2 BOOKS OF FACES

The Photography of Female Pain

Particular authors linked with beginnings of the French tradition—most specifically Duchenne—are regularly cited by contemporary figures in American psychology, such as Paul Ekman, as if the methods and arguments made today are simple refinements of those from the nineteenth century, as if an apparent historical continuity is a sufficient means to legitimate present arguments.¹⁵ Yet the shared use of photography must account for the divergence of milieus that gave rise to French experiments and American experiments, as the negotiation of these differences reveals radical breaks psychology has obfuscated in its study of facial expression. Some of these differences are obvious. The Americans were based in the university setting, with psychologists mostly studying themselves and their students—people like Gertrude Stein. Duchenne, Charcot, and Janet were mostly studying women in an asylum (Figure 6). But other differences are more subtle. Thus I first want to provide a brief discussion of Duchenne’s and Charcot’s use of photography and its relation to the documentation and visualization of female pain—pain which was never fully acknowledged as genuine even though its infliction was thought essential to guarantee the documented truth of the body and its experience.¹⁶ Duchenne and Charcot’s use of photography assumed not only a capacity of the image to visualize the otherwise invisible but, more significantly, the ability to use photography to create a comparative medical archive. As this method moved to the United States, the latter aspect of this practice was retained while the former was initially rejected, for reasons which follow the very problems that emerged in both Duchenne and Charcot’s practices—it was never clear if the bodies they recorded should be taken as “true” or genuine in their expressions and performances.

Duchenne’s images, made in collaboration with photographer Adrien Tournachon, suggest the existence of specific, immobile facial expressions that represent the emotions, even though Duchenne’s primary influence is the direct linking of expression with facial musculature.¹⁷ Duchenne made his images by pairing photography with an instrument that would shock and stimulate particular facial muscles and contort the face into relatively frozen, still expressions—something he imagined to be useful for not only the study of anatomy, but for sculpture and painting, which could use his images to replicate the passions in an anatomically correct way (Figure 7). Duchenne’s method broke the face into discrete, independent muscles, abstracting the visual to arrive at an anatomical correspondence between appearance and essence, providing evidence later used in Charles Darwin’s writings on emotion. (“No one has more carefully studied the contraction of each separate muscle, and the consequent furrows produced on the skin,” Darwin said of Duchenne. “He has also, and this is a very important service, shown which muscles are least under the separate control of the will.”)¹⁸

There have been many attempts to describe a limited set of basic emotions as existing in a broad range of contexts that predate what I describe here, arguments that in some way accept the general argument that some emotions are innate, located in the body’s neurology, and have evolutionary reasons for their existence.¹⁹ But I tend to follow the argument given by François Delaporte in his excellent study of Duchenne: “One wants to discover the history of passions and expression before Duchenne or Darwin, but one does not realize that the passions and expression did not exist then. And if they did not exist, the reason was quite simple: the brain and the face themselves did not exist.”²⁰ This may seem to be a radical and suspicious claim. But Delaporte is making an argument that logically follows Foucault on the birth of modern sexuality. Foucault positioned the modern religious, medical, and scientific management of sexuality as fundamentally productive, a power that incites subjects to speak, directing bodies and their abilities. “Sexuality” did not predate the broader technical apparatus that brought “sex” into discourse, enabling it to be directed and managed to foster and maintain the population.²¹ Delaporte is arguing that, if we today presume the face to represent the emotions in a direct way, correlating expression, emotion, and cognition, we only can do so given Duchenne’s photographic experiments.

Duchenne invented the connection between “face” and “brain” in a way that was both aesthetic and anatomical. The specific articulation of facial expression and the passions, or the articulation of individuated facial muscles with specific cognitive states, was called into being only when Duchenne shocked a few faces and took a few photographs (Figure 8). Of course, Duchenne was drawing on some precedents, on assumptions derived from physiognomy and, especially, from assumptions derived from the work of the painter Charles Le Brun (Figure 9), who saw emotional expression as exceeding the empirical sign visible on the face, dependent on the anatomy of the face. But Le Brun did not directly link anatomy with the nerves and brain. It is only with Duchenne that we have the invention of a “theatre of affects” produced using “transfigurative photography,” photography that would necessarily dis-figure the face, create a facial expression, and document it.²² The face and brain became material to be manipulated by the scientist and the artist, material to mold into ideal forms through technical means.

The photography of Duchenne emerged out of medical pathology and its gaze upon confined, “abnormal” subjects, who were employed to define the capacities of “normal” citizens living beyond the walls of the hospital. For Georges Canguilhem, “It is not paradoxical to say that the abnormal, while logically second, is existentially first.”²³ Medicine cannot operate on or treat bodies that are not already marked as disordered, unwell, pathological, and the norm is established by the “historical anteriority of the future abnormal.”²⁴ When medicine produces “knowledge” of anatomy or the mind, it does so through methods prohibited on the study of the “well” or “normal.” This anteriority of the abnormal is overt in Duchenne. His subjects comprised six different individuals, five of whom were his patients. The sixth was a young man (Figure 10), an artist who was almost never photographed through use of Duchenne’s apparatus and was allowed to simulate facial expressions. The one image of the young man being shocked was because Duchenne wanted a photograph of the only muscle the man could not voluntarily move (Figure 11). Including other images of this artist being shocked—Duchenne assures us they could have been produced—“would have unnecessarily multiplied the number of figures.”²⁵ Duchenne’s favorite model was an “old toothless man, with a thin face, whose features, without being absolutely ugly, approached ordinary triviality” (Figure 12). This old man, Duchenne tells us, had a disorder that resulted in “reduced sensation. He was suffering from a complicated anesthetic condition of the face. I was able to experiment on his face without causing him pain, to the extent that I could stimulate his individual muscles with as much precision and accuracy as if I were working with a still irritable cadaver.”²⁶ He was “of too low intelligence or too poorly motivated to produce himself the expressions that I have produced artificially on his face,” though the young man was almost fully capable of simulation.²⁷ With this old man, Duchenne was able to shock and photograph without significant concern about the pain his method might cause. With his other subjects he believed that excessive pain would produce merely a “grimace” rather than an accurate representation of muscular motion.²⁸ And Duchenne’s other subjects, beyond the old man and the artist, were women and girls.

The absence of explanation in Duchenne’s writing indicates a gendering of pathology and psychology which parallels general beliefs held at the Salpêtrière: its female patients were liars deserving of their sequestering from society, something that even can be seen in the kinds of expression Duchenne induces into his female subjects (scorn, cruelty, lustfulness, coquetry) as opposed to those of the male subjects (suffering, terror, astonishment, aggression). The sole photograph of the young man made with the apparatus, an image supposedly of “severity,” suggests an impossibility of his “natural” ability in this expression. And further, we never read similar justifications about pain and expression when it comes to Duchenne’s female subjects. His explanation of the old man’s face makes it understood: Duchenne was concerned his readers would wonder about the pain his old man was feeling when shocked repeatedly and at length. That his female subjects would potentially be experiencing pain, that their pain would lead to grimaces and not his intended expressions, was discussed in relation to how this pain would ruin the accuracy of his images. Duchenne provides an explanation as to why the men in his images weren’t being tortured by the scientist, a justification which is absent for his other subjects. We hear nothing about the pain or intelligence (or lack thereof) of Duchenne’s female subjects.

