(Session 2) Benjamin Noys - The Grammar of Neoliberalism

Provenance

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 unknown approved for opus-only hosting; mp3 tier deferred pending a disk volume). Series: #Accelerate panels. Source: audio original (.mp3).

Timestamped map

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

  Firstly, there's some kind of irony that I coined accelerationism as a term of critique. I'm anti, if you like, accelerationist, and now there's all this tech stuff surrounding me as an ironic comment on my position. Instead of completely going through what I was going to do, I want to reply to the first two papers…

• 00:02:42

  It's a mistake to conflate those two positions. Then just in relation to what Ray was saying about the conceptual incoherence of Nick Land's position, that it relies on a fundamental dualism. A dualism that is incoherent, and this is why I encountered Nick Land's work when I was researching on Bataille in the 90s…

• 00:04:20

  It just doesn't turn up. So, you end up, as Ray said, with capital as a subject. And if you want to cheerlead and support capital, that's perfectly fine. You know, you're on the winning side. So, congratulations. However, I, you know, personally do not regard that as a... You should be mistaken for a left political…

• 00:07:14

  position, and also often tends to presume a fundamental incompatibility of technological forces, especially cybernetic and currently more neurobiological, with capitalism. Of course, markets have pre-existed capitalism and could post-date it, and there is no simple essential or necessary reason why cybernetic…

• 00:08:52

  What I want to suggest, and only really suggest, is that this kind of argument radically underestimates that the domination of capitalism operates through the value form, which is not simply an external parasite, but rather the self-positing of capitalism as real abstraction. The reason that I think that…

• 00:11:22

  In terms of the more precise context of neoliberalism, the dimension of governmentality is missed. I think the market is treated as a merely neutral social form, without any thought about its conditions, and the constant action on those conditions. The market becomes hymned as the social mechanism, as Ray was saying…

• 00:13:16

  Finally, the enterprise form is valorized by the enterprise of self-deconstruction or self-extinction, whether that's cast in neurological, retooling, biological reformatting, or cyberspatial redistribution, what I've taken to calling a bloated anti-Oedipus. We're expected in the name of de l'usogratarian anti-fascism…

• 00:16:00

  Residues of capitalism's own irrationalisms.