Malign Velocities Accelerationism and Capitalism

Benjamin’s ‘odd idea’ had an explicit context. This was the critique of German Social Democracy, especially in Thesis XI of ‘On the Concept of History’, where Benjamin chided it for ‘moving with the current’.3 The conformity of Social Democracy to the ideology of progress and acceleration, and not least technological progress, meant that it was unable to grasp the dynamic of fascism and unable to critique capitalism effectively. Beyond this historical argument I want to suggest that there is something more to Benjamin’s ‘odd idea’, both then and now.

If we return to Benjamin’s work we can see that it is closely engaged with questions of acceleration and production, especially in his dialogue with Bertolt Brecht. After they met in the late 1920s Brecht and Benjamin engaged in an intense debate over how to subject capitalist production to ‘refunctioning’ (Umfunktionierung).4 While this took place in a very different historical context – the failure of the revolutionary wave after 1917, inflation in Germany and global capitalist crisis, and the rise of fascism – the Brecht/Benjamin debate resonates in our moment. Invocations of Weimar, the 1929 Crash, and anxieties of incipient fascism or war, have become familiar tropes in commentary on our crisis. This is a rather speculative connection, but Brecht and Benjamin offer resources to interrupt a capitalism locked-into crisis and destruction.

Over the Dead Body of Capitalism

Gershom Scholem suggests that Brecht entered Benjamin’s life, in 1928, as an ‘elemental force’.5 We can read this ‘force’ as Brecht’s insistence on the reworking of production. When Benjamin came to know Brecht in the early 1930s, Brecht was articulating his critical practice of cultural and political production to come to terms with the crisis-ridden and destructive effects of capital, in the wake of 1929 and the experience of German inflation.

A key statement is Brecht’s poem ‘The Proletariat Wasn’t Born in a White Vest’ [Das Proletariat ist nicht in einer weissen Weste geboren] (1934). The poem presents a litany of capitalist decline, before concluding: ‘oh, on that day the proletariat will be able to take charge of a /culture reduced to the same state in which it found production: in ruins.’6 The proletarian is not the ‘clean’ modernist new man, but is willing to get his or her hands dirty. This is the only class able to grasp and resolve the ‘dirty’ ruins of capitalism. Alain Badiou argues that Brecht’s poem is founded on the ‘essential thematic [that] the new can only come about as the seizure of a ruin. Novelty will only take place on the basis of a fully accomplished destruction’.7 The proletariat dirties itself with completing the work of destruction on capitalism, but in the service of a new communist production. The ruin of capital is what Badiou calls a ‘nourishing decomposition’.8

Brecht is suggesting the re-use of the ruins of capitalism, and this can take provocative forms. Like the Soviet avant-garde Brecht is not afraid to engage with the worst elements of capitalism:

Behaviourism is a psychology which begins with the needs of commodity production in order to develop methods with which to influence buyers, i.e., it is an active psychology, progressive and revolutionizing kathode (Kathoxen). In keeping with its capitalist function, it has its limits (the reflexes are biological; only in a few Chaplin films are they already social). Here, too, the path leads only over the dead body of capitalism, but here, too, this is a good path.9

Brecht’s ‘refunctioning’ turns on the most extreme forms of capitalist technology as the means to find a ‘good path’ over the ‘dead body of capitalism’. We have to traverse what Benjamin calls ‘the dirty diapers of the present.’10 Again, what is crucial here is not just the ‘dirt’ or waste produced by capital but, as we saw with terminal accelerationism, the need to dig into this dirt to produce the new.

In his ‘Conversations with Brecht’ Benjamin mentions ‘the destructive aspect of Brecht’s character, which puts everything in danger almost before it has been achieved.’11 That Brecht is one of the models for Benjamin’s essay ‘The Destructive Character’ (1931) is, by now, a commonplace.12 Brecht’s ‘destructive character’ provoked Benjamin to think about destruction and production. While the Benjamin essay can be taken as a manifesto for destruction, it is also a manifesto for the retooling or refunctioning of production. ‘The Destructive Character’ destroys to clear the way for something new. This moment of production, however, is predicated on interruption. In this chapter I want to trace this thinking of interruption in Brecht and Benjamin as a complication of any resort to accelerationism.

