how a man became a work of art
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The publishing house “Ad Marginem” has published a new book by the classic of postmodernist thought, the author of “Gesamtkunstwerk Stalin” Boris Groys. In “The Apology of Narcissus,” Groys compares modern Western civilization with Ancient Egypt, refutes the possibility of a machine uprising, and makes many more witty somersaults over the course of just over a hundred pages.
Boris Groys begins his new book with a commonplace: our world is obsessed with narcissism, we constantly produce and examine images of ourselves – endless selfies, posts on social networks. Hundreds of books have been written about this – more and less violent, more and less straightforward. It would seem that Groys, a master of exquisite provocation, has nothing to do in this rather boring territory. He really leaves it almost immediately, declaring: modern media narcissism is not at all an ugly product of digital capitalism, as is commonly thought, but a natural consequence of the development of all human civilization. Moreover, it has a certain nobility inherent in narcissism as such.
Groys offers a rather unusual interpretation of the story of the mythological Narcissus: he does not at all reject others in order to be left alone with his beautiful self. On the contrary, he rejects himself, his entire inner world, his soul, reducing himself to appearance, appearance – to what is accessible only to the gaze of another. This is not self-aggrandizement, but, on the contrary, self-deprecation.
From this existential paradox, Groys draws a lot of conclusions regarding sexuality, technology, politics, religion and a host of other things. He writes about pharaohs and robots, Malevich and Tarantino, G.V.F. Hegele and D.A. Prigov. Quite short in volume, “Apology for Narcissus” contains dozens of unexpected twists. Actually, this is the main property of Groys’s thought – whimsically curling and clinging to random things, like ivy. His books are always more of a philosophical performance than a conceptual program. Attempts at straightening presentation inevitably harm them and make the thought flatter. Nevertheless, several key points of Groyce’s “narcissistic” theory can be outlined.
First of all, Groys is an art theorist, and it is from this perspective that he explores the problem. The title of the English version of the book, “Becoming an Artwork,” reveals its content more frankly.
A person always faces the gaze, this gaze defines and assures him. Previously it was the gaze of a deity; God can see through the physical shell, see the soul of a person, and he preserves a person after death. In the secular era, the view of God has ceased to be a reliable support. The soul began to seem like an equally unreliable thing. The external has become much more important. But appearance is not so much the body as the image, what is visible to others.
It is precisely because of this fundamental role of visibility that, according to Groys, aesthetics became the main sphere of human unrest. Man began to design himself, that is, to turn into a work of art. Modern selfies simply take this modern trend to an absurd extreme.
The ancient Egyptians (those who could afford it) spent their entire lives preparing to become mummies, preserving their image for millennia. We act in a similar way: we turn into our virtual copies – an endless number of pictures and texts. Only, unlike mummies securely hidden in pyramids and sarcophagi, our images are scattered in virtual space. But, like mummies, they are directly related to death.
The image created by the modern narcissist, the work of art into which a person turns himself, must outlive his body. Any selfie already contains both the death of its creator and his life in the memory of others. The self-images we construct through creativity, from great novels to Twitter nonsense, are what Groys calls “public corpses.”
This, of course, raises the question: are these corpses identical to our personalities? And in the world of new technologies, it immediately raises another question that worries all kinds of transhumanists so much—the question of digital immortality. If our entire personality is easily translated into data, does this mean that with the development of technology, we, dying as organisms, will be able to remain alive by simply moving from biological carriers (bodies) to electronic ones?
Groys’ answer: no. The struggle for recognition, the gaze of another, which forces us to perform all actions, makes sense only in the knowledge of imminent death. Because of it, we dream of surviving in the memory of others and therefore produce our cheerful and thoughtful public corpses. Deprived of this perspective, a digital personality simply will not have the incentive to act like a person. Not to mention that the cars are generally not very reliable. Transhumanists believe in electricity providing digital immortality in much the same way that modern mystics believed in the power of mediums that can summon spirits. However, electricity is not a metaphysical, but a completely technical thing; it appears and disappears as a result of the actions of living people.
In general, we are still dependent on others. They alone provide us with weak protection from death. We join them, looking at ourselves, turning ourselves into images for their eyes – and therefore we turn out to be narcissists. Together we make up what is called “humanity.” Here Groys, despite all his cunning and tricksterism, unexpectedly turns out to be a humanist.
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Our public corpses remind us of skeletons: they also seem more stable than our flesh. But they are in much greater danger of disappearing: monuments can be torn down and destroyed, books thrown away and even burned, and digital souls turned off. But it may also happen that these public corpses remain untouched – for one reason or another or by pure chance. In this case, we would prefer that our corpses be decorated in accordance with our taste – so that we can look at them with pleasure, as Narcissus looked at his reflection in the lake.
Boris Groys. Apology for Narcissus. M.: Ad Marginem Press, 2024. Translation: Andrey Fomenko
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