Malign Velocities Accelerationism and Capitalism

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 world-spirit 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 worldspirit 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 ‘warmachine’. 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 self-cancellation.

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.

Sex-Work-Machine

The experience of most work is of profound boredom and pointlessness – hardly one of acceleration. Work is the eternal ‘hell of the same’, as Baudrillard put it – repetitive and often ridiculous tasks to no good or even useful end.11 Accompanying this experience is the erotic reverie, an experience of endless variation and exploration of erotic possibility both at and beyond work in a libidinal acceleration. Those familiar with the most boring forms of work – factory work, office work – will also be familiar with the endless exchanges and discourses about sex. Pornography is passed around, the sexual possibilities of colleagues discussed, and the mind is occupied with the libidinal.

The libidinal fantasies of machinic integration, ‘pathological’ as they are, suggest the utopian merging of libidinal acceleration with an acceleration of labor that is repetitive and machinic. For accelerationists this infusion or melding produces a multiplicity that explodes the limits of the ego in new vital possibilities. The real of production, as desire infuses the machine, ruptures the iterative routines. Work would (finally) be sexy. Although this is a state without feeling or thought, which could also suggest that sex might be worklike…

If, as psychoanalysis suggests, our experience of sexuality is fundamentally repetitive and boring then this fusion does not have to go far. The seeming endlessness of erotic possibilities becomes frozen in the tableaux of our own singular drives. It is the work of the Marquis de Sade that demonstrates this mode of possibility as repetition and, even, as labor. The relentless iterations of the 120 Days of Sodom (1785) produce the deadening sense of timetabled labor, increasing in intensity and activity. Adorno remarks that Sade’s ‘orgies are arranged like mechanical ballets.’12 I’m suggesting that we don’t simply confront the integration of fluid and mobile life into deadening and alienated labor, but also the desire to integrate the repetitive and deadening circuit of the sexual drive into the deadening circuit of labor. While accelerationism might promise an integration of desire and labor in a machinic ‘synthesis’ to accelerate the boredom of work it disguises the boredom of desire. Accelerationism wants to enchant sex as something accelerative and machinic, away from the iterative reverie of fantasy.

The fantasy of integration is the fantasy of abolishing fantasy. What accelerationism promises is the integration of the person into machine, of sex into work, and the generation of the Real of production. In this way fantasy as the access to the Real is collapsed into an immersive and immediate experience of the Real without mediation. Although couched in terms of the libidinal, what is extinguished is the libidinal, as accelerationism reproduces the deadening experience of labor as the site of masochistic enjoyment. At the same time contempt is often expressed to actual workers for their failure to fully ‘enjoy’ this situation. The result is an evasion of the deadlock of desire through the claim to immediately access desire and fantasmatically dissolve the deadlock. This is the libidinal fantasy of accelerationism.

Cyberpunk Phuturism

There seems to be little place for the modernist linear-dynamics of progression and acceleration that I have traced in the dispersed and slackened forms of postmodernity. Whether futurists, capitalists, or communists, the avant-garde ‘passion for the real’,1 that tried to accelerate us to new human types, now seems quaint, kitsch, and politically dubious. And yet the dream and reality of speed machines is not merely the province of dubious nostalgia to be found in the remnants of petrolhead macho excess or in the fetishization of contemporary military technologies.

Acceleration, today, passes from the car, the quintessential technology of mass speed and modernity, to the computer. If the car, as Enda Duffy argues,2 was the lived experience of modernist time for many – a new mass aesthetic, when modernism tended to the hermetic – then the computer plays that role today. It is the computer, especially for those who work with them, that embodies the ‘speed-up’ of labor, as each new model becomes faster and faster (or that is the promise). The Internet provides the ‘one-click’ solution, computers speed-up and slim down, seemingly providing one of the last utopian remnants worthy of any commodity fetishism; the very frustration of a computer slowing down or freezing-up indexes our own internalized demand for speed. The computer also now vectors the alliance of speed and war, as the acceleration of computer processing permits the rapidity of ‘fireand-forget’ warfare, the drone attack, the militarization of civilian space, and, in US-military jargon, the ‘compression of the kill chain’.

