=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-2811/Paper08
|storemode=property
|title=Mediated Self and Subjectification. Selfies as a Negation of Alterity - Cindy Sherman, Inti Romero and Massive Auto-Photography
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2811/Paper08.pdf
|volume=Vol-2811
|authors=Maria Argyrokastriti
}}
==Mediated Self and Subjectification. Selfies as a Negation of Alterity - Cindy Sherman, Inti Romero and Massive Auto-Photography==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2811/Paper08.pdf
Digital Culture & Audiovisual Challenges: Interdisciplinary Creativity In Arts And Technology
MEDIATED SELF AND SUBJECTIVITY.
SELFIE AS A NEGATION OF ALTERITY
CINDY SHERMAN, INTI ROMERO
AND MASSIVE AUTO-PHOGRAPHY
Marily Argyrokastriti
PhD Candidate, Department of Audio and Visual Arts, Ionian University,
maargi17@yahoo.gr
Abstract
Selfies are assumingly the medium of transmitting into the world our identity and
subjective viewing. The instagrammers though, have become a commodity through the
branding of themselves, instead of being one person’s eye into the world, or the marking
of a personality in time, as self portraits once were. The specific aesthetics they promote
have become an Instagramism as Lev Manovic puts it in his latest book on the Instagram,
in the same way as we would talk about Impressionism or Surrealism a solid imagery that
is, corresponding to specific iconological and formalistic norms.
The mediated self and the making of subjectivity go a long way back, in the process
of hominisation and the intersection of becoming a subject and technics (Stiegler). This
ontological analysis of subjectivity corresponds psychoanalytically also to the Mirror
Stage (Lacan) with the Mirror being a technema, a technological achievement (P.
Rigopoulou). Interwoven, subjectivity and technology demonstrate the progress in
enhanced subjectivity. The selfies regardless being a technological medium coincide in
their diffusion and mimesis, with subjection, not by chance, in the root of the word
subjectivity (Butler). Subjection to a stereotype, conformity and annihilation of the
Other (Baudrillard) and Difference (Deleuze). The artists Cindy Sherman and Inti
Romero consider the selfies in a critical manner with Sherman transforming herself in
an ironic edited persona and Inti Romero adding pixels to her photos, in an attempt to
conceal the selfie focus.
Keywords: digital culture, Inti Romero, selfies, Sindy Sherman, subjectivity.
Introduction
In his latest book on the Instagram, Lev Manovic refers to the term Instagramism in
order to refer to the world wide tension of taking and sharing photographs through the
social media platform, that have a particular style ideology which could constitute a
theory in the same way, as we would talk about surrealism or impressionism.
Copyright © 2018 for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative
Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) DCAC 2018.
Digital Culture & Audiovisual Challenges: Interdisciplinary Creativity In Arts And Technology
That style theory is reproduced through the successful instagram profiles providing
them hundreds of thousands followers, creating a wave of imitators and finally
developing the instagram language or to put it in Mac Luhan’s words creating “the
medium that’s the message” . Continuing in the same book, Manovic refers to the
Instagram aesthetics, as an aesthetic not belonging to the arts but to the commercial
goods promoted through the various intagrammer profiles, and he refers to this aesthetic
as not being part of the Society of the spectacle as Debord would sustain, but as an
aesthetic society confined to its self. To this claiming I would like to differ using the
situationist collective Tiqqun later in my presentation.
Subjectivity
Since we are talking about the social media transmitted self it would be very interesting
to analyze briefly the ontology of subjectivity as a byproduct of techno- logy as Stiegler
puts it in Technics and Time, as referred to, in the book Life after the new media by
Sarah Kember and Zoanna Zylinska. Stiegler talks about our being with, and emerging
from, technology as subjects and technical beings, referring to the ancient Greek myth
of Prometheus as included in Plato’s dialogue Protagoras. As Kember and Zylinska
mention “Technology is positioned here as a force that brings man forth and is fully
active in the process of hominization: it is not just an external device that can be picked
up, appended, and then discarded at will”.
So in Stigler’s words human becoming and technics are one and the same. As a
reference for this quote, in the myth of Prometheus and Epimitheus (the two gods
assigned with endowing animals with survival qualities), arrive to man with no qualities
left to give in order to protect himself. Epimitheus fault is to be compensated by the
stealing of fire and techne (art, technique) from Athena and Hephaestus by Prometheus
and his offering them to humans. In this way names were invented and things were
created. Or as Stiegler has it, “the being of humankind is to be outside itself,” the always
already technical human is a human that is inevitably, prior to and perhaps even against
his “will” — productively engaged with an alterity the ground for the formation of
subjectivity I add.
