Expression and Dévisage
The face’s signification from art to reality

Gabriele Buzzi

1.Enigma

My starting point is an enigma. Ugo Volli (2000), an Italian philosopher, in his book Figures of desire, writes:

Because even in the closer hypothesis of sociological codification of the face form, even in front of the strongest fashion, always remains the impossibility of closing, the ambiguity and elusiveness of every face: the mystery of an individual life, of his motivation, of his meaning. Here lies the truth of the face: in his opening, in his dis-identity, in his ambiguity. In my impossibility to get it, to really understand it, to conceptualized it. In his enigma. (My italics and my translation)

In all the authors I shall examine in this paper we shall find, in one form or another, the idea of enigma, the idea that the face’s signification hides (even if from time to time it does surface) something enigmatic, mysterious, paradoxical in its literal meaning: something that passes by our side, that avoids what seems to us common and usual. However there is more to it than that and, perhaps, something more interesting. In the authors we will analyze, the idea of ambiguity of face signification does not only persist, but, even though all of them arrived at those remarks through a course that has some constancy (at least terminological), when they try to outline a solution for this enigma, they give us a host of conflicting versions. It is something that makes me think of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue in which the witnesses of the first murder all come from different countries and are all only “auditory” witnesses of the fact. No one is able to identify exactly the language spoken by the assassin, so everyone ascribes the language, in some way familiar yet incomprehensible, to a different, foreign country. The Italian gentleman says the culprit spokes French, the German affirms that he was without a doubt Spanish and so on…
Even the face enigma appears to me projective: he who studied its evasive semiotic nature used to see – through a mechanism that I will try to explain at the end of my paper –, distorted in the face’s mystery, only his own, partial truth.

2. Expression

But let’s take a step backwards. We have spoken about terminological constancy: we will work on two terms that cross philosophical and semiotic thought about face. The first is expression. The face expresses itself: that is its first modality of signification. Antonio Tabucchi (1990), a famous Italian writer, in one of his novel writes:

It was a simple and practical question, but I hesitated over the answer, for I too felt the weight of memory and at the same time I sensed its inadequacy. What does one remember of a face in the end? No, I didn’t have a photograph, I only had my memory: and my memory was mine alone, it wasn’t describable, it was the expression I remembered of Xavier’s face.

What is, exactly, the unspeakable expression of face?
We start with Emmanuel Lévinas: expression, for him, is exactly the face signification, but that way in which the face signifies is exclusively and totally auto-referential. So expression is the signification of face, but a signification that does not re-enter the well-know Peirce’s formula that affirms “sign, or representamen, is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity” (CP 2.228). The face only refers to itself, expresses itself Kath’auto, from and for itself, and breaks the classic Peirce’s system of signification. Lévinas (1961) writes in Totality and Infinity:

The face of the Other at each moment destroys and overflows the plastic image it leaves me, the idea existing to my own measure and to the measure of its ideautum – the adequate idea. It does not manifest itself by these qualities, but Kath’auto. It expresses itself. The face brings a notion of truth which, in contradistinction to contemporary ontology is not the disclosure of an impersonal Neuter, but expression: the existent breaks trough all the enveloping and generalities of Being to spread out in its “form” the totality of its “content”, finally abolishing the distinction between form and content. (…) But the first content of expression is the expression itself.
(Last italic mine)

…the first content of expression is the expression itself.
We must not stop here: what does it mean for the face to be this expressive not-sign? What does it mean in semiotic and philosophical terms? The face becomes, for Lévinas, a sort of zero degree of signification: in the coincidence between form and content, between signified and signifier, face opens the symbolic field where semiosis is born. So the face is a non-sign, but, for the peculiarity of its signification, is also the “first” signifier, the possibility of every signification. Again Lévinas (1961):

It (the expression) presents the signifier. The signifier, he who gives a sign, is not signified. It is necessary to have already been in the society of signifiers for the sign to be able to appear as a sign. Hence the signifier must present himself before every sign, by himself – present a face.

