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 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.