Just look at Mark Dery’s delightful essay about the “politics of enthusiasm.” Just look at it.
Embracing the positivity gospel of Alice Roosevelt Longworth’s famous pillow, whose embroidered homily still tut-tuts at visitors to Hyde Park, “If you don’t have anything nice to say, come sit by me,” blogs that trade in the currency of exuberance tend to be epic catalogs of Things We Like. Indexes of enthusiasms, they ratify popular perceptions of blogs as virtual wunderkammern (Baroque “cabinets of wonder”).
At its brainiest, this sensibility expresses itself in the group blog Boing Boing, a self-described “directory of wonderful things.” Tellingly, the trope “just look at this!,” a transport of rapture at the wonderfulness of whatever it is, has become a refrain on the site, as in: “Just look at this awesome underwear made from banana fibers. Just look at it.” Or: “Just look at this awesome steampunk bananagun. Just look at it.” Or: “Just look at this bad-ass volcano.” Or: “Just look at this illustration of an ancient carnivorous whale.” Because that’s what the curators of wunderkammern do–draw back the curtain, like Charles Willson Peale in “The Artist in His Museum,” exposing a world of “wonderful things,” natural (bad-ass volcanoes, carnivorous whales) and unnatural (steampunk bananaguns, banana-fiber underwear), calculated to make us marvel. We’re free to use these museum exhibits as points of departure for philosophical rumination or flights of intellectual fancy, but the primary mode of address is retinal, the tone rhapsodic rather than analytic: Look at this. Just look at this.
Of course, the world can always use a little more wonder, even if it arrives in the form of an “awesome laser-cut banana.” But at their most lethally perky, the politics of enthusiasm are the Black Flag of the intellect, killing critical thought on contact. Consider the ubiquitous Favorite This button: How many favorites can we have? Isn’t “favorite” the Everest of our emotional lives, reserved for the acme of our enthusiasms? When everything is our favorite, nothing is our favorite. (And, pardon my grammar Nazi, but when did “favorite” become a transitive verb?) Consider, too, that nudgy “Like” button on Facebook, coercive as a flashing “APPLAUSE” sign in a TV studio. (“Disliking” something would be unimaginably antisocial, of course, grounds for casting the offender into the outer darkness to weep and gnash his teeth, un-Friended by all. Because what is Facebook Friendship, after all, but the unending quest for People Like Me, people who like all of My Favorite Things–a monument to mutually enabling narcissism, disguised as a Place Where Everybody Knows Your Name?)
Hate is All Around: The Politics of Enthusiasm (and its Discontents)