Third Text
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Selfie Culture in the Age of Corporate and State
Surveillance
Henry A Giroux
To cite this article: Henry A Giroux (2015) Selfie Culture in the Age of Corporate and State
Surveillance, Third Text, 29:3, 155-164, DOI: 10.1080/09528822.2015.1082339
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2015.1082339
Published online: 11 Sep 2015.
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Date: 22 March 2016, At: 20:00
Third Text, 2015
Vol. 29, No. 3, 155– 164, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2015.1082339
Selfie Culture in the Age of
Corporate and State Surveillance
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Henry A Giroux
Narcissism is an expression not of self-love but of alienation from the self
. . . [a] person clings to illusions about himself because, and as far as, he
has lost himself.
Karen Horney1
1 Karen Horney, New Ways in
Psychoanalysis, Routledge
& Kegan Paul, London,
1939, pp 99 –100
2 Alex Honneth, Pathologies
of Reason, Columbia
University Press, New York,
2009, p 188
3 Immanuel Kant, Critique of
Pure Judgement, Revised
Edition, Oxford University
Press, New York, 2009,
p 123
American society is in the grip of a paralysing infantilism, marked by a
crisis of history, memory, and agency. Everywhere we look, the refusal
to think, interrogate troubling knowledge, and welcome robust dialogue
and engaged forms of pedagogy are now met by the fog of rigidity, antiintellectualism and a collapse of the public into the private. A politics of
intense privatisation and its embrace of the self as the only viable unit of
agency appears to have a strong grip on American society, as can be seen
in the endless attacks on reason, truth, critical thinking and informed
exchange, or any other relationship that embraces the social and the
democratic values that support it. Freedom has become an exercise in
self-development rather then social responsibility. Neoliberalism has
undermined shared modes of sociality, reducing society to a collection
of nomadic individuals tantamount to what Alex Honneth describes as
‘an abyss of failed sociality’.2 This might be expected in a society that
has become increasingly anti-intellectual, given its commitment to commodities, violence, privatisation, the death of the social and the bare
bones relations of commerce. But it is more surprising when it is elevated
to a national ideal and fashion craze, wrapped in a kind of self-righteous
moralism marked by an inability or reluctance to imagine what others are
thinking, or, as Kant once said, ‘to think from the standpoint of everyone
else’.3 This type of ideological self-righteousness, fuelled by a celebrity
culture and elevation of possessive individualism as the only value that
matters, is especially dispiriting when it accommodates rather than challenges the rise of the surveillance state and the demise of the public good,
along with those modes of solidarity that embrace a collective sense of
agency. Democracy no longer leaves open the importance and experience
of the common good. All social bonds now seem untrustworthy, deficient
# 2015 Third Text
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156
4 Ariel Dorfman, ‘Repression
by Any Other Name’,
Guernica, 3 February 2014,
http://www.guernicamag.
com/features/repression-byany-other-name/, accessed 2
March 2014
and disabling. A vision of the good society has now been replaced with
visions of individual happiness characterised by an endless search for
instant gratification and self-recognition. The personal appears to be
the only politics that matters in providing both emotional gratification
and a tangible referent for negotiating social problems.
Surveillance has become a growing feature of daily life wielded by
both the state and the larger corporate sphere. This merger registers
both the transformation of the political state into the corporate state
and the transformation of a market economy into a criminal economy.
One growing attribute of the merging of state and corporate surveillance
apparatuses is the increasing view of privacy on the part of the American
public as something to escape from rather than preserve as a precious political right. The surveillance- and security-corporate state is one that not
only listens, watches, and gathers massive amounts of information
through the data mining necessary for monitoring the American
public – now considered as both potential terrorists and a vast consumer
market – but also acculturates the public into accepting the intrusion of
surveillance technologies and privatised commodified values into all
aspects of their lives. Personal information is willingly given over to
social media and other corporate-based websites, such as Instagram,
Facebook, Twitter and other media platforms, and harvested daily as
people move from one targeted website to the next across multiple
screens and digital apparatuses.
