When reading Hodge’s ‘Vernaculars: The Always-On Image,’ I kept thinking of the recent show at the MCA, ‘I Was Raised on the Internet.’ Specifically, when Hodge writes that ‘the constitutive too-much-ness of always-on computing requires the management of the feelings it brings about and sustains,’ I thought of how so much of the aesthetic of that MCA show was one of sensory and semiotic overload. The works therein both represented this overload and induced it, often to the point of leaving me unable to form coherent thoughts or sentences for a few minutes, while I recovered from some object in silence. As interesting as the show and that too-much-ness was, that excess felt as though it was more of a kind with the genre of representing the internet, rather than the genre of living on and with the internet. That is, as opposed to the often blanket overwhelm of its representation, internet being (rage cycles notwithstanding) is as much a proliferation of virtual stillnesses and virtual intimacies as it is a proliferation of ‘too-much-ness.’ Here, I am thinking virtuality in the Deleuzian-Massumian sense in which it is the ‘cloud of potentiality’ that is as real as the actual, and from which the actual emerges. It is the cloud of all that could have happened from which that which actually did takes shape and persists in an enduring relationship to.
To think through selfies specifically, Hodge reads them as forms of self-touch and affirmation of the present, real and ongoing nature of one’s being in the world, and as a form of self-regulation in which one distinguishes oneself from the background excess of networked being. This is where he locates both the pleasure and anxiety of such performances. I think this reading is latent within the sensory and semiotic insistence of the objects in the MCA show and I don’t disagree with it. I would however augment it to say that while this kind of carnivalesque, hyper-present self-touching is one side of internet being, it coexists with a stillness and futurity that is the opening up of oneself to others that is experienced as a virtual touch. That is, where selfies are forms of self-regulation through self-touching - digital stims in their way - they are also forms of opening oneself to other people’s touch. Through them, one creates a space in which intimacies may form and be supported. This is a space of potentiality insofar as these intimacies are not the image itself, so much as they are the sum of the connections formed and sustained through it across the life of the image. That this life is effectively infinite renders this sum always a possible future, rather than an actual present. That is, it renders this sum a virtuality, the intuition of which supports the still ongoing emergence of the selfie’s well of intimacy.
Works Cited
Hodge, James J. “Vernaculars: The Always-On Image.” Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Visual Culture, Forthcoming 2019.
Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2005.