Atlas4 min read

The Atlas

What flowed out of the CCRU are currents of thought, six of them, and they pull apart in opposite directions. Each page first shows what the strand is and wants, and places it separately from that. With the political strands this separation is strict, the account without caricature, the Critic just as precise. These pages report, they do not advocate, and they do not conceal.

Accelerationism and its split

Accelerationism is no doctrine but a dispute over one question. Can the process of capital be steered, and if so, by whom and toward what. The word was at first a charge, Benjamin Noys coined it in 2010. Left accelerationism, the manifesto of Srnicek and Williams in 2013, says the process can be steered, toward a world beyond work. The right, Land, rejects steering by humans, capital being the real intelligence, and runs into Neoreaction. The unconditional, from Vincent Garton, draws the hardest consequence, the process cannot be steered at all, and remains an antipraxis. Last the effective, out of Silicon Valley, the same for artificial intelligence. A word of demarcation, far-right attackers use the same word for a strategy of chaos, which shares nothing with the positions above but the name. [Critic, expandable] Above all stands Noys's objection, whoever celebrates acceleration easily confuses the analysis of a force with its affirmation. Telling that the left wing soon shed the name.

Xenofeminism

Xenofeminism opens with a sentence, if nature is unjust, change nature. The collective Laboria Cuboniks wrote it in 2015. Meant is the refusal of any politics that appeals to the natural. Helen Hester put the stance in three terms, technomaterialism, antinaturalism, gender abolitionism. Here lies the break with Plant, who called technology female. Xenofeminism wants to free woman from any such ascription. From the CCRU it takes hyperstition. [Critic, expandable] The critique lands on the universalism. And the trust in technology easily overlooks who owns the platforms.

Speculative Realism

Speculative Realism was born on a single day, 27 April 2007, at a workshop at Goldsmiths that Mackay's Collapse co-carried. Four philosophers, Brassier, Grant, Harman, Meillassoux, were united by a single rejection, correlationism, the inheritance of Kant. No further did the unity carry. Meillassoux absolutised contingency, Brassier made extinction the ground and soon rejected the name, Harman built object-oriented ontology, Grant recovered Schelling's nature. Four different outsides. Speculative Realism is thereby the academic crystallisation of the CCRU's antianthropocentric stance, made strict and at once scattered. [Critic, expandable] The sharpest objection is that the movement barely existed, a shared enemy is no shared philosophy. Add the suspicion that correlationism is a straw man.

Hauntology

Fisher's hauntology mourns not the past but a future that was cancelled. He took the term from Derrida. Two sentences carry it, the slow cancellation of the future, borrowed from Berardi, and the failed mourning for the futures the neoliberal order smashed. The difference from nostalgia is fine and decisive, nostalgia longs for a past time, hauntology mourns the not-arrived. Its music is one of crackle, Ghost Box, Burial. In the cosmos it is the melancholic counterpole to Eshun and Goodman, the same origin, the opposite stance. [Critic, expandable] The strongest objection comes from Reynolds, a critique of the retro that is itself retro. Add the charge that it aestheticises defeat.

Neoreaction and the Dark Enlightenment

Neoreaction, NRx for short, also the Dark Enlightenment, is the political shape of right accelerationism, an antidemocratic and antiegalitarian current that arose around 2007 in blogs. Its frame was drawn by Curtis Yarvin under the name Mencius Moldbug. His neocameralism thinks the state as a firm with a sovereign CEO, the citizens as customers. His figure of the Cathedral means the assumed alliance of universities, media and administration. Nick Land coined the term Dark Enlightenment in 2012 and gave the current its apocalyptic version. Both share the rejection of the idea that the average person is capable of self-government, and find an audience today in parts of Silicon Valley. [Critic, expandable] The strand is explicitly antidemocratic, it advocates the abolition of democratic structures in favour of authoritarian rule, and is placed by scholarship as reactionary, in part as neofascist. Historians connect Land's capitalist eschatology with supremacist figures of thought, while Land himself disputes any nearness to fascism, arguing that fascism is an anti-capitalist mass movement. This page presents the position in full and takes a clear counterposition. It reports, it does not advocate.

Theory-Fiction as Legacy

Theory-fiction is the CCRU's real legacy, no question of style but a wager on how ideas become real. Its core is hyperstition, a fiction that makes itself real. Barker is the proof in small, Negarestani's Cyclonopedia carries the procedure into a work of its own. The claim is serious, that the separation of analysis and invention is itself an illusion, coherence becomes the test. [Critic, expandable] Exactly here lies the danger. A method that declares invention a means of knowledge can justify anything. Where the fiction escapes testing, it becomes mystification. The line between thought-experiment and fog is thin, and the CCRU dances on it deliberately.