I decided to read Proust. Recently graduated, and armed with a highly sought after degree in English and French literature, I found that now the only barrier between me and the formless future that would take up the rest of my life, was me. In the interest of better knowing my enemy, I needed to know myself. As a member of the western tradition, positing a false ‘social’ self and an authentic ‘inner’ self, rather than asking the people who knew me best what they thought was wrong with me (what do they know anyway?) I felt that my quest into the self would have to be a solitary affair. I went on holiday to France, bought every volume of Proust’s massive novel In Search of Lost Time, and set about completing it.
It might seem antithetical to the pursuit of self-knowledge, that instead of taking ayahuasca or mushrooms, and not even thinking very hard about myself, I spent all my time involved in the intricate social milieus of Proust’s narrator, as he describes his youth in monumental detail, reconstructing a fleeting personal and historical moment that, by the time Proust was writing, had already been conjured away with the turning of the wheel. Countless revolutions later, Proust’s novel remains one of the most comprehensive quests into the self, exploring the minute social codes that govern the behaviour of the narrator himself along with thousands of other characters, their idiosyncratic quirks, and their desires. Yet, always mediating the narrator’s explorations into psychology is the knowledge that all desires to exhaustively comprehend the world around him are ultimately frustrated. Proust’s narrator mirrors the desire of Swann to fully know what his lover, Odette, does while they’re apart, in order to dispel the mystery of her individual life that is at once the cause of his suffering, and the object of his desire. Swann neurotically pieces together “clues” received through her friends, left in her apartment, or discovered by calling on her unannounced late at night, in order to arrive at no more solid conclusion than the suspicion he began with; every suggestion of infidelity could be as true as it is false, each word from Odette can be interpreted a thousand ways. In this othered self, in this instance the lover, we find total knowledge ineffable; Proust’s novel makes the reader live this experience of frustrated knowledge, as it revisits experiences from his childhood and the impressions they left, to return only a few hundred pages later to a different, even contradictory, interpretation of the same experience. In Proust’s shifting kaleidoscope of reality, all is true – and yet, as he says of the theatre, though there may be a thousand spectators, there is only one stage. The drama of In Search of Lost Time derives from the fact that in order to access the stage, we must consult the spectators.
For the contemporary reader, this frustrated search for self-knowledge is the more appealing for its unfamiliarity. Vast explorations of ‘human nature’, sweeping across three thousand pages of meandering impressions and introspective reflection, have lost their vogue – possibly for good reason. The work is dense, even the sentences are infamously long and hard to follow, giving rise to the joke about a spouse who says they’ll go and do the dishes, only once they have finished this sentence of Proust’s. Thirty minutes later, of course, the sink is untouched. The intricate social rules that would seem obvious to a reader of Proust’s era have been mostly dissolved, and with them some of the humour and finesse of the characterization. But even with this loss, In Search of Lost Time is an infinitely rewarding read; its sensitivity to the minutiae of existence are a beautiful reminder that our reality is as rich as we allow it to be, the depth of our feelings as profound as we allow ourselves to mine them, and our lives might truly be as interesting as the stories we have to tell about ourselves. Proust’s narrator is sickly, effete, and by all accounts unproductive. Biographies today tend to lay out factual details about the people who rule the world so that readers might locate their winning factor, the work habits and philosophies that make their biographies worth reading. By contrast, the radical subjectivism of Proust’s novel won’t teach us how to win friends and influence people – but what Proust can teach us is how to enrich our experience of reality, a lesson that is all the more important in an era where technologies like social media and AI construct simulacra that more often are replacing real experience, real knowledge, and real art.
As more and more people consume, and are consumed by, these simulacra, baseline reality is lost; our experiences are transubstantiated on the altar of social media to become fetishised and objectified counterparts to unreliable, fleeting memories. It’s important to bear two things in mind: these fetish objects replace reality, they are not windows onto it, and the powers they have over us are not neutral, but tightly monitored and dangerously manipulated.
One consequence of Proust’s view of time and experience, as an endlessly proliferating series of possible realities rooted in a central objective, but inaccessible, reality, means that memory as an action becomes more engaged; we cannot make reference to the past without facing the limits of our experience. What we saw, how we felt, who we were, are subjects for debate, and therefore require engagement. In Search of Lost Time is told from a present position long after the events have taken place, and as the past is recalled, not only is the status of the past brought into question, but the role of memory and the present self in deforming the past are too. Proust’s approach to memory differs greatly from that of today. For us, the act of remembering more often leans on objective crutches to memory, such as photographs and social media posts. These simulacra, while assuring us of the reality of our experience, also subjectively deaden it; the desires that animate Proust’s memories, imbuing them with a sense of mystery and wonder, cannot be translated into a photograph. Proust describes seeing a photograph of his grandmother and, alienated from his subjectivity, he is shocked to see not his grandmother, but a frail old woman; only after this upsetting vision does his inner world flock back to fill him with pity for this woman whom he feels strangely distant from. For us, as for Proust, our inner lives can be crushed beneath a photographic reminder that reality isn’t governed by our subjectivity.
Social media, then, might have been an opportunity to be more honest with each other and to create channels of communication between people that are otherwise closed off. We’ve seen how videos circulating on social media of the genocide in Gaza have reached wider audiences, creating a clearer image of the situation on the ground than legacy media headlines would suggest. While having the capacity to shock and inspire change, social media more often uses the objectivity of the photograph to conceal the ways in which we organise this data to construct fictional narratives about ourselves. What images we choose to share online has been found to affect the way we remember the events – we remember what we post, and forget what we delete. Subjectivism therefore returns with a spin of the wheel, but now consciously and narcissistically constructing an ideal self, whilst reassuring us of the truth of this construction. Posting is no longer about sharing authentic moments with friends, but a way of curating a public image – and data harvesting and marketing are actively engaged in shaping what kinds of image people construct.
