Malign Velocities Accelerationism and Capitalism

Tempos Decide Everything

Stalin engineered his rise to power after Lenin’s death. In 1928 he launched the first five-year plan, which ended NEP and recaptured the utopian energies of War Communism in the cause of a violently rapid process of industrialization and a catastrophic war on the peasantry. The ‘accelerationism’ of this first five-year plan is evident in that it was completed in four years. The result was a far more radical and destructive reworking of society than had been undertaken between 1917 and 1928, but also ‘the abandonment of all the varied, autonomous revolutionary utopian strivings in favour of the single utopia of Stalinism.’22 The historical irony was that Stalin, the ‘conservative’, used utopian tropes against the utopians, insisting on discipline, obedience and conformity to achieve the necessary historical ‘acceleration’ (uskorenie), and ‘slowing the tempo’ (gromozhenie) would become a counterrevolutionary act. This ‘Stalinist jouissance’ offers the masochistic sacrificial ‘pleasure’ of acceleration through submission to labor.23

It was now Stalin who would control time, criticising those who tried to go too fast as being ‘dizzy with success’, while also insisting that any slowdown was unacceptable. A Stalinist slogan of time declared that ‘In the epoch of reconstruction tempos decide everything’.24 Andrei Platonov’s surreal novel of Stalinist collectivization, The Foundation Pit (written in 1930, but only published in 1987), constantly recurs to the term ‘tempo’. The novel concerns the digging of the foundation pit for a future house of the proletarians and the elimination of the kulaks, the ‘rich’ peasants, who are sent downriver on a raft.

It also includes perhaps the strangest attempt to characterize the new Stalinist tempo of shock work. The village blacksmith has as his assistant the ‘unknown last proletarian’ and last instance of ‘residual exploited labor’ on the collective farm: a bear who hammers at the forge.25 In fact the forge is a ‘shock’ workshop and the bear is not only the last proletarian but also the first shock worker (udarniki). After having been taken around the collective farm to denounce kulaks – in actuality, those who have mistreated him – the bear sees a banner ‘For the Party, for Party loyalty, for the Shock Labor Forcing Open for the Proletariat the Doors into the Future!’ Taking this injunction absolutely the bear begins to hammer out iron at a frantic rate, distressing the villagers as his labor threatens to ruin the iron.

The bear prefigures the destructive excess of ‘shock work’ as the storming of production, by trying to force the door for proletarian future by ‘expending all this furious, speechless joy into the zeal of labor’.26 Anna Epelboin sees the bear as figuring not only acceleration into the future but also as ‘the agent of ultimate destruction’ who ‘threatens to return the world to primordial chaos’.27 In Platonov’s vision the Stalinist tempo reverses itself as the revolution turns into its opposite – destruction replaces production, and order is revealed as chaos.

The fate of Aleksei Gastev under Stalinism reflects the impossibility of adapting his utopian acceleration to this new form of Stalinist shock work. Gastev had written a collection entitled Poeziia rabochego udara [Poetry of the Worker’s Blow] in 1918, which some have anachronistically translated as Shockwork Poetry. Gastev’s attempt to rationally control work was, however, contrary to the ‘storming’ of shock work and the destructive chaos that resulted. Certainly Gastev did try to conform to the new regime, but the Stalinists recognized the incompatibility. In 1938 the Central Institute of Labor was closed and Gastev arrested on 8 September of that year, charged with ‘counterrevolutionary terrorist activity’. He was found guilty and sentenced to death on 14 April 1939, and shot the next day. N. V. Ustryalov remarked, ‘The revolution is merciless not only toward those who lag behind it but also toward those who run ahead of it.’28

Gastev’s end in Stalin’s prison system also reveals something about this new Stalinist politics of productivity. Kate Brown has demonstrated that much of the ‘work’ of the Gulag, the prison and camp system that camp to dominate the USSR, can be understood as the disciplining and organization of labor.29 In the absence of a regime of private property, which restricts people’s settlement through the need to earn wages and afford housing, the Soviet regime used various forms of zoning and internal passport controls. The bulk of those incarcerated in the Gulag fell foul of these laws, so as well as providing slave labor the Gulag also served to restrict and control freedom of labor as well. Stalinist ‘politics of productivity’ rescinded the dreamworld of the integration of living labor into the machine, only to replace it with the brutal organization of slave and unfree labor through social regulation and spatialization.

