Accelerationism offers a uniquely robust theory of the future as a subject for political contestation. In this way, it is surprisingly close to the concerns of queer theory. Like queer theory in its engagement with temporality, acclerationism works to describe the causal relations between past, present, and future. However, where queer theory attributes agency to affect and aesthetics, accelerationists look to rational control. In this contribution, I demonstrate that accelerationist rationality undoes itself, involuting into a form of demonic possession (...) that might also be the basis for a queer future-working. (shrink)

Modern types of social reality require updated ways of comprehending them. The research is devoted to a new analytical form of understanding modernity that has recently emerged - accelerationism, still rarely discussed in Russian philosophy. The representatives of accelerationism call for a radical and rapid acceleration of socio-economic and technological processes in capitalist societies. The article reflects some ideas of the Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics by Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek, after which the accelerationist trend in philosophy (...) and social sciences intensified and gained clear theoretical guidelines. The Manifesto’s ideas about accelerating technological evolution as a means of resolving social conflicts, about unleashing all the latent forces of capitalist production to achieve a state of post-capitalism, denying a return to the Fordist type of production and calling for the restoration of the future as such, are highlighted. The Manifesto and the works of Nick Land, the founder and the most prominent representative of accelerationism, present the position of creating a new program and the very style of thinking with regard to changing the capitalist system along the vector of acceleration. The article pays attention to the interpretation of Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s concept of “deterritorialization” in Land’s works. It emphasizes the focus of accelerationism on the future as a kind of realization of the paradoxical thesis of “looking back from the future.” The content of Land’s accelerationist theory shows the fundamental concepts of K-space (cyberspace), K-war (cyberwar), time and reality, technocratic future of society as Techno-Capital Singularity, expansion of capital as opposed to its reterritorialization. The meaning of Land’s idea of an acceleration of capitalism and the transition to a more progressive future through the collapse of outmoded structures and phenomena of the existing system of capitalism and its technological basis is deduced. (shrink)

The global financial crisis beginning in 2008 has encouraged the revitalization of a wide spectrum of leftist theorizing, but arguably the most audacious is that of ‘accelerationism’. Left-accelerationism sees the intensification of certain tendencies in late capitalist society as a way to escape its gravitational orbit and ‘repurpose’ the very material infrastructure of capitalism itself, to universally emancipatory ends. The central task here is to engage accelerationism with a thinker of the post-Autonomist tradition, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi. Contrary (...) to Williams and Srnicek, co-authors of the #Accelerate manifesto, Bifo asserts that acceleration per se only augments the power and dynamism of capital, and posits instead a ‘post-politics’ of ironic detachment, aesthetic cultivation, and ‘therapy’. Contrasting Bifo and accelerationism clarifies each of their assumptions and core arguments, and points the way to a more nuanced perspective on these issues, in a contemporaneous moment marked in equal measure by inestimable threat and liberatory promise. (shrink)

This paper reviews Benjamin Noys’ recent attempt in Malign Velocities: Accelerationism and Capitalism to mount a critique of accelerationism. The book, persuasive in certain respects, bypasses the institutional dynamics of accelerationism’s theoretical progenitors, viz. Nick Land and the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit of Warwick University, and instead portrays it as a “defeatist strategy” of the post-’68 conjuncture of “Deleuzian Thatcherism.” Such portrayal is debatable to the extent that it exhibits a questionable appropriation of “theory” in the strict (...) sense of the term; a term the paper attempts to define with reference to Matthew Arnold, Louis Althusser and Gilles Grelet. (shrink)

This paper traces the history of accelerationism as a political philosophy, from its inception at Warwick University to its deployment by avowed white supremacists. Probing its philosophical commitment to a both a deterministic philosophy of history and a sacrificial logic of politics, I argue that even the initial elaborations of (non-race-based) accelerationism contained the seed of its development into violent white supremacy. The conclusion assesses a politics of deceleration as a strategy for countering accelerationism, ultimately arguing for (...) the superiority of a Benjaminian politics of the emergency brake. (shrink)

Constellations, Volume 29, Issue 2, Page 131-145, June 2022.

