While the personal is political, the self is a dead-end if what you want is social change. It’s worth remembering the lesson of Narcissus: being too interested in your own reflection will kill you.
Ash Sarkar, continuing a press tour that has sounded bum note after bum note, has a new article in the Guardian today about how “the left keeps getting identity politics wrong – and the right is benefiting from that”. Sarkar is aiming for some kind of nuance here, clearly, but the paeans to a class-first politics still leave a sour taste, not least because it is a project that feels just as outdated and occupied by reactionaries as ‘identity politics’ does in general these days.
First things first, class is important — it’s a topic the UK has long been obsessed with but is ultimately very bad at talking about, and it is vital that discussions around class be rescued from reactionary TV pundits talking about salt-of-the-earth figments of their imagination. Indeed, class is too often reduced to another identitarian category by both the left and the right today, leading many of those who identify as working class to do so on the basis of vibes and presentation alone rather than any material assessment of their working conditions.
Some writers have done well to offer new approaches to this topic, in light of its contemporary complexities. Dan Evans’ A Nation of Shopkeepers comes to mind — a book I found very convincing when I proofread it, with an argument far more in-depth than that of anyone else I’ve seen go on about the PMC (professional-managerial class). In this regard, I take no issue with Sarkar’s interest in class as a topic, but what really irritates me about her line of argument is how — like many conservative and reactionary ‘anti-woke’ Marxists on Twitter — it fundamentally misunderstands the position of the self in collective politics today more generally.
In concluding her Guardian article — quoted above — Sarkar seems to think that the individual and the social can somehow be cleft from each other, as if anyone can so easily shift from speaking of an ‘I’ to a ‘we’, as if these two forms of subjective referent aren’t as amorphous or even as empowering as each other. Hers is, in this regard, an argument that is all Laschian pseudo-psychologising without any sense of the role our senses of self have played in a long history of political (and, yes, more pointedly, class) struggles, which she is otherwise hoping to rejuvenate.
Going on about all this here recently, I was aghast at how popular Sarkar’s outmoded sentiments were online, and I made a tongue-in-cheek reference to my own book. I really did spend the last two years of lockdown writing about all of this, but pitching the book as a history of the selfie remains a regret of mine overall, because I think most judge the book on that basis — as something trivial — and do not delve further into it, where they will discover a short history of self-(re)presentation that is entangled with a history of the self / the individual as a motor for political change — not the be-all-and-end-all by any means, but as an important factor at the start of many a revolution.
For instance, the German Peasants’ War — arguably more significant to Marx and Engels than the later French Revolution — is unthinkable without reference to the emergent conception of the Individual in Renaissance Europe, or how Protestantism, whilst inadvertently responsible for a weakening of many social institutions, first ignited the revolutionary flame. In this monumental moment, individual consciousness was followed by group consciousness, and much the same can be said for many more recent social justice movements as well. This transition has nothing to do with why these revolutions failed — as many contemporary reactionaries might want to insist — but was a core foundation for the building of political momentum.
None of this is to say that identity politics is somehow essential. I have many issues with it myself, and I am more inclined to defer to Mark Fisher’s ‘(dis)identity politics’ (even whilst fully aware of my own capture by facializing social-media platforms). But any suggestion that the self and society (or the individual and the collective) are in some kind of antagonist relationship, with one needing to win out over the other in some stupid battle, is not only bogus but little more than the tail end of a superficial moral panic that has gripped more than one generation of political commentators — and they’ve hardly achieved much of anything outside of inflaming resentment and sowing division. That Ash Sarkar has joined this boring tradition is as inexplicable as it is disappointing to me…
Anyway, all of the above and more is in my book, but it begins with a rereading of the myth of Narcissus that is completely to the contrary of Sarkar’s pithy closer above, and so rather than rehash the argument for you here, I thought I might just share the book’s introduction on the blog, since it captures the overall argument of the book in microcosm and offers the seeds of a new joined-up approach to thinking the self and the social that I think is far more productive than Sarkar’s echoing the Laschian reactionary posturing of yore.
The introduction is split into three parts. First, a consideration of Narcissus the plant, also known as the daffodil, and its historical uses and abuses. Second, a look at the selfie and a questioning of the apoliticism assigned to those most famous for deploying it as a mode of self-expression. Third, an overview of the politics of narcissism, including the “collective narcissism” of identity politics, and how the prevalent misuse of the term isn’t simply wrong or ill-founded, but completely useless to anyone.
Enjoy.
1. Narcissus Unbound
Narcissus blooms in spring. They are striking flowers that seem to grow anywhere. Their yellow and white trumpets sprout forth from gardens, roadsides, woods and fields. Around March, the supermarkets start to sell them in little bundles. Along with chocolate bunnies and hot cross buns, they are a sign that Easter is coming.
