Here are my thoughts on the book Cute Accelerationism by Amy Ireland and Maya B Kronic, which I am reading with some friends this summer of 2024. I posted a version of this at mirror.

What is Cute Accelerationism? We are creating a new category, Cute Accelerationism, or perhaps just Cute. Cute as a category promises to help us transcend our original categories of biology, culture, language, and organization. This reorganization opens us toward a new perception beyond the traditional Western categories of truth, beauty, and the good, i.e., epistemology, aesthetics, ethics, politics and metaphysics.

Cute and Camp

When I read this book, I thought of Sontag and “Notes on Camp.” What if she had written Notes on Cute? Is this essay actually “Notes on Cute.”

No.

Cute Accelerationism is not “Notes on Cute.” In Notes on Camp, Sontag points to subculture as politics, aesthetics as politics (which Walter Benjamin first pointed at), and from here we can treat subcultures as potlicial and aethetic powers: punk, grunge, straight edge, etc. From a metalevel, Notes on Camp makes us take subcultures seriousouly, and also gay subculture. It connects culture with sexual and gender orientation. Cute might be one in this series of subultures – and that would be Notes on Cute. But in Cute Acceleration, Cute is not one in a series, but a new series itself – a Category. (Can’t you tell I have been reading a lot of Category Theory this year)

What is Accelerationism? It became popular a few years ago as a way for us to fix the problems of post modernity. We move very fast. Accelerationism, as first concieved, is sort of imperialist and neoliberal, and there are now different modifiers of accelerationism – like CUTE.

Accelerationism is solutioning. Solutioning is part of neoliberal imperialist ideology: problems/solutions projects/goals – its a new type of duality a new time of hylomorphism. We can argue about this, it would be fun.

Cute and the Young Girl

Tiqqun’s Theory of the Young Girl is another text that comes to mine along with Notes on Camp. And, it is discussed in the end notes to Cute Accelerationism. In Tiqqun’s book, the “Young Girl” is a commodity – a object within the capitalist category and the morphism of M-C-M’. (More Category Theory Jargon). It is about the transformation to becoming young girls – all of us are becoming young girls.

CUTE though defines partials – dividuals -that create cute bodies without organs or UwU. The Young Girl may have cute attributes but we cannot have young girl accelerationism. (Here I am referencing D&G)

The “young girl” is a monolith, molar, an object that is measurable and Finte. Cute is outside scale. Cute is both molar and molecular and neither, including object, category and divitual.

Cute is sort of a dirty

Anti-Oedipus, by Deleuze and Guattari, was popular because of dirty language. Shit is in the first sentence. Language is philosophy (especially in the 20th/21st century).

Dirty language is philosophical radicality. Language is radical. The language of Anti-Oedipus expresses ways of thinking other than linear causality, a new theory of sense perception, a rethinking of the object-subject distinction through partial objects like ‘divduals’, ‘Object petit a’, and other partials gleaned from psychoanalysis and category theory.

Cute Acceleration creates it own language

The first 40+ pages of Cute Accelerationism are the manifesto or the myth—it is the new language and myth of cuteness. The last 100 or so pages are the theoretical scaffolding for what happened in the first 40 pages.

This reminds me of Platonic dialogues that begin with a ‘rational’ analysis of a concept or action, like piety or temperance, and then end with a myth to justify our interest in these concepts in the first place.

Cute mythology

What are the new myths of the planetary age? Mythologist Joseph Cambell challenges us to find them. Cute is a modern concept—a modern mythology—perhaps this is it! It is definitely one of the myths.

The landscape of Cute mythology is the creatures of cuteness, the itemization of cute attributes (i.e., dividuals), and the different topologies that Amy Ireland and Maya B Kronic discuss, such as flatness and cuddles without interiority.

Accelerationism Again

There are all sorts of accelerationism, left, right, queer, etc. As I read Cute Accelerationism, I kept wondering if this is metaphysics or politics — or aesthetics — as aesthetics is the new metaphysics — the new master philosophy.

Accelerationism was originally a logic, a way to move past the blocks of contemporary thinking and politics. It was a logic of speed. It is the fourth transcendental category that Kant left out, and Lyotard introduced.

Cute Acceleration is not a logic. Acceleration applied to ‘Cute’ is a way to prioritize outside hierarchy — that is political. Cute Acceleration is about organization — without hierarchy but with time to market — time to agora — to discuss the concept, proposal, or laws.

Body without Biology

Cute bodies, in Cute Accelerationism, are not biological bodies or are they? There are four circuits of cuteness that the authors outline in the end of the book: biology, capital, database, ai. I think of this as part of the discussion of the molecular and the molar, or of systems. Cute can be political, aesthetic, metaphysical(biological), or epistemological — depending on the circuit.

Cute is Virtual in the sense that lives in the realm of possibility outside of biology or logic — the cat is both dead and alive. Joseph Cambell talks about the need for a planetary mythology -but what of a virtual mythology.

Non-Philosophy

“The trend is away from the real human body toward something cute. This is abstraction, but it is not unreal. The use of just a few lines enable us to imagine a certain three-dimensional entity, just like a mathematical model’ Ito — The Please of Libes — The Moe Manifesto p.160 (Cute Accelerationism)

Laurelle’s non-philosophy is a way to think about philosophy in a way that non-euclidian geometry is a way to think about space. What is a non-philosophical way to think about philosophy? This is a hard question to think about — but I think about Category Theory and how to think about mathematics through morphisms and categories rather than numbers and operations. This is a sort of ‘non-’ thinking, although I am not sure what the other side of the non is.

The creation of these new categories—as in category theory—such as Cute or Camp even, and looking at the ways these categories connect with other categories through morphisms—to create new language and worlds and new categories themselves—perhaps can then address those things that are not so cute: famine, sickness, violence. The book was written during COVID-19, but can we just accelerate Cute and move past these forces?