ABSTRACTThis article analyzes different positions on the relationship between politics and the experience of time, both those which defend the legitimacy of institutions and those which claim to liquidate them. Recognizing the links between certain theological arguments and certain modalities of time and politics, the article describes and analyzes three different theses: the one that defends institutions against the erosion of subjectivity in capitalist societies, the one that proposes a mystical anarchism with a messianic profile and, finally, the thesis that (...) argues for the need to accelerate the contradictions of capitalism in order to overcome it and, at the same time, to preserve its conquests. Finally, I vindicate certain experiences that involve and prioritize the body against sense or meaning. To do this, I make use of some ideas of Agamben and Hans U. Gumbrecht. (shrink)

Interview by Marco Emanuele of James Brusseau. October 27, 2021, The Science of Where. Topics include: AI ethics, Accelerationism, Decentralization.

A Religion of Progress has taken shape over the last 21 centuries, from the Enlightenment to present times. It is quite simple to follow a thread from Hermeticism to today, however, several facts have altered its content, therefore, reformulating some of its promises and vision of the world. This paper attempts to evaluate how that Religion of Progress has become a sort of Techno-Hermeticism 2.0. Digital technologies have redefined old hermetic myths into a high-tech religion with dire environmental consequencies. Some (...) of those myths are the resurrection of the bodies, the construction of the City of God, the Adamic universal language and so forth. Now religion must confront the upcoming collapse, however, it is unable to provide satisfactory answers. This goes for all the different churches, from accelerationists (Nick Land) to extinctionists and believers of digital solutionism. That leaves possible imaginative responses to that sociecological crisis without any relevant proposals. (shrink)

Teoria cywilizacji Marcuse oferuje udaną syntezę freudyzmu i marksizmu. Podejście Marcusego, które znalazło swój najdobitniejszy wyraz w Erosie i cywilizacji, miało na celu całkowite przeformułowanie nauki o popędach Freuda, uhistorycznienie jej i sprzęgnięcie z zagadnieniem strukturalnej przemocy czy zinstytucjonalizowanymi (oraz zinternalizowanymi) mechanizmami represji. Twierdzę, że wspomniane przeformułowanie stanowi kamień węgielny dla idiosynkratycznej wersji teorii krytycznej Marcusego, która w mojej interpretacji posiada wyraźne akcenty protoakceleracjonistyczne. Artykuł krótko rekapituluje "dialektykę cywilizacji" Marcusego i wskazuje na jej zaskakujące zbieżności z akceleracjonistyczną wersją post-kapitalizmu w (...) refleksji Marcusego nad polityką, technologią oraz rolą sztuki i wyobraźni estetycznej w zakwestionowaniu afirmatywnego (desublimującego) charakteru kultury. (shrink)

The Critical Naturalism Manifesto is a common platform put forward as a basis for broad discussions around the problems faced by critical theory today. We are living in a time, e.g. a pandemic time, when present-day challenges exert immense pressure on social critique. This means that models of social critique should not be discussed from the point of view of their normative justification or political effects alone, but also with reference to their ability to tackle contemporary problematic issues (like the (...) dismantlement of the welfare state, the environmental catastrophe, and the sanitary crisis). With this manifesto, we invite varying practices of philosophical, artistic and scientific social critique to take seriously the enormous challenges our societies face with regard to inner and outer nature. We first identity eleven theses of critical naturalism which contemporary critical theory should take into consideration. We then identify the historical crises and catastrophes that critical naturalism seeks to respond to, dispelling the prejudices against naturalism in contemporary critical thought, and considering alternative answers to these questions such as social constructivism, accelerationism, xenofeminism, flat ontologism, and monist world ecology. By sketching the notions of nature and naturalism, we anchor critical naturalism in the history of materialism and critical theory, understood initially as that of the Frankfurt School, but expanded and enriched by other approaches to social critique. Finally, we sketch models and projects of critical naturalism, which are exemplary fragments of varying ways to practice naturalist social critique. (shrink)

