The Concept of Machinic Materialism

Laruelle, Kantian Accelerationism, and Marx

In Nietzsche contre Heidegger (1977), François Laruelle puts forward the following proposition: Nietzsche’s text should be read through a materialist lens, one that allows us to see the concept of the 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 Laruelle’s later concept of “the radical dyad,” in which contradiction is permanently maintained. Without the constant tension between these opposing poles, neither Revolution nor Fascism would be possible, and this possibility, too, necessarily remains permanent.

Revolution, which is the Will to Power of the “oppressed” or the “defeated,” as Laruelle puts it, is carried out in opposition to Mastery and Fascism without ever taking their place. These are structural positions, not psychological or ethical ones; therefore, “reconciliation,” “resolution,” synthesis, or Aufhebung—the means of Hegelian dialectics—are superfluous fantasies within the political Machine for which Nietzsche provides the conceptual material.

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 across the chiasm of the real, that is, of the Will to Power. These doubly intersecting poles constitute the fourfold (quadriparti) of the materialist machine (MM) that Nietzsche’s philosophy engenders. Political materialism (PM) operates as a machine, and the political continent Nietzsche uniquely provides is the impersonal force.

In this sense, MM/PM can be compared to Marx’s notion of the political as a system or structure—in a way, a “machine”—moved by immanent laws rooted in the material production of social relations rather than in forms of subjectivation. However, Laruelle differentiates between the Marxian project and Nietzsche’s Machine, since the former retains a teleology and an eschatological dream of eliminating 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-” signifies the suspension of the principle of philosophical sufficiency, not a negation of Marxism. In a lecture I organized in 2015 as part of the New Realisms Conference, he insisted that class struggle does not stop, that there is no telos of history, and that there is no point at which the principles of Mastery/Fascism are ever defeated. A non-philosophical Marxist, he insisted, was a subject modeled according to the figure of a messiah. I was the consecutive translator for that lecture, and its transcription is published here; the lecture was in French, and the translation is in English.

The political is purely transcendental; any concept belongs only to the realm of the transcendental. Yet it is, again, undergirded by materiality. The 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 also a function, one that can be explained in terms of quantum mechanics, according to Laruelle in Christo-Fiction. It is superimposed on the real, that is, on the real of the political. In a couple of articles published here, I have analyzed the Kantian concepts of the subject and time, as well as capitalism as an impersonal force of pure temporality, drawing on the work of Anna Greenspan. If we look at the body of work produced by CCRU—particularly by Anna Greenspan, Nick Land, and other CCRU and post-CCRU figures—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, the overlaps with Laruelle, whether in his early Nietzschean phase or in his quantum and non-Marxist phase, are obvious.

In my book Capitalism’s Holocaust of Animals (2019), I argued that capitalism equals philosophy and that this inference is possible only if one understands language, both natural and artificial, as an automaton, which is perfectly in line with structuralist linguistics and structuralist psychoanalysis, especially Lacan. I further argue, by applying Laruelle’s method, that subjectivity is nothing but the radical dyad of the physical and the automaton. Language, like all automata, is always already machinic, material, and mechanistic. The same holds for any production of signification. Thus, there is nothing “organic,” since nature operates in a way that could perhaps be described and explained only as mechanistic or mechanical. Nature/Technology, Body/Mind, Organic/Mechanistic, and all analogous oppositions—for example, “Rational” versus “Emotional”—are false dichotomies: nature operates in ways that can only be explained mechanically, and so does “sign-making,” signification, or “making sense”; that is, Language and “Mind,” or, more generally, processes of cognition. The organic could only be a synonym for the physical, the bodily, and the material, not for some ideal(ist) flow of unadulterated immanence, which, in philosophy, is usually Idea, Spirit, Intelligence, etc. Of course, machinic, mechanical, and mechanistic materialism belong to the transcendental register, and they are our access to the always already foreclosed real, the noumenon, the “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 the overlap between capitalism and philosophy as automata, as explained above. The same model can be applied to the hypercapitalist accelerationist project. The latter, however, remains profoundly philosophical and retains the atavistic assumption of a radical discontinuity between matter and mind, or Intelligence. Marxism, at least in its non-philosophical form, recognizes the metaphysical nature of capitalism-as-philosophy: the assumption that pure value, intelligence, and Sign can sustain themselves without a material foundation, or through the transformation of matter into value, meaning, and Sign, is the untenable final contradiction. Capitalism is philosophy materialized: it risks presuming that it can sustain itself independently of its material foundation through the latter’s complete exploitation, as if matter could somehow be alchemically transformed into pure intelligence.

Text originally published by Katerina Kolozova on Hyperspekulation.