“Century of the Selfie”

The selfie—perhaps the most ubiquitous image form of the twenty-first century—often appears banal or superficial, a symptom of narcissism or of a culture of endless circulation. In this talk, I argue that its preeminence in networked culture indexes a larger transformation of subjectivity, akin to the one Walter Benjamin, a century ago, associated with the advent of photography. While it shares a genealogy with earlier forms of self-portraiture, the selfie also belongs to a media ecology that includes the GIF, the meme, and the TikTok video—an ecology inseparable from an economy of overtaxed and monetized attention. But if the selfie is emblematic of the contradictions of its historical moment, it also, like all practices of self-representation, has an existential dimension. We put it on view, into circulation, for whom? For the Other. At the faultline between transforming media paradigms, the selfie offers a privileged site from which to take the measure of a contemporary cultural logic and the forms of subjectivity it produces.

Damon Ross Young is Associate Professor of French and Film & Media at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Making Sex Public and Other Cinematic Fantasies (Duke, 2018), shortlisted for the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present Book Prize, and of numerous essays on film theory, psychoanalysis, queer theory, pornography, and digital media. He is co-editor, most recently, of Meme Aesthetics, a special issue of Representations. His current book project, Century of the Selfie, is forthcoming with Harvard University Press.

This event is free and open to the public.