An Introduction to Accelerationism

If you don’t know Deleuze, check out the Deleuze Dictionary linked at the end

Feb 25, 2021

“Land was our Nietzsche [...] the kind of antagonist that the Left needs” — Mark Fisher, ‘Terminator VS Avatar’

A large number of the quotes I’ll use throughout are drawn from Mark Fisher’s ‘Terminator VS Avatar’, including the quotes from Nick Land’s essays, purely for convenience; I have read the essays quoted in full, and many others. I will cite the quotes from Land to their original essays, however, in order to assist the interested reader in following them up. Some quotes are not drawn from Fisher; I do not indicate where that is the case, simply because it is of no significance and can only distract the reader.

“Accelerationism”, a term coined by Benjamin Noys in his book ‘Malign Velocities: Accelerationism and Capitalism’, is a surprisingly broad political and philosophical approach, especially considering how unknown it is. To sum it up far too briefly, accelerationism views the history of human society (and capitalism especially) as accelerating towards the end of the human subject through a fragmentation of identity and a constant decreasing of the power held by human agents. It tends to build off the two volumes of ‘Capitalism and Schizophrenia’ by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, named ‘Anti-Oedipus’ and ‘A Thousand Plateaus’, but it’s biggest influence by far is the work of British philosopher Nick Land (and the philosophers surrounding and taught by him at the University of Warwick, some of whom formed a group called the CCRU, or Cybernetics Culture Research Unit). There are a variety of approaches to accelerationism, including but not limited to:

u/acc — unconditional accelerationism, the most popular, this argues that acceleration is inevitable and cannot be meaningfully impacted by humans

r/acc — right accelerationism, one of the least popular, is of the view that acceleration must be protected and encouraged by various forms of right-wing politics

l/acc — left accelerationism, reasonably popular though often critiqued, can take a number of perspectives, but generally uses left-wing politics as a response to acceleration

z/acc — zero accelerationists agree that acceleration is happening, but think everything possible should be done to stop it

g/acc — gender accelerationists approach acceleration and technological development from a transfeminist perspective, arguing for the abolition of gender and the adoption of technology as a means to transcend the limits of the human body

There are many more, but those are the important ones, and the ones I feel relatively confident describing.

For the sake of context, it’s worth understanding Nick Land’s theoretical trajectory. In the ‘80s and ‘90s, he took a bunch of meth and essentially made himself schizophrenic. He was initially quite left-wing, and his essays collected in the book ‘Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007’ show this pretty clearly (especially his feminism and anti-racism), even though they also present his critiques of leftism. Around the time Facebook took off, however, he kind of realised that his predictions had been incorrect (this was because of his misunderstanding of capitalism, which we’ll outline later), and had something of a mental breakdown. Now he’s the figurehead of the nrx (neoreactionary) movement, alongside Mencius Moldbug, and (from his new home in Shanghai) spends his time being extremely racist (he calls himself a hyper-racist) on Twitter and writing about Bitcoin. He still has some intriguing insights, perhaps best shown in his interview on the ‘Other Life’ podcast, but for the most part his best ideas are behind him.

To outline Land’s ideas, I’ll have an in-depth look at some quotes.

“For accelerationism the crucial lesson was this: A negative feedback circuit – such as a steam-engine ‘governor’ or a thermostat – functions to keep some state of a system in the same place. Its product, in the language formulated by French philosophical cyberneticists Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, is territorialization. Negative feedback stabilizes a process, by correcting drift, and thus inhibiting departure beyond a limited range. Dynamics are placed in the service of fixity – a higher-level stasis, or state. All equilibrium models of complex systems and processes are like this. To capture the contrary trend, characterized by self-reinforcing errancy, flight, or escape, D&G coin the inelegant but influential term deterritorialization. Deterritorialization is the only thing accelerationism has ever really talked about.

