The world could use less superego and more Id.
Superego tries to start a fight
and when it beats you down
would have you believe its in the right.
Id doesn't care.
It saves its energy only for itself
and finds a cave to which it drags it meat
Zack's Z/Acc:
Zack Beauchamp's Vox article on accelerationism completely begs the question to the extent that it's final depiction of accelerationism is something reminiscent of right wing Leninism.
If this seems at all strange, it shouldn't. It makes perfect sense that Zach, a mainstream journalist, is so embedded in his own monolithic, all encompassing epistemological models that he can't think outside of his own worldview and therefore unintentionally filters 'alien' theories through his own humanist ideological grid.
To illustrate, let's play a simple game, a kind of imaginary conversation. Zack will introduce an excerpt of his article and I'll respond with a snarky slogan that clarifies the mistakes.
Z1:
Zacc: Accelerationism is "...ideology...that dismisses the alt-right as cowards unwilling to take matters into their own hands."Acc: Hand's off the process, buddy!
Accelerationism promotes leaving matters completely alone, 'hands off, let the process take (un)control. This is exactly what Land tells Zack in their email exchange - 'we were trying to figure out what the process wanted from us,' i.e., see what happens when human intervention is removed and cybernetic feedback cycles are left to autoselect and self-reinforce (what Shaviro in his accelerationist book refers to as the Thatcher-Reagan free market aspect of Land's Acc).
Z2:
Zacc: Accelerationists believe "...Western governments are irreparably corrupt...the best thing white supremacists can do is accelerate their demise by...creating political tension..."Acc: A strong hit of Cathedral!
Accelerationism has no need for such a banal religious and moral concept as corruption. It begs the question.
Put analogically;
- A: because there is no God, you can't be in God's grace, and because you can't be in God's grace, you can't fall from grace and become corrupted. All there really is is corruption and its gradients of more or less corrupt;
- B: because there is no perfect government, you cannot be a citizen in the perfect government, and because you cant be a citizen of the perfect gov't the government cannot fall out of grace with its own perfection and therefore become corrupt (and therefore there's no wish to destroy it on the grounds it's corrupted).
Likewise, accelerationism has no interest in white supremacy - pathologically obsessed as it is with anthropocentric order, cleanliness, hierarchy, and domination - is opposed to the 'hands off' free market concept which Acc accepts, and in fact based on the above secularized religious notions of humanism-moralism which Acc opposes.
Z3:
Zacc: Accelerationists "reject any effort to seize political power through the ballot box, dismissing...mass politics as pointless...intensify points of political and conflict...Acc: Exit not voice!
It is true that accelerationists are critical of representational politics - as they are with the concept of representation in general, instead opting for diagrammatics - such as ballot voting in a representational democracy. However, what follows from this position is not that political conflict is desired, as is claimed here, but quite the opposite - that politics should be split up along new longs that are experimental and diverge from traditional racial, political, and social groupings and instead focus on Outside incentive forces, wants, needs, appetites, etc., in a way that avoids conflict rather than engages in it.
Thus, accelerationists have no interest in such boring and tired ordeals as fomenting political and social tensions between anyone, never mind races (but democracy and modernism does!); no interest whatsoever in 'doing politics' or upholding race dialectics, only an interest in 'exiting' this stuff altogether through 'patchwork.'
To explain, politics can be boiled down to convincing others that what you want or need in life is actually what they want or need in life because what you want or need is actually universal, i.e., what everyone (they) would want (or agree to want) if everyone was seeing things clearly. This lends itself to enlightenment-democracy models and its mode of rationalist debate which, being as it is built around the dynamic of crowd A using its numbers to convince another crowd of crowd A's indisputable rightness, quickly devolves into populism and then (soft) fascism.
Patchwork, a kind of hyperlibertarianism that emphasizes disintegration and fragmentation, is a way out of fascism (one attempting to dominate another whether through violence or voice) through encouraging the affirmative freedom to experiment with social organization along new lines, organizations that require no moral centrality, argumentation or appeal .
Recently Land told me in a private communication
"The point of Patchwork is to stop arguing about this stuff, as if people were rationally persuadable. Run multiple divergent tests. People probably won't even agree on the outcomes, which is fine."No violent race wars here, just people allowed to pursue their interests, follow the Outside lines of incentives.
