Hideous as an aesthetic

a slightly unfocused rant

Until it came across a social media feed I’d been completely unaware of the existence of Bambi Thug, the Irish “artist” pictured above with her (or “their,” fuck knows) partner. The clip played with her flashing a metallic smile was from a Eurovision press conference, where she/it proclaimed herself to be “queer,” to raucous applause. When I see these increasingly extreme and progressively more monstrous fashions and body mods, I sometimes feel—maybe it’s my advancing age—as if I’ve been teleported into an episode of Orphan Black or an audience scene in The Hunger Games.

Whereas I could once console myself that these were fashions among well-off wastrel brats, I see it with ever greater frequency now even in our farm town. No doubt this is the influence of media. When the overstretched middle-aged stars of daytime soaps start to sport tats, you can bet there will be fifty-something housewives who feel compelled to spend $500 to have Mandlebrot designs needled into their calves. So, it’s no real wonder that otherwise ordinary people in small towns now have hair in colors that never occur in nature and piercings in places never once imagined. Fashion is a sternly passive-aggressive master.

I could suggest, as a certified clinical pop-psychologist, that hideousness as an aesthetic choice is part and parcel of some vaguely Girardian arms race for “self-expression,” in the metropoles at least, where we’ve all been conformed to the techno-grid. We’re all aware, down in the dank and gloomy penetralia of our minds, that this conformity is an emptiness, a vacuum. If we, as cyborgs, have no access to esteem, the best we can hope for is attention. Anything to prove we actually exist. idk

It feels as if Sartre’s pithy pronouncement that “you are what you do” is some quaintly antiquated artifact like bear-baiting, or calling one’s bald head a fly rink. Now, it’s what you look like. Of course, this preoccupation with “looks” has been around forever, but until recently (in my lifetime, at least) this was to look better (by whatever that standard was). Now, it’s about how to look ever more extremely hideous.

Facial tattoos, for example, are part of some older cultures—actual cultures, not media inventions—and they have actual meaning.

In today’s anti-culture, this race to hideousness is just another bootless (and often expensive) rebellion destined for normalization through commodification. Hell, it’s already there. All praise Bambi Thug!

Let’s face it, the Eurovision Song Contest, where thousands of idiots fell out over Bambi Thug, was a jillion-dollar event in which thirty-seven nations competed. It’s pretty hard to make the case that one is being “transgressive,” when these literally superficial contraventions—looking like gargoyles, ghouls, and clowns—have become con-ventions. Ahhh, the conjury of capitalism!

It was Marx who said, “alles Heilige wird entweiht,” that is, “All that is holy is profaned.” Marx also said that “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” I could say aesthetic “transgression” appears first as shock, then as silliness. What might have once been shocking about Bambi Thug’s vaguely Satanic shtick is now just silly, and exposes her admirers as equally silly poseurs.

It’s at peak capitalization now. In five years, market saturation will drive the entrepreneurs elsewhere.

Going back to hideousness as aesthetically desirable, we need some Phillip Reiff to get underneath it by speaking to desire itself.

Reiff dates the problem back to Freud and what Reiff called the emergence of “psychological man.”

“Religious man,” Reiff said, “is born to be saved. Psychological man is born to be pleased.”

The problem with the latter—and one need not parse Hegel’s master-slave dialectic nor spelunk the catacombs of Lacan’s objet petite-a’s to understand it—is that desire, absent authority and restraint, is a bottomless pit. We need authority.

Reiff noted, as others have, that societies are held together by “the sacred,” something Ellul might have called myth, which give society an order, and an arrangement which he called “the aesthetics of authority.” (I won’t digress here, for it would take some time, into a discussion of the difference between authority and power, except to say that authority is something akin to responsible parenting, as opposed to arbitrary rule by fiat. It sets limits, yes, but only in the interest of proper growth and formation.)

One might throw up a chicken-egg dilemma about social crises and the anti-aesthetics which Reiff called “deathworks,” but we’ll set that aside, too, and just explain this weird Reiffian term . . . deathworks. When rebellion is valorized—with or without good cause (and Reiff’s complaint was that the emergence of “psychological man” was not at all a good thing)—then we have an accompanying aesthetic of rebellion, an assault on those values vital to that society/culture: deathworks.

Some aesthetics of rebellion are actually good art. Much of it, however, is just delusional narcissistic shit (let’s combine Reiff with Lasch). The hideousness aesthetic, in my view, is the latter. When Bob Dylan sang “The Times They Are a-Changin’,” there was a rebellion afoot, with a social conscience. When Marilyn Manson recorded “Arma-goddamn-motherfuckin-geddon,” he was just trying to resuscitate his career as a pointless shock-maven.

There’s no boundary—which is the point of postmodern deathworks. It’s rebellion for rebellion’s sake, like an arrow released into a midnight canyon, a mimetic spiral.

Just as I now see aging bikers in their automated wheelchairs, their tats folded into the drapery of their aged skin, wearing their old colors over their decrepitude as if they just don’t know what else to do, the landscape will some day (sooner than they realize) be populated by geriatric Bambi Thugs, wondering, “What the fuck was it all for?”

Life in this world is ugly enough, simple dignity and authentic beauty too precious and rare. Without our boundaries and guideposts, though, we ourselves become the arrows shot into the void.