001: greetings from semiotic purgatory
how can i tell i'm a real person with real interests?
[I wrote this at the turn of the New Year, then decided not to publish it, then changed my mind as of May 2024.]
I know, I know. Starting a Substack is the 2020s version of starting a podcast in the 2010s, or a blog in the 2000s… but for the pseudo-intellectual, and the jaded. But this is possibly the worst time in history to be a writer, and yet here I am, experiencing the death rattle of the written word as we know it, clawing at my keyboard in hopes it becomes a preservative vessel for my future. You can’t just write your little heart out and get paid for it anymore, so this is my next best option… Sigh.
But really, writing for pleasure and stretching my oeuvre as a litterateur (gag) is this year’s #2 priority on my scribbled list of “resolutions”, behind 1. don’t spin out (stop overcommitting), and ahead of 3. get involved with an animal rescue organization (but don’t get attached to a dog you cannot take home). And really, I don’t see a better way of doing that than shining the allegorical spotlight of cultural contribution upon myself to dance, monkey, dance myself into prolificacy. Taking the bull by its horns, or something like that.
In this edition, I’m reflecting on media consumption, the performance of sophistication, and the strange vibe around it that the New Year brings.
It seems like every year, young people are struck with the overwhelming urge to reconnect with media authentically. Or, whatever authentically means to us in an age where something didn’t happen if it wasn’t tweeted about or meticulously recorded for later sharing. Meaning, every January, a lofty goal of books to read and films (always films, never movies) to watch gets penned – in the Notes app, Notion, Docs, or one of the various websites specially designed for tracking one’s media consumption.
Each year since 2020, searches for Letterboxd, a movie review and tracking platform, peak at the turn of the new year. Unsurprisingly, the same is true for Goodreads, a comparable platform for books. We enter the year with soaring goals of being auspicious young intellectuals, well-read and watched, culturally incisive, and prepared to make succinct but biting observations on Twitter, or astute, highbrow reviews on one of the aforementioned platforms.
For fun, I looked into the search popularity of a bunch of other media-specific search terms: “AMC A-List”, “movie theater memberships”, “The New Yorker”, “New York Times”, and “book stores near me”. I thought that maybe, with the influx of Goodreads and Letterboxd hits, there would be more traffic to media platforms and searches to enact those resolutions. But none of them had early-January peaks, and even worse, they’d all dropped swiftly off the ledge of search popularity since the mid to late-2000s, like the old couple in that awful scene from Midsommar. Grim!
This isn’t indisputable science in favor of my thesis – I’m sure many people don’t actually know what an AMC A-Lister is (we used to live in a REAL country), the age of streaming, etc. – but it was an exercise in looking into our commitment to tracking our media consumption versus our commitment to presenting ourselves with actual media to engage in. Aka, our commitment to talking about doing a thing versus actually doing it.
I’m not oblivious to the fact that in a way, my creation of a Substack is the same thing. It’s a public means of chronicling my productivity, in letting the world know I am working to become a well-cultured person with “shrewd opinions” and a “vast inner life.” I suppose we won’t know if I’ve truly fallen into the trap until December of 2024 when my Substack will be either a ghost town or runneth over with ruminations.
I also won’t gloss over the fact that I, too, set out to track my readings and watchings this year in a nicely formatted Google Doc, with ratings, dates, and brief reviews of each completed piece. The call is coming from inside the house.
So, what causes the impulse to chronicle our consumption? For some of us, it’s an innate desire to archive, collect, or hold close, spurred by the expectation of future nostalgia. For others, a glimmering trophy that speaks without words, an almost elemental desire to perform leisure to the invisible spectator. Likely, for most of us, a combination of both.
The concept of performance isn’t novel. It was one of the first snarling bits of societal underbelly to show itself upon the introduction of money and power into civilization. Social media is new, but seeing and being seen is not. The entire premise of The Fontainebleau’s “stairway to nowhere” was for women to make highly visible descents in their best eveningwear. Men take ‘roids to beef up at the gym for literally no other reason than to assert perceived dominance. Sumptuary laws. Curated photo “dumps”. Promenading. We do what we can to differentiate and elevate ourselves above one another, even when the only real competition is the one between us and our socially conditioned selves.
But young people are, to dramatize, penniless. Even influencers, the symbolic gentry of people under 30, are wearing Zara. Or, it could be The Row, but no one can tell the difference when it’s on Instagram and the photo is too compressed to look at the stitching up close. So really, it doesn’t matter as much as the way you are perceived while wearing it. It’s the illusion of a carefully constructed reality, something as meticulously symbolic as the Arnolfini portrait, that creates an abstraction greater than the sum of its parts.
It seems somewhat tangential but it’s all a part of the same phenomenon; the one where we see living a life as so inaccessibly foreign that we settle for the mere act of performing it. Many years ago I read an essay about a man who suffered from amnesia and had re-learned the regular acts of living by watching movies. He began to associate things like smoking a cigarette not with being a person smoking a cigarette but with the staged performance of an actor doing so. So, in his own life, enacting wholly human actions, he felt like he was in a movie. (I cannot, for the life of me, remember where I read it, or who wrote it, but if it comes to me in a dream I’ll be sure to share.)
