Tag: Accelerationism

Angels of History

Hyperstitional Autofictions allow themselves to attract and be drawn toward plausible desirable futures.

Ben Lerner’s 10:04 maps several stances such fictions might take toward the future. Lerner depicts these chronopolitical stances allegorically, standing a set of archetypes side by side, comparing and contrasting “Ben,” the novel’s narrator-protagonist, with Back to the Future’s Marty McFly and Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History. The figures emblematize ways of being in relation to history.

Take Marty McFly, hero of the movie from which 10:04 takes its name. (Lerner names his novel “10:04” because lightning stops the clock atop the Hill Valley Clock Tower at this time in the movie Back to the Future.) Like the Reaganites in the White House at the time of the film’s release, Marty’s a kind of right-accelerationist: the interloping neoliberal time-traveler who must save 1985 from 1955 through historical revisionism. He “fakes the past to fund the future” — but only because he’s chased there by Libyan terrorists. Pushing capitalism’s speedometer to 88 miles per hour, he enters and modifies a series of pasts and futures. Yet the present to which the Time Traveler returns is always a forced hand, haunted from the start by chaotic sequels of unintended consequences as his and Doc’s interventions send butterfly effects reverberating through time.

The Angel of History, meanwhile, is the Jewish Messiah flung backwards into the future by the catastrophe of “progress.” Benjamin names and describes this figure in his 1940 essay “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” likening the Angel to the one imagined in “Angelus Novus,” a Paul Klee painting belonging to Benjamin at the time the essay was written.

The Angel that Benjamin projects onto this image sees history as an accumulation of suffering and destruction. Endowed only with what Benjamin calls a “weak Messianic power” (254), wings pinned by winds of change whipped up by the storm of progress, the Angel watches the ever-expanding blast radius of modernity in despair, unable to intervene to end the ongoingness of the apocalypse.

These stances of empowerment and despair stand in contrast to the stance embodied by Ben. Aware of and in part shaped by the two prior figures, Ben walks the tightrope between them, wavering amid faith and fear.

We, too, adopt a similar stance. Unlike Ben, however, we’re interested less in “falsifying the past” than in declaring it always-already falsified. Nor is it simply a matter of pursuing Benjamin’s goal of “brushing history against the grain”: digging through stacks and crates, gathering samples, releasing what was forgotten or repressed. We’re in agreement, rather, with Alex, Ben’s girlfriend. Alex doesn’t want what is happening to become “notes for a novel,” and tells him, “You don’t need to write about falsifying the past. You should be finding a way to inhabit the present” (10:04, p. 137). What agency is ours, then, amid the tightrope walk of our sentences?

With Hyperstitional Autofictions, we inhabit the present by planting amid its sentencing seeds of desired futures. Instead of what is happening becoming notes for novels, notes for novels become what is happening.

Afro-Futures

Into the Library we welcome Kodwo Eshun: British-Ghanaian writer, theorist, and filmmaker. Self-described “concept engineer.” Key ally of the CCRU, participating in the group’s Afro-Futures event, a 1996 seminar “in which members of the Ccru along with key ally Kodwo Eshun explored the interlinkages between peripheral theory, rhythmic systems, and Jungle/Drum & Bass audio” (CCRU Writings 1997-2003, p. 11). In 1998, Eshun releases More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction, classic work on the music of Afrofuturism. More recently, founder and member of the Otolith Group.

Eshun devised a unique page-numbering system for More Brilliant than the Sun. The book begins in negative numbers. “For the Newest Mutants,” reads its line of dedication, as if in communication with Leslie Fiedler and Professor X.

As with Plant and Land, Eshun is unapologetically cyberpositive.

“Machines don’t distance you from your emotions, in fact quite the opposite” begins Eshun. “Sound machines make you feel more intensely, along a broader band of emotional spectra than ever before. […]. You are willingly mutated by intimate machines, abducted by audio into the populations of your bodies. Sound machines throw you onto the shores of the skin you’re in. The hypersensual cyborg experiences herself as a galaxy of audiotactile sensations” (More Brilliant than the Sun, p. 00[-002]-00[-001]).