The term expression has brought us far enough. If now we turn our attention to another philosopher, Gilles Deleuze, we can find more interesting suggestions. The French philosopher talks about face in the first of his cinema books, The movement-image. Let’s go straight to the question: for Deleuze, when we talk about cinema, face is close-up and close-up is always face. For this reason, for Deleuze, every object framed in a close up is immediately “envisaged”, “faceified” [visagéifée].
In his categorization of the cinematographic images, Deleuze (1983) names the couple face\close up affection-image: “(…) there is no close-up of the face, the face is in itself close-up, the close-up is by itself face and both are affect, affection-image”.
Therefore, face becomes the vehicle of affectivity, of pathos. But in which way the face makes itself responsible for the affectivity of the cinematographic narration? Deleuze (1983) again: “Now, this is exactly what the affection-image is: it is quality or power, it is potentiality considered for itself as expressed. The corresponding sign is therefore expression, not actualization”. (My italic)
The face sign is expression again. But why is the face expression potency as opposed to act? We know that actual and virtual (potential) are Deleuzian concepts, but here we find a little more: Deleuze, in fact, follows Peirce and his concepts of firstness, secondness and thirdness. Opposition is born because firstness is, for Deleuze, the field of pure possibility, of quality and affect, while the secondness:

(…) is the category of the Real, of the actual, of the existing, of the individuated. And the first figures of secondness is that in which power-qualities becomes “forces”, that is to say are actualized in a particular state of thing, determinate space-times, geographical and historical milieux, collective agents or individual people. (Deleuze 1983)

Even for Deleuze face is expression, expression of affectivity or the emotional quality of a situation, a virtual disposition to act, potency waiting to become act. Firstness in Peirce’s terms.
Here, beyond the terminological constancy, we found the first firm point of our discussion: firstness, according to Peirce but also Umberto Eco’s theories, is again what unleashes the semiosis, the “prime mover” of signification.
Now we will end our discussion about expression with Roland Barthes. We will discuss a famous essay by the French semiologist about the obtuse meaning, the third sense of image. For Barthes, photographic image has three meaning levels: the communicative or informative one, which is studied by the so called “first” semiotics, the message sciences (the studies of Shannon and Weaver for example), the symbolic one, studied by symbolic system sciences, like economy or psychoanalysis, and the obtuse meaning of image which has not its own scientific statute status and that is the most problematic of the three levels. Barthes (1994) writes about a photogram of Eisenstein’s’ Ivan the terrible:

I read, I receive (and probably even first and foremost) a third meaning – evident, erratic, obstinate. I do not know what its signified is, at least I am unable to give it a name, but I can see clearly the traits, the signifying accidents of which this –consequently incomplete – sign is composed: a certain compactness of the courtiers’ make up, thick and insistent for the one, smooth and distinguished for the other; the former’s “stupid” nose, the latter’s finely traced eyebrows, his lank blondeness, his faded, pale complexion, the affected flatness of his hairstyle suggestive of a wig, the touching-up with chalky foundation talc, with face powder. I am not sure if the reading of this third meaning is justified – if it can be generalized – but already it seems to me that its signifier (…) possesses a theoretical individuality. By contrast with the two first levels, communication and signification, this third level – even if the reading of it is still hazardous – is that of signifiance [left in French by the translator], a word that has the advantage of referring to the field of the signifier (and not of signification) (…).

We have a face description and the preeminence of signifier. The consonance with Lévinas is quite perceptible even if, in this case, remains a terminological difference. Barthes does not use the term expression and he talks about signifiance (in Italian significanza, in English, I guess, significance) because significance refers only to the signifier and not to signification.
We saw that, for Lévinas, face signification was sui generis: through his terminology, Barthes radicalizes this hypothesis and he refuses to talk of signification, but only of signifiers. I prefer to continue talking about signification, stressing its anomaly and complexity: it is simpler for me, in this way, to subsume the several instances of the dialogue. So, in refusing the terminological break introduced by Barthes, we want to be careful not to lose the meaning of its reflection.
But let’s make a sketch of the situation: face signification is given by expression: or rather the preeminence of a “pure” signifier, a signifier that has itself as signified: or rather a potency, a quality [firstness] starting the semiosis chain.

