Accelerate what?

For the accelerationism movement, “Accelerate what?” is my two word (and importantly openly questioning) correction, which is only a partial help that points to Rene Girard’s more complete correction to Marx. I recognize that Girard converted me.

Many of today’s accelerationist cultists do not know that the core concepts of the movement are rooted in Marx’s discussion of capital accumulation.

From Chapter 32 in Das Kapital:
“Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolise all advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organised by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralisation of the means of production and socialisation of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.”

The accelerationist philosophy is also rooted in the writings of Deleuze and Guattari, who offered a vision of capital as alien intelligence in the 1970s.

You cannot be an accelerationist without choosing that which to accelerate, unless you choose to accelerate nothing or choose to observe that the acceleration is out of your control. But all of these choices are still choices aware of an accelerating process, even if the choice is acceptance of non-choice while staring at what appears to be a techno-Marxist accelerating chaos.

Cult-members of accelerationism already observe the existence of this notion with their recognition of, and debates about, multiple variations of accelerationism (e/acc, r/acc, l/acc, and cute/acc as just a few of these variations).

By recognizing accelerationism variants, in some ways the believers accelerated and destroyed the movement. But not in so succinct and disabling a form as my question (which will nag at any accelerationists that remain), and not in so complete a way as Rene Girard’s masterful correction of not only Deleuze and Guattari (and Nick Land), but of Marx too, in his work “Innovation and Repetition.” Girard also corrects Dupuy and Dumouchel, which some reprints of the essay have missed.

It might be said that I am participating in a consolidating and culminating acceleration process in writing this essay, or more terrifying and then calming, that I am recognizing that Rene Girard already completed accelerationism (and the Enlightenment) in a non-time-traveling time-traveling kind of revelatory method that practices what is preached within the first few lines of his essay. (I realized this point after I wrote most of this essay, and added this last line to this paragraph towards the linear time-measured end of this creative process).

In his essay, Rene Girard traces the real usage of the word innovation back from aimless revolutionary destructive process and to the only process that has ever worked, which is pursuit of traditional rejuvenation with a demeanor occasionally-welcoming enough to accept and incorporate emergent variations of practice (which a person could call revelations or improvements or perspectives or techniques), or in some cases with a demeanor that is not welcoming of change at all.

In this lens, described and practiced by Girard, we have always been operating the world in an intellect and revelatory-driven rejuvenation, but at some point in history people and communities hypnotically began to attempt to rejuvenate institutions with novelty as singular goal instead of rejuvenating the stable institutional practices that occasionally resulted in novelty.

Rene Girard’s word for describing the self-deception that the mind is capable of is meconnaissance (or mis-recognition). As Girard explains, the mimetic nature of the human brain means that a single individual’s misrecognition can sometimes result in a community-wide hypnosis followed by scapegoating sacrifices.

It is by pursuing and speaking truth and practicing repetition and rejuvenation that misrecognition can be corrected (which sometimes happens slowly and sometimes happens quickly and sometimes does not happen at all). Forgiveness can help to avoid sacrifices, but is not required for misrecognition to be corrected by the repetition of rejuvenation.