Acceleration II: Land on the MAP

This week I want to base things around the Manifesto for Accelerationist Politics, and use it
as a jump-off. It’s obviously a text that in some sense I’m more averse to than any other in
existence, but I think it’s an extremely rich text, and there’s all kinds of interesting material in
it. I don’t mean that just in terms of bits and pieces, but in terms of structural factors that are
extremely stimulating.

I’ve attempted to divide my comments into four broad sections, which roughly go under the
labels ‘critique’, ‘neoliberalism’, ‘agency’, and what I’ll call ‘templexity’—I know that’s a
horrible neologism that will need a bit more explanation. It would obviously be nice to keep
them in order, but as we see, that turns out to be complicated, so I’ll try roughly to follow that
series, and not to hog the thing for too long but try to treat this as a way of opening things
up.

I think a close reading of the text would actually overspill our time here, so we’ll dip in and
out of it, and obviously anything that people find there is completely on topic, for this week
especially but I think more generally.

Let me start first of all with a few very elementary remarks—and I apologise to people if this
is repetitive, because I’m sure some of this is stuff I’ve talked about before. I think one of the
frames of this discussion is the relationship between capitalism and critique, taking therefore
the critique of political economy in a strictly Kantian sense as a delimitation of metaphysics.
This subdivides in a complicated way—not a neat way, because these elements all enter
into various relations of antagonism with each other and mutual interference—into three
sections.

The first of these is Marx’s own argument, [presented?] as a critical argument, which, taking
a step back to what Kant is doing in the most absolutely schematic way, is drawing
transcendental empirical difference and saying that metaphysics consists of treating a
transcendental structure as if it’s an empirical object. On that level I think this is an anchor-
point that can be confidently held onto. All kinds of difficulties emerge from that, and these
are not difficulties at a conceptual level but difficulties that have a deep propelling historical
force, and a lot of the things that happen to historical critique involve materialising it and
therefore seeing these difficulties and complexities and forms of turbulence as actual
historical processes, not merely philosophical difficulties.

Marx’s argument, constructed as critique in the Kantian sense, draws transcendental

empirical difference in his distinction between labour and labour power. Labour power is
transcendental for Marx: it is the fundamental source of all productivity. Capitalism as he
grasps it critically is a metaphysical system in the strict sense that that transcendental power
is formatted as if it were an object. That formatting-as-object is commoditisation and
obviously in particular the central nexus of his whole theoretical endeavour, the
objectification of labour as a commodity. This is Marx’s understanding of the wage labour
system understood in its philosophical structure. We can obviously return to this if people are
interested, but I want to simply say that this is one of the basic articulations of the capitalism-
critique relation, that Marx’s analysis of capitalism takes this particular form. This is repeated
in a displaced way in Anti-Oedipus with their notion of schizophrenia as the historical
process of decoding and deterritorialisation versus schizophrenia as clinical entity, as an
object. That’s just a strict philosophical displacement of exactly the same theoretical
structure taking place there.

That is the first capital critique articulation, and it’s obviously relevant in the sense that the
default is to assume that that is implicit in the position of the MAP. The question of exactly
what extent they remain faithful to what Marx is doing there, or they want to in various ways
modulate it, is obviously one of the [questions?] people naturally bring to that text.
The second articulation of capitalism and critique which directly interferes with this Marxist
sense of it is the function of capital itself as a critique. I think this is most simply or
straightforwardly understood in terms of abstract capital, or capitalism itself being
synonymous with the emergence of abstract capital, which is critically separated from its
concrete instances. That’s to say, any particular configuration of capital is subject to this
critical destabilisation by this emergence of increasingly abstracted capital, which is only
inadequately objectified by any particular configuration of capitalist organisation.

Already I think in this the implicit question haunting the MAP is the extent to which capital
itself or the left critique of capital is able with greater profundity and practical efficacy to
actually undertake the critique of concrete capital. I think that this is very much already in
play in the accelerationist Marxist canon, starting with the Communist Manifesto itself. This
spectre, quite another spectre to [Marx’s] famous spectre, [is] the spectre of creative-
destructive capital that is able more profoundly to revolutionise itself than any external
revolutionary force is able to destabilise it—at a greater speed. It becomes immediately a
question of speed and acceleration. Again I think there’s lots to be said, and I don’t want to
get sucked into it too much.

