Affective Accelerationism Part One
The Politics of the Counter-Fold
Power in its traditional conception is always viewed as a transcendent entity centered around the figure of the sovereign. There is always a justifying myth (traditionally that of the divine or social contract) which creates an enforcement of stasis as opposed to some pre-established state of flux or chaos (the state of nature). Politics is thus viewed as the termination of war, the establishment of order and power over the polis. Foucault reveals in his lecture series Society Must be Defended that this view of power is inherently faulty. Instead, power is not the termination of war but its continuation by radically new means. The history of politics is not the progression of different periods of stasis defined by a given means of ordering (different justifications of sovereignty) but instead a continual self-adjustment towards war in order to avoid the collapse of the monopoly of sovereignty over control. This is not to say the modern conception of the nation-state is the site of politics (the classical anarchist notion of the state as a monopoly on violence), far from it. Instead power has become radically diffuse, expressing a particular immanence of norm towards the wider socius. The site of sovereignty as an area of power is more so a justification of the wider immanent discipline and control that creates stasis within a warring ontology. This is not to ignore the state’s apparent monopoly over the politics of death (the extraction of bare life as Agamben would call it), however these various thanto- and necro-political theories are themselves but a particular mode of the biopolitical imposition of norms on the human species. The threat of death and the “state of exception” that has defined all critical analysis of state power since Schmidt and Benjamin is but one more instance of a justifying means behind the panoptical self-discipline that produces docile bodies (at least at the “colonial core”, seeing as Mbembe and others effectively demonstrate how a biopolitics conceived primarily as sovereign power over death is particularly useful for colonial analysis).
This biopolitical imposition of norms across the socius creates a seemingly contradictory sense of immanence as the transcendent norm, itself at the level of transcendent discourse (here defined by the enlightenment conception of man and its nature), imposes itself in the immanent experience of thoughts and actions within an individual body. Of course that ordering, the discourse on how one should act as to be most “natural” or “human”, is a transcendent entity at the level of the “thought-world”. However its affect is relatively immanent towards the broader socius, producing a self-discipline of individual bodies and a general state of stasis. This is done through war, it is not the termination of the war between forms-of-life (which themselves rely according to Agamben on a given intensity-of-living that cannot be reduced to bare life) but instead the denial of war to its participants. It is the total de-armament and becoming-bloom of the potential members of the “imaginary party” wich provides the only entry into war through its un-recuperable embracing of vitality through the form-of-life. This paradox between the immanence of the socius alongside the experience of individual bodies and the transcendent becoming-immanent of its mediation by norms and images (biopower and spectacle) is the problematic of modern politics, its resolution only possible through civil war.
The study of this particular immanence of power and control to the socius is known as cybernetics, the study of control and feedback. The field of cybernetics has had a deeply interconnected history with Foucauldian power and discourse analysis, Foucault’s analysis of disciplinary power arguably being a particular elaboration of first-order and later second-order cybernetics. Cybernetic power in its most basic form is to be understood as a science of apparatuses, of different zones of opacity and capture which produce what Foucault calls discipline. These apparatuses or zones are themselves what Deleuze and Guattari call territories, here interpreted in a quite literal sense as there are given boundaries to these territories outside of mere abstraction. As such, these apparatuses have given insides and outsides (one can be in or out of the control of a given apparatus). For instance, one can be either inside or outside the control of a psychiatric apparatus (not necessarily the biopolitical regime of norms that define public psychiatric norms but instead the material apparatus of the psychiatric facility) depending on if one is currently inside or outside of its material reach. One can also be inside or outside different regimes of norms expressed as an image-of-thought based on if one thinks based on that particular image-of-thought. This clear division of inside and outside is the very division that has become opaque with the becoming-immanent of power, which constitutes the first “evolution” of cybernetic power. This is beyond even the mediation of norms, wich holds a transcendent separation between oneself and the norm that holds sway over one’s actions and interactions with others (the norm is always a social phenomena that is then internalized, producing discipline). Instead, the relative immanence of power to the socius implies the relative death of an authentic base by which to designate an inside and an outside to power (its relativity implies a given level of intensity in its immanence, a given degree to which the norm is imposed). This produces an internal contradiction within power itself, as if power becomes everywhere it is effectively nowhere. The division between power and non-power effectively collapses, with power itself becoming pure metaphysics (a dual becoming-immanent and becoming-transcendent characterizes this end point, what will be called counter-folds and folds respectively).
