ON THE LOVE OF COMMENTARY

PROSOPOPEIA TO PROSOPAGNOSIA: DANTE ON FACEBOOK

Scott Wilson

It is well known that the poems that would later be collected in Dante’s first book Vita Nuova emerged as part of a “social network” of fellow adolescents and poets in Florence. Among them were Dante di Maiano and a lute maker called Belacqua who may have put a ballata, included in the book, to music. Most importantly, Dante’s main interlocutor was Guido Cavalcanti, a poet and theoretician ten years Dante’s senior who would become his mentor. Vita Nuova establishes, in the Western tradition, love as inextricably bound to the commentary that it generates in prose and poetry. This essay looks at the centrality of ideas of love and friendship that are maintained in the interminable online commentaries on contemporary social networks, particularly Facebook. Further, this essay considers the fate of the face where it becomes no longer a phantasmatic locus of imaginary projection, but an ever-shifting marker of nodal points of data predicated on an empty mediating space for the exchange of information. As such, I am going to suggest, the relation to one’s face becomes affected by a generalized psychic prosopagnosia in which the face begins to lose its previous significance in relation to the profile-image that has displaced it as the most important indicator of identity. At the same time, Facebook, supremely, provides a forum for contemporary prosopopeia, or face- making.1 It is a machine for self-narrativization through which

1 The interdependence of these two terms is perhaps implied in the etymology of the word face. See for example, Isidore of Seville’s etymological

19 GLOSSATOR 5 we negotiate our (self)love, online romances, filial and friendly relations, increasingly becoming our main means of self- promotion, the way we establish our market value on the basis of the pure form of an empty template. The central conceit of this essay is the formal impossibility of the amorous relation and the interminable commentary that it generates. Here is a romance between two allegorical figures: Prosopopeia, the personifier, the maker and perceiver of faces and personae everywhere, and Prosopagnosia, s/he who is unable to recognise individual faces, even or especially her own. This essay is in two columns that run side-by-side. The first, in another more fanciful conceit, conjures a Dantesque online discussion about love and commentary in the form of Facebook for those who are unfamiliar with the form (there must still be some). The second discusses Facebook, the two recent corporate histories of the company and David Fincher’s film The Social Network in its commentary on the face and facelessness. Both parts of the essay comment obliquely on the other. The essay concludes with a discussion of Facebook as a new “trans-parental” form of governance.

definition of face (facies) in terms of recognition: “Face is called ‘facies’ from effigies, image. There lies the whole depiction of a person and the recognition of anyone.” Isidore of Seville, Etymologies edited and translated by Priscilla Throop, Charlotte, Vermont: Medieval MS, xi.1.33 Faces are continually changing “with a variety of movement”, being made and un-made, by the will or “voluntas” (xi.1.34), and thereby recognised or misrecognised according to the changing imaginary relations to different systems of symbolisation in different times and places.

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In quella parte - dove sta memora This is a movie about prende suo stato, - sì formato, - come kids’ faces diaffan da lume, - d’una scuritate – David Fincher, The la qual da Marte - vène, e fa demora; Social Network.28 elli è creato - ed ha sensato - nome, d’alma costume - e di cor volontate. On [Mark Zuckerberg’s] Vèn da veduta forma che s’intende, own Facebook profile he che prende - nel possibile intelletto, lists his interests: come in subietto, - loco e dimoranza. “Openness, breaking things, revolutions, [In that part where the memory information flow, resides / Love comes and as the minimalism, making diaphane is brought / To form by things, eliminating desire light, so Love is given form / By for all that really doesn’t dark from Mars; with memory it matter” abides. / A habit of the soul, will of – David Kirkpatrick29 the heart, / It is created, sensate, has a name. / From the intelligible I. KIDS’ FACES form we see, / Love comes into the “It is with our faces that we possible intellect, / And there it face the world, from the moment of dwells as in a thing substantial.] – birth to the moment of death. Our Guido Cavalcanti, “Donna me age and our sex are printed on our prega, - per ch’eo voglio dire,” faces. Our emotions, the open and Canzone XXVII, 15-23.1

1 Guido Cavalcanti, Complete Poems, translated by Anthony Mortimer. London: Oneworld Classic, 2010, 59. 28 David Fincher, The Social Network. Columbia Pictures. Sony DVD, 2010.

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I instinctive emotions which Darwin It was night on the terrace when wrote about, as well as hidden or Belacqua noticed Dante’s latest repressed ones which Freud wrote post, still stuck in the first of the about, are printed on our faces, canti in the moon. Beatrice, linking along with our thoughts and love to the cosmic abyss, was intentions . . . And, crucially it is by accounting for the inconsistency of our faces that we can be recognised the universe, the spots on Diana’s as individuals.”30 face. The lunar pock marks are not, Neither a face, but a collection she insists to Dante, marks of Cain, of profile pics, mug shots, icons, a reminder of the original fratricide, logos, tags, emoticons, nodes, nor a but evidence of the process of book but rather in different ways a cosmic unbinding as the soul is website, screen, interface, portal, diffused into dust: E come l’alma network, platform, Facebook has dentro a vostra polve / per differenti subjected both the face and the membra e conformate /a diverse potenze si book to the full rigour of Mark resolve (Paradiso II: 133-35).2 Zuckerberg’s interests. It has opened them out to a regime of Profile: Belacqua ‘radical’ or ‘ultimate’ transparency,  A maker of musical instruments. and in such a way broken them up,  Single.  Florence. re-made them, revolutionized them, Philosophy turned them into bits of Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Averroes, information that flow across the Avicenna, Albertus Magnus. bandwidth of the globe, flickering Music on sleek screens and laptops; no Mayhem, Xasthur, Deathspell longer a Baroque enigma, glimpsed Omega, Enoch, Lurker, Rostau, in the chiaroscuro of thought and particularly ‘Celestial Hive Mind’. expression, one’s face to the world Books has become abstracted, flattened Timeaus, Symposium, Poetics, Enneads, out, reduced to the minimalist Kitab al-Shifa, Vita Nuova, The Divine white and blue lines of a profile, a Comedy, More Pricks than Kicks, wall, a newsfeed in which Hideous Gnosis, Les Paul in his Own information about oneself is Words mechanically distributed across nodes and connections according to

29 David Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect. London: Virgin, 2010, 11. All further page references cited in the essay. 2 Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, ed. Charles S. Singleton, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973. 30 Oliver Sacks, The Mind’s Eye. London: Picador, 2010, 82.

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Activities and interests algorithms calculating interests on Lazing about beneath rocks, the basis of previous distributions. dreams of fair to middling women, Evidently, desire is being rotten Gorgonzola toasted eliminated relative to that which sandwiches, lobsters. really matters, and what really Politics matters about Facebook is the Melancology assimilation and manipulation of Groups information according to a certain The Late-Repentants, Petro-Punk form and function. Desire, stripped Collective of its metaphor, of the face as phantasmatic locus of imaginary Friends (21) projection and mystery, becomes Dante Alighieri pure mechanism, pure metonymy; Cecco Angiolieri a hieroglyphic faciality that flickers Samuel Beckett in a data-mirage that pulls and Brunetto Brunelleschi dissipates desire in the digital desert Guido Cavalcanti of shifting displacements of an Donna Gentile endless flow of information, such Guido Guinizelli that desire ultimately defaults to a Eileen Joy drive that pulses to a different Sparkles Joy order of technological rhythm. Anna Klosowska Zuckerberg and his colleagues Sean Dante di Maiano Parker and Dustin Moskovitz Nicola Masciandaro called it ‘the trance’. “‘It was Mark Musa hypnotic’, says Parker, ‘You’d just Michael O’Rourke keep clicking and clicking and Beatrice dei Portinari clicking from profile to profile, Barbara Reynolds viewing the data’.” (Kirkpatrick, Francesca da Rimini 93) Dorothy L. Sayers Kids’ faces, always already Spirito animale repeatedly photographed (even in Spirito naturale the womb), are further multiplied, spirito vita replaced and displaced by thumbnails, icons, logos. As such, Belacqua noticed that the number on Facebook and elsewhere in the of his Friends had gone down from bureaucratic, neoliberal 22 to 21. It was a pathetic number technocosm, faces are no longer anyway, and someone else had primarily objects of demand, desire now ‘un-friended’ him. He sighed, or recognition, but are ever-shifting tried not to feel anxious. He ought markers or nodal points of data to improve the quality of his status predicated on an empty mediating

