What Is a Face

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2011 17: 1Body & SocietyDaniel Black

What Is a Face?

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What Is a Face?

DANIEL BLACK

Abstract The face is a shifting, multiplex, distributed and layered phenomenon. It is by far the mostmercurial feature of the human body, and even a single face cannot be isolated in, on or outside any onebody. In the following discussion I will employ a variety of differing accounts of the face and suggestthat the differences separating each account are merely reflective of the multiplex nature of the face itself.

Keywords anatomy, Deleuze, face, Levinas, vision

The question ‘What is a face?’ might seem easy enough to answer. Commonsense might define a face as the presence of certain features, such as eyes andmouth. But does anything with these features qualify as a face? Can a snake, forexample, be considered to have a face?

Certainly, in some sense, it can. We speak of all manner of living things ashaving faces, and even the crudest representation of key facial attributes – mostimportantly eyes – are enough to trigger recognition as a face. Infant humans andprimates are able to recognize representations of faces within days of birth (Guoet al., 2003: 371; Lutz et al., 1998: 169–70; Slaughter et al., 2002: B71); in addition,neonates not only seem to recognize others as having faces, but also understandthat they themselves have faces. Experiments have shown that babies only hoursold will imitate the facial expressions of others, despite never having had a chanceto look in a mirror and see that they have features which correspond to thosethey are seeing (Gallagher, 2005: 75ff.; Meltzoff and Moore, 1983). They seemto have an innate understanding of what a face is and the commonality between

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their faces and those of others. On the other hand, infants also seem to recognizesimple line drawings of faces (Wilson et al., 2002: 2910), and this ability toidentify even the most rudimentary of representations as a face would seem tosuggest that the face exists more in the mind of the viewer than on the bodyof the viewed: it perhaps results more from the attribution of a face than the sim-ple presence of physical features.

These and other attributes of the face invite multiple, seemingly contradic-tory, accounts of what faces are and how we perceive them. In this article I willargue that, while common underlying themes can be identified in these differentattributes of the face, the face remains, by its very nature, a multiplex phenom-enon that never can be fully accounted for within a simple or singular account.

I will, therefore, approach the face in a way which does not seek to force itsattributes into a restrictive pre-existing framework. A variety of differentaccounts of the face will be used, but none will serve as a point of origin formy analysis; rather, I will seek to have different kinds of knowledge regardingthe face interact productively with one another without privileging any partic-ular one as more truthful or apposite. Understanding the face as a multiplexphenomenon, my intention is to capture the different views of the face pro-duced by differing investigative approaches, accepting each as adding to thepotential for understanding the nature of the face through its very difference.I will then draw common themes from these differing accounts and suggestthat, despite their methodological dissimilarities and varying foundationalassumptions, together they do provide a consistent view of the dynamism andmultiplicity of the face.

However, drawing together different kinds of research on the face will inevi-tably require that I sometimes arbitrate between competing claims underpinningdifferent approaches. Before I begin, therefore, I will set out the foundationalassumptions of the following discussion. These assumptions derive from my eva-luation of competing claims made by the various sources discussed here, and thebasis of my conclusions regarding the superiority of one claim over another willbe set out during the discussion itself.

1 The face, while a key factor in the production of subjectivity and social struc-tures, is not produced by or comprehensively explicable in terms of either ofthese things. Deleuze and Guattari’s treatment of the face is referred to at mul-tiple moments in the discussion, but I will argue that an account of the facewhich, like theirs, sees faces purely in terms of subjectivization is untenablegiven the anatomical and cognitive uniqueness of the face as a material organof communication.

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2 Communication is not entirely reducible to linguistic structures. Too often, allcommunication is understood to be linguistic, or amenable to analysis in lin-guistic terms. The face is the most powerful example of communication whichextends outside and predates language, rationality and consciousness.

3 The material body provides a fundamentally important substrate of communi-cation. In its ability to communicate affects and associations at a corporeal levelwithout conscious analysis or linguistic sense, the face challenges a commontendency to understand communication as detachable from, or even opposedto, biology and bodily materiality. Foundational to both the biological structureof the face and the machinery of human perception is the body’s role in non-verbal, non-linguistic communication. The following discussion will thereforelook to disciplines such as ethology and neuroscience as sources of insight intothe evolutionary and cognitive production of faces, as this can both highlight theblindspots in accounts of the face arising in the humanities, and offer opportu-nities to enrich and extend those accounts. As we will see, however, the appealto such disciplines does not reflect a desire to provide an objective, ‘scientific’account of the face, nor does it require that communication be treated as some-thing rigidly structured by biology or amenable to simplistic empirical accounts.Nonetheless, I will interact with these forms of knowledge in good faith — Ihave no desire to simply criticize them from a position founded on, or use themas a resource to bolster the claims of, approaches external to them.

4 The body as material substrate of communication is a dynamic entity whichproduces a multiplicity of perceptual interactions with itself and the world.Highlighting the role of biology and materiality in communication need notproduce an account of the face which is fixed, essentializing, or built on claimsto identify some objective ‘rules’ of function or meaning. Accounts of the cul-tural production of the body tend to start with the body as it is isolated andfixed by social forces, but the lived materiality of the body is not reducibleto this entity. The face as an anatomical and perceptual phenomenon is themost mercurial, unstable, and elusive feature of human anatomy, endlesslyexceeding efforts to capture it and draw a stable, generalized view of it fromits endlessly shifting lived reality. It is these very qualities of the face whichnecessitate a mode of investigation which is open to multiple perspectives andmultiple forms of knowledge.

What is a Face for?

Crucial to the question of what a face is is the question of what a face does. Whatis a face for? While eyes are for looking, and noses and mouths are for breathing,

What Is a Face? & 3



tasting, smelling, eating and talking, the face as a whole is for none of these things(it just happens to be partially composed of features which carry out these func-tions). The face is, rather, an instrument of communication.

Faces are for signification; the most obvious use of the face is to generatemeaning for the benefit of an observer. Among mammals, facial signals such as thenarrowing of eyes, lowering of brows and baring of teeth to denote an urge toattack are consistent across a tremendous variety of species. A human being anda cat will both communicate in this way as a result of an innate biological predis-position, and so, on this most basic level, equally can be attributed with faces.

