In 2010, a group of scientists working for NASA announced a startling discovery. They claimed to have found a strain of microbes, hidden in the depths of Mono Lake in California, that were able to consume arsenic as a replacement for phosphorus. This was a surprise. Phosphorus is one of the basic, necessary building blocks of life alongside carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and sulfur. Arsenic, on the other hand, is generally toxic: not just to human beings—for whom it has a long history...

Tout se résume dans l’Esthétique et l’Économie politique . Everything comes down to Aesthetics and Political Economy. Mallarmé’s aphorism is my starting point for considering accelerationist aesthetics. 1 I think that aesthetics exists in a special relationship to political economy, precisely because aesthetics is the one thing that cannot be reduced to political economy. Politics, ethics, epistemology, and even ontology are all subject to “determination in the last instance” by the forces...

Learn the aesthetic error of submitting everything to a law: leveling the local event produces boredom and ugliness, a world without landscapes, books without pages, deserts. Take everything away and you will not see. To see space demands time, do not kill time. Avoid the symmetrical error of being satisfied with fragments. —Michel Serres 1 In Post-Cinematic Affect , Steven Shaviro defines accelerationist aesthetics in two ways. First, he points to the “‘disruption,’ or the...