Back to the Futurists: Accelerationism Left and Right (Prometheus Books 2019) (original) (raw)
Futures of Accelerationism (3)
Noys (2016) one thing from this opening text: the final battle for the future is to be fought now, in our present. This, I think, is true. Not only true about the actuality of fighting to determine that future as the world seems to slide inexorably to various forms of barbarism, lacking any seemingly realistic figure of socialism, but also true about the fight over the image of the future as well. This battle over the image of the future is at the centre of the accelerationism debate. The defining feature of accelerationism, broadly-speaking the demand that we engage with forms of technology and abstraction as the means to reach postcapitalism, has been the claim to the future. The very title of Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams's book Inventing the Future suggests this, as does all the futuristic and sci-fi imagery that has surrounded accelerationism. The accelerationists claim they are the only ones to offer us a future: all that actually-existing neoliberal capitalism promises is more of the same, and 'there is no alternative' could be written as 'there is no future', except the market stamping on a human face forever; the left is often no better, mired in 'folk politics', driven by nostalgia for social democracy or the face-toface ideology of small communities resulting in a regression to the past. I, of course, dispute this claim to a monopoly on the future. 1 Here I want to give a brief history of the term accelerationism, which at least is part of the condition of understanding the debate. Then I want to recap and refine my critique of accelerationism in its dominant forms. My interest, however, lies not so much in repeating these already fading debates but considering the battle that is being fought over the future in the present. Here I suggest that accelerationism often presents a limited sense of what images are on offer of the future, particularly underestimating the problem of reactionary images of the future. I also want to
The debate about accelerationism has been violent and vituperative. Here I want to consider the battle over the notion of the future. Accelerationism, in its various forms, has often claimed a monopoly on the future. The argument is that only by engaging with capitalist forms of technology and abstraction can we envisage a future beyond capitalism. Neoliberal capitalism only provides more of the same, while accelerationism can force a new future into being or even invent the future. Restating and developing my critiques of these claims I probe the problems of the subject, time and politics in left and right accelerationism. I also consider the difficulties on coming to terms with reactionary, if not fascist, alternative 'futures' as one of the stakes of the present moment. In conclusion I try to develop a left response to these problems.
Accelerationism… and degrowth: The Left’s strange bedfellows
Uneven Earth, 2017
Degrowth and accelerationism, two increasingly popular terms on the left, have more in common than I initially thought—both in practical terms (policies and strategy), and in their general ideological positions. And they have a lot to learn from each other. What follows is a bit of a report: a conversation between the two proposals. There will be some critique, but also some cross-pollination. My discussion revolves around a couple of themes: the importance of utopian thinking, technology, economy, and political strategy. If there is commonality there is also difference. How is it possible that, considering so many agreements, they have such an oppositional framing of the problem at hand? By way of a conclusion, I suggest that the notion of ‘speed’—and their divergent views of it—is fundamental to each position.
Acceleration Theory, Temporal Regimes, and Politics Today. An Interview with Hartmut Rosa
Res Publica, 2021
Hartmut Rosa is currently one of the best-known sociologists in Germany. In this interview, we un-dertake a brief retrospective of his initial work on temporality. In doing so, we evaluate his theory 15 years after its first publication in German (Suhrkamp 2005). The interview seeks to examine the topicality of the acceleration theory through the voice of one of its main authors, having in mind current socio-polit-ical phenomena such as the pandemic deceleration, social discontents (both global and local), energy challenges, and the revival of old nationalisms.
Let me start with a caveat: my paper engages with sub-and lowbrow cultures only indirectly. I am interested in the relationship between technophile subcultures, especially cyberpunk fiction/films, and the recent theory current called "accelerationism." My interest goes in both directions: on the one hand, I want to show how accelerationism uses cyberpunk's subversive imaginary as inspiration for its politics. On the other hand, I would like to discuss in the seminar what potentially uneasy questions the appropriation of sub-/lowbrow culture by accelerationism pose to us.
