Sociable Media:Phatic Connection in Digital Art

James J. Hodge (bio)
Northwestern University

Abstract

This essay argues for the impersonally social character of phatic communication in the context of contemporary networked media culture. Georg Simmel’s theorization of sociability as a playfully impersonal mode of social being prior to difference provides the basis for a discussion of the pleasures of phatic communication in digital media in terms of connection not with persons but with the network itself. This pleasure has two distinct poles of experience: being and relating. The latter portion of the essay examines this distinction through the analysis of two digital artworks, Frances Stark’s My Best Thing and David OReilly’s Mountain.

The Network as a Felt Relation of Non-relation

What is a phantom cell phone vibration? As a number of recent scientific studies show, the sensation of a vibrating cell phone in its actual absence has become increasingly common.¹ While explanations vary, the term evokes the neuroscientific concept of phantom limbs, a phenomenon marked by the (often painful) felt sensation of a missing limb as if it were present. Accounts of phantom limbs illustrate the existence and plasticity of the brain’s internal representation of the body, or body maps.² Such studies presuppose a prosthetic logic of embodied incorporation, augmentation, and extension familiar to media studies since at least Marshall McLuhan. By contrast, phantom phone vibrations plainly exceed the logic of technical prosthesis. Like older telephone technologies, mobile telephones extend the human body’s capacity to communicate and act across vast distances. Phantom vibrations, however, index a different transformation in the human techno-sensorium than the old modernist tale of the conquest of time and space.³ More sensational, intensive, and strikingly non-agential, phantom phone vibrations evince the diffuse and ordinary sensation of being “always on.”

The notion of living an “always on lifestyle,” as danah boyd calls it, imagines the contemporary networked subject as a kind of machine without an off button (boyd 2010). While devices may shut down, their networked infrastructure does not. Neither Facebook nor Google nor my cellular network provider turns off. Human subjects, of course, do need to “power down.” As Jonathan Crary notes, human beings need to sleep! (Crary 2013). Simply put, always-on networking problematically implies a fantasy of symmetry between lived experience and its technological infrastructures (smartphones, wireless networks, ubiquitous media). The availability of the network is not, however, the availability of the networked subject. The phantom phone vibration’s spastic hum from nowhere exemplifies this impossible, asymmetrical relation of network and subject, a relation of non-relation that desires so much more possibility, so much more symmetry. Defined in light of this situation, the ordinary fantasy of being “always on” is less a “lifestyle” than a series of technical and discursive practices through which one manages, cultivates, and tends to the oddly ambient demandingness of networked infrastructure. More specifically, one tends not so much to the infrastructure itself as our indirect relation to it.

Phatic communication plays a crucial and variable role in managing the felt relation of non-relation to the network central to being “always on.” Phantom phone vibrations and e-mail alerts are phatic insofar as they establish, affirm, or sustain the possibility of connection. Many more digital habits are primarily phatic: checking email incessantly, scrolling social media newsfeeds or waterfall displays, gaming during moments of micro-boredom, swiping left and right again and again, and even just the urge to pull out a phone for no reason other than to unlock the screen and check, well, whatever. These ostensibly “active” practices seem to reinforce the reigning characterization of digital subjectivity as at least vaguely purposeful and driven by a need for “productive” intersubjective or personal connection. The actions most common to being online—scrolling, swiping, tapping, browsing, and clicking—are, however, perhaps first and foremost responses to the felt fact of networked connection. They’re about living in networked relation generally. Being networked, then, is less about striving for connection to anyone or anything than it is about maintaining and managing the felt experience of connection as such. Phantom phone vibrations are merely one of the more vivid examples underscoring the impersonal sociability of always-on networking, of living life on the basis of an ambient possibility of being connected otherwise afforded by networked digital infrastructures.⁴

In this essay I describe the simultaneously impersonal and social character of connection in contemporary media culture. The first half of the essay examines linguistic theories of phatic address to specify the impersonal nature of networked connection. Georg Simmel’s notion of sociability, or the fundamental drive for relation as such prior to social affiliation, helps to flesh out the pleasurably social dimension of phatic communication. Even as Simmel’s short essay on sociability appeared over a century ago, his discussion of conversation and flirting as artful and playful modalities of sociability uncannily resonates in the age of texting and Tinder. The key distinction is, of course, that while Simmel theorizes sociability as impersonally intersubjective, sociability in the era of digital networks concerns impersonal connection to the network itself.

The second portion of the essay discusses two digital moving image artworks: Frances Stark’s feature-length video My Best Thing (2011) and David OReilly’s art game Mountain (2014). Impersonal connection is a frankly difficult subject to thematize in a sustained critical idiom. As the example of phantom phone vibrations illustrates, impersonal connection is at once embodied and highly resistant to representation if not wholly non-representational. It is also distinctively ephemeral and persistently peripheral. Digital art becomes valuable and instructive here for the way it offers striking reflexive and sustained presentations of these problems. My Best Thing and Mountain alike emphasize the impersonal dimensions of the experience of digital media. My Best Thing almost completely brackets any direct human presence in its serial narrative of one woman’s Internet chats with two different Italian men. The video features basic animations of the three main characters set against a monochrome green background. Synthesized digital text-to-speech programs provide the dialogue through which we experience indirectly (or quite indirectly) conversational flirting and mutual masturbation. Like My Best Thing, Mountain suspends any direct representation of human experience. Much of the game features a mountain/planet floating in outer space occasionally offering subjective yet highly impersonal remarks on its own emotions and the weather. Despite such bare bones, anti-anthropomorphic, or impersonal modes of address, both works exert a powerful hold on their audiences. It is precisely if improbably by means of their manifest impersonality that the phatic emerges more clearly as the affective engine of networked digital sociability.

