i am really not trying to be an opportunist. but every time i get pinged here it is about something i have done elsewhere lol. i respect y'all and what you do here, i'm just not good at forums. get teenage flashbacks of proto-twitter hellthreads and an inability to keep up. too many channels to pay attention to. it's only when i get an @ ping or a blog clickback i take a look... which is bad form on my part... but too much to try and pay attention to already.
that being said, the lectures i wrote for that lecture series are relevant here. (i'm hoping to hammer it into a book over the next few months so it doesn't languish behind a massive paywall forever.) it's based on a bit of blogosphere archaeology i've been doing. i found that the pop understanding of the beginnings of accelerationism is so convoluted at this point, even amongst those who were there, but following the blogposts written around that time, particularly by Steven Shaviro and Alex Williams, the intention seems to be pretty clear.
around that time, Badiou and Zizek were teaming up and going on about the crisis in negation -- how Marx's negation of the negation wasn't really going the way he planned.
capital vol 1 cliff notes: the negation of private property, which leads feudalism to become capitalism, frees serfs to become a working class that earns a wage and can own individual property. this allows the world to evolve but the capitalists have opened pandora's box because opening the possibility of individual ownership up to everyone creates the shadow of universal individual ownership -- and what is universal individual ownership if not social ownership, i.e. socialism? that's why, for Marx, capitalism will inevitably lead to socialism. but once capitalists know this, they can try to attempt the negation of the negation of the negation and now we find ourselves flailing about in the resulting stasis, where culture stalls and the shift on the horizon is not socialism but rentism -- i.e., renting everything (not just homes but our access to culture et al) increasingly becomes a convenient mod con norm. for Badiou in particular, this has had nefarious political consequences and we tumble towards neoliberal stasis. It was Shaviro who noted Badiou's argument in this regard but also critiqued it really well, highlighting that whilst he and Zizek seemed to have their finger on the pulse at some point, they were increasingly falling into the same trap that they themselves had described, at once diagnosing
why we are afflicted by a crisis of imagination whilst not being able to see beyond it for themselves. (for me,
this post is where accelerationist questions first start being asked, although they wouldn't be answer in the blogosphere for a while.)
the hauntological blogosphere, seemingly in isolation, was talking about this from a cultural perspective, of course, but this cultural version wasn't quite connecting with the political version except through a shared melancholy. It was Alex Williams who then made
the first accelerationist post, thinking how best to use contemporary economic thinking to update Marx's theory of the negation of the negation. Land was a big influence at that time -- Williams referred to his thinking as a "left-Landianism" or a "post-Landianism" at that time -- but so was Badiou (negatively perhaps) and also Ray Brassier's writings on nihilism (recognising the fact we live in an indifferent universe and using that as a Promethean basis for acting anyway -- he started a project that seemed to apply this logic to capitalism explicitly but then he abandoned it.)
