What Is a Face?

DANIEL BLACK

Abstract The face is a shifting, multiplex, distributed and layered phenomenon. It is by far the most
mercurial feature of the human body, and even a single face cannot be isolated in, on or outside any one
body. In the following discussion I will employ a variety of differing accounts of the face and suggest
that the differences separating each account are merely reflective of the multiplex nature of the face itself.

Keywords anatomy, Deleuze, face, Levinas, vision

The question ‘What is a face?’ might seem easy enough to answer. Common
sense might define a face as the presence of certain features, such as eyes and
mouth. But does anything with these features qualify as a face? Can a snake, for
example, be considered to have a face?
Certainly, in some sense, it can. We speak of all manner of living things as
having faces, and even the crudest representation of key facial attributes – most
importantly eyes – are enough to trigger recognition as a face. Infant humans and
primates are able to recognize representations of faces within days of birth (Guo
et al., 2003: 371; Lutz et al., 1998: 169–70; Slaughter et al., 2002: B71); in addition,
neonates not only seem to recognize others as having faces, but also understand
that they themselves have faces. Experiments have shown that babies only hours
old will imitate the facial expressions of others, despite never having had a chance
to look in a mirror and see that they have features which correspond to those
they are seeing (Gallagher, 2005: 75ff.; Meltzoff and Moore, 1983). They seem
to have an innate understanding of what a face is and the commonality between

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2 & Body & Society Vol. 17 No. 4

their faces and those of others. On the other hand, infants also seem to recognize
simple line drawings of faces (Wilson et al., 2002: 2910), and this ability to
identify even the most rudimentary of representations as a face would seem to
suggest that the face exists more in the mind of the viewer than on the body
of the viewed: it perhaps results more from the attribution of a face than the sim-
ple presence of physical features.
These and other attributes of the face invite multiple, seemingly contradic-
tory, accounts of what faces are and how we perceive them. In this article I will
argue that, while common underlying themes can be identified in these different
attributes of the face, the face remains, by its very nature, a multiplex phenom-
enon that never can be fully accounted for within a simple or singular account.
I will, therefore, approach the face in a way which does not seek to force its
attributes into a restrictive pre-existing framework. A variety of different
accounts of the face will be used, but none will serve as a point of origin for
my analysis; rather, I will seek to have different kinds of knowledge regarding
the face interact productively with one another without privileging any partic-
ular one as more truthful or apposite. Understanding the face as a multiplex
phenomenon, my intention is to capture the different views of the face pro-
duced by differing investigative approaches, accepting each as adding to the
potential for understanding the nature of the face through its very difference.
I will then draw common themes from these differing accounts and suggest
that, despite their methodological dissimilarities and varying foundational
assumptions, together they do provide a consistent view of the dynamism and
multiplicity of the face.
However, drawing together different kinds of research on the face will inevi-
tably require that I sometimes arbitrate between competing claims underpinning
different approaches. Before I begin, therefore, I will set out the foundational
assumptions of the following discussion. These assumptions derive from my eva-
luation of competing claims made by the various sources discussed here, and the
basis of my conclusions regarding the superiority of one claim over another will
be set out during the discussion itself.

1 The face, while a key factor in the production of subjectivity and social struc-
tures, is not produced by or comprehensively explicable in terms of either of
these things. Deleuze and Guattari’s treatment of the face is referred to at mul-
tiple moments in the discussion, but I will argue that an account of the face
which, like theirs, sees faces purely in terms of subjectivization is untenable
given the anatomical and cognitive uniqueness of the face as a material organ
of communication.
 What Is a Face? & 3

2 Communication is not entirely reducible to linguistic structures. Too often, all

communication is understood to be linguistic, or amenable to analysis in lin-
guistic terms. The face is the most powerful example of communication which
extends outside and predates language, rationality and consciousness.
3 The material body provides a fundamentally important substrate of communi-
cation. In its ability to communicate affects and associations at a corporeal level
without conscious analysis or linguistic sense, the face challenges a common
tendency to understand communication as detachable from, or even opposed
to, biology and bodily materiality. Foundational to both the biological structure
of the face and the machinery of human perception is the body’s role in non-
verbal, non-linguistic communication. The following discussion will therefore
look to disciplines such as ethology and neuroscience as sources of insight into
the evolutionary and cognitive production of faces, as this can both highlight the
blindspots in accounts of the face arising in the humanities, and offer opportu-
nities to enrich and extend those accounts. As we will see, however, the appeal
to such disciplines does not reflect a desire to provide an objective, ‘scientific’
account of the face, nor does it require that communication be treated as some-
thing rigidly structured by biology or amenable to simplistic empirical accounts.
Nonetheless, I will interact with these forms of knowledge in good faith — I
have no desire to simply criticize them from a position founded on, or use them
as a resource to bolster the claims of, approaches external to them.
4 The body as material substrate of communication is a dynamic entity which
produces a multiplicity of perceptual interactions with itself and the world.
Highlighting the role of biology and materiality in communication need not
produce an account of the face which is fixed, essentializing, or built on claims
to identify some objective ‘rules’ of function or meaning. Accounts of the cul-
tural production of the body tend to start with the body as it is isolated and
fixed by social forces, but the lived materiality of the body is not reducible
to this entity. The face as an anatomical and perceptual phenomenon is the
most mercurial, unstable, and elusive feature of human anatomy, endlessly
exceeding efforts to capture it and draw a stable, generalized view of it from
its endlessly shifting lived reality. It is these very qualities of the face which
necessitate a mode of investigation which is open to multiple perspectives and
multiple forms of knowledge.

What is a Face for?

