''Accelerationism: Capitalism as Critique'' and Other Essays

180 Pages·2020·17.953 MB·English

by  James Ellis

“Accelerationism:
Capitalism as Critique”
& Other Essays

James Ellis
Copyright © 2020 James Ellis and Miskatonic Virtual
University Press. Some rights reserved: Creative Commons
for Non-Commercial Use.
Miskatonic Virtual University Press is an open-access, autono-
mous, not-for-profit publishing house operating in Meatspace.
This volume was edited, formatted, and designed by the col-
lective entity known as Murdock Parsons.
Cover art: “Architectural photography of brown spiral stairs.”
Set in Times New Roman.
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Press (Arkham, MA): https://mvupress.net/
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Contents

Editors’ Introduction ............................................ i
Author’s Introduction ......................................... iv
Section One: Accelerationism: Capitalism as
Critique ................................................................ 1
Acknowledgements ......................................... 2
Introduction ..................................................... 3
The Inside ........................................................ 8
Standardized Time and Machines.................. 18
The Outside.................................................... 30
Zero ................................................................ 42
Accelerationism ............................................. 54
Conclusion ..................................................... 67
Bibliography .................................................. 70
Section Two: Supplementary Accelerants ........ 74
On Left and Right Accelerationism ............... 75
An Atomist Reading of Accelerationism: The
Machinic Clinamen........................................ 83
A Critique of the Accelerationist Attitude ..... 88
Bibliography .................................................. 91
Section Three: Z/Acc ........................................ 96
Z/Acc Primer ................................................. 97
Interview: On Z/Acc (Parallax Optics and
Meta-Nomad) ............................................... 120
Bibliography ................................................ 159
Editors’ Introduction

In publishing “Accelerationism: Capitalism as
Critique” & Other Essays, we at Miskatonic Virtual
University Press are taking the first step in our
broader mission of publishing emerging voices in
what can broadly be construed as ‘weird theory.’
While an intentionally vague term, the goal of MVU
Press is, in our book series as well as our sister jour-
nal, Plutonics: A Journal of Non-Standard Theory, to
seriously engage with thinkers and ideas that not only
fall outside the mainstream, but whose thoughts, gen-
erally speaking, have no place within the Academy.
We find James’ work to not only be insightful but
to also provide a unique view of accelerationism as
an extension – and indeed, update – of Deleuze’s phi-
losophy of time. It is our hope in publishing this book
that we can ‘expand the conversation’ around accel-
erationism and encourage new theorizing.
To get involved (either in an editorial capacity or
to publish with us or our sister journal, Plutonics),
please visit our website at https://mvupress.net/

***

Logistically, James’ texts provided two different
sets of editorial challenges. On the one hand, his the-
sis, “Accelerationism: Capitalism as Critique,” is
clearly written within an academic milieu and as such
makes use of certain citational practices. On the other
[i]
hand, James’ follow-up texts which appeared as blog
posts do not make use of any citational practice save
for hyperlinks. Thus, the majority of our editorial in-
terventions into the texts that follow are, apart from
efforts at proof-reading and structuring, attempts to
standardize citational practices across the works.
In the original text of “Accelerationism,” James
used what appears to be a variant of Chicago style
with in-text citations and footnoted comments. We
find in-text citational practices to be unpalatable, to
say the least, and thus opted to shift to a footnotes-
based style. While retaining James’ bibliography in
(mostly) unaltered form, we have done three things
to the quotations within the text. First, we have de-
italicized them. In the original version of “Accelera-
tionism,” all quotations were italicized. This didn’t
fit with our manic aesthetic sensibilities and thus we
removed the formatting. Second, all quotations
longer than three lines have been rendered as block
quotations even if they were not within the original
text. The reason for this simply has to do with page
size. Finally, following each quotation (or the end of
a sentence, if they are in the middle), we have added
a footnote. The footnote does not contain the entirety
of the bibliographic information as that would be re-
dundant. Instead, we opted for last name(s) of au-
thor(s), title, and page number. Should a reader wish
to track down the full bibliographic information, they
need only turn to page 70.
Further, we made several small interventions into
the text of “Accelerationism” itself in the name of
[ii]
editing. ‘Major’ interventions (e.g. words added
and/or substantive changes) are noted by [hard
brackets] around our insertion. All comments, non-
citational footnotes, etc., are James’ originals.
To standardize the blogposts with the citational
style of “Accelerationism,” we have opted to add
semi-complete bibliographic footnotes after each hy-
perlink or quotation with a bibliography at the end of
each section where a reader can find complete cita-
tional information. Since this will also be published
in eBook format, the hyperlinks have been retained
for ease of follow-up.

-Murdock Parsons
July 2020
[iii]
Author’s Introduction

It’s been over a year since I wrote Acceleration-
ism: Capitalism as Critique, and the socio-political
fluctuations within the ‘Accelerationist sphere’
within that time have been simultaneously chaotic,
misinformed, ignorant, catastrophic, dumbfounded,
exemplary, racist, humanist, leftist, rightist, ecologi-
cal, libertarian, emancipatory and entropic. In short,
Nick Land was entirely correct when he stated:

Anyone trying to work out what they think about
accelerationism better do so quickly. That’s the
nature of the thing. It was already caught up with
trends that seemed too fast to track when it began
to become self-aware, decades ago. It has picked
up a lot of speed since then.1

It seems humorous to me now that the primary
reason I wrote this piece, which was in fact my Mas-
ter’s dissertation, was as an attempt to wash-away all
the (as I saw them) ridiculous political readings of
the accelerationist process and focus solely on its
philosophical implications. I think to a certain extent
I succeeded, and I outlined as best I could the process

1 Nick Land, “A Quick-and-Dirty Introduction to Accel-
erationism,” on Jacobite Mag, published May 25, 2017.
(https://jacobitemag.com/2017/05/25/a-quick-and-dirty-
introduction-to-accelerationism/)
[iv]
and its effects on various spheres of being and exist-
ence. I state it’s humorous because only weeks after
submitting my dissertation various articles heralding
‘Accelerationism’ as a form of white-supremacism
turned up on the scene. In those early days I tried
contacting a few of these journalists and making it
clear that they were using the wrong signifier. The
irony is, I still don’t exactly know whether or not
they were using the wrong signifier. The inherent
problem with Accelerationism, or more aptly, the
process of acceleration itself, is that it momentarily
becomes that which it has clung to, and any post-
philosophical attempt to discern the process from the
parasite would be near impossible. It’s a rather dif-
ficult situation. Because on the one hand, no single
existing thing is either privileged or non-privileged
with respect to the process of acceleration. Much like
capitalism, if it does decide to use X, Y or Z for its
own positive oriented feedback, it does so not out of
affiliation, but out of an ever-increasing understand-
ing that such utilization will lead to greater expan-
sion. Acceleration doesn’t care for what it uses in the
sense of a belonging, empathy or support, it does so
from an inhuman level targeted at inhuman aims. Ac-
celerationism is transcendental, and thus its reason-
ing for using and abusing various virtualities for its
own productive aims shall always elude us.
The Zero-Accelerationism (Z/Acc) pieces came
a short time after writing my dissertation. My mis-
take with the dissertation is that it ignores entropy
and decay – it’s aware of the cyberpositive but
[v]