schaffer_faciality_off

=You, sans visage= part of the horror of Georges Franju's "Eyes without a Face" (1960) (based on the novel of the same name published in 1959) is that the murderous desire for a face doesn't come from Christiane, the young "faceless" woman, but from her father, Doctor Génessier. "content" wouldn't be the word I'd use to describe her relationship with her plastic mask, but her nostalgia for skin never leads her to steal faces. on the other hand, Okuyama, the "faceless" engineer of Hiroshi Teshigahara's "The Face of Another" (1966) (based on the novel of the same name published in 1959) feels so urgently the need for a new face that it drives him to undertake a risky surgery, to ignore medical advice, and eventually, to murder.

what's odd in both of these stories isn't just the simultaneous emergence of "face transplant" as a conceivable plot point in Japanese and French sci-fi (not that the trope was utterly new; it showed up in the American noir "His Kind of Woman" eight years prior, and while we're at it, Robert Wiene's "The Hands of Orlac" (1924) invokes a procedure known as a "head transplant," which is almost illegible to contemporary viewers ). it's also that both of these stories, unlike other stories about face transplants, are really stories about facelessness, about the way that the faceless person interacts with the world, about the way that the world tries to understand eyes that don't have a face attached to them. stories about the ugly and disfigured abound (the elephant man sticks out, and is by no means singular) but Christiane and Okuyama are specifically written as "faceless." i'm going to suggest that facelessness, as expressed in these stories, offers us a useful place for thinking through the concept of the face as elaborated by Emmanuel Lévinas, as well as the //faciality// of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.

"The face is not simply an assemblage of features such as eyes, nose, cheeks, and jowl. It is also the singularity of an impression that is absolutely unique, a "trace," expressive of a person's vitality and vulnerability. For Levinas, the face reveals absolute otherness, singularity, in the other person." (FR, 33)

"faceless terror," of course, is a classic trope (H.P. Lovecraft's yuggoths come to mind) and in Levinasian logic we might understand that the horror of facelessness isn't just that a thing is other, foreign, unreadable (after all, Edith Scob and Tatsuya Nakadai were cast for their utterly legible physicality), but its lack of singularity, its anonymity. the faceless terror is one that is not just unreadable but unidentifiable; it is maybe better understood as an embodiment of the same--

"In the face-to-face, the “other” is never a stand in for any “human,” or for generic humanity, but a singular individual, that is, a face" (FR, 41)

onto the faceless terror (on the other hand) the audience imposes universality, an indistinguishability from the self. there is nothing individual about the forlorn Christiane, she is a need that exists disembodied, without specific anchor. it's no wonder that her and Okuyama's characters remain so confused; they've lost identity!

"The face is commanding--behind the confident smiles, articulated laughs, and sociable expressions the face is the vital singularity that guarantees nothing more than "there is," the fact that the other person is capable of being killed and that, as someone capable of executing such an event, the self is always already bound by this ethical relationship." (33-4)

at this point it might make sense for Jason Voorhees to make an appearance.

removing the face also removes vulnerability! when will a sequel to Friday the 13th become unthinkable!?

after all, "violence can only aim at a face"...

while Christiane, Okuyama, and Jason are all written as "faceless," there's a sort of pareidolia that takes place in our reception of these characters. onto the faceless terror we assign faced-ness, in a move related to what Deleuze and Guattari call "faciality"

"...the modes of perception that guide 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." (EC, 595)

"To say that faces are socially produced means they are perceived in a fundamentally different way than Levinas wishes." (EC, 596)

with this let's return to the mal docteur Génessier and his assistant Louise, for whom faciality is a literal manifestation of their pathological subject/object relations; the women Louise abducts and Génessier de-faces are nothing more than objects to them, a social "type" (pretty young woman) reduced to base material for experimental surgeries. faces themselves become objects in their twisted ontologies.

i run out of steam here and quote at length:

