Acceleration/Katabasis: A Short Note on the Calculable Velocity of Lunacy

"Moscow opened the door of the airplane and did her step into emptiness; a fierce vortex struck into her from below, as if the earth were the muzzle of a mighty blast engine inside which air is compressed to hardness and stands erect, like a solid column; Moscow felt she was an empty tube, being blown straight through and through, and she kept her mouth constantly open so she would have time to breathe out this wild wind piercing point-blank into her. All about her was dim from mist; the earth still lay far distant. Moscow began to swing from side to side, invisible to everyone because of the gloom—alone and free. She took out a cigarette and some matches, wanting to light up and have a smoke, but the match went out; then Moscow curled up to form a quiet, cozy space by her own bosom and immediately exploded all the matches in the box; carried by the pull of the vortex, flames at once seized the combustible lacquer impregnating the silk straps that linked the burden of the human being to the canopy of the parachute; these straps burnt away in less than a moment, immediately turning white-hot and scattering into ash. What happened to the canopy Moscow was unable to make out—the wind was now burning the skin on her face, as a result of the fierce, ever more blazing speed of her fall downward.

She flew, her cheeks red and burning, and the air tore harshly at her body, as if it were not the wind of celestial space but a heavy, dead substance—it was impossible to imagine that the earth could be harder and still more merciless. "So, world, this is what you're really like!" Moscow Chestnova thought inadvertently as she disappeared down through the half dark of the mist. "You're soft only so long as we don't touch you!" She pulled the ring of the reserve parachute, saw the ground of the aerodrome in its signal lights, and let out a cry of sudden torment—the opening parachute had jerked her body upward with such force that Moscow's bones suddenly all felt like aching teeth all the way through. Two minutes later she was sitting on the grass, covered by the parachute, and she began to crawl out from under it, wiping away the tears beaten out of her by the wind."

One can picture the Accelerationist position through an image of Moscow Chestnova coming to acceptance, then blaming her plight on the cigarette collective, and then, finally, seeking out their sponsorship. This is the madness upon which our question rests: humanist realism and its resounding failure in maintaining itself as an artform; socialist realism deprived of all its human qualities. The backdrop, if the Apres-Garde were capable of such a thing, would be Victory over the Sun; but at once gaudy, grotesque, gothic, and banal, with its steel melted into plastic. This is an important image to keep in mind, because our great revolutionaries consider themselves not only ahead of the socialists, but ahead of Capital itself—that great sentience, which, for some reason, worships the god of ugliness.

Also important to keep in mind is the days following the collapse of those great towers of World Valorisation and Devalorisation: in which, through the following days, the clouds parted for the heavens, and the sun warmed the earth to levels within which its nature had been hidden.

And a double-bind this is not, for these theorists never quite come around to asking such a question. Instead, they bypass it, barge through it softly, turning the Most Beautiful Machine into a Dadaist work which neither turns off nor destroys itself. It is conceptual performance art, in a theoretical space—but with neither concept nor performance, nor art nor even theory. It is the true manifesto of a revolutionary who does nothing by doing everything; which is also nothing. Behold! The revolutionary who conquers himself! A flawless victory, no need of bloodshed but for the natural running valorisation of capital in its sentience. No possibility of counter-revolution either, because its sentience has been written into the Winter Palace of this paradoxical figure.

But let us put an end to satire, for it is no longer fashionable—nor even possible. We are all wanderers now, and capital is nothing more than an attempt to catch up with an old form of economic appeasement to a theology of death. To satirise this, or rely upon irony in any way, would be a cruelty against the idle nomads now born again as proletarians of the highest standing. Our current position is quite the opposite of accelerationist theory: we, or those in charge at least, are attempting to free G-d into a wasteland where he is overwhelmed by his own undoing. G-d's escape into the desert of nothingness is the final bourgeois revolution.

Here the humanist unveils himself as the object of his own critique: trapped within everything he creates, the golden refuse intricate only in its destruction of all surrounding material. The great problem of science reveals itself once we see that the old idiom 'to tie even the devil to a pillow' can only be taken literally. Doubly so once we begin to see the humanist form as a singular effort to reform a lone figure capable of reducing God to envy. We are so blinded by this that we come to see the death of God as a new idea, a revelation, a creation of human effort. So quick-witted in the recuperation of heaven that we are two-thousand years too late.

Accelerationism, like its forebears, never attempts to understand this basic truth of Capital: that it too has a timeline, a genealogy, and it too is but an extricate of some greater herald. And this is why accelerationism can never work, nor come to any rest in a single truth, because it presupposes itself within the valorisation process, just as its fathers and grandfathers had done before it. An extricate of its own extrication; a human subjectivity which deepens along with its being impossibilised. In this sense, the theory of accelerants is nothing more than an attempt to reconcile a misunderstood Being with the being of capital—something which had already occurred at the very beginning of humanist thought. Here we see the age-old tale of Achilles and the Turtle returned to us through necessity; but now with each figure at rest, and yet, somehow the Turtle escaping ever farther into the distance.

