Cal Revely-Calder (who has an interesting Three Things substack) writes about faces in the New Yorker (archived); I was enjoying its brio and historical tidbits, but when I got to this passage I knew I had to post it:
Yet there’s another side to this coin. Our vocabulary also speaks of invention, even artifice. The English word “face” derives from the Latin facies, implying a created form; so does the French visage, from videre, suggesting something seen from without. “Mask,” “masque,” “mascara,” “maquillage,” and their European relations seem to be etymologically linked, and carry long-standing associations with concealment, distortion, pretense. For Socrates, the art worth prizing was the cultivation and preservation of natural beauty; we’ve happily overwritten it with what he treated suspiciously as kommōtikē, the art of changing how one looks. Even “person,” along with “impersonation” and “personae,” derives from persona, a theatrical mask through which classical actors spoke. The cultural historian Hans Belting suggested that faces and masks were conceptually inseparable: we shouldn’t think of one as “real” and the other as “fake”—one as the thing we have and the other as the thing we temporarily don. Life, he wrote, was fully “a perpetuum mobile,” an “expressive drama,” in which our faces resolve into one legible position, one legible role, then reassemble themselves into the next. We make them up, in every sense.
I was suspicious about “the Latin facies, implying a created form,” but it seems to be true; Wiktionary says:
The term faciēs is to faciō as speciēs is to speciō, literally meaning “a make, imposed form”.
(face): Compare typologically Czech tvář, Polish twarz [both ‘face’] (<< Proto-Slavic *tvarь, akin to *tvoriti)
All of which was new to me, and may be new to you.
Revely-Calder writes well, and his piece is full of interesting passages, such as this:
One unexpected consequence of the return of realism was a renewed attention to anatomy. Take dissection, which was mostly in abeyance through the medieval era, though by the thirteenth century in Europe it was beginning to appear in university curricula. During the Renaissance, it flourished again, and became a routine part of an artist’s studies, as Leonardo’s sketches attest. At the same time, another art returned, equally venerable and equally obsessed with the human form: physiognomy. The thinking, from the Greeks onward, was that you could, if sufficiently skilled, read people’s inward rottenness from their outward appearance. They might alter their behavior or speech, but a nose could never lie. Physiognomic treatises reappeared in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, then took off in the eighteenth and nineteenth. The star was Johann Kaspar Lavater, a Swiss poet and philosopher, whose “Physiognomische Fragmente,” a complete manual of flesh-reading, was published in four volumes between 1775 and 1778, featuring illustrations by Henry Fuseli and William Blake of faces and other body parts. It was successful enough to be abridged in multiple forms—“The Portable Lavater,” “Ladies’ Lavater”—and by the end of the century, Le Breton writes, “a visit to Lavater, complete with a physiognomy consultation with the master, was a must for anyone travelling to Switzerland.” The fashion spread. George Sand was a Lavater fan. So was Honoré de Balzac, who called physiognomy “prophetic.” Balzac used Lavater’s work in devising his own characters, who are practically lashed to destiny; Samuel Beckett would deride them as “clockwork cabbages.” One eighteenth-century chief justice of Naples took aside convicted prisoners who still refused to confess and personally examined their heads. If he found proof of inbuilt depravity, he would approve their execution; if he didn’t, he’d set them free.
Such thinking had serious critics. If you judged someone’s soul from his appearance, Montaigne noted, it would be curtains for Socrates. The entry for “physionomie” in Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie described it as “imaginary” and “ridiculous.” Hegel compared physiognomists to a merchant who complains that it rains whenever the fair comes to town. But the belief died hard, and photography spurred its adherents on. Once faces had been “captured,” as we still say, they could be put into giant comparative systems, proto-databases of facial types. Francis Galton, the father of eugenics, used superimposed portrait photos in his hunt for “deviant” traits that criminals supposedly shared. His friend Cesare Lombroso, an Italian criminologist, agreed, suggesting that the signs of a “born criminal” included a receding brow and a heavy jaw.
I thought we had discussed Lombroso somewhere, but apparently not.
https://languagehat.com/bunins-loopy-ears/#comment-4221587
(I see that at one point, I mistyped “Lombroso” as “Lombardo”. *Shakes fist at past self*)
The practice of physiognomy is coming back into vogue, along with increasing public video surveillance and “AI.” It aligns well with the TESCREAL faith of the technofascists who are enabling and pushing it.
