The Becoming of Possibility: 01/13/26

Tuesday, 13 January 2026

Culture: The Aesthetics of Coordination: 5 Subversion Through Style, Not Message

When people want culture to change, they usually reach for messages. They argue, explain, persuade, critique. They assume that if the right content is delivered clearly enough, coordination will follow.

Relationally, this misreads how culture actually shifts.

Cultural subversion rarely succeeds by changing what is said. It succeeds by changing how things can be said, felt, and taken up. In short: style reconfigures fields; messages mostly circulate within them.

Why Messages Are Easily Neutralised

Messages presuppose an existing field of intelligibility. They rely on shared norms about:

what counts as serious
what is worth attention
who is authorised to speak

When a message challenges the dominant coordination, the field responds by filtering it:

as naïve
as shrill
as humourless
as “not quite right”

The message may be heard, but it is not taken up. It fails not because it is wrong, but because it arrives in a style the field cannot accommodate.

Style as Field Configuration

Style is not decoration. It is a way of organising attention and expectation:

pacing determines what feels urgent
tone determines what feels permissible
form determines what can be noticed at all

When style shifts, the field shifts with it. New distinctions become visible. Old reactions lose their grip.

This is why cultural change often looks superficial at first. The content may seem familiar, but the conditions of uptake have changed.

Why Subversion Is Recognised Late

Genuinely subversive styles are rarely recognised as such when they first appear. They are dismissed as:

unserious
tasteless
inappropriate
“not really about anything”

Only later, once the field has reconfigured, do they appear meaningful or influential. By then, the work has already been done.

This delay is structural. Style operates before interpretation.

The Mistake of Counter-Messaging

Counter-messaging often reinforces the coordination it opposes because it:

adopts the dominant pacing
accepts the dominant seriousness
speaks in recognisable argumentative forms

Even radical content can be absorbed when delivered in familiar styles. The field remains intact.

Subversion that truly matters does not argue for change. It changes what argument feels like.

Style and Risk

Working through style is risky because:

uptake is unpredictable
intention does not guarantee effect
misalignment can lead to marginalisation

But this risk is also its strength. Style cannot be fully controlled or instrumentalised. Once reduced to strategy, it loses its force.

Subversion through style is not a tactic; it is an exposure to the field.

Responsibility Revisited

This returns us to relational responsibility. To intervene stylistically is to attend carefully to:

what the field can tolerate
where it is brittle
how much disruption can be absorbed without collapse

The aim is not to shock, but to open space — to make new forms of coordination possible without demanding immediate agreement.

Closing

Messages persuade within existing worlds. Styles help make new worlds intelligible.

This is why cultural shifts rarely announce themselves. They arrive sideways, through rhythm, tone, and form, long before anyone can say what has changed.

In the final post of this series, we will consider art directly — not as expression or messaging, but as intelligibility reconfiguration itself.

Culture: The Aesthetics of Coordination: 4 Taste, Belonging, and Invisible Exclusion

Taste is usually treated as harmless: a matter of preference, personality, or lifestyle. We say things like “It’s just not my thing” as though nothing of consequence were being expressed.

Relationally, this is a misrecognition.

Taste is not merely personal. It is a coordination mechanism — one of the most efficient and least visible forms of normativity in cultural life.

Taste as Silent Normativity

Unlike explicit rules, taste does not instruct or prohibit. It signals. Through shared aesthetic preferences, participants learn:

what belongs
what is excessive
what feels awkward or out of place

No one needs to explain these distinctions. They are enacted through recognition and discomfort.

This is why taste feels apolitical. It does not argue; it filters.

Belonging Without Admission

Taste governs belonging without ever naming criteria. One does not apply or qualify; one either “gets it” or does not.

This produces a powerful effect:

inclusion appears natural
exclusion appears accidental
boundaries feel unchosen and therefore unchallengeable

Because no rule is stated, no rule can be contested.

The Power of “Just Not My Thing”

The phrase “It’s just not my thing” is doing far more work than it seems. It simultaneously:

denies judgement
withdraws engagement
stabilises distinction

It presents exclusion as personal preference while performing structural sorting.

No justification is required. No responsibility is acknowledged.

Taste and Cultural Reproduction

Taste is one of the primary mechanisms through which culture reproduces itself:

styles circulate among those already aligned
unfamiliar forms are dismissed as awkward or embarrassing
innovation is tolerated only when it can be absorbed without disrupting coordination

This is why many cultural fields appear open while remaining structurally closed.

Why Taste Is So Resistant to Critique

Critiquing taste feels impolite, intrusive, or authoritarian because taste is framed as private. But this framing protects its power.

Unlike ideology:

taste does not claim truth
it does not demand agreement
it does not present itself as universal

And yet it governs who is heard, who is taken seriously, and who must adapt.

Reopening the Field

Subverting taste-based exclusion does not mean demanding different preferences. It means making the mechanism visible.

This can involve:

slowing down dismissal
staying with discomfort
noticing which forms are consistently filtered out
experimenting with adjacency rather than confrontation

These are small moves, but they widen the field of intelligibility.

Closing

Taste feels innocent because it hides its normativity behind preference. But culturally, taste is one of the most powerful ways coordination is stabilised without coercion.

Belonging is rarely enforced by rules. It is more often felt into existence — and felt out of reach.

In the next post, we turn to how cultural change actually occurs when it does occur — not through better messages, but through style.

Culture: The Aesthetics of Coordination: 3 Narrative as a Technology of Stability

Narrative is often celebrated as the primary vehicle of meaning: the way humans make sense of experience, transmit values, and imagine alternatives. We are told that better stories can change the world.

Relationally, this is only half true.

