3 THE PRISON DYNOGRAPH

The Offner Dynograph and the EEG

The Offner Dynograph is a scientific instrument branded for its inventor, Franklin F. Offner. In the 1930s, as a doctoral student at the University of Chicago, Offner developed a range of electrical devices used in the Chicago biophysics lab. There, Offner invented the first direct-writing oscillograph and the first differential amplifier, both regarded as foundational for most subsequent EEG devices. In the 1940s, Offner worked on the development of electroshock therapy, and especially methods to standardize electroshock processes by accounting for the differences in how bodies conduct electricity.¹⁰ After World War II, in 1956, he devised the first EEG machine to use transistors—the Offner Type R Dynograph—which would not only write brain waves but do so with a level of stability and control previously unknown.¹¹ The Dynograph was able to transduce and inscribe a wide range of embodied signals beyond the EEG, and early advertisements for the Dynograph did not even mention its use as an EEG (Figure 29). So the Dynograph is a form of EEG, but it also registers more than an EEG alone. The studies I discuss in this chapter often use not only EEG imaging but also other capacities of the Dynograph. The essential technical ability of the Dynograph (as an EEG and as a medical technology with capacities beyond the EEG), I emphasize, is how the “direct-writing” oscillograph enabled something to be seen for the first time: the capacities of the body as a highly detailed, written wave on paper, in which “events” are identified as an anticipatory change over time.

In other words, understanding emotion as a reflexive and anticipatory narration of cause and effect came about through inscription instruments related to a particular kind of EEG around 1960—even though temporal sequence is not intrinsically what an EEG measures. An EEG visualizes the activity of “pyramidal cells” as an inscribed wave. Pyramidal cells are nerve cells on the outer layer of the brain, which were some of the earliest neurons to be identified. With the EEG, electrodes are attached to the patient’s head in a standardized arrangement, though different arrangements of electrodes are used to detect different things, and methods of connecting the electrodes to the head also do different things—this combination of electrode arrangement and connection method is called a “montage,” and different montages can be used to diagnose epilepsy, coma states, and seizure disorders, as well as monitor sleep.¹² It’s not always clear what, exactly, an EEG measures (pyramidal cells are correlated with motor function, but that’s not what an EEG usually detects). Books written as introductions to the EEG, throughout its history, foreground its function in sleep research, its ability to locate epileptic tumors, and its use in differentiating epileptic seizures from nonepileptic seizures.¹³

Many of the artifacts seen on an EEG aren’t the result of brain activity, however, and there’s always been uncertainty about what an EEG actually allows one to see.¹⁴ One theoretical discussion of the EEG, from 1993, goes so far to argue the following as a general first principle to explain the relation between the EEG and the brain: “First, accepting the premise that the EEG originates from the brain (more specifically, from the cerebral cortex), the EEG is considered as a signal from a ‘black box’—that is, without regard to its generating mechanisms.”¹⁵ There’s a split between the firing of the pyramidal neurons and what an EEG actually “finds” in the brain. The signal the EEG transduces is independent of the arguments developed about its use—the explanatory model receives primacy rather than the reasons that the brain generates patterns in the first place, meaning that most interpretations of the EEG are “idealist”—the idea (the theory) precedes and determines how one understands the materiality of the body and brain. There are further problems with the EEG in the history of mental and psychiatric illness, as well. An overview of the EEG from 1976 notes that, even though the original use of the EEG was often in mental hospitals, as there are strong parallels between the history of the EEG and electroshock therapy, “patients who have psychotic illness generally show little EEG abnormality at all.”¹⁶ But accepting that the EEG is ultimately an idealist form of measurement, “EEG abnormality” presumes in advance what differentiates a normal brain and an abnormal brain, and it presumes a particular “montage” and a particular use of the EEG. Given these theoretical abstractions that guide the EEG, in the 1970s the brain of a psychotic was not something that this instrument could write. This relation between the EEG and “abnormal brains” is essential when it comes to identify “pathologies” such as psychopathy. How could this technology become a diagnostic means for identifying mental illness, identifying personality disorders?

The inscriptions of the EEG should be taken as ideological rather than material,¹⁷ providing a means for governing bodies and minds that continues today with the spread of EEG “wearables” that promise the quantification of the self.¹⁸ Melissa Littlefield calls this use of the EEG “instrumental intimacy,” which refers to how “we learn about, access, and manipulate ourselves (in this case our brains) by interfacing with machines.”¹⁹ The EEG is a particularly salient example of how, to recall the words of Gaston Bachelard, instruments can serve as theories materialized. What an EEG inscription means is interpreted through preexisting assumptions about its meaning. Its actual measurements, grounded as they are in the activity of the pyramidal cells, have little to nothing to do with what an EEG is assumed to measure. But an EEG does measure something, and the device’s ability to inscribe also shapes possible interpretations through the physical qualities of writing. When it comes to studies of psychopathy, this interface reveals something extremely specific—that EEGs are about temporality. An EEG is an assumed registration of the temporal materiality of cognition, even though there’s nothing intrinsically “in” the EEG that correlates what it registers with temporal change. So we cannot disregard the specific materiality of instruments here, and we must foreground specific variants of different kinds of EEG recorders. Some EEGs simply visualize waves on oscilloscopes, which, since the document recorded by the EEG itself vanishes after a brief amount of time, does not permit any sustained, comparative attention to detail. The EEG as a measure of temporal change emerged at a particular moment using a particular version of the EEG—the Offner Dynograph, an EEG-related technology that would literally write “brain waves” as a printout (Figure 30). The materiality of the Dynograph, as a machine to write the brain and not just visualize the brain, allowed the inscriptions of the EEG to be interpreted in a way previously impossible.

The ability to cognitively “narrate” causality, to “know” and apprehend the relation of cause and effect in one’s own actions and thoughts, to describe the anticipation of one’s actions and one’s experiences, then, would come to define personality disorders like psychopathy. Techniques that measure the body’s electricity, written by the Dynograph, be they EEGs or measurements of electrodermal response, inscribe temporal anticipation and thus frame affect as temporal prediction. Affective pathologies—as these studies were performed to identify abnormal and pathological subjects, and not “normal” brains and “normal” psyches—are consequentially defined in terms of the presence or absence of specific reflex responses about the prehension of the future. Affect, here, is about judging, understanding, and preparing for what has yet to happen, what will likely happen in the future given specific stimuli.

Anticipation and the Contingent Negative Variation

The idea of an EEG as a measurement of future anticipation descends from a very specific point—Grey Walter’s reinvention of the EEG as an instrument for measuring psychological states. Until Walter, the EEG had mostly been used to study brain waves as related to sleep and visual arousal. The failure to correlate the EEG with mental capacities was a well-known problem in early EEG research. Hans Berger, a German psychiatrist, first used the EEG to chart the neural activity of humans between 1929 and 1938. Berger used devices intended to measure the heart to discover what he termed the “alpha” wave and “beta” wave, which correspond to the firing of the pyramidal neurons when a subject’s eyes are open or closed, respectively. While the discovery of “brain waves” is significant, and there’s good reason that Berger is central to the usual history of the EEG, Melissa Littlefield notes that privileging Berger as the figure who “discovered” the EEG must ignore how his work was overlooked for a decade, at least. His defining of the brain as electrical was radical for the time, and many of the beliefs we ascribe to the EEG today—seeing it as a technology that provides access to the intimate, private thoughts in another’s brain—are indebted to spiritualist and pseudoscientific desires in achieving telepathic communication that predate both psychology and the EEG.²⁰ Even though Titchener and his followers worked to remove the taint of spiritualism from psychology in the wake of James, varied desires that guided spiritualism were influential even when this metaphysics was replaced with empirical “fact.” But the point I’m making here is that Berger —along with these spiritualistic beliefs—attributed to the EEG a technical ability to represent psychic states of consciousness and nonconsciousness. Berger was never able to make this link sufficiently, however, and the “waves” he found could not be grasped as a measurement of thought. For decades this correlation was never successfully made. This link was made by Grey Walter, who was able to do so through the Dynograph’s inscriptions of the temporality of cognition.

