Dromology, Bolidism and Marxist Accelerationism (part 1)

by Obsolete Capitalism

​Indice

Preface 11

Between revolution and Al-Khwarizmi
by Algorithmic Committee (for Decomputation)

Dromology, Bolidism and Marxist Accelerationism
Fragments of communism between al-Khwarizmi and Mach 15
by Obsolete Capitalism

Biography 58

Between revolution  and Al-Khwarizmi 

 by Algorithmic Committee (for Decomputation)

Dromology, bolidism and Marxist accelerationism, an odd text by Obsolete Capitalism written in the summer of 2015, represents the first endeavor in the speculative philosophical sphere known by the equally eccentric name of “accelerationism”. The main source of the book is Matteo Pasquinelli’s Algoritmi del Capitale (Ombre Corte, 2014), followed by other texts of contemporary authors such as Molecular Red by McKenzie Wark. However, Obsolete Capitalism has always rejected the label of “review”. In fact, they do not accept the triptych composed of the power figure of the critic, of the role that culture and philosophy assign to critique, and of the dapper halo of the know-it-all reader. As a result, the text is closer to Paul Klee’s semi-automatic rickety appliance, that is, the notorious Twittering machine, or to the saturated distortions and the soft entropy of A.R. Kane’s “suicidal kiss” in 69, rather than to a quasi-essay able to introduce itself in the national and international debate on accelerationism. The matter is that Obsolete Capitalism did not and still does not identify itself in any nineteenth-century political classification bestowed on the multiple trends of this movement. Accelerationist thought, be that political or philosophical, does not exhaust ​itself in the philosophy of Nick Land or Nick Srnicek, among others. The core feature was, and still is, to refuse any form of identification, that is, it is necessary to perpetually trans-identify oneself, and question each model – be that the closest or the most distant one – in order to open spaces for experimentation and caosmosis, that is, for the unthinkable. The text is divided in two parts which ought to be read in such sense: the “dromologic archives” are an early but inevitable attempt to institute, in the name of Paul Virilio, a kind of Encyclopedia of the World of Speed and Acceleration, although the two terms are not synonyms. The accelerationist paragraphs, which in some way are asymmetrical to the “dromologic archives”, appear as counterpoints to speculative Marxist and workerist thought embodied by authors like Pasquinelli, Terranova, Srnicek, Williams and McKenzie-Wark. To sum up, we find the theme that Obsolete Capitalism points at, among the ghosts of Revolution and Al-Khwarizmi, to be the following: the danger, which Marxist accelerationism runs without any understanding of the power of the becoming, is that of going back with adrenaline enthusiasm over the same routes already explored by Marxist catastrophism, or, on the contrary, that of reviving the ghost of the Nation through modernist and technologically-computed idealizations which found their own success – once again – on the asphyxiating embrace of the Exploded Good of the State.

Dromology, Bolidism and Marxist Accelerationism

Fragments of communism between al-Khwarizmi and Mach

I’ve been waiting for fifteen minutes to be assigned on a mission by the FBI! What the hell is happening to this fucking world? I’m restless!!!’ – ‘And you’re not happy? We have been married for just twenty minutes!’ 

Stefano Tamburini - Snake Agent

‘Surely there is very real and very convincing data that the planet cannot survive the excesses of the human race: proliferation of atomic devices, uncontrolled breeding habits, the rape of the environment, the pollution of land, sea, and air. In this context, isn’t it obvious that ‘Chicken Little’ represents the sane vision and that Homo Sapiens’ motto ‘Let’s go shopping!’ is the cry out of the true lunatic?’

(Dr. Peters’ Monologue-Twelve Monkeys-Terry Gilliam)

"Philosophy does not travel fast’

(Gilles Deleuze – Nietzsche and Philosophy)

Let’s Accelerate!

