Twentieth-century cultural theorists saw this coming a long way off — or, perhaps, encouraged it. In an influential 1949 paper on the “mirror stage”, the psychoanalyst and cultural critic Jaques Lacan argued that we arrive at adult selfhood by coming to recognise idealised “mirrored” versions of ourselves, whether literally reflected in a mirror or as “reflected” in another’s gaze.
“Humankind cannot bear very much reality” wrote TS Eliot in 1935 — words echoed in Lacan’s 1949 paper, where the real, material world was described as only ever indirectly accessible. Encountering the Real was, Lacan thought, always traumatic: a perspective that makes sense, perhaps, in the light of the brutal realities Europe had only recently endured. And while Lacan’s theories don’t feature heavily in modern psychotherapeutic practice, the psychological flight he theorised away from reality into mirrors, language and identification has been wildly influential, via someone even less willing than he to bear very much reality: the queer theorist Judith Butler.
Judith Butler argued that there’s never a point when we can encounter material reality save through language and ideal — and that language and ideal also shape material reality. And this has implications even in the supposedly “natural” and irreducible domain of sex: something that, Butler argued, isn’t “natural” at all but as it were performed into existence.
A much-reduced pop-Butlerism has long since percolated from the academy into popular culture — not least because our increasingly digital-first social lives make it seem plausible. Online, everything really is so disembodied you can feel as though it might be possible to “LARP” anything into existence in the real world; and pretty much everyone younger than me has been socialising partly (or in some cases almost exclusively) in virtual spaces, some since childhood. Online, we all live in Judith Butler’s world: a space where “performance” and reality are, effectively, the same thing.
Increasingly, wave after wave of young people reaches adulthood armed with pop-Butlerism via university and Tumblr alike. No wonder growing numbers long to edit their meat avatars as they might their online ones, and that this isn’t confined to young girls pursuing unattainable beauty ideals. Reddit hosts anecdotal reports from individuals who decided to transition after using the digital funhouse mirror to feminised themselves, and deciding they liked that look better.
But the trouble is that this is only true until you log off. The digital age holds out a promise of total emancipation from material reality — one that, in politics, is now driving an increasingly bitter divide between those who can sustain this illusion and those still forced to deal with the real world. And, implicitly, we’re told we can apply this digital Prometheanism to our bodies, too. But it doesn’t work: the gap between protean sex-swap fantasy and sutured, bleeding, often complication-filled reality can be the stuff of nightmares — one that’s now prompting a surge of lawsuits. All that happens is that we open up a new, futile (but still highly profitable) war of attrition against our own nature.
The multimillionaire transhumanist and trans activist Martine Rothblatt may claim that the results of sex change surgery are “so persuasive that rarely can a “new man” or “new woman” be distinguished from a biological original”. But even if this were true (and it generally isn’t), no amount of Woman of the Year awards will change the fact that the individual formerly known as Bruce Jenner remains male down to the cellular level.
Today, Big Tech billionaires are throwing vast sums into the war on death — while the middle classes, and women in particular, find ourselves pressured to submit to expensive procedures aimed at approximating our flesh to the digitally-tweaked ideal in our pocket funhouse mirror. But no amount of “you go, girl” celebration of Madonna’s increasingly bizarre look alters the fact that it’s no more possible to halt the passage of time than it is to change sex.
Lacan envisaged a world where our reflections structure our worlds, and reality is at best a shadowy intermittent interruption. But he never imagined a situation in which we don’t just receive the reflections that shape our self-images, but claim the power to control them. In this world, the magic mirror offers unreal ideal selves to order: the “me” we would like to be, whether thinner, prettier or the opposite sex. And the upshot is that humankind can bear ever less reality — even as we throw ever more of our resources at paying to defy it. Now, with young people reaching adulthood having never known an age before the editable online mirror, we shouldn’t be surprised that so many believe the only compassionate response to an unwanted reality is to dissolve it — digitally, or medically, or both.
But it’s a scam. In practice, “liberating” ourselves from the reality of our bodies amounts, without fail, to increasing our dependence on for-profit services. As 51-year-old fashion director Anna Murphy points out, in explaining why she’s rejected “tweakments” route, it’s a “one-way street”. One procedure leads to the next, and eventually “your face becomes a jigsaw puzzle that doesn’t quite fit together any more — unless you pay someone else to do it for you”.
And for those who can’t quite afford the payments, there’s always the digital-only filter option. But this comes at a terrible cost. For as the gulf between mirror and matter widens, many find the gaze of the other reflects a reality they’d rather not bear.
Mary Harrington’s Feminism Against Progress (Swift) is out now!
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