Category: Theory

Bergson tells us, as Deleuze puts it in his Cinema books, that “the hidden ground of time” is “its differentiation into two flows, that of the presents which pass and that of pasts which are preserved.” Or, as Paolo Virno similarly puts it, in his recently translated book Deja Vu and the End of History, memory “captures the same current moment as perception does, but in an essentially different manner. The fleeting present is always grasped in two distinct and concomitant aspects (which are concomitant precisely because they are distinct),” the passing of the present and the memory of the past. What this means, for Bergson, Deleuze, and Virno alike, is that ontological memory, or the preserved past, is identical with the virtual (as opposed to the actual of the fleeting present). Virno goes on to explain how Bergson’s distinction between intuition and pragmatic intelligence is really one between how intuition bathes itself in the virtual, or the past, in contrast to “practical impulse oriented towards the future.”

These formulations have always bothered me, because they seem to privilege the past over the future; since the past is the only location of that virtuality which exceeds the actual, and which allows for things to change. These thinkers claim (rightly) that the future is open, that it is not entirely determined in advance by the past out of which it grows; and yet they seem to belittle the future, by returning us always to the past. I would like a notion of potentiality (or the virtual) that is more open to futurity: that sees potentiality as unactualized futurity, rather than as a reservoir of pure pastness. This would go along with my sense that science fiction gives expression to this futurity: SF does not predict the future, but expresses and explicates the real-but-not-actual elements of futurity that are part of our lived present. (“Real but not actual” is the Proustian phrase that Deleuze invokes on numerous occasions).

It strikes me (all too predictably, perhaps) that I can use Whitehead to resolve this predicament. Whitehead has a dual notion of God: there is both “the primordial nature of God” and “the consequent nature of God.” in my book Without Criteria I only discussed the primordial nature of God, which I equated, roughly, with potentiality or the virtual. God contains all the inactual “eternal objects” that can be actualized in particular events, and that make possible novelty rather than just mere repetition. But it strikes me now that the other aspect of God, the consequent nature, is exactly equivalent to Bergson’s (and therefore Deleuze’s and Virno’s) formulation of the past as preserving everything that happens (in contrast to the sheer passage of the present). That is to say, with his double nature of God, Whitehead separates out potentiality (or the virtual) as the reservoir of change from the “objective immortality” of a past that is preserved in ontological memory (even if not in particular empirical memories). This separation is precisely what is missing from Bergson, Deleuze, and Virno.

I need, at some point, to write an essay developing and expanding on this. (Unfortunately I don’t have the time to pursue this now: I am writing this blog entry as a note to myself for future elaboration).

Here is the text of the talk I gave this past week at the International Whitehead Studies conference in Claremont, California. It is a bit rough and fragmentary, and it doesn’t have a proper conclusion. But since I do not know when, or even if, I will expand it into a proper article, I am posting it here.

I am especially interested in what Whitehead calls feeling. The word is everywhere in Process and Reality. But it is not necessarily used in the ways we might expect. Whitehead insists that "the word feeling is a mere technical term." He says that he is using it in order to designate "that functioning through which the concrescent actuality appropriates the datum so as to make it its own." At another point, Whitehead defines feeling as "the term used for the basic generic operation of of the actual entity in question. Feelings are variously specialized operations, effecting a transition into subjectivity."

In other words, "feeling" for Whitehead means capture and appropriation, and the form of subjectivity that arises from all this. Feeling as "a mere technical term" is pretty much equivalent to what Whitehead elsewhere calls prehension: a more unusual word that doesn’t have common-language connotations (although we recognize it in composite words like apprehension and comprehension). Strictly speaking, a feeling is a positive prehension; Whitehead contrasts this to negative prehension, a mode in which things are not felt, but rather "eliminate[d] from feeling." Positive and negative prehensions are the way that any entity constitutes itself in the process of responding to other entities that precede it. In every encounter, you either feel whatever it is that you have encountered, or else you actively reject it from feeling. Most importantly, an entity encounters, feels, and picks up from, its own state of being in the immediate past, which is to say in "time-spans of the order of magnitude of a second, or even of fractions of a second." But an entity also encounters other entities in its vicinity. And ultimately, an entity encounters – at least to some extent, though quite often this extent is "negligable" – its entire world, whch is to say, in the terminology of physics, everything within the light cone of the entity.

Explicitly specifying that "feeling" is just a technical term is a way of warning us that we shouldn’t take it as anthropomorphically as we normally would. On Whitehead’s account, a tree has feelings – but they are probably quite different from the feelings that human beings have. A tree may well feel assaulted, for instance; we know that trees (and other plants) release pheromones when insects start eating their leaves. These emissions both act as a chemical attack on the predator, and warn other trees (or, indeed, other parts of the same tree) to take defensive measures as well. It is not ridiculous, therefore, to claim that a tree has feelings. However, it is unlikely that a tree would ever feel insulted or humiliated – these are human feelings that have no place in the life of trees.

