The Body and the Archive

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The Body and the Archive Author(s): Allan Sekula Source: October, Vol. 39 (Winter, 1986), pp. 3-64 Published by: The MIT Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/778312 . Accessed: 11/08/2013 19:25
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The Body and the Archive*

ALLAN

SEKULA . there mustbe arranged a comprehensive so that there system ofexchanges, might grow likea universal up something currency ofthese orpromises to pay in solid subbanknotes, stance,whichthesun has engraved for the Bank ofNature. great - Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1859 On theoneside we approach more to closely whatis goodand beautiful; on theother, vice and suffering are shut up withinnarrower limits;and we have to dreadless themonand moral, which havethe strosities, physical intothesocial powerto throw perturbation framework. --Adolphe Quetelet, 1842 I.

The sheer range and volume of photographicpractice offers ample evidence of the paradoxical status of photographywithinbourgeois culture. The simultaneous threatand promise of the new medium was recognized at a very early date, even beforethe daguerreotypeprocess had proliferated.For exam* Earlier versions of this essay were presented at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, October 2, 1982, and at the College Art Association Annual Meeting, New York, February 13, 1986. This versionwas completedwiththe assistance of a Visiting Senior Fellowship at the Center forAdvanced Studies in the Visual Arts,The National Gallery of Art,Washington,D.C., summer 1986.

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ple, followingthe French governmentannouncement of the daguerreotypein August 1839, a song circulated in London which began with the following verse: O Mister Daguerre! Sure you're not aware Of half the impressionsyou're making, By the sun's potent rays you'll set Thames in a blaze, While the National Gallery's breaking. Initially, photography threatens to overwhelm the citadels of high culture. The somewhat mockinghumor of thisverse is more pronounced ifwe consider that the National Gallery had only moved to its new, classical building on Trafalgar Square in 1838, the collection having grown rapidly since the gallery's founding in 1824. I stress this point because this song does not pit photographyagainst a static traditionalculture, but ratherplays on the possiIn expanding cultural institutions. bilityof a technologicaloutpacing of already this context, photographyis not the harbinger of modernity,for the world is already modernizing. Rather, photographyis modernityrun riot. But danger resides not only in the numerical proliferation of images. This is also a premature fantasyof the triumphof a massculture,a fantasywhich reverberates with an enhanced of political foreboding. Photography promises mastery nature, and anarchy, an incendiarylevelbut photographyalso threatensconflagration ing of the existingcultural order. By the thirdverse of this song, however, a new socialorder is predicted: The new Police Act will takedowneach fact That occurs in its wide jurisdiction And each beggar and thiefin the boldest relief Will be giving a colorto fiction.' Again, the last line of the verse yields a surplus wit, playing on the figurative ambiguityof"givinga color,"which could suggestboth the elaboration and unon the obvious monochromaticlimitamasking of an untruth,playing further tionsof the new medium, and on the approximatehomophonyofcolor and collar. But thisvelvetwit plays about an iron cage whichwas then in the process ofbeing constructed.Although no "Police Act" had yet embraced photography,the 1820s and '30s had engendered a spate of governmentalinquiries and legislation designed to professionalizeand standardize police and penal procedures in Britain, the most importantof which were the Gaols Act of 1823 and the Metropolitan Police Acts of 1829 and 1839. (The prime instigatorof these modernization efforts, Sir Robert Peel, happened to be a major collectorof seven1. New York, Dover, 1968, Quoted in Helmut and Alison Gernshiem, L. J M. Daguerre, p. 105 (italics in original).

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III ofChina,plate Articles Fox Talbot. William Henry The Pencilof Nature,1844. from Dutch paintings,and a trusteeof the National Gallery.) Directly teenth-century the the of to song, however,was a provisionin the 1839 act fortakinginto point "whose name and residence the homeless,and otheroffenders custodyvagrants, [could] not be ascertained."2 Although photographicdocumentation of prisonerswas not at all common until the 1860s, the potentialfora new juridical photographicrealismwas efforts widelyrecognized in the 1840s, in the general contextof thesesystematic a chroniof the of urban to regulate the growing "dangerous classes," presence cally unemployed sub-proletariat.The anonymous lyricistvoiced sentiments thatwere also heard in the higherchambers of the new cultureof photography. Consider that incunabulum in the historyof photography,Henry Fox Talbot's The PencilofNature.Talbot, the English gentleman-amateurscientist who paralleled Daguerre's metallic inventionwith his own paper process, produced a lavish book that was not only the first to be illustrated with photographic prints, but also a compendium of wide-ranging and prescient meditationson the promiseofphotography.These meditationstook the formof briefcommentarieson each of the book's calotypeprints.Talbot's aestheticambition was clear: forone austere image of a broom leaning beside an (allegorivol. 25, London, Police Act, 1839, in Halsbuiy's Statutes The Metropolitan 2. of England, and punishon crime debates ofparliamentary Butterworth, 1970,p. 250. For a useful summary in thenineteenth see Catalogue ment Dublin,IrishUniversity Papers, century, ofBritish Parliamentary National see MichaelWilson,The oftheNational Press,1977,pp. 58-73. On thehistory Gallery, London, London,PhilipWilsonPublishers. Gallery:

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of the Dutch school of art, fortaking cally) open door, he claimed the"authority as subjects of representationscenes of daily and familiaroccurrence."3But an order of naturalism emerges in his notes on another quite entirelydifferent beautiful calotype depicting several shelves bearing "articles of china." Here Talbot speculates that "should a thiefafterwardspurloin the treasures- if the mute testimonyof the picture were to be produced against him in court- it would certainlybe evidence of a novel kind."4 Talbot lays claim to a new the truth of an indexical ratherthan textualinventory. legalistictruth, Although thisfrontalarrangementof objects had its precedentsin scientific and technical illustration,a claim is being made here that would not have been made fora drawing or a descriptivelist. Only the photograph could begin to claim the legal status of a visualdocument of ownership. Although the calotype was too insensitiveto light to record any but the most willing and patient sitters,its variant of the evidentiarypromise could be explored in this-property-conscious still life. Both Talbot and the author of the comic homage to Daguerre recognized a new instrumental potentialin photography:a silence that silences. The protean oral "texts"of the criminal and pauper yield to a "mute testimony" that "takes down" (that diminishes in credibility,that transcribes) and unmasks the disguises, the alibis, the excuses and multiple biographies of those who find or place themselves on the wrong side of the law. This battle between the presumed denotative univocality of the legal image and the multiplicityand presumed duplicityof the criminalvoice is played out during the remainderof the nineteenthcentury.In the course of thisbattle a new object is defined- the criminal body- and, as a result, a more extensive"social body" is invented. We are confronting, then, a double system: a system of representation of both and repressively. This double operation is capable functioning honorifically most evidentin the workingsofphotographicportraiture. On the one hand, the and photographicportraitextends, accelerates, popularizes, degrades a traditional function.This function,which can be said to have taken its earlymodern formin the seventeenth century,is thatof providingforthe ceremonial presentation of the bourgeois self.Photographysubverted the privilegesinherentin portraiture,but without any more extensive leveling of social relationships, these privilegescould be reconstructed on a new basis. That is, photography could be assigned a proper role withina new hierarchyof taste. Honorificconventions were thus able to proliferate downward.5 At the same time,
3. WilliamHenryFox Talbot, ThePencil 1844, facsimile edition,New York, Da ofNature, Capo, 1968,pl. 6, n.p. 5. The clearest of the early,optimistic of photography's role within a new understandings oftaste,necessitating a restructuring oftheportrait labormarket hierarchy lines, alongindustrial canbe found in an unsigned review vol. 101, Eastlake, byElizabeth Review, "Photography," Quarterly no. 202 (April1857),pp. 442-468.
4. Ibid., pl. 3.

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photographic portraiturebegan to performa role no painted portraitcould have performed in the same thoroughand rigorousfashion. This role derived, not fromany honorific portraittradition,but fromthe imperativesof medical and anatomical illustration.Thus photographycame to establish and delimit - and the the terrainof the other, to defineboth thegeneralized the typology look-of deviance and social instance contingent pathology. Michel Foucault has argued, quite crucially, that it is a mistake to describe the new regulatorysciences directed at the body in the early nineteenth century as exercises in a wholly negative, repressive power. Rather, social power operates by virtue of a positive therapeuticor reformative chanwe the of need to understand those modes of instrumental neling body.6 Still, realism that do in factoperate according to a veryexplicitdeterrent or repressive logic. These modes constitute the lower limitor "zero degree"of sociallyinstrumentalrealism. Criminal identification photographs are a case in point, since they are designed quite literallyto facilitatethe arrest of theirreferent.7 I will argue in the second part of this essay that the semantic refinement and rationalizationof preciselythis sortof realism was centralto the process of defining and regulatingthe criminal. what general connections can be charted between the honorific But first, and repressivepoles of portraitpractice?To the extentthatbourgeois order dedefenseof social relationsbased on privateproperty, pends upon the systematic to the extentthat the legal basis of the selflies in the model of property rights, in what has been termed"possessive individualism,"every proper portraithas its lurking, objectifyinginverse in the files of the police. In other words, a covert Hobbesian logic links the terrainof the "National Gallery" with that of the "Police Act."8
6. See Michel Foucault, Disciplineand Punish: The Birthof thePrison,trans. Alan Sheridan, New York, Pantheon, 1977, and, The History Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert ofSexuality,

1978. Hurley,New York,Pantheon, 7. that seek to identify a target, such as military reconnaissance Any photographs phototo thesame general graphs, operate according logic.See my1975essay"TheInstrumental Image:
Steichen at War," in Photography theGrain:Essaysand PhotoWorks, against 1973-1983, Halifax, The

Press,1962). Whileitwouldbe farfetched to present Hobbes as a theorist ofthe"bourgeois it is portrait," tonotehowhe defined individual and itsrelinquishment contractual interesting autonomy through in terms ofdramaturgical thusdistinguishing between twocategories ofthe obligation metaphors,

edition and his PoliticalTheory HobbestoLocke,London, Oxford University Individualism: ofPossessive

PressoftheNova ScotiaCollegeofArtand Design, 1984. 8. The theoretical fortheconstruction of a specifically ground bourgeois subjectcan be found in Hobbes'sLeviathan has arguedthat Hobbes'saxiomatic ofan (1651). C. B. Macpherson positing individual human"nature" was in fact to a developing market essentially competitive quitespecific to a market inwhich humanlaborpower took theform ofan moreover, society, society increasingly alienablecommodity. As Hobbes putit,"The Value or WORTH ofa man,is as ofall things, his Price;thatis to say,so muchas wouldbe givenfortheuse ofhisPower:and therefore is notabon theneedandjudgement ofanother" solute;buta thing dependent (ThomasHobbes,Leviathan, to this introduction Harmondsworth, Penguin,1968,Chap. 10, pp. 151-152.See Macpherson's

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In the mid-nineteenthcentury, the terms of this linkage between the sphere of culture and that of social regulation were specificallyutilitarian.9 Many of the early promotersof photographystruckup a Benthamitechorus, stressingthe medium's promise fora social calculus of pleasure and discipline. Here was a machine forprovidingsmall doses of happiness on a mass scale, for to JeremyBentham's famous goal: "the greatesthappiness of the contributing in particularwas welcomed greatestnumber."'0 Thus the photographicportrait as a socially ameliorative as well as a socially repressive instrument.Jane Welsh Carlyle voiced characteristichopes in 1859, when she described inexpensive portraitphotographyas a social palliative: Blessed be the inventorof photography. I set him even above the inventorof chloroform!It has given more positive pleasure to poor humanitythan anythingthathas been "cast up" in my time suffering .- this art, by which even the poor can possess themselves of tolerable likenesses of their absent dear ones." In the United States, similar but more extensive utilitarianclaims were made by the portraitphotographerMarcus Aurelius Root, who was able to articulate the connectionbetween pleasure and discipline, to argue explicitlyfor of a moral economy of the image. Like Carlyle, he stressedthe salutoryeffects Not was serve to on only photography photography working-classfamilylife. forthe workingclasses, but familyphotoas a means of culturalenlightenment graphs sustained sentimentalties in a nation of migrants.This "primal houseserved a socially cohesive function,Root argued - articulatinga hold affection" thatwould surviveand become an essentialideofamilialism nineteenth-century

and the "Actor" Chap. 16, pp. 217-218). The analogybeperson,the "Author" (Leviathan, and political-legal is central tween tohisthought. representation symbolic representation (An amuson thevicissitudes ofportrait couldbe written oftheHobbesianstruggle photography inghistory and sitter, and inthesubsequent between bothin theactualportrait encounter photographer receptionofportrait photographs.) to Leviathan the frontispiece took the formof an allegorical The Furthermore, portrait. inthefigure or state, isliterally embodied ofa sovereign, an "artificial whose commonwealth, man," ofa multitude ofbodies, all ofwhom havecededa portion individual oftheir composed bodyis itself in order thecivilwarthat toprevent wouldinevitably tothecommonwealth result from their power Thus the"body" of "natural" of theLeviathan is a kindof pressure unchecked appetites. pursuit This imageis perhaps natural forces. thefirst to diagram the vessel,containing explosive attempt ifusually socialfield As such,ithas a definite, resonance in nineteenth-century indirect, visually. visualmetaphors fortheconceptual to construct modelsof thenew socialsciences. attempts 9. "The utilitarian doctrine . . . is at bottom oftheindividualist onlya restatement principles which outin theseventeenth wereworked Bentham on Hobbes"(C. B. Macpherson, built century:
PoliticalTheory Individualism, ofPossessive p. 2). 11. FromtheCameraObscura totheBeQuoted in Helmut Gernsheim, The History ofPhotography.of theModernEra, New York, McGraw-Hill, 1969, p. 239. ginning

"A Fragment on Government" 10. Jeremy Bentham, (1776), in MaryP. Mack, ed., A Bentham New York, Pegasus, 1969, p. 45. Reader,

