THE EVANESCENCE OF THE “MATERIAL” AND OF THE“CULTURAL”: THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF FIXING A FACE.

Some notes on experience, representation, identity – steps into an interdisciplinary field of enquiry?*

by

Vítor Oliveira Jorge**

Abstract: Is our body – the physical body of each one of us – predominantly material(biological), or spiritual (cultural)? This kind of question (deeply embedded in ourspontaneous thoughts) obviously makes no sense.

The world is infinitely complex. Let us consider, for instance, the faces of people.Their expression, and in particular their eyes – interpreted for a long time as the“manifestation of the soul” – continuously change at the most minimal levels.

The face, and the cult of its “beauty” in particular, is part of a modern fetishism,which tries to “materialize” everything, including the most subtle aspects of human lifeand experience. That fetishism (expressed for instance in pornography) is also the groundwhere archaeology develops.

Until very recently, archaeology has been a fetishism of objects (be they smallartefacts or huge landscapes) into which we project our phantasms, our nostalgia of“returning into the objectuality of things”.Now, many “archaeologists” – together with people from other disciplines, such asarchitecture, anthropology, performance arts and studies, land-art, installations, etc. –are making new attempts in order to understand how we human beings relate to other beingsand to the environment in which we are submerged.

Faces are indeed a good way of dealing with the strangeness of the reality of ourdaily life, in which “things” often appear to us as separated from their contexts ofaction. The same experience of “otherness” occurs in archaeology.

But it was our own “scientific enquiry”, in its process of objectification, of“creating objects of observation” separated from subjects that observe in a neutral way,which is responsible for the conditions of the production of that very “otherness”.

Key-words: Face; contingency; truth.

Resumo: O nosso corpo é predominantemente material (biológico) ou espiritual (cultural)? Éevidente que este tipo de perguntas (no entanto profundamente ancoradas na consciênciaespontânea) não tem qualquer sentido.O mundo é infinitamente complexo. Repare-se, por exemplo, nas faces das pessoas. A suaexpressão, e em particular os olhos – considerados durante muito tempo a “manifestação daalma” – mudam continuamente aos mais pequenos níveis.

O rosto, e em particular a sua “beleza”, faz parte de um fetichismo moderno, que seliga à “materialização” de tudo, incluindo os aspectos mais subtis da vida e daexperiência humanas. Esse fetichismo (que se expressa por exemplo na pornografia) é tambémo campo em que a arqueologia se desenvolve.

Até há muito pouco tempo, a arqueologia era um fetichismo de objectos (fossempequenos artefactos ou grandes paisagens) nos quais nós projectamos os nossos fantasmas, anossa nostalgia de “voltar a uma certa objectualidade das coisas”. Hoje, muitosarqueólogos – juntamente com pessoas de outras “disciplinas”, tais como a arquitectura, aantropologia, as artes performativas e os estudos sobre a performance, a chamada “land-

art”, a realização de instalações – estão a fazer novos esforços no sentido de compreendercomo é que os seres humanos se relacionam com outros seres e com o ambiente em que estãosubmersos.

Os rostos são um bom tópico para pensar a estranheza da realidade de todos os dias,na qual as “coisas” nos aparecem frequentemente separadas dos seus contextos de acção. Amesma experiência de estranheza, de estarmos a contactar com uma “realidade outra”, ocorreem arqueologia.

Mas foi o nosso próprio método de “produção de conhecimento científico”, no seuprocesso de objectificação, de criar “objectos de investigação” desligados dos sujeitosobservados e neutrais, que foi o responsável pelas condições de produção dessa mesma“estranheza.”

Palavras-chave: Face; contingência; verdade.

The ideas sketched in this paper are also a modest tribute to oneof the greatest painters of our time and indeed of all times,

Francis Bacon(born in Dublin 1909; died in Madrid 1992)

“What painting had never shown before is the disintegration of the social being which takes placewhen one is alone in a room which has no looking glass.

We may feel at times that the accepted hierarchy of our features is collapsing,and that we are by turns all teeth, all eye, all ear, all nose.”

John Russell apropos of F. Bacon, 1979 (quoted by M. Hammer, 2005, p. 17)

“When I look at you across the table, I don’t only see you but I see a whole emanation, which has to do with personality and everything else. And to put that over in a

painting, as I would like to be able to do in a portrait, means that would appear violent in paint. Wenearly always  live through screens – a screened existence. And I sometimes think, when people say my

work looks violent, that perhaps I have from time to time been able to clear away one or two of theveils or screens.”

Francis BaconIn David Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon, London, 4th ed., 1993, p. 82.

“This face attracts us into a distancea remote proximity

ponderableness of our transparencybecause we are present in her

through a contemplationwhich refuses to look at what shall not  be seen

which crosses the visible in order to  see.”António Ramos Rosa (Portuguese poet)

Extract of a poem (inspired in the painting by Magritte, “Le Domaine Enchanté”)  of the book “The Center at a Distance” (“O Centro na Distância”, 1981, included in

an anthology published in 2001 – see bibliography) (my translation)

1Introductory remarks

This paper – in fact, to be honest, these preliminary notes fora future enlarged work, that I hope to share with others – aims toescape the traditional rules of the academic paper, of the current

argumentative discourse. It proceeds like a series of flashes, orinsights, or (more or less long) aphorisms, which does notnecessarily follow a simple line of thought (i.e., a real text, wordthat comes from the idea of textile, of some continuity with noapparent gaps). Many of them were written directly on slides, withina “power point” frame.

I hope that the reader understands that it is more thenintentional: it aims to break the separation between reason (un-embodied mind) and feeling (embodied knowledge), between argument(theory) and evidence (proofs, empirical data), between intuition(the beginning) and certitude (the pathos of revelation), etc. Italso tries to avoid redundancy and “bad literature”, especially whendone by a non English speaking person like me. Obviously, I hope tobe able some day to organize many of the suggestions that I exposehere into a more current shape.

Often the most interesting ideas come to our minds in a non-textual manner, or as fragments of texts (and often too, the veryinterest of the fragments is subverted by the linearity of thetext). Like a sort of configuration, something with no precisecontours and having, as a structure, no straight lines. The “author”is here a collector of fragments, of quotations, a maker of“collages”, which hopefully should give more freedom to the readerthen the conventional text. Like a painting, or a piece of music.Not so much as an “open work” (reinforcement of the authoritativeideal under its liberal face), but precisely as fragments for amultiplicity of possible works (dissolving the centrality of the“author” and the authoritative argument and its rhetoric).“Bricolage” is the word.

Some quotations may be made out by memory: so, although they tryto be rigorous, they are not systematically forced to mention theexact source or context from which that were “taken”, as it is therule in a strict “scientific” paper.

Finally, having learned to think and write in Portuguese (andsecondly in French), the translation of my ideas into a sort of“current English” makes many of them indeed appear as too simple,strange and very schematic; hopefully, it will have also someadvantages (to write in a language which is not our mother languageis also a way of getting some distance from our self-evidences,prejudices and habits). I prize very much oral and visualcommunication (the experience of dialogue).

To allow archeology to detach itself from a “representational”,“realistic” tradition (largely dominant) it would be veryinteresting to try to work within it like people do in aperformance, for instance, or when some artists are making a modernpiece. I mean: at least at a preliminary level of approach, an

archaeological site, for instance, is not “there” to “tell a story”or to “represent” some general idea. It is just a site, and oftenjust a small part of a site in search of its own “meanings”. Atleast at a first glance, it represents itself, it has no hiddentruth to unveil – it affords an experience of dialogue, of shareddialogue between archaeologists and between their action and thefeatures of the site, the locus of the setting. Instead of being aprocess of reduction, an observation should be a process ofunfolding, of multiplication. Obviously, this is against the economyof fast-past production.

Actually, first of all, everything is about an experience ofcontact, of dialogue, between us, contemporary people, and areasaround us, pieces of terrain where we intervene in order to“expose”, to take to the front certain features. In fact, to say “toexpose” is already reducing and excessive, because in practice, andin a certain way, often we “sculpture” them, or we “make” them(through a series of choices), as an artist of land-art does. Tocontact with anything, even a small “trace”, is a unique event.

When we approach a site, a landscape, we approach something tobe studied and recorded carefully, but that is not to be done in arigid way, by some sort of “automaton”. Instead, that contact ismade by living people, who carry all their emotional experience toan unique event. We need to balance the “spirit” of traditionalscience with the more flexible “spirit” of art.

The same attitude is needed to overcome many common sense“psychologies” about the human face. Again, we are dealing withsomething fluid, that we may examine attentively, but not to befrozen in some fixed meaning. That would be simply absurd.

Enlarging the scope of our approach, not only we will do morecomprehensive work, and we will understand better the complexity ofthe situations that we are facing to, but also we may attain thefreedom of spirit and the joy of the creative open mind thatcharacterizes many contemporary “art experiences”.

The point in not to reach any “conclusion”; to the contrary, itis to show how our fisrt task consists in dissolving unlikelyconcepts and frames, in order to build something open to the broaderfield of “contemporary thinking”.  

2At the very antipodes of mainstream “cognitive sciences”?

Perhaps one of the more “audacious” papers (all of them arealways, at least, surprising and extremely stimulating) by Tim

Ingold is the one titled: “From complementarity to oblivion: ondissolving the boundaries between social and biologicalanthropology, archaeology, and psychology” (in Oyama, Susan et al,“Cycles of Contingency. Developmental Systems and Evolution”,Cambridge, Massachusetts/London, The MIT Press, 2001, pp. 255-279).

The author criticizes a serious of conceptual distinctions anddisciplinary boundaries, trying to reach a synthesis conventionally(or temporarily) placed under the name of his own field,anthropology – but the designation of that new “discipline” is notso much important (see p. 266). Anthropology “studies the conditionsof human living in the environment.” (p. 265). Crucial is the ideathat we live in one world and that “any divisions within” that“field of enquiry must be relative rather then absolute, dependingon what is selected as one’s focus rather than a priori separationof substantive, externally bounded domains.” (p. 276). I could notfeel more identified with these words then I do – every disciplinaryboundary is now the main obstacle to the increase of ourcomprehension of the world, which shall not drive us into asituation of syncretic mixture. To the contrary: this is a pre-condition of the overcoming of our present impasse.

