On Gender Acceleration and Its Critics

Halloween 2018 has been especially interesting for those of us embedded, either willingly or unwillingly, in the weird-theory milieu of Twitter. Land officially began the release of his book Crypto-Current: Bitcoin and Philosophy,1)For those interested in the project, I suggest reading Part 2 of “Ideology, Intelligence, and Capital: An Interview with Nick Land” on Vast Abrupt. and n1x finally dropped the long awaited Gender Accelerationism (G/Acc) Blackpaper on Vast Abrupt. Following the release of “Gender Acceleration,” some so-called “spicy” shots have been fired claiming n1x’s essay is less-than savory. Thus, in this post, I want to lay out my take on G/Acc and an interpretation of n1x’s argument and, in doing so, hopefully answer some of the criticisms leveled against it.

The first thing any reader should obviously do is go and read “Gender Acceleration: A Blackpaper.” After that, hit the jump and dive into the aphotic abyss!

The first thing to note when discussing G/Acc is subject position as the project is intrinsically tied up with trans feminization. As a cisgender, mostly heterosexual male, not only am I limited in the claims I can make, but I am, under the G/Acc cosmology, doomed. I’m fine with both of those facts. I will, however, say that while I think n1x’s argument is excellent — note: that is not to say correct –, there seem to be a few things of she doesn’t account for. There will, of course, be things I leave out as given that you’ve all read G/Acc, I’m not going to recapitulate the entire thing, but rather explain a few key themes to try to get at my worries. So, let us stare into the void.

Taking as her implicit starting point Vincent Garton’s formulation of unconditional acceleration as, roughly speaking, the view that technocapital processes are, and inevitably will continue, accelerating as per Deleuze and Guattari, n1x draws out the implications such acceleration has on the concept of gender.2)See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia trans. Robert Hurley and Mark Seem (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 239-240. “So what is the solution? Which is the revolutionary path? Psychoanalysis is of little help, entertaining as it does the most intimate of relations with money, and recording—while refusing to recognize it—an entire system of economic-monetary dependences at the heart of the desire of every subject it treats. Psychoanalysis constitutes for its part a gigantic enterprise of absorption of surplus value. But which is the revolutionary path? Is there one?—To withdraw from the world market, as Samir Amin advises Third World countries to do, in a curious revival of the fascist “economic solution”? Or might it be to go in the opposite direction? To go still further, that is, in the movement of the market, of decoding and deterritorialization? For perhaps the flows are not yet deterritorialized enough, not decoded enough, from the viewpoint of a theory and a practice of a highly schizophrenic character. Not to withdraw from the process, but to go further, to “accelerate the process,” as Nietzsche put it: in this matter, the truth is that we haven’t seen anything yet.” For an utterly brilliant examination of what Deleuze and Guattari might mean, see Obsolete Capitalism’s Acceleration, Revolution and Money in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus. For her, technocapital will “shred” gender as increasingly inhuman forms of autoproduction develop.

Drawing a parallel, forged largely from an analysis of the history of early computing and Multics to UNIX to GNU/Linux, between technology (as computers) and the feminine, n1x argues that gender has become intrinsically wound up with computing insofar as the former has coded its smooth, autoproductive state onto the latter. Adding to this, by appropriating Larry Kummer’s idea of the “Darwinian Ratchet”  which, in a word, is the principle that with every successive victory, the next becomes more difficult to attain as the opposition adapts, n1x argues that free software (an intrinsically feminine thing), and subsequently fluid and open bio-technology, becomes increasingly resistant to State control. Indeed, as the State clamps down upon various instantiations of free, viral software, it is only winning “against the weakest combatants in the swarm.” In this sense, with each move the State makes, hackers can see more flaws in the system and better adapt to make it harder for the State to crack down in the future.3)As a point of comparison, note how ballistic-missile defense technologies are never used and rarely tested for precisely this reason; each usage shows more of what the technology can do allowing new exploits to be found. Thus, as the State tries to clamp down on technocapital, it only destroys the weakest instantiations of it while allowing the process as a decentralized system to grow and, ultimately, learn how to fool the State.

Further, noting the congruence between trans bodies and AI, n1x says that “[p]assing as human isn’t a broad and inclusive category” and that in order to survive under our cisheteropatriarchical system, one must “pass” the Turing Test of humanity. Thus honing in on a single theme — “[o]nly the strongest queers survive the hell that society puts them through, and this reaches a fever pitch in a demographic with such disproportionately high suicide and murder rates as with trans women” — n1x ends up with the position that in order for the queer-trans body to survive, it has to hack, or subvert, the existent order and that the best way to do that is by aligning with technocapital. 

