Argentinian performance artist Amalia Ulman has hijacked Instagram as her creative narrative form of choice. In the conceptual performance she calls “Excellences and Perfections” she has fabricated an Instagram feed that tells the story of a woman who has just moved to L.A. to try and become a model. The feed of photos chronicles her slow arc into what Ulman calls “middle brow femininity.” This essentially constitutes girls commonly referred to as “basic” or average in their tastes which include, but are not limited to, working out, yoga, Starbucks, quinoa, etc.

This ties in with our work on autobiography and the tension between self-representation and identity construction. With Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, we have never before existed in a time with so much opportunity for this kind of hyperreal and relentless identity construction. Instagram can almost be likened to the many frames of the self like the comic book form afforded for Spiegelman in Maus. But once we construct something, does it cease to be true from the nature of constructing it?

By Ulman creating this account that “passed” as real, she is drawing attention to the manufactured nature of our social media “selves” as such. The ambiguity of “truth” makes us pause on our own tenuous identities. We are mutable, formable, and pictorial artifacts of ourselves. Thus, as Friedlander asks, how do we navigate the “dilemma of wanting to engage in the culture of self-representation online without creating a fallacious fantasy image?” But, my question is, isn’t self-representation always a fantasy image just by the very nature you you having to imagine it and construct it for yourself in the first place?

To-reimagine something and conjure up its memory, is an act of creation itself. As we have seen in Stories We Tell, the past is composed and manufactured upon  recall. Ulma’s project brings focus to the problem of “the real” assumed in autobiography. Even if we can never truly achieve a “true” account of “what happened,” how can we tell a story that is still important to tell?

The video today in class raised questions of representation. The argument being made was that the U.S. media was coming to Haiti to represent Haiti to the rest of the world but the Haitians didn’t really have a say in how they were being represented. The man from the video felt that they were misrepresenting Haiti and only showing “the bad.”

The idea of representation is a large part of our course and an important topic in contemporary culture. For example, misrepresentation perpetrated by the U.S. has been a large complaint coming from many Muslim communities. Iranian-born Shirin Neshat, in her TED talk “Art in Exile” talks about how she constantly has to fight how Iranian women are being portrayed in the U.S. media as powerless and oppressed. She works to find images of all the powerful, educated, and resilient Iranian women to show others in the Western world.

Jasbir Puar similarly discusses this concept in his essay “Homonationalism and Biopolitics.” He cites how the Revolutionary Association of Women from Afghanistan said that the Feminist Majority Foundation (from the U.S.) came to Afghanistan under the guise of “liberating” women but really came to spread and inculcate U.S. political and economic power in Afghanistan. The Feminist Majority Foundation’s “hegemonic, ego driven, and corporate feminism” came to position the U.S. as an “arbiter of appropriate ethics, human rights, and democratic behavior while exempting itself”  (Puar 8).

As we can see, the U.S. savior complex belies the assumption that because the U.S. is so “advanced,” it is their “responsibility” and “duty” to save the world from their “primitive” infrastructures. In both the Middle East and in Haiti, we see the U.S. media representing these places as below them, thus inciting a savior complex predicated on a false sense of superiority. The power of representation lies in the hands of who is doing the representing.

Works Cited

Puar, Jasbir. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer times. Durham: Duke UP, 2007. Print.

An important connection I found between Maus and Diamond Grill was that they both look at the notion of interstitial or liminal identity.

When Art is tasked with drawing his girlfriend, the comic shows us that he cannot decide whether to draw her as a mouse to denote a Jewish person, or a frog to denote a French person, of which she is both. Similarly, one of the men in Auschwitz came forward pleading to the guards that he was German and he was one of them, so he should not be persecuted. Art draws him as both a mouse and a shadow of a cat to signify this assertion of identity versus how the guards perceived him.

These examples force the reader to examine the notion of identity and its supposed exclusionary properties. When we reconcile these identities, the very notion of identity seems to melt into ambiguous meaninglessness. Fred Wah approaches this concept as well when he tries to navigate identifications of Chinese and Canadian. How doe we conciliate “disparate” identity entities?