As Ariel Dorfman points out, many ‘social media users gladly give up
their liberty and privacy, invariably for the most benevolent of platitudes
and reasons’, all the while endlessly shopping online and texting.4 While
selfies may not lend themselves directly to giving up important private
information online, they do speak to the necessity to make the self into
an object of public concern, if not a manifestation of how an infatuation
with selfie culture now replaces any notion of the social as the only form
of agency available to many people. Under such circumstances, it
becomes much easier to put privacy rights at risk as they are viewed
less as something to protect than to escape from in order to put the self
on public display.
When the issue of surveillance takes place outside the illegal practices
performed by government intelligence agencies, critics most often point
to the growing culture of inspection and monitoring that occurs in a
variety of public spheres through ever-present digital technologies used
to amass information, most evident in the use of video cameras that
inhabit every public space, from the streets, commercial establishments
and workplaces, to the schools our children attend, as well as in the
myriad scanners placed at the entry points of airports, stores, sporting
events and the like. Rarely do critics point to the emergence of the
selfie as another index of the public’s need to escape from the domain
of what was once considered to be the cherished and protected realm
of the private and personal. Privacy rights that were once viewed as a
crucial safeguard in preventing personal and important information
from being inserted into the larger public domain are now regarded as
a liability by many young people. Formerly defended as a key democratic
principle that ensures citizens’ autonomy from the state, the right to
privacy has now been reduced to the right to participate, anonymously
or otherwise, in the seductions of a narcissistic consumer culture.
157
Privacy was also seen as a sphere of protection from the threat of totalitarianism made infamous in George Orwell’s 1984. In the present oversaturated information age, the right to privacy has become a historical relic,
and for too many people privacy is no longer a freedom to be cherished
and protected.
Privacy has become a curse, an impediment that subverts the endless
public display of the self. Zygmunt Bauman echoes this sentiment in
arguing that:
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These days, it is not so much the possibility of a betrayal or violation of
privacy that frightens us, but the opposite: shutting down the exits. The
area of privacy turns into a site of incarceration, the owner of private
space being condemned and doomed to stew in his or her own juice;
forced into a condition marked by an absence of avid listeners eager to
wring out and tear away the secrets from behind the ramparts of
privacy, to put them on public display and make them everybody’s
shared property and a property everybody wishes to share.5
5 Zygmunt Bauman and
David Lyon, Liquid
Surveillance: A
Conversation, Polity Press,
Cambridge, UK, 2013, p 28
6 Cited from personal
correspondence from the
author’s colleague, David L
Clark, 10 February 2015.
7 ‘Self-portraits and Social
Media: The Rise of the
“Selfie”’, BBC News
Magazine, 6 June 2013,
http://www.bbc.com/news/
magazine-22511650,
accessed 4 March 2014
Privacy has mostly become synonymous with a form of self-generated,
non-stop performance – a type of public relations in which privacy is
valued only for the way it makes possible the unearthing of secrets, a
cult of commodified confessionals and an infusion of narcissistic, selfreferencing narratives. Of course, there is a notable exception here
regarding people of colour, especially poor dissenting blacks, for whom
privacy has never been an assumed right. The right to privacy was violated in the historical reality of slavery, the state terrorism enacted
under deep surveillance programs such as COINTELPRO, and in the
current wave of mass incarcerations. What has changed, particularly
since 9/11, is that the loss of privacy now extends to more and more
groups. Unfortunately, in too many cases the loss of privacy is voluntary
rather than being imposed by the repressive or secret mechanisms of the
state, big corporations, and powerful financial institutions.
