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The Medea hypothesis is a term coined by paleontologist Peter Ward for a hypothesis that contests the Gaian hypothesis and proposes that multicellular life, understood as a superorganism, may be self-destructive or suicidal. The metaphor refers to the mythological Medea (representing the Earth), who kills her own children (multicellular life).

In this view, microbial-triggered mass extinctions result in returns to the microbial-dominated state it has been for most of its history.

Possible examples of extinction events induced entirely or partially by biotic activities include:

The Great Oxygenation Event, 2.45 billion years ago, believed to be responsible for the mass poisoning of anaerobic microbes to which oxygen was toxic, and for the Huronian glaciation that resulted from the reaction of methane with oxygen to form carbon dioxide (a less potent greenhouse gas than methane) and subsequent depletion of atmospheric carbon dioxide by aerobic photosynthesisers

The Sturtian and Marinoan Snowball Earth glaciations, 715 to 680 and 650 to 632.3 million years ago, respectively, resulting from the sequestration of atmospheric carbon dioxide during the Neoproterozoic Oxygenation Event

The Late Ordovician Mass Extinction (LOME), 445.2 million years ago to 443.8 million years ago, suggested by some studies to have been caused by glaciation resulting from carbon dioxide depletion driven by the radiation of land plants

Euxinic events, such as during the Great Dying, 251.9 million years ago, and the aforementioned LOME, caused by sulphur-reducing prokaryotes that produce hydrogen sulphide

The list excludes the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event, since this was, at least partially, externally induced by a meteor impact.

Peter Ward proposes that the current man-made climate change and mass extinction event may be considered to be the most recent Medean event. As these events are anthropogenic, he postulates that Medean events are not necessarily caused by microbes, but by intelligent life as well and that the final mass extinction of complex life, roughly about 500-900 million years in the future, can also be considered a Medean event:

Plant life that still exists then will be forced to adapt to a warming and expanding Sun, causing them to remove even more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere (which in turn will have already be due to the increasing heat from the Sun gradually speeding up the weathering process that removes them from the atmosphere), and ultimately accelerating the complete extinction of complex life by making carbon dioxide levels drop down to just 10 ppm, below which plants can no longer survive.

However, Ward simultaneously argues that intelligent life such as humans may not necessarily just trigger future Medean events, but may eventually prevent them from occurring.[citation needed ]

1. ^ "Gaia's evil twin: Is life its own worst enemy?". The New Scientist (cover story). Vol. 202, no. 2713. 17 June 2009. pp. 28-31.

2. ^ Bennett, Drake (11 January 2009). "Dark green: A scientist argues that the natural world isn't benevolent and sustaining: It's bent on self-destruction". The Boston Globe.

3. ^ Grey, William (February 2010). "Gaia theory - reflections on life on Earth". Australian Review of Public Affairs. University of Sydney.

4. ^ Hodgskiss, Malcolm S. W.; Crockford, Peter W.; Peng, Yongbo; Wing, Boswell A.; Horner, Tristan J. (27 August 2019). "A productivity collapse to end Earth's Great Oxidation". PNAS. 116 (35): 17207-17212. Bibcode:2019PNAS..11617207H. doi:10.1073/pnas.1900325116. PMC . PMID 31405980.

5. ^ Kopp, Robert (14 June 2005). "The Paleoproterozoic snowball Earth: A climate disaster triggered by the evolution of oxygenic photosynthesis". PNAS. 102 (32): 11131-6. Bibcode:2005PNAS..10211131K. doi:10.1073/pnas.0504878102. PMC . PMID 16061801.

6. ^ Stern, R.J.; Avigad, D.; Miller, N.R.; Beyth, M. (2006). "Geological Society of Africa Presidential Review: Evidence for the Snowball Earth Hypothesis in the Arabian-Nubian Shield and the East African Orogen". Journal of African Earth Sciences. 44 (1): 1-20. Bibcode:2006JAfES..44....1S. doi:10.1016/j.jafrearsci.2005.10.003.

7. ^ Rooney, Alan D.; Strauss, Justin V.; Brandon, Alan D.; Macdonald, Francis A. (2015). "A Cryogenian chronology: Two long-lasting synchronous Neoproterozoic glaciations". Geology. 43 (5): 459-462. Bibcode:2015Geo....43..459R. doi:10.1130/G36511.1.

8. ^ Lenton, Timothy M.; Crouch, Michael; Johnson, Martin; Pires, Nuno; Dolan, Liam (1 February 2012). "First plants cooled the Ordovician". Nature Geoscience. 5: 86-89. doi:10.1038/ngeo1390. ISSN 1752-0908.

9. ^ Cao, Changqun; Gordon D. Love; Lindsay E. Hays; Wei Wang; Shuzhong Shen; Roger E. Summons (2009). "Biogeochemical evidence for euxinic oceans and ecological disturbance presaging the end-Permian mass extinction event". Earth and Planetary Science Letters. 281 (3-4): 188-201. Bibcode:2009E&PSL.281..188C. doi:10.1016/j.epsl.2009.02.012.

10. ^ Zou, Caineng; Qiu, Zhen; Wei, Hengye; Dong, Dazhong; Lu, Bin (15 December 2018). "Euxinia caused the Late Ordovician extinction: Evidence from pyrite morphology and pyritic sulfur isotopic composition in the Yangtze area, South China". Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology. 511: 1-11. Bibcode:2018PPP...511....1Z. doi:10.1016/j.palaeo.2017.11.033. ISSN 0031-0182. S2CID 134586047.

11. ^ Zou, Caineng; Qiu, Zhen; Poulton, Simon W.; Dong, Dazhong; Wang, Hongyan; Chen, Daizhou; Lu, Bin; Shi, Zhensheng; Tao, Huifei (2018). "Ocean euxinia and climate change "double whammy" drove the Late Ordovician mass extinction" (PDF). Geology. 46 (6): 535-538. Bibcode:2018Geo....46..535Z. doi:10.1130/G40121.1. S2CID 135039656.

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The Medea hypothesis is a term coined by paleontologist Peter Ward for a hypothesis that contests the Gaian hypothesis and proposes that multicellular life, understood as a superorganism, may be self-destructive or suicidal. The metaphor refers to the mythological Medea (representing the Earth), who kills her own children (multicellular life).

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Aphro-ism Essays on Pop Culture, Feminism, and Black Veganism from Two Sisters (Aph Ko  Syl Ko [Ko, Aph]) (z-lib.org)

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Crimes of the Future | Official Website | June 03 2022

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Crimes of the Future | Official Website | June 03 2022

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Watch the trailer, find screenings & book tickets for Crimes of the Future on the official site. In theaters June 03 2022 brought to you by Neon Rated. Directed by: David Cronenberg. Starring: Viggo Mortensen, Léa Seydoux, Kristen Stewart, Scott Speedman

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The study of planetary habitability is partly based upon extrapolation from knowledge of the Earth's conditions, as the Earth is the only planet currently known to harbour life (The Blue Marble, 1972 Apollo 17 photograph).

The Gaia hypothesis (), also known as the Gaia theory, Gaia paradigm, or the Gaia principle, proposes that living organisms interact with their inorganic surroundings on Earth to form a synergistic and self-regulating, complex system that helps to maintain and perpetuate the conditions for life on the planet.

The Gaia hypothesis was formulated by the chemist James Lovelock and co-developed by the microbiologist Lynn Margulis in the 1970s. Following the suggestion by his neighbour, novelist William Golding, Lovelock named the hypothesis after Gaia, the primordial deity who personified the Earth in Greek mythology. In 2006, the Geological Society of London awarded Lovelock the Wollaston Medal in part for his work on the Gaia hypothesis.

Topics related to the hypothesis include how the biosphere and the evolution of organisms affect the stability of global temperature, salinity of seawater, atmospheric oxygen levels, the maintenance of a hydrosphere of liquid water and other environmental variables that affect the habitability of Earth.

The Gaia hypothesis was initially criticized for being teleological and against the principles of natural selection, but later refinements aligned the Gaia hypothesis with ideas from fields such as Earth system science, biogeochemistry and systems ecology. Even so, the Gaia hypothesis continues to attract criticism, and today many scientists consider it to be only weakly supported by, or at odds with, the available evidence.

Gaian hypotheses suggest that organisms co-evolve with their environment: that is, they "influence their abiotic environment, and that environment in turn influences the biota by Darwinian process". Lovelock (1995) gave evidence of this in his second book, Ages of Gaia, showing the evolution from the world of the early thermo-acido-philic and methanogenic bacteria towards the oxygen-enriched atmosphere today that supports more complex life.

A reduced version of the hypothesis has been called "influential Gaia" in "Directed Evolution of the Biosphere: Biogeochemical Selection or Gaia?" by Andrei G. Lapenis, which states the biota influence certain aspects of the abiotic world, e.g. temperature and atmosphere. This is not the work of an individual but a collective of Russian scientific research that was combined into this peer-reviewed publication. It states the coevolution of life and the environment through "micro-forces" and biogeochemical processes. An example is how the activity of photosynthetic bacteria during Precambrian times completely modified the Earth atmosphere to turn it aerobic, and thus supports the evolution of life (in particular eukaryotic life).

Since barriers existed throughout the twentieth century between Russia and the rest of the world, it is only relatively recently that the early Russian scientists who introduced concepts overlapping the Gaia paradigm have become better known to the Western scientific community. These scientists include Piotr Alekseevich Kropotkin (1842-1921) (although he spent much of his professional life outside Russia), Rafail Vasil'evich Rizpolozhensky (1862 - c. 1922), Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky (1863-1945), and Vladimir Alexandrovich Kostitzin (1886-1963).

Biologists and Earth scientists usually view the factors that stabilize the characteristics of a period as an undirected emergent property or entelechy of the system; as each individual species pursues its own self-interest, for example, their combined actions may have counterbalancing effects on environmental change. Opponents of this view sometimes reference examples of events that resulted in dramatic change rather than stable equilibrium, such as the conversion of the Earth's atmosphere from a reducing environment to an oxygen-rich one at the end of the Archaean and the beginning of the Proterozoic periods.

Less accepted versions of the hypothesis claim that changes in the biosphere are brought about through the coordination of living organisms and maintain those conditions through homeostasis. In some versions of Gaia philosophy, all lifeforms are considered part of one single living planetary being called Gaia. In this view, the atmosphere, the seas and the terrestrial crust would be results of interventions carried out by Gaia through the coevolving diversity of living organisms.

The Gaia paradigm was an influence on the deep ecology movement.

The Gaia hypothesis posits that the Earth is a self-regulating complex system involving the biosphere, the atmosphere, the hydrospheres and the pedosphere, tightly coupled as an evolving system. The hypothesis contends that this system as a whole, called Gaia, seeks a physical and chemical environment optimal for contemporary life.

Gaia evolves through a cybernetic feedback system operated by the biota, leading to broad stabilization of the conditions of habitability in a full homeostasis. Many processes in the Earth's surface, essential for the conditions of life, depend on the interaction of living forms, especially microorganisms, with inorganic elements. These processes establish a global control system that regulates Earth's surface temperature, atmosphere composition and ocean salinity, powered by the global thermodynamic disequilibrium state of the Earth system.

The existence of a planetary homeostasis influenced by living forms had been observed previously in the field of biogeochemistry, and it is being investigated also in other fields like Earth system science. The originality of the Gaia hypothesis relies on the assessment that such homeostatic balance is actively pursued with the goal of keeping the optimal conditions for life, even when terrestrial or external events menace them.

Rob Rohde's palaeotemperature graphs

Since life started on Earth, the energy provided by the Sun has increased by 25% to 30%; however, the surface temperature of the planet has remained within the levels of habitability, reaching quite regular low and high margins. Lovelock has also hypothesised that methanogens produced elevated levels of methane in the early atmosphere, giving a situation similar to that found in petrochemical smog, similar in some respects to the atmosphere on Titan. This, he suggests, helped to screen out ultraviolet light until the formation of the ozone layer, maintaining a degree of homeostasis. However, the Snowball Earth research has suggested that "oxygen shocks" and reduced methane levels led, during the Huronian, Sturtian and Marinoan/ Varanger Ice Ages, to a world that very nearly became a solid "snowball". These epochs are evidence against the ability of the pre Phanerozoic biosphere to fully self-regulate.

Processing of the greenhouse gas CO ₂, explained below, plays a critical role in the maintenance of the Earth temperature within the limits of habitability.

The CLAW hypothesis, inspired by the Gaia hypothesis, proposes a feedback loop that operates between ocean ecosystems and the Earth's climate. The hypothesis specifically proposes that particular phytoplankton that produce dimethyl sulfide are responsive to variations in climate forcing, and that these responses lead to a negative feedback loop that acts to stabilise the temperature of the Earth's atmosphere.

Currently the increase in human population and the environmental impact of their activities, such as the multiplication of greenhouse gases may cause negative feedbacks in the environment to become positive feedback. Lovelock has stated that this could bring an extremely accelerated global warming, but he has since stated the effects will likely occur more slowly.

Daisyworld simulations

Plots from a standard black and white Daisyworld simulation

In response to the criticism that the Gaia hypothesis seemingly required unrealistic group selection and cooperation between organisms, James Lovelock and Andrew Watson developed a mathematical model, Daisyworld, in which ecological competition underpinned planetary temperature regulation.

Daisyworld examines the energy budget of a planet populated by two different types of plants, black daisies and white daisies, which are assumed to occupy a significant portion of the surface. The colour of the daisies influences the albedo of the planet such that black daisies absorb more light and warm the planet, while white daisies reflect more light and cool the planet. The black daisies are assumed to grow and reproduce best at a lower temperature, while the white daisies are assumed to thrive best at a higher temperature. As the temperature rises closer to the value the white daisies like, the white daisies outreproduce the black daisies, leading to a larger percentage of white surface, and more sunlight is reflected, reducing the heat input and eventually cooling the planet. Conversely, as the temperature falls, the black daisies outreproduce the white daisies, absorbing more sunlight and warming the planet. The temperature will thus converge to the value at which the reproductive rates of the plants are equal.

Lovelock and Watson showed that, over a limited range of conditions, this negative feedback due to competition can stabilize the planet's temperature at a value which supports life, if the energy output of the Sun changes, while a planet without life would show wide temperature changes. The percentage of white and black daisies will continually change to keep the temperature at the value at which the plants' reproductive rates are equal, allowing both life forms to thrive.

It has been suggested that the results were predictable because Lovelock and Watson selected examples that produced the responses they desired.

Ocean salinity has been constant at about 3.5% for a very long time. Salinity stability in oceanic environments is important as most cells require a rather constant salinity and do not generally tolerate values above 5%. The constant ocean salinity was a long-standing mystery, because no process counterbalancing the salt influx from rivers was known. Recently it was suggested that salinity may also be strongly influenced by seawater circulation through hot basaltic rocks, and emerging as hot water vents on mid-ocean ridges. However, the composition of seawater is far from equilibrium, and it is difficult to explain this fact without the influence of organic processes. One suggested explanation lies in the formation of salt plains throughout Earth's history. It is hypothesized that these are created by bacterial colonies that fix ions and heavy metals during their life processes.

In the biogeochemical processes of Earth, sources and sinks are the movement of elements. The composition of salt ions within our oceans and seas is: sodium (Na⁺), chlorine (Cl −), sulfate (SO ₄ 2−), magnesium (Mg ²⁺), calcium (Ca ²⁺) and potassium (K⁺). The elements that comprise salinity do not readily change and are a conservative property of seawater. There are many mechanisms that change salinity from a particulate form to a dissolved form and back. Considering the metallic composition of iron sources across a multifaceted grid of thermomagnetic design, not only would the movement of elements hypothetically help restructure the movement of ions, electrons, and the like, but would also potentially and inexplicably assist in balancing the magnetic bodies of the Earth's geomagnetic field. The known sources of sodium i.e. salts are when weathering, erosion, and dissolution of rocks are transported into rivers and deposited into the oceans.

The Mediterranean Sea as being Gaia's kidney is found ( here) by Kenneth J. Hsu, a correspondence author in 2001. Hsu suggests the " desiccation" of the Mediterranean is evidence of a functioning Gaia "kidney". In this and earlier suggested cases, it is plate movements and physics, not biology, which performs the regulation. Earlier "kidney functions" were performed during the " deposition of the Cretaceous ( South Atlantic), Jurassic ( Gulf of Mexico), Permo-Triassic ( Europe), Devonian ( Canada), and Cambrian/ Precambrian ( Gondwana) saline giants."

Levels of gases in the atmosphere in 420,000 years of ice core data from Vostok, Antarctica research station. Current period is at the left.

The Gaia theorem states that the Earth's atmospheric composition is kept at a dynamically steady state by the presence of life. The atmospheric composition provides the conditions that contemporary life has adapted to. All the atmospheric gases other than noble gases present in the atmosphere are either made by organisms or processed by them.

The stability of the atmosphere in Earth is not a consequence of chemical equilibrium. Oxygen is a reactive compound, and should eventually combine with gases and minerals of the Earth's atmosphere and crust. Oxygen only began to persist in the atmosphere in small quantities about 50 million years before the start of the Great Oxygenation Event. Since the start of the Cambrian period, atmospheric oxygen concentrations have fluctuated between 15% and 35% of atmospheric volume. Traces of methane (at an amount of 100,000 tonnes produced per year) should not exist, as methane is combustible in an oxygen atmosphere.

Dry air in the atmosphere of Earth contains roughly (by volume) 78.09% nitrogen, 20.95% oxygen, 0.93% argon, 0.039% carbon dioxide, and small amounts of other gases including methane. Lovelock originally speculated that concentrations of oxygen above about 25% would increase the frequency of wildfires and conflagration of forests. This mechanism, however, would not raise oxygen levels if they became too low. If plants can be shown to robustly over-produce O ₂ then perhaps only the high oxygen forest fires regulator is necessary. Recent work on the findings of fire-caused charcoal in Carboniferous and Cretaceous coal measures, in geologic periods when O ₂ did exceed 25%, has supported Lovelock's contention.[citation needed ]

Gaia scientists see the participation of living organisms in the carbon cycle as one of the complex processes that maintain conditions suitable for life. The only significant natural source of atmospheric carbon dioxide () is volcanic activity, while the only significant removal is through the precipitation of carbonate rocks. Carbon precipitation, solution and fixation are influenced by the bacteria and plant roots in soils, where they improve gaseous circulation, or in coral reefs, where calcium carbonate is deposited as a solid on the sea floor. Calcium carbonate is used by living organisms to manufacture carbonaceous tests and shells. Once dead, the living organisms' shells fall. Some arrive at the bottom of shallow seas where the heat and pressure of burial, and/or the forces of plate tectonics, eventually convert them to deposits of chalk and limestone. Much of the falling dead shells, however, redissolve into the ocean below the carbon compensation depth.

One of these organisms is Emiliania huxleyi, an abundant coccolithophore algae which may have a role in the formation of clouds. CO ₂ excess is compensated by an increase of coccolithophorid life, increasing the amount of CO ₂ locked in the ocean floor. Coccolithophorids, if the CLAW Hypothesis turns out to be supported (see "Regulation of Global Surface Temperature" above), could help increase the cloud cover, hence control the surface temperature, help cool the whole planet and favor precipitation necessary for terrestrial plants.[citation needed ] Lately the atmospheric CO ₂ concentration has increased and there is some evidence that concentrations of ocean algal blooms are also increasing.

Lichen and other organisms accelerate the weathering of rocks in the surface, while the decomposition of rocks also happens faster in the soil, thanks to the activity of roots, fungi, bacteria and subterranean animals. The flow of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to the soil is therefore regulated with the help of living organisms. When CO ₂ levels rise in the atmosphere the temperature increases and plants grow. This growth brings higher consumption of CO ₂ by the plants, who process it into the soil, removing it from the atmosphere.

Earthrise taken from Apollo 8 by astronaut William Anders, December 24, 1968

The idea of the Earth as an integrated whole, a living being, has a long tradition. The mythical Gaia was the primal Greek goddess personifying the Earth, the Greek version of " Mother Nature" (from Ge = Earth, and Aia = PIE grandmother), or the Earth Mother. James Lovelock gave this name to his hypothesis after a suggestion from the novelist William Golding, who was living in the same village as Lovelock at the time ( Bowerchalke, Wiltshire, UK). Golding's advice was based on Gea, an alternative spelling for the name of the Greek goddess, which is used as prefix in geology, geophysics and geochemistry. Golding later made reference to Gaia in his Nobel prize acceptance speech.

In the eighteenth century, as geology consolidated as a modern science, James Hutton maintained that geological and biological processes are interlinked. Later, the naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt recognized the coevolution of living organisms, climate, and Earth's crust. In the twentieth century, Vladimir Vernadsky formulated a theory of Earth's development that is now one of the foundations of ecology. Vernadsky was a Ukrainian geochemist and was one of the first scientists to recognize that the oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere result from biological processes. During the 1920s he published works arguing that living organisms could reshape the planet as surely as any physical force. Vernadsky was a pioneer of the scientific bases for the environmental sciences. His visionary pronouncements were not widely accepted in the West, and some decades later the Gaia hypothesis received the same type of initial resistance from the scientific community.

Also in the turn to the 20th century Aldo Leopold, pioneer in the development of modern environmental ethics and in the movement for wilderness conservation, suggested a living Earth in his biocentric or holistic ethics regarding land.

It is at least not impossible to regard the earth's parts-soil, mountains, rivers, atmosphere etc,-as organs or parts of organs of a coordinated whole, each part with its definite function. And if we could see this whole, as a whole, through a great period of time, we might perceive not only organs with coordinated functions, but possibly also that process of consumption as replacement which in biology we call metabolism, or growth. In such case we would have all the visible attributes of a living thing, which we do not realize to be such because it is too big, and its life processes too slow.

Another influence for the Gaia hypothesis and the environmental movement in general came as a side effect of the Space Race between the Soviet Union and the United States of America. During the 1960s, the first humans in space could see how the Earth looked as a whole. The photograph taken by astronaut William Anders in 1968 during the Apollo 8 mission became, through the Overview Effect an early symbol for the global ecology movement.

James Lovelock, 2005

Lovelock started defining the idea of a self-regulating Earth controlled by the community of living organisms in September 1965, while working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California on methods of detecting life on Mars. The first paper to mention it was Planetary Atmospheres: Compositional and other Changes Associated with the Presence of Life, co-authored with C.E. Giffin. A main concept was that life could be detected in a planetary scale by the chemical composition of the atmosphere. According to the data gathered by the Pic du Midi observatory, planets like Mars or Venus had atmospheres in chemical equilibrium. This difference with the Earth atmosphere was considered to be a proof that there was no life in these planets.

Lovelock formulated the Gaia Hypothesis in journal articles in 1972 and 1974, followed by a popularizing 1979 book Gaia: A new look at life on Earth. An article in the New Scientist of February 6, 1975, and a popular book length version of the hypothesis, published in 1979 as The Quest for Gaia, began to attract scientific and critical attention.

Lovelock called it first the Earth feedback hypothesis, and it was a way to explain the fact that combinations of chemicals including oxygen and methane persist in stable concentrations in the atmosphere of the Earth. Lovelock suggested detecting such combinations in other planets' atmospheres as a relatively reliable and cheap way to detect life.

Lynn Margulis

Later, other relationships such as sea creatures producing sulfur and iodine in approximately the same quantities as required by land creatures emerged and helped bolster the hypothesis.

In 1971 microbiologist Dr. Lynn Margulis joined Lovelock in the effort of fleshing out the initial hypothesis into scientifically proven concepts, contributing her knowledge about how microbes affect the atmosphere and the different layers in the surface of the planet. The American biologist had also awakened criticism from the scientific community with her advocacy of the theory on the origin of eukaryotic organelles and her contributions to the endosymbiotic theory, nowadays accepted. Margulis dedicated the last of eight chapters in her book, The Symbiotic Planet, to Gaia. However, she objected to the widespread personification of Gaia and stressed that Gaia is "not an organism", but "an emergent property of interaction among organisms". She defined Gaia as "the series of interacting ecosystems that compose a single huge ecosystem at the Earth's surface. Period". The book's most memorable "slogan" was actually quipped by a student of Margulis'.

James Lovelock called his first proposal the Gaia hypothesis but has also used the term Gaia theory. Lovelock states that the initial formulation was based on observation, but still lacked a scientific explanation. The Gaia hypothesis has since been supported by a number of scientific experiments and provided a number of useful predictions.

In 1985, the first public symposium on the Gaia hypothesis, Is The Earth a Living Organism? was held at University of Massachusetts Amherst, August 1-6. The principal sponsor was the National Audubon Society. Speakers included James Lovelock, George Wald, Mary Catherine Bateson, Lewis Thomas, John Todd, Donald Michael, Christopher Bird, Thomas Berry, David Abram, Michael Cohen, and William Fields. Some 500 people attended.

In 1988, climatologist Stephen Schneider organised a conference of the American Geophysical Union. The first Chapman Conference on Gaia, was held in San Diego, California on March 7, 1988.

During the "philosophical foundations" session of the conference, David Abram spoke on the influence of metaphor in science, and of the Gaia hypothesis as offering a new and potentially game-changing metaphorics, while James Kirchner criticised the Gaia hypothesis for its imprecision. Kirchner claimed that Lovelock and Margulis had not presented one Gaia hypothesis, but four:

CoEvolutionary Gaia: that life and the environment had evolved in a coupled way. Kirchner claimed that this was already accepted scientifically and was not new.

Homeostatic Gaia: that life maintained the stability of the natural environment, and that this stability enabled life to continue to exist.

Geophysical Gaia: that the Gaia hypothesis generated interest in geophysical cycles and therefore led to interesting new research in terrestrial geophysical dynamics.

Optimising Gaia: that Gaia shaped the planet in a way that made it an optimal environment for life as a whole. Kirchner claimed that this was not testable and therefore was not scientific.

Of Homeostatic Gaia, Kirchner recognised two alternatives. "Weak Gaia" asserted that life tends to make the environment stable for the flourishing of all life. "Strong Gaia" according to Kirchner, asserted that life tends to make the environment stable, to enable the flourishing of all life. Strong Gaia, Kirchner claimed, was untestable and therefore not scientific.

Lovelock and other Gaia-supporting scientists, however, did attempt to disprove the claim that the hypothesis is not scientific because it is impossible to test it by controlled experiment. For example, against the charge that Gaia was teleological, Lovelock and Andrew Watson offered the Daisyworld Model (and its modifications, above) as evidence against most of these criticisms. Lovelock said that the Daisyworld model "demonstrates that self-regulation of the global environment can emerge from competition amongst types of life altering their local environment in different ways".

Lovelock was careful to present a version of the Gaia hypothesis that had no claim that Gaia intentionally or consciously maintained the complex balance in her environment that life needed to survive. It would appear that the claim that Gaia acts "intentionally" was a statement in his popular initial book and was not meant to be taken literally. This new statement of the Gaia hypothesis was more acceptable to the scientific community. Most accusations of teleologism ceased, following this conference.[citation needed ]

By the time of the 2nd Chapman Conference on the Gaia Hypothesis, held at Valencia, Spain, on 23 June 2000, the situation had changed significantly. Rather than a discussion of the Gaian teleological views, or "types" of Gaia hypotheses, the focus was upon the specific mechanisms by which basic short term homeostasis was maintained within a framework of significant evolutionary long term structural change.

The major questions were:

1. "How has the global biogeochemical/climate system called Gaia changed in time? What is its history? Can Gaia maintain stability of the system at one time scale but still undergo vectorial change at longer time scales? How can the geologic record be used to examine these questions?"

2. "What is the structure of Gaia? Are the feedbacks sufficiently strong to influence the evolution of climate? Are there parts of the system determined pragmatically by whatever disciplinary study is being undertaken at any given time or are there a set of parts that should be taken as most true for understanding Gaia as containing evolving organisms over time? What are the feedbacks among these different parts of the Gaian system, and what does the near closure of matter mean for the structure of Gaia as a global ecosystem and for the productivity of life?"

3. "How do models of Gaian processes and phenomena relate to reality and how do they help address and understand Gaia? How do results from Daisyworld transfer to the real world? What are the main candidates for "daisies"? Does it matter for Gaia theory whether we find daisies or not? How should we be searching for daisies, and should we intensify the search? How can Gaian mechanisms be collaborated with using process models or global models of the climate system that include the biota and allow for chemical cycling?"

In 1997, Tyler Volk argued that a Gaian system is almost inevitably produced as a result of an evolution towards far-from-equilibrium homeostatic states that maximise entropy production, and Axel Kleidon (2004) agreed stating: "...homeostatic behavior can emerge from a state of MEP associated with the planetary albedo"; "...the resulting behavior of a symbiotic Earth at a state of MEP may well lead to near-homeostatic behavior of the Earth system on long time scales, as stated by the Gaia hypothesis". M. Staley (2002) has similarly proposed "...an alternative form of Gaia theory based on more traditional Darwinian principles... In [this] new approach, environmental regulation is a consequence of population dynamics. The role of selection is to favor organisms that are best adapted to prevailing environmental conditions. However, the environment is not a static backdrop for evolution, but is heavily influenced by the presence of living organisms. The resulting co-evolving dynamical process eventually leads to the convergence of equilibrium and optimal conditions".

