Body & Society http://bod.sagepub.

com/

What Is a Face?
Daniel Black Body & Society 2011 17: 1 DOI: 10.1177/1357034X11410450 The online version of this article can be found at: http://bod.sagepub.com/content/17/4/1

Published by:
http://www.sagepublications.com

On behalf of:
The TCS Centre, Nottingham Trent University

Additional services and information for Body & Society can be found at: Email Alerts: http://bod.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Subscriptions: http://bod.sagepub.com/subscriptions Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav Citations: http://bod.sagepub.com/content/17/4/1.refs.html

>> Version of Record - Nov 3, 2011 What is This?

Downloaded from bod.sagepub.com at Universitetsbiblioteket i Bergen on December 14, 2011

What Is a Face?
DANIEL BLACK

Abstract The face is a shifting, multiplex, distributed and layered phenomenon. It is by far the most mercurial feature of the human body, and even a single face cannot be isolated in, on or outside any one body. In the following discussion I will employ a variety of differing accounts of the face and suggest that 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. Common sense might define a face as the presence of certain features, such as eyes and mouth. But does anything with these features qualify as a face? Can a snake, for example, be considered to have a face? Certainly, in some sense, it can. We speak of all manner of living things as having faces, and even the crudest representation of key facial attributes most importantly eyes are enough to trigger recognition as a face. Infant humans and primates are able to recognize representations of faces within days of birth (Guo et al., 2003: 371; Lutz et al., 1998: 16970; Slaughter et al., 2002: B71); in addition, neonates not only seem to recognize others as having faces, but also understand that they themselves have faces. Experiments have shown that babies only hours old will imitate the facial expressions of others, despite never having had a chance to look in a mirror and see that they have features which correspond to those they are seeing (Gallagher, 2005: 75ff.; Meltzoff and Moore, 1983). They seem to have an innate understanding of what a face is and the commonality between
Body & Society Copyright The Author(s) 2011, Reprints and permissions: http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav Vol. 17(4): 125; DOI: 10.1177/1357034X11410450

Downloaded from bod.sagepub.com at Universitetsbiblioteket i Bergen on December 14, 2011

www.sagepublications.com

2 & Body & Society Vol. 17 No. 4

their faces and those of others. On the other hand, infants also seem to recognize simple line drawings of faces (Wilson et al., 2002: 2910), and this ability to identify even the most rudimentary of representations as a face would seem to suggest that the face exists more in the mind of the viewer than on the body of the viewed: it perhaps results more from the attribution of a face than the simple presence of physical features. These and other attributes of the face invite multiple, seemingly contradictory, accounts of what faces are and how we perceive them. In this article I will argue that, while common underlying themes can be identified in these different attributes of the face, the face remains, by its very nature, a multiplex phenomenon 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 its attributes into a restrictive pre-existing framework. A variety of different accounts of the face will be used, but none will serve as a point of origin for my analysis; rather, I will seek to have different kinds of knowledge regarding the face interact productively with one another without privileging any particular one as more truthful or apposite. Understanding the face as a multiplex phenomenon, my intention is to capture the different views of the face produced by differing investigative approaches, accepting each as adding to the potential for understanding the nature of the face through its very difference. I will then draw common themes from these differing accounts and suggest that, despite their methodological dissimilarities and varying foundational assumptions, together they do provide a consistent view of the dynamism and multiplicity of the face. However, drawing together different kinds of research on the face will inevitably require that I sometimes arbitrate between competing claims underpinning different approaches. Before I begin, therefore, I will set out the foundational assumptions of the following discussion. These assumptions derive from my evaluation of competing claims made by the various sources discussed here, and the basis of my conclusions regarding the superiority of one claim over another will be set out during the discussion itself. 1 The face, while a key factor in the production of subjectivity and social structures, is not produced by or comprehensively explicable in terms of either of these things. Deleuze and Guattaris treatment of the face is referred to at multiple moments in the discussion, but I will argue that an account of the face which, like theirs, sees faces purely in terms of subjectivization is untenable given the anatomical and cognitive uniqueness of the face as a material organ of communication.

Downloaded from bod.sagepub.com at Universitetsbiblioteket i Bergen on December 14, 2011

What Is a Face? & 3

2 Communication is not entirely reducible to linguistic structures. Too often, all communication is understood to be linguistic, or amenable to analysis in linguistic terms. The face is the most powerful example of communication which extends outside and predates language, rationality and consciousness. 3 The material body provides a fundamentally important substrate of communication. In its ability to communicate affects and associations at a corporeal level without conscious analysis or linguistic sense, the face challenges a common tendency to understand communication as detachable from, or even opposed to, biology and bodily materiality. Foundational to both the biological structure of the face and the machinery of human perception is the bodys role in nonverbal, non-linguistic communication. The following discussion will therefore look to disciplines such as ethology and neuroscience as sources of insight into the evolutionary and cognitive production of faces, as this can both highlight the blindspots in accounts of the face arising in the humanities, and offer opportunities to enrich and extend those accounts. As we will see, however, the appeal to 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 something rigidly structured by biology or amenable to simplistic empirical accounts. Nonetheless, I will interact with these forms of knowledge in good faith I have no desire to simply criticize them from a position founded on, or use them as a resource to bolster the claims of, approaches external to them. 4 The body as material substrate of communication is a dynamic entity which produces a multiplicity of perceptual interactions with itself and the world. Highlighting the role of biology and materiality in communication need not produce an account of the face which is fixed, essentializing, or built on claims to identify some objective rules of function or meaning. Accounts of the cultural production of the body tend to start with the body as it is isolated and fixed by social forces, but the lived materiality of the body is not reducible to this entity. The face as an anatomical and perceptual phenomenon is the most mercurial, unstable, and elusive feature of human anatomy, endlessly exceeding efforts to capture it and draw a stable, generalized view of it from its endlessly shifting lived reality. It is these very qualities of the face which necessitate a mode of investigation which is open to multiple perspectives and multiple 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. What is a face for? While eyes are for looking, and noses and mouths are for breathing,

Downloaded from bod.sagepub.com at Universitetsbiblioteket i Bergen on December 14, 2011

