Malign Velocities Accelerationism and Capitalism

The impasse of Bataille’s critique is not only that it has been outpaced by a ‘cloacal’ capitalism, a capitalism that thrives on excess and waste. The more damaging problem is that it conceives this excess or waste as the site of a new production, which hardly seems to break with capitalism. This is an inverted or negative productivism, which accelerates destruction to a ‘higher’ level of solar excess – a terminal acceleration. This productivism makes it hard to see how Bataille can be used, as Baudrillard wished, to shatter the ‘mirror of production’.8 Bataille is equivocal. While it’s true he can be read as hymning a new form of production, his work also insinuates a crisis within production. It is not so much that Bataille is offering an alternative principle of waste, but that his undermining production from within, eroding or sapping its capacity. His use of the figure of the ‘rotten sun’ suggests this equivocal undermining of solar excess by dragging down excess into a rotten base matter (57–58). Bataille attempts the impossible task of thinking elevation together with the sudden downward fall.

Bataille’s line of flight along the excremental demonstrates the difficulty of the attempt to find an absolute resistance to accelerationist and productive dynamics. If we erect a principle of waste then we can find that principle reversed into a ‘nourishing decomposition’. Bataille’s ‘solution’, which doesn’t exactly solve the problem in the traditional sense, is to suggest a reversible moment that lies within any ‘productive’ discourse or practice. In this moment the negative and positive can suddenly, and catastrophically, shift places. The difficulty remains, however, of extracting this possibility from the shifting ‘dynamics’ of contemporary capitalism.

Barbarism or Barbarism?

Godard’s Weekend concerns a bourgeois couple, Roland and Corinne, who are driving to Corinne’s father to collect her inheritance. Both have secret lovers, both are plotting to murder each other, and both are happy to murder Corinne’s father if necessary to claim the inheritance. Their journey through France rapidly descends into anarchy as the bourgeois social-order falls apart around them. Here the excremental is revolutionary – the apocalyptic crisis of the bourgeoisie. Godard casts this crisis in the satirical form of cannibal revolutionaries – the ‘Seine-et-Oise Liberation Front’ (FLSO) – who dominate the closing sequences of the film. Quasi-hippy revolutionaries, dressed in parodic Native American costume, the FLSO provide a literalization of the metaphor of ingestion, not so much digging the grave of the bourgeois world as consuming and voiding it.

In fact, as Godard’s film registers, this ‘excremental vision’ is split: we have the revolutionary anality of Bataille, in which the heterological forces open a reenchantment and resacralization of reality, but also the anality of capitalist production, with its cycles of digestion and voiding in ‘creative destruction’. Godard reproduces explicitly the tension we noted in Bataille, in which revolution and creative destruction intertwine and merge in new forms of destructive consumption. In fact the cannibal is at once the irrecuperable figure of extremity and the figure of an auto-consumptive capital.

Norman O. Brown’s Life against Death (1959) analyses this split vision in his, now contested, reading of Jonathan Swift. For Brown, Swift’s ‘excremental vision’ reveals the anality of culture and the psyche. In Brown’s words, ‘for Swift [scatological imagery] … becomes the decisive weapon in his assault on the pretensions, the pride, even the self-respect of mankind.’9 And yet the revelation by Swift of the excremental core that wrecks human dignity is also the historical revelation of the anal economy of capitalism itself. Eli Zaretsky notes: ‘Capitalism at root, Brown argued, was socially organized anality: beneath the pseudo-individuated genitality of early modern society, its driving force was literally the love of shit’.10 The chapter on Weekend in the discussion between Kaja Silverman and Harun Farocki on Godard is titled ‘Anal Capitalism’.11

If the excremental is under the sign of the sacred then it displays the typical equivocation of the sacred: revolutionary or bourgeois, terminal regression or rebirth? If the ‘driving force’ of capitalism is ‘the love of shit’ then this ‘driving force’ is appropriately figured in the equivocal status of the car, which in Weekend is both ‘treasured commodity’ and ‘worthless junk’.12 The ‘weekend’ break from production leads to the heterological space of stasis, in which production is reversed into voiding; the traffic jam is the blockage of this driving force, the indigestible moment of failed flow and the accumulation of the excremental. The famous long tracking-shot of the traffic jam, as Brian Henderson points out, finds its future echo in the tracking-shot of the car production-line in British Sounds (1970).13 Again Godard plays on the reversal of production and destruction, production and anti-production, value and waste. He injects, as Bataille did with his thinking of instability, an oscillation into this vision of excremental vitalism.

