DOSSIER FUTURE STASIS

A Marxist heresy?
Accelerationism and its discontents
David Cunningham

In his study of the semantics of historical time, ‘the accelerations of an always globalizing capitalism’
Reinhart Koselleck proposes that ‘two specific deter- produce what Marx identified in the Grundrisse as
minants’ characterize modernity’s ‘new experience that ‘constant continuity’ essential to the temporali-
of transition: the expected otherness of the future ties of circulation at a world scale – particularly via
and, associated with it, the alteration in the rhythm an intersection of the increasing ‘velocity at which
of temporal experience: acceleration, by means of new products emerge’ with the pace of technological
which one’s own time is distinguished from what development and of its penetration into everyday
went before’. If the concept of acceleration is thereby life – this is generative, today, of what appears as
central to the emergence of a qualitatively different ‘a time without time’, an ‘ever more congealed and
modern or new time (Neuzeit) around the latter half futureless present’.3 Cut loose from historical nar-
of the eighteenth century, it is also at this ‘epochal rative, the felt experience of the present is one of an
threshold’ that history itself, in the collective sin- ongoing state of transition, which tends to present
gular, comes to be first perceived as ‘in motion’ – a itself less as a sense of possibility of the truly new
perception that Koselleck locates in a divergence than as a paradoxically frenzied sense of repetition,
between the ‘space of experience’ and the ‘horizon with a consequent depoliticization of the ‘dynamic
of expectation’. There would thus seem to be good and historical force’ accorded by earlier political mod-
reason to argue, as Hartmut Rosa does in his recent ernisms to time itself. Acceleration become the mark
book, Social Acceleration, subtitled A New Theory of not of ‘progress’ but of the paradoxical temporality of
Modernity, that acceleration just is the fundamen- a ‘frenetic standstill’.4
tal temporal experience of modernity as a whole: This is ‘one familiar story’, as Benjamin Noys
‘the decisive and categorially new foundational puts it. But there is ‘another, stranger’ one that has
experience of history, and the [basis of the] rapid re-emerged over the last few years: ‘of those who
establishment of the concept of modernity’ itself. think we haven’t gone fast enough’, who think that
Such a ‘transformation of the experience of history the way out of the ‘frenetic standstill’ of accelera-
lies at the root’, as Rosa notes, ‘of the reconceptu- tion’s ‘futureless present’ is to accelerate through
alization of the role and status of the political in and beyond such (capitalist) acceleration itself. First
modernity’, according new temporal meanings to named by Noys himself in a critical vein, in his 2010
such pivotal terms as ‘revolution’, ‘utopia’, ‘progress’ book The Persistence of the Negative, where it appears
or ‘conservatism’.1 as a subset of the more pervasive ‘affirmationism’
It is all the more striking, therefore, that recent of contemporary continental theory, the idea of an
accounts of capitalist modernity have tended to stress accelerationism has subsequently been valorized as
in acceleration’s ‘alteration in the rhythm of temporal the basis for a re-politicization of leftist thought
experience’ not, in fact, so much the opening to the today.5 If contemporary politics is beset by a ‘paraly-
alterity of the future, but what Paul Virilio – the cur- sis of the political imaginary’, in which ‘the future
mudgeonly godfather of all such accounts – describes has been cancelled’, write Alex Williams and Nick
as a ‘futurism of the instant that has no future’, and Srnicek in their 2013 Manifesto for an Accelerationist
of an increasing ‘shrinkage to the present’.2 Thus, for Politics, the ‘political left’ must disinter what they
Jonathan Crary, to take another recent example, if call its ‘supressed accelerationist tendency’. And if

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confirmation were needed that an accelerationist he, too, places particular emphasis on an enthusiasm
turn will thus have to be added to the sequence of for ‘the machine’ as the central organizing trope in
all those other (dismally accelerating) recent ‘turns’ this respect. The first chapter of Malign Velocities
in contemporary theory, the appearance of Noys’s is thus focused on Futurism before moving on to
own extensive critical treatment in his Malign Veloci- what Noys terms the ‘communist accelerationism’ of
ties: Accelerationism and Capitalism, along with the the Bolshevik embrace of a ‘proletarian Taylorism’,
500-plus-page #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, exemplified artistically in the technical utopianism
should suffice to allay any doubts.* of the poet Aleksei Gastev.
Where these different genealogical tracks meet
The story so far is in 1970s’ France, and in particular in the work
Accelerationism might only have been recently of Deleuze and Guattari and Jean-François Lyotard.
named, but both books are concerned to uncover Politically, such writings are to be understood, Noys
the ‘supressed accelerationist tendency’ across a much plausibly argues, as responses to ‘the new libertarian
longer history. For Robin Mackay and Armen Avanes- mood induced by May ’68’, each of which came to
sian, the editors of the Accelerationist Reader, this is claim that, as against ‘traditional’ socialist aspira-
mainly a question of providing a kind of intellectual tions to rational state-led planning, ‘desire’ could
prehistory for Williams and Srnicek’s Manifesto, as be liberated not by regulating or controlling but
well as providing a selection of recent texts presented only by radicalizing the ‘deterritorializing’ forces
as the work of fellow travellers, including ones by of capitalism itself in such a way as to ultimately
Tiziana Terranova, Benedict Singleton and Luciana ‘exacerbate [it] to the point of collapse’.6 If capitalism
Parisi, along with Ray Brassier and Reza Negrastani. is going to ‘perish’, as Lyotard asserts in 1972, it
(The kinship with speculative realism is especially will not do so of ‘bad conscience’, but only ‘through
important to Mackay and Avanessian; and, indeed, excess, because its energetics continually displace
Srnicek was one of the editors of the 2011 collection its limits’: ‘Destruction can only come from an even
The Speculative Turn.) The Reader also includes two more liquid liquidation’ (AR, 183, 203). Deleuze and
direct responses to the 2013 Manifesto – sympathetic, Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus may have provided much
if not uncritical – by Patricia Reed and Antonio of the vocabulary for such a position, but its most
Negri (one source of the ‘lively international debate’, extreme (and bracingly ‘posthuman’) manifestation
as Mackay and Avanessian term it, to which the comes in Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy (1974), with its
Manifesto has given rise). Notably not included is notorious account of nineteenth-century proletarian
anything by accelerationism’s principal antagonist, experience as a form of jouissance in which the worker
Noys, although this absence is compensated for by ‘enjoyed the hysterical, masochistic, whatever exhaus-
the more or less simultaneous appearance of the tion it was’ of industrial labour and the anonymity of
excellent Malign Velocities, which, while only directly the metropolis as an emancipation from the organic
engaging Williams and Srnicek’s appropriation of his body and from the claustrophobia of village life (AR,
originally critical term in its conclusion, can also be 212–13).
