REINVENTING HORIZONS

nize the imbalanced nature of their relationship, so grows their

demand for equality and their technical capacity to be in charge
ACCELERATING ACADEMIA:
of their destiny. This realization opens up a space for intervening ON HYPERSTTION
in history and for creating new horizons of possibility.22 IN THEORY
Armen Avanessian

Recall that hype is the ratio of expected earnings to earnings

(EE/E), whereas the above impressions are based on the
ratio of capitalization to earnings (K/E). The latter number
reflects both hype and the discount rate (K/E = H/r), so un-
less we know what capitalists expect, we remain unable to
say anything specific about hype. But we can speculate[…]
—Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan1

The new realist and materialist philosophy and the new po-
litical theory which it explicitly inspired, assert that reality
can be known and that change is possible. Rather than spell
out here what this entails in the various currents of thought
that range from New Materialism via Speculative Realism to

22. A different version of this essay was originally presented as part of Ashkal Alwan’s Home 1. Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan, Capital as Power: A Study of Order and Creorder,
Works 7, a Forum on Cultural Practices in Beirut on November 18, 2015. (Milton Park: Routledge, 2009), 190.

76 77
 REINVENTING HORIZONS
Accelerationism, I would like to look at the discursive framework
and background information that have led to their engagement
with the scientific and (financial-) economic phenomena that
characterize the early twenty-first century. Yet these phenomena
are largely ignored in the everyday academic life of the human-
ities, marked for decades now by a conservative philologism and
a politically motivated, yet nonetheless vague and inert theoret-
ical relativism – the legacy of ’68. In its various guises – “ma-
terialistic turn,” “speculative turn” – the abandonment of the
dogmata into which poststructuralism and critical theory have
petrified has made an undeniable impact. Suddenly, there are
alternatives to the stubborn technological and scientific analpha-
betism of the humanities, alternatives that recuse the dominant
cultural pessimism. The astonishing ignorance, enmity even, of
the official academic apparatus notwithstanding, these new real-
isms and materialisms have refocused public attention on philo-
sophical theorizing outside the academic bubble.
The discursive-political framework is linked to the political/
economic and intellectual crisis of the university. To understand
this crisis, we must first resolve an apparent paradox concern-
ing the self-conception of most humanities scholars. Both the
academic field of the humanities and the function of scholars
in it are often misunderstood. There is, first of all, the critical
self-conception of the protagonists. They see themselves threat-
ened by an increasing economization. What is at stake, in their
view, is nothing less than the construction of a bulwark against
capitalism (today, capitalism of the neoliberal variety). A more
careful historical archaeology of the contemporary university,
however, reveals this view to be quite illusory, not to say ideo-
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AVANESSIAN—ACCELERATING ACADEMIA
logical. This common folkloristic mystification of the past is best
countered with an accelerationist perspective on the origins of
the modern research university. Only in this way can we develop
an alternative scenario which we need, in my view, to focus and
conceptualize the considerable deficits of the way the human-
ities produce theory today – a preliminary but necessary step in
bringing about actual change.
How, then, do we think (of the academic present) differently?
