Vince Garton: Collected Writings, 2016-2023

Scribbling in the chaos of phenomena

I’ve imposed upon myself a strict regime of productivity, a sort of mental Stakhanovitism, which has clearly manifested as the constant stream of posts that have clogged everybody’s email inboxes. I apologize for that but it’s also the most widely read and subscriber-dense period of this blog to date so that’s cool. Besides writing incessantly I took some time (with the help of Tom, the self-declared archivist of certain undertow currents in this corner of the internet sphere) to put together a collection of writings—blog posts and articles—from one of the great thinkers of our time, Vince Garton. I’m not sure if you read this substack, Vince, but if you do I hope you’re ok with this being put together.

You can download it: here. At some point this will be properly formatted to look better and be more uniform and I guess be available via print-on-demand services. But that’s not happening today and we’ll see if I get a cease and desist letter before then.

It should go without saying that basically an ‘big idea’ I’ve had—from the old ‘unconditional acceleration’ (U/Acc) days down through the Metacartel—was formed out from dialogue with Vince. For a while, there was a vibratory plateau that brought together many of us—Thomas Murphy, Amy Ireland, Xenogoth, etc—and which was hyperproductive in ways I have a hard time imagining now. That was the heyday of U/Acc; later, as inevitable fragmentation and diverging interests took sway, a drift took place, and new topics and theoretical positions moved to the fore. In these collected writings, we swing from Vince’s deep articulation of what ‘acceleration’ really is to his writings on Catholicism, his considerations on China and Singapore, and, finally, to the covid crisis and beyond it, to what it means to grapple with the ‘end of history’.

Putting these essays together and reading back through them made me reflect on my own relationship to these trajectories and how they shaped the weird projects that I’ve sequestered to the ‘pages’ of this substack. I’ll give just a few thoughts on the general microcultural history that is being archived here, beginning with that infamous creature: Unconditional Acceleration(ism). U/Acc meant a whole lot of different things to a whole lot of different people and I’m certain that if you ask any of the people who came together under the different hashtags on twitter that signaled theoretical affinity—#RhettTwitter and #CaveTwitter—you would get a series of fairly unique responses, each vaguely resonant but divergent from one another. The meaning also changes over time, and things that were hazy in those heady day make a little more sense in hindsight.

Here’s what the core of U/Acc seems to me, at least now: it was an ensemble of different theoretical and aesthetical components, shoved together in a novel way. They included:

• The perception of political action and political identification as epiphenomenal to the real process that undergirds them. This was a hard Marxist determinism, which allowed little-to-no room for the autonomy of the political, relative or not. If political maneuvering did occur—something felt most sharply in state-led developmentalism—it would eventually be subverted, subjected to unexpected ironies and pushed far beyond its original intentions. (See Vince’s essay ‘Park Chung-Hee Napoleon’)

• If political coordinates do not grasp the real thing under consideration, then the different ‘accelerationisms’—the “left acceleration” of Srnicek and Williams and the “right acceleration” of Nick Land had to function in a secondary position to a more fundamental, unconditional acceleration that gave rise to both.

• “Acceleration” was a loose descriptor not simply for ‘things speeding up’, or the even more vulgar version of ‘the worse the better’, but for spiral temporality. Time is neither cyclical (the time of tradition) nor linear (the time of modernity), but tangled between the two; the spiral of time is itself compressive and involutionary, a tightening gyre bending asymptotically towards ??? something. (This thread is picked up by Amy Ireland in her early 2017 essay ‘The Poememenon’)

• A commitment to a Fundamentalist Marxist understanding of crisis theory, which holds that crisis does not signal the catastrophic breakdown of capitalism, but illustrates the quickening pace of development and all that it entails—mechanization, expanded circuits of production and consumption, and, most importantly, the compounding problem of overproduction. In this version of Marx, which emerges most strongly in the 15th chapter of Capital Volume III, the limit of capitalism is an absolute crisis of overproduction. The auto-generative mechanical dimensions of the capitalist system rip beyond themselves. (I refer the reader here to Vince’s ‘Accelerate Marx’, but also to Capital Volume 3, Chapter 15: Exposition of the Internal Contradictions of the Law)

• A grafting-onto of this version of Marx to Bataille’s notions of excess, particularly that of the Accursed Share. There, Bataille discards any notion that the world is sunk into scarcity—he was an early theorist of Cornucopia Earth—but is instead swollen with excess, which must be discharged somehow lest society itself break apart at the seams. Reading Marx back through this makes the ultimate overproduction crisis not the herald of communism, but a situation of apocalyptic proportions: society being driven to madness.

