Is the “wearethe99%” tumblr the counter-archive of Instagram’s selflies? Does it help us imagine ourselves as a political collective, giving an image to the 99%? Do images lead to mass mobilization, or do they vibrate at a different frequency?
“The camera can aid us in knowledge of fascism, because it provides an ‘aesthetic’ experience that is nonauratic, critically ‘testing,’ capturing with its unconscious optics precisely the dynamics of narcissism on which the politics of fascism depends, but which its own auratic aesthetics conceals.” – Susan Buck-Morss, “Aesthetic and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered.”