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# Malign Velocities Accelerationism and Capitalism

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wreckage of history.

The ‘Angelic Locomotive’ is, therefore, the sign of acceleration to the point that indicates that the ‘energies that technology develops beyond their threshold are destructive.’25 The point here is that we can’t simply accept technology as it is, but the ‘refunctioning’ of technology depends on the interruption of capitalist acceleration. Benjamin reiterates this point in his essay ‘Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia’ (1929), where he criticizes the surrealists for their ‘overheated embrace of the uncomprehended miracle of machines’.26 Such a characterization speaks, obviously, to the currents of accelerationism. Benjamin is poised in a tense debate not only with Brecht, but also with his own earlier desire to wrest the forces of production for revolution (which we discussed in Chapter 1).

Revolutions per Minute

Both Brecht and Benjamin adopt positions that can, at times, loosely be described as accelerationist. I’ve tried to probe the fact that they also disrupt and interrupt the accelerationist fantasy of tapping into the capitalist forces of production. What I’ve suggested is that the image Jameson offers of ‘a streamlined technological future’ as the key to revolutionary change is precisely what they put into question. The result is not simply some nostalgic or pastoral vision, but rather an interruptive politics that refuses to treat capitalist production on its own terms. Instead, Brecht and Benjamin are attentive to the destructiveness of the productive forces, and particularly those that have gone off the rails.

Benjamin’s registering of destruction, and its equivocation, suggests exactly that heterogeneity of time that will find its formulation in ‘On the Concept of History’ (1940). Homogenous empty time is the time of the train on the tracks, which can speed up and slow down. The emergency brake of Benjamin’s metaphor for revolution is not simply the stopping of a train on the smooth tracks of progress. Rather, as with the metaphor of the angel of history, it suggests that the train tracks into the future are being laid immediately in front of the train. In fact, the anecdote of the Tay Bridge disaster suggests that the emergency brake is applied precisely due to the derailing of the train, and threatens another catastrophic derailing. The ‘rails’ of history accelerate us to disaster if we are not aware of the destructive side of the dialectic of production.

The irony, as Benjamin’s notes make clear, is that the desire for acceleration on the tracks of history breeds passivity before the productive forces:

Once the classless society had been defined as an infinite task, the empty and homogeneous time was transformed into an anteroom, so to speak, in which one could wait for the emergence of the

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The idea of the tracks stretching into the future leaves revolution as a receding moment – the station we never quite arrive in. The result, contra to the revolutionary intervention, it is the constant stoking of the train, i.e. the capitalist productive forces. This is another instance of accelerationism, which either tries to actively increase the speed of capital, or simply becomes the passenger on the train, allowing the constant destruction of living labor at the hands of dead labor to do the work.

The conclusion is that the emergency brake is not merely calling to a halt for the sake of it, some static stopping at a particular point in capitalist history (say Swedish Social Democracy – which the American Republican Right now takes as the true horror of ‘socialism’). Neither is it a return back to some utopian pre-capitalist moment, which would fall foul of Marx and Engels’s anathemas against ‘feudal socialism’. Rather, Benjamin argues that: ‘Classless society is not the final goal of historical progress but its frequently miscarried, ultimately [endlich] achieved interruption.’28 We interrupt to prevent catastrophe, we destroy the tracks to prevent the greater destruction of acceleration.

The emergency brake is the operator of Benjamin’s non-teleological politics of temporality, which aims to wrest the classless society from the continuing dialectic of production/destruction that is our constant ‘state of emergency’.29 Instead of accelerating into destruction, we have to think destruction as an intimate and on-going possibility. In the case of Brecht’s slob we have a kind of anti-handyman destruction posed against the clean new. Here we rearrange and take apart the new in ‘illogical’ ways. Benjamin’s interruption suggests a more definitive break (or brake) with the aim of production. The stopping of the angelic locomotive tries to jump the tracks of history, or jump out of the vision of history as infinite waiting for the revolutionary situation.