Critics discussing social media and networks too often assume that the allure of connection lies with interpersonal or intersubjective relationality. In her study of Facebook, for example, José van Dijck argues for a distinction between “connectedness” and “connectivity” (van Dijck 2013). The former refers to users’ relations to one another; the latter refers to users’ more ambivalent relation to “Third Parties,” e.g. corporations and advertisers. Connection here denotes living in explicit or implicit relation to a potential somebody or a group of somebodies. It ignores, however, the more fundamental and ordinary impersonal pleasures of simply being connected to the network. This mode of sociality overlaps with but ultimately exceeds identity-based discussions of personhood and sociality, discussions that typically return to problems such as the public, private, and anonymity. To be sure, several critics, such as Steven Shaviro, do recognize the profoundly impersonal dimensions of networked connection. But even for Shaviro, the problem of identity remains paramount as something “implanted from without, not generated from within” (13). Instead, I take a cue from media theorist Scott C. Richmond’s observations about the appeal of Candy Crush Saga and Grindr.⁵ For Richmond, such media don’t show up too much. They don’t demand that I perform my subjectivity in any lasting, defining, or decisive fashion. Casual, desultory connection to the network allows me not to have to be myself too much. As Richmond notes, the pleasure of not having to be oneself too much can mean quite a lot in the context of digital neoliberalism’s constant opening up of markets (e.g. friendships as monetizable data). And to be clear, I imagine this impersonal pleasure as conceptually and phenomenologically distinct (if not wholly separable) from the much-noted carnivalesque performance of identity online, the work of crafting avatars, handles, and profiles. In contrast to analyses of online identity typically centering around immersive virtual worlds such as Second Life or World of Warcraft, I argue that many of the pleasures of connection are profoundly impersonal. They’re not about being or becoming someone else. The ordinary and impersonal pleasures of networks are about not having to be oneself too much; impersonal connection is about the bare sensation of feeling connected.

Alongside recent work by scholars such as Richmond, Patrick Jagoda, and Kris Cohen, I offer this essay as an effort to re-orient the study of new media toward ordinariness, art, and the social dimensions of networked affect.⁶ Much prominent work in digital media theory emphasizes the nonhuman and implicitly impersonal character of human experience and knowledge as networked and technical. Yet this work often retreats to airy frames of metaphysical inquiry unfriendly to the more granular and the frankly messy experience of contemporary subjectivity. It is revealing that the very subject of subjectivity feels more native to affect and queer theory than to digital media studies, which too often favors masculinist discussions of the technical operation of software or the suspiciously sex-free domain of ontology. Approaches to media culture attendant to the subject as the focal point of critical investigation—and which combine approaches to digital media with affect and queer theory—are more urgently needed.

Recent work in queer and affect theory focuses on the impersonal dimensions of experience. While digital media theory privileges various spectra of experience such as varieties of non-conscious cognition running from intelligent machines to humans to rocks and other things, queer theory concerns itself with the “non-sovereignty” of the subject (Hayles 2014). Unlike digital media theory, queer theory by and large has no problem with anthropocentrism. Conceived in opposition to the implicitly straight, white, male, educated, financially solvent liberal self of classical economics (homo oeconomicus), the economic subject who can act in the world and make decisions unbeholden to anyone else, queer theory’s characterization of the subject as non-sovereign acknowledges the ways in which the self and its attachments to others and the world remain variously incoherent, ambivalent, and dynamic. On this point, I aim to build on Lauren Berlant’s work on affect, ordinariness, and the historical present. Berlant writes, “To think about sensual matter that is elsewhere to sovereign consciousness but that has historical significance in domains of subjectivity requires following the course from what’s singular—the subject’s irreducible subjectivity—to the means by which the matter of the senses becomes general within a collectively lived situation” (Berlant 2012, 53). While attending resolutely to subjectivity, Berlant’s concern with non-sovereignty resonates with digital media theory’s concern with the impersonal dimensions of contemporary technologies. Berlant’s goal, as I understand it, is to examine how forces beyond our own apparent agency nonetheless exert tremendous influence on lived experience in its constitutive incoherence, its non-sovereignty. These forces include both the network in its parallel operation to human consciousness as well as much of our own, quite local and amodal embodied experiences called “affect.” The problem is to grasp the points of intersection or mediation by and through which the subject reckons with the forces shaping its ongoing formation and articulation. How is subjectivity produced not only by the powers that exceed it but which it can never know? This essay argues that the phatic form of address in digital networked media represents a key point of connection between subject and network. As such, the phatic plays a key role in producing the digital subject and its promotion of impersonally sociable connection.

Feeling the Call of Networks: From the Phatic to the Sociable

The network calls out. And it feels good!

The network calls out constantly. My phone buzzes. A ding or trill accompanies the arrival of a text message. My Macintosh laptop “breathes” when it’s sleeping. Pop up ads “pop up.” While these noises, lights, and small animations sometimes feel annoying, they also remain deeply appealing. Few people manage to put their phones away or keep them away from their persons, and this seems instructive. Without succumbing to the rhetoric of addiction—“Are you addicted to your phone???”—it is important to note how even the arrival of an e-mail may carry with it a faint libidinal promise. E-mail is perhaps the least sexy mode of networked connection. But, if—like me—you’ve stopped reading a good novel to attend to an e-mail that ended up being something from a listserv, then you know what I’m talking about. That e-mail wouldn’t feel so deflating or disappointing if its sonic arrival didn’t tap into a latent urge for connection, for being or living otherwise in even the thinnest of quotidian or fleeting fantasies. Instead of understanding hailing in terms of interpersonal communication in the scene of contemporary media, I argue we may best grasp the forms of digital address as impersonal and social. We need to understand better how such apparently unappealing forms of address sustain a powerfully persistent—if simultaneously ambient and soft—libidinal promise of connection. We need to understand, in other words, digital forms of address in terms of their phatic character.

Phatic communication feels good because it’s primarily social. Yet this crucial aspect of phatic communication has been oddly displaced in its travels from anthropology to linguistics via information theory. Indeed, the phatic begins as part of a theorization of social life.

