I’ve been thinking a lot about what ‘performance’ means these days. Since the pandemic began and I moved to Goa, I live a fairly isolated life, defined by a quiet writing routine, domestic chores, catching up on a lot of B-grade films from around the world, yoga and swimming. It’s a good life. I hardly meet people, I’ve hardly had any official meetings in person, my wardrobe has dwindled from outfits for every occasion and mood to the comfiest cotton and linen fabrics, super-stretchy cotton underwear, my collections of bras is pretty non-existent (forget matching lingerie). I’ve pivoted from investing in make-up to investing in basic skincare and I’ve stopped using any hair products except shampoo- it rains a lot here and the rest of the time, the air is at 99% humidity making sustaining any hairstyles virtually impossible. Because, I hardly hang out with a larger group of people at crowded places and prefer to meet one on one socially, I find the pressure to perform various rituals of existence easing. I now shower in the morning, not because I have an office to go to, but because I like to feel ready and fresh before I get down to any kind of work. And, the biggest change, I’ve stopped posting anything really personal on social media.
I take my time with things as I wake up— stretching, yoga, meditation, breathwork, breakfast and then coffee & emails compared to the frantic waking up during Bombay times— crawl out of bed with the hangover of too much wine from the previous night, down a cup of black coffee, shower and get into an auto only from the putrid city air to wreck the skin, lung and mind. My one and a half hour commute to the last real office job I held would take 20 minutes without bumper to bumper traffic and I’d survive the onslaught by blasting angry Death Grips so you can only imagine my mood once I managed to get to my desk.
I’ve never been much of an office person— I’m usually late, not particularly chatty with co-workers, have zero patience for bureaucracy, despise relying on others to get things done or waiting on others to get things done (although, I’m working on this one), I take too many cigarette breaks and don’t suck up to bosses. I do however do my work on time, go beyond my scope of work without being asked (God knows I’ve been exploited for this particular tendency) and generally like to mind my own business. I’ve always been confused about the idea of initiative— I have plenty when it comes to my own projects (I’m writing a book, run a podcast, a creative writing workshop, this newsletter, and write non fiction pieces intermittently) but in a group setting, official or social, I tend to hang back, prefer to observe and quite frankly, follow somebody else’s lead. It’s easier and allows me to switch my brain off. It’s not like I don’t have ideas or don’t want to run my mouth off and see what sticks— that’s half of any creative process if you ask me— but I’ve often felt back in my 20s that kind of input wasn’t appreciated by the management teams or seniors. Something about stealing thunder or overshadowing or generally people being threatened. I’ve never quite managed to wrap my head around this.
Nearing the start of my 30s, the tables seem to have turned quite abruptly. I’m working with people younger to me entirely by chance and finding myself in leadership positions. Their ethic is starkly different from my seniors— people 40 and above. They’re work ethic squarely rests on ethics of care, people and fair share. They all run for profit companies but to their best of abilities, pay on time, don’t try and undercut me, value my inputs and the expertise I bring to the table and are truly, trying to make a difference (Remember that? Before life got to us and all made us casual nihilists and fashionable stoics). Anyway, so that’s been great.
But, coming back to performance and why I find my generation and the one before me so obsessed with the idea of it. Social media is the easy culprit. Remember when Flickr was launched as an online community for people who loved photography and photog nerds ooooed and aaahed at each others photographs of NYC subways, autumn leaves, Britney Spears midriff, the view from Burj Khalifa? It was an online community where people with a shared passion from across the globe could connect and find a sense of belonging. We all know that quickly devolved to Botox challenges on TikTok and facetuning instagram filters. There’s a lot of marketing speak about performance and then academic speak about performative femininity or masculinity and I’m like, does existence itself mean that you’ve got to perform? For photoshoots for PR things, on Instagram, during social hangs, with a new boyfriend, with an old boyfriend, on Twitter— whose gaze do we pander to when nobody’s watching?
The most classic/embarrassing memory I have of performative charm is getting high on mdma (often spurred by social anxiety) and chatting shit with everybody at a party only to not remember their names or what I said the next day. And, the foreboding feeling that you may have to match up to that kind of charm at every such occasion.
Sometimes, I find myself going through my own feeds, timelines and marvelling at this curated persona. The social media gaze poses a threat to the coherence of our personal narrative. In these terms, performance tends to slide into self-deception.
To look is to affirm an entitlement to do so. But when does that become the only way to look at ourselves? Somebody today introduced me to Slack etiquette with regard to emojis and how it’s considered rude to respond when you don’t have anything substantial to say. It feels weird to demarcate between the public and private when the private is public. To be successful on social media, one has to learn to exist with an audience in mind—and the greatest reward granted by this audience is the prize of attention.
The late art critic John Berger memorably described the manner in which art has traditionally been created through the male gaze: “The ideal spectator is always assumed to be male and the image of the woman designed to flatter him.” For Berger, the form of this exchange shapes relations between men and women: “Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.”
The gaze becomes an examination of how the privileged and the prevailing choose to see the world. As such, it is connected with the construction of gender and sexual difference and, more generally, with the representation of marginalized and oppressed people. To explore the gaze is to expose the objectification—and sometimes commodification—of those for whom autobiography is not possible. In short, the gaze is about who controls representation.
We watch ourselves being watched, to borrow Berger’s idiom, and thereby hand over power to those who survey us—not to an individual or demarcated group, but simply to the abstract notion of the audience. The power differential is eventually felt personally, sometimes painfully, because the audience is never clearly identified.
Content often begins with a proclamation: an opinion proffered, a restaurant meal photographed, a tourist attraction visited. “I have experienced this” is the tenuous underlying message.
Social media relies on the perception of granting others access to our lives, but we purposefully disconnect from our realities, even distorting time, in order to accord with the gaze of others.
I suspect I may have had anxiety since I was a child and then substances made it worse, then social media, then adulthood and a bad gut and I wonder why when I lie in bed watching a movie on days I am supposed to be resting, I get up post-credits with an insurmountable guilt to make something of my life but instead check my social media or email just to feel something? I mean, who’s really watching?
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Image source: Venetia Berry