The Face as Artefact. Towards an Artefactual Genealogy of the Portrait

In: Reconfiguring the Portrait, eds. Abraham Geil and Tomas Jirsa. Edinburgh UP 2023, pp. 61-79

The Face as Artefact: Towards an Artefactual Genealogy of the Portrait

 Sigrid Weigel

The most we can do is weave a legend around this man Kafka. It is as if he had spent his entire life wondering what he looked like, without ever discovering that there are such things as mirrors. (Benjamin 1999: 495)

We do not know what the faces of people who lived in earlier eras

looked like.1 We have no idea with what kind of facial expressions

they addressed themselves to their contemporaries and what their

smile, their sadness, their fear, or their anger might have looked like.

And we cannot be certain whether we would consider the faces of

the people living in the past to be beautiful and pleasant or whether

we would rather turn away. We know their features only through

pictorial re/presentations:2 from sculptures, whose stony eye sockets

look at us as if they were blind; from grave masks with their ‘dead

gazes’, which appear strange or mysterious to us; or from paintings,

the art from which portrait emerged.3 The latter, standing for the

idea of a faithful picture of a person with individual facial features,

has become the ideal of the likeness: the portrait as similar image of

a living model, in which the face is captured as a seemingly natural

expression of his or her character. Our image of the human being is

based not insignificantly on the history of images.

While the genre of portraiture in painting is the ideal image of the

human face, it is also an exception within a vast manifold of facial

images: faces that have been handed down to us from times before

the age of pictorial portraiture, faces from the history of science and

medicine, media faces, surveillance pictures, and deconstructions in

modern art. We are familiar with faces mainly in the form of pictorial

artefacts.

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The Human Face – Artefact and Image of the Humanum

Human faces never stand for themselves alone; they receive their meaning

through a vis-à-vis, the interplay between seeing and being seen,

that is, the constellation between one’s own face and the face of the

Other – or even the mirror image. The double semantics of face in

German, Gesicht as sight (Sicht) and visage (Angesicht, literally ‘being

seen’), corresponds to this reciprocity of the gaze. A face that is not

looked at by anyone loses its meaning as a visage; it is merely that part

of the head that is concerned with sensory perception, food intake, and

speech production. It is only through looking back that the front of

the head becomes a visage – a human face. Yet this description should

not be confused with the idea of a natural face; it does not presume

any necessary opposition between natural face and artefact. When,

according to a developmental perspective (Lemche 2002; Adamson

and Frick 2003; Weigel 2017b), the intersubjective exchange of glances

and expressions forms the primal facial experience of the infant and its

development into an empathic creature, this primal scene of the human

face is later superimposed by facial patterns of different social contexts

and images from the cultural history of re/presentations.

Today, the image that looks at me from the mirror and the features

of the Other are part of an endless loop with countless re/presentations

from news, photos, film, and art, from the internet and advertising

pictures in public spaces. How many faces might you see every

day? How many of them are perceived involuntarily and only fleetingly,

and how many are actually looked at? The latter are undoubtedly

the smallest part: those persons with whom looks or even words

are exchanged. The way we perceive and interpret these faces is essentially

shaped by artefacts. Our knowledge of the meaning of complex

facial expressions and often ambiguous countenances is generated by

pictures from all kinds of material images, analogue and digital likenesses,

and by the wealth of textual descriptions of the human face;

and this implicit, largely non-conscious knowledge gets projected on

to the physiological appearance of today’s people. In European cultural

history, the face – as the external image of a creature with affects

or feelings – has become the condensed image of the humanum, and

yet it is at the same time a composite image of countless pictorial

traditions, of descriptions and the features of contemporaries. Facial

expressions handed down through artefacts, those seen in real time,

and one’s own features and expressive gestures are difficult to distinguish

from one another.

Etymology and the history of concepts reveal a fascinating field

of interrelationships and tensions. While the idea of the person, for

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example, is derived from the mask in ancient Greek, the distinction

between mask and face was still unknown to the Greek prósopon,

which literally means ‘that which is vis-à-vis the eyes (of another)’.