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porwidelydistributed logical featureofAmerican mass culture. Furthermore, traits of the great would subject everyday experience to a regular parade of moral exemplars. Root's concern for respectabilityand order led him to applaud the adoption of photographyby the police, arguing that convicted offenderswould "not find it easy to resume their criminal careers, while their faces and general aspects are familiarto so many, especially to the keen-sighted The "so many" is significant detectivepolice."''12 enlistsa here, since it implicitly wider citizenryin the vigilant work of detection. Thus Root's utilitarianism comes full circle. Beginning with cheaply affordableaesthetic pleasures and moral lessons, he ends up with the photographicextension of that exemplary utilitariansocial machine, the Panopticon.'3
Marcus Aurelius Root, The Camera and the 12. Pencil,1864, reprint,Pawlett, Vermont, Helios, 1971, pp. 420-421. The Panopticon, or Inspection House, was Jeremy Bentham's proposal, writtenin 1787, 13. foran architecturalsystemof social discipline, applicable to prison, factory,workhouse, asylum, and school. The operative principlesof the Panopticon were isolation and perpetual surveillance. Inmates were to be held in a ring of individual cells. Unable to see into a central observation tower, theywould be forcedto assume thattheywere watched continually. (As Hobbes remarked over a centuryearlier, "the reputationof Power is Power.") The beneficialeffects of thisprogram were trumpetedby Bentham in the famous opening remarksof his proposal: "Morals reformed - public burdens lightened-health preserved- industry invigorated- instruction diffused Economy seated, as it were, upon a rock- all by a simple idea of architecture"(John Bowring, vol. 4, London, Simpkin, Marshall, 1843, p. 49). With Bened., The Works Bentham, ofJeremy tham the principle of supervision takes on an explicit industrial capitalist character: his prisons were to functionas profit-making of convict establishments,based on the private contracting-out labor. Bentham was a prototypicalefficiency expert. (On these last two points see, respectively, Gertrude Himmelfarb, "The Haunted House ofJeremyBentham," in Victorian Minds, New York, On Knopf, 1968, pp. 32-81; and Daniel Bell, "Work and Its Discontents," in TheEnd ofIdeology: theExhaustion Glencoe, Illinois, Free Press, 1960, pp. 227-274.) ofPoliticalIdeas in theFifties, For Foucault, "Panopticism" provides the central metaphor formodern disciplinarypower based on isolation, individuation, and supervision (Disciplineand Punish,pp. 195-228). Foucault traces the "birthof the prison"only to the 1840s, just when photographyappears with all of its instrumental promise. Given the central optical metaphor in Foucault's work, a reading of the subsequent development of disciplinary systemswould need logically to take photography into account. John Tagg has writtena Foucauldian account of the "panoptic" characterof early police and psychiatricphotographyin Britain. While I am in frequentagreement with his argument, I of the Panopticon became redundant disagree with his claim that the "cumbersome architecture" with the development of photography ("Power and Photography: Part 1, A Means of Surveillance: The Photograph as Evidence in Law," Screen no. 36 [Winter 1980], p. 45). This Education, seems to accord too much power to photography,and to imply that domination operates entirely by the forceof visual representation.To suggest that cameras replaced prisons is more than a little hyperbolic. The fact that Bentham's plan was never realized in the form he proposed has perhaps contributedto the confusion; models are more easily transformedinto metaphors than are realized projects. Once discourse turnson metaphor, it becomes a simple matterto substitute a photographicmetaphor foran architecturalone. My main point here is that any historyof dismust recognize the multiplicity of material devices involved--some literally ciplinaryinstitutions concrete- in tracing not only the importance of surveillance, but also the continued importance of confinement.Afterall, Bentham's proposal was partially realized in the cellular and separate systemsof confinementthat emerged in the nineteenthcentury. At least one "genuine" panopticon prison was constructed:the Stateville Penitentiaryin Illinois, built between 1916 and 1924. (For works on early prison history,see D. Melossi and M. Pavarini, The Prisonand theFactory.

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Notwithstandingthe standard liberal accounts of the historyof photography, the new medium did not simplyinheritand "democratize"the honorific of bourgeois portraiture.Nor did police photography functions simplyfunction repressively,although it is foolish to argue that the immediate functionof police photographs was somehow more ideological or positivelyinstrumental than negatively instrumental.But in a more general, dispersed fashion, in servingto introducethe panoptic principleinto daily life,photographywelded the honorificand repressivefunctionstogether.Every portraitimplicitly took its place withina social and moral hierarchy.The private momentof sentimental individuation, the look at the frozen gaze-of-the-loved-one, was shadowed looks: a look two other more at one's and a look down, at "betters," up, by public one's "inferiors." Especially in the United States, photography could sustain an imaginary mobilityon this vertical scale, thus provokingboth ambition and fear, and interpellating,in class terms, a characteristically "petit-bourgeois" subject. We can speak then of a generalized, inclusive archive, a shadowarchive that encompasses an entire social terrainwhile positioningindividuals withinthat terrain.4" This archive contains subordinate, territorialized archives: archives whose semantic interdependenceis normallyobscured by the "coherence"and of the social groups registeredwithineach. The general, "mutual exclusivity" all-inclusivearchive necessarilycontains both the traces of the visible bodies of and thoseofthepoor, thediseased, heroes,leaders, moral exemplars,celebrities, the insane, the criminal,the nonwhite,the female, and all otherembodiments of the unworthy.The clearest indicationof the essential unityof thisarchive of images of the body lies in the factthat by the mid-nineteenth centurya single hermeneutic paradigm had gained widespread prestige. This paradigm had
Origins of the Penitentiary System,trans. Glynis Cousin, London, Macmillan, 1981; David

tion,1750-1850, London, Macmillan, 1978.) Certainly prison architectureand the spatial positioning of prisons in the larger environment remain matters of crucial importance. Especially in the United States, where economic crisis and Reaganite judicial tough-mindednesshave lead to record prison populations, these are paramount issues of what is euphemisticallycalled "public policy." In fact, the currentwave of ambitious prison building has led to at least one instance of (postmodern?) returnto the model of the Panopticon. The new Montgomery County Detention Center in Virginia was designed by prison architect James Kessler according to a "new" principle of "podular/direct supervision." In this scaled-down, rumpus-room version of the Panopticon, inmates can see into the central control room fromwhich they are continually observed (see Benjamin Forgey, "Answering theJail Post, August 2, 1986, pp. G1-G2). Question," The Washington 14. For earlier arguments on the archival paradigm in photography, see Rosalind Krauss, "Photography's Discursive Spaces: Landscape/View," The ArtJournal,vol. 42, no. 4 (Winter between Labour and Capital," in B. Buchloh 1982), pp. 311-319; and Allan Sekula, "Photography The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1983, pp. 193-268.

SocialOrder andDisorder inthe NewRepublic, Rothman,TheDiscovery ofthe Asylum: Boston,Little, AJust Measure inthe Industrial RevoluBrown,1971; and Michael Ignatieff, ofPain: ThePenitentiary

and R. Wilkie,eds., Mining andOther Pictures: Photographs Shedden, Photographs Halifax, byLeslie

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entwinedbranches, physiognomyand phrenology.Both shared the two tightly belief that the surface of the body, and especially the face and head, bore the outward signs of inner character. physiognomy Accordingly,in revivingand to some extent systematizing in the late 1770s, Johann Caspar Lavater argued that the "originallanguage of on the face of Man" could be deciphered by a rigorousphysiogNature, written nomic science.15Physiognomyanalyticallyisolated the profileof the head and of the head and face, assigninga characterological the various anatomic features element: to each forehead, eyes, ears, nose, chin, etc. Individual significance character was judged through the loose concatenation of these readings. In both its analytic and syntheticstages, this interpretive process required that individual featuresbe read in conformity to type. Phrenology,which distinctive decade of the nineteenthcenturyin the researches of the emerged in the first Viennese physician Franz Josef Gall, sought to discern correspondences between the topographyof the skull and what were thought to be specific localized mental facultiesseated withinthe brain. This was a crude forerunner of more modern neurological attemptsto map out localized cerebral functions. In general, physiognomy,and more specificallyphrenology,linked an everydaynonspecialist empiricismwith increasinglyauthoritativeattemptsto medicalize the studyof the mind. The ambitiouseffort a materialist to construct science of the selfled to the dissectionof brains, including those of prominent and to the accumulation of vast collectionsof skulls. Eventually phrenologists, would lead to a volumetricsof the skull, termed craniometry.But this effort presumably any observant reader of one of the numerous handbooks and manuals of phrenologycould master the interpretive codes. The humble origins of phrenological research were described by Gall in these terms: I assembled a large number of persons at my house, drawn fromthe lowest classes and engaged in various occupations, such as fiacre driver, street porter and so on. I gained their confidence and induced them to speak frankly by givingthem money and having wine and beer distributedto them. When I saw that theywere favorably disposed, I urged them to tell me everything they knew about one both their and bad I carefully and examined another, good qualities, theirheads. This was the origin of the craniological chart that was seized upon so avidly by the public; even artiststook it over and distributeda large number among the public in the formof masks of all kinds.16

15. John [ sic] Caspar Lavater, Preface to Essayson Physiognomy toPromote the Designed Knowledge and theLove ofMankind,vol. 1, trans. Henry Hunter, London, J. Murray, 1792, n.p. in 16. Louis Classes and theFirst Chevalier, Labouring Quoted DangerousClasses in Paris during trans. Frank Jellineck, London, Routledge, 1973, p. 411. Half oftheNineteenth Century,

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The broad appeal and influence ofthesepracticeson literary and artistic realism, and on the general culture of the mid-nineteenth-century cityis well known."7 And we understand the culture of the photographicportraitonly dimly if we failto recognizethe enormousprestigeand popularity of a generalphysiognomic in 1840s and the 1850s. in the United States, the proliferaparadigm Especially tion of photographyand that of phrenologywere quite coincident. Since physiognomyand -phrenology were comparative, taxonomic disto an entire ciplines, theysought encompass range of human diversity.In this these in constructingthe very archive were instrumental respect, disciplines to claimed manual interpret. they Virtuallyevery deployed an arrayof individual cases and types along a loose set of "moral, intellectual,and animal" continua.18Thus zones of genius, virtue, and strength were charted only in relation to zones of idiocy, vice, and weakness. The boundaries between these zones were vaguely demarcated; thus it was possible to speak, forexample, of "moral idiocy." Generally, in this pre-evolutionarysystem of difference, the lower zones shaded offinto varieties of animality and pathology. In the almost exclusive emphasis on the head and face we can discoverthe idealist secretlurkingat the heartof theseputativelymaterialistsciences. These were discoursesoftheheadforthe head. Whateverthe tendencyofphysiognomic - whetherfatalisticor therapeuticin relation to the inor phrenologicthought exorable logic of the body's signs, whether uncompromisinglymaterialistin tone or vaguely spiritualistin relation to certain zones of the organic, whether republican or elitist in pedagogical stance--these disciplines would serve to legitimateon organic grounds the dominion of intellectualover manual labor. Thus physiognomy and phrenologycontributedto the ideological hegemonyof a capitalism that increasinglyrelied upon a hierarchical division of labor, a capitalism that applauded its own progress as the outcome of individual cleverness and cunning. In claiming to provide a means for distinguishingthe stigmata of vice fromthe shiningmarks of virtue,physiognomyand phrenologyoffered an essential hermeneuticservice to a world of fleeting and oftenanonymous market transactions. Here was a method for quickly assessing the character of strangersin the dangerous and congestedspaces of the nineteenth-century city. Here was a gauge of the intentionsand capabilities of the other. In the United States in the 1840s, newspaper advertisementsforjobs frequentlyrequested
In addition to Chevalier's book just cited, see Walter Benjamin's 1938 essay, "The Paris of 17. the Second Empire in Baudelaire," in Charles Baudelaire: A LyricPoetin theEra ofHigh Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn, London, New Left Books, 1973, pp. 35-66. See also Judith Wechsler, A and Caricature in Nineteenth Human Comedy:Physiognomy Paris, Chicago, University of Century Chicago Press, 1982. For specific histories of phrenology, see David de Guistino, Conquest of and Victorian Social Thought, Mind: Phrenology London, Croom Helm, 1975; and John Davies, Fad and New Yale 1955. Science, Haven, Phrenology: University Press, 18. Lavater, vol. 1, p. 13.

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that applicants submit a phrenological analysis.19Thus phrenologydelivered that are today delivered in more "refined" the moral and intellectual"facts" and and polygraphexperts. abstract formby psychometricians Perhaps it is no surprise,then, that photographyand phrenologyshould in 1846 in a book on "criminaljurisprudence." Here was an have met formally to the already established medical to lend a new organic facticity opportunity and psychiatricgenre of the case study.20A phrenologicallyinclined American penal reformerand matron of the women's prison at Sing Sing, Eliza of inmates Farnham commissioned Mathew Brady to make a series of portraits at two New York prisons. Engravings based on these photographs were appended to Farnham's new edition, entitledRationaleof Crime,of a previously unillustrated English work by Marmaduke Sampson. Sampson regarded criminal behavior as a formof "moral insanity."Both he and Farnham subscribed to a variant of phrenologythat argued forthe possibilityof therapeutic modification or enhancement of organically predetermined characteristics. Presumably, good organs could be made to triumphover bad. Farnham's contributionis distinctivefor its unabashed nonspecialist appeal. She sought to speak to "the popular mind of Republican America," in presentingan argument for the abolition of the death penalty and the establishmentof a therapeutic system of treatment.21Her contributionto the book consisted of a extensivenotes, and several appendices, includingthe polemical introduction, illustratedcase studies. Farnham was assisted in her selection of case-study of phrenology, subjects by the prominent New York publisher-entrepreneur Lorenzo Fowler, who clearly lent further authorityto the sample. Ten adult prisoners are pictured, evenly divided between men and women. Three are identifiedas Negro, one as Irish, one as German; one woman is identified as a "Jewessof German birth,"another as a "half-breed Indian and negro." The remaining three inmates are presumably Anglo-Saxon, but are not identified as such. A series of eight picturesof child inmates is not annotated in racial or ethnicterms,althoughone child is presumablyblack. Althatwas not overtly racistthoughFarnham professeda variantof phrenology unlike other pre-Darwinian head analysts who sought conclusive proof of the "separate creation" of the non-Caucasian races --this differential marking of race and ethnicity in otherways. Afterall, Farnaccording to age is significant ham's work appeared in an American context- characterized by slavery and the massive immigration of Irish peasants--that was profoundlystratified
19. Davies, p. 38. 20. case study,see Sander Gilman, Seeing the On the historyof the illustratedpsychiatric Insane, New York, J. Wiley, 1982. Eliza Farnham, "IntroductoryPreface" to Marmaduke Sampson, Rationaleof Crime 21. and its Considered in Relation to Cerebral Treatment, Appropriate Being a Treatiseon Criminal Jurisprudence New York, Appleton, 1846, p. xiii. Organization,

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OCTOBER

along theselines. By markingchildrenless in racial and ethnicterms,Farnham avoided stigmatizingthem. Thus children in general were presented as more malleable figuresthan adults. Children were also presented as less weighted down by criminal biographies or by the habitual exercise of their worst faculties. Despite the fact that some of these boys were explicitlydescribed as incorrigibles, children provided Farnham with a general figure of moral was greaterthan thatof the renewal. Because theirpotentialfor"respectability" adult offenders, they were presented as miniature versions of their potential adult-male-respectable-Anglo-Saxon-proletarianselves. Farnham, Fowler, inventorsof thatprivilegedfigureof social and Brady can be seen as significant discourse: the figureof the child rescued by a paternalisticmedicosocial reform science.22 Farnham's concerns touch on two of the central issues of nineteenthcenturypenal discourse: the practical drawing of distinctionsbetween incorrigible and pliant criminals, and the disciplined conversion of the reformable into "useful"proletarians(or at least into useful informers).Thus even though she credited several inmates with "well developed" intellects,and despite the fact that her detractorsaccused her of Fourierism, her reformist vision had a definiteceiling. This limitwas definedquite explicitlyby the conclusion of her study. There she underscored the baseness shared by all her criminal subjects by illustratingthree "heads of persons possessing superior intellect"(two of which, both male, were treated as classical busts). Her readers were asked to note the "striking contrast."23 I emphasize thispoint because it is emblematicof the manner in whichthe criminalarchive came into existence. That is, it was only on the basis of mutual comparison, on the basis of the tentativeconstructionof a larger, "universal" could be clearlydemarcated. archive, thatzones of deviance and respectability In this instance of the first sustained application of photographyto the task of phrenological analysis, it seems clear that the comparative descriptionof the criminalbody came first. The book ends witha self-congratulatory mirrorheld thatthe pictoriallabor behind Farnup to the middle-classreader. It is striking ham's criminalsample was thatof Brady, who devoted virtuallyhis entireantebellum career to the construction of a massive honorific archive of photographs of "illustrious," and would-be celebrated American figures.24 celebrated,
oftheemergence 22. Fora reading ofthissystem in France,seeJacquesDonzelot,ThePolicing trans.RobertHurley,New York, Pantheon,1979. Donzelot seemsto place inorofFamilies, dinate blame on women forthe emergence of a "tutelary" mode of social regulation. For a Marxist-feminist ofDonzelot,see MichelleBarrett and Mary McIntosh,The Anti-Social critique London, New LeftBooks, 1982. Family, 23. Sampson,p. 175. vol. 31, no. 3 (July1974),pp. 128-135;and AlanTrachtenberg, ofthe ofCongress, Library "Brady's The YaleReview, vol. 73, no. 2 (Winter1984), pp. 230-253. Portraits,"
24. See Madeline Stern, "Mathew B. Brady and the Rationaleof Crime,"The Quarterly Journal

