Towards a Future Post-Capitalism: Accelerationism and its Aesthetics

Read full dissertation here!

At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production. [...] From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. 

- Karl Marx, 1859 

Is there no alternative? Are we as Francis Fukuyama argues, at the end of history? It was Frederic Jameson who pronounced in his 2003 article ‘Future City’, “that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.”1 Our current hegemonic political status quo – that of neoliberalism – has had resounding effects on contemporary Western society and political thought. We live in a time of political inertia and of cultural sterility. It has become impossible to evoke or pragmatically imagine an ‘outside’ to globalised capitalism, leaving us in what Mark Fisher aptly describes as a state of ‘Capitalist Realism.’2 The 2008 Global Financial Crisis and its aftermath, along with devastating effects on economic and social realities, has precipitated a perpetuation of Thatcher’s axiomatic platitude that there is indeed ‘no alternative.’ Yet it is argued by some that these ostensibly impenetrable mechanisms of contemporary geopolitical organisation, namely the pervasive right-wing governmental policies and global corporate power established through neoliberal ideologies, have proceeded, at least in part, due to the ineffective nature of both mainstream and radical Leftist politics. In which case, what option does the Left still have? To withdraw into a politics of localism, or to return to the ‘golden age’ of post-war socialist democracy? Perhaps, however, it is to push forward: to accelerate the deterritorializing powers of capital, as to do so is our only possible escape. A technological social acceleration through capitalism, to a markedly post-capitalist social order. 

The recently reignited politico-philosophical programme,3 coined by Benjamin Noys, ‘Accelerationism’, argues that any political project attempting to navigate beyond capitalist frameworks must do so using its own tools: the acceleration of technological development on a global, abstract and complex stage. Its genealogy has been traced to the fallout of the failed events of May 1968, with its resurgence ignited by the aftermath of the global crisis of 2008. Its emergence in Leftist discourse is symptomatic of the endemic nature of neoliberal fundamentalism in contemporary global capitalism; its advocation a response to our postmodern malaise of political despair. Today, accelerationist politics is broadly settled into two camps: the Left and the Right. From the radically antihumanist writings of Nick Land to the distinctly more Marxist trajectories of Srnicek and Williams, accelerationist disparities find their common ground in the belief that there can be no established outside-of-capitalism – it must be surmounted from within. Be it from desire, libido or death – in the case of post-68 French thought – the way out of capitalism is through capitalism itself: a “liberation through absolute immersion in the flows and fluxes of a libidinised capitalism.”4 

What would it mean, however, for the possibility of an accelerationist aesthetic? It has been shown that throughout the previous century ‘acceleration’ as both a political and cultural programme has been mobilised in varying time-spaces in order to affect change or revolutionary ideals, from Communist political strategy to 90s ‘Cyberpunk Phuturism.’5 Yet a contemporary accelerationist aesthetic remains elusive. At its worst, it could work towards a fervent complicity in the vectors of neoliberalism, offering us nothing more than “the wink of reality laughing at itself in its most hyperrealist form” 6 – a nihilistic propagation of capitalist imperatives and marketization. Or could it offer us a way out of the impasses of the current political imaginarium and act as a combative force against what Alex Williams describes as global capitalism’s ‘politics of abstraction’?7 An avenue of exploration for the production of new subjectivities and possible futures which challenge the dominant mode of neoliberal hegemony. It is the purpose of this dissertation to explore the varying notions of accelerationist politics and the possibilities thereafter of an accelerationist aesthetic, and what possible avenues of enquiry this could offer us in the face of such debilitating circumstances.

1 Frederic Jameson, ‘Future City,’ New Left Review 21 (2003): 65.

2 Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is there no Alternative? (Wiltshire: Zero Books, 2009).

3 David Cunningham sees one evident reason of this revival as produced by the return to Nick Land’s writings and their subsequent promotion via ex-students Robin Mackay, Ray Brassier, Reza Negarestani and Mark Fisher, with a collection of Land’s work edited by Mackay and Brassier published by Urbanomic in 2011. See footnotes of: David Cunningham, ‘Accelerationism and its Discontents,’ Radical Philosophy 191 (2014).

