Abstract
On social media, the face—and the body—act as sites of subjectivity, whose authenticity is anchored in the “truth” of verifiable identity. This claim to authentic subjectivity is grounded in the promise of access to the “real person” as a biologically unique identity. Establishing the supposed truth of such identities is often done through using techniques such as facial biometrics. I demonstrate how contemporary data modalities construct biologically unique identities and authentic subjectivities as two end poles connected through data practices. These practices seek to designate “reality” in order to establish their own validity and usefulness. Overall, I argue that current data practices designate the face and the body as “the real world” to generate further forms of abstraction that can be anchored upon the indexical promises of physical truths. These data practices then process the biological, the socio-political, the imaginary, layering and stitching abstractions together.
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Notes
Such truths also go back to Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Darwinian accounts of emotions and the face became grounded within psychology and were later generalised as the basic emotion paradigm in the work of Paul Ekman. Ekman’s work serves as a foundation for, for instance, much criticised USA Transportation Security Administration’s SPOT technologies (Screening Passengers by Observation Techniques) (see Ruth Leys, “How Did Fear Become a Scientific Object and What Kind of Object Is It?” Representations, Vol. 110, No. 1 (Spring 2010), pp. 66–104).
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Goriunova, O. Face abstraction! Biometric identities and authentic subjectivities in the truth practices of data. Subjectivity 12, 12–26 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41286-018-00066-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41286-018-00066-1