2010 Issue No. 18 — The Face and Technology

We may call tragicomedy of appearance the fact that the face uncovers only and precisely inasmuch as it hides, and hides to the extent to which it uncovers. In this way, the appearance that ought to have manifested human beings becomes for them instead a resemblance that betrays them and in which they can no longer recognize themselves. Precisely because the face is solely the location of truth, it is also and immediately the location of simulation and of an irreducible impropriety.
Giorgio Agamben, Means Without Ends.

The face. But which one? And therein lies the problem. How to reduce to the face this thing that is different for and unique to each of us, this thing that wavers between appearance and reality, between mask, make-up, put-on, and the very locus of human identity and communicability? Perhaps we cannot even speak of the face, perhaps there are only faces, public and private, screened and veiled, variable iterations of a whole series of contradictory modes of being and appearing, of fronting up and representing. The face disappears across these iterations, fragmented into its constituent pores, its pixels, its molecules and particles. And yet we cannot be done with the face, as much as we may wish to, because it returns as soon as or even before we open our mouths or look one another in the eye, it is always there in front of us. This is the paradox of the face, one of the most complex and normalized paradoxes of human being; that it is separate from us, fickle, mutable, artificial, at the same time as it is us, irredeemably so.

The face is a vital element in the grand narratives of being for Western culture. It is the coding of the human, and the over-coding of the body, it precedes the body, it is the body’s a priori. The face tells us where we come from and where we are going, it is the historical and structural index of our evolution and the display-home for the fantasy of human perfectability via technology. The face is everywhere in the media, on stage, on screen; it sits at the centre of a vast apparatus encompassing lights, cameras, action, mirrors, surgeons, scalpels and white-coated lab-technicians furtively grinding foetuses into expensive white paste. With the development of a global real-time media, and of a culture of the image and the interface, a culture obsessed with celebrity, with youth, aging and the effects of time, and with the transformative promise of technology, the question of the function of the face in contemporary culture becomes paramount. What role does the face play in how we imagine ourselves, our existence and purpose? What is happening to the face today, and is this any different from what has gone before? What does the profusion of images of celebrity faces in the media – online, in print, on television and in the cinema – do to the “owners” of those faces, and to our conceptions of our own faces, and faciality more generally? How do new media, with their facilities for social networks, interactivity and telepresence, mediate the relations between faces and interfaces?

There can be no easy answers to these questions. Because faces are variable, because they are subject to capital investment in so many industries and sectors, and because they are the site of identity and power struggles, our task is not to come to some single understanding but to map the vicissitudes of these struggles and investments across multiple domains. Our task – a task this issue of Transformations attempts to address – is to read the face, and to examine the reading of the face.

In the first paper of this issue, Warwick Mules offers an analysis of the face as “that which withdraws from self-presence.” Countering the tendency to see the face as the site of self-presence, rather, Mules argues that it is the withdrawal of the face that in fact makes the face-to-face or I-you relation possible, a withdrawal characterized by a mediation in which “I” see “you” only on the basis of my imagination of “myself” seeing “you.” Using this notion as a guide, Mules provides an analysis of the “Waiting for Tear Gas” photographs of Alan Sekula, reading Sekula’s photos of clashes between police and demonstrators at the 1999 WTO summit as a physiognomy of resistance.

The cinema is also one of the central technologies of the face, providing a scene in which notions of the face as identity, as appearance, as cultural product and as self-expression are worked through. In “I’m Ready For My Close-Up Now”: Grey Gardens and the Presentation of Self,” Ilona Hongisto conducts an analysis of the Maysles brothers’ controversial direct documentary Grey Gardens. Via Béla Balázs’ theories of the close-up, and an analysis of how the Beales interact with the camera, Hongisto advances a theory of Grey Gardens as providing a platform for the “legending” of the two main characters. Here, the close-up is not a mechanism for the display of some pre-existent interiority, but rather, it serves as a medium for a re-working of the past, a performance and updating of what a person “is.”

In “GUI Faces / Sticky Ethics,” Laurie Johnson explores the role of the face in the interface and in understandings of Computer Mediated Communication. Building on his previous work on ethics and the face in Levinas, Johnson argues that debates about the ethical content of Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) compared to Face-to-Face (FTF) communication have tended to lose sight of the need to find common ground for the comparison. In seeking out a “face” in the interface, Johnson aims to identify an “ethical ethics” of CMC, an ethical way to enquire about ethical relations in Computer Mediated Communication.

Quite a different face is explored in Grayson Cooke’s paper, “Appearing to Act Younger: The Face of Avon.” Here, Cooke meditates on a phrase used to advertise an Avon anti-aging crème: “Rejuvi-cell Complex makes surface skin cells appear to act younger.” Exploring the vagaries of the cosmetic use of the word “appearance,” and analysing the absurdity of skin cells “appearing to act,” Cooke argues that Avon’s rhetoric represents the targetting and construction of a molecular, technoscientific consumer, a bio-techno-logical body prone to failure and in need of a cosmeceutical fix.

