Post-Land: The paradoxes of a speculative realist politics.

To answer some of Mark K-Punk’s questions (original posts here and here):

1. Is this pure capital not a phantasmic projection? Yes, absolutely, one which does not exist at present but which, as the powerful fiction of a completed truth, (to horribly misuse Badiou) might be able to actualise its own reality.

2. The problem of Agency: A more difficult question undoubtedly, but one which I hope to answer in part below, though with certain problems.

3. How to evade a fall into neo-liberalism…

To distinguish left-Landianism from Land’s own (surely now firmly rightward in its orientation), we might make two points:

1. Capital in its present form is incapable of delivering anything but inertia, or at least that parallax between a interminable rush of change at the level of fashion and an eerie stasis in terms of innovative cultural or political forms it seems incapable of throwing up. Hence there is a need for a very real praxis upon it (and its articulation with institutional forms). Land's position is a shadowy obverse to that of the Multitude(s)/Autonomia group, that "we are already (almost) there". He forgets that capitalist relative deterritorializations are always usually accompanied by an immediate reterritorialization, as determined by the capitalist axiomatic. It is this that needs to be worked upon, the shifting of the balance of de/re-territorializations.

2. To evade the dark/banal fall into mere neo-liberalism, we must maintain a firm belief in the horrifying and utterly negative nature of capital. It is in this meaning of the term "left-Landian" then that we might position this accelerationist reading of capitalism- as a preservation of the critique of the left, and the praxis of the right, the preservation of capital's negative dimension, and its absolute valorisation for this very reason. For the form of politics this demarcates comes closest to what the literary buffoon Martin Amis termed "horrorism"- part of the nomenclature he used in his pitiful misreading of islamist terrorist activities. I certainly enjoyed the term, if not its application, for it conveyed something of what a less literal terroristic praxis might consist, in the sense of what a non-dialectical amassing of negativity might mean, a horror piled upon horror, a critical mass capable of pulling the subjectivity attached to the organic human substrate through to some nether-zone of dissolution, a Deleuzean becoming crucially without affirmation. Outside of a vitalist notion of an inhuman jouissance, (shared by the libidinal economists) the market delivers not a utopia of free-flowing desire but rather a perfect dystopia of the genuinely inhuman, a non-affective cold-machinism truly adequate to capital-in-itself. The irresistible inverse image of 9/11 presents itself: Instead of flying the planes into symbols of western capitalism, we plunge the financial-capitalistic contents of the towers into the human world itself, dissolving, sundering, shattering…

The question of what form the praxis necessary to destabilise the current state-capital bond has already been answered in part- a kind of meta-terrorism, operating on the plane of capital itself (ideally, in the conception which has obsessed me for some time, in the form of a capitalist surrealism, the exploitation of credit based financial systems for their primary destructive potential. This destruction is not merely to be thought on the ability to trigger vast crashes, which is readily apparent, but further their capacity to destabilise the consistency of value itself). That this consists in taking more seriously the claims of finance capital than even its own agents is the very point itself, and is in a sense an actualisation of Lyotard's gestures towards a 'nihilist theory of credit'. Further we might conceptualise the collective forms necessary to actualise this praxis as being very much in the mode of the kind of Maoist party delineated by Badiou in Théorie du Sujet, an institutional actor capable of allowing the ephemeral vanishing term of history (now surrealist avant-capital, rather than the proletariat of course) to cohere, for as long as required to enable it to achieve the absolute dissolution of all structuration, including itself.

There is a significant question which remains unanswered, one which was touched upon by Schoolboyerrors in the comments box of the previous post:

“To what end accelerationism? In order to provoke a crisis, as you say, in the system, but for what? For the future of humanity? Is this inhumanism, then, merely a deferral of pathos until such time as revolution has been achieved?”

