DOWNFALL:
Accelerationism for Beginners

Essay by
SCOTT LAWRIE

No. 4–4/12 (v1.1)
Written November-December 2024

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“Illusion is no longer possible, because the real is no longer possible.” – Jean Baudrillard(1)

This show is a result of theory meeting action. In the Blue corner, we have Accelerationism; a theory of speed, collapse, and perhaps even renewal. In the Red, we have the election of Trump; quite possibly the most significant election of our lifetimes. Betwixt the two, there is a curious relationship that has sent chills down the necks of anyone wallowing in philosophy or the theory of criticism.(2)

Never before in history has a President elect had so much thrown at them. Yet nothing stuck. Old Teflon Don. Everyone has a take on the reasons for this, from the Dems misreading an entire nation, and pollsters being wildly wrong, to Russian interference and a media system which is officially on a par with TikTok. As with all these things, the answers will be more nuanced and complicated – but hopefully a lot clearer – in time. Whatever it was, it’s clear that critique wasn’t effective. Was the strength of the voters’ conviction a result of pure ignorance? Or an sign of something else?

The fortitude of the MAGA ideology can’t be ignored. Trump spoke to voters in ways that people understood. And they weren’t all rednecks and stupid, much as some on the left would like us to think. For too many were ordinary, hard working people who had done everything asked of them in life - went to college, had kids, didn’t break the law, paid their taxes - but felt their contract with society had been broken. Most of these same people can’t afford to retire. They lack political agency. Their voices feel unheard. The toothless Democrats refused to reign in the billionaires who are now not only wealthier than most small countries, but have, like Musk and Bezos, opportunistically consolidated their positions of power at the highest levels of Government. Doh.

It’s a brutal irony of course. Such was the extremity of feeling of mistrust in the Dems that in order to feel any sense of agency, the swing voters all voted for Trump. America’s faith in democracy was so strong that they literally voted in the fascists. I’ve yet to read the Project 2025 manifesto  (currently out of print again) but from what I’ve read of the summaries, it’s pretty explicit, and jarring in that it seeks to dismantle the democratic principles that brought them to power in the first place.

Despite all of this one fact remains. Trump was democratically elected, albeit with a shocker of a mandate. Here is a politician the majority of the American people clearly like and trust, and no amount of hard facts or ‘media lies’ were going to get in the way. That it all happened so easily should make us all - regardless of our political beliefs – sit up and take notice.

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Hyperreality and the US Election as Spectacle
Boiled down to its essence, Baudrillard’s idea of hyperreality is a state in which the symbols and signs of reality become detached from any authentic meaning, creating a world where the image is mistaken for reality itself. When pundits say we live in a ‘post-truth’ world, this is generally what they’re hinting at. To drill a little deeper, we need to first understand how those symbols and signs are disseminated into the population. Traditional media (print, press, websites, etc.) now reflects back to its audience what they want to hear, in order to consolidate market share, which in turn increases advertising revenue. This is exacerbated even further in the digital social sphere, where forums, Facebook friends, and platforms like ‘X’ are now so bound to algorithmic interference that it only serves to reinforce views, rather than challenge or counter them in any critical fashion.

Take for example, the “scripted reality,” of the campaigns, where messaging was either carefully crafted by strategists (mostly Dems) or bluntly delivered during mass rallies (Trump), either way, each side presented the other as delusional. Forget the substance of policy, it was always about what you wanted to hear. Add in a layer of legitimised selfishness (‘What’s in this for me?’) and you could argue this election was possibly the easiest win in a generation, not because of the choice of candidates, but as a result of the absence of any meaningful future.

Harris was a fairly underwhelming choice, she was tolerated as a candidate for the status quo - a woman of mixed heritage, educated, likeable, tick, tick, tick – albeit with not a shred of enthusiasm for the working classes she expected to be voted in by. But it is Trump who personified the hyperreal candidate. He certainly embodies the absurdity of hyperreality: his political “identity” is built on celebrity, controversy, and the idea of “winning”. By contrast, his crime sheet and bad character became completely irrelevant. It’s worth noting that as far back as 2016, Žižek called out Trump(3) – surprisingly at the time, but correctly as it turned out – as a centrist candidate, because his use of language resonated with most ordinary people. In their heads, his base liked the fact he was everything the left hated. Trump’s campaign rhetoric didn’t care about facts because neither did his supporters – reflecting Baudrillard’s notion that the “truth” is secondary only to the power of the image. In hyperreality, truth or factual consistency loses importance and Trump’s rhetoric operated so effectively in this space that the image or spectacle he creates holds more sway over his audience than any objective truth.

