How did accelerationism become a boy’s club? This isn’t to say that the accelerosphere consists only of men; in fact it’s always been jampacked with women, especially trans-women. But when you look at the canonical list of Major Accelerationist Thinkers™, the sausage party unveils itself: Nick Land, Mark Fisher, Nick Srnicek, Alex Williams, Ray Brassier, Robin Mackay, Edmund Berger, Vincent Garton, Matt Colquhoun, James Ellis—all male.
Sadie Plant may get a casual mention from those in the know, perhaps even Amy Ireland or Anna Greenspan, but these female accelerosphere members are often swiftly dropped into the “xenofeminism” basket. As a Twitter-storm revealed last year, bracketing off female fellow-travellers of accelerationism into a separate xenofeminism category has served partly as a mechanism for men in the accelerosphere to ignore them.
This is bizarre, not just because Sadie Plant founded the CCRU and is hence the ur-figure of the whole movement, but because a cosmic femininity is central to the accelerationist worldview. Nick Land knows this and even used to acknowledge it: The Thirst for Annihilation is peppered with references to feminist philosophy, and invokes concepts like “vulvocosmic dissolution”. His essay “Kant Capital Capital and the Prohibition of Incest” (which he now disavows) puts women and radical feminism at the centre of a proto-accelerationist praxis.
Folding everything away into xenofeminism is also quite problematic, since xenofeminism is far from encompassing the potential feminist side of accelerationism, nor is it even its best representative. In this piece, I want to explore the woefully under-acknowledged connections between feminism and accelerationism, while simultaneously offering a broad critique of some of the celebrated acc-involved feminist texts.
Zeroes & Ones: Technosomy
In her book Zeroes & Ones, Sadie Plant details not just how women have been inextricably bound up with the advance of technology (and often written out of the story of that technology’s development), but how there is an inherent cosmic femininity in technics itself. Technics, contra the stereotype that it is a deeply masculine phenomenon opposed to “naturalness” and femininity, is in fact a manifestation of a deeper femininity*.
Technology, especially information technology, refuses to remain in the little box that a masculine order prescribes for it. Masculinity wants top-down control, reason, purpose, instrumentality. Technics is often presented as a manifestation of a masculine desire for power over nature, but in fact it is quite the opposite. Technics is the ultimate way in which nature enchants man, takes hold of him and uses him as the material resources for its own alien ends.
The masculine social order continues to engage in the fantasy that technology can be controlled and regulated. But technology is always one step ahead of rational oversight: propagating, evolving, capturing minds, decentralising, slipping through the cracks. It is in fact technics that will be the ultimate undoing of the rational, centralised masculine order: a technics without the logos, a technosomy.
Vulvocosmic Dissolution: Cosmic Femininity
The masculine is ultimately built on a fear of penetration. Not just anal penetration with a phallus, but penetration of the inner sanctum of the self by the outside world. Masculinity prizes “strength” above all, where strength is read as “ability to not be affected”. To be a real man is to not let the world get to you, and certainly to not let it get into you.
What libidinal materialism calls for however is radical, deep affectivity. The libidinal materialist leans into the flows of desire, lets them penetrate, lets them dissolve the subject and its barriers. It rejects the traditionally masculine pseudo-strength, what theorist Nassim Taleb would call “robustness”, and opts instead for what he would call “antifragility”: strength through plasticity, through adaptability and openness to change. As Deleuze recognises in Nietzsche and Philosophy, the true measure of strength is not the ability to resist but the ability to be affected.
While masculinity calls for the one, the uniform, the stable, the ordered, femininity calls for the many, the diverse, the fluid, the chaotic. Accelerationism is cosmically feminine in its recognition of the inevitability of dissolution. Territorialised structures will crumble and give way to a deterritorialised, decoded, destratified wilderness. As Nick Land notes in The Thirst for Annihilation, accelerationism is the movement from 1, the phallomorphic base, to the femininity of zero.
The masculine is rational and wants to contain the world within the cognitive realm, to fold matter into mind. It cannot bear the unthought that the world out there could find ways to penetrate it subterraneanly, to puppet it, to slip free from its attempt at containment and be transcendentally unbegreiflich. The masculine mind must be the one in control: the real must be reduced to the thinkable, the discursive, the known and understood. Libidinal materialism says no: reality always surpasses.
Reality is weird or—to put it another way—queer. The “normal” (as Irigaray points out) has always been the masculine, but reality is not masculine and so reality is abnormal. Accelerationism recognises unbridleable technocapitalism’s accelerating charge into the wilderness. The world will get queerer at an exponentially accelerating rate. Traditional masculinity cannot survive intact. The remnants of the masculine that do remain will be queered, warped, torn up and mixed with things beyond “manly” men’s worst nightmares.
Cosmic Queerness vs. Xenofeminism
Now that I’ve laid out a sketch of the radical libidinal femininity and cosmic queerness that I see inherent in accelerationism, I want to explain why it is so wrong to bracket all potentially feminist aspects of acc away into “xenofeminism”. Xenofeminism, while aligning with accelerationism in multiple ways, is a different movement and one that exhibits a number of inadequacies in light of what I’ve detailed above.
The Xenofeminist Manifesto (hereafter XFM), ascribed to the multi-authorial assemblage Laboria Cuboniks, is a tragic case of so near and yet so far. It’s a fantastic document, full of promise, sense and stylistic flair, but also a document that fails to push the boundaries far enough. Some of the good things one finds in the XFM are as follows:
- (1) A much more materialist and technophilic stance than most forms of contemporary feminism. XFM, taking the lead from Plantian cyberfeminism, celebrates the potential of technology, engineering and natural science as liberatory.
