Days of phuture past: Accelerationism in the present moment

Abstract

The so called "classical accelerationism," which stems from the works of Nick Land, draws inspiration from sci-fi literature (cyberpunk, for the most part) and dance music, especially drum-n-bass and jungle. These genres promised to intensify the acceleration of capitalist dynamics to the point of a breakthrough into a nonhuman future. The permanent crisis of neoliberalism, however, deprives capitalism of any dynamics and deprives us of our future. Contemporary accelerationism reacts to this by calling for a return "back to the future" - a return into the past in order to select from it those forces which are capable to create the future - and thus it implicitly defines itself as a nostalgia directed against nostalgia itself (e.g. in the spirit of postmodernism). Nevertheless, nostalgia is all the same nostalgia. Thus, there is a major risk that accelerationism will degenerate - or is already degenerating - into a sterile mix of futurism and retromania. This trend is partially evidenced by the crisis of dance music cooccurring with this phase of accelerationism: for example, juke/footwork withdraws from the ground-breaking drive of jungle and locks itself in the iterative velocity of the current moment. Moreover, at a time when accelerationism explicitly deals with forces of the present, it concentrates only on extreme moments of abstraction in such fields as financial speculation and military technology, which are indifferent to humans and exceed our perception. Accelerationists rely heavily on technologies and equate them with development, disregarding Marx's and Marxist works on political and technical orders. As a consequence, they get trapped, for they are no longer capable of identifying the subject who would perform their suggested reframing of the forces of production. The reality of the present moment withdraws from analysis, leaving room only for the metaphysics of fluid forces that are to be liberated from another time.