Matteo Pasquinelli is a young cosmopolitan philosopher who is creating an excellent and original theoretical-speculative path across Berlin, London and Amsterdam. He is one of the leaders of the international ‘accelerationist’ philosophical movement as well as one of the innovative thinker of the political and intellectual post-workerist circle. For Ombre Corte publisher he has edited an important anthology, The Algorithms of Capital, which cogently gathers the state of the art not just of ‘accelerationist’ theory – of which it includes the famous #Accelerate: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics written in 2013 by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams – but also of all the research made on the theme of ‘algorithms and capital,’ moving further the well-known Nitzschean arrow of philosophical enquiry. Critical Theory has been interrogating itself for a long time about the relationship between the present modes of production and the ‘soft machine’ component – the algorithm – which grants neo-liberal governance with the ability to fulfill its effort to dominate the whole ‘State-World,’ since, as Wittgenstein argued, ‘the world is everything that is the case’. In order to have a more complete view of the philosophical dispute underway, this anthology should be read together with the coeval collection by Robert Mackay and Armen Avanessian, #Accelerate# (Urbanomic Media, 2014), with which it shares some essays, as well as with the book by Benjamin Noys Malign Velocities: Acceleration​ism and Capital (Zero Books, 2014). This last volume presents itself as a constructive and very coherent critique from the left to the accelerationist movement, written by the same man who in 2010 created its name, taking it from a sci-fi story by Roger Zelazny, Lord of the Light (1967). The anthology is divided into three different sections: the first and most political one is dedicated to the theme Acceleration and Crisis, the second and more theoretical one to the topic of algorithmic abstraction, while the third and last one – the weakest, which will later acquire a ‘positional significance’ in the Italian setting – inquires the autonomy of the Common, and introduces these themes in the internal debate of the Italian post-workerist thought. Last introductory note: Pasquinelli and Avanessian have organised the event entitled Accelerationism. A Symposium of Tendencies in Capitalism which took place in Berlin on 14th December 2013.

:: Dromology Archive 1 :: Bolidism and vertical dromologies

​Andy Green is the English pilot who drives faster than the speed of sound. In 1997 Green established in the Nevada desert the speed world record, 1,228 kilometres per hour – Mach 1.016 – with the supersonic car ThrustSSC, becoming the first man overcoming the sound barrier at ground level. In summer 2015, in South Africa, he will attempt to exceed the 1600 km/h limit behind the wheel of a new supersonic vehicle, the Bloodhound SSC. He has declared: ‘It should be easy leaving aside the heat, the noise, gravity and the skid of the car’. Such a declaration, and such a character, would have made J.G. Ballard happy, he too an RAF pilot like Green. It should be remembered that the first officially registered speed record of a car was established in 1898. The pilot was the French Chasseloup-Laubat, and the car – an electric one! – reached the speed of 63,14 km/h. But just one year later, in 1899, the jet-car ‘La jamais contente’ thrashed the 100 km/h barrier; indeed, the Belgian pilot Jenatzy pushed it at 105.88 km/h. Nowadays that primordial speed of 63 km/h is reached by the elevators of the Shanghai Tower, 632 metres high, the second world highest building – the inauguration is planned for December 2015. From level B2 the ‘high-speed elevators’ will reach level 119 in 55 seconds with a maximum speed of 64.8 km/h

Feasible futures: inadequacy of leftist movements’ political common sense.

Pasquinelli and the authors of the Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics, Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek, have a primary political aim, healthy for the whole society. That is, regaining control over the future, or, more precisely, over the elaboration of a new idea of future which must not have anything in common neither with the idea propositioned by the present political situation – first of all, austerity, together with the correlated mantra of a permanent crisis of western political, economic and social institutions – nor with the predominant alternatives suggested by the left, moderate or radical. In fact, among the many feasible futures, the future of the left deserves a distinct analysis. A good part of the perspectives of those who criticise from the left the present unwanted political order still hold in their political DNA two fundamental elements that accelerationism strongly and contentiously condemned: technophobia and folk politics. According to Williams and Srnicek, folk politics refers to ‘’the political common sense of leftist movements, as it has developed historically and collectively’’ (Srnicek, Folk Politics and the future of the Left, 2014). In other words, it refers to the residual struggles of such localism founded on a horizontal anti-capitalism which originates from the so-called ‘happy de-growths’ – an intellectual position formulated in the West by Serge Latouche and Mauro Bonaiuti – and ends with the ​ecologist, anarchic and anti-modernist movements such as the No-Tav one, passing by timeworn unionism, Marxist and not, which borders on neo-corporatism or operates only on strictly local dimensions. The accelerationist critique is not based on a frontal contraposition with, or on rejection of, these forces, but rather on the well-founded idea that, in order to build a new winning socialist perspective, it is necessary to drastically change strategy. It is the way of resisting and fighting that must be changed. It is important to challenge the State-World in its own field of action, that is global. To avoid instead is the logic of a frontal clash with Mondialism, as it happened with the fighting front that originated from Genoa 2001. The incidental and prospective problem of political fighting was and is a problem of scale.