The equivocation of the ‘driving force’ of capitalism – the question whether this anal economy of incorporation, digestion, and excretion that Bataille traces can be derailed into an ecstatic and apocalyptic voiding – is redoubled in the moment of the scatological apocalypse. We equivocate on the waste of a decomposing culture. Does Godard offer us ‘a nourishing decomposition’, are we merely mired in the scrap-heap? In Swift’s words, will we find ‘Such gaudy Tulips rais’d from Dung’?14 Weekend implies is that we no longer have socialism or barbarism, but barbarism per se; but it is this barbarism that seems to be the only way to socialism? Harun Farocki argues that: ‘there is the suggestion that under the thin veneer of this “civilization” beats the heart of a more affectively vital “barbarism.”’15 For Godard’s ‘revolutionaries’, ‘We can only overcome the horror of the bourgeoisie by even more horror.’16 This could well be the motto, avant la lettre, of terminal accelerationism.

The lesson of Weekend, which is why it resonates in the present moment, is that an excremental vitalism emerges in terminal crisis. In Bataille’s formulation, the revelation of ‘a disagreeable and terminal stagnation’ destroys ‘the prestige of industrial reality’.17 This is the promise that, as Robin Wood puts it, ‘Weekend is not about the end of the world – it is simply about the end of our world.’18 In a rather touching remark, Wood continues: ‘The film postulates, rather convincingly, the irrelevance, uselessness, and ultimate disintegration of everything I have always believed in, worked for, and found worth living for, and I don’t think I can be unique or even unusual in this.’19 The apocalypse is limited to the end of the bourgeois world, and out of the shit the rebirth of a new vital order.

The horror of vital barbarism predicts a new impassioned future. This chimes with the remark of the nineteenth-century socialist William Morris, after reading Richard Jefferies apocalyptic novel After London (1885), that:

I have no more faith than a grain of mustard seed in the future history of “civilization”, which I know now is doomed to destruction, and probably before very long: what a joy it is to think of! and how often it consoles me to think of barbarism once more flooding the world, and real feelings and passions, however rudimentary, taking the place of our wretched hypocrisies.20

Barbarism is regeneration. The difficulty is that Godard represents the ‘new world’ as one of stasis and drift and not a world of ‘real feelings and passions’. The cannibal revolutionaries feast on the remains of the old order, literally, and live lives that are hardly passionate.

While the promise is that one world will end in horror to give birth to a vital and passionate new world, presumably without horror, it seems unlikely, in Godard’s film, that horror will peaceably disappear. Although Weekend appeared just before the events of May ’68, which would reinvigorate ‘the passion for the real’, in Godard’s film this revolutionary passion takes the terminal form of cannibal extinction. His cannibal revolutionaries are studied hippie primitivists, who play drums, rape their captives, and are served their meals by the cook in blood-stained apron. The dialectic in the revolutionary ‘passion for the real’ between voluntarist vitalism and historicist confirmation is ruptured in Godard’s film through a regression. In this regression ‘vitality’ detaches itself from history and pulverizes history into a mythic space of social degree-zero and auto-consumption.

If capitalism is all shit, if we have an ‘anal capitalism’ that levels all into general equivalence, then the end of everything is required in a final voiding. The apocalyptic tone is required prior to some ‘future’, a full decomposition to consume that rotting culture. Godard, as Silverman notes ‘launches an extended assault upon all forms of abstraction.’21 With abstraction, itself the organization of levelling and equivalence through value, voided, we have what appears to be another abstraction of absolute barbarism. This voiding and levelling of abstraction takes its own revenge, as a kind of capitalist nihilism or exhaustion that turns the film once again into shit. The signs equivocate again, and the ‘liberation’ of the anal, of the ‘excremental forces’, is, to again quote Silverman, ‘not the utopian sexual liberation hailed by Hocquenghem thirty years ago, but the catastrophic end of all singularity. What we might call “anal capitalism” decrees the commensurability of “male” and “female,” but only by consigning both, along with Weekend itself, to the cosmic scrap heap.’22 The apocalypse reveals then not another revolutionary order, the film as gate to May ’68 which redeems its hippy-cannibal revolutionaries into the ‘good hippies’ of libidinal revolt, but watched again at the point of the voiding of the capitalist order in crisis, seems also to reveal a terminal levelling of capital itself.