Better known by its common name, the daffodil, the scientific name for this complex genus of flower is nonetheless loaded with meaning. Many assume that Narcissus is named after the hunter from Greek mythology, for instance. In the classic telling of the tale, penned by the Roman poet Ovid in his Metamorphoses, Narcissus is a solitary hunter. Out in the woods one day, he is inadvertently led to a pond by the nymph Echo, who is entranced by his beauty but has no voice of her own with which to entice him. Searching for this strange voice, which echoes his own but only in part, Narcissus stumbles upon his own reflection. But on seeing himself for the first time, and thereby finally coming to know himself, he is trapped in a morbid feedback loop between the self and its gaze.
Though caught in his own reflection, Narcissus is nonetheless still able to reflect on his newfound predicament. As beautiful as he may find himself to be, once he realises that he cannot escape his own gaze, he becomes distraught. With no way to pull himself free, he instead tears himself apart. (In other versions of the tale, he falls into his reflection and drowns.) After his death, the nymphs of spring mourn him and prepare a pyre on which to burn his remains. But when they return to collect his body from the water’s edge, it has gone. “Instead of his corpse, they discovered a flower with a circle of white petals round a yellow centre”. A Narcissus grows in his place.
This was no coincidence. Narcissus the flower was already well-known at this time, suggesting that the man was named after it rather than the other way round. Indeed, the hunter is arguably a personification of the flower’s cultural associations, just as Echo is the personification of her namesake as well.
These cultural associations are no doubt related to the flower’s medicinal uses, of which it has many. Writing around the same time as Ovid, in the first century AD, the Roman philosopher and naturalist Pliny the Elder was among the first to use the plant’s now-familiar Latin name in writing, discussing both its curative and toxic qualities in his exhaustive Natural History. It nonetheless appears that the question of which came first, flower or myth, was a common question in Pliny’s time as well. First, he warns the reader that the flower is poisonous — when ingested, it is “injurious to the stomach … and produces dull, heavy pains in the head” — before adding that it is presumably for this reason that Narcissus “has received its name, from ‘narce,’ and not from the youth Narcissus, mentioned in fable”.
The word “narce” remains in use today, becoming the prefix “narco-”, as in narcotic, which is common to many Indo-European languages. Narcissus was certainly a man who became intoxicated with himself, but for the ancients, narce primarily referred to feelings of numbness and lethargy, and so the flower was thought of as a kind of sedative, associated with tiredness and sleep. This understanding has also survived into modernity. Narcolepsy, for example — literally meaning “an attack of numbness” — is the name for a chronic brain condition related to excessive daytime drowsiness and sudden lapses into unconsciousness. This may explain how the story was later rewritten, swapping Narcissus’s violent suicide for a more peaceful and watery end, through which seduction and sedation become fatally entwined.
Despite being renowned for its toxicity, Pliny nonetheless goes on to describe Narcissus as a “very useful” flower. When ground down and mixed with oil to create an ointment, he notes that it is an effective treatment for burns and sprains, as well as bruises, frostbite and earache. Though it might make you sick, it is also useful when “employed for the extraction of foreign substances from the body”. (Does the ego count?) The plant is also “good for tumours”, he says — a usage mentioned by Hippocrates in his writings as well. In fact, for Hippocrates, the application of Narcissus oil to a pessary was a recommended treatment for uterine tumours specifically, which has led to the flower being adopted as a symbol of hope by some women’s cancer charities today.
Between tumours and sleeping disorders, the flower is unsurprisingly also associated with death. The ancient Egyptians saw it as a tomb flower to be grown around burial sites, and daffodils are still a familiar sight in cemeteries around the world today. But it is also a symbol of life, birth and resurrection — lest we forget its symbolic ties to Easter in Christian countries, with Jesus’s resurrection retaining Pagan echoes of seasonal new beginnings. In Iran, too, the flower is synonymous with celebrations of Nowruz, or the New Year, held on the spring equinox. This does not make the daffodil an emblem of contradiction, however, but of transformation. With death comes rebirth. The end of winter brings with it a new spring. Narcissus, as a perennial, will itself return year on year. As one of the first flowers to show itself after the deep sleep of winter, its droopy appearance is a fitting form for a lethargic creature newly awoken from a long hibernation.
Despite all this, today Narcissus tends to remind us of one thing: “narcissism”. The hunter’s fatal encounter with his own reflection becomes a cardinal sin, or a pathological affliction in the age of psychoanalysis. First coined by the German psychiatrist Paul Näcke in 1899, “narcissism” was, at that time, a term used to describe the “perversion” of autoeroticism, exemplified by a wide range of (largely innocuous) sexual behaviours, including homosexuality and masturbation. (Näcke would change his mind on this, later arguing explicitly that homosexuality, in particular, is natural rather than a mental illness, but he was sadly still well ahead of his time in doing so.)
Sigmund Freud’s more popular reading of the term suggested that, whilst he could corroborate Näcke’s initial clinical observations of sexual “misfunction”, there was much more to narcissism than that. In his case studies, Freud found that your average narcissist’s self-obsession was not always vainglorious but also anxious. Indeed, Freud observed that certain traits described in Näcke’s pathology were common to many mental disorders.