4 & Body & Society Vol. 17 No. 4

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 functions). The face is, rather, an instrument of communication. Faces are for signification; the most obvious use of the face is to generate meaning for the benefit of an observer. Among mammals, facial signals such as the narrowing of eyes, lowering of brows and baring of teeth to denote an urge to attack are consistent across a tremendous variety of species. A human being and a cat will both communicate in this way as a result of an innate biological predisposition, and so, on this most basic level, equally can be attributed with faces. However, when discussing animal behaviour, a distinction must be drawn between display (a signal or pattern of motor activity whose exaggerated or stereotyped characteristics suggest that it has become specialized in form, frequency, or both during evolution to effect or to facilitate the process of communication [Redican, 1982: 216]) and expression, which suggests an intentionality of communication. While a human being might make an involuntary 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 piece of meat; one cat is willing to fight for the piece of meat, and so prepares to do so by flattening its ears against its head to prevent them being torn off, and pulling back its lips to bare its teeth before sinking them into the other cat. It then bites and seriously injures the other cat. In stage two, descendants of these two cats are in the same situation. One cat makes the same preparations to bite the other, but the other has evolved an instinctive fear of the sight of another cat flattening its ears 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, two further descendants of these cats engage in the same behaviour, but with the important innovation that the first cat flattens its ears and bares its teeth independently of any intention to bite. Once the second cat has developed an instinctual fear of the facial arrangement preparatory to biting, that facial arrangement comes to have an evolutionary benefit for the first cat which is independent of any actual bite. It just has to look like its going to bite in order to make the other cat give up its claim to the piece of meat. As a result, the preparatory contortion of the face itself comes to have use even when not followed by an attack, and so becomes a valuable inherited feature. The process by which practical behaviours are 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 display is evidence that the natural world is full of codes and communications, but
Downloaded from bod.sagepub.com at Universitetsbiblioteket i Bergen on December 14, 2011

What Is a Face? & 5

while the poisonous reptiles markings carry a message, that message has not been intentionally formulated by any individual reptile. Ironically, the animal with the least need to understand the message on the reptiles back is the reptile itself; not being likely to eat itself, it gains no advantage from decoding this warning. While human beings might be differentiated by their capacity to intentionally express themselves using their faces, the fact remains that intentional, expressive deployments of the face by humans remain in the minority, and our own faces more commonly signify without conscious direction. The face is an instrument of communication, but when discussing communication it is important to understand that communication need not depend upon language, consciousness or culture. Faces predate all of these things, although they are now a part of each. The cat communicates with its challenger without language and without even the conscious formulation of any message. Making Faces Once the significatory power of the face is taken into consideration, it becomes clear that the simple possession of certain anatomical features is not enough to qualify for possession of a face; while many living things have certain structures on the surfaces of their heads, not all of those structures collaborate to generate meaning, and very few (only human beings and perhaps higher primates) are able to 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 the realm of simple physical or biological fact and into that of perception and interaction. The key question becomes, not what physically comprises a face, but how it is used. This, in turn, raises the possibility that faces might be used or defined differently even within the human species, depending on culturally-specific structures of social interaction. Deleuze and Guattaris account of the face (1987: 167ff.) depends upon a belief that the face is a signifying structure imposed upon the body as part of the process of subjectification:
The head, even the human head, is not necessarily a face. The face is produced only when the head ceases to be a part of the body, when it ceases to be coded by the body, when it ceases to have a multidimensional, polyvocal corporeal code when the body, head included, has been decoded 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 the face only appears when the body has been divided and organized by cultural
Downloaded from bod.sagepub.com at Universitetsbiblioteket i Bergen on December 14, 2011

6 & Body & Society Vol. 17 No. 4

forces. Bernadette Wegenstein has even gone so far as to suggest that, in contemporary media representations, any body part can now gain the status once exclusively enjoyed by a face as a window to the soul. It is not necessarily behind faces that we expect the person to be revealed. Faces are becoming obsolete (2002: 233). But is the face really nothing more than a signifying structure which has been hived off from the rest of the body as an outward label of subjectivity? Has its status truly been conferred purely by cultural forces, which might then transfer them elsewhere, for example to healthy and stronglooking body parts such as arms and legs (Wegenstein, 2002: 233)? Deleuze and Guattaris complaint concerning the face centres upon the effect of faciality, which is created through a white wall/black hole system (1987: 167): the interaction of plane and hole produces an experience of selfcontained interiority, of there being a unified someone behind the face. The face, with its expressive openings particularly the eyes which serve as windows to the soul is a perforated exterior surface which produces a sense of interior subjectivity, and the faces expressive power is understood to make externally manifest the inner life of the individual. The face certainly can and does serve as a means of intentional expression, but how much of the expressive power of the face is really occupied by such a role? While I might (aside, perhaps, from the occasional Freudian slip) have a fairly firm conscious control over the words I use, the reality is that the expressivity of my face is in many ways more of a mystery to me than it is to other people who know me well; the face expresses itself visually, but I have little opportunity to observe these visual signals, and relatively little of it is under my conscious control. I hear the words I speak, but dont see the expressions assumed by my face. So the trained interrogator will scrutinize a suspects face as she answers a question in order to see if the direction of eye gaze or some other movement betrays the spoken words as a lie: the words can be carefully controlled, but the facial expressivity is largely independent of conscious direction. Human beings are notable for their degree of intentional control over facial musculature, but this control is imperfect and exercised relatively rarely. For example, it is impossible to truly fake a smile because, while we have conscious control over our lips, we do not have conscious control over the muscles at the edges of our eyes which are engaged by a genuine expression of happiness. Our conscious minds might even as when trying to stifle a sneeze or smother a smile be reduced to employing those facial muscles we can control in a direct physical struggle against those we cant, and the final outcome of such contests is never certain. Richard Rushton notes this key difference in signification produced by the face, as opposed to language or even visual representation: The face . . . on
Downloaded from bod.sagepub.com at Universitetsbiblioteket i Bergen on December 14, 2011

