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.
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