read as offering a certain prehistory of its own. If this constitutes the first wave of accelerationism
Conforming to its technophilic and ‘posthuman’ ‘proper’, accelerationism mark 2 is to be found in the
orientation, Mackay and Avanessian’s Reader sets out later re-embrace of these writings in the somewhat
its ‘construction of a genealogy’ by beginning with altered context of the UK during the early 1990s in
Marx’s ‘Fragment on Machines’ and Samuel Butler’s the work of Nick Land and the CCRU (Cybernetic
1872 Erewhon, before charting a course through Thor- Culture Research Unit).7 While Deleuze and Lyotard
stein Veblen’s 1904 ‘The Machine Process’ to Shula­ wrote against the backdrop of May ’68, Land and
mith Firestone’s The Dialectics of Sex. By comparison, his compatriots, drawing on cyberpunk and rave
Noys places more weight on those ‘elements of the culture, took up the accelerationist call in a context
avant-garde’ in the early twentieth century for whom of an increasingly triumphant neoliberalism credo
‘the vanguard desire for the future’ was broadly con- of ‘no alternative’. Noys terms the result a ‘Deleuzian
gruent with ‘a time of acceleration’ (MV, 27), although Thatcherism’, and certainly the CCRU’s arguments,

* Benjamin Noys, Malign Velocities: Accelerationism and Capitalism, Zero, Alresford, 2014. 117 + xii pp., £9.99 pb., 978 1 78279 300 7; Robin
Mackay and Armen Avanessian, eds, #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, Urbanomic and Merve Verlag, Falmouth and Berlin, 2014. 536
pp., £14.99 pb., 978 0 95752 955 7. Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics is reprinted in the Reader. Page references are given in the main text
as AR and MV, respectively.

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while still claiming that the post-humanist embrace Contemporary accelerationism is, then, in the dif-
of capitalist deterritorialization would ultimately ficult position of trying to resuscitate something of
generate ‘a cybernetic offensive capitalism could no the rhetorical energy of earlier accelerationisms while
longer control’, also resonate fairly obviously with (in simultaneously redirecting it towards a rather differ-
Foucault’s phrase) a contemporaneous ‘state phobia’ ent if equally paradigmatic Marx: the Enlightenment
of the New Right.8 To the degree that this remains a Marx over the pervert. As a Marxist heresy, however,
‘left-wing’ politics in any meaningful sense, it is one this is notably less heretical, and, once stripped of
for which it is the very failure of the ‘Left’ itself to the affective charge of a poetics of onward rush, risks
‘go all the way to capitalism (and not all the way to boiling down to not much more than a generalized
the left)’ that constitutes the main obstacle to some political modernism in search of some future to call
inhuman liberation (MV, x, 56). Land’s later writings its own. In this way it is able, as Noys notes in a recent
subsequently jettison the horizon of a non-capitalist paper, both to proclaim its own (ceaseless) novelty
future altogether, favouring instead a full-on (and as the latest thing on the market and suggest that
apparently endless) embrace of ‘the time-structure of it reveals ‘the truth that permeates the thinking of
capital accumulation’, whose ‘explosive’ momentum modernity or is even synonymous with modernity’ as
should be affirmed against any ‘compensatory action’ a whole, in so far as it names, for its adherents, the
or ‘instance of intermediate individuation – most affirmation of the new as such.9 (One must still be
obviously, the state’ (AR, 511–20). absolutely modern.) Yet simple antipathy to nostalgia
As the culmination of a certain strain of political – which might, after all, embrace a dizzying array
modernism this is not uninteresting, since, while of different theoretical positions – is far from being
its source is rendered somewhat obscure in much of a political strategy or programme. (‘Everyone is an
Land’s own work, there is general agreement in both accelerationist’ remarks Mark Fisher in the Reader;
Noys and Mackay & Avanessian that accelerationism AR, 340.) There is, then, a tendency towards a loss
has its primary origins in Marx – the ‘paradigmatic of steam, leaving behind a considerably scaled-down
accelerationist thinker’, as Williams and Srniceck call demand to keep facing forwards, rather than glanc-
him (adding ‘along with Land’, in what must be one ing back in the rear-view mirror, to which very few
of the most terrifyingly implausible couplings ever on the left could really object (AR, 5). Indeed, in this
suggested). If, then, as Noys argues in The Persistence respect it reiterates what has become a thoroughly
of the Negative, the works of Deleuze and Guattari uncontroversial understanding of the crisis of the
and Lyotard are self-consciously ‘heretical’, they are Left as a crisis in historical temporality more gener-
nonetheless still a ‘Marxist heresy’, albeit one that ally, of which the loss of a historical future appears as
evokes a distinctively Nietzschean ‘Marx of force and the main source of a political paralysis in the present.
destruction’, a Marx who – freed from ‘negativity and Appropriately abstracted, the task becomes simply
guilt’ – is ‘fascinated’ by ‘capitalist perversion, the sub- ‘the recovery of the future as such’ (AR, 351).
