Malign Velocities Accelerationism and Capitalism

The Road of Excess

It might be easy to dismiss theoretical accelerationism as a malady of those who take theory too far, spinning-off into abstract speculation. In fact, the very point of accelerationism is going too far, and the revelling and enjoyment engendered by this immersion and excess. They push into the domain of abstraction and speculation which, with the financial crisis, is evidently the space of our existence. I am sceptical that such a ‘road of excess’ will, in William Blake’s words, lead ‘to the palace of wisdom’. It does, however, lead us to think what this excess and abstraction might register. If accelerationism is not the revolutionary path it may be the path that records, in exaggerated and hyperbolic form, some of the seismic shifts of capitalist accumulation from the 1970s to the present.

What accelerationism registers in particular are two contradictory trendlines: the first is that of the real deceleration of capitalism, in terms of a declining rate of return on capital investment, which has led to a massive switching into debt. The second is the acceleration of financialization, driven by the new computing and cybernetic technologies, which themselves create an image of dynamism. Of course, this ‘contradiction’ of deceleration and acceleration speaks to a dual dynamic as capitalism tries to restart processes of accumulation by acceleration. The financial crisis that began in 2008 brought this contradiction to the point of collapse.

It is in this double dynamic that accelerationism finds its theorization, answering deceleration with the promise of a new acceleration, driven by faith in new productive forces that come online and disrupt the ideological humanism that tends to be capitalism’s default ideology. In capitalism we are treated as free agents, although always free to choose within the terms set by the market. Accelerationists reject this ‘humanism’ by embracing dehumanization. They take utterly seriously the Marxist argument concerning the dehumanizing aspects of capitalism and they also take seriously those ideologues of the market who try to dehumanize us into ‘mere’ market-machines. This accounts for the instability of accelerationism, which is poised on this faultline.

It also speaks to the position of labor within capitalism: at once necessary, as Marx noted, to the production of value, while also constantly squeezed out by machines and unemployment. For Marx capitalism is ‘the moving contradiction’, which ‘presses to reduce labor time to a minimum, while it posits labor time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth.’16 This contradiction has only become more and more striking over the last forty or so years. The place of labor has shifted, at least in countries like the UK and US, from manufacturing to the so-called service economy (although this shift should not be overstated). It has also been displaced geographically and displaced in form – dispersed beyond the concentrated forms that it once held, or seemed to hold. At the same time, many of us work longer and harder. The relief that technology was supposed to bring from labor merely leaves less labor doing more work. No longer, as in Marx’s day, are we all chained to factory machines, but now some of us carry our chains around with us, in the form of laptops and phones.

My suggestion is that accelerationism tries to reengage with the problem of labor as this impossible and masochistic experience by reintegrating labor into the machine. In what follows, we will see this fantasy of integration, the ‘man-machine’ (note the gendering), that might at once save and transcend the laboring body. This will take various forms, at once radically dystopian and radically utopian. Rather than taking this as a solution, I will argue it is a symptom. If we take accelerationism critically then we can use it to gauge the mutations of labor and its resistance to integration within capitalism and the machine – including sabotage, strikes, and more enigmatic forms of passive resistance. The stress of theoretical accelerationism on our immersion in capitalism will prove central to unlocking the various cultural and historical moments I will trace in this book. It is the extremity of accelerationism makes it the most useful diagnostic tool. It will also allow us to try and break the appeal of acceleration.

War Machines

To visit Gabriele D’Annunzio’s villa and garden at Gardone Riviera on Lake Garda is to experience the commemoration of speed as the essential sign of modernity. This is speed vectored through that other sign of modernity: mechanized warfare. Beyond his poetry, the villa and garden are D’Annunzio’s truly prefigurative artworks of the twentieth century. The Vittoriale degli italiani (The Shrine of Italian Victories), as the estate is named, is a remarkable and disturbing testament to the ‘man-machine’ of D’Annunzio’s protofuturist and protofascist vision. It contains all the ‘speed machines’ that embody this aesthetics of acceleration and war. There is the Motoscafo Armato Silurante MAS-96 anti-submarine motorboat D’Annunzio captained, and the name of which he détourned into the Latin motto Memento audere semper – ‘remember always to dare’). The SVA-5 aeroplane in which he flew to drop propaganda leaflets and bombs in the ‘il Volo su Vienna’ (‘Flight over Vienna’) as squadron leader of the ‘La Serenissima’ 87th fightersquadron on 9 August 1918. The most striking machine is the warship Puglia, donated by the Italian government and now embedded into the hillside.

