Visual Culture Approaches to the Selfie

Derek Conrad Murray, Derek Conrad Murray

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780429556869
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Contemporary Art

This collection explores the cultural fascination with social media forms of self-portraiture, "selfies, " with a specific interest in online self-imaging strategies in a Western context.

This book examines the selfie as a social and technological phenomenon but also engages with digital self-portraiture as representation: as work that is committed to rigorous object-based analysis. The scholars in this volume consider the topic of online self-portraiture—both its social function as a technology-driven form of visual communication, as well as its thematic, intellectual, historical, and aesthetic intersections with the history of art and visual culture.

This book will be of interest to scholars of photography, art history, and media studies.

1 Counter-Selfies and the Real Subsumption of Society

Grant Bollmer

DOI 10.4324/9780367206109-1

Counter-selfie names a variant of selfie; in taking a counter-selfie one strives to become visibly present to other people but simultaneously works to render oneself invisible to systems of computational, digital surveillance. Its form accounts for how digital images shared over social media are not only circulated and viewed by other human beings but are also visual documents disseminated and analyzed by digital platforms—both in terms of the automated agencies of infrastructures and the precarious, often exhausted employees who labor as part of the apparatus of social media monopolies¹—beyond the awareness or intent of the individuals taking them and sharing them. It is a political-aesthetic practice insofar as we describe the “politics” of aesthetics in the terms given by Jacques Rancière; “politics” is the policing and reinvention of the boundaries of what can be sensed and what can be said.²

Questions of visibility and invisibility are, here, about a distribution of the sensible where the visibility of “persons” is only enacted for the sensation of other “persons,” but ideally made impossible for the identification techniques which are presumed to be based entirely on the potentials of computer vision to see and identify. Thus, who (or what) is included as part of a collective space of circulating and judging images is founded on a distinction that delineates “personhood” through varied capacities of vision. In this context, digitally automated vision is presumed to arrange bodies, either to identify for purposes of state control, or to extract economic value by way of visual classification, prediction, and preemption. Creating social relations outside of state control or capitalist exploitation requires a visual ratio that circumscribes through the ability to see or not see. In this chapter, I want to both define counter-selfie practices and also highlight how the politics of counter-selfies are contradictory and presume a separation between human and nonhuman that reproduces a division between (human) user and (technological) platform—a separation that is only partially correct. This claim requires a rather roundabout structure, and the vast majority of this chapter is dedicated to questions about the political economy of communication and relation under social media, along with the potentiality of selfies—which are most commonly disseminated via the platforms of social media monopolies—to exist beyond the strictures of capitalist accumulation.

The contradictions of counter-selfies relate to concerns central to digital culture writ large; they depict the limits of conceptualizing and enacting politics as relational and democratic; they demonstrate the impossibility of particular political acts when structures of capital have moved from what Marx termed “formal subsumption” to “real subsumption;” they substitute for political action when resistance to capital seems to be articulated in a profoundly anti-democratic and anti-communist frame (“communist,” here, referring to the self-determination and sovereignty of an egalitarian community defined by mutualistic relations of collective ownership). In making these claims, I’m following Jacques Camatte in his argument that, in contemporary capitalism, there exists a “real subsumption” of all social relations by capital:

capital exercises an absolute domination over society, and tends to become society: the final state in the development of its social character. The opposition is no longer between capital and previous modes of production, but between a fraction of capital and capital itself, the presupposition of the production and circulation process.³

Camatte’s view of the real subsumption of labor by capital—embodied in his claims about absolute domination—is profoundly pessimistic,⁴ though I agree with his general assertion that the resistance to capital can neither be found in directly challenging capital nor in looking for an immanent potential through which capital undermines itself. Rather, it must be found in abandoning capital and working for a new kind of community that exists beyond capitalist categories of production and exchange, and thus cannot be enacted by subverting (or misusing) technologies designed to perpetuate relations of capitalist exploitation.⁵ Selfies—which speak to both a potential of a kind of communal announcement of presence and also to voluntary participation in “surveillance capitalism”⁶—and counter-selfies—which depend on the “policing” of boundaries of visibility and invisibility—speak to the desire for, but also represent the ultimate impossibility of, relating to a larger community outside of that which has been not only captured but produced for the sake of judging and extracting value from individuals using digital technologies. Likewise, they speak to an inability to phenomenologically orient oneself toward a world (and community) beyond that which has not been captured by (and represented through) capital.⁷

