Selfies as Testimonies of the Flesh

• In Event: Digital Media and the Body

Abstract

In this presentation, I take my point of departure on refugee selfies in European media and I reflect on what the selfie is and how it works within the visual economies of global media networks. Extending dominant approaches to the selfie as aesthetic or a techno-social practice, I propose a theoretical understanding of the selfie as embodied practice with ethico-political effects - as a digital genre of ‘flesh witnessing’ (Harari 2005). This conception of the selfie as flesh witnessing originates in two places. First, it originates in the function of the selfie to confront us with the face of the other as a sovereign act of self-representation (as a locative ‘here I am’ and an existential ‘here I am’) and, in so doing, to make the demand for a response. Second, it stems from the capacity of the selfie to flow across digital networks, both horizontally across social media (intermediation) and vertically onto mainstream news platforms and their relationships of social power and geo-political hierarchy (remediation).
As both face and flow, the selfie as flesh witnessing is particularly relevant in research questions around excluded or marginalized groups, whose ‘face’ struggles not only for visibility in Western media spaces but crucially for survival at the outer borders of Europe. Drawing on a comparative project of European news on refugee selfies taken on the Greek shores, I demonstrate two things. On the one hand, I demonstrate how, as an embodied practice of self-representation under conditions of risk of death, the face of the refugee selfie works as both visual evidence of arrival (‘I am here’) and as affective celebration of survival (‘I am here’). On the other hand, I show how the flows of the selfie across European media displace, marginalize or erase this embodied testimony of survival in favour of Eurocentric norms of newsworthiness, significance and relevance. Coupling the geo-political bordering of bodies stuck in the outskirts of Europe, Western economies of visibility work to keep refugee selfies and their sovereign claims to arrival and survival outside the scope of ‘our’ mediated publicity.

Author

• Lilie Chouliaraki, London School of Economics and Political Science