A very dear mom of someone very dear to me responds (as do, I suspect, most polite middle-class white moms, in some variation or another) the same way every time something is held up for her contemplation that is unfamiliar: “Oh, that’s very…interesting.” Primed by a childhood spent as a weird nerd with his nose in a book at most intergenerational gatherings, I at first took this as a gentle putdown: “interesting” as a simple euphemism for “unpleasantly weird,” for example. But thinking more on it, I believe now that it’s a perfect use of the word. “Interesting” is not a substitution, in that utterance, for some less socially acceptable but stronger aesthetic judgment. Rather, it is a final judgment all its own. This realization I reached by reading the stupendous, subtly argued, carefully thought, sometimes embarrassingly overgrand work of Sianne Ngai. (Wait, I hear you saying, isn’t this series about Twitter porn? Shush, we’re getting there.) Ngai is an English professor, formerly of Stanford, currently of Chicago, whose work occasionally makes my six years of grad school floundering feel worth it. An omnivorous media critic, philosopher, and Marxist aestheticist, Ngai writes weird, rigorous, grand theory drawing from old-school tools. Did you know that the much-maligned 1996 Jim Carrey vehicle The Cable Guy contains within itself a trenchant critique of the casualization of labor in late-capitalist democracies, whose necessary form is the zany black comedy? Sianne Ngai will make an improbably convincing case that it is so.
Anyway, in her 2012 book Our Aesthetic Categories, which I heartily recommend you stop reading my blathering to go devour, Ngai makes a case for three categories of aesthetic evaluation that she thinks are central to our attempts to organize our experience of late capitalism: cuteness, interestingness, and zaniness. (This is in distinction to more traditional Western aesthetic categories that were more prominent in earlier eras. A good example is beauty and sublimity, which were the paradigmatic aesthetic categories for Immanuel Kant, a product of the late Enlightenment transition away from aristocratic organizations of property to early capitalism.) Reluctantly leaving beside the other two, Ngai’s description of “interestingness” is a deeply, well, interesting one for thinking about what kinds of assumptions are embedded in the form of a social media platform like Twitter. The chapter is, like, 70 pages long and ranges over everything from German Romanticism to 1960s American conceptual art, but here’s a pretty good quick summary of what Ngai means by “interestingness” as an aesthetic category:
To be sure, the evaluation ‘interesting’ is not restricted to aesthetic contexts. People find things aesthetically interesting, but also scientifically interesting, historically interesting, sociologically interesting, psychologically interesting, ethically interesting, politically interesting and so on. That the specific objects and situations judged interesting vary widely according to discipline or institutional context should come as no surprise. What is striking is the consistency of the judgment’s function: that of ascribing value to that which seems to differ, in a yet-to-be-conceptualized way, from a general expectation or norm whose exact concept may itself be missing at the moment of judgement. Moreover, regardless of the particular objects and situations to which it is ascribed, the judgment always seems underpinned by a calm, if not necessarily weak, affective intensity whose minimalism is somehow understood to secure its link to ratiocinative cognition and to facilitate the formation of social ties. (112-113)
In other words, we call something “interesting” when it seems to differ from other examples of its type but we’re not entirely sure how to justify that feeling rationally yet. In that way, interestingness is a sort of judgment without any content: all you’re really saying is that there must be something more interesting (more concrete, more conceptual, more elaborate) to say about the thing. Interestingness is the very feeling that something is worth having some sort of feeling about, good or bad. Later in the chapter, Ngai declares that interestingness is important because it is a hinge-point between feeling and rational thought, between self and other: if someone says an object feels interesting, we respond, “Why?” And perhaps a rational discussion follows. According to Ngai, “interestingness” has become more prominent as capitalism has produced ever-greater differentiation in the things and experiences we have and has created new media technologies (the newspaper, the highway, the television) for circulating information about those things. All of this is, to me, intensely interesting for thinking about social media and porn. Unfortunately for me (and for you as readers, who will have to endure my own extension of this thought rather than wiser words from its fount), Ngai is a lot more interested in the 1960s American art world, and her chapter never really quite makes it past that era even though you’d think that an aesthetic category concerned with the circulation of information in late capitalism would demand a discussion about social media. And so you will ask, “Why is ‘interestingness’ such an interesting way to think about Twitter and porn?” Well….
