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.

Zimmerman media coverage, Scorcese on reading cinema, remediation in Game of Thrones, and much more

• William Saletan at Slate shows how media coverage has misrepresented Juror B29's comments on the Zimmerman trial verdict:
  

The reports are based on an ABC News interview with Juror B29, the sole nonwhite juror. She has identified herself only by her first name, Maddy. She’s been framed as the woman who was bullied out of voting to convict Zimmerman. But that’s not true. She stands by the verdict. She yielded to the evidence and the law, not to bullying. She thinks Zimmerman was morally culpable but not legally guilty. And she wants us to distinguish between this trial and larger questions of race and justice.

ABC News hasn’t posted a full unedited video or transcript of the interview. The video that has been broadcast—on World News Tonight, Nightline, and Good Morning America—has been cut and spliced in different ways, often so artfully that the transitions appear continuous. So beware what you’re seeing. But the video that’s available already shows, on closer inspection, that Maddy has been manipulated and misrepresented. Here are the key points.

• This follows Zimmerman filing suit against NBC for defamation:

In the recording heard by NBC viewers, Zimmerman appeared to volunteer the information, “This guy looks like he’s up to no good. He looks black.”

Edited out was the 911 dispatcher asking Zimmerman if the person he was suspicious of was “black, white or Hispanic,” to which Zimmerman had responded, “He looks black.”

• John Nolte at Breitbart thinks that CNN's coverage of the Zimmerman case establishes the network as "the most disgraced name in news":
  

Though Zimmerman and his attorneys have filed a lawsuit against NBC News for the malicious editing of the 911 tape, what CNN did is far worse.

NBC News was attempting to make Zimmerman look like a racial profiler. CNN, on the other hand, was attempting to make Zimmerman look like an enraged outright racist (there was no racial angle in ABC's fraud). It also took CNN far longer to retract their story than either NBC or ABC.

Moreover, on its own airwaves, CNN would allow the complete fallacy that Zimmerman had said "fucking coon" to live on.

• Dan Laughey offers an idiosyncratically British perspective on "royal baby" media coverage:

Pulling teeth doesn’t do justice to the painful viewing experience accompanying this sort of news manufacture - making news from no news. Even the daily palaver known as Changing the Guard was spun to look like an integral prelude to the long-awaited arrival. And the waiting went on, and on, and on, and the longer it went on, the more desperate and dull the coverage became. Sometimes people complain about the high salaries enjoyed by news presenters, especially the public service variety, but by golly they earnt their crust trying, albeit failing, to sustain the suspense.

• In the New York Review of Books, Martin Scorcese discusses "reading the language of cinema":

Light is at the beginning of cinema, of course. It’s fundamental—because cinema is created with light, and it’s still best seen projected in dark rooms, where it’s the only source of light. But light is also at the beginning of everything. Most creation myths start with darkness, and then the real beginning comes with light—which means the creation of forms. Which leads to distinguishing one thing from another, and ourselves from the rest of the world. Recognizing patterns, similarities, differences, naming things—interpreting the world. Metaphors—seeing one thing “in light of” something else. Becoming “enlightened.” Light is at the core of who we are and how we understand ourselves.

[...]

Or consider the famous Stargate sequence from Stanley Kubrick’s monumental 2001: A Space Odyssey. Narrative, abstraction, speed, movement, stillness, life, death—they’re all up there. Again we find ourselves back at that mystical urge—to explore, to create movement, to go faster and faster, and maybe find some kind of peace at the heart of it, a state of pure being.

• The Guardian provides an update on Hollywood's summer of doom:

Despite stormy forecasts, Hollywood appears to be too unwieldly or too unwilling to shift direction towards smaller, cheaper pictures. Guests at Comic-Con learned about upcoming studio productions including Pirates of the Caribbean 5, Thor 2, Fantastic Four 3 and a reboot of Godzilla. The director Joss Whedon came to the event to lament that "pop culture is eating itself" and called for "new universes, new messages and new icons". He then revealed the title of his next film to be Avengers: Age of Ultron.

• Also in the Guardian, John Naughton writes that Edward Snowden is not the story:

Repeat after me: Edward Snowden is not the story. The story is what he has revealed about the hidden wiring of our networked world. This insight seems to have escaped most of the world's mainstream media, for reasons that escape me but would not have surprised Evelyn Waugh, whose contempt for journalists was one of his few endearing characteristics. The obvious explanations are: incorrigible ignorance; the imperative to personalise stories; or gullibility in swallowing US government spin, which brands Snowden as a spy rather than a whistleblower.

