Deleuze
for the Desperate #12 Faciality
Plateau 7 of A Thousand Plateaus (ATP)
on faciality offers all the classic problems
associated with reading Deleuze and Guattari. It
is a masterpiece of French elite academic style.
There are all sorts of casual asides to novels by
DH Lawrence and Henry Miller, work by Sartre and
Lacan, American psychoanalysis, paintings and
music, epics of mediaeval knighthood and recent
work in embryology. Some examples just get a small
paragraph, as a kind of passing thought, like the
ones on bouncing balls in Kafka and a Nijinsky
ballet, or discussion of the facial tic. This
weird collection of examples is perhaps
intended to show the universality and cultural
significance of the faciality system, but only a
philosopher could see any of this as evidence.
There is a lot of repetition. Some sources are
more explicit and adequately referenced, but not
all. Some of the references are still in French of
course. There are very abstract 'theorems'
relating to general issues and horrible little
scrappy diagrams. There is also philosophical
thinking aloud kind that can look like evasiveness
— maybe it is evasiveness.
If you have lots of time and leisure, as I do at
the moment, it is a treasure house, and I have
much enjoyed tracking down some of the references
and exploring them. However, if you are a
hard-pressed student trying to get some basic
argument out of this work, it must be deeply
frustrating. These are the people I am addressing
in this video.
As usual, therefore, I'm going to stratify my
offering. The video script will focus on the main
points and just mention what I take to be the main
issues, in so far as I can grasp them, but the
transcript includes some extra comments to cover
some more background.
Let's get on with the main argument as I see it.
We are told from the start that we are going to
consider how two forces are going to be integrated
together. We have already met these in the
previous plateau (6) on the body without organs
(BwO). The two forces are signifiance and
subjectification. Signifiance relates to the ways
in which what is seen as the proper construction
of language controls us and what we can say.
Subjectification describes the ways in which
subjective identities are made available to
us and also limit the potential of what we
can do and think. You might remember that we saw
these as two 'enemies' of the BwO. We have also
mentioned faciality as a process which functions
like the refrain
We are told that D&G are going to operate as
usual at two levels. Slightly unusually, we're
going to discuss the abstract system first,
whereas in the other plateaus it is often the
other way around. First, there is the virtual or
'pure' level, dealing with an abstract system or
machine of faciality. This will operate across a
wide range of examples 'regardless of the content'
(page 196). Second, there are some actual
examples. The virtual system takes the form of an
abstract machine, technically capable of producing
the whole range of possible combinations of the
forces involved. The concrete and actualized
possibilities are produced by additional social
and political forces, in the context in which we
are operating. The actual examples largely turn on
the role of the human face as usually understood,
in social and political life, and in art. We are
told that this is a really important discussion
for understanding human culture, humanity itself,
as well as the most general features of modern
social life, none of which need resemble the
conventional human face at all. This is because
the virtual system itself is inhuman. We would
expect this 'inhumanity' with any abstract or
machinic system that operates at the level of
impersonal universal forces, operating behind
human cultural life. Understanding the faciality
system in its full impersonality becomes important
if we are to escape it, as we shall see -- we can
develop new machinic possibilities altogether --
'probe heads'. We are also told early on that the
notion of becoming something other than
conventionally human is going to be important, so
there is a link with the discussion of becoming.
At the virtual level, the basic components of
machine faciality can be understood as a white
screen and a black hole, combined in various ways.
We are told in What is Philosophy (Deleuze
& Guattari 1994) that Deleuze was intrigued by
white screens from his interest in cinema, and saw
white screens as an important component, upon
which particular messages, sequences of language
or symbols, are projected. The most literal and
concrete example of the face is the one often seen
in cinema or photography, the washed out,
overexposed white face with contrasting black
eyes. The notion of a screen can be used to refer
to any surface upon which messages are projected,
not just cinema screens (and this might be where
the notion of a landscape fits in). Such messages
are going to be treated as powerful forms of
social conformity and control, which is argued
strongly in other plateaus on language.