This is a common critique of Foucault’s theory of cybernetic power, as power is assumed to have a given inside and outside that defines its zone of operation. In the critic's mind, power is either there or it is not, it is either acting or it is not acting. This is, however, not the case within the current status of power. Power has become fully diffuse and immanent towards the socius while at the same time operating as pure simulacra, its strategics of control being hyperstitional in nature. In this sense the Baudrillardian critique of Foucault, given in the aptly titled Forget Foucault, is not much of a critique at all given the contemporary state of cybernetic power. Power is a “lost object”, its endless process of becoming-”real” relegating power-as-power into a purely symbolic existence. The internal contradiction (contradiction here being an explicitly Hegelian difference between the philosophical means of conceptualizing immanence and transcendence, a Hegelianism which can only be resolved by the death of the philosophical decision which produces the representation of immanence itself) between the immanence of power to the socius, which is here purely affective rather than the various conceptual elaborations bound up in discourse, and its exit from any authentic outside-as-base to ground it in any means besides simulacra constructs the scene of contemporary power, the basis of any productive political strategy (both for imposing power and resisting it). In this sense there is a double meaning behind the Baudrillardian symbolic “invasion of the real”: the invasion of the affective milieu by the code and the becoming-code of the affective milieu.
These dual operations produce two opposed operations: the fold and the counter-fold (in contrast to the fold and non-fold presented by Deleuze). The fold is here borrowed from Deleuze, who developed the concept in his works on Leibniz and Foucault respectively. While the fold is, like many of Deleuze’s concepts, a “fuzzy” concept, for our purposes it is a given folding where the outside of an apparatus goes inward. It is a particular non-dialectical relationship between insides and outsides characterized by a “folding” of planar metaphysics, upon wich the specific territories by which “inside” and “outside” are constituted, where the outside holds agency over the inside. The fold is a hijacking of the inside, a movement outwards by going through. Deleuze uses the fold to analyze aesthetics (such as with baroque art, which he characterizes as having an obsession with insides and outsides), power/knowledge (here he explores the relationship between the visible and the sayable along with Foucualt’s conception of subjectivation), and subjectivity (subjectivation as the outside of the self coming in and the ethics of the self as self effecting self). He posits that the fold, at least in its political dimension, is both defined by the interactions between the inside and outside of an apparatus while continually reconstituting and constructing the inside of said apparatus and by proxy “curving” the outside. Deleuze writes:
“And from the nineteenth century on it is more the dimensions of finitude which fold the outside and constitute a 'depth', a 'density withdrawn into itself, an inside to life, labour and language, in which man is embedded, if only to sleep, but conversely which is also itself embedded in man 'as a living being, a working individual or a speaking subject. Either it is the fold of the infinite, or the constant folds [replis] of finitude which curve the outside and constitute the inside.”
Thus, the fold is the continual self-adjustment of the inside while by proxy manipulating what is outside (this is the strategy of empire in its self-adjustment to crisis as was discussed earlier). For instance, madness is outside of the image of thought defined as “reason”, however what madness and reason constitute (alongside their particular norms and apparatuses of enforcement) through their Kantian transcendent dialectic is itself the very apparatuses and norms of what reconstitute reasoning and madness. Thus conceptual relative differentiation and individuation on the social level is constituted always by foldings of the object being differentiated, producing a fundamental dependency of all insideness of outsideness (this makes the case of cybernetic power all the more difficult). What is made clear is that what constitutes insides and outside and as such what constitutes folds are relative to the given territoriality on which the fold is grounded, there cannot simply be a constitution of a new or differentiated apparatus without a prior grounding apparatus (there is no folding ex nihilo). For instance, subjectivation is clearly a fold when grounded upon the territory of the subject, as the outside of power is invading the inside of subjectivity. Subjectivation is the folding inwards of power into the human subject, its constitution within both transcendent discourse (the subject-as-subject) and immanent reality (the subject-as-experience). However for our purposes the fold is not to be grounded at the level of subjectivity but instead at the level of power more broadly, constituted by the interactions between the insides and outsides of control. In this sense a fold of power, especially in its current diffuse state, is the outside of power going inwards, a particular hijacking or short-circuiting of power to reach the outside.
