On Influence
The new year is marked by best-of lists, many accounts of the Year-In-Review, and prognostications about what is to come. Perhaps the most successful branding of this is TIME magazine’s annual Top 100 issue. The TIME 100 bills itself as a list of the Most Influential People of the year that has just passed. While really an excuse to place a bunch of glossy celebrity photos between ad copy, the constellation of figures ascribes meaning to calendrical time. What does it mean to live when Brett Kavanaugh sits next to Jane Goodall or Pope Francis with Xi Jinping? Yet at the same time, TIME’s 100 is decidedly stodgy. Its five categories—Pioneers, Artists, Leaders, Icons, Titans—simply replicate the mediated image of cultural power, where entertainers, politicians, and the wealthy are the movers and shakers of what’s next in culture. In this, 2019 is not so different from 2018, or really any year that TIME has marked in this way.
The term “influence” is derived from an astrological concept. According to Abu Ma’shar, an important ninth-century astrologer, there was an unseen aetherial substance that “flowed out” from the stars and planets and caused changes and variations of all sorts in the terrestrial world. This notion had its basis in Aristotelian meteorology and biology, where effects from the sun explained variations of seasons, weather, and organic generation. Abu Ma’shar thought that in addition to the effects of the visible motion and light of the planets, there was also the invisible influxus of the celestial body that had a hidden or occult influence on the terrestrial world. Yet just as a magnet’s power worked only on iron or lodestone, so too the invisible effluxes of the heavens had a variety of effects depending on what kind of body was receiving them. Not every physical body was equally liable to the influence of Saturn or Jupiter. In a certain sense, the body drawing in the stellar force participated in its own influencing, becoming a channel for an occult force. In short, influence is a two-way street.
The concept of influence has survived from astrology and migrated into literary studies, intellectual history, psychology, and popular discourse—as TIME’s 100 shows. Especially in intellectual history, tracing influence has been a standard way of generating genealogies of ideas, linking them across time, place, and purpose. Yet the astrological notion of influence has an anti-genealogical character. Rather than our birth being characterized by our lineage, it is instead marked by a celestial conjunction or the planetary ruler of a zodiacal house. This specific instance of time follows us through life, in a sense, giving us a kind of receptivity to those influences that were activated by the sky at our arrival.
Rather than thinking of the influential as the most prominent or salient features of the contemporary world, the astrological notion ascribed influence to the planets, the most distant bodies imaginable. Moreover, celestial time was seen as permanent and unchanging, according to the Aristotelian theory of the incorruptibility of celestial bodies. Influence, then, connected two forms of time: the lifetime of the human being with the eternal time of the heavens. This is partly what is so appealing about natal astrology: my own individual quirks, foibles, and predilections are inscribed into the starry night sky. This is an elaborate kind of flattery, one that is integral to the long duration of astrology and its use in courts and halls of power.
Just as the deities of pagan antiquity were preserved in the names and powers of the planets, so too modernity is marked by a preservation of occult natural philosophy in the realm of human affairs. Stars still influence us—but now it is Taylor Swift rather than Sirius. The rise of a new class of “influencers” on social media platforms can be explained by economic forces, the mass dissemination of self-made video content, or the greater opportunities charismatic personalities have when not subject to the hurdles of traditional mass media institutions. But whatever has made the influencers appear, they are undoubtedly creating new forms of receptivity. How is it possible that there are dozens of popular YouTubers who do nothing other than review fast food? What does it mean that makeup artists are beefing with one another and that more viewers tune in for the drama than the foundation tips?
I will offer my own prognostication: the career of the term “influence” is a sign of the modernization of receptivity. From deities to planets to leaders to influencers, the source of influence becomes ever closer to the mundane, human world we already find ourselves in. Rather than a passive object of turbulent and irresistible forces that shape my health, life, and destiny, I choose how I am shaped by attuning to an overcrowded field of personalities vying for influence—and advertising revenue. But, again, influence is a two-way street. It is now the public that more than ever shapes the influencers. A recent, nearly two-hour video by ContraPoints on the toll “cancelling” took on her attests to this. The influencer is shaped into a star by the desires and appetites of his or her audience. Because of this, a survey of these freshly-minted figures is a far better marker of what 2019 means than what appears in the TIME 100. Yet they should not be seen as spontaneously generated sources of cultural authority. They are sources of influence precisely because they have the power to articulate and communicate in a way that uncovers a latent receptivity in an audience looking to be influenced. Influence is neither a force that shapes a passive subject nor is it quite the Goethean “elective affinity,” an association of two peers who complement each other but develop independently, as Weber famously described the relationship between capitalism and Protestantism. Rather, influence elects to elevate one party to a “star” whose position of influence is maintained only by maintaining a following.
Influence is not something that can be well-traced by the eventful calendar of the newsworthy. What qualifies as an event has a force that is visible and that can be accounted for in a narrative. The influential, by contrast, is only visible in its effects, a variation seen against the background of the old normal. We only see influence through the time of lived phenomena: changes in fashion, manners, mores, and opinions are not easily clipped into a month-by-month account. While I am quite suspicious of the journalistic obsession with generational explanations of cultural phenomena, we might usefully think of a generational influence as a newly discovered receptivity on a mass scale. It is more evident than ever that the news media’s selection of what is important or relevant cannot be relied upon as a bellwether for culture. One sign of this is the practice of media outlets regularly reporting on Twitter trends and spats as if they were events not already mediated. However, the new receptivity of a generation is not at all explained by pointing to “social media.” Instead, we must take account of what kind of people and performances are being cultivated there.
Influential YouTuber Natalie Wynn, better known as ContraPoints