Crucial to the question of what a face is is the question of what a face does. What
is a face for? While eyes are for looking, and noses and mouths are for breathing,
4 & Body & Society Vol. 17 No. 4

tasting, smelling, eating and talking, the face as a whole is for none of these things
(it just happens to be partially composed of features which carry out these func-
tions). The face is, rather, an instrument of communication.
Faces are for signification; the most obvious use of the face is to generate
meaning for the benefit of an observer. Among mammals, facial signals such as the
narrowing of eyes, lowering of brows and baring of teeth to denote an urge to
attack are consistent across a tremendous variety of species. A human being and
a cat will both communicate in this way as a result of an innate biological predis-
position, and so, on this most basic level, equally can be attributed with faces.
However, when discussing animal behaviour, a distinction must be drawn
between display (‘a signal or pattern of motor activity whose exaggerated or
stereotyped characteristics suggest that it has become specialized – in form, fre-
quency, or both – during evolution to effect or to facilitate the process of com-
munication’ [Redican, 1982: 216]) and expression, which suggests an
intentionality of communication. While a human being might make an involun-
tary facial display of aggression or fright like a cat, a cat will never, like a human,
intentionally express itself using its face.
Take the following example. In stage one, two cats both want to eat a piece
of meat; one cat is willing to fight for the piece of meat, and so prepares to do so
by flattening its ears against its head to prevent them being torn off, and pulling
back its lips to bare its teeth before sinking them into the other cat. It then bites
and seriously injures the other cat. In stage two, descendants of these two cats are
in the same situation. One cat makes the same preparations to bite the other, but
the other has evolved an instinctive fear of the sight of another cat flattening its
ears and baring its teeth (as avoiding serious injury is beneficial to its survival),
and so runs away, leaving the aggressor to claim the prize. In stage three, two
further descendants of these cats engage in the same behaviour, but with the
important innovation that the first cat flattens its ears and bares its teeth indepen-
dently of any intention to bite. Once the second cat has developed an instinctual
fear of the facial arrangement preparatory to biting, that facial arrangement
comes to have an evolutionary benefit for the first cat which is independent of
any actual bite. It just has to look like it’s going to bite in order to make the other
cat give up its claim to the piece of meat. As a result, the preparatory contortion
of the face itself comes to have use even when not followed by an attack, and so
becomes a valuable inherited feature. The process by which practical behaviours
are converted into significatory ones is referred to by animal behaviourists as
‘ritualization’ (Chevalier-Skolnikoff, 1973: 30; Redican, 1982: 216).
Like the iridescent pattern on the back of a poisonous reptile, ritualized dis-
play is evidence that the natural world is full of codes and communications, but
 What Is a Face? & 5

while the poisonous reptile’s markings carry a message, that message has not
been intentionally formulated by any individual reptile. Ironically, the animal
with the least need to understand the message on the reptile’s back is the reptile
itself; not being likely to eat itself, it gains no advantage from decoding this warn-
ing. While human beings might be differentiated by their capacity to intention-
ally express themselves using their faces, the fact remains that intentional,
expressive deployments of the face by humans remain in the minority, and our
own faces more commonly signify without conscious direction.
The face is an instrument of communication, but when discussing commu-
nication it is important to understand that communication need not depend upon
language, consciousness or culture. Faces predate all of these things, although
they are now a part of each. The cat communicates with its challenger without
language and without even the conscious formulation of any message.

Making Faces
Once the significatory power of the face is taken into consideration, it becomes
clear that the simple possession of certain anatomical features is not enough to
qualify for possession of a face; while many living things have certain structures
on the surfaces of their heads, not all of those structures collaborate to generate
meaning, and very few (only human beings and perhaps higher primates) are able
to make volitional use of this communicative apparatus. It is quite possible,
therefore, to have eyes and a mouth, but no face.
But once the face is tied to communication, focus is shifted away from the
realm of simple physical or biological fact and into that of perception and inter-
action. The key question becomes, not what physically comprises a face, but how
it is used. This, in turn, raises the possibility that faces might be used or defined
differently even within the human species, depending on culturally-specific
structures of social interaction.
Deleuze and Guattari’s account of the face (1987: 167ff.) depends upon a
belief that the face is a signifying structure imposed upon the body as part of the
process of subjectification:
The head, even the human head, is not necessarily a face. The face is produced only when the
head ceases to be a part of the body, when it ceases to be coded by the body, when it ceases to
have a multidimensional, polyvocal corporeal code – when the body, head included, has been
decoded and has to be overcoded by something we shall call the Face. (Deleuze and Guattari,
1987: 170)

This account suggests that the face is not simply a product of biology, that the
face only appears when the body has been divided and organized by cultural
6 & Body & Society Vol. 17 No. 4

forces. Bernadette Wegenstein has even gone so far as to suggest that, in

contemporary media representations, ‘any body part can now gain the status
once exclusively enjoyed by a face as a ‘‘window to the soul’’. It is not necessarily
behind faces that we expect the person to be revealed. Faces are becoming obso-
lete’ (2002: 233). But is the face really nothing more than a signifying structure
which has been hived off from the rest of the body as an outward label of sub-
jectivity? Has its status truly been conferred purely by cultural forces, which
might then transfer them elsewhere, for example to ‘healthy and strong-
looking body parts such as arms and legs’ (Wegenstein, 2002: 233)?
Deleuze and Guattari’s complaint concerning the face centres upon the
effect of ‘faciality’, which is created through a ‘white wall/black hole system’
(1987: 167): the interaction of plane and hole produces an experience of self-
contained interiority, of there being a unified someone ‘behind’ the face. The
face, with its expressive openings – particularly the eyes which serve as ‘windows
to the soul’ – is a perforated exterior surface which produces a sense of interior
subjectivity, and the face’s expressive power is understood to make externally
manifest the inner life of the individual. The face certainly can and does serve
as a means of intentional expression, but how much of the expressive power of
the face is really occupied by such a role? While I might (aside, perhaps, from
the occasional Freudian slip) have a fairly firm conscious control over the words
I use, the reality is that the expressivity of my face is in many ways more of a
mystery to me than it is to other people who know me well; the face expresses
itself visually, but I have little opportunity to observe these visual signals, and
relatively little of it is under my conscious control. I hear the words I speak, but
don’t see the expressions assumed by my face. So the trained interrogator will
scrutinize a suspect’s face as she answers a question in order to see if the direction
of eye gaze or some other movement betrays the spoken words as a lie: the words
can be carefully controlled, but the facial expressivity is largely independent of
conscious direction. Human beings are notable for their degree of intentional
control over facial musculature, but this control is imperfect and exercised rela-
tively rarely. For example, it is impossible to truly fake a smile because, while we
have conscious control over our lips, we do not have conscious control over the
muscles at the edges of our eyes which are engaged by a genuine expression of
happiness. Our conscious minds might even – as when trying to stifle a sneeze
or smother a smile – be reduced to employing those facial muscles we can control
in a direct physical struggle against those we can’t, and the final outcome of such
contests is never certain.
Richard Rushton notes this key difference in signification produced by the
face, as opposed to language or even visual representation: ‘The face . . . on
 What Is a Face? & 7

certain occasions, can represent or signify automatically, without the intention of

