Mathieu Corteel*

French Journal of Psychiatry, 2015/1 (no. 41), pp. 75–80 — Éditions érès
ISSN 1260-5999 — ISBN 9782749242002 — DOI 10.3917/jfp.041.0075
Online: 🔗

• PhD candidate in philosophy at Paris-Sorbonne.

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This study deals with the machinic dispositif established by the social medium that today counts more than one billion members, Facebook. We think that this medium is not a simple means users have at their disposal to communicate with their friends, but rather a machine that disposes of its users by producing faces and posthuman friendship, that is to say, a post-literary friendship that converts the letter and the book of the humanists into social machines for the production of friendship. It seems to us interesting to apprehend this rhizome of friendship from the angle of the productive machine.

In fact, it seemed to us more judicious to conceive Facebook as a condition of possibility (or actualization) of the face and of friendship than as a means conveying preexisting faces and friendships. For it is evident that Facebook is above all a machine of ‘virtual’ production, in the Deleuzian sense of the term, namely which does not oppose reality but rather has as its principle actualization by difference, divergence, or differentiation [1]. For Deleuze, the virtual is found behind the actual and structures it; it is, so to speak, a condition of possibility of actuality established by differentiation. The virtual is the source of the multiple that remains behind the actual itself and after actualization, that is to say, that does not exhaust itself in the actual but is always re-actualized. It is interesting to see that the term ‘actualization’ is today a kind of ubiquity of information on the Internet and that Facebook, in its principle of producing faces and friendships, is itself held by actualization and therefore by multiplicity. This multiplicity, perhaps synonymous with a crisis of identity brought about by the Internet and the creation of this new home, the ‘home page’ [2], invites us to think of Facebook as a productive machine.

We will therefore ask ourselves how this production of the face and of friendship is organized on Facebook and, more generally, whether the perpetual actualization of the multiplicity of faces and friendships does not constitute a stigmergy of the social, which becomes, by that very fact, more easily traceable, by defining a new form of surveillance of the body decoded by the multiplicity of the virtual and recoded in the face and friendship. To do this, we think not simply to take on the exhaustive task of defining the face and friendship, but rather to highlight how these two attributes of Facebook are produced sui generis. We will therefore address the production of the face on Facebook on the basis of Deleuze and Guattari’s study of faciality [3], which we will combine with the idea of the production of a posthuman friendship in parallel with Sloterdijk’s approach [4]. This will lead us to ask whether this new mechanism of production does not institute a new form of surveillance, no longer founded by a vertical organization of power but by the horizontal organization of the network.

The machine of faciality and the semiotic production of the face

Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg’s project, had, as Anne Dalsuet notes, as its first name ‘The Facebook, the trombinoscope’ [5]. It was indeed a trombinoscope allowing Harvard students to put their personal information (age, name, activity, etc.) on the intranet network and, from there, to exchange information with other people registered on the network. But the most important thing is that the site proposes itself from the outset as a trombinoscope: from the origin, it is interested in the face as manifestation of self in the network.

However, before Facebook, a good number of sites already allowed people to chat online with friends under the mask of a photo or an avatar, such as MSN Messenger. But what makes Facebook specific is its virtual aspect, that is to say, the multiplicity established by actualization. Facebook does not simply network avatars, fixed masks: it continually produces face in the multiplicity of actuality. Facebook is a machine producing a facialization by a mechanism of cutting flows. In September 2006, Mark Zuckerberg added the functionality that constitutes the essence of Facebook and differentiates it from all other social networks: the ‘News Feed’. The News Feed creates multiplicity and divergence, and enriches the digital landscape with a continuous process of actualization. Its principle is simple: a web page fluctuating according to notifications, events, photos, and information posted and commented on by those whom the network calls our ‘friends’. This establishes and classifies a kind of current of actuality in the virtual relation with our ‘friends’. It seems that this is Facebook’s great innovation and its source of development. More recently (April 9, 2012), Zuckerberg’s site acquired Instagram, an application allowing one to post a photo taken from a smartphone directly on Facebook. Photographic actualization thus gradually absolutizes the production of the face of our ‘friends’ and of ourselves.

Our profile, which multiplies over time, can from then on be followed throughout its process of facialization. Deleuze and Guattari, who study in A Thousand Plateaus what they call — and what we take up here — ‘faciality’, provide a precise understanding of the production of the face, which, strangely, in every respect resembles Facebook. They define ‘the abstract machine of faciality’ as a machine producing the face by giving ‘to the signifier its white wall, to subjectivity its black hole’ [6]. On Facebook, we have our ‘white wall’, on which one emits signs within a defined frame, and our ‘black hole’, this multidimensionality brought by the camera — the third eye —, our subjectivity and intersubjectivity, which inscribes in the silence of the data the actualization of ourselves and of our friends.

