Table Of ContentPlastic Recognition: The Politics and Aesthetics of Facial Representation from Silent
Cinema to Cognitive Neuroscience
by
Abraham Geil
Program in Literature
Duke University
Date:_______________________
Approved:
___________________________
Mark B.N. Hansen, Co-‐‑Supervisor
___________________________
Gregory Flaxman, Co-‐‑Supervisor
___________________________
Fredric Jameson
___________________________
Jane Gaines
___________________________
Inga Pollmann
Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of
the requirements for the degree of Doctor
of Philosophy in the Program in
Literature in the Graduate School
of Duke University
2013
ABSTRACT
Plastic Recognition: The Politics and Aesthetics of Facial Representation from Silent
Cinema to Cognitive Neuroscience
by
Abraham Geil
Program in Literature
Duke University
Date:_______________________
Approved:
___________________________
Mark B.N. Hansen, Co-‐‑Supervisor
___________________________
Gregory Flaxman, Co-‐‑Supervisor
___________________________
Fredric Jameson
___________________________
Jane Gaines
___________________________
Inga Pollmann
An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial
fulfillment of the requirements for the degree
of Doctor of Philosophy in the Program in
Literature in the Graduate School of
Duke University
2013
Copyright by
Abraham Geil
2013
Abstract
Plastic Recognition traces a critical genealogy of the human face in cinema and its
afterlives. By rethinking the history of film theory through its various investments in the
face, it seeks to intervene not only in the discipline of film studies but more broadly
within contemporary political and scientific discourse. This dissertation contends that
the face is a privileged site for thinking through the question of recognition, a concept
that cuts across a range of aesthetic, political, philosophical, and scientific thought.
Plastic Recognition examines this intimate link between the face and recognition through
a return to “classical” film theory, and specifically to the first generation of European
and Soviet film theorists’ preoccupation with the face in silent cinema. In the process, it
recasts the canonical debate over cinematic specificity between Béla Balázs and Sergei
Eisenstein as an antagonism between two opposing conceptions of the face in film:
transparent universalism versus plastic typicality. Of these two conceptions, this project
contends that the “Balázsian” idea of a transparently expressive face assumes cultural
dominance in the latter half of the 20th century by virtue of its essential
commensurability with the political and social ideal of mutual recognition that has come
to prevail in the United States and Western Europe in the context of neoliberalism.
Alongside and against this dominant tendency, the “Eisensteinian” insistence upon the
plasticity of aesthetic form provides a radical alternative to the idealist metaphysics of
iv
immediacy underlying both the “Balázsian” notion of the cinematic face and the ideal of
mutual recognition it exemplifies. That insistence forces into view the ways that
recognition itself is always contingent upon aesthetic and technological practices, even
(or especially) when it is brokered by that seemingly most immediate of images—the
human face. By adopting this approach as its basic critical orientation, this dissertation
attempts to restage the problem of recognition as fundamentally about the historicity of
plastic form. The project concludes by turning to a scientific scene of recognition in
which the “Balázsian” conception of the face makes an uncanny reappearance. The final
chapter examines several studies in contemporary neuroscience that use representations
of the human face as experimental stimuli in an effort to establish a neurophysiological
basis for the mutual recognition of empathy.
