NOTES
Introduction
1.Foucault, Birth of the Clinic, 107.
2.Scarry, Body in Pain, 3.
3.Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 5.
4.Wershler, Emerson, and Parikka, Lab Book, 37.
5.My use of “origin” here follows Foucault, Aesthetics, 369–92.
6.Cf. Feyerabend, Against Method.
7.Hemmings, “Invoking Affect”; see also Yao, Disaffected, 9–10.
8.The distinction made in psychology is, in actuality, far more complex than this, with many different kinds of “feelings” and “emotions” that account for a range of distinct bodily and interpretive states. See Wetherell, Affect and Emotion, 28–31, 59.
9.Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, xl.
10.See Clough, User Unconscious; Hansen, Feed-Forward; and Sampson, A Sleepwalker’s Guide, among others.
11.Karppi, Disconnect, 21.
12.Illouz, Saving the Modern Soul, 86; Liu, Laws of Cool, 89–104.
13.Lazzarato, “Immaterial Labor”; Illouz, Cold Intimacies.
14.Han, Burnout Society; Berardi, Soul at Work; Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 21–29.
15.Ahmed, Promise of Happiness; Davies, Happiness Industry.
16.Naveh, “Techniques for Emotion Detection,” 3.
17.Naveh, 4.
18.Picard, Affective Computing.
19.Feng, Rosenberg, and Shapiro, “Just-In-Time”; Laine et al., “Production-Level.”
20.Andrejevic, Infoglut.
21.Clough, User Unconscious; Hansen, Feed-Forward.
22.Cf. Serpell, Stranger Faces, 14–15; Leys, “How Did Fear?”
23.Gates, Our Biometric Future; Magnet, When Biometrics Fail.
24.On the history of physiognomy, see Pearl, About Faces. On the contemporary role of metrics, see Beer, Metric Power.
25.Apprich et al., Pattern Discrimination; Noble, Algorithms of Oppression.
26.Lavater, Essays on Physiognomy, 15.
27.Lavater, 66.
28.Lavater, 188.
29.See Todorov, Face Value; Bunn, Truth Machine; and Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” among others.
30.As an example of this, see Safra et al., “Tracking Historical Changes.”
31.Daston and Galison, Objectivity, 123.
32.Daston and Galison, 121.
33.Coon, “Testing the Limits.”
34.Hookway, “Making of the Experimental Subject.”
35.Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 204.
36.Taussig, Defacement, 224.
37.Bollmer, “Mimetic Sameness”; Chun, “Queering Homophily”; Han, Transparency Society.
38.Moors, “Theories of Emotion Causation,” 645.
39.For an outline of FACS in research, see Ekman and Friesen, Facial Action Coding System. For an overview of FACS in the history of emotion detection technology, see Gates, Our Biometric Future, 151–90. For a critique of the development of FACS, see Leys, Ascent of Affect.
40.Izard, Face of Emotion; Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience.
41.For instance, see Turner and Stets, Sociology of Emotions, 3; Richardson, “Facial Expression Theory,” 66; and Grodal, Embodied Visions, 18.
42.What theory knows today is quite different from what it knew when Sedgwick and Frank provoked with their “Shame in the Cybernetic Fold.” See Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 93–94.
43.See Leys, Ascent of Affect, 93–119.
44.Cf. Tagg, Burden of Representation, 4.
45.See Genosko, Critical Semiotics; Lazzarato, Signs and Machines.
46.Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 46–49; Bollmer, Materialist Media Theory, 46–49.
47.See Coon, “Standardizing the Subject” and “Testing the Limits.”
48.Hacking, Representing and Intervening.
49.As Feyerabend claims, “The material which a scientist actually has at his disposal, his laws, his experimental results, his mathematical techniques, his epistemological prejudices, his attitude towards the absurd consequences of the theories which he accepts, is indeterminate in many ways, ambiguous, and never fully separated from the historical background” (Against Method, 45–46). I generally follow Wershler, Emerson, and Parikka’s heuristic for describing this “material” that is actually available outlined in The Lab Book. Their “extended lab model” argues that labs are comprised of bounded spaces; specific technical apparatuses; an infrastructure which comes from how a lab is funded; people who exist and work in a lab and occupy particular forms of subjectivity; the imaginary, or ideological or discursive frames that cannot be completely reduced to the material reality of a lab; and technique, or practices of the lab. Wershler, Emerson, and Parikka argue that these are all essential, and intertwining, categories for understanding the “situated” practices of laboratories. While I do not emphasize these categories in each chapter by name, and my emphasis almost always begins with either apparatus or technique, I follow their general argument in how I understand a “lab” throughout this book.
50.As Hans-Jörg Rheinberger notes, epistemology for the authors in this tradition —Gaston Bachelard, Georges Canguilhem, Michel Foucault, and François Delaporte, among others—means “reflecting on the historical conditions under which, and the means with which, things are made into objects of knowledge” (On Historicizing Epistemology, 2).
51.Bachelard, New Scientific Spirit, 13.
52.The approach of this book resonates with several other recent works, though it focuses on a different set of technologies and problems than previously covered. This includes Jimena Canales’s Tenth of a Second, Robert Brain’s Pulse of Modernism, and the essays of Otniel E. Dror, such as “The Scientific Image of Emotion” and “Counting the Affects.” Brenton Malin’s Feeling Mediated covers a broader range of technologies than these other writers, but argues that a belief in “media physicalism,” or the capacities of media to physically inscribe and reveal the emotions, is misguided, an argument this book opposes. Branden Hookway’s “Making of the Experimental Subject,” like this book, draws explicit links among the history of psychology, art, and contemporary media.
53.Galison, Image and Logic, xix.
54.See, for instance, Frank and Wilson, Silvan Tomkins Handbook, 7. This argument is itself questionable since it presumes language to be disembodied. See Leys, Ascent of Affect.
55.Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race.
56.Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 91; Chen, Animacies, 11.
57.Schuller, Biopolitics of Feeling; Fretwell, Sensory Experiments.
58.Yao, Disaffected, 10–11; Ahmed, Cultural Politics of Emotion and Promise of Happiness; Berlant, Female Complaint.
59.Edelman, No Future.
60.Fretwell, Sensory Experiments, 5.
61.This would mean, then, that an affect theory that intends to be antiracist or decolonial has to contend with arguments from media studies such as those offered in Armond Towns’s On Black Media Philosophy.
62.See Bollmer, “Pathologies of Affect.”
63.Baron-Cohen, Science of Evil; cf. Rose and Abi-Rached, Neuro, 141–98.
64.See Chytry, Aesthetic State.
65.See Ahmed, Cultural Politics of Emotion, 42–61.
66.This “problem” was perhaps best “solved” in the Gesamtkunstwerk of Richard Wagner, which provides the archetypal cultural technique to produce national bonding through feeling. For an outstanding study (albeit one sympathetic to Wagner) that links Wagnerian theater with this “problem,” along with attempts to theorize Einfühlung, see Koss, Modernism after Wagner. See also Smith, Total Work of Art.
67.Kant, Practical Philosophy, 17.
68.Also see Foucault, Ethics, 303–8.
69.Schiller, Aesthetic Education of Man, 167.
70.Cf. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment.
71.Lessing, Hamburg Dramaturgy, 40. See also Baldyga, “‘We Have Actors,’” 14.
72.Lessing, Hamburg Dramaturgy, 43.
73.Lavater’s essays were first published a decade after Lessing’s hiring by the theatre. This similarity suggests that Lavater could be framed as responding to the same problem posed by Kant and Schiller—how to employ the aesthetic as a means of producing and judging commonalities assumed essential for national belonging.
74.Lessing, Hamburg Dramaturgy, 43.
75.Baldyga, “‘We Have Actors,’” 19.
76.See Aristotle, Poetics.
77.Pinotti, “Empathy,” 93.
78.Cited in Koss, Modernism after Wagner, 68. For a collection of writings of Vischer and others involved in the initial theorization of Einfühlung, see Mallgrave and Ikonomou, Empathy, Form, and Space. See also Jarzombek, Psychologizing of Modernity, 37–72.
79.Fritz Breithaupt is correct to note that exclusion, partisanship, and factionalism all can be considered linked with the cognitive capacity of empathy. See The Dark Sides of Empathy, 75–130. Philosopher Kate Manne, in her analysis of misogyny, makes a similar move when she frames particular forms of gender-based identification and exclusion as “himpathy.” See Down Girl, 196–205.
