Fisher’s “Postcapitalist Desire” lectures, much like the introduction to his Acid Communism, present themselves as an attempt to route around this capture. They ask, what is required of us if we truly want to push beyond capitalism? The suggestion that emerges from the fifth lecture of this series is that we must accelerate beyond the pleasure principle, beyond our culture of retrospection and pastiche, beyond the persistent disarticulation of group consciousness, beyond capitalist realism. In this sense, Fisher is attempting to describe to his students, from the ground up, a new praxis for a left-accelerationism.

Accelerationism is mentioned frequently throughout the lecture series — Fisher even goes so far as to claim the discourse surrounding the term to be “probably the biggest influence on the course” — but, from the vantage point of 2020, its appearance warrants some further context.

Accelerationism is much maligned today. Having garnered a (perhaps fatal) popular association with the far-right — with the term most repulsively appearing in the 2019 manifesto of Australian white supremacist and mass murderer Brenton Tarrant — the popular understanding of this philosophy’s aims today is that capitalism (or the “status quo” more generally) is some barely functioning, unsustainable mess of contradictions; therefore, we should accelerate the mechanisms of capitalism (or the “status quo”) towards their inevitable doom. This position is even more loosely (but frequently) translated as “things have to get worse before they can get better”. However, as the philosopher Pete Wolfendale noted in 2015, “this is not a position that anyone has ever held”. In truth, the accelerationist position was a critique of the way that things are only getting worse. Crises, whether they be crises of that followed it — no longer produce change; negativity destroys the old but no longer produces the new.

It was with this in mind that accelerationism — a term coined by Benjamin Noys in his 2010 critique of post-May 1968 Continental philosophy, The Persistence of the Negative — was later seized upon by Mark Fisher and, perversely, affirmed. Noys’ book was, by and large, a critique of how Continental philosophy was obsessed with affirming the negative. Fisher, in deftly trollish fashion, then affirmed Noys’ negative critique. In hindsight, this may have been a mistake on Fisher’s part but, for better or for worse, the name stuck, straddling a bizarre confluence of competing positions.

Fisher arguably usurped the term to demonstrate that Noys’ seemingly benevolent position, looking down on this entanglement of negations and affirmations, was a fallacy. Whereas Noys attempted to untangle the mess, Fisher affirmed all sides, as if Noys’ project was itself a reification of the negative — extending the very problematic it hoped to critique. Fisher was nonetheless attuned to the ways that this negative feedback loop of affirmations and negations was the primary cause of the hauntological “stuckness” of the twenty-first century. Indeed, the online discourse surrounding accelerationism had emerged explicitly from the financial crash of 2007/08, following which the Left and its protest movements seemed wholly incapable of effectuating real change. Whereas Noys was concerned about the extent to which a philosophical negativity had persisted, Fisher was concerned about how this negativity was now politically in crisis. Its presence was not a concern, but its impotence was. His accelerationist writings sought to establish a practical strategy for how this crisis might be overcome.

Accelerationism, then, as hauntology’s hyperactive cousin, was seen by Fisher and others as an analysis of the ever-increasing speed of technological progression under capitalism which sought to understand how this speed was affecting human cultural production and the production of subjectivity. These accelerationist writers observed that, whilst capitalism continues to develop at exponentially greater speeds, we as the contemporary subjects of capitalism cannot keep up with the system we find ourselves enclosed within. As a result, culture stalls and causes drag on the system itself, which responds by pacifying our desires through superficial means and leads us to languish at the end of history. The Continental philosophers that Noys critiqued may have been incapable of preventing this acutely postmodern condition, but, for Fisher, to blame them for its ascendency was useless. No one else had gotten so close, philosophically speaking at least, to stalling our enclosure in what Fisher later described as our “frenzied stasis”.

Nevertheless, it is from Noys’ initial argument that most critiques of accelerationism now emerge. He had defined the theory under his critical eye as harbouring the belief that “if capitalism generates its own forces of dissolution then the necessity is to radicalise capitalism itself: the worse the better”. It was this that he referred to as Continental philosophy’s accelerationist tendency; it is a tendency that the far-right have used to justify the encouragement of a race war. When Pete Wolfendale later argued that no one has ever held his position, he was attempting to clarify that accelerationism, in its newly affirmed mode, “is not about accelerating the contradictions of capitalism in any sense. Whatever is being accelerated, and there are severe and significant disagreements about this, it is not contradictions, and whatever transition this acceleration aims towards, it is not societal collapse”. By now, however, these objections to the accelerationist cliché too often fall on deaf ears. The reduction of Noys’ critique of Continental philosophy has been affirmed in the worst sense and, at the level of popular discourse at least, it has won out.

Predicting the split that would later define accelerationist discourses online in the mid-2010s, Wolfendale writes that our speculation on this matter can descend into a perverse celebration of capitalism’s destructive and oppressive tendencies (I’m looking at you, Lyotard), but it can equally become a call for greater self-consciousness regarding how we construct our desires and ourselves (here’s looking at you, Foucault), an honest appraisal that refuses to be trapped within the nostalgic false-consciousness that seeps unbidden into so much leftist discourse.56

Here, Fisher’s psychedelic reason once again rears its head, with accelerationism — as an admittedly broad church — contending precisely with the ways in which a reason under siege from the irreality of capitalism modernity can still give rise — as Spinoza declared — to actually-existing human freedom.

For Lukács, what is necessary seems clear. When accelerationists argue that “the only way out is through”, they mean that the only way out is forwards; forwards in time and in history. There is no going back into the reified past. To attempt to do so is to accept the fate that the ideologues of capitalism want for us. As little agreement as there may be amongst other accelerationist factions, the process to be accelerated, in a Lukácsian sense, is history.

Some References

If there is any essence of left-accelerationism, it is the call to rigorously discriminate between the emancipatory potential of social and industrial technologies that have emerged within capitalism from the oppressive potentials that will inevitably be actualised should we fail to stop them. If technosocial acceleration means dystopia, then this is because we let it, and we have the option not to. source