September: 17th -- 10 am Pacific Time
Webinar Link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86910245766
Isabel Millar:
What is a Face?
Deleuze and Guattari wrote of the abstract machine of the face, as made up of two poles: the white wall and the black hole. Representing the semiotic systems of signifiance and subjectification, they relate it to the original face (and quilting point in facialization terms) of patriarchal white hegemony: that of Jesus Christ, and ultimately urged us to 'escape the face'. Paradoxically as we have become a species completely obsessed with the semiotics of the face, vision is severed from its intimate relationship with the bilaterian creature, instead belonging to a acephalic, panoptic, machinic architecture which no longer has the restrictions of biological embodiment. Is the evolutionary function of the face and its relationship to 'intelligent' life becoming redundant? What is the scopic drive of artificial intelligence? Will the face eventually start to disappear from view?
Millar, I. (2022) Blonde: Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Bombshell. Vestigia Journal 3(2): 119-131.
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (2013). "Year Zero: Faciality" In A Thousand Plateaus. London: Bloomsbury.
Isabel Millar is a philosopher and psychoanalytic theorist from London. She is the author of The Psychoanalysis of Artificial Intelligence published in the Palgrave Lacan Series in 2021 and Patipolitics, forthcoming with Bloomsbury. As well as extensive international academic speaking and publishing, her work can be found across a variety of media, including TV, podcasts, magazines and art institutes. She is currently Associate Researcher at Newcastle University, Department of Philosophy and faculty at The Global Centre for Advanced Studies, Institute of Psychoanalysis.