A fourth international conference on the Gaia hypothesis, sponsored by the Northern Virginia Regional Park Authority and others, was held in October 2006 at the Arlington, VA campus of George Mason University.

Martin Ogle, Chief Naturalist, for NVRPA, and long-time Gaia hypothesis proponent, organized the event. Lynn Margulis, Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Geosciences, University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and long-time advocate of the Gaia hypothesis, was a keynote speaker. Among many other speakers: Tyler Volk, co-director of the Program in Earth and Environmental Science at New York University; Dr. Donald Aitken, Principal of Donald Aitken Associates; Dr. Thomas Lovejoy, President of the Heinz Center for Science, Economics and the Environment; Robert Corell, Senior Fellow, Atmospheric Policy Program, American Meteorological Society and noted environmental ethicist, J. Baird Callicott.

After initially receiving little attention from scientists (from 1969 until 1977), thereafter for a period the initial Gaia hypothesis was criticized by a number of scientists, including Ford Doolittle, Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould. Lovelock has said that because his hypothesis is named after a Greek goddess, and championed by many non-scientists, the Gaia hypothesis was interpreted as a neo-Pagan religion. Many scientists in particular also criticized the approach taken in his popular book Gaia, a New Look at Life on Earth for being teleological-a belief that things are purposeful and aimed towards a goal. Responding to this critique in 1990, Lovelock stated, "Nowhere in our writings do we express the idea that planetary self-regulation is purposeful, or involves foresight or planning by the biota".

Stephen Jay Gould criticized Gaia as being "a metaphor, not a mechanism." He wanted to know the actual mechanisms by which self-regulating homeostasis was achieved. In his defense of Gaia, David Abram argues that Gould overlooked the fact that "mechanism", itself, is a metaphor-albeit an exceedingly common and often unrecognized metaphor-one which leads us to consider natural and living systems as though they were machines organized and built from outside (rather than as autopoietic or self-organizing phenomena). Mechanical metaphors, according to Abram, lead us to overlook the active or agentic quality of living entities, while the organismic metaphors of the Gaia hypothesis accentuate the active agency of both the biota and the biosphere as a whole. With regard to causality in Gaia, Lovelock argues that no single mechanism is responsible, that the connections between the various known mechanisms may never be known, that this is accepted in other fields of biology and ecology as a matter of course, and that specific hostility is reserved for his own hypothesis for other reasons.

Aside from clarifying his language and understanding of what is meant by a life form, Lovelock himself ascribes most of the criticism to a lack of understanding of non-linear mathematics by his critics, and a linearizing form of greedy reductionism in which all events have to be immediately ascribed to specific causes before the fact. He also states that most of his critics are biologists but that his hypothesis includes experiments in fields outside biology, and that some self-regulating phenomena may not be mathematically explainable.

Lovelock has suggested that global biological feedback mechanisms could evolve by natural selection, stating that organisms that improve their environment for their survival do better than those that damage their environment. However, in the early 1980s, W. Ford Doolittle and Richard Dawkins separately argued against this aspect of Gaia. Doolittle argued that nothing in the genome of individual organisms could provide the feedback mechanisms proposed by Lovelock, and therefore the Gaia hypothesis proposed no plausible mechanism and was unscientific. Dawkins meanwhile stated that for organisms to act in concert would require foresight and planning, which is contrary to the current scientific understanding of evolution. Like Doolittle, he also rejected the possibility that feedback loops could stabilize the system.

Margulis argued in 1999 that " Darwin's grand vision was not wrong, only incomplete. In accentuating the direct competition between individuals for resources as the primary selection mechanism, Darwin (and especially his followers) created the impression that the environment was simply a static arena". She wrote that the composition of the Earth's atmosphere, hydrosphere, and lithosphere are regulated around "set points" as in homeostasis, but those set points change with time.

Evolutionary biologist W. D. Hamilton called the concept of Gaia Copernican, adding that it would take another Newton to explain how Gaian self-regulation takes place through Darwinian natural selection.[better source needed ] More recently Ford Doolittle building on his and Inkpen's ITSNTS (It's The Song Not The Singer) proposal proposed that differential persistence can play a similar role to differential reproduction in evolution by natural selections, thereby providing a possible reconciliation between the theory of natural selection and the Gaia hypothesis.

The Gaia hypothesis continues to be broadly skeptically received by the scientific community. For instance, arguments both for and against it were laid out in the journal Climatic Change in 2002 and 2003. A significant argument raised against it are the many examples where life has had a detrimental or destabilising effect on the environment rather than acting to regulate it. Several recent books have criticised the Gaia hypothesis, expressing views ranging from "... the Gaia hypothesis lacks unambiguous observational support and has significant theoretical difficulties" to "Suspended uncomfortably between tainted metaphor, fact, and false science, I prefer to leave Gaia firmly in the background" to "The Gaia hypothesis is supported neither by evolutionary theory nor by the empirical evidence of the geological record". The CLAW hypothesis, initially suggested as a potential example of direct Gaian feedback, has subsequently been found to be less credible as understanding of cloud condensation nuclei has improved. In 2009 the Medea hypothesis was proposed: that life has highly detrimental (biocidal) impacts on planetary conditions, in direct opposition to the Gaia hypothesis.

In a 2013 book-length evaluation of the Gaia hypothesis considering modern evidence from across the various relevant disciplines, Toby Tyrrell concluded that: "I believe Gaia is a dead end. Its study has, however, generated many new and thought provoking questions. While rejecting Gaia, we can at the same time appreciate Lovelock's originality and breadth of vision, and recognize that his audacious concept has helped to stimulate many new ideas about the Earth, and to champion a holistic approach to studying it". Elsewhere he presents his conclusion "The Gaia hypothesis is not an accurate picture of how our world works". This statement needs to be understood as referring to the "strong" and "moderate" forms of Gaia-that the biota obeys a principle that works to make Earth optimal (strength 5) or favourable for life (strength 4) or that it works as a homeostatic mechanism (strength 3). The latter is the "weakest" form of Gaia that Lovelock has advocated. Tyrrell rejects it. However, he finds that the two weaker forms of Gaia-Coeveolutionary Gaia and Influential Gaia, which assert that there are close links between the evolution of life and the environment and that biology affects the physical and chemical environment-are both credible, but that it is not useful to use the term "Gaia" in this sense and that those two forms were already accepted and explained by the processes of natural selection and adaptation.

"The Gaia Hypothesis" is the title of the award-winning collection of short stories A Hipótese de Gaia by Jorge Reis-Sá, published in Portuguese in 2022.

Biocoenosis - Interacting organisms living together in a habitat

Earth science - Fields of natural science related to Earth

Environmentalism - Philosophy about Earth protection

Gaianism - Earth-centered philosophical, holistic, and spiritual belief

Global brain - Futuristic concept of a global interconnected network

Holism - A system as a whole, not just its parts

Hylozoism - Philosophical doctrine which holds that all matter is alive

Planetary boundaries - Limits not to be exceeded if humanity wants to survive in a safe ecosystem

SimEarth - 1990 video game

Spiritual ecology - Field in religion, conservation, and academia

Superorganism - Group of synergistic organisms

Jaworski, Helan (1928). Le Géon ou la Terre vivante. Paris: Librairie Gallimard.

Lovelock, James. The Independent. The Earth is about to catch a morbid fever, 16 January 2006.

Kleidon, Axel (2004). "Beyond Gaia: Thermodynamics of Life and Earth system functioning". Climatic Change. 66 (3): 271-319. doi:10.1023/B:CLIM.0000044616.34867.ec. S2CID 55295082.

Lovelock, James (2001). Homage to Gaia: The Life of an Independent Scientist. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-860429-7.

Lovelock, James (2006), interviewed in How to think about science, CBC Ideas (radio program), broadcast January 3, 2008. Link

Lovelock, James (2007). The Revenge of Gaia: Why the Earth Is Fighting Back - and How We Can Still Save Humanity. Santa Barbara CA: Allen Lane. ISBN 978-0-7139-9914-3.

Staley M (September 2002). "Darwinian selection leads to Gaia". J. Theor. Biol. 218 (1): 35-46. Bibcode:2002JThBi.218...35S. doi:10.1006/jtbi.2002.3059. PMID 12297068.

Thomas, Lewis G. (1974). The Lives of a Cell; Notes of a Biology Watcher. New York: Viking Press. ISBN 978-0-670-43442-8.

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The Gaia hypothesis (), also known as the Gaia theory, Gaia paradigm, or the Gaia principle, proposes that living organisms interact with their inorganic surroundings on Earth to form a synergistic and self-regulating, complex system that helps to maintain and perpetuate the conditions for life on the planet.

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#ACCELERATE MANIFESTO, #Alex Williams and #Nick Srnicek : Any transformation of society must involve economic and social experimentation. The Chilean Project Cybersyn is emblematic of this experimental attitude — fusing advanced cybernetic technologies, with sophisticated economic modelling, and a democratic platform instantiated in the technological infrastructure itself. Similar experiments were conducted in 1950s–1960s Soviet economics as well, employing cybernetics and linear programming in an attempt to overcome the new problems faced by the first communist economy. That both of these were ultimately unsuccessful can be traced to the political and technological constraints these early cyberneticians operated under.

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The #Planning Machine: Project #Cybersyn and the origins of the #Big Data nation.

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The #Planning Machine: Project #Cybersyn and the origins of the #Big Data nation.

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Chile president Allende, who took office in November of 1970, had swiftly nationalized the country’s key industries, and he promised “worker participation” in the planning process. Cybernetic scientist Stafford Beer’s mission was to deliver a hypermodern information system that would make this possible, and so bring socialism into the computer age. The system he devised had a gleaming, sci-fi name: Project Cybersyn.

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In June, 1972, Ángel Parra, Chile's leading folksinger, wrote a song titled "Litany for a Computer and a Baby About to Be Born." Computers are like children, he sang, and Chilean bureaucrats must not abandon them. The song was prompted by a visit to Santiago from a British consultant who, with his ample beard and burly physique, reminded Parra of Santa Claus-a Santa bearing a "hidden gift, cybernetics."

The consultant, Stafford Beer, had been brought in by Chile's top planners to help guide the country down what Salvador Allende, its democratically elected Marxist leader, was calling "the Chilean road to socialism." Beer was a leading theorist of cybernetics-a discipline born of midcentury efforts to understand the role of communication in controlling social, biological, and technical systems. Chile's government had a lot to control: Allende, who took office in November of 1970, had swiftly nationalized the country's key industries, and he promised "worker participation" in the planning process. Beer's mission was to deliver a hypermodern information system that would make this possible, and so bring socialism into the computer age. The system he devised had a gleaming, sci-fi name: Project Cybersyn.

Beer was an unlikely savior for socialism. He had served as an executive with United Steel and worked as a development director for the International Publishing Corporation (then one of the largest media companies in the world), and he ran a lucrative consulting practice. He had a lavish life style, complete with a Rolls-Royce and a grand house in Surrey, which was fitted out with a remote-controlled waterfall in the dining room and a glass mosaic with a pattern based on the Fibonacci series. To convince workers that cybernetics in the service of the command economy could offer the best of socialism, a certain amount of reassurance was in order. In addition to folk music, there were plans for cybernetic-themed murals in the factories, and for instructional cartoons and movies. Mistrust remained. " Chile Run by Computer," a January, 1973, headline in the Observer announced, shaping the reception of Beer's plan in Britain.

At the center of Project Cybersyn (for "cybernetics synergy") was the Operations Room, where cybernetically sound decisions about the economy were to be made. Those seated in the op room would review critical highlights-helpfully summarized with up and down arrows-from a real-time feed of factory data from around the country. The prototype op room was built in downtown Santiago, in the interior courtyard of a building occupied by the national telecom company. It was a hexagonal space, thirty-three feet in diameter, accommodating seven white fibreglass swivel chairs with orange cushions and, on the walls, futuristic screens. Tables and paper were banned. Beer was building the future, and it had to look like the future.

That was a challenge: the Chilean government was running low on cash and supplies; the United States, dismayed by Allende's nationalization campaign, was doing its best to cut Chile off. And so a certain amount of improvisation was necessary. Four screens could show hundreds of pictures and figures at the touch of a button, delivering historical and statistical information about production-the Datafeed-but the screen displays had to be drawn (and redrawn) by hand, a job performed by four young female graphic designers. Given Beer's plans to build an entire "factory to turn out operations rooms"-every state-run industrial concern was to have one-Project Cybersyn could at least provide graphic designers with full employment.

Beer, who was fond of cigars and whiskey, made sure that an ashtray and a small holder for a glass were built into one of the armrests for each chair. (Sometimes, it seemed, the task of managing the economy went better with a buzz on.) The other armrest featured rows of buttons for navigating the screens. In addition to the Datafeed, there was a screen that simulated the future state of the Chilean economy under various conditions. Before you set prices, established production quotas, or shifted petroleum allocations, you could see how your decision would play out.

One wall was reserved for Project Cyberfolk, an ambitious effort to track the real-time happiness of the entire Chilean nation in response to decisions made in the op room. Beer built a device that would enable the country's citizens, from their living rooms, to move a pointer on a voltmeter-like dial that indicated moods ranging from extreme unhappiness to complete bliss. The plan was to connect these devices to a network-it would ride on the existing TV networks-so that the total national happiness at any moment in time could be determined. The algedonic meter, as the device was called (from the Greek algos, "pain," and hedone, "pleasure"), would measure only raw pleasure-or-pain reactions to show whether government policies were working.

Project Cybersyn can also be viewed as a dispatch from the future. These days, business publications and technology conferences endlessly celebrate real-time dynamic planning, the widespread deployment of tiny but powerful sensors, and, above all, Big Data-an infinitely elastic concept that, according to some inexorable but yet unnamed law of technological progress, packs twice as much ambiguity in the same two words as it did the year before. In many respects, Beer's cybernetic dream has finally come true: the virtue of collecting and analyzing information in real time is an article of faith shared by corporations and governments alike.

Beer was invited to Chile by a twenty-eight-year-old technocrat named Fernando Flores, whom Allende had appointed to the state development agency. The agency, a stronghold of Chilean technocracy, was given the task of administering the newly nationalized enterprises. Flores was undeterred by Beer's lack of socialist credentials. He saw that there was a larger intellectual affinity between socialism and cybernetics; in fact, both East Germany and the Soviet Union considered, though never actually built, projects similar to Cybersyn.

As Eden Medina shows in "Cybernetic Revolutionaries," her entertaining history of Project Cybersyn, Beer set out to solve an acute dilemma that Allende faced. How was he to nationalize hundreds of companies, reorient their production toward social needs, and replace the price system with central planning, all while fostering the worker participation that he had promised? Beer realized that the planning problems of business managers-how much inventory to hold, what production targets to adopt, how to redeploy idle equipment-were similar to those of central planners. Computers that merely enabled factory automation were of little use; what Beer called the "cussedness of things" required human involvement. It's here that computers could help-flagging problems in need of immediate attention, say, or helping to simulate the long-term consequences of each decision. By analyzing troves of enterprise data, computers could warn managers of any "incipient instability." In short, management cybernetics would allow for the reëngineering of socialism-the command-line economy.

To take advantage of automated computer analysis, managers would need to get a clear view of daily life inside their own firm. First, they would have to locate critical bottlenecks. They needed to know that if trucks arrived late at Plant A, then Plant B wouldn't finish the product by its deadline. Why would the trucks be late? Well, the drivers might be on strike, or lousy weather might have closed the roads. Workers, not managers, would have the most intimate knowledge of these things.

When Beer was a steel-industry executive, he would assemble experts-anthropologists, biologists, logicians-and dispatch them to extract such tacit knowledge from the shop floor. The goal was to produce a list of relevant indicators (like total gasoline reserves or delivery delays) that could be monitored so that managers would be able to head off problems early. In Chile, Beer intended to replicate the modelling process: officials would draw up the list of key production indicators after consulting with workers and managers. "The on-line control computer ought to be sensorily coupled to events in real time," Beer argued in a 1964 lecture that presaged the arrival of smart, net-connected devices-the so-called Internet of Things. Given early notice, the workers could probably solve most of their own problems. Everyone would gain from computers: workers would enjoy more autonomy while managers would find the time for long-term planning. For Allende, this was good socialism. For Beer, this was good cybernetics.

Cybernetics was born in the mid-nineteen-forties, as scholars in various disciplines began noticing that social, natural, and mechanical systems exhibit similar patterns of self-regulation. Norbert Wiener's classic "Cybernetics; or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine" (1948) discussed human behavior by drawing on his close observation of technologies like the radar and the thermostat. The latter is remarkable for how little it needs to know in order to do its job. It doesn't care whether what's making the room so hot is your brand-new plasma TV or the weather outside. It just needs to compare its actual output (the temperature right now) with its predefined output (the desired temperature) and readjust its input (whatever mechanism is producing heat or cold).

Wiener held that a patient suffering from purpose tremor-spilling a glass of water before raising it to his lips-was akin to a malfunctioning thermostat. Both rely on "negative feedback"-"negative" because it tends to oppose what the system is doing. In a way, our bodies are feedback machines: we maintain our body temperature without a specially programmed response for "condition: bathhouse" or "condition: tundra." The tendency to self-adjust is known as homeostasis, and it's ubiquitous in both the natural and the mechanical worlds. For Beer, in fact, corporations are homeostats. They have a clear goal-survival-and are full of feedback loops: between the company and its suppliers or between workers and management. And if we can make homeostatic corporations why not homeostatic governments?

Yet central planning had been powerfully criticized for being unresponsive to shifting realities, notably by the free-market champion Friedrich Hayek. The efforts of socialist planners, he argued, were bound to fail, because they could not do what the free market's price system could: aggregate the poorly codified knowledge that implicitly guides the behavior of market participants. Beer and Hayek knew each other; as Beer noted in his diary, Hayek even complimented him on his vision for the cybernetic factory, after Beer presented it at a 1960 conference in Illinois. (Hayek, too, ended up in Chile, advising Augusto Pinochet.) But they never agreed about planning. Beer believed that technology could help integrate workers' informal knowledge into the national planning process while lessening information overload.

Project Cybersyn, to be sure, lacked the gizmos available to contemporary organizations. When Beer landed in Santiago, he had access only to two mainframe computers, which the government badly needed for other tasks. Beer chose the "cloud" model: one central computer, analyzing reports sent by telex machines installed at state-run factories, could inform the firm of emerging problems and, if nothing was done, alert agency officials.

But computer analysis of factories was only as good as the underlying formal model of how they actually work. Hermann Schwember, a senior member of Cybersyn, described the process in a 1977 essay. The modelling team dispatched to a canning plant, for example, would start with a list of technical questions. What supplies-tin cans, sugar, fruit-were critical to its over-all activity? Were there statistics-say, the amount of peeled fruit, the number of cans in the factory line-that offered an accurate snapshot of the state of production? Were there any machines that might automatically provide the indicators sought by the team (the counter of the sealing unit, perhaps)? The answers would yield a flowchart that started with suppliers and ended with customers.

Suppose that the state planners wanted the plant to expand its cooking capacity by twenty per cent. The modelling would determine whether the target was plausible. Say the existing boiler was used at ninety per cent of capacity, and increasing the amount of canned fruit would mean exceeding that capacity by fifty per cent. With these figures, you could generate a statistical profile for the boiler you'd need. Unrealistic production goals, overused resources, and unwise investment decisions could be dealt with quickly. "It is perfectly possible . . . to capture data at source in real time, and to process them instantly," Beer later noted. "But we do not have the machinery for such instant data capture, nor do we have the sophisticated computer programs that would know what to do with such a plethora of information if we had it."

Today, sensor-equipped boilers and tin cans report their data automatically, and in real time. And, just as Beer thought, data about our past behaviors can yield useful predictions. Amazon recently obtained a patent for "anticipatory shipping"-a technology for shipping products before orders have even been placed. Walmart has long known that sales of strawberry Pop-Tarts tend to skyrocket before hurricanes; in the spirit of computer-aided homeostasis, the company knows that it's better to restock its shelves than to ask why.

Governments, with oceans of information at their disposal, are following suit. That's evident from an essay on the "data-driven city," by Michael Flowers, the former chief analytics officer of New York City, which appears in "Beyond Transparency: Open Data and the Future of Civic Innovation," a recent collection of essays (published, tellingly, by the Code for America Press), edited by Brett Goldstein with Lauren Dyson. Flowers suggests that real-time data analysis is allowing city agencies to operate in a cybernetic manner. Consider the allocation of building inspectors in a city like New York. If the city authorities know which buildings have caught fire in the past and if they have a deep profile for each such building-if, for example, they know that such buildings usually feature illegal conversions, and their owners are behind on paying property taxes or have a history of mortgage foreclosures-they can predict which buildings are likely to catch fire in the future and decide where inspectors should go first. The appeal of this approach to bureaucrats is fairly obvious: like Beer's central planners, they can be effective while remaining ignorant of the causal mechanisms at play. "I am not interested in causation except as it speaks to action," Flowers told Kenneth Cukier and Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, the authors of "Big Data" (Houghton Mifflin), another recent book on the subject. "Causation is for other people, and frankly it is very dicey when you start talking about causation. . . . You know, we have real problems to solve."

In another contribution to "Beyond Transparency," the technology publisher and investor Tim O'Reilly, one of Silicon Valley's in-house intellectuals, celebrates a new mode of governance that he calls "algorithmic regulation." The aim is to replace rigid rules issued by out-of-touch politicians with fluid and personalized feedback loops generated by gadget-wielding customers. Reputation becomes the new regulation: why pass laws banning taxi-drivers from dumping sandwich wrappers on the back seat if the market can quickly punish such behavior with a one-star rating? It's a far cry from Beer's socialist utopia, but it relies on the same cybernetic principle: collect as much relevant data from as many sources as possible, analyze them in real time, and make an optimal decision based on the current circumstances rather than on some idealized projection. All that's needed is a set of fibreglass swivel chairs.

Chilean politics, as it happened, was anything but homeostatic. Cybernetic synergy was a safe subject for the relatively calm first year of Allende's rule: the economy was growing, social programs were expanding, real wages were improving. But the calm didn't last. Allende, frustrated by the intransigence of his parliamentary opposition, began to rule by executive decree, prompting the opposition to question the constitutionality of his actions. Workers, too, began to cause trouble, demanding wage increases that the government couldn't deliver. Washington, concerned that the Chilean road to socialism might have already been found, was also meddling in the country's politics, trying to thwart some of the announced reforms.

In October, 1972, a nationwide strike by truck drivers, who were fearful of nationalization, threatened to paralyze the country. Fernando Flores had the idea of deploying Cybersyn's telex machines to outmaneuver the strikers, encouraging industries to coördinate the sharing of fuel. Most workers declined to back the strike and sided with Allende, who also invited the military to join the cabinet. Flores was appointed Minister of Economics, the strike petered out, and it seemed that Project Cybersyn would win the day.

On December 30, 1972, Allende visited the Operations Room, sat in one of the swivel chairs, and pushed a button or two. It was hot, and the buttons didn't show the right slides. Undaunted, the President told the team to keep working. And they did, readying the system for its official launch, in February, 1973. By then, however, long-term planning was becoming something of a luxury. One of Cybersyn's directors remarked at the time that "every day more people wanted to work on the project," but, for all this manpower, the system still failed to work in a timely manner. In one instance, a cement-factory manager discovered that an impending coal shortage might halt production at his enterprise, so he travelled to the coal mine to solve the problem in person. Several days later, a notice from Project Cybersyn arrived to warn him of a potential coal shortage-a problem that he had already tackled. With such delays, factories didn't have much incentive to report their data.

One of the participating engineers described the factory modelling process as "fairly technocratic" and "top down"-it did not involve "speaking to the guy who was actually working on the mill or the spinning machine." Frustrated with the growing bureaucratization of Project Cybersyn, Beer considered resigning. "If we wanted a new system of government, then it seems that we are not going to get it," he wrote to his Chilean colleagues that spring. "The team is falling apart, and descending to personal recrimination." Confined to the language of cybernetics, Beer didn't know what to do. "I can see no way of practical change that does not very quickly damage the Chilean bureaucracy beyond repair," he wrote.

It was Allende's regime itself that was soon damaged beyond repair. Pinochet had no need for real-time centralized planning; the market was to replace it. When Allende's regime was overthrown, on September 11, 1973, Project Cybersyn met its end as well. Beer happened to be out of the country, but others weren't so lucky. Allende ended up dead, Flores in prison, other Cybersyn managers in hiding. The Operations Room didn't survive, either. In a fit of what we might now call PowerPoint rage, a member of the Chilean military stabbed its slides with a knife.

Today, one is as likely to hear about Project Cybersyn's aesthetics as about its politics. The resemblance that the Operations Room-with its all-white, utilitarian surfaces and oversized buttons-bears to the Apple aesthetic is not entirely accidental. The room was designed by Gui Bonsiepe, an innovative German designer who studied and taught at the famed Ulm School of Design, in Germany, and industrial design associated with the Ulm School inspired Steve Jobs and the Apple designer Jonathan Ive.

But Cybersyn anticipated more than tech's form factors. It's suggestive that Nest-the much admired smart thermostat, which senses whether you're home and lets you adjust temperatures remotely-now belongs to Google, not Apple. Created by engineers who once worked on the iPod, it has a slick design, but most of its functionality (like its ability to learn and adjust to your favorite temperature by observing your behavior) comes from analyzing data, Google's bread and butter. The proliferation of sensors with Internet connectivity provides a homeostatic solution to countless predicaments. Google Now, the popular smartphone app, can perpetually monitor us and (like Big Mother, rather than like Big Brother) nudge us to do the right thing-exercise, say, or take the umbrella.

Companies like Uber, meanwhile, insure that the market reaches a homeostatic equilibrium by monitoring supply and demand for transportation. Google recently acquired the manufacturer of a high-tech spoon-the rare gadget that is both smart and useful-to compensate for the purpose tremors that captivated Norbert Wiener. (There is also a smart fork that vibrates when you are eating too fast; "smart" is no guarantee against "dumb.") The ubiquity of sensors in our cities can shift behavior: a new smart parking system in Madrid charges different rates depending on the year and the make of the car, punishing drivers of old, pollution-prone models. Helsinki's transportation board has released an Uber-like app, which, instead of dispatching an individual car, coördinates multiple requests for nearby destinations, pools passengers, and allows them to share a much cheaper ride on a minibus.

Such experiments, however, would be impossible without access to the underlying data, and companies like Uber typically want to grab and hold as much data as they can. When, in 1975, Beer argued that "information is a national resource," he was ahead of his time in treating the question of ownership-just who gets to own the means of data production, not to mention the data?-as a political issue that cannot be reduced to its technological dimensions.

Uber says that it can monitor its supply-and-demand curves in real time. Instead of sticking to fixed rates for car rides, it can charge a floating rate depending on market conditions when an order is placed. As Uber's C.E.O. told Wired last December, "We are not setting the price. The market is setting the price. We have algorithms to determine what that market is." It's a marvellous case study in Cybersyn capitalism. And it explains why Uber's prices tend to skyrocket in inclement weather. (The company recently agreed to cap these hikes in American cities during emergencies.) Uber maintains that surge pricing allows it to get more drivers onto the road in dismal weather conditions. This claim would be stronger if there were a way to confirm its truth by reviewing the data. But at Uber, as at so many tech companies, what happens in the op room stays in the op room.

Stafford Beer was deeply shaken by the 1973 coup, and dedicated his immediate post-Cybersyn life to helping his exiled Chilean colleagues. He separated from his wife, sold the fancy house in Surrey, and retired to a secluded cottage in rural Wales, with no running water and, for a long time, no phone line. He let his once carefully trimmed beard grow to Tolstoyan proportions. A Chilean scientist later claimed that Beer came to Chile a businessman and left a hippie. He gained a passionate following in some surprising circles. In November, 1975, Brian Eno struck up a correspondence with him. Eno got Beer's books into the hands of his fellow-musicians David Byrne and David Bowie; Bowie put Beer's "Brain of the Firm" on a list of his favorite books.

Isolated in his cottage, Beer did yoga, painted, wrote poetry, and, occasionally, consulted for clients like Warburtons, a popular British bakery. Management cybernetics flourished nonetheless: Malik, a respected consulting firm in Switzerland, has been applying Beer's ideas for decades. In his later years, Beer tried to re-create Cybersyn in other countries-Uruguay, Venezuela, Canada-but was invariably foiled by local bureaucrats. In 1980, he wrote to Robert Mugabe, of Zimbabwe, to gauge his interest in creating "a national information network (operating with decentralized nodes using cheap microcomputers) to make the country more governable in every modality." Mugabe, apparently, had no use for algedonic meters.

Fernando Flores moved in the opposite direction. In 1976, an Amnesty International campaign secured his release from prison, and he ended up in California, at Berkeley, studying the ideas of Martin Heidegger and J. L. Austin and writing a doctoral thesis on business communications in the office of the future. In California, Flores reinvented himself as a business consultant and a technology entrepreneur. (In the early nineteen-eighties, Werner Erhard, the founder of est, was among his backers.) Flores reëntered Chilean politics and was elected a senator in 2001. Toying with the idea of running for President, he eventually launched his own party and found common ground with the right.

