Self-Design

Re: Groys' "Self-Design and Aesthetic Responsibility"

'Who are you?' is not the question that gets answered when one human being meets another, but rather 'Who am I being seen as?' As Groys says, modern human beings cannot escape fashioning themselves into signs for what they stand for. Groys notes a shift from peopledom interested in "how their souls appeared to God" to "how their bodies appear to their political surroundings", so after God's death, the judging viewer did not disappear but rather shifted and dispersed into the masses. Because of this, the habit of self-fashioning has remained, though I venture that an increased interest in honesty and authenticity as visible virtues has influenced that self-fashioning "obligation" towards remaining 'true'. As such, it is not enough to simply live a life honestly or authentically but one must show that eagerness and commitment to do so, that visibility, through self-design. The human must be seen to in order to be validated, because validation comes from the seeing Other. The pre-Nietzscheans may have thought God used to be able to see their soul and tell if their being is pure or not, but since His death (and with it, His omniscience), peopledom sought to project their soul-state outwards through substitute soul-reflective clothing and habits, inspirational quotes as Facebook statuses and music that resonated with them. I count myself among this peopledom. This is still manipulation of perception, whichever way one looks at it, precisely because the opinion of the Other is accounted for. To make my example work for me even more, Facebook has increasingly restrictive privacy settings, though ideally, if one lived an honest life, and assuming that this honesty can be projected, one would not have anything to hide and so one would not need to tinker with those settings to limit what the 'public' sees. Facebook simply allows any user to design a virtual self, and through that self one can vise other virtual selves. Somehow, through these distant, pseudo-selves, people can talk to each other that would never even say hello to each other on the street, and they can claim they know each other. Is this true though, or would they just have seen the image of the other? I don't think self-design is escapable, but I also see it as tempting to think it is, with the pretext that if one lives honestly, one would not need Facebook selves or other imagery. Part of me still naively thinks that on some level, to interact, we need to go beyond images anyway. That interaction ain't just images imagining each other. Say it isn't so.