ACCELERATIONISM
A symposium on tendencies in capitalism
14 December 2013, 10-20hr
Berlin Alexanderplatz
http://xlrt.org/
Contemporary capitalism is an object of high abstraction. The symposium is an
invitation to discuss and disclose the anonymous and inner tendencies of
capitalism, to study its monetary, algorithmic and energetic viscera. How can
one grasp the living drives of financial markets and technological innovation?
And more importantly: who really produces and controls those drives and how
could any alternative political subject emerge without such a complex knowledge?
The recent debate on accelerationism and the philosophical scene of Speculative
Realism just reminded of an old question posed by Deleuze and Guattari: Which
is the real revolutionary path? To withdraw from the world market or, on the
opposite, to go further and "accelerate the process", as Nietzsche already
suggested long before the current Stillstand? For example today Germany finds
itself in the eye of the storm: a mild social democracy at the center of Europe
watching neoliberalism freely devastating the rest of the world.
There are multiple strategies of how to cross a stormy passage. In Ballard's
first and prophetic novel The Drowned World (1962), an imbalance in solar
radiation causes the polar ice caps to melt and global temperatures to rise,
leaving cities submerged by tropical lagoons where flora and fauna restart
their evolution. Human population migrates towards the polar circles. Rather
than being disturbed, the protagonist is enraptured by the new nature that is
replacing the old world and decides to move south towards the sun.
Though encaged within cognitive capitalism, we call for an epistemic
acceleration. The symposium convenes to refresh the cartography of the keywords
employed in the last centuries to describe economy and the political response
to it: development, progress, growth, accumulation, peak, degrowth, revolution,
speculation, entropy, singularity, sustainability and so on. Today it is time
to anticipate and accelerate, for sure, time for anastrophism and not
catastrophism.
Curated by Armen Avanessian and Matteo Pasquinelli
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PRELIMINARY PROGRAM
Ray Brassier
Wandering Abstraction
Josephine Berry Slater
Epistemic Panic and the Problem of Futurity
Benjamin Noys
Days of Phuture Past: Accelerationism and Time
Elisabeth von Samsonow
Electra's Oracle: An Analytical Account on Accelerationist Hyperstition
Nick Srnicek
Ten Theses on Technology and Capitalism
Alex Williams
Hegemony and Complexity
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