3. Dévisager

The second term we would like to comment upon is dévisager. This French verb, and his substantivization, dévisage is used only by Lévinas and it is not present in Deleuze. But the concept that lies beyond the use, as we will see, is also present in Deleuze.
When Deleuze talks about Dreyer’s and Bergman’s cinema, two cinematographers who have done a lot of work on the expressive potentiality of the human face, he talks about the moment in which the face, through a strong use of close up, loses every social reference, every reference to the subject identity and finds itself in the nudity of an exposed signifier, for which fear is the only reference. The close-up, an insistent and closed gaze on the face, socially defaces, dévisage it. Deleuze (1983), especially thinking of Bergman’s famous sequence ending with the film that stops on a frame and starts burning, writes:

The close-up does not divide one individual, anymore than it reunites two: it suspends individuation. Then the single and ravaged face unites a part of one to a part of the other. At this point it no longer reflects nor feels anything, but merely experiences a mute fear. It absorbs two beings, and absorbs them in the void. And in the void it is itself the photogram which burns, with fear as its only affect. The facial close-up is both the face and its effacement [effacement]. Bergman has pushed the nihilism of the face the furthest, that is its relationship in fear to the void or the absence, the fear of the face confronted with its nothingness. (My italic)

Let’s see now in that way Lévinas talks about dévisager:

The problem is if a face is only a plastic shape. Not for sure. In French we say dévisager that means looking at someone but also taking off the face. Looking at the face, the way I mean it, is not to look at the color of the eyes (...). In any case the idea that a face was visual does not work, it is not representative. It is not a face, it is dévisage.
(Lévinas in Ghidini 1987, my translation)

Here we are arriving at a new affinity: the “face off” operation, in which even the gaze becomes protagonist. It is the moment in which the face seems to falter on its own signification, in which it is hard to tell, for those who are watching it, if the face brings us a surplus or a lack of meaning. The face, closely seen, melts behind our eyes and dévisage appears to us in all his strength.
What is true both for Lévinas and Deleuze is that dévisage is a loss of social dimension and that we have to pass over the figurative aspect of face. Deleuze (1983) writes:

Ordinarily, three roles of the face are recognizable: it is individuating (it distinguishes or characterizes each person); it is socializing (it manifests a social role); it is relational or communicating (it ensures not only communication between two people, but also, in a single person, the internal agreement between his character and his role). Now, the face, which effectively presents these aspects in cinema as elsewhere, loses all three in the case of close-up.
(My italic)

The idea that face – under the influence of our gaze that, directly or connected by technique, makes a close up – loses its consistency instead of improving it, that it loses its figurative values, sounds unusual to us. It is something different from what we are used to thinking. It is something that we find in the works of the great British painter Francis Bacon: in his painting face melts under our eyes and the movement of lines and colors appears exactly like the pictorial exemplification of dévisage. As Deleuze (1981) says: “Bacon thus pursues a very peculiar project as portrait painter: to dismantle the face, to rediscover the head or make it merge from beneath the face”.

Picture 1: Francis Bacon, Three studies for a portrait of Isabel Rawsthorne, 1965.

The Dévisage theme shows us all its importance, and probably its radical nature, if we apply it to that huge culture phenomenon that is the star system. The cult of cinematographic face, fetish par exellence of the twenty century, shows, in the light of the notion of dévisage, all his charming ambiguity.

4. Digital faces

But there is more. The idea that face essence does not lie in its social or pictorial dimension could explain to us why it is so difficult to re-create a digital version of the human face. The oddity and weirdness of our avatars and videogames heroes’ expression could be considered as a meaningful proof that face signification is something difficult to reproduce through digital technologies and that could be true because it actually does not concern reproduction. So can we consider human face (signification) as the most analogical part of our body? As the last analogical “bulwark” against the “imperialism” of the digital era?
American philosopher and media theorist, Mark Hansen, in his beautiful book New philosophy for new media (2003) stresses the importance of human face in the digital, real time, interaction, considering the problem from an opposite point of view.
In his opinion, in fact, the problem of digital face has to be framed in the largest problem of the digital interface or, in his words, GUI (Graphic User Interface). In the chapter of the book dedicated to DFI (Digital Face Image) Hansen examines a series of works of art and installations proposing, as user interface, a digital image of a human face. One of the best example, for Hansen, is Kirsten Geisler’s Dream of beauty 2.0 (1999).

Picture 2: Kirsten Geisler, Dream of beauty 2.0 (1999).