I think interestingness is the key to why Twitter is great for porn and perhaps the worst thing to ever happen to the circulation and discussion of information. Far more so than, say, the Usenet server or the Internet forum, which organized information and discussion in chronological posts, and even more so than a platform like Facebook, whose feed is also largely organized mostly around interestingness but at least takes some other things into account, Twitter is a platform entirely organized around interestingness, at basically every level. Every interaction and every display of content on Twitter measures, displays, and is organized by interestingness. Like Facebook, your feed is organized not chronologically, but by measuring the types of interactions you’ve had in the past and giving you new ones that people interested in similar things to your interactions have also liked—content that is of the same type, but a little different. Moreover, the ways you interact with this content are themselves all ways of registering your interest in that content: you can like something, and you can retweet it. Both of those interactions are expressions of the exact judgment that Ngai describes. We can phrase it, “I have noticed something about this thing that merits further attention to it, though I have made no conceptual judgment about what.” Those rational judgments can, in theory, occur in the quote-tweet or the comment, though Twitter’s radical character limits sharply discourage the providing of considered, evidentiary judgments that go very much beyond, “This is interesting.” Indeed, the way that comments are displayed in the feed and even under posts strongly discourages the possibility of the sort of back-and-forth discussion of rational evidence that Ngai claims is begged by the judgment of “interestingness.” Each of those comments (or retweets, or quote-tweets) is itself removed from the context of the post it responds to and held up by the algorithm as an object of possible interestingness. If enough people like a retweet, or the algorithm judges the comment more interesting than the original post, or whatever, it will reappear in your feed, shorn entirely of whatever narrative or argumentative context it was originally embedded in.
Ngai’s chapter ends on a moment of redemption for the “merely interesting”; she claims, “Exactly on the basis of our conviction that the object merits our going on—merits stretching the moment of aesthetic appraisal to include its discursive and intersubjective aftermath—we tell people we find works interesting when we want an opportunity to show them our evidence or to present support for our claims of value in a way capable of convincing them of their rightness. In other words, we tell people we find works interesting when we want to do criticism” (170). In other words, the value of “interestingness” is precisely that it’s a personal feeling that opens the way for rational debate about the value of personal feelings in the first place. Ngai’s intense interest in conceptual art arises because she finds it to be a kind of art that implements rational criticism into its own aesthetic practice. Her reading of conceptual art like Edward Ruscha’s Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1962) is that it is art that consists entirely of aesthetic judgment. What a high-art book of twenty-six photos of generic gasoline stations claims is, “These photos are interesting!” But what I don’t think she really considers is the opposite possibility: what about aesthetic judgment that consists entirely in being an object held up for aesthetic contemplation? That situation, I think, is exactly what we have with Twitter: every comment, every retweet itself becomes a piece of aesthetic “content” held up for aesthetic evaluation by every other user, with the only allowable judgment being whether or not that object is “interesting.” The “like” and “retweet” buttons let you make that judgment without opening further discussion. The quote-tweet and the comment let you judge whether the original piece of content was interesting in a way that begs other users to judge whether your judgment was itself interesting. The presentation of “support for our claims of value in a way capable of convincing [other people] of their rightness” never really comes; it’s attempts to present the judgment “This is interesting!” in the most interesting way possible all the way down. (Of course I acknowledge that this isn’t the only way people use Twitter – there are attempts at long Tweet threads and back-and-forth discussions on Twitter, and long discussions do occur. But my whole point is that these uses of the platform are essentially hacks; they actively resist the design features of the platform, which strongly discourage them.)
When it comes to the circulation and discussion of information, I think this design is a disaster; when it comes to porn, I think it’s brilliant. If I’m trying to access up-to-date information about the novel coronavirus or have a discussion about the best tactics for advocating for trans people, interestingness is absolutely not the aesthetic principle by which I would want to organize the units of content I see. As Ngai emphasizes, interestingness is about variation within a type, about novelty, about difference. Accurate information is, well, often boring and conventional. When it comes to debates about contested values, interestingness is somewhat more useful – often, novel arguments about a contested topic turn out to be good ones! But interestingness is a purely aesthetic category; the presentation of evidence comes after it. Responses to people’s positions that are themselves attempts at interestingness aren’t induction; they’re polarization. If all you can do to have your point heard in a big debate is make the most interesting point and the moment of further conceptualization or justification never arrives, you’re not really having a discussion at all. You’re doing performance art. Novel paradigm shifts are occasionally deeply important in moving a debate forward, but most of the actual stuff of debate is ever-greater refinement and sophistication given to a novel theory. Novelty after novelty after novelty in position-taking is simply a process of extremism or radicalization. Since every response in a debate on Twitter is itself an aesthetic object held up for its consumers’ judgment of “interesting” or “not interesting,” the best way to win attention on Twitter is to take the most “interesting” position, rather than doing that boring work of refinement and justification. Aesthetics—particularly an aesthetic category that, if we listen to Ngai, consists entirely in the withholding of judgment—is a dreadful way to organize information, if we have any investment in that information’s truth or utility.