The notion of a black hole comes from Guattari and
his work on psychoanalysis (for example, Guattari
1995). The most concrete way to think of this is
as a description of catatonic patients: all sorts
of people attempt to direct communication at them,
but nothing comes back, just as no information or
light comes out of black hole in astronomy. The
black hole appears in Guattari more generally to
represent what we experienced normally as personal
consciousness and personal passions, experienced
as an inward dimension, a feeling that something
is going on inside us, personal to us, something
not necessarily socially shared. Ordinary
subjectivity can degenerate into the more
pathological catatonic kind when individuals
obsess so much about their personal feelings that
they develop black holes. We are talking about the
sort of obsession with self that you occasionally
find with great writers, or with those in the grip
of consuming personal passions. One of Proust's
characters — Swann — shows such an obsession as we
shall see and there might be another example in
the lovers' fatal passions in Wagner's opera Tristan
und Isolde . (I haven't seen it --try the Wikipedia
account for a first step). Faciality in this opera
even gets its own diagram on page 205.
Components are always combined together. A sense
of personal subjectivity is therefore integrated
with social messages being projected onto various
social surfaces and carried by ordinary language.
Human subjectivity is never completely autonomous,
but is always integrated with patterns of
signifiance. In this way, social systems
themselves provide for a number of positions, even
though we think of those as our own forms of
subjectivity. For me, this is the abiding
political theme that runs throughout this Plateau,
and it might be something to think about in
particular for those of us in Anglo-US societies
who tend to think that the individual person can
escape, resist, even challenge social and
linguistic arrangements by developing our own
subjectivity and creativity. Modern French
thinkers have always been far more pessimistic
about this. For them, subjectivity does not
spontaneously arise from individuals, but is
itself constructed through processes that make us
think we are autonomous, but which also require us
to conform to existing social arrangements. I
think that this pessimistic, or realistic if you
prefer, notion of subjectivity can be found in
most of the other plateaus as well. This obviously
disagrees with those who see Deleuze (with or
without Guattari) as an advocate of the sort of
entirely subjective approaches to research that
you see in developments such as Autoethnography: I
have developed my own view in a recent open access
publication (Harris, 2018) (free download!).
Turning to the concrete examples, we find
references to work in American psychology on the
perception of the child, a topic which is
discussed elsewhere quite a lot as well.
Particular criticism is directed at Freud, but
also at his disciples, like Klein. She has
developed an argument to include the importance of
things she calls 'part objects'('transitional
objects' for Winnacott). These are important in
the child's growing understanding of the external
world. Objects like perceptions of the mother's
breast or face are understood both as part of the
integrated passional world of the infant, and,
increasingly, as external real objects in
their own right. Guattari in particular has
frequently discussed the pros and cons of this
particular approach, for example in Guattari
(2014). Here, the approach is being criticized as
claiming to be universal, as part of some
inevitable stage of development. Deleuze and
Guattari prefer a different model of development,
one described as a matter of intensive forces
arriving at different speeds in the development of
children. We have a rather implicit reference here
to background work on embryology, denying the
existence of any fixed blueprint, and referring to
how abstract biochemical forces and flows in the
embryo territorialize or reterritorialize in
different places and different times with
subsequent effects on other flows. I think
DeLanda's commentary is the clearest here
(DeLanda, 2002).
Freudian psychology, sees its own approach
as 'science', though, and the actual words of the
patient are always translated into the scientific
terms. This takes place particularly in the
dangerously authoritarian face–to–face context of
conventional Freudian psychotherapeutic practice.
This face-to-face system is represented as a 'four
– eye machine', although that is not clear here.
