I am a mechanical eye

(apologies to Dziga Vertov)

not my photo, but I recognize the place & perspective

Not long ago, I went on a short camping trip in the Pine Barrens, where I spent some time looking out over the pond in the photograph above. I wish I could claim credit for the picture, but neither I nor my spouse were equipped to take it.

First: my excuse.

I use a dumbphone, and its camera is basically an easter egg in terms of functionality. Until last year, I had a digital camera—but no longer. It broke my heart one too many times.

In 2016 or 2017 I rushed out to buy a camera in anticipation of a once-in-a-lifetime visit to Poland’s Białowieża Forest, and didn’t realize until I was already overseas that it lacked a manual focus option. Getting a crisp and clear photo of anything that isn’t human-shaped and sitting right in front of the lens was a roll of the dice, and the dice were loaded. Twelve blurry photos of a couple of bluebirds perched less than twenty feet away were the twelve final straws.¹ I got rid of the camera, and am too much of a cheap ass to casually splurge on a replacement that can do what I require of it.

Even though it wasn’t a great camera, I did get a lot of use out of it. Under the right circumstances, it could take decent pictures. For several years I carried it with me whenever I left the city to ramble around some forest or swamp, and reached for it to make mementos of encounters with strange and/or beautiful birds, bugs, or blossoms. (How much I miss living in places where I didn’t have to go so far out of my way to stand somewhere that I could turn a pirouette and see nothing of any built environment is another conversation.)

It wasn’t until after I stopped using the camera that I realized how much it changed my comportment when I went out on a stroll or a hike. I’d visit the Heinz Refuge outside of Philadelphia, the Great Swamp National Park in North Jersey, or the Black Run Preserve in South Jersey, and find myself looking at the time and thinking about how many neglected emails I could have been answering, how much of my reading backlog I could be getting through, how pages of The Novel I might have written,² or how many tedious but necessary domestic tasks I could have accomplished if I hadn’t elected to get in my car and drive 30–45 minutes to stand around in the woods alone for no reason.

By and by, and without my noticing, these trips had become occasions to use the camera. Finding myself a mile down a path without it was like sitting at a desktop computer when the wi-fi’s down. The behavioral circuit was broken, the follow-through precluded, and I’d check the map to figure out the shortest loop back to the trailhead.

Marshall McLuhan:

By continuously embracing technologies, we relate ourselves to them as servo-mechanisms. That is why we must, to use them at all, serve these objects, these extensions of ourselves, as gods or minor religions. An Indian is the servo-mechanism of his canoe, as the cowboy of his horse or the executive of his clock.

Quite so: I served my camera as its finder scope, and was happy to do it.

In some respects, this kind of relationship with a camera isn’t such a terrible thing at all. Performing the motions the camera asks of us gives definition and purpose to the free-floating acts of seeing which characterize most of our solo walks along a dirt path under tall trees. Unless we’re out bow hunting, foraging, heeding fugitive impulses to climb trees or rocks, or otherwise conducting transactions with the environs that leave us with dirt under our nails or on the tips of our noses, we usually restrict ourselves to following a conveniently traversable line through the wild growth and hygienically looking at things.³ Perhaps we’re not necessarily unreceptive to birdsong, thrumming insect signals, or rustlings in the leaf litter—but for creatures like us, possessed of sensoria so steeply tilted towards the visual, hearing is typically just an antecedent to looking around for something to see.

Comporting oneself to see with the camera imposes structure, discipline, and purpose upon the somewhat objectiveless behavioral patterns attendant on following a trail from the parking lot at Point A to the cranberry bog at Point E (taking discretional detours to Points B, C, and/or D along the way), and then schlepping back to Point A and going home. One grows more attentive to his surroundings and deliberate in his actions as the affair becomes goal-oriented, and as one applies criteria for good and poor outcomes to his performance. We see better not only when we’re intent on finding something to see, but endeavoring to see it in a particular manner—as we are when we’re trying to transform a glimpse of a green heron stooped among the cattails into a well-composed photograph.

By the same token, circumambulating a patch of asphalt in the sweltering July heat and idly bouncing a ball by oneself isn’t without its charm, especially if one has nowhere else to be, nothing else to do, and wants to get some thinking done. But more engaging fun might be had if he made a goal of throwing that ball into an elevated metal hoop parallel to the ground. And it would be more engaging and purposeful still if he were to use that ball and that hoop to play a rules-organized game with his friends.

The eventuality of the basketball game reframes an afternoon shooting hoops from solitary and aimless play into preparation for a social performance. One executes a layup on an empty court and imagines his glad and grateful teammates when the ball bounces off the backboard and swishes through the net, and may quietly reprimand himself if it rebounds onto the asphalt; in either case he brings his expectations of a future audience to his one-man game.

This is to say that bringing a digital camera out on a hike usually means taking along the the idea of an eventual Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, etc. audience for use as a hermeneutic filter and selection procedure. Following a scenic trail antecedes taking photographs, and taking photographs antecedes the receipt of virtual approval tokens from one’s real or imaginary peers. Speaking from personal experience, it doesn’t matter if your cool photo of an ebony jewelwing damselfly earns you a paltry eight Likes; you did the thing, people reinforced you through the mediating software, the software reinforced you as you admired what a handsome and meaningful grid you’ve made of your Insta profile, and later on you go out to do the thing again because it was rewarded/-ing. The behavioral chain preceding your afternoon jaunts have to some greater or lesser extent come under the control of the technology you carry with you and the peer group that interacts with you through it.

