Interpassivity, Reaction Videos, and Emotions as Content: Why Pablo Hidalgo is (maybe) Right

Amidst all the Cyberpunk 2077 discourse over the past month-and-a-half, I was struck by the opinion expressed by gamepressure’s Michael Chwistek that the game perhaps offers more potential as an interactive movie than as an open-world RPG. The article begins thusly:

“I don't like games that complete themselves. Take Telltale games, for example. I only managed to finish the first season of Walking Dead, and my adventure with Life is Strange ended on the first episode. Now, these are fine stories, of course, and I really like a well-crafted story, but I expect more from games. For story itself, I prefer to read a book or watch a movie, instead of mindlessly pressing keys to see just another portion of dialogue.”

These sentiments stood out to me for two reasons. In the first place, the comments resonated with recent thoughts I’ve been working through in regards to so-called “walking simulators,” games that emphasize environmental exploration and narrative with interactive gameplay elements often limited to mere movement. During the coronavirus quarantine I have both played several noted entries in this sub-genre, and watched several others as walkthrough videos on YouTube. I’ve been fascinated by the ways in which many of these games engage with psychogeographic ideas and explore possibilities of a topological (rather than chronological) narrative presentation. It’s a topic I’ve been considering writing about, so more on walking simulators later.

My other thoughts on these comments have to do with interpassivity. The theory of interpassivity was first articulated by Austrian philosopher Robert Pfaller to describe trends in interactive artwork. Pfaller’s original formulation was directed as a response to discourses on interactivity predominating in art theory during the 1990s, but the concept has since been taken up to theorize modes of quasi-interactivity or mediated engagement, such as practices of online online “slacktivism.” Chwistek’s formulation of “games that complete themselves” accords perfectly with Pfaller’s initial framing of interpassive objects as “the work of art that observes itself.”

Interpassivity was also evoked by another recent ripple in online discourse. A Star Wars-centric YouTuber released a reaction video showing themselves crying while watching an episode of The Mandalorian. It later transpired that Lucasfilm employee Pablo Hidalgo had responded to an online discussion of the reaction video by tweeting: “emotions are not for sharing.” Hidalgo later apologized and attempted to clarify the intent behind his comments:

“I wish to clarify that my post that ’emotions are not to be shared’ was sarcastic self-mockery and was certainly not intended to be hurtful to anyone and I’m deeply sorry that it was. As a lifelong fan, I appreciate fans expressing how they feel – it’s what being a fan is about!”

The controversy over Hidalgo’s comments may seem like a temporary tempest in a teapot, just another ripple in the continual current of click bait content and rage tweeting. But I think it also highlights salient aspects of contemporary media culture and some of the attendant ideological assumptions. Particularly in relation to interpassivity and the mediation of emotions.

In most applications interpassivity refers to phenomena in which activity or behavior is delegated or “outsourced” to another agent. In a recent book Pfaller (2017) repositioned interpassivity as the delegation of enjoyment. Rather than having other people or machines work on your behalf, “interpassive behaviour entails letting others consume in your place” (p. 1). Through interpassivity, Pfaller argues, “people delegate precisely those things that they enjoy doing” (p. 2). 

The myriad genres of video content that have proliferated on YouTube in recent years offer clear potential for an interpassive analysis. Reaction videos, unboxing videos, and “let’s play” videogame livestreams all represent emergent manifestations of the attention economy. But these examples also evince a commodification of reception and response, a shift in media consumption where consumption itself is what is being consumed. These video genres can be seen as interpassive media because they enable the view to enjoy through the other, to vicariously unpackage the commodity or play the videogame through the mediation of the video creator.

