‘Cuteness cares nothing for judgement, and is infuriating to power’: Interview with Maya B. Kronic and Amy Ireland — Clarice Pelotas (2024)
Firstly, i’d like to thank Maya and Amy for agreeing to do this interview. Here in Brazil we have a shortage of translated material on accelerationism but we have a growing interest in the topic.
MBK: Thanks for asking us! One thing we insist on in Cute Accelerationism is that accelerationisms are plural, each arising from a local set of encounters, desires, compulsions, perversions…. We’re excited to see what forms accelerationism takes on in Brazil. We have learned, through Urbanomic’s work with Fernando Zalamea, our recent translation of Alberto Rangel’s Inferno Verde, and Éric Alliez’s book on Ernesto Neto (Body Without Organs, Body Without Image), that the Latin American countries have a very singular relation to modernity. Zalamea depicts them as a borderzone ‘naturally prone to mixture and hybridization — what Fernando Ortiz Fernández called ‘Transculturation’ — and as a ‘privileged site of gnoseological oscillations and creative transits’. Perhaps we should hope for an anthrophagous accelerationism…?
1. Would you like to make a presentation first? About who you are, your work, how the idea for the book came to be etc.
AI: I first met Maya in person at a book launch for #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader in London in 2014. We talked about Gilles Châtelet’s To Live and Think like Pigs, Maya did a DJ set, and at the end of the night they gave me a grape flavoured gummy. I thought they were really shy and cute, and totally different from how I imagined a philosophy publisher would be. Not too long after that, I was invited into the secret left accelerationist chat that was running at the time on Google’s now defunct Circles platform, which led eventually to my meeting Helen Hester, Diann Bauer, Patricia Reed, and Lucca Fraser. Along with Katrina Burch, who I already knew in London, we formed Laboria Cuboniks and wrote Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation (the ‘xenofeminist manifesto’) largely in response to left accelerationism being criticised for being masculinist and excluding women. The xenofeminist manifesto is both an attempt to rebut this misconception (we were all involved in it, after all!) along with the attendant claim that left accelerationism’s interest in co-opting Enlightenment ideas like prometheanism and universalism made it intrinsically anti-feminist, and to provide a friendly critique of left accelerationism from a queer and feminist point of view (we did think they could do with learning a thing or two from us). As a result, the xenofeminist manifesto occupies a really interesting place in the history of feminist thought. Reason and universalism, the critique of folk politics, and a positive interest in technology and epistemology are not usually seen as feminism-friendly pursuits. We subtilised a lot of the universalist thinking in left accelerationism by plugging it into Rosa Maria Rodriguez Magda and Fernando Zalamea’s work on transmodernity, and this, to me, is the most interesting and most underappreciated aspect of what we did. That said, I am a cyberfeminist at heart, and a lot of what Laboria Cuboniks wrote in the xenofeminist manifesto was a little too rationalist and statist for me. I also love the work of Nick Land, which was a big problem for a lot of readers of Xenofeminism, who did not see the feminist side of his philosophy. Cute Accelerationism feels like a continuation of the queer and feminist aspirations that were crucial to the xenofeminist manifesto, but in a way that is much more coherent with my own philosophy. Maybe this is because its origin was also quite personal.