In the early twentieth century anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski coined the term ‘phatic communion’ to describe how language establishes and maintains social bonds. Importantly, phatic communion does not depend upon semantic content. It occurs even in the absence of a shared language. Malinowski writes,

Are words in Phatic Communion used primarily to convey meaning which is symbolically theirs? Certainly not! They fulfill a social function and that is their principal aim, but they are neither the result of intellectual reflection, nor do they necessarily arouse reflection in the listener. Once again we may say that language does not function here as a means of transmission of thought. (Malinowski, 330)⁷

Phatic communication shores up social bonds or establishes and re-establishes a connection. It names a form of ongoing acknowledgment of co-presence and social proximity. Its primary role is social over and above any need to transmit ideas or content. When I say “How are you?” to an acquaintance in passing I’m just acknowledging our momentary co-presence in time and space. I’m not actually asking how she is (a lengthy response would feel like too much). All the same, the phatic communicational event remains irreducibly social.

In his influential account of the phatic as a linguistic function, however, Roman Jakobson de-emphasizes this founding dimension of the phatic. Jakobson’s re-theorization of the phatic comes in the larger context of his synthesis of linguistics and information theory. The resulting combination de-privileges the social function of the phatic in Malinowski’s formulation. For Jakobson, phatic messages serve

to establish, to prolong, or to discontinue communication, to check whether the channel works (‘Hello, do you hear me?’), to attract the attention of the interlocutor or to confirm his continued attention (‘Are you listening? Or in Shakespearean diction, ‘Lend me your ears!’—and on the other end of the wire ‘Um-hum!’). (Jakobson 355)

The word ‘communion’ drops out in Jakobson’s treatment. While communication inevitably implies or implicates some social dimension in play, Jakobson’s description feels decidedly less social than technical; a social bond here becomes a channel. In the wake of Ferdinand de Saussure’s synchronic linguistics, the phatic designates a function of a language system whose larger functioning maintains an aloofness from concrete, historical social interactions. For Jakobson, the phatic is technical and linguistic over and above its mediation of the social. His reworking of Malinowski remains suggestive because it affirms an affinity between the historical theorization of the phatic and the advent of information theory at the origins of contemporary media culture. As Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan shows, Jakobson adapts the structure of Claude Shannon’s diagram of information theory for his own model of linguistic functions (Geoghegan). This move remains relatively unappreciated, however, for the way it privileges a technical model of operation over and above Malinowski’s emphasis on the social. In Jakobson’s re-theorization, the phatic becomes a technical aspect of language, not the self-sustaining and pleasurable mode of social affiliation it is for Malinowski. In the section quoted above, Jakobson discusses the phatic in relation to the part of his diagram labeled “contact.” All of his examples imagine a person talking to another person. And yet one of his examples sticks out for the way it masquerades as intersubjective communication. As Jakobson himself specifies, the phatic functions “to check whether the channel works.” In such cases, and even if such acts require a response from another human interlocutor, the phatic serves to verify the infrastructural viability of communication. Such instances privilege technical modes of communication. What’s more, they ever so slightly displace human communication as the default frame of communication. Even as one may speak to a somebody—can you hear me now? Good!—such phatic communications primarily address a technical system.

A further glance at the similarities between Shannon’s and Jakobson’s diagrams reveals something of the probable motivation for this subtle but hugely significant shift. Jakobson’s “contact” corresponds to Shannon’s “noise.” For Shannon, noise signifies the measure of disorder in communication. It is not an obstacle to communication but rather constitutive of it. Taken a step outside the mathematical purview of his theorization of information—a step Shannon warns against but which has been done countless times—noise can also be considered in terms of its address to human experience.⁸ Rendered phenomenally as “noise”—white noise or non-semantic elements such as glitches or fuzz—noise indicates the availability or existence of a channel of communication. Whether considered strictly as an engineering problem or more broadly, noise names a property of a technical system. As much as Shannon’s theory of communication has obvious ramifications for the study of communication, it privileges the technicity of communication over and above what Malinowski would call “social bonds.” In synthesizing Malinowksi with Shannon, Jakobson quietly brings attention to the impersonally technical and mediated nature of communication. My argument is that this quiet transformation of the phatic reorients its relation to the social. Jakobson effectively pivots away from the profoundly intersubjective scene of the social sketched by Malinowski, a move that has much broader implications when considered against the historical backdrop of the massive influence of Shannon’s theory for the development of networked information systems.⁹ The question arises: does the phatic lie similarly at the basis of contemporary media culture?

In his elaboration of the rise of “phatic culture,” sociologist Vincent Miller gestures toward an affirmative answer to the question. Taking up the emergence of networked digital culture through the rise of social media such as blogs, social networking websites and microblogs, Miller cites Malinowski’s (but not Jakobson’s) notion of the phatic in a discussion of phatic technologies: “technologies which build relationships and sustain social interaction through pervasive (but non-informational) contact and intimacy” (395). More concretely, for Miller, Twitter represents a paradigmatic instance of phatic culture because it sustains a sense of connected presence that “is necessarily almost completely devoid of substantive content” (396). Miller’s account helpfully sketches out the phatic character of networked media culture. What Miller misses, in his resolute focus on networks of persons, is the deep phatic appeal of a media culture that, of necessity, also includes technologies. Indeed, Miller neglects the revealing extent to which Twitter is only just mostly human. As a 2014 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission reveals, a significant percentage of active Twitter handles do not properly belong to individual persons but rather to bots, that is, automated programs whose very job is simply to call out (Mottl).

Our devices call out. But it’s only partially right to say they’re calling out to us or that they call out to serve as mere vehicles for interpersonal exchange. Our devices do not call out in the form of a direct address. They do not call out to us or for us because they do not primarily mediate person-to-person networks but rather the connections of machines to other machines or other technical systems. As much as Apple and similar-minded companies strive for new forms of personal computing and branding such as the iPhone or iPad, digital media hail human subjects in an irreducibly impersonal idiom. Amazon may hail me “personally”—Jim, we recommend X for you—but it does so algorithmically. Amazon.com hails me as market data, not as a person with parents and psychological depth. To synthesize Althusser and Deleuze, the network does not call out like a policeman in the street (hey! You there!). The network does not hail me as a disciplinary subject of the law and possible incarceration. The network hails me as a dividual, a collection of data points to be sifted algorithmically. Big Data is not Big Brother. To put the matter otherwise, networked digital media simply do not partake of what Émile Benveniste terms the “I-You” structure of address central to the construction of linguistic subjectivity (218ff.). Digital media’s phatic character does not evoke the structure of one thing (a subject, an I) acting upon or communicating with another (an object, a You). It operates more like expression in the middle voice, a tense not found in English or Romance languages but present in a minority including Ancient Greek, Swedish, Tamil, and Icelandic among others. The phatic character of digital media evokes more a sense of an impersonal “it happens” rather than an enunciation founded in the familiar and arguably inescapable structure of I-You in English and other languages. And in the context of digital media, the “it happens-ness” of phatic address seems to index a happening elsewhere.