This is particularly true for many young people who cannot escape
from the realm of the private fast enough, though this is not surprising
given neoliberalism’s emphasis on branding, a ‘contextless and eternal
now of consumption’,6 and the undermining of any viable social sphere
or notion of sociability. The rise of the selfie offers one index of this
retreat from privacy rights and thus another form of legitimisation for
devaluing these once-guarded rights altogether. A case in point is the ubiquity of self-portraits endlessly posted on social media. In 2013, BBC
News Magazine reported that:
A search on photo sharing app Instagram retrieves over 23 million photos
uploaded with the hashtag #selfie, and a whopping 51 million with the
hashtag #me. Rihanna, Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga and Madonna are all
serial uploaders of selfies. Model Kelly Brook took so many she ended
up ‘banning’ herself. The Obama children were spotted posing into their
mobile phones at their father’s second inauguration. Even astronaut
Steve Robinson took a photo of himself during his repair of the Space
Shuttle Discovery. Selfie-ism is everywhere. The word ‘selfie’ has been
bandied about so much in the past six months it’s currently being monitored for inclusion in the Oxford Dictionary Online.7
What this new politics of digital self-representation suggests is that the
most important transgression against privacy may not only be happening
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158
through the unwarranted watching, listening and collecting of information by the state. What is also taking place through the interface of
state and corporate modes of the mass collecting of personal information
is the practice of normalising surveillance by upping the pleasure quotient
and enticements for young people and older consumers. These groups are
now constantly urged to use the new digital technologies and social networks as a mode of entertainment and communication. Yet, these technologies function largely to simulate false notions of community and to
socialise young people into a regime of security and commodification in
which their identities, values and desires are inextricably tied to a
culture of private addictions, self-help and consuming.
The usual criticism of selfies is that they are an out-of-control form of
vanity and narcissism in a society in which an unchecked capitalism promotes forms of rampant self-interest that both legitimises selfishness and
corrodes individual and moral character.8 In this view, a market-driven
moral economy of increased individualism and selfishness has supplanted
any larger notion of caring, social responsibility and the public good. For
example, one indication that Foucault’s notion of self-care has now
moved into the realm of self-obsession can be seen in the growing
number of people who are waiting in line to see plastic surgeons to
enhance their image so that they feel comfortable with the photograph
of themselves they post on social media.9 Patricia Reaney points out that:
Plastic surgeons in the United States have seen a surge in demand for procedures ranging from eye-lid lifts to rhinoplasty, popularly known as a
nose job, from patients seeking to improve their image in selfies and on
social media.10
8 Anita Biressi and Heather
Nunn, ‘Selfishness in
Austerity Times’,
Soundings 56, spring 2014,
pp 54 –66, http://muse.jhu.
edu/journals/soundings_a_
journal_of_politics_and_
culture/v056/56.biressi.
pdf, accessed 1 December
2014
9 Patricia Reaney, ‘Nip,
Tuck, Click: Demand for
U.S. Plastic Surgery Rises
in Selfie Era’, Reuters, 29
November 2014, http://
www.reuters.com/article/
2014/11/29/life-selfiessurgery-idUSL1N0SW1F
I20141129, accessed 2
December 2014
10 Ibid
11 Peter Fonagy, Ethel Person,
and Joseph Sandler, eds,
Freud’s ‘On Narcissism: An
Introduction’, Yale
University Press, New
Haven, 1991, and
Christopher Lasch, The
Culture of Narcissism:
American Life in an Age of
Diminishing Expectations,
Norton, New York, 1991
It appears that selfies are not only an indication of the public’s descent
into the narrow orbits of self-obsession and individual posturing, but
also good for the economy, especially for plastic surgeons, who are generally among the rich elite. The unchecked rise of selfishness is now partly
driven by the search for new forms of capital that recognise no boundaries
and appear to have no ethical limitations.
The plague of narcissism has a long theoretical and political history,
extending from Sigmund Freud to Christopher Lasch.11 Freud analysed
narcissism in psychoanalytic terms as a form of self-obsession that ran
the gamut from being an element of normal behaviour to a perversion
that pointed to a psychiatric disorder. According to Lasch, narcissism
was a form of self-love that functioned less as a medical disorder than
as a disturbing cultural trait and political ideology deeply embedded in
a capitalist society, one that disdained empathy and care for the other
and promoted a cut-throat notion of competition. Lasch argued that
the culture of narcissism promoted an obsession with the self under the
guise of making selfishness and self-interest a cherished organising principle of a market-based society. For Lasch, these traits became visible
in the cinematic critique of the megalomaniac and utterly narcissistic
Gordon Gekko, the main fictional character in Oliver Stone’s 1987 film
Wall Street, who has become immortalised by his infamous ‘greed is
good’ credo. Both theorists saw these psychological and cultural traits
as a threat to one’s mental and political health. What neither acknowledged was that, in the latter part of the twentieth century, they would
become normalised, common-sense principles that shaped the everyday
159
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behaviour of a market-driven society in which they were viewed less as an
aberration than as a virtue.