Before designing Project Cybersyn, Beer used to complain that technology "seems to be leading humanity by the nose." After his experience in Chile, he decided that something else was to blame. If Silicon Valley, rather than Santiago, has proved to be the capital of management cybernetics, Beer wasn't wrong to think that Big Data and distributed sensors could be enlisted for a very different social mission. While cybernetic feedback loops do allow us to use scarce resources more effectively, the easy availability of fancy thermostats shouldn't prevent us from asking if the walls of our houses are too flimsy or if the windows are broken. A bit of causal thinking can go a long way. For all its utopianism and scientism, its algedonic meters and hand-drawn graphs, Project Cybersyn got some aspects of its politics right: it started with the needs of the citizens and went from there. The problem with today's digital utopianism is that it typically starts with a PowerPoint slide in a venture capitalist's pitch deck. As citizens in an era of Datafeed, we still haven't figured out how to manage our way to happiness. But there's a lot of money to be made in selling us the dials. ♦

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Evgeny Morozov on how the ideas behind Project Cybersyn, a futuristic experiment in cybernetics from nineteen-seventies Chile, still shapes technology.

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Gilles Louis René Deleuze was a French philosopher

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Gilles Louis René Deleuze ( də-LOOZ , French: ; 18 January 1925 - 4 November 1995) was a French philosopher who, from the early 1950s until his death in 1995, wrote on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. His most popular works were the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980), both co-written with psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. His metaphysical treatise Difference and Repetition (1968) is considered by many scholars to be his magnum opus.

An important part of Deleuze's oeuvre is devoted to the reading of other philosophers: the Stoics, Leibniz, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, and Bergson, with particular influence derived from Spinoza. A. W. Moore, citing Bernard Williams's criteria for a great thinker, ranks Deleuze among the "greatest philosophers". Although he once characterized himself as a "pure metaphysician", his work has influenced a variety of disciplines across the humanities, including philosophy, art, and literary theory, as well as movements such as post-structuralism and postmodernism.

Gilles Deleuze was born into a middle-class family in Paris and lived there for most of his life. His mother was Odette Camaüer and his father, Louis, was an engineer. His initial schooling was undertaken during World War II, during which time he attended the Lycée Carnot. He also spent a year in at the Lycée Henri IV. During the Nazi occupation of France, Deleuze's brother, three years his senior, Georges, was arrested for his participation in the French Resistance, and died while in transit to a concentration camp. In 1944, Deleuze went to study at the Sorbonne. His teachers there included several noted specialists in the history of philosophy, such as Georges Canguilhem, Jean Hyppolite, Ferdinand Alquié, and Maurice de Gandillac. Deleuze's lifelong interest in the canonical figures of modern philosophy owed much to these teachers.

Deleuze passed the agrégation in philosophy in 1948, and taught at various lycées (Amiens, Orléans, Louis le Grand) until 1957, when he took up a position at the University of Paris. In 1953, he published his first monograph, Empiricism and Subjectivity, on David Hume. This monograph was based on his 1947 DES () thesis, roughly equivalent to an M.A. thesis, which was conducted under the direction of Jean Hyppolite and Georges Canguilhem. From 1960 to 1964, he held a position at the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique. During this time he published the seminal Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962) and befriended Michel Foucault. From 1964 to 1969, he was a professor at the University of Lyon. In 1968, Deleuze defended his two DrE dissertations amid the ongoing May 68 demonstrations; he later published his two dissertations under the titles Difference and Repetition (supervised by Gandillac) and Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza (supervised by Alquié).

In 1969, he was appointed to the University of Paris VIII at Vincennes/St. Denis, an experimental school organized to implement educational reform. This new university drew a number of well-known academics, including Foucault (who suggested Deleuze's hiring) and the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. Deleuze taught at Paris VIII until his retirement in 1987.

Deleuze's outlook on life was sympathetic to transcendental ideas, "nature as god" ethics, and the monist experience. Some of the important ideas he advocated for and found inspiration in include his personally coined expression pluralism = monism, as well as the concepts of Being and Univocity. His thoughts were shaped by Spinoza's leanings and inclinations; for Deleuze, Spinoza was the "prince" or even the "Christ" of philosophers.

He married Denise Paul "Fanny" Grandjouan in 1956 and they had two children.

According to James Miller, Deleuze portrayed little visible interest in actually doing many of the risky things he so vividly conjured up[clarification needed ] in his lectures and writing. Married, with two children, he outwardly lived the life of a conventional French professor. He kept his fingernails untrimmed because, as he once explained, he lacked "normal protective fingerprints", and therefore could not "touch an object, particularly a piece of cloth, with the pads of my fingers without sharp pain".

When once asked to talk about his life, he replied: "Academics' lives are seldom interesting." Deleuze concludes his reply to this critic thus:

What do you know about me, given that I believe in secrecy? ... If I stick where I am, if I don't travel around, like anyone else I make my inner journeys that I can only measure by my emotions, and express very obliquely and circuitously in what I write. ... Arguments from one's own privileged experience are bad and reactionary arguments.

Deleuze, who had suffered from respiratory ailments from a young age, developed tuberculosis in 1968 and underwent lung removal. He suffered increasingly severe respiratory symptoms for the rest of his life. In the last years of his life, simple tasks such as writing required laborious effort. Overwhelmed by his respiratory problems, he died by suicide on 4 November 1995, throwing himself from the window of his apartment.

Before his death, Deleuze had announced his intention to write a book entitled La Grandeur de Marx ( The Greatness of Marx), and left behind two chapters of an unfinished project entitled Ensembles and Multiplicities (these chapters have been published as the essays "Immanence: A Life" and "The Actual and the Virtual"). He is buried in the cemetery of the village of Saint-Léonard-de-Noblat.

Deleuze's works fall into two groups: on the one hand, monographs interpreting the work of other philosophers ( Baruch Spinoza, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Bergson, Michel Foucault) and artists ( Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Francis Bacon); on the other, eclectic philosophical tomes organized by concept (e.g., difference, sense, events, schizophrenia, economy, cinema, desire, philosophy). However, both of these aspects are seen by his critics and analysts as often overlapping, in particular, due to his prose and the unique mapping of his books that allow for multifaceted readings.

Deleuze's main philosophical project in the works he wrote prior to his collaborations with Guattari can be summarized as an inversion of the traditional metaphysical relationship between identity and difference. Traditionally, difference is seen as derivative from identity: e.g., to say that "X is different from Y" assumes some X and Y with at least relatively stable identities (as in Plato's forms). On the contrary, Deleuze claims that all identities are effects of difference. Identities are neither logically nor metaphysically prior to difference, Deleuze argues, "given that there exist differences of nature between things of the same genus."[31] That is, not only are no two things ever the same, the categories we use to identify individuals in the first place derive from differences. Apparent identities such as "X" are composed of endless series of differences, where "X" = "the difference between x and x ", and "x " = "the difference between...", and so forth. Difference, in other words, goes all the way down. To confront reality honestly, Deleuze argues, we must grasp beings exactly as they are, and concepts of identity (forms, categories, resemblances, unities of apperception, predicates, etc.) fail to attain what he calls "difference in itself." "If philosophy has a positive and direct relation to things, it is only insofar as philosophy claims to grasp the thing itself, according to what it is, in its difference from everything it is not, in other words, in its internal difference."[32]

Like Kant, Deleuze considers traditional notions of space and time as unifying forms imposed by the subject. He, therefore, concludes that pure difference is non-spatiotemporal; it is an idea, what Deleuze calls " the virtual". (The coinage refers to Proust's definition of what is constant in both the past and the present: "real without being actual, ideal without being abstract.") While Deleuze's virtual ideas superficially resemble Plato's forms and Kant's ideas of pure reason, they are not originals or models, nor do they transcend possible experience; instead they are the conditions of actual experience, the internal difference in itself. "The concept they [the conditions] form is identical to its object." A Deleuzean idea or concept of difference is therefore not a wraith-like abstraction of an experienced thing, it is a real system of differential relations that creates actual spaces, times, and sensations.

Thus, Deleuze at times refers to his philosophy as a transcendental empiricism ( empirisme transcendantal), alluding to Kant. In Kant's transcendental idealism, experience only makes sense when organized by intuitions (namely, space and time) and concepts (such as causality). Assuming the content of these intuitions and concepts to be qualities of the world as it exists independently of our perceptual access, according to Kant, spawns seductive but senseless metaphysical beliefs (for example, extending the concept of causality beyond possible experience results in unverifiable speculation about a first cause). Deleuze inverts the Kantian arrangement: experience exceeds our concepts by presenting novelty, and this raw experience of difference actualizes an idea, unfettered by our prior categories, forcing us to invent new ways of thinking (see Epistemology).

Simultaneously, Deleuze claims that being is univocal, i.e., that all of its senses are affirmed in one voice. Deleuze borrows the doctrine of ontological univocity from the medieval philosopher John Duns Scotus. In medieval disputes over the nature of God, many eminent theologians and philosophers (such as Thomas Aquinas) held that when one says that "God is good", God's goodness is only analogous to human goodness. Scotus argued to the contrary that when one says that "God is good", the goodness in question is exactly the same sort of goodness that is meant when one says "Jane is good". That is, God only differs from us in degree, and properties such as goodness, power, reason, and so forth are univocally applied, regardless of whether one is talking about God, a person, or a flea.

Deleuze adapts the doctrine of univocity to claim that being is, univocally, difference. "With univocity, however, it is not the differences which are and must be: it is being which is Difference, in the sense that it is said of difference. Moreover, it is not we who are univocal in a Being which is not; it is we and our individuality which remains equivocal in and for a univocal Being." Here Deleuze at once echoes and inverts Spinoza, who maintained that everything that exists is a modification of the one substance, God or Nature. For Deleuze, there is no one substance, only an always-differentiating process, an origami cosmos, always folding, unfolding, refolding. Deleuze summarizes this ontology in the paradoxical formula " pluralism = monism".

Difference and Repetition (1968) is Deleuze's most sustained and systematic attempt to work out the details of such a metaphysics, but his other works develop similar ideas. In Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962), for example, reality is a play of forces; in Anti-Oedipus (1972), a " body without organs"; in What is Philosophy? (1991), a " plane of immanence" or "chaosmos".

Deleuze's unusual metaphysics entails an equally atypical epistemology, or what he calls a transformation of "the image of thought". According to Deleuze, the traditional image of thought, found in philosophers such as Aristotle, René Descartes, and Edmund Husserl, misconceives thinking as a mostly unproblematic business. Truth may be hard to discover-it may require a life of pure theorizing, or rigorous computation, or systematic doubt-but thinking is able, at least in principle, to correctly grasp facts, forms, ideas, etc. It may be practically impossible to attain a God's-eye, neutral point of view, but that is the ideal to approximate: a disinterested pursuit that results in a determinate, fixed truth; an orderly extension of common sense. Deleuze rejects this view as papering over the metaphysical flux, instead claiming that genuine thinking is a violent confrontation with reality, an involuntary rupture of established categories. Truth changes what we think; it alters what we think is possible. By setting aside the assumption that thinking has a natural ability to recognize the truth, Deleuze says, we attain a "thought without image", a thought always determined by problems rather than solving them. "All this, however, presupposes codes or axioms which do not result by chance, but which do not have an intrinsic rationality either. It's just like theology: everything about it is quite rational if you accept sin, the immaculate conception, and the incarnation. Reason is always a region carved out of the irrational-not sheltered from the irrational at all, but traversed by it and only defined by a particular kind of relationship among irrational factors. Underneath all reason lies delirium, and drift."

The Logic of Sense, published in 1969, is one of Deleuze's most peculiar works in the field of epistemology. Michel Foucault, in his essay "Theatrum Philosophicum" about the book, attributed this to how he begins with his metaphysics but approaches it through language and truth; the book is focused on "the simple condition that instead of denouncing metaphysics as the neglect of being, we force it to speak of extrabeing". In it, he refers to epistemological paradoxes: in the first series, as he analyzes Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, he remarks that "the personal self requires God and the world in general. But when substantives and adjectives begin to dissolve, when the names of pause and rest are carried away by the verbs of pure becoming and slide into the language of events, all identity disappears from the self, the world, and God."

Deleuze's peculiar readings of the history of philosophy stem from this unusual epistemological perspective. To read a philosopher is no longer to aim at finding a single, correct interpretation, but is instead to present a philosopher's attempt to grapple with the problematic nature of reality. "Philosophers introduce new concepts, they explain them, but they don't tell us, not completely anyway, the problems to which those concepts are a response. [...] The history of philosophy, rather than repeating what a philosopher says, has to say what he must have taken for granted, what he didn't say but is nonetheless present in what he did say."

Likewise, rather than seeing philosophy as a timeless pursuit of truth, reason, or universals, Deleuze defines philosophy as the creation of concepts. For Deleuze, concepts are not identity conditions or propositions, but metaphysical constructions that define a range of thinking, such as Plato's ideas, Descartes's , or Kant's doctrine of the faculties. A philosophical concept "posits itself and its object at the same time as it is created." In Deleuze's view, then, philosophy more closely resembles practical or artistic production than it does an adjunct to a definitive scientific description of a pre-existing world (as in the tradition of John Locke or Willard Van Orman Quine).

In his later work (from roughly 1981 onward), Deleuze sharply distinguishes art, philosophy, and science as three distinct disciplines, each relating to reality in different ways. While philosophy creates concepts, the arts create novel qualitative combinations of sensation and feeling (what Deleuze calls " percepts" and " affects"), and the sciences create quantitative theories based on fixed points of reference such as the speed of light or absolute zero (which Deleuze calls "functives"). According to Deleuze, none of these disciplines enjoy primacy over the others: they are different ways of organizing the metaphysical flux, "separate melodic lines in constant interplay with one another." For example, Deleuze does not treat cinema as an art representing an external reality, but as an ontological practice that creates different ways of organizing movement and time. Philosophy, science, and art are equally, and essentially, creative and practical. Hence, instead of asking traditional questions of identity such as "is it true?" or "what is it?", Deleuze proposes that inquiries should be functional or practical: "what does it do?" or "how does it work?"

In the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980), Deleuze and Guattari describe history as a congealing and regimentation of " desiring-production" (a concept combining features of Freudian drives and Marxist labor) into the modern individual (typically neurotic and repressed), the nation-state (a society of continuous control), and capitalism (an anarchy domesticated into infantilizing commodification). Deleuze, following Karl Marx, welcomes capitalism's destruction of traditional social hierarchies as liberating but inveighs against its homogenization of all values to the aims of the market.

The first part of Capitalism and Schizophrenia undertakes a universal history and posits the existence of a separate socius (the social body that takes credit for production) for each mode of production: the earth for the tribe, the body of the despot for the empire, and capital for capitalism."

In his 1990 essay "Postscript on the Societies of Control" ("Post-scriptum sur les sociétés de contrôle"), Deleuze builds on Foucault's notion of the society of discipline to argue that society is undergoing a shift in structure and control. Where societies of discipline were characterized by discrete physical enclosures (such as schools, factories, prisons, office buildings, etc.), institutions and technologies introduced since World War II have dissolved the boundaries between these enclosures. As a result, social coercion and discipline have moved into the lives of individuals considered as "masses, samples, data, markets, or 'banks'." The mechanisms of modern societies of control are described as continuous, following and tracking individuals throughout their existence via transaction records, mobile location tracking, and other personally identifiable information.

But how does Deleuze square his pessimistic diagnoses with his ethical naturalism? Deleuze claims that standards of value are internal or immanent: to live well is to fully express one's power, to go to the limits of one's potential, rather than to judge what exists by non-empirical, transcendent standards. Modern society still suppresses difference and alienates people from what they can do. To affirm reality, which is a flux of change and difference, we must overturn established identities and so become all that we can become-though we cannot know what that is in advance. The pinnacle of Deleuzean practice, then, is creativity. "Herein, perhaps, lies the secret: to bring into existence and not to judge. If it is so disgusting to judge, it is not because everything is of equal value, but on the contrary, because what has value can be made or distinguished only by defying judgment. What expert judgment, in art, could ever bear on the work to come?"

Deleuze's interpretations

Deleuze's studies of individual philosophers and artists are purposely heterodox. In Nietzsche and Philosophy, for example, Deleuze claims that Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morality (1887) is an attempt to rewrite Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (1781), even though Nietzsche nowhere mentions the First Critique in the Genealogy, and the Genealogy's moral topics are far removed from the epistemological focus of Kant's book. Likewise, Deleuze claims that univocity is the organizing principle of Spinoza's philosophy, despite the total absence of the term from any of Spinoza's works. Deleuze once famously described his method of interpreting philosophers as "buggery ( enculage)", as sneaking behind an author and producing an offspring which is recognizably his, yet also monstrous and different.

The various monographs thus are not attempts to present what Nietzsche or Spinoza strictly intended, but re-stagings of their ideas in different and unexpected ways. Deleuze's peculiar readings aim to enact the creativity he believes is the acme of philosophical practice. A parallel in painting Deleuze points to is Francis Bacon's Study after Velázquez-it is quite beside the point to say that Bacon "gets Velasquez wrong". Similar considerations apply, in Deleuze's view, to his own uses of mathematical and scientific terms, pace critics such as Alan Sokal: "I'm not saying that Resnais and Prigogine, or Godard and Thom, are doing the same thing. I'm pointing out, rather, that there are remarkable similarities between scientific creators of functions and cinematic creators of images. And the same goes for philosophical concepts, since there are distinct concepts of these spaces."

Along with several French and Italian Marxist-inspired thinkers like Louis Althusser, Étienne Balibar, and Antonio Negri, he was one of the central figures in a great flowering of Spinoza studies in the late 20th and early 21st centuries continental philosophy (or the rise of French-inspired post-structuralist Neo-Spinozism) that was the second remarkable Spinoza revival in history, after highly significant Neo-Spinozism in German philosophy and literature of approximately the late 18th and early 19th centuries. A fervent Spinozist in many respects, Deleuze's preoccupation with and reverence for Spinoza are well known in contemporary philosophy.

From the 1930s onward, German philosopher Martin Heidegger wrote in a series of manuscripts and books on concepts of Difference, Identity, Representation, and Event; notably among these the Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) (Written 1936-38; published posthumously 1989); none of the relevant texts were translated into French by Deleuze's death in 1995, excluding any strong possibility of appropriation. However, Heidegger's early work can be traced through mathematician Albert Lautman, who drew heavily from Heidegger's Sein und Zeit and Vom Wesen des Grundes (1928), which James Bahoh describes as having "...decisive influence on the twentieth century mathematician and philosopher [...] whose theory of dialectical Ideas Deleuze appropriated and modified for his own use." The similarities between Heidegger's later, post-turn, 1930-1976 thought and Deleuze's early works in the 60s and 70s are generally described by Deleuze-scholar Daniel W. Smith in the following way:

" Difference and Repetition could be read as a response to Being and Time (for Deleuze, Being is difference, and time is repetition)."

Bahoh continues in saying that: "...then Beiträge could be read as Difference and Repetition's unknowing and anachronistic doppelgänger." Deleuze and Heidegger's philosophy is considered to converge on the topics of Difference and the Event. Where, for Heidegger, an evental being is constituted in part by difference as "...an essential dimension of the concept of event"; for Deleuze, being is difference, and difference "differentiates by way of events." In contrast to this, however, Jussi Backman argues that, for Heidegger, being is united only insofar as it consists of and is difference, or rather as the movement of difference, not too dissimilar to Deleuze's later claims:

"...the unity and univocity of being (in the sense of being), its 'selfsameness,' paradoxically consists exclusively in difference."

This mutual apprehension of a differential, Evental ontology lead both thinkers into an extended critique of the representation characteristic to Platonic, Aristotelian, and Cartesian thought; as Joe Hughes states: " Difference and Repetition is a detective novel. It tells the story of what some readers of Deleuze might consider a horrendous crime [...]: the birth of representation." Heidegger formed his critiques most decisively in the concept of the fourfold [ German: das Geviert], a non-metaphysical grounding for the thing (as opposed to "object") as "ungrounded, mediated, meaningful, and shared" united in an "event of appropriation" [ Ereignis]. This evental ontology continues in Identität und Differenz, where the fundamental concept expressed in Difference and Repetition, of dethroning the primacy of identity, can be seen throughout the text. Even in earlier Heideggerian texts such as Sein und Zeit, however, the critique of representation is "...cast in terms of the being of truth, or the processes of uncovering and covering (grounded in Dasein's existence) whereby beings come into and withdraw from phenomenal presence." In parallel, Deleuze's extended critique of representation (in the sense of detailing a "genealogy" of the antiquated beliefs as well) is given "...in terms of being or becoming as difference and repetition, together with genetic processes of individuation whereby beings come to exist and pass out of existence."

Time and space, for both thinkers, is also constituted in nearly identical ways. Time-space in the Beiträge and the three syntheses in Difference and Repetition both apprehend time as grounded in difference, whilst the distinction between the time-space of the world [Welt] and the time-space as the evental production of such a time-space is mirrored by Deleuze's categorization between the temporality of what is actual and temporality of the virtual in the first and the second/third syntheses respectively.

Another parallel can be found in their utilization of so-called "generative paradoxes," or rather problems whose fundamental problematic element is constantly outside the categorical grasp fond of formal, natural, and human sciences. For Heidegger, this is the Earth in the fourfold, something which has as one of its traits the behaviour of "resisting articulation," what he characterizes as a "strife"; for Deleuze, a similar example can be spotted in the paradox of regress, or of indefinite proliferation in the Logic of Sense.

In the 1960s, Deleuze's portrayal of Nietzsche as a metaphysician of difference rather than a reactionary mystic contributed greatly to the plausibility and popularity of "left-wing Nietzscheanism" as an intellectual stance. His books Difference and Repetition (1968) and The Logic of Sense (1969) led Michel Foucault to declare that "one day, perhaps, this century will be called Deleuzian." (Deleuze, for his part, said Foucault's comment was "a joke meant to make people who like us laugh, and make everyone else livid.") In the 1970s, the Anti-Oedipus, written in a style by turns vulgar and esoteric, offering a sweeping analysis of the family, language, capitalism, and history via eclectic borrowings from Freud, Marx, Nietzsche, and dozens of other writers, was received as a theoretical embodiment of the anarchic spirit of May 1968. In 1994 and 1995, L'Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze, an eight-hour series of interviews between Deleuze and Claire Parnet, aired on France's Arte Channel.

In the 1980s and 1990s, almost all of Deleuze's books were translated into English. Deleuze's work is frequently cited in English-speaking academia (in 2007, e.g., he was the 11th most frequently cited author in English-speaking publications in the humanities, between Freud and Kant). Like his contemporaries Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-François Lyotard, Deleuze's influence has been most strongly felt in North American humanities departments, particularly in literary theory, where Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus are oft regarded as major statements of post-structuralism and postmodernism, though neither Deleuze nor Guattari described their work in those terms. Likewise in the English-speaking academy, Deleuze's work is typically classified as continental philosophy.

However, some French and some Anglophone philosophers criticised Deleuze's work.

According to Pascal Engel, Deleuze's metaphilosophical approach makes it impossible to reasonably disagree with a philosophical system, and so destroys meaning, truth, and philosophy itself. Engel summarizes Deleuze's metaphilosophy thus: "When faced with a beautiful philosophical concept you should just sit back and admire it. You should not question it."

American philosopher Stanley Rosen objects to Deleuze's interpretation of Nietzsche's eternal return.

Vincent Descombes argues that Deleuze's account of a difference that is not derived from identity (in Nietzsche and Philosophy) is incoherent.

Slavoj Žižek states that the Deleuze of Anti-Oedipus ("arguably Deleuze's worst book"), the "political" Deleuze under the "'bad' influence" of Guattari, ends up, despite protestations to the contrary, as "the ideologist of late capitalism".

Peter Hallward argues that Deleuze's insistence that being is necessarily creative and always-differentiating entails that his philosophy can offer no insight into, and is supremely indifferent to, the material, actual conditions of existence. Thus Hallward claims that Deleuze's thought is literally other-worldly, aiming only at a passive contemplation of the dissolution of all identity into the theophanic self-creation of nature.

Descombes argues that his analysis of history in Anti-Oedipus is 'utter idealism', criticizing reality for falling short of a non-existent ideal of schizophrenic becoming.

Alain Badiou claims that Deleuze's metaphysics only apparently embraces plurality and diversity, remaining at bottom monist. Badiou further argues that, in practical matters, Deleuze's monism entails an ascetic, aristocratic fatalism akin to ancient Stoicism.

Other European philosophers have criticized Deleuze's theory of subjectivity. For example, Manfred Frank claims that Deleuze's theory of individuation as a process of bottomless differentiation fails to explain the unity of consciousness.

In Fashionable Nonsense (1997), physicists Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont accuse Deleuze of abusing mathematical and scientific terms, particularly by sliding between accepted technical meanings and his own idiosyncratic use of those terms in his works. Sokal and Bricmont state that they don't object to metaphorical reasoning, including with mathematical concepts, but mathematical and scientific terms are useful only insofar as they are precise. They give examples of mathematical concepts being "abused" by taking them out of their intended meaning, rendering the idea into normal language reduces it to truism or nonsense. In their opinion, Deleuze used mathematical concepts about which the typical reader might be not knowledgeable, and thus served to display erudition rather than enlightening the reader. Sokal and Bricmont state that they only deal with the "abuse" of mathematical and scientific concepts and explicitly suspend judgment about Deleuze's wider contributions.

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Other scholars in continental philosophy, feminist studies and sexuality studies have taken Deleuze's analysis of the sexual dynamics of sadism and masochism with a level of uncritical celebration following the 1989 Zone Books translation of the 1967 booklet on Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Le froid et le cruel (Coldness and Cruelty). As sexuality historian Alison M. Moore notes, Deleuze's own value placed on difference is poorly reflected in this booklet which fails to differentiate between Masoch's own view of his desire and that imposed upon him by the pathologizing forms of psychiatric thought prevailing in the late nineteenth century which produced the concept of 'masochism' (a term Masoch himself emphatically rejected).

In collaboration with Félix Guattari

In collaboration with Michel Foucault

"Intellectuals and Power: A Discussion Between Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault". 16 (Summer 1973). New York: Telos Press (reprinted in L'île déserte et autres textes / Desert Islands and Other Texts; see above)

Audio (lectures)

Deleuze, Gilles: Spinoza: Immortalité et éternité [double CD]. (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 2001)

Deleuze, Gilles: Spinoza: The Velocities of Thought: Lecture 1, 2 December 1980. (Purdue University Research Repository, 2017) doi:10.4231/R7DF6PDS

Deleuze, Gilles: Spinoza: The Velocities of Thought: Lecture 14, 31 March 1981. (Purdue University Research Repository, 2017) doi:10.4231/R70863HN. "Spinoza: The Velocities of Thought" ("Spinoza: Des vitesses de la pensée") was a 14-lecture seminar given by Deleuze at the University of Paris 8 from December 1980 to March 1981. Deleuze had previously published two books on Spinoza, including Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza (Spinoza et le problème de l'expression, 1968), and Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (Spinoza: Philosophie pratique, 1970, 2nd ed. 1981). The majority of these lectures were given the same year as the publication of the second edition of the latter title.

1. "^ Difference and Repetition is definitely the most important work published by Deleuze." (Edouard Morot-Sir, from the back cover of the first edition of the English translation)

2. James Williams: "It is nothing less than a revolution in philosophy and stands out as one of the great philosophical works of the twentieth century" (James Williams, ^ Gilles Deleuze's Difference and Repetition: A Critical Introduction and Guide [Edinburgh UP, 2003], p. 1).

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Gilles Louis René Deleuze ( də-LOOZ , French: ; 18 January 1925 - 4 November 1995) was a French philosopher who, from the early 1950s until his death in 1995, wrote on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art.

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#Fred Turner: ON (Left) #ACCELERATIONISM

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#Fred Turner: ON (Left) #ACCELERATIONISM

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What is to be done? In 1901, when Lenin posed this now-canonical question, the answer was a communist revolution. Today, 25 years since the Internet went public, the answer has come to seem to many on the left to be a technological one. In the 1990s, it was right-wing libertarians such as John Perry Barlow who claimed to know what to do with the information system. In the future, they wrote, we would leave our bodies behind and dive headlong into a glorious pool of universal mind called Cyberspace. In the early 2000s, the builders of social media, some of whom subscribed to the tech-left ideals of open source software and copyleft reproduction rights, sold the public a new utopia. But instead of the world of technology-enabled interpersonal intimacy they promised, social media have become a series of commercially sponsored stages on which to preen for selfies and spin off data to be mined by states and corporations. During the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011, pundits on the right and the left even declared that cell phones and the Internet were becoming tools of political revolution. Yet today the authoritarian leaders of Egypt are if anything more entrenched than their predecessors were.

