WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED WITH THE POLITICS OF ACCELERATIONISM?

Reading Ben Noys' recent note on accelerationism, one gets the feeling that many are starting to return (some more reluctantly than others) to the original sources of accelerationism to discover that, after so much fucking with L/Acc and R/Acc, the real fun was in the original accelerationism. 

Ultimately, perhaps we've been misunderstanding the "speculative turn." Why do we speak so readily of overcoming the framework of language and the framework of the subject (typical tasks of postmodernism and poststructuralism), yet struggle so much to talk about overcoming the framework of human politics? Why is it harder to imagine the end of human politics than the end of capitalism?

Because, indeed, however many post-apocalyptic scenarios we may dream up (including the end of capitalism), none is as apocalyptic as the end of human centrality. This is the terminal station beyond the well-known ends of history, culture, civilizations, economic systems and so on. The end of humanity is the nihil ulterius awaiting at the end of the game. But this particular "endgame" I'm referring to (for humans) might not be an end for the post/none/more-than humans. 

Accelerationist polytics is not so much a politics for humans as for the non-human and the marginal constellations of the human, and it clearly runs counter to the speciesist framework that underpins exceptionalism. It is a more-than-human politics because it includes the human in a non-essentialist sense and because it opens it up to (or is opened up by) feedback with alien circuits. —Recall, for example, Land's famous "fish code," or the K-space of machine production as a virtual matrix of the real—. Sadie Plant's cyberfeminism is perhaps the clearest proposition of an accelerationism concerned with subaltern (id)entities, the zeros, the Others, the unrepresented or unrepresentable within human identity codes. —This included, crucially for Plant and Land, abject intelligences[1] and the very notion of non-human intelligence—. Hence, many accelerationists have always used, in my view, a restricted form of accelerationism, one that denounces the contingency of capital but has not yet made the leap to the screen of the “final monster,” which is none other than human subjectivity/identity and its exclusionary politics. Thus, the accelerationist framework may end with a sense of the political made by and for men (and especially for a certain type of men), but it will not end with a million inhuman post-politics that are yet to flourish. Perhaps we need a million non-human politics, after all.[2]

It is essential to understand that the notion of the human polis can and should delve into the realm of the inhuman polys, and the same can be said of the inner sanctum of knowledge. For all science, properly understood, is first and foremost an oceanography, a portal to the outside, a vanishing point where knowledge is opened by the unknown—the true, unfinished purpose of the Enlightenment, to use Negarestani's words today.

Just as the feminist slogan "the personal is political" threw a wrench in the works of idealist patriarchy, when we say "the (im)personal is political," we not only don't deny political power but expand it, endowing it with an inappropriate meaning it didn't previously possess. And it is here that the supposed "apolitics" of accelerationism reveals itself for what it has always been: a politics that "doesn't behave well" ("always unfaithful"), a politics of non-human or not exclusively human relationships. In this sense, accelerationism is not apolitical in its origin: it is more political than "politics" itself; which means beyond the politics of identity, the politics of sameness and difference that underpins every human economy. An alien politics. A hyper-politics, if you will.

Far from making the political impossible, what "original" accelerationism (that of the Warwick school) did was queerize it, infect it, infocorrupt the data in a posthuman and post-species xenogenetic crossbreed. And, in a fate similar to that of queer politics, the safeguards of traditional organic thought (or the ROM/unidirectional Regime of Time) were quick to raise their defenses against the cth-subversive possibilities of accelerationism, in an attempt to steer things back toward monohuman agency and its parochial interests. Perhaps the humanist left, with its perpetual and necessary demand for a post-capitalist future, was merely obstructing the posthuman potentialities of accelerationism (with neo-reaction as its fascist twin); because, as Sadie Plant already pointed out, the most radical gesture might consist of dismantling the structural tactics of human(phallo)centrism, rather than the ever-reappropriable strategies of the vicious capitalist circuit. In a way, accelerationism came to certify a great failure of the left, given its reluctance to see beyond human epistemological limits, and hence the term accelerationism coined by Noys arose as a negation of accelerationism itself. Accelerationism, like a stillborn child (like a pure machinic desire), has always been a disturbing specter for the organic hopes of the left and will always regard with cadaverous coldness the pathetic fundamentalisms wielded by the right. Ultimately, it is this regime of abject and retrocausal temporality of accelerationism (its future politics) that is the only thing capable of collapsing the appropriations of human politics as they are found in L/Acc and R/Acc.

Notes

[1] Thanks to VNS Matrix for the contribution of their AI = "Abject Intelligence".

[2] Cf. Reza Negarestani, polytics = “Schizotrategy”: “Strategies for being open (by), not for being open (to),” in clear reference to Land’s “Schizotechnics” and Barker plutonics. As well as his “Cthulhuoid Ethics”: “A political ethic necessary to replace or undermine existing political-economic and religious systems. Cthulhuoid Ethics is fundamental to accelerating the emergence of and encounter with the radical Outside, and can be characterized by the question ‘What will happen now?’ when it is formulated by the other side or the radical outsider, instead of by the human being and their faculties.” Negarestani, Cyclonopedia, and Land/CCRU, "Barker Speaks".