Layer Two: The Gradual Overriding of the interior life

This piece is an attempt to understand how my view of the world has shifted from seeing life to seeing artifice or the use of life for the sake of artifice.

Prada Marfa: a permanent sculptural art installation located along U.S. Route 90 in Jeff Davis Country, Texas. Marfa, TX is where true-grit West Texas meets minimalist art. The town is survived by this cultural fusion and maintained by deep-pocketed tastemakers who seek experiences of art and culture they believe they can manufacture. It’s a place that has been gradually remade by upscale developers and wealthy art collectors who have turned the town into a viewing platform for their counterparts to interface. A majority of the original mercantile, civic, and adobe buildings retain their structural integrity. However, their utility has been replaced by artificially hastened and idiosyncratic means of making spaces for wealthy aesthetes. What remains of the towns original textures is now framed and polished for viewership as if Marfa only exists for the sake of being perceived.

Marfa’s integrity has been overexposed by its new population—its spirit replaced by appearance. Its origin of life has been misshapen, taken over, by a small populace forcing its command. Results from this command over: people and places gradually lose their primeval properties—their nature is confused with control over its design. Why do I say any of this? Marfa illustrates how, out of modern habit, we obscure the interiors of something, including ourselves, for the sake of desired visage.

Last time we met, I focused on how appearances bind organic articulations of the self. I offered the scene on the train and how the violence of the other’s gaze effected my self-awareness. I described his gaze: lazy, interrogative with no motive, self-consciously avoiding my attention while remaining inquisitive and collecting. His gaze shifted my unconscious equilibrium—indifferent to external influence—and, like a magnet, attracted me away from a peaceable mental space that seemed to be acting on behalf of itself. My attention of myself moved outward—a collapse of internal orientation—and my awareness was forced toward the things I had on my exterior, away from the steering unconscious. There was a passage from autonomous self-reflection to self-reflection dictated by the trajectory of the other’s gaze. Like the streets of Marfa, the self is reoriented, composed, to meet the expectations of spectatorship.

The authority I thought I had to interpret my experience of myself and the world had been taken over by the gaze of the other and an idea of their interpretation of my exterior—an interesting ontological reversal.

I was no longer experiencing myself, my individual, passively, and my behaviors became reactive: I shifted awkwardly, I repositioned my coat, I rotated the brand on my yoga mat to face me, I adjusted the orientation of my tote, disguising its holes and stains, then brushed something invisible from my exposed and faded-black pilling socks. My new experience of myself was the one I’m always trying to fight: the experience of acute and compulsive self-loathing at the smallest glimpse of my outer being (an inquiry for another time).

This type of social perception is what, I think, chips away at our bond with the subtle interior states of the self. Interior states that ground one’s authority over the intuitive navigable nature of oneself. Though we do not have direct or reliable access to our own interior motives behind these shifts, we can fine tune our senses as they are impacted by the other. Moreover, there is more attention we can pay to how our idea of ourselves shifts at the interrogative gaze of the other.

Instead of ceding my attention to any gradation, I hid from my altered perceptions by lifting my phone. Lifting my phone was a conscious intention to override a diagnosis of my shifting mannerisms and thoughts. I was in the city that day with no desire to be seen one way or another. I felt free-spirited, unbridled by the repression of appearances or the ideas of others. There was no part of my interiority that was obscured by desired visage. What I ought to have done was attend to the part of myself that ceded first to the external gaze—the part of me that fell off, that surrendered itself to my exterior and an opaque perception of what it seemed to signify to the kid in the Urban Outfitter trucker cap.

The theory I want to propose is this: there has been an overconsumption of the ‘ontological condition’ of the other—that is, we increasingly treat someone’s appearance, adornment, posture, as the first, and most reliable, evidence of who this person is. Responding to the ontological condition of the other—responding to another’s appearance—is responding to the idea that we can treat extrinsic qualities as default markers of the self. But this information is inherently opaque: appearance orients outward without revealing interiority despite our expectation that it should. This contradiction motivates the metaphysical problem: the desire to appear one way gradually overrides contact one has with their interior life. The foundation of ones nature if confused. Because appearance is treated as socially authoritative, one is compelled to produce themselves based on the current criteria of what can be externally recognized and validated. The desire to appear according to shifting ideals of how one looks supersedes sustained contact with ones interior life, and ones interior life becomes increasingly organized by expression via outward presentation. Appearances cease to function as merely quiet expressions of ones identity and instead become primary conditions for the production of the self. Authenticity, pure expression of ones interior life, becomes confused with social legibility. The inquisitive encounter of the subway gaze seems to demonstrate how easily the interior life is diffused into the expanding social contract of visible identity.

The conditions through which we come to understand ourself are increasingly bound by visual criteria. What the artists did to Marfa is what we are doing to ourselves. Interiority is quickly sacrificed for the maintenance of façade and we produce ourselves according to a world that commands us to look and make and produce before we feel. We remain fixed on performance and appearances as a demonstration of being. We allow ourselves to be organized by the gaze of the other—we cultivate ourselves, and spaces, in tandem with external criteria. Gradually, our authority to inhabit ourselves becomes consumed by the quality of our external visibility, and our interior life is subsumed into the ontological condition of the other.