Meta: Aesthetics of the media assemblage

True Detective is an example of a recent spate of works that could generally be described as "nihilist pop culture". True Detective is "meta" not simply as a work of meta-fiction, but also in an inter-textual media assemblage sense and furthermore in the way it dramatises a conflict over the value of (cultural) value. Meta is a minor aesthetic category of cultural works that operate by way of a recursive self-referential movement across singular qualitative thresholds of individuation. This essay reads True Detective in terms of Nietzsche's concept of nihilism as a process of transvaluation and Simondon's concept of meta-stability. Nietzsche and Simondon both gesture towards the germ of value from which normative values develop and this essay argues that works of nihilist pop culture such as True Detective are organised around articulating a sense of the meta-stability of cultural value.