El Campo:
 * "Whereas violence is typically conceived in terms of physical harm, and although responses often seek to pin praise or blame on individual actors, a tendency Paul Farmer calls “the erosion of social awareness” or “desocialization," this literature emphasizes societal, institutional, and structural dimensions of suffering, including the role of corporations, markets, and governments in fostering various kinds of harm in populations. Farmer defines structural violence as social arrangements that systematically bring subordinated and disadvantaged groups into harm’s way and put them at risk for various forms of suffering. Anthropologists have sought to “resocialize” suffering by tracing its origins to political-economic processes, social structures, and cultural ideologies." (590)
 * "Farmer suggests structural violence is often perpetuated on the basis of visibility. Certain factors are seen as “causes” of suffering (and/or disease) while others are overlooked, as when government policies and programs focus on individual behaviors, ignoring underlying systemic conditions. He encourages anthropologists to scrutinize dominant frames of perception that remove historical and societal forces from an account of how structural violence, attendant inequalities, and responses are constituted." (593)
 * "It is not only scientific knowledge that influences the visibility or invisibility of suffering and harm but also subjective acts of meaning making, patterns of moral reasoning, and cultural logics of accountability that can encourage people to look at suffering (and each other) in particular ways. Oftentimes, the problem is not that suffering is invisible or its causes unknown. Individuals and whole groups can have something at stake in actively overlooking and taking distance from other people’s suffering. “Oppression is a result of many conditions,” Farmer writes, “not the least of which reside in consciousness”" (594)
 * "When some people look at a migrant farmworker they do not see a sentient face that bears witness to the vulnerability of existence and commands the self to infinite responsibility and hospitality, as in the ethics idealized by Emmanuel Levinas. They see someone who, despite living down the country road in a labor camp and doing the backbreaking work of harvesting the area’s tobacco crop, does not belong to the fabric of “who is here with us,” excluded from what counts as community" (594)
 * "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." (595)
 * "One is always already bound to the other by an ethical relationship because of the possibility of turning away or doing harm. However, the modes of perception that guide 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." (595)
 * "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." (596)
 * "To say that faces are socially produced means they are perceived in a fundamentally different way than Levinas wishes." (596)
 * "Generic facial representations are detachable images that can circulate as symbols of place, icons of a group of people, and tools of power and resistance." (597)
 * "This is what is meant by campo—a metaphoric expression used to disparage structural violence and facialize its inhospitable and menacing character. Wages are campo not simply because they are meager, but because they are part of an unremitting slap in the face that plasters symbolic denigration into the materiality of such things as a paycheck or a labor camp." (598)
 * "But the crew is also aware that Craig’s intentions with “face time” are partly economical. “The boss is here, but he is not really here,” one worker, Marcos, a frail young man from Veracruz, says to me. “He comes and looks at everything. But he just comes to make sure there are no problems. He wouldn’t come and eat dinner in the kitchen here. He wouldn’t use this bathroom.”" (599)
 * "From the standpoint of Levinasian ethics, what Craig idealizes as “face time” falls short of being an ethical relationship. This is not because Craig directly causes some kind of harm to workers, but rather because his engagement with them is already couched within a particular set of relations embedded in economic transactions and dependencies. In contrast, Levinas imagines ethics as a “relation without relation," a situation in which the other person calls the ego into question, holds the self hostage precisely because an economy of expectations or debts has yet to be established. Only in such a hypothetical setting, the unmediated face-to-face, does the face of the other defy totalizing representations and command a kind of respect that is not linked to self-interest." (600)
 * "The social production of face is here a mechanism of power that does not render people faceless or invisible as much as it facializes individuals as having the Face of a culture that is alternately seen as friendly and familial, docile and hard working, threatening and not local, or morally inferior and filthy." (602)
 * "The particular spatial sensitivity to aesthetic aspects of human habitation and exchange that defined this colonial gaze was evidence of a more generalized mode of perception and technology of power that, Chakrabarty stresses, underwrites the very grammar of modernity, including visceral sensibilities about public health, a tendency to equate filth with otherness, and knee-jerk responses to disorder" (603)
 * "The face-to-face he idealizes assumes that self and other are cohabitants of shared time and space: an immediate, proximate encounter with vulnerability galvanizes ethical responsiveness . In practice, this interpersonal dynamic is rare." (604)
 * "When Craig visits the camp and meets with workers, he is literally facing time, a commodity, labor hours, which he has purchased and which is assumed to be continuously at his disposal, available for monitoring and managing, even though the workday has ended." (605)
 * "The “deeply ambiguous character” of the colonial bazaar, for example, challenged a modern bourgeois sensibility centered on the home and a strict division between that which is “outside” and the “ritually enclosed inside” of both private life and community. Spaces linked to trash and garbage (e.g., bazaars and labor camps) become dangerous realms of “matter out of place” to be policed and protected from the public sphere of sociopolitical membership but never relinquished as cozy private spheres of domesticity." (606-7)
 * "The face here does not signal the radical neediness of the other person, but the worldliness of the face, the fact that the face bears traces of social processes and pressures, not the asocial singularity of an individual." (612)
 * "Migrant farmworkers are often viewed through a prism of faciality that frames them and spaces linked to their life and work as “other” and belonging on the “outside.” They are people who do manual field labor under the beating sun, run headlong for the portable toilet, and live in an archipelago of labor camps that are literally not counted in the string of houses that anchor people inside the moving borderlines of community." (620)
 * "To explore how faces are socially produced and perceived is to gauge the workings of power and resistance in the most intimate of ways." (620)

