William H. Aile
– FROM THE LAST ESSAYS OF W. H. AILE

On content

There’s something to the claim that everything’s been done. One can hardly express contempt without feeling one’s brow quoting a lost first furrow. And empirically speaking we seem right to conclude that there’s nothing new to do from the fact that nothing new is done. We fall in the same love we hear in songs; get duped by the same lies; protest the same indecencies. Again and, it seems, again we mimic what’s made – and what’s made is nothing new. Producers green-light the sixteenth Star Wars; galleries are re-hung with the same easy scrap; books are printed and reprinted with the same turns, words, and terrors; and, pain beyond pain, the apotheosis of the scientific method, TikTok, for its never ending stores of content, may have in and of itself finished form. There are those little burps of consistency that fate brings to the surface in the dumb world’s selection of the right words for its wrong ways, of which the title “content creator” as that to which kids, I’m told, aspire – meaning, if you live under the rock that is our common sky, one who coordinates, makes, and posts matter online – is an arresting example. The content in question is but so many clever variations on a theme from a given platform: dance or makeup videos on TikTok; unboxing or reaction videos on YouTube; and beyond into ever more niche corners of the web. But every post, I’m informed, not only those quasi-professional ones – even a post by you, Reader, or me – creates content, that is, something for viewers to consume. That this consumption is rather queer compared to the consumption of, say, cake, I must remark. The video once consumed remains consumable – grows, even, in another apt phrase, like a virus, more consumable, enough to make one wonder whether we aren’t the consumed and not the consumer in these cases. But the point is: “content” is an almost applaudably forward word for work that finds it needn’t face its form – and, I dare say, can’t, being, as it is, cast onto such platforms. – But doesn’t TikTok offer a medium (I seem to hear some young soul ask) – the reel and the feed – which its influencers work within to mold these various genres? And isn’t the creative working-within-material-constraints all artists have ever done? – One need only take one reflective step away from one’s phone to see that the constraints are, in the case of the content creator, but not in the case of the artist, absolutely arbitrary and made by those with interests in your death and repetition. To be sure, not in your biological death – for you’d then stop making and consuming its content – but, depend upon it, in your annihilation. – But is it art? Can it be? – We should, I think, question the usefulness of this word if it applies as easily to what gives us reason to live as to what contributes to our doom. Now don’t mistake me. It is not that any painting is better than any piece of content: for it must be admitted, too many paintings are as shallow as the average ware on Instagram, and the art market, if heeded, is but one stuffy algorithm dictating shape to work that will – or would – pad the portfolios of the very villains postured to profit from your death. If we think, as I’m afraid it is now normal to think, that what makes a work art is its entry into the market, or its hanging on a wall, or our pleasure in it, or our interest, however brief – then we will be inclined, within reason, it seems, to call a post on Instagram art. But rather than raising content to the level of art, what we’ve done is reduced all art to content. If that is all we think art is, then the repetitious stream of content on TikTok and the discontent it carries are what we deserve. – But what more could art be? – It is one of the sickest twists of modern life that we are accustomed to cant and cliche that are at once true and empty, and we inherit the – true – idea that art makes life meaningful and that it creates new possibilities for meaning, but with either no sense of how to live with this truth, and so no sense of what art is, or else a sublime indifference to it; but reflect – will you? – on the thought: art makes new possibilities for meaning: meaning now, before it’s made, it is impossible – which it is – and what it wants to be is not another familiar actuality, but will create – it must – not content but a form. And that’s just what a form is: a thing’s possibility of meaning, which a work of art must make. If this doesn’t sound like what art does, then we have lost the sense of that word and the world it illuminates. And if we can fare just as well without the word – and can we? – then we can’t without the thing. For the repetition of the actual flatters, at the expense of potential, present selves by repeating back to us what we already are, and without new forms we will watch and live, with no new sense, the same after the same, and let – if even now it lives – the last light of our unattained life be extinguished by a torrent of content.