the person upon whose face the markings arise’ (2002: 220). However, this does
not make the point with sufficient strength; rather than occurring ‘on certain
occasions’, it would be more accurate to say that it occurs on the great majority
of occasions; rather than occurring ‘automatically . . . without the intention of
the person’, it occurs in a way which makes questions of automatism or intention
irrelevant. If a stranger rushes towards me with his face contorted by rage, or a
child smiles up at me, in neither case is the facial expression really an ‘expression’
per se: it is not expressing an emotional state which takes place independently of
the face, and the possessor of the face certainly hasn’t decided to assume that
appearance as a way of telling me how he feels, as would be the case if he’d said,
‘I’m angry’, or ‘I’m happy’. If we understand the face to ‘express’ in the sense of
‘to represent or make known’, then an angry facial expression is no more an
expression of anger than increased muscle tension and heart rate, or some other
bodily change that accompanies rage, and a smile is no more an expression of
happiness than is a sense of elation or contentment; they are both rather part
of the emotional state itself, not a reflection or revelation of it. Perhaps it would
be better to utilize an alternative sense of the verb ‘to express’: aside from the
minority of cases in which we pull faces or express emotion in a calculated and
insincere manner, our faces express emotion in a sense more analogous to the
way in which a lactating woman expresses milk. The body naturally exudes emo-
tional signals through the face in a way which has nothing to do with an inter-
iorized subject intentionally communicating its inner states. If I am startled by
a sudden noise, my facial expression of fright is likely to precede my conscious
experience of fear.
When I’m angry, I don’t decide to arrange my face in a certain way in order
to intimidate an enemy any more than I decide to increase my heart rate in order
to deal more effectively with the physical exertions of combat. Furthermore,
such physical changes don’t result from my feeling angry – rather they are part
of the experience of feeling angry itself (see Despret, 2004: 125–8; Shusterman,
2008: 146–50). There is no other realm of emotional experience which precedes
or triggers these things; nor is there an interior subject pulling the strings of my
face in order to communicate certain things to the outside world. As a result, the
living face has relatively little to do with Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘facialization’.
Faces are implicated in the creation of restrictive identities in that faces are privi-
leged identifiers used in official photographs (on driver’s licences or passports, for
example) and the search for features that can be generalized into populations (of
race, etc.), but such enterprises begin by abstracting and fixing the face so that most
of its relationship to living human bodies and human perception is destroyed.
8 & Body & Society Vol. 17 No. 4

Deleuze and Guattari’s treatment of the face could be re-evaluated in light of

their explanation of the face as a ‘deterritorialization’ of the head. Not only does
this not preclude a focus on the face’s physical structure, but in fact the entirety
of human physical evolution is an instance of deterritorialization. The deterritor-
ialization of head into face parallels the deterritorialization of paw into hand,
mammary gland into breast, and snout into lips.
But the face represents a far more intense, if slower, deterritorialization. We could say that it
is an absolute deterritorialization: it is no longer relative because it removes the head from the
stratum of the organism, human or animal, and connects it to other strata, such as signifiance
and subjectification. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 172)

The problem with this claim is its very truth: the face does represent a deterritor-
ialization of the head in its transformation of the head from a mobile platform for
gathering sensory data into a site of signification; however, this deterritorializa-
tion is not absolute in that the appearance of the face does not signal the disap-
pearance of the head, which retains its previous usefulness. Furthermore, this
account carries the suggestion of some absolute division between biology and
signification, reflecting a broader tendency to erroneously understand commu-
nication as incorporeal and immaterial.
On the contrary, the consequences of the deterritorialization of the head
include – like those of hand, breast and mouth – an actual shift in the anatomical
arrangement of the body. Just as the significatory power of language brought
about extensive changes in human anatomy, so the significatory power of expres-
sion brought about a shift from head to face.
The human face is the result of a process of physical evolution and speciali-
zation which has redeployed features of the head for the task of communication.
This is particularly evident in the development of the human facial musculature,
which diverged from the mask-like inexpressiveness of creatures such as fish and
lizards to create an astonishingly mobile surface. Amphibians and reptiles have
no facial muscles in the human sense: they only possess muscles in the neck capa-
ble of opening and closing the eyelids, nostrils and mouth – somewhat reminis-
cent of the hidden cables which give limited mobility to the face of a
ventriloquist’s dummy. With the appearance of mammals, these muscles branch
out across the front of the head and become attached to the skin (providing the
capacity to deform the face’s surface), presumably largely to facilitate chewing
and suckling. Among the higher primates, the facial muscles become more com-
plex and refocus themselves (for instance, shifting from tasks like swivelling ears
to greater control of the mouth) (Chevalier-Skolnikoff, 1973: 58ff.), and in
humans the skull is more or less completely covered by sheets of muscle fibre.
This is a process of reterritorialization, certainly, but one which places the origin
 What Is a Face? & 9

of the human face prior to the appearance of an interiorized subject. The human
face has evolved a physical structure reflective of its prioritization as a locus of
signification, and its importance to communication could not plausibly be
explained otherwise; for example, if we try to imagine a hypothetical society
in which some other region of the body were privileged as a site of communica-
tion in the same way, it becomes obvious that only one other anatomical region is
adequately equipped for the task: the hands.1 And the hands and face are the two
most extensively reterritorialized regions of the human body.
The cortical motor strip – the region of the brain responsible for voluntary
muscle control – is located in the frontal lobes, a part of the brain more extensively
developed in human beings than other animals. Those areas of the body under vol-
untary muscle control are distributed across this strip, and two-thirds of the
human cortical motor strip is occupied by the hands and face, illustrating both
how prioritized these areas are and how much fine control we have over them
compared to the rest of our bodies (Rinn, 1991: 7–10). Clearly, faces result from
a process of physical development and specialization in which a focus on the face
as instrument of communication drove the modification of human anatomy. And
the key defining attribute of the face as anatomical structure is mobility. The
development of ever more extensive musculature and its anchoring in the skin has
given the face the power to dynamically reshape itself in a way impossible for any
other part of the human body. Largely unobserved by its owner, the human face is
constantly shifting its form in response to both conscious and unconscious direc-
tions, instinctive responses to stimuli or changes in the other faces around it.
Humans’ greater voluntary control over their faces is generally ascribed to
the development of speech, a human activity which is obviously reliant upon
fine, voluntary control of the facial muscles (Schmidt and Cohn, 2001: 8). How-
ever, surely it is just as plausible to turn this account on its head and suggest that
the capacity for speech resulted from the development of greater facial control.
While fine control of the face is crucial to verbal communication, the anatomical
complexity of the human face facilitated powerful affective communication for
millennia prior to the advent of language, and the refinement of facial expressiv-
ity could drive the development of the volitional muscle control necessary to
form words. Chimpanzees possess relatively fine muscle control of the lower
face and share the human separation of the upper lip from the nose (which allows
the shaping of words), but are incapable of speech (Chevalier-Skolnikoff, 1973:
58ff.), suggesting that speech is not necessarily the driver of such physical
changes.2 Again, the human body, and the face in particular, provide a biological
substrate for communication. The face, and communication more generally, are
not brought into being by language or culture.
10 & Body & Society Vol. 17 No. 4

