Amsterdam, Holland (male and female composite)
Lima, Peru (male and female composite)
Lisbon, Portugal (male and female composite)
What is the face of London, New York, or Paris? What does a typical Londoner, New Yorker, or Parisian look like?
The images above represent the typical male or female face from Amsterdam, Lima and Lisbon, respectively. They are the work of Mike Mike, an Istanbul-based photographer. Mike addresses the effects of globalization on identity by compositing the current inhabitants of a given city to produce a face of the future. The result is a face that doesn’t presently exist, but which nonetheless seems quite real. A Face of Tomorrow. A face of no one.
Philosophically, this is very interesting. The expressive aspects of a facial expression are the felt quality of the sentience that is recognized in the face and which the face thus seems to personify. If no assumed or fictive subjectivity underlies the facial expression, that represented by the subject must. Every facial expression is seen as the expression of someone, and to express a face of no one is itself a powerfully expressive act (as Mike’s faces show). To express nothing is merely a very special quality of sentience. One can therefore always ask of a facial expression what kind of sentient agency is expressed in it. Is that true?
Wittgenstein Light: Real Refreshment 
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October 23, 2007 at 7:37 am
Brian Sorrell
You say: “One can therefore always ask of a facial expression what kind of sentient agency is expressed in it. Is that true?”
This is completely off the cuff, but here’s what occurs to me: there are at least a few ways in which we talk about “facial expression”. There is expression as it appears in a photograph or still image (as here), there is expression as seen on film or in a series of still images, there is expression as we see in a sculpture, there is expression as it appears in person — in the course of events in life. It is only in the latter case, I think, where it *might* make sense to ask about sentient agency, but even then, the circumstances will be special.
“Always ask” is an overstatement — or perhaps it’s tempered sufficiently with “can”. Of course you *can* ask whatever you want to ask, but it is not always reasonable or sensible to expect an answer. This is especially the case here, I think, as you’re asking about “sentient agency”, which is an incredibly complcated notion in itself, as it stands in relation to “expression”, which is what is in question to begin with. An investigation of the relationships between “expression” (generally) and “sentient agency” is something that we *can* do, but it is certainly not something that we *always* want to do.
If your investigation of “facial expression” is an investigation of an event *in life*, then it is not entirely clear what “sentient agency” could come to separate from the events *of life*. That is, the answer to the question “what kind of sentient agency” is just “the kind that happens in life.”
If you want to separate living facial expression from the series of events in which it occurs (from the life in which it occurs), then you must have a very special purpose in mind. But if you want to look at non-living facial expressions, i.e., in photographs, composites, sculptures, then you will not have access to a series of events that leads up to or that follows the expression. To ask about agency is to ask about those missing events. So to ask about agency as it stands in relation to a non-living image is an odd thing to do. To ask about expression of a non-living image is not so odd, but it seems to me that there is a different purpose in doing so.
October 23, 2007 at 9:10 am
Simon van Rysewyk
Hi Brian,
Thanks for the comment.
When I speak of ‘sentient agency’ I mean something that is meaningful in a way referrable to human subjectivity, to the course of lives. A human face is expressive inasmuch as it is a human person expressing, or what resembles a human person, not a set of articulated muscles in action. Wittgenstein writes famously: “…only of a living human being and what resembles (behaves like) a living human being can one say: it has sensations; it sees; is blind; is deaf; is conscious or unconscious” (PI 281). If we ascribe psychological attributes to androids or robots who make facial expressions, such robots would no longer count as machines. This underlies Wittgenstein’s remark: ‘Turings’s “machines”. These machines are humans who calculate’ (RPP I 1096).
You write: “So to ask about agency as it stands in relation to a non-living image is an odd thing to do. To ask about expression of a non-living image is not so odd, but it seems to me that there is a different purpose in doing so”.