Narrative does not merely make sense of experience. It stabilises coordination by smoothing contingency, compressing time, and reducing revisability. Its power lies not in what it says, but in how it organises intelligibility.

Narrative as Temporal Compression

At its core, narrative transforms uncertainty into sequence:

events are ordered
causes are clarified
outcomes are rendered intelligible

This temporal compression is comforting. It turns open-ended processes into trajectories and accidents into inevitabilities.

But this comfort has a cost: possibility is narrowed. What might have been otherwise becomes what “had to happen”.

Heroes, Villains, and Moral Alignment

Narratives stabilise coordination by distributing roles:

heroes anchor admiration
villains anchor blame
victims anchor sympathy

These roles are not merely representational. They are coordination devices. They tell us:

who to side with
how to feel
when judgement is complete

Once roles are fixed, revisability declines. New information threatens not just beliefs, but the coherence of the story itself.

The Illusion of Closure

Narratives promise closure: an ending that resolves tension and restores order. Closure feels like understanding.

Yet closure often functions as premature stabilisation. It discourages further inquiry by presenting the situation as settled, finished, or morally resolved.

This is why narrative-heavy discourse often resists revision. To reopen the question feels like undoing meaning itself.

Why “Better Stories” Often Fail

Calls for better or more inclusive stories assume that narrative is inherently liberatory. But narrative form itself tends toward stabilisation:

it selects
it excludes
it fixes relations

Even progressive narratives can become rigid, policing how one is allowed to speak, feel, or belong.

The problem is not the politics of the story, but the structural work narrative performs.

Narrative and Power

Narratives are especially effective tools of power because they:

operate affectively
feel natural and humane
conceal their stabilising function

Institutions, movements, and media rely on narrative not simply to persuade, but to freeze coordination long enough to act.

This is why counter-narratives so often reproduce the same exclusions they seek to undo.

Living Without Narrative Closure

None of this implies that narrative should be abandoned. Rather, it must be handled carefully.

Relationally responsible use of narrative:

resists totalising arcs
leaves room for interruption
foregrounds contingency rather than inevitability
treats closure as provisional

Such narratives feel unsettling because they refuse to do narrative’s usual stabilising work.

Closing

Narrative is not neutral. It is a technology that stabilises coordination by organising time, roles, and outcomes. Its power lies in making uncertainty feel resolved.

To work relationally is to recognise when narrative is closing possibility — and to resist the urge to let coherence stand in for truth.

In the next post, we turn from stories to something even quieter and more powerful: taste — and how belonging and exclusion operate without ever being named.

Culture: The Aesthetics of Coordination: 2 Aesthetic Alignment Before Ideology

Political analysis often assumes that people align because they are persuaded: by arguments, doctrines, or beliefs. Ideology, on this view, comes first; alignment follows.

Relationally, the order is reversed.

People align aesthetically long before they align ideologically. By the time beliefs are articulated, coordination has already occurred.

Alignment Without Agreement

Aesthetic alignment does not require agreement, conviction, or even understanding. It operates through:

tone
rhythm
pacing
style
affect

People can find themselves “on the same side” without sharing reasons. They move together, feel together, react together — and only later explain why.

This is why ideological disagreement often fails to disrupt coordination. The alignment is happening elsewhere.

Vibe as a Coordination Technology

What is often dismissed as “vibe” is, in fact, a powerful coordination technology. Vibe does not persuade; it orients.

Through repeated exposure, aesthetic forms train:

what feels serious versus ridiculous
what feels urgent versus boring
what feels authentic versus artificial

These distinctions operate beneath explicit judgement. They determine what can be taken seriously at all.

By the time an argument is heard, its fate has already been shaped by the aesthetic field in which it appears.

Why Ideology Feels Secondary

Ideologies often arrive as justifications for alignments that are already in place. This is why people can hold contradictory beliefs without experiencing incoherence: coherence is being supplied aesthetically.

From within the system:

the ideology feels obvious
alternatives feel strained or absurd
dissent feels not merely wrong, but “off”

This is not stupidity or bad faith. It is aesthetic coordination doing its work.

The Speed of Aesthetic Capture

Aesthetic alignment spreads faster than ideology because it demands less:

no explicit assent
no cognitive commitment
no articulation

A person can be aesthetically aligned simply by:

enjoying a tone
sharing a rhythm
recognising a style

This is why political movements, authoritarian or otherwise, often win culturally before they win electorally or institutionally.

Fear, Pleasure, and Relief

Aesthetic alignment is affective, not neutral. It carries:

pleasure (the relief of belonging)
fear (the discomfort of misalignment)
ease (the effortlessness of recognition)

These affects stabilise coordination far more reliably than belief. One can abandon an argument; it is much harder to abandon a way of feeling at home.

Why Counter-Ideology Rarely Works

Attempts to oppose harmful systems through better arguments often fail because they misdiagnose the problem. The issue is not incorrect belief but prior aesthetic alignment.

Counter-ideology that ignores aesthetic coordination:

speaks into a hostile affective field
feels alien or condescending
is dismissed before it is understood

The failure is not rhetorical; it is structural.

Reframing Cultural Intervention

If alignment precedes ideology, then cultural intervention must attend to form before content:

How does this feel?
What rhythms does it establish?
What kinds of participation does it make easy or hard?

Shifts in style, tone, and pacing can reconfigure coordination without requiring immediate agreement.

This is why cultural change often looks superficial — until it suddenly isn’t.

Closing

Aesthetic alignment is the quiet groundwork of politics. It determines who can hear whom, what counts as plausible, and which futures feel imaginable.

Ideology rides on top of this alignment; it does not create it.

In the next post, we will examine one of the most powerful aesthetic stabilisers of all: narrative — and why storytelling so often functions as a technology of stability rather than liberation.