Apocalyptic Acceleration
In a time of crisis, apocalyptic desires and fantasies become pressing and real. Norman Cohn’s In Pursuit of the Millennium (1957) offered a secret history of the periodic emergence of a ‘revolutionary eschatology’ in the Middle Ages in response to a collapsing social order, immiseration, disease, and war.1 Responding to crisis these dreamers dared to imagine an apocalypse that would turn the world upside down, and create a new heaven on earth in which Princes would bow to peasants. The apocalypse that became real was the apocalypse of repression. During the Peasants’ War in Germany (1524- 26) over one hundred thousand peasants were killed and Thomas Müntzer, one of the leaders who, under torture, proclaimed ‘Omnia sunt communia’ (‘All things are to be held in common’), executed. Cohn, an anti-communist liberal, regarded these millenarians as dangerous forerunners of the ‘totalitarian’ movements of the twentieth century and, in the 1970 edition, extended this to condemn ’60s counter culture by linking these medieval protoanarchists to Charles Manson’s death cult. Guy Debord and the Situationists would deliberately re-purpose Cohn, reclaiming these rebels not as symptoms of irrationalism but as forerunners of modern revolution.2 Apocalyptic desires are ambiguous: at once consolatory fantasies, deferred hopes, and, potentially, spurs to radical re-orderings.
We are living in a time of crisis and potential apocalypse, with the overlapping of the financial crisis, ecological crisis, and the crisis of movements of resistance. This rupture of the capitalist continuum results in an apocalyptic imagination that produces dreams or nightmares of a world ‘cleansed’ of humanity, from 2012 to the History Channel’s Life After People. These fundamentally reactionary fantasies can only imagine redemption of our fallen world on the condition that humanity ceases to exist, or is reduced to the ‘right’ number of the ‘saved’. There is, however, another apocalyptic tone that also runs through radical and revolutionary thought in the present moment: apocalyptic accelerationism.
If the current conjuncture of overlapping crises – financial, ecological, and political – figures the bad side of history at its worst, then apocalyptic accelerationism tries to radicalize the worst. To choose some examples, we have Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi’s contention that the current crisis is actually the sign of the demise of capitalism under the pressure ‘of the potency of productive forces (cognitive labor in the global network)’;3 the claim by Angela Mitropolous and Melinda Cooper that the crisis is generated by ‘usury from below … that extended beyond the limits which were tolerable to capital’;4 and Antonio Negri’s argument that ‘no New Deal is possible’, and so we must go on to more radical demands.5
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