The starting point would have to be the Humboldt nostalgia,
rampant not only in Germany, with its wistful phantasm of an
amalgamation of two contradictory claims: to advance research
and to promote teaching, a synthesis alleged to have succeeded
so much better in the past. This combination, the story goes,
makes the free development of academics’ individual talents and
creativity possible in the first place and thereby guarantees origi-
nality and quality in research, theory production, and knowledge
transmission. This high-flown scenario of a gradual decline of
Humboldtian ideals, said to be caused primarily by the processes
of economization which, after all, do not spare the university, is
misleading in more than one way. First of all, it is doubtful, from
an accelerationist perspective, whether such a utopian outside
of capitalist conditions is even possible. When we look, first, at
the origins of the modern research university in Prussia prior
to 1800 and, second, at the reactions of contemporary univer-
sities after 1800, the situation looks very different from what it
is said to be in the ever-popular humanist tale. The judgments
of the professoriate back then – be it at the Sorbonne, at the
English colleges, or among the Vienna Jesuits – bear a striking
resemblance with the laments about the state of affairs we hear
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today. What Humboldt’s contemporaries merely had an inkling
of has today emerged as the (long repressed) historical truth
of the modern research university: an economic orientation is
inscribed in its very purpose, which is to provide education as
professional training. And this shift produces, not as a side ef-
fect but as its intended governmental goal, a new type of aca-
demic and, in my view, aesthetic subjectivity. The switch from
an oral disputatio (which served to demonstrate mastery of the
established canon of knowledge) to a written dissertatio (which fo-
cuses on innovative research) is one example. Another is the bu-
reaucratization of the universities. Often presented as the result
of an increasing capitalization of the institution, it too has an
antecedent history in Prussian politics and policing – be critical! is
an imperative proclaimed beyond just Königsberg.2 As historian
William Clark pointedly remarks: “The researcher as modern
hero of knowledge, the civil servant as work of art was a work
of German irony.”3
Among the philosophers, including Hegel and Schleier-
macher, who were working on this fundamental and, to this day,
internationally reverberating reorientation of the university, it
is probably Fichte, who in coining the term Wissenschaftskünst-
ler, or academic-artist, has best characterized this new type of
subjectivity. The Romantic-idealist university, for him, was to
be “a school of the art of the scientific employment of reason”
and of “the practical employment of the art of science in life,”
2. See Armen Avanessian, Überschrift: Ethik des Wissens und Poetik der Existenz (Berlin: Merve,
2015), 24-46. An English translation is forthcoming from Sternberg Press.
3. William Clark, Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University (Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 2006), 211.
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AVANESSIAN—ACCELERATING ACADEMIA
from which “artists in life” are to emerge.4 Aesthetics becomes
a philosophical discipline at a time when a new “aesthetic re-
gime” (Jacques Rancière) produces, as its correlate, an aesthet-
ic subjectivity.5 Without being able to elaborate it here, it may
thus be necessary to take an even broader approach in deriving
from the critique artiste the new spirit of capitalism and its “cre-
ativity dispositif,” the “‘aesthetic capitalism’ of today” (Andreas
Reckwitz),6 than Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello have done
in their trailblazing study.7 Even before the Romantic bohème,
the matrix of today’s neoliberalism began to take shape in the
universities, which are responsible for a general aestheticization
of discourse. Autonomy, flexibility, creativity, and all the other
ingredients of innovative research were first conceived and em-
ployed in precisely those laboratories of the humanities that to-
day, wilfully ignoring their genesis, act the part of distinguished
pockets of resistance.
Given such misunderstandings, it comes as no surprise that
the critique that has been practiced with such devotion in facul-
ties of humanities for more than two hundred years now often
4. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, “Deduzierter Plan einer zu Berlin zu errichtenden höheren
Lehranstalt, die in gehöriger Verbindung mit einer Akademie der Wissenschaften stehe
(1807),” in Idee und Wirklichkeit einer Universität: Dokumente zur Geschichte der Friedrich-Wil-
helms-Universität zu Berlin, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1960), 34.
5. Jacques Rancière, Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art, trans. Zakir Paul (London
and New York: Verso, 2013).
6. Andreas Reckwitz, Die Erfindung der Kreativität: Zum Prozess gesellschaftlicher Ästhetisierung (Ber-
lin: Suhrkamp, 2012), 11.
7. Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Gregory Elliott (Lon-
don: Verso, 2005).
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 REINVENTING HORIZONS
takes the form of “transcendental miserabilism.”8 The main dif-
ference between the various forms of critique – be it immanent,
external, implicit, explicit, be it called critique or criticality – and
the speculative and accelerationist approaches already men-
tioned lies in the latter’s emphatic insistence on the potential of
the future: they attempt a recursive practice of transformation
instead of reflecting, in a bad infinity, on the given. The twisted
nostalgic look backward – about which Nietzsche already said
everything that needs to be said: “O Voltaire! O humanity! O
nonsense!”9 – leads one to stumble, as it were, backside forward.
Accelerationist speculation, on the contrary, advocates an inhu-
man and optimistic look back from the future onto a past we
(still) know as our present. And in contrast to the dromo nihilism
of earlier thinkers of speed who were unable or unwilling to op-
pose a speed posited as absolute by Virilio, contemporary leftist
accelerationism conceives of itself as an attempt to subvert or
manipulatively appropriate the power relations that tend to be
invisible in our hyperdynamic society but do not, for all that,
have a priori validity.10 Yet this is not possible in the mode of the
nostalgic and folkloristic mystifications of the university’s past. It
can only be achieved by means of a rational analysis, by a cog-
nitive mapping of the status quo, and by productively engaging
with the very dynamic and speed that our pervasively accelerat-
ed society imposes (whether we like it or not).