Digital media work at scales and speeds that largely exceed the purview of human perception and cognition. The operational withdrawal of digital technics, especially in its invisible and ubiquitous proliferation “out of the box and into the environment” begs for further inquiry into the question of how human experience comes into contact with contemporary media as infrastructure (Hayles 2009, 48). As media theorist Mark B. N. Hansen notes, this means that digital media’s address to human experience, in contrast to older media such as print or cinema, may be characterized as massively indirect or oblique (Hansen 2012, 53). This means that even as much as digital media unquestionably structure our lives as a largely insensible or inaccessible domain of infrastructure (Wi-Fi, undersea cables, the microprocessural nature of code) the question arises as to how we interface at all with such infrastructure or if “interfacing” may be reduced to the surface effect of a system that remains deeply opaque?¹⁰

The phatic address of digital networks working in concert with our phatic habits provides a powerful scene for confronting the feeling of non-relation to digital media infrastructure. In the context of digital media’s “massively indirect” address to human experience, Hansen argues for the relatively novel significance of the periphery of experience, or what he also calls “sensibility.” Sensibility names the dimension of lived experience beyond the modal specificity of perception as well as the deliberative privilege of higher-order consciousness (Hansen 2015). I affirm the spirit of this project in my own inquiry into the phatic sensibility of always-on networking. While Hansen theorizes this media historical condition in onto-cosmological terms, my own concerns return to the ordinary. Why does the phatic feel good? Or, if that question is too naïve, why does the phatic successfully conscript us into feeling always on?

Why is the phatic more than just annoying? A person tapping you on the shoulder over and over again engages in phatic communication. It may be annoying, but the implied promise (however thin) of inhabiting another social relation feels good. In a similar vein, e-mail can be annoying, but it can also feel good for the simple reason that it establishes or sustains a form of technical connection. In an essay from 1910, sociologist Georg Simmel builds on Aristotle’s famous characterization of man as a “social animal” with insights crucial for understanding the pull of today’s phatic media culture. Sociability, for Simmel names the “drive” for relation as such. For Simmel, “the impulse to sociability distils, as it were, out of the realities of social life the pure essence of association, of the associative process as a value and a satisfaction” (128). Sociability names a dimension of social life prior to affiliation. Sociability is social relation, in other words, prior to identity. Even as Simmel presupposes the field of the social as that toward which sociability strives, his theorization of sociability prior to social distinctions or differences—a drive for association as such—furnishes the basis for articulating the allure of contemporary media’s phatic address. The blinking lights and bells of mobile and networked media call out, and by so doing solicit a response in the mode of sociability, or in the idiom of social media, connectivity in general over and above connection to anyone in particular. Texting, for example, is pleasurable not precisely because of who we’re texting; the open-ended and associational character of texting or instant messaging is an end in itself.

Simmel’s two main examples of sociability are flirting (discussed as “coquetry”) and conversation. The pleasures of both practices vividly exemplify Simmel’s emphasis on the open-ended nature of sociability. On a fundamental level, the pleasures of both flirting and conversation involve being in relation as such. Anticipating Malinowski’s discussion of phatic communion, Simmel writes, “in sociability talking is an end in itself; in purely sociable conversation the content is merely the indispensable carrier of the stimulation, which the lively exchange of words unfolds” (136). Even as a conversation may turn upon revelations, disagreements, and negotiations, sociability as a play of relation itself “may retain its self-sufficiency at the level of pure form” (136). Texting and instant messaging function in a similar way. Only the emergence of a “business-like” point in the conversation vanquishes sociability. Sociability diminishes when decisions must be made or contracts signed, i.e. the serious and decidedly unpleasurable points in an exchange that put an end to the phatic play of possibility. Pick you up at 7? It is no wonder so many people complain of an increased inability to make plans after the introduction of smartphones. Making plans actually works against the reigning fantasy of always-on computing in its phatic sociability. The network’s job, indeed the being of the network is to not make plans to the extent that any such decision would mark an exit from networked sociability and its phatic pleasures. The crucial turn, again, lies with the impersonal nature of networked sociability.

Art and play also figure centrally in Simmel’s account. Simmel defines sociability as “the play-form of association” insofar as “the fact that in every play or artistic activity there is contained a common element not affected by differences of content” (128). To be sure, Kant’s aesthetics lingers in the foreground and background of Simmel’s discussion. Kant’s famous discussion of aesthetic experience as “purposive purposelessness” and the “free play of the faculties,” resonate with Simmel’s emphasis on the open-ended character of sociability (what we might call today being “always on”) and his emphasis on the artful play of sociability. Departing from Kant, however, Simmel’s emphasis on the ordinariness of social relations and their exemplification in aesthetics holds powerful lessons for assessing the value of art in examining contemporary media’s networked sociability.¹¹

Shot-Reverse-Shot After Instant Messaging: Phatic Sociability in My Best Thing

The centrality of art and play in Simmel’s account suggests that analysis of digital artworks can help us grasp the low-level pull of phatic sociability characteristic of ordinary networked experience. Such analysis helps particularly because the phatic, so difficult to grasp in ordinary experience, plays a strong formal and aesthetic role in a number of important digital artworks. Ben Rubin and Mark Hansen’s digital installation Listening Post (2001), for example, sonifies network subjectivity in its computer-synthesized pattern repetitions of “I am” statements.¹² A machinic beep precedes each utterance. Untethered from specific sources and divested of the singular grain of individual human voices, each “I am” statement functions as a bare utterance of indexical hereness absent local particularity. In the nascent genre of data visualization, Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar’s online We Feel Fine (2006) project gives variable form to “I feel” statements culled anonymously from the web. Its animated Java applet interface depicts these statements as colorful phatic particles floating against the black vacuum of networked space. Like Listening Post, We Feel Fine brackets statements from their personal sources. Instead of promoting the singularity of personal emotion, We Feel Fine reveals the generic and therefore impersonal quality of despair, love, and depression without the grain of embodiment. After reviewing a number of samples, each colorful dot starts to feel like any other, an expression of sameness grounded in the fact that somebody somewhere wrote an “I feel” statement. Confession becomes phatic.

