When it comes to aesthetics, minimalism is being minimalized, brutalism is being left for the brutes, and that passion for erecting monuments to architectural ingenuity, over and against the needs and pleasures of human life, has been embarrassed—and all God’s people rejoice.
The concrete monoliths and endless open-concept spaces of yesteryear will resist erosion for a while yet. They’ll haunt us, these Ghosts of Building Past. But in small homes and unassuming workplaces, where people, rather than architects, pick between what pleases and what pains, a humane philosophy is working itself out: one that would build, finish, and decorate with a warm feeling for embellishment, detail, and a definite sense of place.
Sure, fewer have the joy of choosing a beautiful and useful surrounding, living, as they do, in a nation of rent. And of course, that savage, imbecile, Pinterest-AirBnB-Target aesthetic will continue to circulate like a pathogen; feverishly flipping, spreading gray-tinted laminate over every floor and fixing faux barnwood painted with the word “Faith” to every kitchen wall. Still, the Spirit moveth, and an ethic has risen out of a people oppressed by these follies; a snobbery, perhaps, but a snobbery in defense of humanity; a cultivated disgust and exasperation with habits like painting over beautiful woodwork, replacing wooden windows with vinyl, leaving all things clean, bare and white, without ornament beyond what can be hung from nail; every faucet and door knob the same matte black.
And alongside this conservative rush to protect the old from the devastations of the new comes the radical desire to build the new with the kind of features that ever made the old worth protecting. This, roughly speaking, describes the transition from conservatism to radicalism, wherever it comes. For restoration, of houses as of social orders, is never performed in a spirit of reenactment, as if, given a few more years, the same families that would restore a Victorian or a Craftsman could be caught restoring seventies-style bungalows, replete with packed-sawdust paneling and shag carpets. Restoration is always of something good that has been found within the merely old; something eternal within the antique. Even if we might call restoration work something “historical,” the word does not indicate a valueless reference to the past. A well-carved newel is a jewel even when it is new. An ugly facade isn’t any less ugly by virtue of being old.
All of this is good, because a poverty of embellishment is a pain for the poor. The bare, the clean, the white, the angular; the excessive love of negative space over and against all detail; these things, above all, expose us. And exposure, like a spotlight, only really suits the proud. No one but the celestially beautiful or the infernally made-up look pretty under white lights, which expose every pore and pimple of the human face as if it were squinting before the divine judgment. Our great-grandparents may have liked frilly lamps in every corner, but there was wisdom glowing under all that lace. A wrinkle lit by a warm light needs no excuse; a wrinkle under a ceiling of recessed LEDs needs Botox. The contemporary boom in cosmetic surgery may have some slight causal relation to our habit of living under surgical lights.
Minimalism in the human surrounding exposes our dirt, our mess, our inability to keep up. If it seems sterile, it is not simply because it is blank, but because it actively discourages procreation. Living within great tundras of white paint; eating within open-concepts in which every piece of furniture looks like an exhibit at the MoMA; playing on floors without variation, all evenly lit and only interrupted by some solid-colored rectangle designed by Swedes; all this is only really plausible for twenty-somethings paying to suppress their menstrual cycles or thirty-somethings paying their maids. When pattern becomes passé, it's not merely the medieval repetitions of tree, bird, flower, and fruit that are passed up—we also lose the ability to hide among them, to soften the spill, to take the edge out of the mess. There is a healthy human habit of beginning with a riot of color as to better absorb a riot of toddlers; to lay a foundation of visual “movement” so as to better embrace that violent circulation of goods and commodities that is the playroom or the rug beneath the dining room table. Covering a wall with beautiful art is a preemptive strike against a two-year old covering it with a crayon.
Minimalism is childless, not merely over and against the child as a whirlwind, but against the child as a lover of small details, little spaces; of nooks, corners, and closets in which to wedge himself; of the fittingness of thing to place and place to thing which defined his recent womb and is repeated in his predisposition to containers, cubbies, and special spots, all dismissed as so much “busy-ness” within the ideal minimalist plane.