According to Hansen, Dream of beauty 2.0 is, in Deleuzian terms, an affection-image to the square, considering all the digital images as a specific kind of affection-image and being the face image, as we have seen, the most peculiar kind of affection-image.
But why does Hansen consider all digital images as affection-images? Hansen’s book is an interesting attempt to bring our attention to the corporeal dimension of the digital image: the human face directly recalls users’ corporeity and affectivity, thus becomes a kind of interface with a great development potential.
Obviously works of art analyzed by Hansen try to stress exactly that potential, producing effects of estrangement of our habitual vis-à-vis communication, and these kinds of effects, according to Hansen, are meaningful because they furnish us with a new, affective, graphic user interface. So the digital face image is able to reverse that circular and “inhumane” aspect that some media theorists underline in the digital convergence phenomenon. Number-image (as in Geisler’s work of art) becomes face and questions us, calls us in a new, affective way:

The experience it has catalyzed for you is an affective interfacing with what I shall call the “digital facial image” (DFI). In this experience, the infelicitous encounter with the digitally generated close-up image of face – and specifically the affective correlate it generates in you, the viewer-participant – comes to function as the medium for the interface between the domain of digital information and the embodied human that you are. Geisler’s work is exemplary of aesthetic experimentations with the DFI precisely because of its success at furnishing some sense of the radical material “indifference” of digital information to human sensory ratios. (…) Geisler’s work answers Kittler’s claims, as it were, by generating an intense affective experience that forms a kind of human counterpart to the potential autonomy of the digital, a new domain of human embodiment that emerges out of our response to digitalization.
(Hansen 2004)

Geisler’s Dream of beauty 2.0, through a beautiful and strange female face, embodies “the material “indifference” of digital information”, generating “an intense affective experience”. This digital face, in fact, does not respond at all to the viewer’s stare and this failed interaction points out the problem of digital convergence. Points out the problem of (real time) interaction with digital images.
According to Hansen’s book, we can observe something similar in Robert Lazzarini’s Skulls (2000):

(…) a sculptural installation composed of four skulls hung about eye-level and protruding about a foot from the walls of a small, well-lit, clean and bright room. To create this deceptively low-tech installation, Lazzarini laser-scanned an actual human skull to re-create a three-dimensional CAD (computer-aided design) file, which he then subjected to various distortions. The resulted distorted files became the models for four sculptures cast in solid bone. (…) Nonetheless, despite their undeniable resemblance to traditional icons of anamorphosis, Lazzarini’s work cannot be considered anamorphic in any conventional sense of the term, since they do not resolve into a normal image when viewed form an oblique angle, but confront the viewer with the projection of a warped space that refuses to map onto her habitual spatial schematizing, no matter how much effort she puts into it, no matter how many angles she try.
(Hansen 2004)

Picture 3: Robert Lazzarini, Skulls, 2000.

Skulls represents another case – a really radical one! – of (digital) dévisage: a new way to interact with images and, probably, a new form of communication, unthinkable during the analogical stage of representation.
Thus even the digital face is problematic and it is difficult to understand if it represents the last domain of the analogical era or the avant-garde of digital user interface, probably for the same reason: the brittle strength of his signification, the partial abstractness of every facial representation.
But it does allow us to study some new mechanisms of interaction between users and digital images and representations, to trace the pathway through which “we are becoming post-human”. Because here face’s enigma embodies fears, hopes, difficulties and successes generated by our daily interaction with the digital flow of information that surrounds us.
Let’s summarize what I have said so far: face signification is given by expression: or rather the pre-eminence of a “pure” signifier, of a signifier that has itself as signified: or rather a potency, a quality [firstness] starting the semiosis chain (even) through dévisage. Through a process of “liquefaction” of signifier that is (a part of) face signification:

As we can see, the process is circular or, at least, the expression contains, is formed (even) by the strange “dance” of the pure, isolated signifier, that gives itself to us, losing itself.
Expression as dévisage: there is not better description in this sense than this brief passage at the end of Nabokov’s Lolita (1995):

There was the day when having withdrawn the functional promise I had made her on eve (whatever she had set her funny little heart on – a roller rink with some special plastic floor or a movie matinee to which she wanted to go alone), I happened to glimpse from the bathroom, through a chance combination of mirror aslant and door ajar, a look on her face…that look I cannot exactly describe…an expression of helplessness so perfect that is seemed to grade into one of rather conformable inanity just because this was the very limit of injustice and frustration – and ever limit presupposes something beyond it – hence the neutral illumination. (My italic)