Storming Heaven

Communist accelerationism, I have suggested, can be understood as the attempt to answer the capitalist dynamic in which living labor (i.e. people) is squeezed out by ‘dead labor’ (i.e. machines). Communist accelerationism tries to answer this dynamic in two ways. First, it tries to reverse the dependence of living labor on dead labor. For Marx dead labor in capitalist society ‘subordinates labor instead of being subordinate to it, it is the iron man confronting the man of flesh and blood.’30 Accelerationism, here and elsewhere, answers this problem by fusing the man of flesh and blood with the iron man – integrating man and machine, or person and machine, to fuse and infuse living labor into dead labor. This will mutate into the cyborg fantasy of the ‘man-machine’. Rather than being reduced to the ‘mere appendage’ of the machine, the worker will control and direct the machine, reworking capitalist technology to communist ends.

Second, the machine will be used as a substitute for living labor, but not in the capitalist form which leads to unemployment or the misery of working for the machine. The bonding of living labor and dead labor means dead labor does not replace living labor, but rather they can coordinate and work together. The machine can be used to free-up people to engage in one of Marx’s few positive views of a communist society:

while in communist society, … , society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.31

This bucolic vision will, ironically, come about as a result of a thorough industrialization and resort to the machine to regulate and minimize labor.

This is the utopian dream of communist accelerationism, in which the seeming horror of the full mechanization of the human is, in fact, regarded as the freeing of labor. We might say, to adapt Lenin, that the formula is Taylor + Fourier = Communism. The techniques of Fredrik Taylor for work-place efficiency will lead to a Fourierist vision of engaged labor and free time. The result of such thinking, however, was ‘in the highest degree tragic’, as the fate of Gastev indicates. In fact the system could not achieve the dream which animated it. In an acerbic description Chris Arthur had noted that ‘The Soviet system was not a labor-saving system but a labor-hoarding one.’32 Labor was hoarded precisely to permit the moments of ‘storming’ to meet plan deadlines and this was a result of guaranteed employment. The ‘problem’ was that the labor discipline of capital, of which Taylorism was one influential ideological form, could not operate effectively. Yet, for the utopians of Soviet accelerationism this was the point. In this guarantee new possibilities offered themselves. Of course Stalinism, through the Gulag archipelago, would generate new forms of labor discipline.

The repetitions of this scenario, which we mentioned briefly in regards to the Cuban revolution but which also speaks to the Maoist ‘Great Leap Forward’, would also repeat the tragedy. The new socialist economy would prove much more recalcitrant to serving labor than had originally seemed possible. It is this experience of failure, I would argue, that drives accelerationism to its acceptance and even celebration of the coordinates of capitalism. Rather than attempting to change the relationship of labor and capital, accelerationism celebrates the disappearance of labor into capital. In an uncanny fashion it fuses, as we shall see, elements of the communist dream of accelerationism with capitalism’s own fantasies of self-engendering production.

Machine-Being

Thomas Brinkmann’s 1998 minimal-techno track ‘Maschine’, recorded under the name Ester Brinkmann, includes a repeated voice sample that kicks in at 3.18. In German, the voice says: ‘Ich will eine Maschine sein. Arme zu greifen Beine zu gehn kein Schmerz kein Gedanke.’ ‘I want to be a machine. Arms to grab [,] legs to walk [,] no pain [,] no thought.’ The sample is the voice of Blixa Bargeld, lead vocalist of Einstürzende Neubauten, from their album Die Hamletmaschine, which is a score for Heiner Müller’s play of that name. In Brinkmann’s hands the sample repeats the techno trope of machinic acceleration and integration, from Kraftwerk through Detroit to Sheffield, in a semi-parodic fashion. What Nick Land had celebrated as ‘manically dehumanized machine-music’ is here slowed and repeated in a lulling techno rhythm.1 The sample holds up for critical inspection the exit from feeling and consciousness (‘no pain, no thought’) promised by machinic integration that is, I will argue, the fantasmatic underpinning of accelerationism.