80.“Empathy” can be found in print in English prior to Titchener’s use of the term—in E. L. Hinman’s “Ueber psychophysische Energie,” a brief review of a German article on psychophysics written by German science fiction author Kurd Laßwitz. From the review, it’s unclear what word Laßwitz used in his own writing, but Hinman uses empathy to describe a quantification of neurological energy that correlates to pleasure or pain—a definition that has little to no relation to its use since Titchener’s lectures. Other uses of empathy in English from the early 1900s all appear to refer to Titchener’s translation of Einfühlung.
81.Depew, “Empathy, Psychology, and Aesthetics,” 99–107; Jahoda, “Theodor Lipps,” 151–63.
82.Overviews that situate present understandings of empathy in relation to its history include Lanzoni, Empathy ; and Pinotti, L’empathie.
83.Titchener, Lectures, 21–22.
84.See Parisi, Archaeologies of Touch, 34–36.
85.Paterson, How We Became Sensorimotor, 128–29.
86.Paterson, 127.
87.Titchener, Lectures, 185 (emphasis added).
88.James, Principles of Psychology, 1:245–46. Cf. James, Writings, 1902–1910, 1161.
89.Titchener, Lectures, 188.
90.This is a similar definition of empathy to the one recently given by art historian David Freedberg and neuroscientist Vittorio Gallese: “Viewers often experience a sense of bodily involvement with the movements that are implied by the physical traces—in brushmarks or paint drippings—of the creative actions of the producer of the work” (“Motion, Emotion and Empathy,” 197). Freedberg and Gallese argue that the pleasure a viewer gets from a painting by Jackson Pollock or Lucio Fontana emerges from the indexicality of motion captured in a work, be it the splattering of paint for the former or the slashing of the canvas for the latter. When looking at a work of Fontana’s, they suggest, “sight of the slashed painting invites a sense of empathetic movement that seems to coincide with the gesture felt to have produced the tear” (197). Empathy, here, is a mental simulation of motion that comes from an inner mirroring of external perception. This would be very similar to Riegl’s sense of haptic vision and how I’m associating it with empathy. This also would suggest that painting—and the physical presence assumed left by the indexical trace of paint—is a cultural technique that precedes our understanding of empathy today.
91.Titchener, Lectures, 90.
92.Titchener, 91.
93.Titchener, 96.
94.Titchener, 98.
95.See Batson, “These Things Called Empathy.”
96.An argument further developed by Titchener’s student and sometimes collaborator Edwin G. Boring decades later, in 1961. See Boring’s “The Beginning and Growth.” Cf. Canales, Tenth of a Second.
97.Einfühlung was translated into French in 1869 as sympathie symbolique, suggesting a completely different genealogy than the one I describe here, as well.
98.Stein, “Radcliffe Manuscripts,” 121, as cited in Meyer, Irresistible Dictation, 211.
99.On inequalities of race as foundational for psychophysics and early American psychology, see Fretwell, Sensory Experiments.
100.The idea of a necessary exclusion as essential for the emotional bonding through art is one of the major criticisms leveled by Theodor Adorno against the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk—that aesthetic unity can only occur through the exclusion of the ground through which that unity is produced. See Adorno, In Search of Wagner, 91.
101.On cultural techniques, see Siegert, Cultural Techniques. What I mean by “materialist” is outlined in Bollmer, Materialist Media Theory. On the technical a priori, see Tuschling, “Historical, Technological and Medial A Priori.”
102.Spinoza, Ethics, 164.
103.Spinoza, 180.
104.James, Principles of Psychology, 2:442–85.
105.Schopenhauer, Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics, 113–258. Schopenhauer’s inclusion here as a predecessor of affect theory is uncommon, and is derived from Fritz Breithaupt’s The Dark Sides of Empathy, which locates Schopenhauer as the first philosopher of empathy. Placing current claims about empathy in the Kantian frame of Schopenhauer should be explored in more depth, especially given how affect and empathy are often assumed opposed to the Kantian critical project and how the “politics” projected onto affect today—along with Schopenhauer’s own ethical arguments—would seem to necessarily be at odds with Schopenhauer’s notorious misogyny and misanthropy. For an example of his misogyny, see Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, 2:550–61. For an analysis of Schopenhauer’s misogyny and its relation to will, see Guinness, Schizogenesis, 102–8.
106.This is one of the main points of critique offered by Ruth Leys in her Ascent of Affect which, she claims, unites contemporary theoretical approaches to affect and the history of American experimental psychology on emotion. Frank and Wilson, in A Silvan Tomkins Handbook, attempt to defend Silvan Tomkins, one of the main psychologists popular among affect theorists in the humanities today, against this charge. I don’t think that they do so successfully, as Tomkins’ model presumes a cybernetic understanding of bodies and behaviors, which also sidelines consciousness and intentionality as epiphenomena.
107.Kant privileged a third category, the transcendental. But Schopenhauer’s interpretation of Kant invests in the noumenal “will” rather than the phenomenal world of “representation.”
108.See Brinkema, Forms of the Affects, xii.
109.This is something of which, I believe, James was quite aware, though many of his followers today seem not to be. Again, to be clear, the targets of my critique are the affect theorists who defer to biology and the brain for their arguments, suggesting that affect is thus “formless” or impossible to qualify, not those who see emotion or sentiment as a political force articulated with a range of other qualities (meaning, form, etc.). This is a notable split that exists with, say, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Brian Massumi, Erin Manning, and William Connolly on one side, and Lauren Berlant, Sara Ahmed, and Lawrence Grossberg on the other. The list here is not exhaustive, and some authors tend to bridge these two “camps,” like Steven Shaviro or Mark Hansen, and even others link the affective with the traditions of aesthetic theory, like Fredric Jameson and Sianne Ngai. I’m interested in opposing a neurophysical definition of affect that escapes the symbolic, and thus am referring to the first group of authors I’ve listed here, the many, many scholars who have been influenced by their work, along with the conceptual slippages that happen when the materiality of the body is assumed “affective” and thus beyond language, which is a tendency in affect theory that far exceeds Sedgwick, Massumi, Manning, and Connolly.
110.Cf. Massumi, Parables for the Virtual.
111.See Bloor, “The Strengths of the Strong Programme.”
112.See Vattimo and Rovatti, Weak Thought.
113.I’m indebted to Maurizio Ferraris’s Documentality and its theorization of “social objects” on this point. For more on my interpretation of Ferraris, and my broader arguments about inscription and documentation, see my Materialist Media Theory, 51–78.
114.There is a metaphysical assumption here, of course—that the world is material and everything that exists must be grounded in the material. But even then, “matter” is inherently variable, changing, and situated.
115.Cf. Levinas, Totality and Infinity; Han, Transparency Society.
116.Leys’s Ascent of Affect has provided the most sustained version of this argument, though she focuses mostly on more recent (or more mainstream) debates than what I emphasize here. For other arguments that share my concerns, see Hemmings, “Invoking Affect,” and Papoulias and Callard, “Biology’s Gift.” An earlier version of my argument can be found in Bollmer, “Pathologies of Affect.”
117.See, for instance, Scheler’s Nature of Sympathy.
118.Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 93.
119.See Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 21.
120.Yaczo, “Fear and Panic,” 377–397.
121.Otis, Banned Emotions, 2.
122.On “culture,” see Williams, Culture & Society, xvi.
123.On making motion into scientific data, see Salazar Sutil, Motion and Representation.
124.Schmidgen, “Laboratory.”
125.Shapin, “Invisible Technician,” 556.
126.Cf. Wershler, Emerson, and Parikka, Lab Book.
127.Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway; Latour, Science in Action.
128.Weigel, “Phantom Images,” 33.
129.Parikka, What Is Media Archaeology?
130.My approach here shares much with that proposed by Jeremy Packer in “The Conditions of Media’s Possibility.”
131.Agamben, What Is an Apparatus?, 14
132.Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, 32.
133.See Delaporte, Chagas Disease.
134.Delaporte, Figures of Medicine, xix.
135.Feyerabend, Against Method, 7.
136.Wetherell, Affect and Emotion.
137.Leys, “Turn to Affect,” 455–58.
138.Brinkema, Forms of the Affects, xv; Grossberg, Cultural Studies, 192; Bollmer, “Pathologies of Affect,” 303.
139.Otis, Banned Emotions.
140.Cf. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §412.
141.Derrida, Of Grammatology.