What Is a Face? & 7

certain occasions, can represent or signify automatically, without the intention of the person upon whose face the markings arise (2002: 220). However, this does not make the point with sufficient strength; rather than occurring on certain occasions, it would be more accurate to say that it occurs on the great majority of occasions; rather than occurring automatically . . . without the intention of the person, it occurs in a way which makes questions of automatism or intention irrelevant. If a stranger rushes towards me with his face contorted by rage, or a child 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 of the face, and the possessor of the face certainly hasnt decided to assume that appearance as a way of telling me how he feels, as would be the case if hed said, Im angry, or Im 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 an expression of anger than increased muscle tension and heart rate, or some other bodily change that accompanies rage, and a smile is no more an expression of happiness than is a sense of elation or contentment; they are both rather part of the emotional state itself, not a reflection or revelation of it. Perhaps it would be better to utilize an alternative sense of the verb to express: aside from the minority of cases in which we pull faces or express emotion in a calculated and insincere manner, our faces express emotion in a sense more analogous to the way in which a lactating woman expresses milk. The body naturally exudes emotional signals through the face in a way which has nothing to do with an interiorized subject intentionally communicating its inner states. If I am startled by a sudden noise, my facial expression of fright is likely to precede my conscious experience of fear. When Im angry, I dont decide to arrange my face in a certain way in order to intimidate an enemy any more than I decide to increase my heart rate in order to deal more effectively with the physical exertions of combat. Furthermore, such physical changes dont result from my feeling angry rather they are part of the experience of feeling angry itself (see Despret, 2004: 1258; Shusterman, 2008: 14650). There is no other realm of emotional experience which precedes or triggers these things; nor is there an interior subject pulling the strings of my face in order to communicate certain things to the outside world. As a result, the living face has relatively little to do with Deleuze and Guattaris facialization. Faces are implicated in the creation of restrictive identities in that faces are privileged identifiers used in official photographs (on drivers licences or passports, for example) and the search for features that can be generalized into populations (of race, etc.), but such enterprises begin by abstracting and fixing the face so that most of its relationship to living human bodies and human perception is destroyed.
Downloaded from bod.sagepub.com at Universitetsbiblioteket i Bergen on December 14, 2011

8 & Body & Society Vol. 17 No. 4

Deleuze and Guattaris treatment of the face could be re-evaluated in light of their explanation of the face as a deterritorialization of the head. Not only does this not preclude a focus on the faces physical structure, but in fact the entirety of human physical evolution is an instance of deterritorialization. The deterritorialization 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 it is an absolute deterritorialization: it is no longer relative because it removes the head from the stratum of the organism, human or animal, and connects it to other strata, such as signifiance and subjectification. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 172)

The problem with this claim is its very truth: the face does represent a deterritorialization of the head in its transformation of the head from a mobile platform for gathering sensory data into a site of signification; however, this deterritorialization is not absolute in that the appearance of the face does not signal the disappearance of the head, which retains its previous usefulness. Furthermore, this account carries the suggestion of some absolute division between biology and signification, reflecting a broader tendency to erroneously understand communication as incorporeal and immaterial. On the contrary, the consequences of the deterritorialization of the head include like those of hand, breast and mouth an actual shift in the anatomical arrangement of the body. Just as the significatory power of language brought about extensive changes in human anatomy, so the significatory power of expression brought about a shift from head to face. The human face is the result of a process of physical evolution and specialization 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 and lizards to create an astonishingly mobile surface. Amphibians and reptiles have no facial muscles in the human sense: they only possess muscles in the neck capable of opening and closing the eyelids, nostrils and mouth somewhat reminiscent of the hidden cables which give limited mobility to the face of a ventriloquists dummy. With the appearance of mammals, these muscles branch out across the front of the head and become attached to the skin (providing the capacity to deform the faces surface), presumably largely to facilitate chewing and suckling. Among the higher primates, the facial muscles become more complex and refocus themselves (for instance, shifting from tasks like swivelling ears to greater control of the mouth) (Chevalier-Skolnikoff, 1973: 58ff.), and in humans 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
Downloaded from bod.sagepub.com at Universitetsbiblioteket i Bergen on December 14, 2011

What Is a Face? & 9

of the human face prior to the appearance of an interiorized subject. The human face has evolved a physical structure reflective of its prioritization as a locus of signification, and its importance to communication could not plausibly be explained otherwise; for example, if we try to imagine a hypothetical society in which some other region of the body were privileged as a site of communication in the same way, it becomes obvious that only one other anatomical region is adequately equipped for the task: the hands.1 And the hands and face are the two most extensively reterritorialized regions of the human body. The cortical motor strip the region of the brain responsible for voluntary muscle control is located in the frontal lobes, a part of the brain more extensively developed in human beings than other animals. Those areas of the body under voluntary muscle control are distributed across this strip, and two-thirds of the human cortical motor strip is occupied by the hands and face, illustrating both how prioritized these areas are and how much fine control we have over them compared to the rest of our bodies (Rinn, 1991: 710). Clearly, faces result from a process of physical development and specialization in which a focus on the face as instrument of communication drove the modification of human anatomy. And the key defining attribute of the face as anatomical structure is mobility. The development of ever more extensive musculature and its anchoring in the skin has given the face the power to dynamically reshape itself in a way impossible for any other part of the human body. Largely unobserved by its owner, the human face is constantly shifting its form in response to both conscious and unconscious directions, instinctive responses to stimuli or changes in the other faces around it. Humans greater voluntary control over their faces is generally ascribed to the development of speech, a human activity which is obviously reliant upon fine, voluntary control of the facial muscles (Schmidt and Cohn, 2001: 8). However, surely it is just as plausible to turn this account on its head and suggest that the capacity for speech resulted from the development of greater facial control. While fine control of the face is crucial to verbal communication, the anatomical complexity of the human face facilitated powerful affective communication for millennia prior to the advent of language, and the refinement of facial expressivity could drive the development of the volitional muscle control necessary to form words. Chimpanzees possess relatively fine muscle control of the lower face and share the human separation of the upper lip from the nose (which allows the shaping of words), but are incapable of speech (Chevalier-Skolnikoff, 1973: 58ff.), suggesting that speech is not necessarily the driver of such physical changes.2 Again, the human body, and the face in particular, provide a biological substrate for communication. The face, and communication more generally, are not brought into being by language or culture.
Downloaded from bod.sagepub.com at Universitetsbiblioteket i Bergen on December 14, 2011

10 & Body & Society Vol. 17 No. 4

Losing Face A focus on evolved physical structure would seem to return us to the face as simply a physical endowment; while not simply dependent upon physical features such as eyes and mouth, it might be considered the result of muscular development and fine motor control. However, as I have already stated, it is not my intention to replace one singular account of the face with another, but rather to demonstrate that no singular account can fully explain the complexity of the face. While anatomical features are clearly of fundamental importance, they do not 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 is clearly the result of a mechanism that is not socially constructed or culturally dependent the newborn could hardly be expected to have been influenced by such considerations to any substantial degree it also problematizes the idea of faces as simply resulting from the physical endowments already mentioned. This rudimentary representation of a face has no mobile muscle structure it does not have any real physical attributes at all besides those of ink and paper. Clearly, in this instance, the key consideration is the infants recognition of certain shapes as representative of a human face, rather than any physical qualities of a particular face. The significance of physical features is one side of the coin, but the 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 seem a simple matter to recognize a certain collection of shapes as a face, just as we recognize other collections of shapes as words or houses or cars, there must be something quite different underlying the perception of faces. This is not only because the newborn infant cannot yet have learnt to identify faces in the same manner as words, houses, or cars, but also because we are so adept at, not simply recognizing a face as a face, but recognizing a face as the face of a particular person. Innumerable experiments have documented the human facility for recognizing faces, and when we weigh up the mobility of the human face, as well as its capacity to appear differently at different moments (for example because of the angle of viewing, lighting, etc.), against the sheer number of faces we see, and the small differences which make one distinguishable from another (one nose being a millimetre or two longer or wider than another, perhaps, or one set of lips being marginally thinner or thicker), our ability to instantaneously identify a face we might only have seen once before from a previously unobserved angle and at distance is quite simply astonishing. When we contextualize this ability with an oftnoted 1932 experiment which demonstrated that nine out of ten subjects couldnt pick their own hands out of a photographic line-up (Merleau-Ponty, 2002 [1962]:

Downloaded from bod.sagepub.com at Universitetsbiblioteket i Bergen on December 14, 2011

What Is a Face? & 11

1723; van den Berg, 1952: 12), we realize that this is a feat of differentiation and identification unlike any other of which we are capable, and one which is far more reliant on the mind of the observer than the physical attributes of the face being observed (cf. Kanwisher and Moscovitch, 2000: 1). The Face as Apparition Human beings are not only adept at recognizing the faces of people theyve previously encountered in person, however. Surely the face most often recognized is that of Jesus Christ. Deleuze and Guattari use the image of Christs face on the Shroud of Turin to illustrate their discussion of faciality (1987: 167ff.), but the faces of holy personages have graced many other inanimate objects. The modern era of such appearances perhaps began when Christs face was noticed scorched into an overcooked tortilla by 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 cheese on toast purported to bring good luck as a result of bearing the likeness of the Virgin 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, which many believe shows Christs face sculpted from cosmic gas (Sky Image Lab, 2003). Less individuated faces have also been attributed to inanimate objects or features of the natural world, for example the famous Face on Mars seemingly captured 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-devout viewer, the Face on Mars is readily apparent, even if the viewer does not believe it 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 apparitions are not simply the result of wishful thinking or self-delusion, but rather that our minds search for faces in everything we see. This anthropomorphization of our environment might be understood to result from human narcissism, a desire to colonize the environment with our own 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 which is most important and stimulating to us: other human bodies. As a result, we are constantly seeking out human faces, even when there are none to be found. Clearly, our brains are predisposed towards identifying the features of the human face, even to the point where any collection of shapes roughly equivalent to its structure will be recognized as such.

Downloaded from bod.sagepub.com at Universitetsbiblioteket i Bergen on December 14, 2011

12 & Body & Society Vol. 17 No. 4

It seems clear that we have a strong predisposition towards the perception of faces. Given the strength of this predisposition and its early appearance, studies of the human perceptual apparatus generally accept that there is some mechanism 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 attention towards faces, and that this fixation leads to the acquisition of a more nuanced perception of faces soon after (see de Haan et al., 2002; Sinha et al., 2006: 1314). If this is the case, the process of learning to understand the face is broadly similar to verbal language acquisition: we are not born with the words of a language in our minds, but our brains are predisposed towards absorbing and acquiring the building blocks of that other fundamental communicative skill. While the underlying mechanisms which make it possible might be subject to debate, studies of human perception have firmly established that human beings (like other higher primates) are naturally inclined towards fixation upon and identification of faces. Facial information is processed by the human brain in a distinctive fashion, and this specialized processing is even engaged when presented with a simplified computer representation, black and white photograph, or line drawing of a face (Wilson et al., 2002: 2910). Clearly, phenomena such as the Face on Mars result from the fact that the human brain actively seeks out visual information that matches the form of the human face. But this is only half the story. It explains how the human brain possesses the capacity to recognize faces (and even altogether different material features) as faces, but it does not explain its impressive capacity to recognize an individual face as distinct from the countless similar faces which surround it. We might be able to imagine a human being developing the nuanced perception necessary to recognize one particular tree in a forest (excusing for the sake of argument that trees exhibit a far greater degree of formal variation than faces), but it would be impossible for an infant whose age is measured in days to apply this level of differentiation to individual trees in the way infants do in relation to individual faces. Our recognition of faces is miraculous not only because we are exposed to so many different faces with so little variation among them; we must also take into account the facial mobility already discussed. In addition to the variation in the environmental circumstances of our viewing of faces, every living face is an unstable entity; unlike other parts of our bodies, or the entirety of the bodies of most other animal species, we possess an intricate network of musculature which is anchored to the skin of our faces for the purpose of deforming and sculpting its surface. As if the task of differentiating static faces was not difficult enough, each individual human face is constantly squirming beneath the gaze,
Downloaded from bod.sagepub.com at Universitetsbiblioteket i Bergen on December 14, 2011

What Is a Face? & 13

altering its appearance from moment to moment. How is it possible for human beings 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 we see them are in a very real and significant way products of our own brains, extrapolated and generalized from certain kinds of visual information. Furthermore, when considering our remarkable ability to recognize even relatively unfamiliar faces seen from novel angles, it becomes clear that the mechanism of facial recognition 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 recognizing when we look at another person, given that no face maintains the same appearance from one moment to the next. Given the quite small margins of difference between faces, how can we recognize a face we have only seen smiling when we come upon it again while it is crying? The variation in the contours and lineaments of that one face between expressions might be larger than that separating it from another face holding the same expression. When we look at anothers face and recognize that face, we cannot simply be matching the visual input before us with another piece of visual information which has been filed away in our brains for reference. The likelihood of seeing the same face from the same angle in the same lighting conditions while it assumes exactly the same facial expression is infinitessimally small. Bruce and Young (1986) have put forward an influential model of facial recognition summarized 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 invariant representation from different views of the same face. This stage, common to all kinds of faces (e.g., known and unknown), is followed by two independent routes. The first route allows the recognition of the face and the person, whereas the second concerns visual operations which are not mandatory for the recognition process per se, but are made in parallel to it: lip-reading behavior, analysis of facial expression and extraction of semantic information from 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 conducts a generalized mapping of the face, constructing a three-dimensional invariant representation by synthesizing and generalizing as many different views of the face as possible. Our memory of a face, therefore, is not any particular view of the face; we never actually see before us the face which is available to our memory, as the memory-face has no particular expression or perspective. We are not simply comparing shapes or images, as we would when recognizing a
Downloaded from bod.sagepub.com at Universitetsbiblioteket i Bergen on December 14, 2011