Does the equivocation of satire have to be met with a full politicization to escape the relentless dialectic of reversal between satire and object? For Godard Weekend was his last film before the collective experiment of political filmmaking the Dziga-Vertov Group. Writing in 1973, Thomas M. Kavanagh argues Godard’s turn to explicitly political and didactic cinema as the only possible response to the fact that the bourgeoisie adored Weekend.23 The commercial and critical success of Weekend would lead Godard to depart for the austerity and collective practice of his explicitly political filmmaking of the early 1970s.

Recuperation and re-digestion; an anal biopolitical economy à la Pasolini’s film Salo (1975) beckons. The irrecuperable ‘foreign body’ becomes an object of jouissance, of self-disgust that returns to bourgeois narcissism. Revolution itself is circular: ‘There is even the familiar suggestion, rendered concretely in the film in terms of similarities and parallels in their rituals – eggs and fish between girls’ thighs – that the revolutionary society will be another formulation of the murderously bourgeois one we knew already.’24 Godard’s escape out of this circle of consumption was an indigestible political austerity that could not, he felt, be capitalized on.

And yet the collapse of Godard’s political certainties and those of his critics re-locate the satire or parody of Weekend in our moment: the Weekend of crisis, the bursting of the bubble, abandonment of house and car as debt-loaded ‘hostile objects’.25 Excremental or cannibal hostility now shapes the decomposing culture of capitalism. The impasse of Godard’s film was to be saved through political praxis, but the decomposition of capitalism and of that praxis makes the ‘levelling’ of Weekend if not ‘radically funny’, at least necessary again. In this way it is the terminal document of negative accelerationism. It is at once its most extreme satiric form, but tips over into the abstract voiding that figures our moment.

Emergency Brake

Fredric Jameson, reflecting on the contemporary moment, comments that:

we may pause to observe the way in which so much of left politics today – unlike Marx’s own passionate commitment to a streamlined technological future – seems to have adopted as its slogan Benjamin’s odd idea that revolution means pulling the emergency brake on the runaway train of History, as though an admittedly runaway capitalism itself had the monopoly on change and futurity.1

In light of the persistence and resurgence of accelerationism Jameson’s characterization of the contemporary left is dubious. Acceleration hasn’t gone away, and Jameson’s own retooled productivism is part of a ‘passionate commitment to a streamlined technological future’ that persists and even increases at our moment of crisis.

I want to pause on Jameson’s reference to Walter Benjamin’s ‘odd idea’ that revolution might be an act of deceleration, interruption, or stopping the ‘runaway train of History’. This obviously suggests a counter to accelerationism. The reference is to the notes for Benjamin’s 1940 essay ‘On the Concept of History’, where he writes: ‘Marx says that revolutions are the locomotive of world history. But perhaps it is quite otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by the passengers on this train – namely, the human race – to activate the emergency brake.’2 For Jameson, obviously, this conception is an ‘odd idea’ because it is a failure to measure up to Marx’s own embrace of capitalism, and capitalist production, as the condition of revolutionary change.

Benjamin’s ‘odd idea’ had an explicit context. This was the critique of German Social Democracy, especially in Thesis XI of ‘On the Concept of History’, where Benjamin chided it for ‘moving with the current’.3 The conformity of Social Democracy to the ideology of progress and acceleration, and not least technological progress, meant that it was unable to grasp the dynamic of fascism and unable to critique capitalism effectively. Beyond this historical argument I want to suggest that there is something more to Benjamin’s ‘odd idea’, both then and now.

If we return to Benjamin’s work we can see that it is closely engaged with questions of acceleration and production, especially in his dialogue with Bertolt Brecht. After they met in the late 1920s Brecht and Benjamin engaged in an intense debate over how to subject capitalist production to ‘refunctioning’ (Umfunktionierung).4 While this took place in a very different historical context – the failure of the revolutionary wave after 1917, inflation in Germany and global capitalist crisis, and the rise of fascism – the Brecht/Benjamin debate resonates in our moment. Invocations of Weimar, the 1929 Crash, and anxieties of incipient fascism or war, have become familiar tropes in commentary on our crisis. This is a rather speculative connection, but Brecht and Benjamin offer resources to interrupt a capitalism lockedinto crisis and destruction.

