Abstract Machines of Faciality

The mute, vacant face may be commonplace in modernist portraiture, but there is another, quite different kind of late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century face that bears consideration. If the traditionally expressive face signifies a subjectivity or soul emanating outward, and if the modern expressionless visage invites the projection of the artist's or viewer's subjectivity onto its surface, this third order of faciality selects its subjectivity from a menu of multiple choices, rends and punctures the once-inviolable surface of the human countenance, and establishes what might be called a participatory theater of false smiles, feigned psyches, faked characterizations, and fictional souls. In short, it is a theatrical face that dons its personalities as easily as it assumes its masks. The dramas range from the heat of passionate excess to the coolness of subdued irony, and they are customarily played before an audience presumed to be willingly complicitous in the artifice. Unlike the blank, modern faces discussed in the previous essay, with their isolated iconicity, faces in this scheme are actively narrative and the products of a dramaturgy consciously engaged with the camera and the viewer. It is as though the hysterics and cataleptics whose seizures were triggered before an audience in Jean-Martin Charcot's theater of the passions had deliberately contrived their own reactive performances (many believed they had, in fact). In place of Oskar Schlemmer's drawing Man the Dancer (Human Emotions), the key to this portraiture could be Egon Schiele's Grimacing Self-Portrait of 1910. Here, according to historian Klaus Schröder, the "conspiratorial understanding" created by the model's direct gaze at the viewer is thoroughly undermined and rebuffed by the subject's grimace: a toothless, gaping snarl that "blocks all attempts to interpret the nature of a human individual through physiognomy." We are back in the realm of Duchenne de Boulogne's old and toothless, grimacing male patient, only now the patient deliberately grimaces without the aid of electroshock.

Of course, there is a degree of dramatics in nearly all portrait photography. In one of the earliest American treatises on photographic art, the daguerreian artist Marcus Aurelius Root advised portrait photographers to suggest certain roles or characterizations to their sitters in order to arouse desired expressions. Contemporary portraitist Richard Avedon has asserted that "portraiture is performance, and like any performance, in the balance of its effects it is good or bad, not natural or unnatural." The theatricality under discussion in this essay, however, is far more mannered and insistent than the poses and heightened moods of traditional portraiture. This kind of theater is what differentiates, say, Julia Margaret Cameron's portrait of Mrs. Herbert Duckworth, née Julia Jackson (1867) from her depiction of a wistful angel in The Angel at the Tomb (1870), or a self-portrait of F. Holland Day from his performance as the dying Christ in The Seven Last Words (1898). Or consider the clinical depiction of a rigid cataleptic patient horizontally supported in space by the backs of two chairs in Paul Regnard's Lethargy: (Muscular Hyperexcitability) (1880) as a foil to Bruce Nauman's Failing to Levitate in the Studio (1966), a double exposure in which the artist is pictured both propped up by two chair seats and haplessly fallen to the ground.

Regnard's image is the result of a logical and analytical, even if naïve, enterprise that firmly trusted in the value of probing a patient's inner nature. Nauman's farce, on the other hand, dramatically symbolizes the distance our culture has come from the positivism of Duchenne's and Charcot's investigations. The fundamental lessons of modernism have been that certainty, even subjective certainty, is doomed to collapse, and that human nature can be explored only through ambiguity and irony. And it is with these two tactics that many twentieth- century artists, from the Surrealists Claude Cahun and Salvador Dalí to the postmodernists Nauman and Cindy Sherman, have created their most memorable excursions into physiognomic uncertainties.

Faces denote the culture that surrounds them, and modern culture has been progressively viewed as discontinuous, fragmented, and ruptured. In the late twentieth century Cartesian logic may not be capable of determining the correct response, the laws of classical thermodynamics no longer hold, instead of scientific certainty there are the "uncertainty principle" and a "chaos theory," and any cosmology or metaphysics suggesting anything approaching definitiveness is largely suspect. According to British novelist J. G. Ballard, "we live in quantified non-linear terms— we switch on television sets, switch them off half an hour later, speak on the telephone, read magazines, dream and so forth. We don't live our lives in linear terms in the sense that the Victorians did." Nonlinear, atomized, illogical, and lacking any pretense to objectivity, modern life has become a "dynamic system of local, interdependent, self-updating movements, perceptions and gestures," where the sensation of a fluid consciousness "sets an axe to the roots of formal logic and ends by making it impossible to know even the simplest things that the nineteenth century took for granted." Within such a cultural experience, fixed certainty of the laws of physiognomic expression—Duchenne's immutable and universal "gymnastics of the soul"—has given way to a view of the face as a matrix of constantly shifting, multiple identities at once true and false, assumed and genuine, feigned and sincere. In 1965 the American novelist William S. Burroughs said it perfectly: "Nothing is true— everything is permitted."

Although physiognomy and phrenology have been all but discredited and debunked during the twentieth century, science has continued to apply progressively more complex technologies to probing the face's significance and charting our recognition of its emotions, tangling the issues even further. Now neurosurgeons use electrodes to record electrical signals from the individual neurons in the human brain that create memories. Some of these neurons, they have discovered, respond to a single emotion, others to identity or gender; and a single neuron in the hippocampus reacts with different intensities to specific facial expressions. Researchers at the Science University of Tokyo have invented a "face robot," a life- sized, soft plastic model of a female head with a video camera in its left eye, designed to "detect emotions in the person it's 'looking at' by sensing changes in the spatial arrangement of the person's eyes, nose, eyebrows, and mouth." After comparing these configurations with its database of standard facial expressions, the robot guesses the person's emotion and adjusts its plastic face "into an appropriate emotional response."

Three centuries ago, Descartes pointed to six elemental passions of the soul; now the face robot has an expressive repertoire of the same number of (synthetic) emotions: "anger, sadness, fear, surprise, happiness and disgust." With machines like this, we may very well be approaching a world anticipated by Masamune Shirow's futurist manga, Ghost in the Shell, in which a cyborg questions her nature: "Sometimes I wonder if I've really already died, and what I think of as 'me' isn't really just an artificial personality comprised of a prosthetic body and a cyberbrain." Writing about Inez van Lamsweerde's portraits of young girls with adult mouths seamlessly morphed onto their faces, critic Christiane Schneider similarly asks, "How can we find the point where the prosthesis ends and the homunculus begins?" At the end of the century, machines have fully become a dominant metaphor of the human. This chapter is thus about the fluid nature of the contemporary "me" that proffers a multitude of emotional expressions, as well as the synthetic theatricality of those expressions complicitously emoted by the postmodern "we."