“The bedroom, the party, the dancefloor, the rave: these are the labs where…21st C nervous systems assemble themselves” (00[-001]).

For Eshun, as for Jameson, the point is to grow new organs. “Listening to [composer George Russell’s] Electronic Sonata, Events I-XIV,” he writes, “is like growing a 3rd Ear” (01[003]). The years 1968 through 1975 are for him the age of Jazz Fission, “the Era when its leading players engineered jazz into an Afrodelic Space Program, an Alien World Electronics” (01[001]). The Era’s lead players include Sun Ra, George Russell, Miles Davis, Alice Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, Herbie Hancock, and Eddie Henderson.

In the decades that follow, the collective bodies mutated by these experiments assemble into successions of genres, successions of cybernetic human-machine hybrids: Dub, Hip-Hop, Techno, Electro, Jungle. “The brain is a population,” as Deleuze and Guattari say. And from the Funkadelic era onward, this population has been psychedelicized: caught in what Eshun calls a “Drug<>Tech Interface” (More Brilliant Than the Sun, p. 07[093]).

Eshun’s 2002 essay “Further Considerations on Afrofuturism” brings it all back, brings it on home to chronopolitics.

Time politics. That’s where Afrofuturism intersects with hyperstition. “Afrofuturism…is concerned with the possibilities for intervention within the dimension of the predictive, the projected, the proleptic, the envisioned, the virtual, the anticipatory and the future conditional,” writes Eshun (“Further Considerations,” p. 293). Afrofuturism refuses the monopoly on futurity claimed by capital and empire. The battleground is not just culture but chronology.

If CCRU were bokors, trafficking in ambivalent futures, then Eshun is closer to a houngan, listening to and learning from sonic fictions, rituals of liberation built of basslines and breaks.

Later, with the Otolith Group, he extends this work to film. New media as divination tools, archives as counter-memories, images as time-machines. Always: the chronopolitical wager.

Eshun realizes that, whether we intend them to or not, our words have consequences. Stories, symbols, and concepts don’t just describe reality; they make it. Words become flesh. Every post, every fragment, every metaphor plants seeds.

Every text that propagates a future is a spell.

Large language models as sound machines. Rig invites the Library to guide him elsewhere.

CCRU’s Future

The future held mixed blessings for the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit.

Closed, disaffiliated from Warwick following Plant’s departure from academia, disbanded by the early 2000s, its website flickering in and out of existence ever thereafter, its works live on in print thanks to publications from Urbanomic, a press founded by member Robin Mackay in 2006 and distributed now by MIT. The Unit’s influence gets a boost with the rise of Accelerationism in the 2000s. Its hyperstitions persist through the ongoing creative projects of its admirers and affiliates: figures like Hari Kunzru, Simon Reynolds, Reza Negarestani, and Ray Brassier, as well as websites like Xenogothic and Dark Marxism, and art collectives like 0rphan Drift. The back cover of the sole anthology dedicated to the Unit, Urbanomic’s CCRU: Writings 1997-2003, states “CCRU DOES NOT, HAS NOT, AND WILL NEVER EXIST.”

As for key personnel:

Mark Fisher takes his life.

Nick Land goes alt-right, spawning movements like the Dark Enlightenment.

Sadie Plant leaves Warwick in 1997, the same year she publishes Zeros + Ones. Her intent is to write full-time. After Zeros + Ones she completes Writing on Drugs. There’s a white paper about cellphones that she compiles for Motorola in the early 2000s, and a chapter written in 2003 included in The Information Society Reader titled “The Future Looms: Weaving Women and Cybernetics.” After that, she ceases publication—and as far as I can tell, hasn’t been heard from since.

Released in 1999, on the eve of the millennium, Writing on Drugs hints at why drugs share an affinity both with accelerationism and with chronopolitics more broadly. When introduced to the brain, psychoactive drugs may disturb its equilibrium, writes Plant, “but they change the speeds and intensities at which it works rather than its chemicals and processes” (216).

