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INTRODUCTION

LOOK AT ME

I know. You can’t. Well, I suppose you could search my name online. If we’ve met before, you could picture me. If we haven’t, you could conjure me. Or maybe I’m with you, reading these words to you in some distant future. But let’s say you read those familiar words, absent my presence. Look at me. What comes to mind?

For me, this three-word sentence has some assumptions built into it. One is that by me, I mean my face. Why? There is a great deal more to me than my face, which is one of the few parts of me that I can’t actually see without a reflection or a recording. When I think or say the words I or me, I rarely picture my own face. So why is the face the seat of identity? What is it about the face—be it from the point of view of biology, neurology, psychology, philosophy, anthropology—that yields that cliché “the eyes are the windows to the soul”? In any case, look at me seems to equal look at my face.

Built into that instruction are also some assumptions about the nature of that face. It’s presumably visible, close enough to see, uncovered, recognizable as a face, and impenetrable—we generally don’t say look into me or look through me. To look into a face (searchingly) or through it (distractedly) would be either to go too far or not far enough in terms of seeing it. When it comes to dimension, this picture of the face corresponds to somewhere roughly between a filmic close-up and a passport photo. It is implicitly a direct view of the front of the head, not a view from the side or of the back. Another strangeness: is the front of the face really more legible than, say, the silhouette? We use both for mug shots, after all.

Embedded even deeper in the phrase look at me are assumptions about the situation in which it would be uttered. The grammar dictates a human speaker, a human listener, and a human face subjected to the view of functioning human eyes. You wouldn’t say look at me to yourself or even to a mirror. We imagine a personal encounter between two people who know each other well enough for it to pass between them in a conversation. Look at me feels urgent, emotional. Prefaced by please, it becomes an appeal; by I said, it becomes an order. Between lovers, it’s a call to intimacy, a promise of honesty. Between enemies, it’s a threat of violence, a demand to be heard. Look at me vibrates with a sense of what we owe each other, that is, with a sense of ethics.

Doesn’t this preclude some entities from that sense of ethical obligation? The very fact of an instruction between two humans also assumes that they are both alive and that their faces are capable of actions—speaking and looking, respectively—and expressions of feeling. But you might not say this sentence to a blind person, a victim of paralysis, or an animal.

The notion that human faces are recognizable, categorizable, and distinct from other kinds of faces first emerged as a scientific concept in Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). Nowadays, facial recognition is a well-studied developmental stage in babies. Neuroscientists have located a part of the brain, the “fusiform face area,” that lights up when we look at faces. For many, the face is the basis for sympathy, which is defined as “an affinity between certain things, by virtue of which they are similarly … affected by the same influence.” The idea that morality is enhanced by face-to-face interaction has been promulgated by scientists since Darwin and can be summed up by the title of a 2001 article in the Journal of Consciousness Studies, “Empathy needs a face.”¹

The Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas claimed that “the face is meaning all by itself.”² In his work, he extols all the features I describe above: “the very uprightness of the face, its upright exposure, without defense. The skin of the face is that which stays most naked, most destitute. It is the most naked, though with a decent nudity.” He presumes a human face, a frontal view of the face, and a kind of complete or replete meaning in it: “the face signifies itself”; “the face is meaning all by itself.” This face is adamantly not an object; it resists exchange and conversion.³ For Levinas, it’s not just sympathy with a face that promotes ethics. The face also subjects us to a sense of radical, unique otherness, what he calls alterity. The face shocks us into recognizing our stark difference from, and our profound responsibility for, one other.

In sum, the face—what we ask each other to engage with when we say look at me—is fundamental to how we understand ourselves. The face means identity, truth, feeling, beauty, authenticity, humanity. It underlies our beliefs about what constitutes a human, how we relate emotionally, what is pleasing to the eye, and how we ought to treat each other. All of this—ontology, affect, aesthetics, ethics—rests on a specific version or image of the face. We might call it The Ideal Face. This book aims to break it.

