Age Pervert but anime than a project with any descernable relationship to accelerationism. There’s nothing to discuss there. The manifesto at least tries to distinguish itself from prior accelerationisms whilst moving forward, so we’ll stick with that.]
Although it positions itself in righteous opposition to e/acc, denouncing its “retard metrics”, which imbue tired free-market logics with a overhyped lexicon of Silicon Valley techno-optimism, Milady nonetheless affirms its own stupidity. Its affirmation of humanity’s diminution starts to feel like little more than a kawaii coat for the “animal humanism” of old — that is, the tacit acceptance that humanity is but a pitiable animal. It is a cute/acc that affirms its miserablist insecurity as a vulgar bimbo/himbo nihilism, twisting the radical unintelligibility of an anti-philosophical cuteness into a basic anti-intellectualism. In this sense, Milady/Remilia affirms its childishness as the other side of adulthood, ultimately leaving the binary unscathed.
As Badiou declared at the end of The Century, “our philosophical task, on the shores of the new century, and against the animal humanism that besieges us, [is] that of a formalized in-humanism.” Ireland and Kronic move decisively in this direction. “There is no thermodynamic equation that explains why Hello Kitty is cute” is just one Milady claim that helps demonstrate this, since Ireland and Kronic attune themselves to a general economy of cuteness through postmodern science’s interest in supernormalisation. There is a thermodynamics of Hello Kitty, in fact, since this most visible symbol of Cute’s circulations gives us some idea of how the semiotic systems of communicative capitalism have been shaken by Cute’s child-like energies. And what is Hello Kitty if not precisely a minimalist form of inhumanity, as a sparse collection of lines that is instantly recognisable despite bordering on formlessness, thus showing how the poetic condensing of semiotic information leads to the Cute most potently.
Cute/acc, in Ireland and Kronic’s hands, has fun with these processes of cute-ification, whilst also taking them seriously. Early on in the book, they trace our shapeshifting understanding of what “cute” is, tying cuteness to cunning — to an occluded intelligence. Similarly, Cute’s immaturity is affirmed as a playground for any inchoate subjectivity that forgets what it should be but nonetheless thinks through its predicament intensely. The letting-go first expressed in Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy is thus conjoined with his writings on the child-philosopher, whose “immaturity” presents a positive irresponsibility across from Milady/Remilia’s negative posturing. Whereas Milady/Remilia proclaim that “[w]e do not even need a theory of acceleration anymore”, “[t]he time of theories is over” — all in the guise of a theoretical manifesto nonetheless — cute/acc proper affirms Lyotard’s insistence that philosophy is the “season of childhood, the season of the mind’s possibilities”. It is an anti-philosophy that does not discard philosophy itself but makes it all the more transcendental, opening contemporary philosophy up to swarms of anti-philosophical affectation. It is a kind of “anti-philosophy”, then, that is far more rigorous than an easy anti-intellectualism.
As Karin Fry explains, Lyotard foregoes any understanding of philosophy as a process of maturation and mastery:
Instead of a mastering a text, philosophical reading is an exercise in listening and being de-stabled by the text. He describes philosophical reading as a type of unreading and his use of the concept of the “child” is meant to underscore the lack of mastery and maturity. One needs to be open to otherness in order to do philosophy and cannot come to it with rigid attachments to particular stances.
Milady/Remilia undoubtedly retains an openness to otherness, but in its rigid attachment to edgelordism, any scratch beneath of the surface of its aesthetic presentation demonstrates an unfortunate illiteracy as to what cuteness itself inscribes on the skin of the postmodern body, orphaned from all traditions. But reading is important, and any accelerationism, as a post-Marxist “reading” of capitalism, is no less an attunement that tracks and responds to its own destabilisation. This is the only way that transformations can occur, after all.
In Cute Accelerationism, we are gifted one product of such a transformation, tied up and presented to us with a bow. We find two individuals who have let go, who have fallen in love: Maya B. Kronic — former member of the Ccru, co-editor of Land’s collected writings, editorial Svengali extraordinaire — and Amy Ireland — sorceress of cybernetics, g/u/acc crypt-mother, diagrammatician of the poememenon — who congeal through cuddles to form a third, an (a)cute remainder that takes leave of all binaries. Together, they work through a becoming-other of self and philosophy, of pop and the occult, of adult and child, of cunning and cuteness. They produce a book that is at once a rigorous work of transcendental philosophy and a product of uninhibited play, demonstrating how “the process of philosophical writing [is] paradoxical”, since we generally must start to write before we even know what it is we have to say. But this is precisely why philosophy is necessary to our understanding of what we are becoming. Indeed, just as “[f]or Lyotard, philosophy is ‘…muddled up in the unthought, trying to make sense of the impertinent chatter of childhood'”, so too for Ireland and Kronic, whose conceptual cornucopia slips from philosophical invention into a kind of recombinant pig Latin, like a language shared intuitively by two children in love.
For all these reasons and more, Amy Ireland and Maya B. Kronic’s Cute Accelerationism serves as a generous starting point to working-through of postmodern cuteness, littered with neologisms and cultural detritus that encourages, in its brevity, a new transversal passing through the rabbit holes of contemporary culture and its structures. This working-through is less a self-serious exercise in hard study, however, and instead mutates itself through an anti-philosophical softness like the kneading of dough. “Be unyielding in your determination to make yourself soft.” Then, when you’re ready, climb into that Easy Bake oven. And don’t forget to add sprinkles.