Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Thomas Foster
135
all students had undergone the same procedure, so that, for her,
calliagnosia is “natural,” and the perception of facial beauty has to
be produced by technological intervention. Tamera’s first act when
she goes to college is to have her calli turned off, and the story traces
her ambivalent response to her newfound capacity to distinguish
people aesthetically when she gets back into contact with her high
school boyfriend, who turns out not to be very attractive physically
by her new criteria of judgment. Despite that fact and the difficulty
Tamera has in adjusting to it, she ultimately ends up turning her
calli back on, in part as an attempt to reconcile with her “plain” ex-
boyfriend. Tamera is still able to distinguish between boys; under
the influence of calliagnosia, she simply cannot sort them by greater
or lesser degrees of facial beauty or attractiveness.
The second plotline follows the spokespersons for different
positions in the campus debates over the desirability of making cal-
liagnosia mandatory. These debates clearly refer, in displaced form,
to debates over campus date-rape legislation. Some of the key ques-
tions include whether the procedure deprives students of aesthetic
pleasure in the name of political correctness (292), or whether it
is a misdirected attempt to protect women that only undermines
their sexual agency and power and imposes a new form of self-
censorship (311, 314). One female student, who has had her nose
removed, argues that “calli is for wusses. My attitude is, fight back.
Go radical ugly. That’s what the beautiful people need to see. . . .
It’s about how ugly can beat beautiful at its own game” (312). Here,
body modification is contrasted to cognitive modification.8
not only does natural selection privilege frames of reference that reveal
patterns of universality in human life but our evolved psychological
architecture does also. . . . So . . . we arrive in the world not only
expecting, Geertzian fashion, to meet some particular culture about
whose specifically differentiated peculiarities we can know nothing in
advance. We also arrive expecting to meet, at one and the same time,
and in one and the same embodiment, the general human culture as
Typically, the term technicity is deployed to mark not just the
shift from race to ethnicity, from biological to cultural differences,
that Winant has critiqued, but also a further shift from ethnicity
to new forms of difference and belonging, from cultural differ-
ences to their technological denaturalization, a shift that either
proliferates new identity categories or tends toward the elimina-
tion of traditional categories entirely.29 Turning to examples of
how writers and artists of color have expropriated the conventions
of cyberpunk science fiction for purposes of racial representation
complicates this linear narrative of a move beyond, not against,
race (to try to reclaim Gilroy’s formulation). Chiang’s speculations
on calliagnosia as a cognitive prosthesis build on cyberpunk con-
ventions, while the story’s reflections on lookism’s complex relation
to racism moves cyberpunk concerns in a new direction.30
Tomas suggests how technicity should be understood as a
critique of ethnographic categorization schemes when he defines
technicity as a form of “post-organic anthropology,” capable of
moving beyond familiar self-other dialectics that keep difference
trapped in a specular model. He defines technicity as “processes of
technological differentiation.”31 For Tomas, these processes tend
to replace more traditional ideas of ethnicity (grounded in kin-
ship structures, religious affiliations, or shared geographical local-
ity) once new technologies become more central to defining who
counts as “one’s own kind” and what it means to form associations
with them.32 The argument here is that the recognition of shared
social bonds increasingly requires an explicit prior recognition of
a shared technological infrastructure or of operating systems that
enable (and have always enabled) such a sense of connectedness,
a prior recognition of interface compatibility: Are you a Mac or
PC person? Do you use a proprietary or an open-source operating
system, Windows or Linux or Ubuntu? Can you open that attach-
ment I sent you? That last question might be regarded as the most
banal expression of technicity, its opening wedge into the practices
of everyday life.
Tomas’s critique of anthropology and racial categorization,
however, tends toward their transcendence or elimination. Tomas
Read in this way, the example actually shows how racism is more
persistent and harder to change than norms of beauty because race
is a cultural construct rather than a natural fact. Such a reading is
only the flip side of the character DeSouza’s political claim that,
without calliagnosia (that is, in the real world that readers of the
story occupy), lookism is in fact more fundamental than racism. In
interviews, Chiang himself has endorsed this reading, suggesting
that it is easier to imagine a world without racism than it is to imag-
ine one without a preference for beauty. On one level, this kind of
statement emphasizes that his story should be read as a reflection
on the complex interactions and asymmetries between gender,
desire, and race. On another level, the story subtly undermines the
sociobiological distinction that the neurologist character implicitly
makes between race as defined by superficial cultural differences
and gender and sexual differences as more fundamental reproduc-
tive factors, therefore embedded in what Tooby and Cosmides call
the evolved “programming structures of our minds.”54
The question the story goes on to raise is whether it is so
easy to distinguish the content of our thoughts from the biologi-
cal structures that allow us to have them, to distinguish “natural”
from “cultural” factors determining how we recognize what we see.
