Mercifully, advertisements don’t usually attract my attention at all. Perhaps that’s why I find them particularly bothersome when they do; distraction is their raison d'être. If ads were ignorable then how might we become subliminally aware that there are unmet needs in our life which only SalaciousCorpTM can satisfy? Aesthetically pleasing ones are not so bad, but those irritating, garish ones—frequently deploying the most crude methodology—are the type that, once they register, really stick in one’s craw. Today, I walked past an advertisement which, for the first time in a long time, seemed like both, at once.
I should note that by today I mean not today. In fact, I mean a not-today so far in the past it was prior to lockdown in 2020 when I began this particular reflection, tinkered with it for a while, almost completed it, then promptly moved on to other topics. Rummaging through dozens of half-finished half-thoughts, I realised this one had some potential, and only needed a few slight tweaks and, y’know, an actual conclusion. So… here we are, back at this this advertisement which was both garish, and attracted my attention way back then.
The scaffolding of both photographs are designed to represent a ‘selfie’—using a smartphone to take a photographic self-portrait—but this one in particular is explicit in its depiction of the act of taking a selfie, rather than it being a reconstruction of a faux-selfie. It reveals echoes of the classical cinéma vérité style of the 1960s, in contrast to a more expressionistic or artfully constructed style. Ironically it draws attention to the act of photography rather than the art of photography, and so is one step removed from the notion of capturing “truth” or “reality” as a purist vérité style would. In that respect it represents a diametric opposite of the ideals expressed in that particular movement.
It struck me with such force that I intercepted the friend I was meeting for lunch and immediately mentioned my compulsion to return to take a photo of the said advertisements. I did so: they are two of the images which accompany this piece. It doesn’t appear—neither now nor when they caught my attention—that they were designed with the any attention is good attention theory in mind (Dolce & Gabbana, I’m looking at you), yet something bothered me nonetheless. The brand is something called “maje”, which I’ve never heard of, and carries the perennially-haute subtitle of, simply, “Paris”. The text is all sans-serif. So far, so run-of-the-mill.
Both images feature women, both include a pet dog, both are taken inside a lift. There, the similarities largely end. But there’s one more thing, an unusual thing, which unites them both—which, when I showed the pictures to a variety of other people, they couldn’t discern. Perhaps this is little more than a signifier of my own age and detachment from the cultural zeitgeist, but it struck me immediately. The subject of each advertisement gazes not at the actual camera, not at another person, nor even wistfully into the distance—but at a phone. A phone which is an imitation of an actual camera: in regard to the actual photograph being observed, it is functionally useless but also functionally identifiable to those “reading” the ad in an aspirational sense.
In other words, the phone itself is the “camera” within the image which the advertisement’s target audience is likely to identify and understand as the one being “used” (as opposed to the real camera being used which we cannot see). More to the point the phone is deployed in a sense which those who are not inured to the cultural self-aggrandisement of social media are unlikely to properly recognise. In that sense, this is an ad very likely to divide interpretation along generational lines.
Perhaps none of this will strike young people as unusual. Perhaps that’s the point. Perhaps this is already a trend in advertising. I simply do not know; this is just the first image I happen to have seen with this motif. My first thought was that a certain kind of commodification—not just of social media or the overarching concept of self-branding itself, but of the way Instagram in particular, and its homogenous aesthetic, is employed by wannabe influencers (ie. most of its most regular users)—had permeated the echelons of the advertising industry and was now not simply mirroring the occasion but actively exploiting it. Which got me, as usual, thinking.
Enter the Simulation
Way back in 1981—in an era of power suits and a staggering propensity for consumptive excess which foreshadowed somewhat naïve antecedents to our now altogether knowing and narcissistic nihilism—a French philosopher called Jean Baudrillard wrote a nigh-on prophetic book called Simulacra and Simulation. The work explores the fundamental mote of what had attracted my attention in regard to these advertisements.
I studied just enough philosophy during my first abortive attempt at university to have a grasp of the key voices in the field, and Baudrillard was (at least at that point in time) one of them. I was also quite interested in the fundamental hypocrisies of capitalism and its so-called and theoretical (that is, intended but not exercised in practice) “free market” economy, which makes extensive literal use of Baudrillard’s concepts. My interest in fashion, I suspect, also blossomed at the same junction, alongside my nascent awareness of artificial “need”. Perhaps they developed simultaneously because the aspects of fashion which lured me with the greatest strength were also those which spoke with the harshest terms toward precisely those dichotomies. It is an inseparable fact that these inspirations lay at the heart of an industry perhaps more perniciously exploitative than almost any other, even—or perhaps especially—despite its efforts to outwardly embrace progressive values such as diversity and sexual freedom.
A book hollowed-out and rendered a facade, containing not the knowledge one might expect from a book but a wooden shell surrounding a void into which physical articles can be placed. Very post-postmodern. It hasn’t lost all semiotic meaning, though; the simulacra of money and data have merely replaced literal meaning, not unlike the way the digital revolution has irrevocably altered the way most human minds consume and interpret information, and the meaning derived from it.
