Third Text ISSN: 0952-8822 (Print) 1475-5297 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ctte20 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. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 866 View related articles View Crossmark data Citing articles: 1 View citing articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=ctte20 Download by: [73.15.27.158] 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 Downloaded by [73.15.27.158] at 20:00 22 March 2016 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 Downloaded by [73.15.27.158] at 20:00 22 March 2016 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: Downloaded by [73.15.27.158] at 20:00 22 March 2016 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 Downloaded by [73.15.27.158] at 20:00 22 March 2016 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 Downloaded by [73.15.27.158] at 20:00 22 March 2016 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 Downloaded by [73.15.27.158] at 20:00 22 March 2016 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 Downloaded by [73.15.27.158] at 20:00 22 March 2016 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 Downloaded by [73.15.27.158] at 20:00 22 March 2016 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. Downloaded by [73.15.27.158] at 20:00 22 March 2016 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 Downloaded by [73.15.27.158] at 20:00 22 March 2016 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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