However, when discussing animal behaviour, a distinction must be drawnbetween display (‘a signal or pattern of motor activity whose exaggerated orstereotyped characteristics suggest that it has become specialized – in form, fre-quency, or both – during evolution to effect or to facilitate the process of com-munication’ [Redican, 1982: 216]) and expression, which suggests anintentionality of communication. While a human being might make an involun-tary facial display of aggression or fright like a cat, a cat will never, like a human,intentionally express itself using its face.

Take the following example. In stage one, two cats both want to eat a pieceof meat; one cat is willing to fight for the piece of meat, and so prepares to do soby flattening its ears against its head to prevent them being torn off, and pullingback its lips to bare its teeth before sinking them into the other cat. It then bitesand seriously injures the other cat. In stage two, descendants of these two cats arein the same situation. One cat makes the same preparations to bite the other, butthe other has evolved an instinctive fear of the sight of another cat flattening itsears and baring its teeth (as avoiding serious injury is beneficial to its survival),and so runs away, leaving the aggressor to claim the prize. In stage three, twofurther descendants of these cats engage in the same behaviour, but with theimportant innovation that the first cat flattens its ears and bares its teeth indepen-dently of any intention to bite. Once the second cat has developed an instinctualfear of the facial arrangement preparatory to biting, that facial arrangementcomes to have an evolutionary benefit for the first cat which is independent ofany actual bite. It just has to look like it’s going to bite in order to make the othercat give up its claim to the piece of meat. As a result, the preparatory contortionof the face itself comes to have use even when not followed by an attack, and sobecomes a valuable inherited feature. The process by which practical behavioursare converted into significatory ones is referred to by animal behaviourists as‘ritualization’ (Chevalier-Skolnikoff, 1973: 30; Redican, 1982: 216).

Like the iridescent pattern on the back of a poisonous reptile, ritualized dis-play is evidence that the natural world is full of codes and communications, but




while the poisonous reptile’s markings carry a message, that message has notbeen intentionally formulated by any individual reptile. Ironically, the animalwith the least need to understand the message on the reptile’s back is the reptileitself; not being likely to eat itself, it gains no advantage from decoding this warn-ing. While human beings might be differentiated by their capacity to intention-ally express themselves using their faces, the fact remains that intentional,expressive deployments of the face by humans remain in the minority, and ourown faces more commonly signify without conscious direction.

The face is an instrument of communication, but when discussing commu-nication it is important to understand that communication need not depend uponlanguage, consciousness or culture. Faces predate all of these things, althoughthey are now a part of each. The cat communicates with its challenger withoutlanguage and without even the conscious formulation of any message.

Making Faces

Once the significatory power of the face is taken into consideration, it becomesclear that the simple possession of certain anatomical features is not enough toqualify for possession of a face; while many living things have certain structureson the surfaces of their heads, not all of those structures collaborate to generatemeaning, and very few (only human beings and perhaps higher primates) are ableto make volitional use of this communicative apparatus. It is quite possible,therefore, to have eyes and a mouth, but no face.

But once the face is tied to communication, focus is shifted away from therealm of simple physical or biological fact and into that of perception and inter-action. The key question becomes, not what physically comprises a face, but howit is used. This, in turn, raises the possibility that faces might be used or defineddifferently even within the human species, depending on culturally-specificstructures of social interaction.

Deleuze and Guattari’s account of the face (1987: 167ff.) depends upon abelief that the face is a signifying structure imposed upon the body as part of theprocess of subjectification:

The head, even the human head, is not necessarily a face. The face is produced only when thehead ceases to be a part of the body, when it ceases to be coded by the body, when it ceases tohave a multidimensional, polyvocal corporeal code – when the body, head included, has beendecoded and has to be overcoded by something we shall call the Face. (Deleuze and Guattari,1987: 170)

This account suggests that the face is not simply a product of biology, that theface only appears when the body has been divided and organized by cultural

What Is a Face? & 5



forces. Bernadette Wegenstein has even gone so far as to suggest that, incontemporary media representations, ‘any body part can now gain the statusonce exclusively enjoyed by a face as a ‘‘window to the soul’’. It is not necessarilybehind faces that we expect the person to be revealed. Faces are becoming obso-lete’ (2002: 233). But is the face really nothing more than a signifying structurewhich has been hived off from the rest of the body as an outward label of sub-jectivity? Has its status truly been conferred purely by cultural forces, whichmight then transfer them elsewhere, for example to ‘healthy and strong-looking body parts such as arms and legs’ (Wegenstein, 2002: 233)?

Deleuze and Guattari’s complaint concerning the face centres upon theeffect of ‘faciality’, which is created through a ‘white wall/black hole system’(1987: 167): the interaction of plane and hole produces an experience of self-contained interiority, of there being a unified someone ‘behind’ the face. Theface, with its expressive openings – particularly the eyes which serve as ‘windowsto the soul’ – is a perforated exterior surface which produces a sense of interiorsubjectivity, and the face’s expressive power is understood to make externallymanifest the inner life of the individual. The face certainly can and does serveas a means of intentional expression, but how much of the expressive power ofthe face is really occupied by such a role? While I might (aside, perhaps, fromthe occasional Freudian slip) have a fairly firm conscious control over the wordsI use, the reality is that the expressivity of my face is in many ways more of amystery to me than it is to other people who know me well; the face expressesitself visually, but I have little opportunity to observe these visual signals, andrelatively little of it is under my conscious control. I hear the words I speak, butdon’t see the expressions assumed by my face. So the trained interrogator willscrutinize a suspect’s face as she answers a question in order to see if the directionof eye gaze or some other movement betrays the spoken words as a lie: the wordscan be carefully controlled, but the facial expressivity is largely independent ofconscious direction. Human beings are notable for their degree of intentionalcontrol over facial musculature, but this control is imperfect and exercised rela-tively rarely. For example, it is impossible to truly fake a smile because, while wehave conscious control over our lips, we do not have conscious control over themuscles at the edges of our eyes which are engaged by a genuine expression ofhappiness. Our conscious minds might even – as when trying to stifle a sneezeor smother a smile – be reduced to employing those facial muscles we can controlin a direct physical struggle against those we can’t, and the final outcome of suchcontests is never certain.

