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It has been a successful practice to define a canonical pre-ordering on a normed space using the inclusion of faces of its closed dual unit ball. This pre-ordering reflects some geometric property in a natural way. In this article, we will give an algebraic description of this pre-ordering in the case of complex C*-algebras as well as that of their self-adjoint parts. In developing our theory we introduce the essential support of an element, which is closely related to the notion of peak projections studied recently by Blecher and Hay. As applications, we give some interesting facts about weak*-closed faces, and will identify the quasi-maximal elements and the quasi-minimal elements with respects to this pre-ordering. They are closely related to the extreme points and the smooth points of the unit sphere of the C*-algebra.

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