Artistic Fever: Archival Subjectivity and the Politics of Aesthetic Desire in the Age of Social Media

In the age of social media, users increasingly organize and stage their everyday lives in aestheticized ways, appropriating artistic modes of self-presentation in a phenomenon this paper terms 'Artistic Fever.' This tendency simultaneously blurs the traditional boundary between artist and non-artist and compels professional artists to internalize the platform logic of visibility. Drawing on Jacques Derrida's concept of archive fever and Lev Manovich's theory of software subjectivity — supplemented by Walter Benjamin's account of exhibition value, Byung-Chul Han's diagnosis of the transparency society, Bernard Stiegler's notion of tertiary retention and Wendy Hui Kyong Chun's analysis of habitual media — this paper develops a theoretical framework that articulates the inner structure of archival compulsion with the external techno-aesthetic conditions of social media platforms. The analysis identifies three strategic modes through which contemporary artists deploy social media (process-sharing, branding, and relationship-building) and demonstrates that each mode instantiates the dual structure of archival desire and algorithmic form. Both user and artist practices are shown to converge within the same economy of platform visibility, structured by algorithms, data capitalism, and the politics of deletion. The paper concludes that 'Artistic Fever' is not a transient cultural phenomenon but a structural symptom of contemporary subjectivity formed at the intersection of archival desire, algorithmic power, and platform capitalism — one that poses new ethical and ontological questions about self-constitution in the digital age.