The legitimacy of seeing women’s pain, of a scientist causing women’s pain to consume it as spectacle, to generate scientific knowledge from the visual consumption of pain—these themes, implicit in Duchenne, are overt for Charcot, using visual spectacle to reveal and document what previously had escaped documentation, providing the promise of seeing what otherwise cannot be seen. Charcot would parade subjects out in an amphitheater: “In a moment I will give you a first-hand experience, so to speak, of this pain; I will help you recognize all its characteristics by presenting you five patients.”²⁹ He was, as Didi-Huberman notes, following physiologist Claude Bernard’s “scopic postulate”: “To understand how men and animals live, it is indispensable to see a great number of them die.”³⁰ To understand pain, suffering must be inflicted and seen. Nineteenth-century French medical science presumed the necessity of the spectacular consumption of death, of pain, of pathology. In Charcot’s photographic work, this pain is again circumscribed by gender: his subjects were entirely women.³¹ Neither Duchenne nor Charcot denied that their female subjects were in pain, suggesting that their expressions were deceptions. Duchenne worried that this pain would ruin his photographic archive, distorting the technologically induced expressions recorded by the camera. Charcot saw this exhibition of pain as a source for the archive, photography as “a museological authority of the sick body, the museological agency of its ‘observation’: the figurative possibility of generalizing the case into a tableau.”³² Photography was the method through which a woman’s body was made into a document—reinventing what can be known through a means which would render a body seemingly still and, perhaps just as important, making a body one among many that can be compared, contrasted, and organized by means of books that collect the body in multiple, or collect multiple bodies all performing variations of the same pose.³³

Seriality and the Objectivity of the Photographic Image

This assumption—of the necessity of photographing not just a singular individual but photographing multiple people in multiple poses—guides the use of photographic archives in psychological research in numerous contexts. The psychological use of photography occurred not because of the qualities of a single photograph to stop time but because of the abilities of serial photography to be grouped and compared. It is not so much that photography in and of itself led to experimental conclusions, but books and folios of photographs used in a comparative manner.

Duchenne’s Mécanisme de la physionomie humaine is one of the earliest examples of this approach. Not a photograph of a specific face, contorted by electrical stimulation, but many images of several faces. With the multiple volumes of Charcot’s Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière,³⁴ not an image of a specific hysteric, but many images—a practice continued by both Germans and Americans following from Duchenne and Charcot, if with notable distinctions. Duchenne’s book was intended to advance both artistic representation and anatomical knowledge. Charcot’s books were filled with photographs of women at the Salpêtrière, made for medical purposes (even if they never lost an appeal to the male gaze of the scientist). German books were of hired and trained actors, created to refine representations in the visual arts. American photos (which were often published as academic articles, not books themselves) were of the researchers who made the photos, designed to better evaluate the human capacity of judgment. Part of these changes had to do with the problem of performance, of posing, of truth or deception intended by the object of the image. While Duchenne’s images were “true” because of his apparatus—apart from the young man in his photographs, all his poses were electrically induced—Charcot’s method served to systematize the appearance of hysteria without any additional technology beyond the camera. Thus his systematization could never do away with the potential of observers to be deceived by performance. Early German and American books of faces were, from the outset, acknowledged as posed, not “natural” expressions.

We often assume photography to be objective in some way, an index of reality rather than a representation. Photography, as André Bazin memorably claimed, “embalms time” through “an impassive mechanical process.”³⁵ Yet the earliest photography almost always had problems in revealing truth without question. Collodion wet plate photography, which dominated photographic practice between 1860 to 1880 and was used to produce the images in Charcot’s Iconographie photographique, takes around fifteen minutes for an exposure.³⁶ While Duchenne’s apparatus enabled a body to remain still long enough for an exposure, this wasn’t the case for Charcot, whose subjects had to perform their own hysteria for the camera.³⁷ Other early methods for obtaining a photograph, if they did not rely on posing, required elaborate apparatuses for lighting and would often “disturb” or otherwise intervene in the “natural” state the psychologist was working to document.³⁸ Additionally, the errors produced by the physical inconsistencies of early photography produced a bleeding between the scientific and the occult. “The realm of the invisible is vast,” according to the art historian Peter Geimer, “and the demarcation line between science and nonscience, fact and artifact, was often blurry at best.”³⁹ The same could be said of the photos themselves. Early debates about the objectivity of a photographic image, as opposed to scientific drawings, often revolved around the fact that a single photograph could not stand in for an entire category, and the specific visual aspects of a photo were routinely distorted by the medium.⁴⁰ But today, the photograph, it is assumed, “reveals” what the eye cannot see and thus becomes a method for scientific study—a fact that, in nineteenth-century science, was not uniformly accepted.

This instability of photographic truth was compounded by the broader context in which these experiments were embedded. If one accepts the visible evidence of a picture as moving beyond the empirical evidence of sight, then this “beyond” drifts into the occult, never entirely subsumed as scientific fact—as was the case with James’s discussions of the “unclassified residuum.” What a photograph documents, when it came to the late 1800s and early 1900s, was never the result of an “impassive mechanical process,” to use Bazin’s words. With early photography, the lines between spirit and science remained unclear, though ensuring this distinction was necessary for further separating Geisteswissenshaften from die Psychologie. In expanding the possibilities for the empirical, photography also threatened to expand the metaphysical, and its visible evidence was not always taken as that which could be assumed “true.” Or, photography (and for that matter, Duchenne’s method) implies an inability of the empirical to grasp the essence of the emotions, and thus opens up a possible metaphysics that escapes what sensation knows on its own.

Because of this drift into the spiritual and metaphysical, American psychology had to work to eliminate any potential for the spiritualistic or occult dimensions of photography when it began to employ photography as a method. To do so, American psychologists replaced the “problem” to be solved by experimental science; James’s contemporaries were not interested in seeing beyond the empirical, at least initially. They used photography to address the German problem of aesthetic judgment and aesthetic education, the problem of the variable and multiple interpretations of judgment given by assorted observers. James’s contemporaries did not initially assume a photograph to be an objective index. While Duchenne used photography to systematize the link between face and brain in emotional expression, the American use of photography initially worked to evaluate if observers could correctly identify and judge the facial expressions performed by actors—a problem that resonates precisely with Lessing’s Hamburgische Dramaturgie and its methods for creating performance as a pedagogical development of sympathy and compassion.⁴¹ The Americans accepted that a photograph was essentially posed, that an image was closer to an artwork than a scientific document. They wanted to know if people could consistently identify facial expressions as representative of emotions, which would work to help understand the cognitive investment a spectator would have for a performance—a mission similar to the one proposed by Theodor Lipps and Edward Titchener in their discussions of empathy and judgment.⁴² The subject addressed by American psychology, initially, was disagreement about what an image and an expression represented. As we will see, this problem of disagreement was framed in different ways by different people—Was disagreement the result of the inability of the subject in a photograph to serve as a universal model of all emotions? Was it about experimental constraints (or the lack thereof)? Or simply about the fact that people interpret facial expressions in relation to a range of local norms?

By the middle of the twentieth century, however, this problem was deemed “solved,” it seems, as attention to disagreement disappears in work descending from Titchener and others in the American experimental tradition. The attempt to psychologically understand aesthetic judgment was yet again rewritten, this time in accordance with past attempts to use photography to reveal that which is otherwise invisible. The problem of multiple interpretations and judgments became an assumption about the universality (or lack thereof) of the subject of an image. The “solution” to judgment was to gradually invent a photographic archive of a person that represents all people and all expressions. This transformation, I aim to demonstrate, has epistemological problems for our present, given the widespread popularity of the psychological paradigms that it helped produce: affect program theory and the discrete “basic emotions” thought universally understood and expressed by all “normal” humans.⁴³

Mimesis, Community, and Aesthetic Judgment

In his 1931 essay “Little History of Photography,” Walter Benjamin identifies one promise of photography as visualizing “the optical unconscious,” a promise similar to other arguments about the capacity of photography to visualize the invisible. I introduce Benjamin here because he provides a striking example of how a number of French understandings of photography—as a scientific means of visualizing the invisible, classifying and comparing particular forms of expression—were revised and reimagined in relation to the German concern of aesthetic judgment as that which grounds community. This happens as the methods of Duchenne and Charcot migrated to Germany and were taken up and modified, directly and indirectly, by individuals such as the doctor and physiologist Theodor Piderit, who influenced Darwin and who produced materials that would be incorporated into American psychological experiments, and the portraitist August Sander, whose People of the 20th Century provides a massive archive of portraits divided up into seven general categories intended to create an archive of a broad range of “types” of modern German society.⁴⁴

As Benjamin discusses some potentials of photography, he seems to be describing the photographic capacity to visualize the invisible in the halting of time:

Whereas it is a commonplace that, for example, we have some idea of what is involved in the act of walking (if only in general terms), we have no idea at all what happens during the fraction of a second when a person actually takes a step. Photography, with its devices of slow motion and enlargement, reveals the secret. It is through photography that we first discover the existence of this optical unconscious, just as we discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis.⁴⁵

The photograph, Benjamin admits, reveals an unseen that exceeds the empirical. And yet the secret details revealed in the stopping of time matter not because of their revelation of the occult to the empirical, at least not completely. Benjamin tells us, in his essay “Doctrine of the Similar,” an essay that shares many of the same themes as the “Little History,” “The similarities perceived consciously—for instance, in faces—are, compared to the countless similarities perceived unconsciously or not at all, like the enormous underwater mass of an iceberg in comparison to the small tip one sees rising out of the water.”⁴⁶ Benjamin sees something of a parallel between physiognomy and photography, in the idea that similarity and likeness, be they perceived instantaneously or exposed only in a photograph, are foundational for a cosmic intertwining of human lives. This similarity and likeness—that there is a form of mimetic judgment that unites disparate individuals together—seems more akin to a Schiller-like sense of aesthetic community than to the French use of photography as a document that borders empirical science and the occult.

