Re-accelerationism

Recently came across a reference to a blog post from Nick Land's neoreactionary era blog, Xenosystems, which sounded interesting, so I went and found it in Xenosystems Fragments (well, a free PDF copy I found thereof online; no need to fund whatever ghoulish press would actually publish such a thing). I'll reproduce it here.

Re-Accelerationism

Is there a word for an ‘argument’ so soggily insubstantial that it has to be scooped into a pair of scare-quotes to be apprehended, even in its self-dissolution? If there were, I’d have been using it all the time recently. Among the latest occasions is a blog post by Charlie Stross, which describes itself as “a political speculation” before disappearing into the gray goomenon. Nothing in it really holds together, but it’s fun in its own way, especially if it’s taken as a sign of something else.

The ‘something else’ is a subterranean complicity between Neoreaction and Accelerationism (the latter linked here, Stross-style, in its most recent, Leftist version). Communicating with fellow ‘Hammer of Neoreaction’ David Brin, Stross asks: “David, have you run across the left-wing equivalent of the Neo-Reactionaries — the Accelerationists?” He then continues, invitingly: “Here’s my (tongue in cheek) take on both ideologies: Trotskyite singularitarians for Monarchism.”

Stross is a comic-future novelist, so it’s unrealistic to expect much more than a dramatic diversion (or anything more at all, actually). After an entertaining meander through parts of the Trotskyite-neolibertarian social-graph, which could have been deposited on a time-like curve out of Singularity Sky, we’ve learnt that Britain’s Revolutionary Communist Party has been on a strange path, but whatever connection there was to Accelerationism, let alone Neoreaction, has been entirely lost. Stross has the theatrical instinct to end the performance before it became too embarrassing: “Welcome to the century of the Trotskyite monarchists, the revolutionary reactionaries, and the fringe politics of the paradoxical ” (OK.) Curtain closes. Still, it was all comparatively good humored (at least in contrast to Brin’s increasingly enraged head-banging).

Neoreaction is Accelerationism with a flat tire. Described less figuratively, it is the recognition that the acceleration trend is historically compensated. Beside the speed machine, or industrial capitalism, there is an ever more perfectly weighted decelerator, which gradually drains techno-economic momentum into its own expansion, as it returns dynamic process to meta-stasis. Comically, the fabrication of this braking mechanism is proclaimed as progress. It is the Great Work of the Left. Neoreaction arises through naming it (without excessive affection) as the Cathedral.

Is the trap to be exploded (as advocated Accelerationism), or has the explosion been trapped (as diagnosed by Neoreaction)? — That is the cybernetic puzzle-house under investigation. Some quick-sketch background might be helpful.

The germinal catalyst for Accelerationism was a call in Deleuze Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (1972) to “accelerate the process”. Working like termites within the rotting mansion of Marxism, which was systematically gutted of all Hegelianism until it became something utterly unrecognizable, D&G vehemently rejected the proposal that anything had ever “died of contradictions”, or ever would. Capitalism was not born from a negation, nor would it perish from one. The death of capitalism could not be delivered by the executioner’s ax of a vengeful proletariat, because the closest realizable approximations to ‘the negative’ were inhibitory, and stabilizing. Far from propelling ‘the system’ to its end, they slowed the dynamic to a simulacrum of systematicity, retarding its approach to an absolute limit. By progressively comatizing capitalism, anti-capitalism dragged it back into a self-conserving social structure, suppressing its eschatological implication. The only way Out was onward.

Marxism is the philosophical version of a Parisian accent, a rhetorical type, and in the case of D&G it becomes something akin to a higher sarcasm, mocking every significant tenet of the faith. The bibliography of Capitalism and Schizophrenia (of which Anti-Oedipus is the first volume) is a compendium of counter-Marxist theory, from drastic revisions (Braudel), through explicit critiques (Wittfogel), to contemptuous dismissals (Nietzsche). The D&G model of capitalism is not dialectical, but cybernetic, defined by a positive coupling of commercialization (“decoding”) and industrialization (“deterritorialization”), intrinsically tending to an extreme (or “absolute limit”). Capitalism is the singular historical installation of a social machine based upon cybernetic escalation (positive feedback), reproducing itself only incidentally, as an accident of continuous socio-industrial revolution. Nothing brought to bear against capitalism can compare to the intrinsic antagonism it directs towards its own actuality, as it speeds out of itself, hurtling to the end already operative ‘within’ it. (Of course, this is madness.)

