There was a moment there, about 1916, let's say, when bea...

There was a moment there, about 1916, let's say, when beards and thought separated. Until that date, to think was to have a beard. This was no mere fashion: women have no facial hair. Monks do. Scholars do. They are men. The practice of thought, of gravity, was the prerogative of the bearded. The threat of the modern was multiple: it threatened manhood, what was understood by 'thinking', and it allowed women to practice. The beards of the 'great' thinkers, Marx, etc. thinned out into the goatees of Freud and Lenin, as philosophy transitioned to modernity. Hair is not frivolous, as the British court still understands. Hair is philosophy. The fact that both men and women have it, in a manner domesticated by 'civilization' (which is only the manufacture of hair-islands), means that a strict division of labour had to be established when the bourgeoisie distributed commodities: thought was produced by face-hair, psychology by womanish long hair. bankers and Jews (identical in the mid-18th to late 19th centuries) were compelled to shave clean to show that they were producers neither of thought nor of reproduction.  In an age when artists masqueraded as thinkers [...] Tzara's clean-shaven mug proclaimed  its solidarity with abstraction, i.e., money and relativity. Until Wassily Kandinsky and Roman Jakobson, unbearded Russian philosohpers were inconceivable: abstraction was born in Russia only when the clergy shaved.

Andrei Codrescu, The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara and Lenin Play Chess