A machine producing the face by giving ‘to the signifier its white wall, to subjectivity its black hole’.

It therefore seemed to us that Facebook was not a simple medium modifying a reality already present. It is above all a virtual machine producing faces and friendship between multiple faces. Deleuze and Guattari accentuate their analysis by differentiating the face from the body: ‘The face is produced only when the head ceases to be part of the body […] — when the body, head included, finds itself decoded and must be overcoded by something that will be called the Face’ [7]. The face is anchored in a process of decorporealization or decoding of the body. The body must disappear to make way for the face inscribed on the white wall / black hole dispositif. And it is the entire body that must be decoded and then overcoded to make face: ‘The hand, the breast, the belly, the penis and the vagina, the thigh, the leg and the foot will be facialized’ [8]. Facebook produces face by an overcoding of the body in a virtual space. We dismember ourselves there in order better to reconstitute ourselves there in the form of the face. Our manifestation, our appearance within this network is nothing but face: we do not present ourselves there under the form of the mask or the avatar, for we actualize ourselves by a process of continuous decoding and overcoding. In fact, Facebook deterritorializes the body in order to make it a face in the signifiance of the white wall and the subjectivity of the black hole.

Inscription of the face in the digital landscape

Deleuze and Guattari think that the reterritorialization of the face is established only in connection with a landscape: the landscape connects to the abstract machine of faciality in order to reterritorialize it. In other words, the face stabilizes in a striated space, a territory, the landscape. ‘The hand, the breast reterritorialize on the face, in the landscape: they are facialized at the same time as they are landscapified’ [9]. On Facebook, it is no different: we are, in a certain manner, reterritorialized — therefore stabilized — in a striated space, which is none other than the digital landscape, or cyberspace, which Michael Benedikt defines as ‘a common mental geography […] a territory swarming with data and with lies […] with a million voices and two million eyes in a silent and invisible concert of investigations, decisions, shared dreams and simple contemplations’ [10].

This landscape, this territory, this striated space that we call cyberspace is doubtless the place par excellence where overcoding takes form and informs through the semiotics of the virtual. As far as Facebook is concerned, this overcoding makes the face appear. Indeed, Facebook is a virtual territory, a system that grids space in a binary geometry, that of the signifier and subjectivity. As Deleuze and Guattari write: ‘It is necessary already that the black hole–white wall system grid all space, draw its arborescences or dichotomies, so that the signifier and subjectivity can only render conceivable the possibility of their own’ [11]. In other words, the structure of Facebook which is established between the white wall and the black hole is programmed, structured by an arborescence allowing the user to progress through the system by elaborating himself an arborescence through the black hole–white wall dispositif. We construct from this structure our face and participate in the system through the link to friends. We see it well, one need only go to the site to observe it: each person has an arborescence by his affiliation to friends, which links to that of their friends; in this, Facebook constitutes a system of friendship through the face.

It is interesting to note that Deleuze and Guattari are critical with regard to this faciality which, on the one hand, for them is inhuman and, on the other, constitutes a disciplinary political arrangement. The face is inhuman and not even animal, for it undoes the corporeality of its arrangement. The animal becoming of the body defined by the milieu and arranged by it is undone as the face is constituted. When the face appears, the body is dispossessed of its arrangement, of its territory; it is decoded and overcoded in a landscape. This loss of humanity and animality is a loss of arrangement in relation to the milieu: in this, facialization deterritorializes the body. By this deterritorialization, we rid ourselves of the organic strata and recombine in the norm of the face. For the face is normative, as they themselves admit: ‘The abstract machine of faciality takes on a role of selective response or choice: a given concrete face, the machine judges whether it passes or does not pass, whether it goes or does not go, according to the elementary face units’ [12]. It is evident that on Facebook there is a kind of normativity of the face: we cannot appear just any way, there are a good number of decency criteria to fulfill in order not to see our profile deleted. Moreover, this profile is subject to the incessant gaze of our ‘friends’, who in a certain way also participate in this normativity of the face. It is possible, for example, to like a profile, photos, etc., or to report them to the Facebook administrator for various reasons, such as harassment. But beyond that, arrangements of power develop which, as Deleuze and Guattari note, ‘impose signifiance and subjectivation’ [13]. In fact, these two instances limit the body or rather dispossess it of itself by making it face. By reducing our identity to the face, we deconstruct the body in order to fashion a new arrangement of strata of signifiance and subjectivation. This arrangement is above all an arrangement of power that stripes the semiotic whole of the manifestations of our subjectivity through a virtual landscape. ‘It is a question of a concerted abolition of the body and of the bodily coordinates through which passed the polyvocal and multidimensional semiotics. Bodies will be disciplined, corporeality undone, a hunt made for animal becomings, deterritorialization pushed to a new threshold, since one will jump from organic strata to strata of signifiance and subjectivation’ [14].

