1 After the Face

It was the night of the 86th Annual Academy Awards. The red carpet had been rolled out and anyone who was anyone was there, dressed up to the nines. But if the 2019 Oscars were a watershed moment, it was not because of the acclaim for Twelve Years a Slave, which garnered the first nomination for a black director, Steve McQueen; nor was it on account of the fabulous acceptance speech given by Jared Leto, looking remarkably like Jesus. No, that evening’s ceremony was set to become a double record-breaker as the most liked and most shared image on the planet proceeded to break Twitter. ‘We have made history,’ proclaimed host Ellen DeGeneres, having received notification from the social network, while still live on air, that an outage had been caused by the runaway sharing of what has since been dubbed the ‘selfie of the century’. In less than thirty minutes, the image had travelled around the world and across time zones and had been retweeted more than two million times, smashing the record previously held by a 2012 photograph of Barack Obama hugging his wife Michelle when he was re-elected. Although still pinned on the host’s Twitter page, today the Oscars image with its 3.4 million retweets already seems like old news. Three years after the event it was relegated to the ranks of former record holders by a certain Carter Wilkerson, a teenager who made a bet with his favourite restaurant chain in the hope of winning a year’s supply of free chicken nuggets.

      #NuggsForCarter overtook Degeneres’s selfie – or should we say usfie – of a gaggle of stars, in which she appeared alongside Bradley Cooper, Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Lupita Nyong’o, and Jennifer Lawrence. But what had seemed like a spontaneous whim on the part of the Oscars host was actually an impressive marketing coup orchestrated by Samsung – the evening’s sponsor – to promote its Galaxy Note 3 smartphone. Making the stars into unwitting brand ambassadors, the South Korean manufacturer’s VIP marketing strategy had converted their faces into exchange value, potentially revealing something more than just their own ‘visibility capital’. Not that there was anything new in itself about the idea of using icons’ faces as a sales pitch. Neither was there anything extraordinary, in a digital culture, about images being circulated, shared, and manipulated in all sorts of ways. And yet this act did herald a new turn, functioning as a kind of decisive punctum that would drive contemporary research on the selfie and determine its orientation.

The historic photo was taken on 2 March 2014 – just a few months before the word ‘selfie’ was officially added to the Oxford English Dictionary. Even though online self-portraiture had been silently proliferating for years, and even though various social networks revolved around images of users’ faces, suddenly everyone was rushing to register their take on this new object. Who would denounce the narcissistic tendencies and egotistical neurosis of the individual? Who would see it as a vast database capable of producing a sociology of the contemporary ethos, as in Lev Manovich’s SelfieCity project?¹ Who would accuse it of being a profiling tool designed for advertisers or an aspect of the ‘Facebookization’ of the world? And finally, who would see this new face as a conversational object,² no longer the preserve of an oversized ego but open to others and to the world, in accordance with a relational logic typical of the so-called ‘Web 2.0’ era? Treated as pure data, quantifiable and analysable by way of a host of diagrams, curves, and algorithms, the face had become an insubstantial reflection of the contemporary aspirations courted by the industries of singularity.

      But all that these proliferating discourses were really saying was that the portrait and the self-portrait genre no longer made much sense. The face was now operating in terms of avatars, profiles, traces, and indexes, apparently following a path opened up by the nineteenth century: that of a calculative reason, a limitless ratio that stripped the face