The term does explicitly refer to Anglo-American
psychiatric practice in Guattari's The
Machinic Unconscious (Guattari, 2011). We
also find in Anti-Oedipus (Deleuze and
Guattari 1984) freudian psychology referred to as
an example of biunivocalization, a term discussed
in a minute. I offer a brief summary of the
critique of the Oedipus complex in a short
paragraph on the transcript (below)
Deleuze and Guattari use the
term biunivocalization to refer to the
colonizing tendencies of Freudian theory,
especially in Anti-Oedipus. Freudian
categories are simply applied to whatever it is
that the patients happen to be discussing. As D
and G say, for example, everything always turns
on the Oedipus complex. In a famous case study,
a young child, Little Hans, develops anxiety
about going outside his house, even though he
yearns to play in the street. Freud's early
diagnosis is that this is the result of an
Oedipal fear of his father's castrating power,
based on some symbolic resemblance between his
father and the horses moving up and down the
street. In another case, one of Klein's
patients, Little Richard, likes to draw maps of
different European countries in different
colours, and shows them being invaded by various
naval forces: this is an Oedipal anxiety about
adult sexuality and the bodily invasions that it
implies, says Klein. There is quite a good early
article on these cases in Deleuze (2006). The
point is that whatever they say, no matter how
personal or idiosyncratic it might be,
utterances of the patients all turn on Oedipus.
Their cure depends on them accepting this
diagnosis. When patients finally agree, one
voice fits the other so smoothly that there is a
single regime of understanding. We have here the
pessimistic account of subjectivity as never
free but tied to a set of fixed positions
provided by a system, a theoretical one in this
case.
There are also some extraordinary examples,
apparently of faciality, in a Kafka novella (Blumfeld)
and in a staging of a ballet by Debussy and
Nijinsky, possibly (Prelude to an)
Afternoon of a Faun. Both seem to appeal
because they feature bouncing balls, and this
somehow relates to black holes. There is
'nothing to explain, nothing to interpret', page
187, but these examples apparently show the
possibilities of the 'pure abstract machine' and
the possible combinations it can produce. I have
not particularly followed these up, although I
have read the Kafka novella, which reminded me
of other Kafka discussions of paranoia, and
surveillance by intrusive strangers. This sort
of example apparently shows the universality of
the faciality system.
The text then provides us with a casual and
unreferenced aside about the work of Sartre and
Lacan, and how the discussion of faciality helps
ground their work and logically precedes it. They
use terms like 'the look' and 'the mirror phase'
respectively, and this is where online aside 1 spells out
some of the implications.
We then encounter various theorems relating to
deterritorialization. That concept is, of course,
important to other discussions in ATP,
including ones about lines of flight, which is
where we encountered it in this series of videos.
These theorems extend the formal qualities of
deterritorialization. To give you just the gist of
the argument as I understand it, we need this
extended discussion to avoid oversimple
interpretations of the term. Deterritorialization
is a complex matter, where elements can be linked
with other elements in whole systems or
structures. Each element has a different potential
for deterritorialization, so various possibilities
of contamination or escalation exist, as the
deterritorialization of one element affects the
others. Faciality shows all the complexities of
deterritorialization. Initially, it is quite a
simple matter, where the human face gets
deterritorialized from its original setting, the
human head. Then a particular historical process
ensues which produces further deterritorialization
and further relations with other elements, as we
shall see in the case of cultural activities.
The face actually offers an absolute
deterritorialization (page 191), represented as
the highly abstract system of white screens and
black holes. The system will go on to dominate
large areas of culture as they reterritorialize on
it. This is why we should understand the face
quite distinctly from the ways of understanding
bodies: faces are coded differently. This
extensive power of deterritorialization and the
potential for reterritorialization of neighbouring
components explains its cultural role. The face
can now overcode a wide range of cultural
activity, offering a very general and widely
applicable coding system. We have to remember that
we are not just looking for simple resemblances
between faces and other cultural elements, but
rather for the same machinic operations.
Incidentally, the underlying system can also be
understood as a surface with holes, or a holey
surface, and this is discussed briefly right at
the end of the Plateau on smooth space.
