Right now, someone on Instagram is realizing that their dream girl doesn’t exist. Maybe they’re squinting at a little shimmer near the hip of their favorite IG baddie, a telltale sign that a body-altering filter is in use. Or they’re commenting “what’s her @” on a post with #midjourney in the caption, and someone else is replying “it’s AI, wake up bro.”
This moment plunges my hypothetical someone into an uncanny valley, a horrifying realization that the beauty on the screen is an imposter. The feelings of attraction curdle and my someone hides from their phone for the rest of the day.
I am, of course, very wrong. Image-based social media has played the perfect prelude to AI image-making by warping what representation means. It has eroded our commitment to (interest in?) verisimilitude, so when we’re confronted with an image that almost-but-not-quite represents reality, we don’t abject like we would if confronted with a lifelike humanoid robot. My someone’s psyche is safe from the uncanny valley, and the abjection is all mine.
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I like the word image because it fits in the slippery space between digital photography and media more readily associated with art, such as painting and sculpture. Images online may begin as photos, which we understand as direct representations of a subject, but editing tools allow for plenty of creative intervention. A subject may intervene upon their own likeness, sometimes with the likeness of someone else (or the diffused Instagram Face) in mind. Over the years the labor of self-image-manipulation has become an expected step in the beauty process.
Image comes to English from the 11th century Latin imago, “copy, imitation, likeness,” stemming of imitari, “to copy, imitate,” from the Proto-Indo-European root aim- meaning “to copy.” Mimesis comes directly to English from the Greek mīmēsis, “imitation, representation, representation by art,” stemming from mimos “mime, imitator, actor.” In ancient Greece, the notion of mīmēsis governed how art corresponds to the physical world, which was understood as a model for beauty and truth. This is all a fancy way of saying that this essay will concern itself with mimesis and the making of beauty images.
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Digital photo manipulation has crossed over into the IRL beauty lexicon. Take for example the ubiquity of makeup products that reference IG filters: Developed for the Selfie Age, the Colour Pop No Filter Complexion line is formulated with soft blurring pigments to blur pores, cover blemishes, and blend effortlessly... Inspired by the perfecting lens of social media filters and behind the scenes blurring and soft-focus tricks, Hollywood Flawless Filter creates red carpet makeup, in real life... Not only do these products affirm that using filters to augment one’s appearance is perfectly acceptable, they suggest that it’s possible — through more labor and consumption — to close the gap between the real and the image by mimicking the image-self.
The subject now references the image. AI enters here, into our desire for perfect images of ourselves and the attendant desire to fuse with those images, into our beautiful wheel-spinning. René Girard’s theory of mimetic desire can help explain why the pursuit of image-beauty is so frenetic, so mortifying, and yet so pointless. Girard argued that human desire is imitative rather than spontaneous: we see someone wanting an object so we want that object, too. And we often fail to recognize that the appropriated desire is motivated externally rather than internally. I see AI entering into a mimetic triangle that already exists, its points SELF, BEAUTY, and IMAGE, and pushing our culture deeper into its regressive beauty obsession.
The beauty industry already depends on mimetic desire. This is evident in influencer marketing and celebrity endorsements and the magazines full of weight-loss tips and anti-aging tricks. Our desire for beauty is modeled via images, but when the images themselves become generative, suggestive, they encourage us to desire impossible things. They do the work of making-real that art and even our imaginations cannot, rendering perfection and inviting us to identify with it just enough to aspire to it.
A perfect beauty-image is one scrubbed clean of humanity. The textures of human flesh and its tendency to take up space are flattened away as innocently as applying concealer to a blemish. Everything is smooth and plump, there are no wrinkles or asymmetries or seams. In the anti-grotesque age that sees the human body as inherently dirty, the monumental body is hygienic and therefore beautiful. And what is more monumental than a not-real body, the original referents crushed into two dimensions and mechanically reproduced into a million empty shells?
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With the mention of the monumental body, our discussion moves inexorably toward art. Artists have always been models for beauty-desire, creating images that motivate viewers to yearn for something specific. I like to reference the below painting when I talk about the monumental body as a beauty ideal because it’s an example of how beauty is deployed politically, how beauty is implicated in violent conflict.