Freud initially surmised, then, that narcissism was not just an expression of self-love but of self-concern, and therefore often a product of great pain, since a person in pain so often “gives up his interest in the things of the external world, in so far as they do not concern his suffering”. Running contrary to Näcke’s earlier analyses, this was not an opportunity for Freud to pathologize morally “deviant” behaviours but to recognise the obvious. Drawing on a marvellously succinct couplet from the comic poet Wilhelm Busch, writing about a toothache, Freud defines his broader view of the narcissist as follows:
Concentrated is his soul
In his molar’s narrow hole
Though he retains Näcke’s earlier view that narcissism is a deviation from nature — through which our sexual and self-preservative instincts are blocked inside the ego, rather than finding satisfaction in external subjects or objects, as they supposedly should — Freud recognises that this pathology can be acquired through trauma, rather than defining a person outright through a series of uncorrected personality traits. This leads him to incorporate narcissism as a central component of many mental illnesses, from anorexia nervosa and hypochondria to the catch-all condition of dementia praecox (or, as it is now known, schizophrenia).
This understanding of narcissism has persisted in psychoanalytic circles ever since. Through a multitude of further studies and therapeutic developments, our understanding of narcissism has been complexified further still and it is today known as something very difficult to treat. In his seminal 1971 study of the treatment of “narcissistic personality disorders”, or NPDs, for instance, Heinz Kohut attempts to develop a systematic therapeutic programme for treating narcissism as a condition generally resistant to more readily used psychotherapeutic techniques. Though Kohut’s diagnosis is more clinically robust, it is clear from his analyses that the core Freudian definition of narcissism remains intact. As Kohut explains, NPDs are often “the result of the psyche’s inability to regulate self-esteem and to maintain it at normal levels”. He also notably emphasises the fact that narcissism runs the gamut of human emotional states, extending “from anxious grandiosity and excitement, on the one hand, to mild embarrassment and self-consciousness, or severe shame, hypochondria, and depression, on the other”.
We might expect (or at least hope) that this understanding of narcissism would elicit a certain degree of compassionate awareness in us today. As with anyone suffering from mental illness, though they may not adhere to our ideals of “normal” or “polite” social functioning, we should perhaps give some people the benefit of the doubt. Unfortunately, it seems no such awareness informs our popular use of the term. Contrary to its status as a complex and contentious diagnosis in therapeutic circles, popular culture frames narcissism as a form of sociopathy, since we more readily associate its stereotypical displays of self-centredness with a distinct lack of care for others.
Primarily, at least in popular culture, to be a narcissist is to have an excess of vanity or pride, particularly regarding one’s looks, or to indulge in delusions of grandeur regarding one’s social status. In the age of social media, it is supposedly an increasingly common disorder. To be a narcissist is also to post too much online, or to “overshare” the minutiae of your daily existence, as if we are all narcissistic in assuming that the details of our lives warrant so much attention from others. (Those who abstain from social media are by no means exempt, as even cultivating an offline air of mystery is seen by some as an attempt to put oneself above the chattering masses — betraying an excess of concern for how one appears, precisely in not appearing.)
Like the flower from which it takes its name, this “disease” is everywhere today, rearing its heavy head in one-dimensional op-eds and essays on our civilisational discontent. However, though ubiquitous, and therefore surely innocuous, to be a narcissist is one of the worst things a person can be. From behind our computer screens, we repeatedly diagnose both the most deplorable and the most harmless members of society with narcissistic personality disorders. This understanding has only become more pronounced since the United States of America elected a narcissist-in-chief, in the form of Donald J. Trump, to the White House in 2016. Many now see narcissism as the defining pathology of our deluded age.
But we may already sense that there is another “narcissism” here — or, indeed, multiple narcissisms — lurking beneath the surface of our shallow reflections. Throughout recorded history, both flower and man have been associated with far more than vanity alone. Behind our popular understanding of the term is the narcissism of self-transformation, rebirth and self-overcoming. And yet, despite being routinely dramatized and depicted in cultures all around the world, any alternative reading of narcissism today is drowned out by a cottage industry of self-help books and works of folk-psychology — which have long had a place in bookstores but arguably became truly inescapable over the last decade, following the advent of social media — not to mention the casual symptomologies paraded around by the media, which screams ad nauseum that narcissism is a plague we’re all at risk of catching (if we haven’t already). Move over, coronavirus! But to dismiss narcissism as modernity’s fatal flaw, heralding the decline of civilisation, is to ignore the libidinal motor driving its spread — that is, our constant yearning for the new (be it new selves or new worlds).
