Dance and Die

Dance and Die: Obsolescence and Embedded Aesthetics of Acceleration Benjamin Noys The contemporary moment is a moment of acceleration. This might be taken as a typical piece of diagnosis, which would reflect on what Hartmut Rosa has called the ‘totalitarian’ dominance of social acceleration (2010: 9; Rosa 2013). I am concerned with something rather different. This is the development of new ‘accelerationist’ modes of thinking that attest to the power of acceleration as means to probe forms of knowledge and technology that might be re-purposed to generate a non-capitalist future. The contention is that we are not accelerating, or not accelerating enough. Mired in capitalist crisis we face the exhaustion of the utopian promise of acceleration that fed the avant-gardes of the twentieth century, from the Italian Futurists to the British Independent Group of the 1950s, and beyond. F. T. Marinetti proclaimed, in the first manifesto of Futurism, that ‘others who are younger and stronger will throw us in the wastebasket, like useless manuscripts. – We want it to happen!’ (Rainey et al 2009: 53). Acceleration belonged to the young, to those who could outpace their elders and render them obsolete. In our moment we witness the struggle to redeploy acceleration, to rework or reengineer the avant-garde ‘passion for the real’ (Badiou 2007), to return from the senility of capitalism in crisis to the (figural) youth of reinvention. I want to trace this struggle in terms of the aesthetic 291 Hopeless Youth! Apolitical Youth? figuration of acceleration in contemporary dance music. The accelerative nature of the form, often registered in increasing beats-perminute (bpm), makes dance music a signature aesthetic model for recapturing a ‘youthful’ passion for acceleration, and has been used as such by many of the theorists of accelerationism. Such claims for the necessity of ‘accelerationism’ are problematic. They rest often on accepting images of acceleration that are debateable and, for forms of thought aiming at the future, often evoke past accelerations (see Noys 2014). What goes missing in such accounts, as I will trace, is an awareness of the tension and friction necessary to any moment of acceleration. Nonetheless I want to trace this return of acceleration in the present moment as a symptomatic expression of a desire to transcend a capitalism that appears at once frantic and static. The seeming capitalist monopoly on acceleration feeds the need to extract or isolate new forms of acceleration that can be turned against capitalism. Gean Moreno (2013), in a recent editorial for the art-journal e-flux on ‘accelerationist aesthetics’, argues for an accelerationist aesthetics that offers the capacity for us to negotiate between ‘innovative cartographic exercises’ and ‘the drive to deliberately exacerbate nihilistic meltdowns.’ It is an aesthetics of acceleration that promises the capacity to explore and trace new forms of acceleration that can un-lock the present moment. To critically unpack these claims I want to use dance music as the test bed for discussions of accelerationism. My critical reconstruction examines three moments. The first is that of what we might call ‘classical accelerationism’. This refers to the work of Nick Land and his allies in the Cybernetic Culture Research Centre (CCRU) conducted during the 1990s at the University of Warwick. Land gave a provocative punk form to previous arguments for social acceleration as a means to puncture the limits of capitalism. The figurative element would be provided by the emergence of ‘Jungle’ or ‘drum and bass’, a genre of dance music developed in Britain from so-called ‘Rave’ and which used fast breakbeats (160–180 bpm) (see Noys 1995). The second moment is a step back to the emergence of Detroit techno in the early to mid-1980s and the solidification of techno as a genre. This self-conscious ‘Afro-Futurism’ (Eshun 2003) 292 Benjamin Noys Dance and Die: Obsolescence and Embedded Aesthetics of Acceleration aimed at generating a new aesthetics of acceleration that was explicitly post-industrial. Finally I consider interventions by contemporary accelerationists around current forms of dance music. Here we see the tension that persists in turning to the present moment to release forces of acceleration. The inhuman dance floor Nick Land and the CCRU articulated ‘classical accelerationism’ as the most radical endorsement of capitalist time as a time of acceleration, in the form of expanding value and the absorption of all elements of life under an inhuman marketisation. This moment emerged from 1970s theoretical currents, notably Deleuze and Guattari’s AntiOedipus (1972), and in Land’s work it gained a kind of resonance and accelerative force that deliberately aimed at a para- or anti-academic energisation (Reynolds 2010). Whereas Deleuze and Guattari stepped back from what they called deterritorialisation (1988: 160), riding the flux and flows unleashed by capitalism, Land argued the need to go further: Machinic revolution must therefore go in the opposite direction to socialistic regulation; pressing towards ever more uninhibited marketisation of the processes that are tearing down the social field, ‘still further’ with ‘the movement of the market, of decoding and deterritorialisation’ and ‘one can never go far enough in the direction of deterritorialisation: you haven’t seen anything yet’. (Land 2013) For Deleuze and Guattari ‘absolute deterritorialisation’ remained asymptotic – something to be converged on, but never reached. For Land it had already been realised, but only in the future – 2012, in fact. We should at this point note that this realisation is, in the language of the CCRU, hyperstitional (CCRU 1999), which is to say it is a performative fiction. The then present moment of the 1990s was 293 Hopeless Youth! Apolitical Youth? being infiltrated by cyber guerrillas from this realised absolute deterritorialisation. We had traces of this future – drugs, sci-fi, jungle, theory, biotech – that prefigured the meltdown to come: ‘as if,’ in Land’s words, ‘a tendril of tomorrow were burrowing back.’ (Land 2013) One of the key ‘tendrils of tomorrow’ was the post-rave speed-up of jungle and drum and bass (Fisher 2011). This intensification of the accelerative elements of dance culture resulted in ‘impending human extinction becomes accessible as a dance floor’, according to Land (2013). Not ‘Dance or Die’, but ‘Dance and Die’; the accelerative force of jungle or drum and bass instantiated the trace of our future inhuman state. The tendency of jungle tracks to sample sci-fi films such as The Terminator (Metalheads, ‘Terminator’ (1992)) or Predator 2 (Hyper on Experience, ‘Lord of the Null Lines (1993)) was read by Land and the CCRU as indicative of an emergent future in which the human would be dissolved into the flows of deterritorialised capitalism. Jungle was a ‘street’ futurism, a popular avant-garde, that in its ‘dark’ forms (extreme basslines, eerie or uncanny samples, and propulsive rush) figured ‘extinction’ through exhilaration. The combination of dance music with drugs rendered possible a practical anti-humanism – the disintegration of the ego under the forces and forms of drug and dance induced-states of dissolution. Far from the communal dreams of certain factions of rave culture, with the promise of new Dionysian collectives, the CCRU and Land pursued a studiedly nightmarish integration of the human with the machinic and technological. Instead of some neo-primitivism, this was a neo-futurism. This counter-mythology was just as much another mythology, and largely uninterested in tracing the political, social, and economic tensions of rave and post-rave dance culture (see Thornton 1995). The aim was to dissolve those tensions in an endorsement of the inhuman at the expense of any political claiming of rave in the name of collectivity. It is perhaps not surprising that such a theoretical tendency should extinguish itself. The logical outcome of such a set of beliefs was the disappearance of the human, as not only did the flows of capitalism not require humanity but also that a state of absolute 294 Benjamin Noys Dance