… In the context of science fiction studies Guattari’s interest in Cyberpunk
offers an alternative to Frederic Jameson’s dismissal of the genre as failing to offer anything more than an uncritical celebration of late-capitalism’s technological ubiquity. In fact Guattari offers hisown version of the theory of capitalist and cybernetic Accelerationism that would shortly after be developed by Nick Land and the group of young philosophers gathered around him at Warwick University. While on the one hand Guattari offers an aesthetic acceleration that takes us through capitalism to a point beyond the human, as Land does, he rejects the nihilist ethics Land took from early Lyotard, and privileged to the point of a total affirmation of capitalism’s death drive, as he called it. Guattari offers a radical aesthetic acceleration/deterritorialisation that remains avowedly anti-capitalist, and in this way perhaps offers an alternative to both Land’s alarming (provocatively so) affirmation of neo-liberalism and to the disappointing compromises of the recent Accelerationist Manifesto’s rational and revisionary social democracy …
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