Here’s a hypothetical: a man walks into a bar, buys a drink, and starts reading from a paperback copy of David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest.” He could very well be reading “Moby-Dick” or “Gravity’s Rainbow” or “Middlemarch,” but, for the sake of this setup, let’s say it’s Wallace’s 1996 novel, with its thousand-plus pages and hundreds of endnotes and the ghosts of a million bespectacled graduate students whispering, “You know it’s got a nonlinear plot, right?” To the severely online, this guy is not simply enjoying a good book in the company of strangers but participating in the practice of “performative reading,” a concept that’s recently gained a curious notoriety. A performative reader treats books like accessories, lugging around canonical texts as a ploy to attract a romantic partner or as a way to revel in the pleasure of feeling superior to others. While everyone else is scrolling social media and silencing life with noise-cancelling headphones, the performative reader insists upon his intelligence with attention-seeking insincerity, begging to be noticed with the aid of a big, look-at-me, capital-“B” book.

This way of perceiving social reality—and particularly a person’s reading life—may seem inane, even deranged. But performative reading has firmly implanted itself into the popular imagination, becoming a meme for a generation of people who, by all accounts, aren’t reading a whole lot of books. On TikTok and Instagram, users post short-form videos to satirize the affectations of the performative reader, who is usually male: a twentysomething guy in an oversized sweater vest, reading two hardcovers at once while descending an escalator; a scarf-donning dude at a café, reading a book upside down; a guy sitting at an outdoor patio, glancing up to see who’s watching him annotate a text. Similarly, on X, the ruse of performative reading has come to mask a more earnest quest: to share one’s actual passion for books while also seeming in on the joke. (It’s not uncommon for a user to post a picture of himself reading a heady book with a preëmptive “I’m a performative reader” caption.) These posts function, in part, as an ironic foil to the way that influencers and celebrities have come to wield physical books as material signals of taste, hiring “book stylists” to provide them with novels for vacation photographs and social-media posts, to curate their at-home libraries and name-branded book clubs. Performative reading has emerged as a suspicious activity not because reading books is suspect but because being beheld reading a book is understood to be yet another way for one to market himself, to portray to the world that he is indeed deeper and more expansive than his craven need for attention—demonstrated by reading a difficult book in public—suggests.

When did life become a landmine of possible performative gestures? There’s activism and performative activism, masculinity and performative masculinity, positivity and performative positivity—et cetera, ad nauseam. Are these neologisms diagnosing modern phenomena or illuminating preëxisting cultural realities? If all human activity can be measured on a spectrum of authenticity and performativity, what metrics can we use to weed out the genuine from the fabricated? Will we just know? And why do we care? If our culture of liberal individualism demands anything of us, it is to be, above all else, authentic. To be seen as a poseur or a phony—a person who affects rather than is—violates some nebulous code of acceptable self-cultivation. No one wants to be perceived as the person at the skate park with all the right gear but none of the right lingo, the fan at the concert who doesn’t know any of the lyrics, or, worse, the political protester who spends hours making a quippy sign but doesn’t know the name of their district representative. If our authenticity is questioned—if we are caught pretending and playacting—what ground do we have left to stand on? If we are deemed inauthentic, how can we stand for anything at all? Conversely, if everything is potentially performative, how will we ever work up the courage to step outside of our sphere of normal, to risk being earnest and cringe, and experience something transformative?

Performing personhood has perhaps never been as panoptical, and top of mind, as it is today. Social-media platforms prioritize the fastidious maintenance and monitoring of online personas, creating spaces where identity construction is central to the user experience. But how is one to authentically represent themselves online? Unlike offline reality, where spontaneous and unrehearsed human expression is not only possible but inevitable, a life online is always reminded of its own artifice. To post is to calculate, deliberate, manipulate—performance is built into the experience, whether the poster is aware of this dynamic or not. This explains why unflinchingly earnest content rarely flies on social media; does the poster not see that simply by posting, they are revealing themselves to be image-conscious and vain? A chief reason that “virtue signalling” became so hotly contested in the mid-twenty-tens was not just because it was in bad taste to express passive, entirely gestural solidarity with a political issue but because the broader mores of social-media use had begun to shift dramatically. It was no longer normative to post a photo of your breakfast, or to write an Instagram caption about how much you loved your mom on International Women’s Day. Suddenly, any type of unironic persona-forward material entered the hall of mirrors of performativity criticism. These days, users can avoid being labelled as performative by imbuing content with the metatextual awareness that they are, in some way, aware of the performance. But it is still impossible to fully ignore the spectre of performativity on social media, despite the apps’ assertion that they are organic breeding grounds for genuine human expression. (Instagram’s mission statement claims its purpose is to bring “you closer to the people and the things you love”; TikTok says that its platform allows users to “unleash their creativity and share authentic stories.”)

