#Accelerate

#Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader

Robin Mackay & Armen Avanessian (eds.)

Urbanomic and Merve Verlag
May 2014
Paperback 115x175mm
ISBN
978-0-9575295-5-7

Special edition of 25 copies with Diann Bauer print

$140
For orders & information, contact post@sequencepress.com

 

Accelerationism is the name of a contemporary political heresy: the insistence that the only radical political response to capitalism is not to protest, disrupt, critique, or détourne it, but to accelerate and exacerbate its uprooting, alienating, decoding, abstractive tendencies.

The term was coined to designate a certain nihilistic alignment of theory with the excess and abandon of capitalist culture, and the associated performative aesthetic of texts that seek to become immanent to the very process of alienation. Developing at the dawn of contemporary neoliberal consensus, the uneasy status of this impulse, between subversion and acquiescence, between theoretical purchase and aesthetic enjoyment, constitutes the core problematic of accelerationism.

Since the 2013 publication of Williams's and Srnicek's #Accelerate: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics, the term has been adopted to name a set of new theoretical enterprises that aim to conceptualise non-capitalist futures outside of traditional marxist critiques and regressive, decelerative or restorative solutions.

#Accelerate presents a genealogy of accelerationism, tracking the impulse through 90s UK darkside cyberculture and the theory-fictions of Nick Land, Sadie Plant, Iain Grant, and anonymous units like CCRU and SWITCH, across the cultural underground of the 80s (rave, acid house, Terminator and Bladerunner) and back to its sources in delirious post-68 ferment, in texts whose searing nihilistic jouissance would later be disavowed by their authors and the marxist and academic establishment alike.

On either side of this largely unexplored central sequence, the book includes texts by Marx that call attention to his own 'Prometheanism' and key works from recent years document the recent extraordinary emergence of new accelerationisms steeled against the onslaughts of neoliberal capitalist realism, and retooled for the twenty-first century.

At the forefront of the energetic contemporary debate around this disputed, problematic term, #ACCELERATE activates a historical conversation about futurality, technology, politics, enjoyment and Kapital. This is a legacy shot through with contradictions, yet urgently galvanized today by the poverty of 'reasonable' contemporary political alternatives.


 

Contents

ANTICIPATIONS
Karl Marx - Fragment on Machines
Samuel Butler - The Book of The Machines
Nikolai Fyodorov - The Common Task
Thorstein Veblen - The Machine Process and the Natural Decay of the Business Enterprise

FERMENT
Shulamith Firestone - On the Two Modes of Cultural History
Jacques Camatte - Decline of the Capitalist Mode of Production or Decline of Humanity?
Gilles Deleuze + Félix Guattari - The Civilized Capitalist Machine
Jean-François Lyotard - Energumen Capitalism
Gilles Lipovetsky - Power of Repetition
JG Ballard - Fictions of All Kinds

CYBERCULTURE
Nick Land - Circuitries
Nick Land + Sadie Plant - Cyberpositive
Iain Hamilton Grant - LA 2019: Demopathy and Xenogenesis
CCRU - Cybernetic Culture
CCRU - Swarmachines

ACCELERATION
Mark Fisher - Terminator vs Avatar
Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams - #Accelerate: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics
Antonio Negri - Reflections on the Manifesto
Tiziana Terranova - Red Stack Attack!
Luciana Parisi - Automated Architecture
Patricia Reed - Seven Prescriptions for Accelerationism
Reza Negarestani - The Labour of the Inhuman (Extended Mix)
Benedict Singleton - Maximum Jailbreak (Extended Mix)
Ray Brassier - Prometheanism and its Critics
Nick Land - Teloplexy: Notes on Acceleration
Diann Bauer - 4xAccelerationisms

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