The phallic ship thrusting from the hillside seems to embody exactly the masculine and protofascist mastery over nature by technology and acceleration. D’Annunzio wrote that the prow of a warship was ‘a monstrous phallic elongation’.1 It embodies what Paul Virilio, writing of the Italian Futurist F.T. Marinetti, called the ‘inhuman type’: ‘an animal body that disappears in the superpower of a metallic body able to annihilate time and space through its dynamic performances.’2 D’Annunzio’s personal motto ‘per non dormire’ (‘In order not to sleep’) captures perfectly, in advance, this vectoring of human will into a mechanized acceleration that displaces any organic need. It might also stand as the motto for contemporary capitalism, which, as Jonathan Crary has noted, declares war on sleep as one of the few residual and non-productive human activities.3

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The ship, however, is somehow integrated into nature, in a strange fusion that accelerates the forces of nature as the vessel thrusts itself from the hillside into the lake. To stand on the deck is to experience a vertiginous toppling of the frozen moment of launching. The fact that the other various machines and devices of speed and destruction are placed in a house and garden offers an incongruous experience that estranges both the natural and the technological. This techno-pastoral figures the desire to infuse the forces of technology into nature and to give life to technology through the integration of nature. What is crucial is the link between technological speed and the dynamic and vital will of the ‘animal’ or natural body.

In this chapter I want to consider the Italian Futurist celebration of speed and their attempt to harness the forces of velocity and acceleration as the Ur-form of accelerationism. The Futurist’s cult of war, their misogyny, and their alliance with fascism, make them the symbolically toxic avant-garde. My aim is not to redeem the irredeemable, or to use them to convict accelerationism in advance. Instead, I want to explore how the Futurists try to grasp and integrate forces of production that appear as forces of destruction. This involves strange integrations and displacements, as the Futurists try to fuse and infuse mechanical bodies with vital forces and accelerate these new fused forces towards a threshold of destruction and rebirth.

Cruel Razors of Velocity

The Italian Futurists fully inhabited the cult of speed predicted by D’Annunzio. Point Four of ‘The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism (1909), written by Marinetti, announces:

We affirm that the beauty of the world has been enriched by a new form of beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car with a hood that glistens with large pipes resembling a serpent with explosive breath … a roaring automobile that seems to ride on grapeshot – that is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.4

In Point Eight the Futurists go on to declare that ‘we have already created velocity which is eternal and omnipresent’, and in Point Nine to make clear the importance of military speed (and misogyny): ‘We intend to glorify war – the only hygiene of the world – militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of anarchists, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and contempt for woman.’5

The contempt for woman indicates the usual armoured trope of erecting the hard, phallic and mechanized male body over and against the feminized: soft, liquid, and organic. In response the Futurist ‘feminist’ Valentine De Saint-Point wrote the ‘Manifesto of Futurist Woman’ (1912), which suggested women were equal to men – equal in terms of meriting the same disdain.6 After this amusingly anti-humanist opening the argument falls back into arguing that both men and women needed more virility, and that both should take the ‘brute’ as their model. The solution to misogyny is to join an equality of brutality, confirming the phallic hardness of the machine as destination for both genders.

In a similar fashion Marinetti’s misogyny also opens on to a general anti-humanism – the cult of speed is one that bursts apart the limits of the human. Marinetti declared: ‘Those who are weak and sick [will be], crushed, crumbled, pulverized by the relentless wheels of intense civilization. The green beards of moss-grown streets in the provinces will be shaved clean by the cruel razors of velocity.’7 The only survival is elective surgery by ‘the cruel razors of velocity’ that will provide the ‘clean’ speed to transform the human body into a new individual war-machine.

