The Selfie and the Face

Exploring the Selfie Historical, Theoretical, and Analytical Approaches to Digital Self-Photography Edited by Julia Eckel, Jens Ruchatz, Sabine Wirth Julia Eckel • Jens Ruchatz • Sabine Wirth Editors Exploring the Selfie Historical, Theoretical, and Analytical Approaches to Digital Self-Photography sabine.wirth@staff.uni-marburg.de 6 The Selfie and the Face Hagi Kenaan Introduction A selfie, according to the Merriam Webster Dictionary, is “an image of oneself taken by oneself using a digital camera especially for posting on social networks.” The online version of the Oxford Dictionary offers quite a similar definition but is a bit more specific with regard to the technology involved. It defines a selfie as “a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and shared via social media” (Oxford Living Dictionaries). These definitions (which entered into dictionaries only around 2014) are generally adequate and factually correct. What they underscore is the self-directedness of the selfie image, its display on social networks, and its embeddedness in digital high-speed technology of smartphone cameras and the internet. In doing so, however, they do not directly address the question of the selfie’s visuality. How should we approach the uniqueness of this new kind of image that, in recent years, has become so integral to our everyday visual experience? H. Kenaan (*) Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel © The Author(s) 2018 J. Eckel et al. (eds.), Exploring the Selfie, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57949-8_6 sabine.wirth@staff.uni-marburg.de 113 114 H. Kenaan On a methodological level, there are two common ways of framing the selfie that I wish to avoid. First, while we definitely need to be attentive to the particular technological setting within which the selfie is produced, we should also be careful not to reduce the question of the selfie image to its technological underpinnings. The selfie is clearly grounded in important technological developments that photography and communication have undergone in the last 20 years, but these developments are in themselves insufficient for assessing the new kind of image-ness that the selfie brings about. Furthermore, I wish to avoid what is probably the most common paradigm for understanding the selfie: its casual framing as a self-portrait. While the tradition of self-portraiture is clearly an important, even crucial, backdrop for understanding the emergence of the selfie, I find it wrong to hurry to conceptualize the selfie—as is often done1—as if it were just another, albeit new, kind of self-portrait.2 Doing so would hinder us from coming to terms with the selfie’s distinct mechanism of self-presentation whose specificity needs to be addressed. My attempt here is to articulate the senses in which the selfie singularizes itself against the backdrop of self-portraiture. I do this in terms of a phenomenological account of the structure of reflexivity that grounds the selfie’s self-image. Presenting Identity Whereas smartphone cameras can be used (and are used) in a variety of ways for framing images of ourselves, selfies in the full sense of the term are those images intended to be shared via social media. They are forms of participation in the public sphere whose telos of appearing in public plays indeed an important role in the constitution of their visuality. A selfie, in other words, is a mode of making oneself present in the public domain, a visual mode of self-presentation.3 As such, it is a dimension of the self ’s ongoing engagement with the visuality of the world, a visuality whose characteristics are intimately tied to who we are and particularly tied to the complex structure of living at the intersection of vision and visibility, of seeing and being seen. The first thing to notice about the selfie’s mode of self-presentation is its anchorage in a depiction of the human face. The face does not always sabine.wirth@staff.uni-marburg.de The Selfie and the Face 115 appear at the picture’s actual center, but it is always there, serving as the grounding point of self-reference—a “this is me” that functions as the selfie’s necessary index. To put this differently, the selfie’s visuality is typically based on an undemanding—simple—notion of identity that is corroborated by the depiction of the face that functions as an unmistakable denotation of that identity. Thus, the face is not only an essential part of the selfie, but its appearance must be sufficiently clear and comprehensive to serve as an identity indicator: A picture without a clearly identifiable face is not typically a selfie.4 Furthermore, beyond its identifiability, the face typically appears in selfies through two dominant modalities of visual statements: Although one mode of presentation has as its focus the appearance and implied meanings of the presented face itself, the second kind of presentation pertains