Room without Room

Not only is it weirdly hard to evaluate what you yourself look like ... but it turned out that consumers’ instinctively skewed self-perception, plus vanity-related stress, meant that they began preferring and then outright demanding videophone masks that were really quite a lot better-looking than they themselves were in person. High-def mask-entrepreneurs were ready and willing to supply not just verisimilitude but aesthetic enhancement. — David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (148) To combat the physical and emotional effects of Zoom Face, “cosmetic injectables ... give a natural, rejuvenated appearance.” — Stacey Leasca, Forbes (quoting medical aesthetician Gabby Garritano) Technological forms of life are disembedded, they are somehow “lifted out”. As lifted out, they take on increasingly less and less the characteristic of any particular place, and can be any place or indeed no place. This lifted-out space of placelessness is ... characterised not so much by a multiple of identities, but by an absence of identity. Its context is no context at all ... . In all cases, social interaction is on a different level from ordinary forms of life. — Scott Lash, Critique of Information (21) Introduction: Communication-Image To zoom, in its original verb form, describes a decisive movement of a body through space, as in the abrupt upward climb of an aircraft, or a modulation of the space between two bodies, as in the play between the film camera and its subject (“Zoom”). The term carries connotations of speed, distance, proximity; it is suffused with kinetic energy and intensified affection. Zoom, Inc.—the pandemic era’s prevailing video communications platform—inverts these received senses of the word, as it liquidates the body, prunes away affective charge, and promotes an insipid aesthetic of atomised talking heads, rigid grids, noise suppression, and facile customisation. Along the way, the screen experience becomes increasingly dominated by a preponderance of talk. As we acclimate more to the look and feel, and to the attendant routines of working and learning and socialising from home, the platform refashions the screen from an aesthetic surface to a channel of multimodal communication, from a vehicle for the circulation of affect to one for the circulation of verbal, visual, and text-based information. This essay takes aim at Zoom in its principle, normative form, as enterprise software developed for professional and educational uses. The ensuing critique is thus not directed at art and craft adoptions, at hobbyists, or at the many creative, experimental, or otherwise alternative deployments of the software. Rather, in enumerating some of the more numbing, oppressive features and effects of the Zoom standard, I hope to supply some basic benchmarks for what such alternative uses might strive for, beginning with a resuscitation of affect, embodiment, and aesthetic experience. For Massumi, affect derives from movements of and in the body, circumscribing a “real-material-but-incorporeal” dimension of experience (5). Affect studies, in turn, part ways with the “linguistic model” that had held sway over poststructuralist cultural theory for decades (Massumi 4). As a communications channel, Zoom dampens the affective dimension of any encounter, discouraging movement in its privileging of information exchange. (“Don’t ... walk around during the class meeting”, read a multitude of college and secondary school guidelines for Zoom etiquette.) With Shannon’s classic diagrammatic model of communication in mind, we could say, on Zoom, the bodies of sender and destination are forever obscured by the mechanisms of transmission and reception. The eclipse of aesthetics and embodied affect by information in the contemporary screenscape is hardly unique to Zoom, nor is it a particularly novel trend, but one whose genealogy harks back to film newsreels and broadcast television’s nightly news. It is akin to the way the podcast has in recent years captured much of the sonic attention that had once been disposed toward music listening, or to the way, with the adoption of the PC some four decades ago, the screen has become an at-home workspace. In a pandemic year, Zoom has for many become a quintessential mediator of synchronous interaction in both work and educational contexts. In mediating two or more speaking bodies, it also mediates our relationship with ourselves, as we see ourselves speaking more closely and more often than ever before. My approach in this essay draws on critical discourse analysis, affect theory, and science and technology studies to interrogate the standard Zoom experience and its disciplinary effects. My primary case study takes the shape of auto-ethnographic exposition of Zoom teaching in a university setting. Within this framework I probe the “technological forms of life” screened on Zoom (Lash 21)—the emerging behavioural and perceptual norms, and new forms of standardised experience manufactured by and through the platform. At work, in school, and in social life, Zoom has reorganised our habits and redesigned our capacities to experience and reflect on ourselves. Through its formal constraints and basic audio-visual setup, as well as through the common practices and etiquettes in effect for business and classroom usage, Zoom extends and intensifies many trends of our algorithmically mediated scopic field: a surge in self-reflection paired with a twin expulsion of otherness and environment; an occlusion of expressive and perceptive acts by rapidly accumulating instances of communication. Fulfilling David Foster Wallace’s 1996 premonition of a videophonic culture “spiral[ling] totally out of control”, Zoom has the power to monstrously augment modes, habits, and customs of self-reflection (148). It thus makes an archetypal communications medium for our age of extreme self-concern. My analysis of Zoom—as a ubiquitous “site” for social reproduction in the classic disciplinary spaces of the school and the workplace—reveals a suite of mutations around self-self, self-other, and self-environment relations, between my body and my sense of self, and between my body and the bodies of others (Foucault, Discipline 135–169). At stake is nothing short of how we organise and narrativise our lives and the space for spontaneity, otherness, equality, and bodily autonomy therein. In the specific constellation of powers and parameters of the standard Zoom experience—the fixed close-up on the face, the