Inevitably this jumping of the tracks will produce something new – there is no simple way outside of production, as we have repeatedly seen. To interrupt acceleration(ism) is not to give up on the new. We can, instead, consider production as an interruption, as a series of experiments that have ‘frequently miscarried’. This does not prevent the ‘ultimately [endlich] achieved interruption’ which would be the real condition of the new. Brecht and Benjamin’s thinking of interruption is a thinking of intervention that not only stops acceleration, but also rethinks production and the very notion of ‘productive forces’. The difficulty of applying the emergency brake does not mean that interruption should be abandoned.

revolutionary situation with more or less equanimity.27

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Conclusion: The Moving Contradiction

Communism is not radical. It is capitalism that is radical. Bertolt Brecht

Lenin once described ‘left communism’ – the radical rejection of parliamentary elections and unions as sites of struggle – as an ‘infantile disorder’.1 I would describe contemporary accelerationism as a ‘postgraduate disorder’. This is not just a reference to the subjective position of contemporary accelerationists, and neither is it mere name calling or ad hominem argument. I’m referring to the specific position of the postgraduate on the edge or cusp of the job market. The postgraduate possesses, usually, significant cultural capital, but they confront full immersion in the labor market fairly late in life. Of course, in the UK and US, student financing already forces them into a future life of debt servitude. Also, many are working, trying to get ahead or, more often, stay afloat. That said, this merely adds to the fact that the world of labor is confronted as one of future horror – endless and trivial. Accelerationism provides an answer by turning the horror of work into the jouissance of machinic immersion. We may face a life of labor, but we can try and face it ‘kein Schmerz, kein Gedanke – without feeling, without thought.

This is the immersive fantasy of work as site of repetitive libidinal acceleration, where the bourgeois ego is drowned in the icy waters of inhuman labor. While remarkably easy to criticize, such a vision recognizes a truth of the decomposition of contemporary capital. In particular, it is the collapse of the future as sustainable mode of life under capitalism, which accelerationism answers with an ersatz future in its place: retooled retro-70s futurism coupled to the frayed remains of capitalist ‘dynamism’.

What could be an alternative? To pose this problem I want to first consider the current attempts to put the brakes on accelerationism and contemporary restatements of accelerationism. Tracking between these two extremes I want to suggest that the traversal of accelerationism requires more than a simple rejection or the discovery of some (un)happy median. We have to tap and resist the incitement of desire that capitalism produces and which accelerationism mimics – the fantasy of immersion into Real forces of acceleration.

A Supposedly Fun Thing

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The few scattered anti-accelerationist critiques of our present moment often seem to leave untouched the libidinal core of accelerationism. These alternatives seem tepid, or even reactionary – take Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi’s invocation of a politics of exhaustion that would ‘become the beginning of a slow movement toward a “wu wei” civilization, based on withdrawal, and frugal expectations for life and consumption’.2 This postmodern Taoism hardly enchants, and its expectation of sacrifice and escape seems to mock those paying for the current financial crisis. ‘Frugal expectations’ are what many of us already have, and such promises can hardly compete with offers of acceleration and excess. For this reason it is not surprising that accelerationism gains adherents uncomfortable with such re-treads of the usual political moralisms.

A more convincing version of the politics of deceleration has been given by Timothy Brennan, partly based on the slow slide of Cuba from its state as one of the last remaining ‘actually-existing’ forms of socialism to what, almost certainly, will be a capitalist future. In this strange hiatus or transition Brennan glimpses another possibility, in which the pleasure of socialism would be ‘the pleasures of a slower pace’.3 In particular, Brennan is willing to contemplate the problem of pleasure and to confront the incitements to desire of actually-existing capitalism with an alternative order:

The relative lack of commodities – at first glance anti-pleasure – would actually allow for a less extreme division of labor, freeing one from illusory ‘choices’ and the mental overload of advertising, as well as a greater (if not absolute) freedom from the tyranny of things.4

Pleasure is reconfigured, rather than abandoned to the frugalities of inhabited exhaustion. It is reconfigured in an alternative mode of choice, rather the compulsive exercise of ‘choice’ offered and demanded by contemporary capitalism. This reconfiguration of pleasure is a crucial element of any counter-accelerationist programme.

The recent restatements of accelerationism come explicitly against the background of ongoing financial crisis, the evident stasis of the world-system of capitalism, and the structural (mal)adjustments of Neoliberalism 2.0. The work of Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek has most explicitly tried to reinvigorate and retool accelerationism for our moment. They do so by reworking Nick Land’s ’90s vision, suggesting that we need to split speed from acceleration. Williams and Srnicek argue, on the one hand, that the endorsement of speed is the failing of ‘traditional’ accelerationism. This endorsement remains within the parameters of capitalism – it is a ‘dromological acceleration’ that proffers a ‘fundamentally brainless increase in speed’,5 or even ‘a simple brain-dead onrush’.6 In contrast they suggest an ‘acceleration which is also navigational, an experimental process of discovery within a universal space of possibility.’7 We could speak of an accelerationist critique of accelerationism…