The Aesthetics of Accelerationism
In 2010, critical theorist Benjamin Noys coined the term accelerationism to denote the argument that the only way to overcome capitalism is to intensify exploitation and expansion to the point of collapse. Since Noys’ coinage of the term, several thinkers have attempted to present more positive and celebratory cases for accelerationism. In their “#ACCELERATE: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics,” Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams define accelerationism as the basic belief that existing technological tendencies “should be let loose by moving beyond the limitations imposed by a capitalist society.” They expand on this basic premise in their 2015 book Inventing the Future, in which they reframe accelerationism as the demand for the establishment of a post-work, post-scarcity, postcapitalist society. Before Inventing the Future was published, literary theorist Steven Shaviro asserted in his book No Speed Limit: Three Essays on Accelerationism that accelerationism must be an aesthetic program before it can become a political one. Shaviro defines accelerationist aesthetics as the representation of a post-apocalyptic, accelerated form of capitalism. In this thesis, I propose four alternative characteristics for an aesthetics of accelerationism that accounts for the developments and changes in Srnicek and Williams’ political program: melting, mutation, hyperstition, modernity. I then apply these characteristics to the works of three contemporary artists and artist collectives—British installation and video artist Benedict Drew; Japanese artist collective Chim↑Pom, and the British filmmakers known as the Otolith Group. These characteristics present the transition from capitalism into postcapitalism in an aesthetic form, rendering the arguments and ambiguities of accelerationism more recognizable and understandable.
The Pleasures and Pains of Accelerationism
Introducing my book Malign Velocities, this talk explores the fantasy structure of accelerationism in a series of moments: the financialized present, the texts of Marx, the Soviet Avant-Garde, and "Manhattanism". In probes the effects of deceleration, congestion, and sedimentation on which accelerationism tries to operate and transcend.
Accelerationism and the Limits of Technological Determinism
Filozofski vestnik, 2018
Accelerationist writing has tended to focus on aesthetics and technology rather than capitalism’s tendencies of motion. This may be because of accelerationism’s catastrophic implications: in an era of generalized social crisis, speeding up capitalism appears counter-intuitive. An alternate perspective, left-accelerationism, has defined it as using technological potentialities for social, rather than private ends. However, to break with the death spiral of neoliberalism’s stagnant profit rates, it is necessary to bring a critique of political economy to bear on accelerationism. This can be best formulated using Marx’s study of capitalism’s central dynamic: the conflict between the forces and relations of production, which drives the crisis-ridden expansion of the system as a whole. Efforts to show that capitalism develops solely on the basis of technological progress cannot be maintained theoretically or empirically. This was most clearly shown by Bill Warren, whose attempt to build a historically progressive role for imperialism failed to account for macro-trajectories of development in the Global South. This suggests that an accelerationist political economy must begin from the conflict between the forces and relations of production, rather than an ahistorical, additive account of development factors. An anti-determinist accelerationism remains possible, providing capitalist development is understood as a political struggle over the creation of value.
RUDN Journal of Philosophy
Modern types of social reality require updated ways of comprehending them. The research is devoted to a new analytical form of understanding modernity that has recently emerged - accelerationism, still rarely discussed in Russian philosophy. The representatives of accelerationism call for a radical and rapid acceleration of socio-economic and technological processes in capitalist societies. The article reflects some ideas of the Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics by Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek, after which the accelerationist trend in philosophy and social sciences intensified and gained clear theoretical guidelines. The Manifesto’s ideas about accelerating technological evolution as a means of resolving social conflicts, about unleashing all the latent forces of capitalist production to achieve a state of post-capitalism, denying a return to the Fordist type of production and calling for the restoration of the future as such, are highlighted. The Manifesto and the works o...