Losing Face
A focus on evolved physical structure would seem to return us to the face as
simply a physical endowment; while not simply dependent upon physical
features such as eyes and mouth, it might be considered the result of muscular
development and fine motor control. However, as I have already stated, it is not
my intention to replace one singular account of the face with another, but rather
to demonstrate that no singular account can fully explain the complexity of the
face. While anatomical features are clearly of fundamental importance, they do
not answer all the questions about the face already raised. Most importantly,
how does a newborn infant recognize a line drawing as a face? While this is
clearly the result of a mechanism that is not socially constructed or culturally
dependent – the newborn could hardly be expected to have been influenced
by such considerations to any substantial degree – it also problematizes the idea
of faces as simply resulting from the physical endowments already mentioned.
This rudimentary representation of a face has no mobile muscle structure – it
does not have any real physical attributes at all besides those of ink and paper.
Clearly, in this instance, the key consideration is the infant’s recognition of cer-
tain shapes as representative of a human face, rather than any physical qualities of
a particular face. The significance of physical features is one side of the coin, but
the other is the perception and identification of certain shapes as being faces.
This, too, is far more complex than it might first appear. While it might seem
a simple matter to recognize a certain collection of shapes as a face, just as we
recognize other collections of shapes as words or houses or cars, there must be
something quite different underlying the perception of faces. This is not only
because the newborn infant cannot yet have learnt to identify faces in the same
manner as words, houses, or cars, but also because we are so adept at, not simply
recognizing a face as a face, but recognizing a face as the face of a particular per-
son. Innumerable experiments have documented the human facility for recogniz-
ing faces, and when we weigh up the mobility of the human face, as well as its
capacity to appear differently at different moments (for example because of the
angle of viewing, lighting, etc.), against the sheer number of faces we see, and the
small differences which make one distinguishable from another (one nose being a
millimetre or two longer or wider than another, perhaps, or one set of lips being
marginally thinner or thicker), our ability to instantaneously identify a face we
might only have seen once before from a previously unobserved angle and at dis-
tance is quite simply astonishing. When we contextualize this ability with an oft-
noted 1932 experiment which demonstrated that nine out of ten subjects couldn’t
pick their own hands out of a photographic line-up (Merleau-Ponty, 2002 [1962]:
 What Is a Face? & 11

172–3; van den Berg, 1952: 12), we realize that this is a feat of differentiation and
identification unlike any other of which we are capable, and one which is far
more reliant on the mind of the observer than the physical attributes of the face
being observed (cf. Kanwisher and Moscovitch, 2000: 1).

The Face as Apparition

Human beings are not only adept at recognizing the faces of people they’ve
previously encountered in person, however. Surely the face most often recog-
nized is that of Jesus Christ.
Deleuze and Guattari use the image of Christ’s face on the Shroud of Turin to
illustrate their discussion of faciality (1987: 167ff.), but the faces of holy personages
have graced many other inanimate objects. The modern era of such appearances
perhaps began when Christ’s face was noticed scorched into an overcooked tortilla
by Maria Rubio of New Mexico in 1977 (‘Shrine of the Miracle Tortilla’, 2006).
There have been numerous similar sightings since, including a slice of grilled cheese
on toast purported to bring good luck as a result of bearing the likeness of the Vir-
gin Mary, which Florida woman Diana Duyser tried to auction on eBay in 2004
(BBC, 2004), but perhaps the most famous case of all is the so-called ‘Jesus Nebula’,
an image of the Cone Nebula taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2002, which
many believe shows Christ’s face sculpted from cosmic gas (Sky Image Lab, 2003).
Less individuated faces have also been attributed to inanimate objects or fea-
tures of the natural world, for example the famous ‘Face on Mars’ seemingly cap-
tured in a photograph taken by the Viking 1 space probe in 1976 (NASA, 2001).
While many of the Christ or Mary faces are imperceptible to the non-devout
viewer, the Face on Mars is readily apparent, even if the viewer does not believe
it to be intentionally fabricated and is aware of the fact that the image only shows
– at best – half a set of facial features. This illustrates the fact that such apparitions
are not simply the result of wishful thinking or self-delusion, but rather that our
minds search for faces in everything we see.
This anthropomorphization of our environment might be understood to
result from human narcissism, a desire to colonize the environment with our
own image (cf. Angel, 1997). However, it is not really about seeing ourselves:
it is about seeing others. Our perception is most highly attuned to that which
is most important and stimulating to us: other human bodies. As a result, we are
constantly seeking out human faces, even when there are none to be found.
Clearly, our brains are predisposed towards identifying the features of the
human face, even to the point where any collection of shapes roughly equivalent
to its structure will be recognized as such.
12 & Body & Society Vol. 17 No. 4

