Ironies of Web 2.0

How do we take the measure of the contemporary? In the recent spate of texts championing "post-critique," the answer is formulated in the negative: not with the outmoded tools of psychoanalysis, ideology critique, or deconstruction. Who needs a hermeneutics of suspicion, ask Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, the editors of the special issue of Representations that first pitched the idea of "surface reading," when surfaces no longer conceal anything, when the workings of power are fully on display? "[D]emystifying protocols," they write, seem "superfluous in an era when images of torture at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere [are] immediately circulated on the internet."1 No point in attempting to uncover a hidden truth when things are just as they appear. Elsewhere, I have commented on the way this particular example, adduced for its self-evidence, raises questions that go unanswered: for instance, if the "immediate" circulation of images on the Internet plays a key role in making interpretation redundant, shouldn't the internet as medium of transmission be central to any discussion of "the way we read now"?

As for the images themselves: perhaps their explicit depiction of violence makes demystification redundant. But what are we to make of the fact that the violence in question just as explicitly draws on the image-repertoire of gay pornography?2 Is the rendering of neocolonialist torture as homo-pornographic fantasy an insignificant detail, or is its significance too obvious to state? Conversely, what if the pornographic spectacle of the abuse of power serves to keep power's more covert and quotidian forms of death dealing screened from view?3 Even at the level of the surface, the images do not refer in any simple way; they offer a meta-reflection on the medium and the process of their own production. If the awful scenes these images depict were composed "for" the camera — as the "thumbs up" poses and fourth-wall-breaking smiles of the torturers seem to suggest — then what they show is the (grotesquely homo-eroticized) collapse between the documentation and the practice of torture. In that case, the digital apparatuses of image circulation have themselves become central to torture's defining imaginaries, giving our incipient media theory both a queer and an altogether sinister inflection. From any angle, how can we be sure we know what we are seeing?

Eugenie Brinkema has helpfully characterized the modern-day position against interpretation in terms of a double negative — a "suspicion about suspicion (a wariness about wariness, skepticism about skepticism, mistrust of mistrust) rendered as ethical critique."4 Brinkema's phrasing suggests that "ethical critique" is itself a cover story. Surface reading and its cognates — "just reading" and "close but not deep" reading, as well as "distant reading" and "reparative reading" — can be understood as attempts to formulate an ethics of reading, in terms of the critical modalities (psychoanalytic, "paranoid," Marxist) they respond to by opposing. And yet it may be that in the digital era, we have more cause than ever to be paranoid in our readings of textual surfaces that emerge into visibility out of a vast, invisible substructure of algorithmic operations, and monetized flows of data.5 Surfaces may tell us less than ever about what they screen from view. My thesis is that language's constitutive indeterminacy, of the kind once pursued by deconstructionists, finds a properly technological support in contemporary digital media platforms, creating transformed conditions for humor, politics, and authorship.6 In this article, I focus specifically on the aesthetic prevalence of an irony that proceeds through double (and triple . . .) negation within contemporary media cultures in which images of torture at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere immediately circulate — along with a barrage of selfies, LOLcats, pornographic GIFs, and racist memes — on the internet. I will ask to what extent this is a postmodern irony; how it relates to the equally striking prevalence of pornified sexuality; what it reveals about the paradoxical status of authorship in online cultures; and how it generates a cultural logic that is at once embedded within, and transcendent of, the technological mediums of its expression.

What a liar you are!

Web 2.0 refers to the early twenty-first century rise of web platforms that are customizable, crowd-sourced, and interactive, such as social media platforms and video sharing sites: paradigmatic examples include the bulletin board 4chan (launched in 2003), Facebook (2004), and YouTube (2005). For the idealist, the technologies of Web 2.0 embed a certain democratic potential, turning authorship into an open category and inviting a mode of reading that can participate in the revision of the text (as on Wikipedia), its evaluation ("thumbs up" or "thumbs down"), and an active responsiveness through the comments threads that are arguably Web 2.0's most ubiquitous feature.

The rise of Web 2.0 "sharing" platforms is accompanied by an accelerated pace of circulation ("immediate," as Best and Marcus put it) as well as the massive profusion of texts and images, the sublime sense of an archive expanding infinitely in every direction. Reading, under these conditions, is a modality of surfing, a metaphor that conveys a sense of gliding across surfaces and that makes surface reading appear as a method well suited to the digital age.7

And yet, the digital in digital media also names a contemporary crisis of the surface.8 In digital images, the famed indexicality of the analog photographic image (its "existential" link to its referent) is replaced by a digital code; instead of the material emanation of the thing itself, the digital image is comprised of manipulable signifiers, 1s and 0s.9 A recent example: Justin Bieber poses for a Calvin Klein advertisement in his underwear (Fig. 1). A paranoid reading accompanies the viral circulation of the images: his musculature and penis size have been digitally enhanced. Soon, ostensibly unretouched images of an all-round smaller Bieber are "leaked," themselves going viral. But these in turn invite their own paranoid reading: perhaps it is the leaked images that are the fakes? Which version was retouched? The question is undecidable to the extent that the digital image has lost what Barthes calls its "evidential power."10 Images, in the digital era, are no more reliable than words.

The unreliability of words — and the function of the double negative — are thematized in a "precious story" that Freud tells in one of many discussions, in his book on jokes, of Jewish humor.11 In Freud's retelling:

Two Jews meet in a railway carriage at a station in Galicia. "Where are you going?" asks the one. "To Cracow," replies the other. "What a liar you are!" cries the first. "If you say you're going to Cracow, you want me to believe that you're going to Lemberg. But I know that in fact you're going to Cracow. So why are you lying to me?"12

The humor of the story (not that it tends to generate many laughs — except from my Jewish mother!) lies in its staging of the inherent negativity of words even when they do manage to mean what they say. Jacques Lacan, commenting on the story, formulates this negativity as the difference between the énoncé (the subject of the statement) and the énonciation (the subject making the statement).13 The story's absurdity, but also its plausibility, comes from the non-coincidence of those two registers. At the level of the énoncé, the statement is true: I am going to Cracow (said by somebody who is going to Cracow). But this true statement is corroded by the negativity of énonciation. If the speaker happens to be telling the truth, the negativity of énonciation is not canceled, leaving positive truth, but — here's the joke — redoubled into an even more devious lie. (This negativity, for Lacan, is the place of the subject, as subject of desire). Here the double negation (equivalent, as we will see, to JKJK) coincides with telling the truth, a truth that is, however, noncoincident with itself, because it has been unmade and remade through the operations of desire—not sexual desire per se, but the desire endemic to "speaking beings."