Therefore, in that synthesis the traditional divide betweensocial anthropology and biological (physical) anthropology makes nosense; the same occurs with the boundaries of anthropology andarchaeology. And, in the same line of reasoning, psychology, as thescience that studies the human mind, should also be dissolved intothis general field (ib., p. 266). How? Let’s try to understand thevery clear, logical reasoning of Ingold.

In the “complementary” (interdisciplinary) approach there is aneed to link two (wrongly) separated realities: individual organismand cultural subject. That link being “human mind”, the crucialdiscipline here would be psychology, giving way to a sort of mixed“biopsychosociology”. This triple complementary basis (biology,psychology, sociology) is already present in the well knownclassical approach on the body by Marcel Mauss (1934), as Ingoldreminds us.

For the author, “mind” is an invention of modern science, amongmany others, as for instance “human genotype”, another concept thathe dismiss in the same paper. In the line of F. Bateson (1973), mindis “immanent in the active, perceptual engagement of organism-personand environment.” (p. 265).

A traditional dichotomy of the structure of our culture, besidesthose of mind/body, spirit/matter, etc., is that between wholes andparts, assuming that the whole not only contains the parts, but thatit is more that the sum of them (an hierarchical idea that comesfrom E. Durkheim, 1895). This notion underpins the interpretations

of the kinds of relationships that individuals (taken as“indivisible, naturally bounded units” – p. 266) establish with thecollectivity, an entity which is at a higher level of abstraction.This is indeed a very important point: the whole conceived as amatrix (as a model) for the parts, in a hierarchical mutualrelationship (see below the references to Schaeffer’s thoughts).

Current social sciences have divided (and still do) the concernfor the individual mind – the object of study of psychology – fromthe interest on the “collective mind of society” – the task ofsociology. But this dichotomy individual/society – which correspondsto different departments and areas of research/learning in ouruniversities – actually has no sense outside the common spontaneousideas of our own tradition.

And Ingold (ib, p. 266) adds: “(…) those capacities of consciousawareness and intentional response normally bracketed under therubric of mind are not given in advance of the individual’s entryinto the social world, but are rather fashioned through a lifelonghistory of involvement with both human and non-human constituents ofthe environment. (…) it is through the situated, intentionalactivities of persons, not their subjugation to the higher authorityof society, that social relationships are formed and reformed.”

So “the process of social life” (p. 266) as a whole is amovement, not an entity. “Persons come into being (…) asdifferentially positioned enfoldments of this process, and in theiraction they carry it forward.”

Consciousness and social existence are, “in their temporalunfolding”, “one and the same” (p. 266).

If we accept so, then “perception is an aspect of functioning ofthe total system of relations constituted by the presence of theorganism-person in its environment.” (ib, p. 267). It is throughpractice and training in a particular environment that the humanorganism “developmentally” incorporates a mode of perception,capacities of perception and action, which are not innate noracquired – another dichotomy that we need to overcome (ib., pp. 267-268).

It is this line of thought that Ingold calls the “obviationapproach” – stressing the importance of relations and processesinstead of structures and event (p. 272). Here, in my text, hisargument is rather simplified, but I think that this paper of hisdeserves particular attention and should be considered as a point ofdeparture for many of so called “interdisciplinary” meetings (whoseresults, in general, are subject to doubt in the sense of animprovement of knowledge, or even at the level of promoting a realdialogue between peers; there is no time for a full length debatethese days, “et pour cause”).

Obviously we need to be cautions in order not to go into thedogmatic acceptance of any author’s ideas, which is a very commonattitude when we feel that he/she is right. Nothing is more againstthe very movement of thought, whatever it is, then freezing it in aseries of formulae. It is a very current abuse, though. The problemis not so much to accept a certain “system”, but to cross differentapproaches and to compare, by intuition, which is able or not toestablish our own cartography, our own embodied guide to make thingsclear. Changing of points of view is crucial to build, step by step,our own experience’s field.

Memorization – Ingold says – is a very important process in the“developmental incorporation of specific competencies (…) throughrepeated trials” (ib., p. 269) in order to learn, to get skilled andto be able to act, to perform an enormous range of tasks.“Knowledge, then – the author resumes (p. 272) – (…) is immanent inthe life and consciousness of the knower as it unfolds within thefield of practice set up through his or her presence as a being-in-the-world.”

I think that this continuous process of learning, of acquisitionof knowledge, is an outcome of an “education of attention”, to usewords of Gibson often quoted by T. Ingold. The “regimes ofattention” are extremely diversified throughout the world; theychange in time and space, and ultimately, in their detail, they areobviously different from person to person. But, in spite of that, weneed to find some regularities, i. e., to separate the general (thatwhich seems common to every human community and individual) from theparticular, accepting the contingency of any conclusion. We alsoneed to find a logic of communitarian functioning that does notreify “society”, but also does not departure from individuals as“basic entities” – that would be a clear generalization of ourWestern experience. We need to account for power relations, and forthe “political economy”, for how the distribution of value is inoperation at every moment of “history”.

In his book “Suspensions of Perception” (2001), Jonathan Craryhas showed how modern science is itself connected to a very specialmode of attention (focusing on a precise matter and temporarilysponging out the rest), implying a subjective autonomy of theindividual that is very peculiar of our Western view/experience ofthe world.

That raises some problems, because we need to be constantlyexercising a changing of scale in the participation/observation andunderstanding of any particular reality. And we should not imaginethat the successive scales need to fit into one another as Russianpuppets, in a universal harmony going from the small to the big, andvice-versa, as a series of parts and wholes perfectly organized. We

need to get room for the unknown, the conflictive, the problematic,the incoherent, the still not well clarified, etc.

As in any other field, the permanent question that theresearcher faces is: what is happening here that I shall retain, andwhat shall I discard, at least for the moment? What is here in causeis not so much the divide between general trends and particularities(wholes and parts hierarchically organized, as said before), but abasic question of method.

It is the peculiarity of human experience, the uniquecharacteristics of each human being, that in last analysis feed andjustify the so called “social sciences”, an invention of the WesternXIX century, but an invention that is our inheritance, that we cannot avoid. Whatever the general regularities and invariants we mayfind, they have, first of all, a local cause, a particular “raisond’être”. What is important is not to departure from the “wrong”assumptions or entities, taken as indisputable; that will compromiseall the subsequent reasoning.

Indeed, in the experience of each person, the most crucialaspects are not inscribed on any support or formalized in any way:they are an embodied awareness. And in this embodiment the almostimperceptible, “naked” sensations and perceptions (José Gil) arecritically important.

In this aspect, the phenomenological approach is fundamental,and I do not see how it necessarily contradicts the “revolution”that psychoanalysis has operated in the decentralization of humanconsciousness, at least of the modern Europeans who inventedanthropology, too.

Another anthropologist, Philippe Descola, Prof. of the Collègede France (Paris) in his book “Par-delà Nature et Culture” (Paris,Ed. Gallimard, 2005), disagrees with Gibson’s approach and present arenewed way, inspired in the structuralist perspective (he is adisciple of Lévi-Strauss), of looking at human relationship with thenon-human world.

His argument is that almost every population in the worlddistinguishes between “conscience” and “body”, an inner part of theself (interiority) and a exterior part of the self (exteriority),and applies it in different ways to all reality. The output of thosepossible combinations (see table) are four major ontologies:totemism (interiorities and exteriorities are similar in allbeings), analogism (interiorities and exteriorities are different inall beings), animism (similarity at the level of the interiorities,dissimilarity at the level of the physicalities) and finally ourown, naturalism (similarity at the level of the physicalities,dissimilarity at the level of the interiorities).

Similarity of Similarity ofinteriorities ANIMISM TOTEMISM interioritiesDissimilarity of Similarity of physicalities physicalitiesDissimilarity of Dissimilarity ofinteriorities NATURALISM ANALOGISM interioritiesSimilarity of Dissimilarity ofphysicalities physicalities

The table above is a translation of that presented by the authorat p. 176.

It is impossible to reproduce, here, even a short abstract ofthe book, which assumes its enormous ambition (p. 167). Indeed, itis a very important piece of work, by one of the more distinguishedworld anthropologists, but I think that its very basic assumptionshould be discussed. Can we accept as a “universal” the so calleddistinction, made by humans, between their “exterior” and their“interior”? … I am not so sure... That “generative axis” of anoverwhelming synthesis of mankind as a whole may be very misleading,because it is the axiom over which all the building is made. Nodoubt, Amazonian people’s ontology (a kind of animism) is completelydifferent from ours, and on that aspect and many other, thecontribution of Descola is essential.

In certain aspects, it is interesting to compare Ingold’s andDescola’s approaches, in their coincidences and in their deepdisagreement: it is clear that each one of them belongs to acompletely different school of thought.

But in one point, among others, they coincide, although bydifferent reasons: the cognitivist approach to the understanding ofhuman action (as presented by internationally very known authors,such as Daniel Denett or António Damásio, among many others), is avery interesting approach indeed, but subject to debate (as, in acertain way, reductionist?) in its philosophical basis. Also, bothIngold (who made a critical revision of Leroi-Gourhan, author thathe admires) and Descola (who takes his basis from Lévi-Strauss,whose problems with Lacan’s views are well know) apparently discardpsychoanalysis as a tool to approach the human complexity.

In that they are in opposition to many, including the Slovenianphilosopher Slavoj ˇZiˇzek, an imaginative creator of unexpectedconnections and prolific writer, deeply influenced by Lacan (andHegel). But he is indeed fascinating, and in his last book, “TheParallax View” (2006), he also shows that the theory of Damásio in acertain sense fails its target (from page 222 on, in a sectioncalled “Emotions lie, or, where Damásio is wrong”).

So, in their extreme differences, all the three writers above

mentioned – Ingold, Descola, ˇZiˇzek – are located in spaces ofthought that are deeply anti-cognitivist. That does not mean thatthe broad field of cognitive sciences is without interest: that ideawould be totally simplistic and unfair. Actually it belongs to anold scientific tradition, useful but limited in its basicassumptions (due to its mechanistic tone) that consists in amaterialistic desire to dissolve the boundaries between humans andmachines, i. e. to reduce the tension between two very old poles ofWestern thought, body and soul.

