Faceworld E-Book

Marion Zilio

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 238

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

We have long accepted the face as the most natural and self-evident thing, believing that in it we could read, as if on a screen, our emotions and our doubts, our anger and joy. We have decorated them, made them up, designed them, as if the face were the true calling card of our personality, the public manifestation of our inner being. Nothing could be further from the truth. Rather than a window opening onto our inner nature, the face has always been a technical artefact--a construction that owes as much to artificiality as to our genetic inheritance. From the origins of humanity to the triumph of the selfie, Marion Zilio charts the history of the technical, economic, political, legal, and artistic fabrication of the face. Her account of this history culminates in a radical new interrogation of what is too often denounced as our contemporary narcissism. In fact, argues Zilio, the "narcissism" of the selfie may well reconnect us to the deepest sources of the human manufacture of faces--a reconnection that would also be a chance for us to come to terms with the non-human part of ourselves. This highly original reflection on the fabrication of the face will be of great value to students and scholars of media and culture and to anyone interested in the pervasiveness of the face in our contemporary age of the selfie.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

Front Matter

1 After the Face

Chronicle of a Death Foretold?

Notes

2 The Invention of the Face

The Optical Unconscious: Seeing Flows, Coding Faces

Grammatization and Phenomenotechnical Synthesis

The Face as Diagram

The Proletarianization of the Face

Trouble in Multiplicity

Notes

3 The Apparelled Face

The Default of Origin

An Artificial Organ

The Ego-Technical Complement

Masked Repetition

The Narcosis of Narcissus

4 The Space of Appearances

The Spectacle of Politics

The Face of the Collective: Relation or Rapport?

The Politics of Publicity

The Mass Ornament

From the Mass to the Multitudes

5 Critique of the Political Economy of Faces From the ‘Self’ to the Relational

From the ‘Self’ to the Relational

#Selfie: A Contemporary Readymade?

The Cryptopornography of Care

A New Distribution of the Sensible

The Algorithmic Matrix: Ranking and Mapping of Faces

Notes

6 In the Flow

Of Dissemination?

Aesthetics of the Everyday and Becoming-World

Pervasive Faces

Couch-grass Politics, or the Ethics of the Chameleon

The Thing’s Share

Notes

Index

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Begin Reading

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Faceworld

The Face in the Twenty-First Century

Marion Zilio

Translated by Robin Mackay

polity

First published in French as Faceworld: Le visage au XXIe siècle.© Presses Universitaires de France/Humensis, Faceworld, 2018 This English edition © Polity Press, 2020

Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press101 Station LandingSuite 300Medford, MA 02155, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3727-3

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataNames: Zilio, Marion, author.Title: Faceworld : the face in the twenty-first century / Marion Zilio ; translated by Robin Mackay.Other titles: Faceworld. EnglishDescription: Medford : Polity, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “We have long accepted the face as the most natural and self-evident thing, as if the face were the public manifestation of our inner being. Nothing could be further from the truth. Rather than a window opening onto our inner nature, the face has always been a technical artefact-a construction that owes as much to artificiality as to our genetic inheritance. From the origins of humanity to the triumph of the selfie, Marion Zilio charts the history of the technical, economic, political, legal, and artistic fabrication of the face. Her account of this history culminates in a radical new interrogation of what is too often denounced as our contemporary narcissism. In fact, argues Zilio, the “narcissism” of the selfie may well reconnect us to the deepest sources of the human manufacture of faces-a reconnection that would also be a chance for us to come to terms with the non-human part of ourselves”-- Provided by publisher.Identifiers: LCCN 2019030832 (print) | LCCN 2019030833 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509537259 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509537266 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509537273 (epub)Subjects: LCSH: Face--Social aspects. | Face perception. | Facial expression.Classification: LCC GN298 .Z5513 2020 (print) | LCC GN298 (ebook) | DDC 153.7/58--dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019030832LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019030833

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com

Acknowledgements

A small word but a huge thanks to Laurent de Sutter for his trust; to Lilya Aït Menguellet for her attentive reading of the text; to Matthieu Boucherit, Julie Cailler, and Julien Verhaeghe for their conversation and their presence; to Muriel Garcia for her absence.

1After 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 of all its enigmatic qualities, converting it into a cipher only so as to decipher it with ever greater precision. Yet few commentators sought to trace these practices back to the processes that had originally generated them. And few paid any attention at all to a shift in terminology that had taken place unnoticed: no longer unique and private ‘portraits’, commemorative souvenirs of our forebears, but ‘faces’ – faces which had now become images, flows, commodities, screens for all kinds of phantasmatic, economic, and technical projections.

