Robin Mackay, Armen Avanessian (eds.), #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader (2014)

“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.

#Accelerate presents a genealogy of accelerationism, tracking the impulse through 90s UK darkside cyberculture and the theory-fictions of Nick Land, Sadie Plant, Iain Grant, and CCRU, across the cultural underground of the 80s (rave, acid house, SF cinema) and back to its sources in delirious post-68 ferment, in texts whose searing nihilistic jouissance would later be disavowed by their authors and the marxist and academic establishment alike.

On either side of this central sequence, the book includes texts by Marx that call attention to his own ‘Prometheanism’, and key works from recent years document the recent extraordinary emergence of new accelerationisms steeled against the onslaughts of neoliberal capitalist realism, and retooled for the twenty-first century.

At the forefront of the energetic contemporary debate around this disputed, problematic term, #Accelerate activates a historical conversation about futurality, technology, politics, enjoyment and capital. This is a legacy shot through with contradictions, yet urgently galvanized today by the poverty of ‘reasonable’ contemporary political alternatives.”

Publisher Urbanomic, Falmouth, with Merve, Berlin, 2014
ISBN 9780957529557
536 pages

Reviews: Malcolm Harris (New Inquiry), J.J. Charlesworth (Art Review), Simon O’Sullivan (Mute), Alex Andrews (Review31), Orlando Read (Frieze).
Commentaries: McKenzie Wark (Public Seminar), David Cunningham (Radical Philosophy).

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Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, Jacob Wamberg (eds.): Totalitarian Art and Modernity (2010)

“In spite of the steadily expanding concept of art in the Western world, art made in twentieth-century totalitarian regimes – notably Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and the communist East Bloc countries – is still to a surprising degree excluded from mainstream art history and the exhibits of art museums. In contrast to earlier art made to promote princely or ecclesiastical power, this kind of visual culture seems to somehow not fulfill the category of ‘true’ art, instead being marginalised as propaganda for politically suspect regimes.

Totalitarian Art and Modernity wants to modify this displacement, comparing totalitarian art with modernist and avant-garde movements; confronting their cultural and political embeddings; and writing forth their common generalogies. Its eleven articles include topics as varied as: the concept of totalitarianism and totalitarian art, totalitarian exhibitions, monuments and architecture, forerunners of totalitarian art in romanticism and heroic realism, and diverse receptions of totalitarian art in democratic cultures.”

With contributions by Mikkel Bolt, Sandra Esslinger, Jørn Guldberg, Paul Jaskot, Jacob Wamberg, Christina Kiaer, Anders V. Munch, Kristine Nielsen, Olaf Peters, K. Andrea Rusnock, and Marla Stone.

Publisher Aarhus University Press, Århus, 2010
Acta Jutlandica series, 9
ISBN 8779345603, 9788779345607
359 pages
via Mikkel Bolt

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McKenzie Wark: Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene (2015)

“In Molecular Red, McKenzie Wark creates philosophical tools for the Anthropocene, our new planetary epoch, in which human and natural forces are so entwined that the future of one determines that of the other.

Wark explores the implications of Anthropocene through the story of two empires, the Soviet and then the American. The fall of the former prefigures that of the latter. From the ruins of these mighty histories, Wark salvages ideas to help us picture what kind of worlds collective labor might yet build. From the Russian revolution, Wark unearths the work of Alexander Bogdanov—Lenin’s rival—as well as the great Proletkult writer and engineer Andrey Platonov.

The Soviet experiment emerges from the past as an allegory for the new organizational challenges of our time. From deep within the Californian military-entertainment complex, Wark retrieves Donna Haraway‘s cyborg critique and science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson’s Martian utopia as powerful resources for rethinking and remaking the world that climate change has wrought. Molecular Red proposes an alternative realism, where hope is found in what remains and endures.”

Publisher Verso, London and New York, March 2015
ISBN 1781688273, 9781781688274
xxiv+280 pages

Reviews: Slavoj Žižek (Verso 2015, Wark’s response), John Beck (Radical Philosophy 2015), Mark Rappolt (ArtReview 2015), Maria Chehonadskih (Mute 2015, Wark’s response), Two Grenadiers (2015), Pieter Vermeulen & Tom Chadwick (nY 2016), Jim Harper (LSE Review of Books 2016).
Commentary: Joe Guinan (Renewal 2015), Jernej Kaluža (Radio Student 2019, SL).

Video lecture (Concordia U, Apr 2015)
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See also Molecular Red Reader compiled by Wark (PDF).