Bare Life: A Critical Analysis of Richard Mosse’s Incoming (2016)

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This tendency towards totalitarianism, the imminent and yet spectral crisis at the heart of liberal democracy, threatens to strip each of us of our political life.

Richard Mosse, ‘Transmigration of the Souls’[1]

ABSTRACT:

In 2017 the Barbican Curve Gallery opened its doors to a new work by the Irish conceptual documentary photographer Richard Mosse. Created in 2016 and titled Incoming, the exhibition included a series of still prints, a large video installation projected across three 8-metre-wide screens with an accompanying soundtrack, and several smaller assemblages of black and white television screens with audio-visual content. The subject of Mosse’s work was the contemporary refugee crisis. Using a powerful heat-sensitive military camera, able to detect human bodies from over 30km and identity specific individuals from 6.3km, Mosse filmed as refugees journeyed from the East, hiking through the Persian Gulf and across the Turkish border, and from the West, trekking through the Saharan Desert to the Libyan coastline—each fleeing from war, persecution and fear with the hope of finding refuge in Western Europe. Analogous to the work’s visceral impact and affectivity, Incoming explores important questions of contemporary biopolitics, surveillance and citizenship—issues I shall explore in the work of Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben—at its core, questioning the very foundations that our current political modernity rests upon. Furthermore, Mosse’s position as a European artist provokes questions raised in Hal Foster’s seminal essay of 1996, ‘The Artist as Ethnographer?’—a polemic against the projection of ideological patronage in post-colonial struggles—a text best unpacked with reference to the earlier work of Indian literary theorist Gayatri Spivak and her famous work ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ (1988). Through these two conversations I will present a critical analysis of Incoming, exploring the complex political landscape it seeks to address whilst highlighting the potential difficulties of this as an aesthetic project. 

Introduction 

Richard Mosse is conceptual photographer in search of what he dubs ‘the impossible image.’ By this he means the hidden, intangible and opaque tragedies that occur throughout the world: photographs that are not meant to be seen. Throughout his career Mosse has used cutting-edge techniques to document wars and crises across the globe. Born in Ireland in 1980, he has exhibited works internationally, from the Kunsthalle, Munich to Tate Modern, and represented Ireland at the 2013 Venice Biennale. His previous works have ranged from Kosovo (2004)—a photographic series looking at damaged Serbian Orthodox churches after the civil war; Breach (2009)—images documenting the imperial palaces of Saddam Hussein converted into temporary accommodation for the U.S. Military; and Infra (2011)/Enclave (2013)—two works which employ discontinued 16mm infrared film developed by the military in the 1940s (Kodak Aerochrome) to transform the green landscapes of the Democratic Republic of Congo into a surreal landscape of lucid and vivid pinks. A continual question at the heart of Mosse’s practice has been the liminal space between documentary and art. Echoing the provocations of Manon Slome’s essay, ‘The Aesthetics of Terror’ (2009), each work explores the notion that through this contextual jump, can “violence retain its power to inspire fear, or does this contextual transposition fetishize violence, stripping it of meaning through aestheticization?”[2]

Incoming, Mosse’s most recent major work, is no exception to this trajectory. Developed by a multinational defence and security corporation, the thermal camera used by Mosse is sanctioned as a weapon under international law. Appropriating its inhuman gaze, Mosse has set himself the task of representing the unpresentable: the contemporary refugee crisis, as seen through the eyes of the governments and multi-national agencies such as Frontex—The European Border and Coast Guard Agency, tasked with controlling the borders of the European Schengan Area—which increasingly determine the fate of their lives. The rich textuality of the camera renders its world in a brutal monochrome tonality; a corporeal patina of black and white shades which discloses not light and dark but hot and cold—the difference between life and death. In one scene, the lingering residue of black heat from a rescue worker’s hands is captured on the clear white body of a child, a victim of hypothermia after a boat had sunk just off the port of Molyvos, Lesvos. In others, the colour is inverted and collections of white bodies are surveilled moving through rough hilltops, camps and across deserts; the same military night vision used by Apache helicopters to indiscriminately kill Iraqi civilians, as was revealed in the WikiLeaks footage of 2007, now firmly engrained in the popular unconscious. It is a wholly dehumanizing aesthetic: humans appear radically inhuman, stripped of everything but their fundamental biochemical processes: respiration, blood flow and metabolism. “Even at close range, the camera is unable to perceive [a single] vehicle of emotional communication,” Mosse writes. Our most intimate tool of empathy, the human eye, shown simply as a “viscous black jelly.”[3] Under the retina of the camera, the refugees become what Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls, ‘bare life’. 