In this chapter I want to explore these fantasmatic and libidinal elements of the promised integration of the human with the machine, which is so prevalent within accelerationism. To do so I will treat two exemplary and widely-spaced moments: the first is Victor Tausk’s psychoanalytic research on the ‘influencing machine’, published in 1919, shortly before his suicide by shooting and hanging in the same year. Freud remarked in a letter, with honesty verging on callousness, that ‘I confess I do not really miss him; I had long taken him to be useless, indeed a threat to the future.’2 Tausk’s ‘machine’ would get an accelerationist retooling by Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus, shifted from the status of fantasy to the Real of desiring-production. The second moment is Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), which explores the psychopathology of machinic integration in the context of the Second World War. Pynchon’s novel would be taken-up as one of the texts subject to cybergothic remix by the Cybernetic Cultures Research Unit (CCRU) (which I will discuss in Chapter 4), and read as a manifesto of technological acceleration. My concern, in both cases, is to return to these moments as keys to the libidinal elements of the ideological fantasies of acceleration.

Mystical Machines

In his seminal essay On the Origin of the Influencing Machine in Schizophrenia (1919), Victor Tausk sketched out the pathological experience of identification with the machine that is suffered by certain schizophrenics.3 He traced out how in this situation we feel controlled by a machine, which might make us see pictures, produce or remove thoughts and feelings, control our bodies, create strange sensations, or produce physical ailments:

3

The schizophrenic influencing machine is a machine of mystical nature. The patients are able to give only vague hints of its construction. It consists of boxes, cranks, levers, wheels, buttons, wires, batteries, and the like. Patients endeavour to discover the construction of the apparatus by means of their technical knowledge, and it appears that with the progressive popularization of the sciences, all the forces known to technology are utilized to explain the functioning of the apparatus. All the discoveries of mankind, however, are regarded as inadequate to explain the marvellous power of this machine, by which the patients feel themselves persecuted.

If the apparatus is obscure, so is its operation: ‘the patient rarely having a clear idea of its operation. Buttons are pushed, levers set in motion, cranks turned.’ The black-boxing of technology – in which the functions of a device are made opaque behind an interface, such as in the case of the computer – makes the experience of all machines something like these fantasmatic ‘influencing machines’. This perhaps accounts for our experience of machines as persecutory, as when we bargain with devices in the hope they will work, or violently attack them. It is not only certain schizophrenics who fall under the influencing machine.

Tausk sees this pathological projection of the machine as developing from our alienation or estrangement from our own bodies. The pathology behind this process is due to the formation of the ego – the sense of self that distinguishes us from the world and which is lacking or eroded in the schizophrenic. Tausk argues that the origin of the influencing machine lies in a disorder of the libido at the early stage of narcissism, in which we identify with our own bodies and have no clear conception of the outside world. In particular, following Freud, Tausk sees the problem as being a result of a struggle with homosexual libido – libido directed towards our own bodies. The sociallyunacceptable nature of such a desire drives us to project out this libido onto the world.

The child does not initially recognize their body as their own and as separate from the world. Instead they have to gradually recognize all its parts, what Tausk calls the ‘disjecta membra’ (scattered fragments), as parts of a whole and invest libido into the ego as the image of the whole body. Once this has taken place it becomes possible to project this image onto the world. The pathological projection of the influencing machine is a regression to the stage in which we are trying to find our own body through projection. We return to a sense of our body as mere fragments and therefore of a continuity between us and the world. To cope with the experience of anxiety that results as we fail to distinguish ourselves from the world, libido is projected out and then returns to us as persecution: ‘The estranged organ – in our case, the entire body – appears as an outer enemy, as a machine used to afflict the patient.’ The influencing machine is, therefore, ‘a summation of some or all of the pathologically altered organs (the whole body) projected outward.

When we start to feel our bodies becoming strange we explain this fact by projecting this feeling on to an ‘influencing machine’ which then becomes the ‘cause’ of our bodily alienation. In Tausk’s words we move from ‘the feeling of self-estrangement’ to ‘the delusion of reference’. The machine, however, remains inexplicable. For Tausk this ungraspable machine is a symbol and, more than that, a symbol of our own genitalia. In order to repress this fact we complicate the machine to disguise its symbolism, resulting in the complexity of the influencing machine.

