the inescapability of aesthetics
I've been thinking about the pervasiveness, the total embeddedness into all things, of aesthetics. There is nowhere you can go where you can escape from aesthetics. Mainstream culture, subcultures, radical spaces... everywhere you go, you project and take in images imbued with meanings, categories, histories, functions, suggestions, narratives.
It becomes this paradoxical or infinite regress sort of phenomenon, whereby groups or spaces that purport to reject aesthetical considerations merely project an aesthetic of the rejection of aesthetic meaning, itself still an aesthetic. Like caring very much that you appear not to care about something.
This suggests to me that aesthetics need, instead, to be accepted pragmatically as a characteristic of the real and the material and to be utilized and fashioned into tools that might achieve certain ends. For example, the aesthetics of counterculture or revolution can be alluring and can attract people who have not fully immersed themselves in these spaces to wade deeper into them.
Yoking and intelligently deploying and manipulating the aesthetics of revolution can be a meaningful part of movement building and community building. In a hyperconsumptive world literally consuming itself to death, how can aesthetic and consumption choices bolster our rejection of a world predicated on such overconsumption?