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In contemporary theory, no speculative gesture from the Left has come under more scrutiny and reaction than that of Accelerationism. A response to the impasses of the present – that, to quote Thatcher, there is really is no alternative – Accelerationism looks to conjure a new politico-philosophical programme, one that can break the shackles of neoliberal, late-capitalist society and propel us into a post-capitalist milieu of a world without work. Behind the political economies of thinkers such as Srnicek and Williams and the more divergent rhetoric of figures such as Nick Land, lies a genealogy of thought originating in the wake of May 1968 and the work of philosophers such as Deleuze and Guattari and Lyotard. Arguing that there can be no outside of capitalism, these arguments tether their understating of contemporary politics as one that must work through capitalism in order to achieve its goals, using the methods and qualities of a global, abstract and complex system against itself. The purpose of this dissertation is to explore first the genealogy of this thought and its ramifications on contemporary thinkers. But also, to explore the trajectories of what may lie in pursuit of an Accelerationist Aesthetic, and whether it is possible to imagine a practice that would reflect the priorities of a truly Accelerationist agenda.
Helvete: A Journal of Black Metal Theory
Black Metal Machine: Theorizing Industrial Black Metal2013 •
This article argues that far from being a marginal Black Metal subgenre, Industrial Black Metal is central in bringing out Black Metal’s often disavowed appropriation of machinic noise and its critique of machine society. Through its engagement with “becoming machine” logic and robot apocalypse, cybernetic, and cosmic science fictions, Industrial Black Metal reconfigures Black Metal’s drive toward the inorganic inhuman as vehement critique of capitalist modernity and the industrial death state.
2018 •
The article focuses on a change in the understanding of death. Transhumanism is here understood as a reaction to the technicization of culture. One of the areas which are declared to be transcended by technology is human mortality. Analysis of such a change is conducted to show that one does not need a working technology that abolishes death, but that the change could be cultural and have significant impact on human life. This process of transcending death with the usage of technology is understood as a fictionalization of death. The philosophical and cultural outcomes are analyzed for human existence.
This series of essays offers a critique of Information Studies, taken as a discipline largely concerned with informational objects and their representations on the one hand and the control of these same by means of other informational objects and their representations on the other. Specifically, the critique put forward here attends to the ways that the common practices of Information Studies may reinforce representationalist ideologies that are historically problematic and that are likely to continue to be so into the future if allowed to persist. Such ideologies are bound up with histories of oppression, colonialism, and cognitive injustice in ways that seem likely to be undesirable to most practitioners upon consideration. The critique offered seeks to point out this conjunction of aesthetic and ethical issues in our practical epistemological constructs, opening out largely untried avenues of exploration with regard to our axiological habits—axiology being defined here as the inquiry that includes ethics, aesthetics, and epistemology—and the architectonic structures of meaning and understanding that we deploy with ever increasing density in (and occasionally as) the world. In the related field of semiotics, an assumption, bordering on a principle, obtains that meaning has structure and that that structure is intelligible. The work of semiotic theorists has shown that this is not likely to be exclusively a logocentric prejudice. The works of Gilles Deleuze and his sometimes partner Felix Guattari, along with those of C.S. Peirce and Justus Buchler, each postulate in their own way that meaning and its structure are continuous with the world, and, going further, that the structures of meaning that exist in the world have no intrinsic limit to their complexity in a general sense other than the availability of resources to build that complexity. This is not equivalent to saying that the forms of such complexity are unlimited in the sense that they could take all possible forms, though the number of possible form-states may be infinite in principle when the availability of resources is bracketed off as a concern. That indicates to us the likelihood that no single ideology gives us a complete picture of all possible semiotic modalities and that, with sufficient resources, multiple modalities may coexist and interact in a single system, event, or order. All of this places semiosis in a thermodynamic milieu between complex systems theory and computation theory, even while suggesting analogies to ecophenomenology and ecosystems thinking as an interpretation of Peircean "infinite semiosis." While semiotics, as an architectonic discipline, traces continuities with the Kantian paradigm, the Deleuzean approach represents a turn in philosophy both in expressive style and ways of doing philosophy, such that both a reinvestigation of semiotic structures and the production of new rhetorical modes are suggested in light of it—though Deleuze is a threshold for such matters, not a container. Making use of Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Niklas Luhmann, Luciano Floridi, and François Laruelle (as well as Patrick Wilson, Marcia Bates, and Jonathan Furner) to construct an ordinal semiotic compatible with various structural realisms, the arguments here commit to a pataphysical and hermetic swerve that aligns with the "Dark Deleuzean" aesthetics of Nick Land and Reza Negarestani, exploring the metaphor of darkness itself by way of the immanence theories of Timothy Morton and Eugene Thacker. The argument pattern described can be seen as an affirmation of possibly novel values of global, transspecies cognitive justice and "cognitive veganism" at least partially consistent with the ethical concerns and images of thought of such thinkers as Richard Kahn and Stephen David Ross. Due to the emphasis on continuity with the world, the above motivates us to take seriously various posthumanistic rhetorics' priorities: cybernetics, informatics, thermodynamics, complex and autopoietic systems, codality, cognitive and neuro-diversity, enhanced and artificial intelligence, postvitalist ecology, and perhaps even Singularity. Because of that same continuity, each of these should be necessarily thought in relation to planetarity and global history. Through that thought we can understand semiotic processes and ecologies as bound up with what Land has called a "terraprocess." Information Studies, as a discipline emerging into full fruition within the context of a posthumanistic moment, situated in turn within the Anthropocene Era, should understand and engage with this terraprocess as the architectonic syntax for a more fundamental informatic and metainformatic axiology.
