

Samwise
946 posts

@Samwise04726011
Gardener, friend, assistant ring-bearer




THOUGHTS ON THE ‘YOOKAY’ AESTHETIC - WHY MODERN BRITAIN IS SO AESTHETICALLY DISORIENTATING 🧵 Britain’s ongoing demographic transformation has in recent years made unavoidable in increasingly larger parts of the country what I and others have called the ‘Yookay Aesthetic’ - a historically novel aesthetic fusion between the aesthetics of disparate new migrant groups, the aesthetics of the worldview that facilitates their immigration into Britain (called variously ‘neoliberalism’, ‘late liberalism’, ‘immigrationisme’, ‘wokeness’ and ‘gay race communism’) and the aesthetics of the Historical Britain receiving the migrants. Its relatively recent aesthetic reification as a distinct new ‘thing’ has produced a fair few quite pronounced emotional reactions and I wanted to comment on why that is, the particular elements of the emerging ‘look’ that people find so provocative. Many people have remarked that one of the most defining qualities of the aesthetic is how jarring the effect it produces is, its incongruity. The incongruity is something like this - a Samurai in front of the Pyramids, an Aztec on the Great Wall of China, a Bedouin in the Sistine Chapel. The non sequitur effect is jolting, disorientating. Not because it is inherently impossible for distinct worlds to ever ‘cross over’ but because we have such established and normative standards for what we expect to constitute those worlds that the effect when they do meet is discombobulating. That discombobulating effect is of course not a fact about the world, about their inherent incompatibility - the value judgement that the encounter is incongruous or incompatible is an intersubjective one - but it doesn’t emotionally diminish that discombobulating intersubjective valuation. The effect is further compounded too if in response to an aesthetic regarded as unappealing or ugly. Doubly so if there is the dimension of dispossession, the felt feeling of displacement at familiar aesthestics of home and place transmogrified into something that appears conspicuously alien. The ‘Yookay’ in its birth pangs is a very tonally inconsistent phenomenon. Often a slap-dash blend of incongruous non-sequitur mishmash culture and aesthetic forms - the roadman in the balaclava, puffer jacket and thobe, the old Tudor building adorned with Urdu signage and draped in Palestine flags, Deliveroo riders congregated below a WWI war memorial playing Punjabi music aloud on speakerphone, large populations of Eritreans or Bolivians or Papuans appearing suddenly on the streets of Aberdeen or Aberystwyth etc. Early stage ‘Yookay’ represents a great, undifferentiated throwing together of the world in one place on top of an old and established British culture - whatever its final form it is still something that is very much in the process of being created and consolidated. You have some emerging staples already, the Roadman, the ‘Rubber Dinghy Rapids’ brand of Islam, MLE etc. but those new forms as a whole aren’t yet fully, properly settled. There is no historical weight to our encounters with ‘it’, we are unsure how we are supposed to respond to something so novel and incongruous by any normative standard which is still in so much flux. You are asked to engage with these new fusion forms as serious, authentic cultural expressions but you can’t help but meet those cultural expressions as jarring non-sequiturs. Their incredibly recent historical contingency is inescapable. Often too the new forms are not especially aesthetically ‘pleasing’ which only compounds the incongruity, how dispiriting people find them. “What the hell is going on here? What kind of weird mishmash is this?” [1/3]









The walk to Bradford City’s Valley Parade is some sight 😅🗑️ x.com/TomGtfc/status…

A bizarre take on John 15:12-13 - less Christian and more pagan tribal. We should start worrying when politicians become theologians, assume to speak for Jesus, and tell us in which order to love…

🚨 Keir Starmer's narrative is already falling apart! Journalists are pointing out that there were multiple opportunities to tell the public the truth and it would NOT have made the case fall apart. This is HUGE! Nobody believes his lies. Keir Starmer is in BIG trouble 👀

PICTURE THREAD TOUR OF LUTON, UK 🇬🇧 I recently visited Luton - a working class town near London infamously home to both the Tate Brothers and Tommy Robinson and one of the towns in Britain most transformed by immigration - to see what it looks like today 🧵