The Virtual Spectacle: Images And Ourselves

Scrolling through Instagram is just so convenient. It’s so easy to keep up. 

Things pass me by, information flows through me.

A guy wearing Nike Dunks and Carhartt cargo pants with paint stains. A 90s floral embroidery Jean Paul Gaultier sweater on a wooden hanger. A meme about the dreaded 2020 American election. Another pair of Dunks, this time sitting on a Persian rug. The campaign for the new Moncler x Rick Owens collaboration. A post about the political situation in Nigeria. Some news about Kanye West. “Il pomeriggio di Arianna” by Giorgio de Chirico is now on sale at Sotheby's. 

I am tempted to post something, so I take a book I bought last week out of the shelf and take a picture of it, but the photo doesn’t look good enough.

Everyday I walk through a forest of symbols, wild and fascinating, but all poetry is lost. 

While on a stroll through Brera I spot a guy wearing Ramones and a t-shirt from a brand I don't recognize. I must have seen that t-shirt somewhere. It can’t be just a t-shirt, the guy is wearing Ramones after all. 

On a store shelf there are a pair of bright red Salomon XT-6 ADV. For a couple of seconds I stop and think about buying them, it’s not really my style but I could try something new. I’ve seen Bella Hadid and A$AP Nast wearing them. 

The first image I saw today, a still of Patrick Bateman from American Psycho on the Grailed Instagram page still lingers in my mind. 

I talk briefly with an artist. He’s wearing blue Helmut Lang paint splattered jeans and a Marni tee with horizontal stripes. He sure looks like an artist. 

I really want to buy a new double breasted coat. Actually, I need to buy one. I visit store after store, but the coats don’t look nearly as good as they did on the website.

My Concrete by Comme des Garcons Perfumes cologne is empty, so I decided to throw it away. I take a photo of the empty bottle, and post it on my Instagram story before doing that. My new perfume bottle, Music Festival by Maison Margiela, doesn’t look nearly as good and as I spray it on my skin I wonder if it was the right purchase.

“All sorts of things in this world behave like mirrors”.

Lacan’s ‘Mirror Stage’, interpreted By Leonie Barth

Why are we into fashion at all? The most frequent answer you’ll hear to this question is something along the lines of “because it helps us express ourselves, it helps us communicate who we are”. If you look at an outfit, it’s like reading a sentence about the wearer where the different pieces can be seen as the different words that, based on the relationship between them, convey a different meaning. The phenomenon I find the most fascinating is how what you wear influences the way in which you are seen by others, actively communicating to them many things: what you do for a living, if you’re working today, your mood, your social standing, your belonging to a certain subculture…

The signifying power this has is very strong and it can be completely independent from the one who wears the clothes, and often makes me wonder if the classical “the clothes don’t make the wearer” still applies today. Our society is disseminated with images and symbols. Our way of communicating with the world is related to the way in which we interact with these symbols and images; fashion combines the two in a handy and immediately recognizable way. If one wants to get into a certain circle of people, let’s say a group composed mainly of fashion enthusiasts, they would probably have better luck in 2020 if they wear a pair of Ramones or Nike Dunks. It’s easier to become something if you look like it, because to others it seems like you already are like that. 

This “self-commodification” process is intensely amplified by social media, where the level of control over the signifying image of your persona is not just limited to what you wear. Let’s take Instagram, one of the most used (and surely the most visual) social network as an example: to enact their persona, one can post pictures of the books they (supposedly) read, the music they listen to, the movies they watch, effectively signaling a clear, more or less differentiated, recognizable picture. 

“The whole of our online presence offers an altered version of ourselves, with some aspects amplified and glamorized, others redacted, and this virtual ego ideal inevitably influences us, in a relation of interdependency with our “real” selves.”

We can see how the idea of “expressing yourself” starts to assume a different connotation. Here something seemingly paradoxical happens: what started out as a quest for differentiation, an expression of our unique identity, takes the form of a process of spectacularization and alteration of “ourselves”–where we want our image to be the one that is looked at in a sea of other images. So we start with the processes that we all know too well, “creating content” out of our lives, and then shaping our lives around this “content” we want to show to the world. As an example, many find it hard nowadays to attend a certain event, like a concert or an art show, without posting anything on Instagram. The fact that you can share it is part of the reason why you go there. The whole of our online presence offers an altered version of ourselves, with some aspects amplified and glamorized, others redacted, and this virtual ego ideal inevitably influences us, in a relation of interdependency with our “real” selves. These practices have existed for ages but Instagram amplifies them, and makes the role of the image that we create of ourselves an almost necessary one for your fulfilment and self worth.

But why is that? Why does social media have such a strong impact on us? 

In general, we are defined precisely by what we want. It is what we desire that makes us who we are. This is a constant in our lives, we’re always aiming at something. We are always comparing ourselves with a better version of us, and this “something” that we lack is what separates us from it. This better version of us is precisely what we try to show to others, both in “real life” with our appearance and in an amplified manner, on social media. One of the deepest human needs is to be seen by others, to be recognized, to be desired, and we shape our social media image precisely as a more desirable, spectacularized, version of us, which we hope will get visibility. This creates a condition of an ideal realized (or “virtualized”) where others relate more and more to this ideal, which we can never reach, inducing anxiety in us. Social media does not create this lack and the consequent desire of others, but amplifies it, making our human condition even harder at times. 

 This image, precisely because it’s “just” an image, is not and will never be us, but we are (even when we are aware of this gap) all like actors getting lost in character. Our image influences us as we shape it. We become something that is not shaped by what we really can be, but instead tailored to be desired by others, which inevitably distances us from what we can be, making us at the same time spectators and spectacles of ourselves, for others, as we all endlessly try to fill the hole left in us by desire with desire itself.