It seems clear that we have a strong predisposition towards the perception of

faces. Given the strength of this predisposition and its early appearance, studies
of the human perceptual apparatus generally accept that there is some mechan-
ism for identifying and finely differentiating faces hardwired into the brain.3
However, it might be the case that the brain is only hardwired to direct attention
towards faces, and that this fixation leads to the acquisition of a more nuanced
perception of faces soon after (see de Haan et al., 2002; Sinha et al., 2006:
13–14). If this is the case, the process of learning to understand the face is broadly
similar to verbal language acquisition: we are not born with the words of a
language in our minds, but our brains are predisposed towards absorbing and
acquiring the building blocks of that other fundamental communicative skill.
While the underlying mechanisms which make it possible might be subject
to debate, studies of human perception have firmly established that human
beings (like other higher primates) are naturally inclined towards fixation upon
and identification of faces. Facial information is processed by the human brain in
a distinctive fashion, and this specialized processing is even engaged when pre-
sented with a simplified computer representation, black and white photograph,
or line drawing of a face (Wilson et al., 2002: 2910). Clearly, phenomena such as
the Face on Mars result from the fact that the human brain actively seeks out
visual information that matches the form of the human face.
But this is only half the story. It explains how the human brain possesses
the capacity to recognize faces (and even altogether different material features)
as faces, but it does not explain its impressive capacity to recognize an individ-
ual face as distinct from the countless similar faces which surround it. We might
be able to imagine a human being developing the nuanced perception necessary
to recognize one particular tree in a forest (excusing for the sake of argument
that trees exhibit a far greater degree of formal variation than faces), but it
would be impossible for an infant whose age is measured in days to apply this
level of differentiation to individual trees in the way infants do in relation to
individual faces.
Our recognition of faces is miraculous not only because we are exposed to so
many different faces with so little variation among them; we must also take into
account the facial mobility already discussed. In addition to the variation in the
environmental circumstances of our viewing of faces, every living face is an
unstable entity; unlike other parts of our bodies, or the entirety of the bodies
of most other animal species, we possess an intricate network of musculature
which is anchored to the skin of our faces for the purpose of deforming and
sculpting its surface. As if the task of differentiating static faces was not difficult
enough, each individual human face is constantly squirming beneath the gaze,
 What Is a Face? & 13

altering its appearance from moment to moment. How is it possible for human
beings to recognize faces under such difficult circumstances?

The Face as Perceptual Phenomenon

Our tendency to see faces where none exists illustrates the fact that faces as we
see them are in a very real and significant way products of our own brains, extra-
polated and generalized from certain kinds of visual information. Furthermore,
when considering our remarkable ability to recognize even relatively unfamiliar
faces seen from novel angles, it becomes clear that the mechanism of facial rec-
ognition relies at a very basic level on the generalization and fixing of the face.
Or, to express it in a different way, we might ask what face we are recognizing
when we look at another person, given that no face maintains the same appear-
ance from one moment to the next. Given the quite small margins of difference
between faces, how can we recognize a face we have only seen smiling when we
come upon it again while it is crying? The variation in the contours and linea-
ments of that one face between expressions might be larger than that separating
it from another face holding the same expression.
When we look at another’s face and recognize that face, we cannot simply be
matching the visual input before us with another piece of visual information
which has been filed away in our brains for reference. The likelihood of seeing
the same face from the same angle in the same lighting conditions while it
assumes exactly the same facial expression is infinitessimally small. Bruce and
Young (1986) have put forward an influential model of facial recognition sum-
marized in the following way by Dubois et al. (see also Kircher et al., 2001: B1):

According to this model, a first structural encoding stage extracts a three-dimensional invar-
iant representation from different views of the same face. This stage, common to all kinds of
faces (e.g., known and unknown), is followed by two independent routes. The first route
allows the recognition of the face and the person, whereas the second concerns visual oper-
ations which are not mandatory for the recognition process per se, but are made in parallel to
it: lip-reading behavior, analysis of facial expression and extraction of semantic information
from surface facial features (age, gender, race, etc.). (Dubois et al., 1999: 278)

The first stage of this hypothetical process, then, is one in which the brain con-
ducts a generalized mapping of the face, constructing a ‘three-dimensional invar-
iant representation’ by synthesizing and generalizing as many different views of
the face as possible. Our memory of a face, therefore, is not any particular view
of the face; we never actually see before us the face which is available to our
memory, as the memory-face has no particular expression or perspective. We are
not simply comparing shapes or images, as we would when recognizing a
14 & Body & Society Vol. 17 No. 4

familiar car or work of art. This would explain why damage to particular regions
of the brain can remove the ability to recognize faces even though the ability to
see faces remains unimpaired (prosopagnosia), or can even remove the ability
to recognize faces first seen after the brain injury, while leaving intact the ability
to recognize faces which became familiar prior to its occurrence (Dubois et al.,
1999: 285–6).4 Stranger still, patients with Capgras delusion are able to recognize
faces, but this recognition does not trigger some deeper affective response asso-
ciated with familiarity, leading them to believe that they are seeing a stranger
who has somehow taken on the appearance of someone they know (Kagan,
2007: 520–1). Recognizing a face is therefore not simply about matching shapes;
we recognize also according to the feelings a particular face communicates to us.
In an experiment conducted by Kircher et al., subjects were presented with
images of their own faces and those of highly familiar persons, which had been
distorted to varying degrees using morphing software. Functional MRI scans
were used to compare the brain processes involved in recognizing one’s own face
with that of the familiar other. While the difference between the two forms of
facial recognition was slight, they conclude:
Comparing the response time of the two highly overlearned faces, self and partner, directly
in a post-hoc analysis, we found a small but significantly slower processing speed for the
self faces when they were morphed more . . . but not when morphed less extensively. . . .
We can speculate that the delayed recognition effect might be due to a mismatch of the
internal representation of the self face and reality. For example, many people think that
a snapshot of themselves is not an accurate representation. The morphing procedure might
exaggerate the mismatch between self-representation and photograph even further, result-
ing in a more complex verification process, which leads to a longer response time. (Kircher
et al., 2001: B10-B11)

Everyone has had the experience of finding a photograph of oneself ugly or unfa-
miliar, but perhaps there is more to this than Kircher et al.’s ‘mismatch of the
internal representation of the self face and reality’. While we are adept at general-
izing an enduring model from the constantly shifting appearance of other faces,
we usually only see our own faces from one angle and with one expression (in the
bathroom mirror, perhaps), and so do not have the opportunity to stabilize its
stream of expressions into a universally applicable template which can make it
appear familiar no matter where, when or from what angle a photograph might
be taken. Furthermore, the camera itself is a technology employed to fix and sta-
bilize the face, capturing it within a set of temporal and spatial coordinates alien
to its lived physicality. It therefore introduces another level of processing
between the living face and human perception, as a result sometimes breaking the
connection between the mental conceptualization and the material phenomenon
to which it should refer.
 What Is a Face? & 15