:: Dromology Archive 2 :: The PartiRank of the Circle

​’Mae looked at the time. It was six o’clock. She had plenty of hours to improve, there and then, so she embarked on a flurry of activity, sending four zings and thirty-two comments and eighty-eight smiles. In an hour, her PartiRank rose to 7,288. Breaking 7,000 was more difficult, but by eight o’clock, after joining and posting in eleven discussion groups, sending another twelve zings, one of them rated in the top 5,000 globally for that hour, and signing up for sixty-seven more feeds, she’d done it. She was at 6,872, and turned to her InnerCircle social feed. She was a few hundred posts behind, and she made her way through, replying to seventy or so messages, RSVP’ing to eleven events on campus, signing nine petitions, and providing comments and constructive criticism on four products currently in beta. By 10:16 her rank was 5,342, and again, the plateau – this time at 5,000 – was hard to overcome.’’

​(Dave Eggers, The Circle, 2014)

Feasible futures: a challenge to the monopoly on the techno-scientific revolution.
​
The idea of future that the young accelerationist thinkers offer us revolves around the global challenge to capitalism, and more precisely around the idea that the connections between capitalism and technological progress could transmute from the present divergent concurrence to a more dynamic and perpetual division. Contrarily to those who believe the present technological development to have been caused by and to even be embodied in those dynamics initiated by capitalism, Pasquinelli and the other authors – deriving this critical position from Marx’s Grundrisse –  argue that techno-science has its own independence, and that in the future it could potentially be separated from the researches labs of the industrial sector and from the educational institutions financed by neo- laissez-faire entities. This ‘accelerationist’ position has been itself accused by several parties and by arrogant critics of crisis-theory accidentalism, late positivism, neo-Prometheanism and techno-fetishist apologetic; some of them even charged the young philosophers of having just updated Lenin’s old slogan, ‘soviet + electricity’, to a more fascinating ‘soviet + cybernetic’. Beyond incidental disputes, it must be acknowledged that the accelerationist challenge is ambitious, well supported and provided with remarkable intellectual and tactic depth. Thanks to the novel impulse given by accelerationism, the left recovers ​a minimum margin for political manoeuvre and intellectual self-righteousness which allow to throw down the gauntlet on the same symbolic field of capital, that is, technologic competition. Will these young intellectuals be able to live up to the task that they have set for themselves?

:: Dromology Archive 3 :: negative and positive accelerations. How much acceleration can a body gain?