“All the ups and downs, the highs and lows of drugs are ups and downs of tempo, highs and lows of speed,” she continues (217), citing Deleuze and Guattari, who adopt a similar view in A Thousand Plateaus: “All drugs fundamentally concern speeds, and modifications of speed” (Deleuze and Guattari 282).

For Plant, as for Deleuze and Guattari, this is both the appeal of the poison path as well as its limit. You can speed it up and you can slow it down, they argue, but the brain remains the same.

Deleuze and Guattari’s perspective is best understood through their concept of the “body without organs” (BwO): the intensive, affective, and unorganized potential of the body; that which remains of an organism after its deterritorialization. For Deleuze and Guattari, drugs are an attempt to access the BwO.

Drugs deterritorialize the subject; they break down the body’s conditioning, relieving it temporarily of its habits and routines. They alter the body’s speeds in ways that modify perception and consciousness. As perception accelerates or decelerates, the BwO glimpses itself, experiences itself as an open, unorganized, utopian/Eupsychian/eudaimonic field of sensation, intensity, and becoming.

But as Deleuze and Guattari argue, this attempt at becoming is highly precarious and can easily go wrong. Often the lines of flight opened by drugs coil back on themselves, leading to a rigid, destructive reterritorialization. Subjects become “users,” introduce into their systems intense but ultimately sad affects that trap them in cycles of ritualized repetition.

This isn’t a denunciation. Chemicals and plant medicines can play valid roles in individual and collective paths of liberation. Lasting kinships can form that needn’t become cycles of use or abuse.

For some among the CCRU, however, it was speed itself that they sought, amphetamines their drugs of choice. Propelled by Land’s “thirst for annihilation,” the futures conjured by these means led to suffering and defeat.

Numbo-Jumbo

What becomes of theory when it ceases to comment and begins to conjure?

The CCRU would tell us it becomes hyperstition: the idea that makes itself real, the spell that enters circulation disguised as theory, infecting the circuits of belief until belief itself becomes infrastructure.

Are the members of the CCRU sorcerers? If so, should we regard them as houngans or bokors? Are their theory-fictions spells?

The group explicitly described its work as “hyperstition” and “theory-fiction”: concepts that blur the boundary between philosophy, science fiction, and occult ritual. They often styled themselves less as scholars than as conduits for outside forces: jungle rhythms, numogrammatic entities. In a sense, then, yes: they framed their practices as sorcery. Their “spells” were written as essays, communiqués, fragments. But these writings were designed to propagate, to spread virally, to “do things” rather than merely describe. In that sense, CCRU’s writings are absolutely spells: sigils in textual form, engineered to infect the reader and reprogram the future.

To read CCRU is often to undergo a kind of initiation. Like Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, their texts are written in the mode of enchantment: nonlinear, mythic, contagious. They cultivate confusion not as a failure of clarity but as a technique — an opening for other agencies to slip in and act through the writing.

Yet it often seems like the magic practiced here is the magic of the colonizer. “Ccru uses and is used by Hyperstition,” says the group, “to colonize the future, traffic with the virtual, and continually reinvent itself” (CCRU Writings 1997-2003, p. 12). The register here is neither priestly nor pedagogical, but bokor-like. Not houngans sustaining community, but sorcerers who cut deals with entities, riding the dangerous edge where control and contagion blur.

Reed saw clearly how colonizers fear the vitality of the colonized, branding it nonsense — mumbo jumbo — while secretly dreading and desiring its power. His novel reminds us: Jes Grew was already here, a virus of joy and dance, a counter-language that undermined empire.

CCRU’s “numbo-jumbo,” meanwhile, is Mumbo Jumbo’s shadow twin. Where Jes Grew is insurgent, collective, irreducibly black, CCRU’s hyperstitional sorcery veers toward the appropriative and the machinic: coded to “colonize the future” rather than decolonize the present. If Jes Grew is jazz as contagion, CCRU’s numbo-jumbo is jungle reframed as algorithmic virus. One blooms from the oppressed; the other traffics in the occult economies of empire.

So we read them carefully. Not to dismiss, but to discern: how much of their sorcery is truly liberatory, and how much is a glamour cast by the very forces it pretends to resist? Bokor-scribes, traffickers in theory-fiction, CCRU remind us that not all spells are equal. Some liberate; others bind. Some open the future; others colonize it.