Freud categorizes the joke as "skeptical": what is funny is the first man's certainty that the other is lying no matter what he says. The first Jew is a paranoid reader. He "knows" the other is lying, and never questions his own capacity to see and to positively say the truth: "I know you are going to Crakow." The skeptical subject/paranoid reader is here adjudicator of truth-telling, suspicious that everything outside his own discourse is a lie, but occupying a subject position which is the place where interpretation resolves into truth.

If the humor of Freud's joke derives from the corrosive operations of skepticism — reversing every positive utterance into a double negative — the condition I want to characterize is one in which the skeptical position itself is undermined through a mise en abyme of further negations. What characterizes the "lulz" of Web 2.0, across text and images devoid of referential stability, is the suspension of any agency of adjudication (the skeptical position of the first Jew in the story), and with it, the coherent position of any subject of desire, rendering both the status of the énoncé and the authenticity of the énonciation fundamentally uncertain. This is a suspension that, far from a formalist game, increasingly does the work of politics.

Lulz/lol

Freud's joke highlights the paranoid skepticism that is endemic to the speaking subject, given the constitutive capacity of words to mean what they say or not to (Paul de Man calls this capacity irony). Of course, we are not always paranoid and skeptical. But in order not to be, we have to repress our knowledge of the reversibility inherent to language. In online cultures today, that reversibility, under the sign of irony, is frequently deployed in the service of rightwing politics.14

Consider, for example, an interview in November 2016 between Channel 4 journalist Cathy Newman and alt-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, a political figure whose celebrity depends on Web 2.0 strategies of self-promotion and trolling. In the interview — which, fittingly, had its largest audience on YouTube, where it has been viewed more than half a million times — Newman confronts Yiannopoulos with the headlines of some of the sexist and xenophobic stories that have appeared under his name in Breitbart.15 "You said 'women offended online should log off'; you said 'yes, we'll let women onto the men's Internet a couple of times a year, as long as you follow a few basic rules'; you said 'mass Muslim immigration must stop, or people will know real rape culture'...." Interrupting her, Yiannopoulos says sardonically: "You can't hear the humor in that? Can you genuinely not hear the joke?" (Can you genuinely not hear that I am not genuine? Are you pulling my leg that you can't see that I am pulling yours? The status of the "genuine" is put multiply in question.)

As the exchange continues, Yiannopoulos changes course, now asserting the headlines' validity, still in the mode of the rhetorical question: "Am I wrong? Am I wrong about that?" Finally, he stops asking and starts telling his interviewer: "You know perfectly well that it is a provocation designed to make people think and perhaps to make them laugh." He thus mansplains to Newman that she herself knows how to resolve the ambiguity that his "perhaps" ambiguously re-introduces. What interests me in this exchange is not so much the marshaling of humor as an alibi for hate speech — there is nothing new about that strategy — but the double positioning that oscillates, in the name of "laughs" or "lulz" (see below), between avowing and disavowing the sexist, racist, homophobic, or even, as we will see, genocidal statement: I was joking — no I wasn't — I was — perhaps. The violence or extremism of the statement is, if not modified, put into a state of oscillation that is prevented from stabilizing by the multiplications of JK (JKJK).

JK, JKJK, lol(z), lulz, ROFL. Across the interactive media environments of Web 2.0, such terms proliferate, with no positive semantic content but serving as a supplement that recasts (ironizes) the statement to which they attach or respond. They are additive, frequently appearing together: JK LOL. These acronyms, of course, stand for "just kidding;" "laughing out loud." (ROFL: "rolling on the floor laughing.") But they gain their functional meaning in their use, flying below the radar, as it were, of official dictionaries. On the interactive and heavily hyperlinked Urban Dictionary, another Web 2.0 platform, meaning itself is submitted to a quantitative or consumer rationale: user-proffered definitions are ranked thumbs up or thumbs down by other users, and their position shifts accordingly. The seriousness of the definitions, hard to ascertain, is displaced in favor of their ranking. In both their own style and their content, the definitions on urbandictionary.com demonstrate how the acronyms of digital culture function to undermine referential certainty. JK, according to one highly-ranked definition, is "What people use to say crap about you to you in your face and mean it but not be a complete jerk directly to you, but still are."16 Note that last clause, which reverses the sense of what had just been negated by "not." The sentence's own reversals mirror the way JK can function as an infinitely negating supplement. Or it can be subject to its own supplementary reversal when redoubled into JKJK which, writes another user, is "a secret [sic] jk that cancels out the first jk that you make so in the end, you're really not kidding."17 LOL, meanwhile, is the subject of a lively debate, with significations including: "Your statement lacks even the vaguest trace of humor but I'll pretend I'm amused." While it stands for "laughing out loud" (and/or "lots of love"), LOL can be used ironically to mean just the opposite. Lolz is the plural of LOL, and lulz is "a corruption of lol," but also has a more sinister and overtly amoral tone: "It's what you do things for," writes "Anonymous User," and offers the example (orig. italics): "Why post a giant image of 50 Hitlers? — I did it for the lulz."18

That casual example demonstrates the anti-humanist, mocking quality of lulz as well as its frequent association with racist images. It also shows how the negativizing operations of JK and its cognates are accompanied from the start by a meta-reflection on irony that might itself be "for the lulz." This is the case on Urban Dictionary (where joke definitions are hard to distinguish from serious definitions) and it appears in a more highbrow register in discussions of "metamodernism," said to be the twenty-first-century sequel to postmodernism.19 The online "Metamodernist Manifesto" embraces indeterminacy, aiming to reclaim for contemporary art a perspective "between and beyond irony and sincerity, naivety and knowingness, relativism and truth, optimism and doubt."20 Metamodernism, as a self-coined art movement, expresses at the level of art an aesthetic tendency of digital culture; it is neither on the side of sincerity nor of irony, though the "oscillation" it embraces is arguably another name for irony.21

Yiannopoulos advanced his own theory of Web 2.0 irony in a co-authored article published on Breitbart before he was fired for making comments about the pleasures of intergenerational gay sex — a career fate that suggests the right-wing defense of free speech in the United States is itself JK.22 The article, purporting to explain the alt-right and its culture of memes to old-school (pre-millennial) Republicans, argues that things in the world of alt-right web trolls are not what they seem to be. The "true motivation" of the "alt-right meme team," write the authors, is "not racism, the restoration of monarchy or traditional gender roles, but lulz." In a section titled "The Mask of Racism," we learn that "the meme brigade . . . [has] no real problem with race-mixing, homosexuality, or even diverse societies: it's just fun to watch the mayhem and outrage that erupts when those secular shibboleths are openly mocked." The motivation here for hate speech or racist memes is said to be "fun" or "lulz," and this end is arrived at via a strategy of representational transgression previously associated, they claim, with the left. It would be for this reason that alt-right memes frequently feature the swastika. "[T]he alt-right openly crack jokes about the Holocaust . . . albeit almost entirely satirically."23 Note the ominous effect of the "almost" in that phrase, which (like Yiannopoulos's "perhaps" in the interview with Newman) reactivates the very doubt it ostensibly forecloses. According to this argument, the swastikas and Hitler images that proliferate on alt-right sites and on bulletin boards like 4chan do not express genuine fascist commitments or anti-Semitism (almost; perhaps). These memes would be forms of transgressive speech whose mode is irony, an irony that would ambiguously suspend their referential value, or subordinate it to its aimed effect of lulz as an end in itself, transcendent of all content.