I am by no means the first to try to take apart this picture of the face. What interests me is in fact the co-existence of these two opposed traditions: our continued belief in The Ideal Face and our persistent desire to dismantle it. Perhaps this just means that the face is an ideal before which we continually fall short. But I think we actually take pleasure in failed faces. The history of literature and art is littered not just with The Ideal Face but also with stranger faces, by which I mean both strange faces and the faces of strangers. The essays in this book take up a range of recalcitrant or unruly faces: the disabled face, the racially ambiguous face, the dead face, the faces we see in objects, the animal face, the blank face, and the digital face.

FIGURE, FETISH, ART

Stranger Faces probes our mythology of the face by treating it not as an ideal, but as a kind of sign—a symbol, a medium, a piece of language. A sign is made up of two parts: the sign itself—like a mark on a page or a spoken word—and whatever the sign refers to, its referent—a meaning, a concept, a person. The face is similarly divided, between the surface of the face itself and whatever we think that surface means: beauty, depth, a particular emotion, humanity.

When Levinas claims that “the face signifies itself” and “the face is meaning all by itself,” he is suggesting that the surface and the meaning are fused, inseparable. I disagree. We know that signs don’t always mean what they say. Signs can cease to point to referents because of willful acts of deception, distortion, or erasure. In fact, this potential disjunction between signs and referents is built in, a fundamental principle of language—and of faces, too. Studies have shown that the average person correctly assesses another person’s expressions (thinking, agreeing, confused, concentrating, interested, disagreeing) only 54% of the time. Despite the belief that a face is clearer than a word, there’s more variation in what facial expressions mean across culture, gender, and individuals than we might imagine.

A face is a figure. If the face is always split in two—a surface and a depth or a sign and its referent—then the stranger faces I consider intensify this disjunction. They are hard to read because they intensely distort the assumed correspondence between the surface and its meaning. They’re too big or too dead or too blank or too fungible or too beastly; they don’t conform. What they show us, I think, is that faces don’t have to be human, in front of us, undamaged, whole, visible, beautiful, or recognizable at all. In fact, we seem to prefer thinking about them, playing with them, when they’re not.

Stranger faces lead us to go beyond the usual question—what should a face be?—to an even more basic one: what counts as a face and why? If we dislodge The Ideal Face from its seat of power, the array of stranger faces we’re left with might give us insight into faces as such, as we experience them. We might move toward new models of being, aesthetics, affect, and ethics that rely not on identity or truth, but on pleasure, in all of its richness and complexity. We might even traverse that ultimate taboo: treating the face as a kind of thing.

Stranger faces attract and repel recognition. They ride the line of legibility, and compel us to read them even though we know we are doomed to fail. I think we compensate for that failure by taking unexpected pleasure in it. The gap between the face and its depths is a span across which we fondle, flirt with, and fret over meaning. Room for error is room for play. In psychoanalysis, this pleasurable compensation is called disavowal. As Octave Mannoni said, “I know very well, but nevertheless,”⁴ or applied here: “I know I can’t read this face but nevertheless I try, and take pleasure in the effort.” A more familiar word for this is fetishism.

The fetish has roots in anthropology and Marxist thought as well as psychoanalysis. In all three realms of knowledge, the fetish describes when something is lost or absent—our relationship to a god, to the conditions of production, or to an imagined phallus—and a significant object is recruited to stand in or make up for that loss or absence. So, a shiny statuette, an idol, stands in for a god; the shine of a commodity conceals the labor that produced it; the shine on a nose sparks arousal in a fetishist who associates it with a penis. (It is no coincidence that this, Freud’s first example of the fetish, is a kind of face-play.) Fetishistic pleasure is neither pure nor unequivocally positive. Indeed, fetishism is perverse by definition—it entails finding something good about what we assume to be bad: failure, absence, loss. It is complex, sometimes painful. But it is also an aesthetic relationship to the world.⁵

While the cross-cultural history of art is dominated by the face, we still assume that to treat a face aesthetically is to objectify it. To fetishize the face might seem to contravene not just Levinas’s interdiction against treating it as currency but also an older one against “using people.” Kant claimed that a person “is never to be used merely as a means for someone (even for God) without at the same time being himself an end.”⁶ This idea appears now in warnings against “objectifying” other people. Nonfictional and fictional accounts of rape, slavery, and genocide often point to dehumanizing others—treating them like machines or animals or as a means to an end—as the first step to harming them.

