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.
Further notes on “The Mushroom at the End of the World” by Anna Tsing.
“Landscapes more generally are products of unintentional design… overlapig world making activities of many agents, human and non-human.” How exciting! Tsing points out the dramas and adventures of a landscape being an unintentional collaboration across species, lifeworlds and non-living forces.
Unintentionality is an exciting concept to apply to human and non-human activity. It seems that our shaping of the planet most certaintly reflects a human will but it is also in reaction to adverse circumstances. Our will to surive is totally influenced by that which is around us: the weather makes us build houses, the gut makes us search for certain foods, trees shelter us, materials offer possibilities for design and technology. We are totally entangled with other beings.
The confusing point of the anthropocene or capitalocene is that none of this “human domination” would be possible without the other materials and beings we are in action with outside and within our own bodies. It seems also that we live in a constant precarity that we try to overcome with further development. This precarity is beyond our own control. In a way the “anthropocene” could be seen as a natural disaster. There is another force however, that is to dominate, to colonise, to ascend precarity, that feels like it surpasses a will to live but it is a will to be superior. It seems like to attribute this mode to every human would be a terrible mistake since some humans colonise more than others.
Unintentionality could relate to the accelerationist theory of capital/machine being it’s own force with it’s own will. The will of the machine also participates in the construction of a landscape. In the accelerationst’s vision of the future, this will becomes a totality: everything becomes captial. Tsing relates to this when she describes capitalism as a machine, a “contraption limited to the sum of it’s parts.” But she makes clear that this is only a part of the economic situation: “This machine is not a total institution which we spend our lives inside; instead it translates across living arrangements, turning worlds into assets.” To understand capitalism as a force of translation reveals it’s part and dependency on other forces, meaning it is not a total force. This contrasts to the doom and gloom of accelerationist theories because it means for capital to exist it requires organic life worlds and desires to motivate and push into the machine.
A major point of Tsings is that capitalism has characteristics of an assemblage in the way it gathers and depends on goods and people from around the world. These “diverse patches of livelihoods help constitute capitalism.” Tsing asks that we “notice this precarious living that both uses and refuses capitalist governance… They tell us what is left, despite capitalist damage.” pg 134.
A music that represents this noticing would be polyphonic, a spectrum of voices both human and non-human. Tsing directly relates to music when she says let us “listen to seperate melody lines and their coming together in unexpected moments of harmony and dissonance.” A polyphony that changes and is unpredictable: alive, impermanent, emergent. I am imagining certain tools like randomisation, panning, spatialisation and layering as potential tools to show this moving assemblage of things. Would a new music form change the way we think and relate to this cloud of forces?
I want to add my personal and dangerously essentialist belief in the heart to this cloud of forces. I imagine the tension and drawing of energy from capital towards different bodies requires a desire and ambition from those bodies. Desires for freedom and intimacy are translated into assets by the complex technologies of power. The longing of the heart to live and live outwards is the current moving through our machines. Love is here!
The heart is accelerated by the drawing out of desires and longing through instant communication. The longing for community and intimacy keeps us searching within our possible means, therefore accelerating our communication even more. The heart is there running inside the machins. Hyper heart!
Different holy states remain undiscovered in your now world. Hunt it with open wings and pores, shifting your position so the light tastes different. The end of the world is not enough to put your heart out… if your body can survive then let “the world” get out of the way to reveal the jittery bouncing of world-making things that tickle within and around your wingspan. Flying; you are flying but you are not. Go fly!
From Anna Tsing’s “Mushroom at the End of the World”.
“Lead firms amass capital without controlling the conditions under which commodities are produced.”
In exploring the matsutake mushroom, Tsing shows the conditions under which the mushrooms are harvested and traded are often personal and organic. Commodification can be understood as a part of a chain of events from the organic material to the profit. Other parts of this chain include personal relationships, longing for freedom, love!
There are many other forces and narratives to hold to understand the dynamics of capital. Capitalism is not a totality. It is a temporal translation of material into alienated product. This alienation is temporary in the way that there are other emotional affects happening in the lives of these materials and beings. For example when we give a gift, we often participate into a destructive global supply chain by purchasing an object. However the act of giving this to another person can cut a hole in the seemingly immortal alienation of the object, giving it meaning and a potential to carry emotion. Darkness prevades but is not the whole.
