Introduction: “What Aesthetic Is This?”

Figure 1: "what aesthetic is this ?"

Let’s start with a meme. Posted by Instagram user @quirkyandrelatable69 on August 14^th, 2022, it’s a screenshot of the comments section of a somewhat blurry-looking TikTok which seems to depict some sort of outdoor space with trees. “What aesthetic is this ? x” asks user danica, to which user marinersarchive dryly responds, “walking outside.” “Thank you!” replies danica in turn. The joke here seems to be that danica has become so estranged from living IRL (“in real life,” as opposed to online) that she can only make sense of the basic act of walking outside through its relation to a memetic cultural category. In the comments section of the post, multiple users reference the phrase “touch some grass,” a popular meme and online insult synonymous with “go outside,” implying that someone has spent too much time online to the detriment of their general wellbeing. But danica’s question is something of a Trojan Horse: beneath its seemingly naïve, internet-raised Gen Z exterior, it discloses a number of important unspoken assumptions regarding the state of the aesthetic in contemporary digital culture. Firstly, it suggests the rapid ascendance of a popular connotation of aesthetics distinct from the term’s more traditional definition as “the philosophy of the beautiful or of art”—one which refers to the proliferation of niche aesthetic micro-categories emerging from and saturating digital popular culture.[1] Secondly, danica’s assumption that the very act of walking outside may be situated within a given aesthetic, or even comprise its own aesthetic suggests a kind of aesthetics which might not be simply confined to art and culture, but open to all manner of all aspects of one’s lifestyle. Finally, @quirkyandrelatable69’s choice to use this meme on their page as an ostensibly relatable piece of content implies that danica’s seemingly absurd question might be a symptom of a broader generational shift, suggesting the existence of a whole generation of digital natives for whom aesthetics no longer refers to judgments of beauty or philosophies of art, but rather attempts to situate everyday objects and practices within an exponentially growing array of digital micro-categories.

@quirkyandrelatable69’s meme feels particularly resonant in a historical moment in which digital media has become the motor of popular culture, resulting in an unforeseen proliferation of ephemeral stylistic categories saturating our day-to-day lives. These categories seem to follow us everywhere today: saturating our screens, animating our conversations, and feeding back into a vast array of media practices. In the age of digital social media, these categories serve as the building blocks which make up the frameworks of our cultural understanding, orienting us through processes of encoding and decoding throughout everyday life, and allowing us to place the characteristics of people and objects within both emergent and established cognitive categories. We might find ourselves debating whether indie sleaze has really “returned;” fretting about the obsolescence of millennial aesthetics signified by the emergence of the ominous cheugy designation; trying to educate family members of the perils of acting like a Kyle or a Karen; or lying sleeplessly in bed at night wondering to ourselves just WTF goblincore might be.[2] These categories, which I refer to here as memetic aesthetics, are the focal point of this dissertation.

Why “Memetic Aesthetics?”

Memetic aesthetics is little more than another name for what are more commonly known in digital culture as internet aesthetics, or simply aesthetics, and have also been variously referred to as “namecore,” “TikTok couture,” “vibes culture,” and “TikTok core.”[3] There are four main reasons I’ve chosen the term memetic aesthetics over the more commonly used internet aesthetics or aesthetics. The first one is perhaps the most obvious, namely, its emphasis on the memetic nature of these aesthetics. My use of the term memetic aesthetics derives from the definition of “internet aesthetics” on Aesthetics Wiki—a site used to compile and describe memetic aesthetics—as “a visual-led theme reflected consistently and often memetically throughout a given subculture.”[4] While the meme in memetic aesthetics famously derives from evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins’ name for gene-like units of cultural transmission, my emphasis on the memetic nature of these aesthetics follows Ryan M. Milner, who uses memetics to examine the social practices involved in the production, circulation, and transformation of collective texts across participatory media.[5] In this sense, memetic aesthetics can be understood as any style, type, trope, genre, scene, movement, or related category which is standardized, repeated, and revised through its circulation across digital media.

In addition to the memetic mode through which new style categories emerge, the “memetic” in memetic aesthetics is also intended as a reference to internet memes, which are the primary form of media through which these categories circulate. As Milner writes, “Through their intense sociality, memes are folk media…premised on collective strands intertwining to create new tapestries of cultural production.”[6] In recent years, memes have become so important in the transmission of aesthetic categories that the recognizability of emergent categories is now predicated on their circulation as memes.[7] Consider for example the case of the Karen—an entitled white middle-class woman typically depicted harassing service industry workers and people of colour—who, while only being formally named around 2017, began her memetic journey in 2014 when she was circulated as the “Can I Speak to a Manager Haircut” meme on Reddit forums.[8]

Figure 2: The proto-Karen: “‘Can I Speak to a Manager’ Haircut.”