Richard Rushton notes this key difference in signification produced by theface, as opposed to language or even visual representation: ‘The face . . . on




certain occasions, can represent or signify automatically, without the intention ofthe person upon whose face the markings arise’ (2002: 220). However, this doesnot make the point with sufficient strength; rather than occurring ‘on certainoccasions’, it would be more accurate to say that it occurs on the great majorityof occasions; rather than occurring ‘automatically . . . without the intention ofthe person’, it occurs in a way which makes questions of automatism or intentionirrelevant. If a stranger rushes towards me with his face contorted by rage, or achild smiles up at me, in neither case is the facial expression really an ‘expression’per se: it is not expressing an emotional state which takes place independently ofthe face, and the possessor of the face certainly hasn’t decided to assume thatappearance as a way of telling me how he feels, as would be the case if he’d said,‘I’m angry’, or ‘I’m happy’. If we understand the face to ‘express’ in the sense of‘to represent or make known’, then an angry facial expression is no more anexpression of anger than increased muscle tension and heart rate, or some otherbodily change that accompanies rage, and a smile is no more an expression ofhappiness than is a sense of elation or contentment; they are both rather partof the emotional state itself, not a reflection or revelation of it. Perhaps it wouldbe better to utilize an alternative sense of the verb ‘to express’: aside from theminority of cases in which we pull faces or express emotion in a calculated andinsincere manner, our faces express emotion in a sense more analogous to theway in which a lactating woman expresses milk. The body naturally exudes emo-tional signals through the face in a way which has nothing to do with an inter-iorized subject intentionally communicating its inner states. If I am startled bya sudden noise, my facial expression of fright is likely to precede my consciousexperience of fear.

When I’m angry, I don’t decide to arrange my face in a certain way in orderto intimidate an enemy any more than I decide to increase my heart rate in orderto deal more effectively with the physical exertions of combat. Furthermore,such physical changes don’t result from my feeling angry – rather they are partof the experience of feeling angry itself (see Despret, 2004: 125–8; Shusterman,2008: 146–50). There is no other realm of emotional experience which precedesor triggers these things; nor is there an interior subject pulling the strings of myface in order to communicate certain things to the outside world. As a result, theliving face has relatively little to do with Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘facialization’.Faces are implicated in the creation of restrictive identities in that faces are privi-leged identifiers used in official photographs (on driver’s licences or passports, forexample) and the search for features that can be generalized into populations (ofrace, etc.), but such enterprises begin by abstracting and fixing the face so that mostof its relationship to living human bodies and human perception is destroyed.

What Is a Face? & 7



Deleuze and Guattari’s treatment of the face could be re-evaluated in light oftheir explanation of the face as a ‘deterritorialization’ of the head. Not only doesthis not preclude a focus on the face’s physical structure, but in fact the entiretyof human physical evolution is an instance of deterritorialization. The deterritor-ialization of head into face parallels the deterritorialization of paw into hand,mammary gland into breast, and snout into lips.

But the face represents a far more intense, if slower, deterritorialization. We could say that itis an absolute deterritorialization: it is no longer relative because it removes the head from thestratum of the organism, human or animal, and connects it to other strata, such as signifianceand subjectification. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 172)

The problem with this claim is its very truth: the face does represent a deterritor-ialization of the head in its transformation of the head from a mobile platform forgathering sensory data into a site of signification; however, this deterritorializa-tion is not absolute in that the appearance of the face does not signal the disap-pearance of the head, which retains its previous usefulness. Furthermore, thisaccount carries the suggestion of some absolute division between biology andsignification, reflecting a broader tendency to erroneously understand commu-nication as incorporeal and immaterial.

On the contrary, the consequences of the deterritorialization of the headinclude – like those of hand, breast and mouth – an actual shift in the anatomicalarrangement of the body. Just as the significatory power of language broughtabout extensive changes in human anatomy, so the significatory power of expres-sion brought about a shift from head to face.

The human face is the result of a process of physical evolution and speciali-zation which has redeployed features of the head for the task of communication.This is particularly evident in the development of the human facial musculature,which diverged from the mask-like inexpressiveness of creatures such as fish andlizards to create an astonishingly mobile surface. Amphibians and reptiles haveno facial muscles in the human sense: they only possess muscles in the neck capa-ble of opening and closing the eyelids, nostrils and mouth – somewhat reminis-cent of the hidden cables which give limited mobility to the face of aventriloquist’s dummy. With the appearance of mammals, these muscles branchout across the front of the head and become attached to the skin (providing thecapacity to deform the face’s surface), presumably largely to facilitate chewingand suckling. Among the higher primates, the facial muscles become more com-plex and refocus themselves (for instance, shifting from tasks like swivelling earsto greater control of the mouth) (Chevalier-Skolnikoff, 1973: 58ff.), and inhumans the skull is more or less completely covered by sheets of muscle fibre.This is a process of reterritorialization, certainly, but one which places the origin




of the human face prior to the appearance of an interiorized subject. The humanface has evolved a physical structure reflective of its prioritization as a locus ofsignification, and its importance to communication could not plausibly beexplained otherwise; for example, if we try to imagine a hypothetical societyin which some other region of the body were privileged as a site of communica-tion in the same way, it becomes obvious that only one other anatomical region isadequately equipped for the task: the hands.1 And the hands and face are the twomost extensively reterritorialized regions of the human body.

The cortical motor strip – the region of the brain responsible for voluntarymuscle control – is located in the frontal lobes, a part of the brain more extensivelydeveloped in human beings than other animals. Those areas of the body under vol-untary muscle control are distributed across this strip, and two-thirds of thehuman cortical motor strip is occupied by the hands and face, illustrating bothhow prioritized these areas are and how much fine control we have over themcompared to the rest of our bodies (Rinn, 1991: 7–10). Clearly, faces result froma process of physical development and specialization in which a focus on the faceas instrument of communication drove the modification of human anatomy. Andthe key defining attribute of the face as anatomical structure is mobility. Thedevelopment of ever more extensive musculature and its anchoring in the skin hasgiven the face the power to dynamically reshape itself in a way impossible for anyother part of the human body. Largely unobserved by its owner, the human face isconstantly shifting its form in response to both conscious and unconscious direc-tions, instinctive responses to stimuli or changes in the other faces around it.