In response to this shift, during the twentieth century, art – which of course had been responsible for the first portraits – had instigated a programme of ‘defacialization’. Everywhere faces were devoured, masked, erased, and reified. Artists sought progressively to obliterate the categories of the ‘subject’, the ‘self’, and the ‘I’; in other words, the category of identity in its most immutable, substantial, and metaphysical forms. This led to the creation of faceless faces, faces that were pure exteriority without interiority. No doubt the atrocities of war had left their black mark on the history of the contemporary face, as the themes of the ugly and the formless went hand in hand with the century of great wars. But the fact that the humanity of man could not survive the horror of the Shoah, and that this epiphany had brought him into conflict with his own stereotype, could actually be traced back to more complex antecedents. For the slippage from portrait to face and subsequently to the non-face actually responded to another crisis: the paradoxical crisis of the invention of the face.

This paradox is internal and unselfconscious: rooted in the most decisive features of the face, it operates in utmost secrecy. Whence this discrepancy: never in human history has the face been so widely represented and so firmly established; but at the same time, never has it seemed so threatened by emptiness and extinction. Affected by this obscure rift, the face seems at odds with itself; it seems to be consuming itself from within. Today the face may run a daily gauntlet of mirrors and multiple images of itself, it may circulate through networks and be shared by interconnected devices – indeed, all of this may have become more commonplace than ever before. But anyone who interrogates the origins of the face, and more precisely the possibility of individuals observing themselves, cannot deny that with the invention of the face, what we are dealing with is an event in the history of humanity that is relatively recent and, to say the very least, singular.

Chronicle of a Death Foretold?

With the Facebookization of the world, we have become so used to holding a book of faces in the palm of our hand that we no longer have any sense of the uneasiness of our ancestors, less than a century and a half ago, when for the first time they were able to pick up and hold their own externalized faces. Over a very short period, anyone and everyone would find themselves in possession of their face, materialized in an external medium. Thanks to photography, a portrait could be stored in a jacket pocket, passed from hand to hand, and transmitted from generation to generation. This democratization would be accompanied by an increasing uniformity and banalization of the face, to the point where some portraits could be switched in photographers’ studios without the customer even noticing. The mass production and standardization of ‘portraitomania’ was accompanied by something close to a misrecognition of one’s own face.

Although even today it is the lot of any person with restricted visual access to their face – limited to the traditional photographs of school classes, birthdays, and other such events – this deficiency in recognition has for the most part been superseded by a sort of hypermnesia: an infinite memory of self-images, where memory no longer designates the remembrance of the past or the outcome of a long-term crystallization, but instead a flashback, often to an anodyne moment, part of an everyday life constructed and broadcast in real time. Today the face of a foetus may be posted online even before birth. Plastic surgery can mould a face on demand, and science has made it possible to transplant a face – soon it will be a head – onto another body. Saudi Arabia has just granted citizenship to a silicon face supposedly inhabited by an artificial intelligence, and the latest iPhone has made the face into a password. Who knows, in the near future we may file patents to assert our right to the uniqueness of our own face. We will no longer worry about surveillance cameras, but about applications that steal identities by manipulating expressions – like Face Swap Live, which allows Snapchat users to try on different faces in real time. By exchanging their own face directly and automatically with another, or with something else, this app allows its users to take on the features of an animal, an older person, someone of the opposite sex, a film star mask, or even a bicycle wheel. It’s a feature that certainly lends itself to comic antics, but it is not difficult to imagine how it could be misused for criminal purposes. The promises of such effects are already tantalizing Hollywood studios quite prepared to spend millions of dollars on bringing back dead actors or rejuvenating ageing stars. We have begun to see the first attempts, in Fast and Furious 7 and Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and in experiments by the research team who were able to make Vladimir Putin smile and Donald Trump say whatever they wanted him to. Since the face is exteriorized from the very outset, it is no doubt this potential for faces to be stored, modelled, and infinitely manipulated that explains digital natives’ preference for applications that feature a pseudo-ephemeral temporality, where images are not captured but continually vanish into oblivion.

Facebook is a medium for people in their thirties, the medium of a generation that experienced the transition from analogue to digital, from the pre- to the post-Internet age with all of its personalized prostheses and their connected microphones and cameras. For ten years now it has served as a metaphor for the face’s new destiny – a face that is edited and published, eager to advertise and exhibit its intimacy. This everyday sociality may seem vulgar to our contemporaries, but in fact it lays the foundations for another reading of the face. The face may not just be a stimulus like any other, the metaphysical tradition may have seen it as the site of the encounter with the Other, and modern psychology may have postulated that it constitutes a primary form of interiority; but what has been forgotten is that individuals – that is to say, indivisibles – are only subjects in so far as they participate in a subjectivity that is shared, engaging with an exteriority that cannot be dismissed as merely secondary.