This text was first published on Critical Legal Thinking 14 May 2013. Accel­er­a­tion­ism pushes towards a future that is more mod­ern, an altern­at­ive mod­ern­ity that neo­lib­er­al­ism is inher­ently unable to gen­er­ate. 01. INTRODUCTION : On the Conjuncture 1. At the beginning of the second decade of the Twenty-First Century, global civilization faces a new breed of cataclysm. These coming apocalypses ridicule the norms and organisational structures of the politics which were forged in the birth - Débats.

The purpose of this article is to elaborate on the concept of prefiguration by outlining the necessity of its contribution to a progressive public philosophy for the 2020s. In the introduction, I explain how the object of critique for many social theorists has shifted over the course of the last decade from neoliberal globalization to capitalism understood as an encompassing form of life. In light of this, I enumerate the features that should define a progressive public philosophy: radical, emancipatory, and (...) decolonized. The introduction is followed by an overview of the academic debates emerging after the North Atlantic financial crisis of 2007–8. Among these, accelerationism fundamentally rejects the incorporation of prefigurative politics in any emancipatory political agenda. To better understand this position, I examine the origin and meaning of prefiguration and prefigurative practices in more detail in Section III. In it, I argue that prefigurative politics entails a holistic approach to social change that digs its roots in feminist and ecological thought and focuses on social reproduction and the preservation of life rather than solely economic production. Subsequently, I deploy the case of Occupy Wall Street to show that a growing number of contemporary social movements are implementing a dualistic strategy that simultaneously combines repertoires of action typical of protest movements with prefigurative practices focused on the embodiment of alternatives. This dualism, along with the limited success of Occupy Wall Street in concretizing its claims and goals, has led prefigurative politics to being labelled as incompatible with, if not even hindering, any emancipatory strategy. My argument instead is that prefigurative politics constitutes a fundamental and necessary component of any political strategy aimed at transcending contemporary capitalism since it conceives progressive social change in an ontologically and epistemologically different way with respect to political parties and protest movements. Taking this into consideration, I conclude that conventional politics and prefigurative politics can be seen as having the potential to mutually reinforce each other and that prefigurative politics should be acknowledged as a pivotal concept in establishing a progressive public philosophy for the 2020s. Only by doing so, will this philosophy be truly radical, emancipatory, and decolonial. (shrink)

This article addresses how the Iranian-born philosopher Reza Negarestani has negotiated human distinctiveness in the course of his intellectual journey from speculative realism to inhuman rationalism (Rather than rationalist inhumanism, as some sources have it (Anon 2021)). Moving from challenging the correlationism of post-Kantian Western philosophy, via critiques of the Deleuze and Guattari’s war machine, Nick Land’s accelerationism, and Ray Brassier’s nihilism, Negarestani eventually turns to the neo-pragmatists of the Pittsburgh School and their reflections on reason, normativity, and praxis. (...) The mapping of this trajectory is divided into four parts: Having already discussed the political theology of Reza Negarestani elsewhere (Kersten, World Futures: The Journal of New Paradigm Research, 78(2–4), 256 267, 2022), the first part of this article briefly introduces Reza Negarestani’s early theory fiction as an exponent of speculative realism (Negarestani 2008), followed by two sections dedicated to close readings of Negarestani’s investigations of the inhuman (Negarestani 2011 and 2014). The examination of these writings will demonstrate how they have served as prolegomena to his next book-length publication, Intelligence and Spirit (2018), a connection that will be briefly assessed in the final part. (shrink)