The formation of subjectivity in Lacan holds a great interest for our research, since
in the lacanian theory the subject becomes such in the infantile age, during the process
of the mirror stage. The infant recognizes itself in the mirror as a whole, but in reality it
has a fragmentary auto perception of its body, since it still doesn’t hold full control of
its body parts. This leads the infant to enter the Imaginary stage (the other two being the
Symbolic and the Real) and get ahold of a specular image. The mirror stage and
Narcissism(libidinal investment on the Ego, instead of an object) share a lot in common,
but the special interest is held for us in the fact that the mirror is “a work of art, a
technema, a technological achievement and at the same time a symbolic work” as Pepi
Rigopoulou states in her book The Body. We are having a link here with the prior
assumption with Stigler’s point of view.
In Deleuze – Guattari’s schizoanalysis there isn’t a soul that speaks, an unconscious
Digital Culture & Audiovisual Challenges: Interdisciplinary Creativity In Arts And Technology
that dictates as Colebrook analyzes in Understanding Deleuze. There’s a fragmentary
“body” the parts of which fulfill the orders of the Law, the Father (in the Lacanian sense)
or the hyper ego that transfers the ethics of the social complex.” The mouth judges
through speech, the eye controls and the mind limitates”. In the selfies we have the
fragmentation of an interrupted body, an ideal (in its edited edition) presence. These
fragmented bodies through auto-photography are members of a solid big body, that of
the medium itself, the face presented is nothing but a repetition, a mirroring of the same
represented idol. So in the selfies we are probably having the representation of a specular
ideal self, a subject striving to identify with the Imaginary representation as a paranoid
command.
Butler in “The psychic life of Power – Theories of subjection” mentions that the
word subjection means both submission and subjectification, a binary meaning used
also by Foucault in order to talk about biopower. Therefore subjectification in itself has
no autonomy in the social field. How could it have in the highly normalizing field of the
social media and especially instagram?
Alterity in this way, through the aesthetic leveling of the medium, is being
annihilated via the uniformity, and the voice of the medium becomes the voice of the
norme, a dictation filtered through not only in its iconological sufficiency, but also in
its optical communication via the filter processing of the image. But in a homogenized
(digital of real) reality what happens with the image of the Other? The Other targeted by
seduction and the Other we should not be affiliated with since it is the main bearer of the
Difference referred to by Baudrillard but also Deleuze in his encomium of Difference.
Other and Difference are the foundations of identity.
Imagery of the Selfies
It is time now to enter the aesthetics of the selfies. In his article “The Mutant Cute:
Meitu, the Selfie, and the Rewriting of Global Identities” Patrick Lichty describes a
project of his, called The horror of the Gaze in which he would use the Meitu a Chinese
application for beautifying photographs of pirated facebook photos, or even fellow
academics photographs in order to explore what he called the Augmented Selfie. Identity
politics, global “cuteness” standards and intercultural problems, politics of “whiteness”
arose since the application had algorithmic standards of “cuteness” deriving from the
asian beauty ideals and stereotypes (paleness, large eyes, infantilization).The very
familiar feminist concept of the male gaze in the arts and the spectacle, “ is being here
substituted by a self – reflexive machine gaze” as Lichty writes.
In that same context let’s focus on the work of Sindy Sherman and her instagram
profile where she manufactures her selfies using the application facetune with often
grotesque results. Cindy Sherman in the oeuvre that made her famous in the 70s and the
80s would use in an almost cinematic way, images of various types of women that she
would imitate as a scenery in order to narrate the female status and identity. Secretaries,
housewives, and celebrities would be the syllabus in pictures, for the female
representation in everyday life. In her Instagram profile though, she critiques the way
Digital Culture & Audiovisual Challenges: Interdisciplinary Creativity In Arts And Technology
in which we edit our pictures with an irony for the so called natural and healthy look we
aim to create, (natural being the young, the rosy cheeked, the shiny complexion and the
flawless features, wrinkle free. Nothing natural about it).These Sindy Sherman selfies
can be considered a fruit of post internet art, an art that is inspired by and referential to,
the digital culture, and foremost the internet and our lives within it. Sindy Sherman
refers to social media as being vulgar in an interview of hers in the Guardian, and
perhaps this vulgarity she tends to bring into the light with her selfies. Especially when
she draws a clown face and claims to be a makeup artist or when she paints her face
green and asks for a detox. The words she uses as captions for her selfies describe the
emotion of the scene with perky being, pink, large eyed, full of giant lashes and glossy
lips. In theory this would be the perfect Kardashian selfie had it not been so frightful!
In other selfies we have the so called lustful look, the inviting pose to an unknown
audience. A full exposure to desire but with deformed cheekbones, contracted eyes, half
open mouth surrendered to the Valentine the caption refers to.