What can a body do? This is the chief question for Spinoza. Hence, talking about Bolidism, the query could be turned into ‘What can a body endure in terms of acceleration?’ The speed record on track from the blocks, 9’58’’ (Berlin 2009) belongs notoriously to Usain Bolt: the average speed on the overall distance being 37.578km/h, with the latter 50m run at more than 41km/h and a peak of 44km/h. At the dawn of Olympic competitions, in 1912 in Stockholm, the American runner Donald Lippincott ran 100m in 10’’6’, the first world record registered by the IAAF. The average speed was 33.9km/h. However, if we absolutize the speed and we go outside the tartan track, then the highest speed record ascribable to a human being is that of Felix Baumgartner: once launched in the atmosphere at a height of 38,969m thanks to an aerostat, he reached the speed of 1,357km/h (Mach 1.24) on the 14th October 2012. The human body though does not suffer speed itself, but rather acceleration. In rectilinear motion and at constant speed, the stress on the human organism is very limited. Nevertheless, it is sufficient a sudden change of direction to sum centrifugal forces to the body weight. In order to correct for these implications, physiology has studied negative (feet-head) and positive (head-feet) accelerations. The human body in an upright position can bear positive accelerations up ​to 9g, that is nine times the acceleration of gravity, while for negative accelerations it can be pushed only to -3g due to the blood flow to the brain which produces loss of consciousness. The accelerations are measured in ‘g’, namely the number of times our body weight is augmented by acceleration. At 1g our body weight remains the same; at 9g it will become 720kg assuming it was 80kg at 1g. Modern fighter jets, such as the Eurofighters, the F18 and F22, can reach accelerations up to a 9g/-5g ratio. Still up in the air, under certain conditions, they can exceed the 10g instantaneous, which can only last few seconds in order to avoid the death for cerebral hypoxia of the pilots, who anyway wear anti-g suits. At a positive acceleration of 10g we also encounter the hyperbolic ‘Euthanasia Coaster’ of the Lithuanian engineer Urbonas, which explicates this short essay.  

​Feasible futures: the collapse of capital.
​
If capitalism collapses, how is it possible to stop the erratic course of the ‘immense machine’? To this end, let us consider what Deleuze and Guattari say in the notorious passage of their Anti-Oedipus (1972) with regards to the ways of contrasting the triumphant capitalist society: “So what is the solution? Which is the revolutionary path? […] To withdraw from the world market […]? Or might it be to go in the opposite direction? […] 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.” Pasquinelli and the accelerationists are those philosophical investors who literally want to go further, to ‘see’ – that is, to think – how the ‘uncontrollable flows’ would behave once they were freed from the earning imperative, from the logic of profit and from the allocation based exclusively on income. “The social axiomatic of modern societies is caught between two poles, and is constantly oscillating from one pole to the other. […] [Modern societies] are torn in two directions: archaism and futurism, neoarchaism and ex-futurism, paranoia and schizophrenia.” (AE, 260) Alternatively, in the language of Srnicek and Williams, the choice is between globalized post-capitalism and a slow fragmentation sliding towards primitivism. The authors of The Algorithms of Capital have already isolated the response to the vectorial question of the two post-structuralist philosophers: capitalism is not creative destruction but rather destructive destruction. Thus ​the accelerationists have chosen the militant option ‘to go in the opposite direction’: to accelerate the process along its lines of decoding and deterritorialization. Although the individual positions of philosophers who ascribe themselves to accelerationism can vary and express different nuances on the matter, such acceleration is necessary for capitalism to collapse, because its intimately destructive nature sooner or later will cause its auto-consumption. Indeed, we are already one step away from the disintegrating cataclysm, as anticipated by the collapse of the planet’s climatic system and by the crisis of the dominant financial and economic paradigm; according to Srnicek and Williams a ‘panorama of apocalypses’ has developed all around us, one which present politics is not able to govern anymore. The paroxysmal metabolism of capital, which combines perpetual growth with a swirling technological evolution, has reached the end of the line. The collapse is imminent. In other words, using Prigogine’s terminology, the system entropy of the vast machine has reached its maximum level; we are close to the firewall. The planet necessitates a different navigational acceleration able to disclose new horizons of possibility. This means, according to Srnicek and Williams, that a different political project, distinct from market economics, has to take over the procedures of decoding and deterritorialization of the system. It is urgent and imperative to separate two distinctive trajectories: the one belonging to the capitalistic system, and the one belonging to the techno-scientific evolution. 

:: Dromology Archive 4 :: The accelerationist century par excellence: the XVI century of the Renaissance

Tommaso Campanella in 1602 wrote the famous utopian book The City of the Sun, which includes this significant passage:

‘Oh, if you knew what our astrologers say of the coming age, and of our age, that has in it more history within 100 years than all the world had in 4,000 years before! of the wonderful inventions of printing and guns, and the use of the magnet, and how it all comes of Mercury, Mars, the Moon, and the Scorpion!’ 

