The Cybernetic Limit to Anarcho-Accelerationism
“The story goes like this: Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity as renaissance rationalitization and oceanic navigation lock into commoditization take-off. Logistically accelerating techno-economic interactivity crumbles social order in auto-sophisticating machine runaway. […]
Emergent planetary commercium trashes the Holy Roman Empire, the Napoleonic Continental system, the Second & Third Reich, and the Soviet International, cranking-up world disorder through compressing phases.”(Nick Land, “Meltdown,” 1994)
Accelerationism comes from a long tradition of analyzing capitalism as a physical system governed by laws of motion. “It is the peculiar nature of capitalism,” writes the American economist Robert Heilbroner, that “led the eighteenth-century philosophe, the Abbé Mably, to muse, “Is society, then, a branch of physics?”” (Heilbroner, Marxism, p.119). In response, accelerationism answers Mably’s question with yes.
The accelerationist claim is the inevitability of the state’s failure to withstand capitalism’s imperative for infinite expansion. Capitalism introduces a critique of social order by substituting its own rule for the codes of previous social forms.
In his 1980 book on Marxism Heilbroner continues to write that the uniquely scientific property of capitalism “allows Marx, as Smith and Ricardo before him, to envisage society as a system in motion whose trajectory and destination can be deduced from its expansive tendencies and its channeling institutions” (Heilbroner, p.119). The question for acceleratioinism is: what do we want to accelerate?
Marxism is a philosophy for deducing possible futures from the internal construction of capitalism as a specific mode of production. Capitalism is an economic structure made up of productive relations and forces of production. Movements of history emerge from the disorder produced by extreme tension in the economic structure.
“If anything summarizes this flux of contrary forces, it is Marx’s word anarchy, a term he uses to describe the contradictions inherent in the idea of capital itself. “The real barrier to capitalist production,” he writes, “is capital itself.” By this Marx calls attention to the irreconcilable conflict between the forces of production that are ever more technically interconnected, scientifically complex, and rationally unified, and the relations of production that remain stubbornly individualist, competitive, and antagonistic. The doom of capitalism is that it creates technical structures of production that exceed its institutions of social control.” (Heilbroner, Marxism, p.123–4)
It is precisely the capacity to exceed institutional control that makes capitalism an agent for its own revolutionary overturning. For the British philosopher Nick Land capitalism itself is the most advanced critique. As the Godfather of accelerationism Land discerns no contradiction in accelerating the inhuman processes in capitalism.
Anarcho-Accelerationism can be explained in one sentence: the exponential curve of accelerating capitalism is the uphill battle facing the state in its campaign for control. The first law of cybernetics installs a fundamental antagonism between the state as a regulator mechanism, and capitalism as an entropic disorder accelerator.
The process of acceleration is already discernable in the disorder distributed by the capitalist mode of production. A widening rift in capacities is demonstrated when the CEO of Google testifies before congress:
https://youtu.be/-nSHiHO6QJI
“Why is it, wondered Rep. Steve Chabot (R-OH), that when he Googled the Republicans’ proposed healthcare bill in 2017, only negative stories popped up? Rep. Steve King (R-IA) asked Pichai why his granddaughter saw negative news about him on her iPhone. When Pichai informed him that Google doesn’t make iPhones, King offered lamely, “It might have been an Android.” Meanwhile, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) cited a report by PJ Media that claims 96 percent of search results for President Trump are from liberal media sites, a stat that has previously been debunked.
Rep. Zoe Lofgren of California lobbed a softball at Pichai, asking him to walk through how search works. Pichai explained that Google’s algorithms crawl the web for keywords and rank pages based on more than 200 signals including relevancy, freshness, and popularity. “So it’s not some little man sitting behind the curtain figuring out what we’re going to show the user?” Lofgren replied” (Lapowsky 2018).