A number of digital artworks might well demonstrate the intimate ties between the phatic dimension of communication and networked sociality. No artwork, however, better concretizes the phatic and playful dimension of networked sociability than Frances Stark’s 2011 My Best Thing. Stark’s feature-length video demonstrates how Simmel’s two forms of sociability—flirting and conversation—remain central to networked culture, albeit in a profoundly impersonal manner. My Best Thing is a quasi-fictionalization of the artist’s own experiences with online communication, flirting, and mutual masturbation with two Italian men over the course of 10 and “a half” episodes. With the exception of a few inserted video clips, My Best Thing consists largely of animation generated by the formerly free (and now defunct) website Xtranorml, whose motto “if you can type you can make a movie” provides the project’s technological basis. Xtranorml animation software renders Stark and the two Italian men as minimally expressive Playmobil-like figures with computer-synthesized speech. The video thrives on the disjuncture between the complexity of the dialogue and implicit but unseen action with its bare bones visual correlate. On screen we see two figures facing each other. But sex and dialogue clearly occurs via instant messaging and video chat. Other interfaces and technologies unevenly disturb the conversational rhythm between Frances and the two Italian men: chatroulette, Facebook, gambling, television, and phones. Comical elisions in the dialogue also indicate the intrusion of time spent away from the computer inflecting the continuing but disjunctive nature of dialogue. A continual tension between form and content allows the video to denaturalize the phatic dynamics of online communication and to critically dilate the dynamics of network sociability.

My Best Thing makes special use of the classical Hollywood editing technique of shot-reverse-shot, an editing convention the video strains to near breaking point in its evocation of networked relations (Fig. 1).

As Kaja Silverman has shown, shot-reverse-shot sequences play a crucial role in connecting the spectator to the discourse of the film. Such sequences “suture” the spectator within cinematic narrative by cutting back and forth between camera angles representing the points of view of two characters in dialogue. In the tradition of the classical Hollywood cinema, shot-reverse-shot sequences render cinematic space coherent (See Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson). Shot-reverse-shot also gives psychological coherence to the cinematic illusion of presence, a sense of spectatorial adhesion or “you-are-there-ness.” There is, however, nothing inherently coherent about the “profilmic” space of My Best Thing. The figures stand against a green background suggestive of green screens and the digital apparatus of post-production.¹³ The use of shot-reverse-shot to dramatize the play of instant messaging reveals a different kind of suture at play: the felt relation of nonrelation instanced by phatic sociability.

At a key moment, Marcello tells Frances she must promise him something. Not knowing what it is, Frances expresses anxiety. Playing upon her worry, Marcello types demands to her one word at a time, a practice realized formally by the stilted, staccato rhythm of the computer synthesized dialogue, and reinforced by the use of shot-reverse-shot close-ups. He types,

you / must / promise / to / me / that / am / an / Italian / boy / living / in / Rome / that / you / that / are / an / American / woman / living / in / L.A. / that / the / day / after / the / beginning / of / the / next / year / I lose myself. / Aaaaaahhhhhhhh…

Two shots accompany every single word in the sequence: close ups of Marcello and a reaction shot of Frances. The readymade quality of My Best Thing plays an important role here (indeed, the video references Duchamp’s infamous Fountain later on). Frances reacts “emotionally” to every single word with a small repertoire of facial reactions including blinks, smiles, frowns, and tilts of the head. Such excessively melodramatic editing—as if each word needed to be felt by itself—underscores its real world source in instant messaging one word at a time. Notwithstanding the cartoonish character of the human figures in My Best Thing, they gradually become naturalized as avatars for specific persons who never actually appear in image or voice. All of the Italian’s man’s speech is subtitled. Here, the conspicuous absence of a subtitle for the word you negatively foregounds the impersonal character of this exchange. The absence of the word ‘you’ suggests a movement beyond its ostensibly personal form of second-person address toward what I earlier described as the middle voice-like character of digital media’s phatic address.

This sequence further undoes the scene’s personal naturalism by juxtaposing the familiar conventions of cinematic “suture” with a mode of networked connection playing upon the felt expectation of waiting for a text or instant message to arrive. The thread of dialogue ultimately falls apart. Insofar as sociability thrives on flirting and conversation—and stops dead only when business is contracted, as in a promise made—this breakdown of conversation actually signals its continuation. The whole sequence plays in the elliptical zone of the messaging bubbles familiar to iPhone users (Bennett 2014). Such bubbles indicate that someone is typing a message and so play upon the general experience of connection in its vaguely futural orientation. The “promise” Frances must make, which Marcello can never articulate, is merely the allegorical pretense for the more massive yet always thinly expressed promise of networked sociability embodied by every blip, bloop, ding, or buzz: the promise of being potentially otherwise.

The ‘thing’ in My Best Thing refers to a penis. Marcello asks Frances, “do you want to see my best thing?” Stark’s title draws our attention to this curiously meaningful phrase. Yet why is My Best Thing named after something so concrete yet so manifestly absent? True, it’s a bit of a crude joke. But like My Best Thing, which ranges over politics, literature, and art, it’s also playfully profound. Put simply, My Best Thing is about networked sex. Like Marcello’s nonvisible penis—and like the missing rocket, the phallic symbol at the center of the dream sequence quoted at length from Federico Fellini’s 8½—literal and visible sex remains off stage. Marcello’s “thing” here operates as a sign multiply signifying penises, sex, and artistic production—it is, after all Frances Stark’s “best thing,” her self-proclaimed best work of art but also another absent phallus.