In concealing the arbitrary behind a layer of objectivity, marketing holds even more power over us; failing to construct an image acceptable to the court of public opinion can lead to real social consequences, especially for children and teenagers. Though fashions and trends have always existed, our habits of consumption are being determined more by social media than ever, which means that reality itself is more and more deformed to correlate with the imaginary of social media. Everything from the clothes we wear, the music we listen to, down to the food we eat goes towards the construction of this public image – the performative male cliché is a glaring example of the way that being hyper-online engages us more in self-creation than in introspection. While the jokes are greatly exaggerated, it’s certainly true that an obsession with public image has been aggravated by the advent of social media. Not only that, but the way in which this image is made is one that is no longer organic, but entirely concerned with consumption. Beginning with television and magazines, social media is simply the new face of a culture of over-consumption, but this face is far more effective at shaping our habits because of its valorisation of the individual. The irony is that marketing on social media appeals not to our ability to fit in, but our desire to stand out, hence the performative male who ultimately loses his individuality in the quest for social approval as an individual.
In the social media post, the subjective links that create unity from disparate objective images tend to appeal towards the lowest common denominator of cultural ideals, since these are more easily communicable in audiovisual form; physical beauty, expensive objects and experiences, and fashion. Social media makes us both victim and perpetrator, forced to communicate in its accepted language as we prostitute ourselves to reassure ourselves that we too are beautiful, we too are stylish, we too lead interesting lives; our cries, sold to us as a way to get out from the crowd, blend into the universal hubbub. When we do have the chance to express ourselves, the convention is through captions composed of a few words or even the mute language of emojis. To be ‘honest’ is, in the mainstream, uncommon, because it isn’t appealing, and social media works through manipulating what appeals to us. If the algorithm rewarded genuine interaction, we might not need social media at all. Even Proust remarked that in friendly conversation we do no more than “indefinitely repeat the vacuity of a minute”, while in art we plumb the depths of our selves. But the danger of social media is in the insidious ways it holds our attention, consumes our time with its vacuity, all while suppressing the sort of reflection that leads to valuable growth. On top of this, every time we engage with social media, we only embed it further, promoting the values that were pushed onto us, encouraging the same mute self-expression.
Proust exemplifies the danger of social media well, in the figure of Madame de Villeparisis. In her published memoirs, she omits reference to her inferior social circle, and exaggerates her relationships with the aristocracy to create a public impression that erases her true life for posterity. The way we engage with social media is much the same, engaging in a selective process that necessarily works along hierarchies of values. There is nothing wrong with romanticising your life, indeed it is a key part of our subjective experience. We should feel deeply, love strongly, find beauty everywhere, but we shouldn’t do so in the style of a Madame de Villeparisis. This is especially pertinent when we consider that, more often than not, it is market forces that are determining the values with which we engage with social media.
Think of the way fashion companies and models are often the template for social media usage. In controlling what a ‘fashionable’ social media is, they control how we buy, dress, and importantly, post. Corporations also have a vested interest in increasing the sharing of personal data beyond simply marketing. In 2010, Cambridge Analytica was able to use a social media campaign (the Do So campaign) to change the outcome of an election in Trinidad and Tobago, and it was equally involved in Donald Trump’s election in 2016. The political and cultural ramifications are vast. In controlling the models for our online lives, they are able to bring us to silence; honesty and expression are devalued, in favour of obvious and widely understood signifiers. Complex thought is stifled in favour of short form content, and as a result easy answers have a more widespread appeal than the nuance of the global situation allows. To hope for popular revolution or to be a Reform voter are equal delusions, both of which flourish in online spaces. For less politically engaged thinkers, however, the fantasy of neutrality is just as appealing; they shrug off the responsibility of society, citing their pages as “neutral spaces”, ‘apolitically’ posting cooking videos, travel content or, most ironically and yet all too frequently, art.
Beneath this world of influencers, however, the diminished linguistic capabilities of social media mean that tacitly understood social codes go unchallenged; think of the new American Eagle social media campaign, which puns on eugenicist beauty standards to sell “great genes/jeans”. Pulling the string on the very idea of ‘models’, we arrive at underlying exclusionary beauty standards. Nowadays, with the growing ubiquity of social media, advertising has ensured that not only models, but our peers can sell us Sydney Sweeney’s “great genes”. The only way to challenge this, as it must be challenged, is to pull this string. Proust’s In Search of Lost Time forces us to think, as it circles around, repeats and expands upon the experiences of the narrator. The novel’s structure makes us live what we read, which are the movements of a mind. Social media rarely permits this; in the social codes it reiterates ad nauseum, the progress of thought is barely half the length and complexity of a Proustian sentence. It favours the external, the appearance of objectivity, and the illusion of unity. We should learn from Proust that these unities are appealing mirages, and we should pursue them to their artificial sources as he does. Having spent my whole life fully identifying myself with my online image, I was shocked by this Proustian wakeup call. I still didn’t know myself, the “I” was as nebulous as ever, but I now knew my purpose; to reject the hypocrisies of our social media use. We know social media is bad, we use it anyway, and we all let each other off the hook. But like the performative liberal ceremony of a land acknowledgement, simply acknowledging that social media “isn’t real”, and then carrying on, is not enough. We need to rout these contradictions out where they are, be that among ourselves, our peers or among the influencers and models used by capitalism to control our behaviour. There may one day be a harmless social media, but we don’t have time to wait. We must accept no silence, permit no neutrality; as Proust does, we should pull the string.
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