Ilia Utekhin

FACE IN HUMANS AS A SEMIOTIC CATEGORY

(paper presented at Summer school on semiotics, Saarjarv, August 1995)

It is a very old anecdote that gave rise to the observations I am going to expose here. Its earliest version I could find pertains to Aelianus, a Roman who was writing in Greek in the early IIIrd century A.D.. His writings mainly consist of curious anecdotes with a touch of elegance.

This one is taken from the book entitled "Motley stories": "Once a Scythian king approached a man who stood quite naked in snow and asked him if he was cold. The Scythian, in his turn, wondered whether the king`s forehead was cold, and when the king said, "Not at all", the Scythian replied: "Nor am I cold, since I have my forehead all along my body".

More than thirteen centuries later we encounter the same story with few variations and no reference to Aelianus in "Some Thoughts Concerning Education" by the great English philosopher John Locke. He explains there the ways to train children`s bodies and souls, arguing that the soul is initially a "tabula rasa" which it is to be formed by the environment while the child grows. As to the bodies, he recommends to parents, if they want to have a healthy child, not to indulge

in luxurious meal and warm clothes. He says (art.5):

"The face, when we are born, is no less tender than any other part of the body: it is use alone that hardens it, and makes it more able to endure the cold. And therefore the Scythian philosopher gave a very significant answer to the Athenian, who wondered how he could go naked in frost and snow. "How," said the Scythian, "can you endure your face exposed to the sharp winter air?" "My face is used to it," said the Athenian. "Think me all face," replied the Scythian. Our bodies will endure any thing, that from the beginning they are accustomed to."

For Locke, this story is just a good illustration of the force of habit. But it is worth of more profound interpretation. There is something more than just amusing play with words in this little piece travelling from one author to another, some effort of thought rather than elegance of expression.

Shortly before the First world war, this story turns out to be a key to an original conception of face and nudity by the outstanding Russian poet and art critic Maximilian Voloshin. The place of action and the actors become different, and the authorship is ascribed to Charles Darwin who pretended to have witnessed this scene during his voyage round the world on board the "Beagle":

"It occurred in Tierra del Fuego. It was very cold and it snowed. Darwin trembled with cold in his fur coat, whereas a naked savage who accompanied him showed no signs of being cold while the snow was melting on his shoulders.

- Aren`t you cold? - inquired Darwin.

- And your face, is it cold? - said the savage.

- No, it isn`t.

- Well, all my body is a face."

Although you will find no traces of this dialogue in Darwin`s description of the voyage, it is not accidentally that his name appears in this context. Of course, Darwin actually saw naked savages while travelling in Tierra del Fuego. This fact was well known to the public from his writings about the voyage in "Beagle" and, therefore, there was nothing strange in the idea that such episode with a naked savage could have occurred.

But the matter is that Charles Darwin also wrote another book: "The Expression of Emotions in Animals and Man", which is extremely important for semiotics in general. And he discusses there, among various emotions and their expressions, a topic relevant to our subject - he discusses shame.

I am not sure Voloshin was familiar with this book, but he surely developed some very close ideas, as far as shame is concerned. It was Maximilian Voloshin who noted that the story of the savage is not just about the cold, but also about shame, face and clothes. The words of the savage reveal much more than Darwin, in that dialogue, wanted to know, says Voloshin. They testify that the origin of clothes is not caused by the need to protect a body against cold, for man is able to endure cold without clothes.

Stating that he takes the whole body surface just as a European takes the face, the Fuegian shows that he feels neither cold, nor shame when exposing his body. A naked European would feel both, because it is not only cold that prevents us from taking off our clothes, but also the cultural patterns of decency whose violation would bring about the feeling of shame. That is, a face in a broad sense is a part of the body that, when exposed, has neither cold, nor shame. In Europeans, these properties are characteristic to the face stricto sensu and to the hands, i.e., to those parts of the body which are not hidden under the clothes. In other cultures, it can be organised differently, according to their traditions of clothing - and shame. This is the first conclusion formulated in Volosin`s inquiry.