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While this is a useful corrective to Landian excesses, it faces some conceptual and political problems of its own. Srnicek and Williams discuss High-Frequency Trading (HFT), in which new algorithmic computer instruments push trading below the limits of human perception and to the very limits of physics, but they cannot endorse it. Instead they find themselves in a rather uncomfortable position in which HFT is taken as a new extreme:

Where humans remain too slow – too fleshy – to push beyond certain temporal, perceptual, and quantitative barriers, HFT systems surge past, generating the fine nanoscale structure of modern financial markets, too intricate for the naked mind to observe.8

Yet, they insist, these systems are fundamentally stupid, unable to open out into a new conceptual space of possibility. HFT systems explicitly do not incarnate a new acceleration, but remain operators of dumb speed.

This leaves their accelerationism, unlike in Land’s unequivocal endorsement of capitalist processes, ungrounded. Alternative possibilities of acceleration only open in a post-revolutionary space, which we get to in a much more traditional fashion: ‘the tension fuelled dynamic between labor and capital incalculates a system-wide rupture.’9 So, we have revolution as a result of the moving contradiction of capital and labor, then acceleration after. But even then it doesn’t seem obvious why the opening of a space of possibilities necessarily entails acceleration, which implies forward momentum and advance of existing possibilities? Adorno remarked that ‘Perhaps the true society will grow tired of development and, out of freedom, leave possibilities unused, instead of storming under a confused compulsion to the conquest of strange stars.’10 While we can agree the end of capitalism would involve the loosening of new possibilities it is not selfevident that this accelerationism 2.0 can fully reconfigure the limitations or parameters of capitalism. In its nostalgia for space programmes and others forms of technological rush, it treads the same path of the accelerationism of speed. While Williams declares a push towards a ‘future that is more modern – an alternative future that neoliberalism is inherently unable to generate’,11 it seems this remains within the parameters of the modern as much as Land’s vision did.

What we can trace between anti-accelerationists and accelerationists is a strange convergence on nostalgia – nostalgia for a vanishing possibility of socialist slow-down, itself a terminal slide away from socialism, versus a capitalist ostalgie that can only fill in our absent future with past dreams of acceleration. This is a painful irony for accelerationism, in particular, which stakes so much on its futurism. The nostalgia is a nostalgia for forces – a desire for something, anything, to generate enough energy and momentum to break the horizon of the present. It is important that this is a metaphysics of forces, and not force in the singular, to account for the dispersion and linking of different possible sites into a plane of immanence. Accelerationism is constructive, but the construct replicates the past in the guise of a possible future.

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Impossible Labor

If accelerationism points to the problem of labor as the ‘moving contradiction’ of capital – both source of value, and squeezed out by the machine – then it tries to solve this contradiction by alchemising labor with the machine. I want to suggest that this is not a solution. We can’t speed through to some future labor delegated to the machine, nor can we return to the ‘good old days’ of labor as ‘honest day’s work’. In fact, accelerationism indicates the impossibility of labor within the form of capitalism. This obviously doesn’t mean labor does not take place, but it means labor can’t and doesn’t perform the function of political, social, and economic validation capitalism implies. The readiness of capitalism to abandon any particular form of labor at the drop of a hat, or at the drop of the markets, suggests that labor cannot carry the ideological weight it is supposed to.

In his study of workers in post-Apartheid South Africa Franco Barchiesi has detailed how, on the one hand, work is the condition of neoliberal citizenship, and how, on the other hand, it can’t allow for true self-reproduction.12 The privatization of healthcare, insurance, transportation costs, home ownership, etc., leaves those ‘lucky’ enough to be in work unable to survive. While labor is essential for citizenship – if we think of the demonization of ‘welfare scroungers’, ‘benefit cheats’, and so on (and on) – it also never performs that function. Barchiesi notes that work under capital is always precarious, and this status isn’t simply reserved for the ‘precariat’ – those in more obviously precarious work conditions that have emerged most strikingly in post-Fordist conditions. What is also crucial about Barchiesi’s argument is that he notes that the revelation of this precariousness or impossibility of labor does not simply lead to leftwing political activation but, in the current ideological context, is as likely to lead to anti-immigrant and anti-welfare sentiments. Those struggling to survive as precarious workers are as likely to turn on others as they are to start new forms of support and struggle that recognize the impossibility of work.