Drawing from a Post-Foucauldian analysis of political biopower, Agamben’s political theory reconfigures the notion through a historical distinction traced from antiquity to the ancien régime, to the emergence of the nation-state and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. The demarcation lies between two forms of life: zoē and bios. Taken from classical Greece and the writing of Aristotle and Plato, the former represents “merely reproductive life”, whilst the latter signifies a “politically qualified life.”[4] Tracing the aforementioned genealogy of what he would later call the ‘state of exception’, Agamben analyses the dependency of sovereign power on different forms of politically defined life. In doing so, Agamben pays particular attention to the work of Hannah Ardent, who in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) had already begun to question the intimate relationship between ‘the rights of man’ and the nation-state, articulated through the “very figure who should have embodied the rights of man par excellence—the refugee.”[5] Sovereignty is shown to rely fundamentally on a juridical power over life: the means to name it, provide it and take it away. The political figure of the refugee highlights this inherent paradox—both the conceptual limit of universal rights and the emblematic victim of the nation-state’s structural biopolitical violence. Mosse makes no pretence to hide this influence. He is candid and transparent in his political motivation, placing his work within the ‘spectral crisis at the heart of liberal democracy’. 

How though, to render such a political and technological apparatus within an aesthetic regime which does not simply valorise its intended target? In 1996, art critic Hal Foster wrote the essay ‘The Artist as Ethnographer?’—a short chapter in his larger anthology of works, The Return of the Real. In this text, Foster’s critiques the rise of neo-avant-garde aesthetics, and in particular, what Foster dubs the ‘ethnographic turn’ in contemporary art. Tracing its emergence from the 1960s onward, this “quasi-anthropological paradigm”[6] constituted a new politics of alterity within institutionalised art forms, passing from the urban proletariat to its new place in the post-colonial subject. A move which, if lacking in critical self-reflexivity, threatened to rearticulate modernist claims of authenticity and construct an imagined subaltern Other for Western projection; a process likely to alienate and comprise the intended subject of representation. Theorist Gayatri Spivak is similarly concerned by this process of ideological patronage and appropriation. Her seminal text, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, draws from and critiques the work of French post-structuralism to elaborate her conception of ‘epistemic violence’, highlighting the contradictions and issues with Western attempts to represent subaltern voices—be this intellectually or artistically. Combining these critiques with reference to Incoming and its technological and political tutelage, I hope to demonstrate that the aesthetic ground on which it’s analysis rests remains a highly contested space. 

[1] Richard Mosse, ‘Transmigration of the Souls,’ in Incoming (London: MACK, 2017). 

[2] Manon Slome, ‘The Aesthetics of Terror,’ in The Aesthetics of Terror, eds. M. Slome & J. Simon (Milano: Edizioni, 2009) pp. 12. 

[3] Mosse. 

[4] Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, California: California University Press, 1998) pp. 2. 

[5] Giorgio Agamben, ‘Biopolitics and the Rights of Man,’ in Incoming. 

[6] Hal Foster, ‘The Artist as Ethnographer?,’ in The Return of the Real (Cambridge, Massachusettes: The MIT Press, 1999) pp. 177.

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Biometrics, Phenotypes and Hong Kong Cleanup

“He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection.”

