The project of sincerity, whatever that means...
This is the post that I avoided publishing a few weeks ago. I was in a slump, distracted from self and from writing by the mounting focus on the first round of work and the logistic challenges it was presenting. Also, weighed down by working in the restaurant in what felt like an untenable way, deep in paranoid analysis of the workplace. And wondering about the expressive style of the work I’m sharing digitally. Those concerns with digital presentation have not gone away, but they do seem less dire right now and the writing feels less likely to tip me further into a spiral of confusion and more like a personally important sign-post of a certain direction my thoughts can move in under particular, not uncommon, strains. So here is that omitted blog post:
This week, I’ve been wrestling with a sense of insecurity around feeling young and unformed. I first became aware of it in relation to my instagram posts, specifically creating reels. I felt that these reels required some sort of text or voiceover. What I ended up creating has a tone I would describe as enthusiastic and jokey: lightly comedic, not taking itself too seriously, a little bit intentionally rough around the edges. The mild agony of producing this reel then resonated with other things I’ve done with my pottery’s instagram account. For example, I’ve taken to putting comically incongruous music with posts including excerpts from Schoenberg, Berio, and PinocchioP.
To be clear, all of these decisions feel absolutely genuine and honest. One part of the interesting experience of embarrassment instagram has been realizing that there are specific ways that I am comfortable expressing myself online. Well, more comfortable. Ways that feel possible. Sincerity feels very important to my online presentation. On instagram, my sincerity feels like it has a lot to do with avoiding posts that feel formulaic or too in an established genre: quiet, serene, sincere studio shots, impersonal artist statements etc.
But sometimes that sincerity feels more like fear than authenticity. It’s a fear similar to the fear of stepping out on the dancefloor for the first time or singing karaoke. I’m entering a space where there are a certain set of social codes expected/permitted of me, but which fall outside my normal behavior. It’s like dancing in an incredibly over-the-top and exaggerated way because then you have the ironic distance from the dancefloor that is another version of not dancing at all.
It’s easy to hate on IG and online influencer presentation in general. It can feel vapid and depersonalized and anxious and shallow. But I am playing this game a little bit. I’m interested in having an online presence. It feels like a genuinely enjoyable way to share information about what I’m doing and how. But I don’t feel comfortable stepping onto the dancefloor. Each post has either something of the reticent wall-flower, or the class-clown goof to it (to my eyes).
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That issue of sincerity, it’s something that has to do with the broader quest for a solid sense of identity. I know, this sounds really sort of silly and reductive. But, this feeling I’ve been having this past week has been much more mundane and practical than some long-term quest. What I’ve been struggling with this week is like: how would “I” respond to x situation I’m in? how do I want to phrase this request to a co-worker? what sort of tone do I use to write this email, this blog, this IG post? I even had a long talk with myself in the car where I was trying to figure out what my “natural” speaking voice is – I’m second guessing what my own accent is.
So, what I mean by saying I feel really young and unformed is about a reticence to do the dance, to unironically get on the dancefloor and commit, not just as a budding potter-influencer, but as a human being in general.
One way I’ve been thinking about this is through a quote I recently rediscovered in a letter I had written and then discarded to an ex-girlfriend. The quote is by Umberto Eco and it goes like this:
“I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows that he cannot say to her "I love you madly", because he knows that she knows (and that she knows he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still there is a solution. He can say "As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly". At this point, having avoided false innocence, having said clearly it is no longer possible to talk innocently, he will nevertheless say what he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her in an age of lost innocence.”
Kinda crazy thing to put in a letter to a partner, I know. I was like,19, so we can at least pretend I’m not that deranged now.
Anyway, the important thing here is knowing irony. It’s really hard to sincerely perform an identity that you think is going to be perceived as a character. And it’s very hard to find any language that isn’t already coded with the scripts of some trope or another. And so the only options left are silence, or irony. Irony lets you perform more or less however you want because you and the person seeing your performance know it’s just a performance, that it’s basically a gag, and that underneath there is something more solid.
So that’s one way I’ve been thinking about this destabilised sense of juvenile unformedness; that I’m trapped in this need to operate through irony because it feels more genuine than a sincerity tainted by a sense of performativity.
And actually, before I move on, it’s more complicated than just the “oh, there’s this thing I want to say but it’s already been said” sort of feeling. It’s more like “hmmm, there’s some set of actions called for by the situation and by the ways I’m feeling, and there are many ways to perform those actions. But any concrete action will be a reductive expression of what I’m feeling because it’ll essentially just be some cobbled together pastiche of things that have already been done and said. So since no option will feel sincere, I’ll go in for irony as the surest path to sincerity, since it’s at least obviously insincere and deficient.”
