Filtering: A Theory and History of a Style

This essay names and theorizes a stylistic development shared by a diverse range of contemporary American cultural phenomena: filter. Whether filtering photographs on social media platforms such as Instagram and Snapchat or filtering the chapters of novels of short stories by Colum McCann, Jennifer Egan, David Mitchell, and Elizabeth Strout, this is a style of improvising new genres of social recognition by purifying the affect of individuals within a given scene or space. In each case, filtering responds to a generalized sense of crisis when previously powerful institutions have declined in their ability to organize social life, including the institution of the family and the political institutions of Congress and the American political parties. By trying to repair this crisis, the stylistic developments I survey depart from simila aesthetic forms earlier in the twentieth century, whether photographic tinting and toning (e.g., sepia) in the case of social media filters; or rural short style cycles (e.g., Sherwood Anderson, William Faulkner, or Eudora Welty) in the case of contemporary novels of short stories. I
develop a new theory of style up to the task of tracking this transition across media: style as an action of coordinating form and content.