Written in 1975, Foucault’s seminal work Discipline and Punishment was a vivid genealogy of the emergence of newer, more insidious forms of power. His eminent analysis of the Panopticon, its mechanisation and emergent ideology are as relevant today as they were forty years ago. Over the last few years we have been seeing an unprecedented level of surveillance and data-harvesting enacted on civilians at the hands of both private companies and the state — their agendas and operations not always mutually exclusive. The revelations engendered by Edward Snowden’s dissent in 2013 have been followed by story after story of developments in surveillance-based technologies and the scale of their implementation in our daily, routine existence. These interferences haven taken the form of ‘convenient’ personalised marketing adverts and much darker forms of psychological profiling and voter modelling — as was seen with the case of AggregrateIQ and Cambridge Analytics in the recent US election and EU referendum.

However, as many theorists have noted, even Foucault’s notion of a disciplinary society has been rapidly outmoded. As Paul Preciado states, “The body no longer inhabits disciplinary spaces but is inhabited by them. The biomolecular and organic structure of the body is the last hiding place of these biopolitical systems of control.”[1] In particular to surveillance technologies, the face has long been a historical tool for the taxonomisation and oppression of different peoples; from race, to psychiatry, to criminality, the face has been the object from which to identify and shackle certain physical appearances to pre-determined psychological traits, degeneracies and social corruptions. As Deleuze would go as far as to say, “The despot-god has never hidden his face, far from it: he makes himself one, or even several.” [2]

An example of Francois Galton’s 19th century criminal physiognomies.

Today, the face has not escaped this oppressive history. The evolution of facial recognition systems in recent years has come at the forefront of anti-terror legislation and rhetoric, the latest in a long line of attacks of civil liberties in the name of security and defence; and all across the world it seems, from the Zapatistas to Anonymous, and from black bloc to Pussy Riot, movements are emerging that reject the face as a political tool — as the former declares, “In order for them to see us, we covered our faces; so that they would call us by name, we gave up our names; we bet the present to have a future; and to live . . . we died.”

Artists throughout the years have approached the issue of the face in different ways, from Arthur Elsenaar’s electro-facial choreographies, to the British-Jamaican collective Mongrel’s ethno-racialized composite portraits. Yet the recent developments in biometric pattern recognition has inspired a new wave of artistic responses to the contemporary political and technological problems that they bring.

Tony Oursler is one of these artists. With an oeuvre that is teeming with uncanny images of xeno-physiognomies, spliced and hybridized with screens, alien pigments and modulated voice tones, Oursler presents human identity through the alienating lens of the biometric systems themselves. His portraits are an unsettling account of the inhumanness of these modes of representation, and the troubling effects they have on modern psychology. His anonymous magnified cyborgs drone of ‘natural selection’ and ‘normative association’, they murmur of being hacked, short-circuited, recoded, and warn that “now you’re only a clown for the machine.” His smaller, diluted abstracts focus heavier on their biometric nodes and latticework, pushing the dehumanising effects of these technologies to the extreme. In an interesting work as part of his 2015 solo-show, template/variant/friend/stranger, one projection infinitely shuffles between 150 algorithmically produced Eigen model-faces, beautifully displaying the sinister uncanniness of these nonhuman projections.

Installation view of template/variant/friend/stranger by Tony Oursler.

Similarly, the work of Heather Dewey-Hagborg explores the possibility of artificially producing — or reproducing — the human face. Her works are based on current genomic research and forensic DNA phenotyping. In both her projects Strangers Visions (2012–13) and Probably Chelsea(2017), Hagborg uses a process of molecular photofitting to algorithmically produce the suspected facial images of people’s DNA. Her project Stranger Visions, as well as producing a facial reconstruction of the DNA she harvested from chewed gum, loose strands of hair and cigarette butts, also detailed a list of personal attributes to the individual, using “statistical predictions about what these individuals looked and acted like, what kind of health conditions they had, and even what their last names were.”

Her later work, Probably Chelsea, uses the DNA of Chelsea Manning to produce thirty radically different facial probabilities, which seem to traverse both race, ethnicity and gender, drawing attention to the ‘molecular solidarity’ we all share, and the impossibility of prescribing to a notion of biologically inscribed identities, especially in an age soon to engage in far more common forms of genetic surveillance, such as the somewhat comical Hong Kong Cleanup’s ‘Face of Litter’ campaign in 2015.

