Faces and bodiesTo offer a sense of how poststructuralism relates to spirituality let me focus on the
collaborative work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. In Plateau 7 of their A
Thousand Plateaus (1987:167–91) they introduce the concept of faciality. In brief, it
refers to the machinic, as opposed to ideological, phenomenological, or
psychoanalytical system whereby bodies become differentiated in (Western) social
formations. “Machinic” means that we have to look at how bodies work. We can
then see that bodes are “facialized” through the material connections that they make
with environments, signs, sounds, and objects such as clothes, all of which become
facialized themselves. But calling this process “facialization” points to the fact that
identification occurs primarily though vision and emotion. The “black hole” of
subjectivity libinally invests in a grid of social identities (man or woman, rich or
poor, white or black, etc.); the “white wall” of signification imposes limits to what
can be represented. The black hole/white wall system of faciality Deleuze and
Guattari say is particularly vehement in the Judeo-Christian and colonial structures
of Europe. This is because it succeeds in abstracting itself from concrete bodies and
places, lending itself the possibility of becoming actualized elsewhere. More and
more bodies and places can then be accommodated in a grid which becomes
increasingly fine. The white European faciality machine is therefore self-replicating
and expanding.
René ten Bos and Ruud Kaulingfreks (2002) rightly assert that the concept of
faciality is rather determinist and isolationist, as if faces are fixed once and for all
and do not interact with each other. If we compare Plateau 7 with Erving
Goffman’s writing on the face (1972), we see that while subjectivity and
signification do reproduce power relations, is it not that bodies remain passive when
they are facialized. Bodies are simultaneously capable of supporting faces and
reworking them in the improvisatory mutual involvements of everyday life. If Deleuze
and Guattari choose to think about the social in “cybernetic” terms (1987:177,
179), the only “way out” for them seems to be necessarily crypto-anarchic: all
facialization is bad, and all corporeality good.
Thus, face and body in Plateau 7 are dichotomously positioned in relation to each
other. There is a homology with other well-known Deleuzo—Guattarian binaries:
the “arborescent” thought of “state philosophy” against the “rhizomatic” thought of
“nomadology”; “reterritorialization” versus “deterritorialization,” “molar” versus
“molecular,” “majoritarian” versus “minoritarian,” and “organism” versus “Body-
without-Organs.” Deleuze and Guattari say that an organism is only one way of
organizing the organs of a body (limbs, mouth, skin, genitals, eyes), making them
function in relation to each other, to other bodies, and to spacetime in particularly
fixed ways. What they call (after Artaud) the Body-without-Organs, or BwO is,
instead, the entire immanent range of potential actions a body is capable of, prior to
any social organization (see Plateau 6). While faciality is only possible by tapping
from the BwO, Deleuze and Guattari feel that certain bodies, like artists,
sadomasochists, musicians, drug-takers, and anorexics, are more “in tune” with the
274 ARUN SALDANHA