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\hypersetup{
  pdftitle={Transgression and disruption as aesthetic ideology, from Marinetti to experimental art, counterculture, neoliberalism, and Trump},
  pdfauthor={By Florian Cramer, with Nienke Terpsma},
  hidelinks,
  pdfcreator={LaTeX via pandoc}}

\title{Transgression and disruption as aesthetic ideology,from Marinetti
to experimental art, counterculture, neoliberalism, and Trump}
\author{By Florian Cramer, with Nienke Terpsma}
\date{April 2025}

\begin{document}
\maketitle

(Partially extended and improved English version of the article
\emph{Ontregeling als esthetische ideologie, van Marinetti via
experimentele kunsten, tegencultuur, neoliberalisme tot Trump},
published in
\href{https://metropolism.com/nl/feature/out-now-metropolis-m-nummer-2-tegenspel-precious-okomoyon-magdalena-abakanowicz-botsende-rituelen-in-het-museum/}{\emph{Metropolis
M}, no. 2/2025}, p.~46-48)

\begin{center}\rule{0.5\linewidth}{0.5pt}\end{center}

\textbf{Freeing oneself from rules and constraints has been an important
aspect of the arts in their emancipation from authorities and regimes --
such as the emancipation of Renaissance painting from the medieval
church and aristocracy, the break with conservative bourgeois culture in
the visual arts and countercultures of the 20th century, and liberation
from white supremacy in free jazz. But transgression and disruption can
also easily become means to dubious ends. The deregulation of
neoliberalism, the outside-the-box thinking of management culture, the
revolutionary ``everything must change'' rhetoric of the extreme right?}

A simple, hypothetical proposition: the arts and countercultures of the
twentieth and twenty-first centuries had transgression and disruption as
their main theme and modus operandi. This program was already under
pressure from the disruptions of neoliberalism and is now finally
bankrupt from the total disruptions and transgressions of the extreme
right -- from Trump, Wilders, Milei, and others. Contemporary art is
desperately searching for a new counter-program with other narratives,
values, methods and themes such as: community, collectivity, care and
ecology.

But reality is less simple, because all of these concepts can exist in
ideological gray areas. Like a meme, which spreads and makes everything
a part of itself, fascism can be said to be something that can creep
into any set of ideas and turn them into fascism. This is precisely what
makes fascism so hard to pin down; one could, for example, call it an
ideology of the extremist center, just as well as an ideology of the
extreme right.

1930s Italian and German fascism has often been characterized as a unity
of politics and aesthetics, with its cult of uniformity, mass
choreography, and propaganda. The program of the Enlightenment and
Romanticism, particularly that of Friedrich Schiller, to form a new
democratic society through the aesthetic education and refinement of
citizens, was turned into a grotesque perversion. In place of the
aesthetically autonomous, educated citizen (``Bildungsbürger'') came the
decorative fascist masses. Critics such as the Flemish-American literary
theorist Paul de Man, who was himself entangled in 1940s fascism,
therefore denounced any form of ``aesthetic ideology,'' including
Schiller's, as problematic in itself.

At first glance, Trump, Wilders, and other contemporary extreme-right
leaders do not appear to be classic fascists because their movements do
not exhibit a uniform aesthetic ideology. On the contrary, they spread
chaos and demonstrative ugliness with their meme-like low-brow trash
visual culture spread via social media. But in addition to this
well-known form of populism, there is also an elitist tendency within
contemporary extreme-right politics. This tendency seems determined to
breathe new life into an aesthetic ideology that only a few years ago
was considered outdated-modernist: an ideology of heroic disruption and
visionary anticipation of the future, as described in Filippo Tommaso
Marinetti's 1909 Futurist Manifesto. For the insiders, artists, critics,
theorists, and curators of contemporary art, the paradigm of art as
practiced futurism was sidelined after early 20th century modernism. It
survived only in niches: in popular culture, among art collectors, in
techno-affirmative media art, or in radical reinterpretations such as
Afrofuturism.

What did survive for a long time was the idea of the artist as
\emph{poète maudit}, as a disruptive individual with a transgressive art
practice. This concept existed for centuries before Romanticism, but
reached its peak in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
It then persisted in various forms such as body art, performance art,
expressive painting and street art, and also in part in institutional
critique, political-activist art and digital hacker art.

Even several neofuturist movements have emerged, such as accelerationism
in the 2010s, which emerged from schools such as Goldsmiths and the `New
Centre for Research \& Practice,' along with the closely related
Post-Internet art movement (as discussed in the \emph{Metropolis M}
debate The Technological Future and Art during Art Rotterdam 2016). In
philosophy, accelerationism began as a radical left vision of a future
non-capitalist society using AI and automation, drawing heavily on the
ideas of British philosopher Nick Land from the 1990s. By the time his
former students proclaimed accelerationism, Land had already taken a
radical right turn. Together with the American Curtis Yarvin, he
developed what is known as the `neoreactionary' Dark Enlightenment,
which promotes an autocratic vision of technology and society modeled
on, among others, Deng Xiao-Ping's China. `Neoreaction' subsequently
became an elitist offshoot of the extreme-right `Alt-Right' movement
during the 2016 US presidential election.