Cute Accelerationism took us by surprise. Maya and I had maintained a friendship since 2014, mostly over messaging apps, because I lived in Australia and Maya lived in the UK. Something strange happened, simultaneously for both of us, at the end of 2019, when we suddenly realised that we were more than just best friends. It took us a while to admit this to each other, but we were in love, and falling in love arrived with a huge burst of creativity for both of us — it was like being possessed by cute demons. One of its offspring was a joke about how we had shed our previously dark and ominous terminator skins and become ‘cute accelerationists’. In early 2020 we promised Minority Report, a webzine/art journal in Melbourne that we would write a text on cute accelerationism for one of their issues, but somehow three years passed without us being able to clearly pin down and articulate what exactly cute accelerationism was in any rigorous, philosophical way. I think this is because we were living it so closely and intensely and we had no means of stepping back and taking stock of what was happening. As well as the unforeseen event of falling in love blowing up both our lives and leaving us completely ungrounded, Maya was exploring their gender and experimenting with cuteness in a very embodied and sensory way. Philosophy is nothing unless it is lived! But because cute accelerationism, like every accelerationism, is a transcendental philosophy, it doesn’t just suffice to write about empirical or personal experience–you have to understand what the conditions are that make that experience possible. So we had to wait for the chaos of ungrounding to die down and for all the glitter to settle before finally being able to step back and theorise the mechanisms that lay behind the process of cutification that had totally glomped us both.
MBK: Yes, for a long time it wasn’t clear just what this thing was; from the start it was simultaneously a silly joke and an entirely serious thought the vastness of which we couldn’t yet gauge. So there was an urgency, but also a certainty that something was going to come out of it, somehow, at some point, if we just let it happen.
We were then invited to do an audiovisual presentation at Unsound in Krakow in 2023, and we compiled a version of the text for that, which I performed, unfortunately, on my own, because Amy had visa problems. The book as such only really emerged at the last minute, over a very hectic couple of months during which we did a great deal of new research, laid out the philosophical coordinates, finalised the text, and wrote the extensive endnotes. We tried to keep the main text as smooth, short, and sweet as possible. It contains parts that go right back to the initial explosion in 2020. The endnotes are its belatedly-discovered unconscious. They are basically us trying to understand what we’d done, filling in the background, and identifying all kinds of unexpected links back to work we had written in the past.
As for Amy, so for me, this book feels like a continuation of something, after innumerable interruptions — I’ve been running Urbanomic since 2007, editing and promoting others’ work and seeing various trains of thought develop and mutate, while having little time to formulate my own positions. But real thinking takes an encounter; it occurs when something happens that forces you to think differently. I took advantage of it to reformulate certain philosophical obsessions of my own that all of my ‘industry’ experience has only served to confirm, and to extend some lines of thought I began to outline in the 2017 essay ‘Hyperplastic Supernormal’, commissioned by the artist Pamela Rosenkranz for her Venice Biennial project Our Product.
As a book that was written ‘in between’ the two of us, Cute Accelerationism inevitably became something different to what either of us would have written alone, and expresses the surplus value produced by our coming together. It also alerted us to the curious complementarity of our respective modes of writing. Amy always wants to begin from having an overall idea of the shape of the text as a whole, whereas I’m always feeling my way outward from minute sensory cues that I am trying to describe because I vaguely sense that they contain something I need to write about. So with the two of us together, by the time we meet in the middle we’ve achieved total saturation at all scales, from microfeels to megaconcepts!
Ultimately, Cute Accelerationism has been an object lesson in allowing things to arrive when they are ready (although I wasn’t always all that patient with it!). It has been published at a moment when — although it’s been on the cultural radar for over a decade — there is a general upsurge in interest in Cute as a significant, curious thing out there in the world that we’ve all submitted to, but haven’t really come to terms with yet.
2. What is the cute and what is its potential in the acceleration and for the accelerationism?
MBK: We could define accelerationism, broadly, as a stance for which technocapitalist modernity is irreducible to all prior human social formations, coming from the ‘outside’, with vastly unpredictable effects which cannot be ‘made sense’ of in their own time. Accelerationism sees the resulting disruptions of society, human identity, and historical certainty not as a threat to nature, humanity, tradition, or the social order, but as a vector of emancipation from all of the conservatism, exclusion, and chauvinism that ‘the human’ and its attendant categories have served to enforce in the past.
