Posthuman Accelerationism

Posted by noir-realism on

It is thus necessary to make a distinction between speed and movement: a movement may be very fast, but that does not give it speed; a speed may be very slow, or even immobile, yet it is still speed. Movement is extensive; speed is intensive. Movement goes from point to point; speed, on the contrary, constitutes the absolute character of a body whose irreducible parts (atoms) occupy or fill a smooth space in the manner of a vortex, with the possibility of springing up at any point.

- Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

accel

Accelerationism is a community blog with several well known young philosophers investigating theories of an accelerated futurism: Tristam Adams, Jon Lindblom, Andrew Osborne, Benedict Singleton, Nick Srnicek, James Trafford, Tom Trevatt, Inigo Wilkins, Alex Williams, and Peter Wolfendale. I’ve covered much of this territory before (here) but thought I’d take a second look.

In a post Some Friendly Questions Pete Wolfendale of Deontologistics fame tells us that the group has ”taken quite a bit of flack online since the site went up, some of it informed and well intentioned, some of it the complete opposite, and much of it lying at various points in between”. I admit to being critical of the manifesto (pdf) by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams in my previous post. My friend Levi in a post affirming aspects of Srnicek and Williams manifesto mentioned in passing – commenting on my post, that “Perhaps I just completely fail to understand what the accelerationists are on about, but I find noir’s picture unrecognizable”. So I thought to myself: was my appraisal that far off base? Does this accelerationism deserve a second look? I thought “Okay, let’s give them the benefit of doubt, take another look, see exactly what it is they are saying to us.”

Wolfendale’s post relates answers to some questions provided by Tom O’Shea that he hopes will alleviate some of the criticisms as well us relaying vital information about this project. The first question “Does accelerationism collapse into mere futurism—simply substituting abstraction for mechanics (e.g. HFT for cars)?” deals with difference and could be expanded to include: what is the difference between accelerationism and futurism, what are the relations between the two concepts if any, and can we equate the two concepts or notions as equivalent, can the one be reduced to the other or vice versa? Wolfendale tells us succinctly that

“Accelerationism is in many ways an attempt to revive previous cultural and theoretical ways of relating to the future that have been suppressed, subverted, or otherwise simply degraded in the latter half of the 20th century to now. Amongst these the notions of modernism and futurism and the cultural movements associated with them are crucial predecessors to anything we’re doing.”

This revivication of modernism and futurism within a socio-cultural theoretic formation entails us to first understand just what was “suppressed, subverted, or otherwise degraded” by the post-modern turn that seems to be the central to their argument. If this is so then we need first to understand what these new accelerationists see from that historical matrix of ideas and concepts alleged under the notions of modernism and futurism. Ezra Pound probably typified in his statement: “Make if New!” the essential screed of the modernist ethic. Yet, modernism cannot be reduced to simple screeds, it is too complex, too full of antagonistic elements and movements to be reduced to an essentialist discourse of any type or persuasion. Harold Rosenberg once argued that the progenitor of modernism was none other than the poet, Baudelaire “who invited fugitives from the too narrow world of memory to come aboard with him in search of the New”. 1 Some have suggested that The Scream injects that sense of apprehension and angst that is central to the modernist spirit. As Peter Gay remarks in his seminal study of the period:

The Scream, widely considered the quintessence of modern angst, which he revisited in several versions from 1893 on, shows a scantily articulated figure— whether man or woman is impossible to determine— its hands clasped to its cheeks, its eyes staring, its mouth wide open, standing on a long bridge, with ominous clouds swirling around. We have it from Munch himself that the idea for this portrait of a nervous fit came to him after experiencing an overpowering anxiety attack. But usually its untold thousands of viewers have generalized his nightmarish vision and read The Scream as the artistic epitome of the nervous unease that observant contemporaries thought was haunting crowded and bustling urban existence in the 1890s.2

There were others within modernism that felt a need to open new spaces for thought, art, sociality, etc., and to do that they suggested we should begin by a few deft acts of destruction. In an extreme movement against the reactionary forces within bourgeois society the outspoken French Realist critic and novelist Edmond Duranty had suggested that the Louvre, that “catacomb,” be burned to the ground, an idea that the Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro happily endorsed some two decades later. The demolition of these “necropolises of art,” he thought, would greatly advance the progress of painting. Indeed, at their most bellicose, modernists refused to entertain any traffic with what Gauguin snidely called “the putrid kiss of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.”(ibid. KL 424-430)

But then we come to the Italian Futurists, who, not unexpectedly, made destruction of these bourgeois institutions an ingredient in their immoderate program of aggression against contemporary culture: “We want to demolish the museums, the libraries,” exclaimed Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the group’s founder, in his Initial Manifesto of Futurism of 1909, “combat moralism, feminism, and all opportunistic and utilitarian acts of cowardice.” Hostility could hardly go further short of direct action. At its most central futurism was about speed: Futurists insist that literature will not be overtaken by progress; rather, it will absorb progress in its evolution, and will demonstrate that such progress must manifest in this manner because Man will use this progress to sincerely let his instinctive nature explode. Man is reacting against the potentially overwhelming strength of progress, and shouts out his centrality. Man will use speed, not the opposite. F. T. Marinetti was very active in Fascist politics until he withdrew in protest of the “Roman Grandeur” which had come to dominate Fascist aesthetics. Mussolini once said that the historic soil of Rome had ‘a magical power’. For fascism, the discovery and restoration of Roman ruins was mainly ‘symbolic archeology’, inspired by a mythical attraction towards a ‘sacred centre’ and a desire to come into contact with its ‘magical power’. The fascists also treated the ‘birth of Rome’ ceremony as an initiation ritual, intended to familiarize initiates with ‘romanita’. This ceremony was also inspired by ‘a “divine will”, by an imperial and powerful will’, through which ‘the new Italian resumes spiritual contact with ancient Rome.3 As Peter Gay remarks:

The Futurists’ public declamations, in large part written by their leader and self-appointed spokesman, Marinetti, and noted for their fierce anti-traditional and uninhibited tone, broadcast their case for bellicosity, together with calls for manliness. They were a blatant symptom of discontent with a foreign policy of compromise, and the anxiety about what many termed a nationwide failure of male self-confidence. This ideology made them ideal forerunners for the Fascists’ ambitious, if vague, agenda. Thus several elements of modernism entered Fascist culture with no need for translation. (Kindle Locations 6903-6907).