Walter was well known as an innovator in reinventing the possibilities of the EEG. Through his work on epilepsy, Walter would use the EEG as a method not just of measuring space in the brain (i.e., when locating a tumor, mentioned above, which was another technique Walter pioneered). He would also reinvent the EEG as a method of assessing temporal change.²¹ Walter’s identification of the “contingent negative variation,” or CNV, which is popularly termed the “expectancy wave,” reinvented how psychologists, psychiatrists, and neurologists understood the measurements of an instrument like the EEG.²² Walter’s studies, which were published in Nature in 1964, followed a general experimental pattern:

The subject is presented with a warning stimulus, often a click delivered by earphones, which is then followed by another stimulus about a second later—a train of light flashes. The subject is instructed to respond when the flashes begin by pressing a switch which turns them off. In this experiment a negative wave appears between the warning stimulus and the flashes. The wave is only seen if the subject has been asked to respond to the flashes, and the moment the flashes are extinguished the wave disappears.²³

Walter’s contingent negative variation is, explicitly, psychological. His work linked the activity of the mind and the inscriptions of the EEG, discovering a “close correlation between attentiveness, expectancy, contingent significance, operant response and the amplitude of the CNV,” a form of “cortical ‘priming’ whereby responses to associated stimuli are economically accelerated and synchronized.”²⁴ Walter was able to associate EEG readings with varied defensive reflexes—something we might refer to as “fear” or “anxiety.” At the end of his Nature article, Walter would also lay out the call to which Robert Hare would respond when he brought a Dynograph into the prison: “The application of these methods to the investigation of neuropsychiatric disorders has already shown a surprisingly close correspondence between the objective signs of cerebral expectancy and the mental state of disturbed patients.”²⁵ The measurement provided by the EEG was of a specific type of mental function—one about stimulus and, again, anticipation. Walter’s initial studies asked for his subjects to press a switch, but his later studies did not, leading to the conclusion that the expectancy wave is “not therefore dependent on motor action.”²⁶ The EEG, with the contingent negative variation, is a measurement of the ability to imagine a future, a future in which one’s possible actions have effects, even if the action never happens. We yet again see a recursion of Schopenhauer and James, though now confirmed through a machine to measure anticipation. The imagination of the future is, here, an essential part of the body’s affectivity.

Walter was using an Offner Dynograph in his discovery of the contingent negative variation. The Burden Neurological Institute in Bristol, where he worked from 1939 to 1970, and where he made many of his discoveries about the EEG, was in possession of an Offner Type T Dynograph from 1958. This Dynograph was central to Walter’s many innovations with the EEG as a tool for psychological research. In Walter’s contingent negative variation article, he writes, the effects observed “can be recorded accurately only with equipotential non-polarizable electrodes and long time-constants or directly coupled amplifiers.” His equipment included “specially prepared and selected silver-silver chloride electrodes . . . connected to an Offner type TC 16-channel recorder.”²⁷ The mere ability to use an EEG to identify cognitive change and anticipation should be understood through the foregrounding of a machine to write the actions of a brain as temporal. The Dynograph, as a widely used device to write the EEG as a printout, allowed Walter, Hare, and countless other psychologists to correlate brain waves with changes in mental states, suggesting that a “normal” function of emotional cognition is prediction, attention, anticipation. Hare’s use of this technology and experimental method would suggest that people whose brains do not function this way should stay in prison forever, because the inability to evaluate cause and effect is, Hare would conclude, a pathology that leads to violence.

The Skin of the Psychopath

Through the contingent negative variation, Walter indirectly reinvented the interpretation of everything a Dynograph could register, physiological signs that could be inscribed by other, similar technologies as well—technologies whose appeal to scientific truth was often in question. The lie detector, or “polygraph,”²⁸ for instance, indexes a number of the same signals a Dynograph can inscribe, such as changes in pulse, breathing rate, and sweating—today, the last of these is referred to as “electrodermal response” but has been termed, among other things, “galvanic skin response” or “skin conductivity,” writing through galvanometers to register these changes on a printout and, ostensibly, identify “lies.”²⁹ Throughout the twentieth century, as Geoffrey Bunn tells us in his history of the lie detector, the accuracy of the polygraph was regularly doubted, and, by mid-century, the general belief among those in law was that the “polygraph was powerless against the pathological . . . the lie detector only worked on normal people.” These pathological people included “the psychopath,” “the moron,” “the feeble-minded person,” children, and those expert in operating lie detectors.³⁰ The polygraph, unless one was a “normal” person with “normal” emotions, could not measure meaningful differences between a body’s usual physiological signs. The implication here is that a so-called psychopath was a person that could pass (or, in a sense, break) the polygraph; the polygraph could not discern between a psychopath telling the truth or a psychopath speaking lies. From its colloquial usage associated with law enforcement and the courts, a “psychopath” was a pathological term to signify a body that could lie without detection through the instrumental intimacy of a polygraph. Much like the fear that the EEG could not distinguish between normal and pathological in a mental hospital, particular pathologies of interest to law enforcement were feared to be beyond detection.

But a Dynograph, as Walter would imply in his contingent negative variation article, was a particularly powerful and accurate device. His contingent negative variation could only be observed using the most specific of medical equipment. The polygraphs employed by the police, even if they looked impressive, were relatively simple technologies. Articles in popular newspapers and magazines such as the New York Times and Popular Science from the 1930s told of school principals building their own lie detectors for use in classroom discipline, or provided instructions that detailed how the hobbyist could make their own polygraph at home.³¹ The polygraph was a relatively portable and mobile technology, fitting inside the space of a briefcase. The Dynograph, however, was relegated to the varied spaces of the lab, advertised as a device operated by people in white coats, that ever-present symbol of the doctor’s authority and expertise (Figure 31). This was especially the case with the Type R, which was a relatively large scientific instrument. Because the Dynograph was able to transduce all sorts of physiological signals, it could also allow psychologists—in collaboration with law enforcement—to study bodies through methods that reproduced those of the lie detector, but with a level of detail previously impossible. In the process, what the device measures changes: instead of a discernment between lies and truth, this new means of identifying the pathological and criminal was framed in terms of cognitive anticipation and empathy.

In the late 1960s, there was an Offner Type R Dynograph at the British Columbia Penitentiary, along with Robert Hare and his associate (and, at the time, his doctoral student), psychologist Michael Quinn. Hare and Quinn were supported by three members of the prison’s staff. Hare is currently recognized as one of the most significant researchers of psychopathy in its relatively brief history, and is responsible for devising the most popular method of diagnosing psychopathy today, the Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised, which was released in 1991 and is also referred to as the Hare PCL-R. In the late ’60s, however, Hare had yet to develop his checklist, and his book Psychopathy: Theory and Research, which would come to define much of the subsequent research and discussion of psychopathy, was about to be published.³² When Hare would use the Dynograph at the British Columbia Penitentiary, he would rely on measures also performed by the polygraph—heart rate, electrodermal response. But the epistemological context was radically different. If the lie detector “detects” by correlating spoken answers (of “yes,” of “no”) with, say, a “spike” in heart rate, respiration, and sweating, it is measuring a change that occurs in response to a lie, a lie already defined through a reductive, forced-response question-and-answer method (a method that, if one thinks back to the introduction of this book, is similar to Karl Bühler’s Ausfragemethode). Hare’s use of the Dynograph, following Walter, was a means to measure changes of anticipation, and not reaction or response, properly speaking. In shifting the measurement from response (in which a psychopath can pass the polygraph because they never provide evidence for the presence of a lie) to anticipation (in which a psychopath can be seen and known because of an absence of anticipation), Hare attempts to place into discourse physiological signs that do not exist, defining that absence as both pathological and criminal.