Conceptions of authenticity and sincerity have dominated Western thought since the Enlightenment, a period in which Immanuel Kant argued that individuals should be free to pursue knowledge as a means to better understand the human condition, and thus their authentic selves. (“The motto of Enlightenment is therefore: Sapere aude!,” Kant wrote. “Have courage to use your own understanding.”) Kant’s belief that “a constant critique of the world around us and of ourselves,” per the scholar Anita Seppä, afforded individuals the ability to “reach a more mature stage of existence and individual autonomy.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau was more sensitive to the mystical nature of existence, contending that genuine selfhood emerged from within and was not entirely relational; the true self was a natural, fixed thing that could in turn be malleably expressed out into the world. Few philosophies speak as saliently to our current culture of self-absorption as this post-Enlightenment obsession with authenticity; the guiding promise of the American project is to free individual humans from undue constraint and control, allowing them to discover their true selves and do anything that they put their mind to, regardless of their religion, race, gender, or class background. This promise, despite centuries of unequal fulfillment, still fuels the sputtering engine of American mythology.

Such an absolutist vision of individualism, however, undermines the systemic conditions that inform our relationship with the world, and ourselves. If we are to believe that the purpose of our lives is to unearth and express an authentic version of our true natures, we risk ignoring the myriad associations and forces that determine how we conceive of these premises in the first place. The philosopher Michel Foucault questioned this abiding belief that self-expression leads to liberation, advocating instead for an end to “all these forms of individuality, of subjectivity, of consciousness, of the ego, on which we have built and from which we have tried to build and to constitute knowledge.” Foucault argued that such idealism distracts the individual from grappling with, and critiquing, the power structures that lay claim to their actual freedoms—health care, reproductive rights, education, gender identity, and economic equality among them—which remain under the direction of a “biopower,” a term Foucault used to denote state and social institutions that organize and control a population.

In this view, the performative-reading phenomenon appears less like a newfangled way of calling people pretentious and more like an odious reflection of society’s increasing deprioritization of the written word. Reading a book is antithetical to scrolling; online platforms cannot replicate the slow, patient, and complex experience of reading a weighty novel. This is especially revealing because social media can replicate other art-consuming experiences for users: one could exclusively listen to music, look at visual art, or watch film clips via TikTok or Instagram and reasonably (if not depressingly) claim to have a relationship with these mediums—authentic relationships, fostered with the help of an app. The only way that an internet mind can understand a person reading a certain kind of book in public is through the prism of how it would appear on a feed: as a grotesquely performative posture, a false and self-flattering manipulation, or a desperate attempt to attract a romantic partner.

It’s hard to ignore that the performative-reading discourse is occurring just as literacy rates in America decline. The reports are grim: Americans read for pleasure forty per cent less than they did twenty years ago, and forty per cent of fourth graders lack basic reading comprehension. Humanities professors at élite colleges bemoan their students’ inability to not only read complete texts but also to analyze shorter excerpts. The rise in artificial intelligence compounds the problem, with programs like ChatGPT threatening to nullify the need to learn how to manually research and synthesize information, and then to process and analyze that information through writing. Universities are brokering deals with companies like OpenAI to introduce chatbots into their students’ curricula and, all the while, slashing their humanities departments. The foundational values of the humanities—critical thinking, philosophical inquiry, media literacy, moral development, creative and complex problem solving—will surely suffer, if not vanish, in this new era of the corporate university. And if higher education has given up on reading, how could we possibly blame the individual for doing the same?

The irony of “Infinite Jest” becoming prime performative-reading material is that it is a novel perfectly suited to address our current cultural conundrums. Wallace depicts a politically volatile corporate dystopia on the brink of environmental collapse, an existential reality its characters seldom seem to recognize. To escape from the horrors of the external world—and the indistinguishable ways in which the external world influences one’s inner life—characters turn to drugs and alcohol, intensive sports training, and excessive media consumption, the latter of which is dramatized by a digitized entertainment cartridge so powerful that it vegetates anyone who views it. “Infinite Jest” is a novel obsessed with the shared solitude of contemporary life, of the loneliness and lack of meaning endemic to consumerism and market capitalism. Wallace argues, as he does throughout his œuvre, that salvation arrives through careful attention, through sacrificing one’s myopic sense of self to something larger, holier, more expansive. In Wallace’s personal life, this sacrifice came, in part, by reading books, a practice he feared was losing its moral imperative in an age of constant, inescapable stimulation. “Reading requires sitting alone, by yourself, in a quiet room,” he said in a 2003 interview. “I have friends, intelligent friends, who don’t like to read because they get—it’s not just bored. There’s an almost dread that comes up.” If our screens are adept at anything, it’s allaying this dread, convincing us to scroll until the loneliness goes away. Perhaps the performative reader is doing just that—performing, wielding a book for a perpetual, undying audience. Or maybe they’re leaning into the dread that Wallace spoke of, hoping to discover who they really are once the curtains close. ♦