More of an icon – or “Sign” in a Baudrillard sense – than a traditional politician, it says something about the time in which we live that the public perception of a reality TV star could so easily manipulate the traditional - albeit benign – symbols of decency, intelligence, and trustworthiness – with barely any vision beyond a galvanising, yet utterly futile, position of Make America Great Again. A majority of Americans bought the rudimentary ‘what’ wholeheartedly, but far fewer asked ‘why?’ or ‘how’?

Workers rights? We’ll get to that. Immigrants? We’ll deal with them. The economy? We’ll fix it.

Roughly speaking, about half the population of any liberal democracy doesn’t get the winner they want in an election. It’s an accepted and important part of what participating in a democracy means. Everyone turns up for work the next day, some grumpy, but after few days things settle back into a “normal” routine under late stage capitalism. But this time, it felt like American voters were so fed up participating in a democracy that didn’t really work for them – time after time helping successive governments to power only to settle back into a post-election stasis where nothing has really changed – that they simply wanted to go for broke, even if it meant breaking democracy itself. We can see this happening across many liberal democracies at the moment. Yet in a strange way, this tectonic shift is exciting, albeit in the same way that a nuclear bomb going off might be.

All elections are bluster-fests, but few have been so audaciously exposed. The ‘Hall of Mirrors’, as Baudrillard would describe it, is now in full play, with each media outlet, meme, debate, and social post reflecting back to us a distorted version of the truth, reverting back to a “precession of simulacra,” where established symbols of democracy – the campaigns, debates, rallies, adverts, essentially the spectacle of the election itself – are detached from the reality of atomised experience. In turn, this created a disconnect so powerful that even in spite of what they knew, a majority of voters still went for Trump. And as half a planet wonders where things went wrong for them, the ‘winning half’ didn’t just offer an incendiary mandate, they offered the gunpowder and matches too.

The 2024 US election was elaborate theatre. It presented the idea of democracy as vibrant, competitive, and participatory. Is democracy now a hyperreal construct, a system where the symbols of participation obscure the erosion of its substantive mechanisms, such as meaningful representation and accountability? And if democracy is now more of a symbol than a reality, where do we go from here?

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Accelerationism for Beginners
Accelerationism primarily concerns matters of time, technology, and inevitability. As a mechanism for social change, it was originally born of the left which, when wrestling with alternative ideas to the all-pervasive behemoth of capitalism, realised that a much faster way to progress – far beyond that of grass-roots organisations and endless circular theorising of the left – was to practically hasten the collapse of capitalism by ‘speeding up’ certain social, economic, or technological processes which would in turn ultimately lead to profound change - either pushing capitalism to its limits into collapse, or absorbing it entirely into some form of technological Event Horizon. In this sense, accelerationism isn’t so much an ideology, as a strategic philosophy which embraces extreme potential, while also acknowledging (some might say encouraging) structural collapse in order to rebuild something new. Whether the resulting ‘something’ will be egalitarian or authoritarian, is still up for grabs.

While there is yet no overt political delineation between the various theories, the roughly left-wing version uses acceleration as a way to expose capitalism’s contradictions and inherent flaws. By speeding up the system’s own processes, the goal is to push it to a breaking point, potentially leading to something new; an alternative beyond capitalism. Much more anti-egalitarian is the version which believes in intensifying capitalism and embracing its inequalities, assuming that a faster, more extreme capitalist state will lead to a kind of social Darwinism (which, arguably, we are witnessing the beginnings of today).

We can see some of this at play in Project 2025, which has explicitly laid out the neo-con agenda as a framework for Trump's imminent Presidency. While not explicitly embracing accelerationism as an ideology, it certainly emphasises the rapid, destabilising, and transformative changes that accelerationism encourages. The campaign's focus on swiftly implementing deregulation and the restructuring of federal agencies reflects a desire to expedite systemic change to a place where convention is no longer tolerated. More startling still, explicit references to a ‘Dark Enlightenment’ – a term peppered throughout Trump’s campaign messaging by his alt-right supporters – have started to appear.

