Effective accelerationism

It is this reactionary form that so many saw looming over us as a new leviathan in the 2010s. There was a protracted and promiscuous attempt, at that time, to retain something of Virno’s radical exodus in light of the “resourceful withdrawals” teased and threatened in the name of MAGA or Brexit, which came to dominate any kind of discussion along these lines.

I’m not sure anyone was particularly successful. I think my book Egress, for instance, attempted to deal with all the themes above, albeit implicitly without evoking the patchwork discourse that had occupied me over the years immediately prior to its publication. But the book’s subtitle and study of Mark Fisher’s work tended to pull focus in this regard. Only one person, to my mind, wrote publicly about how the book’s title gestured towards a more explicitly post-Landian sense of exit and defection, both in terms of political action and a bold theoretical thinking. That was Geoff Schullenberger in his review of Egress.

 Effective accelerationism 

But this review always troubled me for the ways Schullenberger tries to tie my titular concept a little too closely to Hirschman, seeing it as a poor reading of “exit” that cannot do without voice, as if he is the only authority on the matter. “[I]n the end, both [myself] and Fisher seem unable to plausibly link accelerationist exit and collectivist politics”, he writes. But Schullenberger seemed far more ignorant of the lineage I was invoking than I was at that time. Indeed, I only wish I had Virno in my arsenal, as his discussion of the relationship between Exodus and the Multitude is far clearer on this. Such an argument shuts down Schullenberger’s more reactionary (if nonetheless sympathetic) reading of my book with ease. But alas, such is hindsight.