Some Belated Response to Grant’s “LA 2019”

Considered as one of the fundamental texts in the British Accelerationist strand is Iain Hamilton Grant’s 1996 essay “LA 2019: Demopathy and Xenogenesis. Some Realist Notes on Bladerunner and the Postmodern Condition” to which his very idea of the “postmodern” was lifted directly and almost uncritically from the writings of the French Philosopher, Jean-Francois Lyotard. While trying to come across to stand on materialist grounds, he cited almost every human social sciences possible – from Claude Levi-Strauss’ anthropology, Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis, to Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics – only to deny the plausibility of historicity. Such may seem to be a self-reflexive attitude from a text that does not seem to celebrate the idea of postmodernism, but in any case affirms its coming at the time of writing. His former colleagues from the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, Robin McKay and Mark Fisher, called this attitude as “pomo-positive.” Pomo-positivism, if we define it as this validation of the postmodern from every aspect of social sciences that deflects historicity, is not without an irony.

One of the earliest claims in the essay that frames his whole endeavor is to refute the claims of Marx (and Engels) that the “ruling classes are the ruling ideas” in a way that inverts the argument to focus on the reign of the idea. This is where the ridiculousness of the claims of the postmodern borrowed from Lyotard begins to unfold. The attempt to refute the claim is there not for a substantive argumentation, but rather as mere strategic framing in a way that avoids the argument Grant was trying to refute on its own terms. Marx and Engels could not be any more clear about their claim: it is not a claim about the ideas, but rather about the ruling classes. Going into that field where Marx and Engels went would have forced Grant to question his very own fascination with Lyotard’s claims.

Another point we can see from this text is that this strategic avoidance towards historicity (in Marx and Engels, a history that is defined by class struggle), is the clear irony of Grant’s fascination over Lyotard’s claims. While Lyotard may have a hint of idealism on his end, he never avoided historicity (even if he mostly reside his philosophy of history outside of Marx’ historical materialism) as was expressed in an earlier work in postmodernism, The Postmodern Condition. A clear writing in French situates his work within the context he was studying. Grant, a translator to English of such contemporary philosophy, seems to miss the point of differing languages. And a comparison of the histories between France and the United Kingdom seems to highlight this irony even further.

While it is in the Great Britain that capitalism reached its modern fruition in a scale that made Marx himself admit to its plausibility as the object of study for his critique of this mode of production, Britain and France differ in expressing their modernism, in a way that seeps into the erosion of grand narratives from the death of god. At the very least, at least the French had a history of beheading their own ruling classes, and thus a history of a break from the old order towards a new. Just within cultural expressions, the French produced their own artists that questions this expression of the new order from Montaigne, Voltaire, to Breton and the surrealists – even towards the realm of Godard and Truffaut. Britain, on the other hand, retained its old gods through their monarchy, while their inherent expression of the “modern” is through the decaying aesthetic of Malcolm McLaren’s punk project, The Sex Pistols, which is mere public relations pure and simple. It is no wonder that Mark Fisher can only theorize further decay in post-punk as a site of nostalgia for lost futures.

Even the irony that the cultural examples from where Grant is extracting his theories – from Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner to the works of JG Ballard (despite being english, the milieu of Ballard’s writings are weirdly American, hence the unproblematic translation of Crash in a Canadian Production) – are all American in milieu seems to fly over his head. Grant’s pomo-positivitism comes from a place that never had a celebratory modernism and whose actual social legacy is to device mechanisms of decay in Thatcher’s neoliberalism that has an almost the same methodology of denying history (there’s no such thing as society).

This denial of history leads Grant to misattribute Marx’ and Freud’s criticisms of the illusion under modernity to them rather than see whatever the thinkers identified with illusion as external to Marx and Freud. In some ways, Marx and Freud agrees to the very function of illusion in their separate critique: Freud’s criticism of illusion – coming from the necessity of it to sustain religious belief – is that of which is necessary to regress the conditions of desire; while Marx’ criticism of illusion through commodity fetishism is that it obscures the productive process that which makes both commodities and exploitation possible. Grant finds comfort from the idealism of Immanuel Kant whose solipsism eclipses the notion of the “world” that is of equal standing with illusions in Grant’s mind.

In this case the collapse of “fiction” with the world is a logical consequence of that decline of “grand narratives” that the Lyotardian understanding of Grant’s postmodernism embraces. In which case, even the framework of history is presented as mere narrative that involves both fiction and the world. Grant inevitably embraced the “end of history” framework with his collapse of speculation towards the imagination of actual machines (i.e. commodities that aids the production of commodities) as avatars of future unfolding in the development of capitalism. Much is this talk of desire attributed to the machines, inspired by science-fiction, for a disinterested dictatorship of an artificial intelligence flowing through a libidinal economy against the so-called biodespotism of the wetware.

