asemic horizon

A barely-even-there distinction needs to be drawn between axiom and axiomatics. This distinction is best seen when the axiom hasn’t degerminated yet, that is, when it plays the role of a desideratum. Then, desiderics makes itself known as the abstractmost concupiscence that desiderata try their best to infuse with definite terminality. But if an axiom is a degerminated desideratum, then axiomatics must likewise strip the germinality present in the raw capacity for violence in desiderics. To temporarily oversimplify for dramatic effect: it must obscure the structural sources of this violence so it appears to be purely terminal.

Axiomatics therefore enforce a kind of (partial, conditional) “pure terminality” of axioms on us. Axiomatikos, as you might remember, are police officers; the law they wield is a pure terminal, abstracted away from the social desiderics that gives rise to police power. Note how this implies that police power is indeterminate: any fool will tell you to cooperate with the cops and then push for determination through the courts. The law before a judge is not the same as the law before a cop; a judge must make the application of the law determinate by stripping it of its pure terminality. In the eyes of a judge, the law has an underlying hermeneutical current that must escape the axiomatikos. Legal hermeneutics must add new germinal nodes to the circuit of law enforcement without slipping into general desiderics.

When someone says “systems, not goals”, they mean “axiomatics, not desiderics”. But the barely-even-noticeable dance of germinal and terminal nodes almost necessarily escapes them. The phrase “systems-not-goals” is, after all, itself an axiomatic, albeit one with very high-dimensional terminals. The ensuing axiom of atelicity is, in its own way, the product of a degerminative transformation of “systems-not-goals”. Is it reversible? Can an utter lack of directional information be “redesiderated”? This, my repeating reading indicates, is how one gets to Deleuze’s rhizome — both the spectre that haunts the world and a desire no longer grounded in a negative.

It’s useful to ride this connection into the general polemic of accelerationism. There are disjoint camps staking a claim to this word, which makes reference to some fragment of a sentence from the D+G corpus. But why? Why would 2015-vintage Nick Land need these soixante-huitard connotations to articulate his universal darwinism? Why would Mark Fisher need to distance himself from the marxist dialectic of capitalism as a roaring contradiction? This is why (I gather): both universal darwinism and the marxist dialectic are powered by a negative propulsion — a “telic lack” — that just doesn’t vibe with acceleration. Land and Fisher alike need to tether themselves to a kind of Nietzschean life-affirmation that they’ve only learned to access through Deleuze.

Nowadays I tend to think this is wrong in almost every aspect. Fisher and Land deal, each in his way, with the challenge of atelicity in the contemporary social formation. They then imagine accelerationism as something to mow down this atelicity like a speeding car crashes into a goat. But any political problematic is powered by a desideric problematic. The problem is precisely to redesiderate atelicity. This is what I’m now calling germinal accelerationism.

(General axiology, as noted lately, suffered from the yawning gap between atelic genericity and totally telic (totatelic?) generality. It leaned into systems theories as a kind of transport medium and told passengers “if we gather all of our telic matter and place it inside this volcano, infinite bliss will eventually explode into the skies”. Germinal accelerationism is more of a fist, an already-there potential, as fragile as its pure punching power. The danger that a fist breaks down into its glass bones is matched by the danger of germinating onto desideric fields of unknown power. This is a fallible project.)