In ancient times, face was ‘simply that side of the head that you

were looking at’. No distinction was made ‘between the natural face

and the artificial face’ (Weihe 2004: 35, 27). In contrast, the Latin

equivalent distinguished persona (mask) from facies (face) and vultus

(facial expression). The meaning of the face in history travels

between the idea of the face as the most important part of the human

body, the placeholder for the person, and an object of cultic practices

as well as artistic, medical, and everyday shaping. In the age of plastic

surgery and morphing, of digital face recognition and the robotic

simulation of facial expression patterns, the face’s recognisability has

become the object of (de-)composition techniques for everyone. The

present dominance of artificial faces sheds light on manufacturing

and framing processes in the past as well, on codes of expression

and cultural techniques of readability (see Weigel 2022). A purely

natural history of the face4 does not exist, for the face, together with

the body, is subject to numerous cultural techniques and semiotic

practices, and it is itself the medium of habituated gestures and techniques

of self-fashioning (see Greenblatt 1980). It is not only ‘social

media’ that makes us aware of the fact that the face’s history is above

all a media history: of mediated facial re/presentations as well as the

face as medium of self-representation, expression, and communication.

Recent surgical and digital procedures, meanwhile, render the

boundary of the media-theoretical distinction between ‘signs-in-thebody’

(they concern the language of the body or its excitation) and

‘signs-on-the-body’ (cultural corporeal practices of appearing, from

make-up via training to cosmetic surgery) obsolete (Schmidt 2003).

Despite the growing variety of media- and semio-techniques, the

dominant social pattern of interpreting the other’s face still refers to the

idea that it presents an outward expression of interiority – an enduring

impact of the fatal history of physiognomic knowledge, which

produced a whole register of pathologising and prejudiced readings of

faces (Schmölders 1995; Campe and Schneider 1996; Weigel 2017a).

Any face reading according to the model of Lavater’s search for character,

in which, as Goethe (1960) already noted, ‘man is broken down

into his elements’ in order to ‘trace his moral qualities’, is based on the

myth of an almost natural correspondence between the ‘inner’ image

and the person’s outer shape. In the present age of medical feasibility,

a similar interpretative pattern comes into play in reverse form, as it

were, when the desire for a correction of the facial shape by means of

plastic surgery is often motivated by a discrepancy between the ‘true

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personality’ and the outer appearance, with plastic surgery then having

the task of bringing the body into line with the inner self-image.5

This inversion is still based on the traditional and amazingly resistant

paradigm of faceism (see Zebrowitz 1997), according to which the

outside appearance is the key to penetrate the inaccessible and invisible

inside – both in individual physiognomies and in peoples, if not

‘races’, as condensed for example in Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s

dictum that the soul of the Greeks is described ‘in the face of the

Laocoön’ (1995: 20). To chart a way out of the trap of physiognomics

is a significant impetus for questioning faces as images of the

humanum with regard to their genesis as artefacts.

Visagéité – On the Problem of Face Destruction in the ‘Post-human’ Age

The face as artefact is currently a pre-eminent subject of artistic

works. By dissolving, destroying, or deconstructing the unity of the

face, by distorting its proportions, and by shifting, displacing, doubling,

or removing individual parts – eyes, nose, mouth – from the

entirety of the front of the head, by blending different facial features

on top of each other, and by creating a bricolage or montage

of human features and animal heads or even things, the arts are currently

working on an aesthetic that destroys the paradigm of the face

as a representative of the humanum (Figure 4.1). This development

is what Judith Weiss refers to as the portrait after the portrait (2012;

see also Körte and Weiss 2017). Since many artists cite genre elements

of the portrait in order to distort them, contemporary art contradicts

the art-historical postulate that ‘The faceless portrait does not exist’

(Preimesberger 1999: 15). In artistic practice, it seems to be primarily

a matter of breaking up the identification of the face and the

individual personality in the conventional portrait, as it emerged in

the early modern era. Thus, the arts currently radicalise the tendencies

of a ‘post-human’ culture, in whose laboratories such destruction

has long been at work, by outdoing existing techniques. In this

respect, the prophecy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari stated four

decades ago in Mille Plateaux (1980, in the chapter ‘Year Zero: Faciality’)

seems to come true: their statement that the face would have a

great future, but only if it is destroyed and dissolved.

Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of visagéité (faciality) has made

an enormous impact since its publication, although what one often

encounters in the abundance of recent theoretical publications on the

face are individual, isolated quotations rather than a real examination

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or intense reading of the chapter. Thus, the sentences ‘The organization

of the face is a strong one’ and ‘the face is a politics’ (1987: 208)

can be regarded as the pathos formulas of recent face theory. Most

frequently the ‘white wall/black hole system’ is cited, which was introduced

by Deleuze and Guattari as a ‘faciality machine’ or a ‘semiotic

machine and regime of signs’ (1987: 186, 71, 202). In view of the

accelerated development of biomedicine and life sciences, robotic construction

and plastic surgery, in whose laboratories all kinds of face

technologies have been developed, a re-evaluation of the much-cited

text seems appropriate.

Mille Plateaux shares the gesture of radical de(con)struction with

other theories of the zeitgeist of that time, which pursued a struggle

against established systems of meaning regarded as the sum of European-

Christian culture and interpreted as a system for securing the

existing power structure. Deleuze and Guattari use the term ‘imperialism’

to characterise the power of a new semiotic system – despotic

‘assemblages that act through signifiers and act upon souls and subjects’

– and place facialisation at its centre: ‘You will be pinned to the

white wall and stuffed in the black hole. This machine is called the

faciality machine because it is the social production of the face’ (1987:

200–1). As a consequence of tracing imperialism back to signification,

the way out can only be sought on an equally fundamental and 

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abstract level: in asignificance, that is a practice that acts against every

process of meaning in order to destroy or deconstruct it: ‘Only across

the wall of the signifier can one run lines of asignificance that void

all memory, all return, every possible signification and interpretation’

(1987: 209). This counter-movement to signification is connected

with a precarious way of dealing with the problem of Eurocentrism,

when the face is called ‘the typical European’, and Deleuze and Guattari

state that ‘the “Primitives” may have the most human of heads,

the most beautiful and spiritual, but they have no face and need none’

(1987: 195–6). Such an idealisation of facelessness is symptomatic of

a problematic argument in certain critiques of Eurocentrism, when

the critique of dominant norms ends up in a normative postulation of

exactly reverse concepts.

Now, a real faciality machine has actually been developed since

the publication of Mille Plateaux, though in the technical form of

digital face- and emotion-recognition programs implanted in most

social media devices and communication and surveillance systems: a

technical machine for formatting the social face and controlling the

social body, the most advanced types of which are today produced

and used in China. Since these programs are based on a de/codingsystem,

which reduces the manifold human facial expressions to just

six so-called ‘basic emotions’ (represented in schemata of certain

muscle movements appearing like frozen masks rather than faces),

the primary task of today would probably be to regain the variety

and ambiguity, the diversity and individuality of facial expression

rather than idealising facelessness.6

But why the face? In Mille Plateaux, faciality is emphasised as a special

dispositif that emerges as a mixed semiotics at the intersection of

signification and subjectivation, namely the system ‘white wall/ black

hole’ (the former stands for significance, the latter for subjectivation).

