Ceci n'est pas un selfie

By Kerry Mitchell

Part 1 of 2

France has recently seen its most significant social unrest in decades, with hundreds of thousands of protesters taking to the streets since November 17. The “gilets jaunes” or “yellow vests” protests, named for the reflective vests that vehicles in France are required to carry, ostensibly erupted from the planned imposition of a new fuel tax. Designed to push people toward greater use of public transportation and the purchase of more fuel-efficient, lower-emission vehicles, this tax formed part of the administration’s efforts to mitigate climate change by helping France meet its emissions targets as per the Paris Agreement. French President Emmanuel Macron has pledged to withdraw the planned tax and has offered other concessions, but protesters have indicated that their concerns are much broader than the single tax. They have called for Macron to resign among other more fundamental, wide-ranging reforms. While the protests have decreased in size from their original peak at around 300,000 people country-wide, they have also involved successively greater degrees of violence. Burned buildings and cars, looted shops, smashed windows, and general vandalism have accompanied the originally peaceful protests, as have battles between police and protesters. The ongoing protests, occurring predominantly on the weekends, have spread to six countries.

In this context, during the protests of December 4 near the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, Russian blogger Ilya Varlamov took a photograph that has been shared widely on the internet. Beaming, arm raised, smartphone in hand, a woman at a Burger King window counter snaps a photo or video in face of the conflict raging outside. Marketwatch.com’s headline asks “A selfie—really? This photo from the Paris riots ‘captures the spirit of an era.”

  

Many echoed the characterization of the image as iconic: “This perfectly sums up the world in 2018”; “An image of our time perfectly captured”; “The state of a generation captured with disturbing accuracy”; “so perfectly encapsulates our current world”; and many more similar statements. But of what, specifically, does this “spirit of an era” or “state of a generation” consist?

One clue can be found in the characterization of the photo as a selfie, and precisely because this characterization is so implausible. One can understand how, if one is looking only at the position of the woman in relation to her phone, one could interpret her as taking a selfie. The huge smile, the focus on the phone, on the world of the phone, in the phone, in the network through which a whole world of images, text, communication comes to “life” in the series of flashes, streams, voices, music, noise, regards, taps, and clicks that make up the sensorium of the smartphone—the smile, not so much mysterious a la Mona Lisa’s, but incongruous, always incongruous, defined by being incongruous in the sense that the smile is not for those who physically, geographically surround the smiling person, but is rather for those in the phone through the phone. Distinct from self portrait, which traditionally involves a certain distancing from self in the act of the making of the portrait (self portraits most often do not depict the artist’s body in the act of painting or taking a photograph, and even when they do, they most often do not plausibly represent the specific position, scene, and setting of the body as it constructs or triggers that particular portrait), the selfie captures the self in the exact moment and position in which the image of the self is produced. To qualify as “selfie,” the image must include the arm reaching into the camera and out of the image as if, yes, holding the phone, which is exactly what the hand is doing, but also as if placing the hand in the unseen frame of the image which, for viewers, at least if they view the image on their phones, is exactly where their own hands are placed, their own arms reaching back to their own bodies and connecting to their faces which smile in face of the face on the screen. Reach out and touch someone was the slogan AT&T used to describe the telekinetic, telepathic capacities of the phone even before the advent of wireless video technology.

But that is not what is going on here, at least not plausibly so. It would hardly make sense for her to have been caught completing ignoring the protests, as if she had simply wandered into Burger King in the middle of a riot so that she could peacefully take a selfie that would show nothing whatsoever of said riot. More likely, she is filming and/or photographing the riots, beaming at the fact that she has captured such historic, dramatic, romantic action. Insurrection in Paris! Me, there, here! What a coup! (the photograph, not the insurrection). The shot from that angle in the Burger King Paris Wagram could easily evoke such a wide smile, not as a pose for an image of the smile to be shared, but as a spontaneous expression, a smile of glee at the unique capturing of place, time, and event. Not only would she capture tear gas and rioters mere feet away, but through the clouds, she would also capture both the Arc de Triomphe and the Eiffel Tower. Of course, we do not (yet) have her images or voice, but we do have, now, here, images from the same position that she occupied:

 

The image on the left, filled with such a scene as on December 4, would much better explain such a smile than the image on the right, filled with her face and not mine, but looking just as ridiculous given the utterly mundane, generic character of the image. Only if she was facing the interior of the Burger King, lining up the photo so that her face would appear in the foreground with tear gas, protesters, and monuments in the background, would the interpretation of selfie make sense.

Why then call it a selfie? What might lead one to advance such an implausible interpretation? Consider the relationships displayed in the image. Outside the window, black-clad, gas-masked, armored, shielded police have deployed a chemical agent that causes significant physical distress. Their target is represented here by a protester, also clad in black, a mask covering the mouth and nose but not his eyes. The medals on his chest display pride. His red beret does, too, for its style, but also as a symbol of nation (French). Contra the line of uniformed police, the protester stands alone (brave), carrying all that he needs on his back (self-sufficient). His bravery will not protect his eyes (self-sacrifice). Inside the window, mere feet but another world away, stands a Burger King. In the context of insurrection in Paris, the logo and its associated branding evoke monarchy and the bourgeoisie: a caricature of a king (overthrow of the monarchy) serves the public in the most pedestrian operation of commerce (triumph of the bourgeoisie). The woman sits (comfort), smiles (satisfaction), and watches with no sense of danger or stake in the scene she is viewing (voyeur, spectator). The glass protects her from the tear gas (insulation, security). Most centrally, the use of the phone suggests that, in face of all this, she is producing an image for personal benefit in terms of social status. The social conflict represented outside the window is thereby transformed into a good to be consumed, and not even with the excuse of pursuit of livelihood. Her production serves the ends of personal entertainment within a social circle.

The explicit interpretation of the woman as taking a selfie betrays, by virtue of its error, an implicit interpretation, an intuition of the ethos of the selfie: self-enclosure and self-satisfaction. The context of emphatic expression of discontent with respect to general social conditions yields the dialectical character of the image. The woman sits contentedly in her own (bourgeois) world, blind to the fact that that world is crumbling around her (to her left, only feet away and scant hours later, the glass doors of that Burger King did indeed crumble and shatter, as did the safety and security that they had hitherto provided (warning: graphic violence)). Moreover, such blindness to social discontent has been cited as a motivation of the expression of that social discontent. Thus the perfection of the image: it represents in microcosm the dynamic of the macrocosm.

So what to do with the self-satisfaction that blinds one to others? How to get past this self-blindness, the failure to see how self-enclosure relates one and alienates one from others? How to understand the social character, the social dynamic in which this blinding relation to self participates? One response pursues objectivity: discover what empirical conditions have given rise to the protest. Recognize these, spread that recognition, and the blindness will be dispelled, or at least it will erode, right? By way of such an approach, I highly recommend this relatively concise explanation of the causes of the protests. That said, I do not have faith that it, or any other social communication, can mitigate the fundamental condition of self-enclosure that characterizes contemporary society. Suffice it to say that we do not appear to be living in an era in which the dissemination of factual information and grounded analysis yields social consensus and harmony. This is not to say that there is nothing to be done. Indeed, I would rate this self-blindness itself as a fundamental social condition that calls for analysis. Seeing this aspect of society, which is also an aspect of self and relation to self, is far from an objective affair.

To be continued...