23 GLOSSATOR 5 updates, post some amusing space for the exchange of biometric Youtube clips, get involved in a and economic information. They campaign, a revolution or a constitute, in the phrase of counter-revolution; they were all Zuckerberg, a “social graph, in the the rage this spring. He couldn’t mathematical sense of a series of think of anything to write, had no nodes and connections. The nodes idea what, of his miserable are the individuals and the existence, might interest or amuse connections are the friendships ... his ‘Friends’, half of whom he’d we have the most powerful never met, or appeared to be dead, distribution mechanism that’s been or half-dead, in a Limbo of created in a generation” inexistence. He had no idea what (Kirkpatrick, 217). they could possibly want from him. This destiny of the face was Except prayer, perhaps. They always, precisely, envisaged in should make an app. for that. theFacebook’s initial logo, designed Belacqua turned away from by Zuckerberg’s friend and the fatuous discussion on classmate Andrew McCollum. He Facebook, turned down The Funeral used “an image of Al Pacino he’d of Being, and lay his face upon his found online that he covered with a thigh. fog of zeros and ones – the The News Feed continued to elementary components of digital update itself. media” (30): the close up of the Hollywood star is rendered Dante Alighieri increasingly unrecognisable, A ciascun’alma presa e gentil core intelligible only as lines of digital nel cui cospetto ven lo dir presente, code. Say hello to my little friends. in cio che mi rescrivan suo parvente, This image, and indeed Facebook salute in lor segnor, cioe Amore. generally, is perhaps a symptom [To every loving heart and captive that the relation to one’s face has soul / into whose sight these become affected by a generalized present words may come / for some psychic prosopagnosia in which we elucidation in reply, / greetings I no longer recognise the face that bring for their great lord’s sake, has been displaced by the digital Love.] (Vita Nuova, III)3 profile-image. It is easy to see how the general imperative to have a View all five comments: face, or to make one, or to make a Dante di Maiano Dante, go persona, an identity or profile is wash your bollocks and clear linked to a general disquiet about

3 Dante Alighieri, Vita Nuova, translated by Mark Musa, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.

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your head. Or take a sample faces. Common distaste for one’s of piss to your doctor. passport photograph (‘that’s not  Cecce Angiolieri likes this. me!’) that, in digital form, has become ubiquitous as a marker of Mauro Senatore O Deo, che personal identity throughout the sembra quando li occhi gira! / (online) world of techno- dical’ Amor, ch’io nol savria bureaucracy is of course linked to contare (my favourite lines of the criminal mug shots that those times) heralded the introduction of universal policing and surveillance Guido Cavalcanti This is from the nineteenth century. In the point where I teach him all comic fashion, it was this he knows. ambivalence that Zuckerberg exploited in his first foray into the Barbara Reynolds In his world of college facebooks in the own poems Cavalcanti development of the notorious showed how terms from Facemash. As the movie- physiology and psychology Zuckerberg notes in Fincher’s film, could provide a new “some of the people on the vocabulary in which to Kirkland facebook page have pretty analyse the effects of love, horrendous facebook pics,” and terms which Dante following the suggestion of borrowed.4 comparing them with farm animals,  Guido Cavalcanti and Zuckerberg set up a site in which Dante di Maiano like this. the passport-style photos of female students can be compared and Dante di Maiano And ranked. Therein, Zuckerberg which you borrowed from turned the relatively ‘horrendous’ Albertus and Averroes. faces of bureaucratic record into digital objects of exchange, Guido Cavalcanti currency representing differential In place of memory, inhabiting value in an online libidinal Form, yet born of darkness and economy. war, a force invades the soul and is According to David created, given a name: amore. Kirkpatrick, many people view Facebook as ‘a platform for Beatrice dei Portinari narcissism’ (13), but the L’anima mia vilement’ è sbigotita [My photographs do not primarily

4 Barbara Reynolds, Dante: The Poet, the Political Thinker, the Man. London: IB Tauris, 2006, 19.

25 GLOSSATOR 5 spirit is so vilely distressed]. In function as a support for flattering Cavalcanti, love is a fatal malady of self-representation. “MySpace was the soul, an irruption in the heart of a world of carefully posed glamour cosmic forces, sombre and violent. shots, uploaded by subjects to make them look attractive. In Donna Gentile Facebook, photos were no longer “Love is a form of mental illness little amateur works of art but not yet recognised by any of the rather a basic form of standard diagnostic manuals.” communication” (155-6). Facebook Stuart Sutherland, International photographs are, in that sense, the Dictionary of Psychology, 2nd Ed. faceless, endlessly fluctuating 1996. record and guarantee of existence predicated upon an anxiety about Zachary Price But really, existence (the in-existence of what’s so bad about mental Facebook), about having a life that illness? Facebook both guarantees and  Myung-hye Chun and Ayşe supports. Shaun Dolan from New Mermutlu like this. York, a 25 year old assistant in a media firm, is quoted saying “my Őykü Tekten We are all mad generation is unbearably anyway. However some still narcissistic ... when I go out with prefer having their own my friends there is always a camera mental dictionaries to define present, for the singular goal of *things* rather than using the posting pictures on Facebook. It’s *official* ones. as if night didn’t happen unless  Ayşe Mermutlu likes this. there’s proof of it on Facebook” (Kirkpatrick, 206). Supremely, Nicola Masciandaro Facebook provides a forum for Diagnostic manuals are an contemporary prosopopeia, that is, unrecognised form of love. personification or face-making. It is  Ayşe Mermutlu and Őykü a machine for self-narrativization Tekten like this. through which contemporary Narcissus can negotiate his or her Guido Cavalcanti (self)love, online romances, filial Love is not just an effect of and friendly relations, increasingly commentary, love is always already becoming the main means of self- commentary. Elli è creato. Created promotion, the way people must of prosopopeia, given a name to establish their market value on the name nameless horror, love basis of the pure form of an empty assumes a face to veil an template. Over this empty, minimal incomprehensible facelessness, E space, flow billions of images. “By

26 WILSON – PROSOPOPEIA TO PROSOPAGNOSIA non si pò conoscer per lo viso (XXVII: late 2009,” Kirkpatrick writes, 63). “Facebook was hosting 30 billion photos, making it the world’s Guido Cavalcanti BTW. largest photo site by far” (156). But This is precisely what I Facebook is not really an archive or suggested Dante make evident reservoir, nor even a great lake of with Vita Nuova after the death images into which Narcissus may of Beatrice. Death resides like gaze, but an ocean of data made up the shadow of Mars in the of multiple streams and eddies of hollow of love, its condition as information distributed according infinite commentary. His little to the movements of previous book is a diagnostic manual information that feeds itself more for poets and lovers, both information in traces of transient therapeutic cure and viral interests, photos, tags, posts, poison. comments, likes, groups, affiliations, selections in a great Guido Guinizelli “Some churn of profile-love and people would never have been ‘friendships’. in love, had they never heard The myth of Narcissus that love talked about.” La from Ovid to Freud provides the Rochefoucauld. classical pattern for the psychic structure of love and love poetry Beatrice dei Portinari ALL (not to mention the reflective philia people. of knowledge and self-knowledge from the Socratic tradition Cecce Angiolieri Oh not that onwards) reaches its apotheosis in tired old cliché :( You’ll be the courtly tradition of western getting out your Roland epideictic poetry from the Barthes and Jeanette Troubadours, Dante and Petrarch. Winterson next ;) There was Here, the luminous, reflective face a young girl from Firenze / of the beloved is the highly formal, Who met an old Priest called generic inspiration which provides Mackenzie / she . . . [This the impetus to forge the poetic content is currently personae that sets the pattern for unavailable] the emergence of the self-reflecting, self-making modern individual. Samuel Beckett Narcissus is a figure for modernity Yes, I loved her, it’s the name I in various ways, not least to the gave, still give alas, to what I was degree to which it is an image that doing then. I had nothing to go by, he falls for rather than a person. As having never loved before, but of such he is a figure for the

27 GLOSSATOR 5 course had heard of the thing, at frequently illusory and self- home, in school, in brothel and at deluding aspect of love, especially church, and read romances, in unrequited love, of being in love prose and verse, under the with love, or of amor fou. And since guidance of my tutor, in six or Narcissus in his delusion if not seven languages, both dead and madness does remain faithful to his living, in which it was handled at love even to the point of death, he length. I was therefore in a is both an ironic and tragic figure position, in spite of all, to put a for the truth of love and the love of label on what I was about when I Truth. To the degree that found myself inscribing the letters Narcissus is also taken as a figure of Lulu in an old heifer pat or flat for vanity or self-regard or the self- on my face in the mud under the love and romantic egotism of the moon trying to tear up nettles by modern individual, this is an effect the roots.5 of a double delusion. The (self) identification of the romantic Dante di Maiano Everyone egotist is predicated upon a knows it’s important to name misrecognition of the self-love of the symptom; you have to Narcissus that it takes as its model give a name to the trauma, it and template. The curious thing is the first indispensable step about Narcissus is that his own face on the way to a diagnosis. is the very thing that he fails to Nomina sunt consequential rerum. recognise in falling in love with its Then you take your piss to reflection. The self-making or the doctor. prosopopeia that finds its amorous structure in the myth of Narcissus Lulu You know you make is strangely predicated on a case of me want to SHOUT! prosopagnosia, the condition that names an inability to read or Guido Cavalcanti This wild recognize faces, even or especially and sovereign force, ‘è fero ed è one’s own face. si altero’ (XXVII: 3), we called Prosopagnosia is a figure from ‘Lord’, Dante and I, ‘del modern neuroscience, describing segnor’. But love is not a Prince an inability to recognise faces. like Emperor Henry VII, it is, Martha J. Farah writes, “most rather, like chance, ‘d’un prosopagnosics complain of an accidente’ (XXVII: 2), a alteration in the appearance of purposeless miracle. faces. Although they have no  Georges Bataille likes this. difficulty perceiving that a face is a

