25.01.15.
What is a face? What use is a face?
Wrapping one’s head around the face is a funny phase. That's why we're sketching. Broad, fuzzy strokes at first; mopping up as much pigment as possible. Let's look at our map:
Genesis 32:30 — ● — So Jacob called the name of the place Peniel, saying, “For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life has been delivered.” — Donald Winnicott (1896-1971) — ● — What does the baby see when he or she looks at the mother’s face? I am suggesting that, ordinarily, what the baby sees is himself or herself. In other words the mother is looking at the baby and what she looks like is related to what she sees there. All this is too easily taken for granted. — Jean-Claude Schmitt (1946-) — ● — The face is the place of identity par excellence. «I am my face,» one might say. If I change it, I become another. 1 — Emmanuel Lévinas (1906-1995) — ● — I analyze the inter-human relationship as if, in proximity with the Other - beyond the image I myself make of the other man - his face, the expressive in the Other (and the whole human body is in this sense more or less face), were what ordains me to serve him. I employ this extreme formulation. The face orders and ordains me. 2 — ● — What is expressed as demand in it [the face] certainly signifies a call to giving and serving […] 3 — ● — The face is present in its refusal to be contained. In this sense it cannot be comprehended, that is, encompassed. 4 — Charles Le Brun (1619-1690) — ● — If it is true that there is a part of the body in which the soul is directly active, and if that is the brain, then we can likewise say that the face is the part of the body in which what it feels allows itself to be seen particularly clearly. [...] The muscles only move thanks to the nerves ..., the nerves first become active owing to the spirits contained in the cavities of the brain, and the brain receives these spirits specifically through the blood that constantly flows through the brain, where it is warmed and diluted such that a certain, very fine air arises that enters the brain and fills it out. — Kate West — ● — Lombroso studied visible signs of criminality in various parts of the body including the skull. Lombroso was drawing on the early-nineteenth century practice of phrenology, craniology, in this regard. Phrenologists considered the skull to be a material proxy of the mind. As such Lombroso could measure it to ascertain internal, criminal states of being. As well as the skull, and more well-known amongst criminologists, is that Lombroso studied visible signs of criminality in the face, too. Lombroso was drawing on the ancient practice of physiognomy in this regard. These features resembled those of ‘primitive’ people. Such features included for example ‘mandibole volminose [massive jaws]’; ‘capelli foltissimi [thick hair]’; ‘labbra vouminose [voluminous lips]’ (Lombroso, 1889a: plate II between 252-253). — Erving Goffman (1922-1982) — ● — The term face may be defined as the positive social value a person effectively claims for himself by the line others assume he has taken during a particular contact. Face is an image of self delineated in terms of approved social attributes—albeit an image that others may share, as when a person makes a good showing for his profession or religion by making a good showing for himself. 5 — ● — Usual objectives, such as gaining face for oneself, giving free expression to one's true beliefs, introducing depreciating information about the others, or solving problems and performing tasks, are typically pursued in such a way as to be consistent with the maintenance of face. 6 — Massimo Leone (1975-) — ● — Making one’s or others’ face(s) present in a distant space or in a distant time through visual simulacra is an old habit of the species. — Bent Fausing — ● — Our self and self-consciousness has become more and more prominent since the Renaissance. It is also during the Renaissance that individuality starts to appear in small portraits, through individual tales and readings of books, and through the invention of the mirror. In all these new media characterized by the formation of a discrete screen around the individual's perception, it is the individual, the self, which creates and is created in the encounter with the media. This is the beginning of the screen societies. 8 — ● — In the selfie, it is instead an adult or near-adult [and not the child of Lacan’s mirror stage] who is testing and seeking acceptance and recognition from the outside world through a mirror image. 9 — Jean-François Leotard (1924-1998) — ● — A baby must see its MOTHER's face as a landscape. Not because its mouth, fingers and gaze move over it as it blindly grasps and sucks, smiles, cries and whimpers. Nor because it is 'in symbiosis' with her, as the saying goes. Too much activity on the one hand, too much connivance on the other. We should assume, rather, that the face is indescribable for the baby. It will have forgotten it, because it will not have been inscribed. — Graham Greene (1904-1991) — ● — He couldn’t see her in the darkness, but there were plenty of faces he could remember from the old days which fitted the voice. When you visualized a man or woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity – that was a quality God’s image carried with it. When you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination. He began to feel an overwhelming responsibility for this pious woman. 10 — Paul Ekman & Wallace V. Friesen — ● — Emotions are shown primarily in the face, not in the body. The body instead shows how people are coping with emotion. There is no specific body movement pattern that always signals anger or fear, but there are facial patterns specific to each emotion. — William Shakespeare (1564-1616) — ● — Hamlet: I have heard of your paintings too, well enough. God hath given you one face and you make yourselves another. You jig, you amble, and you lisp, you nickname God's creatures, and make your wantonness your ignorance. — Acid Horizon Podcast — ● — Two of the fundamental things that seem to be said about face in this text (D&G, A Thousand Plateaus) and in plain, ordinary sense, is that: our common understanding of the face is that it is […] individual.. A matter of pure individuality, and at the same time it is the ultimate kind of social embodiment of myself as a subject. Above everything else I am my face. My relationship with other people is a relationship with a sea of faces that I encounter, in which my face is a part. And what Deleuze and Guattari are denying here is this kind of romantic subject’s embodiment in the face. 11 — Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1925-1995 and 1930-1992) — ● — To the point that if human beings have a destiny, it is rather to escape the face, to dismantle the face and facializations, to become imperceptible, to become clandestine, not by returning to animality, nor even by returning to the head, but by quite spiritual and special becomings-animal, by strange true becomings that get past the wall and get out of the black holes, that make faciality traits themselves finally elude the organization of the face—freckles dashing toward the horizon, hair carried off by the wind, eyes you traverse instead of seeing yourself in or gazing into in those glum face-to-face encounters between signifying subjectivities. — ● — The reason is simple. The face is not a universal. It is not even that of the white man; it is White Man himself, with his broad white cheeks and the black hole of his eyes. The face is Christ. The face is the typical European, what Ezra Pound called the average sensual man, in short, the ordinary everyday Erotomaniac (nineteenth-century psychiatrists were right to say that erotomania, unlike nymphomania, often remains pure and chaste; this is because it operates through the face and facialization). Not a universal, but fades totius universi. Jesus Christ superstar: he invented the facialization of the entire body and spread it everywhere (the Passion of Joan of Arc, in close-up). Thus the face is by nature an entirely specific idea, which did not preclude its acquiring and exercising the most general of functions: the function of biuni vocalization, or binarization. It has two aspects: the abstract machine of faciality, insofar as it is composed by a black hole/white wall system, functions in two ways, one of which concerns the units or elements, the other the choices.