Thankfully, such corporate aesthetics are always retrospectively applied. Minimalism eschews the details, but this is a cost-saving decision made by corporations before it is an aesthetic decision made by hipsters. First it is easy to paint everything off-white; then it is stylish. First it is cheap to build with concrete; then it is bold and brave. Brutalism is not an aesthetic, but an effort to justify crap materials and a loss of skill. Minimalism is not a human taste, it is an effort to obfuscate the fact that we can no longer create what humans have the taste for. First we outsourced all production to China, then we lost anyone with the knowledge of how to, say, carve a mantle-piece, and only then did we decide that ornate mantle pieces were fussy, and that really, what we wanted all along was a floating shelf protruding from an ocean of white. Like men in a famine touting the benefits of a diet, we first became culturally and spiritually incapable of building a gothic church, and developed a style of “modern architecture” to describe this inability as a carefully considered decision.
Detail-work is of most concern to people who live in the details—who touch the closet door-knobs every day; who notice the hinges; who clean the floors. So there is an obvious connection between a wider distribution of property and greater variety of style, just as there is between a lack of distribution and homogeneity. The kinds of things minimalism makes are kinds of things congenial to large-scale property ownership, to apartment complexes and housing developments made by large, centralized squirts of capital rather than the gradual plodding of people. The aesthetic of minimalism is really an anesthetic—a numbing of the pain we would otherwise feel over that lack of owned skill and property which actually determines our visual surroundings today.
And as it comes from a lack of productive property, so it pushes us toward a lack of productive property. A kitchen of gleaming white presumes that no one is growing food in the mud of the back garden. The clean look, with its negative spaces and its objects centered on shelves is only really congenial to a lack of canning, jarring, pickling. Messes should be cleaned, but a mess is also the fruit of work, and where the place rejects a mess, it often discourages the work that produces it, encouraging, instead, that kind of cooking and living that Ivan Illich describes as life under capitalism: the updating of purchased commodities.
All this is also an analogy for the transgender movement. To accuse the thing of a minimalist aesthetic is not to accuse any particular person, identifying in any which way, of surrounding themselves in such a house. I’m sure there is no inherently “queer” penchant for the brutalist and the bare any more than there is a cisgendered swoon for Morris and Ruskin. But in listening to the stories of people who have de-transitioned, there appears to be a strong analogy between their decision and the movement away from the austerity of the modern and towards the clutter of something quite different.
Sex tends toward the interruption of the clean, the honed, the stark, and the bare. It tends to produce, in blood, sweat, and screaming, a surprising new person; the child; messy by nature; an interruption of a plan; an unanticipatable otherness to which we conform. But what sexual difference does—when we allow it—is already prefigured in how sexual difference appears. Sex is an interruption of the body. Anyone who claims that the genital organs represent a harmoniously integrated part must labor to explain why there is no aesthetically pleasing way to display the genital organs as such. The Greeks, in their rage for beauty and order could find no other display for the penis but to shrink it into prepubescence, no artistic solution for the labia but erasure. What rare depictions of pubic hair existed used it for a fig leaf—most depictions imitated the result of a full body tweezing that was a real habit among the pagans (if the early Christian polemicists are to be believed).
The “non-binary” and “queer” identifications of today have obviously shifted from the medical and juridical sex changes of the past, where the male or female sex was the desired object, and the body was the rudely given material upon which one worked. Instead, the sex change has become a change of mind; a psychological identification of oneself as this or that reality asserted over and against an identification made by others—no surgery required. Even when these identifications involve some tentative expression of the male or female sex, they tend towards the negation of sex as an interruption rather than a sculpting of something new.