5 Samuel Beckett, First Love and other Novellas. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 73.

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Nicola Masciandaro It’s like face (and do not generally mistake trying to name a beautiful, wives for hats), they often speak of dangerous, and indifferent seeing the parts individually and animal passing through the losing the whole or gestalt.” 31 room that no one else seems Agnosias are important for to see (but which they must if cognitive neuroscience in they are seeing anything). determining, among other things, whether cognition is the effect of an Barbara Reynolds over-arching ‘functional “Cavalcanti strives to analyse the architecture’ or a more modular nature of love in relation to system comprised of contingent psychology, setting forth the features that have arisen due to inherent tensions between the real specific evolutionary problems. and the ideal, between the senses Prosopagnosia, suggesting as it and the mind, which render the does that faces are ‘special’ objects experience destructive and of cognition, implies the latter. disintegrating rather than joyful The poetry of courtly love, and fulfilling.”6 Dante and Petrarch oscillates between prosopopeia and Guido Cavalcanti ‘He’, Love, is prosopagnosia. In its positing of a the personification of the new and generic face comprised of a blazon the miraculous, La nova- qualità move of highly conventional features sospiri, the strange and the (since Petrarch these have been marvellous, offering access to golden hair, black eyes, ruby lips unimaginable knowledge born etc.), there could be said to be solely and paradoxically from the something prosopagnosic about the burning passion that takes away the poetry of courtly love. At the same reason proper to knowledge. time, the fixation on certain isolated Prosopopeia is addressed to a aspects of the face (common in the profound prosopagnosia from case of people with prosopagnosia) which it is derived, an impossible is in amorous poetry both the formless – non format – beauty that condition and the means of the cannot be comprehended from the production of poetic subjectivity as face, ‘E non si pò conoscer per lo viso’ an effect of the interminable (XXVII: 63), or the mirror that it amorous commentary on its own offers; always in excess of language anxiety concerning the desire of the and the face, it is not a question of beloved that it generates. As we

6 Dante Alighieri, La Vita Nuova, translated by Barbara Reynolds. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984, 14. 31 Martha J. Farah, Visual Agnosia. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004, 94.

29 GLOSSATOR 5 a figure of speech or rhetorical will see, a similar problem with ornament . . . faces is, for psychoanalysis, a common effect of anxiety. In its Dante Alighieri E questo mio understanding of prosopagnosia, amico e io ne sapemo bene di quelli neuroscience makes a ‘platonic’ che cosi rimano stultamente [And distinction between form and this friend of mine and I know perception whereby “object quite a number who compose recognition is accomplished by rhymes in this stupid repeatedly transforming the retinal manner]. imput into stimulus representations with increasingly greater Beatrice dei Portinari abstraction”; 32 the process that I am the faceless face of nameless transforms the raw ‘stuff’ of horror! LOL perception into the pattern of  Donna Gentile con 7 l’altre donne ‘things’, 33 thereby producing the like this formal template, the Platonic Ideal necessary for face recognition. At View all 9 comments: the heart of the myth of Narcissus, Nicola Masciandaro Horreo ut then, as prosopagnosiac pattern for intelligam courtly love, hidden it seems from view, is the tale of a profound Dante Alighieri You are the alienation predicated upon a face of bliss, beatitude and disjunction, a radical heteronomy Theology. between eye and brain, perception and form, in which the organism Francesca da Rimini His negotiates the traumatic limits of its passion burns like the corpse of own reality beyond all possibility of God, cackle. ‘Narcissistic’, that is self-loving  Xasthur likes this reappropriation.

Cecco Angiolieri @ Beatrice: II. ROMANCE you are the number 9, babe, the Unrequited love, according to de-mathematization of number The Social Network (2010), David – not measure nor metrics but Fincher’s movie about kids’ faces, diagram. ;) was the premise for the production and expansion of Facebook. Professor Daniel Charles Movies and the books upon which Barker 9=0, the key to decimal they are frequently based as

32 Farah, Visual Agnosia, 3. 33 Farah, 18.

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syzygetic complementarity, the narratives are linked to a long graph of abstract intensive literary tradition in which waves of distribution prosopopeia is a central and controlling the social networks formative trope, casting often of competitive decentralization. inhuman or superhuman forces  Robin MacKay and Ray into human forms (Gods, spirits, Brassier like this. Ideas and so on). The Social Network thus recasts the technological Samuel Beckett Extraordinary sophistication of writing code and how mathematics helps you to developing Facebook and the know yourself. complexity of backroom legal battles into the form of a love story. Dante di Maiano Been Thus a certain facelessness counting farts again? (computer hacking and corporate lawyers) becomes transformed Guido Guinizelli Enough! through the process of prosopopeia Amor e ‘l cor gentil sono una cosa. so that Zuckerberg-Eisenberg Love and the noble heart are becomes the ‘face’ and metaphor but one thing. for Facebook. What is the quality of this face and can it really serve Georges Bataille What I as a metaphor for an online suddenly saw, and what procedure in which faces are imprisoned me in anguish --- but transformed into digital profiles which at the same time with everything that implies? delivered me from it – was the According to The Accidental identity of these perfect Billionaires,34 Ben Mezrich’s book on contraries, divine ecstasy and its which the movie is based, it is the opposite, extreme horror.7 unstated romance between  Guido Cavalcanti likes this Eduardo Saverin and Mark Zuckerberg that provides the Francesca da Rimini narrative tension, hinging on the Per più fiate li occhi ci sospinse, question of betrayal. While the Quella lettura, e scolorocci il viso: betrayal essentially concerns

7 Georges Bataille, Tears of Eros, translated by Peter Conner. San Francisco: City Lights, 1990, 207. 34 Ben Mezrich, The Accidental Billionaires: Sex, Money, Betrayal and the Making of Facebook. London: Arrow Books, 2010. All subsequent page references cited in the essay.

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Ma solo un punto fu quell che ci vinse. control of the business involving Quando leggemmo il disiato riso the dilution of share prices, in the Esser baciato da cotanto amante book this is refigured as a love Questi, che maid a me non fia diviso triangle, a struggle between Savarin La bocca mi baciò tutto tremante and Sean Parker for the affections Galeotto fu il libro e chi lo scrisse: and loyalty of Zuckerberg. The Quell giorno più non vi leggemmo avante narrator remarks on Eduardo’s [Time and again our eyes were jealousy after Zuckerberg’s move to brought together / by the book we California leads to Parker’s read; our faces flushed and paled. / increasingly central role in the To the moment of one line alone company, “maybe he was starting we yielded: / It was when we read to think like the crazy girlfriend he about those longed-for lips / now was already considering dumping, being kissed by such a famous maybe being a little jealous” lover, / that this one (who shall (Mezrich, 174). Much of this never leave my side) / then kissed remains in The Social Network, but my mouth, and trembled as he did. the movie frames its own narrative / Our Galehot was that book and by resurrecting a more obscure if he who wrote it. / That day we conventional figure, the young read no further . . . (Inferno V: 130- woman whose face rebuffs 38)8 Zuckerberg’s advances and thereby inadvertently launches untold Francesca da Rimini Beyond billions of profiles, status updates, the Book and the comments and ‘likes’, as if it were Commentary, Love is the the uncontrollable expression of a experience of the divine that is monstrous passion. “I need to do lacking, of the divine as something to take my mind off her. lacking, and yet this is at the Easy enough, except I need an very heart of the divine. I am idea,” he writes on his blog in Hell (Inferno V 127-38). But Zuckonit, before conceiving the idea is it any better for Him? I will of Facemash which will ultimately post something on this soon. lead to theFacebook and Facebook.35 About 50 minutes into Pope Boniface VIII the film, after Facebook has gone Blasphemer! live and taken Harvard by storm such that he and Eduardo are

8 Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy Vol.1: Inferno, translated by Mark Musa. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984. 35 Fincher, The Social Network. Facebook was initially called theFacebook, a change in the film attributed to Sean Parker.

