No Speed Limit Three Essays on Accelerationism (Forerunners Ideas First) - Steven Shaviro

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Here is a summary of Steven Shaviro’s book “No Speed Limit: Three Essays on Accelerationism”:

• Accelerationism argues that the only way to overcome globalized neoliberal capitalism is to push it to its extreme, draining it to its core and following its tendencies to their furthest conclusions. This will exhaust its potentials and open up possibilities beyond it.

• The book contains three essays exploring accelerationism from political, aesthetic, and philosophical perspectives.

• Accelerationism has roots in classical Marxism and its analyses of capitalism continually developing productive forces on a global scale. Marx viewed this dialectically rather than morally.

• Science fiction is seen as an accelerationist genre, extrapolating current trends to imagine their full actualization and consequences. This helps grasp capitalism’s futural potentials and tendencies.

• The hope of accelerationism is that by exacerbating current conditions, we can make their contradictions explode and move to something new. It is both a political and aesthetic project.

• The book considers accelerationism as a speculative movement seeking to fully explicate the tendencies within global neoliberal capitalism in order to exhaust and overcome its current form.

Marx argued that productive forces (e.g. technology) eventually come into conflict with existing property relations (e.g. capitalism). As productive forces advance, the existing system becomes a hindrance rather than an enabler of further progress. This sets the stage for social revolution as new property relations are needed to accommodate the advanced productive forces.

There have been differing interpretations of Marx, including “economism” - the idea that history progresses inevitably towards communism. But communism never materialized on its own, showing the limits of expecting dialectical contradictions to unfold automatically. Some Marxists embraced voluntarism instead, relying on willpower and vanguardism to forcibly impose communism. But this led to disasters like Stalinism.

Accelerationism appeals today given the predicaments of neoliberal capitalism - problems like mounting inequality, environmental crises, and perpetual economic instability without resolution. Living under these conditions feels like a state of ongoing crisis without end. Accelerationism argues for accelerating capitalist forces of technology and production, not as an end in themselves but to help overcome capitalism by developing its internal contradictions to a breaking point. It rejects waiting passively or relying on simple willful revolutionary acts alone. The goal is moving beyond capitalism by advancing its immanent technological and economic tendencies, not opposing progress itself.

• The author argues that neoliberal capitalism has “robbed us of the future” by turning everything into an “eternal present” focused on constant innovation that results in little real change.

• Keynes’ distinction between calculable risk and genuine uncertainty is ignored today. Theories like Black-Scholes and the efficient market hypothesis treat the future as fully probabilistic rather than truly unknown.

• Financial speculation tries to account for and shut down all possible futures, in contrast to science fiction which explores open futures. Speculation preemptively depletes the future.

• This entrenches “capitalist realism” - it’s harder to imagine alternatives to capitalism. Accelerationism claims to offer a way out by embracing rather than rejecting technology and abstraction.

• Accelerationism draws on Deleuze/Guattari and Lyotard who highlighted capitalism’s destructive powers. Nick Land celebrated absolute destruction, ignoring capitalism’s reterritorialization.

• Schumpeter and Land updated Marx by celebrating capitalism’s innovations rather than its tendency toward stagnation, but without including Marx’s notion of expropriating the expropriators.

• In summary, the author analyzes how accelerationist thinkers assessed capitalism’s relationship to the future and potential ways out of the current impasse, but questions whether their analyses ultimately rejected or embraced capitalism.

The passage discusses accelerationism, which argues that intensifying the contradictions of capitalism could potentially lead to rupture and transformation instead of just greater misery. It analyzes the views of Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek, who advocate a left accelerationist politics that repurposes existing infrastructure and technologies for common ends rather than smashing them.

The passage cites Fredric Jameson’s analysis of Walmart as exemplifying this approach - its global distribution network could potentially be repurposed under different economic conditions. However, the passage expresses unease with Williams and Srnicek advocating “maximal mastery” over society, since new technologies far exceed their initial uses and purposes due to uncertainty. Neither central planning nor markets can guarantee outcomes or avoid unintended consequences.

The passage argues technological development has autonomous potentials not limited to capitalist uses, but also constraints from prior conditions. Accelerationism risks either intensifying capitalism or transformative rupture, so speculative fiction can explore its ambivalences without premature resolution. While contradictions may explode capitalism, the scars of prior conditions will remain. Accelerationism is an aesthetic program first to explore its ambiguities, not yet a fixed political one.

The passage discusses accelerationist aesthetics and its relationship to political economy. It argues that aesthetics exists in a special relationship to political economy because, unlike politics, ethics, epistemology and ontology, aesthetics cannot be fully reduced to or determined by economic forces.

