“It’s a mistake to mistake content for content” – KENNETH GOLDSMITH

LA Review of Books, June 14 2015

The following essay is part of the Los Angeles Review of Books special series “No Crisis”: a look at the state of critical thinking and writing — literary interpretation, art history, and cultural studies — in the 21st century. Click here for the full series.

RECENTLY I WAS in the mood to listen to the music of the American mid-century composer Morton Feldman. I dug into my MP3 drive, found my Feldman folder and opened it up. Amongst the various folders in the directory was one labeled “The Complete Works of Morton Feldman.” I was surprised to see it there; I didn’t remember downloading it. Curious, I looked at its date — 2009 — and realized that I must’ve grabbed it during the heyday of MP3 sharity blogs. I opened it to find 79 albums as zipped files. I unzipped three of them, listened to part of one, and closed the folder. I haven’t opened it since.

My experience with Feldman indicates how, in a time when cultural artifacts are abundantly available, our primary focus has migrated from use to acquisition; I have more MP3s than I’ll ever be able to listen to in the next 10 lifetimes, yet I compulsively keep downloading more. In this way our role as librarians and archivists has outpaced our role as cultural consumers. Engaging with media in a traditional sense is often the last thing we do, that is (like my Feldman experience), if we ever get to it at all. In the digital ecosystem, the apparatuses surrounding the artifact are more engaging than the artifact itself. Management (acquisition, distribution, archiving, filing, redundancy) is the cultural artifact’s new content. Context is the new content. In an unanticipated twist to John Perry Barlow’s 1994 prediction that in the digital age we’d be able to enjoy wine without the bottles, we’ve now come to prefer the bottles to the wine.

Back in 1983, the media critic and philosopher Vilém Flusser (1920–1991) described this exact phenomenon in a little book called Towards a Philosophy of Photography. Flusser claimed that the content of any given photograph is actually the camera that produced it. He continued with a series of nested apparatuses: The content of the camera is the programming that makes it function; the content of the programming is the photographic industry that produces it; and the content of the photographic industry is the military-industrial complex in which it is situated, and so forth. He viewed photography from a completely technical standpoint. In Flusser’s view, the traditional content of the cultural artifact is completely subsumed by the apparatuses — technical, political, social, and industrial — surrounding, and thereby defining, it.

Although he was writing about analog, print-based photography, Flusser’s ideas go a long way to explain our changing relationship to the cultural artifact in the digital age, reminding us of Moholy-Nagy’s prediction that “those who are ignorant in matters of photography will be the illiterates of tomorrow.”

The mistake most make in reading Flusser is assume that he’s talking about photography. Yes, he is, but that’s the least relevant part. Imagine, instead, that everything he’s saying about photography he’s saying about the digital. This requires an act of imaginative translation on our part, but once you make that leap, you realize that this 1983 text astonishingly directly addresses our situation some three decades later. For instance, Flusser claimed that the camera was the ancestor of apparatuses, which are in the process of “robotizing all aspects of our lives, from one’s most public acts to one’s innermost thoughts, feelings, and desires.” And when we look at social media — from blogs, to Twitter, to Facebook, and to Instagram — we can see he was correct. The Twitter game is like Wittgenstein’s language games; we must learn the rules in order to play. Obeying such rules — going with the apparatus instead of against it — results in victories, substantiated by gains in followers and retweets. Failure to follow the rules (there are no official rules, actually, only a set of community-based standards that most players unquestioningly follow) results in isolation: loss of followers and tweets that go unretweeted. When we tweet, the 140-character constraint determines the form of our content, forcing us to tailor/robotize our production in order to comply with the Twitter apparatus.

Like the camera, the Twitter apparatus coerces/seduces us to tweet, and we dutifully obey. Once we’re hooked into the game, we become compulsive: the more we tweet, the more we enrich the program, thereby increasing its standing within the larger social media apparatus and ultimately, boosting Twitter’s share price. In Flusserian terms, it doesn’t really matter what we tweet (content); it just matters that we keep tweeting (apparatus). In his thinking, Flusser was obviously influenced by McLuhan’s medium as message, but we can read through the digital: When McLuhan claims that the “content of any medium is always another medium,” Flusser might reframe this as “the content of any medium is always the series of apparatuses that produced it.”

In fact, content plays no role whatsoever in Flusser’s writing. A photograph is not a carrier of memories — your baby pictures are interchangeable with a million other baby pictures — but a predetermined artifact spit out by the camera apparatus. The camera is a voracious, greedy device, programmed to stalk images the way an animal stalks prey: the camera smells blood and (literally) snaps. Like Twitter, the more you shoot, the more you become addicted to the photographic apparatus, which Flusser likens to opium addiction or being on a “photograph-trip.” In the end, you end up working for the camera and the industry that produced it. The more people who use an apparatus, the more feedback the company receives about its camera, the smarter it becomes, drawing more users to its base, thereby increasing the manufacturer’s bottom line. For this reason, Instagram keeps adding new filter sets and features in order to retain and broaden its user base. To Instagram, the content of the photos people are taking is beside the point; the real point is that they keep taking them in order to fortify the apparatus.

Photography is easy. Anyone can push a button and produce a photograph without having a clue as to the inner workings of a camera. A lens on a camera will inevitably take telescopic photos. The program of the camera overrides the artifact that it produces. The programmers of cameras strive to keep their interfaces as simple as possible, to discourage experimentation outside of its parameters. The simple interface keeps the photographer pushing the button so they can produce, in Flusser’s words, “more and more redundant images.” The free cost of digital photography keeps the photographer playing the photographic game. (How many people snapping photos with a smartphone only take one shot of any given scene?) Those photos are uploaded to the cloud, where ever-more redundant photos are stored. Your photo of the Flatiron Building on Flickr is identically redundant to the millions already stored on Flickr, yet you keep on snapping them (just as I keep downloading MP3s).

The camera doesn’t work for us. We work for the camera. Our compulsive behavior leaves no scene undocumented. I shoot therefore I am. Or as The Kinks put it, “People take pictures of each other / Just to prove that they really existed.” When we take a holiday to a foreign country, the photos don’t show the sights we saw, they show us the places where the camera has been and what it’s done there. We think we’re documenting our own memories, but what we’re actually producing is memories for the apparatus. The digital photograph’s metadata — geo-tagging, likes, shares, user connectivity, and so forth — proves much more valuable to Instagram than any subject matter it captures. The image is irrelevant in comparison to the apparatuses surrounding it.

Once we buy into a specific apparatus, it’s awfully hard to leave it. Your cultural artifact is locked within that system, constrained by its programming. Notice how another user’s Instagram photo can’t be resized, emailed, or downloaded to your hard drive. It can’t exist within any other ecosystem than Instagram’s. Notice how easily Instagram can be integrated into the interface of its parent company, Facebook, but how difficult it is to share on Twitter, a competitor’s platform. While we play the Instagram game by liking and reposting photos, the apparatus knows otherwise: a “like” is a way for the shareholder to verify that there are consumers populating the program; the greater and more verifiable the user base, the more valuable the apparatus… [+]