In response to this shift, during the twentieth century, art – which of course had been responsible for the first portraits – had instigated a programme of ‘defacialization’. Everywhere faces were devoured, masked, erased, and reified. Artists sought progressively to obliterate the categories of the ‘subject’, the ‘self’, and the ‘I’; in other words, the category of identity in its most immutable, substantial, and metaphysical forms. This led to the creation of faceless faces, faces that were pure exteriority without interiority. No doubt the atrocities of war had left their black mark on the history of the contemporary face, as the themes of the ugly and the formless went hand in hand with the century of great wars. But the fact that the humanity of man could not survive the horror of the Shoah, and that this epiphany had brought him into conflict with his own stereotype, could actually be traced back to more complex antecedents. For the slippage from portrait to face and subsequently to the non-face actually responded to another crisis: the paradoxical crisis of the invention of the face.
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.
Chronicle of a Death Foretold?
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.
Although even today it is the lot of any person with restricted visual access to their face – limited to the traditional photographs of school classes, birthdays, and other such events – this deficiency in recognition has for the most part been superseded by a sort of hypermnesia: an infinite memory of self-images, where memory no longer designates the remembrance of the past or the outcome of a long-term crystallization, but instead a flashback, often to an anodyne moment, part of an everyday life constructed and broadcast in real time. Today the face of a foetus may be posted online even before birth. Plastic surgery can mould a face on demand, and science has made it possible to transplant a face – soon it will be a head – onto another body. Saudi Arabia has just granted citizenship to a silicon face supposedly inhabited by an artificial intelligence, and the latest iPhone has made the face into a password. Who knows, in the near future we may file patents to assert our right to the uniqueness of our own face. We will no longer worry about surveillance cameras, but about applications that steal identities by manipulating expressions – like Face Swap Live, which allows Snapchat users to try on different faces in real time. By exchanging their own face directly and automatically with another, or with something else, this app allows its users to take on the features of an animal, an older person, someone of the opposite sex, a film star mask, or even a bicycle wheel. It’s a feature that certainly lends itself to comic antics, but it is not difficult to imagine how it could be misused for criminal purposes. The promises of such effects are already tantalizing Hollywood studios quite prepared to spend millions of dollars on bringing back dead actors or rejuvenating ageing stars. We have begun to see the first attempts, in Fast and Furious 7 and Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and in experiments by the research team who were able to make Vladimir Putin smile and Donald Trump say whatever they wanted him to. Since the face is exteriorized from the very outset, it is no doubt this potential for faces to be stored, modelled, and infinitely manipulated that explains digital natives’ preference for applications that feature a pseudo-ephemeral temporality, where images are not captured but continually vanish into oblivion.
Facebook is a medium for people in their thirties, the medium of a generation that experienced the transition from analogue to digital, from the pre- to the post-Internet age with all of its personalized prostheses and their connected microphones and cameras. For ten years now it has served as a metaphor for the face’s new destiny – a face that is edited and published, eager to advertise and exhibit its intimacy. This everyday sociality may seem vulgar to our contemporaries, but in fact it lays the foundations for another reading of the face. The face may not just be a stimulus like any other, the metaphysical tradition may have seen it as the site of the encounter with the Other, and modern psychology may have postulated that it constitutes a primary form of interiority; but what has been forgotten is that individuals – that is to say, indivisibles – are only subjects in so far as they participate in a subjectivity that is shared, engaging with an exteriority that cannot be dismissed as merely secondary.
It is this exterior aspect, long consigned to the shadowy world of Platonic appearances or the depths of the unconscious, that constitutes the enigma of the face. Formerly the locus of an existential quest, in its contemporary form the face now seems more like a return of the repressed. The modern epoch exposed the face to its dark counterpart, reified and rendered banal by technical reproduction and exposure value. It became an inter-face, possessing the qualities of both interiority and exteriority, container and content, but also human and non-human. Modernity dreamt of a subject that observed, named, and possessed, but couldn’t accept the fact that this subject itself would become the object of that same ‘masterful panoptic egotism’.3 Humankind’s continuous observation of itself could not take place without inviting a third term into the equation: the technical milieu. What this revealed was the technogenetic dimension of the face – something which, in turn, would have repercussions for its ontogenesis.
We need only look back to see how, during the industrial epoch, photography’s large-scale process of exteriorization of the face forged an other memory of the face, one that was no longer biological but technical. While Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari warned that in any society what is essential is ‘to mark and to be marked’,4 the invention of the face as a technical object made it just one product among others, a living archive available to all. Once only seen when they were depicted in genre paintings or revealed fleetingly in the reflections of stagnant waters or at the bottom of a cooking pot, just a few decades later faces would be everywhere, all of the time.
Notes
1 1. ‘Investigating the Style of Self-Portraits (Selfies) in Five Cities across the World’, http://selfiecity.net.
2 2. André Gunthert, ‘La consécration du selfie’, Études photographiques 32 (Spring 2015), https://etudesphotographiques.revues.org/3529.
3 3.