The role of the mystical and the occult, in Benjamin, is far more expansive than an “unseen” one that can be revealed technologically. Rather, they represent premodern forms of sociality that have waned in modern life. While likenesses may be seen in faces readily—hence the obsession physiognomy has with reading character from the face—photography rewrites the ability to see otherwise unseen similarities. Whenever Benjamin speaks of the “mimetic faculty” that sees and produces similarity, he also suggests that the role of mimesis in modern life has eroded, something related to the very idea of empathy as feeling-into another. Seeing others, training bodies to exchange glances and exchange expressions, mirroring one another—if this is a means to know and judge others, a means that enables the feeling-into others, empathizing and sympathizing with them, then photography is a potential method through which to regain a waning mimetic capacity. Benjamin memorably discusses Sander as an exemplary means to photographically generate a pedagogical, technical form to ground a renewed compassion lost in modern life, albeit a technical pedagogy that also renews an occult, astrological set of values in which people mirror not just others, but the cosmos as well. The mimetic faculty, for Benjamin, is about faces and gestures—but also about one’s place within the universe, about the ability to copy the cosmos, a faculty lost through the disenchantment of ritual in modern life. The optical unconscious is not only about seeing that which is otherwise invisible, but a way of restoring to perception the sympathetic human abilities lost in modern life.

The photograph not only stops the movement of a particular gesture; it also enables its frozen countenance to be replicated, circulated, ripped from its original context. It allows a particular motion to be broken down and become “universal.” Benjamin unintentionally provokes several important questions, questions that only become clear when contrasting his writings on photography with photography’s use in psychology: How do we understand the ability of a photograph to document, and how does this relate to the ability of a photograph to produce relation?⁴⁷ Photography, with Duchenne and Charcot, is not about a potential community, a potential relation. For these French scientists, photography permits a spectacular consumption of the bodies of others, others who become an archive that carries a pedagogy of pathological classification. Benjamin, on the other hand, sees the books of faces created by Sander as advancing a pedagogy of mimetic relation. Who gets photographed? Who sees these photographs? With Duchenne and Charcot, the subjects are mostly women, categorized as pathological, living in a hospital, photographed and observed by scientists, a means to classify and contain, with a purpose of educating medical practitioners to recognize the visible signs of emotion and madness. With Sander, the subjects are potentially anyone and everyone, seen and classified by a photographer for observation by potentially anyone and everyone, a means to classify and unite. Are photographs a method to segment, separate, rationalize, to shape and produce what Foucault would describe as the “docile bodies” of modern discipline?⁴⁸ Or are they a means for regaining a fading mimetic capacity?

What changes in the migration of photography from France to America, which has much to do with who is photographed, who takes photographs, and who looks at these photographs, is a relationship between normal, pathological, and pedagogical. Duchenne was photographing a general, normal capacity of facial expression, albeit by shocking abnormal subjects, creating images intended for researchers and artists. Charcot used photography to define the visual appearance of the abnormal, and his archive was intended for researchers. Like Sander, the Americans would use photography to define the visual appearance of the normal, the everyday, the quotidian. But instead of building an archive of many different people, representing a wide range of social positions and roles, the Americans would eventually create multiple sets of photographs of single individuals—individuals who were initially actors, but then became the researchers themselves, assuming the researcher is the very essence of a normal and universal human. They would show their photographs to the subjects of their experiments, asking them to group and arrange the images. In this reversal of who is photographed and who looks at a photograph, the Americans would eventually use their books of photography to make claims about the visual appearance of emotion that exists as a fundamental structure of all human minds. The Americans would assume themselves to be ideal men, models against which all others would be compared.

Affect Programs at Columbia University

The problem to which we now turn is one of individual interpretation, of collective similitude, of knowing that a set of images corresponds to a universal sense of judgment. As Sigrid Weigel has argued, the evidence for physical and neuronal “arousal,” such as pulse, blood pressure, and muscle contraction, inevitably require one to “rely on interpretation,” a fact that includes the interpretation of facial expression.⁴⁹ These interpretations only occur through the use of a particular technology, providing the grounds of what is seen in conjunction with what can be said about it: books of faces provide the material foundations for an exceptionally influential body of thought, often referred to as affect program theory. Affect program theory’s primary claim is that each of the “basic emotions,” which almost always include happiness, sadness, fear, anger, and disgust, has a specific, unique neural “circuit” or “signature” (or “program”) that is triggered based on a response to a particular stimulus.⁵⁰ These programs are supposed innate to human, and often animal, neurophysiology, and their existence is assumed to have some evolutionary benefit.

The extensive deployment of affect program theory, both in psychology and beyond, is a problem. The most popular source for affect program theory has, for decades now, been derived from the work of Paul Ekman and his regular collaborator, Wallace Friesen. Over the past decade or so, Ekman’s work, which has an astounding level of interdisciplinary influence, has been challenged by several of his contemporaries in psychology. Alan Fridlund, a former student and coauthor of Ekman, was one of his earliest critics. Fridlund has condemned the affect program paradigm for a foundational misreading of Darwin and a reliance on techniques of forced choice in laboratory experiments. Fridlund also found, in reviewing laboratory notes from some of their most widely cited experiments, evidence that Ekman and Friesen manipulated the published reports of their most influential findings to make claims not supported by their experiments, calling into question the empirical validity of some of their studies.⁵¹ Similar critiques have been made in the work of psychologist James A. Russell and the neuropsychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett, who have engaged in experimentally based research to undermine the claims of Ekman and other affect program theorists, using technologies like facial electromyography.⁵² Authors like Ruth Leys⁵³ have provided detailed histories that follow the research of one of Ekman’s mentors, Silvan Tomkins, and those who trailed in his wake, like Ekman and Carol Izard, demonstrating a range of issues that arise in this history, such as Ekman’s involvement in manipulating grant funding, determining which research was funded and which was not, along with a number of other questionable, normative assumptions that guided his ethnographic work on the universality of facial expression.

Rather than repeat the arguments of these authors in much detail, I now turn to a constellation surrounding psychologists Robert Sessions Woodworth and Harold Schlosberg and how they draw on and reinvent what I’ve discussed in this chapter so far. Woodworth and Schlosberg’s textbook Experimental Psychology is the source for the experimental processes later taken up by Ekman and other affect program theorists—a source that has been obscured and hidden throughout the development of affect program theory.⁵⁴ I turn to this book as it demonstrates how the American photography of posed facial expressions became codified, and it also sketches the birth of the basic emotions paradigm in experimental psychology. While there have been countless attempts to describe the basic emotions throughout history, the link among emotion, expression, and empirical study did not occur until this book claimed that the basic emotions could be determined experimentally. So I want to move further into the space that, according to François Delaporte, Duchenne worked to invent: not only did the face and brain come into being with Duchenne but the idea that there are a limited set of five to nine “basic emotions” that exist in the brain as discrete “affect programs” only came into being when American psychologists attempted to purge spiritualism from and thus reinvent the use of photography in psychological research. Basic emotions and affect programs did not exist until they were photographed and organized without recourse to a photography that revealed an occult truth hitherto unobserved, replacing the documentation of truth with aesthetic judgment.⁵⁵

