Deleuze & Guattari: Faciality

What is faciality? At the most basic level, facialization is the process of identity production via social production of the face, the face being the substance of expression of the signifier as it relates to the dominant sign regime “…the face crystallizes all redundancies, it emits and receives, releases and recaptures signifying signs…faciality reigns materially over that whole constellation of signifiances and interpretations…” A Thousand Plateaus (115). The face is thus a plain or a milieu on which signification or subjectification can take place, but it is not a neutral field or milieu. It exists to make certain meanings and subjectivities appear. We might be better off understanding the face as close to Debord’s spectacle. Like the spectacle, the face determines what is presented, what subjectivities and meanings. And like the spectacle, the face relates or reinforces a form of rule. “The face is a politics” (181).

The notion of faciality is perhaps most approachable as a theory of racism. Like all concepts or projects proposed by D&G, faciality as a theory of racism is non-dialectical, an alternative to the notions illustrated by those such as Fanon and Sartre, who propose theories of racial Others. Each rests on the dominant subject, the white male European. Sartre says it’s the anti-semite who creates the Jew, or famously stated in his essay Anti Semite and Jew, “If the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him.” For Fanon, the European colonizer forms the African “native” as a static identity. Reflecting on the end of slavery in the Americas — the formative historical experience of the African Diaspora — Fanon argues that “the white master recognized without a struggle the black slave. But the former slave wants to have himself recognized. There is at the basis of Hegelian dialectic an absolute reciprocity that must be highlighted.” Said’s Orientalism proceeds roughly along the same line, the “oriental” is created in European scholarship, European art, travel logs, etc, “The Orient is watched…the European, whose sensibility tours the Orient, is a watcher, never involved, always detached…The Orient becomes a living tableau of queerness.” In all of these perspectives, there is an otherness, a backwardness, an oppositional identity. The claim follows that these identities (Jew, Africans, Orientals) are a creation of the dominant European imaginary, imposed by the colonial power. Jews existed, but the anti-semite created “the Jew”; Africans existed, but the colonizing power created “the native’’ as it did “the oriental.” The colonizer, the racist, contrived negative identities, forcing alterity to its extreme, initiating the Other, posing a rigid boundary of exclusion through the middle of the world. However, the dialectical conception doesn’t stop with this first act of creation. The European Self is rather the final result of the process, only arrived at through its opposition to the Other, its difference from the Jew, the Native, the Oriental. The White European Self does not actually exist before this creative encounter, this invention of the Other. Negative identity, the Other, the Self, arises as a negation of that negation; this is the dialectical structure. White European Self depends on its negative Other and through negation of that Other can it invent and maintain its own identity.

Alternatively, D&G prepose racism not as exclusion but inclusion determined by proximity. In other words, faciality is a theory of racism (among other things), but it is not a theory of racial Others. On the contrary, European racism functions precisely by including all identities on the white screen and in the black holes — including them and arranging them in a hierarchy defined by degrees of deviance from the dominant standard:

“From the viewpoint of racism, there is no exterior, there are no people on the outside. There are only people who should be like us and whose crime it is not to be. The dividing line is not between inside and outside but rather is internal to simultaneous signifying chains and successive subjective choices. Racism never detects the particles of the other; it propagates waves of sameness until those who resist identification have been wiped out (or those who only allow themselves to be identified at a given degree of divergence). Its cruelty is equaled only by its incompetence and naivete.” (178).

There is no exclusion properly speaking, “Racism operates by the determination of degrees of deviance in relation to the White-Man face, which endeavors to integrate nonconforming traits into increasingly eccentric and backward waves” (178). Year Zero: Faciality, the chapter title, implies the year of Christ’s birth. Christ being the dominant sign, “The face of Christ. The face is the typical European…”(176). The white man, organizing a white capital, the white face of a white capitalism, the most severe despotic blueprint. Christ is the point of resonance to which all identities must orient themselves.

Every face is a composition of a despotic regime and an authoritarian regime, signification and subjectification.The two mix and function together. It is this assemblage of regimes that gives a semiotic system its imperialism, creating a forcible subjugation to the exclusive form of signifying and subjective expression, “You’ll be pinned to the White Walls and stuffed into the black hole”(181), for the recoding, or reterritorializing of the face. Of course, in character, D&G propose an escape of face, or rigid identity, an unmaking of the face:

“If the face is a politics, dismantling the face is also a politics involving real becomings, an entire becoming-clandestine. Dismantling the face is the same as breaking through the wall of the signifier and getting out of the black hole of subjectivity. Here, the program, the slogan, of schizoanalysis is: `Find your black holes and white walls, know them, know your faces; it is the only way you will be able to dismantle them and draw your lines of flight” (188).

Here is where the clarity between the face and the spectacle arises.. Spectacles in Debord are always something external to us, projected for us, faces, on the other hand, are us. We are constituted by our black holes and white walls. Dismantling our faces will be dismantling ourselves. The face is where we must start on our lines of flight.