In the current state of things, where the categories of inside and outside have lost their grounding, how can we talk of the folds of power? If we are to imagine it as a literal folding, one across a plane with a given territory grounding the inside and outside of said territory, that folding would itself no longer constitute a fold with the death of the territory. Instead, there would be no basis for a folding and it would instead constitute an immanent plane with mere intensities, occupying both a plane of immanence and plane of transcendence due to the double nature of cybernetic power. Thus the folding that constitutes power (or rather a counter-fold as will come to be seen) is the producer of this artificial immanence, this immanence-in-the-last-instance. The ground or base of power is not the production of apparatuses out of a metaphysical immanent theory of forces (Deleuze’s Nietzsche), but rather the dual operations of fold and counter-folds wich fold up and diffuse power to a state of becoming-immanent where the very act of folding becomes seemingly impossible.
What is the counter-fold? The counter-fold is not something radically new, a classic Deleuzian reversal or “enculage” of the fold. Rather it is the opposing fold to the fold when placed relative to power, the inside of power folding outwards. Thus subjectivation, the becoming-subject of subjectivity, is itself an act of the counter-fold, a folding of exterior power into the interior of "subjectivity”. The counter-fold of power is its becoming-diffuse, its becoming-immanent. It is the fold which constitutes with the fold of power the dual becoming-immanent and becoming-transcendent of cybernetic power. This of course implies that the outside of power is itself an “insideness”, a given apparatus that is somehow outside power. The outside, though its current presentation is defined by a post-Kantian “philsophical decision” accompanied by “philsophical hallucination”, is clearly not an apparatus that constitutes an insideness of its own. This is where the counter-fold differs from the fold as traditionally conceptualized, its folding is not the invasion of the interior by the outside (forces beyond any conceivable exteriority) but instead a manic becoming-interior wich produces a transcendent flatness (a transcendent immanence so to speak, a plane of transcendence). The endless chain of folds and counter-folds produce the modern “base” of politics, a plane of forces and control constituted both as code and as affect (the base-and-superstructure-esque division between code and affect collapses in on itself, leaving only the war between forms-of-life).
Now this text advances or at least begins the advancement of an “accelerationism”. What does this form of accelerationism, which is supposedly “affective”, constitute and how is it related to the discussion of the dual nature of contemporary power? To answer such a question, accelerationism’s relationship with the fold must first be discussed. Accelerationism as both a term and as a broader milieu has seen a general deteritorialization of use so to speak in recent years. It has eaten itself, spurred on by dozens of offshoots and a general invasion of public discourse. Colquhoun, or Xenogothic, puts it best in their work on the history and current state of “accelerationist” discourse:
“No matter who wins, accelerationism loses. What was once a lively online scene of philosophical discussion, cultural production, and political argumentation has now dried up completely. It has become a dead horse flogged incessantly by critics and adherents alike. For a movement supposedly dedicated to an acceleration away from stasis, it has embarrassingly beaten itself to death with its own riding crop, succumbing to its own conceptual complexity and finding itself stuck in a mess entirely of its own making.”
The once lively scene of cultural and theoretical production, descending from the manic and lively experimentation of the CCRU, has become a shell of its former self. The “hijacking” of capital’s self-adjustive and creative capacities has occurred within accelerationism, as cultural production becomes split along either a general misunderstanding of terms (accelerationism in public discourse as the notion that things must get worse before they get better) or the split between Thiel style neo-reactionaries (a fate that has ultimately befallen upon Land) and esoteric social democrats each informed by an improper view of acceleration. There is also the infamous far-right terrorists who use the term accelerationism as the purposeful instigation of crisis to instigate a “race war”. When we discuss “accelerationism” it will not be as the vulgar accelerationism of public discourse or the variety of political programs associated by what is “outside” or “after” the hijacking of the various foldings of technocapital (though a “program” of our own will soon be advanced). Rather, it will be a specific analysis of transcendental time, technocapital acceleration, and the fold derived from the works of Kant, Marx, Deleuze, Guattari, and the CCRU. Accelerationism operates from an idea of time, derived from Kant, Bergson, and Deleuze, characterized by its non-linearity. Time is not simply a scalar quantity that indicates different moments along a continuum, but instead has various foldings that constitute the experience of time and memory.