But, at last, what lies behind dévisage, behind the effacement of the social mask of the face? What hides the face expression that we have analyzed until now? For Deleuze, we saw it, there is the face’s nihilism, its fear to become nothing. Face nudity becomes indigence, shame, fear. In Lévinas the issue is similar, but even more complex: face, also in his complete nudity does not sink in the abyss of fear, his signification remains different. In Lévinas, dévisage does not mean the blind signification of fear, but infinity’s significance and its consequences on our care for the Other. Behind the face of the other, at last, we find god.
For Roland Barthes, it is the obtuse sense, the grimace of image or even the punctum, a piece of reality that sometimes appears in our representations. Finally, for Hansen, there is a chance to break digital technologies’ anonymity.
Everyone has something to “hide” behind face signification: as we said at the beginning, face’s mystery, the mystery of its semiotic statute, is exactly its capacity of changing identity according to who is looking at it. But how is it possible? Let’s try resolving this enigma.

5. Solution

In this brief paper I tried to outline a plausible semiotic statute of the face. For sure there is a “supports” problem. Lévinas talks about the real face, Deleuze mainly about the cinematographic one, while Barthes and Hansen analyze photographic and digital images or a single film frame. Trying to suggest a unified theory of face signification, I wondered if it was still possible to refer to three different reality levels. Actually I think so and I decided to take a risk even because, this is my guess, the four authors offer us a perfect view of the ways in which face “comes” to us in ordinary life. The theoretical and terminological superimpositions made the rest.
So I kept trying to analyze face’s signification. It reveals itself like something “surprising” in Freudian terms according to which something surprises us simply because it does not match our expectations and so it turns into something difficult to define.
After all that, as I promised, I would like to talk about the enigma of the face, about what it hides and it reveals exactly through the peculiarity of its signification, and about the reason why this enigma is worked out in many and such different ways by the authors I have examined.
The solution that I suggest will be spatial. Or better, topological. In his article De la métaphore à la topologie, Bernarde Nomine takes up some intuitions by the French philosopher and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan about perspective space and its relations with subjectivity – obviously conceived in a structuralist way – with the aim of building a topology of Lacan’s philosophical operative concepts. More precisely the aim is to built the right space for the famous psychoanalytic triad of real, symbolic and imagery or better, talking about Lacan, signified, signifier and representation. In this way Nomine proposes a subject topology that subsumes the lacanian category of subjectivity, a topology that avails itself of the works that Lacan, since the studies about the mirror’s phase, did on perspective and projective geometry.
Nomine’s theoretical landing place, after some little risky passages, is the following one:

Picture 4: Nomine, 1991

S2 is the screen of our representations (Où ça voit): there flow the subject’s representations of his world. In S1 we find the place of the symbolic (D’où ça parle), the linguistic subject, the “je”, the subjectivity discourse which we used to be reflected in and which we are, for Lacan, formed by. As we can see, here the meaning, the signified (the Freudian “Real”) is barred, excluded from the subject’s linguistic construction. We find it again in S, the “moi”, the lost place of sense where the gaze’s line starts (D’où ça regarde) that runs away toward the perspective infinity. It is the mythical place that, according to Nomine and to the French anthropologist Leroi-Gourhan, is situated at the obscure bottom of the cave. Exactly where Plato, making a huge mistake according to Lacan, instead puts the screen used for the projection of the shadows, men’s false beliefs: “it is therefore in a way the opposite of Plato’s cave”. (Nomine 1991)
The perspective is overturned: escaping from Plato’s cave is impossible and rational, linguistic subject is forever proscribed from its signified. The signified is lost behind its shoulders. It is not easy to say if Nomine has really gone out of metaphor to arrive at an accurate topology of the subject. What we are interested in is the following aspect: if s2, the place where subject sees, is a procession of images, what happens when on this screen another man’s face appears?
Maybe dévisage, defacing, is exactly the movement of this face towards the perspective infinity behind our shoulders. Movement that, perhaps, passes us and that probably sees behind our shoulders. The enigma of the face, its elusive and polysemic signification, perhaps is its own possibility to enlighten the place where we really are, we really belong to, the signified that escapes us forever. As a consequence of that everyone sees something different in it, because what face expresses is nothing more that the truth of whoever is watching it. The face truth, as Plato knew very well, is simple the truth of the person who stops and contemplates.

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