142.This theme appears throughout the work of Erin Manning, including Relationscapes ; Always More Than One ; and The Minor Gesture.
143.I’m specifically referencing Manning here, who refers to those who are not babies or autistic as “normopaths.” I’d suggest it also informs the work of any affect theorist who draws on Stern’s The Interpersonal World of the Infant, or any theory of affect that draws on (and rejects) Lacanian models of development in order to privilege a form of subjectivity that has not internalized the Symbolic or Imaginary in favor of continual dwelling within the Real. This is, perhaps, a general problem of assuming an ethical or political valiance to the model of subjectivity articulated by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their Capitalism and Schizophrenia books.
144.I’m again referring to Manning. See Relationscapes, 153–206; Always More Than One, 149–203; Minor Gesture, 111–88.
145.See Bollmer, Materialist Media Theory, for a more thorough version of this argument. Cf. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 39–74.
146.Siegert, Cultural Techniques.
1. William James’s Planchette
1.And continue to examine, as they’re still around today. Alicia Puglionesi provides a thorough history of the American Society for Psychical Research in her Common Phantoms, though I feel this book is a bit too presentist in its orientation, claiming that psychical research is an analog of contemporary “citizen science,” which ignores how psychology in James’s day was yet to be a truly empirical science. I do agree with Puglionesi’s attempt to directly place the work of the ASPR as part of the history of American psychology, however.
2.James, Essays in Psychical Research, 38.
3.James, “A World of Pure Experience,” 1160.
4.James, “Confidences of a ‘Psychical Researcher,’” 1250.
5.Evans, “William James,” 436.
6.Evans, 435; Cf. James, “On Some Omissions,” 986–1013.
7.On James’s relation to introspective psychology, see Meyer, Irresistible Dictation, 25. On the rejection of spiritualism by James’s colleagues, there are many examples. For an overview, see Bjork, Compromised Scientist; for a specific discussion of Hugo Münsterberg’s criticisms of James’s spiritualism, see Langdale “S(t)imulation of Mind,” 6.
8.Meyer, Irresistible Dictation, 26.
9.James, Essays in Psychical Research, 381.
10.I’m referring to Titchener, who was based at Cornell, Hugo Münsterberg, whom James would eventually hire to take over and develop his lab at Harvard, and James McKeen Cattell, who would develop experimental psychology at Columbia. See Bjork, Compromised Scientist, 10.
11.On the ironies of this eventual embrace, see Fretwell, Sensory Experiments, 6–12. James also wrote an enthusiastic introduction to the English translation of Fechner’s Little Book of Life after Death, though it’s clear from this introduction that James admired Fechner’s more “philosophical” aspects than his methodological ones, such as what James called Fechner’s “anti-materialism,” or “the view that the entire material universe, instead of being dead, is inwardly alive and consciously animated” (James, “Introduction,” x). This view that James admires in Fechner has much in common with the materialism of Lucretius and many “new materialisms” today, but this argument is also what guides many of James’s own criticisms of what he calls “materialism” throughout many of his writings.
12.Bjork, Compromised Scientist, 12.
13.See Janaway, “Introduction,” xviii.
14.James, “Confidences of a ‘Psychical Researcher,’” 1261.
15.James, Essays in Psychical Research, 2.
16.Quoted in Skrupskelis, “Introduction,” li.
17.For instance, Davis, High Weirdness, 8, 20–22.
18.There is significant evidence that James was interested in producing “physical” secular evidence for an afterlife, for instance. See Coon, “Testing the Limits,” 144.
19.James, Essays in Psychology, 247–48; cf. Barnard, Exploring Unseen Worlds.
20.This focus on the physicality of the body does seem to vanish in James’s later work as he develops his radical empiricism and levels his criticisms of “medical materialism” in Varieties of Religious Experience, in Writings 1902–1910.
21.James, Principles of Psychology, 1:5.
22.Sargent, Planchette, 1–2.
23.Sargent, 2.
24.Sargent, 2.
25.Sargent, 2.
26.Cf. Peters’s discussion of the links between spiritualism and hermeneutics in Speaking into the Air.
27.Sargent, Planchette, iv.
28.Books Sargent wrote after Planchette, such as The Proof Palpable of Immortality and The Scientific Basis of Spiritualism, the latter of which directly engaged with arguments of Wundt, further emphasized his way of linking spiritualism as a “science” at the edges of empirical knowledge, a belief that both he and James shared.
29.For details and interpretations of James’s depression, see Simon, Genuine Reality, 112–23; Fullinwider, “William James’s ‘Spiritual Crisis’”; or Leary, “New Insights.”
30.James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 124.
31.James, 127.
32.For many of these biographical claims, I’m relying on the “Chronology” published in James, Writings 1902–1910, 1321–49.
33.Schopenhauer, World as Will and Representation, 1:417; Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics, 113–58.
34.James, Will to Believe, 486.
35.James, 584.
36.It’s also clear that James derives some of his claims about emotion from Spinoza, but I think there’s a more solid link between James and Schopenhauer, including a separation between empirical phenomena and a world beyond sensible perception, which is not a claim advanced in Spinoza’s Ethics. The relation between James and Schopenhauer is almost entirely neglected in scholarship on James. In a recent article on James’s “crisis,” David E. Leary states that “no one has ever made much of James’s relation to Schopenhauer or his thought,” and Leary’s work does much to advance the idea that Schopenhauer was, in fact, very significant for James—even though he frames this more in terms of James’s own feelings of depression and stops short of claiming that Schopenhauer had a significant influence on James’s philosophical arguments. See Leary’s “New Insights,” 2.
37.Schopenhauer, Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics, 113–258.
38.John Durham Peters gets close to acknowledging the link between the two when he argues that several neo-Kantian themes in James’s philosophy, which Kant found unable to be proven but “necessary for a rational and moral life—that nature is governed by law, that the will is free, and that the soul is immortal,” are investigated in both James’s philosophy and his psychical research (Speaking into the Air, 188–89). Lisa Blackman also sees this link in her Immaterial Bodies, and Alicia Puglionesi, in Common Phantoms, acknowledges this intertwining between psychology and psychical research in James, but does so to legitimate psychical research as science. Steven Meyer’s Irresistible Dictation makes similar claims, primarily to describe the relation between James and Gertrude Stein, but Meyer’s work provides a good account of how arguments from more recent authors from the neuropsychological tradition, such as Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, assume that James (and even Wundt) relied not on experimental methods but on introspection—a statement that seems to me to excise spiritualistic experimentation (Meyer, Irresistible Dictation, 25). Another notable example would be McGarry, Ghosts of Futures Past, 17–65.
39.Bjork, Compromised Scientist.
40.Peters, Speaking into the Air.
41.Puglionesi, Common Phantoms; Blum, Ghost Hunters.
42.James, “Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist?,” 1142.
43.James, 1142.
44.Brinkema, Forms of the Affects, 8–9.
45.James, Principles of Psychology, 2:449–50.
46.Dalgleish, “Emotional Brain,” 583–89.
47.See Blackman, Immaterial Bodies, 17–18, 30.
48.James, “What Is an Emotion?,” 188–205. It’s unclear if James had experimented with the planchette by 1884, since there’s no mention of the device in this essay. From his review of Sargent’s Planchette, he was clearly aware of the spiritualist use of planchettes at the time. His own use of the planchette can only be documented as early as 1888, published in 1889 and 1890. His research into hypnotism and other nonconscious states occurred throughout the 1880s, however, and there are many mentions of various spiritualist techniques throughout The Principles of Psychology, including discussions of his experiments with the planchette.
49.McDermott, “Introduction,” xix.
50.James, Essays in Psychical Research, 38–39. Interpolation in this quotation is James’s own.
51.James, 39. This is also recounted in James, Principles of Psychology, 1:208–9.
52.James, Essays in Psychical Research, 40.
53.James, 44.
54.James, 41–42.
55.James, Essays in Psychology, 254.
56.James, 259.
57.James, Essays in Psychical Research, 44.
58.James, “Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist?,” 1142.
59.James, 1158.
60.Erin Manning is the most direct in articulating this kind of argument.
61.Cf. Bennett, Vibrant Matter.
62.Cf. Arnold, “Culture and Anarchy”; on the general acceptance of this belief in the “culture and civilization” tradition, along with its links with British history, see Williams, Culture & Society. Note that the German Romantic tradition also shares similar beliefs (albeit ones that did not legitimate imperialism in the same way as the British), embodied in Schiller’s “aesthetic state.” See Schiller, Aesthetic Education; Chytry, Aesthetic State.