Indeed the conscience that we need to try to look at our own“culture” (to use the traditional word) as just one amongst many, iscrucial. I am not so sure that we may trust in a (excessively)general idea of “self-awareness” as a characteristic of humans, as a“universal human attribute” (Moore, 1994, p. 33). But even if wecould accept that, we still would have many other problems to solve:which forms of that putative “self-awareness” would take shape indistinct time/space situations? Our deep ignorance of that isfrightening. But the point is not so much to elaborate a universalencyclopaedia or a holistic explanation of all possible ways of“being in the world”, but, more simply, to discard mythicalobjectives of our work as archaeologists. This work is part andparcel of a project that is definitively a product of our modernera, and thus an inheritance, too, of centuries of thought. So thefirst step is to know better ourselves, the inventors of socialsciences, in order to try to listen to the others, including theirinterpretations about us.

Therefore, the starting problem that we need to face is: whatare the fundamental characteristics of that “culture”, or ontology,since the Greeks, that make us, Westerns, so special? It is only bythis symmetrical attitude of placing ourselves as an anthropologicalobject, as an “exotic” way of thinking and living, that we mayaspire to understand the others, be them persons, communities, orwhatever.

For instance, why is the “body”, and in particular its image, anobsession of ours? Indeed, this problem underpins the theme of thepresent paper. I have chosen the face, and in particular its image(which we see continuously around us, in so many icons, fixed or inmovement), for some reason. It belongs to a long tradition ofinquiry and it may be useful to reveal how simplistic may be the“archaeology of personhood” that is so often elaborated by us… weneed to understand the permanent and the contingent aspects ofWestern ontology regarding the body in order to comprehend ourmodern obsession with the image of the body and in particular withthe face. By the same move, we will probably access why the idea ofvision is so important for us, and what is the connection between

display, exposition, exhibition, and our peculiarphilosophical/religious tradition. The tradition that has inventedarchaeology, the supposed way to make the past present again througha metaphysics of the “material”, a redemption of the “fall”, anovercoming of the loss. As if we could change the irreversibility oftime: the regressive ethos of that very “idea” is obvious. In theface as in the land, we probably search unconsciously the way toreturn to the “good mother”, and through “her”, to the “lost model”.

3To see and to be seen, the transcendent and the immanent, or: why are we so obsessed with the “materiality”? Quoting by memory the French thinker Paul Virilio: “The field of

vision has always seemed to me comparable to the ground of anarchaeological excavation.”And quoting also by memory the painter Paul Klee: “Now, the objectsnotice me”.

In fact, vision is always a dialogue, because we rarely stop andsuspend our perception of the surrounding environment. We are alwaysin motion, submerged into a field of continuously unfoldingexperiences and with thousands of subtle “inputs” that we can not beaware of. These “inputs” are not bits of information coming to mymind as a processing machine divided from the “body”. The “body”(and “the mind”) are Western (European) inventions that come outfrom our Greek philosophical tradition (see bibliography – “Qu’est-ce Que Le Corps?”).

I look at the objects (including animated and inanimate ones),at the materials and persons around me, as I move in space. And, ifI am aware of that series of sights (even if they include some times– breaks – of contemplation), the difference, the gap betweenobserver and observed, between subject and object, dissolves. Themore the distance from the object, the more the illusion of becomingcompletely neutral, as if we were in the place of an outsideObserver (God). In the sense that such sight is conscious that it isthe sight of something, and at a given point of space/time; that“something” imposes itself as an independent projection, as areflection of our own concentration of attention.

In the book mentioned above (pp. 58-81), there is a particularpaper which I consider absolutely important for the goals of thepresent intervention. Its title is “La Chair est Image” (“Flesh isImage”) and it is written by Jean-Marie Schaeffer (École des HautesÉtudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris). I will try to schematically

resume here his argument, which obviously is much richer and clearthan this abstract (with some comments by myself) permits.

The question of the body is typically European and Christian.Also, the image par excellence is the image of the body, inparticular a body represented as an image. Three main aspects formthe basis of our conception of the body: the above mentioned dualism(body/soul), the monotheistic creationism (“man” was created by God,but he/she is a degraded image of Him after the Fall in theparadise), and the idea of Incarnation. Through Christ, God takes ahuman shape (including a face, a fact unique in religion); Passionis the apex of this Incarnation. The flesh of man, corrupted by sin,has a possibility of redemption through the sacrifice of Christ,who, by Resurrection (glorious body), allows the return to the pureAdam’s original flesh.

So, there is an ambiguity, or duplicity, in the status of thebody, right from the beginning of our civilization. In fact, if thebody is an obstacle to the salvation (after the primordial sin), itis also the only way (through the body of Christ) that we have toovercome our condition and to recuperate purity. For instance,nudity, a sign of innocence in paradise, has become after the Fall asign of shame and of lust.

God is beyond any image, any possible representation. He is themodel, the prototype, the one who is inaccessible to sight. Theimage of the human body is in unconformity with that model. But,through the interface between God and “man”, which Christ represents(he is the image of conformity itself) a contact is made possible.By incarnation, the model becomes visible, the body and the imagejoin together in some sort of harmony.

Christianity is the community, the sum, of the believers asindividuals, and it is as individualized bodies that they mayconverge to the model. In this doctrine and practice – I add – wemay see the seeds of modern individualism, the idea of subjects asindividualized entities, so typical of our “culture” to the pointthat we see it as “natural” (i.e., universal), in acharacteristically ideological bias.

Largely dominating in European “art” is the image of Christ, animage of conformity, the interface between “man” and God. In him,image and model coalesce, and the flesh is sacramental, not just ashadow as in humans.

From the Renaissance onwards, a fundamental shift occurs withinthis structure oriented towards the model. The transcendency of themodel typical of the Medieval ages becomes progressively replaced byan immanent perspective, i. e., as an interiorized transcendency:bodily appearance starts being the revelation of the inner model.This dissolution of the transcendence of the model, its

humanization, opens throughout the last centuries a room where “man”as an image of “perfection” may emerge. The asymmetric, hierarchicalrelation between model and its “mimesis” (the body-image) beings todissolve, to become symetrical. The old distinction enters into acrisis: in a certain way, the difference of levels of realitydisappears. On the other hand, ambiguities, or paradoxes inherent tothese topics, do not. It is one of the reasons why – I believe – theface in particular, and the body in general, are still for us,today, so fascinating. They convey an enigma. They are paradoxical.

Actually, in spite of that leveling, according to Schaeffer, anambivalence persists in European tradition vis-à vis the image: onone hand, it may give access to the model (the image of conformity,the ideal beauty, the glorious body – as expressed exhaustively incontemporary media, connected to aesthetic ideals, phantasms,medical order), and, on the other hand, it is the very impossibilityof attaining that situation, because the image installs a distancein relation to the model: it is the image of the Fall, of decadence,of pain and of biological contingency. It is why Christ is thesymbol of the Western, European image, because he is the sum of bothaspects of the image, simultaneously man and god, suffering body(crucifixion) and glorious body (resurrection). We may say – let meadd this comment – that our imagery is still largely dominated,today, by the image of Christ, as we can see in many works of“modern art” – explicitly or not.

So the flesh is simultaneously (another – or, if you want, thesame – paradox, contradiction, or oxymoron) the manifestation ofspiritual interiority (conformity of the image) and sexual (animal)obscenity (unconformity of the image, deformity, ugliness).

The fact that the idea of femininity – Schaeffer argues –conserves the double aspect of a maternal reality (the nurturingbody, the primordial sign of peace and protection) and of a sexualone (the woman as ambiguity, as something not entirely trustable, asa source of fear) comes from the very ambiguity of the “mother” ofChrist, in the sense that being a virgin she gave life to a personwho was the incarnation of god himself, or his “son” (another figureof ambiguity, of course). It is more than obvious the symboliccharacter of all these “familiar” polarities, like father, mother,son, etc., studied by psychology, psychoanalysis, etc.

As long as the “humanization of the father” proceeds, acorrelative internalization (“intériorisation”) of the modelsoccurs: the consistency of man shall be found in himself, theorganic body is from now (Renaissance) on the translation of aninner model. This implies a divinization of “man” and, in lastanalysis, gives way to the modern, typically romantic, conception ofgenius: “the artistic interiority conceived as unlimited creative

power”, Schaeffer writes (p. 69). Therefore, the model of the body is not something that comes

from God’s creation, but rather it exists in the “idealizingprojection of an interior norm” (id., ib.). Image is the interface ofa hidden model (beauty, genotype, etc.) and the (biologically,socialy) contingent body. Modern (Western) subject is therefore aconsequence of a long, endurable, Christian tradition. “Divinealterity installed itself in the very interiority of man under theform of an idealized image of the self.” (id., ib., p. 70). In one ofthe most lucid texts that I have ever read, the author shows how,with Dürer for instance, “we see the passage from a self-portrait ofthe artist into a portrait of Christ as the artist’s portrait.” (p.70). It is evident, in all this matter, the importance of theportrait to trace the development of the underpinningconceptions/perceptions of each epoch, and throughout time: a sortof transformations within the same (ours) overwhelming “matrix”.

So, there is an affiliation, a hierarchic relation, betweenmodel and image. But the perfect image (that in conformity with themodel) is very important, because it is an intermediate, it is fromit that all the other images – crucial for the contemplation andsalvation of the believers – come from. This means that theprimordial image (the image of Christ) must be in direct relationwith him; it must be a true impression of his face: i. e., to be ina relation of similarity with the model, because this last one isthe source of energy from where any effort will find inspiration inthe way to perfection and redemption: for instance, in theacquisition of (how typically modern a myth!) the body’s beauty. Thecontemporary version of redemption may be in this kind of cult – mycomment – often seen in the sense of a ladder, a series of stepshigher and higher, as an ascent to salvation, perfection, imitationof the model. This one is the “spiritualization” of the flesh,playing with the idea of incarnation, the spirit made flesh.

The crucifixion (the supreme sacrifice) is the paroxysm of thepain, of effort, of agony, and it is very interesting (my comment)that we are so much obsessed by the image of agony (the liminalpoint between life and death, conscience and loss of conscience,individual solitude and loss into something beyond my capacity ofcontrol, the chaotic and the “other” in general, the unknown), also(very especially, so to speak) in the erotic sense: the moment oftrance, “read” in the face of the other (our lover, for instance).Ascetics, “self- sculpture” (to use the words of Schaeffer – p. 76),search of eternal youth (to be forever young) are but thecontinuation, in our time, of a long tradition, whose ambiguitiesare well documented in the very iconography of sacred ecstasy (seeBaroque statuary, for instance). This point interests me a lot,

because in it coalesces a religious education that in a way has“made me”, and subjected me, but also because of the (illusionary?)capacity to understand all the myths (free love, and in generalindividual “freedom”) that the same oppression developed as false“ways out”.