14 & Body & Society Vol. 17 No. 4

familiar car or work of art. This would explain why damage to particular regions of the brain can remove the ability to recognize faces even though the ability to see faces remains unimpaired (prosopagnosia), or can even remove the ability to recognize faces first seen after the brain injury, while leaving intact the ability to recognize faces which became familiar prior to its occurrence (Dubois et al., 1999: 2856).4 Stranger still, patients with Capgras delusion are able to recognize faces, but this recognition does not trigger some deeper affective response associated with familiarity, leading them to believe that they are seeing a stranger who has somehow taken on the appearance of someone they know (Kagan, 2007: 5201). 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 with images of their own faces and those of highly familiar persons, which had been distorted to varying degrees using morphing software. Functional MRI scans were used to compare the brain processes involved in recognizing ones own face with that of the familiar other. While the difference between the two forms of facial recognition was slight, they conclude:
Comparing the response time of the two highly overlearned faces, self and partner, directly in a post-hoc analysis, we found a small but significantly slower processing speed for the self 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 the internal representation of the self face and reality. For example, many people think that a snapshot of themselves is not an accurate representation. The morphing procedure might exaggerate the mismatch between self-representation and photograph even further, resulting in a more complex verification process, which leads to a longer response time. (Kircher et al., 2001: B10-B11)

Everyone has had the experience of finding a photograph of oneself ugly or unfamiliar, but perhaps there is more to this than Kircher et al.s mismatch of the internal representation of the self face and reality. While we are adept at generalizing 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 the bathroom mirror, perhaps), and so do not have the opportunity to stabilize its stream of expressions into a universally applicable template which can make it appear familiar no matter where, when or from what angle a photograph might be taken. Furthermore, the camera itself is a technology employed to fix and stabilize the face, capturing it within a set of temporal and spatial coordinates alien to its lived physicality. It therefore introduces another level of processing between the living face and human perception, as a result sometimes breaking the connection between the mental conceptualization and the material phenomenon to which it should refer.
Downloaded from bod.sagepub.com at Universitetsbiblioteket i Bergen on December 14, 2011

What Is a Face? & 15

Clinical experiments have shown that our perception of emotion, and gender and racial identities, in faces can be shifted by changing the continuum of 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 dynamically in response not only to the faces own physical instability but also the perceivers context and experience. Our mapping of identities and categories onto facial features is not an inevitable result of anatomical structure or brain architecture at all; rather our brain architecture is susceptible to socially formulated categories through its very malleability and adaptability. It would be a mistake, therefore, to think that highlighting the mechanics of facial perception would limit or demystify the face, essentializing it as immutable, singular and self-evident. Doing so certainly doesnt suggest that categories like gender or race are objectively manifested in facial features, or even that our brains 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 brought into being), attempts to explain facial perception such as that of Bruce and Young, above, must posit a fragmented, parallel cluster of different kinds of perception which are only later assembled into the unified conceptualization made available to our conscious minds. Whether or not this or any other hypothesis concerning the cognitive underpinnings of facial perception turns out to be literally true is not my immediate concern here (and I am not qualified to make such evaluations in any event). Rather, they are one more attempt to explain what faces are, different in assumptions and approach to others discussed here, but nevertheless raising similar themes. Even within disciplines which seek an objective, naturalizing, scientific account of the face, ultimately the only qualities that 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 systemic structurings (2002: 2), Brian Massumi argues that:
the problem with the dominant models in cultural and literary theory is not that they are too abstract to grasp the concreteness of the real. The problem is that they are not abstract enough to grasp the real incorporeality of the concrete. (2002: 5)

In other words, it is not that a focus on ideological positioning alone is insufficient because it lacks the fixity and stability of the material body and embodied experience in fact, the opposite is true. It is such structures that impose fixity on the dynamism and indeterminacy of the material body and embodied experience. The face Deleuze and Guattari seek to reject is not a theoretical abstraction generalized from the specificity of real instances of interaction between bodies
Downloaded from bod.sagepub.com at Universitetsbiblioteket i Bergen on December 14, 2011

16 & Body & Society Vol. 17 No. 4

in everyday life; faces as we experience them in everyday life are anything but specific and stable. Our faces are in constant flux, being endlessly pulled this way and that by the muscular structures we have evolved precisely for this purpose, and faces as we see and remember them exist as generalized abstractions and extrapolations from this flux. It is only with reference to socially constituted structures of significance that this non-specificity and abstraction is stabilized and fixed within enduring categories such as gender or race. At the moment of apperception, the specificity of individual faces cannot be fixed within such larger categories; in fact, the diversity of our experience of just one persons face cannot be fixed within the single category of an enduring individual identity without the application of further cognitive processing. In both cases, particularity and specificity are precisely what is not present at the apperceptive moment: they are extrapolated from it and retrospectively applied after the moment has ended. Autistic Faces The very complexity of the process which creates our internalized conceptualizations of faces results from the fundamental irreconcilability of the living face with fixed, stable identity and representation. The faces we see must be processed extensively using specialized cognitive faculties in order to be converted into generalizations of this kind. Another body is never simply one more object in our environment, and this is not simply due to the fact that we credit it with an interior life. Its greater significance is apparent long before sophisticated extrapolations have been developed from what we see. Perhaps the most striking evidence of this is the way in which the autistic interact with the bodies of other people. While there is a great deal of variation in the severity and attributes of autism, accounts often highlight an association between autism and the absence of theory of mind (Baron-Cohen, 1995; Premack and Woodruff, 1978: 515), that faculty widely believed to develop in young children as a way of understanding the inner states of others through the formulation 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 persons interior life, this could be expected to result in other human beings losing the special visual fascination they hold for the non-autistic, making them subside into the visual field due to a lack of any special significance. Indeed, it might seem that this is exactly what happens because the severely autistic tend not to make eye contact with other people or focus upon their faces. This might be construed as an indifference to other bodies.

