Is the Face of the Other Manifest Online?
Levinas and the Phenomenology of Digital Life
Emmanuel Levinas believed there was something unique about the human face that opened up the ethical experience, the sense of responsibility. Cognitive science bears out his point—we process non-human objects with different parts of our brain than we do faces; even pictures of faces strike us differently than pictures of other things. I’d bet a stick figure of smiling sun does something different to us than does a stick figure of grass.
Levinas’s concept is lofty, but pairs with the earthly view of Nassim Taleb, who suggests that we make better decisions when we have “skin in the game.” Perhaps the face of other serves to remind us that we are accountable to others. Cynically put, it reminds us that we will have to pay a price if we fail to uphold our obligations.
Luke Burgis follows Levinas to argue that one reason online culture tends to be toxic is that we don’t see the face on the other side of our words (you might apply this same idea to all public writing).
On the other side of the argument, though, is the claim that what we need is more pseudonymity—the great problem is not too much sh*tposting from trolls but self-censorship from people fearing the mob. The problem with online culture—this argument goes—is that it’s too Levinasian, too other-centric.
New technology challenges Levinasian romanticism. Do headshots constitute “the face of the Other”? How about cartoonlike avatars whose goal is to evoke a brand? What about a profile picture of a person from the past? or an animal? One could say these are masks? But what makes them different in kind from a professional headshot? Does the face of the Other present itself on zoom? What about when the wifi gives way and the face is frozen or “delayed”? Is this any different than our experience of the ethical when encountering a face IRL that bothers us or repels us? What about a face that covered in inches of make-up? At what jpeg resolution does a face become humanized or dehumanized? While these questions can be asked in a lab, that they might be answered by empirical testing seems odd.
For Levinas, ethics was to be found in the interpersonal encounter, not the social one. But when there are three people or more—online or in person—the face of the Other no longer opens me up, because I am also called by another facing, watching me, competing for my attention and care. Could the challenge of online culture have to do less with issues of skin in the game and flattened perception than with the sociality of it, the fact that we are always explicitly aware of the “third” watching us encounter the Other?
But if Ethics is the one-on-one, and Politics is the one-on-one-on-one, leading to the two-on-one, then aren’t most gripes with social media really gripes with the politicization of ethics?
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