Accelerationism Archives - Public Seminar

Race

Black Accelerationism

January 27, 2017 • by McKenzie Wark

If accelerationism has a key idea, it is that it is either impossible or undesirable to resist or negate the development of the commodity economy coupled with technology. Rather, it has to be pushed harder and faster, that it has to change more rather than less. It is an idea, a ...

History

Marx and Nature

January 21, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

"What Engels called “the monopolization of the earth by a few” has reached absurdist proportions as I was writing this. (60) It would appear that the 1% now own more than half the wealth of the planet. It is the greatest concentration of wealth ever, and yet it corresponds to ...

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Notes on Zizek’s Absolute Recoil

November 28, 2014 • by McKenzie Wark

Perhaps the first thing to know about Zizek is that his work entails a certain interpretive strategy, which in his new book Absolute Recoil he calls brachylogia, (41) which refers to statements of excessive brevity, with words left out. This can be coupled with Zizek’s insistence that authors misrecognize their more ...

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Spinoza on Speed

November 19, 2014 • by McKenzie Wark

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s, Empire (Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 2000) is a book I have always been ambivalent about. It is a kind of Spinozist-accelerationist epic. (As Benjamin Noys has usefully shown). Spinoza on speed. I admire the boldness with which it attempted to describe the situation that was ...

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The Drone of Minerva

November 5, 2014 • by McKenzie Wark

The one kind of speculative thought that might be of service in the Anthropocene is surely some kind of philosophy of history, and yet within the academy itself it seems the one nobody wants to actually attempt. It is as if the debates at the end of the last century ...

Theory & Practice

#Accelerate and inertia

October 5, 2014 • by McKenzie Wark

Thinking historically and systematically would appear to be something of an urgent requirement for critical theory in the Anthropocene. Yet there was a great allergic reaction to all such lines of thought in the late twentieth century from which social thought never really recovered. Recently, there has been some attempt to ...

Theory & Practice

#Accelerate in reverse

October 2, 2014 • by McKenzie Wark

Nothing seems more urgent now than to find useful ways of thinking what Donna Haraway calls naturecultures, and to do so historically. The elimination in advance of the problem of the continuities from the natural to the cultural that is such an ingrained prejudice in the humanities and social sciences ...

Theory & Practice

Extrapolation, not Acceleration

September 29, 2014 • by McKenzie Wark

We hoped; we waited for the day The state would wither clean away, Expecting the Millennium That theory promised us would come: It didn’t… W. H. Auden, New Year Letter, 1941 It would appear that in the twenty-first century, we should probably relinquish a faith in a force external to capital, even if generated by it, ...

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Blue Ruin: Totality and Acceleration

March 6, 2014 • by McKenzie Wark

Who could have guessed that when the flood came it would come in slow motion, over forty decades rather than forty nights? As the polar ice sheets unravel and plunge into the waters, whose who have so mismanaged the fate of all things cling to their private arks. The animals, ...

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Accelerationism

November 18, 2013 • by McKenzie Wark

There’s a lively debate going on about ‘accelerationism’. As Reza Negarastani has suggested, it might be a way in which big picture speculative thought about historical circumstances has returned after the decline of Marxism. It began with the somewhat hallucinated texts of Nick Land, which saw capitalism as a sort ...