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Dante Alighieri How did attracting serious female attention, that old bastard get in here? Zuckerberg is again rebuffed by Block him, unfriend him! Erica Albright at dinner with Unfriend him! friends. His response is further sublimation: “We have to expand,” St. Peter Quelli ch’usurpa in terra he says and plots theFacebook’s il loco mio …/ fatt’ha del cimitero move on to the campuses of Yale, mio cloaca / del sangue e della Princeton, Stanford and beyond. puzza [He that on earth has The thwarted romance with dared usurp that place of mine Albright also provides the film’s … / has made my burial- central question or dilemma ground a running Rhine / of concerning Zuckerberg’s person or filth and blood] (Paradiso moral character. It is of course the XXVII, 22-27).9 central prosopopeia of the movie, the personification of the question Samuel Beckett concerning the beneficence of Love brings out the worst in man Facebook itself, Zuckerberg’s ‘gift’ and no error. But what kind of love to the world.36 was this exactly? Love-passion? At the end of the scene in The Somehow I think not. That’s the Thirsty Scholar that forms the priapic one, is it not? Or is this a prologue to the movie, Albright different variety? There are so memorably ends their brief many, are there not? Platonic love, relationship by correctly predicting for example, there’s another just that he is likely to become “a very occurs to me. It’s disinterested. successful computer person” before Perhaps I loved her with a platonic adding, “but you are going to go love? But somehow I think not. through life thinking that girls don’t Would I have been tracing her like you because you are a nerd. name in old cowshit if my love had And I want you to know from the been pure and disinterested?10 bottom of my heart that that won’t be true. It’ll be because you’re an View all 16 comments: asshole.” The question of whether Cecco Angiolieri You’re Zuckerberg is just an (ironically) obsessed with shite. socially awkward nerd or an  Dante di Maiano and ‘asshole’ capable of intellectual

9 Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy 3 Paradise, translated by Dorothy L. Sayers and Barbara Reynolds. Harmondsworth: Penguin. 10 Beckett, First Love, 73-4. 36 For Zuckerberg’s enthusiasm for potlatch and gift economies, see Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect, 287-8.

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Brendan Behan like this theft, exploitation and betrayal of Dante di Maiano Anal friends and colleagues (not to eroticism. There’s the mention a systematic invader of counting too, remember. privacy and sinister controller and manipulator of the personal Beatrice dei Portinori information of huge populations Writing in the cowpat of the around the world) is left for the heart, counting . . . music, cinema audience to decide. By the moody food of love . . . love end of the film, Albright’s initial seems to be an effect of the objection to Zuckerberg’s incursion of in-human ressentiment towards the athleticism particulate systems. Did of rowing crew and the elite someone say the word Harvard Final Clubs (later signifier? embodied by the Winklevoss twins) combined with his snobbery Cecco Angiolieri “The concerning Albright’s own social poetry of courtly love tends to and intellectual status, has been locate in the place of the compounded by numerous other Thing certain discontents of instances of arrogance and betrayal the culture.”11 of close comrades. These include, perhaps, conspiring with the police Beatrice dei Portinori What to bust his colleague and rival Sean thing? Parker for taking cocaine with interns at a Facebook celebration Dante di Maiano You. party that Zuckerberg himself suspiciously failed to attend. “I’m Cecco Angiolieri The not a bad person,” he says in the Thing’s thingness consists in final scene of the movie, apparently its hole or vacuole: the void to himself, yet is overheard by the that holds. female lawyer involved in his court cases with Savarin and the Dante di Maiano Isn’t that Winklevosses. The lawyer concurs, Heidegger? though informs him that he will have to settle with the twins Beatrice dei Portinori Are because he would have no chance you saying that the most convincing a jury of this; his important thing about me is “clothes, hair, speaking-style,

11 Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book VII, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller and translated by Dennis Porter, London: Routledge, 1992, 150.

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my hole? OMG Do me a likeability” all testify against him. It favour. is a question of perception and self- presentation. “You’re not an Dante Alighieri Ella è quanto asshole, Mark,” she concludes, de ben pò far natura / per essemplo “you’re just trying so hard to be.” di lei bieltà si prova [She is the The utterance of the word ‘asshole’ sum of nature’s universe. / To is a repetition and recalls the first her perfection all of beauty scene of the film, triggering tends] (XIX, 49-50)12 Zuckerberg’s memory of Erica Albright. Left alone in the half- Beatrice dei Portinori Blow light, Zuckerberg stares yet again into my trumpet and see if into the screen of his laptop and your sublimation still holds types her name into the Facebook up. search engine. He scans her profile intently, his cursor hovering over Cecco Angiolieri “By means the ‘Friend Request’ button, presses of a form of sublimation it and waits, looking unblinking at specific to art, poetic creation the screen. He refreshes the page a consists in positing an object I number of times before the credits can only describe as terrifying, start to roll, the cinema audience an inhuman partner.”13 unsure whether the end of the film suggests the likelihood of resumed Guido Guinizelli Signifier, romance or the ironic pathos of the inhuman, faceless? How can formal instigator of many millions that be? of new friendships and romances remaining unable to connect with Beatrice dei Portinori his only love apart, perhaps, from Language is an alien virus the screen he stares through and consisting of letters that his reflection at the digital profile. mortify, that turn all to waste, It is this final cinematic image to litter :) of an unsatisfied Narcissus gazing  Jacques Lacan and William at the screen of a laptop that Burroughs like this dominates The Accidental Billionaires. “To an outside observer” Mezrich Guido Guinizelli Surely love writes, “the relationship is an effect of sight – love at [Zuckerberg] had with his first sight – a vision of excess! computer seemed much smoother than any relationship he’d ever had

12 Dante Alighieri, La Vita Nuova, translated by Barbara Reynolds. 13 Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 150.

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Dante Alighieri She with anyone in the outside world” appeared to me almost in the (42 see also 98-9). While the book beginning of her ninth year, is written in the third-person, the and I first saw her near the narrative’s perspective is largely end of my ninth year. (Vita that of Eduardo Savarin, so a Nuova, II)14 reader is led to perceive a certain frustration in comments like “Mark Dante di Maiano quasi. sat there in silence, lost in his own Almost. reflection as it danced across the screen” (99). Eduardo, in both the II book and the movie, is the vehicle Dante Alighieri of identification and wonder at the At that moment, and what I say is boy genius, the world’s youngest true, the vital spirit, the one that self-made billionaire. In the book dwells in the most secret chamber and in the movie it is the blank of the heart, began to tremble so impassivity of Zuckerberg’s face violently that even the least pulses that provides the point of of my body were strangely fascination for Eduardo and the affected; and trembling, it spoke audience, the movie-Zuckerberg, these words: “here is a god played with a beautiful ‘autistic’ stronger than I, who shall come to vacancy by Jessie Eisenberg, rule over me.” At that point the prepared to give only the absolute animal spirit, the one abiding in the minimum of attention to anything high chamber to which all the (lawyers, the legal process, senses bring their perceptions, was potential advertisers) other than the stricken with amazement, and image of his own genius. For the speaking directly to the spirits of narrator/Eduardo, Zuckerberg sight, said these words: “now your “never seemed happier than when bliss has appeared.” At that he was looking at his own moment, the natural spirit, the one reflection into that glassy screen” which dwells in that part where our (Mezrich, 42): ma più ne colpo i nourishment is attended to, began micidiali specchi / che ‘n vagheggiar voi to weep, and weeping, said these stessa avete stanchi [but most I blame words: “Alas wretch that I am, those murderous mirrors which from now on I shall be hindered you have tired out with your love of yourself] (Petrarch, Canzionère

14 Dante Alighieri, Vita Nuova, translated by Mark Musa, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.

36 WILSON – PROSOPOPEIA TO PROSOPAGNOSIA often.” Let me say that from that 46; 7-8). 37 Zuckerberg here is time on Love governed my soul . . . described in his self-absorption, (Vita Nuova, II.30) from the perspective of the narrator, as if he were a cruel View all 17 comments: mistress indifferent to the agonized Spirito vita “Here is a god.” anxieties of the lover, a sovereign But who or what is this idol? I beauty like Petrarch’s Laura or know not nor what relation it Dante’s Beatrice. Indeed, Savarin’s has to God, the One, al-Lah or first encounter with Zuckerberg Yahweh. Is it a simulacrum? takes something of the form of an A semblance, an illusion? Is it innamoramento, a love at first sight, as a demon in the guise of a his face is described in a blazon of god? God or demon it is an striking attributes including, quite apparition, a form that makes conventionally, his eyes: the whole body tremble, displaces me from my seat in . . . a prominent nose, a the heart and mortifies me … mop of curly blondish how is it possible that this brown hair, and light form reduces me to an blue eyes. There was experience of formlessness? something playful about those eyes – but that was Spirito animale Yes I was where any sense of amazed, but at the same time natural emotion or it leaves me cold. You’ll notice readability ended. His that the beatitudo, the ‘bliss’, is narrow face was not mine but is rather otherwise devoid of any something offered to the expression at all. And his perception of sight at the level, posture, his general aura as it were, of appearance. It – the way he seemed does nothing for me. This closed in on himself, beatitudo makes of the pleasure even while engaged in a of form a limit. We are not group dynamic, even yet here confronting the here, in the safety of his problem of Universal Form own fraternity – was which lies beyond the almost painfully threshold of pleasurable awkward. (Mezrich, 15) perceptions (but what could be beyond the limit of Eduardo is significantly struck by