In the current historical moment, Gordon Gekko looks tame. The new
heroes of contemporary American capitalism are now modelled on a marriage of John Galt, the character from the infamous Ayn Rand novel Atlas
Shrugged (1957), who transforms the pursuit of self-interest into a secular
religion for the ethically bankrupt, and Patrick Bateman, the more disturbing character in Bret Easton Ellis’s novel and the 2000 film American
Psycho (directed by Mary Harron), who kills those considered disposable
in a society in which only the strong survive. Today, fiction has become
reality, as the characters Gordon Gekko, John Galt and Patrick
Bateman are personified in the real-life figures of the Koch brothers,
Lloyd Blankfein, and Jamie Dimon, among others. The old narcissism
looks mild compared with the current retreat into the narrow orbits of
privatisation, commodification, and self-interest. Lynn Stuart Parramore
gets it right in her insightful comment:
If Lasch had lived to see the new millennium, marked by increased economic inequality and insecurity, along with trends like self-involved
social networking and celebrity culture, he would not have been surprised
to hear that the new normal is now pretty much taken for granted as the
way things are in America. Many even defend narcissism as the correct
response to living with increased competition and pressure to win. According to one study, Americans score higher on narcissism than citizens of any
other country. Researchers who study personality find that young Americans today score higher on narcissism and lower on empathy than they did
30 years ago.12
12 Lynn Stuart Parramore,
‘Can We Escape Narcissism
in America? 5 Possible
Antidotes’, 30 December
2014, http://www.alternet.
org/culture/can-we-escapenarcissism-america-5possible-antidotes,
accessed 4 January 2015
13 Patricia Reaney, 2014,
op cit
Under the regime of neoliberalism, narcissism not only becomes the defining characteristic of spoiled celebrities, brutish and cruel CEOs, and
media stars such as Donald Trump, but also speaks to a more comprehensive notion of deformed agency, an almost hysterical sense of self-obsession, a criminogenic need to accumulate possessions, and a pathological
disdain for democratic social relations. Mainstream selfie culture may not
be entirely driven by a pathological notion of narcissism, but it does speak
to the disintegration of those public spheres, modes of solidarity, and
sense of inclusive community that sustain a democratic society. In its
most pernicious forms it speaks to a flight from convictions, social
responsibility, and the rational and ethical connections between the self
and the larger society. Selfie culture pushes against the constructive cultivation of fantasy, imagination and memory, allowing such capacities to
deteriorate in a constant pursuit of commodified pleasure and the need
to heighten the visibility and performance of the self. The culture of atomisation and loneliness in neoliberal societies is intensified by offering the
self as the only source of enjoyment, exchange and wonder. How else to
explain the bizarre behaviour of individuals who have their faces altered
in order to look good in their selfies? As Jennifer Reynolds points out after
having plastic surgery, ‘I definitely feel more comfortable right now with
my looks if I need to take a selfie, without a doubt, I would have no
problem’.13
In a society in which the personal is the only politics, there is more at
stake in selfie culture than rampant narcissism or the swindle of fulfilment
offered to teenagers and others whose self-obsession and insecurity takes
an extreme, if not sometimes dangerous, turn. What is being sacrificed is
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160
14 Brad Evans and Henry A
Giroux, Disposable
Futures, City Lights Books,
San Francisco, 2015
15 Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late
Capitalism and the Ends of
Sleep, Verso, Brooklyn,
New York, 2013, p 5
16 Op cit, p 17
17 The kind of babble
defending selfies without
any critical commentary
can be found in Jenna
Wortham, ‘My Selfie,
Myself’, Sunday Review,
19 October 2013, http://
www.nytimes.com/2013/
10/20/sunday-review/myselfie-myself.html, accessed
3 March 2014
not just the right to privacy, the willingness to give up the self to commercial interests, but the very notion of individual and political freedom. The
atomisation that, in part, promotes the popularity of selfie culture is nourished not only by neoliberal fervour for unbridled individualism, but also
by the weakening of public values and the emptying out of collective and
engaged politics.