Of course, if Whitehead had really wanted to separate the concept of feeling entirely from our human sense of the term, he could have avoided the word entirely – since it is already synonymous to the technical term prehension. That way he could have easily sidestepped all this baggage of already-existing connotations. Since he didn’t, I must assume that Whitehead wanted to draw on that baggage – even though he also pushes it aside by claiming to be using "a mere techincal term." Why might this be? Whitehead wants us to expand our idea of what feelings are beyond the human context; but at the same time he does not want to completely separate it from human experience. The feelings of a tree are quite different from the feelings of human beings, but there is nonetheless a certain degree of affinity between them.

This, of course, is the point at which many people will accuse Whitehead of anthropmorphism and projection. We can respond to this objection with Jane Bennett’s maxim that anthropomorphism helps us to avoid the far worse problems of anthropocentrism. After all, she notes, "too often the philosophical rejection of anthropomorphism is bound up with a hubristic demand that only humans and God can bear any traces of creative agency." In other words, attributing feeling to trees helps to shake us from our all-too-human, self-congratulatory belief that we are totally unlike all other entities: such as Robert Brandom’s view that we are sapient, whereas other living things are merely sentient. But actually, I don’t think that Whitehead is being anthropomorphic at all: rather, he is inverting the direction of anthropomorphic projections. For Whitehead, human feelings are in fact the exemplification, within our own experience, of a broader kind of process that is far more widely distributed among entities in the world. I cannot remember who first said this, but Whitehead’s actual procedure is – far from attributing human qualities to other organisms –to try to find more general processes, of which the human version that we are familiar with is just one, not necessarily privileged, example. Whitehead’s procedure is actually what Charles Sanders Peirce calls abduction.

Nonetheless, even with all these explanations, Whitehead’s use of feeling as a mere techincal term remains a bit counter-intuitive. He shores up his position by appealing to a number of philosophical precedents . He says that "this use of the term ‘feeling’ has a close analogy to Alexander’s use of the term ‘enjoyment’; and has also some kinship with Bergson’s use of the term ‘intuition.’ (Just as an aside, I wonder whether it might be a good idea to go back and look at Samuel Alexander’s Space, Time, and Deity: I have never read it, but Whitehead clearly thinks highly of it, and Deleuze mentions it in passing as a great book).

In any case, Whitehead also – and more surprisingly than with his citations of Alexander and Bergson – closely associates his use of the word feeling with Descartes’ use of the equivalent Latin term sentire. Didier Debaise discusses this connection in his new book L’appât des possibles. For Descartes, sentire, the act of feeling, is the one indubitable fact of existence – my cogito really reduces to a sentio, since even if the content of the feeling is delusive, the fact of having a feeling is not. (Debaise implicitly draws on Deleuze and Guattari’s substitution of sentio for cogito). (It is worth noting that Whitehead quite frequently draws from the history of philosophy in this way; he find precedents by isolating crucial propositions from an earlier thinker whose general, overall position is entirely opposed to his own).

I am entirely convinced by Debaise’s reading, which is deeper and more complex than what I have space to discuss here. But I would like to point to another, equally odd philosophical borrowing in Whitehead’s discussion of feeling. After citing Alexander and Bergson, and before moving on to Descartes, Whitehead notes that "a near analogy [for his own use of the term ‘feeling’] is Locke’s use of the term ‘idea’, including ‘ideas of particular things’." The qualification of "particular things" is important. At several points in Process and Reality, Whitehead notes how – even though this contradicts Locke’s overall sensationalism – Locke nonetheles speaks of ideas that are "determined to one particular existent." What this means, for Whitehead, is that "in some sense one actual existent repeats itself in another actual existent." There is a lot to unpack here. I will only note two things. In the first place, an entity prehends, or feels, an entire prior entity: meaning the entity as a whole, rather than just its particular qualities. I see a tree, not just an aggregation of points of green (leaves) and grey (bark). I feel the entity itself, as well as feeling its "secondary qualities" (which are what Whitehead calls eternal objects). The "data" that we perceive are not just atomistic impressions; rather, "the datum includes its own interconnections."

In the second place, when Whitehead says that an entity "repeats itself", he means that entities do not just represent other entities, or the sensa emitted by other entities, as private mental pictures: rather, the earlier entity really is present in a certain way in the later one. I discuss this at length in my article "Whitehead on Causality and Perception." For Whitehead, causality and perception are the same thing. Or, more precisely: when an entity perceives another entity, this means that it is being affected by that other entity; perception in this way is a subset of being-affected in general, since entities also affect other entities in ways that are not immediately perceived; the sum of all these affections are what we mean by causality. As Michael Halewood mentioned to me, this means that Whitehead understands causality , not as a "law of nature," but rather as the tendency for the present to conform to the immediate past. Such is the baseline, or basic condition, of becoming for Whithead; although it is partly overcome when an entity introduces novelty in its prehension of a previous entity, rather than merely conforming to it.

There are several other places in Progress and Reality where Whitehead refers his own notion of feeling to Locke’s notion of ideas. For instance:

the terms ‘prehension’ and ‘feeling’ are to be compared with the various significations of Locke’s term ‘idea.’ But they are adopted as more general and more neutral terms than ‘idea’ as used by Locke, who seems to restrict them to conscious mentality.

And again:

Locke’s term idea, in his primary use of it in the first two books of the Essay, means the determinate ingression of an eternal object into the actual entity in question. But he also introduces the limitation to conscious mentality, which is here abandoned."

