The End of Subjective Universality and the Privatization of Aesthetic Taste

In 2026, any take that uncritically treats “pop” as the low or mass culture term in a high/low or art/craft binary is a red herring designed to divert attention away from the fact that the political ontology that makes that aesthetic binary possible is obsolete. Structured by political and fiscal privatization, algorithmic personalization, and the like, present reality in so-called Western liberal democracies no longer reflects the enlightenment public/private binary that has long shaped Western modernity.

As I have written about elsewhere, the traditional art/craft binary is rooted in the classically liberal distinction between public and private: one is the realm of freedom and universality, the other is the realm of particularity and dependence.

The autonomy that Enlightenment aesthetics grants art is analogous to and philosophically intersects with the autonomy of the liberal subject. Cleaving the public sphere from the private in parallel to the way Kant cleaves fine art from craft, classical liberalism holds that autonomy exists in the civil sphere, whereas the private sphere is the realm of material need and dependence. Just as art’s autonomy comes from its purported ontological separation from everyday life, the liberal subject’s autonomy exists outside the sphere of life’s reproduction. 

It’s a simple analogy – art:public::craft:private. 

But if the public/fine art was both the realm of autonomy and of universality, this posed a problem: how could free individuals all come to the same, universal ideas of the true, the good, and the beautiful? Why wouldn’t free individuals have individual, subjective ideas of truth, ethics, and beauty?

This is the problem Kant’s critical trilogy set out to solve: the first critique is about truth, the second is about ethics/the good, and the third is about aesthetics/beauty. I’m going to focus on the third one because I’m a philosopher of art, but the solution is the same in each case.

For Kant, beauty was both subjective – the judgment of an individual subject – and universal. As Kant puts it, “Taste must be an ability one has in oneself (79), and “a judgment of taste requires everyone to assent; and whoever declares something to be beautiful holds that everyone OUGHT to give his approval to the object at hand and that he too should declare it beautiful” (86). To say that something was beautiful was also to say that everyone else would think so too. This is literally the first formulation of the categorial imperative remade for aesthetics.

Kant has to perform a lot of philosophical gymnastics to make the concept of subjectively universal taste work, and those gymnastics don’t really stick the landing. But the relevant point here is that he was invested enough in the universality of subjective taste that he went to the trouble of doing those gymnastics. 

Though he doesn’t frame the project in precisely these terms, Joshua Clover’s 1989 posits that eponymous year as the point where “global, yet American” (5) Western modernity culminates in actually-realized subjective universality. Clover argues that “The logic of ‘the end of history’ is in some degree the logic of pop itself” insofar as they both “imagin[e] a single way of being, one that offers itself equally to everybody, into which all trajectories empty” (12). With the end of the Cold War, classical liberalism’s abstract individual (think of the “Legal Status” section of Hegel’s Phenomenology) understands itself as truly universal, an autonomous free subject that is at the same time without Other, without difference. As Clover put it, “The sudden collapse of the Iron Curtain is made to summon up abstractions like freedom, or democracy” alongside “ the disappearance of the edit, the cut” (13). As Fukyama’s infamous “The End of History” proclaimed, liberal democracy (supposedly) won the Cold War, the latter’s “Two Tribes” reduced to one undifferentiated universality of liberal individualism. For Clover, rave’s PLUR-y ethos of “inclusivity without distinction” (63) exemplifies the triumphant liberal individual, each abstract unit undifferentiated from the other. With the Cold War’s structuring political antagonism newly absent, the apparent absence of geopolitical difference and hegemony of hegemony of “global, yet American” liberalism is understood and experienced as the achievement of a public sphere that is genuinely universal – ‘we’ are all individuals freely choosing on the limitless, borderless global market.

Clover’s analysis of gangsta rap and grunge shows that historically, one consequence of this apparent universality at the civil or public level is the amplification of the private sphere’s traditional role as the locus of difference and inequality. For example, Clover argues that “The shift from Black Power and Black Nationalist to gangsta rap, in and around the year 1989…can be rendered schematically as the turn from inter-group confrontation to intra-group conflict: the emergence of the internalization of struggle’ (34). Whereas 80s Black Power and Black Nationalist hip hop (like Public Enemy) framed white supremacy as its antagonist, gangsta rap adopts instead the “black-on-black violence” frame common in the War-On-Drugs era mainstream media and frames hip hop culture’s structuring antagonism as an internal one. Similarly, Clover claims that grunge turned punk’s political negativity into a personal one: “Grunge constituted itself by doing a very specific thing with punk’s will to confrontation: turning it inward” (80) into “profoundly angry introspection” (81). Going even further than reverting “I’m So Bored With The USA” back to its original, pre-Strummer “I’m So Bored With You,” grunge focuses its rage and disgust only on the inner self, i.e., on “me.” In both the case of gangsta rap and grunge, genres that traditionally targeted their anger at the structures of civil society flip their scripts and channel aggression on the private family/culture or self. Pop culture proclaimed that public agons were a thing of the past while simultaneously glorifying private inter- and intrapersonal conflict. The classically liberal ideal of subjective universality was claimed to have been achieved in civil society, yet the main vernacular representations of masculinity depict a (plural in the case of hip hop, singular in the case of grunge) subject divided within and turned upon itself. Universality had been attained, it and its medium of civil society could thus be shelved – less “there is no such thing as society” and more “society, done and dusted.” Unleashed from its previous imperative to perform universality, subjectivity (here in the sense of bias or non-objectivity) was free to embody purely private difference as such.

