When did life become a land mine of possible performative gestures? There’s activism and performative activism, masculinity and performative masculinity, positivity and performative positivity—et cetera, ad nauseam. Are these neologisms diagnosing modern phenomena or illuminating preëxisting cultural realities? If all human activity can be measured on a spectrum of authenticity and performativity, what metrics can we use to weed out the genuine from the fabricated? Will we just know? And why do we care? If our culture of liberal individualism demands anything of us, it is to be, above all else, authentic. To be seen as a poseur or a phony—a person who affects rather than is—violates some nebulous code of acceptable self-cultivation. No one wants to be perceived as the person at the skate park with all the right gear but none of the right lingo, the fan at the concert who doesn’t know any of the lyrics, or, worse, the political protester who spends hours making a quippy sign but doesn’t know the name of their district representative. If our authenticity is questioned—if we are caught pretending and playacting—what ground do we have left to stand on? If we are deemed inauthentic, how can we stand for anything at all? Conversely, if everything is potentially performative, how will we ever work up the courage to step outside of our sphere of normal, to risk being earnest and cringe, and experience something transformative?
Performing personhood has perhaps never been as panoptical, and top of mind, as it is today. Social-media platforms prioritize the fastidious maintenance and monitoring of online personas, creating spaces where identity construction is central to the user experience. But how is one to authentically represent themselves online? Unlike offline reality, where spontaneous and unrehearsed human expression is not only possible but inevitable, a life online is always reminded of its own artifice. To post is to calculate, deliberate, manipulate—performance is built into the experience, whether the poster is aware of this dynamic or not. This explains why unflinchingly earnest content rarely flies on social media; does the poster not see that simply by posting, they are revealing themselves to be image-conscious and vain? A chief reason that “virtue signalling” became so hotly contested in the mid-twenty-tens was not just because it was in bad taste to express passive, entirely gestural solidarity with a political issue but because the broader mores of social-media use had begun to shift dramatically. It was no longer normative to post a photo of your breakfast, or to write an Instagram caption about how much you loved your mom on International Women’s Day. Suddenly, any type of unironic persona-forward material entered the hall of mirrors of performativity criticism. These days, users can avoid being labelled as performative by imbuing content with the metatextual awareness that they are, in some way, aware of the performance. But it is still impossible to fully ignore the spectre of performativity on social media, despite the apps’ assertion that they are organic breeding grounds for genuine human expression. (Instagram’s mission statement claims its purpose is to bring “you closer to the people and the things you love”; TikTok says that its platform allows users to “unleash their creativity and share authentic stories.”)...
If we are to believe that the purpose of our lives is to unearth and express an authentic version of our true natures, we risk ignoring the myriad associations and forces that determine how we conceive of these premises in the first place. The philosopher Michel Foucault questioned this abiding belief that self-expression leads to liberation, advocating instead for an end to “all these forms of individuality, of subjectivity, of consciousness, of the ego, on which we have built and from which we have tried to build and to constitute knowledge.” Foucault argued that such idealism distracts the individual from grappling with, and critiquing, the power structures that lay claim to their actual freedoms—health care, reproductive rights, education, gender identity, and economic equality among them—which remain under the direction of a “biopower,” a term Foucault used to denote state and social institutions that organize and control a population.
In this view, the performative-reading phenomenon appears less like a newfangled way of calling people pretentious and more like an odious reflection of society’s increasing deprioritization of the written word. Reading a book is antithetical to scrolling; online platforms cannot replicate the slow, patient, and complex experience of reading a weighty novel. This is especially revealing because social media can replicate other art-consuming experiences for users: one could exclusively listen to music, look at visual art, or watch film clips via TikTok or Instagram and reasonably (if not depressingly) claim to have a relationship with these mediums—authentic relationships, fostered with the help of an app. The only way that an internet mind can understand a person reading a certain kind of book in public is through the prism of how it would appear on a feed: as a grotesquely performative posture, a false and self-flattering manipulation, or a desperate attempt to attract a romantic partner...
The irony of “Infinite Jest” becoming prime performative-reading material is that it is a novel perfectly suited to address our current cultural conundrums. Wallace depicts a politically volatile corporate dystopia on the brink of environmental collapse, an existential reality its characters seldom seem to recognize. To escape from the horrors of the external world—and the indistinguishable ways in which the external world influences one’s inner life—characters turn to drugs and alcohol, intensive sports training, and excessive media consumption, the latter of which is dramatized by a digitized entertainment cartridge so powerful that it vegetates anyone who views it. “Infinite Jest” is a novel obsessed with the shared solitude of contemporary life, of the loneliness and lack of meaning endemic to consumerism and market capitalism. Wallace argues, as he does throughout his œuvre, that salvation arrives through careful attention, through sacrificing one’s myopic sense of self to something larger, holier, more expansive. In Wallace’s personal life, this sacrifice came, in part, by reading books, a practice he feared was losing its moral imperative in an age of constant, inescapable stimulation.