The manifest absence of sex in any carnal sense brings us back again to the issue of the erotics of phatic sociability, suggesting that networked sex hinges on a sense of sex in an expanded and non-representational sense, an idea long familiar to scholars of theories of sexuality. In Berlant’s formulation, “Sex is not a thing, it’s a relation; it’s a nonrelation in propinquity to some kind of a recognition” (Berlant 2007, 435). Sex is not an object in the sense of a discrete event or form with definable contours; sex is rather a peculiar form of relation resonant to what I’ve been discussing here as subjectivity’s felt relation of non-relation to the network. For Berlant, sex is a non-relation in indeterminate intimacy with something recognizable, i.e. something resolvable, knowable, and capable of repetition.

I want to propose a schematic distinction to help clarify these abstract terms. We might discern a continuum between the ideal poles of objecthood and relationality. This continuum would include various modalities of subjectivity situated or oscillating between being and relating. In particular, between relationality and objecthood or being lie the mediating twin dynamics of nonrelationality and thingness. The object denotes something known while the thing expresses the unknowableness of an object born of a manifest asymmetry or opacity of relation, in short, its non-relationality. With Berlant we can say that sex is not a thing. But we may propose that sex expresses a certain thingness in its proximity to the objecthood of being without losing its relational character precisely as a non-relation, a chasm, a governing opacity. Refracted through Stark’s title, My Best Thing invites viewers to consider sex as thingness. Such thingness never, of course, comes into view. Instead, the video’s playfully impersonal erotics render in textual form the habitus of phatic sociability (instant messaging) by other means (cinema). In other words, My Best Thing explores sex in its thingness as a play of technical and formal relations over and above any intersubjective drama.

Another way to cast the continuum between objecthood and relationality would be to say that My Best Thing interrogates the pleasurably slippery spaces, the give and take, the variable synchronies between being and relation that more generally characterize networked life. Leo Bersani calls attention to the way sociability dissolves or at least brings into proximity the seemingly distant poles of being and relating, the respective avatars of the individual and the social. “Sociability,” Bersani notes, “is a form of pure relationality uncontaminated by desire.” “Why, exactly,” Bersani queries, “is pure relationality so pleasurable?” (9). Following Simmel, Bersani locates the impersonal pleasures of sociability in rhythm. Bersani writes, “It is as if there were a happiness inherent in not being entirely ourselves, in being ‘reduced’ to an impersonal rhythm.” The happiness or pleasure that inheres, moreover, in the rhythmic play of sociability found in flirting and conversation, is, more specifically, “the non-masochistic one of escaping the frictions, the pain, even the tragedy endemic to social life” (11). If this mode of pleasure seems familiar, it is the dominant form of ordinary pleasure in contemporary networked culture. Texting, for instance, isn’t pleasurable because of shared content; its pleasures derive from a shared and impersonal rhythm of exchange to the network itself.

Consider the reigning complaint of exhaustion and being busy accompanying so much small talk. When the norm feels like exhaustion, soft—or, phatic—forms of connection from checking a phone to instant messaging and texting at once represent symptoms and compensatory reactions to the challenges of managing the uncertain project of subjectivity between being and relating.¹⁴ 21^st century experience is simultaneously slackened and overstimulated, 24/7 and always on. The value of social media, casual games, and networked connection lie with the way that they enable a subject to divest from the burden of selfhood. Crucially, divesting from subjectivity does not mean unplugging so much as doubly investing in sociable forms of relationality that loosely articulate being and relating. Bersani asserts,

Most profoundly, the pleasure of sociability is the pleasure of existing, of concretely existing, at the abstract level of pure being. There is no other explanation for that pleasure. It does not satisfy conscious or unconscious desires; instead, it testifies to the seductiveness of the ceaseless movement toward and away from things without which there would be no particular desires for any thing, a seductiveness that is the ontological ground of the desirability of all things.(11)

Like Berlant earlier, Bersani does not have networked digital media in mind. All the same, one could not give a better description of the appeal of the minimally constant hum of attachment governing the networked sociability modulated by phatic communications. Sociable pleasure does not derive from communicating with someone. It arises from the sheer fact of social being. In Bersani’s elegant formulation, being does not recapitulate some Cartesian scene of ultimate, skeptical withdrawal from the world but rather a presence to the world at arm’s length. Some light inevitably seeps under the door into the dark room of the subject. Following Simmel, Bersani (and Berlant) open the way for grasping the mutual articulation of being and relationality through their sociable others: the impersonal dynamics of thingness and nonrelationality.

“Being or relating, that is the whole question”: David OReilly’s Mountain

If My Best Thing illustrates the relational pole of phatic sociability, David OReilly’s Mountain embodies this thingly pole. Mountain foregrounds questions of being and thingness more latently expressed in Stark’s drama of relation and nonrelation. The ordinary real world correlate of thingness lies in the quietly desultory pleasures of networked connection, of the pleasures of just being. If My Best Thing discloses the pleasures of networked impersonal relation, Mountain helps us discern the pleasures of a network of impersonal things.

Part videogame, part screensaver, part simulator, part long duration art project, Mountain is a remarkable work of new media art that speaks to the networked pleasures of little-b being. Much of Mountain consists of a mountain rotating in the vacuum of space. On the surface, Mountain seems to be about isolation. However, various objects, or things, erratically crash land on its slopes. Objects vary but mine include a bowling pin, a pie, a trash can, a film reel, a tooth, an orange cone, a boat, and an anvil. Zooming out to see the mountain against the background of stars in space, one occasionally catches sight of other objects whizzing by but never landing. Their origin and destination remain unclear. Such actions imply the existence of some kind of larger social field. Why, we might ask, would a giant pie fly through space? And is it even a “pie” when it’s a giant pie floating through space like an asteroid? Something much weirder is going on.