7

Over the Dead Body of Capitalism

Gershom Scholem suggests that Brecht entered Benjamin’s life, in 1928, as an ‘elemental force’.5 We can read this ‘force’ as Brecht’s insistence on the reworking of production. When Benjamin came to know Brecht in the early 1930s, Brecht was articulating his critical practice of cultural and political production to come to terms with the crisis-ridden and destructive effects of capital, in the wake of 1929 and the experience of German inflation.

A key statement is Brecht’s poem ‘The Proletariat Wasn’t Born in a White Vest’ [Das Proletariat ist nicht in einer weissen Weste geboren] (1934). The poem presents a litany of capitalist decline, before concluding: ‘oh, on that day the proletariat will be able to take charge of a /culture reduced to the same state in which it found production: in ruins.’6 The proletarian is not the ‘clean’ modernist new man, but is willing to get his or her hands dirty. This is the only class able to grasp and resolve the ‘dirty’ ruins of capitalism. Alain Badiou argues that Brecht’s poem is founded on the ‘essential thematic [that] the new can only come about as the seizure of a ruin. Novelty will only take place on the basis of a fully accomplished destruction’.7 The proletariat dirties itself with completing the work of destruction on capitalism, but in the service of a new communist production. The ruin of capital is what Badiou calls a ‘nourishing decomposition’.8

Brecht is suggesting the re-use of the ruins of capitalism, and this can take provocative forms. Like the Soviet avant-garde Brecht is not afraid to engage with the worst elements of capitalism:

Behaviourism is a psychology which begins with the needs of commodity production in order to develop methods with which to influence buyers, i.e., it is an active psychology, progressive and revolutionizing kathode (Kathoxen). In keeping with its capitalist function, it has its limits (the reflexes are biological; only in a few Chaplin films are they already social). Here, too, the path leads only over the dead body of capitalism, but here, too, this is a good path.9

Brecht’s ‘refunctioning’ turns on the most extreme forms of capitalist technology as the means to find a ‘good path’ over the ‘dead body of capitalism’. We have to traverse what Benjamin calls ‘the dirty diapers of the present.’10 Again, what is crucial here is not just the ‘dirt’ or waste produced by capital but, as we saw with terminal accelerationism, the need to dig into this dirt to produce the new.

In his ‘Conversations with Brecht’ Benjamin mentions ‘the destructive aspect of Brecht’s character, which puts everything in danger almost before it has been achieved.’11 That Brecht is one of the models for Benjamin’s essay ‘The Destructive Character’ (1931) is, by now, a commonplace.12 Brecht’s ‘destructive character’ provoked Benjamin to think about destruction and production. While the Benjamin essay can be taken as a manifesto for destruction, it is also a manifesto for the retooling or refunctioning of production. ‘The Destructive Character’ destroys to clear the way for something new. This moment of production, however, is predicated on interruption. In this chapter I want to trace this thinking of interruption in Brecht and Benjamin as a complication of any resort to accelerationism.

The Slob

Irving Wohlfarth has noted that Benjamin’s destructive character is ‘the efficient executor of an eviction order.’13 What kind of eviction order? I want to suggest this is an eviction order executed by a slob. In Fredric Jameson’s 1998 book on Brecht he poses the Brechtian energies of production and praxis against the stasis of our opaque and financialized postmodernism. Reflecting on Brecht’s pre-Marxist work Baal (1918) Jameson identifies the character Baal with the figure of the slob:

These are the slobs of literature rather than its zombies or living dead: creatures of physical and vestimentary neglect, satyrs, dirty old men, and the like, they are the archetypes of appetite, surging up from popular culture (rather than, as with supreme villains and manifestations of evil, from the lettered).14

This figure is destructive, in the sense, as Jameson says, that they ‘erupt and break the furniture’.15 Jameson notes that: ‘The Brechtian aversion to respectability in general is richly documented in the early works – with Baal as its virtual allegory: the Marxian turn is thereby able to tap those “antisocial” energies for a new and more productive engagement with the negative.’16 So, the seemingly ‘purely’ destructive slob does not simply disappear in Brecht’s embrace of Marxism and production. In fact the slob persists within the moment of production as a moment of interruption.