That whole irony-defence, it more or less externalizes the problem by arguing that it’s something about culture generally that’s the issue here. That we are so oversaturated with the performance of sincere identity that it becomes impossible to see sincerity as anything but performance.
But I can’t go attributing it all to society. Part of all this mulling has been recognizing a changing life-stage. I was really into the whole vulnerability, uncertainty, self-exposure thing in grad-school. This was particularly the case during my first year, when I was really aware of being part of this cohort of Marshall Scholars. My whole Marshall experience began with this weekend in Washington DC, going around to NASA, to the Pentagon, the White House’s administrative buildings, and sort of being told, basically, “you’re part of this, you might not have figured out how yet, but welcome, and since you’ve made it here, enjoy a couple years in the UK! Then come back, figure it out, and we’ll see you soon.” This is obviously a bit cruel, but the feeling that I got from the whole experience was a sudden, unexpected closeness to Power and a sense that I was implicated in It.
My reaction to that feeling as it unfolded over the following year was a really visceral retreat from Power in the ways I was sensitive to identifying It. This involved a lot of institutional critique of both Marshall and Goldsmiths and a distancing from the art-market oriented sides of London. In one of my reports to the Marshall Commission about what I was getting up to, I wrote pretty extensively about my love for the arcade scene in London. All following requests for reports from scholars included reminders that these were to be read by Parliamentary supporters of the scholarship who helped ensure its continued funding.
But beyond action, the feeling that came along with this sense of a closeness to Power was a desire to be really vulnerable. In the most general terms, that meant a rejection of the type of performative confidence that was a large part of getting me where I was. The clean, elevator pitch, type description of my art, the confident smile-handshake-hello greeting, language around leadership and community building, all of these budding attempts at a type of adult self-certainty became highly suspect for their clear orientation towards the pathway of Power.
And to be clear, what was wrong with Power was not just a generalized wariness towards the US government, but more pressingly, a sense of its artificiality, the theater of the whole thing. The Pentagon is just a massive building with a very busy Taco Bell and at the center and a lot of people talking about cyberwarfare and Russian drones. These immense institutions are just made of people, taking up normal space, breathing normal air, eating normal Taco Bell, making insanely important decisions that steer trillions of dollars and change the contours of the world. That difference in scale from, like, potato tacos to the development of space warfare felt inhuman, unreal.
I wouldn’t say I was intimidated by that so much as I was disheartened. Disheartened because these are just people going about their days and acting like the world depends on them. And it does. And it doesn’t. Which is Power at work making performance into a prescribed, unavoidable reality. A reality which feels artificial because of the immensity of the scale involved.
This determinative requirement of the performance of Power is something I set up as an antithesis to a more fluid, undetermined, open-to-change type of exploratory mode I wanted to inhabit. In this, there is both a moral opposition to the type of inhuman certainty, the echoing up into Pentagon style scales of action I associated with confident, clear self presentation, and a claustrophobic fear of growing up: how does one fit all the changeability of a personality into this bureaucracy of professional life?
I’ve been reflecting on all that a lot this week. The way I’m writing about it here is definitely not the way I’d have been able to talk about it at the time, or probably how I’d talk about it again in a couple weeks (again! the instability of self). But I’ve been thinking about how a lot of that embrace of chaos and righteous shunning of stable identity was enabled by an immense amount of determinative institutional support. In the absence of that support, the need for a stable, easily understood presentation of self to the world becomes my own task. And that task feels like a somewhat uneasy mix of, on the one hand, self-reflective examination, observation, recognition of self, and on the more uncomfortable side, a decision to actively perform a certain version of myself, to inhabit a role and identity that is legible.
Where does this pressure to be legible and singular come from? Why am I casting the problem in this way? It sounds sort of miserable… Because the alternative is irony. Either you present something, like I’m presenting this blog, or you hide the something behind something else which is obviously just a mask. What is being written here isn’t the full story by any means, and that’s sort of excruciating. But it is part of the story, and that, actually, feels pretty good.
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So I got this far in the writing over the last few days and I realized that it’s doing some of that determinative work I’m so worried about. I didn’t start out writing this feeling genuinely gloomy or insecure, but the writing through this has turned those feelings into something a bit more solid. Next week I’ll have to come up with something really positive to write about to see if it can have the opposite effect...