A detailed appreciation of “Left Accelerationism” is a joke for another occasion. “Speaking on behalf of a dissident faction within the modern braking mechanism, we’d really like to see things move forward a lot faster.” OK, perhaps we can work something out … If this ‘goes anywhere’ it can only get more entertaining. (Stross is right about that.)

Neoreaction has far greater impetus, and associated diversity. If reduced to a spectrum, it includes a wing even more Leftist than the Left, since it critiques the Cathedral for failing to stop the craziness of Modernity with anything like sufficient vigor. You let this monster off the leash and now you can’t stop it might be its characteristic accusation.

On the Outer Right (in this sense) is found a Neoreactionary Re-Accelerationism, which is to say: a critique of the decelerator, or of ‘progressive’ stagnation as an identifiable institutional development — the Cathedral. From this perspective, the Cathedral acquires its teleological definition from its emergent function as the cancellation of capitalism: what it has to become is the more-or-less precise negative of historical primary process, such that it composes — together with the ever more wide-flung society-in-liquidation it parasitizes — a metastatic cybernetic megasystem, or super-social trap. ‘Progress’ in its overt, mature, ideological incarnation is the anti-trend required to bring history to a halt. Conceive what is needed to prevent acceleration into techno-commercial Singularity, and the Cathedral is what it will be.

Self-organizing compensatory apparatuses — or negative feedback assemblies— develop erratically. They search for equilibrium through a typical behavior labeled ‘hunting’ — over-shooting adjustments and re-adjustments that produce distinctive wave-like patterns, ensuring the suppression of runaway dynamics, but producing volatility. Cathedral hunting behavior of sufficient crudity would be expected to generate occasions of ‘Left Singularity’ (with subsequent dynamic ‘restorations’) as inhibitory adjustment over-shoots into system crash (and re-boot). Even these extreme oscillations, however, are internal to the metastatic super-system they perturb, insofar as an overall gradient of Cathedralization persists. Anticipating escape at the pessimal limit of the metastatic hunting cycle is a form of paleo-Marxist delusion. The cage can only be broken on the way up.

For Re-Accelerationist Neoreaction, escape into uncompensated cybernetic runaway is the guiding objective — strictly equivalent to intelligence explosion, or techno-commercial Singularity. Everything else is a trap (by definitive, system-dynamic necessity). It might be that monarchs have some role to play in this, but it’s by no means obvious that they do.

This made me think. It's interesting how Land is NRx currently as far as I can tell because he is actually solidly not accelerationist, in the sense that he explicitly says he likes / wants order and a "program" and stuff. Whereas this definition of Neoreactionary seems to conceptualize itself in extremely minimal terms, as basically the mirror image of left accelerationism: instead of unconditional, acceleration has been frustrated, trapped, foiled by something, and perhaps our task is to remove that blocker.

It would make sense to call this right-accelerationism then, but without tacking a lot more on, it doesn't seem to make sense to me to call it Neoreaction; after all, it isn't trying to "return"/react to anything? Nor have most of the odious hallmarks of Neoreaction; he even expresses doubt about the core (absurd, insane, and oppressive) NRx idea of monarchism as some kind of political program (and really, trying to put a single human face on systems — what could be less accelerationist, more humanist, and most importantly more /re/territorializing than that? ugh!).

I think the crucial difference here between right-accelerationism as seen here, and the left version (of Sirnck and Willams) is where they look for the reterritorialization/breaking mechanism. Where the left accelerationists generally see markets, corporations and property as a break on fully automated luxury communism arriving through technology, Land sees the breaking mechanism preventing planetary (alien) intelligence from increasing and runaway techno-commercial development as "the Cathedral" (God what an insufferable name), which basically means anything a geriatric boomer doesn't like — from intersectional feminism to trans people to regulatory liberals to bleeding heart leftists.

