Please Eat Me: Emma Chamberlain, Cannibalism, and the Existentialism of Mediatized Consumerism

By Maia Caleca

When I’m tired of being conscious, I open TikTok. Between polemic injustice, climate change, and the pandemic, it’s justified to want to shut down every now and again, to let two hours of my life go on without me. 

I don’t think I’m alone in this sentiment. Social media contains not people but different appearances of the same content: reproductions of circulated aesthetics, cryptic posts in a language that speaks through the familiarity of images, reflections of the masses instead of real self-expression. People signify who they are through their association with predetermined aesthetics. There is not a self, but an idea. And being an idea isn’t a reprieve when the idea is presented by someone else, an Other, and sold to you for metrics. The Other looks at you and you look back. 

Influencers, virtual Others to our being, remain relevant as long as their followers continue to replicate them. We consume their content—turning them into an object—and want to be consumed as they are. We consume each other, obfuscating any form of subjective self to be more appetizing. Influencer culture has shattered the notion of the self and its relation to others, piecing it back together in a commodified reflection. Circulated in a hierarchy of value determined by external forces, the image of the self is a commodity, a type of content then consumed through the social media interface. You consume the influencer’s content—which is an object of their self—and attempt to reproduce it, to appropriate their success and cultural value for yourself. The self-determining gaze of others has become desired. And in this replication, you offer yourself to be consumed as well. We consume each other, participating in and propagating a mediatized cannibalism.

There’s a trend of cannibalism in the media mirroring this urge. The recently released romantic drama Bones And All (2022) is, on one hand, a beautiful love story about two outsiders finding a home in one another as they roadtrip across the US; on the other, it is a story of two outsiders working together to seduce and devour strangers, not always stopping to clean the blood coagulating on their chins. There’s been reports of people fainting at screenings or getting sick at the grotesqueness of the film. In this complexity, Guadagnino reflected the human desire to belong, to be loved, to be accepted.

These desires are often expressed, albeit with much less visual gore, on the internet as users search for worth through likes, followers, and community. These feelings are what created an economy for influencers, for people who have proven themselves and their lifestyles loveable and consumable enough to be made a career. They market their image, and there’s an unspoken understanding that if followers resemble this image, consuming and reproducing certain performative cues, they may be as loved as their parasocial icon. This relationship, like most, involves a transaction––but not with money, per se. The product being traded is an image imbued with an idealized self-worth, a self-worth informed and shaped by an Other.

In the new world of content creation and consumption, this is the implicit relationship to influencer culture wherein the influencer becomes an object to be consumed. The allegory of cannibalism in Bones and All was so spot-on it was never prescient; it was merely a reflection of the way things have become. This summer, someone said to me that things that have been true for all of time aren’t true anymore. Things like communication that used to take weeks or months now take seconds. Research that used to require a trip to the library are a few Googles and maybe a paywall away.  Jean-Paul Sartre posited we consume the consciousness of others to stay the transcendent subject and reject object-hood, but the role of Object has become exalted. The influencer-Other is an object of enviable social capital, made valuable because they are visible, visibility then determining value.

Sartre describes the idea of a Look occurring between two people. This Look confronts the subject-being with the object-being, the former more associated with subject-hood, and the latter object-hood, which Sartre labels as being for-itself and in-itself, respectively. Object-hood is the sense of existing as a reducible object—a thing—and someone outside of you is necessary for this way of being. They see us, the object, for our facticity, or the facts of who we are. In the example of a restaurant, a waiter is limited to just a waiter in the eyes of the Other. However, the waiter understands their job as an external role they play, but not the extent of who they are. The waiter sees themself on a more transcendental plane, as Sartre describes it. The subject-being takes a reflective step back from the self that allows a person to see who they are as well as all the possibilities of who they could be. Through the Look, the Other grounds the transcendental step of the subject-being and restrains them in the image of the perceptible facts of what they are. The Look is a source of tension, and poses a threat to our existential freedom.