The Slob

Irving Wohlfarth has noted that Benjamin’s destructive character is ‘the efficient executor of an eviction order.’13 What kind of eviction order? I want to suggest this is an eviction order executed by a slob. In Fredric Jameson’s 1998 book on Brecht he poses the Brechtian energies of production and praxis against the stasis of our opaque and financialized postmodernism. Reflecting on Brecht’s pre-Marxist work Baal (1918) Jameson identifies the character Baal with the figure of the slob:

These are the slobs of literature rather than its zombies or living dead: creatures of physical and vestimentary neglect, satyrs, dirty old men, and the like, they are the archetypes of appetite, surging up from popular culture (rather than, as with supreme villains and manifestations of evil, from the lettered).14

This figure is destructive, in the sense, as Jameson says, that they ‘erupt and break the furniture’.15 Jameson notes that: ‘The Brechtian aversion to respectability in general is richly documented in the early works – with Baal as its virtual allegory: the Marxian turn is thereby able to tap those “antisocial” energies for a new and more productive engagement with the negative.’16 So, the seemingly ‘purely’ destructive slob does not simply disappear in Brecht’s embrace of Marxism and production. In fact the slob persists within the moment of production as a moment of interruption.

Brecht’s short story ‘North Sea Shrimps’, probably written around 1926, and subtitled ‘or the modern Bauhaus apartment’, is an allegory of the slob’s interruption.17 It tells of the visit of Müller and the narrator to the apartment of their wartime friend Kampert. Kampert is committed to a life of luxury after his experiences in the trenches of the First World War and, having married into money, fulfils his dream. The apartment is now perfect Bauhaus, whereas before: ‘It was two plain bourgeois rooms. You know the kind of thing, cramped to start with and then stowed to the gunwales with furniture.’ (79)

The all-lilac room, the delicate blinds, and the lack of pictures, drive the narrator, and particularly Müller, to distraction:

What irritated Müller was the flat. He was completely wrong about this. It was a very pleasant flat, not at all ostentatious. But I think Müller just could not stand the carefully contrived harmony and the dogmatic functionalism of it any longer. (82)

Although Müller has brought a present of North Sea shrimps he sends out Kampert on a false errand to buy some, and then proceeds to redecorate. He violently rearranges the furniture, tears down the blind, and sticks up magazine pictures on the wall with sugar water. The narrator concludes, ‘Man is like a terrible tornado, creating the grandiose multiplicity and admirable disharmony of all creation out of an almighty pile-up of patent American chaise-longues, common washbasins and old, venerable, magazines.’ (84)

This short story disrupts Benjamin’s later invocation of the glass architecture of Scheerbart and Bauhaus in ‘Experience and Poverty’ (1933) as the gesture of ‘erasing the traces’ called for by Brecht.18 The creation of ‘rooms in which it is hard to leave traces’,19 is exactly what Brecht’s ‘destructive slob’ is reacting against, with Müller having ‘this longing for all that was most illmatched, most illogical and most natural.’ (85) While Benjamin’s version of the destructive character wipes away the traces of those who want comfort, Brecht’s destructive slob makes his space comfortable by putting his trace on things. The destructive ‘baseness’ of Müller, his lumpen status, interrupts the clean modernist space. He actively turns the new into ruins, interrupts the new, to create something that is not exactly productive, but rather illogical.