Remember, data on a tape (or on a disc or in a computer or phone) is useless without the means of decoding it, and has ceased to be “information” per se. It is information one step removed. The same with money: it has no inherent “worth” as an actual object—it only has value once it is agreed to as a unit of common trade. We forget, in the modern world, how many things with semiotic meaning have no literal meaning; to test this, just remove their context.
As an example, imagine receiving a foreign currency without the means to exchange it—would the physical notes or coinage be “worth” anything to you if nobody else accepted it as legal tender? Ergo, it is a simulacra of “value”, holding no inherent worth unto itself and no longer representing anything real—only a culturally agreed-upon rate for economic exchange. Without the cultural context, therefore, it loses literal meaning altogether.
Amusingly, the remaining “text” left within the mutilated book is entitled “on nihilism”, literally (and I mean that in at least two different ways) reflecting the destruction or disappearance of the meaning once held within, but hollowed out… leaving only the simulated shell. Beautiful. Absolutely, symbolically, beautiful. Image(s): Warner Bros.
I knew enough of Baudrillard to smugly chuckle at the appearance of Simulacra and Simulation in the 1999 film The Matrix. In that instance, the film symbolically and fittingly represents the book not as a book but as a hollowed-out representation of a book, a storage case in which is kept both data tapes and money.
A simulation is an object or concept which references a thing, but is not actually that thing. Neither text, money, nor a data disc or tape, has any inherent utility at all until they are deceiphered within a specific context. While a book may seem as though it has immediate utility, it is only useful so long as the reader is literate in its language. Hence, it is a simulation of knowledge.
A simulacrum, on the other hand, is one step further removed. Very simply put it could be thought of as a simulation of a simulation; the point being that it no longer bears any direct connection with the real. In Baudrillardian terms, it either: retains only referential (semiotic) meaning; is a reference to another referential object; or simply creates its own reality. In other words, it might be thought of as an imitation of a thing, no longer an actual thing.
Later in The Matrix, we discover that what the characters experience as the “real world” is in fact, the eponymous simulation itself (arguably, actually a simulacrum, depending on your perspective or definition of what it is the machines have chosen to depict). It was—at least in 1999—a shocking concept to even consider that things people perceived with their own senses in their everyday lives might, in fact, be unreal, fake, or otherwise illusory; these days, it frequently forms the foundations of entire ideologies.
Baudrillard’s work breaks down both simulacra and simulation into broad orders, then distils them further into degrees, and even associates them with particular phases of technological development. It seems remarkable that a work written so long ago could be so prophetic in its illustration of the link between the adoption of technology and a growing inability to discern the real from the simulated, and then even the simulated from its simulacrum. One could describe the very nature of the internet thus, and the phrase ‘fake news’ positively explodes with possibility.
An everyday example is mass production, which alters the inherent value of a thing (that is, a physical thing, the real) by creating so many iterations of it. This process of commodification nullifies inherent value and replaces it with a degree of homogeneity. This is intentional, and is one of the oft-lauded benefits of capitalism: the cheapening of things built at scale. While on a crude level that is obviously true, it often overlooks the kind of value we might find within particular objects—art especially.
More problematically, what the mass-production and cheapening of material goods also does is shrinks profit margins, and makes most truly essential items so abundant that affluent humans become inured to convenience, and largely unaccustomed to true deprivation. That is, we live in an era where our most important needs are almost always met—which seems incongruous to most people whose lives remain, shall we say, inescapably miserable. Yet, the disconnect is not at all difficult to discern.
Industrialisation and mass production have certainly made many wealthy Western folk incredibly comfortable (at the expense of the less affluent, of course), but perhaps capitalism’s most perverse characteristic is its insatiable desire for exponential growth. More people, more output, more goods, more profit. In reality, it’s only the latter which matters in capitalism—the former are simply means to that end. Which explains why regulation—as a restriction on unfettered output via frivolous little requirements like safety or a leash on exploitation—tends to be a problem, and why manufactured goods tend, over time, to degrade and “cheapen” in many different ways (as corporate cost-cutting inevitably impacts the final product), even when purported “quality” remains part of its appeal.
Anyway, what all this results in is a nullification of the inherent value of the product, the real thing being made or offered. Its commodified expression can only mimic its qualities, and its very homogeneity waters down its perceived value. When the Spanish brought galleon after galleon stuffed full of gold back to Europe during its evisceration of central America, there was so much of it sloshing around that it became “cheap”, and Spain itself arguably set in motion the seeds of its decline when it stopped actually producing anything of value, as the direct acquisition of gold itself became more lucrative. Too much of anything—even a “good” thing like gold—can be a bad thing if its association with the real becomes too dislocated.
In our modern Western society, the homogeneity of generic mass-produced goods—which meet our actual needs—means what we are sold are not “needs” at all, even though they often feel like they are. And why is that? If capitalist entities can no longer sell us what we actually need, the situation requires an arousal of artificial needs in order to drive desirability—and profit—instead.
That process has become the sole task of advertising.