We have, on the one hand, the rapidity of capital versus the slow bureaucratic crawl of regulatory practices on the other. This is a latency problem. The widening schism in technical capacities evidences a power differential that is quickly becoming indissoluble. How will these old men in congress ever understand the complexity demanded by Google or the global capitalist system in which it is situated? Ashby’s law of says “every good regulator of a system must be a model of that system.” Global technocapital versus a decrepit regulator machine.
For anarcho-accelerationism, the only way out is through. Political praxis has to evade capture via complexity itself. Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety is the doctrine for a militant anarcho-cybernetics.
Accelerationism owes its defining impetus to the philosophy of Deleuze & Guattari. Together, they write in their book Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972) a new theory called schizoanalysis. Deleuze & Guattari credit the Left-Freudian Wilhelm Reich for being the first practitioner of schizoanalysis. He is credited with the discovery and application of Marxist political theory fused with Freudian psychoanalysis. This synthesis founds the first thesis of schizoanalysis.
- Every unconscious libidinal investment is social and bears upon a socio-historical field.
- Unconscious libidinal investments of group or desire are distinct from preconscious investments of class or interest.
- Non-familial libidinal investments of the social field are primary in relation to familial investments.
- Social libidinal investments are distinguished according to two poles: a paranoiac, reactionary, fascisizing pole and a schizoid revolutionary pole.[7]
As Eugene Holland rightly suggests, the machine theory of Deleuze & Guattari takes as much influence from Georges Bataille as it does from Karl Marx.
“Anti-Oedipus represents a kind of “natural history” of human societies […] according to which social forms — like all other life-forms — are understood as contradictory dissipative structures; they are antientropically and irreversibly organized, but only in order to dissipate that much more of the practically infinite supply of energy provided to the planet by light and heat radiation from the sun.”
(Eugene Holland, “From Schizophrenia to Social Control” in Deleuze & Guattari: New Mappings in Politics, Philosophy, and Culture, p.66)
On their cybernetic view of life and society, the state is an amalgam of institutions that are anti-entropically oriented. Capital itself constitutes a direct investment in the entropic disorder that undoes previous social formations. Accelerationism recognizes this entropic propensity. Militant anarcho-cybernetics goes further to invest in undoing the capitalist reterritorialization sustaining the extraction of surplus-value.
The Terrifying Prospect of Capitalism: Power and Social Inscription for Universal History
For Deleuze & Guattari, capitalism is distinct from other social forms because it directly invests in the kind of disorder that is toxic to other kinds of social organization. Previous social forms expend enormous amounts of energy to prevent the kind of decay that undoes the cultural codes that bind society. Capitalism, on the other hand, is not bound together by meaning, beliefs, or customs. Instead, it actively subverts them.
Deleuze & Guattari generalize a typology of previous social formations according to ways of organizing consumption and distributing debt. Primitive societies are organized around systems of finite and mobile blocks of debt. Consumption of goods is organized in a collective potlach exchange that requires each family-clan to contribute. The finite blocks of debt circulate around a patchwork of alliances so that no single family clan can achieve a permanent position of dominance over the others.
Organized in this way, consumption plays a role in preventing the formation of the state. Family-clans maintain their place in the symbolic order by contributing to the massive expenditure of goods, preventing the accumulation of a surplus necessary for a state apparatus. Potlach systems, rites of passage, shamanic traditions, and chieftanship all contribute to preventing the crystallization of power in any rigid hierarchy or leader. For Deleuze & Guattari’s machine theory of society, the primitive debt system forms collective social mechanisms for warding-off the formation of a state.
The Body of the Despot in the Formation of the State
Deleuze & Guattari derive an unusual anthropology from Friedrich Nietzsche’s genealogy. Likewise, their universal history is like a genealogy of capitalism and Oedipus. The despotic body is the second socius in their logical typology of social forms
Their concept of the State relies a historical movement “from clans to empires,” or “from bands to kingdoms” (A Thousand Plateaus, p. 359). The despotic socius is military conquest and political domination.