63.Patton, “Planchette,” 4.
64.Patton, 4.
65.Pentangelo, “William Fishbough Revealed,” 264.
66.Wells, Salem Witchcraft. The only signed work reprinted in this book was an article on spiritualism by Harriet Beecher Stowe.
67.Pentangelo, “William Fishbough Revealed,” 264. Fishbough’s records of Davis were published as Davis’s The Principles of Nature, for which Fishbough served as publisher.
68.James, Principles of Psychology, 1:163.
69.James, 182.
70.James, 284–85.
71.James, Principles of Psychology, 2:372.
72.James, 403.
73.James, Principles of Psychology, 1:105.
74.James, Principles of Psychology, 2:414–15.
75.Schopenhauer, Two Fundamental Problems, 224–25. It would be interesting to contrast this understanding of sympathy and sentiment with the version described in Schuller’s Biopolitics of Feeling and Yao’s Disaffected, since Schopenhauer, who is not discussed in either book, is arguing that sympathy is best reserved for those with whom one does not fully identify, even those one is inclined to feel hatred or disgust toward. Central to the arguments of Schuller and Yao is that affective sympathy presumes likeness and similarity and thus enacts violence toward nonnormative, raced, or colonized subjects. James and Schopenhauer suggest a radically different genealogy of sentiment, albeit one also riddled with obvious limitations, such as Schopenhauer’s notorious misogyny.
76.Schopenhauer, Two Fundamental Problems, 225–26.
77.James, Principles of Psychology, 1:121.
78.James, Principles of Psychology, 2:441.
79.James, 559; also see James, Principles of Psychology, 1:394–96.
80.James, Principles of Psychology, 2:553.
81.James, 559.
82.James, Principles of Psychology, 1:125–26.
83.A claim that many aesthetic theories, especially those in the Kantian tradition, tend to associate with propaganda and kitsch.
84.James, Pragmatism, 32.
85.Peters, Speaking into the Air.
86.Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria.
87.Latour, “How to Talk,” 205.
88.Solomons and Stein, “Normal Motor Automatism,” 492–512.
89.Given the ongoing “replication crisis” in the experimental sciences, it is amusing to think that James’s “unscientific” work has more validity than many papers published today, given its replication by Solomons and Stein.
90.Skinner, “Has Gertrude Stein a Secret?,” 50–57.
91.Meyer’s Irresistible Dictation provides an outstanding overview of the relations between James and Stein (along with other philosophical relations to Stein’s work), along with Stein’s automatic writing experiments. This quote is from his demonstration of why Skinner’s critiques are deeply misguided (224).
92.Quoted in Skinner, “Has Gertrude Stein a Secret?,” 52.
93.Skinner, 52–53.
94.Bjork, Compromised Scientist, 63–64.
2. Books of Faces
1.Tagg, Burden of Representation, 5.
2.Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria, 13.
3.Foucault, History of Madness, 44–77.
4.Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria, 13.
5.Freud was also a student of Charcot at the time, and Freud’s psychoanalysis could be said to be a different “solution” to knowing the pathological states he initially observed at the Salpêtrière. For one approach to the history of psychoanalysis that shares much with what I’m drawing on here, see Davidson, Emergence of Sexuality. Freud is also discussed at length in Kittler’s Discourse Networks.
6.Quoted in Bunn, Truth Machine, 58.
7.Carroy and Plas, “Origins of French Experimental Psychology.”
8.As a point of fact, the British psychiatrist Hugh W. Diamond was the first to use photography in psychiatric practice, predating Duchenne by at least a decade. Diamond’s images did not seem to influence American psychology as I describe it here. For more on Diamond, see Gilman, Face of Madness and Seeing the Insane.
9.Duchenne de Boulogne, Mécanisme de la physionomie humaine; Bourneville and Régnard, Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière.
10.There are many discussions of the link among photography, death, and ghosts, but a particularly notable one is Batchen’s Burning with Desire, 172–73. On Charcot’s studies of these topics, see Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria, 293–301.
11.Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, 32–37.
12.The entire debate surrounding digital photography and digital film as a loss of the indexical is bound up in this assumption. See Doane, “Indexical.”
13.Tagg, Burden of Representation; cf. Snyder, “Res Ipsa Loquitur.”
14.Barthes, Camera Lucida, 76–77.
15.See Tomkins, Affect Imagery Consciousness, 125–33; Ekman, “Duchenne,” 275–79.
16.More detailed examinations of the photography of Duchenne and Charcot can be found in Delaporte, Anatomy of the Passions, and Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria, both of which I’m drawing on for my arguments here.
17.Duchenne de Boulogne, Mechanism of Human Facial Expression; Delaporte, Anatomy of the Passions.
18.Darwin, Expression of the Emotions, 5.
19.This includes sources as diverse as Descartes on the passions and the Sanskrit Nātyashāstra, a text that radically predates European writings about emotion. See Descartes, Passions of the Soul; Dharwadker, “Emotion in Motion.”
20.Delaporte, Anatomy of the Passions, 5.
21.Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. 1; Cf. Davidson, Emergence of Sexuality.
22.Delaporte, Anatomy of the Passions, 152.
23.Canguilhem, Normal and the Pathological, 243.
24.Canguilhem, 243.
25.Duchenne de Boulogne, Mechanism of Human Facial Expression, 44.
26.Duchenne de Boulogne, 42–43. See also Sobieszek, Ghost in the Shell, 40–44.
27.Duchenne de Boulogne, Mechanism of Human Facial Expression, 43.
28.Sobieszek, Ghost in the Shell, 43
29.Quoted in Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria, 8.
30.Quoted in Didi-Huberman.
31.Bourneville and Régnard’s Iconographie, compiled under the supervision of Charcot, was produced between 1875 and 1880. Men did not enter the Salpêtrière until 1881, and only then in an outpatient capacity. While Charcot believed that hysteria was more common in men than most of his contemporaries, there is no photographic evidence of a male hysteric until 1888. See Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria, 80.
32.Didi-Huberman, 30.
33.Didi-Huberman also notes the importance of seriality for Charcot’s photographs, though he suggests that this seriality narrates or explains the images, which lack meaning when isolated given their “neutrality” when singular (Invention of Hysteria, 85).
34.Bourneville and Régnard, Iconographie.
35.Bazin, “Ontology of the Photographic Image,” 8. Cf. Doane, “Indexical”; Barthes, Camera Lucida.
36.Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria, 87–88.
37.Didi-Huberman, 87–88.
38.See Geimer, Inadvertent Images, 174–75. See also Snyder, “Res Ipsa Loquitur.”
39.Geimer, Inadvertent Images, 143.
40.Daston and Galison, Objectivity.
41.Cf. Lessing’s Laocoön. The problem of the medium in the Laocoön was about the impossibility of visually representing in sculpture expressions not previously judged beautiful.
42.This also relates to how many Americans were interested in expression and embodiment in determining the rhetorical appeal of public speech. See Malin, Feeling Mediated; cf. Scott, Psychology of Public Speaking.
43.I say “normal” because various personality disorders—specifically, autism, psychopathy, and borderline personality disorder—are all understood today through some breakdown in the cognitive ability to express or judge facial expression. See Bollmer, “Pathologies of Affect.”
44.Sander, People of the 20th Century.
45.Benjamin, Selected Writings, 2:510–12.
46.Benjamin, 695.
47.Cf. Azoulay, Civil Imagination.
48.Foucault, Discipline and Punish.
49.Weigel, “Phantom Images,” 33.
50.Moors, “Theories of Emotion Causation,” 645.
51.Fridlund, Human Facial Expression; also see Leys, Ascent of Affect, 252.
52.Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made. Russell and Feldman Barrett’s theories are contested from a range of perspectives. I would suggest their claims are determined by the techniques they use in their experiments—such as facial electromyography—which would intrinsically lead to a specific definition of an emotion. Ruth Leys critiques both Russell and Feldman Barrett, and goes so far to claim there “is no intellectually viable alternative to Fridlund’s position” (Ascent of Affect, 368).
53.Leys, Ascent of Affect.
54.In some of Ekman’s early work, you can find this book as the source for many of his methods, a source that he eventually replaces with self-citations. For an example of Ekman citing the Woodworth Scale for his experiments, see Ekman and Friesen, “Head and Body Cues.”
