Accelerationism

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"Accelerationism is the name of a contemporary political heresy: the insistence that the only radical political response to capitalism is not to protest, disrupt, critique, or détourne it, but to accelerate and exacerbate its uprooting, alienating, decoding, abstractive tendencies.

The term was coined to designate a certain nihilistic alignment of theory with the excess and abandon of capitalist culture, and the associated performative aesthetic of texts that seek to become immanent to the very process of alienation. Developing at the dawn of contemporary neoliberal consensus, the uneasy status of this impulse, between subversion and acquiescence, between theoretical purchase and aesthetic enjoyment, constitutes the core problematic of accelerationism." (Source)

Events

Authors

Writings

Noys

  • Benjamin Noys, "Accelerationism", No Useless Leniency blog, Oct 2008.
  • Benjamin Noys, "Apocalypse, Tendency, Crisis", Mute 15 (Feb 2010); repr. in Eurozine, May 2010.
  • Benjamin Noys, The Persistence of the Negative: A Critique of Contemporary Continental Philosophy, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, Sep 2010, 196 pp. Discusses the work of Derrida, Deleuze, Latour, Negri, and Badiou from the perspective of accelerationism (see also the section 'Primary references' below).
  • Steven Shaviro, Post Cinematic Affect, O-Books, Dec 2010. A book on accelerationist aesthetics, treating recent audiovisual productions as mappings of the spaces and affective modulations of neoliberal capitalism, 200 pp. Passage (pp 136-139).
  • Nick Land's blog posts on acceleration.
Talks
  • Benjamin Noys, "The Grammar of Neoliberalism", 2010; printed in Dark Trajectories: Politics of the Outside, ed. Joshua Johnson, [NAME] Publications, Aug 2013. Talk given at the Accelerationism workshop at Goldsmiths on 14 Sep 2010.
  • Benjamin Noys, "Abandoning Accelerationism? Two Exits", 2013. Talk given at University of Westminster on 23 May 2014.
Primary references

Noys: "In my critical account [The Persistence of the Negative], accelerationism originates as an explicit theory in the early 1970s in three main works [listed below]. The common origin lies in the recognition that capitalism forms the dominant horizon, subsuming not only forms of life but also strategies of opposition," (from his June 2013 interview). "[These three texts] reply to Marx’s contention that ‘[t]he real barrier of capitalist production is capital itself’, by arguing that we must crash through this barrier by turning capitalism against itself. They are an exotic variant of la politique du pire: if capitalism generates its own forces of dissolution then the necessity is to radicalise capitalism itself: the worse the better. We can call this tendency accelerationism," (passage) (pp 4-6).

  • Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia [1972], trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane, University of Minnesota Press, 1983.
  • Jean-François Lyotard, Libidinal Economy [1974], trans. Ian Hamilton Grant, Indiana University Press, 1993.
  • Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Economy and Death [1976], trans. Ian Hamilton Grant, Sage, 1993.

#Accelerate Manifesto and commentaries

Selected essays

Anthologies and special issues of magazines

  • e-flux 46: "Accelerationist Aesthetics" (Jun 2013), ed. Gean Moreno. Texts by Alex Williams, Steven Shaviro, Benjamin Bratton, François Roche, Franco Berardi Bifo, Mark Fisher, Benedict Singleton, Debbora Battaglia, Patricia MacCormack, and John Russell.
  • Armen Avanessian (ed.), #Akzeleration, Berlin: Merve, Dec 2013, 96 pp. (in German). Texts by Armen Avanessian, Franco Bifo Berardi, Nick Land, Patricia McCormack, Benjamin Noys, Matteo Pasquinelli, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams. [3]
  • Armen Avanessian, Robin Mackay (eds.), #Accelerate#: The Accelerationist Reader, Urbanomic, May 2014. Texts by Mark Fisher, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, Antonio Negri, Tiziana Terranova, Luciana Parisi, Reza Negarestani, Ray Brassier, Benedict Singleton, Nick Land, Patricia Reed, Diann Bauer and "a genealogy of accelerationism". [4]
  • Armen Avanessian, Robin Mackay (eds.), #Akzeleration#2, trans. Moritz Gansen and Hannah Wallenfels, Berlin: Merve, Oct 2014, 100 pp. (in German). Texts by Ray Brassier, Nick Land, Toni Negri, Luciana Parisi, Nick Srnicek, Tiziana Terranova and Alex Williams. [5]

Interviews

Blogs

Nick Srnicek (Synthetic Edifice), Nick Land (Urban Future), London-based PhD-students (Accelerationism: Cosmism, Prometheanism, New Enlightenment], Craig Hickman (Alien Ecologies).

More

Primary references

1990s UK theory-fiction on acceleration
  • Nick Land, "Circuitries", Pli 4:1/2 (1992), pp 217-235; repr. in Land, Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007, eds. Robin Mackay and Ray Brassier, Urbanomic, 2011, pp 289-318; repr. in #Accelerate#: The Accelerationist Reader, eds. Armen Avanessian and Robin Mackay, Urbanomic, 2014.
  • Nick Land, "Meltdown", Abstract Culture 1, Coventry: CCRU, 1997, [6]; repr. in Land, Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007, eds. Robin Mackay and Ray Brassier, Urbanomic, 2011, pp 441-459. [7]. First presented at Virtual Futures, Warwick University, May 1994.
  • Nick Land, Sadie Plant, "Cyberpositive", in Unnatural: Techno-Theory for a Contaminated Culture, ed. Matthew Fuller, 1994; repr. in #Accelerate#: The Accelerationist Reader, eds. Armen Avanessian and Robin Mackay, Urbanomic, 2014.
  • Iain Hamilton Grant, "Los Angeles 2019: Demopathy and Xenogenesis (Some Realist Notes on Blade Runner and the Postmodern Condition)" [1997]; printed as "LA 2019: Demopathy and Xenogenesis" in #Accelerate#: The Accelerationist Reader, eds. Armen Avanessian and Robin Mackay, Urbanomic, 2014.
  • CCRU, "Cybernetic Culture"; repr. in #Accelerate#: The Accelerationist Reader, eds. Armen Avanessian and Robin Mackay, Urbanomic, 2014.
  • CCRU, "Swarmachines", Abstract Culture 1, Coventry: CCRU, 1997, [8]; repr. in #Accelerate#: The Accelerationist Reader, eds. Armen Avanessian and Robin Mackay, Urbanomic, 2014.

See also

Cybernetic Culture Research Unit


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