8. Nick Land, “Critique of Transcendental Miserablism,” accessed February 26, 2016,
http://hyperstition.abstractdynamics.org/archives/008891.html.
9. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. Judith
Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 35.
10. Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology, trans. Mark Polizzotti (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1986).
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AVANESSIAN—ACCELERATING ACADEMIA
From an accelerationist point of view, solving societal prob-
lems requires contextualizing local problems (e.g. working con-
ditions in the university) within the global. The crisis of the uni-
versity within globalized capitalism, which is also an intellectual
crisis, is usefully defined by a formula articulated by economic
theorists Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler (who, not coin-
cidentally, have also harshly criticized the economic innocence
of leftist critique): capital is power. Capitalist power takes two
forms, price and sabotage. Price is the capitalist medium of pow-
er par excellence. “The vast majority of modern capitalists (or
their managers) are ‘price makers’: they fix the price of their
product and then let ‘market forces’ do the rest for them.”11 In
the academic context, constant grading, all the evaluations and
reviews that feign objectivity where arbitrariness, if not market
interference dominate (the so-called Matthew effect, “that is, the
tendency for resources to go to those who already have them”),12
can safely be regarded as equivalents of this logic.13 And this
11. Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler, Capital as Power: A Study of Order and Creorder
(Milton Park: Routledge, 2009), 242. About the simplemindedness of leftist critique in
matters of economic theory they write: “most self-respecting critics of capitalism remain
happily ignorant of its ‘economics’ [...] This innocence is certainly liberating. It allows
critics to produce ‘critical discourse’ littered with cut-and-paste platitudes, ambiguities
and often plain nonsense. Seldom do their ‘critiques’ tell us something important about
the forces of contemporary capitalism, let alone about how these forces should be re-
searched, understood and challenged”.
12. Michèle Lamont, How Professors Think (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 8.
13. Nitzan and Bichler, Capital as Power, 242. The precarious objectivity of Anglo-American
evaluation procedures is the topic of innumerable articles that strongly disagree with
Lamont’s still valuable account. On market interference in the way outside funding is
allocated in Germany, see for example Richard Münch, “Wissenschaft im Schatten von
Kartell, Monopol und Oligarchie: Die latenten Effekte der Exzellenzinitiative,” Leviathan
34, no. 4 (December 2006): 466-486.
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brings us straight to sabotage, which here of course means more
than just opportunistic obstruction of certain new ideas within a
sclerotic intellectual apparatus. Within the contemporary cre-
ativity dispositif, the aesthetic-capitalistic task is to be better than
the average, that is, to constantly deliver more and more inno-
vative research than others. Given the previously unimaginable
lack of relevance that characterizes much of intellectual produc-
tion in the humanities today, the option of shutting oneself off
from the outside naturally suggests itself: where a great majority
rightly doubts the value of their own work, sabotage, as systematic
obstruction, becomes a means of choice. It is thus not merely
an accident that many early-career researchers are first pushed
through the system – from MA to PhD to postdoc after postdoc
– before they finally fail and leave or that many academics sell
their ignorance of new philosophical or societal tendencies as
an expression of professional or philological virtue. This form
of sabotage is instead a fundamental principle organizing the
academic economy.
This short overview should suffice to show that the folkloristic
bulwark of most academics – “kitsch leftism” might be a more
appropriate label14 – is ideological through and through. The
idea that there could be a site beyond the logic of the economy,
a possible outside, is closely linked to the nostalgic look back at
allegedly pre-capitalist Humboldtian ideals. Given these self-in-
volved reveries, it is not surprising that the Theory offered by the
“critical class” is increasingly losing its credibility. One may re-
gret this; it opens the way for conservative and reactionary forces
14. Reza Negarestani, for example, speaks of “kitsch Marxism” (see his “The Labor of the
Inhuman, Part I: Human,” e-flux #52, 2014, accessed February 26, 2016, http://ww-
w.e-flux.com/journal/the-labor-of-the-inhuman-part-i-human/).
