There was a time when the Internet seemed to promise the world to the world. When it appeared to be opening up a benign, infinite network of possibilities, in which everyone was enfranchised and newly accessible to one another as they were drawn, in one of Jia Tolentino’s many felicitous phrases, to the “puddles and blossoms of other people’s curiosity and expertise.” It would be a world in which hierarchies in whatever guise would be upended, a democratic forum to rival and exceed the philosophical marketplace of ancient Greece (no exclusion of anyone, not women, not slaves). At the very least, it was a place where, because you could be sure that someone out there was listening, you would find yourself able to articulate the thoughts that, for lack of an audience, had previously threatened to remain forever unspoken, stuck to the tip of your tongue.
This was the world that Tolentino, born in Canada to parents from the Philippines, saw burgeoning all around her as she grew up in Texas. In a way, she was primed for the illimitable expanse of the Internet by her Christian upbringing, which teaches its followers that everyone on earth is being watched by God. It gave her a flight of optimism, before this same system slowly but surely “metastasize[d] into a wreck”: “this feverish, electric, unlivable hell.” While the Internet was meant to allow you to reach out to any- and everyone without a hint of the cruel discriminations that blight our world, it turned into the opposite, a forum where individuals are less speaking to other people than preening and listening to themselves—turning themselves into desirable objects to be coveted by all. It became, that is, the perfect embodiment of consumer capitalism, where everything can be touted in the marketplace.
How, Tolentino asks, did the idea take hold that “ordinary personhood would seamlessly adjust itself around whatever within it would sell”? How did our basic humanity come to be “reframed as an exploitable viral asset”? We are in danger, as she quotes Werner Herzog saying of psychoanalysis, of losing “our dark corners and the unexplained,” of making ourselves “uninhabitable.” “It’s as if we’ve been placed on a lookout that oversees the entire world,” Tolentino writes, “and given a pair of binoculars that makes everything look like our own reflection.” Hence the title of this collection, Trick Mirror. The more our image appears to inflate our value, the more our vision shrinks to our own measure—and the more we succumb to the old, imperial delusion that allows us to believe we can command and control the furthest reaches of the universe as well as ourselves, regardless of the consequences (“reflections on self-delusion” is the subtitle to the book).
Tolentino is known to readers of The New Yorker, and before that to readers of the websites The Hairpin and Jezebel. In this collection of always trenchant and at times luminous essays, she establishes herself as the important critical voice she has been on her way to becoming for some time, although comparisons with Susan Sontag and Joan Didion seem to me unhelpful—as if, for a woman writer, theirs are the only hills to climb. For Tolentino, this book is the fulfillment of a long-held dream, to claim her place in a higher culture than the one that threatened to devour her as a young girl. (...)
Tolentino knows she is implicated in the world she lays out here with such merciless precision. In the end, she is the last person she wants to let off the hook. “I have felt so many times,” she writes in an essay on scamming as the new American deal, which takes in everything from bailing out the bankers after the crash of 2008 to the student debt disaster, Facebook, and the campaign lies of Donald Trump, “that the choice of this era is to be destroyed or to morally compromise ourselves in order to be functional—to be wrecked, or to be functional for reasons that contribute to the wreck.” Pointing the finger at herself is something of a refrain: “I live very close to this scam category, perhaps even inside it…. I am part of that world…even if I criticize its emptiness”; “Lately I’ve been wondering how everything got so intimately terrible, and why, exactly, we keep playing along.” With this hum of disapproval, Tolentino is describing not just the “ethical brokenness” that she believes is the quandary of critical thought in our time—her deepest implication as a citizen in the unjust structures she laments. She is also issuing a warning. She is instructing her readers, first and foremost herself, not to get too comfortable, or to enjoy her writing too much.
Tolentino is a woman of color in her early thirties, from a relatively privileged family that moved up and down in the middle class. Having been able to pay for their daughter’s private education in grade school, her parents hit serious financial trouble (their house was repossessed) about the time she joined the reality show on MTV. From a relatively young age, she therefore learned that she would have to earn for herself the privilege and stability to which she had almost become accustomed (she chose the University of Virginia over Yale, because Virginia awarded her a scholarship). Before being hired by The New Yorker, she was barely earning $35,000 a year, almost the exact sum she has devoted over the past decade to friends’ weddings (a rite that she clearly sees as another scam, although it is by no means clear who—those getting married or those like herself who have so far refused to do so—she disapproves of most).
