Always, I’m anxious at the ways I pinch together varieties of thought and move, haphazardly, from various critical or academic ways of thinking and writing into more colloquial or quasi-therapeutic or sub-entrepreneurial modes, sometimes in the space of a single paragraph. I’m in impostor in all domains. I do this because I’m trying to describe a reality of overlapping fragments that remain otherwise cordoned off or hidden from one another altogether. Time will tell if it bears any fruit.
An early brush with the operational aesthetic as a concept, well before I had any awareness of that specific term, came when I was a teenager discussing pro wrestling with some friends. From early childhood, I never had any confusion that wrestling was “real,” but I subscribed to the idea that the point of watching it and talking about it was to treat it like immersive fiction. You consume it imaginatively, as if it were real.
So I praised some wrestler, how “good” he was, and a classmate retorted: “he sucks.” I argued entirely within the logic of kayfabe: “look, he keeps winning matches and doing awesome things!” It didn’t occur to me to bother to view wrestling outside of kayfabe. My exasperated classmate hit back: “it’s just steroids, smoke, and mirrors, the guy has limited technique, doesn’t have much presence in the ring to carry a match, and nobody would care about him outside the federation flagrantly pushing this character.” My classmate, of course, was correct and much more sophisticated than I was in this respect. I was willingly credulous and gullible—but I can’t let my younger self off the hook, because I hadn’t considered the full possibility of being incredulous and adept.
To enjoy the operational aesthetic entails a certain detachment. One isn’t subordinate to the object’s rules because one is not immersed in them. One stands back and sees how it works, admiring the system when it works well. It’s a certain kind of care.
In film spectatorship, the medium and its techniques may be invisible for some viewers, in favor of “content” (in the older, quainter, English department sense of the term): this is what’s happening when you’re watching a how-to video on YouTube, or following a heist movie to see how they’ll pull it off. In other words, it’s not an operational aesthetic of moving images, but an operational aesthetic of something else, granted via moving images.
For the student of film form, though, there are all kinds of additional possible questions, from the logistical (how did the filmmakers manage this complicated dolly shot?) to the poetic (how does this single cut convey a specific sense of time so concretely?).
While analysis implies some level of detachment, it also implies a certain amount of permanence and consistency to the object. We’re analyzing something, not simply our senses in a given passage of time. An object the functions is an object that has identity and gravity (even if just figurative gravity). But objects like these—films, books, performances, and so on—exist in environments. Environments affect the identity, the gravity, and the permanence of the attentional objects within them. Perhaps we will wake slowly to the ways that the environments themselves can be conceived as objects that function and thus have capacities for, well, operational aisthesis.
Given the prevalence of distracted viewing, wherein a huge portion of people looking at screens are paying attention to other things too, including other screens, the eye can coast unburdened for stretches. Often it is the eye which looks up every so often at the screen, just to ascertain faces and places, and the ear picks up on the sound cues that THIS IS A SCENE TO PAY ATTENTION TO. In this situation, we are immersed in an environment, and have variable degrees of detachment from the objects within it.
In one of my seminars many years ago, NYU’s Bill Simon screened Zorns Lemma, and with a little smile he remarked on the expectation that “good” experimental film viewers in the earlier generation were expected to catch those few instances when an image was twenty-five or twenty-six frames, rather than only twenty-four, and that this fine calibration was the mark of attentive viewing. Contrast this with the posture toward the film that many people might take, if sat down in front of Zorns Lemma right now, who might look at it and think “ok, we get it” as soon as they sense the pattern, i.e., THE “CONTENT,” and not concern themselves with its EXPERIENCE. But this is what divided attention, sound-era, postliterate spectatorship will be: the idea is to catch the GIST, the PATTERN, the CORE, the VIBE, and only secondarily, if at all, will any implied contract of rapt close attention be honored.
Like they say in that movie The Irishman, it is what it is.
So back to watching something to se how it works. If we are consuming media for the purpose of getting the gist, then we can exit the car repair video early, or space out of the action movie during a “slow” scene, because we have the necessary information—we got what we needed—we are following along SUFFICIENTLY. Even an avowed formalist might look at some “one-perfect-shots” and determine if a film is what they’re looking for.
(One obvious reason podcasts and audiobooks are so popular these days: people can multi-task while listening.)
As always, of course, there are trade-offs. What we gain in a certain empowerment over media objects and time management might also impinge on capacities for attention, inference, memory, etc.
Note some of the responses to Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog. I won’t discuss what happens in the film, in case you haven’t seen it, but either way you might have encountered some discussion about its ending. Apparently, some people do not grasp what happens. Personally I think the film gilds the lily in its choice of final shot; it would be a stronger movie if it were a little more reticent than it is, since all the information is already there. A viewer just has to pay attention. One explanation offered for the fact that people “aren’t getting it” is that many viewers are probably watching the film in a state of distraction—breaks in viewing, phone scrolling, etc. Maybe this explanation is too loose, too hand-wavey, too deterministic. But one important thesis can be pulled out of this example: certain kinds of textuality or objecthood are rewarded, or overlooked, based on the forms of attention they receive.
POINT: A movie that does not strategically attempt to pull in the phone-distracted viewer may be great, but how is that phone-distracted viewer going to know?
COUNTERPOINT: How can something be great if it can’t even capture my attention that much?
RECONCILIATION: Our standards derive from our media environments, and we exist in a palimpsest of multiple environments at once, with differing values and premises that can subsequently produce friction.
In a distraction-rich environment it’s easy to cue up the ear, to share the eye with other screens, to share the mind with other concerns. You don’t give over your attention; you wait to get the gist. But, rightly or wrongly, the media environment whose ethos I value most remains the one that is not ruled by necessity, scarcity, and efficiency. It works in surplus. It works in gifts. The object encapsulates attention as a gift given and received and recirculated.
Jack Hanson, on poet-artist David Jones:
“Everything comes back to the experience of making things, to careful, undivided attention that is still able to hold in its eye the particular joint, the particular stroke, the particular line, and also the house, the painting, the poem. There is also anxiety and doubt equally present in the most carefully made thing, a look over one’s shoulder for a last glimpse at what seems, but may not be, complete. But perhaps what was lost might be salvaged and seen in a new frame or used to turn the eye to a larger body of work or a small, consequential detail.”