The Face is (Not) Like a Mirror

Abstract

That ‘the face is like a mirror (to the soul)' resonates cross-culturally and trans-historically throughout the media imaginary of the last three millennia. But beyond its general habitual topos as an onto-cartographic blueprint in everyday life, the author presents this catoptric metaphor as a specific epistemological trope within the advertising designs that the author defines as face studies. Prospecting representative usages in the printed artifacts from scientific research, the author probes the print advertisements for scientific communications, newspaper cartoons, and periodical spreads–their intermedial and multimodal genealogies. The author then problematizes the metaphoric similitude between the face and a mirror as a fixedly stable type, with fluidly shifting tokens across explanatory models and pedagogical norms for the meaning of facial signs. Finally, the author proposes not only that scientific gatekeepers rhetorically diagrammatize semantic terms ‘face' and ‘mirror'–or other specular prostheses–in the brand identification and marketing narratives. It is with this method that they call for the attention of knowledge consumers, but also how these catoptric metaphors function as cognitive mechanisms to inspire conceptual and methodological innovation in science about the face itself.