Experimental Psychology, which was also referred to as the “Columbia Bible,” circulated initially in 1909 in mimeograph form at Columbia University. Its first published edition, the 1938 edition solely authored by Woodworth, and its 1954 revision, jointly authored by Woodworth and Schlosberg, together sold over sixty-seven thousand copies, making it an academic bestseller that influenced the experimental practices of several generations of psychologists. A third edition was published in 1971, revised and rewritten mostly by Schlosberg’s former colleagues at Brown University.⁵⁶ The book’s first edition was warmly reviewed by luminaries in American experimental psychology, such as Titchener’s student Edwin Boring, and it could be argued that this book was the central text in defining what a psychological experiment even was as psychology was formalized as a discipline in the United States.⁵⁷

Experimental Psychology is one of the most important texts in the formation of experimental psychology in the United States and provided a central route that techniques of German psychophysics entered—and were revised by—American psychology. It is also the specific place that the empirical description of the basic emotions was first written down and disseminated. Yet I have never seen Woodworth and Schlosberg given a prominent place in histories of emotions research, and much of the memory of their work seems to have been obliterated despite their centrality in defining American psychology. Again, this book provides the birth of the discrete emotions used by Ekman, and thus the model of affect programs more broadly; this model of emotion stems not from the work of people like Silvan Tomkins, whose massive Affect Imagery Consciousness is more often described as the origin of the affect program model.⁵⁸ Woodworth and Schlosberg’s methods were foundational for almost all affect program research, and, in examining their textbook, I demonstrate how research on facial emotions depend directly on the material capacities of books of faces and revolve around the physical aspects of bodies recorded in drawings and photographs. In doing this, the occult aspects of photography were sidelined to make the photograph not something that reveals the optical unconscious but something that provides evidence of universal emotional judgment.

The Precedents of Experimental Psychology

There are three intertwining, if relatively distinct, historical traditions that produced the range of physical books of faces used in Woodworth and Schlosberg’s research, which move from drawings and etchings of faces to photography. One tradition, the one Benjamin was interested in, is physiognomic—books of faces were published and circulated to “teach” the interpretation of character from images of faces. The second is artistic—books of facial expressions were created to help artists and actors accurately represent “the passions.” We’ve already seen how some of the above relate to both traditions. Duchenne was firmly embedded in the two. His work was both an engagement with physiognomy, providing an anatomical basis for what were previously physiognomic signs, and also a project intended to improve the abilities of artists.⁵⁹ The third is the Darwinian tradition—so often misinterpreted—that follows from Darwin’s influential 1872 book, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, a book that is itself derived from Duchenne.

Each of these traditions works to visualize and produce similarities, between human bodies, between human faces, between human and animal. Benjamin’s identification of similarity and mimesis as the ultimate pedagogical goal of photographic books of faces is particularly important. While Charcot was not particularly interested in similarity and mimesis beyond the recognition of “types” to be identified and confined, this theme, latent in Duchenne and physiognomy, becomes explicit in Darwin: facial expression is a means to identify commonalities and similarities throughout humanity that link humans with each other and with their evolutionary predecessors. But, through their combination in Woodworth and Schlosberg’s experiments, these three traditions are rationalized to limit the possibilities for similarity, constrained to a set of categories determined by negative differentiation. Or, in combining these traditions and introducing forced choice into experiments on emotion, what Woodworth and Schlosberg discovered is not that observers agree about particular, posed photographs of emotion representing specific emotional states, not that expressions of emotion are a means to unite individuals through a pedagogy of spectacular emotion, fostering empathy and compassion. Rather, observers agree on what specific facial expressions do not represent. If, for Duchenne, for Charcot, and for a broader understanding of photography writ large, the photograph is a trace that represents something’s once extant materiality, a signifier of a truth of the body documented for the first time, this is not the case for Woodworth and Schlosberg. Instead, the photograph is a comparative means of negation.

While part of a long history that descends from Ancient Greece, physiognomy achieved widespread popularity throughout nineteenth-century Europe through the work of the Zürich pastor Johann Caspar Lavater. While many editions of Lavater’s work were large, ornate, and expensive, his writings were circulated—often in pirated form—in inexpensive pamphlets and paperback editions, disseminating his belief in “a way to access the invisible internal through the external” that he saw as evidence of the agency of a divine creator.⁶⁰ Lavater distinguished between physiognomy and pathognomy. Physiognomy studies the immobile, neutral face, while pathognomy examines the muscular motions of the face that provide evidence for the passions.⁶¹ Facial expression, according to Lavater, distorts the face and makes it difficult, if not impossible to judge character (Figure 13).

Physiognomy is inherently visual and, as mentioned in the introduction, embodied in artistic practice. “The art of drawing is indispensable,” claimed Lavater, and the “physiognomist who cannot draw readily, accurately, and characteristically, will be unable to make, much less to retain, or communicate, innumerable observations.”⁶² Physiognomy is therefore intertwined with questions about the training of artists, but is somewhat distinct. The physiognomic tradition worked to remove the presence of facial emotion to approach the “truth” of character in the stillness of the face. The artistic tradition, instead, sought to improve artistic representation and, ideally, produce techniques to induce in the viewer or spectator particular emotions from a mimetic relation with an artwork.⁶³ One perspective on representation (the one we find in Lavater) could be said to be Platonic. The proper form of a representation is one that accurately depicts, through a cultivated method of sketching, the ideal interior essence of character of a person. The drawings in Lavater’s book are abstractions and caricatures. The artistic tradition, which is more Aristotelian in its emphasizing of an accurate mimetic reproduction, can be seen in the work of Charles Le Brun and a range of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century artists and scientists who followed him, the most notable of which were Sir Charles Bell and Duchenne. This also includes the Germans Theodor Piderit (Figures 14 and 15) and Heinrich Rudolph, both of whom published illustrated books or pamphlets with the goal of helping artists accurately represent facial emotions, often synthesising physiognomy with the arts.⁶⁴

Bell, Le Brun, and Piderit all relied on drawings and paintings. Duchenne’s Mécanisme de la physionomie humaine, as mentioned above, was one of the first works to rely extensively on photography. Duchenne’s book was divided up into two parts: a “scientific” section that isolated particular facial muscles, and an “aesthetic” section that reproduced works of art and other “artistic” scenarios to demonstrate how “beauty” could be achieved even with scientifically accurate facial expressions.⁶⁵ This division is one of the most interesting parts of Duchenne’s book, as it speaks to both the intertwining of art and science at his time—an intertwining that also characterizes Bell, Le Brun, and Piderit—along with a rejection of arguments like those of Lessing’s in the Laocoön, with the suggestion that beauty cannot coexist with physiological accuracy (Figure 16).⁶⁶ Duchenne’s division between scientific and aesthetic also speaks to the moment in which Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals emerged and separated out artistic representation and the physiology of emotion.

Darwin’s Expression of the Emotions is, perhaps, the most influential book of all nineteenth-century works on facial expression.⁶⁷ Darwin was operating within the space opened by Lavater, Bell, Piderit, and Duchenne, relying on evidence from their writings and the illustrations from their books. But he was also offering a critique or reinvention many of their assumptions. This instability means that Darwin’s work on facial expression is the most misread of all of those I’ve mentioned. Darwin is often invoked by affect program theorists to argue facial expressions have an evolutionary purpose. This is a misreading: Darwin suggests that facial expression of emotion is less something that has a clear evolutionary function in contemporary human life than it demonstrates humanity’s descent from animals.⁶⁸ The point of the Expression of the Emotions, which was originally drafted as an additional chapter of his Descent of Man, is to highlight continuity between humans and their evolutionary ancestors. The emphasis on facial expression is another way to emphasize this continuity, not to suggest that we have facial expressions—or even emotions—because of some current evolutionary benefit we get from expression and emotion.⁶⁹

Darwin was offering a particular critique of the artistic tradition, especially as represented by Theodor Piderit and Charles Bell.⁷⁰ Bell saw facial expression as an endowment from god, differentiating humans from animals. Through his critique of Bell, Darwin was attempting to dismiss the artistic tradition’s suggestion that the aesthetic experience produced through facial expression was a uniquely human means for producing sympathetic relation. Darwin was also attempting to reject the assumptions of Lavater because of the “unscientific” reputation of physiognomy and his employment of similar illustration strategies as Lavater.⁷¹ In fact, the limitations of photography were something Darwin was working against. The theorization of emotion Darwin offers undermines the idea of discrete emotional categories, conceptualizing emotions as blurry states that cannot be defined discretely. Despite his use of photographic illustrations, Darwin was deeply skeptical about the use of photography to document scientific truth, in part because of the stillness of the image used to capture dynamic movements.⁷² But he still saw Duchenne’s apparatus as a productive engagement with physiology, and he found some of Piderit’s descriptions of facial movements (especially those of nostril flares) to be particularly notable. Duchenne and Darwin, together, demonstrate Delaporte’s argument that the face and brain did not preexist their studies. Together, they highlight a break that engages with but completely remakes the association of character, representation, and physiology. What we get with Darwin is a critical engagement with the photographic halting of motion that works with photography as a limited medium, which must be taken skeptically as a distortion of embodied motion, not as “evidence” of what is otherwise unseen or occulted in daily life.

Classifıcation and Differentiation in Experimental Psychology

Darwin’s skeptical engagement with photography, while influential, was never completely understood by his followers. In American psychology, a misreading of Darwin provides the motivation for research on facial expression, the artistic tradition provides physical materials used in laboratory experiments, and physiognomy looms in the background as a disavowed, yet determining ancestor, in which some interiority of another can be known and judged through appearance alone. The breaks represented by Darwin and Duchenne are reconfigured and reinvented, suggesting continuity where little exists. Merely representing emotion through drawings and photographs—highlighting the “optical unconscious” of emotion—leads to the belief that the emotions are discrete because drawings and photographs are discrete. But this unseen, occulted interiority of another is rarely divulged in this work—the grounds upon which these American experiments took place did not initially assume photography to reveal something that would exceed the empirical. The spiritual and the metaphysical could not be determined through empirical means, and so were refused from the outset. Instead, the ability to organize photographs into groups—which comes from both the discreteness of the image and the ability to arrange photographs in serial, published in books, repeated across pages—creates an experimental method in which different images are conjoined to generate particular “classes” of emotion through the differentiation of facial expressions from each other. As is the case with Saussure’s semiology, emotional categories are arbitrary and differential. Yet these are not “ideal” or “ideological”—rather, these categories emerge from techniques of sorting drawings and photographs to create semiotic oppositions through material, experimental practice.

In the first edition of Experimental Psychology, Woodworth begins by suggesting Darwin claimed that emotions were “serviceable,” or “remnants . . . of practical movements” that were “directed to the securing of practical results.” But instead of interpreting this as a “remnant” from broader evolutionary descent alone, Woodworth assumes that the emotions are also vestiges from human development, and that, say, the “expression of grief in the adult is toned down from the frank crying of the infant. The vocal part of crying is a practical call for help, and the facial part was originally an adjunct to the vocal. The wide open mouth involved the muscles which depress the corners of the mouth, and this little movement remains as a sign of grief after vocal crying has been eliminated.”⁷³ Woodworth begins by assuming emotion to be both a derivation of evolution and a necessary aspect of human development—one that may be inconsequential in adult life, but helps ensure the survival of the child.

In this, Woodworth is conflating the claims of Darwin with those of Piderit, who claimed that expression has “a present utility which can be discovered without going back into individual and racial history.”⁷⁴ Piderit saw the facial residue of habitual expressions—which we refer to as crow’s feet, worry lines, and so on—as the result of the perpetual performance of specific sentiments that would become read as character.⁷⁵ While Piderit was attempting to reinvent physiognomy, reframing claims about the visual evidence of character away from some innate ideal form that in-forms the face and toward an argument about the habitual traces inscribed on the body’s appearance, he nonetheless is suggesting that the visual representation of character has some benefit (which is admittedly not evolutionary and not based in the descent of species). This conflation persists today in the psychology of the emotions. Piderit, the vast majority of whose work was never translated into English, is where we get the idea that facial expressions must have some current social value, rather than the Darwinian claim that facial expressions are remnants of evolutionary descent. Piderit is also the first source of images of faces used in psychological experiments. His 1886 book Mimik und Physiognomik included numerous line drawings of facial expressions, bridging the tradition of Lavater with questions of artistic representation. Many of Piderit’s drawings were similar to Lavater’s, though Piderit diverged from Lavater by including numerous images of the human face expressing particular emotions, with parts of the face broken up to isolate the eyes, forehead, or mouth (Figure 17).

In their 1923 article, “A Model for the Demonstration of Facial Expression,” Edwin Boring and Edward Titchener used Piderit’s drawings to create a model of the human face, comprising wood, ink, and cardboard, in which fungible, physical pieces for brows, eyes, nose, and mouth would generate a range of different facial expressions (Figures 18 and 19).⁷⁶ The combination of a technological model with a series of drawings provides the material techniques that separated eyes from brows, nose from mouth, splitting the face into a series of discrete elements that can be disassembled and recombined. We can already see a particular model of the face that, while not represented through photography, presumes from the outset a lesson of Duchenne—the parts of the face are discrete and can be separated into several limited sections. A model such as that proposed by Boring and Titchener begins by thinking of the face as if constructed by discrete units, and expression is about the arrangement of these discrete units into a set of specific gestures that can be reduced through abstraction.

If their goal was to demonstrate a universality of facial expression, an inborn (evolutionarily determined) ability to read the emotions of others, then Boring and Titchener failed dramatically.⁷⁷ In one study performed using Boring and Titchener’s model, psychologists intended to represent dismay, horror, disdain, disgust, and bewilderment—and, in a second study, suggested dismay could also be a “quizzical” expression, horror also attention, disdain also displeasure, disgust also contempt, and bewilderment also reverence. Without prompting from the scientists, the students who served as the subjects of their experiment would identify intended expressions at very low rates. Woodworth, in recounting the Boring and Titchener model, suggests that the failure of this experiment means “‘reading the emotion from the face’ amounts in large part to reading the emotion into the face,” though, he also suggests, it’s probable that Piderit’s drawings were the main problem.⁷⁸ The implications here are either that the meaning of a facial expression is a projection or that the tools themselves are faulty.

This second suggestion was deemed more likely by experimental psychologists, though the idea that emotion was read into the face, rather than from the face, was not dismissed. Psychologists admitted that their studies were about posed facial expressions, ideals that were abstractions in a lab, and not about the possibilities of universal “natural” facial expressions. They seemed to be interested in understanding if observers could identify the intent of an actor in a particular performance. The goal here was about aesthetic judgment first, and the experience of emotion second. This interest in art and performance had clear precedent—psychophysics in Germany was developed alongside “psychological aesthetics,” which saw aesthetic response as indicative of broader psychological states,⁷⁹ and, as I’ve been suggesting throughout this book, was part of the broader German quest for the “aesthetic state,” of an emotional sociability produced through shared sensation. Theodor Lipps had already begun to conflate aesthetic judgment with emotional community and communication. Similar conflations were clearly happening in these psychological experiments, especially whenever the legitimating function of Darwin (and Piderit) served to suggest that something more fundamental was at stake in the judgment of facial expression.

