Facical

Warwick Mules in the latest issue of Transformations -

'This Face: a Critique of Faciality as Mediated Self-Presence'

In this paper I develop a concept of the face that begins with a simple idea: the face is that which withdraws from self-presence, thereby enabling the possibility of self-relation with others. The face is the mark of the self in the sense proposed by Walter Benjamin, as the medium that manifests the sign by withdrawing from it (“Painting”), thereby opening up possibilities in the materiality of the medium itself for future self-configurations unseeable in current forms of self-identity. This idea, I argue, leads to an affirmation of the self as other, as the self “to come,” opening up possibilities for critique from the place where the face withdraws. My aim here is to counter two tendencies in theoretical work: one in which the face is taken to be the sign of simple self-presence, and the other where, in its withdrawal from self-presence, the face disappears into a system or conceptual scheme, losing its singular specificity as this face, and hence its potential for being something other than what it is.

To make my case I offer an analysis of the conventional face-to-face situation of direct communication with another (the I-you relation), showing how it necessarily depends on a mediation that retreats as it makes this relation possible. I argue that this retreating mediation is the face in its withdrawal and hence resistance to self-identity and conceptual determination. Furthermore, I will demonstrate that the withdrawing face cannot be elided or sublated into an idea or material affect without losing sight of the fact that it happens. My argument counters the material-idealist concept of faciality proposed by Deleuze and Guattari as a “redundancy” within a field of pure material affectivity (A Thousand Plateaus 168). Instead, I argue for a situated critique (critical praxis) of the face opened to otherness in the finite place where it happens — as the mark of withdrawal from self-presence. To demonstrate this, I will discuss photographic work as a creative political art practice that makes a face appear as such, thereby enabling new self-relations motivated by renewed democratic concerns for global “matters of concern.”

Theory is the opiate of the academics?