This article attempts to outline some critical aspects of the accelerationist movement. More specifically, it argues that light can be shed on key aspects of the political proposals of Williams and Srnicek by considering them from the perspective of the socio-political reflections of both Lacan and Deleuze and Guattari. Anti-Oedipus is one crucial starting point for accelerationist thinking, in terms of the concept of the ‘machinic’ and the explicit reference to ‘acceleration’, but it is equally obvious that Lacan has been (...) an important figure in the debate on the topic of ‘desire’. Likewise, and for the same reasons, accelerationism offers the potential for a fruitful reconsideration of Deleuzian philosophy, and of the difficult relationship between schizo- analysis and psycho-analysis. We argue that, in the light of accelerationism, the perspectives of Deleuze and Guattari and Lacan do converge, in particular around the theoretical articulation of the concept of the ‘political’. Accelerationism, as many critics have noted, has numerous implications in the field of subjectivity and often falls into a general plea for a strong neo-Enlightenment. Hence we will attempt to explicate these implications by attempting to read accelerationism via the psychoanalytic categories of jouissance and fantasy. This last category, as Stavrakakis has shown, is directly linked to the political category of ‘Utopia’, and therefore provides an adequate theoretical basis for such a psychoanalytic reading of accelerationism. Should accelerationism be considered the only way out of the socio-political constraints of neoliberalism today? However we approach this question, the argument pursued here is that the best starting points for a critique of accelerationism are the concepts of jouissance, the state/capital relationship, schizo-analysis and paranoid ways of functioning. (shrink)

This article aims to clarify the question of speed and intensity in the thoughts of Simondon and Deleuze, in order to shed light on the recent debates regarding accelerationism and its politics. Instead of starting with speed, we propose to look into the notion of intensity and how it serves as a new ontological ground in Simondon's and Deleuze's philosophy and politics. Simondon mobilises the concept of intensity to criticise hylomorphism and substantialism; Deleuze, taking up Simondon's conceptual framework, repurposes (...) it for his ontology of difference, elevating intensity to the rank of generic concept of being, thus bypassing notions of negativity and individuals as base, in favour of the productive and universal character of difference. In Deleuze, the correlation between intensity and speed is fraught with ambiguities, with each term threatening to subsume the other; this rampant tension becomes explicitly antagonistic when taken up by the diverse strands of contemporary accelerationism, resulting in two extreme cases in the posthuman discourse: either a pure becoming, achieved through destruction, or through abstraction that does away with intensity altogether; or an intensity without movement or speed, that remains a pure jouissance. Both cases appear to stumble over the problem of individuation, if not disindividuation. Hence, we wish to raise the following question: in what way can one think of an accelerationist politics with intensity, or an intensive politics without the fetishisation of speed? We consider this question central to the interrogation of the limits of acceleration and posthuman discourse, thus requiring a new philosophical thought on intensity and speed. (shrink)

In this interview with Thomas Dekeyser, Eugene Thacker elaborates on the central themes of his work. Addressing themes including extinction, futility, human universalism, network euphoria, political indecision and scientific nihilism, the interview positions Thacker’s work within the contemporary theoretical conjuncture, specifically through its relation to genres of thought his work is often grouped with or cast against: vitalism, speculative realism and accelerationism. More broadly, however, the interview offers a unique insight into Thacker’s approach to the thinking, doing and writing (...) of ‘philosophy’. (shrink)