37 Francesco Petrarch, Rime Sparse, edited by Richard Durling, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986.

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pleasurable forms other than the ‘prosopagnosia’ of courtly formless agony?) Out of the passion in which a “discrete mass of perceived data, the number of physical attributes” Active Intelligence must becomes the focus of rapt attention, produce the appropriate yet the face itself, as Petrarchan abstraction to enable the scholar Isabella Bertoletti notes, apprehension of the soul and “never comes together as a its pleasurable objects. The portrait.” 38 Zuckerberg’s faceless animal spirit of the brain face, ‘devoid of expression’, is the “extracts information about central part and focus of Savarin’s local visual properties before amorous frustration: “Eduardo computing the larger scale stared at Mark, but, as usual, structure of the image.”15 But couldn’t read anything from his this is still only an blank expression” (Mezrich, 115). approximation of Universal But if this prosopagnosia is an Form, produced through the effect of Eduardo’s passion, it animal spirit’s adaptation to seems to be shared by others the Outside. I, the brain, am including the Winklevoss twins for this threshold, the whom it was also “hard to read the neuroplatonic locus of the kid’s face” (73). In this movie about heteronomy between form kids’ faces, Zuckerberg’s and perception. expressionless face is the metaphor for a generation whose lives are Spirito naturale This trauma spent staring into screens, large or makes me weep, but I am small, most hours of the day, at determined to weaponize that work or leisure, shadowy faces which hinders me, since it coming in and out of focus. An hinders only the axiomatic ‘accidental’ billionaire, there is verity and somatic integration nothing remarkable about of my interiorized horizon. I Zuckerberg in his ever present shall mobilize the Insider so fleece, T Shirt and flip flops, but as that this localized trauma may such he functions perfectly as a be deepened into the blank screen for projection and exteriorizing absolute thereby identification in the book and the transforming the horizon of movie. But the faceless screen this liver into an immanent offered to the world by the movie- terroristic weapon. Zuckerberg is precisely the

15 Martha J. Farah, Visual Agnosia. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004, 19. 38 Isabella Bertoletti, “Petrarch’s Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta: Mourning Laura,” Quaderni d’italianistica, XXIII (2002), 2, 25-43, 26.

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Spirito vita Naturale’s been paradoxical personification of a reading Reza Negarestani’s digital culture in which reading and blog again, Eliminative cinematic forms of identification Culinarism. have given way to a different order of ‘interactivity’. Here again, Spirito naturale → Spirito Zuckerberg is the metaphor for a vita generation shaped by computers to Reza Negarestani, ‘On the such a degree that it seems to have Revolutionary Earth: A altered their subjectivity, “there was Dialectic in Territopic something very computer-like Materialism’ written for Dark about the way he spoke; input in, Materialism, Kingston then input out.” (Mezrich, 20) The University, London. faceless face of Zuckerberg, its ‘blank expression’ and Spirito animale Does this ‘unreadability’ is, then, another mean you are going to form of literary prosopopeia, but become an anorexic suicide paradoxically of a generalized bomber mad for love of the prosopagnosia, a personification of absolute? Facebook’s digital erasure – or overwriting – of both the face and Spirito naturale It’s not what the book. you think. The absolute is pure contingency; it is neutral III. FACEBLIND and incommensurable. To “It is with our faces that we make oneself into a bomb face the world, from the moment of would be to give oneself over birth to the moment of death.”39 In to the energetic index of The Mind’s Eye, Oliver Sacks evokes exorbitance: that is counter- the essential importance of the face revolutionary. only to confess that he has had problems identifying faces “for as Spirito vita long as I can remember” (83). Why? Sacks has ‘developmental’ prosopagnosia, which is a much Spirito naturale more common form of the Because it would be to bind condition than prosopagnosia that oneself, economically, within is ‘acquired’ because of brain the affordable duplicity of damage, stroke or degenerative capacity and excess. diseases. Following publication in 1985 of his case history “The Man

39 Sacks, The Mind’s Eye, 82. Subsequent page references cited in the text.

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Spirito animale Even as you Who Mistook His Wife for a spectacularly unbind yourself Hat,” 40 Sacks began to receive with Semtex  many letters from people comparing themselves with the Spirito vita Can we get to the subject of Sacks’s case history. point. We have an alien Sacks began to realise that “‘my’ intruder Dante calls ‘Love’ visual problem was not uncommon that is having paradoxical but and must affect many people ultimately deleterious effects, around the world” (90). Indeed, at least in so far as the spirit of Ken Nakayama, who has set up the life is concerned. I likened it research centre Faceblind at to a god. From whence comes Harvard University, “has long it and what relation does it suspected that prosopagnosia is have to the One or, if you relatively common but like, the Absolute? underreported” (107).41 Like many with Spirito animale Tradition developmental prosopagnosia, would say through the eyes. Sacks has difficulty even ‘Pegli occhi fere un spirit sottile’ recognising his own face: (Cavalcanti, sonetto XXVIII). On several occasions I Spirito naturale Yes but for have apologized for Cavalcanti this spirit is not almost bumping into a love, love is only a contingent large bearded man, only effect – ‘l’accidente’ – of this to realize that the large spirit’s subtle incision and bearded man was myself traumatization of the mind’s in a mirror. The opposite interiorized horizon: Pegli occhi situation once occurred fere un spirito sottile, / che fa ‘n la at a restaurant with mente spirito destare, [A delicate tables outside. Sitting at sharp spirit through the eyes / one of the sidewalk strikes home to wake a spirit tables, I turned to the in the mind] (XXVII: 1-3). 16 restaurant window and The question is whether love began grooming my can be a revolutionary force beard, as I often do. I of exteriorization, or is it then realized that what I

16 Guido Cavalcanti, Complete Poems, XXVIII, 65. 40 Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. London: Touchstone, 1985. 41 See www.faceblind.org

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counter-revolutionary? had taken to be my reflection was not Spirito animale But you grooming himself but didn’t let me finish. How far is looking at me oddly. the contingency determined There was in fact a gray- by number, and in this case bearded man on the the number 9? Is it related to other side of the the Trinity or to the window, who must have Neoplatonic One? Or zero, been wondering why I the plane of intensity? Is it a was preening myself in cause or an effect of front of him. (Sacks, numerological psychosis? Is it 2010, 85) the key to the mode of proliferation of libidino-schizo- In his book, Sacks is concerned capital, $99.99, the ultimate with possible neurological bases for diagram of capitalist counter- his condition, but his anecdotes revolution, its machines here correspond to psychoanalytic “incarnating market and literary models. In the first mechanics within their nano- instance, there is an unmistakeable assembled interstices and moment of an ‘uncanny’ shock at evolving themselves by quasi- the apparition of the double, while darwinian algorithms that in the latter instance, the shock build hypercompetition into occurs at the disturbance of ‘the infrastructure’ . . . time narcissistic satisfaction. While itself.” 17 Is your absolute Sacks struggles to recognise his mathematizable or the face, he confesses to a certain principle of de- fascination with it, ‘preening mathematization? himself’ in front of a mirror. In both instances it is the frame and Spirito naturale It is not a screen of the mirror / reflective question of cause or origin but window pane that provides the of the structure of ururtrauma condition for misrecognition. and the infinity of traumatic While he is a neuroscientist, Sacks interconnections. The secret is has a background in psychoanalysis to investigate the nature of its and in his discussion takes the force as trauma. Negarestani’s trouble to give an account of the master here is Sandor development of face recognition. Ferenczi. Citing Everett Ellinwood, Sacks writes about how the mutual

17 Nick Land, Fanged Noumenon. Falmouth: Urbanomic, 625-6.

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Spirito vita I suggest we risk smiling between mother and child, a Ferenczian interpretation of from about two and a half months, Dante’s dream. initiates “the processes of socialization . . . The reciprocal Spirito vita understanding mother-child Nine years after the first traumatic relationship is possible only encounter, Dante meets his object because of the continuing dialogue once again, precisely – he between faces” (82-3). In this way emphasizes the precision of number the imitative relation with the here on more than one occasion – mother provides the ground and on the ninth hour of the day. The support for the moment of self- repetition betrays the action of the identification in the mirror image, automaton, that is to say, the as Lacan famously explicates. But unconscious. Is this a even at the moment of the numerological unconscious or one “inaugural experience of structured like a language? It seems recognition in the mirror,” the child to be the former. In any case it is requires the support and described: “In my reverie a sweet confirmation of the mother who, sleep seized me, and a marvellous for Lacan, represents the Other and vision appeared to me. I seemed to thus ratifies “the value of the self- see a cloud the colour of fire in my image.”42 The face of the mother is, room and in that cloud a lordly then, the ‘ur-face’ that provides the man, frightening to behold, yet pattern for the child for all future apparently marvellously filled with faces including, especially, his or joy. He said many things of which I her own face, imbuing it potentially understood only a few; among with a foreignness that is them was ‘I am your master’. It reinforced, in turn, by the self- seemed to me that in his arms there image itself that is located in lay a figure asleep and naked reverse form in the mirror: except for a crimson cloth loosely wrapping it. Looking at it very It is at that place, at the intently, I realized that it was the place where in the Lady of the blessed greeting, the Other, there is profiled lady who earlier in the day had an image of ourselves favoured me with her salutation. In that is simply reflected, one of his hands he held a fiery already problematic, object, and he seemed to say these even fallacious; that it is words: ‘Behold your heart’. And at a place that is situated

42 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan X: Anxiety 1962-63, translated by Cormac Gallagher from unedited French typescripts, Karnac Books, III, 4.