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The Bodyand theArchive

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Thus far I have described a number of early attempts,by turns comic, speculative, and practical, to bring the camera to bear upon the body of the charted criminal. I have also argued, followingthe general line of investigation in the later worksof Foucault, that the position assigned the criminalbody was a relativeone, that the inventionof the modern criminalcannot be dissociated of a law-abiding body- a body thatwas eitherbourgeois fromthe construction or subject to the dominion ofthe bourgeoisie. The law-abiding body recognized its threateningother in the criminal body, recognized its own acquisitive and aggressive impulses unchecked, and sought to reassure itselfin two contradictory ways. The firstwas the invention of an exceptional criminal who was indistinguishablefromthe bourgeois, save for a conspicuous lack of moral inhibition: herein lay the figureof the criminal genius.25The second was the inSelected Interviews 25. On thispointsee Michel Foucault,"PrisonTalk," in Power/Knowledge: andOther 1972-1977,ed. Colin Gordon,New York, Pantheon,1980, p. 46. Writings,

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universelle de Chicago, 1893. (Album Exposition

ventionof a criminalwho was organicallydistinct fromthe bourgeois: a biotype. The science of criminologyemerged fromthis latteroperation. A physiognomiccode of visual interpretation of the body's signs- specifithe of the headand a of mechanized visual representacally signs technique tion intersectedin the 1840s. This unifiedsystemof representation and intera vast taxonomic of of the pretationpromised ordering images body. This was an archivalpromise. Its realizationwould seem to be groundedprimarily in the technicalrefinement of strictly means. This turns out to be not the case. optical I am especially concerned that exaggerated claims not be made for the or criticalvein. One danger powers of optical realism,whetherin a celebratory lies in constructingan overly monolithic or unitary model of nineteenthcenturyrealistdiscourse. Withinthe ratherlimitedand usually ignoredfieldof instrumental scientific and technicalrealism, we discovera house divided. Nowhere was this division more pronounced than in the pursuit of the criminal was made usefulby the body. If we examine the manner in whichphotography we find evidence of a crisis of faithin police, late-nineteenth-century plentiful In we need to describe the short, optical empiricism. emergence of a truththat cannot be reduced to the apparatus adequately optical model provided by the camera. The camera is integratedinto a larger ensemble: a bureaucraticclerical-statistical systemof "intelligence."This systemcan be described as a form of the archive. The central artifact of this systemis not the sophisticated camera but the filingcabinet.

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II. The institutionof the photographic archive received its most thorough early articulationin precise conjunction with an increasinglyprofessionalized and technologicalmode of police work and an emergingsocial science ofcriminology. This occurred in the 1880s and 1890s. Why was the model of the archive of such importforthese linked disciplines? In structuralterms, the archive is both an abstract paradigmatic entity In both senses, the archive is a vast substitution and a concreteinstitution. set, a of for relation general equivalence between images. This image of providing the archive as an encyclopedic repositoryof exchangeable images was articuin the late 1850s by the American physicianand essayist lated most profoundly Oliver Wendell Holmes when he compared photographsto paper currency.26 The capacityof the archiveto reduce all possible sightsto a singlecode of equivalence was grounded in the metricalaccuracy of the camera. Here was a mewhichexact mathematicaldata could be extracted,or as the physicist dium from Frangois Arago put it in 1839, a medium "in which objects preserve mathepositivists, photography matically their forms."27For nineteenth-century dream of a universal language: the univerthe Enlightenment doubly fulfilled sal mimeticlanguage of the camera yielded up a higher,more cerebral truth,a truththat could be utteredin the universal abstractlanguage of mathematics. could be accommodated to a Galilean vision of the For thisreason, photography in the language of mathematics."Photographypromworld as a book "written ised more than a wealth of detail; it promised to reduce nature to its geometricalessence. Presumably then, the archivecould provide a standard physiognomic gauge of the criminal, could assign each criminal body a relativeand quantitative position within a larger ensemble. This archival promise was frustrated, however, both by the messy continof the and the sheer gency photograph by quantityof images. The photographic archive's components are not conventional lexical units, but ratherare subject to the circumstantialcharacter of all that is photographable. Thus it is absurd to imagine a dictionaryof photographs,unless one is willing to disregard the of individual images in favor of some model of typicality,such as specificity that underlyingthe iconographyof Vesalian anatomy or of most of the plates of Diderot and d'Alembert. Clearly, one way of accompanying the Encyclopidie of the circumstantial "taming"photographyis by means of thistransformation and idiosyncraticinto the typicaland emblematic. This is usually achieved by for a fiat, or by a sampling of the archive's offerings stylisticor interpretive
26. Oliver Wendell Holmes, "The Stereoscope and the Stereograph,"Atlantic vol. 3, Monthly, no. 20 (June 1859), p. 748. For a more extensive treatmentof this issue, see my 1981 essay, "The Trafficin Photographs," in Photography againsttheGrain,pp. 96-101. 27. Frangois Arago, letterto Duchatel, in Gernsheim, Daguerre, p. 91.

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OCTOBER

"representative"instance. Another way is to invent a machine, or rather a clerical apparatus, a filingsystem,which allows the operator/researcher/editor to retrievethe individual instance fromthe huge quantityof images contained withinthe archive. Here the photograph is not regarded as necessarilytypical or emblematic of anything,but only as a particularimage which has been isolated forpurposes of inspection. These two semantic paths are so fundamental to the culture of photographicrealism that their very existence is usually ignored. The difference between these two models of photographic meaning are in two different out approaches to the photographicrepresentationof played the criminal body: the "realist" approach, and by realism here I mean that venerable (medieval) philosophical realism that insistsupon the truthof general propositions,on the realityof species and types,and the equally venerable "nominalist"approach, which denies the reality of generic categories as anyapproach can be seen as overtly thing other than mental constructs.The first in its aims, ifmore covertly theoreticaland "scientific" practical. The othercan be seen as overtlypractical and "technical"in its aims, ifonly covertlytheoretical. Thus the would-be scientistsof crime sought a knowledge and masteryof an elusive "criminal type." And the "technicians"of crime sought knowledge and masteryof individual criminals. Herein lies a terminologicaldistinction, and a divisionof labor, between"criminology" and "criminalistics." Criminology hunted"this" or "that" criminalbody. hunted"the"criminalbody. Criminalistics Contraryto the commonplace understandingofthe "mug shot"as the very exemplar of a powerful,artless,and whollydenotativevisual empiricism,these uses of photographicrealism were systematizedon the basis early instrumental and limitationsof ordinaryvisual emof an acute recognitionof the inadequacies Thus two of systems descriptionof the criminal body were deployed piricism. in the 1880s; both sought to ground photographicevidence in more abstract methods. This merger of optics and statisticswas fundamental to a statistical broader integrationof the discourses of visual representation and those of the social sciences in the nineteenthcentury.Despite a common theoreticalsource, of photographyand statisticsled to strikingly the intersection different results in the work of two different men: Alphonse Bertillon and Francis Galton. The Paris police officialAlphonse Bertillon invented the firsteffective modern systemofcriminal His was a bipartitesystem,positioninga identification. "microscopic" individual record within a "macroscopic" aggregate. First, he combined photographic portraiture,anthropometricdescription, and highly standardized and abbreviated writtennotes on a singlefiche,or card. Second, he organized these cards within a comprehensive, statisticallybased filing system. The English statistician and founder of eugenics, Francis Galton, invented a method of composite portraiture.Galton operated on the periphery of led criminology.Nonetheless, his interestin heredityand racial "betterment"

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Archive The Bodyand the

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him tojoin in the search fora biologicallydetermined"criminaltype."Through one of his several applications of composite portraiture,Galton attemptedto constructa purely apparition of the criminaltype. This photographicimoptical defined,and empiricallynonexistentcrimipression of an abstract,statistically nal face was both the most bizarre and the most sophisticatedof many concurrentattemptsto marshall photographicevidence in the search forthe essence of crime. The projects of Bertillonand Galton constitutetwo methodologicalpoles of the positivist attempts to define and regulate social deviance. Bertillon sought to individuate. His aims were practical and operational, a response to class struggle the demands of urban police work and the politicsof fragmented Third Galton to visualize the the sought generic evidence of Republic. during hereditarian laws. His aims were theoretical, the result of eclectic but ulticuriosities of one of the last Victorian gentleman-amateur matelysingle-minded contextand imscientists.Nonetheless, Bertillon'sworkhad its own theoretical playfulresearchrealized itspractical implicaplications,just as Galton's grimly tions in the ideological and political program of the international eugenics movement. Both men were committedto technologiesof demographic regulawas integralto the efforts tion. Bertillon'ssystemof criminal identification to quarantine permanentlya class of habitual or professionalcriminals. Galton sought to intervene in human reproduction by means of public policy, enand discouragingor preventingoutright couraging the propagation of the "fit," that of the "unfit." The idealist proclivities,territorialism, and status consciousness of intellectual history have prevented us from recognizing Bertillon and Galton's shared ground. While Galton has been considered a proper, if somewhat ecof science, Bertillonremains an ignored mechanic centric,object of the history and clerk, commemorated mostlyby anecdotal historiansof the police. In order to explore this terrain shared by a police clerk and gentleman statistician,I need to introduce a third figure. Both Bertillon'sand Galton's in projects were grounded in the emergence and codificationof socialstatistics the 1830s and 1840s. Both relied upon the centralconceptual categoryof social statistics:the notion of the "average man" (l'homme This concept was moyen). invented (I will argue shortlythat it was actually reinvented) by the Belgian astronomerand statistician Adolphe Quetelet. Althoughless well remembered than Auguste Comte, Quetelet is the most significant other early architectof sociology. Certainlyhe laid the foundationsof the quantitativeparadigm in the social sciences. By seeking statisticalregularitiesin rates of birth,death, and crime, Quetelet hoped to realize the Enlightenmentphilosopher Condorcet's proposal fora "social mathematics,"a mathematicallyexact science thatwould discover the fundamentallaws of social phenomena. Quetelet helped to establish some of the first actuarial tables used in Belgium, and to found in 1853 an internationalsociety for the promotion of statisticalmethods. As the philoso-

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OCTOBER

pher of science Ian Hacking has suggested, the rise of social statisticsin the mechanistic mid-nineteenth centurywas crucial to the replacement of strictly theoriesof causality by a more probabilisticparadigm. Quetelet was a determinist, but he invented a determinismbased on iron laws of chance. This emergentparadigm would lead eventuallyto indeterminism.28 Who, or what, was the average man? A less flippantquery would be, how was the average man? Quetelet introducedthiscompositecharacterin his 1835 treatiseSurl'homme. Quetelet argued thatlarge aggregatesof social data revealed a regularity of occurrence that could only be taken as evidence of determinate had political and moral as well as epistemological social laws. This regularity implications: The greater the number of individuals observed, the more do individual peculiarities, whether physical or moral, become effaced, and leave in a prominentpoint of view the general facts,by virtueof which society exists and is preserved.29 Quetelet sought to move fromthe mathematicizationof individual bodies to he charted various quantitativebiogthat of societyin general. In Sur l'homme raphies of the productive and reproductivepowers of the average man and woman. For example, he calculated the fluctuation of fecundity withrespectto female age. Using data from dynamometer studies, he charted the average muscular power of men and women of different ages. At the level of the social in exaggregate, lifehistoryread as a graphic curve. (Here was prefiguration, treme form,of Zola's naturalism: a subliterary,quantitative narrative of the generalized social organism.) Just as Quetelet's early statisticalcontributionsto the life insurance industrycan be seen as crucial to the regularization of that organized formof gamblingknown as financecapital, so also his chartingof the waxing and waning ofhuman energiescan be seen as an attemptto conceptualize thatHercules of industrial capitalism, termed by Marx the "average worker,"the abstract embodimentof labor power in the aggregate.30 And outside the sphereof waged work, Quetelet invented but did not name the figureof the average mother, crucial to the new demographic sciences which sought nervouslyto chart the relative numeric strengths of class against class and nation against nation. For Quetelet the most emphatic demonstrationof the regularity of social
28. See Ian Hacking,"How ShouldWe Do theHistory ofStatistics?" andConsciousness, Ideology no. 8 (Spring 1981), pp. 15-26; and "Biopowerand the Avalanche of PrintedNumbers," Humanities andSociety, vol. 5, nos. 3-4 (Summerand Fall 1982), pp. 279-295.
29. 30.

Chambers,1842,p. 6. Edinburgh, Books,vol. 1, 1976,pp. 440-441.

on Man and theDevelopment Adolphe Quetelet, A Treatise of His Faculties,trans. R. Knox,

Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique trans. Ben Fowkes, London, New Left ofPoliticalEconomy,

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phenomena was given by crime statistics."Moral statistics" provided the linchof a "social physics"thatwould demolish the prestigeof pin forhis construction moral paradigms groundedin freewill. The criminalwas no more than an agent of determiningsocial forces. Furthermore,crime statistics provided the synecdochic basis fora broader descriptionof the social field.As Louis Chevalier has argued, Quetelet inaugurated a "quantitativedescriptionwhich took criminal statisticsas the startingpoint for a descriptionof urban living as a whole."31 Chevalier has argued further that criminal statisticscontributedthus to a pervasive bourgeois conceptionof the essentially characterofmetropolpathological itan life,especially in the Paris of theJulyMonarchy. Quetelet's terminological
Tailles des Belges de 18 20 ans.

11,55,3I1m,387 Im,459

im,591 Im,,643 m,695 Im,747 1m,799 1m,851

From Adolphe Quetelet, Physiquesociale,ou Essai sur le developpement des facultes de l'homme, 1869. contributionto this medicalization of the social fieldis evident in his reference to the statisticalstudy of crime as a formof "moral anatomy." Quetelet refinedhis notion of the "average man" with conceptual tools borrowed fromastronomyand probabilitytheory.He observed that large agdata- fellinto a patterncorgregatesof social data- notably anthropometric respondingto the bell-shaped curve derived by Gauss in 1809 in an attemptto determineaccurate astronomicalmeasurementsfromthe distribution ofrandom errorsaround a centralmean. Quetelet came to regard this symmetrical bino31. Chevalier, p. 10.