A new perspective! Tsing wants us to hold the realities while not succumbing to totalities. She preaches holding wide perspectives. To allow the personal and the organic to emerge in our experience of our worlds. We deserve to feel excited and entranced in the beauties that pervade our worlds. Destruction existing in the chain of an activity, such as typing on this laptop, does not define the whole process as destructive. This is not a call for total passivity. But it is recognising where we are at: a call for change can not be to end capitalism as we are in the trenches of such; we are dependent on these chains of production to survive. It recognises that between these translations of life to alienated product, there are many other narratives occuring. To see these narratives feels to me as to hold an active and enduring intention. In a way it is to overcome traditional ways of seeing, to stretch a hole between reason and logic, not to delete the past but allow a truth to come to our perspective. Not Truth, but that that reveals love. Love is present.
My current music is to show this intention, this pushing and holding open, the failing and the imperfections of that process, the love peaking through, the intentions, the longing of the spirit, the joy of being, of being within chaos.
Listening with machine. Holding the walls open. Arms strong. Listening through capital for the persistence of soul. Lucky to have arms, ears, a question.
Is the soul underneath, or is it throughout? Neither arms or ears are the essence, nor universal.
How does a soul speak out against exploitation? In a spectrum of voice: roars of passion, whispers of pain and love sing the machines, the people and the materials.
How to open the question itself: tear it apart, into parts, to see the assembly of forces that make up your question. See the longing and the joy that hold them together like sticky glue, to make your question possible. A narrative. Vertical tension.
The sad anti-capitalists have narratives fueled by longing and joy!
The self is now deemed free of external limitations. The self now subjugates itself with internal limitations, those determined by the new technologies of power.
Han’s dark critique starts to crack open near the end of the book, with sillyness, stillness and idiotism.
So it’s not a fine answer to find <3. Narrative making, story making, he describes as a vertical tension. Holding the character in place. What is our own language that exists only to itself? Not always must we see the patterns and relate our experience to a specific knowledge system of reason
Stringing the web. Letting go of sound studies for a while. Thinking about music as a practice to explore these questions <3. It is sound!
I’m very excited about pop music recently. Pop music analysis is a bridge between my research and practice. I don’t make pop music but I would like to develop my music to reach more people, that’s the dream. Pop music is the voice of the parasite. A loose accelerationism teaches me to embrace and hack into the parasite if it’s for temporary relief or a change in our direction. Politicians call it steering the big boat. How can we hack into the parasite and make it more ecological? How to combine the techniques of popular music with ecological ethics or perspectives? What does it mean to represent ecological being with accelerated music?
The flaw of accelerationism perhaps is it’s (xenofeminists, Fishers and Lands) blindness towards materials as a base for production. (I say blindness but perhaps it’s a question why materiality is not at the center of their discussions.)The acceleration of production ~ (capital), and technological development ~ (capital’s modes of domination) relies on earthly bodies and materials. Are the accelerationists infected by meta’s belief in an infinite virtuality? I guess they describe an ending which aligns with a running out of resources. Is this nihilism?
Could an alternative to – running out of resources be mining and extracting other planets?
In popular music, the iconic Sophie was a primary producer in forming hyperpop. It is an exaggerated, often harsh rendition of pop where digital life and identities is represented with a sound design more sensational than the physical. The newness of the sound has created a space for young queer people who are disillusioned with the intentions of mainstream pop music.
This immateriality of sound design matches the idealogies of the communities emeshed with the music. Sophie’s track “Immaterial”: We’re just, im-ma-ma-material (I could be anything I want) Immaterial, immaterial boys (anyhow, anywhere) Immaterial girls (any place, anyone that I want) Im-ma-ma-material, immaterial
Some trans people feel liberated by the immaterialities of virtual life. Enmeshment. I feel enmeshed with digital space.
This is not a critique of Sophie. It is an accelerated music both in it’s intensity and in a techno-optimism: that the internet and the virtual is a space for self-transformation and liberation. I don’t think Sophie is defining the future in the song “Immaterial”, I think she is defining right now. Hyperpop is born in times of acceleration, complex identities and movements against a biopolitics tied to conservative ideas of sex and gender.
I am curious about these paradoxes between the new materialist ecological thought and the accelerationist techno-optimism of hyperpop music. The blessing of hyperpop is that it hacked into the parasite and changed it forever. It makes pop music more queer and inclusive. It is also an updated sonic rendition of contemporary life. It captures the sounds of the digital condition in a way no other music has done.
Can there be a way to make pop music more ecological? We could sing about earth and our moments of awe here. We could represent nonhuman voices through the platform of a ballad or an earworm. I put my dog at the end of a compilation I made with friends.
Anthropomorphic music <3
We can also remix, revive and edit folk and traditional musics into contemporary forms. This is already happening! Let’s join in.