We had a discussion previously (which I can’t find) about which features of a face were regarded as prototypical, and used as synecdoche for “face”, cross-linguistically. “Eye” throughout Oti-Volta, which seems natural enough; but Latin goes for “mouth”, and I seem to recall that Hatters came up with languages that use “nose.” Come to think of it, Welsh …
Lombroso was a real piece of work, physiognomy aside. He reported, for example, that that in one tribe in India, “at birth every male child is consecrated to thievish practices by a peculiar ceremony, in which the new-born infant is passed through a breach in the wall of his father’s house, whilst the words ‘Become a thief’ are chanted three times in chorus.” Similarly, “[n]o Patagonian is deemed worthy of taking a wife unless he has graduated in the art of despoiling a stranger.” In his home country of Italy, for that matter, “whole villages constitute hot-beds of crime, owing, no doubt to ethnical causes . . . The frequency of homicide in Calabria, Sicily and Sardinia is fundamentally due to African and Oriental elements.” (All quotes from *Criminal Man*, https://archive.org/details/criminalmanaccor00lomb)
Current map purporting to show regional variations in homicide rate in Italy: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Distribution-of-Murders-in-Italian-provinces_fig1_226212823
What’s with Imperia?
@DE: no doubt owing to ethnical causes? You know what they say about Ligurians …
no Patagonian is deemed worthy of taking a wife unless he has graduated in the art of despoiling a stranger.”
As the grandson of a Patagonian, I can confirm this. I’ve been despoiling strangers for years. (Artistically, of course.) It was the first thing my wife-to-be* asked when I proposed: “But can you despoil strangers?”
* She is not Patagonian; however, she is from the ancient Ligurian colony of Aberdeen.
there’s a whole segment of the “manosphere” (part of its inheritance from the Pick-Up Artist misogynist subculture) dedicated to practical physiognomy, with the very USian twist* of face-improvement as a path to bettering ones social position (within their rather odd notions of what that means). if you want to get a taste of it – which i can’t really recommend – the deeply depressing drama around a fashy influencer who goes by “Clavicular” has led to some decent explainer pieces, as has the ‘transvestigation’ of brigitte macron (though that pile of dangerous nonsense only involves the more conventionally lombrosian** variety).
.
* voluntaristic bio-essentialism, if you will; or works-based predestinarianism, if you prefer. i can’t pretend it makes any kind of sense, but it sure is pervasive!
** with a /ʒ/, of course.
The great thing about this supposed Soviet-era ethnic-phenotype chart is that all 18 faces (from 18 different ethnicities) look pretty sketchy-to-criminal. Would you trust any of these comrades to honestly account for the collective farm’s petty cash?
https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/sketches-soviet-police-ethnicity/
Called looksmaxxing because of course it is.
The Tatar looks a lot like Lenin, and the Gypsy is a radiant hero – Che with a different beard.
I appear to be a Gypsy, though frankly that guy is quite a bit better-looking than me.
One comment at the bottom: “I didn’t know Lenin was Tatar, Kim Jong-Un Kazakh, Sigmund Freud Uzbek and Mullah Muhammad Omar Turkmen.”
It’s surprising but pleasing to know that during the Soviet era women were perfectly law-abiding.
Ethnicity is about culture for us and descent for Lombroso, but people do kill people for culture-specific (and thus ethnic) reasons. They are easier to recognise for me (a Russian) in Oman than in Russia (which does not mean Russia is so different). I think 19th-century Sicily was culturally more exotic than today for people from the north, so I’m ready to believe that reasons why Sicilians killed Sicilians too looked exotic.
I didn’t know Lombroso was Jewish. I wonder if he’d been exposed at any point to Kabbalistic physiognomic tradition, though by his time it and the European tradition were fairly intertwined.
https://languagehat.com/bunins-loopy-ears/#comment-4221587
Then I am not mad! Thanks for that reassurance and reminder.
there’s a whole segment of the “manosphere” (part of its inheritance from the Pick-Up Artist misogynist subculture) dedicated to practical physiognomy, with the very USian twist* of face-improvement as a path to bettering ones social position (within their rather odd notions of what that means).
Yes, and Revely-Calder discusses it.
