Presentness is disgrace
The phone seems to demand the feed as a form — the endless flow of content, both as something we make and consume. The feed capitalizes on the personalized screen interface, the networkedness of the device, its portability and its immediacy, and resolves it all into a coherent experience that encapsulates the pleasures the phone can afford. The feed defines the sort of subjectivity that's sustainable through the kinds of intermediation that phones allow for. Whether we are consuming or creating it, the feed offers a coherent structure for the self, with a built-in, always implied audience. The stream of personalized content corresponds with the selfhood we can construct by posting; together these come to structure the nature of our self-awareness. We can understand ourselves in terms of what we consume in a feed and what we can post to it.
The feed is an exhibition space, which means it has something in common with museums, theatrical stages, gallery spaces, and retail showrooms, but in its personalized intimacy and expressiveness, it can seem to also externalize inner space, the ebb and flow of consciousness. We curate feeds for ourselves and others, and feeds are curated for us in our name, algorithmically sorted to reveal ourselves to ourselves in a way that is flattering and manipulative, urging us to engage and spend — indexing subjectivity to those practices. It coexists with other kinds of spaces and transforms them, as is most obvious in those physical locales that have been reconceived for social media — the selfie walls and Museum of Ice Cream–style environments, for instance.
One could position the feed as the latest step in the evolution of exhibition space that Rosalind Krauss traces in “Postmodernism’s Museum Without Walls” (1986), from the 19th century’s “arrangement en filade” — i.e. a sequence of rooms in a quasi-palazzo, as with the Met — to the 20th century’s “musée imaginaire,” the “museum without walls” theorized by Andre Malraux, to the postmodern “flea market” that artist-pasticheurs can raid incoherently at their leisure. The feed conflates the audience with those pastiche artists, so that everyone is dealing equally in bricolage.
In Krauss’s account, Malraux described his museum without walls as an “art book” that allows readers the “possibility of experiencing the autonomous power of form that two waves of the decontextualization of art objects have wrought.” Now we can see the museum without walls as a networked feed in which works are not merely decontextualized but serially reappropriated and endlessly redeployed such that stable context can’t be conceived or accounted for. Artists and audiences alike can circulate content as a means of creation and expression, asserting the right of recontextualization over any erstwhile autonomous artwork.
But how can such openness, such loosening of the terms of engagement, be negotiated? Whereas Krauss describes, for example, the spiral track in the Guggenheim in New York as marking a clear trajectory, laid out so that its entirety can be grasped simultaneously with its discrete moments, the feed masks the trajectory and conveys endless immersion. For Krauss, the Guggenheim ramp is the
physical expression of intentionality”; it gives form to “the viewer’s prospective desire to master the space before him or her, of a cognitive effort that precedes motion. As such it is the site for that act of imaginative projection, through which the receiver of art makes of it a fiction, the perceiver’s own fiction, a new writing, that is, of Art’s universal story.
The audience in the thrall of the feed, however, is not rewriting Art’s story from their personal perspective so much as being dunked in an ocean of content, wherein the only way to tread water is to produce content of their own, grabbing whatever they can as an advertisement of their own activity, tastes, ambitions, ideas. The feed has already digested intentionality, metabolized it into countless networked nodes. It is not a clear path but an obscure drift.
Krauss’s describes the postmodern museum in terms of its disruptive “vistas”:
Circulation in these museums is as much visual as physical, and that visual movement is a constant decentering through the continual pull of something else, another exhibit, another relationship, another formal order, inserted within this one in a gesture which is simultaneously one of interest and of distraction: the serendipitous discovery of the museum as flea-market.
That seems apt as a description of content circulation in feeds. Interest in something comes with a sense of being distracted from something else, even if that something else is the way you were thinking of reposting the thing that interested you.
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Who are we when scrolling through a feed? Where is it taking us? What sort of internal division is it sowing? If the feed structures “interest” as simultaneously a form of distraction that inhibits our scrolling, then looking and scrolling are always in an uneasy tension, which gestures like liking and swiping do only so much to resolve. The feed suspends us between lingering and driving on, locating our “intentionality” there as a kind of irresolvable mystery.