Humans’ greater voluntary control over their faces is generally ascribed tothe development of speech, a human activity which is obviously reliant uponfine, voluntary control of the facial muscles (Schmidt and Cohn, 2001: 8). How-ever, surely it is just as plausible to turn this account on its head and suggest thatthe capacity for speech resulted from the development of greater facial control.While fine control of the face is crucial to verbal communication, the anatomicalcomplexity of the human face facilitated powerful affective communication formillennia prior to the advent of language, and the refinement of facial expressiv-ity could drive the development of the volitional muscle control necessary toform words. Chimpanzees possess relatively fine muscle control of the lowerface and share the human separation of the upper lip from the nose (which allowsthe shaping of words), but are incapable of speech (Chevalier-Skolnikoff, 1973:58ff.), suggesting that speech is not necessarily the driver of such physicalchanges.2 Again, the human body, and the face in particular, provide a biologicalsubstrate for communication. The face, and communication more generally, arenot brought into being by language or culture.

What Is a Face? & 9



Losing Face

A focus on evolved physical structure would seem to return us to the face assimply a physical endowment; while not simply dependent upon physicalfeatures such as eyes and mouth, it might be considered the result of musculardevelopment and fine motor control. However, as I have already stated, it is notmy intention to replace one singular account of the face with another, but ratherto demonstrate that no singular account can fully explain the complexity of theface. While anatomical features are clearly of fundamental importance, they donot answer all the questions about the face already raised. Most importantly,how does a newborn infant recognize a line drawing as a face? While this isclearly the result of a mechanism that is not socially constructed or culturallydependent – the newborn could hardly be expected to have been influencedby such considerations to any substantial degree – it also problematizes the ideaof faces as simply resulting from the physical endowments already mentioned.This rudimentary representation of a face has no mobile muscle structure – itdoes not have any real physical attributes at all besides those of ink and paper.Clearly, in this instance, the key consideration is the infant’s recognition of cer-tain shapes as representative of a human face, rather than any physical qualities ofa particular face. The significance of physical features is one side of the coin, butthe other is the perception and identification of certain shapes as being faces.

This, too, is far more complex than it might first appear. While it might seema simple matter to recognize a certain collection of shapes as a face, just as werecognize other collections of shapes as words or houses or cars, there must besomething quite different underlying the perception of faces. This is not onlybecause the newborn infant cannot yet have learnt to identify faces in the samemanner as words, houses, or cars, but also because we are so adept at, not simplyrecognizing a face as a face, but recognizing a face as the face of a particular per-son. Innumerable experiments have documented the human facility for recogniz-ing faces, and when we weigh up the mobility of the human face, as well as itscapacity to appear differently at different moments (for example because of theangle of viewing, lighting, etc.), against the sheer number of faces we see, and thesmall differences which make one distinguishable from another (one nose being amillimetre or two longer or wider than another, perhaps, or one set of lips beingmarginally thinner or thicker), our ability to instantaneously identify a face wemight only have seen once before from a previously unobserved angle and at dis-tance is quite simply astonishing. When we contextualize this ability with an oft-noted 1932 experiment which demonstrated that nine out of ten subjects couldn’tpick their own hands out of a photographic line-up (Merleau-Ponty, 2002 [1962]:




172–3; van den Berg, 1952: 12), we realize that this is a feat of differentiation andidentification unlike any other of which we are capable, and one which is farmore reliant on the mind of the observer than the physical attributes of the facebeing observed (cf. Kanwisher and Moscovitch, 2000: 1).

The Face as Apparition

Human beings are not only adept at recognizing the faces of people they’vepreviously encountered in person, however. Surely the face most often recog-nized is that of Jesus Christ.

Deleuze and Guattari use the image of Christ’s face on the Shroud of Turin toillustrate their discussion of faciality (1987: 167ff.), but the faces of holy personageshave graced many other inanimate objects. The modern era of such appearancesperhaps began when Christ’s face was noticed scorched into an overcooked tortillaby Maria Rubio of New Mexico in 1977 (‘Shrine of the Miracle Tortilla’, 2006).There have been numerous similar sightings since, including a slice of grilled cheeseon toast purported to bring good luck as a result of bearing the likeness of the Vir-gin Mary, which Florida woman Diana Duyser tried to auction on eBay in 2004(BBC, 2004), but perhaps the most famous case of all is the so-called ‘Jesus Nebula’,an image of the Cone Nebula taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2002, whichmany believe shows Christ’s face sculpted from cosmic gas (Sky Image Lab, 2003).

Less individuated faces have also been attributed to inanimate objects or fea-tures of the natural world, for example the famous ‘Face on Mars’ seemingly cap-tured in a photograph taken by the Viking 1 space probe in 1976 (NASA, 2001).While many of the Christ or Mary faces are imperceptible to the non-devoutviewer, the Face on Mars is readily apparent, even if the viewer does not believeit to be intentionally fabricated and is aware of the fact that the image only shows– at best – half a set of facial features. This illustrates the fact that such apparitionsare not simply the result of wishful thinking or self-delusion, but rather that ourminds search for faces in everything we see.

This anthropomorphization of our environment might be understood toresult from human narcissism, a desire to colonize the environment with ourown image (cf. Angel, 1997). However, it is not really about seeing ourselves:it is about seeing others. Our perception is most highly attuned to that whichis most important and stimulating to us: other human bodies. As a result, we areconstantly seeking out human faces, even when there are none to be found.Clearly, our brains are predisposed towards identifying the features of thehuman face, even to the point where any collection of shapes roughly equivalentto its structure will be recognized as such.

What Is a Face? & 11



It seems clear that we have a strong predisposition towards the perception offaces. Given the strength of this predisposition and its early appearance, studiesof the human perceptual apparatus generally accept that there is some mechan-ism for identifying and finely differentiating faces hardwired into the brain.3

However, it might be the case that the brain is only hardwired to direct attentiontowards faces, and that this fixation leads to the acquisition of a more nuancedperception of faces soon after (see de Haan et al., 2002; Sinha et al., 2006:13–14). If this is the case, the process of learning to understand the face is broadlysimilar to verbal language acquisition: we are not born with the words of alanguage in our minds, but our brains are predisposed towards absorbing andacquiring the building blocks of that other fundamental communicative skill.

While the underlying mechanisms which make it possible might be subjectto debate, studies of human perception have firmly established that humanbeings (like other higher primates) are naturally inclined towards fixation uponand identification of faces. Facial information is processed by the human brain ina distinctive fashion, and this specialized processing is even engaged when pre-sented with a simplified computer representation, black and white photograph,or line drawing of a face (Wilson et al., 2002: 2910). Clearly, phenomena such asthe Face on Mars result from the fact that the human brain actively seeks outvisual information that matches the form of the human face.