Downloaded from bod.sagepub.com at Universitetsbiblioteket i Bergen on December 14, 2011

What Is a Face? & 17

However, at least some accounts given by those with autism suggest that, rather than resulting from an indifference to other bodies, this behaviour is an active avoidance, which results from the overwhelming and disorienting blast of stimulation they produce. For example, when Jonathan Cole asked autistic author Donna Williams why looking at faces was difficult for her, she replied that faces produce an uncontrollable stream of stimuli which threatens her very sense of individual selfhood:
Such interaction would generally be only inconsistently comprehensible and would soon cause information overload after a few minutes and be poured down onto to [sic] me with a total absence of my own social interest and want. (Cole, 1997: 94)

Even among those without autism, a number of studies have shown that mental processing of information is hampered when looking at faces because of the high cognitive load they place on the brain this is why we often look away from interlocutors while formulating the answer to a question (Doherty-Sneddon et al., 2001). When, as in the case of autism, the brain is less effective at working harmoniously to create highly conceptualized responses to other bodies, the lack of such conceptualization does not leave the sight of other bodies without special impact; rather, what remains is the torrent of raw lower-order stimuli our brains gather from the surfaces of other bodies. The sheer volume and intensity of this information (which is processed and filtered by the pre-conscious mental faculties of the non-autistic) makes it almost impossible for the conscious minds of those with autism to handle. For the non-autistic, the face as it is consciously understood is actually a highly conceptualized entity derived from the pre-conscious processing of a vast amount of information. The act of looking at a face does not provide unmediated access to its physical materiality; in fact, to access our raw apperceptive experience of another face would be to be overwhelmed by a torrent of visual stimuli beyond the capacity of our conscious minds to organize and interpret. Psychologizing accounts of interpersonal interaction such as theory of mind are notable for their blindness to the importance of the face. While theory of mind is supposedly an innate sense, Baron-Cohen describes it entirely in terms of disinterested observation, conscious reasoning and the formulation of hypotheses, as might be expected from the term theory itself. According to BaronCohen, the ability to formulate such hypotheses is the evolved capacity that makes complex social interaction possible; he supports this claim by suggesting that, without it, such interaction could only be made possible by the deployment of 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 brainoscope before primates (early hominids included) could understand and participate in complex

Downloaded from bod.sagepub.com at Universitetsbiblioteket i Bergen on December 14, 2011

18 & Body & Society Vol. 17 No. 4

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. Just by glancing at another persons face, we understand and feel a tremendous amount about them without any need to theorize. After all, while evolution did not wait around for the invention of the brainoscope to enable complex social interaction, it didnt wait around for the ability to theorize, either.5 Human beings engaged in complex social interaction before the arrival of language and self-reflexive consciousness, and continued to do so after. Nonhuman animals respond to one anothers motivations and desires, and share and inspire affective states with no need for conjecture. As discussed by Vinciane Despret in relation to celebrated cases such as that of the horse Clever Hans, humans and non-human animals can even form powerful non-conscious communicative connections across species through an embodied miracle of attunement (Despret, 2004: 125). To note these things is not to deny that human beings can and do hypothesize about and reflect upon their own and others motivations, or that language is a powerful tool for communication; but it does contest a tendency to privilege the rational, conscious and linguistic to such a degree that all other forms of communication and interaction are rendered invisible. Such a selective understanding renders a full account of the face impossible. The Face as Mystery The conceptualized face available to our conscious minds can therefore be seen as generated by the interplay of multiple phenomena located in physical anatomy, the brains of both the possessor and viewer of the face, the relationship between that face and other faces, and the wider socio-cultural context. Our categorization and generalization of faces can to some degree be determined by social forces, but the influence of social forces is itself, presumably, enabled by a more basic, pre-conscious categorization and generalization of faces brought 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 requires complex generalization and extrapolation. At a cultural level, a similar process occurs on a larger scale, generalizing and extrapolating to fix whole populations of faces into stable categories. Patrizia Magli has discussed the paradox of the human face as something illusive and unstable, mobile and constantly in flux, and yet at the same time so easily recognizable as the surest sign of a stable, individualized identity:
Downloaded from bod.sagepub.com at Universitetsbiblioteket i Bergen on December 14, 2011

What Is a Face? & 19

[T]o isolate a face is to isolate a permanent form, one whose unchanging traits are to be perceived through a process that attempts to freeze the faces state of constant flux into a state of immutability. Such a symbolizing process introduces us to a different time: no longer is it the non-time of an actual face, lost in the uninterrupted fluctuation of lights and shadows. Rather, it is the time of a measure that stills things, develops a formal image and locks it into an absolute fixity, wherein it then interprets proportions, defines outlines, and attempts to establish essential traits. (Magli, 1989: 90)

In a manner reminiscent of Deleuze and Guattaris discussion of the face, Magli sees this fixing and stabilizing as part of a project of binding the human body to systems of meaning, as part of a tendency to freeze the face in a system of strictly codified equivalences, but she does not understand it to produce the face itself. It is not difficult to produce examples of the process whereby the tremendous diversity of faces is reduced to a stable and limited set of established categories of significance associated with restrictive identities the Jewish nose, for example, or those facial characteristics deemed masculine or feminine, aristocratic or plebeian. The attribution of a stable identity to the face once again becomes emblematic of a corralling of the bodys instability and exuberance into unified and restrictive identities. It might be argued that it is partly the faces very instability, its relatively greater capacity for change, that makes it the privileged object of such a project. Without stability being imposed upon the face, it would cease to be the single, holistic entity we currently perceive and attribute to particular individuals. However, a consideration of the mechanics of facial perception makes it clear that this process of stabilization begins before subjectivization; without its incorporation into the very architecture of our brains, we would all be like the autistic person who is forced to shield his or her eyes from the unfiltered glare of the face. Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 171) see the face as a mark of restrictive identity which must be thrown off. But if as concluded above the face is a site whose significatory power has been enshrined in our genetic make-up, how can the face be rejected? The face will always announce itself to us because it is a unique anatomical phenomenon imbued with a unique significance. An escape from restrictive subjectivity would not be accompanied by the loss of a face, just as a man freed from the influence of gender categories would still find a penis among his anatomical endowments. The difference is that unlike the penis signification is part of the faces biologically enshrined nature, which will remain with it regardless of social changes. The significatory power of the face, while it can be harnessed to subjectivization, does not result from it.
Downloaded from bod.sagepub.com at Universitetsbiblioteket i Bergen on December 14, 2011