But what is shame? In his book on the expression of emotions Charles Darwin treats shame in a special chapter about blushing. Blushing, which is "the most peculiar and the most human of all expressions", appears as an involuntary expression of shame, shyness, or modesty. It is most human because, as Darwin says, "it is mind which must be affected", and the essential element in shyness, shame and modesty is self-attention directed to personal appearance in relation to the opinion of others. By association with personal appearance, we feel shame for some moral delinquency, but in all cases the thinking about other thinking of us excites a blush.

((It is an interesting question whether the failures in personal appearance (and, particularly, nakedness) are prototypic as elicitors of shame. As Ch.Darwin says, the observing other is a necessary condition for shame. The modern theory of shame proposed by M.Lewis presupposes three following constituents of shame: a) violation of a norm or a rule, b) internal attribution (that is, the recognition that the responsibility for the violation is on the Self, and is not attributed to external circumstances), and c) global attribution (the idea that the Self as whole is bad, not just his action, otherwise it would be the feeling of guilt, not shame). Here, the observing other is hidden in the notion of the norm: behind the norm understood and accepted by the Self there is an interiorised observing other, that is, the Self acting as other towards himself. The rule-violating act is shameful to the extent to which its result is regarded as related to the Self (I even can be ashamed for my government, but not very much, since actually I am responsible but very little for who is ruling; it is only "by association" that the actions of my government are related to my personal appearance).

The nakedness (and, particularly, sexual parts exposure) is often considered as prototypic shame elicitor. It certainly reflects some cultural (e.g., child-rearing) practices and is supported by linguistic data on etymological relations of the words denoting shame (in at least some languages, the same or derived words can refer to sexual organs, e.g., Latin "pudor" > "pudenda", or Russian "sram").

Nevertheless, even if we refuse the prototypicality of nakedness as shame elicitor, we have to recognise that personal appearance is among what is most related to the Self, and the nakedness is, with exception of a strictly defined set of situations, a considerable violation of norms, which are especially severe about sexual exposure.))

Darwin observes that when being ashamed, one tends to hid his face. And it is the face that is principally subject to blushing. Why is it so? Of all parts of the body, the face is most regarded. It is the main object of attention of others, being "the chief seat of expression" and also "the chief seat of beauty and of ugliness". The emotions are reflected in the face. And since "our self-attention is excited almost exclusively by the opinion of others" - note, these are the words by Charles Darwin, many years before the concept of internalisation started to be discussed in psychology, - the face is "subjected to much closer and more earnest self-attention than any other part of the body". That is why it is the most liable to blush, and why any one ashamed would desire to conceal this part of he body.

And what is revealing, "within races of men who habitually go nearly naked, the blushes extend over a much larger surface than with us". This observation is in complete accordance with Voloshin`s ideas.

Voloshin goes further, remarking that the face is the chief seat of one`s individuality: the face is the most personal, unique and individual part of the body, it is a representative of the personality (Russians would see it quite transparently from Russian etymological relations of "litso" (face) and "lichnost'" (personality); "lichina" (mask) is also of this family, as well as "lichinka" (larva), nominating a "temporary" appearance of an insect).

The differences in shame habits across the cultures determine different perception of individuality in personal appearance. This may be illustrated by the evidence from the history of aesthetics. Pictorial and sculptural portrait with highly psychologised and expressive face is present in European culture since the Romans, while classical Greek sculpture knows only typical, non-individualised heads, lacking biography and expression. This topic some years later was extensively discussed by Oswald Spengler in his "Fall of the West", where examples are given of famous statues which had been for a long time mistaken: Apollo taken for a Muse, and Athena, for a military leader.

A Greek statue with no head, legs and arms does not loose beauty and expressiveness. The torso itself is expressive and individualised. Voloshin argues that this is due to the absence of the shame of nudity characteristic of classical Greece. The face, in its turn, becomes individualised, when the individuality is concentrated and confined within the facial part of the head, when the face is reduced from being elsewhere to a focused zone limited by clothes and shame.

((Metonymic relations between face and personality are worth of a separate discussion. This metonym can be recognised juridically (cf. photograph in the passport) or aesthetically (the tradition of portrait) or can be not, but it seems that certain natural predispositions exist to the importance of face sensu stricto for the recognition of the person. Thus, some data suggest that the frame of face is innate in humans (Meltsoff e.a.). So, even if classical Greeks had no portraits, they surely recognised one another not regarding each other's torso, but rather looking at the face.))