But ultimately, this theory-fiction and endless speculation about the reign of the machine and generalized cybernetics comes from a further non-understanding of the general function of capitalism from its denial of history. The failure of the British civilization to behead its monarchy left its intellectuals, even from the so-called new left of the 1960s, to misattribute the misery brought about by capitalism from the failure of politics alone. The core of Grant’s essay is to displace political imagination towards embracing a fictional speculation of a technological singularity not even to resolve this misery, but merely to define it and to further imagine the conditions down towards further nihilism. Years later, this ideology is seen by Alex Williams and Nick Srncek as the core of the accelerationist philosophy that best defines the contribution of Nick Land: where he saw that rapid development within capitalism will eventually overthrow humanity towards technological singularity.

Of course, Grant the British lives in hyperreality: theirs is a society that denies the existence of the monarchy as a vital force in their class structure. Despite not having “political” power, their mere ownership of land and continuous cultural veneration veils years of colonization that made capitalism – and the United Kingdom by extension – what it is at the time of Grant’s writing. Grant would have known this if he went further than Marx’ Grundisse manuscripts and at least took a peek at the first volume of Capital. Ruling class is, still, after all, ruling ideas: the ruling idea that the monarchy does not have any actual power is a bullshit that made the theorists of acceleration believe that what lies in Capitalism is merely machines and the system alone.

This failure to murder the monarchy in Great Britain is the missing ingredient in Mark Fisher’s writings on hauntology. On why, over the decades, the artists of Great Britain try to get past their present, imagine a future, but only to recycle their past. Fisher’s nostalgia of what should have been is a result of the precarity that exists at the extreme end of the lives of the monarchy. This is also the source of Thatcher’s confidence for her neoliberalism: that there exists an actual ceiling to which their public can ever escalate economically, and so effectively, their society is doomed from the beginning, so she might as well do away with it.

Eventually, this British grim expands to a global scale just years after Grant’s essay. The world leans towards the nullification of society – breaking off social welfare to depend on the philanthropy of the global ruling class – whose names and faces can be identified by the list of Jeffrey Epstein clientele, which includes the Prince of Britain. This grim, as earlier identified through the hauntological quality of “modernism” in the Great Britain is the very imagery that neoliberalism brought to them. Williams and Srncek claimed otherwise that it is what brought about the erasure of “cognitive inventiveness in favour of an affective production line of scripted interactions.” Grant may have misidentified the this emptiness for the future with the “failure of grand narratives” when what would be present in 1996, if they indeed are living in postmodernity, is not a failure of grand narrative, but the erasure of it that comes from a calculated attack towards the imaginative capacity of their population.

The global acceleration of capital from the centers of capitalist monopoly have became unstoppable, therefore seemingly inevitable. This results to the thinkers of the global north, the accelerationists included, to think that capitalism is an overarching, global, hegemonic mode of production. Williams and Srncek called for a “post-capitalist politics”  of an accelerationist strand that is “at ease with a modernity of abstraction, complexity, globality, and technology.” But such imagination towards imagining a new modernity, coming from a monotheistic treatment of capitalism will only miss its target.

While there is indeed a global circulation of capital, the reason why, despite crises in capitalism the world over, it remains sustained due to a necessary “uneven development” the world over. The development of ground breaking computer technology, which technosingularists drool over, do not produce itself, but necessitates the stunted development of several African nations where minerals necessary for the production of microchips and semiconductors are plundered. Machine learning and artificial intelligence, the latest babies of neoreactionaries, can never happen without the need of precariat data-feeders from India and other South East Asian nations. Capitalism can sustain itself because it is not a singular tower and that the global ruling classes do not just enjoy its fruits from capital alone but through several other modes of production that is capable in extracting surplus value in any form necessary: colonialism, feudalism, semi-colonialism, semifeudalism, barbaric warlordism, etc. exists the world over.

Recent development in global politics do not carry the anonymity promised by technological singularity, but intensified further the spectacularization of the global ruling class, to the point that they are no longer invisible to us. What might the oracles of acceleration in the 1990s did not thought of is global capitalism’s integration of fascist spectacle both in the scale of war and propaganda. The so-called “war in the age of intelligent machines” did not happen: what retained are barbaric genocides after War on Terror (from the systematic genocides in Timor and Papua to the genocide in Palestine). Consequentially, these wars, even the relapse to fascism, has been the result of a certain denial of history that Grant similarly has been doing with his 1996 essay.

It seems like, the decline of grand narrative, is merely, literally, a matter of perspective. There are portions in the world where history may not be visible due to overlapping fiction that results to a hyperreal existence. In the case of Grant and the British accelerationists of the 1990s, the coexistence of their monarchy and their fictional powerlessness with capitalism resulted to that hyperreal conviction of the end of history just because they were able to connect in the internet through a dial-up connection. And this was never enlightenment, but merely, a box where they got themselves trapped in.

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