For both Debord and Adorno, the Society of the Spectacle and The Culture Industry, respectively, both focused on the passivity of the consumer subject to the producer. As Adorno says: “For the consumer there is nothing left to classify, since the classification has already been preempted by the schematism of production”. We now see a dialectical reversal of this paradigm. For Adorno, there was a binary of consumer versus producer. This did not mean, of course, that one person could not take on both roles. The Hollywood film director could be a producer while sitting in his foldable chair in the studio, but once he takes his seat in the cinema, he is as much of a consumer as any of the other spectators, albeit likely with free admission. But now the roles themselves of producer and consumer are no longer discreet. What this amounts to is not a collapse of passive consumers and active producers, but rather, a birth of the interpassive consumer-producer. Or rather, what has already been coined in the neologism “prosumer”. This metamorphosis of consumer/producer to prosumer, however, does not result in a movement of mere passivity to activity, but rather, it results in a movement of a hegemony of passivity to a hegemony of interpassivity.
Interpassivity is defined in opposition to interactivity. Zizek uses the example of Tibetan prayer wheels to explain the term: “you write a prayer on a paper, put the rolled paper on a wheel, and turn it automatically, without thinking. In this way, the wheel itself is praying for me, instead of me – or more precisely, I myself am praying through the medium of the wheel. The beauty of it all is that in my psychological inferiority I can think about whatever I want, I can yield to the most dirty and obscene fantasies, and it does not matter because – to use a good old Stalinist expression – ‘whatever I am thinking, objectively I am praying.’” In itself, interpassivity is not necessarily a good nor bad thing for the subject. What is critical to ask is which activities are being rendered interpassive, and what potentialities may be lost in that process. If the Tibetan monk’s use of prayer wheels allows the monk to spend more time on community activities, such as cooking or meeting with people, rather than long hours of manual prayer, we can suggest this is an overall positive. But we must ask, in our consumer societies, which activities are increasingly becoming interpassive?
As the Tibetan prayer wheel example shows, interpassivity in itself is not a new phenomenon. We can extend the principle to the use of oil paintings in the 18th century, as discussed in the book Ways of Seeing, they discuss Gainsborough’s painting “Mr and Mrs Andrews” where the entitled aristocrats are pictured relaxing on their land. The authors write: “The point [in the painting] being made is that, among the pleasures their portrait gave to Mr and Mrs Andrews, was the pleasure of seeing themselves depicted as landowners and this pleasure was enhanced by the ability of oil paint to render their land in all its substantiality.” Earlier in the piece, the authors extend the utility of oil paintings to objets d’art – still life paintings of objects. They write: “Many oil paintings were themselves simple demonstrations of what gold or money could buy. Merchandise became the actual subject-matter of works of art.” So what we have is an interpassive relation, where the wealthy landowner or capitalist no longer has to use their own facilities of articulation to make their status and wealth apparent. The oil painting can carry out that task for them. Is this not precisely the type of activity which is frequently seen on social media? In a slightly crude way, we can say that we use Instagram and other social media for near enough the exact same purpose as the wealthy aristocrats of the 18th century used oil paintings – an interpassive form of signifying our status and/or wealth. We should at least briefly mention this use of artwork for signifying status in such a direct way was somewhat novel, since property, land and commercial goods were not really a common motif in Western painting until that period. Before the 18th century, paintings were largely more concerned with historical, mythical or religious figures, nature in itself as opposed to in relation to the owner of land, as a few examples. What is also interesting to note is that paintings with subjects not directly signifying what the owner possesses also function to signify painting through their form, but it was not until 18th century oil painting that the content (of the painter-owner’s commodities) itself also took this role. This is of course, a generalisation with many exceptions, but it is an overarching historical trend which we can observe.
Of course this is not to say that all forms of social media are for signifying status and/or wealth, or even to say that these acts of signification take the form of simple vulgar images of commodities we have obtained. However, it is sometimes literally that simple. Take for example, the common social media post where one photographs their house keys in order to signify that they have successfully grasped the rungs of the property ladder. A more complex example of this phenomenon, however, would be the “my year in summary” collage that has become popular in recent times. These take the form of not commodities merely on display, but the social media user themself on display taking part in various events. At first glance this appears to be much the same as a home video, or photo album ,but formally they have profound differences to the social media annual collage. Home videos are usually consumed in coprescence, by people directly known by the filmer, with exceptions of a stranger stumbling cross a forgotten box of relic in a sold property. However, it’s also important to note that the social media annual collage also is intended for consumption by an unspecified audience. As the prosumer of the social media collage will not be present, as they would be when showing a friend or family member home videos or photo album, this necessitates the ability for the medium to communicate immediately and through shorthand. The viewer will likely also not be as focused on the social media annual collage as they would be on in person viewing of a photo album or home video, which also in turn necessitates the shorthand nature of the collage.
