The compulsive protagonism of his digital persona is certainly Warholian in spirit, sustained as it is by an era of open access that makes simulation prevail on any form of authentic representation. Likewise, he makes the digital and the performative modes overlap in his self-portrait as a gay Internet artist. As a result, his life on-line is wittily presented as a locus of critique and self-critique of mobile personalities who perceive themselves as performative creations in progress rather than as individuals per se.ģ It is quite clear how Bernstein’s morphic perception of digital subjectivities lyrically reformulates the post-gender model established by Judith Butler in her discussion of queer subjectivities. In his doubly critical and creative incarnations, Felix ironically portrays his poetic alter-ego Leopold Brant as a master of artifice and pretension, who turns his fragilities into a competent management of his public persona and is ready to design, at this advanced stage of videoculture, a convincing public image that candidly admits the importance to “make strategic friendships, put certain people forward, pretend to like the statuses of idiots who write constantly on Facebook…press the like button… pretend to be in control-as the stager and the staged” (24).
Nevertheless, in Felix Bernstein’s works, the new confessionalism developed in digital communication seems crucial to inaugurate a new poetics, well aware that the obsessive act of daily restyling of one’s own self-image on line does not coincide with the interior process of building an identity, the way in which psychoanalysts and theorists of the unconscious conceived it in modern times.Ģ The youth described and parodied by Felix Bernstein is consciously fame-struck and celebrity-obsessed, and often agrees to limit its existential space to a performative act that mimics the broader domain of the spectacle. Bernstein adopts the Woolfian metaphor of “the death of the moth” 1 to describe the fatal attraction of the 2.0 generation to the ephemeral lights of the social networks, that promise an instant visibility, despite the many risks of overexposure of youth and the dangers of being quickly consumed and discarded by predatory voyeurism. All of them embrace a gender fluidity and the new confessionalism absorbed in internet chats and in the autobiographical process of creating and updating their Facebook profiles.
His first book of poetry, Burn Book, in many ways, exemplifies the poetics announced in Notes on Post-Conceptual Poetry, so that the two books mirror each other in their circulation of a composite, “hipster” style unwilling to “become the new master discourse” (2016 89) that identifies the generation of “post-conceptual” poets that the author partakes of, along with Ryan Trecartin, Eva Ionesco, Cory Arcangel, Lonely Christopher, Cecilia Corrigan, and Andrew Durbin. 1 Felix Bernstein’s “queer” style does not define a specific sexual orientation but hints at the hybrid, Internet aesthetic that informs his poetry and critical writings.
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