viz.

This post is not about a certain viral video that will remain nameless, even though most people probably know what I'm talking about, and even if they haven't seen it they may have heard about the controversy surrounding it. Instead, this post is about the response to this viral video, a phenomenon documented in a recent slideshow presented on slate.com (created by Michael Agger). The slideshow presents a series of youtube videos in which people film their reactions to the video in question. So, a strong disclaimer: if you watch this slideshow, you will NOT see the video in question, but you will be shown a series of videos in which people react to it. Additionally, the videos are accompanied by a written commentary on what they signify; this commentary does, albeit somewhat obliquely, hint at the contents of the video.

The slideshow is prefaced by a brief discussion of the study of disgust, an argument that is related to some of my earlier posts about the representation of the unrepresentable:

Disgust, it seems, is hard to investigate without being mocked or without becoming disgusting yourself. With those caveats in mind, let's turn to the phenomenon of [redacted]. Immediately we run into trouble: [redacted] is a video that's too disgusting to write about. In order to discuss (and perhaps learn from) [redacted], then, we must study the faces of those who have seen it.

My (long, inscrutable) reaction to this reaction to the reactions after the jump!

I want to draw attention to two of Agger's points: first, his claim that the original is too disgusting to write about, and second, his claim that there is something to be learned from watching these reaction videos.

First, I want to support and extend his second claim: I do think it is worth asking what these reaction videos are about (this question is separate from but related to the question of what the original video is about). Agger offers one suggestion: "These reaction videos are an unusual instance of the Web taking something disgusting and somehow making it more innocent." But, he adds, "'Collective resilience' is a nice sentiment. Too bad Web culture has a way of taking things to the next level." Certainly these videos are probably performing some kind of cultural work, although what this work is/does is less clear (and I'm interested to hear other opinions on this point).

Agger makes a good point, but I wonder what else is at work here. In order to make these reaction videos, the people who film themselves seem to be anticipating their disgust in order to record it. Why? To me, the most fascinating thing about these response videos is the way they stage performances of disgust--they are as much about this performance as they are about genuine feelings of disgust. This is not to say that the people in the videos are "acting," "pretending," or not genuinely disgusted. It's just that to me they point to an odd kind of awareness of the socially-expressive function of disgust, an emotion that is usually presumed to be about one's visceral, individual, bodily response. That is, they seem to be just as much about inter-subjectivity as they are about intra-subjectivity--the public dimension of disgust as much as, if not more than, the personal dimension. Maybe I'm headed into la-la theoryland, and I'm not sure where this line of thought will take me. Suffice it to say that I'm interested in the way these videos call attention to or deflect attention away from the Real (and given the subject matter of the original videos, I think this is no accident).

With regard to Agger's second point, I want to offer a qualifying observation. I think he's right in one sense when he says the original video is too disgusting to write about. But that is not to say that what happens in the video is not describable--it is. But I do think it is impossible to convey in writing just what makes this video so...unique. There is something about what happens in the video that escapes a verbal description, written or spoken--there is something left over that cannot be conveyed (shades of Derrida here, I guess, but also of Plato--in this case the copy really is not quite the same as the original). What I'm wondering is whether the reaction videos are a form of writing about the original, albeit in a different form. Isn't there a sense in which the reaction videos are easier to read precisely because they get at conveying (even if they don't quite actually convey) something a more conventional form of writing doesn't? Can't the viewer read the subject's response more easily, and more accurately, by actually watching it?

But at the same time, doesn't the staginess of the performances call attention to the way in which even disgust is conveyed by a series of conventional markers? It seems like what is suggested here is the way the Real still relies on the symbolic to get its work done. And to me, it's as if the reaction videos speak, more than anything else, to a desire to be disgusted more than they record actual disgust. As if the videos are really "about" our ever-diminishing capacity to be disgusted--a desire at which these videos point but don't actually manage to satisfy. (On this point, I think I differ from Agger, who suggests that the videos are about resilience to disgust, whereas I think they may actually be about anxiety concerning the absence of disgust.) In this sense, it seems like the videos speak to the way our supposedly "new" visual culture reiterates, albeit with some differences, the same old problems that have always been faced by works of mimesis or representation. My question is: how are the mimetic problems faced by visual culture like or unlike the old problems of signification always encountered in a theory of meaning?

Anyway, these are some half-baked ideas I have about what's going on here...