The important point here is that subjective experience need not involve, and can be detached from, consciousness. On the one hand, Whitehead catergorically insists that "apart from the experiences of subjects there is nothing, nothing, nothing, bare nothingness." But he also continually reminds us that most of this "experience of subjects" is nonconscious. We feel more than we can know. And many organisms feel events in the world, without necessarily being conscious of what they feel. Trees for instance, have feelings, as many recent studies have shown (see, for instance, What a Plant Knows, by Daniel Chamovitz). Trees sense and feel the sunlight; they sense and feel water in the ground; they sense and feel when insects eat their leaves. But none of this necessarily means that trees are overtly conscious; most likely, they are not.

Whitehead’s distinction between feeling and consciousness helps to illuminate certain deadlocks in the contemporary philosophy of mind. Many philosophers – David Chalmers is a good example – insist upon a supposed special quality of consciousness, its irreducibility to physical process. Other philosophers – Daniel Dennett for example – deny that consciousness has any special qualities; but in giving a fully physical explanation, they end up by explaining it away. Galen Strawson has recentlly suggested that both positions are fallacious. On the one hand, there is no evidence, in the mind or elsewhere, for anything that transcends the physical. On the other hand, though, we don’t really know everything that physical processes or materiality can do; there is no ground for claiming that physicality somehow excludes mentality. I am inclined to agree with Strawson here; but the larger, Whiteheadian point is that the issue gets entirely confused when we simply equate mentality with consciousness. Neurobiologists have shown that many and perhaps most mental processes occur nonconsciously, and may well be absoutely inaccessible to consciousness. But we need not assume, as neurobiologists and philosophers of mind generally do, that all this nonconscious mental activitty can rightly be described as computation. Whitehead’s discussion of feeling gives us a broader picture of mental functioning than cognitive psychology does. I cannot develop this here, but my hunch is that feeling in this sense is a necessary precondition for cognition, but is not in itself cognitive.

There is much to admire in David Graeber’s recent and much-commented upon article about the importance of play. Graeber playfully proposes a “principle of ludic freedom”: this states that play is a central principle for all living things, and even perhaps for all entities in the universe. Graeber admits that this is (ungrounded for now) speculation, but he draws a line from quantum indeterminacy — the way that an electron or a photon may “choose” its behavior, which is why this behavior cannot be deterministically predicted, but only expressed in terms of probabilities — all the way up to playful behavior in both nonhuman animals and human beings. Graeber is right, I think, to suggest that, at least for biological organisms, the urge to play — or to deploy “the free exercise of an entity’s most complex powers or capacities” — is precisely what makes these organisms’ behavior irreducible to the calculus of rational utility maximization that neo-darwinian theorists have borrowed from “rational choice” economics and applied to the evolutionary “survival of the fittest.” (Graeber doesn’t mention Bataille, but his argument is coherent with Bataille’s arguments about non-utilitarian general economy; one reason for this parallelism may be Graeber’s and Bataille’s common interest in the work of Marcel Mauss on gift economies).

In any case, for me the most thought-provoking aspect of Graeber’s essay is that he links this principle of play to panpsychism (the thesis that all entities in the cosmos are in some sense sentient). Graeber cites Galen Strawson‘s argument for panpsychism as an alternative to strong emergentism as a non-reductionist explanation for sentience, consciousness, or experientiality.This is an argument that I find persuasive as well. Emergence has become too much of a catchall explanation for something (like mentality) that cannot be explained any other way. Strawson concludes that, if we are therefore to reject the emergentist explanation of sentience, but we also reject either eliminativism a la Daniel Dennett and Cartesian dualism, then the only alternative is to conclude that sentience already exists as a quality or power of all matter. Graeber draws on this in order to extend his “principle of ludic freedom” beyond (or before) the biological. (Strawson himself rejects casting this in terms of “free will”; but one might think here instead, or as well, of Conway & Kochen’s “free will theorem” in quantum mechanics).

Graeber’s connection between play and panpsychism really helps me with something that I have been trying to formulate. One way to understand panpsychism is to say that sentience = information processing. This is why philosophers like David Chalmers have been willing to entertain the idea that something like a thermostat is minimally conscious; the identification of consciousness with information processing is also implicit in formulations like Giulio Tononi‘s phi principle. However, this approach has bothered me, because it seems too exclusively cognitivist; I think that “cognition” and “information” have become way overrated in recent discourse, and that sentience needs to be seen first of all as affective (or as involving “feeling” in Whitehead’s sense) before it is seen as cognitive or informational. Affect or feeling both precedes and exceeds cognition or information, in the same way that play, in Graeber’s formulation, precedes and exceeds utility maximalization. What clicks for me especially in Graeber’s formulation is the way that “the free exercise of an entity’s most complex powers or capacities” necessarily involves energetics as well as informatics. Sentience as a power or capacity must thus also be understood in energetic terms rather than only informatic ones (and this is for me precisely where the panpsychist leanings of Chalmers and Tononi need to be supplemented). 