Accelerationism more generally might be considered to take a number of forms, fitting into two kinds of category, broadly being “weak” accelerationism, and “strong” accelerationism:

1) Weak Accelerationism: By driving capitalism towards an accelerated position, the conditions for something resembling a communist revolution might be engendered. In this (limited) sense accelerationism is merely an anti-ameliorationism, which sets the conditions for revolution by undoing the improvements in living conditions which western capitalism (in part) produces, mainly through the state, in order to further its own continued existence within its homeostatic form. Whilst we would not want to fall into a total economic determinism here, it appears relatively obvious (as it did to Lenin in What is to be Done) that soft leftist activities (socialist parties, unions etc) far from being agents of genuine change merely arrest the situation as it stands, frequently operating as part of the axiomatic machinery ensuring the stability of the homeostatic form of capitalism. In this sense then accelerationism opposes ameliorative leftism by acting to foreground the structural privations of the capitalist system. Further the utilisation of capitalist institutions for their primary negatory character would work to undermine the consistency of capitalist ideology. We might think of the current financial crisis as perhaps giving us such an opportunity, though we have already noted our cynicism as to the lack of an effective political organisation to capitalise upon this.

2) Strong Accelerationism: Unlike the “weak” model of accelerationism, which maintains the thesis that capital shifted beyond its current homeostatic form entails a collapse or fundamental catastrophe, suitable for the inculcation of some kind of neo-Marxist revolutionary communism, the “strong” form of accelerationism entertains the notion that far from ushering in the downfall of capitalism, acceleration beyond a certain point radically alters the nature of the processes of capital itself. Here acceleration is not a means to a crisis in the system, but rather a radical mutation of the system itself, along with it the kinds of subjectivations made possible.

Certainly the revolution which the “strong” accelerationist model has in mind can be far from merely a humanist pathos postponed, an inhumanism in the service of the ultimate utopian destiny of the human, or of some kind of vitalist maximisation of what these particular (human) bodies can do. Instead we might think of it as the process necessary to erase the human altogether (as a form of subjectivation), to actualise something close to the dissolution of subjectivity (and the initiation of what might resemble a Guyotadian political economy).

But there is a more serious, and perhaps intractable question which underlies this: How might one ground a politics which aims towards an inhuman becoming (or perhaps we ought to say de-subjectivation) outside of a discourse of either alienation or alternately some kind of pseudo-biological vitalist ethology such as Deleuze’s appropriation of Spinoza’s conatus? This is really the problem which lies at the core of a speculative realist politics (and ethics and aesthetics also). In other words of how to apply a skilfully de-correlated philosophy to the always correlated domains of the subject, (even if our intent is to ground a politics whose aim is towards the erasure of the very dimension of the subject itself). For surely there seems to be a presumption of the continuation of the problem of alienation (or at least, that the incommensurable nature of the current form of subjectivation with capitalism is itself the reason for our need to close the gap). Part of what I am looking for is a way to ground the Deleuzo-Guattarian model of capitalism (which even their harshest critics such as Peter Hallward and Ray Brassier hold is the finest conception of capital since Marx) outside of a faulty affirmative vitalism. That capital operates via a (largely state-mediated) axiomatic, controlling relative de/reterritorializations of flows seems too useful a model even for Brassier himself to give up on (indeed he uses it unproblematically in the original article of ‘Nihil Unbound’ to call one of Badiou’s silent a prioris into question). But even if such a regrounding were to be possible (upon a speculative realist xenoeconomics, as I think will need to be the case) the aim of the exercise, to re-introduce this into the social field in order to enable a radically new form of politics to become thinkable, the fundamental problematic remains. Outside either a vitalist ethology of ‘natural’ auto-self-maximisation, or some kind of Marxist-Hegelian dialectical drive towards the elimination of contradiction in the same, how might we be able to ground the very need for an inhumanising desubjectivation at all? Though we might wish to create a system which has had done with judgement, to ground the praxis (and here we return to the “sticky” issue of agency) necessary to arrive at this state requires the illegitimate use of the very devices the praxis seeks to erase.