But this is only half the story. It explains how the human brain possessesthe capacity to recognize faces (and even altogether different material features)as faces, but it does not explain its impressive capacity to recognize an individ-ual face as distinct from the countless similar faces which surround it. We mightbe able to imagine a human being developing the nuanced perception necessaryto recognize one particular tree in a forest (excusing for the sake of argumentthat trees exhibit a far greater degree of formal variation than faces), but itwould be impossible for an infant whose age is measured in days to apply thislevel of differentiation to individual trees in the way infants do in relation toindividual faces.

Our recognition of faces is miraculous not only because we are exposed to somany different faces with so little variation among them; we must also take intoaccount the facial mobility already discussed. In addition to the variation in theenvironmental circumstances of our viewing of faces, every living face is anunstable entity; unlike other parts of our bodies, or the entirety of the bodiesof most other animal species, we possess an intricate network of musculaturewhich is anchored to the skin of our faces for the purpose of deforming andsculpting its surface. As if the task of differentiating static faces was not difficultenough, each individual human face is constantly squirming beneath the gaze,




altering its appearance from moment to moment. How is it possible for humanbeings to recognize faces under such difficult circumstances?

The Face as Perceptual Phenomenon

Our tendency to see faces where none exists illustrates the fact that faces as wesee them are in a very real and significant way products of our own brains, extra-polated and generalized from certain kinds of visual information. Furthermore,when considering our remarkable ability to recognize even relatively unfamiliarfaces seen from novel angles, it becomes clear that the mechanism of facial rec-ognition relies at a very basic level on the generalization and fixing of the face.Or, to express it in a different way, we might ask what face we are recognizingwhen we look at another person, given that no face maintains the same appear-ance from one moment to the next. Given the quite small margins of differencebetween faces, how can we recognize a face we have only seen smiling when wecome upon it again while it is crying? The variation in the contours and linea-ments of that one face between expressions might be larger than that separatingit from another face holding the same expression.

When we look at another’s face and recognize that face, we cannot simply bematching the visual input before us with another piece of visual informationwhich has been filed away in our brains for reference. The likelihood of seeingthe same face from the same angle in the same lighting conditions while itassumes exactly the same facial expression is infinitessimally small. Bruce andYoung (1986) have put forward an influential model of facial recognition sum-marized in the following way by Dubois et al. (see also Kircher et al., 2001: B1):

According to this model, a first structural encoding stage extracts a three-dimensional invar-iant representation from different views of the same face. This stage, common to all kinds offaces (e.g., known and unknown), is followed by two independent routes. The first routeallows the recognition of the face and the person, whereas the second concerns visual oper-ations which are not mandatory for the recognition process per se, but are made in parallel toit: lip-reading behavior, analysis of facial expression and extraction of semantic informationfrom surface facial features (age, gender, race, etc.). (Dubois et al., 1999: 278)

The first stage of this hypothetical process, then, is one in which the brain con-ducts a generalized mapping of the face, constructing a ‘three-dimensional invar-iant representation’ by synthesizing and generalizing as many different views ofthe face as possible. Our memory of a face, therefore, is not any particular viewof the face; we never actually see before us the face which is available to ourmemory, as the memory-face has no particular expression or perspective. We arenot simply comparing shapes or images, as we would when recognizing a




familiar car or work of art. This would explain why damage to particular regionsof the brain can remove the ability to recognize faces even though the ability tosee faces remains unimpaired (prosopagnosia), or can even remove the abilityto recognize faces first seen after the brain injury, while leaving intact the abilityto recognize faces which became familiar prior to its occurrence (Dubois et al.,1999: 285–6).4 Stranger still, patients with Capgras delusion are able to recognizefaces, but this recognition does not trigger some deeper affective response asso-ciated with familiarity, leading them to believe that they are seeing a strangerwho has somehow taken on the appearance of someone they know (Kagan,2007: 520–1). Recognizing a face is therefore not simply about matching shapes;we recognize also according to the feelings a particular face communicates to us.

In an experiment conducted by Kircher et al., subjects were presented withimages of their own faces and those of highly familiar persons, which had beendistorted to varying degrees using morphing software. Functional MRI scanswere used to compare the brain processes involved in recognizing one’s own facewith that of the familiar other. While the difference between the two forms offacial recognition was slight, they conclude:

Comparing the response time of the two highly overlearned faces, self and partner, directlyin a post-hoc analysis, we found a small but significantly slower processing speed for theself faces when they were morphed more . . . but not when morphed less extensively. . . .We can speculate that the delayed recognition effect might be due to a mismatch of theinternal representation of the self face and reality. For example, many people think thata snapshot of themselves is not an accurate representation. The morphing procedure mightexaggerate the mismatch between self-representation and photograph even further, result-ing in a more complex verification process, which leads to a longer response time. (Kircheret al., 2001: B10-B11)

Everyone has had the experience of finding a photograph of oneself ugly or unfa-miliar, but perhaps there is more to this than Kircher et al.’s ‘mismatch of theinternal representation of the self face and reality’. While we are adept at general-izing an enduring model from the constantly shifting appearance of other faces,we usually only see our own faces from one angle and with one expression (in thebathroom mirror, perhaps), and so do not have the opportunity to stabilize itsstream of expressions into a universally applicable template which can make itappear familiar no matter where, when or from what angle a photograph mightbe taken. Furthermore, the camera itself is a technology employed to fix and sta-bilize the face, capturing it within a set of temporal and spatial coordinates aliento its lived physicality. It therefore introduces another level of processingbetween the living face and human perception, as a result sometimes breaking theconnection between the mental conceptualization and the material phenomenonto which it should refer.




Clinical experiments have shown that our perception of emotion, andgender and racial identities, in faces can be shifted by changing the continuumof faces with which we are familiar (Rhodes et al., 2003; Webster et al., 2004),establishing that what we see in the faces of others is unstable, shifting dynami-cally in response not only to the face’s own physical instability but also the per-ceiver’s context and experience. Our mapping of identities and categories ontofacial features is not an inevitable result of anatomical structure or brain architec-ture at all; rather our brain architecture is susceptible to socially formulated cate-gories through its very malleability and adaptability.

It would be a mistake, therefore, to think that highlighting the mechanics offacial perception would limit or demystify the face, essentializing it as immuta-ble, singular and self-evident. Doing so certainly doesn’t suggest that categorieslike gender or race are objectively manifested in facial features, or even that ourbrains are hardwired to perceive them there. Even when confined to the brain(which is only one of the loci in which the phenomenon of the face is broughtinto being), attempts to explain facial perception such as that of Bruce andYoung, above, must posit a fragmented, parallel cluster of different kinds of per-ception which are only later assembled into the unified conceptualization madeavailable to our conscious minds. Whether or not this or any other hypothesisconcerning the cognitive underpinnings of facial perception turns out to be lit-erally true is not my immediate concern here (and I am not qualified to makesuch evaluations in any event). Rather, they are one more attempt to explainwhat faces are, different in assumptions and approach to others discussed here,but nevertheless raising similar themes. Even within disciplines which seek anobjective, naturalizing, scientific account of the face, ultimately the only qualitiesthat can be identified as fixed and ‘natural’ to the face are those of multiplicity,dynamism and distribution across varying anatomical, mental and social loci.

In seeking to move beyond static accounts of subjectivization as ‘systemicstructurings’ (2002: 2), Brian Massumi argues that:

the problem with the dominant models in cultural and literary theory is not that they are tooabstract to grasp the concreteness of the real. The problem is that they are not abstractenough to grasp the real incorporeality of the concrete. (2002: 5)

In other words, it is not that a focus on ideological positioning alone is insuffi-cient because it lacks the fixity and stability of the material body and embodiedexperience – in fact, the opposite is true. It is such structures that impose fixity onthe dynamism and indeterminacy of the material body and embodied experience.The face Deleuze and Guattari seek to reject is not a theoretical abstractiongeneralized from the specificity of ‘real’ instances of interaction between bodies




in everyday life; faces as we experience them in everyday life are anything butspecific and stable. Our faces are in constant flux, being endlessly pulled this wayand that by the muscular structures we have evolved precisely for this purpose, andfaces as we see and remember them exist as generalized abstractions and extrapo-lations from this flux. It is only with reference to socially constituted structures ofsignificance that this non-specificity and abstraction is stabilized and fixed withinenduring categories such as gender or race. At the moment of apperception, thespecificity of individual faces cannot be fixed within such larger categories; in fact,the diversity of our experience of just one person’s face cannot be fixed within thesingle category of an enduring individual identity without the application of fur-ther cognitive processing. In both cases, particularity and specificity are preciselywhat is not present at the apperceptive moment: they are extrapolated from it andretrospectively applied after the moment has ended.

Autistic Faces

The very complexity of the process which creates our internalized conceptuali-zations of faces results from the fundamental irreconcilability of the living facewith fixed, stable identity and representation. The faces we see must be processedextensively using specialized cognitive faculties in order to be converted intogeneralizations of this kind. Another body is never simply one more object inour environment, and this is not simply due to the fact that we credit it withan interior life. Its greater significance is apparent long before sophisticatedextrapolations have been developed from what we see.

Perhaps the most striking evidence of this is the way in which the autisticinteract with the bodies of other people. While there is a great deal of variationin the severity and attributes of autism, accounts often highlight an associationbetween autism and the absence of ‘theory of mind’ (Baron-Cohen, 1995; Pre-mack and Woodruff, 1978: 515), that faculty widely believed to develop in youngchildren as a way of understanding the inner states of others through the formu-lation of hypotheses regarding their motivations and world-view.

If autistic behaviour results from the lack of an effective theory of mind,which prevents an autistic person from understanding another person’s interiorlife, this could be expected to result in other human beings losing the specialvisual fascination they hold for the non-autistic, making them subside into thevisual field due to a lack of any special significance. Indeed, it might seem thatthis is exactly what happens because the severely autistic tend not to make eyecontact with other people or focus upon their faces. This might be construedas an indifference to other bodies.




However, at least some accounts given by those with autism suggest that,rather than resulting from an indifference to other bodies, this behaviour is anactive avoidance, which results from the overwhelming and disorienting blastof stimulation they produce. For example, when Jonathan Cole asked autisticauthor Donna Williams why looking at faces was difficult for her, she repliedthat faces produce an uncontrollable stream of stimuli which threatens her verysense of individual selfhood:

Such interaction would generally be only inconsistently comprehensible and would sooncause information overload after a few minutes and be poured down onto to [sic] me witha total absence of my own social interest and want. (Cole, 1997: 94)

Even among those without autism, a number of studies have shown that mentalprocessing of information is hampered when looking at faces because of the highcognitive load they place on the brain – this is why we often look away frominterlocutors while formulating the answer to a question (Doherty-Sneddonet al., 2001). When, as in the case of autism, the brain is less effective at workingharmoniously to create highly conceptualized responses to other bodies, the lackof such conceptualization does not leave the sight of other bodies without specialimpact; rather, what remains is the torrent of raw lower-order stimuli our brainsgather from the surfaces of other bodies. The sheer volume and intensity of thisinformation (which is processed and filtered by the pre-conscious mental facultiesof the non-autistic) makes it almost impossible for the conscious minds of thosewith autism to handle. For the non-autistic, the face as it is consciously understoodis actually a highly conceptualized entity derived from the pre-conscious process-ing of a vast amount of information. The act of looking at a face does not provideunmediated access to its physical materiality; in fact, to access our raw appercep-tive experience of another face would be to be overwhelmed by a torrent of visualstimuli beyond the capacity of our conscious minds to organize and interpret.

