Issue 000 accentuates and renders visible the divergences and unexpected overlaps between “tachophobia” (fear of speed) and “tachomania” (obsession with speed), in the ongoing debates over accelerationism that have followed the publication of Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’ “#Accelerate: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics”. Beginning with Benjamin Noys’s assertion that accelerationism contains “too much substance,” that it “accepts an image of substance… that integrates… with [the] world in a way that allows it little critical access to the question of substance,” we then proceed to Ivan Niccolai’s response, in which he argues that, nevertheless, “This does not mean ignoring the class and power relations of capitalism, which Noys assumes accelerationism is guilty of.” The third article is Tom McGlynn’s “genealogy of the generic”, which reconsiders “long-held philosophical suppositions of difference and similarity, representation and abstraction and immanence and transcendence, as set forth in contemporary continental philosophy by thinkers such as Nietzsche and Deleuze.” Rather than ending there, however, McGlynn goes further, considering their relation to Laruelle’s Non-Philosophy and Non-Standard Aesthetics considered “through specific examples in historical and contemporary art”. In the fourth article, Sam Sackeroff focuses on Robert Rauschenberg’s printed works of the 1960’s, asking what a politically engaged aesthetic project premised on reform might look like. The issue includes a review of CCRU: Writings 1997-2003 (Time Spiral Press 2015) by Chris Shambaugh.
Later contributions to Issue 000 will cover additional elements of the post-accelerationist exegesis, including xenofeminism and cyberfeminism, algorithmic decisionism and democratic technoculture, and several contributions towards an accelerationism glossary. These will appear as part of an ongoing roll-out of new pieces, over the course of Spring 2015.
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