This system receives its cultural-historical signature in Mille Plateaux

through the eponymous thesis of the year zero, when the authors trace

its emergence to the year zero of Christ’s birth – with the argument

that here the mingling of signification and subjectivation has achieved

complete interpenetration. In this way, the face of Christ becomes a

metaphor for their entire theory of faciality. It has been repeatedly

noted, however, that this thesis is historically untenable. For example,

Hans Belting, in his study of the early images of Christ, proves that it

is far from the actual historical development ‘that this face was produced

by Christianity in an hour zero’ (Belting 2005: 84). Images of

Christ appeared not earlier than in the third and fourth century, at

first in the figuration of the youth or theios aner (divine teacher) in

the tradition of philosophical iconography. Belting assumes that these

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images originated from a heathen context, while for Christians the

question of whether and what image of Christ’s face could exist at all

was a precarious one that gave rise to the debate about the vera icon

(Wolf 2002; Wolf et al. 2004). The response to the problem of the

‘real image’ of Christ is the very likeness that derives from the shroud,

in which the traces of Christ’s body are visible: ‘The authenticity of

the shrouds was read off from the facial features, just as these were

authenticated by a corporeal trace, connected to the living Christ. Such

artifacts were hybrids of image and index’ (Wolf 2002: 57). When

Belting speaks here of artefacts and characterises the shroud with the

imprint as a mixture of contact- and image-medium, this is in line with

the perspective of image-theory as a secular approach, while image-

theology understands such an image as a contact-relic and Christians

of that time as acheiropoietos: an image not made by hand.

Before the ‘Year Zero’ – Genesis of the Likeness from Funeral Cult

It is not only the complicated genesis of Christ’s image that contradicts

the ‘year zero’ claim; the pre-Christian history of handed-down

human traits is just as instructive. It is a history of a manifold, already

fully developed culture of facial re/presentations, mostly imprints,

grave masks and other forms of sculptural pictures. This includes not

only the developed Roman culture of portraiture, which already followed

the claim of true-to-life imaging and produced heads cut into

stone as well as the imagines maiorum, that is, masks (made of wax

or other material) taken from the head of a deceased person. These

early types of portrait were used by the Romans both as a political

medium and as objects of memorial culture, a cultic worship of ancestors

(Flower 1996). Therefore, one can already speak of a ‘first heyday

of the portrait’ for the second and first century BCE, with regard

to Rome (Beyer 2002: 21). From Greek antiquity, too, countless portrait

statues have survived, although their faces are not (yet) designed

according to the principle of similarity, but rather as an eikon of idealistic

ideas: for example, the statues of statesmen, which are interpreted

as ‘political topoi’ (Beyer 2002: 18), or the retrospective portraits of

deceased scholars and authors, which were created in the context of

the emerging Hellenistic philology, biography, and museum culture,

‘invented faces’, which are characterised as ‘literary visions of likenesses’

(Zanker 1995: 152). In addition, there were the masks of the

ancient theatre representing a typos, whose forms of expression developed

parallel to its representation in sculpture (Weihe 2004).

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 Much further back in history, one comes across numerous archaeological

finds from prehistoric and early historical eras, for the most

part from burial sites and sanctuaries. They attest to the genesis of

the image from the cult of the dead. The appearance of these faces

from far away could be more easily associated with the configuration

‘white wall/black hole’ than the image of Christ can. The best-known

are the finds from Jericho from the pre-Christian seventh millennium

BCE (Figure 4.2); they point to burial rituals in which the head of the

deceased was separated from the buried body, the skull cleaned of

decayed flesh and covered with an applied, painted layer of plaster, so

that the skulls placed over the buried body bore the imprint-like features

of the deceased (Leroi-Gourhan 1967). It is doubtful, however,

that the meaning of individuality had been attributed to these skulls

and that they already expressed a sense of individuality, tradition,

and the continuity of the family (Landau 1989). But they can certainly

be regarded as ‘head pictures before the image’ (Preimersberger

1999: 22), as the primal form or pre-figuration of the likeness and

its emergence from the funeral cult. From the viewpoint of imagetheory,

these objects, a sort of pre-iconic similarity or ‘resemblance

through contact’ (Didi-Huberman 1991: 15; see also Weigel 2022)

and a hybrid of imprint and imitation, anticipate that transition from

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the index to the iconic which would later be associated with the vera

icon, long before the question of the real picture had even arisen.