Irony, which Kierkegaard described as an "infinite and absolute negativity," has the depthlessness, extensibility and ambiguity of JK.24 As an infinite negativity, irony cannot be simply asserted; any such assertion is at risk of its own ironic reversal (are you pulling my leg that you don't know that I'm pulling your leg?). It is for this reason that the editor of a neo-Nazi site could argue, in response to Yiannopoulos and Bokhari's article, that the alt-right "irony" in question is itself ironic (JKJK). What is at stake, he wrote, is "non-ironic Nazism masquerading as ironic Nazism." And he added, "lulz are a weapon of the race war."25

The predominating rhetorical register of lulz connects overtly far-right and neo-Nazi sites to more complexly oriented bulletin boards such as 4chan and Reddit — and also to massively popular YouTube stars such as PewDiePie. Famous for filming himself playing video games, PewDiePie is YouTube's most-watched star ever, recently attaining sixty-nine million subscribers. The neo-Nazi site mentioned above included, at the time, an image of PewDiePie in its homepage banner, establishing a continuity between two seemingly far-removed corners of the Internet: the popular mainstream and the extremist fringe. The connection either was or was not facetious. PewDiePie became the object of controversy around this time over a series of videos in which, for example, he dons army regalia and watches footage of Hitler in Triumph of the Will, smirking and nodding.26 (From the YouTube comments thread: "does these people know any of the sarcasm?"; other comments include anti-Semitic and other racist statements.)27 In another notorious video, he used an app to pay two men in India five dollars to film themselves holding a sign reading "DEATH TO ALL JEWS," while laughing and dancing. He broadcast this footage to his then-sixty million subscribers. The neo-Nazi site's adoption of PewDiePie's image as a page header recast his "sarcasm" as ambiguously serious, even as it recast the site's own content as ambiguously satirical. For his part, PewDiePie said (in a series of mea culpa videos that themselves don't escape his constitutively ironic mode of address) that he "of course" meant it as a joke. PewDiePie's deployment of anti-Semitic and misogynist tropes "for the lulz" provoked an interpretive debate that played out across contexts from traditional newspapers to online comments threads, to the corporate channels of some of his YouTube sponsors — no doubt, only money "talks" in a register that is immune to irony's corrosions. PewDiePie might be (construed as) a metamodernist performance artist or else a white supremacist masquerading as a comic. That neither of those possibilities is foreclosed in his "art" might also be the key to the very thing that drives it, namely its commercial success.

In PewDiePie's case, the effect of this indeterminacy is to render him "zany" - one of three aesthetic categories (along with the "cute" and the "interesting") that, according to Sianne Ngai, reign across "Web 2.0 culture in its entirety," comprised as it is of "zany blogs, cute tweets, and interesting wikis."28 (His name is itself a derivation of "cute." [Fig. 2]) But the functioning of this trinity of aesthetic categories, I propose, cannot be separated from its saturation by two others: the "funny?" expressed in those ubiquitous digital acronyms, JK, LOL, ROFL, and the "sexy," in both pornographic and non-pornographic declensions, which no longer functions, I will argue, in the ways we are accustomed.

Consider the conjoining of the "funny?" and the "sexy" in a video posted by YouTube user itsRucka (viewed over one million times) that creates a melodic refrain out of the phrase "Hitler is PewDiePie."29 This refrain devolves, later in the song, into a series of pornographic statements: "There's a butthole that I want to bang tonight / It belongs to Hitler also known as PewDiePie / and he won't have a chance to say no thank you sir I'm fine / cos I'm like super strong and I fuck super hard." The music video is absurdist (one form of the "zany"); it advances a gay pornographic rape fantasy in the register of an irony that sexualizes PewDiePie, or makes explicit the ways his Internet persona is already implicitly sexualized. The conjunction of sex and irony runs in multiple directions and across multiple platforms: on February 24, 2018, PewDiePie came out as gay on Twitter, tweeting "No video today due to unforeseen circumstances, I choose now to live as a gay man."30 (The phrase "I choose now to live as a gay man" was taken from Kevin Spacey's coming out statement a few months earlier.) Contradicted by his public, heterosexual relationship with another "cute" and "zany" YouTube star, CutiePieMarzia, this was a coming out for the lulz, deploying the language of personal choice and self-affirmation — also ubiquitous in contemporary culture — but in the mode of (ambiguous) irony. (Some of PewDiePie's fans took his coming out in earnest, dutifully posting affirming comments in the Twitter thread.)

We are far away here from what Eve Sedgwick called the "epistemology of the closet," which named a system organized around the life-or-death stakes of disclosure vs. concealment, bound up in the equally high stakes question of (male) hetero/homosexual distinction.31 In the digital era, the drama of secrecy/disclosure no longer structures a dominant subjectivity founded in secrecy and based on homophobic repression, but rather generates signs subject to ironic reversal. The operative distinction is no longer hidden/revealed, but rather ironic/sincere. True enough, PewDiePie's coming out "for the lulz" can be considered funny only from the perspective of old-fashioned homophobia, which is clearly therefore still operative; at the same time, the critique of homophobia is itself folded into the irony in question ("you're all a bunch of homophobes," quips PewDiePie in one video.) The oscillation between "funny" negation and double (and triple) negation, conjoined with and extending to a discourse on sex and sexual identity, is a major feature of the chatrooms, bulletin boards, and social media spaces that constitute our twenty-first-century version of a public sphere.32

Sarcastic cuteness

Media scholar Alexandra Juhasz has written about irony's "ubiquity" in post-cinematic media cultures, and specifically on YouTube, a paradigmatic Web 2.0 platform.33 "YouTube," she writes, "is all irony, all the time" to the point that "it has become unpopular, if not downright impossible, to see the difference between sincerity and satire. We can't." Juhasz doesn't say why post-cinematic media forms cause this hypertrophy of irony, but she seems to hold out the hope that those media forms could be repurposed in a way that would escape irony's hegemony.