to the significance of the relational context in which the face/self appears (Fig. 6.1). Selfies, on the one hand, make use of the face as a site for depicting a wide range of conventional—typically ready-made—attributes that present the state of the self, for instance: I am happy, sad, confused, resolute, cute, sexy, beautiful, dreamy, frantic, miserable, … or, I have amazing blue eyes, a new beard, and so forth. On the other hand, there is a whole genre of selfies whose presentation of the self is based on the point they make about the self ’s relation to its surrounding and that which appears therein, for example: Here I am swimming next to a shark, hugging a celebrity, celebrating my birthday in a posh restaurant, running a marathon, cuddling my newborn baby, et cetera. These two modalities differ in their ways of articulating the presence of the self, but they both share the same internal logic of self-presentation: “This is me. I am xyz.” This affinity between them also makes it natural for these visual syntaxes to complement each other and intersect in one and the same selfie. Given this preliminary sketch, the question of the selfie’s relation to the self-portrait can be put in a more acute manner. Does the depiction of one’s face—and self—in a selfie really differ from the traditional form of self-portraiture? What would we overlook by simply regarding the selfie as an updated, digital, version of a self-portrait? These questions cannot be settled by factual answers about the objective features of different kinds of autodepictions but require a more general understanding of what a face is and what it means to present oneself in a picture. More sabine.wirth@staff.uni-marburg.de 116 H. Kenaan Fig. 6.1 Renana at the hairstylist specifically, in order to answer these questions, we first need to become clearer about the unique kind of visual relation that we ordinarily have with our faces and consequently about the kind of visual problem that the face poses for the project of self-presentation. Face/Self Faces have a peculiar visual place in our field of visual experience. On one hand, they are completely in the open, constantly in the mode of presenting themselves in the public sphere, and, at the same time, they mostly remain unseen by their own bearers. While we constantly see the faces of others, our own face does not directly appear in our field of vision. This sabine.wirth@staff.uni-marburg.de The Selfie and the Face 117 double structure makes the face visually different from most of the objects that surround it. An object is something that is, in principle, simply there, given as this or that visual content and invariant with regard to who the looker is. The keys or the smartphone that I am holding now, for example, are visually given to me just as they are given to you. They are part—or can be part—of our visual field in the very same way. This is not the case with the visual space in which faces appear. The relation I have with my face is completely different from the one I have with yours. Besides saying that I see your face but don’t see mine, we may say that the logic of the face’s appearance is different from that of objects in that it cannot be subsumed under one general homogeneous description. Rather, it requires an account that can accommodate both the appearance of the other person’s face and the way in which, as individuals, we experience our own face. This first-person perspective has two central aspects to it: the direct experience that we have of our face and the modes in which we experience the participation of our face in—its givenness to—the public sphere and gaze of others. These two last aspects will be especially pertinent for our discussion of the selfie. The question of the face is inseparable from the question of its appearance that, in turn, is something we daily engage in apropos the dominant presence that the faces of others have in our lives. We are familiar with the basic constant features of the other’s face, but we also know that real faces appear to us as constantly changing: a ceaseless self-revelation, a dynamism whose visual potential and actuality both seem to be part of the same surface. The face is a peculiar sur-face. We often speak of a person’s face as hiding from us the person’s emotions or thoughts, but, interestingly, this “hiding” has no depth structure in which something is actually hidden. The face is a surface that seems to unravel itself “from within itself.” This means that, unlike objects, it appears as a modality of selfexpression, self-presentation, constant exteriorization. Yet, while the face shows itself by hiding and hides itself by showing, there is a different perhaps deeper sense in which the face can never hide: The face, in its inner form, is always already out in the open, a being depending on its appearance. Embodying this structure, the face thus provides an intuitive metonym for the self. The self, like