But the question arises, what gives to the face this capacity to be exposed to others` regards? Other parts of the body are covered with clothes, but what is it that allows the face to feel as if it was protected? The answer suggested is: the capacity for lying, the ability to conceal one expressions and to show another.

This ability is alien to little infants. Little babies cannot say either truth or lie with their face, as their expressions are initially natural and out of conscious control. The abilities to say truth and to lie (that is, the ability to produce signs intentionally) grow together in the course of an increasingly complicated psychic life.

The creation of a false face, of a mask, requires self-awareness, a certain degree of self-consciousness. And a certain idea about how your expressions can be interpreted by others. Shame and modesty simply do not exist without a conscious Self, and thus until a Self is conceived, there is no need to conceal anything, no need to express something different. However, as soon as a Self arises, as soon as the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil is tasted, the individual starts to learn to conceal and to lie - to control his expressions. He starts to acquire the standard modes of expression.

And thus a true human face is formed through the creation of a mask, of a kind of dress for the face, intended to be exposed toward the others. This mask is built according to a socially accepted pattern. Broadly interpreted by Voloshin, the notion of mask includes not only the personal appearance and communicative strategies of the face, but also gestures, manners, and words. "Average people" often become "slaves of their masks", and have "their selves on the surface of the dress". To say it in other words, their personalities are not reflexive, they are directed to fit in the stereotypic ideas about behavior and appearance, and are wholly predictable from these stereotypes.

This is the second conclusion I would like to point out: the exposed parts of the body are turned towards others, they communicate with others in some way, and to do so, they should bear certain adaptive cultural devices - be it material clothes for some parts of the body or psychological clothes - a mask - for other parts of the body, namely, for the face. That is to say, for an individual to be able to act in the society, the surface of his body must be organised by protective devices, material or spiritual. The material means may be different - dress, painting, tattooing, even covering with rice powder once broadly used on stage.

The third and the deepest insight by M.Voloshin into the sense of face, nudity and clothes concerns their dynamics. It has to do with the origin of clothes. In that epoch the insufficiency of the two earlier polar points of view on the origin of clothes had become obvious. It was equally difficult to accept that purely protective necessities brought about the use of clothes, as well as that men began to cover their bodies in compliance with the sentiment of shame.

If the protection is the cause, why do not we limit ourselves to an outer clothing which is put off once we enter a warm room? Or, if modesty is the reason, where could the modesty and shame of personal appearance have come from, before clothes came into use?

Voloshin was among those who, departing from the semiotic nature of dress, defended the opinion that the primary goal of the primitive coverings was not just to protect or to conceal, but rather to attract the attention to certain details of the body to expose them in a decorated form. Savages were moved not by modesty, but by shamelessness: "The first strips ... appeared in order to make think about what is hidden behind them". Once the novelty is socially accepted, its absence becomes abnormal and thus shameful.

The whole history of costume is the history of human sensuality, which takes various intricate shapes. Not the nudity itself, but the refined uncoverings given by the clothes, are sensual: the elements of the clothes do hide in order to draw he attention, and do conceal in order to emphasise.

All these is evident enough, but what about the nudity? The nakedness of primitive man and of animals before the use of clothes is not the same thing as the aesthetic nudity in Greece which appeared after a long and diversified tradition of clothes as a result of cultural development. This cultural nudity came from Sparta along with gymnastics and sports games, and must have been shocking in the beginning, but later even aesthetics was transformed by what first emerged from gymnastic necessity. M.Voloshin expected that some contemporary cultural practices - such as dance, theatre and sports - were to transform the values in a similar way, and non-ashamed nudity would not be limited by a reduced set of social situations such as a visit to a doctor. He saw the nudist movement as one of the symptoms of such transformation.

The relations of the categories within this conception may be presented schematically. It is rather difficult to discuss them because of the special kind of the text in which they are used: they are used, I would say, poetically by a philosopher, who is at the same time a poet. Voloshin`s essays on art are pieces of art, not just logical constructions. And his highly metaphorical usage cannot be criticised in scientific terms. But we may try to trace the way of thought underlying this usage, using the "semiotic square" of categories.

