I look like yes and you look like no.
– Nicki Minaj

In 2018, walking through Brooklyn, I saw a word written in large, sans serif, on the empty windows of a black building: GHOST. The letters were back-to-front, and the façade offered no information about the institution, as if advertising itself only to those already inside. Later I found out it was an exclusive gym, and puff pieces in several online magazines contained pictures of an interior unpeopled and luxuriously grim, as if they had tried to design a dungeon people would voluntarily enter. In this marriage of Heaven and Hell, users can move between fitness, business, and leisure without ever leaving. New entrants have biometric tests so that an optimized regime can be devised by the gym’s own algorithms. In the lobby, large letters have been stenciled on the wall: ‘OWN EVERYTHING’. This must be the unceasing prayer of its inhabitants, quietly chanting as they become the ripped, relaxed, networked CEO they want to see in the world. Combining elements of the Goth nightclub, S&M dungeon, and a tech start up, the gym exemplifies a dominant aesthetic of our time, in which the sensuous world is reduced to a sharp, black-and-white silhouette.

In the past decade, Minimalism has come to stand for aesthetics in general. The name originates in mid-twentieth-century art, but it has migrated to the more spacious domain of ‘lifestyle’, subsuming art, interiors, fashion, and typography. There are numerous Minimalisms – including, for example, the Japanese simplicity of Muji, the Soviet glamour of Brutalism, Scandi homeware. However, in the past few years, a new Minimalism has made an extreme and totalizing claim to the aesthetic. In 2018, some major fashion brands – including Burberry, Yves Saint Laurent, and Balenciaga – suddenly adopted new, black-and-white, sans serif logos. The typographer David Rudnick comments that this change represents ‘removing the shadow of the ego,’ typically that of their founder, ‘transforming them into global brands.’ In a polycentric market, these companies have reduced themselves to the bare essence of the brand. This seems inevitable, necessary, good business sense.

Today you see this aesthetic on tote bags, websites, coffee shops: everywhere, in fact, that aesthetic decisions are called for, and where they are also, in a sense, refused. Minimalism is an anti-aesthetic, reducing the sensuous part of aesthetics to the most rationalistic form. This new Minimalism assumes a vague but important relationship to the logics of work-life in our society. In adopting this aesthetic, the gentrifying institution imposes the logics of a global market on the city, advertising its role in producing a pasteurized, expensive neighborhood, all the while displacing the communities of people whose labour sustains it.

The Minimalist – conventionally an architect, artist, or poet – wears plain, often black clothes in simple and elegant cuts. But the aesthetic is no longer exclusively for a creative elite. It has been industrialized. As Kyle Chayka notes in his study, The Longing for Less (2020), Minimalism has spread to middle America: ‘There in Cincinnati were suburban commuters, high school students, and retirees alike discussing how they had embraced minimalism.’ The writings on this new phenomenon wonder in its paradoxes: it is monastic and modern, anti-materialist and consumerist, old and new. These diagnoses have not been able to account what in history makes it appear inevitable. Considering Minimalism in the long history of Western modernity suggests that its appeal is based on its association with what is most modern, and especially capitalism’s extraction of value from humans, a violence that passes in the daylight of everyday life. As such, its emergence could be told as a vampire story.

Minimalism and modernity

Minimalism appears as the aesthetic end-point of that set of practices known as modernity, and to understand it we must talk about how modernity itself emerged. One account that helps to explain this is Hans Blumenberg’s monumental (and almost unreadable) study, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (1966). The modern age, Blumenberg claims, involved the triumph over a belief system he calls Gnosticism. Gnosticism is the name for a loose grouping of sects in the Middle East and North Africa in the first century CE, whose religion combined elements of Hellenic thought, Jewish mysticism, Platonic philosophy, and Christian religion. Early Christian theologians, most importantly the second-century Church Father Irenaeus, codified Gnosticism when they rejected it as a heresy. For Christians, Gnosticism is a useful enemy because it holds that a lesser divinity, known as the Demiurge, created the world. The Demiurge is evil and its creation – the world – is evil and deceptive. By contrast, Christians believe that God is the creator of the world and present in it. For this reason, the foundation of Christianity involved what Blumenberg calls the ‘first overcoming’ of Gnosticism. But when they rejected Gnosticism as a heresy, he claims, Christians preserved it at the heart of their own religion.

