Benjamin Hoh, 1996

It doesn’t have a nose, eyes and a mouth.
It’s something else…
– Frank Black, on surf music

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I first read Ian Wilson’s The Turin Shroud (1978) as a child, when popular interest in Catholicism’s greatest icon was running high. But besides evoking awe, this event also planted the seeds of a terrible fear in me. Wilson’s book reproduces a faded painting of Christ, found in an old stronghold of the Knights Templar, that bears an uncanny resemblance to the Shroud: it is a bearded face with a calm, owlish stare. For some reason I found this portrait radically menacing. Even now, I can only look at it for moments at a time, and for years I have been haunted by the face of Jesus, hovering in the darkness outside my window. It still follows me as I write this essay, sometimes reducing me to a huddled mess. I thus feel a genuine sympathy for one Templar, Raoul de Gizy, whose testimony adorns Wilson’s argument that the mysterious “head” that the Templars allegedly idolised was actually the Shroud:

INQUISITOR: What was its face like?

BROTHER RAOUL: Terrible. It seemed to me that it was the face of a demon, of a maufé [evil spirit]. Every time I saw it I was filled with such terror I could scarcely look at it, trembling in all my members.
(Wilson 1978: 203)

Wilson suggests that de Gizy’s response could very well have been “hysteria” in the presence of a forbiddingly miraculous likeness of Christ. This possibility appeals to me. But such terror, like my own, and with its excesses keyed so particularly to a certain visual configuration, cannot be simply attributed to a simply submissive, monolithic or reactionary “fear of God”. (The autonomous pleasures of S&M and horror movies are distilled proofs of this unassimilability into emotional literalism.) Instead, the traumatic moment of recognition might lead us ambivalently to a scene: the space and time in which the figure and ground of a system of meaning are still unfolding.

This essay is not, therefore, about the primal birth of the image, but instead approaches the continued situation of fundamental dilemmas. It sees how the Shroud can point to a negotiation of the politics of “form” through the schema of the face, or what Deleuze and Guattari call the “abstract machine of faciality” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 168).

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The Shroud of Turin is a piece of linen, 4.3 metres long and 1.1 metres wide, which bears the frontal and dorsal images of a man who has all the markings of Christ’s Passion: the flogging, the crucifixion, the crown of thorns, the pierced side. Since its earliest recorded appearance in the mid-14th Century, it has been revered as the burial linen of Christ, and a physical representation and trace, not made by human hands, of God Himself.

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It is unquestionable that the face of the Leader is heavily imbricated in power; the Leader’s face is the dominant medium of public expression, appearing everywhere: on posters, on television, in magazines and newspapers, and especially on coins. As John of the Apocalypse knew, nobody will buy or sell without the mark of the Beast, but this is merely a literalisation of the framing of transactions that occur in the economy of signs, or the general economy of flows. As Marie-José Baudinet notes, this applies especially to the image of Christ, the divine leader:

Economy, 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)

How are we to handle the ikonomia of the Shroud, the ultimate icon? Basically, we must not mimic the prominence of the face on the Shroud by mistaking the (mystifying) anatomy of the face for its wider (economic) morphology. Against such literalisations, Deleuze and Guattari warn against attributing the origin of social power to the face itself: “Certain assemblages of power require the production of a face, others do not” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 175). They cite the Shroud as an archetypal product of faciality (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 167), a particular conjunction of semiotic configurations:

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)

If the gaze pre-exists the eye, and if the phallus does not equal the penis, what makes the face the totalising locus of expression that we always look to? Deleuze and Guattari propose that the Christ-phenomenon was the point at which a fully integrated faciality emerged, leading them to title their discussion “Year Zero: Faciality” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 167-191).

This is an angular kind of analysis that some would call promiscuous… Deleuze and Guattari obliquely trace the multidimensional effects of flows and blockages within a general semiotic “geology”, undercutting reifying analyses of the ideologies of “form” or “content”. …Or perhaps it engages with the volatile qualities of real semiotic effects.