4 Benjamin Noys, ‘Apocalypse, Tendency, Crisis,’ Mute 2, 15. (2010) Accessed October 19, 2015, http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/apocalypse-tendency-crisis 

5 Benjamin Noys, Malign Velocities: Accelerationism and Capitalism (Croydon: Zero Books, 2014).

6 Jean Baudrillard, The Conspiracy of Art (Cambridge & London: Semiotext(e), 2005): 26.

7 Alex Williams, ‘The Politics of Abstraction,’ in Speculative Aesthetics, ed. Robin Mackay et al. (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2014): 62-71.  

Read on here!

Interview with Mark Fisher

CM: Hello Mark, the current debate surrounding Accelerationist Aesthetics seem to oscillate between two ostensibly separate formulations – in your opinion, does an Accelerationist aesthetic lies more in a process of ‘cognitive mapping’ – combatting our phenomenological discontinuity within globalised capitalism – or with an affective cartography of the latter, an experience of what it feels like to be a late-capitalist subject?

MF: I think this question points to a difficult problem with the very concept of accelerationist aesthetics. If accelerationism is about the inadequacy of experience as a category, then how is it possible to render accelerationism aesthetically? Cognitive mapping would seem to be compatible with a leftist accelerationism, but the issue here for me is: what is the aesthetic dimension of this process? It can’t be merely an illustration of a set of propositions that can be apprehended cognitively; the aesthetic has to be doing something in its own right.

For me, a leftist accelerationism could be partly about showing how the “experience” of late capitalism is very different from how it is ideologically rendered. That rendering is not something superimposed over experience, after the fact; it is more that experience (and the subject of experience) is first of all ideological. The problem then is how do we deal with what Ray Brassier has called “the myth of experience”. I think this is an experimental problem, and I guess from my point of view the most important task for a left accelerationist aesthetics is to produce and/ or simulate an “experience” that is beyond capitalism. What would a post-capitalist world feel like, and what kind of being would function in it?

Jon Lindblom, a PhD student in Visual Cultures, has done some interesting work on this area. One important emphasis in Jon’s work is on what he calls the drug-tech interface. Thinking about drugs in relation to technology, about drugs as a technology, gives the whole discussion on accelerationist aesthetics an important twist. In common with recent tendencies in my own work, Jon has been thinking about the psychedelic again, and the way the psychedelic opens up different forms of experience, time, etc. I would say that capitalist realism has suppressed the psychedelic – because the idea of a fixed and immutable reality is a kind of super-reification that is incompatible with psychedelics. Psychedelic ‘experience’ is productively paradoxical, in that it de-reifies both ‘experience’ and ‘reality’, both of which come to seem what they are – provisional and plastic.

CM: Many argue that an Accelerationist Aesthetic must utilise the vernacular of late-capitalist imagery in its work – stock, commercial and brand images; digital-rendering and -editing software; sci-fi and cyberpunk visuals, such as from video games and movies; references to contemporary social media trends etc. – presumably anchored in the belief of re-engineering capitalist technologies and tendencies against themselves. Do you agree at all with this sentiment?

MF: Not really. I think this misses the point of the accelerationist critique of capitalism – that capitalism essentially inhibits acceleration, continually reterritorializing on the familiar and the familial. All of the examples you gave have an exhausted quality; they are “futuristic” only in some long-established generic sense – they don’t relate to any plausible future. The whole emphasis on IT and communicative capitalism is a symptom of capitalist exhaustion. That was the future in the 1980s – it isn’t the future any longer, just as Kraftwerk is no longer the future of music. Social media and smartphones have already happened; extrapolating them into or as the future is surely a mistake. This is the point of all my work on hauntology – capitalism increasingly can’t deliver the future, because it arrests the potentials of technological modernity.

CM: Do you think we have seen a clear manifestation of Accelerationist ideas in some contemporary music production? I am thinking here of artists such as Holly Herndon, PC Music, Kode9, Ryoji Ikeda or even someone like FKA Twigs?
MF: To some extent, though I think there has been a slowing of the accelerationist tendencies in music culture. Up till the end of the 1990s, there was a proliferation of new sonic modes, which opened up whole new phase spaces, new terrains which were experienced by the listener in terms of an enjoyable future shock. Kodwo Eshun describes this brilliantly in his talk “Abducted By Audio” http://www.ccru.net/swarm3/3_abducted.htm It’s hard to think of much 21st century music which delivers this future shock in the same way.

