As Ben makes clear here it is very much the issue of agency which is most crucial. As I have hoped to distinguish, any vision of accelerationist capital which fails to delineate a clear role for agency (even if merely to push the system towards its maximum negatory potential, even if to undo agency itself) falls into a plain neo-liberal dogma. Further my aim, surely entirely unfulfilled so far, is to seek a grounding for a new mutant politics which is not subsumable beneath any kind of Marxist or leftist banner, but which simultaneously is neither the empty repetitions of contemporary liberal democratic-materialism nor a capitulation to the “invisible hand” of the market. The objective then is not to refound that which already exists, but instead to find through the detours of theory the basis for a praxis which is as yet inexistent, one which if appropriately shielded from crypto-humanisms will be capable of breaking through the wall of the end of history. Part of my frustrations with theory is that a great deal of abstract reasoning takes place to merely justify in a new fashion the same praxis or simply a variant of it, when such praxes appear tactically to have fallen totally into the realm of what Sartre would term ‘counter-finality’.
Hence whilst I have considerable sympathies with the kind of line which Peter Hallward takes (cf: his recent critique in Radical Philosophy of Meillassoux’s After Finitude and the refutation made available here, but which is common to his criticisms of Deleuze and Badiou also) it seems to remain overly encased in a priori assumptions. His critiques have a consistency, no matter whether the object of discussion is Badiou or Deleuze or Speculative Realism, his central concerns remain identical: that politics is primary, (which I actually agree with) and that only a hyper-relational ontology will give the necessary nuances to vouchsafe a practically useful revolutionary political praxis. Given that ultimately what he is interested in I suspect is precisely a new way not merely to model radical political activity but as a way into new tactical innovations, his inability to identify within Speculative Realism a set of tools which can fundamentally destabilize old assumptions when applied to the political field is disappointing. That Meillassoux himself gives little clue as to how we are to go about such an experimental splicing of the speculative genome into the body of radical politics (and his own insistence on theological or ethical developments) is simply an opportunity for those who come after him. Perhaps this is to radically misconstrue the proper theory-praxis relationship, to naively accord too strong a role to theoretical discourse in moulding real-world political activities, but I think that at the very least a hyper-anti-human or coldly inhuman political theory, whether devised by pushing Deleuzo-Guattarian or Badiouian thought beyond its vital/humanist limits or by constructing an implied politics from Speculative Realism is an avenue worth pursuing, precisely because of the perverse results which it will undoubtedly produce. To re-orient politics away from any notion of the human-as-suffering animal for example, would entail a genuine shift in both political aims and means…
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For what it's worth that's kind of what I'm trying to do with the book on negativity; the impasse I came to was that it started off more speculative (around non-dialectical negativity qua inhuman / nonhuman) but then drifted back towards politics. It was that drift that left me with difficult questions I can't answer clearly - ie the articulation of negativity politically (the old debate between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty on 'functionaries of the negative'). This is a long way of saying I have no answers, I'd be very interested in what your 'new mutant politics' might be, and I'm still concerned about the collapse into neo-liberalism. Plus I'm thinking more and more in Marxist terms, rather than less.
I wanted to respond to this, because some weeks ago I ran across your post on the financial crisis and polemicized rather immoderately about it. I think I see where you're coming from now, and in general I agree. The task of theory is undoubtedly to find some kind of new politics. (That "a great deal of abstract reasoning takes place to merely justify in a new fashion the same praxis or simply a variant of it" is something I've noticed all too often myself. Well put.)
But when you hedge your bets against surrendering to the invisible hand, I think you're evading the real problem, which is how these lines in the sand are to be drawn by a new politics in the first place. As long as you're firmly planted on the anti-market side of the divide, it's very easy to keep yelling "¡No Pasarán!" without really subjecting the dividing line to critical analysis. If by not surrendering you mean not becoming a neo-liberal triumphalist, that's fine. But in a concrete sense, since no one has yet created a sustainable, livable alternative to capital, we've all already surrendered to it. At that point, whether we hide behind Das Kapital or the Anti-Oedipus, we've already given the market everything it needs from us.
So the first thing that this politics must explain is this: what is the difference between completely impotent resistance and passive surrender?
The second is this: what is wrong with apolitical resignation and quietism? The standard Marxist response has been that what is supposedly "non-ideological" or "non-political" is in fact always ideological. I don't think that really answers the question, however. If we accept that our active power to resist capitalism is severely limited, then we get to claim that any implicit reinforcement of capitalism that takes place through depoliticization is likewise minimal.
In short--if you want to stake out a political terrain beyond Marxism, how do you justify your reliance on the same hierarchical oppositions (collectivism broadly defined vs. the market, praxis vs. theory, materialism vs. idealism, and so on)?
Why would we want to re-orient politics away from any notion of the human-as-suffering animal, though?
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