At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production. [...] From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution.
- Karl Marx, 1859
Is there no alternative? Are we as Francis Fukuyama argues, at the end of history? It was Frederic Jameson who pronounced in his 2003 article ‘Future City’, “that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.”1 Our current hegemonic political status quo – that of neoliberalism – has had resounding effects on contemporary Western society and political thought. We live in a time of political inertia and of cultural sterility. It has become impossible to evoke or pragmatically imagine an ‘outside’ to globalised capitalism, leaving us in what Mark Fisher aptly describes as a state of ‘Capitalist Realism.’2 The 2008 Global Financial Crisis and its aftermath, along with devastating effects on economic and social realities, has precipitated a perpetuation of Thatcher’s axiomatic platitude that there is indeed ‘no alternative.’ Yet it is argued by some that these ostensibly impenetrable mechanisms of contemporary geopolitical organisation, namely the pervasive right-wing governmental policies and global corporate power established through neoliberal ideologies, have proceeded, at least in part, due to the ineffective nature of both mainstream and radical Leftist politics. In which case, what option does the Left still have? To withdraw into a politics of localism, or to return to the ‘golden age’ of post-war socialist democracy? Perhaps, however, it is to push forward: to accelerate the deterritorializing powers of capital, as to do so is our only possible escape. A technological social acceleration through capitalism, to a markedly post-capitalist social order.
The recently reignited politico-philosophical programme,3 coined by Benjamin Noys, ‘Accelerationism’, argues that any political project attempting to navigate beyond capitalist frameworks must do so using its own tools: the acceleration of technological development on a global, abstract and complex stage. Its genealogy has been traced to the fallout of the failed events of May 1968, with its resurgence ignited by the aftermath of the global crisis of 2008. Its emergence in Leftist discourse is symptomatic of the endemic nature of neoliberal fundamentalism in contemporary global capitalism; its advocation a response to our postmodern malaise of political despair. Today, accelerationist politics is broadly settled into two camps: the Left and the Right. From the radically antihumanist writings of Nick Land to the distinctly more Marxist trajectories of Srnicek and Williams, accelerationist disparities find their common ground in the belief that there can be no established outside-of-capitalism – it must be surmounted from within. Be it from desire, libido or death – in the case of post-68 French thought – the way out of capitalism is through capitalism itself: a “liberation through absolute immersion in the flows and fluxes of a libidinised capitalism.”4
What would it mean, however, for the possibility of an accelerationist aesthetic? It has been shown that throughout the previous century ‘acceleration’ as both a political and cultural programme has been mobilised in varying time-spaces in order to affect change or revolutionary ideals, from Communist political strategy to 90s ‘Cyberpunk Phuturism.’5 Yet a contemporary accelerationist aesthetic remains elusive. At its worst, it could work towards a fervent complicity in the vectors of neoliberalism, offering us nothing more than “the wink of reality laughing at itself in its most hyperrealist form” 6 – a nihilistic propagation of capitalist imperatives and marketization. Or could it offer us a way out of the impasses of the current political imaginarium and act as a combative force against what Alex Williams describes as global capitalism’s ‘politics of abstraction’?7 An avenue of exploration for the production of new subjectivities and possible futures which challenge the dominant mode of neoliberal hegemony. It is the purpose of this dissertation to explore the varying notions of accelerationist politics and the possibilities thereafter of an accelerationist aesthetic, and what possible avenues of enquiry this could offer us in the face of such debilitating circumstances.
1 Frederic Jameson, ‘Future City,’ New Left Review 21 (2003): 65.
2 Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is there no Alternative? (Wiltshire: Zero Books, 2009).
3 David Cunningham sees one evident reason of this revival as produced by the return to Nick Land’s writings and their subsequent promotion via ex-students Robin Mackay, Ray Brassier, Reza Negarestani and Mark Fisher, with a collection of Land’s work edited by Mackay and Brassier published by Urbanomic 
in 2011. See footnotes of: David Cunningham, ‘Accelerationism and its Discontents,’ Radical Philosophy 191 (2014).
4 Benjamin Noys, ‘Apocalypse, Tendency, Crisis,’ Mute 2, 15. (2010) Accessed October 19, 2015, http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/apocalypse-tendency-crisis
5 Benjamin Noys, Malign Velocities: Accelerationism and Capitalism (Croydon: Zero Books, 2014).
6 Jean Baudrillard, The Conspiracy of Art (Cambridge & London: Semiotext(e), 2005): 26.
7 Alex Williams, ‘The Politics of Abstraction,’ in Speculative Aesthetics, ed. Robin Mackay et al. (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2014): 62-71. 