The structure of the Internet has a critical structure in terms of the elimination of privileged
nodes; the whole notion of network decentralisation has a critical structure in terms of not
identifying the system as a whole with any node within the system. Any node that serves as
an inadequate objectification of the system is subject to this decentralised process of critique
by the system, through route-arounds, going all the way back to radicalising the notion of
roundabout production that you get in Böhm-Bawerk: the process, looked at as an economic
argument, of disintermediation. The elimination of trusted third parties is the way it’s carried
forward into the Bitcoin system.

So I think there’s an anarcho-capitalist, or what’s called critically the Californian, ideology

that is this very insistently reproduced critical dynamic intrinsic to capital itself, as opposed to
something that’s brought to it from outside as a critique of the left.

The final thing to definitely mention here is platforms, which is something that comes in a
little elusively in the MAP. Platform capitalism is obviously a big interest to the authors of the
piece, and they articulate their project in terms of repurposing certain large platform
structures of contemporary capital. A platform is something that is in itself a displacement of
transcendental empirical difference; it divides a system from particular instances, traffic,
within that system. I’m going to pass you on a link, which I think captures this very well, by
Eli Dourado [https://theumlaut.com/bitcoin-isnt-money-it-s-the-internet-of-money-
203d7eca8119]. The title of the piece is ‘Bitcoin isn’t money, it’s the Internet of money’. Eli
Dourado describes himself as an economist working on accelerating the pace of
technological change. Just in the title, it’s clear there’s a displaced transcendental empirical
difference doing the important philosophical work in this piece.

I’m trying to move on from this: I expect these issues will be with us to the end of the course,
so it’s not a question of trying to conclude anything at this stage. Another instance that’s
worth throwing in at this point is the very famous quote from Saul Alinsky’s Rules for
Radicals where he advises: ‘pick the target, freeze it, personalise it, and polarise it’. This too
has a very clear critical sense to it, which is this sense that strategically, conflictually, the
strategic goal is to make your enemy the object. The philosophical question of how to locate
the transcendental and empirical instances in a topic at hand has this immediate strategic
sense to it. If you can objectify your enemy, if you can put your enemy on the side of the
object, then you’ve already succeeded in establishing this position of strategic advantage.

I’m going to put, just as a dogmatic assertion that people can definitely pick at, that modern
philosophy in particular is the self-apprehension of transcendental temporality. The question
of time, trying to get a deep rigorous grasp of what is meant by acceleration, takes us to the
core of the modern philosophical enterprise, and by that I mean it immerses us in these
Kantian problems.

The next word on my list is ‘neoliberalism’, and I’ll try to be even quicker about that, in the
hope again that it’s something we can come back to. It plays an important role in the MAP.
They’re very clear they date the whole thing when they say it’s a ‘post-1979 configuration of
political economy’, so they’re basically associating it with the Thatcher-Reagan revolution,
I’m assuming also Deng Xiaoping in China, all of this incredibly simultaneous catastrophe in
a technical sense that happened to the world order at that stage. I know that their reading of
that is very much that this is a kind of realisation of certain principles that were formulated by
the Mont Pelerin Society in an attempt to put Austrian economics into some sort of practical
political effect, and they themselves then say in the text as one of their three ‘medium-term
concrete goals—the first of them they say they want to produce an intellectual infrastructure
that is explicitly modelled on the Mont Pelerin Society.

There’s really one point I want to make about this, which is that it’s quite clear that the MAP
has as a kind of unspoken expectation—and it’s perhaps unspoken as a matter of political
strategy, that to problematise it by making it too explicit would be ineffective or
countereffective—that neoliberalism will be obsolesced from the left. The first section of the
MAP is called ‘On the Conjuncture’, and when they say ‘on the conjuncture’ there’s all kinds
of stuff we can come to, to do with environmental collapse and catastrophes in perhaps the
colloquial more than the technical sense. One absolute crucial structural element of the
conjuncture as it’s being articulated in this text is exactly this point: neoliberalism, it can be
assumed, is to be obsolesced from the left—assumed on one level just because it is seen as
being perhaps the final configuration of the enemy; if there is any hint at all of a subsequent
configuration it so hazes out into horror that it doesn’t take any kind of concrete form.

However we make sense of where we are now, which is not an easy thing to think through
clearly, but however we think of that, I think it at least places us in a different conjecture. I
think if there is a certain crisis of the left happening right now, it’s precisely because this
assumption that the challenge to neoliberalism would come from the left is one that has
become problematic.

