The drone is the signature object of the contemporary moment, incarnating a quasi-theological power to see and to kill. The danger of trying to analyse the drone is that we reproduce the image of this theological or metaphysical power, embracing the discourse of techno-fetishism that surrounds it. Here I analyse this discourse primarily through a series of literary, visual, and philosophical discourses that while pre-drone predict and probe the metaphysics of drones. This metaphysics toys with the possibility of a fully-automated (...) or subject-less weapon, which integrates and deploys the human. Counter-drone discourses have tended to emphasise the human element in the “kill-chain” to disrupt this discourse of technological perfection. This is necessary, but my concern is with how notions of integration, acceleration, and “loading” suggest the drone “assemblage” is one which constantly includes the human through transforming the human into a dream of transcendence. The attempt to stress the banality of the drone as just another weapon does not counter this metaphysics, which aims to integrate the messy materiality of the human into “autonomous acceleration.” To resort to messy materiality as a counter remains within the ambit of drone metaphysics and instead, I suggest, we have to attend to the disruption and negations at work within the discourse of transformation and acceleration that surrounds and finds its destination in the drone. (shrink)

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

Proceedings of the Sixth Argumentor Conference held in Oradea/Nagyvárad, Romania, 11–12 September 2020.

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)

This paper examines an ideology I call techno-colonialism. I argue that techno-colonialism represents an attempt to selectively reproduce settler colonial practices adjusted to twenty-first century realities. This argument has implications for contemporary settler colonialism, the radical right, and climate change politics. In what follows, I discuss the techno-colonial doctrines of Nick Land, Curtis Yarvin, Peter Thiel, and Patri Friedman. These figures articulate a political theory about exploiting new technologies to escape the state and found new societies. To explore techno-colonial ideology, (...) I focus on Seasteading—the practice of creating floating city-states to colonize the ocean––as an attempted realization of techno-colonial ideals. As I claim, techno-colonialism attempts to humanize the politics of settlement. But I argue that techno-colonialism's ambitions fail, and techno-colonialism fails to create a harmless politics of settlement. I conclude that we should be attentive to the relations of political and economic power in which such exit projects are embedded. Moreover, this paper also promotes our understanding of climate change and the radical right's politics. While scholars most naturally associate the radical right with climate change denialism, the techno-colonists illustrate another possibility. They welcome catastrophe, and see rising-sea levels as an opportunity to start society afresh. (shrink)

This dissertation seeks to reactivate the Marxist transition debate, by conceptualising transition as a problem in its own right, moving away from a stagist vision of the development of modes of production. Part I outlines the historical materialist parameters of the ontology of transition, and traces the concept across classical and western Marxism. This section draws from Althusserian theory to sketch out a conception of historical time as a multiplicity of dislocated trajectories. This is followed by a critique of post-Marxism, (...) based on the disappearance of the concept of transition in the discursive turn. It is argued that transition should be retained as a sociologically rigorous concept, and that among various strands of Marxist theory there is evidence of its efficacy. Part II analyses contemporary left theory and politics through the dichotomy of melancholy and utopia, and argues that they exemplify temporal complexity and illuminate current impasses on the left. Part III applies the findings of the preceding parts to strategic questions of demands, agency and strategy. This is achieved through a substantive discussion of postwork theory as a new postcapitalist vision, embodying issues of temporality, transition and utopia. The thesis concludes that the neglected problem of transition and the notion of multiple temporalities are important theoretical tools for addressing questions of historical epistemology and left strategy. Understanding transition as an embedded societal tendency is valuable to critical social theory, and provides the means to theorise postcapitalist futures. (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)

Several scholars have noted parallels between the online communicative tactics of the American alt-right and those of industrial musicians in the 1970s and 1980s. This article explores these connections further by analysing the informational media that industrial musicians developed. Between the mid-1980s and 1990s, these zines, handbooks, and websites made a strenuous break with the values of democracy, egalitarianism, and grassroots authenticity that were the default ideological ‘mode’ of DIY. Where the Californian ideology would centre the summer of love and (...) the politics of the New Left, the zines ambiguously celebrated the nihilistic, authoritarian, and occult vectors of psychedelia – tendencies that have been associated with the late 1960s fate of the counterculture rather than its earlier heyday. The article tracks these themes from Vague magazine and Rapid Eye, to the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit in the 1990s, to neoreaction and the Dark Enlightenment, asking whether communicational utopianism should be considered a blip rather than the internet’s default state. (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)

In this article, the anti-anthropocentric philosophy of Nick Land is discussed from the perspective of the concept of capital – capital becomes a philosophical problem. The origin of Land’s conception of capital as artificial intelligence alien to humanity is traced from the theory of libidinal materialism, the transcendental philosophy of Kant, and also from the historical and cultural background. The ideas of Deleuze and Guattari let Land think of capital as machinically and cybernetically accelerating techno-capital – Land’s intense relation to (...) the process of acceleration is defined here as ecstasy. Also, the problematic interpretation of Deleuze and Guattari is noted, the processes of automatisation and autonomisation are considered, and Land’s teleological vision of technological singularity is criticised, especially from the point of the threats of the climate crisis. Here is shown that the philosophy of Land affectively follows the relevant and important tendencies of capitalism, but suffers from some inner contradictions and paradoxes, according to which we can reasonably doubt the philosopher’s ecstatic celebration of the abyss between capital and human subjectivity. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In a reflection on his Marxist past, J. F. Lyotard described a différend between himself and the revolutionary discourse. This might also represent the relations between the latter and the contemporary discourse of resistance, with its characteristic fascination with non-teleological political action. The disdain for teleology apparently justifies the incommensurability of these discourses, thus disabling any inheritance of elements of the revolutionary tradition. This essay challenges the unbridgeable nature of this gap and explores alternative relations between the two discourses, (...) such as mimetic ones, by reading Walter Benjamin's somewhat neglected fragments on barricades in his Arcades Project. Benjamin's concept of interruption – celebrated by contemporary theorists of resistance – alongside his non-teleological concept of revolution, provides the theoretical armature for this task. Thus, I use barricades, commonly conceived as the emblem of the revolutionary tradition, in order to reconsider the possibility of inheriting aspects of this tradition in times in which the predominant discourse is that of resistance. (shrink)

There is a complicated relation between social and political inertia – the failure of institutions to respond adequately to social, technological and environmental change – and social acceleration – the tendency of social change to go faster and faster. Social stasis and acceleration are not simply opposed but also causally related. This article contrasts two theories of political and social inertia. Francis Fukuyama argues that political inertia is a result of a cognitive and institutional rigidity which is ultimately grounded in (...) human nature, and that therefore inertia is a feature inherent in political systems. Hartmut Rosa, by contrast, sees inertia as a specifically modern phenomenon, which is the result of the inability of political institutions to cope with the accelerating rate of change in other social systems. It will be argued that a broad approach combining historical, institutional and normative perspectives is needed to explain political inertia. (shrink)