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Faciality
and facetiousness ( my comments)
I first read the 'plateau' on faciality in Thousand Plateaus
(TP) I had taken the advice in the
Introduction to consider each plateau as offering
a self contained argument, and was immediately
disappointed to find that that section started
with a reference to an earlier discussion about
signifiance and significance somewhere else—it was
not actually referenced of course. I then
tried to make sense of the ludicrously aphoristic
and gnomic sentences about white screens and black
holes, 'four eyed machines', and
territorialization, but it soon dawned on me that
all sorts of references were being made not only
to other sections of the book, but to other books
that Deleuze and Guattari had read (only partially
referenced). Eventually I realized that they
were also referring to their own earlier works, or
even to conversations they had had among
themselves on various topics. In other
words, the whole thing was really a kind of
private reverie, two people putting down comments
in a kind of joint diary, making sense among
themselves, no doubt, but leaving any reader
outside the conversation completely baffled—and
pretty pissed off.
Very recently, I have read Guattari's book The Machinic
Unconscious,(MU) and he has a
lengthy chapter (4) on faciality. This is
long winded, really superficial in its arguments,
and again not entirely well referenced, but it is
an improvement on Thousand Plateaus.
Guattari says he wrote this book before working
with Deleuze producing TP, and it was not
published in English until 2011, but it did emerge
from a series of collective discussions that he
was having with Deleuze. Chapter 4
made much more sense in the context of a general
discussion about modes of subjectification and
typical patterns of semiological activity in
capitalism in the first three chapters. I'm
still not claiming to have understood Guattari,
and privately I think much of it is overblown and
paranoid, but he argues that faciality is a
crucial way of rendering the endless semiotic
possibilities in an domesticated binary way. That
is probably why the binary system of white
screen/black holes is discussed as amajor
component of faciality. Although it is
obscure, it is much clearer than the plateau in Thousand
Plateaus. It must have been the same
collective discussions that our heroes were
referring to in TP., but implicitly,
without telling we innocent readers
The 'four-eyed machine', for example, is
traced in MU to the work of unnamed
'Anglo Saxon psychologists' (89) who exploit the
disciplinary power of interaction between two
people face-to-face. Once you know that, you
can start to interpret some of the gnomic remarks,
but if you didn't know that, you would be forced
to read the phrase as some kind of evocative
poetry, designed to trigger your own memories,
perhaps of being called 'four eyes'if you wore
spectacles as a child, or thinking of being
interrogated by two people at a police station, or
whatever.
I am aware that I am preferring academic meanings
to poetic ones, or should I say
(pre)ferring. But that is how the work of
Deleuze and Guattari is also read—as serious
philosophy, and I have no doubt that reducing it
all to poetry is as dubious as reducing it or to a
kind of fashionable cultural Marxism. At the
very least, commentators should make up their
minds: either warn students that there are only
poetic meanings in the sections, or help them to
find the context for some of the more obscure
utterances. What is required is a
hermeneutic approach, in the classic sense,
weeding out the poetry from the philosophy, just
theologians had to do with God's words in the
Bible. To insist that we recognize the
poetic bits as somehow integral to the
philosophical bits, as some sort of anti
positivist or anti fascist trope is a conceit,
perfectly acceptable if you are a leisured and
high powered academic, with the time and
inclination to be amused by the style, but pretty
well inaccessible to the non elite. And
delberately so, as the final insult!
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