Maybe the theory will save us all?
On "performative male" tiktoks, and the aesthetics of knowledge consumption
My friends and I send each other texts where we name drop Deleuze or Sartre and talk about MAFS and reference American Politics. I sometimes look at our group chat and think: what the fuck should I say now? Sometimes I’ve got no idea. Sometimes I feel so out of the loop.
It doesn’t matter - in this particular group chat - how I feel, how we’re actually doing, if we’re all alright. That’s not what we talk about. What’s important is that weknow how to pronounce Loewe and Baudrillard and can apply both in the same sentence. Or that we can critique the media coverage of Charlie Kirk’s shooting with the same wry dead pan tone we would use to critique the latest Paul Thomas Anderson.
I’ve been thinking about performative man content in relation to this. About how I think a lot of it is rooted in mysoginy - in that it then just becomes about shaming men for having any vaguely femme coded interest. Sure, if he’s reading Florence Given in the bar without turning a page - it’s probably performative. But so is lifting weights in the gym or grunting as you slam a tennis ball over the net. All masculinity is performative. That’s the fucking point of gender. It’s a performance.
Anyway - the thing that strikes me about this kind of “performative man” is that they’re not performing “masculinity” - but knowledge, interest, taste - traits that exist across the gender spectrum. These men know what wine to pair with the monkfish. They know about Chanel’s debut under Matthieu Blazy at PFW where they turned the Grand Palais into a planetarium. They know about Sylvia Plath. They know about Vittorio De Sica and Italian neorealism. They’ve “read Sartre”.
It’s a performance of intellect, a wealth defined by the books on your shelves and not the number in your checking account.
In an economic system where traditional forms of wealth (financial capital) are increasingly unattainable, the accumulation of knowledge (cultural capital) has become the new, primary, and desperate frontier of class warfare. We can’t buy the house, so we’ve become obsessed with collecting the theory. If you’ve not been to uni you can just be an autodidact, get the book from your library.
And in a way, I kind of love it. I love the idea of us exchanging wealth for knowledge. Is this the death of Shein, because we’ll be consuming 19th century russian lit instead of wear-once clothes?
No. You know it won’t be. Because knowledge accumulations comes with…you guessed it…an aesthetic.
Success isn’t just about money. It’s about cultural capital: the unspoken codes, the “right” education, the “right” clothes, the “right” way of speaking. By and large, money can buy you these things. It can get you into the right shops, buy you the right education, buy you the right way of speaking. But a lot of it is a byproduct of the structures you grew up in.
In the old days, cultural capital was often also a key to entry into the spaces of financial capital accumulation. It was your way in as well as a byproduct of already existing in those spaces in the first place. For example: you could get a good job at the bank if you’d gone to the same school as everyone else at the bank, and therefore because you knew how to culturally assimilate - you reached the same financial echelons. For Bordieu “cultural capital…[was] a form of power, and a source of ‘profit’”. The trouble is that we’re not profiting off of our cultural capital anymore. We can’t buy houses. We have no savings.
Instead we’ve pivoted - what we’re experiencing now is a frenzied gold rush for cultural capital.
So if we look at what we talked about before - the idea that your cultural capital allows you to somewhat assimilate, that’s what Bordieu calls “habitus”: the system of embodied, ingrained tastes, preferences, and ways of carrying yourself that you learn from your class. It’s the “feel” for the game.
”Distinction”, then, is using that taste to separate yourself from others. Not just having taste, but using taste to classify yourself as part of the intellectual or creative elite.
In previous essays, I’ve talked about the slow shift from performance of consumption to almost a performance of restraint. A way of showing your success by showing that you can deny yourself, and that self-denial is the ultimate performance of control in a world where we feel like we have none.
I think this is tied up in the performance of knowledge. Like… people are touting the death of the age of the influencer. Posting your dubai holiday and your chanel handbag have become crass. Now it’s about your perfectly curated bookshelves, your artfully thrifted vintage Burberry, your perfectly pulled espresso. You are performing taste. which is to say, you are performing cultural capital. Which, in lieu of being able to buy a house and actually achieve all the things we were told our expensively bought educations in critical theory would buy us, is as good as it gets.
”Performative man” TikToks exemplify this, really. They’re about achieving a highly coveted spot on the cool people invite list - not because your dad has a yacht, or you work for Penguin Publishing - but because you can convincingly name drop Sartre to people who also haven’t read him.
pls this espresso and my copy of the bell jar are just the simulacrum. The map is the territory. My life is this espresso and this book. I am this espresso and this book. please love me. please find me worthy.