Alien Vectors: Accelerationism, Xenofeminism, Inhumanism

James Trafford, Pete Wolfendale, James Trafford, Pete Wolfendale

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000672855
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

This book works through the notion of the alien in contemporary philosophy. The authors attempt to think through politics, posthumanism, and alienation beyond and across the circuitry of thought that would otherwise enfold the alien in its regressive and parochial trappings.

The figure of the Other has held critical thought in its sway for decades, to the point that we now suffer from a surfeit of alterity. This book considers whether the figure of the alien can offer us something better. It traces the outlines, intersections, and problems of emergent vectors of thought that coalesce around a renewed relationship to alienation: left accelerationism, xenofeminism, and inhumanism. Their common thread is the embrace of alienation as a positive force, transforming our progressive exile from a series of edenic harmonies – be they economic, sociological, or biological – into an esoteric genealogy of freedom.

Appeals to alien forces can mask all too familiar prejudices, repackaging old assumptions in the language of sublime strangeness or harsh reality. This book seeks to move beyond this by looking at how the notion of the alien interacts with present problems and politics. It was originally published as a special issue of Angelaki.

Introduction

james trafford
pete wolfendale

ALIEN VECTORS
accelerationism, xenofeminism, inhumanism

The figure of the Other has held critical thought in its sway for decades, to the point that we now suffer from a surfeit of alterity. Whether it is thought under the sign of radical transcendence or radical immanence, its extremes are indistinguishable: an ineffably abstract and purportedly inexhaustible excess over reason, representation, and often concreteness as such. Awash in amorphous otherness, it is all too easy to fall back on familiar forms, disavowing every explicit universal while enforcing implicit universals, and thereby preserving assumptions about the “naturalness” of given modes of community, sexuality, and embodiment. The supposedly indescribable openness of the space of socio-cultural possibilities tends to conceal limits that have simply been supposed, rather than described.

Can the figure of the Alien offer us something better? This is the question that this issue of Angelaki considers, by tracing the outlines and intersections, and problems of emergent vectors of thought coalescing around a renewed relationship to alienation: left-accelerationism strives to turn the emancipatory tendencies of modernity against the oppressive sociality of capitalism, xenofeminism aims to harness the artificiality of identity by rejecting the givenness of material conditions (sex) and social forms (gender) alike, and rationalist inhumanism seeks to extract the functional core of humanism from its imbrication with the biological and historical contingencies of the human animal. Their common thread is the embrace of alienation as a positive force. To follow this thread, and the movements through which it is woven, requires clarification, discussion, and criticism.

There is some controversy regarding both the meaning of “accelerationism” and its appropriation by a contemporary strand of left-wing – broadly egalitarian and anti-capitalist – political theory. The term was introduced into political discourse by Benjamin Noys to describe a trend in French theory that had begun with the publication of Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus.¹ This had been pursued further in the anglophone world by the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) and Nick Land (whose evolution into a thinker of the neo-reactionary right raised difficult questions regarding the provenance and eventual fate of associated intellectual trends).² The defining idea was that within capitalism there remains an emancipatory tendency that must be accelerated in such a way that its oppressive elements, and perhaps even capitalism as such, might be dissolved. However, Noys took this to imply that “the worse the better.”³ This interpretation gave rise to a persistent misunderstanding that has haunted the term since, namely, that the purpose of acceleration is to intensify the internal contradictions of capitalism envisaged by Marx, or to deepen immiseration in order to hasten revolution.⁴ The common thread running from every proposed antecedent to accelerationism (e.g., Marx, Federov, Veblen, etc.) to every avowed variant of it (e.g., left, right, unconditional, etc.) is that they valorise the acceleration of positive tendencies at the expense of negative ones, no matter how much they may disagree about which tendencies are which, and whether they will lead us beyond capitalism or deeper into it.⁵

It was Mark Fisher who initially proposed to take back the term as a name for an active political project, developing themes from his work with the CCRU in an explicitly egalitarian and anti-capitalist direction. However, it wasn’t until Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek’s “#Accelerate: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics” that what would come to be called “left-accelerationism” was articulated:

We believe the most important division in today’s left is between those that hold to a folk politics of localism, direct action, and relentless horizontalism, and those that outline what must become called an accelerationist politics at ease with a modernity of abstraction, complexity, globality, and technology. The former remains content with establishing small and temporary spaces of non-capitalist social relations, eschewing the real problems entailed in facing foes which are intrinsically non-local, abstract, and rooted deep in our everyday infrastructure. The failure of such politics has been built-in from the very beginning. By contrast, an accelerationist politics seeks to preserve the gains of late capitalism while going further than its value system, governance structures, and mass pathologies will allow.⁶

The result is a politics that treats the transition from capitalism to postcapitalism as a complex historical process akin to the transition from feudalism to capitalism in Europe, and which advocates for strategic intervention in this process: championing the emancipatory tendencies of modernity against the oppressive strictures of capitalism to which they have hitherto been bound. The philosophical underpinnings of this project have since been developed in the work of Ray Brassier, Reza Negarestani, and Benedict Singleton, among others, while its more immediate political consequences have been explored in Srnicek and Williams’s own Inventing the Future, which advocates embracing the increasing automation of work and supporting universal basic income (UBI) as a transitional demand.⁷ Nevertheless, ongoing confusion regarding the term “accelerationism” and its use by divergent political tendencies (e.g., the pro-capitalist right accelerationism inspired by Land, and the so-called “unconditional” accelerationism more reminiscent of the CCRU) have unquestionably dulled its utility for the left, leading many to downplay or abandon it entirely.⁸ As such, it can be difficult to establish left-accelerationism’s intellectual coherence beyond its sociological formations.

The case of xenofeminism is somewhat different. Inspired by the technofeminism of Shulamith Firestone as much as the cyberfeminism of Sadie Plant and VNS Matrix, The Xenofeminist Manifesto written by the Laboria Cuboniks collective shares many theoretical concerns with left-accelerationism – e.g., embracing technology, complexity, and abstraction – along with a practical concern with the importance of strategy, but its inherent multiplicity and mutability are a deliberate reflection of these concerns. It is proposed not as a doctrine, but as a platform. This should not be taken to imply that xenofeminism lacks intellectual coherence. On the one hand, it critiques certain conceptual pitfalls to which it thinks other feminisms are prone, celebrating impurity and transformation while excoriating every possible appeal to nature:

We need new affordances of perception and action unblinkered by naturalised identities. In the name of feminism, “Nature” shall no longer be a refuge of injustice, or a basis for any political justification whatsoever!If nature is unjust, change nature!⁹

On the other, it develops a new, generic conception of universality that is not indifferent to questions of identity:

Xenofeminism understands that the viability of emancipatory abolitionist projects – the abolition of class, gender, and race – hinges on a profound reworking of the universal. The universal must be grasped as generic, which is to say, intersectional. Intersectionality is not the morcellation of collectives into a static fuzz of cross-referenced identities, but a political orientation that slices through every particular, refusing the crass pigeonholing of bodies. This is not a universal that can be imposed from above, but built from the bottom up – or, better, laterally, opening new lines of transit across an uneven landscape. This non-absolute, generic universality must guard against the facile tendency of conflation with bloated, unmarked particulars – namely Eurocentric universalism – whereby the male is mistaken for the sexless, the white for raceless, the cis for the real, and so on. Absent such a universal, the abolition of class will remain a bourgeois fantasy, the abolition of race will remain a tacit white-supremacism, and the abolition of gender will remain a thinly veiled misogyny, even – especially – when prosecuted by avowed feminists themselves.¹⁰

Xenofeminism thus extends the concerns of left-accelerationism not simply by addressing the personal dimension of the political but also by synthesising its modern ideals with postmodern critiques of the corresponding historical realities.

A less obvious link between left-accelerationism and xenofeminism is the influence of philosophical ideas explored in the work of Ray Brassier, Reza Negarestani, and Peter Wolfendale and increasingly grouped under the heading of “neo-rationalism.” This work is char...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Remote Vision Experiments: A Photo Roman
• Foreword
• Part I Politics
• Part II Posthumanism
• Part III Alienation
• Index