Funnily, I remembered that thread (and Tarkovsky’s verse that I quoted there) yesterday…
I clicked the “looksmaxxers” link in Reverly-Calder’s article and found a rhetorical question: “What’s sexy about math?”
This is funny, because “sexy” (and similar words) is how I have been describing certain mathematical (linguistical too) objects and ideas for ages.
But WP says it arose in incel rather than pick-up artist subculture. Not a contradiction, perhaps “pick-up artists” is where incels took some of the ideas. But there is important difference in the number of sexual partners between these two:
0 for incels
above the average (like 10 times) for pick-up artists
When many people of either sex can’t find a partner (despite having tried for years) by the age of 20 or more, that’s a social problem that shouldn’t be ignored. Also doing something to their looks is a natural idea for such people, and when they form a community, I expect it to develop a whole mythology about looks. When they do not form a community, some of them will develop such mythologies individually.
Despite having tried for years by the age of 20? Do you at least mean 30?
Given that Latin facies primarily means “appearance, form” rather than “face” (though it can mean “face”), I wondered about the rendering of “face” in the Vulgate, and serendipitously discovered the mistranslation of the verb קרן which led to Moses being depicted with horns (Exodus 34:29):
Cumque descenderet Moses de monte Sinai tenebat duas tabulas testimonii et ignorabat quod cornuta esset facies sua ex consortio sermonis Dei.
It’s not from the LXX, which has δεδόξασται “had been glorified.” I blame St Jerome, and also infantilisation, texting, and violent video games.
@DM, “20 or more”.
If someone starts thinking in, say, 16 “I’m ugly and awkward and [girls, boys] don’t like me” I that’s already a personal problem. When there are many such people, it’s a social problem.
I mean, I’m not going to say “in 20 they are TOO numerous to be called a social problem, when something is so numerous, it is the norm!”:) That would be circular…
The cultural historian Hans Belting suggested that faces and masks were conceptually inseparable: we shouldn’t think of one as “real” and the other as “fake”—one as the thing we have and the other as the thing we temporarily don.
This may have been extracted from a context in which it was not obviously ludicrous; at least, I hope so. Belting seems to have been an eminent scholar of (Western European) visual art.
If it’s intended to mean that we all continually play roles of one kind or another in everyday life: why, sure. But the very concept of “playing a role” becomes meaningless and empty if you declare that there is no conceptual difference between playing a role and not playing a role. And the various roles we play in everyday life are not all equivalent in terms of authenticity: no sane person could think so.
the incel and PUA spheres are interestingly intertwined – and in a lot of ways, incel subculture is a pessimistic/”blackpilled” offshoot of the PUA world. if i’m remembering right, “looksmaxxing” has some of its origins in a forum that began as an anti-PUA space and then more or less re-converged with it.
i’d also hesitate to assume that the actual numbers of sexual partners of people in those spheres have anything to do with the spheres’ enabling mythologies*. both are, at heart, high-turnover pools of marks created by grifters. the grifters lie about their own lives to hook the marks; most marks don’t stay long because their lives don’t match the fiction. the shared grift dynamics and specific misogynist ideologies are part of what makes them both so central to the “manosphere” (which is itself basically just an accumulation of the most successful grifters and would-be ideological leadership).
—
the place of baldness in that soviet chart is fascinating!
and i’m surprised nobody’s mentioned that stalin was apparently azerbaijani, and trotsky uzbek.
I also note that none of the Soviet criminals has a unibrow. They must have all shaved off the middle of theirs to avoid recognition.
P.S. rozele, I don’t know how you have the stomach to educate yourself about these types. Bleh.
David, I don’t think Belting’s comment about “we shouldn’t think of one thing as fake and one as real” was meant to suggest that real and fake are not valid concepts. If you keep reading in the same quote, he says “our faces resolve into one legible position…” In my opinion, he is objecting to the strict duality of the two, not the existence of two concepts. Similarly, we could say that a person’s instincts and consciousness “resolve into one legible position” without invalidating the differences between them. I think Belting meant to suggest that we fool ourselves by trying to understand fake and real as dichotomously opposed and easy to separate.
I don’t think the label “incel” is random:
If a man is 25 or 30 (this time ages named by DM) and believes that no one among hundreds women he met and talked to in a period of 10 or 15 years liked him and is frustrated (the word “incel” refers to such people) he is very likely to fear that for some reason he and people like him are unattractive to “ALL women in the world, period”.