20 & Body & Society Vol. 17 No. 4

However, it is equally true that, irrespective of its provenance or materiality, the face as Deleuze and Guattari argue is fundamentally implicated in the structuring of identity and subjectivity. The uniqueness of the face in physical terms depends primarily on its mobility, a mobility which gives it an unmatched capacity for expressiveness and signification, but the harnessing of the face to fixed identities requires a stabilization and generalization of those mobile features, a freezing of them into singular attributes which endure through time. The identification of these stable features is necessary for the generalization of facialized 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 such a fixing of the face is necessary for any attribution of individuality and uniqueness to any face. For each of us, faces are integrated into a system of meaning that is largely a product of the ways in which our brains organize sensory experience. The visual information generated by faces is subject to a variety of complex processes in order to create an internal record and conceptualization. When we see a face, we attempt to stabilize this profoundly unstable phenomenon and make it the enduring marker of a particular, stable identity. This generalization of attributes in individual faces articulates with a cultural process whereby populations of faces are generalized, for instance into racial groupings. Our brains expend a great deal of effort converting the dynamism of faces into stable, abstract reference points so that their constant flow of information can be managed and tracked, but the rich potentiality of the faces around us in the physical world is never encapsulated or erased by this process. Faces as physical phenomena remain something of another order entirely; complex mental processing would not be necessary if there were not a tremendous qualitative gap between the experiential reality and its mental conceptualization. When Emmanuel Levinas speaks of the face (1988: 194ff.), he takes the face as representative of our inability to fully capture and control the Other. For Levinas, the face represents the paradox of imagining that the Other experiences an inner life like ones own while simultaneously only being able to interact with the Other as a sealed exteriority, which implacably hides the truth of this posited interior life from us. The full truth of the Other is ultimately lost behind the face or between the features and expressions it presents to us. For Levinas, the face is not simply the result of the bodys subjectification and subjugation to larger structures of meaning and identity, as it is for Deleuze and Guattari. Rather it illustrates 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 here name face. This mode does not consist in figuring as a theme under my gaze, in spreading

Downloaded from bod.sagepub.com at Universitetsbiblioteket i Bergen on December 14, 2011

What Is a Face? & 21

itself forth as a set of qualities forming an image. 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 ideatum the adequate idea. (Levinas, 1988: 501)

Deleuze and Guattaris account of the face focuses on its role in subjectification. Levinas, on the other hand, sees it as something prior to our integration into social structures and intersubjective relationships. In the words of Jon Erickson, [f]or Le vinas [sic] it is the presignifying signifyingness of the human face that calls to us, not its already socially overcoded significations (1999: 18). Levinass account suggests that the face not only predates subjectification, but also that it can never be fully reconciled with this process. In light of this, the limitations of Deleuze and Guattaris account of facialization can be seen to stem from its failure to consider two quite different but overlapping phenomena, both of which we understand as the face. Their account of facialization considers the face of the Other as we see it, stabilizing it and fixing it within a system of significance, but does not take into account that this is something quite different from the face as a material component of the body, which is never fully fixed, grasped or possessed by the viewer of that face. The three-dimensional invariant representation which is extracted from our viewing of a face and fixed in multidimensional face space (Rhodes et al., 2003: 558), then used as a representation of a particular identity (both a personal identity and a more generalized identity such as race or gender) is a phenomenon produced within the mind of the viewer, and is quite different in nature from both the anatomical phenomenon of the face and our perceptual experience of it. (In fact, it would not be possible for the former phenomenon 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 in fact a variety of different phenomena which are stabilized and assembled into a unified, highly conceptualized entity by human perception. Differing attempts to explain the face might look for its genesis in subjectivization, anatomy, various brain processes or the creation of categories of identity, and these attempts are misguided only when they work on the assumption that their chosen line of inquiry alone will suffice. A face is a unique anatomical feature, but it cannot be isolated in any one body; after all, a face can only be said to meaningfully exist when at least one other body synthesizes a number of different physical features and plots a series of morphological changes over time in order to produce a unified and significant conceptualization. The face is brought into being by communication, and
Downloaded from bod.sagepub.com at Universitetsbiblioteket i Bergen on December 14, 2011

22 & Body & Society Vol. 17 No. 4

communication can only exist in the relationships between bodies, rather than on any one body in isolation. Acknowledging this should not result in a dematerialized understanding of the face, however; the rich significance of the face is produced by a sophisticated and highly specialized set of anatomical and neurological capacities which human beings have evolved over time and which are part of our biological make-up. At the same time, the evolution of these capacities has been driven by communication between human beings without such communication they would confer no evolutionary advantage. The ability to see faces to stabilize them as meaningful, unique and unified entities capable of creating relationships between bodies is itself reliant on extensive cognitive specialization so complex as to still largely defy scientific understanding or emulation. To acknowledge such considerations does not produce an understanding of the face as something simple, predictable, fixed or self-evident. Rather, this inescapable foundation in biology and neurology provides the mechanisms which allow the face to be as dynamic, unstable, and multiplex as it is.
Notes
1. Of course, hands are already privileged sites of communication through their complex role in gesture (see Gallagher, 2005: 107ff.; McNeill, 1996, 2005). It is not accidental that the only true non-verbal language is sign language; no other part of the body aside from the vocal apparatus and hands possesses the level of flexibility and fine motor control necessary to produce grammar. It is true that sign language engages more than one part of the body, but in this regard 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 central role played by hands or mouth. 2. The common assumption that spoken language has driven such anatomical changes is perhaps indicative of the more general privileging of language and linguistic structures at the expense of affective and embodied communication, apparent in disciplines as diverse as critical theory and cognitive science. Of course the development of language can be accepted to have influenced the evolution of the face; however, it would be a mistake to see language as the driver of the faces evolution. Michael Corballis (2002) makes a persuasive case for spoken language having appeared relatively late in our evolution, following a period in which gesture and facial expression were dominant. The very absence of the machinery of speech in other primates, despite their capacity for seemingly quite sophisticated communication, provides support for this argument. 3. The claims of Deleuze and Guattari notwithstanding, the examples of specialized perception of the face used throughout this article do suggest that human perception differentiates faces from the rest of our bodies at a fundamental level. Furthermore, while infants only days old exhibit a preference for realistic depictions of faces as opposed to ones whose features have been scrambled, it is only after the 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 hereditary prosopagnosic is the neurologist Oliver Sacks.

Downloaded from bod.sagepub.com at Universitetsbiblioteket i Bergen on December 14, 2011

What Is a Face? & 23

5. Shaun Gallagher observes that explanations such as theory of mind conceive of communicative interaction between two people as a process that takes place between two Cartesian minds. It assumes that ones understanding involves a retreat into a realm of theoria or simulacra, into a set of internal mental 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 behaviour in terms of theory of mind than that of others (while still, presumably, being perfectly aware that they themselves have a mental life) (Gopnik and Meltzoff, 1995: 177ff.). See also Erin Mannings discussion of autistic interaction in Body & Society 15(3) which, while different from mine in important ways, also suggests that it is irreconcileable with a contained, unified verbal self (Manning, 2009: 40).