The Karen, alongside others such as the Kyle and the fuccboi are noteworthy case studies from the perspective of memetic aesthetics because as pejorative stereotypes, they aren’t included in Aesthetics Wiki’s archive, and are never really discussed as being in the same ontological category as better-known aesthetics like night luxe or French girl. In order to understand why this is, we must revisit Aesthetics Wiki’s definition of internet aesthetics as “a visual-led theme reflected consistently and often memetically throughout a given subculture.”[9] Fuccbois and Karens are certainly types, but because nobody willingly identifies with them, defining them as subcultures would be a misnomer. The notion of a memetic aesthetic on the other hand is slightly more capacious, referring to any cultural style or type which is propagated and formally standardized through its circulation across digital media. This brings us to another important distinction between memetic aesthetics, and what are otherwise referred to as internet aesthetics or aesthetics: while the latter have often been referred to as “internet subcultures,” the theory of memetic aesthetics presented here specifically relies on a post-subcultural framework.[10] This is to say that memetic aesthetics are of a different order than subcultures, and must therefore be theorized using a different vocabulary. In Section I, we’ll discuss how the exponential growth of early memetic aesthetics such as vaporwave and normcore on platforms such as Tumblr in the late-aughts and early twenty-teens arose from the gradual dissolution of the hipster, a broad meta-subcultural structure of feeling which itself can be read as a response to challenges regarding the idea of subculture throughout the 1990s.[11]

Despite dealing with different sets of historical circumstances, memetic aesthetics and classic youth subcultures (e.g., punks or mods) are also not entirely unalike, as both concepts emerge out of a common lineage as lifestyle-based responses to the problem of aesthetic autonomy within capitalist society. What sets them apart is that traditional subcultures still retain some influence from classical aesthetics through their investment in concepts such as authenticity. The notion of being a “lifer” within a particular scene for example, is a testament to the respect and cultural capital associated with one’s long-standing and authentic commitment to their respective subculture.[12] Memetic aesthetics on the other hand, represent a digital break from the investment in authenticity which informed subcultures of previous decades. As François Brunet observes, the exponential proliferation of processes of dissemination and dematerialization in the digital era has rendered concepts of originality, reality and authenticity associated with the “old” Benjaminian question of reproduction obsolete:

In the realm of the visual, the ‘lives of images,’…consist in endless mediations and re-mediations of ‘visibilities’ (and other modes of communicability) that need not retain any materiality or uniqueness to circulate virtually, and yet tend to lay claim to a strong link to reality—the reality of their own circulation, to begin with. Digital-native students expect images (if not objects) to move, multiply, and disseminate virtually and instantaneously; they measure the worth of digital things by the statistics of their circulation…they appraise virality before they observe form or content.[13]

Drawing on Brunet, we can say that memetic aesthetics’ primacy of virality over content can be understood as a reconfiguration of the postmodern concept of lifestyle in the “post-authentic” digital age—one whose “life” no longer connotes the life-consuming commitment of a subcultural practitioner, but rather the “life” of a category’s own thingness, which is in turn defined by its viral circulation.[14] Freed from the burdensome baggage of subcultural authenticity, memetic aesthetics are precisely the kind of ephemeral and expendable post-subcultural styles prophesized by David Muggleton, who describes the noncommittal “style surfing” of the postmodern post-subculturalist.[15] In a YouTube video deconstructing the French girl aesthetic, style analyst Mina Le aptly captures the prevailing attitude toward memetic aesthetics amongst Gen Z youth as follows:

I don’t think anyone should feel trapped by an aesthetic. It’s a way of expression, not a form of social conformity. I see a lot of videos on TikTok and on YouTube of people being like, ‘help me choose an aesthetic, I just like so many aesthetics,’ and you don’t have to choose.[16]

The third reason in my case for the term memetic aesthetics is that it situates the concept within the genealogy of aesthetic theory, while also periodizing it as a distinct stage in the development of Western aesthetics characterized by memetic circulation on digital media. The relationship between memetic aesthetics and aesthetics in the more traditional sense is an interesting and complicated one. Anthony Cross alludes to it in a blog post about Aesthetics Wiki, in which he points out a distinction between “aesthetics (a singular noun) in the more philosophical sense,” and “‘aesthetics’—a plural noun in the internet sense.”[17] Rather than treating these two uses of the aesthetic as antithetical, I argue in Section I that they can be understood as two historically distinct stages of a continuum which I call the Kant to cottagecore pipeline: the story of how a branch of philosophy concerned with sensation and beauty gradually ended up sharing a name with the TikTok generation’s exponentially growing list of niche style-types.