Facing Risk:
 * "Against a model of ethics premised upon rights and equality, Levinas says that the self is infinitely responsible for the other and that this unequal and hierarchical encounter defines ethics." (FR, 30)
 * "Here, the term "reflexivity" is distinguished from critical self-reflection; while the former totalizes ethnography as either an objective form of knowing or an engaged form of action (both of which return power and authority to the ethnographer) the latter aims to undermine the self's sovereignty and knowledge." (30-31)
 * "Ethnography thus becomes a deconstructive basis upon which encounters with others dynamically inform the patterns of life and values that define the researcher." (31)
 * "That Levinas's philosophy was so unsystematically stated makes it good to think with, anthropologically speaking. This article, for one, tables a textual pursuit of the "real Levinas" and instead gears its reading of Levinas toward specific questions formulated in light of anthropological research design, the practice of fieldwork, and ethnographic writing." (32)
 * "The face is not simply an assemblage of features such as eyes, nose, cheeks, and jowl. It is also the singularity of an impression that is absolutely unique, a "trace," expressive of a person's vitality and vulnerability. For Levinas, the face reveals absolute otherness, singularity, in the other person." (32)
 * "In contrast, what Levinas called "the same" applies to everything Western thought can understand. It is intelligibility, rationalization, system, structure, teleology, identity, and being." (32)
 * "For Levinas, there are two kinds of travel. One is envisioned as a return to "the same," provoking no substantive transformation int he self's thought and attitudes. In this case, movement across space and encounters with other beings do not change the traveler but rather reinforce the kind of person that the traveler was before the journey. Anther kind of travel is a journey away from the self, in which one is dissociated from the familiar, the comfortable, and the recognizable. Here, the self begins to depart from "totality" and moves toward an "exterior."" (33)
 * "Because the subject is inherently social, it is amidst this sociality that the face-to-face relationship with another person reveals the mutuality of existing in an immediate, visceral form. The face makes the other's vulnerability apparent and makes the self responsible, someone with the potential to do violence." (33)
 * "The face is commanding--behind the confident smiles, articulated laughs, and sociable expressions the face is the vital singularity that guarantees nothing more than "there is," the fact that the other person is capable of being killed and that, as someone capable of executing such an event, the self is always already bound by this ethical relationship." (33-4)
 * "a form of faceless communication that did not occur between interlocutors but "with" them." (35)
 * "But what the prayers were "about" was also a subject of research, secularized for me, something to write about in field notes. The "spontaneous" demand for me to pray and to receive prayers challenged the hierarchy of researcher and informant, but without collapsing it entirely." (36)
 * "The challenge of the prayer circle, for example, ethnography's risky constitution in "life," is quickly covered over by more structured interviews and the placement of what those prayers were "About" within the larger context of a research problem. The open quality of fieldwork gets lost (or embellished) along this teleological path. Fieldwork then "corresponds not to the right then and there," Castañeda cautions, "but to the subsequent re-constitution of information and experience as knowledge in writing, text, and representation that circulates for other audiences of readers and viewers detached form the specific time and space of the fieldwork." (37)
 * "The construction of a “field” is a theoretical process that bears the traces of anthropology’s historical connections to colonialism and to cartographies of power/knowledge that have constituted the modern world order and the familiar patterning of circumscribed cultures, nations, and territories... Fieldwork often yields encounters that are “structured, shaped, and conceived within the specific disciplinary, theoretical, and institutional logics of anthropology, sociology, and related cultural studies” (37)