Proc Fiskal brings gaelic and folk music from the British Isles into a Hyperdub record!
I often find electronic renditions of folk musics that are in a critique of the representations of traditions. I am interested in a new step of carrying a heartyness/earthlyness from these traditions and the critique will still maintain in the remixing of the “original”. But I don’t want to be an essentialist 🙁
We can also write new folk music loosened from borders, ethnicities and places.
I am particularly interested in new-materialism as an instigator for sound design. How can we respresent assemblages of materials, active object, nonhuman agency and tensions between force through sound design? DAWs have the power to do so. I have been experimenting with this style for a while and can attatch this philosophy as a mild interpretation of what I’ve been doing. Foley and sampling can be another way to have a clear representation of materials. Imagine a stimulating sensational and accelerated pop music using earthly materials as percussive and melodic instruments. I want to build more sample packs of the objects around me.
People have been using these techniques for a long time. But I am interested in a contemporary use of sampling and folk musics that harnesses the power of accelerated digital music. I am entranced with the accelerator as I am within it and part of it. Digital space is a part of me as long as I can access it.
Accelerated new-materialist pop is full of contradictions. Is this rendition so far removed from an original situation of materials that it could not instigate physical change in consumption or desire? Working digitally and emphasizing the power of digital software is techno-optimistic. It feels like, if we just continue for a while, keep developing, we will make it through. This does not feel like a de-growth music. But a great vaccine/sedative. That’s the main question of accelerated media! : is it a vaccine or a sedative? Does it help us cope and embrace our situation to participate, or does it numb a heart longing for something different?
These are questions to explore through practice. < 3
Tiny note: is the artist’s role to expand the capacity of society for consuming new media? as in to accelerate.
No long tropes, always a subtle change that may be dramatic.
A question: Is accelerated music a vaccine or a sedative?
Quotes from Paul Preciado on smoking tobacco as vaccination:
“Chemical substances that can be assimilated by an organism function like potentia: they provoke a substantial modification of the body and consciousness—provided that subjectivity allows itself to be affected, that it makes itself dynamic in the Greek sense of the word dynamis, which is to say, it allows its potentiality and its capacity to pass from one state into another to emerge. The transference that is understood to be the cornerstone of psychoanalytic therapy depends on a model of substance transport, a traffic in images, memories, and emotions that will modify a network of somatic links. Similarly, alcohol, tobacco, hash, cocaine, or morphine, as well as estrogens and androgens, are neither synthetic tunnels for escaping from reality nor mere links from point A to point B. Rather, they are technologies of the subject, microtechnologies of the mind, chemical prostheses from which will issue new practices for defining frames of human intelligibility. Modern subjectivity is the management of self-intoxication in a chemically harmful environment. Smoking in the plasticelectric-nuclear metropolis can be seen simply as one way of vaccinating yourself against environmental poisoning by means of homeopathic inoculation. The battle for modern subjectivity is a struggle for immunological equilibrium. The ingestion of drugs or psychoanalysis is the experimental ground on which we learn how to live in a somatic and semiotic environment that is becoming ever more toxic.” Testo Junkie pg 360
Smoking in the plasticelectric-nuclear metropolis can be seen simply as one way of vaccinating yourself against environmental poisoning by means of homeopathic inoculation. I imagine to apply this framework of substance use/self modification to music consumption.
“Transversal politics recognizes the different power positions among participants/groups in the dialogue, but it approaches these differences with equal respect and recognition of each participant/group.”
Encroachment: a gradual advance beyond usual or acceptable limits.
Final notes on Artificial Hells by Claire Bishop.
At the end of her book on participatory art and the politics of spectatorship book, Bishop proposes the value of art or artistic imagination in relation to ethics, politics and ideology. At risk of being devalued, she claims it is necessary to recognise art’s function as a negator. She defines artistic imagination as a “transversal encroachment of ideas”, an imagination that constantly throws systems of value into question. Art’s ability to hold nuance and question the parameters that define our ideas, including ethics and morality, can be seen as a powerful tool for social transformation without relying on those predetermined parameters of sucess defined by our institutions and cultures. This is her definition of the tranversal encroachment of ideas. It is the negative characterteric of art, to critique and deconstruct as much as an artistic project can construct.
Bishop states that art can overlap with political projects while not needing sole resonsibility of devising and implenting them. I find this a very valuable description of the artistic process that is often devalued for not providing a constructive alternative to it’s critique, or even being narrowed to it’s critique. In Bishop’s vision, art can be seen as a continual play of mutual tensions, and will lose it’s potential in social process to “constantly throw systems of value into question” if it is expected to align with systems of value such as morality or productive change.To liberate art from questions of morality and politics is the more dangerous road of change.