According to Sianne Ngai, the erosion of a modernist conception of aesthetic autonomy amidst the hyperaestheticization of everyday life under late capitalism has led to a situation in aesthetic theory in which “neither art nor beautiful/sublime nature remains the obvious go-to model for reflecting on aesthetic experience as a whole.”[18] Paralleling the development of the word “culture,” from a word connoting the highest achievements of creative expression, to one referring to “whole ways of life,” memetic aesthetics, like subcultures before them, represent a pluralization of the aesthetic, as it shifts its emphasis from questions of value to a seemingly limitless array of stylistic semiotic systems.[19]

Jean Baudrillard cites the Bauhaus as the start of a shift in the focus of Western aesthetics from beauty to signification, resulting in a “universal semantization of the environment in which everything becomes the object of a calculus of function and of signification.”[20] Hal Foster traces these developments back even further, citing Art Nouveau as the point of origin for a “world of total design,” but arguing that this has only been fully achieved in the digitized late capitalist present, in which “the aesthetic and the utilitarian are not only conflated but all but subsumed in the commercial, and everything.”[21] A telling sign of the association between aesthetics and late capitalist consumer culture is in the popular vernacular, where the words brand and aesthetic have become virtually synonymous with one another, allowing individuals to discuss their personal “brands,” as well as which actions, attitudes, styles, tastes, and objects may be considered “on-brand” or “off-brand” for a given person or entity. Used in this sense, aesthetics refer to the seemingly limitless repertoire of personal or collective brands cultivated through the semiotic coding of stylistic categories, which circulate within the “brandscape” of everyday life.[22]

Of course, the use of the term aesthetic to refer to stylistic or subcultural categories as personal or collective “brands” is hardly a new development. Nor is minting categories of people as a form of “worldbuilding” or “thingification”—a tendency whose mainstream popularity blogger Suspended Reason attributes to the colourful social reporting of “types of guy” on Sex and the City.[23] However, this kind of classificatory typing has seen a dramatic rise in the age of social media, where the rapid speed of digital circulation is able to transform the most seemingly obscure cultural object into a global phenomenon—or thing, virtually overnight. Hazard P. Spence argues that platforms such as Twitter have contributed to an acceleration in the minting of social types:

The key component of Thingness is knowing that everyone knows that everyone knows it’s a Thing (aka Common Knowledge). It’s not just that each individual knows it’s a Thing, but that you can count on the fact that others know it’s a Thing. That’s why I think twitter is a hotbed of Type creation. Twitter (and the internet in general) is a massive machine for ratifying discrete chunks of social reality and creating common knowledge. Digital word of mouth moves faster than irl [in real life] word of mouth. I feel like we’re in a moment of Type Accelerationsim [sic], where the speed at which new Types can be minted and ratified is increasing, and the max- specificity/complexity of a viable Type is increasing.[24]

Suspended Reason and Spence’s mentions of thingification, things, and thingness bring me to the fourth and final reason I insist on the concept of memetic aesthetics. In recent years, the concept of the thing has acquired a curious new connotation which has become central to memetic practices. In June of 2017, the Oxford English Dictionary posted about a new meaning of the word, referring to “a genuine or established phenomenon or practice.”[25] Alexander Stern writes that this transformation in the use of the word “thing” corresponds to a need to formalize the being of cultural objects amidst an increasingly fragmented cultural sphere flooded with digital content:

‘A thing,’ then, corresponds to a real need we have, to catalog and group together the items of cultural experience, while keeping them at a sufficient distance so that we can at least feign unified consciousness in the face of a world gone to pieces. [26]

Consider the way in which the question “is that even a thing?” has come to mean something like “have they made a meme of that too?” and the way in which the styles we come to know as aesthetics—be it the cottagecore aesthetic or the e-girl/e-boy aesthetic—almost always begin as a thing which we come to recognize through their memetic circulation. Used in this sense, a thing refers to a “basic unit of cultural ontology” intended to designate the emergent becomings of new sets of cultural practice, which gradually materialize into memetic aesthetic categories.[27] Memetic aesthetics in turn, can be understood as a digital shift in contemporary aesthetics in which the ontological takes precedence over the axiological: the question is no longer “is this beautiful?” or even “is this art?” but rather, “is this even a thing?”

I use the term memetic aesthetics in this dissertation precisely because the term is not yet an established concept, or thing. This project then, is at once an attempt to provide a general theory of memetic aesthetics, and a memetic experiment in itself. As such, this dissertation tries to replicate the logic of a starter meme: it strives to make memetic aesthetics a thing by mapping it out, demonstrating what distinguishes it as a thing, and subsequently circulating it as a distinct thing of its own. The concept of memetic aesthetics is admittedly quite broad. Encompassing a host of different fashion styles (e.g., indie sleaze and normcore), syn-aesthetic music genres (e.g., vaporwave and egg/chain punk), atmospheric design motifs (e.g., cottagecore and Danish pastel), lifestyle categories (e.g., night luxe and that girl), and even pejorative stereotypes (e.g., Karen and fuccboi), the sheer capaciousness of the term runs the risk of arousing the mistaken suspicion that it is not an actual thing. Indeed, the bulkiness of the concept of memetic aesthetics itself runs counter to the decidedly fragmentary nature of the things it names, potentially rendering it something of a theoretical fashion faux pas in our age of digital micro-bubbles.[28]