 * "The methodological advantage of this ever ambivalent mode of empathy, the "love" is that it helps maintain a productive but potentially irritating and emotionally risky sense of incomplete control that constantly nudges a researcher into critical self-reflection about the cultural and moral assumptions that guide research design and analysis." (38)
 * "For Scheper-Hughes, ethnographers must become involved in the situations in which they find themselves, whether as researchers or just plain humans, even with incomplete knowledge about how things work." (39)
 * "For Levinas, the self is infinitely responsible, which means that one is responsible not just for the other, a single individual, but indeed for all others, for all individuals. It is in the face of the other that responsibility is articulated, embraced, and enacted, and yet it is likewise there that one delimits one’s responsibility and thus fails to accomplish what Levinas calls ethics... There is violence involved, a break from ethics, from infinite responsibility, in any interpersonal encounter. When I take up the imperative to act //here// I am failing to carry out responsibilities that lie both //there// and //there//." (40)
 * "Whereas Scheper-Hughes describes a subject who knows where she stands and chooses her battles, Levinas seeks to undermine the sovereignty and control of the subject as social agent" (40)
 * "Instead, it is an imperative, signified in the inequality of the face, that commands a passive self." (40)
 * "The repugnancy [Scherper-Hughes] refers to, insofar as it is prior to "culture," a kind of totality, is like the sense of infinite responsibility commanded by the face." (40)
 * "On face-to-face encounters of fieldwork, he writes that the very fram- ing and proximity is complicit with the colonial project: "[Colonialism] made possible the kind of human intimacy on which anthropological fieldwork is based, but ensured that that intimacy should be one-sided" (42)
 * "Yet, the participation of both of these positions in a stark division between subject and object, self and other, suggests complicity with the very legacies of Western power and knowledge from which they claim to depart."
 * "Being alive to the other’s experience would have opened the doctor to a more full picture of sickness, one linking individual physiology, competing explanatory models, and a larger social context of financial and family strain. But while a conversation about these social and cultural issues might have allowed for a more effective course of treatment, it would have been risky, challenging the doctor’s epistemology of disease and moral model of proper compliance." (46)
 * "For Kleinman, the ethical act of acknowledging the other person’s suffering and what is deeply at stake in that experience must take precedence in health care delivery over epistemological issues, lest the patient be reduced to the biomedical understanding of a particular disease." (46)
 * "Nelson’s “consciousness” resembles the Levinasian “ethics” because it seeks to maintain the “possible tension and discomfort” of doing fieldwork as crucial sources of critical self-reflection, ethical sensibilities, and political affiliations. Nelson remains skeptical of attempts to “level these differences” through claims to collaboration or solidarity, because, for her, ethnographic research is defined by “inherent inequality” or the dissymmetry between ethnographer and subject that is constituted in the foundational anthropological division between “research” and “life.” Nelson thus insists that “a truly collaborative product may be an unobtainable ideal,” not in order to discourage such activity but indeed to move discomfort and dissymmetry—what we have diagrammed as Levinas’s unequal kind of proximity—to the center of “a larger and necessary process of social repositioning, redefining, and reworking of historical power relation- ships."" (47)
 * "Although in essence an impossible ideal, Levinasian ethics can usefully inform ethnography’s ethical possibilities insofar as it fosters irritation and an affirmation of unexpected and contingent encounters that emerge within the ongoing flow of fieldwork." (48)