- (2) An ambitious, unswerving, unabashed embrace of alienation. XFM, against the essentialism of second-wave feminism, allies itself firmly with the greatest of all people: freaks and weirdos. XF takes an exploratory and artistic approach to gender: “let a thousand genders bloom!”.
- (3) XF is pragmatic and anti-utopian, recognising the value of decentralised institutions and spontaneous order. (It even goes so far as invoking Smith’s invisible hand metaphor!). It puts itself forward as a stridently adaptable and anti-dogmatic movement: not a programme, but a platform to create a new language.
The manifesto however, and it’s accompanying ideology, also suffer from a number of important shortcomings:
- (1) Xenofeminism is still too leftist for its own good. It wants to be something different, alien, amorphous and adaptable but it remains trapped within the cage of conventional socialist politics. I’ve argued before that socialism is a ball and chain hanging around accelerationism’s neck. Any interesting politics that comes out of acc needs to radically dissociate itself from the discourse of socialist and communist intellectual traditions.
- (2) Xenofeminism’s failure to dissociate itself from socialism means that, despite its protestations against moralism, it remains wedded to an outdated concept of “justice”. Like socialism, the concept of “justice” as a whole must be transcended. No truly radical liberatory movement should invoke justice as a guiding principle. The positive, anti-critical anti-politics that xenofeminism strives for will not be reached until it adopts a fully post-justice position.
- (3) Moving beyond justice, XF must go even further, until it finds itself entering the space of the post-political. The XFM’s current praxis is profoundly political. Even as it attempts to carve out a new more practical realm of the “mesopolitical”, it’s sophomoric commitment to anti-capitalist activism, and to the fantasy of capitalism as the root of all evil, prevents it from recognising the importance of a cosmic praxis beyond the merely political.
- (4) XF makes the classic Marxist mistake of drawing everything back to class politics. In the end, the manifesto argues, gender inequality itself is ultimately a manifestation of class inequality, with class war being the true war. This Marxist illusion must be overcome in favour of a libidinal realism: the key opposition is not Capital vs. Labour but Super Ego vs. Id. The ultimate oppression is not the oppression of the underclass by the overclass, it is the oppression of desire by constraints. XF, in its admitted rationalism, has failed to go deep into the bowels of the libidinal.
Queer Acceleration
Perhaps one problem here is that gender politics as a whole needs to escape itself, broadening its horizons to become not merely a gender movement but a queer movement. The widely derided but actually quite excellent Gender Accelerationist Blackpaper, authored by the mysterious trans-female programmer Nyx Land, puts forward something that gets a lot closer to this ideal than xenofeminism.
Pinching concepts promiscuously from both Plantian cyber-feminism and neoreaction, Nyx builds on Plant’s insights about the history of information technology, while bringing the figure of the trans-woman to the centre. The piece presents gynephilic trans women (i.e. trans women who are attracted to women) as a kind of superior being, a high IQ copy-of-a-copy that has transcended gender itself and turned stereotypical female “weaknesses” into strengths.
By untethering gender from biological sex, the trans-woman is said to launch a guerilla war, bringing the gender binary and patriarchy down from the inside by deploying it against itself. Only the trans-woman is capable of this, since cis-queerness is not a fully molecular queerness, and so will inevitably fall back into some kind of humanism or residual masculinity. Also, contra xenofeminism’s anti-capitalism, G/acc is presented as a deep “conspiracy with technocapital”, aligning itself with capitalism’s inherent decoding tendencies.
There is much to take issue with in Nyx’s thesis, especially her outright bigotry against gay men and androphilic trans-women. But, despite its flaws, her manifesto comes much closer than the XFM to the genuinely queer accelerationism that we need. It is not simply from the masculine to the feminine that we are accelerating, but from the “normal” to the queer: a Q/acc, rather than just a G/acc.
Acéphallus: The Solar Bussy
It is a great shame that the G/acc manifesto completely dismisses male homosexuality, presenting it as a dangerous masculine avenue through which humanism and even neo-fascism can creep back in. In its acknowledgement of what it terms “acéphallus”, the deterritorialisation of sexuality from the phallus to the whole of the body (as celebrated by Sadie Plant), the G/acc manifesto misses the contribution made to acéphallisation by anal sex.
It’s not just women who can have full body orgasms. Men can too, via the “bottom” position in anal sex. The experience of an anal orgasm is so transcendent that the occultist Aleister Crowley practically built an entire gnostic practice around it. Through anal sex, an organ completely separate from the economy of sexual reproduction becomes an instrument of the queerest jouissance—a queer jouissance that people of all genders can enjoy, since the anus is the only sexual organ that every human being possesses.
Much is made of the way the number 1 looks a bit like a dick and the 0 looks a bit like a vagina, and how the vulva and the female body are a smooth space, contrasting with the rigidity and straight lines of the male form. But surely 0 looks much more like an arsehole than a vagina? Nyx is being faithful to her Plant and D&G, but not to her Bataille: zero is not a vagina, it’s a solar bussy.
What could be more accelerationist than the triumph of the anus as an instrument of libidinal liberation? The sun, shining representative of inevitable cosmic dissolution is, as Bataille informs us, an anus. Accelerating cosmic dissolution is waste, expenditure as an end-in-itself. Q/acc isn’t just an acceleration towards the feminine; it’s an acceleration towards the anal, in the most deliciously anti-Freudian sense: the freed anus as the exemplar par excellence of a world beyond traditional masculinity and traditional gender relations.
*In case I’m accused of misreading Plant, I should add the caveat that I am using Plant more as inspiration than as doctrine for what is said here
Cybertrop(h)ic 