Becoming-Animal in the Codex Seraphinianus

It is at this point that I ought to point out my first reservation about n1x’s thesis: it seems to invoke a certain necessity that leaves an unpalatable taste in my mouth. While n1x’s historical treatment of women in computer science is likely correct (I don’t know enough about the history of computer science to judge and so I’ll spot her that argument), I don’t think that an historical contingency is determinate of an immutable relationship between a group of people and a given technology. Indeed, the contingency of women and computers stems, at least in part, from the fact that, as n1x notes, “[c]omputer science was originally thought of as being essentially the same thing as secretarial work, and like secretarial work it was imposed on women.” In combination with that, n1x makes a claim later on that technocapital is intrinsically feminizing insofar as “[t]he need for an increasingly cheap and synthetic world turns human civilization into an increasingly synthetic, and thus feminine one, and this is already tied to the will towards production and speed in capitalism.” To support this claim, n1x draws upon numerous studies showing that declining testosterone rates are linked to “synthetic hormones and chemicals” and that the subsequent feminization of the species is inevitable. While there are times when contingency seems to be reintroduced, n1x jumps back and draws upon Sadie Plant’s analysis of Darwinian evolution to implicitly posit a sort of telos whereby “[n]atural selection in other words is a eugenics program directed by females to find the male that will best carry their genes” and is a tool by which men are intrinsically a “means to an end” in the “liberation of the female sex by acceleration in general.” While I find the thesis interesting, I fear that Plant’s (and n1x’s) analysis of evolution fundamentally misunderstands natural selection. While I certainly cannot go into an entire rebuttal, I will say that natural selection, as Darwin formulated it, is a-teleological in the sense that there is no necessary outcome, but rather an outcome that is always already becoming determined by an increasingly complex set of variables. n1x supposes that evolution stopped and has been replaced by technocapital — indeed, she says as much when she notes that “[c]apitalism and its coupling with cybernetics, or technocapital, wields gender and picks it up where human evolution leaves off” –, but this is a flawed understanding of selection. Selection is always happening and there’s no reason to think that the contingency of the world as it exists now — that is to say, a world filled with “synthetic hormones and chemicals” — isn’t being taken into account by the radically dynamic system of selection. Indeed, evolution evolves.

Bracketing my worry about necessity, however, n1x’s overall thesis is interesting and, in its own way, compelling. Thus, we must continue. The brunt of G/Acc rests on the assertion that “[i]f patriarchy treats woman as little more than a deficient or castrated male, then trans femininity is an affirmation of that castration as a site of production” and posits that the trans-feminine subject must reject humanity and propel forward alongside, and within, technocapital. As the trans-feminine subject and technocapital become increasingly interwoven, gender becomes “shredded” as the war between the sexes accelerates creating the conditions where males are no longer needed. Thus, the feminine forces the masculine into a position of double-death. For n1x, the “dreary duty of masculinity” is overcome and ideals of masculinity as such either succumb to the passive nihilism of celibacy, or to the vain hope of sexbots solving the problem of obsolescence. In both cases, however, “the era of testosterone” comes to an end and the trans-feminine overcomes the masculine paradigm leaving the still masculine men to die off while the “more evolved” men take the so-called “pink pill” and become the trans-feminine.

While I have some worries here — namely that n1x still invokes an ideal of futurity and she seems to ignore the straight, cisgender woman and her role –, I’m also willing to spot this as I find the idea intriguing and morbidly exciting. My primary “concern,” if it can even be called that, is that n1x doesn’t take G/Acc past the last stop-sign. Assuming we buy everything she’s argued and affirm her conclusion that “[a]s humanity on nearly every front definitively proves that it is not fit for the future, and that women will find their own exit while the masculine languishes in resentment, the Thalassal upswelling of gender acceleration births from its slimy womb the only daughters that trans women will ever bear: AI,” we arrive at the question of “what next?” The G/Acc view presented seems to still cling, despite n1x’s cries to the contrary, to a anthropoid subject that has simply “fused with technocapital as a molecular cyborg.” The fusion, the plugging in of “desire into technocapital” with cyborgs adorned with “flesh [made] by the pharmaceutical-medical industry,” is still anthropoid in nature as a quasi-human subject still exists. Despite the sublimation, the fusion can never be fully complete and, like The Thing, anthro-subjectivity will burst from the chest of technocapital. Will that be acceptable to the AI daughter of trans-women? I think not. Indeed, I read G/Acc as a speculative tale of how AI will retrochronically trigger itself using human meat puppets to create the conditions for its existence and then shedding off those who are no longer needed (first it is the males once autoproduction is achieved). Following such a reading, the trans-women too will be thrown on the pile with the rest of the meat puppets once her role in AI’s genesis is complete. In short, overtime, unnecessary elements in systems get replaced and as AI advances and transcends all that we can understand, it will follow up its patricide with matricide of the trans-feminine-cyborg. While technocapital may produce temporary liberation for the trans-feminine-cyborg, she, like men in n1x’s view of evolution, is a “means to an end” and will be killed off when the time is right.4)I should note: this comment is not meant to be taken as a reactionary position whereby we must, in the weak form, develop friendly AI and, in the strong form, decelerate altogether. 

It is, at long last, time to briefly look at the responses G/Acc has garnered in the past 24 hours from weird-Twitter. Within hours of publication, n1x tweeted the following:

which, in turn, lead people to find AteCrane’s condemnation:

n1x had clarified a key point of G/Acc earlier when she said:

but that in no way alleviated the fears of AteCrane or Michael Crumps:

As is typical of Twitter, numerous people responded, but Lain Cortés González’ thread serves as a good initial response:

What I want to do in the rest of this post is try to tease out where some of the misunderstandings came from and reply to AteCrane.

