Sea of Elvis
According to Slate's Christina Bonnington, the "battle for the cartoon me" is in progress: Which service will I use to make myself into an emoji? Memoji? Bitmoji? AR Emoji? Zmoji? I'm not especially eager to become the battlefield in this war — I find cartoon avatars creepy and threatening, probably in part because they try so hard to make everyone cute. As Sianne Ngai argues, cuteness is a "way of aestheticizing powerlessness. It hinges on a sentimental attitude toward the diminutive and/or weak." This makes cartoon avatars an emblem of our helplessness in the midst of social media.
I suppose digital avatars are supposed to be "fun" but when I see them, I see a flamboyantly disguised rage; they seem like ghoulish Halloween masks, as if people were wearing a mask of their own face over their face. The struggle for market share in the "digital-avatar space," Bonnington reports, is leading toward ever more realistic cartoon selves. Where once users might have built their avatar by selecting from menu options, now they are being derived from captured images of their actual face, manipulated to seem broadly cartoony and amenable to animation — a ventriloquist's-dummy version of the self. This make me think of the deranged dummy in the 1978 movie Magic, or Conky from Trailer Park Boys. It seems inherently creepy to me to operate a puppet made in your own likeness. Typically evil dummies can say the things their operators can't allow themselves to say. They speak honestly; they become more "authentic" then the flesh and blood behind them, as though we need duplicates of ourselves to reveal ourselves to ourselves.
The logic of digital mannequins leads beyond ultra-realistic faces to entire bodies. Brud — the company responsible for Lil Miquela, the Instagram influencer created entirely with CGI — is rumored to be developing a "social network where anyone with an iPhone can create, dress, and promote his or her own personal CGI model."
This sort of self-duplicative play is regarded as a good thing because personalization and customization are forms of self-expression, and self-expression is good because it supposedly indexes our level of freedom. "As emoji have become more detailed, nuanced, and integral to our digital messaging, phone and app makers are striving to give us even more control over this experience with customizable features," Bonnington writes. "Customization and personalization have been big themes in general across the smartphone and consumer electronics space this year."
Of course, customization and personalization are "big themes" across all consumer-goods markets, as they have been for decades. Consumerism is basically synonymous with personalization — buying things as a form of self-expression. Shoshana Zuboff identifies personalization and customization as watchwords of emerging surveillance capitalism. Though Google et al. see personalization as a way to make data gathering a fair exchange, a quid pro quo for those who are surveilled, Zuboff argues that these techniques "are not the objects of a value exchange. They do not establish constructive producer-consumer reciprocities. Instead they are the 'hooks' that lure users into extractive operations and turn ordinary life into the daily renewal of a Faustian pact." Personalization, in its guise of efficiency, leads to "a psychic numbing that inures people to the realities of being tracked, parsed, mined, and modified."
So perhaps to say, as Bonnington does, that phone and app makers are "giving us more control" is misleading. It conflates agency with the making of rote choices from among options those companies control. The more elaborate the menus are, the more control the app maker has, not you. It resembles the way social media platforms have always worked: Having the expanded means to "express yourself" within a captured space simply permits more exploitation, not more consumer agency. Personalization, like most forms of participation, is a mode of conformity.
Digitizing one's self-image seems less self-expression than self-estrangement. You can play with your own voodoo doll, fashion your own portrait of yourself as Dorian Grey, but the faithfully rendered cartoon image of oneself is not a liberated self —not some winged fantasy from Second Life, where one can be ten feet tall or be a pegasus or whatever — but a disciplined self, a version fashioned explicitly for the limitations and expectations of digital communication.
Making a digital avatar of oneself suggests a willingness to accommodate the network, to become a simplified piece of information so that you can circulate with less friction. Digital avatars streamline the self into a signal, an emblem, making it possible to circulate the self without bogging it down with too much personality or "content." Like selfies, they are sort of zero degree of personal expression: Selfies are something to post when you have nothing in particular to say; digital avatars are selfies with their habitus-signalling capabilities muted. The avatar seems to have much less capacity to show off cultural capital, tending toward a kind generic amiability. They point to a fantasy about being able to appear as "unique" without having to commit to anything too specific.
***
The advent of printing, Elizabeth Eisenstein points out in The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, made it possible to have a famous face. Before printing, "even artists’ self-portraits were deprived of individuality" and "the figure at the desk or the robed scholar holding a book became simply an impersonal symbol of the author at large." The shift to print disseminated these stock icons, which "were subject to a greater degree of standardization and multiplied by woodcuts and engravings." But at the same time, as "the self-portrait acquired a new permanence" in print, "a heightened appreciation of individuality accompanied increased standardization and there was a new deliberate promotion by publishers and print dealers of those authors and artists whose works they hoped to sell."
