Marco Polo describes a bridge, stone by stone.
“But which is the stone that supports the bridge?” Kublai Khan asks.
“The bridge is not supported by one stone or another,” Marco answers, “but by the line of the arch that they form.”
Kublai Khan remains silent, reflecting. Then he adds: “Why do you speak to me of the stones? It is only the arch that matters to me.”
Polo answers: “Without stones there is no arch.”
— from Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
Andrew Culp interview at Society & Space:
Accelerationism is an attempt to rethink deterritorialization outside of the schizoanalytic model of Anti-Oedipus. Deleuze and Guattari are less used than abused in the early accelerationism proposed in Nick Land’s “Machinic Desire” which fundamentally relies on the opposition between humans and machines—a distinction that is nonsensical within Deleuze and Guattari’s post-naturalist framework (something demonstrated quite cogently in Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto”). There is also an odd “boomerang dialectic” interpretation of accelerationism that borrows the affective tonalities of Land’s misanthropy. According to the boomeranger, things have to get worse to get better. Similar to the physics of a pendulum, energy is introduced in one direction to break stasis, with the eventuality of it swinging back in the opposite direction. While Deleuze and Guattari do use a certain energetics, even at their most destructive, their critique of dialectics makes them fundamentally allergic to any strategy based on assisting the opposition. This is why the accelerationist citation of Anti-Oedipus is so perverse. No one more vehemently disagrees with boomerang-dialectical propositions—such as Žižek reciting Oscar Wilde that “the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realized by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it” (1891)—than Deleuze and Guattari. When they say that “no one has ever died of contradictions,” Deleuze and Guattari are not flippantly egging on bad things— they are arguing against those Marxist crisis theorists who say that there is a point at which things will be so bad that people must revolt (151). So when they say that “we haven’t seen anything yet,” we should also take it as a warning: there is no floor to how terrible things can get.
As for Land’s more recent right-accelerationism based in a libertarian obsession with markets, private property, and a corporatist state—that critique is even easier. Those three things do not represent maximum deterritorialization but the inverse, they are the absolute essentials of any mode of capitalist reterritorialization. Until they are eliminated, reterritorialization will always reign supreme.