• A highlighting of information as both a commodity and a process undergoing densification. If information is a commodity, then it too is subjected to overproduction. This was the material base for what at the time appeared as total social schizophrenia between the years of 2016 and 2017. The overproduction of information, social interconnection, cybernetics etc. was reaching a degree to where the individual could no longer operate in the world, could no longer act as the rational subject that liberalism held it as. The individual was being dissolved into the digital soup of “mass consciousness”. (See the essays ‘2016: The Accession of the Internet’ and ‘The End of (Your) Humanity: Cybernetics Casually Defined’)

The twist was to take all of these recognitions not as a critique, but to find a way to give oneself over to the process, to embody that sense of individual dissolution into a phantasmagorical kaleidoscope of social-mechanical energy. In the crisis, the rupture-that-wasn’t that gripped the world for those two years, there was a sense that one could reach out and touch Year Zero, realize it even if only psychically or through aesthetic-poetic registers. But this wasn’t Year Zero as a blank slate, the reignition point in the wake of catastrophe. This was Zero in the sense of the productive matrix that gives rise to things, the spatium where the production of production takes place. It’s that passage from Anti-Oedipus that so entranced me (and still does):

We shall speak of an absolute limit every time the schizo-flows pass through the wall, scramble all the codes, and deterritorialize the socius: the body without organs is the deterritorialized socius, the wilderness where the decoded flows run free, the end of the world, the apocalypse.

U/Acc died several deaths in the years that followed 2017. Some of it wasn’t pretty and I’ll avoid getting into it, but the real consequences of firing irresponsible philosophies off into the world became all too clear and real. Bad things happened, a litany of freaks and weirdos came crawling out of the woodwork, people took things out of context and ran with them, cults formed, weird Silicon Valley recuperation began to take place. Creepy-crawlies from the dark of the night were hovering in the peripheries. The reality of our catastrophic civilization is that there is an apparatus of capture looming, invisibly, in every corner.

There’s also the question of intensity. You cannot remain in an intensive place for too long, supercharging your mind with an infinite jangling of the nerves. Exhaustion, psychological weariness, fatigue—each of these are the fatal consequences from diving headlong in the electric currents. This doesn’t only happen at the individual level, but at a societal one as well. The energies of 2016-2017 shipwrecked themselves hard on the terminal beaches of 2018 and especially 2019—populism, the boogeyman that haunts the nightmares of the liberal, revealed itself as simulation. The catabolic geopolitics of Brexit receded into the halls of bureaucracy, the Trump administration recoded itself back into neoconservatism, memes became brands, sigils became slogans and became brands again, deterritorialization became the sharpest of tribal territory. U/Acc looked towards the breaking apart of the State, but the irony that as divergent paths careen towards inevitable burnout, the road leads inexorably back towards the State itself.

Around 2019 I began to take seriously that antithesis of acceleration, stagnation, very seriously. It’s something that preoccupies me to this day. There’s a curious twist in this history: when you look back towards all the moments where “accelerationism” blossomed, it wasn’t in periods where those fires cold really be felt. Srnicek and Williams first articulated what became left accelerationism—their initial version, scrubbed from the internet to make way for their highly sanitized redux that was conducive to desired careers in think-tanks, was far closer to U/Acc than anything else—emerged in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. Anti-Oedipus was written during the economic turmoil of the early 1970s. The examples are endless, and it’s because accelerationism at its core, for all its theoretical pretenses and so-called explanatory power, is a phantasy deployed against the real situation: the frenzied, yet unwaveringly stable, tableau of a seemingly eternal and frozen present.

2020 was the final death of U/Acc and it was a victim of covid. I’ll never forget how myself, Vince, and a handful of others (including Thomas Murphy and Tom) spent days in a group chat, watching the economy collapse in real time, minute by minute, second by second, stock market plummeting in terminal velocity, circuit breakers repeatedly bringing trading to a halt. The volatility index, which gets interpreted as a fear index, was skyrocketing and obscure finance terms like “death cross” and “doom loop” became common currency. The Catastrophe was here—then it wasn’t. The covid situation revealed, in real-time, that everything could fall to pieces, but the State could freeze it all in that moment, put the whole system on life support, and revive it when needed.