the face, is not only constantly found in a process sabine.wirth@staff.uni-marburg.de 118 H. Kenaan of becoming, but its existence is always part of the public domain. Just as, at times, we cover our face, we can also cover up certain aspects of our selves, but this covering up would already take place in and remain part of the public sphere. Furthermore, in being part of the public domain, both face and self always open up to what’s already a shared world, a world with others, an intersubjective world. In the midst of this intersubjective surrounding, caught in a web of relations whose ongoing determination is the condition for its meaningfulness, the self/face becomes what it is. It is never a self-sufficient entity that happens to be installed in an environment but is, itself, an intrinsically environmental being. This is also the case with the face that is never just present in the human situation but, to begin with, is always self-presenting, always geared toward and affected by its surroundings. In this respect, like the self, the face is primarily an inter-face. In growing up, we typically develop some understanding of our intersubjective condition and specifically of our essential entanglement with others. This understanding takes on a variety of forms that are mostly nonthematic but nevertheless typically resonate a recurring awareness to an important point: Appearance is tricky. That is, while, in an obvious sense, our appearance is “ours,” in a deeper sense it is never completely in our hands. We do not own our appearance and can never fully know or determine its character, or control the effects or the meaning it has. As we grow up, we come to understand that there is always a possible gap between how we imagine ourselves to be—how we wish to appear—and the actual ways in which we appear to others. People who are overly selfconscious are often preoccupied with finding ways to eliminate this gap. Perhaps this is something that the uploading of selfies onto social media also seeks to achieve in presenting the self through a micromanaged, thoroughly supervised, well-packaged image. But the elimination of this gap is sheer fantasy, for the gap is structural, intrinsic to the space of appearance. That is, when we appear in the public domain, our appearance is constituted by a structure of perspectival viewings that necessarily includes perspectives that we cannot contain. Another way to put this is to say that our appearance in the public sphere ineluctably involves a blind spot for us. We can never fully see how we are seen. And, in this context, our face is an exemplary case in point. sabine.wirth@staff.uni-marburg.de The Selfie and the Face 119 Interestingly, what serves as our most immediate carte de visite, our point of entry into the public visual sphere—the face—is something to which we ourselves do not have direct access. Our face escapes us. It is, literally, the self ’s primary blind spot, one that, on a factual level, can be explained apropos two dimensions of our bodily existence. As bodily creatures, our particular form of embodiment bars us from having an all-inclusive, synoptic, view of our body; and, more important, we see through seeing organs that are directed outward, that is, structured in such a way that bars them from viewing themselves and their immediate surroundings. A self-relation is not part of our in-built visual capacities. And, yet, this is only one part of the picture. Its other side is that while our face escapes us, it concomitantly presents itself to others who can contemplate, describe, and interpret it freely. And, in this respect, our relation to the visuality of our face is, in principle, mediated by what others see. “The trouble,” Sartre (1974 [1939]) writes in an interesting early piece on faces, “is that I don’t see my face—or at least not at first. I carry it in front of me like a secret I am unaware of and it is, on the contrary, the faces of others that teach me about my own” 68). For Sartre, the understanding that our faces are not part of our immediate field of vision gains its significance once we realize that others are the ones holding the secret of our facticity. This insight would later, in Being and Nothingness, trigger an intricate dialectics of conflict that, for him, is “the original meaning of being-for-others” (Sartre 1992 [1943], 474). Sartre analyzes the visual dimension of this dialectics in the famous chapter on Le regard (Sartre 1992 [1943]) in which he reformulates the dialectics of self and other in terms of the forces and effects generated by the efficacy of the human gaze: The self, according to him, can thus either encounter others as objects of one’s gaze or yield to the objectifying force of the other’s gaze. And, since “no synthesis of these two forms is possible” (400), the domain of the visual is disclosed as a space of violent confrontation that, for him, epitomizes the inner structure of our being