The face has long held a privileged and determining place within Western metaphysics – as those who choose to veil, hide, or disguise the face are now beginning to discover. There is, we might say, an entire politics of the face.
We like to think that our face is individual and unique. But it isn’t. It’s essentially a type of social machine that overcodes not just the head, but the entire body, ensuring that any asignifying or non-subjective forces and flows arising from the libidinal chaos of the latter are neutralized in advance. The smile and all our other familiar facial expressions are merely types of conformity with the dominant reality. It might be said that we love our faces with the same passion that slaves love their chains; who, after all, likes to lose face?
And yet Deleuze and Guattari insist that if men and women still have a destiny, it is to escape the face, becoming-imperceptible or clandestine in the process; something explored by D. H. Lawrence in the first version of his Lady Chatterley novel via the use of an item of clothing that has been made the focus of great concern in countries with a significant Muslim minority. One evening, Connie retires to her bedroom and places "a thick veil over her face, like a Mohammedan woman, leaving only her eyes" as she stands naked before her mirror, looking at her "slow, golden-skinned, silent body".
What is interesting is not merely that she is seeking out an impersonal self that might exist "apart from the face with all its complexities and frustrations and vulgarity!", but that Connie is prepared to become-minoritarian (non-White, non-Western, non-Christian) in order to do so. In other words, she is prepared to sacrifice her social status, her class and her ethnic and cultural identity, so that she might be effaced in some manner.
In the final version of the novel, however, Connie is no longer prepared to be quite so reckless. Wishing to retain her independence, she fears that effacement will result in becoming subservient. It is precisely this point that troubles those European politicians and commentators who have allowed themselves to become increasingly exercised over the wearing of a piece of cloth. Obviously, the debate relates not only to religion, but also to class, gender, and, perhaps most importantly, race. For as Deleuze and Guattari point out:
"The face is not universal. It is not even that of the white man; it is White Man himself, with his broad white cheeks ... The face is Christ ... he invented the facialization of the entire body and spread it everywhere ..."
Thus the face is a culturally specific idea: it arises at the zero point of Western history, i.e. at the beginning of the Christian era. As Western moral culture has spread and exerted its power over the rest of the world, so too have other non-white, non-Christian, peoples been given faces and inscribed a place within the universal system. No one is allowed to deviate or to go unidentified, unsubjectified. No one is allowed the luxury of anonymity. In an important passage, Deleuze and Guattari write:
"European racism ... has never operated by exclusion, or by the designation of someone else as Other ... Racism operates by the determination of degrees of deviance in relation to the White-Man face, which endeavours to integrate nonconforming traits ... sometimes tolerating them at given places under given conditions ... sometimes erasing them ... From the viewpoint of racism, there is no exterior, there are no people on the outside. There are only people who should be like us and whose crime is not to be. ... Racism never detects the particles of the other; it propagates waves of sameness until those who resist identification have been wiped out ..."
What this passage allows us to appreciate is that the issue over the veil is by no means a trivial one within white European culture: it might be articulated in the language of ‘women’s liberation’ and ‘human rights’, but what’s really at stake is the hegemony of a system that accords those freedoms, subjective identities, and happy white faces in the first place.
- D. H. Lawrence, The First and Second Lady Chatterley Novels, ed. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn, (CUP, 1999), p. 18.
- Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, (The Athlone Press, 1996), pp. 176, 178.
