Visage Mathematics: Semiotic Ideologies of Facial Measurement and Calculus

The chapter proposes a cultural semiotics of mathematics meant as a language that is modeled after human cognition but then turns often not only into a beneficial instrument for the patterning of reality, but also into a biased rhetoric that bestows an aura of commensurability, accurateness, and precision to human domains that are, on the contrary, unpatterned, and subject to ideological choices. The chapter dwells, in particular, on the mathematical mensuration of the body, and specifically of the head and the face. Counting and measuring the body were indispensable to the raise of ancient medicine and to its development as modern science and practice, yet they have also often turned into techniques of biopolitical control. The chapter focuses, in particular, on the tradition of “face mensuration” that, starting from the Enlightenment, claimed that measuring heads, skulls, and faces could lead to objective knowledge about their beauty, intelligence, morality, and placement in the ranking of natural evolution. A cultural semiotic analysis of this tradition shows that it adopted facial mathematics as a way to conceal and objectify racist biases. It also points out that the bias was not in the measurements, but in the decision itself of measuring.