sharing (1)

i think it's important that we continuously share what we're working on / thinking about here. our own practices and research will inevitably shape the work of the group. that said, i'm going to post an abstract below for a paper i'm working on...so you all can see what i'm thinking about these days.


Interfacing Enmity: Faces and the Tactics of Nonexistence

This paper questions the power and abilities of faces in media to perform in various political conflicts. If the face is an interface of enmity, I will ask what types of faces can successfully mobilize against sovereignty and what excludes other faces from such actions.

In the cinema, the close-up of the face has been suggested to offer its viewers a depth into humanity, a so-called warmth constituted by the image’s humanness. Surely, we project this reading of depth and humanness onto the image, for the cinematographic image is flat and the faces it depicts are only surfaces, maps to be read any which way. It is the way we read the surface of the face that brings us toward some type of depth. In an age of ubiquitous digital surveillance culture, representations of the face deliver its promise as surface to the sovereign power that uses the surface of the face to map, match, capture, and secure patterns: facial analysis of video surveillance footage, eigenface research and simulation, facial and retinal recognition laser scans, not to mention the proliferations of passport photos, mug shots, and photo ID cards.

The exposed face, as a map of / to the human, must adapt in times of conflict for agency and survival. Alexander Galloway & Eugene Thacker have stated that while political conflicts of the past were face-offs between friend and foe, current restructurations of conflict and warfare have de-faced enmity. That is, technological advancements coupled with military strategies and tactics no longer require face-to-face combat. Enmity becomes an interface under constant mutation that one must tactically engage with to vie for political power and life-in-general.

Galloway & Thacker have urged their readers that tactics of nonexistence are the necessary ways in which we must now attempt to allude sovereign dominance: not nonexistence as absence but rather nonexistence as that which is nonrepresentable within sovereign rule. Importantly, Galloway & Thacker note that these acts of nonexistence are not nihilistic but the purest form of love. As our data proliferates throughout networks and our faces are always exposed, how do our faces become nonexistent in times of conflict? How is it possible to reconstitute the surfaces of faces to regenerate depth—a depth of nonexistence that is therefore a depth of love? What are the inherent assumptions and requirements that necessitate an ability as well as desire to be nonexistent in this sense? How do / can those who are fighting for their very existence practice a tactics of nonexistence?

This paper will read through three representations of faces in political conflict: 1) the human faces of female terrorists in the 1966 film The Battle of Algiers, 2) the face of information in the obfuscated code presented in Ben Rubin’s 2005 artwork Dark Source (not sure about this choice; would prefer something that is NOT an art piece), and 3) the faceless faces of torture victims at Guantanamo Bay we encounter through photographs. For each, I will question the efficacy of nonexistence in relation to existence as well as surface and depth. I will argue that while faces attempt to not exist, they always only half succeed, and this attempt is already predicated upon privilege that many faces will never have. How do we reconcile efforts to not exist when so many struggle for the visibility of existence? To exist or not exist, are we not at all times still encrypted within a face of struggle and conflict?

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