Masks and Impersonal Affects: Hegel and Deleuze.

Hegel first. In Greek acting, he suggests, the masked actor is the pure instrument of speech, no more than a “vitalised statue”. What we hear in this speech is not “character”, the signature of some person or other, but language, poetry itself. As Hegel puts it: “words had full poetic rights”.

The function of the mask worn by actors is to block individuality so that language itself might speak. The ‘pathos’ of the mask is some fixed attitude of woe, joy or horror. It is in no way ‘particularized,’ i.e., not yet woven into the fabric of an individual’s character, a personal story.

The mask is in this sense a way of isolating and extracting certain affects or attitudes from the complications of a ‘who,’ from the contingencies of the individual person. In other words, when we see an attitude or affect embodied in an individual person it is contaminated by the ‘flavour’ of that person, our sense of their personality and status – them as a totality colouring all individual manifestations. The whole ‘colours’ and corrupts the particular. The mask, in erasing the face and transferring attention to the voice - a voice presumably intoned and therefore also de-subjectified – liberates these affects. The attitude or affect achieves an autonomy, becomes free-floating, with an energy of  its own rather than one informed by the force and context of the ‘individual character’.

The function of the mask, therefore, is not to suppress expression, to stifle the face as the locus of spirit, but rather to displace expressive efficacy into the voice and to liberate the affect from its anchorage in the individual subject, to ‘de-subjectify’ expression and bring us in contact with free-floating affects.

This is connected to what Deleuze says about the close-up in cinema. The close up effectively turns the face into a kind of mask: “when we see the face of a fleeing coward in close-up, we see ‘cowardice’ in person, freed from its actualisation in a particular person.” We encounter cowardice without the coward, rage or love extracted from the enraged, from the lover. These emotions shine through the face, as when we say something like “his face was a picture of terror.” 

What I'm curious about, what it would be good to explore another time, is whether there is something politically liberating about this?