The general drift is a mere activity in a certain direction
In her obituary for dancer and choreographer Ann Reinking, Helen Shaw mentions that "Reinking actually had to audition for the role of herself in All That Jazz, Bob Fosse’s 1979 semi-autobiographical film about a Broadway choreographer (played by Roy Scheider) stretching himself too thin." This immediately struck me as a metaphor for basically everything I tend to write about: the production of the self, "authenticity" as an alibi, identity reified as capital, mediation as a mode of production, reality TV and social media as ideological operating systems or means of formatting everyday life, and so on and so on. How hard did she prepare for that tryout?
It seems significant that Fosse does not play himself in the movie he made about himself; we generally audition to play ourselves not in the stories of our own lives but in the life stories of others. When we begin to mediate our own lives on various platforms, we generate similar casting calls, serially auditioning everyone we know, again and again, inviting them to figure out how to play themselves as a character in our lives. But we don't typically have the luxury of making something semi- rather than fully autobiographical; the veneer of fictionality, the production of critical distance from your own life story that can give it a kind of pseudo-objectivity, requires power. If you can afford to, you can hire someone to be you the way you want to be. Most of us lack those sort of resources. More often than not, we have to audition for ourselves too.
It's a privilege to not have to play yourself; it means that you can simply be yourself, or at least tell yourself that it is so. It means that you take representation, recognition, the reality of who you are and who you seem to be for granted. You don't have to insist on your own significance in your own voice; an entire culture speaks it to you. There is no need to pass any auditions, no need for autobiography. The story seems to tell itself. But it seems that most people are not that fully present to themselves. We fail at our own auditions; we find our own self-performances lacking in credibility, not particularly convincing, likely to be better performed by someone else. It's easier to consume other selves vicariously, find fulfillment in their mastery of the form.
Natalie Beach sounds a similar note of displacement in this account of her relationship with Instagram influencer Caroline Calloway: "When I was a sophomore in college, I took a creative-nonfiction workshop and met a girl who was everything I wasn’t. The point of the class was to learn to write your own story, but from the moment we met, I focused instead on helping her tell her own." Calloway would go on to show Beach that Instagram was the relevant medium for creative nonfiction and that the platform itself could be treated as a workshop in narrative methods; Beach in turn would help her script a character and a plot so that Calloway could convincingly and profitably play herself. Having an accomplice in the project may have helped defer any concerns about self-alienation, "inauthenticity," or self-exploitation, since after all, someone else was being exploited: Beach recalls writing in her journal from the time, "I am beginning to feel like a child or an unpaid intern."
In an essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Sarah Brouillette argues that the fact that "Calloway did not properly credit [Beach's] work is worth noting. Obscuring the help provided by others, or subtly indicating, as a sign of status, that you are able to get others to work for you for free, is part of the social media influencer toolkit: make it look effortless, like an expression of your inner life, something you do not as a paying job or as a boss, but simply because of who you are." In the influencer economy, having someone else do the work of creating your story makes you more rather than less "authentic." Effortlessness — the intoxicating illusion of being so fully present to yourself that you lack the distance to perceive your own story from someone else's point of view and must recruit others to narrate you — is the base currency, but it is not taken at face value: Just as any experience of convenience has the inconvenience of others built into it as part of the "pleasure" that it affords, so does effortlessness signify how effort has been displaced onto someone else. When something as intimate as personal identity is involved in the displacement, the effortlessness and the self-disinterestedness become even more impressive.
This alienation is the inevitable result of self-creation no longer being a practice performed for its own sake (if ever it was so autonomous) but as a media strategy for maintaining economic viability. You don't "become who you are" because that process is intrinsically rewarding; that's for suckers. You find ways to make such people contribute to "who you are" and add to the brand equity of that piece of property.
Similarly, algorithmic curation, which also assumes some of the labor of uncovering who you are, can be understood as supporting the impression that "being ourselves" can be or should be effortless. It allows anyone to feel that massive data power has been placed at their disposal to do the work of synthesizing selfhood for them — the automated equivalent of our own ghostwriter. It helps sustain the feeling that we are most present to ourselves when the work of being ourselves is outsourced. Rather than audition to play ourselves, we can opt to play no role at all and be a spectator instead, applauding as our self comes into view.
The influencer's subject position also illustrates how "self-promotion" changes when it becomes more literalized — when it is not a matter of promoting things that are sold separately but of promoting the act of self-promotion itself as the product. Calloway, for instance, is presumed to be working on a book called Scammer, but whether the book is ever published is irrelevant to what in effect has become her perpetual book tour. As Brouillette points out, "Even if her book is never published, that failure is content for her social media platforms, where one primary source of her self-branding activity is the idea that she’s an inveterate con artist who is just fooling around."
