Outfacing the “In” Face: The Posthuman Wound and the Defacing of Relationality in Joma West’s Face.

Abstract

Joma West’s Face (2022) is set in a near future where digital faces and bioengineered babies determine the characters’ social status in a disembodied and fragmented experience. Individuals are mere data divided into two types: biological information and digital information. The popularity of these two types is based on the aesthetics of perfection in the form of transhumanist biologically modified individuals (the organic face) and the digitalized “face.” Physical boundaries and virtual traces are represented as subordinated to surveillance. Through different narrative techniques, readers discover the entrapment, fear and even ingrained disgust characters feel in the face of close and true contact, either physical or affective. The narrative style brings out questions on the distancing of bodies from the relational and affective standpoint in the desire to reconsider the natural organic and affective response via the fragmentation of the narrative and subjectivity. Through critical posthumanism, this chapter explores the fragmented narratives and the disrupted embodiments and relationality to others towards a more response-able call (Hayles). Face reflects on how embodiment, embeddedness, collectivity and the natural affective response are intertwined with not only an ethical, healthy encounter with the other but also with openness for establishing one’s own subjectivity.