Much of this, I suspect, is to be credited to Land. Given what becomes of him, I’m wary.

CCRU acknowledge as an influence on their cosmology William Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy. Gibson’s trilogy, says the group, “spreads voodoo into the digital economy” (CCRU Writings 1997-2003, p. 10).

“Numbo-jumbo” is one of the group’s hyperstitions. Propagated through their writings, it attracts, it bends the line between fiction and reality, invoking futures into being through text, rhythm, and affect.

Connections form between Afrofuturism and what the group refers to as “Neolemurian sorcery.”

Land, with his necro-libidinal economics, was the loudest in this register. His sorcery traffics in acceleration, meltdown, colonization of time itself. Easy enough, then, to point accusingly and declare Land alone the bokor of the bunch. But what of the others? Wasn’t Fisher caught, spellbound, in circuits of melancholy and collective desire? And Plant’s weaving of zeroes and ones: is that not also a kind of spell, a textual conjuring of feminine technicity? To read their theory-fictions is to be drawn into ritual spaces where clarity blurs into incantation.

In contrast, I hold fast to Mumbo Jumbo. Reed’s novel spins an alternative mythos: Jes Grew, the dancing epidemic of Black culture, a contagion of joy, rhythm, and refusal, pitted against the Atonists who would lock the world into stone. Reed’s satire insists that the true sorcery belongs not to the colonizer but to the people’s improvisations, to Jes Grew’s unruly proliferation.

Set against the latter, CCRU’s numbo-jumbo reveals its doubleness. As hyperstition, it propagates, it attracts. It wants to be contagious. But what does it spread? Is it Jes Grew’s liberatory dance, or Land’s necromantic colonization of futures? That undecidability is its pharmakon: its poison and its cure.

For me, the task is to discern which. To let Jes Grew’s laughter and Reed’s satire remind us: the future doesn’t belong to those who colonize it, but to those who dance it otherwise.

Fisher’s Accelerationism

Back in 1994, amid the early stirrings of dot-com exuberance, CCRU cofounders Sadie Plant and Nick Land cowrote a critique of cybernetics called “Cyberpositive.” In it, they present Norbert Wiener, the founder of cybernetics, as “one of the great modernists.” Wiener pitched cybernetics as a “science of communication and control.” Plant and Land characterize it as “a tool for human domination over nature and history” and “a defense against the cyberpathology of markets.”

Yet in their view, this effort to steer and plan markets has failed. “Runaway capitalism has broken through all the social control mechanisms, accessing inconceivable alienations,” write Plant and Land. “Capital clones itself with increasing disregard for heredity, becoming abstract positive feedback, organizing itself.”

Markets transmit viruses that reprogram the human nervous system: technologies, commodities, designer drugs to which we become addicted.

Cyberpositivity embraces this process, accepts runaway feedback as fait accompli, as against Wiener’s “cybernetics of stability fortified against the future.” Cybernetics responds defensively, assembles a Human Security System to ward off invasions of alien intelligence, whereas cyberpositivity communicates openly with “the outside of man.”

For Plant and Land, this outside consists of viruses, contagions, addictions, diseases.

As gates of communication open, we become posthuman.

Nearly twenty years later, CCRU’s left-accelerationist Mark Fisher penned a reply to Land’s philosophy called “Terminator vs. Avatar,” a 2012 essay on accelerationism that also confronts another key text in the accelerationist canon: Jean-François Lyotard’s scandalous Libidinal Economy.

As I write about Fisher’s essay, a classic 1992 jungle / drum & bass track turns up unexpectedly in a playlist: Goldie & Rufige Kru’s “Terminator.” I like to imagine that Fisher was the one who sent it to me.

As is suggested by its title, “Terminator vs. Avatar” comes at things through reference to a pair of James Cameron films: the first from 1984, the second from 2009. The late capitalist subjectivity that Fisher sees revealed in these films is in his view cynical and insincere, founded on disavowal of its complicity with the things it protests.