For the rest of us elsewhere, early signs of Accelerationism can be seen everyday in the relentless speed of tech development, our 24/7 news cycle, and the incessant pressure for resource and profit growth. We’re told technology such as AI may well herald the fifth industrial revolution, especially if Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) happens in the next few years. Throw in robotics, surveillance, necropolitics, and technofeudalism – our dependancy on ‘renting’ via subscriptions from big tech – and it’s easy to grasp how the suffocation of agency is a direct result of a relentless obsession for growth over innovation. Digital capitalism - the cousin of Surveillance capitalism and Control capitalism – now finds its use as a mechanism for increasing prices for subscription services which invariably provide less for more (the insertion of ads on Netflix and Amazon Prime for example, with an optional ‘premium’ to become ad free - despite users already paying for an ad-free service) all with zero consultation and a degree of arrogance that would have been shocking only a couple of decades ago. So called ‘dynamic pricing’ is another repulsive gouge by an industry more interested in growth than any sort of emancipation. This controversial practice of charging you more when goods or services are in high demand, is another insidious example of an economic system that’s clearly no longer fit for purpose. Uber and the Airlines have done it for years, but now the mugging has expanded to tickets, fast fashion, the gig economy as well as our monthly subscriptions.

“Capitalism has begun to constrain the productive forces of technology, or at least, direct them towards needlessly narrow ends,” explains Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek in their essay #Accelerate: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics. “Patent wars and idea monopolisation are contemporary phenomena that point to capital’s increasingly retrograde approach to technology. The properly accelerative gains of neoliberalism have not led to less work or less stress. And rather than a world of space travel, future shock, and revolutionary technological potential, we exist in a time where the only thing which develops is marginally better consumer gadgetry. Relentless iterations if the same basic product sustain marginal consumer demand at the expense of human acceleration.”(4)

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Art and Accelerationism
The art industry may not recognise Accelerationism yet, especially given the various fields of production are still shaping art into fast-moving commodity through retail experiences like Art Fairs, auction houses, rent-a-show programming, and whatever institutional ideology provides the best optics at the time. Accelerationism, as it applies to the art industry at least, isn’t just about speed, but also artifice and dissolution. This has been hampered somewhat by the staggeringly shortsighted refusal to engage seriously with any form of digital art, pushing us further into an unsalvageable crisis of relevance. But what Duchamp accidentally started with ‘Fountain’ in 1917, and Warhol almost completed by the mid- 1980’s with his disdain of ‘the original’ and his relentless drive for multiples, was quickly subsumed by late stage capitalism instead; where cost over value, spectacle over substance, and introspection over innovation reigned supreme. Andy Warhol was both the prophet and the assassin. With his factory approach to production, Warhol obliterated the notion of the singular artist-genius, replacing it with the artist-as-brand. Moreover, his work didn’t just reflect the acceleration of consumer culture - it intentionally embraced it, revelling in the commodification of everything, from Campbell’s soup cans to Marilyn Monroe. While Warhol’s genius might have turned the art world into a glittering mirror-ball of capitalism – celebrating the vacuousness beyond the surfaces of our commoditised lives – he left the art industry with no way out, instead forcing it further in to the suffocating embrace of introspection, unable to envision any hypothetical future, with no way to cover up what was exposed.

Baudrillard, who never held back from putting the boot into the art industry, summarised Warhol’s contribution thus, ‘Warhol went the furthest in the ritual paths of the disappearance of art, of all sentimentality in art; he pushed the ritual of art’s negative transparency and art’s radical indifference to its own authenticity the furthest.’ (5)

So, almost forty years on from his death, if we accelerate Warhol’s trajectory - what might we expect? Art that exists solely to provoke Instagram likes? Galleries as shops? Art as a backdrop for influencer photo-ops? A banana taped to a wall? (6)