She could hardly, then, be expected to be immune to the lure of capital. Nor to the ideal of perfection that, especially for women, is its increasingly coercive accompaniment. Hence, again, “mirror,” the surface in which women never stop searching for unattainable beauty because somewhere deep down they have been conned into thinking that, merely by dint of being women and despite whatever efforts they make, they are flawed beyond repair. “You make appointments with mirrors,” a friend once said to me. The last thing a woman expects or remotely wishes to see in the mirror is herself. “Optimization”—Tolentino’s term for this insane hunt that turns women into their own quarry—is a counsel of despair. “I like trying to look good,” she writes, “but it’s hard to say how much you can genuinely, independently like what amounts to a mandate.”
by Jacqueline Rose, NYRB | Read more:
Image: Joanna Neborsky
This was the world that Tolentino, born in Canada to parents from the Philippines, saw burgeoning all around her as she grew up in Texas. In a way, she was primed for the illimitable expanse of the Internet by her Christian upbringing, which teaches its followers that everyone on earth is being watched by God. It gave her a flight of optimism, before this same system slowly but surely “metastasize[d] into a wreck”: “this feverish, electric, unlivable hell.” While the Internet was meant to allow you to reach out to any- and everyone without a hint of the cruel discriminations that blight our world, it turned into the opposite, a forum where individuals are less speaking to other people than preening and listening to themselves—turning themselves into desirable objects to be coveted by all. It became, that is, the perfect embodiment of consumer capitalism, where everything can be touted in the marketplace.How, Tolentino asks, did the idea take hold that “ordinary personhood would seamlessly adjust itself around whatever within it would sell”? How did our basic humanity come to be “reframed as an exploitable viral asset”? We are in danger, as she quotes Werner Herzog saying of psychoanalysis, of losing “our dark corners and the unexplained,” of making ourselves “uninhabitable.” “It’s as if we’ve been placed on a lookout that oversees the entire world,” Tolentino writes, “and given a pair of binoculars that makes everything look like our own reflection.” Hence the title of this collection, Trick Mirror. The more our image appears to inflate our value, the more our vision shrinks to our own measure—and the more we succumb to the old, imperial delusion that allows us to believe we can command and control the furthest reaches of the universe as well as ourselves, regardless of the consequences (“reflections on self-delusion” is the subtitle to the book).
Tolentino is known to readers of The New Yorker, and before that to readers of the websites The Hairpin and Jezebel. In this collection of always trenchant and at times luminous essays, she establishes herself as the important critical voice she has been on her way to becoming for some time, although comparisons with Susan Sontag and Joan Didion seem to me unhelpful—as if, for a woman writer, theirs are the only hills to climb. For Tolentino, this book is the fulfillment of a long-held dream, to claim her place in a higher culture than the one that threatened to devour her as a young girl. (...)
Tolentino knows she is implicated in the world she lays out here with such merciless precision. In the end, she is the last person she wants to let off the hook. “I have felt so many times,” she writes in an essay on scamming as the new American deal, which takes in everything from bailing out the bankers after the crash of 2008 to the student debt disaster, Facebook, and the campaign lies of Donald Trump, “that the choice of this era is to be destroyed or to morally compromise ourselves in order to be functional—to be wrecked, or to be functional for reasons that contribute to the wreck.” Pointing the finger at herself is something of a refrain: “I live very close to this scam category, perhaps even inside it…. I am part of that world…even if I criticize its emptiness”; “Lately I’ve been wondering how everything got so intimately terrible, and why, exactly, we keep playing along.” With this hum of disapproval, Tolentino is describing not just the “ethical brokenness” that she believes is the quandary of critical thought in our time—her deepest implication as a citizen in the unjust structures she laments. She is also issuing a warning. She is instructing her readers, first and foremost herself, not to get too comfortable, or to enjoy her writing too much.
Tolentino is a woman of color in her early thirties, from a relatively privileged family that moved up and down in the middle class. Having been able to pay for their daughter’s private education in grade school, her parents hit serious financial trouble (their house was repossessed) about the time she joined the reality show on MTV. From a relatively young age, she therefore learned that she would have to earn for herself the privilege and stability to which she had almost become accustomed (she chose the University of Virginia over Yale, because Virginia awarded her a scholarship). Before being hired by The New Yorker, she was barely earning $35,000 a year, almost the exact sum she has devoted over the past decade to friends’ weddings (a rite that she clearly sees as another scam, although it is by no means clear who—those getting married or those like herself who have so far refused to do so—she disapproves of most).
She could hardly, then, be expected to be immune to the lure of capital. Nor to the ideal of perfection that, especially for women, is its increasingly coercive accompaniment. Hence, again, “mirror,” the surface in which women never stop searching for unattainable beauty because somewhere deep down they have been conned into thinking that, merely by dint of being women and despite whatever efforts they make, they are flawed beyond repair. “You make appointments with mirrors,” a friend once said to me. The last thing a woman expects or remotely wishes to see in the mirror is herself. “Optimization”—Tolentino’s term for this insane hunt that turns women into their own quarry—is a counsel of despair. “I like trying to look good,” she writes, “but it’s hard to say how much you can genuinely, independently like what amounts to a mandate.”
by Jacqueline Rose, NYRB | Read more:
Image: Joanna Neborsky