Instead of just shoes, we need Nike Air Max 270s, and probably a bunch of other shit, too. The association between cost and brand now bear no actual relationship to the “value” of the material goods themselves. It’s their perceived value that matters, because being above necessity they represent status instead. Infamously, Nike has for many decades exploited the labour of third-world countries to produce what are actually pretty cheap shoes; and then sells them at boutique prices to Western consumers who display them as status symbols.
This process of status-as-need simulates very real needs—for things like food or shelter—and in an environment of such abundance that these things are frequently taken for granted, they are mutated into whimsical consumptive impulses for things like cars with the power to drive three times the legal limit of almost any country, plastic pop-culture artefacts, Apple watches, diamanté-encrusted handbags, bottled water, and cheap, deliberately disposable fast-fashion. Props, essentially. Things we absolutely do not need. While money can’t buy happiness, it sure can buy leisure or prestige.
Have you ever wondered why the word “value” is now more likely to be synonymous with “saving money” rather than “inherent quality”? The very notion of a “sale” or “savings” makes a consumer feel like they are benefiting somehow financially when to attain the purported benefit actually requires the expenditure of money. If a sign says something like great value!, our first instinct is to think that it might be cheap, on sale, or a good price, rather than thinking to ask, “which of its values is so great?” Our concept of the term has been reduced to its signification within a market where only capital matters, because money can procure status; a market which itself has been artificially manipulated by all manner of different vested interests in order to distort things like actual “value”. The meaning still exists, for example, in a related word like valuable. We don’t think of valuable things as cheap, or a bargain. It’s the opposite dichotomy to the difference between priceless, and worthless, which on the representative level of capital should signify the same thing but are actually diametrically opposed.
In my opinion, Baudrillard’s ideas are profound, and while an extended digression is inappropriate here, a basic understanding is beneficial to the point I intend to make. The rise of mass production has transformed artefacts of art or specific aesthetic value into copies, in vast volumes which in turn shifted their value as individual physical things into mere commodities; they are now items of exchange. When you buy “art” from some mega-store like Harvey Norman, you’re not really buying art… you’re buying a simulation of art in the form of a commodified representation of it. If it happens to be AI art, then it has become a simulacra of art instead, without any remaining link to the real; the process of human creativity.
This shift also explains why exclusivity—that is, the exclusion of access to something from a particular group—has become in the context of high-end capital exchange not some parable of inequality but instead a mark of commercial appeal: something which marks the possessor with that same exclusivity. In other words, it becomes a status symbol. Exclusivity is essentially the manner in which the super-wealthy are able to distinguish themselves from others around them in a (“Western”) world where an individual overflowing in an abundance of material possessions is positively commonplace. Plebeian iterations exist, of course, to lure numpties with the false flattery that their knock-off “exclusive” deal means the same thing. But it’s almost always just that the price has been lowered for a limited time.
Because what is meant by “exclusivity” is really “superiority”. It does end up meaning exactly the same thing as you’d expect: the exclusion of one class for the benefit or status of another. In the vast majority of cases, an attempt at advertising exclusivity is itself a mid-stage simulacrum and, hence, a spurious lure or ploy (ie. it merely claims to be exclusive but is in fact available to just about anyone). Or, if it is legitimately exclusive then, in a commercial sense, it is almost certain to remain within the domain of only the super-rich. And by that I mean an élite in the sense that populists use the term, but no longer understand the term. In fact, the word élite has itself entered the realm of simulacra on more than one level, and has ceased to maintain integrity with respect to its origin—from which it has become unshackled—and perhaps appropriately it is now, in its populist sense, not unlike the word fake. A bombastic, propagandistic term stripped of legitimate meaning. A mere category, a label, an insult. It no longer matters what it means, only what it represents.
Seeing past the gaze
It may occur to you to wonder at this junction how all this talk of meaning and value and reproduction and Baudrillard even relate to advertising? In my view, they are central to understanding how the medium of advertising functions in a patriarchal, capitalist society. The dominant factors here are, firstly, the misrepresentation of the real—using simulation, or even simulacra, to transmogrify real needs into artificial ones. Secondly, the focus of the entire process through the lens of the single most dominant cultural power of the last few thousand years: the male gaze.
For now, let’s just say that the male gaze has dominated almost every visual cultural process in the world for the past several millennia. It permeates a vast coterie of cultural strictures, all conspiring to maintain the status quo. I could say a lot more about it, but for now you can just take my word for it.
The male gaze in particular is significant because it is an example of how marketing can exist as a simulacrum. Consider someone seeing a female-coded face with make-up on it within an advertisement for said product. That face is neither just that of the model, nor is it simply an amalgam of the product, which just so happens to resemble a face (or at least requires one to facilitate its application).
The “original” face has been artificially altered in other ways, either by lighting, distance, or positioning, during the photographic process, and certainly these days with some element of digital manipulation, in order to express features which are desirable and disguise those which are not. It is not implausible to consider that, soon, products may dispense with an organic original at all, and have the entire process created by the ultimate simulacrum: artificial intelligence.