The Other creates worlds that confine this freedom, and these worlds, Sartre explained, resemble the identities or personal aesthetics created online. “I am this self that I am within a world that the Other has alienated from me,” Sartre wrote in Being and Nothingness. “The Other’s look encompasses my being, and correlatively the walls, the door, the keyhole … turn toward the other a face that necessarily escapes me.” The individual, in a mediatized form of self-expression, moves toward pre-established boundaries, edifices, constructed in the form of influencers. Aesthetics are often set by influencers, who have garnered enough social capital to become influential in image or lifestyle—or a general “vibe.” Think what might be the walls of Dark Academia, the door of Cottagecore, the keyhole of Coquette. They are frameworks for Being set and designed externally, within which people situate themselves. So the self the Other constructs for us, each time they see us, is effectively outside of us. A great tension of Being is the constant back-and-forth between this version of ourselves and the transcendental version that exists in the worlds we make for ourselves. And Sartre doesn’t necessarily believe we will ever entirely overcome this tension. There may be moments of harmony, but it is a nebulous thing.

Through this tension, the Other creates and controls the facts of who we are in the reflection of their Look. To combat this loss of control over identity, and regain the freedom in the possibilities of who we are, we opt to “confer objecthood on him in my turn,” resuming the position of control. This reflects a desire to remain the subject to control our sense of self. But on the internet, the Other is far more popular. The Other can bring popularity and, on occasion, wealth. The Other provides a way to quantify identity, or at least significance of identity. And this is the center of influencer culture: identity is conferred to image. The crafted, filtered image that fetches a number of likes and comments becomes a tangible representation of Self, and, more importantly, self-worth. Everyone has a self, but we are (or were) left to our own devices to determine the worth of that self. We could only try and hope for the best. Now we can try and get an exact number of how many people like the self we’ve invented, comparing the numerical data generated by our ‘self’ to the ‘self’ of others. On the internet, our factitious selves are even more objective than Sartre could ever conceive. The image you project is the idealized version of yourself you want to be seen as, and the quantitative response enjoins the factitious and transcendental, where you convince the Other to see you as you see yourself. Yet, in offering yourself to the Other in this fashion, you are recognizing them as having power over your object-hood, consequently offering yourself to objectification.

Influencers are seen and effectively consumed, and extends this consumption to the self. In buying into their internet persona through their image, there is a commodification in this process of consumption. You recreate their image, hoping to go viral like them and be reproduced like how you reproduced them. Emma Chamberlain, Gen Z’s most beloved influencer, has cultivated a specific identity most clearly associated with an “art museum aesthetic” (an abundance of the type can be found on Pinterest). Girls attempt to capture Her essence in similar images, in a soft and contemplative pose amidst an array of Impressionist paintings. With their back to the camera, their face—their identity—is absent from the picture. If they are facing the camera, their face is obscured in some way, partially covered by hair or blurred by motion. They never have a face, an identity, a persona that might displease the Algorithm. In this sense, they have decapitated themselves, willingly, to access the most optics. The cannibalism is understood—there is a desire to be consumed—and they are preparing themselves for the reflective serving platter that is social media. The desire to use the facticity of cultural semiotics, to be understood as identifying with a specific aesthetic, now outweighs the self-reflective, transcendental step back that took our possibilities as a part of our being. The step back that is necessary to see these possibilities as who we are.

This voluntary death within the curated facelessness is the process of a subject turning themself into an object. Cannibalism devours through consumption, and in the era of the mediatized object, people would rather be an object to be consumed than a subject to be judged, presenting the destroyed self on a shiny silver platter upon which people are looking for their reflection—or, turning you into their reflection. People eat the Sartrean Other to remain the transcendent subject, but the new Other being eaten is the idea of influence, of which appropriation or reproduction is not enough—the thing must be subsumed and destroyed, destroyed through its consumption, consumed and turned to nothingness. Cannibalism has been used to incite fear, to excite the morally gray, to represent a societal othering, all through the specific lens of human relationships. It can only exist between two beings of the same species. So in this modern mediatized age, as interpersonal relationships change and shift to the online sphere, cannibalism has perhaps re-emerged to better understand the new ways in which we identify with and devour one another.

