Faceblindness, Visual Pleasure and Racial Recognition

“The New Face of the Silicon Age.
” Wired magazine cover,

February 2004. Photograph by Ian White.
Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/camera-obscura/article-pdf/24/1 (70)/135/401056/CO70_06_Foster.pdf

by CENTRAL EUROPEAN UNIV user
on 25 November 2018
Faceblindness, Visual Pleasure,
and Racial Recognition:
Ethnicity and Technicity in
Ted Chiang’s “Liking What
You See: A Documentary”
Thomas Foster
This essay focuses on how processes of visual recognition and

response are being reconceptualized in some technoculture con-
texts, including new media and its theory, popular and journalis-
tic discourses, and speculative fictions. This reconceptualization
takes the form of the identification of a physical, embodied basis
in the brain for the cognitive processing of visual information
about the human face, as the basis for technological intervention
and the modification of those processes of meaning attribution.
While I will address specific visual practices, especially expropria-
tions of the conventions of antiportraiture in photography and
fine art by African American artists (such as Lorna Simpson, Fred
Wilson, and Glenn Ligon), my main example will be a science fic-
tion short story, Ted Chiang’s “Liking What You See: A Documen-
tary.” This story exemplifies and interrogates the scientific basis
Camera Obscura 70, Volume 24, Number 1

doi 10.1215/02705346-2008-017 © 2009 by Camera Obscura
Published by Duke University Press
135

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136 • Camera Obscura
for this reconceptualization of vision in interdisciplinary cognitive

science research, which draws on evolutionary psychology, sociobi-
ology, and new neurological techniques for mapping brain func-
tions. Chiang’s story demonstrates how such scientific research
can be read both as the symptom and determining cause of an
emergent epistemological framework whose theoretical assump-
tions need to be situated in relation to cultural studies methodolo-
gies and intellectual traditions of ideology critique. It specifically
addresses changes in the function of processes of naturaliza-
tion and biologization, as well as changes in the context for such
operations, most notably the tendency for information cultures to
privilege disembodiment and dematerialization as social norms
in ways that often subsume and redefine ideology critique’s tradi-
tional emphases on denaturalization and constructedness, rather
than naturalness. The key feature of this emergent framework, I
argue, is an imagined inversion of the meanings associated with
the categories of nature and culture. I refer to this inversion as
technicity. Chiang’s story dramatizes how these new assumptions
about the supposed nature of vision and new technological chal-
lenges to the understanding of visual culture affect political proj-
ects that seek to reconstruct sexuality, gender, and race.
Sexually Selective Cognition and Visual Pleasure

To clarify how Chiang’s story does not simply reproduce reductive
sociobiological assumptions but also critically intervenes in the
visual politics of race and gender, I want to situate this story in a
larger scientific and theoretical context, beginning with a particu-
lar scientific paper. In September 2007 a flurry of news reports
treated a forthcoming scientific article titled “Can’t Take My Eyes
off You: Attentional Adhesion to Mates and Rivals.”1 The paper’s
first author was the Florida State University psychology profes-
sor Jon Maner, who has made something of a subspeciality out
of what he calls “sexually selective cognition” — that is, the ways
in which, over evolutionary time periods, reproductive pressures
and competition for mates have resulted in the development of
specialized brain functions. Specifically, Maner’s work focuses on

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Faceblindness • 137
whether human beings have evolved specialized brain circuitry or

pathways to distinguish between more and less attractive faces as
the basis for choosing sexual partners; in other words, whether
norms for recognizing physical beauty in others are built into the
structure of our brains. “Can’t Take My Eyes off You” reports the
results of an empirical study that found both men’s and women’s
eyes are drawn to certain faces in a photo array in less than a sec-
ond after exposure. These particular faces are then designated as
the “most attractive,” and this attractiveness is typically explained
in terms of characteristics such as the symmetry of features or
healthy appearance (skin tone, etc.), all defined as visible evidence
of a particular genetic fitness for reproduction. This work exem-
plifies a sociobiological argument about the evolutionary basis for
particular forms of spectatorship and for visual pleasure as a uni-
versally shared psychological process. The argument inherent in
this work both challenges and confirms the commonsense notion
of sexual choice. On the one hand, it raises questions about the
extent to which sexual attraction involves conscious choice or pre-
determined response; on the other hand, it holds out the promise
of validating a particular set of sexual choices as universally true.
From a cultural studies perspective, the comfort provided by the
ideological desire to universalize a culturally specific set of norms,
and therefore to locate those norms at a level at which they can-
not be questioned or reasoned about, trumps the uncomfortable
challenge to beliefs in individual agency and free will implicit in
the determinism by which this same universalizing desire is real-
ized. While this critique is undoubtedly partially true, I want to
argue that it also obscures how research like Maner’s shifts the
very meanings of nature and biology, and therefore culture, in
ways that those of us working in the humanities have not yet fully
incorporated into our critical methods. Arguments like Maner’s
are not simply naturalizing in the traditional way that ideology
critique has understood that process.2
The speed with which Maner’s subjects performed the
visual identifications is taken as evidence that those preferences
somehow exist prior to any conscious or learned response. There-
fore, the evolutionary psychologist argues, these perceptions of

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physical beauty constitute a way of seeing, knowing, and judging

other people that resides in specific physical mechanisms in the
brain — they are part of an evolutionary heritage common to
every human body. This work builds on a generally accepted argu-
ment that human beings have evolved specialized brain structures
devoted to facial recognition and the analysis of facial expressions.
The existence of such specialized structures for the more neutral
or less judgmental process of facial identification has been strongly
suggested, if only negatively, by a relatively rare form of neurologi-
cal damage called prosopagnosia, or the inability to recognize oth-
ers on the basis of their distinctive facial features. Generally, apper-
ceptive prosopagnosics are unable to make sense of facial features
at all, while associative prosopagnosics can see differences between
people’s faces but cannot interpret or organize those visual details
into modes of recognition. This disruption of cognitive processes
by physical brain damage indicates the material, biological basis
for facial recognition.3
Destroying Visual Pleasure; or, “Liking What You See”

Maner’s research might be taken as pointing toward the possi-
bility of a similar agnosia, or process of unknowing, that would
not disrupt our ability to identify people by facial features, but
instead disturb our ability to render aesthetic judgments about
the attractiveness of those features. This agnosia would in effect
embody Laura Mulvey’s famous argument that feminist film criti-
cism needs to destroy the visual pleasure we have learned to take
in Hollywood cinema and its techniques for fetishizing feminine
beauty.4 From a feminist perspective, would it be desirable for neu-
rologists to develop a method for inducing this kind of agnosia,
the inability to know whether someone else is attractive or not? In
2002 Chiang’s “Liking What You See” posed precisely this ques-
tion by imagining a technology of brain modification that induces
what he calls “calliagnosia.” The procedure prevents people who
have undergone it from experiencing “any aesthetic reaction”
to perceived differences between other people’s faces.5 Mulvey’s
argument, of course, focuses on the ways in which a seemingly

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innocent act of aesthetic enjoyment masks interpretive processes

of voyeurism or sadism already organized culturally by hetero
normative assumptions embedded at the level of unconscious psy-
chic structure. Especially in the passages in which it asserts the
possibility of altering the ideological function of visual pleasure
in Hollywood cinema, however, Mulvey’s essay depends on reject-
ing any sharp distinction between visual perception and cultural
recognition or interpretation, since for Mulvey visual pleasure
comes preorganized or preprocessed. While sociobiology treats
these processes of recognition as functionally developed rather
than as ideologically determined (that is, as a function of the
evolutionary pressures of natural and sexual selection), the pos-
sibility of technologically modifying human cognitive processes
and brain structures restores a political dimension to the socio-
biological argument that visual pleasure is built into our cogni-
tive architectures. This return of the political is in fact one of the
main points of Chiang’s work. Like Mulvey’s essay, Chiang’s story,
I argue, problematizes the distinction between perception and
recognition, especially when it comes to questions of disrupting
or reproducing visual processes of racial recognition rather than
sexual preference.
“Liking What You See,” the one original story in Chiang’s
2002 collection Stories of Your Life and Others, constitutes an inter-
vention in the postcyberpunk subgenre sometimes called “hard
character SF,” which, drawing on evolutionary psychology, sociobi-
ology, neurology, and cybernetics, takes a scientifically materialist
approach to the representation of psychological states and social
interactions.6 In that tradition, the story is unusual neither for its
materialism and determinism nor for its elaboration of the politi-
cal implications of the philosophical stance it takes; instead, the
story is striking for its focus on the cognitive mechanisms of visual
perception. “Liking What You See” imagines a technology for alter-
ing human consciousness and perception by deliberately inducing
agnosias in the form of brain lesions or blockages of neural path-
ways. The story’s speculations are grounded in the existing medical
literature on prosopagnosia. In the story, this type of dysfunction is
taken as evidence that “our brains have a special ‘circuit’ devoted

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to the visual processing of faces” and that “we” have evolved to

