SOPHIE, Hyperpop, and Accelerationist Aesthetics

Reduce me to nothingness

This piece is a companion text to the accelerationist art / anti-hauntology debate between Matt Colquhoun (xenogothic) and Matt Bluemink. Scrolling through their discussion archives, I was deeply inspired by the way Fisher’s theories were applied to art criticism and I’ve attempted to contribute my two cents on the issue here. Originally, I intended to publish this in my school’s newspaper but there was no possible way of condensing these huge ideas into my small, allocated spread. I withdrew the article and decided to publish it exclusively on IBS; yet, ironically, having infinite words at my disposal has made the writing process even more arduous. There’s just too much to include! Continuously, I wrote and rewrote the contents here until I felt vaguely satisfied; but still, I feel like I could have done more. Please read this piece as a cursory introduction into accelerationist/xenofem/xenoqueer theory. There’s much lacking here; however, if I even attempted to expand and flesh out the points made, it’d take me another century or so to publish! 

The idea came to me a few months ago on a hinge date (turned friend who reads this blog). As I blabbered on about accelerationist aesthetics, he, turned off, remarked that I was the most “chronically online” person he’d ever met. Ouch! I refuse to interpret that pejoratively, for I think there are so many exciting and novel ideas lurking in the corners of the internet which should be obsessed over. SOPHIE seemed to have the same thought. As I argue here, she was an extremely accelerationist artist — maybe not in a political sense — but her entire project seemed enamoured, crazed even, with constructing a luxurious queer cyber-soundscape.

Also I’m dropping my RYM here if you want to read more of my music takes: https://rateyourmusic.com/~heybye

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Marx writes in Grundrisse that capitalism’s demise is built in itself. Sometime in the future, the dialectic between exploiter and exploited will become so heavy, so unbearable, that workers will inevitably rise up and overthrow the system. Capitalism is thus impermanent: its ending is and has always been to collapse. 

But if this is true, then why has capitalism persisted despite being the most oppressive it’s ever been? Our ‘today’ is defined by neo-colonialism and actual colonialism in Palestine, an environment regularly raped by greedy corporations, and a society dissolved into a composite of lonely, atomized souls (s-o-c-i-e-t-y). The contradictions are ripe; yet, other than periodic protests and fledging revolutionary movements, nothing has prompted sublation. A promising tomorrow seems infeasible. 

In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari argue that this is because Marx’s telos was wrong. Capital, they posit, is ambidextrous; on one hand, it plummets and deterritorializes everything that comes into its vicinity and reterritorializes with the other. It simultaneously destroys and rebuilds.

Through these twin processes, revolution is cockblocked. The moment that the people’s anger reaches an orgasmic boiling point, Capital mutates into a new set of codes that seem harmless and impotent. Of course, Capital can never be asexual; its libido for accumulation is insatiable and sadistic; but, through reterritorialization, it gains a subtle disguise which can momentarily pacify unrest. Take queer rights as an example. Up until the 90s, queerness was abjected from the symbolic order for undermining heterosexual bourgeoise reproduction. It wasn’t until queerness became fungible — that is, developed economic value as a potential market — that Capital realized it could acquiesce it and, through that process, strip the ‘Other’ of its polemical power. The once-militant stonewall continuum has thus withered into a dull, neoliberal aberration which refuses to move beyond identity politics. We traded in the Marxist-coded dreams of total equality for a ceasefire decorated with rainbow-coloured trinkets from Michael Kors. Today’s queer culture is allowed to exist solely because it has become a reterritorialized shell of earlier liberation struggles: a soulless, hyper-commodified movement now made ‘acceptable’ by Capital. 

With every destructive gambit, Capital gets away by constantly disguising and rebuilding its exploitative dynamics. Grievances, anguish, and frustration of the working class are hence never given its cathartic release and thus, Fisher explains, “Capital will not be ultimately unmasked as exploited labour power, [and human] identities and self-understandings [become] simulations that can and will be ultimately sloughed off.” It is precisely this sly plot which allows the system to overcome its inherent limitations. 

Capital’s slippery movements and conniving ingenuity pose a serious challenge to revolutionary praxis. Always eluding its demise, always a few steps ahead of the people, it seems like the system will never be slain. This fatalism is especially felt after the Soviet collapse which, as Dean argues, completely sterilized our cultural imaginations. Now, only capitalism exists. Now, only capitalism is true. This is our new reality: a nihilism, so reified and entrenched, that our status quo is the only possibility. 