How did this system develop? It is not essentially
human, but draws on inhuman forces. It is not just
that faces appear as inhuman in certain
circumstances, in very large close-up, for
example. The faciality system is not the result of
an evolution or a necessary stage of development.
It has nothing to do with psychoanalytic stages of
the development of human subjects. It does
not involve ideology in the usual sense (as
deliberate strategic communication) , but is more
an abstract issue of 'economy and the organization
of power': it is a very powerful and flexible way
to overcode human life.
Social power has not always been exercised through
faciality. In 'primitive societies' (page 195),
there is a different semiotic, something
'essentially collective, polyvocal and corporeal',
expressed in a variety of forms and substances,
but usually involving bodies and the domination of
them. Speech, symbolism and ritual act as forms of
bodily domination. These can achieve some
limited becomings, usually becomings–animal,
invoking animal spirits of various kinds, for
example, but more abstract ones are needed in
modern societies.
Faciality actually emerges with the power of White
Man, with European dominance, symbolized by the
face of Christ spreading everywhere and becoming
the model of the seemingly universal human face
(which is what I understand by the Latin tag facies
totius universi on page 196). Here, the
system of power works in a new way, focused on the
key process of biunivocalization. To simplify,
univocalization occurs when a single speaker
voices a statement that reflects their own
understandings and beliefs. Bivocalization clearly
involves two people speaking and making
statements. However, biunivocalization describes a
situation where two voices may be speaking, but
they are both offering complementary versions of
the same statement, the statement offered by the
dominant speaker. Different speakers might take
turns to make versions of a statement, but that
statement will still reflect the interests of one
speaker. An oppressive ruler might be making a
statement about something, and we might find
ordinary citizens offering the same views,
apparently quite spontaneously and independently.
Or we might have some sort of call and response
system, where a powerful speaker makes a statement
about something and then asks for responses, and
the listeners give personal examples that
illustrate and fully agree with the view. We will
add another example in a minute
The faciality system is biunivocal. Whatever the
variations in content, centres and surfaces
provide a coherent basic unit with the same
underlying logic — to express subjective meaning
in conventional language you need a twofold
combination of surface and subjective centre. Not
only that, the subjective centre itself also
operates only with binaries, usually of a simple
'"yes – no" type'. And there is a further form of
biunivocalization to add to the examples above.
Any system that is going to domesticate a complex
society cannot be too rigid, and has to deal with
new cases that emerge now and then. The faciality
system works to domesticate anything that might be
emerging as a challenge — 'the white wall is
always expanding, and the black hole functions
repeatedly' (page 197). For example, if the
traditional binary difference between conventional
men and conventional women comes under strain, new
categories can be invented — the example is the
category of transvestite in the 1970s (many more
categories exist in 2018). This category will not
necessarily be particularly hostile, but it will
be part of the abstract machine, not something
outside that can challenge it --so what do you
think about the politics of the growing list of
categories as in LGBT -- QA etc?
At this point, there's quite an interesting
discussion about 'European racism'. We have
already seen that faciality is based on the
emergence of White Man, so nonwhite people, when
they finally appear in the heartlands of Europe
for example, have to be categorized as deviants in
the way suggested just now. I thought at
this point of some British work on black people
and how they finally began to appear on British
television, first of all as barbaric savages or
criminals, then increasingly as slightly more
tolerant stereotypes such as 'noble savage',
talented natural athlete or musician. Of course
these are all still sometimes used in social
discrimination. Deleuze and Guattari argue that
none of these categories actually grasp very much
about otherness — 'Racism never detects the
particles of the other' (page 197). Black people
are granted otherness but on the terms of the
system and there is no recognition of any other
kind outside the system.
There is parallel work in feminism to
draw upon here as well, not mentioned in Deleuze
and Guattari though. Irigaray (1985) suggests
that in patriarchy women have a limited identity
just as 'not–men', not even as proper others.
Going back to the text, we can conclude that
language and signifiance squeeze out any
heterogeneity and offer continuous translation
of it back into an overarching system of
categories. Again I thought of early work on
British television which had to manage a range
of political opinions, including anything that
lay outside the usual Parliamentary consensus.
Representatives of conventional Parliamentary
parties were offered places on a panel in the
studio on the left or on the right of the
neutral chairperson (a BBC presenter) in the
middle,but anyone outside that consensus,like
radical trade unionists for example, were
interviewed literally outside the studio, often
on the street or against some standard
background like a picket line or a crowd. The
last time I saw that sort of display was during
a BBC discussion of the impending referendum on
Scottish independence in 2014. All sorts
of conventional spokespeople were gathered in a
cosy tent but the sole working-class dissenter
(advocating remaining in the union with England)
was interviewed outside in the cold drizzle.
We learn that 'language is always embedded in the
faces that announce its statements' (page 199) and
you might need to remember this argument if you
encounter elsewhere, such as in Plateau 4,
apparently strange statements like there is no
such thing as language in its own right. No
separate language also means no separate level of
subjectivity either, no subjective choices as a
prior activity which then expresses itself in
language — subjectivity is not outside of
language. Subjective choice presupposes the
faciality system and how it has already
constructed with binary signifiers and binary
subjective identities. In this sense, 'it is faces
that choose their subjects' (page 199), not the
other way around. That is, the faciality system
has constructed human subjects in the first place.
Again we are reminded that linguistic operations
and the operations of subjectivity do not look
like the same kind of thing, and neither resemble
a human face, but nevertheless both arise from the
abstract operation of faciality. As a result, they
are always found combined together.
Then we get some examples in
painting, where proliferations of the basic
'face of Christ system' are developed in
various ways, some even seeming to approach
'madness'. The example here is the painting by
Giotto of the life of St Francis, which I
include here. D and G say that 'the crucified
Christ–turned–kite–machine sends stigmata to
St Francis by rays… [which]… effect the
facializaton of the body of the Saint… [but]…
the rays carrying the stigmata are also the
strings St Francis uses to pull the divine
kite' (page 198). In this way, St Francis's
personal actions as a divine fully complement
Christ's action to confer his divinity.
So certain social formations need faciality
systems, and also landscapes, we are assured,
although I still do not see quite how landscapes
fit in (I've had a go in aside
2) . Our social formation has colonized the
earlier systems of power which were much more
polyvocal and far less individualized. We now have
a fully modern process of signifiance and
subjectification which tries to deal with all
eventualities. This explains why the modern body
is so heavily disciplined, because bodies were
once the source of alternative corporeal forms of
semiotic. Colonization took place, and is
maintained, precisely because modern systems of
signifiance and subjectification are so abstract,
so deterritorialized, and are thus generally
applicable. Social change has deterritorialized
the older systems, but instead of developing new
territorialized relations of their own, they have
been colonized by highly deterritorialized
systems, one of those outcomes predicted in the
theorems of deterritorialization.
In detail, there are specific assemblages of power
at work, and these form two main kinds — despotic
and authoritarian. Both are involved in crushing
otherness and heterogeneity. There is much
discussion of various power assemblages in Anti-Oedipus.
Roughly, a despotic system is based around the
presence of a single ruler, leader or institution
which monopolizes all power and acts everywhere.
An authoritarian system is more like our own;
depersonalized, based on institutions that make us
conform willingly, such as systems of contract.
Sometimes the two forms are mixed.
There are some additional possibilities as well,
some of which are illustrated in the curious
diagrams on page 203.
There might be moving black holes for example, or
more than two. We can add circles to add diagrams
to show how the black hole can expand its areas of
operation: inside each new black hole is an eye in
some of these examples, some of which are drawn
from Mercier's book on Ethiopian magic
scrolls. Have a look at aside 3 on that
book if you wish. Black holes can overlap, 'enter
into redundancy' (page 202), and this is how
despotic systems work to proliferate the centre of
power and spread it across the whole surface.
In another case, perhaps describing the modern
authoritarian regime, the wall of the signifier
becomes something that looks rather more like a
line. We are not actually told much more about
what this represents, but perhaps it is a
personalized version of the signifier? We see
these lines in the diagrams on page 205.
In some cases, it seems, the
line bearing signifiers heads toward one
dominant black hole. Sometimes, opposing faces
will appear, representing either two persons
or aspects of the same person, say their
rational consciousness and their subjective
passions. In the third example, it seems as if
various kinds of artistic representation can
be made to converge, perhaps on one decisive
act, like the final scenes of Tristan und
Isolde, where more or less everyone dies
passionately. I am not at all clear why this
is called a 'maritime' case, but it might
refer to an argument by DH Lawrence's essay on
Melville (Lawrence, nd): note 18, page 590,
says the essay 'begins with a lovely
distinction between terrestrial and
maritime eyes'
I've read this, but can't see what
they mean. This is the beginning:
Melville has the strange, uncanny magic of
sea-creatures, and some of their
repulsiveness. He isn't quite a land animal.
There is something slithery about him.
Something always half-seas-over. In his life
they said he was mad - or crazy. He was
neither mad nor crazy. But he was over the
border. He was half a water animal, like
those terrible yellow-bearded Vikings who
broke out of the waves in beaked ships.
He was a modern Viking. There is something
curious about real blue-eyed people. They
are never quite human, in the good classic
sense, human as brown-eyed people are human:
the human of the living humus. About a real
blue-eyed person there is usually something
abstract, elemental. Brown-eyed people are,
as it were, like the earth, which is tissue
of bygone life, organic, compound. In blue
eyes there is sun and rain and abstract,
uncreate element, water, ice, air, space,
but not humanity. Brown-eyed people are
people of the old, old world: Allzu
menschlich. Blue-eyed people tend to
be too keen and abstract.
Melville is like a Viking going home to the
sea, encumbered with age and memories, and a
sort of accomplished despair, almost
madness. For he cannot accept humanity. He
can't belong to humanity. Cannot.
Hardly compelling argument! Incidentally, the
rest of the essay is not at all in line with
deleuzian views:
Whatever else the South Sea Islander is, he
is centuries and centuries behind us in the
life-struggle, the consciousness-struggle,
the struggle of the soul into fullness.
There is his woman, with her knotted hair
and her dark, inchoate, slightly sardonic
eyes. I like her, she is nice. But I would
never want to touch her. I could not go back
on myself so far... She has soft warm flesh,
like warm mud. Nearer the reptile, the
Saurian age. Noli me tangere....
If you prostitute your psyche by returning
to the savages, you gradually go to pieces.
Before you can go back, you have to
decompose. And a white man decomposing is a
ghastly sight.
Then we get to a major example, Proust who
was 'able to make the face, landscape, painting,
music, resonate together' (page 205). I have
my own summary
of the novel on my website. In this example, we
are reminded how Swann persuades himself that
Odette is a beautiful person, worthy of his love,
despite being of humble origins and having a
dubious reputation as a courtesan. He does this by
looking at parts of her face and seeing in them
reminders of parts of faces in classical
paintings. Specifically, according to my notes on
the novel, she recalls a Giotto painting of
Zipporah in the Sistine Chapel:
I understand the Google Arts and Culture app now
helps you do something similar, by locating your
own selfie in a classical painting. Back to
Proust, the same music always seems to be playing
when Swann meets Odette in various salons, and he
begins to add value to the meetings, to use a
phrase found in leisure studies, by associating
them with a particularly beautiful musical phrase.
However, all these aesthetic efforts push Swann
into a crippling obsession with Odette and he
follows all these efforts 'along a line hurtling
towards a single black hole, that of Swann's
Passion'. He is eventually able to escape and put
things back into perspective only by considerable
intellectual reflection on music, separating its
effects from subjective people and subjective
feelings, attaining a kind of 'salvation through
art'. That is, he finally gets a proper technical
understanding of art in its own right, seeing that
it does not just express subjectivity, but has its
own internal rules of composition which offer many
more possible meanings.