Recognition seems to name a third, hybrid term that falls between
ideas and seeing, between mental content and evolved neural dis-
positions or circuits, between apperceptive and associative agno-
sias. I would suggest that “Liking What You See” indicates that this
distinction applies to racial perceptions and representations.
From this perspective, we might pay special attention to the
“absolute markers” of beautiful faces that, in Chiang’s story, all
people supposedly have a built-in disposition to recognize. The
neurologist character cites “clear skin” or “good skin” as the most
obvious universal trait of beauty,55 and the potential ambiguity
between good, clear skin and skin color is suggested later when
the neurologist discusses the relation of calliagnosia to perceptions
of “skin tone” (315). The other universal traits cited in the story
are symmetry and facial proportions. The neurologist notes that
“we tend to be attracted to facial proportions that are close to the
population mean,” an indicator of “genetic health,” and he then
Notes
5. Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life and Others (New York: Tor, 2002),
283.
11. Davis, “Face Blind,” 202. For another literary response to these
ideas, see Richard Powers, The Echo Maker (New York: Farrar,
Strauss, and Giroux, 2006), in which one of the main characters
develops Capgras syndrome, a form of neurological damage
that renders him unable to recognize family or close friends. He
perceives the similarity in facial features but, unable to close the
gap from similarity to identity, remains convinced that they are
impostors (see 148 – 49 on connections to prosopagnosia).
15. Allucquère Rosanne Stone, The War of Desire and Technology at the
Close of the Mechanical Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 36.
19. Davis, “Face Blind,” 201. In Face Blind! (see n. 10), Bill Choisser
attributes his homosexuality to his difficulty in distinguishing
people’s faces.
21. Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color
Line (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 42 – 43.
Compare this to Nakamura’s question, “Where does race go
when Asian-American and African-American users log on? Does
it disappear?” (Nakamura, Cybertypes, 54).
24. See Sedgwick, Epistemology, 42, for the argument that the
relegation of identity categories to the domain of the “merely
cultural” risks promoting a eugenic and even genocidal fantasy
of the elimination of difference (for her, homosexuality).
Compare this to the suspicion that constructivist theories play
into the disembodying impulse N. Katherine Hayles locates in
the disciplines of cybernetics and information theory in Hayles,
How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature,
and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999),
192 – 93.
31. David Tomas, “Old Rituals for New Space: Rites de Passage and
William Gibson’s Cultural Model of Cyberspace,” in Cyberspace:
First Steps, ed. Michael Benedikt (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1991), 45 – 46; David Tomas, “The Technophilic Body:
On Technicity in William Gibson’s Cyborg Culture,” in The
Cybercultures Reader, ed. David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy
(New York: Routledge, 2000), 176. All quotations are taken from
the last of these essays.
33. Coco Fusco, The Bodies That Were Not Ours and Other Writings
(New York: Routledge, 2001), xvi.
38. The image might also be read in relation to Rachel C. Lee and
Sau-ling Cynthia Wong’s critique of a tendency in which Asian
or Asian American identities are constructed less in terms of
“externally imposed” racial or bodily markers of difference and
more in terms of technical skills and access to economic capital
(Lee and Wong, eds., AsianAmerica.Net: Ethnicity, Nationalism, and
Cyberspace [New York: Routledge, 2003], xiv).
41. Stuart Hall, “New Ethnicities,” in Morley and Chen, Stuart Hall,
446.
44. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 10 –12. See John Brockman,
ed., The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1996), for claims about the emergence of a
“third culture” exemplifying this same hybridity. For a critique of
Brockman, see Slavoj Žižek, “Cultural Studies versus the ‘Third
Culture,’ ” South Atlantic Quarterly 101 (2002): 22.
46. For examples of this kind of analysis, see Allan Sekula, “The
Body and the Archive,” October 39 (1986): 3 – 64; and Robyn
Wiegman, American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995).
56. Troy Duster, Backdoor to Eugenics, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge,
2003), 3 – 20.
62. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1948; New York: Vintage, 1980),
354.