Notes on “Critiqiue of Accelerationism” by Michael E Gardiner.
Gardiner engages left-accelerationist thought with philosopher Franco Bifo Berardi to explore a potential critique of accelertionism.
Gardiner extracts striving points from the #Accelerate Manifesto by Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek to make a broad definition of what the accelerationists are about. They strive to drag the “present into the future – not blindly, but in a rationally-directed, ‘navigational’ sense.” In this form the Acc. are not describing a situation of acceleration but they want to form it out of a frozen moment, a repeating cycle of unharnessed potentialities without navigation.
Gardiner write “Accelerationism sees the intensification of certain tendencies in late capitalist as a way to escape its gravitational orbit, thereby allowing for a repurposing of the very material infastructure of capitalism itself, to universally emancipatory ends.” Accelerationism sees the liberatory potential of the material infastructure of capitalism, which it highlights based on a premise that this infastructure the only possible resource for inspiring the mass social change possible to overcome capitalist totality. It imagines capitalist infastructure as capable of producing an exit from itself / it’s demise through it’s ability to build technologies and process data in the speed of the machine itself, as in it is the machine itself. “An accelerationist politics seeks to preserve the gains of late capitalism while going further than its value system, governance structures, and mass pathologies will allow.” Williams and Syrnek.
In contrast Bifo critiques this call for liberation through the accelerated productive machinery as inherently prometheanist, a term that defines a human perspective of the environment as a resource and all environmental problemst to be overcome with technological intervention. Bifo instead calls for a “post-politics of ironic detatchment, aesthetic cultivation, and therapy in response to the systemic violence, unbridled competitiveness, and mass psychopathologies of our age.” He proposes that our bodies are not capable of meet the overwhelming flow of stimulation we are immersed in, and are therefore exhausted and disorientated.