with others. Sartre’s position (which I have discussed elsewhere5) is not, in itself, crucial to the present discussion. I mention it here because it grows from an insight that I find methodologically important and that informs my discussion. The insight, shared in different variations by a few twentieth-century sabine.wirth@staff.uni-marburg.de 120 H. Kenaan philosophers dealing with the human face, is that the question of how a face looks needs to be understood with a double entendre: how it looks onto the world and how it looks in the eyes of others—its active looking and its being looked at.6 I shall later say more about the intersection of these two vectors that, in my view, is crucial for thinking about the face’s appearance in the selfie. But, at this point, let’s first turn to the question of what a selfdepiction, a visual representation of our face, means in terms of the relationship it construes between the self and its face. As suggested, our face is a modality of self-expression and self-presentation. The face is an interface. Thus, we may be inclined to understand the acts of making and then disseminating our self-image as an enhanced development of the dynamis that is already inherent in the face/self. Just as our face is always already making an appearance to a given public, a face’s image, too, is essentially public and, as such, tied, in its very being, to a potential dynamics of spectatorship. Images, in other words, are extrovertly visual. They are not only visible, but they specifically address the eye in the form of that which offers itself to sight. The image, like a face, is thus never just present but always already in the mode of self-presenting. It is an entity whose essence lies in its turning toward the eye, in facing a viewer. And, thus, in the age of “technological reproducibility,” the image seems to be a natural vehicle through which the primary self-presentation of the face can expand its reverberation in the public sphere. This is often what the selfie seems to be doing, say, in its paradigmatic use by media celebrities or by teenagers who have adopted a celebrity’s attitude of self-promotion. Indeed, in social media, the posting of self-images is all too often connected to (explicit or implicit forms of ) self-promotion.7 Self-images thus typically serve the self ’s perpetual drive of extending its influence and power, and, in this sense, they are digitalized fulfillments of—what Nietzsche (1967) termed—the will to power. This is not to say that we cannot find exceptions to the rule. Of course we can. But the fact that there are certain pictures of the face/self that are not fully interest-driven is not the issue here. What needs to be asked, rather, is whether the imperialism of the self is the fundamental drive—or, whether there’s an alternative telos—operative in the space in which self-images are made. sabine.wirth@staff.uni-marburg.de The Selfie and the Face 121 Self-Depiction My intuition, here, is that underlying the common praxis of presenting our faces to the world through images there is a parallel, perhaps even prior, human drive that seeks to come to terms with the face that is ours but that we cannot really see. Our inability to have a direct view of our face goes together with a deep dissatisfaction, curiosity, desire, and sometimes obsession to see more than our body allows us to see. And, in this sense, the fact that our face does not register within our visual field is not just a neutral fact about us but one that plays a constitutive role in who we are as humans. That is, we are the kind of creatures who are aware of and affected by the lacuna that the face creates in their field of vision. Furthermore, we are the kind of creatures whose life with the visual consists in a constant negotiation of means for overcoming this disturbing blind spot. The implication that this carries for an understanding of the role of images is the following: The image, in this context, is not only a way for presenting ourselves to others as much as it is the means we have for accessing the appearance of our own face. We need an image in order to see ourselves. We cannot see our face without one. What this means is that in addition to the well-known manner in which images allow us to represent, revisit, and communicate things and events that appeared in our visual sphere, images are operative in our lives in yet another primary way: They make it possible for us to see what is otherwise inscribed in our field of vision as an invisibility.8 In this respect, I suggest that what we see when looking at a mirror should not be understood as a representation of our selves (at least not in the common use of the term). The mirror does not re-present to us something that is already present in our visual field but rather transforms the invisibility of our face in a manner that allows it to become part of the realm that lends itself to our vision. The effect of the