Brecht’s short story ‘North Sea Shrimps’, probably written around 1926, and subtitled ‘or the modern Bauhaus apartment’, is an allegory of the slob’s interruption.17 It tells of the visit of Müller and the narrator to the apartment of their wartime friend Kampert. Kampert is committed to a life of luxury after his experiences in the trenches of the First World War and, having married into money, fulfils his dream. The apartment is now perfect Bauhaus, whereas before: ‘It was two plain bourgeois rooms. You know the kind of thing, cramped to start with and then stowed to the gunwales with furniture.’ (79)

The all-lilac room, the delicate blinds, and the lack of pictures, drive the narrator, and particularly Müller, to distraction:

What irritated Müller was the flat. He was completely wrong about this. It was a very pleasant flat, not at all ostentatious. But I think Müller just could not stand the carefully contrived harmony and the dogmatic functionalism of it any longer. (82)

Although Müller has brought a present of North Sea shrimps he sends out Kampert on a false errand to buy some, and then proceeds to redecorate. He violently rearranges the furniture, tears down the blind, and sticks up magazine pictures on the wall with sugar water. The narrator concludes, ‘Man is like a terrible tornado, creating the grandiose multiplicity and admirable disharmony of all creation out of an almighty pile-up of patent American chaise-longues, common washbasins and old, venerable, magazines.’ (84)

This short story disrupts Benjamin’s later invocation of the glass architecture of Scheerbart and Bauhaus in ‘Experience and Poverty’ (1933) as the gesture of ‘erasing the traces’ called for by Brecht.18 The creation of ‘rooms in which it is hard to leave traces’,19 is exactly what Brecht’s ‘destructive slob’ is reacting against, with Müller having ‘this longing for all that was most illmatched, most illogical and most natural.’ (85) While Benjamin’s version of the destructive character wipes away the traces of those who want comfort, Brecht’s destructive slob makes his space comfortable by putting his trace on things. The destructive ‘baseness’ of Müller, his lumpen status, interrupts the clean modernist space. He actively turns the new into ruins, interrupts the new, to create something that is not exactly productive, but rather illogical.

Angelic Locomotives

My second scene of interruption is from one of Walter Benjamin’s radio talks for children, given in 1932, on ‘The Railway Disaster at the Firth of Tay’ (‘Die Eisenbahnkatastrophe vom Firth of Tay’).20 As the title suggests the central subject of the talk is the railway disaster of 28 December 1879, when a passenger train of six carriages and two hundred people was lost after plunging into the Tay, when the iron bridge it was passing over collapsed during a fierce storm. Benjamin does not begin with the disaster, but rather with the early technologies of iron working and train construction and with what he calls, in his essay on Eduard Fuchs, the ‘defective reception of technology’.21 This ‘defective reception’ turns, in part, on acceleration, as Benjamin reports the view of the medical faculty at Erlangen suggesting that the speed of rail travel would lead to cerebral lesions, while an English expert suggested that moving by train is not travel but simply being dispatched to a destination like a package. Perhaps neither could foresee the current British train system…

In describing the disaster Benjamin quotes from a poem by Theodor Fontane, not the renowned poem by William Topaz McGonagall – renowned for being terrible. This is the first stanza of the McGonagall:

Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay!

Alas! I am very sorry to say

That ninety lives have been taken away

On the last Sabbath day of 1879,

Which will be remember’d for a very long time.22

Benjamin reports that when the accident occurred the storm was raging so severely it was not evident what had happened. The only sign were flames seen by fishermen, who did not realize this was the result of the locomotive plunging into the water. They did alert the stationmaster at Tay, who sent another locomotive along the line. The train was inched onto the bridge and had to be stopped a kilometre out, before reaching the first central pier, with a violent application of the brakes that nearly led to the train jumping from the tracks: ‘The moonlight had enabled him to see a gaping hole in the line. The central section of the bridge was gone.’23

The brake is a figure of interruption, and this foreshadows its later use in ‘On the Concept of History’. While one catastrophe has already occurred, in which two hundred people have lost their lives, the act of braking prevents, although only barely, a second catastrophe. We can place this consideration of the locomotive, speed, and the malignancy of technology, alongside Benjamin’s remark in the essay on ‘Eduard Fuchs’ that:

The disciples of Saint-Simon started the ball rolling with their industrial poetry; then came the realism of a Du Camp, who saw the locomotive as the saint of the future; and a Ludwig Pfau brought up the rear: ‘It is quite unnecessary to become an angel’, he wrote, ‘since the locomotive is worth more than the finest pair of wings.’24

This angelic locomotive, which rushes into the future and into destruction, can be paired with Benjamin’s famous invocation of the Angelus Novus or Angel of History in ‘On the Concept of History’ (1940), which is turned to the past and contemplates the