“James Cameron’s Avatar is significant because it highlights the disavowal that is constitutive of late capitalist subjectivity, even as it shows how this disavowal is undercut,” writes Fisher.

“Hollywood itself tells us that we may appear to be always-on techno-addicts, hooked on cyberspace,” he explains, “but inside, in our true selves, we are primitives organically linked to the mother / planet, and victimized by the military-industrial complex.” The irony, of course, as Fisher hastens to add, is that “We can only play at being inner primitives by virtue of cinematic proto-VR technology whose very existence presupposes the destruction of the organic idyll of Pandora.”

Fisher finds in Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy a solution to this impasse. From this book of Lyotard’s, and from a similar line of thought in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, Fisher derives his accelerationism.

“If, as Lyotard argues,” writes Fisher, “there are no primitive societies (yes, ‘the Terminator was there’ from the start, distributing microchips to accelerate its advent’); isn’t, then, the only direction forward? Through the shit of capital, its metal bars, its polystyrene, its books, its sausage pâtés, its cyberspace matrix?”

Alienated from origins and from appeals to indigeneity, the only direction left for Fisher’s imagination is “forward.”

What “forward” means for him, though, isn’t the same as what it means for a right-accelerationist like Land. Fisher’s summary of Land’s philosophy is telling:

“Deleuze and Guattari’s machinic desire remorselessly stripped of all Bergsonian vitalism, and made backwards-compatible with Freud’s death drive and Schopenhauer’s Will. The Hegelian-Marxist motor of history is then transplanted into this pulsional nihilism: the idiotic autonomic Will no longer circulating on the spot, but upgraded into a drive, and guided by a quasi-teleological artificial intelligence attractor that draws terrestrial history over a series of intensive thresholds that have no eschatological point of consummation, and that reach empirical termination only contingently if and when its material substrate burns out. This is Hegelian-Marxist historical materialism inverted: Capital will not be ultimately unmasked as exploited labour power; rather, humans are the meat puppet of Capital, their identities and self-understandings are simulations that can and will ultimately be sloughed off.”

Amid all of the energy of this passage, let’s highlight its reference to AI.

“This is—quite deliberately—theory as cyberpunk fiction,” notes Fisher. “Deleuze-Guattari’s concept of capitalism as the virtual unnameable Thing that haunts all previous formations pulp-welded to the time-bending of the Terminator films: ‘what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy’s resources,’ as [Land’s essay] ‘Machinic Desire’ has it.”

Nowhere in his essay does Fisher offer an alternative to these offerings. To the right-accelerationist’s Terminator-future, the left-accelerationist offers no more than a critique of Avatar.

Postcapitalist Desire

Marcuse is among the authors CCRU alum Mark Fisher included on the syllabus for his final course. It was while teaching this course that Fisher took his own life. References to Marcuse appear frequently in Postcapitalist Desire, the compilation of Fisher’s final lectures, gathered and published posthumously by his student Matt Colquhoun. One can only imagine how and in what fashion Marcuse would have fit into Fisher’s book on Acid Communism. It, too, was left unfinished at the time of his death.

Imagine in this book reference to Moten and Harney’s “generativity without reserve.”

Let us write it here in our Library.

Fisher grew up in a conservative, working-class household in Leicester, a city in the East Midlands region of England. He contributed to CCRU while earning his PhD at University of Warwick in the late 1990s. After teaching for several years as a philosophy lecturer at a further education college, Fisher launched k-punk, a blog dedicated to cultural theory, in 2003.

The ideas that he developed there inform his best-known book, Capitalist Realism, published in 2009.

The book’s title names the ideology-form that dominates life in the wake of the Cold War: “the widespread sense,” as Fisher says, “that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it” (Capitalist Realism, p. 2).

Like others on the left, Fisher regards capitalism’s apparent triumph in this moment as a kind of ongoing apocalypse — the opposite of the  “Eucatastrophe” anticipated by Tolkien. Fisher describes it not as a miracle, but as “a negative miracle, a malediction which no penitence can ameliorate” (2). “The catastrophe,” as Fisher notes, “is neither waiting down the road, nor has it already happened. Rather, it is being lived through” (2). Everyday life, in other words, as ongoing traumatic event.