I mean, this is very important to understand how we mainlyreformulate our discourse within the same ideology, the sameontology. Ideology is like Hydra: it has many heads, and its core isthe “false impression” (the felt “deep conviction”) of being inpossession of the truth, the “real one”. Indeed, doubt, distancefrom common beliefs that only self-reflection may provide, is theultimate “luxury”: indeed still another version of the salvation,each one of us, in the Christian trend – as individuals –,pretending to be in the right way, whatever it may be.

Turning back to Schaeffer’s text, what we have in our time isthe idea of the profane (beautiful, perfect) body as the way toaccess the “image in conformity”. More specifically, the nude(contrarily to the nudity, which may be purely sexual or opaque)becomes the spiritualization of the body, that is, the locus whereall the contradictions dissolve: “sensibility and spirituality,matter and form, temporality and eternity, perception and idea” (p.78). No surprise, then, that the nude appears as the way parexcellence of the staging, or display, of the transcendence (theinvisible) under the forms of the visible. Its contemplationpromotes the spiritualization of the body. In that sense, the nudeis in a situation of opposition to the desired body, to the nudity,to the eroticized object of sight.

This is why modern artists have largely exploited this image ofthe obscene, pornographic body, going into the self-portrait as atotal auto-exhibition, to try to subvert the idealized nude. But, asSchaeffer seems to suggest, this may be a way of pursuing the samegoal, the desperate trial to find an interiority at the very surfaceof the images, of searching the invisible in the very opacity of theexposed surface (or “skin”, if you want). Photography has been,since its discovery, a fantastic machinery revealing this obsessionof the search of a “improbable coincidence between reality and theideal” (p. 79): the rejection of a model, of a hidden reality behindthe surface, in order to reach a pretense unity (harmony, overcomingof contradictions or paradoxes) at the very “sur-face” of people andthings. Epidermis would be our last phantasm of “interiority”, theprocess of internalization (“intériorisation”) typical of Europe inthe moment of reaching a sort of exhaustion.

Anyway, Schaeffer argues that the modern program of geneticsmarks the last step of the process, a mythological step indeed. TheAND, the “architect of life” (p. 79) is the ultimate version of the

model’s thought: an inner model, but also an abstract one, because,as an image, it may be “read” – it the model of the phenotypic body(p. 80). And Schaeffer adds: “ The opposition between genotype andphenotype is the contemporary form of the model’s and image’sthought” (…); “The individual organism is nothing but a contingentsub-set of the genetic storage of the species.” (p. 79).

This particular point meets an idea expressed by Tim Ingold inhis criticism to current genetics, when he writes that the “(…)organic form is a property not of genes but of developmentalorganisms”, and that “(…) there is no reading of the genetic codethat is not itself part of the process of development (…). Itfollows that there can be no specification of the characteristics ofan organism, no design, that is independent of the context ofdevelopment.” (see the paper already mentioned, “Fromcomplementarity to obviation: on dissolving the boundaries betweensocial and biological anthropology, archaeology and psychology”,Cycles of Contingency. Developmental Systems and Evolution (ed.Oyama, Susan et al), Cambridge/Mass., London, MIT Press, 2001, p.261). Maybe some of the insights of this author help to answer tosome of the perplexities expressed in the final page of Schaeffer’schapter, when he speaks about the disintegration of a thought basedin the ideal of a “primordial” model in the very moment where itseems to impose its sovereignty everywhere.

So the reader starts to see more clearly why this subjectinterests me so much as a person and as an archeologist.Understanding the tradition to which I belong – its very particularand contingent ontology – in both plans, at least I may be able toavoid some interpretive “ingenuities” vis-à-vis myself and theothers (my study’s object). Not to look from outside, replacing themyth of God’s eye; but to open myself to the diversity ofpossibilities of interpretation, to its infinite complexity. In lastanalysis, let us say that this is an aesthetics of self-deconstruction, of self-decentering, as well as an ethics ofprecautionary suspicion.

4

We live in a world infinitely complex and diversified. But onlynow, perhaps, we have access, through multiple experiences ofcontact, to that complexity. Look, for instance, at the faces ofpeople. Their “expression”, and in particular their eyes (themultiple and subtle images that I capture from them) – for a longtime considered the “manifestation of the soul” – continuously

changes at the most minimal levels.Faces are the Other (s) in their infinite diversity and extreme

ambiguity…but what about the many “selfs” that coexist in myself?The process of internalization goes along with the process ofinterest by what is alien to us, what is strange and enigmatic.

As Spanish Romantic writer Mariano de Larra has said (quoted bymemory): “I am face to face with myself, and this is the major jobthat I could have.”

Yes, what about our own face, fragmented, unrecognizable? If theXXth century brought many new things, one of the most important wasthe fall of humanism, the belief in continuous moral and materialprogress. With the first war, and especially with the second one,the “human” exploded, allowing T. Adorno to ask if poetry would bepossible again after the holocaust. We still did not digest thatkind of unexplained monstrosity, which occurred in Europe and wasperpetrated by one of the most so-called “cultivated nations” of theworld. Having invented the idea of “primitive”, of “savage”, toclassify the others (anthropology), we discovered that the realsavages were ourselves. Something was lost forever.

As Jorge Luís Borges said (quoted by memory): “If you take offall your masks, you will be left with no face at all”. Suddenly, wewere face to face with the mystery of ourselves. The works ofSartre, for instance, express well that explosion, that anguish withour identity. Something that has its roots in the XIXth century, toquote the very famous thought of Rimbaud about the ambiguity thatlies in the core of modern consciousness: “Je est un autre”. Indeedit would be impossible to try to develop here (or even to refer morelargely) these very well known ideas. They demand the crossing ofpractically all fields into a more comprehensive, but also open and“gaped” attitude towards life, experience, explanation.

5Knowledge, information, sight and illusion

Merleau-Ponty stressed how the visible and invisible aremutually connected. (quoting by memory): “The invisible is the madepresent as a certain kind of absence.”

In fact, any regime of visibility, of sight, originates a fieldsurrounded by hidden realities. Any candle light originates darknessaround it. Every information carries (implies) a secret. In thepolitical economy of knowledge, as long as “information” grows andspreads, a tendency increases in order to keep crucial (muchvaluable) information in very limited circuits. It would be a deep

naiveté to call our society an information society and to think thatwe may have access to all knowledge and that we can expresspertinent opinions about any matter. A certain “flattened” kind ofbehavior (for instance, in interpersonal relations) is simply apseudo-democratic screen: it goes along with a deep stratificationof sophisticated kinds of creating hidden, closed realities. Themodes of distinction changed, moved, but they increased under a“surface” (appearance) of “equal access”.

What is valuable and what is not may change at any moment, andit depends on constant reconfigurations of meaning. Circuits andinterests are in permanent fluidity today. What is in factcirculating, flowing, are signs, and their erosion (devaluation)today is extremely fast.

Transparency is part of a politics of distribution closelyrelated to opacity.

In old authoritarian societies, “information” was restricted,object of censorship. In modern “democratic” societies, informationflows like a cascade, in unlimited quantities, and the time andcritical distance of the subject to embody and to choose a strategyof navigation in this informative mess is very restricted. Theideology of “freedom”, of free access, is a screen for the unequaldistribution of value, for an authentic tyranny of the media. A softone, easy, pleasant to embody.

The panoptic obsession for vision is misleading, because themore images we have, the more darkness and ambiguity surrounds them.Too much light makes us blind.

6The ambiguities of objectification: photography, the “death” of

art, the relativity of knowledge

To photograph a face is like to kill a living person, turning itinto a frozen expression, a dead object – we know that well. It is acommon sense idea.

But photo-graphy is the paradigm of modern vision and itsparadoxes, whatever the case in question: to turn something into anobject of observation is to freeze life.

Artists have understood that a long ago: art today is a sort oftrip over of a dead body. What body? The one in which we haveinvested the nostalgia of the lost model.

On the other hand, photography has allowed us to access newrealities formerly ignored; or, better, photography has created themodern illusion that we could fix the flux of like itself, and to

store the entire reality of the lived, past and present. Photographyis in fact, together with the museum, one of the symptoms of themodern way of life: the loss of aura of the unique, and the fruitionas that commodified “unique” by the mass consumption (heritageindustry, archaeology included).

“Reality” is not itself fixed, it is in constant creation by ouractive engagement in life, conducted by desire, using new tools anddevices, dependent on different “episteme”.

We are witnessing an enormous revolution in art in our digitalera.

The photographed face is mute, they say.The so-called “archeological record” (by the way, record,

mirror, of what? made by who?!) is mute too, they repeat.Yes, sure they are, they are opaque, in a certain way; but, let

us ask:  in whose name, and about what, should these “things” speak?And even if by miracle they would speak, who would guarantee theythey were saying “the truth”?… i.e., that they would fit to asupposed external reality (the past excavated and exposed, thefeelings or personality of the beings photographed and unfolded)?That would be too simple, to return to the loss model with the formof a pedestal where the harmony of a centered world reposes!

7

Are faces simply denotative? Are they expressing somethingunivocal? Are objects, sites, landscapes denotative? Are they tryingto “tell” us something, any univocal, hidden meaning? Obviously not.They are signs, and as signs their meaning is fluid; it ismetaphorical, so fortunately it will never reach a point of fixedformulation.

In fact, everything that exists in our lived reality is anaction, a contact. A contact between our contingency  and “their”(the other’s) contingency. A fluid, engaged, active contact.

We try to fix a sense from that experience, a sense that we mayshare with others, according to some learned rules and methods. Buthopefully we never escape ambiguity, in the positive sense of theword.

The sense that we try to reach is not the product of some kindof delirium of individual imagination out of any control, because itis based on commonly discussed ways of approach, and (as long as wecan get access to it) on something that is presented to us as openlyavailable information.

But  “open available information” is just a conventionalsentence. In fact, we balance between agreements and disagreements,

between approvals and disapprovals. “Authoritative power” continuessubtly under more liberal “surface” behavior.

