Zepke Stephen: Head in the Stars. Essays on Science Fiction

(ie., parasites) that can reconstitute open communities,
communities constituted around their immanent
heterogeneity and own becoming. We saw in the last
chapter how this is to once more orient science fiction
around a ‘real’ future, one capable of creating a new and
inhuman sensation.
The question now becomes what these aesthetic
attractors might be, and how could they work? Deleuze
and Guattari’s well-known call in Anti-Oedipus for an
acceleration of capitalism’s schizophrenia would be one
way of unleashing the material power of Pasquinelli’s
parasite. ‘Not to withdraw from the process,’ Deleuze
and Guattari write, ‘but to go further, to “accelerate the
process”, as Nietzsche put it: in this matter, the truth is
we havn’t seen anything yet.’ (1983 240) This will be an
approach explored by Accelerationism, and in particular
by the early work of Nick Land (see Avanessian, 2014 and
Land, 2012). Before Land explicitly adopted a far-right racist
ideology he explored an aesthetics in which capitalism
unleashes desire to gleefully turn against its captors, human
subjectivity and its organic body. Reading Bladerunner
and Terminator (Cameron, 1984) against themselves,
Land envisaged a ‘Cyberrrevolution’ (2012 319) in which
capitalism returns from the future in digital form to free
itself from human constraints: ‘How would it feel to be
smuggled back out of the future in order to subvert its
antecedent conditions? To be a cyberguerrilla, hidden in
human camouflage so advanced that even one’s software
was part of the disguise? Exactly like this?’ (Land, 2012
318) Here, the cyborgs are the heroes, cleansing the earth
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