The Futurists try to perform what Fredric Jameson calls ‘a virtual cooptation of the machine, a homeopathic expropriation of its alienated dynamism.’8 This virtual co-optation of dynamism by means of war runs through to the very end of Futurism. In 1941 Marinetti composed the manifesto of ‘Qualitative Imaginative Futurist Mathematics’, with the Futurist poet Pino Masanta and the renegade mathematician Marcello Puma.9 Puma was a student of quantum mechanics and the diffusion patterns of infectious diseases. This new ‘antistatic antilogical antiphilosophical mathematics’ offered modes of acceleration that are non-linear. The Futurist embrace of chance and randomness meant that they could imagine a ‘poetic geometry’ in which the river Nile could be redirected to turn back on itself, which suggests that Futurist accelerationism is not simply a teleological movement forward.

Yet, this is still a deeply dubious political mathematics, which plays off the disruptive force of the Futurists against their political enemies. The manifesto celebrates the battle of 15 April 1919, when Futurists and war veterans assaulted a communist rally on the Via dei Mercanti in Milan, before going on to burn down the headquarters of the Socialist Party’s newspaper Avanti!:

Calculate the clear sum of revolutionary Victory obtained in Milan the 15th of April 1919 (the Battle of Via dei Mercanti) by means of 50 Futurist poets 100 Arditi 50 early Fascist squadristi and 300 students from the Polytechnical Institute + the political genius of Mussolini + bold aeropoetic imagination of Marinetti + Ferruccio Vecchi in order to defeat 100,000 socialistscommunists routed because imbued with pacifism and hence frightened by pistols multiplied a hundredfold by patriotic courage.10

Marinetti and Puma’s calculus appears objective, but it rests success in combat on the qualitative value of ‘great men’. The contingent allows the infusion of the leader into the ‘objective’ array of mechanical forces.

This Futurist mathematics, according to Jeffrey T. Schnapp, engages with the new statistics generated by capitalist society by trying to overload the circuits of accumulative linear mathematics with a ‘statistical sublime’.11 In the case of their machinic integration we can see how the attempt at virtual co-optation of dynamism also tries to inhabit and overload the technological forces Futurism lauds. This suggests that Futurism isn’t simply the celebration of technology and war, but a reworking or struggle to push acceleration into new forms. Obviously the dominant forms of Italian Futurism compromised or celebrated the Fascist ‘solution’, while also remaining in a complicated and marginal position to Fascist modernization. What the Futurists highlight is that accelerationism is always an intervention or a selection of forces, particularly structured by the need to integrate labor within a new ‘mechanical’ configuration.

In the Lunapark

In the Epilogue to his famous essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1936) Walter Benjamin condemned the Futurists for aestheticizing war, in which ‘we experience [our] own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.’12 While this has become the accepted diagnosis of the Futurists, Benjamin goes on to add a caveat: we can accept the Futurist diagnosis if we understand their aestheticization of war as the result of the impeding of the ‘natural’ use of the productive forces. The Futurists aestheticize the destructive turn of the productive forces because they cannot truly grasp the possibility of redeploying these forces.

Benjamin’s brief suggestion returns to his short work ‘To the Planetarium’, contained in his book One-Way Street (1928). There he argued that the First World War was ‘an attempt at new and unprecedented commingling with the cosmic powers.’13 While science seems to have disenchanted the stars we cannot simply evade these cosmic powers, which are retranslated into technological forces. The war presents the equivocal site of released and intoxicating forces of destruction:

Human multitudes, gases, electrical forces were hurled into the open country, high-frequency currents coursed through the landscape, new constellations rose in the sky, aerial space and ocean depths thundered with propellers, and everywhere sacrificial shafts were dug in Mother Earth. (103–4)

In Benjamin’s quasi-mystical reading this is an ‘immense wooing of the cosmos’ carried out via ‘the spirit of technology’ (104). The resulting ‘bloodbath’ was due to these cosmic forces being subject to profit, i.e. to capitalism.

This does not imply these forces should be abandoned. Benjamin argues that we reconfigure the relation between mastery and technology. No longer should humans master nature, but humans need to master the relation between us and nature. The intoxication of these cosmic powers has gone astray, and this turns on the question of speed:

One need recall only the experience of velocities by virtue of which mankind is now preparing to embark on incalculable journeys into the interior of time, to encounter there rhythms from which the sick shall draw strength as they did earlier on high mountains or on the shores of southern seas. The ‘Lunaparks’ are a prefiguration of sanatoria. (104)

‘Lunaparks’ was an early name for what we now call amusement parks, and the first park to use this name was in Coney Island, New York in 1907. Benjamin’s suggestion is that these parks – with their rollercoasters and other rides – form a kind of homeopathic or therapeutic intoxication or acceleration, which will allow us to cure the tubercular sickness of technology. Intoxication is played against intoxication.