What is at stake in this irony is not simply satire that presents itself as such, but rather the collapse of a vantage point for adjudicating between satire and sincerity. For Juhasz, this corrosive indeterminacy is distinct from an earlier modernist irony that maintains a critical distance from its object (consider the self-reflexive objectification of Brigitte Bardot's body in the opening prologue of Jean-Luc Godard's Le Mépris [1963]). Modernist irony, in the romantic lineage, establishes a critical distance from its object that takes the form of narrative self-reflexivity. Web 2.0 irony would evince both a historical and a modal departure from that earlier irony that constructs the position of, in Fichte's account, a "self standing above its own experiences."34 More than a decade before the advent of Web 2.0, Jameson had already remarked the collapse of a critical position in his work on postmodernism. The postmodernist author does not subtract himself from his material, ironizing it as it were; he is a machine of mechanical reproduction, parroting "dead styles," speaking "through all the masks and voices stored up in the imaginary museum of a now global culture."35 (Global culture, perhaps — although the actual practitioners of "postmodern" art and literature were or are overwhelmingly white men in the urban centers of the USA.) A machine of mechanical reproduction was how Andy Warhol liked to present himself: "The interviewer," he once said in an interview, "should just tell me the words he wants me to say and I'll repeat them after him. I think that would be so great because I'm so empty I just can't think of anything to say."36 Warhol's postmodern self is an empty vessel, rather than a self standing above its experiences. This subjective destitution or emptying is matched by what Jameson famously called the "waning of affect" — the "deathly" flatness, for example, of Warhol's "Diamond Dust Shoes."37

And yet, as David James observes, the "erasure of authorship" was, paradoxically, Warhol's "most characteristic authorial gesture."38 Something different is at stake in the ironies of Web 2.0. For one thing, the erasure of authorship is realized on bulletin boards like 4chan, which are properly anonymous (Fig. 3). In these engines of Web 2.0, memes are posted by users with made-up names and in their forwarding and circulation they lose even that minimal attribution of authorship. Second, while the memes created there recycle cultural material, appropriating "dead styles," as Jameson put it in relation to postmodernism, they deploy these borrowed materials in ways that are far from blank or affectively neutral. Veering between highly charged symbols like the swastika and images of cute cats, they maintain a consistent aim of producing affect — passing through Ngai's categories of the zany, the cute, and the interesting — at the center of which is lulz. Lulz are, by definition, not affectless; they name a form of affective concentration and intensity. But they transform the meaning of affect, negativizing it from within — as we can see in the case of a signature 4chan invention, the LOLcats.

Unlike Pepe the Frog, a right-wing meme made popular on 4chan, the LOLcats do not have any political signification.39 But like most everything on 4chan, they are designed for lolz — it's in their title (Fig. 4). At the same time, they are cute. According to Ngai, cuteness is the contemporary aesthetic category that condenses the qualities of the commodity. Commodities, in order to become commodities, must produce an affective response that impels us to consume them; the cute is one name for this response, an impulse to merge with the cute object by consuming it, smothering it in kisses or eating it up.40

The LOLcats are indeed cute, possibly stimulating a desire to hug or devour them, but, writes Juhasz, the lolz in their title are also lolz of sarcasm. Juhasz addresses the reader: "Do you, Kool-Aid drinker, actually find them cute — oooh how precious, so sweet n furry — or, like me, would you posit that they enable a sarcastic viewing position?" That sarcastic viewing position is registered, for example, in the poor spelling and grammar that are a staple of the genre ("I ARE CRYING CUZ I ARE OUT OF FOCUSS"). But Juhasz also comments, crucially, that in the case of LOLcats the two alternatives aren't distinct but enmeshed: the critical and affective distance of the sarcastic viewer "[holds] within itself its own sappy reverse, its soft-spot for cuteness." We could say that each negativizes the other from within.

A sarcasm that holds within itself the very sappiness it is sarcastic about; conversely, a feeling of cuteness that keeps veering into an irony which would seem to negate it. The affective response to cuteness, an impulse toward proximity, consumption, merging, somehow here encompasses the cool distance of irony without each canceling the other. This irony (Juhasz's "sarcastic viewing position") seems to be an effect of the medium, of the technological mediation and memetic circulation of cuteness. This is certainly the case on 4chan, where cute images preponderate but where a sarcastic viewing position seems built into the very form of the bulletin. Which is to say: real-life babies or cats are simply cute; our response to that cuteness, varied as it may be, is rarely redoubled by sarcasm. Things in themselves cannot be ironic; irony is a property of mediation, or (differently formulated), it exists in the register of signification (and not of being). Yet, as David Halperin remarks, irony is also not "a formal property of language. It has no fixed or unambiguous linguistic markers."41 It is an unmarked supplement that negativizes an utterance without altering its form. Like pornography in Justice Stewart's famous definition, you have to "know it when you see it." But Juhasz's point about YouTube culture is that we don't know it when we see it, or don't know if we know — JK/JKJK. John Searle maintains that we can make the distinction by understanding the background context and the intentionality of the author.42 In the case of "ironical speech," he writes, we quite easily achieve determinacy by distinguishing "sentence meaning" from "speaker meaning."43 In contemporary digital platforms where authorship is often erased, it is not always possible to identify the speaker. But even where there is an author or speaker — or where we can construct or imagine a plausible one — the ironies of web 2.0 function in such a way that "speaker meaning" frequently cannot be determined, even by the speaker. And even if it could, nothing would be resolved. An imagined intentionality cannot tame or arrest the technological reproduction of indeterminacy that unmoors authorship and inheres in the platform.

The death and rebirth of the author, or a short history of irony

The postmodernist author's self-erasure is a refusal of the modernist ideal of originality and the existentialist idea of authenticity. Yet in postmodernist literature and art, the author nevertheless survives as a transcendent and value-laden signifier: the commodity value of a Warhol artwork, for example, depends on an intact and even hyperbolic author-function. In Web 2.0, what I referred to above as the real erasure of authorship on bulletin boards finds its (perhaps dialectical) counterpart in the hyperbolization of subjectivity in ubiquitous digital practices of self-imaging and self-presentation. Web 2.0 is defined by the strange co-presence of the "erasure of authorship" and its converse, the social media profile and the selfie, which extend their generic reign in the form of video diaries, confessionals, vlogs, how-to videos on YouTube, etc. The selfie is a genre that is pure author-function, constituting a phatic and non-ironic insistence of the author without any other necessary content. Warhol purported to empty the author category of content while maintaining and heightening its commodity value. That move was itself received as an operation of artistic genius, so Warhol takes his place among the canon of great artists. In Web 2.0, the idea of the vacuous author as commodity is both extended and detached from the Romantic tradition of the author-genius.

