<i>The New Physiognomy: Face, Form, and Modern Expression</i> by Rochelle Rives

We are consumed with faces, so much so that we consume them constantly. Why call when you can Facetime? Trying to conjure the image of an old friend? Look them up on Facebook. The “selfie,” a new kind of portraiture, is one of the primary genres of our times. It’s also one of the main currencies in the marketplace that is social media. Indeed, our faces themselves have become a type of currency, as credit card companies begin to deploy facial recognition tools that enable—or perhaps “compel” is more accurate—customers to pay for their goods with the mere scan of a face. Surely, this sort of recognition, where our faces are objectified and used in manners that fall outside of our control, couldn’t have been what Allen Ginsberg was imagining when he asked in 1956, “When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?” (39). Nevertheless, such treatment of our faces and the demands placed on us as a result are hallmarks of the current age—an age that Rochelle Rives artfully traces back to the turn of the previous century in her new monograph, The New Physiognomy: Face, Form, and Modern Expression.Rives’s book is primarily concerned with what makes faces legible to others. As she points out in her introduction, such reading typically depends less on what the person wearing the face wishes to express and more on the interpretive “script” that “simultaneously alters or exceeds the original image or pose of the body” (7). This highlights how the construction of a “personality,” the “master template” (6) for interpreting faces, is always influenced by impersonal forces intent on remaking, sometimes violently, the person in question. Rives is well situated to examine such a process. Her first book, Modernist Impersonalities: Affect, Authority, and the Subject (2012), takes up the way that losing one’s sense of self may serve as a precursor to either oppression (through the suppression of individuality within authoritarian politics) or liberation (as a means of empathizing with others). The New Physiognomy then narrows this investigation into the politics of impersonality tied to the idea of the face as an aesthetic form. More specifically, it outlines the physiognomic discourses—for example, criminology—emerging from the late nineteenth century that built a “modern facial typology” (12) invested in making persons legible, often by stripping them of their individual personhood. It also demonstrates how a range of modernist figures sought to counter such discursive reading practices by generating facial forms that “sabotage readerly attempts to assess, describe, or apprehend their surfaces” (18).While the face may seem like a small canvas to work with, The New Physiognomy immediately impresses for the way it utilizes facial expression as a means of connecting a wide array of seemingly disparate theoretical and cultural material. Exploring the relationship between “scholarly reading practices” and “the reading—scientific, technological, or social—of persons” (13), the book repeatedly wades into theoretical debates on subjects like surface reading and affective intention. Additionally, it covers a broad cultural landscape, which in turn enables Rives to consider “the modern face and its centrality to what reading and writing meant for a variety of twentieth-century writers and artists” (1–2). The cast of literary figures in the book is indeed quite diverse, featuring Oscar Wilde, Charles Baudelaire, Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, Edgar Allan Poe, Jean Rhys, Joseph Conrad, Djuna Barnes, Ezra Pound, Mina Loy, and W. H. Auden, among others. But, as Rives suggests, her analysis of the face often takes her outside the field of literature to explore literature’s relationship to a variety of other forms of art and media, so that Conrad gets paired with realist painting, Loy with medical illustrations, and Auden with selfie portraiture.The first two chapters of The New Physiognomy respond to modes of physiognomic perception that gained prominence around the turn of the last century. Chapter one begins with caricatures of Wilde from his 1895 trial that promote a “physiognomic ideal of a readable subject” (27) by encoding a certain “perversion” (26) in his facial features. The ensuing analysis of this “ideal,” which comprises some of the denser sections of the book, unfolds in a few theoretical directions but ultimately comes back to the way the legibility of this subject can never be completely secured. The argument turns, for example, to Baudelaire’s theories of modern visual culture to illustrate how these Wilde caricatures in fact produce a “different, deformed surface to be read and further ‘readjusted’ by the spectator” (48). That these surfaces still require reading is something Rives, taking aim at Ruth Leys’s controversial account of affect, also leverages against the notion that there exists a kind of automatic affective response to surface-level phenomena which takes place outside of interpretation. Chapter two then pivots to the physiognomic imperative implicit in turn-of-the-century realism. Although realism is aligned with “aspirations that privilege vision and legibility” (55), Rives shows how Dreiser, whose naturalist fictions are often understood to involve highly precise and realistic representations, frustrates this legibility by documenting how the reading of faces involves “vague physiognomic guesswork” (62). In Sister Carrie (1900), such frustrated reading frequently comes back to scenes of gendered performance, the way in which consumer society requires women to put on a face that supposedly allows them to claim their identity but in truth bespeaks the impersonality regularly impressed upon them. This connects Dreiser’s writing to that of Edith Wharton, where similar acts of gendered identity appear. Yet Rives’s larger point here is that this illegibility is a condition of the modern city, which—in the writings of authors like Poe or in the paintings of artists from the Ashcan school—repeatedly brings spectators into contact with “blotted out” (77) or “blank” (78) faces.Rives’s Dreiser is thus a more modern version of the author that sees the face as a place to defy aesthetic conventions (in this case, those of realism). Such a figure prefaces the discussions of the next two chapters, which look more squarely on the faces of modernism. In chapter three, Rives shows how Conrad’s modernism meets the physiognomic notion that our bodies will eventually “out” (87) all of our interior secrets with faces that altogether evade our ability to come to any conclusion about them. To make this point, the chapter places a