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OCTOBER

mial curve as the mathematicalexpressionof fundamentalsocial law. While he thisfiction lived within admitted that the average man was a statisticalfiction, the abstract configurationof the binomial distribution.In an extraordinary of individualdifference withmathematicalerror,Quetelet metaphoricconflation defined the central portion of the curve, that large number of measurements clustered around the mean, as a zone of normality.Divergent measurements and biosocial pathology.32 tended toward darker regions of monstrosity an ideal, not only of social Thus conceived, the "average man" constituted and of In but of social health, stability beauty. interesting metaphors,revealing both the astronomical sources and aesthetico-politicalambitions inherent in Quetelet's "social physics,"he definedthe social norm as a "centerof gravity," and the average man as "the type of all which is beautiful--of all which is good."33 Crime constituteda "perturbingforce,"acting to throw the delicate balance of this implicitly republican social mechanism into disarray. Although a quantitative model of civil societyand only indiwas constructing Quetelet of an ideal commonwealth,his model of a gravithe contours rectlydescribing tational social order bears strikingsimilarity to Hobbes's Leviathan.34 Like Hobbes, Quetelet began with atomized individual bodies and returnedto the image of the body in describingthe social aggregate. Quetelet worked, however, in a climate of physiognomicand phrenologicenthusiasm, and indeed early social statisticscan be regarded as a variant of physiognomy writlarge. For example, Quetelet accepted, despite his republicanism,thelatenotion of the cranialangle, which, as George Mosse has eighteenth-century anargued, emergesfromthe appropriationby preevolutionary Enlightenment thropologyof the classicist idealism of Wincklemann.35Based in part on the art-historicalevidence of noble Grecian foreheads, this racist geometrical fiction defineda descending hierarchyof head types,withpresumablyupright Caucasian brows approaching this lost ideal more closely than did the prein sumably apelike brows of Africans.For his part, Quetelet was less interested a broadlyracistphysicalanthropology than in detecting withinEuropean society It is understandable patternsof bodily evidence of deviation from"normality." that he would be drawn to those variants of physiognomic thought which sought to systematizethe body's signs in terms of a quantifyinggeometrical

32. AdolpheQuetelet,Lettres surla thiorie desprobabilitis, Brussels,AcademieRoyale, 1846. onthe trans.0. G. Downes,London,Layton,1849). See also Georges (Letters ofProbability, Theory andthe trans.CarolynFawcett,Boston,Reidel, 1978, Normal Canguilhem,On the Pathological, pp. 86-104. 33. Quetelet,Treatise onMan, p. 100. 34. See note8. Of course,Quetelet's extreme determinist viewofthesocialfield was diametmodelof humanrelations advancedby Hobbes. rically opposedto thecontractual 35. See George Mosse, Toward theFinal Solution. A History New York, Racism, ofEuropean Fertig,1978,pp. 17-34.

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became increasingly absorbed schema. From Quetelet on, biosocial statisticians withanthropometrical researches,focusingboth on the skeletalproportionsof the body and upon the volume and configurationof the head.36 The inherited idealist fascinationwith the uprightforeheadcan be detectedeven in Quetelet's model of an ideal society:he argued thatsocial progresswould lead to a diminished number of defectiveand inferior cases, thus increasing the zone of normality. If we consider what this utopian projection meant in terms of the binomial curve, we have to imagine an increasinglypeaked, erect configuration: a classical ideal to a fault. Certainly physiognomyprovided a discursive terrainupon which art and the emergingbio-social sciences met during the middle of the nineteenthcentury.Quetelet's explicitlystated enthusiasmforthe model of artisticpractice is understandable in thiscontext,but the matteris more complicated. Despite the abstractcharacterof his procedures, Quetelet possessed the aestheticambition to compare his project to Diirer's studies of human bodily proportion. The statisticianargued thathis "aim had been, not only to go once more throughthe task of Albert [sic] Dfirer,but to execute it also on an extended scale." 37Thus visual empiricismretained its prestige in the face of a new object- societyor comprehensivelyvisualized.38 which could in no way be effectively
36. See Adolphe Quetelet, Anthropomitrie, ou mesure des diffrents Brussels, facultisde l'homme, Muquardt, 1871. Quetelet sufferedfrom aphasia after 1855, and his later works tend to be as Statistician, New York, Corepetitiousand incoherent(see Frank H. Hankins, AdolpheQuetelet lumbia University Press, 1908, pp. 31-32). On the intersection of anthropometryand race science, see Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure ofMan, New York, Norton, 1981. 37. on Man, p. v. Quetelet, Treatise 38. Here are some ways in which Quetelet's position in relation to idealist aesthetic theory become very curious. The "average man" can be regarded as a bastard child of Kant. In the "Critique of AestheticalJudgement"Kant describes the psychological basis of the constructionof the empiricallybased "normal Idea" of human beauty, arguing that "the Imagination can, in all probability,actually though unconsciously let one image glide into another, and thus by the concurrence of several of the same kind come by an average, which serves as the common measure of all. Every one has seen a thousand full-grown men. Now ifyou wish tojudge of the normal size, estimatingit by means of comparison, the Imagination (as I think)allows a great number of images (perhaps the whole thousand) to fall on one another. If I am allowed here the analogy of optical presentation,it is the space where most of them are combined and inside the contour, where the place is illuminated with the most vivid colors, that the average size is cognizable; which, both in heightand breadth, is equally farremoved fromthe extremebounds of the greatestand smallest stature. And this is the stature of a beautiful man" (Immanuel Kant, Critique trans. ofJudgement, not only Quetelet J. H. Bernard, London, Macmillan, 1914, pp. 87-88). This passage prefigures but also-as we shall see--Galton. However, Kant was careful to respect differences between normal Ideas of beauty appropriate to different races. On an empirical level, he constructedno hierarchy. Furthermore,he distinguished between the empirically based normal Idea, and the "Ideal of beauty," which is constructedin conformity with a concept of morality. Quetelet can be accused of unwittingly collapsing Kant's distinctionbetween the normal Idea and the Ideal, and thus fusingaesthetics and moralityon a purely quantitative basis, preparing thus the ground for Galton's plan for the engineering of human reproduction. Although Kant's more general proposal for a science of the human species based on the model of the natural sciences was known to Comte, Quetelet, "a stranger to all philosophical

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OCTOBER

model of a By the end of the nineteenthcentury,thisessentiallyorganismic visible social fieldwas in crisis. The termsof Quetelet's honorific linkage of an emergent statisticsto a venerable optical paradigm were explicitlyreversed. The French sociologistGabriel Tarde argued in 1883 that"a statisticalbureau that"each of our senses mightbe compared to an eye or ear," claiming further of the gives us, in its own way and fromits special point of view, the statistics externalworld. Their characteristic sensations are in a certainway theirspecial Here the transition graphical tables. Every sensation . . . is only a number.""39 is made fromthe prestigeof the visual and the organic to the prestigeof institutionalized, bureaucratic abstraction. Tarde was a centralfigure,not only in the demise of organismicmodels of society, but also in the development of a French school of criminological thoughtduring the 1880s. Tarde was a magistrateduring his early career, and by 1894 became the head of the Bureau of Statisticswithinthe Department of Justice in Paris, which made him the abstractoverseerof the quantitativeebbs and flowsof a regulated criminality.His background in legal theoryand practice led him to attempta criticism and modification of Quetelet's extremedeterminism, which had absolved the criminal of all responsibility.After all, classical legal theory was not about to abandon its ideological capacity to uphold the state's rightto punish criminalsfortheirdeeds. In 1890, Tarde advanced a notion of "criminal responsibility" based upon the continuityof individual identitywithin a shared social milieu, a milieu of "social similarity." Tarde's psychologicalmodel of individuality assumed an essential internalnar-

statisticien et sociologue, speculation," seems never to have read Kant (Joseph Lottin, Quetelet, Louvain, Institutsupdrieur de philosophie, 1912, p. 367). Quetelet's persistentlikening of his project to the work of the visual artistcan certainlybe taken as emblematic of the fusion of idealist aesthetics with Enlightenment theories of social perfection.More specifically,however, Quetelet's evocations of art history- which extended to the measurement of classical sculpture and to long chronological tables of artistswho had dealt withproblems of bodily proportion- can be seen as a legitimatingmaneuver to ward offaccusations that his strictdeterminismobliteratedthe possibilityof a human creativity based on the exercise of freewill. (It was also an attemptto compare the average bodily types of "ancients"and hint of romanticism. "moderns.") Thus Quetelet colors his gray determinismwith a self-justifying But this maneuver also converts the visual artist into a protoscientist,linking Quetelet to the emerging discourse of artisticrealism. (See his Anthropomitrie, pp. 61-169. In this work Quetelet constructeda visual diagram of the biographical course of an average body type frominfancyto old age, based on anthropometricaldata.) 39. Gabriel Tarde, "Archaeology and Statistics,"in TheLaws ofImitation, trans. Elsie Parsons, New York, Henry Holt, 1903, pp. 134-135 (this essay firstappeared in the Revuephilosophique, October 1883). In an extraordinarypassage of the same essay Tarde compares the graphical curve forcriminal recidivism with the "curve traced on [the] retina by the flight of [a] swallow," metaphoricallylinkingwithinthe same epistemological paradigm the work of Bertillonwith that of the physiologistEtienne Jules Marey, chronophotographerof human and animal locomotion (ibid., p. 133).

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Archive The Bodyand the

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rative coherence of the self: "Identityis the permanence of the person, it is the personalitylooked at fromthe point of view of its duration."40 Tarde's rather nominalist approach to the philosophy of crime and punishment paralleled a more practical formulationby Alphonse Bertillon, directorof the Identification Bureau of the Paris Prefecture of Police. In 1893, Bertillonoffered the followingintroductionto his system,then in use for ten years, known variously as "Bertillonage"and the "signaleticnotice": In prison practice the signaleticnotice accompanies every reception and everydeliveryof a human individuality;thisregisterguards the trace of the real, actual presence of the person soughtby the administrativeor judicial document. ... [The] task is always the same: to record of a personalityto be able to identify the preserve a sufficient with which one be at future some presentdescription may presented time. From this point of view signalmentis the best instrument for which theproof the ofrecidivation, necessarilyimplies ofidentity.41 proof In effect, then, Bertillon'spolice archive functionedas a complex biographical machine which produced presumably simple and unambiguous results. He that is, criminalswho were liable to be consought to identify repeat offenders, in theirdeviant behavior. The concernwith sidered "habitual"or "professional" recidivismwas of profoundsocial importancein the 1880s. Bertillon,however, or disconprofessedno theoryof a criminaltype,nor ofthe psychiccontinuities tinuities that might differentiate "responsible" criminals from "irresponsible" criminals. He was sensitiveto the status hierarchybetween his Identification Bureau and the more "theoretical" mission ofthe Bureau of Statistics.(Bertillon was the son of a prominentanthropometrician, Louis Adolphe Bertillon,and seems to have labored mightily to vindicate himselfafteran inauspicious start as a mere police clerk.) He was more a social engineer, an inventive clerktechnician,than a criminologist.He sought to ground police work in scientific principles,while recognizingthat most police operatives were unfamiliarwith consistentand rigorous empirical procedures. Part of his ambition was to accelerate the work of processingcriminalsand to employ effectively the labors of unskilled clerks. He resembles in many respects his American contemporary, Frederick Winslow Taylor, the inventor of scientificmanagement, the first system of modern factorydiscipline. Bertillon can be seen, like Taylor, as a prophetof rationalization. Here is Bertillondescribingthe rapidityof his process: "Four pairs of police officers at Paris, forthe measurement,every suffice,
40. Gabriel Tarde, PenalPhilosophy, trans. Rapelje Howell, Boston, Little, Brown, 1912, p. 116. instructions 41. Alphonse Bertillon, Paris, Melun, signalitiques, anthropomttrique; Identification thetranslation 1893,p. xiii. I have modified edition, Instructions, givenin theAmerican Signaletic trans.R. W. Mclaughry, Chicago, Werner,1896.

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26

OCTOBER

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Serviced'identification. Classification ParisPrefecture From Bertillon, cabinets, Alphonse ofPolice. universelle de Chicago, 1893. Exposition morningbetween nine o'clock and noon, of from100 to 150 men who were arrestedthe day before."42 Ultimately,thiswas not fastenough, and thereinlay a reason for the some thirty demise, principal years later, ofthe Bertillonsystem. How did the Bertillonsystemwork?The problems withprior attemptsat were many. The earlypromiseofphotography criminalidentification had faded in the face of a massive and chaotic archiveof images. The problemof classificationwas paramount: The collection of criminal portraitshas already attained a size so considerable that it has become physically impossible to discover among them the likeness of an individual who has assumed a false name. It goes fornothingthat in the past ten years the Paris police have collected more than 100,000 photographs. Does the reader believe it practicable to compare successivelyeach of thesewitheach one of the 100 individualswho are arresteddaily in Paris? When this was attemptedin the case of a criminalparticularly easy to identify, the search demanded more than a week of application, not to speak of the errorsand oversights which a task so fatiguing to the eye could
"The Bertillon of Identification," 42. AlphonseBertillon, vol. 11, no. 3 (May Forum, System 1891), p. 335.

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not fail to occasion. There was a need fora method of elimination analogous to that in use in botany and zoology; that is to say, one based on the characteristic elements of individuality.43 Despite the last part of this remark,Bertillonsoughtnot to relate individual to species, but to extractthe individual fromthe species. Thus he inventeda classifyingscheme that was based less upon a taxonomic categorizationof types than upon an orderingof individual cases withina segmented aggregate. He had failedmiserablyin an earlierattemptto classify police photographsaccordto the of for obvious reasons.44 Criminals may have conoffense, ing genre stituteda "professionaltype," as Tarde argued, but they did not necessarily observe a narrow specialization in theirwork. Bertillonsought to break the professionalcriminal'smasteryof disguises, false identities,multiplebiographies, and alibis. He did thisby yokinganthrovocabupometrics,the optical precisionof the camera, a refined physiognomic and statistics. lary, First Bertillon calculated, without a very sophisticated grasp of the calculus of probabilities,that the chance that two individuals mightshare the same series of eleven bodily measurements ran on the order of one in four
43. 44. Ibid.,p. 331. etla loidereligation, L'identiti desricidivistes Bertillon, Paris,Masson, 1883,p. 11. Alphonse

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1893. Identification Bertillon, anthropom6trique, million.45He regarded these eleven measurements as constant in any adult signalment,"recorded body. His signaleticnotice linked this"anthropometrical as a numerical series, with a shorthand verbal description of distinguishing marks, and a pair of photographicportraits,both frontaland profileviews. Bertillon'ssecond problem was the organization of individual cards in a comprehensivesystemfromwhich recordscould be retrievedin shortorder. To this end, Bertillon enlisted the prodigious rationalizing energies of Quetelet's "average man." By organizing his measurements into successive subdivisions, each based on a tripartite separation of below-average, average, and abovewas able to file 100,000 records into a grid of file Bertillon average figures, with the smallest subset withinany one drawer consistingof approxdrawers, a dozen identification cards. Having thus separatelyprocessed 100,000 imately
45. Identification Bertillon, anthropomitrique, pp. xvii-xviii.