As psychology professor Paul Bloom put it in a 2017 New Yorker essay: “The thesis that viewing others as objects or animals enables our very worst conduct would seem to explain a great deal. Yet there’s reason to think that it’s almost the opposite of the truth.” When you apply basic logic to, say, the practice of taunting people, you can see that “to believe that such taunts are effective is to assume that their targets would be ashamed to be thought of that way—which implies that, at some level, you think of them as people after all.” In Down Girl, philosopher Kate Manne makes an analogous point about misogyny: “people may know full well that those they treat in brutally degrading and inhuman ways are fellow human beings, underneath a more or less thin veneer of false consciousness.” Bloom concludes: “The aggressions licensed by moral entitlement, the veneer of bad faith: those things are evident in a wide range of phenomena, from slaveholders’ religion-tinctured justifications to the Nazi bureaucrats’ squeamishness about naming the activity they were organizing, neither of which would have been necessary if the oppressors were really convinced that their victims were beasts.”⁷

If cruelty doesn’t require dehumanization, nor does dehumanization require cruelty. Bloom raises the usefulness of a surgeon’s clinical, unbiased view of a body. In her masterful study, Persons and Things, Barbara Johnson contests Kant’s rule about not using people with another psychoanalytic concept, one that has a lot in common with the fetish—the “transitional object,” like a teddy bear or a blanket, which is often personified and survives the child’s efforts to destroy it. It thus teaches the child consistency and humility. Even beyond sadomasochism, many valuable and ethical relationships depend on this oscillation between a person and a thing. I would add to them the complex pleasures—dangerous, but not necessarily unethical—of treating the human face with the attention and value we grant to a work of art.

LOOK AT ME

Jennifer Egan’s 2001 novel, Look at Me, begins: “After the accident, I became less visible. I don’t mean in the obvious sense that I went to fewer parties and retreated from general view. Or not just that. I mean that after the accident, I became more difficult to see.”⁸ The narrator, Charlotte, flashes back to explain: driving without a seatbelt, she hits the brakes and “bursts through the windshield into the open air,” breaking her ribs, arm, and leg, shattering every bone in her face:

My face was in the midst of what he called a “golden time,” before the “grotesque swelling” would set in. If he operated immediately, he could get a jump on my “gross asymmetry”—namely the disconnection of my cheekbones from my upper skull and of my lower jaw from my “midface.” I had no idea where I was or what had happened to me. My face was numb, I saw with slurry double vision and had an odd sensation around my mouth as if my upper and lower teeth were out of whack.⁹

She undergoes twelve hours of surgery, which she describes in detail: “eighty titanium screws were implanted in the crushed bones of my face to connect and hold them together … I’d been sliced from ear to ear over the crown of my head so Dr. Fabermann could peel down the skin from my forehead and reattach my cheekbones to my upper skull; … incisions were made inside my mouth so that he could connect my lower and upper jaws.”¹⁰

Egan taps into a longstanding fascination with cosmetic surgery in journalistic accounts, from the report on Indian rhinoplasty published in The Gentleman’s Magazine in 1794 to Alice Hine’s recent deep dive in the May 2019 issue of New York Magazine into the new subculture of extreme facial surgery among “involuntarily celibate men.” These “incels” are turning to the scalpel to achieve what they perceive to be “‘manlier’ noses and head shapes” like “a wide jaw or prominent brow” or “angular ‘male model’ cheekbones.”¹¹ Egan’s aesthetic luxuriation over medical details is also characteristic of fictional narratives that depict facial surgery—novels like Thomas Pynchon’s V. (1963) and films like Georges Franju’s Les yeux sans visage (1960), Scott McGhee’s and David Siegel’s Suture (1983), Alejandro Amenàbar’s Abre los ojos (1997), and Pedro Almodóvar’s La piel que habito (2011). Works like Phantom of the Opera luxuriate through layering: the addition of a mask that stands in for the face, competes with the face, implies that the face is itself constructed and removable. It seems one way we compensate for a perceived injury to or deficiency in a face is to aestheticize its repair.