very compelling analysis of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century science of identity alongside a reading of The Secret Agent (1907), in which Conrad employs the exaggerated and unreliable expressions of melodrama to make us question any “codes of reading” that depend on “the world of comprehensible appearance” (107). The next chapter on “Modernist Prosopopoeia” is probably the most dynamic and rewarding of the book. It considers the modernist tradition of “prosopopoeia,” a mode of personification that grants a face to an absent person or thing, by linking Loy’s pamphlet on facial construction with Henri Gaudier-Brzeska’s sculpture of Pound and Henry Tonk’s medical illustrations of WWI soldiers’ facial wounds. The end result is a highly nuanced reading of how these various artists’ attempts at facial reconstruction reveal the face as a complex “form”—a “multidimensional structure with interior and exterior surfaces” (134)—that expresses something about the person to which it is attached while also enforcing a kind of absence or disfigurement upon them.The last chapter of the book looks to the second half of the twentieth century. It starts with a photograph of Auden’s deeply lined, aged face—an image that allows Rives to reflect on how lingering notions of modernism play out later in the century. As the previous chapters of the book make clear, the modernist body is one that can be remade and rejuvenated, its face an alterable surface. Rives finds further evidence of this belief in the example of W. B. Yeats, who in old age underwent a Steinach operation with the aim of rejuvenating both his vitality and authority. But while such techniques were intent on producing physical effects that would be legible to others, Rives highlights how aging inevitably brings with it a sort of damage that casts the face “as an unreadable, disingenuous, and unstable form, a threat to easy interaction and social order” (156–57). On this point, Rives analyzes John Frankenheimer’s Seconds (1966), showing how the film meditates on the ways in which the effort to rejuvenate one’s aging face are tied to a “capitalist fantasy, where modern identity production is literalized as a business that trades in the production and consumption of faces” (171). Rives then ends the chapter by looking at how Cindy Sherman’s self-portraits in the guise of aging movie starlets provide a commentary on the “pain” (177) involved in making and maintaining a face under such social conditions. In response to this pain, Rives asks in an epilogue: how might we differently consider the faces we meet? The answer, she suggests, depends upon a refusal to see the sum of any person expressed in their face, meaning that we are all faced with the task of “making the face known while preserving its essential strangeness” (192).As a whole, The New Physiognomy makes important contributions to two areas of study, the first being race studies. Discussions of Blackness in fact serve as important bookends to Rives’s in-depth analysis of the modern face. In chapter one, Rives considers how the caricatures of Wilde from his 1882 United States tour that depicted the author as African American drew on an existing “racist field of vision” to devalue Wilde’s personality and “mock [him] as an expression” (42). The book’s epilogue then counters such an obvious exploitation of racial identity, where black face is deployed for the sake of parody, with Jordan Peele’s 2017 Get Out. For Rives, the film’s story of affluent white individuals who rejuvenate themselves through the supernatural possession of Black bodies exposes the horror of “the idea of the skin as a pliant surface material that can be seamlessly processed into new persons” (186). In short, Peele’s film brings us face to face with the subjects exploited in such a process. The power of readings like this makes one wish that the subject of race actually came up more regularly in the book—and that Rives’s thoughts on facial identity were extended to analyses of, say, racial profiling. However, in comparing the use of black face in late nineteenth-century caricatures to the coopted Black faces in Get Out—the practices are different and, terrifyingly, not that different—Rives reveals exactly why we should be thinking about the relationship between face and race.The other area where Rives’s book makes a significant contribution is in disability studies. That The New Physiognomy would interest readers in the field of disability studies isn’t immediately apparent from the topic of the book. And yet, the subject of disability recurs frequently throughout this study. Early on, Rives points out how the production of legible types of human appearance was developed in direct response to “the ambiguity and indeterminacy of disabled bodies” (11). Such an idea is important to her subsequent analysis of Wilde, whose depiction as pathological was predicated on the new concept of a “normative face” (32). It also comes into play quite heavily in the chapter on Conrad: if the biological markers (fingerprints, facial types, and so on) delineated by identity science were part of the eugenic aim of identifying and eradicating the disabled body, then Conrad’s representation of the cognitively disabled Stevie as having an unreadable face provides a sort of ethical resistance to this ableist agenda. The analysis of wounded faces in chapter four and of the aging body in chapter five of course also have much to do with disability—all of which explains why the disabled face is what ultimately launches Rives toward her conclusion in the epilogue that many of our immediate reactions to faces are based on normative scripts, and that stepping outside of these often requires looking beyond the surface. Such a conclusion underscores how The New Physiognomy sits alongside important work in disability studies such as Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s Staring: How We Look (2009), which investigates how staring at disabled others can precipitate either the dehumanizing treatment of those persons or opportunities for more and deeper interaction with them. In its own consideration of disability, Rives’s book provides another critical view of the ethics of our day-to-day, face-to-face encounters.So what’s in a face? It may be that, after reading Rives’s study, we are less confident about answering this question, about the act of assigning meaning to faces—but that’s the point. Too often we, as amateur physiognomists, project this meaning onto others; we face them without meeting them. In her patient and perceptive examination of the expressions found in modern art and literature, Rives discovers the promise of another way of looking.