It is also easy to view this in a one-way fashion, where events which are photographed and filmed are merely arranged after-the-fact into a collage. However, this does not consider the reflexive nature of this activity. Once the desire to signify through the social media collage is set in motion, there is a compulsion to ensure that each year of the user’s life has enough photographable or spectacular events in order to produce the next year’s collage. This then results in a desire to conspicuously consume spectacular experiences such as holidays and events in order to produce content for the collage, hence the birth of the prosumer. We should also note that these social media collages, as with all social media activity, immediately enter the circulation of capital in the form of creating the content which allows social media to profit through advertising and subscriptions. It is much harder to imagine a home video or photo album becoming immediately commodified in this fashion, although it is not impossible. We must ask ourselves, what kind of life are we confined to if we are subject to this compulsion to pursue spectacular experiences? It is hard to imagine Immanuel Kant having much of anything spectacular to post on social media, taking the same walk through Königsberg for most of his lifetime.
Of course, there are many differences between the paintings hung in the home of an aristocrat and the images posted on the profile of the prosumer which should not go unremarked. One aspect is circulation. A painting can take years to create and is inordinately expensive to commission, but can hang on the wall of a stately manor in perpetuity. A smartphone photo takes milliseconds to take, is virtually free, but is not necessarily on constant display. Of course directly viewing a profile will produce an experience analogous to gazing at the painting in a stately home, but for the social platforms to remain profitable, a production of new content is demanded. This is in turn incentivised with the opportunities for likes. So all three vectors of production, circulation and consumption are temporally compressed. There also develops a certain “superegoic injunction to document” one’s activities. It is not uncommon for the prosumer to, while dining at a restaurant, viewing a picturesque landscape, or enjoying a gig, to compulsively photograph or video the experience. Crude and ill thought-out assertions of narcissism typically ensue here.
But what is more interesting to ask is, what possible experiences are negated here? We may draw a brief parallel, as many have done, between the concerns expressed over the effect writing may have on the capacity for memory in Plato’s Phaedras, and the effect our present technologies may have on our minds. Socrates speaks of two Egyptian gods, one of whom bemoans that writing “will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls.” We could speculate that photography could potentially do the same. Interestingly enough, recent studies have confirmed exactly this thesis. Participants in the study were asked to either take one photo, five photos, or just observe the painting without taking any photos. The result was that: “both the photo-taking groups did worse on the memory test than the group that only observed the painting”. However, another study has also shown that more conscious photography, where participants were asked to focus on aspects of a painting while taking photos, tended to aid memory. However, what is key here is another cognitive capacity mentioned in Plato’s Phaedrus. The Egyptian god Theuth mentions both memory and wisdom as the potential benefits of writing, and Thamus counters this by suggesting writing replaces memory with reminiscence and wisdom with “the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom”. Now it would be crude to directly assume that compulsive photographing could instantly result in some privation of cognitive abilities. But, we can consider what activities we are “outsourcing” to our smartphones when we take a photo. Consider, for example, the centuries old tradition of writing letters. Upon participating in any of the aforementioned activities, dining, viewing landscapes, going to a musical performance, you would not be able to rely on an instantly producible and transmissible image of the event to explain your experience to friends or family. You would, of course, have to rely on your own abilities for articulation, whether in writing or oration. Consider the multiplicity of attempts to describe the vast expansiveness of the sea in literature. From Homer to Conrad to Hemingway to Meville to Woolf.
The struggle to grasp and represent in language something so sublime and overwhelming is precisely what makes these artistic depictions possible. Kant writes on the sublime that “the irresistibility of [nature’s] power certainly makes us, considered as natural beings, recognize our physical powerlessness, but at the same time it reveals a capacity for judging ourselves as independent of nature and a superiority over nature” So for Kant, it is not that an encounter with the sublime merely renders us powerless or powerful. But rather there is an ambivalence: we are both the subject of nature, which reminds us of our own finitude and impotence, yet, nature is our object, and, through this impotence, we can “[judge] ourselves as independent of nature”. The capacity to grasp oneself as powerless with regard to nature is to already be beyond nature. It follows that the castrating experience of feeling like a speck of dust in an encounter with the sublime is what necessitates the sublimation of this horror into art. But in a compulsive smartphone photograph, there is no encounter or recounting. Just a production of a semblance.