Politics at the arrival of the figure
Benjamin Hoh, 1996
This essay was prompted by the differences that one can find in radical approaches to the politics of "form". Take the Baroque. In Against Literature (1993), Marxist literary critic John Beverly approaches aesthetics with a resolutely concrete "sociohistorical" hermeneutic, identifying the indulgent complexity of Baroque form as a mystifying incarnation of imperialist ideology. Against this one can contrast other Marxist theorists such as Deleuze and Benjamin, who find the Baroque to be politically useful. For Deleuze (1993), Baroque forms can stimulate a non-anthropomorphic engagement with materiality, while Benjamin notes that Baroque artifice can usefully corrupt the purity of the symbol (Eagleton 1981). At this abstract level of conceptuality, form does not become "primal", but is still eminently political and historical; we must thus forge critical practices that can approach the particularity of its happening, and its social fallout.
It is to such an end that this essay proposes an investigation into the politics of the face. What conditions lead to its formation or perception? How (far) does it extend, and what are its crises? The face provides an excellent example of the political particularities of the "fundamental" arrival of figure as a recognisable form. But what possible social fallout can this (seemingly very abstract) level of enquiry uncover? More than first appearances: in "The Unraveling of Form" (1996), Samuel Weber interrogates Kant's approach to form as the Gestalt that requires an outline -- an Abriß -- for its demarcation and recognition as a figure, but which is always haunted by its unavoidable unravelling. For Weber, this "microscopic" definition of "figure", and its enterprise of maintaining autonomous aesthetic forms, leaves a very immediate trace:
Since the notion of the modern academic "discipline" in general and in particular those disciplines that are traditionally concerned with questions of aesthetic form (literary and film studies, art history, etc.) owe much of their institutional legitimacy to the post-Kantian notion of a relatively autonomous "field" of enquiry, much more is at stake in this problem of form than merely "theoretical" or "aesthetic" questions. The structure and status of modern disciplines, as well as the cognitive model depends, are and remain neo-Kantian... This explains, at least in part, the passions and sense of urgency generated by recent debates on what would seem to be relatively recondite and local problems of what is called "critical theory". What is at stake is also, and not least of all, the future of the university. Large questions frame the question of the "frame". (Weber 1996: 24)
Indeed. And rather than evoking an undifferentiating, "postmodernist" (and basically ultra-leftist and/or crypto-liberal) fear of anything substantial, this critique should provoke questions of quality: just how do we figure the world, and how do we negotiate institutionality? Engagement is always preferable to disavowal.
Studying the very phenomenon of form also approaches disciplinarity from another angle, since it operates on the ground that much of the contemporary, "progressive" humanities has unwittingly ceded to (or dismissed as) "formalism", and alludes to a field that is implicitly disavowed in the discourse of the humanities: "popular science". With its technical expositions and grand syntheses written for the lay reader, popular science extends from the "hard" sciences to fields such as psychology, information theory, sociology and, increasingly, religious theory or theology. In the past twenty years, this vague "genre" has been remarkably "postmodernised" in ways that are perhaps more successful than the (still rather provincial) efforts of cultural studies, since its interdisciplinary syntheses are more accessible and "immediately" materialist than those of the rarified and textualist humanities. Indeed, recent works that draw on quantum physics, chaos theory and cognitive science all evince a firm fascination with the concrete social consequences of form's "abstract" arrival.
Of course, this is hardly a counter-valorisation, since it must lead to a consideration of further problems: without any questioning of the wider metaphysics of presence and representation, pop science's contemporary celebration of "post-Cartesianism" often leads to the positing of an uncritical, symbolistic holism in the place of mechanism, and thus some hairy political problems that compromise the whole affair.[1] This space must therefore be negotiated carefully. So if we are to look at the face as a "fundamental" form, pulling the rug out from under art history and displacing the ground of its neo-Kantian figurings, we must gingerly move towards the uncertain battleground of pop psychology...
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Naïveté. 1. When I was a small child, I thought that my fingernails looked like little faces. Although they had no facial features as such, their different shapes, repeated in a row of fingertips, suggested a kind of expressiveness that seemed "human". 2. Quite recently, I noticed something that I had always taken for granted: in Return of the Jedi, Darth Vader has a mechanical face that cannot change expression. And yet when his son Luke appeals to "that last vestige of humanity" within him, the camera lingers on his mask in closeup, and you can almost see the torn confusion in his face. The exaggerated act of looking to a face that lacks expressive features reveals that facial features are mere players in a wider field of expression that is nonetheless facially oriented.
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In A Thousand Plateaus (1987), Deleuze and Guattari describe the semiotic schema of the face, or what they call the "abstract machine of faciality" (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 168). For a face to be significant as a face, its meaning must be produced.
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. ... 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 biunivocalization, or binarization. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 176)
Faciality is a semiotic morphology, and cannot be limited to a literal anatomy. It is a configurative system that is specific, but which may or may not be literalised. Heads, bodies and continents can be facialised. Perhaps the best analogy would involve the vocabulary of psychoanalysis: the Lacanian "gaze" pre-exists the eye, since it structures the relations that "vision" works within; similarly, faciality "precedes" the face. Faciality is like the phallus, which is a coding mechanism that is connected to the penis, but which does not equal it; faces are "obviously" facial in the way that penises are "obviously" phallic. Morphology. Coding. Deleuze and Guattari warn against mystically attributing power itself to "concrete" faces, since they are products of a particular coding system that can be differentiated from others (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 175). No absolutes.
The crucial thing to remember is that the facial morphology has a historicity and a political particularity, in contrast to the tendency for psychoanalysis to create deterministic and ahistorical categories whose political import cannot be interrogated. Faciality is the real operation that makes the face a binaristic, gendering and racialising locus of expression that we always look to, and the literalisation of the template against which all differences are categorised. It would thus have a tangential kind of historicity, although Deleuze and Guattari propose that Christ was a well-known point at which a fully integrated faciality first seemed to emerge, leading them to title their discussion "Year Zero: Faciality" (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 167-191). It is not magical: it arrives in the intersection of certain existent semiotic systems, and varies in particular combinations and emphases. Mixity.
This is an angular kind of analysis that some would call promiscuous, but which engages with the volatile qualities of real semiotic effects and productions, rather than blandly bringing a hermeneutic apparatus to bear on an apparition. Deleuze and Guattari obliquely trace the multidimensional effects of flows and blockages within a general semiotic "geology", undercutting reifying conceptions of one-dimensional ideological mappings. It is a Nietzschean approach to a universe in which meanings are fundamentally generated through accretion and fissure, which may precede any fantasy relation of the subject to its environment: "[faciality] is an affair not of ideology but of economy and the organisation of power" (Deleuze & Guattari 1987: 175). Ironically, our world of meaning works inhumanly, even when it produces Man everywhere, and as Brian Massumi notes, many political meanings are not necessarily ideological by nature, although they may indeed be given ideological investment (Massumi 1993). Deleuze and Guattari also dodge formalism: following Weber, there is no resignation to "primal form" as an absolutely pure category of aesthetico-political determination; instead, we have an autonomic machine that plays through and configures the semiotic elements -- the "white wall" and the "black holes" -- that American "hard" psychologists have identified in the basic navigational imagination of newborn children (Deleuze & Guattari 1987: 169-170). Faciality -- that most "primal" of figures -- operates on levels of the political that escape traditional hermeneutics.[2]
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Deleuze and Guattari's emphasis on the face of Christ is not misplaced. Many of faciality's most far-reaching effects can be given a religious "face"; as Marie-José Baudinet notes in "The Face of Christ, The Face of the Church",
[e]conomy, that is oikonomia, in Greek reads as ikonomia. To the Byzantine ear... the law of the icon and the law concerning the administration of goods are one and the same thing. In either case, the supreme administrator, the great economist, is God the Father who gave His essence in order that it be distributed in the visible world through His own image -- the natural image of His Son. (Baudinet 1989: 149)
We negotiate the ikonomia all the time. Faciality codes faces, markets, cities. This range, which Deleuze and Guattari note in architecture and landscaping (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 172), is nicely demonstrated in the case of the Turin Shroud, whose formal specificities repeat what Deleuze and Guattari identify as the "despotic" aspects of Byzantine portraiture. In 1978, the new Cardinal of Turin, Anastasio Ballestrero, had inherited "Turin's considerable domestic troubles, among them a huge unwanted immigration into the city of Italians from the South; a Communist civic administration; and terrorism from the Red Brigade" (Wilson 1978: 266). He turned this around in the Shroud's 1978 Exposition.
For a full-scale exposition of the Shroud, Turin needed to be made ready for visitors, streets and public buildings cleaned, signposting erected and special crowd-control barriers prepared. On the Cathedral steps special gantries needed to be built, and inside the Cathedral a special posse of security men needed to be on guard day and night to avoid the Shroud becoming yet another Red Brigade object of ransom. Ballestrero sought help for these requirements from the unlikeliest source, Turin's Communist administration. He succeeded to a greater degree than anyone could have believed, the Communist mayor agreeing to give Turin a total facelift for the exposition, embracing Ballestrero's requirements, and costing in the region of a million pounds. (Wilson 1978: 266, italics added)
Social fallout indeed. Here, the face of Christ occupies the opposite position that was given to Richard Serra's Tilted Arc by the same kind of despotic apparatus.[3] But in the middle of all of this politico-formal fundamentalism, weird things do happen: defacialising resistances, like Kant's haunting by the unraveled outline, are always present in religion. This is what Bataille grasped in his valorisation of the acephale, the headless human, the defacialised body that is traversed by all sorts of untrammeled polyvocalities and urgencies (Krauss 1993: 19), channelling the sacrificial, excessive, deconfiguring religious impulse.
This excess, which always makes facial coding an incomplete gesture, is precisely what Stewart Guthrie fails to appreciate in Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion (1993), which is a mixture of anthropology, art history and cognitive science written for the lay reader. Guthrie's study has significant potential; he approaches the face as a fundamental form that is connected to a "strategy of perception" that marks a significant aspect of human sociality, and which is concretised most systematically in religion. But by drawing on Enrst Gombrich's elaboration of perceptual cognition as a kind of "betting" on the accuracy of representation, which can then be extrapolated to the enterprise of art as representation (Guthrie 1993: 131), Guthrie argues that the face-form becomes fundamental to social practice because of the pragmatic importance of resemblance in a condition of scarcity and survival. Everything unfolds from here. Unfortunately, Guthrie's conflation of resemblance, representation and configuration leads to a deterministic reading of the face-form and religion as solely an elaborate extension of anthropomorphism. Anthropomorphism is perception. Religion is anthropomorphism. Religion is perception. The transgressive urges of finitude that religion attempts to legislate do not even make an appearance.
The status of "human" is never interrogated in Guthrie's use of anthropomorphism as a universalising explanation. The potential of Guthrie's identification of the strategy in perception is immediately reterritorialised by naturalisation of "creativity" as an overcoded "human response" to an anthropocentrically demarcated "environment". Transgression figures as something that the universe can only do to us.[4] In Faces in the Clouds, the machinic production of subjectivity, meaning, etc., is utterly collapsed, which is why "perception" is valorised but unable to be philosophically unpacked. To identify this reductionism is not to propose an equally reductive alternative of "total social constructionism", since semiotic effects are also materially grounded; the point is to identify the elisions that allow Guthrie to short-circuit the developmental psychology (that Deleuze and Guattari use) with theories of representation. This denial of semiotic production precisely what Deleuze and Guattari warn against when they describe faciality as a machine: "No anthropomorphism here" (Deleuze & Guattari 1987: 170). This leads to an endless and strangely prone archive of identifications: a list of faces in every possible context. One could say that while working on such a fundamental level of (political) form, Guthrie's elisions led to his surrender to (political) formalism.
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These days, the social fallout of these problems of "fundamental form" is not literalised under the banner of religion per se, but in contemporary mythologies of equally far-reaching political import. Take, for instance, Whitley Streiber's accounts of his alien abduction experiences (Streiber 1987, 1988). We all know the story: the mysterious, strangely humanoid visitors, with huge faces, dominated by eyes and dwarfing their bodies, come in the night to terrify us with both pleasure and pain. The outer-space face, in this time of global economy, is perhaps too iconic. How can we approach this? Notice that Streiber's story is a remarkable repetition of Medieval women's religious experiences, whose ecstatic physical encounters with Christ constituted a negotiated, pre-ideological resistance of the body to gendering facial codings of the despotic Church (Ash 1990, Walker Bynum 1989). In the middle of Christian representation, the passional face introduces a line of flight from faciality (Deleuze & Guattari 1987: 185), initiated by the anchorite's becoming, which challenges the Church's imperialism (Deleuze & Guattari 1987: 247).
We can perhaps engage with the alien abduction phenomenon as modestly marking the fundamental ambivalence of the technoscientific order's planetary configurations.[5] Or, we could unfortunately short-circuit the facial ikonomia, as Guthrie does, and cement its formalities via the flip identification of "anthropomorphism", producing a remarkably conservatising discourse, which could be contrary to expectations. This is what happens in Annalee Newitz's "Alien Abduction and the End of White People" (1993). Newitz sees the abduction phenomenon as a new, universal allegory of imperialism that challenges multiculturalism's "demonisation of white people":
[T]he alien abduction story... clues us in to the fact that most people on Earth aren't really convinced by the ‘official' position of multiculturalism. ... [W]hat we fear most is that white people are not the only people or beings who might try to take over and rule the world... Multiculturalism insists that white people are what is wrong with power today. But isn't this a little bit like the racial prejudice we became multicultural to fight against? If all races are equal and the same, aren't oppressive forms of domination something that non-white people can lay claim to as well?
(Newitz 1993)
This critique of essentialism is an alibi for a thoroughly liberal idea: that racial marginalisation can end in an historic "moment of recognition" of non-white people, which Newitz finds crystallised in the "natural" "victory" of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. Against such a backdrop, the contemporary rise of the alien abduction phenomenon is somehow "fitting". An non-human, non-white enemy means that anybody, in this "post-imperial" era, can now be an enemy. Australia's current public climate of ultra-xenophobia demonstrates how such a liberal framework can preside over surges of the most reactionary populism -- "they've had their moment of recognition..." Is this, too, a traumatic symptom of globalism's anti-essentialist political unconscious? Despite her erstwhile leftism, this is indeed suggested by Newitz's subsequent and explicit defense of the New World Order.
Here we have "recognition" as two kinds of naturalised formalism: paternalism and perception. For Newitz, we can recognise races like we recognise inkblots -- on our (natural, universalist and historically teleological) terms. (Human perception. Perception by humans. Perception of humans. Paranoid perception. Humanoid perception. Paranoia. Humanoia.) Resembling Guthrie's use of Gombrich, Newitz's "moment of recognition" unwittingly reiterates the racially differentiating logic of faciality:
If the face is in fact Christ, in other words, your average ordinary White Man, then the first deviances, the first divergence-types, are racial: yellow man, black man, men in the second or third category... Racism operates by the determination of degrees of deviance in relation to the White-Man's face, which endeavors to integrate nonconforming traits into increasingly eccentric and backward waves, sometimes tolerating them at given places under given conditions, in a given ghetto... (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 178)
Capitalist globalisation -- the widest ever scene for setting up a system of (political) figure and ground -- has made liberal democracy's technocratic humanist formalisms ever more dangerous. But drawing from historical materialism and the knowledge of faciality's unfinished operations, the answer is not nostalgia or defeatism, but strategy.
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If we are to forge a politics that can engage with the geologic (and pre-ideological) depths of semiotic configuration, it must involve a denaturing of the anthropomorphic "recognition" that is cemented in liberal perception. We must be in the middle of pop science's technoscientific materialities to be sensitive enough -- especially to our own unnaturality. This brings us back to my naïve examples: the fingernails and Darth Vader. We can take the lead from an incident related by science fiction writer Bob Shaw:
"Daddy, why are my fingernails made of plastic?"
The question came from my youngest daughter, then aged about four, who had just examined her hands, almost as though seeing them for the first time. I looked at her fingers and saw that the nails were indeed little translucent slivers, not much different in appearance from that shiny pink plastic which is used in making tiny dolls. I knew the true situation, but the child had accepted that she was a composite being -- part flesh, part Woolworths plastic... (Shaw 1989: 9)
I look at my own fingernails now, and they are not so natural, not so human. And in Return of the Jedi, Darth Vader is eventually unmasked, and revealed to be a surprisingly human-looking old man. We all groaned when we saw this as kids -- Darth Vader wasn't Darth Vader anymore. Meanwhile, Bob Shaw's daughter, as she matter-of-factly negotiates her configuration, is truly learning to become Darth Vader, a cyborg. Only a cyborg would stand a chance.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ASH, Jennifer (1990) "The discursive construction of Christ's body in the later Middle Ages: resistance and autonomy", in Terry Threadgold & Anne Cranny-Francis (eds), Feminine/Masculine and Representation, Sydney: Allen & Unwin
BAUDINET, Marie-José (1989) "The Face of Christ, The Form of the Church", in Michel Feher, Ramona Naddaf & Nadia Tazi (eds), Zone 3: Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Volume 1, New York: Zone Books
BENJAMIN, Walter (1970) "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", in Illuminations (ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn), London: Fontana
BEVERLY, John (1993) Against Literature, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis
BHABHA, Homi (1994) "Of Mimicry and Man: The ambivalence of colonial discourse", The Location of Culture, London: Routledge
BUCKLEY, Sandra (1996) "Contagion", in Cynthia Davidson (ed), Anywise, Cambridge: MIT Press
CRIMP, Douglas (1993) "Redefining Site Specificity", On the Museum's Ruins, Cambridge: MIT Press
DELEUZE, Gilles (1993) The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (trans. Tom Conley), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press
DELEUZE, Gilles & Felix Guattari (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (trans. Brian Massumi), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press