Military conquest is the precondition for the despotic social form. It comes from without. “They come like fate, without reason, consideration, or pretext; they appear as lightning appears, too terrible, too convincing, too sudden, too different even to be hated” (On the Genealogy of Morals, II, 17). The agents of state formation emerge from outside the primitive socius. As such, Deleuze & Guattari historicize Nietzsche’s concept of the blond beast and combine it with Marx’s Asiatic mode of production. What results is an economic and libidinal model for how production and consumption are organized.
The socius or social body is not reducible to a mode of production. Rather, the socius includes the organization productive forces (Marx) along with the institution of consumption and debt (Nietzsche). For the Marxist category of distribution, Deleuze & Guattari substitute social inscription. Inscription is the term because it underscores the agency of representation in shaping what people desire.
Deleuze & Guattari are invested in exposing the role played by social institutions in repressing desire, making it conform to the particular needs of the social form. So, in the same manner every historical epoch has its mode of production, every social form correlates to a particular regime for which desires are repressed, affirmed, or allowed.
Distributing goods of social production — as inscription — simultaneously inscribes a pattern to be repeated — the code of the social form. The code is not primarily economic, but equally social and libidinal.
Only through the concept of the code do we apprehend the fuller import of Deleuze & Guattari’s formula. They are interested in how, and to what degree, social institutions repress desire through alienating representations — inscribing production on the socius. Why do people fight for their servitude as though it were their salvation? Representation is the key for understanding how desire comes to repress itself.
But production does not occur on the socius; it is only recorded there. Production really occurs between the machines in the first connective synthesis. Only the second disjunctive synthesis is responsible for recording production, inscribing it on the socius. The third synthesis of consumption is the final production of subjectivity: “So that’s what it was! So that’s me!” But it is production that causes the image. Inscribed representations are only capable of appropriating production in a more or less effective illusion, a quasi-cause. The quasi-cause — the earth, despot, capital — all appear as the agent of production. But each conceals the fuller extent of dependence on the machines in the first connective synthesis of production.
The debt relations of primitive society — finite and mobile — are overcoded by the despotic machine. Debt become infinite and unidirectional. All production is owed to the despot. Flows of matter-energy, goods, and money are all collected into the “bottomless coffers” of the despot. He appropriates all flow to himself. Direct appropriation is reserved for the despot, the exception to prove the rule. The patchwork of alliances and filiation from primitive society are overcoded by the state, a machine in which “parts and functions are delimited and coordinated, in which nothing whatever finds a place that has not first been assigned a ‘meaning’ in relation to the whole” (Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, II, 17).
The primitive machine takes the Earth itself as its quasi-cause, a socius or social body, from which all production emanates. Imperial society, however, takes the body of the despot for its quasi-cause. The despot is akin to a monotheistic God. He overcodes the patchwork of alliances and filiation to trace them back onto himself as their sole cause. The despot is like Freud’s primal father as the origin of fecundity. A dictator avows himself as the agent of production, to whom all surplus is owed. All production is traced back onto the body of the despot as the sole cause of production. What prevents capitalism from emerging is the overcoding that prevents a level of surplus beyond what is necessary for despotic control.
“When Etienne Balazs asks why capitalism wasn’t born in China in the thirteenth century, when all the necessary scientific and technical conditions nevertheless seemed to be present, the answer lies in the State, which closed the mines as soon as the reserves of metal were judged sufficient, and which retained a monopoly or a narrow control over commerce” (Anti-Oedipus, p.197).
What stands out in the above selection is the condition of sufficiency — having enough metal from the mines. The State plays a role in plugging the flows of production. The despot secures for itself a surplus value of code. By halting the flow of metal from the mines, the despotic regime excludes the emergence of an uncontrolled surplus value of flux which is the necessary precondition for capitalism. Only under capitalism is the whole interplay of sufficiency and need completely erased, converted into the imperative for infinite expansion. There is never enough profit, never enough capital; and no degree of exploitation is too obscene for the capitalist account books.
