After my giant NRx piece at The Awl, I’d been planning on leaving the topic alone. Recently, however, I’ve had a few interactions – a conversation with another grad student who’s into Left Accelerationism and ran across my piece, and an e-mail from someone who wanted to discuss a recent Twitter exchange they had with Nick Land – that have gotten me thinking about Land and Acceleration once again, so I thought I’d type out some of my thoughts.
To begin with: I’m not a neoreactionary, nor an accelerationist of either the left or the right-wing variety. I don’t quite have a dog in these fights. At the end of the day I consider myself a liberal, albeit one who is suspicious of some of liberalism’s broader truth-claims (e.g. regarding the source of rights or the efficacy of rational debate). Still, I tend to think that much of the worthwhile political thought out there comes from traditions that are, in their broad outlines, il- or anti-liberal. The Communist Antonio Gramsci and the Nazi Carl Schmitt had more interesting things to say about the political and ideological dynamics of parliamentary liberalism than most liberals do, and I think the best book on modern ethics is the conservative Catholic Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue. Liberalism tends, perhaps more than any other ideology, to perceive itself not as an ideology but simply as the way things are, and this tends to obstruct understanding.
All this to say, I think there’s some utility in familiarizing one’s self with anti-liberal thought. Most of us, especially if we go to elite colleges, and especially if we take classes in the humanities, are exposed to the left-wing variety. Marx, Freud, Foucault, Fanon, Adorno, Benjamin, Gramsci, Lacan, Derrida, Deleuze-Guattari, Judith Butler, and Zizek (who else?) form a sort of quasi-radical cultural theory canon that achieves a limited but significant penetration in the mind of many American students. Limited, because, despite the revolutionary aspirations of most of these theorists, they are typically assimilated into a vague left-liberal critique of consumer society, patriarchy, and structural racism. Significant, because they do at least transmit, in embryo, the idea that “liberalism,” understood as an ideology that prioritizes abstract individual rights and equal opportunity, might have some problems with it. That these problems have recently been glossed along the lines of “liberal norms unfairly protect the speech of oppressors (read: people I don’t like)” is unfortunate, but neither here nor there.
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