The “face” we see in an advertisement does not itself actually exist, and if you were instantly able to magically scry upon the model whose features the advertisement borrows and resembles (but is not), the model would be asleep, or talking to a friend, or reading a book in the sunshine, or in some other state which bears little resemblance to the static face in the image—the simulacrum-posing-as-simulation—we see. The conditions of the face would likely look completely different; the model older, her hair tied up or let down, with less or alternative make-up on, et cetera.
Further to that, not only does the face no longer represent something real, it has become something representative in and unto itself: desirability. An abstracted feeling. The face exists only to draw admiration, and have no other ostensible qualities of its own. Because that would potentially undermine the illusion, and its associated fantasy, which is that the face exists and might be possessed by the observer, who could be anyone. For women that possession is an embodiment, but for men it’s a functional ownership.
It’s the same dichotomy as the institution of marriage offers: the same fictions of empowerment which, in turn, obfuscate the pantomime of performance in the service of status. Status defined and pre-determined by patriarchy, and exploited by capitalism (as the sickeningly venal wedding industry plainly illustrates). Familiarity and, hence, comfort in the form of tradition is probably its greatest virtue. Countless couples endure the excruciating process of marriage and its various expensive ceremonies simply because it’s, what… just what’s done? Where, exactly, did that childhood dream come from?
There’s a certain status to the big event, the demonstrative value of having found a mate, the white dress, the expensive photography, the gifts, the ritual exchange of rings and vows, all functionally unnecessary accoutrements to one simple act: commitment. While symbols can of course be of the harmless variety, the event of a wedding as it is commonly understood in Western society no longer signifies merely an act of commitment, nor even one of religious devotion. Instead, it has become a commodified performance of the culturally requisite tradition which reinforces not just the notion of commitment but also a grandiose—often obscene—display of wealth in the form of excessive consumption and waste (bonbonnière is my personal bête noire), all in the guise of celebration. Sure, it has a few hangovers from its religious origins, mostly in the form of the patriarchal handing-over of the goods—the bride—from father to husband; the original owner to the new. Capitalism has remade function and purpose into simple superficiality.
Most modern weddings, in my view, as a social construction are not about the union itself (if they ever were; traditionally they were either business transactions or tactical dynastic alliances)—they are about the fantasy nested in that union, and are simply yet more ways of communicating social status. Weddings are not about the actual commitment-making (which can be, and sometimes is, done with as little as two people and a registrar); that ceremony is merely the facade which justifies what’s really happening: the selling of a fantasy. A very expensive one, which is why the modern incarnation is more often about status than, say, religion.
The modern wedding has become a simulacra of “love”. A simulation (a commercial ritual focused on attendees and status performances) of a simulation (the religious ritual focused on agreements between men), which in its original form had nothing to do with romance at all. That’s not to say it can’t be—I’ve attended plenty of lovely weddings, including my own—but the event itself bears no functional relationship whatsoever with the love it coincidentally hosts.
In the same way, a face which exists in advertising is nothing more than a simulacrum of a face, neither an actual face or even the face of an actual person any longer. Arguably it is not even a simulated face—airbrushing, digital or manual, removes many features we might consider “natural” or even “human”—but merely a possible face. The fantasy of a face. That is the purpose of something which is fundamentally idealised. It is a face that many men will look at with desire.
And, perversely, so will many women… precisely because they are projecting an image of themselves upon the object of desire and making a comparison. A negative one, usually. When they inevitably fall short (which, remember, is the purpose of advertising), they subconsciously seek a solution; a means of artifice which might assist them to reach a little bit closer to the ideal. Maybe… the make-up that the face wears, perhaps? Which the company who created this illusion in the first place has manufactured as a need precisely so it can then provide a solution: its own product. Thanks to that possible face, which to a woman in possession of an actual face becomes a literal impossibility.
So what is the result of all this largely subconscious anxiety? A woman sees an impossible face, rightly feels as though she cannot hope to compare herself positively with it, and in the same visual glance absorbs the intended solution: the make-up which the company who created this artificial need is now selling to meet that same need. Then there’s the brand, conveniently right there, lodged in the mind ready for all those feelings to surge back to mind when the name and its visual iconography are semiotically linked in a different context—the supermarket or shopping centre, for example.
In many cases this process is almost identical when it comes to fashion. Have a think about why the appearance of models has morphed over the last few decades beyond being really good-looking to an almost ethereal or otherworldly appearance even if it’s not immediately “pretty” in quite the same way. Fashion brands will tell you it’s because of inclusivity: bullshit, it’s much more insidious than that.
The less “normal” the impossible image becomes, the less likely any “normal” person has a chance to feel secure in comparison. Extreme thinness likely needs little explanation in this context. It all depends on the target audience and its sophistication, of course, but for society’s upper echelons—which haute couture targets—then good genes and a comfortable lifestyle, including access to surgical enhancement, means that their mostly female audience may already look like a generically attractive person already.
Therefore, in order to manufacture an effective need, those elite brands have managed to find people so unusual-looking that it becomes impossible to mimic or live up to their unobtainable image. Sound familiar?
Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?