Versions of the Dead:
 * "I admit, though, that it was in words first, and only through their repetition, that she hooked me on the dead." (473)
 * "Her face was her principal device for creating an atmosphere of consequence in which her ever- repeating words weighed with self-evident importance." (474)
 * "Observing that the right hand “acts, orders and takes” while the left hand is “repressed and kept inactive, its development methodically thwarted,” Hertz then expanded his insights far beyond the strictly physiological. The range of his interpretation extended to the moral valuations produced by right and left in social life, such that to the right corresponds “the idea of sacred power, regular and beneficent, the source of everything that is good, favorable and legitimate,” while the left holds that which is illegitimate, impure, unstable, maleficent and dreaded. Palo would have fascinated Hertz because of its position within African-inspired realms of healing, especially relative to the better known and researched religion of //Santo,// commonly referred to as [//Santería//]." (477)
 * "Palo is too unexpected in its basic assumptions about the status of matter, the dead, and the living, to be seamlessly assimilated into the prevailing ethnographic modes of analysis as these are defined, above all, by their adherence to regimes of knowing organized under the signs of negation, identity, and being." (479)
 * "This would be a writing that was, in a most material way, "touched" by the dead." (480)
 * "In our engagements she insisted, through repetition, that I learn her vocabulary of the dead by speaking her words back to her. Our growing rapport depended on my words being reiterations of her own, so that before long I surrendered the terms of my research and together we spoke about the dead in her words alone. Within Spanish, which we shared fluidly, Isidra spoke a language that was at once familiar and alien, ripe with sentiment, and formed to communicate the dead intellectually and viscerally at once." (480)
 * "I would like this foreign language for Palo both to describe and to make felt the unstable substances that Palo prizes. It must have words for the volatile social potentials found in matter and terms to arrange what are normally considered dialectically exclusive classes, like “matter” and “spirit,” into mutually affirming couplings and assemblages, paradoxical though these may seem. It must also have terms for a new materiality, including terms for morphogenic dynamisms immanent to matter itself.18 This language will operate by making use of philosophy, just as it makes use of narrative description, in its attempt to speak newly, individually, unsettlingly, about Palo and its dead." (481)
 * "As Isidra used it, Kalunga was not only haunted by the dead, but was also composed of the dead and simultaneously constitutive of them; the dead were immanent to it, in the same way a broth makes a soup." (482)
 * "Kalunga, if it was to be grasped at all, had to be felt first, as a gentle turn of the stomach." (483)
 * "Her elaboration of Kalunga dissolved the expected opposition of living and dead so that not only did these two great ordering categories no longer stand in opposition to one another, but at the limit of their characterizations became an indivisible coupling, mutually becoming one another at their limits. Placed within the context of Kalunga's saturating immanece, the living are best understood as singular densities of the dead coagulating in a fluid at its saturation point." (484)
 * "Within the immanence that is Kalunga, the body is less fixed, more like a membranous peel constituted in any depth it might have only by the hydraulic fluctuations and rearrangements of the dead across and through its surface. This was the status of the body in Isidra's formulation of Kalunga, the body becoming a form of the dead, and the dead becoming material in momentary coagulations we recognize as bodies and objects." (484)
 * "Now Hegel would like to be moving along the path toward a stabilized, negating, masculine European subjectivity, but I want to linger here in what I am calling “sense un-certainty,” which is to say, in Kalunga. Linger in this immediacy of sense experience that suffuses those who practice Palo. Linger in the chaos, in infinite, “indefinite” nature, in the //apeiron// of European becoming prior to Hegel’s first negation, prior to his first penetration, prior to the motion that initiates the German Enlightenment’s last unselfconscious attempt to constitute wholly stable objects and wholly knowing subjects. Linger in this radical connection, or immanence, of forces and receivers, in the flux of limits implied by such an intimate connection, which is the Cuban-Kongo sea of the dead." (487)
 * "In lingering through the repetition of the instant just before the crank is turned on the engine of dialectics, I follow my teachers of Palo, but also Nietzsche and Deleuze, who would seek difference, which is to say the basic architecture of concepts—of forms—not in negation, but rather in affirming repetition, affirmed repetition, through a repetition that affirms. But I linger here first and foremost because this is where Palo returns us, again and again—to this connection between bodies, to the repetition of events that link bodies, to this zone of bodies so receptive to minor sensation that their boundaries dissolve." (488)
 * "My communication of Palo's dead, Kalunga, depends on making felt this zone I have been calling "sense un-certainty," which owes its instability to instants of forceful sensation, and our immanent receptivity of such, in which we as scholars find it so difficult to linger. Without the stabilizing resources of negation, it is only through repetition, serial repetition of the instant sense of un-certainty, that we can linger here at all. Which is to say that the sense un-certainty that is Kalunga is in effect a series of sense events, different in their repetitions but repetitions nonetheless. Kalunga must be understood as a zone of sensation that generates many versions of itself, mutually coexisting and concurrently affirmed." (488)
 * "Such returns of the dead--distributed, collected, redistributed and assembled--form arrangements we might, in a different language, call "objects" and "subjects."" (490)