#goals

In seeking to provide a general theory of memetic aesthetics, my aims in this dissertation are threefold. Firstly, I hope to quell any suspicions regarding the thingness of memetic aesthetics by making the case that memetic aesthetics are not only a thing, but also a valuable theoretical concept allowing us to make sense of how “things” become things in the first place. In other words, memetic aesthetics expose the mechanics of cultural ontological production in the age of networked social media, allowing us to make sense of how various styles, types, and tropes are created, disseminated, and transformed across a range of digital platforms. In a moment in which even legacy media outlets have begun clambering to define the TikTok generation’s rapid influx of new cultural categories like indie sleaze and that girl, I argue that understanding these categories as memetic aesthetics might allow us to understand what these things are, what they do, and where they come from.[29]

Memetic aesthetics are highly niche, trivial, and often largely inconsequential by definition, and it would be virtually impossible to provide an exhaustive account of the hundreds (if not thousands) of categories currently circulating on the internet.[30] However, I suggest that as a broader concept, memetic aesthetics offers an opportunity to critically reflect on broader shifts in the relationships between aesthetics, technology, capitalism, affect, politics, and culture in the smartphone-saturated present. This is the second central aim of this dissertation. My efforts to historicize the contemporary moment here are inspired by Lauren Berlant’s notion of the present, which they describe as “a temporal genre whose conventions emerge from the personal and public filtering of the situations and events that are happening in an extended now whose very parameters (when did ‘the present’ begin?) are also always there for debate.”[31] In making big claims about the “now” on the backs of a number of small aesthetics, this project also shares with Berlant a deep interest in generalization, seeking to make sense of “how the singular becomes delaminated from its location in someone’s story or some locale’s irreducibly local history and circulated as evidence of something shared.”[32] In the chapters that follow, I examine the emergence and development of memetic aesthetics in the context of a number of both long-standing and relatively new theoretical issues including but not limited to: the problem of aesthetic autonomy under capitalism; the decline of modernist aesthetics; the postmodern fluidization of identity; the emergence of lifestyles and atmospheres as marketing concepts; the waning influence of youth subcultures; the fragmentation and hybridization of genre; the digital death of authenticity; the digital/aesthetic impasse in cultural and media studies; the hyperacceleration of cultural transmission via digital technology; the emergence of the vibe as a means of theorizing affective experience within digital culture; the debates over mediation in affect theory; and the millennial/Gen Z generation gap.

As one might hopefully have gathered by now, this is a research project about the internet. Yet, it is also a product of the internet. By this, I mean that the internet not only serves as the principal object of study of this dissertation, but also guides its methodology and formal structure. In other words, this dissertation is as much about digital culture as it is about how to read and write about digital culture. The third and final aim of this dissertation is thus to offer an approach which resonates with the perpetual on-going temporality, the pre-emergent indeterminacy, and the fragmentary nature of memetic aesthetics. There are two crucial concepts to this approach which correspond respectively to the methodology and the form of this dissertation: vibes and constellations.

As a result of their emergent status within popular culture and accordingly, the indeterminate nature of their thingness, or actualization, memetic aesthetic categories are characterized by a uniquely elusive ontological quality. In other words, because memetic aesthetics only begin to materialize as things through their viral circulation and subsequent recognition, they exist in a somewhat awkward liminal space within the cultural imaginary—they are both subjective and objective, both virtual and actual. It should seem entirely unsurprising then, that much of the vocabulary used to describe digital culture is phrased in terms of collective affective resonance. The popular “vibe check” meme of 2019 for example, invited users to express their present affective/emotional state.[33] Similarly, the phrase “big mood” is commonly used in digital culture, in which it is synonymous with relatable.[34] Note the emphasis in both of these examples—and most prominently in the word meme itself, which derives from the French word for same—on feeling as an innately collective and social phenomenon. Collective modes of affective experience such as vibes, moods and feels may thus be understood as the forces which structure the nebulous constellations of things which are memetic aesthetic categories.

In recent years, the concept of the vibe has gained centrality in contemporary digital culture as a useful theoretical tool for making sense of the affective means through which pre-emergent cultural categories come into being. Robin James for example, refers to vibes as a “phenomenological horizon,” and describes the way they function as a standard against which phenomena are evaluated for purposiveness and in/exclusion within a given category.[35] For Kyle Chayka, the pre-linguistic quality of vibes makes them particularly well-suited to social media’s prioritization of audio, video, and images over text.[36] Chayka argues that digital media has made it easier to curate specific vibes, leading to what he calls a “vibe revival,” referring to the proliferation of increasingly more niche memetic aesthetics such as cottagecore and dark academia on platforms like TikTok.[37] For Peli Grietzer, the vibe of an aesthetic work or category is what he calls its “internal space of possibilities,” referring to the collection of objects and phenomena which embodies the internal logic of the category’s world and imbues it with a sense of aesthetic unity.[38] Grietzer likens the “logic of formal affinity” of vibes to the input-space manifold of an autoencoding algorithm, arguing that both entities render collections of objects and phenomena as examples of the logic of a world of aesthetic experience opened up by a given aesthetic category, genre, or work.[39]