Accelerationism therefore adopts whatever it feels to be the most transformative aspects of this process as both an object of study and an opportunity for participation in the unfolding of a future that will not obey the certainties of the past. It extrapolates the vectors of transformation into problematic configurations that lie beyond the current horizon of experience, then transplants those configurations back into the present as productive forces (a kind of science fiction, or what’s known as ‘hyperstition’). In doing so, then, accelerationism seeks to make itself a machine part for the intensification of tendencies that don’t have any finality, but point outside of all known coordinates.
Although as Amy said, Cute Accelerationism has its origins in our attempts to think the shape of what we felt taking hold of us during a particular period in our ‘personal’ lives, it immediately became a philosophical problem for us too, and then eventually it led us from our own inability to resist becoming-cute, to the question of Cute as a wider cultural force. We decided that Cute was one of these intense points where human culture is interacting with, and being altered by, something that we don’t yet have a grasp of. And we saw how Cute was accelerating, intensifying all around us. It seems to be everywhere, infiltrating all aspects of our lives, sometimes in ways that are utterly incongruous, totally at odds with prior cultural norms. Where does it come from? What does it want? Is there even a singular ‘it’? Sure, to a certain extent cuteness is a prominent twenty-first century aesthetic and commercial tendency that is being exploited to sell commodities. Sure, our sensitivity to it seems to be the product of evolutionary imperatives. And yet, at its cutting (or cuting) edge, where humans are helplessly compelled to produce ever more acute forms of cuteness, even using their own bodies as materials for it, strange new mutations of desire are emerging, new forms of life that seem to serve neither Nature nor Capital.
Of course, a great deal had already been written on cuteness and its various peculiarities and paradoxes. But beginning from the assumption that we don’t yet know what Cute can do, rather than collecting empirical observations or making attempts at cultural theory, we were able to see these peculiarities as glimpses into an entity that is interacting with humans and transforming them in unprecedented ways. We try to produce a transcendental portrait of this Thing in its most abstract form. As for the ‘paradoxes’ of Cute, what if they are only paradoxes from the restricted point of view of our existing cultural constraints? For instance ‘cute aggression’ — when you love something so much you want to squeeze it to death — seems to express an impossible combination of aggressive and care-taking behaviours associated with ‘opposed’ binary genders, but maybe it’s this binarity and this impossibility that Cute is calling into question, from a perspective external to our current socio-psychological conditions.
So, combined with our own encounter with becoming-cute, a philosophical approach — specifically, an approach via accelerationism, itself a mutation of transcendental philosophy — allowed us to think Cute differently. The ‘symptoms’ we examine include a reversibility between subject and object and between binary gender roles eventually leading to their dissolution, a reformatting of the relation between sexuality and social reproduction, a fragmentation of libidinal investments, a collective intensification of abstract sensory triggers, and perhaps most important from a wider political point of view, a reevaluation of the power of passivity and submission and the relinquishing of all manner of masculinist constraints upon the defence of fixed identity and the avoidance of ‘shameful’ and ‘embarrassing’ behaviour and affects…. Well, these symptoms all seemed strangely familiar to us. All of the important aspects of the uncontrollable process of falling helplessly in love turned out to be subprograms of Cute. And both processes are temporally anomalous: they can only possibly make sense anastrophically (via ‘backward’ causality).
3. How does this dialogue with xenofeminism?
AI: Like xenofeminism, cute/acc rejects humanism and biological determinism; it is intensely allied with technology and the synthetic; it understands the digital and the material not as separate, antagonistic realms, but as integral components of a complex feedback loop in which developments on one side lead to changes in the other (and vice versa), and it sees the impetus behind social and bodily change as intrinsically collective. Both xenofeminism and cute/acc are oriented toward an ‘alien future’, a destination that cannot be known in advance (as Maya says above of accelerationism in general, both seek the ‘intensification of tendencies that don’t have any finality, but point outside of all known coordinates’) but their means of moving toward this alien future are very, very different.
