ATP 7- Year Zero: Faciality

I.      This chapter begins with the opposition between signifiance (signifying capacity, RS) and subjectification which involves two semiotic systems (strata). Just as Signifiance always uses a white wall to express its signs and redundancies, subjectification necessarily employs a black hole to sustain its consciousness, passion, and redundancies.
        We have seen many binary structures thus far; however, this one is unique because the abstract machine of faciality is created at the boundary separating the two, a boundary whose limits are seemingly impossible to define.
        The face (faciality) is necessary for language to function. Signifying traits of language are indexed to and dependent on specific faciality traits.  This idea undermines the idea of individuality of faces.
        Close-up in film leads to idea of black holes that "crest." And this isn't entirely clear, how can we conceive of a series of black holes that crest?
        A transition is then made to the idea of the abstract machine of faciality in a pure state and an example from Kafka is given (bouncing balls).  Thus it becomes clear that the abstract machine (black hole/white wall system) does not resemble what it produces.  Another example is then given from a ballet by Debussy and Nijinsky.(again bouncing balls). These are representations of the abstract machine of faciality in its pure enigmatic state and so distinctions such as black and white, wall and hole lose significance. Perhaps this is similar to the functioning of a universal BwO that is impossible to describe physically.
        This chapter then moves to a short commentary on discoveries in American psychology: 1) Isakower's study and proprioceptive sensations (manual, buccal, cutaneos, vaguely visual) recall the infantile mouth-breast relation. 2) Lewin's white screen of the dream which though normally covered with visual contents remains blank when the dream contents are proprioceptive sensations. 3)Spitz holds that the white screen is the breast as visual percept upon which the mother's face is superimposed and used as a guide by the baby.
        From these discoveries in psychology we can postulate that the face exists in a two-dimensional liminal zone and it is here that the abstract machine of faciality operates.  This surface is likened to a map even though it may cover the volume-cavity system of the proprioceptive body.
        The next question to arise is that of what triggers the AMF. Here faciality itself becomes liminal existing somewhere between the animal and the human but belonging to neither. Humankind's destiny is to escape the face, to dismantle the face and facializations.  It seems to be suggested that beyond the face lies the BwO.
        [See outline II E. here for negative distinctions concerning the AMF]
        We must get back to the BwO and look for differential speeds and part-objects.  Within the BwO are movements of deterritorialization that differentiate bodies and organisms. Here a distinction is made between relative DT and absolute DT.  An example of the former would be the prehensile hand and an example of the latter would be the face because we are no longer dealing with a correlary relationship (breast/mouth) but instead a relationship across strata.  The AMF connects the corporeal
stratum to other strata such as signifiance and subjectification.  The AMF takes as its correlate landscape (is it an abstract machine, too?)
        Architecture transforms landscape by placing its structures (houses, towns, cities) on its surface like faces. Painting reverses this and treats landscape as a face. BH/WW system informs all the arts: cinema, painting, the novel. Example of the novel: Chretien de Troyes (Perceval), Cervantes (Don Quixote), and Beckett (Molloy, Unnameable) [See Outline III. A-D]
This essay does not attempt to study the entire plateau of Faciality and will finish by raising one  question that has not been adequately answered thus far is: what triggers the abstract machine of faciality?
        The following examples and precisions are given: assemblages of power require the face, primitive peoples have little use for the face, the becoming-animal is not to be mistaken for facialtiy; however the causal question remains.
        The direction the chapter follows next seems to complicate matters,  for though the face is not a universal, it is Christ. It is l'homme sensuel. Jesus Christ invented facialization of the entire body but this isn't explained in any detail.