Yes, I agree with that. When would one enquire about the sentience of a non-living image? Well, when doing philosophy! If one forgets or is confused about the role of a non-living image, one might ask – a philosopher might do so – what sentient agency it expesses. What about the “Eye of God”? Certainly, one can ask what it expresses – is this equivalent to a statement of sentience?
Let’s distinguish between the ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ use of facial predicates (as you intimate in the first paragraph of your comment above). We apply some psychological terms to non-living faces like the picture-face of a god or goddess, but I think this is a ‘secondary use’ of the term. Imagine if we ascribed facial expressiveness only to the gods! On the other hand one can always ask of a human facial expression – according to PI 281- what kind of sentient agency is expressed in it. Similarly, we predicate of inanimate objects like dolls since it involves ascribing these objects with the behavioral capacities of human beings, as in a fantasy tale (PI, 282).
This is a quick comment. More to follow.
(By the way, I tried to leave a comment on your blog, but your site asked for login information. Do I need to register to submit a comment? Thanks.)
Sincerely,
Simon
October 24, 2007 at 4:13 pm
Brian Sorrell
Simon,
I think you are spot on by saying: “When would one enquire about the sentience of a non-living image? Well, when doing philosophy!” This is more or less what I wanted to convey — and the consequence of saying this, in my estimation, is to say that we don’t *always* ask about sentient agency, and it would often seem odd to do so. Your example of ascribing behavorial capacities to dolls (which I like very much as an example) is one such case: if while playing with my little sister, she asked about “agency” with respect to her dolls, I wouldn’t know how to react! I could think “well, she’s doing philosophy”, but it’s hard to imagine a context in which that explanation would help elucidate the behavior of an 11 year old.
Anyway, I’m rambling now.
Regarding commenting on my blog: I had added the extra step because I was getting a ceaseless run of automated spam comments (or perhaps lots of readers found reason to associate Cialis and Viagra with my entries?). The box should tell you to enter something specific. However, I just removed it in order to make commenting easier again. If the spammers come back, I’ll cook up some other scheme.
Cheers!
Brian.
October 25, 2007 at 5:36 am
Simon van Rysewyk
Brian,
One might say that the language-game of playing with toys makes no provision for ascribing sentience to dolls, for example. It only makes sense in the ‘secondary sense’ of the term. On the other hand we could imagine a case where consciousness is attributed to inanimate objects in Wittgenstein’s ‘primary sense’, e.g., certain tribes regard natural objects (trees, rivers) as possessing sentience, and treat them as persons.
Glad you dropped on by. Excellent. Let’s keep this up!
Sincerely,
Simon
October 29, 2007 at 5:13 pm
Brian Sorrell
Simon,
I had some parallel thoughts about facial expressions and the meanings of words / sentences / etc. A colleague and I were coming up with exercises to teach writing skills. One of his interests is in “formulation”, and so one of his exercises is to make students write the same sentence in three different ways (let’s put aside issues of what counts as the “same sentence” and just use keep the exercise colloquial). The point of the exercise is to demonstrate that the way the sentence is formulated affects our reading of the sentence, if you will.
A similar exercise is to take the exact same sentence and to write a sentence before it and a sentence after it to show that the same sentence can take on different roles in a paragraph, depending on what surrounds it. (This is part of a much larger thesis, mind you.)
How this fits in with facial expressions, especially with respect to the expressions on these generated faces is as follows: We might want to say of one of them, “he looks content.” But what happens if we show a series of expressions that led up to the one that you see here? Perhaps the series starts with a smile, which begins to fade, and we caught it here in what we initially wanted to call a “satisfied” expression. In such a series, we might now think of the expression as “disappointed”, since we now see that it’s a product of a fading smile. We can imagine a similar re-evaluation of the expression if the series shows that the expression is changing from a frown. And so on.
