Malign Velocities Accelerationism and Capitalism

Techno-Phuturism

Cutting to another scene, it is, I would argue, Detroit techno that forms one of the most fascinating and most aesthetically successful instances of cyberpunk phuturism. Deliberately couched as a postindustrial Afro-futurism, it aimed to ‘erase the traces’ (in Brecht’s phrase) of the Fordist sound of Motown and to mimic the new robot production-lines that had displaced the remains of ‘variable capital’ (i.e. humans) for ‘constant capital’ (i.e. machines) at Ford. This socalled ‘automation’ was called ‘niggermation’ by radical black workers in the 1970s – the systematic forcing-up of production under unsafe conditions through super-exploitation.8 They disputed the story of new hitech production, noting that what was happening was often just old-fashioned speed-up on the line. Once again, we might be cautious about the images of acceleration we encounter.

Detroit techno traced the mutating social space of Detroit – from the ‘white flight’ following the 1967 insurrection, the deindustrialization that followed, and its own position in the suburban site of Belleville High, where the pioneers Derrick May, Juan Atkins, and Kevin Saunderson met. Mixing European influences (Kraftwerk, New Order, Depeche Mode, etc.) with the Detroit funk of Parliament / Funkadelic, the result was a singular form that defied the studied reflexes of postmodern collage for an integrated acceleration.

The axes of Detroit techno were an increase in speed (in bpm) from previous forms of disco and House and a stripping-out of the humanist residues that often dominated those forms – not least the voice. The singularity of its aesthetic invention lay in this welcoming of the ‘mechanization’, or better ‘computerization’, of the aesthetic (which had obviously been prefigured by Kraftwerk’s Man-Machine (1978) and Computer World (1981)). The apotheosis of the form, at least as I regard it, is the work ‘It is what it is’ (1988), by Rhythim is Rhythim (aka Derrick May). This was, as one semi-ironic description of the time put it, ‘dance music with bleeps’. Retaining funk, the insistence of Detroit techno had the utopian, if not kitsch, elements of sci-fi futurism coupled to the dystopian fragmentation of the city-space (‘Night Drive Thru Babylon’, as the track by Model 500 had it). Again, the equivocations lay in a sense of abandonment: an escape to the future, escape from labor, or the loss of labor and the collapse of the future into permanent unemployment?

The Detroit electro/techno-duo Drexciya, who emerged in the ’90s, made explicit a longer history of disposable laboring bodies. Their name, as revealed on their 1997 album The Quest, referred to an underwater country populated by the unborn children of pregnant African women thrown from slave ships who had adapted to their underwater environment.9 This Afrofuturist sci-fi vision placed cutting-edge contemporary techno in contact with the abandoned bodies who ‘escaped’ the fate of slavery and their descendants who labored in Detroit’s factories, before being abandoned by capitalism to destitution, drugs, and prison. Here the future is haunted by the traces of impossible labor, which ruptures with the possibility of an accelerationist continuum.10 Detroit techno could be re-read, along these lines, as a critique of the ‘smoothness’ of acceleration, by a repetition that disrupts the future rather than the endorsement of accelerationism.

Cybergothic Remix

The splicing of these two moments, and the real instance of fullblown cyberpunk phuturism in explicit accelerationist form, can be found in the 1990s work of Nick Land and his allies in the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU). This ‘nomad’ (anti-) academic grouping, formed at Warwick University in 1995, couched its ‘disjunctive synthesis’ of the drives of sci-fi and techno through the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, especially their Anti-Oedipus (1972). The aim was to format an avant-garde practice that would explode the limits of 1990s inertia.