Clinical experiments have shown that our perception of emotion, and

gender and racial identities, in faces can be shifted by changing the continuum
of faces with which we are familiar (Rhodes et al., 2003; Webster et al., 2004),
establishing that what we see in the faces of others is unstable, shifting dynami-
cally in response not only to the face’s own physical instability but also the per-
ceiver’s context and experience. Our mapping of identities and categories onto
facial features is not an inevitable result of anatomical structure or brain architec-
ture at all; rather our brain architecture is susceptible to socially formulated cate-
gories through its very malleability and adaptability.
It would be a mistake, therefore, to think that highlighting the mechanics of
facial perception would limit or demystify the face, essentializing it as immuta-
ble, singular and self-evident. Doing so certainly doesn’t suggest that categories
like gender or race are objectively manifested in facial features, or even that our
brains are hardwired to perceive them there. Even when confined to the brain
(which is only one of the loci in which the phenomenon of the face is brought
into being), attempts to explain facial perception such as that of Bruce and
Young, above, must posit a fragmented, parallel cluster of different kinds of per-
ception which are only later assembled into the unified conceptualization made
available to our conscious minds. Whether or not this or any other hypothesis
concerning the cognitive underpinnings of facial perception turns out to be lit-
erally true is not my immediate concern here (and I am not qualified to make
such evaluations in any event). Rather, they are one more attempt to explain
what faces are, different in assumptions and approach to others discussed here,
but nevertheless raising similar themes. Even within disciplines which seek an
objective, naturalizing, scientific account of the face, ultimately the only qualities
that can be identified as fixed and ‘natural’ to the face are those of multiplicity,
dynamism and distribution across varying anatomical, mental and social loci.
In seeking to move beyond static accounts of subjectivization as ‘systemic
structurings’ (2002: 2), Brian Massumi argues that:
the problem with the dominant models in cultural and literary theory is not that they are too
abstract to grasp the concreteness of the real. The problem is that they are not abstract
enough to grasp the real incorporeality of the concrete. (2002: 5)

In other words, it is not that a focus on ideological positioning alone is insuffi-

cient because it lacks the fixity and stability of the material body and embodied
experience – in fact, the opposite is true. It is such structures that impose fixity on
the dynamism and indeterminacy of the material body and embodied experience.
The face Deleuze and Guattari seek to reject is not a theoretical abstraction
generalized from the specificity of ‘real’ instances of interaction between bodies
16 & Body & Society Vol. 17 No. 4

in everyday life; faces as we experience them in everyday life are anything but
specific and stable. Our faces are in constant flux, being endlessly pulled this way
and that by the muscular structures we have evolved precisely for this purpose, and
faces as we see and remember them exist as generalized abstractions and extrapo-
lations from this flux. It is only with reference to socially constituted structures of
significance that this non-specificity and abstraction is stabilized and fixed within
enduring categories such as gender or race. At the moment of apperception, the
specificity of individual faces cannot be fixed within such larger categories; in fact,
the diversity of our experience of just one person’s face cannot be fixed within the
single category of an enduring individual identity without the application of fur-
ther cognitive processing. In both cases, particularity and specificity are precisely
what is not present at the apperceptive moment: they are extrapolated from it and
retrospectively applied after the moment has ended.

Autistic Faces
The very complexity of the process which creates our internalized conceptuali-
zations of faces results from the fundamental irreconcilability of the living face
with fixed, stable identity and representation. The faces we see must be processed
extensively using specialized cognitive faculties in order to be converted into
generalizations of this kind. Another body is never simply one more object in
our environment, and this is not simply due to the fact that we credit it with
an interior life. Its greater significance is apparent long before sophisticated
extrapolations have been developed from what we see.
Perhaps the most striking evidence of this is the way in which the autistic
interact with the bodies of other people. While there is a great deal of variation
in the severity and attributes of autism, accounts often highlight an association
between autism and the absence of ‘theory of mind’ (Baron-Cohen, 1995; Pre-
mack and Woodruff, 1978: 515), that faculty widely believed to develop in young
children as a way of understanding the inner states of others through the formu-
lation of hypotheses regarding their motivations and world-view.
If autistic behaviour results from the lack of an effective theory of mind,
which prevents an autistic person from understanding another person’s interior
life, this could be expected to result in other human beings losing the special
visual fascination they hold for the non-autistic, making them subside into the
visual field due to a lack of any special significance. Indeed, it might seem that
this is exactly what happens because the severely autistic tend not to make eye
contact with other people or focus upon their faces. This might be construed
as an indifference to other bodies.
 What Is a Face? & 17

However, at least some accounts given by those with autism suggest that,
rather than resulting from an indifference to other bodies, this behaviour is an
active avoidance, which results from the overwhelming and disorienting blast
of stimulation they produce. For example, when Jonathan Cole asked autistic
author Donna Williams why looking at faces was difficult for her, she replied
that faces produce an uncontrollable stream of stimuli which threatens her very
sense of individual selfhood:
Such interaction would generally be only inconsistently comprehensible and would soon
cause information overload after a few minutes and be poured down onto to [sic] me with
a total absence of my own social interest and want. (Cole, 1997: 94)

Even among those without autism, a number of studies have shown that mental
processing of information is hampered when looking at faces because of the high
cognitive load they place on the brain – this is why we often look away from
interlocutors while formulating the answer to a question (Doherty-Sneddon
et al., 2001). When, as in the case of autism, the brain is less effective at working
harmoniously to create highly conceptualized responses to other bodies, the lack
of such conceptualization does not leave the sight of other bodies without special
impact; rather, what remains is the torrent of raw lower-order stimuli our brains
gather from the surfaces of other bodies. The sheer volume and intensity of this
information (which is processed and filtered by the pre-conscious mental faculties
of the non-autistic) makes it almost impossible for the conscious minds of those
with autism to handle. For the non-autistic, the face as it is consciously understood
is actually a highly conceptualized entity derived from the pre-conscious process-
ing of a vast amount of information. The act of looking at a face does not provide
unmediated access to its physical materiality; in fact, to access our raw appercep-
tive experience of another face would be to be overwhelmed by a torrent of visual
stimuli beyond the capacity of our conscious minds to organize and interpret.
Psychologizing accounts of interpersonal interaction such as theory of mind
are notable for their blindness to the importance of the face. While theory of
mind is supposedly an innate sense, Baron-Cohen describes it entirely in terms
of disinterested observation, conscious reasoning and the formulation of hypoth-
eses, as might be expected from the term ‘theory’ itself. According to Baron-
Cohen, the ability to formulate such hypotheses is the evolved capacity that
makes complex social interaction possible; he supports this claim by suggesting
that, without it, such interaction could only be made possible by the deployment
of an (impossible) scientific instrument able to look inside the minds of others:
Evolution was not going to wait around for human scientists to invent a brainoscope
before primates (early hominids included) could understand and participate in complex
18 & Body & Society Vol. 17 No. 4

social interaction. If it had done so, the hominid line would have died out long ago.
(Baron-Cohen, 1995: 24)

