Users who perform an intentional action
Art historian Rosalind Krauss's "Notes on the Index" dates from 1976 and 1977, and, like an Isley Brothers single from that period, it comes as part one and two. It attempted to give some coherence to the art of the 1970s, which at the time was perceived as "pluralistic," if not entirely random, especially in comparison to how the art of previous decades was formalized into various movements. She argues that the "pervasiveness of the photograph as a means of representation" led to a preoccupation with indexicality — with finding a way to convey the artist's physical presence through the artwork. The work becomes nothing more than the proof that the artist had been there. The index was sort of the blockchain of its day, a valorization of a kind of pure authentication.
The late 1970s may have been the last period in which photography, not yet digital, could be understood as indexical, as a specific impression of "reality" onto a light-sensitive surface, as self-evidently evidentiary, as documentary perhaps even despite itself. Krauss cites Barthes's claim that a photograph is a "message without a code," that it was essentially WYSIWYG. "Undoubtedly the photograph implies a certain displacement of the scene (cropping, reduction, flattening)," Krauss concedes, "but this passage is not a transformation (as an encoding must be)."
With that understanding of photography in place — that it simply appropriates reality and represents it without any space for transformative manipulation on the part of the photographer — Krauss argues that painting in the 1970s moved toward the indexical, presenting itself as a kind of evidence in a way, as a mode of cropping reality or isolating it to caption it, rather than as a moment of transcendent truth conjured from the eternal now of Real Art. It's as though artworks themselves no longer needed to aspire to evoking "presence" because photography made that mundane, tedious, too easy.
Here's how Krauss's sums up this shift:
Internal division (drawing) is converted from its formal status of encoding reality to one of imprinting it. The edge of the work is redirected from its condition as closure (the establishment of a limit in response to the internal meaning of the work) and given the role of selection (gathering a visually intelligible sample of the underlying continuum). The flatness of the support is deprived of its various formal functions (as the constraint against which illusion is established and tested; as the source of conventional coherence ) and is used instead as the repository of evidence. (Since this is no longer a matter of convention but merely of convenience, the support for the index could obviously take any configuration, two- or three-dimensional.) Each of these transformations operates in the direction of photography as a functional model.
In the post-Photoshop era, it is hard to take seriously the proposition that photographs are indexical or that they are "messages without code" — they are now commonly understood as digital artifacts made entirely of code and highly subject to all sorts of manipulations and filtering. The suite of editing tools that are built in to every camera offer a range of ways to reconceive visual media and "pictorial conventions" far beyond cropping and captioning. One could probably examine all forms of visual art since Photoshop in these terms (as I'm sure many have): as a kind of rendering, as subject to the default settings of standardized operations, as varying levels of deepfakery. "Gaussian blur" and tilt-shift parameters as ways of seeing, and so on.
The discourses around postmodernism grappled with the idea that objective truth was not straightforwardly representable, that no evidence transcended interpretation, that presence was a metaphysical fiction, a failed grand narrative. Another way to look at those thematics is in terms of the gradual disillusionment with photography, which could no longer be seen as neutral or transparent, or even as a metaphor for "transparency" or "neutrality" or a blank, unbiased way of seeing. The camera itself is no longer a camera; it produces images that are not representations but separate realities in their own right.
If the turn to the index — to evidence and captions — was, in Krauss's terms, artists "bowing to the implied necessity to add a surfeit of written explanation to the depleted power of the painted sign," we can possibly see NFTs as bowing to the necessity to add a crypto token to the depleted power of any kind of image at all. Not only are images no longer indexes, but physical presence itself no longer indicates "true" presence like it used to. You might be standing somewhere while your screen has you somewhere else.
If art once insisted on its own formal rigor as the only reality, the Platonic purity of true abstraction, now it seeks its opportunities elsewhere, attempting to negating the proliferation of realities in competing images and networked screens, and strenuously insisting that the only reality, the only harbinger of true presence, is what you can mint on a blockchain.