In their new book, Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World without Work, based on their widely circulated 2013 " Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics," British cultural theorists Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams argue that all of this needs to change. At a time when the future seems to belong to Chicago-school economists and the Internet to Google and the NSA, Srnicek and Williams have courageously drafted a call to re-imagine left politics from top to bottom. Nonetheless, the alternative vision of the left they propose in fact owes a great deal to the neoliberal imagination it aims to challenge. Srnicek and Williams believe that emerging technologies have laid the foundation for the kind of egalitarian social world once promised by Lenin himself. To bring that world into being, they argue, we need not to resist but to accelerate the development of new technologies and the spread of capitalism. And they are not alone. In the last two years, a vigorous debate has bubbled up in England, where Srnicek and Williams live, and spilled over into the tech-savvy enclaves of the United States. To visit that debate may be to catch a glimpse of a new New Left emerging-or, in the view of some of the movement's more strident critics, the final triumph of techno-libertarianism.

One thing that Srnicek and Williams make abundantly clear is that the tactics the left has inherited from the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s no longer work. The antiglobalization actions of the 1990s, various student uprisings in Europe and North Africa, and, above all, the Occupy Movement in the United States-Srnicek and Williams argue that all have failed because of the left's preoccupation with what they call, with the hint of a sneer, "folk politics." This mode emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s, they write, from roots in anarchism, autonomism, and various forms of communism. In their view, the last 50 years have seen "the collapse of the traditional organizations of the left, and the simultaneous rise of an alternative new left predicated upon critiques of bureaucracy, verticality, exclusion and institutionalization." This new New Left loathes all forms of top-down power, revels in consensus decision making, and believes in direct action. Above all, it hopes that its own local democratic processes might be a model for a new, more democratic social order at scale.

As Srnicek and Williams note, such an ethos has produced relatively little in the way of lasting change-at least in social structure. The case of Occupy is particularly instructive. Many participants have described how gathering together in public squares, debating public issues, and shouting together in the Human Megaphone made them feel politically powerful, often for the first time. And few would deny that the Occupier's famous phrase-"We are the 99 percent!"-shaped public debate for months to come. But where are the structural changes that Occupy has wrought? What congressmen are beholden to the Occupiers in the way that so many are to the Tea Party?

According to Srnicek and Williams, the logic of Folk Politics has prevented movements like Occupy from evolving into something more than a string of ephemeral protests. A faith in horizontal organizations, local action, and the transformative potential of immediacy is all well and good, they write, but almost by definition, it prevents the emergence of large-scale, well-organized forces that claim and hold institutional and financial territory. Folk Politics also reflect a failure to accept a series of truths about capitalism and modernity, they argue. The first of these is that capitalism is omnivorous. Srnicek and Williams note that, as Marx pointed out, capitalism devours almost all social forms in its way. This means that efforts to create local enclaves of, say, ethical consumerism or horizontal, extra-market social relations, are ultimately bound to fail. For all their emphasis on bottom-up reform, such efforts can do little to prevent the commodification of experience, the expansion of inequality, and the ever-extended need to turn social life toward financially profitable ends.

Anyone who has visited the cheese boutiques of San Francisco will recognize the truth of this critique. Even as the city hosts an ever-growing flock of charcuteries, hipster barbershops, and artisanal groceries, the rich young technologists who use them have been steadily pushing the poor out of their apartments. But this is where Srnicek and Williams take an unexpected turn. Rather than try to resist the forces of technology and capitalism, they urge us to embrace them. Or more specifically, they argue that in fact the only way to escape the maw of the consumer society is to accelerate the engines driving it. The left must do what the neoliberal right has done: it must celebrate the liberating tendencies of capitalism; it must take advantage of the ever-more-social affordances of new technologies; and it must help the world imagine both as sources of social improvement.

The alternative vision of the left proposed by Srnicek and Williams in fact owes a great deal to the neoliberal imagination it aims to challenge.

Given the failures of conventional left movements in recent years, Srnicek and Williams's call to imitate the tactics of the far more successful New Right makes a certain amount of sense. As they note, capitalism is a complex global phenomenon, a creature of banks and states, digitized financial flows, global transportation networks, and transcontinental media systems, all defended by border police of various kinds. Thanks largely to the work of the Mont Pelerin Society, a network of economists and fellow travelers first convened by Friedrich Hayek in 1947, the neoliberal right has built a coherent ideological framework that takes into account the full range of capitalist activity. In other words, they explain, neoliberalism scales. In the hands of neoliberal ideologues, for instance, Schumpeter's notion of "creative destruction" becomes something that individuals can do (as entrepreneurs), that companies can do (through innovation), and that even whole economies experience (in cycles of growth and recession). Neoliberalism seems to "work" at every level of individual and collective experience. To match its power, Srnicek and Williams argue, the left will need to build its own version of the Mont Pelerin group and spread its own alternative vision of the future.

Imitating neoliberal tactics is one thing; arguing that commerce and technology will bring about utopia is another. Srnicek and Williams want both. And they don't think conventional politics is the way to get it. Instead, they hope to build "a post-work society" by "fully automating the economy, reducing the working week, implementing a universal basic income, and achieving a cultural shift in the understanding of work." For Srnicek and Williams, the central problem with capitalism is not the inequality it produces, nor the ways it intersects with longstanding patterns of racism and nationalism, but rather the hoary problem of labor. For generations, they write, the left has "sought to liberate humanity from the drudgery of work, the dependence on wage labor, and submission of our lives to a boss." New technologies allow us to build "a postcapitalist and post-work platform upon which multiple ways of living could emerge and flourish."

Here Srnicek and Williams resurrect the ancient ghost of romanticism and marry it to a Marxist critique of labor in a way that would be quite familiar to the American counterculture of the 1960s. First, they describe virtually all labor as a species of spiritual subjection. We have authentic selves, they argue, and to work for wages, we must leave our authentic desires at home. Such a view also animated the American communards of the 1960s. After all, the point of a commune was to bridge work and home so as to make it possible to be "authentic" at all times. Second, Srnicek and Williams misinterpret an important aspect of contemporary labor. They note that a 2013 Gallup poll showed that only 13 percent of workers worldwide find their work "engaging." In their view, the survey provides evidence of global alienation. Yet Gallup conducted the survey for a group of CEOs who were quite likely seeking to make work more engaging precisely so as to draw out and monetize ever more of their workers' inner selves. Today, levels of engagement at work measure not so much workers' ability to achieve psychological authenticity on the job as they do the ability of employers to integrate the psychological needs of employees into the work process. Employers want their employees to be authentic at work. The more work feels like home, the more and better work employees will do.

Oddly enough, Srnicek and Williams seem quite comfortable with top-down management. In one of their book's strangest passages, they invoke the computerized management system known as "Cybersyn" as an emblem of the future they hope for. Cybersyn was designed and partially built for Salvador Allende's socialist government in Chile in the early 1970s. It featured a command center that resembled the bridge of the Star Trek Enterprise. Like Captain Kirk and his officers, leaders were to sit together watching information stream in from around the nation, and to act on what they saw. Srnicek and Williams see today's digital technologies as tools with similar potential. In order to free our individual desires, they claim, we need to automate all the work we can, manage that automation together using systems like Cybersyn, and so build a flexible postcapitalist economy in which we work when we want to, love when we want to, and all in all, "create new modes of being."

If this sounds more than a little like a marketing campaign for Uber, it should. This is the same logic that drives the rhetoric of the sharing economy. And that should make us nervous. New digital platforms really are making work patterns more flexible and automation really is replacing (some) drudgery. Yet, marketers' claims notwithstanding, they have hardly brought us a new era of social sharing. Instead, they've marketized ever smaller segments of time and transformed formerly private resources (such as your car) into potential sources of profit. You of course bear the responsibility for capitalizing those resources (buying and maintaining the car) and getting the training to use them (learning to drive). For all their vaunted computer power, companies like Uber, Airbnb, and TaskRabbit are essentially traditional service brokers. And the vision of sharing that underlies them belongs more to the legacy of Friedrich Hayek than of Karl Marx.

Srnicek and Williams are blinded by their faith in all things digital. To consider automation only in terms of its ability to replace onerous labor is wondrously naive. Who will build the machines? Manage them? Say we succeed in building a new Cybersyn. Who will sit in the armchairs of command? As the current rage for Donald Trump reminds us, leaders need hardly be rational, disinterested public servants. And what will become of those who never reach the centers of command? Or should I say, what will become of us? How will we speak back to power? Will we become the political equivalent of Uber drivers, communicating with central powers only through the data our work throws off?

Some of Srnicek and Williams's future is indeed enticing, particularly the notion of a universal basic income. And their willingness to crack open the door of left theory to embrace the sometimes liberating power of capitalism does offer an alternative to the Folk Politics they rightly critique. Yet, as two other important volumes point out, that door has been opened before, and not always with liberating results.

Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian's #Accelerate reprints two dozen essays and book sections written between the mid-19th century and today. In a wide-ranging introduction, the editors make the case that contemporary accelerationists belong to a long-neglected left intellectual tradition. "Accelerationism is a political heresy," they write. "The insistence that the only radical political response to capitalism is ... to accelerate its uprooting, alienating, decoding, abstractive tendencies" would seem, they suggest, to violate the founding principles of left politics. But that would be wrong, according to Mackay and Avanessian, who cite and reprint Marx's "Fragment on Machines" from the Grundrisse in reply. There Marx describes a process by which capital, embodied in the machines of production, draws the living labor of workers into itself. In Marx's account, automated machines work on behalf of capital to turn men into mere prostheses. Mackay and Avanessian take this to be a good thing. For Mackay and Avanessian, the best way to supersede capitalism is to become one with its machines.

The same devices that are slowly choking off our ability to act in the world without their help have also offered us extraordinary pleasures.

The "Fragment on Machines" notwithstanding, Marx might well have taken issue with their view. In Das Kapital he argues that the centralization of capital and of production will come into conflict with the social relations that support them and capitalism will crumble from there. In the Marx of Das Kapital, conflicts between men, machines, and money pave the road for revolution; in Mackay and Avanessian's introduction, the fusion of men and machines into something new is the revolution. In many ways Mackay and Avanessian's vision of accelerationism's postcapitalist effects derives from the readings of two bodies of philosophy. The first emerged in France in the early 1970s, when theorists like Deleuze and Guattari and Lyotard aimed to synthesize Marx and Freud. These critics sought to escape Marxist dialectics and to suggest that, in Mackay and Avanessian's words, "emancipation from capitalism be sought ... by way of the polymorphous perversion set free by the capitalist machine itself." The machine, these critics wrote, would free us to create what Mackay and Avanessian call "a new fluid social body."

As Mackay and Avanessian note, such work helped set the stage for Donna Haraway's celebration of the feminist cyborg in the United States and for the autonomist Marxism of Antonio Negri and Tiziana Terranova in Italy. But it also helped give rise to the reveries of Nick Land and the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) at the University of Warwick in England, which Land founded with cyber-theorist Sadie Plant. In the mid-1990s, Land and Plant played an ecstatic prose accompaniment to the rise of the public Internet. A random sample, from the CCRU collective's essay "Swarmachines," which Mackay and Avanessian reprint: "Jungle rewinds and reloads conventional time into silicon blips of speed and slowness that combust the slag-heaps of historical carbon-dating."

This was the kind of thing that seemed to make sense about the time Wired
magazine first appeared on corporate coffee tables. It was also quite right-wing. "The past is passed," wrote the CCRU collective. "The eternally deferred eschatologies of the left are consigned to the white trash-can of the future and leave a present tense with synthetic possibilities." Clumsy wordplay aside, the writers of the CCRU saw in the emerging digital matrix much what John Perry Barlow did: a new frontier on which they could leave their fleshy bodies and even politics itself behind. They dismissed not only Folk Politics, but all left politics. They embraced the logic of creative destruction-not only as an economic project, but as an aesthetic, and in raves at least, as a lifestyle too.

To British cultural theorist Benjamin Noys, the members of the CCRU had fallen under the spell of "Deleuzian Thatcherism." Noys is widely credited with having coined the term "accelerationism" in his 2010 volume of critical philosophy, The Persistence of the Negative. His recent Malign Velocities presents a sustained and stinging rereading of the history mapped out by Mackay and Avanessian. Like them, Noys points to 19th- and early 20th-century Marxism and Futurism and to early 1970s French philosophy as key sources of accelerationist ideals. Yet he reads both very differently. He reminds us that Lenin himself embraced the management theories of Frederick Taylor and dreamed of a world in which productivity gains would free workers to relax. Noys notes that such policies resulted not in universal leisure, but in the Kafka-esque machinations of Soviet bureaucracy. Returning to the reveries of the Italian Futurists, their love of speed and the automobile, Noys reminds his readers of their deep misogyny and their affection for Fascism.

As Noys points out, these first accelerationists did much more than fail to spark a populist revolution; they actually helped legitimate the technologies of domination in place today. Noys saves his harshest criticism for the French theorists of the 1970s, and for the CCRU. In the social unrest of 1968, he argues, the French left saw their hopes for an anticapitalist revolution raised and dashed. In response, thinkers such as Baudrillard, Lyotard, and Deleuze and Guattari turned their frustration into celebration. They not only accepted their inability to escape capitalism; they reveled in it. They dreamed of individuals who could melt into the libidinal slipstream of media spectacles and consumer delights. Like the Marx of the "Fragment on Machines," they dreamed of human beings who could become one with their tools.

In the 1990s, Nick Land and Sadie Plant promoted the same dreams, writes Noys, this time to a techno beat. Noys is not content to attack accelerationism as a philosophy. He also takes its aesthetics to task. Land and Plant wrote at the same moment that Kraftwerk and Detroit techno could be heard from London to Berlin. Such artists seduced listeners into a fantasy of becoming one with machine systems, of giving over their agency and taking pleasure in complete submission, argues Noys. Like the essays of the CCRU, the music appeared to herald an "exit from feeling and consciousness," and this, writes Noys, is the true promise underpinning accelerationism. For all its talk of a technology-enabled socialist utopia, accelerationism actually offers little more than a steep dive down a nihilist rabbit hole.

Here Noys picks up on an essential paradox of accelerationism, and in fact of many ostensibly left-leaning, technology-embracing social movements. The same devices that are slowly choking off our ability to act in the world without their help have also offered us extraordinary pleasures. With our iPhones in our pockets, we can find out almost anything, instantly. We can summon the sounds of Muddy Waters and Django Reinhardt alongside Devo and Talking Heads. We see pictures of places whose names we've only just heard. And we can send them to people we've only just met. Much as the Italian Futurists did when they first drove off in cars, we have every reason to marvel at the new speed in the world.

Yet as the Futurists themselves have taught us, the dream of machines that will speed us away from everyday life can just as easily open the road to fascism as to democracy. In their rush to celebrate the benefits of automation, Srnicek and Williams have forgotten this history. Lenin may have turned to Taylorism to ease the lives of peasants, and the founders of the CCRU may have embraced Schumpeterian creative destruction in order to experience a technocentric form of ecstasy. Yet neither approach substantially improved the prospects for a more egalitarian social world. On the contrary, one set the stage for Stalin and the other helped legitimate Margaret Thatcher.

To their credit, Srnicek and Williams do not ask us to dissolve into digital ones and zeros, as John Perry Barlow once did. Their call for a universal basic income makes a kind of grounded sense that has eluded earlier accelerationists. So too does their critique of Folk Politics. Yet, the problem of politics writ large remains. How can we build a more just, more egalitarian society when our devices already surround us with so many of the personalized delights we might want such a society to offer? Meetings are boring. Talking to people unlike ourselves is hard. How can we turn away from the mediasphere long enough to rediscover the pleasures of that difficult work? And how can we sustain it when we do?

To these kinds of questions, the accelerationists have no answers.

Featured image: Umberto Boccioni, Elasticity (1912). Oil on canvas, 100 x 100 cm. Museo del Novecento

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What is to be done? In 1901, when Lenin posed this now-canonical question, the answer was a communist revolution. Today, 25 years since the Internet went public, the answer has come to seem to many on the left to be a technological one.

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Monoskop: Links to info #Accelerationism

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Monoskop: Links to info #Accelerationism

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Despite its image of rapid technological change, progress under capitalism has stalled. Spinning ever faster is not the same as going somewhere. Contemporary Accelerationism wants to take off the brakes, and it is enlisting art's help to do so.

Taking its name (like every good movement) from one of its critics - Benjamin Noys claims credit for naming the historical tendency in 2008 - contemporary Accelerationism has both a philosophical and a political form with the latter only weakly related to the former. What Epistemic (philosophical) and Left (political) Accelerationism have in common is an attitude of "prometheanism", of amplifying our capabilities, of rationally overcoming intellectual and material limits. Of hacking the systems of philosophical and political thought to find the exploits that will allow us to increase our knowledge of them, our control of them, our reach through them. Hopefully this will work out better than it did for the original Prometheus of Greek myth (or for Ridley Scott).

Contemporary Accelerationism may seem heretical compared to the "folk politics" and philosophy that it contrasts itself with but it is not (however some people may start essays) the capital-intensifying Accelerationism of 1970s continental philosophy or its killer-robot-welcoming successor in 1990s cyberculture. From the point of view of the former it is too immediately critical of capitalism and from the point of view of the latter it is an off-ramp on the road to the singularity. It is also not the pure speed of Paul Virilio's dromology, or the experience of lack of time of the overworked neoliberal subject.

Cybersyn Control Room (1973)

Accelerationism is a progressive attitude towards the liberation of reason and production - and therefore selectively technology - rather than the fetishisation of them. The "real" accelerationists in these senses aren't working at Google, although they might in time exploit technology developed there. Chile's early 1970s Cybersyn project provides an informative precedent. It sought to accelerate transition to a socialist economy using limited and almost obsolete mainframe and teleprinter technology. Its Accelerationism lay in the attempt to rationally analyse and spur growth in industry to increase the rate at which it developed, not in technofetishism.

Epistemic Acceleration

Philosophical Accelerationism is "Epistemic Accelerationism", represented in the writing of Ray Brassier, Reza Negarestani, Peter Wolfendale and others. This is a neo-rationalist philosophy, a programme of " maximizing rational capacity " and the ability to reason about or navigate our knowledge of the world. This is a self-revising, non-monotonic, socially situated reason very different from the logicism of 20th century rationalism and its detractors (although logics have advanced considerably as well).

"After Us" magazine cover

Two new journals are taking an Epistemic Accelerationist approach to art and culture. In the UK, " After Us" shares a designer with former CCRU member Kode9's Hyperdub record label. In France, " Glass Bead" takes its name from Herman Hesse's imaginary game of knowledge described in his novel of the same name. Both are haunted by the legacy of C. P. Snow's 1950s " Two Cultures" of science and the humanities, with "After Us" explicitly invoking the need to reconcile them. This isn't the first time such a move has been called for, and previous attempts make clear that scientists tend to make as bad artists as artists make scientists. The contemporary artworld is also not under-populated by transversal and interdisciplinary research and its aesthetics. Regardless, both provide thought-provoking cultural insights and resources. And the first issue of Glass Bead features, among other articles and interviews, Colombean mathematician Fernando Zalamea, whose accessible promotion of contemporary mathematics and production of a synthetic philosophy based on it deserves much wider attention.

"On the Necessity of Art"s Exit from Contemporary Art " cover (2016)

Escaping the radial velocity of asset-class zombie formalism is the focus of Suhail Malik's " On the Necessity of Art's Exit from Contemporary Art" ( I'll be reviewing the book for Furtherfield). Malik describes Contemporary Art's self-image of escape (from society and art's own limitations into a space of freedom) that disguises an inescapable and complicit recuperation of novelty. To move beyond this he proposes a strategy of exit (which contrasts interestingly with designer Benedict Singleton's discussion of traps). This is not a seasteading-style fantasy of libertarian secession, rather it is an attempt to identify the next move in the game of art after a long impasse and to return art to a more grounded and constructive role in society.

"Final Machine" installation view, Amanda Beech (2013)

A group centred around The New Centre For Research (whose events and video archives I cannot recommend highly enough) are seeking to apply neo-rationalism to art in order to effect just such an escape from the outsideless beige singularity of Contemporary Art. This would be an art intentionally constructed to make the rules of contemporary art and of its own construction explicit, allowing artists to reason about this and to thereby come to understand how to escape the seemingly irresistible aesthetic and political cage of contemporary art. Amanda Beech's "Final Machine" (2013) prefigures this kind of analysis of the structure of images and their situatedness in the networks of power that produce contemporary art. Diann Bauer's collaboration on the art and finance R&D project "Real Flow" is another good example. Bauer has also produced videos for Laboria Cuboniks (see below) and for accelerationism-related events. Beech, Bauer and others have held a series of discussion panels on the subject of "Art and Reason" ( one) ( two).

"Artificial Cinema" installation view (2016).

Curator and critic Mohammad Salemy has curated a series of art shows with Epistemic Accelerationist themes - " Encyclonospace Iranica" in Vancouver, " For Machine Use Only" in Vienna, and most recently " Artificial Cinema " in Prague. Each of these has created an artistic critical context for networked systems of perception and knowledge, engaging with the political possibility of their being repurposed to more emancipatory ends in the future.

"Index: Incident In The Museum", Art & Language (1986)

A self-aware, critical, politically committed art aware of its institutional context that is nonetheless still recognisable as art may sound like a stretch but there are precedents in the work of veteran conceptual art collective Art & Language, most obviously in their early "Index" installations and in their later "Incident In The Museum" paintings. There is another way in which Art & Language provide a precedent for the New Centre group - a decade ago they theorised genre as a means of interrupting the frictionless misrepresentations of Contemporary Art, similarly to Malik's (and, as we shall see, Beech's) emphasis on recategorisation.

Left Acceleration

Contemporary political Accelerationism is "Left Accelerationism", exemplified by the writing of Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams. Initiated by the " Manifesto For An Accelerationist Politics" and fleshed out in the book " Inventing The Future ", Left Accelerationism claims that some of the technologies created by capitalism can be repurposed and even intensified to enable an achievable socialist future and unleash the creative forces in society that they currently repress. As Srnicek and Williams make clear in "Inventing The Future", this is not in opposition to other struggles but rather a means of materially supporting them.

As a group that often struggles with basic material support, the Left Accelerationist project can hold some appeal for artists. Universal Basic Income (pursued as Srnicek and Williams propose - within rather than as a reason to dismantle the rest of the Welfare State) for example would benefit artists (and musicians, actors and other creatives) in much the same way as earlier welfare state provisions. Artists can support this, rather than having to make the specific moral case for artworld subsidies, as an effective means of solidarity.

"The Promise Of Total Automation" installation view (2016)

Full automation, another of Srnicek and Williams' proposals, is the theme of the show at Kunsthalle Wien. The diverse work included drives home that art and curation needn't be propagandistic, uncritical or overly serious to promote or engage with Accelerationist themes.

In their essay in the book " Speculative Aesthetics " (2014), Nick Srnicek proposes an Accelerationist aesthetics of transforming a "data sublime" into forms comprehendible by human beings, an aesthetic of user interface-style efficiency and transparency rather than beauty. The example Snicek gives is of transforming a complex economic model into a tool for the manipulation of economies. In the same volume, Amanda Beech (again) argues that rather than "asking what images mean, or if it is possible to mean what we say" we should produce an art that leaves behind the category of the uncategorisable in order to unravel the political project that contemporary art is subject to.

Likewise Alex Williams' consideration of Accelerationist aesthetics in the article " Escape Velocities " (2013) emphasises aesthetics as a means of presentation of conceptual spaces, rendering them tractable to the human imagination, as well as explicitly discussing interface aesthetics with reference to Cybersyn. They also mention the concept of Hyperstition, which we will return to below.

Xenofeminism GIF, Diann Bauer (2015)

Laboria Cuboniks are a pseudonymous collective who have produced the "Xenofeminism" accelerated feminist manifesto. It's a strikingly designed production (the website was designed by artist Patricia Reed) that is already inspiring artistic production. The "3rdspace" show describes itself as "a response to XF and an exploration into the potentials of technology to escape modern structures of control", building on Promethean themes.

Additivist Manifesto (2015)

Morehshin Allahyari & Daniel Rourke have produced the Additivist Manifesto for art in the Anthropocene (the video for it features the " Urinal" 3D printable model I commissioned from Chris Webber). They "...call for you to accelerate the 3D printer and other technologies to their absolute limits and beyond into the realm of the speculative, the provocative and the weird". This is the kind of acceleration through (and into) art that works as both epistemic and left accelerationism without merely illustrating the program of or being instrumentalised by either. It is accelerated critical theory.

Holly Herndon's album "Platform" (2015)

And beyond the visual arts, musician Holly Herndon's most recent album was described by collaborator Mat Dryhurst as being designed to support Left Accelerationism.

Hyperstition

While contemporary accelerationism is at pains to signal how far removed it is from CCRU-era Nick Land (let alone their contemporary work), the CCRU's instrumentalised mythological theory-fiction has resources that are of interest. The slippery concept of "hyperstition", essentially self-creating science fictional or mythical entities, is key. Cyberspace is hyperstitional, as was the writing of H. P. Lovecraft, as was Neoliberalism, and the music of Hyperdub. They are all unreal entities that bootstrapped themselves into reality via the human imagination. Hyperstition is an example of rational irrationality, or at least rationalised irrationality.

"Hyperstition" movie still (2015)

Seeking to harness hyperstition for a moral or political programme has something of the air of trying to summon Cthulhu for social justice, or to turn Skynet into a phone tree, but Williams' "Escape Velocity" mention of Hyperstition as a means of creating visions of a better future as something that will have been possible is compelling. Hyperstition should be more (mis-)used in art than it currently is, and its creation all but demands activity outside the existing artworld.

"Hybridized" video sleeve, Orphan Drift (1999)

International art collective (and CCRU collaborators) Orphan Drift 's autopoietic mythologies realised in glitch art videos, installations and writing provide a historical point of reference here.

"Cyclonopedia" cover (2008).

The earlier work of Reza Negarestani serves as a bridge between the CCRU era and the present. His novel of theory-fiction " Cyclonopedia ", 2008, evokes hyperstitional entities from the layers of trauma present in the politics and geology of oil and the Middle East.

Conclusion

In art, reason and rationality may inspire memories of dry conceptualism or stern Soviet abstraction but contemporary art's hidden and totalising rules are no less binding and are in desperate need of exposure and critique. The task of uncovering and overcoming them presents a challenge to perception and representation that meeting will amount to much more than "art about art". Perhaps we can use Deep Learning and neural nets to pull the ghosts of genre and medium specificity out of contemporary art then intensify them rather than make puppyslug kitsch... but that's another story.

Left Accelerationism's design tasks and the hyperstitional making of its future seems to have always been possible to provide more challenging alternative projects to the manufacturing of yet more zombie formalism, and as "The Promise Of Total Automation" demonstrates this needn't take the form of uncritical propaganda.

In contrast to these approaches, I feel it's worth asking what a direct equivalent to Left Accelerationism for Contemporary Art would look like. Which aspects of the contemporary artworld would be worth intensifying, appropriating and pushing further to create an alternative? And what would the vanishing point for such an art be in order to avoid recuperation into the generic space of Contemporary Art?

Accelerationist art is working out how to climb over the event horizon of contemporary art, helping to make a better future seem possible, analysing and transforming technocapital, and ironically intensifying the trajectories of new technology to critical excess. As the logic of neoliberalism colonizes personal space, time and identity, suggesting that we need to move faster in any way may seem perverse or complicit. Accelerationist art is part of a project to grab the wheel rather than slam on the brakes and to thereby move beyond the exhausted constraints and artistic apologetics of the logic that is eating the world.

(Updated 2016-05-18 to include more examples.)

Accelerationist Art by Rhea Myers is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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Despite its image of rapid technological change, progress under capitalism has stalled. Spinning ever faster is not the same as going somewhere. Contemporary Accelerationism wants to take off the brakes, and it is enlisting art's help to do so.

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Assistant Professor of Philosophy

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Dr. Francesca Ferrando is a professional philosopher and an international lecturer,
actively involved in the posthuman scene as a thinker and organizer.
Dr. Ferrando teachesPhilosophy at New York University (US),
NYU-Program of Liberal Studies,
as an Adjunct Assistant Professor.

She has earned a Ph.D. in Philosophy at the University of Roma Tre (Italy),
to which the European Doctoral Fellowship was applied.
She holds an M.A. in Gender Studies, Director of the Program:
Prof. Rosi Braidotti, Utrecht University (Holland).

Dr. Ferrando is an Award-Winning Philosopher.
She is the recipient of the Philosophical Prize "Premio Sainati",
with the Acknowledgment of the President of the Italian Republic, 2014.

Dr. Ferrando has repeatedly been a Visiting Scholar at Columbia University (US). She was also an Independent Researcher at the University of Reading (England),

working on Cyborg Theory with Prof. Kevin Warwick.

Dr. Ferrando has been named one of the 100 Top Creatives
making change in the world by 'ORIGIN' magazine.
"Francesca Ferrando is at the Forefront of Thinking Philosophically"

​"Ferrando is both a Classicist and a Futurist:
Erudite and Upbeat, Committed but Critical, Conceptual and Poetic, at Once"
Rosi Braidotti

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Dr. Francesca Ferrando is a professional philosopher and an international lecturer, actively involved in the posthuman scene as a thinker and organizer. Dr. Ferrando teachesPhilosophy at New York University (US), NYU-Program of Liberal Studies , as an Adjunct Assistant Professor. She has earned a Ph.D.