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to gain ground within the university. Or one can seize it as an
occasion for developing a more progressive position. That is why
in recent years, materialist, realist, and speculative positions have
asserted themselves against the dusty philologization practiced in
philosophy departments – the philologization of phenomenolo-
gy in France, for example, of critical theory in Germany and
of analytical philosophy in the Anglophone countries. And they
have been successful, not least because they team up with more
radical political positions (post-operaism, technofeminism, ac-
celerationism). And the reaction of the academic establishment?
It oscillates for the most part between ignorance and animosity.
Let’s take the example of speculative realism, one of the
most important philosophical movements of the early twen-
ty-first century. Movement here is to be taken emphatically in the
Deleuzian sense, as the opposite of a “school’s” scholastic ten-
dencies, as a polyphonic conglomerate of young philosophers
scattered across the globe whose agility is linked to a certain
antagonism and which can, moreover, dissolve and enter into
different constellations. What distinguishes individual authors is
their outrageous attempt to philosophize and think once again
in their own name, to debate the big questions of our time. The
reaction of the academic establishment is as uniform as it is un-
surprising: these attempts are scandalous usurpations, we’re told,
and rereading this or that author of the (almost entirely male)
canon would yield much more adequate answers to the pressing
questions of our time than some new hype ever could. The im-
mense interest in these new voices outside of classic universities,
in art schools or the art world generally, then could only be a
superficial and short-lived hype, nothing else.
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This symptomatic reproach reveals, I think, a fundamental
lack of understanding, on the part of many academics, of how
theorizing and its propagation work in the twenty-first century
and of the role fashions, hypes, and so-called hyperstitions play
in the process. These latter, Nick Land tells us, are
a positive feedback circuit including culture as a compo-
nent. It can be defined as the experimental (techno-)sci-
ence of self-fulfilling prophecies. Superstitions are merely
false beliefs, but hyperstitions – by their very existence as
ideas – function causally to bring about their own reality.
Capitalist economics is extremely sensitive to hyperstition,
where confidence acts as an effective tonic, and inversely.15
Or, in the words of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU)
founded during Land’s time at the University of Warwick by
Sadie Plant, Mark Fisher, Robin Mackay, and others: “Hype ac-
tually makes things happen and uses belief as a positive power.
Just because it’s not ‘real’ now, doesn’t mean it won’t be real at
some point in the future. And once it’s real, in a sense, it’s al-
ways been.” It is no coincidence that these insights into the sig-
nificance of hypes, bubbles (in speculative finance, in social and
mass media, etc.), and hyperstition emerged from the import,
comprehension, and appropriation of precisely those theoretical
constructs that the authorities in Frankfurt, at the Sorbonne, or
in American philosophy departments had only recently accused
of being fascist, terroristic, or at least nonsensical. That these
15. Nick Land and Delphi Carstens, “Hyperstition: An Introduction,” accessed February,
26, 2016, http://merliquify.com/blog/articles/hyperstition-an-introduction/#.VOtK-
gUJ_wZg.
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AVANESSIAN—ACCELERATING ACADEMIA
intellectual interdicts have turned out to be wrong, to be indefen-
sible positions in the history of ideas, leaves the structural bigotry
of large parts of professional philosophy unperturbed.
Philosophical platforms developed independently of these
structures which practiced a different kind of philosophy and
philosophizing – think of Merve publishers in Germany, Semi-
otext(e) in the States, or most recently the the English journal
Collapse/Urbanomic. (The exception is the ‘revolutionary’ founda-
tion of a university in France, Paris-VIII.) They all testify to a hy-
perstitional efficacy of philosophical theorizing below the radar
of philosophical high priests and academic hardliners. In the age
of social media, of course, other kinds of platforms and commu-
nication channels increasingly serve to introduce hyperstitions
into the discursive mix, whence they spread and become active.
This is the point to introduce an important limitation of
Land’s dromo nihilistically conceived neologism: “hyperstition
accelerates the tendencies towards chaos and dissolution.”16 This
limitation concerns the political orientation of progressive ac-
celerationism, which distinguishes between a navigating accel-
eration and blind speed. (In German, the term Akzeleration – not
to be confused with Beschleunigung, i.e. a mere increase of speed
– even implies the recursive introduction of a difference into a
movement that would otherwise remain circular.) According-
ly, if hyperstition is to have progressive effects, its viral spread
must be coupled with a controllable and emancipatory element.