Thankfully, there are still artists who have rejected art as the ‘cure’ in favour of the necessary ‘disease’ it must be, continually exploring whether there’s any substance beneath the spectacle - or indeed if that’s all there ever was. Accelerationism then, forces us to confront an uncomfortable question: what happens when the art world implodes under its own weight? If the art industry has become the plaything of speculative markets, the ultra-wealthy, and institutional sandboxes, does it have any future to speak of? For some, the only way forward is to hasten its demise, pushing it to such absurd extremes in the hope that something new emerges from the wreckage. Either way, the current stasis globally signals a need for some form of serious disruption. It can’t do it ‘organically’, and it certainly won’t do it within the existing structures of the art industry, which is now so trapped between a heritage mindset and a failure to acknowledge any form of digital future-state, that it has become embarrassingly bereft of any original thought, clinging on to the vestiges of critically-soft, populist-centred exhibitions. As Baudrillard reminds us, ‘Official art never acts out its own disappearance.’

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Art as Self-Destruction
For the past decade at least, the original bad boy of British art, aka Jake Chapman, has taken accelerationism into darker, more nihilistic territory. From his early work with his brother Dinos, where mutilations of Goya prints and brilliantly grotesque sculptures of mass-produced naked children mock the very idea of art as sacred, to his current solo projects, Jake’s art doesn’t so much critique the art world as desecrates it, ironically demonstrating how even the fetishisation of shock and controversy can itself veer into boundary-pushing commodity. Jake doesn’t care. The real difficulty is what lies beyond those boundaries once they’re smashed. How bad can things get versus how bad should things get? Jake’s practice thrives on its own degradation, it’s very uselessness. And if we’ve ever needed more anti-heroes like him in the art world, surely that time is now?

Similarly, New Zealander Dan Arps creates pieces that refuse traditional authorship or value systems, dismantling the ideological scaffolding that holds the current art world together. Often created using literal rubbish or found materials in the street, Dan’s work is comfortable sitting inside and outside the conventional functions of the art market, purposely avoiding institutional validation, while raising the possibility that the collapse of the art world might not be a catastrophe, but instead a liberation.

Meanwhile, Oliver King’s gorgeously seductive luxurious branded Gucci and Louis Vuitton man-bags are simply flat images suspended in perspex; resplendent in all their transparent vacuousness. Products may be made in factories, but brands are made in the libidinal minds of consumers.

The premise for the show in general is simple. The gallery showcases store-bought items of clothing which are licensed by the artist’s estate, and placed within a gallery context. They are all for sale, however the price for these items in the gallery remains exactly the same as what was paid in the high-street stores they were bought from, such as Primark and TK Maxx. Do these commodities then become ‘artworks’ complete with certificate, provenance, and exhibition history attached to them by virtue of being in a ‘exhibition’? Licensed clothing by Jeff Koons, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol, and Keith Haring all feature alongside these three (very much alive) contemporary artists.

Viewed on Baudrillard’s terms, and just like Trump, the ‘licensed artwork’ is no longer a representation of the artwork - it is its own hyperreal entity, detached from the reality of what’s being sold. While the signs and symbols don’t match up to the lived experience of the product – none of these items of clothing are original artworks merely facsimiles – they are nevertheless meticulously constructed to trigger desire. The factory only provides the material substrate, the branded world finishes the job. This is where simulation takes over: Nike isn’t selling sneakers; it’s selling the fantasy of triumph. Apple isn’t selling technology; it’s selling the aura of sleek sophistication. The consumer isn’t buying an object but the idea of that object, complete with all the cultural signifiers it carries. The irony? There isn’t any. There’s only the raw, pre-programmed response—a conditioned lust for what the brand promises.

Brands are constructed through a set of values, personality traits, a defined proposition, and a marketing position that teams of psychologists, strategic planners and “creatives” use to bring to life the product in the most compelling way for their target audience - already pre-determined by tracking the motivational behaviours of potential buyers, and backed up by pages of psychological reports. Now that the big meta-narratives such as religion and politics have been eroded by decades of fallacy, brands today are positioned to become an extension of the individual - literally a part of our personalities that make up ‘who we are’. Drive this brand of car, it’ll say something about you. Wear this brand of clothing and it’ll make you feel more confident. Eat this cereal and you’ll feel like a champion in the morning, etc. This is how capitalism thrives in the hyperreal. Consumers are seduced not by the thing itself but by the simulation of the thing, leaving them complicit in the perpetuation of the system. In this way, the libidinal response becomes an unconscious acceleration: every Instagram ad clicked, every logo worn, and every TikTok influencer followed speeds up the production of the next desire, the next simulation. There’s no escape because escape isn’t profitable. The loop is endlessly generative, endlessly exhausting.