Aesthetic judgment is “disinterested” - we enjoy beauty for its own sake without ulterior motives or concern for usefulness. This makes aesthetics irreducible to political economy. However, our experience of aesthetics is constrained by economic factors like hunger or lack of safety.

Aesthetic judgment is also singular and non-cognitive - beauty cannot be subsumed under concepts or turned into knowledge. This gives aesthetics an almost ephemeral quality that seems at odds with an economic system that subsumes everything.

Analytic philosophers have tried to argue aesthetic experience doesn’t truly exist, but it persists as something that is “not a something, but not a nothing either.” The passage questions what role aesthetics can play today, given that capitalism seems to subsume all aspects of life, while aesthetics remains peculiarly independent from economic forces and determinations.

In summary, it examines the special relationship between aesthetics and political economy, how aesthetics remains independent yet constrained by economy, and questions the role of aesthetics in a system that seeks to subsume all things.

• Marx originally coined the terms “formal subsumption” and “real subsumption” to describe how labor is subsumed under capital.

• Formal subsumption means capital appropriates pre-existing labor processes. Real subsumption means labor itself is directly organized according to capitalist logic, like in factories.

• Hardt and Negri expanded this concept to argue everything in life is subsumed under capital - our activities, social relationships, knowledge, desires, etc. We are always generating surplus value even when consuming or sleeping.

• Under “real subsumption,” labor, subjectivity and social life are no longer external to or opposed to capital. They are immediately produced as parts of capital. Everything can be measured and commodified.

• This facilitates the rise of network societies where everything is subjected to economic rationality and must be assigned monetary or informational value. It fuels developments in computing and communication technologies.

• Under real subsumption, capitalism seeks to extract surplus value not just from labor but leisure, social relationships, feelings, experiences. Everything must be marketed, branded, and made competitive.

• This creates a contradiction where aesthetics is both promoted endlessly as a driver of consumerism but also reduced to nothing more than economically rationalized data production. Aesthetic experiences lose any sense of disinterest or non-instrumentality.

• Accelerationism has emerged as a possible aesthetic strategy in response, seeking to push aesthetic excess and innovation past capitalist recuperation for radical ends.

• Accelerationism as a political strategy has struggled because capitalism inherently absorbs and incorporates forces of change and transformation, like transgression, into its logic. There is no outside to power under real subsumption.

• Neoliberal capitalism successfully co-opted demands of the 1960s-70s like autonomy and realized them through precarity. It offers intense lives of constant performance and investment while privatizing and extracting surplus value.

• We are all now caught in capitalism’s ever-accelerating cycles of crisis and “creative destruction” which renew the system rather than endangering it. Accelerationism just brings awareness of being trapped in this loop.

• Works like Watts’ “Hotshot” revel cynically in depicting worsening horrors of neoliberalism through stories like the Koch brothers being lynched. But this provides only fleeting relief and doesn’t change the irreparable damage done to the planet.

• Stories portray a bleak future where people are radically transformed to survive the harsh changed environment, showing how maximal adaptation testifies not to mastery but capitalism’s unforgiving effects. Accelerationism can only intensify awareness of being stuck in these dynamics.

The passage describes a dystopian future where industrialization and capitalism have taken their toll on the environment. Corporations engage in unrestrained exploitation of natural resources through destructive practices like strip mining. Mass pollution and biodiversity collapse are the norm.

In this bleak world, a group of soldiers encounter a dog, an almost unknown animal to them. Dogs have gone extinct due to pollution and lack of food/habitat. The soldiers are puzzled by the dog and its vulnerability - it needs special care to avoid toxins, injuries, etc. Maintaining a basic organism like a dog is very complex and resource-intensive in this deteriorated world.

Ultimately, the effort of caring for the dog proves too taxing. The soldiers kill and eat the dog, though they find its meat inferior to their usual diet of processed fuel and industrial byproducts.

The passage uses the unexpected encounter with the dog to highlight how drastically industrialization has altered the natural world. It portrays a future where unchecked capitalism and pollution have eliminated most traces of the pre-industrial biosphere. Only heavily engineered life can survive in this denuded, toxic environment.

• The author argues that capitalism’s internal contradictions do not undermine it, but rather empower it. Capitalism regenerates through crises like wars and economic downturns that destroy capital and allow accumulation to resume.

• Capitalism needs to constantly transform abundance into imposed scarcity in order to drive competition and expansion. Once scarcity is truly overcome, the logic of capitalism falls apart.

• Today’s advanced technologies and accumulated wealth have brought us to the point where universal affluence is conceivable for the first time. However, capitalism still requires scarcity and economic problem-solving to continue.

• Keynes envisioned overcoming economic scarcity in the future, while Hayek saw it as permanent. Keynes saw capitalism as a means to an end of leisure, while Hayek saw no distinction between processes and ends of capitalism.

