Kaiak (Nov 2015)
Ultima fermata: Antropocene. Accelerare o biforcare?
Abstract
This paper aims to diagnose the weakness of the recent writings on accelerationism, which try to develop a new narrative for the Left. Following Franco Beradi Bifo’s direct criticism of the Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politic (Srnicek & Williams 2013), and Stiegler’s broader organological perspective, we argue that accelerationists do not take into account many symptoms of subjective and collective disease within digital society. Through Bifo and Stiegler we show that these symptoms, caused by neo-liberal ideology and technological infrastructure, are directly tied to the conditions of possibility for a political future of the Left and of human kind in general, which seems fully proletarianised. For these reasons we come to acknowledge that accelerationism is too hasty in its project of inventing a new future and does not take into account the relations between individual, technical and social elements that compose our society.This situation could be thought as a contemporary apocalypse, whose image for Stiegler is that of the Anthropocene. For him, assuming this term means to situate in a perspective that goes beyond geological questions of periodisation, but that rather allows us to conceive the various stages of general proletarianization, up to the annihilement of every kind of knowledge, will and future. While, the only way to “escape” could be to begin a process of deproletarianization, by revisiting the questions of entropy and negentropy from a perspective that is not only scientific, but philosophical and political.