Contrary to xenofeminism, cute/acc doesn’t posit a voluntaristic political subject as its agent (collective or otherwise) which, in my opinion, makes it more of a classic accelerationist philosophy, and this in turn means it really has no use for the ideas that made xenofeminism so distinct: reason, universalism, normativity, hegemony, etc. The role played by the subject in cute/acc is one of active passivity: it’s about being strong enough to let the interesting things that are happening — including to oneself — happen (counterintuitively, you have to be ‘strong’ to do this, because it is always simpler and more acceptable to resist), whereas the collective subject of xenofeminism, just like the promethean subject of left accelerationism, considers itself as being capable of actively imposing a political will on history. Desire for political action can easily collapse into needing or becoming a Daddy — Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis of the ways in which this occurs in Anti-Oedipus is as relevant today as it ever was — and I think the xenofeminist manifesto succumbs to this sometimes (to say nothing of left accelerationism!): it is ceaselessly telling its readers what they ‘must’ do.
This was always something that I found troubling about the xenofeminist manifesto. Looking back over my writing, there are two texts in particular that appear to have been fundamental to the formulation, in the wake of Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation, of the passive subject that appears in Cute Accelerationism. The first is my contribution to Mikkel Bindslev’s Shanghai Frequencies (2020), particularly the section entitled ‘Zigzags’, which is a sort of protracted traumatic vivisection of the xenofeminist manifesto, and the second is ‘The Asymmetry of Love’, the afterword I wrote for the Gruppo di Nun’s Revolutionary Demonology (2023). Both explore modes of active passivity as a critical rejoinder, directly, then indirectly, to the voluntarism of xenofeminism’s universalist ‘no one in particular’. In homage to VNS Matrix’s ‘Big Daddy Mainframe’ (from their 1991 ‘Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century’), one of the conceptual personae and key antagonists of Cute Accelerationism is Daddy Admin. Cute is explicitly anti-Daddy.
Finally, both are transfeminist manifestos (among other things), and although cute accelerationism is not at odds with the ontological naturalism of the xenofeminist manifesto, I think it contains much more fully formulated theories of sex, gender, and the body.
4. Does the book intend to trace some kind of libidinal economy of the cute? Exists a libidinal content in the cute?
MBK: Of course, what else could it be? In the book we identify three circuits of Cute. These are libidinal assemblages that emerge with the ‘discovery’ of Cute within history and its gradual determination, firstly within natural evolution, then within the capitalist economy, and subsequently within the microcircuits of a ‘postmodern’ networked culture. (We also discuss a potential fourth circuit, in relation to AI). These circuits describe how desire, new social formations, means of production, and the economy all participate in the intensification of Cute, but each circuit also has its limits, its braking mechanisms, as well as its lines of flight that allow Cute to escape elsewhere — a new circuit. Our model is certainly that of Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: the machinic immanence of supposedly personal libidinal investments with social, technological, and economic spheres.
AI: While cute accelerationism is a fundamentally libidinal philosophy, this doesn’t mean it’s about conscious, individualised desires. This relates back to what I was saying before about the passive subject of cute. Cute’s agency belongs to a feminised idea of desire — desire that precedes the ego and construction of the ‘I’, which is inserted into the process of desiring only at the very last moment, even if it takes itself to have been the agent all along. The ‘I’ is also the part that ‘stops things from happening’ (to paraphrase from the book). This is a cyberfemininist point: the ‘I’ — the fully formed, autonomous subject, ‘the human’ (aka ‘Man’) — is the part of the process that looks back at desire and tries to control and contain it. It’s the One to the cyberfeminist Zero. Accessing the transformative, libidinal power of cute involves bypassing the ego–with all its guilt, its self-consciousness, its shame–and letting things in, allowing oneself to be vulnerable and silly, channelling intensities, making new connections, experimenting with fragments (or moé-elements) rather than identities, sliding along the infinite surface of cute and not knowing where any of this is taking you in advance. As individuated, self-conscious, specifically-embodied subjects, we inhabit only a very small part of a much larger, ‘virtual body’, capable of affects and desires we are only just beginning to learn how to map out.