I’ll move on from ‘neoliberalism’, for now, onto the third one, which is ‘agency’. The relation
to agency is totally crucial in the MAP, it’s a huge organisational factor. I would like to argue
it pushes certain questions off the agenda as much as it puts things on the agenda, because
of the fact that it’s absolutely essential that a certain configuration of agency is sustained in
order to make sense of what the text is doing as a political project, as a manifesto, as an
intervention within the politics of its conjuncture, no doubt in a modified way an intervention
that continues into the present time.

This is immediately bleeding into the next thing, so we should probably let it bleed straight in.
The type of construction of agency that is necessary for the MAP to work at what seems to
be its political intent requires a certain control of the notion of time. They say as the first
sentence of the final section of the MAP, ‘the future needs to be constructed’. This is a very
interesting sentence, I think, because what is being said in this sentence, clearly, is that the
future is less ontologically settled than the past. They consolidate that by saying in section
23 of the final section, ‘The choice facing us is severe’. There is a choice, it could go in either
direction, and what will decide how it tips in one direction or another is politics; the text itself
is an intervention in the political process attempting make a decision in terms of this choice
presented by history. Why this is, I think, worthy of really concerted attention is the fact that
just in terms of the history of accelerationism it’s obviously locking certain things down in a
way that is at least questionable.

We can take it all the way back to Marx, who was criticised by the right and certain elements
of the left for his determinism. The notion that the future is less ontologically settled than the
past is a questionable proposition, at least in certain constructions of the Marxist philosophy.
But I think it gets more thoroughly unsettled if we take it in the basic direction of returning to
the question of critique, and insisting on a radically transcendental apprehension of time
which I think is also for accelerationism a transcendental cybernetics in which time-circuitry
is primordial or ultimate and is not reducible to some object-level, transcended sphere of
objectivity, according to what might be called a naïve-realist conception of science and
technology.

There’s two things I want to say to dig into this a little further at this stage. The first is that I
think the MAP itself has a much more intricate relation to time than it is actually happy with
having. There are some sentences which I think are deeply emblematic of that. ‘On
Accelerationisms’ is dealing with this question; Chapter 2 is where I have, as might be
expected, my most severe problems with this text, and I think it’s the most botched level of
their philosophical discussion. What they’re trying to do here is to separate a capitalistic
notion of ‘speed’—they’re not explicit about wanting to critically delimit it, but it could be
taken in that sense—from how they want to use ‘accelerationism’ that is, I would say
transcendental, but they say ‘also navigational, an experimental process of discovery within
a universal space of possibility’.

They go on in the next paragraph to say, ‘Even worse, as Deleuze and Guattari recognized,
from the very beginning what capitalist speed deterritorializes with one hand, it
reterritorializes with the other.’ So there is a progressive and a regressive [tendency?] that is
inseparable within capitalism, and they’re treating this as a critique: this is why capitalism is
a form of constraint for them, because of the fact that it can’t escape this double pincer—if
I’m going to use Deleuze and Guattari language with this—of these two different impulses.
And then they end this section by saying ‘Thatcherite-Reaganite deregulation sits
comfortably alongside Victorian “back-to-basics” family and religious values’, so that’s the
concrete instantiation of this.

Tracking it forward a little bit, taking this dynamic, from a certain perspective double pincer,
you get something that is like neoreaction. You get something that is simultaneously a
futuristic and regressive programme. But then—and this is why I think they are saying more
than they want to say—there is a truly fantastic sentence, I think it’s my favourite in the MAP,
where they say, in section 3 part 22, ‘We need to revive the argument that was traditionally
made for post-capitalism.’ Now, this is an absolutely fantastic phrase. It’s so time-tangled, it’s
absolutely unbelievable: it’s a revival, it’s a return to tradition, it’s an invocation of
postcapitalism, it’s absolutely templex in this sense of being deeply ambiguous or schizoid in
terms of its temporal structure.

I think this goes deep into their project, that the project of left-accelerationism as outlined in
the MAP is retroprogressivist, and actually it has exactly the same retroprogressivist time-
structure as right-accelerationism, in the sense that it is both kind of hyperfuturistic and
drawn back particularly to something like the 1920s. It’s like Art Deco, it’s a return to this
point at which modernisation was lost. Obviously from the right it’s lost because of the New
Deal and the destruction of classical liberalism; from the left it’s lost by the disappointments
of Soviet communism and the betrayal from that point of view of these socialist dreams
contemporary with the Bolshevik revolution.