v
Dedication
For Laura, Dominick, Raphael
vi
Contents
Abstract ......................................................................................................................................... iv
List of Figures ................................................................................................................................. x
Acknowledgements ..................................................................................................................... xi
1. Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 1
2. Static Recognition: Physiognomy in Béla Balázs’s Visible Man ......................................... 13
2.1 Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 13
2.2 Between History and Expressivity: Balázs’s Paradox of Form ................................. 16
2.3 Cinema’s Universal (Anti-‐‑) Language ......................................................................... 23
2.4 Balázs’s Romantic Physiognomy .................................................................................. 30
2.5 Goethe on Film? ............................................................................................................... 39
2.6 Lavater and Physiognomy as Nature Morte ............................................................... 43
2.7 Transcendental Physiognomy: Balázs’s Laocoönism ................................................ 48
2.8 Balázs and Agamben ...................................................................................................... 55
2.9 Alien Races / Nature’s Faces .......................................................................................... 61
3. Eisenstein’s “Formal Ecstasy”: Typage and Plasticity........................................................ 68
3.1 Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 68
3.2 Infinite Types: Typage as Comedic Anagnôrisis ........................................................ 71
3.3 Typage as Caricature: A Juncture of Opposites .......................................................... 81
3.3.1 From “Living Man” to “Image” [Obraz] ................................................................. 86
3.3.2 Galton’s Composite Photography ........................................................................... 92
vii
3.4 Dynamic Typicality ......................................................................................................... 97
3.4.1 Physiognomy as Self-‐‑generalizing Form ................................................................ 99
3.5 Animal Typicality in Strike .......................................................................................... 104
3.5.1 Superimposition ....................................................................................................... 112
3.6 Mimesis and The Politics of Form .............................................................................. 115
3.6.1 Eisenstein and Balázs at La Sarraz ......................................................................... 115
3.6.2 Beyond Forgotten Scissors: Cinematic Movement .............................................. 123
3.6.3 Shklovsky: False Movement, Thought, and Defamiliarization ......................... 129
3.7 Eisenstein’s Spectator: From Calculability to Ecstatic Form ................................... 131
3.7.1 Typing the Audience ............................................................................................... 135
3.7.2 Expressive Movement and Contour Drawing ..................................................... 141
3.8 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... 149
4. Neuro-‐‑Recognition: Mirror Neurons, Empathy, and the Face ........................................ 154
4.1 Introduction ................................................................................................................... 154
4.2 The Naturalization of Empathy .................................................................................. 156
4.3 Experimental Design and/of Spectatorship ............................................................... 162
4.3.1 The Mimetic Gap ...................................................................................................... 171
4.3.2 Neural Mechanisms for Empathy in General ...................................................... 177
4.3.3 “Both of Us Disgusted in My Insula” .................................................................... 178
4.4 The Heteronomy of Affect ........................................................................................... 180
4.5 Pavlov’s Return: Mirror Neurons and Associational Conditioning ...................... 185
4.6 Conclusion: Mirror Neurons Beyond Good and Evil .............................................. 185
viii
Coda: “A Gesture Can Blow Up a Town” .............................................................................. 189
Bibliography ............................................................................................................................... 193
Biography .................................................................................................................................... 203
ix
List of Figures
Figure 1: Machine for drawing silhouettes. From the 1792 English edition of Johann
Kasper Lavater'ʹs Essays on Physiognomy. .................................................................................. 45
Figure 2: Skull and Mask from Lavater’s Physiognomische Fragmente .................................. 47
Figure 3: The Literal Animism of the “Rogues Gallery” in Strike ....................................... 106
Figure 4: Superimposition of Animal Types in Strike ........................................................... 108
Figure 5: Eisenstein'ʹs "ʺIn the World of Animals,"ʺ Riga 1913-‐‑14 .......................................... 110
Figure 6: Grandville'ʹs "ʺLe loup et le chien"ʺ ............................................................................... 111
Figure 7: Facial detail of Laocoön sculpture and Duchenne'ʹs "ʺcorrection"ʺ ....................... 127
Figure 8: Mantegna’s The Dead Christ or The Foreshortened Christ (1467) ........................... 146
Figure 9: The Foreshortened Kulak in The General Line ....................................................... 146
Figure 10: Eisenstein'ʹs Contour Drawing ............................................................................... 147
Figure 11: "ʺStimulus material and camera view."ʺ From Barbara Wild, et al., "ʺWhy Are
Smiles Contagious?"ʺ .................................................................................................................. 165
Figure 12: From Laurie Carr, et al., "ʺNeural mechanisms of empathy in humans."ʺ ........ 165
Figure 13: Nana (Anna Karina) mimics the tears of Joan (Maria Falconetti) .................... 169
Figure 14: Asta Nielsen ............................................................................................................. 169
Figure 15: "ʺBoth of Us Disgusted"ʺ Stimuli and Response .................................................... 179
x
Description:plasticity of aesthetic form provides a radical alternative to the idealist metaphysics of .. three major works on the topic: Axel Honneth's Kampf um Anerkennung (published in English translation as The 2, Issue 1, 2006; Édouard Glissant, "ʺThe Thinking of the Opacity of the World,"ʺ Frieze d/e
