Masks: The Face between Bodies and Networks

Over the past year with increasing intensity an image has occupied the faces featured across media. From the Australian forest fires to the ongoing Covid-19 epidemic, a visual production of emergency, disease, epidemic containment, and security is materialised in a particular piece of protection: the mask. From gas masks to surgical masks, the covered mouth and nose has become a sign of affected bodies. In this short piece we trace the presences and functions of the masks that permeate our contemporary moment as a key proxy of cultural politics centred on the body. The mask articulates tensions between self and other, public and private, identification and obfuscation, contact and containment, inhabitability and uninhabitability, as well as contagion and immunity. The bans against the covered face in Europe are now giving way, acknowledging the medical necessity of covering the face. The emergent political stance to protect breathing must be set against a longer duration of measures of protection and harm, of breathing and denial of breath in ways that amplifies Achille Mbembe’s recent point about the long history of attacking the respiratory tract, having constrained “entire segments of the world population, entire races, to a difficult, panting breath and life of oppression.”[1] Thus, this text argues that it is through contexts of immunity and air – breathability – that we come to understand the broader political stakes of the present as well as the histories in which the mask sits.