CartPost-Accelerationism:
Futurity between Time and Space Instructor: J.-P, CaronProgram: Sociopolitical Thought, Transdiciplinary Studies, Intercentric Art & Curatorial Practice, Critical Philosophy, Information Architecture & Intelligence DesignCredit(s): 1Date: May 17, 24, 31, June 7Time: 09:00-11:30 ET.
DESCRIPTION: There have been a number of recent attempts at taking stock of Speculative Realism on one side, and of Accelerationism on the other (including the fashioning of new labels: cute/acc, psychotic acc, effective acc, etc.). But from the ashes of that intellectual constellation that formed sometime between 2006, the release date of Meillassoux’s After Finitude, and 2015’s Xenofeminist Manifesto, including the re-release of Nick Land’s texts from the 90s and the launch of the Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics, it is Left Accelerationism that is mostly left out of any serious engagement. Coined in 2013 by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, the term was very rapidly dropped by its own proponents and never appears in their 2015 book Inventing the Future.
This Workshop tackles, if not some influences, some resonances of the specifically left accelerationist constellation from the time on more recent political and intellectual endeavors. With its demand for imagining a new future compatible with abstraction and scientific rationality, the ideas of the Manifesto resonated and took on different guises, some mostly convergent, some only partially so. Starting from a close reading of the MAP and of the Xenofeminist Manifesto, the Workshop shifts emphasis in the middle sessions from the temporal futurity announced in these attempts to a spatialized future harboured by the critics that come from the point of view of the Global periphery. Instead of these provoking a blank rejection of the tenets of L/Acc, the Workshop rekindles its wager on abstraction from a more globally spatialized point of view.
Session 1: Introduction to MAP / The first session is a close reading of the Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics and of the XF Manifesto, tracing its immediate intellectual influences in Marxist critique of political economy, CCRU-era accelerationist writing, Speculative Realist attempts to rekindle scientific rationality within continental philosophy, and gender politics in xenofeminism. The critique of localist politics is given precedence in the session.
Session 2: Neorationalism / One important mutation is called “epistemic accelerationism,” referred to in many writings of the 2013–15 years. Stemming from the connection between the political ideals of L/Acc and the epistemological program coming from the scientific realist wing of Speculative Realism, neorationalism is traced in its program of inferential unpacking of the consequences of Reason and of the Human (as inhumanism) in a few important texts of the time.
Session 3: The Real Abstraction Constellation / In 2008, with the publication of “The Open Secret of Real Abstraction,” Alberto Toscano paved the way for the revitalization of the Sohn-Rethelian thesis of real abstraction in the Anglo-American continental milieu. Reflexes of the dissemination of these theses can be seen already in the Speculative Aesthetics volume, out in 2014, where many of the speakers, including Srnicek, Williams, Brassier, and Fisher, among others, mention the real abstraction hypothesis as a way out of the problems put forward by the left-accelerationist espousal of abstraction (a mention that came way too early to be registered at the time).
Session 4: Futurity as Time and as Space / While not a signatory of the Manifesto, the works of Mark Fisher are given place of prominence in the fourth session as defining a new set of attempts to rekindle “Post-Capitalist Desire” and “the Communist Hypothesis” as Badiou and Žižek would have it. With this, the Workshop arrives at a juncture where the point of view of the periphery as depicted in the works of Roberto Schwarz and Paulo Arantes becomes relevant to think of any kind of post-capitalist futurity. The parallax is important: while Fisher wants a new orientation towards the future, these Brazilian authors suggest that the future of capitalist experimentation is to be found in the peripheries of the World System, issuing a challenge to any Global North-led understanding of the dynamics of contemporary capital (a charge that was all too soon led against L/Acc). Here the debate between left-accelerationism and communization theory as led by Ray Brassier can put us on track to a theory of transition in its relation to organizational issues.
IMAGE: #Accelerate Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics, 2013
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