[manuscript for presentation at Stony Brook]
To Have No Face: Introduction
Like so many Foucault conference papers start with an epigraphical quotation of Deleuze, I will, in turn, start mine with a quote from Michel Foucault:
do you think that I would keep so persistently to my task, if I were not preparing – with a rather shaky hand – a labyrinth into which I can venture, in which I can move my discourse, opening up underground passages, forcing it to go far from itself, finding overhangs that reduce and deform its itinerary, in which I can lose myself and appear at last to eyes that I will never have to meet again. I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face. Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order.
To write to have no face. No easy task when we are always pressing against subject-functions and their many faces. To evade the face, for Deleuze and Foucault alike, is to evade the police – to evade those bureaucrats, even bureaucrats of thought who love to cite Gilles Deleuze, who would like to see that we have our papers in order. Part of what makes Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari so interesting is their penchant for a practice of politics that explicitly seeks to evade reconstituting a polis predicated on a kind of isolatable belonging. It is as much an ethics of revolt, as it is any kind of political program.
To evade the face, to refuse who we are rather than to “discover it,” means to tackle, in a very careful way, how we are constituted. For Deleuze and Guattari, the face is a way in, but into a trap.
I would like to put forward that in D&G’s faciality plateau, what one is faced with is an articulation of a mode of subjectivation that is specific to a disciplinary milieu. Faciality is, for Deleuze and Guattari, that challenge in modernity that can be best understood as the confluence of historical forces and formations that allow us to become legible to ourselves and others. This legibility is a trap. D&G mark out a route of escape explicitly through the face by redefining how subjectivation (and by extension subjectivity, which we have to use really carefully here) ought to be understood. The face, for Deleuze and Guattari, is not reducible to the subject – it points to a series of operations in play that make that subject legible in a grid of intelligibility. It is my contention that the disciplinary society emerges through the complex formation that becomes a regime of faciality. Docile bodies are faces. Once we understand this, we may be able to come to a reading of this plateau, and Deleuze’s later work on control societies, that deepens the political stakes while also avoiding some of the metaphysical pitfalls that Deleuze becomes so weary of in his older age.
In order to make this argument there are several things that I need to achieve. First, we have to lay out how the question of subjectivity is operating in this plateau, and, more importantly, how it is not Instead, the point to tease out the moments when Deleuze and Guattari tether the “slipping” into faces explicitly to the problem of subjectivation – of becoming what one supposedly is. How the face itself becomes a redundancy without being reducible to a speaking subject is important.
Next, I would like to spend some time on the abstract machine of faciality and the two explicit “aspects” it carries. These are, respectively: “facial units” and “choices/selective responses”. Here, it will be important to remember that, like Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari are not binaristic thinkers even if they are placing a binary relation atop.
Finally, I would like to shift gears to how Deleuze and Guattari are contending with research accomplished by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish. Foucault’s account of the emergence of the problem of the subject within bourgeois revolutionary discourses, that of course immediately become counter-insurgents (the point of the revolution was the revolution to end all revolts), help us understand precisely why Deleuze and Guattari are so adamant against a politics of representation, a polity of faces.
Face and its Subjectivations
Deleuze and Guattari first lay out a schematic relation between white walls and black holes that are going to establish their metaphysical plane of analysis. The white wall is that constituted and reconstituted space upon which enforced distinctions are inscribed. It operates in a similar fashion to what Deleuze and Guattari call the “socius” in the previous volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Faces “take shape” on this white wall, subjectivations are played out – bodies cascade through formations (the school, the prison, port-royal grammar, West Point).“Subjectification is never without its black holes”. The black hole lays out borders, places of darkness. This is not a metaphor for D&G, as they explicitly refer to cinematic practice pertaining to the lighting of the face.
The skin of the human being, sheening with sweat, makeup, or tears, flashes light back into the camera lens, whereas the dark holes of the eyes provide a contrast that gives the bordering effect and cavities that breaks up the white wall and allows for the springing forth of particularities. It is in these breaks that this question of the “how” of who we are is found. We are not simply our body, if only it were that simple. We live in a dictatorship of the face. This dictatorship is determined by concrete assemblages of power. This is not a vague notion for D&G but explicit relations between non-discursive formations (the prison, the factory, the barracks) and the respective faces that they need – the faces that they produce.
In the realm of subjectivation, Deleuze and Guattari see the face as a horror story. It is a cartography of violence, one that overwhelms all other aspects. It is worth noting that the face is not reducible to the human. There are faciality traits on all things. It is important that this is not reduced to a crude anthropomorphism of the world, the face is the violence of a kind of encoding. The limp that I came to this seminar conference with is as facializing, if not more so, than my eyes or cheeks or anything else. It immediate speaks to a particular subject-function and face taken on. As Foucault writes in Discipline and Punish, what is “abnormal” is precisely what is more individuated by normalizing power. This stands for faciality as well.
