Anna Marie Tendler, Susan Sontag, and Instagram
A smattering of cultural criticism and a small announcement.
The irony that Instagram gave me the words to explain why I want to leave Instagram is not lost on me. I’ve felt a stronger and stronger urge to take a break from the app, and I decided a few weeks ago I’d take off the month of July. Earlier this week, I was tapping through stories on the app and arrived at one from Anna Marie Tendler, an artist (she makes Victorian lampshades!!!!) and master’s candidate in NYU’s Costume Studies program. Her masters thesis is on the sociocultural politics of aesthetics and the female body, and she frequently shares interesting snippets from her research. She shared the following excerpt from Susan Sontag’s “The Double Standard of Aging," which began to get at how I’ve been feeling about Instagram:
This took me down a Sontag rabbit hole. I’d read her Notes on “Camp” ahead of the 2019 Met Gala, but I hadn’t spent much time with her other work. She’s was a tertiary figure in my women’s studies classes, and as I spoke to friends about her this past week, there was a 50/50 split of folks who’d even heard of her.
For those who haven’t, Susan Sontag was a writer and cultural critic active from the ‘60s until her death in 2004. She wrote books, essays, and films about culture, art, and human rights. She was an outspoken detractor of the Vietnam war and critiqued the US government’s reaction to AIDS. A bisexual, she had a storied series of love affairs, the most interesting of which was with photographer Annie Leibovitz, which I think provides interesting context for reading her her 1977 essay collection On Photography.
One chunk of text from the essays stood out to me:
“A capitalist society requires a culture based on images. It needs to furnish vast amounts of entertainment in order to stimulate buying and anesthetize the injuries of class, race, and sex. And it needs to gather unlimited amounts of information, the better to exploit natural resources, increase productivity, keep order, make war, give jobs to bureaucrats. The camera's twin capacities, to subjectivism reality and to objectify it, ideally serve these needs as strengthen them. Cameras define reality in the two ways essential to the workings of an advanced industrial society: as a spectacle (for masses) and as an object of surveillance (for rulers). The production of images also furnishes a ruling ideology. Social change is replaced by a change in images. The freedom to consume a plurality of images and goods is equated with freedom itself. The narrowing of free political choice to free economic consumption requires the unlimited production and consumption of images.”
This was a far more academic way of saying what I’ve been feeling: I am tired of being marketed to and engaging in self-commodification that distracts from what really matters. I’d like to give my brain a break from the stimulation Instagram provides and figure out how to be at peace with what I have and where I am in the moment. I’d like to find the bottom of my seemingly bottomless-pit-need for validation.
I’m sure I’ll be back—Instagram has been a wonderful point of connection and is directly responsible for a handful of my most meaningful friendships. But for the first time in a long time, I’m not looking for anyone new to come into my life. I am content with my cast of characters. I’d like to see how far I can coast on this contentment.
Text me, email me, send me a letter (once I have a new address). Tell me what you’re watching, reading, listening to, and thinking about. I’ll have some time on my hands.
Until next week,
Elizabeth
This newsletter is just one facet of Zhuzh, my platform dedicated to conscious consumption and making space for delight. I offer secondhand-and-vintage-based wardrobe and interior styling services, art curation, and super chill life coaching. Keep up with me on Instagram and learn more at www.zhuzhlife.com.