The category of "Armouring" can be manifested in two different ways: as a clothed body surface (so to say, material dress) and as a "masked" body surface (psychological dress), which categories are contrary and form a semantic axis:

Clothed B.S. <-------------> "Masked" B.S.

Contradictorily related to these is the pair of terms which are, respectively, the absence of "masking" (nakedness) and the absence of clothes (nudity), that is:

Thus, the difference between nakedness and nudity is shown: a naked body surface is principally unmasked and, hence, needs clothing, whereas nude body surface implies masking, which is used instead of clothing.

What has been briefly outlined above is the state of art of the first two decades of our century in the semiotic study of face and clothes. By that time, main distinctions were traced and the ways were indicated for further inquiry. We see it, particularly, from the metaphorical usage of the words "face", "clothes" and "nudity" by M.Voloshin.

To sum up, let me emphasise the ideas we can see behind his reflections:

- clothes do not exist as purely material objects in culture, but are at the same time a complicated spiritual phenomenon; apart from studying the psychology of clothes it is impossible to explain their origins and evolution; being cultural categories, nudity, face, clothes (and shame underlying them) are interdependent and form a system; they do not exist one without another - say, the notion of nudity would simply have no sense if there were no clothes;

- intended for social communication, duly modified to fit the cultural patterns, body surface is an object of self-cognition, which contributes to the formation of personality through the internalisation of communicative

stereotypes;

- the development of cultural practices affects behavioural stereotypes, value system, material culture, aesthetic canons, and the psychic life; they are closely related;

Of course, a more systematic approach would discover a whole range of the functions of body surface modifications in different cultures and situations, but this is a separate subject. Later, the psychoanalytical studies of the phenomenon of narcissism and of its cultural impact, ethological research within the field of human ethology and the evolution of behavior, psychological studies of Self, personality and shame and, clearly, new ideas in ethnology and ethnopsychology - e.g., the notion of possession, - all these intellectual efforts have prepared the ground for a modern semiotic theory of clothes, to which all the said are but introductory remarks. ((Possession: Different cultures understand differently the relationships of the man and what can be depicted as his possessions. The closeness of the relationships with "what is mine" - the parts of the body, the parents and friends, the property of various types, the fruits of activity etc. - is not the same, all of them are mine, but in a different way, and these ways vary across cultures, which becomes especially obvious when comparing semantics of some languages in which the category of possession is reflected in grammar. The degree of clo seness illustrates the relation to the Self, that is, in our context, the potentiality to elicit shame. Thus, some differences in shame elicitors across cultures can be explained through the particularities of a given cultural model of possession.))

The old anecdote cited in the beginning testifies that people thought on these matters since very long ago, and the best we can do is to formulate the keen intuitions of our forebears in terms of our scientific language. How much of this language is needed to express the relation between the feelings of shame and of cold, implicit in the etymology of the Russian word "styd" (shame)?

((Styd "shame" does to the body surface the same as the cold does (if we do not take Fuegians): both provoke the need to be protected. Cold and warm are known to be common metaphors of social interaction. According to them, others who blame you can be metaphorically understood as a cold coming from outside.

In the case of shame, the feeling of cold comes also from inside as a result of blaming yourself (cf. the feeling of cold, e.g., shivering, as a result of negative emotional response, fear or aversion, for instance). At the same time, it is possible "to burn with shame" ("sgoret' so styda"). This expression reflects blushing and the desire to disappear.

In the Russian language and culture, two distinctions in this field are revealing.

First of them is the opposition of shame ("styd") and moral consciousness ("sovest'"). One can be referred to as having "neither shame, nor moral consciousness" (ni styda, ni sovesti"), where sovest' is related to the motivation of actions, while styd is the feeling resulting from a failure. Those who have no moral consciousness (cause), naturally, have no shame (result). As a proverb says, "good moral consciousness is [the same as] God's eye" ("Khoroshaya sovest' glaz bozhiy").

Another distinction is that of two Russian words for shame, often occurring together in proverbs: styd and sram. Styd is rather a general term, whereas sram has a connotation of the shame of nakedness (this word can also denote naked or sexual parts of the body). ))