Z4:
This is a continuation of the above, Z3. 'Exit, not violence' is just another way of saying 'exit, not voice.' As the great 'psychologist' Nietzsche argued in his near death journals, an intellectual position, whether written or spoken, is a will to power, a sublimated instinct, a transformation of a body impulse. As the secret Nietzschean psycho-neurologist Freud, relying on neurologist John Hughlings Jackson, writes "the man who first flung a word of abuse at his enemy instead of a spear was the founder of civilisation.'" As Deleuze and Guattari illustrate, relying in part on psychoanalysis, but more so on ethology, the voice is a reterritorializion of a growl (enemies) or a song (allies). As DC Barker and the CCRU note, in part relying on this previous genealogy, language has asignifying and diagrammatic effects - it makes things happen outside of simply representing or symbolizing things happening. In short, the rational debate voice of enlightenment democracy is a sublimated form of group violence.
Accelerationists call for exit not voice (and remember Vox - where Zacc's article was published - means voice...) which means human violence (an attempt to engage with another as to assert one's will - i.e. one's political preferences - over another or to dominate territory physically or ideologically) is neither endorsed nor necessary - in fact its pretty cringe.
At the same time, inhuman and impersonal violence - the cold process of nature and its brute mechanisms of morphological selection and shift which was explored by Nietzsche, Freud, D and G, and the CCRU all in their own ways, and which Land calls Gnon - are impersonally interfaced with in the affirmative mode (what D and G refer to as deterritorialization, which, for Land, is nothing other than acceleration). In this sense, accelerationists endorse a multiplicity of lifestyles, peoples, wills, etc., existing side by side (disjunctive synthesis as opposed to simple negation) as long as each finds a way to manage the other without attempting to dominate the other - how to machinically plug into each other in a way that does not overcode the other.
Put into the political register, this is patchwork (not an 'ethnostate' which relies on archaic religious concepts of purity and corruption - blood and soil, etc. Patches = experiments, what works, what's desired, not strange moralistic abstractions such as, again, corruption and purity of bloodlines...To use a Guattarian term, Patchwork arranges along new lines of flight).
Z5:
Zacc: Accelerationist's "preferred tactic for heightening these contradictions...attacking racial minorities...as a way of bringing us closer to a race war...The ultimate goal is to collapse the government itself; they hope for a white-dominated future after that."Acc: Exit, not violence!
This is a continuation of the above, Z3. 'Exit, not violence' is just another way of saying 'exit, not voice.' As the great 'psychologist' Nietzsche argued in his near death journals, an intellectual position, whether written or spoken, is a will to power, a sublimated instinct, a transformation of a body impulse. As the secret Nietzschean psycho-neurologist Freud, relying on neurologist John Hughlings Jackson, writes "the man who first flung a word of abuse at his enemy instead of a spear was the founder of civilisation.'" As Deleuze and Guattari illustrate, relying in part on psychoanalysis, but more so on ethology, the voice is a reterritorializion of a growl (enemies) or a song (allies). As DC Barker and the CCRU note, in part relying on this previous genealogy, language has asignifying and diagrammatic effects - it makes things happen outside of simply representing or symbolizing things happening. In short, the rational debate voice of enlightenment democracy is a sublimated form of group violence.
Accelerationists call for exit not voice (and remember Vox - where Zacc's article was published - means voice...) which means human violence (an attempt to engage with another as to assert one's will - i.e. one's political preferences - over another or to dominate territory physically or ideologically) is neither endorsed nor necessary - in fact its pretty cringe.
At the same time, inhuman and impersonal violence - the cold process of nature and its brute mechanisms of morphological selection and shift which was explored by Nietzsche, Freud, D and G, and the CCRU all in their own ways, and which Land calls Gnon - are impersonally interfaced with in the affirmative mode (what D and G refer to as deterritorialization, which, for Land, is nothing other than acceleration). In this sense, accelerationists endorse a multiplicity of lifestyles, peoples, wills, etc., existing side by side (disjunctive synthesis as opposed to simple negation) as long as each finds a way to manage the other without attempting to dominate the other - how to machinically plug into each other in a way that does not overcode the other.
Put into the political register, this is patchwork (not an 'ethnostate' which relies on archaic religious concepts of purity and corruption - blood and soil, etc. Patches = experiments, what works, what's desired, not strange moralistic abstractions such as, again, corruption and purity of bloodlines...To use a Guattarian term, Patchwork arranges along new lines of flight).