“look at faces in a different way than we look at anything else.”7
Prosopagnosics, however, can still distinguish attractive from unat-
tractive faces, even if they cannot recognize to whom the faces
belong. Chiang’s story imagines that research on prosopagnosia
has made it possible to go further and identify “the neurological
circuit responsible for perceiving beauty in faces,” and thus to
invent a new syndrome called “calliagnosia” (290), an associative
rather than an apperceptive agnosia, since “it doesn’t interfere with
one’s visual perception, only with the ability to recognize what one
sees” (283). This distinction between perception and recognition is
crucial to the way the story problematizes the distinction between
nature and culture. Recognition — or interpretation, as we might
call it — would usually be understood as an effect of cultural frame-
works of intelligibility, but in this story those frameworks are a func-
tion of material brain structures, just as much as visual perception
is. Chiang’s calliagnosics can perceive differences in facial features
perfectly well; they simply do not “experience any aesthetic reaction
to those differences” (283).
The story is organized in a documentary or ethnographic
style, as a series of first-person monologues by various characters
in response to a campus initiative sponsored by the Students for
Equality Everywhere (SEE). The form of the narrative itself there-
fore raises questions about the production and perception of eth-
nicity, through the implicit requirement that each speaker take
on some representative or typical quality; this implication of the
narrative form recalls and reproduces the role of anthropology in
the production of racial types.
The initiative SEE sponsors would require all students at
fictional Pembleton University to undergo induced calliagnosia
when they enroll. The spokesperson for this group, Maria DeSouza,
argues that the effect of the technology will be to redress “look-
ism,” defined both as a bias in favor of attractive people and as the
problems created by objectification (282, 286). DeSouza explicitly
defines this project of combating lookism as an extension of strug-
gles against racism and sexism, but also as a “deeper” and “more
pervasive” issue that has more successfully resisted being perceived

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as a problem (282). Proponents of calliagnosia argue that it consti-

tutes a form of “assisted maturity” that allows users to “ignore the
surface” and “look deeper” (282); calliagnosia, they argue, “doesn’t
blind you to anything; beauty is what blinds you. Calli lets you see”
(293). In effect, calliagnosia makes visible not only what beauty
conceals but requires us to recognize the role that our own cogni-
tive processes of recognition play in our responses to and inter-
pretations of others. While sociobiology often seems to stabilize
and dehistoricize ideological processes by relocating them at the
level of an evolved human nature, the technology Chiang’s story
imagines reveals a more radical potential in sociobiological argu-
ments. The technological manipulability of evolved mechanisms of
visual recognition recontextualizes human nature and its biology
in a contingent and open-ended process of development, not in
a fixed form. In this way sociobiological analyses both naturalize
and contest the common sense of associating sexual attraction and
emotional response in a set of supposedly universally fascinating
physical features. This disappearance of a shared common sense
is dramatized by the story’s ethnographic form, which relativizes
responses to the technology and fractures the narrative into a set
of equally valid perspectives.
A later development of the technology allows users, rather
than doctors, to reverse the procedure’s effects and turn the
induced calliagnosia on and off at will. As a result, DeSouza and
SEE change their agenda to promote “the idea that beauty is appro-
priate in some situations and not in others” and that “appreciating
beauty” should become “a consensual interaction, something you
do only when both parties, the beholder and the beheld, agree
to it” (318 –19). For SEE, calliagnosia constitutes a technique for
literally unlearning habits of social hierarchy and objectification
as embodied in reflexes of visual perception.
In the text, lookism and its treatment through the calliagno-
sia procedure are defined primarily in terms of gender and sexual
norms and their potential contestation. The story divides into two
related plotlines. One is conveyed by the repeated monologues of
one woman student, Tamera Lyons, who not only grew up with the
calliagnosia modification but also attended a special school at which

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all students had undergone the same procedure, so that, for her,
calliagnosia is “natural,” and the perception of facial beauty has to
be produced by technological intervention. Tamera’s first act when
she goes to college is to have her calli turned off, and the story traces
her ambivalent response to her newfound capacity to distinguish
people aesthetically when she gets back into contact with her high
school boyfriend, who turns out not to be very attractive physically
by her new criteria of judgment. Despite that fact and the difficulty
Tamera has in adjusting to it, she ultimately ends up turning her
calli back on, in part as an attempt to reconcile with her “plain” ex-
boyfriend. Tamera is still able to distinguish between boys; under
the influence of calliagnosia, she simply cannot sort them by greater
or lesser degrees of facial beauty or attractiveness.
The second plotline follows the spokespersons for different
positions in the campus debates over the desirability of making cal-
liagnosia mandatory. These debates clearly refer, in displaced form,
to debates over campus date-rape legislation. Some of the key ques-
tions include whether the procedure deprives students of aesthetic
pleasure in the name of political correctness (292), or whether it
is a misdirected attempt to protect women that only undermines
their sexual agency and power and imposes a new form of self-
censorship (311, 314). One female student, who has had her nose
removed, argues that “calli is for wusses. My attitude is, fight back.
Go radical ugly. That’s what the beautiful people need to see. . . .
It’s about how ugly can beat beautiful at its own game” (312). Here,
body modification is contrasted to cognitive modification.8
Faceblindness and Raceblindness:

Interpreting Prosopagnosia
Joshua Davis’s 2006 essay in Wired magazine, possibly informed
by a reading of Chiang’s story, makes a similar move from the
identification of facial recognition mechanisms in the brain to
speculations about modifying or disabling them. The evidence for
the existence of such mechanisms leads Davis to ask, “Are there
further specializations within that for gender, skin color, age, and
even attractiveness?”9 His essay demonstrates two tendencies that

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also appear in some of the medical research on prosopagnosia:

first, the desire to conceptualize prosopagnosia as faceblindness —
that is, as a perception rather than a recognition problem, a prob-
lem of seeing rather than of processing and interpreting visual
information — and second, the desire to map faceblindness onto
gender- or raceblindness.10 These conflations undermine the Wired
essay’s infatuation with the progressive social implications of pros-
opagnosia, apparent in the article’s concluding speculations about
the formation of Internet user groups “with names like Trouble
Recognizing Gender or Trouble Recognizing Myself.”11 Chiang’s
“Liking What You See” had in fact already problematized these
dual tendencies. As implied by the first plot strand in the story,
concerning the effects on Tamera’s romantic life of turning her
calliagnosia on and off, induced forms of calliagnosia do not pre-
vent Chiang’s characters from perceiving gender difference, and
the possibility of inducing raceblindness is explicitly rejected. But
if this kind of neuroscience does not immediately render existing
social differences obsolete, does it hold the potential to critically
reflect on or transform those differences in any way?
The close connection between research into the cognitive
mechanisms that underlie visual processes of recognition and
judgment and the medical evidence that such mechanisms can
be rendered inoperative provides the basis for speculations about
inducing conditions of visual agnosia. Instead of naturalizing “cul-
tural norms” in terms of “biological processes,” this kind of argu-
ment exemplifies a shift in thinking that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
defines, in the context of debates about the existence of a gay gene
(or, later, of specifically gay neural structures), as constituting a new
epistemological nexus of nature and culture. Sedgwick points out
that practices of ideology critique assume that natural phenomena
are fixed and unchanging, while “cultural constructs are peculiarly
malleable.” In contrast, however, in the context of current techno-
science, “increasingly it is the conjecture that a particular trait is
genetically or biologically based, not that it is ‘only cultural,’ that
seems to trigger an estrus of manipulative fantasy in the technolog-
ical institutions of the culture.”12 Sedgwick’s comments suggest that
locating explanations for human behavior at the biological level

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proves attractive precisely because biology is increasingly perceived

as more available to a particular form of intervention and change,
a technological fix, than cultural categories and determinations
are — precisely the opposite of the situation that ideology critique
presumes. In this context, research like Maner’s is likely to be read
as justifying the treatment of norms of beauty as an engineering
problem, rather than as a political one.13 Mulvey imagined that the
destruction of forms of visual pleasure dependent on the fetishiza-
tion of some feminine ideal might result from the technical, avant-
garde manipulation of the structure of cinema “to free the look of
the camera into its materiality in time and space and the look of
the audience into dialectics and passionate detachment,” or even
from the mere act of the critical analysis of “pleasure, or beauty,”
which would undo the objectification of the feminine image as
consumable entertainment and open it to the “dialectics” of intel-
lectual debate.14 Today this technical manipulability seems to be
increasingly relocated to the level of the viewers’ cognitive architec-
tures and mental processes, understood as scientifically material,
physically identifiable, and therefore open to change rather than
reified or eternalized. Does this relocation provide more or less
opportunity for the “passionate detachment” of critical thought?
Technosociality and Sociobiology

To frame this question, it is useful to consider the extent to which
Sedgwick’s brief comments on the manipulative fantasy inform-
ing contemporary genetic and biological rhetorics also diagnose a
general technocultural dynamic and a resultant critical dilemma
for cultural studies methodologies. This point is suggested by
Allucquère Rosanne Stone’s definition of “technosociality” as
“the state in which technology and nature are the same thing, as
when one inhabits a network as a social environment.”15 This kind
of shift in living and thinking poses a number of challenges and
opportunities for cultural critics. It can be read as a more thor-
oughgoing and literal naturalization of cultural categories, as
humanists usually argue is the case with sociobiological research,
or it can be read in terms of the disappearance of nature and the

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emergence of denaturalized and normative — rather than pro-

gressive or liberating — cultural forms, as Lisa Nakamura argues
occurs in the case of online “cybertyping” or the performance of
reductive understandings of racial difference in the absence of any
physical body to legitimate and naturalize such performances.16
Chiang’s story, however, is useful for its suggestion that this same
breakdown in traditional conceptual distinctions between nature
and culture, biological givens and social constructs, might also
represent an opportunity to move beyond the impasse of these
dichotomies to an understanding of the natural environment,
including our own bodies, as something other than a constraint,
and to a recognition of our technology as something other than a
neutral instrument or extension of our conscious will.
Chiang’s story specifically interrogates the sociobiological
assumption that it is possible to make a sharp distinction between evo-
lutionary “deep time,” from which biological determinations origi-
nate, and the historical time of contingent cultural determinations —
that is, between sociobiology and anthropology (figured in the
story as the difference between brain structures and resulting men-
tal content or ideas, the difference between perception and recog-
nition). This discourse depends on distinguishing between the dis-
ciplinary temporality specific to sociobiology and the temporality
specific to anthropology or cultural studies more generally. In one
of the foundational texts of evolutionary psychology, John Tooby
and Leda Cosmides define the classic sociobiological assumptions
informing this discipline. They argue, “human [cognitive] archi-
tectures are ‘pre-equipped’ (that is, reliably develop) specialized
mechanisms that ‘know’ many things about humans,” including
“social relations, emotions, and facial expressions.”17 “We” know
these things because
not only does natural selection privilege frames of reference that reveal
patterns of universality in human life but our evolved psychological
architecture does also. . . . So . . . we arrive in the world not only
expecting, Geertzian fashion, to meet some particular culture about
whose specifically differentiated peculiarities we can know nothing in
advance. We also arrive expecting to meet, at one and the same time,
and in one and the same embodiment, the general human culture as