A moment cannot be experienced in an atomized form, it is always contextualized and indeed experienced as an immanent folding of memory and present. In a Proustian and somewhat situationist sense, the emphazisation of the moment as situation is itself only a product of the intensity of the moment. There is always the distinction between situation and event, the distinction between a situationist and a Badiouian politics. The situation itself is the immanent transcendence of Bergsonian time, the “fractal” transcendence of its planar immanence and foldings grounding an insurrectionary micro-politics. The Bergsonian theory of time by contrast grounds what will be called an “accelerationist” politics, based on the various foldings of capital-time and the becoming-macro of the micro-political. Just as capital is porous to Deleueze and Guattari, capital time is composed of various folds between the past, present, future, and outside all bound into a coherent experience of capital-time as capital in totality. This is grounded upon what the CCRU call the numogram, a particular mathematical diagram that is said to model the immanent foldings of capital time in relation to outsideness and “lumerian time sorcery” or for our purposes hyperstition. The numogram gives a mathematical account of how capital-time and the outside interact, operating through a occult-like immanent structure of various folds between different zones and what lies between them. Capital-time is perpetually haunted by capital’s future and the futures wich it constantly denies. Capital and cybernetic power enforce a becoming-immanent to all aspects of transcendental time, smoothing out time till the concepts of agency, linearity, and cause-effect become meaningless. This is a particular folding not of just the social fabric but of the very experience of time-as-capital.
Accelerationism posits that out of this series of folds we have the potential to hijack the future, producing what is called a hyperstition. A hyperstition is a self-fulfilling prophecy, a memetic force of becoming-immanent which imposes change not from any concrete agency but instead from the short-circuiting of the very lack of agency. Hyperstition is thus purely spectacular and purely “fatal”, being a hijacking at the level of code and representation that defines our experience of transcendental time. Transcendental time is, to Land, transcendental in the Kantian sense, meaning that it is both prior to the experience of the subject-as-subject an beyond it within its existence as outsideness. Time is thus not an affective entity at the level of human subjectivity, but a non-linear transcendental process beyond and before the subjectivation of the human-as-human. It’s experience and forces are, however, purely at the level of code in its invasive becoming-immanent with the real. Likewise, hyperstition is actualized in the free play among the code which engenders the “self-fufilling prophecy”. The various accelerationist programs (r/acc, l/acc, etc) each operate through a hyperstitional strategy which seeks to hijack technocapital and “outsideness” for the production of a new “social peace.”
The outside they seek to utilize, though certainly a being-beyond-apparatus as stated earlier, is in direct contrast to the Tiqqun-esque immanent, vital outside. For Tiqqun and the broader insurrectionary tradition, the outside is the lived intensity that escapes and secedes from the forced passivity of biopower and spectacle. It is something always reachable, a plane of consistency from which struggle and contestation find their basis. The accelerationists, taking from the work of the CCRU, instead position the outside at the fringe of capital-time which is a radically inhuman and “cold” transcendent plane. Both groups view this outside as an intensive vital site of deteritorialization, however each position their “outside” at fundamentally different planes of consistency (or rather transcendence in the case of the CCRU). The differences between the folds described by both camps (folds and counter-folds) is directly contingent on which zone of struggle they ground themselves within (totality and singularity). The strategies of both camps rely on the hijacking of each’s respective fold, the use of each’s respective outside to engage in hyperstitional or insurrectionary transformation.
An “affective” accelerationism concerns itself not with a singular focus on folds or counter-folds, totality or singularity, etc, but instead the plane constructed out of the dual becoming-immanent and becoming-code of the increasingly diffuse scene of cybernetic power. It does not base itself upon the cold inhuman outsideness of the CCRU or the lines of flight traced by the likes of Tiqqun, but rather the purely immanent outside as lived (tracing back to the late work of Deleuze and Laruelle) found within the emerging convergence between affect and representation. The outside cannot be reached as a plane of consistency nor as inhuman capital due to this unique convergence of folds. It can only be reached through a vital impulse, an acting-through-the-outside or “one.” The convergence of fold and counter-fold while easing the capacity for social control provides a unique opportunity for hijacking through the folding of totality and singularity. This is no longer through a fatal hyperstitional strategy (wich is itself a dark repositing of Baudrillard’s early situationist utopianism) but instead a vital strategy wich, rather than folding the coldness of transcendence into affective subjectivity, folds affective vitality into the realm of totality and transcendence. It is only here where a truly insurrectionary politics can emerge, one regulated into neither a TAZ-esque politics of zones and literal secession (as opposed to the vital and metaphysical separation of Tiqqun) or the classical revolutionary politics of totality.