55.I’ve mentioned Sylvan Tomkins and Paul Ekman, but this paradigm also includes widely cited figures such as Antonio Damasio, Jaak Panksepp, and Joseph LeDoux.
56.These editions are as follows: Woodworth, Experimental Psychology; Woodworth and Schlosberg, Experimental Psychology, rev. ed.; and Kling and Riggs, Woodworth & Schlosberg’s Experimental Psychology.
57.Winston, “Robert Sessions Woodworth,” 391–401.
58.Admittedly, Tomkins did create the term “affect program,” which means that I’m using this phrase because of my own context of writing. While Tomkins’s work is fascinating and often different from the others I’m mentioning here, especially in Tomkins’s general opposition to the rigid positivism espoused by people like Titchener, his work is probably most important for its synthesis of the model of discrete affects with a cybernetic theory that demonstrates a great deal of continuity between his work and people like Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead—the latter being Ekman’s main rival in his legitimation of the model of universal basic emotions. See Tomkins, Affect Imagery Consciousness; Leys, Ascent of Affect ; Frank and Wilson, Silvan Tomkins Handbook.
59.Delaporte, Anatomy of the Passions, 4–5.
60.Pearl, About Faces, 11.
61.Lavater, Essays on Physiognomy, 11.
62.Lavater, 66.
63.This is central to the history of “empathy.” See Mallgrave and Ikonomou, Empathy, Form, and Space.
64.For publishing details about the books of these authors—aside from Piderit and Rudolph—see Smith, Charles Darwin, 179–213.
65.Smith, 216–18.
66.Lessing, Laocoön.
67.Darwin, Expression of the Emotions.
68.There is wide agreement that Darwin’s emotions book must be historically contextualized, but significant disagreement as to why. Jonathan Smith suggests that Darwin be situated in relation to the authors he is drawing on and differentiating himself from. Eric Korn and Paul Ekman argue that Darwin censored himself to avoid offending Victorian Christians. I think Korn and Ekman’s interpretation requires a retrojective projection of Ekman’s arguments into the original text when there’s scant evidence for these claims in the text itself. As well, this interpretation ignores Darwin’s criticism of Piderit, who does make the argument Korn and Ekman attribute to Darwin. Smith, Charles Darwin, 179–80; Korn, “How Far Down,” 23–24.
69.Darwin, Descent of Man; Fridlund, Human Facial Expression, 14–15.
70.See Piderit, Mimik und Physiognomik. Darwin’s references to Piderit are rarely discussed in anglophone scholarship except by Fridlund.
71.Smith, Charles Darwin, 202.
72.Smith, 208, 221.
73.Woodworth, Experimental Psychology, 243.
74.Woodworth, 244.
75.Piderit, Mimik und Physiognomik, 139–40; Fridlund, Human Facial Expression, 11.
76.Boring and Titchener, “A Model for the Demonstration of Facial Expression,” 471–85.
77.As described in their article, this model was initially designed to be a pedagogical tool for classroom demonstrations. As Rand B. Evans has noted, instruments intended for experimental research, for the classroom, and in undergraduate laboratory research, were often very different (“Psychological Instruments,” 322). As well, Boring and Titchener report that the initial model they designed was, in fact, faulty (“Model,” 473). And yet, even with these caveats, this model was used in actual experimental research, reported on in the Woodworth textbook. Even though the model was faulty, even though technologies designed for classroom demonstration were not often intended for laboratory research, Boring and Titchener’s model nonetheless was used in experimental work. This in fact further legitimates my claim that the instrument was deemed faulty in these experiments, if, in this case, for reasons more obvious than problems with the representation of the face.
78.Woodworth, Experimental Psychology, 247.
79.Cf. Jarzombek, Psychologizing of Modernity.
80.Rudolph, Der Ausdruck.
81.Scott, Psychology of Public Speaking, 101.
82.While Scott is not discussed in Malin’s Feeling Mediated, this book provides an excellent overview of how perspectives like Scott’s led to the development of public speaking and persuasion in American communication research.
83.Woodworth, Experimental Psychology, 248.
84.Ruckmick, “Preliminary Study of the Emotions,” 31. For more on Ruckmick, see Malin, Feeling Mediated, 157–95.
85.Feleky, “Expression of the Emotions,” 33–41.
86.Woodworth, Experimental Psychology, 251.
87.Woodworth and Schlosberg, Experimental Psychology, rev. ed., 118.
88.Woodworth and Schlosberg, 124.
89.Taussig, Defacement, 95–97; Guinness, Schizogenesis, 102–9; Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, 2:551.
90.Jones, Sigmund Freud, 2:421; Elms, “Apocryphal Freud.”
91.Feleky, Feelings and Emotions, n.p.
92.Feleky’s images are one of the most overt in my story about presuming that aesthetic education can produce liberal sympathy for the marginalized. Cf. Schuller, Biopolitics of Feeling.
93.Feleky, Feelings and Emotions, 2.
94.Feleky. All typos in this quotation are from the original.
95.See Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan & Co., 9.
96.Fijalkowski, “Question of Play Analysis.”
97.Frois-Wittmann, “Judgment of Facial Expression,” 116–17.
98.Frois-Wittmann, 117.
99.Guinness, Schizogenesis, 104.
100.Breton, Manifestos of Surrealism, 17; Guinness, Schizogenesis, 109–20.
101.Frois-Wittmann, “Judgment of Facial Expression,” 134–35. Frois-Wittmann’s own method also deviates from Woodworth—he asked observers to group faces which had, in their minds, similar expressions, though did so without specific categories guiding their groupings. Yet the scale we use today descends from Woodworth, not Frois-Wittmann’s method, thus indicating the importance of negation and not similarity in the judgment of emotion.
102.Hulin and Katz, “Frois-Wittmann Pictures,” 482–98.
103.Hulin and Katz, 495.
104.Engen, Levy, and Schlosberg, “New Series of Facial Expressions,” 264. The experiments performed with the Frois-Wittmann images were repeated with the Lightfoot images in Levy and Schlosberg, “Woodworth Scale,” 121–25.
105.Kling and Riggs, Woodworth & Schlosberg’s Experimental Psychology.
106.Leys, Ascent of Affect, 76. For more on Birdwhistell and his relation to film, see Watter, “Scrutinizing.”
107.Boucher and Ekman, “Replication of Schlosberg’s Evaluation.”
108.See Frijda, “Recognition of Emotion,” 188.
109.Leys, Ascent of Affect, 76–128.
110.Ekman and Friesen, Facial Action Coding System, 6–7.
111.Frois-Wittmann, “Judgment of Facial Expression,” 117.
112.Tomkins, “Inverse Archaeology,” 284.
113.Ekman, Emotions Revealed, 82.
114.Ekman, 94–95.
115.Ekman, 96.
3. The Prison Dynograph
1.In this chapter, I attempt to both link and differentiate psychology and psychiatry, though this points to how the boundaries of the “psy-sciences” are often difficult to define. See Rose, Inventing Our Selves.
2.Similar arguments to what I advance in this chapter can be found in Schmidgen’s Helmholtz Curves and Canales’s Tenth of a Second. These books are about, respectively, the missing time between a stimulus and response in the firing of a nerve, and the technical standardization of small temporal measurements. Neither of these books discuss Grey Walter and the contingent negative variation, which is essential in linking the measurement of “missing” time and the claims of affect theory that appear derived from James but are, in fact, part of a much broader and more contested field.
3.Federman, Holmes, and Jacob’s “Deconstructing the Psychopath” provides a critical analysis of psychopathy that shares similar themes as this chapter, but I feel this article begins from assumptions that guide, as this chapter will develop, claims like those of the anti-psychiatrists, rather than explain how this concept was developed with explicit reference to a technical mode of visibility.
4.The complete and abridged versions of Foucault’s thesis were translated into English as The History of Madness and Madness and Civilization, respectively.
5.Szasz, Myth of Mental Illness.
6.Goffman, Asylums.
7.Cooper, Psychiatry and Anti-psychiatry.
8.See Kesey, Cuckoo’s Nest; Guattari, I, Little Asylum.
9.Cooper, Psychiatry and Anti-psychiatry, 24.
10.Offner, “Electrical Properties of Tissues.”
11.Weinberg and Dallos, “Franklin F. Offner,” 190–91.
12.Dondelinger, “Electroencephalographs,” 388–89.
13.Scott, Understanding EEG, 45–61.