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male and 20,000 female prisoners over the decade between 1883 and 1893, Bertillonfeltconfidentin boasting that his systemwas "infallible."He had in identified the process "infallibly" 4,564 recidivists.46 Bertillon can be said to have realized the binomial curve as officefurusers of photographicdocuments to comprehend niture. He is one of the first fullythe fundamentalproblem of the archive, the problem of volume. Given his recourse to statisticalmethod, what semantic value did he find in photographs? He clearly saw the photographas the finalconclusive sign in the process of identification. Ultimately,it was the photographedface pulled fromthe filethat had to match the rephotographedface of the suspect, even ifthis final proofwas dependent upon a series of more abstract steps. "photographic" Bertillonwas criticalof the inconsistentphotographypracticed by earlier
46. Ibid., pp. xxi-xxiii, lxxiv.

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30

OCTOBER

neutral police techniciansand jobbers. He argued at lengthforan aesthetically standard of representation: In commercial and artisticportraits,questions of fashion and taste are all important.Judicial photography,liberated fromthese considerations, allows us to look at the problem from a more simple the best forsuch and such a point of view: which pose is theoretically case?47 Bertilloninsistedon a standard focal length,even and consistentlighting,and a fixeddistance between the camera and the unwillingsitter.The profileview of expression;the contourofthehead remained servedto cancel the contingency consistentwith time. The frontalview provided a face that was more likelyto be recognizable withinthe other,less systematizeddepartmentsof police work. These latterphotographsserved betterin the search forsuspects who had not yetbeen arrested,whose faceswere to be recognizedby detectiveson the street. Just as Bertillonsought to classifythe photographby means of the Vitruvian registerof the anthropometricalsignalment and the binomial curve, so also he sought to translate the signs offeredby the photograph itself into another,verbal register.Thus he was engaged in a two-sided,internaland external, taming of the contingencyof the photograph. His inventionof the por- was an attemptto overthe "speaking likeness"or verbal portrait trait-parldcome the inadequacies of a purely visual empiricism. He organized voluminous taxonomic grids of the featuresof the male human head, using sectional photographs. He devoted particular attentionto the morphologyof the ear, repeating a physiognomicfascinationwith that organ that extended back to Lavater.48 But on the basis of this comparative anatomy, Bertillon sought to reinvent physiognomy in precise nonmetaphysical, ethnographic terms. Through the constructionof a strictly denotative signaleticvocabulary, this project aimed forthe precise and unambiguous translationof appearance into words. For Bertillon,the criminal body expressed nothing. No characterological secretswere hidden beneath the surface of this body. Rather, the surfaceand the skeletonwere indices of a more strictly material sort. The anthropometrical signalment was the registerof the morphological constancy of the adult
47. Paris, Gauthier-Villars, 1890, p. 2 (my transAlphonse Bertillon,La photographiejudiciare, lation). In 1872, 0. G. Rejlander suggested that photographs of ears be used to identify 48. criminals Almanac,1872, ("Hints Concerning the Photographing of Criminals," British JournalPhotographic pp. 116-117). Carlo Ginzburg has noted the coincidence of Bertillon's attention to the "individuality" of the ear and Giovanni Morelli's attempt to construct a model of art-historical authenticationbased on the careful examination of the renderingof the ear by different painters no. 9 ("Morelli, Freud, and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and ScientificMethod," HistoryWorkshop, [Spring 1980], pp. 5-29).

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The Bodyand the Archive

33

skeleton,thus the key to biographical identity.Likewise, scars and otherdeformations of the fleshwere clues, not to any innate propensityforcrime, but to the body's physical history:its trades, occupations, calamities. For Bertillon, the mastery of the criminal body necessitated a massive a transformation a text of the body's signs into a text, campaign of inscription, that pared verbal descriptiondown to a denotative shorthand,which was then linked to a numerical series. Thus Bertillonarrestedthe criminal body, deteras a body thathad already been definedas criminal,by means mined its identity that subordinated the image-which remained necessary but insufficient-to verbal textand numerical series. This was not merelya self-contained archival if We can understand more we remember another, global, imperative project. that one problem for the late-nineteenth-century police was the telegraphic transmissionof informationregarding suspects. The police were competing withopponents who availed themselvesof the devices of modernityas well, including the railroad. Why was the issue of recidivismso importantin France during the 1880s? Robert Nye has argued recentlythat the issue emerged on the political agenda of GambettistRepublicans during the Third Republic, leading to the passage of the Relegation Law of 1885, which established a Draconian policy of colonial transportfor repeat offenders.The bill worked out a variable quota of misdemeanors and felonies,includingvagabondage, that could lead to permanent exile in Guyana or New Caledonia. The French agriculturalcrisishad led to a renewed massive urban influxof displaced peasants duringthe 1880s. The recidivism debate focused on the social danger posed by the vagrant, while also seeing the milieu of the chronicallyunemployed urban poor as a source of Not least in provokingthe fearsof the defendersof order increased criminality. was the evidence of renewed working-class wave of 1881, militancyin the strike aftera decade of peace purchased by the slaughterof the Communards. At its most extreme,the debate on recidivismcombined the vagabond, the anarchist, and recidivistinto a single composite figureof social menace.49 Bertillonhimselfpromoted his systemwithinthe context of this debate. his first in Februaryof 1883, he recidivist Having only succeeded in identifying quickly argued that his binomial classificationsystemwould be essential to the application of any law of relegation. He described a Parisian working-class milieu that was undergoing what mightfacetiouslybe called a "crisisof identity."During the Commune, all city records prior to 1859 had been burned; any Parisian over twenty-two years old was at libertyto inventand reinventan
49. See Robert Nye, Crime, inModern TheMedical Concept Madness,and Politics France.: ofNational Decline, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1984, pp. 49-96. Although Nye mentions Bertillon'sproject only in passing, I have relied upon his social historyforan understanding of the politics of French criminologyduring the late nineteenthcentury. A more directlyrelevant study of Bertillon, Christian Pheline's L'image accusatrice (Paris, Cahiers de la Photographie, came to my attention only afterthis essay was going to press. 1985), unfortunately

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34

OCTOBER

entirelybogus nativity.Furthermore,Bertillonclaimed that there was an exin false documents, citing the testimonyof foremenat the traordinarytraffic - white lead and fertilizer more "insalubrious" industrial establishment factories,forexample- thatjob applicants frequently reappeared two weeks after names.50 In effect, being rejected with entirely new papers and different a social fieldthat had exploded into multiplicity. Bertillonsought to reregister One curious aspect of Bertillon'sreputationlies in the way in which his method, which runs counter to any metaphysicalor essentialistdoctrineof the self,could be regarded as a triumphof humanism. One biographerput it this way: "A man of his type inevitablyfound a kind of romance in a technique the aim of which was to individualize human beings."51 Bertillon himself contributedto this"humane" reading of his project: "Is it not at bottom a problem of this sort that formsthe basis of the everlastingpopular melodrama about But in more technicaland theoretilost, exchanged, and recoveredchildren?"52 cal contexts,the degree to which Bertillonageactually eroded the "uniqueness" of the selfbecame clear. Writingwith a coauthor in 1909, Bertillonnoted that according to the logic of the binomial curve, "each observationor each group of observations is to be defined, not by its absolute value, but by its deviation fromthe arithmetic mean."53Thus even the nominalistBertillonwas forcedto recognize the higherrealityof the "average man." The individual could only be identified by invokingthe powers of this genie. And the individual only existed as an individual by being identified. Individuality as such had no meaning. Viewed "objectively,"the self occupied a position that was wholly relative. The Bertillonsystemproliferated widely, receivingan enthusiasticreception especially in the United States and contributing to the internationalization and standardizationof police methods. The anthropometric systemfaced competitionfromthe fingerprint system,a more radically synecdochicprocedure, invented in part by Francis Galton, who had interestsin identification as well as typology.With the advent of fingerprinting, it became evidentthatthe body did not have to be "circumscribed" in order to be identified.Rather, the key to could be in found the merest trace of the body's tactile presence in the identity world. Furthermore,fingerprinting was more promisingin a Taylorist sense, since it could be properlyexecuted by less-skilledclerks. By the late nineteenand less cumtens, the Bertillonsystemhad begun to yield to thismore efficient bersome method, although hybridsystemsoperated for some years.54
50. 51. des ricidivistes, Bertillon, L'identiti pp. 2, 5. Bertillon: FatherofScientific Henry Rhodes, Alphonse Detection, London, Abelard-Schuman,

1956, p. 83. 52. Bertillon, "The Bertillon of Identification," System p. 330. 53. A. Bertillon and A. Chervin,Anthropologie Paris, Imprimerie Nationale,1909, mnitrique, The same textdrolly likenstheshape ofthebinomialcurveto thatofa p. 51 (my translation). hat." "gendarme's 54. Bertillon noted thathis system was adopted by 1893 in the United States, Belgium,

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WestIndies,and Rumania Switzerland, Russia, muchof SouthAmerica,Tunisia, theBritish ofBertillon's manualsof signaletic instrucanthropomitrique, p. lxxxi).Translations (Identification tionsappearedin Germany, Switzerland, England,and Peru, as wellas theUnitedStates.On theenthusiastic American oftheBertillon see Donald Dilworth, ed., Identificareception system, tionWanted.: American Criminal 1893-1943,Gaithersburg, Development ofthe Identification System, ofChiefs International Association ofPolice, 1977. The IACP promoted thegeneral Maryland, and municipally autonomous adoptionof Bertillonage by the geographically dispersed police forcesof the United States and Canada, and the establishment of a National Identification Bureauin Washington, D.C. This office was absorbedintotheFederalBureauofInvestigation in 1924.(Canada adoptedBertillonage withtheCriminal Identification Actof 1898.) Starting in oftheIACP, called The carried Bertillon mea1898,a quasi-official Detective, monthly publication surements and photographs ofwanted criminals. This publication a reasonable provides gaugeof theratioof reliance and fingerprint overthenext by American policeon theBertillon systems resisted Bertillon's becausethefingerprint method, twenty-five years.The British largely system

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From Yawmanand ErbeMfg. Co., Criminal Identification by "Y and E": Bertillonand Finger Print Systems, 1913. in 1896 underthe Penal Serwereestablished was of British regulations origin.Nonetheless, ofcriminal andBertillon measurement vitude Actof 1891forthephotographing, fingerprinting, Rules andOrders, 1896,no. London,H. M. Stationary Office, Statutory prisoners (GreatBritain, theanthropometric was abandoned. 762, pp. 364-365). By 1901,however, signalment Bertillon faulted Bertillon and Galtontraded Galtonfor jibes at their respective systems. in classifying thedifficulties encountered of Identification," System fingerprints ("The Bertillon that Bertillon for torecognize werecorrehisfailure measurements bodily p. 331). Galtonfaulted theprobability of duplicate lated and not independent variables,thusgrossly underestimating Memories measurements London,Methuen,1908,p. 251; see also his ofMy (FrancisGalton, Life, Identification and Description," vol. 18 [May 29, "Personal Institute, ofthe Anthropological Journal 1888],pp. 177-191). however.In The two men'sobsessionwithauthorship may have been a bit misplaced, Holmes"(citedin note48, above), Carlo Ginzburg has suggested Freud,and Sherlock "Morelli, on thetheft ofa morepopuofrationalized criminal identification rested that thewholeenterprise in hunting form ofempiricism, and divining. had SirWilliamHerschel lar,conjectural grounded in 1860from a usagecustomary under hiscoamongBengali peasants fingerprinting appropriated in whatGinzburg The sourceofpolicemethods describes as "lowintuition" lonialadministration. in a passagein which he arguesfor a rigorously was obliquely acknowledged byBertillon scientific at thesametime whileinvoking thedistinctly imageofthehunter: "Anthropolpremodern policing, in all times butthenatural ofman. Have nothunters is nothing been history ogy,by definition, ofthehunter in natural interested And,on theother hand,havenotnaturalists history? something willapplytotheir in them? form ofthechasetherules No doubtthepoliceofthefuture particular ofourlocomotives are putting in practice and psychology, ofanthropology just as theengineers of Identification," and thermodynamics" thelaws of mechanics System p. 341). ("The Bertillon a modelofobservation and description thatis moreopen to multiplicity has proposed Ginzburg than thatadvancedbyJohnTagg, who subsumesall documentary the within and resistance of thePanopticon p. 55). paradigm (Tagg, "Powerand Photography,"

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The Bodyand theArchive

37

the description For Bertillon,the typeexisted only as a means forrefining of individuality. Detectives could not affordnot to be nominalists. Bertillon was not alone in this understanding of the peculiarities of the policeman's of crime. For example, the New York City detective search forthe specificity chiefThomas Byrnespublished in 1886 a lavish "rogues' gallery"entitledProfessionalCriminals Although Byrnes practiced a less systematicmode of ofAmerica. than did Bertillon,he clearlyarticulatedthe positionthatclassical photography physiognomictypingwas of no value whatsoever in the hunt for the "higher and more dangerous order" of criminals, who "carried no suggestion of their In Bertillon'scase, theresistanceto the theoryofa biologicalling about them."55 of late-ninecriminal type was also in keeping with the general drift given cally which stressed the French criminologicaltheory, importanceof teenth-century environmental factors in determiningcriminal behavior. Thus the "French school," notablyGabriel Tarde and Alexandre Lacassagne, opposed thebiologof the"Italian school"of criminalanthropology, whichcentered ical determinism Cesare Lombroso's quasi-Darwinian theory on the anatomist-craniometrician of the criminalas an "atavisticbeing who reproduces in his person the ferocious animals."56Against thisline of of primitivehumanityand the inferior instincts reasoning, Lacassagne argued that "the social milieu is the motherculture of criminality;the microbe is the criminal."57 (In this context, it is worthnoting the mutual admiration that passed between Pasteur, the microbe-hunter, and The French were able to medicalize crime Bertillon,thehunterofrecidivists.58) while simultaneouslypointing to environmentalfactors.A range of positions emerged, some more medical, some more sociological in emphasis. Tarde inthatproliferated sistedthatcrimewas a profession throughchannels of imitative behavior. Others argued that the criminal was a "degenerate type," suffering more than noncriminalsfromthe bad environmentaleffects of urbanism.59 the acute differences between the Despite warringfactionsofthe emerging criminologicalprofession,a common enthusiasm forphotographicillustration of the criminal type was shared by almost all of the practitioners, with the notable exception of Tarde, who shunned the lowly empiricismof the case study formore lofty, even ifnominalist,meditationson the problem of crime. Before at Francis Galton's peculiar contributionto the search for a criminal looking I will that note type, during the 1890s in particular, a profusionof texts ap-

55. Thomas Byrnes, "Why Thieves are Photographed," in Professional Criminals New ofAmerica, York, Cassell, 1886, p. 53. 56. Cesare Lombroso, "Introduction,"to Gina Lombroso-Ferrero, Criminal Man, New York, Putnam, 1911, p. xxv. 57. Quoted by Nye, p. 104. 58. Rhodes, p. 190. 59. See Nye, pp. 97-131.