Angelic Locomotives

My second scene of interruption is from one of Walter Benjamin’s radio talks for children, given in 1932, on ‘The Railway Disaster at the Firth of Tay’ (‘Die Eisenbahnkatastrophe vom Firth of Tay’).20 As the title suggests the central subject of the talk is the railway disaster of 28 December 1879, when a passenger train of six carriages and two hundred people was lost after plunging into the Tay, when the iron bridge it was passing over collapsed during a fierce storm. Benjamin does not begin with the disaster, but rather with the early technologies of iron working and train construction and with what he calls, in his essay on Eduard Fuchs, the ‘defective reception of technology’.21 This ‘defective reception’ turns, in part, on acceleration, as Benjamin reports the view of the medical faculty at Erlangen suggesting that the speed of rail travel would lead to cerebral lesions, while an English expert suggested that moving by train is not travel but simply being dispatched to a destination like a package. Perhaps neither could foresee the current British train system…

In describing the disaster Benjamin quotes from a poem by Theodor Fontane, not the renowned poem by William Topaz McGonagall – renowned for being terrible. This is the first stanza of the McGonagall:

Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay!

Alas! I am very sorry to say

That ninety lives have been taken away

On the last Sabbath day of 1879,

Which will be remember’d for a very long time.22

Benjamin reports that when the accident occurred the storm was raging so severely it was not evident what had happened. The only sign were flames seen by fishermen, who did not realize this was the result of the locomotive plunging into the water. They did alert the stationmaster at Tay, who sent another locomotive along the line. The train was inched onto the bridge and had to be stopped a kilometre out, before reaching the first central pier, with a violent application of the brakes that nearly led to the train jumping from the tracks: ‘The moonlight had enabled him to see a gaping hole in the line. The central section of the bridge was gone.’23

The brake is a figure of interruption, and this foreshadows its later use in ‘On the Concept of History’. While one catastrophe has already occurred, in which two hundred people have lost their lives, the act of braking prevents, although only barely, a second catastrophe. We can place this consideration of the locomotive, speed, and the malignancy of technology, alongside Benjamin’s remark in the essay on ‘Eduard Fuchs’ that:

The disciples of Saint-Simon started the ball rolling with their industrial poetry; then came the realism of a Du Camp, who saw the locomotive as the saint of the future; and a Ludwig Pfau brought up the rear: ‘It is quite unnecessary to become an angel’, he wrote, ‘since the locomotive is worth more than the finest pair of wings.’24

This angelic locomotive, which rushes into the future and into destruction, can be paired with Benjamin’s famous invocation of the Angelus Novus or Angel of History in ‘On the Concept of History’ (1940), which is turned to the past and contemplates the wreckage of history.

The ‘Angelic Locomotive’ is, therefore, the sign of acceleration to the point that indicates that the ‘energies that technology develops beyond their threshold are destructive.’25 The point here is that we can’t simply accept technology as it is, but the ‘refunctioning’ of technology depends on the interruption of capitalist acceleration. Benjamin reiterates this point in his essay ‘Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia’ (1929), where he criticizes the surrealists for their ‘overheated embrace of the uncomprehended miracle of machines’.26 Such a characterization speaks, obviously, to the currents of accelerationism. Benjamin is poised in a tense debate not only with Brecht, but also with his own earlier desire to wrest the forces of production for revolution (which we discussed in Chapter 1).

Revolutions per Minute

Both Brecht and Benjamin adopt positions that can, at times, loosely be described as accelerationist. I’ve tried to probe the fact that they also disrupt and interrupt the accelerationist fantasy of tapping into the capitalist forces of production. What I’ve suggested is that the image Jameson offers of ‘a streamlined technological future’ as the key to revolutionary change is precisely what they put into question. The result is not simply some nostalgic or pastoral vision, but rather an interruptive politics that refuses to treat capitalist production on its own terms. Instead, Brecht and Benjamin are attentive to the destructiveness of the productive forces, and particularly those that have gone off the rails.

Benjamin’s registering of destruction, and its equivocation, suggests exactly that heterogeneity of time that will find its formulation in ‘On the Concept of History’ (1940). Homogenous empty time is the time of the train on the tracks, which can speed up and slow down. The emergency brake of Benjamin’s metaphor for revolution is not simply the stopping of a train on the smooth tracks of progress. Rather, as with the metaphor of the angel of history, it suggests that the train tracks into the future are being laid immediately in front of the train. In fact, the anecdote of the Tay Bridge disaster suggests that the emergency brake is applied precisely due to the derailing of the train, and threatens another catastrophic derailing. The ‘rails’ of history accelerate us to disaster if we are not aware of the destructive side of the dialectic of production.