14.Scott, 191.
15.Barlow, Electroencephalogram, 3.
16.Scott, Understanding EEG, 120–121.
17.Which goes for other forms of brain imagining as well. See Dumit, Picturing Personhood.
18.EEG wearables are consumer technologies that allow hobbyists and artists to experiment with EEGs at home, usually with the intent of quantifying vital signs or engaging in some of the more questionable aspects of EEGs, like attempts to generate telepathy.
19.Littlefield, Instrumental Intimacy, 9.
20.Littlefield, 5.
21.For an overview of Walter’s EEG work and its relation to cybernetics, see Pickering, Cybernetic Brain, 37–89.
22.Walter et al., “Contingent Negative Variation.”
23.Scott, Understanding EEG, 171.
24.Walter et al., “Contingent Negative Variation,” 382–83.
25.Walter et al., 382–384.
26.Scott, Understanding EEG, 171.
27.Walter et al., “Contingent Negative Variation,” 380. I can find no information about this model of Dynograph. Walter had a Type T Dynograph at hand, though this Type T Dynograph had only eight channels, and the TC, as reported in the article, had sixteen channels.
28.In this chapter and the next, I use “polygraph” in its popular sense, as a synonym for “lie detector.” In some of the scientific literature from the 1960s, Offner’s technologies are often referred to as polygraphs, though this follows the etymological history of this word as “writing much” or “many writings.” This differentiation is fuzzy, however, since the Dynograph can measure the same things as a lie detector. For an example of Offner’s instruments referred to as “polygraphs,” see Guedry and Collins, Adaptation to Vestibular Disorientation, 1.
29.For a description of how the polygraph functions, see Baesler, Clearer Than Truth, 23–30.
30.Bunn, Truth Machine, 147.
31.Bunn, 141.
32.Hare, Psychopathy.
33.See Critchley, “Electrodermal Responses,” for a recent elaboration of the relations between sweating and neurological activity.
34.For an overview of the problems and potentials of electrodermal measurement in psychology and physiology, see Boucsein et al., “Publication Recommendations.”
35.Hare and Quinn, “Psychopathy and Autonomic Conditioning,” 223–35.
36.Hare and Quinn, 225.
37.Hare and Quinn, 225.
38.Hare and Quinn, 225.
39.This version of empathy relates strongly to what is termed “theory of mind,” which suggests that particular personality disorders, including psychopathy and autism, are characterized by an inability to experience “empathy,” defined as the simulation and comprehension of both oneself and others as minded. For a discussion of the “theory of mind” theory and its relation to autism, see Baron-Cohen, Mindblindness.
40.Hare and Quinn, “Psychopathy and Autonomic Conditioning,” 234.
41.Baesler, Clearer Than Truth, 26–27.
42.Hare and Quinn, “Psychopathy and Autonomic Conditioning,” 234.
43.Kittler, Discourse Networks, 206–25.
44.Joyce and Baker, “Recalling Psychology’s Past.”
45.Hare, “Electrodermal and Cardiovascular Correlates,” 122.
46.Hare, 122.
47.Leys, “How Did Fear?,” 89.
48.Schramme, “Introduction,” 17.
49.Here we can locate Canguilhem’s claims about how the abnormal and pathological precede the normal, and how the pathological is assumed to be a deficiency in some vital capacity of the human body. See his Normal and the Pathological.
50.Cooper, Psychiatry and Anti-psychiatry, 19; Szasz, Myth of Mental Illness.
51.Cleckley, Mask of Sanity.
52.Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 228.
53.Cooper, “Introduction,” 8.
54.See Illouz, Cold Intimacies and Saving the Modern Soul.
55.Westbrook, “‘Enemy of My Enemy.’”
56.Szasz, Myth of Mental Illness.
57.Szasz and Freud feature far more prominently in Harrington’s account of this history, in her excellent Mind Fixers, than any other figures mentioned above. To me, this is because Szasz’s arguments were made on grounds that could be easily refuted through medical means. The critiques of Cooper, Laing, Foucault, and Guattari, among others, were far more complex and called for a complete reinvention of society.
58.Foucault, Abnormal, 57–58. The entire passage where Foucault outlines these three types can be found on pages 44–77.
59.Hacking, Historical Ontology, 99–114.
60.James, Principles of Psychology, 2:414–15.
61.This theme leads to much broader issues related to the history and function of prison. The liberal tradition assumes prison as a space of “reformation,” a theme central to Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. But the pragmatic realities of prison, especially in the United States, rarely if ever follow this “reformist” mission and instead serve to segregate through incarceration, which is often marked by inequalities in race. See Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?, for an argument about prison abolition in this context.
62.Knight, “Empathy Circuit.”
63.Malabou, New Wounded, 3.
64.Malabou, 50.
65.Bernhardt and Singer, “Neural Basis of Empathy.”
66.Blair, Mitchell, and Blair, Psychopath.
67.For examples that associate autism, psychopathy, and borderline personality disorder through an inability to grasp interpersonal cues, including facial expression, see Baron-Cohen, Science of Evil; Decety and Moriguchi, “Empathic Brain”; Lockwood et al., “Dissecting Empathy”; Dudas et al., “Overlap.”
68.Psychopathy would be the ability to understand the expressions of others and simulate expressions, but not experience the empathetic mimesis of facial expression; autism is an inability to interpret the expressions of others; borderline personality disorder would be an overreading of facial expressions. These understandings of expression and personality are highly debated, even if they’re very common.
69.Massumi, Parables for the Virtual.
70.Among others, see Baron-Cohen, Science of Evil; Fallon, Psychopath Inside ; Kiehl, Psychopath Whisperer. See Stadler, “Empath,” for an analysis of psychopathy and empathy in the television program Hannibal.
71.Schramme, Being Amoral.
72.See, for instance, Babiak and Hare, Snakes in Suits.
73.Seltzer, Serial Killers, 12. See also Seltzer, True Crime.
74.Cf. Foucault, Discipline and Punish.
75.Lazzarato, “Immaterial Labor”; Illouz, Cold Intimacies.
76.Liu, Laws of Cool.
77.Kotsko, Why We Love Sociopaths; Bollmer, Inhuman Networks, 204–32.
78.Cf. Seltzer, Serial Killers, 135–40.
79.Babiak and Hare, Snakes in Suits.
80.Dutton, Wisdom of Psychopaths.
81.Adams, Psychopath Factory; Brons, Hegemony of Psychopathy ; Kotsko, Why We Love Sociopaths.
82.Boltanski and Chiapello, New Spirit of Capitalism; Liu, Laws of Cool.
83.Cf. Bauman, Liquid Modernity.
84.Cited in Hare, Without Conscience, 81.
85.Bollmer, Inhuman Networks.
86.See Illouz, Cold Intimacies; Liu, Laws of Cool.
87.Cleckley, Mask of Sanity, 16.
88.A close reading of Cleckley’s case studies reveals that—at least with some of his patients—his interpretations are clouded by personal biases and judgments. This is obvious in his case study of “Anna,” one of the few women Cleckley discusses.
89.Baron-Cohen, Science of Evil.
90.Blair, Mitchell, and Blair, Psychopath, 111–34.
91.Hare, Without Conscience, 194.
92.I am reminded of Georges Canguilhem’s comments on how pathology must begin with the patient’s experience of being “unwell,” which is clearly not the case here. The pathology is defined directly through the inability of the patient to consent to the authority of psychological diagnosis. See Normal and the Pathological, 115–23.
93.Hare, Psychopathy, 8.
94.Hare and Neumann, “Psychopathy.”
95.Blair, Mitchell, and Blair, Psychopath, 15.
96.Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?
97.The link between applied psychology and law, in the United States, is indebted to the efforts of Hugo Münsterberg. See Baesler, Clearer Than Truth, 31–65. This association between psychology and the police is regularly discussed, especially in the French context. See Canguilhem, “What Is Psychology?,” especially the final paragraph.
98.Morris, Wilderness of Error, 31–33, 194–99.
99.Estelle v. Smith, 451 U.S. 454 (1981), 459–60.
100.Morris’s 1988 film The Thin Blue Line was initially planned to be a study of James Grigson, and much of this explanation comes from evidence from Morris’s book Wilderness of Error. For another example of Grigson’s significance, see Federman, Holmes, and Jacob, “Deconstructing the Psychopath,” 44–45.