In one study, Hare and Quinn were studying fifty-four prisoners, some of whom had been identified as psychopathic, some of whom had not, classified based on a fifteen-item checklist administered by Quinn. This list was assumedly derived from the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, or MMPI, a version of which was the standard diagnostic for psychopathy research at the time. Hare and Quinn, using techniques similar to those of other psychopathy researchers, had connected their prisoner to their Dynograph, which, according to an advertisement from the early 1960s (Figure 32), inscribed “any physiological signal you can transduce,” be it an EEG, arterial pressure, electrocardiogram (or EKG), oxygen tension, or respiratory carbon dioxide.

The Dynograph was attached to the prisoner through sensors to detect pulse along with ones to identify changes in the electrical resistance of the skin. Heart rate and electrodermal response would provide evidence that the body’s autonomic nervous system was aroused and, assumedly, the body was producing some sort of nonconscious emotional response to a stimulus.³³ These sensors, connecting the prisoner to the Dynograph, were attached to his fingers and forehead. One of the scientists would stand by, preparing to administer an electrical shock at the right moment. We can see the continued influence of James in this basic experimental setup—in Hare’s work, what the Dynograph measures are the embodied signs that occur prior to conscious awareness of “an emotion.” Sweat conducts electricity, and even exceptionally small and delicate changes in a body’s sweating can be measured by devices that detect differences in the electrical conductance of the skin. Today, the specific meaning of electrodermal response is still questioned, given how the conduction of electricity itself has multiple factors—the mere presence or absence of sweat, measured as a change in skin conductance, may not signal all that much on its own.³⁴ Regardless, electrodermal response is often interpreted as a sign that the body is undergoing emotional changes that may otherwise be invisible, an understanding that Hare accepts and is indebted to the James-Lange theory of emotion.

My account of Hare and Quinn’s prison laboratory is based on the description of a study they coauthored and published in 1971.³⁵ The prisoner, as I mentioned above, was directly linked to the Dynograph. The shock came from a “constant-current stimulator” applied to the top of the right forearm (echoes, here, of Duchenne). The prisoner was given “stereo earphones that had been placed inside padded ear protectors of the type used around aircraft engines,” which he then had placed on his head.³⁶ Through the earphones, he heard one of three auditory tones, each of which would be ten seconds long. One tone was followed by a “pleasant” image, that of a nude woman, one of “16 colored slides of nude females, erotic value being somewhat greater than those usually found in Playboy magazine.”³⁷ These slides had been ranked by the psychologists running the study, “that is, from the least to most erotic,” to avoid any “fairly rapid habituation”³⁸ that may happen from viewing the images. The second tone was not followed with anything. The third was followed by a painful electric shock. Tones would be repeated, along with any linked image or shock. After, the prisoner would be given two packs of cigarettes and asked to keep any knowledge of the experiment to himself. Ninety minutes after his arrival, the prisoner would leave Hare and Quinn’s laboratory in the prison.

Depending on the readings of the Dynograph, along with the results of other experiments the scientists had performed, Hare and Quinn would conclude one of two things. A prisoner who is not psychopathic, who is “normal,” has learned from the shocks and images to which he had been subjected. He experiences fear upon hearing the sound that would lead to pain, as is evidenced from changes in his perspiration. A “normal” prisoner would understand which tone was associated with a naked woman, nothing, or a shock, and his body would elicit the physical response of sweat that demonstrated preparation for the shock. This preparation, this perspiration, was the signifier that revealed fear, inscribed via the mechanism of the Dynograph.

A prisoner understood as psychopathic, in accordance with the checklist administered by Quinn, would have a different physical response from those classified as “normal.” Those with psychopathy did not anticipate being shocked, the scientists concluded. Extrapolating outward from the evidence they had of electrodermal (non)response, the psychopathic prisoners would not learn or make inferences about stimulus and response, cause and effect. They would not experience fear, Hare would eventually conclude, because their brains were unable to experience a range of emotions. But the main reason they could not experience these emotions was because they could not understand causality, and thus could not reflect on the relationship between one event and another. They could not imagine the future as emerging from the association of sound and pain, and—extrapolating further—they were unable to understand the motivations of others, the effect their actions have on others. They were unable to anticipate punishment, they were unable to feel “empathy.”³⁹

Some of these larger conclusions about psychopathy are justified by other research Hare had undertaken, but this isn’t precisely what this specific study observed:

Previous theory and research . . . suggest that the psychopath’s inability to avoid punishment is related to the failure to anticipate emotionally the consequences of his behavior, a suggestion based upon clinical observation and research involving electrodermal measures. The present electrodermal results are consistent with this suggestion, but the cardiovascular results are not. It is possible, of course, that electrodermal activity is a better (or simpler) indicant of emotional arousal in conditioning paradigms than is cardiovascular activity.⁴⁰

Electrodermal response was different in the psychopathic prisoners than it was in the “normal” prisoners, but heart rate was relatively consistent—confirming similar problems with psychopathy found with other measures often used in conjunction with law, such as the polygraph, which often relies on measures of heart rate and respiration as well as electrodermal response. The lack of correlation between these different measures, which happens regularly with the polygraph, is assumed evidence for the lie detector’s failure as a means for interpreting thought.⁴¹ But with their Dynograph experiments, Hare and Quinn suggest that a lack of consonance between heart rate and sweating, perhaps, should be expected when it comes to psychopathy. They don’t rule out that this inconsistency was because of their experimental design, though they do not fault their Dynograph. Perhaps, Hare and Quinn suggest, this inconsistency was the fault of the slides of nude women, which didn’t seem to be very effective in eliciting any sort of physical response from any of the prisoners. Or, perhaps, heart rate isn’t associated in a clear way with fear—electrodermal response may be a better technique for judging the presence or absence of fear. In the end, they concluded, “it may be that the cardiovascular responses indicate that both groups of [subjects] were aware of and attentive to the stimuli and their contingencies, while the electrodermal responses reflect the fact that only the nonpsychopaths experienced anticipatory fear (in the case of shock).”⁴²

Other studies of Hare’s removed any attempt at understanding the reaction prisoners may have to “pleasurable” images. One, performed prior to the experiment recounted above, involved prisoners watching consecutive numbers through a “memory drum.” A memory drum is a relatively old psychological tool invented to revise German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus’s memory experiments, which involved the memorization of random, nonsensical syllables.⁴³ Psychologists Georg Elias Mueller and Friedrich Schumann took a common piece of laboratory equipment, a kymograph, a metal cylinder that would rotate and inscribe through a stylus, placed it on its side, and used it as a technology that would present various items that the subject of the experiment was to remember. The memory drum was, like the scale accepted by “affect program theory,” popularized in North America by Robert Woodworth’s Experimental Psychology,⁴⁴ and Hare used one as another stimulus that would result in an electrical shock. The numbers would pass by, rotating from one to twelve. At the number eight, the prisoner would receive a shock. Another experiment, which Hare coauthored a few years after his collaboration with Quinn, had pairs of prisoners taking “turns administering shocks to one another.”⁴⁵ In having prisoners shock each other, Hare could measure if one would psychologically prepare for their own “direct shock,” as well as if they had any physiological response to the “vicarious shock” that they administered to another. “Psychopathic inmates gave smaller anticipatory SC [skin conductance] responses than did other inmates,” Hare concluded, “especially when they themselves were about the receive the shock.”⁴⁶

Fear and Anticipation

What do Hare and Quinn mean by “fear”? In their research, they distinguished between different kinds of general emotional responses, responses they named pleasure and fear. They assumed these emotions were generated by soft-core pornography and electrical shocks, respectively, and could be correlated to different physical signs, signs assumed to demonstrate the existence of an emotional response, be it heart rate or sweating. Nonetheless, not all bodily responses are equivalent, and some—like heart rate—may not tell us much about the truth of the emotions when it comes to particular (psychopathic) bodies and particular (psychopathic) brains. The evidence they gathered from the Dynograph was interpreted according to the assumptions of classification they had previously accepted, which are about signs that may not be clearly visual but can be translated into visual form through the Dynograph and its method for inscribing the body’s electrical emanations.