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A feminist genealogy of posthuman aesthetics in the visual arts 

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#Francesca Ferrando: A #feminist genealogy of #posthuman aesthetics in the visual arts 

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#Francesca Ferrando: A #feminist genealogy of #posthuman aesthetics in the visual arts 

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Introduction

This article aims to emphasize the extraordinary number of (self-identified) women who have contributed, with their radical imagination, to the shaping of posthuman aesthetics, featuring techno-mythologies, cyborg embodiments and rhizomatic bodily performativity, even before the birth of the cyborg as a theoretical framework was conceived and the term "posthuman" popularized. In this endeavour to reassemble a feminist genealogy of the posthuman in the arts, this article will specifically focus on the visual works conceived by female artists after the rise of what has been retrospectively defined as first-wave Feminism, which took place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Starting with the main avant-garde movements of the first half of the twentieth century-specifically, Futurism, Dadaism and Surrealism-this genealogy will analyse the second-wave Feminism of the sixties and seventies, with its integral exploration of the body highlighted by performance art. Subsequently, this article will take into account the third-wave Feminism of the nineties and its radical re-elaboration of the self: from Cyberfeminism and its revisitation of technology, to the artistic insights offered, on the one hand, by critical techno-orientalist readings of the futures, and, on the other, by the political and social articulations of Afrofuturism and Chicanafuturism. Finally, it will access the ways contemporary female artists are dealing with gender, social media and the notion of embodiment, touching upon elements that will become of key importance in fourth-wave Feminism. Starting with an overview of bioart by presenting ORLAN's1 body reshaped by pro-technological ethics and aesthetics, this article will explore Lee Bul's cyborgs, Mariko Mori's androids and Cao Fei's avatars, to conclude with a presentation of Natasha Vita-More, the transhuman philosopher and multimedia artist who is engaged with the idea of redesigning the human body itself as a work of art. The ways in which female artists have been addressing the notion of human embodiments and gender identities throughout spaces and times will offer valuable insights into the possibilities inscribed in the shaping of our posthuman futures.

Methodological premises

In the posthuman2 era, the decision to strictly focus on works produced by (self-identified) female artists could be criticized as essentialist, for it suggests the possibility of pursuing an analysis based on a set of bio-cultural characteristics. I shall thus clarify that such a move is currently needed for strategic reasons, to re-establish an inclusive genealogy of the posthuman itself. Posthumanism is becoming a highly fashionable trend. By going mainstream, the hierarchical schemata that (Critical, Cultural and Philosophical) Posthumanism ( Wolfe, 2010; Braidotti, 2013) wishes to deconstruct are reappearing, affected by what may be defined as hegemonic essentialism-that is, the historiographical tendency and methodological habit of quoting "thinkers, artists or theorists who belong to the cultural hegemony" ( Ferrando, 2012: 13) who often are, in the current episteme, white and male. In line with a posthumanist methodology, this genealogy wishes to maintain a comprehensive and inclusive way of recognizing the large variety of artists who have contributed to the development of Posthuman Studies. Given such premises, I will adopt a strategic essentialist standpoint ( Spivak, 1987) to emphasize the centrality of female artists in the development of posthuman aesthetics. And still, it is important to remark that there is no specific type of woman who can symbolically represent every woman ever born, but there are women (in the plural form) with different social and individual characteristics. The postmodern feminist shift offered controversial interpretations of the concept of "woman" itself, presenting it as a cultural construct ( Butler, 1990) to the extent of what has been criticized as a "Feminism without women".3 In the following, I should mention that I will only address artists who were born after the first wave of Feminism, although not all of them defined themselves as feminist. From a queer perspective, it shall be noted that a considerable number of them shared an open view on sexuality, which did not fit into heterosexual normativity.

Another important aspect to highlight is that this genealogy will focus only on the visual arts, not including artists who have expressed posthuman intentions in other forms, such as science fiction (that is, Octavia Butler, Marge Piercy and Kathy Acker), electronic music (such as Pauline Oliveros, Laurie Anderson and Pamela Z) or dance (Pina Bausch, Anna Halprin and Tai Lihua, among others). There are different reasons why I have chosen this type of analysis. Visual culture has played an increasing role in the development of Western civilization, becoming central in the elaboration of Modernity, as Foucault (1975) pointed out in his articulation of Panopticism; it has replaced logocentrism, turning into a distinctive feature of Postmodernism, to the extent that Baudrillard (1994) saw the simulacrum not as a copy of the real, but as a reality of its own, the hyperreal. Cybernetics has only augmented the power of representation. Programmers have developed codes that mostly relate to one sense, the sight, leaving other senses such as taste, smell and, to a lesser extent, touch, in a marginal position. In the words of Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston: "The posthuman body is a technology, a screen, a projected image" ( Halberstam and Livingston, 1995: 3). Our posthuman present is visual, interactive and linkable; the power of representation in knowledge production is becoming less and less innocent, if it has ever been.4

A radical genealogy

Focusing now on the artists, it is worth explaining why I will not be able to offer each of them the space they deserve. More than glorifying the individual genius, my point is to emphasize the great variety of women who have visualized the posthuman shift through their art works, generating original perspectives on areas of representation commonly associated with white male imagination (women's skills were traditionally confined to fields that, for being women's activities, were not considered "art" but "craft", such as textiles and pottery).5 As Leonard (2003: 19) has pointed out: "science and technology are themselves generally viewed as masculine pursuits". But science and technology are first imagined, before they are performed. In Albert Einstein's words: "Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world" ( Viereck, 1929: 117). With this genealogy, I would like to share the contribution brought by female artists' radical imagination to the settings of the forthcoming times. Following, I will first focus on paintings and collages representative of some of the main avant-garde movements of the first half of the XX century; I will then move on to consider the visual power of documented performances within the rise of second-wave Feminism. Lastly, following third-wave Feminism, I will present different types of visual arts in the contemporary art scene, stressing their hybrid and multimedia approaches that will give rise to fourth-wave Feminism.

Futurist, dada and surrealist grandmothers

Futurism

To reassemble a map of posthuman grandmotherhood, I will focus on the three main avant-garde movements that arose in Europe at the beginning of the XX century: Futurism, Dadaism and Surrealism. Let us begin with Futurism-the term was coined by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in "The Futurist Manifesto" ( 1909/2006), and shall not be confused by the contemporary use of the word to refer to scientists and social theorists engaged in the attempt of predicting the future of humankind and life in general. There are many reasons why Futurism should be listed in this genealogy, including the fact that it has been regarded as one of its sources by Transhumanism, especially in Europe and, particularly, in Italy.6 First of all, I would like to emphasize its drive towards the future, which was not perceived as something to come in a chronological way, but it was welcomed in a "here and now" mode, and it relied in accepting the new possibilities offered by the present. Futurism was about dynamism; its artistic research was not aimed to express objects in movement, but movement itself, creating an aesthetic of simultaneity. To generate a space for dynamic imagination, Futurism wished to pose a symbolic break from the past. This is one of the crucial differences with Posthumanism, which, to fully embrace the future, does not disregard the past. On the contrary, Posthumanism draws on many different sources, histories and herstories,7 in an academic attempt of inclusiveness that opens to other species and hypothetical life forms: from non-human animals to artificial intelligence, from aliens to the possibilities related to the physic notion of a multiverse. As I have stated in a previous article: "Posthumanism offers a theoretical invitation to think inclusively, in a genealogical relocation of humanity within universality ('Posthumanism' as a criticism of humanism, anthropocentrism and universe-centrism), and alterity within the self ('Posthuman-ism' as a recognition of those aspects which are constitutively human, and still, beyond human comprehension)" ( Ferrando, 2014b: 220).

Another important difference between Futurism and Posthumanism regards life. In its attempt to decentre the human from the centre of the discourse, Posthumanism opens to environmentalism and animal rights; if it embraces technology as essentially human ( Gehlen, 1957; Stiegler, 1998), it still warns about its destructive side, already experienced through many catastrophes, such as the drop of the atomic bomb or the ecological impact of industrialization. By contrast, the futurist exaltation of contemporary challenges included the fascination with war, defined by Marinetti as "the only world's hygiene" (Marinetti, 2006: 14), and with machines, as we can read in his "Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature" ( 1912/2006): "we are preparing for the creation of mechanical man, one who will have parts that can be changed" ( Ibid.: 113-114). Even though the term "cyborg" was articulated much later by Clynes and Kline (1960), we can trace in Futurism the fatherhood of such conceptualization. Marinetti also foresaw its militaristic developments; in "Extended Man and the Kingdom of the Machine",8 he wrote: "This non-human, mechanical species, built for constant speed, will quite naturally be cruel, omniscient and war-like" ( Ibid.: 87).

The fascination with speed, machinery and war was shared within the movement by man and women alike, as remarked in the "Manifesto of Futurist Woman" ( 1912/2001).9 Despite of the chauvinist and contradictory value of the futurist discourse,10 a high number of female artists joined the movement, as an act of challenge and criticism towards the female stereotypes of self-denial and sacrifice theorized hitherto for women. There are many futurist painters we can recall, such as Rougena Zátková (1885-1923), Benedetta Cappa Marinetti (1897-1977), Marisa Mori (1900-1985), Olga Rozanova (1886-1918) and Alexandra Exter (1882-1949), but I will focus in particular on two specific artists for different reasons: the Russian painter Natalia Goncharova (1881-1962), and the Italian painter Olga Biglieri Scurto (1916-2002). Natalia Goncharova11 was not only one of the main contributors to Russian Futurism, but also one of the founders of Rayonism, a style of abstract art that she developed in 1911 with her companion, painter Mikhail Larionov (1881-1964), after hearing a series of lectures about Futurism by Marinetti. Rayonism focussed on representing the rays of light reflected from objects, rather than objects themselves, in a pre-intuition of the central role of light in virtual reality and the consequent electrical infrastructure of cyberspace. Our other posthuman futurist grandmother is Olga Biglieri Scurto, Barbara,12 who I will present not only for her futuristic paintings and attitude (she became a patented pilot at only 18 years of age, before she even encountered Futurism), but also for the fascinating twist in her own poetics. Her life crosses the XX century, starting with her adhesion to Futurism, passing through World War II and the death of her husband; she then encountered Feminism and the philosophy of Luce Irigaray, which she elaborated in her "noetic paintings"; she finally became a strong supporter of the peace movement and donated her piece "L'Albero della Pace" (1986) to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum.

Dada

If Futurism sustained the war and the Fascist drive to colonization, Dada arose at the outbreak of War World I as a cultural movement of protest against such expansionist policies. Henry Ball, author of the first Dada Manifesto (1916), stated: "For us, art is not an end in itself (...) but it is an opportunity for the true perception and criticism of the times we live in" ( Ball, 1974: 58).13 Before presenting our dada grandmothers, I would like to mention the prosthetic work of US artist Anna Coleman Ladd (1878-1939), who produced masks of thin copper for soldiers who were disfigured in World War I; such masks were sculpted and painted to resemble the portraits of the soldiers before their disfigurement. The connection between war mutilations and dada aesthetics has been widely remarked. As Stanton B Garner has stated: "To place (...) the body-object hybrids of Dada collage and photomontage next to war-time prosthetic devices, (...) is to glimpse the wider cultural field where the modern body was fragmented, altered, and re-imagined" ( Garner, 2007: 507). Antibourgeois and anarchistic in nature, Dadaism strongly repudiated the war, as we can read in Ball's words: "The war is based on a crass error. Men have been mistaken for machines. Machines, not men, should be decimated" ( Ball, 1974: 22). More than ludditism, what characterized Dadaism was a cynical approach towards ideas of progress and control. Dada artists did not reject the machine, they actually embedded the mechanic in their aesthetics. Some of them, such as Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) and Francis Picabia (1879-1953), went so far as to develop a dada machine art, but the specificity of such machines can be found in their futility and nonsense, in a interpretation of the new that radically differed from Futurism: the advances of technology were recognized by Dadaism as part of a larger reality, chaotic and existentially unstable, anticipating the uncanny feelings often associated with cyborgism.14

Even if there are many dada artists whose artworks have contributed to create a posthuman canon, such as Sophie Tauber-Arp (1889-1943), Sonia Delaunay (1885-1979) and Beatrice Wood (1893-1998), in this visual genealogy I will focus on German artist Hannah Höch (1889-1978), following Matthew Biro's suggestion, who places the motherhood of the cyborg in the Dada movement,15,16 and, specifically, in her collages. Extending the origins of the cyborg to Dadaism offers not only the possibility of an alternative genealogy to the functional definition articulated by Clynes and Kline of cyborgs as "self-regulating man-machine systems" ( Clynes and Kline, 1960: 31) conceived "to meet the requirements of extraterrestrial environments" ( Ibid.: 29), but also to the militaristic one foreseen by Marinetti. Such re-rooting, as Biro has stated, "expands the concept beyond its traditional definition (...) including the cyborg as representing hybrid identity in a broad sense" ( Biro, 2009: 1). The art form adopted by Dadaism to visualize such synthesis was collage; Höch developed this technique far more than any other Berlin dada artists. The cyborgian nature of many of her photomontage's figures blends genders as well as colours, ethnicities and ages, eventually suggesting that these traits are not immutable. Höch was deeply aware of the changes women were facing on a social and individual level in the postwar period,17 and one of her central concerns was to visually represent such a shift: female cyborgs ultimately became much more prevalent in her art.

The dada roots of the posthuman are traceable not only in its aesthetics, but also, specifically, in the use of techniques such as the collage, as presented, and the assemblage, that is, the artistic process of putting together found objects in two or three-dimensional compositions, which found in dada artist Elsa Von Freytag-Loringhoven (1874-1927) and in sculptor Louise Nevelson (1899-1988) some of its pioneers. On one side, due to biotechnology, genetic engineering and nanotechnology, life itself has become more and more of a "biotechnological assemblage" ( Waldby, 2000); on the other, the environmental concerns of posthuman ethics, which invest in recycling policies and sustainability, spontaneously delve into such tradition. Posthumanism also shares with Dadaism the acceptance of the nonsense, which is embedded in its own meta-narratives: in its attempt to decentre the human, Posthumanism is still thought and theorized by humans, in a human-centric system of signs.

Surrealism

Surrealism spread internationally from the 1920s onward, becoming one of the most influential movements of the period. It developed out of Dadaism, and it elaborated the nonsense in evocative juxtapositions and non-sequiturs. On the footsteps of Freud, Surrealism gave full recognition to the unconscious, dream symbolism and free associations. Surrealist aesthetics bent the laws of physics to provoke surprise and mystery, which replaced the dada uncanny; to release the creative potential of the unconscious mind, surrealists adopted techniques such as automatic writing and drawing, defined as "automatism".18 Surrealism, though, did not aim to express a transcendence of the real; its intent was to deepen the understandings of the world perceived by the senses, extending its foundations over what had been historically confined to "the reign of logic" ( Breton, [1924]1972: 9), as Breton defined it in the "First Surrealist Manifesto" (1924). In his words: "I believe in the future resolution of these two states-dream and reality-which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality" ( Ibid.: 14). In its attempts of avoiding dualisms, Posthumanism owes to Surrealism the retrieving of such aspects of life: the dream world can offer a unique space of visualization; the possibilities opened by the future are already embedded in the mystery of the present; the conscious becomes the unconscious, in a fluid view from which the field of posthuman psychology is currently emerging.

Surrealism also brought attention to the environment, which, as previously stated, characterizes critical Posthumanism. As Rosemont notes: "always implicit in surrealist thought, a radical ecological awareness is increasingly explicit in movement publications after 1945" ( Rosemont, 1998: LI). Such awareness merged, for instance, in the paintings of US artists Katherine Linn Sage (1898-1963), whose large, surreal sights recall futuristic landscapes and science fiction movies. Both aesthetically and content-wise, posthuman evocations can be found in the works of Dorothea Tanning (1910-2012) and Leonora Carrington (1917-2011), whose interest for animal imagery, world mythologies and occult symbolism deepened after meeting the Spanish-Mexican surrealist painter Remedios Varo Uranga (1908-1963), who was influenced by a wide range of mystic and hermetic traditions, both Western and non-Western: from Carl Jung's archetypal psychology to Helena Blavatsky's Theosophy, George Gurdjieff's spiritual teachings and the Sufi tradition. In this section, I would also like to mention Lois Mailou Jones (1905-1998). Born in the United States, Jones spent a long time in Paris. Some of her paintings recall surrealist suggestions, such as "The Fetishes" (1938). What deeply inspired Jones' work was the Harlem Renaissance, which was flowering at the time, the African-American experience and African traditions. Her masks trespassed the traditional divide between the human realm and the divine, while "The Ascent of Ethiopia" (1932) re-inscribed the African diaspora within a spiritual time and space, visualized through symbolic imaginary, technological artifacts and the human arts.

Two other artists to consider are Argentinian-born artist Leonor Fini (1907-1996), and Mexican painter Frida Kahlo (1907-1954); interestingly enough, neither of these artists claimed an affiliation to the surrealist movement, even if their works have been labelled as such. I have decided to focus on Fini not only for the excellence of her work, but also for her intriguing personality, and, in particular, for her taste of the masquerade, which actually derived from a curious biographical experience. When Leonor was a child, after her parents had divorced, her father tried on various occasions to kidnap her, so her mother ingeniously started to disguised her as a boy to hide her identity. In her reiterated act of cross-dressing, Leonor fully experienced not only the social mimicry of gender performativity ( Butler, 1990), but also its fascinating theatrical side. The idea of metamorphosis became central in her work, which featured female sphinxes, androgynous figures, cats and powerful women (see Figs. 1 and 2). Carnivalesque aesthetics were embedded in her everyday life, as she later stated: "only the inevitable theatricality of life interests me" ( Webb, 2009: 127). Her use of the mask and costumes was not aimed at misleading individual recognition (there was no mystery about who was wearing them, and Leonor sincerely enjoyed such attention),19 but was meant to represent the different identities inhabiting the persona: "With costumes and masks I feel I become an extension of myself" ( Webb, 2009: 127). Fini's posthuman sensitivity drove her work and her life, as she recalled: "I experience an erotic world where there is no divergence, no hostility, where everything mixes together (...) I like to feel myself in a state of metamorphosis like certain animals and certain plants" ( Ibid.: 105).

Frida Kahlo could be included in such genealogy for many different reasons, but I will focus on a specific aspect of her work, which is rarely debated in enthusiastic transhuman accounts of techno-bodies: pain. Frida contracted polio at age 6; when she was 18 she almost died in a tragic bus accident, her body was seriously damaged and she never fully recovered. Her condition led to more than 30 surgeries, to the impossibility of a healthy pregnancy, with consequent miscarriages and therapeutic abortions; to the amputation of three toes and, some years later, of her right leg to the knee. Her paintings depict a complex symbolism, where self-portraits and autobiographical references cohabit with pre-Columbian gods, Christian imagery and animal-human hybrids. Frida's dark Surrealism is "without hope" (to mention the title of one of her paintings, 1945); it is not rooted in the dream world, but in the embodied experience-personal, social and political. In her own words: "They thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn't. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality" ( Kettenmann, 1993: 48) - a reality that has been physically and emotionally challenging: "my paintings (...) have a message of pain in them" ( Tibol, 1993: 67). Her damaged naked body stands as "a socialized body, a body that is open by instruments, technologized, wounded-as Jean Franco pointed out-its organs displayed to the outside world". In a diary she kept towards the end of her life, next to a drawing of her body, Frida wrote: "I am disintegration" ( Fuentes and Kahlo, 1995: 225). This female body, subject and object of an autobiographical public narrative, never turns into a fetish nor into an impersonal site of "mechanical eroticism" ( Baudrillard, 1991: 119), to borrow Baudrillard's term, which he used in the essay "Crash"20 on JG Ballard's homonymous novel.21 This essay actually provoked a strong response, which I found useful in analysing Kahlo's poetics. Specifically, Vivian Sobchack's criticism suits the purpose very well: "there's nothing like a little pain to bring us (back) to our senses and to reveal Baudrillard's apocalyptic descriptions of the postmodern techno-body as dangerously partial" ( Sobchack, 1991: 328). Frida's technologized bodies do not leave space for naïve celebration of prosthetic futures, in which the flesh is dismissed as an old-fashioned element that can (and will) be easily substituted; her paintings carry all the grief related to such techno-reconfigurations.

Our feminist mothers: from the seventies to the nineties

After presenting the three main artistic avant-garde movements of the first half of the XX century, in this section I will focus on the artistic scene connected to the second wave of Feminism, which began in the sixties and flourished through the seventies. The theoretical contribution of Feminism to Posthumanism is crucial. The fact that Feminism brought into question male symbolism as universal has been fundamental to the posthuman effort of decentring the human and its anthropocentric logos from the centre of the discourse. On the claim that "the personal is political", the body became the first space to be reclaimed from patriarchal ontological constriction; performative art seemed an appropriate tool for such purpose. As performer Cheri Gaulke pointed out: "in performance we found an art form that was young, without the tradition of painting or sculpture. Without the traditions governed by men" ( Goldberg, 1998: 129). Since many of the artists of the time shared the postmodern criticism of strong ideologies and distantiated themselves from strict labels, in this section I will present our posthuman feminist mothers by subject of interest.

Let us start with the problematization of the inner and external boundaries of the human body, which, as previously mentioned for Kahlo's work, cannot be simplified by the superhero iconography common in transhuman accounts,22 but it is also marked by blood and pain. As Pastourmatzi recalls: "Only in fiction are the magical transmutations from flesh to text and text to flesh ubiquitous and painless" ( Pastourmatzi, 2009: 214). Many artists could be listed here, starting with French performer Gina Pane (1935-1990), the mother of Body Art, whose self-mutilations represented, in the words of Michel Thevoz, a "profanation of humanistic values" ( Thevoz, 1984: 119). In the sixties, US artist Hannah Wilke (1940-1993) developed her vaginal imagery, which included tiny vulval sculptures made of chewing gum and then stuck to her naked body, achieving a grotesque confusion of lines between the flesh and the gums. Her last work, "Intra-Venus" (1992-1993), posthumously published, consisted in a photographic record of her body changing as a result of chemotherapy and bone marrow transplant. Another posthuman mother to be mentioned here is Serbian-born Marina Abramović (1946) who, in an interview given in 1990, stated about her previous work: it "had a lot to do with pain and injuriousness in order to push the body to its border, even to the border between life and death" ( Goy, 1990: n. pag.). In "Rhythm 0" (1974), she placed upon a table 72 objects that people were allowed to use on her, including a gun and a single bullet. Still an active artist, Abramović is constantly questioning boundaries on a personal and cultural level. In her own words: "I don't have any feeling of nationality. I travelled so much that I really took the whole planet as a studio. And in a way I even think it's too small" ( Ibid.). One of her ongoing series of sculptures titled "Transitory Objects for Non-Human Use" (1993-present) includes a "Chair For Non-Human Use" (1995), whose legs are so high that no human being could possibly sit on it.

There are some artists whose works are crucial to this genealogy for the challenges they raised to the anthropocentric perception of the human in confronting their own identity. I would like to mention Japanese-born Yoko Ono (b. 1933), Cuban-born Ana Mendieta (1948-1985) and Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929). Ono was part of the Fluxus group, which, inspired by movements such as Dadaism and the Gutai, used an intermedia approach and highlighted the connection between art and everyday objects, focussing more on the artistic process than on the final product itself. In such spirit, Ono identified the common housefly as an alter ego ("Fly", 1970), in a video portraying interspecies connection. Mendieta's environmental art, on the other side, features her body merging with the earth and other natural objects found in loco, including grass growing through her body. The minimal intervention of her performances contrasts with the monumental alterations of some of her male contemporaries, such as Robert Smithson (1938-1973), whose work depended on heavy machinery to be completed. In Mendieta's performances "Siluetas" (1973-1980), the human figure-sometimes reproduced in fire or blood-is not separated from the environment, in a holistic approach that resonates with posthuman environmental awareness and an overcoming of dualistic ontologies. The human becomes an ephemeral concept, in an organic vision of life as a force constantly shaping and evolving. Yayoi Kusama will bridge us to the next section on technology. Kusama has developed through her life performances and environmental installations characterized by obsessive repetitions and accumulation, based on dreams and hallucinations occurring since her childhood. Her "infinity nets" and polka dots seems to pre-announce computer-generated visual patterns: in a subversion of perspectives, the dots are the subjects, while the humans become part of their infinite tendency to multiply, one more layer of repetition (see Figs. 3 and 4). Her series of "Mirror/Infinity rooms", produced since 1963, recalls the universe in expansion. It is worth mentioning that Kusama, who was very active in the New York avant-garde movement of the 60s, staged the first "homosexual wedding" to be performed in the United States: the happening took place in 1968, one year before the Stonewall riots.

Yayoi Kusama (2012).

Note: This image is covered by the CC BY 2.0 licence and is attributed to Vagner Carvalheiro ( https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38789947).

Ascension of Polkadots on the Trees (2006), by Yayoi Kusama.

Note: This image was in the public domain at the time of publication. The copyright holder is User:Sengkang ( https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1297624). This figure is not covered by the CC-BY 4.0 licence.

Let me conclude this section by mentioning the work of other artists who, in different ways, elaborated on the interaction between humanity and technology. First, there is the work of Japanese artist Atsuko Tanaka (1932-2005). Her "Electric Dress", which dates as early as 1956, was simultaneously a sculpture and a performance: it not only became one of the iconic images of the Gutai, but it also represented an important antecedent to the feminist tradition of wearable art. German artist Rebecca Horn (b. 1944) began her body-extension series in 1968. In her performance "Unicorn" (1972), she wore a long horn on her head and, to hold it, white straps on her naked body, which strongly resembled the ones portrayed in Frida Kahlo's painting "Broken Column" (1944). Horn produced sculptures designed to be attached like prostheses to the bodies of performers to lengthen their fingers and arms, resonating with Marshall Mc Luhan's theory of new media technologies as "extensions of man" ( McLuhan, 1964). In her artistic investigation, she foregrounded the relationship between technology, power and gender, creating "extensions of women". In the Eighties, she worked on a series of art machines, such as the "Painting Machine" (1988), about which she stated: "My machines are not washing machines or cars. They have a human quality and they must change" ( Horn et al., 1993: 27), enacting an overcoming of the traditional binary opposition between the human and the mechanical.

Brazilian artist Lygia Clark (1920-1988) did not directly explore the possibilities offered by advanced technologies, and still, as Simone Osthoff has remarked: she "opened conceptual ground for practices similar to those of electronic performance and telecommunications art, with their emphasis on fluid, intangible exchanges" ( Osthoff, 1997: n. pag.). Clark's emphasis on interactivity, marked by the necessary manipulation of objects by the viewer to unfold different shapes and forms (Bichos, c. 1960), largely preceded the development of interactive media. Her multisensory devices, such as the "Sensorial Hoods" ( 1997) and the "Abyss-Masks" (1967), offered new perceptive experiences, which anticipated virtual reality simulations. Before passing to the third and final part of this genealogy, I would like to pay homage to many more artists who have contributed to the posthuman imaginary, among others: Joan Jonas (b. 1936), Adrian Piper (b. 1948) and Linda Montano (1942) for their performative works; Ulrike Ottinger (b. 1942), Dara Birnbaum (b. 1946) and Steina Vasulka (1944) for their video works; Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010), Nancy Grossman (b. 1940) and Senga Nengudi (b. 1943) for their sculptural works; Francesca Woodman (1958-1981) and Cindy Sherman (b. 1954) for their photography.

Our digital sisters: from the nineties till today

The early nineties marked the birth of Cyberfeminism. The unexpected success of Haraway's "Cyborg Manifesto" (1985) strongly contributed to its popularization, in a historical moment when cyberculture was establishing its narratives and art was reshaping into new forms, such as cyberart, web art, new media art, electronic art, software art, digital art, telematic art. The tremendous possibilities opened by virtual reality, which included computer-simulated environments, where to experience different gender identities (whose effects actually proved to be less revolutionary than expected)23 were theoretically inscribed within CyberFeminism, which stressed multiplicity, nomadicity and connectivity. Its practices were participatory and decentred; its goals were mainly concerned with making the digital realm a woman-friendly space, which would not perpetuate patriarchal agendas. Cyberfeminism represents an important antecedent of Posthumanism. Although the term "posthuman" had first appeared a decade earlier within the frame of postmodern literature, and specifically, in the writings of Ihab Hassan,24 it started to be popularized in the writings of the time.25 Its use became familiar within academia after the publication of "How We Became Posthuman" ( 1999) by Katherine Hayles, who already in 1995 was writing: "Standing at the threshold separating the human and the posthuman, the cyborg looks to the past as well as the future" ( Hayles, 1995: 322). The historical and herstorical passage between the human and the posthuman is the cyborg.

