Terminal Acceleration
When I talk about shit, it is hardly a metaphor: Capitalism reduces everything to shit, that it to say to the state of undifferentiated and decoded streams out of which everyone has to take its part in a private mode and with a sense of culpability. Félix Guattari1
Things are shit. Terminal accelerationism, however, sees this shit as what Alain Badiou calls ‘nourishing decomposition’;2 as the chance to break through the sterility of a failed capitalism and leap into a new future. I want to analyse, or anal/yse, this ‘excremental vision’ as one of the signature forms of contemporary accelerationism. Rather than the relentless positivity of thinkers like Deleuze and Guattari, or Negri, here the path of acceleration lies in the negativity and nihilism of capitalism. We’ve already seen that Jean Baudrillard is one of the key figures of this form, but I want to return to two earlier moments to track the convergence of the negative and the apocalyptic. These are the 1930s work of Georges Bataille and Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967 film Weekend. If the car was the model of modernist speed then Godard’s Weekend, with its famous single tracking shot of a traffic jam lasting over eight minutes, suggests the terminus of that model. The film also bears the intertitle ‘A FILM FOUND ON A SCRAP-HEAP’, which we could rephrase as ‘A FILM FOUND ON A SHIT-HEAP’, considering its staging of a veritable scatological apocalypse.
Godard’s film makes an obvious reference to Georges Bataille. The image ‘anal/yse’ appears before Corinne’s monologue – a fantasy, or nightmare, or reality – which describes sex scenes that deliberately mimic the anal eroticism of Bataille’s 1928 novel Story of the Eye (and which makes it to wikipedia’s cultural references for the film). We could also add the more esoteric reference that ‘Emily Brönte’ appears as a character in the film and one of the ‘case studies’ in Bataille’s Literature and Evil (1957) is dedicated to her work. At a more general level we could say that Godard develops Bataille’s ‘heterological’ vision, which Bataille articulated in the 1920s and 1930s, of ‘an irruption of excremental forces’ that void value.3 In Bataille’s excremental Marxism the revolution erupts from the ‘materialist bowels of proletarians’ (35), while class struggle, for Bataille and Godard, is an excremental apocalypse in which everything turns to shit.
This shit forms a site of equivocation and reversal: from an anal capitalism of crisis and waste to a revolution that will accelerate beyond the ‘limited’ waste capitalism produces, which is always subordinate to value. In this way accelerationism can weave together the apocalyptic possibilities of the productive forces and the apocalyptic possibilities of destruction. If capitalist crisis operates, as the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter argued, by periodic bouts of ‘creative destruction’,4 then this form of terminal accelerationism aims to exceed capitalism on its own ground.
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