Gnosticism resurfaced in the medieval period, when Christian theologians – most famously Pope Innocent III – wrote treatises preaching a contempt of the world to shore up the power of the church against the secular state. In the seventeenth century, the moderns reacted against this aspect of medieval religion, rescuing Christianity once again from the error of Gnosticism. Liberal theologians returned to Irenaeus, celebrating the spirit of love in Christianity, and scientists emphasized the fundamental goodness of the world as they sought authority to examine it anew. Blumenberg calls this ‘the second overcoming of Gnosticism’, and he argues that it was fundamental to the birth of the modern age. While eccentric and probably unprovable, Blumenberg’s rewriting of Christian myth illuminates the connection between a Gnostic suspicion and Minimalism’s claim to be the modern aesthetic par excellence.

Today, we can see the effects of the ‘overcoming’ of gloomy Gnosticism in the cheerful secularism of capitalist society, and even in its religion. In twenty-first-century America, according to the theologian Brad Gregory, ‘religion is conceived instrumentally, its central purpose being to make one “feel good and happy about oneself and one’s life.”’ When the moderns saved Christianity from Gnosticism, it seems, they threw the baby out with the bath water, unwittingly replacing the Christian love of God with a secular love of the world. Few people, however, would agree that modern society has been characterized by a love of the world, in the true sense of the word ‘love’. In fact, the modern attitude to the world is often closer to what Christians call concupiscence, or craving: we treat the world as temporary, disposable, consumable. Where Christians are taught to love the world that is God’s creation, we secular moderns have no such obligation, and often view it with a frankly Gnostic suspicion, as a place of inequality and suffering that might as well have been created by an evil Demiurge, where we just get our kicks while we can. The second overcoming of Gnosticism was no more successful than the first, and its survival in the modern age led to the emergence of Minimalism.

One place where we see the survival of Gnosticism is among those early Minimalists, the Puritans. Mostly educated members of the urban middle classes in northern Europe, they were radical Protestants who challenged the traditional authority of the church and state. The Puritans were also, in a sense, Gnostics at the frontiers of Western modernity: they settled colonies in North America and participated in the most advanced forms of capitalism. In their notoriously long sermons, their preachers declared their gratitude for God’s creation even as they emphasized the deep evils of the human world and the improbable luck of God’s gift of salvation to us unworthy sinners. The Puritans were drivers of progressive change, fighting for democratic reforms even as they used enslaved labourers to build their godly cities on the hill. They also pioneered a Minimalist style, opposing the flamboyant worldliness of the European courts with their own, flamboyant abstinence, wearing black to advertise their humility. In some senses, their other-worldly humility was only a disguise: Puritan merchants profited from the global trade in luxury commodities no less enthusiastically than their worldly enemies. After political Puritanism dissolved in New England in the early eighteenth century, it survived as a name for a hypocritical abstinence, simultaneously world-denying and world-exploiting. In other words, it became an aesthetic. 

For this reason, it’s no surprise to find the spectre of Puritanism resurfacing in twentieth-century Minimalist Art. Michael Fried’s essay, ‘Art and Objecthood’ (1967), seeks to expose the Puritanism at the roots of Minimalism. In the style of seventeenth-century Puritan polemics against the theatricality of court society, Fried accuses Minimalism of a theatrical dishonesty. Unlike his preferred Modernist artists, Fried says that the Minimalist artists betray a kind of pure presence, which he identifies in the essay’s memorable final sentence: ‘Presence is grace.’ In Fried’s analysis, Minimalists default from the grace of presence in their theatrical concern with the viewer’s experience. In a vitriolic response, the artist Robert Smithson accuses Fried of being a Puritan, a comparison that Fried himself courts by taking his epigraph from the great Puritan preacher Jonathan Edwards. But Fried’s point is that, just as the Puritans pretended to celebrate God’s creation even as they denounced the world in their theatrical sermons, so do the Minimalists betray the material world that they pretend to celebrate through the medium specificity of their artwork. In his influential essay, Fried does more important than merely accuse Minimalism of Puritans: he also exposes a Gnostic hatred of the world at its foundation.