Mountain begins after the user executes several drawings in response to variable prompts, e.g. “draw your relationship with your mother” or “draw forgiveness” or “draw love.” Upon completing these exercises with a basic paint program, the application builds the titular “mountain.” A message reads “Welcome to Mountain. You are Mountain. You are God.” Unlike “God games” such as The Sims, however, Mountain does not put its player in the position of an interventionist deity. There are no points, no enemies, no levels. Some call it a “non-playable game.” Once opened, Mountain runs fairly unobtrusively on my laptop as I mostly do other things. Most of the action seems to happen outside my possible participation. The application works hard to render the graphics, and so the fan turns on. My students complain that the application drains their devices’ batteries abnormally fast.

And even in the game not much “happens.” Seasons change, snow falls, fog lifts, day turns into night and back again at an accelerated but even pace. Every once in a while, a piano key sounds a resonant note, a phatic note seemingly from the mountain itself. A variety of messages appear onscreen: “I CAN’T GET ENOUGH OF THIS ENIGMATIC NIGHT.” “I FEEL VERY SAD TODAY.” “I CAN’T PROPERLY DESCRIBE THIS SUMMER MORNING.” “I’M BASICALLY THIS DIM NIGHT.” “I’M TAKING IN EVERY PART OF THIS SWEET DAY.” What could be more phatic than talking about the weather?

The game’s only menu even denies there’s anything to do. Under “Controls,” it says, “MOUSE—NOTHING / KEYBOARD—NOTHING.” After some time, however, one discovers there are in fact quite a few things to do. The keyboard can be used as a piano. Playing songs such as “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” one makes it rain blood, frogs, and hearts. By playing the theme from Close Encounters of the Third Kind one can summon a catastrophic rogue star or other object to destroy the mountain unless one intervenes by “spamming” the keyboard perpetually, thus creating a glowing force-field. A sort of chorus-like sound plays variously during normal game “play.” This sound recalls elements of the soundtrack of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The game itself acknowledges this influence during the near-destruction of Mountain as the music played during encounters with the monolith, Ligeti’s Lux Aeterna, heightens the alien drama of the cosmos. Of course, most of the gameplay in Mountain is predominately non-dramatic. One can tinkle around on the piano keyboard, zoom in and out, and solicit messages by pressing the period key. But mostly it’s a game that plays in the background of one’s laptop or tablet while one is doing something else.

Mountain is not networked in any traditional sense. One downloads it and then it runs locally. At the same time Mountain is profoundly redolent of networks. It would be difficult to learn of its many easter eggs without Reddit or other sites. More strongly, the game itself expresses the experience of networks. Like us, and like our networks, Mountain exists in a state of being always on. Its existence is primarily phatic, calling out while talking about impersonal feelings and the weather, available for almost literal “pings,” or gentle forms of play. With this context in mind it becomes possible to reconsider just why all those object/things keep floating by or crashing on the mountain. More than objects, these things are phatic communications themselves: hailings from the invisible universe of the network.

Far from any monadic entity, I propose Mountain functions as an inverse antidote to common visualizations of the Internet. Such images portray the network as composed of uncountable lines and nodes in constant, determined connection (Fig. 2).

As sublimely impressive as such images may be, as Alexander R. Galloway notes, “every map of the Internet looks the same” (85). All such images try to represent a totality, and they all fail. Mountain does something related but quite different. In one sense, Mountain seems like a zoomed in picture of a tiny aspect of such maps. Seen thusly Mountain suggests that the nodes do not appear to connect if we look very closely. The occasional crash landings of various things, however, suggest the contingency and opacity of networked connection. Things hail us but we don’t know why or from where they call out. From a perspective divested of any vision of synoptic totality, Mountain allegorizes the experience of networked connection in the heterogeneous rhythms of phatic sociability (Fig. 3 & 4).

The imaginary of “always-on” networking posits a kind of impossible symmetry between the subject and the network. This tends to produce expressions that either anthropomorphize the network or de-humanize the subject (the network “calls out,” the subject needs to “power down”). The game’s opening statement—“You are Mountain. You are God”—foregrounds precisely this problem. Ian Bogost helpfully argues that “the ‘you’ in ‘you are mountain’ doesn’t refer to the terraformed 3D game object, at all. Instead, it describes the game itself as a piece of software. You are not this mountain; rather, you are Mountain” (Bogost 2014). Drifting, working, not working, playing, fidgeting, Bogost’s main point rings true. “I” am more Mountain the software and game than I am “mountain,” or the cartoon representation of a game onscreen. Taking Bogost a step further, however, to say that I am Mountain invites us to inquire as to the meaning of inhabiting such a strange subject position.

Bogost believes Mountain has much to teach us about being. For Bogost, Mountain represents a game version of what he calls “alien phenomenology,” a variant of object-oriented ontology that de-privileges human experience in favor of the investigation into “what it’s like to be a thing.” While I agree that Mountain helps to think about thingness, the question of what it’s like to be a thing here resonates more with the thing in Stark’s title than it does with the quasi-lyrical litanies of objects populating Bogost’s (and Graham Harman’s, and Bruno Latour’s) prose.¹⁵ In his speculative zeal, Bogost discusses the mountain and its objects in an astonishingly literal manner as if they actually stood in for real objects. Bogost discusses Mountain’s interest in being as though it actually solicits the viewer to consider what it’s like to be a mountain. Rarely, however, do giant pies or film reels crash land on mountains. Notwithstanding the work of sculptor Claes Oldenburg, giant pies and giant film reels do not exist in reality. Instead of interpreting Mountain as an allegory of reality de-privileging human experience, I believe it is more fruitful to attend to how Mountain’s evokes problems of networked experience and subjectivity. Mountain is not at all what it’s like to be a thing, unless of course we consider that question from the standpoint of networked human experience. How, then, might we pursue this phatic and sociable thingness at Mountain’s core?