The ‘rush’ of this cyberpunk phuturism operated through a new radicalization of acceleration. Vectored through cyberpunk fiction and the post-rave speed-up of Jungle and drum-and-bass, Nick Land and the CCRU’s discourse aimed at maximum intensification into immanence until ‘impending human extinction becomes accessible as a dance floor’.11 The mass drug experimentation of rave culture was also spliced into this mutagenic remix. It aimed at immersion in immanence that had been, according to Nick Land, already realized in the then-future of 2012 (!). In case of present scepticism we should note Land’s prediction is hyperstitional – a kind of performative fiction, which creates the future it predicts – and that his theorization (according to Land) disrupts linear, chronological time. In the present moment we only have traces of that future – drugs, sci-fi, Jungle, theory, biotech – that prefigures the meltdown to come: ‘as if a tendril of tomorrow were burrowing back.’12

The project of this race to the realized future is best captured in Nick Land’s restatement and remixing of Deleuze and Guattari’s original accelerationist formulation. Land gives this accelerationism a deliberately provocative and late-punk antisocialist and anti-social democratic form:

Machinic revolution must therefore go in the opposite direction to socialistic regulation; pressing towards ever more uninhibited marketization of the processes that are tearing down the social field, ‘still further’ with ‘the movement of the market, of decoding and deterritorialization’ and ‘one can never go far enough in the direction of deterritorialization: you haven’t seen anything yet’.13

Machinic revolution, in Land’s metaphysics, reaches out to the horizon of absolute deterritorialization – the realized capitalism that has decapitated itself into full-blown immanent marketization.

This posing of the market against capitalism was derived from the historian Fernand Braudel. Obviously markets have preexisted capitalism, and Braudel suggested that capitalism formed itself as a monopolistic anti-market, tying down exchange. For Braudel, however, the virtue of markets was that they were face-to-face, localized and controllable. The problem of capitalism as antimarket, especially financialized capitalism, was that it was speculative, opaque and exceptional.14 Land mutates this argument to identify markets with monstrously powerful cybernetic forces, which are ‘speculative, opaque and exceptional’. It is these forces of exchange that can resist the stagnations of capitalism. A purified capitalism, shedding the dictates of the State, would traverse to a pure market accelerated out of capitalism altogether.

This theory fed-off the localized economic ‘boom’ of the ’90s in which, at least in the UK and US, regimes claiming some tenuous and residual connection to social democracy instantiated a further deepening of the neoliberal project. It would be this coupling of attenuated social-democracy and neo-liberalism that bred a series of ideological tropes that dominate the perception of that moment, the ’00s, and the present time of crisis. In this discourse it was the ‘left’ (or pseudo-left), and the ‘left’ in State power, that authorized, ratified and exacerbated the excesses of financialization and consumer credit. It was the spending of the State and the public sector, not the excesses of capitalism, which came to be treated as the ‘dead weight’ that is now holding us back from another leap into the future. Politicians of the present can play the austerity card in the elimination of this State and public debt, while accelerationist positions can argue that the only problem was the State itself, which did not unleash these processes far enough. It was the ‘humanist residues of State spending that failed to measure up to the antihumanism of capitalism.

The position of the CCRU, despite its radicalized antihumanism and inhuman immersive promise of capitalism exploding its own limits, resonates with these contemporary ideological claims that capitalism wasn’t really allowed to follow through. In this narrative, the acceleration of capitalism was held back by State spending and State regulation (focused, in the UK, often on ‘health-and-safety’, as in the trope of ‘health-and-safety gone mad’). It was a ‘left’ failure of nerve to go all the way to capitalism (and not all the way to the left…), that leaves us in the situation we find ourselves in.

This story of constrained capitalism was coupled, in the work of Nick Land, to a switch to China as the only State formation really willing to go all the way, or that had already gone all the way, as ‘neo-China arrives from the future’.15 What China could offer, in its post-Maoist embrace of capitalism, was the final synthesis between Stalinist acceleration (‘shock work’, rapid and violent industrialization), the Maoist ‘great leap forward’, and capitalist acceleration (although, of course, the ultra-left had long argued Stalinism was really a form of State-capitalism and ‘primitive accumulation’). The State-directed excesses of China, in its uncompromising developmental drive, become a utopian element. Hence Land’s decamping from academia to work as a journalist in China was the personal embrace of this trajectory. His more recent toying with the neo-reactionary theories of Mencius Moldbug (aka computer scientist and entrepreneur Curtis Yarvin) renders critique of this latest work superfluous.16

The anti-Statism of cyberpunk phuturism is more opposition to particular kinds of State, and makes the demand for a State that is willing to acephalically decapitate itself – in ‘special zones’ – to engage in self-termination (allowing that this is certainly not what the Chinese State is doing). It leaves exposed the toxic core of capitalism, hence its anti-ideological drift, but this exposure aims to reconnect and exacerbate this core to meltdown.

