Shared techniques render the world’s face identical for everyone

Evidence

The contradiction can be resolved, I think, by recalling the paradoxical nature of the world-as-exhibition. The exhibition persuades people that the world is divided into two fundamental realms – the representation and the original, the exhibit and the external reality, the text and the world. Everything is organised as if this were the case. But ‘reality’, it turns out, means that which can be represented, that which presents itself as an exhibit before an observer. The so-called real world ‘outside’ is something experienced and grasped only as a series of further representations, an extended exhibition. Visitors to the Orient conceived of themselves as travelling to ‘the East itself in its vital actual reality’. But, as we saw, the reality they sought there was simply that which could be photographed or accurately represented, that which presented itself as a picture of something before an observer. A picture here refers not just to a visual illustration, but to what stands apart as something distinct from the subject and is grasped in terms of a corresponding distinction between representation and reality. In the end the European tried to grasp the Orient as though it were an exhibition of itself. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 118 (#expands, via linked claim)

Why is it that people put so much effort into the construction of these images? Because they are well constructed self-portraits, not selfies. Because they are representations of a commodity, a representation that produces a commodity, a commodity indistinguishable from a subject, a commodity indistinguishable from an identity. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 90 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: A globalized psychic pathology is identical across all contexts. — Catherine Malabou, The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain…, 3279; Standardized beauty homogenized facial features by blending ethnic influences.; Abstraction, modern thought’s key power, operates by effacing the human face (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Standardized beauty homogenized facial features by blending ethnic influences. #expands (0.85)
• Influencer images are self-portraits that produce a commodity identical to identity #exemplifies (0.75) — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 90
• The world-as-exhibition framework makes reality itself a series of representations #expands (0.75) — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 118
• Abstraction, modern thought’s key power, operates by effacing the human face #complicates (0.72)