At that time, this version of accelerationism remained largely confined
to the US and Silicon Valley. It was closely linked to debates about the
future societal impact of AI, including the potential destruction of
humanity, on the influential internet forum LessWrong. Elon Musk and
Peter Thiel, both co-founders of PayPal in 2001, have often implicitly
referenced debates on LessWrong in public statements. By now, it has
become abundantly clear that Musk has fused the roles of techno
futurist, transgressive performance artist, visionary CEO, and
right-wing internet troll in his public persona and actions. His
affinity for techno-speculative art is also evident in his relationship
with electronic musician Grimes and their three children, X Æ A-Xii, Exa
Dark Sideræl and Techno Mechanicus. This recently culminated in his
leading the `Department of Government Efficiency,' founded by Trump and
named after the internet meme DOGE. Thiel showed an affinity for
neoreactionary ideas early on in his public statements, funding Curtis
Yarvin as early as 2013. Around the same time, he was also the mentor of
JD Vance, whom he introduced to Trump in 2021.

Another central figure in the second Trump administration hailing from
Silicon Valley is Marc Andreessen, who founded the browser company
Netscape in the 1990s and later Andreessen Horowitz, one of the most
important venture capitalist financiers of Silicon Valley start-ups.
Andreessen says he spends `half' of his time at Trump's Mar-a-Lago
residence as an advisor to the new administration. In 2023, he published
the \emph{Techno-Optimist Manifesto} on the Andreessen Horowitz website.
Some quotes from it: `Technology is the glory of human ambition and
achievement, the spearhead of progress, and the realization of our
potential. {[}\ldots{]} We can advance to a far superior way of living,
and of being. {[}\ldots{]} We believe everything good is downstream of
growth. {[}\ldots{]} And so the only perpetual source of growth is
technology. {[}\ldots{]} Give us a real world problem, and we can invent
technology that will solve it. {[}\ldots{]} We believe the
techno-capital machine of markets and innovation never ends, but instead
spirals continuously upward.' And finally: `We believe in
accelerationism -- the conscious and deliberate propulsion of
technological development -- to ensure the fulfillment of the Law of
Accelerating Returns.' The overlap with the 2010s accelerationism is no
coincidence. The manifesto ends with a list of `Patron Saints of
Techno-Optimism.' In addition to economic liberal and neoliberal
thinkers such as Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig Mises, this list
also includes Nick Land, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Buckminster
Fuller.

In this way, an originally artistic program of heroism and transgression
reemerges in the marriage between techno-libertarianism and the extreme
right. Politicians and entrepreneurs, such as Milei with his chainsaw
performances in Argentina and Musk with his raised-arm salutes, appear
and act as transgressive activist performance artists.

\textbf{Disruptive cultures}

In retrospect, transgression played a role in both romanticist and
libertarian programs. Libertarian has a double and in this context
somewhat confusing meaning: historically, the word stems from
nineteenth-century political anarchism and was meant to clarify the
difference between anti-authoritarian and authoritarian socialism.
Libertarian socialism essentially strives for a
\href{https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom}{free} and
\href{https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egalitarianism}{equal} society. But
in the 1960s and 1970s, the term libertarianism was appropriated in the
US by supporters of the neoliberal economist Friedrich Hayek and the
right-wing writer Ayn Rand, as a radical neoliberal ideology: maximally
deregulated capitalism with maximum individual freedom.

In retrospect, one could say that in counterculture since the 1960s,
left-wing and right-wing libertarian ideas and methods have frequently
overlapped while left-wing methods and proposals were twisted for the
benefit of neoliberal, right-wing or autocratic agendas.

This also applies, to some extent, to the founder of Dutch right-wing
populism in the late 1990s and early 2000s Pim Fortuyn, who anticipated
current American culture by calling himself a ``an aesthete and grass
roots democrat, a desperado, a Dadaist with a skull of a
gladiator'',\footnote{Source:
  \href{http://www.glbtqarchive.com/ssh/fortuyn_p_S.pdf}{Nikolai Endres,
  \emph{Fortuyn, Pim (1948-2002)}}, GLBT Archive, 2009} or Dutch
right-wing populist politician Geert Wilders, who is a fan of the
radical left-wing punk band Dead Kennedys.

What does it mean when programs of transgression and rhizomatic chaos
emerge as something that can also be fascist, and not just since the
21st century? In her much-read essay \emph{The Carrier Bag Theory of
Fiction} (1986), Ursula K. Le Guin wrote about what she saw as an
unjustified general preference for heroic stories with conflict and
drama: hunting over picking berries. This preference now seems
grotesquely exaggerated and exploited in the right-wing accelerationism
around Trump and the associated pop culture such as the
\emph{manosphere} that originally emerged from the 4chan Alt-Right and
is now fueled by influencers such as Andrew Tate.