This entirely ignores the rich affective relationships between human beings,
which render both the brainoscope and theory of mind itself unnecessary. Just
by glancing at another person’s face, we understand and feel a tremendous
amount about them without any need to theorize. After all, while evolution did
not ‘wait around’ for the invention of the brainoscope to enable complex social
interaction, it didn’t wait around for the ability to theorize, either.5
Human beings engaged in complex social interaction before the arrival of
language and self-reflexive consciousness, and continued to do so after. Non-
human animals respond to one another’s motivations and desires, and share and
inspire affective states with no need for conjecture. As discussed by Vinciane
Despret in relation to celebrated cases such as that of the horse Clever Hans,
humans and non-human animals can even form powerful non-conscious com-
municative connections across species through an embodied ‘miracle of attune-
ment’ (Despret, 2004: 125). To note these things is not to deny that human beings
can and do hypothesize about and reflect upon their own and others’ motiva-
tions, or that language is a powerful tool for communication; but it does contest
a tendency to privilege the rational, conscious and linguistic to such a degree that
all other forms of communication and interaction are rendered invisible. Such a
selective understanding renders a full account of the face impossible.

The Face as Mystery

The conceptualized face available to our conscious minds can therefore be seen
as generated by the interplay of multiple phenomena located in physical anat-
omy, the brains of both the possessor and viewer of the face, the relationship
between that face and other faces, and the wider socio-cultural context. Our
categorization and generalization of faces can to some degree be determined
by social forces, but the influence of social forces is itself, presumably, enabled
by a more basic, pre-conscious categorization and generalization of faces
brought about by the architecture of our brains. To fix and recognize a single,
but constantly changing, face as the identifier of a particular person itself requires
complex generalization and extrapolation. At a cultural level, a similar process
occurs on a larger scale, generalizing and extrapolating to fix whole populations
of faces into stable categories.
Patrizia Magli has discussed the paradox of the human face as something
illusive and unstable, mobile and constantly in flux, and yet at the same time
so easily recognizable as the surest sign of a stable, individualized identity:
 What Is a Face? & 19

[T]o isolate a face is to isolate a permanent form, one whose ‘unchanging traits’ are to be per-
ceived through a process that attempts to freeze the face’s state of constant flux into a state of
immutability.
Such a symbolizing process introduces us to a different time: no longer is it the non-time of
an actual face, lost in the uninterrupted fluctuation of lights and shadows. Rather, it is the
time of a ‘measure’ that stills things, develops a formal image and locks it into an absolute
fixity, wherein it then interprets proportions, defines outlines, and attempts to establish
essential traits. (Magli, 1989: 90)

In a manner reminiscent of Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of the face, Magli

sees this fixing and stabilizing as part of a project of binding the human body to
systems of meaning, as part of a tendency to freeze the face in a system of
strictly codified equivalences, but she does not understand it to produce the
face itself. It is not difficult to produce examples of the process whereby the
tremendous diversity of faces is reduced to a stable and limited set of estab-
lished categories of significance associated with restrictive identities – the Jew-
ish nose, for example, or those facial characteristics deemed masculine or
feminine, aristocratic or plebeian.
The attribution of a stable identity to the face once again becomes emble-
matic of a corralling of the body’s instability and exuberance into unified and
restrictive identities. It might be argued that it is partly the face’s very instability,
its relatively greater capacity for change, that makes it the privileged object of
such a project. Without stability being imposed upon the face, it would cease
to be the single, holistic entity we currently perceive and attribute to particular
individuals. However, a consideration of the mechanics of facial perception
makes it clear that this process of stabilization begins before subjectivization;
without its incorporation into the very architecture of our brains, we would all
be like the autistic person who is forced to shield his or her eyes from the unfil-
tered glare of the face.
Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 171) see the face as a mark of restrictive identity
which must be thrown off. But if – as concluded above – the face is a site whose
significatory power has been enshrined in our genetic make-up, how can the face
be rejected? The face will always announce itself to us because it is a unique ana-
tomical phenomenon imbued with a unique significance. An escape from restric-
tive subjectivity would not be accompanied by the loss of a face, just as a man
freed from the influence of gender categories would still find a penis among his
anatomical endowments. The difference is that – unlike the penis – signification
is part of the face’s biologically enshrined nature, which will remain with it
regardless of social changes. The significatory power of the face, while it can
be harnessed to subjectivization, does not result from it.
20 & Body & Society Vol. 17 No. 4

However, it is equally true that, irrespective of its provenance or materiality,

the face – as Deleuze and Guattari argue – is fundamentally implicated in the
structuring of identity and subjectivity. The uniqueness of the face in physical
terms depends primarily on its mobility, a mobility which gives it an unmatched
capacity for expressiveness and signification, but the harnessing of the face to
fixed identities requires a stabilization and generalization of those mobile fea-
tures, a freezing of them into singular attributes which endure through time. The
identification of these stable features is necessary for the generalization of facia-
lized identity, for the attribution of membership in particular fixed groupings
(e.g. the male face, the African face, the insane face), but at a more basic level such
a fixing of the face is necessary for any attribution of individuality and unique-
ness to any face.
For each of us, faces are integrated into a system of meaning that is largely a
product of the ways in which our brains organize sensory experience. The visual
information generated by faces is subject to a variety of complex processes in
order to create an internal record and conceptualization. When we see a face,
we attempt to stabilize this profoundly unstable phenomenon and make it the
enduring marker of a particular, stable identity. This generalization of attributes
in individual faces articulates with a cultural process whereby populations of
faces are generalized, for instance into racial groupings. Our brains expend a
great deal of effort converting the dynamism of faces into stable, abstract refer-
ence points so that their constant flow of information can be managed and
tracked, but the rich potentiality of the faces around us in the physical world
is never encapsulated or erased by this process. Faces as physical phenomena
remain something of another order entirely; complex mental processing would
not be necessary if there were not a tremendous qualitative gap between the
experiential reality and its mental conceptualization.
When Emmanuel Levinas speaks of ‘the face’ (1988: 194ff.), he takes the face
as representative of our inability to fully capture and control the Other. For
Levinas, the face represents the paradox of imagining that the Other experiences
an inner life like one’s own while simultaneously only being able to interact with
the Other as a sealed exteriority, which implacably hides the truth of this posited
interior life from us. The full truth of the Other is ultimately lost behind the face
or between the features and expressions it presents to us. For Levinas, the face is
not simply the result of the body’s subjectification and subjugation to larger
structures of meaning and identity, as it is for Deleuze and Guattari. Rather it
illustrates the inability of structures of meaning to contain the body of the Other.
The way in which the other presents himself, exceeding the idea of the other in me, we here
name face. This mode does not consist in figuring as a theme under my gaze, in spreading
 What Is a Face? & 21

itself forth as a set of qualities forming an image. The face of the Other at each moment
destroys and overflows the plastic image it leaves me, the idea existing to my own measure
and to the measure of its ideatum – the adequate idea. (Levinas, 1988: 50–1)