From later millennia another kind of image has come down to us,

whose schematic re/presentation of the face – eyes/eyebrows, nose,

mouth – comes close to the figuration of a mask. When viewed today,

one will involuntarily associate these ‘abstract’ features with the art of

classical modernism, which broke with the principle of resemblance

of the portrait and borrowed from so-called primitivism. Such facial

figurations are found on anthropomorphic grave stelae and ‘eye stelae’

from the Arabian Peninsula, a region which was already covered

with sepulchral mounds in the fifth and fourth millennia BCE (these

protruded up to two metres above the ground and were marked by

stelae as burial and cult sites). Particularly impressive is an ‘eye stela’

from the fifth to fourth century BCE from the Taymâ region in the

form of a 72 cm high rectangular stela made of sandstone; on its

front side there is a schematic image of a face, which we today perceive

as almost abstract: a square with an elongated bar as nose,

which at the top merges into two curved eyebrows, under which the

two elliptical eye fields are located; a mouth is missing (Figure 4.3).

Under the field with this face there is the Aramaic inscription ‘Taym,

son of Zayd in memory’ (André-Salvini et al. 2010: 13).

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Concerning the history of images, these representations bear witness

to a transition to the (stone) image, in which a schematic reproduction

has taken the place of the overmoulding of a skull. In this

respect, the image of the face seems to have originated from a type

of picture that was later called a mask. If Moshe Barasch (1991) has

repeatedly shown that the portrait originated from the mask, these

early portraits of the dead can conversely also be regarded as early

masks. Mask and portrait are doubtless inseparable in the history

of the human face. And the genesis of the portrait from the cult of

the dead has left its traces in the memory of the portrait as well. It is

no coincidence, according to Andreas Beyer (2002: 116), that skulls

appear as an iconographic motif simultaneously with the modern

portrait.

Christ’s Likeness, Mask, Portrait

In view of the pre-Christian history of face images that are mainly

part of the cult of the dead and the phenomenon of an already developed

art of likenesses with individualised traits, Christ’s face cannot

at all stand for a year zero of visagéité, although it indeed takes

a special position. The ‘portrait of Christ’ raised problems not just

because of the biblical prohibition of images, but also because of the

precarious status of the dual nature of its figure: as a deceased human

being and the risen Son of God with a missing corpse.7 His humanlike

appearance required strong distinctive features to distinguish his

holy face from human portraits – and vice versa. In this respect, the

format of frontal icon is most striking, as Moshe Barasch (1991:

20–35) has shown; it was reserved almost exclusively for the ‘holy

face’. The mask-like frontal icon, which in ancient vase paintings was

reserved for gods, monsters, and the dead (while mythical figures in

action and warriors are shown in profile) and thus not intended to

depict mortal creatures, seemed ideally suited for the iconic face of

Christ in medieval painting. It was only when monastic Christianity

turned into a Christian society and previously supramundane biblical

figures became more human-like that the bust portrait took the

place of the isolated, bodiless, neckless face.

When the autonomous portrait – that is, the motif of the face

isolated from the rest of the body and manufactured ‘from life’ –

evolved in the Renaissance as ‘a faithful reflection of individual distinctiveness’

(Beyer 2002: 15), and the central object of the ‘golden

age of similarity’ (Didi-Huberman 1994; Kohl 2012), this happened

in the midst of a highly developed Christian iconography, with the

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iconic image of Christ’s face having a firm place. Whereas the latter

became the model for the autonomous portrait – as recognisable

when placing Jan van Eyck’s famous True Face of Christ (1438) and

Dürer’s Self-portrait with Fur Coat (1500) side by side – the artists

invented a different mode to re/present the human face. In an

effort to individualise the likeness and to make the portrayed person

a counterpart, they developed the three-quarter posture: with the

head turned slightly or more strongly to one side, the face looks as

if it is directly looking at us. This pictorial format couples similarity

and individuality with the reciprocity of the gaze: ‘The person in the

autonomous portrait, who looks out of the portrait into an “immanent”

world of individuals who are capable of images – although

not always worthy of being portrayed – demands for its realization

a fellow human being, the independent observer, to whom he turns’

