Fashwave, Accelerationism, and the Aestheticisation of Destruction
摘要
This chapter examines the aesthetic strategies employed by actors at the extreme end of the far-right political spectrum, focusing on fashwave and schizowave media. These forms of media merge popular cultural references with white supremacist and accelerationist propaganda, frequently incorporating environmental and landscape imagery to construct narratives of social crisis and impending collapse. While fashwave blends 1980s synthwave aesthetics with far-right iconography, evoking nostalgia for an imagined past, schizowave is characterised by surreal, disorienting visuals, often drawing on Hyperborean aesthetics. Both subgenres advance accelerationist objectives, portraying contemporary systems as irredeemably broken and advocating societal collapse as a precursor to the establishment of a new ethnonationalist and authoritarian political order. This analysis engages with Rancière’s theory of the distribution of the sensible and Benjamin’s concept of constellation, while also considering the role of new technologies in facilitating the dissemination of these aesthetic forms. Additionally, it examines how such imagery is framed as a remedy for the alienation and despair engendered by neoliberalism, fostering a sense of loss among target audiences and advancing a vision of a purified future.