There is no doubt that between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe there was a great number of technical, scientific and theoretical processes under development. These were all interrelated in a continuous progression, and, as a result, they sparked the dream of a “common Whole”, that is, that “Union of the World” which Campanella retraced in the “great signs”, namely the great discoveries of the sixteenth century: the magnet, thus Science, prints, thus Wisdom, the gun, thus War. But the opus of the Italian philosopher highlights some additional topics on which it is worth to focus our attention: the relationship between utopic-political thought and scientific discoveries, between the psycho-rational  and the “mechanic” revolutions, and between  the future world structure and the contingent social one. The proximity between “Union of the World”, techno-scientific development and temporal materialistic compression that Campanella so well described, triggers some considerations: 1) an absolute acceleration does not exist, each age has its own acceleration; 2) in the secularized force field there is nothing more than a chaotic convergence of a bunch of accelerated tendencies which intertwine themselves with other average environmental speeds; 3) in the accelerated process of material forces – to which any cyclical or linear hypotheses are not to attributed – each “negative” resistance is expelled by the progressive momentum itself, because it bears a centrifugal power which ousts any inorganic element. Following these assumptions, we ought to distinguish between relative and absolute accelerations, between intra-generational and intergenerational accelerations, between average long-lasting speeds and sudden accelerations of contingent moments, and finally between organic and inorganic elements of an acceleration. Alternatively, we could imagine, radically changing the techno-political perspective, the distinction between catechontic forces and revolutionary pressures. We would then need to analyse historical periods, archaeologies of knowledge, cartographies of power and future virtualities using appropriate Physics and Mechanics. The moment has come for politics and philosophy, as well as physics and cybernetics, to elaborate a new shared vision and to stipulate a new alliance.

​Dromology, hence Logic of Speed.

A first necessary task could be the following: to build an appropriate lexicon and a shared dictionary of political and philosophical concepts drawn from the collective analyses of those who ascribe themselves to the accelerationist thinking circle. If this circle was concentrating itself on the founding principles and concepts of physics, mathematics and cybernetics, developing and articulating them in accordance with the political contingencies determined by the algorithmic governance of market economics and by the overbearing technological development, the understanding of space, time, singularity, community and the laws of politics would all result deeply renewed, exactly as it happened, for example, with the meditations by European philosophers of the XIII and XIV century like Nicola Oresme, Giovanni Buridano, Richard Swineshead and Thomas Bradwardine. In particular, the so-called “Mertonian” school distinguished itself by elaborating very advanced analyses and concepts, concerning the language of limits, infinity, continuum, increase and decrease. This step would actually consist, following that noble propensity to analyse and research embodied by the “Mertonians” and by the “New Physics” of the fourteenth century, in giving political and philosophical consistency to these new speculative areas linked to material force fields and ultimately in designing the outline of a new ontology for the de-fastest me. To this end, we could adopt, expand and twist the definition of Dromology by Paul Virilio. Dromology is a neo-science which – according to the theories of the French town planner – focuses itself on the “logic of speed”. Additionally, embracing the advice that Antonio Negri gives in his essay Reflections on “Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics”, we ought to draw a political distinction between “speed” and “acceleration”, that is, between the ‘experimental process of discovery and creation within the space of possibilities determined by capitalism itself’, and speed conceived as “pure” intensive quantity, intrinsic to any power endeavor. On the contrary, Virilio, being a great catastrophist, views the irrational speed of capital together with the intrinsic characteristics appended by the concepts of Accident and Catastrophe. Namely, the interruption of the whirling speed of capital, or of the World-State, occurs through that sudden and violent crisis embodied by the Crash, the Collapse, the Cataclysm, the Exceptional Event, which is already assimilated into the automation and into the algorithmic governance. It could be termed “technological fatalism”, quite dissimilar from the Marxian epistemic economic determinism that we will examine further on. Anyway, nothing seems able to stop the entropic process of capital. It could be argued that its destructive character is one of the poles of capital’s existence, it could be called Mad-Max pole, which would bring us back to the catastrophism under-cover of the accelerationists, and to their will to palingenetic drive. Forgers of ultra-fast photonic processes able to break the sound barrier.

