Photo by Alex Iby on Unsplash

The whole thing reads to me as though there is a profound insecurity that I touched on, semi-accidentally.

Half of my point, in that tweet — though it was wrapped in layers of irony —was that I was able to ignore the existence of Deleuze, while writing a work within the field that he is seen as the grandfather of, because — it at least appears — most of the point of much of philosophy is to act as an in-group signaling device.

Which is why me saying “look at how much you all accepted me, to the point of assuming that I was an authority on philosophy, without me ever actually reading any philosophy” aroused so much blind and incoherent rage — I essentially pointed out that the gatekeeping method didn’t work.

That I could become well regarded and seen as a teacher within the community without ever reading Deleuze calls into question not only the validity of all their friendships, but also their own self-identity. If I was able to inadvertently deceive them, how can they have any confidence that their friends aren’t doing the same? How can they even accept the validation of their supposed peers? After all, if I was able to get that validation as well, doesn’t that undermine the authority of that validation?

And thus, the number of people who felt compelled to repeatedly scream that I was absolutely not a major accelerationist thinker — despite, of course, their very reaction implying otherwise. After all, if I was so insignificant to them, why am I even worth talking about? Some of them are still talking about it now, a full week later.

That so many people are insisting that I am nothing, for so long, would seem to imply the opposite.

All this, I feel, is best incapsulated in the reaction of one of my (I suppose, now ex-)reply-guys. He responded to my tweet by writing his own essay on anarcho-accelerationism, in which he attempted to redefine it in ways that made no reference to my essay on the topic.

Tellingly, he didn’t try to refute me by showing crucial things that I had missed out on — things that I might have gotten if I read his favorite philosophers. He didn’t even try to refute me at all — he just tried to fuck with my search engine optimization.

When I pointed this out publically — he responded with:

Now, obviously, there is a lot to unpack here.

Firstly, this is a man that was repeatedly in the replies to my posts, and that I eventually DMed with. Further, he used my term, in what appears to be an intentional and admitted attempt to muddy those waters. He’s essentially citing me by not citing me.

Further, he clearly does think that I am important and serious — after all, why else would he have put in the effort to write that essay about me? If he doesn’t find me threatening, then why try to discredit me? Also, he was quite happy to be in my mentions until this, so I was clearly of some interest to him.

Finally: the pictures of books. The books are really what get me. His message appears to be that he is smarter than me because he owns more philosophy books — that they are some sort of fetishistic talisman, and that he gains their power by hoarding them like a dragon.

The whole thing reminds me, to an uncomfortable degree, of how much of the (American) Left is mere aesthetics — anarchists aping rebellion, Marxist-Leninists pining away for the Soviet Union, Bookchinites weeping over fading Rojava, syndicalists pining for the labor movement of a generation (or even two!) ago, social democrats wishing for the disappeared industrial truce of pre-neoliberal Europe, so on and so on. I wrote an article about that, and I’m actually quite surprised at how well it continues to do:

My point then, and my point now, is that so much of what we do is nothing more than posturing and fantasizing — and, I suppose, part of the vitriol of the reaction came from me parodying that.