I’m in a new city with a small group of peers and we go on tours together and it slightly tears at me.

The tear: tourist vs. visitor

I dislike the thought of being a tourist. But I am one, of course. I’m here and I’m surrounded by my brilliant classmates and having people show me around and teach me. I enjoy that. But the thought of being a stereotypical tourist (fanny-packed, passive, wide-eyed, sheep-like) makes me uncomfortable. Why? There’s a certain irrational shame in being an obvious unknowing stranger I guess. I prefer to see myself as the anonymous and shadowy visitor, completely unremarkable, taking everything in silently. Maybe it’s just a jaded city girl thing, though.

Our first group outing brought us from the Brandenberg Tor through the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, the Finance building with it’s spooky Nazi doorknobs and cheery Eastern bloc mural, ending at the site of Hitler’s bunker, where he and his wife killed themselves for their honeymoon.

I ended up going on that exact same route maybe a week later, with three other people.

Now it’s time to go alone, I think. Be the invisible visitor.

What stuck to me immediately was the beauty of The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. The levels of planes, perfect lines, grays, light glints, all in perfect harmony…

I will return for it, and fill giant pages with it, so that I won’t forget.

Benjamin says, “that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art.” Keeping this in mind while visiting a museum on the history of German film is truly inspiring. No art for in history has so mercilessly rendered all other art forms so obsolete as film has. A film is in itself already a mechanical production, and thus mechanical reproduction is nothing special. Where as for thousands of years, what man has done by hand is now possible almost entirely though technology. 3D printers for sculpture, computers for architecture, and graphic design for painting. Of course there are the differences that cannot be replicated through technology, such as the brush strokes and the cracks in the concrete. These are the small minor details, that when accumulated together makes art human. In terms of photography, and later film, though, all production is created through a lens, what is produced is merely manipulated rather than created. The stage of theater has long been a home to artistic expression, and now, through close ups and filters, we have stories revealed to us one frame at a time, all rehearse and perfected and captured and copied exactly forever. There may be, in terms of aura, advancements that have been made as technology has advanced. For instance the introduction of sound has lead the text dialogue to become completely unnecessary. And the ability to allow color to be visible when filming has changed how we see the world through the screen. These two examples, although aged,  both have their own situational qualities to them. I use the recent film The Artist as a great example. In this day and age of computer images, it still takes a special talent, a flair for brining the old school back, that which was once revolutionary to be brought to light all over again. The film the Artist is in black and white and with no sound, a true homage to the birth of film if there ever was one. Instead of letting what was dead stay there, it has been cleverly reborn again to serve as a reminder of just how far we have come.

Sound and color are probably the two most obvious forms of aura for a film that can come to mind. Just as the dust on a record produces the crackling sound that adds an aging effect that we all cannot help but love, so too has the clear and succinct sharpness of film come from a place of similar origin. Old film reels often have scratch marks that, for a brief second are visible before they disappear. Older film can often be full of these marks and thus a whole reel can consist of brief stutters and halts that add an authenticity of sorts that one would not find in movies today. When you think of clear images, you would usually want to avoid these minor imperfections, but when you see them for what they are, you gain an appreciation for their existence as you think that never would you see this happen nowadays.

On April 5th I attended a lecture by the English journalist Paul Mason entitled “After Capitalism?!” The interrobang at the end of this title is either a little bit embarrassing, or devastating, depending on your relationship to anti-/post-capitalist discourse in general, and to the various new liberal third positionisms that seem to be getting a lot of attention over the last couple of years. I’m Highly Ambivalent.

What most non-reactionary accelerationists argue is that the transition between and production of economic forms is not ultimately accomplished by the activities conceived of as political during a given form’s lifetime, but rather by the emergence, out of a given form, of the new material conditions for the succeeding one; and that this process can be actively accelerated. The logic goes: capital was produced by the self-intensification of the economic relations of old-imperial mercantilism, so if we wish to move beyond capitalism  we need to figure out which of capital’s characteristic relations are potentially liberatory (especially those that make is so remarkably adaptable to new challenges) versus those that are primarily conservative. If we can get a better image of this then we can locate the places where these things that are contradictory in principle are contradictory in material form, and then we can intensify or accelerate the relevant processes. It is a fundamentally marxist position, but one which (whether explicitly or not) amputates most marxist theory of revolution from Marx’s ontological core of dialectical materialism.

I have no idea if Paul Mason considers himself an accelerationist, or whether he’s ever heard the term, but as far as I can tell he is working from this same basic logic. Where he differs is in his focus not only on the positive capacities of the technologies of capital, but also on roles these play in what he sees as a necessary acceleration in the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. As traditional market growth slows and stagnates the digital economy increasingly colonizes our subjectivity. Desire for both immaterial goods (and really only secondarily the material media of these goods) is a new market front, but one which requires constant reproduction, as the labor input and consumption are increasingly identical. Facebook et al are valuable to a given user because, and only so long as, many others are using it frequently: practically any direct competition begins pushing surplus value production toward zero; so they can only remain profitable as long as a sort of trust exists between the biggest tech and digital monopolies to simultaneously reduce competition and mutually produce in consumers habits and desires that mutually feed their models rather than freeing the consumers or the media up for alternative activities. This seems to mean that any breaks or resistances to this feedback loop could produce an opposite one in which the power of capital is diminished or threatened while more and more people are simultaneously interacting with each other and with technology in new, creative, and potentially liberatory ways.

Like I said, I’m ambivalent. I agree with the economic logic and hope the possibility for lines of flight out of the current internet desire-machine is a real one, but I’m frustrated to hear another person saying this sort of thing without any idea how to really begin producing these resistances or lines of flight. I also share some of the pessimism of one of Mason’s interlocutors, Hans-Jürgen Urban, who fears that the crises of capital that have already been occurring are producing new forms of conservative power (which may look more like pre-capitalist ones and therefore not be threatened by the same things) faster than Mason and other utopianists recognize. There’s really a lot to say about all of it, and I don’t think that either of the two criticisms I mention here are good reasons not to try what Mason (or other accelerationists) is ultimately suggesting, but I find myself with no more clue how to start than I did before hearing him speak and I think that’s a harder problem than he makes it out to be.