This reading is already present in Ovid’s metamorphic myth. Though his Narcissus loved himself to death — and any drive that culminates in one’s own death is catnip to the Freudian psychoanalyst — his tale is still not a moral one. Narcissus isn’t even described as having an overabundant ego. His beauty is objectively recognised by society around him, and it is a beauty that is notably unrecognisable to Narcissus himself. In being captured by his own reflection, his demise is narrated almost as an occupational hazard — something bound to happen to someone so impossibly beautiful. In fact, it was Narcissus’s curse, foretold prior to his birth, that he would live a long and healthy life so long as he did not come to know himself. Others came to know him, but in sensing the dangers of his attractiveness, they kept out of his way. Narcissus, then, was not fawned over and worshipped like a modern-day supermodel; on the contrary, his beauty was so intense that few allowed themselves to get close to him. Loved by some from afar, he was nonetheless painfully alone. This may well explain his chosen profession as a solitary hunter. Unaware of his own beauty, and distinctly lacking anything we might call “self-knowledge”, Narcissus did not understand why he was shunned by the world around him. But he was not so vain as to lash out at society’s inattention; instead, he retreated into the wild and into nature.
Though his eventual death gave those who saw and loved him a reason to mourn, his death — a suicide — nonetheless brought him relief from suffering. And Narcissus did suffer. When he was eventually captured by his own reflection and experienced what it was like to both see himself and be seen, the torturous feedback loop was too much to bear. “I am in love, and see my loved one”, he declares, “but that form which I see and love, I cannot reach, so far am I deluded by my love”. Whereas those around him can simply avoid or turn away from the object of their desires, no doubt fearful of their nascent obsessions with the man, Narcissus could not hope to separate himself from himself. He finds himself suspended between his simultaneous presence as a subject and as an object. Soon enough, any distinction between the two is dissolved completely. The self, the ego, becomes a barrier to be torn away.
It is for this reason that Narcissus begins to scratch and lash out at his body, now reflected before him. Though he may love his aquatic imago, he is tormented by its inaccessibility, and he soon wishes to shed the outer shell that has so suddenly forsaken his internal self. As Ovid writes:
In his grief, he tore away the upper portion of his tunic, and beat his bared breast with hands as white as marble. His breast flushed rosily where he struck it, just as apples often shine red in part, while part gleams whitely, or as grapes, ripening in variegated clusters, are tinged with purple. When Narcissus saw this reflected in the water … he could bear it no longer. As golden wax melts with gentle heat, as morning frosts are thawed by the warmth of the sun, so he was worn and wasted away with love, and slowly consumed by its hidden fire.
It is surely no coincidence that Narcissus’s decay is repeatedly compared to the seasonal transformations of nature in bloom. In the end, though the man may be dead, his desires suddenly seem more befitting of a flower anyway, and so Ovid’s Narcissus quickly complicates the convenient view of the early psychoanalysts, who saw narcissism as a deviation from nature. The tale instead depicts nature’s return or, at the very least, its transformation into a new phase of itself. The story of Narcissus, then, is not just a story of man’s self-love but of nature’s self-overcoming. It is the story of the seasons, and of nature’s yearly cycle, which may start with pollination and germination, but which always ends with a holocaust of its own making, only to begin again.
2. The Selfie
Can narcissism ever be a positive affliction? Such a question may seem deeply contrarian today. There is already a “narcissism epidemic”, or so we’re told — we should arguably be doing more to stop its spread. But rather than encourage or discourage narcissism in ourselves and others, perhaps the best way to counter our moral panics is to reinterpret this woeful pathology and consider its status as ubiquitous affliction from another angle. After all, are we not in pain? Is our contemporary self-concern not warranted? Are we not morbidly aware of and rightly worried about our own fragility — not just as postmodern hypochondriacs, but as part of a wider and endangered natural world? Our soul, no longer confined to a toothache, is instead captured by the entwined gazes of culture, nature and all of their inhabitants — ourselves included — who look back at us, beautiful and clearly in distress.
However, our contemporary narcissism is supposedly unconcerned with such grand questions. It is, instead, far more trivial. Take the selfie — that ubiquitous symbol of our contemporaneous self-obsession. We frequently hear stories of people, often tourists, doing incredibly reckless things for a good selfie, so focussed are they on their own presentation that they fall from high places to their deaths. The tabloid press loves to share statistics of these selfie deaths as a kind of sensational schadenfreude, or as a macabre measure of social Darwinism, gleefully telling us that more people die taking selfies than from shark attacks, in a bizarre and perpetual retelling of Ovid’s story as a social-media morality tale.
It is easy for us to be cynical about this tendency. We are surely all aware of the ways that our societal self-concern is precisely encouraged by the media and capitalism more generally. By now, most of us know all too well how tech companies the world over take advantage of the data we upload about ourselves, turning it into a lucrative commodity. Our fears and our desires come to form a peculiar ouroboros, which the tabloid press, in particular, feeds upon for its own nefarious purposes: turning a profit by spreading the sickness, then proclaiming it can sell us the cure, in the form of a self-deprecating moral panic. But looking past the tabloid hysteria, even contemporary selfies — including those taken by some of the most shameless self-promotors — have often signalled a silent hope for self-transformation nonetheless.