But what do hyperstitions know, such that they can manipulate
heterogeneous systems, and what types of control do they make
available? What types of systems-theoretical and systems-practi-
16. Quoted in Delphi Carstens, “Hyperstition,” 2010, accessed February 26, 2016, http://
merliquify.com/blog/articles/hyperstition/.
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cal knowledge emerge from the transformation of the channels
in which they move? First of all: it is neither the formal force of
the network, nor the causal constraint of the better argument as
regards content that allows hyperstitions to impose themselves on
the existing pathways. Instead, it is absolutely central that they
never refer merely to a form but also to a content; in the lan-
guage of contemporary theories of finance, they, not unlike de-
rivatives, have an “underlying.” The relevant contents, therefore,
are those (theoretical, philosophical) contents that produce a sur-
plus value of knowledge about the actual consistency of con-
temporary reality and are thus suitable for constructing channels
that promote a change of (academic, philosophical, etc.) reality.
At this point, it is both conceptually and (discursively) political-
ly decisive that merely negative or defensive practices, such as
neutralizing the evaluating powers in the short term or avoiding
academic sabotage, won’t suffice. New brands, fashions, or hypes
only have emancipatory and progressive effects when their in-
trinsic knowledge of forms of distribution simultaneously lead to
a redistribution of speaker positions and a retrofitting of chan-
nels of information – not just to the establishment of this or
that new master doctrine, even if the next such doctrine were a
speculative-realist one. In concrete terms: the authority of aca-
demic theorizing would have to be relativized in favor of other
platforms of philosophical thinking, and philosophical thinking
would have to be sought out in other places and be practiced
there.
In general terms, every step in the historical development of
capitalism comes with a change in its modes of distribution (this
applies to knowledge as much as it does to commodities). In the last
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AVANESSIAN—ACCELERATING ACADEMIA
few decades, an adequate reaction to such changes has time and
again been the hallmark of new theorizing on the left. The breadth
of such theories’ reception in the academy has been inversely pro-
portional to their speculative lucidity: it is only a slight exaggeration
to say that the more developed a theory’s anticipatory qualities were,
the longer it had to wait to be accepted by the academy. Examples
include current speculative and materialist thinking, rhizomic and
nomadic thinking in the work of Deleuze and Guattari, post-opera-
ist political economies or many, many years ago Walter Benjamin,
long since integrated into academic orthodoxy.
What is so difficult to understand about this? Is the current
pronounced disdain toward any form of discourse that succeeds
beyond the beaten scholastic paths merely due to a fear of losing
one’s share of the lucrative field of art, which is constantly lust-
ing for new theory fodder? Quite obviously and despite the ut-
most institutional mobilization, an entire generation of budding
artists and curators has more and more trouble doing anything
useful with the traditional theoretical instruments. Yet, more im-
portantly, we are today no longer merely dealing with the usual
time lag in the reception of new theories. That’s how it used to
be in past decades, during which an awkward compromise with
their career-happy successors eventually led the guardians of the
intellectual status quo to integrate every new theoretical current
into the curriculum. What is taking shape today is a fundamental
transformation of expanded media, i.e. the mix of classic re-
search and new online universities, art academies, various theory
programs in art institutions, etc.: new forms of artistic explora-
tion are emerging, and, like experimental curatorial practices,
they mostly move outside the official university circles.
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These shifts in the field of discursive production have a
correlate in a changed function and practice of authorship.
Foucault, in his “What is an Author?” had already pointed out
that the author is “neither exactly the owner of his texts nor is
he responsible for them; he neither produces nor invents them.”
Instead, “that which in the individual we call ‘author’ (or what
makes an individual an author) is only [a] projection.”17 At a
recent conference in Berlin, the art theorist, David Joselit, picked
up on this idea with regard to our information age and articu-
lated the contemporary plasticity of the author as a “profile”:
“A profile is both subject and object – it can be owned by the
biological person linked to it, or it may be expropriated from her.