transformative workings of the mirror has traditionally been studied and explored by painters whose self-portraits embody an unwritten commentary on the bewildering experience of encountering their own apparition gazing back at them from the mirror.9 sabine.wirth@staff.uni-marburg.de 122 H. Kenaan Here, however, we need to notice that self-depicting images typically rely on one of two kinds of viewing structures: Whereas in the tradition of painting, the self-portrait initially grows out of a relation to one’s mirror image, photography added a new form of self-depiction that has been consistently popular since its very early days. If photographic self-portraits frequently make use of the potential of mirrors, this alternative, new modality of creating one’s self-image was made possible in the nineteenth century through the technological ability to separate the depicting device from and to turn it toward the body of the image maker.10 Since photography is first of all dependent on its apparatus and then, only in a secondary manner, on the body of the photographer, it allows for views of the self to be severed from the body and framed from an external point of view, one that others may just as well occupy.11 So, how is all this relevant to our understanding of the selfie? First, on a technological level, the selfie combines the two aforementioned modalities of self-depiction. When looking at the smartphone’s screen in the course of taking a selfie, what initially appears to us is our mirror image (indeed, people often use the smartphone’s camera only as mirrors without taking any pictures). Yet, once the camera clicks, a new image appears in place of the initial mirror image that seems to have been flipped left to right. This is the selfie’s final image, which depicts the self as seen from the perspective of a camera directed at it. The selfie is based on a technological innovation that allows us to photograph ourselves while concomitantly presenting ourselves on screen and seeing what it is that we are photographing.12 But the question that concerns us cuts deeper than the level of the selfie’s technological achievement. What’s at stake here, rather, is the question of how the selfie comes to terms with the self ’s appearance and the visuality of the face. More specifically, what kind of relationship does it conjure up among face, self-presentation, and image? These questions need to be answered while holding the self-portrait tradition in mind.13 This would be fruitful for reminding ourselves of the drama that underlies the quest to contain our own appearance. As suggested, our face escapes us. It is not given directly to sight, and its integration into our field of vision requires the mediation of an image. This mediation is so deeply rooted in our daily visual routines, however, that we all too often forget our inherent inability to see ourselves and superintend sabine.wirth@staff.uni-marburg.de The Selfie and the Face 123 the way we look. A good reminder of this limitation can be found, for example, in the myth of Narcissus which may be read as echoing the primary strangeness inherent in our self-image. While Narcissus is known for the desire he developed toward his self-image, it was in fact his mistaking of the image for another handsome youth that prompted that desire. That is, on a literal level, at least, Narcissus’s predicament ensued from his inability to identify his self-image as his own. Narcissus was unable to do what, in our world, we take for granted: He was unable to bridge over the alterity of the image that is always part of the way we appear to ourselves.14 In looking at ourselves in pictures, we typically embrace what we see with an assumed degree of familiarity that makes it easy to ignore the open gap separating us from our self-image, a gap that can be reconciled only virtually.15 Hence, in thinking of the making of self-images, it is important to underline the allegedly trivial fact that in the course of human history self-portraits have typically required the masterful work of specialists, depending on the unique skills of mature and proficient artists. The selfportrait was the exclusive domain of artists who, under varying circumstances, invested themselves in the project of self-presentation. In doing so, however, the self-portrait never became a common kind of image within an artist’s oeuvre but typically kept a special status that aired singularity even in the case of artists—think of Rembrandt—who were continuously engaged with the making of self-portraits. In art’s history, the making of a self-portrait has consistently been understood as a specifically challenging task. The painter’s mastery reveals itself in the ability to work with appearances in a manner that uncovers a truth that transcends appearance. The work of the self-portrait aims at the secret of the artist’s selfhood, a secret that could have perhaps resonated through appearances, if