Indeed, each one of us desires not to miss the encounter. We arelonging for clearness, for precision.  We dream of convincing theothers as long as ourselves. So we come back again and again to the“evidence”, we look at it, we manipulate it, and we discardinterpretations and guesses that are no more plausible. Desiredrives us.

That is the movement of knowledge: not an independent process,but the result of a negotiation of individual intuitions occurringin particular communities, in the context of social and powerrelationships.

We produce results. And we overcome former interpretations.Sometimes, some of them seem nonsense, and even make us laugh;others, just make us smile. They became old, too simplistic, tooschematic. We do not believe in them anymore. The residue of nondiscarded material is the truth of our observation’s results; but bycontrast to everything that the others (our forerunners) havebelieved before us, we can feel and notice how much we have“progressed” since then.

So, this is not a total relativism, only a mitigated one. Notall interpretations and views are equally valid, or equally based.And suddenly we notice how long is the “cemetery of discardedinterpretations”. Looking ahead, keeping searching, establishing new“bridges” and dissolving walls between infertile fields,  newlandscapes will open to us, some of them probably with a certainsplendor.

To learn (i.e. overcoming former confusion, seeing thingsclearer) may be a pleasure. Repeated gaze, interrogation, in face ofa face, in face of a thing – that is the beauty of human experienceand wonder.

8

Within a given environment, to search for traces of human“occupation” and to study them archaeologically in order to recoverthe “temporality of the landscape” seems to be almost a demiurgicact: to “give life again” to past actions and intentions.Archaeologists with that idea in mind would probably be tooambitious.

But in fact, more modestly, and quoting Tim Ingold [2004Whitechapel Art Gallery – London – ResCen seminar transcript]: “Ithink being human means moving about in the world somewhere.

“(…) in fact anthropologists [we could read “archaeologists” –

my remark] and artists are doing very similar things. And therefore,we might each learn from what the other is doing.”

And  Tim Ingold again continues (ibidem): “What does it mean tosee? (…) “(…) the world is continually coming into being and we ‘realways at the edge of this process. [We are] “actually seeing theemergence of that world in process, in movement.” (…)

“I don’t think that anything begins or ends anywhere. (…)Because we are talking about a life process, we are talking aboutperformances that are going on in the life process.” (…) “There areno fixed beginning or end points.”

I could add: there is no ultimate sense for anything. The face.The past. They are not representations, but ever changingpresentations. Research never stops, except for reasons ofexhaustion (of practical means and or of lack of people’smotivation).

And quoting T. Ingold again: “(…) [We need] to keep the processgoing by creating the conditions in which growth is possible.” (…).

Stressing the importance of the interrogation over the answer,he says:“(…) there are all sorts of “how is it possible?” questions thatdrive me, anyway, and that is what I mean by research questions.”

“(…) fundamentally knowledge is about shared experience thatcomes from immersion in doing the same things, in the sameenvironment.”(…) “I don’t think that anthropology [we could readarchaeology – my remark] is like one little segment of academicdivision of labour. It is a way of being (…).”

(see http://www.mdx.ac.uk/rescen/archive/catalyst204.html).He is right. To consider research a profession like any other

else, submitted to conventional timetables, is not to be aresearcher. For someone who likes to render the world problematic,ideally there are not times for this and that: this may sound“Romantic”, but research is a passion, a drive into the unknown.Being a collective work, it differs from the artist’s one; withinthis last one, he/she may operates alone and he/she is more free todo things according to his/her own rhythm. But it depends, becauseperformance arts, cinema, etc., are collective works, and thetendency for the idea of the individual, autopoietic genius, seemssomething of the past.

9

The face, and the cult of its “beauty” in particular, is part ofa modern fetishism, which tries to “materialize” to fix, and toexpose everything, including the most subtle aspects of human life

and experience.  That fetishism (expressed for instance inpornography) is also the ground where archaeology develops. But inorder to understand why this occurs we need to go further into acritical view of our history as we have seen before.

As I have mentioned before, until very recently archaeology hasbeen a fetishism of objects (be they small artefacts, structures,sites, or huge landscapes) into whom we project our phantasms, ournostalgia of “returning into the objectuality of things”. Ofcrossing a threshold, entering through a passage into a new state ofknowledge.

Now, many archaeologists – together with people from other“disciplines”, such as architecture, anthropology, performing artsand performance studies, land-art, installations, etc. – are makingnew attempts in order to understand how we human beings relate toother beings and to the environment in which we are submerged.

Faces are indeed a good way of dealing with the “strangeness” ofthe reality of our daily life, in which “things” appear to us asseparated from their contexts of action. “Things” escape from ourhands like living fish. They are just signs, in modern capitalisteconomy. Turned into fixed icons, into images through photographyand other media, faces are the very symbol of our Western nostalgiaof the prototypical model typical model. In that resides theirattraction and their strangeness. Their are simultaneously thepresence and the absence.

The same experience of “otherness” or “strangeness” occurs inarchaeology. That strangeness in not any “essence” of ourdiscipline; it is constitutive of all modern knowledge. Instead ofcausing anxiety, it is one of the reasons why it is also veryexciting to live; because we never unveil anything, we just crossthrough curtains to find others, in a never ending process ofexperience.

10

A face is something surprising. Often it looks like an appealcoming from our own past. A particular pattern of face may beconnected to a reminiscence of something that happened to us, andthat we are now unable to remember.

The visible appeals to the unconscious. The contribution ofpsychoanalysis is here obviously fundamental.

But on the other hand it was our own “scientific enquiry”, inits process of objectification, of “creating objects of observation”separated from subjects that observe in a neutral way, which was/isresponsible for the conditions of the production of that very

“otherness”. This strangeness is magnificently illustrated by manyof the paintings by Paul Delvaux, the Belgian surrealist painter.Some of them show a conventionally dressed man looking into picturesof “life” through old-fashion glasses, in what looks like to be anallusion to the deserted reality frozen by conventional science, tothe absurdity that results from the very attempt to isolate “acomplete objective reality”. At least, this is my reading of it.

Indeed, in general modernity installed a divided regime: publicimage for the power (aided by science), privacy for the desire (fedby literature). Schematically, both are faces of the same coin;objectivity and subjectivity, engineering and romance are alwaysplaying together and complement each other. We have created theidea of “nature” as independent from “culture”, and for centuriesour science have been looking at that invention (“nature”),astonished, trying to understand it and if possible completelydominate its “secrets”.

This is indeed a very old and exotic way of approaching life byWestern philosophy and common sense…

To replace a fundamental lack, we have created something verystrong indeed. Something that seems to be obsessively observing usthrough a world made out of images turned into a foolish cascade.And that obsession is certainly fed by our own gaze. The mirrorsends back to us our interrogative face, often under the aspect of afragmented monster. We can not face ourselves. That is basicallywhat painting and sculpture have been saying to us these last twocenturies. And it is difficult to find the proper words to expressthis new kind of anguished world populated by the frantic imaginary,by the agony of the images surrounding us in films, in papers, inoutdoors, everywere. Wim Wenders’s or David Lynch’s films are goodexamples of that “postmodern” vacuum. “No hay banda. Silencio”(“There is no band. Silence”), says one of the characters in Lynch’s“Mulholand Drive”.

11

Indeed we are longing for something missing – the model.Probably, behind the attractive face, there is the phantasmic

portrait of the Great Absent: God, the major invention of mankind,our supreme projection.

Deprived of Him, surrounded by small objects of desire,particularly those who live in a modern Western consumer societyexperience disenchantment and solitude, together with the fear ofaggression from Outsiders.

Archaeology is for us a way, among many others, of trying tofill a double gap created by the death of God (the Big Other, orwhatever we call it) and by the fall of the sense of traditionalcommunity, as a consequence of modernity.

But – this is the recurrent question – did we, as human beings,ever have an harmonic life? Obviously not; this is a question whichis connected with the idea of a primordial paradise, some idealstate of “equilibrium”, of nature before sin and fall. Actually whatwe lack is the result of the loss of a myth. Totality, fulfillment,is our phantasm. But this is also in connection of a libidinaleconomy, and with the progressive globalization of market andliberal system, in a word: with the spread of modern capitalism.Indeed, modernity and the laic society are settled on a paradox:individual freedom that is crucial for the market is also theterrain where exclusion develops, externally and internally.

12

We lack a collective project. Our project is individual: tocapitalize, to enlarge our belongings in money, prestige, power,capacity of seduction of others, knowledge, “culture”, whatever. Theultimate value is money, an abstract and fluid thing, connected toindividual improvement. M. Weber showed very clearly how this“freedom to expand fortune”, so intimately tied to capitalistentrepreneurship, is also in connection with protestant Puritanism.

And as long as a society of mass consumption and entertainmenthave emerged, as a result of industrialization, many have searchedin the past a refuge for their own perplexity: the implosion of “themeaning”, the Great Other, in the neo-liberal society.

In old monarchies, the king represented god, and his image (hisportrait) showed his unquestionable status, as a symbol of power,and stability of the order of the universe. The same with thenobles.

With the emergence of the bourgeois world, the concept ofcitizenship and the individual living in growing cities, the oldorder became unstable.

Anonymous and lost in a crowd, the individual, promoted not byblood (inherited status) but by merit (acquired by work and personalvalue), needed new modes of distinction. News ways of representationcame from this regime of  power desire, i.e., from the loss of afixed universal meaning existing forever.

Photography, as noted before, was one of the main devices ofthat new discursive order.

13

Things are everywhere on display to be seen, to be bought andsold. Faces to observe and to be observed.

Subjects producing themselves for an open market or vividexperiences.Images, images, images forever; a cascade of signs trying to imposethemselves as temporary icons. This is very tiring, but one of thecharacteristics of capitalism is its extraordinary capacity toabsorb, to include in its very expansion and reinforcement anymargin, any criticism, any discordance.

Modern personal computer brings a world home. With it, we createnew images, new signs, we multiply messages, we increase noise,superimposition, discard.

We have internalized our condition of individual productivemachines: innovative, desiring, all the time on the move, even whenseated.

As the one who was/is preparing this presentation, this text.