If the vibe of a memetic aesthetic category refers to the space of possibilities within its world, its atmosphere refers to the phenomenological qualities of the world itself. Gernot Böhme describes atmospheres as “something that proceeds from and is created by things, persons or their constellations,” which are neither objective nor subjective, yet potentially thinglike and subjectlike.[40] Böhme argues that aesthetic atmospheres are one of the most important tools for marketing commodities in the contemporary moment which he terms “aesthetic capitalism.”[41] Arguing that atmospheric production is not simply limited to art, Böhme calls for a “new aesthetics” which accounts for the full range of “aesthetic work”—from hairstyling, to design, to filmmaking.[42] This resonates with the descriptions of memetic aesthetic categories on Aesthetics Wiki, each of which feature long lists of dispositions in fashion, lifestyle, activities, careers, movies, television, hairstyles, speech, quirks, and more. As Katie Freeman writes, “It doesn’t just have to be clothes… [It can be] how you decorate your room, how you do things on the internet, [it is] kind of an every day, every facet of life type of thing.”[43] Each minute detail of one’s life thus serves as a potential affective signifier, evoking the vibe or atmosphere associated with a given memetic aesthetic category, and the various constellations and networks it might find itself embedded in.

The concept of the vibe guides my methodology in this dissertation because the concept of memetic aesthetics, like the seemingly limitless array of categories that it names, is only yet coming into being. As Raymond Williams writes, “social forms are evidently more recognizable when they are articulate and explicit.”[44] In their hazy, raw, and pre-emergent states however, memetic aesthetic categories and the concept that binds them are first perceived affectively—we might have a general sense of their vibe, but do not yet know where they will go or what they will become. Rather than trying to offer any kind of totalizing account of memetic aesthetics then, this dissertation relies on a broad, interpretive, and relational framework it terms vibeology (explored further in Part II), which tracks their formal, contextual, and affective affinities across a wide array of networks, platforms, media, and historical trajectories. Grietzer’s parallel between vibes and AI is useful here because of the loose algorithmic logic with which this dissertation brings together its objects, case studies, and concepts. Like the content fed to us by algorithms, some parts of this dissertation may resonate strongly with its reader while other parts might feel more tangential. The reasons for this could be personal—Luis-Manuel Garcia writes that “bodies respond differently to vibration, according to their own ‘resonant frequencies’”—or it could very well be that they represent early stages of thinking about memetic aesthetics which may get filtered out as the term gains more formal consistency over time.[45]

The concept of the vibe is also crucial to this dissertation because it informs the data sampling method used in its research process. While the expansiveness of digital culture—or even meme culture more specifically—makes it nearly impossible to create an established canon of prominent online phenomena, this dissertation offers a wide assortment of Instagram memes, Tweets, YouTube videos, TikToks, Substack entries, podcasts, pop songs, and blog posts which seeks to approximate at least some of what a “terminally online” person may have scrolled through somewhere between the late aughts and early twenty-teens.[46] There’s an important autobiographical element to this as well which ought to be mentioned. As a late millennial who came of age during the golden era of MySpace and Facebook and entered the DIY music scene toward the end of the hipster era, I witnessed firsthand a number of important “vibe shifts” in the culture, beginning with the emergence of a new generation of Tumblr-raised Gen Z youth whose attitudes to identity and subculture were of an entirely different nature to those of myself and my millennial cohort. This dissertation serves as an effort to document and historicize some of these shifts and very much reflects the perspective of the millennial subculturalist by which it was written. An alternate subtitle for this dissertation could be something like: “Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Hyperpop.”

As aggregates of seemingly unrelated objects and characteristics brought together under a particular vibe, memetic aesthetic categories can be understood as constellations. This concept is particularly useful when thinking about starter pack memes (explored further in Chapter 7), which allow viewers to conceptualize a given memetic aesthetic category by presenting a visual map of “its constellation of signifiers.”[47] Walter Benjamin was the first to liken ideas to constellations, writing that “ideas present themselves not in themselves but solely in a correlation of the elements of things in the concept—indeed, as the configuration of these elements” which “determines the way these elements belong to one another.”[48] Borrowing the concept from Benjamin, Theodor Adorno writes in Negative Dialectics:

The history locked in the object can only be delivered by knowledge mindful of the historical positional value of the object in its relation to other objects—by the actualization and concentration of something which is already known and is transformed by that knowledge. Cognition of the object in its constellation is cognition of the process stored in the object.[49]

In addition to its roots in the dialectical thought of the Frankfurt School, the constellation concept is also crucial to memetic aesthetics because of the ways in which it has informed thinking in genre theory and scene studies. In one of the key works of genre criticism, Karlyn Kohrs Campbell and Kathleen Hall Jamieson describe genres as “constellations of elements” which share an internal dynamic rather than sets of specific features.[50] Similarly, Georgina Born and Christopher Haworth describe how in addition to characteristic sonic properties, music genres can be understood as “a constellation of distinctive non-sonic mediations,” and Daniel Yacavone writes that films worlds can be “grouped together in constellations or galaxies…in the ever-expanding universe of cinematic history, with other ‘satellite’ worlds clustered around them.”[51] In the preface of Dissonant Identities, Barry Shank, one of the originators of scene studies, also refers to the Austin music scene as a “constellation of divergent interests and forces.”[52]