There is a certain dreamlike quality of cultural experience during late-stage capitalism. Our surroundings are changing so rapidly, deterritorializing and reterritorializing at light speed, that the way we understand the world and self becomes uncanny in an instant. Every day is a new ontological crisis…it’s surreal…

Given the rate of development, a chromatic future seems inevitable and it really makes you wonder if there’s any point in resisting. Should we be wasting our energy on fearing the murkiness of modernity, or is it more productive to think about how we should navigate the push forward? Enter Accelerationism: a fringe ideology that believes in intensifying the contradictions of Capital in order to bring upon its suicide. Made infamous by the nut Nick Land, accelerationism argues that Capital’s self-deterritorializing processes cannot be stopped. So rather than trying to slow it down, we ought to speed up our journey through these inevitable processes; instead of attempting to reduce collateral damage, we should welcome Capital’s uninhibited wreckage. For example, accelerationists radically embrace automation and its concomitant effects on our culture, environment, and society. This masochistic aiding and abetting of capitalism’s self-destructive tendencies is a death drive; after all, you must kill the system before you can rebuild it. 

Accelerationism has become somewhat of an empty signifier for both sides of the political spectrum. The right-wing aberration (R/acc), as you may expect, seeks to accelerate towards a techno capital singularity — a crypto-fascist cyberscape ruled by Chairman Musk. The left-wing deviation (L/acc) argues that technologies can be used to build a fully-automated, communist utopia. Where they converge is in the process of plummeting through today’s uncertainties and anxieties, like a Chinese bullet train, into the neon waves of our new millennium. It is about daring to look the future in its eye and envisioning a society beyond our present.

Art is a testing ground for this new world order. As Shaviro writes, “accelerationism needs to be an aesthetic program first, before it can be a political one…fiction can explore the abyss of accelerationist ambivalence, without prematurely pretending to resolve it.” When people are able to imagine an idea, they are more likely to buy into it. Hence, aesthetics and culture play a key role in changing the superstructure which, dialectically, collapses the base. 

Sophie: Overcoming hauntology

In Ghosts of My Life, Fisher famously bemoans the crippled state of contemporary culture. After social democracy was eschewed for neoliberal fundamentalism, art too became bondaged by the logics of Capital. But the commodification of art is antithetical to its very existence. What makes art sublime is its expressive potential, the ability for people to freely liberate themselves in creativity. Capital, however, with its emphasis on maximizing profit, is indifferent to ‘pushing the limits of a medium’ or ‘chasing aesthetic novelty.’ It is only concerned with expanding its portfolio. 

Experimentation is necessary; without it, art remains stagnated. However, work that is unconventional or new always risks ‘not landing’ with its audiences. Whereas social democracy would have protected the aesthetic gamblers, our current neoliberal order is built on a cutthroat, dog-eat-dog mentality that punishes innovation with economic death. For instance, grants are becoming harder to get, or tied to disgustingly uninspiring aesthetic parameters; independent galleries that platform young visionaries are closing one by one; talented students who have a dazzling eye are turning away from artistic fields because of the dwindling job prospects. At the end of the day, artists, too, need to pay their bills. 

So instead of exploring the terrain beyond mainstream sensibilities, artists turn towards the past and copy its commercially proven paradigms. Think of all the retromania films that clone the aesthetics of older movies without adding anything new. Or the local punk band that sounds indistinguishable to Rites of Spring. Culture has been reduced to copying; stripped away of its transgressive potential, art has become lame, repetitive, and uninspiring; it is now rare to experience something so profound and indescribable, that neologisms are needed. Fisher described this recycling of the old as “a slow cancellation of the future." Novelty is dead, he sighed.

Ironically, older artistic conventions were almost always born out of an economy that tolerated play and experimentation. When artists borrow from the glory days, they are, essentially,  interpolating post-capitalist desires into a hyper-capitalist present. The effect is chilling. This conjuring is known as ‘hauntology’: the way past myths of progressive futures haunt our capitalist reality. It is when the ‘not yet’ infiltrates the ‘here’ and ‘now.’

Art is both a reflection of the contemporary and a speculative playground to imagine alternative futures that move beyond the entrenched ‘here and now’: it records and manifests at the same time. The fact that art — the space where our febrile imaginations run wild — can no longer envision a forward path and must resort to history is incredibly disturbing. So how do we move beyond these spectres? Or does our capitalist malaise doom all art to an eternity of pastiche and repetition? 

Scottish singer and producer Sophie Xeon, aka SOPHIE, was an artist who broke the plateau. The first time I listened to her music I was at a loss for words. Not only was I enchanted, but I literally did not have the language to articulate her music. Sculpted out of industrial techno, noise, and bubblegum pop, SOPHIE’s glossy sound transgressed the genres of before.  

Nowhere is this more evident than in her debut record OIL OF EVERY PEARL’S UN-INSIDES: a xeno-femme world overflowing with glitter and joy. Listening to this conjures images of cyborg mermaids splashing about in a sea of pink binary code. Of a teenage girl giggling and rolling around in bed after sending her internet lover a digital kiss. A sexless angel fluttering haplessly inside a USB. Kawaii J.G. Ballard. It is an album which highlights feminine jouissance in a cyberspace. 