(Boehm 1985: 9). In addition, there exist many portraits in profile

in Renaissance painting, the majority of them of women: there personality

and status, here beauty and harmonious proportions. And

although the expressive gestures of ‘tragic faces’ in the Renaissance

are largely modelled on those of antique masks (Barasch 1991), they

are viewed en-face only in exceptional cases. This was reserved for

the image of Christ, Mary, and the saints, and, beyond that, royal

portraits. The distinction between en-face and profile, which Meyer

Schapiro (1973) considered to be ‘symbolic forms’, gained importance

after the iconic portraits of Christ had been established in

painting and were no longer traced back to the vera icon.

In an investigation of the problem of the ‘holy face’, Georges

Didi-Huberman has discussed the vera icon topos as a basic imagetheoretical

question in respect of a fundamental abyss between any

likeness and an intricate interweaving of relic and image: ‘What

immediately springs to mind here is the typology of relic/icon: relic

refers to what a “Holy Face” is, icon expresses what it represents

(or that it represents)’ (2012: 57). If the holy face requires a special

conception of the image, this problem finds its ‘solution’ in a

certain constellation of proximity and distance. There would be no

sacred image, according to Didi-Huberman (2012: 59), that would

be able to initiate the dialectical conversion ‘of trace into grace, of

the vestigium into visio’ if the proximity inherent in the material

process of production (impression, contact) were not represented as

distance. Referring to Walter Benjamin’s reflection on the aura as a

‘strange tissue of space and time: the unique apparition of a distance,

however near it may be’ (2002: 104), Didi-Huberman emphasises

the dialectic of the gaze at work here – ‘To experience the aura of

an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look back

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at us’ (Benjamin 2006: 204) – in order to characterise the peculiar

image of Christ’s face on the shroud: the visual appearance of traces

that themselves have the property of disappearing.

A resonance of this auratic charge of the image affects the history

of the portrait as well. For in the human likeness there is also

a dialectic, albeit different, of presence and absence, of visualisation

and disappearance, of exhibition and concealment at work. This

does not only concern the survival of the mortal person in the picture,

in accordance with the much-cited statement in Leon Battista

Alberti’s treatise On Painting (1435/36): ‘Painting contains a divine

force which not only makes absent men present [. . .] but moreover

makes the dead seem almost alive’ (1966: 63). It also concerns the

fact that the portrait captures the movements and facial traces of the

expressive gestures in the two-dimensional picture, thus re/presenting

something fleeting and disappearing in a standstill. And finally,

it concerns the impression of being looked at from the picture, the

reciprocity between the viewer and the model discussed above.

Admittedly, the history of this genre must be regarded as a closed

chapter after the ‘criticism of the old concept of the portrait and the

individual carried out with the means of painting’ (Boehm 1985: 10).

Yet the recent boom of large exhibition projects with portraits points

to a longing for the lost genre and possibly for ‘old faces’, especially

in the age of proliferating new media faces and multiple modes of

post-human facial de(con)structions. At any rate, the genre of portraiture,

precisely because of the pictorial scenario of the mutual gaze,

has played an essential role in cultural work on the image of humans.

Recently, evolutionary anthropology has emphasised Homo sapiens’

ability to recognise in the Other an intentional being similar to the

Self (Tomasello 1999), while neuroscience, following the discovery of

mirror neurons, has identified the resonance mechanism of a mutual,

intersubjective form of ‘embodied simulation’ (Gallese 2008; see also

Lux and Weigel 2017). In this way the natural sciences are discovering

insights that are part of the implicit knowledge that traditionally

underpinned the cultural history of the face. The work on the human

likeness and the portrait has thus considerably contributed to the internalisation

of the facial reciprocity which forms the visage (Angesicht).