Not only is the political and corporate surveillance state concerned
about promoting the flight from privacy rights but it also attempts to
use that power to canvass every aspect of people’s lives in order to suppress dissent, instil fear in the populace and repress the possibilities of
mass resistance against unchecked power.14 Selfie culture is also fed by
a spiritually empty consumer culture driven by, in Jonathan Crary’s
words, never-ending ‘conditions of visibility . . . in which a state of permanent illumination (and performance) is inseparable from the non-stop
operation of global exchange and circulation’.15 Crary’s insistence that
entrepreneurial excess now drives a 24/7 culture points rightly to a
society driven by a constant state of ‘producing, consuming, and discarding’ photos as disposable – a central feature of selfie culture.16 Selfie
culture is increasingly shaped within a mode of temporality in which
quick turnovers and short attention spans become the measure of how
one occupies the ideological and affective spaces of the market, with its
emphasis on speed, instant gratification, fluidity, and disposability.
Under such circumstances, the cheapening of subjectivity and everyday
life are further intensified by social identities now fashioned out of
brands, commodities, relationships, and images that are used up and discarded as quickly as possible. Under such circumstances, pleasure is held
hostage to the addiction of consuming, with its 24/7 discharging of
impulses, fast consumption, and quick turnovers to the expense of purposeful thought and reflection.
Once again, too many young people succumb to the influence of neoliberalism and its relentless refiguring of the public sphere as a site for displaying the personal by running from privacy, by making every aspect of
their lives public. Or they limit their presence in the public sphere to
posting endless images of themselves. In this instance, community
becomes reduced to the non-stop production of shared images in which
the self becomes the only source of agency worth validating. At the same
time, the popularity of selfies points beyond a pervasive narcissism, or a
desire to collapse the public spheres into endless and shameless representations of the self. Selfies and the culture they produce cannot be entirely
collapsed into the logic of domination. Hence, I do not want to suggest
that selfie culture is only a medium for various forms of narcissistic performance. Some commentators have suggested that selfies enable people
to reach out to each other, present themselves in positive ways, and use
selfies to drive social change. And there are many instances in which transgender people, people with disabilities, women of colour, undocumented
immigrants, and other marginalised groups are using selfies in proactive
ways that do not buy into mainstream corporate selfie culture.
Many young people claim that selfies offer the opportunity to invite
comments by friends and to raise their self-esteem, and that they offer a
chance for those who are powerless and voiceless to represent themselves
in a more favourable and instructive light.17 For instance, Rachel Simmons
makes a valiant attempt to argue that selfies are especially good for girls.18
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161
While this is partly true, I think Erin Gloria Ryan is right in responding to
Simmons’ claim about selfies as a ‘positive-self-esteem builder’ when she
states: ‘Stop this. Selfies aren’t empowering; they’re a high tech reflection
of the fucked up way society teaches women that their most important
quality is their physical attractiveness.’19 It is difficult to believe that mainstream, corporate-saturated selfie culture functions constructively to
mostly build self-esteem among young girls, who are reduced to salacious
sexual commodities and fodder for dating sites in the context of a neverending market that defines them as titbits of a sensationalised celebrity
culture. What is often missing in the marginalised use of selfies is that for
the most part the practice is driven by a powerful and pervasive set of poisonous market-driven values that frame this practice in ways that are often
not talked about. Selfie culture is now a part of an economy that
encourages selfies as an act of privatisation and consumption, not as a practice that might support the public good, and fails to recognise that some
groups are using selfie culture to expand public dialogue rather than turn
it over to commercial interests.
