“For man, or for a man, there can be no new beginnings.” — David Zindell, Shanidar
Re: A Call for New Aesthetics.
At some point in the 20th century, we filled out the last few basis vectors of humanity. We explored the whole game map. This is what it means to live at the end of history: every aesthetic movement, political and economic system you can imagine can be understood as a linear combination of things that have come before. Asking for a new aesthetics is like asking for a new continent, one north of 90° and with imaginary longitude.
This is why culture feels stuck, and why every ideology is “neo” or “post” something that came before: we have exhausted humanity. And this is why every response to the call for a new aesthetics is to dig up some past artistic movement, and scale it up linearly. “We offer nothing new except gigantism”.
I don’t want to believe this is true, because I want to believe culture is an infinite game, and inexhaustible. And surely the number of linear combinations—of distinct ideas humans can have, and works of art we can make—is so high as to be inexhaustible. But each new remixing brings less information than the last.
Today, futuristic aesthetics often mean retrofuturistic aesthetics.
At the end of history, all futurism is retrofuturism, because the future is contained in the past. The space age, the atomic age, the age of supersonic flight all came and went. Dyson spheres and nanomachines and mind uploading were theorized and written about decades ago.
If there is a new aesthetic, it will have to come from a transhuman culture—from people who are more than, or at least other than, human—or from the alien minds being born around us.
Thanks to Mónica Belevan for reading the draft of this article.