In his attack on Minimalism, Fried echoes Max Weber’s famous argument that the Puritans were the drivers of modern capitalism. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1909), a study so influential and so contested by later historians it might as well be called myth, Weber describes Puritans as the champions of a sober attitude to money-making: he calls it an ‘inner-worldly asceticism and he says it was uniquely fruitful for capitalism. In doing so, Weber argues, the Puritans imposed an ‘iron cage’ of rationality that has become characteristic of modernity, extinguishing the ‘spontaneous enjoyment of everyday life’ and bringing about a ‘disenchantment of the world’. Likewise, the Minimalist artwork is ‘inexhaustible’, Fried says, ‘not because of any fullness … but because there is nothing there to exhaust.’ This suggests that Minimalism is successful because it denies what Christian philosophers used to call the plenum – the experienced and objective fullness of the cosmos – and accurately reflects the hollow and meaningless modern world.

Minimalism is often treated as a cipher for modernity in general, but we should be cautious about accepting this. Against Weber’s contested hypothesis, which claims that the Puritan ideology was uniquely modern, we might more safely suggest that Minimalism is an aesthetic highly compatible with contemporary capitalism, but by no means the only one. What makes Minimalism so compatible with modern capitalism? Perhaps because it subjects the body to an extreme reduction, not because the world is evil (as the Puritans thought) but as a mimicry of the extreme reductions of human life to the logics of the capitalist economy. Consider the way that the new Minimalism imprints a black ground with the white brand, using the infinite variety of blackness as a mere foil to capital’s signatures, as if repeating the symbolic logics of racial capitalism, translating everything into a mythic opposition of black and white.

This is not to dismiss Minimalism. It is, after all, just an aesthetic and doesn’t necessarily designate a politics (witness its use by left-wing, anti-racist and anti-gentrification organizations). To adopt the Minimalist aesthetic is not necessarily to pay homage to capitalism, but simply, perhaps, to claim some belonging in an extreme modernity that none of us chose. The most dangerous kind of Minimalist, however, is one who embraces it as a philosophy that reduces everything to a condition of being neither entirely alive nor dead.

VAMPIRE PHILOSOPHY

Vampire mythology flourished in the nineteenth century, becoming an important way to conceptualize the rapacious changes brought about by modernity, capitalism, and colonialism. Karl Marx brilliantly assimilates vampire mythology into his account of the dynamics of capitalism. In Capital: Volume One (1868), describing capital’s tendency to extract value up to the absolute limits of a worker’s physical capacity, he writes: ‘Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.’ Marx, like others before him, saw that the relation between vampire and victim illuminates something about exploitation: in particular, the way the exploited are kept alive by their exploiter, while they suck their life away.

Thirty years later, Bram Stoker literalized this metaphor in Dracula (1897), which became the canonical version of the vampire myth for the twentieth century. In Stoker’s novel, Count Dracula is looking to invest in London property, and so an English solicitor travels to Transylvania to facilitate the purchase. Greeting his guest at the threshold of his castle, Dracula appears ‘clad in black from head to foot.’ The 750-year-old Count explains his personal style as a state of perpetual mourning. Unable to die, he is tortured by the life that now eludes him. It is not only Dracula’s appetite for human blood that is vampiric, but also his real estate practices. A real estate portfolio will enable him to feed more securely on the blood of the young in England, a detail said to have been inspired by fears about the influx of Ashkenazi Jews (including my ancestors) from Eastern Europe in nineteenth-century Britain. The fears that Stoker’s novel exploits – and in a sense reproduces – were a distortion of anxieties caused by racial capitalism and its disruptions of social relations in European cities. Considered in this context, Stoker’s novel can be used as a diagnostic of the relationship between modernity and Minimalist philosophy.

Stoker’s vampires sustain themselves on the lives of others, but they remain proudly indifferent to what it is that keeps their victims alive. In the novel, an interview with a minor vampire yields precious insight into the vampire philosophy:

“Oh, it is a soul you are after now, is it?”

His madness foiled his reason, and a puzzled look spread over his face as, shaking his head with a decision which I had but seldom seen in him.

He said, “Oh, no, oh no! I want no souls. Life is all I want.” Here he brightened up. “I am pretty indifferent about it at present. Life is all right. I have all I want.”