The concept of constellations is useful to thinking about memetic aesthetics because it allows for a materialist discourse on the thingification of various objects, phenomena and concepts as they are arranged into categories which are determined by their parts, yet always exceed them.[53] On their own, a pair of Birkenstock sandals or a can of Monster energy drink are merely ordinary commodities. Yet, combined with other objects within their constellations—hydroflask water bottles and Kånken backpacks, or Limp Bizkit albums and Tapout tee-shirts respectively—they acquire a sense of cultural coherence as signifiers of the VSCO girl or the Kyle. The concept of memetic aesthetics developed in this dissertation follows a similar logic, building its constellation out of a wide array of divergent objects, examples, and bodies of literature. Seeking to formally reproduce the emergent, relational and fragmentary nature of these aesthetics, this dissertation is broken down into four separate sections, each dealing with a particular problematic.

The dissertation is organized as follows: Part I offers a trajectory through aesthetic theory it terms the “Kant to cottagecore pipeline,” which seeks to make sense of how a field of philosophy dealing with sensation and taste from the mid-eighteenth century ended up sharing a name with an umbrella term for a vast expanse of niche digital “namecore” styles in the twenty-teens and twenties. Chapter 1, “Beware of the Pipeline,” offers a general outline of the pipeline, and its relationship to pipelines as a meme genre. The Pipeline spans Chapters 2, 3, and 4, (“Bad and Boujee,” “Our Brand Could Be Your Life,” and “All the Small Things”) which respectively focus on modern, postmodern and “digital” moments within this history. Chapter 2 begins by outlining the development of an aesthetic of artistic authenticity within bourgeois thought between the mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, and goes on to describe the transition into modernist avant-gardes into the early twentieth century. Chapter 3 describes the development of fashion, subculture and personal branding in the postwar period, highlighting the development of a new conception of subcultural authenticity, and its subsequent crisis between the 1980s and the 1990s. Last but not least, Chapter 4 begins by examining the boiling point of this crisis of authenticity around the turn of the millennium, and goes on to describe how this led to the rapid spread of memetic aesthetic categories in the post-authentic climate of the early to mid-2010s.

Part II: “Vibeology and Thingification” offers a rudimentary theory of the vibe concept, focusing specifically on how it can be used to read and write about emergent digital phenomena. Chapter 5, “‘What Vibe Do I Give Off?’” begins by discussing the centrality of vibes to both meme culture and theories of affect in the digital age. Chapter 6, “How (Not) to Read the Internet” advocates for an interpretive and relational theory of the vibe by tying the debates around sociality and signification in affect theory to a number of prominent critiques which surfaced during the “vibe shift” controversy of 2022. Chapter 7: “The Shape of ‘Things’ to Come” focuses on a Montreal-based meme page to examine the use of the starter pack meme in the formalization (thingification) of the fuccboi trope, as an illustration of how aesthetic categories become standardized through their memetic circulation. Chapter 8: “‘Is the Scene Still Alive?’” focuses on a broad structure of feeling within digital popular culture it terms post-hipster affect, citing it as an affective residue of the transition between subcultural and memetic aesthetics in the early twenty-teens.

Part III: “The Memetic Aestheticization of Politics” examines some of the political implications of memetic aesthetic categorization. Chapter 9: “Neon-Nazis” uses the failed attempt of the alt-right at appropriating vaporwave aesthetics into a new aesthetic called fashwave as a case study for how online extremists manipulate the affective signifiers which inform the synaesthetic feeling-worlds of particular genres or aesthetics in order to transform them into propaganda tools. Chapter 10: “Wide Awake Woke” examines the transformation of wokeness from a black radical practice of political consciousness-raising to a (mostly) white liberal memetic aesthetic category.

Last but not least, Part IV: “Two Case Studies and a Conclusion” brings this thesis to a close in a manner faithful to its name. Chapter 11 examines a pair of memetic aesthetic categories which offer insight into the current state of subculture and aesthetic judgement in the memetic aesthetic moment. The first half of it, “What Came First, the Chain or the Egg?” details the chain punk/egg punk meme as an example of the memetic aestheticization of subculture, while the second half, “Elevation, Don’t Go to My Head” focuses on the coinage of the elevated horror film genre as a case study for the problem of aesthetic judgment as it has been dealt with in various memetic aesthetic categories. The dissertation’s conclusion: “Meme Machine Go Brrrrr” closes with a summary of the main arguments made in this dissertation and a discussion of some potential directions for future work on memetic aesthetics.

---

[1] “aesthetics, n.1,” OED Online, September 2022, https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/293508.

