(Ir)reality: the virtual image and the performative male

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A spectre is haunting Europe: it is the spectre of the performative male. Given how much has been said about it lately—especially following a controversy on the italian TikTok, which serves as the starting point for this reflection—I am not sure if it is still appropriate for performative males to «openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies» and draw up a party manifesto (with all due respect to Marx).

In any case, before getting into the heart of the matter, I would like to testify that I spotted a specimen—and quite a specimen at that—of this species last October in Barcelona. I hastily took a photo that I cannot find now, but I remember the image depicted him engaged in the typical daytime activity of the performative male: reading a classic by a female writer (I believe it was Jane Austen) on an outdoor bench in the shade of the awning of a radical-chic, organic-based café, in a hipster neighborhood of the most hipster city in Mediterranean Europe. But let’s rewind.

The problem is not so much reification: it’s not just that buying a book matters as much as, or more than, reading it, and that the good things we read are debased by a slew of other "merchandise-with-pages" on mall shelves. The problem is rather the opposite: it is dematerialization. Reality is replaced by the image of reality, and what we buy—books just like any other commodity—is as if it had no body: bodily objectivity, human flesh as well as the lifeless body of a book, ceases to count for itself and becomes a phantom before its symbolic complex.

What we acquire when we buy a book—what we therefore read when we make a show of reading on the web—is ultimately nothing but a bloated ghost of ourselves, the projection of an ideal self whose only chance of existing is in the expanded and immaterial reality of the ether. Thus, while since the historical rise of capitalism the commodity has been and continues to be a catalyst for symbolic elements (if with commodities, exactly as with the bodies of others, we are always dealing with our own ghosts, our insecurities, our obsessions: in short, not with the "other," but with "us"), today a radical shift has taken place. The subject's identity has finally become one with its own projection. The ghost of us that exists on the unreal plane of the online has fused irremediably with the very perception of the real subject, generating confusion. What is the difference between one who reads and the photograph of one who reads? Between us reading and the image of what we read? What difference is there, then, between the performative male and his image, if the performative male is—as the expression itself suggests—eminently an image? Exactly.

This is not just a crisis for those of us who watch. It is not only for us—if it is possible to isolate a passive "us" that is not also an actor in the dynamics it suffers—that the link between reality and the image of reality cracks; it is, first and foremost, I would say, the crisis of the subject. Whoever performs on the internet, whoever presents an image of themselves (of any kind, but let’s say the image of the intellectual), is not ultimately offering a single image, but at least a double one: that of the self-as-person and that of the self-as-intellectual.

For Plato, art was a copy of a copy, the propaganda of false knowledge; and so is the virtual image: the image of an image. The difference is that if art and literature, with their symbolic weight, preserved at least a little of that aesthetic quality that might redeem them, the virtual image has no aesthetic advantage, and even less an aesthetic capacity: it is emptied of it a priori. Moreover, with the caveat of an inversion: between the real and the virtual, the normal relationship of precedence has been distorted and shows no sign of remembering a "before." The virtual, where images live, is no longer a medium to reach the real. The existence of the real is, in this, completely devoid of meaning and, on the other hand, who would want to retrace their steps to return now? Indeed, the virtual image gives absolute pleasure because it is pure: purely narcissistic, masturbatory, entirely self-sufficient.

But from this also originates the crisis of the subject: the performance-creature, once unleashed, is capable of autonomy; it can live perfectly well far from us without even coming to visit once in a while. Not only can one be the image of something without actively wanting to become it, but—even worse—one can become the image of something without first being it. If the boy on the bench in Barcelona actually reads the books he talks about (flaunts?), if his thoughts on the matter are authentic and not the result of plagiarism, he can nonetheless still be the image of someone who doesn't really read those books, who has no existential relationship with them, who only pretends to read them—the performative male. It is precisely that, at the root, the specific nature of the relationship between the "I" and the image has changed: the "I" is a function of the image, which precedes it. The image is the only truly vital organism of the virtual, and the authenticity of the ego is nothing but its dead outgrowth.

The fact remains that everyone on the internet, from the most to the least performative, seems placed there specifically to claim their own authenticity. If the expression of identity is a right—and I would say one of the most inflated ones—authenticity is its correlated value: there is no one more consistent and rock-solid than a user of the former Twitter or an Instagram activist whose entire existence seems devoted to morally blackmailing you.

It follows that, in the virtual world, the highest level of authenticity to which the free expression of identity can aspire is an "authentic performance," and it only takes basic logic to realize that there is nothing faker than a performance that is authentic through and through. It is a painful impasse, and I imagine that the crisis of the performative subject—which is to say, today, the subject tout court—stems from here as well. There is, however, something more painful, and that is asking how one might then escape it, because the answer to that question forces us to face desolation. In the ruthless struggle for authenticity, how can (for example) the performative male win the debate and prove once and for all that he is not fake? It is easily said: he cannot.

