Part I
The Face of the Other
Chapter 1
CountenanceâMaskâAvatar
The âFaceâ and the Technical Artifact
Dieter Mersch
1. A Question of Relation
What does it mean to âmeetâ a robot? What happens when we contemplate it, look into its face or stare into its âeyes?â How do we read the face of an avatar or understand its expression; in short, how do we respond to it? Does gaze meet gaze? What are we reacting to when we dialogue, solve problems, or fight with it? It seems that the faceâGerman, Antlitz, also countenance or visageâis neither an image that can be animated at will nor a simulative screen open to mimetic play, but rather the opening to the Other, an âabyssâ or âalterity.â Emmanuel Levinas (1969, 197) described the face as the âfirst revelation of the Otherâ to whose expression we ârespond.â From the very first moment we communicate with one another, we throw ourselves into a veritable labyrinth. We become flustered or lose ground the instant we make contact. We carefully get a âfeelâ for each other, even if we only catch a sideways glimpse of one another in passing. Continuously, the face creates confusion; it takes hold of us and echoes within us long after we have shifted our attention elsewhere. To meet another person is thus, as Levinas so aptly put it, to be âkept awake by an enigmaâ (1998, 111)âopen and ready to be unnerved or, to the contrary, scared-off or repulsed. The experience of the face is met by a fundamental âinindifference,â as Levinas said. The double negation emphasizes the impossibility of disinterest. For this reason the face is always like an interruption, a âtrapâ or an attraction that leaves an indelible impression upon us and reminds us that we are first and foremost social beings and dependent upon others. We refer to others, desire them, and share a âworldâ with them, whether we want to or not. The ânakednessâ of the face, again Levinasâs (1969, 75) formulation, the fact that we usually present it unprotectedâdisclosing its insufficiency and distress, its inherent vulnerability because it exposes the bareness of our existenceâalso implies that it âconcernsâ us (regarder), attracts the gaze and expects respect (ĂŠgard), but at the same time demanding distance and restraint. Levinas speaks in this context of âsupplication,â the expression of a âfirst word, âyou shall not commit murder.ââ It is almost impractical to destroy a face. For this reason, confronting the countenance also has an ethical dimension. Even if we are oblivious to this fact, every face brings puts us on the trail of the initial experience of sociality that tells us, in principle, you are like me.
Is the above also true for our interaction with robots or avatars? Can they similarly become a âcounterpartâ that we meet âface to face,â like the intermediary incarnation of Indian mythology from which the motif of the avatar stems? Or is there a fundamental separation, an unbridgeable gap, as if two inaccessible territories faced one another? Masahiro Mori (2012) made a similar claim as early as 1970, a claim that reappears in Jasia Reichardtâs 1978 study Robots: Fact, Fiction and Prediction. Mori theorized an âuncanny valley,â an unease that erupts when technical artifacts become too close to us and their appearance all too familiar. Our acceptance or approval of robotsâand avatarsâcorrelates directly, Mori postulated, with their lack of resemblance to us. The more they look like humans, the more they awaken revulsion. It seems we can accept animated dolls, animals, or automatons only if they are not âghostsâ or doppelgängers that we are unable to control. Otherwise the question of their autonomy arises, their âsocialâ status and the respect due to them, depending on the specificity of their differences. The âuncanny valleyâ is our discomfort at their sameness and it exists in principle for all technical or digital devices with which we interact. Thereby the true question is what exactly does âinter-actionâ mean, in particular what is âin betweenâ and what can we âshareâ in its spatium.
In the same vein, the relation between human and machine or simulation and âlife,â or the possibility of their mutual confusion, is also up for discussion, in particular the question of photorealistic rendering or 3-D models of âpeople.â The problem is not so much whether machinesâor computers or robotsâcan think. Alan Turing attempted to determine just that with his test, which tellingly works with curtains behind which the concealed competitors are asked to make decisions meant to reveal which one of them is, without a doubt, a technical structure (Turing 1950; see also Hayles 1999, xi ff.). Decisions however take place below the threshold of the discernible, for which reason Turing was content to contest that once a machine passed the test, we had no more reason to deny that it âthinks.â However the entire construction already presupposes a decision-logical arrangement and thus encircles its own argumentation. The error is thus rooted in the set-up of the experiment itself, which operates within a binary logic where undecidability implies un-differenceâbut undecidability and indistinguishability are not the same (Mersch 2013). Indeed the greater problem by far is situated before thought at the level of perception, which Turing intentionally precluded from his experiments and which reveals, in a reflection on artificial skin or a âdeadâ eye, a difference that thwarts deception.1 If we speak only of âsimilaritiesâ we have already accepted that distance and distinction. But the question is whetherâperhaps in the near futureâanalogs will exist that not only defy understanding and recognition of distinctions, but also exhibit reactions and affects similar to our own, so that, as some science fiction movies suggest, we despair of trying to detect them. Or put another way, might we, in our meetings with artifactsâavatars or acting and speaking machinesâpossibly develop the same deep-seated desire and disquiet, and repulsion and attraction we experience in confrontation with human âpeople?â If we answer in the affirmative, we need moral standards for these meetings, a second posthuman ethics to stand alongside ethics as the prima philosophia that Levinas attempted to formulate. In developing robots and avatars are we confronting ourselves with digital twins that, once and for all, deprive us of our uniquenessâa further metaphysical humiliation beyond Copernicusâs revolution, Charles Darwinâs model of evolution, and Sigmund Freudâs theory of unconsciousâand reawaken doubts about our singularity? Or is the human face in contrast unique and irreplaceableâenjoying a distinct form of encounter that could never occur with technical devices, images, or other objects and apparatuses?
