Self Design

The site of the design of the soul shifts, and the soul becomes the sum of the relationships into which the human body in the world enters. The soul becomes the clothing of the body, and its social, political and aesthetic appearance. The only possible manifestation of the soul becomes the look of the clothes that human beings wear, the everyday things in which they surround themselves in, the spaces they inhabit. Design becomes the medium of the soul.

Does design therefore take on a whole new ethical dimension that is has not done previously?

Yes.

-‘Ethics became aesthetics’
-‘The modern subject now has a new obligation: the obligation to self-design, and aesthetic presentation as ethical subject’.
-‘The designer wants here and now the apocalyptic vision that makes everyone New Men. The body takes on the form of the soul. The soul becomes the body. All things become heavenly. Heaven becomes earthly, material. Modernism becomes absolute.’
-‘In a world of total design, the man himself has become a designed thing, a kind of museum object, a mummy, a publicly exhibited corpse.’
-‘That is why many people view our entire society today—the society of commercial design, of the spectacle—as a game with simulacra behind which there is only a void.’
-‘By designing one’s self and one’s environment in a certain way, one declares one’s faith in certain values, attitudes, programs, and ideologies…Modern design has transformed the whole of social space into an exhibition space for an absent divine visitor, in which individuals appear both as artists and as self-produced works of art.’
[Groys 2008]

What happens when we consider the self-designed virtual avatar/identity construction in relation to Groys’ piece?
Well….

Avatars in online games are considered representations of their player, and in some cases recognisable as a ‘second-self’. Players ability to customise their avatar poses questions about the aesthetics vs. ethics relationship and emphasises Groys’ point of social space as exhibition space. Some studies show self-avatars to have a potentially significant impact on the user experience, extending into offline constructions of the self too.

Artist Amalia Ulman similarly explores issues surrounding constructions of online identity in her piece ‘Excellences & Perfections’, and therefore a very literal example of a ‘self-produced work of art’. The digital artist curated an Instagram profile that documented the life of a girl trying to ‘make it’ in LA. From a fake boob job to a public apology, Ulman projected a curated life which social platforms often encourage.

The embodiment of this online, curated, self-designed persona demonstrates a ‘formula’ for achieving more followers and the ‘one size fits all’ personality that many adopt in order to do so; this formula however is based on a very selective representation of one’s reality. Consider the term ‘influencer’ for example: this hardly existed before the immense value placed on Instagram marketing and now this comprises a vital part of marketing budgets in companies all over the world. Her critique of unattainable body ideals and gendered expectations through ‘Excellences & Perfections’ exposes online culture’s ability to manipulate. Audiences were invested in her life as she evoked an inauthentic consumerist fantasy - what she was really doing was exposing the presence of gender and sex politics on social media, and its harmful social ramifications. As man becomes an entirely designed object and humanity moves quickly towards an increasingly streamlined and digitalised existence, the consequences must be considered.

‘Modern design…set itself the task of revealing the hidden essence of things rather than designing their surfaces.’ [Groys 2008]

Groys profoundly links the rise of modern design to the project of redesigning the old man into the ‘New Man’; emerging at the start of the twentieth century, this project is often described as utopian. Before Nietzsche diagnosed the death of God, the design of the soul was more important to people than the design of the human body - the body and its environments was only understood from the perspective of faith;