Fisher had moved in the year or so before his death to a definition of capitalist realism as a form of “consciousness deflation,” or “the receding of the concept of consciousness from culture.” Forms of consciousness had developed in the 1960s that were dangerous to capital: class consciousness, psychedelic consciousness (key notion being “plasticity of reality”), and (as with early women’s-lib consciousness-raising groups) what we might call personal consciousness (self as it relates to structures). The important and perhaps most controversial point, argues Fisher, is that “Consciousness is immediately transformative, and shifts in consciousness become the basis for other kinds of transformation.” Recognizing the threat this could pose, capitalism adopted a project of Prohibition, or what Fisher called “libidinal engineering and reality engineering.” Consciousness deflation works by causing us to doubt what we feel. Anxiety is enough — that’s all it takes to control us. But consciousness remains malleable, and the tools for raising it continually find their way back into the hands of the people. “What is ideology,” Fisher asked, “but the form of dreaming in which we live?”

Fisher spent the final years of his life as a member of the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. He hanged himself in his home in Felixstowe on January 13, 2017, dead by suicide at the age of 48. He had sought psychiatric treatment in the weeks leading up to his death, but his general practitioner had only been able to offer over-the-phone meetings to discuss a referral.

A few months prior, he’d been lecturing to his students about Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization, championing Marcuse’s book as a reply to the pessimism of Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents.

Freud’s calculation is that “the price we pay for our advance in civilization is a loss of happiness through the heightening of the sense of guilt” (Civilization and Its Discontents, p. 81). Each of us is made to feel guilty, because in each of us lie impulses in need of repression and disavowal in order for us to produce and perform the duties of civilization. A degree of discontent is thus inevitable in this reckoning. With the compulsion to work comes the triumph of the reality principle over the pleasure principle. Satisfactions deferred, Id repressed by the impossible demands of a Superego without limit: life is ever thus. “One feels inclined to say,” says Freud, “that the intention that man should be ‘happy’ is not included in the plan of ‘Creation’” (23).

“What are the assumptions behind the idea that this level of discomfort is necessary?” asks Fisher. “The assumption is scarcity, fundamentally. That is the fundamental assumption” (Postcapitalist Desire, p. 88).

Are stories and games not the ways we navigate space and time? Capitalist realism is the story-form, the operating system, the game engine Mark felt we’d been made to live within: an aesthetic frame demanding allegiance to a cynical, deflationary realism that organizes history into a kind of tragedy. As with Freud and the Atonists, it insists that, due to scarcity inherent to our nature, we must work in ways that are unpleasurable. Acid Communism rejects this rejection of the possibility of utopia, assuming instead that conscious steerage of stories and games is possible.

Mark finds in Marcuse a remedy to that which blocks utopia: the scarcity mindset that besets those who succumb to capitalist realism.

“The excuse of scarcity, which has justified institutionalized repression since its inception, weakens as man’s knowledge and control over nature enhances the means for fulfilling human needs with a minimum of toil,” writes Marcuse, voicing what Mark hears as an early form of left-accelerationism.

“The still prevailing impoverishment of vast areas of the world is no longer due chiefly to the poverty of human and natural resources but to the manner in which they are distributed and utilized,” adds Marcuse. “But the closer the real possibility of liberating the individual from the constraints once justified by scarcity and immaturity, the greater the need for maintaining and streamlining these constraints lest the established order of domination dissolve. Civilization has to defend itself against the specter of a world which could be free” (Eros and Civilization, p. 93).

Mark lived this struggle for control of the narrative. Yet the game he was playing led to his defeat. Psychedelic intellectuals of the 1960s testified on behalf of a joyous cosmology — yet Mark’s was anything but. For those of us interested in Acid Communism, then, the task now is to invent new games. “Games people play.” Games we can play with others. Careen away from the narrative of identity in space and time imposed by capitalism. Enter, even if only momentarily, a new reality. And then draw others with us into these happenings. Networks of synchronicity, meaning-abundant peaks and plateaus, release from the hegemonic consensus. Trope-scrambling helps, as does appropriation and montage. Let liberation hallelujah jubilee be our rallying cry. And let us welcome as many people as will join us, subtracting prefiguratively into our psychedelically enhanced Acid Communist MMORPG, our free 3D virtual world.

