Mad Black Accelerationists to Dark Deleuze: Drop Dead (Black as the Anti-Dark)

It is impossible to think “selective” accelerationism outside Marx’s critique of “Proudhonism” in The Poverty of Philosophy. History advances by its bad side, Marx states, arguing against Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s selective approach to capitalism. For Proudhon, capitalism has both a good and a bad side whereby the good side can be kept while the bad side can be left behind. Such Proudhonism represents the false dialectic: markets without imperialism, profits without exploitation, the state without coercion.

Andrew Culp, Accelerationism and the Need for Speed: Partisan Notes on Civil
War [ http://www.ladeleuziana.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Culp.pdf?fbclid=IwAR0rEob6lE3i3y26g3qy6HGNBBHiXNAhbPnDGG2gCNbQJpimNc9xohmW2Jk ]

Dark Deleuzianism as pitched by Culp is a sensible, well-researched and innovative leftist position. The identity of this Real in dialectic opposition to the technological gains in the name of the waste of capital makes a lot of sense when taken with the whole of the project of leftist critique. But it can go fuck itself.

The denial of the Real of capitalism has never been a part of the accelerationist project. A critique of the reactionary strains of accelerationism is that in fact, they revel in the Real, and want to make more of it, in and for itself. The denial of the Real has always been the mechanism of neoliberalism, and the function of any state which has not come to terms with its garbage can.

Black the Anti-Dark

A parody of a parody such as “Black Dynamite” (2009) gives an example of the Hegelian purpose of the negated negation rather nicely. In it, there is no shortage of vulgarity, dick jokes, “edgelordism” (which the Dark Deleuzian project is also VeryAgainst.exe) all in the name of creating the negation of the negation of blaxploitation and the minstrel tradition. A tradition of racist caricature can not be simply negated by bland critique, but it needs to perhaps, even accelerate this process. “Black Dynamite” takes into account the libidinal vulgarity which is offered by blaxploitation, and it turns it against itself.

We are told to cancel the future on account of it being out of our control. The anal-retentive left dreams of swallowing the world and never taking a shit, and as a group is always bound to come up against the map which they have mapped out against themselves.

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Accelerationism is, if against anything, against empty depressive nothingness.

Of course there is specificity in critique, and of course there is something left out. The creation of utopia is not the business of capitalists, and when it is made the business of capitalists and reactionaries, only capitalists and reactionaries will be in control. If one makes the business of creating force and energy that of their enemies, one is either a perverse masochist, or simply ineffectual.

The dream of a totalizing system which takes into account all there is in the world is nothing new. Object Oriented Ontology has a similar project of the universe as a total, anti-dialectical object. “Something has been left out,” is the cry of inevitably, someone who is leaving yet another thing out, since this is always the side effect of creating their totalizing signifier: emptiness.

This totalizing is exactly what Dark Deleuze accuses Accelerationists of, while taking up the mantle of the universal themselves, disavowing while advocating.

Politics presents itself not as a subject but as a series of solutions. Shrewdly, Foucault found that politics, policy, and the police were once one-in-the-same. A new clarity has emerged in today’s era of crisis management, where crises are provoked in order to manage them. Immigration, detention, security, and military occupation: all solutions parading as causes. “To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace” (Tacitus 2013).
The partisan war machine never adopts the universal perspective, a position usually inhabited by those trying to offer a solution to everyone. Rather, the partisan refuses the role of governance altogether. The partisan instead presents itself as challenge to politics because it appears in a way that politics itself is not able to resolve. As an embodiment of problematics, the partisan war machine echoes the words of W. E. B. Dubois, “what it feels like to a be a problem?” It finds itself in history in “the Woman question”, “the Negro problem”, and other “problems”.
The image of an accelerationist politics is that of the world picture, a desire to control the whole globe. The partisan war machine is a politics without an image. In its cry, “you ain’t seen nothing yet”, it promises the only true image of revolution: a future so different that it no longer resembles the present.

Andrew Culp, Accelerationism and the Need for Speed: Partisan Notes on Civil
War, [Tacitus (2013) The Germany and The Agricola of Tacitus.
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/7524/7524-h/7524-h.htm%5D

The process is always the superpositional critique, as it is what is Actually happening. If it is actually happening, all things happen through the process one is critiquing. Accelerationists in their “cry” do not promise a future radically different, but an escape velocity. Accelerationism is against-via-through, the idea that the Actual by virtue of being Actual is really present, and that circling it and giving it the rating of double-plus-bad is not enough. The voice of the thing is not the thing itself.

In short, be like Black Dynamite and #accelerate.