Generally though, French novels are not very good
at helping us get out of black holes we are told.
This massive generalization is followed by another
one praising Anglo-American novels which stress
the theme of escape, breaking out of social
constraints, travelling and having adventures.
However, there is also an awareness that escape is
going to be very difficult as we shall see.
The same goes with breaking from conventional
signifiance, and even Christ was unable to break
entirely with conventional understandings — 'he
bounced off the wall' is the way they put it, page
207. The trouble is that our culture exerts a
massive inertia over any attempt to escape. This
means there are some risks in doing things like
becoming animal or becoming imperceptible, which
leads to warnings at the end of the Plateau.
We will need to draw upon all the resources of art
to resist and escape, especially 'art of the
highest kind' (page 208), which probably implies
art that engages with philosophy. In experimental
writing you can become animal or become
imperceptible, and the same goes with music. We
have to be careful that we do not see art as a
refuge, however, and allow it to reterritorialize
us too early. We have to go all the way instead
'towards the realms of the a–signifying,
a–subjective and faceless'. This is risky, and
'madness is a definite danger'. Clinical
schizophrenia could be seen as a form of total
loss of the sense of face, for example.
Incidentally, there is also a bizarre discussion
of the facial tic, which I will leave you to read
to enjoy, page 208.
Breaking out of faciality will always be a
political act, something real, with real
consequences. One possibility is
'becoming–clandestine', which perhaps here means
avoiding the usual categories, not willingly
conforming but keeping something back, so that you
are no longer open to total control. As usual,
though, it is necessary to do some philosophy
first, some extensive analysis to 'find your black
holes and white walls' so that they might be
dismantled, or that we might find lines of flight.
We should not be tempted to think of simply
returning to become a primitive person again. This
will not leave behind the categories that we still
think with: when we look at 'the deep ocean, we
will think of the lake in the Bois de Boulogne' is
how they put it (page 209). Or we will find
ourselves reterritorialized again. For these
reasons, a return to some precapitalist
arrangement is 'an "impossible return"' (quoting
DH Lawrence's critique of Melville's novel of
living amidst noble savagery Typee). We
should not return, but rather move forward to
think of new ways of living — 'we can't turn
back'.
Instead, we have to find new uses for the walls
and black holes we have been given. We need to
analyze signifiance in order to try to develop
'lines of a-signifiance'. We should escape from
memory that constrains us, try to avoid previous
interpretations, and examine our own subjectivity
to try and find those 'particles' that have not
been domesticated. In our relations with others we
need a kind of transformed love which is
nonsubjective, which does not attempt to colonize
the other, but explores others as genuinely
unknown.
We can do the same with landscape
traits and with other forms of expression like
painting and music. Giotto's painting of St
Francis shows that there are possibilities in
depicting religiosity, even working within the
conventional codes of Catholic Christianity. DH
Lawrence, despite his pessimism, admits that
conventional travellers can at least become
lost, '"mindless and memoryless beside the sea"'
(page 210). This is a quote from Lawrence's Kangaroo
and refers to the culture and eco shock
experienced by a Brit bourgeois on living for a
while in Australia.The Brit also yearns for some
wonderful new and rather fascist form of
government based on manly love, naturally with
little thought given to any intermediate
institutions. Deleuze's admiration for DH
Lawrence runs throughout the book and is hard to
explain,but, apparently, his long-suffering wife
Fanny was engaged in translating Lawrence, so we
might be overhearing some pillow talk chez
Deleuze?
In summary, the abstract machine of faciality
links us to definite political and social strata
in a way which offers only a limited freedom (a
limited form of personal deterritorialization) or
tolerated forms of harmless deviancy. This system
colonizes and extends itself consistently (it
develops 'on a plane of consistency' is the way
they put it, becoming a diagram). However, there
is one liberating possibility — faciality can
produce a 'probe head', something that searches or
guides, that breaks through strata, pierces walls,
and escapes holes of subjectivity.