CM: Is it possible that the recent ‘return to the body’ in contemporary art production – specifically through a technological lens – could be understood as an Accelerationist critique – in that it attempts to expose the material and affective infrastructures of a fully libidinised capitalism? One which is ubiquitously offered platitudes of dematerialisation?

MF: Yes, it could – but I think the emphasis on “the body” has a tendency to re-incribe a dualism in the attempt to too quickly overcome it. I suppose I would say that the focus on conditions which produce what is ‘experienced’ as embodiment. There isn’t any “natural” form of embodiment: all “experiences” of embodiment are produced by machineries of one kind or another. Which means that “the body” doesn’t exist. There is a material set of receptors and relays, plugged into and potentiated by various virtual and actual machines, but this isn’t the same as “the body”, which can only ever be a reification. So in many ways, I think the same goes for “the body” as for “experience”. The emphasis should be on material and conceptual dismantling of the way in which they are both naturalised/ reified.

Interview with Nick Srnicek

CM: Nick, your work is often seen in contrast to more ‘accelerationist’ (in the sense of which I think you now try to distance yourselves) thinkers such as Nick Land and the CCRU, can you briefly explain the disparities the latter and your work?

NS: I think one of the biggest differences is the subject of the accelerative process. For Land in the 1990s (I stopped reading him when he started writing racist stuff), capital was the subject to be accelerated and human consciousness was just a sort of emergent floating element being swept along by the process of capital. The ultimate endpoint there was to recognise our own illusory nature and accept immersion into the flows of capital. For Alex and I, the subject is perhaps more properly deemed reason, in a collective and inhuman sense. This is more Hegelian and Negarastanian than Deleuzian. The labour of the inhuman is a sort of collective boot-strapping process whereby what it means to be human is progressively uncovered and revised throughout history.

CM: In the post-capitalist society you imagine, do you think contemporary technologies such as Bitcoin, blockchain and other cryptocurrencies are good examples of a current technology which could be utilised in a larger scale?

NS: Personally, I think digital currencies have very little to offer. They are basically a renewal of the gold standard in digital form, and the gold standard fell for good reasons. Bringing it back is not a viable or desirable option. Digital currencies will likely keep being useful for marginal economies (black market economies, most obviously), but I don’t see them threatening global currencies in any way. The blockchain is much more interesting though, and from what I know of it, open to some very interesting potentials. I see a place for it in a postcapitalist economy, but I don’t know it well enough to say much with any certainty.

CM: Is your emphasis on the role of ‘cognitive mapping’ as an aesthetic programme concurrent to your political economy – as opposed to a more affective notion of accelerationist aesthetics as championed by Steven Shaviro – in response to what you see as the conceptual immediacy of folk political tendencies, which favour the personal and the affective over the structural and the rational?

NS: It is, to a certain degree. The issue with cognitive mapping is ultimately one of generating a strategy for a collective historical agent. A strategy, by definition, requires a mapping of the terrain of the struggle, along with an understanding of the various forces in play. This is a systemic – and therefore, rational – approach. But it isn’t simply the rejection of affective and aesthetic elements, since they play the mediating role between an abstracted strategy and local instantiations. So cognitive mapping tries to gesture towards the problem of connecting abstracted strategy to localised actions.

CM: Do you think the recent movement of what have been described as ‘New Materialist’ art practices – or more generally, art practices which take dematerialised platforms such as the internet or finance and reinvest them with a more bodily, affective and material nature – could be classed as a form of accelerationist critique? In that they reconfigure abstract, global and complex areas of contemporary capitalism in an attempt to reveal their material infrastructure and bodily affects.

NS: It possibly can, though I’m wary of saying much about contemporary artistic practice since I know so little of it. I think the work of people like Holly Herndon, Kode9, and Ryoji Ikeda are good examples of musical ‘accelerationism’, but in large part because their work doesn’t simply try to instantiate some pre-planned ideas. They’re working with material in new ways and inspired by related ideas, but it’s not ‘accelerationist’ in any simple sense. More part of a broad cultural milieu where these sorts of ideas are percolating and being developed through different media in different ways.