The phenomena of interpassivity has also been tied to belief. For Pfaller, interpassivity is marked by a double delegation, involving a transfer not only of pleasure but also of belief to a representative agent. This delegation of belief has been central to Slavoj Žižek’s use of the term. Žižek employs the theory of interpassivity to argue that cynical distance and doubt buttress rather than undermine ideological function by positing the existence of an “other supposed to believe” and “illusions without owners.” Žižek cites examples of interpassive operation from electronic media. The “canned laughter” on the soundtrack of a TV sitcom “performs” laughter on behalf of the viewer “so that it is the object itself that ‘enjoys the show’ instead of me, relieving me of the superego duty to enjoy myself” (1998, p. 5). Video recording of TV programs allows one to continue working in the evening “while the VCR passively enjoys for me” (p. 7). Advertising messages perform the enjoyment of commodities on behalf of the consumer (“Coke cans bearing the inscription ‘Ooh! Ooh! What taste!’” , p. 5).

Žižek has also frequently used the example of the Tibetan prayer wheel as a key analogy in his theory of how ideology is perpetuated through disavowed belief. The prayer wheel allows the user to delegate religious belief, as spinning the wheel executes the prayer ritual on the subject’s behalf. For Žižek, the situation is analogous to capitalist subjects who act “as if” they believe the economic system works while professing a cynical distance. As with the prayer wheel, ideology allows subjects to dispense with belief or conviction while persisting in the routines and behaviors through which the belief is enacted.

Critical responses to the proliferation of self-promotion and exhibition on social media tend to focus on issues of privacy surveillance. The advent of pervasive communication technologies has apparently expanded the notion of generalized panoptical surveillance beyond earlier formulations based on overreaching state intervention. We now live in a world where individuals readily broadcast the details of their own lives to an anonymous audience. We are so suffused in the endless stream of media signals that we contribute our own responses in the form of new consumable content. What becomes of personal affect and sentiment in this circumstance? Is “privacy” fated to be an illusion without owners? 

Pablo Hidalgo’s flippant remark that “emotions are not meant to be shared” contains an implicit argument against the mass mediated publicity of online culture. A tacit defense of intimate and inner experience against the colonization of the lifeworld by popular culture, against the transmutation of authentic emotional reactions into “content.” This oblique rebuke only seems radical in the context of Hidalgo’s position as a Lucasfilm executive, placing him within the gargantuan Disney apparatus which is at the forefront of subsuming our shared culture and imaginative expression in its ever-expanding portfolio of “intellectual property.” It is this crucial fact that underlies both the controversy over his comments and his public mea culpa.

Dutch philosopher Gijs van Oenen has further developed the theory of interpassivity, expanding the scope of interpassive operations to the domains of politics and citizenship. For van Oenen, interpassivity emerges as a response to the overwhelming demands for interactivity and expectations of civic responsibility facing modern subjects. The “privilege of self-realization” has come to be experienced as a burden as an “imperative to participate” (2011, p. 10). Interpassivity provides subjects with a means to “outsource the burden of interactivity” and promises repose in the form of institutions and objects that “appear prepared to assume the load of emancipation and self-realization” (p. 11). Van Oenen thus considers interpassivity as “a form of resistance to the pressures exerted by successful emancipation” and a relief from the obligation to always live up to our emancipatory promise (p. 1).

Interpassivity also features in Jodi Dean’s (2009) notion of “communicative capitalism.” Dean defines communicative capitalism as “the materialization of ideals of inclusion and participation in information, entertainment, and communication technologies in ways that capture resistance and intensify global capitalism” (p. 2). She argues that discourses and practices of networked communications media fetishize speech, opinion, and participation in such a way that the exchange value of a message overtakes the use value. Messages are thus unmoored from “contexts of action and application” (p. 26) and become part of a circulating data stream that relieves institutional actors from the obligation to respond. Thus, for Dean, communicative capitalism is “democracy that talks without responding” (p. 22).

Dean argues that the ostensible democratic possibilities offered by participatory media merely serve to provide a semblance of participation by substituting superficial contributions of message circulation for real political engagement, a phenomenon she connects to the theoretical concept of “interpassivity.” Changes in communication networks represented by the acceleration and intensification of global telecommunications have consolidated democratic ideals and logics of capital accumulation, resulting in a “strange merg­ing of democracy and capitalism in which contemporary subjects are produced and trapped” (p. 22). The integration of communication technologies and message circulation into neoliberal governance calls the very possibility of an emancipatory communicative practice into question.

