Speculative Aesthetics: Resisting White Norms

Speculative aesthetics is a future-oriented interpretation of how we will experience aesthetic philosophy, art, and design. When we talk about speculative aesthetics, we are talking about possibility based on a priori and a posteriori knowledge of aesthetics and the speculative. In other words, to speculate aesthetics—whether it be contemporary art and design, or literature, music, and graffiti—is to self-reflexively consult the methods by which one creates, and the results of that speculation. This meditation, as I call it, on how we know aesthetics and the speculative yields the creation of an imagined future from the vantage point of the now and the new of the contemporary.

In the introduction to Speculative Aesthetics (2014), Robin Mackay, Luke Pendrell, and James Trafford posit that to conceptualize aesthetics is to "[renegotiate] its relation to the affective," a renegotiation that is often taken up as an object-oriented and anti-anthropocentric project under the rubric of speculative realism.¹ However, these writers caution such an approach, raising the issue of what "[speculative realism] might bring to this negotiation, in so far as its primary selling point (according to popularly diffused credo) is its dismissal of the mediating role of human experience."² We can expand this "selling point" to speculative aesthetics more broadly. There is a conundrum, however, in conceptualizing speculative aesthetics with and without the mediating role of the human experience. Objectivity and subjectivity seem almost inextricable from one another when we conceptualize speculative aesthetics, i.e., an aesthetic that doesn't exist in the now and new of the contemporary but only in relation to them. Speculative aesthetics only exists in some absolutist becoming outside and within space and time. Yet the DNA of speculative aesthetics is, no doubt, bound up in the now and the new of the contemporary.

It is important to theorize the relationship between the now and the new of the contemporary in order to understand speculative aesthetics. The relationship between the now and new of the contemporary can be outlined as a struggle to be different from and similar to the "norm." Let's assume that the norm is practical laws governing and effecting action to believe and feel, rather than conceptual abstractions that describe, explain, and express.³ The norm is essentially speculative because as much as it determines how things are now, it can also suggest how things ought to be and how these ought-to-be things are, in some cases, new. One significant correlation between the now and the new of the contemporary is that although they are informed, no doubt, by past norms, they do not signify or point to the past. The now and the new are present- and future-oriented, i.e., they too are speculative and can create new norms.

The now and the new of the contemporary can be immersed in their historical, political, cultural, social moment and how artists and critics respond to these moments. When, in April 2017, Kendrick Lamar released his album DAMN, Lamar was speaking back to norms of the contemporary: police brutality in the Black community, racial capitalism, and representations of these issues in the media. DAMN contributes to the tradition of social and political activism in hip hop music that dates to the 1980s. Connected to the momentum of tradition, Lamar's DAMN elucidates the now and new of the contemporary through song titles like "D.N.A.," "Humble," and "Loyalty," which respectively critique and reimagine normalized beauty standards, Black history, and solidarity. Addressing the influence and impact of Lamar's album, Christopher R. Weingarten writes in Rolling Stone that Lamar's album "is a brilliant combination of the timeless and the modern, the old school and the next-level. The most gifted rapper of a generation stomps into the Nineties and continues to blaze a trail forward."⁴ Weingarten's review speaks to a continuum of influence that spans through time: the past, the now, to the "new" and the future, "timeless[ness]" and the continuation "to blaze a trail forward."

One of the most well-trod norms blazed anew was Lamar's...