Posts ⁂ The Postmodern Terminal >_
A reading of Laboria Cuboniks, Helen Hester, Aria Dean, and McKenzie Wark on who actually absorbs the speed that accelerationism keeps celebrating.
In 2015 a manifesto appeared under the name Laboria Cuboniks, who is nobody. The name anagrams Nicolas Bourbaki, a fake mathematician invented by French academics in the 1930s so a group could publish as one mind. Behind the second fake name sat six women on three continents, and their closing line is a demand, not a complaint: "If nature is unjust, change nature!" I argue that the sharpest accelerationist thinking of the last decade comes from the tradition's margins rather than its center, by reading xenofeminism and blacceleration as two answers to the question the center keeps declining to ask: whose body absorbs the speed.
For two centuries the standard argument against feminist demands has been that something is natural: a place, a hormone level, a division of labor. Xenofeminism (XF, in the manifesto's shorthand) does not try to win that argument; it walks off the field. "Natural" is not a good enough reason for anything, so if biology functions as a cage, rebuild the biology.
What holds the six authors together is a term most feminism treats as a wound. Alienation, being cut off from your body, your labor, your people, usually counts as the injury to be healed. Laboria Cuboniks flip it: we are all alienated, and we never were anything else, so alienation is the material you build freedom out of. Gender abolitionism follows, and gets misread constantly. Nobody is asked to stop being a woman or man. What gets abolished is gender as a grid, the mechanism that hands out power by category. Keep the traits; lose the sorter. "Let a hundred sexes bloom!" is an image of more, not less.
Helen Hester, one of the six, spelled out the practice in her 2018 book Xenofeminism. Her word is repurposing: take technology built for one narrow purpose and hand it to the people it acts on rather than leaving it behind a clinic door. Hormone regimens run by the people taking them; medical instructions published rather than patented. Hester is candid about the irony: she has hung her account of posthuman agency on care, a vision she rejected elsewhere. Most critiques of technology want less of it. This one wants the same machinery in different hands.
The second current cuts deeper. In December 2017 Aria Dean published "Notes on Blacceleration" in e-flux journal, and her claim reorders the genealogy: the enslaved person, not the industrial worker, was capitalism's first fully commodified life. Every accelerationist story about capital stripping people down to exchange value describes something that already happened, with paperwork, centuries earlier. A history of capital reduced to exploitation, alienation, and wage labor, Dean writes, cannot account for the position of the slave. That is racial capitalism: capital structured through Black subjection from the start, not racism bolted on later by accident.
Blacceleration lands on the tradition's favorite thrill. Nick Land races gleefully toward a future with nothing human left in it; Dean's charge is that celebrating the inhuman while ignoring people who already lived total commodification reinforces the white humanism those thinkers claim to have shed. The thrill is not speculative. It has an archive, and the archive has a body count.
McKenzie Wark traces a lineage he calls Black accelerationism, from Sun Ra's big-band cosmology through Detroit techno to Kodwo Eshun, who argued that machine music needs no roots or authenticity. We no longer have roots, Eshun writes; we have aerials. Drexciya, the Detroit myth of a nation under the Atlantic peopled by descendants of women thrown from slave ships, is not a memorial. It is a future built from the worst available past.
Neither current gets a free pass. Hito Steyerl mocked the scene's aesthetic as dead white Ferrari envy, and Benjamin Noys notes that xenofeminism's link to accelerationism is asserted more often than argued. A third hit: "xeno" indexes a racially coded outside, hard to embrace if your alienation meant exclusion from citizenship rather than a seminar position. The manifesto saw it coming and wrote the warning into itself: abolishing race can remain a tacit white supremacism, abolishing gender a veiled misogyny, especially when avowed feminists prosecute it. A politics that calls alienation raw material owes an answer to people for whom alienation was the whole sentence.
The Postmodern Terminal >_