The phenomenon of interpassivity further troubles traditional schemas of subversion and resistance. Whereas Dean identifies interpassivity with the capture and neutralization of resistance, van Oenen sees interpassive operations as a form of resistance in themselves. If van Oenen is correct that citizens are burdened by interactivity and the imperative to participate, then how might an emancipatory politics be formulated in the post-emancipatory era of interpassivity?

Various authors have explored the possibilities of an anti-politics of withdrawal, such as Zizek’s (2006) promotion of a “Bartelby politics” which elevates the fictional scrivener’s refrain of “I prefer not to” into a political mantra. In response to the calls for interaction and engagement that proliferate in contemporary discourse Zizek states that the “threat today is not passivity but pseudo-activity, the urge to ‘be active,’ to ‘participate’” (p. 334).

Against this backdrop we might discern a latent revolutionary impulse in Hidalgo’s admonition that “emotions are not meant to be shared.”

References

Dean, Jodi. Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009.

Pfaller, Robert. Interpassivity: The Aesthetics of Delegated Enjoyment. Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press: 2017.

van Oenen, Gijs. Interpassive agency: Engaging Actor-Network Theory’s view on the agency of objects. Theory & Event 14, no. 2 (2011):

Zizek, Slavoj. The Interpassive Subject. Centre Georges Pompidou, Traverses, 1998.

Zizek, Slavoj. The Parallax View. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006.

Hiroki Azuma's General Will 2.0 and Urban Planning

The Japanese cultural critic Hiroki Azuma has contributed some of the most inventive contemporary propositions for the use of information and communication technologies for democratic practice. In General Will 2.0 (2014), Azuma argues that democratic ideals should be “updated on the basis of the realities of information society” (p. iii). Simply stated, the proliferation of myriad media channels and messages disseminated by networked communication has made modern society too complex to accommodate traditional notions of the public sphere and practices of democratic political participation. Azuma proposes the “creation of a completely new public sphere” (p. x) supported by the use of ubiquitous computing technology. His prescription for a model of governance informed by ubiquitous computing and social media draws on Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s notion of “the general will.” The general will refers to the collective will of a people that aims toward common well-being and “creates the standards for good and for the public sphere” (p. 23). This will is distinct from the will of the government or the sum of individual wills, and arises from a community of people joined through a social contract, regardless of whether communication or political deliberation occurs between them. Azuma’s interpretation of Rousseau leads him to the provocative proposition that “politics does not require communication” (p. 34). That is to say, spaces for communication and deliberation are not only unnecessary but are in fact “an impediment to the emergence of the general will” (p.33), as citizens need only be provided with adequate information in order for the general will to emerge. It is here that Azuma locates the potential for data aggregation and information visualization to inform political procedure. 

Azuma introduces the term “democracy 2.0” to describe a model of democratic governance supplemented by data aggregation and information visualization. Such a system, he argues, would provide “a mechanism to visualize what we truly need without the mediation of roundabout systems such as elections, hearings, and public comments” (p. 86). He points to internet-based communication behaviors and social media usage in particular as fertile resources for assessing the collective thoughts and attitudes of a populace. Azuma thus relates the general will to concepts such as “collective intelligence” and the “wisdom of crowds” (p. 12). Under the democracy 2.0 model, the public realm would be shaped by the aggregate of private actions in a way that challenges traditional distinctions between the public and private spheres. Azuma contrasts this notion of democracy 2.0 with Arendt’s and Habermas’ conceptualizations of the private and public realms. Crucially, Arendt and Habermas both stipulated that the public realm is created through speech or communication whereas Azuma is proposing democracy 2.0 as politics without communication. For Azuma, the inherent complexity and fragmentation of contemporary society precludes the realization of an Arendtian or Habermasian ideal public sphere such that modern citizens “are not able to believe in a shared space for discussion” (p. 69). Declaring these formulations of the public sphere as “impossible to establish” (p. 87), Azuma calls for taking “our current social situation and technological conditions” to bring about “something like a public sphere” (p. 87). This approach calls for abandoning both traditional notions of politics as “conscious communication mediated by language” (p. 75) as well as “abstract frameworks that differentiate between private and public” (p. 77). 

