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  • Selfiehood: Singularity, Celebrity, and the Enlightenment
  • Shearer West (bio)

I am a member of the international Re-Enlightenment network: a collection of eighteenth-century scholars from a variety of disciplines who have been meeting for intellectual exchange for a number of years.1 We debate vociferously about the ways in which the Enlightenment can help us understand our contemporary knowledge economy and digitally connected world, and conversely, how our present day global challenges can deepen our understanding of the history and culture of the Enlightenment. I would précis our mission as follows: to ask present-centered questions of the past without doing violence to our historical sources. To consider current global challenges through an Enlightenment lens is never less than illuminating, and this method evokes Joseph Roach’s view of the “deep eighteenth century” (as opposed to the “long” or “wide” eighteenth century)—a century, as he puts it, “that isn’t over yet.”2 Here I am treading on territory that has a powerful legacy in the manner in which Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in 1947 interpreted the authoritarianism and hyper-empiricism of the Nazi regime as the culmination of the Enlightenment project.3 While their uncompromising view of the Enlightenment has been rightly deconstructed, it opened up a new way of thinking about the workings of mass culture and totalitarianism in the twentieth century. The subject of this essay is quite different from theirs, though it draws on a comparable consideration of Enlightenment legacy. [End Page 109]

I will probe a twenty-first- century narcissistic obsession with the self and images of the self by looking back to a defining period in late eighteenth-century England when “selfhood” became examined, popularized, and visually presented in new ways.

The narcissistic phenomenon that triggered my historical investigation was identified by Christopher Lasch in the 1970s as characterized by “the fascination with fame and celebrity, the fear of competition, the inability to suspend disbelief, the shallowness and transitory quality of personal relations.”4 While these factors retain their resonance, more recent concerns about freedom of speech, safe spaces, and micro aggressions are uncomfortably aligned to self-obsession, narcissism, solipsism, and body dysmorphism.5 As a portraiture specialist, I am particularly interested in the ways in which self-obsession finds its way into images, especially the mass media attention given to people taking photographs of themselves.6 Global media and social media are not only inundated with these images, but also, quite often, we are looking at photographs of people taking selfies, rather than the selfies themselves.7 While anyone and everyone today can make an image of themselves, the purveyors of “selfies” before the twenty-first century were primarily artists, a subject that I reflect on below. Travelling from our present-day “selfiehood” to the past, many scholars have demonstrated how the Enlightenment represented a period in which there was a new attention to individual and personal identity. New technologies and spaces of dissemination and socialization opened up a growing concern with the self, individuality, singularity, and the social performance of what we would now call personality within a nascent celebrity culture. I am going to explore the way in which this cultural shift can be understood in its own terms, the growing fascination with singularity and eccentricity at the end of the eighteenth century, the contribution of portraiture to changes in social attitudes to the self, and the relationship of these changes to a deep-rooted English political commitment to liberty.

The last decades of the eighteenth century experienced a constellation of new developments in social life, philosophy, and visual culture that together foregrounded more frequently the singular traits of individuals.8 These new tendencies were opposed to earlier generic categorizations that searched for broad classifications of social types, modelled loosely on Theophrastus.9 The changes that took place in conceptions of identity and self have been characterized by a number of scholars in slightly different ways; however, most agree that perceived stability of character was accompanied by an emphasis on interiority and the distinctiveness of individual “personalities.”10 This was, of course, a phenomenon that predated the eighteenth century. Charles Taylor, in his magisterial work of moral...

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