Z5:
Zacc: Accelerationist's "ideas have been cited in mass shooters’ manifestos...and are frequently referenced in white supremacist web forums and chat rooms."Acc: Exit, don't shoot!
Sadly, accelerationist ideas are in fact cited by a mass shooter, however, in addition to referring back to Z3 and Z4, we must say;
- A: citing a philosophical system - if we can even call /Acc that, as it is routinely called 'anti-philosophy' - as motivation or justification for an action, heinous or otherwise, in no way indicates that the actor has any understanding of the philosophical system;
- B: the actor could in fact have had an appropriate understanding of the philosophical system, but this in no way means that the appropriate understanding was a cause or even contributing factor to the violent act;
- C: even if it is argued that a mass shooter does not need to understand a philosophy to use it as a weapon because the thought is 'inherently dangerous' or something of the like, we must acknowledge that ideas - whether dangerous or safe, understood or misunderstood - don't make people do things that people aren't already thinking of doing and that, as indicated above, nowhere in the accelerationist canon (which includes its left, trans, cosmic, etc. variants) is human on human violence endorsed.
The great irony - tragedy perhaps - with a shooter claiming accelerationism is that this event - with its shooter hopped up on self-imposed delusional moral high ground vibes and the need to impose this on others through political violence, etc. - is closer to modernist, democratic, soft fascism than it is to any Accelerationism. Democracy says you must fight for what you believe - after all, America is founded on bloody armed revolution - Acc says exit, leave. Ironically, one can imagine that if this shooter understood accelerationism, he would not have written his manifesto (voice) nor taken up arms (violence).
With this in mind, the thrust of much of Acc can be described as 'Go ahead and be whatever you want, do whatever you want, and advocate for your needs, just don't try and convince me that I should be like or advocate for you unless its in my interest as well; don't tell me that my life should be significantly altered for reasons only specific to you' (not unlike the appropriate and oft accepted leftist feminist argument against phallocentrism that is taken up in part by the Xenofeminism that runs parallel to some acc - that men and their subjective experiences or biological structure shouldn't set the standard for everyone else).
Right Wing Leninism and Making it with Death
So, if Zacc's Z/Acc is not accelerationism, then what is it? It's right wing Leninism, or vulgar Marxist-Humanism.
The icing on Zach's strawman-accelerationism-cake is his Charlie Manson narrative which runs like this - 'accelerationists, like Manson, want to start a race war for white supremacy.' The ultimate irony is that accelerationism is simply not 'raising tensions to induce a collapse' as Zach makes it out to be, but this description does fit another ideology - vulgar Marxism. The kind that actually manifested in Europe and Asia as mass murder and genocide; the Maoist 'chaos under heaven' adage that Zizek frequently quotes, or the vulgar notion of dialectics - 'conditions will get so bad the workers will have to revolt.' This is even consistent with Zach's assumption that accelerationists hate corruption, a common leftist trope mired in secularized religiosity. Remember, early Communists explicitly struggled with the problem of the corrupted revolutionary/cadre - capitalism being the corrupter, while leftists today entertain fantasies of eradicating corruption such as greed.
As mentioned earlier, it seems Zach is so embedded in his own epistemological models that not only can he not think outside of his own worldview, but he is also completely ignorant to the values he holds and thus unconsciously attacks himself. This is what, in psychoanalysis, would be indicative of a narcissistic defense mechanism, and in Acc terms, a human security system.
Zacc can't think outside of the human - and this is precisely why its hard for Zacc to make it with death.
In Making it With Death Land writes
"Nothing could be more politically disastrous than the launching of a moral case against Nazism: Nazism is morality itself ...To want to be in the right is the common substratum of morality and genocidal reaction. Who could imagine Nazism without daddy?"A genius move, but one that seems counter intuitive or even confusing if you're used to the cottage culture of critique. We will get to this in a moment.
