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3.5 Faciality

In forensic photography it is the face more than the broken thorax which seems most unnerving. Fascination with unusual and bizarre mechanisms of death is only foiled when the picture includes a staring eye, a swollen tongue from an open mouth. What is it about the face that makes us invest so much of the ‘self’ in it? Deleuze and Guattari write in ‘Year Zero: Faciality’,

Although the head, even the human head, is not necessarily a face, the face is produced in humanity. But it is produced by a necessity that does not apply to human beings ‘in general’; there is even something absolutely inhuman about the face. [86]  

The face is produced in humanity because it is the very mechanism of signification. [87] It ‘makes sense’ of the rest of the body, and the facial machine is what makes sense of the world, the face being the machine that indicates recognition and hence primary signification. The face is also inhuman for this reason, faces are representative of humanity but are not confined to it, and do not demand a ‘humane’ treatment, but often the vindication of inhumane consideration, depending on whether or not a face passes. Faces inhumanly overwrite the human with a system for comprehension, whereby a human face may encourage either humane (pass) or inhumane (does not pass) treatment. The face is an abstract system that indicates and signifies but not anything in particular, simply systems of what may or may not be and who may or may not ‘pass’. Faciality is the condition of possibility for being considered human, and the vindication for being treated unethically. Significations range across the face making subjectivity possible. These possibilities exist within established binary options that refer to the ‘body’ (male/female, white /black) but in actuality only the flesh and folds of the face, to signify the ‘person’ or thing within, Hu-Man (majoritarian) or identifiably less-than-human (minoritarian). Deleuze and Guattari state:

The faciality machine is not an annex to the signifier and the subject; rather; it is subadjacent (connexe) to them and is their condition of possibility...  It is precisely because the face depends on an abstract machine that it does not assume a pre-existent subject or signifier; but it is subjacent to them and provides the substance necessary to them. What chooses the faces is not a subject... it is faces that choose their subjects. [88]

Significations of the face (black holes) are empty according to Deleuze and Guattari because they rely entirely on a made or formed meaning that revolves around a reason-er or marker (white-wall), “Facialization operates not by resemblance but by an order of reasons.” [89] The reasons of the folds of the face are independent of its flesh, and depending on the intersecting axioms that occur upon a face. These reasons and meanings are liable to alter. Faciality is comprehensible only through what is already available in the order in which the face operates: that of resonating arbitrary signification and meaning. What the face is to the viewer is an essence of a marked signified subjectivity that is entirely antagonistic to a being in corporeality and any potential for a becoming because the face, non-creative and defined before it is formed, removes the head and creates the ‘person’ away from the body. The face mimetically performs who and what the body is or stands for in the future, thus closing off any potential of the body and any ethical consideration of the other. The ‘condition of possibility’ is the hardest concept to fix because it is completely mutable based on systems of value at work in society, and hence so is its meaning. As a possibility one would think faciality indicates a potential for subversive, subject altering effect, but its’ possibility is one of pre-prescribed comprehension of faces that ‘pass’ and faces which do not pass. It is a possibility of prohibition and control, a possibility of patrolling and eventually encompassing the ‘un-passable’ as its reasons alter with accepted forms of faciality at any one time. Possibility here occurs only within the logic of two options that are essentially isomorphic to one. This is what is meant by the term ‘biunivocalization’. The face as a single unified entity is supposedly representative of the subject, but, because it is actually a connexe rather than an annex, faciality chooses from binaries, which indicate gender, race, etcetera. These converge in order to create the unity of a passable or un-passable face. The individual(’s) face is a series of units which represent choices from binaries but are indivisible from the face singular. Deleuze and Guattari state: “Concrete individuals are produced and transformed on the basis of these units... ”. [90] The biunivocalized face is antagonistic to the body and its potentials. Deleuze and Guattari point out that the head is part of the body but the face is something else, a territorial marker that indicates what one is and whether one will ‘pass’ in the world. The body becoming which is speed, possibility to transform and dismantled-face is challenged by the monolithic, Christ-inspired image of inert man. Deleuze and Guattari advocate a challenge to this monolith by reterritorializing faciality through deterritorializing the body. [91]

The photographed face is a most fixed face. In it is the stagnation needed to ‘read’ the subject, to find in the inhumanity of the significations of the multi-holes in a head the meaning of the ‘human’ beneath, inside or inscribed upon the face. The face is, as Deleuze and Guattari claim, a most produced topography driven by the desire to see the psyche or the self upon the flesh. Camilla Griggers stakes the white face of femininity as the ‘despotic’ face that over-represents everything yet simultaneously represents nothing, blankness. Faciality itself deterritorializes simple signs, binary signs, by being biunivocalized, representing binaries in one, singularities in many, all on one plane or territory. Binary choice, glued by signification and subjectification, into one face, is no ‘choice’ at all. The face reduces all to one plane yet expands a single surface into multi-layers of signification. According to Griggers and to Deleuze and Guattari the face is already teeming with a confusion of over signification and masquerading ‘open’ readability. The face performs a readable plane(s) of what Griggers calls