The two surplus values, one of code and the other of flux, are qualitatively different. Respectively, they correspond to the difference between a linear and an exponential rate of surplus extraction. The State overcodes production and gains a revenue through taxation. But capital extracts an ontological surplus value at the point of production. This difference, which we will see in greater detail below, is key for understanding how social production is organized on the socius. In the same drive for self-preservation, the primitive socius effectively wards off the formation of a state via strategies for The finite and mobile blocks of debt are diffused among the exogenous relations of alliance and filiation. In the same vein of self-preservation, the social form of despotism wards off the emergence of capital like death. It is crucial that the State plugs any flows that might escape overcoding. A degree of surplus is necessary to found and secure the State apparatus. But in every instance of production the flows threaten to explode the regime of codes by becoming a surplus value of flux, the emergence of private capital. And the previously infallible image of the despot withers away under the conditions of a global market authority.
The Body of Capital and the Surplus-Value of Flux
The primitive socius and the despot — what the two social machines share is what D&G call the “dread of decoded flows — flows of production, but also mercantile flows of exchange and commerce that might escape the State monopoly, with its tight restrictions and its plugging of flows” (Anti-Oedipus, p.197). Deleuze & Guattari assign a revolutionary agency to flows escaping social coding.
For Deleuze & Guattari, capitalism is an unspeakable potential that haunts all previous social formations. They emphasize the threat of decoded flows, and the possibility of a deterritorialized socius. The continued survival of the primitive or despotic social machine is threatened by anything that might escape the coding or overcoding respectively.
When flows of goods escape the potlach system, they engender an accumulation of wealth effecting the patchwork of alliance and filiation. The danger to the primitive machine lies in the possibility of an accumulation causing a family or clan to become dominant in a new, more permanent manner. Through accumulation, the surplus value of code, privilege coalesces around a singular point, and the diffuse network of relations is subdued to a power center.
The capitalist socius is unique for its transcendence from relying merely on social code to innovate its own axiomatic for furnishing a surplus-value. Even the desire for revolution can be incorporated into the logic of the system by adding another axiom. What was previously charged with revolutionary potential is decoded, axiomatized, reconverted into another cash cow. Even image of a communist revolutionary like Che Guevara is decoded from his historical context and his likeness is reterritoralized into the form of trendy t-shirt, another commodity among many. The desire for revolution finds its outlet in an outlet store.
The structuring role played by social coding is replaced by the cash nexus. Capitalism deterritorializes the socius, decoding all flows of matter-energy it can find into a universal quantitative equivalent for exchange. The value of goods is no longer determined by local codes of primitive society, nor the despotic decree from on high. Instead, value is determined immanently by the market. The organizing principle for production becomes the infinite accumulation of capital for its own sake. Then, the notion of massive expenditure which previously had its social utility in the potlach and the despot becomes unrecognizable to a capitalist society singly devoted to profit.
Under the relations of capitalism, production is no longer structured by the code inscribed on the socius. All production is organized around the continued extraction of surplus-value. Deleuze & Guattari write on the emergence of a new sort of asceticism by which all the needs of life are subordinated to the infinite drive for profit. Even the intrinsic utility of leisure time is decoded, reconverted into the. Every minute spent not working can be calculated in terms of an opportunity cost. People make a lifestyle out of never turning off, calling it the hustle or the gig economy.
Capitalist society does not produce for the sake of the despot’s enrichment, nor for the massive expenditure required by the primitive socius. Instead, workers in capitalism are alienated from their product at the point of production, and further alienated from the idea of massive expenditure altogether.