I still haven’t worked out in any coherent way how to put all this together. Energetics, as well as informatics, needs to be part of any panpsychist explanation of sentience. Also, an energetic (instead of informatic) understanding of physical processes (including but not limited to biological processes) needs to take in account Eric Schneider and Dorion Sagan’s insights into self-organizing systems (and most complexly, living systems) as ways of reducing energy gradients in accordance with the Second Law of Thermodynamics (a living system is internally negentropic, because this allows it to reduce energy gradients, or increase entropy, in the surrounding environment more thoroughly or consistently than would otherwise be the case. This is where we should be able to find the connection between energy expenditure and sentience. 

I will add, just to make things even more confusing, that all this is not necessarily opposed to eliminativist approaches to consciousness (which I am currently also thinking about through Scott Bakker’s Blind Brain Theory and his novel Neuropath, and through Peter Watts’ novel Blindsight). The eliminativist approaches have the virtue of decentering the disucssion of sentience from that of consciousness: as Whitehead insists from an entirely different line of reasoning, consciousness is only a very narrow and specialized part of mental activity (of of what I call sentience). Panpsychism insists that all entities have some sort of experiential or sentient component, and that all entites in some sense make “decisions.” But Whitehead is right to say that experience and decision far exceed consciousness; which is why the eliminativist accounts of consciousness have the virtue of drawing attention to the other, more basic and substantial, aspects of mental activity. This is despite the fact that I reject the eliminativists’ assumption that mental activity must  be understood in functionalist terms. Rather, I think that Graeber’s play, or Whitehead’s “feeling”, is not primordially functional: although it leads to or grounds functional activity, in itself it is non-functional or even dysfunctional. 

Sorry for the disorganized state of what I am saying: I am just trying to list the pieces of an argument I have not yet succeeded in pulling together, or the requirements for an as yet incomplete theory of universal sentience.

The philosopher Jesse Prinz, in his book Gut Reactions: A Perceptual Theory of Emotion, notes — following research by Kent C. Berridge — that “liking and wanting are actually dissociable and… reside in different neural systems.” At least in the case of rats, “the liking system involves the shell of the nucleus accumbens, the ventral pallidum, and the brainstem region. Wanting involves the dopamine projection system from midbrain to nucleus accumbens.” As a result of this dissociation:

if one creates a lesion in the wanting system of a rat, the rat will not eat. It will starve to death. But if you force the same rat to eat agreeable food (e.g., something sweet) it will display behavior that suggests it enjoys the experience. It likes food, but it doesn’t want food. Conversely, one can stimulate the wanting system to achieve wanting without liking. A rat in this condition will eat everything you give it, including food that it dislikes. It will gorge itself on foods that cause it to display aversive reactions at every bite. Berridge compares this to addiction. Addicts often pursue their drug of choice even after that drug no longer induces pleasure.

Now, leaving aside the sadism of such experiments, and my own lack of knowledge about how much of this can be transferred physiologically from rats to human beings, the comparison of wanting without liking to addiction (or at least, to one sort of addiction) makes a great deal of sense. But what, then, about the reverse? Is there a human analogue for liking without wanting?

I’d suggest that, if wanting without liking is an addictive state, then liking without wanting is an aesthetic one. “Liking without wanting” is more or less what Kant means when he says that aesthetic pleasure is “disinterested.” I am pleased by a certain combination of colors or sounds, by a certain narrative, etc., without being concerned one way or another as to whether whatever is being represented by such colors or sounds or narrative lines exists in actuality. (In many cases, I might well positively not want the thing from whose representation I take pleasure to actually exist — this would be the case with horror novels and films, or with stories about charismatic characters who would certainly harm or kill me were I to meet them in real life). And this may well happen — for me it often happens — in “real life” as well as in the contemplation of works of art (e.g., I might find some person’s sexuality likeable or pleasurable, despite my not having any wish to actually have sex with that person).

The horror of a rat starving to death amidst food it likes, because it doesn’t want to eat is, I think, a good emblem of the aesthetic — or at least of one aspect of the aesthetic. And it explains, perhaps why so many people on the Left have a basically anti-aesthetic stance (“the aestheticizing of politics [i]s practiced by fascism. Communism replies by politicizing art”).

However, I think that we should affirm aesthetics as liking without wanting, if only because this is a good antidote to the bombastic exaggerations of theories of desire. I refer here equally to Lacanian theories of desire as lack, and Deleuzian/Guattarian theories of desire as production. Both sorts of theories of desire take wanting, even when divorced from liking, very seriously — desire is either the labor of the negative or the actual process of production. Both sorts of theories of desire tend to marginalize, or leave little room fo,r nonproductive play — which is to say, they leave very little room for the wayward pleasures of aesthetics, even if they exalt certain great works of art.

We might think here even of someone like Roland Barthes, who exalts works of “bliss” or jouissance while denigrating works of pleasure. Barthes is especially interesting here because he is definitely an aesthete, but an avant-garde modernist one, who only loves art when it is difficult and repellent. Barthes associates the art of which he approves with desire (wanting, even when it is without liking) rather than with the aesthetic state of liking without wanting.

In conclusion, I will note that all three of the attitudes I have been describing have their roots in Kant. Desire as lack or negativity comes of course from Hegel, who erects his system by abusively revising the Transcendental Dialectic in Kant’s First Critique. Deleuze & Guattari’s theory of desire producing the real comes directly (as they themselves note) from the Second Critique. Both of these positions emphasize wanting; they may both be contrasted with the liking without wanting that, as I have already noted, is theorized in the Third Critique.