Multiplicitous proliferation. Is she white or colored? Straight or Lesbian? Sane or Mad? The face will tell. And if she is something else entirely the social process of facialization will capture her in one aspect of a categorical binary or its other, even if it has to do so by making a third term… Does the individual face conform to socially intelligible limits? Are its deviations intelligible? Does it pass? Faciality serves a policing function. Moreover, if the face can proliferate redundantly while expanding its borders into new territories, it is, by definition ‘despotic’. Its imperialism is materialized in the mimetic demand it places on anything that comes into its expansionist sign-flow. [92]

The death face, or the dead face which comes to ‘represent death’ is at once a most despotic and yet a most arid sign-free face. The dead face is teeming with emptiness. The first point of faciality in death - whether she is white, black, lesbian, straight sane or mad - now becomes that which may affect the evocation of sympathy in s/he who looks at the dead face. No longer is an affirmation of subjectivity contained within the face relevant. The corpse’s face performs what Deleuze and Guattari would consider a regressive form of reterritorialized faciality. Whatever is created by the gaze upon the face, or reading the face, is immediately redundant. The face itself in a way no longer exists; its potential for a connexe-ion with signification does not have any effect. What is in there? Nothing and yet not-nothing because here the dead face sits, staring out through the portrait. It seems the term ‘dead’ is the ultimate third created term, or perhaps it is the one binary to all others: white or - dead; sane or - dead; lesbian or - dead.  The dead face is redundant signification. The binary opposite term does not matter any more despite the first statement of the coroner who affirms and creates that the body was, ‘A white, middle age female’… etcetera. The identity and habits of the corpse are all meticulously discovered, in the flesh and no longer through the face, and recorded and even stand for a reason, excuse or vindication of the death, as if to be in a certain way or a certain self will encourage one’s death. But when faced with the face all it is, is dead; if it is anything else it is firstly and most importantly, dead. What is so striking and terrifying about the dead face is that it is despotic. It encroaches and reterritorializes without any further potential for deterritorialization of the object it represents. The dead face cannot see, it cannot stare but to stare at the dead face is to be confronted with the question ‘what is the mimetic demand in the face of this face?’ Its effect on the viewer, however, is exactly where its deterritorializing effect takes place. Its only deterritorialization is of us, turning our faces into what Deleuze and Guattari call freed faciality traits – “probe-heads”. Probe-heads are “a rhizomatic realm of possibility effecting the potentialization of the possible, as opposed to arborescent possibility, which marks a closure, an impotence.” [93] The dead face infects with fear like a virus, as if death is catching. This virus, ranging over our face, splices and divides our facial machines and may set into effect our becoming probe-head. We cannot facially reflect the arborescent possibility of a dead face because we are not dead. We can close the book or repress its effectuation of ourselves. But if we resist such closure we are forced into the potentialization of the possibilities the effect of the dead face instigates. We cannot predict what such an effect will be, but effect it is nonetheless. The dead face is all redundancy, the very proliferation of redundancy; its sign-flow is empty because it can never deterritorialize what it represents; yet it is a teeming flow nonetheless which inflicts its deterritorializing effect on us. It means nothing while encroaching on everything.

The face speaks, sees, hears and understands, so it is there the human being resides in the cultural imagination. But the photograph of the cadaver’s face problematizes this false investment. It is a face still; it has the potential, when taken out of its highly specific context, to be ‘mistaken’ for a living face. When placed within its context the cadaverous face, worse than mistaken for living, exhibits the phantasmatic ‘life’ of the dead. It looks and its look signifies a power to draw the looker into its death, representing the horror bouncing from the glossy image onto the viewer and back again, especially in the case of the strangulation victim who will be presented in photography with eyes wide open, mouth open in a ‘scream’ revealing a swollen tongue and a general visage of fright. In the cadaverous face we cannot read death. And this is what the curious will be seeking in the face of the dead. When the page is turned the squinting eye and clenched mouth awaiting the shock of another vile murdered face will see the repulsion of violent death. The blots and tracks of blood tributaries navigate the face (new black holes of signification upon the white plane of nothingness according to Deleuze and Guattari’s faciality). The differences between the living face and the dead face will be read or imagined. The viewer will look for differences between the living face and the dead face rather than find them easily or immediately in most cases, but nowhere upon the face of the dead will there be the ‘evidence’ of what death is, of where the subject now resides or even of the absence of the subject from the staring cadaver. Signifying black holes of the face are replaced by the black text beneath the photograph, which states ‘dead’ as the univocal signifier. Regardless of whether the photograph is of someone dead or not, photographs still stare back through their white walls of human subjectification – that which is able to stare back will - they still signify ‘human’ (i.e. living human) if they include a face, and they indicate self-consciousness at being stared at. In The Object Stares Back James Elkins discusses the difficulty in extricating a face from meaning, expression from intent and life from image. He states, “It seems to me that we have no choice but to continue to assume that expressions are intentional, even when we have evidence that is not so.” [94] Over-investing in faces is something Elkins points out has an immediately terrifying effect. He claims the relationship between the viewer and a face is a necessarily terrifying one, and that which is most terrifying must have a face,

