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  • The Scientific Image of Emotion: Experience and Technologies of Inscription
  • Otniel E. Dror (bio)

When . . . drama is translated into English and the passions of its Pietros, Gonzalos and Raouls are put into the mouths and antics of Piccadilly and Broadway actors, they quite naturally strike the spectator not only as alien but as extremely jocose. . . . The argument here, of course, is that competent English or American actors should be able so to alter their actual personalities as realistically to suggest the nature and deportment of the alien characters entrusted to them. . . . It is not the alien passions, but the alien funnels of those passions, that generate the Anglo-Saxon titters.

George Jean Nathan, 1928 1

The craft of representing and rendering the passions has been practiced and pursued by the visual, literary, and performative arts since at least the time of the Latin rhetor Marcus Fabius Quintilianus. 2 Historical analyses of these endeavors have led to a variety of contemporary perspectives: the elucidation of the philosophical, social, and cultural contexts of these artistic productions; 3 the synchronic [End Page 355] examination of the tensions between a “set of affective conventions” for representing the passions across the arts, on the one hand, and the variations imposed by the rigidity of the medium for representation (e.g., the body as medium vs. the canvas), on the other; 4 the study of the reflection or description of emotions through the creation of “poetic landscape[s]” from “concrete geographical” ones; 5 and more diachronic approaches that stress rapid historical permutations, such as the one between Greek and Roman representations of violent emotions. 6

A number of historians have also interrogated other aspects of representing emotions. Focusing on social conventions for representing the emotional self in middle-class culture during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they describe a shift in representations of (and attitudes toward) specific emotions and argue for the emergence of a modern “emotionology” in the United States. 7 Lately, a number of studies have examined how concerns with emotional representation were explicitly addressed and contested by historical actors. These studies argue either that such concerns were debated on a more theoretical level, such as Diderot’s famous Paradoxe sur le comédien, or that they were actively explored, as Debora Silverman has argued in her analysis of symbolist painters, such as Seurat and Gauguin, who experimented with the “emotional equivalents of visual language” in their attempts to represent emotions through colors. 8 [End Page 356]

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries similar concerns with emotions and their representations appeared in the sciences. Physiologists, psychologists, and clinicians began to produce their own unique and scientific representations of human and animal emotions in the context of developing a new and modern science of emotions. 9 Applying the methods and tools of the experimental laboratory to study emotions, they generated, purified, quantified, measured, manipulated, and—most important for my present discussion—recorded and preserved emotions in visual or numeric form. 10 As they often explained, the emotions in this new mode of representation recorded themselves (through the mechanical and transparent mediation of laboratory instruments), and the images that they produced were the subject-matter of the new science of emotions. 11

The early beginnings of instrument-generated graphic representations of emotions can be traced to the pioneering laboratory observations of the French physiologist Claude Bernard during the 1860s. Bernard applied Étienne Jules Marey’s new cardiograph to trace the heart during emotion (1865). 12 By translating the heart’s “intimate functions” into omnipresent and permanent graphs on paper, Bernard literally “read in the human heart.” 13 The slightest emotion, [End Page 357] he explained, produced a reflex impression in the heart, “imperceptible to all, except for the physiologist” and his instrument. 14 Following in Bernard’s footsteps was the Russian physiologist M. E. Cyon Tsion. In his 1873 lecture “The Heart and the Brain,” Cyon described the relationships between the brain, emotions, and the heart. 15 Each emotion activated the heart; each emotion left its own “peculiar and characteristic” curve on the graphic paper issued forth by the physiologist’s new machine. 16

Bernard’s and Cyon’s lectures on...

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