Face in silicon: otherness in the purist mirror of technology

Abstract

Contemporary times marked by technological purism, an aesthetic of objectivity, transparency, and algorithmic efficiency, distance themselves from the philosophical ethical proposal conceived by Levinas (2008). In this context, we observe that Levinasian ethics is disfigured by the logic of reducing the other to data, images, and profiles; the face, a symbol of ethical interpellation, becomes a flat reflection on the digital surfaces that mirror but do not embrace the infinite responsibility for the other. In this text, we start from the hypothesis that the logic of technological purism, analogous to cubism in art, by seeking pure and intelligible forms, promotes a type of sterilization of alterity, in which the other ceases to be an ethical appeal and becomes an object of reading, prediction, and algorithmic control. Such a process undermines the ethics of the face proposed by Levinas (2008) and intensifies the liquidity of human relationships already diagnosed by Bauman (2001). Thus, aligning three strands (i) the radical ethical otherness of Levinas (2008), (ii) technological purism as a development of a modern aesthetic thought (via cubism), and (iii) the anxieties of Bauman's liquid modernity, which presents society in a constant process of change while also retaining certain aspects. Thus, the discussion proposed in this article aims to break with the apparent neutrality of technology and investigate how it ethically affects the relationship with the other when it comes to otherness. Therefore, we consider that this infinite proximity (Levinas, 2008) serves as the starting point for the construction of ethical philosophy.