Performing personhood has perhaps never been as panoptical, and top of mind, as it is today. Social-media platforms prioritize the fastidious maintenance and monitoring of online personas, creating spaces where identity construction is central to the user experience. But how is one to authentically represent themselves online? Unlike offline reality, where spontaneous and unrehearsed human expression is not only possible but inevitable, a life online is always reminded of its own artifice. To post is to calculate, deliberate, manipulate—performance is built into the experience, whether the poster is aware of this dynamic or not. This explains why unflinchingly earnest content rarely flies on social media; does the poster not see that simply by posting, they are revealing themselves to be image-conscious and vain? A chief reason that “virtue signalling” became so hotly contested in the mid-twenty-tens was not just because it was in bad taste to express passive, entirely gestural solidarity with a political issue but because the broader mores of social-media use had begun to shift dramatically. It was no longer normative to post a photo of your breakfast, or to write an Instagram caption about how much you loved your mom on International Women’s Day. Suddenly, any type of unironic persona-forward material entered the hall of mirrors of performativity criticism. These days, users can avoid being labelled as performative by imbuing content with the metatextual awareness that they are, in some way, aware of the performance. But it is still impossible to fully ignore the spectre of performativity on social media, despite the apps’ assertion that they are organic breeding grounds for genuine human expression. (Instagram’s mission statement claims its purpose is to bring “you closer to the people and the things you love”; TikTok says that its platform allows users to “unleash their creativity and share authentic stories.”)...
If we are to believe that the purpose of our lives is to unearth and express an authentic version of our true natures, we risk ignoring the myriad associations and forces that determine how we conceive of these premises in the first place. The philosopher Michel Foucault questioned this abiding belief that self-expression leads to liberation, advocating instead for an end to “all these forms of individuality, of subjectivity, of consciousness, of the ego, on which we have built and from which we have tried to build and to constitute knowledge.” Foucault argued that such idealism distracts the individual from grappling with, and critiquing, the power structures that lay claim to their actual freedoms—health care, reproductive rights, education, gender identity, and economic equality among them—which remain under the direction of a “biopower,” a term Foucault used to denote state and social institutions that organize and control a population.
In this view, the performative-reading phenomenon appears less like a newfangled way of calling people pretentious and more like an odious reflection of society’s increasing deprioritization of the written word. Reading a book is antithetical to scrolling; online platforms cannot replicate the slow, patient, and complex experience of reading a weighty novel. This is especially revealing because social media can replicate other art-consuming experiences for users: one could exclusively listen to music, look at visual art, or watch film clips via TikTok or Instagram and reasonably (if not depressingly) claim to have a relationship with these mediums—authentic relationships, fostered with the help of an app. The only way that an internet mind can understand a person reading a certain kind of book in public is through the prism of how it would appear on a feed: as a grotesquely performative posture, a false and self-flattering manipulation, or a desperate attempt to attract a romantic partner...
The irony of “Infinite Jest” becoming prime performative-reading material is that it is a novel perfectly suited to address our current cultural conundrums. Wallace depicts a politically volatile corporate dystopia on the brink of environmental collapse, an existential reality its characters seldom seem to recognize. To escape from the horrors of the external world—and the indistinguishable ways in which the external world influences one’s inner life—characters turn to drugs and alcohol, intensive sports training, and excessive media consumption, the latter of which is dramatized by a digitized entertainment cartridge so powerful that it vegetates anyone who views it. “Infinite Jest” is a novel obsessed with the shared solitude of contemporary life, of the loneliness and lack of meaning endemic to consumerism and market capitalism. Wallace argues, as he does throughout his œuvre, that salvation arrives through careful attention, through sacrificing one’s myopic sense of self to something larger, holier, more expansive. In Wallace’s personal life, this sacrifice came, in part, by reading books, a practice he feared was losing its moral imperative in an age of constant, inescapable stimulation.
by Brady Brickner-Wood, New Yorker | Read more:
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[ed. Well, performative displays in modern culture are everywhere and have been for a long time (fashion, art, interior design, technology, hipsters, hippies, mixtapes, bumper stickers, flag-flying pickup trucks, social media in general, etc.) although it's possible I might be confusing/conflating some of these with simple tribal association. All I know is that if someone wants to read in public (or anywhere else for that matter) more power to them. There could be worse ways of drawing attention to one's self (if that's what you're after). Also, I loved Infinite Jest (and even The Pale King), both read strictly at home.]