version of codes, religions, decency, trades, education,
cuisine, speech’, in Lyotard’s words (AR, 182). Discourses of modernity
Contemporary accelerationism seeks to recon­ Symptomatically, what might be most interesting
figure this schema while claiming a continued fidelity about accelerationism, particularly now, would be
to the Marxist tradition. However, if, broadly speak- less whatever explicit political strategies it articu-
ing, 1970s’ accelerationism finds its central dynamic lates, underelaborated and generally underwhelming
in the ‘all that is solid melts into air’ of Marx and as these are, than what it tells us about the current
Engels’s 1848 Manifesto, for the new accelerationism philosophical–political discourses of modernity more
it is the 1859 Preface and its argument concerning generally. As Rosa rightly notes in Social Acceleration,
that ‘stage of development’ at which ‘the existing from the late eighteenth century onwards it is the
relations of production’ become ‘fetters’ holding back ‘formulation of modern philosophies of history’ that
‘the material productive forces’. At the same time, become ‘constitutively tied to the idea of political move-
while maintaining Land’s technological enthusiasms, ment’. The concept of ‘progress’ – as what Koselleck
and the appeal to cybernetics in particular, this is calls the ‘first genuinely historical category of time’
combined with what Mackay and Avanessian describe – constitutes, initially at least, ‘the key concept for
as a ‘call for Enlightenment values and an apparently this expectation of goal-directed historical develop-
imperious rationalism’ at odds with the more vitalist ment’.10 Yet, as the fate of such a concept suggests,
proclivities of its predecessors (AR, 23). what Koselleck defines as ‘the new experience of

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transition’ also intersects, politically,
with a more profound tension between
what we might call a longue durée of
historical transition – classically, that
between different modes of production
– and, on the other hand, what Crary
calls ‘ongoing transition’, in the form
of an apparent acceleration of sheer
temporal change internal to the ‘con-
stant revolutionizing’ of the political
economy of capitalist modernity itself.
(This is also of course a problem of
the relation between immanence and
transcendence inherent to the concept
of transition as such.) If, politically, this
would thus frame the problem of how
far it is possible to know whether ‘social
acceleration’ is furthering some struggle to go beyond to a ‘history’ reduced to the terrain of the empirical.
capitalism, or simply furthering the expansion of (In his contribution to the Reader, ‘Prometheanism
capitalism itself, it also reflects a problem, philosophi- and its Critics’, Ray Brassier suggests that to ‘orient
cally, of how to understand the relationship between oneself towards the future’ comes down to a ‘very
the temporal concept of acceleration and the concept simple question: What shall we do with time?’ But,
of history on which any notion of ‘transition’ depends. leaving aside the question of who this ‘we’, the collec-
In a passage from Anti-Oedipus much quoted in tive Prometheus, exactly is, this is surely a question
both these books, Deleuze and Guattari write: of historical time; AR, 469.) Moreover, politically, it
generates a problem that might perhaps be best elu-
[W]hich is the revolutionary path? Is there one?
– To withdraw from the world market, as Samir cidated through a passage from the Grundrisse:
Amin advises Third World Countries to do …? Or This tendency – which capital possesses, but which
might it go in the opposite direction? To go further at the same time, since capital is a limited form
still, that is, in the movement of the market, of de- of production, contradicts it and hence drives it
coding and deterritorialisation? … Not to withdraw towards dissolution – distinguishes capital from all
from the process, but to go further, to ‘accelerate earlier modes of production, and at the same time
[or hasten] the process’, as Nietzsche put it. (AR, contains this element, that capital is posited as a
162) mere point of transition.12
Although this Nietzschean account of the ‘revolution- In part, to understand capital as itself ‘a mere
ary path’ must, in some sense, suppose a philosophy point of transition’ is simply to remark, for Marx,
of history – since its articulation depends, at some capitalism’s own historicity, and hence (however
level, on a conception of the qualitative historical long-lasting) its status as a necessarily transitory
otherness of the future to which such a ‘path’ might social form. But this also intersects with that which
be directed – there is also, characteristically, a tension ‘distinguishes capital from all earlier modes of pro-
here between a historically specifically dynamic of duction’: that is, its own ‘revolutionary’ temporality
the new, associated in this case with the distinctive (the constant revolutionizing of production) evoked
‘deterritorializing’ forms of capitalism, and Deleuze’s in the 1848 Manifesto. What, then, mediates between
tendency towards a more general ontologization of these two senses of capitalism as a time of transi-
time itself as sheer movement, flow or change, which, tion is precisely Marx’s proposition that it is only
as I would not be the first to note, effectively denies from the standpoint of a projected non-capitalist
any distinctiveness of modernity as a temporalization future that this temporality of capitalism can also be
of history in favour of a sense of time simply as the understood as historically progressive. Without this
generalized New.11 horizon of expectation, what results is simply the
Philosophically, this promotes the primacy of time affirmation of a metaphysics of forces and tendencies
as a ‘dynamic force in its own right’ (to borrow some that celebrates effects of ‘decoding and deterritorial-
words from Koselleck), which is effectively opposed izing’ unmoored from any historical narrative within

32
which they might be rendered socially meaningful production, the key term becomes not ‘acceleration’
in ‘revolutionary’ terms. One logical, if extreme, but rather repurposing:
consequence of this can be seen in what we might Accelerationists want to un­leash latent pro­ductive
call Gilles Lipovetsky’s ultra-accelerationist text, ‘The forces. In this pro­ject, the ma­terial plat­form of
Power of Repetition’, written in 1976, which resolves neo­lib­er­a lism does not need to be des­troyed. It
in an argument that ‘the supposed “contradictions” needs to be re­pur­posed to­wards common ends.
