Staring how we look sobre la mirada.pdf - artecolonial

FACES 103
Familiarity determines our ability to know faces. All people, for example,
are poorer at recognizing faces from races other than their own. Experiments
that distort photos of faces by changing the spatial relations among components
confuse face perception. We also have trouble recognizing inverted faces
but not inverted objects. Visual perception studies suggest that we recognize
faces as undifferentiated wholes rather than by way of their constituent parts
(Peterson and Rhodes 2003). Such research suggests that competent, efficient
facial recognition depends on encountering faces that meet certain
visual expectations. In other words, an internalized facial norm shaped by
culture—what psychologists call “norm based coding”—determines facial
legibility (Rhodes and Tremewan 1994, 279). As long as we are seeing the
kinds of faces we are accustomed to coming across, visual cognition and
the social relations that accompany them go smoothly. The unexpected face
confounds us, presses us—and thus makes us stare. This visual indeterminacy
is more than a cognitive problem, however. Illegible faces are a social
problem, too.
FACE-WORK
What sociologist Erving Goffman calls “face-work” demands staring. Facework
extends both reading and recognizing faces into an interactive social
drama of self-management and status negotiation. Face-work is an exacting
interchange of mutual scrutiny, adjustment, call, and response in which
visual vigilance is crucial. Because we recognize ourselves in the faces of
others, we often seek out faces we suspect will tell us what we want or need
to know about who we are in the social world. In this process, we first visually
identify a face with which we want to engage and then stare at it
intently to discern its response to the face we have put forward. Goffman’s
work emphasizes that such face-work is more than simple individualized
communication; rather, the ways that we stare at one another are highly
ritualized ceremonies of regard acted out anew in each staring encounter
(Goffman et al. 1988).
Face-work is exacting and potentially perilous. We can be “out of face” if
we are unprepared to perform according to expected conventions (Goffman
1982, 8). We are in the “wrong face” when information surfaces that threatens
the face we put forward. We try to use the social tool Goffman calls
“poise” to conceal any shamefacedness that comes from having the wrong
face or being out of face. Failures of poise can be, for example, faltering conversational
fluency like forgetting someone’s name, the emergence of unflattering
information such as a lost job, or breaches of class etiquette such