It is here where we can begin to cut into how faciality is a critique of the givenness of any aspect of subjectivity. The sovereignty of the subject, its priority ontologically, has not just been demoted – it has been destroyed. This is how the French phenomenologists and psychoanalysts alike fall into error according to D&G. They “make the error of appealing to a form of subjectivity […] phenomenological field or split in a structural field.” The subjectivity, more importantly the subject itself and its necessity, are a given in Sartrean phenomenological ontology, Being and Nothingness would cease to function without it. The existential condition that sets the human subject apart from the object (with its use and immanence) only works if a subject is confronted with the object, the object literally “appears to it” (Being and Nothingness 17, Barnes). On the other hand, Deleuze and Guattari will caution against the transcendental nature of the symbolic order, as this cedes to a pre-discursive destiny of the face (mommy, daddy, me).
The gaze, the mirror, the encounter, these are secondary to the black hole and white wall respectively. In the same way that politics precedes ontology for Deleuze, the politics of faciality and facialization precedes anything we could say about a recourse to a subject. There is no prior subject to speak up without that facialization that makes it legible. This regime of legibility is what Deleuze calls politics.
Just as a signifier does not construct its field of relations (which, for D&G, is contingent on this white wall), subjectivity “does not dig its hole all alone”. To speak of a transcendental here, in any way, whether it is a unified subject, or a pre-discursive series of capacities (one can take their pick of readings of German Idealism or Post-Kantian phenomenology; Deleuze, Guattari, and Foucault will not be satisfied), is to conceive of a face as ready-made.
It ignores the conditions of the face, its passages, which are the functionings of the abstract machine which we will turn to in just one moment. However, the phenomenological stakes are not what is crucial in this. The polemic against Levinas, and phenomenology in general, in this text is palpable and enough ink has been spilled on it. While that polemic is certainly interesting, it is not a formal worry if Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty come to an agreement in the end. Instead, what needs to be emphasized is that faces are always being slipped into rather than emanating from a subject or readymade to be taken on.
What the face is not is as important as what it is. The negative theory at work in this plateau is crucial to understanding its implications. The first displacement we have discussed already is that of the human being. The face is absolutely inhuman. Its inhumanity has to be understood in relation to its existence as a cartography of the subject. “The inhuman in human beings: that is the face from the start.” This inhumanity is not the binary that separates the human and non-human along the lines of animality, it is an inhumanity that is specifically human. It is the inhumanity that would be what drove Primo Levi to ask us, when faced with the history of classification of human beings that results in the horrors of the camps, “is this a man?” The shame, extrapolated, must be one that condemns a humanity that can even make the question legible to begin with. The face is a horror because it reveals the perpetual and mobile circumscriptions of human beings within the disaster of history. The face reveals that politics is always a war by other means, and it is a war that cuts through the most intimate aspects of our encounters and collisions with one another.
The face carries that shame of the human being that is always draped in the inhumanity of itself, particularly of its account of the human itself the face provides. The inhumanity of the face has to be understood, in a very specific sense, like a document. It is that stamped pass, that entity that speaks by not letting a voice be heard at all, but instead letting a metaphysical apparatus of distinction speak in its place. Along the grid of the white wall, my face (separable from and yet coding over my body) speaks where my own utterances fail.
My face acquires its legibility from a historicity of relations that are not reducible to any phenomenological encounter. “Knowledge,” a loaded term for Deleuze and Foucault, does not stop at the end of power, but, in fact, begins there. Nietzsche says that the upright face of the Prussian soldier haunts Kant for this reason (Nietzsche and Philosophy). To be legible, to be knowable, is to be disciplined. This is precisely because the face does not inform a prior social power or explain it. Certain concrete assemblages of power need to produce a face; they will make their faces out of an inert clay like Bonaparte’s soldiers.
The face composes a whole world. It can speak to that world, but never because it was prior to it. Our task, however, is to work to escape it. In this seeking, one finds the becoming-imperceptible which Deleuze and Guattari are so fond of. There is no terminal state in the becoming-imperceptible, because one is always seeking saddle up on a line of flight that is forming within a striated space. We start from our current position, with the faces that we have. We must know our faces well, not so as to constitute a new face, but to begin to make an egress from this theater of representation.