I have recently, without having planned to in advance, found myself giving talks on the subject of accelerationism. First there was an “Introduction to Accelerationism” that I gave as a talk at Grand Valley State University. The video is here. And then, this past week, I gave a talk at the e-flux “Escape Velocity” symposium. What follows is the text of the latter talk. Long-time readers of this blog may recognize that the last portion of the talk actually recycles something that I initially published on the blog seven or eight years ago, and that is an extract from my still unfinished manuscript The Age of Aesthetics (which I swear I intend to return to and finish at some point…). The text that I present here is mostly complete, but there are a few points where I just have notes to myself, which I filled in more or less well while speaking.

In his science fiction novel Pop Apocalypse, Lee Konstantinou imagines the existence of a “Creative Destruction” school of Marxist-Leninist thought. The adherents of this school “interpret Marx’s writings as literal predictions of the future, so they consider it their mission to help capitalist markets spread to every corner of the world, because that’s the necessary precondition for a truly socialist revolution.” This means that the Creative Destruction Marxists are indistinguishable, in terms of actual practice, from the most ruthless capitalists. In the novel, their actions coincide with those of a group of investors who have concluded that “there’s money to be made off the destruction of the world,” and that in fact apocalyptic destruction constitutes “an unprecedented business opportunity.” They therefore seek to precipitate a worldwide nuclear conflagration: “On behalf of our investors, we’re obligated to take every step we can to insure that we corner the Apocalypse market before anyone else does.”

Let us take this satire as a preliminary parable of capitalism and accelerationism. Benjamin Noys, who actually coined the term accelerationism, does indeed present it somewhat like this, as “an exotic variant of la politique du pire: if capitalism generates its own forces of dissolution then the necessity is to radicalise capitalism itself: the worse the better.” But perhaps Noys’ critique is a bit unfair. Accelerationism is a new response to the specific conditions of today’s neoliberal, globalized and networked, capitalism. But it is solidly rooted in traditional Marxist thought. Marx himself writes both of capitalism’s revolutionary effects, and of the contradictions that render it unviable. On the one hand, Marx and Engels write in the Manifesto that capitalism is characterized by

Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation… All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

Note the way that capitalism’s relentless “revolutionizing” of technologies and social relations also revolutionalizes our self-understanding. As capitalism shakes up the material basis of life, it also demystifies and disenchants; it destroys all of the old mythical explanations and legitimations that were previously used to justify our place in society, and in the cosmos. We are left, as Ray Brassier puts it, with a world in which “intelligibility has become detached from meaning.” My difference with Brassier on this point is that he attributes the demystification of old narratives to some supposed “normative ideal of explanatory progress,” when in fact it is, as Marx says, a consequence of capitalism’s overwhelming development of productive forces. This does not mean that science, in practice, is in any sense arbitrary or “socially constructed.” But it does suggest that any talk of the alleged power of inferential links in the logical space of reasons is itself little more than a post hoc rationalization — rather than any sort of actual explanation of the way that science works. We ought to be as wary of Sellarsian neo-rationalism as we are of the meaning-laden narratives the Brassier so categorically dismisses.

In any case, Marx refuses to separate the radically liberatory effects of the “constant revolutionizing of production” from its creation of vast human misery. He insists that these go together, precisely because the development of capitalism is beset by severe internal contradictions. These contradictions are both the reason why capitalist development is not benign, and why it cannot be the ultimate horizon of history or of technological invention. In particular, Marx emphasizes the violent contradiction between the forces of production unleashed by capitalism, and the relations of production that organize it. The discordance between these, he insists, must lead to its downfall:

The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production which has flourished alongside and under it. The centralization of the means of production and the socialization of labour reach a point at which they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.

At the risk of belaboring the obvious, I will point out that Marx’s diagnosis of the maladies of capitalism has been amply confirmed by subsequent events; even though his vision of a movement beyond capitalism has never come to pass. In today’s neoliberal, globalized network society, “the monopoly of capital” has indeed become “a fetter upon the mode of production.” We can see this in all sorts of ways. Insane austerity programs transfer more wealth to the already-rich at the price of undermining living standards (not to mention spending ability) for the population as a whole. The privatization of formerly public services, and the expropriation of formerly common resources, undermine the very infrastructures that are essential for long-term survival. “Digital rights management” and copy protection restrict the flow of data, and cripple the power of the very technologies that make them possible in the first place. Ubiquitous surveillance by both corporate and governmental entities, and the consequent consolidation of Big Data, leads to stultification at precisely those points where the ruling ideology calls for “flexibility” and “creativity.” Investment is increasingly directed toward derivatives and other arcane financial instruments; the more these claim to comprehend the future by pricing “risk,” the more thoroughly they move away from any grounding in actual (and short-term, much less profitable) productive activity. And of course, massive environmental deterioration results from the way that actual energetic expenditures are written off by businesses as so-called “externalities.”

And yet, none of these contradictions have caused the system to collapse, or even remotely menaced its expanded reproduction. Instead, capitalism perpetuates itself through a continual series of readjustments. Nearly all of us, as individuals, have suffered from these blockages and degradations; but Capital itself has not. Despite the fact that we have reached a point where capitalist property relations have become an onerous “fetter upon the mode of production” that they initially helped to put into motion, this fetter shows no sign of being lifted. The intensification of capitalism’s contradictions has not lead to an explosion, or to any “negation of the negation.” The “capitalist integument” has failed to “burst asunder”; instead, it has calcified into a rigid carapace, well-nigh suffocating the life within.

