A quick fact sheet.
Deleuze has inspired a new “accelerationist” movement at the intersection of “New Marxisms,” New Materialisms, and Cyber culture–including transhumanisms and cybergoth nihilism.
In a nutshell, the idea is that we should sink into the decays of capitalism and speed it up to its imploding end. Or that we should accelerate some version of anti-capitalism to help capitalism implode more quickly.
Either way, some thinkers seem to think something better awaits “on the other side”; some do not. Some embrace violence as a strategy; some do not embrace it (even as they often take up a ‘come what may’ attitude).
And in at least some of its forms, this is a key emergent form of anti-democracy.
P.S. Left-accelerationists oppose “older style” Marxists who care about local economies and civic action. In this regard, here’s a quote from the ‘#ACCELERATE MANIFESTO‘ (2013):
We believe the most important division in today’s left is between those that hold to a folk politics of localism, direct action, and relentless horizontalism, and those that outline what must become called an accelerationist politics at ease with a modernity of abstraction, complexity, globality, and technology. The former remains content with establishing small and temporary spaces of non-capitalist social relations, eschewing the real problems entailed in facing foes which are intrinsically non-local, abstract, and rooted deep in our everyday infrastructure. The failure of such politics has been built-in from the very beginning. By contrast, an accelerationist politics seeks to preserve the gains of late capitalism while going further than its value system, governance structures, and mass pathologies will allow.”
Read more here:
- Jose Rosales on “Deleuze and the Accelerationists” (2014)
- Benjamin Noys, Malign Velocities: Accelerationism and Capitalism (2014) | Amazon link
Truth be told, as a Levinasian, I have low tolerance for accelerationism in general, and frankly zero tolerance not only for White Supremacist forms on the Right, but for its “transhumanist” forms on the Left which can get rather gothy-dark-nihilist. Here is my general response to dark cybergothic versions of this movement:
