Malign Velocities Accelerationism and Capitalism

Terminal Acceleration

When I talk about shit, it is hardly a metaphor: Capitalism reduces everything to shit, that it to say to the state of undifferentiated and decoded streams out of which everyone has to take its part in a private mode and with a sense of culpability. Félix Guattari1

Things are shit. Terminal accelerationism, however, sees this shit as what Alain Badiou calls ‘nourishing decomposition’;2 as the chance to break through the sterility of a failed capitalism and leap into a new future. I want to analyse, or anal/yse, this ‘excremental vision’ as one of the signature forms of contemporary accelerationism. Rather than the relentless positivity of thinkers like Deleuze and Guattari, or Negri, here the path of acceleration lies in the negativity and nihilism of capitalism. We’ve already seen that Jean Baudrillard is one of the key figures of this form, but I want to return to two earlier moments to track the convergence of the negative and the apocalyptic. These are the 1930s work of Georges Bataille and Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967 film Weekend. If the car was the model of modernist speed then Godard’s Weekend, with its famous single tracking shot of a traffic jam lasting over eight minutes, suggests the terminus of that model. The film also bears the intertitle ‘A FILM FOUND ON A SCRAP-HEAP’, which we could rephrase as ‘A FILM FOUND ON A SHIT-HEAP’, considering its staging of a veritable scatological apocalypse.

Godard’s film makes an obvious reference to Georges Bataille. The image ‘anal/yse’ appears before Corinne’s monologue – a fantasy, or nightmare, or reality – which describes sex scenes that deliberately mimic the anal eroticism of Bataille’s 1928 novel Story of the Eye (and which makes it to wikipedia’s cultural references for the film). We could also add the more esoteric reference that ‘Emily Brönte’ appears as a character in the film and one of the ‘case studies’ in Bataille’s Literature and Evil (1957) is dedicated to her work. At a more general level we could say that Godard develops Bataille’s ‘heterological’ vision, which Bataille articulated in the 1920s and 1930s, of ‘an irruption of excremental forces’ that void value.3 In Bataille’s excremental Marxism the revolution erupts from the ‘materialist bowels of proletarians’ (35), while class struggle, for Bataille and Godard, is an excremental apocalypse in which everything turns to shit.

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This shit forms a site of equivocation and reversal: from an anal capitalism of crisis and waste to a revolution that will accelerate beyond the ‘limited’ waste capitalism produces, which is always subordinate to value. In this way accelerationism can weave together the apocalyptic possibilities of the productive forces and the apocalyptic possibilities of destruction. If capitalist crisis operates, as the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter argued, by periodic bouts of ‘creative destruction’,4 then this form of terminal accelerationism aims to exceed capitalism on its own ground.

Wallowing in the Mud

In an article of 1929 titled ‘The Language of Flowers’ Bataille writes, apocryphally as it unfortunately turns out, of

[t]he disconcerting gesture of the Marquis de Sade, locked up with madmen, who had the most beautiful roses brought to him only to pluck off their petals and toss them into a ditch filled with liquid manure – in these circumstances, doesn’t it have an overwhelming impact? (14)

The impact of Sade’s gesture for Bataille is that it confirms his invocation of ‘base materialism’ as that which returns to excrement to void beauty and value. This is why Bataille would chide

Nietzsche for being ‘altogether incapable of wallowing in the mud’ (39). Unlike Nietzsche’s attempt to constitute the possibility of the overman (übermensch), Bataille’s vision was of the ‘underman’: of dragging ‘man’ down into the excrement.

In the 1920s and 1930s Bataille developed what he would later call a ‘general economy’, which ‘founded’ itself in the excremental, the perverse, and all the elements that could not be coordinated with utility, and which ruptured the restricted economy of capitalism. I don’t think it is a coincidence that he should develop this theory at the same time capitalism entered into worldwide depression after the Wall Street Crash of 1929. This ‘heterology’ functioned as a ‘cloacal’ critique that targeted the stabilizations of value accumulation and labor. Bataille’s materialism not only ruptured the image of a stable economy, but also the image of stable matter. For Bataille materialists were too-often guilty of turning matter into a ‘dead God’ by simply reversing the place of matter from below to above. In contrast Bataille argued that the disruption of ‘senile idealism’ required we see matter as unstable, active, and excessive (15). We have to drag all ideals and values down into the mud.

Of course, as Jean-Joseph Goux points out, Bataille’s economy of excess might have had traction on the asceticism of the Protestant ethic of a capitalism committed to accumulation but it seems to have a strange congruence with a ‘postmodern’ capitalism of excess.5 Even Bataille’s proximity to the Wall Street Crash signals this ambiguity, as capitalism enters into its own voiding and destruction of value only then to restart in a destructive war economy. If we read the life story of Don Simpson – the producer of so-called ‘high concept’ films during the 1980s and early ’90s, such as Beverly Hills Cop (1984) and Top Gun (1986) – we can see how a transgressive world view conforms to capitalism’s fantasmatic selfimage as liberatory and excessive.6 Simpson’s punishing regime of excess – from drugs and prostitutes, to exercise and plastic surgery – involved him working on the very materiality of his body to make himself the ‘perfect’ capitalist subject. We could also turn to the more quotidian fact that those abandoned by capitalism, as ‘surplus humanity’, often live, literally, in shit.7 Instead of the excremental and perverse setting out some alternative space to capitalist modernity it becomes coded within it, as its inherent and licensed transgression, and hence reconnected to value production but at the level of ‘pure’ speculation and excess. The so-called ‘sound investment’ can turn into excrement, but also excrement or waste can suddenly become a speculative resource.

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 autoconsumptive 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 degreezero 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.