So, the integration of the accelerating man-machine does not simply disappear, but mutates. Fredric Jameson comments:

4

there are no great utopian texts after the widespread introduction of computers (the last being Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia of 1975, where computers are not yet in service). Instead, we have the freemarket deliria of cyberpunk, which assumes that capitalism is itself a kind of utopia of difference and variety.3

Cyberpunk is the utopia not only of difference and variation, but also of deliria and acceleration. It is that ‘utopia’ I want to explore, which is rather more durable and robust than Jameson’s dismissal might suggest.

This new aesthetic can be thought of as the attempt to recapture the energy of the classical avant-garde in the slackened time of postmodernity. It is not simply the repetition of the avantgarde, but a mutated and modulated futurism, which, in typical postmodern fashion, straddles between genres, forms, and cultural domains. This is what I will call ‘cyberpunk phuturism’. Certainly ‘cyberpunk phuturism’ has an anachronistic and kitsch ring. The term ‘cyberpunk’ did not really recover from Billy Idol’s album of that title, released in 1993. ‘Phuturism’ is my adaptation via the Chicago Acid House practitioners Phuture, whose ‘Acid Tracks’ (1989) has a claim to be the first Acid House record. That said, perhaps the kitsch element, as we’ll see, reflects something of this aesthetic.

I will focus on three moments: cyberpunk fiction, Detroit techno, and their synthesis in Cybertheory. In line with my general argument I am not interested in simply expressing disenchantment with this avant-garde and celebrating chastened conformity to the ‘democratic’ protocols of the present. Instead, I want to probe these re-tooled forms of accelerationism as a response to the mutations and continuities of contemporary capitalism. Accelerationism is not merely an historical curiosity, but an aesthetic and political attitude that continues to exert a gravitational pull on the present.

The Thrill and Threat of Materialization

The Ur-text of cyberpunk phuturism is William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984), which is perhaps its most effective manifesto and predicts all its later mutant forms. The novel of cyberpunk science-fiction, and to my mind the only successful work of this form (along with its sequels), it tracks the new shifting forms of cybernetic embodiment. The very technology of ‘jacking-in’ to cyberspace is rooted, within the novel, in the frame of military technologies: ‘“The matrix has its roots in primitive arcade games,” said the voice-over, “in early graphics programs and military experimentation with cranial jacks.”’4 Also, the wellknown description of ‘Night City’ as ‘a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button’,5 prefigures the neoliberal future, and the compulsive attachment to the speed that promises to break the shackles of social confinement. The simile suggests, in the figure of the ‘bored researcher’, that this deregulatory fantasy has more than an element of (anti-) planning and direction, contrary to fantasies of the acephalic market. While speed is the promise of the opening to a new deterritorialized fluidity of social and virtual space – beyond the Fordist social-compact and the ‘static’ segmentations of social democracy – this is no blind process. The historical significance of Gibson’s novel (leaving aside aesthetic judgements) lies in the fact that it is poised between anxiety and endorsement, critical distance and immersive jouissance, in its vision of cyberspace, augmentation and the accelerative disembedding of social relations.

Joshua Clover points out that Neuromancer incarnates the ‘thrill and threat of dematerialization’ that lies at the heart of neoliberalism;6 the thrill of new fluid forms of accumulation and super-wealth (for a very few), and the threat of obsolescence and abandonment (for many). In Gibson’s novel the thrill lies in the discarding of the ego, ‘de-sleeving’ consciousness, to borrow a term from Richard Morgan’s sci-fi novel Altered Carbon (2002), from its material support. The threat lies in being condemned to the ‘meat’ (the body), and excluded from the delights of cyberspace. This is the fate of the hacker Case at the beginning of the novel, who has had his capacity to jack-in surgically removed as punishment for an earlier entrepreneurial failure. Yet we could rewrite Clover to say that say that the novel’s cyberpunk phuturism also captures the ‘thrill and threat of materialization’. The thrill here is augmentation and integration, from Tally Isham (‘the girl with the Zeiss-Nikon eyes’) to Molly Numbers (with her implanted retractable razor blade implants). The threat is from bad tech, bad surgery, and falling behind the accelerative race to the future. Acceleration into the utopian horizon of capitalism – as a social form of pure drive and accumulation, freed from its dependence on the meat of labor – is always haunted by our obsolescence. Gibson’s novel tracks a capitalist utopia in dystopian formulations, figuring the self literally as the ‘entrepreneurial machine’ that Foucault had already anatomized as the subjectivity of neo-liberalism.7