In this post, I’d like to summarize a series of claims from this week’s readings that resonated with me personally, while also thinking more deeply about my post from last week on “embodying difficulty” (with thanks to Gabe, Chris, Evan, India and David for their further provocations on that post).
Yesterday was a really bad day. The news was horrible.[1] Lately, when the news is bad, or I’m just feeling bad, or both, I turn on some really boring media; makeup reviews for makeup I have neither the money to buy nor the time to use and makeup tutorials for techniques that I will never master for fussy looks I’ll never try. These vlogs are the soothing background noise that facilitates the various domestic labors that make my life livable.
In “Remediation after 9/11,” Grusin recalls Benjamin’s work on shock and the anesthetizing power of consciousness. As Jonathan Flatley expertly summarizes, “the primary function of consciousness, Benjamin argues, is to insulate us from disruptive emotional experiences” (Flatley 18). Grusin argues that "game-playing serves precisely as a way for people to modulate or regulate their affective states by creating a media activity […] where they [can] have cognitive or sensory stimulation with a minimum of affective turbulence" (Grusin 112). Grusin’s argument turns video games into a technological prosthesis for Benjamin’s consciousness; video games take the place of consciousness, shielding us from “the violent or negative affective states produced by an ever-threatening world” (Grusin 112). I see Grusin’s intervention as specifically geared toward the use of media as a distributed prosthesis for consciousness, aka affect modulation.
Richmond further elaborates on the distributed and external affect modulation capacities of media by offering the diagnostic categories of profound and vulgar boredom. The former is characterized by a boredom that is made profound through its recourse to critical/analytical capacities and frameworks. The latter is a kind of boredom in which we are not led to “good” or intellectually productive thoughts by a media object. His argument would seem to suggest that not all media are suitable “shock absorbers.” Only some media objects allow us to be with ourselves in ways that are not productive or intensive. The media that place us in closer relationship with our bodies without the pressure of engaging the affective intensities of having a body are best suited to the labor of affective modulation. However, as Richmond emphasized throughout his essay – the media that inspires vulgar boredom is wholly subjective and subject to change.
My beauty-related media consumption is almost certainly a tool for such modulation – often consumed while I’m getting ready to go to sleep or taking a break from the rigors familiar to studying at UChicago, these videos place me in a non-productive, slack, and diffuse relationship with a screen that is otherwise a part of the intensity I seek reprieve from. However, I can imagine a world in which the same videos inspire a more rapt or “profound” form of boredom – those brief moments where the events of the “real” world seep into the world of makeup reviews, and I’m again face to face with the world from which I had sought escape.
As Chris pointed on my last post, I used “embodying difficulty” and “embodied relationship to difficulty” somewhat interchangeably. Chris’s observation that the former term, “with its connotation of active process and working-through” is more descriptive of an affective state is, I think, correct. In returning to this term I’m invited to think about the profoundly subjective underpinning of my claims about embodying difficulty, and perhaps around any claims I could make about particular intensities uncategorizable under larger rubrics of emotions experienced during game play. Continuing our classroom interrogation of the power of affect theory to make sense of our relationships with media, I’m wondering what diagnostic power “vulgar boredom” or “embodying difficulty” have when media itself can be seen as a prosthetic for consciousness, and when media consumption can be understood as a form of affect modulation. What is the power of a hermeneutic that, by definition, is not generalizable?
Works Cited:
Flatley, Jonathan. “Introduction: Like.” Like Andy Warhol. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2017.
Grusin, Richard. “Remediation After 9/11.” Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11. Palgrave, 2010.
Richmond, Scott C. “Vulgar Boredom or What Andy Warhol Can Teach Us about Candy Crush.” Journal of Visual Culture, 2015, 14:1, 21-39.
[1] (*~ if you need a place to come and process, I’m opening my house up on Monday night after 7:30p to folks who need some space to mourn/process – feel free to DM me on slack for more info ~*)
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