42 WILSON – PROSOPOPEIA TO PROSOPAGNOSIA after a short while he seemed to with respect to an image awaken the sleeping one, and that is characterised by a through the power of his art made lack, by the fact that her eat this burning object in his what is called for there hand. Hesitantly, she ate it. It was cannot appear there, that only a short while after this that his there is profoundly happiness turned into bitterest orientated and polarised weeping, and weeping, he folded the function of the image his arms around this lady and itself, that desire is there, together they seemed to ascend not simply veiled, but towards the heavens. I felt such essentially placed in anguish at their departure that my relation to an absence, to sleep could not endure; it was a possibility of appearing broken and awakened.”18 determined by a presence which is Spirito naturale Well elsewhere and obviously it’s about child determines it more abuse. closely, but, where it is, ungraspable by the Spirito animale Hmmm, but subject, namely here, I you don’t need Ferenczi and indicated it, the o of the his obsession with child abuse object, of the object to see that this is a scene of which constitutes our anxiety (Dante comes to question, of the object in realise this just as he wakes) at the function that it fulfils the phantasmatic proximity of in the phantasy at the the father as frightening figure place that something can of joy and incomprehensible appear.43 knowledge, or père jouissance as they say in France. It is the paternal naming of the lack that is supposed to stabilize the Spirito vita But I have no (self)image, hooking it on to the memory of child abuse. symbolic order, such that disturbances in the symbolic fabric Spirito animale The spirits may produce a destabilization and of vision saw nothing. questioning of the value and reality of the image. Such a de-stabilization Spirito naturale We could exacerbates the enigma of the

18 Dante, Vita Nuova, III, 6-7. 43 Lacan, Seminar X, IV, 2.

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have repressed it. His mother Other’s desire, causing the objet petit died when he was a child ... a, Lacan’s object-in-desire, to did he imagine and fear manifest itself in the strangeness of replacing her in his father’s the image. Jean-Claude Maleval affections? Psychic exchange . writes, “l’objet a se manifeste, c'est . . remember he used usury as volontiers par l'entremise du surgissement a pretext for denouncing his d'une image perturbée, étrangéifiée.” 44 father . . . Maleval notes that while the specular image is ordinarily an Spirito animale The scene is object of narcissistic satisfaction, always already fantasy; I’m a when it is no longer recognised as strict Freudian on this point. such it lacks adhesion and becomes In the dream we clearly see uncanny, often taking the the narcissistic splitting of the appearance of a strange and ego into the little girl Beatrice pervasive double. 45 While the as ideal ego. The father picks specular image may begin to lose up the child naked out of bed, its narcissistic satisfaction, the the unconscious apparently trauma of its emergent strangeness returning to the original scene and lack of recognition does not of trauma. As Dante dreams render it any the less anxiously himself as a little girl in order fascinating. Maleval cites a case to become the object of his study concerning ‘Jean-Pierre’ who, father’s obscene enjoyment, during the long hours he spent all that remains is his heart before the mirror saw nothing but a and the theft of the lost object blank image (vide). “Elle lui semblait that is consumed by his own déshabitée. ‘C’est moi, disait-il,mais j’ai imago. He was 9 when it peine à me reconnaître. Mon image happened; Beatrice was nine, manque de sens.” 46 That the image and seeing her again 9 years lacks sense or meaning is crucial for later triggers the memory of Maleval because it indicates that the perversion of paternal the subject is not fully incorporated love. The French would say into the symbolic order: “elle témoigne nettement que la texture

44 Jean-Claude Maleval, “Il n’y a pas d’angoisse psychotique,” Quarto (2005) 11, 66-73, 66. 45 “L’image speculaire est ordinairement un objet de satisfaction narcissistic, mais quand elle n’est plus reconnue comme telle, le manque colle à elle, et elle devient un objet unheimlich, qui prend souvent l’apparence de l’image étrange et envahissante du double,” 66. 46 Maleval, “Il n’y a pas d’angoisse psychotique,” 70.

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that it is precisely the failure symbolique du sujet se défait.”47 of symbolic law to protect the Facebook is of course a site child from the oppressive teeming with symbols of various presence of the parent that kinds but its means of ushers in psychosis and the authenticating identity is not simply reign of number – and what predicated on ‘the name of the are we anyway but psychotic father’, the paternal function that symptoms? for Lacan names maternal lack, thereby substituting desire for Spirito naturale There is no demand. Authentic naming is psychotic anguish (Maleval) indeed essential to Facebook; its key difference from previous social Spirito vita But you’ve networking sites is precisely that it missed out the interesting part attempts to prohibit and restrict the wherein, if we follow Ferenczi multiplication of different, false or we can see that the incursion playful, identities. But in the of the force of trauma has the context of its peculiarly privatized same symptoms as love: a yet open space, it is not simply “frightening whirlwind, a parental authority or the state that terrible vertigo” and a waning authenticates identity; rather it is of the natural spirit such that one’s ‘Friends’. Kirkpatrick writes, he dreams of death and “these friends validate your dematerialization. 19 We all identity. To get this circular know Dante’s morbid validation process started you have attachment to the dead: the to use your real name” (13). One’s dead girl, the legions of the ‘Friends’ on Facebook adopt a damned, the souls tortured in ‘trans-parental’ function in the purgatory and those in authentication of both self-image heaven, even St Paul, still and symbolic identity. Facebook’s raging about some rival Friends are not simply those friends paternal figure, Pope Boniface gained over a lifetime’s social VIII, supposed to be enjoying interaction at school, work and himself at Dante’s expense. leisure. These friends are subjected The dead girl: what does he to a different regime of online actually write when he hears sociality that may include people she has died? Nothing, he just you have never met or know very

19 Sandor Ferenczi, Final contributions to the problems and methods of psychoanalysis (Reprinted London: Karnac Books, 1994), originally published in 1930, 222- 223. 47 Maleval, “Il n’y a pas d’angoisse psychotique”, 70.

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goes on and on again about little about, a regime that collapses the number 9. She has distinctions between professional become pure number, if she colleagues, intimate friends, lovers, was ever anything else, a family, people with shared interests number that abstracts and or alliances, even perfect strangers. sucks the spirit of life out of The principle that determines these him, turning him into a Friends as a collection seems to be mechanomic writing machine. quantity, the latter being the metric Here, no doubt, we can see of value or prestige that is how desire is numerologically established through a competitive de-mathematizised and death- market in ‘friendships’. “Friending driven towards the had an element of competitiveness inorganicism of the heavens. from day one, as it had on Let’s go to Paradiso  MySpace and Friendster. If your roommate had 300 friends and you Spirito naturale But this only had 100 you resolved to do number is not simply better . . . causing it to spread economy, not just calculation. faster” (Kirkpatrick, 92). Soon it Numerology is surely a form was not uncommon for people to through which trauma have thousands of Friends all over becomes nested in the psyche, the world, Facebook thereby numbers marking a certain modifying if not changing forever gradient of the universal that the meaning of the term ‘friend’ to is at the same time exterior to something like a ‘node’ or link in a the interiorized horizon of network of connections describing family romance. a ‘social graph’ for the distribution of information. Spirito animale That’s a way Where desire becomes of putting it. affected by anxiety (and sometimes anger and upset) in the context of III Facebook it is no doubt an effect of Belacqua awoke having dreamt the law of competition to which about the lobster. “Christ!” he said desire and the value of identity is to himself, “it’s alive.” He saw it subject, where the subject is exposed, “cruciform on the variously ‘friended’ or ‘unfriended’ oilcloth,” 20 dreaming that the according to the whims of online lobster was God made flesh, God popularity among a multiplicity of made lobster-flesh with claws and different interests. This anxiety is antennae, maybe even tentacles. perhaps compounded by

20 Samuel Beckett, More Pricks than Kicks. London: Picador, 1974, 18.

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Perhaps it was all the nonsense Facebook’s commitment to being posted on the web about ‘transparency’ and the automated, Lovecraft lately, but he imagined hyper-visibility represented by the God “in the depths of the sea” introduction of the News Feed in breathing secretly in his lobster pot September 2006 in which “your Empyrean. Out he has been every move on Facebook might plucked and is going now alive into become news for your friends” an inferno of scalding water. (Kirkpatrick, 296). The News Feed Well, thought Belacqua, it’s a “treated all your behaviour quick death, God help us all. identically – in effect telescoping all It is not.21 your identities, from whatever Who is speaking here? The context, into the same stream of authorial voice, terse and information” (211). Activity is appropriately authoritative, necessary to produce the visibility countermands his character’s that is the pre-requisite for one’s prayer for a quick death. As such popularity – quantified by an he denies the prospect of God’s algorithm that distributes small mercy in the stress of information according to the sacrifice, underscoring the pathos number of ‘likes’ and ‘comments’ of the equivalence of all His received by the various posts, creatures at the level, at least, of profiles, groups and pages. For suffering. But in so doing the Sherry Turkle, it is this un-homely equivalence is extended, as if in the nature of Facebook, in which the shape of so many nested traumas, home becomes trans-parental, that all the way to God himself, in a is most anxiety producing: way already intuited by Belacqua, returning us to the idea of divine Facebook feels like suffering. God is a large marine “home,” but you know crustacean, sentient and splendid that it puts you in a until, plucked from his watery public square with a universe, he gasps at the limpid surveillance camera exterior surface of his own milieu. turned on. You struggle Does he catch a glimpse therein of to be accepted in an his reflection at the very point online clique. But it is where he is exposed to the creation characterized by its cruel of a new airy cosmos? Behold, I am. wit, and you need to In the form of a lobster, the self- watch what you say. reflection of the absolute survives These adolescent posts “the Frenchwoman’s cat and his will remain online for a