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In the Shroud phenomenon we can discern the facial configuration of a whole apparatus of expression. The appearance of the Shroud-face undoubtedly features in this, but the “content” of such a fascination belies its broader faciality. For example, Ian Wilson attempts to give the Shroud an art-historical consistency that stretches back two thousand years, on the idea that the “universally known” face of Jesus — the long hair, forked beard and owlish eyes — has been derived from the Shroud’s face (Wilson 1978: 112-119). Evading the easy explanation of 14th Century forgery, Wilson attributes the appearances of Shroud-like portraits of Jesus, in specific places and times, to the slow journey of the Shroud from Palestine to Europe, and vice versa. The sudden appearance of Shroud-like Christs in 10th Century Constantinople, congruent with the arrival of the Mandylion icon, suggests to Wilson that the Mandylion was the Shroud, which therefore influenced Byzantine religious art, which therefore means that the Shroud is not a 14th Century fake… The specificities serve a universal purpose: the history of Christian art is configured as a coherent presence of atemporal expression that is somehow affirmed by the deviances that occur in its absence. The Shroud therefore becomes, metaphorically and literally, the “face” of Christian art.

But the specificities of the Shroud’s face do have telling affinities with the Byzantine mosaic portraits of Christ: the staring face seen startlingly flat from the front, without any kind of ambience. This points to the common function of the faces of the Shroud and the Byzantine code: they are both maps of the territory captured by the eyes of the despot (Deleuze & Guattari 1987: 183-5). There is no slippage, only a centralisation. A sidelong glance would have introduced a line of flight.

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In 1898, the first photograph of the Shroud revolutionised the icon’s fortunes. It was found that the Shroud’s photographic negative does not resemble a mere imprint of a body, but has a sensitivity of shade and depth that resembles a photograph of a body; the face takes on a particular clarity and “presence”. This creates a miraculous sense of immediacy: “[the photographer] found himself thinking that he was the first man for nearly 1,900 years to gaze on the actual appearance of the body of Christ…” (Wilson 1978: 33). Because of this phenomenon, the Shroud’s natural image is claimed to be a photographic negative.

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The Byzantine reterritorialisation continues. In the last quarter of the 20th Century, this often involves our co-option into the technoscientific vision of the military industrial complex, culminating in our complicities as players of Desert Storm’s Nintendo war on CNN in early 1991. And in the wake of the technological breakthrough of the vision of 1898, Shroud studies have tuned in nicely. In a recent television programme, a Catholic priest asserted that it was unfortunate that there was no video surveillance of Christ’s tomb at the moment of Resurrection. “If there had been a video camera, we would have seen something.” But all is not lost: “the Shroud is our videocamera”. In 1976, John Jackson and Eric Jumper, both Captains in the US Air Force, used NASA image-enhancement computers — some developed for the analysis of the Viking mission’s photographs of Mars — to show that there is a remarkable correlation between (a) the projected distance, from the cloth, of the relief of the presumed body, and (b) the relative intensity of the image (Wilson 1978: 259-261). Jackson and Jumper therefore extrapolated a three-dimensional model of Christ’s body from the Shroud’s image, which was concluded to be a sort of holographic projection of the Resurrection.

This is an almost archetypal example of how the obsessive mappings of crackpot/conspiracy theories must use a certain amount of scientifistic reason in order to fetishise the facts and establish the taste for totality that are both necessary for spreading circular networks of proof across the globe. Conspiracy produces a reified World, recoding the Earth in spite of its deterritoriaising capacities. Indeed, Jackson and Jumper’s method has been revealed to be circular, since it involves the iterative modification of data, with the model of the probable body as an attractor (Picknett & Prince 1994: 143-144). Jackson and Jumper look to, and reproduce, a facialised Body. But it is not simply that paranoid, loopy fools appropriate (and dilute) a dose of monolithic “Reason” during their stay in the military; the very technoscientific existence of the military is a co-option of the war machine’s “loopy” and “metallurgical” syntheses by the State’s apparatus of capture (Deleuze & Guattari 1987: 424-473). Everybody knows that all the cool stuff, like VR and the Internet, still comes from the military. The scopic fascinations of conspiracy theory, like fascism, therefore signal the crazy and pathologised return of the military’s repressed (and damaged) war machine: witness the mania of Colonel Ardenti, the fascist treasure-hunter in Foucault’s Pendulum (Eco 1989). All sensory apparatuses are unleashed (“scan for life-forms, Mr Data!”), spinning out of control in the search for Form.[1]

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As evidenced by his notes on fascism in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1970), Walter Benjamin was well acquainted with the macropolitical meanings of the militarist co-option and re-auratising of visual technologies of perception and reproduction:

In big parades and monster rallies, in mass sporting events and in war, all of which today are brought before the cameras, the mass looks itself in the face. (Benjamin 1970)

The links between envisioning the form of Christ and invoking the governing of the body politic are not particularly farfetched. Jacques Le Goff makes it quite clear that with the abandonment of the ancient Greek appreciation of the liver as a mediating nexus, Medieval Europe took a very particular step into nested hierarchies of the (political) body, in which the body of Jesus was the head of the body of the church, which was the head of the body of the people (Le Goff 1989). Of course, that particular relation of the head to the body involves the nested facialization of both, which leads to all the subsequent nestings (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 170). So to be a Christian is join the body of Christ, but as an obedient part, just as to be a citizen is to be a “participating” but sensibly governed subject — a passive cell in the body politic. Such is “responsibility”.

The macropolitical applications of this faciality were laid bare, in almost literal terms, by the 1978 Exposition of the Shroud, the largest in forty-five years. The Exposition, which led to the huge public profile of the Shroud in the late 1970s, was initiated by the new Cardinal of Turin, Anastasio Ballestrero, who had, according to Wilson, 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). The successful display of the Shroud to over three million people in forty-two days (Wilson 1978: 268), despite such problems, was achieved in terms so overcoded that is it is useful to quote Wilson in full:

For 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)

Here, with help from Eurocommunism’s Statist sympathies, the Shroud occupies the opposite position that was given to Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc by the same kind of regulatory apparatus. 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).[2] 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.[3]

Architecture positions its ensembles — houses, towns or cities, monuments or factories — to function like faces in the landscape they transform. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 172)

The facial configuration of urban space by the State are also made explicit in Deleuzoguattarian terms by Sandra Buckley, for whom “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).

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It’s not a complete tragedy. Faciality is always an intersection of different semiotic axes, and there is thus no way of positing it as a monolithic Source of All Evil. I have already hinted at uncertainty; I am presenting its troubled scene, which may contain resistance. This brings up a crucial interpretive question for cultural studies: is the identification of resistances within majoritarian culture merely a substitution of revolutionary politics with the satisfactions of consumption? Not if we ensure that resistance never replaces revolution. Perhaps it has for most critics, leading to the commodification of virtuality. But embracing the historical materialist imperative to identify the prerequisites of revolution without moralist idealism, one can take a “scientific” approach to culture, and hence identify qualitative differences in semiotic forces that not yet even be ideologically differentiable. This is Deleuze and Guattari’s mission: to outline philosophy as a physics of non-anthropomorphic relationality, of post-human sociality. It is not moral. They recognise that the breadth of Christian representation is able to shift Christ’s faciality in bizarre directions (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 189), and they repeat the concerns of Anglo-American cultural studies by emphasising the black American experience of translating facialising languages into countersignifying semiotic systems (Deleuze & Guattari 1987: 137).

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Against the masculinist totalisation implied in the body of the despot and its body politic, the body is precisely the site of contention and resistance in much contemporary feminist theory — not as an oppositional essentialism or a subservient surrender to binarism, but as a radical negotiation of situated embodiment. If women are gendered as the Body that requires suppression, we must ask the obvious question: do the unregulable excesses of corporeality, strategically useful in the face of gendering, appear in the midst of the Shroud’s overcodings? We must ironically return to the formal specificities of the Shroud as it appears to the “naked eye”: it is the faint image, almost a mirage, of a pierced, tortured corpse, with blood trickling down its arms, across its brow, through its hair, from the hole in its chest. Given the endless black and white photographic reproductions of the negative image, the affective qualities of the positive colour image are often forgotten.

Look close into the relative imperceptibility of the image, and there is the rising heat of dripping horror. Besides the bloodstains, the image on the cloth has been proved to lack any pigment (Picknett & Prince 1994); instead, it has the properties of a scorch. The cloth hints at the characteristics of David Fincher’s film Seven (1995), which injects film noir with dirty yellow light, nails, blood and fire, or Fredric Jameson’s description of Days of the Eclipse: “We are in a yellow dusty world, the very camera’s light is a faded, jaundiced orange so that its subjects look sick and feeble…” (Jameson 1992: 94). Besides the Byzantine surety, this too is the body of Christ on the Shroud. It is not without reason that Deleuze and Guattari note that “the body of the tortured is fundamentally one who loses his or her face” (Deleuze & Guattari 1987: 116). Escaping the terrestrial territoriality of Byzantine signifiance, “passional” faciality begins a line of flight (Deleuze & Guattari 1987: 184) through pain and fear. Masochism and horror movies, anyone? Unassimilable.

Indeed, there is much evidence that in the middle of Medieval piety regarding the body of Christ, the multidimensional, polyvocal corporeality of the body cannot be fully assimilated into the univocal, facialised body of the despot. For example, note the approaches of Caroline Walker Bynum (1989) and Jennifer Ash (1990) to Medieval religious women’s startling bodily excesses. Women mystics observed the most hideous tortures to join with the bleeding body of Christ – a feminised object of adoration and identification that arrives as a sign of pre-ideological, strategic negotiation of the sex/gender system. Walker Bynum and Ash assert that there is substantial, expressive resistance and autonomy in the middle of the most reactionary Medieval dualisms and misogynies.

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In 1988, a carbon-14 dating of the Shroud found the cloth to date from the 14th Century. But regardless of this, fascination with the Shroud has not ceased. Neither have the objections of believers.

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In Turin Shroud: In Whose Image? The Shocking Truth Unveiled (1994), Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince conclude that the Shroud is indeed a photograph, and that is a self-portrait by Leonardo da Vinci. While their proposed method of image-formation is the most plausible and interesting yet offered, Picknett and Prince’s truly loopy conspiracy theories are more interesting in this context. After showing that the face of the Shroud is incompatible with the image of the body, they argue that Leonardo replaced the face of the original model with his own, in order to deliberately rupture the facialising configuration of Christian representation. For Leonardo was a Johannite, a believer in the Messianic primacy of John the Baptist (Picknett & Prince 1994: 178), and the sign of John the Baptist, who achieved martyrdom via beheading, is the figure of the headless man. Rather than indicating the facialising separation of the head from the polyvocal body, the curious space that Picknett and Prince notice between the Shroud’s head and body is a symbolic decapitation.[4] Leonardo created a travesty. In a way, it also implies an unravelled calligram: the self-evident image of the body of Jesus, and the face that wryly announces “I am… not who I am”. The faulty locus of expression, the facial failure, causes the declarations of the despot to fizzle out. In the gap of the severed neck is the unconscious that cannot be contained by the Ur-consciousness of Christendom.

In terms of the body politic, Picknett and Prince’s intentionally subversive invocation of the headless man must inevitably recall Georges Bataille’s journal Acephale, which also celebrated the headless, polyvocal body, which Bataille figured as “the sign of radical anti-statism”. Bataille knew that one can ever totally repress the mutilating nature of signification, and that the sacrificial urge of the universe can only be captured and codified for so long by religion. This is what eludes Stewart Guthrie’s meditation on the phenomenon of the face in religion (Guthrie 1993); Guthrie recognises a perceptual strategy behind the appearance of the face, but merely refacialises it, attributing religion to anthropomorphism, leaving the category of “human” uninterrogated, and erasing the possibility of any excess. Everything becomes mundane: resistance is futile — you will be assimilated.

Regardless of whether Picknett and Prince are correct about the Shroud being a photograph, their literalising invocation of the Shroud’s already-photographic discourse provides the perfect space in which we can locate the jittery, incomplete scene of faciality and its politics. Their major recoding, despite their subversive, anti-statist fantasies, is to excessively celebrate the first-ever photograph as a master work, a self-portrait by the great genius, Leonardo.

[C]ult value does not give way without resistance. It retires into an ultimate retrenchment: the human countenance. It is not an accident that the portrait was the focal point of early photography. The cult of remembrance of loved ones, absent or dead, offers a last refuge for the cult value of the picture. (Benjamin 1970: 227-228, emphasis added)

In a recent television interview, Lynn Picknett has asserted that “the Shroud is a masterpiece, a ‘Leonardo’; people have been praying over it for five hundred years when they should have been appreciating it in a gallery”. This insistent re-auratisation dramatises the action of faciality within the general arena of corporeal semiotic configuration, unfolding despite the ambivalence at its core.

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What is to be done? While the Shroud fades into insignificance as a single work or a literal sign, the facialisation of the planet — in the formal terms of the West, of Man, of Capital — continues in crisis, but unabated. Here we are, as motes in God’s eye. We must link with revolutionary statements of ambivalence, hope and strategy within the scene, the dilemma, the belly of the monster, the location of culture, and learn. The Manifesto of the Communist Party. A Manifesto for Cyborgs. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. But it must not stop at “philosophy”.

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

BAIGENT, Michael, Richard Leigh & Henry Lincoln (1982) The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, London: Corgi

BAUDINET, Marie-Jos&233; (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

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 & Felix Guattari (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (trans. Brian Massumi), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press

ECO, Umberto (1989) Foucault’s Pendulum, London: Picador

GUTHRIE, Stewart (1993) Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion, Oxford: Oxford University Press

JAMESON, Fredric (1992) The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System, Bloomington: Indiana University Press

KRAUSS, Rosalind (1993) The Optical Unconscious, Cambridge: MIT Press

LE GOFF, Jacques (1989) “Political Uses of the Image of the Body in the Middle Ages”, in Michel Feher, Ramona Naddaf & Nadia Tazi (eds), Zone 5: Fragments for a History of the Human Body (Volume 3), New York: Zone Books

PICKNETT, Lynn & Clive Prince (1994) Turin Shroud: In Whose Image? The Shocking Truth Unveiled, London: Bloomsbury

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

WILSON, Ian (1978) The Turin Shroud, London: Penguin

[1] On the necessity to be strategically phallogocentric:since one of Jackson and Jumper’s NASA computers was originally designed to analyse the surface of Mars, it is quite appropriate that the Viking photographs eventually revealed what appears to be a huge, sphinx-like face on the surface of Mars, staring upwards towards us like a Byzantine portrait. There now exists the fascinating phenomenon of amateur investigators using commercial photo-manipulation programs like Adobe Photoshop to “enhance” low-resolution JPEG images of the Face obtained via the Internet — images that are compressed using algorithms that cause data loss, and which are usually scanned from printed reproductions with equipment whose results, as most electronic publishers unfortunately know, usually require significant, gamma corrections and recalibrations that apply to a singular combinations of equipment. Earnestly reinvoking the set of practices that erased Trotsky and exulted the Stalinist despot-body, these investigators apply pretty Gaussian blurs and posterisations in order to determine the diameter of the Face’s iris, or the width of its teeth. (The “teeth” were eventually found to be enlarged, exaggerated pixels of the low resolution image, which appeared after the application of tilting and resolution-enhancing functions.) Like fascism, which mobilises a suicidal war machine, of this wildness only leads towards more totalisation.

Perhaps more alarmingly, it must also be noted that Jackson and Jumper’s famous “3D relief” images were obtained using “an ordinary three-by-five-inch transparency of the Shroud” (Wilson 1978: 259), as if the low quality of the sample material could increase the validity of the findings. The trouble doesn’t stop: to theatricalise their (otherwise sound) debunking of Jackson and Jumper, Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince use Aldus Photostyler and a public domain ray-tracing package to “analyse” a 300 dpi flat-bed scan of an ordinary photograph (Picknett & Prince 1994: 141) — a data source that is much worse than Jackson and Jumper’s and which is unacceptable even for the naked eye of standard technical publishing.

[2] When explosions in Federal buildings do happen, it is notably without the aid of modernist sculpture. But the State, on the other hand, can always be relied upon to play its part; in Oklahoma, FBI investigations immediately turned to the nearest deviants from the great American facial structure: the local Arabic community.

[3] Baudinet notes that canny iconoclastic governmentalists were cynically keyed into the relationship: “Traditionally, the iconoclasts were known to be as iconocratic as the iconophiles. For them, it was never a question of abolishing all images and governing without them. They were content to ban the representation of Christ’s face and the Virgin’s and to replace them with their own” (Baudinet 1989: 149).

[4] It gets weirder: Leonardo’s Johannism is apparently a function of his Grand Mastership of the now infamous Priory of Sion. According to The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (Baigent, Leigh & Lincoln 1982), the Priory of Sion formed the Knights Templar, whose last Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, was burnt at the stake by the King Philip the Fair of France in 1314. Legend has it that when King Louis XVI of France was beheaded during the Revolution, an unknown man climbed on the block and shouted, “Jacques de Molay, you are avenged!”.