Through impossibilisation of the laws of physics a theology of velocity begs us to return and ask its question: how might the Capital of Babel fall if it has already recuperated heaven? This difficulty of theological engineering in a world opposed to theological laws is why we build laterally now, and why the greatest revolutionaries will never catch up with the form of destruction arching within the totalising sarcophagus. The formal proletariat is subsumed by its real capital—every monument to thieves has this engraved within its foundation.

One must take a moment of silence here, wonder at the procession of the workers in mourning. They are, themselves, dead. And it was only in states which solidified this state of the worker that time appeared to halt: where all monuments became the extricate of the memory of death, where they sang hymns to this Being, where survival continued on within its impossibility. In these states the valorisation process ended, at least in the economic realm, and it appeared, for a time, that materiality had transcended its worldly constraints to become One.

For Western states there was no such realisation. They were forever burdened by the absence of their own inhumanity, and the natural progression of crypsis ensured that they could do nothing other than dwell within the territory of their own being: a dead language. Such are the contradictions of the spectral cult, the individual a saecellum wandering within his own ruins—the Anthropocene as natural law of the triumph of the Earth March. If there is a tragedy in such ease of living it is one which cannot be easily recognised, for he who lives in isolation is never mourned in procession. And if he is ever found there can only be a second isolation in the mind of the wanderer who finds him—and so it becomes necessary to constantly prefigure this death and mourning throughout one's life, to sing the ending hymn which no one will ever hear. The cult of death, once reduced to a lone melancholy, is incapable of writing itself into the past, and so must eternally refrain in katabasis. Total immobilisation causes the earth to take flight of itself, crystallising as immaterial, a celestial death, a firmament of all that which can never be recognised as mourning.

It is in this spiritual wandering of the lone human, the atheist and godformed individual, that we can imagine his deep theology: he wishes to build a sprawling apparatus which will capture the final breath of God in His world-weariness. The creation which had exhausted all of his efforts shall now become his end; or at least this is the theological law for a cult of death in open rebellion against the laws of death. And so the Mangod becomes trapped within his own curse, within the labyrinth of his own perfidious wandering between worlds. Liquidation of humanism works so long as the world can endure its own imprisonment within ruins, but the question remains: can the human wield such unworldly power? As we approach absolute destruction the ruins appear as little more than a fata morgana, and this feeds the frenzy of our final moments. We rush onwards—scrambling, crawling, pulling our failing torso against the noise of our being torn asunder.

The only remaining theory of value for accelerationism is in bringing to the surface the totalitarian and tyrannical nature of our current condition. But this is an impossible framework given that the necessity of life ensures our capitulation to any economic mode leveraging our continuation. If theological armistice turns to worldwide economic encirclement, so be it, our wars are grand enough now that it may take an eternity to fill the stores and block up the tunnels. Such is the simplicity of nature turning us around the bend so that we do not run off course. The narrowing of the river precedes its flow into rapids. And the wearing away forms the juncture of land now forever impassable.

Humans will never see the marketplace as the source of domination and tyranny, it is unnatural—no matter how unforgiving the landscape itself becomes. Thieves may be born of our hoods, and the gloves we purchase may be slipped on to hide our severed hands, but we will never turn against the market. We are abstract beings wandering hourly into an abstract bazaar, because the goods never arrive on time; they are a mess of irradiated rot; or they simply act as a drain upon the unknown craft which forms them, thus necessitating an unfolding of anti-forms—this is the essence of Capital, the bourgeoisie's lament for its loss of idle nomadism. And yet its rites of destruction only further divide it from Fortune; Fate staring at her own future, patch-bald, and bearing between her fingers her own golden tresses—boldly stripped of its colour in life and death. Lachesis the allotter, pulling the threads of opportunity out of her own decrepit madness.

Capital is a massive, horrifying, and invisible apotropaic symbol; a spectral God self-flagellating; the fiery horizon of our future ancestors descending upon the city with vengeful justice of the war of all against all; but also nothing more than the waste left over after days of rites and mysteries. And accelerationism lives and dies in the same place: between monstrous ruse and absurd hubris. The Goddess of marketing is the residue left over in empty bottles, simply stale without the possibility of turning to mould. Worse than a Dionysian who doesn't drink, the false worshippers of Hermes cannot imagine that modernity itself was the false worship of Fate—attempting to turn her wheel against her, a humanity at once ascendant to heaven and struggling to survive within the wrath of Earth and her gods of pestilence. The accelerationist, like all materialists, identifies the subjective not only as the object of creation, but as creation itself.

Residue is reformed into an idol, and then an Aegis Shield containing God himself. But we should remember that this Goddess is incestuous to the God of Ugliness. Brother or Son to the Mother, it is no matter. Simply the draw of the bare symbols in a world of hype and post-ballyhoo is what matters. Make it simple yet exciting—the only law of the Eleusinian Mysteries of capital worship. But to think that anyone would shake in fear over products with spooky rebranding is foolish. These are nothing more than apotropaic trinkets sold to wanderers in the marketplace, while the symbolic mysteries of the initiated forever remain repulsive to them. The latest product may arrive as a house of horrors, or a recuperation of the cosmos even, but life never turns on itself, no matter how decrepit.