14

Baudrillard (1994, pp. 131-132): “(…) everything turned out tobe operational. Every category, instead of being a category ofaction, became a category of operation. Therefore, everything drivesinto this sort of facticity.” (…)

“It is true that the human face, alive, contains a sort ofalterity, i. e., a contradiction in itself; there is a kind ofsemiological action even at the level of the traces, which aestheticsurgery partially sponges out.” (…)

It’s always the same thing with every kind of aesthetic surgery,be it done in the nature, in green spaces, etc – it consists ineffacing the negative traces in order for us to be left only withthe ideal model. Everywhere, indeed, this modelization of the will,of the body, of sex, occurs.”

We could add:  archeologists are a kind of aesthetic surgeons ofthe land, trying to imprint the landscape with the ideal traces of aperfect past (= clean, clearly visible, nice to look at, expressive,meaningful present).

15

In school, they have taught us that the concept to be definedshould not be included in the definition. But, to the contrary:archaeology, for instance, is the study of the archaeologicalreality.

The archaeological reality is the universe of things that weconsider archaeological.

To be or not to be included in that reality depends on the epochof the archaeologist, on his/her approach, i. e., on his/her way oflooking at reality, on the paradigm that shapes his/her way oflooking.

Each “discipline” is the product of an historical situation: itis a set of conventions.

The order that the disciplinary system tried to impose on thereality consisted of dividing that reality into pieces, each onebeing the object of a particular “discipline”.

But a “discipline” (like archaeology, or architecture, oranthropology, etc.) has more to do with a particular tradition, aparticular way of looking at/living in the world, a genealogy ofquestions and tasks, methods, techniques, ways of approach, themes,controversies, and authors.

It is a convention as any other else. It has only fitted arelatively stabilized reality, as long as this reality existed.

Today knowledge is fluid, like finance: it is in a continuousflow, it avoids being fixed or framed in permanent rules and themes,and it is seeking not only for exchanges between “fields”(interdisciplinary work) but for new fields where to expand(transdisciplinary work, the globalization of thought).

To establish unexpected connections between topics of formerdifferent fields, to use imagination, became the prime mover of theso-called “creative people”. To be a “creative person” (in science,art, or… finance) is potentially the most valuable feature of themodern individualistic and productive society. Imagination,connection, production of the unexpected – that is what opens newfields for the commodification process (global capitalism).Imagination is money. Going directly to new targets saves energiesand  potentializes more power and prestige. Business andentertainment: both demand sustainable effort, under an ideal ofhedonist mythological background. The market embraces them all.

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Garry Winogrand (quoted by Sontag – see bibliography) said: “Iphotograph to find out what something will look like photographed.”We could say: “We archaeologists we excavate to find out what things

will look like excavated.”Or: “ We do archaeological survey in order to find out what

things will look like when observed, recovered, or recorded.”We need to accept a huge gap, not to say an abyss, between our

“philosophical questions” and our “daily life” as archaeologists.Philosophy is too sublime, too abstract, too much separated fromexperience; daily “recovery” of information is not so much excitingas we often pretend (to convince ourselves and our publics/sponsors)…

17

To think, to search, is a form of action. In action we arealways previewing what comes next; action is in itself a permanentanticipation; but it is an anticipation submerged in the contingencyof the events.

To “search for something” is already in a certain way to findit, because we never conceive “a priori” a precise object ofresearch. We just go ahead, moved by desire, in order to keepacting. And if we find something, we tend to say: look, it wasprecisely this that I was searching for.

And then we review all the film of life in order to trace in thepast the first signals of the interest for (of) the thing justdiscovered.

All meaning is, in a certain sense, tautological. To a certainpoint, we move in circles, larger and larger ones. Or, if youprefer, in a spiral. We obviously never come back to the same place.Each one of us patiently builds his/her own capsule made out withmaterials of the environment, including social environment. But thisis a very typically Western way of acting…

18

Every year, in the end of an excavation season in theprehistoric site of Castanheiro do Vento (NE of Portugal), ourresearch team tries to protect large exposed areas from weathering.For that, we need to use long plastic bands offered to us. We do nothave means for a better protection. So, the last days, when thestudents are there no more, the directors of excavation performthese and many other “practical” activities. Sometimes we askourselves, looking at the colorful aspect of the site:Is this a Christo’s modern installation in Castanheiro do Vento? Itcould be!

But, no: obviously, and unfortunately, it is just ours.We are just covering the questions (the problematic face of the

site) with those colorful plastics in order to protect them forfuture solving, and to prepare ourselves for a peaceful winter.

So, as you see, in practice there are no boundaries. When weneed to solve problems, we are immersed in life, and we are creativeactors. All the excavation may be seen as a performance, even in themodern “artistic” sense.

This is why performance artists are welcome to the site. We mustbe creative together to survive as people who are more concerned toexperience new things than simply to accumulate older ones. Toprotect “archaeological values”, we need to dissolve barriers.Giving a new face to the discipline, to use an easy metaphor…

19

We are longing for coming back to a sort of regressive state of“peace”, before the separation from the Great Other. In that state,questions and answers would be imbricated, dissolved into a solething.

So, I stress this point – all action (and all thought) tends tobe tautological: in some way it arrives always at the point ofdeparture, but in the meantime both reality and us were transformedby an historic experience of “dialogue”: we “come back” a certaintime later, with a certain experience accumulated. “Touteconnaissance est une reconaissance”. On another hand, the oppositeis also true: what is in fact a point of departure, in the fluidityof things? Past, present and future intersects at every point.

The archaeologist, as the photographer, are like the criminal:they always turn back to the place where the crime was committedoften to meet a surprise.

To live is to be engaged in some sort of compulsory form ofaction. People need to be involved in tasks in order to survive bymaking sense of themselves within a given environment. They tracelines in a landscape, produce footprints in the sand and the snow.Most of those will fade in an instant; some may be conserved for thethousands of years to come.

20

Making sense (of individual and of communal action) is our majorgoal.

As Francis Bacon (who tried many sorts of tasks and jobs before

becoming a painter) said (quoting by memory): “The important pointis always to be able to do something. If you do something in yourlife that gives it a meaning, the way that drives you there, thefield in which you express yourself are of minor importance. As itis so rare to come up to the point of giving life a meaning, and itis so good to reach that!”

We archaeologists we want to unveil the face of reality, as the“voyeur” that exists in every one of us wants to find the absolutelysurprising face, to unveil the sublime unknown, to record it, tophotograph it.

We want to strip the landscape from its modern features. We needto ecograph the soil, to see what is underneath, to work likesurgeons in order to extract meaning from its apparent indifferenceand muteness.

And we justify our activity saying that we want to givelandscape its temporality, that we want to understand the past. Yes,but… probably, moreover, and nostalgically, we want to recover theatemporality, the “eternity” of the landscape.

The landscape of archaeology has no essence: it is the landscapeof the modern individual, surrounded by all sounds and visions ofhis/her own solitude.

Attached to the ground, concentrating our attention on it,paradoxically we dream about levitation, about “dancing in the skywith diamonds…” continuously  trying to find the undiscovered face,the image of self recognizance and fulfillment…the sublime (thoughimpossible) trans-figuration. Archaeology, ethnography, eroticism,pornography, photography, etc. – they have more things in commomthan most people imagine. Suffice it to say that all came into beingin the XIX century, the apex of European domination.

21

The regime of thought that interrogates the face, considered asthe interface between the body (the visible) and the soul (theinvisible), is the same that interrogates the soil, considered asthe interface between the present (the visible) and the past (theinvisible).

Psychology and archaeology depend on the same metaphysics: tounfold, to expose the invisible that is hidden by the visible, thatlies underneath it.

But the encounter quickly dismisses such a simple scheme.A face is a fluid appearance, in the sense that it changes

continuously as an image, and that image is by vocation ambiguous:there is no single subject behind it.

Each one of us is in fact “many”. Or, better, the “self” is afragmented, fluid reality in a process of liquid transformation. So,when I say “me”, who is speaking in my name? Identity is a fictionthat gives the self a sense of stability which is certainly neededfor mental health and individual survival.

The work of memory is one of the “machines of identity”, amachine that is constantly at work, trying to make sense aposteriori of each individual life. The mythic nature of that senseis specially notorious in biography.

Autobiography, in particular, implies always a narcissisticmotivation. The reflexive subject “reviews” his/her own past inorder to find coherence in a lifetime, in order to find and exposethe reasons why he may call himself or herself  “him” or “her”. Thesame applies to the past.

The past is in a way a particular sort of fiction built frompieces of “collective memory” and public “documentation”. In thatimmense archive of history, the so-called archaeological realityplays an important role, because it seems to substantiate by amaterial, solid basis, conclusions about what happened before us.

But every self-reflexive archaeologist knows that there isnothing more ambiguous than archaeological reality itself. Thatreality – as it keeps recorded and/or exposed for others to observe– is the result of an encounter of a certain research approach witha certain portion of the terrain, of the territory. The contingencyof that encounter and its products is obvious. But here again thecommunity and the heritage enterprise (an industry very muchconnected to processes of local identification and to products fortourism management) demands the archaeologist a story, an historicaldiscourse that may be made to function as an account of thetemporality of that particular landscape, monument, or piece. Andagain, like in biography, the writer, or specialist, needs to tell acoherent story, a narrative of how things were in the past, and howthey suffered a series of transformations until becoming the thingsof the present. This narrative of continuity is the trick of history– to make sense of a collective memory. Archaeologists know that ifthey do not tell this, here and now, and as completely as possible,they will not be funded for the suite of their research, and theywill be considered unproductive, spending public money in anactivity which is asked to produce stories and monuments for thepublic, for children, for leisure times, something that fills allimaginative gaps and reassures people on certain fundamental “needs”and “functions”, presented as universals, like in the search for“prehistoric houses”, for instance – using the concept of “house” asa an-historical “ready-made”.

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So the gap that the subject feels – when, for instance, he/shelooks at the mirror – between his/her reflected image and his/herown subjective image of  the “self”, is homological to the gap thatthe archaeologist meets when he needs to tell the result of his/herresearch to non- specialists, and even sometimes to archaeologistsspecialized in a different matter. Almost like children, they askall the important questions; but also like children – especially inthe case of the public – they will not accept doubts or alternativeversions. They want a quite precise answer, they want to bemythically transported back to the past (as imagined by them). Theywant to confirm their feelings of belonging to a community (local orglobal) whose history makes sense. A domesticated sense. In 2005 Ihave published a book, called (translating to English) “Show-CasesToo Well-Lighted. Essays on Archaeology”, which cover displays ashow-case having just a question mark inside.

