Heretical facial machines, or the ambivalence of faciality in the politics of digital dissent of Anonymous

Deploying heterogeneous media actions under a shared moniker is one of the key aspects of the digital resistances of Anonymous. The multiple-use name of Anonymous implies a radical, collective form of subjectivity that allows minor processes of subjectivation, guaranteeing the continual proliferation of differences (Deseriis). Accordingly, Anonymous connects to a longer lineage that had opposed the emergence of always-novel power relations, but this time confronting with the mass distribution of digital networks. Furthermore, Anonymous deploys its media resistances under a common face/mask, which signals the decisive involvement of processes of faciality in its active media resistances. The process of making (or ‘dis-making’) a face – or faciality (visage?ite?) – is a political affair, since despotisms hierarchically originate faces with the objective of separating from otherness and defining themselves (Deleuze and Guattari).The employment of a common visage – the white face with black moustaches – in Anonymous is a heretical stratagem. It is the attempt to turn around despotic facial machines without taking a reactive path that returns to pre-modern, idyllic collective facial traits. However, this is a very ambivalent process too: it allows the reformation of asymmetries, which are key to strike distributed power nodes, but it equally entails specific power relations, because the many forces at play are caught under one leading face. This paper discusses the politics of digital dissent of Anonymous arguing that its potency of active resistance resides precisely in the ambivalent attempt to originate a refraining point, a temporary crystallisation that stratagematically operates as a fixation of heterogeneous assemblages: a face/mask that allows the (un)stable manifestation and deployment of various media actions, a face/mask that is able to let multiplicity swarm and combine within the possible creative outputs that are continually originated.