New Year’s is a time for reflecting on ourselves and resolving to close the gap between our ideal selves and our actual, drunken, midnight-kissed selves. About the self, the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze once said:
The self is only a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities (Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus, 1980).
If the self is a blurred line between patterns of enfolded syntheses, as Deleuze suggests, then are ‘selfies’ a technomodern attempt to capture the singular conditions–the moment–in which such patterns produce sites of self-awareness or, alternatively, narcissistic attempts to reclaim the right to individuality from an identity politics under siege?
Or are they just a way to remind ourselves that memory still has meaning, even if it’s tipsy and huddled over a street that won’t stop spinning?
Kris Coffield 