It is this treatment of the machine as a projection that Deleuze and Guattari object to in Anti-Oedipus.4 For them, machines can only ever be real, in the sense of the Real of productive desire. The Real is capitalized to indicate this is not the ‘real’ qua reality, but rather the excessive force of production that is only ever cooled-off to form the apparently ‘real’. This is a metaphysics of the production of the Real as the Real of production. It is one form of the metaphysics of accelerationism, which can be more widely grasped as a metaphysics of forces – forces of production, of destruction, and human, mechanical and cybernetic forces, that must be welded or melded together into a plane of immanence. For Deleuze and Guattari this notion of the Real as immanent production is neutralized or led astray if, as Tausk does, it is conceived as a pathological symbol.

I want to stay longer with Tausk, however, to put pressure on the accelerationist desire to translate everything into Real production. Both terms – ‘Real’ and ‘production’ – are contestable as libidinal fantasy productions, which is my line of attack. The collapse of fantasy into the Real by accelerationists is, I’ll argue, a sign of fantasy that tries to produce the Real as such. In doing so it evades the problem of the simulacral and fantasmatic notion of production. This is a fantasy of the end of fantasy. It also evades the pathological and painful elements of this identification with the machine, the friction between the body and its integration, that this extreme experience attests to. With this in mind, let’s return to Tausk.

Tausk’s case study was based around ‘Miss Natalija A.’, a thirty-one year-old former philosophy student who believed she was being controlled by a machine operated by her ex-fiancée. The machine took the form of her body symbolized by a trunk having the shape of a lid of a coffin and lined inside with silk or velvet. At first the limbs of the machine were natural, and then merely drawn on the lid of the coffin.

The head appeared to be absent. The inner parts of the machine consisted of electric batteries. For Tausk the machine is both a projection of the genitalia and the patient’s body. As the projection gets stronger becomes more like a machine and less like a body to protect her from recognising herself in the machine.

The machine is operated by love objects, as a result of the transfer of libido. In fact in this situation some of our close love objects are also persecuted, which is because we do not distinguish them from ourselves because of our fluid ego-boundaries. So, those who operate the machine are love objects at more of a distance – doctors, lovers, suitors or, as with Natalija A., an exfiancée. The ‘body’ that is projected onto the machine becomes identified with the genitalia, which saturates the body into a libidinal zone. The increasingly unreal machine becomes an image of derealized libido, a receding figure of jouissance.

Deleuze and Guattari valorize this experience as the fragmented multiplicity of the schizo-machine that exceeds the normalized body and normalized ego enforced by psychoanalysts like Freud and Tausk. Against the wholeness and integration preached by psychoanalysis, which they see as the true paranoid fantasy, they try to free up these frozen projections into zones of exchange and interaction. The task of schizoanalysis is not to force the patient to recognize a false projection and return it to the self, but to embrace the possibilities of fragmentation and dispersion that paranoia freezes.

While this offers a useful corrective to some of the normative projections of psychoanalysis, which admits fragmentation and multiplicity only to always insist on return to the ego and structure, it risks missing the anxiety and paranoia that marks the relation of humans to machines, and of humans to the machine that is our body. Instead of exploding paranoia through the accelerationist embrace of the schizo trip I want to follow more closely the problem that the ‘influencing machine’ reveals of our own machinic nature that coincides with the repetitions of labor and production.

Tausk emphasizes the libidinal dimension of this alienation, but we can also see the fear of our own becoming-machine – the machinic nature of our own libido and the increasing penetration of the machine into our bodies. Marx noted that the trend of capitalist production is to reduce us to a ‘mere appendage’ of the machine. In the case of the influencing machine this is literalized as we become libidinally manipulated by the projected machine. The choice to valorize the influencing machine by Deleuze and Guattari speaks to how they welcome this integration – the explosion of the body on the deterritorializing lines or flows of capital. We find the machinic body as saturated libidinal zone. The fantasy of the influencing machine, in contrast, interrupts this smooth circuit of integration, suggesting the fraught zone of transfer between body and machine that never achieves smooth integration.