Land goes on:
"How do you make yourself a Nazi?...Burn Freud...take desire back to the Kantian conception...Introduce a gloomy atmosphere of oppressive responsibility...Love obedience above all things, and enthuse only for...the name of the leader...Foster nostalgia for what is maximally bovine, inflexible, and stagnant: a line of racially pure peasants digging the same patch of earth for eternity...resent everything impetuous and irresponsible...crush sexuality under its reproductive function, rigidly enforce the domestication of women, distrust art, classicize cities to eliminate the disorder of uncontrolled flows, and persecute all minorities exhibiting a nomadic tendency. Trying not to be a Nazi approximates one to Nazism far more radically than any irresponsible impatience in destratification. Nazism might even be characterized as the pure politics of effort; the absolute dominion of the collective superego in its annihilating rigor..."These are the words of someone who not only does not have anything good to say about Nazism and white nationalism, but actively avoids it for the creepy political straight jacket it forces upon the unbridled libidinal creative energies (if not still dark and amoral ones) of the (in)human set free to experiment in a natural world (Outside forces).
What is really interesting here is that Land points out in both a much more far reaching, poetic and theoretic manner what Zizek and Arendt have only hinted at - that Nazism is predicated on what Nazi's would have others believe as moral grounds of the same kind as the left progressives that would critique Nazism. This isn't to say that the the left and Nazis are the same, or that Nazism shouldn't be critiqued for exactly what it is. The point is that you can't solve something like Nazism with moralistic politics because Nazism - which, don't forget, was composed of vegetarian Christians obsessed with, purity, cleanliness, order, and Kantian categorical imperatives - has inoculated itself against moralistic politics by being itself a kind of twisted moralistic politics.
We of course see similar dynamics at play in things like ‘manifest destiny’ and the ‘white man’s burden’ which were both racially charged campaigns of domination based on what these groups would call ‘moral’ mandates handed down from moral power on high such as God, King, Daddy, State, etc. (which are all Oedipal and based around negation and domination/subordination and therefore in opposition to patchwork which is disjunctive-synthetic, that is, schizo and pre-oedipal).
Thus, historically, the great evils of history such as genocide are often predicated upon what one group have others believe to be ‘moral’ claims. In fact, genocide by its abstract definition and pragmatic manifestation necessitates some sort of ‘moral’ structure, an ought, a superego (daddy or daddy-stand-ins [fuhrer] to tell me what to do) and is therefore far from some sort of violent discharge (Freud's Id). The systemic murder, that is, the premeditated and orderly sorting and killing of a certain group of people, requires a distinction, organization and ought (just as the child chooses 'not-mommy' from 'mommy' via daddy's mandate).
As the Dostoevskian-Nietzschean adage employed by Zizek and Deleuze goes, it’s not that once God is dead anything goes (a kind of morose Nihilism), it’s that through God (moralism, secularized rationalism, etc.) anything is permitted.
We could use less superego and more Id. Id doesn't care. It saves its energy for itself and finds a dark cave to drag its next meal into. The moral superego looks for a fight. It says ‘Me, I am comfortable with everyone, but those people over there, they have a problem that I don’t have. If only we could reeducate, rehabilitate, or get rid of them, then society would be ok…’ Superego splits - in a Kleinian sense - between the good and the bad, and the crude ego under the influence of the superego is always going to make itself 'the good.'
To be provocative for a moment, in the form of a (very) polemical strawman this looks like ‘let’s put all the racists in camps, let’s kill the whole lot of those dirty rat bastards (see Roger Water’s lyrics in The Fletcher Memorial Home which valorize locking right wing politicians into a “home” so “the final solution can be applied.” The left is far from free of genocidal fantasy…and I say this as an avid supporter and fan of Waters but one who does not endorse this idea of course). This is, as mentioned earlier, the progressive liberal idea of education – a widespread enlightenment that would remove bad thoughts and replace them with good ones (the right has its death camps, the left its re-education camps – i.e. mental hygiene. The atrocious synthesis of the two is the school, i.e. educational apparatus, turned Communist death camp in Cambodia).
To reiterate before finishing, again, in a recent private communication Land reminded me that accelerationism is about getting away from the superego and its moral mandates of dominating others, and about getting back to the id, or deterritorialization, when he said
"The point of Patchwork is to stop arguing about this stuff, as if people were rationally persuadable. Run multiple divergent tests. People probably won't even agree on the outcomes, which is fine."So run 'multiple divergent tests.' Follow the lines of flight that create new conditions and events, some of which we find personally likable and some of which we don't - but this is the nature of affirmative and diverse life after all.