of capitalism’ are themselves precisely a question The ex­isting in­f ra­struc­ture is not a cap­it­a list stage
to be smashed, but a spring­board to launch to­
not so much of politics or history, but simply of
wards post-​capitalism. (AR, 355)
‘configurations of time’ (AR, 17). This is a Manichean
conception that positions power, and ultimately the There is the basis here of an argument to which
social itself, as secondary mechanisms of oppressive one could well be sympathetic – at least in so far as
solidity opposed to the quasi-ontological forces of it is posed against various forms of the politics of
liquification tout court. Accordingly, what Lipovetsky exodus and refusal. Yet it also makes clear the degree
terms ‘the meaning of permanent revolution’ (AR, 233) to which a ‘left accelerationism’ requires necessary
straightforwardly pits, in the words of Mackay and mediation or supplementation by the modernity of
Avanessian, ‘capital’s essentially destabilizing tempo- what is actually a rather different and more complex
ral looping of the present through the future against Marxian tradition – that of the appropriation of the
all stabilising reinstantiations in the present’ (AR, 17; means of production and of the collective powers of
emphasis added). social labour, or, in more specific form, what Brecht
What results, however, is a dehistoricization and termed a process of ‘refunctioning’ (Umfunktion-
reduction of revolution – as opposed to what, in ierung). (Noys discusses this at some length in his
the 1859 Preface, Marx identifies as an ‘era of social final chapter.) As such, however, it also entails the
revolution’ – to an apparently endless ‘energetics’ of need for a far more variegated set of temporaliza-
temporal dynamism (to borrow a term from Lyo- tions of history, which the one-dimensional, flat-
tard’s own accelerationist period) identified with the tened image of modernity as a time of acceleration
modern at its most abstract; what Adorno termed at best obscures and at worst undermines. Williams
the ‘new as an invariant’ or the endless desire for the and Srnicek recognize this – sort of – in declar-
new. As such, in its ‘classical’ accelerationist variants ing that acceleration must also be what they term
at least, permanent revolution does little more than ‘navigational’ (AR, 352). But ‘speeding up’ and ‘steering’
mimic that temporality of commodity production should not be confused – and the attempt to distin-
in which the new appears as the repetition of the guish ‘acceleration’ and ‘speed’ (which they regard
ever-same. Ironically, this is the precise terrain of as Land’s problematically privileged term) tends
Crary’s or Rosa’s ‘futureless present’.13 In other words, therefore to founder, while effectively occluding what
the political modernism of the Communist Manifesto’s would in fact seem to be the central issue: namely, the
affirmation of the revolutionary temporality of capi- historical time of transition itself.
talism needs to be read rather more closely alongside The real question would, then, be not simply one
Capital’s later analysis of the commodity. concerning some vague availability of ‘the future
as such’, but one concerning the consequences of
Problems of transition actually existing acceleration for the broader notion
If the current felt experience of ‘frenetic standstill’ that social transformation can be understood as a
identified in Social Acceleration relates to what Rosa collective project ‘to be politically organised in time’.
terms a peculiar ‘detemporalization of history’, it Indeed, in Rosa’s terms, it is a series of assumptions
might then equally – perhaps better – be under- that follow from this that have ‘become problem-
stood as a consequence of capital’s distinctive atic’ in the contemporary: ‘namely, the expectations
‘dehistoricalization of time’. It is significant therefore that the future will be different from the past, [and]
that where the ‘new wave’ of accelerationism seeks that societal development in this future is subject
precisely to ­re-historicize the ‘libidinal energy’ of a to our understanding and is supposed to be steered
metaphysics of forces, flows and tendencies, it can or shaped in a democratic political fashion’ – a set of
only do so by effectively undoing its own privileging expectations which rest, in turn, upon an assumption
of the temporality of acceleration itself. Hence, in that ‘diverse, institutionalised temporal structures
Williams and Srnicek’s contemporary account of a of political will-formation, decision-making and
contradiction between the forces and relations of decision-implementation’ can, at some level, still be

33
synchronized with ‘the rhythm, tempo, duration and the sense of inertia attendant upon neoliberal speed,
sequence’ of other social, technological and economic it also registers the loss of a certain experience of
temporalities. Recent accounts of the acceleration modernity as precisely an experience of contestation,
of transaction speeds in High Frequency Trading between feudalism, on the one hand, and a ‘socialist
(HFT) are emblematic here, to the extent that, as modern’, on the other.
Rosa puts it, ‘the information and financial markets This is where the problem of ‘transition’ reasserts
in which transactions span the world in fractions of itself, since the implication seems to be that while
a second now hardly … admit of political, and in part capitalism is capable of increasing (temporal) speed,
not even legal, steering. Individuals and nation-states it is now unable to deliver (historical) acceleration.
have grown too slow for the rate of transaction in Unsurprisingly, Williams and Srnicek throw a refer-
globalized modernity.’14 ence to High Frequency Trading into their manifesto,
Rosa’s own primary concern as regards such lack accompanied by some rather vague gestures towards
of synchronization lies with the comparative (and the retooling of its technological and mathematical
seemingly ineliminable) slowness of representative forms away from its deployment in the service of finan-
democratic systems in particular. But, for the Left cial capital. (For a more developed version of this, see
more broadly, the far wider danger is that, as a result, Parisi’s essay on algorithmic automation in the Reader.)
‘today, “progressives” find themselves mostly [if often Equally unsurprisingly, however, as Noys observes
unwillingly] on the side of deceleration … because they in his few pages devoted to recent accelerationisms,
advocate political control of the economy, [and] pro- they cannot ultimately ‘endorse it’, leaving them in an
cesses of democratic negotiation’. As Rosa points out, ‘uncomfortable position in which HFT is taken as a
this is, in many ways, ‘a direct inversion of classical new extreme’, but one which in no way opens out onto
modern relations’.15 It is against this that accelera- ‘a new conceptual space of opportunity’ (MV, 95–6).
tionism thus seeks to realign the Left with modernity At best, it becomes emblematic of a contemporary
in its most emphatically future-oriented form, so as dynamics of capital as a kind of ‘idiot savant driven to
to restore such ‘classical modern relations’ between squander collective cognitive potential’ that has to be
Left and Right. Yet the problem that it faces is fairly somehow rescued from capital’s grasp (and then accel-
immediately apparent in the concluding section of erated?) in order to get history moving again (AR, 45).
