The Concept of Machinic Materialism

Laruelle, Kantian Accelerationism, and Marx

In Nietzsche Contre Heidegger (1977), Laruelle puts forward the following proposition: Nietzsche’s text should be read with a materialist lens which allows us to see the concept of Will to Power as a material(ist) force. The opposing poles of Mastery and Rebellion remain in a non-relation (or a unilateral relation), reminiscent of his later concept of “the radical dyad,” whereby contradiction is maintained permanently. Without the constant tension between the opposing poles neither Revolution nor Fascism would be possible, and this possibility necessarily remains permanent too. Revolution which is Will to Power of the “oppressed” or the “defeated” (Laruelle) is carried out in opposition to Mastery and Fascism without ever taking its place. These are structural positions, not psychological or ethical, and, therefore, “reconciliation,” “resolution,” synthesis or Aufhebung – the means of Hegelian dialectics – are superfluous fantasies to the political Machine that Nitzsche provides the conceptual material for. The ontological foundation is material, and it is expressed in the forms of Mastery and Resistance; the machinic operation, on the other hand, consists in occupying the poles of Revolution and Fascism, cutting through Resistance and Mastery over the chiasm of the real (of the Will to Power). This doubly intersecting poles constitute the fourfold (quadriparti) of the materialist machine (MM) Nietzsche’s philosophy engenders. Political materialism (PM) operates as a machine and the political continent uniquely provided by Nietzsche is the impersonal force.

In this sense, MM/PM can be compared to Marx’s notion of the political as a system, structure – in a way a “machine” – moved by its immanent laws rooted in the material production of social relations rather than forms of subjectivation. However, Laruelle differentiates between the Marxian project and Nietzsche’s Machine as the former has a teleology and eschatological dream of elimination of Mastery/Fascism. Laruelle seems to think that, from the perspective of political materialism, none of the poles can ever be eliminated. Decades later, Laruelle revisits Marx and develops the radical non-philosophical core of his project which he names non-Marxism (the “non-” stands for suspending of the principle of philosophical sufficiency, not as a negation of Marxism). In a lecture I organised in 2015 as part of the New Realisms Conference, he insisted that class struggle does not stop, there is no telos of history and no point at which principles of Mastery/Fascism are ever defeated. A (non-philosophical) Marxist, he insisted, was a subject modelled according to the figure of a messiah. I was the consecutive translator of that lecture, and its transcription is published here (in English, the lecture was in French).

The political is purely transcendental; any concept belongs but to the realm of the transcendental. Yet again, it is undergirded by materiality. Subject is not a person or a Self; it is merely a function and a clear product of the Kantian postulate of subjectivity (and apperception). The figure of the messiah is but a function which can be explained in terms of quantum mechanics, according to Laruelle (Christofiction). It is superimposed on the real (of the political). In a couple of articles published here, I have analysed the Kantian concept of the subject, time, and capitalism as an impersonal force of pure temporality via the analysis of Anna Greenspan. If we look at the body of work produced by CCRU, in particular, Anna Greenspan, Nick Land and others of CCRU and post-CCRU, the centrality of Kant’s understanding of subjectivity, his critical apparatus, the concept of the transcendental and the understanding of the political (in their case – capitalism) as an impersonal machine is evident. Thus, overlaps with Laruelle, be it in his early Nietzschean phase or his quantum and non-Marxist phase, are obvious.

In my book Capitalism’s Holocaust of Animals (2019), I have inferred that capitalism equals philosophy and that this inference is possible only if one understands language (natural and artificial) as automaton, which is perfectly in line with structuralist linguistics and structuralist psychoanalysis (Lacan). I further argue, by applying Laruelle’s method, that subjectivity is but the radical dyad of the physical and the automaton. Language, as all automata, is always already machinic, material and mechanistic. Such is any production of signification. Thus, there is nothing “organic,” as nature operates in a way that could be described and explained perhaps only as mechanistic or mechanical. Nature/Technology, Body/Mind, Organic/Mechanistic and all analogous to them (for example, “Rational” vs. “Emotional”) is a false dichotomy: nature operates in manners that can be explained but mechanically, and so does “sign making,” signification or “making sense,” i.e., Language and “Mind” (processes of cognition more generically put). The organic could be but a synonym of the physical, bodily and material not of some ideal(ist) flow of unadulterated immanence which in philosophy, is usually Idea, Spirit, Intelligence, etc. Of course, machinic, mechanical and mechanistic materialism are of the transcendental register, and they are our access to the always already foreclosed real, noumenon, “thing in itself.”

It is only now that I see that the fourfold of PM/MM can be applied to the communist and Marxist project based on the understanding of overlap of capitalism and philosophy as automata in the sense explained above. Same model can be applied to the hyper capitalist -accelerationist project. The latter however remains profoundly philosophical and retains the atavistic assumption about the radical discontinuity between matter and mind (Intelligence). Marxism (at least the non-philosophical one) recognises the metaphysical nature of capitalism-as-philosophy: the assumption that pure value, intelligence, Sign can sustain itself without the material foundation or through transformation of matter into value, meaning, Sign is the untenable final contradiction. Capitalism is philosophy materialised risking the presumption it can sustain itself independently from its material foundation through its complete exploitation which is supposed to somehow alchemically turn matter into pure intelligence.