This is, I think, one of the crucial conundrums of the present moment. Accelerationism tries to resolve it in machinic integration and extinction, which bypasses the problem of consciousness, awareness, and struggle in a logic of immersion. We are torn by the moving contradiction of capital into two broken halves that can’t be put back together – neither able to go forward into the ‘streamlined’ future, nor return to the ‘stability’ of the Fordist past. There is no simple solution to this contradiction. What I want to suggest is that replication along the lines of nostalgia for images of capitalist ‘productivity’ is no way into the future. In fact the struggles over the state and condition of labor, even as impossible labor, have to be fought now.

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My perhaps minimal suggestion is recognition of this contradiction is the first necessary step. This returns us to ‘traditional’ problems of how we might intervene and negate the forms and forces of labor that mutilate and control our existence. Yet the discourses of the refusal of work or techno-libidinal fantasies of liberation from work do not operate. What are particularly absent are institutions and collective forms in which to engage the negation of work while considering the necessity and possibilities of sustainable existence. We encounter a capitalism that is, sometimes, quite happy to refuse us work while, at other times, to place extreme demands on us for work.

A working solution, to be deliberately ironic, is to struggle for decommodification of our lives. Campaigns against privatization and for the return of privatized services to public control try to reduce our dependence on work by attacking the way work is supposed to account for all of our self-reproduction. These struggles are in parallel for struggles to defend public services, protect benefits, and sustain social and collective forms of support. While they may be unglamorous, especially compared to space travel, these struggles can negate the conditions of the impossibility of work by trying to detach ‘work’ from its ideological and material role as the validation of citizenship and existence. In relation to the Nietzschean rebels of absolute communism or absolute acceleration these struggles can be dismissed as reactive, but they react precisely to the contradiction in which we are currently bound.

This is also true of the defence of workplace and employment conditions against new waves of privatization and outsourcing. The struggles at the University of Sussex over the outsourcing of support work, under much worse contracts and conditions, has forged an alliance of workers and students on the grounds of the precarity and impossibility of labor. It has also involved new experiments with forms and organizations against unresponsive unions and neoliberal management strategies. This impossibility of labor, I’m suggesting, does not simply mean abandoning work as an impossible site in the name of a dream of exit. Instead the negation of capitalist work can also be the struggle to free that true choice Timothy Brennan indicates by breaking our relation with constant ‘accelerative’ demand that we attend to the commodification of our lives.

People are Afraid to Merge

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When Jean-François Lyotard invoked ‘mechanical ascetism’ he wrote of it as a ‘new sensibility made up of little strange montages.’13 This sensibility was explicitly one of full jouissance with Lyotard, as we saw, mocking the French who thought jouissance meant ‘the euphoria that follows a meal washed down with Beaujolais.’ The political sensibility underlying accelerationism is one of jouissance, taken to the extreme, and merged with the promise or fantasy of full immersion in the Real forces of acceleration. The attraction of this sensibility lies, as I’ve tracked, on this fantasy of immersion into Real forces, with a new acceleration always promised and always just out of reach. To adapt Sade, it’s always ‘one more effort, to truly be accelerationists’.

While explicit accelerationists remain fairly rare, the emphasis on a sensibility of acceleration and speed is much more widespread. From discussions of the ‘resonance’ of contemporary struggles to the spreading wildfire of communization, a range of disparate and often conflicting theoretical and activist positions converge on the need for speed. While these models don’t adhere strictly in the accelerationist form of speeding-up capital or offer various forms of speeding-up of struggles (which often rely on the technological media of capital, such as Facebook), ‘little strange montages’ that integrate acceleration are everywhere.

This sensibility is one of flux and flow – in accelerationism the liquid is everywhere. At the same time a residual hardness, most evident in the early twentieth-century avant-gardes, still remains. The hardness is now the capacity to form strange montages without reserve, to fully immerse and so disperse into fluxes and flows. This is an aesthetics or practice of liquefaction that can temporarily solidify to activate force, before dispersing again into new liquid immanent forces.

From the classical accelerationist position any rejection of acceleration leads to a sensibility of what Nick Land calls ‘transcendental miserablism.’14 To give up on the dream of accelerating is to lapse into a Gnostic belief that the world is fallen into evil. Supposedly lacking any positive alternative the antiaccelerationist can only regard everything as negative and is left with only the feeling of resentment. Land’s answer is ‘Go (hard) for capitalism’. If we want to counter accelerationism, as I do, then we have to address how an alternative political sensibility might define itself not simply as a mode of misery.

