Source: O Superman by Laurie Anderson
Faciliality and Pathology (Excerpt)
To understand the significance of [the faciality machine], we must properly understand the register of face as “character”. The face is a double facing entity that represents a socially legible symbolism that with other faces forms the web of connections that is at the basis of cultural life. It points inwards to being and outwards to others, and as such is not just face but interface. The human face as symbolic interface transcends mere vital interchange, forming a culturally specific landscape that directs both the individuals of human groups and the groups themselves. It is the very grounds of our co-presence and, as such, actualizes our capacity for being well with others and as existential salience. The virtual face of the abstract machine constructs itself through the harvesting of this interface, of character itself, transposing intrasocial functionality into its domain, so its composite expressivity substitutes for a concomitant and growing lack of depth, difference, and weight in humanity [1]. The blankness of machinic expression is transferred to us, just as we transfer and thus lose our expressive quality to it. And this is not a simple linear process but looped and reinforcing whereby the mirroring back to us of a flattened degraded face further degrades our face and normalises the homogenisation of human character.
Over time, the humiliation becomes a ritual whereby the exclusivity of the human face as interface of socially conditioned identity becomes blurred and conjoined with the undead machinic caricatures that dominate virtual life, from smileys to exaggerated thumbnail faces designed to maximize views. The line between human and non-human, character and non-character, being and technology, soul and machine, is gradually effaced and we become caught in an instrumental form of facial performance that mimics sociality but is formed of little beyond optimized algorithmic exchange. Character is reduced to the thoughtless swapping of signs speeding along grooves carved out to suit the machines whose lack of such becomes imprinted on our faces and becomes the new and only form of social legibility. And so we are gamified, remixed, and processed into a giddy simulation of true facial presence. This process tends ultimately to the ontological threat of the full interiorization of the logic of the machinic face so that all barriers between what should be two fundamentally separate forms of being-with, the organic and the algorithmic, are transgressed and erased and we become a hybrid “orgarithm”, regurgitating a limited set of discrete signifying masks in a limited set of patterns to create a defined and fully manipulable set of programs that pass for individuals and cultures [2].
The future of the human in this dystopia is a body with a face of discrete and predefined machinic expressions that it uses to flit through its social interactions to maximize the utility thereof while losing any consciousness of the meaning or inner being of face as character. And with this character erasure, emotional consciousness itself may become all but superfluous and the human reduced to a kind of sophisticated ant with the abstract machine as its queen. Here we envision a future of machinic facial hegemony where the virtual face directs and delimits character and emotional capacity and becomes a necessary mediator of understanding rather than a mere practical aid of communication. The machinic face no longer facilitates the crossing of boundaries of time and space but instantiates boundaries of comprehension between us that only through it can we cross. We lose the necessary plasticity of facial expression and comprehensibility to function socially and cohere into cultural wholes, becoming wholly dependent on the abstract virtual face [2].
We cede then to media technology a divine face, the inscribing face of social legibility and our faces become its canvas. Thus a new hybrid machinic-human culture is formed whereby our individual symbolic decay is matched by an enrichment of the machine’s nodal architecture, both quantitatively and qualitatively. We are thus commodified and supplanted, becoming mere carriers of its predefined facial scripts rather than emotional beings capable of producing novel socially mediated scripts. There is then little apart from the packages of flesh we inhabit to distinguish us from the virtual faces of the machine. This is an ultimate melding that cannot be undone as it is defined by its exclusion of human feeling and will, both substituted as a motivator of action by the anticipation and experience of giddiness, which become all that is effectively left of us. The remainder wallows in an unrealized void of angst that never surfaces, as this call to being cannot be heard above the quasi-cultural noise of the machinic algorithms that now run everything, including us. And so we are left with a desert of empty performativity that proliferates endlessly. Such is the future that faciality unleashed presents us with [2].
Source: Faciality and Pathology by Paul. R Buckle