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17

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40

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photographic evidence of basic criminal peared in France and Italy offering at odds withone another over the were authors the frequently types. Although "atavistic"or "degenerate"nature of the criminal, on a more fundamentallevel they shared a common battle. This was a war of representations.The photruth,even in the face of Bertillon's tograph operated as the imageof scientific demonstrationof the inadequacies of the medium. Photographs and technical illustrationswere deployed, not only against the body of the representative criminal, but also against that body as a bearer and producer of its own, inferiorrepresentations.These textscan be seen as a battle between the camera of a prison subculture. For and the tattoo, the erotic drawing, and the graffiti mark of was a atavism, since criminalsshared Lombroso, tattooing particular the practice withpresumablyless evolved tribalpeoples. But even workswhich sought to demolish Lombroso's dogmatic biologism established a similar hierdown at the visual products of a primitive archy. Scientificrationalism looked a This was criminality. quasi-ethnologic discourse. Consider, for example, a work which argued against atavism and for degeneracy, Charles Marie des criminels. This book contained an ilDebierre's typologicallytitledLe crdne lustratedchapter treating"les beaux-arts dans les prisons"as subject matterfor a set of the psychological study of the criminal. A subsequent chapter offered of of heads "taken one of an hour the severed convicts, quarter photographs afterdecapitation." Faced with these specimens of degeneracy, this physiognomist of the guillotineremarked: "Degroote and Clayes . . . theirdull faces and wild eyes reveal thatbeneath theirskulls thereis no place forpity."Works of this sort depended upon an extreme form of statisticalinference: basing physiognomicgeneralizations on very limited samples.60 This brings us finallyto Francis Galton, who attemptedto overcome the limitationsof this sort of inferential reading of individual case studies. Galton was a compulsive Where Bertillonwas a compulsive systematizer, was concerned While Bertillon with the triumphof social primarily quantifier. order over social disorder,Galton was concerned primarily withthe triumphof established rank over the forcesof social leveling and decline. Certainly these were not incompatible projects. On a theoreticalplane, however, Galton can be linked more closely to the concerns of the Italian school of criminalanthropology and to biological determinismin general. Composite images based on Galton's procedure, first proposed in 1877, proliferated widely over the following threedecades. A composite of criminal skulls appears in the albums of the
60. CharlesMarie Debierre,Le crdne descriminels, and Masson, 1895, Lyon and Paris, Storck illustrated works are by members oftheItalianschool:Lombroso's important p. 274. The other revised Frenchand Italianeditions ofhis 1876L'uomo includedseparatealbumsofildelinquente lustrations Bocca, 1896-97).The platesofcriminal (Paris,Alcan, 1895and Turin,Fratelli types in thesealbumsweretakenfrom materials forEnricoFerri, Atlante prepared antropologico-statistico dell'omicidio, Turin, Fratelli Bocca, 1895.

XXXIXfrom Plate Cesare L'homme Lombroso,
criminel, 1895.

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Galtonian composite. 1895 French edition and the 1896-97 Italian edition of Lombroso's Criminal which adhered to the positionsof Man. Likewise, Havelock Ellis's The Criminal, the Italian school and marked the high tide of Lombrosoism in England, bore a in its first,1890 edition.61 Galtonian frontispiece Both Galton and his quasi-official biographer, the statisticianKarl Pearthe son, regarded composite photograph as one of the central intellectualinventions of Galton's career. More recent studies of Galton have tended to neglectthe importanceattached to what now seems like an optical curiosity.62 statisof science fordeveloping the first in the history Galton is significant His career was suspended between the tical methods for studyingheredity.63 paradigm in the late 1860s triumphofhis cousin Charles Darwin's evolutionary and the belated discoveryin 1899 of Gregor Mendel's workon the geneticratio underlyinginheritance. Politically, Galton sought to constructa program of social bettermentthroughbreeding. This program pivoted on a profoundly of existingclass relationsin England. Eugenicistsjustiideological biologization fiedtheirprogramin utilitarianterms:by seekingto reduce the numbersof the
61. HavelockEllis, TheCriminal, London,WalterScott,1890. and Eugenics,"The is David Green,"VeinsofResemblance: 62. The exception Photography vol. 7, no. 2 (1984), pp. 3-16. Art Oxford Journal, inthe Nineteenth Galton andthe 63. See RuthSchwartz Cowan, SirFrancis Century, of Heredity Study New York,Garland, 1985.

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44

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"unfit" theyclaimed to be reducing the numbers of those predestinedto unhappiness. But the eugenics movement Galton founded flourishedin a historical - similar in this context respect to Third Republic France - of declining birthrates middle-class coupled withmiddle-classfearsofa burgeoningresiduum of degenerate urban poor.64 was an attemptto demonstrate Genius Galton's early, 1869 workHereditary in his words, of "nature"over "nurture" in determining the priority, the quality of human intelligence.In a rathertautological fashion,Galton set out to demonstrate that a reputation for intelligenceamounted to intelligence,and that with(reputationsfor)inmen with(reputationsfor)intelligence begat offspring binomial He distribution,observing that appropriated Quetelet's telligence. cadets at Sandhurst fellinto a bellthe entranceexamination scores of military shaped pattern around a central mean. On the basis of this "naturalizing" evidence, he proposed a general quantitativehierarchyof intelligence,and applied it to racial groups. This hierarchywas characterizedby a distinctclassicistlonging: "The average abilityof the Athenian race is, on thelowest possible estimate,verynearly two grades higherthan our own - that is, about as much as our race is above thatof the Africannegro."65 Eugenics can be seen as an attempt to push the English social average toward an imaginary, lost Athens, and away froman equally imaginary, threatening Africa. Galton's passion forquantificationand numerical rankingcoexisted with a qualified faithin physiognomicdescription. His writingsdemonstratea remarkable parallelism and tensionbetween the desire to measure and the desire to look. His composites emerged fromthe attemptto merge optical and statistical procedures within a single "organic" operation. Galton's Inquiriesinto of 1883 began by suggestingsome of the limitationsof priorHuman Faculty and subsequent- attemptsat physiognomictyping: The physiognomicaldifference between different men being so numerous and small, it is impossible to measure and compare them each to each, and to discoverby ordinarystatisticalmethodsthe true physiognomyof a race. The usual way is to select individuals who are judged tQ be representative of the prevalent type, and to photobecause the judggraph them; but this method is not trustworthy, ment itselfis fallacious. It is swayed by exceptional and grotesque featuresmore than by ordinaryones, and the portraitssupposed to be typical are likely to be caricatures.66

64. See GarethStedman London: A Study inthe between in VicClasses Jones,Outcast Relationship torian Oxford,Clarendon,1971. Society, 65. FrancisGalton,Hereditary Genius, London, Friedman,1978, p. 342. 66. FrancisGalton,Inquiries into Human andItsDevelopment, London,Macmillan,1883, Faculty pp. 5-6. Frontispiece fromFrancisGalton,Inquiries into Human Faculty, 1883.

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DIAGRAM SHOWING THE ESSENTIAL PARTS.

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This book was a summary of Galton's researches over the preceding fifteen years. From this initialcriticismof a more naive physiognomicstance, Galton moved directlyto an outline of his composite method. The composite frontispiece and the recurrentreferencesin various contextsthroughoutthe book to lessons to be learned fromthe composites suggestthat Galton believed that he had invented a prodigious epistemological tool. Accordingly, his interestin composite imagery should not be regarded as a transparentideological stunt, but as an overdeterminedinstance of biopositivism. How did Galton produce his blurred, fictitious apparitions? How did he understand them? He acknowledged at the outset of his experimentsHerbert Spencer's priorproposal fora similarprocess of superimposition.Spencer's or-

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Thecomposite Francis Galton, apparatus, from Inquiries intoHuman Faculty,1883. soil forthe notion of a genganismic conception of societycan be seen as fertile eralized body, although in this case Spencer seems to have been drawn to the notion of a composite througha youthfulfascinationwith phrenology.67 But Galton was concerned also with the psychologyof the visual imagination,with the capacity of the mind to constructgeneric images fromsense data. Here he foundhis inspirationin Thomas Huxley. He claimed in factthatthe composite photographicapparatus shared, and ultimatelysurpassed, the capacity of artistic intelligence to generalize. Here, as with Quetelet, one witnesses the statisticianas artistmanque. Galton fabricatedhis composites by a process of successive registration of a copy camera holding a single plate. Each and exposure of portraitsin front successive image was given a fractionalexposure based on the inverse of the total number of images in the sample. That is, ifa composite were to be made froma dozen originals,each would receive one-twelfth of the required total exindividual distinctive that features were unshared and Thus, features, posure. faded into the of What remained was away night underexposure. idiosyncratic, the blurred, nervous configuration of those featuresthat were held in common throughout the sample. Galton claimed that these images constituted legitimate averages, and he claimed further that one could infer larger generalitiesfromthe small sample that made up the composites. He proposed that "statisticalconstancy"was attained after"thirty haphazard picturesof the same class [had] been combined."'68 Galton made more expansive claims forhis process,whichhe has described as a formof "pictorial statistics": Composite pictures are . . . much more than averages; they are rather the equivalents of those large statisticaltables whose totals, divided by the number of cases and entered on the bottomline, are the averages. They are real generalizations,because theyinclude the whole of the materialunder consideration.The blur of theiroutlines, which is never great in trulygenericcomposites, except in unimpor-

67. Galtonacknowledged theAnthropological Spencerin an 1878paperreadbefore Institute, in ibid.,p. 340. Spencer'spreviously extracted 1846 proposalforproducing and unpublished can be superimposing phrenological diagramsof the head, "On a ProposedCephalograph," foundas an appendixto hisAnAutobiography, vol. 1, New York,Appleton,1904,pp. 634-638. Like Quetelet,Spencerappearsnot to have read Kant on thenotionof an averagetype,or on TheSocialand Political any othertopicforthatmatter (see David Wiltshire, Thought ofHerbert Oxford defense ofa hierarOxford, Press,1978,p. 67). Spencer's Spencer, University organismic chicalsocialdivision oflaboris articulated in a review ofthecollected works ofPlatoand Hobbes: "The Social Organism," TheWestminster New Series,vol. 17, no. 1 (January1860), pp. Review, 90-121. This extended ofblood withthatof metaphor goes so faras to comparethecirculation betweenSpenceriansocial Darwinismand eugenics,see money(p. 111). On the connections GretaJones,SocialDarwinism andEnglish 1980. Sussex, Harvester, Thought, 68. Galton,Inquiries, p. 17.

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tant details, measures the tendencyof individuals to deviate fromthe central type.69 In this passage the tension between claims forempirical specificity and claims forgeneralityreaches the point of logical rupture: what are we to make of this glib slide from"theyinclude the whole" to "except unimportantdetails"? In his search fora type, Galton did not believe that anythingsignificant was lost in underexposure. This required an unacknowledged presupposition:only the gross featuresof the head mattered.Ears, forexample, which were highlymarked as signs in other physiognomic systems, both as individuating and as typical features,were not registeredat all by the composite process. (Later Galton or "unimportantdetails" by means of a sought to "recapture"small differences he called which superimposedpositiveand technique "analyticalphotography," their unshared negative images, therebyisolating elements.70) Just as he had acknowledged Quetelet as a source forhis earlier rankingof intelligence,so Galton claimed thatthe composite photographproduced an immoyen: proved impressionof l'homme The process . . . of pictorial statistics[is] suitable to give us generic pictures of man, such as Quetelet obtained in outline by the ordias described in his workon Annary numerical methods of statistics, . . . . By the process of composites we obtain a picture thropomitrie and not a mere outline.7" In effect Galton believed that he had translatedthe Gaussian errorcurve into bell curve now wore a human face. This was pictorial form.The symmetrical an extraordinaryhypostatization.Consider the way in which Galton conveniently exiled blurring to the edgesof the composite, when in fact blurring would occur over the entire surface of the image, although less perceptibly. Only an imaginationthatwanted to seea visual analogue of the binomial curve would make this mistake, findingthe type at the center and the idiosyncratic and individual at the outer periphery. The frontispiece to Inquiries into HumanFaculty consistsofeightsetsof comGalton describes these as an posites. images integratedensemble in his text,in what amounts to an illustratedlecture on eugenics. The first, upper leftcom69. Francis Galton, "On Generic Images," Proceedings vol. 9 (1879), p. 166. ofthe RoyalInstitution, 70. Francis Galton, "Analytical Photography,"Nature,vol. 18 (August 2, 1890), p. 383. 71. Francis Galton, "Generic Images," Nineteenth vol. 6, no. 29 (July 1879), p. 162. In Century, the related, previouslycited paper "On Generic Images," Galton stated thatQuetelet was the first to give "the idea of type"a "rigorous interpretation" (p. 162). Ruth Schwartz Cowan has argued, followingKarl Pearson, that Quetelet was of no particular import in Galton's development as a statistician;but Cowan is interestedin Galton's position as a statisticianin the lineage of hereditarian thought,and not in his attemptto negotiate the merger of optical and statisticalmethods. That is, Cowan prefersto definebiostatisticsas a science which began withGalton, a science having no prehereditarianprecursor in Quetelet (see Sir FrancisGalton,pp. 145-200).

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FrancisGalton.CriminalComposites. c. 1878. The Life, Letters PlateXXVII fromKarl Pearson, and Labours of Francis Galton, vol. 2, 1924.

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50

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posite of six portraitmedallions of Alexander the Great serves Galton as an introductory, epistemologicalbenchmark,not only to the series, but to the entire book. Oblivious to issues of styleor artisticconvention, Galton assumed that individual engravers had erred in various ways in their representations.The composite, according to a Gaussian logic of averaged measurements, would contain a "truer likeness." An unspoken desire, however, lurks, behind this construction. Galton made many composites of Greek and Roman portrait coins and medallions, seeking in the blurred"likenesses"the vanished physiognomy of a higher race. Galton's next two sets of composites were made from members of the same family.With these he charged into the active terrainof eugenic research in a and manipulation. By exhibitingthe blending of individual characteristics to have seems been for a of Galton ratio searching single composite image, He these to the influence. extended experiments composites tracing hereditary lineage of race horses. The next composite was probably the most democratic constructionof and eleven Galton's entirecareer: a combination of portraitsof twelve officers as a "clue to the direction enlistedmen ofthe Royal Engineers. This was offered in which the stock of the English race mightmost easily be improved."72 This with its was dystopian counterparts,generic images of paired utopian image disease and criminality. crime While tuberculosisseemed to produce a vaguely wan physiognomy, was less easy to type. Galton had obtained identification photographsof convictsfromthe Directorof Prisons, Edmund Du Cane, and thesewere the source of his first composites in 1878. Despite this early startin the search forthe biological criminal type, Galton came to a position thatwas less enthusiasticthan that of Lombroso: "The individual faces are villainous enough, but they are villainous in different ways, and when theyare combined, the individual peculiaritiesdisappear, and the common humanityof a low typeis all that is left."73 Thus Galton seems to have dissolved the boundary between the criminal and theworking-class poor, the residuumthatso haunted thepolitical imaginationof the late-Victorianbourgeoisie. Given Galton's eugenic stance, this meant that he merely included the criminal in the general pool of the "unfit." of the London Later, followingCharles Booth's sociological stratification classified Galton and loafers" as the "criminals, semi-criminals, population, worstof the eugenically unfit:the bottom one percentof the urban hierarchy. On thisbasis, he supportedlong sentencesfor"habitual criminals,"in hopes of theiropportunitiesforproducing low-class offspring."74 "restricting Galton concluded the introductory in his Insample of compositeportraits
72. 73. Galton, Inquiries, p. 14. Ibid., p. 15.

