/Thresholds/

I find myself, as I often do at this time of year, away from the perpetually bedraggled kingdom that for now still seems to be holding on for dear life to its browbeaten and blood-soaked photographs of past glories, nestled instead somewhere in the north of Germany where if I’m perfectly honest I haven’t much of an idea what specifically is going on. This said it has already been constructive to peel myself away from the quotidian day-to-day realities of city-life for a little bit; it seems that certain repetitions that prove necessary for a minimum level of survival also tend to channel my thoughts into a kind of analogous Nietzschian eternal return, whereupon I never truly allow myself a moment of commitment or pause to gather together whatever I’ve been working towards. The constant routine, while reassuring somewhat in its similitude, also is punctuated by blockages, pulses of activity that seem to interject and swirl up silt into the currents just as it was on the verge of settling.

Some thoughts that have emerged since I have been here, and as I was reaching the final passages of Fredric Jameson’s monumental Valences of the Dialectic [a book that will no doubt be informing my writing for a while yet and from which I have noted a staggering amount of new reference points] have surrounded as much what I intend to do, leading up tentatively to a potential PHD application in the coming year, as vigorously as what I absolutely want to avoid. Since it seems prudent to undergo a process of elimination before we reach any kind of statement of intent, I will first of all outline the latter in the most euraesthetically despondent way I can.

The Plane of Total Abstraction [No I don’t want to associate with Fascism]

My own experience studying Fine Art at university familiarised me a little too well with the kind of obfuscatory poetic allusion that dominates a certain mode of discourse there. Unfortunately, the same language extends, despite what one might assume, beyond the doors of the art school, as anyone who has encountered the reams and reams of pseudo-deleuzian romanticized creativity porn might attest to. The issue quickly becomes a wider theoretical one, in which you may find yourself buried amid attractively worded poetic and mysteriously aesthetic passages that nonetheless appear to have little to no purchase on anything concrete. This is the plane of total abstraction, where progressive really means reactionary, where emancipation is less desirable than reading ones preferred gothic allusions into Marx & Engels. We here end up at the point where largely online writers congregate, where we find the slippage between the emancipatory and the deeply conservative, where people are intent on transforming commitments to revolutionary/leftist politics into the same grey mulch of word syrup where practically mystical conceptualisations stand in for collective praxis, where “the left” is intoned with the same ironic cynicism as one finds in the worst right wing snake pits. Everywhere in this plane we find an unbearable malice towards those who in reality have good, if perhaps misguided intentions, and you don’t have to walk far through this blasted land to find the bitter, unpleasant aroma of first a general misanthropy, then as the fog thickens more immediately objectionable outbursts of racism, misogyny, the worst kind of reactionary poison until it all coagulates in the viscous sludge of fascism [here come the cries of “everything is fascism now!”].

Unfortunately I find that despite the moment of cyber-futurism that led to what is called Accelerationism holding some degree of historical interest now, I would take aim at a good portion of the online communities around what now carries that label. Am I saying they’re all fascists? No. What I’m saying is that I have less than zero interest in reactionary politics, in maintaining social relations with “ironic” fascists, or people who form their online identity around an obnoxious edginess and occulted language. In terms of actually effecting the world, in considering others, in any form of democracy, empowerment or collective joy, these online cultures are a lead weight, a choking cloud of dust, at worst actually dragging people down to their level and emptying them of blood. Their aloofness, objection to emancipatory desire, insistence on removing themselves from the social and political particulars, remaining behind the veil at all costs, make them little better than the academic professors they often so despise, and even on a surface level all that we really find here is a universal ironic dismissal where everything is weightless, nothing forms unless around the individual ego…

So where do I stand here. No doubt there is no small degree of abstraction per se in the sometimes labyrinthine texts I’m approaching, so it’s not the abstract itself clearly that I object to, lest I be accused here of a monumental hypocrisy. Where the problem intervenes, and shows itself time and again online, is in the failure to bridge the gap from here to the particular. Something is wrong, quite simply, when what is objected to in the work of a political thinker is precisely the point at which they directly engaged with politics, the point where Lefebvre becomes actively involved with the production of space he wrote about, the point, in other words, where theory intersects with praxis. The whole idea of praxis in this regard becomes lost in the plane of total abstraction, a place where a concept shared between a few clued-in people somehow stands for a whole process of collective engagement.

The issue here is a shortcut taken in between conceptualisation and realisation that unfortunately must be somehow bridged, whether in potentiality or actuality. We can’t progress, for instance, from some extensive pontification on “exit” towards a genuine radical redress of social reality without at some stage theorising how this in the starkest terms translates into material processes and affects. This of course means not simply from the position of the individual subject, but also the ripples we can perceive across the totality, by which I mean the vast webs of cause/effect that criss-cross the reality beyond direct experience and can largely be accessed through a kind of narrative topology, or in some sense a conceptualization, whether that be explicitly through the avenues of theory or the no less effective dreamworks of cultural collage and social imagination. Either way, the shortcuts taken in this regard often lead into an effervescent confusion in which the entirety of the political and historical processes that form the socialist project and horizon becomes transmuted into something… fuzzy. In this no-mans land, discussion of political strategy becomes unfashionable, so it is not approached, anything as concrete or dry as history becomes something more sexy to some perhaps, but loses its hold on particular reality.

