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 platformsâboth in terms of the automated agencies of infrastructures and the precarious, often exhausted employees who labor as part of the apparatus of social media monopolies1âbeyond the awareness or intent of the individuals taking them and sharing them. It is a political-aesthetic practice insofar as we describe the âpoliticsâ of aesthetics in the terms given by Jacques RanciĂšre; âpoliticsâ 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 âpersonsâ is only enacted for the sensation of other âpersons,â 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 âpersonhoodâ 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) platformâa 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 selfiesâwhich are most commonly disseminated via the platforms of social media monopoliesâto 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 âformal subsumptionâ to âreal subsumption;â they substitute for political action when resistance to capital seems to be articulated in a profoundly anti-democratic and anti-communist frame (âcommunist,â here, referring to the self-determination and sovereignty of an egalitarian community defined by mutualistic relations of collective ownership). In making these claims, Iâm following Jacques Camatte in his argument that, in contemporary capitalism, there exists a âreal subsumptionâ 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
Camatteâs view of the real subsumption of labor by capitalâembodied in his claims about absolute dominationâis 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 Selfiesâwhich speak to both a potential of a kind of communal announcement of presence and also to voluntary participation in âsurveillance capitalismâ6âand counter-selfiesâwhich depend on the âpolicingâ of boundaries of visibility and invisibilityâspeak 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, Iâm 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 âselfâ as a figural image distinct from a âbackground.â In the act of taking a selfie, the âselfâ (as a âpersonâ 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 âpeopleâ 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 âTuring Testâ of sorts that defines âhumannessâ 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 selfiesâas facial images of a district âselfââcannot be separated from more general concerns about surveillance and facial recognition in social media. One of the points of this chapter Iâm 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.
âSelfies can be read as a necessary proof-of-presence,â Geert Lovink tells us, ânot 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.â10 For Jodi Dean, selfies are âa communist form of expression,â a generalized mimetic practice signified by the formal fungibility of selfies-in-general, âthe emancipation of the commonality of the object from the commodity form.â11 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 oneâs presence and bond one to another.12 While theorists such as Dean make larger moves about repetition and gesture, arguing for a communism of formâmoves which Iâll be returning to later in this chapterâthe 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 âprivacyâ 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 âgreater visibilityâ with âgreater political agencyâ 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 âoutsideâ 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...