Faceworld

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. 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

'highly convincing'
Aesthetica

'Fascinating'
Art Quarterly

Marion Zilio is a theorist, art critic and curator