Malign Velocities Accelerationism and Capitalism

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 ‘counter-revolutionary 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 laborhoarding 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

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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:

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 socially-unacceptable 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 thirtyone 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.