In a process unmediated by codes capitalism conjoins a flow of labor (deterritoralized wokers) with a flow of capital (deterritorialized money) (Bogue 1989, 101). What results is “the fundamental capitalist phenomenon of the transformation of the surplus value of code into a surplus value of flux (Anti-Oedipus, p.228). The infinite debt known to the despot is now owed to capital as the transcendent agent of production, the socius as quasi-cause. From this emanates all the notions of commodity fetishism, and fetishized capital. In the words of Marx, we enter into “an enchanted topsy-turvy world, in which Monsieur le Capital and Madame la Terre do their ghost walking as social characters and at the same time as mere things” (Marx, Capital III, p.830). These spectral agents of production are the social representation inscribed by the social form. The social body for capitalism is the body of capital. As such, all social relations seem to emanate from capital “the same capital as God-capital, whence all the forces of labor seem to emanate” (Anti-Oedipus, p.225). Here, Deleuze & Guattari’s metaphysics of production enter into the critique. Production does not happen on the socius, it is only recorded there. Production occurs via connections made in the first synthesis of desiring-production. Only in the second synthesis of disjunction is the path of production recorded in an inscription that is at once social and libidinal (on the socius and the BwO, respectively).
The social dynamics of capitalist society result from a great deterritorialization. The socius becomes the body of capital, replacing the body of the despot in a similar manner that the despot replaced the primitive socius of the earth. Only now in this second great deterritorialization, “alliance and filiation of primitive societies and the new, overcoded alliance and filiation of despotic societies are replaced by a ‘new-new filiation’ of industrial capital (money that begets money) and a ‘new-new alliance’ of commercial capital and finance capital” (Bogue 1989, p.101). The new lines of alliance and filiation explain the social dynamics of capitalism as a highly volatile
Capital appears as the quasi-cause of social production because beyond being physical things, land, capital, and labor are also “social relationships — namely, the right accorded to the owners of land and capital to exert a claim on production” (Heilbroner, p.103). The social right is confused for the physical reality of production — the definition of commodity fetishism. This misrecognition is the cornerstone of false consciousness.
Capitalism is constituted by relations “in which some classes work and others exert claims of ownership” (Heilbroner, p.105; bold mine). Capital cannot produce anything on its own. It can only appear to be productive in virtue of its reliance on labor. Capitalism is a particular organization of productive forces, a machine for extracting surplus-value. It is only an image of production. The foundation of capitalist ideology is the mis-identification of production with its inscription.
Thesis on Anarchism: Marxism
The central tenet of anarchist thought, as I mean to reproduce here, is the requirement that authority must be justified.
The asymmetrical wealth and power of the bourgeoisie as a class of owners is explained by its exerting disproportionate claims of social right. But their claims obfuscate the central process of production itself where labor is the productive element, not capital. Capital is productive only in virtue of exerting claims of ownership. As such, the owning class is granted an unjustified authority over those deprived of ownership and wealth. On the Marxist model, ethical justifications occur in the ideological superstructure rising from the economic base. There in the superstructure, fetishistic notions of capital as intrinsically valuable or productive effectively obscure the real production process which is marked by a dependence on labor. Fetishism itself is this “confusion of this social right with the physical reality of production” (Heilbroner, Marxism, p.103).
“Land, labor, and capital then appear only as things that “cooperate” to create social wealth, each contributing its measurable share, for which each is properly rewarded” (Heilbroner, 105). This serves to conceal the antagonism between whose who produce and those who exert claims of ownership to society’s production.
In their emphasis on the internal logic of capitalism, D&G are not far off from Marx & Engels in their Manifesto describing the revolutionizing agency of bourgeois economic development. “The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production.” On the historical materialist view, capitalism is both the most productive and most destructive moment of development. Marx & Engels trace capitalism as a social form that has overturned previous social forms of feudalism. Emanating from the underside of capitalism’s success in immense productivity, however, there are self-destructive tendencies that explain how billions of people are confined to poverty and threatened by irreversible planetary warming.
“[W]hy does [capitalism] keep its artists and even its scientists under such close surveillance — as though they risked unleashing flows that would be dangerous for capitalist production and charged with a revolutionary potential, so long as these flows are not co-opted or absorbed by the laws of the market? Why does it form in turn a gigantic machine for social repression-psychic repression, aimed at what nevertheless constitutes its own reality — the decoded flows?” (Anti-Oedipus, p.245).
