The niqab and the surgical mask. Beyond given binaries: visual semiotics,figurativisation, and discursive interactions of covered faces

The article presents a semiotic account of niqabs and surgical masks, deconstructing the various realms where a contrariety is constructed around those objects: the visual manifestation of facial coverings and the face as plastic objects; and the existence of masks and masked faces both as discourse and as the objects about which discourses are created. An analysis and theoretical reflection dedicated to the surface levels of manifestations, through an exploration of visual semiotics, the discursive level of the generative trajectory, and the discursive interactions emerging from texts about masked faces in different socio–cultural situations, the work debates the disconnection between discursive and semio–narrative levels the contrariety of niqabs and surgical masks manifests. The analysis is divided into three parts: an initial discussion of the plastic of masked faces, following Greimas (1983) Figurative Semiotics; an examination of the mechanisms of thematisations and figurativisation (Greimas & Courtés 1993); and an exploration of the Discursive Interactions (Oliveira 2013) emerging from the production of communications about the objects in relation to their cultural contexts. By exploring this false contrariety, originated in a given binary supporting a power imbalance between Western and Oriental cultures and practices, we aim at visiting the mechanisms of meaning–making — particularly the ones discussed by Barthes (1970a, 1970b, 2009), such as the bending of signifiers through myth or the construction of the Other through a collection of essentialised traits — and what those mechanisms entail both to our current cultural and media landscape, and equally for a theory of construction and apprehension of meaning. Such exploration of a crisis of meaning and its models occasions the overlapping with the Post–structuralist tradition, particularly the work of Deleuze and Guattari (1980) and their idea of rhizomatic anti–models of meaning. The work concludes with a reflection about the matter of veridiction and its construction, as well as the role of random sense in both creating the current chaos of information and crises of truth and in becoming a performative tool to restore a sense of meaning, helping subjects — meaning makers and meaning readers — to restore their sense of identity.