The political vagaries of these aesthetic forms of accelerationism do not fall on the tired tropes of fascism and ‘totalitarianism’, but rather on this difficult and tense imbrication with the dynamics of capitalism. Implicit in cyberpunk phuturism is not only the logic of increased computing speed and power, but also the claim that capitalism is maintaining its dynamic of acceleration first given its most memorable form by Marx and Engels in ‘The Communist Manifesto’ (1848). While we are all familiar with the line that ‘all that is solid melts into air’, the more resonant line for cyberpunk phuturism, especially as articulated by Nick Land, is: ‘[the bourgeoisie] has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation.’17 Land’s work dissolves the ego in the flows of this ‘icy water’, although the cult of personality that developed around him indicates the paradox of calls to dissolve the ego: some kind of ego has to be there to experience this dissolution into immanent flux and to theorize or report on its own extinction.

This drowning of the ego is closely linked to the question of labor. It is as laboring subjects we are subjected to the ego and it is in the cyberneticization of labor that we are redeemed from the ego. In his text ‘Meltdown’ (1996) Nick Land proclaims: ‘Industrial machines are deployed to dismantle the actuality of the proletariat, displacing it in the direction of cyborg hybridization, and realizing the plasticity of labor power.’18 It is this integrated plasticity that reshapes the proletariat from subject of history into disappearing vector of acceleration. The displacement of labor will not be achieved by communism, or communist accelerationism, but through capitalism’s dynamic. Another of Land’s formulations, from ‘No Future’ (1995), paints a more horrifying fate: ‘The full labormarket cycle blurs into meatgrinder.’19 Now the fate of labor is not simply to disappear into an accelerated future, but to be processed as if in a meat plant. Land’s statements code the paradox of extinction in-and-through machinic acceleration. The cybernetic machine is at once liberation from the meat and destruction of the meat, resolved in the jouissance of immersion into immanence.

Land’s final theoretical texts, from the late ’90s and then mid’00s, explore non-standard numeric and alphabetic anti-systems. These deeply strange experimental texts, which engage with the QWERTY keyboard and with esoteric Kabbalist number systems, explode into a hyper-rational deliberate non-sense. They continue Land’s project to break with the despotism of Western reason through a parodic hyper-reason, through an acceleration into the iterative. In a strange convergence with the qualitative mathematics of late Futurism, Land became interested in the numerical as a medium of counterpractice, a new technics. I think this could also be considered a response to the digital field of the computer, trying again to inscribe disruptive moments of fatal acceleration within and beyond the accumulative field – releasing the ‘energy’ of numbers.

The bursting of the dot.com bubble on Friday 10 March 2000, which indicated the emptiness of the cybernetic regeneration or reinforcement of the productive forces, didn’t simply wreck Land’s programme. Instead it became more frantic, more intensive, and more weird, as it tried to extract any remaining vestige of dynamism from the series of financial shocks that wash round the global capitalist economy.

Stasis Today

The contemporary moment is nicely summarized in Fredric Jameson’s remark from 1998: ‘Stasis today, all over the world … certainly seems to have outstripped any place for human agency, and to have rendered the latter obsolete.’20 The failure of agency leads to the accelerationist dream of the reinsertion of agency by the merging of humans and computers in a new technological synthesis. Gopal Balakrishnan, in his recent survey of the deceleration of global capitalism, notes that Fredric Jameson’s account of postmodernism and the excess of global capitalism was initially predicated on ‘unleashed nuclear and cybernetic productive forces’, before ‘the locus of the problem silently shifted to mapping an opaque, pseudo-dynamic world of financial markets.’21 At the centre of both is the speed-machine of the computer. We might say that the shift in Jameson’s work is the one not fully taken by cyberpunk phuturism, which remains at the first moment. In fact, cyberpunk phuturism often implicitly posed the first dynamic of ‘cybernetic productive forces’ against the emergent sense of the ‘opaque, pseudodynamic world of financial markets’. This is explicitly the case in contemporary accelerationism’s ambiguous discussion of ‘accelerative’ elements of financial capitalism, such as High-Frequency Trading (HFT).22

