Rupturing as foundation.

Now of course what we are not suggesting is that there is a clear cut off point or line in the sand between Capitalism’s halcyon era of cultural productivity and its deceleratory endpoint. To extend the diagrammatical metaphor with petroleum once more, all we can say of resources stripped at a rate higher than their generation is that a certain point will arrive when it becomes more and more marginally expensive to extract value from them- rather than reaching an absolute limit. Moreover this is extremely hard to predict, and even more so if we extend the diagram to human culture. Further its deceleration is non-linear, non-absolute and “patchy” in distribution- certain sectors or subgenera falling into rote repetitions quicker than others, dependant on the contingent social, aesthetic, technological etc components of which these assemblages consist, so there is no clean demarcation point. In terms of Bass Music, perhaps some will call this as being the transition from Jungle to D'n’B, others 2-Step to Grime/Dubstep etc... We might look to other generic sectors to observe similar patterns, for example rock music seems to have used up the stable set of attractors much earlier than electronic music, and is now locked into extreme minimal marginal utility surplus value extraction techniques: underground transgeneric cross breeding and mainstream retro-necro reiterations. Electronic music, Hip Hop, and Metal certainly aren’t in as dire conditions yet, but are headed towards similar thermo-dynamic destinations. Exactly how long it takes them to get there depends on an almost unimaginable array of contingent empirical phenomena, but I don’t think this alone is enough to safeguard an absolute ex nihilo productive freedom for the human. In general humans are productive, but with material constraints, chiefly the total set of currently extant aesthetic information (both as end points and generative strategies), when set against the rate at which these components are accessed, disseminated, and conjugated with each other. We can run counterfactuals as to how precisely these energies are worked out, distributed, what forms they give rise to etc, but given capitalism (itself contingent of course) and its processes, resource crisis based deceleration seems highly likely, providing we ignore the possibility of absolute techno-cultural acceleration as identified in Kurzweil's Singularity concept.

Indeed it is the very affectivity of acceleration which has set our expectations of future changes. On the one hand this is quite a simple claim: Humans are pattern-recognizing animals, with neurological systems which are sensitive to change, rather than stasis. Hence a steady state of acceleration quickly becomes felt as if it were the norm, and hence the perception of a relative deceleration. The dyschronia of Capital is not a voodoo ideological bewitchment or some kind of Philip K Dick-esque rupture of time itself, it is an entirely intelligible psycho-cultural response to environmental shifts. This response results in a de-historicizing perspective on the contingent nature of the emergence of Capitalism itself, and its status as rupture- it falsely naturalises it, and hence in a certain sense the totally immersive character of our sociologically mediated user-illusion “covers-over” the suturing points, the scars, the scabrous matter in the joins… But this has further implications, that there is no necessary reason that music for example should change at such rates, that there is no intrinsic moral worth in “the new” per se in the slightest. Pop music is entirely a creature made possible by capitalism. For many thousands of years folk and Art musics likewise changed only very slowly, but since the economic systems built around them (localist minstrels or music for ritual, or the institutional support of wealthy patrons) did not demand endless novelty this was entirely unproblematic. This is a point upon which I believe we might wish to take Badiou to task, (and perhaps modernism as a whole). The valorisation of the new seems to be an artifact of a certain kind of capitalistic subjectivation, and as Nick Srnicek of Accursed Share pointed out here, why change at all? Why not slow emergence instead of rapid revolutionary change? Why not absolute stasis? Why valorise the new? Capitalism’s endless turn-over of products and services serves an obvious purpose within its own terms, but the claim towards inherent worth (whether capitalistic or modernist) is on shaky ground (i.e.- is a massively under-theorized discursive a priori). Affirming a kind of Speculative Nihilist Realism, I am unable to safeguard the claim that Capitalism in this regard is either "good" or "bad", but the presumption of one or the other, or indeed the ignoring of its status as a rupture with the past forms of production and accumulation are clearly delusions we must divest ourselves of in the ongoing disenchantment of the real, the continuing critique of the manifest image.