"Introduction: Radical Futurisms"
Radical Futurisms, 2023
T. j. Demos, Radical Futurisms: Ecologies of Collapse, Chronopolitics, and Justice-to-Come (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2023)
Social Acceleration: Ethical and Political Consequences of a Desynchronized High–Speed Society
Constellations, 2003
In 1999, James Gleick, exploring everyday life in contemporary American society, noted the "acceleration of just about everything": love, life, speech, politics, work, TV, leisure, etc. 1 With this observation he certainly is not alone. In popular as well as scientific discourse about the current evolution of Western societies, acceleration figures as the single most striking and important feature. 2 But although there is a noticeable increase in the discourse about acceleration and the shortage of time in recent years, the feeling that history, culture, society, or even 'time itself' in some strange way accelerates is not new at all; it rather seems to be a constitutive trait of modernity as such. As historians like Reinhart Koselleck have persuasively argued, the general sense of a "speed-up" has accompanied modern society at least since the middle of the eighteenth century. 3 And indeed, as many have observed and empirical evidence clearly suggests, the history of modernity seems to be characterized by a wide-ranging speed-up of all kinds of technological, economic, social, and cultural processes and by a picking up of the general pace of life. In terms of its structural and cultural impact on modern society, this change in the temporal structures and patterns of modernity appears to be just as pervasive as the impact of comparable processes of individualization or rationalization. Just as with the latter, it seems, social acceleration is not a steady process but evolves in waves (most often brought about by new technologies or forms of socio-economic organization), with each new wave meeting considerable resistance as well as partial reversals. Most often, a wave of acceleration is followed by a rise in the 'discourse of acceleration,' in which cries for deceleration in the name of human needs and values are voiced but eventually die down. 4 However, contrary to the other constitutive features of the modernization process -individualization, rationalization, (functional and structural) differentiation, and the instrumental domestication of nature -which have all been the object of extensive analysis, the concept of acceleration still lacks a clear and workable definition and a systematic sociological analysis. Within systematic theories of modernity or modernization, acceleration is virtually absent, with the notable exception of Paul Virilio's 'dromological' approach to history, which, alas, hardly amounts to a 'theory.' This surprising absence in the face of the
Space-time Dialectics: Acceleration and the Politics of Space
Azimuth, 2018
Modernity has often been interpreted as a process of the progressive elimination of space through movement and acceleration or, as Marx put it, the ‘annihilation of space through time’. Paul Virilio and Hartmut Rosa have argued this process of acceleration leads to a state of ‘polar inertia’ where progressive social change is no longer possible. As David Harvey and Rosa show, the process of acceleration is not linear and continuous; instead, space continues to reassert itself, even if it is continuously transformed. There is in fact a dialectical relation between time and space or acceleration and inertia. So in what way and to what degree is society subject to a logic of speed, acceleration and mobilization? What role do space, inertia, immobility continue to play, as counter-movements to this acceleration? And what are the political consequences?
Left Accelerationism, Transhumanism and the Dialectic: Three Manifestos
New Proposals: Journal of Marxism and Interdisciplinary Inquiry, 2022
Left accelerationism and the transhuman subject who embodies this movement's political potential have multivalent relations to Marxism. Whilst recent interventions such as Srnicek and Williams' #Accelerate: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics and Bastani's Fully Automated Luxury Communism (FALC) situate themselves within the Marxist tradition (typically relying heavily on the "fragment on machines" section of the Grundrisse), immediately apparent is a problem of both politics and epistemology. In positing a transhuman subject that resolves ontologically the antagonism between labour and capital, left accelerationism flattens and dehistoricizes the specific and contingent historical and material conditions that make possible the thinking of this subject at all, and lapses from a properly dialectical mode of thought in its breathless rush to adumbrate the "inevitable" conditions for this subject's emergence. Here, we are close to Althusser's notion of history as a "process without a subject" (Althusser 1969), and a similar lack of dialectical rigour can be discerned. E.P Thompson's polemic against Althusser reminds us of what is at stake in a Marxism that is fundamentally antagonistic to a thorough engagement with-and immersion in-history, specifically history as lived and made by real human subjects, and we can likewise trace in left accelerationism's idealised transhuman a subject for whom history offers no socially embedded place, only an abstract theoretical subject-position. In short, despite the inventiveness and optimistic constructivism evident in Bastani and Srnicek and Williams' manifestos, these very qualities speak to the lack of a properly and consistently dialectical epistemic framework: they thus implicitly reject what Jameson describes as "the austere dialectical imperative" necessary to think capitalism as "progress and catastrophe all together" (Jameson 2000, 226). Drawing on Noys, Brassier, Wood, Thompson and Jameson, this paper will critique left accelerationism's consistent divergence from a materialist dialectic, and show how these lapses elide the contingent and always in-process nature of the political struggles that determine who the subject/s of any future historical period will be or can be. Left accelerationism contains seeds of radical political potential, however the lapses into idealism and techno-utopianism to which it is so prone result precisely from an abandonment of dialectical materialism in the very instances where a generic transhuman subject is articulated: in conceiving class relations thus, an inattention to "the hard lesson of some more genuinely dialectical way to think historical development and change" (Jameson 2000, 225) is revealed. The paper will contrast Srnicek and Williams and Bastani's manifestos with the Xenofeminist Manifesto, arguing that this latter offers a more promising basis for an emancipatory class politics precisely because it demands serious and sustained engagement with the forces and relations of production at the level of their bounded and contingent historical specificity. It is only by resisting the abandonment of the dialectic in order to imagine the future that we might seriously arrive at a useful picture of our destination.