We are so caught up within this natural revolution that we do not even see the leadership forming—we are spectres led on by even more ghostly figures. But it was our ancestors who dealt with the true horrors: cannibalism against encirclement, starvation amidst the ecstasy of an unending dance of death; we are merely hauling the rubble away. A true ode to capital would pay tribute to these men. Yet the accelerationist wants us to live in his tragicomedy, to believe that a counter-inventory of the dwindling stores will shock the castle into capitulation with a war already lost. All the hype and influence is merely a cover, a mobilised tomb of our own endless ending. We need desperate symbols and spectacles to make up for our own lack of appearance in the world, the will to our never being known, never having lived. In the end, the spectral being becomes its own apotropaic symbol. The world is forever loyal to its internal logic, and so capital betrays its true believers most of all.

And here we see the necessity of unveiling the tyranny which resides elsewhere. Capital is sentient. Capital is sacrament. Capital is senescent. Capital is sentiment. And yet it is not everything, not even close—no matter how hard we might pray for a permanent fixture amidst our abstraction. It is neither G-d, nor Go-, nor -od—no matter how many trinities are produced attempting to enclose all manner of escape. Recent figures even suggest that capital is nothing more than a drain on the gods. And this is opposed to the tradition of economic myths: for the old god Hermes the market was only ever a beginning, he started out as the god of economy, and through his trials and wanderings between worlds he eventually became everything. Capital, in contrast, appears ever more to take flight from its own supposed object, two of the greatest apotropaic symbols brought to ruin—then the slow floor down upon floor collapse into black market conflict around the world.

Here, the landscape ghosted before itself. Here, the apotropaic symbol of endless streams of invisible data. Here, the final triumph of humanism racing against itself: the technicalised instrument bounding over itself, survival's completion. Capital. This timeline.

On a long enough timeline, the eternal-recurrence-rate for everyone drops to zero.

On a long enough timeline, the eternal striving for levelling finds its paradox in the collapse of negative numbers to zero.

On a long enough timeline, the acceleration rate for every high-frequency trader creates the Collateralized Debt Obligation of Building 7.

On a long enough timeline, the economic object realises that it cannot overcome the gravity of Pseudo-Achilles who goes 'SPLAT!'

On a long enough timeline, the eternal closing of the gap between the upper and lower tower becomes the sentience of jet fuel meeting its molten steel.

Capital. This timeline.

Concerning two rows of columns built atop two separate general equivalents of equal size, passing each other along the mill-bridge as they proceed with equal velocity in opposite directions of mobilisation—the gods accelerate the ground into a melting bed of coals: smouldering against all time, reforming the river as a petrification of glowing stone.

Capital. This timeline.

Capital is nothing more than the leverage against a fulcrum occupying a position as a theology of Fate's Wheel resting motionless within the locomotion of Doom.

Capital. This timeline.

If capital is not resting motionless, then it is dead. If it comes to the singular production of a single commodity, it is also dead.

Capital. This timeline.

The question of our tyrannical lives beneath a lost market - and our counter-revolution against the eternal revolution of human flight - begins here. At that moment when capital collapsed into its own apotropaic symbols we were forced to ask entirely foreign questions; questions which have long been abandoned and which no one had the heart to return to. And so we are left to that final apotropaic symbol, that hidden and invisible hand which sacrifices itself to the world's end—but cannot, for the immaterial can never be sacrificed to the material. Only that which reigns within its own quantity may feed on its doom. The final paradox of bourgeois revolution is that its obsessive, recurring inventory creates its own counter-revolution: formal capital is subsumed by its real proletariat. And that which sought to create a world of law extricated from natural order is subsumed by it—the gods do not die, they are merely blurred out as we lower ourselves into the black pool. And the more we wipe the muck from our eyes the more we see only ourselves.  Within the mass mausoleum brought to its end, the Falling Man finds himself eternal, motionless; glowing stone. 'I am that I am.'

Why is Hermes lost to the underworld? Have his thieves turned upon him for some greater treasure? Has the market been banished to hell with him, or have we attempted to bury him beneath our extrication of eternal material? It seems that our triumph over death comes at a much greater cost than a mouthful of coins passed to Charon, and in a world where everything becomes its opposite the market is turned into the plunder of our being unscathed before the gauntlet of hell. But the gods are never saleable, that is Capital's final, unintentional lesson—and it is here that we recognise that it was nothing, and never was anything. Only our lack of being turned it as a conduit, a beacon guiding us along the River Styx which had overrun its banks.

A story may only unfold within its setting, an old lesson now abandoned by our best and brightest. Pseudo-Achilles can never catch up to the turtle because the paradox turns him to lunacy, and he looks back in longing—for Eurydice, or Persephone, or Hecate, or Thetis, or Lachesis, or Briseis; some woman or goddess or unknown form which weighs impossibly upon him, drowning. Find the source of this paradox, and therein also find the single coin which releases Capital from its death grips and returns Hermes to his crossings. It is our great want of strength which unravels us as the weakened thieves of time; and it is in recognising this that we may pay the toll and cross that river of our final hour.

The coin-closed mouth opposed to world occlusion. The dead flesh returning to look out for its soul. Fate's locks returned to her and her weaving.