The problem with accelerationists

Even worse is the perturbation from these spheres to anyone who dares “misunderstand” their chosen buzzword. Let me for example take the term “accelerationism”. I repeatedly see protestations from people who to a certain extent identify with accelerationism as a term, often in the form of a modifier such as U/acc. Much of accelerationism it must be said keeps itself intentionally occulted, vague, easy to appropriate into a million different forms, but let’s be honest, upon hearing it our first associations will likely come from the word “accelerate”. In both senses it becomes patently absurd when people connected to this term complain in the most vociferous, hard-done-by-terms about the association with speed. I’m not one usually these days to attach to a term concrete and unmovable definitions, but we choose a certain language for certain reasons, and if we don’t want our philosophy [or project, or politics, or whatever it is] to be associated with a concept like speed I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest you probably don’t use a word of which the dominant connotation is precisely to “go faster”. If we look towards the singular [and relatively brief] moment of the 90s in which the current usage of the term online largely arose from, there is a general quickfire, heightened aesthetic and lifestyle and way of writing that is indelibly connected to it and formed its dominant mode. Even extending to the use of amphetamines, or “speed” no less, the heightening suggested in this cyber-futurism was dominated by the implications contained in the term accelerationism itself, it was either an injunction, a prediction, a wish perhaps, for something faster, more intense, bigger, more total. Now of course before I am accused here of wilfully misinterpreting anything I’m acutely aware that many do not actively pursue it in this way, but in lieu of that it must be said it’s not particularly clear what’s being offered. A theory of time? Perhaps, in fact quite likely, but frankly if acc-heads don’t want their philosophy or label to become so frequently appropriated or misused according to their own ideal interpretations I might advise setting forth something a little bit clearer about what precisely it is supposed to be.. what it really is, what implications it has, other than some kind of easily ignored teleology. If it is not a political project for instance, or just another, cooler word for futurism what is it? The more you read about it, the less clear it gets. In the plane of total abstraction, things are made to be misinterpreted.

And here I reach what really becomes uncomfortable territory for anyone who calls themselves in some regard an accelerationist, and another regard in which I have seen hand-waving protestations, as if one is nothing but a troll for bringing this up in the first place, and that is the nigh-constant flirtations with the reactionary right. The proximity of the acc sphere to Nrx isn’t difficult to ascertain after a small amount of research, and not just because one of it’s primary progenitors Nick Land now spends most of his time spouting exceedingly dull neoconservative talking points on twitter and penned some of the primary literature for what has become known as neoreaction, or Nrx for short [none of this lessens the interest of his early work, but it does bring it into perspective], but because of the consistent allusions, friendly banter, politesse, compromise and praise for right or reactionary ideas and figures. When coupled with a certain brand of misanthropy, irony and the sneering attitude towards left action and politics, one begins to legitimately question the political aims here. Of course if you are more inclined towards the reactionary right, and make no bones about it, then fair enough on your part, but I don’t really have much of a reason or desire to share your predilections.

This is far from some complete denunciation of anything at all connected with the realms of theory I’m here discussing; in fact if it is anything it is my cry of frustration at the state of theory as it is discussed and formulated online at the present moment. Accelerationism as it exists online, in twitter communities and elsewhere, is in some sense merely a symptom for the wider issue I might now connect back to the plane of total abstraction, that discourse that really does seem to result in nothing besides an aesthetic commitment. Of course if we are to hold that aesthetics, or rather the manner of presentation matters, then how can we avoid the conclusion that people who wallow in an aesthetic of mysterious cyber-allusion/gothic darkness/scrambled poetics/irony to some degree are actively resisting interpretation. And, if indeed this is the aim, more power to them, but in this regard, why protest misinterpretation? Is it only the horror at being connected via the term to violent murders that provokes this? And if so, shouldn’t this provoke some reflection, shouldn’t the question be asked “why is it so easy to misinterpret?”, instead of the usual comments on the idiocy of those doing the misinterpreting? Why, even, is the aesthetic of accelerationism, the term itself even, attractive to such people who would commit such acts? Is the fault here not with the misuse of the term, but the lack of feasable interpretation, of structure, of explicit implication?

If this has proved a little negative, I promise soon a more positive affirmation of what I do intend to do; before I did that however I have found it constructive to get these issues out of my system, as the contradictory dominance online of a discourse that claims for itself a fringe status, the constant and unwelcome appearances of reactionary sentiment and abstract edginess, has become on the whole quite irritating, not to mention the consistent hostility towards open and unambiguous leftism. Some of the same problems I would argue extend more generally to people who adhere to a kind of vulgar-deleuzian language and philosophy, who deliver passages that for all the world could have been uttered from the mouth of your local weed-head, but here I wanted to outline specifically some of my issues with accelerationism as it appears and is seen today, precisely to illustrate the sum of what I want to avoid in my own work. It is all too easy to dissolve oneself into the plane of abstraction, to avoid any sense of commitment to a cause and to immerse oneself in a kind of constant deferral of intent. After some time however, perhaps all this effort should be reverted into a single question; why?