5. In Brazil, there is some theorising about the Becoming-travesti of the world or ‘popular cyborgism’, when cisgender people start looking for procedures to become more and more “dolls”, I think this dialogues with Becoming-cute. What do you think about this?
AI: Definitely. Travesti culture, popular cyborgism, and dollification are all ways of exploring the virtual body. Although the specific techniques each favours may differ, all are pushing against the edges of the so-called ‘natural’ body and the very limited forms of desire that are supposed to go along with it, most emphatically that of reproductive heterosexual desire. What other bodies and forms of desire are we capable, collectively, of producing? What as yet unimagined affects and intensities are out there to be discovered?
For instance, in Cute Accelerationism, we talk about ‘flatmaxxing’: how, thanks largely to social media, contemporary experiences of the body are being altered by our tacit understanding of ourselves from the point of view of a two-dimensional image — from simple things like cute aegyo hand gestures that frame the face as if it were already an image, to more profound aspirations like that of ‘becoming anime’ — as well as the various forms of desire that correspond to the two-dimensional regime, such as moé and nijikon (having affectionate feelings for two-dimensional characters). Moé is especially interesting because it operates in a permutational way that deals with libidinal fragments. Everything it cares about exists prior to subjects and identities, and because of this I think it provides the model for the future of gender once the ancient relic of the binary finally rots away. Cute is highly technological and has been since its emergence in the biological realm as a modality of supernormalisation. All of these experiments with synthetic forms of embodiment and desire, both material and digital, are just a continuation of the trajectory originally charted out by cute supernormalisation.
MBK: It should be abundantly clear that, if trans- means refusing to just rawdog whatever default character skin life has allotted you, it also means more than ping-ponging between binary presets. Here it overlaps with Cute, describing the opening up of a space where the options assembled under what has been called ‘gender’ can proliferate into a multitude of sensory and aesthetic possibilities, and from which more and more techniques for self-construction will emerge.
Transgenders are at the forefront, since they already form one of those collective subjects which, having been excluded from being ‘properly human’, doesn’t necessarily invest a great deal of hope in that category or its preservation, and is therefore primed for accelerationism. n1x’s Gender Acceleration: A Blackpaper (g/acc) already hit us with a fierce trans accelerationism back in 2018, and as we began our journey into cute/acc, it became very clear to us that trans individuals and communities are simply doing accelerationism, and that this is far more interesting than those who are pontificating about it or making accelerationism into a subject for academic debate, whether positively or negatively.
Gender transition in all its forms is perhaps the emblematic accelerationist adventure of the contemporary moment, since it brings together refusal of the given, submission to a process whose outcome cannot be entirely foreseen, self-production, technological mediation, and the emergence via electronic networks of collective means of production and propagation that bypass state institutions. Trans- desires exemplify radical contemporary forms of self-construction. Increasingly visible and audible today, they are at the forefront of the development of techniques for transformation, and attract all the fear, anger, and spite one would expect for this reason. In the end, though, euphoria and collective affirmation will always prove more powerful than the weight of scorn, negativity, and complacency.
The process of making yourself cute — pursuing a ‘just-right’ version of yourself by any means necessary, today usually initiated by the mediation of digital imaging technologies — is too easily written off as ‘trivial’ or ‘unreal’. In Cute Accelerationism we talk about the whole set of self-production methods as ‘rigging’. Rigging is synonymous with the gradual discovery of the virtual body or the ‘egg’. Each level of organisation of the body, whether that of social role, self-presentation, clothing, cosmetics, hormones, or anatomy, has a stratified aspect — the rigid grammar within which one is assigned a place by the default mechanisms of natural development or the discursive power structures of society. But alongside that stratified body, there is always a nonstratified, fluid, or egglike (unformed, pluripotential) body, a pool of possibilities which can be accessed in order to enter into becomings. We are not saying this is simple or easy to do, we are not saying there are no barriers. Both the actual body and the virtual body are real, with real effects. We are not saying that it is not an ordeal. But we are saying that we should not trust those who refer us to a bedrock of unchanging ‘nature’, or who forbid or block transformations on the grounds that they ‘go too far’, are ‘impossible’, ‘unnatural’, or ‘merely superficial’.
