Cosmogenic acceleration: Futurity and ethics

Abstract

The article investigates the relation between accelerationist aesthetics and ethics. In the understanding of Steven Shaviro, accelerationist aesthetics is on one hand a utopian contentless gesture, and on the other - a reappraisal of the future which becomes for this aesthetics a future-present, thanks to its orientedness onto this futurity. The author agrees with Shaviro - the task of accelerationism is to save the present and future from the insatiable capital. This is an extremely difficult task - even art and imagination, although freed from its limits by postmodernism, still serve capital. To solve this problem, the author uses the definition of acceleration as varying intensity and draws a distinction between a nihilistic aesthetics of acceleration which ignores intensity and an aesthetics of accelerationism based on intensification. The second version of an accelerationist aesthetic can penetrate the depth of capital and lay bare its affects, creating a dehumanising network of classifications and endless connections. The more inhumanly classified we are, the less vulnerable to an unjust status quo, and the intensification of experience within a new, inhuman classification makes experience more ethical. The author also criticises Shaviro - his fear that aesthetics might lose itself within the spaces of the future it investigates is unjustified. Despite the importance of the future for an accelerationist aesthetics, it already has everything it needs for dehumanising the affects here and now. Through recomposition and reconfiguration, it is capable of becoming more minoritarian and more ethical. Thus, the aesthetics of acceleration is an ethical aesthetics.