We have long accepted the face as the most natural and self-evident thing, believing that in it we could read, as if on a screen, our emotions and our doubts, our anger and joy. We have decorated them, made them up, designed them, as if the face were the true calling card of our personality, 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.
This highly original reflection on the fabrication of the face will be of great value to students and scholars of media and culture and to anyone interested in the pervasiveness of the face in our contemporary age of the selfie.
By:
Marion Zilio
Translated by:
Robin Mackay
Imprint: Polity Press
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions:
Height: 213mm,
Width: 137mm,
Spine: 15mm
Weight: 227g
ISBN: 9781509537266
ISBN 10: 1509537260
Pages: 160
Publication Date: 27 February 2020
Audience:
General/trade
,
ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
1 After the Face Chronicle of a Death Foretold? Notes 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 3 The Apparelled Face The Default of Origin An Artificial Organ The Ego-Technical Complement Masked Repetition The Narcosis of Narcissus 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 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 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 Index
Marion Zilio is a theorist, art critic and curator
Reviews for Faceworld
'highly convincing' Aesthetica 'Fascinating' Art Quarterly