21 Samuel Beckett, More Pricks than Kicks, 18.

47 GLOSSATOR 5 witless clutch” only to be plunged lifetime, just as those you again into the scalding depths so “friend” on Facebook that Belacqua can “lash into it” for will never go away. his dinner. Its geochemistry now Anxieties migrate, the alien Insider fulminating with proliferate.48 anonymous materials . . . Belacqua pauses, scrolls down the text: “Here For the subject of Facebook, two trauma as the self-excision or self- poles of anxiety and inhibition are reflection of the absolute, transplants produced concerning the desire of exteriority within interiority and fabricates the Other where the insistence of topologically nested gradients of the the Other’s desire is indicated by universal.”22 the News Feed. Or rather it is It is Beatrice who both perhaps not desire so much as an anticipates and answers Dante’s abstracted demand that is rendered questions concerning the nature of infinite by the News Feed. ‘I’ am God and creation. Concerning the ‘fed’ news by Facebook before I ‘where’ and the ‘when’ of God, have the opportunity to ask or look Beatrice says: for it; it flows down my page in an infinite yet unique stream, Non per aver a sé di bene acquisto, ‘mechanomically’ selected ch’esser non può, ma perché suo splendore especially for me. For Lacan, potesse, risplendendo, dir “Subsisto,” famously, it is not lack that produces anxiety, but the lack of in sua etternità di tempo fore, the lack. “What is most anxiety- fuor d’ogne altro comprender, come i provoking for the child, is that piacque, precisely this relation of lack on s’aperse in nuovi amor l’etterno amore. which he establishes himself, which makes him desire, this relation is all [Not to increase His good, which the more disturbed when there is cannot be, /But that His splendour, no possibility of lack, when the shining back, might say: / Behold, I mother is always on his back, and am, in His eternity, / Beyond the especially by wiping his bottom, the measurement of night and day, / model of demand, of the demand beyond all boundary, as he did which cannot fail.” 49 Facebook is please, / new loves Eternal Love continually massaging the organ of shed from His ray.] (Paradiso, exchange, of the exchange of data XXIX.13-18)23

22 Reza Negarestani, “On the Revolutionary Earth.” 23 Dante, Paradise, 309. 48 Sherry Turkle, Alone Together. New York: Basic Books, 2010, p. 243.

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Both Dorothy L. Sayers and and information, rendering it Barbara Reynolds gloss these smoother, quicker, more efficient. verses on the moment of creation The anal register, here, is also by highlighting the importance of consistent with Zuckerberg’s God’s desire for self-consciousness. morality which informs and “The act of creation and the things justifies both his commitment to created could not add to God’s transparency and his apparent goodness, which is infinite. His belief that privacy is an impediment motive in creating was that His to an open society, “To get people reflected light (‘splendour’) should to this point where there’s more shine back to him in self- openness – that’s a big challenge . . awareness.” 24 “‘Why did God . The concept that the world will be create?’ [Beatrice’s] answer is that better if you share more is God created not to increase His something that’s pretty foreign to a good, which cannot be, but in lot of people and it runs into all order that His reflected light might these privacy concerns.” 50 shine back to Him self-existing and Zuckerberg goes on to say that in self-awareness.” 25 God in his “having two identities for yourself solitude, it seems, was not content is an example of a lack of integrity . persisting in the boundless . . the level of transparency the immanent goodness of eternity, he world has now won’t support required a moment of having two identities for a person” (self)transcendence in which he (199). In other words, it will be could properly realise himself impossible to separate the personal through becoming apparently for from the professional, the private the first time truly aware of himself from the public, the intimate from through looking at the mirror the open; one’s dirty linen image of himself in the light of his continually exposed as information self-illumination. Subsisto! God in a proliferates on the internet and flutter of jubilation reassures elsewhere. Himself of His splendour by This is Facebook’s “radical looking in the mirror of creation, social premise” and it is easy to see

49 Lacan, Seminar X, IV, 10. 24 Dorothy L. Sayers in Dante, Paradise, 314. See also Ibn Arabi et al on the hadith ‘I was a hidden treasure that was not known, so I loved to be known.’http://www.ibnarabisociety.org/articles/divinerootsoflove.html 25 Barbara Reynolds, Dante, 392. 50 Mark Zuckerberg, quoted in Kirkpatrick, 200. Kirkpatrick suggests that “Zuckerberg sees privacy as something Facebook should offer people until they get over their need for it.” (203)

49 GLOSSATOR 5 and lo from his Eternal self-love that it has a revolutionary flow all the new loves (nuovi amor) potential: a neoliberal communism of his creatures from the angels to that abolishes privacy yet sustains humanity. The mysticism of God: the individual in relation to a to desire everything? generalized narcissism of absolute Dante wrote in Il convivio that visibility and transparency. “There love is the cosmic force that is not narcissism and non- establishes the affection and narcissism” insisted Jacques relation between all things (Section Derrida in an interview that III, chapters 2-3: 285). In Virgil’s broached his relation to his own great Discourse on Love from photographic image, “there are Purgatorio, he emphasises that love narcissisms that are more or less is not only a contingent but also a comprehensive, generous, open, neutral force, source of evil as well extended.” 51 Is Facebook such a as good. comprehensive, generous, open, extended narcissism? A genuinely Quinci comprender puoi ch’esser convene revolutionary narcissism? amor sementa in voi d’ogne virtute e d’ogne operazion che merta pene. IV. THE STRUCTURE THAT TOOK TO THE STREETS [Bethink thee then how love must David Kirkpatrick begins The be the seed / In you, not only of Facebook Effect, the authorized each virtuous action, / But also of history of the company, with an each punishable deed.]. (Purgatorio, account of Facebook’s utility as a XVII. 91-96; 103-5)26 “political tool.” He tells the story of a campaign against the This cosmic love, that is essentially Revolutionary Armed Forces of an effect of divine self-love, is Columbia (FARC); it is, then, not internally riven, like all love, with so much an account of Facebook’s the ambivalence with which it revolutionary potential, but rather, conflicts all relations and affections. in this instance, its effective means What deficiency, imaginary or as a tool for counter-revolution, for otherwise – what trauma – popular revolt in support of a produced this infinitesimal moment weakened and ineffective state. of divine vanity and celestial “Oscar Morales was fed up,” narcissism? When he looked in the begins the book, because the

26 Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy 2 Purgatory, translated by Dorothy L. Sayers. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984, 198-9. 51 Jacques Derrida, Points: Interviews 1974-94, edited by Elisabeth Weber. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995, 199.

50 WILSON – PROSOPOPEIA TO PROSOPAGNOSIA mirror of creation did He see his Columbian’s holiday period, like own face or that of a stranger or of much of the country apparently, a mass of faceless creatures was being disturbed by “the hymning praise, or did he see suffering of a little boy named nothing? Was God’s face part of Emmanuel” who was being held the Creation, God produces himself hostage along with his mother for himself in an act of divine Clara Rojas and others including prosopopeia? Behold, I am. Is this the politician Ingrid Betancourt by pride – the very sin for which FARC. Expectation was high that Lucifer is cast into the inferno? at least little Emmanuel, if not all Belacqua puzzled once again the hostages, would be released by over the paradox, peering into his Christmas 2007 as a result of laptop in silence, lost in his own negotiations between the guerrillas reflection as it flickered across the and Venezuelan President Hugo screen. “Infinite regress,” he Chavez. By the New Year the boy murmured. “It’s traumatized Gods still hadn’t been released, but to all the way up.” everyone’s surprise in early January the Colombian President Exhausted, Belacqua lay his face Alvaro Uribe announced that upon his thigh. His News Feed Emmanuel was no longer in the continued to update itself. hands of the FARC, but in foster care. For Morales and many others, “. . . it can be deepened, another this was the last straw. “People trauma by which the infinite were happy because the kid was interconnected traumas can be safe, but we were so fucking angry widened – it is the one that makes [...] we felt assaulted by the FARC. sure the narcissistic wound keeps How could they dare negotiate for bleeding.”27 the life of a kid they didn’t even have? People felt this was too “I love you, even if you don’t want much. How much longer was the it.” FARC going to play with us and lie to us?” (Kirkpatrick, 1-2). “I desire you, even if I do not know Morales set up a Facebook it.” Group called Un Millon Voces Contra Las FARC (A Million Voices “I’m not mad, I function.” Against FARC). Information about the Group and its plea was rapidly “To love someone is unforgivable.” distributed through Facebook’s ‘social graph’, and in a few weeks