Williams and Srnicek’s manifesto – ‘Accel­er­a­tion­ism This explains, in part, the rather mournful tone that
pushes to­wards a fu­ture that is more mod­ern – an frames the Manifesto, since while capitalism has, on
altern­at­ive mod­ern­ity that neo­lib­er­a l­ism is inher­ this account, got faster in a phenomenological sense,
ently un­able to generate’ (AR, 362; my emphases) it has ceased to accelerate, leaving accelerationism in
– and in the unacknowledged tension in this passage search of some other source of momentum. The result
between the temporality of ‘pushing’ forward and is, however, ironically enough, that the future can
the historical positing of an ‘alternative’ that can seemingly only be retrieved from the past – a ‘recovery
only problematically be mediated by the comparative of lost possible futures’ — while the possibility of any
criteria of a modernity that would be more modern actual acceleration is effectively projected into some
than capitalism itself. post-revolutionary moment in which modernity might
Somewhere in the background to this, we might begin again (AR, 351).
see (a little charitably), a registration of some broad It is telling, then, that when it comes to fleshing
problems with the Deleuzean account of capital- out how ‘emancipatory potentials’ are to be socially
ist deterritorialization that informed most post- and politically realized, the polemical desire to
1970s’ accelerationism. For while earlier stages of provoke, characteristic of the manifesto form – and
capitalism may have constituted ‘the emancipatory the Deleuzean ‘aesthetics’ of excessive forces straining
dynamic that broke the chains of feudalism’ (AR, at the leash that, in this instance, underlies it – gives
4), it would – certainly in the ‘advanced’ capitalist way to a set of arguments that are both vaguer and
areas of the world upon which accelerationism is a good deal more sober. Indeed, they are downright
focused – be tricky to maintain that this dynamic is ‘sensible’ in places: the steady building of a neo-
what predominantly defines any ‘creative destruction’ Gramscian counter-hegemony which would balance
today, as opposed to the ‘negation’ of earlier forms of a bit of democratic horizontalism with the ‘command
capitalism itself (most obviously, under neoliberalism, of the Plan’, so knitting together ‘a broad assemblage
in the shift from hegemony of industrial capital to of tactics and organisations’ (AR, 359–60). As Patricia
that of financialization). If this partly accounts for Reed observes, in her contribution to the Reader, ‘the

34
surging popularity of #Accelerate … would not have Despite it beginning with an emphatic denial
functioned under a more accurately modest label of any desire to return to either Fordism or ‘mid-
of #redesigninfrastructure­institutions­technology­ twentieth-century socialism’ – even delivering a little
ideology­towardsotherends’. But it’s certainly instruc- rap on the knuckles to ‘the neosocialist regimes of
tive to observe the ways in which ‘an approach which South America’s Bolivarian Revolution’ for their lack
in fact, paradoxically, seems more deeply attached to of imagination – it is hard not to sense a ‘mood’ of
Gramscian “long institutional march” of politics’, and nostalgia in contemporary acceleration for a moment
whose principal past future to be recovered is one of when, for example, having put the first man in space
rational planning, finds itself hitched to ‘a model of and apparently achieved extraordinary rates of
political thinking bound to speed or the revolution- industrial growth, the ‘alternative modernity’ of the
ary event’ (AR, 523). Soviet Union could appear as ‘more modern’ than
its capitalist foe (AR, 350). (Space exploration is a
Socialist futures particular fascination of the new accelerationism,
One way of narrating all this might be in terms of reflected in Singleton’s contribution to the Reader,
its relation to the historical fate of a certain con- as well as Williams and Srnicek’s own emphasis on
ception of socialism. Or, rather, it is the crisis of ‘the promissory note of the mid-twentieth-century’s
socialism that constitutes, above all, the historical space programmes’ (AR, 362); a telling coincidence
crisis – and, indeed, the crisis of history – of the idea with ‘mid-twentieth-century socialism’.)
of an alternative modernity as more modern (that is, Notwithstanding Negri’s attempt to co-opt an
an ‘alternative modernity’ as something more than a accelerationist politics for a cheerful autonomist
variant within the socio-economic system of a global ‘goodbye’ to ‘Mr. Socialism’,18 it is significant that, in
capitalist modernity), for which, we might say, the setting out the terrain of their ‘recovery of lost pos-
maintenance of a messianic communist Idea in much sible futures’, Williams and Srnicek’s own privileged
contemporary leftist thought functions as, at best, a moments of technological Prometheanism are them-
kind of compensation for its absence. selves drawn from a fairly limited set of projects to be
If, in Deleuze and Lyotard, the accelerationist idea recovered from the past futures of ‘actually existing
emerges in the context of a new libertarian politics socialism’: the experiments with cybernetics under-
that saw its struggle, at least in part, as one directed taken by Soviet economists in seeking to rethink the
against a Stalinist Communist Party and a ‘police-like planned economy, and the Chilean Cybersyn project
paternalistic contempt for the masses and the libido’ overseen by the British cybernetician Stafford Beer
that they saw at work in both welfarism and the Soviet during Allende’s time as president. (More unexpect-
Union (AR, 173), Land and the CCRU ratchet up this edly, the Manifesto also turns to Lenin’s argument
opposition to a ‘socialistic regulation’ at a historical that ‘[s]ocialism is inconceivable without large-scale
moment that was, in the early 1990s, understood to capitalist engineering based on the latest discover-
have already effectively accelerated beyond socialism ies of modern science. It is inconceivable without
through the contemporary reconfigurations of (neo- planned state organisation’; AR, 353.19) Such references
liberal) capitalism, and to which there could be no justify Noys’s complaint that there is something of
turning back.16 In Rosa’s terms of ‘a direct inversion a paradoxical nostalgia for a future apparent here,
of classical modern relations’, it is worth consider- premissed on the lack of an actual instantiation of
ing someone like Schumpeter, who, while famously ‘acceleration’ that might be identified in the historical
celebrating the creativity of capitalism’s ‘creative present. More specifically, they would seem to want
destruction’ and entrepreneurial spirit, nonetheless to resurrect a time before the early 1970s’ moment
argued, in the 1930s, that there was an ‘observable that both Noys and the Reader identify with the
tendency’ in capitalism towards its own destruction, beginning of accelerationism proper. In this sense,
and hence effectively positioned the capitalist on the the new accelerationism seems condemned to play
side of ‘deceleration’. He extended this claim in his out the role, in the old joke, of the urban rambler
1942 Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy: wandering lost around the countryside. Asking a
farmer how they get to where they want to go, the
Can capitalism survive? No, I do not think it can …
its very success undermines the social institutions
farmer pauses for a moment before replying: ‘Well, I
which protect it, and inevitably creates condi- wouldn’t start from here.’