constraints on gesture, the stillness and frequent mute(d)ness, and, of course, the constant glitching—subjectivity is remade around diminished affective powers and ubiquitous self-reflection. From Talking Head to Glitching Gaze: The Dispositif of the Face At work, in school, and in many social settings, the communication-image on Zoom is typically an image of a face, a few faces side by side or nested one in the other’s frame, or an entire grid of faces. The Zoom standard exemplifies what in documentary cinema is known as the talking-head format: experts and eyewitnesses are interviewed on screen, framed typically from the shoulders up and set against a generic backdrop. Whether it is Edward R. Murrow on the CBS Evening News or Edward Snowden in Citizenfour, the interviewee, as talking head, projects authority and authenticity; in the Zoom room, we are all such talking heads. While facial expressions and mise-en-scène also contribute information, the prevailing emphasis remains on the discourse issued forth from the mouth on the face. Zoom generalises the talking-head format so that, particularly during pandemic lockdowns, all our conversations, lectures, and meetings look the same, and each of our interlocutors—whether a student taking a turn to talk in class, an eminent speaker at a conference, a colleague at work, or a friend in the throes of a nervous breakdown—speaks through the visual trappings of authenticity and expertise inherited from the documentary tradition. That, through a “picture-in-picture” format, we see ourselves commanding such authority may boost the ego, fuel neuroses, or both. In his seminar on the psychoses, Lacan locates the origins of psychotic delusion in a basic feature of the relationship between language and sensation: we hear ourselves speak and, even when not speaking aloud, we continue to “hear” our thoughts as if they are speech (Lacan 161–62). Zoom propagates a potent visual supplement to this phenomenon: not only do we hear ourselves speaking, but we see ourselves speaking, too. Although Lacan ridicules those who refuse to recognise the (typically) latent psychotic in themselves, my point is not that Zoom (along with similar video-chat apps that nest a mirrored self-image in the picture of the other) is making psychotics of us all; rather, as we grow more accustomed to this view, new dimensions and experiences of subjectivity open up. Our “self-view” becomes a constituent factor in the schema of the normative subjective. In describing the solipsistic state of public discourse after a decade of social media saturation, we commonly reach for terms like disinformation, alternative facts, and fake news. In its standard, most common usages, Zoom proffers an image of ourselves to match. The platform has positioned itself as the foremost expositor of what I call the dispositif of the face. I use dispositif in Jean-François Lyotard’s sense, as a setup or trap for libidinal drives, as well as in Foucault’s sense, as a “thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble” of architectures, visibilities, and propositions that metes out “history’s destruction of the body” (Lyotard, Dispositif 246; Lyotard, Libidinal 23–25; Foucault, “Confession” 194–95; Foucault, “Nietzsche” 148; Crano 3–8). A dispositif synchronises the coordination of libidinal, corporeal, and industrial production. On Zoom, the face functions as such a dispositif, as its form appears in uncompromising close-up and interminably multiplied, and as its promise sustains social harmony and economic efficiency through an extended public health crisis and waves of state-mandated isolation. In its disembodying and “disembedding” of communication (Lash 21), Zoom crystallises the iconicity of the face, and, while an iconised and overcoded face is perhaps as old as human civilisation itself, never before has the face—not the face of a queen or a tyrant or a god, but my face and your face and any face whatsoever—been exposed up close so often to so many people. The self-care industry has been quick to respond. Glamour describes how “excessive video conferencing can trigger damaging repercussions for our mental health and our body image” and offers a series of predictable tips to stay positive and put on your best “Zoom face” (Turner). Similarly, with special attention to body-dysmorphic disorder, Vogue reports on “how staring at our faces on Zoom, is impacting our self-image” (Valenti). In classrooms, students plead to keep their cameras off, and, while some may do so simply to mask their distractedness, it would not be unreasonable to take a preponderance of black screens as an index of increasing anxieties around being seen—and seeing ourselves speaking and seeing—in this way. Elsewhere in the self-care industry, one might even get a new face. The “aesthetic doctor” Sarah Hart explains: “the in the use of Zoom to a in facial ... Not only are more also ... . and are the features they would like to In the of the ubiquitous and might on the or of face. and even some are not to seeing each other’s faces this and, even this hardly to seeing each many are to Zoom Face for tips on a Forbes “how to look and your best on those constant video Although a few may so “cosmetic injectables like and are a place to or so one of the whose to in to the dimensions and of the face” might that this has to do with Zoom, that these and are simply the pandemic to their I this but it remains to the in discourse of a for self-image that we and social in of a Zoom the face in an and, in a it is only that some in this would to their face the by the and a context of and the of In this could hardly from the practices of and that typically to the novel of cultural While many the to be to play and I a the communication-image on Zoom, one to become more like as as by the promise of we out our and ourselves out (Lash ever more to our increasingly the has of the by communication technology and seeing the of and social media as so many of the and that and us in human in can we our and, its Zoom up short While “the that is the to one a verisimilitude with the their work with the and the Zoom a to and in the face. As dispositif, the face is and perhaps more than ever to or an of the a for the The for human communication is not that we see of the it is that we see and much of our As it the social and of Zoom a the a in the dispositif of the face. It is that we at what and in a different “the of how we look or our self-image no how or or our the platform any or