For all their postmodern panache, cyber-accelerationism was far more concerned with the exploding of opacity, rather than the revelling in the usual clichés of the play of signs or simulacra. In that sense, they do not simply play ‘real production’ against ‘fictional finance’, but rather try to produce the Real as the Real of production and circulation (combining Deleuze and Guattari with Lyotard). That is why I have argued that cyberpunk phuturism is a postmodern ‘passion for the real’, passing through the forms of simulation and semblants to accelerate out and beyond the antinomy of circuit and flesh.

Of course, the difficulty is that it involved a certain attachment to an accelerative dynamic of ‘productive forces’ that proved illusory, although this was something of a material ‘transcendental illusion generated by capitalist forms of value. Capitalism’s drive to accumulation, its squeezing of labor, and its penetration of existence through abstraction, shape the conditions of our experience giving rise to a felt experience of dynamism. Accelerationism enhances and celebrates this, but the future it could not grasp was the future of crash and crisis – the terminus of acceleration in the grinding to a halt of the speed machine of capitalism.

This slowing-down did not signal the end of cyberpunk phuturism. Accelerationism is, as we will see, remarkably resilient. In response to the drawn-out moment of crisis, which resists being cast as the punctual interruption to capitalist service soon to be resumed, the attraction of the return to speed is an unsurprising development. This desire can gain purchase precisely through the resistance to the slowing-down of the moment of crisis, and the selfserving and nostalgic language of austerity being deployed as its remedy (‘Keep Calm and Carry On’). Also, the process of creative destruction that is ensuing, to supposedly ‘free up’ capitalism from its own contradictions, can become recoded as a new piercing of existing barriers, including that of subjectivity itself. The accelerationist desire can revel in the apocalyptic destruction caused by the crisis, or used to resolve the crisis, and take this as the sign of a new take-off. If, as Marx said, ‘[t]he real barrier of capitalist production is capital itself’, then cyberpunk phuturism can pose itself as the transgressive desire to surpass that barrier ‘beyond capital’.23

The difficulty is that this ‘barrier’ is, in fact, what serves the ‘dynamic’ of capitalism as contradictory social formation. The perpetual desire to purify and pierce the barrier of ‘capital itself’ is encoded within the genetic structure of the capitalist social relation. This leaves cyberpunk phuturism in the uncomfortable position of joining with those attempts by the managers of capital to induce movement and acceleration by removing the dead weight of variable capital. This confluence can be seen as a result of the attempt by cyberpunk phuturism to resolve ‘the moving contradiction’ of capital. It does so by integrating labor or variable capital into constant capital. The potential obsolescence of labor is resolved by a violent sublation into the machine, or more precisely the computer or cybernetic device. Then the constant acceleration of the computer, via increases in processing power, memory, or software upgrades, promises the upgrading of the integrated meat that can finally keep pace with capitalism: Labor 2.0, or 2.1, and so on. We have the ‘immortality’ of labor not as ‘mere appendage’ of the machine, but as integrated within it.

Virilio remarks that: ‘The Japanese Kamikaze will realize in space the military elite’s synergistic dream by voluntarily disintegrating with this vehicle weapon in a pyrotechnical apotheosis; for the ultimate metaphor of the speed-body is its final disappearance in the flames of explosion.’24 This is the apocalyptic realization of speedbody indexed to military acceleration (as we saw in Chapters 1 and 3); another realization takes place in the dream of cyberpunk phuturism indexed to capitalist acceleration – the disappearance in integration. The perpetual-motion machine of capital generates the perpetual temptation to cybernetic accelerationism. One more effort, if we are to really speed-up capitalism, one more effort to dispose or displace the drag of labor and the meat. The difficulty, at its heart, is that cyberpunk phuturism gives over to capital a monopoly on our imagination of the future as the continuing intensification of accumulation and the reinforcement of the capitalist continuum.