We understand well then that the polyvocal and multidimensional voice disaggregates from the body to be overcoded in an information-processing dispositif that reduces us to the face, and on Facebook this reduction is established by our actualization in the network. The voice is no longer organic, it becomes organized by an informational semiotics. Facebook, in a certain manner, makes of us what Philippe Breton calls ‘Homo communicans’ [15], which he defines as a being whose interiority is wholly exterior, that is to say, whose subjectivity is constantly defined by an informational environment, between input and output. This is perhaps the new type of humanity that Facebook constitutes: a facialized humanity reduced in the expression of its subjectivity by an informational process abolishing the body of communication. It is interesting to see that this machine of faciality that is Facebook is defined by an arrangement of power. In sum, it would seem that Facebook is political — at least in its production of face.

It is therefore now a matter of seeing how this production of face forms a system through friendship and, doubtless more, what type of friendship it intends to produce. For this machine of faciality is also and above all a machine of friendship. Indeed, this is above all how Facebook is presented: on the site’s home page, one can read ‘Facebook allows you to stay in contact with the people who matter in your life’. The friendly contact that loosens itself from corporeal tact elaborates a production of friendship and seems to call for a new definition of the friend become contact.

The system of posthuman friendship

It would seem that with Facebook the conditions of communication between friends — space and time — are totally modified. In fact, as Anne Dalsuet writes, with Facebook there is established ‘a quest for proximity’ [16]. We are far from our friends but at the same time we seem, through the virtual space of Facebook, to tend to draw closer to them through actualization and the possibility of online discussion. Cyberspace deterritorializes the territories, the borders of planetary geography, to reterritorialize faces in one and the same space of signifiance and subjectivity. The temporality of the virtual, perpetually actualizing itself, establishes a certain continuity in the friendly link. We are already defined by the time of the highways of communication. The speed of broadband intensifies the current of actuality and develops a certain form of compulsion. We establish contact at the speed of fiber optics and connect with disconcerting ease, to such an extent that staying online becomes a habit. The conditions of contact between friends are changed: we have passed to posthuman friendship. The book, the letter, and their anemic slowness are no longer of this world; only the network subsists. Facebook changes the relation to the friend but, much more, it is a machine for the production of friendship, as we mentioned; Facebook forms a system from the arborescence of friendship. There is, in sum, a kind of rhizome of friendship established on several plateaus and tending toward the extension of Facebook space and time. It would seem that human relations such as friendship have become posthuman in the sense that they definitively break with the humanist conception of the rational animal; with the appearance of cybernetics, we have become rational machines organized in a network of friends.

Norbert Wiener, the father of cybernetics, the science ‘of control and communication’ [17], is at the origin not only of the development of contemporary information and communication technologies, but also and above all of an ontological transvaluation that made man a communicating machine, homo communicans. For Norbert Wiener, man and machine alike are regulated by a system of feedback loop generating an automatic system of information and communication. The human brain, like the machine, is reduced to information processing. This new paradigm of communication is, in our view, what constitutes posthumanism. The latter is a break with humanism, which defined man as a rational animal. It generates this friendship between connected faces by undoing the corporeal and animal link. Sloterdijk, commenting on Heidegger’s ‘Letter on Humanism’, brings a remarkable clarification to this idea. In fact, he dares to think hominization in terms of technical domestication. According to him, man is forced to domesticate his world and himself, for he is a premature being defined by neoteny and the failure of his animal becoming [18]. We find here what Deleuze and Guattari said: man has failed in his animal becoming, he has made himself face in order to free himself from a milieu. Our technical tendency comes from a failure vis-à-vis animal becoming. We did not succeed in adapting to the natural milieu and thus adapted nature. Nature has become a home and we domestic animals. Only, with Facebook’s deterritorialization, it seems that we have become more than that, no longer domestic animals but faces in a network. We have become machines for producing arborescence to extend the system of friendship.

The best of all worlds

To take up the title of Sloterdijk’s lecture, Facebook is a new human park with its own rules. We have become peer-to-peer, a link in the communication chain being established in the community of Facebook friendship. The friend, that face caught in the ‘web of the metaphysical spider’ [19], seems on my ‘home page’ to constitute a kind of domestic conviviality that binds me ad infinitum to the whole system generated by the loop of friends of my friends, etc. So that what seems to me personal, close, familiar, convivial is in fact only a link in an infinite chain in which I am only a monadic loop. Moreover, it is interesting to recall that Leibniz himself is at the source of this ideal of semiotic communication with the calculus ratiocinator, whose heritage Wiener recognizes [20]. In a certain manner, one could say that we are bound to a Facebook monadology. And it is evident that, like the Leibnizian God, Facebook’s administrators have at their disposal omniscience. All my data are at the administrators’ disposal, who organize the best of possible worlds. Indeed, there is something troubling in this system of friendship, which can quite easily be noticed with what Anne Dalsuet calls Facebook’s ‘normative ideology’ [21]. It is the ‘like’, which allows one to manifest oneself to our friends. But what is strange in this dispositif is that one cannot not like; there is no ‘hate’ function. In fact, it would seem that Facebook is elaborated in a system of trivial and positive friendship. Our friends comfort us in our actualizations.