The Look involves vulnerability—the Other catching you in the act—and makes the objects surrounding you real, and you tangible, by association. You feel caught in an act or surrounding you didn’t see as yourself before they saw you in it. Most importantly, the Other has to see you. Emma Chamberlain is not the Other. She can’t be the Other posting through a phone screen. We are the Other, seeing her—but only almost. We are seeing the image she wants us to see, and taking this image as her Self. “The Other holds a secret,” Sartre wrote, “the secret of what I am.” There is no secret in this interaction, other than what Emma keeps to herself. But we have taken her projected image as her Self, and the privacy is discarded in regards to her overall Being. The Other is supposed to possess you, to create your body, but we are seeing the reverse. People on the internet see Emma, craft an idea of her Being, and model themselves after it, creating boards of her style on Pinterest, turning to Depop for little boys’ shirts and Adidas Sambas. The transcendent Self is removed entirely, lost to replication of Emma’s factic object.

This is not to say the Other no longer exists, but that the concept of it has changed. Sartre implied an in-person interaction for the Other and Self to work together, to find harmony between the object- and subject-being. But the era of parasocial relationships and the expression of the self through circulated media has seemingly transfigured the Look. The fictitious is overcoming the factitious as online interpretations create a new surrealism of experience. The relationship formerly necessitated by the Look has changed as we’ve moved online. What used to require something vulnerable and intimate, using shame to reveal to the Other the most authentic appearance, has become one-sided and ill-informed. And when this relationship, vital to grounding the removed way in which we reflect on ourselves, transmutes to the internet, the most important part of the look is lost. It is no longer grounded in vulnerability—it becomes a projection of the idealized Self. It leans too far into what might be considered a transcendent self, though this transcendent self is tainted by its inauthentic connection to the Other.

There is something comforting in facticity, especially as a young person. When you’re trying to figure out who you are, aesthetics offer costumes to try out when searching for your cartoon-character outfit, the one you wear everyday. You can learn to borrow from each, or just use them as stepping off points: introductions to subcultures that weren’t around in your childhood that open a whole new door to who you could be. So yes, I listen to x music, watch y movies, read z books, which may suggest assumptions about my personality that just turn out to be true. And when overwhelmed with I’m not who I thought I was or I’m a fraud, there can be comfort in reducing yourself to an image. Sometimes I’d rather be the underdeveloped friend character who is simply along for the ride. But there is always a trade happening, even amidst the mindless consumption that occurs during a silly little doom scroll. Each interaction that happens during this two hour lapse in consciousness further commodifies you in the world of the Internet, further objectifying you in the Other’s look.

Social media was created with the intent to connect people. We project a self with others in mind, modernizing Sartre’s trouble with mediating others against the Self. It is not for-itself. It is still in-itself, acting with the Other in mind, wanting to be seen as this specific object, but acting as the transcendent self acts, believing it to be internal when shaped by the external world of the Other. Because of this, we are abandoning facticity. Without grounds for the Self, we are left with machinations of appropriation. The individual is failing, and not in a productive way—in the way that the supreme individual takes the form of a thin, white, blonde, rich woman, and it is this individual being reproduced across a generation. It is individualism, but everyone is trying to be the same kind of specific. Identical individuals consume to be consumed. There is no Self, there is only Emma.

We are expressing the Self through a reproduced image that blurs all differences to sameness, to a faceless object designed to be consumed, to a materialized surrendering of consciousness. We are cannibalizing the individual to disseminate ourselves as objects. The coup of the Image as stand-in for person has revealed a system of objects that have decided, in the midst of Instagram and the influencer, and they’d rather taste good than exist.