Let us follow Juhasz for one more turn and consider an example that demonstrates the way the selfie form troubles the question of authorial intentionality in a different manner than the postmodernist "erasure of authorship." Juhasz writes that a student in her class on YouTube, using the moniker Footballbob22, completed his class assignment by uploading a video, consisting of a high-minded monologue, delivered from his dorm room, about the virtues of YouTube and the dangers of drugs.44 Watching this video, Juhasz assumed that the uninflected earnestness of Footballbob22's delivery must indicate "that he means the very opposite of what he says." ("If you tell me you are going to Crakow, it's because you want me to think you are going to Lemberg!") Attuned to the ironies of Web 2.0, Juhasz could only imagine that Footballbob22's performance mocked its own enunciating voice, in a kind of first-person free indirect discourse through which a knowing, sardonic, authorial self would be silently commenting on its own narration, negativizing it as it were. In that case, we would have a YouTube version of the literary tendency David Foster Wallace described in his analysis of 1980s and '90s postmodernist literature.45 For example in Don DeLillo's White Noise (1985), Wallace writes, "the authorial tone throughout is a kind of deadpan sneer."46 This metaphorical "sneer" manifests not at the level of narrative content but as a transcendent narrative distance, the ironic distance of the first-person voice from the content of its narration.47

This "sneering" narrative voice differs from the earlier kind of ironic narration, achieved through free indirect discourse, that reached its apotheosis in the novels of Jane Austen. In those novels, as D.A. Miller has shown, the narrative voice (a narrating "No One") both mimics and distinguishes itself from its characters.48 In assuming the linguistic registers of its characters, dropping into their way of formulating things, the narration sweeps down to the particular from its transcendent position of moral universality. "[W]hen free indirect style mimics Emma's thoughts and feelings," writes Miller, "it simultaneously inflects them into keener observations of its own."49 In this way, it works to "put the characters under its correction," constructing its own impeccable position by subtracting itself from theirs through the operations of irony.

But though Austen's narrating No One puts its characters under its correction, it never condescends to or sneers at them. Nor is a sneering narration characteristic of modernist deployments of free indirect discourse as the novel evolves in the twentieth century (for example, in Virginia Woolf). Wallace, writing in 1993, argues that this particular form of ("sneering") irony emerges as a different medium exerts its influence on the novel, namely television. According to Wallace, DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon were ahead of their time; David Leavitt and other writers born in the 1950s and early '60s were the first generation of writers that grew up in a world saturated and transformed by television. These authors translate into literary style an ironic self-consciousness that accompanied television's rise to cultural dominance and prevailed across TV genres of the 1980s and '90s, from commercials, to the late night standup of David Letterman, to sitcoms. This style, contagious across media forms, "invites complicity between its own witty irony and veteran-viewer Joe's cynical, nobody's-fool appreciation of that irony."50 It is an ironic, knowing style that hails an indifferent, jaded (but somehow still engaged) viewer, one who was "last naïve about something at maybe like age four."51 No doubt this viewer/reader takes pleasure in being surprised by nothing, cynical about everything, distanced from, but somehow still transfixed by, the never-ending spectacle of televisual simulation — or its literary translation.52

It is something like this postmodern jadedness that Juhasz thought she detected in her student's YouTube video. But things take a surprising turn: "When pressed, and now somewhat confused, [Footballbob22] ruefully admitted that his video was, in fact, straight, serious, sincere. As was he." And then she adds: "But who's to know really?" The first thing to note here is that where the 1980s and '90s style described by Wallace is defined by a jadedness that excludes sincerity and disavows affect, in these Web 2.0 examples, neither sincerity nor affect is foreclosed. As with the LOLcats' cuteness, sincerity is symbiotically enmeshed with an irony that it cannot shake. As in Freud's joke, the speaker's claims about his own intentions fail to convince; the utterance remains subject to an ironic reversal that exceeds the author's authority on the question of his own speech. In Freud, it is the unconscious that gives the lie to conscious intention. In the examples we are considering, I propose that in an overdetermined media context of pervasive irony, some combination of technology and form works to displace both conscious and unconscious intention, such that the author is no longer any kind of authority on the question of his own sincerity. "Who's to know, really?"

Britny spears sucks lol (joking)

Let us consider another example: one of the best-known YouTube confessionals, Chris Crocker's viral video "Leave Britney Alone," which appeared in two parts in 2007 and garnered four million views within two days.53 In this video, a young genderqueer man addresses the camera apparently from his bedroom.54 Crocker's posting was made the morning after Britney Spear's disastrous "comeback" performance at the 2007 MTV Music Video Awards. An emotional Crocker defends Britney against the mocking comments her performance engendered. In this case, indeterminacy works in the register of affective excess rather than pedagogical restraint. "How fucking dare anyone out there make fun of Britney after all she has been through!" yells a teary Crocker (Fig. 5). "She lost her aunt! She went through a divorce! She had two fucking kids! Her husband turned out to be a user, a cheater . . . All you people care about is readers, and making money off of her! SHE'S A HUMAN!" The monologue builds to its titular climax, with a wild-eyed and distraught Crocker yelling: "LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE!"

This YouTube video functions as a commentary on postmodern stardom and celebrity culture, marked by a collapse of public and private, and as a confessional.55 As such, the performance was generally taken to be in earnest.56 The video itself became the object of satire, including on Saturday Night Live (old-school satire, on the "old" medium of television), which took its seriousness for granted, as well as generating countless memes and remixes.57 But as in the case of Footballerbob22, it seems hard to discount the possibility that the video might not be entirely serious. In both cases, the formal properties that indicate "authenticity" — there, over-earnestness; here, excessive emotionality — are the very ones that arouse our suspicion, as in Freud's joke. But unlike in the joke, in these cases of Web 2.0 self-portraiture, nobody "really" knows who is or isn't going to Crakow — neither the skeptical commentator or the person who might be going there. Like Footballerbob22, Chris Crocker said (in interviews) that the video confession is authentic. But, to repeat Juhasz's comment, "who's to know really?" The confessing subject's position on the sincerity of his own confession fails to convince, or at least to allay every doubt. The question remains undecidable not because the unconscious veils its true motives — that would imply that we could resolve it through an analysis of the speaking subject — but because something about the interrelation of form and technology (not just language but the form of its technologization) erodes the vantage point from which the referential status of the utterance could be adjudicated. Just as television, in Wallace's account, generates postmodern style through its massification of culture and by filling domestic life with its own simulation, here the interactive forms of Web 2.0 culture seem to generate a style that turns around the fundamental indeterminacy of the confession, the groundlessness of an enunciation that does not clearly belong to a "self standing above its own experiences."58 For this reason, Crocker seems no more convincing when he says that his video is in earnest than PewDiePie when he claims that his videos are not. Both claims seem liable at any moment to reverse into JK.