Accelerationism is best understood as an attempt to respond to this dilemma. On the one hand, we have massive dialectical contradictions that, nonetheless, do not lead to any sublation, or “negation of the negation” such as Marx — in this respect at least, all too faithfully following Hegel — envisioned. On the other hand, and at the same time, actually existing capitalism has in fact brought us to the point where — perhaps for the first time in human history since the invention of agriculture — such a supersession is at least conceivable. With its globe-spanning technologies, its creation and use of an incredibly powerful computation and communications infrastructure, its mobilization of general intellect, and its machinic automation of irksome toil, contemporary capitalism really has produced the conditions for universal affluence. In the world today, there is already enough accumulated wealth, and sufficiently advanced technology, for every human being to lead a life of leisure and self-cultivation. As William Gibson famously said, “the future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.”

We should not underestimate the significance of this. In principle at least (even if not in fact) we have solved the economic problem — just as John Maynard Keynes, writing in 1930, predicted we would do within a century. “This means,” Keynes added, “that the economic problem is not — if we look into the future — the permanent problem of the human race.” Instead, Keynes predicted,

for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem — how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.

What the Bloomsbury aesthete Keynes foresaw as the outcome of capitalism — assuming, of course, “the euthanasia of the rentier,” which Keynes hoped would happen gradually, and without a revolution — differs little from the socialism imagined by Charles Fourier and Oscar Wilde, among others. They both saw general affluence as the necessary condition for human beings to be able to flourish, cultivating their individuality or their passions. Keynes’ vision is not even all that far from the communism described by Marx himself in his early writings: a society which “makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.”

This seemingly old-fashioned (19th-century aesthete) view of self-cultivation can be connected, not only to late Foucault, but also to the whole question of becoming posthuman.

But of course, the rentier has not gradually faded away; nor has the capitalist organization of production been overturned either by reform or by revolutionary upheaval. In other words, the Hegelian dialectic has definitively failed. The real is unquestionably not rational. Hegelian dialectics is not adequate to describe the delirious, irrational “logic” of capital — even though Marx himself originally analyzed this “logic” with Hegelian categories. For our experiences of the past century have taught us that, the worse its own internal contradictions get, the more fully capitalism is empowered. Marx wrote that “capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.” But in fact, capital is even more monstrous than this. For it is actively auto-cannibalistic. It feeds, not only on living labor, but also upon itself. As David Harvey reminds us, Marx envisions “the violent destruction of capital, not by relations external to it, but rather as a condition of its self-preservation.” When profit rates decline, then vast conflagrations of value — whether in wars or in economic crises — allow the accumulation of capital to resume anew. The lesson is that capitalism is never undone by its own internal contradictions. Rather, capitalism both needs and uses these contradictions; it continually regenerates itself by means of them, and indeed it could not survive without them.

In other words, we cannot hope to negate capitalism, because capitalism itself mobilizes a far greater negativity than anything we could hope to mount against it. The dirty little secret of capitalism is that it produces abundance, but also continually transforms this abundance into scarcity. It has to do so, because it cannot endure its own abundance. Again and again, as Marx and Engels say in the Manifesto, “there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity — the epidemic of over-production.” The wealth that capitalism actually produces undermines the scarcity that remains its raison d’etre. For once scarcity has been overcome, there’s nothing left to drive competition. The imperative to expand and intensify production simply becomes absurd. In the face of abundance, therefore, capitalism needs to generate an imposed scarcity, simply in order to keep itself going. This is the irrational turn that Keynes missed, in his all-too-rational hope for capitalistically-generated affluence. And this is why Deleuze and Guattari, in the notorious and much-quoted passage that is the ur-text of accelerationism, urge us

to go further still… in the movement of the market, of decoding and deterritorialization… For perhaps the flows are not yet deterritorialized enough, not decoded enough, from the viewpoint of a theory and practice of a highly schizophrenic character. Not to withdraw from the process, but to go further, to ‘accelerate the process,’ as Nietzsche put it: in this matter, the truth is that we haven’t seen anything yet.

This passage has in fact been taken out of context, and interpreted much more broadly than I think Deleuze and Guattari ever intended. For the statement only makes sense in the light of their overall understanding of how scarcity under capitalism “is never primary,” but rather “is created, planned, and organized in and through social production.” More specifically, they say that scarcity “is counterproduced as a result of the pressure of antiproduction” arising from Capital as the socius, or monstrous “body without organs” of social being.

The larger point here is that political economy needs to be understood first of all in terms of abundance instead of scarcity. The classical economics of Smith and especially Ricardo, and after them Marx, and revived in the 20th century by Sraffa, was concerned with social production, distribution, and expenditure. These political economists asked how a society could materially reproduce itself, as well as how it could grow by generating a surplus. And they were therefore concerned with the management and distribution of such a surplus. But neoclassical economics, ever since the late 19th century, and especially today, has a very different set of concerns. It deals, not with the problem of surplus, but with the problem of scarcity. It asks how individuals make decisions, given limited resources. Rather than noticing that we in fact have more than we can use, neoclassical economics insists that we are bedeviled by infinite desires and only finite means. This mimics the way in which capitalism must suppress the very abundance it produces, by subjecting it to an imposed scarcity.