Because the modern individual feels alone and disconnected fromcommunity as an individual consumer in an abstract and generalizedmarket, he/she critically needs some narrative that ties him/her toa collective “meaning”.

The past – and the heritage in general – is the product that theconsumer is searching for in the global modern hypermarket to fillhis/her basket with “culture”, with products of leisure andentertainment that may give him/her a sense of belonging tosomething located beyond mere “physical” survival.

Those are also products of social distinction, the proof thatthe individual has overcome the status of mere comfort and common-sense “happiness”, to look far ahead, i.e., to mimic the usefulnessof the leisure class reading books, participating in debates,listening to “classic” music, in short, reaching the level of afull-rights citizen integrated in a community of educated persons,separated from the regime of the poor, those concerned with meresurvival.

23

To decipher faces and their expression, and to decipher objectsand their history, opens the way to a body of specialists, toprofessions concerned with the invisible behind the visible.

Psychologists – not to mention psychiatrists and psychoanalysts– decipher the bodies, and the faces in particular, to “cure”deviations and to help people to integrate into the system through

the proper behavior.Archaeologists decipher the land, ideally advising entrepeneurs

and politicians about where to build and where to makesurvey/excavation, in order to preserve “remains of the past”, i.e., symptoms of history that reinforce collective cohesion, mentalhealth of citizens integrated into a meaningful world, where cultureand entertainment are fundamental for the reproduction of the socialorder.

Visiting and buying products available in this market – whichcovers every aspect of reality – citizens reinforce that peacefulacceptance of shared values and ideologies.

To sum it up, psychology and archaeology as public activities(as professions) act as mechanisms for feeling gaps and correctdisruptions both at the individual level and at the public spacelevel, in order to provide accepted explanations and shared values.

Only at a very specialized level do psychologists,archaeologists, and other social scientists raise difficult,disturbing questions, questions which are also welcome because theymeet a specialized fraction of the market itself. The fraction thatseeks to look beyond common/pop culture, popular books, self-helpbooks, etc., etc.

Unexpected connections and fresh insights are the bread andbutter of this small fraction of the inclusive market.

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In this context, which is ultimately my project?To dissolve the boundaries between argumentative (conceptual,

logically organized) thought and aesthetic thought (poetry), betweenanthropology (and archaeology, and architecture) and art.

To express myself in a “unique” way with a variety ofmodulations, creating synergies between separated fields and betweendifferent people, at a transdisciplinary level.

Ultimately, to pursue the project of modernity and its universalutopia of global “inclusion”... for instance, helping students,helping students to understand that in order to get involved in realprojects of knowledge research we need to create new forms ofpractice within the traditional institutions we have, through activelearning, horizontal practice of a continuous share of informationand experience, where the status of each member does not so muchdepend on formal post or age, but of individual contribution tocollective effort.

In archaeology, that effort is enormous, so gigantesque is thetask of dialoguing with many people concerned with environment

planning in order to negotiate zones/times to make long runarchaeological interventions possible. This position frontallydenies a mere accommodation to the status quo. Discussing “theory”means to prepare to struggle for a higher status in the symbolicpower of archaeology, which is vital for the enlargement of itsfield of activity in real, “practical life”.

We are not confined to an abstract and contradictory subjectmatter as “material culture”, or whatever. We may extend ourinterest to every field of knowledge/activity (exploring new pathsand connections), and to every question at stake in order to amplifyour conditions for public intervention.

In Portugal, at least, it is possible to do it in some way, andthat task is urgent. We need to be connected to other Europeancolleagues, establishing a network where people with commoninterests may meet with mutual advantages for researchers andstudents. We need to succeed at that level; otherwise we fail. But,for our effort to be successful, it needs the conjugation ofcapacities of different teams from different countries; in turn, weare able to do our best to be useful to others: that is at leastideally the very heart of science, art, or any knowledge, and thatis the spirit of the moment: to make things, persons, thoughts,circulate. Hopefully, there will be always detached personalitiesand well supported projects to inspire us all.

People currently live in the world of evidence, of naturalthings. The majority of the archaeologists is not an exception –they apply, and reproduce, uncounsciously, what they have beenteached to do.

However, “nothing is writen”; nothing is natural, in the sensethat nothing is definitive or is as it must be.

The interesting point about this world is the fact that it is inconstant mutation. Things that today seem natural, spontaneous,obvious, will give place in the future to new worlds. Each one ofthese will be lived (and felt, and thought) by common peoplesimilarly with total conviction.

People who never open their entrance door to the doubt are, in acertain way, already dead; taking refuge in certitude, they block atthe same time their creativity.

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When the objectification of the human body (face included) wasmade by medical sciences, that process divided it between a surface,defined by the epidermis (visible symptoms of some “inner” problem

or disease) and an interior, an inside matter made out of organs,functioning or disfunctioning in an unknown way. It installed adichotomy between appearance (surface, form, area of the sight) andreality (in this case, the very systems of the body as a livedmatter) (depth, content, area of opacity).

Anatomy, and in recent times technical systems of observationlike echography, helped to explore the “enigma” of the human body,making each one of us an element to be “included” under the modernhygienic law of medical scrutiny and surveillance, and at the sametime compelling us to a constant self surveillance (we are also thatalien, the body, that needs to be scrutinized regularly).

We are in a certain way compelled to feel guilty of our owndiseases, because, if the symptoms are detected at a precociousmoment, we may eventually stop the degradation process or even becured; this corresponds to interiorize, to make medical ordersubjective. The modern subject is the “locus” of responsibility –having embodied rules of all kinds, he is the knot of a net ofsurveillance and objectification never seen in history before.

No surprise, then, that many are kept outside that extremelydemanding system: it is a sort of “Darwinist machine” of exclusion;no surprise, too, that depression and anxiety are the verycompanions of many of us, those “inside” the system and keeping italive everyday by our continuous action.

Probably no former regime of history was like this; in a certainway, we have gone far ahead of many fiction novels about “thefuture” and its totalitarian, opressive system/way of life. Indeed“oppression” in not coming from outside, it is ideologicallyimplanted in individuals, in their habitus, in their beliefs, intheir very imagination of individual freedom. It is a process ofcomplete overlapping between intimacy and order.

The body exposed to medicine, to scientific vision and scrutiny,is a naked body, a body that has temporality lost its intimacy.Obviously, nakedness may be a sort of cloth, and intimacy has moreto do with sentiment then with physical appearance. But I do nothave occasion to develop this here.

Especially after an hospital surgery we may feel that our bodyis an alien, an object exposed to the look of others, even students,who observe us (?) as a matter of practical knowledge, as a casestudy to illustrate their manuals. Nakedness, intimacy, anderoticism suffered a deep transformation in modern times, in many(but all inter connected) ways. As I said, it is impossible todevelop all those themes in this context.

The same exhibition of the self, this time transformed into amind, is operated by psychiatry (the branch of medicine concernedwith what is beyond materialized body, the mind), psychology,

psychoanalysis.Each one needs to decide by himself/herself  if, in addition,

he/she has or not a metaphysical third reality, called the soul, andif this one will survive as promised to individual death, in a sortor non-place called heaven. That is the territory of belief, theblack-hole that escapes objectification. It is in fact itscomplement. People need to believe that they are free to choosetheir most intimate feelings and options, in order that they “feelfree” at the very moment where the reproduction of the ideologyoccurs. People are constantly nurturing their own “alienation” astheir most sacred individual tabernacle.

Turning back to the “physical”, “material” body, the result ofthe medical identification process, we all know that between surfaceand organs contained by the skin there are holes, entrances,passages between inside and outside, some of them connected with thesenses and with the eroticized body in particular.

Eroticism is, in a certain way, the popular culture (andreligion…) of modern, secular times, the democracy of pleasure forall; we do not need to spend much time and effort to acquire themeans of production of that promised pleasure, as long as we have ahealthy body/mind (being “normal”).

The problem is that “healthy” eroticism, the one publiclyrecommended (itself in fact the upper surface of an iceberg, as weall know from our own experience, and through modern art andperformance, for instance) implies a certain kind of mind, not only“free from prejudices” but, moreover, available to that kind ofexperience.

Parallel to romantic love (the deep motivation for projecting acouple life, trying to keep living with another person) modernityinvented a fantastic paraphernalia of erotic attractions,entertainments, and stimulations having ultimately as a goal the“sexual fulfillment” of the individual (considered by some psycho-sciences as almost an obligation, or pre-condition, for a healthymind).

That environment is fed continuously by the market. Normally itincludes, in its complex package, a “box” for the individualpleasure, taken as obligation and right, and doctors advice eachindividual of the norms (individually adapted) to reach thatfulfillment.

In fact, individualization goes along with, and complements, theprocess of universalization of the modern body. A physical diseaseobeys to universal rules (biology, natural law); instead, apsychological disease, although following a general nomenclature, isunder the scope of individual peculiar combinatory of universalmodules, because it is the product of a biography, an individual

experience, i. e., as a mode of “culture” considered as a lived,particular, specific embodiment of the rules defining (defined for)the human being.

By “discovering” deep substratum beneath the conscious, in acertain way psychoanalysis disturbed, but ultimately reinforced, themodern medical system, in the sense that it provided ways to curethe secular soul (something more complex than just the mind) by moreintimate means that those of the psychologist or of thepsychiatrist. It corresponds to the subjective, romantic, anti-Jacobin face of modernity, the other side of its coin. Freeingdesire (libido) from its “hidden” former places, psychoanalysisserved also to objectify the complexities of the human soul. It mainly allowed a shared experience between analyst and analysed(complexity of the transfer) which was eradicated from objective,scientific medicine and psychology. In that aspect, psychoanalysismay be very important and even subversive. Obviously, there are asmany versions as psychoanalysis as its own practicioners; thus, thisis a specially sensitive matter.

The separation between object (ill, suffering person) andsubject (the analyst) is more complex, because it involves long runinteraction of two “souls”, the deep “introduction” of the mind ofthe observer into the mind of the observed (and vice-versa). It maybe a sort of “erotic” experience, socially approved and encouraged,in the sense that it explicitly may involve shared emotions.Obviously, in Portugal at least, this “treatment” is very muchdependent on the economic capacity of the analysed1.

