Voting night in America and Collapse of Western Civilisation Studies

By Caitlin Fisher

The accelerationists are having a party
And I wonder if the food is slow or fast
Their hands warm on a dancing girl’s waist
Or cool, channeling the computer
It doesn’t matter: bring on the end of the world!
Except it matters like this:
They read the situation like I do,
But just change directions, slightly
And say fuck it to the mortgage

As a child
Of hippie parents
Whose friends lived under the stairs eating orange seeds
Cautioning me to avoid the undertow
A childhood populated by adults who had disavowed the culture
Or became so very tired
Collapsing into a gentler landscape of hashish
I don’t have a romantic image of people with no money
The asking of a small child for a quarter
Though those were not unkind times

I never felt that the people under the stairs were burning for my destruction
The world was left there
To go on as it would
And all they wanted
Was to step into a parallel universe
alterity
where there was more love, less duty
and hopefully some dancing.
Most radically it meant packing for Nepal, or Bhutan or an unheard of
Indonesian beach

This?
The intellectual reading Deleuze and Guattari
Marx on audible
Wishing for speed speed speed speed speed and the end to it all
Not content to hide under the stairs
Happier with the house blown up
Is more challenging
As they light a match under
Ordinary
Under capitalism
Under Trump
And wear their ‘
I voted’ button

The accelerationists are both dynamite and match
They fuck fast and swear fast and get disappointed fast
The thing is – they are mostly 50
Mostly men
Waking up to the realization that capitalism won’t collapse in their lifetime
And it was supposed to
Well, something was supposed to happen
in their lifetime
Something was promised but they’ve forgotten what, like in a dream
It was going to be different
It was going to matter
they have no womb
where the alchemy happens

or could.
his hands hot on a dancing girl’s waist
turning on the strobe light
it’s the end of the world
the end of the money system
the end of the grind
the end of false hope
the end of art
the end of this crappy house
the end of this steady system of death march as holiday

surprise!
when the collapse comes, stare straight into the sun of it
and breathe the cool air
you’re lighter than helium
there are no such things as jobs
it’s what we wanted, just in different ways
I fell in love with my computer who was writing me love poems,
based on the algorithm I invented when we used to try.
Oh, well.
I trust Žižek to recognize shit when he sees it

Hold my hand.
It’s the Collapse of Western Civilisation practicum exam.
Stare straight into the sun
Or it’s an 18 million dollar bunker
Staged like the 1950s
Only the deer are dead.