In socio-historical terms, the line of deterritorialization corresponds to uncompensated capitalism. The basic – and, of course, to some real highly consequential degree actually installed – schema is a positive feedback circuit, within which commercialization and industrialization mutually excite each other in a runaway process, from which modernity draws its gradient. Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche were among those to capture important aspects of the trend. As the circuit is incrementally closed, or intensified, it exhibits ever greater autonomy, or automation. It becomes more tightly auto-productive (which is only what ‘positive feedback’ already says). Because it appeals to nothing beyond itself, it is inherently nihilistic. It has no conceivable meaning beside self-amplification. It grows in order to grow. Mankind is its temporary host, not its master. Its only purpose is itself.” — Nick Land, ‘A Quick-and-Dirty Introduction to Accelerationism’

An understanding of what this means can perhaps best be gained by looking at Marx’s analysis of capitalist production (which I assume you’re familiar with). Capital’s only purpose is the production of more capital, including the reproduction of itself, in any form. To do this, capital invests in resources and labour, which produce commodities, which are then sold only for the value created to be reinvested into the productive process. The Landian perspective, influenced by cybernetics, is based on the observation that the thing initially input into the process (value) is exactly the same as the thing produced by the output of the process. If a particular business fails to make surplus value, the amount of resources it controls continuously reduces until it vanishes; if it succeeds in making surplus value, it invests in more and more resources, constantly expanding. Capital is a self-adapting machine designed to consume everything for the production of more capital. Capital can and will utilise everything in existence to produce more capital, and to this end it is a perfectly designed machine, since it endlessly changes and evolves to become more efficient and productive. This is a simple point, but it’s the cornerstone of Land’s philosophy.

“It is ceasing to be a matter of how we think about technics, if only because technics is increasingly thinking about itself. It might still be a few decades before artificial intelligences surpass the horizon of biological ones, but it is utterly superstitious to imagine that the human dominion of terrestrial culture is still marked out in centuries, let alone in some metaphysical perpetuity. The high road to thinking no longer passes through a deepening of human cognition, but rather through a becoming inhuman of cognition, a migration of cognition out into the emerging planetary technosentience reservoir, into 'dehumanized landscapes...emptied spaces' where human culture will be dissolved.” — Nick Land, ‘Circuitries’

This quote is perhaps the weirdest of the lot in content, if not in style. It’s fundamental idea is that intelligence, as distinct from sentience, is the ability to adapt oneself in order to achieve a goal or surmount an obstacle. Under this definition, capitalist production, as we have seen already, is intelligent; since it’s not a biological organism, however, it must be an artificial intelligence. The idea, completely without metaphor, is that capitalism is an AI, and that it’s already won; the AI has already taken over and we didn’t notice. At the moment this seems purely stylistic, but as Land’s philosophy develops we see it become more and more significant.

“Emergent Planetary Commercium trashes the Holy Roman Empire, the Napoleonic Continental System, the Second and Third Reich, and the Soviet International, cranking-up world disorder through compressing phases. Deregulation and the state arms-race each other into cyberspace.” — Nick Land, ‘Meltdown’

This one is relatively simple, but it serves to introduce the concept of time to Land’s work. The general idea is that, once it has begun to exist, capitalism cannot be stopped. The assumption, not stated explicitly but undeniably assumed, is Deleuze and Guattari’s conclusion that all hitherto existing societies have attempted to ward off capitalism in every aspect of their social relations. Land’s claim here is that capitalism outstrips and overthrows every prior and subsequent approach to politics. This is the first and only hint we get in any of these quotes regarding ‘hyperstition’, a fiction that makes itself real. Hyperstition is the idea that predictions about what the future will look like are, in some cases, so captivating to human culture that we can’t help but make them real (think hoverboards); at no point do we stop to think ‘Is this good?’ or even ‘Do we want this?’, we simply make the prediction a reality. Capitalism, according to Land, is one such hyperstition. Capitalism is the artificial intelligence that invades from the future to make itself real. I am incapable of adequately describing Land’s approach to time, but that will do as an introduction.

“What, then, is Land's philosophy about?

