Accelerationist Ambivalence
Listening to Steve Bannon coping with the increasing ineptitude of the Trump Regime is fun, but I actually like Steve Bannon. I like his approach. He’s a tactician. He knows his Sun Tzu. Moreso, I like that he’s an Accelerationist.
It’s easy to shout ‘burn down the old temples’. As much as I cheer on people like Bannon, I also realize that there are problems with Accelerationism. It’s complicated. We’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t. Let me explain.
What is Accelerationism?
Here is my definition of ‘corrupt’:
X is corrupt if X is so diseased that it is behaving like the opposite of its intended purpose.
Take for instance the appendix. (I mean the one near your stomach). The intended purpose of an appendix is to be a kind of dead-end trap for bad bacteria. Be it corrupt however, then, to the bad bacteria, it is not a dead-end trap, but rather a cosy place to live.
Once you take onboard that our institutions are not just failing, but acting contrary to their telos, one grasps just how dire the situation is.
Problem One: Chesterton’s Conservatism
Sounds good: Push rather than let fall.
Not so fast. The first problem is that we don’t know what our societies would be like without the institutions. We haven’t A/B-tested this. This is a variance on Chesterton’s Fence.1 As rotten as I think The Guardian and The New York Times are, and as happy as I would be to see their end, I grant that it would be haphazard to tout only boons springing from their demise.
Consider Accelerationism at work in the field of urban planning. How smug were those Modernists! “Tear it down!” Messiness is a sign of vitality. Dense-living evinces psychological warmth.2
Problem Two: Shells get recycled
Maybe burning an institution to the ground is too extreme, even metaphorically. I have a warning bell going off in my head and it’s telling me: ‘Library of Alexandria’. Maybe, instead, a good gutting is needed. After all, it’s the guts which rot first. Gutting an institution means that we keep it, but take out its leaders, its dogma, its modus operandi. We keep the shell.
The problem is that you can’t unshuck an oyster. The shell is dead. It can’t be stuffed with new life. You could jazz up the BBC all you wanted, but it would still connote ‘BBC’. Gutting just leads to ruin. I am reminded of the fate of the Roman temples. Beautiful as they were, people eventually couldn’t say ‘no’ to using the marble for other buildings, because the soul had been taken from them. The Romans chose the law court, i.e. the basilica, for their new model of the temple. Gutting is pointless; one may as well raze.
Problem Three: Ignoring cancer is not smart
If burning down is too extreme, and gutting just leads to the same outcome, how about ignoring?
It seems to be happening anyway. Less and less people watch films from Hollywood. Less and less people go to liberal, 20th-century-style churches.
For sure, ignore. Stop hate-watching the corporate media; stop bemoaning the unfair treatment by YouTube. Vote with your feet.
The problem is that ignoring the bastards just gives them a chance to regroup. Existing oligarchic structures are quickly self-healing. This is what the academic Accelerationists call ‘reterritorializing’.3 To stop this, one must never rest. When you’ve got a tumor, don’t ignore it.
Problem four: The Chimps are still locked their pens
Ignoring is too passive. At least, boo! Don’t underestimate the power of a good ‘boo’. Auron Macintyre famously puts it as ‘never stop chimping’.4 Just because institutional power is pulling back, we would make a grave mistake in deeming it weak. Sometimes it’s easy to forget how many Boomers and Gen-Xers get their news from television still.
Chimping is necessary but not sufficient. Words are cheap. The zookeepers can handle noisy chimps.
The Scylla and Charybdis
We are caught between the Scylla and Charybdis.5 On one side, we do too much, and with folly. On the other side, we do too little, and with cowardice. To be honest, I don’t know the answer here. I’ll keep musing on it. One thing is for sure: You can’t go wrong by helping new, non-corrupt versions of the institutions.
- If, wandering through a wild meadow, you come upon an old, forgotten fence, the first instinct should not be to knock it down. It might be serving a purpose still. Indeed, someone spent a lot of energy to put it there, so would not have done so for kicks. (Return)
- …so long as the housing comes into being organically! Top-down, then, we will be dealing with globalist overlords. In other words, human beings should not be squashed into narrow spaces unless by self-will. (Return)
- After leading philosophers, Deleuze and Guatarri. (Return)
- Chimping is slang for the online expression of strong, angry disapproval, often with sarcasm. (Return)
- …from Homer’s Odyssey, Scylla lives on one side of a narrow strait (an arrow’s flight wide, so perhaps 200m), a monster; and Charybdis is a whirlpool on the other side. As ships would hug the opposite coast to the whirlpool, the monster would grab sailors and eat them. It means ‘caught between a rock and a hard place’. (Return)