Let us consider a particularly infamous example. In 2017, Paris Hilton tweeted two photographs of herself with Britney Spears. “11 years ago today, Me & Britney invented the selfie!” she announced to her millions of followers — and it wasn’t long before objections to her claim started rolling in. One Twitter user suggested, with photographic evidence, that it was not Spears and Hilton but Bill Nye the Science Guy who took the first selfie, whilst onboard an airplane in 1999. Actually, it was Kramer, argued another, in a 1995 episode of Seinfeld. No, it was Beatles guitarist George Harrison in 1966, tied with astronaut Buzz Aldrin, who incontrovertibly took the first selfie in outer space that same year. But wait, here’s a mirror selfie taken by former US Secretary of State Colin Powell in the 1950s…
The examples were numerous, as were the methods used to make the self-portraits in question. Some photographed themselves reflected in mirrors, whilst others turned their cameras around on themselves with arms awkwardly outstretched. Some came prepared with tripods and shutter release cables, whilst others betrayed themselves as wielders of disposable cameras with a garish flash and a flat focal range. The only thing shared amongst these images was that their subjects were, in some way, famous. Some would only become famous later in life, like the young Colin Powell, whereas others were contemporary celebrities taking selfies with an admirer, as was Bill Nye; Buzz Aldrin’s selfie showed him documenting the very event or achievement that made him famous in the first place — being on the moon.
After the argumentative Twitter users had had their fun, some journalists began investigating the history of the selfie for themselves. The New York Times went so far as to contact Mark Marino, a professor at the University of Southern California who teaches a class on selfies, “to see if there was some set of criteria that could justify Ms. Hilton’s claim”.
Marino argued that the first photographic self-portrait was, in fact, taken by Robert Cornelius, an American photographer, in 1839. Not only that, Cornelius’s photograph — or, more accurately, his daguerreotype — is considered by some to be the oldest recorded photograph of a (then) living person. But despite having offered up his own suggestion to the growing list of alternatives, it was not Marino’s intention to cynically burst Paris Hilton’s bubble and deny her claim that her selfie was the first of its kind. Instead, Marino makes an interesting point: maybe Ms Hilton recognised that she and Ms Spears produced an image quite unlike anything shared previously. “She’s not being ahistorical”, Marino suggests, “she’s saying ‘we’ did something with selfies that had not to that moment been done” before.
Marino seems to be arguing that many of those people replying with photographs of celebrity selfies probably wouldn’t find them quite so interesting had Hilton and Spears not made the selfie such an explicitly postmodern cultural phenomenon, innately tied to the otherwise private lives of two very public individuals. Perhaps, in recognising our own fascination with these images, we came to understand how they were accessible to all of us, as if we looked at them with wonder and began to aspire to becoming such spectacles for ourselves.
This is significant for two reasons. Firstly, we might argue that the selfie phenomenon directly influenced the development of modern technology, even if only in a small way — without the Hilton-Spears selfie, would forward-facing cameras now be installed on our smart phones as standard? Secondly, the Hilton-Spears selfie also inaugurated a new era of celebrity. Although, at first glance, we may think there is nothing innately interesting about a picture of two of the most photographed women of the 2000s, it is precisely because they were so frequently and intrusively photographed by others that their selfie inaugurated a more autonomous gaze, providing a privately constructed window into the lives of two otherwise very public figures, seemingly for the first time.
When we consider what later happened to Britney Spears in particular, Marino’s argument becomes even more interesting. This supposedly inaugural selfie was taken just a year or two prior to Britney’s very public nervous breakdown. Hounded by the paparazzi, she was driven to shaving her own head — in the false hope that this would make her less recognisable or perhaps less worthy of the paparazzi’s attention — and infamously attacked the persistent crowd of photographers who still wouldn’t leave her alone. Consistently scapegoated as crazy and violent by the very people who had driven her over the edge, a number of documentaries have more recently attempted to tell a more sympathetic version of her story, some fifteen years later, going into great detail about the lead up to and distressing aftermath of her mental collapse.
The most horrifying outcome of Spears’ mental breakdown was that she was placed under a controversial “conservatorship”, through which her affairs and finances were strictly “managed” — some might say “exploited” — by her father and others. Despite having been driven to such violent distress by a complete lack of autonomy over her public image, the deeply unjust response was for Britney’s general autonomy to be further restricted by a court of law. The #FreeBritney movement later developed, with many fans concerned about her sudden disappearance from the public eye, taking it upon themselves to advocate for her release from this draconian US law. Many, at first, believed the movement to be conspiratorial; fans began cataloguing, interpreting and decrypting “hidden messages” and strange behaviour broadcast on the singer’s closely monitored Instagram page. In late 2021, however, the movement was vindicated. Britney’s conservatorship was dropped, and in an emotional statement to her fans, she thanked them for seeing the signs and freeing her from an oppressive existence, which she communicated through her persistent exploration of the selfie as an easily accessible form of self-expression.
As the world has come to better understand Spears’ ordeal, this original selfie, taken by two friends, starts to look like the tragic beginning of the otherwise avoidable breakdown. Here we find Britney Spears taking a selfie not just to be seen or to appease a fan, but to take control of her own image, affirming the private self that the paparazzi were compulsively denying her. The selfie, then, was arguably her way of prefiguring or imaging a new version of herself — a new conception of the self no less.