2. Aura and Alterity
Today, there seems to be a tendency to believe that the former is at least likely. Posthumanist ethics, which aim to oust human beings from their central positionâeither as cognitive subjects with privileged access to the âworldâ and to the âtruthâ or as actors in a reality populated in the main by, as Graham Harman (2007) put it, Other objectsâseemingly postulates a symmetry that denies both human exceptionality and the genuine asymmetry of human sociality. In that paradigm, there is no reason to favor humans over artifacts or things. Important instead is the analysis of mutual networks and relations or, in the words of Timothy Morton (2008, 2010), of unnatural ecologies, in which people are at best one node among others. As the problem is too complex for the scope of a single chapter, the following focuses on one key aspect, the problem of identity or difference in the relationship between âalienâ objects such as robots or avatars and human beings. By ârobots and avatars,â I mean machines that seem to act and communicate autonomously as well as digital figurations that serve the purpose of resembling humans or taking over some of their features and functions. This analysis is further restricted to a concentration on, paradigmatically, the similarity or dissimilarity of the human face and the âfaceâ of the avatar, whereby the mask shall serve as both parallel and mediator. The goal of these explorations is to disturb the seeming plausibility of a posthumanist movement that posits itself as avant-garde and assumes their sameness. In contrast, the chapter at hand insists there is a difference in our manner of relatingâif not necessarily in our relationships.2 It claims that the experience of the face is a âmodelâ for an experience of alterity that precedes all experiences of things or artifacts, even when they look deceptively like us. In short, I uphold the primacy of an asymmetry that stems not from the ontological supremacy of humans over things, but from our relationships to others, which are different from our relationships to objects or non-humans, even when the latter are artificial systems which looks like humans. In fact, we owe our relationships to things or automatons first and foremost to our primary relationship to the Other, so that a constitutive difference opens between the Other and the others (in the sense of the social). Or, put another way, we are interested first in others and only secondarily and derived from there in the world we share with them or in a ânatureâ that presents itself to us as that which we did not make and are nevertheless a part of. There are, therefore, two different modes of relationship, the relation between humans and non-humans (things), which is intentional, and the (social) relationships between humans, which are either active or passive but both founded in their prior ability of responsivity. It is for this reason that myths personalized natural things, in order to move them closer to our understandings and behaviors.
A prime example of this distinction can be made by examining the meaning of the face. For us, as literary scholar Peter von Matt (1983) has said, the face is the âcondensed image of the humanumâ and at the same time the absolute heteronomy that embodies that which is completely inscrutable. In the face we meet the trace of the âGod who passedâ as Levinas (1986, 359) pointedly stated, for which reason its ânudityâ and âinfinitenessâ demand an ethical stance. It is the prerequisite and the basis for every social relationship. Walter Benjamin (2010, 19) claimed almost the same, calling the âhuman countenanceâ the âlast entrenchmentâ against the disappearance of the âauraâ in a world of âtechnological reproducibility.â The faceâs âfleeting expression . . . beckons from early photographs for the last time.â âIt isâ Benjamin continued âno accident that the portraitââlike painting in early modernityââis central to early photography,â rather than the perfect illusion of a space constructed by means of mathematical perspective. Similarly, BĂŠla BalĂĄzs (2010, 38â41)âas later developed by Gilles Deleuze in his books on cinemaâbelieved the facial close-up to have a particular âemotionalâ status and claimed it was more central than landscapes. He even believed facial expression to be a universal language of emotion that could not be replaced by any aesthetic of the sublime, no matter how impressive.
3. Responsiveness and the Primacy of Answering
The difficult concept of the auraâusing Benjaminâs (2010, 19) definition of âthe unique appearance of a distance, however near it may beâ3âthus coincides with the way in which alterities, as the site where all types of relations are constituted, are at the center of Levinasâs critical phenomenology. Levinas sought in particular to bypass Husserlâs insistence on an always subjective âintentionalityâ by means of privileging answering or the more passive âresponsivenessâ (Waldenfels 2007).4 Here responsio comes before intentio, thus intentionality is rooted in responsivity. Relating is therefore not an actio of an acting subject, but develops from the site of the Other as a primary event of answeringâwithout us knowing what we are responding to. The same is true of the aura. It cannot be forced, Benjamin (1997, 147ff.) states in his analysis of Charles Baudelaire, but appears as a recusant surprise. Likewise, comprehension of a face is not a conscious act, as long as I turn toward it curiously. Rather its attraction happens, it takes me by surprise and pierces me with the rapidity of an arrow. For this reason the faceâlike the auraâcannot become the object of a gaze, just as the idea thereof cannot come out of myself. Rather, it never truly arrives, remaining, as Levinas also said, âinfinitelyâ transcendent. This infinitude and transcendence is its most radical denial. That experience, drawn from twentieth-century Jewish scholarship, can by no means be dismissed as exceptional. To the contrary, its âanticipationâ of the âabsolute othernessâ of the Other gives it clear primacy over every other form of relationship, especially encounters with things, technical objects, or avatars, which can at best be deduced from it. To be more exact, it is important to distinguish between relationships and relations. The latter can be formalized by functions, they prove to be Zu-Ordnungen (attributions, literally toward-orders), correlations or configurations of points that express affiliations, not Zu-Wendungen (attentions, literally toward-turnings) around which our relatings have always gravitated.
The same perspective is incidentally shared by other philosophical positions that see the experience of the face as the primary site of human relationships. As only one example, allow me to cite Georges Bataille (2002, 63): âNothing is human in the unintelligible universe outside of naked faces which are the only open windows in a chaos of strange or hostile appearances. Man only escapes his insupport...