Authors could appear as distinct personages only against a backdrop of standardization, and only after exact duplication of their likeness became possible through printing. When authors became brands, their face became a logo. Branding comes before individuality. This echoes a point Eisenstein makes earlier in the book: "Concepts pertaining to uniformity and to diversity — to the typical and to the unique — are interdependent. They represent two sides of the same coin. In this regard one might consider the emergence of a new sense of individualism as a by-product of the new forms of standardization. The more standardized the type, indeed, the more compelling the sense of an idiosyncratic personal self."
Without an established standard — a ground against which the individual can be discerned — individuality just appears as entropy, as random noise. Individuality doesn't have some inherent meaning in and of itself; to value individuality is not to value difference but the sameness that makes it stand out.
This means that uniqueness doesn't translate into the sort of individuality we have been trained to want. Eisenstein argues that books produced by an individual scribe — as unique an artifact as there can be — were and remain entirely impersonal, unfathomable in their unrepeatable singularity. Printed books, on the other hand, allow for distinct personalities to be preserved through duplication and redundancy. Similarly, social media profiles and avatars can seem to capture us individuals because of how formatted and standardized they are. The amount of control they exercise over our personal expression is what allows us to experience that expression as personal.
Individualism is often represented in advertising as a form of resistance — a way to beat the forces of conformity out there that for some reason want you to be like everyone else instead of a unique and creative person. But individualism validates efforts to impose standardization, and becomes the alibi for how those standards can be exclusionary. This is how xenophobes can treasure individuality while rejecting diversity.
***
One morning I was driving down the shore in Delaware and I heard Jaron Lanier on NPR claiming that "people are starved for reality." It seemed both a misleading and reassuring conclusion, to suggest that reality might somehow exist outside of technological mediation. But media don't represent (and thereby distort) reality; they are reality. We exist within them. No experience we have is any more real than any other, regardless of how many devices and screens are involved.
Lanier argues that media technology has been designed to exploit our neurological vulnerabilities to manipulate our behavior. This reduces us to our irrational desires for stimulation instead of nurturing our rational interest in substantive information. I tend to be more pessimistic than that; I think we deceive ourselves more than we are manipulated by technology. We aren't tricked into shutting our rational minds off; we instead choose to rationally pursue information that shelters us from realities we don't want to accept. Though this makes us isolated, vulnerable, and readily scammed, it doesn't make us starved for reality. "Reality" is not a fix for media.
In Dead Elvis (1991), Greil Marcus focuses in on Ed McClanahan's account of an Elvis impersonator from his book Famous People I Have Known:
Elvis made people want something; when he couldn’t give it, they still wanted it and, in stray moments, fakes could provide it, and make the people who got it feel confirmed. Watching from his seat in the bar, McClanahan writes out the truth that a representation can make people feel as deeply as whatever it is the representation represents...
What Elvis did was not only thrilling, it was painful. With every true seizure of desire, every fan had to give up something just as valuable: the comfort of rules ... Elvis himself took no prisoners: he released you into the world. The Elvis imitator, himself the prisoner of a representation he never made, makes you love your chains. “If only, if only,” he makes you say—and all the emotions of release come forth. But Elvis did not say “if only.’’ In his best music he destroyed the qualifier, and replaced it with a negation that was also an affirmation: your life is empty, but there is another life. It was thrilling and terrifying—no wonder so many prefer the Elvis imitator to Elvis, irreducible in his absolute subjectivity.
In that passage, Marcus makes Elvis a talisman of the real, which is equated with "absolute subjectivity" — a sense of agency and mastery of oneself. But in his account, this is too much for people to handle. We'd rather have "the comfort of rules" than face our "empty lives." It's tempting to say too that we would rather have digital avatars than the idea of "another life."
When I was at Graceland last summer, one of the things that struck me the most was a stack of Elvis's books among the other ephemera: one was on color therapy, one was on the human aura, some were bible studies, one was a novelization of the film The Omen. One of the books, The Initiation of the World by spiritualist Vera Stanley Adler, was opened to display to visitors how Elvis liked to underline passages. See? He really could read!
I took a picture of what he underlined: "The result of Pain ... is awareness, reaction, adaptability, modification, originality, genius—EPIGENESIS." I don't know what that is supposed to mean, but through a feat of delusional identification that Marcus thinks is impossible, I can imagine why Elvis was drawn to it. In his absolute subjectivity, he had become a cipher to himself, with pain as the only indication of his having a private self, a separate consciousness. Like the child in The Omen he must have felt himself marked, singled out of all the world for a demonic power over others. As he became the most recognizable brand in the world, he became flattened out and diluted, readily imitated by thousands yet wholly imprisoned in his singularity. Of all the Elvis impersonators, he was the least successful.