In the early 19th century, the Victorians believed in physiognomy: the practice of assessing a person’s character from their outer appearance (especially the face). Scientists believed that human beings were puzzles that could be deciphered: a nose like this, meant that. A smile like that, meant this. That you could pinpoint the criminals, the mischievous, the poor simply by looking at their face. People would carry pocket-size guidebooks with illustrations helping them identify who they could trust. Physiognomy was irresistible. It gave license for people to both judge and surveil one another. And even better: it sanctioned this in the name of science.
Physiognomy has since been disproven as a pseudoscience. But I think we are still haunted by its legacy. There’s this enduring commitment to the idea that our exterior appearance signifies a less visible interior. That the visual realm presents the most reliable data. Truth, even.
What is social media but a 21st century book of physiognomy?
Yesterday I filmed my first video project under quarantine. I woke up earlier than I usually do and I looked in the mirror and encountered my face for the first time in a long time. I thought about what other people would think of it: my face. I have grown accustomed to a newfound obliviousness to my body. It’s not that my face has been absent, it’s that it hasn’t been present.
And for a moment, there in front of myself in front of you, I mourned what would be lost. How many words I will utter! say! scream! and how few of them will go anywhere because of what I look like. How what I look like is the least interesting thing about me, but the most noticeable. I felt the inchoate, amorphous grief of having to be seen - and in that — having to be disappeared. A vanishing act before your eyes.
I guess I felt a tinge of sadness — subtle, like a wheatgrass shot — of having to face the fact that I had a face.
Then I took a selfie. Wrote this caption like a cigarette pack disclaimer: “what you see, is not what you get / what you get, is not what you see.” Walked back to my mother, the camera. Said:
“Hello.” or “Hello?”
(I’m not quite sure.)
