Love and Other Technologies: Retrofitting Eros for the Information Age

Four: Facing the Interface

f o u r Facing the Interface The face is exposed, menaced, as if inviting us to an act of violence. At the same time, the face is what forbids us to kill. — e m m a n u e l l e v i n a s , Ethics and Infinity I am sitting on a stationary bus, leaning my head against the window and feeling pensive; as people often do when they are alone on public transport. Presently, another bus pulls up right beside me, forcing a stranger’s face directly into my field of vision, only three feet away and in a similar pensive, head-leaning position. She is rather indistinct, but her presence is undeniable , and there follows an extended moment of awkwardness as we wait for the lights to change. We exchange glances but can’t very well continue staring into each other’s eyes, at least not without doing some kind of existential violence to our psychic equilibrium. For ‘‘staring people out’’ is either the hostile game of teenagers, misogynists, and racists or the deliciously risky game of lovers. And as random commuters, we are neither of these. Since two heavily vibrating panes of glass separate us, we cannot smother the discomfort of the situation through small talk. So, we both stare down at the road, held to ransom by Levinas’s originary ‘‘shame of 84 Facing the Interface 85 being’’: ‘‘Do I have the right to be?’’ (1985, 121). Usually, phatic speech covers these ontological doubts with the banality of everyday encounters, suspended in the sticky amber of reification: ‘‘How are you?’’ to the neighbor . ‘‘Have a nice day’’ to the cashier. ‘‘How about that local sports team?’’ to the boss. Hence the panic which can seize people displaced outside their linguistic boundaries; who have to face the other unclothed by language, existentially exposed to a rudimentary confrontation with alterity. ‘‘It is the most naked,’’ says Levinas, speaking of the face, ‘‘though with a decent nudity’’ (86).1 The epiphany of the face: an event which lies dormant in every meeting yet sometimes blossoms beyond the humdrum of quotidian contemplation. The structure of such an intense encounter is captured in the otherwise forgettable Baz Luhrmann version of Romeo Ⳮ Juliet (1996), where an initial glimpse of the future beloved (through the fish tank, in this case) provokes the sudden loss of self in the face of the other. It is both a revelation and a rediscovery of Narcissus (who, as Agamben shows in his book Stanzas, was not ‘‘narcissistic’’). The lovers shed the awkwardness of being for a luminescent curiosity for the other. As such, ‘‘love at first sight’’ is a triumph over perceived ontological shame—or at least a profound acceptance of it, which amounts to the same thing. ‘‘The true union or true togetherness is not a togetherness of synthesis,’’ states Levinas (the resident authority on such matters), ‘‘but a togetherness of face to face’’ (77). Levinas sees the face as both an order and an ordination for the subject, as an essential etiquette taken to the highest level of ethics, ‘‘an original ‘After you, sir!’’’ (89, 97).2 More importantly for Levinas, face and discourse are tied, since it is the face which speaks: ‘‘[T]he saying is the fact that before the face I do not simply remain there contemplating it, I respond to it’’ (88). But as we have just seen—through both the shuddering bus windows and the Capulets’ fish tank—there are revealing moments when speech is denied , impossible, inadequate, or simply unnecessary. In the case of love, we search this radiant face for the quivering presence of the code itself, before content and before Proustian signs compel us to interpret, deduce, and decode the beloved through the grids of jealousy, egotism, and the narcissistic feedback loop of literary love. Hence Levinas’s recognition of the fact that ‘‘across all literature the human face speaks—or stammers, or gives itself a countenance, or struggles with its caricature’’ (117).3 86 Love and Other Technologies Staring into the face of the other calls for an untangling of this complex interplay between vision, speech, discourse, and seduction. For it is not simply a case of ‘‘drinking’’ the other in through the eyes, since there are resistances , ‘‘black holes,’’ blockages, projections, and introjections in the libidinal-scopic event. This is why Levinas believes that ‘‘[t]he best...