The Xenofeminsit Manifesto: “The real emancipatory potential of technology remains unrealised.”
Reading left-accelerationist adjescent texts always leaves one with an energetic feeling. The accelerationst aesthetic is exciting. It electrifies our desire for the new: it sheds that nostalgic left that clings on to all its lost, the so-called ‘golden age’ of fordist capitalism that allowed for the Keynesian welfare state, localism and moralism. Instead it invites a left that charges forward into the future, sets free new utopian desires. Perhaps that’s why I often feel that it may be the most exciting emergent movement within the left, it invites a utopian political imaginary that has been so vacant in the wasteland of ‘capitalist realism’. Rather than resist technology it celebrates its liberatory potential. Of course we must move past the glorification of capital’s deterritorializing tendencies that the likes of Nick Land espouse and instead assert that true acceleration must transcends the logic of capital. As Nick Sneruck and Alex Williams state in the Accelerate manifesto “Landian neoliberalism confuses speed with acceleration. We may be moving fast, but only within a strictly defined set of capitalist parameters that themselves never waver. We experience only the increasing speed of a local horizon, a simple brain-dead onrush rather than an acceleration which is also navigational, an experimental process of discovery within a universal space of possibility.” It is the best kind of theorising in the anthropecene, one that offers a bright gleaming future, that doesn’t just hold onto what we have and what we’ve lost. It is a promising antidote for that pervasive left-melancholia that plagues us today and which leaves us only able to look back, not forward. We cannot bring back the future on fear and pessimism alone, we must put forward an alternate vision of modernity that can rival the one that neoliberalism has cemented so firmly into our collective psyche. So four cheers for Accelerationism (not three) as it always demands we go that little bit further!