In theorizing the politics of the counter-selfie, I’m relying on a definition of a selfie that Katherine Guinness and I developed previously. A selfie should be understood as a self-reflexive and autopoietic production of a “self” as a figural image distinct from a “background.” In the act of taking a selfie, the “self” (as a “person” who can be visibly identified by others) is produced as distinct, and in front of, the background upon which it appears. In this process, however, the background is itself rendered invisible for the one taking a picture, and thus the relationality of the selfie is one in which the person taking a selfie is directed toward both themselves and toward others, but not toward the physical environment in which they are immediately located, and not toward those who do not visually appear as a representation.⁸ While still obeying most of these formal, phenomenal claims about selfies, in a counter-selfie the figure disappears through specific techniques employed, such as make-up, camouflage, or dress. This disappearance is itself relational; it is only intended for specific observers. If, with a selfie, the background disappears to the one taking a picture but remains in the image itself, to be viewed by others, in a counter-selfie the figure remains sensed by the one taking a picture, by other “people” viewing the picture (both of whom make the figure-background distinction that characterizes a selfie), and additionally disappears to a technological system observing the image, which cannot differentiate between figure and background successfully because of material qualities of visual sensing built into specific hardware/software assemblages. A counter-selfie, then, is essentially a variant of CAPTCHA, a negative “Turing Test” of sorts that defines “humanness” through the ability to make a visual distinction between figure and ground.⁹

As I mentioned earlier, the majority of this chapter discusses political-economic questions about the larger context in which discussions of selfies (and their politics) take place. I begin by summarizing some broad perspectives on selfies and surveillance, moving toward an outline of real subsumption and why this concept matters for the discussion of selfies, before turning, at the end of this chapter, back to conceptualizing counter-selfies as a contradictory practice. I should note that some readers may consider my emphasis here to refer to things that are not selfies, properly speaking. But my discussion here presumes that selfies—as facial images of a district “self”—cannot be separated from more general concerns about surveillance and facial recognition in social media. One of the points of this chapter I’m trying to make is that selfies must be framed in relation with the rise in various forms of automated surveillance which take the measurement and identification of the face as a means to link data profiles with a specific person, either for the purposes of economic exploitation or state control.

Selfies, Visibility, Agency, Surveillance

The usual debates surrounding selfies, debates that have been unfolding over the past ten or so years at this point, oscillate unceasingly between two general perspectives. I want to begin by summarizing some of these debates and framing them in terms that, in this chapter, will eventually be understood as evidence of how social media is a technical form of sociality inextricable from the real subsumption of capital.

“Selfies can be read as a necessary proof-of-presence,” Geert Lovink tells us, “not as evidence of electronic solitude, let alone a symptom of a personality disorder. They do not exemplify who we are, but rather show we exist, at this very moment.”¹⁰ For Jodi Dean, selfies are “a communist form of expression,” a generalized mimetic practice signified by the formal fungibility of selfies-in-general, “the emancipation of the commonality of the object from the commodity form.”¹¹ Or, this first perspective suggests, selfies should be thought of as a kind of phatic communication, a kind of visual small talk equivalent to modes of communication that serve to announce one’s presence and bond one to another.¹² While theorists such as Dean make larger moves about repetition and gesture, arguing for a communism of form—moves which I’ll be returning to later in this chapter—the point is to define selfies as a visual means of being together which operates through the act of documenting presence and sharing that presence over social networking platforms.

In making this argument political, this perspective shares claims advanced by some variants of second-wave feminism, stressing the role selfies have in reframing the opposition between public and private.¹³ For instance, as one illustration of these feminist arguments, Catherine MacKinnon claims that the elimination of “privacy” is essential for feminist struggles:

For women the measure of intimacy has been the measure of oppression. This is why feminism has had to explode the private. This is why feminism has seen the personal as the political. The private is the public for those for whom the personal is the political. In this sense, there is no private, either normatively or empirically.¹⁴

In the current context, selfies are thought to visualize intimate, private space, displaying this privacy for the observation of an online public sphere (if one not formed around the traditions of rational-critical debate that defined the opposition of public and private to begin with), refusing a (mystifying, ideological) spatial arrangement that renders particular (usually gendered) acts and bodies beyond the space of public regulation and citizenship.¹⁵ Selfies are thus assumed to participate in a politics that overthrows the public-private boundary if with considerable ambivalences¹⁶ since challenging the public-private divide in the 1970s and 1980s did not inherently lead to a more just world in terms of a range of struggles over civil rights and citizenship. Regardless, the idea is that taking a selfie, documenting presence, and circulating an image online, contributes toward entering into public and staking a claim that links visibility with the capacity of public speech, becoming a public subject whose interests and desires can be acknowledged and debated within the public sphere.

Any attempt to equate “greater visibility” with “greater political agency” must also examine the many factors of a particular conjuncture that associates issues of identity and the relationality of bodies and images with the ability of capital to extract value from aspects of daily life heretofore “outside” of the boundaries of exchange and valorization. Visibility and political agency cannot be equated, though the articulation of the two should not be severed, either. As Lauren Berlant has shown, for instance, in the 1980s the particular interests of feminists like MacKinnon were articulated to a conservative politics which circumscribed the political addres...