Issue No. 18 2010 — The Face and Technology

abstracts

By Warwick Mules

This article develops a concept of the face as an absolute opening to an outside not yet known or experienced. The article counters Deleuze and Guattari’s pre-critical concept of faciality as an abstract machine and instead argues for a situated critique (critical praxis) of the face opened to otherness in the finite place where it happens ­ as the mark of withdrawal from self-presence. To demonstrate this, the article discusses photographic work as a creative political art practice that makes a face appear as such, thereby enabling new self-relations motivated by renewed democratic concerns for global “matters of concern.”

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By Ilona Hongisto

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.     

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By Laurie Johnson

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.

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By Grayson Cooke

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?

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By Ingrid Richardson

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.