Selfie-image: Has social media turned our faces into masks?
Faces as they were once appreciated are in danger of being rendered extinct.
According to French academic and arts curator Marion Zilio, the human face, far from being “the true calling card of our personality”, is now more of a work of art or modified technical object, a mask beneath the COVID-19 face masks so many of us now feel compelled to wear.
Advertised as a history of this “mask” and its discrete economic, legal, political and other fabrications, Faceworld: The Face in the Twenty-First Century is, in fact, Zilio’s argument for the understanding of the face as a cultural barometer.
Importantly, she presents the possibility that faces as they were once appreciated are in danger of being rendered extinct.
As a cultural practice, the separation of the human face from the psyche is characteristic of the 21st century. Confrontingly anatomical photographers such as Richard Avedon attempted to restore character to the face, but this artistic trend was superseded by customary considerations of sitter vanity.
This disintegration began to be normalised in earnest during the 19th century, when mirrors, which had become a standard bourgeois fixture, normalised the adornment of “the face-become-image, the sensible apparition of a twice-present existence”. Man’s “continuous observation of himself, splitting him in two”, Zilio argues, was the starting point of a culturally remunerated narcissism.
The plurality — a multiplicity of self-representations — “reinforced the idea of a plural identity caught between two kingdoms, living ‘between the animality that constitutes it and the representations that it constitutes’.” Integration, as such, was on the way out.
Zilio identifies winter 2010 as the real turning point: Apple released a new iPhone that featured a tiny camera, a seemingly inconsequential addition that kickstarted a global redefinition of humanity: the identity-fluid era of post-humanism.
No longer a window into the heart and spirit, the 21st-century face, “submerged under layers of filters, hidden behind hyper-virtualised avatars”, is an ever-regenerating blank canvas for self-definition.
Through technology, the intimacy-facilitating “capital visibility” of the human face, once the exclusive province of celebrities, criminals and politicians, has become universal.
“Selfies are by definition part of a logic of overflowing, of surplus. Hyper-exposed, hyper-sexualized, outrageously mediated”: the face as a luxury item or measure of cultural wealth.
Zilio considers the selfie in particular to be central to an attentional system that measures the relevance of an individual’s existence by the number and intensity of responses it inspires, even if these responses are, in essence, fraudulent. For example, the purchase of followers to bolster a brand is now standard company practice.
The widespread public tolerance of this fraud is indicative of our increasing tolerance for fictionalisation, as evidenced by the rapidly dispersing impact of “alternative facts” and other scandals pertaining to the honesty of government. On far too many levels, authenticity is no longer the benchmark.
The possibility of metamorphosis, however, is implicit in all reflections. Masks — the splitting of identity — are representative: another face, another consciousness. Oscar Wilde, who would have loved social media, narrativised the duality in his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Zilio wonders if the “return” of the mask — as symbolised by the filtered, edited selfie — heralds a deepening unease born of “the proliferation and exponential diffusion of faces since the invention of photography”.
Then there is this: masks liberate their wearers, creating a space in which judgment is suspended. In the place of self-knowledge, the mask issues a command for self-completion. We may start with a selfie and create ourselves from there.
Before photography, Zilio writes, the working class had no real sense of its own face beyond that which could be seen reflected in glass, metal or a pool of water. There was no way of transporting a reflection to codify it; mirrors and portraiture were exclusive to the elite.
Until the Industrial Revolution and other than within the context of age, the notion of self was similarly static; but, in the 21st century, screens are the new Dreaming. The “fluid and ephemeral temporality” denied by the portrait genre, which affixed character to canvas in the fashion of a pinned butterfly, is returned or bestowed by the camera.
Aligned with purpose, representation makes a nomad of the face, yet, as Zilio writes, this “in no way means that the face escapes the politics of facialisation. Visibility is a function of new criteria, linked, among other things, to algorithms”.
The human face now operates “in terms of avatars, profiles, traces, and indexes, apparently following a path opened up by the 19th century: that of a calculative reason, a limitless ratio” that converts it “into a cipher”.
Paparazzi shots of American television celebrity Kylie Jenner during lockdown evidence Zilio’s theory. This Jenner — lumpen in a tracksuit, pink-faced and with her low brow yanked back by a ponytail — bears no resemblance to the inhuman perfection of her Instagram portraits. Her delicate waist, full lips and satiny complexion are, in essence, a lucrative fiction.
Zilio calls this process “defacialisation”, in which faces are “devoured, masked, erased, and reified” and, ultimately, rendered faceless: “pure exteriority without interiority”. For more than a century, photography and psychoanalysis have formalised the duality of subject-object (shadow and light, ego and id) and, through this process, the “spiritual is transferred into the machine, investing it with a power that is now withdrawn from the human gaze”.
The daily bombardment of imagery online and on television is partly responsible for this diminishment of our spiritual investment in any one face-image. Thus overwhelmed, the individual is able to devote only a limited amount of emotional energy to each image. Globally, meditative consciousness in the course of everyday life is close to extinct.
In its contemporary form, the face is no longer “the locus of an existential quest” but a return to the repression of individual identity. Technology converts it into that which Zilio calls “an inter-face, possessing the qualities of both interiority and exteriority, container and content, but also human and non-human”, and subject to a “masterful panoptic egotism”, resulting in a narcissistic narcosis: the face a shield or veil of sorts between the universe and the self, reflective only of the individual’s social and financial ambitions.
With this democratisation there is what Zilio calls the “increasing uniformity and banalisation of the face” necessary to conform to a standardised ideal of beauty or presentation. Kim Kardashian’s bestselling 2015 book of selfies carried this principle through to its logical conclusion.
Processed through the medium of photography, commercialisation shifts the context of the face from the biological to the technological. Zilio imagines a future in which we may have to file patents “to assert our right to the uniqueness of our own face”. This particular technogenesis — the cross-pollination of the face and technology — is now so commonplace as to be unremarkable, and with it a blurring of boundaries. Increasingly, our humanity is being diluted by technological contamination.
Photographing the face can also be interpreted as a legitimisation of the individual and individuality. Modern democracies were, Zilio writes, in part established by this form of identification: by face-images, and the space, both emotional and political, accorded to their representation.
In turn, the images “reconfigured our relation to time and space, further intensified the telescoping of presence and absence, visible and invisible, real and fictional”: the face as a conduit of information rather than a commemoration of character. Ironically, the same process led to the “bourgeois visage” becoming “as anonymous as it was anodyne”.
In the assertion of a fictionalised identity lies the 21st-century individual’s conclusive obscurity. Zilio posits that far from enshrining the self, Instagram, Snapchat, Tinder and similar apps amount to an index of the erosion of humanity. She believes this “proletarianisation of the face” is highly problematic.
Intricate, difficult, lyrical and exquisite, Faceworld is a book that will establish Zilio as a pre-eminent cultural theorist. The intensity of her desire to understand how we can resurrect and retain our humanity within a technological context may not be unique, but the intellectual charge she brings to it is unforgettable.
Antonella Gambotto-Burke’s new book, Apple: Sex, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine, will be published early next year.
Faceworld: The Face in the Twenty-First Century
By Marion Zilio
Translated by Robin Mackay
Polity, 160pp, $31.95
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