Indeed, the strange thing about Charlotte’s face in Look at Me is that it’s of greatest aesthetic interest when it’s shattered and when it’s being reconstituted: “My face was just entering the ‘angry healing phase’: black bruises extending down to my chest, the whites of my eyes a monstrous red; a swollen, basketball-sized head with stitches across the crown”; “rather than fading … my bruises simply changed color, like fireworks whose finale won’t arrive.”¹²

Perhaps even stranger is that though Charlotte’s surgery is successful—seamless—it makes her unrecognizable. Her face is unscarred, still beautiful, possibly improved by plastic surgery, but somehow vague. Once a professional model—the title is obviously riffing on this valence of look at me, too—she can’t return to her work: “people looked at me in the particular way people do inside the fashion world: a quick ravenous glance that demands beauty or power as its immediate reward. And then they looked away, as if what they had seen were not just unfamiliar, but without possibility.”¹³ Her accident has destroyed what she calls “a shadow self” or “shadow face”: “that caricature that clings to each of us, revealing itself in odd moments when we laugh or fall still, staring brazenly from certain bad photographs.”¹⁴ Her face no longer functions as a source of identity, power, or ethical relation for her.

For Egan, the opposite of The Ideal Face isn’t the non-ideal face—what I’m calling “the stranger face.” It is the face “without possibility,” which our glances pass over as if over porcelain, or through as if through glass. And outside of Egan’s novel, that face doesn’t exist. Its very impossibility is what makes the premise of Look at Me so intriguing. Every real face is interesting, worth looking at, often precisely because of its deviation from an abstract ideal. If we think of every face, even the strangest one, as a work of art, then beauty and truth—what we claim to seek when we look at a face, what we want to hear when we say look at me, what do you see?—suddenly seem insufficient indices for all that a face can hold, for all it can do.

I am a mixed-race woman who has been mistaken for Chinese, Dominican, Egyptian, Eritrean, Ethiopian, Mexican, Somali, Spanish, and Thai. My face has been compared to E.T. (big eyes), to a mango (asymmetrical), and to Cleopatra . Zambians often tell me I look like my mother, who had much darker skin than I but the same bone structure; Americans, who see skin color first, don’t catch the likeness. Men on the street have called me beautiful and ugly, at about the same frequency. If I say look at me, I frankly don’t know what you’ll see.

Maybe you’ll picture a meme. The 2013 movie, Captain Phillips, stars Tom Hanks—the coziest face that ever sat on a screen—as the titular captain. When Somali pirates board his cargo ship, their leader Abduwali Muse (played by Barkhad Abdi) points at his own eyes and says, “Look at me. Look at me. I’m the captain now.” The intensity of this interracial encounter and the deft performance by the previously unknown Abdi, make it a perfect meme. Hanks’s Hollywood smile and squinty affability contrast sharply with Abdi’s imperfect teeth and big eyes, which widen between the two commands: look at me. I recently tweeted a fictive riff on this meme:

The joke has layers of race and gender built into it: Hanks’s face hovers over my unassuming date’s; my face over Abdi’s. This is what fascinates me about faces—not their ideality but their mutability, the way they shift and layer, always abrim with charged relation.

They remind me of how art works. Art, like everything, is entangled with capital. But it isn’t limited to it. While Kant argued against objectifying people, he also argued that the beauty of art itself is not a means to an end, that it does not satisfy desires, but is rather “purposive without purpose” (“final without end,” in some translations).¹⁵ Art isn’t just a commodity, an object to be bought and sold, in order to satiate some craving; it’s a creation and an experience. It moves, and it moves us. It is this fugitive aspect of the face as art—its fleeting, fleeing quality, the sense that it is always turning into, or toward, or away from—that I hope to evoke in these pages.