All of this brings us back to our New Accelerationists, and to the question that Wolfendale paraphrased as “in what ways are we not simply returning to these concepts/movements, but trying to inherit and develop them?” Wolfendale argues that instead of the nostalgic language of return, rehabilitation, or defence Accelerationism offers a model of inheritance and development. First, he tells us that this new accelerationist creed situates itself within a Hegelian tradition of dialectical historicism. Yet, against some of the more encrusted conceptual notions associated with Marxian absorption of Hegelian dialectic for historical materialism Wolfendale offers this ‘stripped-down’ version without the excess baggage of Marx’s various linguistic and conceptual trappings. Wolfendale disparages both Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek for what he terms their resurrection of Hegel, insofar as it just looks like Lacan/Sartre/Schelling wearing a Hegel mask.

“What of futurism and modernism then?,” asks Wolfendale. Applying his ‘minimalist dialectic’ he informs us that we can now separate the truth from the falsity that has been obscured by both the disparagement of post-modern turn theorists or sublimated by contemporary capitalist discourse out of touch with these radical notions. Against those supposed post-moderns he would revive Lyotard – who has fallen out of favor in recent critical history, saying, the “point is that Lyotard’s thought explicitly denies anything like a historical epoch of ‘postmodernity’, and that anything which self-identifies as postmodernism on the basis of an analysis of such an epoch is thus highly suspect.” The point is for the new accelerationist is to bypass postmodernity altogether as if it were itself an illusionary project that had no bearing on the return of modernism and futurism.

Instead he offers a Futurist Opportunism that opposes political nostalgia - any notion of a “return to the good old days of revolutionary praxis, etc.”, as well as opposing political activismis, which stuck in the moment, the eternal now, offers no view onto the future coming at us, and also opposes political eschatology“whose relationship to the future has become pathological”. Once is reminded of Matteo Pasquinelli who in his ‘Manifesto of UrbanCannibalism’, says, “if in the modern age ‘Europe was beginning to devour, to digest the world’, urban cannibalism is the nemesis of late capitalism”. Such apopcalypticisms offered an eschatology of the political that could open new spaces of struggle against a capitalist totality – methodologically reframing Western neoliberal economics – which on the one hand appears to be unavoidable, and on the other hand constantly changes its form. What these new accelerationist oppose is not so much this pop-culture of zombie capitalism discourse as it is any “consideration of future social transformations from both theoretical attempts to identify the enabling conditions of these transformations in the present and practical attempts to act upon them to bring about such transformations”. So its a need to find the new possibilities or conditions of the future in the present that might offer real change and social transformation that is at stake rather than some dire need to enter the post-apocalyptic wasteland of World War Z variety.

Wolfendale tells us that what accelerationsism is most against is the “bland techno-capitalist vision of incrementally upgrading of the present state of affairs, which lacks both plausibility and vision”. And that what we need are new visions, by “creating a new link to history, by finding opportunities in the present to appropriate trends from the past and accelerate them into the future”. Which makes it seem like accelerationism is a sort of ‘time-machine’ that is able to exploit opportunities within events of our moment, as well as movements still viable with events of the past – which makes me beg the question why they despise Badiou/Zizek so much, since this is much the same as what those two argue for in their ‘Idea of communism’ essays. And, not to be matched, they want to accelerate the present and past into the future. How is this possible? What concepts are notions of Time does this accelerationist philosophy conceive as its central insight? Do we enter this future through some speed machine, some strange twisting of time and gravity, a loop through the infinite wormhole of possibility; or, is our temporal registry skewed beyond our limited Kantian categories, bound to an engine of necessity that slows us to a standstill allowing the past and future to bleed into our present finitudes like so many small rivulets from a great river that has no beginning and no ending. “The imperative is to see both the past and the future in the present, in the nooks and crannies of the current system, and to exploit these mercilessly, without waiting for some deferred revolutionary horizon or mourning the passing of the old conditions that may have made it possible.” says, Wolfendale.  In other words time is not some object situated in the past or future, it exists in the very movement of our present global system, waiting for us to exploit it without mercy or forethought. This is sounding more like Harman’s ‘Time is an Illusion’, or like Julian Barbour’s ideas of all those pockets of time sitting out there disconnected waiting to be exposed and manipulated, each isolated in their own eternal nows. If the past and future exist to be manipulated in this eternal now of our present moment then what is accelerationism? Is it a speeding up of the mind itself to light speed? Does the mind overcome the inertia of universal entropy? Do we suddenly allow the past and future to bleed into the present making our ability to change the political systems at will? Are do we anticipate the future by inventing it out of our past and present needs? Or, better yet, maybe it is the future that is inventing us out of the specters of past civilizations, cracking open the dead zones of lost realities, pulling out of their twisted faded shadow life the formations for our present dispositions?