Keynes also opposes the argument from scarcity:

Now it is true that the needs of human beings may seem to be insatiable. But they fall into two classes-those needs which are absolute in the sense that we feel them whatever the situation of our fellow human beings may be, and those which are relative in the sense that we feel them only if their satisfaction lifts us above, makes us feel superior to, our fellows. Needs of the second class, those which satisfy the desire for superiority, may indeed be insatiable; for the higher the general level, the higher still are they. But this is not so true of the absolute needs — a point may soon be reached, much sooner perhaps than we are all of us aware of, when these needs are satisfied in the sense that we prefer to devote our further energies to non-economic purposes.

This can also be linked to self-fashioning, in opposition to the 19th/20th century idea of infinite desire.

In the latter part of the twentieth century, Keynesian policies were replaced by neoliberal ones — precisely because the latter are premised upon the imposition of a universal requirement for competition in all areas of life. over scarce resources, as Foucault was the first to note.

This is a question for environmental considerations as well. Do we think in terms of resource scarcity, which would mean that we must learn to live with less? Or do we understand our destruction of the biosphere, our causing mass extinctions, etc., as a kind of imposed scarcity (in contrast, perhaps, to the Bataillean overabundance and sheer gift of solar energy?). General economy needs to be decoupled from fictions of the infinitude of desire.

Everything I have said so far about contradictions and going further needs to be understood in terms of one of the most contentious doctrines in Marxism, that of the fall of the rate of profit. Although Marx refers to “laws” of capitalist political economy; but he also says that these laws are tendential ones. The “the law of the tendential fall of the rate of profit” (Gesetz des tendenziellen Falls der Profitrate). There are many countervailing factors to any tendency. The tendency is real in itself; it is a part of the present situation. But because of the countervailing factors, there is no guarantee that the tendency will actually happen.

What Marx calls a tendency has some similarities to what Deleuze calls the virtual. Both are fully real, without being entirely actual. It is a question of futurity. Science fiction articulates the futurity that already exists as a virtual component of the present. It grasps both technology and socio-politico-economic organization.

Among all its other accomplishments, neoliberal capitalism has also robbed us of the future. It turns everything into an eternal present. The highest values are supposedly novelty, innovation, and creativity, and yet these always turn out to be more of the same. The future exists only in order to be colonized and made into an investment opportunity. The genuine unknowability of the future is transformed, by means of derivatives trading, into a matter of calculable risk. I am haunted by the condition of what Mark Fisher calls capitalist realism, in which — as Fisher puts it, channeling Jameson and Zizek — “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” In this way, accelerationism is an attempt to answer a problem of imagination, no less than than a problem of economics.

Deleuze and Guattari’s reconceptualization of capitalism was of course picked up in the 1990s by the British philosopher Nick Land. Land pushes the deterritorializing schizophrenia of D & G to the maximum, while dropping the anti-capitalist rhetoric. Instead, Land celebrates absolute deterritorialization as liberation, to the point of total disintegration and death. He sees Capital as an alien force that exceeds and ruptures the human; but he celebrates this destructive force (whereas Marxists denounce it; and defenders of capitalism deny that such is the case).

Land offers a science-fictional view of capitalism. But he identifies with Capital itself — against human beings, or any other sort of organic life. This picks up the monstrosity of Capital as body without organs or socius. But do we need therefore to identify with it, against ourselves? Land develops a kind of Stockholm Syndrome with regard to capital. Contrast the way Hardt and Negri try to reclaim the multitude as a monstrosity that the ruling order has always tried to repress. But they are wrong and Land is right; it is really Capital that is excessive and monstrous. Of course, we cannot remain the same and deal with this monstrosity. In order to survive the monstrosity of capital, let alone flourish under it or despite it, we need to change. This is where we become posthuman.

Paul De Filippo’s science fiction short story “Phylogenesis” deals directly with this situation. The story is an accelerationist one, in the way that it pushes to the end of the full monstrosity of the body of Capital, and especially of the ecological catastrophe that is one of its most important consequences. “Phylogenesis” is a story about living on in the face of monstrosity.

The literal premise of “Phylogenesis” is that an alien species of enormous “invaders came to Earth from space without warning… In blind fulfillment of their life cycle, they sought biomass for conversion to more of their kind.” As a result, “the ecosphere had been fundamentally disrupted, damaged beyond repair.” The invaders’ massive predation leaves the earth a barren, ruined mass: “the planet, once green and blue, now resembled a white featureless ball, exactly the texture and composition of the [invading species].” Human beings are reluctant to accept the hard truth that they cannot repel the invasion: “only in the final days of the plague, when the remnants of mankind huddled in a few last redoubts, did anyone admit that extermination of the invaders and reclamation of the planet was impossible.” The human agenda is reset at the last possible moment: with victory unattainable, sheer survival becomes the only remaining goal. In this situation of general dispossession, there is no longer any environment capable of sustaining humanity. It is necessary, instead, “to adapt a new man to the alien conditions.”

