No Speed Limit: Three Essays on Accelerationism (Forerunners: Ideas First)

Accelerationism is the bastard offspring of a furtive liaison between Marxism and science fiction. Its basic premise is that the only way out is the way through: to get beyond capitalism, we need to push its technologies to the point where they explode. This may be dubious as a political strategy, but it works as a powerful artistic program. 

Other authors have debated the pros and cons of accelerationist politics; No Speed Limit makes the case for an accelerationist aesthetics. Our present moment is illuminated, both for good and for ill, in the cracked mirror of science-fictional futurity.

Forerunners: Ideas First is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital publications. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.

Steven Shaviro is DeRoy Professor of English at Wayne State University and author of The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism (Minnesota, 2014), Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics (MIT, 2009), Connected, or What it Means to Live in the Network Society (Minnesota, 2003) and The Cinematic Body (Minnesota, 1993).