The Profanation of the Face: On Politics and Spectacle in Contexts of Urban Exclusion
This article proposes a series of interpretive keys for analyzing the instrumentalization of the face in the staging of certain urban policies. In this sense, we focus on the spectacular logic constructed around these interventions, in which the faces of the beneficiaries acquire a singular place wi...
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| Format: | article |
| Language: | Spanish |
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2025
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| Online Access: | https://revistas.ort.edu.uy/inmediaciones-de-la-comunicacion/article/view/4099 http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11968/7727 |
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| Summary: | This article proposes a series of interpretive keys for analyzing the instrumentalization of the face in the staging of certain urban policies. In this sense, we focus on the spectacular logic constructed around these interventions, in which the faces of the beneficiaries acquire a singular place within the policies analyzed in a neighborhood on the periphery of the city of San Luis (Argentina). Following Le Breton (2009), we observe how the capture of the sacred is then reproduced and multiplied in audiovisual and graphic formats, benefiting the constructed image of success that the provincial government seeks to project. This phenomenon invites us to problematize the uses of the face in contexts of urban exclusion, especially when it becomes a valued element for sustaining a “perceptual faith” surrounding the image of redemption that the state apparatus projects onto the impoverished bodies of the periphery. These keys to interpretation lead us back to old dilemmas: in the spectacular regime of the gaze, dignity includes capturing the face and becomes a strategic objective, since the logic of value and the appropriation of the last trace of humanity are played out on it. |
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