tions in which it will not be able to live and which This leaves the ‘new’ accelerationism fundamen-
strongly points to socialism as the heir apparent.17 tally ‘ungrounded’ despite its seemingly self-defining

35
‘realism’ about the present. As Noys notes, in his opposed to that which may itself be a source of pro-
earlier book, the likes of Lyotard and Deleuze felt ductivity). It echoes the arguments of a number of
in some ways compelled by the political situation of other recent thinkers in this respect.21 In particular,
the early 1970s to ‘find a liberating dynamic in the Brassier’s insistence on a necessary coming-to-terms
“unleashing” of capital flows due to the withdrawal with abstraction as a basis for ‘expanding the hori-
of post-war regulative mechanisms in the 1970s’, but, zons of socialisation beyond parochial communitar-
in doing so, ‘became increasingly detached from any ian limits’ can surely be fairly unreservedly endorsed,
actual social or political agency’ that could realize an a few Invisible Committee fans notwithstanding,
emancipatory project.20 Contemporary acceleration as can his conclusion that what is thus ‘required
would obviously like to claw its way back from this, is an understanding of social practices that would
if only to forestall a theoretical handing over, à la allow us to begin distinguishing between oppressive
Land, of an agency of abstraction and emancipation and emancipatory forms of mediation’ rather than
to capital itself. Yet it has no real agent of its own, pursuing the chimera of communal immediacy and
and so, despite a passing reference to the ‘need to the eradication of forms of representation or media-
reconstitute various forms of class power’, it remains tion per se.22 Moreover, if one of Brassier’s points
largely unclear exactly who – what kind of political is that attempts to cast ‘every existing instrument,
subject – is supposed to be carrying out its repurpos- technique or method enveloped by capitalist social
ing of a contemporary technological second nature, forms’ as mere ‘alibis for reformism’ are both politi-
and when. The call for a renewed Prometheanism cally and philosophically simple-minded it is easy
is profoundly uncertain as to who its Prometheus is to concur. Indeed this is not so different from, say,
to be. David Harvey’s sober assertion (in an exchange with
If accelerationism is a modernism, the suspicion Hardt and Negri) that ‘[c]apitalism, with its hierarchi-
would be that it cannot but be, therefore, a kind of cal forms, has made serious progress in feeding the
vanguardism also. It is difficult, at any rate, to make world, albeit unevenly, so one must be careful not to
much other sense of the Manifesto’s quixotic sug- demolish these structures too readily’.23 But for this
gestion of the necessity for a ‘Mont Pelerin Society’ to continue to be yoked to a dynamic of acceleration
of the Left ‘tasked with creating a new ideology, requires that an awful lot of (notably undertheorized)
economic and social models’ (AR, 359). While this weight be laid upon some idea of the latent ‘emanci-
is explicitly conceived in neo-Gramscian terms as patory potentials’ immanent to ‘technologies whose
a hegemonic project, its form seems rather more functioning is currently subordinated to capital’.
technocratic, as much in the tradition of Saint-Simon On the one hand, stripped of its overexcited
as Marx. Not for nothing does The Accelerationist rhetoric, this risks boiling down simply to the banal
Reader include among its forebears Thorstein Veblen, point that we cannot but start from where we are; a
for whom the revolutionary subject was to be found baseline of any Marxist ‘realism’, which, the odd back-
in the collective intelligence of the engineer and the to-nature environmentalist or hard-core Rancièrean
scientist rather than the proletariat. aside,24 is hardly a contentious position in itself. The
epigraph for Noys’s first chapter is Brecht’s famous
Politics of abstraction assertion that we cannot start from the ‘good old
None of this is to say that there are not a number of things’ but only from ‘the bad new ones’. Yet, as Noys
things to welcome in the idea of a ‘politics at ease with rightly observes, if most on the left would accept
a mod­ernity of ab­strac­tion, com­plexity, glob­ality, and this (including many who could hardly be described
tech­no­logy’ (AR, 354). Many will certainly be sympa- as accelerationists), it does not negate the political
thetic to contemporary accelerationism’s recapitula- question of exactly how we are to recognize which
tion of Kracauer’s argument that the problem with of those ‘premises now in existence’ are indeed part
capitalism is not that it is too rational, but that it is of the ‘state of things’ to be ‘abolished’, and which
not rational enough. Equally, the concern for ques- could be the conditions of a possible non-capitalist
tions of abstraction, as an ineliminable dimension of future. Indeed, by contrast to someone like Land’s
modern societies, is a strength in that it further chal- gleeful embrace of the toxic, this would seem to be a
lenges what has often been, on the left as elsewhere, necessary conclusion of contemporary acceleration-
a tendency to present abstraction as a necessarily ism’s emphasis on escaping (or steering away from) the
tragic form of violence or instrumentality imposed inertial drag of neoliberal speed rather than pushing
upon the rich diversity of concrete particularity (as it still further forward.