From its beginnings Modernism and Futurism have practically embodied the experience of acceleration: “modernity is about the acceleration of time,” ran Peter Conrad’s influential formula. This is confirmed by the testimonies from the “epochal threshold” investigated by Koselleck as well as by the theoretical frameworks of “classical” sociology. From Simmel’s observation of the continuous “heightening of nervous life” in the modern metropolis to Weber’s analysis of the time discipline of the Protestant ethic, for which wasting time is the “the deadliest of all sins,” and from Durkheim’s fear of anomie as a result of overly rapid social change to Marx and Engel’s dictum that capitalism’s inherent tendency is to make all that is solid “melt into air,” classical sociological analyses of modernity can always be reconstructed as diagnoses of acceleration.4

So the key to Accelerationism is a new theory of Time or the temporal use of history and the future in the present. Could it be that the post-modern turn forgot about Time? That it formulated simulations in a void, created static models based on mathemes that were in themselves based on Platonic entities rather than the real processes of change in the world? Maybe the reason for this is above all a “forgetfulness of time” in twentieth-century social-scientific theory, which notoriously preferred “static” models of society and modeled the modernization process (almost entirely according to the analytical pattern of a “comparative statics”) along the dimensions of structural differentiation, cultural rationalization, the individualization of personality, and the domestication of nature (Hartmut p. 300). What if there was not just one monolithic past, present, and future but a plurality of bubbles or spheres of time? What then? What if there are many types of acceleration, and not all on the same time track, but colliding with each other in ways we have yet to understand?

What if we break it down into three complementary components of acceleration as Hartmut Rosa does in Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity:

1) technical acceleration, that is, the intentional acceleration of goal-directed processes. From this perspective, the acceleration history of modernity essentially represents a history of the progressive acceleration of transportation, communication, and production.

2) the acceleration of social change, that is, the escalation of the rate of social change with respect to associational structures, knowledge (theoretical, practical, and moral), social practices, and action orientations. As Hartmut puts it : Here “acceleration” means primarily the accelerated change of fashions, lifestyles, work, family structures, political and religious ties, etc. For the definition and empirical operationalization of this form of acceleration I drew on the concept of the contraction of the present introduced by Hermann Lübbe, but also justifiable on systems-theoretical grounds. Accordingly, “the acceleration of social change” means the following: the intervals of time for which one can assume stability in the sense of a general congruence of the space of experience and the horizon of expectation (and hence a secure set of expectations) progressively shrink in the various domains of society, whether these are understood in terms of values, functions, or types of action, although this shrinkage neither occurs in a unilinear way nor at the same tempo across the board. Thus the acceleration of social change can be defined as the increase of the rate of decay of action-orienting experiences and expectations and as the shortening of the periods of time that are defined as “the present” in the respective spheres of society.(p. 301)

3) the acceleration of the pace of life, represents a reaction to the scarcity of (uncommitted) time resources. This is why, on the one hand, it is expressed in the experience of stress and a lack of time, and, on the other, it can be defined as an increase in the number of episodes of action and/ or experience per unit of time.

Along with this is certain counter tendencies or antagonistic forces that seek to bind acceleration and curtail its effects. She terms these counter-dynamization processes: first, there are natural geophysical, biological, and anthropological speed limits, that is, processes that either absolutely cannot be manipulated or only at the price of a massive qualitative transformation of the process to be accelerated; second, there are territorial, cultural, and structural “islands of deceleration,” i.e., areas that are in principle susceptible to modernization and hence to processes of acceleration but that have, up till now, not been caught up in them or have managed (at least for the time being) to remain idle. They thus appear to be places where “time stands still.”; third, there are in many fields of action blockages and slowdowns occur again and again as unintended side effects of acceleration that can lead to dysfunctional and, to some extent, pathological consequences. The most well-known example of this is the traffic jam, though economic recessions and forms of depressive illness can also be placed under this heading. Yet beyond this, acceleration-induced unintended slowdown also occurs at the interface points of functional systems or processing cycles when these prove to be capable of acceleration to different extents, which causes desynchronization problems that are expressed in unwanted waiting times: for instance, when the new long-distance express train arrives at the station twenty minutes earlier than the old long-distance train did, but the local commuter train comes at the same time it did before; fourth, there are phenomena of intentional deceleration, which appear in two different forms: either as “functional” or “accelerative” deceleration in the sense of individual and collective moratoria or phases of recuperation (as in the four-week retreat of a CEO to the tranquillity of a monastery) that ultimately serve the goal of further increases of speed (for example, in the form of an increased capacity for innovation) or as “ideological” deceleration movements that often have a fundamentalist or antimodernist character and aim at genuine social slowdown or a stalling of the acceleration process in the name of a better society and a better form of life. This idea of deceleration may even be on the verge of becoming the dominant counter-ideology of the twenty-first century; and, fifth, there are cultural and structural phenomena that embody a tendency toward rigidity. This tendency does not appear to be a self-standing principle, but rather the paradoxical flip side of social acceleration. These phenomena constitute the basis for the experience of an uneventfulness and standstill that underlies the rapidly changing surface of social conditions and events, one that accompanies the modern perception of dynamization from the very beginning as a second fundamental experience of modernization. It is often precisely in phases of an intense surge of acceleration that this phenomenon is reflected individually in manifestations of “ennui” or “existential boredom” and collectively in the diagnosis of cultural crystallization, or the “end of history,” but in both cases as the perception of a return of the ever same.(303-304)

It was Niklas Luhmann among other representatives of systems theory who defended the idea that the principle of functional differentiation is generally accompanied by the heightening and temporalization of complexity: decisions are not all made simultaneously, but rather a growing number are displaced into the future, thus constantly increasing the amount of open and realizable options. So the notion of accelerating our options and programs into the future has its own lineage. If the Enlightenment project can be seen as the temporalization of history with its concomitant of speed, then post-modernity can be seen as the detemporalization of history into static modes of life. In our time we are seeing the political project of modernity coming possibly to its end as a result of the desynchronization of socioeconomic development and political action. The dialectical inversion of acceleration and movement into rigidity and standstill, which is, so to speak, the leitmotif of my analysis of the modern acceleration process, culminates in a “postmodern” political culture that dispenses with the claims to autonomy and identity that have always characterized the project and ethos of modernity.(314)

Ours has been seen as the age of ‘Time Sickness’, of too little time and too much speed all colliding in a time-induced void that offer ‘pathologies of change’ rather than change itself. Caught between modes of acclerationism/decelerationism we find ourselves pulled by forces into temporal dilemmas that have opened wounds in our collective as well as singular psyches, opening flows that end in stasis, or produce blockages that open onto chaos and timeless contingencies. Because of this the old critiques of alienation must become for us a Critique of Time. As our socioeconomic and technocapitalist spheres of influence seep between time past,present, and future, and our movements speed up in endless cycles of rage, our ability to control those forces through collective decision making processes are slowing down to zero. And more the acceleration of technique leads to the apparent slowdown and collapse of the environment and natural resource base that sustains this acceleration process.