So it doesn’t seem to me, even though the MAP wants to say it has an unambiguous futurist
orientation, it has an unambiguous sense of what modernisation would mean in terms of
being forward-looking rather than backward-looking, I don’t think the text itself supports that.
There is no difference in terms of the degree to which this retrospective element of retrieval
is operating in the MAP and as it is operating on the right side of the accelerationist project.

I’m going to say one more thing about that and then get to my final point. For everyone who
wasn’t there, and even people who were there as a reminder, when we were looking at “On
the Geology of Morals” in the Qwernomics course, there’s this complex process that is
happening in the direction of absolute deterritorialisation in the text. It’s exactly trying to
indicate something on the far side of the relative deterritorialisation that is captured by their
phrase, a perfectly unobjectionable gloss of Deleuze and Guattari, ‘what capitalis[m]
deterritorializes with one hand, it reterritorializes with the other’. And as we saw in that text,
Challenger, the protagonist, the pseudo-human interlocutor of that text, in the process of this
engagement with this double-pincered system in the direction of deterritorialisation, acquires
claws. He himself becomes this claw-handed, double-pincered being precisely because the
vector of absolute deterritorialisation requires that there is a simultaneous [movement?] of
these sides of the double pincer. The double pincer works by the fact that you’re only on one
side or the other of the double pincer at any particular time, and it’s being able to
simultaneously get those two different tensed, complementary double-pincered structures
unpackaged that is a mark within the strata of a line of absolute destratification, or a
tendency to absolute deterritorialisation.

In temporal terms, it has to be noted that the transcendental philosophy of time cannot
privilege the future as anything less ontologically settled than the past. To do that is precisely
to fall into a metaphysics of time. Absolute transcendental temporality cannot be any more
real in the past than the future. The differentiation of past, present, future, the articulation of
time is transcendentally simultaneous. It’s not something that can privilege one particular
temporal orientation over another. So we would expect that transcendental temporalisation
would exactly manifest itself within the strata, within the complementary system of
deterritorialisation-reterritorialisation, as something like retroprogressiv[ism], or neoreaction,
or Cybergothic, or any of these other terms that capture the profound ambiguity of time. The
MAP is doing that just as much as Thatcherite, Reagan, proto-neoreaction or whatever you
want to call it, or any other system of reterritorialisation and deterritorialisation. The structure
of retroprogressivism is absolutely basic and structural to the MAP.

The final thing in these talking points, I want to say, is taking Anti-Oedipus as a kind of
stimulus to that, is to say a little thing about Oedipus. Obviously at the most inane level of
reading that text it’s saying ‘let’s forget about Oedipus, Oedipus is not interesting’. I want to
say Oedipus is extremely interesting. Oedipus is all about this templex structure. We know
from the myth that Oedipus’s action is guided by the fact that there is a prophecy about what
will happen to him—that he will kill his father and marry his mother. That prophecy then
becomes an incentive to action that is self-fulfilling. The figure of the Sphynx is a figure of
transcendental temporality within the Oedipus myth, and the tragedy of Oedipus is tied up
with this structure of templexity absolutely integrally.

You cannot read the play at all, or the myth, the structure there at all, without this temporal
complexity being central to it. This is obviously—I won’t simply say ‘devastating’, because
that makes it sound too one-sided and simple—massively complicating of any notion of
agency. It certainly makes the notion, to go back to this quote, that ‘the future needs to be
constructed’, which is a fantastically convenient platform, hugely complicated. Oedipus
cannot be assembled as a political agent in the kind of way the MAP wants to constitute a
political agency, because of the fact that the future is already operative on the past, the
future is no less ontologically [settled?] than the past. So the situation of Oedipus, which is
the situation of any subject caught in time-anomaly, is a situation of transcendental time-
circuitry. It’s a situation in which there’s no way to de-realise the future in order to make it a
completely plastic object for political praxis in a way that’s fundamentally distinct from the
past. Once you go into that terrain, what you mean by politics, what you mean by political
possibility—their term again—being a ‘universal space of possibility’: these are concepts that
become [impossible?] at a first-order level, they have to be fed through this transcendental
philosophy of time, and have to undergo a drastic revision of a kind that I don’t think the
MAP wants to do for intelligible purposes.