However, this no doubt conceals something more insidious. Indeed, it would seem that this allows for a simpler traceability of our actualizations. In this sense, friendship on Facebook defines stigmergic behaviors. Our friendship leaves traces and the whole Facebook community acts in the same dynamic of actualization. This can be explained by von Foerster’s conjecture. Von Foerster’s idea is that the more trivial the actions are, the easier it will be to make the behavior of the totality of the system appear. It seems that the system of friendship on Facebook responds to this dynamic. Marketing and advertising are woven within Facebook. It is interesting, moreover, to note that Facebook establishes a sort of recommendation system in the right-hand bar according to our friends and our activities. We are therefore subjected, by the horizontal organization of the network, to a new type of soft surveillance in which each person is somewhat subject to a tracking of his actualizations. The production of face and friendship, which may at first sight appear playful and friendly, establishes a kind of latent power that plays on the transparency of profiles to administer a traceable system in which each person is reduced to the set of information constituting him. Friendship on Facebook is above all constitutive of this system and changes absolutely nothing in the friendly link in its raw state. On Facebook, we find only what we put there, but once in the system, we accept the administration of our face and our friendship, which suggests an increased form of control over our intimacy.

Conclusion

Facebook, as a machine producing face and friendship, thus appears to us under the features of discipline and surveillance. The facialized body is defined through a normative landscape that limits its field of action and experience to signifiance and subjectivity — that is to say, to an informational loop between an input and an output. In a certain way, the face constitutes the informational becoming of our corporeity and of ourselves in cyberspace. To make oneself face is not trivial; as we see, every face is nothing other than a limited body. It is a body that has been taken from the milieu and then recoded in a striated space where each of the actions is defined in advance by an architecture. Facialization dethrones bodies from the possible-real arrangement in order to produce face under the virtual-actual arrangement. There is, it seems, a kind of modification that is no longer action of the body but actualization by the signifiance and the subjectivity of the black hole–white wall dispositif that is the face.

Facebook, in this, disciplines the body by tearing it from its milieu and from its animal becoming in order to limit it under the features of the face, by signifiance and online subjectivity. On Facebook, we no longer manifest ourselves objectively through action, but subjectively through signifiance. This allows for a friendship between faces that forms a system. This system of friendship, based on a semiotic process, defines the functionalities of the face, establishes a stigmergy of the network in which the traceability of manifestations is continuous. Thereby, surveillance seems to manifest itself through friendship making system. In short, the Facebook system is above all a new way of disciplining bodies through the production of the face and the surveillance of our stigmergic behaviors.

References

1. G. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, Paris, PUF, ‘Bibliothèque de philosophie contemporaine’ series, 1972, p. 273.
2. S. Turkle, Life on Screen: Identity in the Age of Internet, New York, Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 1995, pp. 258–262.
3. G. Deleuze, F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia 2, Paris, Éditions de Minuit, ‘Critique’ series, 2001, pp. 205–234.
4. P. Sloterdijk, Rules for the Human Park followed by The Domestication of Being, Paris, Fayard, ‘Mille et une nuits’ series, 2010.
5. A. Dalsuet, Are You on Facebook? What Do Social Networks Change About Friendship?, Paris, Flammarion, ‘Antidote’ series, 2013, p. 5.
6. Deleuze & Guattari, op. cit., p. 207.
7. Ibid., p. 208.
8. Ibid., p. 209.
9. Ibid., p. 214.
10. M. Benedikt (ed.), Cyberspace: First Steps, Cambridge (Mass.), MIT Press, 1991, p. 2.
11. Deleuze & Guattari, op. cit., p. 219.
12. Ibid., p. 217.
13. Ibid., p. 221.
14. Ibid.
15. P. Breton, The Utopia of Communication: The Myth of the ‘Global Village’, Paris, La Découverte, ‘La Découverte/Poche’ series, 2011, pp. 54–56.
16. A. Dalsuet, op. cit., p. 27.
17. N. Wiener, Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, Cambridge (Mass.), MIT Press, 1965, p. 11.
18. P. Sloterdijk, op. cit., p. 38.
19. F. Nietzsche, The Antichrist, Paris, Flammarion, 1994, § 17, p. 61.
20. N. Wiener, op. cit., p. 12.
21. A. Dalsuet, op. cit., p. 59.