What we are seeing in our time is the end of the Enlightenment project, an end to modernity and postmodernity as new forms of posthuman subjectivity begin to open up alternative paths and lines of flight, and make inroads from the future into our present moments. New modes of perception, new ways to process speed, and new forms of individual and collective self-relations are even now in the midst of forming as these new modes of existence insert themselves within the wounds or interstices of our forgotten lives. What these new modes of existence and posthuman subjectivity might entail are still open possibilities, yet fragments of that future lie scattered everywhere in our present moments waiting to be awakened and put into play. How we approach this maddening moment as the forces of acceleration/deceleration seem locked in eventful battle is undecided and undecideable. Yet, the breaking of the symmetry of time in synchronic-diachronic lines of flights are bifurcating outward even now.

Long before these forces play themselves out and before that point is reached when capital consumes the last of earth’s resources these ‘pathologies of acceleration’ might well have replaced us with our posthuman progeny through some as yet unknown bifurcation in time. Yet, if we can establish a temporal critique worthy of a new Posthuman project who can say what possibilities will remain to us as we open that past and that future in our present moments of empirical movement. Cracking open the dark rift that bars us from that future where our own singularities await us on the final speed bump at the edge of time, we may just discover the unique potential that awaits the human species itself as the conditions for its own possibilities flowers into a thousand resilient forms. If Utopia is only the possibility of hope that keeps us following those lines of flight toward impossible futures, and its opposite is the dystopic entropy of a false stasis at the end of the line enfolding us into that dark abyss from which there is no exit, then what is the path between - the one that offers us the only balancing act worth having and living, that of reality itself?

———————–

I’ll need to stop now… there are other questions in his post I’d like to take up at another time…

1. Harold Rosenberg. The Tradition of the New. (1959)
2. Gay, Peter (2010-08-16). Modernism: The Lure of Heresy (Kindle Locations 2004-2010). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.
3. Fascism as Political Religion. Emilio Gentile. Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 25 No. 2/3 (May-Jun., 1990) pp. 229-251)
4. Rosa, Hartmut (2013-05-21). Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity (New Directions in Critical Theory) (pp. 299-300). Columbia University Press. Kindle Edition.

Letters to a young Comrade (2)

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Dear Comrade,

Yes, I know its been a while since we last wrote to each other, and that it is high time that I spoke of something that is little discussed in the course of one’s investigations. You have asked me about my life, about the choices I’ve made, and the consequences of those choices. I have thought on this for a long while. It is always difficult to turn the light onto one’s own distinct failures, to realize the truth of that old dictum that the “unexamined life is not worth living.” Yet, here I am turning that light on.

That I am now a part of that fractured working class we term the ‘intellectual labourer’ is superficial to say the least, for it leaves out my heritage in the old working classes and my long years caught within the meshes of all that entails.  As you know I’m not a young man anymore, yet I have the energy of ten of my younger compatriots – ha, at least in my imagination. I grew up in the fifties in what we might term now a thriving boom-town in West Texas. Odessa, in the fifties, was the place to be if you were in the oil business – a piss hole full of nothing but jack rabbits, tumbleweed, and the smell of working men’s grime: beer, corn-dogs, and, cheap, two-bit dreams that never ended good. Maybe it does sound like some old noir novel, that’s true, but it was one that was alive with those who lived such things. Founded by Russian immigrants in 1891 a water stop and cattle shipping point on the Texas and Pacific Railway it was just a small pit stop going nowhere till the great oil boom of the Petroleum Basin.

Just the kind of place a kid full of small town dreams thrived in, bound by an endless horizon of dust storms and tumbleweed, hailstorms and thunder made of green lightning. Growing up in a place like that you knew from the beginning you were fucked and going nowhere fast. Just the way it was. You could see it in the bloody eyes of the men who lived it day in and day out, their hands oiled and black as the ash pits that slurred the oil to the end of a blow out. This wasn’t paradise, this was hell at 100 degrees Fahrenheit most of the year. If the sand didn’t bury you then some roughneck with a grudge just might. Fidelity to one’s marriage partner wasn’t on high priority. So many men and women bent the wind to strange love in hopes of some kind of companionship on those lonely dark desert nights.

Oh sure we had plenty of Churches and Bars – on opposite sides of town, if you get my drift - that seemed to be all we had for entertainment in those days. That is unless chasing jack rabbits and coyotes down an old country dirt road under a full moon, or with blaring lights blazing from the top of an old 56 Chevy Pick-up was your sort of fun. The stain of sin and redemption, the working man’s bondage to a faded dream out of some forgotten world of hope. People would square-dance on Wednesday night in the church basements till the late hours as if time was a broken record on hold, while the kids told ghost stories to each other in pup tents till the fires behind the sand lot dimmed. We lived in our own real live Norman Rockwell painting, yet it was always a little skewed like someone had scraped off all the paint and covered it with cartoon pictures of hell instead. Most of the people that grew up in this twilight zone never went beyond two hundred miles to Lake Thomas where one could swim in mud soup as thick as a slime bucket for a small price. Yea, we loved this world, it was ours, a place where Saturday night drive-ins still existed, where kids with cigarettes rolled up in t-shirts ran old klunkers round a pit they called a speed track, and others went down to the local A&W for rope ice-cream and to watch the girls skating round the burger joint. The myth of the fifties did exist until someone pulled the plug and let the real world in.

