Fifteenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

In digital social networks, human beings are exposed to an unprecedented quantity of images of faces; they visually and haptically interact with them in new ways, like ‘scrolling’ them through digital touch screens; rapidly evolving communication devices and formats co-determine this experience, for instance, through the mobility of smart phones and the architecture of digital platforms; most human beings, today, store, carry, and manipulate daily hundreds if not thousands of little icons of faces. The face is, in human anthropology, a central surface for interpersonal interaction, including that of subjects observing the reflected image of their visage. Many sociocultural practices, as a consequence, seek to mould the communicative power of the face. The face is the object of numerous strategies of signification, like controlling one’s facial expressions, making up, arranging facial hair, masking, veiling, piercing, tattooing, aesthetic surgery, etc. It is also the object of several strategies of reading, as the history of physiognomy attests. It is, finally, a central object in human visual cultures; on the one hand, some of them represent it obsessively: Pliny and other ancient sources have the history of painting start with the nostalgic representation of the silhouette of a face; on the other hand, alternative visual cultures restrict the communicative power of the face through forbidding its representation or veiling its appearance. Practices of exhibition and occultation of the face in the era of digital communication are, therefore, not entirely new. Their features must be traced back to the long period of visual cultures.