Emotions are felt participations in things and events insofar as they matter. We can know as much as we want about van Gogh’s Starry Night, and we can stare at the thing until our eyes bleed, but it is only when we perceive the painting as mattering that we are affected. The onrush of feeling reverses the order of knowledge. Instead of me grasping the thing, it grasps me. Instead of me capturing the painting, the painting captures me. It is precisely this experience of emotion that eludes us at the museum. We are an age divorced from tradition and history, educated for usefulness within a market economy, given to fulfillment in and through technology, and now, thrown into a room of objects we assume, theoretically, to be valuable, significant, and beautiful . . . we are disappointed. We know we should be “having an experience.” Indeed, we were told to go to the museum for an “experience.” But what experience? My Internet-trained generation stands before the Caravaggio without religious sentiment or aesthetic education, and panics. We know its greatness in theory only; our hearts remain stony. We act upon it with scrutinizing eyes; the painting does not act upon us. The agent does not become the patient; the outside object does not become the source of movement within our soul. We do not feel. [...] The click offers us a way out. What does not come naturally can always be aped technologically, and the act of taking a photo mimics the moment of emotion. The outside thing, deemed significant, is taken in and stored. If the paintings remain inscrutable, if beauty refuses to show her face to an eye trained on the arousing, the useful, and the entertaining, then we will outsource our affectivity to a technology. We achieve through the lens what we cannot achieve through the heart: a moment in which the object penetrates and changes us according to its own value. Of course, it does not really reach us, only our phones, and the change is not the change of the body and soul, only of machinery. But the act is a sufficient parody of the real thing to deliver us from our awkwardness of "not knowing what to do" in front of the painting. [...] It is a sure sign of being disappointed and frightened by our own withdrawal that we take a photo for the sake of the taking. This explains the unique sadness of our over-imaged age, in which an Instagrammed picture of lunch speaks of the loneliness of the meal, a pornographic image signifies a lack of any real feeling in the erotic, a forced family photo is a sure sign that the feeling of family is fading, and every Facebook album of vacation photos attests not to the beauty of the sunsets, but to the withdrawn affectivity of the photographer. The man who drinks to grieve gradually finds it impossible to grieve without drinking. The man who seeks the joys of sexual communion in pornography gradually loses his capacity for sexual arousal outside of pornography. To indulge a replacement instead of a reality eventually coronates the replacement as the new reality - a "second nature." Photography-as-capture is no different. It is not just a neutral, momentary surrogate for genuine feeling. It inaugurates a new habit of human behavior, one that gradually asserts itself as the "real" and "natural" mode for dealing with objects of significance. This new mode is the mode of control, from contra, "against." It allows us to run against the outside world, neither surprised nor overwhelmed by the things and events that construct our freedom and press on the borders of consciousness. We do not participate in reality. We are not affected. [...] The act of taking a photograph allows us to enjoy the outside object within an egocentric framework. The violent language of photography—capture, take, and shoot—attests to this arresting of the given. If our camera-phones begin as weapons to take participation by force, they end as shields. Our picture-taking translates what gives itself into an object of our will, an object with significance we decide upon, an object we decide to “allow in.” We replace affectivity, participation in the given as it grabs us, with photography, in which we grab the given. We retain our status as sovereign individuals and remain captains of our souls.
Marc Barnes, “Click Fix”