and Die: Obsolescence and Embedded Aesthetics of Acceleration deterritorialisation had already been achieved. This is a variant of Marinetti’s logic of obsolescence. Instead of the heroism of Marinetti’s narrative, which requires new young ‘over-men’, in a Nietzschean vein, Land and the CCRU would be rendered obsolete by the turn-over of capitalist speed. The only subject left was this inhuman force of desire or the libidinal – identical with the ‘forces’ of capitalist production. Land and the CCRU deliberately operated as a vanishing mediator between the signs of the future and, they claimed, the realised future of acceleration. Of course that future did not arrive. At the same time the moment of jungle and drum and bass burned itself out. After the relative hegemony of this form post-rave dance culture underwent further fragmentations and returns to more ‘stable’ or conventional forms, such as UK Garage. This type of dance music slowed down to 130 bpm with 4/4 beats and returned to previous dance music, notably House, to craft a ‘soulful’ sound. It was accompanied by a return to an embrace of capitalist hedonism – champagne, smart clothes, designer labels, and the more conventional elements of club culture. The irony, considering Land’s arguments, was that this could be considered a much more capitalist form than jungle. The reply would no doubt be that this was the ideology of capital represented – the gentrification of the corrosive inhuman force of capital with the ‘human face’ of conspicuous consumption. The more painful irony was that jungle and drum and bass persisted as modes of nostalgia. It is consumed by the age group that was contemporary with it in the 1990s, in a similar mode to various other pop-cultural nostalgic events or gatherings. The DJs and artists still tour but the form, with some exceptions, largely remains frozen in that 1990s moment. This process is not unusual and familiar from the fate of many artistic avant-gardes, which begin from wanting to destroy museums and end-up by being collected by those museums. In the relatively more rapid turnover of pop culture this process is itself accelerated. The difficulty it raises is, however, for the attempt by Land and the CCRU to invest in the aesthetic of acceleration tied to this moment. With the future not arriving in the form they desired the substitution is of nostalgia for a future that did not happen. 295 Hopeless Youth! Apolitical Youth? Night drive thru Babylon Detroit techno emerged from that city in the early to mid-1980s. It was a deliberately accelerative aesthetics, speeding bpm from the previous forms of disco and house and stripping-out of the humanist residues that often dominated those forms – not least the voice. Instead of ‘soulful’ singing, or samples, Detroit techno tended to mechanised and repetitive sampling, or absenting the voice altogether. The singularity of its aesthetic invention lay in this welcoming of the ‘mechanisation’, or better ‘computerisation’, of the aesthetic. This has obviously been prefigured by Kraftwerk’s albums Man-Machine (1978) and Computer World (1981), which were hugely influential on Detroit techno (Cunningham 2010: 59). It mixed European influences, from electronic music pioneers like Kraftwerk, New Order, Depeche Mode, and others, with the Detroit funk of Parliament / Funkadelic. The apotheosis of the form, at least as I regard it, is the track ‘It is what it is’ (1988), by Rhythim is Rhythim’s (aka Derrick May). This was, as one semi-ironic description went at the time, ‘dance music with bleeps’. Retaining funk, the insistence of Detroit techno had the utopian, if not kitsch, elements of sci-fi futurism coupled to the dystopian fragmentation of the city-space (‘Night Drive Thru Babylon’, as the track by Model 500 had it). Detroit techno was a self-consciously post-Fordist and post-industrial music. The very coldness of techno and its equivocal embrace of deindustrialisation make it discomforting, if we consider the contemporary fate of Detroit. It also set out to ‘erase the traces’, to use Brecht’s phrase, of the city’s musical heritage, notably Motown. In Juan Atkins’s infamous words, the ‘originator’ of techno stated: berry gordy built the motown sound on the same principle as the conveyor belt at the ford plant. today the automobile plants use robots and computers to make their cars and I’m more interested in fords robots than gordy’s music. (Cosgrove 1988, in lower case in original) 296 Benjamin Noys Dance and Die: Obsolescence and Embedded Aesthetics of Acceleration Berry Gordy, founder of Motown, had been an automotive worker and his label was founded on Fordist principles: a production line sound with a range of interchangeable artists on the roster called in to perform (Cohn 1970: 111−113). This is literally visible in the Martha and the Vandellas promotional film for the song ‘Nowhere to Run’ (1965) which was made on the Ford production-line in 1965. This very strange film shows the group dancing through Ford’s paint shop and production line, being ogled or studiously ignored by the, predominantly African-American, workers. Detroit techno shifted to a post-industrial sound and mode of production, involving individual artists deploying technology, notably samplers and drum machines; as machines has replaced workers in the factories so machines replaced artists in music. Rather than rejecting this, as could be witnessed in the various forms of protest music and ‘blue-collar’ music of the 1970s (see Cowie 2010), Detroit techno seemed to celebrate the replacement of ‘variable capital’ (i.e. humans) by ‘constant capital’ (i.e. machines) at Ford. In this way it traced the mutating social space of Detroit – from the ‘white flight’ following the 1967 insurrection, the de-industrialisation that followed, and its own position in the suburban site of Belleville High, where Derrick May, Juan Atkins, and Kevin Saunderson met. The utopia present in techno is the dehumanised machinic-self integrated with a sci-fi future. Kodwo Eshun remarks ‘The cyborg fantasies of the Detroit techno producers, such as Juan Atkins and Derrick May, were used to both alienate themselves from sonic identity and to feel at home in alienation’ (2003: 296). The names of acts (‘Cybotron’, ‘Model 500’, ‘Drexciya’), labels (‘Transmat’, ‘Red Planet’), track titles (‘No UFOs’, ‘Skynet’, ‘Apollo’, ‘Alpha Centauri’, ‘Waveform2’), and cover imagery, index this sometimes kitsch and ironic ‘futurism’. This is not an unproblematic celebration. Derrick May, the leading figure of Detroit techno, known as ‘the innovator’, reflected in an interview: ‘factories are closing and people are drifting away’ says derrick, ‘the old industrial detroit is falling apart, the structures have collapsed. It’s the murder capital of america. six year olds carry guns and thousands of black 297 Hopeless Youth! Apolitical Youth? people have stopped caring if they ever work again. if you make music in that environment it can’t be straight music. in britain you have new order, well our music is the new disorder.’ (Cosgrove 1988, in lower case in original) In contrast to May’s claim, what is striking is how ordered this music feels. The insistence and regularity of techno is what seems to link it to the regularity of the machine. On the other hand, however, the registration of disorder suggests the conflict at work in the process of de-industrialisation. Techno is not simply the smooth registration of the passing into a ‘new order’, but the registration of collapsing structures. Again, a logic of obsolescence is at work. Where techno artists aimed to render Motown obsolete, by embracing the machine, they also operated as witnesses to the decline and crisis of the order of Fordism. The sci-fi elements attested to the displacement of labour and the attempt to render this as a utopian futurism that could escape the dystopia of Detroit. Many of the artists would move from Detroit to Europe, to Berlin or Amsterdam, to escape in their own version of flight from the crisis of capitalist labour. At the same time techno itself, as we saw with jungle and drum and bass, would be subject to similar forces. The genre would develop in various ways, but remains today only one strand in the fabric of electronic music and a minor one at that. What is also striking is how innovative the original recordings sound compared to later ‘developments’. The generic solidification of techno often has equivocal results, with a tendency to ‘freeze’ the form and so sapping the figural ‘energy’ released in the moment of its inception. Certainly there have been extremely inventive post-Detroit moments, from Berlin’s Basic Channel, with their fusion of dub and techno, to Frankfurt’s Mille Plateaux label, with its exploration of micro-techno of ‘clicks and cuts’. Despite this a certain formalisation seems to have resulted in a more involuted and self-conscious form of techno, which lacks the tense dynamism of that original moment (Lison 2012: 130). This formalisation also accounts for the sense that techno seems to lack the necessary energy to trace or inscribe a future. The original Afro-Futurism of Detroit techno probed the tension 298 Benjamin Noys Dance and Die: Obsolescence and Embedded Aesthetics of Acceleration of a future in which labour might seem to be disappearing into the streamlined and technological. The displacement of the city of Detroit from this process, its continuing abandonment by capital, suggests the energy of the original moment of Detroit techno is one of fear and anxiety at obsolescence, as well as the celebration of acceleration. It is this recognition of the threat of obsolescence that inscribes an aesthetic resistance to obsolescence. Stuttering GIFs Contemporary accelerationism returns to and modulates Nick Land’s schema. Whereas Land sought acceleration along the lines of capitalism and so risked dissolving into capitalist flows, contemporary accelerationist thinking poses acceleration against capitalism. In the influential ‘#Accelerate: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics’ (2013), Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams argue that Land’s belief is in capitalist speed alone and so he remains within ‘capitalist parameters’ (2013: 140). What is required is not speed, which is merely ‘a simple brain-dead onrush’, but acceleration as ‘an experimental process of discovery within a universal space of possibility.’ (Srnicek, Williams 2013: 140) The reason Srnicek and Williams have for objecting to Land is not only the danger of simply remaining within capitalist parameters, but also that an inertial and crisis-ridden neoliberalism has rescinded the dynamism of capitalism for the opaque mechanisms of speculative finance. We have been robbed of our future. The phenomenology of this second (or third) wave of accelerationism is still provided by dance music. Once, in this story, dance music provided an inventive form of musical accelerationism. In Mark Fisher’s characterisation, ‘While twentieth-century experimental culture was seized by a recombinatorial delirium, which made it feel as if newness was infinitely available, the twenty-first century is oppressed by a crushing sense of finitude and exhaustion.’ 299 Hopeless Youth! Apolitical Youth? (Fisher 2013a) This experimental culture obviously includes Detroit techno and jungle / drum and bass. Simon Reynolds (2013) argued that in the 1990s there was a ‘hardcore continuum’ in British Rave culture that traced an experimental line of flight from rave to jungle to drum and bass to early grime. This is adopted by Alex Williams (2013) to trace the accelerative possibilities of dance music. Williams, however, also adopts Simon Reynolds diagnosis of ‘Retromania’ (Reynolds 2011), which claims that contemporary music is parasitic on the past and can only produce pastiches of previous genres. The tension lies in the truncation of the hardcore continuum into the limit of repetition of past glories. Our moment is a nostalgia for a future that was once promised – ‘Today is the Tomorrow you were Promised Yesterday’, to use the title of a work by Victor Burgin. Retromania is, in Alex Williams’s (2013) formulation, the ‘pop-cultural logic of late neoliberalism.’ The difficulty of that argument is that while Land has a subject of acceleration – capitalism – and an aesthetics – jungle and drum and bass – contemporary accelerationism seems to lack both. If the present moment is static, then where is accelerationism to come from? This is evident in Mark Fisher’s recent discussion of juke / footwork – a form of Chicago ‘ghetto house’ at 155−165 bpm, with repetitive and often aggressive sampling (‘Fuck Dat’, being one example). It would seem that footwork continues the hardcore continuum and instantiates another acceleration, which would dispute the accelerationist characterisation of the present moment as a moment of stasis. To rescue this diagnosis, Fisher argues that while jungle ‘was dark, but also wet, viscous, and enveloping,’ footwork is ‘strangely desiccated’ (2013b). This dessication indicates a lack of propulsive movement. The signature metaphysic of forces for accelerationism is a liquid one, in a strange echo of Luce Irigaray (1985: 106–118), but without her attention to gender. In contrast, the illiquid form of footwork traces its expression of and resistance to the present moment. Fisher explains that footwork finds it image ‘in the bad infinity of the animated GIF, with its stuttering, frustrated temporality, its eerie sense of being caught in a time-trap’ (Fisher 2013b). If jungle was predictive of accelerative temporalities then footwork, according to Fisher, only captures the impasses of the 300 Benjamin Noys Dance and Die: Obsolescence and Embedded Aesthetics of Acceleration present moment. We suffer, in Alex Williams’s Ballardian coinage, a ‘chronosick feeling’ (2013; italics in original), a disorder of our experience of time. Unable to accede to the future, or even a faith or belief in the future, we instead can only live out the blockage of our present moment. If footwork registers the impasse it seems that for Fisher the techno musician Actress’s ‘solution to this impasse has always been to patch together something new from fragments of prematurely discarded science and sonic fictions’ (Fisher 2014). The Actress album Ghettoville maps, according to Fisher, a cartography of exclusion in probably appropriately paranoid style, considering the present moment. This mapping, however, also presents an act of sonic recovery that is not simply an instance of ‘retromania’ but, according to Fisher, the recovery of lost and encrypted energies. In particular, Fisher argues, the album’s registration of the various pains of social and political exclusion offers a means to externalise rage. The gesture is one that ‘recovers the future’ (Fisher 2014). Alex Williams makes a similar gesture. If jungle embodied the ‘Landian imaginary’ of ‘apocalyptic paranoid euphoria’ then today we lack this ‘alienating temporality’. (Williams 2013) The future is now predicated, for Williams (2013), on engagement with ‘the forward-propelling energies embodied in the best of UK dance music, its posthuman ingenuity, alien sonic vocabulary, and its manipulation of affect and impersonal desire.’ I leave aside the nationalism of this agenda, but the central point remains the same. While we exist in a moment of impasse it seems that some moments of nostalgia or ‘retromania’ might rescue or reconstruct lost energies. If there is no central aesthetic of acceleration, then we have to track, find, or construct the fleeting new moment of ‘forward-propelling energies’ that remain. For all the anti-nostalgic verve of accelerationism it is forced into a different form of nostalgia. We have to go back to the future, rescuing moments of aesthetic and political acceleration from their obliteration. 