We (mostly, young women) can’t have anything; our own lives, a sense of authenticity. We must constantly be in service of the Great Big Performance Machine, which is just a pseudonym for capitalism and patriarchy and the swampy hellhole where they converge. Like most topics that stir around in my mind, I talked to my best friend, Lucia, about it. She’s a sociology superstar, with especially astute views on performance and identity, specifically that of young women. I asked her why she thought teenage girls and twenty-somethings are so likely to fall into these “arbitrary” categorizations, which come across as empty titles outside of media contexts.
“I think as women we are a lot more concerned about being seen, not in a visual way, but just being seen as people. So we've created these categorical aesthetics that are meant to be indicators of who we are below the surface,” she says.
We’ve become accustomed to the building blocks of our persona being neatly laid out in front of us, because when you’re constantly burdened with the weight of Everything, it’s hard to figure out who you actually are. We’re dizzily throwing darts at a dartboard, hoping one hits a bullseye. On social classification, Lucia says:
“We do this as a way to find a sense of belonging. The disconnect that I feel like I’m seeing right now is that with all the access we have with social media to other peoples’ business, it is so much easier to "shop" aesthetics. Before, people just existed and interacted with others and formed these groups based on similar interests, and then formal categories were formed. Now, because of influencers and social media and never-ending access to other people’s lives, we know what the starter packs to each of these so-called aesthetics and what the products and media we are supposed to consume are that fit this aesthetic. There is so much more "ideal form" at play. It's literally a fake it ‘til you make it situation.”
Think of a short video of a book on a bed, “haphazardly” strewn next to it is a Dior lipgloss and something pink and flowery. To the trained eye, this tableau gives more than enough context to reveal the type of person who should engage with that media. It’s a contemporary Vanitas painting that does the opposite… we aren’t to be reminded of the vanity of worldly pleasures, but how we can ascend to the next echelon of social stature by being defined by them.
I need you all to know that the above description was scrounged from the unlucky remnants of TikTok memories stuck to the inside of my brain like debris to a dumpster and was not about a particular thing I’d seen. But when I went to Twitter to search for a specific tweet I saw last week about how being a girl who reads Kafka is now cringe, an absolute gem came across my feed like it was offered up on a tip line. A tweet by user @diorrfiona: a video of a Franz Kafka illustration book on sweet little white and pink rosette sheets. The caption says, “I wish i could have the ability to give franz kafka a very very soft deep hug the way that lil kittens hug each other so he can feel protected”. Am I prophetic or is this the natural consequence of keyword searching “Kafka” on Twitter in our great year 2024?
We’re so desperate for belonging that we’re effectively shooting ourselves in the foot to get there; tight-lacing down to the 18” waist of ideal social standing and hoping people treat us better for it, then getting nauseous, yakking, and passing out before we’re even seen. Tightlacing can be a subcultural practice in the right context (beside the point), but the premise stands: our tendency to lean into visual markers and menial actions as sole identifiers of self upholds a social order rooted in consumption and vanity just as much as the asinine codes of social presentation in the 1800s. As long as a black ribbon around the neck can make one a prostitute, and pearls a virgin, we won’t break the chains.
Though it can feel like we’re in too deep, it’s not all hopeless. People are more complex than we like to give them credit for, and we’re generally not in the business of doing things that we don’t think will serve us in some way. Lucia rocked my world with her analysis of the “clean girl” aesthetic:
“Sure, the visual aesthetic might be rooted in pulled-back sleek hair and gold jewelry and drinking matcha in the morning and doing yoga and changing your sheets daily and having your schedule color-coded on your laptop and journaling, but what this is all trying to imply, and what people who are trying to follow this "aesthetic" are really just trying to demonstrate is that they have the psychological characteristics and personality traits to be able to do all these routine things. It's a way of waving your arms and saying, ‘Look! I am organized and disciplined, and stress-free, and I’m not a victim of procrastination.’"
At the end of the day, we’re just trying to signify who we are through methods of self-fashioning and presentation. The depth and earnestness of these signifiers can become foggy when they’re cycled through rapidly and commodified for social media, which is the unfortunate downside of accessibility.
It’s the same with visual media. Realistically, people aren’t taking the time to read books and watch movies, then track them all, with the ultimate goal of publicizing them and gaining nothing internally. We may want people to see that we’ve read 28 books this year and watched 95 movies, but likely not just for the clout of having good taste publicly, or being prolific in your consumption. We want to feel something, to escape through beautiful stories, to feel validated in our interests by our peers, and ideally, to find mutual understanding.
But then again, I don’t know. I was at the only bar I ever frequent last night, catching up with a regular who had been in Europe the past few weeks. He showed me a picture he took in Paris at the Louvre, not of art but of the crowd around the Mona Lisa, which was so packed he couldn’t even get in the same room as it. Everyone had their phone up, and absolutely no one was looking directly at the painting. It was clear that the purpose was not to see the Mona Lisa but to prove you saw it. Situations like that drive me into a feedback loop with whiplash so severe I begin to feel like these ducks.
I see only one way forward: we all just come to the logical conclusion that we don’t care about how we’re perceived on the internet, even if we do care. To quote Lucia earlier, fake it ‘til you make it. We hold our dear friends close, we tell them all about what we’re reading and watching and they tell us the same, we close TikTok (deleting it two years ago was the best choice I could have made), and Twitter (still can’t stomach deleting it all together), we track our media for the sake of self-satisfaction and personal review. We let our world be a little smaller, not because we’re close-minded but because our worlds were never supposed to be this giant and deafening and crushing.
If we make our prison break, the Great Big Performance Machine can’t stop us all…