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Letters to a young Comrade (1)

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Dear Comrade,

I know we’ve had this conversation before, and I know you’ve asked me more often than not why the ‘Idea of communism’ matters in such an age as ours. You’ve pointed out that the history of communism has been the history of a great failure. But was it communism that failed us, truly? Should we not admit that mistakes have been made? Are we better than Comrade Lenin who once stated that those “Communists are doomed who imagine that it is possible to finish such an epoch-making undertaking as completing the foundations of socialist economy (particularly in a small-peasant country) without making mistakes, without retreats, without numerous alterations to what is unfinished or wrongly done.”1 Yet, we cannot stop there, we must continue, must remember, allow his message to sink in completely into the core of our being, listen to what he says after this first iteration: “Communists who have no illusions, who do not give way to despondency, and who preserve their strength and flexibility ‘to begin from the beginning’ over and over again in approaching an extremely difficult task, are not doomed (and in all probability will not perish). (ibid.)

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Quiet Week

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Been a quiet week. Been actively writing on my dystopian novel.  One could throw a whole reading list at the revolutionary era of the Bolshevik’s. Thinking on the era between the October Revolution and the death of Trotsky one could spend a lifetime. But to put on top of that our own era, a prelude to so many strange worlds opening up as we move into a multipolar reorganization of life on this planet with all that entails in human suffering, as well as the impacts that may be unleashed by the new sciences and technologies of Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Information Technology, and Cognitive Science. One can only wonder and surmise what possible consequences face us in the near future. Not to mention all the other aspects of resource depletion, climate change, famine, and all the other dire apocalyptic imaginings.

To create a speculative fiction based not only on all these factors, but on the latest philosophical literature available is almost mind boggling to anyone attempting to compress our eras struggles without being either too complex or too simplistic and reductionary.  That no one person could ever begin to master the data needed to understand every facet of our coming eras struggles is in itself telling. Even the notion of a “mastery of knowledge” seems vein in our time. Knowledge is fractured, frayed by its vast storehouses of archives and endless labyrinths of databanks that only a machinic consciousness could hope to interrogate much less apply any structure or narrative decomplexification for human consumption. Maybe that’s just it. Maybe the whole Enlightenment project is now bankrupt to the point that the idea of building a Rational Order of the Ages is becoming a perfect nightmare without outlet.

Maybe our accumulation of knowledge is just like our vast accumulation of surplus value an endless and monstrous assault against history itself. Why else so many present day movies and novels filled with zombies? Are we becoming so oversaturated by the accumulation of guilt and shame at our own dark histories that we too are becoming entombed in our own machinic transformations? Maybe all those followers of accelerationsim are instead of speeding things up really moving us into a slow dance of dead space, an endless revolution in stasis that appears to be another version of Plato’s moving image of eternity, but is only ever another vision of the living dead or of that Death-in-Life of which the counter-enlightenment forcast?

In our dystopian fictions we seem to be merging apocalypticism with the agon of political struggle. What’s sad is that the reader’s market is becoming saturated with such mindless fare in what they are terming YA Dystopian fiction. Most of this fare is good entertainment, but has little to do with awakening people to a knowledge of their predicaments. Most of it caters to our pruient desires rather than an infiltration and disturbance of our ethical being. Until we can awaken a passion for real change rather than titillation we will continue down the path of decadence and decay being coopted by capital and its minions.

As I read of the history of these men and women who struggled against Tsarist Russia I see people who took their ideas into the streets, who seized the moments of their lives with passion and intelligence. Like any human struggle mistakes were made, and leaders turned dictators betrayed the original intent of the movement to ends other than originally intended by the majority of participants. This is to be studied, learned from, and not to be repeated but to be lived through with one’s eyes open. If communism is an Idea that has yet to be realized, and I think it is, then we have much to do, much to know, much digging into our own dark hearts so that such worlds as in a parallel dimension will oversee our steps as we move into our own brave futures. We need passion and desire and much intelligence, but most of all we need people who are willing to once again take up the banner of struggle in our world. I waver between utopian dreams and dystopian nightmares like a madman who seeks a way between, an alternative to false hopes and broken dreams.

Once again we need to understand this heritage. We need to know what they did: - their actions, their thoughts and aspirations, their failures and their compromises, the inner history of their souls struggle? Who were these passionate souls who fought against such odds to create a new world based on egalitarian justice? What happened? Why did it fail? Why did such a monstrous being as Stalin betray the revolution? How did Trotsky fail? As well as the West, how and why have we allowed such imperial systems to arise in our midst? What are we doing about it? Why are we sleepwalking through existence allowing the earth to be consumed by this system of accumulated waste? When will our revolution begin? The one in which humans finally decide enough is enough, that it is high time we learned to collaborate with each other rather than killing each other in endless nightmare wars…

All these types of ideas feed into my overwrought imagination as I continue writing my fiction… I think of this blog as a way to resurface from my dark caves, my subworlds of struggle. I flow between pessimism and nihilism like a ghost wandering through an archive of our fractured era. I sometimes think of one of our future machinic progeny resurrecting my mind from the data banks of some long buried archive, retrieving the information stored in my terror ridden synapses trying to understand why I spent so many pointless hours struggling against the inevitability of the machinic future. In our fantasy conversation I tell him the truth:

“I still believe in the magic of the word human, I still believe in the passion of organic life, of pain and joy, of all the little passions that arise from doing things for the first, second, or even, last time; for feeling the sun on my face, of the first cold breath on a winter’s morn, of the touch of my loved one, and her kiss, of human thought and the passions of the mind; of all the thousand and one tales of impossible never never lands that once strewn the corridors of vast libraries where human imagination believed in itself; and, most of all believed in a future worth living in, where we could all live and work and love and play passionately; of my breath on a lute, of listening to Chopin, Mozart, Schoenberg, to Jazz, Rock, and, even, Counry music; to long walks in the mountains, along soft sandy beaches, or, even the cavernous river trips kayaking… and, most of all, of gazing into the night of endless stars wondering about the myriad alien worlds where other life forms have emerged out of this strangeness, and the mysteries of the universe that we have barely begun to comprehend.”

