Faceworld
Описание книги
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. <br /> <br /> 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.<br /> <br /> 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.
Оглавление
Marion Zilio. Faceworld
CONTENTS
Guide
Pages
Faceworld. The Face in the Twenty-First Century
Acknowledgements
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
Notes
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
Notes
5 Critique of the Political Economy of Faces
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. A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
O
P
Q
R
S
T
V
W
Y
POLITY END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT
Отрывок из книги
Marion Zilio
Translated by Robin Mackay
.....
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.
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.
.....