faces

I’m interested in the connection of the face suggested in Michele White and Jennifer Gonzalez’s essays. White argues that the particular interface of the computer screen offers a different ontological mode of encounter that collapses the voyeuristic distance of the cinema, and, bringing the computer user in closer proximity to the webcam operator, this complicates the distinction between the “viewing ‘subject’ and the ‘object’ of contemplation.” (65) The Internet at least appears to provide a face-to-face encounter, though White’s argument regarding the constructed nature of Internet self-representation (instead of a sense of “liveness” and simultaneity that provides an illusion of unadulterated access, what is given to be seen is actually highly controlled), however, would also seem to reassert a power imbalance in this mirrored relationship. Though she touches on psychoanalytic and even phenomenological descriptors for the ways in which the computer interface fundamentally departs from traditional screen media, I’m not yet fully convinced that this mode (which shifts in scale and proximity, among other things) isn’t also fraught with the same problematics of looking and being looked at, especially since the communication (I’m presuming this isn’t iChat) only travels in one direction.

Gonzalez’s discussion of the face offers an interesting counterpoint to White; as another site of encounter, the face as she describes through Agamben and Levinas’s work (along with visual/digital artists Burson and Mongrel), as a contact point perpetually in flux, in shifting relation to other (racialized) faces around it. She reminds us that as façade, the face both invokes an architecture and an artifice; it is a constructed surface that simultaneously absorbs and imparts social meaning. It hides as much as it reveals, and this gets at something that I think is under-theorized in White’s piece, the way that one representation might be used to cloak another. Webcam operators (like pregnancy avatars in Nakamura) might offer a new social space for previously underrepresented Internet users, and this in turn also reshapes the Internet in terms of what kind of interaction it allows, but I hesitate at the latent eroticism that female webcam operators employ, or the Bratz-like graphic avatars of Nakamura’s Beaner Dreamers. As much as a new space is opened up, another invisible one seems to be foreclosed. The somewhat overdetermined relationship of race and the visual, as Gonzalez describes, offers insights so long as it’s understood to be a mask alongside a visage.