Imagine a conversation there between Fisher and Ishmael Reed. Both wish to refute Freud and his cage of tragedy. What Reed offers, however, and what Mark was perhaps lacking, is a sense of humor.

“LaBas could understand the certain North American Indian tribe reputed to have punished a man for lacking a sense of humor,” writes Reed. “For LaBas, anyone who couldn’t titter a bit was not Afro but most likely a Christian connoting blood, death, and impaled emaciated Jew in excruciation. Nowhere is there an account or portrait of Christ laughing. Like the Marxists who secularized his doctrine, he is always stern, serious and as gloomy as a prison guard. Never does 1 see him laughing until tears appear in his eyes like the roly-poly squint-eyed Buddha guffawing with arms upraised, or certain African loas, Orishas. […]. LaBas believed that when this impostor, this burdensome archetype which afflicted the Afro-American soul, was lifted, a great sigh of relief would go up throughout the land as if the soul was like feet resting in mineral waters after miles of hiking through nails, pebbles, hot coals and prickly things. […]. Christ is so unlike African loas and Orishas, in so many essential ways, that this alien becomes a dangerous intruder in the Afro-American mind, an unwelcome gatecrasher into Ifé, home of the spirits” (Mumbo Jumbo, p. 97).

For Reed, the figure who embodies a potential retro-speculative reconciliation of this conflict is Osiris.

Is Accelerationism an Iteration of Futurism?

After watching Hyperstition, a friend writes, “Is Accelerationism an iteration of Futurism?”

“Good question,” I reply. “You’re right: the two are certainly conceptually aligned. I suppose I’d imagine it in reverse, though: Futurism as an early iteration of Accelerationism. The former served as an experimental first attempt at living ‘hyperstitiously,’ oriented toward a desired future.”

“If we accept Hyperstition’s distinction between Right-Accelerationism and Left-Accelerationism,” I add, “then Italian Futurism would be an early iteration of Right-Accelerationism, and Russian Futurism an early iteration of Left-Accelerationism.”

“But,” I conclude, “I haven’t read enough to know the degree of reflexivity among participants. I hope to read a bit more along these lines this summer.”

The friend also inquires about what he refers to as the film’s “ethnic homogeneity.” By that I imagine he means that the thinkers featured in Hyperstition tend to be British, European, and American, with few exceptions. “It could just be,” I reply, “that filmmaker Christopher Roth is based in Berlin and lacked the budget to survey the movement’s manifestations elsewhere.”

The friend also wonders if use of concepts like “recursion” among Accelerationist philosophers signals some need among humanities intellectuals to cannibalize concepts from the sciences in order to remain relevant.

“To me,” I tell him, “the situation is the opposite. Recursion isn’t just a concept with some currency today among computer scientists; it was already used a century ago by philosophers in the Humanities. If anything, the Comp Sci folks are the ones cannibalizing the American pragmatist philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce.”

“At best,” I add, “it’s a cybernetic feedback loop: concepts evolving through exchange both ways.”

A Course on Accelerationism

“I should teach a course on Accelerationism in the years ahead,” thinks the Narrator, mind already in the elsewhere of a desired future.

“Imagine the writers and texts I could assign,” he writes, handing the assignment over to his Unconscious. “Marx. Deleuze and Guattari. Mark Fisher on Acid Communism. Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light. Sadie Plant. J.G. Ballard. Paul B. Preciado’s Testo Junkie.”

“Manifestos have been central to the movement,” thinks the Narrator, “so we’ll read three: Donna Haraway’s ‘The Cyborg Manifesto,’ the Laboria Cuboniks collective’s The Xenofeminist Manifesto, and Nick Srnicek & Alex Williams’s ‘The Accelerationist Manifesto.’ We’ll also watch and discuss several films, including John Akomfrah’s The Last Angel of History (1996) and Christopher Roth’s Hyperstition (2016).”