The means by which we view and understand our appearance has shifted radically since before antiquity, when the first introduction to what we look like would have been something like an occasional glance in a pond. Or, as Greek mythology would have it, an extended gaze in the case of Narcissus, whose degree of self-obsession was evidently disdained by Hellenic culture.
For millennia, it was the mirror which offered us insights into personal appearance. A mirror is itself a simulation: what we see is not the thing itself but it directly (and literally) reflects and represents that thing. Yet it is not that thing. The mirror is not the person looking into it, merely a reflection of it, the imperfection of the process expressed in its being permanently reversed, so we can never see in a mirror exactly what we look like, and in a perverse kind of way we see precisely the opposite of what we look like from a certain point of view. A reversed image isn’t even the image, much less the thing which that image represents.
When we gaze into a mirror, we are not observing ourselves empirically, but instead via a means of a simulated reflection. We can observe, say, our hands or limbs as things-unto-themselves, and most of our bodies, but not our face. Our perception is made impossible by the limitation of our eyes being in our skull, atop the rest of our body. In that sense, we can never “see” our external appearance either—from the perspective, or gaze, as another would see us—without the aid of such a tool. There can be few more simple examples of a simulation than a mirror.
Photography acts in a similar manner. While a photograph is not reversed as a mirrored image is, it is not immediate in the sense of it being real-time, and instead captures a static moment in time. Therefore, it exists as a simulation not simply because it represents reality through reproduction, but because its place in time is fixed. Photographs can, for example, capture and retain images of places or people which no longer exist. They are not the “thing: merely a representation of it.
The live-feed video in, among other things, a modern smartphone camera might seem to be closer to the truth of a thing than either a mirror or a photograph. And, yet, it is constrained by the same limitations of each. It too is either reversed (if being observed in a front-facing camera), or not immediate, in the form of a pre-recorded moving iteration of a photograph. These technologies also require the device itself, and the constraints of its reproduction, in order to function. One only needs to consider smartphone app “filters”, which radically alter what’s being observed, to see how wildly what we see often differs from the real.
Never mind that the physical article we typically observe when looking at most modern media is illusory. While we interpret the blobs of ink or printed chemicals in a photograph as a discernible image, or perceive the flashing pixels of a digital screen, or the electron beams of cathode-ray tubes projecting against a phosphorescent screen as “television” (literally, Latin for “far-sight”, or “across-sight”), these means of transmission are entirely artificial. That we possess a means of reception (or at least interpretation) of these signals as an analogue for something real they once recorded, or currently represent, is not unlike our means of disseminating semiotics. Human minds do not need to perceive an actual in order to understand a representation of the actual. It’s how our entire imagination works; that same wonderful brain creates ideas, imagines a future which is yet to exist. We have that capacity to exchange the real for the represented, and create simulations among our own thoughts. Yet over time, we have clearly lost the capacity to reliably discern one from the other, if we ever possessed it at all.
The digital age presents another interesting conundrum: does a digital image—the image, not the data—actually exist beyond the device into which it is encoded? Or is it purely self-referential? In other words, until a digital photograph is printed and becomes a physical artefact unto itself (whereupon it is arguably a simulation), does it remain digital and, hence, an artificial representation reflected only by digital code and interpreted only by the screen of the device for which it was designed?
If the answer to the latter is yes, all digital photographs or images are simulacra. They are a reproduction (as data) of a representation (the photograph) which itself is a simulation (of a thing) and not an actual thing unto themselves. The subject of a photograph does not exist in any sense within a photograph—it is merely represented there—and, therefore, a digital photograph—being a representation of that representation—is a simulation-of-a-simulation: a simulacrum.
In the Eye of the Beholder
A digital image, it might therefore be argued, remains purely internal to the device itself, having no means of existing outside the framework of the phone’s internal mechanism. Without the phone, there is nothing. It becomes an internalised storage of the gaze of others. Or, more accurately, an encoded perception of what an externalised gaze might see, interpreted via the screen of the phone.
The way the shadow of the elevator aligns with, yet also works in a strangely inverted way against the shadow of the garment in this image, as well as speaking to contrasts of the lighting in general, is fascinating. The model’s hair is another fine expression of contrast within the mise-en-scène of this photograph. Say what you will about the underlying process, most people would rightly be pretty happy to have taken this on their phone.
The awkward Dalmatian, however, is a complete mistake (other than its thematic necessity, in comparison with its twin and, presumably, other similar ads in the series). Unusually, the fluffy, Ewok-looking handbag-mutt in the earlier image is better suited to this than the clearly distracted canine leashed literally at its faux-mistress’s feet. You know what they say: don’t work with children or animals. This is why. The hope in the construction is that the focus will be on the primary subject—the model’s selfie-pose (not merely ‘the model’)—and the clothes she wears, rather than the wealth-coded affectation of an expensive breed of dog.
This, in my view, is the foundation of the insidiousness of social media. Instagram is an easy target because it’s the boldest and most markedly visual of all, the easiest to doom-scroll. Except perhaps TikTok, which in my opinion is quickly shaping itself merely as Instagram That Moves—which is precisely what Instagram’s “reels” intended to blunt. Need video? Don’t defect to TikTok: we’ll invent something similar (ie. copy it) for Instagram.