only the master of appearances had access to or were in possession of that secret. Another way to put this is to say that, in working on a self-portrait, the artist is in the midst of answering a question that, in principle, cannot be affirmatively answered. The question is: Who am I? Grappling with this question, the self-portrait traditionally consists of a personal testimony that intertwines the expression of the artist’s singular identity with a statement regarding the nature—the limits, the resourcefulness—of his or her artistic capacities. The self-portrait’s sabine.wirth@staff.uni-marburg.de 124 H. Kenaan confrontation with the question of identity is thus traditionally inseparable from a domain of questions about one’s identity as an artist, about the meaning of being an artist, and, ultimately, it is inseparable from the artist’s views on what art is. From Albrecht Dürer16 to Diego Velázquez, from Édouard Manet and Francisco de Goya to Frida Kahlo, and from Ilse Bing (see Fig. 6.2) to Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander, self-portraiture has always embodied a meta-statement about its own artistic medium. The intertwining of the personal, the idiosyncratic, and the meta-poetic has established the self-portrait as the visual drama of the self ’s unfolding. Hence, when traditional painters are considered masters of appearances, this is not because of their ability to affirm their identity by overcoming the dialectics of being and appearance but because they succeed in locating themselves within—giving us an inside glimpse onto—that unresolvable dialectics. Similarly, when they succeed in the task of self-presentation, this is not because they have overcome the problem of visual presentation Fig. 6.2 Ilse Bing: Self-Portrait with Leica (1931), The National Art Gallery, Washington D.C sabine.wirth@staff.uni-marburg.de The Selfie and the Face 125 but because they have lent themselves to that problem, transforming it into a mode of ongoing exploration. In doing so, however, image makers have been articulating ever anew the conditions within which the face continues to show and singularize itself. Selfie/Image/Face As we consider the implications that the tradition of self-portraiture carries for our understanding of the selfie, we first need to remember that the selfie is a phenomenon belonging to mass culture. It is entrenched in a space of image-making that is not only thoroughly “democratized” and thus available to all but that also seems to bear no memory of a past in which image making was the burden and privilege of the few sharing a vocation. The contemporary eye has access to limitless visual information, and the clicking finger of just anyone can effortlessly create vast amounts of images. Millions of selfies are uploaded daily to social networks.17 Yet this incredible profusion of face-images does not in any way suggest that the selfie has opened new or diverse ways for the face/self to discover and imagine itself. On the contrary, the unbearable lightness of making one’s self-image may suggest that the selfie is based on a paradigmatically shallow production modality, one that cannot begin to uphold the complex structure of a face’s coming into appearance and that thus erases the intrinsic difficulties—the questions, the dilemmas, the depth— involved in the act of self-presentation. Looking at trendsetting selfies, it is indeed often unclear whether the visual mechanism of these images does anything beyond the mere assertion of a given content with which the depicted individual is identified. Are these images anything other than a crude digital manifestation of the will to power? Can the visuality of the selfie come close to containing, for example, modalities of exploration, of self-questioning and skepticism toward one’s identity, as the self-portrait often does? Can the selfie subvert and offer an alternative to the common, ready-at-hand and well-packaged, replicas of the affirmation of selfhood, or is it ultimately condemned only to repeat and duplicate these simplistic figures of identity? Indeed, the selfie’s superabundance together with its repetitive image patterns and sabine.wirth@staff.uni-marburg.de 126 H. Kenaan oversimplified renditions of identity may easily elicit critical and ethical concerns. And, yet, I don’t think that there is a conclusive or univocal way to answer the above questions. The selfie is an image modality. And images, like faces, are not fully determinate objects. They cannot be framed only in terms of their factuality. While having acquired for itself a certain image identity, the selfie is nevertheless in the midst of an ongoing negotiation of the relationship, the tension, between the potentialities it brings to vision and their determination. This concrete negotiation takes place in between a variety of forces and agents (e.g., technology, economy, media, theory, the body, the gaze) operating within a