Deterritorializations can become more positive and
creative. Lines and holes need not form a unified
system, nor extend to fully colonize landscapes,
paintings or music. Faciality traits can be freed
to go off and develop rhizomes of their own,
linking up with previously unknown aspects of
landscapes, painting or music.
Overall, current notions of the face (of
subjectivity or personhood) are 'a horror',
necessarily inhuman (in the pejorative sense as
well?), produced by a machine to serve the
interests of apparatuses of power. Even
'primitive' forms are inhuman too although they
combine forces differently, with 'very different
natures and speeds' (I think we have discussed the
notion of speed before, which refers both to when
a force arrives to be combined with others, and
the extent to which it can combine across a range
of other forces -- high speed means the capacity
to connect with a wide range of other forces and
thus induce qualitative change from an
accumulation of impulses). We should try to
develop a more liberating inhumanity — the probe
head, something which explores, something which
seeks out deterritorialization and lines of
flight, intending to form new becomings and
polyvocalities. Our slogan might be 'become
clandestine, make rhizomes everywhere' (page 211).
But even so, this still looks a bit unsatisfactory
— 'must we leave it at that, three states and no
more: primitive heads, Christ face, and probe
heads?'.
I think this unsatisfactory nature of analysis of
the faciality system might explain its near
absence anywhere else in subsequent work. I cannot
remember offhand a single reference to faciality
in Deleuze's massive two volume discussion of the
cinema which we reviewed in other videos (Deleuze
1989, 1992). Guattari's work on subjectivity does
mention it occasionally and there is a short
essay on faciality at the end of his book Schizoanalytic
Cartographies (2013). Here, there is a
review of some portrait photographs at an
exhibition by Eiichi Tahara, which repeats some of
the themes of this Plateau but also jousts with
Barthes on the aesthetics of the portrait
photograph. The main point developed is that
further deterritorialization of aspects of the
face , selected by blanking out or masking
the remaining sections, for example, permits those
aspects to be used for artistic purposes beyond
conventional representation.
References
Delanda,
M. (2002) Intensive Science and
Virtual Philosophy, London: Continuum
(my notes here)
Deleuze, G. (2006) Two Regimes
of Madness: texts and interviews 1975--95.
Ed D Lapoujade. Trans. Ames Hodges &
Mike Taormina. New York: Semiotext(e)
Foreign Agents Series (notes here)
Deleuze G and F Guattari (1994) What
is Philosophy?, London: Verso Books.
(notes here)
Deleuze, G. ( 1992) Cinema 1: The
Movement Image, London: The Athlone Press.
(notes here)
Deleuze, G (1989) Cinema 2 --
the time-image, London The Athlone Press.
(notes here)
Deleuze G and Guattari F
(1984) Anti-Oedipus. Capitalism
and Schizophrenia, London: The Athlone
Press. (brief notes here)
Guattari, F. (2015) [1972] Psychoanalysis
and Transversality. Texts and
interviews 1955-1971.
Introduction by Deleuze. Translated by Ames
Hodges. South Pasadena: Semiotext(e)
(notes here)
Guattari, F. (2014) The Three
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Trans.) London: Bloomsbury. [Also has
an essay by Genosko on the life of Guattari,
focusing on transversality] (notes)
Guattari,
F. ( 2013) Schizoanalytic
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Academic. (notes)
Guattari, F. (2011) The
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Adkins. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e)
Foreign Agents. (notes)
Guattari, F. ( 1995) Chaosmosis:
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Paul Baines and Julian Pefanis.Power
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Harris, D. (2018)
'Subjectivity in autoethngraphic
collaborative writing: a deleuzian
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DOI 10.17583/rise.2018.2881
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L. (1985). This Sex Which is Not One.
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