Media, affect and the face : biomediation and the political scene

The television screen, the photograph, the cinematic image are mirrors of the human self, mirrors that are caught up in national, global, and corporatised flows of information. Usually, media flows are theorised in fairly abstract terms that speak of technologies, audiences, information or communication environments. This paper attempts to contribute to these debates through consideration of a much more concrete, and perhaps unfamiliar, perspective: one that focuses on the transmission of affect in communication and that provides a context for thinking about affect in an evolutionary and biological context. We argue that media communicate through processes that are more than semiotic and cognitive. These processes rely on the appropriation of other aspects of the human organism, such as the face. On one level, they feed off the capacity of the human for affect (to affect and be affected); on another, they rely on the ability of technology to interface with the human through a process of biomediation. Eugene Thacker writes of biomedia as processes in which ‘biological components and process are informatically recontextualised for purposes that may be either biological or nonbiological’ (2003, p. 52). For us, all media are biomediations of the human