And so the “chromosartors” get to work, genetically refashioning Homo sapiens into a new species. We are reborn as viral parasites, living within the very bodies of the spacefaring invaders. On the outside, the host presents a smooth surface: it is a “tremendous glaucous bulk,” with skin “like a bluish-gray compound of fat and plastic,” possessed of “a relatively high albedo,” and shaped like a “featureless ovoid.” The host, just like Deleuze and Guattari’s body without organs, “presents its smooth, slippery, opaque, taut surface as a barrier.” But beneath this surface, Deleuze and Guattari tell us, the body without organs “senses there are larvae and loathsome worms… so many nails piercing the flesh, so many forms of torture.” Or, as Di Filippo tells the story, a whole ecology pullulates beneath “the sleek uniformity of the host’s thick skin.” Its “interior structure” is “a labyrinth of cells and arteries, nerves and organs, structural tubules and struts… A nonhomogeneous environment of wet and dry spaces, some cluttered with pulsing conduits and organs, some home to roving organelles, others like the empty caverns formed in foam.” And this is where the genetically refashioned human species takes up residence.

Most of the text of “Phylogenesis” lovingly recounts the physiology, psychology, and overall life cycle of the new parasitic humanity. The bioengineering is precise and efficient. Everything is optimized in accordance with the physiology and metabolism of the host, and in the interest of flexibility. Anything deemed superfluous to survival is unsentimentally jettisoned. The “neohumans” mate quickly, reproduce in great numbers (in “litters” of five or more), and mature rapidly. They exhibit both swarm behavior — ganging up together when necessary to overwhelm the host’s defenses — and nomadic distribution — “scattering themselves throughout the interior of the gargantuan alien” to reduce the chances of being all wiped out at once by the host’s counterattacks. Once they have killed their host, they go into hibernation within “protective vesicles,” in order to survive the vacuum of deep space until they can encounter another host. In this way, they are able to perpetuate both their genes and their cultural heritage. Since they unavoidably “possess a basically nonmaterial culture,” they only use light-weight technologies that have been interiorized within their bodies. They are especially gifted with “mathematical skill,” including a genetically-instilled “predisposition toward solving… abstruse functions in their heads.” Aesthetically, they are all masters and lovers of song, “the only art form left to the artifact-free neohumans.” Mathematics and music are the sole “legacy of six thousand years of civilization” that has been bequeathed to them. The lives of the neohumans are short and intermittent; they are “mayflies, fast-fading blooms, the little creatures of a short hour. Yet to themselves, their lives still tasted sweet as of old.”

We can see Di Filippo’s story as an allegory of capitalist realism and accelerationism. The story turns upon devising a brilliant strategy for adapting to catastrophic monstrosity. When “There Is No Alternative” — when it no longer seems possible for us to defeat the monstrous invasion, or even to imagine things otherwise — Di Filippo’s parasitic inversion is the best that we can do. The neohumans of “Phylogenesis” evade extinction at the hands of the monstrous aliens, by devising a situation in which their own survival absolutely depends upon the continuing survival of the monstrosities as well. The parasitic neohumans end up killing whatever host they have invaded; but their continuing proliferation is always contingent upon encountering another host. The extinction of the invaders would mean their own definitive extinction as well.

As far as I can determine, Di Filippo never intended “Phylogenesis” to be read as an allegory of Capital. Yet the traces are there, in every aspect of the story. The downsizing of the neohumans (adults are “four feet tall, with limbs rather gracile than muscular”), the rationalization of their design in the interest of mobility and flexibility, their uncanny coordination and ability to “monitor the passage of time with unerring precision, thanks to long-ago modifications in the suprachiasmatic nuclei of their brains, which provided them with accurate biological clocks,” the “inbuilt determinism” by means of which their sexual drives are canalized “for a particular purpose,” their severely streamlined cultural heritage, and the ways that even their nonproductive activities (singing and nonprocreative sex) serve a purpose as “supreme weapons in the neohumans’ armory of spirit”: all these are recognizable variations of familiar management techniques in the contemporary post-Fordist regime of flexible accumulation. The neohumans make use of the only tools that they find at hand; they parasitize and mimic the very mechanisms that have dispossessed them.

The emotional lives of the neohumans are effectively streamlined in a post-Fordist manner as well. Feeling an overwhelming sense of loss, and aware of all the ways that their potential has been constrained, these people nonetheless conclude that “we just have to make the most of the life we have.” As for the prospect of these monstrous hosts ever going away, “we can’t count on it, we can’t even dream about it.” Both socially and affectively, Di Filippo’s neohumans are thus the very image of the multitude invoked by Hardt and Negri, and even more explicitly by Paolo Virno. They exercise a genuine creativity under extremely straightened circumstances; and they produce, and themselves enjoy, an experience of the common. But Di Filippo recognizes, more clearly than Virno or Hardt and Negri do, the limitations of any “mobilization of the common” in our current situation of the “real subsumption” of labor (and forms of life more generally) under capitalism. “Phylogenesis” is a demonstration of a kind of vitalism in spite of capital, but that is also the reslience that neoliberalism demands (cf. Robin James on this): “Life is tenacious, life is ingenious, life is mutable, life is fecund.”