• Lauren Granger at memeburn reports on YouTube's first ever Geek Week:
  

The video site is aiming to showcase some geek culture by pronouncing 4-10 August its first ever ‘Geek Week’ and promoting some of the genre’s top channels which cover everything from sci-fi to comics, gaming and superheroes. To do this, its own channel will be featuring videos from users like Nerdist, the official Doctor Who channel, MinutePhysics and more than a hundred others, with every day of the week hosted by a different user. It’ll even include the first trailer for the new Thor movie, The Dark World.

• Chris Cagle at Category D writes about the new documentary Blackfish and "the effaced spectator":

That said, things kept nagging me. Blackfish does raise some valuable secondary issues - how SeaWorld markets itself, how labor issues are at stake in addition to environmental ones - but as a spectator I kept wanting the film to pursue lines of analysis that it would suggest but never develop.

[...]

In short, if there's an ur-ideology to the American progressive documentary, it's that demand-side drivers of political situations (Gramsci's hegemony, ideology, what have you) don't matter, it's merely the supply side of oligopoly, big money, and corporate control. Or to be less political, as a film scholar I can't help but notice than in a film about the business of spectacle, the spectator is both crucial (SeaWorld viewers provide the vital footage of the incidents) and completely effaced.

• Matthew Manarino at New Media Rockstars looks at 10 years of AdSense:

And what of the YouTube creator? How has AdSense helped or hindered their careers? In most cases, the advertising structure has been a blessing to creators as it’s allowed them to launch careers solely through YouTube. AdSense gave us a new type of celebrity for a new generation.

Creators have had their fair share of AdSense woes in the past, though. Last year, one of YouTube’s biggest names, Ray William Johnson, entered a very public dispute with Maker Studios. Johnson claimed that Maker Studios was holding his AdSense account “hostage” even after he had terminated his contract with them.

• Scott Nye, a Rogerebert.com contributor, has just discovered the lampshade hanging trope:
  

If you watch big budget entertainments, there's no escaping these sorts of moments. The trope familiar to the Scooby-Doo generation, in which a few nagging uncertainties are resolved with a "there's just one thing I don't understand" kickoff, has now become a motif. Characters must constantly address questions on behalf of a too-curious audience awash in complexly-plotted mega-stories. The movies are trying to plug leaks in a boat before the whole thing sinks—never quite repairing it, but doing just enough to get by.

• Here is the TV Tropes page on Lampshade Hanging.
  

• Cyborgology contributor Britney Summit-Gil writes about remediation and violence against women in the Game of Thrones tv series:
  

What I’m talking about here is the unavoidable shift that occurs when content is remediated—that is, borrowed from one medium and reimagined in another. In this case, the content of the book series A Song of Ice and Fire (ASOIAF) is remediated to Game of Thrones, the HBO television series. Some of the differences in this instance of remediation seem pragmatic—remembrances are turned into scenes of their own, dialogue is shortened, characters omitted or altered for the sake of brevity and clarity. I am no purist, and I recognize that with remediation comes necessary alteration for the content to suit the new medium. But other differences speak volumes about our cultural biases and expectations surrounding those with socially-othered bodies—like Tyrion, Sam, and, of course, women. What can we say about these differences? And perhaps more importantly, what do they say about us?

• At BFI Nick Wrigley posted a look at some of Stanley Kubrick's favorite films, with insight from Jan Harlan:
  

Why does it matter what Kubrick liked? For years I’ve enjoyed unearthing as much information as I can about his favourite films and it slowly became a personal hobby. Partly because each time I came across such a film (usually from a newly disclosed anecdote – thanks internet! – or Taschen’s incredible The Stanley Kubrick Archives book) I could use it as a prism to reveal more about his sensibilities. My appreciation of both him and the films he liked grew. These discoveries led me on a fascinating trail, as I peppered them throughout the 11 existing Kubrick features (not counting the two he disowned) I try to watch every couple of years. I’m sure a decent film festival could be themed around the Master List at the end of this article…

• Lastly, the Media Ecology Association has uploaded some videos from their latest annual convention which was held in June. These include Dominique Scheffel-Dunand on canonic texts in media ecology and Lance Strate's talk "If not A, then E".