The point is that this entire process is still about the same thing: a gaze. But now, rather than seeing an ideal based on a lifestyle or a specific desire—which “old-school” pre-millennial advertising had mastered—the social media generation of advertisers have created an ideal “internalisation” of what an external gaze would view as an internalised process. That is, to reinforce and actively market what it looks like to be pondering one’s own self, through the mechanism of a simulacrum.
The mission statement for this style might be: “I am central to this performance, and my self-worth is nested in the unacknowledged external gaze idealising me for idealising myself (thereby validating my worth) reflected through an internal ideation of that same gaze via the conduit of a device which does not—and cannot—accurately reflect my own reality.” Or something like that.
This brings the level of simulacra to a truly absurd degree of departure from anything other than the performance of life (gender, for example, is merely one such performance). The self-subject of a selfie gazes at the phone screen, not even the camera lens as has been the case for centuries prior. That’s exactly what suggests it is performative; it’s practically impossible to take a candid selfie. It strikes me as part of an existence that is no longer living unto itself, but enacting life as it appears to others. A kind of echo of reality. Performative behaviour has always been around and isn’t anything new, but as is often the case with technology, this particular iteration exalts the gaze above what was once an occasional performative consideration into the raison d’etre of dasein; the underlying reason for the act of being.
It seems not so different to the way in which some people who loathe their own self will perform an opposed identity—for example becoming a loud-mouthed, homophobic Christian nationalist in order to psychologically counter some unwanted internal reality, such as a latent sexual thirst for a same-gendered partner; internally desired but externally despised. In other words, it embraces a denial of actuality, consciously or otherwise, usually in exchange for external validation from others who require only garden-variety bigotry to hold such opinions. Merely being so wouldn’t work; as it would fail to generate any external validation, which is the whole point.
If such a person were internally at peace, with a strong and proactive identity, they wouldn’t need to perform at all—and this is a universal truth.
Airs and graces, virtue signalling, hyper-masculine strutting (and, controversially for some, even gender itself) usually hold no inherent meaning; their value is in the expression of an encoded acting-out of expected or approved patterns of conduct (rather than being a true aspect of identity per se, in which case such a facet of identity would drive behaviour regardless of external expectations). It seems to me to be a reactive form of self very much tied into social or status anxiety in particular. Identity unshackled from an internalised self and reduced to an expression of in-group loyalty not unlike a cult or gang, quite detached from a conscious dasein; the concept of being in the world.
Perhaps this is also an instance of both simulation and simulacra acting at once, together. Should it come as a surprise that the generation of young people raised under the poisonous aegis of social media are also identified as suffering hitherto unimaginable levels of social anxiety, depression, and a general sense of displeasure with the experience of simply existing? It should not.
To return to the photos which triggered this entire reflection in the first place, remember that the internalised gaze doesn’t even fall upon the self, specifically. It falls upon the phone screen, requiring no particular introspection or even direct reflection; it is a simulation of reflection. This is yet another level of signification removed from reality.
The seductive value of the simulacrum is that it is capable of convincing the user into thinking that this image is them; but digital images are disconnected from the real. They are a mere representation of that person, at best. This ad’s form of selfie-replication invites one to think of themselves, the viewer, as the person in the elevator taking the photo—they can then imagine themselves posting the photograph on Instagram (or their social media app of choice). How many likes would that generate? Imagine living in a world where validation came in the form of an integer next to an icon of a thumb. I, for one, would want to throw myself out of a window, too.
Insidiously, this process also piggy-backs on the fear-of-missing-out (FOMO) which is infamously exaggerated by social media. That is, a constant stream of doom-scrolling feeds full of endless content make a consumer feel as though everyone is doing everything right now, in all these wonderful (and carefully curated) ways. Whereas I, lame-oid that I am, remain in my room, doom-scrolling (probably unhappy with how even the filters I put on my last few photos make me look), instead of doing these wonderful things myself. It’s that very dread, the feeling of life slipping by—in part because you know darn well it is with every little flick of your finger—which feeds the sense that there’s so much more going on.
It’s an interesting teleological question: what is the purpose of one’s own life? Not necessarily the meaning, which is the more common question, but the purpose—a more personal interrogation. These endless feeds and reels seem to communicate a sense of life-as-adventure, whereupon if you’re not out there experiencing things then you’re necessarily going without. Which isn’t true; the function or purpose of life is dependent only on the being who lives it. The primary criterion for a well-lived life is contentment: ergo, if scrolling generates discontent, then it becomes the death of purpose and the opposite of what makes a good life. Could the act of viewing someone else’s carefully curated selfies, or wedding photos, or whatever, actually be the very definition of existential poison in regard to how we should live a full life? Such images should mean nothing to us at all, inherently—and emotionally only insofar as we are pleased that our online “friend” is happy. Or, more accurately, that they appear happy (it’s performative, remember; it does not have to reflect the real).