As Amy already mentioned, a crucial part of Cute involves ‘letting go’, a passivity in relation to one’s own compulsions, a passion that allows one to initiate transformations that might indeed at first seem either unreal or impossible. At the level of lived experience, transition is profoundly accelerationist, it’s a positive feedback loop, and involves temporal anomalies. Think about when you fall in love: everything snowballs in ways you couldn’t have imagined, and eventually you realise that everything before that moment had been leading up to that event. In the same way, you only become an egg when you realise you always have been, which is what effectively makes you one…and then all manner of transforms become available, even though you might have to undo a great deal of stratification in order to activate them. It’s a form of labour, a labour of self-love; we talk about it as an initiation, the ordeal of the egg.
Becomings start with the most ‘trivial’ things, weird thoughts that emerge from who-knows-where — What would it be like to put on a skirt? To cut all your hair off? To wear cat ears or a tail? — only to become slow slidings in a direction that doesn’t even stop at the human, but heralds a kind of hyperplasticity, a trans-ness that goes way beyond questions of gender. Importantly, it is also collective: to post your cute pics is to socially circulate and ratify your transforms — which is a part of making them real. In turn, their propagation will provoke weird thoughts in others, enabling them to discover their own egg. The ordeal is also a relay of euphoria.
Rather than striving for agency, the most powerful and courageous move, and the most demanding one, can be to just give in, even or especially if you don’t know where it’s going, even if Daddy Admin says it’s silly and insignificant. A great deal of what went into Cute/Acc was based on simply trying to describe what is at stake in this type of submission — as Nick Land says, ‘revolution is not duty, but surrender’. Like lovers, cuties traffic with demons, they know how deep the superficial runs, and they know how to become transformers, that’s why they’re accelerationists.
It’s something I think many of us have experienced over time on social media. The supposedly ‘evil algorithm’ is like a demon, it solicits us to try out different identities, challenges us to expose ourselves, and makes us reflect upon which fictions of ourselves we are willing to experimentally commit to, and then introduce into the IRL world. Some of the most interesting artists and thinkers today are people who are disciplining themselves to give in to this process as fully as possible, and reporting back.
6. ‘Evading all discipline, sliding across all possible surfaces’ cute is a deterritorialization force?
MBK: Cute seems to be altering the way we see ourselves and others, our conduct, our patterns of behaviour, and our libidinal investments, in ways which — to put it in the terminology of Deleuze and Guattari — exemplify the deterritorializing and decoding forces of capitalism, those that tend to dismantle, melt down, and break apart things inherited from the past and detach them from their social codes that governed their relation to one another. In turn, the reterritorializing and recoding forces of capitalism are continually recuperating cuteness, presenting it in consumable form, slotting it into the great axiomatic with which capitalism replaces all previous social forms — the first axiom being that everything must be profitable. A side-effect of this is what D&G call ‘miraculation’ — everything seems to emanate from Capital — but this is an illusion we mustn’t fall for, on pain of inertia and despair. It’s not that capitalism ‘did’ Cute or that Cute is ‘merely capitalism’, it has its own specificities.
Crucially, we think that the deterritorializing tendencies unleashed by Cute are only ever partially reterritorialized, owing to certain features inherent to Cute which ally it with acceleration and, in a weird way, with the capitalist process itself.