74.

Francis inEugenics, Education Galton,Essays London,Eugenics 1909,pp. 8-9, 62. Society,

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Archive The Bodyand the

51

with contrastedsets of composites made fromverylarge samples: reprequiries senting"consumptive"and "not consumptive"cases. With these he underlined ambitions behind his optical process and and the socialhygenic both the statistical his political program. and philosophical ambitions. In his Galton harbored other psychological earlier essays on "genericimages" he examined "analogies" between mental images, which he claimed consisted of "blended memories,"and the genera produced by his optical process. Citing the Weber-Fechner Law of psychophysics, which demonstratedthatrelativeperceptual sensitivity decreased as the level of a most stimulusincreased, Galton concluded that"thehuman mind is therefore apparatus forthe elaboration of general ideas," when compared with imperfect In the relentlessand untiringquantitativeconsistencyof "pictorialstatistics."'75 he returnedto thistheme: "The ideal faces obtained by the method of Inquiries, appear to have a greatdeal in common with.., so-called compositeportraiture abstract ideas." He wondered whetherabstract ideas might not be more corGalton's ratherreifiednotions of what conrectlytermed"cumulative ideas."''76 stitutedthoughtis perhaps most clearly, if unwittingly, expressed in his offof introspection:"taking stock of my own mental furniture."''" hand definition The composite apparatus provided Galton with a model of scientific intelof model intellectual a mechanical labor. this Furthermore, ligence, intelligence answered to thelogic ofphilosophicalrealism. Galton argued thathis composites refutednominalistapproaches to the human sciences, demonstrating with certainty the reality of distinct racial types. This amounted to an essentialist physical anthropologyof race.78 It is not surprising,then, that Galton would come to regard his most successfulcomposite as that depicting"theJewish type." In a historicalcontextin which therewas no clear anthropological consensus on the racial or ethniccharacter of modernJews, Galton produced an image that was, according to Karl Pearson, "a landmark in composite photography":"We all know the Jewish brings him before us in a way that only a great boy, and Galton's portraiture work of art could equal - scarcelyexcel, forthe artistwould only idealise from onemodel."79This applause, ominous enough as it is, takes on an even more sinistertone in retrospectwhen one considers the line of influencewhich led fromAnglo-American eugenics to National Socialist Rassentheorie.80
75. Galton, "Generic Images," p. 169. 76. Galton, Inquiries, p. 183. 77. Ibid., p. 182. 78. Galton, "Generic Images," pp. 163-164. Karl Pearson, The Life,Letters 79. and LaboursofFrancisGalton,vol. 2, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1924, p. 293. 80. On the role played by eugenics in Nazi racial policy, see Allan Chase, TheLegacy ofMalthus: The Social Costs of the New Scientific Racism, Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1980, pp. 342-360. Galton was asked to make the composites in 1883 byJosephJacobs, who was attemptingto

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OCTOBER

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The Jewish Francis Galton. XXXV Type. 1883. Plate Pearson. from Galton's composite process enjoyed a wide prestigeuntil about 1915. Despite its origins in a discourse of racial essentialism,the composite was used to make a varietyof points, some of whichfavored"nurture" over "nature."For
the existence of a relatively demonstrate pure racial typeof modern Jew, intactdespitethe from theJews'Free Schooland from Diaspora. For theportraits, Jacobsrecruited boystudents the Men'sClub in London.GaltonandJacobsbothagreedthat a racialtype had Working Jewish butthey on themoral essence ofthattype.Galton,thegreat been produced, disagreed profoundly methisimaginary Other:"The feature me most, that struck as I drovethrough the... quantifier, was the cold scanning or gaze of man, woman,and child. . . . I felt, Jewishquarter, rightly thatevery one ofthemwas coolyappraising me at market theslightest value,without wrongly, interest kind" ofany other ThePhotographic vol. 29, no. 1389 News, Composites," ("Photographic to Galton'santi-Semitism witha morehonorific of [April17, 1885]). Jacobsresponded reading thecomposites, that "here wehave something.., morespiritual thana spirit . . . The suggesting In these facemustrepresent thisJewishforefather. we have the composite Jewishcomposites we can hopeto possessofthelad Samuelas he ministered nearest before theArk, representation David whenhe tended hisfather's or theyouthful Comsheep" ("TheJewish Type, and Galton's ThePhotographic News,vol. 29, no. 1390 [April24, 1885]). Thus Jacobs positePhotographs," of theJew as the embodiment of capitalwitha proto-Zionist counters Galton'smyth of myth ofJewsin thelate nineteenth and the origins. (On themedicaland racialstereotyping century, see SanderGilman,"The Madnessofthe in Difference andPathology: Stereoreaction, Jewish Jews," Ithaca,CornellUniversity Race,andMadness, Press, 1985, pp. 150-162.) types ofSexuality,

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Archive The Bodyand the

53

IF
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laborers LewisHine. Composite photograph ofchild in cotton mill.1913. (National employed Gallery of Canada,Ottawa.) example, Lewis Hine made a number of crude composite printsof girl millworkersin 1913, in what was evidentlyan attemptto trace the general effects of conditions on bodies. in a curious the book And, twist, factory working young which provided the conclusive refutationfrom within criminologyof Lombroso's theoryof the innate criminalwiththe telltaleskull, Henry Goring's The opened its attackwitha comparisonbetween compositesof freeEnglishConvict, hand drawingsand compositesof tracingsfromphotographsof criminalheads. The former had been used by Havelock Ellis to make his physiognomiccase in The discrepancybetween these and the tracingsrevealed a great The Criminal. of caricature in Ellis's pictures.81 With both Hine and Goring, a faithin degree the objectivity of the camera persisted.However, withthe general demise of an of the camera and the staoptical model of empiricism,Galton's hybridization tistical table approached extinction. Photographycontinued to serve the sci81. HenryGoring,TheEnglish A Statistical Convict: London, H. M. Stationery Office, Study, 1913. Lombroso's theoretical fixation withconvict head size had alreadybeen undercut within by Franz Boas. See his 1910-1913essay,"Changesin BodilyFormof physical anthropology Descendantsof Immigrants," in Race, Language and Culture, New York, Macmillan, 1949, pp. 60-75.

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ences, but in a less grandiose and exalted fashion,and consequentlywithmore more casual- truthclaims, especiallyon the periphery modest- and frequently of the social sciences. In retrospect,the Galtonian composite can be seen as the collapsed verthe archive attemptsto exist sion of the archive. In this blurred configuration, as a potentsingle image, and the single image attemptsto achieve the authority of the archive, of the general, abstract proposition. Galton was certainlya vociferousideologue for the extension and elaboration of archival methods. He for hereditarian purposes, calling actively promoted familial self-surveillance forhis readers to "obtain photographsand ordinarymeasurementsperiodically of themselves and their children, making it a familycustom to do so."82 His of sailors. Here model here was the British Admiralty'svoluminous registry modeled itself on the founded an AnthropoGalton military. again, eugenics metrical Laboratory in 1884, situated first at the InternationalHealth Exposition, then moving to the Science Museum in South Kensington. Nine thousand visitorswere measured, paying threeor fourpence each forthe privilege of contributing to Galton's eugenic research.83 Althoughmarriedformany years, Galton leftno children. Instead, he left behind an immense archiveof documents. One curious aspect of Karl Pearson's massive pharaonic biographyof Galton is its profusionof photographicillustrations, including not only Galton's many photographicexperiments,but also a kind of intermittent familyalbum of more personal pictures. Eugenics was a utopian ideology, but it was a utopianism inspired and haunted by a sense of social decline and exhaustion. Where Quetelet had apin averages both a proached the question of the average withoptimism,finding moral and an aesthetic ideal, Galton's eugenicist hope foran improved racial stock was always limited by his early discoverythat successive generationsof eugenically bred stock tended to regress back toward the mean, and "mediThus the fantasyof absolute racial betterment was haunted by what ocrity."84 must have seemed a kind of biological entropy.85 cenLater, in the twentieth would with brutal in its tury,eugenics only operate certainty negative mode, throughthe sterilizationand exterminationof the Other. What can we conclude, finally, about the photographic problems encountered and "solved" by Bertillon,the nominalistdetective,and Galton, the essentialistbiometrician?The American philosopher and semiotician Charles
82. Galton, Inquiries, p. 43. 83. and Labours,vol. 2, p. 357. Pearson, Life, Letters 84. Galton, Hereditary Genius,pp. xvii-xviii. 85. On the cultural resonance of the concept of entropyin the nineteenthcentury,see Anson Rabinbach, "The Body without Fatigue: A Nineteenth Century Utopia," in Seymour Drescher et al., eds., PoliticalSymbolism in ModernEurope:Essays in Honorof George Mosse, New Brunswick, Transaction Books, 1982, pp. 42-62.

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Archive The Bodyand the

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Sanders Peirce, theircontemporary,made a useful distinctionbetween signs to theirobjects indexically,and those that operated symbolically. that referred of the radiations fromthe object," To the extent that photographs are "effects they are indexical signs, as are all signs which registera physical trace. Symbols, on the other hand, signify by virtueof conventionsor rules. Verbal language in general, and all conceptual thought,is symbolicin Peirce's system.86 Paradoxically, Bertillon, in taming the photograph by subordinatingit to the verbal textof theportrait order of meanparld,remained wedded to an indexical more than the The was of its contingent trace nothing physical photograph ing. instance. Galton, in seeking the apotheosis of the optical, attemptedto elevate the indexical photographiccomposite to the level of the symbolic, thus expressIn so doing, a the accretion of law instances. through contingent ing general Galton produced an unwittingcaricature of inductivereason. The composites not by embodyingthe law of error,but by being rhetorically annexed signified, to thatlaw. Galton's ambition, althoughscientistic, was not unlike thatof those otherelevatorsof photography,the neosymbolistsof the Photo Secession. Both Galton and Stieglitzwanted somethingmore than a mere trace, somethingthat would match or surpass the abstract capabilities of the imaginativeor generalbelieved to emerge izing intellect. In both cases, meaning that was fervently fromthe "organic"characterof the sign was in factcertified by a hidden framing convention. Bertillon, on the other hand, kept his (or at least his underlings') eye and nose to the ground. This made him, in the prejudiced and probably inconsequential opinion of one of his biographers, Henry Rhodes, "the most advanced photographerin Europe."87Despite theirdifferences, both Bertillon and Galton were caught up in the attempt to preserve the value of an older, optical model of truthin a historicalcontextin which abstract,statistical the high road to social truthand social control. procedures seemed to offer III. The first rigorous systemof archival cataloguing and retrievalof photowas that invented by Bertillon. Bertillon'snominalist systemof idengraphs tificationand Galton's essentialist system of typologyconstitutenot only the two poles of positivistattemptsto regulate social deviance by means of photography, but also the two poles of these attemptsto regulate the semantic traffic in photographs. Bertillon sought to embed the photograph in the archive. Galton sought to embed the archive in the photograph. While their projects were specialized and idiosyncratic,these pioneers of scientificpolicing and
86. Charles Sanders Peirce, The Philosophical ed. Justus Buchler, New York, Writings ofPeirce, Dover, 1955, pp. 99-119.

87.

Rhodes,p. 191.

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eugenics mapped out general parameters for the bureaucratic handling of that historiesof photographyhave visual documents. It is quite extraordinary been writtenthus far with little more than passing referenceto theirwork. I suspect that thishas somethingto do with a certainbourgeois scholarlydiscretion concerningthe dirtywork of modernization,especially when the status of photography as a fine art is at stake.88 It is even more extraordinarythat historiesof social documentaryphotographyhave been written withouttaking the police into account. Here the issue is the maintenance of a certain liberal humanistmythof thewhollybenignoriginsof sociallyconcernedphotography.89 Roughly between 1880 and 1910, the archive became the dominant institutional basis forphotographicmeaning. Increasingly, photographicarchives were seen as central to a bewildering range of empirical disciplines, ranging fromart historyto militaryintelligence.90 Bertillonhad demonstratedthe usefulnessof his model forpolice purposes, but otherdisciplinesfaced significantly different science problems of image cataloguing. An emergentbibliographic proforthese expansive and unrulycollecvided the utopian model of classification tions of photographs. Here again Bertillonwas prescientin his effort to reduce the multiple signs of the criminal body to a textual shorthandand numerical series. At a varietyof separate but relatedcongresseson the internationalization and standardizationof photographicand bibliographicmethods, held between 1895 and 1910, it was recommended that photographsbe catalogued topically according to the decimal system invented by the American librarian Melvil Dewey in 1876. The lingeringprestige of optical empiricismwas sufficiently strong to ensure that the terrain of the photographable was still regarded as roughlycongruentwiththatof knowledgein general. The InstituteforInternational Bibliographybuilt on the universalistlogic of the eighteenth-century encyclopedists. But appropriate to the triumphal years of an epoch of scientific

88. trans. Edward Epstean, New York, CoCompare Josef Maria Eder, History ofPhotography, lumbia UniversityPress, 1945, with Beaumont Newhall, Photography.: A Short Critical New History, York, Museum of Modern Art, 1938. Eder, very much part of the movement to rationalize phodecade of this century,is quite willing to treat police photographyas a tographyduring the first proper object of his narrative. Eder in fact wrote an introduction to a German edition of Bertillon'smanual (Die gerichtliche Halle a. S., Knapp, 1895). Newhall, on the other Photographie, hand, wrote a modernist historyin 1938 that privileged technical photography, including First World War aerial reconnaissance work, without once mentioningthe use of photographyby the police. Clearly, Newhall found it easier to speak of the more glamorous, abstract, and chivalrous state violence of early air power than to dwell on the everyday state violence of the police. 89. An exceptionwould be Sally Stein's revisionist account ofJacob Riis, "Making Connections with the Camera: Photography and Social Mobility in the Career ofJacob Riis," Afterimage, vol. 10, no. 10 (May 1983), pp. 9-16. 90. Compare Bernard Berenson, "Isochromatic Photographyand Venetian Pictures," The Nation,vol. 57, no. 1480 (November 9, 1893), pp. 346-347, with Fred Jane, "Preface," Fighting their objects, these texts share an Ships, London, Marsten, 1905-1906, p. 2. However different enthusiasm for large quantities of well-definedphotographs.