In reality, other people are only posting their content on occasion; a wedding usually only happens once for most people, and you can bet your arse they don’t post their divorce online with the same fanfare. It’s the great splattering totality of all those adventures all at once from hundreds of accounts at a time which make it seem so immediate and immense. The feeling that “all my friends are getting married”—FOMO again—is probably one of the worst reasons to actually want to get married in the first place.
Or, if the content really is constant, it’s basically a job; a life of nothing but performativity—and it won’t be as fun as it looks. Almost all social media users are savvy enough to consider what they post and what they don’t, which means that most of it skews toward the more accessible, or aesthetic, or attractive. Who, while visiting some exotic place, is going to post that accidental shot of their worst facial angle, stuffing their intoxicated face in some grungy late-night McDonalds, instead of the curated selfie in the fancy café in the most expensive part of that same far-flung city the morning before? Statistically nobody, that’s who, perhaps with the exception of a few irony-conscious hipsters.
And so, advertising tapping into that same sense of FOMO and inadequacy makes people think, “ugh, I really need to post something on Instagram soon”, prompted by the image of someone striking a pose commonly understood to be about preparing to do just that. Quickly followed by “I should be wearing something like what I see in this image of someone whose lifestyle is appealing to me, as they presumably post to Instagram.” Because if your lifestyle isn’t all that appealing, what are you doing bragging about it where other people can see?
I’ll say it again: anyone who is actually happy with their life is almost certain to keep it to themselves—precisely because they don’t need that external approval.
Status Symbols
So what does that say? Is all of this just an appeal to a latter-day narcissism? Or a next-level, gaze-seducing renewal of the same old status quo? I’d suggest both, but particularly the latter; for all their social-media savvy, the youth of today still have the same psychology baked into their brains as anyone else who’s lived in the last couple of hundred thousand years. Phones and the social media apps they host exist only to draw eyeballs—via ads, and the revenue they create, and ads will prey (and always have preyed) on insecurity and its relationship to longing and desire in order to keep those eyeballs looking.
Don’t be fooled into thinking that this is actually anything new, or that it is a uniquely female problem, either. While the most obvious marketing derived from pure envy tends to target women, for men it targets a more specific kind of status anxiety. Where women might be traditionally drawn into comparisons with other women as objects—their value placed in the adornments of appearance to the detriment of their agency—men in contrast are lured by what it takes not to be an object, but what it takes to own objects (whether or not that message is actually “deserve”, or “dominate”—it certainly doesn’t need to be an altruistic desire). To do so, they need two things: authority, and control over material possessions. How might one express such things? Often, through ironically subtle displays of ostentation—as much as that sounds like a contradiction of terms—in the form of whatever happens to reflect prestige in their particular circle.
Not for the first time, I would offer the pitch-perfect exchange of business cards in Mary Harron’s masterpiece American Psycho as a sublime example of this kind of subtle exchange. Perhaps in this context with the additional adage that men express their status through the perception of control. Even the illusion of control, in the same way that make-up offers the illusion of beauty. That is, men drive cars, they own objects, they take risks; their insecurity tends to be expressed far more as a need to exaggerate masculine traits associated with either extant (usually physical strength or the appearance of it), or economic, power.
Which is incidentally why men are so easily seduced by money-making scams like gambling or cryptocurrency, well out of proportion to women. Patriarchal messaging also tells men that if they aren’t wealthy, they won’t be able to “afford” a woman, and without a woman they’re worthless. I suspect this messaging is also where a great deal of latent homophobia originates; being attracted to other men is abhorrent sometimes simply because patriarchy demands that they need to own a woman. So a man won’t help. It’s nothing to do with happiness or companionship or living a good life—it’s about playing the patriarchal game. What more than one washed-up, pallid bloke has over the last decade called “winning”. It seems no surprise to me at all that the modern incarnation of this anxiety reaches its apex with stereotypes like the poor, cellar-dwelling, quite often physically unattractive, enraged incel, or the more likely middle-class, unnecessarily aggressive, gym-junkie “alpha” male obsessed with their self-perceived dominance of all and sundry.
After all, what greater humiliation could there be for a man who—our popular culture reminds us all the time—has been blessed by all the fruits of patriarchy, their path gilded by an effortless rise to the top, failing upward, bumbling their way to every conceivable success… and yet still isn’t the CEO of a Fortune-500 company? It’s easy, right? Patriarchy engineers it so. Naturally, that kind of stereotype is just as reductive as that of the classical gold-digger, moving from one man to the next, each wealthier than the last. It’s not completely without real-world examples but becomes a very crude means of characterising an entire gender. Men do, very often, find themselves beneficiaries of power structures and entitlements which most women could only dream of. What is often overlooked is that they just as often find themselves slaves to those same structures. Men don’t talk about it much precisely because it scares the shit out of them—what if all this prancing and peacocking and showing off their purported dominance didn’t actually lead to contentment? Best to just stow that one away in the subconscious somewhere.
Beneficiaries or not, men are still driven, hard, to play the same bullshit game—one in which, among other things, they are disallowed an emotionally expressive life. That’s why those chads in the Dolce & Gabbana ad hold such robotic expressions. Heaven forbid they allow themselves some sensuality or genuine intimacy. Only anger, the language of dominance, is sanctioned; vulnerability in particular is condemned. That comes at a grievous cost, and not just for women—as suicide rates regularly, and reliably, show.