This is, in and of itself, very different than other notions of fear that characterize research on facial expressions, for instance. Hare suggests that the emotions are about temporal judgment, about stimulus and anticipation, about understanding cause and effect—if not always about conscious understanding. Fear is about the movement of a body in relation to anticipating effects to come. There is an inherent, physiological distinction between those with psychopathy and those without, and the techniques of the lab discover how this distinction is expressed in the body. But this difference is framed in relation to an understanding of causality and temporal order. Fear is anticipation of something that could be judged as unpleasant. Fear is about preparing for the worst.

Psychopathy, then, is not just about the presence or absence of fear, but the inability to make nonconscious judgments of cause and effect, about automatically imagining something bad to happen in the future, a judgment grounded in the materiality of cognition. This understanding of the materiality of cognition is different from the version argued by Hare’s contemporaries, like Paul Ekman. Ekman assumes fear to be a discrete, photographically identified state, a facial expression. It is an affective “object” that relates to the capacities of photography to isolate and compare. Following Ekman and like-minded affect program theorists, fear is a cognitive state that exists as a reflex response, one that bridges face and brain. Fear happens after the stimulus, even if it happens before conscious awareness of “fear.” But it isn’t about anticipation, and most significantly, this fear is facialized. You can see it on the face, if you know where to look.⁴⁷ The facial expression of fear is the emotion. Ekman places us in a similar problem space to that addressed with the polygraph. Techniques for seeing discrete facial expressions permit one to “know” what another person is feeling. The polygraph, while it doesn’t focus on the face, assumes a similar linkage. The embodied reflexes of the body, as signifiers for emotion, point out moments in which a body acting and a mouth talking disagree. One can look at the polygraph printout and “know” the truth of emotional cognition. While the mind and mouth may lie, the face and body—these techniques assume—cannot. The conscious statement is secondary, but, with the proper instruments, nonconscious emotions can communicate to verify or disqualify words intentionally spoken.

With both Ekman and the polygraph, these techniques presume that the bodies observed by the psychologist are “normal.” And hence, the “problem” of psychopathy—a category in which these prior understandings of emotion do not apply. Thus there are not only some similarities between Ekman’s conclusions and Hare’s experiments but some radical distinctions too. Hare does not assume fear to be universal, as its absence is a sign of a pathological deficiency. Hare does not assume that fear can be seen on the face, but is looking for other signs that must be made visible—sweating, heart rate, brain waves—even though he does not believe a clear correlation can be made between the presence of these signs and psychopathy. The signifier of a disorder’s presence is an absence of embodied anticipation. The experience of fear, defined as an anticipatory response to a shock to come, simply does not exist for some people, people who do not and cannot understand that actions have consequences, who do not and cannot understand that stimulus leads to response. And identifying these people cannot rely on the face. Means to detect lies—be they Ekman’s understanding of facial expression as universal, be they polygraphs to detect embodied signs—simply do not work when it comes to the kind of person called “psychopathic.” The very point of Hare’s work is to identify bodies that do not or cannot experience particular states and thus label them as “deficient,” a deficiency that will keep these bodies in prison, ideally forever. As a recent, philosophical analysis of psychopathy has put it: “It might be sensible to keep [psychopaths] in custody to safeguard the public as long as they have not been treated adequately. . . . Since the outlook for actual cures for psychopaths is currently bleak, the potential length of commitment of affected people is indefinite, which obviously raises severe ethical and, again, legal issues, as it might be a practice that undermines human rights.”⁴⁸ While fear may be a norm, it is not universal—Hare’s psychopaths will never exhibit signs of fear, as long as fear is framed as anticipatory.⁴⁹ This perpetual emotional deficiency, which is not merely about an “affect program” in the brain but about the ability to conjoin a particular cognitive state with an interpretation of sequence, should keep someone in prison forever.

Anti-psychiatry and Incarceration

Hare’s understanding of psychopathic emotion coemerged with the rise of anti-psychiatry. Anti-psychiatry was grounded in the belief that mental illness is not an actual brain disease, but instead a social judgment of proper and improper conduct—to summarize the main arguments made by David Cooper and others tangentially associated with anti-psychiatry, like Thomas Szasz. And if mental illness is not an actual illness, then there is no “cure.” Schizophrenics, psychopaths, neurotics, and so on, shouldn’t be held in mental hospitals against their will, since these conditions are derived from value judgments of a society that cannot stand nonconformity, a society unwilling to let people take responsibility for their actions.⁵⁰ Hare, in some way, agrees. There is no cure for psychopathy for him. Hare disagrees on the reasons why there is no cure. Szasz and Cooper argue that there is no cure because there is no illness. Hare uses the Dynograph to argue that there is a physical, cognitive ground for psychopathy, that it can be considered a disorder linked with the materiality of the brain. Because psychopathy is both material and uncurable, then those identified as “psychopaths” should be confined, not in a mental hospital, but a prison, which is where they were “found” in the first place. The prison is where psychopaths should remain, as there is no prospect of correction for those with psychopathy. Also—to use the title of a book foundational for research on psychopathy, a book we’ll return to shortly—these bodies have a “mask of sanity” that allows them to escape being seen as “insane.”⁵¹ The role of incarceration—and its different interpretation by Hare and the anti-psychiatrists—deserves drawing out to understand the implications of Hare’s work in framing affectivity as material. In short, Hare’s turn to an instrumental definition of a personality disorder “solves” the problem posed by anti-psychiatry, a problem that frames mental illness as, to some degree, ideological rather than material. Making affect and empathy material, however, came from an instrument to visualize lack.

Anti-psychiatry was often aligned with other radical struggles of the 1960s—best seen with the Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation, which Cooper helped organize. The congress was held in the summer of 1967 in London and included a range of activism-minded participants such as, along with Cooper and Laing, cybernetician Gregory Bateson, poet Allen Ginsberg, critical theorist Herbert Marcuse, artist Carolee Schneemann, Marxist economist Paul Sweezy, Buddhist monk Thích Nhâ´ t Ha. nh, and Black Power organizer Kwame Ture (then Stokely Carmichael). Psychiatry was seen as one institutional form among many, institutions linked through their fundamental opposition to personal freedom, self-determination, and social liberation. “Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?” asks Michel Foucault, in one the most famous lines from his Discipline and Punish.⁵² Foucault’s comments were first published in 1975, echoing almost directly the arguments Cooper made a few years earlier in describing the mission of the congress, moving beyond psychology and psychiatry into the varied institutions of power populating modern life. Psychiatry, for Cooper, makes particular people into social scapegoats, which it labels “mad” and treats accordingly. This antagonism is equivalent to a much broader social structure that creates enemies by defining them as inhuman and deserving of incarceration, ensuring that those who do not conform are confined and punished until they submit. The hatred of the nonnormative guides a variety of “political facts,” facts that, for Cooper, ground most prejudice and hatred in the world by legitimating racism, greed, the destruction of the environment, the repression of sexuality, mass suicide, and mass murder.⁵³ The congress was formed to address this broader structural context that began with psychiatry to lead elsewhere, toward other issues of civil rights and social liberation.