References
Angel, M. (1997) Life on Mars? Faciality as a Research Diagram, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 24(3): 54358. Baron-Cohen, S. (1995) Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. BBC (2004) Woman Blessed by the Holy Toast, BBC News, 17 November, URL (consulted 15 December 2009): http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4019295.stm. Bruce, V. and A. Young (1986) Understanding Facial Recognition, British Journal of Psychology 77(3): 30527. Chevalier-Skolnikoff, S. (1973) Facial Expression of Emotion in Nonhuman Primates, pp. 1189 in P. Ekman (ed.) Darwin and Facial Expression: A Century of Research in Review. New York: Academic Press. Cole, J. (1997) About Face. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Corballis, M.C. (2002) From Hand to Mouth: The Origins of Language. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. de Haan, M., K. Humphreys and M.H. Johnson (2002) Developing a Brain Specialized for Face Perception: A Converging Methods Approach, Developmental Psychobiology 40(3): 20012. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Despret, V. (2004) The Body We Care For: Figures of Anthropo-Zoo-Genesis, Body & Society 10(23): 11134. Doherty-Sneddon, G., L. Bonner and V. Bruce (2001) Cognitive Demands of Face Monitoring: Evidence for Visuospatial Overload, Memory & Cognition 29(7): 90919. Dubois, S., B. Rossion, C. Schiltz, J.M. Bodart, C. Michel, R. Bruyer et al. (1999) Effect of Familiarity on the Processing of Human Faces, Neuroimage 9(3): 27889. Erickson, J. (1999) The Face and the Possibility of an Ethics of Performance, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 13(2): 521. Gallagher, S. (2005) How the Body Shapes the Mind. Oxford: Clarendon. Gopnik, A. and A.N. Meltzoff (1995) Minds, Bodies, and Persons: Young Childrens Understanding of the Self and Others as Reflected in Imitation and Theory of Mind Research, pp. 16686 in S.T. Parker, R.W. Mitchell and M.L. Boccia (eds) Self-Awareness in Animals and Humans: Developmental Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Guo, K., R.G. Robertson, S. Mahmoodi, Y. Tadmor and M.P. Young (2003) How Do Monkeys View Faces? A Study of Eye Movements, Experimental Brain Research 150(3): 36374. Kagan, A. (2007) Face to Face with an Enactive Approach: A Sensorimotor Account of Face Detection and Recognition, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 6(4): 50925.

Downloaded from bod.sagepub.com at Universitetsbiblioteket i Bergen on December 14, 2011

24 & Body & Society Vol. 17 No. 4

Kanwisher, N. and M. Moscovitch (2000) The Cognitive Neuroscience of Face Processing: An Introduction, Cognitive Neuropsychology 17(1): 111. Kircher, T.T.J., C. Senior, M.L. Phillips, S. Rabe-Hesketh, P.J. Benson, E.T. Bullmore et al. (2001) Recognizing Ones Own Face, Cognition 78(1): B1B15. Levinas, E. (1988) Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Lutz, C.K., J.S. Lockard, V.M. Gunderson and K.S. Grant (1998) Infant Monkeys Visual Responses to Drawings of Normal and Distorted Faces, American Journal of Primatology 44(2): 16974. Magli, P. (1989) The Face and the Soul, pp. 86127 in M. Feher, R. Naddaff and N. Tazi (eds) Fragments for a History of the Human Body. New York: Zone. Manning, E. (2009) What If It Didnt All Begin and End with Containment? Toward a Leaky Sense of Self, Body & Society 15(3): 3345. Massumi, B. (2002) Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. McNeill, D. (1996) Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal about Thought. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. McNeill, D. (2005) Gesture and Thought. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Meltzoff, A.N. and M.K. Moore (1983) Newborn Infants Imitate Adult Facial Gestures, Child Development 54(3): 7029. Merleau-Ponty M. (2002 [1962]) Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge. NASA (2001) Unmasking the Face on Mars, 24 May, URL (consulted April 2011): http://science. nasa.gov/headlines/y2001/ast24may_1.htm. Premack, D. and G. Woodruff (1978) Does the Chimpanzee Have a Theory of Mind?, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 1(4): 51526. Redican, W.K. (1982) An Evolutionary Perspective on Human Facial Displays, pp. 21280 in P. Ekman (ed.) Emotion in the Human Face. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rhodes, G., L. Jeffery, T.L. Wilson, C.W.G. Clifford and K. Nakayama (2003) Fitting the Mind to the World: Face Adaptation and Attractiveness Aftereffects, Psychological Science 14(6): 55866. Rinn, W.E. (1991) Neuropsychology of Facial Expression, pp. 330 in R.S. Feldman and B. Rime (eds) Fundamentals of Nonverbal Behavior: Studies in Emotion and Social Interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rushton, R. (2002) What Can a Face Do? On Deleuze and Faces, Cultural Critique 51: 21937. Schmidt, K.L. and J.F. Cohn (2001) Human Facial Expression as Adaptations: Evolutionary Questions in Facial Expression Research, Yearbook of Physical Anthropology 44: 324. Shrine of the Miracle Tortilla (2006) URL (consulted 15 December 2009): http://www.roadsideamerica.com/attract/NMLAKtortilla.html. Shusterman, R. (2008) Body Consciousness: A Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sinha, P., B.J. Balas, Y. Ostrovsky and R. Russell (2006) Face Recognition by Humans, pp. 25791 in W. Zhao and R. Chellappa (eds) Face Processing: Advanced Modeling and Methods. San Diego, CA: Academic Press. Sky Image Lab (2003) Jesus Nebula, URL (consulted 15 December 2009): http://www.skyimagelab. com/jesus-nebula.html. Slaughter, V., M. Heron and S. Sim (2002) Development of Preferences for the Human Body Shape in Infancy, Cognition 85(3): B71B81. van den Berg, J.H. (1952) The Human Body and the Significance of Human Movement: A Phenomenological Study, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 13(2): 15983. Webster, M.A., D. Kaping, Y. Mizokami and P. Duhamel (2004) Adaption to Natural Facial Categories, Nature 428(6982): 55761.

Downloaded from bod.sagepub.com at Universitetsbiblioteket i Bergen on December 14, 2011

What Is a Face? & 25

Wegenstein, B. (2002) Getting Under the Skin, Or, How Faces Have Become Obsolete, Configurations 10(2): 22159. Wilson, H.R., G. Loffler and F. Wilkinson (2002) Synthetic Faces, Face Cubes, and the Geometry of Face Space, Vision Research 42(27): 290923.

Daniel Black lectures in the School of English, Communications and Performance Studies at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. His research focuses on the relationship between embodiment and technology. [email: daniel.black@monash.edu]

Downloaded from bod.sagepub.com at Universitetsbiblioteket i Bergen on December 14, 2011

TITLES PUBLISHED IN ASSOCIATION WITH THEORY, CULTURE & SOCIETY

Downloaded from bod.sagepub.com at Universitetsbiblioteket i Bergen on December 14, 2011