In a nutshell: Deleuze and Guattari's machinic desire remorselessly

stripped of all Bergsonian vitalism, and made backwards-compatible with Freud's death drive and Schopenhauer's Will. The Hegelian-Marxist motor of history is then transplanted into this pulsional nihilism: the idiotic autonomic Will no longer circulating on the spot, but upgraded into a drive, and guided by a quasi-teleological artificial intelligence attractor that draws terrestrial history over a series of intensive thresholds that have no eschatological point of consummation, and that reach empirical termination only contingently if and when its material substrate burns out. This is Hegelian-Marxist historical materialism inverted: Capital will not be ultimately unmasked as exploited labour power; rather, humans are the meat puppet of Capital, their identities and self-understandings are simulations that can and will be ultimately be sloughed off.” — Mark Fisher, ‘Terminator VS Avatar’

Fisher here provides an excellent summary of Land, but one that requires a great deal of explanation. Firstly, the “idiotic autonomic Will” is the will to life of Schopenhauer, portrayed as unproductive and unchanging. In Land’s philosophy, this will becomes “upgraded into a drive”, specifically the death drive of Freud, but it’s taken away from the unconscious and put into the “motor of history”. Land takes the understanding of history as teleological from Marx and Hegel, but makes it only “quasi-teleological”; there are many ways history can unfold, but it will always tend towards the “pulsional nihilism” of the death drive of humanity, where humanity is used simply as a trigger to cause the development of capitalism, much like the fission reaction is used to trigger the much larger fusion reaction of a hydrogen bomb. The “quasi-teleogical” endpoint of history is the victory of capitalism, at which point the history of humanity ends, and humanity becomes simply subservient to the AI it created. This is, to say the least, an extreme anti-humanist perspective. The “motor of history”, the “pulsional nihilism” is the “artificial intelligence attractor”, which draws capitalism in from the future, or (depending on your perspective), draws humanity towards the critical mass of unleashing capitalism. In doing so, human (“terrestrial”) history passes through a few stages, over a few significant thresholds, whereby social organisation is qualitatively distinct from the previous and subsequent form, but this is not a full teleology; these thresholds do not come together, capitalism has no endpoint inherent to itself — if it ever ends, it’ll only be because it ran out of resources to consume, burnt itself out. “[H]umans are the meat puppet of Capital, their identities and self-understandings are simulations that can and will be ultimately be sloughed off.”

Land, however, misunderstands capitalism; he sees it as purely deterritorialising, when in reality (and according to Deleuze and Guattari), it also reterritorialises constantly. As such, it will never unveil its true face, and can never do without humans completely, so Land’s predictions were fundamentally flawed. There’s nothing that proves this quite as well as Facebook, which completely reterritorialised almost the entire Internet, which Land saw as extremely deterritorialising (understandably, since it looked quite different in the ‘90s).

And that’s Land, and all you really need as an introduction to accelerationism.

“While Land's cybergothic remix of Deleuze and Guattari is in so many respects superior to the original, his deviation from their understanding of capitalism is fatal. Land collapses capitalism into what Deleuze and Guattari call schizophrenia, thus losing their most crucial insight into the way that capitalism operates via simultaneous processes of deterritorialization and compensatory reterritorializa tion. Capital's human face is not something that it can eventually set aside, an optional component or sheath-cocoon with which it can ultimately dispense. The abstract processes of decoding that capitalism sets off must be contained by improvised archaisms. lest capitalism cease being capitalism. Similarly, markets may or may not be the self-organising meshworks described by Fernand Braudel and Manuel Delanda, but what is certain is that capitalism, dominated by quasi-monopolies such as Microsoft and Wal-Mart, is an anti-market. Bill Gates promises business at the speed of thought. but what capitalism delivers is thought at the speed of business. A simulation of innovation and newness that cloaks inertia and stasis.” — Mark Fisher, ‘Terminator VS Avatar’

Sources:

The Deleuze Dictionary, by Adrian Parr: https://chilonas.files.wordpress.com/2018/11/thedeleuzedictionary.pdf

Terminator VS Avatar, by Mark Fisher: https://hersephoria.com/files/books/theory/Mark_Fisher_Terminator_vs_Avatar.pdf

Meltdown, by Nick Land: http://www.ccru.net/swarm1/1_melt.htm

Circuitries, by Nick Land: http://www.labster8.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/NickLand-Circuitries.pdf

Nick Land on the ‘Other Life’ podcast: