Face masks disrupt facial expressions Self-awareness: a phenomenological account of the feedback effect of a material artifact on bodily Self-consciousness

In the present paper, we focus on the bodily habit of face mask-wearing in everyday life to test at what extent material artifacts exert a retroactive effect on bodily Self-consciousness, intertwined as it is with face awareness. We gathered consistent evidence from 48 qualitative semi-structured interviews with naive and experienced participants. Self-reports on facial expressions production show that the interference of the face mask with the face disrupts facial expressions Self-awareness. This disruption is told to be managed through two non-mutually exclusive strategies: inhibiting and enhancing facial and bodily movements. We explain these as due to the “material performative agency” of the face mask, whose multisensorial components and affordances affect the fundamental experience of “being seen qua seeable” by others. While we endorse the phenomenological account whereby being seen grants bodily Self-consciousness, we argue that such a scenario does not operate in and for itself, because the material conditions under which human beings are exposed to onlookers shape their experience of being seeable. To develop the argument, we proposed an original understanding of the gazing process as materially dependent. Finally, our discussion of bodily Self-consciousness backs up the idea that an ecological approach is essential when addressing Self related topics from the first-person perspective.