THE TRAGIC ART OF POSTING

Hegel's aesthetics and the Sartrean Other

Everything we do is a clamouring of I EXIST I EXIST I EXIST; the only thing that changes is who or what we're saying it to.

Posting is not just the practice of self-expression, but the art of exteriorization: we cast ourselves outward, into digital fragments, so that we may be made real to ourselves through the eyes of others.

In Hegel’s theory of aesthetics, art is the process of the Spirit coming to see itself. The aesthetic gesture is a means by which subjectivity externalizes itself in form. In posting, I throw a shard of my consciousness into the public sphere. A symbolic act—a small flare, lit from the edge of myself, tossed into the world. It is meant to be noticed.

But not every externalization rises to the level of art. Hegel draws a crucial distinction between modes of expression: not all forms of communication are aesthetic. For instance, poetry is an art while prose is not. The differentiation is one of function, of intimacy. Prose moves outward: it explains, informs, clarifies. It doesn’t need beauty; it prefers precision. Poetry, on the other hand, reveals. It expresses not only content but also the mode of its appearing. It is a process, it holds movement. The post comes from a person, a profile, who demonstrates their thinking in an act of unfolding, a loose narrative of thoughts and moments. Hegel calls poetry the highest of the arts because it is the most interior—it moves through the medium of language but doesn’t seek to communicate in the way prose does. Instead, it manifests Spirit. It is the Idea made sensuous through rhythm, image, affect. Not a report of thought, but a flowering. Prose is thought that wants to be understood. Poetry is thought that wants to be felt.

This is why I think of posting as poetry. Even when it’s ugly, ironic, or half-formed, posts are fragments of selfhood shaped for visibility that is not meant to inform—it’s meant to hit. A form of compressed Spirit, slanted with emotion, mood, personality. A good post is not a message, but rather a mark or an imprint. It is a performance of becoming. Where prose is coherent and explanatory, posting is elliptical, suggestive, imbued with the logic of lyric. It gestures, spirals, alludes, jokes; it resonates, or sometimes, flops.

The act of posting becomes an art when it transcends communication and becomes expression. It is not just what you say, but how you appear. It’s poetry in the Hegelian sense: an inwardness that has stepped outside of itself and become form, a sensuous image of thought.

And if poetry, for Hegel, is where Spirit most freely articulates itself, then posting is where the digital self becomes briefly alive. Not yet frozen into identity, not yet flattened into prose. It is a flash of inner life distilled into the timeline. But what begins as revelation inevitably becomes recognition—being seen, not as pure Spirit, but as object in another's eyes, a profile on the feed of the Other.

In order to understand this, we must look to Sartre, to the concept of “being-for-the-Other.” To post is to enter the realm of the Look from the Other: the moment I realize that I am being watched, I am no longer a pure subject—the moment where I become an object in another’s field of perception, a subject among subjects. This is a fracture in the self, a moment of alienation. But we crave this moment—we manufacture it, we dress up for it; we pose, caption, post. The art of posting necessarily involves this function—we do it for an audience, to be seen.

But in the digital age, the Look becomes the Like. The Like is the affirmative gaze. It is not merely that we are seen, but that we are seen well. It is a recognition, a virtual nod, an ontological pat on the back: you are not only real, but desirable. I agree with you—a glorious distortion; a trap!

We perform our digital selves in order to receive this kind of recognition. We scroll our own profiles not to relive the past but to re-objectify ourselves. We gaze into the reflection of our virtual selves like a digital Narcissus. The Like, which once served as a symbol of connection, mutates into a kind of currency for being. I post, therefore I am. I am liked, therefore I am valid.

The digital self, in this sense, becomes dangerous not because it's fake, but because it becomes more real to us than our natural or inner self. It becomes a visible, curated mirror that we return to as validation of our existence which we eventually become subservient to. This performativity creates a subtle dread—the self becomes a thing curated for others, and our consciousness hovers permanently between being and seeming. We don't just share ourselves, we sculpt ourselves to be shared.

Over time, the art of posting begins to overtake the structures of our thought. We start to think in tweets, narrate our own lives in the cadence of this medium. A moment is not just a moment—it’s raw material. Experience becomes content-in-waiting. Humour, grief, confusion, awe, even boredom: all are scanned for their postability, anticipating how something might appear once externalized. We start to pre-live our lives from the outside, imagining the view from another side of the screen.

The digital version of ourselves becomes more fluent than the natural one. We curate our virtual selves for tone, coherence, referents. It is legible in a way the natural self rarely is. And slowly, almost imperceptibly, we begin to defer to it. We look to it for confirmation that we are, in fact, the person we believe ourselves to be. We become the editors of our own appearing.

But it’s important to note that this virtual self (our online double) is not false, but rather, strategic. It is not a lie, but it is built. We know this, yet sometimes can’t help but give it more credit than we do the self that stares blankly at the ceiling at night. The digital self transcends our bodies, it circulates in the world. We can shape it be a better, more accurate version of ourselves. It realizes the version of ourselves we aspire towards. It receives recognition, it appears. And in a world where to be is to be seen, this appearance begins to feel like the only version that matters. The internal voice becomes quieter. More and more, we speak back to ourselves in the voice we imagine others hear when they read us. What begins as expression slowly becomes self-direction—not in the name of authenticity, but legibility.

Posting, once a gesture of expression, becomes a loop of self-reinforcement, a recursive mirror. We are the ones performing, yes, but we are also the audience we’re trying to convince. We post not only to be seen—but to believe that we are worth seeing.

Knowing this, posting reveals itself not just as poetic, but as tragic poetry. We reach for transcendence but grasp only its simulation. We speak in symbols, moods, screenshots, or photos, hoping someone will recognize the shape of our inner lives through these signs. We hope to be seen, to be decoded, not just looked at.

The tragedy lies in the asymmetry: the post is an offering of self, but only received in fragments. The self is externalized in symbols too flimsy to bear its full weight. We craft gestures of intimacy that are processed as noise, content, as ephemera. The full context of ourselves is never delivered along with it.

To post is to hope that someone else can reconstruct the whole from the fragment, but all they ever receive is the shard. What we offer as expression is consumed as surface.

Still, we engage the act as if reflexive habit. We keep performing the gesture, knowing it will fail (maybe if we offer more, the Other will receive a fuller picture of ourselves). That is the tragedy—not that it doesn't work, but that it almost works; that once in a while, someone does understand. Someone sees it, replies in kind, offers their own fragment in return. That fleeting sense of recognition is enough to keep the performance alive.

Tragic poetry is not merely about suffering; it’s about futility and resignation. We know this loop won't save us, that it isn’t real contact. Still, we place our marks on the timeline and hope someone will feel them and say: I know what you mean.

But even that is not presence, intimacy, or recognition. The post is always a delay, a translation, a rendering. We don’t meet in the moment — we meet in the lag between gesture and response. And maybe that’s the most poetic thing about it: the digital lyric is always addressed to a You who might never arrive.

Our impulse to post is an extension of our self-curation, the aesthetic gesture of our age. It is the Spirit trying, again and again, to see itself in the screen of the Other. It’s the modern lyric: fragmentary, reflexive, and always-already addressed to someone who may or may not be looking. (They must be looking, surely.)