The irony, as Benjamin’s notes make clear, is that the desire for acceleration on the tracks of history breeds passivity before the productive forces:

Once the classless society had been defined as an infinite task, the empty and homogeneous time was transformed into an anteroom, so to speak, in which one could wait for the emergence of the revolutionary situation with more or less equanimity.27

The idea of the tracks stretching into the future leaves revolution as a receding moment – the station we never quite arrive in. The result, contra to the revolutionary intervention, it is the constant stoking of the train, i.e. the capitalist productive forces. This is another instance of accelerationism, which either tries to actively increase the speed of capital, or simply becomes the passenger on the train, allowing the constant destruction of living labor at the hands of dead labor to do the work.

The conclusion is that the emergency brake is not merely calling to a halt for the sake of it, some static stopping at a particular point in capitalist history (say Swedish Social Democracy – which the American Republican Right now takes as the true horror of ‘socialism’). Neither is it a return back to some utopian pre-capitalist moment, which would fall foul of Marx and Engels’s anathemas against ‘feudal socialism’. Rather, Benjamin argues that: ‘Classless society is not the final goal of historical progress but its frequently miscarried, ultimately [endlich] achieved interruption.’28 We interrupt to prevent catastrophe, we destroy the tracks to prevent the greater destruction of acceleration.

The emergency brake is the operator of Benjamin’s nonteleological politics of temporality, which aims to wrest the classless society from the continuing dialectic of production/destruction that is our constant ‘state of emergency’.29 Instead of accelerating into destruction, we have to think destruction as an intimate and ongoing possibility. In the case of Brecht’s slob we have a kind of antihandyman destruction posed against the clean new. Here we rearrange and take apart the new in ‘illogical’ ways. Benjamin’s interruption suggests a more definitive break (or brake) with the aim of production. The stopping of the angelic locomotive tries to jump the tracks of history, or jump out of the vision of history as infinite waiting for the revolutionary situation.

Inevitably this jumping of the tracks will produce something new there is no simple way outside of production, as we have repeatedly seen. To interrupt acceleration(ism) is not to give up on the new. We can, instead, consider production as an interruption, as a series of experiments that have ‘frequently miscarried’. This does not prevent the ‘ultimately [endlich] achieved interruption’ which would be the real condition of the new. Brecht and Benjamin’s thinking of interruption is a thinking of intervention that not only stops acceleration, but also rethinks production and the very notion of ‘productive forces’. The difficulty of applying the emergency brake does not mean that interruption should be abandoned.

Conclusion: The Moving Contradiction

Communism is not radical. It is capitalism that is radical. Bertolt Brecht

Lenin once described ‘left communism’ – the radical rejection of parliamentary elections and unions as sites of struggle – as an ‘infantile disorder’.1 I would describe contemporary accelerationism as a ‘postgraduate disorder’. This is not just a reference to the subjective position of contemporary accelerationists, and neither is it mere name calling or ad hominem argument. I’m referring to the specific position of the postgraduate on the edge or cusp of the job market. The postgraduate possesses, usually, significant cultural capital, but they confront full immersion in the labor market fairly late in life. Of course, in the UK and US, student financing already forces them into a future life of debt servitude. Also, many are working, trying to get ahead or, more often, stay afloat. That said, this merely adds to the fact that the world of labor is confronted as one of future horror – endless and trivial. Accelerationism provides an answer by turning the horror of work into the jouissance of machinic immersion. We may face a life of labor, but we can try and face it ‘kein Schmerz, kein Gedanke’ – without feeling, without thought.

This is the immersive fantasy of work as site of repetitive libidinal acceleration, where the bourgeois ego is drowned in the icy waters of inhuman labor. While remarkably easy to criticize, such a vision recognizes a truth of the decomposition of contemporary capital. In particular, it is the collapse of the future as sustainable mode of life under capitalism, which accelerationism answers with an ersatz future in its place: retooled retro-70s futurism coupled to the frayed remains of capitalist ‘dynamism’.