hdh-faciality

Image from Franz Kafka Pictorial Artist. Niels Bokhove and Marijke van Dorst.

 https://twitter.com/franzkafka_ **Deleuze and Guattari - Kafka** translators intro xxii Reading a text is never a scholarly exercise in search of what is signified, still less a highly textual exercise in search of a signifer. Rather, it is a productive use of the literary machine, a montage of desiring machines, a schizoid exercise that extracts from the text its revolutionary force. — Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus

xxiii Rather, writing stands against psychology, against interiority, by giving an author a possibility of becoming more than his or her nominal self, of trading the insistent solidity of the family tree for the whole field of desire and history. The romance of the individual life is exceeded, deterritorialized, escaped. Only in this sense is Kafka "about" Kafka.

xxiv all readings... are political practices that can contain and constrain, impel and empower. xxv as Deleuze explains, the goal of their reading process is to "bring to an author a little of this joy, this amorous political life that he knew how to offer, how to invent. So many dead writers must have wept over what was written about them. I hope that Kafka enjoyed the book that we wrote about him" (Deleuze 1977, 142). xxviii In only one way, perhaps, have I made use of the Kafka discipline; most of the translations of the citations from Kafka come from the standard Muir translations. Although Joyce Crick suggests that the Muirs tended to translate Kafka as a writer of bleak negativity (Crick 1980), and although the French translation seems to express more of that virtually carnivalesque joy that Deleuze and Guattari read in Kafka, it seemed to me that the inscription of the Muir version within the Deleuze-Guattari text might already encourage that kind of active escaping that Deleuze and Guattari work to establish for Kafka.

the bleak univocality of the Muir version of Kafka increases the intensity of the struggle and shows how much is at stake in Deleuze and Guattari's attempt to constitute literary criticism as one of the most advanced branches of the Joyful Science.

ch. 1. 3. How can we enter into Kafka's work? This work is a rhizome, a burrow

These two elements —the portrait or the photo, and the beaten and bent head— are constant in Kafka, although there are varying degrees of autonomy of one from the other.

4. the entrance we have chosen not only promises to connect with things that we hope will eventually appear in the work but is itself constituted by the connecting of two relatively independent forms, the form of content (the bent head) and the form of expression (portrait-photo), which reunite at the beginning of The Castle. We aren't interpreting them. We would simply say that this reunion causes a functional blockage, a neutralization of experimental desire-the untouchable, unkissable, forbidden, enframed photo that can only take pleasure from its own sight, like that desire blocked by the roof or the ceiling, a submissive desire that can only take pleasure from its own submission. And also the desire that imposes submission, propagates it; a desire that judges and condemns...

The memory blocks desire, makes mere carbon copies of it, fixes it within strata, cuts it off from all its connections. But what, then, can we hope for? It's an impasse. Nonetheless, we can realize that even an impasse is good if it forms part of the rhizome.

4-5 It's curious how the intrusion of sound often occurs in Kafka in connection with the movement to raise or straighten the head... The distinction between two states of desire

5. could well believe that these are two new forms: the straightened head is a form of content, and the musical sound is a form of expression.

It isn't a composed and semiotically shaped music that interests Kafka, but rather a pure sonorous material.

6. What interests Kafka is a pure and intense sonorous material that is always connected to its own abolition—a deterritorialized musical sound, a cry that escapes signification, composition, song, words—a sonority that ruptures in order to break away from a chain that is still all too signifying.

In short, sound doesn't show up here as a form of expression, but rather as an unformed material of expression, that will act on the other terms. [deterritorialization]

7. Kafka's drawings, the old men and the silhouettes that he liked to draw, emphasize figures with bent heads, straightened heads, and head over heels and away. (((see above)))

We believe only in a Kafka that is neither imaginary nor symbolic. We believe only in one or more Kafka machines that are neither structure nor phantasm. We believe only in a Kafka experimentation that is without interpretation or significance and rests only on tests of experience: "I am not appealing for any man's verdict, I am only imparting knowledge, I am only making a report. To you also, honored Members of the Academy, I have only made a report."

A Kafka-machine is thus constituted by contents and expressions that have been formalized to diverse degrees by unformed materials that enter into it, and leave by passing through all possible states. To enter or leave the machine, to be in the machine, to walk around it, to approach it—these are all still components of the machine itself: these are states of desire, free of all interpretation. The line of escape is part of the machine. Inside or outside, the animal is part of the burrow-machine. The problem is not that of being free but of finding a way out, or even a way in, another side, a hallway, an adjacency.

8. In The Trial, it is once again a question of a determined machine like the single machine of justice; but its unity is so nebulous, an influence machine, a contamination, that there is no longer any difference between being outside or inside.