Rather than admit that people project emotions onto facial expressions, methods had to be refined. To solve the problem of Piderit’s drawings, experiments were conducted using images from another German book of facial expressions intended for the training of artists, Heinrich Rudolph’s Der Ausdruck der Gemütsbewegungen des Menschen, which included hundreds of photographic reproductions of a bearded actor simulating a range of expressions (Figure 20) along with drawings of faces derived from these images (Figure 21).⁸⁰ Rudolph’s book was relatively well known in the United States. Walter Dill Scott, a professor of psychology who ran the psychological laboratory at Northwestern, another student of Wundt and one of the first Americans to apply experimental psychology to advertising and public speaking, included in his 1906 book The Psychology of Public Speaking a list of “the best works on expressions of emotions.” This list included texts by Wundt, James, Darwin’s Expression of the Emotions, a book by Herbert Spencer, and—alongside these works still considered foundational for psychology today—Rudolph’s book, for which Scott included a relatively lengthy description:

Several authors have attempted to indicate the exact method of expressing scores of emotions. Ordinarily such work is inaccurate and misleading. Among the best of such attempts is an atlas with 680 heads, each expressing a different emotional condition, together with the explanatory text . . . by Heinrich Rudolph. . . . This book is in German, and the 680 heads, all of the same man, are all labelled. The reader who does not know German will usually have no trouble in understanding what emotion is intended.⁸¹

The purpose of Scott’s book was to develop a model that applied the claims of experimental psychology to advertising and public speaking, a model for persuasion that could influence others.⁸²

Even though Scott found Rudolph’s photos to be obvious and thus persuasive, experiments performed with Rudolph’s images, as was the case with Boring and Titchener’s model, found a very low agreement on just what emotions these images were supposed to represent.⁸³ This was, perhaps, because of the images themselves—or at least that was the argument offered by a number of those engaging with the Rudolph images. The methods were, yet again, at fault. As University of Iowa psychologist Christian A. Ruckmick argued dismissively, “The collections of facial expressions so far published and available for general use are made up of line drawings of a heavily bearded face that was obviously ‘touched up’ by some artist.” Ruckmick, who apparently only had access to Rudolph’s drawings, thus created his own set of images—of a female student with acting experience—in order “to see what range of expression we could obtain without such accentuating accessories as a moustache and beard”⁸⁴ (Figure 22). At Columbia, the psychologist Antoinette M. Feleky produced a similar archive of faces as Ruckmick (Figures 23 and 24). Using herself (referred to as A. F.) as her subject in 86 photographs, she asked 100 observers to label her images as expressing a particular emotion from a list of 110 possibilities.⁸⁵ Feleky’s image set was by far the most sophisticated and standardized of all of those used to that point. And it was the first in which the psychologist used their own face as the model for all emotions.

In the first edition of Experimental Psychology, Woodworth tells a story of gradual refinement in empirical studies of facial emotion, both in terms of the material used in experiments and in terms of the general boundaries of empirical study. In the revised edition, Woodworth and Schlosberg claim that the first edition recounted how Woodworth, using data from Feleky’s study, was able to limit emotions to six categories and would then account for a range of “near misses” or inconsistencies in naming. This is a distortion. In the first edition, Woodworth’s six categories were presented as a hypothetical grouping in a table, not as a settled fact. His categories, while derived from gradually simplifying Feleky’s 110 emotions to 6, worked consistently with data from a range of prior studies, such as Ruckmick’s.⁸⁶ In the revised edition, this tentative hypothesis became the following:

After some trial and error, [Woodworth] found the following scale to be satisfactory:

I. Love, Happiness, Mirth

II. Surprise

III. Fear, Suffering

IV. Anger, Determination

V. Disgust

VI. Contempt

The scale was satisfactory in that a pose which most [observers] judged to be Fear might seem to others to represent a neighboring step, as Surprise or Anger, but was rarely called anything as remote as Love or Disgust.⁸⁷

There’s some heavy lifting being accomplished with the word “satisfactory.” The Woodworth scale—which, for anyone acquainted with the “basic emotions” of the affect program theorists, should be familiar—was constructed after the fact. It was designed as a measure that, to Woodworth, sufficiently described past findings of psychologists such as Ruckmick and Feleky. But more significantly, it is not a measure of homology or association. It is not a description of what photographs represent, it is not a description of basic emotions, it is not a scale of natural kinds. It is intended “to say how far apart two different expressions are.”⁸⁸ In Experimental Psychology, empirical studies of facial expression identify similarity through negation—the posed images of love, happiness, or mirth are grouped together because those images were not interpreted as belonging to one of the other general categories, not because people identified “happy” faces as being happy. These categories are less about which images belong in a particular category than which images do not belong.

The creation of the Woodworth scale reveals several important historical breaks, which come from both Feleky’s explanation of her images and Woodworth’s revision of Feleky’s project. We can see how the subject in the photographs has completely changed. With the books of Duchenne, Charcot, and Rudolph, with Ruckmick’s photo set, we have actors and confined, pathological, and abnormal individuals—people assumed to be deceptive because of gender, because of profession, because of pathology, or because of a combination of these factors. Duchenne’s most famous images, of his old man, appear to be an exception, though this old man is still a “pathological” subject under medical care. Otherwise, Duchenne’s other subjects were women from the Salpêtrière and a male actor. With Rudolph’s book, we have one individual—a male actor. With Ruckmick’s photos, we have a female student with acting experience. This changes with Feleky’s images, though not completely. With Feleky’s image set, we have the researcher, a woman, who performed her research while a graduate student at Columbia, made into a scientific scale by the male faculty members of her department. And yet even though the researcher now presumes herself to be the ideal human subject to represent all emotions, problems of acting and of men gazing at photos of women’s faces still permeate the entire study of facial expression from its outset in American experimental psychology.

There’s an uneasy balance between questions of the falsity of theatrical performance and the anxieties encapsulated by Schopenhauer’s misogyny, which presumed women to be innate actors, abusing their capacity of duplicity to elicit sympathy and kindness.⁸⁹ It also seems that American psychology, intentionally or not, presumed that famous Freudian question first stated around the same time. As Freud wrote in a 1925 letter to Marie Bonaparte, this question “has never been answered and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul,” the question, “‘What does a woman want?’”⁹⁰ Wanting to know what another is feeling initially appears as a question about art, about the ability to feel-into a painting, or feeling-into performers on a stage. But in its refinement, it becomes about men trying to feel-into and know what women are feeling, mostly examining their own students.

Feleky’s images were often constructed through the imagining of specific events, and often responses to particular aesthetic stimuli, such as a specific song or a line of poetry (Figure 25). The point was not so much to induce that emotion in the viewer, but to see if the viewer could correctly identify the emotion Feleky intended. The presumption is not that this identification has anything to do with the specific subject documented in the photo. Rather, Feleky’s images assume that she can represent and experience all emotions, and that her observers will be able to understand what these emotions are. With Feleky’s photos, the idea of judging images moves away from the specificity of subjective evaluation to an assumed universality produced in the construction of an experiment. Subjective difference becomes a problem to be solved through the invention of an artificial technology to capture judgment. Feleky herself explains that her photographic work should “bring out clearly and prove the existence of a phenomena known as prejudice” and thus “should be of value to all those who are interested in the human individual, to the physician, the lawyer, the social worker, etc.”⁹¹ This is a particularly strange claim given the fact that Feleky is the only person photographed in her work. Thus she’s claiming that her face, in substituting for all others, can serve to undermine a logic of prejudicial judgment, permitting an empathetic relation to be fostered and cultivated. Emotional projection is reinvented, no longer about an artistic effect produced through visual representation or through dramaturgy, but a universal capacity possible given the proper context.⁹² While Benjamin described the photography of August Sander as a “physiognomic gallery” that could rekindle the mimetic faculty, part of this was a result of how Sander was photographing an exceptionally broad range of “types” found throughout German society. Even though Sander did group his photographs into types, Benjamin’s interpretation of these photos emphasized their specificity and detail rather than their categorizations. Feleky, on the other hand, has one subject, herself, that posits to become all subjects, all bodies, all categories.

Finally, we can note that, throughout, what is at stake here is disagreement and difference, not agreement and identity, not mimesis and collectivity through empathy. Even though Feleky presumed a neutrality and universality to her images, and believed that her research demonstrated a high agreement among those looking at her images, this universality could not be sufficiently demonstrated in empirical study. Hence Woodworth’s reinvention of Feleky’s experiments, reducing possible emotions from over one hundred to only six. Regardless of her intent, Feleky’s photographs—and Woodworth’s rewriting of her research—point to a radical change in what these studies were supposed to find.