Mountain playfully brings into focus the problem of navigating the vague boundary of being and relating in the impersonal idiom of networked phatic sociability. In We Have Never Been Modern, the groundbreaking work that in large part inspired the pursuit of the very brand of philosophy Bogost promotes, Bruno Latour argues, as Bill Brown neatly summarizes, that “modernity has artificially made an ontological distinction between inanimate objects and human subjects, whereas the world is full of ‘quasi-objects’ and ‘quasi-subjects.’” (12). For us, the inheritors of the so-called ‘moderns,’ the problem consists in the “proliferation of hybrids” that saturate and overwhelm the modern ‘constitution,’ or the strategies cultivated to sort and manage things. The creation of a few vacuum pumps doesn’t pose much of a threat. But the proliferation of a number of contemporary phenomena do: “frozen embryos, expert systems, digital machines, sensor-equipped robots, hybrid corn, data banks, psychotropic drugs, whales outfitted with radar sounding devices, gene synthesizers, audience analyzers…” (Latour 50). Significantly, digital media and networked technologies figure prominently in Latour’s litany even from 1991. Digital relationality contributes heavily to Latour’s need to re-think the old problem of the subject/object divide. But it is not Latour specifically who helps to re-think this problem so much as his friend, Michel Serres, from whom Latour derives the notion of the “quasi-object.”

The quasi-object (and its conceptual double, the quasi-subject) troubles the sharp division between subject and object.¹⁶ Moving toward a conclusion, I want to suggest that Serres’ quasi-object articulates the variable and playful continuum between being and relating so central to the impersonal dynamics of always-on networks. In a moment strikingly resonant with Bersani’s discussion of Simmel, Serres proclaims how the quasi-object opens onto the matter of “the whole question”: namely, “being or relating.” The “quasi-object is not an object, but it is one nevertheless since it is not a subject, since it is in the world; it is also a quasi-subject, since it marks or designates a subject, who, without it, would not be a subject” (225). For Serres, the strange traffic between subject and object does not merely undo the rigidity of their division, which typically redounds—as Latour shows—into a categorical purification of human and nonhuman in modernity writ large. The quasi-object doesn’t replace the terms subject and object so much as it forms their ground, which we now grasp in terms of the coupling of being and relating. Serres illustrates the concept with reference to games and sports. In games such as the furet (a game in which a circle of children furtively pass along an object while a ‘hunter’ in the middle tries to guess who has the object) or soccer, the movement of an object or ball orients collective forms of relationality. In its playful movement, the ball re-organizes sociality insofar as it becomes a quasi-object and its movement bestows upon the players the status of quasi-subjects.

To re-open Bogost’s question: what does it mean that the program declares you are mountain? What is the nature of such indistinction? Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Mountain is that it doesn’t vanish completely into the background of experience. It re-engages my interest not just because it calls out; like the network, it calls out for phatic play. To invert David Golumbia’s critique of the normative mode of videogames, Mountain is not so much an example of a game “without play,” but rather a mode of “play without gaming.” Even in the absence of any rules of the game, it’s fun to spin the mountain like a top. When one spins the mountain, however, it is not the mountain that spins but rather the visual perspective on the mountain. Focusing on just the mountain it seems like a top, but the background of stars spins, too. We don’t spin the mountain, we spin ourselves as Mountain. This is a curiously dizzy state of affairs, indeed, especially as it works upon the inaugural indistinction between subject and object announced at the outset: you are mountain. When the mountain, or, game perspective spins, it’s hard to know who is the subject and who is the object. Who is the quasi-object? And who is the quasi-subject? In lieu of an answer, what matters is the phatic play of association between software and human experience that blurs the distinction. This, I venture, is a small pleasure, and it is pleasurable largely because I don’t really have to be myself too much. But it is also, more profoundly, something like the pleasures of being always on, or living between being and relation. When delineated schematically, being and relating sound like two, isolable elements. Yet as My Best Thing and Mountain demonstrate, considered against the ambient infrastructure of contemporary networked life, the difference between the two often collapses into modalities of ordinary pleasure: flirting, conversation, but also the pleasures of thingness found in the felt relation of non-relation of being always potentially otherwise.

Footnotes

1. See Greg Miller, “What’s Up With That? Phantom Cell Phone Vibrations”; and Michelle Drouin, Daren H. Kaiser, and Daniel A. Miller, “Phantom vibrations among undergraduates: Prevalence and associated psychological characteristics.”

2. See V. S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee, Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind.

3. See Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918.

4. I have explored this idea in relation to Spike Jonze’s Her. See James J. Hodge, “Gifts of Ubiquity.” Several other scholars make related formulations. On “connected presence” see Christian Licoppe and Zbigniew Smoreda, “Are Social Networks Technologically Embedded?” Mark B. N. Hansen argues that web 2.0 mediates not so much content as “sheer connectivity.” See Hansen, “New Media.”

5. See Scott C. Richmond, “Vulgar Boredom, or What Andy Warhol Can Teach Us About Candy Crush”

6. See Patrick Jagoda, Network Aesthetics; and Kris Cohen, Never Alone, Except For Now.

7. On the phatic in linguistics more broadly, see Gunter Senft, “Phatic communion.” The phatic also figures in J. L. Austin’s speech act theory. See Austin, How to Do Things with Words.

8. For example, see William R. Paulson, The Noise of Culture: Literary Texts in a World of Information.

9. See Paul Ceruzzi, Computing: A Concise Introduction.

10. Nicole Starosielski raises a version of this question in her discussion of “lag” in relation to global online gaming and undersea cables. See Starosielski, “Fixed Flow: Undersea Cables as Media Infrastructure.”

11. I take inspiration here from Sianne Ngai’s post-Kantian and post-Cavellian efforts to theorize ordinariness and aesthetics together. See Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting.

12. See Rita Raley, “List(en)ing Post.”

13. Mark Godfrey analyzes the green background as an allusion to the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. See Godfrey, Frances Stark: My Best Thing.

14. See Berlant, Cruel Optimism; Teresa Brennan, Exhausting Modernity: Grounds for a New Economy; and Judy Wajcman, Pressed for Time: The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism.

15. See Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing. For a strong critique of speculative realism and object-oriented ontology attentive to its rhetorical strategies, see Scott C. Richmond, “Thought, Untethered: A Review Essay.”

16. Pierre Levy and Brian Massumi have respectively discussed the import of Serres’ quasi-object for the fields of digital media and affect theory. More recently, David J. Alworth evokes the quasi-object in his Latour-inspired revision of setting in literary fiction.

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