Ask DB1: The Pictorial 'Bag
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DB1-
A question for you…
In an age of spiritual, moral, and fashion uncertainty, one thing remains constant: digital cameras and their fascinating ability to allow you to see what the hell you look like in any and all given pictures mere seconds after they are taken.
With that in mind, would your expert opinion lead you to conclude that the ‘bags race back and forth like orange lightning between the camera and pose in order to achieve maximum captured douchocity? That they have practiced the pose enough times in the mirror to have perfected it, or that their douchi is so centered that they simply radiate the exact amount needed in any and all photographs?
Thank you for your consideration on this perplexing topic.
– J.P.
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As Baudrillard notes, the spectacle of the digital age has untethered identity by supplanting the real with simulacra.
Our notion of the self fractures into spectral masks of pixelated projection. This primal projection of the psyche predates our technological simulation, as Lacan notes. Seeing ourselves through the eyes of the “other” simply finds amplification in the Facebook/MySpace image race. Our swirling feedback loop of projections upon projections becomes a funhouse mirror of refracted and fractured identities, always rooted in notions of identity, but given room to overwhelm in the media age.
As such, these images become extensions of our corporeal touch. We rescramble spatiality to form kinetic sub-space where we reform as culturally coded and branded entertainment specters. This form of cultural currency as potent as anything Bourdieu described within the social spheres. A radical alterity of self through the prism of the Apple/PC proto-gender binary.
In short, douchebags may be temporarily orange. But boobies are forever.
