This sounds clever. Here goes from Deleuze & Guattari and people writing about them:
"... social-organisation violently transposes the production of desire from the Body with Organs (ourselves seen as flows and drives) to the socius – the face (ourselves as social and political constructs)." Charlie Mills (my italics) So this is something about the way we have become detached from our 'animal' or corporeal selves. "Faciality... is the human system of organisation of our present times. It lies at the intersection of two regimes: the signifying regime (premised on signifiance; on the desire for interpretation) and the post-signifying regime (subjectification; consciousness, or the turn inwards)." Simon O'Sullivan Could we see these as the sometimes competing desires for a) meaning and understanding [signifying regime] and b) awareness/presence [post-signifying regime]? Where this latter desire is described as 'the turn inwards' we can see the turn towards psychology, psychoanalysis and understanding intention and motivation. Perhaps Move into Life work, which seems to combine a turn inwards with a turn outwards (to incorporate environment and others in the so-called 'ecological body') offers a third way. "...if human beings have a destiny, it is rather to escape the face, to dismantle the face and facializations, to become imperceptible, to become clandestine, not by returning to animality, nor even by returning to the head, but by spiritual and special becomings-animal, by strange true becomings that get past the wall and get out of the black holes." (Deleuze & Guattari ) Perhaps Move into Life work is a spiritual and special becoming-animal. "What is a probe-head? ...A probe-head might in fact be any form of practice – any regime – that ruptures the dominant (faciality). An individual “subject” in his or her life might operate as a probe-head in this sense (but in which case are they any longer a subject?). Groups might also function as probe-heads (radical political groupings, but also any intentional community that turns away from typical regimes and transcendent points of coordination). Art works might likewise operate as probeheads (Francis Bacon’s portraits for example (at least as Deleuze writes about them), but we might also add the more expanded practices from the 1960s to today that offer even stranger – non-human, non-facialised – diagrams for subjectivity). In fact, it is in the realm of art that we can identify a key modality of probe-heads: that they are somehow orientated against the present time." Simon O'Sullivan So our Move into Life practice might be a probe-head and our Project Group might be another probe-head. Both ways of disrupting the dominance of faciality, the reliance on the power structures associated with facial (rather than bodily) expression. And perhaps facial is to corporeal as digital is to manual? "The face in the modern Western world, they claim, is primarily a disciplinary mechanism, its smiles, grimaces, glares and twitches enforcing social codes, identities and power structures. Yet the face is also open to “defacialization,” to a usage that decodes and unfixes identities, faces mutating into “probe-heads (têtes chercheuses, guidance devices)” … that counter the restricting operations of the socially constructed face. Probe-heads open 'a rhizomatic realm of possibility effecting the potentialization of the possible, as opposed to [the face’s] arborescent possibility, which marks a closure, an impotence'” Ronald Bogue Bogue's bit sounds brilliant but I can't think of anything to add to it. "In The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life Erving Goffman points to the origins of the word “person” which originally meant “mask.” He argues this is a recognition of the fact that everyone is 'more or less consciously, playing a role…in so far as this mask represents the conception we have formed of ourselves-this mask is our truer self'.” "In their essay on Faciality Deleuze and Guattari identify the face as the site of social production of this performative self, a production that encodes the hierarchies of bodies through signifiers such as race and gender. They call for an end to the operations of the face machine through “deterritorialization,” a process of making things unfamiliar and setting “faciality traits free like birds.” The “probe-heads” answer this call to dismantle the operations of the face machine. Not conventional portraits, the disembodied faces resist easy signifiers such as “personality,” “character,” or “expression.” They point instead to the masks of personhood, the binary nature of identity, and the social construction of the self." Alexandra Phillips So maybe what we're doing through movement is trying to practise a kind of 'deterritorialization' in the Deleuzian sense, where we shake off the fact of being 'owned' by our hierarchical (vertical) socio-political roles and performances and allow ourselves to be reintegrated into the ecological (horizontal) landscape of natural environment, interdependence and affect. |