Heads

It takes a lot of time to record commentary, but there are still some things I wanted to note from the second day of panels at RSA. The panel on “Visual Rhetoric and Visual Culture” chaired by Robert Hariman embraced three fine and polished papers. In fact, the presentation was so smooth it seemed choreographed (other than the chair’s unfashionably late arrival). About the first paper . . .

Michelle Gibbons’s “How to Look at Heads: The American Phrenological Journal and Nineteenth Century Visual Culture” made a bold claim at the onset: previous scholarship has failed to address the bidirectional nature of phrenological and physiognomic claims. In other words, phrenology didn’t just read head-bumps, it sought to modify the shapes and features of heads by modifying the behavior of the owners of said heads.

Perhaps that’s true in rhetorical/speech communication scholarship—it isn’t true in American Studies/Literature. Her presentation reminded me somewhat of “Monica Lewinsky, The Music Man, and The Scarlet Letter,” a lecture delivered flamboyantly by Chris Castiglia that I attended in 2002. Besides belting out show-tunes, Castiglia made a pretty compelling case that phrenology and physiognomy in the nineteenth century externalized not only positive virtues, but also sins so that they could be cast-off. Behavior modification, not just interpretation, was key to Castiglia’s presentation. I don’t write this to undermine the core of Gibbons’s paper, because her presentation and research was hardcore and specific, but merely to suggest that perhaps “great minds think alike.” To be fair, Castiglia was concerned with, as he puts it in a related article, “the redisposition of delinquent interiority” while Gibbons seems more interested in the visuality of these claims. Fun stuff. I can’t help but think of a Talking Heads song, “Seen and Not Seen”:

He would see faces in movies, on T.V., in magazines, and in books….
He thought that some of these faces might be right for him….And
through the years, by keeping an ideal facial structure fixed in his
mind….Or somewhere in the back of his mind….That he might, by
force of will, cause his face to approach those of his ideal….The
change would be very subtle….It might take ten years or so….
Gradually his face would change its’ shape….A more hooked nose…
Wider, thinner lips….Beady eyes….A larger forehead.



He imagined that this was an ability he shared with most other
people….They had also molded their faced according to some
ideal….Maybe they imagined that their new face would better
suit their personality….Or maybe they imagined that their
personality would be forced to change to fit the new appear-
ance….This is why first impressions are often correct…
Although some people might have made mistakes….They may have
arrived at an appearance that bears no relationship to them….
They may have picked an ideal appearance based on some childish
whim, or momentary impulse….Some may have gotten half-way
there, and then changed their minds.

He wonders if he too might have made a similar mistake.

I prefer Talking Heads over showtunes. [to be continued]