Cute is inherently escalative. It’s a process that takes hold of you. Firstly, you can’t simply consume cuteness without becoming cute yourself, turning the subject into a cute object. Cute somehow burrows right inside the power relation between subject and object, between consumer and commodity. Secondly, cute is inherently excessive, it always invites you to make it more refined, more insinuating, more cute — after all, the word ‘cute’ comes from ‘acute’, meaning sharp, poignant. Cute is always too cute. The huge landmass of cute objects — funkopops, squishmallows, cat videos, etc. etc. — does not exhaust the Cute process, which seems capable of compelling us to take it to further and further extremes. ‘We haven’t seen anything yet’.
In particular, we pay close attention to the ‘third circuit of cute’, consisting of otaku-type subjects, who are certainly consumers, but who because of their marginality place themselves at a certain remove from the capitalist axioms. Through practices of self-objectification, refinement, reappropriation, and recontextualisation, they are collectively driving the acceleration of cute desire, deterritorializing much faster than the capitalist economy would countenance, but then feeding the results back into the wider market, and thus effecting broader transformations. On the cut(t)ing edge where capitalist axioms scramble to catch up with these injections of deterritorialized desire, Cute is flush to and indistinguishable from the ever more acute intensification of capitalism ‘itself’ (cute/acc, or cute = acc?).
7. Much of the criticism (especially Marxist and\or conservative) of so-called “Identitarianism” and kawaii-otaku-cute culture is that such cultures “alienate” young people. Is there any way to positively reinterpret this criticism?
MBK: Accelerationism in all of its forms has always been about making alienation a positive force. We took a great deal of inspiration from work on otaku by Japanese philosopher Azuma Hiroki and psychoanalyst Saito Tamaki, who take seriously and stand up for the anomalous forms of desire that emerge from otaku culture. More generally, I see the whole book as a love letter to young people who find themselves with no place in history or in the socially-acceptable version of the future. Outcasts and marginals who pursue their strange ‘antisocial’ compulsions regardless of the cost, refuse their ‘proper place’ in social reproduction, and form connections with one another in unaccustomed ways. We have no idea what they might produce. And those who preach at cuteness from a position of assumed political purity often reveal dubious libidinal investments of their own, as we found out when we examined Tiqqun’s Theory of the Young-Girl, to which we dedicate a very long endnote in the book.
If by ‘identitarianism’ you mean LGBTQ+ sexual and gender identities, there is surely little harm in making these small efforts to stretch your imagination so as to make others feel welcome in the world, and I feel nothing but joy for a generation able to give voice to the proliferating madness of desire, hence the love letter. As for pronouns, experiments with language are anything but trivial — to imagine that alterations within basic grammar are an apolitical diversion would be naive. I understand the resistance, and even the ridicule, because we are dealing with incredibly entrenched social norms here. But to ask someone to adapt their use of pronouns is actually not an imposition, it’s a generous act, since it offers them a chance to expand their perception of the world around them and develop a more nuanced understanding of people they interact with.
However, for us, one of the watchwords from the outset was to begin from euphoria and see where that led, rather than using dysphoria to plead for acceptance and inclusion, rather than protesting, critiquing, or trying to claim and defend an identity. What we invoke is transformation, and transformation is an ordeal and a collective relay of euphoria. This is entirely in line with the perennial irresponsibility of accelerationism, in the sense that accelerationism is refractory to any political position (the attempt to make accelerationism politically responsible — left accelerationism — fell apart quickly enough). We are writing from and for joy, against all of those, of whatever political stripe, who seek to impose, defend, or recover ironclad identities. But we are not aligned with those who dedicate their lives to petitioning the administrative powers for official permission to exist. Instead, we belong with those who persist at a weird angle to, and in spite of, Daddy Admin, those who become imperceptible by submitting to their queer compulsions, those who disappear into another dimension (Cute Experiments Lain). Who knows the forces harboured by those who the ‘critics’ may judge to be alienated, apolitical, domesticated by capital, wasting their time on self-absorbed trivia? Of course they make you angry, because you can’t command them. Cuteness cares nothing for judgement, and is infuriating to power.