The profile thus exists at the crossing of alienability versus in-
alienability of one’s own image as property.”18 Starting with the
figure of Edward Snowden, Joselit thus describes a “new par-
adigm” in which, in analogy to Benedict Singleton’s and Reza
Negarestani’s accelerationist reflections on the topic, alienation
is no longer to be conceived simply as the opposite of freedom
but as its precondition, as it were. Manipulatively accelerating
oneself and one’s environment thus means abandoning the sup-
position of an ideal outside in favor of accepting an originary
alienation. Yet at the same time it means using this entanglement
17. Michel Foucault, “Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?” in Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits, ed. Daniel
Defert, François Ewald, and Jacques Lagrange, vol. 1, 789–821 (Paris: Gallimard, 1994),
789 and 801; most of this text has been published in English under the title “What is an
Anthor?” trans. Josué V. Harari, in Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984, vol. 2: Aesthet-
ics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. James D. Faubion, 205–23 (New York: New Press,
1997).
18. I am grateful to David Joselit for granting permission to quote from the manuscript of
the talk he gave at the Lunch Bytes: Thinking about Art and Digital Culture conference at the
Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin on March 20, 2015.
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AVANESSIAN—ACCELERATING ACADEMIA
– in Marx’s terms: life in real subsumption – to open a breach to
the future. And in that case, even one’s imperfections point the
way to changed and future norms - ought rather than is. In the
present case, such an ought implies an epistemological as well as
a political dimension. On the one hand, to cite Foucault once
more, “it is time to study discourses not only in terms of their ex-
pressive value or formal trans-formations but according to their
modes of existence: the modes of circulation, valorization, attri-
bution, and appropriation.”19 For a politics of discourse, on the
other hand, this implies the normative demand to manipulate
and change the modes of circulation, valorization, attribution,
and appropriation.
From an accelerationist perspective, the decisive question is,
once more, to what extent alternative practices of knowledge
production and knowledge circulation also entail a different dis-
tribution of knowledge, a distribution that achieves more than
the conquest of endowed professorships by a new generation of
researchers. This redistribution marks the difference from the
“march through the institutions” advocated by the generation
of ’68. A circulating attractor – which can be a conceptual per-
sona, a personal profile, a transdiscursive instaurateur, a particular
discursive intersection, or a philosophical idea – reconfigures the
forms of distribution, it changes the context, and the success of
this change, in my view, depends not least on the content of the
attractor, hyperstition, or brand. In any case the manipulation
of existing conditions of distribution has to be part of the un-
derlying content.
19. Foucault, “Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?,” 810; “What is an Author?” 220.
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The poetic quality of hyperstitions is evident in many artistic
works, and even in the early days of institutional critique (before
its own institutionalization and academization began to suffo-
cate it). In general, the field of art is the best terrain on which
to learn how poeisis, the production or bringing-into-reality, the
letting-become-real of something new functions. This implies,
of course, not limiting oneself to merely writing about art. For
that, precisely, is one of the most conspicuous symptoms of insti-
tutionalized criticality with its third-party – funded conferences
about antiquated institutional critique. In the best of cases, these
exercises feature breathtaking intellectual pirouettes that name
the market mechanisms everyone is already familiar with – but
these insights are hardly ever mobilized in an accelerationist
manner (and there is, of course, the danger of contemporary
speculative and accelerationist theories being appropriated by
curators, gallery owners, and other market players). Instead of
parasitically appropriating the constantly expanding field of art
for an entirely unaesthetic agenda, for example, academized re-
flection about art usually leads to a mere affirmation of the status
quo, to an active participation even in the much-derided capital-
ization one pretends to criticize – for example in the conversion
of symbolic into economic capital which takes place in the writ-
ing of texts for exhibition catalogs. This to my mind is an inad-
equate conception in more than one sense. On the one hand,
it is inadequate to today’s entirely post-conceptual art, which is
nonetheless often analyzed by art-historically trained theorists
purely in terms of content, neglecting its performative or poietic
ability to make fictions realities. On the other hand, it testifies to
the inadequacies of academic theorizing. Christian Marrazi’s di-
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AVANESSIAN—ACCELERATING ACADEMIA
agnosis of the neoliberal orientation of academic economics, of
“[p]olitical discourse’s delayed reaction to the post-Fordist trans-
formation [...] with regard to what has happened in the world of
scientific research,” applies to other disciplines as well.20
It is a precondition for accelerating academia that both the
university and its protagonists are understood to always be tied
into a social, and at least potentially global, context. To ignore
this is to deprive abstract political theories of all efficacy in con-
fronting contemporary neoliberal forms of distribution. No
wonder that a large part of political science does not (or cannot,
or does not want to, or... the question of modal verbs becomes
negligible here) change anything about the concrete economic
conditions of discursive distribution. Hence the suggestion, in
my recent polemic Overwrite: Ethics of Knowledge/Poetics of Exis-
tence,21 that we cut back on venting academic political theory and
start politicizing academic thinking in all its material dimensions
(its settings of writing, its spaces of communication, its mafia-like
practices of evaluation). If any transformation or acceleration of
the academic situation is to be brought about, political engage-
ment with today’s university has to understand these local details
in their global economic context.