This revealed too the costs of such a situation: the Western State could zombify the economy, but it can’t make it churn and grow. The key insight of ‘terminal Marx’ remains: crisis is what propels the system, and but what must be added to this picture for us today is that crisis is exactly what State management removes. The trade-off is stagnation, permanent stagnation, and here history comes to a standstill. This is what decadence is.

It was in this context that my two favorite pieces by Vince, ‘Viral Empire’ and ‘Sino-No-Futurism’ emerged. The latter essay grapples the eclipse of futurity in the context of the Western and Chinese responses to covid, and poses a troubling figure: “Dark Fukuyama”. What if Fukuyama was right when he wrote about the end of history—but in ways he himself could never have anticipated:

What has emerged is not, of course, the pleasant liberal world order Fukuyama himself envisaged in the ethereal sunset of the 1990s. The end we are facing is something else—the wholly technicised world, in which mass politics has retreated into irrelevance behind the closed doors of quarantine and hyperregulated biological control. As governments retreat into arcane committees, freed of direct political accountability, information war is waged through Internet phantoms and flickering conspiracies. This is, in some sense, precisely a reflection of the cybernetic world imagined in the 1990s, though a reflection seen through haze and moonlight. We’ve heard enough of “Dark Deleuze”, “Dark Derrida”, and the like: the question at the heart of the present conjuncture may instead be more intractable: how can we defeat Dark Fukuyama? Should we?

The other essay, ‘Viral Empire’, brings a very unfashionable thinker, Austrian Marxian economist Rudolf Hilferding, into the present. Vince writes: “as the present crisis involves central banks ever more deeply and directly in sustaining the real economy, and large corporations such as Amazon assume the functions of economic planners in the face of logistical breakdown—Hilferding’s claim about the reorganisation of capitalism around a general cartel deserves a second look”. This was exactly the same problem that I was thinking about, and Hilferding and the general cartel was a constant topic of conversation. It was in those conversation in 2020 when the concept of the Metacartel, as an elaboration and extension of Hilferding’s passing remarks, began to take shape.

Here accelerationism has passed wholly over to its opposite, a consideration of what exactly blocks these conceptual dynamics that, in their most naked form, are about the generation of a sense of futurity, the “future so close it connects”. That’s a much more consequential task in my opinion.

The last two pieces by Vince included here continue on from the provocations of ‘Sino-No-Futurism’. The first, ‘What is the End of History’, draws backwards to Kojeve to find a precise definition of what posthistorical existence means: “there is nothing new that remains to be said”. What this means is not that there aren’t things to say, or that new events won’t happen to which we react (and speak on and act on and think on), social change will continue, systems will transform, oscillate, clash and dissolve. ‘Nothing new remains to be said’ means that thought—philosophical and political thought—has reached its final culmination. But there’s a twist—

For a certain system (of thought) to represent the definitive end point to all human thought—that is, to rise above the competition of ‘thesis’ and ‘antithesis’ and of mere opinion—it must be capable of recapitulating every possible system within itself, that is, of following and re-following the total circular history of human discourse from start to finish and back again

The final piece, ‘Language Inhuman’, appeared in December 2023. It is probably his strongest bit of theoretical writing, and the question again turns about on the problem of liberalism and the end of history. Here, Fukuyama is really rebuked: liberalism cannot constitute an end of history (at least through the lenses the Kojeve viewed it) because it is a “regime of language, that as the reign of symbols it is also the reign of simulacrum, but that this simulation is necessarily incomplete or defective”. The reason that this simulation cannot complete itself is because it cannot truly reconcile paradox or contradiction within itself. The liberal seems to endlessly prolong the “linguistic flux” to steady the tide of paradox and challenge, which drives itself to the point of absolute meaninglessness. But despite this meaninglessness, it persists onward.

Vince suggests that the situation is not one where liberalism can simply be collapsed, challenged on its own grounds, either politically or through some appeal to a reality that it has obscured. “An authentic ‘postliberal’ must appeal instead from the residue of phenomenal necessity to the perfection of simulation, to a regime of experimental reconfiguration that can generate new realities and definitively replace the working of necessary fact by arbitrary linguistic decision… this indeed will amount to an end to history”.