8. There’s a lot about “cute culture” on the Asian continent (especially Japan and China). You’ve both written a few things about China and sinofuturism (especially Amy). Is there anything that links the two themes? Does Sinofuturism have a Becoming-Cute? I think it’s interesting to note that both the Neochina described by Land and the Cute described by you are things that come from the future and ‘will very soon no longer be even remotely human’.
MBK: We deliberately adapted that quote, among others, from Land in order to mark our departure from certain stylistic and aesthetic choices that had become definitive of accelerationism — largely thanks to Nick’s brilliant writing — while signalling our fidelity to the core tenets of accelerationism as we understand them.
AI: Cute came to China via Japan, and has taken root in its current popular instantiation, meng (萌) — to bud or sprout — through the minor concept of moé rather than through the major concept of kawaii (ke ai [可爱] in Chinese). Perhaps this is not irrelevant from the point of view of accelerationism, since moé is a neologism that arose in Japan specifically to describe the experience of being attracted to things that were not, and could never be, human, whereas kawaii has always had a much wider field of reference. Another aspect of cute culture in China that interests us — and there is an extensive note about this in the book — is tangping or ‘lying flat’. Tangping is an example — like those mentioned by Maya above — of a subculture created by alienated and marginalised youth, and nurtured by social media and the internet (despite censorship by the Chinese state), that has adopted cuteness as a defining aesthetic — not only in the form of memes of cute, sleepy animals lying flat on the their backs (a symbol of the tangpingists’ refusal to play their allotted roles in social reproduction), but also, more laterally and in a way that recalls Cute’s integral drive to subtract dimensions, in the affirmation of flatness as an emblem of the freedom that can be won by refusing the normative lifescript and using marginality as a counteractualising force. When Nietzsche writes about the coming of the overhuman in the famous accelerationist fragment, he predicts that it will arrive in the wake of a great ‘flattening’. Flatmaxxing, nijikon, 2D love, superflatness, tangping…we live in the era of the two-dimensional, so it follows that the overhuman will be an enormous cutie.
MBK: Asia, in particular Japan, has certainly been pioneering in Cute culture, but as we point out, Cute has appeared in different guises at different places and points in modern history. Only in the internet age is it becoming a global culture, with Western forms of cuteness in dialogue with Japanese kawaii, Korean aegyo, and Chinese meng — a dialogue between nations and languages that involves misunderstandings and mistranslations, exoticisms and fetishisation, and unexpected connections. Sometimes it meets with public opprobrium, blamed for ruining the youth, sometimes it enjoys institutional and even state support (as in the case of the Japanese government’s promotion of kawaii as part of ‘Cool Japan’).
Did Cute originate in Japan? Is kawaii a separate phenomenon from Disney cuteness? Did capitalism produce cute or is it inherent to the human species? Is it a product of mass psychological debilities inflicted on the Japanese population by the Second World War? Is it a way for stressed-out capitalist subjects to find safety and security? Or, on the other hand, is it an evolutionary trait that was just waiting for animated GIFs and plushy factories in order to fully blossom? None of these alone provides a suitable perspective from which to interrogate Cute. As philosophers, our method is transcendental — that is, we ‘deduce’ a problematic point of convergence that is out of sight, beyond the horizon of any nation or culture, and we ‘start’ from there. We posit Cute as a problematic abstract entity that is slowly revealing itself via our desire to feel it out and continually intensify our models of it — a desire which is apparently inexhaustible. This means that we no longer think Cute in terms of origins. We see it instead as a sigint (signals intelligence) problem: the signal can be detected more or less clearly in various phenomena. We have to track it as if all of these phenomena were converging toward something, rather than imagining that we can trace them back to a single causal origin, either historical or evolutionary. Cultures discover Cute, but Cute is autonomous from any of its particular instantiations. What makes it philosophically interesting is its problematic nature — which is also to say, Cute is an Idea. As such, it doesn’t submit to disciplinary categories, and can only be truly known via participation.