Desire evidently passes through these positions and states or, rather, through all these lines. Desire is not form, but a procedure, a process.

ch. 3

16. A minor literature doesn't come from a minor language; it is rather that which a minority constructs within a major language. But **the first characteristic** of minor literature in any case is that in it language is affected with a high coefficient of **deterritorialization**.

17. The **second characteristic** of minor literatures is that **everything** in them **is** **political**.

The third characteristic of minor literature is that in it everything takes on a collective value.

18. There isn't a subject; there are only collective assemblages of enunciation, and literature expresses these acts insofar as they're not imposed from without and insofar as they exist only as diabolical powers to come or revolutionary forces to be constructed.

We might as well say that minor no longer designates specific literatures but the revolutionary conditions for every literature within the heart of what is called great (or established) literature.

19. Go always farther in the direction of deterritorialization, to the point of sobriety. Since the language is arid, make it vibrate with a new intensity.

That is the glory of this sort of minor literature—to be the revolutionary force for all literature.

how to tear a minor literature away from its own language, allowing it to challenge the language and making it follow a sober revolutionary path? How to become a nomad and an immigrant and a gypsy in relation to one's own language? Rich or poor, each language always implies a deterritorialization of the mouth, the tongue, and the teeth. The mouth, tongue, and teeth find their primitive territoriality in food. In giving themselves over to the articulation of sounds, the mouth, tongue, and teeth deterritorialize.

22. "Metaphors are one of the things that makes me despair of literature." Kafka deliberately kills all metaphor, all symbolism, all signification, no less than all designation. Metamorphosis is the contrary of metaphor. There is no longer any proper sense or figurative sense, but only a distribution of states that is part of the range of the word.

The animal does not speak "like" a man but pulls from the language tonalities lacking in signification; the words themselves are not "like" the animals but in their own way climb about, bark and roam around, being properly linguistic dogs, insects, or mice.

27. How many styles or genres or literary movements, even very small ones, have only one single dream: to assume a major function in language, to offer themselves as a sort of state language, an official language (for example, psychoanalysis today, which would like to be a master of the signifier, of metaphor, of wordplay). Create the opposite dream: know how to create a becoming-minor. (Is there a hope for philosophy, which for a long time has been an official, referential genre? Let us profit from this moment in which antiphilosophy is trying to be a language of power.)


 * Versions of the Dead**

4. Such was the appearance of the dead in Isidra. The dead [Kalunga] appeared in her very sleeplessness and inhabited her body as the restlessness that woke her and drove her to get up, just as her dead (mis muertos)subsisted in encounters with old sayings and parables. Such were the dead as they came to populate her anecdotes and stories with instances of tension in her body and with voices and words she recognized as responses from her intimate dead in moments of despair. And such was Isidra’s mode of “conversation,” her overwhelming presence in an exchange, her insistence that one receive her meaning in theway she intended. Taken together, this was Isidra’s language of the dead.

In this article, I seek to create, borrowing resources from anthropology and philosophy, a language for Cuban-Kongo ideas concerning the dead and matter as these are expressed in the practice of Palo.

6. For them (Bataille and his pirate surrealists) , the opposition of right and left, admittedly a stiff dyad, became the forceful artistic–philosophical–ethnological concept that for me yet better situates Palo, that concept being the “negative sacred,” where attraction is connected to repulsion in sprawling concatenations of force, at once seductive and frightening

8. A principal objective is to manage what Isidra did with her words, which is to assemble a language for Palo’s dead that is suffused with sensation, affected, in the way that Nietzsche wished language had the strength to be.11 This would be a writing that was, in a most material way, “touched” by the dead.12

In their book on Kafka, Deleuze and Guattari (1986) pursue Kafka’s sensitivity to the precariousness of writing in any of the languages available to him, and especially his insights into the disruptive potentials of minor languages when they are grafted onto major, or “master” languages.15 I do the same with Isidra’s Palo Kikongo, and even more so with Isidra’s particular use of this tongue, which becomes a minor language within a minor language, and thus a nest of disruptions of dominant codes.

9. There are also political stakes in creating this foreign language; they are those of complying or not with the dominant codes, of allying with disturbances in dominant meaning-making regimes, and of creating texts that partially escape the machines of discipline Kafka so convincingly wrote about.

11. Thus, Kalunga was tangibly learned as radically subjective perceptions at the absolute limits of sentience and credibility, felt subjectively yet collectively influential, and, in the case of Palo, recognized and taught as significant turns of the dead. Kalunga, if it was to be grasped at all, had to be felt first, as a gentle turn of the stomach.

“Cuban Socialism isn’t materialist!” she exclaimed, “They’re dreamers! Palo is materialist, it takes care of things here and now, with ingredients from the forest, from the earth! How much more materialist do you get than that?”