In this section, I will present the artists in three areas, which could be referred to as "Bioart", critical "Techno-Orientalism" and "Afrofuturism". Bioart, in the strict sense, is a very young and ethically controversial form of art, which works with live tissues, bacteria and living organisms; in the broad sense, it might include artists who address biotechnology merely from a symbolic or conceptual perspective. The connection between Posthumanism and bioart26 is complex. On one side, the posthuman attempt to decentre the human species, by placing it among any other species and forms of life, seems to be shared by bioartists, as Ionat Zurr, one of its very pioneers, warns: "We have to be careful of human arrogance. We need to be posthumanist. For us, species is not important" ( Solon, 2011: n. pag.). On the other end, removing boundaries can serve as a theoretical strategy for unconditional human dominance, as Vandana Shiva remarks: "Boundaries have been an important construct for ecological restraint. 'Removing boundaries' has been an important metaphor for removing restraints on human actions, and allowing limitless exploitation of natural resources" ( Shiva, 1995: 281). Bioart is too often concerned strictly with the artist's vision, a human in a god-like position for life to be used in the name of art; in so doing, it ontologically separates the concept of creating life from care-giving.27 In this genealogy of posthuman sisterhood, let us introduce the work of Kathy High (b. 1954), who actually reverses such a tendency: in "Embracing animals" (2004-2006), she exhibited three live transgenic lab rats she adopted after purchasing them from a science research facility, where they had been microinjected with human DNA as part of an autoimmune disease research on illnesses similar to High's own medical condition. Her live installation emphasized the exchanges between human animals and other species.

ORLAN28 (b. 1947) is one of the few artists whose importance in the growing field of posthuman art has been unanimously recognized. She has a large body of work, which began in the early sixties, but in this genealogy I will only focus on the art she has produced after the nineties. ORLAN's work symbolically marks the passage between the seventies and the cyberfeminist nineties, fully embracing the possibilities opened by advanced technologies. In her digital photographic series "Self-Hybridizations" (started in 1994), she merged her facial features with non-Western iconographies; her bioart project "The Harlequin's Coat" (2007) featured a biotechnological coat made of coloured diamond shaped petri dishes, containing pieces of skin of different origins. More specifically, I will now focus on her work with plastic surgery: see Fig. 5, for the strong impact it had on the elaboration of posthuman artistic domains. ORLAN was the first artist to use cosmetic surgery as a medium of artistic enquiry, but she deviated its normative purpose of realigning bodies to specific aesthetic canons. As she stated in her "Carnal Art Manifesto" (1989/2010): "Carnal Art is not against aesthetic surgery, but against the standards that pervade it, particularly, in relation to the female body, but also to the male body. Carnal Art must be feminist" ( Ibid.: 29). "The Reincarnation of Saint-Orlan" (1990-1993): see Fig. 6 involved a series of plastic surgeries in the course of which the artist started to morph herself with respect to ideal features of the feminine as depicted by male artists in the history of art; exaggerating some of these features, she turned such bodily reconfiguration into an anti-aesthetic process. ORLAN's operations were staged as mediatic performances and screened live in different locations. The focus was, in her own words: "the spectacle and discourse of the modified body which has become the place of a public debate" ( Ibid.: 28). Her perception of the flesh as a public stage for disruption of social normativities resonates with Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of the grotesque:29 "Contrary to modern canons, the grotesque body is not separated from the rest of the world. It is not a closed, completed unit; it is unfinished, outgrows itself, transgresses its own limits" ( Bakhtin, 1941/1965/1984: 26). ORLAN has not only offered a feminist switch to plastic surgery; constantly challenging fixed notions of identity, her research has extended the nomadic subjectivity ( Braidotti, 1994) to the biological self (see Figs. 5 and 6).

ORLAN (1997).

Note: This image is covered by a CC BY-SA 4.0 licence and is attributed to Fabrice Lévêque ( https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=36619853).

US artist Natasha Vita-More is also redesigning the human body, but if ORLAN's work is rooted in a materialist feminist perspective, Vita-More is a futurist and one of the main theorists of Transhumanism. Her "Primo Posthuman" is the prototype of the "new human genre", a media design and a conceptual work (see Fig. 7). Her redesigned human body features: "a sensorial mix, assured performance, motion in concert with physique, seamless fusion of body and technology, equilibrium of logic and passion" ( Vita-More, 2005: n. pag.). The role of the artist in the visualization of the future is central in Vita-More's poetics, as she resumes: "artistic options will expand in creating new practices for designing of biosynthetic bodies, sensorial extension, cognitive enrichment, gender diversity, identity transfer, and radical life extension" ( Vita-More, 2011: 78-79). In her view, art, science and philosophy go hand in hand, supporting and inspiring each other. I would like to end this part on bioart mentioning one more artist: Australian artist Patrizia Piccinini (b. 1965). Piccinini does not work directly with live material, but she uses her artistic practice as a site to reflect on the possibilities opened by biotechnology, and on its impact upon life. In her anthropomorphic sculpture "The young family" (2003), a hybrid human-pig mother is portrayed with her babies in a very informal pose, provoking a sense of normality and familiarity through a cross-species representation. She is one of Donna Haraway's favourite artists: "When I first saw Patricia Piccinini's work a few years ago-Haraway recalls-I recognized a sister in technoculture. I experienced her as a compelling story teller in the radical experimental lineage of feminist science fiction" ( Haraway, 2007: n. pag.).

Primo Posthuman (2005), by Natasha Vita-More.

Note: Image reproduced with permission of Natasha Vita-More; Copyright (@ Natasha Vita-More, 2016). This figure is not covered by the CC-BY 4.0 licence.

Moving now to the second area mentioned earlier, critical Techno-Orientalism,30,31 I will present the work of Lee Bul (b. 1964, South Korea), Cao Fei (b. 1978, China) and Mariko Mori (born 1967, Japan), but I would also like to mention Shu Lea-Cheang (b. 1954) and Hiromi Ozaki (b. 1985). Let us start with Lee Bul. Her series of "Cyborg" sculptures (1997-1998) have no face; their female bodies are missing parts, they are disabled. Far from the glamorization of the female body in Japanese manga and Korean anime culture, Bul's cyborgs provoke uneasiness. In her words: "All I've done is push the logic of male fantasy to its darkest extremities" ( Wetterwald, 2003: 179). On the other side, video and photographic artist Mariko Mori, a former fashion model, casts herself precisely in the role of the animated heroines of mainstream iconographies, posing into questioning, as Makiko Hara has recalled, "the borderline between the subject and the Other" ( Hara, 2001: 242), between the real and the fantasy, the physical and the digital. It is also worth noticing that Mori futuristic, iconic, postfeminist characters share a transcendental sensitivity specific to her Japanese religious background. As Naho Kitano has explained about Japanese Animism and Robotics: "In Japan, there is a traditional belief of the existence of spiritual life in objects or natural phenomena (...). I strongly believe that, in Japan, autonomous or intelligent robots are easily accepted socially because of the belief in its spirit" ( Kitano, 2007: 1-4). Another artist who blends the line between physical reality and virtual reality is net artist Cao Fei. Her documentary "Imirror" (2007) was filmed entirely in Second Life, and the direction of the movie was credited to her SL avatar China Tracy. Fei explored the effects of an immersive use of online identities on the self, questioning what is real and what is fantasy not only in the narratives of the movie, but in its meta-narratives too. Her work, focussed on the potential of online personas, harmoniously bridges third- and fourth-wave Feminism. It is important to note that, if Internet is one of the main fields of interest for fourth-wave Feminism, intersectionality ( Crenshaw, 1989) is one of its fundamental analytical tools.

Let us now consider Afrofuturism, a term coined by Mark Dery in 199332 to refer to the contribution of the black experience to the settings of the upcoming times. Afrofuturism and Posthumanism share common theoretical ground and a crucial difference with Futurism, in their recognition of the importance of acknowledging the past, based on the same premises: "human" is not a neutral term, and it carries a history of privileges. For instance, women, people of colours other than white, disabled people and so on have been repeatedly deprived of such status. In particular, the African-American diaspora, which caused a forced erasement of private and public histories, makes it crucial to keep the past and present in the visualization of desirable futures. Many artists have contributed to such narratives. Let us start with Wangechi Mutu (b. 1972), a Kenyan-born artist whose collages melt together the aesthetics of traditional African crafts with science fiction imaginary, bionic prosthetics and Surrealism (see Figs. 8 and 9). Her visionary cyborgism is fully aware of the sexual and racial difference. In a interview for the CNN, she stated: "what I've been trying to sort of do is (...) give the women a kind of strength that the machine supposedly represents for the man. It's like they're taking it back and they become these cyborgs, these fierce female cyborgs" ( Mutu, 2011: n. pag.). US artist Denenge Akpem is both an artist and an academic theorist. She has done extensive work on divulging the concept of Afrofuturism, which she defines as "an exploration and methodology of liberation, simultaneously both a location and a journey" ( Akpem, 2011: n. pag.). In her performative installation "Rapunzel Revisited: An Afri-Sci-Fi Space Sea Siren Tale" (2006), she transforms herself into a hybrid human-jellyfish, with lighted fibre-optic tentacles. Her work re-defines concepts of race, gender and humanity with a holistic approach. Jamaican-born Renée Cox (b. 1960) is a photographer who stages her own body in self-portrays which deconstruct racist and sexist stereotypes. In the series "Raje" (1998) she poses as her alter-ego, Raje, a superheroine who fights for racial justice. Between the many other afrofuturist posthuman sisters I would like to mention: Kara Walker (b. 1969), Fatimah Tuggar (b. 1967) and Tanekeya Word (b. 1983).

Related to Afrofuturism is Chicanafuturism, a term coined in 2002 by Catherine S Ramírez to explore the relation between the Chicana experience and the future, with a special emphasis on its technological and scientific developments (Ramírez, 2002). Chicanafuturism also explores a re-definition of the human through Latin American history and exploitation: "Chicanafuturism articulates colonial and postcolonial histories of indigenismo, mestizaje, hegemony, and survival" ( Ramírez, 2008: 187). Some of the artists who delve into this area of investigation are: Alma Lopez, Marion C Martinez (1954), Coco Fusco (1960) and Laura Molina (1957), whose character "Cihualyaomiquiz, The Jaguar", created in 1994, represents an avenging Mexican-American super heroine ready to die for social justice (see Fig. 10). Before ending the third and last section of this genealogy on cyberfeminist posthuman artists, I would like to mention some of the many whose works, for a matter of space, I could not present. Between the others: media theorist and artist Sandy Stone (b. 1936), digital artist Linda Dement (b. 1959); video-game artist Mary Flanagan (1969), video-artist Shirin Neshat (1957); photographer Shadi Ghadirian (1974) and her work Ctrl+Alt+Del (2006); US performer Narcissister and her revisitation of the masquerade.

Concluding remarks

This genealogy elaborates on the richness and variety of the artists presented, emphasizing the contribution of female radical imagination to the present and to the forthcoming times. Starting with the main avant-garde movement of the first half of the twentieth century, Futurism, Dadaism and Surrealism, this genealogy passes through the sixties and seventies, with the feminist exploration of the body opened by performance art. It lastly takes into account the nineties and its radical re-elaboration of the self: from Cyberfeminism and its revisitation of technology, to the insights of bioart; from critical techno-orientalist readings of the future, to its political and social articulations, pointed out by Afrofuturism and Chicanafuturism. The great variety of works, inputs and perspectives presented, demonstrates the need to maintain a comprehensive methodological approach of the posthuman, avoiding cultural appropriations and discriminatory erasures. I would like to think of this article as an attempt to pay homage to all of these visionary artists, whose works have radically contributed to the configuration of posthuman aesthetics and, more in general, to the manifestation of the posthuman turn.

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Data sharing is not applicable to this article, as no datasets were generated or analysed during the current study.

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How to cite this article: Ferrando F (2016) A feminist genealogy of posthuman aesthetics in the visual arts. Palgrave Communications. 2:16011 doi: 10.1057/palcomms.2016.11.

Acknowledgements

This article is based on a talk delivered by the author at the Conference "Audiovisual Posthumanism" (University of the Aegean, Greece, 2010). The author would like to thank the organizers and participants for their constructive feedback. Thanks are also due to Prof. Achille Varzi, Prof. Evi Sampanikou, Ellen Delahunty Roby, Isabel De Lorenzo, Natasha Vita-More, ORLAN and Maëva Gomez, Laura Molina, Neil Zukerman and the CFM Gallery, Wangechi Mutu and Astrid Meek.

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Liberal Studies, New York University (NYU), New York, USA

Francesca Ferrando

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# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
A feminist genealogy of posthuman aesthetics in the visual arts - Humanities and Social Sciences Communications

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This article aims to reassemble a feminist genealogy of the posthuman in the arts, with a specific focus on the visual works conceived by female artists after the rise of what has been retrospectively defined as first-wave Feminism.

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#Kevin Lagrandeur: Emerging #Technology, Art, and the #Posthuman 

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#Kevin Lagrandeur: Emerging #Technology, Art, and the #Posthuman 

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Podcast: Art and #Posthumanism with #Cary Wolfe (Art after Nature Part 1)

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Podcast: Art and #Posthumanism with #Cary Wolfe (Art after Nature Part 1)

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How do contemporary art and theory contemplate the "bio" of biopolitics and bioart? One of the foremost theorists of posthumanism, Cary Wolfe argues for the reconceptualization of nature in art and theory to turn the idea of the relationship between the human and the planet upside down in his new book, ART AND POSTHUMANISM. This is the inaugural volume in the new series ART AFTER NATURE, edited by Giovanni Aloi and Caroline Picard. The series fosters multidisciplinarity, creatively engaging with new and alternative discourses at the intersection of art, science, and philosophy. It engages with the politics and contradictions of the Anthropocene in order to problematize disciplines such as animal studies, posthumanism, and speculative realism, through art writing and art making.

Cary Wolfe is Dunlevie Professor of English at Rice University. Wolfe has written on a range of topics including debates in animal studies and posthumanism, has authored many books, and edits the Posthumanities series for University of Minnesota Press.

Dr. Giovanni Aloi is an author, educator, and curator specializing in the representation of nature and the environment in art. Aloi is editor in chief of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture.

Caroline Picard is a writer, cartoonist, curator, and executive director of Green Lantern Press.

References in the episode include:

Foucault

Agamben

Derrida

Donna Haraway

Flusser

Jacob von Uexkull

Damien Hirst

Steve Baker

Gregory Bateson

Eija-Liisa Ahtila

Niklas Luhmann

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Art and Posthumanism with Cary Wolfe (Art after Nature Part 1)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
How do contemporary art and theory contemplate the "bio" of biopolitics and bioart? One of the foremost theorists of posthumanism, Cary Wolfe argues for the reconceptualization of nature in art and theory to turn the idea of the relationship between the human and the planet upside down in his new book, ART AND POSTHUMANISM.

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Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet exposes us to the active remnants of gigantic past human errors—the ghosts—that affect the daily lives of millions of people 

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Arts of Living on a #Damaged Planet Ghosts and Monsters of the #Anthropocene, 2017 • #Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, #Heather Anne Swanson, #Elaine Gan, and #Nils Bubandt, Editors

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Arts of Living on a #Damaged Planet Ghosts and Monsters of the #Anthropocene, 2017 • #Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, #Heather Anne Swanson, #Elaine Gan, and #Nils Bubandt, Editors

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1. What does "POSTHUMAN" mean? Dr. Ferrando (NYU) 

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#Francesca Ferrando: What does #"POSTHUMAN" mean? (NYU) 

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#Francesca Ferrando: What does #"POSTHUMAN" mean? (NYU) 

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1. What does "POSTHUMAN" mean? Dr. Ferrando (NYU) - Course "The Posthuman" Lesson n. 1

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Rosi Braidotti is a Philosopher and Distinguished University Professor at Utrecht University as well as the founding director of the Centre for the Humanities in Utrecht.

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Rosi Braidotti (/braɪˈdɒti/; born 28 September 1954) is a contemporary philosopher and feminist theoretician.

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Rosi Braidotti (; born 28 September 1954) is a contemporary philosopher and feminist theoretician.

Braidotti, who holds Italian and Australian citizenship, was born in Italy and moved to Australia when she was 16, where she received degrees from the Australian National University in Canberra in 1977 and was awarded the University Medal in Philosophy and the University Tillyard prize. Braidotti then moved on to do her doctoral work at the Sorbonne, where she received her degree in philosophy in 1981. She has taught at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands since 1988, when she was appointed as the founding professor in women's studies. In 1995 she became the founding Director of the Netherlands research school of Women's Studies, a position she held till 2005.

Braidotti is a pioneer in European Women's Studies: she founded the inter-university SOCRATES network NOISE and the Thematic Network for Women's Studies ATHENA, which she directed till 2005. She was a Leverhulme Trust Visiting Professor at Birkbeck College in 2005-6; a Jean Monnet professor at the European University Institute in Florence in 2002-3 and a fellow in the school of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 1994. She is a founding member of the European Consortium for Humanities Institutes and Centres ( ECHIC), 2008; in 2010 she was elected member of the Board of the Consortium Humanities Centres and Institutes (CHCI) and in 2014 a member of the Scientific Council of the Conseil National de la Recherche Scientifique in France. Braidotti was the founding Director of the Centre for the Humanities at Utrecht University (2007-2016), and is currently Distinguished University Professor at Utrecht University.

Braidotti's publications have consistently been placed in continental philosophy, at the intersection with social and political theory, cultural politics, gender, feminist theory and ethnicity studies. The core of her interdisciplinary work consists of four interconnected monographs on the constitution of contemporary subjectivity, with special emphasis on the concept of difference within the history of European philosophy and political theory. Braidotti's philosophical project investigates how to think difference positively, which means moving beyond the dialectics that both opposes it and thus links it by negation to the notion of sameness.

This is evidenced in the philosophical agenda set in her first book Patterns of Dissonance: An Essay on Women in Contemporary French Philosophy, 1991, which gets developed further in the trilogy that follows. In the next book, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory, 1994, the question is formulated in more concrete terms: can gender, ethnic, cultural or European differences be understood outside the straitjacket of hierarchy and binary opposition? Thus the following volume, Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming, 2002, analyses not only gender differences, but also more categorical binary distinctions between self and other, European and foreign, human and non-human (animal/ environmental/ technological others).

The conclusion is that a systematic ambivalence structures contemporary cultural representations of the globalised, technologically mediated, ethnically mixed, gender-aware world we now inhabit. The question consequently arises of what it takes to produce adequate cultural and political representations of a fast-changing world and move closer to Spinozian notions of adequate understanding.

The ethical dimension of Braidotti's work on difference comes to the fore in the last volume of the trilogy, Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics, 2006. Here she surveys the different ethical approaches that can be produced by taking difference and diversity as the main point of reference and conclude that there is much to be gained by suspending belief that political participation, moral empathy and social cohesion can only be produced on the basis of the notion of recognition of sameness.

Braidotti makes a case for an alternative view on subjectivity, ethics and emancipation and pitches diversity against the postmodernist risk of cultural relativism while also standing against the tenets of liberal individualism. Throughout her work, Braidotti asserts and demonstrates the importance of combining theoretical concerns with a serious commitment to producing socially and politically relevant scholarship that contributes to making a difference in the world. Braidotti's output also included several edited volumes. Her work has been translated in a total of 19 languages and all the main books in at least three languages other than English.

In The Posthuman (Polity Press, 2013), Braidotti offers both an introduction and major contribution to contemporary debates on the posthuman. As the traditional distinction between the human and its others has blurred, exposing the non-naturalistic structure of the human, The Posthuman starts by exploring the extent to which a post-humanist move displaces the traditional humanistic unity of the subject. Rather than perceiving this situation as a loss of cognitive and moral self-mastery, Braidotti argues that the posthuman helps us make sense of our flexible and multiple identities.

Braidotti then analyzes the escalating effects of post-anthropocentric thought, which encompass not only other species, but also the sustainability of our planet as a whole. Because contemporary market economies profit from the control and commodification of all that lives, they result in hybridization, erasing categorical distinctions between the human and other species, seeds, plants, animals and bacteria. These dislocations induced by globalized cultures and economies enable a critique of anthropocentrism, but how reliable are they as indicators of a sustainable future?

The Posthuman concludes by considering the implications of these shifts for the institutional practice of the humanities. Braidotti outlines new forms of cosmopolitan neo-humanism that emerge from the spectrum of post-colonial and race studies, as well as gender analysis and environmentalism. The challenge of the posthuman condition consists in seizing the opportunities for new social bonding and community building, while pursuing sustainability and empowerment.

In 2011 Braidotti published two new books: the renewed and revised edition of Nomadic Subjects and collection of essays Nomadic Theory. The Portable Rosi Braidotti. The collection provides a core introduction to Braidotti's nomadic theory and its innovative formulations, which engage with Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Luce Irigaray, and a host of political and cultural issues. Arranged thematically, essays begin with such concepts as sexual difference and embodied subjectivity and follow with explorations in technoscience, feminism, postsecular citizenship, and the politics of affirmation.

Influenced by philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze and especially French feminist thinker Luce Irigaray, Braidotti has brought postmodern feminism into the Information Age with her considerations of cyberspace, prosthesis, and the materiality of difference. Braidotti also considers how ideas of gender difference can affect our sense of the human/animal and human/machine divides. Braidotti has also pioneered European perspectives in feminist philosophy and practice and has been influential on [third-wave as well as post-secular feminisms].

On 3 March 2005, Braidotti was honored with a Royal Knighthood from Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands; in August 2006 she received the University Medal from the University of Łódź in Poland and she was awarded an Honorary Degree in Philosophy from Helsinki University in May 2007. In 2009, she was elected Honorary Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Since 2009 she is a board member of Consortium of Humanities Centre and Institutes. In 2013 she received an Honorary Degree in Philosophy from Linköping University in Sweden. Braidotti was elected a member of Academia Europaea in 2014.

International activities (2011-present)

2017: Delivered the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at the Whitney Humanities Center, Yale University (1-3 March 2017).

2015-present: Appointed member of the core group of the steering committee for the First World Humanities Conference, organized by CIPSH (Conseil International de la Philosophie et des Sciences Humaines), UNESCO and the University of Liège (Belgium), 6-12 August 2017. Presidents of the Conference: Prof. Chao Gejin (Beijing) and Prof. Robert Halleux (University of Liège).

2014: Elected member of the Scientific Council of the Conseil National de la Recherche Scientifique in France.

2012: Mellon Foundation Grant for an international collaborative project on: 'Religion and Political Belonging', with the University of Portland, Oregon; the University of Arizona, of Tel Aviv, The Chinese University of Hong Kong and Duke University in the USA.

2011 - present: Founding member of the European Consortium for Humanities Institutes and Centres ECHIC.

1991, Patterns of Dissonance: an Essay on Women in Contemporary French Philosophy,: Cambridge: Polity Press; USA: Routledge, pp. 316. Second edition: 1996.

1994, Co-authored with Ewa Charkiewicz, Sabine Hausler and Saskia Wieringa: Women, the Environment and Sustainable Development. Towards a Theoretical Synthesis, London: Zed Books, pp. 220.

1994, Nomadic Subjects. Embodiment and Sexual difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. Cambridge: Columbia University Press, pp. 326.

1996, Madri, Mostri e Macchine, Rome: Manifesto Libri, With postface by Anna Maria Crispino. Second edition, revised and enlarged, 2005.

2002, Nuovi soggetti nomadi, Roma: Luca Sossella editore, pp. 201.

2002, Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming, Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 317.

2003, Baby Boomers: Vite parallele dagli anni Cinquanta ai cinquant'anni, Florence: Giunti, pp. 191.

2004, Feminismo, diferencia sexual y subjetividad nomade, Barcelona: Gedisa, pp. 234.

2004, Op doorreis: nomadisch denken in de 21ste eeuw, Amsterdam: Boom, pp. 298.

2006, Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics, Cambridge: Polity Press pp. 304.

2007, Egy nomád térképei. Feminizmus a posztmodern után, Budapest: Balassi Kiado, pp. 137.

2009, La philosophie, là où on ne l'attend pas, Paris: Larousse, pp. 286.

2011a, Nomadic Subjects. Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory, Second Edition, New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 334.

2011b, Nomadic Theory. The Portable Rosi Braidotti, New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 416.

2013, The Posthuman. Cambridge, Polity Press.

2017, Per Una Politica Affermativa. Milano: Mimesis/I Volti.

2017, Posthuman Knowledge. Cambridge, Polity Press.

2021, Posthuman Feminism. Cambridge, Polity Press.

Guest editor "Special issue: De la parenté à l'eugénisme". Les Cahiers du GRIF (in French). Persée: Revues Scientifiques. 36. 1987.

Guest editor "Special issue: Women's Studies at the University of Utrecht". Women's Studies International Forum. ScienceDirect. 16 (4). July-August 1993. doi:10.1016/0277-5395(93)90020-a.

Een beeld van een vrouw. De visualisering van het vrouwelijke in een postmoderne cultuur, Kampen: Kok Agora, 1993, pp. 188.

Poste restante. Feministische berichten aan het postmoderne. Kampen: Kok Agora, 1994, pp. 157.

(Ed. with Suzette Haaksma), Ik denk dus zij is; De vrouwelijke intellectueel in literair en historisch perspectief, Kampen: Kok Agora, 1994, pp. 199.

(Ed. with Nina Lykke) Between Monsters, Goddesses and Cyborgs. Feminist Confrontations With Science, Medicine and Cyberspace.London: Zed Books, 1996, pp. 260.

(Ed. with Gloria Wekker) Praten in het donker. Multiculturalisme en anti-racisme in feministisch perspectief. Kampen: Kok Agora, 1996, pp. 170.

(Ed. with Gabriele Griffin) Thinking Differently: a Reader in European Women's Studies, London / New York: Zed Books, 2002, pp. 405.

(Ed. with Charles Esche and Maria Hlavajova) Citizens and Subjects: The Netherlands, for example, Critical Reader/Catalogue for the Dutch Pavilion at the Biennale in Venice, 2007 Utrecht: BAK and Zurich: JRP, pp. 334.

(Ed. with Claire Colebrook and Patrick Hanafin) Deleuze and Law. Forensic Futures, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, pp. 212.

(Ed. with Claire Colebrook) special edition of Australian Feminist Studies, on: "Feminist Timelines', Routledge Volume 24 Issue 59, 2009, pp. 142.

The History of Continental Philosophy Volume 7, Durham: Acumen, 2010, pp. 398.

(Ed. with Patrick Hanafin and Bolette Blaagaard) After Cosmopolitanism, New York: Routledge, 2012, pp. 188.

(Ed. with Patricia Pisters) Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze, [London and New York: Continuum], 2012, pp. 238.

(Ed. with Rick Dolphijn) This Deleuzian Century, Leiden: Brill, 2015.

(Ed. with Paul Gilroy) Conflicting Humanities, London: Bloomsbury, 2016.

(Ed. with Rick Dolphijn) Philosophy After Nature, London and New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017.

(Ed. with Maria Hlavajova) The Posthuman Glossary, London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017.

Turkish translation: Insan Sonrasi, Istanbul: Kolektif, 2014, pp. 240.

German translation: Posthumanismus: Leben jenseits des Menschen, Frankfurt/New York: Campus, 2014, pp. 215.

Italian translation: Il postumano. La vita oltre il sé, oltre la specie, oltre la morte, Rome: Derive Approdi, 2014, pp. 256..

Polish translation: Po człowieku, Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN SA, 2014, pp. 380.

Korean Translation: 포스트 휴먼. Seoul: Acanet, 2015.

Chinese translation: 后人类，trans. Gencheng Song, Henan Publishing House, 2016.6

Romanian translation: Braidotti, Rosi. (2016). Postumanul. Trad. Ovidiu Anemțoaicei. București: Hecate.

Italian translation: Trasposizioni. Sull'etica nomade, Roma: Luca Sosella Editore, 2008, pp. 343.

Spanish translation: Transposiciones, Barcelona: Gedisa, 2009, pp. 414.

Italian translation: In Metamorfosi, Milano: Feltrinelli, 2003.

Spanish translation: Metamorfosis. Hacia una teoria materialista del devenir, Madrid: Akal Ediciones, 2005

Korean translation: Moonhwa Kwahak Sa., 2011

Greek translation: Νομαδικά Yποκείμενα: Ενσωματότητα και έμφυλη διαφορά στη σύγχρονη φεμινιστική θεωρία, Athens: Nissos, 2014.

Italian translation: Soggetto Nomade, Rome: Donzelli, 1995.

Spanish translation: Sujetos Nómades Corporización y Diferencia Sexual en la Teoria Feminista Contemporánea, Buenos Aires, Barcelona, Mexico: Paidos, 2000.

Translation into Russian of some extracts of Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. In particular: "Introduction: By Way of Nomadism" (pp. 13-22) and chapter 11: 'Women's Studies and the politics of Difference'(pp. 136-163). In: Sergei Zherebkin (ed.) Anthology on Western Gender Studies Theory, II Volume of the textbook Introduction to Gender Studies, St. Petersburg: Aleteia and Kharcov Center for Gender Studies, 2001. Translated by Zaven Babloyan.

