Abstract
The selfie is the newest and arguably most radical phenomenon in the long-standing tradition of photographic portraiture. Driven by changes in both technological and social contexts, the selfie is central to the ongoing transition from written to image-based communication and has been accompanied by the reconfiguration of identity into a self-curated visual archive. This chapter argues that this is an act of affective curation, re-describing Roland Barthes’s notion of the photographic punctum in terms of the multi-faceted, ambivalent ontology of selfies. With particular attention to sexualised photos and death-by-selfie, the chapter interrogates selfies in relation to the Deleuzian assemblage, the Lacanian gaze and the Freudian death drive in order to understand the role of the self/ie archive in relation to digital identity.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
The insertion of camera technology into mobile phones was introduced in the early 2000s (see https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/camera-phone-history/), developing from being a two-in-one device, through stages of ever greater integration, to what Katie Warfield refers to as a “multi-stable” technology, that is, a device of “multiple stabilities” in which the phone function is no longer primary (2017, 79). It is worth noting, too, that for many users the technical appeal of the two-in-one device preceded any intended purpose; I recall, for instance, a friend of mine, on the verge of buying his first camera phone, saying, “I have no idea what I’ll use it for, but I want one.”
- 2.
Vilém Flusser’s seminal work Towards a Philosophy of Photography locates the advent of what he calls the “technical image” of the photo in the context of a larger argument about the shift from discursive to image-based communication (Flusser 2000). Insofar as it foregrounds the digital age of image distribution, the technical image works as a punctum , or rupture, in the communicological universe.
- 3.
The seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza, to whom Deleuze is indebted for much of his thinking about affect, distinguishes between affectus and affectio, which can roughly be understood as force (affectus) and capacity (affectio) of a body (Watkins 2010, 270).
- 4.
It is worth noting that Kardashian is by no means the inventor of the celebrity sexy pose or of the bathroom selfie. Over two decades earlier, Madonna—still the voice responsible for your hearing “strike a pose” as a melodic line in your head (from the song “Vogue”)—published her culturally shocking book Sex (1992). Although, compared to Selfish , Sex lives up to its title with many more pseudo-pornographic poses, it does include plenty of bottom shots as well as a headless nude selfie in black and white (1992, 76) that seems to presage things to come.
References
“selfie, n.”. 2018, December. OED Online. Oxford University Press. Accessed December 26, 2018. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/390063.
Abidin, Crystal. 2016. Aren’t These Just Young, Rich Women Doing Vain Things Online?: Influencer Selfies as Subversive Frivolity. Social Media & Society 2 (2): 1–17.
Albury, Kath. 2015. Selfies, Sexts and Sneaky Hats: Young People’s Understandings of Gendered Practices of Self-Representation. International Journal of Communication 9: 1734–1745.
Bansal, Agam, et al. 2018. Selfies: A Boon or Bane? Journal of Family Medicine and Primary Care 7 (4): 828–831.
Barthes, Roland. (1980) 2000. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans. Richard Howard. London: Vintage.
Bucher, Tania, and Anne Helmond. 2018. The Affordances of Social Media Platforms. In The Sage Handbook of Social Media, ed. Jean Burgess, Alice Marwick, and Thomas Poell, 233–253. London: Sage Publications Ltd.
Dean, Jodi. 2010. Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of the Drive. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. (1980) 2008. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. London: Continuum.
van Dijck, José. 2008. Digital Photography: Communication, Identity, Memory. Visual Communication 7 (1): 57–76.
Egan, R. Danielle. 2013. Becoming Sexual: A Critical Appraisal of the Sexualisation of Girls. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Flusser, Vilém. (1983) 2000. Towards a Philosophy of Photography. Trans. Anthony Mathews. London: Reaktion Books.
Freud, Sigmund. (1920) 1995. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. In The Freud Reader, ed. by Peter Gay, 594–626. London: Vintage.
Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books.
Gye, Lisa. 2007. Picture This: The Impact of Mobile Camera Phones on Personal Photographic Practices. Continuum 21 (2): 279–288.
Hess, Aaron. 2015. The Selfie Assemblage. International Journal of Communication 9: 1629–1646.
Hjorth, Larissa, and Natalie Hendry. 2015, April. A Snapshot of Social Media: Camera Phone Practices. Social Media + Society 1: 1–3.
Kardashian, Kim. 2013. #NoFilter. Instagram, October 17. https://www.instagram.com/p/fjw59uuS7b/?utm_source=ig_embed.
Kardashian West, Kim. 2015. Selfish. New York: Rizzoli International Publications.
Kuntsman, Adi, ed. 2017. Selfie Citizenship. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
Lacan, Jacques. (1973) 1979. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis. Trans. Alan Sheridan. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
Madonna. 1992. Sex. New York: Warner Books.
Marwick, Alice E. 2015. Instafame: Luxury Selfies in the Attention Economy. Public Culture 27 (1): 137–160.
McCormick, Erin, and Michael Safi. 2018. Is Our Life Just Worth a Photo?: The Tragic Death of a Couple in Yosemite. The Guardian, November 3. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/nov/02/yosemite-couple-death-selfie-photography-travel-blog-taft-point.
Moorthy, Meenakshi. 2018. Chasing Sunsets or Chasing Likes? Instagram, March 28. Accessed December 26, 2018. https://www.instagram.com/p/Bg31bD2hgDq/?utm_source=ig_embed.
Pink, Sarah, and Larissa Hjorth. 2012. Emplaced Cartographies: Reconceptualising Camera-Phone Practices in an Age of Locative Media. Media International Australia 145: 145–156.
Renold, Emma, and Jessica Ringrose. 2017. Selfies, Relfies and Phallic Tagging: Posthuman Part-icipations in Teen Digital Sexuality Assemblages. Educational Philosophy and Theory 49 (11): 1066–1079.
Rettberg, Jill Walker. 2014. Seeing Ourselves Through Technology: How We Use Selfies, Blogs and Wearable Devices to See and Shape Ourselves. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Ringrose, Jessica. 2013. Postfeminist Education? Girls and the Sexual Politics of Schooling. London: Routledge.
Routh, Patricia. 2016. The Politics of Transformation: Selfie Production of the Visually Marginalised. In The Digital Transformation of the Public Sphere, ed. Athina Karatzogianni, Dennis Nguyen, and Elisa Serafinelli, 363–381. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Schwarz, Ori. 2010. On Friendship, Boobs, and the Logic of the Catalogue: Online Self-Portraits as a Means for the Exchange of Capital. Convergence 16 (2): 163–183.
Silverman, Kaja. 1989. Fassbinder and Lacan: A Reconsideration of Gaze, Look, and Image. Camera Obscura 7 (1 (19)): 54–85.
Warfield, Katie. 2017. MirrorCameraRoom: The Gendered Multi-(in)stabilities of the Selfie. Feminist Media Studies 17 (1): 77–92.
Watkins, Megan. 2010. Desiring Recognition, Accumulating Affect. In The Affect Theory Reader, ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, 269–285. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Wikipedia. n.d. List of Selfie-Related Injuries and Deaths. Accessed December 26, 2018. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_selfie-related_injuries_and_deaths.
Wise, J. Macgregor. 2011. Assemblage. In Gilles Deleuze: Key Concepts, ed. Charles J. Stivale, 2nd ed., 91–102. Durham, UK: Acumen.
Žižek, Slavoj. 2006. The Parallax View. London: MIT Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Kavka, M. (2019). From the “Belfie” to the Death-of-Me: The Affective Archive of the Self/ie. In: Riquet, J., Heusser, M. (eds) Imaging Identity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21774-7_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21774-7_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-21773-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-21774-7
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)