Comedian Marga Gomez similarly discusses this in her skit entitled “Long Island Latina” as a Latina that can’t speak Spanish. The Spanish speaking people in her community called her “boba” which roughly translates to “idiot,” thus shaming her for not being “true” to her identity.

What results from these purported “transgressions” of identity is a boundless liminality that makes us hyperaware of the socially constructive nature of identity. Professor José Esteban Muñoz talks about undergoing a period of disidentification after breaking down the social categorizations and barriers of being. In this way we can resist interpellation to become fixed subjects within a social context. He posits that to find one’s self, we must deny self. We must deny what we have been told are ourselves with ideological restraints.

PostSecret is a compelling project for many reasons. PostSecret gives a voice to the unspoken human experience, a world outside of the dubious logic of sitcoms and movies. It allows senders to give their feelings validation and room to breathe their truth. What I found interesting was the page entitled “Are all these secrets true?”

What is the nature of truth? Can a story we tell ever be true in an objective sense? This is a key component of our course. To tell a secret, one takes on the task of defining and sculpting a “truth” for themselves. Frank points out that some people have read one of the secrets and realized “sometimes a secret we keep from ourselves only becomes true after we read it on a stranger’s postcard,” which harks back to his catalyzing mantra of “you will find your answers in the secrets of others.”

He also states that “as art, secrets can have different layers of truth, some can be both true or false.” Not only does this break down the dichotomy of “real” versus “unreal” but it hints at the notion that if it’s not true for you, it might be true for someone else, thus extracting truth from the confines of personal experience. A truth about humanity that others relate to can still be deemed as a truth, even if you don’t identify with it.

This also harks to the function of art, and why Frank distinguishes it as “art.” The function of art in Frank’s eyes is similar to Pablo Picasso’s “Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.” However, some of these people would probably not distinguish their secrets as art, and would deem them as “true” therefore, not a “lie.” Can these secrets be both at the same time? Either way, they function to facilitate truth in that they represent a personal reality for others to recognize or dismiss. Thus we become artistic curators of truth.

The notion of curating one’s Facebook page brought up in one of the Facebook promotional videos particularly struck me. Not only are we (intentionally or unintentionally) curating what is shown on our newsfeed by a logarithm of what we click most, as discussed in Parier’s “filter bubbles” video, but we are curating ourselves as an explicit entity. In essence, we are curating an identity or an “individual” self. However, this is primarily a Western concept. As Lévi-Strauss puts it:

solidity of the self, the major preoccupation of the whole of Western philosophy, imbues itself with an experiential awareness of its own unreality

Thus, we have created the cult of the individual. Individuality and identity are a social construct and Facebook is now sacrosanct to this creation. Anthropologist, Daniel Miller’s ethnography on the internet states that Facebook is used to “help people to deliver on pledges that they have already made to themselves about themselves” (Miller 11). 

However, does this really “solidify the self”? Or is the solidity of self just an illusion, as Lévi-Strauss would say? It is an illusion such that it is an intangible social phenomenon. It induces “expansive realization” of “the self” such that “one can become what one really thinks one is” (Miller 10). I argue that it also builds and informs what one thinks one really is over time.

A great video that explicates this circumstance is called The Innovation of Loneliness. It talks about how the aphorism we live by now is “I share therefore I am.” Individuation in our current era is dominated by the notion of “self actualization” which has come to mean “wealth, career, self-image, and consumerism.” In this type of pursuit, Facebook sharing becomes the crucible where we are meant to create this perfect individual portrait to fit those values. We curate everything to look like we are a distinct “self” to other “selves.” We can literally “edit” ourselves.

The ontology of the individual identity versus the “other” is now deeply entrenched in the social consciousness. My question is, how does Facebook change the way we see or relate to others now that the idea of the self has become more palpable?

– Callie Hitchcock

Cited Works:

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Naked Man. London: Harper & Row Publishers, 1981. 625-695. Print.

Miller, Daniel. The Internet: an Ethnographic Approach. Oxford: Oxford International Publishers Ltd., 2000. 10-11. Print.