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well — that is, recognizably human life manifesting a wide array of forms

and relations common across cultures during our evolution. (89)
Onto the distinctions between evolutionary and historical time

frames, E. O. Wilson – style sociobiology and Clifford Geertz – style
anthropology, the authors in this passage also map the distinc-
tions between universal human patterns and contingent cultural
specificities and between forms of knowledge hardwired into our
neural architectures and knowledge that has to be learned after
birth.18 The key distinction, then, is ultimately the classic one
between nature (now explicitly redefined as “the general human
culture” encoded in our bodies as an evolutionary legacy) and
nurture or cultural locality.
In elaborating this distinction, the above passage rehearses
some well-known assumptions of sociobiology and evolutionary psy-
chology. This kind of analysis privileges reproduction (or sexual
selection) as a feature of evolutionary processes. Therefore it locates
certain gender and sexual norms in the “universal patterns” of evo-
lutionary deep time and defines them as equivalent to the ability to
read faces, as behaviors with which we come “pre-equipped” and
whose production does not require socialization in any particular
cultural frame. For instance, Maner’s 2007 paper explicitly argues
that both women’s and men’s attractiveness gets fetishized. Male sub-
jects come pre-equipped with the ability to make snap judgments
about the attractiveness of other men ( just as women do about
other women). However, this ability is explained not in terms of
possible sexual attraction but instead in terms of heteronormative
assumptions about men’s needs to form judgments about poten-
tial competitors for mates. It is not surprising, then, that Davis’s
essay in Wired expresses considerable enthusiasm for one prosopag-
nosic’s claim that his inability to perceive significant differences
between men’s and women’s faces accounts for his bisexuality.19
The questionable assumption that evolutionary explanations have
to privilege heteronormativity to the point of completely failing to
consider homosexuality at all (since it is not reproductive) means
that the interpretation of prosopagnosia as facilitating something
more like Chiang’s calliagnosia (by disabling one of the major

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mechanisms of a supposedly heterosexual and reproductive attrac-

tion) would “naturally” encourage alternative sexual orientations
and practices.
More unexpected and less explicit are the behaviors, per-
ceptions, traits, and categories that are excluded from this model
of evolutionary development and determination and that there-
fore lack the physical instantiation in “our one and the same
embodiment,” which allows for the possibility of their technologi-
cal modification. First and foremost among them are race and
ethnicity. While the prosopagnosia research described in Davis’s
essay is imagined as revealing the superficiality of racial markers
and therefore the possibility of eliminating their perception and
thus achieving raceblindness (as well as genderblindness), a more
dominant argument in sociobiological research paradoxically links
the superficiality of race as cultural product to its reification as a
social category. In Chiang’s “Liking What You See,” a neurologist
who provides expert commentary on the calliagnosia technology
asserts that there is no brain-modification technology to produce
“race-blindness” because “there’s no neural pathway that spe-
cifically handles resentment toward immigrants, any more than
there’s one for Marxist doctrine or foot fetishism.”20 It is thus not
possible for science to affect these attitudes, ideologies, or invest-
ments. It is important to note the critical irony implicit in the fact
that the racial equivalent of calliagnosia is immediately imagined
by this character as a form of color- or raceblindness, since Chiang’s
story assumes that the calliagnosia procedure does not produce
genderblindness. The implication seems to be that racial differ-
ence itself produces resentment, even without the factor of resent-
ment against immigrants (though perhaps racial encounters are
imagined as always resulting from immigration or the mixing of
populations), while gender differences (as opposed to differences
in beauty) do not. The key point is to note how the neurologist
naturalizes a definition of what is political and what is not in ways
that depend on a reductive and naive concept of politics. Indeed,
in the Tamera Lyons plot, it is that very ability to continue to per-
ceive gender difference without judging others by norms of beauty
that is presented as the most progressive effect of the procedure.

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Like Maner’s research, Chiang’s story assumes that concrete neural

pathways do exist for the perception of beauty in other people.
I will argue, however, that the story also effectively subverts this
expert’s claim that race, among other things, has to be relegated
to the domain of what Sedgwick calls the “only cultural.”
Race and Recognition

This argument, then, offers a different take on Paul Gilroy’s the-
sis in Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line
that “aspects of ‘race’ as it has been understood in the past are
already being conjured away by new technologies of self and spe-
cies being,” technologies that no longer support the “old visual
signatures of ‘race.’ ”21 Gilroy offers these claims as evidence that
the understanding of race as mediated social construct should be
followed by the further step of rejecting the “cold, corporeal fact”
of race in general (42). When Gilroy begins his book by arguing
that the techniques of “raciology,” or the “visual signatures” of
colonial comparative anatomy, “cannot be readily re-signified or
de-signified,” he seems to echo Chiang’s neurologist in regarding
race as more intransigent and resistant to manipulation precisely
because it is a mediated social construct and not a biological “fact”
(12). The re- or designification of race would constitute cultural
processes of change, and Gilroy argues that it is necessary to relo-
cate our understanding of race to a different “scale,” noting that
“the boundaries of ‘race’ have moved across the threshold of the
skin,” and “if ‘race’ is to endure, it will be in a new form, estranged
from the scales respectively associated with political anatomy and
epidermalization” (47). New imaging technologies (and I would
include techniques for mapping neural pathways and brain
functions) that render “the body . . . absolutely penetrable” thus
make obsolete a commonsense racializing “gaze,” “aesthetic,” or
“regime of power” directed exclusively at “the external surface of
the body” (47). Gilroy here qualifies his dismissal of race by sug-
gesting the persistence of racial differences through the agency of
new forms of technoscientific mediation, and it is this possibility
that Chiang’s story explores.

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This possibility moves in the direction of Howard Winant’s

analysis of “racial dualism,” which suggests that race be neither
reified as an objective condition nor dismissed as merely an ideo-
logical construct.22 Winant argues that “race not only naturalizes,
it socializes”; it both makes the world “intelligible” and “opaque.”23
My reading of Chiang’s story suggests that a more critical deploy-
ment of sociobiological forms of determinism can illuminate this
dualism or hybridization of the natural and the social as it informs
contemporary racial formations. It is, however, precisely the kind of
position that Winant takes — arguing both that race is a construct
or consensual fiction and that it possesses a social materiality —
that Gilroy dismisses when he criticizes analysts who endorse the
constructed nature of race but still insist that it has material effects.
In this sense Gilroy’s argument consents too quickly to the idea
that race is “only cultural” or, more accurately, to the idea that
culture itself is merely cultural — a commonsense assumption that
is directly challenged by Tooby and Cosmides’s argument that we
inherit evolved predispositions toward a “general human culture,” a
function of our “one and the same embodiment.” I am skeptical of
this universalization of either culture or embodiment but attracted
to the interconnection between culture and (evolved) nature also
asserted here. The political value of such formulations might reside
in their insistence on the materiality rather than the naturalized
self-evidence of cultural categories.24 In a technocultural context,
Gilroy’s critique of theorists like Winant, for acknowledging race
as a cultural construct but refusing to abandon it nevertheless, can
be read as the flip side of Katherine Hayles’s argument about how
the privileging of information over materiality in cybernetics and
information theory also promotes an ideology of disembodiment,
in an intensification of the Cartesian mind-body dualism.25 If race
is just a construct, Gilroy seems to argue (at least at this point), then
let it be dematerialized entirely. Gilroy suggests that any defense
of the social and historical materiality of race always tends to col-
lapse into and reproduce specious assumptions about comparative
anatomy and social Darwinism, or what he calls raciology. However,
this same technocultural context also suggests that the definition
of materiality, or what Sedgwick calls nature, is changing in ways

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that might mitigate the link between materiality and essentialism

that seems crucial to Gilroy’s polemic “against race.”
Ethnicity and Technicity:

The Persistence of Social Categories
I prefer the term technicity to Stone’s technosociality because technic-
ity, on a mere verbal level, continues to define itself in some kind
of relation to ethnicity, reminding us of ethnicity’s persistence.
However, the idea of technicity and the exact nature of its relation
to ethnicity are contested in seemingly contradictory ways. In one
dominant version of technicity, it names a new logic of identity or
nonidentity that subsumes and replaces ethnicity, while in other
versions it displaces but continues to function as ethnicity used
to. In still other accounts, technicity constitutes an intervention in
and critical reflection on ethnicity, or even a perpetuation of eth-
nicity formations in high-tech societies. Both Jennifer González
and Beth Coleman have used the term in a more critical way,
but here I draw primarily on the work of the art historian David
Tomas, who in turn bases his definition of technicity on the cyber-
punk fiction of William Gibson, especially on its representations
of cyborg and virtual embodiment.26 What different conclusions
about technicity might we draw, what alternate models of technol-
ogized embodiment might we develop, if we started from Chiang’s
fiction rather than Gibson’s?27 Science fiction writers of color are
more often interested in articulating technicity in relation to vari-
ous ethnic positions and histories than in offering a more teleo-
logical narrative, in which ethnicity is oriented exclusively toward
the past and tradition, while technicity is oriented toward the
future and the new. Attention to such expropriations and alterna-
tive narratives of technologized embodiment by writers of color
is necessary to develop a critical posthumanism, specifically as an
alternative definition of the relation between information and
material bodies as critiqued by Hayles in her argument about the
tendency to theorize information as dematerialized or decontex-
tualized in the history of cybernetics.28