ResumoNeste artigo, são analisados filme e roteiro de Bacurau (2019), dirigido por Kléber Mendonça Filho e Juliano Dornelles. Compreende-se a obra sob a perspectiva da ficção weird pela conjunção entre os elementos de futuridade da narrativa e os conflitos sociais do interior do Brasil, circunscritos a uma realidade histórica. Misturando gêneros cinematográficos em um filme que vai do cangaço ao gore, Bacurau nos coloca frente a uma distopia sobre a proliferação de tecnologias de vigilância e controle e, sobretudo, sobre a (...) proliferação de sistemas políticos de morte.Palavras-chave: Bacurau. Ficção weird. Aceleracionismo. Desterritorialidade. Necropolítica. Estudos decoloniais. AbstractIn this article I analyze the film and the script of Bacurau (2019), directed by Kléber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles. The work is understood from the perspective of weird fiction for the conjunction between the elements of futurity of the narrative and the social conflicts of Brazil’s countryside, anchored in a historical reality. Mixing cinematographic genres in a film that goes from Cangaço Cinema to Gore, Bacurau confronts us with a dystopia about the proliferation of surveillance and control technologies and, specially, about the proliferation of political systems of death.Keywords: Bacurau. Weird Fiction. Accelerationism. Deterritorialization. Necropolitics. Decolonial Studies. (shrink)

Who said manifestos are dead? Some thirty years after the publication of Donna Haraway's illustrious A Cyborg Manifesto, fifty years after Valerie Solanas's angry and delightful SCUM Manifesto, and 170 years after Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels's influential Communist Manifesto, a new manifesto in town in fact bears traces of all these and then some: The Xenofeminist Manifesto. This manifesto, which comes in a gorgeously designed booklet version as well as in a colorful and nostalgic 80s computer-culture website with nerdy (...) hexadecimal page numbers and related Twitter account, is a work from the “xenofeminist” collective Laboria Cuboniks. The name of this collective, whose members are from various parts of the globe, is actually an anagram of “Nicolas Bourbaki,” a largely French collective of mathematicians in the early 1900s who sought to affirm abstraction, rigor, and generalization. Together with a firm foot in cyberfeminism and a strong penchant for the abstract and universal by way of the logic of computing against the arguably flawed universal of “nature,” the manifesto also clearly bears the marks of feminist ecocriticism, new materialism, queer theory, and technological accelerationism. The two books under review bring various activisms and insights together in an original way, and do so clearly with an eye toward reviving the cyberfeminist spirit through, among others, ideas from Shulamith Firestone's Dialectics of Sex. This pairing certainly had me excited, since, as I argue elsewhere, I am, together with Haraway's original cyborg manifesto, firmly of the opinion that feminisms of all kinds should intervene in and contribute even more radically to contemporary techno-culture and philosophy of technology. This is because clearly, new media and genetic technologies are at present some of the most powerful techniques by which we live and probably will live in the near future, and because these technologies are intimately interwoven with Eurocentric masculinism, heterosexism, militarism, and capitalism. (shrink)

Much of leftist political philosophy has uncritically accepted the logic of capitalism, which is a logic of conservation that presents itself as a logic of “production.” Many leftist political philosophers subscribe to capitalism’s fundamental myth—that capitalism produces the new. This appearance of proliferation, however, masks an underlying stasis. This article interrogates this trend in the apparently disparate projects of contemporary accelerationism and Jacques Rancière. The accelerationist project of immanence allows for newness only in quantity and not in quality, while (...) Rancière, coming closer to thinking radical newness in his account of politics, forecloses the possibility of a radically emancipatory society. I suggest an open ontology, which Marx offers, provides a better framework for thinking revolutionary newness. (shrink)

The Euro-American far-right represents a highly diverse political movement comprising numerous ideological tendencies. It includes the European New Right, the US ‘alt-right’ and ‘alt-lite’, far-right accelerationism, traditionalism, and new forms of political misogyny. Despite the diversity in ideas and activities, this article argues that an overarching theme of the ‘fear of white extinction’ travels across and animates each major contemporary far-right tendency. The article explores a variety of older and contemporary metaphysical themes that are deployed in contemporary fascism. These (...) include new configurations of racism, occultist ideas of nature and vitalism, the rendering of culture and civilization in ‘biocultural’ and ‘anthropological’ terms, and ideas about cosmic destiny. The article considers how older ideas from Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Hans Günther, Ludwig Klages, Arnold Gehlen and others are mobilized in contemporary fascism to generate a critique of liberal modernity, one which leads remorselessly to a logic of white supremacy and apocalyptic violence. (shrink)