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positivism and the early years of bureaucratic rationalization, a grandiose clerical mentalityhad now taken hold.91 The new scientific bibliographers articulated an operationalist model of knowledge, based on the "general equivalence" established by the numerical shorthandcode. This was a systemforregulatingand accelerating the flowof linked to the logic of Taylorism. Is it surprising thatthe main texts,profoundly reading room of that American Beaux-Arts temple of democratic and imperial knowledge, the Library of Congress, built during this period of bibliographic rationalization, should so closely resemble the Panopticon, or that the outer perimeterof the building should bear thirty-three "ethnologicalheads" of various racial types?92 Or is it any more surprisingthat the same American manufacturingcompany produced Bertillon cabinets, business files, and library card catalogue cabinets?93 and means of bibliographicrationalPhotographywas to be both an object ization. The latterpossibilityemerged fromthe development of microfilm reof documents. as were to be into the production Just photographs incorporated realm of the text, so also the text could be incorporated into the realm of the photograph. If photographyretained its prestigeas a universal language, it increasingly did so in conjunction with a textual paradigm that was housed withinthe library.94 The grand ambitions of the new encyclopedists of photography were eventually realized but not in the grand encyclopedic fashion one mighthave expected. With the increasingspecialization of intellectualdisciplines,archives tended to remain segregated. Nonetheless, the dominant culture of photography did rely heavily on the archival model forits legitimacy. The shadowy presence of the archive authenticatedthe truthclaims made forindividual pho91. The InstitutInternational de Bibliographie, founded in 1895 with headquarters in Brusuniversalis sels, campaigned for the establishment of a bibliographia registered on standardized filingcards. Following Dewey, the Institute recommended that literature on photography be assigned the seventh position within the graphic arts, which were in turn assigned the seventh position withinthe categories of human knowledge. The last subcategorywithinthe classification of photographywas to hold photographicprints. See the Institute'sfollowingpublications: Manuel de la photographie itablid'apres la classification Brussels pourl'usagedu ripertoire bibliographique dicimale, de la (copublished with the Socidte Frangaise de la Photographie), 1900; Codepour l'organisation documentation Brussels, 1910. photographique, I am gratefulto Daniel Bluestone for pointing out this latter architecturaldetail. For a 92. New Library contemporarydescriptionof the heads, see Herbert Small, Handbook ofthe ofCongress, Boston, Curtis and Cameron, 1901, pp. 13-16. 93. See the followingcatalogues published by the Yawman and Erbe Mfg. Co.: Card Ledger and Cabinets, and Finger Rochester, N.Y., 1904; Criminal System Identification by "Y and E"- Bertillon PrintSystems, Rochester, 1913; and "Y and E" Library Rochester, 192-?. Equipment, 94. On early microfilm,see Livremicrophotographique: le bibliophoto ou livre Brussels, iaprojection, InstitutInternational de Bibliographie, 1911. On the more recent conversion of the photograph from library-documentto museum-object, see Douglas Crimp, "The Museum's Old/The Lino. 22 (Spring 1981), pp. 32-37. brary's New Subject," Parachute,

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tographs, especially within the emerging mass media. The authorityof any particular syntagmaticconfigurationwas underwrittenby the encyclopedic authorityof the archive. One example will suffice.Companies like Keystone Views or Underwood and Underwood seriallypublished shortpictorialgroupings of stereographcards. Althoughindividual sequences of pictureswere often organized according to a narrativelogic, one sees clearlythat the overall structure was informednot by a narrativeparadigm, but by the paradigm of the archive. Afterall, the sequence could be rearranged; its temporality was indeterminate, its narrativityrelativelyweak. The pleasures of this discourse were and grounded not in narrativenecessarily,but in archival play, in substitution, in a voracious optical encyclopedism.There were always more images to be acquired, obtainable at a price, froma relentlessly expanding, globallydispersed agency.95 picture-gathering Archival rationalization was most imperative for those modes of photographic realism that were instrumental,that were designed to contributedior manipulation of their rectly or indirectlyto the practical transformation referent. Can any connectionsbe traced between the archival mode of photographyand the emergenceofphotographicmodernism?To what degree did selfconscious modernist to the model of the archive?To practiceaccommodate itself what degree did modernistsconsciously or unconsciouslyresistor subvertthe model of the archive, which tended to relegate the individual photographerto the statusof a detail worker,providingfragmentary images foran apparatus beyond his or her control?Detailed answersto thisquestion are clearlybeyond the scope of this essay. But a few provisional lines of investigationcan be charted. The protomodernism of the Photo Secession and its affiliated movements, to extendingroughly 1916, can be seen as an attemptto resistthe achival mode through a strategyof avoidance and denial based on craftproduction. The in termsboth of images and elegantfewwere opposed to the mechanized many, authors. This strategy the ostentatious marks required display of the "honorific of hand labor," to borrow the phrase coined by the American sociologistThorstein Veblen in 1899.96 After 1916, however, aestheticallyambitious photogmuch closer raphers abandoned the painterlyand embraced pictorialrhetorics to those already operative within the instrumentalrealist and archival paradigms. Understandably, a variety of contradictoryattitudes to the archive emerge within photographic discourse in the 1920s. Some modernists em-

95. This suggests thatthehistoriography ofphotography willhave to approach thequestion of an "institutional mode"in different terms thanthosealreadydeveloped forthehistoriography of cinema. See, forexample,Noel Burch,"Film'sInstitutional Mode of Representation and the SovietResponse,"October, no. 11 (Winter1979), pp. 77-96. 96. Thorstein Leisure Class:AnEconomic Veblen, TheTheory New York, ofthe Institutions, Study of ModernLibrary,1934,pp. 163-164.

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The Bodyand theArchive

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braced the archival paradigm: August Sander is a case in point. Others resisted of the antipositivismand antirationalismof the throughmodernistreworkings Photo Secession: the later Stieglitzand Edward Weston are obvious examples. In many respects the most complicated and intellectuallysophisticated response to the model of the archivewas thatofWalker Evans. Evans's book secan be read as attemptsto quences, especially in his 1938 American Photographs, counterpose the "poetic"structureof the sequence to the model of the archive. Evans began the book with a prefatory note reclaiming his photographsfromthe various archival repositorieswhich held copyright to or authorityover his picthe first photographin the book describes a siteof the artures.97Furthermore, chival and instrumentalmode's proliferationinto the spaces of metropolitan 1943. We now know that Studio,New York, daily life in the 1930s: License-Photo Evans was fascinated with police photographs during the period in which he made the photographsin thisbook. A tersetopical list on "New York societyin the 1930s" contains a central, telegraphic,underlined inscription:"This project getpolicecards."98 Certainly Evans's subway photographsof the late 1930s and are 1940s evidence of a sophisticateddialogue withthe empiricalmethods early of the detectivepolice. Evans styledhimselfas a flaneur,and late in lifelikened his sensibilityto that of Baudelaire. Though Walter Benjamin had proposed that "no matterwhat trail thefidneur may follow,every one will lead him to a Evans avoided his final rendezvous. This final detour was explicitly crime,"'99 described in a 1971 interviewin which he took care to distinguishbetween his own "documentarystyle"and a "literaldocument"such as "a police photograph of a murder scene."100He stressed the necessary element of poetic transcendence in any art photographof consequence. The elderlyEvans, transformed intothe senior figure of modernistgenius by a curatorialapparatus withits own archival imperative,could no longer recognize the combative and antiarchival stance of his earlier sequential work. Evans was forcedto fallback on an organicistnotion of style,searchingforthatrefinedsurplusof stylistic meaning which would guarantee his authorship,and which in general servedto distinguishthe art photographerfroma flunkyin a hierarchyof flunkies. With the advent ofpostmodernism, have abandoned many photographers serious commitment to but any transcendence, stylistic they fail to recognize the degree to which theyshare Evans's social fatalism,his sense of the immutaothermodels, however, inbilityof the existingsocial order. Modernism offers
97. Walker Evans, American New York, Museum of Modern Art, 1938. Photographs, 98. Evans at Work, New York, Harper and Row, Reproduced in JerryThompson, ed., Walker 1982, p. 107. 99. Walter Benjamin, "The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire," in Charles Baudelaire, p. 41. 100. Leslie Katz, "Interview with Walker Evans," Art in America, vol. 59, no. 2 (March-April 1971), p. 87.

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1934. Plate 1 fromAmerican Photographs, 1938.

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models of photographicpractice. cluding more militantand equally intelligent Consider Camille Recht's reading of the photographs of Eugene Atget, a photographer of acknowledged import in Evans's own development. Recht views "whichremindus of a police photographof a crime commentson interior to the scene" and then on "the photographof a worker'sdwellingwhich testifies unavoidof a bed and an For the Recht, "nuptial proximity housing problem." of everydaylifein an excomic testimony able chimneyflue,"provided grimly on the telling detail, the This formation.101 social emphasis ploitative of the powerful,would to the crimes that systemic points metonymicfragment in thewritings ofWalter Benjamin.102Our tendencyto be repeated and refined associate Benjamin with the theoryand practice of montage tends to obscure the degree to which he built his modernismfroman empiricistmodel, froma observation of detail. This model could argue model of careful, idiosyncratic as monteur, and forthe photographer as revolutionary both forthe photographer more as critical or detective, or, "respectably," journalist of the working spy class.
Paris and Leipzig, Henri to Eugene Atget,Lichtbilder, 101. Camille Recht, introduction 1930,pp. 18-19 (my translation). Jonquieres, of Photography," trans.StanleyMitchell, 102. See Benjamin's1931 essay "A ShortHistory vol. 13, no. 1 (Spring1972), p. 25. Screen,

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Plate 12 fromLichtbilder, 1930. EugeneAtget.

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This essay could end with this sketchof modernistresponses to the prior institutionalizationof the instrumentalrealist archive. Social historywould and we would arriveat a safe archivalclosure. Unfortunately, lead to arthistory, Bertillonand Galton are stillwith us. "Bertillon"survives in the operations of the national securitystate, in the condition of intensiveand extensive surveillance thatcharacterizesboth everydaylifeand the geopoliticalsphere. "Galton" lives in the renewed authorityof biological determinism,founded in the increased hegemony of the political Right in the Western democracies. That is, Galton lives quite specificallyin the neo-Spencerian pronouncementsof Reaganism, Thatcherism, and the French National Front.103 Galton's spiritalso survives in the neoeugenicist implicationsof some of the new biotechnologies. These are political issues. As such, their resonance can be heard in the aesthetic sphere. In the United States in the 1970s, a number of works, primarily in filmand video, took an aggressive stance toward both biological deand theprerogativesof thepolice. Martha Rosler's video "opera" The terminism Obtained VitalStatistics Simply ofa Citizen, (1976) retainsits forceas an allegorical attack on the normalizinglegacy of Quetelet and Galton. Other, more feminist nominalist works, took on the police at the level of counter-testimony and counter-surveillance.I am thinkinghere of a number of documentaryfilms: Howard Gray's and Michael Alk's The MurderofFredHampton(1971), Cinda Firestone's Attica(1973), and the Pacific Street Film Collective's Red Squad or overlooked in a contemporary (1972). These examples tend to be forgotten art scene rife with a variety of what can be termed "neophysiognomic"concerns. The body has returned with a vengeance. The heavily expressionist character of this return makes the scientisticand racialist underpinnings of physiognomyseem rather remote. In photography,however, this lineage is harder to repress. In one particularlytroublinginstance, this returnedbody is I refer Galtonian in itsconfiguration. here to the computergenerated specifically of in a composites Nancy Burson, enveloped promotionaldiscourse so appallin in its fetishistic belief truthand its desperate desire to inglystupid cybernetic remain grounded in the optical and organic that it would be dismissable were it not forits smug scientism.For an artistor criticto resurrect the methodsofbiosocial typologywithoutonce acknowledging the historicalcontext and consequences of these procedures is naive at best and cynical at worst.104 In the interests of a certain internationalism, however, I want to end with a storythat takes us outside the contemporaryart scene and away fromthe simultaneouslyinflatedand deflatedfigureof the postmodernistauthor. This anecdote mightsuggest somethingof the hardships and dilemmas of a photo103. For an exampleof the high regardforGalton among contemporary see hereditarians, H. J. Eysenck's introduction to the 1978 editionofHereditary Genius cited. previously 104. See NancyBurson etal., Composites: Generated NewYork,William Portraits, Computer Morrow, 1986.

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Archive The Bodyand the

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graphic practice engaged in frombelow, a photographicpractice on ground patrolled by the police. In 1967, a young Black South African photographer named Ernest Cole published a book in the United States called House ofBondage. Cole's book and his storyare remarkable. In order to photographa broad to change his racial classification range of South Africansociety,Cole had first fromblack to colored, no mean featin a world of multiplebureaus of identity, who have mastered a subtle bureaucratic taxonomyof even staffed by officials racial and ethnicgroups. He counteredthis the offhand gesturesofthe different apparatus, probably the last physiognomic systemof domination in the world, of his own, mapping out the various checkpointsin with a descriptivestrategy the multiple channels of apartheid. Cole photographed during a period of relative political "calm" in South Africa,midway between the Sharpeville massacre of 1960 and the Soweto students' revoltof 1976. At a timewhen black resistancewas fragmented and subterranean in the wake of the banning of the main opposition groups, he discovered a limited, and by his own account problematic,figureof resistancein who lived lives of pettycriminality.Cole photoyoung black toughs, or tsotsis,

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mugging a whiteworkerforhis pay envelope, as well as a scene graphed tsotsis of a white man slapping a black beggar child. And he regularlyphotographed the routine passbook arrests of blacks who were caught outside the zones in which theywere permittedto travel. As mightbe expected, Cole's documentation of the everydayflowsof power, survival, and criminal resistance got him into trouble with the law. He was questioned repeatedly by police, who assumed he was carryingstolen camera equipment. Finally he was stopped after photographingpassbook arrests. Asked to explain himself,he claimed to be making a documentary on juvenile delinquency. Sensing his criminological promise, the police, who then as now operated througha pervasive systemof invited him to join the ranks. At that point, Cole decided to leave informers, the country while he still could. House of Bondagewas assembled from the negatives he smuggled out of South Africa. Since publishinghis book in exile, Cole has disappeared fromthe world of professionalphotojournalism.s05 The example of Cole's work suggests that we would be wise to avoid an overlymonolithicconception of realism. Not all realisms necessarilyplay into the hands of the police, despite Theodor Adorno's remark, designed to lampoon a Leninist epistemologyonce and forall, that"knowledgehas not, like the state police, a rogues' galleryof its objects."'06 If we are to listen to, and act in solidaritywith, the polyphonic testimonyof the oppressed and exploited, we like Cole's, will take the ambiguous should recognizethatsome ofthistestimony, form of visual documents, documents of the "microphysics"of barbarism. These documents can easily fallinto the hands of the police or theirintellectual apologists. Our problem, as artistsand intellectualsliving near but not at the center of a global systemof power, will be to help preventthe cancellation of texts. that testimonyby more authoritativeand official

105. ErnestCole (withThomas Flaherty), House New York,Random House, 1967. ofBondage, For theaccountof Cole's own struggle to producethepictures in thebook,I have reliedupon "One of theLeast-Known Countries in theWorld,"pp. 7-24. introduction, JosephLelyveld's 106. TheodorAdorno, trans. E. B. Ashton, New York,Seabury, Dialectics, 1973,p. 206. Negative

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