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Typically, the term technicity is deployed to mark not just the
shift from race to ethnicity, from biological to cultural differences,
that Winant has critiqued, but also a further shift from ethnicity
to new forms of difference and belonging, from cultural differ-
ences to their technological denaturalization, a shift that either
proliferates new identity categories or tends toward the elimina-
tion of traditional categories entirely.29 Turning to examples of
how writers and artists of color have expropriated the conventions
of cyberpunk science fiction for purposes of racial representation
complicates this linear narrative of a move beyond, not against,
race (to try to reclaim Gilroy’s formulation). Chiang’s speculations
on calliagnosia as a cognitive prosthesis build on cyberpunk con-
ventions, while the story’s reflections on lookism’s complex relation
to racism moves cyberpunk concerns in a new direction.30
Tomas suggests how technicity should be understood as a
critique of ethnographic categorization schemes when he defines
technicity as a form of “post-organic anthropology,” capable of
moving beyond familiar self-other dialectics that keep difference
trapped in a specular model. He defines technicity as “processes of
technological differentiation.”31 For Tomas, these processes tend
to replace more traditional ideas of ethnicity (grounded in kin-
ship structures, religious affiliations, or shared geographical local-
ity) once new technologies become more central to defining who
counts as “one’s own kind” and what it means to form associations
with them.32 The argument here is that the recognition of shared
social bonds increasingly requires an explicit prior recognition of
a shared technological infrastructure or of operating systems that
enable (and have always enabled) such a sense of connectedness,
a prior recognition of interface compatibility: Are you a Mac or
PC person? Do you use a proprietary or an open-source operating
system, Windows or Linux or Ubuntu? Can you open that attach-
ment I sent you? That last question might be regarded as the most
banal expression of technicity, its opening wedge into the practices
of everyday life.
Tomas’s critique of anthropology and racial categorization,
however, tends toward their transcendence or elimination. Tomas

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initially tries to argue that technicity, as a technological redefinition

of social difference, represents a “regeneration of ethnic identity”
in “late-capitalist creolized technocultures” and can be defined as
“cyborg transformations in traditional categories of kinship and
ethnicity” (176, 184). He nonetheless ends up emphasizing the
replacement of ethnicity by technicity, arguing that “traditional
expressions of ethnicity are incapable of coming to terms with emer-
gent technosymbolic ‘systems of essential similarity and difference’
that conjoin individuals into groups in cyborg-dominated cultures”
(184). The increasing dominance of cyberspace computer networks
over cyborg body prostheses in Gibson’s fiction as Tomas reads it
in fact completes the denaturalization of “post-organic” bodies by
dematerializing them entirely, along with their “associated ethnic
distinctions” (187). In this way, Tomas’s argument exemplifies the
tendency that Coco Fusco identifies in posthumanist critiques of
slipping into a “backlash against identity politics.”33 There is a big
difference between arguing that technology supplants more tra-
ditional self-definitions entirely (Tomas’s claim) and arguing that
technology now functions as a mode of cultural differentiation
alongside physical markers, kinship and shared histories, religion,
or locality, since the latter allows for a critical interaction between
traditional ethnicities and new technosocial formations foreclosed
by the former.
The critical value of technicity is supposed to reside in the
way it literally lays bare the device, the way in which it exposes
the preconditions for both social identities and interactions and
the constructedness of both bodies and social relations (with the
former imaged by cyborg body prostheses and virtual-reality ava-
tars, and the latter exemplified by the phenomena of thumb tribes,
flash crowds, or smart mobs).34 But at the very moment at which
Tomas articulates this claim, he also produces the increasingly
familiar slippage from a critique of naturalized or biologized forms
of difference to a dismissal of bodies in general and of raced bodies
in particular. Tomas notes that the essential difference between
“the composition of traditional ethnic categories and cyborg tech-
nicity lies most clearly in the issue of ‘inborn qualities,’ ” and his
assertion that “cultures of technological similarity and difference

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are obviously no longer organized in relation to the human body,

its shape, color, sex” leads him to define these new forms of technic-
ity as “alternative dematerialized identity compositions” (emphasis
mine).35
The ambiguity I have identified resides in whether the term
transformation means transcendence and obsolescence or whether
it means the perpetuation of ethnicity as a form of technological
kinship, what Tomas calls “ethnic-type relations among cyborgs”
(184). At times, Tomas turns to Gibson’s cyberpunk fiction, espe-
cially its representation of the multicultural city of the future (à la
Blade Runner), to define how “an ethnically creolized culture” is
“laminated” or layered over by “another technologically creolized”
one, a trope of coexistence (184).36 At other times in his argument,
however, Tomas suggests that technicity is only “analogous” to eth-
nicity, not materially informed by it.37
The cover image from the February 2004 issue of Wired
magazine suggests how technicity functions as a complex displace-
ment and reinscription of more traditional categories rather than
as a substitution for them. Illustrating a story about the outsourcing
of programming jobs to India, the image depicts a South Asian
woman covering the lower portion of her face with her hand, on
which are inscribed lines of computer code. What interests me are
not the questionable historical claims and anxieties that the image
purports to allegorize, but instead how the visual logic of the image
exceeds those anxieties through the juxtaposition of technology as
sign and signs of racial difference.38 The image assimilates exper-
tise in coding and processing languages to a traditional ethnic
practice, in this case mehndi (East Indian henna body art). The
techno-orientalism of the image — its combination of the denatu-
ralization of bodily markers of difference and the reinscription of
signs of otherness — is clear. But the image also dramatizes a shift
and destabilization in the racial character of “geek culture.” As the
marker of this particular class and cultural identity (the ability to
code) allegedly migrates to a nonwhite, nonmale body, that marker
itself is spectacularized and rendered as if equivalent to markers
of race (skin color) or ethnicity (traditional body art). At the same
time, the image dramatizes the ungrounding of that cultural iden-

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tity, the unnaturalness of its articulation with this particular body

and perhaps with any particular body. But the familiarity of the
orientalizing techniques here suggests the limits of this challenge
to the “possessive investment in whiteness,” which may result in
some loss of control over white self-fashioning but not necessar-
ily in a loss of control over that self’s traditional others.39 That is,
Wired’s cover image demonstrates that loss of self-continuity may
result not in a self-critique of cultural authority and privilege but
in a reassertion and extension of that discontinuous self’s ability to
overwrite its subordinated subalterns. As paradoxical as it seems,
the image suggests that the apparent loss of a dominant cultural
perspective does not prevent its continuing appropriations, even
when what others are being appropriated to seems fundamentally
in question: the problematizing of self does not necessarily result
in the disappearance of otherness.
Cyborg Nature/Cyborg Culture

It is therefore critical to generate a version of technicity that
attends to “how subaltern bodies are positioned vis-à-vis tech-
nology.”40 This kind of technicity would not be sharply distinct
from ethnicity, which, as Stuart Hall defines it, names the ways
in which racial subjectivities “are not stabilized by Nature or by
some other essential guarantee” but must instead be understood
as “constructed historically, culturally, politically.”41 The notion
of technicity can, in fact, foreground this dimension of construct-
edness and, in that sense, might be understood as an attempt to
avoid the renaturalization of ethnic identities. At the same time,
however, the shift from concepts of ethnicity to those of technicity
acknowledges how the previously noted inversion of the meanings
of nature and culture (as discussed by Sedgwick) challenges prior
understandings of ethnicity and points toward forms of newness
and a problematic of ethnicity that Hall may not have envisioned.
Sedgwick’s argument about how, within current thinking,
nature or biology is taking on the qualities of malleability previ-
ously reserved for cultural categories raises a whole series of further
questions. Does this rethinking of nature as malleable necessarily

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lead to a fantasy of a “postidentity era” in which “any mention of

race” seems “antiquated,” as Fusco argues is often the case with
digital techniques of morphing and image manipulation? 42 What
happens to cultural constructs after this shift in the meaning of the
natural or the biological? Is nature assimilated to a cultural model,
as Tomas’s narrative of technicity supplanting ethnicity seems to
assume, or do cultural categories become more fixed as nature
becomes more plastic, as Sedgwick suggests? 43 To what extent is
it really possible for nature and culture simply to trade places? To
what extent do they remain in place, and to what extent do these
categories cross over into one another to produce something dif-
ferent, some new form of “technoscientific hybridity,” to use Bruno
Latour’s term, that displaces the opposition between nature and
culture?44 In particular, is it possible to identify an overlap between
such technoscientific or technosocial forms of hybridity and the
duality of Winant’s theory of race as “formation,” resistant to simple
characterizations of race as either transient ideological construct
or unalterable objective condition?
The (Im)Materiality of Vision and Race

Chiang’s “Liking What You See” suggests the possibility of this
overlap between Latour and Winant by interrogating the scien-
tific materialism associated with sociobiology and especially with
evolutionary psychology. But the story also addresses the issue of
whether new communications and interface technologies dema-
terialize physical embodiment by implicitly raising another ques-
tion: is the calliagnosia brain modification a reaction against or
an extension of the logic of digital imaging in its plasticity and
manipulability? In the narrative, the character DeSouza explains
the origin of the calliagnosia initiative as a political reaction to
the widespread use on campus of a software program called Vis-
age, which allows users to see what other people would look like if
they had cosmetic surgery.45 Students, she points out, were down-
loading Visage into their spex (wearable computers or heads-up
displays) and walking around campus comparing people’s actual
appearances to their ideal forms, mocking them, and eliciting

