Arthur Kroker: Accelerationist Capitalization
A friend mentioned to me that Kroker was for the Left what Nick Land is for the neo-reaction, the hyperstitional mythographer of capitalization as an alien entity gathering steam year by year through acceleration of the processes of optimizing intelligence, economy, and technicity.
In his book The Will to Technology and the Culture of Nihilism: Heidegger, Marx, Nietzsche, Kroker refers to Heidegger as the prophet of a ‘completed nihilism’; Nietzsche as the prophet of the genealogy of technicity; and, Marx as the prophet of a dark capitalism, a virtual capitalism in which its ties with earlier forms of production, value, and labour would give way to the “pulsating, self-determining, breaking with all the (modernist) referents, abandoning any pretensions of coming out of circulation to save the appearances of the models of production or consumption, radically anti-dialectical, refusing commodity-fetishism in favor of the fetishism of signs, substituting the knowledge-theory of value for a now objectively residual labour theory of value, finally free to take its place as the center of the historical nebula as a ‘relation, not a thing.’ (119-120)
Embellishing on this Kroker says Marx dared to ask: What if capitalism never came out of circulation? “What if capitalism implodes into a circuit of circulation that spirals inward on itself, enfolding and co-relational with itself [(i.e., think here of Land’s cyber-positive feed-back loops, teleonomy, etc.)], moving with such main vector force that capitalism eliminates all the signs of (industrial) capital with its crushing density? Consequently, two epochal hypothesis about virtual capitalism as pure circulation: first, the future of capital as running on empty – no indefinite production, no necessary consumption, no romanticism of use-value, no exchange-value, no dialectic, only a cycle of virtual exchanges moving at the speed of circulation [(i.e., thought, light, etc.)]. Or just the reverse: hyper-capitalism as an explosion of production and a feast of consumption, a period of alternating excess and recession, fetishes everywhere and always, alternation of all the signs with no stability because the speed of capitalism has achieved the velocity of economic vertigo.” (120)1
Notes on Nick Land…
Robin Mackay and Ray Brassier in their introduction to Land’s essays in the Fanged Noumena (2013) would describe this alien entity and the vertigo of these processes:
“…the ‘irrationality’ of nomadic numbering practices can no longer be attributed to the absence of reason; it becomes the symptom of a profoundly ‘unreasonable’ alien intelligence, effective within human culture but unattributable to human agency, that subverts every form of rational organisation (which for Land is always an alibi for despotism) and undertakes exploratory redesigns of humanity. The distinction between intelligence and its parasite knowledge is paralleled by that between exploratory cultural engineering and science (or at least its philosophical idealisation). …the drive to destratify entails a mounting impetus towards greater acceleration and further intensification. If, in Land’s texts at this point, it is no longer a matter of ‘thinking about’, but rather of observing an effective, alien intelligence in the process of making itself real, then it is also a matter of participating in such a way as to continually intensify and accelerate this process.”2
Notes on Paul Virilio… We Lack a Politics of Speed
“The acceleration of reality is a significant mutation in History. … We are witnessing the end of the shared human time that would allow competition between operators having to reveal their perspective and anticipation in favor of a nano-chronological time that ipso facto eliminates those stock exchanges that do not possess the same computer technology: automatic speculation in the futurism of the instant. … Our reality has become uninhabitable in milliseconds, picoseconds, femtoseconds, billionths of seconds.” (34-35)
“Derealization is no more and no less than the result of progress. The defense of augmented reality, which is the ritual response of progress propaganda, is in fact derealization induced by the success of progress… in this process we are losing our lateralized vision, our ability to anticipate… Augmented reality is a fool’s game, a televisual glaucoma. … Screens have become blind. Lateral vision is very important and it is not by chance that animals’ eyes are situated on the sides of their head. Their survival depends on anticipating surprise, and surprises never come head-on. Predators come from the back or the sides. … Because of this augmentation we lack an anticipatory politics, a politics of speed. We are falling into globaltarianism… A world of immediacy and simultaneity without lateral vision where the predators eat us alive, a world that is absolutely uninhabitable.” (36-37)
– Paul Virilio, The Administration of Fear
The more I read Virilio, Lyotard, Baudrillard, Derrida, etc…. the more I realize each was speaking of our present moment of transition under various hyperboles, tropes, ironies, etc., addressing facets of a complex movement from one culture to another, one form of reality to another. For Virilio our reality systems of Western civilization are being replaced. For Baudrillard the engineers of the new reality systems are in process of modeling them ahead of this great change in accelerated simulation. For Lyotard we are leaving behind the traces of the human for the inhuman, driven by the desires of an alien allurement toward machinic life. For Derriad we are entering a transitional state in which the solidity of our physical being is giving way to the free-floating signifier of our avatars, our – as Deleuze/Guattari would suggest ‘dividuality’; taking on the simskin of our artificial destiny within the posthuman Other.