Rocketman

In his mordant postwar reflections collected in Minima Moralia (1951) Theodor Adorno remarks on the effects of the new technologies of death on our conception of history:

Had Hegel’s philosophy of history encompassed this epoch, then Hitler’s robot-bombs would have taken their place, next to the death-scene of Alexander and similar images, among the empirically selected facts in which the symbolic state of the worldspirit is immediately expressed. Like Fascism itself, the robots are self-steering and yet utterly subjectless. Just like the former, they combine the utmost technical perfection with complete blindness. Just like the former, they sow the deadliest panic and are completely futile. – “I have seen the world-spirit,” not on horseback but on wings and headless, and this at once refutes Hegel’s philosophy of history.5

The ‘subjectless’ weapons – the V-1 flying bombs, and V-2 rockets – incarnate a refutation of history as potentially rational process. Today the world-spirit is not a person, for Hegel Napoleon, but a self-steering device. In contemporary terms, we might say the world-spirit is the drone.

In some enigmatic passages of Speed and Politics (1978) Paul Virilio turns to the metaphysics of metempsychosis – the transmigration of souls – to suggest the tension of the loading of the soul on to various metabolic vehicles. Virilio argues that the soul is ‘plural, multiform, fluidiform, coagulated here and there in social, animal or territorial bodies.’6 The philosophy or theology of the military class is Gnostic, in that it assumes the ‘powerful’ soul is deterritorialized, fluid and transferable, while the ‘weak soul’ is imprisoned within the body and the world. Virilio likens this powerful soul to the ‘gyrovagues’, wandering and itinerant monks often condemned by the church of the early Middle Ages for their parasitic mobility, selling of fake relics, and gluttony. In this military Gnosticism acceleration is not only the acceleration of the vehicle but the ‘pure’ acceleration of the soul moving smoothly from embodiment to embodiment, and so able to exceed any territorial capture.

For Virilio, of course, this deterritorialization is not to be lauded. It incarnates the nihilistic politics of ‘pure war’ in which global space becomes a playground for these detached souls. Military Gnosticism, which incarnates a fantasy of pure mobility, finds a resonant literary figuration in Thomas Pynchon’s 1973 novel Gravity’s Rainbow. Set during the Second World War, the novel is partly a picaresque exploration of the wanderings of Tyrone Slothrop through the ‘zone’ – the remains of postwar Germany. Slothrop was subject to Pavlovian conditioning as infant, sensitising him sexually to the mysterious plastic Impolex G.7 This plastic is used in the German V-2 rockets, and thanks to his conditioning results in pre-strike erections and sexual encounters for Slothrop. The conditioning makes Slothrop a machine controlled by the influence of his conditioning: ‘erection hums … like an instrument installed, wired by Them into his body as a colonial outpost’.8

Adrift in the zone Slothrop is ‘thrown back on dreams, psychic flashes, omens, cryptographies, drug-epistemologies, all dancing on a ground of terror, contradiction, absurdity.’ (582) This sketches in advance what might have been the adopted research programme of the accelerationists of the CCRU, who operated in the ’90s and which we will encounter in Chapter 4. The absurd accelerative forces of the war fragment and explode Slothrop’s identity, to the point where ‘[s]ome believe that fragments of Slothrop have grown into consistent personae of their own. If so there’s no telling which of the Zone’s present population are offshoots of his original scattering’ (742). One of Slothrop’s (in)consistent personae is the comic-book superhero ‘Rocketman’, which implies already the fantasy fusion of man and machine.

Slothrop is, however, subject to much more profound conspiratorial forces, from industrial cartels to the very way in which ‘[t]he War has been reconfiguring time and space into its own image.’ (257) Pynchon, with tongue as usual somewhat in cheek, suggests that ‘secretly, [the War] was being dictated instead by the needs of technology … by a conspiracy between human beings and techniques, by something that needed the energy-burst of war.’ (521) ‘War’ and ‘Technology’ become forces demanding acceleration and the integration of the human into the suicidal ‘war-machine’. They also code capitalist deterritorialization, as the ‘Manual’, on file in the War Department, states: ‘The true war is a celebration of markets.’ (105) In Pynchon’s pessimistic and conspiratorial view the emergence of great systems of control operate precisely through energy and acceleration.