In addition to the political philosophy of Rousseau, Azuma’s formulation of “democracy 2.0” is further informed by the Freudian psychoanalytic concept of the unconscious. Social media again functions as a significant touchstone for Azuma, who describes tweets, check-ins, and other social media activities as constituting a vast trove of information enabling “the extraction of patterns of unconscious desires that go beyond the intentions of individuals” (p. 57). Azuma thus defines incidental yet observable online activity as “unconscious communication” and proposes the use of data monitoring in democracy 2.0 for “collecting and systematizing the wills and desires of people without the need for conscious communication” (p. 56). The realization of democracy 2.0 involves not just data aggregation but also data visualization, as Azuma notes “the internet is not only an apparatus for documenting the unconscious but also for actively visualizing it” (p. 95). Revisiting the earlier formulation of the general will as “politics without communication,” Azuma specifies that the “visualization of the unconscious of the masses” (p. 122) should not be understood as a replacement for deliberation but rather as a supplement to deliberation. He proposes that a democracy 2.0 framework should consist of “on the one hand extracting the unconscious of citizens and on the other invigorating conscious communication among citizens” (p. 102). Azuma proposes that the aggregate unconscious communication of the citizenry should shape the contours and define the limits of public policy-making in a fashion that is “neither direct democracy nor indirect democracy but something that might be called unconscious democracy” (p. 143). Such a model reflects the democracy 2.0 ideal that “all deliberation must be exposed to the unconscious of the populace” (p. 144), whereafter the database citizens’ unconscious communication “and harnesses it as a power to restrain deliberation” (p. 153). 

In order to illustrate what such a system would look like in practice Azuma turns to the field of urban planning and design. Azuma’s argument is scaled to the level of the nation state, and he is concerned overall with practices of national citizenship rather than regional or municipal governance. There are, however, significant points of intersection between the theory of democracy 2.0 and urban studies. For instance, Azuma (2014) often employs spatial metaphors in theorizing how to “design an architecture” that would support the democracy 2.0 model (p. 80). His theory also bears correspondences with the urban visualization literature, as he describes the general will 2.0. as “the record of action and desire carved into the information environment” (p. 71). Yet the most substantial connection between urban studies and general will 2.0 is the invocation of Austrian-born urban designer Christopher Alexander. Azuma’s prescription for unconscious communication is not that it be ignored or blindly followed but rather that states should “harness it through visualization via information technology” (p. 136). The unconscious desires of the masses, aggregated and visualized, would then be used to inform public deliberation and policy-making. Azuma cites Alexander’s urban planning work as a prototype for such a model. In the classic planning text A Pattern Language (1977), Alexander and his colleagues outlined an index of urban settlement shapes or “patterns” inspired by the then-emerging fields of network theory and computer science. Alexander’s systems approach to urban design is captured in his well-known aphorism “a city is not a tree” (1965). What Azuma highlights, however, is a method Alexander developed for determining the design of highway routes. 

Alexander and his team identified twenty-six factors that influence planning decisions such as construction costs, economic impact, and environmental issues. The list of factors also included not typically taken into account by highway planners such as air pollution, eye sores, and noise (Lystra, 2016). The planners then examined the site under consideration to determine what the least and most desirable locations were for each influencing factor. They then visualized the distributions of these factors by superimposing shades of color onto a map, with least desirable locations colored lighter and most desirable areas colored darker. Using a combination of photographic and hand drawing techniques they composited multiple overlays to create a final path map. The resulting distribution did not necessarily plot the optimal route, and would not always determine the final planning decisions, but it did provide a method for visualizing a range of options based on aggregated data. Azuma thus cites Alexander’s approach to planning the highway route as “the budding form of an urban design based upon collective intelligence” (p. 152). He also sees in this technique “a method for providing limits to design rather than determining the design” (p. 124). This is a crucial takeaway for Azuma: Alexander’s method is a model for imposing limitations on deliberation via a database. Alexander and his fellow planners did not automatically implement the routes that emerged from the composited path maps, but they rather used the maps to delimit the best areas for potential action. Democracy 2.0 may therefore be seen as “an application of a theory of urban planning” (p. 125) and “a mechanism that restrains the arbitrary wills of planners” (p. 153). As Azuma notes, planners today have access to a wealth of information and communication technologies from which to draw a “map of user desires” (p. 125). The democracy 2.0 framework is thereby applicable to not only national politics but is particularly relevant for e-governance initiatives in smart city programs.