If the veridical status of the confession is thus rendered unstable, so too, in this aesthetic-techno-social system, is the operation of aesthetic judgment. In the comments thread of one autotune remix of Crocker's video, a commenter writes: "britny spears sucks lol (joking)."59 It's not clear if the addition of lol affirms the view that Britney Spears sucks or negates it by making it ironic, and the parenthetical JK hardly clears up the matter (a friend asks: "can one unironically not like Britney Spears anymore?"). The double and triple negatives of contemporary digital culture encompass confession and aesthetic judgment, and this is a mode that differs both from 1990s televisual cynicism, which is at least consistently cynical, and from camp as the aesthetic pleasure taken in "passionate failures," as Susan Sontag once put it.60 It is certainly possible to enjoy Britney Spears in a camp way, which is to say, in a way that asserts the spectator's aesthetic self-confidence. Camp spectatorship is a position that knows better than its object and better than anyone else, transvaluing what others deem failed or excessive and arrogating to itself a superior power of aesthetic judgment that overturns common consensus. But in these examples, nobody knows for sure (britny spears sucks lol [joking]). Crocker's adulation of Spears lacks the distance and the irony of camp, although it might be camp if we could know that he were joking; conversely, if we could pin him to an unambiguous sincerity, his performance might itself become susceptible to a camp transvaluation as its own kind of "passionate failure." But to take it as unambiguously sincere is to miss its metamodernist "oscillation." Crocker's performance is both behind and ahead of any attempt to read it as camp; oscillating between sincerity and satire, like Schrödiger's cat (Schrödiger's LOLcat), the performance, the confession, is always somewhere other than where you find it.

Sexy

The subject of this new media ecology, vying for attention in a media landscape whose sublime expanse risks overwhelming her, stands on shaky ground. If her confession is ambiguous, the quantitative imperative that solicits it is not. There is nothing ironic about the number of views; that number has the hard materiality of a fact. Compelled by a quantitative imperative, the confession's platform prevails over its content. Ultimately, it doesn't matter if Chris Crocker and PewDiePie are serious or not, what matters is the number of hits. In Giardina Papa's video, need ideas?!?PLZ!!, young video bloggers address their anonymous viewers, asking for suggestions about what they should do in order to expand their viewership. They have nothing concrete to tell; they are interpellated by the form of the communication, producing the portrait of a classically neurotic subject (not a single subject but a whole "demographic," as Erica Levin puts it), uncertain what the Other wants, but ready to do whatever is required, if they could only figure out what it was.61 They try asking directly — "what do you want me to do?" But Giardina Papa's work suggests the neurosis in question may pertain to the platform more than the individual psyche.

As Levin observes, some sense of potentially creepy sexuality, ambient rather than specifically located, clouds the horizon of this disarming solicitation to the viewer/Other. It derives not from anything that the video bloggers say or do in particular, but from two aspects of the medium: its propensity to sexualize anonymous interaction, and the proximity of these webcam sites to others in which performers, working for money, make a similar but less innocent solicitation: "what do you want me to do?"62 Pornography is never more than a click away. If ironic ambivalence characterizes YouTube culture, so too does a similarly ambivalent sexualization, in the register of the (always potentially) pornographic.63

No contemporary star embodies this conjunction more fully than Kim Kardashian West, a figure whose celebrity is native to Web 2.0. West is the author of a best-selling anthology of Instagram selfies, ironically(?) titled Selfish (2015). The 512-page book features images of its author accompanied by a sparse and anodyne textual narrative. "Photos are memories to me. As soon as I see an image, all of the details of the day or moment come alive for me. I remember Stephen Moleski did my makeup and Clyde Haygood did my hair" (Fig. 6). "It was so hot in Thailand. I was sweating and loved how the lighting was at this waterfall. Thailand had the best food, nicest people. I can't wait to go back. We stayed at the nicest place. Such a great experience" (Fig. 7). "Fresh spray tan. I get so dark ... Kanye calls it a Yé-tan."64 What are we to make of this banal attachment of the "I" to a series of platitudes about memories and family and friends, and the equally banal repetition of the adjectives "best, nicest, great"? The objects and people to which these adjectives attach — friends, Kanye, Thailand — are eerily absent from the images in Selfish; the caption "Thailand had the best food, nicest people" accompanies no image of Thailand, its food, or its people; similarly, the deictic "this waterfall" confuses because the waterfall is nowhere to be seen (fig. 7). If digital photography already erodes photography's indexical certainty, Kardashian West's vast oeuvre of selfies effects an erosion in a different sense, or rather a dissolution: the index points only to the subject; the subject is the only object. While the text multiplies platitudes about an object-world consisting of family, friends, and places, the images evoke a world filled to the brim with the "I," an "I" visually detached from social bonds and fully consumed by — exalted in — serialized self-reflection (a relation to self that is precisely reflective rather than reflexive, the title of the book notwithstanding).65

 

Nevertheless, this serial performance of a self whose self-actualization takes the form of endlessly proliferating mirror images is framed as an explicit address to an Other. From the inside flap to Selfish: "This book is a candid tribute to all my fans, who were with me the entire time." Whereas narcissism names the retreat from object relations into self-reflection (Narcissus at the pond) — in technical, Freudian terms, the retreat of libido from an object-cathexis to an ego-cathexis — the larger context of Selfish is the environment of "likes" and "retweets" which generated the images. In other words, the text constitutively performs the relation to some generalized Other, given the name "the fans," who are "with me the entire time," though nowhere to be seen. The Other will not manifest phenomenologically but exists as an affectively well-disposed, quantitative potentiality. Strikingly, what characterizes the address to the abstract but quantified Other is its sexual solicitation. For all the chaste conventionality of the family-and-friends rhetoric that accompanies them, these selfies draw most consistently on the image-repertoire (the poses, angles, and facial expressions) not of glamor photography but of pornography — "wife life," indeed! (fig. 8). The self of the selfie invents and presents itself (to itself, to a quantified but nonspecific audience, to the apparatus) as the object of an explicitly erotic gaze, one that can no longer be said to be "male," since the syntactical operation of suture that qualified it as such in classical narrative cinema is here absent; an erotic gaze attached to nobody in particular.66