101.Some of these themes are discussed in Blair, Mitchell, and Blair’s The Psychopath, a book that foregrounds a more directly neuroscientific understanding of psychopathy, if one that correlates neuroscientific evidence with Hare’s checklist. Hare, Black, and Walsh’s “Psychopathy Checklist-Revised” argues that Hare’s checklist is still the standard diagnostic for legal judgment of psychopathy, not other, more technically grounded methods.
102.See Ronson, Psychopath Test.
103.Wang, Carceral Capitalism.
104.Clough, User Unconscious; Hansen, Feed-Forward.
105.Bollmer, “Pathologies of Affect.”
106.Cf. Batson, “These Things Called Empathy.”
107.Cf. Naveh, “Techniques for Emotion Detection”; Bollmer, “Automation of Empathy.”
108.Aserinsky, “Discovery of REM Sleep,” 216.
4. E-Meter Metaphysics
1.Daston and Galison, Objectivity, 115–90.
2.Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 13.
3.Cf. Kafka, Letters to Milena, 230–31.
4.Gunn, Modern Occult Rhetoric.
5.My main sources for arguments about occult philosophy in modern society are Gunn, Modern Occult Rhetoric ; and Eburne, Outsider Theory.
6.Hubbard, Dianetics, 119.
7.Cf. Eburne, Outsider Theory, 15–25.
8.For instance, see memoirs such as Leah Remini and Rebecca Paley’s Troublemaker or Jenna Miscavige Hill and Lisa Pulitzer’s Beyond Belief. Wright’s Going Clear also documents historical instances of this abuse.
9.See Cowan, “Researching Scientology.”
10.Westbrook’s Among the Scientologists is, in my opinion, by far the best book on Scientology, though it contains almost no critical engagement with the religion’s history. Urban’s Church of Scientology attempts a “serious, respectful history of the church” (12), one that admits this history but does not disqualify abuse and violence. Most historians of religion seem to approach this abuse as similar to that performed by the Catholic church, or most other religions, both in the present and in history.
11.For readers interested in Hubbard, most biographical sketches are written by authors hostile to Scientology, using the unsavory details in his personal history to invalidate him and his work. Journalist Lawrence Wright’s Going Clear, while critical, takes a nuanced perspective and contains ample details about Hubbard’s personal life and the religion. Westbrook’s Among the Scientologists barely addresses Hubbard’s biography, as contemporary Scientologists see Hubbard as a flawed figure; his biography is less important to the religion than his methods, which they view less as a matter of faith than as a pragmatic series of techniques for accessing spiritual truth. Other examples of academic research on Scientology worth examining include Urban, Church of Scientology; Lewis, Scientology ; and Lewis and Hellesøy, Handbook of Scientology, among others.
12.Eburne, Outsider Theory, 358.
13.Eburne, 358.
14.Allen, How to Build a Lie.
15.Quoted in Westbrook, Among the Scientologists, 98.
16.Quoted in Westbrook, 98.
17.Hubbard, Scientology, 7.
18.Ekelöf, “Genesis of the Wheatstone Bridge.”
19.Brain, Pulse of Modernism; Schmidgen, Helmholtz Curves.
20.For an early description of this process, see Trovillo, “A History of Lie Detection,” 109–10. For a recent description of it, see Baesler, Clearer Than Truth, 23–30.
21.Eburne, Outsider Theory; Davis, High Weirdness.
22.Eburne makes this connection explicit in Outsider Theory, 358–59.
23.Westbrook, Among the Scientologists, 18.
24.Wright, Going Clear, 111–12.
25.Christensen, “Rethinking Scientology,” 63.
26.Illouz, Saving the Modern Soul.
27.Westbrook, Among the Scientologists, 60–63.
28.Hubbard, Dianetics, 10.
29.Hubbard, 16, 381–82.
30.The subtitle of Dianetics was changed after its first edition to The Modern Science of Mental Health.
31.Whitehead, “Reasonably Fantastic,” 567–73; Westbrook, Among the Scientologists, 66.
32.Westbrook suggests that Dianetics cannot be considered a variation of psychoanalysis because the auditor “does not counsel in the traditional sense of engaging in conversation” (Among the Scientologists, 72). Yet the traditional therapeutic situation in psychoanalysis has the analyst simply listen and take notes. This is overt in some variants, in which the analyst says literally nothing, or where the analysand is prohibited from looking at the analyst.
33.This end exists in theory, but not in practice—Hubbard would eventually add numerous goals beyond “clear,” advancing along a path Scientology terms “The Bridge to Total Freedom,” which he introduced in 1965, a turn which overtly links Scientology with the occult traditions I’ll discuss later in the chapter. See Westbrook, Among the Scientologists, 27–30; Whitehead, “Reasonably Fantastic.”
34.Freud, “Analysis Terminable and Interminable”; Ferenczi, Final Contributions, 77–86.
35.Quoted in Westbrook, Among the Scientologists, 70.
36.Hubbard, Dianetics, 87–88.
37.Hubbard regularly invokes Bergson’s élan vital in the Dianetics books. See Dianetics, 280; and Science of Survival, 3.
38.Westbrook, Among the Scientologists, 73.
39.See Freud, Standard Edition, vol. 1 (1886–1899); Cf. Oliveria et al., “Jean-Martin Charcot’s Influence.”
40.Harrington, Mind Fixers.
41.Szasz, Myth of Mental Illness.
42.Which is notable in and of itself. As Harrington describes in Mind Fixers, the turn to a materialist explanation for mental illness was not just a response to Szasz, but a rejection of Freudianism.
43.Westbrook, Among the Scientologists, 66.
44.Illouz, Saving the Modern Soul, 34.
45.Leys, Trauma, 83–92.
46.Illouz, Saving the Modern Soul, 34.
47.Illouz, 34.
48.Baesler, Clearer Than Truth, 32–33.
49.Scott, The Psychology of Public Speaking, 9.
50.See Moskowitz, “Hugo Münsterberg,” 829.
51.Woodworth, “Autobiography,” 373–74. Woodworth’s tests would eventually lead to personality testing used to predict future work performance. See Thulin, “First Personality Test.”
52.Stanger, “Healing the Soldier,” 266–68.
53.Wright, Going Clear, 26–27.
54.Quoted in Westbrook, Among the Scientologists, 67. Hubbard also mentions this in Science of Survival, 291, 390.
55.Quoted in Wright, Going Clear, 61.
56.Stanger, “Healing the Soldier.”
57.Hubbard, Dianetics, iv.
58.Hubbard, vii.
59.Freud, “Note,” 228–29.
60.Freud, 230.
61.Freud, Standard Edition, vol. 6; Freud, Interpretation of Dreams.
62.Racker, Transference and Countertransference.
63.Carnegie, How to Win Friends. Blum’s Self-Help Compulsion argues that self-help has deep historical precedents, and does so to claim self-help less as a kind of laissez-faire demand of rational self-mastery (as in the case of Carnegie) than as a form of resistant social mobilization.
64.See, for instance, Carnegie, How to Develop Self-Confidence.
65.Carnegie, How to Stop Worrying.
66.Carnegie, xvi. Carnegie repeats this “fact” at least two more times in his book.
67.Hubbard, Dianetics, iv.
68.See the discussion of “dub-in” and “demon circuits” in Hubbard, Science of Survival, 77–78, or the broader chapter on “demons” in Hubbard, Dianetics, 103–10.
69.Hubbard, Dianetics, 106.
70.Hubbard does say that Dianetics “is not psychoanalysis.” Hubbard, 205.
71.Westbrook, Among the Scientologists, 67–73; Urban, Church of Scientology, 36–40.
72.Freud is mentioned in Science of Survival several times, where Hubbard remarks that the goal of “clear” is “far, far beyond anything envisioned by such investigators as Freud” (18).
73.Cf. Jay, “History of Alienation.” The reading of Auden here could also be performed through other devotees of psychoanalysis from this period, be they Georges Bataille, Herbert Marcuse, or Wilhelm Reich, the last of whom will be discussed later in the chapter. According to Jay, some of Jacques Lacan’s reinventions of Freud come from his rejection of a Freudian “wholeness” as a goal for psychoanalysis, a theme that directly parallels my use of Auden here.
74.Auden, Age of Anxiety, 11.
75.Auden, 55.
76.Didymus (W. H. Auden), “Sin in the Mirror.”
77.Illouz, Cold Intimacies, 47.
78.Jacobs, “Introduction,” xvii–xxi.
