A stone mask from c. 7000 BC
Musée Bible et Terre Sainte (Paris)
I.
Worn by peoples belonging to many different cultures since the very earliest of times and for a wide variety of reasons - ceremonial and practical, sacred and profane - the mask is that which is más que la cara and which seems to mock the very idea of a real face.
Indeed, it ultimately exposes the shocking truth that the human face isn't a unique natural formation, but a type of social machine that covers and overcodes the front of the head and, eventually, the entire body, thus ensuring that any asignifying or non-subjective forces and flows arising from the libidinal chaos of the latter are neutralized in advance.
As Oscar Wilde knew very well: we are least ourselves when we present our grinning white face to the world and speak in our own name; it is only when we put on a mask and dare to disguise the self we have been given, that we find the courage to speak with free anonymity.
II.
Like Wilde, Nietzsche also asserts the philosophical profundity of masks and says that every artist recognises the need to wear such. Indeed, the greatest of men often don monstrous masks in order to best inscribe themselves in the memories, dreams and affections of humanity.
Men who love these seductive creatures of veiled appearance and cosmetic disguise, are fated to seek their souls or uncover their nakedness in vain. Yet, it is precisely such women who are often best able to (fetishistically) arouse male desire.
Remember: after the orgy, the masked ball ...
The face is, precisely, a 'unique natural formation', of course – a one-off assemblage and unrepeatable creation, since no two faces are exactly alike. And why, contra Wilde and/or Dr Alexander, rather than neutralising or anaesthetising in advance the body’s libidinal drives and pulsions, can the face not be seen, at least to some extent, as their intensive aesthetic particularisation?
ReplyDeleteNietzsche's gendered aphoristic statement about masks in Beyond Good and Evil interestingly links the masking of the self with the depth of an individual's shame and the shape of his fate:
'A man whose sense of shame has some profundity encounters his destinies and delicate decisions, too, on paths which few ever reach [...] Such a concealed man who instinctively needs speech for silence and for burial in silence and who is inexhaustible in his evasion of communication, wants and sees to it that a mask of him roams in his place through the hearts and heads of his friends.’
Psychic depth, that is to say, generates the need for a kind of supersessive self-displacement, dissimulation and disguise – the shallow, presumably, can unselfconsciously rejoice in the natural vitality of their visages. As such, ‘every profound spirit needs a mask: even more, around every profound spirit a mask is growing continually...'
Thanks for this Simon.
DeleteIt's not quite true that the face is unique in the manner you assert; one might remind you, for example, of identical twins, clones, or doppelgängers ...
The fact is, there are a limited number of faces, so there's a fair chance in a world of seven billion people that someone, somewhere looks just like you (even if not exactly the same in every detail).
Of course, I'm not really concerned with faces as natural facts, but as social machines that belong to a world of modern subjects whom they help invent.
Mayn't it be the case that primitive peoples needed masks because, technically, they had no faces; only heads. Thus masks didn't have a disguise function for them as might be imagined (and as they do for us).
The Nietzsche quote from BGE is one of the most enigmatic in his writings (to my mind at least). But I was paraphrasing an earlier remark on masks from "Human, All Too Human".
Further to the above ...
ReplyDeleteUnder the influence of Nietzsche, a magnificently disturbing passage in Rilke's solitary novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, teaches that that there are, in fact, many more faces than people - since people have several. These surplus faces may be stored, or passed onto their children, or even worn by their dogs. Other people go through faces with compulsive rapidity, Rilke/Malte reports, to be tragically confounded when they reach their last one, worn-out and riddled with holes, through which the ‘lining’ or 'non-face' – Rilke’s poetic signifiers for the inhuman facelessness that underwrites all faces - nightmarishly shows. (One thinks here of the popular adage that, after a certain age, one gets the face one deserves.)
‘But the woman, the woman: she had completely fallen into herself, forward into her hands. It was on the corner of rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. I began to walk quietly as soon as I saw her. [...] The street was too empty; its emptiness had gotten bored and pulled my steps out from under my feet and clattered around in them, all over the street, as if they were wooden clogs. The woman sat up, frightened, she pulled out of herself, too quickly, too violently, so that her face was left in her two hands. I could see it lying there: its hollow form. It cost me an indescribable effort to stay with those two hands, not to look at what had been torn out of them. I shuddered to see a face from the inside, but I was much more afraid of that bare flayed head waiting there, faceless.’
Later, when the protagonist is under fire-lit observation, his face is both shadowed and illuminated - since we are creatures of fire and ash - as a cipher of transhistoric fate, replete with multiple personality.
'[...] his face became light and dark, light and dark, and now the other man saw his face as he had never seen it before. He was shown what possibilities lay in this face: the mask of very many great and remarkable fates emerged from its shapes and sank back again into the depths of an unknown life.'
Faces, it appears, are both materialised and metaphysical, real and spectral.
Again, many thanks for this. It's a brilliant passage; Rilke never disappoints, always amazes.
DeleteI think he wrote a poem also about the manner in which the world is contained in the face(s) of his beloved, but easily lost just the same.