With such a movement establishing itself against psychiatry, psychology, and their varied institutional implementations, anti-psychiatry could be grasped as a critique that took on the psy-sciences’ midcentury intimacy with institutions beyond the university, along with these sciences’ sheer power in dictating the use and cultivation of emotion in the transforming of work, family, and the self.⁵⁴ But the politics of this critique were never entirely clear or consistent. Cooper’s arguments, grounded in an existentialist Marxism, saw social liberation as its goal. But Cooper opposed psychiatry for vastly different reasons than Thomas Szasz, the most influential critic of psychiatry in the United States, who was guided by a libertarianism that saw psychiatry as a means for undermining norms of personal responsibility. The anti-psychiatric assemblage, which, with the Dialectics of Liberation Congress, achieved its closest articulation with Marxism and other overtly radical political movements, also included L. Ron Hubbard, science fiction writer and founder of the religion Scientology. Hubbard’s reasons for opposing psychology and psychiatry seem guided by personal spite, and potentially profit, more than anything else. Nonetheless, Szasz collaborated with Hubbard in the founding of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights in 1969, a major anti-psychiatry group that many consider, today, a front for Scientology. Szasz, it seems, saw his libertarian political mission of taking down psychiatry to be far more important than the specific motivations of those with whom he associated.⁵⁵

This coziness of psychology, psychiatry, and law led to one definition of mental illnesses for the purpose of incarceration. But “madness,” especially in the 1960s, because of very visible criticisms of psychiatry and psychology, could no longer be assumed divorced from technical measurements to locate mental illness within the materiality of cognition. Szasz’s arguments suggested that the real problem with psychology and psychiatry was in their inability to locate mental illness as a physical, embodied thing with an etiology to be treated by medicine.⁵⁶ For Szasz, mental illness simply did not exist because of this lack of a demonstrable physical, embodied ground. Szasz’s claims hinge on a dualism that separates mind and body. Mental illness cannot be an “illness” because it is about mind, and not body. While Cooper’s arguments against the psychiatric hospital suggested the need for a much broader social reinvention, psychology and psychiatry have generally responded to this moment with an attempt to refute Szasz. Psychology and psychiatry after Szasz responded by emphasizing how mental illness is physical, and thus can be “corrected” through pharmaceuticals and neuroscientific means of surgically correcting brains.⁵⁷

This rejoinder to Szasz is medical, and thus not the solution proposed by psychologists such as Hare, whose training did not permit the prescription of drugs or surgery to “correct.” Instead, for Hare, the writing of a Dynograph became visual evidence of neurocognitive (in)capacities in the experience of emotion, empathy, and relation. These measurements invented a new form of what Foucault, in his seminar Abnormal, termed a “human monster.” The human monster is a specific figure of psychiatric and psychological practice, an incurable individual who violates laws both social and natural, whose behavior cannot be explained through extant knowledge. Foucault contrasts the human monster with two other figures—the “incorrigible,” an “individual to be corrected,” and the “onanist,” a masturbator and sexual deviant who must speak their sexual trauma.⁵⁸ But the figure of the monster is our interest here, and why the monster is distinct from the incorrigible and the onanist: the monster cannot be corrected. When it comes to emotion and empathy, the name of this monster, the monster who cannot experience affective relations, whose deficiency is incurable, and who must therefore be confined forever in the prison, is the psychopath. Categories of people, like psychopaths, who can be identified through psychological testing but cannot be corrected by any means, medical or otherwise, permit psychology to participate in institutional practices of incarceration and confinement even when the means of physical, medical “correction” are beyond of the scope of psychological treatment, framing cognitive deficiencies as material.

Techniques of the Affect Lab thus contribute to what Ian Hacking terms “making up people,” the invention of specific kinds of people that emerge within a broader historical conjuncture.⁵⁹ This integration of the emotions into law, especially in its creation of the psychopath as a type of pathological person—a type of person who is imagined best confined in prison, else this person acts as a singularly destructive antisocial force—relies on a model that assumes emotion as preconscious, derived from James and his planchette. The type of the psychopath doesn’t require emotion to be essentially discrete, at least in terms of a few cognitive affect “programs.” But it does assume a correlation among face, body, and brain that derives from Duchenne and his face-shocking apparatus, and it does assume the necessity of making emotion visible. Most significantly, the understanding of emotion here emphasizes the capacities of the human mind to reflexively understand a relationship between cause and effect in the apprehension of intentionality and agency, reflecting on the implications of causality in the evaluation of one’s own actions. Emotion, when it comes to the psychopath, is about temporal sequence and causality, remorse and regret. We’re operating directly in the space James created when he framed consciousness as an inhibitory force that restricts nonconscious reactions and impulses until this conscious restriction becomes habitual and automatic. When it comes to Hare and psychopathy, emotion—rather than reflecting a hidden self that exists beyond consciousness—is bound together with a conscious ability to reflect, learn, and inhibit the body’s reflexes, becoming a “good citizen” that can live beyond the walls of a prison.

Hare is thus picking up the thread that James loosened with his discussion of Jesse Pomeroy, the “Boy Fiend” of Boston.⁶⁰ But while James saw Pomeroy as evidence for the need to instill good habits to repress an otherwise natural will to violence, the “kind of person” represented by Pomeroy—inquisitive, unremorseful, destructive—becomes uncurable with Hare, a permanently damaged and dangerous individual that psychology must seek out and incarcerate to protect society as such. James did not seem to fault Pomeroy for his actions. He faulted Pomeroy’s upbringing in failing to curtail his instincts. Hare, instead, would fault a cognitive inability to anticipate and reflect, an inability to learn, an inability of a brain to change, a kind of person invented by the Dynograph’s ability to inscribe the brain. Hare is, explicitly, inventing a kind of person whose brain cannot be said to be plastic, and therefore becomes the very embodiment of social evil and violence.

Decision and Indifferent Affects

Hare thus draws out the presumption that specific “pathologies” are defined by the body’s inability to experience the cognitive grounds of affective relation. Hare does not assume fear to be visible on the face, even though he does believe it to be physiological and detectable through an apparatus. Most significantly, Hare sees fear as anticipatory. Fear is not only an automatic response to a stimulus but a response to something one believes will come next. The use of photography in the foundations of affect program theory obliterates narrative sequence. A photograph of a universal facial expression assumes a continuity and stability over time, which exists regardless of narrative explanation. Hare is restoring sequence and narrative to an understanding of emotion after sequence was eliminated by the discrete photographic image. The (in)ability to perceive or narrate sequence now becomes the grounds that determine if one should remain in prison forever, or if one can be “reformed” and corrected through incarceration. The very point of Hare’s studies is to identify specific bodies that will never be reformed by prison, and, if released, will commit crimes with abandon. The psychopath, for Hare, never learns. The pedagogy of narrative sequence differentiates between monsters and the incorrigible.⁶¹

Hare’s work suggests that those with psychopathy are, in a sense, brain damaged, an instance of what philosopher Catherine Malabou calls “the new wounded.” The part of their brain that is damaged usually permits the body to experience the overflowing forms of affect that cultural theory often makes into an ontology of relation.⁶² Hare’s work has been foundational in providing evidence for the claim that “personality disorders” like psychopathy are not about cultural beliefs, flawed moral judgments, or other ideal capacities of thought. Rather, “personality” is about the brain, and is about the ability or inability of the brain to make specific “decisions.” Evidence for this inability is in the human body itself—here, in electrodermal response, if not heart rate. As Malabou notes of similar claims made by other scientists, “According to research of this type, the brain is the organ of all of our attachments. . . . Today, obscurely yet certainly, the brain appears as the privileged site of the constitution of affects.”⁶³ A neurological “decision” refers to the ability of the brain to make a specific association or perform a specific affective attachment. The inability of the brain to make a decision leads to a state in which the body appears to be indifferent or disaffected. With the brains of the “new wounded,” the neurological “apparatus remains mute” and “decision becomes a matter of indifference: Everything is just as good as everything else, so nothing is worth anything.”⁶⁴ This indifference to decision, with psychopathy, is explicitly temporal. The inability of a psychopathic brain to experience fear means that it is unable to be shocked into movement, and unable to make causal associations. It does not have an affective response where, assumedly, a “normal” brain would, which means that it does not comprehend sequence properly.