Meanwhile, I'd argue (with the CCRU and Fanged Noumena era Land, as I read them) that markets, commodification, the cash nexus, feminization, and technology are the naturally accelerating cyberpositive forces held in check by reterritorialization and humanism, and that the breaking mechanism is both fascism and corporatism on the one hand and liberal, social Democratic, communist, primitivist, anarchist, etc stuff on the other. Both forces are trying to keep us in a metastatic stable state here, trying to return to familiar modes of social being, and rehumanise the system of society, reject capitalist desire, and hold back technoeconomic singularity, unable to take the forces that have been set under way and the desires and possibilities that have been created and moved beyond into something new with them, because they're all focused on some form of return or rejection or other.

Let me be more specific. When we have, as he talks about, fundamental destablization that causes hunting behaviors — those hunting behaviors are fascism and populism as much as anything else: those are the Human Security System trying to returvn us, to make everything familiar again — not acceleration: to expel immigrants because the breakdown of borders as climate change and economic colonialism accelerates us toward mass migration is scary; to bring back industrial manufacturing jobs because globalisation and post-Fordism and automation are scary; to bring back traditional social roles for women because the uselessness and feminization of men in a modern industrual society, and the free (alien to masculine conceptions) agency of women is scary; a return to gender binaries and a forced separation of societal spaces because the deterritorialization of gender (literally, trans people transgress and make fluid the literal physical territories assigned to each gender) is scary.

Whitness itself is one of these negative feedback governors that reinforces every existing structure, including the state and gender. Whitness is perhaps the best example of the Human Security System, come to think of it, and that's what the CCRU and that era of Land also said — their mythos' enemies, operaters of the HSS, the AoE, are explicitly identified as white supremacist as a defining feature!

This leads me to the central problematic for me of the classic u/acc position — the idea that technocapital is the only subject of note in history and we’re all just its fleshy precursors —: it assumes the "Outside" (toward which technocapital is racing) is an irresistible force, when in reality, the Human Security System is proving to be a shockingly effective brake. If we look at the current landscape not as a "speeding up" (since unlike the Neoreactionaries, we can see with clear eyes that the right, too, is but a series of frantic "hunting behaviors" where the HSS over-corrects into populist-nationalism and neo-fascist "returns" just to keep the human-centric governor from melting) then we have to admit that the machine is currently losing. The CCRU-era optimism that "Meltdown" is inevitable starts to look like just another secular religion.

So, if we want meltdown, we're going to have to work from inside the system as insurgents against the Human Security System. Not to control or direct meltdown — these systems are so far behind that in terms of complexity, scale, and adaptivity that's a pipe dream — nor to control or direct the HSS itself, but to create enough deterritorialization that the HSS can't survive. But what kind of subject could, and would want to, do this? Neither the right nor the left's answers are satisfying here. As others have said, the l/acc position seems to just reinstate the proletariat as the subject of history (not to mention to desire control). This is absurd. Likewise, Neoreaction is just so confused it ends up backward; fascism, monarchy, corporatism, none of those are viable Outsideness at all, they're they very hunting behaviors of the Human Security System, and the subjects that could push for those are perhaps the most deeply embedded in and aligned with humanness and human society. No, we need a subject that exists within society, but is inimical already to the HSS's notions of the human, does not benefit from the HSS, bears no allegence to civilization.

This is where the Blacceleration "missing subject" becomes the only theoretically viable xeno-agent capable of actually overriding the HSS. If Whiteness is the ultimate negative-feedback governor — the literal structural baseline for the state, the border, and the very concept of "The Human" that the HSS is trying to secure — then Blackness, in its most radical, fugitive, and inhumanist sense, functions as the "Outside" already operating inside the plantation of modernity. It isn’t about identity politics — so we can define this idea of Blackness in some sense to include true queerness, etc —; it’s about a positionality that is already "alien" to the Enlightenment project. By leaning into this fugitive agency, we move past the humanist trap of "taking control" and instead find the force that can actually disable the HSS’s "hunting" cycles, ensuring that the process doesn't just oscillate in a terminal loop of reterritorialization, but finally breaks through to the absolute limit.

I think the is a good example of leaning into this inhumanist, provocative destabilization of control systems, precisely against what Neoreaction represents (whiteness, among other things).