THE NAKED SELFIE
”Like every mass art form, photography is not practiced by most people as an art. It is mainly a social rite, a defence against anxiety, and a tool of power.” (Susan Sontag, On Photography)
I, too, have experienced the impulse to transmit my body to others, to hold up the phone and scan it as a document. What motivates me to perform this action? If it were merely to record my presence, my existence, why would I strip down to the bone to do so? I have perhaps reached a point where I feel I have nothing to lose.
My middle-aged bulk, drilled into a structure that might lie somewhere on the spectrum of beauty standards endorsed by the gay community and my own conditioned ideas of what it might mean to be a sexual object.
I copycat the behaviour of my role models in the hope that I am identified with a particular crowd. It works and similar men message me, as if talking to themselves in the mirror. I find it hard to establish the object on screen as myself; it is an image, a replicant of an existing template.
Maria Callas once stated that the media created idols only to destroy them. A sacrificial cycle so we can then canonise them into immortality. Is this the hope that lies behind so many selfies, offered up as click bait to the toxic arenas of social media? For some, the digital age of the influencer has cheapened the concept of celebrity. A once exclusive realm bestowed on the wealthy, talented, beautiful and notorious has been democratised to include us all, as we eagerly commodify and disseminate ourselves as 15 minute wonders across the internet.
As humans we seem to need icons: role models that might govern our behaviour. These figures embody various ideologies, (ideas not only about political structures, but moral values, cultural roles, psychologies, aesthetics etc). One of the problems traditional totems have faced in the postwar age of mass media is maintaining their authority or mystique on such matters. This exercise has become increasingly difficult to carry out as media has accelerated in its temporal and spatial ubiquity from the early paparazzi press, through twenty-four hour news cycles, to the seeming apotheosis of the internet. Cynical and wary of institutions, we now take the law (the Wild West of New Media) into our own hands, quite literally, to participate in this enquiry.
In The Golden Bough James George Frazer describes in one chapter, “The Burden of Royalty”, how the designated “king” is denied a normal social life and is treated as a fetish. As they are incarcerated and subjected to strict taboos, unable to see sun or moon, their body either untouchable or ritually cleansed, their very movements statuesque or divine in nature, they become public property with no life of their own. A nexus for community desires and fears; venerated when times are good and sacrificed when times are bad.
The anthropological analogies between such tribal fetishism and celebrity culture are easy to map and we seem to be seeking a similar catharsis through the act of the naked selfie. We offer ourselves up as demi-gods to be worshipped and potentially destroyed in a public act of self-immolation. We strip our privacy away with our clothes, to let the toxic masses invade our psyche, with their ridicule, judgement and envy.
No longer a person but an image, primarily a sexual image, a replication of some mediated ideal that we have managed to perfect, that can sometimes include lifestyle, wealth, style and attitude as integral contexts to our body-image. We hold ourselves up as successful copies of the totem, and as templates to inspire others.
It is an act of front: to display a lack of insecurity about our physical self. Though when analysed, this could be an overcompensating gesture revealing just that. An inner fear that we are not beautiful or successful enough, and the very act reassures us we are culturally worthy.
There is some process of collective grooming at work here as we slowly commodify ourselves into sex objects. We slave in the gym and then document the results. The most extreme manifestation of the process are the cruising apps; a factory processing fuck-boy physiques through its relentless meat grinder. A strange slow-motion scopophilic orgy as we collectively manifest a group sexual energy around our ecstatic phones.
In the middle of this bloodlust, the phone held aloft, like a trophy, a pitiless eye with an algorithm brain, framing and disseminating my figure. The gesture of the photographer-sender seamlessly interlinked with the gesture of the viewer-receiver holding a similar device to access and participate in this ritual. We caress and tap the body on screen, to offer our approval, condemnation, indifference, through slogans and symbols like scrawling graffiti on a toilet cubicle. We hold the body in our hand as if we have taken the photo of the sex object ourselves. This illusion of possession is another component in our compulsion to interact with as many bodies as possible.
Have I confused private and public space? An intimate moment now in general circulation. Is there a thrill within that transgression? My shameless narcissism not only confessed, but widely broadcast. The cool collascence of circuitry, plastic and glass housing our feverish desires, ambitions and aggressions. We protectively cup the precious feed in our hands, and yet it is shared between thousands. Something taboo cathartically released, not only pornography, but racist invective, terrorist ideology, suicidal ideation, animal cruelty, snuff video or just a classic flame war over nothing. We rise and hold up the same instrument to the mirror to participate in the same trial by ordeal.
Is it a socio-political statement, all too characteristic of social media? Tropes such as the selfie, indicate a rejection of the shame associated in the unmitigated worship or promotion of the self. I rip away any intellectual personality to become pure body-object, and embrace superficial values of sexual individualism rather political consciousness.
Is the combination of mirror and phone some kind of portal to actualisation, to the collective, to an ecstatic surrender with a greater self? The surfaces are seductive luminous interrelations where we can wonder and leap through time and space in an endless game of primal therapy.