Heather Dewey-Hagborg, Probably Chelsea (2017)

One project that has become symbolic of queer and anti-biometric protest, however, is artist-theorist Zach Blas’ iconic Facial Weaponisation Suite (2011–14). Using aggregated data from different facial sets, including queer men (a riposte to several scientific studies conducted in 2007 which claimed to be able to correctly infer sexual orientation from facial images), non-white participants and surveys looking at both anti-veil legislation in France and security technologies at the US-Mexico border control, Blas uses 3D modelling software to creative ‘collective’ masks that evade facial recognition systems. The amorphous masks lack any recognisable human features, and politically resound with the formerly mentioned movements that reject the face and the current forms of identitarian political representation that it subtly -and not so subtly- enforces. The strikingly aesthetic objects make poignant the interlaced nature of visibility and power, technological surveillance and mass protest, biometrics and defacement. Combined, these three artists force us to consider again the insidious nature technology and power, but also new possibilities of collective dissent. They question how best to face — or not to face — the future of our high-tech societies of control.

Zach Blas, Facial Weaponisation Suite (2011–14)

[1] Paul B. Preciado, Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era
(New York: The Feminist Press, 2013): 79.

[2] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005): 115.

Becoming-Other, Becoming-Slime

In a competition to best optimise Tokyo’s railway network, pitted against a vast team of Japanese experts from the fields of engineering and design, who would you choose to help win the project?

I choose a piece of mould.

Physarum poluycephalum to be precise. This single-celled collective organism — or slime mould — given its favoured environment — dark, wet and concealed from light, with plenty of bacteria and fungal spores to munch on — will ooze and promulgate its dendritic body in a garish, toxic yellow. And whilst possessing absolutely no brain, nervous system or any means of centralised regulatory function, displays a resounding capacity for intelligent behaviour.

The worming blob of cytoplasm grows and extends as individual spores merge from their molecular to molar aggregate through an unpredictable and entirely environmental set of sensory-feedback loops. Through some sense of extracellular spatial-intelligence — “a kind of living hard drive”[1] — individual amoebas are directed toward one another and synergise into an amorphous, unicellular whole. It then engulfs bacteria and other microbiotic prey into its cell membrane and secrets enzymes to digest them.

Physarum, whilst having been previously lumped into the fungal taxonomical camp, has now been classified as a Protist, a special place reserved for those biological anomalies that are at the “odds and ends of the natural world [and] don’t fit in with the rest of our taxonomic grouping system.”[2] Arriving on the Earth a good billion years ago, this slime is perhaps the most resilient and hardy of terrestrial species, coagulating into a hardened sclerotium under adverse environmental factors, or else deploying an army of haploid spores, both of which under more favourable, moist conditions will deliquesce back to its active, plasmodium vitality. In other words… its immortal.

For a few months or so back in the early 2000s, nature and technology columnists were captivated by the work of Japanese researcher Toshiyuki Nakagaki. Along with his team of microbiologists, Nakagaki placed some Poluycephaluminside a labyrinthine structure with some crumbs of oatmeal at different ends. Almost intuitively, and with a precision and speed that most humans would doubtful replicate, the slime mould managed to established the shortest and most efficient tubular network possible from one piece of food to the other, it’s tendrils of protoplasm slithering into dead ends and back out of them, hunting for its meal.

In a second experiment, with the grains placed in the approximate location of Tokyo and its neighbouring 36 towns, the rhizomatic slime produced a cartography remarkably similar to the existing railway network. One which, it has been remarked, unaffected by political biases, could actually be more efficient, cost less, and be more fault-tolerant that the current one. Indeed, the logistical genius of this mould has been extended in similar experiments to road networks in both the United Kingdom and the Iberian Peninsula. 

Even more bizarrely, the mould has shown signs of memory. In a controlled environment, Physarum has been proven to anticipate and react to set-interval environmental changes, and has also been shown to exhibit a rudimentary form of learning called ‘habituation’: upon encountering a bitter but harmless substance in its path to a food source, whilst originally met with hesitation, the slime mould would eventually begin to pour over the substance with increasing determination, forgetting and re-learning this information with different time-frames of exposure. More recently, it has even been used to control robot facial expressions. 

Learning without a brain, storing without a memory, cognition without a thought.