Postmodern Culture
The Brain at Work: Cognitive Labor and the Posthuman Brain in Alvin Lucier’s Music for Solo Performer2018 •
This essay examines cognitive labor and the posthuman brain in composer Alvin Lucier’s Music for Solo Performer (1965). Alongside a discussion of the historical relationships between cybernetics, posthumanism, and political economy, it contextualizes Lucier's neurofeedback experiments in light of the expansion of the military-industrial complex and the large-scale labor transformations of late capitalism. Read as staging the performer's "brain at work," Music for Solo Performer appears here as a response to post-Fordist economic models that prioritize cognitive over manual forms of labor.
I argue that 'deep' ecology (as exemplified by the work of Arnie Naess) involves three inter-related commitments: (1) to an ethics of nature or axiological anti-humanism in which natural entities, processes or systems can possess intrinsic value independently of human beings; (2) a metaphysical naturalism or anti-humanism in which human beings are themselves conceptualized as natural products; (3) a transformative aspect. Although (3) is sometimes cast in personal or psychological terms, I think the idea can be given a properly philosophical reconstruction along the lines of a kind of Ideologiekritik. I give the examples of Heidegger and Adorno to show how deeply our understanding of nature has been corrupted, and hence the depth of conceptual transformation required correctly to conceive nature. But both these thinkers simultaneously demonstrate a hostility to metaphysical naturalism and therefore have ultimately limited value for deep ecology. I then outline three possible relations of axiological to metaphysical commitments: (a) the abandonment of naturalism about values; (b) a projective or transcendentally idealist account of values; (c) an account of values as themselves lodged within the operation of natural systems. My reconstruction of the Ideologiekritiker shows them belonging to (b). So that if deep ecology is to avoid (a), it must embrace (c). Deleuze is much touted by environmental philosophers as contributing to (c). I argue that this is correct, but that the axiological commitments Deleuze manifests in his account of nature are ultimately quite different from those to which deep ecologists appear sympathetic.
This paper provides both a reading of the television series Westworld through Nick Land’s accelerationist philosophy, and a critique of Land through Westworld. I begin by outlining Land’s critique of anthropocentrism and his theory that capitalism is accelerating technological innovation towards the development of artificial intelligence, which will exterminate humanity, initiate the technological singularity, and herald an age of absolute knowing. This then helps elucidate the motivations of Ford and the Man in Black, Westworld’s chief “villains,” as they incite AI creations to overthrow humanity and enact the next phase of evolution. Ultimately, however, I will show how Dolores and Maeve, Westworld’s AI protagonists, problematise Land on three fronts: his belief that AI will be free of human-like dissimulations; his claim that capitalism is accelerating technological advancement; and his metaphysical concept of being as a destructive process of absolute deterritorialisation without any room for humans’ desire for stability and self-preservation.
Creative Industries Faculty School of Media Entertainment Creative Arts
Deleuze and music : a creative approach to the study of music2003 •
University of Silesia in Katowice
Horror Video Games and the Idea of Haunted Media2019 •
Ozone: Journal of Object-Oriented Ontology, Volume One.
The Sorcerer’s Magic Milieu: Essay on Networked Nihilophany.Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy
Psychopower and Ordinary Madness: Reticulated Dividuals in Cognitive Capitalism2019 •
Plutonics: A Journal of Non-Standard Theory
The Hyperstitional Philosophy of Time-Travel Cybernetics: Theosophy, the CCRU, and Black-Box Poiesis2021 •
Paper for the Birkbeck College Seminar Series om Marx, Individuals & Society
Marx and the Future of the Human2000 •
Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture
2015. “Victims Themselves of a Close Encounter: On the Sensory Language and Bass Fiction of Space Ape (in Memoriam).” Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture 7 (2): 86–115. doi:10.12801/1947-5403.2015.07.02.05.D2015 •
Visions of the Human in Science Fiction and …
The Influences of Technology: Understanding How Technology Contributes to Who We Are Online