My Father, The Outside, Technologies of Seeing: Notes Towards a Cabinet of Faces

This work is both an exploration of processes of facialization as well as an experiment in alternative methodologies for scholarship that lie at the fuzzy, leaking cross-sections of philosophy/theory & literature/lyric/creative writing. Through a combination of lyric, confessional autobiography; fragmented & associative arrangement of short sections; & interrogation of a variety of theoretical texts, I compose not so much an argument-as-such as a patchwork of conceptual & affective blocs that resonate alongside one another to present an experience of rupturous faciality. In particular, I turn toward a concept of the face that is both processual ([de-]facializations rather than a stable face) as well as rooted in a concept of rupture or effacement. I think through the face as a site of processes that undo a stable sense of self or other, allowing for a leakage between subjects that troubles & re-articulates the self as fluid, under construction, & contingent. This concept of faciality is (un)grounded with the principal interlocutors of Warwick Mules, Deleuze&Guattari, Reza Negarestani, & Bishnupriya Ghosh at the same time that it is produced through a poetry that contemplates the relationships that persist between myself & my face, my father & his face, myself & my father’s face, & the face-to-face relations that we have out in the world.