79.Hubbard, Science of Survival, vi–vii.
80.Cf. Jung, Psychology and the Occult.
81.Yates, Giordano Bruno and Rosicrucian Enlightenment.
82.Yates, Giordano Bruno, 4.
83.Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, 128, 130.
84.Westbrook, Among the Scientologists, 21.
85.Westrbrook, 86–91. Also see Hubbard, Scientology. Many popular critics presume that this science fictional aspect of Scientology is “hidden” to outsiders, but this book of Hubbard’s is publicly available. Perhaps more relevant is Westbrook’s finding that practicing Scientologists seem to not believe in this science fictional metaphysics, instead framing it as an excuse to organize the technical practices of Scientology.
86.Cf. Wright, Going Clear ; Coleman, Hacker, 53–79.
87.Hubbard, Scientology, 3.
88.Hubbard, 64.
89.Hubbard, 79.
90.A biography of Hubbard that emphasizes his con-artistry is Miller, Bare-Faced Messiah.
91.Westbrook, Among the Scientologists, 78. There are other explanations as well, though I feel these assume too much of Hubbard’s ability to simply dupe and con people. Anderson’s “A Brief History of Scientology,” for instance, even suggests that the turn to Scientology was simply because Hubbard was going through a divorce and was “desperately in need of a new project.” This explanation is far too simplistic and does little to work out the similarities and distinctions between Dianetics and Scientology.
92.Wallis, Road to Total Freedom.
93.Hubbard, Science of Survival, vi–vii.
94.Wright, Going Clear, 86
95.Westbrook, Among the Scientologists, 80–82.
96.Westbrook, 196.
97.Westbrook, 195–99.
98.Westbrook, 97.
99.For instance, see Leonard, “Scientology Debunked,” a review of Malko’s Scientology, an early attempt to debunk Hubbard. Kim Cooper’s “Very Different Tonight” also links Reich and Hubbard—along with Crowley.
100.Eburne, Outsider Theory, 358.
101.Hubbard also claims Dianetics can potentially cure cancer in Dianetics, 114.
102.Reich, Ether, God and Devil, 86–87.
103.Reich, Cancer Biopathy.
104.Reich, Ether, God and Devil, 112.
105.These numbers are from the 2015 introduction to Peter Reich’s A Book of Dreams, the memoir of Wilhelm Reich’s son, where Peter is describing the broader context that led to his father’s imprisonment and death.
106.See Sharaf, Fury on Earth.
107.For an overview of Palmer’s own beliefs, see The Chiropractor. Palmer’s religious legitimation can be found on pages 1–12 of this book.
108.Busse, Morgan, and Campbell, “Chiropractic Antivaccination Arguments.”
109.Kaptchuk and Eisenberg, “Chiropractic.”
110.Kaptchuk and Eisenberg.
111.Hubbard, Introducing the E-Meter, 103. This publication presents a pictorial history of all models of the E-Meter. Until 1957, E-Meters were branded as “Mathison Electropsychometers” and relied on vacuum tubes. The E-Meter from 1957, the Hubbard American Blue Meter, was the first “Hubbard Electrometer,” and was the first to use transistors rather than vacuum tubes.
112.Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, 27–50.
113.Westbrook, Among the Scientologists, 17–18.
114.Mathison, “Electropsychometer or Bioelectronic Instrument,” 1.
115.Mathison was following Carl Jung in developing his device. Jung was enthusiastic about the potential of “psycho-galvanometers” in psychoanalytic therapy. See Urban, Church of Scientology, 39.
116.Mathison, “Electropsychometer or Bioelectronic Instrument,” 1 (emphasis added).
117.Hubbard, Dianetics, 31.
118.Hubbard, 31.
119.Hubbard, Science of Survival, 4.
120.Tones beyond 4 are not discussed in the text of Science of Survival but are part of the “Hubbard Chart of Human Evaluation and Dianetic Processing,” included with the book and summarizing its arguments.
121.Hubbard, Dianetics, 280.
122.Hubbard, 280.
123.Hubbard, Scientology, 5.
124.Westbrook, Among the Scientologists, 82–85.
125.Hubbard, E-Meter Essentials, 1.
126.Hubbard, 5.
127.Hubbard, 11.
128.Hubbard, 12.
129.Hubbard, Scientology, 1.
130.Hubbard, 137–38.
131.Gunn, Modern Occult Rhetoric, xxiv.
132.Gunn, 34.
133.Westbrook, Among the Scientologists, 69; cf. Wallis, Road to Total Freedom, 111–13; Urban, Church of Scientology, 33–35.
134.Blum, Self-Help Compulsion.
135.Gunn, Modern Occult Rhetoric, 93.
136.Westbrook, Among the Scientologists, 31.
137.Hubbard, “Expanded ARC Straightwire Grade Process Checklist,” “Expanded Grade 0 Process Checklist,” and “Expanded Grade II Process Checklist.”
138.Hubbard, Introducing the E-Meter, 62.
139.Hubbard, 63.
140.Hubbard, 64.
141.Hubbard, 65.
142.Hubbard, E-Meter Essentials, 17.
143.Hubbard, Introducing the E-Meter, 66.
144.Hubbard, 67.
145.Hubbard, E-Meter Essentials, 21.
146.Hubbard, Introducing the E-Meter, 68.
147.Hubbard, E-Meter Essentials, 25.
148.Hubbard, 25.
149.Hubbard, 26.
150.Hubbard, Introducing the E-Meter, 69.
151.Hubbard, E-Meter Essentials, 27.
152.See Wright, Going Clear, 122–23.
153.Hubbard, E-Meter Essentials, 125.
154.Hubbard, Introducing the E-Meter, 70.
155.Hubbard, 71.
156.Hubbard, 72.
157.Hubbard, 73.
158.Scientology treats this as a technical term. See Westbrook, Among the Scientologists, 108–9.
159.Hubbard, E-Meter Essentials, 41–42.
160.Hubbard, Scientology, 113.
161.Hubbard, 114.
162.Hubbard, Book of E-Meter Drills, 11.
163.Hubbard, 84.
164.Gunn, Modern Occult Rhetoric, 169–71.
165.Compare this to the descriptions of Robert Hare’s psychopathy checklist (or PCL-R) when used in legal and carceral settings, in Hare, Black, and Walsh, “Psychopathy Checklist-Revised,” 251.
166.Barbrook and Cameron, “Californian Ideology,” 44–45.
167.Elaborations and extensions of this argument can be found in Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture and Davis, High Weirdness.
168.Cf. Boltanski and Chiapello, New Spirit of Capitalism.
169.Bollmer, Inhuman Networks.
170.Illouz, Cold Intimacies and Saving the Modern Soul.
171.Lazzarato, “Immaterial Labor”; Bauman, Liquid Modernity.
Conclusion
1.Canguilhem, “What is Psychology?,” 200.
2.Canguilhem, 212.
3.Cendrars, Moravagine, 26–27.
4.Cf. Brinkema, Forms of the Affects, xiv–xvi. On media as portals, see Cubitt, “Limen, Portal, Network Subjectivities.”
5.Otherwise, we would drift into the theology of Scientology.
6.Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 20.
7.See Sorell, Scientism.
8.Cf. Yates, Rosicrucian Enlightenment.
9.Brinkema, Forms of the Affects, xvi.
10.While Tony Sampson and Mark Hansen do not make this argument, their version of affect theory seems, to me, to be closest to this view. Eugenie Brinkema I also believe to be doing something similar, and, as I see it, it would be relatively easy to also read Sianne Ngai, Marie-Louise Angerer, and possibly even Steven Shaviro as making similar claims.
11.Bachelard, New Scientific Spirit, 13.
12.Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 56.
13.Delaporte, Chagas Disease; Feyerabend, Against Method.
14.Brennan, Transmission of Affect, 7.
15.Prinz, “Against Empathy,” 214.
16.Cf. Breithaupt, Dark Sides of Empathy, which argues that this social violence is a result of cognitive empathy.
17.Hogan, Literature and Emotion, 20. See also Gallese and Guerra, Empathic Screen.
18.See Schuller, Biopolitics of Feeling.
19.Levinas, Totality and Infinity.
20.Han, Transparency Society, 2.
21.Cf. Guinness, “Coloniser and Corpus Nullius.”
22.See Bollmer, “Empathy Machines”; Bollmer, “From Immersion to Empathy”; and Bollmer and Guinness, “Empathy and Nausea.”