[2] The term “cheugy” is Gen Z’s derogatory term for somewhat “basic” millennial women whose aesthetic dispositions are seen as behind the times. The term made headlines in 2021 when it was brought to mainstream attention in a New York Times article by Taylor Lorenz. See: Taylor Lorenz, “What Is ‘Cheugy’? You Know It When You See It.,” The New York Times, Apr. 29, 2021, https://web.archive.org/web/20210501155619/https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/29/style/cheugy.html.

[3] See: Lily Alexandre, “Millions of Dead Vibes: How Aesthetics Hurt Art,” YouTube, Feb. 24, 2023,

Rebecca Jennings, “Fashion Is Just TikTok Now,” Vox, Feb. 1, 2022, https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22911116/tiktok-couture-fashion-trends; Anna Mikhaylyants, “TikTok Core: The Fashion World of Today,” The Harvard Crimson, Mar. 9, 2023, https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/3/9/tiktok-aesthetics-microtrends-fast-fashion-style/; Olive Pometsey, “Namecore Is the Trend That Unifies All Trends,” The Face, Apr. 27, 2022, https://theface.com/culture/namecore-goblin-mode-night-luxe-twee-feral-girl-internet-trends-subcultures-slang-language-coining-names.

[4] Anthony Cross, “Instagram Filters for the Self: Autonomy and Internet ‘Aesthetics,’” Aesthetics for Birds, September 3, 2020, https://aestheticsforbirds.com/2020/09/03/autonomy-and-internet-aesthetics/#more-9335; emphasis added.

[5] This is an effort on Milner’s part to avoid throwing the baby out with the bathwater in rejecting the Darwinian determinism that has come to characterize Dawkins’ work. Ryan M. Milner, The World Made Meme: Public Conversations and Participatory Media (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2016), 3 & 9; Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

[6] Ibid., 40.

[7] The relationship between memes and memetic aesthetics is discussed in greater length in Chapter 7, which examines the centrality of the starter pack meme format to memetic aesthetics by focusing on the formalization of the fuccboi as a memetic aesthetic category on a Montreal-based Instagram meme page.

[8] Adam, “Karen,” Know Your Meme, 2019, https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/karen; KeeQue, “‘Speak to the Manager’ Haircut,” Know Your Meme, 2016, https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/speak-to-the-manager-haircut.

[9] Anthony Cross, “Instagram Filters for the Self: Autonomy and Internet ‘Aesthetics’”; emphasis added.

[10] Blogger Chicandcultural for example, defines aesthetics as “the visual identity of an online subculture,” and a Medium article on aesthetics refers to them as “social media subcultures.” Holly, “AESTHETICS: The Style of Internet Subcultures,” Chicandcultural, Jan. 18, 2022, https://www.chicandcultural.co.uk/post/aesthetics-the-style-of-internet-subcultures; Psychedelics Are Medicine, “10 of the Weirdest and Most Fascinating Internet Aesthetics,” Medium, Mar. 21, 2022, https://medium.com/counterarts/10-of-the-weirdest-and-most-fascinating-internet-aesthetics-d7efa4719f36.

[11] Alexa Gould-Kavet, The Demise of the Subcultural Identity: Towards a Postmodern Theory of The Hipster and Hipster Style, 2.

[12] Thomas Slee for example, draws a hierarchy of categories in the skateboarding world, with “lifer” placed at the top, and “poser” at the bottom. Thomas Slee, Skate For Life: An Analysis of the Skateboarding Subculture, Honors Thesis (University of South Florida, 2011.

[13] François Brunet, “Introduction: No Representation Without Circulation,” Circulation (Chicago: Terra Foundation for American Art, 2017), 10-39, 12; emphases added.

[14] Jay Owens, “Post Authenticity and the Ironic Truths of Meme Culture,” Post Memes: Seizing the Memes of Production, edited by Alfie Brown and Dan Bristow (Santa Barbara: Punctum Books, 2019), 77-113.

[15] David Muggleton, Inside Subculture: The Postmodern Meaning of Style (New York: Berg, 2000), 47.

[16] Mina Le, “American Girl unpacks the ‘French Girl’ Style,” YouTube, August 12, 2020,

[17] Anthony Cross, “Instagram Filters for the Self: Autonomy and Internet ‘Aesthetics.’”

[18] Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), 20-21.

[19] Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 17.

[20] Baudrillard: “The category of the aesthetic succeeds that of beauty (liquidating it) as the semiological order succeeds the symbolic order. Contemporary aesthetics, once the theory of the forms of beauty, has become a theory of a generalized compatibility of signs.” Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (London & New York: Verso, 2019), 198 & 201.

[21] Hal Foster, Design and Crime and Other Diatribes (London: Verso, 2002), 17 & 19.

[22] The term “brandscape” is coined by Toronto-based art digital collective, Tough Guy Mountain, whose new media approach to contemporary art and ethos of “focusing on the glories, trials, and absurdity of late capitalism” resonates nicely with the work of Baudrillard and Foster. http://toughguymountain.com/projects/Brandscape/.

