"The permeability of the face, the face as a site of multiple abyssal orifices, is taken up by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus in the chapter entitled Year Zero: Faciality. According to Deleuze and Guattari, the face is a product of signifying regimes. They ask:

When does the abstract machine of faciality enter into play? When is it triggered? Take some examples: the maternal power operating through the face during nursing; the passional power operating through the face of a loved one, even in caresses, the political power operating through the face of the leader…the power of film operating through the face of the star and the close up. Deleuze and Guattari 2013: 205

Counterintuitively, they argue for a concept of faciality as that which is inhuman on the human body, in fact they say that the face is not even part of the human body unlike the head.

It would be an error to proceed as if the face only became inhuman beyond a certain threshold: closeup, extreme magnification, recondite expression etc. The inhuman in human beings: that is what the face is from the start. It is by nature a close up. Deleuze and Guattari 2013: 199-200

This is why in primitive societies (note the anthropological thrust) the head was more privileged than the face, hence the use of masks and other headgear that obscured the facial features. Furthermore, they argue that faciality extends beyond the face and can take up and overcode the whole body, or parts of it"

• BLONDE: PRELIMINARY MATERIALS FOR A THEORY OF THE BOMBSHELL, Isabel Millar, V e s t i g i a , V o l u m e 3 , I s s u e 2 , D e c e m b e r 2 0 2 2

Some notes on Bataille:

"Bataille connects the seductive look of the eye, where the eye is open to the eye of another, to an extreme vulnerability."

interested in the dynamics of seeing, and or re-seeing, looking back for details. The vulnerability of the image to you, and you to the image. Or the STRAY image, one removed from its context...It sometimes seems more generous to allow for hidden details and tiny repetitions within fixtures etc, making a rhythm from looking. I think Bataille is interesting because he relates looking, seeing and opened eyes to extreme emotional experiences, often violent ones. Although that tone is not what I'm after, I think that understanding vision as a cut or as a marking event is completely in line with Natterer's drawing and other allusions in this research. it's also the vehicle of fine art!!

"In Bataille we find images circulating in a movement which blurs objects, causing them to run into each other."

I like his denial of clarity- no clear image, no clear history. I think that he talk about vision being facilitated by a hole/an opening (the light-hole in the eyeball), so one cannot say that seeing is a closed and distinct set of conditions...

The Unconscious is structured like a Language

Lacan borrows some ideas of linguistics that Freud did not have access to. As we have seen, Saussure showed that a sign is not necessarily something that connects a word or name to a thing, but is in fact something which connects a sound or image to a concept. The sound or image is called a signifier. The concept is called a signified. Meaning is produced not only by the relationship between the signifier and the signified but also, crucially, by the position of the signifiers in relation to other signifiers (in a given context). When Saussure’s theory is put together with Freud’s it is not difficult to see that the movement of signifiers, which generates meaning, must remain fundamentally unconscious. Meaning may only have a place in what Lacan calls “the signifying chain.” So the signifier has primacy over the signified, which means that meaning is generated not by the normal meaning of a word but by the place the word has in a signifying chain.

Lacan turns the formulation on its head:

Sr

Sd

Henceforth the unconscious, sexuality and fantasy can be pictured as the Signifier over the signified. The unconscious is constituted in the same way as our intrinsic ability to speak. Desire is left always unsatisfied and is either displaced from signifier to signifier or it is substituted for—one signifier for another—and the whole process makes up a “chain of signifiers,” which remains unconscious but which, like the unconscious, leaves traces of itself, traces which may be read.

Metonymy follows the horizontal line of signifiers, which never cross the bar (of repression) that leads to the signified and to signification. Just as desire is always deferred from one object to the next, so the signifier suspends signification while following the horizontal chain. Each signifier that fails to cross the bar has exactly the same meaning. If signifies lack (desire).