There are lots of little variations on the exercise, including showing only particular facial features in the series of images and so forth. The point is to show that evaluating what *emotion* is associated with the expression, or describing the expression in words, depends on how the expression shows up in the flow of life (if you will). Attempting to ascribe a *state* to the agent whose image we’re evaluating is tricky business, because determining the significance of a facial expression usually happens *in the flow*.
For my purposes, I want to say that the phenomenon we call “meaning” works similarly. It is dangerous and difficult to say what the meaning of a word is outside of a stream of words. A stream of words can deeply affect what we call the meaning of any given word, just as the series of pictures that leads up to the single image affects what we think of the expression of that single image.
(These are all very new ideas, so I’m just working them out. Forgive me if it is a tad unclear or rambling….)
Brian.
October 31, 2007 at 7:31 am
Simon van Rysewyk
Brian,
Thanks for the post. Hope you are well.
You write: “Attempting to ascribe a *state* to the agent whose image we’re evaluating is tricky business, because determining the significance of a facial expression usually happens *in the flow*”.
Wittgenstein makes the same point: “A smiling mouth smiles only in a human face” (PI, 583). What characterises a friendly face? Well, just these features. When we notice the friendly expression, we are drawn to the eyes. For the same eyes may look unfriendly in another face. The difference between a friendly and unfriendly eye need not lie in the eyes, but in the surrounding face. Similarly, what gives meaning to words is their being incorprated in a language-game (PI, 43). “A word has meaning only as part of a sentence” (PI, 49).
You write: “A stream of words can deeply affect what we call the meaning of any given word, just as the series of pictures that leads up to the single image affects what we think of the expression of that single image”.
Right. A picture-face tells one something (PI, 522). A face illustrates a narrative, tells a story.
Here is another thought: a face is the minimal unit according to which a move is made the language-game (of emotions). Only the face can ‘tell’ a person something. An image of a face (e.g., a picture) can be used in isolation only if there is a language-game in which such moves are made: the “Eye of God” would not be a label if we did not treat God as like a person capable of ‘facial expression’.
Sincerely,
Simon
October 31, 2007 at 5:40 pm
Brian Sorrell
Simon,
“Similarly, what gives meaning to words is their being incorprated in a language-game (PI, 43).”
I strongly resist using the early remarks of PI to establish something substantial about the phenomenon that philosophers call “meaning”. I have many reasons for this, but this is likely not the place to develop them; indeed, that is what I’m up to, more or less, in my work. Roughly, I find that the things said early in PI about “meaning” are, shall we say, stepping stones: he helps us work out some confusions and kinks so that that by the time he’s talking about facial features and expectations and intentions much later, metaphors like “Meaning is physiognomy” have more philosophical bite.
As I see it, this is where your interests and mine converge in an interesting way.
On a different related tangent: I tend to watch a whole lot of black and white films. Silly as this might sound, I find faces to be more beautiful in black and white. Perhaps the reason for this is as simple as “black and white hides flaws”. Or, perhaps it’s my preferred explanation: I am more invested in the “watching”, in the sense that I bring blond-ness to hair and brown-ness to eyes, etc. For example, in Casablanca, Bogart quips to Renault “… Are my eyes really brown?” It takes more of *me* to see his eyes as brown than when they’re shot in color.
The point: it’s not only the face or the mouth or the eyes or the image that makes the expression what it is. It’s what *we* bring to the expression. “A smiling mouth smiles only in a human face” indeed, but the lion does not see us smile.
Brian.
November 1, 2007 at 10:57 am
Simon van Rysewyk
Brian,
Thanks for the comment. Let’s hope our interests continue to converge and bear fruit in a mutually beneficial way. A good place to look next is maybe the tie-up between ‘meaning’ and ‘physiognomy’?
“It’s what *we* bring to the expression” – yes, our form of life, our behavioral repertoire, is alien to the lion. It is manifest in our cultural activities, our forms of social interaction. Wittgenstein stresses our historical practice in discussing what *we* bring to the table, not biological capacities.
Anyway, more later!
Simon