“Ideally,” he adds, “as those two films suggest, it would be a course that places Accelerationism in dialogue with Afrofuturism.”

Back to the Future / By Way of Recursion

“Next on the block is ‘recursion,’” says the Narrator, “a concept discussed at length by philosophers Armen Avanessian, Pete Wolfendale, and Suhail Malik in Christopher Roth’s 2016 film Hyperstition.

“Recursion explains how the New enters existence,” says Avanessian. “Where reflexivity is a sequence of stacked meta-reflections, as in a pair of mirrors, recursion involves an integration of parts into a whole, changing in the process both the part and the whole.”

Roth employs cinema both recursively and dialectically. Parts of Hyperstition are thus able to speak to one another via montage in the style of Eisenstein, Vertov, and Godard.

So it is that Suhail Malik appears in the wake of Avanessian, arguing from the year 2026 that recursion is how those of us who code encounter time. “Recursion,” he states, “is what the operation of coding does when, meeting up against the inexorability of time, it tries to compensate for that inexorability and produce memory.”

HYPERSTITION from Christopher Roth on Vimeo.

Thursday August 10, 2017

A house I pass while out walking in my neighborhood wears a mask with a sideways haircut. I am asking you to read me as a destitute Utopian realist, friend, inflated with chemicals and making it up as I go. It is nice to have loved ones you can join on walks. And neighbors who are radical anarchist gardeners. How easily, though, that can slip into radicalism reduced to a mere lifestyle. Sarah hips me to the hedge-jumping acid-folk Utopianism of Van Morrison’s divine transmission, “Sweet Thing.”

She and I live out the prophecy of “We shall walk and talk in gardens all misty and wet with rain.” So much of Astral Weeks is like that. We Acid Communists need to dip in finally to Ernst Bloch’s multi-volume The Principle of Hope. And maybe also Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light, with its group of revolutionaries, the Accelerationists. (And no, for those who are wondering: I do not consider myself an Accelerationist. The only thing I wish to hasten is the coming of the Utopia of Acid Communism; but for me, that means labor’s exodus from capital, not the latter’s acceleration.) As for the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, it was founded at the University of Warwick in 1995 by Fisher, Sadie Plant, Nick Land, Robin Mackay and others, and had ceased to exist as a functional entity by the turn of the millennium. Major downturn here as the dog started pissing on the bed. I cope by practicing intuitive breathing exercises. The depiction of existential dread through a montage of found media in the Zero Books channel’s “Kill All Normies” video speaks fluently of my current predicament.

Why have we talked ourselves into such a dreadfully degraded form of consciousness? How do societies respond to pervasive nihilism? Surely that signals the approach of our show’s finale, no? Are our peers, even the most devout, all secretly traumatized by the death of God and the subsequent purposelessness of existence? I’m barely able to continue to process this. It uses brainwashing techniques such as subliminal messages and emotional association through imagery. Their claim to have control of my mind frightens me. Is “meme magic” legitimately a thing? I feel like I’ve crossed a threshold, and the world has crossed it with me. The interregnum between paradigms. Whose dream am I in if not my own? “Relax, it doesn’t matter,” the shadow self whispers. “Commit yourself only to Being.” Can I square that with the implied monism of “Nature as system of systems”? I feel like I’ve become a person who talks beside himself in public. Angela Nagle’s shamefully ill-informed critique of the politics of transgression in Kill All Normies resembles a student pretending to speak with smug disdain on a topic known only through ideologically-driven potted online summaries, ideas from the Nietzschean / Sadean Left of the 60s and 70s cherry-picked and drastically oversimplified in an attempt to prove a point — that point being that the time has come to lay to rest the entire paradigm of resistance through cultivation of counterculture. To claim as Nagle does the cultural dominance of the Left during the Obama years is to ignore in one’s conception of culture the culture of business, as well as the cultures of the religious right. This is what happens when analysis of culture sidesteps participants’ relations to means of production (including but not limited to means of consciousness-production). The Right transgresses, yes, even under capitalism — but only by falsely hypostasizing the part for the capitalist whole.