Graphics and Augustine

In 2014, there was an online campaign called #BringBackOurGirls, which sought the release of almost 300 girls held hostage by the Nigerian terrorist organisation boko haram. The campaign quickly veered off in several different directions and sometimes went off topic entirely, thanks largely to the photographic alteration program Photoshop.

One example involved the social commentator, Ann Coulter, who made an attempt to attack Michelle Obama (who was photographed holding a placard with the “#BringBackOurGirls” motif). Coultier then posed in a similar fashion with a placard which read “#bringbackourcountry”.

The Huffington Post reported that this attempt seriously backfired on Coulter, with Photoshopped versions of her picture circulated on the internet as a meme with the placard bearing all manner of self-deprecating remarks.

To me, the above episode demonstrated the high degree of slippage with photographs in the age of the internet. Thanks to the increasing digitisation of photography and the democratisation of photographic alteration software, images no longer have the integrity that they once enjoyed. Things can be altered, included or removed from the original, often without the knowledge or consent of the subject in the photo.

What this technically facilitated slippage bears out for me, however, is an Augustinian maxim in his City of God. In that text, Augustine spoke about the earthly city being marked by a love of self over God. Acting on this self-love, the city thus pulsates with a lust to dominate others through aggressive self-assertion. The irony he identified is that this desire to dominate everything is an illusion: in acting out on one’s desire to dominate others, they do so without knowing that they are being dominated by others.

Whilst the Coulter episode exemplified an unintended domination, there are other examples in pop culture where this technologically facilitated slippage from a desire to empower oneself through self-expression slides easily into a willing subordination to rule and manipulation by others.

This was borne out most graphically in an ad campaign for Youtube which featured posters of makeup celebrity, Michelle Phan. Posters like the one featured were appearing around the same time as #bringbackourgirls, and were in heavy circulation in trains and billboards in cities when I lived in the United States.

One of the most prominent of these ads featured a photoshopped montage of Phan, standing beside the “You” component of the YouTube logo. Whilst this is meant to emphasise the site as a launchpad for confident self-assertion of the unified subject, this is almost immediately qualified with the slogan “help me make up who we want to be”. In a single graphic move, one sees rather eloquently the Augustinian self-love giving way to the desire for domination over others but ultimately slipping into the desire to become dominated by others.

As an aside, it is interesting that the ad also puts on display another Augustinian motif coming out of his Confessions: that the love of self will result in multiplicity. This multiplicity also plays itself out in this graphic, where the confident assertion of “You” as a united subject quickly slides into a dispersion into the “we” of the slogan.

This twofold negation of self can be seen in Phan’s signature makeup line, EM-Costmetics. The nomenclature is meant to reflect the subjectivity of “Me”, as claimed by Phan herself. The result, however, is its very reversal, from a unified “Me” to a dispersed multiplicity of “Em”, namely the colloquial shorthand of “Them”.

The risk of dissolution is not simply found in the realm of graphics. Indeed, Augustine gives a sense in the City of God that every step in the earthly city would be to move within a giant graphic, a simulation of the real city. This means that all of us face the possibility of dissolution. Ironically, it is not the assertion of our unity that combats this dissolution. Rather, as I argued elsewhere, it is actually a de-centring of the self in light of the Word of God. The Word of God de-centres us, insofar as it de-centres a false self. Our true unity as a subject, paradoxically, can be found to the extent that we unite ourselves to this Word of God who St Paul declares to be the “All in all’ (1 Cor 15:28).

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