Adolf Ziegler’s The Four Elements features allegorical nudes in a neoclassical style; their bodies read fertile, pure, healthy, racially superior, and not at all sexy or vulgar thanks to their invisible genitalia and demure postures. It’s feminine beauty as symbol and gentlemanly snack. This painting hung above the fireplace in Hitler’s Munich apartment.
AI-generated “art” images like the one below creep me out because they similarly present a sterilized and normative beauty ideal, but without the political awareness. The creator of such images, the viewers as well, put all criticism in a suspension of wonder because the true author of the image is a nonhuman program. The program innocently pulls images of young women the world has labeled beautiful and mashes them together, creating a static prop for the enactment of heterosexual fantasy and envy. The fact that the result contributes to such an economy, that it contributes to the violent cult of feminine purity and youth and thinness and whiteness, is ~merely accidental~.
The question of authorship and the intention of art seems to further encourage what Girard identified as pointless conflict born of mimetic rivalry.
He wrote in Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World that mimetic desire can engender conflict because when we all want the same things, we engage in ever-escalating competition for the things. Competition is a reality of human society, and it can be a healthy motivator of progress, but it stifles progress when the rivals “forget about whatever objects are the cause of the rivalry and instead become more fascinated with one another.”
In this case, we have mistaken beauty for a necessary object like food or shelter and engage in competition to possess more and more and more of it. The further our beauty ideals move from human reality, a drift that AI is contributing to, the more scarce the object of our desire appears. (All the while, images of aspirational beauty proliferate at an unprecedented rate: brands will soon produce ad campaigns without needing to hire human models, pornography will be produced without the need for consenting human participants.) Beyond the money spent on beauty products and the hours of precious life wasted on beauty work, this pointless conflict involves the cutting of flesh, the grinding down of bone, the injection of toxins, the psychological torment of diets and eating disorders. The violence increases in lock-step with the inflation of the beauty standard, keeping us unhappy, alienated from our bodies and uneasy with who we are.
As this mimetic competition narrows our vision, we’re losing the plot on what beauty means and why we pursue it. I mean, we pursue beauty because everyone else does, so if we opt out, we risk rejection — that’s the only why we need to be thoroughly motivated. But allowing the language of art-making into the competition implies that there is intrinsic value in such a banal type of beauty.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge said this about poetry, but I think it applies to image-making as well: art is not imitative because it is interested in achieving sameness with nature, rather artful imitation reveals some human essence when it “consists either in the interfusion of the same throughout the radically different, or the different throughout a base radically the same.” Our image-based beauty contest interfuses nothing radical, resulting in a feedback loop that reveals nothing and offers only more of the same: feminine bodies as passive objects for consumption, feminine presence as putty in a manipulating hand.
We’ve sidestepped the uncanny valley of human-beauty versus image-beauty by welcoming a measure of inhumanity. The beautiful AI art-person wears its blankness as a signifier of inhuman cleanliness, perfection. It learned this from the dissociative pouts of it-girls on social media, the sunken death stares of fashion models, the resentful passivity glimpsed in paparazzi snaps. It represents everybody and nobody. It represents what everybody wants and nobody can have.
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For the benediction, a passage for Luce Irigaray’s “This Sex Which Is Not One,” a crackling, albeit dated, essay in a volume of the same name about sexuality and desire. I found it surprisingly productive to reread this essay in the context of my thinking on the economy of beauty-images that women are forced to see themselves in and through and against.
“Must [the] multiplicity of female desire and female language be understood as shards, scattered remnants of a violated sexuality? A sexuality denied? The question has no simple answer. The rejection, the exclusion of a female imaginary certainly puts woman in the position of experiencing herself only fragmentarily, in the little-structured margins of a dominant ideology, as waste, or excess, what is left of a mirror invested by the (masculine) "subject" to reflect himself, to copy himself. Moreover, the role of “femininity” is prescribed by this masculine specula(riza)tion and corresponds scarcely at all to woman's desire, which may be recovered only in secret, in hiding, with anxiety and guilt.
But if the female imaginary were to deploy itself, if it bring itself into play otherwise than as scraps, uncollected debris, would it represent itself, even so, in the form of one universe?”
For more reading on this topic…
My stuff
Stuff I referenced
The Uncanny Valley by Masahiro Mori, translated by Karl F. MacDorman and Norri Kageki
Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World by Rene Girard, trnaslated by Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer
Other good stuff