CM: Is there a worry with your emphasis on cognitive mapping, and technological modelling of objects such as the economy or climate change, that this will lead to a form of technological sublime (such as in your example of the software Minksy)?

NS: It definitely could, though in part the aim of modelling is to avoid that problem! It’s increasingly a risk though, as models get more and more complex – particularly in the back-end where all sorts of complex mechanisms and hidden politics go on. One area where you might see something like the technological sublime is when you get machine-learning algorithms that produce convincing results – but without anyone knowing how those results came about. It doesn’t leave people stupefied like normal technological sublime, but it does leave them no more aware of what is actually going on.

Vevo, Fuck You

Exhibition Text for first solo-show of Lewis Henderson's works at the benevolent association of excellent solutions, Februrary 2016


I remember when I was the one they were looking for. I was an entrepreneur. The Chief Exec. Head to toe in pin-stripe and gold plating. Lapelled vest with white-on-blue polka-dot braces and Versace cufflinks. I was your source of entertainment au courant; a trailblazer. Never seen the likes of which before. Impossible to neglect. Burnished-leather loafers adding verve and finesse. I was the original Player. Mr. M. E. G. A. Video. They cast aspersions and character-assassinations. It was scandalum magnatum: the typical defamation casual to most federal objectives. But I kept my back straight and my upper-lip Sisyphean stiff. I was pervasive, the face of the firm – I had to. After all, I was both your reliable friend and your frequent lover. Yet now you barely remember. And now that suit once so immaculate and crisp is emaciated and blemished. The collar coils to the lower neck and the shirt is stained Pinot Noir, the lingering smell of yeasty-perspiration and Old Spice roll-on deodorant still tanging from the seams. And the soles of the Tom Ford’s now flap as I walk the sidewalk, revealing the uncoordinated socks underneath; the mundane and tragic reality of gracelessness manifest in a pair of holey under-garments.

What callous behaviour permitted such a fall from precedence? Was this the malevolent prescription of some hypocritical bureaucratic-clerk? A conservative defence of infringement upon the client’s fourth-quarter investment? Or just like my cellular phone keypad and monophonic ringtones, perhaps I too have become outdated – obsolete. The latest chunk of grey matter to be steam-rolled and framed. Hung-up in a gallery of nostalgic interfaces and logos: reduced to nothing but surface. ‘Part and parcel’ they told me. But now they – the new artists – drag you flailing from your early retirement. They dress you up like some old rockstar gimmick and charge their cattle-prods. Static bolts of electric zap behind you as they force you down the catwalk. Cameras flash in Mexican wave, forming a circular aura of perpetual, infuriating buffering. I was here once before, but it was all so different. What was once a gaze of admiration and respect is now a glare of sincere indifference. An object of both pastiche and parody – ambiguously situated in the contemporary half-way-house of an ostensibly ‘post-post’ –modern culture. A brooding troupe of Photoshop formalists picking under their nails and sighing into their iPhones.

Playerz, 2016

Occasionally I’m invited to their penthouse corporate boardroom, as a sort of historical case study; the bastard offspring of the fruits of my labour, secreting silver spoons from their drooling holes. Not so much as even a polite rattle of the saber. All sat in forest-green Chesterfield office chairs – fit with polished chrome base and user-weight tilt tension control – eyes aligned to the 16:9 Celexon Premium InterLink D-P at the head of the room. A tour de force of online consumption. Pure and unhindered. And with a quick wave of Pot Lucker’s selfie-stick the HD-ready pie chart disappears. Except now there’s a bad taste in my mouth. Jay Double-U is climbing his moist-palm up Pirate Bae’s boudoir garter-brace, eyes poised at the green-satin lingerie at its summit, whilst Bon Vevo is busy tonguing Your-Tube’s rouge-lips in the corner of the room. Wetflix looks over and curls her indexfinger towards me, as if to say, ‘Stream if you want to go faster, baby.’ I lean towards her spoor when all of a sudden – ‘What the fuck is this traffic cone doing here?’

‘Six Frappuccinos, and make it fast buck.’