Portuguese translation of chapter 8: "A diferença sexual como um projecto politico nomada" in: Genero, Identitade e Desejo. Antologia Critica do Femminismo Contemporaneo, Lisboa: Ediçoes Cotovia, 2002.

Korean translation, ISBN 89-951903-8-8, 2005.

Russian translation of chapter 8: "Sexual Difference as a Nomadic Political Project" in: Feminism, Art and Theory. 1970-2000, Moscow: RosPen, 2005.

Polish translation: Podmioty Nomadyczne. Ucieleśnienie I różnica seksualna w feminizmie współczesnym, Warszawa: Wydawnictwa Naukowe I Profesjonalne, 2009.

Dutch translation: Beelden van de leegte. Kampen: Kok Agora, 1991; Amsterdam: Rainbow paperback edition, 1995.

Finnish translation: Riitasointuja. Tampere: Vastapaino, 1993.

Italian translation: Dissonanze. Le donne e la filosofia contemporanea. Milano: La Tartaruga, 1994.

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Rosi Braidotti (; born 28 September 1954) is a contemporary philosopher and feminist theoretician. Braidotti, who holds Italian and Australian citizenship, was born in Italy and moved to Australia when she was 16, where she received degrees from the Australian National University in Canberra in 1977 and was awarded the University Medal in Philosophy and the University Tillyard prize.

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#Stefan Herbrechter: #Posthumanism – A Critical Analysis

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#Stefan Herbrechter: #Posthumanism – A Critical Analysis

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Centre for the Humanities, Utrecht University, Netherlands. Directed by Rosi Braidotti. Also Gender Studies, Iris van der Tuin and her project The Material Turn in the Humanities.

The NONHuman Research Group, Queen's University, Canada. Headed by Myra J. Hird.

The posthumanities node at the Wesleyan University, Connecticut. With Lori Gruen and Kari Weil.

The Posthumanities Hub, Linköping University, Sweden. Founded by Cecilia Åsberg.

The HumAnimal Studies Group of GenNa, Uppsala University, Sweden. With Tora Holmberg and Malin Ah-King.

The Zoontology Research Team, Linköping University, Sweden. Headed by Jami Weinstein.

The Network for Gender Research, University of Stavanger, Norway, 2013. With Wencke Mühleisen and Ingvil Hellstrand.

Posthumanities Network: The Next Genderation.

Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects, Columbia University Press, 1994; 2nd ed., rev. & exp., Columbia University Press, 2011.

Chris Hables Gray, with Heidi J. Figueroa-Sarriera and Steven Mentor (eds.), The Cyborg Handbook, New York: Routledge, 1995, xx+540 pp. Reviews: Badmington (Sci-Fi Studies), Hektor (Young), Dokulil (SFFBU).

Judith Halberstam, Ira Livingston (eds.), Posthuman Bodies, Indiana University Press, 1995, 275 pp.

Cary Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism?, University of Minnesota Press (Posthumanities), 2009. [2]

Cecilia Åsberg, Martin Hultman, Francis Lee (eds.), Posthumanistiska nyckeltexter, Lund: Studentlitteratur, 2012, 233 pp. [4]. Review: Ingvarsson (Samlaren). (Swedish)

Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman, Polity, Apr 2013, 180 pp.

Debashish Banerji, Makarand R. Paranjape (eds.), Critical Posthumanism and Planetary Futures, Springer, 2016, xiii+277 pp.

Jami Weinstein, Claire Colebrook (eds.), Posthumous Life: Theorizing Beyond the Posthuman, Columbia University Press, 2017, 392 pp. [5] [6]

NORA - Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research 19(4), Special Issue: "Post-humanities", eds. Cecilia Åsberg, Redi Koobak and Ericka Johnson, 2011. [10]

Michel Serres, Le Parasite, Grasset, 1980. (French)
Parasite, trans. Lawrence R. Schehr, Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982.

Donna Haraway, "A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s", Socialist Review 15:2 (1985), pp 65-107. New version printed as "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century", in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, Free Association, 1991, pp 149-181, n243-248.

Humanities

Fields and theories: Classics, Art history, History of architecture, Anthropology, Semiotics, Philosophy of technology, Marxist aesthetics, Design research, Humanities computing, Structuralism, Poststructuralism, Mediology, Media archaeology, Cyberfeminism, Cultural techniques, Neuroaesthetics, Posthumanities, Sensory ethnography, Media ecology, Digital humanities, Software studies, Modern periodical studies, Accelerationism.
Concepts: Faktura, Ostranenie, Biomechanics, Commons, Postmedia, Evil media.
Related theories: Systems theory, Information theory, Cybernetics.
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Centre for the Humanities, Utrecht University, Netherlands. Directed by Rosi Braidotti. Also Gender Studies, Iris van der Tuin and her project The Material Turn in the Humanities. The NONHuman Research Group, Queen's University, Canada. Headed by Myra J. Hird. The posthumanities node at the Wesleyan University, Connecticut. With Lori Gruen and Kari Weil.

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#Posthumanism and Contemporary Art | Widewalls

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#Posthumanism and Contemporary Art | Widewalls

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Posthumanism and Contemporary Art | Widewalls

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By re-defining the human race, posthumanism changes our perception of ourselves and the world. What is our posthuman future and how does art illustrate it?

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Imagining the #Posthuman: Art, #Technology, and Living in the Futurem, Myers, Cerise (2013)

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Imagining the #Posthuman: Art, #Technology, and Living in the Futurem, Myers, Cerise (2013)

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Thesis: This project examines works of contemporary performance, digital, and bio- art that reflect the blurring of boundaries once perceived as impermeable, whether between art and science, organism and machine, or the natural and modified.

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Imagining the Posthuman: Art, Technology, and Living in the Future

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This project examines works of contemporary performance, digital, and bio- art that reflect the blurring of boundaries once perceived as impermeable, whether between art and science, organism and machine, or the natural and modified.

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Thesis #Katažyna Jankovska: BEYOND THE HUMANUNSTABLE MEDIA ART CONSTRUCTING NEW SOCIALREALITIES

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Thesis #Katažyna Jankovska: BEYOND THE HUMANUNSTABLE MEDIA ART CONSTRUCTING NEW SOCIALREALITIES

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#Posthumanism in art and science: a reader / edited by. #Giovanni Aloi and #Susan McHugh. (Intro of book)

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#Posthumanism in art and science: a reader / edited by. #Giovanni Aloi and #Susan McHugh. (Intro of book)

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#Posthumanism, #New Materialism and #Feminist Media Art

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#Posthumanism, #New Materialism and #Feminist Media Art

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The Posthuman offers both an introduction and major contribution to contemporary debates on the posthuman. Digital ‘second life’, genetically modified food, advanced prosthetics, robotics and reproductive technologies are familiar facets of our globally linked and technologically mediated societies. This has blurred the traditional distinction between the human and its others, exposing the non-naturalistic structure of the human.

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The critical perspective that the age of humanism has come to an end. It is premised on the idea that humanism's twin assumptions that humans are both knowable and reasonable is false. It rejects the idea that humans can be known, largely on the grounds that the dividing line between human and non-human or animal is difficult to delineate in the first place and highly permeable too. Donna Haraway's work on cyborgs is especially important in this regard. It also rejects the idea that because humans have reason (or at least bestow upon themselves the idea that they have reason), this is sufficient to make them the only arbiters of the fate of the planet and all its other non-human inhabitants. Posthumanism is a highly eco-conscious discourse

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#Nick Land: A QUICK-AND-DIRTY INTRODUCTION TO #ACCELERATIONISM

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#Nick Land: A QUICK-AND-DIRTY INTRODUCTION TO #ACCELERATIONISM

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Completing the CAPTCHA proves you are a human and gives you temporary access to the web property.

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A dream is a succession of images, ideas, emotions, and sensations that usually occur involuntarily in the mind during certain stages of sleep.[1] Humans spend about two hours dreaming per night,[2] and each dream lasts around 5 to 20 minutes, although the dreamer may perceive the dream as being much longer than this

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#ACCELERATE MANIFESTO for an #Accelerationist Politics

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#ACCELERATE MANIFESTO for an #Accelerationist Politics

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A view of left-wing accelerationism through an analysis of the Accelerationist Manifesto, by Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek from 2013, with an emphasis on environmental issues.

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#ACCELERATE MANIFESTO for an Accelerationist Politics

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By Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek - The Left must accelerate towards global post-capitalism or risk planetary catastrophe.

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Video: A Quick Rundown on #Accelerationism

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Video: A Quick Rundown on #Accelerationism

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The #neo-fascist philosophy that underpins both the #alt-right and #Silicon Valley technophiles

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The #neo-fascist philosophy that underpins both the #alt-right and #Silicon Valley technophiles

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From the outside, America's alt right is a nebulous movement based on racism, nationalism, and white supremacy. In contrast, the tech elites in Silicon Valley look like a relatively worldly bunch, despite the calls from some quarters of the valley to from the plebeian masses of the US.

Despite their differences, strands of the two groups share strong links to "Dark Enlightenment," an obscure neo-fascist philosophy started by a British academic in the 1990s.

The birth of a manifesto

The primary figure behind Dark Enlightenment is Nick Land, who was a philosophy professor at Warwick University until he quit academia in 1998. His work is a form of "accelerationism" (broadly speaking, a belief that the tools of capitalism and technology should be sped up and dramatically enhanced) and he was, for a time, something of a cult figure for his work on internet and cyber culture.

While at Warwick, Land was part of "Cybernetic Culture Research Unit," which explored drugs, raves, and science fiction, and was affiliated with such notable figures as the philosopher Sadie Plant and the artists Jake and Dinos Chapman. Land has never been a typical academic, and that shows in his writing. His Dark Enlightenment manifesto, published online in 2012, is florid, contradictory, and opaque.

Land's writings on in his and can an alt-right rant, and comment sections on the far-right outlet Breitbart are apt to mention his work. Academic and former students of Land's have expressed ideas that are vaguely influenced by Dark Enlightenment. Others are more outspoken: One philosopher with clearly Landian ideas, Jason Reza Jorjani, who lectures at New Jersey Institute of Technology, is co-founder of altright.com and at a white nationalist meeting led by Richard Spencer.

What are the tenets of Dark Enlightenment theory? There are a few consistent themes, circling around technology, warfare, feudalism, corporate power, and racism. "It's an acceleration of capitalism to a fascist point," says Benjamin Noys, a critical theory professor at the University of Chichester and author of Malign Velocities: Accelerationism and Capitalism.

Those who have studied Dark Enlightenment describe an almost cult-like vision of a dystopian future. "It is a worship of corporate power to the extent that corporate power becomes the only power in the world," says David Golumbia, a new media professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. "It becomes militarized, and states break down. For some reason that's difficult to understand, they seem to think these highly weaponized feudal enclaves would be more free than the society we currently have."

Land believes that advances in computing will enable dominant humans to merge with machines and become cybernetic super beings. He advocates for racial separation under the belief that "elites" will enhance their IQs by associating only with each other.

Capitalism has not yet been fully unleashed, he argues, and corporate power should become the organizing force in society. Land is vehemently against democracy, believing it restricts accountability and freedom. The world should do away with political power, according to Dark Enlightenment, and instead, society should break into tiny states, each effectively governed by a CEO.

Fans in high places

Earlier this year, Politico reported that White House strategist Steve Bannon of Dark Enlightenment. Meanwhile, the major proponent of the movement other than Land is software engineer Curtis Yarvin, who blogs as "Mencius Moldbug."

And while most Silicon Valley techies are unaware of and uninterested in Dark Enlightenment, there are notable figures and ideas that seem to share intellectual heritage and connections with the movement.

Venture capitalist Peter Thiel is a major of Yarvin's start-ups and, as The Baffler reports, in 2012, Thiel gave a lecture at Stanford with distinct Dark Enlightenment themes. "A startup is basically structured as a monarchy," he said at the time. "We don't call it that, of course. That would seem weirdly outdated, and anything that's not democracy makes people uncomfortable."

Growing Silicon Valley interest in creating a small, separate state is straight out of Land's writing. Meanwhile there are growing numbers of who identify with Yarvin and "neoreactionary" ideas.

And, of course, both Silicon Valley and Dark Enlightenment are products of and devotees to internet culture. Noys notes that certain values in Silicon Valley are vaguely sympathetic to Land's thinking. "There's this entrepreneurial belief that you're the master of the universe," he says. "They believe they're the exception that proves the rule, that anyone can be successful."

Land says that, though he expects Dark Enlightenment micro-states to first form on islands, Silicon Valley is "bound to be involved in the process" as these societies form.

The alt right and Silicon Valley are not the only two cliques with ties to Dark Enlightenment thinking. Avant-garde art artists have also dabbled in Dark Enlightenment. A London gallery, LD50, was amid after Land was invited to talk at the gallery, providing a platform for Dark Enlightenment ideas.

"You could argue-though I wouldn't-that the alt right and Dark Enlightenment are artistic works," says Noys. "Twenty-first century art has been interested in transgression and shock, so there's an interest in how these people have used their memes to achieve their goals."

The philosophical masters of a popular movement

US president Donald Trump, Land says, is a "symptom of crisis" and sign that the West is broken. But Land views White House chief strategist Steve Bannon as, "an unusually interesting politician."

Dark Enlightenment proponents see themselves as "the philosophical masters" of the alt-right movement, says Noys. "Land sees himself as above all that, as a Philosopher King of a movement that's too populist and grubby for this liking," says Noys. "He's part of this continuum, that's pretty clear. But he's fighting to distinguish himself from the more populist end of things."

Golumbia agrees that "He probably thinks he's smarter than all of them [the alt right], or they haven't gone far enough. But they are definitely fellow travellers."

Land himself is dismissive of the alt right, which he calls "a predictable (and predicted) development of mass democracy, as it enters its collapse-phase" in an email to Quartz. Still, he says, "Insofar as it marks the end of global governance on the basis of evangelical egalitarian-universalism, it makes space for more realistic political conversations, which have notably begun to happen."

Land also rejects the idea that Dark Enlightenment has fascist elements, writing that "Fascism is a mass anti-capitalist movement, when the word isn't (more usually) simply a childish insult." As for racial divides, he says the science is "an empirical question" but "that human population groups are significantly distinct, however, is a matter so self-evident to ordinary people that it makes for a natural default."

Land's theories sound easily dismissible, and Nick Land is still largely unknown, but his neo-fascist ideas are finding niches where they flourish.. "I think there's this emergent fringe," says Noys.

Golumbia notes that Land's work attracted plenty of impressionable graduate students decades ago. It undoubtedly helps that offensive ideas are masked with references to respected writers and philosophers: Land has his own idiosyncratic reading of the German philosopher Nietzsche, for example, and the French 2oth century thinkers Deleuze, Guattari, and Bataille. And as far as accelerationism goes, Noys traces its intellectual heritage to the Italian futurists (who had their own ties with fascism).

Despite their long lineage, the ideas fall apart under scrutiny. "To those of us who were more skeptical, it looked like it had the seeds of a disturbing belief in a superman: This kind of digital hybrid cyber-being who was a lot better than the ordinary weak people," says Golumbia. "His writing is more and more obsessed with race, Islam, echoing the things that people like Nigel Farage say. He sounds like a visionary but really he's nothing but these reactionary clichés about how minority people are to blame for all of our problems."

Land, who has long perceived himself as a visionary, firmly believes that society and government as we know it will break down and his vision for the future will come to pass. "The crack-up is obvious to everyone," Land writes. "(That's why you're doing this story.)"

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The neo-fascist philosophy that underpins both the alt-right and Silicon Valley technophiles

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From the outside, America's alt right is a nebulous movement based on racism, nationalism, and white supremacy. In contrast, the tech elites in Silicon Valley look like a relatively worldly bunch, despite the calls from some quarters of the valley to from the plebeian masses of the US.

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Deleuze and Guattari’s “accelerationism” has been too tarnished to rehabilitate. The idea was hatched by Nick Land.

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The University of Minnesota Press is known for its boundary breaking editorial program in the humanities and social sciences.

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(Photo By )

Accelerationism (n)

Accelerationism is the idea that capitalism, or various processes attached to it, should be deepened or "accelerated" in order to prompt radical change.

As Steven Shaviro sums it up,"'accelerationism' is the idea that the only way out is through".

Origin

The concept of accelerationism has been traced back to Karl Marx, but the word was first used prominently by Benjamin Noys in 2010, in his book Malign Velocities: Accelerationism and Capitalism.

Usage

Some understand "accelerationism" as being the process by which capitalism is pushed to its worst excesses as soon as possible in order to provoke an anti-capitalist response. In this basic model, exposing the true evils of late capitalism will lead inevitably to revolt.

You might, for instance, theorize that it's better to vote for Donald Trump than Hillary Clinton, as the latter will maintain the status quo, while the former's negative disruptive influence might instigate a true socialist backlash. (Historically, this does not go well).

Yet few philosophers preach anything so simple (or so passive). Of course, there are different varieties of accelerationism. Some philosophers, for instance, focus on repurposing the tools of capitalism, outlining a model for political change opposed to the work of thosw Marxists who seek to entirely reject the suspect tools of, to give one example, knowledge of late capitalist economics.

In this version of accelerationism, the aspects of capitalism which may instigate its own downfall are seized and refashioned to speed up the process of its undoing. As #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader puts it:

Accelerationism is a political heresy: the insistence that the only radical political response to capitalism is not to protest, disrupt, or critique, nor to await its demise at the hands of its own contradictions, but to accelerate its uprooting, alienating, decoding, abstractive tendancies.

If you really want to get into it, it's possible to see accelerationism as one of two possible models for radical Left-wing action: one rooted in the local (and some would stay nostalgic), and the other in the global, technological and abstract (and some would say alienating). As Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek put it:

The most important division in today's Left is between those that hold to a folk politics of localism, direct action, and relentless horizontalism, and those that outline what must become called an accelerationist politics at ease with a modernity of abstraction, complexity, globality, and technology.

Getting lost? That's fine. The important thing to know is that plenty of people are going to use "accelerationist" to mean "making things so bad people rebel". You'll see people shout them down for this usage - but at least you'll recognise it.

On the other hand: want to know more? Try this manifesto of accelerationism, and McKenzie Wark's critique of it here.

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Accelerationism (n) Accelerationism is the idea that capitalism, or various processes attached to it, should be deepened or â?oacceleratedâ?? in order to prompt radical change. As Steven Shaviro sums it up,â?oâ?~accelerationismâ?T is the idea that the only way out is throughâ??.

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Text by David Henkin

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1 Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek, "# Accelerate: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics," reprinte (...)

1 In May 2013, the British website Critical Legal Thinking published a "Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics," composed by a pair of young British intellectuals named Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams. Although dotted with expressions and allusions that reflected the authors' formal training in British doctoral programs, the text was not a scholarly project. Like its more famous model, the manifesto clearly set out to change the world rather than to interpret it. Srnicek and Williams's MAP, as it is now commonly designated, exhorted fellow leftists to "take advantage of every technological and scientific advance made possible by capitalist society," including quantification, economic modeling, social network analysis, and big data analytics, and to claim "the materialist platform of neoliberalism" as a "springboard to launch towards post-capitalism." Rejecting what it characterized as a backward-looking "folk politics of localism, direct action, and relentless horizontalism," in favor of a "politics at ease with a modernity of abstraction, complexity, globality, and technology," the manifesto cast its lot with Prometheus, sloughing off decades of leftist suspicion and discomfort (especially, one might add, among feminists and environmentalists) toward projects of mastery and domination.

2 The impact of this exhortation on leftist politics within or beyond the United Kingdom is hard to discern, but the authors' insistent comfort in the face of technological change seems broadly shared, not surprisingly, within a certain region of the blogosphere, and might even represent a growing political sensibility. Such a sensibility probably reflects, among other things, the reconciliation of radical critics of capitalism to their own dependence on consumer gadgets and the need for dissenters from the prevailing neoliberal creed to secure a seat at tables where the discourses of finance and digitization have become the lingua franca . The specific keyword in the MAP's title, however, gestured to what now appears, at least to observers in the UK, as more than just a sensibility. Calls for "accelerationist politics" seemed to summon a critical or philosophical movement related to acceleration itself, with its implications of both speed and progress. And indeed, a number of critics and scholars have sought to construct an intellectual movement to match, frame, or anchor the political posture that Srnicek and Williams proclaimed. In the short time since the Manifesto's publication, several books and numerous blog posts in English (written mostly by Englishmen) have taken stabs at elaborating something that might be called accelerationism .

3 Accelerationism remains an elusive term, even (or especially) in the wake of recent attempts to define it. The MAP's call for accelerationist political stances and strategies did not elaborate an acceleration , and Srnicek and Williams's newest book, Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (2015), pointedly avoids the label, citing the "the miasma of competing understandings that has risen around the concept" of accelerationism. Their latest collaboration intervenes in debates about automation and capitalism, which can proceed without much reckoning with theories of accelerationism. Still, while Sricek and Williams may have migrated to other metaphors, the discourse of accelerationism carries on in their absence. Three publications have found philosophically serious content in the notion of accelerationism and have sought to construct lengthy genealogies and rich pedigrees for current thinking about everything from the autonomy of technology to the relationship between humans and machines, from the nature of capitalism to the trajectory of history. Benjamin Noys, in Malign Velocities (2014), provides the most systematic attempt to present (and reject) accelerationism as a philosophical movement. Noys, a specialist in critical theory and continental philosophy, had in fact introduced the term in a 2010 book (though the earliest appearance of the noun accelerationism dates to Roger Zelazny's 1967 fantasy novel Lord of Light ) to link and diagnose a set of fundamentally nihilist impulses in the writings of Deleuze, Guattari, Lyotard, and various other post-1968 Nietzschean engagements with capitalism. The most emphatic recuperation of the term accelerationism as the banner for a philosophical position appears in #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader (2014), edited by Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian, which finds (not without some strain) surprising antecedents (including Thorstein Veblen and Shulamith Firestone) for a movement that gathered steam around the anti-humanism of Nick Land and his Warwick-based Cybernetic Culture Research Unit in the 1990s. Somewhere in the middle lies No Speed Limit (2015) by the American scholar Steven Shaviro, who expresses sympathy for the political goals of the MAP, distances himself from its Promethean confidence and its technophilia, and seeks to redeem a form of accelerationist aesthetics best captured in science fiction.

4 Taken together, the three books give a sense of the diverse positions and thinkers that could fit under the capacious rubric of accelerationism, as well as the quite different genealogies that might connect Marx, through Deleuze / Guattari, to something like the MAP. Shaviro's lucid account presumes accelerationism to be a leftist project, but Noys's critique pays attention to the affinities between accelerationism and the fascist-friendly elements of Italian Futurism, while the #Accelerate anthology suggests a spectrum of political agendas (especially anti-humanist ones) that might converge around a celebration of the productive capacities of capitalism. The various versions of accelerationism fasten on distinct strains of Marxist thought that do not necessarily point in the same political direction: Marx's forward-looking orientation, his suggestion that progress toward communism would take place through capitalist expansion, and his fascination with the disruptive, revolutionary tendencies of capital itself.

5 But whereas the political polysemy of accelerationism's flaunted ease with brave new technological worlds might make the phenomenon more interesting, the ambiguity of the term itself gives pause. Accelerationism implies two quite different things, one prescriptive and one descriptive, one rooted in the transitive use of the English verb and one rooted in the intransitive. For some proponents, acceleration is something that political actors ought to do - or at least root for. Accelerationism on this model means accelerating (in the transitive sense) a historical process of capitalist development, with all of its dislocation and disruption, in order to hasten the arrival of a postcapitalist order. But at other times acceleration describes what is already happening (intransitively) in the current capitalist order. Accelerationism on this second model identifies, privileges, and embraces a particular feature of the world we inhabit and a particular disruptive tendency of capitalism - acceleration rather than speed or velocity (which are closely related to acceleration, of course, but not quite the same), but also acceleration rather than commodification, abstraction, deterritorialization, decoding, alienation, and annihilation.

6 Whenever acceleration means hastening or expediting an historical process, accelerationism amounts to a call for revisiting familiar strategic debates among those who wish to defeat or transcend capitalism. But if acceleration is itself the social force with which we are being asked to grapple, accelerationism invites us to reconsider the state of capitalist society in that light. In subtle ways, much of the recent writing appearing under the accelerationist banner seems to link or merge these two distinct understandings of acceleration, as if to suggest that the impulse to "accelerate the process" (to quote Deleuze and Guattari's innovation of Nietzsche) would naturally accompany the perception that the defining feature of contemporary capitalism is its accelerative impact. But the two accelerationisms may not be that connected, except inasmuch as enthusiasm about the latent political potential of new technologies tends to incubate with greater frequency and fervor among those who imagine that the ever-increasing speed of some of those technologies constitutes the hallmark of our age.

4 Kern, The Culture of Time & Space, 1880-1918 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983).

7 The claim that acceleration, in the descriptive and intransitive sense, characterizes and even defines the current phase of capitalist development, goes largely unscrutinized in accelerationist discourse. It might seem incontrovertible to assume that technical changes in communications devices have dramatically increased or intensified the pace of commercial and social exchange over the course of twenty years (though it is worth observing that from the perspective of transportation technologies those years do not seem equally characterized by acceleration). Still, it does not follow that ours is an age of acceleration. On the face of it, one might as plausibly define the current communications landscape in terms of information glut, the collapse of temporal boundaries, or the further annihilation of space by time. Or one might reasonably compare our own experiences and perceptions of simultaneity, instantaneity, velocity, and temporal compression to those of North America and Western Europe a century earlier, when (as Stephen Kern argued influentially in The Culture of Time and Space ) new thresholds and standards of speed prompted revolutionary talk in such diverse fields as music, literature, physics, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. Yet the assumption that life is accelerating beyond recognition in distinctive, rule-changing, barrier-breaking ways dominates cultural and political criticism.

5 Taylor, Speed Limits: Where Time Went and Why Have So Little Left (New Haven: Yale University Press (...)

8 Such an assumption is shared by both the giddy accelerationists who embrace current developments and the despondent voices on the anti-Promethean left who mourn them. Mark C. Taylor's Speed Limits: Where Time Went and Why We Have So Little Left (2014) appeared as if on cue to defend accelerationism against the charge of having created a straw-man version of the miserabilist and nostalgic left. Taylor, a religious studies scholar at a major U.S. university, offers an oddly simplistic account of the history of his subject, but his conviction that the last few decades have witnessed "a pace of change...accelerated" beyond both precedent and expectation - and his impulse to substantiate that conviction by pointing to the speed of new communications media - undoubtedly resonates with many humanist readers.

6 Max Weber and Norbert Elias stand at the head of this tradition, but more recent contributors inclu (...)

7 Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013) tr (...)

9 Are we, in fact, living in age of profound and straining temporal acceleration? Accelerationist criticism leaves this question largely unanswered, and historians have barely begun to provide the kinds of studies of the pace of life that would help contextualize our current predicament. Scholarly inquiry into temporal acceleration and compression has been dominated for a long time by German authors, and especially by sociologists (both empirical and theoretical). Hartmut Rosa's Social Acceleration (originally published in German in 2005) represents the most comprehensive recent attempt to analyze from a sociological perspective the proposition that accelerationists and Luddites take for granted: that technical speedups in production, communication, and circulation produce profound social changes. Rosa's conclusions reinforce the conventional hypothesis that things are speeding up all around us, as well as the familiar Marxist notion that "the contraction or annihilation of space by... acceleration is a constitutive feature of modernity." But by distinguishing the issue of how quickly something is produced, transported, or communicated from the larger experience of time moving quickly, he is able to make the familiar hypothesis seem less straightforward and self-evident. One of the virtues of Rosa's book is that it leaves the subject of acceleration more fragmented than it found it. Whether the new interest in accelerationist politics will provoke further inquiry into the phenomenology of speed and the multiple meanings of acceleration seems doubtful. Instead, accelerationism may help specify and clarify the historically shifting lines that divide the optimists among us from the pessimists.

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In May 2013, the British website Critical Legal Thinking published a "Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics," composed by a pair of young British intellectuals named Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams. Although dotted with expressions and allusions that reflected the authors' formal training in British doctoral programs, the text was not a scholarly project.

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#Accelerationism: how a fringe philosophy predicted the future we live in

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#Accelerationism: how a fringe philosophy predicted the future we live in

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The world is changing at dizzying speed – but for some thinkers, not fast enough. Is accelerationism a dangerous idea or does it speak to our troubled times?

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alf a century ago, in the great hippie year of 1967, an acclaimed young American science fiction writer, Roger Zelazny, published his third novel. In many ways, Lord of Light was of its time, shaggy with imported Hindu mythology and cosmic dialogue. Yet there were also glints of something more forward-looking and political. One plot strand concerned a group of revolutionaries who wanted to take their society "to a higher level" by suddenly transforming its attitude to technology. Zelazny called them the Accelerationists.