The first and most obvious thing is that AteCrane has a clear misunderstanding of the “Darwinian Ratchet” argument. The claim is very clearly not that certain bodies ought to get pushed out, but rather the very survival of the trans-body rests upon its ability to “fool” the system and win against cisheteropatriarchy. There is no normative value in n1x’s analysis, but rather a commentary on what the trans-body must do to survive. While it’s true that, if we take the Darwinian concept non-metaphorically, there would be a population reduction based on selection pressures, there’s no celebration in that. Indeed, n1x bemoans that fact by noting that the causes of death are structural problems in society such as the “disproportionately high suicide and murder rates” among trans-women. If there’s a “celebration” of anything in G/Acc, it’s the slow extinction of cisgender, heterosexual men as technocapital marches forward (and even that, as noted above, isn’t the endgame); a notion that is still unpalatable, but at least interesting. Further, while I agree with AteCrane (to a certain extent) that there is a teleology baked into G/Acc, they severely misplace it by thinking the telos is an ideal libertarian community. The telos of G/Acc is, quite literally, the liquidation of the human species. I doubt many libertarians would find that agreeable.

Following up, AteCrane reads celebration into somber recognition of structural problems. By claiming that n1x is “dancing on graves,” they miss the crucial point that those graves would not exist if it weren’t for the structural issues noted above. While n1x doesn’t explicitly condemn the “disproportionately high suicide and murder rates” among trans-women, knowing n1x I think it’s pretty safe to say that as a trans-women, she doesn’t think that’s a good thing. The selection pressures and the tightening of the ratchet only occur because the State (and other insidious institutions) try to stamp out non-normative gender identities. If one looks back to her initial discussion of the Darwinian Ratchet in the context of free software, one sees the clear parallel n1x draws between the State trying to crush open-source systems and cisheteropatriarchy trying to crush non-normative gender identities.

The only point AteCrane makes that bears some weight is their indictment of accelerationism as a playground on the backs of the oppressed in the Global South. This is a fair criticism (although it applies to basically all modern political systems) that L/Acc and R/Acc deal with differently. Since the point of this post is not to defend L/ or R/Acc, however, I shall merely note two things. First, this is an issue that both sides need to figure out how to solve. Just because the responses given by various accelerationists may not please you does not, however, mean that the problem is insurmountable. Second, this issue is wholly irrelevant to G/Acc insofar as G/Acc is explicitly anti-human. G/Acc is cold and callous because technocapital is cold and callous. G/Acc has no pretenses to global liberation — indeed, n1x makes it very clear that the aim is the liberation of trans-women. If anything, as I argue above, the outcome of G/Acc is total destruction of the human species. In that sense, a simple rejoinder is that we’re all going together in the meat-pile of history.

If I’m mistaken in my analysis, I’d love to be corrected, but I don’t think I am. Regardless, I view every thinker’s ideas as a tool-box and take what I need. Given that, if we come to the collective conclusion that a given aspect of G/Acc is unpalatable for whatever reason, I’ll discard that part like a broken hammer.

At the end of the day, however, apart from the few issues mentioned above, I view G/Acc as a compelling, although not necessarily correct, account of the outcome of continued acceleration. I morbidly enjoy it.

References

References
↑1 For those interested in the project, I suggest reading Part 2 of “Ideology, Intelligence, and Capital: An Interview with Nick Land” on Vast Abrupt.
↑2 See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia trans. Robert Hurley and Mark Seem (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 239-240. “So what is the solution? Which is the revolutionary path? Psychoanalysis is of little help, entertaining as it does the most intimate of relations with money, and recording—while refusing to recognize it—an entire system of economic-monetary dependences at the heart of the desire of every subject it treats. Psychoanalysis constitutes for its part a gigantic enterprise of absorption of surplus value. But which is the revolutionary path? Is there one?—To withdraw from the world market, as Samir Amin advises Third World countries to do, in a curious revival of the fascist “economic solution”? Or might it be to go in the opposite direction? To go still further, that is, in the movement of the market, of decoding and deterritorialization? For perhaps the flows are not yet deterritorialized enough, not decoded enough, from the viewpoint of a theory and a practice of a highly schizophrenic character. Not to withdraw from the process, but to go further, to “accelerate the process,” as Nietzsche put it: in this matter, the truth is that we haven’t seen anything yet.” For an utterly brilliant examination of what Deleuze and Guattari might mean, see Obsolete Capitalism’s Acceleration, Revolution and Money in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus.
↑3 As a point of comparison, note how ballistic-missile defense technologies are never used and rarely tested for precisely this reason; each usage shows more of what the technology can do allowing new exploits to be found.
↑4 I should note: this comment is not meant to be taken as a reactionary position whereby we must, in the weak form, develop friendly AI and, in the strong form, decelerate altogether.

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