Affirmative Rhetoric and Aesthetics of Imperfection A Genealogy

Ideally, spellcheckers, navigation systems, photo filters, and other digital technologies allow us to perfect our everyday lives with each day. In practice, they not only boast bugs – but their ‘politics of perfection’ (Hale 2016) also evokes a fierce social and artistic counterpolitics. Contemporary filmmakers, writers, programmers, composers, (fashion) designers, and artists often shun the perfect. Instead, they embrace the imperfect, which they frame as a hallmark for authenticity and wholeness in a digitized and mediatized age (on the current preoccupation with glitches, errors, and imperfections, see, among others, Kelly 2009; Rombes 2009; Betancourt 2016; Saito 2017).
In this chapter, I scrutinize the present-day imperfection cult by taking one online text as my starting point: a blog post by the renowned Russian writer Tatiana Tolstaia. More specifically, I zoom in on an entry that Tolstaia posted shortly after launching her blog, in December 2007. In this entry, she states that in this new discursive space, ‘I claim the right: — to write with mistakes; — to disobey all grammar rules if I feel like it; — to swear.’ In previous publications (Rutten 2009; Rutten 2014), I contextualized Tolstaia’s statement within a broader transdisciplinary and transnational aesthetics of imperfection. In this new analysis, I explore the historical genealogy of this aesthetics. Central in this genealogy are the Romantic ‘acceptance of the notion of imperfection’ (Nemoianu 2006) and ‘the aesthetics of imperfection’ (Gioia 1988) of early twentieth-century jazz music, which each responded to and engaged with drastic technological transitions. How does Tolstaia’s plea for mistakes – and the broader present-day preoccupation with the glitchy and imperfect that her plea illustrates – relate to these historical ‘imperfection cults’? And how can their stories help us to unpack the preoccupation with the non-perfected in the twenty-first century?