Of all things, Michael Fried’s “Art and Objecthood” offers a way of thinking about that crux. The essay seems as sneering as ever to me in its assessment of what counts as “authentic” art, but much of what he condemns about the “theatricality” of Minimalist art could be applied to the experience of consuming feeds. This analogy requires shifting slightly from thinking of feeds as exhibition spaces to thinking of them as specific works, though that is another distinction their irresolvable nature tends to blur. The feed is both an intrinsically limitless exhibition of a variety of content and a totalizing work in and of itself. Its structure of feeling is akin to what Fried regards as the “sensibility” of Minimalist art: “the repetition of identical units (Judd’s ‘one thing after another’).”
The problem with minimalist works, in Fried’s view, is that they are interesting. In describing a cube sculpture by Tony Smith, he complains that it
is always of further interest; one never feels that one has come to the end of it; it is inexhaustible. It is inexhaustible, however, not because of any fullness — that is the inexhaustibility of art — but because there is nothing there to exhaust. It is endless the way a road might be: if it were circular, for example. Endlessness, being able to go on and on, even having to go on and on, is central both to the concept of interest and to that of objecthood.
And obviously, "endlessness" is central to the concept of the feed, which is designed to hold our attention through a perpetual scroll. It compels us to stay put and go on.
“Interest” is the bad form of attention, the opposite of “absorption,” which characterizes the good and true response to real Art. As much as this baffles me as an aesthetic morality, it starts to makes more sense with respect to feeds, which demand a continual renewal of attention that prevents a sense of focus or, in Fried’s terms, a “fullness” or “presentness.” The feed is always there, demanding that you do something with it. The encounter, by design, is never completed, fulfilled. You are stabilized by the feed as someone who needs to keep looking for more, who is irreparably lacking.
Minimalist art, Fried claims, “confronts the beholder, and thereby isolates him, with the endlessness not just of objecthood but of time.” His dismayed tone here reminds me the feeling of having lost track of time while scrolling a feed — of getting lost in the seriality, of feeling impelled to keep going without ever attaining anything like a flow state and without any hope of finally seeing what I am searching for, because I am not looking for anything. It’s an experience of time as something that, as Fried describes, is “simultaneously approaching and receding, as if apprehended in an infinite perspective.” The finite ramp Krauss described is definitively gone; instead, there is simultaneous interest and distraction, and the self that is both constituted and fractured by it.
Fried argues that minimalist art “extorts” a “special complicity” from beholders which “demands that the beholder take it into account, that he take it seriously”; it coerces viewers by centering their subjectivity, their view, which activates or completes the work. “Being able to go on and on indefinitely is of the essence,” he writes, and this does the “job of distancing or isolating the beholder, of making him a subject.” But this is not the subjectivity you should be looking for. Commenting on “Art and Objecthood” in "Notes on the Re-emergence of Allegory," Stewart Melville argues that
what Fried objects to in the work of Tony Smith is the way in which it offers itself to its beholder as (not simply a person but) a person who then refuses to allow one a human relation to itself — it is work that distances itself from (the subject it thereby forces to become merely) its beholder. It refuses to let itself mean — be taken as meaning; it is soulless, it enforces the condition Cavell calls "soul-blindness" on its viewer.
The feed could be said to enforce “soul-blindness” as well — it imposes a way of being “interested” in content without being able to completely ascertain its context or its ultimate intention, let alone your own. You can interact with a feed without establishing any reciprocity, sympathy, or empathy with the people and things on the other side of it. Feeds (like minimalist art, in Fried’s account) constitute viewers as needing to pay attention in this way — as though their subjectivity depended on it.
In revisiting “Art and Objecthood” in 1996 for an introduction to a collection of his criticism, Fried claims that his critique of Minimalist art was grounded in the idea that it “theatricalized the body, put it endlessly on stage, made it uncanny or opaque to itself, hollowed it out, deadened its expressiveness, denied its finitude and in a sense its humanness, and so on.”
And so on. All of that can be readily translated to a certain critique of feeds, which put users onstage to perform themselves and thus alienate them from spontaneous being; which subject users to opaque forms of algorithmic sorting that generate an uncanny rendition of one’s desires and identity; which extend users beyond the conventional limits of time and space and bind them up with a variety of automated and pre-emptive processes that blur the boundaries of agency and responsibility, rendering them part-human and part-machine.
