Interesting squib here from Matt “Xenogothic” Colquhoun, highlighting a section of a Reddit of a discussion on accelerationism, and his description of the absurdity of identifying as an accelerationist:
As far as I see it, there’s no such thing as “being an accelerationist” because there’s nothing I can do to impact the process of acceleration. It is something that is happening to us already (and has been for centuries) rather than something I can do. It’s naive to think any of us have our foot on the throttle of global capitalism. In that sense, “accelerationism” is a bad name. “Hauntology” is a better term for the political impact of the process but it’s also just as misunderstood.
This reminds me strongly of arguments I’ve had over the past decade with Old Futures Men who would huff and puff about the damage wrought on the culture (or the academy, or whatever else it was that was annoying them that day) by “postmodernists” (which is the slightly more self-aware and/or intellectual conservative’s synonym for “Cultural Marxists”), which seemed to indicate little other than a complete unfamiliarity with any postmodern theory whatsoever, save its caricatured form (“Moral relativism! They’d have you believe that nothing is true, and that there’s no grounds for comparison between any set of beliefs or actions!”) as encountered in media outlets catering to a demographic unsettled by the increasingly obvious obsolescence of the certainties with which they were raised. (Which was always a pretty piquant irony when dealing with people who defined themselves as futurists.)
The point being: for the most part, though with some notable exceptions, postmodernist thinkers were not advocating for a doctrine of postmodernity so much as they were attempting to describe the contours of a new cultural condition that had been assigned that (unfortunate and contentious) moniker. As such, I’m tempted to see accelerationism as Colquhoun sees it — which, I concede, may not be a universal conception of that term — as being a condition rather than a creed, in the same sense that postmodernity was a condition rather than a creed; in both cases, the conditionality may suggest certain stances in response, but that’s a very different thing to waving a flag that says “postmodernity, yay!”
(I wonder, then, if accelerationism might be the term to replace the awkward placeholder terms of “post-postmodernity”, “altermodernity” etc. Given Colquhoun’s closeness to the thought of Mark Fisher, it might also be seen as the dialectical successor to capitalist realism… which, one might argue, is what the coronavirus pandemic is currently killing off.)
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