This week at Real Life, in "Nameless Feeling," Ludwig Yeetgenstein writes about the how the recent prominence of "vibes" is related to how algorithms increasingly direct culture. If vibes are a way to refer to indistinct feelings without pinning them down to specific causes and effects, then they are analogous to the kinds of correlations that machine-learning systems uncover and operationalize — connections that are statistically relevant but may otherwise be inexplicable. Vibes are what appear when you reach the infamous "end of theory" once declared by Wired in the midst of the 2000s Big Data hype. "The vibes framework may hone our abilities to identify settings like 'cozy' or 'cursed,'" Yeetgenstein writes, "but it doesn’t give instructions on how we might build them or avoid them in our lives. As an analytic, vibes don’t connect feelings and consequence; as such, it is symbiotic with passive modes of media consumption."
Vibes are not an ambiguous human element of feeling that escapes computation and algorithmic processing; instead they are the output of such processes, viewed from the perspective of the limited human understanding. They become our attempt to emulate how machine learning and prediction systems work, only without the underlying but inscrutable logic. We can assert the existence of patterns of feelings, but these appear as cultural dead ends, arbitrary recombinations of elements stabilized in an inert, backward-looking unity. "If we can’t make sense of all the sensory and conceptual data that saturates our experience," Yeetgenstein writes, "at least we can extract some salient features and then mix and match them in appealing and inchoate ways. Explanations are unnecessary; it’s seen as enough to just recognize a desired mood or feeling." Indeed, the more we can explain them, the less we feel them, as though thought were the antidote to feeling.
This then contributes to what Mark Fisher once described (following Franco Berardi) as "the slow cancelation of the future": a foreclosure on new cultural ideas in favor of "formal nostalgia" and the endless cycle of retro fashions. Yeetgenstein discusses this in terms of how prediction algorithms have instrumentalized expressions of cultural taste and used them in loss functions as recursive targets. These algorithms are always directing us backward, to connections that have always already been enjoyed or articulated, as if being surprised by cultural expression marked a total system failure. "The influence of machine learning and data- and metric-oriented thinking on culture may result in a certain lack of change, repeating the existing patterns and goals over and over again," Yeetgenstein writes.
Also this week at Real Life, in "Chat History," Hannah Gold reviews Calvin Kasulke’s novel Several People Are Typing, which is set entirely in Slack. Admittedly, this sounds a bit gimmicky, the sort of book that might be more fun to read about in a review than actually read. Being on Slack for real is bad enough; why would you want to extend that unpleasantness into your leisure time? That's assuming you have any, which would mean that perhaps Slack is failing to accomplish what your employers are hoping for. As Gold points out, "worker testimonials and technology reporters have pointed out Slack’s uncanny knack for making workers accountable to their supervisors with greater immediacy, during hours of the day that might have once been off-limits."
A novel set in Slack runs the risk of seeming to redeem the app and make it appear less objectionable than it should be to everyone who is required to use it. Reading the Slack novel places you in the position of the boss, the only person who can see everything that goes on in any particular implementation of the app, and invites you to enjoy the view, to implicitly empathize with it. Slack, Gold notes, had its origins in multiplayer gaming, but now the play is work. The app is an "efficient tool for documenting that disconnect" between how work life is sometimes romanticized — a place of camaraderie and personal achievement — and what it actually is, an endless spate of acting out someone else's drama for someone else's profit. "Catching up on Slack messages can feel similar to reading a novel, one that absorbs and positions you as a character, even while the plot progresses without you," Gold writes. "You are split, watching yourself flit in and out of existence. Should you try to insert yourself more assiduously into its verses, or fade out altogether?"
In Kasulke's novel, Slack begins to host supernatural phenomena, which, as Gold suggests, plays on how the app is hyped for how it supposedly magically increases cooperation and productivity. It also points to how Slack dematerializes workers into abstractions, as though they were no more substantial than the symbols they spend all day manipulating. But what has really disappeared is the sense of a humane audience for all their on-app performances. If they are not performing for a boss at the expense of their colleagues, then they are performing for analytical algorithms that are extracting data from their work vibes and seeking the correlations that will allow for their maximal exploitation. "Technology, which promised community, will turn our interlocutors away from us, toward its own algorithmic logics," Gold writes.
Just as close reading is being supplanted by the data-processing paradigms of the digital humanities (on how many occasions did Shakespeare use alliterative phrases? Let's count them!), the careful attention that once fostered workplace collaboration and maybe even solidarity will be replaced by the analytics provided by work-team software that diagram who spoke most to whom, how many minutes they spent composing messages to one another, how much time they spent on documents, who was the most active and reactive user, and who is the weakest link in the communicative chain. With Slack, the world of work is metadata.