This is the trouble with virtual communication, its formal, let’s even say structural, essence. Discourse on the web is built, it seems to me, on the nerve of reiteration: the juxtaposition of regular modules, opposing and identical components—let's call them A and non-A, B and non-B, etc. It is not a flow: it is a deafening cycle, a communicative vortex with a downward suction, or a drunken and exceptionally elastic mosquito bouncing from wall to wall in an empty room, and it never dies. But those inside this escape room seem not to notice: they continue to oppose A with non-A, B with a B+1 against which the opponent will unsheathe a fine B+2. In short, it’s all a contest to see who has the biggest C.

But it is all in vain. If we are attributed an image in which we do not recognize ourselves, the only weapon with which we could try to free ourselves is to oppose that image with another equal and opposite image. If yesterday we were "teacher's pet" nerds to others, today we will prove to be brilliant and alternative students; if yesterday we were performative males, today we won't just buy books to flip through them and we will reveal ourselves to be truly intelligent too. There is nothing, after all, more democratic than social media. On there, the famous and the unknown alike—having achieved ephemeral fame for the "debate of the moment"—spend their time trying to distance themselves from the images others assert of them. We want to withdraw from hetero-produced images with self-produced images which, although they retain the unpleasant aftertaste of plastic, we have at least swallowed autonomously; no one else forced them down our throats.

It ends up that on social media—where from the beginning the tension between the "reality effect" and the "unreality effect," the true and the polished, fleshly misfortunes and synthetic happiness has played out—one cannot harbor hope of reaching reality. On the contrary, in the controversies that find an outlet there, the universe of the virtual multiplies: it equips itself with plots and subplots, it thickens with twists worthy of a literal novel. To call it a "disconnection" is perhaps imprecise, because it’s not so much that we have withdrawn; it is rather that reality itself has taken to thinning out. It has become like a thin film that sticks onto an immaterial universe, like the packaging on a commodity—reality is now reduced to a "license of reality." The unreal climate in which we are immersed, instead, muffles us, and we emerge half-chewed as fodder for a sub-reality: a sort of detonated reality, simple and modular, where things organize themselves into antithetical patterns and in which primitive, superficial, but ungovernable passions surface. If until twenty years ago it was television (from reality TV to the news) that held the exclusive right to a fictionalized reality, today what has happened is that if no one watches television anymore, it is because, perhaps, there is no longer anyone who stands outside of television. Once, reality show characters were only some of us, while the majority of us remained the spectator in front of a dormant reality, a reality in which we still believed; today this paradigm—inside/outside—no longer makes sense. By entering that reality, by going directly to live there, we have finally managed to dematerialize ourselves, to lose ourselves blissfully in the ether of telecommunications. The virtual image is the only thing whose existence can truly count and, if reality loses its meaning as well as its taste, it ends up being the only thing that truly exists.

What use would it be, then, if the male in our debate managed, by some absurdity, to prove himself authentic? In the virtual world, the person as we understand them in reality does not exist: the digital subject is not an entity but a procedure, and what remains of this cannot progress, it will always and only go backwards: the person becomes a persōna (mask), from this a character, from the character a personality trait.

If anyone on the web truly wanted to show themselves as authentic, they would change the medium. Just one example: what authentic subject is so morally upright, so sheltered from disintegration? It is as if we chose not to respond to the crisis of the ego and its fragmentation, but rather to stun ourselves. The battle for authenticity is therefore lost from the start, and the reason is, again, a priori, in the very structure of virtual communication. In real communication one can also lie, one can even manufacture a credible alter ego, one can even end up believing one's own lies: it's not that uncommon. But the real—real communication—has another quality that cannot be feigned, recreated, or generated virtually. It is the unconscious, or something like it.

The virtual completely elides the irrational dimension of a non-diurnal logic; it obliterates what exists despite ourselves, that which we do not control. And yet, in that very virtual world in which we seem to have all the control, nothing is truly under our control: what interacts with others is not us but an image of us sent on a mission; it is as if we were always speaking through a proxy, a papier-mâché mannequin. Like very frustrated Frankensteins, we engineer—without knowing it— a complete identity that nonetheless escapes us, and it escapes us because our virtual selves are incapable of giving life to that part which, in reality, is born from us and yet endures, continuing to exist. Walter Siti, when asked why a text generated by AI cannot be literature, replies that the only thing artificial intelligence lacks is the unconscious, for the simple reason that, by remembering everything, it can repress nothing.

Absurdly, then, the only way we would have to win the debate would be precisely to unleash the unconscious: if the one being attacked agreed with those criticizing him; if the male admitted himself to be (even without making amends) performative; if he admitted the true sting of living while feeling inauthentic, of inhabiting an incomplete and fragile identity that, to be truly itself, needs to be identical to someone else. An identity that if it wants to exist, if it wants to last, must not actually exist—it must migrate into something else, not deviate, in order not to go mad. The only way we would have to win would be to lose. But this, of course, is impossible.

(Ir)reality: the virtual image and the performative male