SIREN

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With a Little Help From My Friends: the Construction of the Self Through Others

By: andomeda 🪨🌊

No, you didn’t just read the work of Kant, Hegel, or Schopenhauer. The burst of profundity you were just blessed with is from the diary of yours truly, written last May. As the work of great scholars is wont to do, the entry from whence this excerpt came raised several questions for me: 

Why did I write so much about Succession? 

Why wasn’t my Zoloft dosage raised sooner? 

And perhaps most compellingly, why did I imagine it being read? 

Until now, the entry was completely private. There was no Reader, so why was I haunted by the idea of one? I guess it was kind of prophetic: lo and behold, what were once my most intimate thoughts are now blasted across your screen. And in a sense, it feels like sharing them with you has made them real–can it be that by wishing you, my “imaginary audience,” into existence, I’ve wished myself into existence as well? 

These questions are evocative of Abeba Birhane’s article, “Descartes was wrong: ‘a person is a person through other persons,” in which she argues, “being is an act or event that must happen in the space between the self and the world.” Is that what Jerry Maguire meant? 

Birhane opposes philosopher René Descartes, who, according to her, believed that others “have nothing to do with the basic constitution of the knowing self, which is a necessarily detached, coherent and contemplative whole.” Birhane considers the “self” an amorphous and porous concept, arguing that “we need others in order to evaluate our own existence and construct a coherent self-image.”

Hang on, you may say, how are you getting “the self” from your shitty melodramatic teenage ramblings? Fear not, I shan’t leave tenuous connections unbolstered. For said bolstering, I turn to our friend Michel Foucault. In Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, he writes, “the writer constitutes their own identity.” Putting thoughts to paper calcifies them. Words become fossils of existence, scraps through which you can catch refractions of my selfhood. But who is the you in question?

For Foucault, imagining a reader is an inherent quality of writing the self: “the fact of obliging oneself to write plays the role of a companion.” So, is this dialogue with the self a satisfying substitute for the formative power of genuine interaction? I’m reminded of my second philosophical boyfriend, Frantz Fanon.

In Black Skin, White Masks, he writes: “to speak is to exist absolutely for the other.” Can the same be said of writing, or is a closed circuit enough to sustain us? 

I’m sure it will come as a shock to none that all answers, including this one, can be found in my writing! The unsatisfying nature of an imagined companion is evident in my compulsion to imagine a real one while writing my entry. I was unable to shake the feeling of being watched when writing because I craved perception. It’s as Birhane writes: “We need others in order to evaluate our own existence and construct a coherent self-image.” I wasn’t a sufficient audience for myself, because isolation isn’t our natural state of being. Authenticity is derived from interaction, so a lack of interaction with the other left me, and consequently my writing (or perhaps Foucault would argue that it’s the other way around?) unmoored by the lack of external evaluation. Private writing is the Twizzlers of identity construction: they taste great, and they’re fun to eat, but you can’t survive on Twizzlers alone: trust me, I’ve tried. 

It seems to me that Birhane, Foucault, and myself (perhaps the Destiny’s Child of critical theory?) would all agree that, though private writing can be beneficial, it does not construct a satisfying other, and the lack of a satisfying other is ultimately the lack of a satisfying self. Foucault said that writing, “palliates the dangers of solitude.” The key word there is palliate–to the self, the simulation of the other in writing has the same nutritional value as the crayon-adjacent bullshit that Twizzlers are made of. As Birhane writes, “others,” or the kale and chicken breasts of this bizarre nutritional metaphor, “are vital to our self-perception.” No matter how much muscle you put in, it’s not possible to conceive a self without acknowledging the formative force of others–their pushing is just as important as yours. Who knew that identity construction and riding a see-saw were so similar?

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Before the Glitch: “Stylized Repetition” and Gender Performance in the Online Mainstream

By: Andromeda 🌊🪨

In the introduction to her book Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto, Legacy Russell writes, “Online, I sought to become a fugitive from the mainstream, unwilling to accept its limited definition of bodies like my own.” The “real world,” or the world “AFK” (Away From Keyboard) involves an immediate and fixed form of visibility, and thus pressure to conformity that the digital one doesn’t necessarily demand. However, as Russell writes, the “artifice of a simple digital Shangri-La” has been “punctured”– escaping the mainstream isn’t as simple as logging on. As all worlds do, the digital world is dominated by a “mainstream”, one rife with the “incessant white heteronormative observation” that Russell describes in her “AFK” to be fraught with. So what exactly does this digital mainstream look like? How do we “construct and perform” our “gendered self,” as Russell puts it, in the language of social media?

As a university student, meeting people typically demands 3 obligatory pieces of information: name (to be immediately forgotten), major (to be vaguely commented on), and Instagram account (to follow, and thus cement your new acquaintanceship. Also, to remind you of the name you just forgot). Despite what self-proclaimed “free spirits” and “casual-Instagrammers” will tell you, your Instagram is notjust a photo-album for you to look back on, or a journal in which to document the events of your life. That’s what photo-albums and journals are for, people! It’s an image of yourself designed for presentation, the digital face you present to old friends and new acquaintances alike:  it’s your own curation of exactly how you want to be perceived, neatly packaged in rows of three. On Instagram, “performing [one’s] gendered self” under “incessant white heteronormative observation” is the name of the game. Personally, I would even venture to say that any online presence is an inherently exhibitionistic one. If you disagree with me on that one, fine. Go write about it on your tumblr. 

What you can’t argue is that using Instagram, arguably the most popular social media platform today, is an exercise that begs for observation, for engagement, for the imposition of opinions and identifiers. In Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, Roland Barthes (one of the only tolerable men that France has ever produced) writes, “every photograph is a certificate of presence.” Let’s for the moment table (read: ignore) the complications of technological tampering on the semiotic-ontological-whatever relationships between photo and subject raised by the likes of Stephen Prince and Lev Manovich (as neither of us have the time for that), and take what Barthes says at face value.

If a photo is a certificate of presence, we can consider Instagram to be a glass case of certificates of your choosing still and pristine as they tell the story of digital you, spectated you, ossified you. And here’s the kicker: you’re not only on display inthe case, but you’re on display as the person who curated it. If you’re a pretentious asshole like myself, you can think of these curatorial choices as the metalanguageof your Instagram (I warned you!). What, with whom, and how often you post all exist in the context of your choice to post at all, and the fact that every post has an agenda (regardless of what that agenda might be). Each post is a stylistic choice, a piece added to the puzzle of one’s digital identity. 

In Performative Acts and Gender Constitution, Judith Butler (who happens to be the celebrity hall-pass of a friend of mine) describes gender identity as, “an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts. Further, gender is instituted through the stylization of the body and, hence, must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and enactments of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self.”

I feel that this passage (along with facilitating my understanding of the hall-pass thing–I can think of bodily movements of various kinds that I’d like to repeat in a stylized manner with Judith) is easily translated to the idea of gender performance online. What are posts, if not stylized acts? Lighting, pose, caption–every element is designed to, quite literally, cultivate an image. The sharing of posts, how they accumulate and interact, are acts of stylized repetition that, whether we know it or not, construct our digital identities. 

As an example, take a look at this TikTok, which outlines a “recipe for a perfect photo dump.” A photo dump is a group of photos collected in one carousel Instagram post, typically designed to look effortless. But the detailed instructions in this post (including one “effortless photo”, an “outfit pic”, and a “personality pic” amongst others) exemplify a guideline for the exact kind of “stylization of the body” (albeit a digital one) that Butler describes, meticulously designed to communicate an identity. Even the arrangement of our Barthesian certificates of presence (the TikToker has graciously numbered each picture, so they may be ordered “perfectly”), is paramount in constructing our digital selves.

“The glitch,” Russell writes, “acknowledges that gendered bodies are far from absolute but rather an imaginary, manufactured, and commodified for capital.” What an unbearably fierce and pithy way to phrase how the body exists in the digital mainstream! From clean-girl to rat girl to coquette girl to messy girl (this one strikes me as particularly ironic–who knew there were so many rules to being messy?), it never fucking stops! These inflexible hole-in-the-wall shapes that we contort ourselves into through our online behaviour generate the same kind of frustration in me that led me to memorize the cool girl monologue in high-school. These trends and their proponents demand of us, as Russell writes, “a gender performance that fits within a binary in order to comply with the prescriptions of the everyday.” Unspoken rules and categories like these are just as, if not more, stifling than those in the mainstream that exists AFK. 

Russell’s manifesto calls to mind one of my favourite winners of RuPaul’s Drag Race, Sasha Velour, and her verse in ‘Category Is…’, the song performed by the season’s final four competitors. There are a few lines in there that I think Russell might enjoy: 

Wear a crown 

Fuck with gender

Bend the rules

Don’t surrender

Originally posted by ivanv

Sounds about right to me! The next time you see a clean-girl TikToker’s hair tutorial or diet plan or morning routine, just take three deep breaths, and think of Sasha. And you think hard enough, who knows? Maybe the force of your psychic energy will crack her forty-dollar gua sha. 

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