And [a part of] the mythology we’re talking about is a theory of who and why “all women” don’t want.
I think I can predict with confidence that (a) a community of such people will create such theories and (b) I won’t like those theories (intellectually)
But they (the theories I predict) won’t necessarily be ugly or misogynist in my view (other than in that they generalise). They can be so, but that’s one possibility.
If the myth we are talking about is so, there must be some other factor at play.
I mean, at my friend’s 26th or 26th birthday party I noted that most of his guests are women.
To which my friend responded that some of his friends introduce this or that girl to him, and he wants them to see that there are many girls among his friends and to realise that that problem is different, that NEVER EVER any girl will notice him and take any interest in him as a man, period. So they wouldn’t waste their time.
It is difficult not to recognise these words in some of the aforementioned mythology.
The guy was relatively rich (and a boss in a famous company) very well-educated and I don’t know about his appearance (slighly obese) but a female friend of mine liked* him (and married a similar-looking man).
*Actually, I thought they were dating each other and I was surprised by this “never ever” but perhaps and even likely – as it happens in my circle – both believed that the other side is interested in something else, like purely intellectual comunication.
From what I’ve read, incel means something much more specific than “involuntarily celibate”. I think the self-described members of that subculture are attracted to all women – or all women in a certain age range, or some other ridiculously large group of people – and simply assume this is mutual. Logically, then, all women that don’t act out their assumed attraction to them must be evil and/or brainwashed, and must be brainwashed back or punished… it’s profoundly horrible.
@Madeline Kalvis:
You may well be right; Belting was clearly not stupid, and the allusion to him in the article may very well have oversimplified his actual thought to the point where it merely seems stupid.
DM, it isn’t that frustrated people are not susceptible to Horrible ideas:) (I even think these two correlate)
@Y: i sit on the shoulders of the researchers who do the real slogging through the muck of it – i can’t claim to put in the time reading and watching it all myself. there are zones of nightmare that i find interesting enough to get into the primary material, but this is one where i’m incredibly grateful there are solid people doing the work so i don’t need to.
A certain lady complained that her son (18, short) read some incel bullshit and believes no woman will ever like him. She’s busy telling him he is handsome and that women like [what she thinks or wants him to think they like] and not [what he thinks they like, e.g. height].
That made me read WP article about incels, and that’s all I know about them.
The core tenet of incels seems to be that women have no business not being willing to sleep with them, and that in a better world, women would be compelled to distribute their favours more widely.
This conception of women as sex toys is pretty much identical that that of the pickup artists; the remedies proposed for the “problem” are less well-defined, but the general outlook is pretty much identical.
@DE, when someone can’t find a partner it is a problem.
Perhaps communication with Arabic speakers changed my view. Maghreb is full of unhappy young men and women, the reason for this is that you can’t have a normal relationship before marriage, and the age of first marriage for women today is 30. I learned to look at people like my friend (described above) as people who have a problem that must be solved. When it is a problem for a whole community I see it as a problem of the community that must be solved. Say, that guy studied math and many male math students in Moscow don’t notice when they are liked. Girls in turn don’t take initiative, everyone is shy.
@de, drasvi
I think the pick-up artists know that if they ask enough women (or the same woman enough times), they will eventually get a date. The incels know that for them, this approach does not work. Instead of looking for the cause in their underdeveloped emotional intelligence, social skills, or their personal hygiene, clothing and hairstyle choices, it seems logical to incels to invent a theory that most women are predisposed to only respond romantically to men who look like Clark Gable. If a man who looks a little like Clark Gable gently suggests the theory is wrong, that man is just Chad-splaining.
CLARK GABLE ????? Just how old are you, mate ?
@drasvi:
I think we’re talking about rather different things here.
We’re not talking about men who are simply sad that women are unwilling to sleep with them. We’re talking about (a) men who blame women for not wanting to sleep with them (incels) and (b) men who think that the solution is for women to be manipulated or tricked into sleeping with them (PUAs.)
Both of these are evidently self-deluding, intrinsically self-defeating and (to some extent) pitiable attitudes, and the holders of such views are easy meat for grifters. But the views themselves are nevertheless repellent.