Self-promotion is not when the self promotes something it has made or some quality it possesses but is instead simply the constitution of the self through the modality of promotion. Self-promotion serves to bring the self into being. When Beach was writing copy for Calloway's Instagram, it was "self-promotion."
I'm often tempted to believe that when influencers make the self or their experience into a product, the self that's put on display automatically implies the existence of some "real" self set back in the shadows, the puppet master controlling the show. There has to be some side of the self that judges whether the displayed self passes its own audition; that judging self presumably remains off-screen and is in some ways secured by the front of the performing self. But as Crystal Abidin's idea of "porous authenticity" suggests, that may simply be part of the larger illusion: "An audience is enticed into trying to evaluate and validate how genuine a persona is by following the feedback loop across the front stage of social media and the backstage of 'real life,' through inconspicuous and scattered holes or gateways that were intentionally left as trails for the curious." Front- and backstage collapse into an infinite regress.
In this essay about Putin adviser Vladimir Surkov, James Dixon (drawing on a 2008 lecture by Boris Groys) argues that successful "self-design" demands we "neutralize suspicion by affirming it." That is, "only when we feel we have seen beneath the surface, and glimpsed the ugly truth is our faith restored." But this is not a matter of planting a false bombshell of sorts to be found so that real ones may remain undetected, as in The Guns of Navarone. Instead, Surkov's idea is to plant so many false bombs that the enemy (or the target market, or your constituents, etc.) is convinced there isn't a real one worth looking for. This outcome effectively does more desired damage than triggering a real bomb. Surkov's "frank dissemination of ambiguous and contradictory statements, fiction, humor, honesty, heresy ... swamps any existing narrative, defamiliarizing the entire landscape and in the process and undermining trust in any existing information structure."
If you think of the "real self" as the "real bomb," you can draw the conclusion that it is more effective, more lucrative, to proceed without one so that one is all the more flexible when it comes to creating the "false" effects of a self at any given moment. You can be more influential in more situations that way; you are capable of being whatever is called for in a particular opportunity. So no "real self" pulls the strings for a "false" one; there is just a set of tactics that has become "the self" and which can be deployed by surrogates on one's behalf. The degree to which you are committed to a "real self" is the degree to which you are stuck auditioning or ghostwriting, even if it is for yourself.
The apotheosis of this approach is the fully synthetic influencer, like Lil Miquela: animated by a team of brand strategists and ready to be deployed on behalf of any other brands. Lil Miquela can never not be authentic. The point though is not that such creations will replace human influencers; it's that human influencers will themselves become synthetic. It is like the cliche about the Turing test really being meant for humans, or the often-made point that automation doesn't substitute for human labor so much as force us to behave in machine-like ways. We're not the ones who've been teaching the robot, the robot's the one's been teaching us.
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For a long time now, I’ve argued that social media incentivize (and then ultimately compel) the production of the self as a commodity; that is, I've been stuck on the supply side of the influencer economy. It seemed important then to point out a phenomenon that now is taken for granted: that posting to platforms isn't "sharing"; it's a kind of "unpaid gig work in the form of self-publishing," as Brouillette points out. The rise of influencers is indicative of how these practices of ritual self-promotion have been normalized, if not glamorized. They are also a harbinger. It seems as though most forms of work will eventually be influencerized, and workers will have to leverage their personality, their “personal brand,” to get work or to perform it up to managerial expectations. Taylor Lorenz details here how this is already happening in journalism.
Over the past decade, it's become second nature that most social media platforms are for hustling, not for self-expression or identity (which is at best an alibi). They are "a place for creators." The rise of the term creator — which subsumes and expands the category of influencer — feels like a piece of spontaneous ideology, modulating the sense that nearly everyone seems to be in the process of professionalizing their personality and selling themselves out. It compensates for the inability to imagine a form of creativity that isn't already governed by the market. Yes, artists made art, but art belongs to the past. Creators make content, which is the present and future of culture.
Yet in recognizing how the reserve army of potential "creators" is being ever expanded, we shouldn't overlook the demand side — that is, how the demand for "content" as such has been manufactured, and how the sorts of subjects who take pleasure in "content" have been constituted. Brouillette notes that creators
are serving a new kind of consumer, too ... who is drawn less to physical paperbound books and more to free content with options added, like that $100 personal phone call, and to the kinds of subscription-based services that reduce the risk of disappointment if you don’t get what you paid for.