Many have invoked the nihilism that is endemic of the age we call the anthropocene. Bernard Stiegler has articulated this sentiment by highlighting how anthropocene films are typically nihi listic, for example, Von Trier’s Melancholia. But if the age is characterized by a cultural pessi mism about the future of human kind, or again about its posthuman supersession, there is also a complementary symptom that corresponds to a strange optimism before the impasses of our age. This optimism, we find it (...) represented in another anthropocene film: Nolan’s Interstellar. This too is a film where the protagonists are faced with a world lacking a future, a world dying under the stresses caused by the human’s exploitation of nature. Here, instead of the mantra ‘Enjoy it while it lasts’, an opposing moral is repeated: ‘Don’t go gentle into that good night, Rage, rage against the dying of the light.’ In the film, Thomas’ poem is a tribute to prometheanism; the death of the earth will not mean the end of human life, it declares, the human will surpass all the limits of its ecosystem, the constraints of space time itself, and become pure hyperdimensional intelligence. The film echoes the superstitious optimism in the promise of technology we now find at the heart of contemporary movements such as accelerationism. This paper assesses the validity of this intrumentalization of optimism, drawing from Leibniz’s concept of compossibility and the cosmological anthropic principle. (shrink)

The key claims of left accelerationism are grounded upon a network of concepts. Crucial here have been the notions of hegemony ; strategy ; and rationality. Though the concepts of hegemony–strategy and strategy–rationality have received wide treatment, the hegemony and rationality pair has received minimal attention. Yet to render the core arguments of left accelerationism explicable requires that these three ideas are placed in some concrete relation. To put the issue another way: what is the relationship between power (...) and rationality? This article will argue that many of the critiques which the left accelerationist position has received are bound up in misunderstanding this relationship. To remedy such misnomers, we will argue that it is a more sophisticated understanding of strategy that can help bridge these two domains. This leads us to delineate a form of strategy-without-a-strategiser, a distributed and emergent strategic orientation which mediates the power/rationality binary. (shrink)

I distinguish two theses regarding technological successors to current humans (posthumans): an anthropologically bounded posthumanism (ABP) and an anthropologically unbounded posthumanism (AUP). ABP proposes transcendental conditions on agency that can be held to constrain the scope for “weirdness” in the space of possible posthumans a priori. AUP, by contrast, leaves the nature of posthuman agency to be settled empirically (or technologically). Given AUP there are no “future proof” constraints on the strangeness of posthuman agents. -/- In Posthuman Life I defended (...) AUP via a critique of Donald Davidson’s work on intentionality and a “naturalistic deconstruction” of transcendental phenomenology (See also Roden 2013). In this paper I extend this critique to Robert Brandom’s account of the relationship between normativity and intentionality in Making It Explicit (MIE) and in other writings. -/- Brandom’s account understands intentionality in terms of the capacity to undertake and ascribe inferential normative commitments. It makes “first class agency” dependent on the ability to participate in discursive social practices. It implies that posthumans – insofar as they qualify as agents at all – would need to be social and discursive beings. -/- The problem with this approach, I will argue, is that it replicates a problem that Brandom discerns in Dennett’s intentional stance approach. It tells us nothing about the conditions under which a being qualifies as a potential interpreter and thus little about the conditions for meaning, understanding or agency. -/- I support this diagnosis by showing that Brandom cannot explain how a non-sapient community could bootstrap itself into sapience by setting up a basic deontic scorekeeping system without appealing (along with Davidson and Dennett) to the ways in which an idealized observer would interpret their activity. -/- This strongly suggests that interpretationist and pragmatist accounts cannot explain the semantic or the intentional without regressing to assumptions about ideal interpreters or background practices whose scope they are incapable of delimiting. It follows that Anthropologically Unbounded Posthumanism is not seriously challenged by the claim that agency and meaning are “constituted” by social practices. -/- AUP implies that we can infer no claims about the denizens of “Posthuman Possibility Space” a priori, by reflecting on the pragmatic transcendental conditions for semantic content. We thus have no reason to suppose that posthuman agents would have to be subjects of discourse or, indeed, members of communities. The scope for posthuman weirdness can be determined by recourse to engineering alone. (shrink)