EAGLETON, Terry (1981) Walter Benjamin, Or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism, London: Verso
GUTHRIE, Stewart (1993) Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion, Oxford: Oxford University Press
HARAWAY, Donna (1991) "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century", Simians Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, London: Free Association Books
KRAUSS, Rosalind (1993) The Optical Unconscious, Cambridge: MIT Press
MASSUMI, Brian (1993) "A Requiem for Our Prospective Dead, or, Towards a Participatory Critique of Capitalist Power", unpublished version
NEWITZ, Annalee (1993), "Alien Abductions and the End of White People", Bad Subjects 5
PICKNETT, Lynn & Clive Prince (1994) Turin Shroud: In Whose Image? The Shocking Truth Unveiled, London: Bloomsbury
SHAW, Bob (1991) Dark Night in Toyland, London: Orbit
STREIBER, Whitley (1987) Communion, London: Arrow
STREIBER, Whitley (1988) Transformation, London: Century Hutchinson
WEBER, Samuel (1996) "The Unraveling of Form", Mass Mediauras: Form, Technics, Media, Sydney: Power Publications
WALKER BYNUM, Caroline (1989) "The Female Body and Religious Practice in the Late Middle Ages", in Michel Feher, Ramona Naddaf & Nadia Tazi (eds), Zone 3: Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Volume 1, New York: Zone Books
[1] Neo-Kantian assumptions appear to inform Rupert Sheldrake's formulation of the "morphic field" that encompasses any event or form, leading him towards a mushy sort of New Age theology. More concretely, there is the danger of valorsing romantic liberalism and simplistic relativism via impressionistic "social" readings of quantum theory. And while pop science's questing after the "essence" of events and bodies may end up in territories similar to those of post-representationalist philosophy, this has largely remained within the field of representational "paradoxes". For example, some cognitive scientists admit a fascination with the paintings of Magritte and Zen mysticism in their popular writings. More hopefully, perhaps, artificial intelligence researchers occasionally resort to explicating Heidegger to their lay readers in order to debunk both the mechanistic legacy of "strong AI" and its essentialising alternatives.
[2] Deleuze and Guattari's adventurous engagement with configuration marks a definite contrast to the relatively unsullied interpretive strategies of art history. This is because A Thousand Plateaus, whatever its elitist difficulties, is also pop-scientific philosophy. As Massumi notes in his translator's introduction, "[t]his is a book that speaks of many things, of ticks and quilts and fuzzy subsets and noology and political economy. It is difficult to know how to approach it" (Deleuze & Guattari 1987: ix). Interdisciplinary synthesis for ginger adventurers. Of course, this is not heroic, but merely situational. While "French theory" may have a well-documented literary addiction in comparison to Anglophone philosophy, it often makes its appearance through its appropriation by Anglophone critics who hail from comparatively exclusive institutions of reading: art history and literary theory. Despite its "literary bent", much politically incisive French philosophy still grasps an vital echo of predisciplinarity via the "history and philosophy of science". Also, the vivid discourse of contemporary psychoanalysis cannot be divorced from its clinical engagement: Guattari was a practicing analyst under Lacan, who was ever one to affect a bizarrely scientific aura. It is no wonder, then, that Deleuze and Guattari have been able to produce tools that work where "reading" cannot.
[3] As Douglas Crimp describes, Tilted Arc -- a huge, wall-like sculpture that spanned New York's Federal Plaza -- was eventually destroyed for obstructing the smooth functioning of State surveillance power within public space, and for conversely being a potential instrument of terrorist attack (Crimp 1993). Conversely, the Shroud's appearance, as the face of politico-religious power, is a terrorist target, and prompts the remaking of the city within its parameters. The facial configuration of urban space by the State are also made explicit in Deleuzoguattarian terms by Sandra Buckley's "Contagion", in which "the face of contemporary Japan" is approached as the maintenance of public flows and the pathologisation of shifting autonomous zones of deviant urban sexuality (Buckley 1996).
[4] Deleuze seems to pre-empt Guthrie in his elaboration of non-anthropocentric ecology: "the head of Christ we fancy in spots on a wall refers to plastic forces that wind through organisms that already exist" (Deleuze 1993: 8). The forces of materiality pervade everything, creating an economy in which the subject is not pregiven. Deleuze argues for what Guthrie uses as an error factor that excuses (an embattled) anthropomorphism: the increasing difficulty to differentiate life from inanimate matter.
[5] One of Streiber's alien-induced visions is of a vivid, abandoned, golden city that contains a single, sad building in which the truth about humanity is known (Streiber 1988). (Humanity is a tragic figure, whom Streiber continually portrays as simultaneously self-destructive and promising.) The coded city is at once like a scene of a crime.
