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Why It's Hard to Argue about “Cultural Stasis”

Why It's Hard to Argue about “Cultural Stasis”

Without agreeing on what "culture" is, it's really difficult to understand whether we're at an optimal rate of change

Katherine Dee on Wisdom of Crowds: “No, Culture is Not Stuck”

Since Simon Reynolds published Retromania in 2010, there has been a debate about whether the 21st century is facing a cultural stagnation crisis. There is a general consensus that there were fewer drastic stylistic changes in the Aughts and Teens than in previous decades. “Culture stopped in the year 2000,” quipped Yasi Salek on a recent episode of her podcast Bandsplain. I wrote Status and Culture partly to investigate how the particular economic and technological parameters of the 21st century have contributed to a deceleration of aesthetic changes. My new book, a cultural history slated for Autumn 2025, examines how this played out in more chronological detail.

In the essay above, Katherine Dee offers a counterpoint to the stasis consensus: “Culture isn’t stagnating; it’s evolving in ways that we’re struggling to recognize and appreciate.” I’m quite sympathetic to this argument, in that I think that innovation is certainly out there, and I'm also open to the idea that we're all missing it because we’re too focused on 20th century formats. Dee writes, “Film, fashion, literature, or even music as we once knew them are no longer the primary mediums through which new and exciting culture is experienced.”

Instead, culture is happening in a new set of mediums. Dee names three potential examples:

  1. Social media personalities: “the entire avatar, built across various platforms over a period of time” where “the audience response is part of the piece”
  2. TikTok sketch comedy: “digital vaudeville: a song, a short sketch, a physical feat, slapstick, animal acts and satire, one after another, in a personalized variety show on your phone”
  3. Pinterest mood boards / TikTok accounts that curate “aesthetics”: “Constructing an atmosphere, or “vibe,’ through images and sounds, is itself a form of storytelling”

I am not sold yet on these three as being great examples of innovation, but they reveal the issue with the entire debate: We're all trying to measure cultural stasis or dynamism through different definitions of culture. In order to make any progress in mutual understanding, we need to better define what we mean by "culture." (For the real pedants out there, here’s my essay series: What is culture?)

People are using the word "culture" in these debates to mean:

  1. The non-rational, expressive behavior of people in our era, with or without artistic intention (e.g. drinking low ABV cocktails, making TikTok videos, influencers)
  2. Products of the culture industry (e.g. Dune, Brat)
  3. Artistic practices (e.g. Holly Herndon’s use of AI)

Then on top of that, there’s an additional ambiguity around what would constitute proper “newness” — i.e. what an unstuck culture looks like.

  1. Novelties — i.e. things people do that they didn’t do before (e.g. drinking espresso martinis)
  2. Stylistic changes (e.g. wearing wider silhouette trousers)
  3. Inventive creative practices that expand what is possible with art, and maybe even make us perceive the world in new ways (e.g. cubism, postmodern literature)

If I had to classify Dee’s three examples, I'd say they fall under new kinds of "non-rational, expressive behavior of people in our era." (And I'm not sure I believe that Bronze Age Pervert is an elaborate performance art piece rather than an actual fascist.) TikTok/Reels skits just feel like the glossy, expertly-edited versions of the inside jokes that kids make at summer camp talent shows. There are certainly virtuosos of the genre; Andrew Russo is a master of the flop sweat in male-versus-male social competition. Most of the creators, by contrast, are non-art minded amateurs working in templated formats.

At this point, vertical short video may qualify as a major stylistic change. It's changing the conventions of how we watch content (it’s how many people experience SNL now). I could even see it offering a new palette for complex artistic practices. But “digital vaudeville” says it all — it's just not an "inventive creative practice that expands what is possible with art." This may seem like a very high bar to judge contemporary creative endeavor, but artists used to spend their entire careers with this goal in mind. And many even succeeded.

If we're defining culture so loosely as just "the stuff people do," then obviously there's no crisis at all. There has been a lot of change. We're talking about TikTok and not MTV. The stasis debate is actually just about two specific topics: (1) whether 21st century culture offers the feeling of artistic progress, where new styles/practices devalue previous ones, thereby creating clear chapters in the historical timeline, and (2) whether there are new techniques in symbolic activity that expand how we perceive the world and add to the cumulative knowledge of how to manipulate symbols for human expression and self-understanding. I am optimistic both outcomes are still possible (although I also understand that there have been postmodernist headwinds for 60 years). And I think Dee's overall argument is right: We should stop looking for cultural change in the wrong places. But hopefully clarifying the terms will mean we can hunt with more precision.

An interesting side note: Dee’s essay inspired philosopher Agnes Callard to propose another view point: “Speed of cultural change is just what marks the demise of culture. Healthy culture is precisely ‘stuck’ and ‘stagnant’ because the job of culture is to keep (that) culture going. (On this picture, culture has been dying — slowly at first, and then faster and faster — for about 150 years.)” 

Here we see again why this discourse is so hard. Callard uses “culture” in its original 19th century definition: “a body of high art practices that represent the highest possible means of human expression.” (There are also hints of evolutionary thinking in this perspective: That a piece of culture becomes customary because it's well adapted to human usage and offers better outcomes.) The reason we don’t use this very Bouguereau definition of culture anymore is that 20th century artists eviscerated it. Avant garde artists and radical subcultures in the 20th century added dozens of new techniques and perspectives into the cultural canon, thereby showing that stagnancy is not productive. But it's quite interesting that Callard wants to join the conversation about “cultural stasis” while holding a completely different definition of culture in her head.