So is a face a source of power? Something that transfixes, or petrifies? Something that gives us orders not to move? That entices us to follow? Is it the unanswerable engine of seduction or destruction? Certainly it is, and it must also be more. A face is a terrifying thing, perhaps the terrifying thing - the very idea of terror itself... Anything I can think of that’s scary is a face or has a face. [95]

Elkins is not clear as to why he finds the face so terrifying. The images he includes in his book - deformed faces, a spider’s thorax which has a facial machine, twin faces and the not-yet face of an embryo - represent the basic signification of black (potential meaning) - here and white (plane of nothingness) - there subjugating the topography of a face. But the ‘faces’ are/cannot be read because they are not invested with the binaries that allow a face to ‘pass’ or to be marked as other. In their univocalization they are not entirely unified faces but they are undeniably facial machines. They represent one image, a singular icon in the most basic rudimentary sense of the term, for which they do pass, but all further reading of these faces make them strange. Perhaps the terror Elkins discusses is in the faces he presents pictorially which evade binary choices. These faces most emphatically do not ‘pass’ but whether their terrifying potential is because of their representation of a different face that is neither/nor or because they are examples of a reterritorialized face is difficult to decide. To be reterritorialized would involve a face that did not resemble a face, yet the faces in Elkins’ book are more bodies that resemble faces, so bodies that do not resemble bodies. They are almost hyper facial-machines without having any faces. They are photographs of particular things which, because of their static capture, are forced into being facial machines devoid of movement, celerity or subjectivity, so neither in agreement with, nor antagonistic towards, traditional faciality.

Two chapters before his chapter entitled ‘What is a Face?’ in a chapter entitled ‘Looking Away, and Seeing Too Much’ Elkins discusses a physical transformation that occurred as a result of looking at photographs of ‘death’. The chapter includes a series of four photographs showing a form of Chinese execution called ‘death by division into a thousand parts’. The grainy series of photographs show a woman tied to a tall pole apparently having pieces torn off her. The quality of the photographs is bad; they are not clear and hard to comprehend. Elkins states, “The last frame is gruesome, but it too can be seen: it is meat, a carcass in a butcher shop. It is the middle two scenes that are hardest to look at. The pain in those scenes is enough to cause physical changes in my body.” [96] The final image, the ‘butcher shop’ is almost unintelligible, no clear form is discernible. The second image shows a waxy cadaver-ish woman being flayed, perhaps because her head is back and her mouth is open she may appear to be moaning but this is pushing the signification of her expression. The third image is the most like a forensic photograph, it shows the woman with head falling forward, possibly unconscious, perhaps dead (Elkins himself tries to predict in which photographs the woman is alive and in which dead) with the executioner’s hand tearing flesh from her. Elkins claims it is the pain in the photographs that changes his body. Perhaps he is more sensitive than I am but there does not appear to be pain. How am I reading this? I am guessing Elkins, like most people, reads pain in the face. The victim has no expression; she seems more unconscious or severely drugged than pained. Elkins tries to force a visual personality into the body of the woman, even to the extent that in the third photograph when she may already be dead he still calls what he is effected by, her ‘pain’. Elkins differentiates between carcass and pained person precisely because of the presence of a face. And it remains that the face is the most unnerving element, most especially in death because of the intense despotism of a face which, even if it is subjacent to signification, meaning and reason, makes redundant all of these connexes by making the body, in the sense of ‘dead-body’, the facial machine. It is also of paramount importance that Elkins chose as the site of his affect-ed anguish what is essentially an ethnographic image rather than an image from his own Eurocentric culture. There is an abundance of forensic photography of executions available in most Law libraries. Yet in order to cope with an image of death, embellished by his confession of being most affected by the face, Elkins has chosen a face that does not altogether pass due to both its race and its gender. If the face for Elkins is the site of identificatory pain, where he identifies with the victim, then he has chosen a face very un-like his own.

If death affects the viewer due to the difficulty in articulating precisely where the body and subjectivity divide during death then the face as representative of the process of death is where most people wish to locate the pain because that is where they locate the subject. Pain is not a by-product of facialization, but pain indicates life is still present and so identifying pain in the face is re-investing the face with the subject-in-pain. When the face ceases to be subject the body would no longer seem to need a face for the reasons that culture values facialization so greatly. In death then, the machinery has shut down but its image or its affect of facialization remains. Its function is reduced to nothing but the trace that stares from the page continues to signify.

In this respect all photographic faces are despotic because while overloaded with signification they are the unreal flat faces upon the paper plane. Staring in horror and curiosity at the corpse’s face is felt as an intrusion, a guilty fascination that invades the privacy of the death of the individual despite the actuality of the photo being a multiply-copied piece of paper and nothing more. This is similar to the witnessing of filmed death, however I do not find filmed death to be nearly as unnerving primarily because the image, unlike photography, is not fixed. In film the eyes of the audience may shut, the head turn away and the scene be missed, whereas in photos the image remains in front of the eye determined and immutable. 

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