For the last few years, Finnish artist Jenna Setula has spent her time observing and researching this curious specimen. As for all of its primitivism, this alluring slime poses lots of interesting questions for both biological and computational science — the current development of ‘soft robotics’ — robots that function through ‘genetic’ algorithms, adapting and learning through real-time feedback-loops — have been greatly inspired by these decentralised organisms (in fact, a research group based in Japan actually named one of their soft-bodied robots, ‘Slimey’). And it is generally thought that the combination of variable, morphological feedback-systems, coupled with Big Data information-technologies, will be the foreseeable future of artificial intelligence. 

Now, whilst it is quite easy to jump to the recognisable An/Com political considerations of an organism, that through a decentralised, lateral and rhizomatic ‘network’ of nuclei within the aggregate whole, exhibits extraordinary capacities for long-term species perpetuation, meticulous and efficient energy consumption (with further complex nutrition equilibration), and predictive ecological planning. It is important to remember, however, that the current impasses of neoliberal co-optation have led to a jettisoning of such naïve proclamations of messianic technological and deterritorialized affirmation.

Faced with the endless swamp of digital content, the bottom-up structures of ‘hip’ corporations that function through a horizontal ‘collaboration’ of semi-autonomous agents — all responsible and determined to optimise their own intellectual and affective labour — and the increasing hyper-connectivity of life — where the unemployed are told to upload their CV to LinkedIn for better business opportunities, and through which “new geopolitical forms parasitize the traditional geometries of state sovereignty”[3] – it is no wonder that these examples of micro-biology lack a certain political poignancy.

Fortunately, I don’t think that is the point the Sutela is trying to make. 

Her ongoing series on the life-form is centred around the working title Orgs — Organisation, Organism, Orgasm — and hosts an array of petri-dishes, yellow slime, performances and technological charts. One of its latest iterations, taking place last year at the Future Gallery in Berlin, was her work Orbs (2016). Housed in the gallery’s dark and murky basement, three transparent orbs were lit up with infrared tubes, illuminating the tenebrous maze of glass conduits that Setula’s Physarum crawled through. Each orb contained its own individual design, from a 3D model of an early 20th century Japanese charcoal drawing — a supposed map of the limits of anthropocentric knowledge, made by a royal naturalist who collected slime moulds — to an example of blockchain technology and a Holocratic organisational chart.


Even more recently, at the Centre Pompidou last spring, Sutela inhaled some of the slime mould before conducting a peformative reading, as if the organism were hacking and programming her speech itself — a ‘becoming-slime’. In reference to her titular semiotics, she explained the words’ connotative links: “Orgasms may induce a brief loss or weakening of consciousness, la petite mort. According to Professor Nakagaki, by focusing on the level of unconsciousness, we may find clues to the similarities between the information processing of humans and other forms of organic and synthetic life. […] Artificial intelligence has been trapped on the level of consciousness for too long.”

  

Now, while this may seem like a rather vogue techno-lusting for non-human cognition, I would suggest that Sutela’s sensibility is a little closer to that of Rachel Pimm’s in her 2015 performance at the Chisenhale Gallery, London. In that performance, Pimm, using similar semiotic playfulness, explored the taxonomical etymology of the worm, through an assemblage of agencies from entropic subterranean annelids, to architectures of cerebral activity: “Vermin? Worm. Or Verm? Vermi? Vermis — the Latin worm, the ancient, original worm, or the cerebral neural worm-shaped pathways that carries the sense of what one’s own body is, alongside and in relation to, and touching neighbouring things. Like a direct wormhole to stuff, to other matter.”

Similar to Pimm, Sutela is bringing attention to the other-worldliness of the assemblages and systems of knowledge that humans are always-already enmeshed within. Recent developments in materialist posthuman philosophies have called attention to the myriad ways in which autopoietic, intensive assemblages of species and nonhuman actants co-constitute life. For example, it has been proven that Omega-3 fatty acids help improve human moods, combats stress and depression, and increase female libido. That gut bacteria influence infant brain development, viruses make up about 5% of the human genome, and that quantum mechanics is responsible for a robin’s navigational systems, photosynthesis and all the world’s enzyme systems.