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outrage at what was interpreted as a kind of virtual assault. In fact,

one of calliagnosia’s selling points is its potential as an ad-busting
technique (296 – 97). The plot of the story thus emphasizes the
interpretation of the technology as an alternative to digital
imaging techniques, since the students’ calliagnosia initiative is
defeated largely as a result of an advertising campaign that uses
“software capable of fine-tuning paralinguistic cues in order to
maximize the emotional response evoked in viewers” and spe-
cifically to increase dramatically the “charisma” of media figures
(319 – 20). This technique of digital manipulation of body lan-
guage and oral delivery is especially effective on spex wearers.
When this manipulation is exposed (by a group calling itself the
SemioTech Warriors), a backlash in favor of calliagnosia occurs.
But the calliagnosia treatment also clearly shares some of
the assumptions about embodiment implicit in the very manipula-
tion techniques that it supposedly resists. The procedure’s treat-
ment of the mind and the self as being as manipulable as surface
images is suggested when a hacker group supports the calliagnosia
initiative by altering video “broadcasts so that faces and bodies
exhibit conditions such as acne and varicose veins,” going “radical
ugly” in an attempt to produce the same critical effects claimed
for calliagnosia (302). The reading of the calliagnosia technology
as an extension of new media principles — not just to bodies as
stylistic surfaces but to the inner self — helps explain why the story
shows the same tendency to dismiss racism as a superficial and
outmoded concept encouraged by morphing techniques like the
one made famous by Michael Jackson’s “Black and White” music
video, in which the plasticity of the digital image enacts a fantasy
of breaking down the boundaries between racialized features, as
they were seamlessly interconnected rather than hierarchized. In
this way, the story cites the dominant narrative in which technicity
replaces ethnicity. But the way in which “Liking What You See” also
offers a more complex understanding of technicity as a shift in the
relation between nature and culture is suggested when, in the story,
DeSouza ends her campaign for calliagnosia by arguing that since
“we’ve reached a point where we can begin to adjust our minds,” we
“shouldn’t automatically accept that natural is better” or “automati-

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cally presume we can improve on nature” (316 –17). Here, nature

is neither reified as unchanging nor dematerialized; indeed, it is
open, but only partially, to human use and modification.
In effect, then, calliagnosia treats not images but ways of
seeing and frames of recognition as plastic and manipulable, and
in this sense Chiang’s story might provide a model for understand-
ing contemporary antiracist projects of undoing racial and ethno-
graphic fetishism. In this context, ethnographic fetishism refers to
the relation between traditional anthropology and visual technolo-
gies, with classic anthropology functioning to define non-Western
(or nonnormative) subjects as cultural types or as representatives of
their difference from the ethnographer and with visual technolo-
gies then allowing these cultural types to be biologized through
supposed anatomical differences.46
The form of Chiang’s story reproduces the ethnographic
tendency for individuals to be treated as types or “native infor-
mants,” exemplifying the internal cultural differences revealed
in the course of the calliagnosia controversy. Each monologue is
introduced by name and student or professional status, with no
direct references to race. But it is hard not to notice that the students
involved in a public debate over the technology are Jeff Winthrop,
on the anticalliagnosia side, and Adesh Singh, on the protech
side,47 just as it is difficult not to ponder the ethnic signification of
Maria DeSouza’s name. When the neurologist, Joseph Weingart-
ner, admits that he would never choose to undergo the procedure
himself, even if he were not concerned about how it might affect his
relation to his patients, we are invited to wonder how that personal
response might inform his interpretation of the technology as a
disarticulation of beauty from race (315). “Liking What You See”
was first published in a book collecting Chiang’s stories, and the
larger volume includes notes on each individual story. The note on
“Liking What You See” ends with a declaration that “if calliagnosia
ever becomes available,” Chiang “for one will give it a try” (331).
The author therefore seems deliberately to place himself on the
same level as his characters, as a representative of one particular
perspective on the technology. “Liking What You See” resists the
biologization of representative types precisely by emphasizing the

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difference between the theme of visual perception or its techno-

logical mediation and the verbal form of (self-)representation that
produces each narrator as representative of a more general cultural
or subcultural position. The ethnographic style means that readers
encounter each character as typifying a political position on the
technological mediation of perceptions of visual beauty, and those
positions are themselves mediated by being communicated through
a printed representation of oral argumentative or expressive styles.
Given the story’s focus on visual perception, this location of each
character within a clearly circumscribed (self-)representational
space (marked by the introduction of each character by name, fol-
lowed by a colon) tends to evoke the colonial photographic archive
and its articulation of ethnic categories with physical features, to the
extent that visual perception becomes intertwined with conclusions
about subject positions defined by gender, race, and ethnicity. The
story’s style establishes both a parallel and a tension between these
two sets of mediated techniques of definition, neither of which can
be naturalized and both of which are politicized. The title of the
story in fact seems designed to foreground this difference between
the message and the medium in which it is delivered, a difference
that both retains categories of difference and problematizes or at
least ungrounds them from any natural basis.
Facial Misrecognition and Racial Antiportraiture

Allan Sekula has pointed out the ways in which the practices of
modern ethnography and photographic portraiture dovetailed
as technologies for producing schemas of racialized difference.
The representation of facial features played a key role in the visual
epistemology that results from the convergence of photography
and anthropology. One classic example would be Edward Stei
chen’s famous 1955 photography exhibit The Family of Man.48 In
2003 Fusco and Brian Wallis organized a counterexhibit to Stei
chen titled Only Skin Deep: Changing Conceptions of the Ameri-
can Self at the International Center for Photography in New York.
Only Skin Deep set out to reveal the historical role of photogra-
phy in the production of the visual evidence of anthropological

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diversity and/or identity that The Family of Man had purported

to discover, document, and celebrate. In the published catalog
to the 2003 exhibit, Lauri Firstenberg argues that this project
of undoing the hierarchical categories implicit in the “family of
man” trope becomes most explicit in the subgenre she calls “anti-
portraiture.”49 Perhaps the best-known example of antiportraiture
in African American art would be Lorna Simpson’s signature ges-
tures of having her subjects turn away from the camera and jux-
taposing their averted faces with the interiors of masks (317 –18).
A more general fascination with the possibilities for unlearning
facial recognition that Chiang’s “Liking What You See” “docu-
ments” is also present in experiments with the digital manipula-
tion of photographic images, such as Jason Salavon’s deliberate
blurring of faces by combining multiple, superimposed images in
a single portrait or Aziz + Cucher’s close-up images of faces with
eyes and mouths removed, resulting in a surreal erasure of facial
expressivity (see 330). 50 These manipulated images, with their
blurring or elimination of facial features, are not a refusal of rep-
resentation as might be the case with the modernist techniques of
abstraction that they otherwise resemble. Aziz + Cucher in partic-
ular are usually read as dramatizing a condition of anonymity in
which individual facial differences disappear completely. Instead,
I am arguing that Aziz + Cucher’s imagery should be located at
one end of a spectrum of antiportraiture in which the focus is not
primarily on faces as objects of representation but on contesting
the process of facial recognition in viewers. Perhaps Chiang’s use
of the print medium to reflect on visual perception makes it easier
for him to distinguish between the persistence of facial features
and the removal of the capacity to recognize them as beautiful;
nevertheless, that distinction seems to me to be a productive way
of interpreting the difference between contemporary antiportrai-
ture and modernist abstraction. Like Chiang’s story, these images
mark attempts to document a shift in the conditions of represen-
tation itself, with the face functioning as an index to the “natu-
ralness” of identity types, or their lack thereof. In other words,
these images call attention to the condition of technicity as I have
defined it.

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The utopian claims made for the calliagnosia procedure in

“Liking What You See” suggest an answer to the question Firsten-
berg poses when she asks what a photography that undoes the racial
typology of the colonial archive would look like.51 Chiang’s story
might be read as an attempt to imagine such an antitypological
visual culture of everyday life. Another way of using the story, though,
would be to consider how it supports Fusco’s comments about the
need to break down the opposition between race and beauty to
reveal how the experience of aestheticized visual pleasure depends
on disavowed colonial and racial frameworks, in which beauty be-
comes racialized only through techniques of exoticism and primi-
tivism, or through the “exaltation of the racial other’s beauty.”52 If
we could manipulate our brains as Chiang’s story imagines, would
induced calliagnosia have any effect on racialized ways of seeing
and the pleasure we have learned to take in the consumption of
racial imagery? The story implies that these kinds of technologies
could only produce raceblindness or neutrality if race were a purely
“natural” phenomena, while leaving racial perceptions untouched if
race were just a cultural construction. Ultimately, though, the story
implies that either interpretation of race is unduly reductive.
One of the recurrent speakers in Chiang’s story is a neu-
rologist, who explains what the calliagnosia technology cannot do,
which includes producing a blindness to “race or ethnicity.” Accord-
ing to this character, the calliagnosia procedure inspired attempts
to try to achieve not only aesthetic leveling but also “an analogous
condition” of raceblindness by “impairing various levels of category
discrimination in tandem with face recognition.” Yet these attempts
only succeeded in making subjects perceive everyone they saw as a
family member, as possessing a facial likeness to themselves.53 The
neurologist explains this failure by defining racial categorization
as mental content rather than as an evolved “natural specialization”
(304). In other words, race is just an idea, not a material, embodied
phenomenon. At this point in the story, then, race and ethnicity
are explicitly presented as secondary, “only cultural” and historical
phenomena, in contrast to the more universal and fundamental
structural features of human cognition developed during the deep
time of natural selection. The neurologist’s comment that there