This cute and innocent orange-laced cone is anything but. I can see the piano-key-grin behind his slick branded smile a mile off. They think they’re all so polished; gleaming white pixels on the screen. But I’ve seen them, clawing over one another amidst the overflowing and copper-stained dumpsters behind the old Blockbusters. Like a swarm of frenzied Termites they devour, knots and strands of pristine celluloid bustling over their thorax, in puddles formed from oozing salivary glands and rusty, fetid dumpster-fluids. I’ve seen the orange-laced cone squatted against those oxidized sewage pipes to dumpsters’ immediate left, top to toe in strips of acetate and black thermoplastic, eyes rolled back into his cranium and an occasional sub-squeak from his jugular as he slowly grinds a lubricated copy of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5 against his exposed oboe. Gyrating in orgasmic filth. A scene of real carnage. VHS cassettes are gobbled up and digested. Gramophone records, greased and inserted. Test cards in 1080p.

Poolz (still), 2016

Long ago were the days when you looked deep into my soul. When you really understood me. That requited love: lost. Many a night was spent in each other’s company: the residues of boredom, interest and recommendation. My sleek, crisp interface, your devout, watchful eyes. I used to say to you in such solicitous care, ‘You have watched 72 minutes of video today. Please wait 54 minutes or Click here to enjoy unlimited use,’ in what now seems a vain effort to limit your insatiable appetite. Think of all the endless leg cramps and stinging eyes you now face. All the whirring and hot plastic sticking against your thighs. All those nights curled up under your thin duvet, in one of those dirtcheap, unbranded IKEA-looking double beds, with no headboard and a creamy, tacky floral-like pattern laced around the rim. Your eyes bloodshot from the lurid screen and the insidious glow of dim street lamps squirming in past your grey, short curtains. Your feet cold and rigid, the smell of ashtrays thick around you. And deep down all you really want to do is get some kip cause you’re feeling somewhat tired and you know you’ve got stuff to do tomorrow. But J Double-U and that fucking orange-laced cone are still there on your screen, with unlimited, effortless consumption. So you close the pop-ups and new-windows and keep watching; documentary after documentary of progressively lower-budget anti-corporate conspiracy flicks, insomnia slowly creeping in.

But what do I know? I’m old news: as old as the hills. And just like the sleep-deprived media-junkie, I too want some shut-eye; to catch some zees. I exit the glass-monolith, open-plan after open-plan of strictly regimented and catatonic stares: eyes burning into the florescent tubes in front of them; hands placed silently on their knees. My door is one of many. It looks almost anonymous out there, at the edge of the city. Like one cosmic-ly large Brutalist housing-block, doors standing in monotonous uniform; small, pale-blue boxes atop a vast concrete sheet. I go to take out my keys, squinting my eyes towards the latch… ‘DOMAIN HAS BEEN SEIZED.’ Someone turns the brightness up to full beam and a grainy voice echoes over the loud tannoy: ‘Mr. M. E. G. A. Video, you are hereby under arrest for the following charges of Criminal Copyright Infringement, Conspiracy to Commit Money Laundering, Conspiracy to Commit Racketeering, Wire Fraud, and Embezzlement.’

‘Jesus H. Shit…Those bastards are trying to freakin’ extradite me!’ And before you can say refresh, copter blades are howling towards me. Sirens are wailing and megaphones are barking orders. A cacophony of red of blue swirling lights. Sentences crackling on and off on radio transmitters. Neighbours slamming their doors shut. It’s everyman for himself out here. Bunch of ungrateful swines. A swathe of cerebrally-challenged and pork-bellied, pie-faced coppers are running in slow-motion, unholstering their Smith & Wesson MP 9mms, open-mouths bellowing proverbial rights. The soles of my Tom Fords in corresponding slo-mo, waving to the jelliedeels behind me. How long will I be stuck on this island? Behind these bars. Pirate or martyr, criminal or hero? You close the tab and my heart cuts. You’re sailing away on their luxury-yacht; strip-teases and champagne overflowing. You pirouette and wink, mascara blotched and lipstick smudged. A hand runs up your abdomen as you hopelessly cry ‘SKIP’. They’re all laughing and coughing up IPs. They’ve made it to international waters. But I remain, the scratches in my concrete-cell read: ‘404// Server Not Found’, and I mutter to myself, over and over, in quiet envy, ‘Vevo, Fuck You.’