Faciality/Spaciality: Writing the BwO
 

Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus provide us with an interesting angle on "spaciality." In their chapter "Year Zero: Faciality" they see the face as a "white wall/black hole" system of significance and subjectification. The face provides the wall that the signifier reflects off of, and provides a frame for distinction, bifurcation, allowing black holes (spatialities) to show-up as a necessary elements of subjectification. 

The face is part of a surface-holes, "hol(e)y" surface system. This system should under no circumstances be confused with the volume-cavity system proper to the body. The head is included in the body, but the face is not. The face is a surface: facial traits, lines, wrinkles; long face, square face, triangular face; the face is a map, .... 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 (170).
The abstract machine that produces faciality is the binary system of thought itself [hence our playful rethinking of order/chaos here]. And it is not just the face that is at risk. The body can be facialized, as can the world. "Hand, breast, stomach, penis, vagina, thigh, leg, and foot, all come to be facialized. Fetishism, erotomania, etc., are inseparable from the processes of facialization" (170). It is not a process of making the other body parts resemble a face, (no anthropomorphism is at work), but an unconscious, machinic process that runs the body across the binary system of signification and subjectification. "The role of the face is not as a model or image, but as an overcoding of all the decoded parts" (170). The face represents a deterritorialization..."it removes the head from the stratum of the organism, human or animal, and connects it to another strata, such as significance or subjectification" (172). Thus, deterritorialization always needs a partner, a second element to form a binary system in which each of the elements reterritorializes the other in the process of deterritorialization. Just as capitalism deterritorializes the unconscious by coding it as schizophrenic, it also tries to reterritorialize it via the medico-juridical institutions which attempt to reinscribe the ideology of individuality.

This process of deterritorialization and reterritorialization is a co-conspirator with the writing of significations--"the power of film operating through the face of the star and the close up: the power of television" (175). The power of television, of technology, of the computer is the power of signification, faciality. "It is not the individuality of the face that counts but the efficacy of the ciphering it makes possible, and in what cases it makes it possible" (175). What D&G are calling for is a body without organs. One might suspect that this is akin to the facialization of the body, the detailing of characteristics, an emptying of the body into the system of signs and subjects. But one must not mistake the system of structures as a surFACE metaphor. The body without organs is just that--a body. "If we consider primitive societies, we see that there is very little that operates through the face: their semiotic is nonsignifying, nonsubjective, essentially collective, polyvocal, and corporeal, playing on very diverse forms and substances. This polyvocality operates through bodies, their volumes, their internal cavities, their variable exterior connections and coordinates (territories)" (175). This is the paradox of order and chaos. This is the post-structuralist paradox--everything is determined but remains open--everything is caught in abstract signifying systems but also structures of material bodies. The paradox is that there is no binary here. They are one in the same--order is chaos, chaos is order. The computer combines the two: it signifies with faces but is polyvocal and body centered. Primitives have a semiotic, but one that signifies bodies. "Paintings , tattoos, or marks on the skin embrace the multidimensionality of bodies. Even masks ensure the head's belonging to the body, rather than making it a face" (176). Order and chaos play a dual role. They are faces and masks. They signify significance and subjectification, and they ensure a link to the body.

Paradoxically, "the semiotic of the signifier and the subjective never operates through bodies. It is absurd to claim to relate the signifier to the body... it can be related only to a body that has already been entirely facialized" (181). The "superlinearity proper to language" can not accommodate a polyvocal or multidimensional body. It is not "by chance that linguistics always, and very quickly, encounters the problem of homonymy, or ambiguous statements that it then subjects to a set of binary reductions...the new semiotic needs systematically to destroy the whole range of primitive semiotic systems, even if it retains some of their debris in well-defined enclosures" (180). This is why some theorists see us moving back to a sense of orality in the new media age. The homonymy and polyvocality of the media seem to necessitate it. But Greg Ulmer got it right by seeing not the return of an old semiotic system, but the emerging of a new one--videocy. The modern semiotic suppressed the body; it facialized bodies. But the linear model is fading away, giving way to a new semiotic that holds elements of facialization and elements of the body (spatialization). It is true that even masks can assume the function of faciality. For D&G, "Either the mask assures the head's belonging to the body, its becoming animal, as was the case in primitive societies. Or, as is the case, now, the mask assures the erection, the construction of the face, the facialization of the head and the body: the mask is now the face itself, the abstraction or operation of the face. The inhumanity of the face" (181). But this to me presents itself as an either/or fallacy--as they well know. It follows if one is working off of the binary of primitive/modern. But what is needed in the coming age of videocy/technology is an ability to see past this white wall/black hole bifurcation. D&G characterize the situation in terms of the dialectic "despotic and authoritarian concrete assemblage of power --triggering of the abstract machine of faciality, white wall/black hole--installation of the new semiotic of significance and subjectification on that holey surface" (181). This dialectic, however, will have to be extended in order to accommodate videocy. What is at stake here is the dominance of a metaphor- linearity or a rhizomatic/web metaphor. And this is exactly the situation they take up. 

The problem comes with how to break out of faciality- of signification. How does one signify a body without making it a face? How does one display a face that is also a mask?