That is not necessarily my critique of feeds, but it gets at the anxiety that increasingly attaches to how we use phones (and how they use us!). The somewhat alarmist concern is that the subjectivity that feeds structure and reward is contingent on objectified “experience” — on time being remediated into a consumable commodity. This can seem to deny the possibility of experience on any other terms — the "pics or it didn't happen" epistemology. Or alternately, it brings to "experience" an irrefutable material reality, a sense of confirmation, that for many has been otherwise systematically blocked.
At the heart of “Art and Objecthood” is Fried’s reaction to Tony Smith’s now famous account of taking a night drive on the New Jersey Turnpike before it had been completed and opened. Smith describes how there was nothing but “the dark pavement moving through the landscape of the flats, rimmed by hills in the distance, but punctuated by stacks, towers, fumes, and colored lights.” The ghostly ride brought him to an epiphany:
The experience on the road was something mapped out but not socially recognized. I thought to myself, it ought to be clear that’s the end of art. Most painting looks pretty pictorial after that. There is no way you can frame it, you just have to experience it.
This statement seems to make Fried lose his mind. “But what was Smith’s experience on the turnpike? …” he demands. Did he "really" even have it? “And what was Smith’s experience if not the experience of what I have been calling theater?” Even 20 years later, in the essay-collection introduction, Fried is still asking the same sort of questions: “Why should any experience that is not an experience of art be taken as laying bare the end of art? Would the experience of a spectacular sunset or a nuclear explosion do as much, and if not, why not? … And how tenable is the contrast between ‘framing’ and ‘experiencing’ on which Smith insists?”
Feeds seem to want to posit and eradicate that contrast — "framing" is "experiencing" but the framer is not any one subject — it is imposed by the you, by other people in your feed, by algorithms, by advertisers, and the intentions are not always obvious, if they are discernible at all. But nonetheless, they set up the parameters of experience as always ambiguously motivated.
It seems that Smith is pointing toward a rejection of discrete, autonomous artworks in favor of experiences, necessarily performed in time, shaped by technological interventions “without cultural precedent,” as he says about the turnpike and about abandoned airstrips and works. Feeds, too, evoke the nighttime highway’s endless expanses, the sense that one is moving through a limitless stretch of content, always at the center of it all, but with a necessarily myopic view that occludes any glimpse of the totality. One is never compelled to be “present” on the road in the sense that Fried champions; one is always going nowhere in particular.
The immersiveness of a feed puts one in the midst of the content, as the organizing principle of it in a literal, irrefutable way, threatening to obliterate the perceived “autonomy” of anything or anyone out there, oneself included. The algorithmic feed, especially, centers this consuming subject (without deferring to it), projecting it forward with content continually provided from what appear to be ever-widening archives but which are mostly composed of formulaic material, memetic reiterations, the “challenges” and borrowed audio tracks of TikTok, the pleasant sameness of influencer aesthetics. It keeps reinscribing discovery as limitation, curiosity as a hermetic feedback loop, a spiral without beginning or end. “You just have to experience it.”
Fried can’t seem to fathom why anyone would want to experience that. The very accessibility of Smith’s turnpike drive — the fact that anyone could be the subject of it — strikes him as grounds for dismissing it. (“It is, I think, hardly necessary to add that the availability of modernist art is not of that kind,” he sniffs.) Whenever I start denouncing social media, I feel like I am making a similarly elitist error. It seems important to remember what a luxury it is to feel as though you have so much agency and acknowledgment in your everyday life that you can enjoy surrendering it for an infinite instant to the modernist artwork that compels you with its “conviction.” The privilege of renouncing privilege, and recouping it again in a sense of the superiority of your aesthetic sensibility.
Feeds provides that sense of elitism in a different way, not through transcendence but through the battery of popularity metrics that seem to make status explicit. Immersion in endlessness becomes endless pressure to produce, to make sense of the infinite in a series of posts that try to announce one’s absent presence, one’s ceaseless willingness to participate. But before that and possibly beyond that there is the sense of momentum, the feed bearing us ceaselessly forward, no longer against the current but down a highway that can never be finished.