File:Dromology, Bolidism and Marxist Accelerationism.pdf

Author :: Obsolete Capitalism; Title :: Dromology, Bolidism and Marxist Accelerationism; Publishing House :: Rizosfera; Series of books :: The Strong of the Future; Code :: SF009.eng

Dromology, Bolidism and Marxist accelerationism, an odd text by Obsolete Capitalism written in the summer of 2015, represents the first endeavor in the speculative philosophical sphere known by the equally eccentric name of “accelerationism”. The main source of the book is Matteo Pasquinelli’s Algoritmi del Capitale (Ombre Corte, 2014), followed by other texts of contemporary authors such as Molecular Red by McKenzie Wark. However, Obsolete Capitalism has always rejected the label of “review”. In fact, they do not accept the triptych composed of the power figure of the critic, of the role that culture and philosophy assign to critique, and of the dapper halo of the know-it-all reader. As a result, the text is closer to Paul Klee’s semi-automatic rickety appliance, that is, the notorious Twittering machine, or to the saturated distortions and the soft entropy of A.R. Kane’s “suicidal kiss” in 69, rather than to a quasi-essay able to introduce itself in the national and international debate on accelerationism. The matter is that Obsolete Capitalism did not and still does not identify itself in any nineteenth-century political classification bestowed on the multiple trends of this movement. Accelerationist thought, be that political or philosophical, does not exhaust itself in the philosophy of Nick Land or Nick Srnicek, among others. The core feature was, and still is, to refuse any form of identification, that is, it is necessary to perpetually trans-identify oneself, and question each model – be that the closest or the most distant one – in order to open spaces for experimentation and caosmosis, that is, for the unthinkable. The text is divided in two parts which ought to be read in such sense: the “dromologic archives” are an early but inevitable attempt to institute, in the name of Paul Virilio, a kind of Encyclopedia of the World of Speed and Acceleration, although the two terms are not synonyms. The accelerationist paragraphs, which in some way are asymmetrical to the “dromologic archives”, appear as counterpoints to speculative Marxist and workerist thought embodied by authors like Pasquinelli, Terranova, Srnicek, Williams and McKenzie-Wark. To sum up, we find the theme that Obsolete Capitalism points at, among the ghosts of Revolution and Al-Khwarizmi, to be the following: the danger, which Marxist accelerationism runs without any understanding of the power of the becoming, is that of going back with adrenaline enthusiasm over the same routes already explored by Marxist catastrophism, or, on the contrary, that of reviving the ghost of the Nation through modernist and technologically-computed idealizations which found their own success – once again – on the asphyxiating embrace of the Exploded Good of the State.