However dubious his philosophical chops, Ralph Waldo Emerson was well-attuned to and very good at describing those moments where one seems to intuit a divine Logos or Anima Mundi in the order of things. Rather tipping his hand and flashing his anthropocentric bias, he writes about going out into “nature” as a royal road to self-understanding:

Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental: to be brothers, to be acquaintances, — master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance. I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty. In the wilderness, I find something more dear and connate than in streets or villages. In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature.

Emerson writes to us from a more Romantic age in which the notion of authenticity—rooted in the belief of a core integrity possessed by individual persons, which the gentleman of probity ought to endeavor to preserve from the meanness and materialism of the mob—held more currency than it does today (and was less obviously riddled with contradictions).

In spite of the older and newer truisms of American Individualism and the so-called hyperindividualism promoted by neoliberalism qua corporate globalism, our reception by society (even the technological abstraction of a society) remains our principal grounds of identity. We develop our metrics for self-valuation based on what we notice others valuing in us.⁴

Being among non-human things that grow, wriggle, flit, transpire, hoot, and burble in [relatively] unpeopled open spaces was, for Emerson, a way to better understand one’s [human] self as it relates to the cosmos as like recognizing like. In the age of digital cameras, wireless networks, and social media culture, the woody and marshy stuff of the world is an ancillary means to the end of knowing oneself through the impression one makes on one’s virtual (or virtualized) peers. Picturesque scenes of flowering meadows, ponds refulgent with water lilies, cliffs overlooking green valleys, etc., meet the hiker as social resources, things to be seen against. Selfie-averse roamers may not mug for their own cameras, but by insinuating their personalities as the locus of their curated picture galleries, they (or rather their profiles, their holographic proxies) “wear” them the same way an “alternative” person flaunts a constellation of pins on their denim jacket to broadcast their tastes, politics, and affiliations.

Gary Larson, The Far Side

It might be reasonable to say that when I went on my outings minus a camera after five or six years of consistently feeling its strap pressing into the back of my neck whenever I went somewhere I could expect to see wading birds or hear wood thrushes, my sense of being thwarted, of showing up to a seminar without my duck (see above), was partially an anxiety of social provenance. Not Social Anxiety per se, but a sense of positioning myself to fall behind. Situated in a stage of capitalist development in which, as Debord observed, social relations are mediated by images, to collect, fabricate, and upload no images—to generate no content—is to consign oneself a nugatory existence.

In the twilight between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Thorstein Veblen described the phenomenon of “conspicuous consumption” as the (real or spurious) projection of bourgeoise quality. In the twenty-first century we’ve clicked over into conspicuous production by way of uploads, posts, replies, shares with comments, livetweeting, and routine profile curation (as on Goodreads, Backloggd, Spotify, and so on).⁵ We feel seen, we feel involved, we feel motivated—while the platforms’ barons feel their erections chafing against their undergarments as they watch their firms’ share prices climb.

But this is part and parcel of the ambient pressures and nudges towards maximizing value. YOLO, FOMO, and other such acronyms denoting Millennial hangups were faceted articulations of this tacit imperative. Gen Z’s “hustle culture” expresses a more pervasive internalization of the ethos, which regards idle downtime and unproductive leisure as anathema.⁶ In one way or another, we must produce value—somehow, somewhere, for somebody—for as long as we’re awake.

Going back out into the woods without a camera, I had to relearn how to Do Nothing for a few hours at a time. We are prostheticized to an extent unprecedented in human history—and all technology is purposeful. Attitudes of drifting contemplation and ludic goallessness apparently don’t come so naturally to cyborgs.

Next time: my spouse’s Android loses its charge and we sit around under the oaks and pines, not taking any pictures and not knowing anything.

1. seriously, there’s no friggin excuse for this:

but the trees and branches behind the birds consistently came out sharp! thanks autofocus!

2. Working on A Novel is the reason I haven’t updated this thing in nearly a month. When you’re in the zone, you’re in the zone. Apologies if this piece is a mite scatterbrained.

3. I’ve lately taken up straying from the path and ripping barberry out of the ground wherever I find it. I know it’s a doomed and pointless battle, but I still intend to fight it. (I am in despair of the Japanese knotweed situation, though.)

4. For some older folks who were deep into their thirties when they got addicted to tweeting circa 2010, acculturation to the platform must have been like a second puberty and a second round of high school.

5. We have since become allergic to talking about class, though the quality we seek to project through conspicuous production is bourgeoisie in the sense that it justifies affluence or aspirations of it on the moral grounds of work ethic and taste.

6. Bingewatching is not to be regarded as unproductive, nor is lying supine and scrolling through Instagram or TikTok for two or three hours a waste of one’s time. Staying au courant bespeaks status, and one must put in work to keep up to date with the latest trends, hottest series, dankest memes, etc. (Thus is the position of the celebrated “creative class” held secure. It would be bad for business if engaging with or even bingeing on its produce was a thing to be ashamed of—and the creative class emphatically assures us that it is not, as do its patrons in finance and tech.)