36
 On the other hand, and for all that the new accel- of extracting surplus value. But one would have to
erationism is largely opposed to vitalism, taken to an ignore a great many other passages in the Grundrisse
extreme, the idea of a ‘latent’ potential in technology to think that this is, for Marx, anything like a simple
that has been frustrated by its capitalist uses tends matter. The point is that this is a dialectical and
to repeat an image of capital as a merely vampiric contradictory process.
apparatus of capture, feeding off some creativity or This is the underlying issue in what is perhaps
newness pulsating beneath it, whether one locates Noys’s central critical argument in Malign Velocities:
the source of such newness in a Negrian commons or that if, as Marx said, ‘[t]he real barrier to capitalist
in some more inhuman, machinic force of speculative production is capital itself ’, such a ‘barrier’ is, in fact,
reason. Once the vampire of capital is lopped off, ‘what serves the “dynamic” of capitalism as contra-
according to this schema, the hitherto repressed crea- dictory social formation. The perpetual desire to
tivity, whose ‘functioning is currently subordinated purify and pierce the barrier of “capital itself” is
to capital’, can (like ‘the future’ itself) be liberated. encoded within the genetic structure of the capitalist
The specific heresy of accelerationism’s Marxism social relation’ (MV, 61). For Noys, the failure to rec-
(which has a long and perfectly orthodox history of ognize this is most apparent, and most revealing, in
its own) would then lie, contra Negri’s multitude, the accelerationist approach (exemplified by Lyotard
in a narrative according to which those deterri­ and Land) to the ‘moving contradiction’ of labour’s
torializing forces unleashed by capital in the guise of antagonistic relationship to capital, which seeks to
sorcerer’s apprentice are not so much its proletarian overcome it through the unabashed embrace of an
gravediggers as they are capitalism’s own ‘productive absolute integration of labour (variable capital) into
forces’ themselves. But in imagining some more or the machinic and abstract (constant capital), and
less ‘clean’ extraction of technological latency from hence affirm its ‘capture’. ‘If we are forced to labour
its capitalist ‘subordination’ – and, again, by whom, … then accelerationism tries to welcome and immerse
and through what form of ‘socio-political action’? – it us in this inhuman experience’, since, ironically, only
mirrors, too, that account of the latent creativity of this would put ‘living labour’ on the side of deter-
a living labour that, as more ontologically primary, is ritorializing flows. As Noys continues, ‘While this
supposed somehow to precede its capture by capital fails as a political strategy it tells us much about the
(or the state) altogether.25 impossible experience of labour under capitalism’
This is an argument that can certainly take some (MV, ix). Of course, this could easily be extended to
legitimation from Anti-Oedipus, but as an account the value form itself, since, by this logic, the more the
of capitalism, and of the workings of the value form objects of commodification are loosened from their
particularly, it is surely dubious, in both its post- stubborn materiality and non-identity the better.
autonomist and accelerationist variants. At the very At the very least, at the level of political history,
least, it drastically underplays the degree to which it is the relationship between the temporalities of
both labour and technology come to be formed as movement and change, acceleration and progress,
moments in capital’s self-mediation and valoriza- dominated by the ‘revolutionary’ temporality of
tion. This is not to say that existing technological capitalism itself (with its associated crises), and the
forces are somehow capitalist ‘through and through’, historical time of social revolution (from the perspec-
nor that, speculatively, they could not be, or would tive of which ‘capital is posited as a mere point of
not have to be, appropriated or repurposed for any transition’) that needs to be re-engaged as part of a
socialist future if barbarism is to be avoided.26 (None speculative politics of abstraction, if the desire for the
of which changes the fact that the latter seems a good recovery of ‘the future as such’ is to gain any traction
deal more likely than the former right now.) But nor beyond the endless repetition of an avant-gardism
is it plausible to suggest that the ‘material platforms’ without avant-garde. As against the apocalypticism
of finance or logistics could somehow be exempted and messianism that dominate much contemporary
from their historical formation altogether. It is true leftist thinking, the new accelerationism’s attempt to
that in the ‘Fragment on Machines’, with which The rethink the ‘old’ socialist question of planning, and of
Accelerationist Reader begins, Marx makes the claim a politics of abstraction, opens up some possibilities
that, even if the machine is produced within capital- here. However, this requires an account both of ‘pro-
ist relations as a form of ‘fixed capital’, there is good gressive’ forms of social abstraction and of the tem-
reason to think that such technology might serve an poralities of the modern in terms of their relations to
emancipatory cause once freed from the dynamics the possibility of the historically new – that is, of new

37
relations of production and forms of social produc- Anti-Oedipus, is worth citing in full: ‘Machinic revolution
must therefore go in the opposite direction to socialistic
tion – without which, as Noys points out, Marx’s regulation; pressing towards ever more uninhibited market­
famous proposition in Capital that the ‘true barrier ization of the processes that are tearing down the social
to capitalist production is capital itself’ recedes to field, “still further” with “the movement of the market, of
decoding and deterritorialization”’ (cited by Mark Fisher,
the bad infinity of a limit that can never be reached. AR, 341).
Acceleration may be the key determinant of moder- 17. Joseph Schumpeter, Can Capitalism Survive? Creative
Destruction and the Global Economy, Harper Perennial, New
nity’s ‘new experience of transition’, as Koselleck sug- York, 2009, p. 2. It is worth noting that, as well as writing
gests, but an accelerationism remains constitutively in the wake of 1929 and the New Deal, Schumpeter is
unable to think through the full historical–political already responding at this stage to the emergent neoliberal
‘thought collective’ that would gather around the Mont
meanings of modernity itself. Pelerin Society.