I am quite affected by these descriptions and feel more clarity about the distictions between art/entertainment or art/ethics and such. Art feels like the infinitely indulgent but also powerfully unexpected force. Today alienation remains with new orders that form it. I feel more free to wonder how participation can exist in my practice without needing to craft a perfect political map for our future steps.
Reflection on my emerging practice. What is happening in your creative work? My process at the moment feels contemplative as I am engaging in a never-ending cycle of text. One question leads to another document. I start to feel grounded with ideas of action based on my critiques, and slow down the textual learning into a space for real action.
Where does the material want to go? I want to build more instruments to install in public space, starting with our class wind-chimes. Materials tell me stories and trigger ideas of how to make them sound in space.
How is it evolving over time? First imagined as installing many instruments around London, I felt it could be more transformative to have other people engaged in the making of these instruments. I want to making process to also be a bridge for connection and learning from one another.
What shape is it taking? The sounding of materials that represent personal stories, histories of place and non-human agency is where I want to go. It expresses my desire for more engagement with the physical worlds around us, and also to expand my art practice beyond my own ideas in the digital space of my DAW.
Might you want to change direction? As I aim to expand into fascillitation and practice primarily lead by political and social intentions, perhaps I will feel like I lost the sense of play and creativity in my work. Perhaps I’ll return to solely making music on my laptop and enjoy building my skills with that practice.
Why not? I feel pretty determined that the wind-chimes installation meets a lot of my desires about the change I believe I can be part of. I have had positive feedback so far and have enjoyed working with the materials used to make the chimes.
Notes and thoughts related to the discussion of participatory art and the politics of the spectacle in “Artificial Hells” by Claire Bishop.
@ the National Encounter of Avant-Garde Art in 1968, the reception called for an artistic revolution to supplement political work; they demanded that this artistic content be revolutionary and to “deal with the material in a shocking, disquieting, even violent way.” I wonder how this announcement relates to the precarious situations of today? How does the call for shock and violence through artistic medium relate or contrast to today’s necessary resistance and subversions?
My personal opinion is that aesthetics of violence and rage are no longer subversive or threatening to the tactics of alienation we experience in London’s disintegration into global capitalism. Violence and rage are necessary expressions for cathartic release and personal and collective healing, but must be a means to something new if it is to be healing. I imagine violence and rage as very necessary aesthetics in other places or in local situations here in mega London.
I imagine cute, wholesome and folk aesthetics can function as uplifting and gathering subversions to the rational mind of colonialism. A new folkyness can be a method to reterritorialise ourselves and our spaces. Imagine a neo folk tradition that re-engages with the ancient folk themes of nature and spirit, birthed in a new language. Neo would mean to reconstruct, and by reshaping our folk traditions we can continuing expanding contemporary values of liberation and identity while grounding those values in a sense of place and planet.
The cute and the wholesome combat a nihilism intrinsic to capitalist realism.For example, the aesthetics of hardness, fastness in techno or hardcore music cultures could be seen as a nihilistic, out of body accelerationism. To place our hope in accelerating the present means to believe in the liberatory potential of new technologies. If hardcore and techno isn’t about dying, then it’s about birthing a new hybrid existence of human and machine. It is being uploaded. It is techno-optimism.
Perhaps this critique is too rash of an analysis for cultures that celebrate non-textual movement and rhythym, that perhaps are about having fun! But I do feel the lack of wholesome aesthetics in my generation reflects a lack of belief in returning, in sustainability, or of overcoming this age of global capitalism we live in. Wholesomeness is a sort of fantasy of what society could be, and can function as a motivator for positive change around sustainable living and ecological sensitivity.
“Community arts have becomes harmless and unthreathening to social and cultural stability” due to a lack of self-critique. Those organisations became known as kind and compassionate, but not great, since it’s hard to critique the expression of strangers when the intention is about the process if engagement and not the product of creation. They began with a critique of the great, since the “greatness” of art represents a hierarchy of success founded on skill, quality and virtousity that conceals class interests.
What does community work look like today in London? I would like to learn more and how my practice with music and installation could become more participatory. Informally community work happens all the time in the underground, and in regards to my previous tangent this work could be concieved as neo-folk construction.
I would like my installation for the gallery exhibition to be wholesome rather than mysterious, not bending the perception of the participant to pretend an understanding as to conform into the gallery space, but make it simple enough so they can ponder in their own way. All it takes beside the work is a little emoji or a smile 🙂