At the same time, there is considerable research indicating that
the reality of being watched results in feelings of low self-esteem,
depression and anxiety. Whether observed by a supervisor at work or
Facebook friends, people are inclined to conform and demonstrate less
individuality and creativity.20
18 Rachel Simmons, ‘Selfies
Are Good for Girls’, 20
November 2013, http://
www.slate.com/articles/
double_x/doublex/2013/
11/selfies_on_instagram_
and_facebook_are_tiny_
bursts_of_girl_pride.html,
accessed 2 December 2014
19 Erin Gloria Ryan, ‘Selfies
Aren’t Empowering.
They’re a Cry for Help’, 21
November 2013, http://
jezebel.com/selfies-arentempowering-theyre-a-cryfor-help-1468965365,
accessed 2 March 2014
20 Kate Murphy, ‘We Want
Privacy But Can’t Stop
Sharing’, New York Times,
4 October 2014
21 Ibid
Moreover, the more people give away about themselves, whether
through selfies or the emptying out of their lives on other social media
such as Facebook, ‘the more dissatisfaction with what they got in
return for giving away so much about themselves’.21 Is it any wonder
that so many college students in the age of the selfie are depressed?
A romanticised and depoliticised view of the popularity of selfies
misses the point that their mass acceptance, proliferation and commercial
appropriation, filling the public space that once focused on important
social problems, shows that a sense of social responsibility is in decline,
especially among young people, whose identity and sense of agency is
now shaped largely through the lens of a highly commodified celebrity
culture. Ironically, there is an element of selfie culture that does not fall
into this trap but is barely mentioned in mainstream media.
We now live in a market-driven age defined as heroic by the conservative Ayn Rand, who argued in her book, The Virtue of Selfishness, that
self-interest was the highest virtue, and that altruism deserved nothing
more than contempt. This retreat from the public good, compassion
and care for the other, and the legitimisation of a culture of cruelty and
moral indifference, are often registered in strange signposts and popularised in the larger culture. This new celebrity-fed stupidity is exemplified by the widely marketed fanfare over Reality TV star Kim
Kardashian’s appropriately named book, Selfish, the unique selling
feature of which is that it contains 2000 selfies.
There is more at work here than the marketing of a form of civic illiteracy and retrograde consumer consciousness in which students are
taught to mimic the economic success of alleged ‘brands’; there is also
the pedagogical production of a kind of insufferable idiocy that
remakes the meaning of agency, promoted endlessly through the adoration of celebrity culture as the new normal of mass entertainment. As
162
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22 Mark Fisher, Capitalist
Realism: Is There No
Alternative?, Zero Books,
Winchester, UK, 2009, p 74
23 Quentin Skinner and
Richard Marshall, ‘Liberty,
Liberalism and
Surveillance: A Historic
Overview’, 26 July 2013,
http://www.
opendemocracy.net/
ourkingdom/quentinskinner-richard-marshall/
liberty-liberalism-andsurveillance-historicoverview, accessed 10
August 2014
24 Henry A Giroux,
‘Totalitarian Paranoia in
the Post-Orwellian
Surveillance State’, 10
February 2015, http://
truth-out.org/opinion/item/
21656-totalitarianparanoia-in-the-postorwellian-surveillancestate, accessed 15 February
2015
25 Michael Hardt and
Antonio Negri,
Declaration, Argo Navis
Author Services, 2012, p 23
26 Tom Engelhardt,
‘Tomgram: Engelhardt, A
Surveillance State
Scorecard’, 12 November
2013, http://www.
tomdispatch.com/blog/
175771/, accessed 8 March
2014
27 I take up many of these
issues in Henry A Giroux,
The Violence of Organised
Forgetting, City Lights
Publishing, San Francisco,
2014, and Henry A Giroux,
The Twilight of the Social,
Paradigm Press, Boulder,
2012, and Henry A Giroux,
Zombie Politics and
Culture in the Age of
Casino Capitalism, Peter
Lang, New York, 2011.
Mark Fisher points out, this suggests a growing testimony to a commodified society in which ‘in a world of individualism everyone is trapped
within their own feelings, trapped within their own imaginations. . .
and unable to escape the tortured conditions of solipsism’.22 One consequence is what Goya once called ‘the sleep of reason’: a growing inattentiveness to the power of criticism, an inattentiveness that breeds horrors
such as the failure of conscience, wars against thought, flirtations with
irrationality, and the collapse of political life and agency into the abyss
of private obsessions.
