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Accelerationism and
Posthumanism II

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Accelerationism combines a transhumanist techno-

optimism with a Marxist analysis of the dynamic
between the relations and forces of production. Its
proponents argue that under capitalism, modern
technology is constrained by myopic and socially
destructive goals. They argue that rather than Follow

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Accelerationism and Posthumanism II – enemyindustry

abandoning technological modernity for illusory

homeostatic Eden we should exploit and ramp up its
incendiary potential in order to escape from the
gravity well of market dominated resource-allocation.
Like posthumanism, however, Accelerationism comes
in several flavours. Benjamin Noys (who coined the
term) first identified Accelerationism as a kind of
overkill politics invested in freeing the machinic
unconscious described in the libidinal postructuralisms
of Lyotard and Deleuze from the domestication of
liberal subjectivity and market mechanisms. This
itinerary reaches its apogee in the work of  Nick
Land who lent the project  a cyberpunk veneer
borrowed from the writings of William Gibson and
Bruce Sterling.

Land’s Accelerationism aims at the extirpation of

humanity in favour of an “abstract plan­et­ary
intel­li­gence rap­idly con­struct­ing itself from the
bri­c­ol­aged frag­ments of former civil­isa­tions”
(Srnicek and Williams 2013).

However, this mirror-shaded beta version has been

remodelled and given a new emancipatory focus by
writers such as Ray Brassier, Nick Srnicek and Alex
Williams (Williams 2013). This “promethean” phase
Accelerationism argues that technology should be
reinstrumentalized towards a project of “maximal
collective self-mastery”.

Promethean Accelerationism certainly espouses the

same tactic of exacerbating the disruptive effects of
technology, but with the aim of cultivating a more
autonomous collective subject. As Steven Shaviro
points out in his excellent talk “An Introduction to
Accelerationism”, this version replicates orthodox

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Marxism at the level of both strategy and intellectual

justification. Its vision of a rationally-ordered
collectivity mediated by advanced technology seems
far closer to Marx’s ideas, say, than Adorno’s dismal
negative dialectics or the reactionary identity politics
that still animates multiculturalist thinking. If
technological modernity is irreversible – short of a
catastrophe that would render the whole programme
moot – it may be the only prospectus that has a chance
of working. As Shaviro points out, an incipient
accelerationist logic is already at work among
communities using free and open-source software like
Pd, where R&D on code modules is distributed among
skilled enthusiasts rather than professional software
houses (Note, that a similar community flourishes
around Pd’s fancier commercial cousin, MAX MSP –
where supplementary external objects are written by
users in C++, Java and Python).

This is a small but significant move away from

manufacture dominated by market feedback. We are
beginning see similar tendencies in the manufacture of
durables and biotech. The era of downloadable things
is upon us. In April 2013, a libertarian group calling
themselves Defence Distributed announced that they
would release the code for “the Liberator”, a gun that
can be assembled from layers of plastic in a 3 D
printer (currently priced at around $ 8000). The
group’s spokesman, Cody Wilson, anticipates an era
in which search engines will provide components “for
everything from prosthetic limbs to drugs and birth-
control devices”.

However, the alarm that the Liberator created in global

law-enforcement agencies exemplifies the first of two
potential pitfalls for the Promethean accelerationist

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Accelerationism and Posthumanism II – enemyindustry

itinerary. The democratization of technology –

enabled by its easy iteration from context to context –
does not seem liable to increase our capacity to control
its flows and applications; quite the contrary, and this
becomes significant when the iterated tech is not just
an Max MSP external for randomizing arrays but an
offensive weapon, an engineered virus or a powerful
AI program.

I’ve argued elsewhere that technology has no essence

and no itinerary. In its modern form at least, it is
counter-final. It is not in control, but it is not in
anyone’s control either, and the developments that
appear to make a techno-insurgency conceivable are
liable to ramp up its counter-finality. This, note, is a
structural feature deriving from the increasing
mobility of technique in modernity, not from market
conditions. There is no reason to think that these
issues would not be confronted by a more just world
in which resources were better directed to identifiable
social goods (See Roden 2014, Ch7).

A second issue is also identified in Shaviro’s follow up

discussion over at The Pinocchio Theory: the
posthuman. Using a science fiction allegory from a
story by Paul De Filippo, Shaviro suggests that the
posthuman could be a figure for a decentred, vital
mobilization against capitalism: a line of flight which
uses the technologies of capitalist domination to
develop new forms of association, embodiment and
life.

I think this prospectus is inspiring, but it also has moral

dangers that Darian Meacham identifies in his
paper ‘Empathy and Alteration: The Ethical
Relevance of the Phenomenological Species Concept’

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(Meacham 2014). Very briefly, Meacham argues that

the development of technologically altered
descendants of current humans might precipitate what
I term a “disconnection” – the point at which some
part of the human socio-technical system spins off to
develop separately (Roden 2012; 2014, Ch5). I’ve
argued that disconnection is multiply realizable – or so
far as we can tell. Meacham suggests that a kind of
disconnection could result if human descendants were
to become sufficiently alien from us that “we” would
no longer have a pre-reflective basis for empathy with
them. We would no longer experience them as having
our relation to the world or our intentions. Such a
“phenomenological speciation” might fragment the
notional universality of the human, leading to a
multiverse of fissiparous and alienated clades, as
envisaged in Bruce Sterling’s novel Schismatrix. A
still more radical disconnection might result if super-
intelligent AI’s went “feral”. At this point, the subject
of history itself becomes fissionable. It is no longer
just about “us”. Perhaps Land remains the most acute
and intellectually consistent accelerationist after all.

References

Meacham, D., 2014. Empathy and alteration: The

ethical relevance of a phenomenological species
concept. Journal of Medicine and Philosophy,39(5),
pp.543-564.

Roden, David 2012. “The Disconnection Thesis.” The

Singularity Hypothesis: A Scientific and Philosophical
Assessment, Edited by Ammon Eden, Johnny Søraker,
Jim Moor, and Eric Steinhart. Springer Frontiers
Collection.

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Accelerationism and Posthumanism II – enemyindustry

Roden, D., 2014. Posthuman life: philosophy at the

edge of the human. Routledge.

Srnicek, N.and Williams A (2013), #ACCELERATE

MANIFESTO for an Accelerationist
Politics, http://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/05/14/accelerate-
manifesto-for-an-accelerationist-politics/

Sterling, Bruce. 1996. Schismatrix Plus. Ace Books.

Williams, Alex, 2013. “Escape Velocities.” E-flux

(46). Accessed July 11. http://worker01.e-
flux.com/pdf/article_8969785.pdf.

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Accelerationism and Posthumanism II – enemyindustry

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Accelerationism and Posthumanism II – enemyindustry

NOVEMBER 21, 2013 BY ENEMYINDUSTRY

4
ACCELERATIONISM, AESTHETICS, HUMANISM,
POSTHUMANISM, SCIENCE FICTION,
TRANSHUMANISM

https://enemyindustry.wordpress.com/2013/11/21/accelerationism-and-posthumanism-ii/[9/23/2017 12:10:37 AM]