David Livingstone on Alexander Dugin; Ukrainian Nazis; Nick Land; Process Church ;O9A & Pinay Cercle
– David Livingstone on Nick Land and Accelerationism. Nick Land has been described as the “father” of accelerationism, a set of ideas which propose that capitalism and technological change should be drastically accelerated to create further radical social change
– Accelerationism is the name of a contemporary political heresy: the insistence that the only radical political response to capitalism is to accelerate it
– NOT The BCfm Politics Show presented by Tony Gosling
David Livingstone on Nick Land and Accelerationism …. Nick Land has been described as the “father” of accelerationism, a set of ideas which propose that capitalism and technological change should be drastically accelerated to create further radical social change. Land argued that the triumph of capitalism and the rise of technoculture were inextricably intertwined. Drawing on the work the postmodernists Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari and Jean-Francois Lyotard, Land argued that capitalist technological progress was transforming not just our societies, but the individual, who is becoming less important than the techno-capitalist system itself.[69] Accelerationism reflected a similar approach adopted by Satanists, particularly the Process Church and Charles Manson. Although the Process Church’s “processean” theology is considered unrelated to the process theology of Alfred North Whiteheadwho influenced Deleuzeafter its leader DeGrimston was removed by the Council of Masters as Teacher, many former members of the cult joined Deleuze in his leadership of the Anti-Oedipal movement of 1968.[70] Hinting at the connection, Land explained in an email to Vox, “Modernity has Capitalism (the self-escalating techno-commercial complex) as its motor. Our question was what ‘the process’ wants (i.e. spontaneously promotes) and what resistances it provokes.”[71] Land was a lecturer in Continental Philosophy at the University of Warwick from 1987 until his resignation in 1998. At Warwick, he and Sadie Plant co-founded the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit. Plant is a British philosopher whose original research was related to the Situationist International before turning to cyber-technology. She published The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age in 1992. Her writing in the 1990s would prove profound in the development of cyberfeminism. Land is the author of The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism, published in 1992. The CCRU’s writings drew inspiration from H.P. Blavatsky, Carl Jung, William S. Burroughs, J.G. Ballard and William Gibson.[72] After the CCRU split from Warwick in 1998, according to Andy Beckett, a journalist who chronicled the CCRU’s in The Guardian, Land and his remaining followers moved into a home in Leamington, where they were drawn to numerology, HP Lovecraft, and Aleister Crowley, part of an obsession with the occult that had flourished in the accelerationist ranks. “The CCRU became quasi-cultish, quasi-religious,” explained former member Robin Mackay. “I left before it descended into sheer madness.”[73] Land has also “highly-recommended” the works of David Myatt’s fascist Satanist Order of Nine Angles (O9A), whose international distributor is adept Kerry Bolton, founder of the Black Order and associate of Alexander Dugin.[74] On his blog and on Twitter, Land describes Dugin as his “best enemy,” and also accepts Dugin’s appellation of “Atlanticist,” par of Dugin’s Land and Sea dichotomy that pits the West and NATO against his own ambition for his own anti-liberal Eurasian empire. “We agree exactly about what the war is,” expands Land, “We’re just on opposite sides of it.”
Accelerationism is the name of a contemporary political heresy: the insistence that the only radical political response to capitalism is not to protest, disrupt, critique, or détourne it, but to accelerate and exacerbate its uprooting, alienating, decoding, abstractive tendencies. Accelerate presents a genealogy of accelerationism, tracking the impulse through 90s UK darkside cyberculture and the theory-fictions of Nick Land, Sadie Plant, Iain Grant, and CCRU, across the cultural underground of the 80s (rave, acid house, SF cinema) and back to its sources in delirious post-68 ferment, in texts whose searing nihilistic jouissance would later be disavowed by their authors and the marxist and academic establishment alike.
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