My reading list:

Russian Studies:

Isaac Deutscher’s three volume biography of Trotsky
Victor Serge’s Memoirs of a Revolutionary
Zizek’s essays on Lenin in Revolution at the Gates, and Trotsky’s Terror and Communism
Rereading classic texts by Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemberg, etc.
Johnathan Sperber’s biography of Marx
E. H. Carr’s three volume work on The Bolshevik Revolution

Utopian Studies:

Richard Stites Revolutionary Dreams
Erika Gottliev Dystopian Fiction East and West Universe of Terror and Trial
Susan Buck-Morss  Dreamworld and Catastrophe
Rosi Braidotti’s new The Posthuman
Anthology Histories of the Future
Katherine Boo Behind Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity Adrian Adrian Johnston Badiou, Zizek, and Political Transformations

Novels:

The Case of Comrade Tulayev by Victor Serge
We by Zamyatin
Roadside Picnic by Arkady Strugatsky
Children of the Arbat by Anatoli Rybakov
Conquered City by Victor Serge
The Foundation Pit by Andrey Platonov

Speculations on the End of Time: Gratton, Harman, Barbour

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The primary dualism in the world is not between matter and mind, but between objects and relations, and most relations will be unrecognizable as anything mental, just as objects turn out not to resemble what is usually called the physical.

- Graham Harman, Time, Space, Essence, Eidos

Harman’s work must deny the reality of time in order to make his own claims for a certain realism…

- Peter Gratton, Post-Deconstructive Realism It’s about Time

I suggest that our belief in time and a past arises solely because our entire experience comes to us through the medium of static arrangements of matter, in Nows, that create the appearance of time and change. Tensors relate different things and bring them into lawful connection.

- Julian Barbour, The End of Time

Recently Peter Gratton’s essay in Speculations IV (which I’ve already written of here) reminded me of Julian Barbour’s book The End of Time which I’d read a few years back and found some interesting parallel’s on the theory of Time within a metaphysics of presence. What you see below is just bringing out the comparisons, this is not a defense of Harman, Gratton, Barbour or anyone else. Time is a philosophical bombshell, and not a notions that has a perfect solution: at least, not yet, in my honest opinion.  Time is still one of the grand mysteries for science and philosophy, along with ideas on causality, and we need to be open to the strange and unfounded speculations even if they appear at first as counter-intuitive or against the grain of one’s common sense experience. Even Einstein’s conceptions on relativity were not accepted outright, but were debated for years before becoming central to physics. What I show below is just such a comparison between a working scientist, Julian Barbour (quantum gravity theorist), and the speculative philosophy of Graham Harman. To draw comparisons is not to defend either side of the coin. Quantum Gravity Theory is not even the most accepted theory in physics: that being String Theory at present. But all these ideas are hotly debated with no perfect solution. It is to tease out speculative thought and see things differently from our usual habitual modes of thinking. My attitude toward philosophy is to keep an open mind, to take off my ideological blinkers, my philosophical presuppositions, and let the philosopher bare his or her conceptual framework without some ultimate judgment. Judgment is for critique, not commentary. What I try my best to do on this site is commentary rather than critique. You’ll find plenty of critique on a thousand other blogs.  Time is a hobby for me, so I find things interesting in crossovers between systems, even if those systems are true or not true, its the strangeness of the ideas that fascinates. In fact Graham can and will defend his own position in a new book from a comment on this post and on Gratton’s conceptions: here.

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Peter ultimately critiqued both Meillassoux and Graham Harman as metaphyscians of presence: philosophers for whom time is the cosmic illusion (my post on this: here). Harman considers himself a substantial formalist. In an early essay Time, Space, Essence, Eidos he lays out most of the themes that have from the beginning haunted his discourse on Objects and the fourfold tensions between real objects and real qualities, and sensual objects and sensual qualities. Every time I begin thinking about Harman’s system I want to pull out my nephew’s tinker set and start building objects in patterns that will somehow match his diagrammatic imagination.  Peter Gratton in his essay he remarks in otherwise frank terms tells us that neither Meillassoux or Harman believe in Time:

Meillassoux and Harman mark a return to the real that is anything but, as long as they treat the time of becoming as epiphenomenal, and thus deny the reality of time however aporetic it is, as we well know—at the beating hearts of thinkers they too quickly disparage while ignoring what were their central insights.

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Speculative Posthumanism: R. Scott Bakker, Mark Fisher and David Roden

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“A posthuman is any WHD [Wide Human Descendent] that goes feral; becomes capable of life outside the planetary substance comprised of narrow biological humans, their cultures and technologies.”