Psychologizing accounts of interpersonal interaction such as theory of mindare notable for their blindness to the importance of the face. While theory ofmind is supposedly an innate sense, Baron-Cohen describes it entirely in termsof disinterested observation, conscious reasoning and the formulation of hypoth-eses, as might be expected from the term ‘theory’ itself. According to Baron-Cohen, the ability to formulate such hypotheses is the evolved capacity thatmakes complex social interaction possible; he supports this claim by suggestingthat, without it, such interaction could only be made possible by the deploymentof an (impossible) scientific instrument able to look inside the minds of others:

Evolution was not going to wait around for human scientists to invent a brainoscopebefore primates (early hominids included) could understand and participate in complex




social interaction. If it had done so, the hominid line would have died out long ago.(Baron-Cohen, 1995: 24)

This entirely ignores the rich affective relationships between human beings,which render both the brainoscope and theory of mind itself unnecessary. Justby glancing at another person’s face, we understand and feel a tremendousamount about them without any need to theorize. After all, while evolution didnot ‘wait around’ for the invention of the brainoscope to enable complex socialinteraction, it didn’t wait around for the ability to theorize, either.5

Human beings engaged in complex social interaction before the arrival oflanguage and self-reflexive consciousness, and continued to do so after. Non-human animals respond to one another’s motivations and desires, and share andinspire affective states with no need for conjecture. As discussed by VincianeDespret in relation to celebrated cases such as that of the horse Clever Hans,humans and non-human animals can even form powerful non-conscious com-municative connections across species through an embodied ‘miracle of attune-ment’ (Despret, 2004: 125). To note these things is not to deny that human beingscan and do hypothesize about and reflect upon their own and others’ motiva-tions, or that language is a powerful tool for communication; but it does contesta tendency to privilege the rational, conscious and linguistic to such a degree thatall other forms of communication and interaction are rendered invisible. Such aselective understanding renders a full account of the face impossible.

The Face as Mystery

The conceptualized face available to our conscious minds can therefore be seenas generated by the interplay of multiple phenomena located in physical anat-omy, the brains of both the possessor and viewer of the face, the relationshipbetween that face and other faces, and the wider socio-cultural context. Ourcategorization and generalization of faces can to some degree be determinedby social forces, but the influence of social forces is itself, presumably, enabledby a more basic, pre-conscious categorization and generalization of facesbrought about by the architecture of our brains. To fix and recognize a single,but constantly changing, face as the identifier of a particular person itself requirescomplex generalization and extrapolation. At a cultural level, a similar processoccurs on a larger scale, generalizing and extrapolating to fix whole populationsof faces into stable categories.

Patrizia Magli has discussed the paradox of the human face as somethingillusive and unstable, mobile and constantly in flux, and yet at the same timeso easily recognizable as the surest sign of a stable, individualized identity:




[T]o isolate a face is to isolate a permanent form, one whose ‘unchanging traits’ are to be per-ceived through a process that attempts to freeze the face’s state of constant flux into a state ofimmutability.

Such a symbolizing process introduces us to a different time: no longer is it the non-time ofan actual face, lost in the uninterrupted fluctuation of lights and shadows. Rather, it is thetime of a ‘measure’ that stills things, develops a formal image and locks it into an absolutefixity, wherein it then interprets proportions, defines outlines, and attempts to establishessential traits. (Magli, 1989: 90)

In a manner reminiscent of Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of the face, Maglisees this fixing and stabilizing as part of a project of binding the human body tosystems of meaning, as part of a tendency to freeze the face in a system ofstrictly codified equivalences, but she does not understand it to produce theface itself. It is not difficult to produce examples of the process whereby thetremendous diversity of faces is reduced to a stable and limited set of estab-lished categories of significance associated with restrictive identities – the Jew-ish nose, for example, or those facial characteristics deemed masculine orfeminine, aristocratic or plebeian.

The attribution of a stable identity to the face once again becomes emble-matic of a corralling of the body’s instability and exuberance into unified andrestrictive identities. It might be argued that it is partly the face’s very instability,its relatively greater capacity for change, that makes it the privileged object ofsuch a project. Without stability being imposed upon the face, it would ceaseto be the single, holistic entity we currently perceive and attribute to particularindividuals. However, a consideration of the mechanics of facial perceptionmakes it clear that this process of stabilization begins before subjectivization;without its incorporation into the very architecture of our brains, we would allbe like the autistic person who is forced to shield his or her eyes from the unfil-tered glare of the face.

Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 171) see the face as a mark of restrictive identitywhich must be thrown off. But if – as concluded above – the face is a site whosesignificatory power has been enshrined in our genetic make-up, how can the facebe rejected? The face will always announce itself to us because it is a unique ana-tomical phenomenon imbued with a unique significance. An escape from restric-tive subjectivity would not be accompanied by the loss of a face, just as a manfreed from the influence of gender categories would still find a penis among hisanatomical endowments. The difference is that – unlike the penis – significationis part of the face’s biologically enshrined nature, which will remain with itregardless of social changes. The significatory power of the face, while it canbe harnessed to subjectivization, does not result from it.




However, it is equally true that, irrespective of its provenance or materiality,the face – as Deleuze and Guattari argue – is fundamentally implicated in thestructuring of identity and subjectivity. The uniqueness of the face in physicalterms depends primarily on its mobility, a mobility which gives it an unmatchedcapacity for expressiveness and signification, but the harnessing of the face tofixed identities requires a stabilization and generalization of those mobile fea-tures, a freezing of them into singular attributes which endure through time. Theidentification of these stable features is necessary for the generalization of facia-lized identity, for the attribution of membership in particular fixed groupings(e.g. the male face, the African face, the insane face), but at a more basic level sucha fixing of the face is necessary for any attribution of individuality and unique-ness to any face.

For each of us, faces are integrated into a system of meaning that is largely aproduct of the ways in which our brains organize sensory experience. The visualinformation generated by faces is subject to a variety of complex processes inorder to create an internal record and conceptualization. When we see a face,we attempt to stabilize this profoundly unstable phenomenon and make it theenduring marker of a particular, stable identity. This generalization of attributesin individual faces articulates with a cultural process whereby populations offaces are generalized, for instance into racial groupings. Our brains expend agreat deal of effort converting the dynamism of faces into stable, abstract refer-ence points so that their constant flow of information can be managed andtracked, but the rich potentiality of the faces around us in the physical worldis never encapsulated or erased by this process. Faces as physical phenomenaremain something of another order entirely; complex mental processing wouldnot be necessary if there were not a tremendous qualitative gap between theexperiential reality and its mental conceptualization.

When Emmanuel Levinas speaks of ‘the face’ (1988: 194ff.), he takes the faceas representative of our inability to fully capture and control the Other. ForLevinas, the face represents the paradox of imagining that the Other experiencesan inner life like one’s own while simultaneously only being able to interact withthe Other as a sealed exteriority, which implacably hides the truth of this positedinterior life from us. The full truth of the Other is ultimately lost behind the faceor between the features and expressions it presents to us. For Levinas, the face isnot simply the result of the body’s subjectification and subjugation to largerstructures of meaning and identity, as it is for Deleuze and Guattari. Rather itillustrates the inability of structures of meaning to contain the body of the Other.