It requires a whole line of writing, picturality, musicality [videocy!]...For it is through writing that you become animal, it is through color that you become imperceptible, it is through music that you become hard and memoryless, simultaneously animal and imperceptible... art is never an end in itself; it is only a tool for blazing life lines... all of those real becomings that are not produced only in art,...all of those active escapes that do not consist in fleeing into art, taking refuge in art, and all of those positive deterritorializations that never reterritorialize on art, but instead sweep it away with them toward the realms of the asignifying, asubjective, and faceless (bold emphasis mine, 187).
The question finally raises it head explicitly here: How can writing this way be possible in the age if videocy with our new technology? How do computers, more specifically writing on/with computers, allow for the creation of this type of art? Can it deterritorialize without reterritorializing? D&G recognize that escaping faciality is not a simple matter. "Madness is a definite danger" (188). The schizophrenic [who is never fully reterritorialized], the drug addict, the masochist, are all potential outcomes. We are all born into a state of faciality but we must use it as "a tool for which a new use must be invented...not in order to return to a primitive head, but to invent the combinations by which [the new] traits connect with landscapacity traits that have themselves been freed from the landscape and with traits of picturality and musicality that have also been freed from their respective codes" (189). The new rhizomatic, chaotic metaphor frees traits from their rigid landscape/faciality, the new technology can allow these traits a freedom to recombine. This is a call for a new writing, that now has a new medium. The medium is the metaphor for a reconceptualization of the body, what it means to be a body, and what it means to be a body caught in a system of signification. The body can function under the sign of an abstract machine as a negative or positive deterritortialization. Deterritorialization can take the body and place it in a signifying system, facialize it, or can take the body from its facial landscape and allow it a chance for reterritorialization under a new "sign." D&G are not falling prey to a nostalgia for a regression to primitive humanity. 
In truth, there are only inhumanities, humans are made exclusively of inhumanities, but very different ones, of very different natures and speeds. Primitive inhumanity, prefacial inhumanity, has all the polyvocality of a semiotic in which the head is a part of the body, a body that is already deterritorialized relatively and plugged into becomings-spiritual/animal. Beyond the face lies an altogether different inhumanity: no longer that of primitive heads, but of "probe-heads"; here, cutting edges of deterritorialization become operative and lines of deterritorialization positive and absolute, forming strange new becomings, new polyvocalities. Become clandestine, make rhizome everywhere, for the wonder of a nonhuman life to be created (190-1).
What will this new technological post-human, post-facial, rhizomatic form of strange becomings entail? Bodies without organs? BwO are bodies without signification. Bodies that have "sufficiently dismantled [its] self[es]"..."The BwO is what remains when you take everything away" (151). It is when the body is emptied, as if by torture. As an emptied space, "a BwO is made in such a way that it can be occupied, populated only by intensities... The BwO causes intensities to pass; it produces and distributes them in a spatium [spatiality] that is itself intensive, lacking extension. It is not space, nor is it in space; it is matter that occupies space to a given degree- to the degree corresponding to the intensities produced" (153). In this sense the BwO is the space in-between the structures, the meeting point of structure that is neither presence nor absence. It is the space that the body occupies, the space within the space, the space that is not space but is productive. The BwO is not necessarily empty. It is full with intensities, energy, it is the point of flow (chaos) within structures (order). It is in these structures, this plane of consistency, that the BwO can encompass the paradox of face and mask. "Anarchy and unity are one and the same thing, not the unity of the One, but a much stranger unity that applies only to the multiple" (158). 

This complex relation between order and chaos is the topic/topoi of my project here. It is important that we not mistake the BwO for the external body of characteristics facialized, externalized, and categorized in a logos of exposition [an Aristotelian rhetoric]. "The BwO is not at all opposite of the organs... The enemy is organism." It is the body as a site of "forces, essences, substances, elements, remissions, productions; manners of being or modalities as produced intensities, vibrations, breaths..." (158). But this state of unified anarchy (ordered chaos) cannot be reached if one stays "locked into the organism...into a stratum that blocks the flows and anchors us in this, our world" (158). "The BwO is that glacial reality where the alluvions, sedimentations, coagulations, foldings, and recoiling that compose the organism- and also a signification and subject- occur" (159). It is the position in "space," in structures, that allows bodies, individualities, subjects, et al.. to flow--there has to be something to flow through. Subjectivity is the facial mask--the entity that at once embodies signification and materiality. "Dismantling the organism has never meant killing yourself, but rather opening the body to connections that presuppose an entire assemblage, circuits, conjunctions, levels and thresholds, passages and distributions of intensity, and territories and deterritorializations measured with the craft of a surveyor" (160). The BwO is "necessarily a Place, necessarily a Plane, necessarily a Collectivity (assembling elements, things, plants, animals, tools, people, powers, fragments of all of these; for it is not "my" body without organs, instead the "me" is on it, or what remains of me, unalterable and changing form, crossing thresholds" (161).

"Thus the BwO is never yours or mine. It is always a body. It is more projective than it is regressive" (164). 

I am offering up this project as an example of writing, a writing that puts linearity, order, faciality, at the service of rhizomatic, chaotic spatiality (but only to a certain extent). One layer of the text is linear, ordered. Another layer is "random" chaos. Yet another is rhizomatic-- filling in the spaces in-between. Order and chaos are already implicated in each other. Use it to your/our advantage. Layers give body. A body that is difficult to reterritorialize. A BwO. Even though I talk little of writing in this project...IT IS ALL ABOUT WRITING. We must write as if projecting. Not just our sentience, but the world. The world that flows through us. Combine, recombine, deterritorialize, reterritorialize. We cannot regress to orality or literacy, only project our "probing heads" into videocy.