Continue viewing this article with a TANK Digital subscription.

n these interactions, the Aesthetics Wiki feels not unlike a slightly older online community also dedicated to the investigation and documentation of aesthetics. Once a Facebook group and now also on Discord, the Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute (CARI) welcomes new users into their server with a somewhat daunting list of rules in the #posting-guidelines channel. Long walls of text should be avoided, bumping posts more than a few days old should be avoided unless you have something constructive to add, and posting about an aesthetic that has already been discussed should be avoided, especially if that aesthetic falls into the #do-not-post category (which currently includes the Y2K aesthetic, which CARI is famous for having coined, and, for some reason, “scholastic utopian”, a descriptor for the visual style of the DK Eyewitness book series). Yet while the mods of CARI and the Aesthetics Wiki hold their community members to high standards, when it comes to discussing aesthetics on the internet, CARI distinguishes itself with its stricter, design-historical focus, diplomatically separating itself from the cores, waves and academias that the Aesthetics Wiki community cares about. From its server FAQ: 

Q: How come we aren’t tracking cottagecore, steampunk, or sea-shanty-wave??? Those are my favorite aesthetics!!!

A: We enjoy analyzing & critiquing some of those aesthetics too! However, we are the Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute, and our mission specifically focuses on aesthetics that reach enough popularity among consumers to be adopted by corporations.

For CARI, a consumer aesthetic is, officially, “a visual movement unified by overarching attitudes and themes that survived long enough or became popular enough to be appropriated by capital”. In short, the aesthetics CARI considers worth documenting must exist in the world, and you must provide evidence of this to justify its documentation: you can’t just make one up on your own, or with friends. The Aesthetics Wiki community understands this difference and even seems to have its own critique of CARI’s approach, something I caught a glimpse of when reading back through a discussion in its Discord after one of its members was ostensibly banned from the CARI server for “saying something about Steven Universe to the mods”.

In its own meticulous way, the Aesthetics Wiki community encourages a freer, more experimental and expressive approach to aesthetics. One of the newer pages on the wiki offers a guide to those interested in blending aesthetics together, and how they can use colour theory for winning results. In the Discord, members can request help in defining their own personal aesthetic, listing objects, colours, concepts, media and places that they feel drawn to, with or without supporting visual references. In what I like to think of as the vaguely spiritual experience of “having one’s aesthetic read”, more experienced community members will then weigh in with suggestions for which aesthetic, or blend of aesthetics, that the user might be most aligned with. Using a combination of impressive visual memory and intuition, server members can debate which aesthetic is the true essence of a certain image, song, music video or TV series, regardless of whether that aesthetic has reached a certain degree of commercial popularity or not, or was even the aesthetic intended by the creators of that piece of media, read within the context of its creation.

Most interesting for me, however, is the slippage between invention and discovery that seems to characterise proposals for new aesthetics to add to the wiki. Sometimes, members share ideas for aesthetics that they have “made up” or “coined”. But other times, they will excitedly share an aesthetic that seems to have existed all along, which they have just now unearthed. Occasionally, a disconcerting image that is difficult to categorise will appear in the server, and members will jokingly declare that a new aesthetic has “dropped”. Perhaps all aesthetics exist as platonic forms in some higher realm, and members of online aesthetic subculture communities have found their calling in seeking out their imperfect, yet still beautiful, incarnations here on Earth, or divining their presence by cobbling together huge networks of images, each one helping you to articulate something sublime for yourself and for others – without using any words at all.

In this way, the activities of aesthetics communities emerge as a kind of sense-making that is able to persist and proliferate even in times of apparent narrative crisis. This in turn is a useful opportunity for a little lesson in narrative theory. Not that you would know it from reading recent cultural commentary, but there is in fact an entire scholarly discipline dedicated to the study of narrative, its unique qualities, its elusive underlying grammar, the political and social contexts that shape it and the way we process it in our brains. While think pieces, Substack dispatches and non-fiction stocked in airport bookshops have all made grand claims about the collapse of narratives, narratologists have spent decades debating what a narrative actually is, and with inconclusive results. Reading claims of narrative collapse through narratology’s debate around narrativity is highly instructive. 

