SUICIDE AESTHETICS by Jaana-Kristiina Alakoski
SUICIDE AESTHETICS by Jaana-Kristiina Alakoski
Welcome to my essay about suicide aesthetics.
Within the walls of this essay we are going to do many things. To name some; we are going to plunge into the thickets of cream, wade through the meadow of mud, explore the prelude to and meditate on our own passing, through and by the hands of suicide aesthetics. Welcome, again, to the apocalyptic foretellings or the crumbling house of SUICIDE AESTHETICS.
We arrived at this particular vibe after many inventions and materials, after new fabrication processes and wars which made mass production and luxury consumption a new normal. We arrived here after greed, love, evolution, death, psychopathy, joy and fun. Today we are going to discover how the collective consciousness of the murderous political machine; “democracy”, finds its climactic release in suicide aesthetics. In order to find our grasp of these aesthetics completely, we are going to have to touch, squeeze, motorboat, nozzle, gobble and purge for repeat, dear signifiers such as:
Water, hearts, deer, water drops, bed sheets, cherries, bows, eyes, glitter, pink, bunnies, butts, guns, gags, whips, pink cheeks, lips, lip gloss, hair, sex dolls, trash, dust, knives, Christmas presents, plastic foil, tin foil, flowers, roses, pearls, cream, blue, panties, dollar signs, butt holes, pigs, money (coins), money (notes), botox, silver, mansions, high heels, muscles, energy drink, unicorns, beaches, hentai, diamonds or any other gem stone, palm trees, dolphins, cars, blood, cigarettes, doves, meadows, yachts, swimming pools, straight men choking their lovers, femmes pairing up with masc enbies, girls doing nude self-portraits, tops fucking bottoms, edible gold leaf salad, diamond teeth, white teeth, horse powers and true, the truest, crime.
As you feel: suicide aesthetics binge. We binge suicide aesthetics. The binge feeds culture what it needs to hurt itself, using only signifiers from its own juices.
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With suicide aesthetics, we enjoy killing ourselves. Through them we poison ourselves. Every image and every glossy surface is a self-inserted nasogastric tube hindering any and all ingestion of actual food, smell and the following – would be – emotional orientation. Suicide aesthetics surpass the heart and fill our bowls with images, images, images. Moving images, 3D images, AR, VR and eventually dreams and hallucinations. Suicide aesthetics are also a foot standing on your head, of your own leg because you always fuckin’ like suicide aesthetics.
I love suicide aesthetics.
Death by suicide aesthetics comes not as actual death but as putrefaction. In this putrefaction you are the living dead, you are in the fumes rising from the pile of rotten meat, the fruit, the candy, the stainless steel and the gold plated heart earrings you have become. You smell only yourself in a perfect closed circuit between your face and the internet. Yelping from the pressure of suicide aesthetics, we run. You run, breathlessly up and down the funicular, back and forth between the car dealer podium and the girl next to it. Round and round between all the world’s airports into the arms of suicide aesthetics.
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Suicide aesthetics are insanely cool.
They are so cool that I can’t.stop.yet.
Suicide aesthetics are insanely cool sunglasses, on your nose, whose price tag says: X-RAY VISION. In reality they are too dark for you to see anything. The allure of these aesthetics can only be compared to the glow from behind the uterine wall. Or, the halo of Father Christmas who pas de bourrées and demands that you lick up the fake snow and all the presents. Suicide aesthetics are sometimes art when it becomes a pile of waste planted for critical scrutiny, containing hope for a new dawn.
There are conscious suicide aesthetics and there are insidious suicide aesthetics, the latter often manifesting subconsciously. Intrinsically morally ambiguous, suicide aesthetics are always bad and always very fun. More than anything, they are the only thing which can kill suicide aesthetics. Sometimes this killing happens unintentionally when inevitably the house caves in on itself, but it can also happen as scheduled euthanasia.
You cannot black out suicide aesthetics. They are all of us and we always want more, whilst knowing that boobs can’t get bigger and eyes cannot get glitterier, waists can only be so thin and butts only so big. Exclusivity is only exclusive if the excluded are looking and anyone who is looking can turn signifiers to their own wind. Image wise, the possibility of enthralling contrast is finite. Thus we need to ask: what happens AFTER suicide aesthetics?
You have covered your whole body in red pearls/scales, you mastered the wet hair look, you showed up to the party in a worm costume, looking at your painting is like licking the door handle of a Bentley. You tell us/we tell you, you wanna be fucked by “daddy”, and “daddy” wants to fuck his daughter. How does one top suicide aesthetics? Concomitantly we ask you and ourselves why am I asking how to top suicide aesthetics?
We can also query about the limit of a company’s growth. Is its ultimate stage of existence its singular dominance, its world monopoly, dictatorship, a solo oligarchy which dies from the lack of a market? We repeat: suicide aesthetics are the prelude to their own death. More than anything, suicide aesthetics is the only thing which can kill suicide aesthetics.
The term is indebted to many previous thinkers and theories. In a later version of this essay I will need to outline them all, but here comes a shortlist merely for reference:
The essay In Free Fall by Hito Steyerl, cute accelerationism by Amy Ireland and Maya B. Kronic, Antonio Gramsci’s famous hegemony developed by Stuart Hall, a particular vicious aesthetic circle as outlined by Ariella Azoulay in The Civil Contract of Photography, the term necropolitics as coined by Achille Mbembe and cruel optimism as coined by Lauren Berlant. About the last Berlant says:
“Cruel optimism” names a relation of attachment to compromised conditions of possibility. What is cruel about these attachments, and not merely inconvenient or tragic, is that the subjects who have x in their lives might not well endure the loss of their object or scene of desire, even though its presence threatens their well-being, because whatever the content of the attachment, the continuity of the form of it provides something of the continuity of the subject’s sense of what it means to keep on living on and to look forward to being in the world.1
When buying, creating, building, curating, compiling, designing, drawing, filming, consuming suicide aesthetics, some of the selves who are dying are like magpies compiling treasures that can grow into mountains of rubbish and form deluded echo chambers thanks to the western colonial, necropolitical project. Allow me to paraphrase a meme from meme school which turned out to be a quote not exactly derived from but often attributed to Aimé Cesaire and his essay Discourse on Colonialism: Fascism is what white people call capitalism when they start getting treated like the colonised.
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The opposite to suicide aesthetics is not bringing-back-to-life aesthetics. I don’t know yet what the inversion of the binge/purge/repeat cycle would be. It could be helping out or rewilding the planet. Whether this is true will be discovered in my further writings about suicide aesthetics.
Reading by Jaana-Kristiina Alakoski filmed by RacerContent at Ut&Om.
Lauren Berlant, “Cruel Optimism” d i f f e r e n c e s : A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 17. No. 4 (December 2006): 20-36 https://read.dukeupress.edu/differences/article-pdf/17/3/20/405405/diff17-3_03Berlant.pdf