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is no neural circuitry specifically designed to handle “resentment

toward immigrants, any more than there’s one for Marxist doctrine
or foot fetishism” treats all these practices as comparable mental
content rooted in particular forms of socialization and cultural
peculiarity (304). We have seen the roots of this type of argument
in sociobiological theory like Tooby and Cosmides’s. Even as they
break down the distinction between nature and culture, they also
establish a new basis for remapping and reasserting that distinction
as the neurologist does here, in a disavowal of the more radical
implications I have tried to locate within evolutionary psychology
(following the lead of Chiang’s story).
The assertion by Chiang’s neurologist that perceptions of
race cannot be manipulated technically or scientifically is simi-
larly tied to an earlier sociobiological explanation of calliagnosia
offered in the story. Calliagnosia, we are told, targets an “absolute”
or universally cross-cultural “idea of a beautiful face” (283; note the
contradiction in defining race as untouchable because it is the con-
tent of a thought and defining “a beautiful face” as an “idea” rather
than a natural given or a built-in neural disposition). As a result, the
neurologist explicitly argues that as natural ways of seeing become
manipulable, cultural values become more entrenched. Calliag-
nosics, he points out, “are not blind to fashion or cultural standards
of beauty” (284; emphasis original); they note but do not immedi-
ately evaluate them. But a careful reading of the story’s details will
detect plenty of evidence that features often taken as racial markers
are included among those whose evaluation is bracketed by the
calliagnosia procedure. The first example offered is that calliagno-
sia will not keep you from noticing that some people are wearing
black lipstick, only from evaluating whether it makes them prettier
than people who are not; the implication thus seems clear that the
procedure might well affect the racial perceptions of anyone who
pays attention to natural rather than just to artificial distinctions of
skin color, such as lip shades. A later example of what calliagnosia
cannot affect is cultural stigma: “If everyone around you sneers at
people with broad noses,” for instance, calliagnosia or no, “you’ll
pick up on that” (284). While supposedly presented in race-neutral
terms, the scenario echoes the traditions of comparative anatomy.

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Read in this way, the example actually shows how racism is more
persistent and harder to change than norms of beauty because race
is a cultural construct rather than a natural fact. Such a reading is
only the flip side of the character DeSouza’s political claim that,
without calliagnosia (that is, in the real world that readers of the
story occupy), lookism is in fact more fundamental than racism. In
interviews, Chiang himself has endorsed this reading, suggesting
that it is easier to imagine a world without racism than it is to imag-
ine one without a preference for beauty. On one level, this kind of
statement emphasizes that his story should be read as a reflection
on the complex interactions and asymmetries between gender,
desire, and race. On another level, the story subtly undermines the
sociobiological distinction that the neurologist character implicitly
makes between race as defined by superficial cultural differences
and gender and sexual differences as more fundamental reproduc-
tive factors, therefore embedded in what Tooby and Cosmides call
the evolved “programming structures of our minds.”54
The question the story goes on to raise is whether it is so
easy to distinguish the content of our thoughts from the biologi-
cal structures that allow us to have them, to distinguish “natural”
from “cultural” factors determining how we recognize what we see.
Recognition seems to name a third, hybrid term that falls between
ideas and seeing, between mental content and evolved neural dis-
positions or circuits, between apperceptive and associative agno-
sias. I would suggest that “Liking What You See” indicates that this
distinction applies to racial perceptions and representations.
From this perspective, we might pay special attention to the
“absolute markers” of beautiful faces that, in Chiang’s story, all
people supposedly have a built-in disposition to recognize. The
neurologist character cites “clear skin” or “good skin” as the most
obvious universal trait of beauty,55 and the potential ambiguity
between good, clear skin and skin color is suggested later when
the neurologist discusses the relation of calliagnosia to perceptions
of “skin tone” (315). The other universal traits cited in the story
are symmetry and facial proportions. The neurologist notes that
“we tend to be attracted to facial proportions that are close to the
population mean,” an indicator of “genetic health,” and he then

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admits that the specific character of this mean “obviously depends

on the population you’re part of” (284). The word population is here
used as if it were an “obviously” natural set of genetic distinctions.
The term therefore functions as a way of rescuing broad racial dis-
tinctions from the scientific challenges posed by developments like
the Human Genome Project, as Troy Duster has argued is often
the case in the discourse of genetic medicine, which uses the term
population to mark differences in susceptibility but often falls into
the temptation to map “inherited genetic disorders” onto “inher-
ited social orders” such as race.56 By referencing such discourses,
“Liking What You See” problematizes the sociobiological premise
that the natural perception of facial beauty can be sharply distin-
guished from the cultural perception of racial difference.
However, I also want to emphasize the implications of the
language of symmetry, proportions, and means. These terms effectively
mediate between physical features and cultural interpretations;
they meaningfully organize or preorganize visual perceptions of
bodies or faces, but they are still partially descriptive rather than
prescriptive. As such, Chiang’s use of these terms, especially viewed
in relation to traditions of African American antiportraiture, sug-
gests how facial recognition is linked to what I would follow Scott
McCloud in describing as “iconic abstraction.” McCloud coins this
term to conceptualize the implications of cartooning as a visual
style in comics, which he defines as combining both an aesthetic
and a communicative or rhetorical side. “Pictorial icons,” McCloud
argues, differ from nonpictorial ones in that the meaning of picto-
rial icons is not “fixed and absolute,” to the extent that pictorial
icons are neither purely abstract representations of ideas nor purely
mimetic representations of a preexisting object or person; their
“meaning is fluid and variable” according to the “varying degrees”
to which they “differ from ‘real-life.’ ” (Iconic abstraction differs
from aesthetic abstraction because the process of abstraction is
functionally communicative — that is, iconic abstraction makes
pictures signify, rather than emphasizing the sensual qualities
of the artist’s materials themselves. As McCloud puts it, the more
such pictorial icons are “abstracted from ‘reality,’ ” the more they
come to resemble words.)57 I might note that this theory of how

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comics do not just juxtapose visual imagery against written text

but internally hybridize the visual and the textual (with the lat-
ter often functioning as an element of the overall panel or page
composition) is especially relevant to a text like Chiang’s, which
poses a question about the relation between its written form and its
visual thematics. McCloud’s theory of the hybrid nature of comics,
moreover, depends on retaining a tension between the visual and
the textual. As examples of iconic abstractions, cartoons combine a
conceptual and ideological component with a “sensual” and physi-
cal one (40 – 41), so that such icons can be radically simplified or
abstract and still remain recognizable. As classically demonstrated
in the work of Rudolph Arnheim, specifically in his reflection on
the minimal amount of line work (a circle and two dots) that view-
ers will still recognize, the great example of such an icon is the
human face (29, 41).
The neurologist in Chiang’s story grounds his claims for the
universality of the recognition of facial beauty in a set of features
that more closely resemble McCloud’s pictorial icons than actual
faces, and the resemblance resides in the hybrid or mixed charac-
ter of those pictorial icons. Symmetry and proportion as defined by
population means, for instance, possess the curious quality of being
only partially abstracted from the empirical particularity of faces,
so that these norms are determined neither entirely by physical
anatomy nor by cultural ideas and frameworks. Such iconic abstrac-
tions remain accountable and responsive to material embodiment,
while that materiality is mediated and opened to variable meanings
and contestations. This conceptual/sensual hybridity offers a use-
ful framework for thinking about the potential effects on visual
practice of the shifts in the meanings of culture and nature that I
have associated with technicity, and it returns us to the question of
these shifts’ effects on racial formations. In McCloud’s work, his
characterization of cartooning and iconic abstraction as a hybrid-
ization of idea and materiality is explicitly intended to offset the
more dominant interpretation of cartooning as a simplification
and therefore a distortion or corruption of reality. As applied to
racial representation, iconic abstraction as simplification results in
racial stereotypes such as the Sambo figures and the comic Irish-

on 25 November 2018
men so prominent in early newspaper comic strips, where iconic

abstraction denaturalizes racialized features in the interest of reify-
ing that same difference. The hybridization of idea and materiality
that McCloud locates in iconic abstraction, however, also suggests
more critical possibilities.58
To clarify both the dangers and the promise of racial iconic-
ity, and to make the racial subtexts of Chiang’s “Liking What You
See” more legible, I want to briefly refer to some other examples
of the appropriation of antiportraiture techniques for purposes of
racial representation by African American visual artists. In what
sense, for instance, is race “about face,” to reference the title of
Fred Wilson’s paired photos of racist kitsch objects, such as Sambo
or mammy images, with one object intact and one at least partially
defaced? These 1995 photos are often read as being ironic com-
mentaries on museum collection practices, but they also involve
a self-conscious play with the minimal visual markers needed to
recognize a face as a racist stereotype or vice versa. In this latter
reading, the photos suggest that race can structure the most basic
forms of iconicity, visual closure, and facial or pattern recognition
in an implicit commentary on Arnheim’s work. For Wilson, facial
icons are not more basic than racial figurations. Wilson’s refram-
ing of racist kitsch objects foregrounds the “play between corpo-
real objectification and anthropomorphization of the object,” as
Firstenberg puts it, where racialization operates as a double cross-
ing of the boundary between nature and culture, between objecti-
fied body and personified object.59 I would take this formulation
further to argue that Wilson’s art is about the ambivalent effects of
race as a simultaneous process of materialization and abstraction.
The question “About Face II” poses to viewers is the same ques-
tion that Chiang’s story poses: what happens to race or ethnicity
when fetishized visual images of racial difference are defaced or,
in Chiang’s case, detached from value judgments and processes of
aesthetic evaluation? Is the stereotypical racial perception undone
or not? If not, how do we explain its persistence? If so, does undo-
ing the stereotypical perception also make race disappear? What
materiality do these images of a black face possess, given that this
materiality is clearly not unmediated or natural? This concern