Aerosmith could scream “dude looks like a lady” in the eighties. It’s too bawdy of a song to describe the clean, thin, androgynous, “gender expressions” that pose for the iPhone today. The fashion is for minimalism. Drag can be tolerated from an older generation and the theater kids as a relic useful for angering conservatives and keeping bars profitable, but it is otherwise too bright for the serious psychological work of the agender, graysexual, autosexual, postgender, and otherwise non-binary duties of our late empire. (Indeed, it is hard to imagine how anyone could have fun in drag, now that it is a sanctified ritual war against the presumptions of heteronormativity, or whatever). Negation is the national mood; one has neither a male nor a female haircut but some other thing; one binds the breasts, suppresses the hormones, and flattens the curve, lest any protrusion of flesh speak of the sex which dare not say its name. In fact, “trying to look like the other sex” is a little suspicious, as it suggests that the other sex has any substance outside of its contingent, constructed appearance—against all the glorious gains of queer theory. If all is power and all is equal, then one can only take on the prototypical look of the other sex, not to embody it, but to negate the interruption of that bodily sex against which one identifies. One does not wear a dress to look like a girl—one wears a dress to not look like a boy.
The sexual organs prefigure the children they might produce—surprising interruptions, demanding a response: “and what do I do with you?” Likewise, the activity of sex, which needs no description here, is only attainable through surprise. Augustine bemoans this, not only that arousal overtakes the rational faculty, but that reason cannot command it: “even those who delight in this pleasure are not moved to it at their own will, whether they confine themselves to lawful or transgress to unlawful pleasures; but sometimes this lust importunes them in spite of themselves, and sometimes fails them when they desire to feel it, so that though lust rages in the mind, it stirs not in the body.”
This is the reason for our shame, that “the organs of generation are so subjected to the rule of lust, that they have no motion but what it communicates.” And while it is not the place, here, to critique Augustine’s view, it seems that this same fact could be said with a more cheery interpretation. For the whole comedy of arousal seems to be its abject dependence on the other, its being stirred up from without, so much so that even though one “plans” in this regard, one is still planning to be surprised—planning for the unplanned. Sex is a paradox of hope, in which the lover can only hope that the beloved will draw from his flesh the the response needed to love her. However rich, strong, and capable of enacting their sovereign will, people arrive at the doorstep of sexual arousal as beggars, hoping for a gift. In this sense, arousal is like so many humbling experiences—like sleep, for instance, which one can never quite decide to do, but only hope to receive. It summarizes and even icons the human condition as revealed in the Gospels: we are those animals who long for a grace we cannot give ourselves.
Indeed, pornography and masturbation seem to be sins of minimalism, rather than extravagance. They are a literal taking of ourselves by the hand; an attempt to foreclose surprise by a more rationally applied control of the other who surprises us; reducing them to an available commodity and so solving the Augustinian problem, having sexual arousal “at our own will.” That this is all illusion is evident: even the reduction of the other to so many pixels produces its own humbling dependence—though now it is not the person, but the commodity one needs, made available by the wealthy at the cost of one’s soul.
All of this is a negation of the interruption of sex, a taming of its transcendent orientation towards otherness and an effort to wrestle the thing into the regions of serene, rational, and technological control. It is silly to imagine our current gender blues as something other than the generalized liberal effort to contracept, sterilize, implant, and otherwise override the body in order to deny it as an unchosen nature that makes claims on us. It is likewise silly to imagine that this rationalizing rage, indulged by conservatives and liberals alike, is something more than a battle within liberalism’s larger war on the land, on tradition, and ultimately on the Catholic Church as the sign and sacrament of the fundamental givenness of reality.
In one of the many controversies swirling around women’s sports, a transgender advocate boldly jumped over the question of what makes one a woman by pointing to her identification card: is this not evidence enough? And while it may be tempting to mock the move, it is more consistent than most. State authority is a cleaner provider of sexual difference than the mysterious unity of the body and the body of the other who am I not and yet I am for. Like those blank swashes of aesthetic minimalism, our non-binary moment imposes a regime of sterility that must be kept up. The clean look requires more cleaning. There is no one more exposed in their sex as the one at war with it. The “detrans” movement is at pains to show this: that what is often sold as a “solution” to the problem of not belonging to the sex which one did not choose is, in fact, the exchange of a given problem for a purchased one; of the given wound of sex for the purchased wound of its suppression.