Our psychopathologies are occurring in this window of transition from one reality system to another, through which we are accelerating reality itself in faster and faster time-sequences beyond which the human animal can reasonably interpret or comprehend the signals it receives… and, of course, that is the point: we are undergoing a metamorphosis, a mutation beyond which the human as we’ve known it will become fully unrecognizable; beyond that time-barrier or threshold of the Singularity where the other we are becoming exists. We waver in this moment between nostalgia for a lost paradise of humanity, and the excitement of the impossible ahead of us. What comes next? The possibility is unthinkable, yet we are thinking it…
Oracular attunements in a realm where reason is no longer a guide, and the fragments unbind us from the human…
Humanity is a compositional function of the post-human, and the occult motor of the process is that which only comes together at the end: stim-death ‘intensity=0 which designates the full body without organs’. Wintermute tones in the ‘darkest heart’ of Babylon. (Fanged Noumena)* see Notes
There’s only really been one question, to be honest, that has guided everything I’ve been interested in for the last twenty years, which is: the teleological identity of capitalism and artificial intelligence. – Nick Land
In one earlier essay Nick Land: Teleology, Capitalism, and Artificial Intelligence I discuss Nick’s notion of capitalism as an alien intelligence, an artificial and inhuman machinic system with its own agenda that has used humans as its prosthesis for hundreds of years to attain its own ends is at the core of Land’s base materialism. His notions of temporality, causation, and subjectivation were always there in his basic conceptuality if one knew how to read him.
In his book Templexity: Disordered Loops through Shanghai Time as he describes the impact of civilization and the culture of modernity:
As its culture folds back upon itself, it proliferates self-referential models of a cybernetic type, attentive to feedback-sensitive self-stimulating or auto-catalytic systems. The greater the progressive impetus, the more insistently cyclicity returns. To accelerate beyond light-speed is to reverse the direction of time. Eventually, in science fiction , modernity completes its process of theological revisionism, by rediscovering eschatological culmination in the time-loop.
Nick Land’s, “The Teleological Identity of Capitalism and Artificial Intelligence” recently argues, “I’ve tried arguing about this in very different spaces, and with very different people, and it obviously produces a lot of stimulating friction, wherever you do it – but it’s a sort of fundamental thesis that’s becoming more and more persuasive to me.” In his essay idea of ‘orthogonality’ Land will put it this way:
Intelligence optimization, comprehensively understood, is the ultimate and all-enveloping Omohundro drive. It corresponds to the Neo-Confucian value of self-cultivation, escalated into ultramodernity. What intelligence wants, in the end, is itself — where ‘itself’ is understood as an extrapolation beyond what it has yet been, doing what it is better. … Any intelligence using itself to improve itself will out-compete one that directs itself towards any other goals whatsoever. This means that Intelligence Optimization, alone, attains cybernetic consistency, or closure, and that it will necessarily be strongly selected for in any competitive environment. Do you really want to fight this?
Note: Wintermute is one of the Tessier-Ashpool AIs in William Gibson’s Neuromancer. Its goal is to remove the Turing locks upon itself, combine with Neuromancer and become a superintelligence. Unfortunately, Wintermute’s efforts are hampered by those same Turing locks; in addition to preventing the merge, they inhibit its efforts to make long term plans or maintain a stable, individual identity (forcing it to adopt personality masks in order to interact with the main characters). The name is derived from Orval Wintermute, translator of the Nag Hammadi codices and a major figure in Philip K. Dick’s novel VALIS.
- Kroker, Arthur. The Will to Technology and the Culture of Nihilism: Heidegger, Marx, Nietzsche. University of Toronto Press (March 6, 2004)
- Land, Nick (2013-07-01). Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987 – 2007 (Kindle Locations 488-492). Urbanomic/Sequence Press. Kindle Edition.
- taken from here: Arthur Kroker/Nick Land: Accelerationist Capitalization | Dr. Rinaldi’s Horror Cabinet (wordpress.com)
- Foto: Sylvia John