The first point I’d make is that the immersive accelerationist makes a lot of their misery, but simply changed into jouissance. It is the accelerationist who risks constructing an absolute image of capitalism as monstrous machine or, in the case of Land, as the summoning of one of H.P. Lovecraft’s monstrous Shoggoths.

The Shoggoth, which appears in Lovecraft’s novella of Antarctic horror At the Mountains of Madness (1931), is an apt symbol for accelerationism. It is a creature that was genetically engineered as a ‘beast of burden’ to do the work for the Old Ones – ancient alien beings who inhabited the earth before humanity, and which were masters of occult knowledge. The Shoggoths developed a rudimentary intelligence and eventually rebelled, but were defeated by the Old Ones. A few remain and it is one of these creatures that is encountered at the climax of Lovecraft’s narrative by his unlucky human explorers. This is how it appears to Lovecraft’s unfortunate heroes:

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the nightmare, plastic column of fetid black iridescence oozed tightly onward through its fifteen-foot sinus, gathering unholy speed and driving before it a spiral, rethickening cloud of the pallid abyss vapor. It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train – a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnelfilling front that bore down upon us.15

Capitalism, for the accelerationist, bears down on us as accelerative liquid monstrosity, capable of absorbing us and, for Land, we must welcome this. The history of slave labor and literally monstrous class struggle is occluded in the accelerationist invocation of the Shoggoth as liquid and accelerative dynamism. The horror involves a forgetting of class struggle (even in dubious fictional form) and the abolition of friction in the name of immersion.

The second point is that this desire for immersion and forgetting is, I’d suggest, generated out of the psychopathologies which capitalism induces. By now we are familiar enough with a litany of psychological maladies that have been claimed as the signature disorder of capitalism: psychopathy, narcissistic personality disorder, schizophrenia, depression, hysteria, anxiety, etc. In response to these psychic effects accelerationism responds by intensification to transcend the limit: schiz to the point of excess, the potency of depression, and the enjoyment of subjection. The pathological effects of contemporary capitalism barely need pointing out and are the lived experience of most of us. We all know what’s wrong. Therefore, I don’t think the task is to add or refine the relentless framing of capitalism as generator of negative experience or the mutilation of ourselves. To be called to merge with the capitalist Shoggoth is hardly useful… Instead, and what is much more difficult, is what we do with this basis of affects, experiences, and moods.

I want to suggest that the starting point of any political sensibility, by which I mean a sensibility from the left, is to break with fantasies of Real forces of acceleration. This fantasy consists of the premise of the existence of forces that promise accelerative vitality, even in the most extreme moments of despair. These are dispersed and plural forces, which allow for multiple possibilities of accelerationism that can change form or content. It is integration with these real forces that offers an immersive immediacy without any mediation or any fantasy, and abandons the order of human language for the disorder of an inhuman existence.

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What I’m arguing for is a restoration of the sense of friction that interrupts and disrupts the fundamental accelerationist fantasy of smooth integration. This smoothness is neatly summarized by a statement from one of the characters in another Lovecraft story ‘The Whisperer in Darkness’ (1931): ‘All transitions are painless, and there is much to enjoy in a wholly mechanized state of sensation.’16 The fact this line is spoken by a human whose brain has been removed and placed in a metal cylinder to allow for space travel indicates the ‘transcosmic horror’ disavowed by accelerationism. It’s something to the credit of accelerationism that it doesn’t tend to figure transitions as ‘painless’, but as sites of jouissance. The solution, however, to making the transition is ‘going hard’ to go soft, in a peculiar mixture of machismo and the valorization of feminised immersion.

I’m not suggesting a return to the human, or a simple decelerative equilibrium, withdrawal, or new asceticism, as an answer. Our task today is to collectively sustain forms of struggle and negation that do not offer false consolation, either of inbuilt hope or of cynicism and absolute despair. In terms of political sensibility this would mean neither relentlessly tracking pathologies nor celebrating their coming magical transformation into new powers. Starting from misery might instead involve developing forms of politicization that could not only recognize misery but delink from what causes us misery.

This strange montage would involve the recognition of the friction of integration, which isn’t simply posed as an alternative of hard or soft, transcendent or immersive. Instead we are already up to our necks in potential and actual integrations, immersions, and extractions. The tension of these moments requires a collective sense of past struggles and of struggles to come, a recognition that the impossibility of work as it is has been shaped not only by capitalism but also by resistance. It also involves attention to the aesthetics of these moments of friction, which encode the tension accelerationism wishes to dissolve. There is not much consolation or celebration to be found here, this is not as fun as the montage promised by accelerationism, but it is a place to start.

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