Shelving civil society and the public sphere in this “long 1989” moment, “global, yet American” pop culture sets the stage for the wave of privatization and personal responsibilization that we continue to ride today. Policy-wise, that wave is formalized by the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996. This legislation deregulates private markets and makes them more “free” while using the state to intensify the policing of race, gender, and class differences by, for example, adding work requirements to welfare programs or the 287(g) program, which allows local law enforcement to be deputized as federal INS/ICE officers. Instead of civil society as the realm of supposed freedom over and against the realm of private subjection, its now private markets that embody freedom, whereas private differences and identities serve as the grounds of criminalization as figures like “the welfare queen” or the “illegal alien” represent Black and brown people as inherently lacking the personal responsibility necessary to earn the law’s protection. Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Committee and full corporate personhood, here we come. 

Culturally, that wave begins to surface in a few different ways. First, though Clover thinks “the question of what exactly allowed Nevermind to surmount both Guns N’ Roses and Michael Jackson–seemingly to banish such music to the outer dark–remains unanswered and perhaps unanswerable” (83), my forthcoming article in American Music finds a clear answer to this question: grunge’s inward turn aligns with the way about 15 years of anti-affirmative backlash has reshaped masculinity into the performance of personal injury. In US law, personal injury is private property claim covered by tort law, not a claim of political wrong or injustice. Critical Race Theorist Cheryl Harris’s 1993 “Whiteness as Property” shows how right-wing propaganda reframed affirmative action not as a redistributive program regarding past injustices but as a judgment on the present responsibility individual white people had in making up for those past harms. As Harris put it, “the property interest in whiteness has skewed the concept of affirmative action by focusing on the sin or innocence of individual white claimants with vested rights, rather than on the broader questions of distribution of benefits and burdens.” In other words, whereas affirmative action was an attempt to redistribute opportunities equally across the entirety of the public, discourses and structures of white entitlement reframed affirmative action as an issue of individual private responsibility wherein specific white men were or were not responsible for holding minorities back in the way negligent drivers are responsible for injuring people they crash into. At the same time, affirmative action’s reparations were framed by both right wing activists and the mainstream media as injuring white men in similar ways, i.e., as personal injuries. 1989 was also the year Claremont McKenna sociologist Friedrick Lynch published his monograph Invisibile Victms: White Males and the Crisis of Affirmative Action. As I explain in the article, 

As Jennifer L. Peirce argues, “print media” in the 80s and 90s exhibited an “eagerness to construct sensational headlines about white male injury.” For example, in the November 1990 issue of SPIN, Jefferson Morley’s feature titled “Kulturkampf” stated that “young white males…resent integration, especially affirmative action, as an imposition and a threat.” Similarly, Pierce finds that “A 1994 cover of Businessweek declared, ‘White, Male, and Worried,’ adding ‘White men still dominate corporate America. But in companies with aggressive diversity programs, white males are starting to feel angry and resentful.’”

Forget John-Wayne-style stoic strength, by 1989 pop culture had shifted the vibes around American white masculinity so significantly that it was OK to be vulnerable, hurt, and damaged…so long as that injury reinforced white masculine grievance at gender and racial minorities. Grunge crossed over in the 1989 era because mainstream American white masculinity had made the same shift from public to private grievance–grunge’s once-countercultural performance of injured selfhood had, for entirely nonmusical reasons, become the norm.

The “inward turn” away from the public to the variously-figured private sphere that Clover identified in hip hop and grunge extends far beyond the realm of popular music; these genres are microcosms of a broader shift as the public/private binary collapses and the ideals it valorized – universality, objectivity, autonomy, formal equality before the law, abstract individuality, etc. – lose their purchase…in part because postwar civil rights movements had caused the very people that public/private binary was designed to exclude from accessing those values to begin to meaningfully benefit from them.
Since 1989, the privatization of aesthetic taste has taken many forms: omnivorousness (1996), poptimism (turn-of-the-millennium), algorithmic personalization and Nick-Seaver-style “avidity” (2010s), Kornbluhian “immediacy” (also 2010s), vibes (2010s & 20s), AI slop (2020s), looksmaxxing (2020s), and who knows what will come next. In true Cooperian “Family Values” style, this privatization can lean neoliberal or neoreactionary. The whole point is that there is no singular hegemonic construction of aesthetic taste: universals don’t matter anymore. Taste can be whatever so long as it is a vector for patriarchal racial capitalist accumulation and status. The point is that it is subjective and non-universal.