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We want to accelerate the process of technological evolution. But what we are arguing for is not techno-utopianism. Never believe that technology will be sufficient to save us. Necessary, yes, but never sufficient without socio-political action. Technology and the social are intimately bound up with one another. and changes in either potentiate and reinforce changes in the other. Whereas the techno-utopians argue for acceleration on the basis that it will automatically overcome social conflict, our position is that technology should be accelerated precisely because it is needed in order to win social conflicts.
We need to revive the argument that was traditionally made for post-capitalism: not only is capitalism an unjust and perverted system, but it is also a system that holds back progress. Our technological development is being suppressed by capitalism, as much as it has been unleashed. Accelerationism is the basic belief that these capacities can and should be let loose by moving beyond the limitations imposed by capitalist society. The movement towards a surpassing of our current constraints must include more than simply a struggle for a more rational global society. We believe it must also include recovering the dreams which transfixed many from the middle of the nineteenth century until the dawn of the neoliberal era, of the quest of homo sapiens towards expansion beyond the limitations of the earth and our immediate bodily forms. These visions are today viewed as relics of a more innocent moment. Yet they both diagnose the staggering lack of imagination in our own time, and offer the promise of a future that is affectively invigorating, as well as intellectually energising. After all, it is only a postcapitalist society, made possible by an accelerationist politics, which will ever be capable of delivering on the promissory note of the mid-twentieth century's space programmes, to shift beyond a world of minimal technical upgrades towards all-encompassing change. Towards a time of collective self-mastery, and the properly alien future that entails and enables. Towards a completion of the Enlightenment project of selfcriticism and self mastery, rather than its elimination.
[...] what characterizes a capitalist economy is that this surplus of time and energy is not simply released, but must be constantly reabsorbed in the cycle of production of exchange value leading to increasing accumulation of wealth by the few (the collective capitalist) at the expense of the many (the multitudes).
Automation, then, when seen from the point of view of capital, must always be balanced with new ways to control (that is, absorb and exhaust) the time and energy thus released. It must produce poverty and stress when there should be wealth and leisure. It must make direct labour the measure of value even when it is apparent that science, technology and social cooperation constitute the source of the wealth produced. It thus inevitably leads to the periodic and widespread destruction of this accumulated wealth, in the form of psychic burnout, environmental catastrophe and physical destruction of the wealth through war. It creates hunger where there should be satiety, it puts food banks next to the opulence of the super -rich. That is why the notion of a post-capitalist mode of existence must become believable, that is, it must become what Maurizio Lazzarato described as an enduring autonomous focus of subjectivation. What a post-capitalist commonism then can aim for is not only a better distribution of wealth compared to the unsustainable one that we have today, but also a reclaiming of 'disposable time'-that is, time and energy freed from work to be deployed in developing and complicating the very notion of what is 'necessary'.
[...] But this is already to presuppose that there is a natural, which is to say, transcendently ordained, equilibrium. Yet we are never told precisely what the equilibrium is supposed to be. What I want to suggest is that it is precisely this assumption of equilibrium that is theological: it is the claim that there is a 'way of the world', a ready-made world whose order is simply to be accepted as an ultimately unintelligible, brute given, that is objectionably theological. This is the idea that the world was made, and that we should not presume to ask why it was made this way and not some other way. But the world was not made: it is simply there, uncreated, without reason or purpose. And it is precisely this realization that invites us not to simply accept the world as we find it. Prometheanism is the attempt to participate in the creation of the world without having to defer to a divine blueprint. It follows from the realization that the disequilibrium we introduce into the world through our desire to know is no more or less objectionable than the disequilibrium that is already there in the world
In Donald MacKenzie's study on the financial turn of economics, he highlights
the role of the self-fulfilling prophecy (positive feedback) of mathematical models
upon reality, through the example of the Black-Scholes-Merton model. At first
the correspondence between the model and actual prices was fairly inaccurate
(the model did not refiect reality), yet as traders began to rely on the modeltaking
up its mathematical claims of legitimacy, directly using its projections in their
practice through the dissemination of purchased pricing charts-the model began
to create reality, it became a tool of the trade-what MacKenzie calls 'an engine,
not a camera', a (once inaccurate) model (now) driving reality. [...]
footnote 8
The main thing is to write
for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust
that imagines its haven like your hands at night
dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast.
[...]
<3 this one passage justifies all the time it took to type up the stupid TOC
When all the others were away at Mass
I was all hers as we peeled potatoes.
They broke the silence, let fall one by one
Like solder weeping off the soldering iron:
Cold comforts set between us, things to share
Gleaming in a bucket of clean water.
And again let fall. Little pleasant splashes
From each other’s work would bring us to our senses.
So while the parish priest at her bedside
Went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying
And some were responding and some crying
I remembered her head bent towards my head,
Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives –
Never closer the whole rest of our lives.
sweet
10:04
by
Ben Lerner
by
Ben Lerner
10:04
by
Ben Lerner
by
Ben Lerner
10:04
by
Ben Lerner
by
Ben Lerner
It was impossible, as at most openings, to look at the art; indeed, the opening as a form, insofar as I understood it, was a ritual destruction of the conditions of viewing for the artifacts it was meant to celebrate. [...]
[...] She said she hoped she would see me again, and the next thing I knew I was running through light snow back to my dorm, laughing aloud from an excess of joy like the schoolboy that I was. I had an overwhelming sense of the world’s possibility and plentitude; the massive, luminous spheres burned above me without irony; the streetlights were haloed and I could make out the bright, crustal highlands of the moon, the far-sprinkled systems; I was going to read everything and invent a new prosody and successfully court the radiant progeny of the vanguard doyens if it killed me; my mind and body were as a fading coal awakened to transitory and body were as a fading coal awakened to transitory brightness by her breath when she’d brushed her lips against me; the earth was beautiful beyond all change.
lol
I would like to say my recognition of this asymmetry led me to meditate—as I added soy sauce and pepper to what was destined to be a meal of prodigious blandness—on the pleasure I was taking in cooking for my fellow man as he bathed, but I was aware at that point of no pleasure. I would like to say that, at the very least, I resolved to cook henceforth for my friends, to be a producer and not a consumer alone of those substances necessary for sustenance and growth within my immediate community. I would like to say that, as the protester finished his shower, I was disturbed by the contradiction between my avowed political materialism and my inexperience with this brand of making, of poeisis, but I could dodge or dampen that contradiction via my hatred of Brooklyn’s boutique biopolitics, in which spending obscene sums and endless hours on stylized food preparation somehow enabled the conflation of self-care and political radicalism. Moreover, what did it mean to say that Aaron or Alena had prepared those meals for me, when the ingredients were grown and picked and packaged and transported by others in a system of great majesty and murderous stupidity? The fact is that realizing my selfishness just led to more selfishness; that is, I felt lonely, felt sorry for myself, despite the fact that I was so often cooked for, because, as I stood there in my little kitchen stirring vegetables, stood there at the age of thirty-three, I was crushed to realize nobody depended on me for this fundamental mode of care, of nurturing, nourishing. [...]