The Face as the Image of the Image – the Art of Readability

The portrait can also be discussed as the image of the image, because it

frequently serves as a paradigm in controversies about the superiority or

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inferiority of images in relation to language and writing. This position

is due to its perception at a glance, that is, viewing the face as a unity

in an instant, literally in a blink of an eye. According to Lessing, Laocoön’s

face, the classical sculptural object in the competition of the arts,

confronts visual art with the limits of its possibilities, when the expression

of pain, passions, and affects is concerned, because its pictorial re/

presentation would distort the facial features. Thus, he discusses the

problem of a disfiguring ugliness through the example of the veiled face

of the father in Timanthes’ Painting of the Sacrifice of Iphigenia (fourth

century BCE) and argues for the principle of a moderating depiction as

in an exemplary manner realised in the Laocoön group. On the other

hand, the impossibility of describing a beautiful face through language

is ‘an instance of painting without picture’ for him. Taking Ariosto’s

description of the ‘charming Alcina’ in Orlando Furioso (1516), Lessing

addresses a general warning to poets to refrain from such attempts, since

‘what is most readily expressed by the painter through lines and colours,

is most difficult to express by words’ (1853: 142). In Lessing’s opposition

of the spatial juxtaposition in painting to the temporal succession

or seriality of poetry, the face represents the paradigm of the pictorial,

when he writes that ‘it surpasses the power of human imagination to

represent to oneself what effect such and such a mouth, nose, and eyes

will produce together, unless we can call to mind, from nature or art, a

similar composition of like parts’ (1853: 138–9). Accordingly, literary

descriptions of faces would always be at a disadvantage compared to

visual re/presentations.

This judgement refers to the perception of the face as a unit which

requires the synthesising gaze. However, the positions of literature and

painting swap around as soon as emotions and the fundamental problem

of visualising affects are concerned. In Della Pittura (1435/36), for

example, Alberti already noted ‘how difficult it is when attempting to

paint a laughing face to avoid making it more weeping than happy’,

and likewise: ‘Who could ever, without the greatest study express faces

in which mouth, chin, eyes, cheeks, forehead and eyebrows all accord

together to form a laughter or weeping’ (1966: 77).8 This observation

about a kind of antithetical meaning of primal words in the field of

expressive gestures can be found again and again in the discourse on

painting.9 In his Discourses on Art, Joshua Reynolds also states of a

comparison between the figure of a frenetically laughing bacchanal

and the depiction of a grieving Mary: ‘It is curious to observe, and it is

certainly true, that the extremes of contrary passions are with very little

variation expressed by the same action’ (1997: 221–2). Against the

background of such difficulties, it is no coincidence that deciphering

facial expressions primarily runs within the paradigm of readability,

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a reading of facial features trained in the reading of writing, of literal

characters. However, the latter always runs the risk of falling into the

trap of the physiognomic pattern of interpretation when it is in search

of a universal tool for decoding emotions through facial expressions,

as in the ‘Facial Action Coding System’ (FACS) (Ekman and Friesen

1975; Ekman et al. 2002), instead of reading the faces of others that

are full of ambiguity and require intersubjective experience and sensitivity

to decipher their individual and often enigmatic countenances.

