Note: This document comprises the textual content of my senior independent project, the final product of which is a zine. Title linked to Issuu flipbook.
Un-Pinterest-ed – Viral Aesthetics Reimagined and Deromanticized through the Lens of Anthropology – Angelica Zhiyu Luo Disclaimer : No hate at all. I am, too, a humble devotee of aesthetics, which is… Not great, I know. Introduction Historian and media lecturer Stuart Ewen argues in his book “All Consuming Images,” style is an instrument we use to navigate displacement, a mitigative approach to tackle subjectivity disorientation. This is also somewhat illuminated in Merleau-Ponty's theory of the self as an embodied subjectivity, which contends that our physical and bodily presence, as well as our emotionality, are critical determinants of our worldliness, and the experience of being per se. To elaborate a little more, the French phenomenological philosopher argues, “[o]ur body, rather, is the origin of all the others, it is the very movement of expression, it projects significations on the outside by giving them a place and sees to it that they begin to exist as things, beneath our hands and before our eyes”1. This excerpt illustrates with clarity that things only exist insofar as we bestow meanings upon them; this endeavor is realized through the mutual dependence of our mind and body, and, accordingly, the interactive agency of said dual upon the outside world as well. As distressing as both remarks read, neither was wrong. In a world of mass media and, consequently, a digital landscape where anonymity is the default personality, style is the most approachable way to prove that we pertain as independent bodies and minds. It’s “a device of survival”2, or, to quote American scholar Joel Kovel, “the ego’s homage to the id.”3 The way I see it, style is a visual rhetoric. We seek empowerment through a meticulously curated exhibition of the self, and, in this process, endeavor an erasure of the past; we fidget with facades to modify our establishment, to claim communal membership, and to have our presence acknowledged by an intended demographic. Therefore, the social media content we see compiled under viral hashtags goes beyond their visual and auditory qualities: they mirror unacknowledged yearnings and dissatisfaction. By the same token, what we know as aesthetics and cores (i.e. styles so ideologically distinct and visually 1
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 147. Ewen, All Consuming Images, 73. 3 Ewen, 263. 2