He and the book are largely forgotten now. But as the more enduring sci-fi novelist JG Ballard said in 1971, "what the writers of modern science fiction invent today, you and I will do tomorrow". Over the past five decades, and especially over the past few years, much of the world has got faster. Working patterns, political cycles, everyday technologies, communication habits and devices, the redevelopment of cities, the acquisition and disposal of possessions - all of these have accelerated. Meanwhile, over the same half century, almost entirely unnoticed by the media or mainstream academia, accelerationism has gradually solidified from a fictional device into an actual intellectual movement: a new way of thinking about the contemporary world and its potential.

Accelerationists argue that technology, particularly computer technology, and capitalism, particularly the most aggressive, global variety, should be massively sped up and intensified - either because this is the best way forward for humanity, or because there is no alternative. Accelerationists favour automation. They favour the further merging of the digital and the human. They often favour the deregulation of business, and drastically scaled-back government. They believe that people should stop deluding themselves that economic and technological progress can be controlled. They often believe that social and political upheaval has a value in itself.

Accelerationism, therefore, goes against conservatism, traditional socialism, social democracy, environmentalism, protectionism, populism, nationalism, localism and all the other ideologies that have sought to moderate or reverse the already hugely disruptive, seemingly runaway pace of change in the modern world. "Accelerationism is a political heresy," write Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian in their introduction to #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, a sometimes baffling, sometimes exhilarating book, published in 2014, which remains the only proper guide to the movement in existence.

Like other heresies, accelerationism has had generations of adherents, declared or otherwise: passing its ideas on to each other, refining some and renouncing others, communicating with each other in a private language, coalescing around dominant figures, competing to make the faith's next breakthrough, splitting into factions, burning out. There are, or have been, accelerationists from the United States, Canada, Britain, Germany, Italy and France. The movement has produced books, essays, journals, manifestos, blogs, social media battles - and cryptic, almost unclassifiable communiques combining dystopian fiction with a dizzying range of political, cultural and economic theory.

Occasionally, accelerationists have held teaching posts at universities. They have held sporadic public gatherings, in order to think out loud, argue and acquire converts. A few recorded fragments of these can be found on YouTube: dim footage of intense young people talking mesmerically about the future, often with electronic music and abstract visuals churning in the background, to sometimes baffled audiences in badly lit lecture rooms.

At any one time, there have probably only been a few dozen accelerationists in the world. The label has only been in regular use since 2010, when it was borrowed from Zelazny's novel by Benjamin Noys, a strong critic of the movement. Yet for decades longer than more orthodox contemporary thinkers, accelerationists have been focused on many of the central questions of the late 20th and early 21st centuries: the rise of China; the rise of artificial intelligence; what it means to be human in an era of addictive, intrusive electronic devices; the seemingly uncontrollable flows of global markets; the power of capitalism as a network of desires; the increasingly blurred boundary between the imaginary and the factual; the resetting of our minds and bodies by ever-faster music and films; and the complicity, revulsion and excitement so many of us feel about the speed of modern life.

"We all live in an operating system set up by the accelerating triad of war, capitalism and emergent AI," says Steve Goodman, a British accelerationist who has even smuggled its self-consciously dramatic ideas into dance music, via an acclaimed record label, Hyperdub. "Like it or not," argues Steven Shaviro, an American observer of accelerationism, in his 2015 book on the movement, No Speed Limit, "we are all accelerationists now."

elebrating speed and technology has its risks. A century ago, the writers and artists of the Italian futurist movement fell in love with the machines of the industrial era and their apparent ability to invigorate society. Many futurists followed this fascination into war-mongering and fascism. While some futurist works are still admired, the movement's reputation has never recovered.

One of the central figures of accelerationism is the British philosopher Nick Land, who taught at Warwick University in the 1990s, and then abruptly left academia. "Philosophers are vivisectors," he wrote in 1992. "They have the precise and reptilian intelligence shared by all who experiment with living things." Iain Hamilton Grant, who was one of Land's students, remembers: "There was always a tendency in all of us to bait the liberal, and Nick was the best at it."

Since Warwick, Land has published prolifically on the internet, not always under his own name, about the supposed obsolescence of western democracy; he has also written approvingly about "human biodiversity" and "capitalistic human sorting" - the pseudoscientific idea, currently popular on the far right, that different races "naturally" fare differently in the modern world; and about the supposedly inevitable "disintegration of the human species" when artificial intelligence improves sufficiently.

Other accelerationists now distance themselves from Land. Grant, who teaches philosophy at the University of the West of England, says of him: "I try not to read his stuff. Folk [in the accelerationist movement] are embarrassed. They think he's sounding like a thug. Anyone who's an accelerationist, who's reflective, does think: 'How far is too far?' But then again, even asking that question is the opposite of accelerationism." Accelerationism is not about restraint.

Even its critic Benjamin Noys concedes that the movement has an allure. "Accelerate is a sexy word," he says - not a common thing in philosophy. The determinedly transgressive artists Jake and Dinos Chapman are associates of the movement and longstanding Land collaborators. One of their frenzied, grotesque paintings is on the cover of his collected writings, Fanged Noumena, published in 2011, which contains some of accelerationism's most darkly fascinating passages. Earlier this year, secondhand copies of the paperback, which is now being reprinted, were on sale on Amazon for £180.

The manic presidency of Donald Trump has been seen as the first mainstream manifestation of an accelerationist politics

In our politically febrile times, the impatient, intemperate, possibly revolutionary ideas of accelerationism feel relevant, or at least intriguing, as never before. Noys says: "Accelerationists always seem to have an answer. If capitalism is going fast, they say it needs to go faster. If capitalism hits a bump in the road, and slows down" - as it has since the 2008 financial crisis - "they say it needs to be kickstarted." The disruptive US election campaign and manic presidency of Donald Trump, and his ultra-capitalist, anti-government policies, have been seen by an increasing number of observers - some alarmed, some delighted - as the first mainstream manifestation of an accelerationist politics. In recent years, Noys has noticed accelerationist ideas "resonating" and being "circulated" everywhere from pro-technology parts of the British left to wealthy libertarian and far-right circles in America. On alt-right blogs, Land in particular has become a name to conjure with. Commenters have excitedly noted the connections between some of his ideas and the thinking of both the libertarian Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel and Trump's iconoclastic strategist Steve Bannon.

"In Silicon Valley," says Fred Turner, a leading historian of America's digital industries, "accelerationism is part of a whole movement which is saying, we don't need [conventional] politics any more, we can get rid of 'left' and 'right', if we just get technology right. Accelerationism also fits with how electronic devices are marketed - the promise that, finally, they will help us leave the material world, all the mess of the physical, far behind."

To Turner, the appeal of accelerationism is as much ancient as modern: "They are speaking in a millenarian idiom," promising that a vague, universal change is close at hand. Noys warns that the accelerationists are trying to "claim the future".

n some ways, Karl Marx was the first accelerationist. His Communist Manifesto of 1848 was as much awestruck as appalled by capitalism, with its "constant revolutionising of production" and "uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions". He saw an ever more frantic capitalism as the essential prelude to the moment when the ordinary citizen "is at last compelled to face ... his real conditions of life" and start a revolution.

Yet it was in France in the late 1960s that accelerationist ideas were first developed in a sustained way. Shaken by the failure of the leftwing revolt of 1968, and by the seemingly unending postwar economic boom in the west, some French Marxists decided that a new response to capitalism was needed. In 1972, the philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari published Anti-Oedipus. It was a restless, sprawling, appealingly ambiguous book, which suggested that, rather than simply oppose capitalism, the left should acknowledge its ability to liberate as well as oppress people, and should seek to strengthen these anarchic tendencies, "to go still further ... in the movement of the market ... to 'accelerate the process'".

Two years later, another disillusioned French Marxist, Jean-François Lyotard, extended the argument even more provocatively. His 1974 book Libidinal Economy declared that even the oppressive aspects of capitalism were "enjoyed" by those whose lives the system reordered and accelerated. And besides, there was no alternative: "The system of capital is, when all's said and done, natural."

In France, both books were controversial. Lyotard eventually disowned Libidinal Economy as his "evil book", and moved on to other subjects. Deleuze and Guattari warned in their next book, A Thousand Plateaus, which was published in 1980 - as relatively benign postwar capitalism was being swept away by the wilder, harsher version of the Thatcher-Reagan era - that too much capitalist acceleration could suck society into "black holes" of fascism and nihilism.

Yet in Britain, Anti-Oedipus and Libidinal Economy acquired a different status. Like much of postwar French philosophy, for decades they were ignored by the academic mainstream, as too foreign in all senses, and were not even translated into English until 1983 and 1993 respectively. But, for a tiny number of British philosophers, the two books were a revelation. Iain Hamilton Grant first came across Libidinal Economy as a master's student at Warwick in the early 90s. "I couldn't believe it! For a book by a Marxist to say, 'There's no way out of this', meaning capitalism, and that we are all tiny pieces of engineered desire, that slot into a huge system - that's a first, as far as I know." Grant "got hooked". Instead of writing his dissertation, he spent an obsessive six months producing the first English translation.

Such exploratory philosophy projects were tolerated at Warwick in a way they were not at other British universities. Warwick had been founded in the 1960s as a university that would experiment and engage with the contemporary world. By the 1990s, its slightly isolated out-of-town campus of breeze-block towers and ziggurats looked worn rather than futuristic, but its original ethos lived on in some departments, such as philosophy, where studying avant-garde French writers was the norm. At the centre of this activity was a new young lecturer in the department, Nick Land.

Land was a slight, fragile-looking man with an iron gaze, a soft but compelling voice, and an air of startling intellectual confidence. "Lots of people are clever," says Grant, "but I've never witnessed anyone who could so forensically destroy a thesis." Robin Mackay, who also became one of Land's students, remembers: "Nick was always ready to say, 'Don't bother reading that.' But he had read it all!"

By the early 90s Land had distilled his reading, which included Deleuze and Guattari and Lyotard, into a set of ideas and a writing style that, to his students at least, were visionary and thrillingly dangerous. Land wrote in 1992 that capitalism had never been properly unleashed, but instead had always been held back by politics, "the last great sentimental indulgence of mankind". He dismissed Europe as a sclerotic, increasingly marginal place, "the racial trash-can of Asia". And he saw civilisation everywhere accelerating towards an apocalypse: "Disorder must increase... Any [human] organisation is ... a mere ... detour in the inexorable death-flow."

Land gave strange, theatrical lectures: clambering over chairs as he spoke, or sitting hunched over, rocking back and forth. He also spiced his pronouncements with black humour. He would tell lecture audiences, "I work in the field of The Collapse of Western Civilisation Studies." A quarter of a century on, some former Warwick philosophy students still talk about him with awe. Robin Mackay says, "I think he's one of the most important philosophers of the last 50 years."

But for a would-be guide to the future, Land was in some ways quite old-fashioned. Until the late 90s, he used an ancient green-screen Amstrad computer, and his initial Warwick writings contained far more references to 18th- and 19th-century philosophers - Friedrich Nietzsche was a fixation - than to contemporary thinkers or culture. The Warwick version of accelerationism did not crystallise fully until other radicals arrived in the philosophy department in the mid-90s.

Sadie Plant was one of them: a former Birmingham University lecturer in cultural studies, the study of modern popular culture. Mark Fisher, a former student of hers at Birmingham, was another incomer. He was jumpy and intense, while she was warm and approachable. For a time in the early 90s, she and Land were partners.

Like Land, Plant and Fisher had both read the French accelerationists and were increasingly hostile to the hold they felt traditional leftwing and liberal ideas had on British humanities departments, and on the world beyond. Unlike Land, Plant and Fisher were technophiles: she had an early Apple computer, he was an early mobile phone user. "Computers ... pursue accelerating, exponential paths, proliferating, miniaturising, stringing themselves together," wrote Plant in Zeroes and Ones, a caffeinated 1997 book about the development of computing. Plant and Fisher were also committed fans of the 90s' increasingly kinetic dance music and action films, which they saw as popular art forms that embodied the possibilities of the new digital era.

With the internet becoming part of everyday life for the first time, and capitalism seemingly triumphant after the collapse of communism in 1989, a belief that the future would be almost entirely shaped by computers and globalisation - the accelerated "movement of the market" that Deleuze and Guattari had called for two decades earlier - spread across British and American academia and politics during the 90s. The Warwick accelerationists were in the vanguard.

Yet there were two different visions of the future. In the US, confident, rainbow-coloured magazines such as Wired promoted what became known as "the Californian ideology": the optimistic claim that human potential would be unlocked everywhere by digital technology. In Britain, this optimism influenced New Labour. At Warwick, however, the prophecies were darker. "One of our motives," says Plant, "was precisely to undermine the cheery utopianism of the 90s, much of which seemed very conservative" - an old-fashioned male desire for salvation through gadgets, in her view. "We wanted a more open, convoluted, complicated world, not a shiny new order."

The Warwick accelerationists were also influenced by their environment. "Britain in the 90s felt cramped, grey, dilapidated," says Mackay, "We saw capitalism and technology as these intense forces that were trying to take over a decrepit body." To observe the process, and help hasten it, in 1995 Plant, Fisher, Land, Mackay and two dozen other Warwick students and academics created a radical new institution: the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU). It would become one of the most mythologised groups in recent British intellectual history.

he CCRU existed as a fully functional entity for less than five years. For some of that time, it was based in a single office in the tight corridors of the Warwick philosophy department, of which it was an unofficial part. Later, the unit's headquarters was a rented room in the Georgian town centre of nearby Leamington Spa, above a branch of the Body Shop.

For decades, tantalising references to the CCRU have flitted across political and cultural websites, music and art journals, and the more cerebral parts of the style press. "There are groups of students in their 20s who re-enact our practices," says Robin Mackay. Since 2007, he has run a respected philosophy publishing house, Urbanomic, with limited editions of old CCRU publications and new collections of CCRU writings prominent among its products.

The CCRU was image-conscious from the start. Its name was deliberately hard-edged, with a hint of the military or the robotic, especially once its members began writing and referring to themselves collectively, without a definite article, as "Ccru". In 1999, it summarised its history to the sympathetic music journalist Simon Reynolds in the terse, disembodied style that was a trademark: "Ccru ... triggers itself from October 1995, when it uses Sadie Plant as a screen and Warwick University as a temporary habitat ... Ccru feeds on graduate students + malfunctioning academic (Nick Land) + independent researchers ..."

Former CCRU members still use its language, and are fiercely attached to the idea that it became a kind of group mind. Land told me in an email: "Ccru was an entity ... irreducible to the agendas, or biographies, of its component sub-agencies ... Utter submission to The Entity was key."

These days, Iain Hamilton Grant is an affable, middle-aged professor who wears a waistcoat with a pen in the top pocket. Yet when I asked him to describe the CCRU, he said with sudden intensity: "We made up an arrow! There was almost no disharmony. There was no leisure. We tried not to be apart from each other. No one dared let the side down. When everyone is keeping up with everyone else, the collective element increased is speed."

The CCRU gang formed reading groups and set up conferences and journals. They squeezed into the narrow CCRU room in the philosophy department and gave each other impromptu seminars.Mackay remembers Steve Goodman, a CCRU member who was particularly interested in military technology and how it was transforming civilian life, "drawing yin and yang on the blackboard, and then talking about helicopters. It wasn't academic point-scoring - that was exactly what we had all got heartily sick of before the CCRU. Instead it was a build-up of shared references."

Grant explained: "Something would be introduced into the group. Neuromancer [William Gibson's 1984 novel about the internet and artificial intelligence] got into the philosophy department, and it went viral. You'd find worn-out paperbacks all over the common room."

The CCRU was image-conscious from the start. Its name was deliberately hard-edged, with a hint of the military

Land and Plant's offices in the department also became CCRU hubs. "They were generous with their time," said Grant, "And he had good drugs - skunk [cannabis]. Although it could be grim going in there, once he started living in his office. There would be a tower of Pot Noodles and underwear drying on the radiator, which he had washed in the staff loos."

The Warwick campus stayed open late. When the philosophy department shut for the night, the CCRU decamped to the student union bar across the road, where Land would pay for all the drinks, and then to each other's houses, where the group mind would continue its labours. "It was like Andy Warhol's Factory," said Grant. "Work and production all the time."

In 1996, the CCRU listed its interests as "cinema, complexity, currencies, dance music, e-cash, encryption, feminism, fiction, images, inorganic life, jungle, markets, matrices, microbiotics, multimedia, networks, numbers, perception, replication, sex, simulation, sound, telecommunications, textiles, texts, trade, video, virtuality, war". Today, many of these topics are mainstream media and political fixations. Two decades ago, says Grant, "We felt we were the only people on the planet who were taking all this stuff seriously." The CCRU's aim was to meld their preoccupations into a groundbreaking, infinitely flexible intellectual alloy - like the shape-shifting cyborg in the 1991 film Terminator 2, a favourite reference point - which would somehow sum up both the present and the future.

The main result of the CCRU's frantic, promiscuous research was a conveyor belt of cryptic articles, crammed with invented terms, sometimes speculative to the point of being fiction. A typical piece from 1996, "Swarmachines", included a section on jungle, then the most intense strain of electronic dance music: "Jungle functions as a particle accelerator, seismic bass frequencies engineering a cellular drone which immerses the body ... rewinds and reloads conventional time into silicon blips of speed ... It's not just music. Jungle is the abstract diagram of planetary inhuman becoming."

The Warwick accelerationists saw themselves as participants, not traditional academic observers. They bought jungle records, went to clubs and organised DJs to play at eclectic public conferences, which they held at the university to publicise accelerationist ideas and attract like minds. Grant remembers these gatherings, staged in 1994, 1995 and 1996 under the name Virtual Futures, as attracting "every kind of nerd under the sun: science fiction fans, natural scientists, political scientists, philosophers from other universities", but also cultural trend-spotters: "Someone from [the fashion magazine] the Face came to the first one."

Like CCRU prose, the conferences could be challenging for non-initiates. Virtual Futures 96 was advertised as "an anti-disciplinary event" and "a conference in the post-humanities". One session involved Nick Land "lying on the ground, croaking into a mic", recalls Robin Mackay, while Mackay played jungle records in the background. "Some people were really appalled by it. They wanted a standard talk. One person in the audience stood up, and said, 'Some of us are still Marxists, you know.' And walked out."

Even inside the permissive Warwick philosophy department, the CCRU's ever more blatant disdain for standard academic practice became an issue. Ray Brassier watched it happen. Now an internationally known philosopher at the American University in Beirut, between 1995 and 2001 he was a part-time mature student at Warwick.

"I was interested in the CCRU, but sceptical," Brassier says. "I was a bit older than most of them. The CCRU felt they were plunging into something bigger than academia, and they did put their finger on a lot of things that had started to happen in the world. But their work was also frustrating. They would cheerfully acknowledge the thinness of their research: 'It's not about knowledge.' Yet if thinking is just connecting things, of course it's exciting, like taking amphetamines. But thinking is also about disconnecting things."

Brassier says that the CCRU became a "very divisive" presence in the philosophy department. "Most of the department really hated and despised Nick - and that hatred extended to his students." There were increasingly blunt bureaucratic disputes about the CCRU's research, and how, if at all, it should be externally regulated and assessed. In 1997, Plant resigned from the university. "The charged personal, political and philosophical dynamics of the CCRU were irresistible to many, but I felt stifled and had to get out," she told me. She became a full-time writer, and for a few years was the British media's favourite digital academic, an "IT girl for the 21st century", as the Independent breathlessly billed her in October 1997.

In 1998, Land resigned from Warwick too. He and half a dozen CCRU members withdrew to the room above the Leamington Spa Body Shop. There they drifted from accelerationism into a vortex of more old-fashioned esoteric ideas, drawn from the occult, numerology, the fathomless novels of the American horror writer HP Lovecraft, and the life of the English mystic Aleister Crowley, who had been born in Leamington, in a cavernous terraced house which several CCRU members moved into.

"The CCRU became quasi-cultish, quasi-religious," says Mackay. "I left before it descended into sheer madness." Two of the unit's key texts had always been the Joseph Conrad novel Heart of Darkness and its film adaptation, Apocalypse Now, which made collecting followers and withdrawing from the world and from conventional sanity seem lethally glamorous.In their top-floor room, Land and his students drew occult diagrams on the walls. Grant says a "punishing regime" of too much thinking and drinking drove several members into mental and physical crises. Land himself, after what he later described as "perhaps a year of fanatical abuse" of "the sacred substance amphetamine", and "prolonged artificial insomnia ... devoted to futile 'writing' practices", suffered a breakdown in the early 2000s, and disappeared from public view.

"The CCRU just vanished," says Brassier. "And a lot of people - not including me - thought, 'Good riddance.'"

alf a dozen years later, at the University of Western Ontario in Canada, a mild-mannered political science master's student, Nick Srnicek, began reading a British blog about pop culture and politics called k-punk. K-punk had been going since 2003, and had acquired a cult following among academics and music critics for its unselfconscious roaming from records and TV shows to recent British history and French philosophy.

K-punk was written by Mark Fisher, formerly of the CCRU. The blog retained some Warwick traits, such as quoting reverently from Deleuze and Guattari, but it gradually shed the CCRU's aggressive rhetoric and pro-capitalist politics for a more forgiving, more left-leaning take on modernity. Fisher increasingly felt that capitalism was a disappointment to accelerationists, with its cautious, entrenched corporations and endless cycles of essentially the same products. But he was also impatient with the left, which he thought was ignoring new technology when it should have been exploiting it. Srnicek agreed. He and Fisher became friends.

The 2008 financial crisis, and the left's ineffectual, rather old-fashioned response to it - such as the short-lived street protests of the Occupy movement - further convinced Srnicek that an updated radical politics was needed. In 2013, he and a young British political theorist, Alex Williams, co-wrote a Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics. "Capitalism has begun to constrain the productive forces of technology," they wrote. "[Our version of] accelerationism is the basic belief that these capacities can and should be let loose ... repurposed towards common ends ... towards an alternative modernity."

What that "alternative modernity" might be was barely, but seductively, sketched out, with fleeting references to reduced working hours, to technology being used to reduce social conflict rather than exacerbate it, and to humanity moving "beyond the limitations of the earth and our own immediate bodily forms". On politics and philosophy blogs from Britain to the US and Italy, the notion spread that Srnicek and Williams had founded a new political philosophy: "left accelerationism".

Two years later, in 2015, they expanded the manifesto into a slightly more concrete book, Inventing the Future. It argued for an economy based as far as possible on automation, with the jobs, working hours and wages lost replaced by a universal basic income. The book attracted more attention than a speculative leftwing work had for years, with interest and praise from intellectually curious leftists such as the Labour MP Jon Cruddas and the authors Paul Mason and Mike Davis.

Yet the actual word accelerationism did not appear in the book. "We've given up on the term now," Srnicek told me. "It's been too popularised. And we don't just want everything to go faster, anyway. Arguing for a shorter working week is arguing for people's lives to slow down."

The 2013 manifesto had mentioned Land's earlier version of accelerationism in passing, describing it as "acute" and "hypnotising", but also "myopic" and "confused". When Srnicek and I met - appropriately, he chose a futuristic public space: a cafe in the angular new extension to Tate Modern - I asked how he regarded Land and the CCRU's work now. "Land's stuff is a valid reading of Deleuze and Guattari," he began politely. "But the inhumanism of it all ... And I'm not sure if returning to the CCRU's texts is that interesting - all that word-play ... Using the word 'cyber' seems very 90s."

I asked Land what he thought of left accelerationism. "The notion that self-propelling technology is separable from capitalism," he said, "is a deep theoretical error."

fter his breakdown, Land left Britain. He moved to Taiwan "early in the new millennium", he told me, then to Shanghai "a couple of years later". He still lives there now. "Life as an outsider was a relief." China was also thrilling. In a 2004 article for the Shanghai Star, an English-language paper, he described the modern Chinese fusion of Marxism and capitalism as "the greatest political engine of social and economic development the world has ever known". At Warwick, he and the CCRU had often written excitedly, but with little actual detail, about what they called "neo-China". Once he lived there, Land told me, he realised that "to a massive degree" China was already an accelerationist society: fixated by the future and changing at speed. Presented with the sweeping projects of the Chinese state, his previous, libertarian contempt for the capabilities of governments fell away.

Back in less revolutionary Britain, Land's Chinese journalism, a strange amalgam of pro-government propaganda, PR hyperbole, and wild CCRU imagery - "At World Expo 2010 Shanghai ... parallel tracks melt together, into the largest discrete event in world history" - went either unnoticed or pointedly ignored during the 2000s and early 2010s. Among the steadily rising number of people with an interest in accelerationism, there was a feeling that Land had taken the philosophy in inappropriate directions.

Other members of the Warwick diaspora made less controversial accommodations with the modern world. Suzanne Livingston, a former CCRU member, joined the international branding agency Wolff Olins, and used PhD work she had done at Warwick on robotics and artificial intelligence to help technology corporations such as Sony and Ericsson. Steve Goodman set up the electronic music label Hyperdub in 2004, and began releasing skeletal, ominous dubstep records, by the lauded south London artist Burial among others, sometimes with accelerationist messages deep within. "It's like an onion," he says. "Our audience are welcome to peel off as many layers as they want - some will make their eyes water, so we don't force feed."

Between 2002 and 2014, Goodman also lectured in music culture at the University of East London (UEL), which, along with Goldsmiths College in south London, is a frequent employer of former CCRU members. "The Warwick lot are still a group of friends, devoted and loyal to each other," says a former UEL colleague of Goodman's. "That's the good way of putting it. The other way is to say that the CCRU cult thing never stopped."

Whether British accelerationism is a cult or not, Robin Mackay is at the centre of it. Besides publishing its key texts through Urbanomic, he has kept in touch with most of his former Warwick comrades, even Land, who he has known, and often defended, for 25 years. But Mackay is a less unsettling presence. Forty-three now, he has lived for a decade in a plain village in inland Cornwall. He met me at the nearest station, wearing a severe black shirt and playing complicated techno on his car stereo, with one of his children in the back.

In the living room of his half-renovated cottage, blinds down against the lovely spring day, Mackay talked about accelerationism and its serpentine history for hours, smoking throughout - an old CCRU habit - and blinking slowly between his long sentences, so deliberately and regularly you could see him thinking. Near the end, he said: "Accelerationism is a machine for countering pessimism. In considering untapped possibilities, you can feel less gloomy about the present." Mackay said he had experienced periods of depression. His close friend, Mark Fisher, who also had depression, took his own life this January.

Towards the end of his life, Fisher was increasingly preoccupied by the idea that Britain was not heading towards some great leap forward, but stasis. For all the freneticism of modern life, in some ways even the most developed countries still live in the opposite of accelerated times: the same parties seemingly perpetually in power; the same sluggish capitalism, still struggling for momentum a decade after the financial crisis; the same yearnings for the good old days, expressed by elderly Brexit voters and nostalgic leftists alike.

Even the thinking of the arch-accelerationist Nick Land, who is 55 now, may be slowing down. Since 2013, he has become a guru for the US-based far-right movement neoreaction, or NRx as it often calls itself. Neoreactionaries believe in the replacement of modern nation-states, democracy and government bureaucracies by authoritarian city states, which on neoreaction blogs sound as much like idealised medieval kingdoms as they do modern enclaves such as Singapore.

In 2013, Land wrote a long online essay about the movement, titled with typical theatricality "The Dark Enlightenment", which has become widely seen as one of neoreraction's founding documents. Land argues now that neoreaction, like Trump and Brexit, is something that accelerationists should support, in order to hasten the end of the status quo. Yet the analyst of accelerationism Ray Brassier is unconvinced: "Nick Land has gone from arguing 'Politics is dead', 20 years ago, to this completely old-fashioned, standard reactionary stuff." Neoreaction has a faith in technology and a following in Silicon Valley, but in other ways it seems a backward-looking cause for accelerationists to ally themselves with.

Without a dynamic capitalism to feed off, as Deleuze and Guattari had in the early 70s, and the Warwick philosophers had in the 90s, it may be that accelerationism just races up blind alleys. In his 2014 book about the movement, Malign Velocities, Benjamin Noys accuses it of offering "false" solutions to current technological and economic dilemmas. With accelerationism, he writes, a breakthrough to a better future is "always promised and always just out of reach".

In 1970, the American writer Alvin Toffler, an exponent of accelerationism's more playful intellectual cousin, futurology, published Future Shock, a book about the possibilities and dangers of new technology. Toffler predicted the imminent arrival of artificial intelligence, cryonics, cloning and robots working behind airline check-in desks. "The pace of change accelerates," concluded a documentary version of the book, with a slightly hammy voiceover by Orson Welles. "We are living through one of the greatest revolutions in history - the birth of a new civilisation."

Shortly afterwards, the 1973 oil crisis struck. World capitalism did not accelerate again for almost a decade. For much of the "new civilisation" Toffler promised, we are still waiting. But Future Shock has sold millions of copies anyway. One day an accelerationist may do the same.

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Accelerationism is a range of Marxist and reactionary ideas in critical and social theory that propose that social processes, such as capitalist growth and technological change, should be drastically intensified to create further radical social change referred to as "acceleration".[1] The term also refers to the post-Marxist idea that because of capitalism's internal contradictions and instabilities which can jeopardize its growth, the abolition of the system and its class structures could be brought about by its acceleration.