Finally, in “Faces, Interfaces, Screens: Relational Ontologies of Framing, Attention and Distraction,” Ingrid Richardson explores the technosomatic relations between faces, interfaces and screens. Taking a phenomenological stance in which bodies, technologies, knowledge and perception are “intercorporeal,” Richardson moves through the traditional frontal relation between faces and screens to the variable and distracted relations between users and mobile devices, arguing that the face-interface relation is in no way given, and must be examined in the light of the specificities of the medium in question.

The paper addresses the presentation of self in the documentary classic Grey Gardens (The Maysles, USA 1976). Drawing from the work of the American sociologist Erving Goffman and particularly from the Hungarian film theorist Béla Balázs and his outline of the facial close-up, the paper elaborates on the presentation of self on the axis of framing and performing. Instead of emphasizing the premises of authenticity and true character – as is customary in analyses of the film – the paper proposes to view Grey Gardens in terms of asymmetric communication. The paper argues that it is in the asymmetric disposition of framing and performing a self that the documentary carries out the making of the Beales of Grey Gardens into legends.

The paper addresses the presentation of self in the documentary classic Grey Gardens (The Maysles, USA 1976). Drawing from the work of the American sociologist Erving Goffman and particularly from the Hungarian film theorist Béla Balázs and his outline of the facial close-up, the paper elaborates on the presentation of self on the axis of framing and performing. Instead of emphasizing the premises of authenticity and true character – as is customary in analyses of the film – the paper proposes to view Grey Gardens in terms of asymmetric communication. The paper argues that it is in the asymmetric disposition of framing and performing a self that the documentary carries out the making of the Beales of Grey Gardens into legends.

In “Face-Interface, or the Prospect of a Virtual Ethics” (Ethical Space, 2007), I provided the rudiments of an ethical framework for computer mediated communication (CMC) based on the work of Emmanuel Levinas and, in particular, a redefinition of the concept of the ‘face’ on which the ethical relation hinges. The present paper resituates these claims within a more detailed analysis of the underlying assumptions driving research into CMC, which I argue is currently in the midst of a paradigm shift: the assumption of categorical difference between CMC and face-to-face (FTF) communication, supported by the trope of direct competition, is being replaced by more nuanced investigations into the role of presentations of faces in CMC and beyond. I contend further that the conclusions drawn in the previous article continue to hold good because the paradigm shift takes a direction that is matched to the general principle I have articulated as a necessary precursor to an ethics of the virtual: as the object changes, then so does the locus of the phenomenological investigation on which any ethical framework is to be founded. My argument is ultimately that any contingent framework also proves to be necessarily “sticky” – that is, it clings to a notion of adherence rather than to an assumption of inherence – which, I contend further, is a crucial feature of any genuinely ethical ethics.

In Avon’s Australian “Summer Beauty” catalogue for 2004, the following sentence is used to describe Anew Pure 02 Oxygenating Cream: “Rejuvi-cell Complex makes surface skin cells appear to act younger.” Another advertisement in the same catalogue describes a product – Hydrofirming Bio6 Eye Cream – using language that gives rise to similar questions: “’Smart-sensing’ technology re-programmes the skin and trains it to moisturise itself.” This paper proceeds from an analysis of the rhetoric of these advertisements, to a discussion of the wider cultural implications of such rhetoric. Bernadette Wegenstein argues, in Getting Under the Skin, that recent representations of the face in advertising media have shifted their emphasis from the face as locus of identity and over-coding, to the skin and organs, which take over from the face as “windows to the soul.” For Wegenstein, any organ or body part can now act as surface, and can give access to an imagined interior. While it would appear that Avon’s advertisements could fit within this model, a number of questions remain: What does it mean that the face is superseded by the skin, which is then deemed to be programmable and artificial? How does this technologization of the face and skin relate to notions of the cyborg and post-human “subject,” and to post-structuralist celebrations of fluid and changing “identities”? And, crucially, what is the interest of capitalist enterprise in producing such a subject?

This paper considers the prevalence of screens in everyday life – from the televisual and cinematic to the many large and small screens encountered in both domestic and public spaces – and suggests that each of these encounters has its own corporeal and interfacial modality. More specifically, I will argue that at a perceptual and corporeal level we often engage with media screens by way of various metaphors of “framing,” and that there is an historical and ontological affinity between faces, windows, frames and screens. In the context of contemporary screens, I will explore the aptness of these associations, and the problematic assumption that the window and frame are perceptually analogous to either the televisual, computer or mobile interface. That is, while it is possible to describe the broad-spectrum nature of screens in terms of their consonance with the frontal or facial ontology of the window and the frame, such an interpretation glosses over the complex medium specificities pertaining to smaller and portable devices, which challenge many of the sedimented tropes surrounding the body-screen relation.