On the other hand Inti Romero creates selfies she pixelises, towards anonymity and
non recognicity of the person represented. We are being informed on her identity by the
networking we witness, the responses she gets from her “friends” the information she
shares. The face remains the most valuable of her personal data, the best hidden part of
her sharing with the public. Yet this project is mostly revealing about the way we live in
the internet creating and transmitting our identity that doesn’t really connect to the
others, remaining a rizhomatic (anarchic and random) network rather than an arboreal
(hierarchic)construction if we want to use the Deleuzian concepts. Goffman the great
theorist of Identity stated in 1959 that we have different faces, for our different
interconnections, our identity being a performance in different settings
Brooke Wendt in her book The Allure of the Selfie states in conclusion that “All of
our selfies look almost identical on Instagram, which illustrates the power that the
camera and the network have over us; it seems that this connection is so strong that we
will our selfies to the program without a second thought, and we relinquish our personal
distinctions, our identities, to be seen on Instagram. Ubiquity, although it is inherent to
photography, is not inherent to identity, and it appears that we have yet to make this
distinction for ourselves. We find our selfies in multitude more compelling, and more
valued, than a thoughtful, single representation of ourselves.”
The selfies in their multitude, this massive data of photographed faces and bodies,
have become a uniform product, which just happens to depict a person. The likes being
the currency of this transaction, transform themselves some times in real life money.
The “influencer’s” market the popular profiles that is, is a branding field with pretty
much the same characteristics (how odd, to have products based on their similarity
instead of their uniqueness?)
What have these “products” in common? The glossy image of an ideal representation
of femininity, of being into this world, of giving the consumerist society an altar to
worship, that of the goods as displayed upon the young bodies. In Tiqqun’s book the
Preliminary Theory of the Young Girl, the young girl isn’t a gendered stereotype but the
symbol of a society surrendered to consumerism and spectacle, which invests to the
Digital Culture & Audiovisual Challenges: Interdisciplinary Creativity In Arts And Technology
young girl as being able only to consume and not produce. This young girl theory, could
apply to both men and women if they are being submissive enough to the success
narrative. Consume and be consumed.
As Tiqqun put it: “In reality, the Young-Girl is simply the model citizen as redefined
by consumer society since World War I, in explicit response to the revolutionary menace.
As such, the Young-Girl is a polar figure, orienting, rather than dominating, outcomes.
It is very impressive that a book written in 1999 is so applicable to Instagram even
though, it should come as no surprise since it refers to the dictations for the Young Girl
prototype, provided by the women’s magazines and the media. Today each Instagram
profile could be acknowledged as a personal medium in surface, but it is a massively
guided channel in deeper analysis.
Beaudrillard in Screened Out writes:” What we look for today, where the body is
concerned, is not so much health, which is a state of organic equilibrium, but fitness,
which is an ephemeral, hygienic, promotional radiance of the body - much more a
performance than an ideal state — w hich turns sickness into failure. In terms of fashion
and appearance, we no longer pursue beauty or seductiveness, but the ‘look’”.
And he continues: “All we can do is remind ourselves that seduction lies in non-
reconciliation with the other, in preserving the alien status of the Other. One must not
be reconciled with oneself or with one’s body. One must not be reconciled with the
other, one must not be reconciled with nature, one must not be reconciled with the
feminine (that goes for women too).Therein lies the secret of a strange attraction”.
For the purpose of this research I have made a connection with the Tiqqun texts
and real Instagram photographs I randomly collected through hashtags such as girl,
beauty, body and so on. They serve as really matching captions to the photographs they
accompany.
Illustrations
Sindy Sherman
1. 2. 3 .4.
Inti Romero
Digital Culture & Audiovisual Challenges: Interdisciplinary Creativity In Arts And Technology
1. 2.
Tiqqun – Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young Girl
1. 2.. 3.
4. 5. 6.
Digital Culture & Audiovisual Challenges: Interdisciplinary Creativity In Arts And Technology
References:
Baudrillard, J. (translated by Chris Turner) (2002) Screened Out. London, New York:
Verso
Butler, J. (1997) The Psychic Life of Power – Theories in Subjection. California:
Stanford University Press
Colebrook, C. (2002) Understanding Deleuze. Crows Nest, Australia: Allen & Unwin
Deleuze, G. (translation in English Paul Patton) (1994) Difference and Repetition. New
York: Columbia University Press
Evans, D. (1996) An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. London and
New York: Routledge
Hattenstone, S., (2011, January 15) Cindy Sherman: Me, myself and I Retrieved from:
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2011/jan/15/cindy-sherman-
interview
Kember, S., Zylinska, J., (2012) Life After New Media. Cambridge, Massachusetts
London England: The MIT Press
Lichty, P. (2017, October 5) The Mutant Cute, the Selfie and the Rewriting of Global
Identities. Retrieved from http://networkcultures.org/online-self/2017/10/05/
the-mutant-cute- meitu-the-selfie-and-the-rewriting-of-global-identities/
Manovich, L. (2017) Instagram and Contemporary Image http://manovich.net/
content/04- projects/150-instagram-and-contemporary-image/instagram_
book_manovich.pdf
Papacharissi, Z. (2011) A Networked self . New York and London: Routledge
Tiqqun (translated by Ariana Reines) (2012) Preliminary Materials For a Theory of the
Young- Girl. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e)
Wendt, B. (2014) The Allure of the Selfie. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures
Rigopoulou, P. (2003) The body. Athens, Greece: Plethron