:: Dromology Archive 5 :: Shock wave and sonic boom

In 1864 the German physicist August Töpler was the first scientist able to visualize shock waves. These are acoustic waves which consist in actual physical energy, they propagate themselves in the tridimensional space and are generated when matter is subjected to an extremely rapid compression. When supersonic airplanes shoot themselves at speeds higher than the speed of sound (1,237.68 km/h - Mach 1), shock waves trigger a sound induced by the so-called ‘Mach cone’. Hence, the sonic boom can be defined as a unitary shock wave that travels at a critical speed >Mach 1: the singular bystander is not reached by the deafening boom until the shock wave surpasses his location. The power of the shock wave is determined by the quantity of air that gets accelerated and by the shape and size of the aircraft. The perception of a double sonic boom (as indeed there are two sonic reverberations determined in rapid sequence by the compression and the release of pressure) depends on the distance between the single bystander and the plane that breaks the sound barrier. The first aircraft to overcome the sound barrier, Mach 1, in level flight was the jet plane Bell XS-1 piloted by the American aviator Charles Yeager the 14 October 1947. However, in 1953 another American aviator, Albert Scott Crossfield, flew at an average speed higher than Mach 2. The 7 March 2004 the supersonic plane Boeing X-43A reached the speed of 6.83 Mach. The apex though was achieved later on, when on 16th November 2004, the same technological demonstrator came close to the speed of 10 Mach (M 9.68 at a height of 34,000 m). Within the secret military project Hyper-X run by the US Air Force, the experimental aircraft Boeing X-43D is programmed to reach the speed of Mach 15. Thus, it is with great admiration that we think back to the first flight made by the Wright Flyer of the American Wright brothers the 17 December 1903: an engine with the force of 12 horsepower and the highest speed reached 48 km/h …

Beyond the elaboration of grief: cyber-Marx and alien thought

The anthology The algorithms of capital positions itself, with its recurring mentions of Marx, in the contemporary debate about the philosophical present-day importance of Marxism, about its immediate potential employability in the political arena and about its inexhaustible value as unavoidable classic of critical thought. We could define the work of Pasquinelli as a completely legitimate act of both speculative will and political militancy. Indeed, his anthology presents a variation of accelerationism which could be defined as ‘Marxist-post-workerist’, descending from the most visionary Italian heretical-Marxist thought, and operating in this sense on three different fronts.

​1) Inheritance – The first front is oriented both towards the inside and the outside of the Italian intellectual context, in order to reiterate once more how important, original and irreproachable is the inheritance of the post-1945 Italian Marxist political and philosophical tradition, including the more heterodox one, by shedding light on how much workerist and post-workerist legacy is present in the most recent accounts of English left accelerationism

2) Enhancement – The second front is concerned with transferring and spreading accelerationist theories outside the English context, avoiding in such a way their segregation in restricted academic and intellectual circles in London, in order to build vice-versa a powerful analytical instrument provided, at least but not only, with a European afflatus. Thus, the political and philosophical debate would avoid to resolve itself between those in favour and against Nick Land’s theses, the most important thinker of the first accelerationist wave of the nineties. 
 
3) Graft – the third front regards the introduction in Italy of the present European accelerationist political and philosophical debate, grafting and welding it in the debate of the Italian Left, and not only in its Marxist component.

​Nonetheless, nowadays Marx is, using a euphemism, politically convalescent. As Derrida argued, between 1989 and 1991 Marx was credited with a triple loss: The Soviet Union, Communism and Marxism. The accelerated elaboration of this Marxist loss by Pasquinelli and the other authors gathered in the anthology shapes instead an extremely dynamic and evocative capability of his thought: a cybernetic Marx, and not only ‘industrialist’. Is this the only possible Marx nowadays, at the dawn of the twenty-first century?

taken from:

obsoletecapitalism