Given that Nick Land is one of the central influences on certain strands of accelerationism, xenofeminism, and inhumanism, it is important to understand how he himself first developed and deployed the concepts of acceleration, the feminine, and the inhuman, which others would go on to appropriate for their own purposes. This article will trace the four feminine figures throughout Land's philosophical trajectory, which he sees as agents for accelerating the transcendental critique of both anthropocentrism and phallocentrism: the slave turned (...) lesbian; the sister; the sexborg; and the Sphinx. Having elucidated the importance of these figures for Land's thought, this article will conclude by drawing upon the younger Land's feminist resources to immanently critique the disappearance of women from his more recent neoreactionary philosophy in favor of concessions to patriarchal traditionalists. (shrink)

During the last decade a new utopian horizon has emerged from the radical left: that of a future postcapitalist society in which technological progress and renewable energy finally take care of our material needs while robots do most our work for us, making paid employment a thing of the past. Instead, we can focus on fulfilling our desires and dreaming up new ones, leading lives of luxury and ease. This utopia, often called “fully automated luxury communism," could be reached through (...) opportunistically accelerating features of the existing neoliberal capitalist system. -/- However, behind this vision of a bright, sustainable future lurks a worrying political prospect. I show how the post-capitalist’s philosophical prejudice against work comes at a high political cost. By painting productive activity as mere drudgery that machines will emancipate us from, they also end up giving up on work as the root of radical democratic agency. The luxury communist proposal ends up resembling an extreme case of the neoliberal hegemony that it claims to be fighting against, a centrally ruled world completely focused on private enjoyment of luxury and devoid of any shared understanding of human flourishing on which democratic public life could thrive – a political dystopia. (shrink)

'MARXCELERATIONISM' - A HISTORICO-PHILOSOPHICAL IN THE HISTORY OF MARXISMThis article reconstructs anew the correspondence that took place in 1881 between Marx and the Russian revolutionary Vera Zasulich. In this correspondence, initially about the Russian ‘agrarian question’, a much broader historico-philosophical issue was fundamentally at stake: the idea of progress. In the ill-fated history of Marxism the idea of progress has, arguably, served to bolster a politics of modernization partly shielded from criticism by the very fact that it allegedly originated in (...) Marx’s so called theory of history. This article argues, on the contrary, that Marx held no such universal theory of history at all. Instead, Zasulich’s and subsequently Lenin’s appeal to an ‘acceleration’ of the contradictions of capitalism to promote the presumably inevitable historical passage to socialism is construed as part and parcel of a Marxist ideology of progress unequivocally criticized by Marx himself as early as in 1881. (shrink)

Since the advent of media archeology, a deep-seated bifurcation has found one end of the field arguing for the interventionist and appropriative weaponization of media whereas the other side has championed a “total war” with technology itself, insisting that new media’s military-industrial roots inherently color its drivability. Here, I implore a moment within the cultural history of net.art and post-internet art to examine how contemporaneous queries about control after militarism and decentralization, as prognosticated by Paul Virilio and Gilles Deleuze, are (...) part of a more deeply entrenched discourse on neural nets, predictive processing algorithms and machine learning, which the current media theory and post-cinema literature has yet to rigorously respond to. Simultaneously parsing philosophical and media sociology corollaries to ground this overview, I push for more attention towards psychopower, autosurveillance and algorithmic governmentality while distancing critique from the standard Foucauldian discourse of biopower. (shrink)