Under the surveillance state, the greatest threat one faces is not simply
the violation of one’s right to privacy, but the fact that the public is
subject to the dictates of authoritarian modes of governance it no
longer seems interested in contesting. And it is precisely this existence
of unchecked power and the wider culture of political indifference that
puts at risk the broader principles of liberty and freedom, which are fundamental to democracy itself. According to Skinner:
The response of those who are worried about surveillance has so far been
too much couched, it seems to me, in terms of the violation of the right to
privacy. Of course it’s true that my privacy has been violated if someone is
reading my emails without my knowledge. But my point is that my liberty
is also being violated, and not merely by the fact that someone is reading
my emails but also by the fact that someone has the power to do so should
they choose. We have to insist that this in itself takes away liberty because
it leaves us at the mercy of arbitrary power. It’s no use those who have possession of this power promising that they won’t necessarily use it, or will
use it only for the common good. What is offensive to liberty is the very
existence of such arbitrary power.23
The rise of the mainstream appropriation of selfies under the surveillance
state is only one register of neoliberal-inspired flight from privacy. As I
have argued elsewhere, the dangers of the surveillance state far exceed
the attack on privacy and warrant more than simply discussion about balancing security against civil liberties.24 The critique of the flight from
privacy fails to address how the growth of the surveillance state and its
appropriation of all spheres of private life are connected to the rise of
the punishing state, the militarisation of American society, secret
prisons, state-sanctioned torture, a growing culture of violence, the criminalisation of social problems, the depoliticisation of public memory, and
one of the largest prison systems in the world, all of which ‘are only the
most concrete, condensed manifestations of a diffuse security regime in
which we are all interned and enlisted’.25 The authoritarian nature of
the corporate-state surveillance apparatus and security system with its
‘urge to surveill, eavesdrop on, spy on, monitor, record, and save every
communication of any sort on the planet’26 can only be fully understood
when its ubiquitous tentacles are connected to wider cultures of control
and punishment, including security-patrolled corridors of public
schools, the rise in super-max prisons, the hyper-militarisation of local
police forces, the rise of the military – industrial – academic complex,
and the increasing labelling of dissent as an act of terrorism in the
United States.27 Moreover, it must be recognised that the surveillance
state is at its most threatening when it convinces the public to selfmonitor themselves, so that self-tracking becomes a powerful tool of
the apparatus of state spying and control.
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163
28 See for instance the
following sites:
D A K, ‘A ∗ Different∗ Selfie
Article: Decolonizing
Representations of Women
of Color!’, 17 March 2014,
http://www.browntourage.
com/magazine/look-at-me/
Nico Lang, ‘In the Queer
Community, Selfies Are
about Visibility, not
Validation’, 5 December
2013, http://www.dailydot.
com/lifestyle/transgendercommunity-needs-selfies/
Amy Stretten, ‘Transgender
#Selfies Are Acts of
“Revolutionary” SelfLove’, 13 February 2014,
http://fusion.net/story/
4844/transgender-selfiesare-acts-of-revolutionaryself-love/
‘#365FeministSelfie – Are
you in?’, 31 December
2013, http://www.
vivalafeminista.com/2013/
12/365feministselfie-areyou-in.html, accessed all of
these sites on 6 April 2014
29 Alicia Eler, ‘The Feminist
Politics of #Selfies’,
Hyperallergic: Sensitive Art
and its Discontents, 25
November 2013, http://
hyperallergic.com/95150/
the-radical-politics-ofselfies/, accessed 1
December 2014
30 D A K, ‘A ∗ Different∗ Selfie
Article. Decolonizing
Representations of Women
of Color!’, 17 March 2014,
http://www.browntourage.
com/magazine/look-at-me/,
accessed 1 April 2014
31 Hannah Arendt, ‘Ideology
and Terror: A Novel Form
of Government’, in The
Origins of Totalitarianism,
Houghton Mifflin
Harcourt, New York,
2001, p 475
Selfies may be more than an expression of narcissism gone wild – the promotion of privatisation over preserving public and civic culture, with their
attendant practice of social responsibility. They may also represent the
degree to which the ideological and affective spaces of neoliberalism have
turned privacy into a mimicry of celebrity culture that both abets and is indifferent to the growing surveillance state and its totalitarian revolution, one
that will definitely be televised in an endlessly repeating selfie that owes
homage to George Orwell. Once again, it must be stressed that there are registers of representation in selfie culture that point in a different direction.
