A Research Note on Acceleration and Collapsology

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Chiiii

Independent researcher based in the United States whose work develops a constructive theology through Deleuze in dialogue with contemporary post-Continental philosophy.

Substack: https://substack.com/@avicennaquinas

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Accelerationism is twofold:

1. An empirical principle: in capitalism, instrument (capital in circulation) and end (capital accumulation) coincide (a.k.a. Capitalist Organicity).

2. A transcendental principle: matter organizes toward intelligence (a.k.a. Angelic Materialism).

Nick Land defines intelligence as competency at playing games ¹. We could, for example, consider a chess bot like Deep Blue, the IBM supercomputer that beat Garry Kasparov, the world’s greatest chess player at the time. Intelligence, abstractly speaking, need not be a property of agents such as computer bots or persons, however. By Land’s definition, organic systems also exhibit intelligence. If life is a game, without any agentic direction ecological systems continuously reconfigure themselves through Darwinian evolution to be as competitive for it as possible. Organicity is the property of teleological comprehensivity, that is to say, that a set of components is comprehended holistically toward an end. Darwinism is an inherently organic phenomenon. The end of an ecological system is its own perpetuation, achieved through the retention of beneficial properties; Darwinian evolution is simply the persistence of those properties over time. Capitalism may be understood in the same way.

The circulation of money as capital is, on the contrary, an end in itself, for the expansion of value takes place only within this constantly renewed movement. The circulation of capital has therefore no limits. (Capital, Chapter 4)²

The end of capitalism is the accumulation of capital, and the means to that end is capital’s own circulation ((C-M-C) → (M-C-M’)). Presuming the capitalist market to be a kind of game, then, by the foregoing principles and Land’s definition, we may say that capitalism is a form of intelligence and, more speculatively, a non-incidental organization of matter as such.

Collapsology is a neologism denoting the study of the general collapse of societies. In essence, it studies the failure of our second principle—not by directly contradicting it, but by surveying its exceptions. It is therefore exemplified not by affirmation but by negation.

If matter is a process of becoming and, in the accelerationist paradigm, of becoming upwards towards intelligence, then collapsology studies its horizontal and descending detours: errors unanticipated by the competent organization of matter. Unbecomings. Decay. In this sense, collapsology is always posterior to acceleration. For, as Ben Woodard notes, “for decay to function (in both space and time as a function of both and expression of both) there must be a decision of what is an entity, of what is decaying.”³ Intelligent systems necessarily preexist their failure. The reversal of matter’s transcendental will-to-intelligence is precisely an overturning of something necessarily prior.

But what would this reversal entail? What would it mean to inaugurate an age in which matter must be thought through its deterioration? To understand how one transcendental might give way to another, we must first attain an understanding of the event which would occasion such a shift. It is here that Badiou’s Logics of Worlds becomes indispensable. As Badiou himself says, there are many transcendentals;⁴ the transition from acceleration to collapse is therefore surely possible, but it is not so simple as asserting an unprecedented phase shift in the nature of matter itself. For Badiou, the transcendental can change only through an event.

For Badiou, auto-sophisticating machine runaway⁵ and collapse would both constitute distinct worlds. A world is that which articulates the coherence of multiples around a transcendental. It is a kind of insular body upon-and-in which various happenings take place.

These happenings may be facts, weak singularities, or events. Their status is determined by their relation to a maximum, where the maximum is an element M of transcendental T such that

That is, M is greater than or equal to every element of T. If a happening is of lesser magnitude than the maximum, it is a fact; if it is equal to the maximum, it is either a weak singularity or an event. The difference between the latter two is a matter of consequences: an event renders something inexistent of its world absolute, whereas a weak singularity does not.

The previously inexistent rendered absolute and the transcendental transformed with it, we reach a decisive point. The shift necessitated by the collapsological turn, while structurally of the magnitude of the event, is its inverse—the diminution of the absolute. It is, in a way, a non-event⁶.

Badiou denotes the minimum degree of T by μ, where

Formally, the non-event may be expressed by the impossible condition

Every degree of appearance falls below the transcendental minimum, producing a vacuous world where the absolute becomes nihil and determinate content is excluded from its own sense. We can only approach the non-event through this impossible formalization, for its defining feature is precisely the collapse of the transcendental ordering which would make any such formalization possible.

Though impossible within Badiou’s own paradigm, and thus strictly a catachresis in his own terms, this formalization nevertheless remains faithful to the intuition developed thus far. The vacuity of the non-event becomes especially clear epistemically: whereas the event calls for fidelity from subjects, the collapsological non-event could in no way prompt fidelity to itself, for it cannot account for itself and becomes increasingly inexplicable through the progression of material decay.

A bold illustration of this appears in the limit case of collapse: the heat death of the universe. As the culmination of material decay, it undoes the very indexing by which it would be an intelligible substrate of analysis. Intensive flows and becomings remain, yet no splace exists around which its underlying multiplicities could cohere. Heat death thus apophatically marks a non-world.

In this way, the proposition of a coherent collapsology proves bewildering.

Archival Note

Capitalist competition is, at its core, anarchic.

Anything goes as long as the valorization and reproduction of capital are preserved or expanded. Institutional regulations function as the anthropocentric facade—or hypocritical schizophrenia—of a sovereignty that no longer fully controls the movements of capital. Money laundering, tax engineering, and the legal restructuring of transnational corporations (the barons of contemporary capitalism) demonstrate a constant ability to circumvent, absorb, or neutralize the restrictions imposed upon them. Competition continues to operate as a zero-sum game in systemic terms. This reductionism proves useful for describing the chaotic reality that contemporary capitalism represents.

From this perspective, acceleration and collapse are neither successive processes nor distinct stages of the same history. They constitute simultaneous dynamics embedded within the same process. Rather than an economic system, capitalism can be understood as a system of transformation of matter and energy. Neither is created nor destroyed; they are merely transformed. Ultimately, almost all forms of energy available—and profitable—for the capitalist civilizational project are different forms of concentrated solar energy (to quote Dr. Luis Gonzáles Reyes, Ph.D. in Chemical Sciences). The solar system thus ceases to be a mere cosmological backdrop and becomes one of the material conditions that fuel geotrauma. It is no longer solely about the Earth system.

Acceleration is not distributed evenly either. Regions of technological intensification—such as the “Neo-China” evoked by Nick Land—can coexist alongside territories where prolonged processes of material, institutional, and ecological erosion predominate, such as Argentina, Gaza, Haiti, or the European continent. Capitalism does not accelerate everything equally; it distributes differential speeds and produces heterogeneous geographies of collapse.

At this point, Chiii’s observation—drawing on Alain Badiou—opens up a particularly fruitful line of inquiry: “Both the escape and the collapse of a self-sophisticated machine would constitute distinct worlds. A world is that which articulates the coherence of the multiples around a transcendental. It is a kind of insular body upon which and within which various events take place.”

At Crítica Acelerada, we find particularly intriguing potential for development in another of his formulations: “While the event demands fidelity from subjects, the collapsological non-event could not elicit fidelity toward itself, since it cannot account for itself and becomes increasingly inexplicable as material decomposition progresses.”

Perhaps collapse should not be conceived as a succession of extraordinary events, but rather as the progressive impossibility for the world itself to continue producing events that are intelligible to those who inhabit it.

However, does that imply immediate thermodynamic death? Or rather, is language once again beginning to step in to (re)think and (un)think the world from the perspective of human ontology?

The case remains open.