Responsive Performativity, or Why Ryder Ripps is the [something] of [something else]

Ryder Ripps is an internet artist who I’ve been aware of, and interested in to varying degrees, for maybe four years. His work is consistently visually striking, and I generally appreciate his willingness to engage openly and seriously on things like “meme culture” and the changing nature of intellectual property. He’s overall a pretty interesting guy, seems to be my general impression. I wanted to kind of collect some thoughts I had about his work and his general online persona following a particularly jarring exchange he had on facebook with some journalist from the guardian, and I thought it might be cool to publish this here with a title intended as a sort of Ryder Ripps-focused clickbait. Wonder if he’ll see this, lol.

So, the prompt for this whole thing was a series of exchanges that Ripps had with this journalist from the Guardian, after Ripps attended some kind of young republican meet-up to watch the third U.S. presidential debate and was interviewed as if he were a Trump supporter. He offered some fairly unexciting quotes seemingly emulating the kind of rhetoric and concerns a certain portion of Trump supporters ostensibly tend to use.

Anyway, so the article gets published, Ripps finds it, screen-caps the relevant part and posts it to facebook, claiming to have “trolled” the reporter from the guardian. Its a kind of funny bit; Ripps has been an outspoken supporter of Bernie Sanders throughout the election cycle, and for people aware of him and his work, the quotes offered here are obviously disingenuous.

People really liked this joke:

Ripps himself tries to frame the whole gag as a kind of commentary on the ‘age of clickbait journalism’ , which, sure:

And so the journalist that initially wrote the piece responds, I think because Ripps calls him out on twitter, and Ripps’ quotes in the article get pulled, and they (eventually) amend a little ‘correction’ disclaimer at the bottom of the article, noting that one of the sources for the article ‘deceived’ their journalist.

Then the journalist himself posts on Facebook about this whole weird thing, basically saying he doesn’t get why this is ‘trolling’ or how Ripps has done anything to coherently criticize ‘the capitalist system’, and mostly just seems disinterested in (if somewhat bewildered by) the whole event.

So of course Ripps jumps on this thread and, in a series of increasingly infantile responses, just shits all over the journalist and the journalist’s friends. For those somewhat familiar with Ripps, this too feels kind of like a joke: he’s fucking with them, weakly name-calling, critiquing their ‘comebacks’ as dated and unoriginal. It’s pretty rough to look at, honestly, but it is definitely a kind of performance.

So the question, and the impulse behind the current writing, is who is he performing for? It’s obviously not for the journalist and his friends, who are not in on the ‘joke’. It also probably isn’t directly for his own Facebook audience, who seem to be mostly absent from the thread (most of Ripps’ comments remain ‘unliked’, except for a few of those weird passive aggressive ‘likes’ from whatever person he was attacking). What seems more likely, at least to me, based on my fairly limited knowledge of Ripps’ work, and the Internet artist community in general, is that Ripps is engaged in some kind of performance that is primarily for himself: he’s become so abstracted from his own online conduct that his online persona is some kind of long performative action, of which ‘he’ is the primary audience member and critic.

And this is the kind of weird rabbit hole of abstraction that I’d maybe like to write a little more about, both because it feels like a quintessentially modern kind of performance and because, wether or not Ripps is the best example of this kind of thing (at it really might be the case that he’s not), it’s I think a kind of widespread practice amongst people (and especially artists) whose work (and thus lives) are increasingly entangled with the internet.

Consider, for example, this Instagram-based performance piece called Excellences and Perfections, by Amalia Ulman. The Telegraph, which (in my view, egregiously) hailed this as “the first Instagram masterpiece”, summarizes the work like this:

The whole “performance” is cataloged on Ulman’s personal instagram account, such that her followers could watch this series unfold in real time. Again, the idea here is that the artist is self-consciously performing a role, rather than (unself-consciously) “living it”, and thus able to claim ownership over the resulting series of instagram posts as “an artwork”, rather than simply an account of what she was doing over the last few months. Here’s how Ulman explains “the joke”:

There’s obviously a lot going on here, but the thing I’m mostly interested in pointing out is that the only thing that makes this a piece of art, rather than just the lived experience of this woman, is that Ulman, the artist, declares herself to be distinct from Ulman, the fictionalized character of the performance: It’s not really Ulman but rather “her anti-heroine self” who is “performing” a series of stereotypical gender-specific lifestyles. What’s notable about this level of abstraction, wherein Ulman is one step removed from “her character’s” actions, is that it actually kind of weakens the impact of the statement she’s is attempting to make through the work: if “being a woman” is a performance, then wouldn’t it be more impactful to simply own these actions as her own? And perhaps more significantly, why would she choose to emulate, by way of a fictionalized “woman”, only the blandest and most well-worn stereotypes for young women? Isn’t that pretty low-hanging fruit, in terms of performativity?

I guess what I’m getting at is that performativity for its own sake is not only boring, but also unproductive. Both Ripps (as as the “dumb camo hat”-wearing Trump supporter, and later, online troll) and Ulman (as the “L.A. ‘It Girl’”), are self-consciously “performing” roles that are stereotypical (and thus easily recognizable as “performances”) only to step back and go, “look at me performing, everything is performing, isn’t that interesting”. The overall impact of this, rather than somehow presenting a “nuanced critique” of the dominant social structures that encourage this kind of normative performance (i.e., what Ripps refers to as “the capitalist system”), seems to simply reaffirm the hopelessness of these struggles, wherein the artist takes a position of comfortable detachment, and, rather than trying to consider alternatives to the stereotypical performative roles offered by our advanced capitalist social structures (i.e., what Rosi Braidotti calls “epistemological nomadism”), simply shrug at it: “we’re fucked, isn’t that funny?”

And this is maybe the root of the problem: Judith Butler published Gender Trouble over 25 years ago. We know that social roles (gendered, political, etc.) are performative. You’re not saying anything interesting by doing work that just highlights this performativity and essentially posits that because all of our conduct is performative and mediated by normative social structures, we might as well just “troll” others or otherwise exploit our awareness of this fact from a position of cool, detached nihilism. Its the artistic equivalent of this classic meme™:

It’s instructive to note that much of Butler’s recent work is focused on moving beyond normative performative roles into modes of being that are more responsive to the rest of the world. In Frames of War, Butler examines how the normative social structures of Western society mediate which bodies can be seen to matter: “These categories, conventions and norms that prepare or establish a subject for recognition, that induce a subject of this kind, precede and make possible the act of recognition itself…the point, however, will be to ask how such norms operate to produce certain subjects as ‘recognizable’ persons and to make others decidedly more difficult to recognize” (5–6). Rather than wallowing in the shallows of normative, culturally-mediated performativity, Butler goes on to advocate active responsiveness to the world, such that those who the dominant structures of power deem “unrecognizable” (or, what she’s previously termed “unmournable bodies”) can be fully recognized and engaged with.

And this is basically the point: living with a strong sense of performativity is important. it demonstrates an awareness to how our being is iteratively constructed in the world. What’s more important, though, is that that sense of being is tethered, at least peripherally, to the others with which you are entangled. To be a “troll”, to perform a disregard for others (i.e., others who are not the embodiment of ‘the capitalist system’ or whatever, but are just some people trying to to their goddamn jobs) is to foreclose on the kind of responsive engagement that an awareness to the performativity of being ought to catalyze. It’s not enough to recognize that everything (including your ‘self’) is a construct, the next step, if you want to see yourself as someone coherently criticizing “the capitalist system”, is to use that understanding to foster a more responsive sense of being, to become with the entangled others that “the capitalist system” encourages us to ignore.