Week+13



594:
 * El Campo**

Given this emphasis on visibility, a field such as the phenomenology of per- ception would seem indispensable to the anthropology of structural violence. 4 However, the strategies Farmer outlines for opening new fields of vision are premised on a positivism that involves the integration of more bodies of scientific or objective knowledge. [...] 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 ac-tively 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” (2004:307).

595:

// Violence can aim only at a face. // —Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 1969, p. 225

Here, Levinas means that harm is meaningless if understood as directed at an inanimate object (1969:225). One cannot harm a stone, for example (Kosky 2001:39). Violence can only target an animate and sensate existence, which, for Levinas, is signaled in the human face. 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:

To say that faces are socially produced means they are perceived in a fundamentally different way than Levinas wishes. Deleuze and Guattari write sarcastically of “glum face-to-face encounters” between pregiven social types (1987:171). They argue that faces are seen as generic types that do not confound cognitive synthesis in their infinite alterity. Rather, the human face becomes a medium through which finite differences are established, as when the aesthetics of the face play an important role in racial schemes, class structures, and other classificatory logics (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:185–193). 5 Human faces never simply signify in terms of phenotypical features and their composition does not mechanically reflect the structural or societal position of the individual. Amidst a transpersonal set of strategies operating throughout society (i.e., an abstract machine [Massumi 1992:26]), faces are actively coded as allegorical signs and invested with cultural meaning in practices of everyday life. Faces have a figurative quality [...]

In this conceptualization, faces are perceived in terms of a metonymic 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” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:175).

604:

Levinas wants people like Trisha to see in the faces of migrants singular traces of a vulnerable existence and to be held hostage at that sight, infinitely responsible for their well-being and unconditionally hospitable, an experience Levinas calls “epiphany” (1969:213). 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 (Levinas 1981:139). In practice, this interpersonal dynamic is rare. The temporal and spatial coordinates of alterity are culturally shaped and politically consequential. People who reside within a geographically defined community can sometimes seem the most out of place owing to practices of exclusion, segregation, and racialized mappings of belonging (Benson 2005). Among the many paradoxes of “community” is the fact that “it can provide a medium for the fullest expression of belonging or the ultimate suppression and exclusion from one’s closest surroundings” (Greenhouse et al. 1994:175).