The very extension of reason and modern hygienics forced theemergence of a multitude of escapes, going from that psycho-interactive action to the reification and sacralization of sex andits ecstasy (orgasm), from eroticism and the so called “pornography”to romantic love. It created the idea of deviance, of perversion –to be more or less far from the rule, from the “doxa” of the healthyindividual. The healthy individual is the model: the one who gets a“perfect equilibrium” (?) between body and soul, being in preferencethe element of a married heterosexual couple. Certainly, we knowthat things are changing very fast in these aspects. But that onewas the ideology through which people of my generation wereformatted.

In fact, all those principles, taken at the individual level(the individual, another invention of modernity, is the owner ofhis/her own option in terms of “way of life”, as a right and as anobligation) created infinite modes of specificity.

The specificity of each one is just the result of a particularcombination of universal modules, or is there something – someresidue – that remains outside analysis? Objectively, advertisement

and in general the marked machinery is always fabricating newsubjectivities in order to create new needs and the correspondingcommodities to meet them. As consumers and also as consumed (notonly by the sight of orders, as social actors, but by a variety ofsituations, including selling our labor force), we are permanentlyin search of fulfillment, inside an eroticized environment wheredaily powers are in constant negotiation in every niche of humanaction. From home to work, and from them both to public space.

Certainly this helps us strategically to understand the so-called “past societies”, in the sense that conceptually they are aspresent as ourselves: a construction of our own modern “mind”. Aslong as archaeology discovered to be itself an invention ofmodernity, it is included, as everything else, in the general“episteme” of ours. Therefore, in order to be thought, archaeologyneeds itself to be objectified from outside as a “field of study” asany other else. That ideally implies for the observer (the reflexivearchaeologist) a meta-position and the establishment of connectionsto all other fields, in every direction. That implies a politics.Every field of activity does it, producing continuously an enormousamount of discourses of legitimization of that very field. Whyshould archaeology be an exception, confined to a mere technology of“recovering the past”?

Obscene and non-obscene, erotic and non-erotic, pornographic andnon-pornographic are pairs of concepts which are included in thesame liquidity of all concepts and dichotomies today. For somethingto be considered as obscene/pornographic/erotic, or not, is veryrelative; it depends on the attitude of the observer, and on moralconsiderations which are considered as each one (his/her) own fieldof individual decision.

Semiologically, it is at the point of reception (ofinterpretation by each one of us) that something acquires itsconnotation: reality presents itself with a phantasmatic“neutrality” in a certain way. A commodity is a commodity as anyother else, as soon as there are producers and consumers – a market– for it. It is translatable into money, the ultimate value (infinancial but also in “metaphysical” terms).

We all know well the strength of the international networks ofpornographic industry, and how far dissimulation may go in thisdomain. As a rule, puritan morals and perversions are the two sidesof the same coin.

This coalescence of extremes is not new, because in fact we knowvery well that in traditional religious trances orgies and all kindsof excesses were produced: that was – and still is – at the verycore of traditional and popular religious experience. So, even asophisticated piece as the sculpture representing the religious

ecstasy of Santa Teresa by the baroque Italian artist Bernini may beconsidered erotic or even pornographic, depending on the way we lookat it. In fact, it has been retaken by modern “artists” in order toproduce audacious pieces of work. But this should not mistake us:pornography, photography, archaeology – as for instance literatureas a separate field – are all productions of the modernity, mainlyof the XIX century onwards. And pornography – sex industry ingeneral – is today, as I wrote above and everybody knows, one of thegreatest powers in the world, together with war industry, drugs,construction works, football, etc. In these industries the hard faceof capitalism makes itself clear, in its ferocious exploitation ofpeople and its absolute indifference to the so called “humanfeelings”.

What is the point here at stake? What I want to stress is a verysimple idea. The body’s face and the soils’ face, and the ways welook at them, are not simply metaphors of each other, i.e.,superficial bi-univocal analogies.

Human’s face – symbolized in the fashion model, andtraditionally in “women” – and soil’s surface are in facthomologous, in the sense that they are experienced as objectualsigns (“material culture”) of an inner important meaning (“nonmaterial culture”, or, if we want, “culture” in general) that theyoccult and reveal at the same time. In the case of the face, it isthe identity, the personality of the person, and its biographyinscribed in the visual discourse of a face in movement.

Or, we know that that “hidden meaning”, as a circumscribedentity, is a myth, an idealized label that we put on other’s face.Being the only part of the body – at least in “Western culture” –that is constantly exposed to other’s eye, and being connected as asort of “mirror of the soul”, the face and its “mise en scène”represents a very important point for each social actor and a focusof a paraphernalia of products and techniques of self-image andcare. The face is the interface between the visible and theinvisible, the place where the signals of “seduction” are inscribed.

In a similar way, the idea of “extracting meaning” about asupposed past going underneath the surface of the soil, from thevisible superficial remains, is also a chimera, a fantasy. In factwe uncover relatively small portions of features which not only aredeceivingly too scarce to answer the questions we normally ask inadvance, but in general raise new questions.

So the process is not to unveil the past, as to undress a personis not to unveil her/him, but just to change the state of thevisible reality we call “material”. Where we had a surface, we havenow holes or exposed surfaces underneath – we have just created newmorphologies, multiplied the secret of things; where we had a face,

we have now a multiplicity of faces, a vanishing face in all itssecrecy, in all its movement to another state, to anotherappearance. We search behind curtains only to find new ones. That isthe process of learning.

To sum it up, in archaeology as in daily life, or in apsychological study, if we are lucid, we are face-to-face to the“mystery” of the world. We accumulate observations, notes, records.We elaborate discourses, we connect formerly non connected ideas. Wepropose explanations. And we try to influence the “order of things”;but our capacity to do it is considerably restricted.

And after all this we should not feel nostalgic for the factthat we do not find a definitive truth. Who wants a definitivetruth? Is is as much useless as last days papers, to remember an oldsong of the Rolling Stones. We want to act together in the present.To find people, not only faces, not only images; to make things inthe soil, not just to look at it or to experience it walking,talking, or whatever. “Going into the deep of thinks” means just beactive, feel happy, raise questions, propose guesses, elaborateinterpretations, discard views, in a word – to dialogue each otherinside a real and active, engaged world of relationships2.

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Notas:

* During the preparation of this work, Prof. Tim Ingold (University of Aberdeen) hassent (2006) to me his opinion on the theme that I had chosen: “Focusing on the face isimportant. (…) What is so special about it is that (without mirrors) it is a part of thebody that we cannot see, so we know we have one only because it is confirmed in the sightof others. Instead, in the space where your face ought to be (and you know it is therebecause you can feel it), there is the whole world. I think this point is central tocertain shamanic/animic cosmologies: for example the round face-masks of the AlaskanYup’ik (worn in dances where spirits enter the community) are equated with the roundcosmos, conceived as a huge eye which is watching its inhabitants. I was particularlystruck by John Hull’s book, ‘On Sight and Insight’ (1997), on the experience of goingblind. He says somewhere that he felt as if his head was in a sack, when he could nolonger see people responding, in their eyes, to the presence of his face. It was as thoughhe did not have one. It is remarkable, however, how little anthropologists have writtenabout the face and facial gestures. However one point that came out of our recent researchon the sociality of walking is that ‘face-to-face interaction’ may not be the intimateform of social relationship that it is generally held to be. In fact it is ratherconfrontational, and people often feel threatened if looked at directly eye to eye.Walkers reported a much greater sense of companionship if walking side by side, in thesame direction. You would not, then, see your companion’s face, but you would share withhim/her the same view or vista ahead. By contrast, two people standing or sitting face-to-face see quite different views, so that their experience is not shared to the sameextent”.

** Department of Cultural Heritage Sciences and Techniques (DCTP). Faculty of Arts.University of Porto, Portugal. CEAUCP’s researcher. E-mail: vojorge@clix.pt. Web page:http://www.architectures.home.sapo.pt Blog: http://transferir. blogspot.com/

1 The invoice  (document of the amount paid) of a psychiatric treatment is useful forgetting some refund from the public health system; but similar documents given to thepatient by a psychologist or a psychiatrist are not…

2 Some artists/artistic works interesting for this paper (used in an initial, nonpublishable, power point format – some thoughts included in the text were written directlyin the slides, playing with the images, and at the same time as if the texts would be alsoimages themselves) – among many, many others:

Albuquerque Mendes – paintings

Andrew Valko – “Admission”Antony Gormley – “Angel of the North”Bettina Rheims and Serge Bramly – “INRI” (album of photos)Craig Morey – photosFrancis Bacon – several self-portraits; crucifixion; Pope Innocent XJean Paul Delvaux – “The Phases of the Moon I”; “The awaking of the forest”J. Wilcox – photosJohn William Waterhouse – NarcissusJorge Molder (Portuguese photographer) – “Immediate unfamiliarity”Lawick Muller – “Vedova”Luis Duva – “Triptych”Maggie Taylor – “Twilight Swim”Man Ray – “Tears”Raphael – Transfiguration of Jesus R. Magritte – several paintingsRichard Long – several worksRoni Horn – “You Are the Weather”Salvador Dali – Crucifixion; Galatea of SpheresSam Taylor – photosTony Oursler – “Blue” and other worksVanessa Pey – photosI want to thank Amanda Wintcher for having read this paper before publication.

3 The long list presented here is composed of books/texts that were consulted in thecourse of the preparation of the present paper, a simple draft of a more “ambitious” workin progress. Many needed to be bought abroad, in a process of search which has takenyears; in fact, very few useful things are translated in due time into Portuguese, exceptin Brazil.

I think they may be useful references to the reader and certainly most of them willbe – I hope – good guides for myself in the next future to develop ideas that are merelysuggested here. Note the fact that many of the authors “used” are mutually incompatible,at least according to their own statements; that is precisely the more interesting for me,because as long as I “grow up” (…) I notice how contingent is the certitude of the verybest. Each one needs to search the “good way” by him/herself, articulating permanently anattitude of a student (taking advices and being open to every criticisms) and an attitudeof risk and self-definition, of responsability and of “absolute sovereignty”. In the“moment of the truth” each of us is completely alone – there are no masters. In this sortof “desert”, where each one needs to trace his/her own route, Portuguese scholars have thegreat advantage of reading and speaking several languages, in the very spirit of Europewith its characterisitic diversity. To speak another language is in a certain way totranslate oneself into a different person; that means to get a distanciated look (a“parallax view”?…) at everything that used to be our familiar “landscape”.