What makes the record amazing is its innovative play with vectors and temporalities, very reminiscent of breakcore’s characteristic schisms. Ponyboy, for example, starts off as an industrial track focusing heavily on a pounding bass that ricochets with every thud. A girlish diva voice moans “ponyboy” while a distorted male, in the cadence of an ANONYMOUS figure repeats after her Just as this sound is laid, a sudden metallic twinkle cuts through the sexy tonal sphere: a soft, feminine coo follows. It is a moment of picaresque discontinuity that defies everything the music academy teaches to be standard.

Instead of heavy breakbeats and intense kicks, Infatuation features a fluid synth which gently rolls the song forward. Overlaid is a powerful, soulful voice which seeming freestyles the words ‘Infatuation / Who are you / I want to know,’ interspersed by a giggling juke beat.

Perhaps the ultimate testimony to SOPHIE’s genius is the last track on the album, Whole New World. The song begins with an explosive, buzzing bass that echoes through the soundscape. True to SOPHIE’s style, a robotic femme loops the lyric “Whole new world,” while a snarling gargoyle echoes her every word. SOPHIE’s composition evokes the perennial trope of woman versus the environment, a heroine’s voice battling the abrasive instrumentals which threaten her very destruction. The track, surprisingly, ends on a tender note as a soft chord sweeps over the dark melody, like a pink sun rising over the Anthropocene. On the last note, we finally arrive at a Whole New World. 

The album is notoriously hard to describe and categorize. Each track is saturated with so much conflicting emotion, experimental time signatures, and unapologetic use of autotune, that they lack any recognizable identity — which is exactly the point. 

You aren’t supposed to contain SOPHIE’s work into some pre-existing genre; her goal was to create music you would never have heard before not just by satirizing, but also by reworking conventions. For example, elements drawn from pop, IDM, or club are taken and fused to form a sound so unique that their original essence morphs. This is what separates SOPHIE from hauntological or post-modern art — which is a mere copying of the past. Her interactions between different genres and compositional paradigms in her music spurs a sense of the new, generating a multi-dimensional assemblage that Deleuze writes in A Thousand Plateaus as “necessarily changes in nature as it expands its connections.”

These convergences move us into the terrain of the unexplored— I think Fisher would have written a ravishing review of SOPHIE’s debut masterpiece.

The record’s theme is very obviously about being trans. Faceshopping is, quite clearly, a commentary about facial feminization surgery and the euphoria of passing. Immaterial is a witty treatise on the fluidity of gender. The use of autotune and reverb on Ponyboy allows Sophie to change her vocal gender presentation from girly to womanly to manly. However, I'd like to take this line of thought a step forward by highlighting the intersection between these queer themes and the album’s digital form. 

Queerness has always been enmeshed with futurity— in fact, it has to. Unlike heterosexual society, queer people have never had a past to yearn for because there never was space for them. Most of queer culture existed in the shadow of the mainstream. Nostalgia therefore has nowhere to go when history has only been oppressive and cruel to the ‘other.’ There is nothing to reminisce upon: only a future to create. 

It is no coincidence that queer visibility occurred in tandem with the digital boom. Technology gives the once-lonely, atomized queer community a platform to collectivize and organize into a politically explosive force which was able to make gains such as the full legalization of gay marriage in 2015. Google exposes repressed midwestern kids to a whole new vocabulary to express their sexual turmoils. Internet forums offer queer, especially trans folk, a space to decorporealize — a concept featured in Immaterial — and overcome their somatic circumstances; since, online, people can escape the horrid trappings of the body and be judged solely by their spirit. In that sense, the technodigital world has been empowering for the queer community. 

I think there’s something very profound about the way SOPHIE utilizes digital sounds to deliver trans empowerment. Within her sparkly music theres a secret manifesto on queer futurity that radically embraces technology’s emancipatory potential. Online, we can be digital girls in a digital world; code our bodies and customize our avatars; be ‘reduced to nothingness’; free from the contrivances of existing in the material realm. 

In one of her first ever interviews, Sophie lays elegantly on a bed, clad in a skin-tight orange dress. With a soft but confident voice, she declares: “there’s a huge amount of work to be done socially and culturally. “The gap between where we are now and where I’d imagined we could be, and the places our imaginations could take us, are so far away from what we’re presented with a lot of the time.” I think this quote summarizes SOPHIE’s ethos quite well. Her political project was forward oriented; to look towards and hurriedly chase the new; to present the ‘digipocalypse’ in a positive light, turning technophobia into a philia; to imagine a future where queer people are liberated by the forces of technology. It is precisely this accelerationist spirit that enabled her art to pierce through the capitalist realist fog. 

Tragically, SOPHIE passed away on January 21st 2021, after slipping and falling off a balcony while trying to take a photo of the moon. She was only 34.