I ate dog for lunch today. Everyone did. Only I knew what it really was.
It tasted like chicken. Which is the point. Somewhere in the middle of the meal, I felt the
thought arrive before I could stop it: what if this was dog? Not a philosophical but a visceral question. Neither did the food nor its taste change. But something in me did,
immediately, before reasoning had any chance to intervene. The plate became different.
The act became different.
I had not eaten dog, of course. But the fact that the idea of it was enough, that a mere
suspicion could rewire the entire moral texture of a meal without a single fact changing,
told me something I have not been able to put back down since. What I felt in that
moment was not a moral argument. It was a sensation. And somewhere along the way,
we decided that sensation was sufficient grounds for moral distinction. We called the
feeling ethics. We forgot it was taste.
I. The Feeling before the Thought
There is a particular kind of moral certainty that has no argument behind it, only a
feeling. A feeling that arrives before the question has finished forming, that does not
wait to be reasoned and does not need to be.
The chicken and the dog are, by any criterion that could constitute a morally serious
distinction, be it sentience, capacity for suffering or emotional complexity,
approximately equivalent. The dog is perhaps marginally more neurologically intricate.
But the moral gulf between them in the popular imagination is absolute. You can
industrially slaughter ten billion chickens a year and call it lunch. Suggest eating a dog
and watch a dinner table go silent with something that looks, from the outside, exactly
like moral horror.
The horror is real. I am not disputing that it is felt. What I am disputing is what it is.
Because the dog has been aestheticized. It has been placed, by decades of advertising,
by the cultural semiotics of domesticity and companionship, by a thousand films in
which dogs grieve and love and sacrifice. The dog has been photographed with children
and dressed in sweaters and assigned a name. The chicken has been placed in a
Styrofoam tray. And somewhere along the way we decided that this, the aesthetics of an
animal, its visual proximity to things we already love, was sufficient grounds for moral
distinction.
Peter Singer has been making this argument since 1975 and the dinner tables are still
going silent. Why? Not because the argument is wrong. Because it does not matter how
correct the argument is when what it is arguing against is not a belief but a sensation.
The sensation is faster. The sensation always wins.
The question, then, is not whether the sensation exists. It is where it came from.
II. On Desire
Capitalism does not merely sell us things. That is the obvious part. What it actually
does, is sell us a way of seeing. A consistent set of signals that tell us, without
argument, what is valuable and what is not, what deserves care and what does not,
what a life worth living looks like from the outside. These signals are not experienced as
signals but perception itself.
Under this system, objects carry a meaning entirely detached from what they do or what
they are worth, derived entirely from what they represent. You do not desire the thing.
You desire the social world the thing signals membership in. The Dior bag is not leather
and stitching. It is a grammar. It says something about the person carrying it, about their
world, their taste, their elevation above the merely ordinary. And the desire you feel
when you see it is not for the bag but for the life the bag performs.
This is the Constitutive of Desire itself. We do not want the object. We want the world
the object promises to deliver us into. The object-cause of desire is always what the
thing represents rather than what it is. And because that promised thing is never
delivered by the object itself, desire does not end with acquisition. It shifts. The bag
becomes the apartment becomes the holiday becomes the version of yourself that has
all of these things and still feels, strangely, that something is missing. The object keeps
changing. The desire keeps moving. Capitalism did not invent this structure of wanting,
but it understood it with the precision of an engineer and built an entire civilisation on
top of it. It gives desire a direction, endlessly.
The system then develops in us a sense of self that experiences itself as a commodity,
that evaluates its own worth by the same logic it uses to evaluate products, i.e. their
exchange value. You are what you project. Your value is your desirability. Your
desirability is your appearance. What has no aesthetic currency, no proximity to the
world of beautiful images, simply does not register as morally real. In the same vein as
there’s only an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real
him. Only an entity. Something illusory.
III. There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman
Mary Harron's American Psycho understood all of this before most theory did. Patrick
Bateman is a Wall Street investment banker in 1980s Manhattan. He is also, possibly, a
serial killer. The possibly is the point. The film is structured so that you can never be
certain whether the murders are real or fantasised, and Harron is not interested in
resolving the question, because the question is not the point either. The point is that it
does not matter. Patrick Bateman's inner life, his guilt, his violence, his suffering, is
entirely recognizable within the world he inhabits.
What American Psycho performs is the logical endpoint of a world organised entirely
around sign value. Bateman and his colleagues do not experience one another as
people but as surfaces, as walking grammars of status, legible or not legible by the cut
of a suit, the font of a business card, the restaurant where the reservation was made.
The film's most terrifying scene is not a murder. It is grown men in a conference room
shaking with barely contained anxiety over whose business card has the better
colouring. The violence is merely the confession of what the social performance was
always concealing: that in a world of pure appearance, there is no interior. There is no
one home.
The film works as a critique precisely because Bateman's sociopathy is
indistinguishable from his milieu's sociopathy. He is not an aberration in his world. He is
its most honest expression. The capitalism he inhabits has aestheticized everything so
completely, including human worth, suffering and even the self, that the only authentic
thing left is the violence he may or may not be committing in private. And even that
might be fantasy, the last performance of a man with no interiority left to speak of.
