There comes a point in any saturated system wherein meaning no longer accumulates. It combusts. Contemporary culture functions less like a cogent symbolic order and more like a refinery under pressure, endlessly processing images, aesthetics, affect, and identity into liquid form. Brain rot, AI slop, and rage-bait content coalesce into an aesthetic and psychological field which taxes the senses and lowers the threshold by which cognition can accurately attach signification and meaning towards reality. But no refinery can contain its own waste. The overflow must be released.
In the culture industry, that release is not collapse; rather, it is expressed in the form of cultural absurdity. It is not incoherence by accident, but the semiotic exhaust of a media ecosystem that has become too dense to signify. In an age where every object, post, or persona operates as a free-floating unit, severed from any larger framework, meaning in the visual field begins to disintegrate. It must recursively release excess through signifiers which point to no discernible signified. What emerges is a grotesque recombination of signs that no longer serve representation, only release.
Cody Rooney is the Editor in Chief and senior contributor at liminul.
He is a PhD candidate, digital content specialist, writer, editor, multi-media artist, and photographer.