Notes de lecture
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Notes de lecture |
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n° 6, mai 1999 |
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The achievement of Guillaume-Benjamin-Armand Duchenne (Duchenne de Boulogne, 1806-1875) was to bring together three of the most important developments of the nineteenth century: electricity, physiology and photography. Duchenne's work also embraces medicine and neurology, evolution, physiognomic typology, and the education of artists. The eight essays that comprise this book, a catalogue of an exhibition of Duchenne's photography at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, deal with all these aspects of his work and make its complexity intelligible for the first time. Duchenne was a doctor who never held an official hospital position, yet he was welcome at all the Parisian hospitals. His experiments on patients were eagerly followed by the most important practioners of the time, including Charcot who always referred to Duchenne as his master. Duchenne's great achievement was localized faradization: the use of an induction current applied to the skin with a rhéophore skillfully enough to stimulate a single muscle at a time. As he wrote in an 1847 memoir, this procedure neither "punctured nor split the skin." Duchenne thus replaced the anatomist's scalpel with the non-invasive electrical current, creating a form of "living anatomy." The results were significant: the location of the origin of certain muscular diseases in the muscle fibre itself rather than in the neurological lesion which had been the common hypothesis of his time; the identification of one of these afflictions, "Duchenne's myopathy," a form of muscular dystrophy; and, for the first time, the individuation of each separate muscle of the face and the contribution each made to expression. In effect, Duchenne changed the use of electricity from an instrument of medical remedy - its usual function in the eighteenth century - to an instrument of physiological inquiry. Photography was added to electricity and physiology in 1852 when Duchenne, initially with the help of Adrien Tournachon, began to record the results of his faradization of facial muscles with a camera. Published in 1862 as le Mécanisme de la physionomie humaine ou analyse électro-physiologique de l'expression des passions, Duchenne's startling photographs were incorporated into the education of artists as a corrective to previous representations of emotion, and adapted by Darwin to illustrate his volume on the expression of men and animals. Yet Duchenne's photographs were generally not well-received nor widely disseminated. They posed a problem. Rather than signs of inner emotions, of consciousness, of what, in fact, separated man from animal, Duchenne's photographs recorded fear, joy, disdain, or terror as mere physiological facts that could be provoked by electricity and measured by the camera. Stimulated by Duchenne's réophores, the movements of the facial muscles were understood not as signs that indicate the presence of a soul, but rather as free-floating signifiers in a cultural semiotics of muscle movements. (Current research shows that the formation of facial muscle groups into artificial expressions of joy or sorrow seems to stimulate those emotions. Duchenne would have liked that.) The eight essays in this catalogue together cover the wide spectrum of Duchenne's contributions, trace the background of his investigations and demonstrate their influence and reception. For the history of medicine, Michel Fardeau, professor of medecine at the Salpêtrière hospital where Duchenne did much of his work, turns his identification of Duchenne's myopathy and the conflicting claims for anteriority of this discovery into a fascinating narrative. Fardeau describes the contemporary relevance of this hereditary affliction - the first to be identified genetically. François Delaporte, philosophy professor at Picardie-Jules Verne University, is similarly lucid in describing exactly how Duchenne's use of electricity allowed him to attribute a particular expression to each of the facial muscles. Darwin and Duchenne drew different conclusions from Duchenne's results, and Delaporte's analysis of their philosophical differences is most compelling. For the history of photography, Catherine Mathon, the curator of photography at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, explains the diversity of Duchenne's photographic practices - including his microsopic photography - and finally clarifies the various formats and editions in which his photographs were published or displayed. Mathon also situates the photographs in Beaux-Arts teaching. Sandrine Bula and Michel Quétin of the National Archives trace Duchenne's failed attempts to win the Prix Volta, given to "he who by his experiments and discoveries will do something for electricity and galvanism comparable to what Franklin and Volta did for these sciences." Bula and Quétin's description and analyses of the judgements of the committees that examined Duchenne's photographs bring to life the scientific world at whose margins Duchenne found himself. Emmanuel Schwartz, Beaux-Arts curator, shows the ways in which Duchenne's expériences both challenged and called upon the canonical examples of the Academic representations of passion. The essays by Monique Sicard of the CNRS and Jean François Debord, Beaux-Arts professor of morphology, cover a larger field; Debord links Duchenne's imagery to the longstanding need to codify the expression of passion as well as to phrenology, while Sicard traces, among other histories, the medical usage of electricity. The essays often overlap: for example, on the repeated question of Adrien Tournachon's role in photographing Duchenne's patients, on the Duchenne-Darwin connection, or on the defense of Duchenne against the baseless charge of creating a theatre of cruelty. These repetitions only serve to deepen our understanding of this polyvalent talent. In a final essay, a group of conservationists led by Anne Cartier-Bresson elucidate the methods used to preserve and conserve the framed ovals that Duchenne made for artists. These are part of the exhibition, and the restorers provide a thoroughly detailed guide to their creation. Reproductions of the collection Duchenne left to Ensba upon his death - his personal album and the ovals - are complemented by pictures from the BN, archives nationales, and other sources. The images are divided into "scientific" and "aesthetic" sections as Duchenne originally published them, with each image and its variations given sequentially so as to compare the effects of the different formats. Here are also new discoveries, photographs that Duchenne never published. All the images are profusely annotated and explicated. A full bibliography and the "elements for a biography" complete the volume. Duchenne and his work have been the subject of a 1984 exhibition and a number of essays, but in its detail and depth, this catalogue supercedes them all; it will stand as the essential work on the subject for many years. Marta Braun |
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