IV. Production Machines
Capitalism is an autonomous desiring-machine, a system that does not simply respond
to existing desires but actively produces them, captures them, channels them back into
the circuits that generate profit. The machine produces the aesthetics that sell, the
aesthetics that sell reinforce what the machine produces, and the loop closes on itself,
without a centre or an author.
What this machine has produced is a perceptual default that preceeds genuine
judgement by installing its conclusion in advance. The culture industry does not force
you to like what it produces. It trains you to find what it produces natural, and to find
everything outside that naturalism strange, uncomfortable, aesthetically inadequate.
The avant-garde is alienating. The experimental is pretentious. The unfamiliar is
suspicious. And in a grammar that has conflated aesthetics with ethics, the suspicious
is wrong.
The moral verdict and the aesthetic response have become, for practical purposes, the
same thing.
What capitalism has produced is a civilisation suffering from a specific collective
neurosis: the inability to distinguish between “I find this beautiful” and “this is
good.” Between “this looks like a life worth living” and “this life is worth living.” The
neurosis is not a personal failure. It is an infrastructural one.
The consumer who eats factory-farmed chicken while advocating for animal welfare is
not a hypocrite in the ordinary sense. They are a person whose ethical beliefs and
whose aesthetic training are operating on different tracks, and whose aesthetic training
is faster. The beliefs exist. They are real. And they arrive too late, every time.
V. Indian Aesthetics under Capitalism
In India, this story is not new. We have been running it for centuries.
Caste is, among other things, an aesthetic system. It organises bodies into hierarchies
of purity and pollution that feel natural and moral. The Brahmin body is sacred not
because of anything it has done but because of what it represents within a sign system
so total it is experienced as cosmological fact. The Dalit body is polluted not because of
anything it is but because of where it has been placed in that same system of
appearances.
Disgust, in this system, does the work of moral argument. The poor smell. Lower castes
are contaminating. The immigrant body is a biological threat. These are not conclusions
anyone arrived at through reasoning. They are aesthetic aversions that were handed the
vocabulary of ethics. Deliberate cruelty at least knows what it is. The violence of
aesthetic disgust is more insidious precisely because it does not see itself as violence.
It feels like common sense. It feels like nature.
Bong Joon-ho's Parasite understood this perfectly. The Parks are not villains. That is the
film's sharpest observation. They are generous, liberal, aesthetically refined people who
genuinely believe themselves to be good. What they cannot tolerate, what they register
as a moral failing in the Kim family, is a smell. The smell of the basement, of the subway,
of poverty itself, a smell so particular and so persistent that no amount of effort can
wash it off entirely. Mr Park mentions it twice. He does not think he is being cruel. He
thinks he is noticing something which is exactly the point. The aesthetic aversion has
been so thoroughly internalised that it presents as perception rather than judgement, as
fact rather than feeling. The Kims are not poor because the system placed them
underground. They are poor, because they carry the aesthetic signs of poverty. The
smell is a verdict. What Parasite does that most political cinema does not is refuse to let
the audience watch from outside this logic. By the end, the disgust has infected
everything, and you realise you were never above it. Neither were the Parks. Neither, the
film implies, are you.
VI. The Solution
The answer is not to distrust all feeling. Feeling is not the problem. The problem is the
gap between aesthetic response and moral verdict, which can be fixed. The solution is
the very thing capitalism tries hardest to domesticate: genuine art.
Not art as commodity. Not art as the beautiful object that confirms the grammar of what
we already find beautiful. Art as interruption. Art as the moment in which the familiar is
made strange, the invisible is made visible, the legible grammar of value is briefly and
usefully broken. Nakashima's Kamikaze Girls places figures of aesthetic excess in a
frame so precise and so affectionate that the usual sorting mechanism fails.
Sorrentino's Youth photographs the aging, failing, morally complicated body with the
same reverence it extends to conventional beauty, refusing the hierarchy that decides,
pre-ethically, which lives look worth living. American Psycho goes furthest: it holds a
mirror up to a world of pure surface and shows us that the reflection has no depth. It
does not argue against the aestheticization of ethics. It performs that aestheticization
so faithfully, that the performance becomes its own indictment.
These works are not making arguments. They are doing something harder. They are
retraining the eye. And this is what authentic art is actually for: not consolation, not
instruction, but the restoration of the self that capitalism's image economy works
constantly to flatten. The caricature capitalism wants from us is the performed self, the
self as product, the self as a collection of aesthetic signals aimed outward for appraisal.
Art that resists this, that insists on interiority, on ambiguity, on the reality of what cannot
be photographed or sold, is not merely cultural production. It is a political act. It is the
refusal to be only what you project.
Kanye understood this and made it his entire practice: the willingness to be
contradictory, unresolved, ugly and brilliant in the same breath, to refuse the smoothed out legible persona the market would prefer. Yeezus is not a beautiful object. It is an act
of deliberate aesthetic violence against the very industry that made him, a record that
sounds like machinery breaking, that offers nothing comfortable to hold onto, that
refuses to be liked before it is heard. The market wanted a product. He handed it a
provocation and called it art. That refusal is its politics.
VII. I Ate Dog for Lunch Today
I ate dog for lunch today. I did not, but the thought was enough, and the thought is the
whole argument.
They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder. What they do not say is that the eye was
trained. That the beholding was never neutral. That what we see as beautiful was
decided for us long before we were old enough to look.
The question is whether, knowing this, we are willing to look again. Not with the eye we
were given. With the one we might develop.