Is it possible to argue that the “culture of celebrity” encourages us to believe that we know these strange and mythical Titans, the Celebrities? Are we encouraged to think about them as familiars, as peers? Does seeing celebrity faces paper the halls of popular media enable us to think that a face is a person?  Not really. We do this on our own. What the proliferation of recognizable faces does seem to do is to authorize the nearly instantaneous process of assumption, judgment, and acceptance/refusal that civil rights movements like the  recent We Give a Damn campaign are still working so hard to fight.

And it’s a tough fight because nasty habits generally have social and historical roots which are reinforced by people’s inability to see themselves as inheritors and shapers of culture.

For example, the narrative I construct when I look at a face is made up of both that which I see and that which I qualify: wrinkles, or their obvious absence; hair which I perceive as intentionally styled, or not; skin which may be blemished, which is a silly qualifier since the poor skin (all puns intended) is just doing what skin does . . .

And all of my conclusions and assumptions are supported by the values of the social systems in which I participate. But I’m not the lone carnival-goer in the fun house: usually, though not always, those faces are performing something for me as well. And not just for me, but for all seeing eyes, for all constructing selves. Most of us perform, and most of us construct.

These aren’t brilliant, new ideas. Simone de Beauvoir, Frantz Fanon, Judith Butler, Ursula Le Guin and plenty of others have written and theorized about the relationship between perception and performance. Even outside of academics we hear and are supposed to heed the advice to refrain from “judging a book by its cover.”

Taken literally, this aphorism is completely absurd. Books have discernible covers because we do base impulses to include, exclude, or set aside for further investigation upon our initial reactions. Of course, who would take such bumper sticker slogans literally? (Yes, the sarcasm is biting, isn’t it?) Figuratively then, we are supposed to see past the face/facade and let the person/story reveal itself.

Except, I can’t help myself. Try as I might to avoid it, I notice things like gender, age, and ethnicity. No, it’s worse than that. I seek these things out, and then I catch myself reacting to that physicality, questioning my own responses, and punishing myself for being a very bad person because I assume I know something about the people wearing these faces.

Case in point–I’ve been doing a lot of scrolling through university “Staff” directories. (My name and office numbers, to say nothing of my picture, are strangely missing from both the colleges where I teach.) I click on the names, the order usually determined by those professors’ listed academic interests which follow my own, and then . . . I stare at the picture!  I skip the “Recent Publications” lists and go right for the image.

There’s something about anchoring a name to a face that I find comforting. I feel oriented in some way when I see Professor So-and-So’s face, whatever that face may be. I think I know the instructor, or at least I think I know something about the person wearing the face which smiles or not, which seems posed or unposed, which is shrouded by or free from hair.

I do this with books, too. Once I’ve found a book I want to read, I want to “know” who wrote it, so I flip to the very back or the very front, greedily seeking out the ”About the Author” blurb which usually has a photo of some kind. And if there is no picture, I feel rebuked for having cared; or, I wonder what commentary is possible in the absence of such localizing of Authorship. (Aside from my own missing photo on this site, the few credible links I found for Fanon were also “faceless.”)

While current criticisms of decadent celebrity culture would have us assessing and reassessing the function of the images thrust upon us, maybe we should acknowledge our own complicity in the phenomenon; maybe we should examine our own participation in the “vanity fair” (a reference to Thackeray, I assure you, though the parallels might be too much to ignore, or too dismally lacking in irony to be paid much attention): The images exist and multiply because we think we “know” these people; though it’s just as accurate to claim that we think we know them because the images exist.

As for me, I’m still trying to learn how to let a face be a face.