The politics of the aesthetic

Amid the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, chock-full of lockdowns, social distancing, anxiety, illness, and death, Marie Kondo’s Netflix show “Tidying Up with Marie Kondo” surged in viewership. Her philosophy – coined the “Konmari method” – was simple: “Discard everything that does not spark joy.” The show premiered in January 2019, long before the initial lockdowns, but owed its comeback in viewership to an anxious general public’s increased time spent at home. Her advice may seem novel to some, but its popularity during the chaos of 2020 highlighted a stark difference in mindset amongst the wealthy elite and the rest of the population. Working people were struggling to buy everyday items like pasta and toilet paper in lockdown while Kondo advised them to find belongings to discard. While ordinary people were told to shed their belongings, major companies such as Amazon, Apple and Microsoft all saw significant increases in revenue.

The self-care moment

Elements of Kondo’s philosophy and her Netflix show lent themselves perfectly to the “self-care” movement that became prominent during lockdown. Social media at the time was flooded with videos of banana bread recipes and phone-recorded mental health walks. The onus was on working people to change themselves and their mindsets to accommodate the worsening conditions of the pandemic – so long as you kept positive and focused on yourself, all would somehow be well.

The problem with so much of this self-care movement is that it neglects systemic societal issues and focuses exclusively on the individual as if they exist within a vacuum. Marie herself even emphasizes this in an interview on the “Late Show with Stephen Colbert”; when asked why her show resonates with so many, she stated, “Of course we all have problems tidying our homes, but it’s not just that, Stephen. We all have clutter in our hearts, and that’s what needs tidying.”

This idea is that we need to look within ourselves for answers to social and personal crisis rather than challenging our oppressive social system. This idea creates a hollowness within the collective psyche. Mess and untidiness need not always come from untidy hearts – a messy house could indicate a home that’s lived in, loved, and steeped in memories. Mess could come from working professionals, so entrenched in their jobs that they have little time or energy to tidy.  The pattern that emerges of surface-level, individualistic appeal in our society is a symptom of a neoliberal era in which the focus on aesthetics has become all-encompassing. Meanwhile, our sense of humanity and authenticity has eroded from within.

The rise of the aesthetic in capitalism

The phenomenon of aesthetics eclipsing substance isn’t new by any means. In his 1967 work Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord wrote, “All that was once directly lived has become mere representation.” Debord was writing in response to the rise in household television sets and the onset of suburban living that was starting to flourish in the latter half of the 20th century. He was witnessing what he deemed the commodity’s colonization of social life. One can imagine what Debord would write had he lived long enough to witness the Internet age of the onset of artificial intelligence, and the appeal to tidy one’s personal space as a response to a pandemic.

In his 2009 work Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher echoes Dubord’s sentiment, stating:

Capitalism is what is left when beliefs have collapsed at the level of ritual or symbolic elaboration, and all that is left is the consumer-spectator, trudging through the ruins and the relics. Yet this turn from belief to aesthetics, from engagement to spectatorship, is held to be one of the virtues of capitalist realism.

This, in essence, is the psychology behind how we’re encouraged to hyperfocus on ourselves while the world falls apart. Western neoliberalism strips the average citizen of their autonomy to make material changes in society and replaces it with mere symbolism and consumer choices. As Terry Eagleton states in Ideology of the Aesthetic, “The birth of aesthetics as an intellectual discourse coincides with the period when cultural production is beginning to suffer the miseries and indignities of commodification.” He goes on to describe this peculiarity as a “spiritual compensation” for the artist’s degradation into a petty producer of commodities.

Hyper-individualism and the death of subculture

As a result of the commodity’s colonization of social life, the concept of freedom itself is sold back to us via hyper-individualism. This can take the form of any product that implies it can “unleash the real you.” It can be seen in fashion brands, makeup ads, vacation offers, and, in Marie Kondo’s case, the self-help book. These products, however well intentioned, present a false and temporary filling of the hole that capitalism leaves in our lives – a hole that organic community used to fill.

This particularly affects today’s youth in an unprecedented way. Whilst Millennials were born around the emergence of the internet, Gen Z was born into a society in which the internet was well established and its consequences already very apparent. One of those consequences – perhaps the most debilitating of them all – is what is being currently referred to as the “death of subculture.”

Where subcultures in the past would primarily form in person – at schools, coffee shops, bars, music venues, alleyways and parks – today’s social interactions primarily take place via the ever-so-algorithmic social media. To many Gen Z-ers, experiencing an organic subculture that solely meets in person is a relic of the past. What seems to have replaced it are virtual, hollow projections of these previous eras, resulting in the rise of the “Internet aesthetic.”

If you’ve spent any time on social media since lockdown began, you’re likely well aware of Internet aesthetics such as “cottagecore” and “dark academia.” What makes these trends so different from past subcultures is that they can be enacted alone, in your own home, simply by wearing the right clothes, cooking the right food, or buying the right decor. While it’s very possible to enjoy these aesthetics by yourself offline, they are primarily used as a performance – a spectacle for other users of social media to witness, imitate, or vicariously enjoy. Where media were once used to advertise to the consumer, our current social media algorithms train users to advertise their consumerism to each other. With a few exceptions here and there, this deeply anti-human use of aesthetics buries authenticity, leaving only the most highly curated content to reach a mass audience, and this broadcasted idealization of people’s lives only fuels our society’s loneliness epidemic.

Politicizing the aesthetic

In a world that can view aesthetics as the be all and end all of success, it can be all too tempting to view them as a liberatory form of expression, a sign of progress, or an indicator of health. But it’s worth examining who benefits from this ideology and whom it actually serves. Walter Benjamin, for example, took note of how opposing ideological groups viewed the use of aesthetics during the rise of fascism in Europe. Fascists, he argued, were aestheticizing politics, whereas Communists were politicizing aesthetics.

In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction he explained:

Fascism seeks to give the newly proletarianized masses an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life. (…) Mankind, which in Homer’s time was a spectacle for the Olympian gods, has become one for itself. (…) Communism responds by politicizing art.

It is in this way that we should respond to the pandemic aesthetics of Marie Kondo–to reveal how the call to tidy our spaces during a global catastrophe is an ideological strategy to get us to focus on ourselves rather than the world that is causing our suffering.

Marie Kondo and pandemic aesthetics

It’s been over five years since the Konmari method was introduced to Netflix viewers, and this year, The Guardian released an article entitled “How Marie Kondo Changed Her Mind About Mess.” In this article, Kondo states, “I realized always maintaining the perfect state of tidiness was not my goal, but spending time with my kids is. That’s what really sparks joy.” Marie Kondo’s self-improvement program showcased an idealized life that viewers could dream to achieve – one where the only issues you needed to face were your possessions and your mindset. But regardless of how tidy citizens’ homes became, war raged on, pandemics endured, and the cost of living significantly increased. Unfortunately, it doesn’t matter how much we try to block these issues out and focus solely on ourselves; the realities of life seep in and remind us that we do not live, and should not live, in a vacuum. Much more than a tidy, minimalistic environment or an intricately curated fashion sense, humans need other humans with whom to foster both joy and struggle.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”