Today, the extreme right defines itself through its ideological enemy,
thereby bridging its own internal ideological contradictions, such as
those between techno-accelerationism and anti-technological ecofascism
(which already existed in the Third Reich; Heidegger, as an ecofascist,
therefore gradually distanced himself from the German National
Socialists). This enemy of the extreme right is currently `woke' and
thus implicitly includes art and socio-cultural practices of `care',
`community' and `equity, diversity and inclusion.' But even ``care'' and
``community'' -- albeit for members of the in-group -- are already
appropriated into fascist culture and politics, for example in
eco-fascist village communities, right-wing ``sovereign citizen'' groups
that reject the government, and the ``tradwive'' subculture with its
propagation of a feminine domestic sphere. In these subcultures, the
extreme right offers niches for those who want to escape
techno-accelerationism.

Today's fascism could be called postmodern, as it no longer follows or
tells a ``grand narrative,'' to use the definition of the philosopher
Jean François Lyotard. Even its apparent heroism is just second-hand:
`Make America Great \emph{Again'} refers to a deliberately undefined
past and is, in the language of 1980s poststructuralism, a 'floating
signifier.' The floating signifier is simultaneously disruptive and
open-ended. Disruption and chaos are not fixed principles in postmodern
fascism either. As floating signifiers themselves, they can be turned
into their opposite at any moment.

For the time being, disruption and chaos seem to be stylistic devices
with which postmodern fascism distinguishes itself from the
militaristic-authoritarian fascism of the twentieth century, thereby
pretending to be something other than fascism. It no longer looks as if
it was sculpted by Arno Breker, but like Dada-punk-futurist trolling,
parole in libertà: a tactic to seize and stay in power by creating
confusion. In this way, contemporary fascism functions as resistance to
a world without friction: the ostentatiously apolitical or
post-political Western technocratic politics that began in the nineties,
the service design world in which everything is easy, painless,
comfortable, carefree, devoid of materiality, denying what is dirty,
difficult, painful, or hard, as well as the disruptions that are
actually underway -- from the transfer of power to oligarchies to
climate change. Postmodern fascism, with its grotesque physicality and
embrace of transgression, responds as a counter-program. In positioning
itself as a simultaneous antidote to \emph{and} libertarian radicalizer
of neoliberalism, postmodern fascism repeats the stance of
twentieth-century modernist fascism, which positioned itself as an
antidote to classical liberalism.

``We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, will
fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian
cowardice,'' according to Marinetti's \emph{Futurist Manifesto}. Trump,
Musk, Milei and Wilders operate along the same lines. Their difference
from most transgressive art forms is that their brand of disruption,
transgression and chaos is not open-ended, but deterministic. Yet
insisting on this difference does not solve the problem: because
open-endedness and indeterminism can conversely be used to create a
`tyranny of structurelessness,' according to the analysis of feminist
activist Jo Freeman in the 1970s. Aesthetic ideologies that advocate
disruption, transgression and indeterminism as ends in themselves can
easily be co-opted for whatever form of power politics is the goal of
the day. Conversely, \emph{criticism} of the `tyranny of
structurelessness,' for example in community projects, can be a means of
destroying well-functioning non-hierarchical systems and installing
authoritarian or narcissistic structures.

Artistic, intellectual and political work that cannot be made fascist,
or co-opted or used for authoritarian power politics -- if that is even
possible -- requires more complex concepts than a simple binarity of
`regulation' and `transgression;' it requires permanent (self-) critical
work.

\emph{Florian Cramer works as a professor for Artistic Research and
Emerging Forms of Cultural Production at the Willem de Kooning Academy,
Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences. Nienke Terpsma is a visual
artist, book designer and co-editor of Fucking Good Art.}

\textbf{Reading suggestions}

Umberto Eco, \emph{Ur-Fascism}, originally published in New York Review
of Books, 1995, republished in The Anarchist Library,
\url{https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/umberto-eco-ur-fascism}

Robert van Raffe, \emph{Gesamtkunstwerk Nederland, Het
politico-esthetische project van Pim Fortuyn},
\url{https://www.academia.edu/33751127/Gesamtkunstwerk_Nederland_Het_politico_esthetische_project_van_Pim_Fortuyn}

Mike Brock, \emph{The Plot Against America: How a Dangerous Ideology
Born From the Libertarian Movement Stands Ready to Seize America},
\url{https://www.notesfromthecircus.com/p/the-plot-against-america}

Carole Cadwalladr, \emph{How to Survive the Broligarchy}, podcast \&
article series, \url{https://broligarchy.substack.com}

\end{document}