The answer to this is not to create a female gaze, or to simply ignore the male iteration (which is practically impossible in any case). It’s to remove the power of the gaze in the first place, and to redirect that energy into something equitable. Which is a lot harder than it sounds. Because it will require the deconstruction—if not destruction—of almost everything culturally familiar and, often, reassuring to us. Of many millennia of patriarchy, and of several very influential centuries of capitalism (which I would argue is predicated and possibly even dependent on patriarchy), I’ve heard it said (I believe by Slavoj Žižek) that it’s easier to imagine the end of the entire world—as is frequently expressed in various post-apocalyptic films or novels—than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. That’s how cruelly ubiquitous that system has become, how deeply it has sunk its claws into our common, global, human culture.
These images—which I confess drew my attention merely because they were framed differently to the way I was used to seeing advertising subjects framed—seem to me to be feeding yet another layer of externalised imagery into a “feminised” gaze. A gaze perpetually turned inward (what do I look like?), and manifesting a mere simulacra of themselves, not unlike the way ordained priests of the Catholic church once translated the Latin of the bible into the vulgar language of the peasants to whom they preached. The point is that the actual frame of reference is uninterpretable by design, whether an arcane, dead language or an almost invisible, if ubiquitous, form of cultural discourse. In the latter case we no longer need a priest because the language is instead very effective semiotics: the pose; the glance; the clothes; the accoutrements of wealth; the mise-en-scène; nudge that insecurity and make it time to visit the shops for a bit of retail therapy. Instead of a church: a phone.
This largely visual information is processed internally through several obfuscating layers of simulation: a false need communicated by a false image but fed by a very real emotional response—status anxiety of some kind. Where do I belong, what is my worth, and how do I increase my cultural capital? That’s what advertising fundamentally targets. That is its function. As Don Draper says in the magnificent series Mad Men:
You are the product. You, feeling something. That's what sells.
Ultimately, this is just another in an endless list of capitalist adaptations to changing cultural norms. Once upon a time it might have been a girl in jeans on the back of a motorcycle—now it’s a girl in an elevator taking a selfie. The fantasy of freedom expressed in the first idea morphed eventually into the fantasy of wealth (which is what ‘glamour’ is) in the second. A remedy for what you’re missing—whether you even realised you were missing it before now or not—is what you’re being sold.
Another way to look at it is that the imagery itself has become so cunning as to appear intimate, even though it remains, as all advertising is, meaningless in any sense of actuality. It is without dasein, which is the understanding which a being—aware of its own existence—bequeaths its own being; in ignorance, it it just a thing, purposeless. Advertising is not real. If the particular style of imagery has incidentally changed or adapted to a new way of appealing to its audience, that is merely incidental. It has but one purpose: to provoke a simple exchange. The reciprocation of currency in exchange for a fleeting salve for insecurity. That part hasn’t changed at all.
None of the words in this article have any inherent meaning unto themselves. That meaning must be brought by the reader, whose interpretation of it will vary from my intent as an author, or a third party who reads it in the future, or has read it in the past. That is the task of linguistic interpretation. And of symbols and representation—that is the task of semiotic interpretation. There is no absolute “meaning” beyond that which is granted it through understanding—which is what Heidegger means by dasein. As a “being”, it is not enough to simply exist, nor be aware of existence, but to understand existence through the lens of being. Most things we assume to have a purpose—such as a chair—do not hold that purpose inherently; we must interpret that function as a possibility for a being such as ourselves. Put a chair in the middle of a forest, and hundreds of animals will pass it by without notice; they won’t all begin to use the chair as we would use it as humans.
Capitalism inserts itself—via advertising—in the interim between those processes of interpretation. It presents to us an image, like a chair, and says “this is a thing, and it has value”, and manipulates our assumptions about meaning to ensure that we view the chair a particular way. Not as dasein, as self-determining beings able to appraise its value unto ourselves, but instead as an artifice of social value. A symbol aligned with our desire for social capital, the great deception of which is that we can possess it—via the medium of economic capital. That’s the fraud. Sure, we can own a thing… but owning it does not give it any more inherent meaning than it had before; it remains inert, holding meaning only as we observe it ourselves. That is to say, the price tag is a simulacrum of value; joy, appreciation, or function… they are entirely unrelated.
Economic capital is a simulacra of social capital (what we might call status), itself a simulation of what makes real social connection valuable: intimacy. Which is not something anyone can actually display, or perform. It is interpersonal and, arguably, not even social at all because it ultimately relates to discrete individuals. Intimacy might be simulated to a degree, but only ever approximated, and its duplication can only represent, not reproduce, the actuality of it. Because intimacy is lived, requires vulnerability, trust. While carefully manufactured images can fleetingly mimic the feeling of intimacy, or what we imagine it to be—usually by introducing a twinge of desire via nostalgia, guilt or shame—no amount of staring at a screen or a glossy poster can actually produce it. No brand, no matter how many billions of dollars they throw at it, can manage that.
