Mitchell Grafton, Updating Vermeer. 2012

We are at the end of an era characterized by the self-portrait. This claim is not provocative—we’ve lived as characters for some time and have all felt it coming. So let me rephrase, we live at the end of an era characterized by relentless anxiety around the self as a product: what it means, who owns it, what it costs, what it’s worth. The word celebrity suggests that this value can be quantified and, generally, stands as a catch-all term for the collective disorders (disembodied  desire, objectified anxiety, schadenfreude as catharsis) underpinning a cult of self. As two of the leading lights in male egomania, Elon Musk and Kanye West, enter ecliptic phases of digital self-harm, we see that a long-standing crisis is coming to the fore of the treatment of ourselves as characters. The similarity of their breakdowns is uncanny and no doubt representative of a broader crisis in charismatic authority nationwide. Like failed children of the Lacanian mirror stage, the reflection of their own, simplified self-image precipitates a meltdown instead of a progression.

Yet this era was heralded years earlier, in 2007, when Britney Spears shaved her head and the onlooking public could only digest it as hysterical—the most misogynistic of characterizations. It now feels avant-garde: she assassinated her own character. Indeed, she reclaimed her self as something more than just a brand or commodity. By attacking her appearance (her hair, the root of so much aesthetic femininity) she drew attention to the ways in which our society attaches identity to women. In 2018, the ambivalence toward how to treat one’s digital self, how to create one’s “character,” is a particularly unwieldy knot for women. The collapse of the critical space between one’s personality and one’s online persona erases the distinction between self-expression and self-promotion. Every post now seems to fall into a dangerous trap.

We are currently confronted with questions that, until recently, seemed behind us. Is asserting self-love affirming and feminist, or is it playing into age-old misogynist reductions of women as fetish objects? Where do hashtag trends like “I woke up like this” and “celebrities without makeup” quite fit in? Do they acknowledge the pressures that women face in a gendered society, or do they simply obscure the means of beauty’s production? To break past this surface we must ask: where is the work? I mean, really, who seems to work anymore? All we see is women on vacation—cooly “off duty” in the day, beguilingly gowned at night. Studios and offices serve as backdrops for fashion shoots, not meaningful loci of productivity. All these women “woke up like this”: capturing and captioning themselves from the moment the dawn light began streaming in.

Consuming these images is stultifying. To be digitally femme means to bathe anxiously in the images of others and act impotently in response, liking a photo or congratulating others on their beauty. More stultifying is that this is done in spite of knowing the effort that went into each composition. The selfie is a cover-up, hiding both the means of its own production and the true self.  Read More