cultural-historical space that is currently in the process of unfolding. This can be seen as we notice, for example, how in the few years that they have existed, selfies have already changed. They have changed in their supporting technologies, in their community of users, and in the kind of “look” they have today, which is clearly different from the appearance of selfies in the first selfie boom. Considering these changes, we also see that the relationship between selfies uploaded to social media platforms and those used in more personal communication is not fixed but constantly reworking itself. The point I’m trying to advance is that selfies call for a relational understanding. This means that their ways of being visually present are always already dependent on their relationship with other visual forms and, in particular, on their dynamic relation with the possibilities of self-portraiture. Another way to put this is to say that the selfie’s history will eventually be determined by the dynamic relationship between the unreflective banal ubiquity of this self-image and the possibilities it opens for reflection and art. Furthermore, having the face at its center, the selfie finds itself— whether it wants it or not—intertwined with an enigma: the enigma of a subjectivity that not only manifests itself visually but that is always already embedded in the appearances that it cannot control or contain. Consequently, even if the selfie is effective in leveling the face’s complex presence, the enigma is still there waiting to be rediscovered. And in this respect, the possibility is open also for a conventional over-used selfie to reveal itself as hiding unexpected dimensions, just as a boring completely predictable selfie may lend itself, under changing circumstances, to a new kind of gaze that would release it from its banality (see Fig. 6.3a and b). sabine.wirth@staff.uni-marburg.de The Selfie and the Face Fig. 6.3 127 (a) Yonatan and Dana Getting Married (b) Ilil at home Hence, whereas we should take measures not to categorize the value of the selfie’s visuality, we should also notice that the selfie does provide a good case in point for opening important questions about the normative dimension of the visual. In this context, I have suggested that the selfie provides a productive lens through which the question of the face and its visuality can be made relevant: What possibilities can the selfie open for the appearance of the face? What would it mean for the selfie to look after the face and keep its humanity alive?18 These questions need to be asked as part of philosophy’s role—a role that it shares with art—in opening for us new ways of resisting an unprecedented kind of reification that gradually prevails over the sphere of the visual. Notes 1. On this matter, see, e.g., Chap. 4 by Kris Belden-Adams in this volume. 2. For Nicholas Mirzoeff (2016), for example, “the selfie resonates not because it is new, but because it expresses, develops, expands, and intensifies the long history of the self-portrait.” sabine.wirth@staff.uni-marburg.de 128 H. Kenaan 3. With the selfie, the visual is typically intertwined with the textual, which calls for a separate discussion. 4. There are, of course, exceptions here. But these exceptions are completely supervenient on the core of the phenomenon: the face image. And, in this sense, subgenres that rework the face standard are not refutations but rather reminders of what the standard is. For an interesting example of such exception, see Paul Frosh (2015). 5. See Kenaan (2000) and (2014a). 6. In addition to Sartre, see, e.g., Levinas (2005), Derrida (1993), Nancy (2006), and Agamben (2000). 7. The use of the self-image as means of self-promotion has a long history of its own. On the role of Renaissance self-portraiture in creating a celebrity identity for artists such as Michelangelo, Dürer, and Titian, see Loh (2015). 8. This invisibility is not something outside the visible, but a dimension of the visible itself—what Merleau-Ponty (1968 [1960], 247) would call “the invisible of the visible.” 9. For a fascinating account of the condition of painting and the dialectics of looking at the mirror in Caravaggio, see Fried (1997). For an account of selfies that makes a point about the importance of understanding the relation of the face to mirrors, see Fausing (2014). 10. Both painting and photography also use a third modality of self-portraits anchored in the imaginary. The question of the imagination is one with which I shall not deal with here. 11. For an insightful account of the self ’s relation to the camera, see Wilson (2012). 12. In earlier years, photography allowed similar (albeit different) results in self-depictions that involved the photographing mirrors and the images they reflect. An important subcategory of selfies continues this line of photography. 13. In this context, see Pommier (1998), Brilliant (1998), West (2004), Cummings (2009), and Hall (2014). 