Posts ⁂ The Postmodern Terminal >_
A genealogy of accelerationist thought from Marx's Fragment on Machines through Nietzsche, Deleuze and Guattari, the CCRU, and the critic who named the whole thing.
A conference room at Warwick University, late in the 1990s. Jungle music loud enough to feel in your chest. A philosophy lecturer named Nick Land lies on the floor, croaking into a microphone. A man in the crowd stands up, says "some of us are still Marxists, you know," and walks out. That room produced much of the vocabulary people now use to argue about artificial intelligence. I will argue that accelerationism is a theory assembled out of collapse rather than strength, tracing its carriers from an unpublished notebook to a rented house to a critic who spent fifteen years attacking the thing he named.
Seed one is a Prussian exile in a London library, filling notebooks he never planned to publish. In 1857 and 1858 Karl Marx writes the pages editors later call the Grundrisse, and buried inside sits the passage known as the Fragment on Machines. The worker no longer runs the machine; the worker is a conscious linkage inside an automatic system. Marx's words: "In machinery, objectified labour confronts living labour within the labour process itself as the power which rules it." Then, pages on, something closer to hope: "Capital thus works towards its own dissolution as the form dominating production." In 1848 he had told a room he voted for free trade because it "hastens the social revolution." Push the bad thing harder and it breaks sooner.
Seed two comes from a philosopher who despised most of what Marx believed. In an unpublished note, Friedrich Nietzsche considers what he calls the leveling of European man, and instead of mourning writes that "the leveling process of European man is the great process which should not be checked. One should even accelerate it." Do not stop the thing you hate. Speed it up.
Those lines sit in libraries for a century before two French writers pick them up. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari publish Anti-Oedipus in 1972 and ask whether the answer to capitalism's tearing up of the old world is to pull back or push deeper. Two years later Jean-François Lyotard takes the wager darker in Libidinal Economy: there is no outside to capitalism, not your body, not death. He later disowned it, calling it his evil book.
Twenty years on, Sadie Plant and Nick Land found the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit at Warwick in 1995. Iain Hamilton Grant, who taught alongside them, remembers the start: William Gibson's Neuromancer "got into the philosophy department, and it went viral." The CCRU was never a department, only a collective the university tolerated, and Land stated its creed flatly in 1997: "I think capitalism and artificial intelligence are the same thing. It's the same process." Plant left that year. The rest moved into a house once owned by Aleister Crowley and drifted into amphetamines and diagrams that stopped resembling philosophy. Land had a breakdown and vanished from academic life. Robin Mackay, who later edited those essays, said of the period: "It's another life; I have nothing to say about it."
Ray Brassier drew the moral in 2010: follow Land's premises and "there is no bearer of revolutionary intensification left." Nobody remains to do the politics. Once no revolutionary subject exists, the market is the only impersonal force left to affirm, which is how an ultra-left theory slid into cheering deregulation.
Benjamin Noys supplies the name that same year, in The Persistence of the Negative, and means it as an insult. He also names the cautionary ancestor: Italian Futurism, whose 1909 manifesto glorified war as "the only hygiene of the world" and whose poets ended up brawling beside Mussolini's squads, "the symbolically toxic avant-garde." Speed-worship has gone somewhere ugly before. Noys puts his position plainly: "Speed is a problem. Our lives are too fast… But I want to tell another, stranger, story: of those who think we haven't gone fast enough."
The insult did not stay one. In 2013 Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek put a hashtag in front of the word; in 2015 Xenofeminism appeared under the name Laboria Cuboniks; and the New Centre for Research and Practice ran seminars titled #Accelerate. The slur had a syllabus. Hold onto how it began, because what follows presents this tradition as a theory of power. It started as a story of people coming apart.
The Postmodern Terminal >_