Why Do I Keep Crying?

Abstract

This article explores how my performance videos Googling Things in Hell 1 (Tammy) & 2 (Daniel) (2021) capture the contradictory nature of emotional performances in surveillance capitalism and convey them to the viewer. When we perform emotions online through social media posts and comments, or as in these videos, searching for content on Google, personalized content isolates us by using our emotions as data to provide or sell us what the algorithm thinks we want. But the generic nature of our search results shows that our feelings are never truly our own and are always structurally determined by capitalism.

Following Eve Sedgwick and Adam Frank's reading of the mid-century psychologist Silvan Tomkins, the article presents a ‘weak theory' of the emotions under investigation by staying close to the surface of the emotional performances captured in the videos. But, by thinking through the aesthetic and form of the screen image, and the textured feel of the activity taking place on screen, the article reveals the ‘strong' theory of emotions deployed by Google Search, which aims at profiting from those emotional performances by interpreting them as potential requests for information about products or services provided by Google’s advertising clients.

This reductive way of interpreting emotions is contrasted by the videos' interest in the specificity of the online performances of emotion captured on-screen. The article concludes by suggesting that these performances of emotion are necessarily interested in the conditions of their own possibility. Using ideas by the artist Andrea Buttner and the affect theorist Lauren Berlant, the article claims that my videos' maintenance of interest in their on-screen performances of emotion might help a viewer acknowledge, understand and reflect on the political conditions in which they take place.

Notes

1 Tammy Reynolds is a performer, producer and drag artist who sometimes performs as Midgitte Bardot. On stage they ‘sing/dance/ speak/scream/shout/eat my trauma’. They make work with their disability, describing themselves as ‘always disabled … always a dwarf’ (Artsadmin 2020). Daniel Oliver (2015) is a performance artist, lecturer and researcher who makes ‘raucous, dyspraxic-led performance worlds’.

2 The personalized results each performer received on the day of filming would be different if they were to google the same search terms today. The results depend on ad spends by different companies, each webpage’s place in Google’s page ranking system and individual changes in the performer’s data over time.

3 Including search history, location data and other identifying information that they have willingly or unknowingly handed over to Google Search, Gmail or one of Google’s many other services

4 It is important to mention here that some theorists use affect and emotion interchangeably, including Silvan Tomkins, who referred to shame, anger and other nameable emotions as affects. This text uses affect when writing directly about Tomkins’s theories, but it is interested in emotions that take shape in language, rather than any pre-linguistic affects

5 Normal sized penis; normal sized forehead; normal sized babybel; normal sized hands; normal sized tongue; why does my vaginal discharge smell?; why do my testicles feel like a bag of worms?

6 Why am I a bad person?; Why do I keep crying?

7 Why is contemporary art so bad?; who is the best person?

8 Why do we die?; when can we love again?

9 If you know Babybel cheese but you are confused by the phrase ‘normal sized Babybel’ then I urge you to google it now. It will turn your world upside down. Babybel sold in UK shops is the mini version of the squidgy, wax bound cheese. Across mainland Europe there are also midi and maxi sizes of the cheese. I find it very helpful to show students images of midi and maxi size Babybel if I want

10 Tammy suggested this question as an example of something they googled in the middle of the night. This is why I enjoy collaborating with performers. to quickly problematize the idea of cultural norms having objective correlations.