- Dr. David Roden, Hacking Humans

“So really think about it now,” Thomas continued. “Everything you live, everything you see and touch and hear and taste, everything you think, belongs to this little slice of mush, this little wedge in your brain called the thalamocortical system. The neural processing that makes these experiences possible—we’re talking about the most complicated machinery in the known universe—is utterly invisible. This expansive, far-reaching experience of yours is nothing more than a mote, an inexplicable glow, hurtling through some impossible black. You’re steering through a dream…”

- R. Scott Bakker,  Neuropath

In his novel Neuropath Thomas Bible, one of R. Scott Bakker’s characters – an atypical academic, not one of your pie-in-the-sky type, theorists, reminisces with a friend about an old professor who once presented theories on the coming “semantic apocalypse,” the apocalypse of meaning. He tells this friend, Samantha, that this is when the Argument started and conveys to her its basic tenets:

“Remember how I said science had scrubbed the world of purpose? For some reason, wherever science encounters intention or purpose in the world, it snuffs it out. The world as described by science is arbitrary and random. There’s innumerable causes for everything, but no reasons for anything.”1(58)

After a few arguments on how the neural process of the brain itself weaves the illusions of free-will, mind, etc. Thomas lays down the bombshell of Bakker’s pet theory: Blind Brain Theory, saying: “The brain, it turned out, could wrap itself around most everything but itself—which was why it invented minds . . . souls.”(61) Suddenly Samantha wakes up realizing that all this leads to moral nihilism and begins babbling defenses against such truths as Thomas has revealed. For Thomas this all seems all too familiar and human, he reminisces a similar conversation he’d had with his friend and co-hort, Neil Cassidy, who on realizing just where the argument led stated (stoned and pacing back and forth like a feral beast):

“Whoa, dude . . . Think about it. You’re a machine—a machine!—dreaming that you have a soul. None of this is real, man, and they can fucking prove it.” (62)

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Mark Fisher: A Critique of Practical Nihilism: Agency in Scott Bakker’s “Neuropath”

My post was generated by rereading Mark Fisher’s excellent critique of Bakker’s novel in INCOGNITUM HACTENUS Volume 2: here (downloadable in .pdf format). What interested me in Fisher’s critique was his conclusions more than his actual arguments. You can read the essay yourself and draw your own conclusions, but for me the either/or scenario that Fisher draws out is how either the technocapitalists or the technosocialists (‘General Intellect’) in the immediate future might use such knowledge to wield powers of control/emacipation never before imaginable:

For whatever the theoretical implications of neuroscience, Bakker is surely right that its practical applications will in the first instance be controlled by the dominant force on the planet: capital. Capital can use neuroscientific techniques to stave off the semantic apocalypse: ironically, it can control people by convincing them that they are free subjects. This is already happening, via the low-level neurocontrol exerted through media, advertising and all the other platforms through which communicative capitalism operates. Whether neuroscience’s practical nihilism will do more than reinforce capital’s domination will ultimately depend on how far the institutions of techno-science can be liberated from corporate control. Certainly, there are no a priori reasons why Malabou’s question “what should we do with our brain?” should not be answered collectively, by a General Intellect free to experiment on itself. (11)

He brings up two notions, both hinging on the amoral ‘practical nihilism’ of neuroscience itself: 1) the reinforcement by the dominant ideology, technocapitalism, to use such technologies to gain complete control over every aspect of our lives through invasive techniques of brain manipulation; or, 2) the power of some alternative, possibly Leftward, collectivist ideology that seeks through the malleability or plasticity of these same neurosciences to use the ‘General Intellect’ to freely experiment on itself. Do we really want either of these paths?

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Speculations IV: Peter Gratton and Post-deconstructive Realism

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In On Touching, Derrida argues that ‘for Nancy, touch remains the motif of an absolute, irredentist, and post-deconstructive realism [réalisme ... post-déconstructif] … an absolute realism, but irreducible to any of the tradition’s realisms’ (OT 46/60).

- Michael Marder, The Event of the Thing: Derrida’s Post-Deconstructive Realism

Peter Gratton of Philosophy in a Time of Error fame in the introduction to his excellent book The State of Sovereignty tells us “Political mysticism in particular is exposed to the danger of losing its spell or becoming quite meaningless when taken out of its native surroundings, its time and its space”.1 One wonders if the same thing might be true of philosophical mysticism. Is that not what the history of the last two thousand years in philosophy is? Is not one of the basic tenets of modernity the overcoming of our ancestors metaphysical mysticism? Is metaphysics rather than being overcome still very pervasive within our academies hiding under other names other philosophical disguises?

One of the things that Gratton points out in his new essay for Speculations IV Post-Deconstructive Realism It’s about Time is just that: it is about time, about the presumptive arrogance of SR in its castigation of post-structural forms of philosophical speculation, and, as Gratton puts it, these speculative realists seek “means of driving straight past the “linguistic turn” that had side-tracked, they believe, a previous era of philosophers”. But we should not overlook the troubling effects of such a move he tells us, because what these philosophers have done in bypassing the “linguistic turn” is nothing less than a return to pre-modern, pre-critical modes of thought: “But my argument is that this is a dodge: at the heart of this speculative work is a pre-modern (not even just pre-Critical) consideration of time, where time is epiphenomenal when thought against the eternal…”. One of the consequences of this for Gratton is that until until a certain realism of time opens onto SR thought, their “interventions will be anything but timely”.

Peter center his attack on two specific members of the original SR gang of four: Quentin Meillassoux and Graham Harman. Why them specifically? Instead of answering that question directly Peter goes directly to the heart of Jaques Derrida’s central insight: “There is nothing outside of the text [there is no outside-text; il n’y a pas de horstexte]“. The point of this being as Gratton tells us citing Lee Braver’s rendition of this very notion is this:

There is nothing outside the text because our experience is always linguistically mediated; this makes both subject and object effects of language, rather than entities that precede it from the outside to master or anchor it. Language impersonally structures our selves and our world, and our actions depend on passively taking on these structures.

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Speculations IV: Eileen Joy and the Joys of Reading

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Art is inherently subversive, after all, as much an act of doing as undoing.

