Recently Twitter mutual and PHD researcher on Accelerationist adjacent academia (for lack of a better term) Gregory Marks went hard on popular blogger Xenogothic (see the thread here).
What went on between these two thinkers doesn't matter, but it was brutally funny to me, and more importantly helped me be more open with how I feel about Xenogothic - I've tried to like him, I read his blog, bought his book, etc., but the guy's annoying, morose, miserable, humorless, thin-skinned, overly-defensive, stuck in the need to change others' minds, to convince others of this or that academic detail, groping for master narratives and daddy-figures under the guise of being reflective, dark, open, exit-oriented, and denouncing of master narratives and oedipalization, etc.
Tl;dr: I don't like him, but I'm not here to convince you not to like him too. Do as you desire. Make up your own mind. Buy his book, etc.
In fact, I actively try to avoid how I feel about others on Twitter or my blog as it is often of no importance, boring to read, reactive, and against my personal ethics. I'm a psychoanalyst, teacher, and therapist, and I'm of the belief that if you don't have anything nice to say, just keep it to yourself. Speech is for constructive communication, not attack - and as for critique: if you expect someone to learn from it and grow then it has to be given in a way that the other will be able to incorporate it, otherwise its merely a kind of petite-bourgeoisie virtue signaling, or academic bullying not unlike when Leftists dunk on clearly stupid conservatives for TV laughs.
Put differently: Often, when one has disagreeable things to say in the public sphere, one is acting (or reacting) to some kind of personal pathology; they're looking for some kind of 'other' to validate or acknowledge their side of the story - 'yes, you are so right, the person you don't like is as bad as you say, and you are so smart and good for thinking so, good boy.'
As Deleuze says (likely inspired by Guattari and his psychoanalytic practice), if you are trapped in the dream of the other, you're fucked. And being trapped in the other is always bound up with resentment - the inability to sit with and process frustration with others and their different experiences; it is simply an inability to feel and tolerate the frustration of unsymbolizable difference.
In other words, as a psychoanalyst and Nietzschean, I have no interest in convincing others to change what they feel or believe, and find affirmitive communications the only ones worthwhile. Regardless, I am here to ride this new wave of open dislike of Xeno by looking at an older blog post of his.
In You Are Not an Acclerationist Xeno makes the point that calling yourself an 'accelerationist' is "dumb" and "bad" and that "hauntology" "or accelerologist" is "better" because one ultimately has no say in what happens with the process of acceleration (Capitalism and its effects on us human subjects).
Xeno's issue here seems to be with the suffix 'ist/ism' as opposed to 'ology.' 'Ism' means practice, 'Ology' means 'study of.' As many have pointed out, there is no Accelerationist praxis (Vincent Garton / Edmund Berger), and as Xenos says himself, there is really only the study of Acceleration as a process happening without our consent, hence 'ology' being the better suited suffix. This is why Xeno says "Hauntology is a better term."
Xeno seems to assume a position of condescending authority - 'you're a dumb wanker if you call yourself an accelerationist.' This is probably true, but not for the reasons laid out here, and if it is true, it a 'truth' with little to no significance.
Who really gives a enough of a shit about the small, linguistic, rhetorical difference between 'ology' and 'ism/ist,' especially when - as Xeno points out himself in writing "there’s nothing I can do to impact the process of acceleration" - Acceleration is indifferent to human agency, especially the kind of human agency that gets hung up on the details of linguistics?
In other words, if Xeno's position is 'Hauntology is a better name because we have no say in the process and Accelerationist implies we have a say' then whether or not we fret over this or that suffix is completely besides the point. In fact, following 'accelerationist thinking,' for lack of a better term, one might accept that language is but a sloppy shorthand, a functional fiction not to be taken too seriously, and additionally one might get interested in why the term 'accelerationism' was 'selected for' over 'hauntology' to begin with...
This symptom betrays Xeno's entire conflict - attempting to craft this kind of dark, gothic, alien, ACC online brand while also trying to be a snooty, run of the mill humanist who cares too much. Thus, what is being said here when Xeno says 'ology,' specifically 'hauntology,' is the better term than accelerationism is what Xeno has always said about everything - 'Mark Fisher is good and cool and actually better than Nick Land and if you don't think so you're dumb!' except its dressed up as something substantial.
As the Sayre's Law saying goes - the lower the stakes...
