Anatomie des passions (review)

Over the past two decades, François Delaporte's work has generated lively debate. In books like Le second règne de nature (1979), Disease and Civilization (1986), and Histoire de la fièvre jaune (1989), Delaporte has approached scientific problems in epistemological terms by first identifying a major turning point in scientific thought (botany, epidemiology, parasitology) and then reconstructing the discursive and practical factors that allowed scientists to create new objects of inquiry. At times, this approach has led him to draw radical conclusions, such as his oft-quoted claim that disease itself does not exist. But charges of relativism aside, he remains faithful to Georges Canguilhem and Gaston Bachelard, two thinkers who rigorously distinguished between science and ideology. Unlike Bruno Latour, Delaporte does not preach scientific agnosticism.

In this book, Delaporte brings his iconoclastic style to Guillaume-Benjamin Duchenne's pioneering Méchanisme du physiognomie humaine (1863), a study that used electrotherapy to explore facial myology and advance a general theory of human expression. Though often overlooked in current historiography, Duchenne influenced contemporary artists and inspired Charles Darwin's Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). In his analysis, Delaporte shows that new technologies like electrotherapy and photography did not directly lead to Duchenne's discoveries. Rather, Duchenne's analysis of the mechanism of expression—his fundamental insight—required "the formation of a vast theoretical-practical field" (p. 2), something that Delaporte calls an "epistemological reorganization" under concrete historical circumstances (p. 199) (my translations throughout).

On a conceptual level, Duchenne used new studies on the motor nerves and muscular activity to reconsider the interplay between facial surface and anatomy. He thus created a muscular "mosaic" over an expressive facial mask and, by electrifying the nerves, he demonstrated how a muscular mechanism determined expression. At the same time, he borrowed another technology: photography. Trained by Adrien Tournachon, Duchenne used this medium to capture various expressions (both real and simulated) and to study how the viewer responded to the image. For Duchenne, photography allowed the researcher to visualize scientific objects and compare a phenomenon in time.

Like Darwin after him, Duchenne struggled with the meaning of human expression. Before Duchenne, physiognomists believed that the soul provided the natural language of the passions, so that emotional expression revealed God's universal truths. Duchenne redefined this tradition, though he still wanted to analyze morphological figures as a kind of syntax. Here, he connected mechanism and meaning. How someone reflexively understood the expression suggested as much as the intended meaning. Hence Duchenne used electrotherapy to simulate human expressions—joy, fear, surprise, and so on—in order to decode the underlying message. Even his basic creationism did not obscure this insight about mimicry. Because Duchenne identified universal attributes of expression, Darwin could begin his comparative study of human and animal expressions.

Duchenne strongly influenced artistic circles. Matthias Duval, in particular, incorporated Duchenne's teachings into the curriculum of the École Normale Supérieur des Beaux Arts, and thus revolutionized the baroque teachings of Charles Le Brun. Accordingly, aesthetes argued that physiology allowed the artist to represent physical and moral qualities with more realistic, expressive detail. As Duchenne's partisans argued, the artist had to study the body as a moving, psychophysiologic whole—not as an anatomized écorché.

As Delaporte emphasizes, Duchenne has enjoyed a belated but immense influence. He paved the way for the innovative studies by Paul Ekman in the 1960s and the recent work on mimicry and expressive cognition in evolutionary psychology. His myological insights helped pioneer cosmetic surgery, and he promoted imaging techniques in electrography and photography. "It is rare," Delaporte concludes, "that an author could open up so many new fields" (p. 209). Delaporte has brilliantly reconstructed and retold this important and fascinating story, and his book will interest any reader working in science studies and visual culture.