between and This is in part in speaking and listening, I look at face and at the I can look like I making but to do so I look the This is commonly in professional to the camera is the of making this but is with its as we all My that I in not at as I the my The alternative is for to look at the other’s face, but like I making In one the might well that I at even it not look as if I in the I an to to to or perhaps with a of for their through the of the way, the is only ever and The is that, to Zoom, is for communication, no as part of the my might the of the it the or self-reflection. This a with all trappings of but nothing of the only in As a class, I the grid of faces on my screen, out of as if to what in an would As I those on the might my around my screen, perhaps to that I but this through an to of the than to my body through can be no between the I and the To the face of the acts as a on my and my otherwise for the of On Zoom, as the power of the the other’s of the powers well as the of the In the Zoom room, I but a head, framed in to the of and In the Zoom room, the no two or more bodies in my look not the but only and so the of self-reflection. My point is not simply to as the our experiences of and in more media for decades been on the powers of to the I see Zoom, in its standard to be the way. would do well to of the of a in communications technology a in Zoom can a and of but only so as we our for the transmission and the of the face. is Zoom, it is in its and I to Zoom, at a sustains the communication and to the and of at a it the of In the Zoom room, the is no all of get my nor the an to my of Zoom in what in social media culture more as “the expulsion of the The becomes less than out than in the way, their body of being my body might be the as Not not A that I do not as a A of that ... as it might been in an and life, as I take this to the of the body, the Zoom In work, as in the a and also to the of and that so hard on the of of my my and its As the the that The is a who the of my and my As I been this otherness is perhaps not but hard to by in the of your or my Zoom with each of us to our in the our bodies so that the between becomes the of our and our of Zoom I and to what students most The has to do with the that after class, a or a on the way out of the frequent has to do with the embodied of students I would in a the or the by or by or by as physical that are and at the and in between or a might or might even one of affect in terms of of the an for our the of experience that Zoom has us (5). A body through space is a body space and by its and In the experience of is space from a point of view, space affective body is in space, one makes an affective In space and distance, Zoom affect from the body and the body from the in the form of the face. While hardly in Zoom the of and and the of the and of the In the of the of the dispositif of the face, no between bodies can be the body from the from the and the classroom as as it is from the us from of with our is to our our of more one a colleague and up an exchange. grow increasingly one a or an in for discourse becomes increasingly so our in pandemic been to out a our to work and school remains are to a a a up the space of the in the form of the is from the This out of in life dampens cultural and libidinal all Zoom an as it communication while (Lash In a of its Zoom, the that its Zoom bodies and in the way of movement on The affective of the for can be but never as is no that be in the Zoom nothing is no or no to and nor of such (Massumi the face in the and the body at the toward stillness to noise and the communication. are the of the the and the constant of of of bodies in the the of and as students the talk before class, the of the of an or a the ubiquitous on Zoom is to our increasingly of might be to the the of to a by at (“Zoom”). In the stillness of the Zoom can be but an the of my in the and attendant to the and that take the place of experience. is in the way of as as “the to the and a of the subject and the the body” (Massumi In the my projects and in ways that are by the as I the of the or around the seminar I get a sense for my in part by the of my around the in of the not only I in but I also in place, the I or if I to my speech the the communication may sonic of the classroom my my to a space, and my others hear in more or less the way, but to their and in the The of the of a an a in the sonic body of In the place of the Zoom body is before the its to generic its movements to and spaces or the faces and from “lifted with noise and algorithmically In the of Zoom at a to the The body itself becomes the subject but is itself an nor an makes of the Zoom in and but what I been after are the standardised of experiences one has on the in the it for, and the of those experiences in the of It is to and to and the of power in the standard of I been of such alternative uses of the it is in the to the of ourselves affective in The that, with their “the of faces are if is any to the Zoom it is the the but and of and face. visual the of the the is no more than the is the and and faces the of experience of subject to and In the in the of when the image when a to the or when a out, or when you yourself keep speaking after only to that you are the one to these of the I to embodied experience a no the on the we see ourselves speaking as never but it is a of ourselves, a talking head, in the out of the a different body, and is this while it before and software more The a in the that the body as it aesthetics to communication and then to and The Zoom of the of the through increasingly communication of gesture, and The and discourse with a gesture, in a new body to ... speech one might ... has been only to As the with so the with the transmission of talking on of how the more between the and such extends to become of On Zoom, the and spontaneity, as it the transmission and an aesthetic the new forms of seeing and and and can to of in the of The of the and the and the of of Foucault, of the A and Foucault, Discipline and The of the and and to on Forbes The of the and from an to on Zoom Sarah Hart the and after as a of on The of The Leasca, “Zoom to on Forbes and on Lyotard, Libidinal Massumi, for the a of to The and A The On and from and from on in the of the The of in a Zoom to Our and Glamour at Our on Zoom Our Vogue Wallace, David Infinite A The

Architectural engineering · Living room · Digital Media and Philosophy · Engineering · Visual Culture and Art Theory