The way in which the other presents himself, exceeding the idea of the other in me, we herename face. This mode does not consist in figuring as a theme under my gaze, in spreading




itself forth as a set of qualities forming an image. The face of the Other at each momentdestroys and overflows the plastic image it leaves me, the idea existing to my own measureand to the measure of its ideatum – the adequate idea. (Levinas, 1988: 50–1)

Deleuze and Guattari’s account of the face focuses on its role in subjectification.Levinas, on the other hand, sees it as something prior to our integration intosocial structures and intersubjective relationships. In the words of Jon Erickson,‘[f]or Levinas [sic] it is the presignifying ‘‘signifyingness’’ of the human face thatcalls to us, not its already socially overcoded significations’ (1999: 18). Levinas’saccount suggests that the face not only predates subjectification, but also that itcan never be fully reconciled with this process. In light of this, the limitations ofDeleuze and Guattari’s account of facialization can be seen to stem from its fail-ure to consider two quite different but overlapping phenomena, both of whichwe understand as the face. Their account of facialization considers the face of theOther as we see it, stabilizing it and fixing it within a system of significance, butdoes not take into account that this is something quite different from the face as amaterial component of the body, which is never fully fixed, grasped or possessedby the viewer of that face. The ‘three-dimensional invariant representation’which is extracted from our viewing of a face and fixed in ‘multidimensional facespace’ (Rhodes et al., 2003: 558), then used as a representation of a particularidentity (both a personal identity and a more generalized identity such as raceor gender) is a phenomenon produced within the mind of the viewer, and is quitedifferent in nature from both the anatomical phenomenon of the face and ourperceptual experience of it. (In fact, it would not be possible for the former phe-nomenon to exist in physical space at all.)

Conclusion

The only final answer to the question ‘What is a face?’, then, is that ‘the face’ is infact a variety of different phenomena which are stabilized and assembled into aunified, highly conceptualized entity by human perception. Differing attemptsto explain the face might look for its genesis in subjectivization, anatomy, variousbrain processes or the creation of categories of identity, and these attempts aremisguided only when they work on the assumption that their chosen line ofinquiry alone will suffice.

A face is a unique anatomical feature, but it cannot be isolated in any onebody; after all, a face can only be said to meaningfully exist when at least oneother body synthesizes a number of different physical features and plots a seriesof morphological changes over time in order to produce a unified and significantconceptualization. The face is brought into being by communication, and




communication can only exist in the relationships between bodies, rather than onany one body in isolation.

Acknowledging this should not result in a dematerialized understanding ofthe face, however; the rich significance of the face is produced by a sophisticatedand highly specialized set of anatomical and neurological capacities whichhuman beings have evolved over time and which are part of our biologicalmake-up. At the same time, the evolution of these capacities has been drivenby communication between human beings – without such communication theywould confer no evolutionary advantage. The ability to see faces – to stabilizethem as meaningful, unique and unified entities capable of creating relationshipsbetween bodies – is itself reliant on extensive cognitive specialization so complexas to still largely defy scientific understanding or emulation. To acknowledgesuch considerations does not produce an understanding of the face as somethingsimple, predictable, fixed or self-evident. Rather, this inescapable foundation inbiology and neurology provides the mechanisms which allow the face to be asdynamic, unstable, and multiplex as it is.

Notes

1. Of course, hands are already privileged sites of communication through their complexrole in gesture (see Gallagher, 2005: 107ff.; McNeill, 1996, 2005). It is not accidental that theonly true non-verbal language is sign language; no other part of the body aside from the vocalapparatus and hands possesses the level of flexibility and fine motor control necessary to pro-duce grammar. It is true that sign language engages more than one part of the body, but in thisregard it is no different from spoken language (which also utilizes gesture, facial expression,etc.). However, in both cases other parts of the body can only provide support to the centralrole played by hands or mouth.

2. The common assumption that spoken language has driven such anatomical changes is perhapsindicative of the more general privileging of language and linguistic structures at the expense of affec-tive and embodied communication, apparent in disciplines as diverse as critical theory and cognitivescience. Of course the development of language can be accepted to have influenced the evolution ofthe face; however, it would be a mistake to see language as the driver of the face’s evolution. MichaelCorballis (2002) makes a persuasive case for spoken language having appeared relatively late in ourevolution, following a period in which gesture and facial expression were dominant. The very absenceof the machinery of speech in other primates, despite their capacity for seemingly quite sophisticatedcommunication, provides support for this argument.

3. The claims of Deleuze and Guattari notwithstanding, the examples of specialized perception ofthe face used throughout this article do suggest that human perception differentiates faces from therest of our bodies at a fundamental level. Furthermore, while infants only days old exhibit a preferencefor realistic depictions of faces as opposed to ones whose features have been scrambled, it is only afterthe ‘mirror stage’ at 18 months that they display the same discrimination regarding entire bodies(Slaughter et al., 2002).

4. Such perceptual problems can also be present from birth. Probably the most famous hereditaryprosopagnosic is the neurologist Oliver Sacks.




5. Shaun Gallagher observes that explanations such as theory of mind ‘conceive of communicativeinteraction between two people as a process that takes place between two Cartesian minds. It assumesthat one’s understanding involves a retreat into a realm of theoria or simulacra, into a set of internalmental operations that come to be expressed (externalized) in speech, gesture, or action’ (Gallagher,2005: 211-12). For a clinical challenge to the idea of theory of mind, see Gopnik and Meltzoff(1995), particularly where they note that young children are no more able to explain their own beha-viour in terms of theory of mind than that of others (while still, presumably, being perfectly awarethat they themselves have a mental life) (Gopnik and Meltzoff, 1995: 177ff.). See also Erin Manning’sdiscussion of autistic interaction in Body & Society 15(3) which, while different from mine in impor-tant ways, also suggests that it is irreconcileable with a ‘contained’, ‘unified verbal self’ (Manning,2009: 40).

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Daniel Black lectures in the School of English, Communications and Performance Studies at MonashUniversity, Melbourne, Australia. His research focuses on the relationship between embodiment andtechnology. [email: [email protected]]




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What Is a Face

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