- Eileen Joy, Weird Reading

Who can remember the first book they picked up and read for pleasure? I confess that having been athletic and being raised down south in the fifties of the last century that being a book reader wasn’t on the top priority list of things a jock was ever to be seen doing. So like many I separated out what I had to read to get by in school from my subversive reading pleasures done under the covers late at night so that no one, especially my non-book reading Step-dad or brothers would ever catch me in the act of reading stories about ancient knights, or musketeers, or pirates, etc. All those weird tales that took me away from my hum rum life of being molded into a no brainer jock who was supposed to know more about hunting, fishing, football, baseball, etc. than about strange far away places beyond the temporal ken of our staid grey lives in the Fifties U.S.A. So coming onto this passage in Eileen Joy’s new essay Weird Reading for Speculations IV brought all those first time reading pleasures back to me:

Nevertheless, works of literature are also unique events that possess a penumbra of effects that can never be fully rationalized nor instrumentalized, and there is no one set of relations within which the whole range of any one text’s possible effects can be fully plumbed or measured. There is always something left over, some remainder, or some non-responsive item, that has to be left to the side of any schematic critique, and this is an occasion for every text’s becoming-otherwise.

This excess, this remainder, this something that can never be explicated fully or trapped within the close reading of some master reader or critic’s textual analysis, this is what escapes or withdraws from us beyond our wildest speculations into a reality so intense and alive that our minds barely comprehend its existence much less acknowledge its haunting presence. Yet, like Eileen describes we can always count on certain repetitions to occur exactly the same way and at the same point within these strange narrative structures we call novels, poems, stories, etc. As she describes it Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina will repeat the same suicidal tale, jump in front of a beastly train; Macbeth will lose his head; Hamlet will murder too late… each of these things will happen over and over like clockwork each time we pick up these same books, plays, poems, etc. And, yet, something will have altered nonetheless. That something is us. We will have been altered by this reading, this moving through the repetitions of a temporal onslaught of words signifying nothing more than strange characters on the abyss of the page entering into conversation with our mind creating a new sphere or object that is an interpenetration of both worlds: that of the text-as-reader and the reader-as-text, the shifting vagaries of something that is neither one or the other, but of both at once. As Eileen tells us:

Stories are like deterministic, machinic systems in which characters, situations, and other details are frozen, as it were, in certain poses, while also being always “wound,” like watches, to keep the same time. Yet, narratives also contain discrete, disconnected instances of being and becoming that are always attempting to expand beyond or subvert the larger narrative system—these instances, or “units” (as Ian Bogost would term them) are like things, material elements with their own conatus (Spinoza’s term for any thing’s tendency to persist in existing), which always leaves the system open to a creative and possibly fruitful chaos (a plenitude of generative unruliness whose historical tense would be the future perfect subjunctive: what would have been, or, what would have not been).

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Speculations IV: Lee Braver and Transgressive Realism

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Transgressive Realism, I believe, gives us a reality that transcends our ways of thinking, but not all access to it, offering a middle path that lets us have our ineffable cake and partially eff it too.

- Lee Braver, On Not Settling the Issue of Realism

In the opening of his essay, sounding more like some ancient gnostic, maybe a Valentinian precursor, Lee Braver in his Speculations IV offering gives us a vision of “shadows and reflections, of illusions and elisions, of waste and death”.  Reciting an ancient tale he begins: “Philosophy is a means of escape. Our presence in this world is an accident, in both senses of the word, an unfortunate fate that has befallen us as we have fallen into it”. In other passages he takes on an almost ethereal Christian like ambience, telling us that “we are in this world, but we do not belong here”. Then where do we belong if not in this world? Some other world or sphere of reality, per chance? Exactly! Lee Braver returns, after his excursion into the metaphysical ether, to the Platonic myth of the true world, the real world behind the appearances of this illusionary one where: “We yearn for a reality that is real, and a truth that is true. Since these are not to be found among the detritus of everyday life, we must seek it in a world beyond or behind this one, a realm that truly exists because it has no whiff of non-existence about it—no destruction, no imperfections, no suffering, no death”.

Maybe Lee Braver, like Plato before him, is sick unable to cope with the world around him as it is, but instead seeks to overcome this one by finding some eternal home for his sick soul? But then Lee Braver announces the truth, that no this is not what he believes at all, that if the truth be told this is what for two thousand years certain philosophers, and not only philosophers, but whole tribes of churchmen and their followers believed. Who was the culprit who started this: “it is all Plato’s fault”, Braver tells us emphatically. And all those sick metaphysicians that followed in his wake mistook his parables for the truth, and they too sought to escape this dark world of shadows and enter the true world of light. As he surmises the “lesson of these meta-physicians is that we must not settle for the world we see around us, but must ever strive to transcend it, for the sake of our minds and our souls”.

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Speculations IV: Adrian Johnston and the Axioms of Transcendental Materialism

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“Any materialism worthy of the name must involve elements of both naturalism and empiricism.”

- Adrian Johnston, Points of Forced Freedom Eleven (More) Theses on Materialism

In a polemical tour de force Adrian Johnston condenses and codifies the elements of a philosophical materialism for the 21st Century. Adrian like others in the essays for Speculations IV returns to Kant, but for him this is not the exact correlationist litany we’ve seen in the others but more of an acknowledgement of Kant’s philosophical breadth and integrity in being the philosopher who put to rest the metaphysical claims of two thousand years of dialectical deadlocks: “The “Transcendental Dialectic” of the Critique of Pure Reason, revealing the precise contours of the dialectical deadlocks forever dooming in advance each and every classical metaphysics to futility, extracts its critical logics from the evidence furnished by two thousand years of philosophical history.”

I must say that I’m bias toward materialist perspectives and especially of late to both Johnston and Zizek with qualifications (more on that at another time), but will do my part to be – as in previous posts – the neutral observer (or as much as one can be) or close reader and commentator who offers hopefully an unbiased condensation of the original discourse. Being more of a poet and fictional writer and not a professional philosopher, I like many – perceive myself as just an average man thinking and trying to discover in current theory and practice some semblance of the problematique we are all facing in our world today. Trying to find a way forward out of the malaise of our current dysfunctional global (dis)civilization. Speculative Realism offers a multiplicity of perspectives in dealing with the domains of epistemic and ontological aspects of both our material and immaterial worlds, and while I may not agree with each and every perspective I agree that each will need to be confronted and rigorously answered if we are to find a way forward.

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