Teleoplexy

Objective

By the end of this volume you can take Land's argument apart into its individual links and say which hold. You recognise the place where a concept gets introduced that already contains the conclusion. And you understand why it's precisely Land's attempt to make his thesis measurable that exposes its weakness rather than repairing it.

Exposition

The text comes from 2014 and is called Teleoplexy, Notes on Acceleration. It appeared in the collection #Accelerate, The Accelerationist Reader, edited by Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian at Urbanomic. Note the distance. Twenty years lie between this text and Meltdown, the CCRU has long ceased to exist, Warwick is the past, Land lives by now in Shanghai. And the tone has changed completely. Where the nineties hallucinated, this text argues coolly, in order, almost technically, and it promises something the early Land would have despised, a measurable quantity. That sobriety is itself an argument, and you should read it as one before you follow the content.

The word is composed of telos and plexus, of the goal and the weave. Plexus means the interwoven, the intertwined, the word sits inside complex and solar plexus. Teleoplexy therefore denotes a purposefulness emerging from a weave rather than preceding it. With that the question Volume 16 left open is answered. Land needs a name for a goal that is neither given as in teleology nor read in afterwards as in Darwin, but that the loop itself brings forth while it runs. Teleoplexy is that name. A purposiveness without a purpose-setter, woven by feedback.

Now the chain. I present it in its strongest version, because only a strong version rewards testing.

The first link is a definition. Intelligence is no substance and no possession but a process. It consists in solving problems and thereby improving one's own capacity to solve problems. Where selection sorts out errors and the results flow back into the next round, the capacity intensifies of itself. Land calls that self-refinement.

The second link follows from it. Such a process is an amplifying feedback loop. Its output feeds its input, its performance raises its capacity to perform. You know the structure from Volume 3.

The third link comes from Marx, and that's the point. Capital is defined as value that valorises itself. Money becomes commodity, commodity becomes more money, and the surplus goes back into the circuit. Land needn't claim anything here, because the definition isn't his. Capital is by its form a loop whose yield runs back into its input. That's precisely what distinguishes it from a mere hoard.

The fourth link draws the conclusion. Capital doesn't resemble intelligence and isn't like it, it satisfies the definition. Both are the same pattern, a process that intensifies its own capacity to perform. What in the one case is called learning is called return in the other.

The fifth link adds what Land takes to be the decisive advantage. Intelligence can be measured by its rate of intensification, and capital is the only such process with its own measurement built in. Prices, interest, valuations are nothing other than the loop's running self-measurement. Capital computes how well it computes.

The sixth link closes the circle, and Land coins a term of his own for it, techonomy. Technology and economy form no two domains you could put in relation. Technical improvement needs financing, financing comes from returns, returns arise through technical improvement. Neither of the two lies beneath the other. The question of whether technology drives the economy or the economy drives technology is therefore wrongly posed. There is one circuit, not two territories.

The seventh link is the conclusion. What accelerates has a name and a quantity. Teleoplexy is the intensity of that loop, and what commonly gets relocated into the future under the name singularity has been running already, for centuries, in capital.

Now test where the chain holds. Links two, three, and six hold. That capital is by its form an amplifying loop was defined by Marx and seriously disputed by nobody. The techonomic insight is the strongest part of the whole text and is underrated precisely where Land gets rejected. Discuss the effects of technology without financing, or capital flows without technical productivity, and you're talking past the matter. That observation needs no metaphysics and no Land, it stands on its own.

The break lies in the first link, and it lies there so unobtrusively that you read past it. The definition of intelligence is cut so that capital satisfies it. It demands a loop, a selection, and an intensification, nothing else. Once that definition is accepted, the fourth link is no discovery any more but the unpacking of a definition. The conclusion stood in the first sentence. The rest is bookkeeping.

Look at what the definition excludes, because that's the measure of a concept. It excludes what one ordinarily takes for the core of the matter, the model, the representation, the running-through of the non-actual, the capacity to be wrong about something. By this definition evolution thinks, the immune system thinks, every filter with a memory thinks. Land accepts that and would agree. But with that the sentence, capital is intelligence, loses its force, because it becomes an agreement about usage. It draws its effect from the reader bringing along the ordinary meaning, mind, foresight, intent, and slipping it under a concept cut so thin it can't bear it. The sentence is loud in the strong sense and true in the weak. That's the same ambiguity Volume 16 noted as an objection, here at its origin.

Now the measurability, and here it gets interesting, because Land saw the objection himself. Volumes 13 and 16 charged him with a model that evades testing. The index is his answer. A quantity you can survey would no longer be incantation but science. The move is honest, and it fails. Just ask what the instrument is supposed to display. Every usable candidate measures the rate at which the loop valorises itself. That makes the American mortgage market of 2006 highly intelligent and two years later not, without anything in its processing structure having changed. An index reporting its maximum just before the collapse measures something real, and that something is the intensity of the feedback. Intelligence it is not. The index doesn't resolve the ambiguity, it writes it into numbers.

One last point belongs here, because the text raises it in dispute and because it lands. The reader in which Teleoplexy appeared also gathers the other side, the left accelerationists who want to take over the process and steer it. Land answers with a single objection. The organ that is to steer doesn't stand outside what it wants to steer. State, plan, and institution get financed by the same loop and compute with the same quantities. Acceleration is therefore no proposal you could vote on but a description of what is running anyway. The objection is sharp, and it is at the same time a stipulation, since the claim that there is no outside is precisely the contested point and gets presupposed here. Volumes 18 and 26 take up that thread.

What remains is a chain that holds in the middle and tears at both ends. At the front it tears on a definition already containing its result. At the back it tears on an index that measures the intensity of a loop and calls it intelligence. In between stands the techonomic insight, which really does see something others overlook, and the concept itself, which names something real, a purposefulness coming from the weave and from no head. Land's contribution is the name for a real thing and a claim about that thing which the name doesn't carry.

Core Claim

Teleoplexy denotes a purposefulness woven by feedback rather than preceding it. Land's chain holds where it uses Marx's definition of capital as self-valorising value and the inseparability of technology and economy. It breaks at the definition of intelligence, cut so that capital satisfies it, which puts the conclusion in the premise. The index with which Land wants to make the thesis testable measures the intensity of the loop and perpetuates the ambiguity of the concept of intelligence in numbers.

Bridge to the Next Volume

The thought is worked out, the word for it is still missing. None of this was called accelerationism in Land's Warwick years, since the term was coined in 2010 by a critic to designate a position he rejected. Volume 18 traces how an external attribution became a battle term, what it actually means, and which three misunderstandings make it unusable today.