Speaking in Tongues: Networked Aesthetics and the Everyday in Selfie Practices
Despite increasing scholarly attention to everyday aesthetics and relational aesthetics, sociology remains suspicious of incorporating aesthetics and aesthetic approaches, a gap that Georg Simmel's foundational work on sociological aesthetics once sought to bridge. In Art and Agency, British Anthropologist Alfred Gell (1998) argues that most “literature about ‘art’ is actually about representation,” (25) and thus sidelines the performative and agentic aspects of objects. Yet Nicolas Bourriaud in Relational Art, claims some art it takes ‘as its starting point human relations and their social context’ (Bourriaud 1998: 117) and thus relational aesthetics focuses on ‘the inter-human relations which they [artworks] show, produce, or give rise to’ (Bourriaud 1998: 117).
In light of Bourriaud’s positioning of art as a ‘social interstice’, this talk examines the self-aestheticization that social media platforms afford and encourages in reference to the anxieties of faciality manifesting in online phenomena like the trends of “mask-fishing” and “tongue selfie”.
Drawing on a three-year study involving over 100 participants about their selfie practices, we explore how the prolonged engagement with digital images of faces produces new aesthetic practices, preoccupations and anxieties. As Smith, Byrne and Harries (2020) describe in their discussion of Martin’s social aesthetics” (2011), it is our “shared capacity for feeling” that allows us to apprehend and respond to our everyday social worlds and their objects in ways that can exceed simple predetermined social categories (91). A social aesthetics arising from the heightened role of photography within digital sociality provokes an intense visuality within everyday social relations so that new theorizations of the relationships between aesthetics and social life might be proposed.