Although Selfish is roughly as long as the combined two volumes of Rousseau's Confessions, and although family and sexuality are central topics in both, Kardashian West's book does not give us symptomatic clues about Kim's "desire"; it cannot be read for the series of unstable binaries that underpins it (as Derrida reads Rousseau), for its slippages or displacements (no arguments are made; there is no exculpatory discourse; no metonymy) or for the latent desires the text aims to conceal but symptomatically discloses (as Freud reads Schreber's autobiography). Selfish, in other words, does not lend itself to psychoanalytic or to deconstructive modes of reading. This does not mean that its surfaces conceal nothing. In their apparently phatic function, one thing they conceal is the operation of the apparatus that calls them forth, the coordinated labors of management consultants, agents, publicists, and the cross-platform marketing campaign that operates between cable television (Keeping Up With the Kardashians), commercial print media (Selfish), and ostensibly "free" social media, in a symbiotic, transmedia generation of commodity value.67 The dimensionality of these images and their accompanying discourse is clearly not that of Rousseau's or Schreber's texts, though it is still bound up in (and produces, as a text machine) the vicissitudes of sexuality: in this case, it lies in the strange discrepancy between the affirmational chasteness of the written text and the pornographic quality of the images.

The sexy — like the "funny?" — is a pervasive (aesthetic?) category of Web 2.0 culture that accompanies, and modifies from within, the zany, the cute, and the interesting (or here, the dialectical counterpart of the interesting — the entirely uninteresting, which we all recognize in Facebook and Instagram posts of people's cats and restaurant meals). Fittingly, Chris Crocker's next appearance, after "Leave Britney Alone," was as a porn star, as if the shift from one mode to the other — ambiguously ironic confessional to porn acting — were obvious, or no shift at all. Although I cannot elaborate here, it is worth remarking that sexiness in this context is distinct from sexuality as it functions in Foucault's account of the dispositif or "apparatus" formed at the "juncture between Christian confession and medicine."68 That dispositif, which I have elsewhere argued began to dwindle after the 1960s, constituted sexuality as the opaque domain of the subject's truth.69 "Since Christianity," says Foucault, "the Western world has never ceased saying: 'To know who you are, know what your sexuality is' ... In Christian societies, Sex has been the central object of examination, surveillance, avowal and transformation into discourse."70 Entrepreneurs of Web 2.0 surely remain subject to an "incitement to discourse," to use Foucault's phrase; the interactive technologies of Web 2.0 generate an endless demand for self-representation, for representation with a phatic function. But in this postcinematic regime, sexuality arguably no longer lends itself to hermeneutics in the same way it did in the confessional regime whose normalizing, disciplining effects Foucault made clear. Sexuality, omnipresent, seems to inhere in the technological mode of the transaction, to be as much a property of the medium as of the subject. Kim K., giving us a diary of sorts, is a Rousseau for the era of social media. And while de Man laid bare the "text machine" that operated at the inhuman center of Rousseau's text (thereby taking aim at the Enlightenment humanism that Rousseau represents), Kim K. demonstrates that the text machine is an actual machine, a technology of digital reproduction, of instantaneous transmission, and of the immediate, quantifiable "interactivity" of views and likes.

Spring break forever

In a kind of postcinematic feedback loop, these aesthetic tendencies of contemporary online media ramify in the more venerable register of independent film, which is still organized under the sign of an auteur who is not the phatic subject-object of selfies, but generator of a narrative voice that is distinct from its material. Nevertheless, the "filmic narrator" that emerges in the cinema characteristic of the era of Web 2.0 reproduces the uncertainties of YouTube narration.

In this scene from Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers (2013), for example, Britney Spears again makes an appearance as an object of affective intensity that is at once satirical and sincere. The irony here, such as it is, is not straightforward; the scene is not (simply) a satirical commentary on the false valuation of talentlessness in the contemporary culture industry. It doesn't have the jadedness Wallace associated with TV and its sardonic spectator. Nor does the narration work to "put the characters under its correction," as did Austen's. The narrative voice or "filmic narrator" in Spring Breakers does not inflect its characters' thoughts and feelings into keener observations of its own.71 Instead, the scene stages an affective and aesthetic intensification that congeals in Spears's voice, swelling up to replace the characters' thin diegetic homage to her 2003 hit "Everytime" with a lushly recorded, nondiegetic track, and that ramifies visually in the seapunk mise-en-scène, the saturated colors of the sunset, the choreography of silhouetted bodies, and the handheld camera gliding into lyrical slow motion. The "filmic narrator" gives itself over to the aesthetic pleasure of listening to Spears, non-sarcastically as it were, even as a different layer of irony is introduced in the collision between the lush aesthetic just described and the images of violence that ensue. At the same time, it cannot be entirely in earnest that the James Franco character, Alien, describes Spears as "one of the greatest singers of all time, and an angel if there ever was one on this earth." The film's treatment of Spears — recalling the "cute, gooey" LOLcats — is at once affectively rich and sarcastic, sincere and satirical. As Nikolaj Lübecker observes in relation to Korine's earlier Trash Humpers (2009), "it is difficult to establish a position in relation to the film." 72 The narration doesn't give us a vantage point from which to adjudicate between alternative points of view; it invites and inhibits identification with every viewing position (whether critical, amused, or joyful). Were we to laugh, "we do not really know what we would be laughing at."73 Lübecker relates this ambiguity to the twenty-first-century collapse of any belief in the "redemptive" or "emancipatory" value of transgression, an idea I will return to momentarily.

