Marion Zilio - Faceworld

1 Cover

2 Front Matter Faceworld The Face in the Twenty-First Century Marion Zilio Translated by Robin Mackay polity

3 1 After the Face Chronicle of a Death Foretold? Notes

4 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

5 3 The Apparelled Face The Default of Origin An Artificial Organ The Ego-Technical Complement Masked Repetition The Narcosis of Narcissus

6 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

7 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

8 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

9 Index

10 End User License Agreement

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2 Table of Contents

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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

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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 Data

Names: Zilio, Marion, author.

Title: Faceworld : the face in the twenty-first century / Marion Zilio ; translated by Robin Mackay.

Other titles: Faceworld. English

Description: 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--dc23

LC 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.

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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.

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.