[23] While the types of “guy” taxonomized on Sex and the City are typically men within New York’s dating pool, its use in this dissertation is gender neutral. Suspended Reason, “On the Vibe Shift, Pt. 1: Worldbuilding,” Suspended Reason, Nov. 18, 2021, https://suspendedreason.com/2021/11/18/on-party-reports-vibe-shift/.

[24] Hazard P. Spence, “Intuitionistic Type (of guy) Theory,” The Hazardous Times, Jul. 14, 2021, https://hazardoustimes.substack.com/p/tht-13?s=r.

[25] Katherine Connor Martin, “New words notes June 2017,” Oxford English Dictionary, Jun. 16, 2017, https://public.oed.com/blog/june-2017-update-new-words-notes/.

[26] Alexander Stern, “Is That Even a Thing?” The New York Times, April 16, 2016, https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/04/16/is-that-even-a-thing/; emphasis added.

[27] Ibid.

[28] As Jodi Dean writes, “communicative capitalism fragments thought into ever smaller bits, bits that can be distributed and sampled, even ingested and enjoyed, but that in the glut of multiple, circulating contributions tend to resist recombination into longer, more demanding theories.” Jodi Dean, Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), 2.

[29] See for example: Isabel Slone, “The Return of Indie Sleaze Style,” Harper’s Bazaar, Jan. 12, 2022, https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/features/a38746992/the-return-of-indie-sleaze/; Jessica Singer, “TikTok's That Girl Is Meant to Promote Wellness, but Some Say It Does the Opposite,” CBC News, Aug. 15, 2021, https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/that-girl-tiktok-trend-wellness-1.6139284.

[30] See Appendix I for a list of the memetic aesthetics archived on Aesthetics Wiki.

[31] Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 4.

[32] Ibid., 12.

[33] Adam, “Vibe Check,” Know Your Meme, 2019, https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/vibe-check.

[34] Adam, “Big Mood,” Know Your Meme, 2016, https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/big-mood.

[35] Robin James, “What Is a Vibe?” its her factory, Jan. 29, 2021, https://itsherfactory.substack.com/p/what-is-a-vibe.

[36] Kyle Chayka, “TikTok and the Vibes Revival,” The New Yorker, Apr. 26, 2021, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/tiktok-and-the-vibes-revival.

[37] Ibid.

[38] Peli Grietzer, Ambient Meaning: Mood, Vibe, System, PhD diss. (Harvard University, 2017), 134.

[39] Ibid., 99.

[40] Gernot Böhme, The Aesthetics of Atmospheres, edited by Jean-Paul Thibaud (London: Routledge, 2017), 19.

[41] Gernot Böhme, Critique of Aesthetic Capitalism (Berlin: Mimesis International, 2017).

[42] Gernot Böhme, The Aesthetics of Atmospheres, 22.

[43] Katie Freeman, “Your guide to internet aesthetics in 2021,” The Butler Collegian, Feb. 16, 2021, https://thebutlercollegian.com/2021/02/your-guide-to-internet-aesthetics-in-2021/.

[44] Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, 130.

[45] Luis-Manuel Garcia, “Feeling the Vibe: Sound, Vibration, and Affective Attunement in Electronic Dance Music Scenes,” Ethnomusicology Forum 29, no. 1 (2020): 21-39, 31.

[46] William Hawes, “The Rise of the Terminally Online: Digital Subjectivity and Simulation of the Social,” Medium, Jun. 27, 2021, https://wilhawes.medium.com/the-rise-of-the-terminally-online-digital-subjectivity-and-simulation-of-the-social-465545aa59eb.

[47] Suspended Reason, “On the Vibe Shift, Pt. 1: Worldbuilding.”

[48] Walter Benjamin, Origin of the German Trauerspiel (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019), 10.

[49] Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics (New York: Continuum International Publishing Group Inc., 2005), 163.

[50] Karlyn Kohrs Campbell and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, “Form and Genre in Rhetorical Criticism: An Introduction,” Form and Genre: Shaping Rhetorical Action, edited by Karlyn Kohrs Campbell and Kathleen Hall Jamieson (Falls Church: The Speech Communication Association, 1978), 9-32, 21; Eric S. Jenkins, “The Modes of Visual Rhetoric: Circulating Memes as Expressions,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 100, no. 4 (2014): 442-466, 454.

[51] Georgina Born and Christopher Haworth, “From Microsound to Vaporwave: Internet-Mediated Musics, Online Methods, and Genre,” Music & Letters 98, no. 4 (2018): 601-647, 641; Daniel Yacavone, “Towards a Theory of Film Worlds,” Film-Philosophy 12, no. 2 (September 2008): 83-108, 90.

[52] Barry Shank, Dissonant Identities: The Rock ’n’ Roll Scene in Austin, Texas (London: Wesleyan University Press, 1994), x.

[53] Suspended Reason, “On the Vibe Shift, Pt. 1: Worldbuilding.”