Face in the mirror, what do you see? Catoptric autoexperimentation and the physiognomic gaze

Abstract

Abstract To critically explicate the visual epistemology for catoptric autoexperimentation in the contemporary science of facial behavior, by way of its historical progenitors, I draw upon the pragmatic semiotics of the catoptric phenomenon. This problematization of catoptrics is fundamentally about two different but related concepts: the semiotic threshold and the iconicity debate. Based on primary sources both Western and Eastern, I trace a transcultural history of scientific ideas about performing catoptric auto-experimentation through privileged case studies from physiognomic literary corpora. I probe the ways in which self-recognition has long been pragmatically necessitated as well as processually normative in the study of the face, the research and development of optical technologies has in turn led to paradigm shifts in physiognomic thought, and the procatoptric staging behind the catoptric prosthesis conditions its visual epistemology. I propose that the catoptric prosthesis is not pre- but post-semiotic. That is, the mirror only becomes a mirror when part of a semiotic process and sign relation. The extreme of iconicity that is perceptually afforded by the catoptric prosthesis, far from disqualifying it from the status of a sign, is exactly what distinguishes its role and importance for this semiosis of the face.