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with materiality stands in contradiction to contemporary techno-

scientific tendencies to dismiss race as only cultural. Glenn Ligon’s
“Self-Portrait Exaggerating My Black Features/Self-Portrait Exag-
gerating My White Features” (1998) — a photographic diptych that
reproduces the same life-size photo of Ligon, each captioned with
one of the racial labels that provides his title — poses a similar set
of questions.60 Rather than reading Ligon’s work as a call for color
blindness with respect to race, it might instead be read both as
a satirical comment on visual processes of iconic abstraction as
productive of racial differences and color lines and as dramatizing
the value of the fluidity and variability that such processes also
have the potential to generate in the space between nature and
culture, visual image and written label. It is precisely this space
that Chiang’s story tries to locate, against the expert discourse of
the neurologist character.
To conclude, I read Chiang’s story as putting into play two
distinct versions of technicity: the simple inversion of nature and
culture that Sedgwick identifies and a more fundamental displace-
ment of the two categories that treats them as interdependent. Yet
by foregrounding these ambiguities about whether it is possible to
deidealize the face as icon and as a form of recognition, the story
also intervenes in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s critique of
faciality — for instance, their claim that “the face is produced only
when” it “ceases to be coded by the body, when it ceases to have a
multi-dimensional, polyvocal corporeal code.”61 The persistence
of racial and ethnic differences in “Liking What You See” suggests
a different relation to this critique of the face as an index of a
generalized or univocal humanity, a relation more inflected by the
project that Ralph Ellison defines, in which James Joyce’s desire to
create the uncreated conscience of his (Irish) race is rewritten as
the need to create “the uncreated features of his face.”62 The word
uncreated, I would argue, is synonymous with invisibility in Ellison’s
novel. It is not that the “uncreated” face never existed; instead, it
has been rendered uncreated or deliberately effaced. The project
of creation then implies a dual necessity: to materialize or make
visible these features and to make them intelligible or abstract their

on 25 November 2018
meaning from the facticity of the physical. It is this duality that

Winant theorizes as racial formation — both idealization or abstrac-
tion and materiality, both constructedness and facticity — and that
I articulated through McCloud’s definition of iconic abstraction.
Technocultural inversions of the meanings of nature and culture, I
have argued, contain the possibility of producing this same duality,
and Chiang’s “Liking What You See” locates both these inversions
in the technological disruption of sociobiological assumptions
about the relation between gender and race.
Notes
1. Jon K. Maner, Matthew T. Gailliot, D. Aaron Rouby, and Saul

L. Miller, “Can’t Take My Eyes off You: Attentional Adhesion to
Mates and Rivals,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 93
(2007): 289 – 401. For the origin of the phrase “sexually selective
cognition,” see Jon K. Maner, Douglas T. Kenrick, D. Vaughn
Becker, Andrew W. Delton, Brian Hofer, Christopher J. Wilbur,
and Steven L. Neuberg, “Sexually Selective Cognition: Beauty
Captures the Mind of the Beholder,” Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology 85 (2003): 1107 – 20.
2. On the centrality of the naturalization effect to ideology, with

nature defined in contrast to history, see Stuart Hall, “The
Problem of Ideology: Marxism without Guarantees,” in Stuart
Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed. David Morley and
Kuan-Hsing Chen (New York: Routledge, 1996), 33.
3. The term prosopagnosia was coined in a report written by a

German doctor, Joachim Bodamer, in 1947, based on a case
of shrapnel damage to the brain. Bodamer is the source of the
distinction between the ability to see or perceive facial features
and the inability to recognize them as belonging to a particular
person. M. Szpir, “Accustomed to Your Face,” American Scientist 80
(1992): 537 – 39.
4. Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana

University Press, 1989), 16.
5. Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life and Others (New York: Tor, 2002),
283.

on 25 November 2018
6. See David Swanger, “Mrs. Brown’s Prefrontal Cortex: The

Promise of Hard Character SF,” New York Review of Science Fiction,
no. 136 (1999): 7 –10. Chiang has a degree in computer science
from Brown University and has worked in the industry in Seattle,
describing himself as primarily a technical writer doing software
documentation and an “occasional science fiction writer.”
Chiang has become famous in the field for a series of short
stories that work across different types of speculative writing.
For background information on Chiang, see the interview, “Ted
Chiang: Science, Language, and Magic,” Locus, August 2002,
6 – 7, 75; the interview with Lou Anders, “A Conversation with
Ted Chiang,” July 2002, SF Site, www.sfsite.com/09b/tc136.htm;
and the interview with Jeremy Smith, “The Absence of God: An
Interview with Ted Chiang,” Infinity Plus, www.infinityplus.co
.uk/nonfiction/inttchiang.htm (accessed 24 September 2007).
7. Chiang, Stories of Your Life, 289 – 90.
8. Compare to William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace,

1984), specifically to the description of a cyborg bartender
whose “ugliness was the stuff of legend” in the “age of affordable
beauty” in which the novel takes place (4).
9. Joshua Davis, “Face Blind,” Wired, November 2006, 199.
10. Davis focuses on the work of Brad Duchaine, a major proponent

of the argument that prosopagnosia can only be explained
by the existence of specialized brain structures for facial
recognition. Building on the famous case study of Bill Choisser, a
gay man who is the author of the self-published autobiographical
narrative Face Blind! (available online at www.choisser.com/
faceblind; last revised 1 January 2002), Duchaine tends to
interpret prosopagnosia more broadly than Bodamer, as a
general condition of faceblindness, a perceptual problem rather
than one of recognition only. Duchaine argues for the existence
of developmental prosopagnosia, an inherited condition. This
latter category includes cases of “double dissociation” (the ability
to perceive one aspect of people’s facial features, but not others,
such as perceiving gender but not skin color, or vice versa), which
Duchaine argues indicate that it is possible to identify further
subsets of visual processing in the brain, devoted to attributes
such as gender or skin color.

on 25 November 2018
For a more complex treatment of the relation between racial

and ethnic difference, ideologies of raceblindness, and facial
recognition processes, see the Web site AllLookSame (www
.alllooksame.com). For an analysis of this site, see Lisa Nakamura,
“Alllooksame? Mediating Visual Cultures of Race on the Web,”
in Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 70 – 94.
11. Davis, “Face Blind,” 202. For another literary response to these
ideas, see Richard Powers, The Echo Maker (New York: Farrar,
Strauss, and Giroux, 2006), in which one of the main characters
develops Capgras syndrome, a form of neurological damage
that renders him unable to recognize family or close friends. He
perceives the similarity in facial features but, unable to close the
gap from similarity to identity, remains convinced that they are
impostors (see 148 – 49 on connections to prosopagnosia).
12. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1990), 41, 43. Other examples
of this argument might include Bruno Latour, We Have Never
Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1993), 10 –12, on forms of technoscientific
hybridity that precede the nature/culture opposition; Susan
Oyama, Evolution’s Eye: A Systems View of the Biology-Culture Divide
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), which treats
developmental systems as an alternative to either genetic or
environmental determinisms; and Paul Rabinow, Essays on the
Anthropology of Reason (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1996), esp. chap. 5, on the shift “from sociobiology to
biosociality” in biotechnology. See also Elizabeth Ann Wilson,
Neural Geographies: Feminism and the Microstructure of Cognition
(New York: Routledge, 1998), for a feminist analysis of the
implications of new neurological technologies and cognitive
science research.
13. In “Liking What You See,” one character critiques calliagnosia as

a “technological shortcut” (Chiang, Stories of Your Life, 293).
14. Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures, 16.
15. Allucquère Rosanne Stone, The War of Desire and Technology at the
Close of the Mechanical Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 36.

on 25 November 2018
16. Lisa Nakamura, Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the

Internet (New York: Routledge, 2002), 43, 47.
17. John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, “The Psychological Foundations

of Culture,” in The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the
Generation of Culture, ed. Jerome H. Barkow, Cosmides, and Tooby
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 89.
18. For critiques of the concept of hardwiring, see Daniel C.

Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991),
200; and Thomas Foster, The Souls of Cyberfolk: Posthumanism as
Vernacular Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2005), 22 – 27.
19. Davis, “Face Blind,” 201. In Face Blind! (see n. 10), Bill Choisser
attributes his homosexuality to his difficulty in distinguishing
people’s faces.
20. Chiang, Stories of Your Life, 304.
21. Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color
Line (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 42 – 43.
Compare this to Nakamura’s question, “Where does race go
when Asian-American and African-American users log on? Does
it disappear?” (Nakamura, Cybertypes, 54).
22. See Howard Winant, “The Theoretical Status of the Concept

of Race,” in Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self,
ed. Coco Fusco and Brian Wallis (New York: Abrams, 2003), 52;
and Howard Winant, The New Politics of Race: Globalism, Difference,
Justice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 169.
23. Winant, New Politics, 169.
24. See Sedgwick, Epistemology, 42, for the argument that the
relegation of identity categories to the domain of the “merely
cultural” risks promoting a eugenic and even genocidal fantasy
of the elimination of difference (for her, homosexuality).
Compare this to the suspicion that constructivist theories play
into the disembodying impulse N. Katherine Hayles locates in
the disciplines of cybernetics and information theory in Hayles,
How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature,
and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999),
192 – 93.

on 25 November 2018
25. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 18.
26. Jennifer González, “Morphologies: Race as Visual Technology,”

in Fusco and Wallis, Only Skin Deep, 391 – 92; and Beth Coleman,
qtd. ibid., 391.
27. This essay is part of a larger work on ethnicity and technicity in

which I situate Chiang’s fiction in relation to an archive of work
by other science fiction writers of color, including an emergent
body of fiction by such Asian American women writers as Mary
Soon Lee, Larissa Lai, Yoon Ha Lee, and Eugie Foster. In
this book, I will also examine how the question of alternative
technicities is treated from a number of different ethnic and
racial perspectives.
28. On critical posthumanism in relation to Hayles’s analysis of the

tendency for network societies to privilege information over
materiality, see Bart Simon, “Introduction: Toward a Critique of
Posthuman Futures,” Cultural Critique 53 (2003): 8.
29. Winant, “Theoretical Status,” 51. The scientific version of

this narrative is a shift from race to the more permeable
category of “populations” and then to the codification and
instrumentalization of the human genome. See Donna J.
Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan©_Meets
_Oncomouse™ (New York: Routledge, 1997), 210, 236.
30. The connection between Chiang’s calliagnosia procedure

and cyberpunk conventions is suggested by Bruce Sterling’s
definition of cyberpunk in terms of themes of “mind invasion”;
see Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology,
ed. Sterling (New York: Ace, 1988), xiii.
31. David Tomas, “Old Rituals for New Space: Rites de Passage and
William Gibson’s Cultural Model of Cyberspace,” in Cyberspace:
First Steps, ed. Michael Benedikt (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1991), 45 – 46; David Tomas, “The Technophilic Body:
On Technicity in William Gibson’s Cyborg Culture,” in The
Cybercultures Reader, ed. David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy
(New York: Routledge, 2000), 176. All quotations are taken from
the last of these essays.
32. Tomas, “Technophilic Body,” 176, 186.

on 25 November 2018
33. Coco Fusco, The Bodies That Were Not Ours and Other Writings
(New York: Routledge, 2001), xvi.
34. On the concept of smart mobs, see Howard Rheingold, Smart

Mobs: The Next Social Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Perseus, 2002),
x, xii, xiii. On the phenomenon’s practice in the Philippines, see
Vicente L. Rafael, “The Cell Phone and the Crowd: Messianic
Politics in the Contemporary Philippines,” Public Culture 15
(2003): 399 – 425.
35. Tomas, “Technophilic Body,” 185.
36. For another analysis of representations of multicultural urban

life in the future, see Nakamura, Cybertypes, 61 – 85.
37. Tomas, “Technophilic Body,” 185. This problem of analogies

between cyborg and racialized bodies has been critiqued by
Malini Johar Schueller, “Analogy and (White) Feminist Theory:
Thinking Race and the Color of the Cyborg Body,” Signs 31
(2005): 63 – 92. See also my analysis in Foster, Souls of Cyberfolk,
55 – 56.
38. The image might also be read in relation to Rachel C. Lee and
Sau-ling Cynthia Wong’s critique of a tendency in which Asian
or Asian American identities are constructed less in terms of
“externally imposed” racial or bodily markers of difference and
more in terms of technical skills and access to economic capital
(Lee and Wong, eds., AsianAmerica.Net: Ethnicity, Nationalism, and
Cyberspace [New York: Routledge, 2003], xiv).
39. George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White

People Profit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 1998).
40. Fusco, Bodies, xvi.
41. Stuart Hall, “New Ethnicities,” in Morley and Chen, Stuart Hall,
446.
42. Coco Fusco, “Racial Time, Racial Marks, Racial Metaphors,” in

Fusco and Wallis, Only Skin Deep, 34.
43. See also Stuart Hall, “The Meaning of New Times,” in Morley
and Chen, Stuart Hall, 237.

on 25 November 2018
44. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 10 –12. See John Brockman,
ed., The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1996), for claims about the emergence of a
“third culture” exemplifying this same hybridity. For a critique of
Brockman, see Slavoj Žižek, “Cultural Studies versus the ‘Third
Culture,’ ” South Atlantic Quarterly 101 (2002): 22.
46. For examples of this kind of analysis, see Allan Sekula, “The
Body and the Archive,” October 39 (1986): 3 – 64; and Robyn
Wiegman, American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995).
48. Edward Steichen, The Family of Man (New York: Museum of

Modern Art, 1955). On Steichen’s ethnographic fetishism, see
Haraway, Modest_Witness, 242 – 43.
49. Lauri Firstenberg, “Autonomy and the Archive in America:

Reexamining the Intersection of Photography and Stereotype,”
in Fusco and Wallis, Only Skin Deep, 317, 320 – 21.
50. See also González, “Morphologies,” 385.
51. Firstenberg, “Autonomy,” 333.
52. Fusco, “Racial Time,” 17, 20, 21.
54. Tooby and Cosmides, “Psychological Foundations,” 89.
56. Troy Duster, Backdoor to Eugenics, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge,
2003), 3 – 20.
57. Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art

(Northampton, MA: Tundra Publishing, 1993), 28, 49.
58. This argument about iconic abstraction, processes of facial

recognition, and racial difference might be extended to the field
of biometric informatics and facial recognition software. For a
strong critique of the ideological celebration of such software
for its objectivity and freedom from the cultural biases of visual

on 25 November 2018
perception and racial profiling, see Wendy Hui Kyong Chun,

Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 265. Chun points out that
belief in such claims is often grounded in the conviction that
facial recognition software matches individual faces to unique,
identifying photos in digital archives. The software, however,
does not function at that level of empirical observation but
instead in a more mediated way, through the classification of
faces in terms of mathematical proportions or eigenface vectors,
comparable to iconic abstractions (263). On a more general
level, this discussion of iconic abstraction might be compared to
Bernadette Wegenstein’s claim that digital media replace “the
body’s absence with . . . iconic presence” (Wegenstein, Getting
under the Skin: The Body and Media Theory [Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2006], 148 – 49).
59. Firstenberg, “Autonomy,” 321. For a more thoroughly

contextualized analysis of Wilson’s work, see Jennifer González,
“Against the Grain: The Artist as Conceptual Materialist,” in Fred
Wilson: Objects and Installations 1979 – 2000, ed. Maurice Berger
(Baltimore: Center for Art and Visual Culture, 2001), 23 – 25, 31.
60. Fusco and Wallis, Only Skin Deep, 318.
61. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism

and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1987), 170. Mark B. N. Hansen’s comments
on the emptiness of the raced image in digital art apply this
aspect of Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis of faciality directly
to issues of racial representation, without considering whether
racial histories orient subjects differently to the icon of the face.
See Hansen, Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media (New
York: Routledge, 2006), 172. Hansen in fact argues that African
American examples of new media art succeed only by exposing
“the emptiness of the (visible) raced image” and that “the
subjects targeted by . . . racist techniques can only misrecognize
themselves in the images that, for this reason, manage all the
more effectively to exert their violence upon them” (172). The
appropriate response to such a situation, Hansen argues, is
for African American artists to abandon visible raced images
entirely, in favor of “a collective individuation rooted in the

on 25 November 2018
exposure of the affective basis of life” (173). The African

American examples of antiportraiture I cite in the body of this
essay seem to me to represent attempts to inhabit, however
uncomfortably or critically, these “empty” or abstract and iconic
“raced images.”
62. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1948; New York: Vintage, 1980),
354.
Thomas Foster is a professor of English at the University of

Washington, Seattle, and the author of The Souls of Cyberfolk:
Posthumanism as Vernacular Theory (2005). He formerly served as the
director of the Cultural Studies Program at Indiana University, where
he was also an adjunct professor in the cognitive science program.
A multicultural city of the future in Blade Runner

(dir. Ridley Scott, US, 1982)

on 25 November 2018

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“The New Face of the Silicon Age.

” Wired magazine cover,

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This essay focuses on how processes of visual recognition and

Camera Obscura 70, Volume 24, Number 1

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for this reconceptualization of vision in interdisciplinary cognitive

Sexually Selective Cognition and Visual Pleasure

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whether human beings have evolved specialized brain circuitry or

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physical beauty constitute a way of seeing, knowing, and judging

Destroying Visual Pleasure; or, “Liking What You See”

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innocent act of aesthetic enjoyment masks interpretive processes

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to the visual processing of faces” and that “we” have evolved to

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as a problem (282). Proponents of calliagnosia argue that it consti-

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Faceblindness and Raceblindness:

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also appear in some of the medical research on prosopagnosia:

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proves attractive precisely because biology is increasingly perceived

Technosociality and Sociobiology

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emergence of denaturalized and normative — rather than pro-

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well — that is, recognizably human life manifesting a wide array of forms

Onto the distinctions between evolutionary and historical time

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mechanisms of a supposedly heterosexual and reproductive attrac-

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Like Maner’s research, Chiang’s story assumes that concrete neural

Race and Recognition

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This possibility moves in the direction of Howard Winant’s

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that might mitigate the link between materiality and essentialism

Ethnicity and Technicity:

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initially tries to argue that technicity, as a technological redefinition

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are obviously no longer organized in relation to the human body,

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tity, the unnaturalness of its articulation with this particular body

Cyborg Nature/Cyborg Culture

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lead to a fantasy of a “postidentity era” in which “any mention of

The (Im)Materiality of Vision and Race

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outrage at what was interpreted as a kind of virtual assault. In fact,

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cally presume we can improve on nature” (316 –17). Here, nature

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difference between the theme of visual perception or its techno-

Facial Misrecognition and Racial Antiportraiture

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diversity and/or identity that The Family of Man had purported

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The utopian claims made for the calliagnosia procedure in

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