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2.3 Faciality on the Edge: Tourette's Syndrome

It is necessary to move on, and ask after other possibilities or ‘places’ within the differential account of faciality that is being advanced. What, for instance, might be the results of a high level of engagement with micro-corporeality, under circumstances involving a high or increasing degree of stratification? If a young child were to have an intense engagement with zones of speed and slowness (finding its expression in all kinds of bodily and vocal compositions and emergences) then what might be the result of the passion of acceptable uses of the body coming to be joined by the passion of order-words? The details of Tourette’s syndrome seem to give the outline of one kind  of outcome in this situation. A study of over a hundred people with this syndrome found that the median age of the first appearance of tics was approximately seven years old. The same study also found that an eye tic was the most common initial anomaly, and that initial symptoms involving the head (either with or without the vocal chords being involved) were overwhelmingly in the majority:

The most frequent symptom is an eye tic (42.1%) followed by a head tic (20.2%) or  facial grimace (11.7%). A surprisingly large number begin with sounds or words (19.3%), and coprolalia may be the initial symptom in some (6.2%) patients. Many of the initial symptoms, including stammering, stuttering, and sniffing (8.3%) may be difficult to diagnose as Tourette syndrome.[8]

The idea that emerges here is that the children who develop Tourette’s syndrome are intensely engaged in becomings finding overt expression through motions involving the whole body, and that increasing forces of regulation of the body (including the dark world of judgement involved in order-word functionings of language) cause the emergences of aberrant ways of being a body to be transmutated into less bizarre deviations, or to be convulsively curtailed and frozen as an adopted ‘action’ capable of giving  relaxation.

What gives strong substantiation to this account is the pronounced association between Tourette’s syndrome and a high degree of physical fluency  or acuity,  found both in the form of agility and in the form of complex and dynamic ‘playful’ modalities of the body. Oliver Sacks points out the ‘extraordinary speed and accuracy’ of Tourretic people, and goes on to refer to a particular case:

What most of us call startling or ‘abnormal’ speed of movement appears perfectly normal to Touretters when they show it. This was clear in a recent case of target pointing with Shane F., an artist with Tourette’s. Shane showed markedly reduced reaction times, reaching rates of six times normal, combined with great smoothness of accuracy of movement and aim.[9]

Sacks also attests to the other aspect in an initial description of Tourette’s at the start of one of his pieces on the subject, saying that it involves a tendency to ‘outlandish forms of play’.[10] He also refers to an ‘odd elfin sense of humour’. These aspects of the condition help to make evident the way in which Tourretic people are involved to a high degree with becomings with micro-corporeal fields. A term such as ‘outlandish’ is exactly the kind of term to be expected under these circumstances given that the condition involves a love of making connection with zones that will often be regarded as ‘alien’ or ‘innappropriate’. A person with Tourette’s is very much liable to be in love with the ‘outlands’, where these are the wider field beyond the lands or zones of consistency of acceptable modes of being a human body.  These other zones include the worlds of animals, plants, and weather phenomena, but also include zones in the form of states of human bodies, such as rage.

Tourette’s syndrome seems to involve a continual surging up of anomalous expressions at the level of the body (including the voice, and of course the face) which are then transformed into something more acceptable, or are curtailed  and ‘routinised’ as a bizarre behaviour in the form of a tic. As A Thousand Plateaus says, a tic is ‘the continually refought battle between a faciality trait that tries to escape the sovereign organisation of the face and the face itself, which clamps back down on the trait, takes hold of it again’ (TP p.188). What becomes explicable at this point is the way in which Tourette’s recurrently emerges at around the age of seven. At the point where the disciplining of bodies is liable to be increasing (through the instilling of routines and zones of fixation, through order-words, and also through physical coercion, in the family and in school), the person who is potentially Tourettic is already a densely active ‘ecology’ of forms of engagement at the level of the the abstract machine of zones of consistency. The rapidly intensifying engagement with language is both an aspect of an intensification of engagement with zones of consistency (the widening out for instance of the worlds of zoology, geology, and climatology), and a taking up of order words that instill regulated forms of behaviour, alongside the ‘instilling’ or regulating  functioning of the abstract machine of the face. It appears that under these circumstances movements can emerge in the form of strangled or distorted outbreaks of expressions that are beyond the regular, in a way where these movements or tics can just keep on repeating, caught up each time in the same process. These tics in the process are in a sense regularised, giving a kind of license to a whole array of rushing, complex movements. A Tourettic person therefore might go a tiny distance down the path of some anomalous movement or sound and then warp it or get into the habit of just cutting it short. Or they might start to take up the bodily mode of rage or fury (this would recurrently be an understandable response under the circumstances, but clearly what would be better would be a smoothly unreactive hostility) and then transform this into a moan or cry - or into an obscenity. In the survey that has already been cited the uttering of swear-words was an initial symptom in several of the cases.[11] It can be said that the Tourettic person is the person who  literally says ‘fuck off’ to the world of the face, but who remains partially caught up in the routines and neurotic responses generated in the struggle.

Another thing to be expected with this account of Tourette’s is that Tourettic people would have a high chance of success in occupations involving proficiency with respect to expression at the level of bodily movement, despite their condition. It is therefore not as surprising as it might seem that Sacks determined at one point that there were at least nine practicing Tourretic surgeons. Sacks goes on to say: ‘In addition to these I now know of three Tourettic internists, two Tourettic neurologists, but only one Tourettic psychiatrist’.[12] Given the comparitive rarity of the condition and the fact that it involves intense ‘motor disturbance’ it is only with a ‘schizoanalytic’  account that these facts are not in any way surprising. Sacks provides a detailed case history of one of the Tourettic surgeons, who when he is not operating, or fluently engaged in some other way, is continually errupting into different kinds of physical and verbal tics. His account states of this man that ‘anatomy came “naturally” to him’:     

He was always good with his hands and loved the structure of natural things - the way rocks formed, the way plants grew, the way animals moved, the way muscles balanced and pulled against each other, the way the body was put together. He decided very early that he wanted to be a surgeon.[13]

This description pertains to the faculty-affect of engagement with micro-corporeality. In such cases the high degree  of functioning of this mode of engagement both provides part of an account  of the emergence of tics, and also provides an explanation for the success of Tourettic people in apparently unlikely occupations.

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