It is this exterior aspect, long consigned to the shadowy world of Platonic appearances or the depths of the unconscious, that constitutes the enigma of the face. Formerly the locus of an existential quest, in its contemporary form the face now seems more like a return of the repressed. The modern epoch exposed the face to its dark counterpart, reified and rendered banal by technical reproduction and exposure value. It became an inter-face, possessing the qualities of both interiority and exteriority, container and content, but also human and non-human. Modernity dreamt of a subject that observed, named, and possessed, but couldn’t accept the fact that this subject itself would become the object of that same ‘masterful panoptic egotism’.3 Humankind’s continuous observation of itself could not take place without inviting a third term into the equation: the technical milieu. What this revealed was the technogenetic dimension of the face – something which, in turn, would have repercussions for its ontogenesis.

We need only look back to see how, during the industrial epoch, photography’s large-scale process of exteriorization of the face forged an other memory of the face, one that was no longer biological but technical. While Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari warned that in any society what is essential is ‘to mark and to be marked’,4 the invention of the face as a technical object made it just one product among others, a living archive available to all. Once only seen when they were depicted in genre paintings or revealed fleetingly in the reflections of stagnant waters or at the bottom of a cooking pot, just a few decades later faces would be everywhere, all of the time.

Notes

1.

‘Investigating the Style of Self-Portraits (Selfies) in Five Cities across the World’,

http://selfiecity.net.

2.

André Gunthert, ‘La consécration du

selfie

’,

Études photographiques

32 (Spring 2015),

https://etudesphotographiques.revues.org/3529

.

3.

Peter Sloterdijk,

Spheres 1: Bubbles Microspherology

, translated by Wieland Hoban (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2011), 86.

4.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari,

Anti-Oedipus

:

Capitalism and Schizophrenia

, translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (London and New York: Continuum, 2004), 112.

2The Invention of the Face

The face was probably the foremost obsession of the late nineteenth century. In summer 1839, before an audience drawn from all four corners of Europe, François Arago presented his invention, the daguerreotype, to the Académie des sciences et des beaux-arts, and would conspire to ensure a law was passed calling for his patent to be acquired by the French state, which subsequently presented it as a ‘gift to the world’. If the potential of photography caused a public sensation, exciting as much enthusiasm and anticipation as the release of the latest iPhone does today, this was in no small part due to Arago’s oratorical skills. As a good scientist and politician, he touted the scientific merits of his discovery and the tremendous prospects for progress it opened up. But, as Walter Benjamin observed, the ensuing public craze also owed to the unprecedented and even diabolical nature of his invention:

To try to capture fleeting mirror images […] is not just an impossible undertaking, as has been established after thorough German investigation; the very wish to do such a thing is blasphemous. Man is made in the image of God, and God’s image cannot be captured by any machine of human devising. The utmost the artist may venture, borne on the wings of divine inspiration, is to reproduce man’s God-given features without the help of any machine, in the moment of highest dedication, at the higher bidding of his genius.1

Despite this prohibition weighing upon photography, it was widely hailed by the Parisian press and its success spread well beyond the borders of France. Endorsed by the social elite, it became a privileged subject of salon conversations and, thanks to its release into the public domain, was rapidly perfected. The volume and weight of the camera was reduced, the time it was necessary to pose became shorter, and the metal plate was replaced by glass negatives, allowing the making of copies. If technical reproduction necessarily dispossessed works and people of their ‘aura’, as Benjamin claimed, it was also accompanied by a dazzling ‘technical halo’ whose radiation would unconsciously permeate all strata of reality. Photography would become an industry that transformed the face of the world, and perhaps also the face itself.

At this time, the Western world was undergoing profound disruption. Electricity, railways, underground trains, the car, and the elevator, along with the telephone, the phonograph, the radio, photography, and cinema, all formed the backdrop for a technically apparelled [appareillée] society.2 These innovations lay at the origin of a twofold paradigm shift: a rural exodus made it necessary to transform the appearance of the nascent metropolis, following the example of the boulevards envisioned by Haussmann, along with the possibility of recording and reproducing sounds and images of people. Modern democracies resulted from a combination of the development of an optimized system of telecommunications and the deployment of a world of representations, a combination which reconfigured our relation to time and space, further intensified the telescoping of presence and absence, visible and invisible, real and fictional, and gave rise to new spaces of projection. A new world emerged, one of duplicates and of speed, of fluxes and fluidities, stalked by phantasmagoria, commodity fetishism, and the overflowing of nocturnal life into daylight hours. Affecting and transforming the sensibility of individuals, producing ever denser connections and industrializing the modes of production and reproduction of the visible, modern techniques revolutionized our ways of seeing, sensing, and inhabiting the world. According to a Marxian reading, this modern infrastructure reconfigured all of the ideas of society, its laws, its morals, its metaphysics, its language, and its political institutions. The senses, but also what makes sense – and yet more fundamentally, conceptions of the real and of the human – were all reevaluated through the prism of technical mediations that now passed for immediate. This illusion of immediacy, reinforced by automation and rapid acceleration, led to the promotion of mobility and the present moment – which then meant it became necessary for flows to be archived, visualized, and stored, individual and collective memory preserved.