On the other hand, interestingness has many advantages in organizing the production and circulation of aesthetic objects. Ngai focuses on conceptual art because she’s interested in thinking about the merger of high art and academic criticism. But there are much less highfalutin genres where interestingness is at stake: genre fiction. Any art form that’s highly serialized and has few degrees of freedom with respect to its genre conventions—think soap operas, detective novels, mainstream comic books, and, yes, porn—is trafficking in interestingness. All of these highly serialized genres are dealing far less in aesthetic categories like beauty or intellectual categories like social commentary and far more in the production of interestingness. As Ngai repeatedly notes in her chapter, interestingness is a category particularly concerned with time and convention in a way that other aesthetic categories are less concerned with. The problem of interestingness is always variation from a regularity of form. While high art genres of course have their own conventions, genre fiction’s are far more visible and have far fewer degrees of freedom. Depart too far from their conventions and you’ve created something in another genre for a different audience: Twin Peaks may be an interesting piece of art for some people, but probably not for fans of traditional soap operas. I first made this aesthetic connection between genre fiction and porn when I was assisting my dissertation chair’s contemporary English survey course and she assigned Grant Morrison’s The Filth (2002-2003). Despite an investment in most nerdy media, I’ve never been much of a comic book reader, so I might be wildly off-base here, but it seems to me that part of what the comics do in imagining a cyberpunk world of ubiquitous porn, with pornified law enforcement fighting villains who are sometimes literal pornstars, is draw a connection between the narrative demands of comic books and porn as genres. Traditional superhero comics are basically interestingness generators. A world is populated with some interesting people with interesting powers. But when all your characters have interesting powers, what makes them interesting threatens to collapse into sameness and therefore become boring. And so ever-new scenarios are devised to put these narrative elements into constant recombination: two heroes whose powers are particularly antithetical must fight, a villain who was very bad joins the forces of good for a time, characters die and their roles are taken up by new characters who have similar powers but a different backstory, etc etc. The aesthetic problem of serial genre fiction is how to maintain difference within a general background of sameness, to keep interest within the familiar.
While there are, of course, many other aesthetic problems in porn (as there are as well in the superhero comic book), I think it shares this same conceptual issue with genre fiction. Porn, as everyone knows, has rigid genres and types and a limited range of freedom in their recombination. And arousal (though it’d probably take a much longer post to tease out this point) seems to have a definite kinship with interestingness. What’s impressive about Twitter as a medium on which porn is produced and consumed is that the platform encourages the constant production of interestingness: constant differentiation within types, the proliferation of those types by decentralized production, the ever-present possibility of responding to someone’s particularly interesting porn with your own variation on that theme that is even more interesting. Between the decentralization of production (anyone’s comment or quote-tweet can itself be an example of pornography) and the organization of the feed by interestingness, Twitter is a powerful machine for pornographic innovation. For precisely the same reasons that it’s a dreadful platform for the production and circulation of information (the hierarchization by interestingness, and the demand that all replies and interactions themselves be examples of interestingness), it is a hyperproductive machine for the production and circulation of ever-more-interesting pornography.
(As a coda in case that last part seemed a little glib, “interestingness” is of course in itself not the only criterion by which we can and should judge our porn. Wrapped up in the problem of “interesting” porn is the question of whether “genre” itself is a destructive category to organize the bodies of real, living humans rather than pieces of fiction, since genre in porn seems to me to be tightly bound to the question of porn’s potential to reinforce racism, misogyny, transphobia, etc.)
I think there is a flip side to the Twitter machine, one that counters the "interestingness" prompted innovation: Because the algorithm that constructs the feed is looking for things similar to (and perhaps a little far from, but not too far from) the things one found interesting... It seems to prompt people to create content on Twitter is that is actually "more of the same".... because it'll get shown on feeds that found that stuff interesting.
So, while I might choose to create ever-more-interesting pornography to get my posts to be "interesting" --- I might instead choose to create pornography that matches what I'm seeing trending - because I'll get swept up in the algo's thirst for things to show.
I think you can see this without too much squinting at one's feed: There are the "oh everyone has one of those posts" posts... and the "oh, that's a bit more extreme than I've seen before" posts.
While these complementary drives are certainly creating ever-more varied pornography... perhaps it's pronography more slanted to satisfy the algorithm, rather than what I might find interesting.