Universality and the Reinvention of Performance

The experiments of Titchener, Boring, Ruckmick, and Woodworth seem very much indebted to a problem which descended from Schiller and Lessing—How do we know an audience interprets what a performer intends correctly? In some ways, this connection to Lessing’s arguments is overt—Feleky, for instance, begins her 1922 book, Feelings and Emotions, by describing a moment in which she is, quite literally, interrupted while reading a biography of Lessing.⁹³ Feleky’s divergence from Lessing is almost reflexively emphasized in her account of interrupted reading:

On Dec. 17, 1911, about 4 o’clock in the afternoon, I was sitting comfortably in my cosy apartment reading Rolleston’s Life of Lessing when, all of a sudden, I was disturbed by loud cries in the street. Rising from my mission-stained chair, I walked toward the window, drew aside the lace curtains, and looked out. Two men in the street were shouting frantically “Extra! Extra! War with Russia!” . . . I went back to the perusal of my book, but the cries of the two men haunted me. . . . Soon I was compelled to put my book aside, and allow my imagination free sway. I saw vivid images of battles soldiers—nurses—gunpowder etc. I also thought of the Seven-Years’ War mentioned in the story of Lessing’s life. . . . A kind of fear and horror went through my being when I saw the mutilated soldiers of my imagination.⁹⁴

If Lessing was interested in the simulation of emotion in a theatrical performance to generate “real” emotional bonding in the audience, or the inability of a sculpture to represent an emotion—in which simulation leads to the real thing, or artistic constraints prevent feeling from happening—Feleky literally puts down this historical understanding of art and emotion to turn toward her own feelings, which project and feel-into a past that she imagines in her mind. She turns away from feeling-into a work toward feeling-into her own imagined memory of others, a turn Titchener also makes when he begins to describe Einfühlung as motor empathy for his own memories. But, as well, Feleky’s narrative here initiates an understanding of empathy that is, ideally, universal and without specific embodied histories. Lessing’s writings, which still value emotional experience, are almost always about the limits that prohibit the transmission of genuine feeling from one to another, which thus must be rectified through artificial means, through technique. Feleky’s ability to emotionally feel-into images provoked by newspaper vendors, to feel-into the histories described in her reading, to feel-into imagined (and yet “real”) surgeons, soldiers, nurses—this seems to be a moment in which psychology ceases its interest in the specific reactions audiences have to a performance in favor of a pedagogical understanding of facial expression as a universal interface of humanity.

And yet Feleky could not become this “universal” subject in the eyes of her contemporaries. In 1930, a French doctoral student in psychology at Princeton, Jean Frois-Wittmann, published an article derived from his PhD research, “The Judgment of Facial Expression,” for which he created a series of photographs of himself that, implicitly, follow the method Feleky pioneered (Figure 26). Frois-Wittmann is an interesting figure in this entire history.⁹⁵ The cousin of Pierre Janet, Frois-Wittmann enrolled in his youth at L’École des Beaux-Arts de Paris in the studio of Luc-Olivier Merson and was a member of the Surrealists. After World War I, during which he served as a medic, he began graduate study at Princeton and started practicing psychoanalysis in the United States in 1926. After the completion of his PhD in 1929, he returned to France and wrote about the relation between psychoanalysis and art, the only Surrealist to publish in the Revue française de psychanalyse, perhaps one of the earliest explicit links between surrealism and psychoanalysis beyond those published in La Révolution surréaliste.⁹⁶ Frois-Wittmann even appears in some of Freud’s home movies, taken in the summer of 1930 (Figure 27).

Frois-Wittmann tells us that his photos of emotions are the culmination of the process began by Feleky, directly incorporating many of the methodological criticisms previously leveled by Ruckmick, Woodworth, and others. “The face is fairly neutral; there is no indication of clothes, the hair is without parting and unobtrusive; the face is clean-shaven and its muscles are thus plainly visible; the head has been kept in a uniform three-quarter position, and only that mount of tilting necessary for certain expressions is present.”⁹⁷ The problems of past studies are presented as about bodies appearing in photos. No longer are we dealing with the bearded actor of Rudolph, clothed, gesticulating wildly, but with a “neutral,” seemingly nude male body. The seriality of the photos is enforced, and the lack of continuity in the Rudolph photos is presented as a primary problem, a problem already addressed by Feleky, with the same “solution” in both sets. But in the Frois-Wittmann images, the question of gender is overt. As Frois-Wittmann put it in a footnote, clearly referring to Feleky’s photos, if not by name:

Of course a woman would copy a woman’s expressions more readily than would a man. But this does not mean that a man cannot assume them. On the contrary, this is made possible by the plasticity of the facial musculature and the imitative capacity of the subject [Frois-Wittmann], which depends for a great part on the ease with which he can identify himself with a woman and assume the feminine attitude (as exemplified by impersonators). As a matter of fact, a feminine expression like Coyness was frequently judged. This attempt at imitating expressions had an interesting bearing on the question of the learning of a new voluntary movement.⁹⁸

Frois-Wittmann positions himself as a universal, mutable subject, able to reinvent his face through the control of his facial muscles. This both follows and deviates from Schopenhauerian assumptions about gender, mimicry, and facial hair. “A beard can mask man’s lying face and give him half a chance at embodying feminine deceit,” glibly remarks the art historian Katherine Guinness, mocking Schopenhauer’s opinions on masculine follicular maintenance.⁹⁹ Frois-Wittmann, however, consents to the beardlessness of the face as a signifier of a true, genuine, and visible expression. But he also suggests, rejecting Schopenhauer on the lies of femininity, that man is the ultimate mimetic actor, that masculine control over one’s facial musculature turns one into a universal copy of all others. In some way, we’ve returned to Lessing’s dramaturgy, to Duchenne’s young male actor, or even to Gertrude Stein in a psychology lab. The ideal psychological object can be all things to all people in a lab. And here, this universalism becomes about a technical mastery over one’s own body and face, simulating all emotions without feeling them. Apropos of a surrealist psychoanalyst, Frois-Wittmann becomes, to use the words of André Breton in his “First Manifesto of Surrealism,” “masters of ourselves, and masters of women.”¹⁰⁰

This masculine, muscular control is, perhaps, the most significant contribution of Frois-Wittmann to this history—in his photographs, specific facial expressions are linked with particular groups of muscular contractions. As Frois-Wittmann notes, his study demonstrates that, unlike Piderit, expressions do not have fixed patterns, and unlike Duchenne, they aren’t linked with specific, individual muscles. Instead, expressions come from groups of muscles in the face, which themselves exhibit some level of variability.¹⁰¹ Frois-Wittmann gets under the skin and uses his images to suggest that facial expression is not only about a visual relation but about the biological, embodied aspects of a mutable face—a face that, with enough training, could substitute for all others.

While Frois-Wittmann was the subject in front of the camera, Harold Schlosberg was the photographer behind it. The Frois-Wittmann images were published as a set in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 1935, two years before Frois-Wittman’s death.¹⁰² Over the next twenty years, Schlosberg would perform a range of studies using these images, plotting them through a range of measures to refine the Woodworth scale. The posed nature of these images eventually began to bother Schlosberg, especially since the concerns of psychology had, by the 1950s, continued its move away from the aesthetic judgments that characterized it at the turn of the century, a move initiated with the Feleky images. As well, in the years between the publication of the Frois-Wittmann images and the 1950s, Schlosberg’s original photographs and negatives of Frois-Wittmann were apparently lost, and the only copies available were the published versions—experiments used the images from the journal, each a two-and-a half-inch square, cut up and separated so each picture could be handled independently.¹⁰³ In 1957, with some of his colleagues, Schlosberg published “A New Series of Facial Expressions,” images of Marjorie Lightfoot, a “leader in college dramatic activities” at Brown. Instead of having Lightfoot pose for particular expressions, the psychologists had her dramatically recreate a scenario narrated by one of Schlosberg’s colleagues, with a newspaper photographer taking pictures of her face at his own discretion.¹⁰⁴ We return, once again, to actors—but this time, without posed expressions. The documentary evidence of the photograph was now assumed. And what better photographer to capture truth than a photojournalist?

