'Go Forever and Ever' - The Persistence of Accelerationism and Neoliberalism in the Present

Accelerationism is a fraught term. Originally used by Benjamin Noys in The Persistence of the Negative (2010) to pejoratively describe an intellectual tendency in post-’68 French theory, it has since developed a wide array of competing definitions that have arguably made it analytically ‘useless; liable to mean anything to anyone’ (Gureev, 2018). Yet, despite such arguments, accelerationism has continued to find contemporary application in a whole manner of cultural outputs, ranging from the subversively queer gender- and cute-accelerationisms, to more overtly left-aligned projects like Xeno-feminism and blaccelerationism, and their political opposites in the likes of far-right accelerationism, and the neoliberal effective-accelerationism.

While such divergences in the applications of accelerationism undoubtedly blunt its political utility for the left, its continued application in such a plurality of cultural and theoretical forms make its contemporary significance much more difficult to dispute. In this paper, I address this persistence of accelerationism by broadly considering it as an attitude towards a feeling of cultural and social stasis within a neoliberal present. I do this by turning to the early debates which first gave-rise to accelerationism in its contemporary form (2008) alongside the more recent musical outputs of Charli XCX.

My view is that the persistence of accelerationism is of value for critics of neoliberalism, even if accelerationist politics might not be. This is because forms of accelerationism frequently expose the contradictions underlying neoliberalism’s claim to modernity—the idea that the neoliberal project is both a driver of novelty and change in the present, and a permanent, historical epoch in its own right. Forms of accelerationism frequently expose this contradiction through their pursuit of novelty in the present, a pursuit that implies neoliberalism’s inability to deliver the new to begin with, while also risking acquiescence with neoliberal ideological drive towards newness, prosperity, and growth.