Any precise political localization within a global political con-
text also always has an ethical dimension that barely surfaces in
the everyday career-driven life of academia. The primary aspect
here is not the subject (who?) or the content (what?) of speech but
its exact localization: Where do I speak from as an author, which position
20. Christian Marazzi, “Rules for the Incommensurable,” Substance: A Review of Theory &
Literary Criticism 36, no. 1 (2007): 13.
21. Armen Avanessian, Überschrift: Ethik des Wissens – Poetik der Existenz (Berlin: Merve, 2014)
under contract at Sternberg Press for release in 2016.
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do I thereby assume, which is my profile? An ethics or politics of knowl-
edge and a poetics (not aesthetics!) of knowledge intersect where a
method becomes existential, where the site of the self shifts. This
is not to be confused with the function of the deicitic shifts literary
theory draws on to explore the power of fiction (the amalgama-
tion of protagonist and reader, the reader’s entry into the novel’s
imaginary world).22 It is a poetic practice for the simple reason
that academic thinking is tied to the act of writing (and only as
a consequence of, for example, perception, sensation, or aesthet-
ic experience). The widespread failure to understand the poietic
nature of writing in the humanities is, in my view, due to the he-
gemony of aesthetic thinking. The production of texts is regarded
as a purely practical activity; everything else is, at most, of stylistic
value. Under the auspices of the general aestheticization of phi-
losophy since 1800, all we are left with is the kind of unproductive
alternatives with which the futile debates about postmodernism (a
blurring of the distinction between literature and theory versus the
ignorant and adamant insistence on academic cleanliness) have
familiarized us. Taking seriously the fundamental deictic capacity
of language, however, reveals that the poetic transformative power
of philosophical thinking might locate us differently in the world,
might allow me to look onto the world differently from my new perspective.
Every subversive new idea, every metanoietic insight forces us to
assume a new position in the world.
There is yet another reason why the narrative tactics that
sharpen our sense of the strangeness of our own production are
22. See Käte Hamburger, The Logic of Literature, trans. Marilynn J. Rose, 2nd rev. ed. (Bloom-
ington: Indiana UP, 1993), and compare the critical expansion of Hamburger’s approach
in Armen Avanessian and Anke Hennig, Present Tense: A Poetics, trans. Nils F. Schott with
Daniel Hendrickson (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015).
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AVANESSIAN—ACCELERATING ACADEMIA
not the same as the tactics we know from literary fiction and why
they do not, by any means, necessarily end up in aestheticizing
discourse. On the contrary, they guarantee that the one writing,
or the ‘author’ (remembering Foucault’s description of his status
as a psychological projection), does not give in to the “fiction
of his proper place” or assume a fixed position but instead re-
members the heterogeneity and contingency, the produced or
poeticized narration of himself and his environment (Foucault’s
famous “science fiction”). My object has reinvented me, and the reasons
why each and every part of reality now has to be understood differently,
therefore, are not subjective but systematic. Such an existentialization of
one’s method is a recursive combination (not a reflective critique!)