What may sound like an overly generous reading of the postmodern selfie’s peculiar beginnings is nonetheless corroborated by other media at the time. For instance, we might also consider Spears’ 2007 single “Piece of Me”, in which she explicitly admonishes a media industry that wants to rip chunks out of her. But the tension explored in the song can be read in two different ways — both positively and negatively. As Mark Fisher argued in his 2014 book, Ghosts of my Life, the song encapsulates the fundamental disunity innate to any contemporary narcissistic capture: “you can either hear this as the moment when a commodity achieves self-consciousness, or when a human realises he or she has become a commodity”.
In this sense, Marino is right that Hilton was not being ahistorical. On the contrary, it was her critics who were removing the selfie in question from its historical context. The photo becomes a condensed visual representation of the pair’s concerns, as sung about by Spears on “Piece of Me”. Though, to many, it is a moment unworthy of any historical aggrandisement whatsoever, the Hilton-Spears selfie does signal a fundamental shift in how the self-portrait is understood and utilised, particularly by those in the public eye. It is a decisive moment, cutting out the role of tabloid vultures, and attempting to reveal and affirm a certain authenticity behind the incessantly twisted reality of dishonest headlines. It was a photograph that affirmed, perhaps for the first time in a long time, Spears’ own gaze, and — just as significantly — that of a close friend and confidante, over the gaze of others. In this sense, it is an encounter with the self as significant and complicated as Narcissus’s own.
3. Collective Narcissism
The politics of narcissism are not limited to crises of celebrity, of course. Though this popular pathology is, more often than not, applied to those who are famous and powerful — who command, rule and conquer, both in business and government, without fear of consequence or reprisal — what of the narcissism of the underrepresented and maligned? Though so many social critics ask these questions only to pathologize Instagram influencers, we might consider how marginalised communities have persistently struggled with scrutiny and self-knowledge in the modern world, and in the age of social media in particular.
We need only look to the recent ascension of the Black Lives Matter movement, one of the defining social justice movements of our age, which supposedly has narcissists on all sides. Articles and op-eds from around the world accuse both the movement’s supporters and detractors of a “collective narcissism”. Journalist Aaron Smale, for instance, writing about Black Lives Matter in an article for Newsroom, argues that all racism is a form of collective narcissism. “Narcissism in individuals is characterised by self-centredness, arrogance, seeing others as objects rather than equals, perceiving themselves as unique or special”, he writes. That an individual might see the error of their narcissistic ways is a hope confined to a lifetime, but when this pathology “grips a whole group of people and the institutions they have run for hundreds of years”, Smale continues, “it isn’t going to die overnight”.
This brand of self-concern has more recently led to an increase in populist scaremongering and conspiracy theories, such as the “Great Replacement”. First popularised by the French far-right politician Renaud Camus in his 2011 book, Le Grand Remplacement, many have since argued that there is a global conspiracy by certain “elites” to gradually replace the populations of majority-white nation-states with immigrants from other countries, particularly those who follow the Islamic faith. Though widely ridiculed, it has since been referenced frequently by white nationalists the world over, even appearing in the manifestos of far-right terrorists who commit horrific acts of violence in overblown acts of “self-defence” or to draw further attention to their plight. As these sorts of beliefs snowball, we see an exponential rise in far-right nationalism and its affiliated groups.
According to Camus’s central thesis, white people are framed as an endangered demographic in need of special protection, all thanks to the development of a collective narcissism. But already, we may see one of the problems with such a diagnosis: many opponents of Black Lives Matter agree with this critical characterisation, albeit from the other side, when it is used to describe the BLM movement itself. For those who parody the movement’s call to action, by insisting that “all lives matter” or “blue lives matter”, they dismiss the movement’s eponymous motto as the perfect example of an excessive self-concern, which they feel as entitled to as anyone else.
This persistent “whataboutery”, which does all it can to avoid any concrete analysis of the material conditions experienced by the vulnerable and truly marginalised, muddies the waters for many. Constituting a peculiar kind of opposition, it is a kind of rhetorical move that does not wholly disagree with the lived reality of oppression but rather generalises it to include everyone else. The point argued isn’t so much that black communities are not oppressed, in one form or another, but rather that everyone is a little bit oppressed, and so black communities should stop acting like they’re all that special.
This form of argument is very common among right-wing commentators, who tend to mirror Smale’s previously described position almost exactly. Whilst Smale disregards the narcissism of self-victimisation that comes from above, others suggest a similar narcissism from below is unlikely to die overnight either. Indeed, the problem with empowered black communities is that they just love to protest, many commentators argue cynically, and it is for this reason that they don’t realise quite how good they’ve actually got it.