12. Two tasks remain in staging a foreign language for Palo within our own. They are to generate for it a materialism unique to its terms borrowing from the resources ofWestern thought, and to craft for it terms that would speak the dynamisms by which it distinguishes the forms within matter, so as to bring substances to life and in the same instant its practices of healing and its harming.

13 (in Hegel ) the object exudes a charm over the master, which captivates the master in an irrepressible desire and inspires in him imaginary landscapes in which his self-extension is unhindered. Marx (1967:76–87) recognized the intensity of this desire, and saw in the commodities of 19th-century industrial capitalism contemporary versions of the slave’s object, which the master so loves and that so warp reality

17. The method sets up serial presentations of the dead conjoined by an ever-returning and: Kalunga is the dead, and the dead is ashes, and a parable suddenly come to mind is Kalunga, and the dead are what arrive at the height of Palo feasts to take the bodies of the living and set their lives ablaze. The paratactic and that distinguishes the discourse of the dead in Palo, with its characteristic affirmation of versions upon versions of the dead, excuses itself from the hypotactic subordinations and negations we are so accustomed to in setting up “arguments” and dialectically satisfied “conclusions,” subordinations that little by little build up a depth beneath the feet of the progressively transcendent, vertically organized subject.

590. The term campo is used commonly among migrant farmworkers in North Carolina to characterize various aspects of their life and work. Campo means rural, having essentially to do with the countryside and farm work. Campo is also a field where crops are cultivated and the housing facility, the labor camp, where workers reside.
 * El Campo**

When migrants find a job in construction, a restaurant, or an office, anything not farm labor, they say it is “outside of the campo” and regard it as a socioeconomic advance, not just because of higher wages but because it extricates them from a situation largely experienced as embarrassing and dispossessing. The difficulty of manual tobacco work, the neglected condition of labor camps, and the meagerness of agricultural wages—each is stingingly indicted as campo. Something like a paycheck becomes a synecdoche, an illuminative fragment of the mean face of depravity and structural violence.

595. The face is different than objects in that it bears the trace of the infinite alterity of the other person (i.e., the other’s singularity) and thereby confounds cognition, eludes masterful powers of perception. The face cannot be “synthesized” like any old object (Levinas 1969:33). Individuals, in their singular existence, are irreducible to totalized representations, such as “culture” or “ethnicity” (Benson and O’Neill 2007; Kleinman and Benson 2006). The face’s singularity also means, for Levinas, that the face is always the face of vulnerability (1969:251) because it can be materially or symbolically annihilated. According to Levinas, it is the sentient face—the singular existence of the other person— that totalizing representations, physical acts of brutality, and systemized forms of violence target, and this is why he says, “Violence can aim only at a face.”

596. Levinas idealizes the “face-to-face” encounter, the immediate interpersonal frame, as the basic scene of ethics... For Levinas, the very possibility of annihilating the other’s singularity, which shines through in the face, makes hospitality an imperative for the self. One is always already bound to the other by an ethical relationship because of the possibility of turning away or doing harm... ordinary interactions in empirical life tend to squash this esoteric principle into hard realities of faciality, people seeing each other as typified objects and, on that basis, circumscribing suffering as an event that belongs to or was even caused by the sufferer. The other’s suffering dangerously and easily becomes an event in which the self is not complicit.

The term faciality (visag´eit´e) comes from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1987), whose analytic of power emphasizes the social production of faces, how faces are perceived in light of media images, social typologies, and power relations: “the face, the power of the face, engenders and explains social power” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:175).

faces are perceived in terms of a metonymic [associative] relationship between a particular feature and the discursive coding of who a person is, what that type of person is like, where they live, and what capabilities, propensities, and other traits they have (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:168). It “is not the individuality of the face that counts but the efficacy of the ciphering it makes possible”

597. As used in this article, the concept of faciality refers to how power and perception overlap, as well as to how ethical orientations are formed and/or inhibited on the basis of what people see when they look at other people’s faces. Faciality is crucial to the constitution and perpetuation of structural violence because how people see others can help legitimize patterns of social subordination, economic exploitation, and spatial segregation. [how we view the face is a social construction]

596-7 Faciality is thus constituted in a “zone of frequency or probability” involving the coproduction of empirical features and their significance. [interesting connection to computation, stat models]

It is precisely the detachable and allegorical quality that makes faces, especially the face of power, readily available for parody and defacement

618 The project of making farm labor and labor camp conditions more visible through public educational initiatives, social advocacy, and product boycotts is one practical implication of an account of faciality. These activities can put a human face on farm labor and alter what amounts to a stereotyped Face. Faciality matters on the most basic levels of public policy. Public policy debates and measures can challenge or reproduce how bodies, faces, and spaces are facialized and spatialized as alterity.

//are there any women working at these camps? they seem very much missing from these accounts.// //the porta potty discussion in particular makes me wonder about this. If there aren't any, why isn't their absence discussed?//