But if manufactured brands can still elicit such a powerfully visceral response on our identities - so much so that you’ll part with a lot of money to achieve a perceived status in the eyes of others - then surely this is equally true of the global art market, estimated to be worth some $65 Billion USD last year? Yet 96% of artists can’t even make a living with incomes far below minimum-wage levels. (7)

Which brings is to an interesting question. What if the collapse of the art world isn’t something to fear but to welcome? Accelerationism suggests that by pushing systems to their breaking points, we can create the conditions for something new. In art, this means embracing – while simultaneously exploring – its contradictions: its complicity with capitalism, its fetishisation of resignation, its exhausting cycle of trends. Let the market inflate until it bursts. Let galleries become gift shops. Let social feeds overflow with disposable memes of the artwork itself. Let’s make enshittification even shittier.

If we are to truly embrace accelerationism in art, we are left with stark choices: we can mourn the collapse of art as we know it, or we can embrace its collapse as the necessary prelude to something more revolutionary. There’s also the real possibility of a third option, to acknowledge the good run we’ve had, store everything in institutional reliquaries, then simply speed up the whole thing into a technological oblivion where AI, robotics, and a post-human future beckons. What emerges from such collapse is harder to imagine, but that’s kind of the point. A new art world - if it can even be called that - might look nothing like what we know. It could be decentralised, fluid, and uncommodifiable.

Or it could be temporary, like a favourite Basquiat T-shirt or Haring jacket bought in the sales – existing only for a short time in our lives, until the process of desirability can begin again.

Scott Lawrie
December 2024

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NOTES:

1. Jean BAUDRILLARD, Simulacra and Simulation, Michigan UP, 1994 [1981] p33.

2. A solid starting place is Terry EAGLETON ‘The Function of Criticism’, Verso, 1984

3. Žižek in conversation with Gary Younge at a Guardian Live event, London, April 2016.

4. Nick WILLIAMS and Nick SRNICEK, #ACCELERATE MANIFESTO for an Accelerationist Politics, online article from 14.05.2014. https://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/05/14/accelerate-manifesto-for-an-accelerationist-politics/ Jean BAUDRILLARD, The Conspiracy of Art, Semiotext 2005.

5. Jean BAUDRILLARD, The Conspiracy of Art, Semiotext(e), 2005 p102.

6. In November 2024, Maurizio Cattelan's banana artwork ‘Comedian’ has made the news again for its record selling price (about the only time art makes the news these days) of $6.2m USD. Whatever you think of the concept, what is fascinating is that the resulting meme has now become more interesting – and far more important – than any statement the artist was intending to make. Just like the US election, the “memefication” of politics and culture, where movements and ideas evolve rapidly almost to the point of absurdity, start to suggest that accelerationism might already be flexing its gravitational pull.

7. The median annual income for artists in the U.K. is just £12,500 ($15,750), according to the U.K. Visual Artists' Earnings and Contracts Report 2024.
   

FURTHER READING:

For a broad and comprehensive introduction to the various threads of Accelerationist thought, see   #ACCELERATE#, Edited by Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian, published by Urbanomic in 2014. It is by far the best general introduction to the subject. (Buy direct so Bezos can’t take a cut).

WIKIPEDIA also has an excellent overview on Accelerationism (authors unknown).

If you want to learn more about the darker side of accelerationism, specifically through the controversies surrounding leading accelerationist thinker Nick LAND, there’s an excellent blog post by Adam FITCHETT here: https://cybertrophic.wordpress.com/2020/01/04/on-nick-land-the-weird-libertarian/

For an overview of the CCRU and the UK origins of Accelerationism, see Simon REYNOLD, Renegade Academia: http://energyflashbysimonreynolds.blogspot.com/2009/11/renegade-academia-cybernetic-culture.html

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