The Postmodern Scene: Excremental Culture and Hyper-Aesthetics

Overview

Arthur Kroker stages a trenchant cultural diagnosis that reframes postmodernity as an era of aestheticized waste and hyperstimulation. The book fuses cultural theory, media critique, and polemic to show how late capitalist technologies and mass media remap taste, desire, and political possibility. Kroker's language is deliberately provocative: "excremental culture" names both the detritus produced by mass consumption and the ways power defiles meaning, while "hyper-aesthetics" captures the intensity of mediated surfaces that replace depth.

Core Concepts

"Excremental culture" operates as a metaphor and analytic category for systems that expel meaning and generate refuse as value. Cultural artifacts, celebrity spectacle, and disposable imagery are read as by-products of economic and technological processes that prioritize circulation over substance. "Hyper-aesthetics" describes the saturation of everyday life by amplified style, simulation, and sensory overload, where image and effect trump moral or cognitive anchoring.

Technology and Mediation

Digital and electronic media are central actors in Kroker's account: technologies accelerate the dissolution of traditional forms and intensify commodification of experience. The screen, the network, and emergent communications practices reconfigure perceptions of the body, intimacy, and identity, collapsing private and public into flows that are easily packaged and marketed. Technology is not neutral background but an engine that manufactures new desires while erasing boundaries between consumer and consumed.

Aesthetics, Pleasure and Disgust

Kroker links aesthetic fascination and repulsion, arguing that contemporary art and popular culture often flirt with shock, abjection, and scandal to maintain attention in a saturated market. The aesthetics of disgust, pornography, violence, bodily excess, become tools for cultural producers seeking to break through anesthesia. This dynamic renders politics precarious, because transgressive imagery can be recuperated by market forces and transformed into yet another commodity.

Politics and Critique

The book situates aesthetic transformation within a larger political economy. Cultural malaise and the collapse of grand narratives are shown to coincide with neoliberal restructuring and the retreat of collective imaginaries. Resistance, for Kroker, requires more than nostalgic recuperation of lost certainties; it demands a critical engagement with how systems of power deploy aesthetics and technology to naturalize disposability and to foreclose alternative social visions.

Style and Rhetoric

Kroker's prose is combative, aphoristic, and often sardonic, blending scholarly reference with sensational metaphors. The tone aims to jolt: theoretical registers alternate with journalistic invective, and cultural analysis reads like a moral and intellectual wake-up call. That rhetorical volatility mirrors the subject matter, reflecting a culture that itself oscillates between excess and emptiness.

Examples and Illustrations

Cultural products across art, literature, film, and advertising are treated as evidence of a convergent shift toward spectacle and waste. Kroker examines how high art and mass culture increasingly share tactics, shock, pastiche, and surface virtuosity, while political discourses are rendered performative and image-driven. These readings are less taxonomic than impressionistic, designed to trace patterns rather than offer exhaustive histories.

Legacy and Relevance

The critique anticipates anxieties about digital capitalism, surveillance culture, and the commodification of attention that have only intensified. The book remains a useful provocation for readers interested in the entanglement of aesthetics and power, particularly where technology accelerates cultural turnover. Its durational value lies in insisting that aesthetics are not ornamental but constitutive of social life and political possibility, especially under systems that profit from perpetual renewal and discard.