While FACS, which is the dominant code system of contemporary

empirical psychology, social media devices, and ‘affective computing’,

refers to stereotypical frozen patterns (Weigel 2020),10 the media

history of the twentieth century has introduced a field of advanced

and subtle readability of faces through the invention of cinematographic

art. With the entry of portraiture into film, the opposition

between the advantage of the visual arts in representing the face and

the superiority of language to describe and express emotions became

obsolete. The film face is the epitome of a simultaneity set in motion,

of a temporally stretched gaze, as it were. In film, which has developed

the expressive gestures of the face – beyond the physiognomic

register – into art, the diverging arts of the Laocoön paradigm are

apparently reunified, as are the two sides of the semantics of face,

namely seeing and visage (Angesicht). As a medium, film benefits

from the ‘advantages’ of images, while at the same time it overcomes

the ‘weaknesses’ of a static art by setting the images – and thus facial

movements as well – in motion in two ways: through the gestures and

facial expressions of the actors and through the changing perspective

of the camera. Therefore, the theorist of early film Béla Balázs stated

that ‘the whole of mankind is now busy learning’ the ‘long-forgotten

language of gestures and facial expressions’ (2010: 10) and interpreted

the cinematograph as ‘a device at work, giving culture a new

turn towards the visual and the human being a new face’ (2010: 9).

His programmatic sentence, which provided the title for his essay,

reads: ‘Man will become visible again’ (2010: 10).

Since then multiple techniques, ranging from corporeal techniques

such as plastic surgery and Botox treatment to digital techniques

such as morphing and the construction of avatars or animated faces,

have been invented. These developments more and more blur the

line between living faces and artificial faces – up to the production of

hybrids, when, for example, by means of digital ‘expression transfer’

one person’s video-portrait gets animated by the facial movements

and words of another person. While such computer programs have

recently augmented the artefactual history of the face to its extreme

and made the representational function of the portrait obsolete, at

[75]

the same time a new kind of facelessness has emerged, namely a standardisation

of digital portraits. Due to the fact that the same facial

coding system is implemented into the majority of digital devices and

social media, the mimic behaviour of media users obviously more

and more assimilates to its stereotypes – as can be seen in the millions

of selfies circulating online (see Shin 2014) – and tend to cover

and remove the fascinating variety and diversity of individual faces.

While the overinterpretation of the old physiognomics and Deleuze

and Guattari’s ‘facelessness’ are but two sides of the same coin, with

digital portraits a new facelessness of the standardised physiognomy

has emerged, which gets mirrored in the living faces of the users. In

this way the human face itself is about to become an artefact.

Notes

1. This chapter is a revised and translated version of Weigel 2013.

2. Re/presentation is used as equivalent for German Darstellung in order

to emphasise the simultaneity of the process of presentation and that

which is represented and thus perceivable. Darstellung is the counterpart

to Vorstellung in the mind, which receives its specific perceivable

form only through the Darstellung.

3. Dead Gazes (Tote Blicke) is the original title of Julius von Schlosser’s

famous work on death masks (2008).

4. As the German translation of Jonathan Cole’s 1998 book About Faces

(Über das Gesicht. Naturgeschichte des Gesichts und unnatürliche

Geschichte derer, die es verloren haben) suggests.

5. A famous reference case for this kind of ‘medical indication’ is the

so-called Minotaur Syndrome, reported by the Italian surgeon Paolo

Morselli in 1993. The case concerned a patient who suffered from the

outward appearance of his facial features and a related social discrimination;

he believed that his face made him appear aggressive, whereas

he regarded himself as gentle by nature. The surgeon undertook plastic

surgery on the young man ‘to reduce the discrepancy between his true

personality and the aggressive morphology’ and to achieve a ‘more aesthetic

and balanced facial profile’ by ‘softening the facial appearance’,

which was ‘not objectionable in people’s judgment’ (Morselli 1993:

99–102).

6. For a critique of the epistemic and image-theoretical foundations of

‘automatic face recognition’, see Weigel 2020.

7. For the empty grave as origin of a proliferating desire for images in the

Christian culture, see the chapter on ‘Cult Images – Iconoclastic Controversy,

the Desire for Images, and the Dialectic of Secularization’ in

Weigel 2022.

8. Translation modified according to the bilingual edition of Alberti 2002.

[76]

9. Sigmund Freud’s ‘The Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words’ (1957)

discusses opposite meanings of one and the same word.

10. For the origin of FACS in outdated physiognomic knowledge, see the

chapter on faces in Weigel 2022.

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