Abstract Machines and Their Products
The product, the face, of the abstract machine has been discussed. Now, one must break down the abstract machine of faciality as Deleuze and Guattari lay it out in terms of no longer subjectivities, but discursive formations that in turn produce make certain subjectivations possible. After laying out their new metaphysics of the face, they move to establish the conditions of possibility for facialization; the abstract machine of faciality.
There are two lines upon which the abstract machine functions. The first is what Deleuze and Guattari call a “facial unit”. It is best put in DeleuzoGuattarian terms as something dispersed across a white wall. It is that unit, that bordering effect, that black hole that establishes biunivocal distinctions that makes difference possible (of course, only as secondary to the identity of the same, which in this plateau is White Jesus Christ). The example Deleuze and Guattari use is the chin of a West Pointer. That concrete formation, the jaw, strengthened and held at a particular angle, with a close shave and a short haircut, has to have these units transformed first, then they become “stabilized”. It has to first cut through those binaries: “man or woman,” “rich or poor,” but also those of arborescence like “teacher and student,” or “citizen and cop”. These are biunivocal distinctions, perhaps there is no better police officer than the well-behaved citizen. Deleuze and Guattari write that “you don’t so much have a face as slide into one.” This slippage is crucial. One never takes on a subject function in order to possess it, my predicates in the abstract machine are not mine. One is always falling through formations: the school, the prison, the hospital. One is taking on predicates: student, prisoner, patient. That slippage inscribes, but its inscriptions would not be interpretable without a prior regime of signs to turn these inscriptions into what Deleuze and Guattari call order-words.
The second aspect is the “decision” or “selective response”. It is a motion of rejection, when faced with “faces that do not conform”. It is a normalizing judgement where a face sits in relation to a gradience away from the norm. This is not a simple categorization. It is a death sentence. This aspect “propagates waves of sameness until those who resist identification are wiped out”. The disabled man moves from confinement to confinement, until he is disallowed and well-hearted doctor offers him a door out with MAiD. The prisoner is killed not so much for the gravity of his crime, but for the biosocial risk he poses to the social order. “Society, and its pristine faces, must be defended.”
Faciality as a Disciplinary Technology
It is no secret that A Thousand Plateaus is consistently in a dialogue with Foucault’s work on the disciplinary society in his lectures at the CdF and Discipline and Punish. While Foucault is never explicitly cited in this plateau, there is one moment—one key choice of words—where one who has swam with these thinkers knows exactly what Deleuze is prodding at. “A concerted effort is to do away with the body […] bodies are disciplined, corporeality dismantled […] a jump is made from the organic strata to the strata of signifiance and subjectification”. This is, in short, a crucial thesis (of the many) that define Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. An often overlooked an misunderstood aspect of Foucault’s work, in part because it forces one to take an uncomfortable look at the “almightiness […] of the autonomy of the subject”. The disciplinary society loosens its grip on the body while evoking a juridical subject. The subjects of Rousseau, of the revolutionary milieu. But in doing so, it births this facialized, normalized political object of control.
Everything must be legible; everything must be visible. The disciplinary society is a regime of light. This is the dream of bourgeois society and radical democracy. A social body that is completely transparent to itself. “What in fact was the Rousseauist dream that motivated many of the revolutionaries? It was the dream of a transparent society.” A society where each comrade is an overseer and, like Emile’s tutor, the overseer becomes a friend. When the question of justice emerges in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century with reformers, it emerges through the question of a field of visibility that will prevent infractions in the first place. It would, as Deleuze would say, detect deviance.
Space for Foucault, like the landscape in Deleuze, becomes analytical in the disciplinary society. While Deleuze associates the disciplinary society with enclosure in one of his last and most crucial of essays, “Postscript on the Societies of Control”, Foucault never makes such a claim. In fact, one of the primary aspects of the disciplinary society is that enclosure is “neither constant, nor indispensable, nor sufficient in disciplinary technology” (DP 143).
But this misstep in Deleuze’s analysis (one already extensively, and rightfully, polemicized by the Tiqqun journals and others), is remedied through a reexamination of Deleuze’s understanding of the Face and Landscape in the disciplinary society.
The disciplinary society has a new relation to space; it is inseparable from the subject functions, knowledges, and regimes they are working to produce. Deleuze extenuates something already brewing. Foucault writes that disciplinary space’s “aim was to establish […] how to locate individuals, to set up communications, to interrupt others, to be able at each moment to supervise the conduct of each individual, to assess it, to judge it, to calculate […] It was a procedure, therefore, aimed at knowing, mastering, and using. Discipline organizes an analytical space.” We know our face; we know our landscape. It is up to us to destitute the regime of faces.
RevoltingBodies 