Post 27: Posting an Instagram story is like wearing an outfit

Two small white pieces of paper and a physical embodiment of my "favorite color combination."

It’s possible that it was because I had been thinking of each of these subject matters (subject matters sounds absurd, but it does convey how I’m thinking of these terms) separately that I came to the thought that posting an Instagram story is kind of like wearing an outfit. I’ve been thinking about posting stories in that I’ve of late been participating in such an act, though have been engaging somewhat blindly--not knowing exactly why I do it. And I think I’m always having low-grade thoughts about what I wear, though this too has been peaked by a recent experience (by “experience” I mean “revelatory thought”) I had while wearing red socks--because of wearing red socks--which I hope to write about here next. It always feels like there's all this backstory for me when it comes to talking about clothing, but I’ll just say that currently, I conceive of everything I wear as a failed sculpture. (Alternatively, I am a failed sculpture in everything I wear?) For whatever reason (many, real reasons), the principles that guide what I wear are subject to the same invisible rules as those of the physical things I make. An outfit success is in a way the same thing as a “sculpture” success (quotes around sculpture in an effort to convey that I'm using this term for convenience despite not actually thinking of the things I make as sculptures), only, I don’t pursue what I wear to the far-enough-along point that I could deem my outfits successful sculptures on my own terms. (I’m trying to think of what I mean by “same” in the previous sentence. “Success” in each form is an equal sentence in different languages?) In the past, my own needs for existing required me to fully pursue what I wore to the endpoint of success. I did this in a way that now makes me feel a little sad, a little wistful about the fact that I no longer do. (At the very least…I haven’t been doing it.) But, things have also changed, and my impulses have been redirected; as in: yes, I don’t pursue it (success, or a complete sense of satisfaction or correctness in what I wear), but also, my need to do so has decreased. (Though, why view myself as a failed sculpture if I no longer feel the need to pursue being a successful sculpture?) 

Despite both existing on the same spectrum of goodness for me, a big distinction between the modes of clothing and sculpture, and one I find makes landing in satisfaction much more difficult for clothing is that I only have to reveal a “sculpture” when it is finalized, in the correct state I want it to be in, but I have to wear and look like something each day, in a state that feels not yet finalized when compared to a created object like a sculpture. (What does it mean to look like something that isn’t yet ready?) Why do the rules for a “perfect sculpture” carry over to a form that makes it very difficult, impossible for them to be realized?

These thoughts may be a little beside the point when it comes to talking about the outfit–Instagram story comparison (I have just established it as “the”), but maybe they’re a bit of backstory to it. I suppose the lineage is: when I think about Instagram stories, I think about clothing, and when I think about clothing I think about sculptures, and so there's also a way that my thinking/making of sculptures guides my "practice" of posting stories? (Do I wish to make an IG story that is in some way a sculpture?)

I swear I might actually get to talking about what it seems like I would be talking about here based on the title of this post, after I continue not talking about it for a little longer. Funny enough, it just so happens that there’s something about this comparison between Instagram stories and outfits that feels simply like only the bare thought that it is. In this way, it doesn't feel like something worth writing about, as though all of what it is is already contained in the initial statement--the putting the two terms next to each other to begin with. There’s something to the idea of saying more about this comparison, that rather than expand on the statement, seems that it will instead detract from it, take away something that it is. (Is “writing about” to add a quantity of something, a weight [words], to another thing [topic/subject]?) (What makes writing, or when does writing feel like an equation of addition?) Is this feeling (possible feeling) due to the kind of thought this post is? The kind of statement it’s formulated as? The nature of each of the two items that make it up? Am I just obsessed with preventing anything from actually unfolding in writing?

In a book I’m lightly reading, I just arrived at the following passage that describes Roland Barthes's last lecture course (translated in English as The Preparation of the Novel):

Barthes speaks of preparation in terms of getting ready--yes: getting ready for writing. In this case, preparing for the novel. Working out and trying to establish what might be the conditions of possibility for a novel--or something like a novel, something of the order of a novel, something that one might be willing to call a novel--to be written today (in the late 1970s, when the form would appear to have already been exhausted--"I know the novel is dead," he is quoted as saying in an interview published in 1975). But, as it turns out, Barthes is less interested in the historical and social conditions of the novel than in the more particular and personal conditions that might enable a given writing subject, a given would-be writer (someone who wants to write) to actually manage to write one. A given subject such as himself, for whom the specific writing problem--as Barthes formulates it--is how to make the transition from writing short pieces, in fragments, and sort of discontinuously (from what he calls "a taste for the short form") to writing something longer, more continuous and ongoing and sustained.1

It felt necessary to include an excerpt of this length for what is mentioned at the beginning in relation to what is mentioned at the end--not for the sake of entering into the idea of novel writing, or the build-up into it, but for the introduction of this passage's question of the conditions for coming into being. For this question's ability, then, by it being placed here, to exist in relation to my thoughts about Instagram stories and outfits. It gives rise to the idea in me that what one wears is an engagement that is inherently discontinuous. But is this to say that its final form is a discontinuous one? I suppose posting an Instagram story arrives in discontinuous results as well. Do discontinuous actions/existences/things have a final form? Or is their nature inherently final form-less? 

An Instagram story feels like an uncommon opportunity to appear in full, briefly. Somehow it's more closely related to appearance, like thinking of my own appearance, than a permanent grid post; the lasting nature of those posts makes them more like items--series of objects, collected, displayed. Appearance has a more human connotation than display. It also sounds more ephemeral. Even when used to talk about something static, lasting, it sounds (its sound is) as though it describes just a moment of the thing: to say “the chair appears to be filled with glasses of orange juice” seems more to reflect an uncertain moment of human viewing than portray a quality or condition of being of the chair.

In mentioning that I’ve wondered what my impulse is to post a story, I’m referring to the kind of story that’s not evidently sharing a piece information--an upcoming event, a sight seen--but one that is, at its surface, more bare (barren?) as an image. 

On December 5th, 2024, I connected myself to this image:

If Instagram was a place, and I was there (god forbid, I suppose), that’s what I’d have been wearing that day. (I have yet to think of the logistics of this.) Is wearing something a specific form of attaching yourself to an image, of giving yourself an association? I find it kind of exciting to gain this association; there aren't many ways to “be” an image, but this may be one. A story also pointedly feels like a way to “speak” an appearance; for appearance to be something active, rather than something passive (which it can default as). An Instagram story is kind of an emphasized or exaggerated appearance, since it allows not only for the choice of its specific look, but whether or not it appears at all. It’s an unprescribed choice that very clearly begins. You don’t have to “look like something” in the space of an Instagram story every day, so when you do...it...stands out in a particular way? It shows itself as the result of a decision made? Does it get spectacle-ized to exist in this way, on this platform? Maybe I wish wearing an outfit was actually more like posting a story, at least in the sense that it would inherently happen only in a decently intentional way, not always needing to exist, and therefore would be closer to fulfilling the conditions of a successful sculpture.

Questions:
-Who I am fleetingly is different than who I am statically? 
-How I fleetingly look is different than how I statically look?
-Being an image?

Notes:

1 Kate Briggs, This Little Art (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017), 124

Bibliography: 

Briggs, Kate. This Little Art. Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017.