Fukuyama: 25 years after the "End of History"

• Commemorating the 25th anniversary of the publication of his infamous essay, "The End of History?", Francis Fukuyama wrote an essay for the Wall Street Journal reflecting on how the world has changed since he declared the end of history:

I argued that History (in the grand philosophical sense) was turning out very differently from what thinkers on the left had imagined. The process of economic and political modernization was leading not to communism, as the Marxists had asserted and the Soviet Union had avowed, but to some form of liberal democracy and a market economy. History, I wrote, appeared to culminate in liberty: elected governments, individual rights, an economic system in which capital and labor circulated with relatively modest state oversight.

[...]

So has my end-of-history hypothesis been proven wrong, or if not wrong, in need of serious revision? I believe that the underlying idea remains essentially correct, but I also now understand many things about the nature of political development that I saw less clearly during the heady days of 1989.

[...]

Twenty-five years later, the most serious threat to the end-of-history hypothesis isn't that there is a higher, better model out there that will someday supersede liberal democracy; neither Islamist theocracy nor Chinese capitalism cuts it. Once societies get on the up escalator of industrialization, their social structure begins to change in ways that increase demands for political participation. If political elites accommodate these demands, we arrive at some version of democracy.

• An article by Eliane Glaser in The Guardian considers whether Fukuyama's hypothesis is a rightwing argument in disguise:

When he wrote "The End of History?", Fukuyama was a neocon. He was taught by Leo Strauss's protege Allan Bloom, author of The Closing of the American Mind; he was a researcher for the Rand Corporation, the thinktank for the American military-industrial complex; and he followed his mentor Paul Wolfowitz into the Reagan administration. He showed his true political colours when he wrote that "the class issue has actually been successfully resolved in the west … the egalitarianism of modern America represents the essential achievement of the classless society envisioned by Marx." This was a highly tendentious claim even in 1989.

[...]

Fukuyama distinguished his own position from that of the sociologist Daniel Bell, who published a collection of essays in 1960 titled The End of Ideology. Bell had found himself, at the end of the 1950s, at a "disconcerting caesura". Political society had rejected "the old apocalyptic and chiliastic visions", he wrote, and "in the west, among the intellectuals, the old passions are spent." Bell also had ties to neocons but denied an affiliation to any ideology. Fukuyama claimed not that ideology per se was finished, but that the best possible ideology had evolved. Yet the "end of history" and the "end of ideology" arguments have the same effect: they conceal and naturalise the dominance of the right, and erase the rationale for debate.

While I recognise the ideological subterfuge (the markets as "natural"), there is a broader aspect to Fukuyama's essay that I admire, and cannot analyse away. It ends with a surprisingly poignant passage: "The end of history will be a very sad time. The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one's life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands."

• Late last year the International Forum for Democratic Studies interviewed Fukuyama about his article Democracy and the Quality of the State:

• Finally, the CATO Institute just held a conference where Fukuyama and several other scholars discussed "The End of History 25 Years Later". Videos and podcasts of the panels are available at the conference site. Description of the conference and list of participants:

In an article that went viral in 1989, Francis Fukuyama advanced the notion that with the death of communism history had come to an end in the sense that liberalism — democracy and market capitalism — had triumphed as an ideology. Fukuyama will be joined by other scholars to examine this proposition in the light of experience during the subsequent quarter century.

Featuring Francis Fukuyama, author of “The End of History?”; Michael Mandelbaum, School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University; Marian Tupy, Cato Institute; Adam Garfinkle, editor, American Interest; Paul Pillar, Nonresident Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy, Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence, Brookings Institution; and John Mueller, Ohio State University and Cato Institute.