Toward a New Grammar of Reality

A SUPERWRX Position Dispatch on Culture’s Hollowing and the Ethics of Reorientation

In 2025, culture no longer feels like something we participate in. It feels like something we’re asked to continue believing in, despite a growing awareness that its symbolic architecture has collapsed. The structures remain, but the charge is gone. Institutions continue to commission. Platforms continue to publish. Artists continue to make. Yet what once carried urgency or conviction now feels strangely synthetic, suspended in a performance of aliveness that no longer fools anyone. This is not about cynicism or burnout. It’s about recognising a deeper transition — one in which the existing grammar of culture has lost its capacity to orient meaning.

We are living through a moment of hollowing, not collapse. Collapse is sudden, dramatic, visible. Hollowing is quieter. It’s the slow draining of interiority from forms that continue to function on the surface. The result is simulation, a condition where gestures remain legible but are no longer rooted in belief, necessity, or felt intent. Cultural objects and systems behave like they’re alive, but increasingly lack the charge of meaning. The centre no longer holds because there is no centre. There is only infrastructure without soul, performance without pressure, form without force.

The response from artists and cultural practitioners has not been loud or unified, but certain patterns are emerging. Among them is a growing resistance to the simulation reflex, the compulsion to produce work that looks like meaning while bypassing experience, ethics, or inner necessity. This reflex has been accelerated by AI, templated aesthetics, and platform logic, but it predates those tools. It arises from the desire to be seen as intelligent rather than the desire to know something honestly. The work that emerges from this reflex is recognisable — clean, referential, contextually aware, and spiritually vacant. It simulates intelligence but resists depth. It appears legible but avoids being lived.

In contrast, something quieter but more consequential is forming beneath the surface. A reorientation toward what might be called sovereign making — the act of creating work without seeking validation from external systems. This is not a return to individualism. It is a return to fidelity. Artists are becoming more attuned to the internal logics that govern their decisions, and less interested in alignment with institutional language, critical discourse, or commercial viability. What emerges from this shift is often small, embodied, non-performative. It resists legibility. It doesn’t scale. And it doesn’t ask to be understood. Its power lies in its refusal to simulate.

This orientation doesn’t reject systems entirely, it reprograms them. One of the most urgent moves of the moment is symbolic reprogramming: the act of taking existing cultural or technological logics and reassigning their meaning. This goes beyond appropriation. It involves a kind of metaphysical judo, where dominant forms are subverted not by critique, but by quiet repurposing. We see this in work that uses bureaucratic language to describe intimacy, industrial materials to articulate grief, or corporate display logic to explore emotional closure. These are not aesthetic gestures, but ethical ones. They insist that the systems we inhabit can be inhabited differently. That meaning is not owned by form, but chosen through use.

What is notable about these practices is their lack of performance. They don’t declare what they are doing. They don’t name their refusals. They simply do things differently. This marks a departure from earlier modes of cultural resistance that relied on visibility, confrontation, or academic scaffolding. The new grammar being written now is one of intentional opacity. Not to obscure, but to protect. Not to mystify, but to sanctify. In a culture obsessed with transparency and legibility, the decision to remain illegible is no longer a defensive act. It is a form of sovereignty.

This shift also marks a move away from content as the site of meaning. Increasingly, it is form itself that is being politicised. Not the what, but the how. Not what is represented, but how the encounter is structured. The most radical works now are not those that shout new ideas, but those that rearrange the terms of perception. A silent space. An unresolved image. An object that requires stillness. These are not aesthetic choices — they are ethical architectures. They model an alternative grammar, one based not on extraction or explanation, but on presence and pattern recognition.

This reconfiguration isn’t just happening at the level of art. It reflects a broader cultural fatigue with systemic simulation. From corporate ethics statements to algorithmic identities, from speculative design to institutional critique, we are saturated with frameworks that simulate change without risking transformation. What we’re seeing now is not a new movement, but a quiet return to felt reality, a rejection of symbolic excess in favour of symbolic responsibility.

To write a new grammar of reality is not to invent new forms of expression. It is to restore consequence to the act of expression itself. This requires a new stance, one that values coherence over commentary, resonance over recognition, structure over spectacle. It requires that we stop asking what art says and begin asking what it does. Not in the instrumental sense of impact, but in the existential sense of energetic function. Does this work recalibrate perception? Does it restore a sense of scale? Does it tell the truth — not discursively, but atmospherically?

The artists shaping this new grammar do not present themselves as visionaries. They are often quiet, process-driven, and strategically under-visible. Their work resists categorisation, not because it is obscure, but because it refuses existing rubrics of relevance. They are not trying to win the discourse. They are trying to exit it, without abandoning the field.

And that may be the most radical gesture available in 2025: to remain in the field while refusing the game. To stay inside the structures of culture while refusing to let them define the terms of engagement. This is not detachment, nor is it asceticism. It is a post-spectacular ethics, an aesthetic mode grounded in care, fidelity, and the belief that meaning arises not from novelty, but from attention.

The grammar is changing. The question is no longer what we make, but how we remain true in the making. The work ahead is not to fill the hollow, but to live beside it without collapsing into it. Not to re-enchant the world, but to create forms that allow enchantment to return on its own terms.