Katherine Guinness

This essay draws on the work of Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, among others, to examine the relational politics of the selfie in digital culture. We argue that the selfie should be thought of not as the documentation of a " self, " but as a practice that defines a " figure " as distinct from a " background. " In the process, this produces whatever can be thought to be a " self, " with the " background " receding from awareness. In using phenomenology to examine the selfie, we make a larger methodological claim for the study of digital media, one that refuses the empiricist mode that characterizes contemporary media studies. Additionally, in performing our phenomenology, we reevaluate the belief that selfies are " narcissistic, " suggesting that narcissism should be understood through an intertwined dialectic of aesthetic and anesthetic relations that either unveil or close off the body towards another, relations may have different political valiances depending on context. We conclude our essay with a brief discussion of the MV Sewol ferry disaster in Korea, which demonstrates how selfies should be conceptualized as a relational practice that derive an open politics from the interplay between “self” and “background.”