THE PORTRAIT OF A MIRROR

My novel’s announcement in Publisher’s Marketplace:

SELFIES AND THE INNOVATION OF SELF-MYTHMAKING

Paris selfie - croissant in tow.

The mere mention of Paris conjures up images of lovers: walking along the Seine, kissing, maybe sharing a croissant. But on this trip, it has been the mass-demonstration of another kind of love that's struck me. It shouldn't have. Selfies are, by now, so ubiquitous that they are no longer even embarrassing (as in the decadent Rome of Cavelli's opera Eliogabalo, "where everyone is guilty, everyone is innocent"). In Japan this Spring, I saw more signs regulating selfie sticks than bicycles. Here in Paris, they're more easily procured than miniature replicas of the Eiffel Tower. 

The bewitching appeal of self-love is hardly new. In Ovid's Metamorphoses, wise Tiresias rhetorically asks Narcissus:

Caravaggio, Narcissus, ~1597-9.

"Why try to catch an always fleeting image
Poor credulous youngster? What you seek is nowhere
And if you turn away, you will take with you
The boy you love. The vision is only shadow,
Only reflection, lacking any substance."

Looking at Narcissus's conundrum as a design problem, he faces two main issues:

1. Lack of control - Narcissus's image is "nowhere," eluding capture
2. Impermanence - Narcissus's image is "always fleeting," eluding documentation

I think the selfie is so successful as an innovation because it seems to solve for both of these long-standing problems with Narcissism. It provides the subject with the impression of control over his or her self-image as actor-director, coupled with the ability to "immortalize" it on the internet.

CONTROL

When I look at photographs from childhood trips, taken by friendly strangers (or in this case, probably my mom), there are usually other tourists in the background. I don't think it's a coincidence that one of the main things selfie sticks and digital enhancement allow for is their removal. As Jonathan Franzen writes in Freedom, "nothing disturbs the feeling of specialness like the presence of other human beings feeling identically special."

Selfies give us the impression of control on two levels: first, directly from our perspective, and second, recursively from the perspective of others, dreaming of the illusions we will create in others' dreams. 

As the ultimate manifestation of images "known to be false but felt to be true," selfies glamorously highlight some details while obscuring others to reinforce our own specialness. 

The fantasy of someone else fantasizing about you is an even more cunning trick of mind. While, as Virginia Postrel points out, "Glamour is not something you possess, but something you perceive," the recursive perception of another's perception offers the illusion of possession--an illusion that can be seemingly quantified and insatiably fed by "likes," and archived for posterity on Facebook or especially Instagram, everyone's personal museum, digital formaldehyde. 

IMMORTALITY

Selfies thus offer intimations of immortality on our own terms; they are a modern form of mummification. It's really no wonder that people are, increasingly, willing to risk dying for the perfect shot, and actively want to plan for their "digital afterlife." 

Evan Carroll, the founder of Loggacy, a digital afterlife platform, explains that "the emergence of online digital legacy tools, that provide us with the opportunity to record our lives online and leave an everlasting legacy, provide a meaningful solution to the...conundrum concerning 'immortality.'" 

That's a lot of provisions. The thing is, we're not preserving a record of our lives--selfies are carefully-staged simulacra, not faithful representations. Archiving them offers the promise not of self-history, but metamorphic self-mythology.

I'm reminded of a book I vaguely remember from childhood, where the main character is a little boy in search of perfection. He eventually finds it, if I remember correctly--and it's this boring room filled with people doing nothing. Perfection, he realizes, is way overrated; flowers are glamorous, but it's way more fun to be a boy.  

RECURSION: THE REMIX TO COGNITION

The power of recursion, almost by definition, boggles the mind. Its reach transcends academic disciplines, unites art and nature, and may be the fundamental linguistic and even cognitive function that differentiates human from animal existence. Its propensity toward complexity and infinity quickly defies comprehension, with the highest-IQ humans able to process only 6-7 embedded layers. A single infinite loop can crash the most powerful supercomputers, and there's certainly no escape from infinite self-referential nerd jokes.

Broadly, I define recursion as "self-similar embedded repetition." I'm not going to try to rewrite Wikipedia on recursion's many discipline-specific applications and examples, but this list includes:

The Sierpinski Triangle, a fractal

• The Droste Effect and Matryoshka dolls in art
• Mis en abyme in art and literature
• Frame stories and stories within stories in literature
• Fractals in natural phenomenal and mathematics
• Fibonacci numbers, factorials, and the golden ratio in mathematics
• Infinite loops and circular references in computer science

The first chapter of Michael Corballis's book The Recursive Mind provides an excellent extended introduction to recursion, including several choice humorous examples. Building on Chomskyan universal grammar, Corballis holds recursion as not only the distinguishing attribute of human language, but of human thought, the foundational function of not just linguistics, but philosophy.* (He also nicely distinguishes recursion from its cousin simple repetition, and sister iteration.)

It's worth noting that frame stories and stories within stories pervade Classical mythology; Ovid's Metamorphoses, the gold standard, is woven together almost entirely in this way, with multiple layers of embedding. The story of Echo, for example, is embedded within the tale of Narcissus, which is in turn embedded in the that of Tiresias. This example is particularly rich, as the stories each individually contain recursive elements--Narcissus, for example, falls in love with his own self-similar reflection, embedded in a pool. So, here we have 1) textual recursion, 2) metatextual recursion (stories within stories), and 3. recursion of recursion--between levels 1) and 2). 

John William Waterhouse, Echo and Narcissus, 1903

Recursion is all over the business world, even though the word itself isn't part of our vocabulary. We do financial analysis on financial analysis, make a plan for the plan, and innovate on innovation. Especially as operations standardize and scale, recursion often pops up in organizational hierarchies and operational algorithms as well.

And then there's the underlying function of human existence, which I'm very surprised is not mentioned more in connection with the word recursion: mammalian reproductive biology. What is gestation but embedded self-similar repetition? 

Is the cultural ubiquity of recursion--in art, literature, business, technology--a subliminal cognitive response to our physical and biological nature? Is our underlying obsession with recursion, like sex, a natural instinct in the quest for survival? 

I think so. But the more I think about it, the more I think about it.

*There have been some interesting recent challenges to Chomsky, universal grammar, and recursion as a fundamental law of language.