Today, the neuropsychology of psychopathy, if through imaging technologies vastly different from those by which Hare made his diagnoses, are unequivocal. Psychopaths have a “broken empathy circuit,”⁶⁵ which means that they are unable to “share the feelings of others.” Neuroscientists and neuropsychologists often define this sharing as “empathy,” which is then used to suggest that brain deficiencies (namely in the anterior insula or amygdala) tell us that people with psychopathy are unable to have affective associations with others and are unable to recognize others as possessive of emotional states.⁶⁶ Here, empathy is not a feeling, not a consciously interpreted “emotion.” It has very little to do with the aesthetic feeling-into that began its history as a concept. Empathy is now a neurological capacity that enables a relation to exist between individuals, framed in terms of a prediction of a probable response. Psychopathy, along with autism and borderline personality disorder, are all thought to emerge from a similar neurological problem by many neuropsychologists. The brain is not able to act in a specific way that enables an individual to recognize another as a full person with their own interior life—or, at least, the visual signifiers of an interior life in the form of facial expressions are not interpreted or performed correctly. Even though Hare’s work has never really been about the discrete facial expressions described in the last chapter, psychopathy, autism, and borderline personality disorder are all thought today to have something to do with the matching of facial expression with a cognitive experience of emotion.⁶⁷ Empathy, in the study of these disorders, is defined as the ability to recognize another being as having emotions and being able to judge those emotions correctly, though this recognition is not conscious and is about the affective capacity of the brain itself.⁶⁸ Above all, these “acts” of the brain are about causal associations, which necessarily reflect the laboratory practice of eliciting a conditioned response from an administered stimulus. Affect, when it comes to the skin of the psychopath, is a temporal movement of cause and effect that involves a prediction of future events. If, with photography, affect became an interpretation and classification of movement through still images, with the Dynograph it becomes the ability to interpret, narrate, and anticipate sequence.

The Psychopath as a Kind of Person

“Psychopath,” as I’ve discussed above, names a body that lacks the neurological ability to anticipate effects and experience feelings, such as fear, which are (for Hare) intrinsically anticipatory. This lack of anticipation becomes a deficiency in empathy, as a psychopath does not understand how the emotional responses of others result from their own actions. At the same time, psychopaths appear “normal” and can simulate emotional relations without feeling them. They can only be effectively “seen” through a technical means of diagnosis that charts cognitive anticipation. An inability to learn and predict is not a visible quality that can be seen on the face. Thus the necessity for a technical means for seeing cognition.

Why is this cognitive incapacity proposed to suggest some bodies are best incarcerated indefinitely? Being unable to learn from experience and being unable to anticipate the future do not seem like qualities that would warrant imprisonment. I turn now to a brief discussion of the psychopath as a kind of person, as this broader context allows us to see how, since the late 1960s, the ability to genuinely possess an interior life—or the ability to feign an interior, emotional life—has become a point of both anxiety and fascination. This also provides insight into a broader cultural use of affect as a quality of personhood, in which disaffection becomes so threatening as to deserve permanent incarceration. Like Ekman and Tomkins, who argue that the visual representation of emotion is the emotion, theories of “impersonal affect” often presume that affect is a form of emotionality that need not defer to interiority or conscious emotional experience.⁶⁹ But the psychopath as a kind of person demonstrates the limits of this understanding of affection.

Representations of psychopathy tend to focus on the so-called “dark side” of humanity, a dark side identified by psychology and by neuroscience, confirming a belief that some people are simply “evil.” Many contemporary social problems, this argument goes, can be reduced to a physiological absence of empathy.⁷⁰ Psychopathy has become an ideal figure for philosophers speculating on the role of morality in defining the human.⁷¹ Identifying psychopathy, popular nonfiction suggests, protects against deceit and manipulation in interpersonal relationships, both private and professional.⁷² Popular books compound a fascination with the “psychopathic killer” trope in popular entertainment and true crime, along with the tendency to label particular public individuals psychopaths or sociopaths due to their antisocial behavior. From a brief perusal of these many books, “we” apparently live in a world awash with psychopaths, and it’s in “our” interest to learn to protect ourselves from “them.”

Mark Seltzer’s analyses of true crime are here instructive. For Seltzer, public obsessions with serial killers relate to a broader fixation on those who represent the anonymity of the mass in modern, technological culture. The serial killer is a form of “nonpersonality” undetectable because of its everyday banality and blandness.⁷³ Specific serial killers—Ted Bundy provides an archetypal example—attract interest not only because of the exceptionalism of their acts and their total otherness to social norms, but also because of their complete lack of exceptionalism, because of their inconspicuousness, their apparent ordinarity. Serial killers represent, on one hand, the limits of an anonymous, modern, mediated life—of a life captured by statistics and information, a life where individuals are isolated, alienated, and rendered “docile” and malleable to the demands of state and capital as the social bond withers.⁷⁴ On the other hand, serial killers also represent the perfection of an emotional logic of immaterial capital, where one must feign existence as an empathetic individual who is distinct from all others to be of value.⁷⁵ The serial killer is a figure that embodies the absolute contradiction between these two trends: of a life in which one is an impersonal statistic, never taken as a “person” with a complex interior, emotional life, and of a life in which one must be emotionally intelligent, flexible, and responsive, laboring affectively in maintaining social bonds and relations while often bracketing one’s “real” feelings.⁷⁶

The psychopath occupies a similar position to Seltzer’s serial killers. It is a figure that expresses a fascination with violence, trauma, and abuse. It personifies the absolute rejection of social order, a rejection that is perversely viewed as liberatory and ideal through a libertarian politics that desires the refusal of the social contract and social bond.⁷⁷ But it is also a figure that represents the embodiment of the social bond as an impersonal, alienated mimicry that occurs without “real” feeling or “real” knowledge—a figure that is all surface and no depth.⁷⁸ The psychopath is often thought to be “at ease” in a world of temporary work arrangements, in which emotional flexibility is both a necessity and a stumbling block to success. In some popular books, including those written by Hare, such as his coauthored Snakes in Suits, which uses Hare’s past research to discuss executives and entrepreneurs,⁷⁹ psychopathy is a social threat that also provides an ideal model for subjectivity today, a model from which to glean strategies for ruthless striving at work.⁸⁰ The psychopath appears to be the quintessence of particular demands of contemporary capital because it can dissimulate and act “genuine” in the performance of emotional relations that may not internally exist.⁸¹ If capital demands we labor continuously to build flexible and fluid social relations and interpersonal connections guided by emotional “friendliness,”⁸² then the psychopath emerges as a figure of freedom from the bonds of social relations, freedom from caring for others.⁸³

This freedom from social bonds has characterized almost all modern definitions of psychopathy. Robert Linder, a psychoanalyst who, in 1944, wrote an early major work to describe psychopathy, Rebel without a Cause (which is unrelated to the film aside from the shared name), suggested that psychopaths “sparkle with the glitter of personal freedom, the checks and reins of the community are absent and there are no limits either in a physical or in a psychological sense.”⁸⁴ These limits are those of social interconnection, the meaning of which becomes confused and unclear when neoliberalism seems to both tell us of society’s lack of existence as well as require individuals to connect and network, producing the very relations that ground the social and the economic.⁸⁵ What psychopathy shows—along with the influence of a particular apparatus that inscribes emotion as a causal and temporal narrative—is how the postwar reinvention of social bonds, work, and emotion in the name of “flexibility” also made up kinds of “people” that are a response to, and a threat to, what would eventually be called “postindustrial” life.⁸⁶

While Linder’s book was one of the first attempts to describe the psychopath as a particular kind of “free” and thus antisocial person, Hare’s work, while methodologically indebted to Walter and his reinvention of the EEG, was an attempt to empirically codify claims in another book published a few years before Linder’s. This book, psychiatrist Hervey Cleckley’s The Mask of Sanity, initially published in 1941, is widely considered the ur-text of psychopathic personality disorder, providing the first major attempt to define a “psychopath” as a kind of person.⁸⁷ The psychopath, Cleckley claimed, is invisible, cannot effectively be treated, and is a threat to the very foundations of society. Based on a series of case studies, Cleckley’s work defined a profile of psychopathy that has guided both psychological and popular representations since—a profile that seems more about personality traits and behaviors that are a threat to the authority of the family than anything else, resonating with David Cooper’s dismissal of psychiatric pathology. The “freedom” explicit in Linder’s definition above is implicit in Cleckley’s. The rejection of social obligations—be they familial, be they romantic, be they work related—suggests a kind of person who does not conform to midcentury American social norms and thus is a threat to society. Cleckley’s book defines the psychopath as superficially charming and intelligent, unreliable, and untruthful or insincere. They lack clear motivation for their actions, are unable to learn from past experiences, lack symptoms of psychotic delusions or neurosis, and rarely follow a clear life plan. The psychopath’s sex life is impersonal and meaningless, and they rarely commit suicide. Perhaps most significantly, the psychopath lacks remorse or shame for their actions, cannot form affective bonds with others, and is ultimately egocentric and cannot love.⁸⁸ Hare’s formalization of Cleckley’s argument, which would guide the development of his various checklists to categorize psychopathy, was remade into an actual medical disorder by stressing issues of motivation, of learning, of a lack of a life plan, and making the ultimate physical ground of psychopathy into a neurological inability to anticipate.