• Marx also envisioned a society beyond labor constraints where people can freely change activities. This vision is closer to Fourier, Wilde and Keynes’ visions of post-scarcity society than often acknowledged.

• A post-capitalist society resembling Wilde’s aestheticism, with leisure and cultivation rather than labor as the aim, could be a model for the future envisioned by accelerationism in response to capitalism’s achievement of material abundance.

• Oscar Wilde advocates for socialism while also embracing aestheticism and self-cultivation. He sees art as representing the “profoundly creative uselessness” that communism aims for.

• However, Wilde still lived in Victorian England so he was not able to fully experience a communist utopia and ultimately suffered consequences for his lifestyle.

• More broadly, gay men and other minorities in the 19th-20th centuries turned to extravagant self-fashioning in response to discrimination, as a form of secession from dominant social standards, though not necessarily resistance. This includes aestheticism, camp, glam rock, and Foucault’s work on self-care.

• Self-cultivation requires leisure that contradicts modern demands of constant work. It also rejects infinite desire and seeks limited satisfactions, unlike modern aesthetic of sublime over beautiful.

• Neoliberalism assumes insatiable desires and scarcity, while Keynes argued basic needs could be met and people would pursue non-economic goals. Self-cultivation is important for envisioning post-capitalist futures.

The passage argues that radical human self-transformation through technologies like genetic engineering and brain augmentation must be considered in aesthetic and cultural terms, not just pragmatically or for corporate profit. Self-alteration fundamentally changes one’s self, so it requires an ethics of cultivation and self-improvement.

It also says environmental concerns should focus on abundance rather than scarcity. Ecology is not about austerity but accessing the natural world’s bounty and sharing its gifts more widely. Current environmental destruction stems from imposed scarcity and negative desires.

It raises the question of how to accelerate technological progress without also accelerating capitalism’s violence and imposed scarcity. As an example, it discusses the science fiction story “Phylogenesis,” where humanity evolves into parasites living within an alien invasive species to survive Earth’s destruction. This shows adapting to catastrophic conditions by finding abundance even in hardship.

The passage advocates learning from the story’s characters to cultivate well-being even in the face of terror and dispossession through an ethos of abundance, generosity, and self-development. In summary, it connects radical human transformation, ecology, and accelerationism with themes of aesthetics, abundance, and cultivating life amid capitalism’s destructive tendencies.

Here are summaries of the sources provided:

• Harvey 2011, 215: No summary provided. Likely discusses something relevant to the context but no details given.

• Bloch 1986, 140: Discusses the concept of “sheer aimless infinity”.

• Keynes 1937: Distinguishes between uncertainty and risk.

• Meillassoux 2008, 101–7: Discusses the concept of “hyperchaos”.

• Ayache 2010: References the Black-Scholes formula for pricing financial derivatives.

• Henwood 1998: Recommends this analysis for discussion of the efficient market hypothesis.

• uncertain commons 2013: Labels the concept discussed as “affirmative speculation”.

• Grusin 2010: Introduces the concept of “premediation”.

• Fisher 2009: Introduces the concept of “capitalist realism”.

• Castells 2000; Shaviro 2003: Discuss the “network society”.

• Schumacher 2010: Discusses the concept of “small is beautiful”.

• Postman 2000: Describes a “bridge to the eighteenth century”.

• Noys 2010, Noys 2014: Discuss interpretations and discussions of “accelerationism”.

• Deleuze and Guattari 1983: Reference the text “Anti-Oedipus”.

• Lyotard 1993: References the text “Libidinal Economy”.

• Land 2011: References the writer Nick Land.

• Schumpeter 1984: Discusses the concept of “creative destruction”.

• Land 1991: Labels a concept as “virulent nihilism”.

• Deleuze 1990, 161: Quotes Deleuze on “alienation and exploration”.

• Williams and Srnicek 2013: References the “Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics”.

• Jameson 2009: Discusses Jameson’s analysis of Wal-Mart in the cited chapter.

• McLuhan 1994: Discusses McLuhan’s views on “media potentials”.

• Cavell 1979: Quotes Cavell on “the possibilities of a medium”.

The remaining summaries are omitted for brevity. Let me know if any specific ones would be useful to include.

Here is a summary of the entry:

Steven Shaviro is a professor of English at Wayne State University who has written extensively about speculative realism, accelerationism, aesthetics, and related philosophical and cultural topics. His books include The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism (2014), which explores speculative realism, and Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics (2009), which examines aesthetics. He is also the author of Connected, or What It Means to Live in the Network Society (2003) and The Cinematic Body (1993). Shaviro’s work brings together philosophy, critical theory, and popular culture to analyze contemporary society and possibilities for change. He has been an influential voice in discussions around accelerationism and speculative realism.