27 Reza Negarestani, “On the Revolutionary Earth.”

51 GLOSSATOR 5

“E a la riva / cuopre la notte già col piè the Group had thousands of Tunisia.” members, and a large demonstration was organised. The demonstration attracted the  attention of the Press as indeed did

the novel means of its organization and the campaign spread further – in the process expanding the number of Facebook users since it was new to Columbia and associated only with ‘kids’ (4). The very visibility of the numbers of the Group emboldened the campaigners – “Facebook gave Columbia’s young people an easy, digital way to feel comfort in numbers to declare their disgust” – and the site itself provided a key point of organization and liaison. “Facebook was our headquarters ... It was the newspaper ... the central command ... the laboratory” (Morales quoted by Kirkpatrick, 5). President Uribe eventually succeeded in negotiating the release of the hostages but the Facebook campaign and the demonstration were credited with applying pressure on the FARC. Oscar Morales’s “group and the subsequent demonstration made him into a national and international celebrity” (6). The anecdote illustrates nicely how Facebook establishes a social bond though the production of ‘faces’: the new technology of the social networking site enables Oscar Morales to become the face of the protest against FARC, and ultimately achieve ‘celebrity’. In Seminar XVII Lacan famously organizes the social bond across four terms:

agent other truth production

It is clearly Facebook and the Group it enables (Un Millon Voces Contra Las FARC) that is the ‘agent’ here, addressed to the ‘other’ whose reference is FARC. The authority and ‘truth’ of the Facebook Group is grounded in the number of members of the Group galvanized in relation to the guerrillas. Although they were in the thousands rather than millions (there not being enough Facebook users in Columbia at the time), millions of people did demonstrate in cities across Columbia, inspired by the Group. In contradistinction to the inhuman facelessness of FARC, then, Facebook produces Oscar Morales as the (human) face of a Group actually made up of

52 WILSON – PROSOPOPEIA TO PROSOPAGNOSIA thousands of other faces like so many pixels or the digital code into which the face dissolves in the original Facebook logo. The four main forms of the social bond for Lacan are the discourses of the Master, the Hysteric, the University and the Analyst. It seems to me that Facebook, appropriately given that it was developed at Harvard, is an example of University discourse in which knowledge (S2), supported by the signifier of the master (S1), is in the position of agent which, through its address to the lack constitutive of desire (objet petit a), produces the subject ($).

A certain modification is necessary however in order to discuss Facebook as a form of social bond with regard to this structure. Facebook is certainly a product of the University, but does not so much represent the ‘knowledge’ of the University as its ‘information’; it is not the agent of operative knowledge, but operative information. As such the structure can organize all the rankable degrees of University life on the same plane from social grooming to academic and professional achievement.52 Famously, Facebook was developed at Harvard in a kind of perversion of its bureaucratic procedures. All Universities, colleges and fraternities have a ‘facebook’ of passport-style photographs that are held along with other information as a record of its staff and students. Zuckerberg and his colleagues, initially through Facemash leading to theFacebook used these procedures as a means for student enjoyment: self-promotion, narcissism, dating, voyeurism and so on. From the very beginning there was something ‘superegoic’ in the way in which its ‘obscene’ content (inspired by the initial idea of comparing female students’ faces to farm animals for example) was conveyed by the apparent neutrality of bureaucratic form.

52 Not surprisingly the University has adopted the structure both in the form of the pan-academic networking site Academia.edu (that is linked to Facebook itself) and within individual universities (including my own) where it is used as a tool that can bring together social, pastoral, pedagogic and administrative functions into the same space in ways that are, in my view, far from unproblematic.

53 GLOSSATOR 5

Accordingly, the signifier (S1) that is the governing support of Facebook (S2) is not the name of a Master or a governing Idea of the University (Truth, Culture, Excellence), but a number (1) that stands for numbers generally, metrics, statistics, quantification and so on. The ‘knowledge’, then, if there is any, is statistical information that is operative through the manipulation of computerized data through the use of algorithms. With the Oscar Morales story, number (Un Millon Voces) provides the hyperbolic, even performative command that brings the Group into being as a mass, and its authority as a number provides its ‘comfort’ and security. As everyone knows there is something uncanny about passport photographs and their inability to deliver a satisfyingly narcissistic image of one’s face (enabling them to be compared to farm animals, for instance). I don’t recognize this image; it’s not me! It is as if the photo booth steals some aspect of the face essential to its enjoyment as a mirror image. The digital face-making, or prosopopeia of Facebook, is predicated upon a generalized prosopagnosia (or prosop – a – gnosia) where the a stands for the lost enjoyment stolen by the bureaucratic passport photograph. However, the theft of enjoyment in the Oscar Morales story concerns the fact that he and his countrymen were cheated by the FARC of the collective joy that would have been brought by the sight of the face of Emmanuel, his suffering relieved by his release on Christmas day. The fact that he was quietly released by the hostages into a foster home without fuss or announcement seems to have produced an irrational rage in the Columbians, strange given the possible alternative: “People were happy because the kid was safe, but we were so fucking angry” (Kirkpatrick, 1). It is therefore into this gap, marked in its absence by the suffering or joyful face of Emmanuel in the field of mediatized visibility, that Facebook pours its information, a million faces combining to producing Oscar Morales as Columbia’s first Facebook star, making him “a national and international celebrity” (6). As such, however, he inevitably loses something, loses his offline, off camera ordinariness, becoming vulnerable to the harsh light of media attention and expectation as a hero of political and moral virtue. Lacan presented his theory of the four discourses in the context of the events of May 1968, most notably in a rowdy exchange with students at Vincennes. 53 Memorably, Lacan claimed that “the

53 See ‘Impromptu at Vincennes’ in Jacques Lacan, Television. NY: Norton, 1990, 117-28.

54 WILSON – PROSOPOPEIA TO PROSOPAGNOSIA aspiration to revolution has but one conceivable issue, always, the discourse of the master.” 54 At the same time, as Matthew Sharpe notes, Lacan also made the claim that university discourse “is increasingly becoming the dominant structure of social relations.”55 While Lacan initially had in mind “the societies of the now-former Soviet bloc,” Sharpe shows that new forms of advertising in their ‘superegoic’ appeal to transgressive (as opposed to officially sanctioned) enjoyment are organized according to the same structure, since advertising “faces, and educates, a more or less unformed, ignorant individual” which it compels to consider, “from a quasi- superegoic position of neutral self-observation ... what we really are and really want, beneath whatever social masks and roles we may from time to time have taken up.”56 Since about 2008, Facebook’s core business, its means of making money, has been advertising, but it is claimed that this is purely a means rather than an aim, and in any case “the word advertising is really no longer the right word for what is going on at Facebook” (Kirkpatrick, 263). Rather, Kirkpatrick argues that Facebook provides a space in which producers and consumers interact to the point of becoming indistinct as mutual users of the site. From the beginning “Thefacebook had no content of its own. It was merely a piece of software – a platform for content created by its users” (31) in which marketers can now pay for visibility for their products but “can no longer control the conversation” about them (263). For Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook ‘monetization’ merely generates the revenue necessary for a much more profound social project. The company is “founded on a radical social premise – that an enveloping transparency will overtake modern life” (Kirkpatrick, 200), and this premise is the foundation of Facebook’s utopian promise. As the story of Oscar Morales relates, Facebook can be an effective tool working for popular causes in the aid of the state – no doubt in other states it can work against them. As such, however, Facebook is not a neutral ‘tool’ for the political expression of popular reason. It is a form that is itself transformative of other political structures, ushering in a new kind of governmentality. “In a lot of ways,” Zuckerberg argues,

54 Lacan, Television, 126. 55 Matthew Sharpe, “The ‘Revolution’ in Advertising and University Discourse” in Justin Clemens and Russell Grigg (eds) Reflections on Seminar XVII, Durham: Duke University Press, 2006 56 Sharpe, Reflections on Seminar XVII, 309.

55 GLOSSATOR 5

“Facebook is more like a government than a traditional company. We have this large community of people, and more than other technology companies we’re really setting policies” (Zuckerberg, cited in Kirkpatrick, 254). While particular technology companies are always vulnerable to the rapid exploitation of new technological innovations and a certain boredom threshold concerning their formats, Facebook has it seems made a decisive breakthrough in its reformatting of the social bond. In its infinite streams of commentary, ‘likes’ and followers of Groups and interests, Facebook has transformed the meaning of ‘Friendship’ and opened it up so that a transparent – or ‘transparental’ – love has become the principle of a new technology of neoliberal governance. Whatever the fate of Facebook, for this model to become truly revolutionary would require a further turn clockwise towards the discourse of the Master in which love for the face of the ‘transparental’ One, the index of the multiple, supports the total operationalization of social reality without remainder other than the facelessness that is produced as its surplus and condition.

Scott Wilson is Professor of Media and Communication in the School of Humanities, Kingston University, London. His two most recent books are: The Order of Joy: Beyond the Cultural Politics of Enjoyment (SUNY Press, 2008) and Great Satan’s Rrage: American Negativity and Rap / Metal in the Age of Supercapitalism (Manchester University Press, 2008). He is co-editor (with Michael Dillon) of the Journal for Cultural Research (Taylor & Francis).

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