This philosophy might sound appealing to the modern reader. The vampire is living his best life! In fact, it sounds like a parody of Nietzsche’s secular philosophy. But when the interviewer presses him further, the vampire reveals what lies underneath his existential cheer:

“So you don’t care about life and you don’t want souls. Why not?” I put my question quickly and somewhat sternly, on purpose to disconcert him.

The effort succeeded, for an instant he unconsciously relapsed into his old servile manner, bent low before me, and actually fawned upon me as he replied. 

“I don’t want any souls, indeed, indeed! I don’t. I couldn’t use them if I had them. They would be no manner of use to me. I couldn’t eat them or . . .”

The vampire is ignorant of what sustains life (for Stoker, it is the soul), and only interested in what can feed his lifeless existence. Capital is the same: it privileges life over anything else, but knows nothing of what sustains life. This paradox reflects the grand historical irony that, during the era of secularisation in Western modernity – in which the Christian afterlife has been increasingly rejected in favour of life on earth – life has often been experienced as empty and meaningless, and the earth has become increasingly uninhabitable. We could say of this philosophy of life what a Chinese philosopher once said of the Jesuit missionaries: ‘they have understood absolutely nothing about the meaning of the word “life.”’

Minimalism has become associated with a specifically urban modernity, and it tells us something about our cities. In the past fifty years, financialization has made many city centres unaffordable, corporate, and lifeless, drawing in the daily flux of workers who give the city its vitality, and then expelling them at the end of every working day into ever more remote suburbs. It is for this reason that gentrification is properly called vampiric, and it should come as little surprise that the popular fiction of the twenty-first century has taken a series of vampire novels (Twilight) and turned them into a series of novels about sado-masochistic sex (Fifty Shades of Grey). The businessman Christian Grey represents the property-owning, corporate class whose companies and investments drive gentrification, and Anastasia Steele, his student girlfriend, represents a class of rentiers who are exploited as well as, frequently, the foot-soldiers of gentrification, increasingly reliant for any luxuries on literal or sexual daddies. Gentrification, one of the major socio-economic physics of our cities, often clothes itself in the Minimalist aesthetic, and we visit on our own bodies those reductions that capital imposes on our lives more generally. Aesthetics is one way that we make sense of an existence that often feels inhumane and even monstrous. Minimalism as a state of mourning for a more fulfilling world.

Oblivious to the meaning of his mourning, the Minimalist carries on with a passionate intensity. His philosophy reduces all the world’s variousness to calculations. Like his predecessor, the utilitarian Jeremy Bentham, who developed an algorithm to calculate happiness, the Minimalist converts the sensory world into data so that his own pleasure can be predicted and maximized. Everything can be translated into a stark choice: 1 or 0, black or white, yes or no. There’s an app for that. In practice, however, this produces the mere idea of pleasure and not the actual feeling. The fullness of the world is eclipsed. Unaware of what has been sacrificed, the Minimalist promotes all that is most lifeless. Fetishizing his own tools, the Minimalist turns himself into a tool. He defers pleasure, and not only for himself. He would probably use the iron cage of rationality to do pull ups. We could say of the Minimalist what the sensuous poet John Keats said of his forefather, the Puritanical poet John Milton: ‘Life to him is death to me.’ Minimalism is the envy of life itself.

The vampire myth illuminates qualities of the new Minimalism that can’t be expressed in non-mythic terms, and it also reduces the modern aesthetic to one among many. It is a useful way of overcoming Minimalism’s claim to be the single representative aesthetic of modernity. In the final sentence of his great work of myth-analysis, Mythologies (1957), Roland Barthes imagines a world in which myth would be transparent, effecting a ‘reconciliation between man and reality.’ I don’t think that’s ever gonna happen, nor should we want it to. There is no single reality, and no single aesthetic paradigm that is representative of it. Minimalism’s claim to dominance has inspired a contrarian aesthetic that is its mirror image—Dionysian, excessive, indiscriminate—which responds with a manic ‘yes’ to Minimalism’s ‘no’. The Maximalist alternative, no less extreme than Minimalism, represents an unfortunate dilemma, obscuring the importance to aesthetics of moderation, balance, and care. Thankfully it is a false dilemma: our individual and social lives in all their variousness generate aesthetic possibilities that cannot be reduced to a choice between Minimalism and its zany negation. Only in its happy plurality can aesthetics guide us back to the fullness of the world in which our selved bodies swim.