In that passage, Brouillette seems to have in mind what's been called the "creator economy": the suite of platforms that allow users to monetize their production and their performances, whether these be established mega platforms like YouTube and Instagram or relatively niche, patronage-oriented platforms like Patreon, Substack, Onlyfans, and Twitch. (I'd include Etsy if you could sell your personality there.) But influencerization is changing consumption more broadly than that; it destabilizes not just the objects of consumption made but creators but commodities in general. Goods once seen as static and fixed (books, etc.) become content, which means that they become fluid, upgradable, networked, subject to spontaneous (or spurious) customization, directly social in that one can immediately recirculate them, comment on them, argue about them, “react” to them with a button, and so on. It may eventually become strange to consume objects that cannot immediately be imprinted with some avatar of ourselves, that we can’t immediately augment by paying extra or performing some kind of reciprocal labor. What would be the point?
This isn't a matter of goods becoming “interactive” per se. Any interactivity is delimited by the interfaces through which media (i.e. all goods) are consumed. But it is a matter of consumption being a practice that manifests “influence” as part of the satiety it provides. That is to say that no kind of consumption can occur outside the awareness of the asymmetries of attention that directly govern it. The ideal consumer good doesn't satisfy you, it auditions for you again and again.
When one thinks of, say, free-to-play games, it’s easy to construe their constant attempts to milk money from you as annoying. But it may be more accurate to think of that as part of the entertainment, part of the means for subjectivizing the player, for making them feel as though they are being paid attention to, being recognized. This is how I understand the “new kind of consumer” Brouillette mentions. The vicarious fantasy inherent in consumption can be supplemented by more direct forms of engagement; consumers no longer need to be trained how to enjoy vicarious, imaginative experiences in the same way they used to. The emulative, mimetic aspects of consumption are more straightforward now, given the channels consumers have to immediately produce their responses and see what reactions they attract. Every commodified experience concretizes some aspect of the “influence” that has produced and circulated it, and the process of consuming it is now a matter of tapping into that and trying to realize it somehow for oneself.
In "Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture" Fredric Jameson makes the somewhat counterintuitive claim that we never consume objects of mass culture for the first time, that it is only on encountering them again that we recognize them as mass culture, at which point the first time registers as having always already occurred. "The most striking demonstration of this process," he argues, "can be witnessed in our reception of contemporary pop music ... we live a constant exposure to [pop songs] in all kinds of different situations, from the steady beat of the car radio through the sounds at lunch, or in the work place, or in shopping centers, all the way to those apparently full-dress performances of the 'work' in a nightclub or stadium concert or on the records you buy and take home to hear." This constant exposure means our expectations are so conditioned that we can't hear anything different, only what fits the established patterns. "This is a very different situation from the first bewildered audition of a complicated classical piece, which you hear again in the concert hall or listen to at home."
Jameson uses audition there to mean "an instance of having listened," which seems just as stiff as the view he is espousing, that the difficulty of classical music allows it to defy commodification and easy consumption, making it genuine art. (He even felt the need to put "work" in scare quotes since it referred to pop music.) But I think it still makes a kind of sense if you understand audition as a kind of tryout, an attempt to prove possession of the right consumer skills, the capacity to be pleased. "The passionate attachment one can form to this or that pop single, the rich personal investment of all kinds of private associations and existential symbolism which is the feature of such attachment, are fully as much a function of our own familiarity as of the work itself," Jameson writes. The "work itself" is reduced to the level of a trigger, an empty form — it resonates with us only if we've invested ourselves in it, and this will happen more or less arbitrarily. It can be any song, any piece of content — what matters is that it becomes a pretense for creating associations, an index of memories we assign to it that can have nothing to do with the song's substance or material history. It just has to fit the format.
"The pop single, by means of repetition, insensibly becomes part of the existential fabric of our own lives," Jameson argues, "so that what we listen to is ourselves, our own previous auditions." We hear ourselves hearing, or having already heard. We hear how well we fit in with what's expected; we hear how well we know what to listen for; we hear that we have been part of a collective phenomenon of hearing, that we've belonged. I don't think this kind of audition is necessarily about "private associations"; I think it has more to do with auditioning, with passing the test of desiring socially appropriate things. If it seems like we never hear songs "for the first time," that's because the point of them is to make us feel like we've never been excluded; we can believe that we never had to learn how to fit in, that it came naturally, spontaneously, the way "influence" is always just a reminder, the way content just shows up in our feeds.