Capitalism is qualitatively different from other social forms because it relies on disorder. It extracts surplus-value from decoding and deterritorializing the previous codes that organized and distributed production on the social body. Previous social forms enforce their codes against tendencies for disorder and deterritorialization. It is a constant labor and drudgery to enforce local codes and collect taxes. In so doing, the social machines effectively ward off the emergence of capitalism, or the generalized decoding of flows that constitutes the second movement of deterritorialization from the body of the despot to the body of capital.
Capitalism escapes through complexity and velocity. Accelerationism ramps up that process to escape from capitalism itself. Militant anarcho-cybernetics explores the prospects for “leaving the plane of capital, and never ceasing to leave it” (A Thousand Plateaus, p.472).
“The death of a social machine has never been heralded by a disharmony or a dysfunction; on the contrary, social machines make a habit of feeding on the contradictions they give rise to, on the crises they provoke, on the anxieties they engender, and on the infernal operations they regenerate. Capitalism has learned this, and has ceased doubting itself, while even socialists have abandoned belief in the possibility of capitalism’s natural death by attrition. No one has ever died from contradictions. And the more it breaks down, the more it schizophrenizes, the better it works, the American way.” (Anti-Oedipus, p.151).
Semio-Capitalism and Cybernetic Militancy
For Baudrillard, accelerationism is “a science fiction about the system returning to destroy itself.” In reality, the master’s tools do not break the master’s house. Revolution is an ideal first posited by the capitalist machine itself. It is the generalized decoding of flows which haunts all previous social formations. Even our ideas for how to overcome capitalism are fully anticipated by its institutions, its police, its banks.
Baudrillard, too, frames political antagonisms in cybernetic terms. Society is another kind of physics. “Such is the case with closed, or metastable, or functional, or cybernetic systems” because “the inertia of these systems works against them” (Baudrillard Reader, 123). Baudrillard cites the following: “All dissent must be of a higher logical type than that to which it is opposed” (Anthony Wilden, System and Structure: Essays in Communication and Exchange. London: Tavistock, 1977. p.xxvii). It is the capitalist system itself which gives rise to our subjectivities, and indeed makes intelligible our situation, but only in its own terms of exchange-value and infinite accumulation. Postmodern capitalism is the stage where all available courses of action are fully determined by the villainous agency of capital.
In Symbolic Exchange and Death, he writes, “you cannot defend against the code with political economy or “revolution.” All these old weapons (including those of the first order, the ethics and metaphysics of man and nature, use value, and other liberatory referentials) have been progressively neutralized by the general system, which is of a higher order” (Baudrillard Reader, p.122). Baudrillard levies a charge against liberal humanism (and anthropo-Marxism) for misunderstanding the functioning of capitalism. Capital’s hidden functioning lies at the level of representation, beyond the sphere of economic production. After the liquidation of liberatory referentials, politics contends only with images.
Baudrillard’s postmodern nihilism inaugurates an extreme doubt against all emancipatory projects. Semio-capitalism determines which possibilities even appear intelligible to us. When there is no progress, then there is only escape. Yet we are precluded from thinking outside the system which indeed gives rise to us. Escape is as unimaginable as death. Death is the only manifestation capable of matching the system’s irreversibility.
“Such is the fatality of every system devoted through its own logic to total perfection, and thus total defectiveness, to absolute infallibility and thus incorrigible extinction: all bound energies aim for their own demise. This is why the only strategy is catastrophic, and not in the least bit dialectical. Things have to be pushed to the limit, where everything is naturally inverted and collapses. […] The play of simulation must therefore be taken further than the system permits. […] The system’s own logic turns into the best weapon against it. The only strategy of opposition to a hyperrealist system is paraphysical, a “science of imaginary solutions;” in other words, a science fiction about the system returning to destroy itself, at the extreme limit of simulation, a reversible simulation in a hyperlogic of destruction and death.” (Symbolic Exchange and Death, from Baudrillard Reader, p.123)4