Not only did these techniques of reproduction transform knowledge and memory, they encouraged individuals to develop a taste for their own image. As Benjamin emphasized, ‘The notion that one could be reproduced by the apparatus is an enormous attraction for today’s humans.’3 Baudelaire would develop this observation further, into a critique of modernity and, in short, of the bourgeois class. From this moment on, he railed, ‘our loathsome society rushed, like Narcissus, to contemplate its trivial image on the metallic plate’.4 But above and beyond the narcissistic tendencies of his contemporaries, Baudelaire was concerned with denouncing the impact of ‘the invasion of photography and the great industrial madness’5 upon art and the imagination. The ‘machinic turn of sensibility’6 had begun. Culture would henceforth be the product of an industry that was bound to transform aesthetics and sensibility in general. With the rise of an individualizing society, it was ultimately the subterranean forms of a technical unconscious that were unleashed.

The face is an invention, for it responds to a programme – that is to say, an organizational plan that responds to rules established upstream of it. Mass produced and circulating within public space, the imagification of the face presented men and women with new scenes of representation which were accompanied by new forms of control. ‘Visibility is a trap’,7 as Michel Foucault warned. From optical apparatuses to measuring instruments, from informal diagrams to disciplinary institutions, societies became enmeshed with an optical dispositif; and because it was at once that which offers itself to the gaze and that which properly belongs to a theory of vision, the face became both weapon and theatre of a war of visibilities. From this point on, the space of the circulation of gazes, that space where the play of face-to-face engagement between people takes place, would be formed of machinic interfaces and reflecting surfaces. During the nineteenth century, both the shop windows of department stores and the massive commercial production of mirrors exponentially multiplied the images of man. Just as painted portraits had long been reserved for the elite, so mirrors were considered by the people as precious objects of which one might sometimes possess, at most, a fragment. These specular objects invaded bourgeois interiors, becoming a standard fixture in the bedchamber and then the bathroom by the beginning of the twentieth century. Eventually every corner of the home would be adorned by a face-become-image, the sensible apparition of a twice-present existence. From the peasant who, at the time, had little interest in his or her own reflection and saw it only on rare occasions at the hairdresser’s or barber’s, to the bourgeois concerned to use his portrait to maintain his social standing, all submitted to this new experience of the face.

For the first time in the history of humanity, everyone and anyone was able to see themselves and to possess a face – that is to say, to exchange it, pick it up, manipulate it, and capitalize upon it. This new memory of the face constituted a break in so far as, once reproduced by a camera, it became transmissible and accumulable. Like coins struck with the effigy of the sovereign, faces entered into an economy of flows. More than any other media, the specular function of photography and, later, cinema brought about a consciousness of individuality and of the collective. The masses would finally appear, ‘brought face to face with themselves’8 in close up and wide shot, acquiring an image that would represent them and confirm their political potency. In helping bring them to light, photography and the cinema contributed to the spectacularization of people and of the world, the creation of a spectacle whose starting point was man’s continuous observation of himself, splitting him in two: into a face-subject and a face-object. The play of the face-to-face now involved not just human partners, but interfaces, cameras, markets, and quantified evaluations.

We have known since Foucault that the emergence of the figure of man in the human sciences was dependent on certain fundamental dispositions of knowledge and that, if these latter were to disappear just as they once appeared, then ‘one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea’.9 According to Foucault, the human sciences were made possible by the disciplinary power to which they reciprocally offered an object, by describing the features of a human nature that could be objectively standardized. In this way, the epistemic basis of modernity introduced an imaginary wherein man was divided up according to various scientific sectors. With the advent of photography, this schema would take the form of an unprecedented visual spatialization and temporalization by means of a panoptic apparatus, an apparatus that claimed to ‘see all’ and to record all – including everything situated beyond and beneath human perception. Every historical formation inevitably forgets its own historicity and its controversies, and the history of the face is no exception to this rule. Just as Freudian anamnesis is understood as a work of forgetting that is essential to psychic development, the forgetting of the origins of the face serves to obscure its traumatic