A similar indeterminacy characterizes the film's reproduction of a racist tropology and a sexist gaze — and here we have come full circle, back to 4chan's sexist and racist memes. The film begins, pre-spring break, with two of the film's four protagonists attending a college lecture on the civil rights movement. Impervious to what the lecturer is saying about intersecting histories of racial violence in the twentieth century, the two white girls trade lewd cartoon images (fig. 9); as the lecturer mentions "Hitler and fascism and his racist policies," Ashley Benson's character draws "Spring Break Bitch" inside the outline of a penis on her notepad and mock-fellates the drawing. This does not serve to indicate, however, that sex is the motive force that animates the spring breakers' destructive frenzy. "Sex" is certainly involved, but it is entirely on the surface and, moreover, is never clearly distinguished from joking. Halperin, in the essay on irony I cited above, writes that "'Fuck me' . . . is the least ironic utterance in the world"; Spring Breakers suggests that this truth does not survive into the twenty-first century.74

 

In the opening lecture scene, the film sets up a critical perspective on the history of racial oppression in the U.S. and globally as one from which the spring breakers — and the film — take their leave at the outset. The film then proceeds to construct, without commenting on, a narrative of racial violence: the mostly white protagonists assault, rob, and eventually murder mostly black victims. The film's perspective on these scenes of racialized violence is as difficult to specify as Alien's perspective on Britney Spears. (Korine has an ongoing fascination with "politically incorrect" racial representation; he is the author of a novel titled A Crackup at the Race Riots [1998], and shares a fascination for the transgression of representational taboos with the similarly ambiguous ironists on 4chan.) The same goes for the film's hyperbolization of the infamous "male gaze" of classical narrative cinema (fig. 10). One reviewer remarked:

It's among the perviest movies ever made . . . [It] opens with a montage of bouncing bare boobs and buttocks barely squeezed into bikini bottoms, the camera gliding up the lengths of young girl's thighs . . . A friend whispered, "The camera is like a giant tongue." You can almost hear the slurping.75

Evincing neither the detached equanimity of Jane Austen's narrating "No One" nor the "deadpan sneer" of the postmodernist DeLillo, the filmic narrator in Spring Breakers is a pervy, white hetero-male whose erotic interest both cites and reproduces a historical principle of the apparatus, namely its codification of a male gaze. In other words, there is nothing subversive about the film's aesthetics, but this "nothing subversive" is itself marshalled so obtrusively that, like Freud's Jew going to Crakow, it may or may not mean the opposite of what it says. (The film polarized reviewers along political lines: the left-leaning Cahiers du Cinéma ranked it second-best film of 2013, whereas the right-wing Daily Mail gave it a single star.)

In a reading of the film Gamer (Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, 2009), Steven Shaviro describes its refusal of "subversion" — its performance of complicity with sexist and racist genre norms — as a similarly obtrusive narrative and aesthetic strategy. The directors of Gamer, writes Shaviro, "never exhibit moral concern, or adopt an overtly critical stance" toward their material.76 Rather than challenging sexism, racism, or the neoliberal extension of a market logic to all domains of experience — that is, rather than creating a counter-cinema — the strategy of films like Gamer is "not to offer a critique, but to embody the situation so enthusiastically, and absolutely, as to push it to the point of absurdity."77 This would be the accelerationist approach he sees as the only viable strategy under conditions of "real subsumption."78 (On Facebook, Shaviro declared his love of Spring Breakers.) Elsewhere he writes that the directors' "adherence to... [sexist and racist] genre norms is so perfunctory as almost to be sarcastic."79

Note the recurrence of that "almost," which we earlier encountered in Yiannopoulos and Bokhari's alt-right screed. We are back in the domain of the LOLcats, where a "sarcastic" viewing position was indistinguishable from affective absorption, or of PewDiePie's "zany" pranks ("does these people know any of the sarcasm?") PewDiePie is, of course, the world's most famous gamer. And here it becomes apparent that a contradiction afflicts Shaviro's spatial metaphor, "to push it to the point of absurdity." Absent any "metalevel," from which, writes Shaviro, "the film might reflexively comment upon its own content and practice," what would determine the location of that point of absurdity?80 The distinction between absurd and non-absurd can only be established from a critical position outside the field in which it operates. From what vantage point — if not from the universalist perspective of Jane Austen's narrating No One, or the ironic distance of a modernist or postmodernist "meta-level" — could the "point of absurdity" be mapped? (Recall Lübecker's spatial metaphor: "it is difficult to establish a position...") Who, then, is to determine that its racist and sexist tropes are "absurd"?

Films like Spring Breakers and Gamer register — by reproducing — the indeterminacy of JK culture that seems conjoined to pornographic tropes and to disturbing, and resurgent, currents of racialized violence. They take their place within a media landscape in which an aesthetics of indeterminacy connects texts as heterogeneous as "Let's Play" videos, Kanye West's Bound 2, LOLcat and Pepe the Frog memes, and Chris Crocker's "Leave Britney Alone," a landscape also characterized by the paradoxical coexistence of selfies with real anonymity, of nonstop self-performance with the reduction of self to impersonal metadata. These are not only aesthetic modalities, or contradictions, of the contemporary commodity form; they are symptoms of a technologically driven reconfiguration of the relation between subjectivity, sign, and meaning.

Like Best and Marcus, Shaviro assumes the impotence of critique in the era of Web 2.0. To close, I would like to assert a contrary point of view. I have suggested a transformation of the technological and discursive ground of subjectivity, bound up in the transformation of sexuality from a truth that was repressed, sublimated, or concealed, into a system of reversible signs. This is not to say that the subject has ceased to exist; on the contrary, the social media profile and vlog are technologies of hyperbolic subjectivity. The subject they produce is beholden to the signifier, in the form of a number (of views, likes, dollars) that is at once abstract and real. This quantified subjectivity belongs to the era of finance capital, in which interactions between abstract entities with names like "futures" and "derivatives" cause wealth to appear or disappear, the real to emerge out of the virtual. Finance capital is a system of pure signification — a regime of signs whose exchanges of value have no material referent but potential material effects ranging from the creation of massive wealth to the collapse of the global economy — a system of power, then, over life and death.

I have discussed the prevalence in contemporary digital culture of an irony of infinite reversibility, of texts that offer no critical vantage point for determining to what extent they mean what they say. It is not clear how far a criticism that seeks only to "indicate what the text says about itself" can take us under such conditions.81 If surfaces no longer conceal hidden depths, it is because they are stretched over an actual abyss. Rather than retreating to the modesty of simple description or giddily embracing the inexorability of a system with no outside, facing up to the contemporary requires paradoxically affirming the critical negativity that is writing and thought. We must become even more suspicious in our hermeneutics. To the real power and terrifying opacity of the signifier in the era of finance capital, we oppose the uncompromising negativity of the critic, who, like Freud's Jew, knows that nobody who says he is going to Crakow is really going to Crakow, even if he is.

Damon R. Young is associate professor of French and Film & Media at the University of California, Berkeley, and teaches in the Program in Critical Theory. He is the author of Making Sex Public and Other Cinematic Fantasies (Duke University Press, 2018) and co-editor, with Nico Baumbach and Genevieve Yue, of "The Cultural Logic of Contemporary Capitalism," a special issue of Social Text (2016).

References