ABSTRACT

In the previous chapter I argued that the act of looking at, ‘seeing’, and ‘knowing’ the face is intertwined in practices of visualisation, in which situated knowledge-the type referred to by Foucault as connaissance-is positioned according to particular perspectives which are always in the process of exchange, translation, transformation, and negotiation between overlapping ‘fields’ or ‘webbed connections’. As a result of this, I pointed out that knowledge of what ‘counts’ as being ‘true’ and meaningful for any particular ‘way of seeing’ can only ever be partial in the sense that individual elements in any field are always positioned in relation to a set of rules, interests, and objectives that illuminate certain ‘things’, and make other ‘things’ less visible, or (in a sense) in-visible. In this chapter I show how forms of knowledge as connaissance are limited and shaped by a broader discursive knowledge, referred to as savoir, whereby each type of rationality or knowledge-microscopic and macroscopic-mutually constitutes the other. I begin by focussing on the ways visual perceptions are linked to historical and cultural conceptions of knowledge, which in turn are subject to changes in time and space. With regard to the face, I also demonstrate that changing notions of ‘truth’ also maintain degrees of continuity with past micro-level visualising practices in determining the conditions of possibility for judging degrees of facial ‘rightness’ and ‘wrongness’. As an introduction to ways of seeing faces in historicised space, I initially draw upon Foucault’s description of Diego Velázquez’s painting Las Meninas (The Maids of Honour)— detailed in The Order of Things (1970)—not only as a means of pointing out the various facial ‘abnormalities’ of those depicted in the painting, but also as a vehicle for analysing complex arrangements of appearance, perspective, visibility, and invisibility from three distinct epistemes or discursive regimes, each possessing certain underlying conditions of ‘truth’. I argue that, what is regarded as ‘truth’ in the determination of facial ‘correctness’ or desirability in science,

in medicine, and in social settings is positioned within an amalgamation of situated molecular and molar knowledge(s). Notwithstanding this, I show that the conditions of possibility contained within the Modern episteme, the ‘analytic of finitude’—a position from which Foucault himself is conditioned-provide the perspective, the claims of knowledge, and the ‘games of truth’ and meaning in which the ‘known’ body/face is also a ‘knowing’ body/face, and in which vision, and indeed the other senses, may be normalised and controlled, by what Jonathan Crary calls ‘external techniques of manipulation and stimulation’ (1999: 12).