Deleuze and Guattari’s account of the face focuses on its role in subjectification.
Levinas, on the other hand, sees it as something prior to our integration into
social structures and intersubjective relationships. In the words of Jon Erickson,
‘[f]or Lévinas [sic] it is the presignifying ‘‘signifyingness’’ of the human face that
calls to us, not its already socially overcoded significations’ (1999: 18). Levinas’s
account suggests that the face not only predates subjectification, but also that it
can never be fully reconciled with this process. In light of this, the limitations of
Deleuze and Guattari’s account of facialization can be seen to stem from its fail-
ure to consider two quite different but overlapping phenomena, both of which
we understand as the face. Their account of facialization considers the face of the
Other as we see it, stabilizing it and fixing it within a system of significance, but
does not take into account that this is something quite different from the face as a
material component of the body, which is never fully fixed, grasped or possessed
by the viewer of that face. The ‘three-dimensional invariant representation’
which is extracted from our viewing of a face and fixed in ‘multidimensional face
space’ (Rhodes et al., 2003: 558), then used as a representation of a particular
identity (both a personal identity and a more generalized identity such as race
or gender) is a phenomenon produced within the mind of the viewer, and is quite
different in nature from both the anatomical phenomenon of the face and our
perceptual experience of it. (In fact, it would not be possible for the former phe-
nomenon to exist in physical space at all.)

Conclusion
The only final answer to the question ‘What is a face?’, then, is that ‘the face’ is in
fact a variety of different phenomena which are stabilized and assembled into a
unified, highly conceptualized entity by human perception. Differing attempts
to explain the face might look for its genesis in subjectivization, anatomy, various
brain processes or the creation of categories of identity, and these attempts are
misguided only when they work on the assumption that their chosen line of
inquiry alone will suffice.
A face is a unique anatomical feature, but it cannot be isolated in any one
body; after all, a face can only be said to meaningfully exist when at least one
other body synthesizes a number of different physical features and plots a series
of morphological changes over time in order to produce a unified and significant
conceptualization. The face is brought into being by communication, and
 22 & Body & Society Vol. 17 No. 4

communication can only exist in the relationships between bodies, rather than on
any one body in isolation.
Acknowledging this should not result in a dematerialized understanding of
the face, however; the rich significance of the face is produced by a sophisticated
and highly specialized set of anatomical and neurological capacities which
human beings have evolved over time and which are part of our biological
make-up. At the same time, the evolution of these capacities has been driven
by communication between human beings – without such communication they
would confer no evolutionary advantage. The ability to see faces – to stabilize
them as meaningful, unique and unified entities capable of creating relationships
between bodies – is itself reliant on extensive cognitive specialization so complex
as to still largely defy scientific understanding or emulation. To acknowledge
such considerations does not produce an understanding of the face as something
simple, predictable, fixed or self-evident. Rather, this inescapable foundation in
biology and neurology provides the mechanisms which allow the face to be as
dynamic, unstable, and multiplex as it is.

Notes
1. Of course, hands are already privileged sites of communication through their complex
role in gesture (see Gallagher, 2005: 107ff.; McNeill, 1996, 2005). It is not accidental that the
only true non-verbal language is sign language; no other part of the body aside from the vocal
apparatus and hands possesses the level of flexibility and fine motor control necessary to pro-
duce grammar. It is true that sign language engages more than one part of the body, but in this
regard it is no different from spoken language (which also utilizes gesture, facial expression,
etc.). However, in both cases other parts of the body can only provide support to the central
role played by hands or mouth.
2. The common assumption that spoken language has driven such anatomical changes is perhaps
indicative of the more general privileging of language and linguistic structures at the expense of affec-
tive and embodied communication, apparent in disciplines as diverse as critical theory and cognitive
science. Of course the development of language can be accepted to have influenced the evolution of
the face; however, it would be a mistake to see language as the driver of the face’s evolution. Michael
Corballis (2002) makes a persuasive case for spoken language having appeared relatively late in our
evolution, following a period in which gesture and facial expression were dominant. The very absence
of the machinery of speech in other primates, despite their capacity for seemingly quite sophisticated
communication, provides support for this argument.
3. The claims of Deleuze and Guattari notwithstanding, the examples of specialized perception of
the face used throughout this article do suggest that human perception differentiates faces from the
rest of our bodies at a fundamental level. Furthermore, while infants only days old exhibit a preference
for realistic depictions of faces as opposed to ones whose features have been scrambled, it is only after
the ‘mirror stage’ at 18 months that they display the same discrimination regarding entire bodies
(Slaughter et al., 2002).
4. Such perceptual problems can also be present from birth. Probably the most famous hereditary
prosopagnosic is the neurologist Oliver Sacks.
 What Is a Face? & 23

5. Shaun Gallagher observes that explanations such as theory of mind ‘conceive of communicative
interaction between two people as a process that takes place between two Cartesian minds. It assumes
that one’s understanding involves a retreat into a realm of theoria or simulacra, into a set of internal
mental operations that come to be expressed (externalized) in speech, gesture, or action’ (Gallagher,
2005: 211-12). For a clinical challenge to the idea of theory of mind, see Gopnik and Meltzoff
(1995), particularly where they note that young children are no more able to explain their own beha-
viour in terms of theory of mind than that of others (while still, presumably, being perfectly aware
that they themselves have a mental life) (Gopnik and Meltzoff, 1995: 177ff.). See also Erin Manning’s
discussion of autistic interaction in Body & Society 15(3) which, while different from mine in impor-
tant ways, also suggests that it is irreconcileable with a ‘contained’, ‘unified verbal self’ (Manning,
2009: 40).

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Daniel Black lectures in the School of English, Communications and Performance Studies at Monash
University, Melbourne, Australia. His research focuses on the relationship between embodiment and
technology. [email: daniel.black@monash.edu]
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