Paul Ekman and the Reinvention of the Universal, Mutable (Male) Face

A third edition of Experimental Psychology was published in 1971, written not by Woodworth and Schlosberg, but by twenty authors, most of whom were Schlosberg’s former colleagues and students.¹⁰⁵ This edition completely removed the chapters on emotion. The quasi-biological understanding of universal facial expression was out of fashion. Instead, a model of emotion that assumed the primacy of cultural specificity was dominant, represented by Gregory Bateson, Margaret Mead, and Ray Birdwhistell.¹⁰⁶ In 1965, however, early in his career, Paul Ekman delivered a coauthored paper at the annual convention of the Western Psychological Association titled “A Replication of Schlosberg’s Evaluation of Woodworth’s Scale of Emotion.”¹⁰⁷ Ekman’s research until around 1965 was focused on hand movements and gestures, not the face, and it was only in 1964 and ’65 that he began his research into facial expression. Ironically, considering Ekman’s eventual embrace of a model that identified almost the exact same set of basic emotions as Woodworth, a model primarily associated today with his name, arguing for their universality, Ekman’s paper claimed that Woodworth and Schlosberg assumed too much order in their categories of emotion.¹⁰⁸

Ruth Leys has analyzed Ekman’s photographs of facial expression in depth, so I’m not going to go into much detail about Ekman here.¹⁰⁹ But I want to conclude this chapter by mentioning a few ways that Ekman both drew on and reinvented Duchenne’s photography, Frois-Whittmann’s method, and the Woodworth scale, something that also reinvents the ability to identify an emotion as genuine or posed. Working to enhance the specificity of the coding system they derived from Woodworth, Ekman and his regular collaborator, Wallace Friesen, in 1977, published the manual for their Facial Action Coding System, or FACS. In the Investigator’s Guide for the FACS, Ekman and Friesen note the following:

We spent the better part of a year with a mirror, anatomy texts, and cameras. We learned to fire separately the muscles in our own faces. When we were confident we were firing intended muscles we photographed our faces . . . There were a few areas of ambiguity, and here we returned to a variation on Duchenne’s method. A neuroanatomist placed a needle in one of our faces, inserting the needle into the muscle we were uncertain about. With the needle in place, the muscle was voluntarily fired, and electrical activity from that needle placement guaranteed that indeed it was the intended muscle.¹¹⁰

What might it mean to intend to fire a single, isolated facial muscle? The absolute opposition of Ekman to William James should be obvious, as Ekman foregrounds the primacy of intention, making reference to Duchenne but, really, drawing instead on the technique and method pioneered by Frois-Wittmann: the emotions become represented through an extreme attention to conscious, bodily control. It’s only when this bodily mastery fails that one must turn to Duchenne’s electrical stimulation, as Duchenne himself did in his singular photo of his male actor.

Not everyone possesses the level of control cultivated by Frois-Wittmann and Ekman. With Frois-Wittmann, this ability is explicitly masculine. With Ekman, this ability is that of the psychologist, the master of the face and emotion. As Frois-Wittmann wrote about himself learning to manipulate his face (in this quote, “the subject” refers to the author):

In practicing a certain contraction of the brow[,] the subject . . . started with somewhat random contractions of the brow and nose until, out of these, he became aware of the existence and locality of a certain postural combination. With more practice the excess movements dropped out and the proper combination became so fixed as a new entity that he could now control it voluntarily in isolation from the contractions originally associated with it. He later learned how to control individually each side of the brow.¹¹¹

Like Frois-Wittmann, Ekman and Friesen supposedly could control their faces down to the individual muscle, and when that training failed, then electrical stimulation was used to produce movements that would not, by themselves, be recognized as signifying any specific emotion. Ekman and Friesen used this process to separate the face into forty-six measurable units, the interaction of which produced all the possible ways a face could contort itself. As an instruction to coders, Ekman and Friesen suggest that all of those trained in the FACS should themselves be able to move all forty-six facial muscles independently and should record themselves on videotape to visually code their own performance of facial affect at varying degrees of intensity. This would permit coders to understand the link between the firing of a specific muscle and its visual appearance on the face.

While Duchenne linked the face, body, and brain through the visual representation of the passions, Ekman detaches emotion from expression with his method, though the practical disarticulation of face and brain is never recognized, instead privileging the visual appearance of an emotion as its real existence. Appearance becomes primary; the simulated performance of emotion becomes emotion as such. As Silvan Tomkins, one of Ekman’s mentors, once wrote, “The surface of the skin is where it is at, not deep within us, that the skin is the major motivational organ, and that a smile is where it appears to be.”¹¹² No longer is there a necessary correlation between face and brain, a correlation invented by Duchenne. Instead, the control and manipulation of the appearance of emotion is the emotion.

With the FACS manual, we have a recursion of Duchenne and Frois-Wittmann. Many of the early FACS images are of Ekman himself, the very model of “universal” emotions. But there is something I think that Ekman does to reinvent much of what I’ve described in this chapter, something that points to how Ekman’s understanding of emotion makes appearance and ontology interchangeable—which allows the photograph to become documentary evidence while also refusing its occult nature. For Ekman, there is no concealed, occulted reality. There is no optical unconscious. There is no separation between inner experience and exterior expression. All that matters is proper attention to what’s already visible. In his popular book, Emotions Revealed, Ekman presents to us a photo of grief, a photo of Bettye Shirley, a mother whose son has been murdered. (This is a murder whose salacious details are those in which Ekman seems to revel: “It is a parent’s worse [sic] nightmare. Your son suddenly disappears, with no apparent explanation. Months later you hear that the police have uncovered a homosexual mass murder ring that abducted, tortured, and killed young boys. Then you learn that your son’s body has been uncovered and identified at the mass burial site.”)¹¹³ The photo is supposed to speak for itself: in merely seeing grief, we, the viewers, are supposed to feel grief.

Like Feleky, putting down her biography of Lessing to feel-into her own imaginary images, we are assumed to project into and empathize with the image Ekman provides. And if we remain unmoved, Ekman gives us some helpful exercises:

If you did not feel any sadness when you looked at the pictures, try looking again and permit those feelings to occur. If they do begin, let them grow as strongly as possible. . . . If you still have not had any feelings of sadness, if the photograph does not provoke any empathic feelings, and if no memory spontaneously emerged, try this path: Was there ever a time in your life when someone died to whom you were very attached and for whom you felt sadness? If so, visualize that scene, and let the feelings begin to re-institute themselves. . . . If you still have not felt any sadness then try the following exercise . . . drop your mouth open. Pull the corners of your lips down. While you hold those lip corners down, try now to raise your cheeks, as if you are squinting. This pulls against the lip corners. Maintain this tension between the raised cheeks and the lip corners pulling down. Let your eyes look downward and your upper eyelids droop.¹¹⁴

Make yourself into a mirror of a photograph, so you can feel what the image represents. The expression is, after all, the feeling itself; the expression is the emotion. No link between face, body, and brain is needed. Greif is where it appears to be. “Our research shows that if you make these movements on your face, you will trigger changes in your physiology, both in your body and in your brain. If this happens to you, let the feelings grow as strongly as you can.”¹¹⁵

As we traveled from the Salpêtrière to the United States, following the varied uses of books of faces in psychology, we’ve gone from a method in which posed photographs from an asylum allow classification, a “truth” only seen through the stillness of an image, a “truth” that comes from women’s pain, a “truth” designed to identify and isolate. As books of faces became a technology used in American psychology, images were no longer assumed true, but rather material through which observers would disagree. What did an image of emotion actually represent? This practice was developed to understand the ability of audiences to feel-into works of art and theatre, an extension of the German attempt to grasp aesthetics as linked with psychophysical measurement. And yet, the failure to demonstrate agreement, finding instead a wealth of judgments, led not to the abandonment of a quest to discover universals of judgment. The images used in psychological experiments were refined, reinvented, remade over time, making books of faces into objective materials. Actors and women, thought to be intrinsically dissimulative, were replaced with men, men who believed themselves to have such thorough control over their facial musculature to become any face, any expression. These men concluded that, with the correct bodily training, they could stand in for all emotions and all people, universal subjects producing sets of images that represent all possible facial expressions and the very essence of the neurobiology of emotion. And in so doing, interiority vanished, replaced with appearance alone.

With Ekman, we see a particularly bizarre culmination that emerges from this tangled history. No longer is interiority the source of emotional, affective truth. Rather, appearance is. The photograph, as a document of appearance, is accepted as an authentic representation of the reality of emotion, transmitting empathy. No longer is the reality of emotion assumed separate from the laboratory means to capture feeling. The “problem” of the other’s interiority disappears. The medium precedes and teaches how one is supposed to feel, how one is supposed to understand others. The interiority and exteriority of emotion have been reversed. When you look at a photo of grief, Ekman tells us, you should let your face connect with your brain, let the movements of your body produce a flood of feelings, let your mimicry of an image reproduce and become the feeling of another. This should just happen automatically. Ekman doesn’t explicitly say this, but if it doesn’t, you may be a psychopath.