– the possibility of localizing oneself as one is writing, of actu-
alizing oneself via one’s projects. The role abduction performs
in logic can be transposed onto textual practices: writing oneself,
writing what has not yet been known and thereby writing (something) dif-
ferent(ly), over-writing oneself.23 This is linked to a narrative practice
interested as much in retelling the future as it is in genealogies of
alternative pasts, always with a view to actualizing hyperstitions
and heresies. At strategically important points, such genealogical
retelling, it seems to me, is the very opposite of thinking in terms
of a history of philosophy whose practice in contemporary phi-
losophy departments is so unproductive, destructive even, in its
seamless transposition of texts from concepts into a politics of
discourse. It is hard to think of a more efficient way to ban think-
ing from the institution than breaking down the texts one reads
into strategic positions to be assumed and critical frontlines or
23. On abductive logic, Charles Sanders Peirce, Pragmatism und Pragmaticism, vol. 5 of Collected
Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, ed. Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss, and Arthur W. Burks
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 5:182–92.
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 REINVENTING HORIZONS
limits to be drawn – such a program negates and ruins the specu-
lative and poetic moment of all theorizing.
Epistemological, ethical, and political aspects cannot be sep-
arated. A new theoretical formation also changes the subject of
research or the profile of its author and necessarily leads to con-
flicts with the methodological status quo. Inversely, every conflict
concerning the politics of discourse starts from a poietic truth that
affects not only the subject of knowledge but its object as well.
Becoming what one has come to know in speculation or manip-
ulative abduction means to assume, in the emphatic sense, re-
sponsibility for a new insight into or view onto the world. In the
humanities, this is usually tied to developing a new method and
attempting to construct a new paradigm (Foucault’s instructeur). As
in the sciences, this is neither simply a matter of logical deduction
nor one of aesthetic induction (the infinitely dismal reflective pow-
er of judgment) but a question of abduction. Rather than simply
subsuming the singular under a general law, abduction produces a
positive association with other singular cases and thereby unsettles
the established general as well. The form of inference that is ab-
duction, first discussed by Charles Sanders Peirce and now wide-
ly investigated in the philosophy of science, has a (new) singular
emergence only when a new rule is invented for it. This has to be
the accelerationist goal of work in the humanities, too. It is by no
means enough to pick the right opponents in one’s specialty, as the
practice of decades spent writing theses of various kinds would
have it. Only a recursive intervention and the abductive manip-
ulation of the objects of research in the humanities can further
this goal. Henceforth, the newness of a theory can always also be
gauged by the conflicts it gives rise to in the everyday life of the
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AVANESSIAN—ACCELERATING ACADEMIA
academy, no matter whether what is at issue is an academic thesis,
a literary text, or a work of art.
Only the best possible manipulation and exploitation of ex-
isting power strategies will yield the information necessary for
change. And only exact localization (the local) opens the view onto
the future, and only the view onto the greater whole (the global)
allows for new localizations. That is why poetic recursion, which
places differentiated parts into a new whole, is the opposite pole
of aesthetic reflection. Poetics is transformative doing, and it is tied
to the aforementioned speculative production of reality, a produc-
tion that often teams up with theoretical heresies, hyperstitions,
and tricksters’ conflicts with one’s surroundings. “Common to all
tricksters,” Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams tell us, “is the use of a
cunning intelligence to devise technology, deployed as a tool of the
weak against the strong. The trickster logic of production is above
all inventive, often weaponizing empathy with its targets into an
effective trap with which to ensnare them.”24 The practice of a
politics of the university – which can be classified as “parasitic”
in Michel Serres’s sense25 – requires tricksters and chameleons,
deserters and whistleblowers, loose cannons and renegades. The
watchword, therefore, is not Imagine academia and nobody cares but
Imagine the (political) philosophy of the future to be somewhere else, and we
are already thinking it. Academia, accelerate!
Translated by Nils F. Schott
24. Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, “On Cunning Automata,” Collapse 7 (2014), 493–4.
25. Michel Serres, The Parasite, trans. Lawrence R. Schehr (Minneapolis: University of Min-
nesota Press, 2007), 207.
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REINVENTING
HORIZONS
Nick Srnicek / Amanda Beech / Mohammad Salemy
Armen Avanessian / Luciana Parisi / Diann Bauer
Victoria Ivanova / Peter Wolfendale / Patricia Reed
Antonia Majaca / Jason Adams/ Martin Brabec
Federica Bueti

Editors: Václav Janoščík, Vít Bohal, Dustin Breitling