Psychologists and psychiatrists continue to ascribe a similar logic to psychopathy as that proposed by Cleckley. Following Hare, the added dimension of a cognitive, material ground is always present, if with more depth than Hare was able to perform in the 1960s and ’70s. Hare’s use of the Dynograph was able to move psychopathy from a vague description of a personality type—one that was more or less a description of drifters without sustained social bonds who didn’t get married, didn’t hold down a job, and engaged in nonprocreative sex for pleasure—to a specific, technically produced quality that otherwise escaped empirical observation: an inability to cognitively anticipate a future. But this cognitive ground of anticipation, combined with the profile sketched by Cleckley, has led to the definition of this type as “evil” incarnate. Simon Baron-Cohen, a clinical neuropsychologist known for his work on autism, has argued that the neurological foundations for psychopathy be explicitly linked with a biological, material foundation for the existence of “evil.”⁸⁹ Further neurological research has worked to locate this evil as an absence in the brain—again, a form of brain damage. James Blair, Derek Mitchell, and Karina Blair, in their book The Psychopath: Emotion and the Brain,⁹⁰ claim that many of the observational traits that descend from Cleckley arise from dysfunction in the amygdala—especially the hippocampus, superior temporal sulcus, fusiform complex, anterior cingulate, and orbital frontal cortex. Once again, we see how the response to particular categories and sketches of behavior, which were made without reference to the body and its physiology, are made “scientific” by locating behavioral acts in the brain through particular technologies—technologies like the Dynograph or, today, fMRI and PET scanning devices.

The problem here—which is perhaps why Cleckley’s book has been so influential—is the sheer difficulty in identifying psychopathy in daily life and, ultimately, treating psychopathy. One way of dismissing this problem would be to follow the logic of the anti-psychiatrists—that the difficulties in identifying and treating psychopathy are because this “disorder” refers to little more than a group of behaviors that resist and refuse to conform to the logic of the family, of patriarchy, of “good citizenship” and care, but are not in and of themselves indicative of a medical disorder. The response following Hare, however, is to locate psychopathy as a form of brain damage, one that is difficult to discern because psychopaths do not appear “disordered” or exceptional. Hare has claimed that one of the biggest clinical problems for psychology and psychiatry, when it comes to psychopathy, is that psychopaths do not see themselves as “pathological,” and therefore do not seek treatment of their own volition. “Psychopaths don’t feel they have psychological or emotional problems,” he remarks, “and they see no reason to change their behavior to conform to societal standards with which they do not agree.”⁹¹

This lack of a self-reflexive ability to feel as if one is “disordered” is less important than a neurological inability to experience empathy, while nonetheless outwardly simulating a “proper” internal emotional experience.⁹² As Hare argues in his foundational clinical text on psychopathy, the 1970 book Psychopathy: Theory and Research, written around the same time as his experiments with Quinn, what defines psychopathy is a neurological inability to link particular behaviors with a particular emotional judgment: remorse. Remorse, Hare argues, differentiates psychopathy from sociopathy. The former does not cognitively experience remorse, regret, and guilt, while the latter does. While both may commit “antisocial” acts, their reasons for doing so are very different, and their ability to learn and change are completely opposed.⁹³ The inability to cognitively anticipate becomes an inability to cognitively reflect. Hare makes a psychopath a body that has no ability to imagine a future and remember a past. The ability to recognize, and thus anticipate, a particular stimulus provides evidence of learning from experience. Because one can reflect on causes and effects, this then means that one can come to regret the actions they’ve taken in the past and the effects those actions have had. Hare’s work on psychopathy develops one real argument: some people cannot and will never be able to feel this way, will never be able to live in a reflective and anticipatory temporal mode. And because of this, these people should be imprisoned—or even put to death.

Psychopathy and Execution

Hare, and many of those following him, have been explicit with the imbrication of their research with law enforcement.⁹⁴ Hare’s checklist from the 1990s, the PCL-R, which he would eventually develop out of his work from the 1960s and ’70s, is widely regarded to determine recidivism rates better than other possible measures.⁹⁵ Or, the importance of Hare’s work is in its ability to predict who, once their prison sentence is completed, will return to prison. Psychopathy is a diagnosis that suggests prison may reform some bodies, but others will never learn. The entire reason that psychopathy is even debated today is because it presumes a particular goal to psychological and psychiatric research: to predict who should be released from detention and who should be incarcerated forever. This, of course, presumes that prisons have a necessary social function—which they do not⁹⁶—and it presumes that a major function of psychology and psychiatry is its institutional support of prisons and law, a link that, also, should not be assumed.⁹⁷ The diagnosis of a personality disorder becomes that which can legitimate permanent captivity, or even the death penalty, because of emotional dissimulation and the appearance (or lack thereof) of “remorse,” qualities that are related to, but not precisely derived from, Hare’s experimental work.

In legal practice, as filmmaker Errol Morris has argued,⁹⁸ the material, neurological underpinnings of psychopathy are almost never discussed in the courtroom. Instead, law relies on a visual, lay interpretation of “remorse” that remains almost unchanged from Cleckley’s original book. Does the one on trial demonstrate remorse for their crimes? Do they appear as if they’re sorry? As if they regret their actions? The courtroom context presumes the “fact” of a materially real “illness” as established and incontrovertible. While Hare’s initial experiments occurred in a context in which psychiatric disorders were regularly questioned as mythical and imaginary, the decades since, especially in the courts, defer quickly to the judgment of psychology and psychiatry as indisputable. A psychopath is a thing, and we know it exists as a kind of person because the psychologist or psychiatrist sits on the stand of the court as an expert. Additionally, merely being able to answer any one of these questions during a criminal trial, either affirmatively or negatively, requires, from the outset, a performance of guilt by the defendant, thus undermining the very point and purpose of a democratic system of law.

One might assume that the innocent would not appear remorseful, simply because they are innocent. They cannot regret a crime they did not commit. Yet prosecutors who invoke psychopathy, prosecutors who invite expert witnesses like Hare to testify on their behalf, use this lack of remorse as visual evidence that the one on trial lacks conscience. Not demonstrating remorse, rather than a sign of innocence, is a sign that one cannot imagine going to jail because of an inability to articulate cause and effect. The assumption is that the one on trial must be guilty, evidenced by the fact that they are on trial. Their remorse—or lack thereof—only determines if prison will “reform,” or if any attempt to reform will be useless in the long run. The moment psychopathy is invoked in a courtroom means that neither guilt nor innocence can be debated.

