Poker Face (Part 1)
Face cards, masks, scripts.
I didn’t get into gambling until quarantine, at age 28. That’s not true. I had a brief encounter with it in the summer of 2013 – I slipped a quarter into a slot machine in a gas station-casino just outside Las Vegas, and it regurgitated $35. I lost all of it in the following half an hour, steadily sipping two free Miller High Lifes. Slightly drunk, I sat in the passenger seat as my friend drove us down the strip, tearing up while Coldplay played through the aux-to-cassette converter in my grandma’s Camry. The basement in my mind palace – home of key psychic-semiotic thresholds with major domus governance power – first wriggled then collapsed under the city’s gravitational pull, this endlessly productive surplus-void out there in the desert, infrastructure of infrastructures. “We live in a beautiful world / Yeah we do, yeah we do.” I flatlined and saw exchange-value for what it was, which is to say: a unique varietal of nothing. It was utterly draining and then refreshing – the sun set, and then it was night.
Recently I’ve been interested in playing poker, specifically Texas Hold’em. If the game isn’t rigged and the cards are shuffled well, nobody can predict how they will be dealt. Distribution probabilities become more relevant as the community cards – poker’s commons, so to speak – are revealed and interacted with by competing players, but each game occasions genuine instances of pure contingency. When they’re happening, these instances are experientially immersive in part because they feel new. They are not foretold. Although probabilities of certain outcomes are clearly definable over the long term, the short term is anyone’s guess.
Depending on mood, poker is either an eschatological or teleological band-aid. In this sense, it’s a “chiropractor of the unconscious.” The game offers a sense of connection with the sun-baby or perhaps the uncut gem of the real. It’s all in your head until you win, this is how you win. Crucially, a big part of the game comes down to the way a player discloses their relation to fate through facial expressions. Withholding or misrepresenting a feeling about the cards’ colors, numbers, and symbols. Or, stating it plainly, baiting competitors to call a bluff, begging them to call you a fool. Calculation and miscalculation. “What is your poker face?” Experienced players maintain disciplined control over what their face communicates to everyone else at the table. Poker turns everyone into an actor, especially unskilled players. The best actors don’t have to act, artifice is integral to who we are, one simply has to locate this essential kernel and exploit it. The most powerful cards in the game, aside from the ace – which symbolizes both 0 and 1, the parameters of everything, map of maps – are the face cards.
Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face” played through somebody’s speakers in Williamsburg a few weeks ago. The song is about soft power, picking up the baton and conducting the movements of another’s desire. Facilitating a compelling interpretation of the score you handed out at the beginning of the session: desiring their desire, but with a caveat. Wary of being manipulated, choosing to manipulate. Poker faces are generally identified by their lack of expressiveness. They entail self-discipline, a turning inward, but they are only truly effective if they are neither of these things. A poker face must be interpreted as an authentic expression in order to meaningfully communicate context-appropriate information.
A poker face plays upon what Deleuze and Guattari call “faciality,” a form of sociality based on the presumption of shared understanding, the assertion of the primacy of semiotic interpretation over being, assumption of perfect retinal-epistemological coordination. A demand for full disclosure, insisting that it is possible to know someone by “correctly” deciphering the signifiers one is able to recognize in their face. The perceived is positioned in thrall to the perceiver’s imaginary, which is enclosed by the limits of its symbolic inventory: the generally minuscule list of things which one is able to recognize in someone else. “I am not what you think you see in me” is a retort to faciality. Faces are images and supra-images: they are central to visual culture and also bring it about. The actor is concerned first and foremost with images. Actor-face-image: a triple-bind.
Beholding another, you’re always beholding someone or something else, who in turn resembles someone or something else, and so on. Going back to Adam and Eve, who both lack bellybuttons because they were never born. “Your smile reminds me of my grandmother’s — I loved her and I love you very much. What would you like for lunch?” I was served a Tik Tok recently in which a man attempts to woo his beloved by telling her that she has the eyes of a cow. People keep dogs and cats around because their faces remind us of ourselves. Compare canines and earthworms: one of the two looks much more like a person than the other. Cross-species transference, the best kind. In Against The Grain, James C. Scott asks in an aside whether we domesticated animals, or they domesticated us.
In Hiroshi Teshigahara’s The Face of Another (1966), the main character Mr. Okuyama’s face is scarred by an industrial explosion. Early in the film, he recites a familiar platitude: “The face is the door to the soul.” He goes on to make it his own, though, adding: “When the face is closed off, so too is the soul. Nobody is allowed inside. The soul is left to rot, reduced to ruins.” Later, he replaces the bandages with a realistic, anthropomorphic mask, and his life is changed. The film’s message is pessimistic: masks facilitate human connection but ultimately make it impossible. Before Okuyama stabs the doctor who originally fashioned his lifelike mask, the medical professional shares an observation: “It’s always lonely being free. Some masks come off, some don’t.”
In some contexts, the soul is able to to flourish specifically because it is covered by a mask. 3.3 million viewers tuned in to see Kanye West’s Donda livestream last week, and the artist wore a gray mask the whole time, a balaclava without eye-holes. He has also worn full masks in public several times before. Not wanting to be recognized is one thing, but rejecting recognition in the strong sense is something else entirely. A preemptive strike. Less about changing the way you are seen and more about changing whether you are seen: moving from instance to underlying system. The world assumes the ability to recognize whatever it wants, and for what?