NCCP 700-216 - The Concept of Acceleration (session 1)

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Self-transcribed from the recording's audio/video with Whisper ASR, then drawn from the frozen curation of the CCRU oral archive. The identifiers below fingerprint the exact source transcript files.

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Adjudicated APPROVED 2026-07-11 (basis: stage-1 acceptance ruling — lane open-web-talk approved for opus-only hosting; mp3 tier deferred pending a disk volume). Series: standalone. Source: video original (.mp4).

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These jump targets come from timestamps preserved in the source transcript, so they work as navigational anchors rather than editorially invented section labels. Timings are approximate — they mark where a passage begins, not exact word timing.

• 00:00:00

  Hello and welcome to the first session of the concept of acceleration with Nick Land. I'm going to pass the mic off to him now. Thanks Theodore. So I'll start by hopefully launching a few discussion points. And then obviously we can move into a kind of interactive mode. If people urgently want to interrupt me, that's…

• 00:22:28

  And so I think that the sense that, obviously Marx is not using the word acceleration in this quote, but what's being said by Marx here I think reverberates very strongly through the Deleuze and Guattari usage of accelerationism that we will then later find in Annihilationism. I think it's very important to look…

• 00:43:33

  Accelerationism is the basic belief that these capacities can and should be let loose by moving beyond the limitations of the system. And that's what we're talking about here. So, I think that's the key to this. And I think that's the key to this. And I think that's important to me, as I've been doing this…

• 01:06:46

  It had entered a certain kind of folk popular sort of meaning at that point, where acceleration just meant taking things over the cliff, taking things further, that somehow there was a sense that some kind of accelerationist strategy from the left. I mean, I can find people at the top of the grievance, and I…

• 01:22:29

  Can I jump in here and ask a question to Nick and the alt-woke manifestoists? So when we talk about left and right, it seems funny to... I mean, maybe this is Nick's provocation when he asked this question about defined left and right. I mean, left and right. Okay. So what's the antagonism? So you don't just have…

• 01:39:42

  Yeah. That's part of the reason that I was, you know, I was raising this kind of question. Well, what are people, what's going on with the vocabulary left and right now? Because I think there are some very just lazy ways that can be used in terms of like maybe practical on some levels. But in terms of just theoretical…

• 02:02:06

  think my usage of that term is able to support the kind of weight that people seem to be putting on it and the sidebar because I meant it just almost in this exact sense of kind of a scriptural literalism you know I think I use that term in relation to the uh obsolete capitalism text that I've that I hope I've linked…

• 02:25:23

  And it'll make the glass smoother. So, great. Okay. Yeah. So, thanks massively to everyone for a great discussion. I've really enjoyed it. Thanks, Theodore, for your work putting it together. Yeah, no problem. Have a good week. Yeah, you too. Thanks, Nick. Bye.