Regretting that your society is organised in such a way that it impairs the development of sane relationships between men and women is entirely legitimate, as is taking social or political action in the hope of ameliorating this state of affairs. Blaming women as individuals (or as hypostasised “Woman”) for this situation or advocating manipulating women into sex as solutions are not.
“know that for them, this approach does not work” – depends on. In the mathematical subculture (some math students belong to it, but not others) I mentioned above the problem is that nothing is recognised as a sign of interest. That, and shyness. You invite a girl to the cinema IFF you want to see this specific film with her. She spent a night with you? You were talking.
@DE, no, I’m talking about all people who can’t find a partner.
Given what my aforementioned friend said – I’d describe that not as a “problem” but rather a catastrophe. Finding one is top priority for many (unlike successful career). Some factors which he couldn’t control or understand made the likelihood of this 0.
His idea “women will never ever notice me” was… understandable. But weird, almost magical. It is not misogynist, but it illustrates the idea that such frustrated people can have some very strange ideas. Some will be susceptible to ideas which are both strange and ugly.
Meanwhile he belongs to the math subculture described above, I think I know one girl who liked him (and who he liked too) when he was 20 – likely his problem could be solved quickly.
@stu
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0132630/
“The woman who married Clark Gable”
Brenda Fricker has received adequate recognition of her acting, poor Thaddeus has not received sufficient notice as a director.
In the mathematical subculture (some math students belong to it, but not others) I mentioned above the problem is that nothing is recognised as a sign of interest. That, and shyness.
Being clueless and shy is the very essence of puberty, along with a burning desire to get laid. That’s just life. Most people deal. It has nothing to do with math. I know from having been there and done that.
BTW (don’t know if this has already been remarked on here): at least in the context of MM romance novels, “he’s fucking that barista guy” no longer implies anything about who’s on top or bottom. Nor does “get fucked”. It’s as if “get fucked” has completely replaced “get laid”. You betray your age by saying “get laid”.
@DE, when some poor people in a certain country are attracted because of their poverty to an ugly political ideology we must, morally and intellectually, recognise both problems. Else intellectually we won’t understand a shit and morally we will be those rich guys who complain that the poor don’t behave themselves.
However if you describe this evil ideology as an invention of manipulative capitalists without mentioning (or remembering) that people attracted to it are hungry, you distract attention from (and forget about) one of the two problems.
Needless to say
– “recognising both problems” does NOT mean recognising one (poverty)
– ugly political ideologies can be no less repellent than the repellent views we’re talking about. Some of them kill millions.
“nothing to do with math” – @Stu, I’m not not about all math students, but a specific subculture (perhaps one where culture of intersex friendship is particularly well-developed). Only there I could listen to complaints of girls that they can’t seduce certain boys who too complain.
And the peculiarity of this subculture is not shyness, but that nothing is a sign of romantic interest, other than a kiss or simply saying you’re interested. If you two are drunk and naked then maybe you want to be drunk and naked.
Perhaps that isn’t particularly exotic from gay perspective, but in terms of intersex communication it was markedly different from other student communities I know, mathematical or not.
@ plasticpaddy
Brenda Fricker RIP
I have long imagined that there must a lot of people who simply aren’t interested in sex. Nowadays there’s a word for that disposition: ace (asexual). It’s not at all exotic, whether intersex or intrasex.
Exotic is stupid and low-life as far as I’m concerned. Like titty twisters. Even Nietzsche thought so, and he did a lot of thinking. Made millions off it.
@sp
I think you and stu have adequately demonstrated that I am living in the past. Maybe I too have passed….
Cool ! The past is a foreign country, so you’re already abroad on vacation. You can be the official go-between here.
I read WP:looksmaxxing. It is difficult not to think about certain myths and norms wrt women’s looks, certain women’s communities and magazines, and also things like anorexia.
(And also film industry. This time not “women’s”. But it tells you what face you need if you want all women fall at your feet.)
Search terms: eye synecdoche face site:languagehat.com. First hit (after this page itself) is here, in 2024 — the discussion started from Welsh, and the one with “nose” was Biblical Hebrew.
Faces. Has everyone realized by now that Demetrius I of Bactria has been reborn as President of the USA?
There is a certain resemblance. I think Trump should wear an elephant-head crown.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demetrius_I_of_Bactria
I guess Ἀνίκητος means “the one with TOTAL EXONERATION”.