The death penalty is an extreme extension of this logic. According to some following Hare, because psychopaths do not learn, then the world would be better with them put to death. This turn can be seen most directly in the figure of James Grigson, a Texas-based forensic psychiatrist nicknamed “Doctor Death” who testified in 165 capital trials, the majority of which ended in death sentences. Grigson’s psychiatric evaluations were central to the 1981 U.S. Supreme Court case of Estelle v. Smith. Grigson was to perform a psychiatric evaluation of Ernest Benjamin Smith, who took part in a grocery store robbery where an accomplice shot and killed a clerk, determining only if Smith was competent to stand trial. In the process of his psychiatric screening, however, Grigson also performed a broader evaluation and was brought in as a witness for the prosecution during sentencing—with his initial evaluation as that which guided his conclusions for sentencing. Here, Grigson used the term “sociopath,” meaning what is today consistently referred to with “psychopath”:

Dr. Grigson testified before the jury on direct examination: (a) that Smith “is a very severe sociopath”; (b) that “he will continue his previous behavior”; (c) that his sociopathic condition will “only get worse”; (d) that he has no “regard for another human being’s property or for their life, regardless of who it may be”; (e) that “there is no treatment, no medicine . . . that in any way at all modifies or changes this behavior”; (f) that he “is going to go ahead and commit other similar or same criminal acts if given the opportunity to do so”; and (g) that he “has no remorse or sorrow for what he has done.” Dr. Grigson, whose testimony was based on information derived from his 90-minute “mental status examination” of Smith (i.e., the examination ordered to determine Smith’s competency to stand trial), was the State’s only witness at the sentencing hearing.⁹⁹

Because of Grigson’s testimony, the court determined that Smith was to be put to death. In an appeal to the Supreme Court, this ruling was overturned in favor of Smith, following the precedent of the 1966 Miranda v. Arizona decision, as Smith was not informed that Grigson’s psychiatric evaluation would potentially contribute to sentencing. Grigson, who died in 2004, was in 1995 expelled from the APA and the Texas Society of Psychiatric Physicians for ethics violations related to his activities as an expert witness. Until his expulsion he repeatedly appeared in Texas courtrooms to argue defendants were incurable on the basis of psychopathy and would inevitably kill again, as he did in Smith’s trial. Grigson’s expulsion from psychiatry had to do with his haste in arriving at a diagnosis—as with Smith—not with the problems in the diagnoses as such.¹⁰⁰

One would expect the turn to neurology to reinvent the evidentiary means for determining psychopathy in the courtroom. Yet Hare and other psychiatrists who follow the model of Grigson have been opposed to the neurological diagnosis of psychopathy they helped create, instead arguing for the continued relevance for Hare’s PCL-R and lay, visual interpretation of remorse and empathy.¹⁰¹ For Hare, this can be attributed to how much of his income comes from teaching law enforcement and lawyers—at exceptional fees—how to identify psychopathy from visual information.¹⁰² With psychopathy, carceral capitalism¹⁰³ has combined with emotional capitalism, using psychology to extract value from bodies judged evil and necessary to confine. In the courtroom, the technical evidence once supplied by the Dynograph falls away, and we are left with qualitative checklists that sort bodies into categories, a means that presumes the correlations Hare once found with the Dynograph to be true in all circumstances, even if the actual, material evidence for cognition is not inscribed.

Psychopathy and the Ends of Empathy

Psychopathy provides a neurological basis for arguments that some people are simply “evil,” this “evil” cannot be corrected, and thus these individuals should be permanently incarcerated or sentenced to death. More broadly, the figure of the psychopath brings together several themes that guide this book as a whole—that the history of emotion in American psychology has created a problem space in which interiority has become something to be visualized and managed, which, given the sheer diversity of ways that “emotion” and “empathy” have been defined, is an exceptionally large space indeed. I want to conclude this chapter with a few speculations on why psychopathy matters as a point to stitch together some of the themes of this book before we turn, in our final chapter, to a case in which the mechanical objectivity of the Affect Lab collapses.

The first theme I want to mention takes us back to our introduction, and the broader context of why emotion matters today. If we understand the transmission and modulation of affect to describe a primary way that capitalism exploits the affective or immaterial labor of human bodies, directing and pre-empting labor prior to the conscious perception of human cognition,¹⁰⁴ then psychopathy refers to a limit point of bodies that do not labor in some sense, because these bodies do not neurologically experience “normal” emotional bonds and relations. If affect names an impersonal energetic quality through which human bodies overflow their subjective limits, becoming relationally networked with the others around them, then the psychopath becomes a major problem for theorizations of affect as a kind of social ontology.¹⁰⁵ Additionally, psychopathy becomes a figure that prevents the transmission of affect through a neurological disruption or limitation, all the while performing and acting as if a conductor of networked, affective flows. This first theme demonstrates limitations in the affective ontology assumed by many, and how those who exceed this ontology are a threat because they pass as “normal,” at least until caught by the carceral apparatus. The fear and fascination with psychopathy derives, on one hand, from the technical means that demonstrate how some bodies have a different relation to temporality, to anticipation, to remorse. On the other, it derives from a sense that some people can fake sincerity and can pretend to feel without actually caring, are able to manipulate and cajole without the guilt and anxiety that “normal” people might feel when faced with the constant, exhausting, moral quandaries of a life lived at the intersection of countless, seemingly inextricable bonds.

Much of this hinges on empathy, a quality that, as should be clear from this book thus far, is rarely defined well, be it in neuropsychology or in more humanistic and social scientific works that describe empathy as an essential part of human relational experience.¹⁰⁶ Empathy refers to, among other things, the ability to understand others as possessive of an independent mind, or the ability to mirror the emotions of others based on visual evidence from facial expression. Yet, even with its many definitions, empathy is today assumed to be a fundamental, neurological form of social connection. Psychopathy is a threat because bodies associated with it do not feel empathetic affection neurologically, even though they can simulate facial expressions and certainly do feel a range of emotions. Unlike other personality categories associated with the neurological empathy circuit, such as autism or borderline personality disorder, psychopathy can appear “normal.”

If it were not for the links between psychopathy and the carceral, most likely the “problem” of psychopathy would be fodder for popular entertainment and little else. Psychopathy would be the source of fears, which although important because it indicates how popular culture makes sense of the commodification of emotional life, would have little consequence because of the invisibility of psychopathy in daily life. Considering the juridical–psychological apparatus, along with the increasing presence of surveillance technologies designed to detect emotions,¹⁰⁷ we should nonetheless be concerned about how the liminality of emotion, the indiscernibility of emotion, is complicit with a mechanism designed to identify bodies that should be incarcerated or put to death because of a seeming duplicity and lack of remorse. Moral panics about psychopathy are less about empathy than they are about the continued inability to visualize interior, emotional experiences in an age of surveillance and neurological prediction. Contemporary capital asks us to circulate affect, to be genuine in feeling, to express emotion visibly on the face. Psychopathy is a limit point in which internal, neurological events do not conform to external performance, denying the necessity of sincerity. When it comes to the liminality of emotion, psychopathy demonstrates how this inscrutability can lead to death. And this all depends on a specific measurement that turns emotion and empathy into a cognitive judgment, prediction, and reflection on causality and sequence.

The measurements of the Dynograph—while they necessarily define emotion as temporal and causal—do not intrinsically lead to the prison. Thus one final anecdote of a Dynograph, an anecdote that orients us elsewhere, to a beyond that, once again, emerges from the suspension of conscious experience. In 1951, a graduate student at the University of Chicago, Eugene Aserinsky, was told of an exceptionally old Dynograph held in the basement of Chicago’s Abbot Memorial Hall, which housed its physiology department. Aserinsky was interested in eye movements during sleep, but he couldn’t secure grant funding for his research. He was left to improvise methods he could derive using some old, forgotten tools lingering in storage. He dragged the Dynograph from the basement of Abbot Hall to the lab on the second floor, and, in getting the Dynograph running, found that it “spontaneously spewed forth pen movements even when no subject was attached to the instrument.”¹⁰⁸ Aserinsky began to repair the Dynograph himself. He came to learn that the Dynograph he was using was, in fact, Offner’s original prototype from the Chicago biophysics lab. After fixing up the original Dynograph, Aserinsky would come to perform a range of sleep studies, discovering the “Rapid Eye Movement” period of sleep, correlating REM to dreaming.

The inscriptive capacities of the Dynograph were central in inventing the varied “discoveries” discussed in this chapter—the contingent negative variation, psychopathic anticipation, and REM sleep. And the capacities to inscribe interiority—interior feelings unable to be seen otherwise, or moments of dreaming beyond conscious experience—repeatedly turn us toward a metaphysical beyond that, despite so many attempts otherwise, has never been dismissed or eliminated. This relation between the objectivity of the machine and the metaphysics of the soul, a theme that has a perpetual and uneasy relation with all this book has described so far, is the subject of our final chapter.