The Fast and the Negative: Dialectics and Posthumanism

Abstract

The article refers to the way the recent TV drama Brexit: The Uncivil War deconstructs the inherent contradictions of modern capitalism. Historically, both Marx and the avant-garde believed that acceleration or deceleration will aggravate the contradictions to the point of the collapse of the system. British cultural theory further expounds this issue by adding a curious philosophical perspective of the way capital deals with the abstraction of the real in the digital era. Their take on accelerationism subsequently created two competing aesthetic and political concepts: the left wing that endeavours to exploit the dialectical negativity in order to re-purpose the technological speed away from capital’s imaginary, and the right wing that embraces the acceleration of the forces of production to disclose the invasion of posthuman, machinistic Singularity.