At a first glance, faciality.
French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s rhizomatic brick of a book A Thousand Plateaus arrived in its English translation in 1980 and has since made it pretty impossible to speak of the face and not to mention, somewhere, somehow, D&G’s perplexing concept of faciality.
In one stretched-out bullet point, faciality (visageite) is an abstract machine, it is that which appears in the junction between a signifying regime and a post-signifying regime, between the two forces of signifiance and subjectification; where the white wall and the black holes turn into a white wall-black hole system, into.. A face. Into a flat, white face, with two, big, black holes. And so far so good. Great. Well. Maybe. Yeah?
Let us not resort to the wet burps of regurgitation. My aim here is actually not to — I’m sorry for the headline — make you understand D&G or their concept of faciality, not to a great extent anyway. That dive you’ll have to do on your own. And Jesus Christ, as we’ll soon see, that is one sauce to swim in. Again, here, we’re concerned with this thin but vast layer of pigment spread out on our (white, white?) floor — the sketch!
What Deleuze and Guattari did in their chapter Year Zero: Faciality was to historically understand the production and prevalence of the Face in Western societies. And in particular, they provided a potent perspective on the primacy of the Face in visual culture and representation.
Now, let’s throw up our trajectory, turn up the bass and get grooving.
If faciality is intimately linked to European culture, to Christianity, to the White Man, to Christ, to the face of Christ, to the face of the Son of God, to what is the utmost Individual, to the alluring promise of becoming an Individual, to its power and potential; if this is the matrix of the face, then I will ask: how do we understand representations of faces in cultures outside of the West? What is the face of the Black Man? What is the face of today, mediated through ICT and social media, still Jesus Christ? And, what is that draw I feel toward the face, as I stand, face-to-face — evolutionarily, phenomenologically, psychoanalytically — with the source and the object of that which I can never know? And, finally, what would it mean to dismantle that face?
I will try to engage these questions in the parts yet to be written, as I translate and metabolize texts and thoughts of the face.
In conclusion, here is Ovid, “Metamorphoses Book III”, Narcissus sees himself and falls in love:
Thus had Narcissus mocked her, thus had he mocked other nymphsof the waves or mountains; thus had he mocked the companies ofmen. At last one of these scorned youth, lifting up his hands to heaven, prayed: "So may he himself love, and not gain the thing he loves!” The goddess Nemesis heard his righteous prayer. There was a clear pool with silvery bright water, to which no shepherds ever came, or she-goats feeding on the mountain-side, or any other cattle;whose smooth surface neither bird nor beast nor falling bough ever ruffled. Grass grew all around its edge, fed by the water near, and a coppice that would never suffer the sun to warm the spot. Here the youth, worn by the chase and the heat, lies down, attracted thither by the appearance of the place and by the spring. While he seeks to slake his thirst another thirst springs up, and while he drinks he is smitten by the sight of the beautiful form he sees. He loves an unsubstantial hope and thinks that substance which is only shadow. He looks in speechless wonder at himself and hangs there motionless in the same expression, like a statue carved from Parian marble. Prone on the ground, he gazes at his eyes, twin stars, and his locks, worthy of Bacchus, worthy of Apollo; on his smooth cheeks, his ivory neck, the glorious beauty of his face, the blush mingled with snowy white: all things, in short, he admires for which he is himself admired. Unwittingly he desires himself; he praises, and is himself what he praises; and while he seeks, is sought; equally he kindles love and burns with love. How often did he offer vain kisses on the elusive pool? How often did he plunge his arms into the water seeking to clasp the neck he sees there, but did not clasp himself in them! What he sees he knows not; but that which he sees he burns for, and the same delusion mocks and allures his eyes. O fondly foolish boy, why vainly seek to clasp a fleeting image? What you seek is nowhere; but turn yourself away, and the object of your love will be no more. That which you behold is but the shadow of a reflected form and has no substance of its own. With you it comes, with you it stays, and it will go with you—if you can go.
23.06.16.
Source: Burn-Murdoch, J. (2023) ‘Smartphones and social media are destroying children’s mental health‘, Financial Times, 10 March.
23.06.16.
Conversations brings together a series of conversations between students at the School of Media Arts at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Schools of Visual Arts that were carried out over the course of the spring semester 2023.