This view is epitomised by the black conservative author Shelby Steele, who has argued that watching “the antics of Black Lives Matter is like watching people literally aspiring to black victimization, longing for it as for a consummation”. In his particularly cynical framing, Black Lives Matter is a form of mass hysteria — or, perhaps more accurately, mass hypochondria. Contrary to the movement’s protestations, Steele believes that black freedom is far more pervasive today than those who resent their more successful peers are willing to believe. “We blacks are, today, a free people”, he writes. “It is as if freedom sneaked up and caught us by surprise”. That’s not to say that racism has gone away, of course — Steele concedes that there will always be some racism in society — but that doesn’t mean we need to bleach it clean with some grand revolutionary gesture. Like a mysterious rash, racism is an affliction that might always be with us, in one form or another, and so we mustn’t worry ourselves too much about it. Like a hypochondriac making a nuisance of themselves at a hospital, to keep demanding treatment for some relatively innocuous blemishes, Steele suggests, risks doing more harm than good. This is, it should go without saying, a deeply irresponsible position to take.
But there is a position that exists somewhere between these two mirrored perspectives. In fact, in a blogpost written for The American Conservative, the controversial traditionalist Rod Dreher — of all people — makes the implicit connection between Smale and Shelby’s positions most explicitly. As if sensing our impending collective doom, whether politically or existentially, he notes how all corners of society today rightly feel under threat. If white supremacists and garden-variety nationalists are all “collective narcissists”, fearful that their way of life is under attack, then logic dictates that Black Lives Matter are too. However, Dreher does not borrow the phrase “collective narcissism” from Smale; he cites psychology researcher Agnieszka Golec de Zavala instead.
As head of the PrejudiceLab — “an interdisciplinary research team of social psychologists, neuropsychologists and psychophysiologists [who] work on topics related to collective narcissism, prejudice and intergroup conflicts” — Zavala’s research around collective narcissism is promiscuous. This is evidenced by an article summarising some of the research team’s findings, which is illustrated with an image of English far-right nationalists but discusses Muslims and Argentinians as two groups who have been collectively (and, she seems to argue, disproportionately) offended by perceived insults made by individuals or relatively smaller groups. She describes these “collective narcissists” as follows:
Collective narcissists are not simply content to be members of a valuable group. They don’t devote their energy to contributing to the group’s betterment and value. Rather, they engage in monitoring whether everybody around, particularly other groups, recognise and acknowledge the great value and special worth of their group. To be sure, collective narcissists demand privileged treatment, not equal rights. And the need for continuous external validation of the group’s inflated image (a negative attribute) is what differentiates collective narcissists from those who simply hold positive feelings about their group.
Though the overall framing of Zavala’s argument may have been aiming for impartiality, the result is a now-familiar “both sides” rhetoric, and the conclusion Dreher draws from her team’s research is predictable. Whilst the right’s “collective narcissism” may well have fuelled wins for Brexit in the UK and Trump in the US, “it’s only fair”, Dreher says, that we “ask the same about black protesters and their critics”, whom many on the right credit for establishing a new cultural (if not so explicitly party-political) “woke” hegemony. What social dysfunction is their narcissism responsible for? But rather than indulging in yet more whataboutery, Dreher goes on to make a surprisingly interesting point: perhaps the problem is with the diagnosis. In being so easily applicable to all sides, collective narcissism, he rightly notes, might just be “a way to dismiss a group’s grievances by psychologizing them away”.
Narcissism, then, at the level of our pop-cultural understanding, is less a useful diagnosis than a blunt scalpel taken to societal scar tissue. But what is missed in Dreher’s uncharacteristically centrist analysis is the key tension between conservatives and progressives. One wants change and the other does not. One group believes that things are fine just as they are, and are vainglorious in their political hegemony; the other believes that change must come, and it will risk self-destruction to free itself from its given image, often brutally insisted upon by a set of broader ideological expectations. And with regards to the latter, who can blame them? Trapped by their own reflection, black communities in particular see themselves routinely frogmarched across television screens and murdered in police body-camera footage. Whereas other, more privileged members of society may look upon these images and find a way to distance themselves from criminals or anti-social persons who otherwise deserve whatever happens to them — whether that means being arrested, harassed, assaulted or even killed — black communities see themselves in perpetual distress and, like Narcissus, are tormented by their own reflection in the media. They may riotously lash out, and politicians may decry the resulting communal “self-harm”, but such violence is a sure sign of a need for transformation otherwise denied. In this sense, retaining something of Dreher’s provocation, perhaps Black Lives Matter are the real narcissists. But they are narcissists in a far more positive sense, and arguably in the only way that really matters.
It is nonetheless hard to imagine the Black Lives Matter movement picking Narcissus — whether the flower or the man — as a political emblem, but the adoption of such a signifier would not be unprecedented. In his 1952 book, Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon argues “that only a psychoanalytical interpretation of the black problem can lay bare the anomalies of affect that are responsible for the structure of the complex” of Freudian narcissism. In this sense, the role of narcissism in black experiences, Fanon argues, is essential for understanding what he calls a “dual consciousness”, in which the warring cultural perspectives of blackness and whiteness face off against each other in a society built on the back of class struggle — of which racialised experiences are, of course, an integral part. As a sort of internalised narcissistic predicament, caught between a sense of oneself as both subject and object, which allows Fanon to painfully understand how he is seen by a white hegemony, he too comes to desire the tearing apart of the racialised imago before him. “I grasp my narcissism with both hands and I turn my back on the degradation of those who would make man a mere mechanism”, he concludes.