301 Hopeless Youth! Apolitical Youth? Obsolete futures Contemporary accelerationism brings to an extreme point of tension the contradiction between the logic of acceleration and the logic of obsolescence. What has been made obsolete is acceleration. This then requires the return to previous obsolete moments of acceleration to generate the promised future that might takes us beyond the miseries of the present moment and to restart acceleration. In aesthetic terms we are forced into a choice: not a choice between acceleration and retromania, but a choice to reactivate past moments of acceleration against the inertia of the present. We have to choose the correct retromania to overcome the manically stuttering present. This is not necessarily a problematic strategy per se. There are many instances of political and aesthetic strategies that return to the past to rework a possible future. The difficulty is that the terms in which contemporary accelerationism sets itself this task. By rendering the present as stasis, and by flattening out past moments into unequivocal signs of acceleration, the tensions of both are lost. In the first case, of the present moment, we have the contradictions and tensions of the various attempts to restart capitalist production and accumulation, as well as the uneven current distribution of the crisis. Failure to attend to this leaves contemporary accelerationism, with its dreams of re-organised technological production, in dangerous proximity to certain modernising ideologues of creative destruction. In aesthetic terms we have the lengthening history of the form, which gives a field into which to intervene, but can also constrain as well as facilitate new possibilities. Andrew Lison notes (2012: 130) that if we accept the hypothesis of the hardcore continuum then contemporary dance music forms often introspectively refers to and works in that continuum. In the case of contemporary accelerationism this leaves it believing in the accelerative continuum, while struggling to deal with these returns and reworkings. Often these returns don’t simply aim to kick-start new accelerations, but probe the limits of the hardcore continuum, tracing tensions within it. 302 Benjamin Noys Dance and Die: Obsolescence and Embedded Aesthetics of Acceleration In the second case, of the past, matters are also more complex than simply invoking past moments of acceleration. I have noted that Detroit techno registers the tensions and contradictions of the post-industrial within an endorsement of this acceleration. Instead of celebrating the post-industrial or streamlined technological future we find a playing with dread and anxiety. This is also true of Land and the CCRU’s use of jungle and drum and bass. The deliberate playing with dread in jungle, in so-called ‘dark jungle’, indicated the human on the brink of obsolescence. While Land and the CCRU could parlay this into celebration of human extinction, it also indicated their own anxiety at willingly entering into an extinction they also claimed was inevitable. Dread remained in the accession to the state of integrated machine and the promise of human obsolescence equivocated on the abandonment of the human. I think these tensions and pressures are registered in the work of Williams and Fisher. The difficulty is that they do not seem to be fully thought through and so remain disconnected. Too often we end with an opposition of acceleration and retromania rather than the more complex mapping their probing of the limits of the aesthetics of contemporary dance music implies. They attend to issues of nostalgia and the haunting of the present by moments of acceleration, but take these moments as given rather than as complex and equivocal constructs. Fisher’s mining of ‘hauntology’ (2013a), a term borrowed from Derrida (1998), suggests a more complex temporality of return and repetition, rather than the flat metaphor of the ‘hardcore continuum’. It suggests a temporality of what Freud called ‘deferred action’ (Nachträglichkeit) (Laplance, Pontalis 1988: 111–114). In this situation a present trauma exists through reactivating a past trauma, which only comes into being in the deferred act of reactivation. Similarly, rather than the simple search for past moments of acceleration that exist in simple purity we could suggest a more complex process of reactivation and reworking that interrupts the past and does not produce a ‘pure’ new, but a necessarily repetitive ‘new’. That contemporary accelerationists attend to dance music as a test-bed for debates about the future and acceleration is crucial, 303 Hopeless Youth! Apolitical Youth? that they flatten the tensions in their presentation is problematic. What is required is further attention to the logic of obsolescence, both at the level of aesthetic form and as an expression of the capitalist logic of the replacement of living labour by dead labour, with dead labour taking the form of machines and technology. In the first instance, of aesthetic form, an accelerative logic implies the necessity for a ‘built-in’ obsolescence, as a form exhausts its possibilities and, deliberately, tries to generate new paths beyond. That such paths often fall behind the initial intervention suggests the difficulty of sustaining such forms of aesthetic acceleration. In the second case, even in explicitly accelerationist aesthetics the potential obsolescence of the form and of labour is not simply welcomed, Rather there is always a registration of tension, even within the supposed ‘smoothness’ of the line of flight. Conclusion: friction Instead of the smooth presentation of acceleration, aesthetically or politically, the registration of a sense of friction is crucial to grasping the aesthetics of dance music, and to grasping an aesthetic and political analysis of the ‘stuttering’ of the present moment or, for that matter, of the past and future. Instead of metaphysical oppositions between wet (good) and dry (bad), accelerative (good) and static (bad), youth (good) and age (bad), the notion of friction implies the tension that refuses such oppositions. In the case of the aesthetic of dance music despite the fact that the UK government anti-rave legislation referred to ‘repetitive beats’, the actual construction of dance music depends on variations and differences between and within drum patterns, samples, synthesisers, and other elements. This is intensified when the music is used by a DJ to construct a set, where the friction between these elements becomes crucial. The ‘smooth’ tends exactly to the repetitive in the dull sense, whereas playing these elements off against each other generates alteration in repetition. In the case of speed acceleration to certain levels, such as 1,000 bpm, which has 304 Benjamin Noys Dance and Die: Obsolescence and Embedded Aesthetics of Acceleration been tried by various artists, results in indistinguishable noise. So, the felt sense of aesthetic acceleration depends on the slowing down and increasing of speed, the differences between elements that generates a productive friction. In terms of the wider doctrine of acceleration this necessity of friction, as irritant and interruption, also troubles the smooth acceleration figured in the liquid that is the preferred metaphysics of accelerationism. This friction is often most effective in being embedded within a logic of acceleration. In the case of techno attempts to turn towards an industrial or dark techno, which would highlight feelings of horror or anxiety, are noticeably less effective than the original techno forms. A track like Blawan’s ‘Why They Hide Their Bodies under My Garage?’ (2012), is suitably unpleasant, as its title sample implies. The difficulty here is that friction is brought forward into a deliberately irritant function, and so the tension is slackened. In the case of Detroit techno the friction emerged from the tension of the utopian and futurist impulses with the moments of deceleration or anxiety. Of course, as Andrew Lison (2012: 139) notes, nostalgia is a risk in considering dance music and another way to refuse to accede to a future. To laud the past is to occlude the sense of possibility as the inception of a form and to ignore the continuing possibilities of experimentation. Lison’s alternative of a ‘positive’ new in forms of microhouse – a minimal and experimental form of techno – is suggestive, but risks offering another version of acceleration (Lison 2012: 138). Friction is again dissolved, in Lison’s account, by a linear temporality of future invention that tries to overcome the danger of melancholia by refusing to mourn. Again we are called to embrace the future. Instead, I want to suggest that friction remains as the condition of acceleration and the new. An attention to the disruptive and the troubling, in both past and present forms, is essential to avoid the flattening that accelerationism risks. This might not be so ‘joyful’ or, for that matter, youthful, it suggests something of a ‘complex space of navigation’ that the very signifier ‘accelerationism’ forecloses. A critical reading of moments of ‘acceleration’ makes possible a thinking of future possibilities that is not simply anchored to 305 Hopeless Youth! Apolitical Youth? the recovery of acceleration. What I have stressed throughout is how the tensions or friction which conditions acceleration also attests to a mediation of social and political friction. Therefore a passage through this friction is not simply to insist on deceleration, which is to remain within the frame of accelerationism as its negative moment, but to offer new possibilities of reworking and reinvention. This is not to suggest a shining new future, the final return to youth or acceleration, but rather the difficult birth of the future as itself a moment of friction. • References Badiou, Alain 2007. The Century. Trans., with commentary and notes, Alberto Toscano. Cambridge: Polity. Cohn, Nick 1970. Awopbopaloobopalopbamboom: Pop from the Beginning. London: Paladin. Cosgrove, Stuart 1998. ‘Liner Notes to the Virgin Compilation Techno! – The New Dance Sound of Detroit’. − elemental. http://www.ele-mental.org/ ele_ment/said&did/techno_liner_ notes.html (14.02.2014). 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Dance and Die: Obsolescence and Acceleration Benjamin Noys The contemporary moment is a moment of acceleration. This might be taken as a typical piece of diagnosis, which would reflect on what Hartmut Rosa has called the ‘totalitarian’ dominance of social acceleration (2010: 9; Rosa 2013). I am concerned with something rather different. This is the development of new ‘accelerationist’ modes of thinking that attest to the power of acceleration as means to probe forms of knowledge and technology that might be re-purposed to generate a non-capitalist future. The contention is that we are not accelerating, or not accelerating enough. Mired in capitalist crisis we face the exhaustion of the utopian promise of acceleration that fed the avant-gardes of the twentieth century, from the Italian Futurists to the British Independent Group of the 1950s, and beyond. F.T. Marinetti proclaimed, in the first manifesto of Futurism, that ‘others who are younger and stronger will throw us in the wastebasket, like useless manuscripts. — We want it to happen!’ (in Rainey et al 2009: 53). Acceleration belonged to the young, to those who could outpace their elders and render them obsolescent. In our moment we witness the struggle to redeploy acceleration, to rework or reengineer the avant-garde ‘passion for the real’ (Badiou 2007), to return from the senility of capitalism in crisis to the (figural) youth of reinvention. I am sceptical of such claims (Noys 2010: 4−9; Noys 2014), as will soon become evident. Nonetheless I want to trace this return of acceleration in the present moment as a symptomatic expression of a desire to transcend a capitalism that appears at once frantic and static. The seeming capitalist monopoly on acceleration feeds the need to extract or isolate new forms of acceleration that can be turned against capitalism. In particular I want to attend to the aesthetics of accelerationism. Gean Moreno (2013), in a recent editorial for the art-journal e-flux on ‘accelerationist aesthetics’, argues that this aesthetics offers the capacity for us to negotiate between ‘innovative cartographic exercises’ and ‘the drive to deliberately exacerbate nihilistic meltdowns.’ It is an aesthetics of acceleration that promises the capacity to explore and trace new forms of acceleration that can un-lock the present moment. One of the ironies of such claims is that often the proponents of accelerationism return to the past. It is dance music that has formed one of the sites for this aesthetic probing. The accelerative nature of the form, often registered in increasing beats-per-minute (bpm), makes dance music a signature aesthetic model for recapturing a ‘youthful’ passion for acceleration. My critical reconstruction examines three moments. The first is that of what we might call ‘classical accelerationism’. This refers to the work of Nick Land and his allies in the Cybernetic Culture Research Centre (CCRU) conducted during the 1990s at the University of Warwick. Land gave a provocative punk form to previous arguments for social acceleration as a means to puncture the limits of capitalism. The figurative element would be provided by the emergence of ‘Jungle’ or ‘drum and bass’, a genre of dance music developed in Britain from so-called ‘Rave’ and which used fast breakbeats (160-180 bpm) (see Noys 1995). The second moment is a step back to the emergence of Detroit techno in the early to mid-1980s and the solidification of techno as a genre. This self-conscious ‘Afro-Futurism’ (Eshun 2003) aimed at generating a new aesthetics of acceleration that was explicitly post-industrial. Finally I consider interventions by contemporary accelerationists around current forms of dance music. Here we see the tension that persists in turning to the present moment to release forces of acceleration. The Inhuman Dance Floor Nick Land and the CCRU articulated ‘classical accelerationism’ as the most radical endorsement of capitalist time as a time of acceleration, in the form of expanding value and the absorption of all elements of life under an inhuman marketisation. This moment emerged from 1970s theoretical currents, notably Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (1972), and in Land’s work it gained a kind of resonance and accelerative force that deliberately aimed at a para- or anti-academic energisation (Reynolds 2010). Whereas Deleuze and Guattari stepped back from what they called deterritorialisation (1988: 160), riding the flux and flows unleashed by capitalism, Land argued the need to go further: Machinic revolution must therefore go in the opposite direction to socialistic regulation; pressing towards ever more uninhibited marketisation of the processes that are tearing down the social field, ‘still further’ with ‘the movement of the market, of decoding and deterritorialisation’ and ‘one can never go far enough in the direction of deterritorialisation: you haven’t seen anything yet’. (Land 2013) For Deleuze and Guattari ‘absolute deterritorialisation’ remained asymptotic – something to be converged on, but never reached. For Land it had already been realised, but only in the future – 2012, in fact. We should at this point note that this realisation is, in the language of the CCRU, hyperstitional (CCRU 1999), which is to say it is a performative fiction. The then present moment of the 1990s was being infiltrated by cyber guerrillas from this realised absolute deterritorialisation. We had traces of this future – drugs, sci-fi, jungle, theory, biotech – that prefigured the meltdown to come: ‘as if,’ in Land’s words, ‘a tendril of tomorrow were burrowing back.’ (Land 2013) One of the key ‘tendrils of tomorrow’ was the post-rave speed-up of jungle and drum-and-bass (Fisher 2011). This intensification of the accelerative elements of dance culture resulted in ‘impending human extinction becomes accessible as a dance floor’, according to Land (2013). Not ‘Dance or Die’, but ‘Dance and Die’. The accelerative force of jungle or drum and bass instantiated the trace of our future inhuman state. The tendency of jungle tracks to sample sci-fi films such as The Terminator (Metalheads, ‘Terminator’ (1992)) or Predator 2 (Hyper on Experience, ‘Lord of the Null Lines (1993)) was read by Land and the CCRU as indicative of an emergent future in which the human would be dissolved the human into the flows of deterritorialised capitalism. Jungle was a ‘street’ futurism, a popular avant-garde, that in its ‘dark’ forms (extreme basslines, eerie or uncanny samples, and propulsive rush) figured ‘extinction’ through exhilaration. The combination of dance music with drugs rendered possible a practical anti-humanism – the disintegration of the ego under the forces and forms of drug and dance induced-states of dissolution. Far from the communal dreams of certain factions of rave culture, with the promise of new Dionysian collectives, the CCRU and Land pursued a studiedly nightmarish integration of the human with the machinic and technological. Instead of some neo-primitivism, this was a neo-futurism. This counter-mythology was just as much another mythology, and largely uninterested in tracing the political, social, and economic tensions of rave and post-rave dance culture (see Thornton 1995). The aim was to dissolve those tensions in an endorsement of the inhuman at the expense of any political claiming of rave in the name of collectivity. It is perhaps not surprising that such a theoretical tendency should extinguish itself. The logical outcome of such a set of beliefs was the disappearance of the human, as not only did the flows of capitalism not require humanity but also that a state of absolute deterritorialisation had already been achieved. This is a variant of Marinetti’s logic of obsolescence. Instead of the heroism of Marinetti’s narrative, which requires new young ‘over-men’, in a Nietzschean vein, Land and the CCRU would be rendered obsolete by the turn-over of capitalist speed. The only subject left was this inhuman force of desire or the libidinal – identical with the ‘forces’ of capitalist production. Land and the CCRU deliberately operated as a vanishing mediator between the signs of the future and, they claimed, the realised future of acceleration. Of course that future did not arrive. At the same time the moment of jungle and drum and bass burned itself out. After the relative hegemony of this form post-rave dance culture underwent further fragmentations and returns to more ‘stable’ or conventional forms, such as UK Garage. This type of dance music slowed down to 130 bpm with 4/4 beats and returned to previous dance music, notably House, to craft a ‘soulful’ sound. It was accompanied by a return to an embrace of capitalist hedonism – champagne, smart clothes, designer labels, and the more conventional elements of club culture. The irony, considering Land’s arguments, was that this could be considered a much more capitalist form than jungle. The reply would not doubt be that this was the ideology of capital represented – the gentrification of the corrosive inhuman force of capital with the ‘human face’ of conspicuous consumption. The more painful irony was that jungle and drum and bass persisted as modes of nostalgia. It is consumed by the age group that was contemporary with it in the 1990s, in a similar mode to various other pop-cultural nostalgic events or gatherings. The DJs and artists still tour but the form, with some exceptions, largely remains frozen in that 1990s moment. This process is not unusual and familiar from the fate of many artistic avant-gardes, which begin from wanting to destroy museums and end-up by being collected by those museums. In the relatively more rapid turnover of pop culture this process is itself accelerated. The difficulty it raises is, however, for the attempt by Land and the CCRU to invest in the aesthetic of acceleration tied to this moment. With the future not arriving in the form they desired the substitution is of nostalgia for a future that did not happen. Night Drive thru Babylon Detroit techno emerged from that city in the early to mid-1980s. It was a deliberately accelerative aesthetics, speeding bpm from the previous forms of disco and house and stripping-out of the humanist residues that often dominated those forms – not least the voice. Instead of ‘soulful’ singing, or samples, Detroit techno tended to mechanised and repetitive sampling, or absenting the voice altogether. The singularity of its aesthetic invention lay in this welcoming of the ‘mechanisation’, or better ‘computerisation’, of the aesthetic. This has obviously been prefigured by Kraftwerk’s albums Man-Machine (1978) and Computer World (1981), which were hugely influential on Detroit techno (Cunningham 2010: 59). It mixed European influences, from electronic music pioneers like Kraftwerk, New Order, Depeche Mode, and others, with the Detroit funk of Parliament / Funkadelic. The apotheosis of the form, at least as I regard it, is the track ‘It is what it is’ (1988), by Rhythim is Rhythim’s (aka Derrick May). This was, as one semi-ironic description went at the time, ‘dance music with bleeps’. Retaining funk, the insistence of Detroit techno had the utopian, if not kitsch, elements of sci-fi futurism coupled to the dystopian fragmentation of the city-space (‘Night Drive Thru Babylon’, as the track by Model 500 had it). Detroit techno was a self-consciously post-Fordist and post-industrial music. The very coldness of techno and its equivocal embrace of deindustrialisation make it discomforting, if we consider the contemporary fate of Detroit. It also set out to ‘erase the traces’, to use Brecht’s phrase, of the city’s musical heritage, notably Motown. In Juan Atkins’s infamous words, the ‘originator’ of techno stated: berry gordy built the motown sound on the same principle as the conveyor belt at the ford plant. today the automobile plants use robots and computers to make their cars and I’m more interested in fords robots than gordy’s music. (in Cosgrove 1988) Berry Gordy, founder of Motown, had been an automotive worker and his label was founded on Fordist principles: a production line sound with a range of interchangeable artists on the roster called in to perform (Cohn 1970: 111−13). This is literally visible in the Martha and the Vandellas promotional film for the song ‘Nowhere to Run’ (1965) which was made on the Ford production-line in 1965. This very strange film shows the group dancing through Ford’s paint shop and production line, being ogled or studiously ignored by the, predominantly African-American, workers. Detroit techno shifted to a post-industrial sound and mode of production, involving individual artists deploying technology, notably samplers and drum machines; as machines has replaced workers in the factories so machines replaced artists in music. Rather than rejecting this, as could be witnessed in the various forms of protest music and ‘blue-collar’ music of the 1970s (see Cowie 2010), Detroit techno seemed to celebrate the replacement of ‘variable capital’ (i.e. humans) by ‘constant capital’ (i.e. machines) at Ford. In this way it traced the mutating social space of Detroit – from the ‘white flight’ following the 1967 insurrection, the de-industrialisation that followed, and its own position in the suburban site of Belleville High, where Derrick May, Juan Atkins, and Kevin Saunderson met. The utopia present in techno is the dehumanised machinic-self integrated with a sci-fi future. Kodwo Eshun remarks ‘The cyborg fantasies of the Detroit techno producers, such as Juan Atkins and Derrick May, were used to both alienate themselves from sonic identity and to feel at home in alienation.’ (2003: 296) The names of acts (‘Cybotron’, ‘Model 500’, ‘Drexciya’), labels (‘Transmat’, ‘Red Planet’), track titles (‘No UFOs’, ‘Skynet’, ‘Apollo’, ‘Alpha Centauri’, ‘Waveform2’), and cover imagery, index this sometimes kitsch and ironic ‘futurism’. This is not an unproblematic celebration. Derrick May, the leading figure of Detroit techno, known as ‘the innovator’, reflected in an interview: ‘factories are closing and people are drifting away’ says derrick, ‘the old industrial detroit is falling apart, the structures have collapsed. It’s the murder capital of america. six year olds carry guns and thousands of black people have stopped caring if they ever work again. if you make music in that environment it can’t be straight music. in britain you have new order, well our music is the new disorder.’ (in Cosgrove 1988) In contrast to May’s claim, what is striking is how ordered this music feels. The insistence and regularity of techno is what seems to link it to the regularity of the machine. On the other hand, however, the registration of disorder suggests the conflict at work in the process of de-industrialisation. Techno is not simply the smooth registration of the passing into a ‘new order’, but the registration of collapsing structures. Again, a logic of obsolescence is at work. Where techno artists aimed to render Motown obsolete, by embracing the machine, they also operated as witnesses to the decline and crisis of the order of Fordism. The sci-fi elements attested to the displacement of labour and the attempt to render this as a utopian futurism that could escape the dystopia of Detroit. Many of the artists would move from Detroit to Europe, to Berlin or Amsterdam, to escape in their own version of flight from the crisis of capitalist labour. At the same time techno itself, as we saw with jungle and drum and bass, would be subject to similar forces. The genre would develop in various ways, but remains today only one strand in the fabric of electronic music and a minor one at that. What is also striking is how innovative the original recordings sound compared to later ‘developments’. The generic solidification of techno often has equivocal results, with a tendency to ‘freeze’ the form and so sapping the figural ‘energy’ released in the moment of its inception. Certainly there have been extremely inventive post-Detroit moments, from Berlin’s Basic Channel, with their fusion of dub and techno, to Frankfurt’s Mille Plateaux label, with its exploration of micro-techno of ‘clicks and cuts’. Despite this a certain formalisation seems to have resulted in a more involuted and self-conscious form of techno, which lacks the tense dynamism of that original moment (Lison 2012: 130). This formalisation also accounts for the sense that techno seems to lack the necessary energy to trace or inscribe a future. The original Afro-Futurism of Detroit techno probed the tension of a future in which labour might seem to be disappearing into the streamlined and technological. The displacement of the city of Detroit from this process, its continuing abandonment by capital, suggests the energy of the original moment of Detroit techno is one of fear and anxiety at obsolescence, as well as the celebration of acceleration. It is this recognition of the threat of obsolescence that inscribes an aesthetic resistance to obsolescence. Stuttering GIFs Contemporary accelerationism returns to and modulates Nick Land’s schema. Whereas Land sought acceleration along the lines of capitalism and so risked dissolving into capitalist flows, contemporary accelerationist thinking poses acceleration against capitalism. In the influential ‘#Accelerate: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics’ (2013), Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams argue that Land’s belief is in capitalist speed alone and so he remains within ‘capitalist parameters’ (2013: 140). What is required is not speed, which is merely ‘a simple brain-dead onrush’, but acceleration as ‘an experimental process of discovery within a universal space of possibility.’ (Srnicek and Williams 2013: 140) The reason Srnicek and Williams have for objecting to Land is not only the danger of simply remaining within capitalist parameters, but also that an inertial and crisis-ridden neoliberalism has rescinded the dynamism of capitalism for the opaque mechanisms of speculative finance. We have been robbed of our future. The phenomenology of this second (or third) wave of accelerationism is still provided by dance music. Once, in this story, dance music provided an inventive form of musical accelerationism. In Mark Fisher’s characterisation, ‘While twentieth-century experimental culture was seized by a recombinatorial delirium, which made it feel as if newness was infinitely available, the twenty-first century is oppressed by a crushing sense of finitude and exhaustion.’ (Fisher 2013a) This experimental culture obviously includes Detroit techno and jungle / drum and bass. Simon Reynolds (2013) argued that in the 1990s there was a ‘hardcore continuum’ in British Rave culture that traced an experimental line of flight from rave to jungle to drum and bass to early grime. This is adopted by Alex Williams (2013) to trace the accelerative possibilities of dance music. Williams, however, also adopts Simon Reynolds diagnosis of ‘Retromania’ (Reynolds 2011), which claims that contemporary music is parasitic on the past and can only produce pastiches of previous genres. The tension lies in the truncation of the hardcore continuum into the limit of repetition of past glories. Our moment is a nostalgia for a future that was once promised – ‘Today is the Tomorrow you were Promised Yesterday’, to use the title of a work by Victor Burgin. Retromania is, in Alex Williams’s (2013) formulation, the ‘pop-cultural logic of late neoliberalism.’ The difficulty of that argument is that while Land has a subject of acceleration – capitalism – and an aesthetics – jungle and drum and bass – contemporary accelerationism seems to lack both. If the present moment is static, then where is accelerationism to come from? This is evident in Mark Fisher’s recent discussion of juke / footwork – a form of Chicago ‘ghetto house’ at 155−165 bpm, with repetitive and often aggressive sampling (‘Fuck Dat’, being one example). It would seem that footwork continues the hardcore continuum and instantiates another acceleration, which would dispute the accelerationist characterisation of the present moment as a moment of stasis. To rescue this diagnosis, Fisher argues that while jungle ‘was dark, but also wet, viscous, and enveloping,’ footwork is ‘strangely desiccated’ (2013b). This dessication indicates a lack of propulsive movement. The signature metaphysic of forces for accelerationism is a liquid one, in a strange echo of Luce Irigaray (1985: 106-118), but without her attention to gender. In contrast, the illiquid form of footwork traces its expression of and resistance to the present moment. Fisher explains that footwork finds it image ‘in the bad infinity of the animated GIF, with its stuttering, frustrated temporality, its eerie sense of being caught in a time-trap.’ (Fisher 2013b) If jungle was predictive of accelerative temporalities then footwork, according to Fisher, only captures the impasses of the present moment. We suffer, in Alex Williams’s Ballardian coinage, a ‘chronosick feeling’ (2013; italics in original), a disorder of our experience of time. Unable to accede to the future, or even a faith or belief in the future, we instead can only live out the blockage of our present moment. If footwork registers the impasse it seems that for Fisher the techno musician Actress’s ‘solution to this impasse has always been to patch together something new from fragments of prematurely discarded science and sonic fictions.’ (Fisher 2014) The Actress album Ghettoville maps, according to Fisher, a cartography of exclusion in probably appropriately paranoid style, considering the present moment. This mapping, however, also presents an act of sonic recovery that is not simply an instance of ‘retromania’ but, according to Fisher, the recovery of lost and encrypted energies. In particular, Fisher argues, the album’s registration of the various pains of social and political exclusion offers a means to externalise rage. The gesture is one that ‘recovers the future’ (Fisher 2014). Alex Williams makes a similar gesture. If jungle embodied the ‘Landian imaginary’ of ‘apocalyptic paranoid euphoria’ then today we lack this ‘alienating temporality’ (Williams 2013) The future is now predicated, for Williams (2013), on engagement with ‘the forward-propelling energies embodied in the best of UK dance music, its posthuman ingenuity, alien sonic vocabulary, and its manipulation of affect and impersonal desire.’ I leave aside the nationalism of this agenda, but the central point remains the same. While we exist in a moment of impasse it seems that some moments of nostalgia or ‘retromania’ might rescue or reconstruct lost energies. If there is no central aesthetic of acceleration, then we have to track, find, or construct the fleeting new moment of ‘forward-propelling energies’ that remain. For all the anti-nostalgic verve of accelerationism it is forced into a different form of nostalgia. We have to go back to the future, rescuing moments of aesthetic and political acceleration from their obliteration. Obsolete Futures Contemporary accelerationism brings to an extreme point of tension the contradiction between the logic of acceleration and the logic of obsolescence. What has been made obsolete is acceleration. This then requires the return to previous obsolete moments of acceleration to generate the promised future that might takes us beyond the miseries of the present moment and to restart acceleration. In aesthetic terms we are forced into a choice: not a choice between acceleration and retromania, but a choice to reactivate past moments of acceleration against the inertia of the present. We have to choose the correct retromania to overcome the manically stuttering present. This is not necessarily a problematic strategy per se. There are many instances of political and aesthetic strategies that return to the past to rework a possible future. The difficulty is that the terms in which contemporary accelerationism sets itself this task. By rendering the present as stasis, and by flattening out past moments into unequivocal signs of acceleration, the tensions of both are lost. In the first case, of the present moment, we have the contradictions and tensions of the various attempts to restart capitalist production and accumulation, as well as the uneven current distribution of the crisis. Failure to attend to this leaves contemporary accelerationism, with its dreams of re-organised technological production, in dangerous proximity to certain modernising ideologues of creative destruction. In aesthetic terms we have the lengthening history of the form, which gives a field into which to intervene, but can also constrain as well as facilitate new possibilities. Andrew Lison notes (2012: 130) that if we accept the hardcore continuum then contemporary dance music forms often introspectively refer to and work in that continuum. In the case of contemporary accelerationism this leaves it believing in the accelerative continuum while struggling to note the necessity of returns to that continuum that don’t simply aim to kick-start new accelerations but probe the limits of that paradigm. In the second case, of the past, matters are also more complex than simply invoking past moments of acceleration. I have noted that Detroit techno registers the tensions and contradictions of the post-industrial within an endorsement of this acceleration. Instead of celebrating the post-industrial or streamlined technological future we find a playing with dread and anxiety. This is also true of Land and the CCRU’s use of jungle and drum and bass. The deliberate playing with dread in jungle, in so-called ‘dark jungle’, indicated the human on the brink of obsolescence. While Land and the CCRU could parlay this into celebration of human extinction, it also indicated their own anxiety at willingly entering into an extinction they also claimed was inevitable. Dread remained in the accession to the state of integrated machine and the promise of human obsolescence equivocated on the abandonment of the human. I think these tensions and pressures are registered in the work of Williams and Fisher. The difficulty is that they do not seem to be fully thought through and so remain disconnected. Too often we end with an opposition of acceleration and retromania rather than the more complex mapping their probing of the limits of the aesthetics of contemporary dance music implies. They attend to issues of nostalgia and the haunting of the present by moments of acceleration, but take these moments as given rather than as complex and equivocal constructs. Fisher’s mining of ‘hauntology’ (2013a), a term borrowed from Derrida (1998), suggests a more complex temporality of return and repetition, rather than the flat metaphor of the ‘hardcore continuum’. It suggests a temporality of what Freud called ‘deferred action’ (Nachträglichkeit) (Laplance and Pontalis 1988: 111−14). In this situation a present trauma exists through reactivating a past trauma, which only comes into being in the deferred act of reactivation. Similarly, rather than the simple search for past moments of acceleration that exist in simple purity we could suggest a more complex process of reactivation and reworking that interrupts the past and does not produce a ‘pure’ new, but a necessarily repetitive ‘new’. That contemporary accelerationists attend to dance music as a test-bed for debates about the future and acceleration is crucial, that they flatten the tensions in their presentation is problematic. What is required is further attention to the logic of obsolescence, both at the level of aesthetic form and as an expression of the capitalist logic of the replacement of living labour by dead labour, with dead labour taking the form of machines and technology. In the first instance, of aesthetic form, an accelerative logic implies the necessity for a ‘built-in’ obsolescence, as a form exhausts its possibilities and, deliberately, tries to generate new paths beyond. That such paths often fall behind the initial intervention suggests the difficulty of sustaining such forms of aesthetic acceleration. In the second case, even in explicitly accelerationist aesthetics the potential obsolescence of the form and of labour is not simply welcomed, Rather there is always a registration of tension, even within the supposed ‘smoothness’ of the line of flight. Conclusion: Friction Instead of the smooth presentation of acceleration, aesthetically or politically, the registration of a sense of friction is crucial to grasping the aesthetics of dance music, and to grasping an aesthetic and political analysis of the ‘stuttering’ of the present moment or, for that matter, of the past and future. Instead of metaphysical oppositions between wet (good) and dry (bad), accelerative (good) and static (bad), the notion of friction implies the tension that refuses such oppositions. It is also the fact that this tension is required for any sense of acceleration. Acceleration to the extreme merges into noise. It is the tension or friction between different forms of acceleration, or between acceleration and deceleration, that generates the felt sense of acceleration, rather than simply speeding-up. This aesthetic necessity can, more speculatively, be connected to the necessity to include friction that disrupts a smooth acceleration or the liquidity that is the preferred metaphysics of accelerationism. This friction is often most effective in being embedded within a logic of acceleration. In the case of techno attempts to turn towards an industrial or dark techno, which would highlight feelings of horror or anxiety, are noticeably less effective than the original techno forms. A track like Blawan’s ‘Why They Hide Their Bodies under My Garage?’ (2012), is suitably unpleasant, as its title sample implies. The difficulty here is that friction is brought forward into a deliberately irritant function, and so the tension is slackened. In the case of Detroit techno the friction emerged from the tension of the utopian and futurist impulses with the moments of deceleration or anxiety. Of course, as Andrew Lison (2012: 139) notes, nostalgia is a risk in considering dance music and another way to refuse to accede to a future. The continuing experimentation in these forms should not be disavowed in the name of a perfect past. Lison’s alternative of a ‘positive’ new in forms of microhouse – a minimal and experimental form of techno – is suggestive, but risks offering another version of acceleration (Lison 2012: 138). Friction is now dissolved, in Lison’s account, to overcome the danger of melancholia by a refusal to mourn. Instead, I want to suggest that friction remains as the condition of acceleration and the new. This might not be so ‘joyful’ or, for that matter, youthful, it suggests something of a ‘complex space of navigation’ that the very signifier ‘accelerationism’ forecloses. It also forces us to return to moments of acceleration with an eye to the friction that makes them possible. References Badiou, Alain 2007. The Century. 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