Please join the Digital Aesthetics Workshop for our next event with Damon Young, who will present “Selfie/Portrait” on Tuesday, May 9 from 5-7PM PT. The event will take place, as usual, in the Stanford Humanities Center Board Room. Find an abstract and bio attached, as well as a poster for lightweight circulation. Looking forward to seeing you there !
Zoom link for those unable to join in-person: tinyurl.com/aty2zf2a
Abstract:
The selfie, ubiquitous and quotidian, is a media form that has risen to preeminence in the digital environments of the twenty-first century. While it appears banal and superficial, I argue that it is for this very reason that the selfie indexes a larger transformation of subjectivity, akin to the kind Walter Benjamin, one hundred years ago, associated with the invention of early photography. The “self” of the selfie appears in a fundamental relationship to transformation (in both analog forms of body modification and surgery, and digital forms of filters and retouching) in the context of a circulation economy. These same terms indicate the axes along which the selfie refashions contemporary gender and sexuality. On the one hand, drawing unapologetically (if not always consciously) from the visual archive of pornography, the selfie advances the legacy of the “male gaze,” familiar from the history of narrative cinema. At the same time, it destabilizes both the gendered positions associated with that gaze, and their implicit heterosexuality. Moreover, unlike the cinema, the selfie is no longer a voyeuristic medium, but a medium of address. But to whom is it addressed? The answer to that question bears on the way it reconfigures the mediated field of contemporary sexuality. Often said to embody a contemporary “narcissism” — itself a feminized concept— the selfie also puts on view a subject who is no longer an individual but is becoming-generic. At the fault line between historically transforming media paradigms in their intersection with transforming paradigms of gender, sexuality, and desire, the selfie allows us to take the measure of the tensions between the common and the singular, the generic and the particular, as well as the self-satisfied and the anxious, that shape the contours of a contemporary cultural logic.
Bio:
Damon Young is co-appointed with the department of French and is affiliated with the Program in Critical Theory, the Berkeley Center for New Media, the Institute for European Studies, and the Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender & Sexuality. He teaches courses on art cinema, on sexuality and media, and on topics in digital media and film theory (including classical film theory, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, semiotics, feminist and queer theory). His first book, Making Sex Public and Other Cinematic Fantasies was published in the Theory Q series at Duke University Press in 2018, and shortlisted for the 2019 Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present Book Prize. That book examines fears and fantasies about women’s and queer sexualities—as figures for social emancipation or social collapse–in French and US cinema since the mid-1950s. It also considers the way cinema produces a new model of the private self as it challenges the novel’s dominance in the twentieth century. The latter idea is the basis for Professor Young’s current book project, After the Private Self, which explores the technical and technological ground of subjectivity across media forms, from the written diary through to big data, algorithms, and contemporary Internet cultures. Is the self of Rousseau’s Confessions the same as the self of the digital selfie? The inquiry integrates topics in digital media theory with “earlier” questions of language and subjectivity.