We can also observe how the daffodil has more recently become an emancipatory symbol for other political projects as well. It is the national symbol of Wales, for instance, with ties to the country’s patron Saint David, whose national day falls close to the advent of spring. With all of the above in mind, we might draw broader connections between the daffodil’s use as a national symbol, the country’s blossoming independence movement and the rebirth of Welsh national culture more generally, since the Welsh language has been successfully brought back from the dead in recent decades, following centuries of imperial suppression under English rule.
But perhaps the least contentious use of Narcissus as a symbol of self-transformation comes from queer cultures. Many of the most seminal works of queer art and literature produced over the last two centuries, from Oscar Wilde’s 1890 novel The Picture of Dorian Gray to James Bidgood’s 1971 film Pink Narcissus and beyond, have a very different relationship to Ovid’s classic tale than that of your average political commentator.
By reclaiming ownership of Näcke’s offensive pathologizing — in Oscar Wilde’s case, even pre-empting it — artistic explorations of homosexuality have often been as concerned with same-sex love as they have been with self-acceptance in a bigoted world, and the ways that sexual fantasy and self-reflection are entwined together provide each of these works with a great psychological depth.
What is most notable about these examples is that, alongside their expressions of pain and self-critique, there is a clear striving for self-transformation, and not just a transformation of the individual self but of a queer community’s wider social standing as well. In James Bidgood’s Pink Narcissus, for example, the protagonist imagines himself as such — that is, as a protagonist — seemingly for the first time. As a sex worker left alone in a client’s apartment, all too accustomed to servicing the needs and fantasies of others, he places himself centre-stage and enacts various fantasies of his own, in which he is cast in various lead roles. Power is not always in his hands — in one sequence, he is a slave to a Roman emperor — but he is nonetheless the focus of attention. (Submissiveness can, of course, be its own kind of sexual power play.) In every scene, the protagonist’s fantasies do not define his self-obsession but give form to his dreams of self-overcoming. The pink Narcissus raises himself up in the world, as perhaps only he can.
However, it is more often the case today that even the self-transformations innate to queer culture have become clichéd, with TV shows like Queer Eye (formerly “for the straight guy”) selling an emboldened and explicitly queer self-concern to everyday people who have lost touch with themselves in the midst of generalised capitalist drudgery or under the weight of what some British physicians have taken to calling (somewhat facetiously) “shit life syndrome”. To its credit, Queer Eye — at least in its rebooted Netflix incarnation — is often a tandem celebration of both the necessity of self-care and our human capacity for selflessness, but there are frequent moments where the transformations on display are less about self-actualisation for its own sake and more about a group of outsiders offering palliative social care in the face of generalised injustice and inequality, coaching people in a very postmodern sense of middle-class taste, etiquette and propriety. It would be somewhat unfair to criticise a light-hearted Netflix show for failing to tackle the class war, of course, no matter how indicative it may be of some of society’s ills more generally, but the show’s success has allowed this culture of queer narcissism to breach the surface of the spring and be seen as a social good overall. There are many more radical examples for us to choose from, and we will explore some of these in due course.
For now, let it be known that this book will attempt to tell this story of positive self-transformation in two parts, with the latter half eventually exploring a queered history of photography and its radical relationship to the self in more detail. But first, to find out how we got here, we need only follow a trajectory laid out for us by art history. We have already discussed the selfie or self-portrait in this regard, and it is an alternative history of the self-portrait that this book hopes to provide. Though it shall nonetheless draw on some art-historically canonical figures, we shall see how this alternative view of narcissism lies before us in plain sight. The history of the self-portrait, in particular — so emblematic of our contemporary narcissism — harbours a radical (if contentious) narcissism of its own, emerging alongside our first conceptions of the individual, and providing a fertile ground upon which we have since explored the desire and discomfort of self-overcoming for many centuries.
In beginning with the painterly self-portrait, we will find that our modern concerns are not so recent. In fact, they have remained largely unchanged since the Renaissance. That period of history was itself a rebirth, of course, but we have been reborn many times since then, and so, although we continue to moralise and criticise our propensity to gaze at our own reflections, in taking another look at our narcissistic selves, we may well save ourselves the repeated embarrassment of re-discovering, against all the odds, that we retain a capacity and desire for self-renewal.
This squandered potential is so often overlooked by our cultural commentators today, who publicly despair over our propensity for self-obsession. Critics turn their backs on a society tearing itself apart, taking it upon themselves to prepare the funeral pyre on which to lay the dreams of a dozen self-critical social movements and cultural events. But when they return, they too may bear witness to a transformation they did not expect. Not a death, but a new beginning, and the affirmation of a radical future that our past and present selves have been equally desperate to give form to.