Resource

We cannibalize the face and all its facets. Still we cannot satisfy our voracious appetite for the raw unfiltered reactions of others, their look of genuine surprise or disgust upon hearing or seeing something for the very first time. Almost as if, confronted with the thing itself, we wouldn’t know what to do.

Have we stared at the surface so long that the chain of chemical impulses no longer fires across our synapses? so long that we must attempt to jump start a reaction with these mechanistic and rather grotesque caricatures of affect.1 Or is this the unveiling of emotions for what they always were, if better disguised: a ritualized performance, the naturalness of which is the result of much practice and repetition.2

Perhaps we are more similar to the AIs in this regard than we care to admit. We, too, must harvest the microexpressions of others and study the art of facial recognition so that we may project an appearance of humanity that looks natural but is by no means innate.3

Similar to the reactors are the explainers. In these, too, we find a desire to immediately diffuse any ambiguity with with the absolute certainty of its definitive explanation (often staged as a reaction). In doing so the explainer often crops out the margin for error and elides the gap between form and meaning, the interstices of interpretation, transmuting boring content into a series of juicy and palatable tidbits presented in rapid succession as incontrovertible fact.

Even the idea of thinking about something deeply for any length of time seems ridiculous on screen. The thinker broods alone, looks at droplets gliding down th window, sees a flock of starlings or some other shot of nature seeking equilibrium with itself then. Springs up eyes glittering, dashes to the blackboard and begins furiously chalking the equation, the ‘proof’.

Is the actual work of a scholar so obtuse that , even with our vast repertoire of motion graphics and special effects, we cannot represent it as something other than a montage of stock footage, a lightbulb illuminating a familiar face?4 Does this predictable pageantry of inspiration prove anything more than its own banality. It is not an allegory of how very little it takes to make us feel as if we ‘got it’?5

Footnotes

  1. Cf. Freud’s theory of ‘facilitation’ put for in his Project for a Scientific Psychology and analyzed by Derrida in Freud and the Scene of Writing. See also Kleist’s Über das Marionettentheater and Paul de Man’s reading thereof in Aesthetic Formalization in Kleist

  2. Much could be said here about the Heideggerian problematic of ordinary vs. authentic Dasein and its implications about the automatism of ‘Das Man’ which, as he so keenly points out, is not the degraded, fallen state of being that it might first appear but, rather, the norm, the state in which we most commonly find ourself on a everyday basis from which any departure would mark a profund leap into the abyssal structure (Abgrund) of the ego or self. I am reading Being and Time through his later work here but not without warrant. The project of deriving everyday Dasein from the totality of ‘thingly’ relations, to derive authentic temporality from everyday temporality, should be seen as a version of the later problematic of Gestell or language that characterize the later works.

  3. Cf. the problematic of technics (theme) explored in my other series Technics (v3)

  4. We might label this convention the

  5. Clips here are taken from A Beautiful Mind (2001), The Theory of Everything (2014), and Genius (2017) all of are perfect examples of the cult of genius that tend to reduce entire oeuvres of theoretical work to a series of ‘Aha!’ or ‘Eureka!’ moments the substance of which could be gleaned from the back of a book jacket cover.