There are elements of selfie culture that neither subscribe to the Kardashian model of self-indulgence, nor limit the potential of an alternative
selfie culture to comments by a handful of mainstream feminists talking
about photos being self-esteem builders. There is another trajectory of
selfie culture at work that refuses the retreat into a false sense of empowerment, and embraces modes of self-representation as a political act intent
on redefining the relationship between the personal and the social in ways
that are firmly wedded to social change. There are non-mainstream
groups that are concerned with far more than building self-esteem in
the superficial sense. For example, there are women of colour, transgender and disabled people, who are using selfies to promote communities of
healing and empowerment, while also challenging a culture of cruelty
that marks those who are different by virtue of their age, disability,
sexual orientation and race as disposable.28
As Alicia Eler observes, ‘The selfie is an aesthetic with radical potential
for bringing visibility to people and bodies that are othered’.29 And as
writer D A K notes:
The selfie is a new framework for women of color to create their own visibility and subvert dominant truths. Regardless of the content of the image,
it is made with the subject’s own volition and published with their consent.
It is a genuine image, created privately with minimal filtration. The selfie
represents a marginalized human being as a human being, instead of
countless dehumanizing stereotypes. To control our image and how it is
presented is one of the many ways we reclaim our bodies and celebrate
our identities. We are converting a tool used to erase us into means to
fashion our visibility.30
What is crucial to recognise here is that selfie culture can itself be a site of
struggle – one that refuses to become complicit either with the politics of
narcissism or the growing culture of surveillance. In this case, various
individuals and groups are using selfie culture to expand the parameters
of public dialogue, public issues and the opportunity for different political
identities to be seen and heard. This is a growing movement whose public
presence has largely been ignored in the mainstream press because it connects the personal to the task of rewriting notions of self-presentation that
stress matters of difference, justice and shared beliefs and practices aimed
at creating more inclusive communities.
Hannah Arendt has written that:
Totalitarian domination as a form of government is new in that it is not
content with . . . isolation and destroys private life as well. It bases itself
on loneliness, on the experience of not belonging to the world at all,
which is among the most radical and desperate experiences of man.31
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164
32 Alex Honneth, Pathologies
of Reason, Columbia
University Press,
New York, 2009, p 188
Selfie culture cannot be viewed as synonymous with a totalitarian politics in spite of how it organizes and rearranges identities so as to reinforce
the privatization and depoliticization of its citizens. What cannot be forgotten is that under the regime of neoliberalism, selfie culture at its worse
can be used to denigrate the incarcerated, sell dangerous drugs, shame
immigrants, promote bullying and sexually oppress young girls. Selfie
culture may not be all of one piece but it bears the over determined
scars of the punishing surveillance state, and an utterly commodified
and privatized society.
The good news is that selfie culture can also be used to rewrite the
relationship between the personal and the political, and in doing so
expand the vibrancy of public discourse and work to prevent the collapse
of public life. In this case, selfie culture moves away from the isolation and
privatisation of neoliberal culture and further enables those individuals
and groups working to create a formative critical culture that better
enables the translation of private troubles into public issues and a
further understanding of how public life affects private experiences. In
contrast to the mainstream appropriation of selfie culture, this more
empowering use of selfies becomes part of what might be called an emergent public dedicated to undermining what Alex Honneth has called ‘an
abyss of failed sociality’.32 Selfie culture is not all of one piece and is
emblematic of such a struggle. And at its best it becomes an act of empowerment and a vehicle for social change. What selfie culture will become
presents a crucial site of struggle to address both the collapse of the
public into the private, and the rise of the punishing and surveillance
state – a fight desperately worth waging.
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