“Narrative collapse” is usually meant as a failure to establish a sense of cause and effect in the face of global catastrophes that seem to happen nowhere and everywhere at once, which aren’t the work of a single, identifiable villain, aren’t being solved by a likeable, singular hero, and which run their course according to an incredibly convoluted chain of events of which we can make neither head nor tail. This is to identify narrative form with causal agency, however, which is just one account of what narrativity is. Perhaps this is not surprising, from Aristotle’s theory of tragedy, Boris Viktorovicˇ Tomaševskij’s 1925 definition of the fabula, E.M. Forster’s definition of plot in Aspects of the Novel (1927), and influential frameworks put forward by narratologists in the 20th century, theories of narrative have, for the most part, posited causal connection as a necessary condition of narrativity. But since the 1990s, narratologists have brought this older model of narrativity into question. Moving beyond causality and plot, more expansive concepts have moved into the foreground, such as experientiality, or “the quasi-mimetic evocation of real-life experience” – as narratologist Monika Fludernik puts it – that takes place when we experience narratives and aesthetic illusion, that is, according to literary theorist Wolf Werner, the “impression of being recentered in a possible world as if it were (a slice of) life”. At the same time, narratologists also began to look for signs of narrativity in media beyond narrative fiction, with the investigation of narrative qualities in music, images and games challenging conventional criteria for what counts as a narrative in the first place. In light of this, it seems plausible that the activities and practices of online aesthetic subcultures and meta-subcultures are forms of narrative processing that have not collapsed in on themselves, but are thriving. At the individual level, at least, to discover and adopt your own personal aesthetic must feel not only like becoming a protagonist in your own story, but transforming your environment and daily experience into a slice of another, possible world. Why escape into fictional realms when you can build them around you and wake up to them every day?

Do these narrativising behaviours, whether they lean more towards establishing linear causality, or towards producing forms of aesthetic immersion, exist in some kind of radical, utopian opposition to our information-dense, chaotic and overstimulating world? Or are they merely a coping mechanism that allows one to keep existing in it, without needing to change its oppressive structures? Perhaps it is both. In the late 1980s, Lennard Davis, now a well-known scholar of disability studies and cultural theory, wrote a monograph called Resisting Novels. He calls our attention to the double meaning of resistance: in a political context, resistance implies pushing for change, while in the psychoanalytical sense of the world, resistance is “defensive reluctance or the blockage of change”. While it is tempting to think of novels and other forms of narrative-making as agents of the first kind of resistance, Davis encourages us to sit with the uncomfortable idea that, on the whole, they might be more closely aligned with the second kind. “The novel, as a cultural phenomenon,” he writes, “is one part of a gigantic defense mechanism … it serves a defensive function in helping us carry on and live in the world.” Although much emphasis has been placed on the evolutionary role of narrative in helping humans – Homo narrans – find and create meaning, we would do well to consider its function today as a coping mechanism, a role that narrative has played at least since the birth of the novel (it is not for nothing that this is thought to have coincided with the birth of modern capitalism). From this perspective, claims that we need “new narratives”, whether in the form of causal explanations that restore our agency, or as all-encompassing aesthetic experiences that allow us seemingly to bring another world into existence through our choices, deserve more scrutiny than we usually give them. The current burst of aesthetic sense-making online that I have described could be seen as a mere side-effect of Pinterest and other platforms improving their visual search and computer-vision capacities, with the goal of embedding online shopping experiences into any image we encounter online. But, as with any emergent collective behaviour on the internet that takes place prior to a platform’s full commercialisation, I will admit that there does seem to be something utopian about it from a distance. ◉

Illustrations by Sam Lubicz.