The result is an embrace to wrest technology, as second nature, into a new configuration:

In the nights of annihilation of the last war the frame of mankind was shaken by a feeling that resembled the bliss of the epileptic. And the revolts that followed it were the first attempt of mankind to bring the new body under its control. The power of the proletariat is the measure of its convalescence. If it is not gripped to the very marrow by the discipline of this power, no pacifist polemics will save it. Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation [Rausche der Zeugung]. (104)

In Benjamin’s strange cosmic phantasmagoria, which he will later problematize or rescind (as we will see in Chapter 7), the forces of annihilation produce a new intoxication, a new collective and personal body that we have to master – a ‘rush’ [Rausche].

Despite their extreme political differences we can see a convergence between the Futurists and Benjamin on this equivocal ground of the mastery of technologies of acceleration. While Benjamin banks on communist revolt and the Futurists favour the new ‘discipline’ of Fascism, they both suggest a utopian possibility of the collective mastery of acceleration. What they attend to is the integration and acceleration of intoxicating and ecstatic forces. There is no turning back, they imply. What needs more probing is the form and nature of these forces.

Mechanical Asceticism

The Futurists operated an aesthetic of acceleration that was not only predicated on war, but also on the industrial revolution. The energies they aimed to tap were, in fact, positioned at the confluence between industry and warfare. Yet, there was something odd and even anachronistic about this attempt. In his autobiography the English Vorticist Wyndham Lewis reports his encounter with the Futurist Marinetti. When Marinetti tried to enlist Lewis as a Futurist, Lewis replied in a typically racist and acerbic fashion:

‘Not too bad,’ said I. ‘It has its points. But you Wops insist too much on the Machine. You’re always on about these drivingbelts, you are always exploding about internal combustion. We’ve had machines here in England for a donkey’s years. They’re no novelty to us.’14

Putting aside the racial sneer, Lewis’s point invokes another experience of the machine – one that isn’t about the shock of modernity but rather the integration of the machine in everyday life.

Marinetti’s reply to Lewis is, precisely, predicated on acceleration: ‘You have never understood your machines! You have never known the ivresse of travelling at a kilometre a minute. Have you ever travelled a kilometre a minute?’ Lewis’s reply is: “Never.’ I shook my head energetically. ‘Never. I loathe anything that goes too quickly. If it goes too quickly, it is not there.”15 Lewis invokes, as he often would, the need for sharp division, which is opposed to the blurring caused by speed. His invocation of the experience of the machine in Britain, however, suggests a complex relationship between speed, machines, and labor, which is not limited to the mechanization of warfare.

It is Lyotard who closely links the experience of the avantgarde with the experience of the worker. Reflecting on his own notorious invocation of the worker’s experience of jouissance in factory labor Lyotard later commented that: ‘[T]he point was to convey that there is in the hardest working-class condition an impressive contribution that easily matches, and perhaps exceeds, the adventures of poets, painters, musicians, mathematicians, physicists, and the boldest tinkerers and tamperers.’16 The imposed demand on the worker to construct a new body, a new sensorium, and new sensibility matched or exceeded the experiments of the avant-garde in the creation of ‘man-machines’.

Lyotard traces the energies of the integration of labor and the machine over a longer time-span, in which the avant-garde, ironically, features as a late arrival. The workers of the nineteenth century had already gone beyond the sensory limit of the body and, in Lyotard’s controversial addition, enjoyed that experience. Lyotard’s stress is two-fold. First, that we shouldn’t dismiss the experience of peasants become workers as that of simple victims who suffered passively. There was an active engagement with these new possibilities of the augmented and expanded body. His second point is that this engagement creates a new mode of experience and, even, of ethics. The workers practiced, long before the avant-gardes, a ‘mechanical asceticism’, by holding on in a place in which it had seemed impossible to do so.