Amongst all of this, the world simply gets weirder and weirder, and the interplay of forces that shape it — human, bacterial, geological, divine — converge and unravel, full of relentless production and bottomless entropy. The ecology of species, bodies and affects, of computers and algorithms, all radically inter-connected and co-dependant. For all of our cosmic dreams of life beyond this earth, perhaps we should start by considering all things alien, right beneath our noses.


[1] Jamie Sutcliffe, ‘Jenna Sutela: Nam-Gut,’ Art Monthly 408 (2017): 31

[2] http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/19846365

[3] https://frieze.com/article/other-minds

Good Good, Double Good

Exhibition text for Good Good, Double Good at Lewisham Art House, July 2017. 

Featuring artists Felix Treadwell, Lewis Henderson, Charles Verni, Xenia Bond, Rosie Kennedy, Jack Jubb & Jack Bodimeade.


This morning I learnt that if you chew gum whilst chopping onions you won’t cry, and that if I submerge my iPhone in a bag of chickpeas it will charge faster. I learnt that with just 15 easy steps I can overcome my overproduction of earwax, and that when I was 17 years old I shared an 87% facial resemblance to Brad Pitt. I watched as a Cane Toad smoked a joint and an American middle-school choir sung of ‘Whips’ and ‘Nae Naes’. I read an article on Quora that said Gustav Klimt used cat urine as his favourite fixative, that half a millilitre of water is needed for every single Google search, and that central heating makes you fat. I saw on Twitter that VICE have published an interview with Nathan Oakley, Flat Earther. And that Vince Cable is convinced Brexit will never happen. I monitored a LoL vs DotA forum and am convinced that Noxus, Bloodthirsty Goat Herder of Freljord was actually Shia Labeouf. And in less than five minutes I saw Alex Jones sing of ‘Literal vampire potbelly goblins hobbling round after us”, a montage of inspirational Gordon Ramsey mood-boards, and scientific proof that Australia doesn’t even exist.

In the afternoon, I followed Jacob Rees-Mogg on Instagram and finally synched my Apple Watch with my new colostomy bag. I learnt how similar Erdoğan’s facial expressions were to that of Sméagol and how Umberto Eco liked lists ‘the same way people like football or paedophilia.’ I was told that soon enough there would be an AGI of Things that will remove the need for human beings to work, that Tilda Swinton and Wes Anderson are in fact twins, and that Van Gogh’s ear was actually sliced off by Jeanne Calment, the longest living human ever documented. I argued on Reddit about the cultural significance of the dab and watched a YouTube playlist of the Vengaboys’ Greatest Hits. I inspected a US-Army, Unclassified ‘Terrorist, Insurgent & Militant Group Logo Recognition Guide’ and perused UberEats for close to an hour for Vietnamese food. Whilst listening to Lady Gaga’s ‘Swine’ on ARTPOP and refreshing my Tumblr screen, I saw a quote that said I was part of a generation “born into that ahistorical, antimnemonic blip culture, for whom time has always come ready-cut into digital micro-slices.” There’s more potato in a McFlurry than a small chips.

My friend sent me a link to a tale by Lyotard about an Archipelago or something, but every article I found about it seemed to tell a different story. Trump overdoses on Oedipus in Cyberspace and offers Charlie Gard medical support on Twitter. Richard Prince sells Instagrams of Nightcoregirl for $100,000 and Elon Musk vows to solve South-Australia’s energy problems with a Tesla battery-farm in less than 100 days. The EU is set to launch the Digital Single Market to combat US online dominance; the White House’s Chief Strategist used to be CEO of a World of Warcraft gold-mining company; and Hulk Hogan bankrupts Gawker Media over a sex-tape scandal. AggregrateIQ, Cambridge Analytics and Palantir, psy-ops aimed at voter disengagement. Gamergate, J B Peterson and that sad green frog. LinkedIn becomes a rhizome, and “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.”

Depressed Vegetarians for Corbyn. Bad bad, not so bad.

Towards a Future Post-Capitalism: Accelerationism and its Aesthetics

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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.  

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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.