This reconfiguration takes its terminal form in the human passenger that is integrated into a remaining Nazi V-2 rocket, in an experiment staged by the rocket crew following the Nazi defeat. Of course, in agreement with Tausk, we could hardly have a more phallic fantasy of integration than the V-2. The V-2 is also a cryptic text or symbol, one ‘to be picked to pieces, annotated, explicated, and masturbated till it’s all squeezed limp of its last drop’ (520). The V-2 is phallus as Spermatikos Logos, as endlessly interpretable symbol. Pynchon traces the theologies and heresies that surround the rocket, but never touch its core:

Gnostics who have been taken in a rush of wind and fire to chambers of the Rocket-throne … Kabbalists who study the Rocket as Torah, letter by letter – rivets, burner cup and brass rose, its text is theirs to permute and combine into new revelations, always unfolding … Manicheans who see two Rockets, good and evil, who speak together in the sacred idiolalia of the Primal Twins (some say their names are Enzian and Blicero) of a good Rocket to take us to the stars, an evil Rocket for the World’s suicide, the two perpetually in struggle. (727)

The V-2 generates constant forms of heretical metaphysics, which try and fail to close the symbol around any ‘Kute Korrespondences’ (590).

In fact, the integration of the passenger with the V-2 is not so much phallic as masochistic. The passenger is Gottfried, the lover of Captain Blicero, who Blicero has subjected to masochistic and incestuous rituals. This culminates in Gottfried’s insertion into a special compartment in the V-2 while clothed in a shroud of Impolex-G. The fantasy here, although terminal, carries echoes of Jung’s idea of incest as the possibility of re-birth and individuation, an idea which was also influential on Gilles Deleuze.9 It also modifies Adorno’s assertion that Hitler’s robot weapons ‘utterly subjectless’. The dream – masochistic in this case – is of the integration of the subject into the futile trajectory of the machine. Unusually, such a conclusion may be more pessimistic than Adorno’s, as there is a subject integrated but they have no role in steering. This is in line with Adorno’s pessimistic conclusions about the nullification of the subject in modernity, but this is a nullification that is welcomed and embraced. In Pynchon’s text the accelerative fantasy of integration reaches a literally terminal point of selfcancellation.

And yet such a conclusion may be just another ‘Kute Korrespondence’, another theology of the V-2. It’s certainly possible, as the CCRU did, to read Gravity’s Rainbow as accelerationist. Rather than a fascist hardening or securing of identity through fusion, here we have dissolution and fragmentation through the fusion with the accelerative technologies of warfare. To use a much abused word, this is a postmodern accelerationism, that explodes or disperses the concentrated force of modernist or avant-garde acceleration. What Pynchon called ‘soul-transvestism’ in V (1963), or the ‘fluidiform soul’ as Virilio puts it, can be loaded or distributed across vehicles, to the point we welcome our own disintegration.10

We see a collapsing of fantasy, and also a collapsing of the fictional space, into the Real of production and acceleration. If someone like me should accuse this of a psychotic collapsing of our capacities for language and symbolization then the response can simply be you haven’t really gone all the way… No matter how impossible it might be to imagine or think a pure immanence the appeal to such an experience carries relentless attraction as utopian promise. To put fantasy into action, to realize ourselves as productive machines, to realize our scattering of personality as gateway, is the promise of accelerationism. And yet…

Virilio’s insight into the boarding of metabolic vehicles, reinforced by Pynchon’s provocation, suggests the metaphysical desire for integration and dispersion of human and machine at work in the dynamic of technology, military power, and capitalism. It is this dynamic of dispersion that is often lauded in contemporary accounts of protests and struggles, which are seen as instances of resonance between bodies, including technical bodies, that can resist power. The difficulty is that these metabolic vehicles, which is to say living bodies, risk being occluded by an assimilation of their struggles to the same dynamic by which capitalism insists that we are endlessly transferable and mobile labor. What is lost is a real sense of the friction or resistance of the body against integration into fluxes and flows, as the Real acceleration of struggles is seen as a line of flight from the limits of the State and capital.