The category of the alternative, once a vector of resistance, has nevertheless been subsumed in contemporary mass culture as a harmonized marketing technique. Similar to the machine-learning algorithms punctuating our twenty-first century hyper-globalized landscape, the neoliberal capitalist product, too, re-formats and re-generates pre-existing material to equip itself with the facets it previously lacked. It can now be said that the new alternative object is but only a self-reflexive, weaponized defence mechanism devoted to preserving the ever-decaying body of late-stage capitalism.
This essay attempts to define anti-aesthetic imperialism as the outcome of aesthetic regression under neoliberal capitalism. Specifically, it suggests how anti-aesthetic imperialism demarcates a contemporary form of deception: In disguise, the new product provides consumers with what they already have. This occurs when neoliberalism subsumes the alternative, the expression of counter-hegemony, into the realm of production, or rather, prosumerism. To this end, the essay explores how anti-aesthetic imperialism is neoliberalism’s “instrument of power and self-mastery” (Adorno and Horkheimer 28). In doing so, anti-aesthetic imperialism celebrates its ability to accommodate the negative aspects of life under capitalism, reducing the total weight of capital to a mere aesthetic category.
Anti-aesthetic imperialism, however, is not an end in itself. The hyper-commodification of difference does not negate our interpretations of alternative media nor render their expressions meaningless. Instead, alternative objects retain their meanings insofar as audiences engage with their inconspicuous superficial expressions. This paper, thus, argues that our current hyper-fixated demand for new objects, or newness more generally, encourages neoliberal mass culture to be "an organized mania for connecting everything with everything else" (Adorno 83) and, in the process, seeks to answer the question: Is Post-cinema a way out of anti-aesthetic imperialism?