The Daily Niche: Faciality and Apple
“The face, what a horror. It is naturally a lunar landscape, with its pores, planes, matts, bright colors, whiteness, and holes; there is no need for a close-up to make it inhuman; it is naturally a close up, and naturally inhuman a monsterous hood. Necessarily so because it is produced by a machine and in order to meet the requirements of the special appartatus of power that triggers the machine and takes deterritorialization to the absolute while keeping it negative. Earlier, when we contrasted the primitive, spiritual human head with the inhuman face, we were falling victim to a return or regression. In truth, there are only inhumanities, humans are made exclusively of inhumanities, very different natures and speeds. Privmitive inhumanity, prefacial inhumanity, has all the polycovality of a semiotic in which the head is part of the body, a body that is already deterritorialized relatively and plugged into becomings-spiritual/animal. Beyond the face lies an altogether different inhumanity: no longer that of the primitive head, but of ‘probe-heads’; here, cutting edges of deterritorialization become operative and lines of deterritorialization positive and absolute, forming strange new becomings, new polyvocalities. Become clandestine, make rhizome everywhere, for the wonder of a nonhuman life to be created. Face, my love, you have finally become a probe-head…Year zen, year omega, year w. Must we leave it at that, three states, and no more: primitive heads, Christ-face, and probe-heads?”
— Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, “Year Zero: Faciality”
Anyone who wants to understand the significance of Apple’s new facial recognition should read the whole essay quoted above.
What struck me most about the Apple presentation was that it marked an inflection point in the vector of our sight. I thought that the most notable thing would be AR, where the phone uses its back facing camera to project images onto external reality. Instead, that was glossed over and the front-facing camera became the star of the show; our sight is reflected back at us, bounced off our phone. Of course this the culmination of a large trend — the mainstreaming of the Selfie — but it was honored today as the Future.
Of course, it was flawed; the demo didn’t work.
Althusserians among us will recognize the “hailing” interpolating function of Face ID. Your phone will replace other people in serving the function of hailing you, and thereby instantiating you as a subject. You are you because your phone says so (not because your mother/father/school/boss says so).