18. See Antonio Negri with Raf Scelsi, Goodbye Mr. Socialism:
Radical Politics in the 21st Century, Serpent’s Tail, London,
2008, pp. 1–24.
Notes 19. To which might no doubt be added Lenin’s notorious
1. Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of assertion of the ‘need’ for socialism to appropriate the
Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe, Columbia University ‘apparatus’ of ‘big banks’ so as to ‘lop off what capitalistically
Press, New York, 2004, p. 241 (emphasis added); Hartmut mutilates this excellent apparatus, to make it even bigger,
Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity, trans even more democratic, even more comprehensive’. This
Jonathan Trejo-Mathys, Columbia University Press, New was, of course, Leninism’s specific understanding of the
York, 2013, p. 257. historical actuality of transition as precisely a root-and-
2. See, among various books, Paul Virilio, The Great Accelera- branch systematic process of social, rather than narrowly
tor, trans. Julie Rose, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2012; The ‘political’, revolution. Cited in Fredric Jameson, Valences of
Futurism of the Instant: Stop–Eject, trans. Julie Rose, Polity the Dialectic, Verso, London and New York, 2009, p. 419. It
Press, Cambridge, 2010. turns out, then, that both Lenin and Jameson would have to
3. Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, be accelerationists too…
Verso, London and New York, 2013, pp. 29, 35. A slightly 20. Noys, The Persistence of the Negative, p. 7.
different variant of this argument is to be found also in, for 21. See, for example, Peter Osborne, ‘The Reproach of
example, Franco Berardi, ‘Time, Acceleration and Violence’, Abstraction’, Radical Philosophy 127, September/October
e-flux journal 27, September 2011, www.e-flux.com/journal/ 2004, pp. 21–8; David Cunningham, ‘The Concept of
time-acceleration-and-violence. Berardi’s own solution to Metropolis: Philosophy and Urban Form’, Radical Philosophy
the crisis for ‘our relationship to the world’ that he identi- 133, September/October 2005, pp. 13–25; Alberto Toscano,
fies in such an acceleration of acceleration in so-called ‘The Culture of Abstraction’, Theory, Culture & Society, vol.
‘semiocapitalism’ is a ‘poetic’ restoration of the bodily and 25, no. 4, 2008, pp. 57–75.
sensuousness. For a critical view on this, see my review of 22. See Ray Brassier, ‘Wandering Abstraction’, Mute, www.
The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance, ‘Only a Poet Can Save metamute.org/editorial/articles/wandering-abstraction.
Us’, Radical Philosophy 178, March/April 2013, pp. 44–6. This is the text of a presentation to a conference on
4. Rosa, Social Acceleration, p. 15. accelerationism held in Berlin in December 2013.
5. See Benjamin Noys, The Persistence of the Negative: A 23. David Harvey, ‘Commonwealth: An Exchange’, https://
Critique of Contemporary Continental Theory, Edinburgh antonionegriinenglish.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/6422-
University Press, Edinburgh, 2010, pp. 4–9. commonwealth_an_exchange.pdf.
6. Ibid., p. 7. 24. Lest one think that the accelerationists do not at least
7. One evident reason for the current ‘revival’ of interest in have some point, see, for example, Rancière’s assertion, in
accelerationist tendencies more generally has been the the closing pages of Hatred of Democracy, that ‘[u]nequal
return to Land’s own until recently largely forgotten writ- society does not carry any equal society in its womb’, as
ings, particularly through their promotion by ex-students against what he terms, significantly, the ‘socialist’ (but
at the University of Warwick, including Mackay, Brassier, also, in fact, Marxist) wager ‘according to which capitalist
Negrastani and Mark Fisher, all of whom are included in The forms of production and exchange constituted the material
Accelerationist Reader. A collection of Land’s work, edited conditions for an egalitarian society and its worldwide
by Robin Mackay with Brassier, was issued by Urbanomic, expansion’. Jacques Rancière, Hatred of Democracy, Verso,
co-publishers of the Reader, in 2011. London and New York, 2007, pp. 96–7.
8. See Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the 25. To be fair, Williams and Srnicek do recognize some of the
Collège de France, 1978–79, trans. Graham Burchell, Palgrave problems here: ‘We want to accelerate the process of
Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2008. technological evolution. But what we are arguing for is not
9. Benjamin Noys, ‘Accelerated Substance Abuse’, paper techno-utopianism. Never believe that technology will be
delivered at the New Centre for Research & Practice, sufficient to save us. Necessary, yes, but never sufficient
October 2014. without socio-political action. Technology and the social
10. Rosa, Social Acceleration, p. 257. are intimately bound up with one another, and changes in
11. See Peter Osborne, ‘Modernism and Philosophy’, in Peter either potentiate and reinforce changes in the other’ (AR,
Brooker et al., eds, Oxford Handbook of Modernisms, Oxford 356). However, if winning ‘social conflicts’ is presented
University Press, Oxford, 2010, pp. 388–409. as essential to the possibility of any transition to a non-
12. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus, Penguin, capitalist future, what these would be, and who is going to
London, 1973, p. 540, my emphases. fight them, remain pretty vague, beyond the Manifesto’s
13. Crudely stated, this is, of course, reflected in #Accelerate’s appeal to a need for the left to ‘develop sociotechnical
own imbrication in the commodity logic of the rapid hegemony’ (AR, 357).
turnover of theoretical fashions. 26. See David Cunningham, ‘Metropolitics, or, Architecture
14. Rosa, Social Acceleration, pp. 251, 252, 19. and the Contemporary Left’, in Nadir Lahiji, Architecture
15. Ibid., p. 268 Against the Post-Political, Routledge, London and New York,
16. Land’s argument, written in 1993, and quoting 2014, pp. 11–30.

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