14. For a philosophical analysis of the question of visuality in the Narcissus myth, see Kenaan (2014b, part 1). 15. A key text for discussing the alterity involved in the mirror image and the self ’s early sublimation of that alterity is of course Lacan’s “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience” (2007). 16. On Dürer’s project of self-portraiture and the self-portrait as a statement on art, see Koerner’s (1997) impressive work. sabine.wirth@staff.uni-marburg.de The Selfie and the Face 129 17. For an interesting attempt to analyze selfies as big data, see Lev Manovich’s Selfie City Project at http://selfiecity.net 18. On the ethical significance of the face, see, in this context, Kenaan (2014a). On the ethical dimension of images, see Kenaan (2010, 2011). Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio. 2000. The Face. In Means Without Ends: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Cazarino, 91–102. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Brilliant, Richard. 1998. The Portrait. London: Reaktion Books. Cummings, Laura. 2009. A Face to the World: On Self-Portrait. New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers. Derrida, Jacques. 1993. Memoirs of the Blind: The Self Portrait and Other Ruins. Translated by Michael Naas. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Fausing, Bent. 2014. SELF-MEDIA. The Self, the Face, the Media and the Selfies (Script of a keynote lecture given at the International Conference on Sensoric Image Science, Sassari July 24, 2014). Accessed January 19, 2016. https://www.academia.edu/7988938/SELF-MEDIA._The_Self_the_Face_ the_Media_and_the_Selfies Fried, Michael. 1997. Thoughts on Caravaggio. Critical Inquiry 24 (1): 13–56. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Frosh, Paul. 2015. The Gestural Image: The Selfie, Photography Theory, and Kinesthetic Sociability. International Journal of Communication 9: 1607–1628. http://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/3146/1388. Hall, James. 2014. The Self-Portrait. A Cultural History. London: Thames & Hudson. Kenaan, Hagi. 2000. The Philosopher and the Window. In Descartes: Reception and Disenchantment, ed. Yaron Sanderowicz and Yves Wahl, 195–208. TelAviv: University Publishing Project. ———. 2010. What Makes an Image Singular Plural? Questions to Jean-Luc Nancy. Journal of Visual Culture 9 (1): 63–76. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 1470412909354256. ———. 2011. Facing Images: After Levinas. Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities 16 (1): 143–159. ———. 2014a. The Ethics of Visuality: Levinas and the Contemporary Gaze. London: I.B. Tauris. ———. 2014b. Touching Sculpture. In Sculpture and Touch, ed. Peter Dent, 45–60. Farnham: Ashgate. sabine.wirth@staff.uni-marburg.de 130 H. Kenaan Koerner, Joseph Leo. 1997. The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Lacan, Jacques. 2007. The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience. In Ecrits, trans. Bruce Fink. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company. Levinas, Emmanuel. 2005. Humanism of the Other. Translated by Nidra Poller. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press. Loh, Maria. 2015. Still Lives: Death, Desire and the Portrait of the Old Master. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1968. The Visible and the Invisible. Followed by Working Notes. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Merriam Webster Dictionary. n.d. Selfie. Accessed March 20, 2017. https://www. merriam-webster.com/dictionary/selfie Mirzoeff, Nicholas. 2016. How to See the World: An Introduction to Images, from Self-Portraits to Selfies, Maps to Movies, and More. New York, NY: Basic Books. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2006. The Look of the Portrait. In Multiple Arts: The Muses II, trans. Simon Sparks, 220–248. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1967. The Will to Power. Edited by Walter Kaufmann and translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York, NY: Random House. Oxford Living Dictionaries. n.d. Selfie. Accessed September 16, 2016. https:// en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/selfie Pommier, Edouard. 1998. Théories du portrait. De la Renaissance aux Lumières. Paris: Gallimard. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1974 [1939]. Faces. In Selected Prose. The Writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, vol. 2, 67–71. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1992 [1943]. Being and Nothingness. Translated and with an introduction by Hazel E. Barnes. New York, NY: Washington Square Press. West, Shearer. 2004. Self-Portraiture. In Portraiture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wilson, Dawn M. 2012. Facing the Camera: Self-portraits of Photographers as Artists. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 70 (2): 55–66. sabine.wirth@staff.uni-marburg.de