Probing Pictures: Carol Armstrong on Georges Didi-Huberman - Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpetriere - Book Review

But whether the apparatus is visible or not, the photograph itself is a fundamental part of the experiment: The camera is the machinery of the experiment; the prostituted body of Augustine, its subject; and the photographs, its results--"photographs induced with hysteria," which in turn had been induced through one method or another. (The bodies of the hysterical women who put themselves on show were often all that was needed for the experiment to take place; their bodies were the equipment of experimentation, both its object and its device, the central feature of the whole contraption. As ever in the world of positive science, pathology was a form of experiment produced in the laboratory of Nature, aided and abetted by human artifice, while the experiment was a form of induced pathology into which there was built considerable indeterminacy as to whether Nature or man had done the most inducing and where the line between them fell. And when positivism began to turn its eye inward, inverting its own project, no pathology was more suited to its purposes than that of the female subject, as the birth of psychoanalysis out of positivism and the later history of the movement prove.)

Photography was conceived out of the very regime of positivist induction and inductive experimentation that concocted Charcot's photogenic hysteria: together they were the spectacularly functional property of that regime. And nothing demonstrates this better than the photographic inferno of the Salpetriere, in which the positivist episteme reached its hellish apogee. But there is more to it than that; in Invention of Hysteria photography is more than a mere "iconography"--more than an archive of documents, more than the vast image bank that it has become, more than a record of a prior event, transparent to and determined by that event. (There is much to suggest, in fact, that the opposite was true--that the photographs helped determine the event, as they almost always do in "documentary" situations.) The chapter titled "Attacks and Exposures" in particular points to the two-way equation between hysteria and photography at work, for it suggests that the "attack" was already a kind of "exposure," while the "exposure" was always a kind of "attack."

The following are some of the descriptors of the hysterical "attack" that may be transferred to the photographic "exposure" and vice versa. Each convulsion of the hysterical body, face, limb, and/or entire frame made a tableau, a kind of living sculpture, in which the subject was simultaneously hypercontracted and cataleptic, ultramobile and immobilized: a photograph before it was photographed, in short. Like the "automatic writing" of the photograph, it was a body under the sway of its soma, a body that caricatured its own automatisms. Like the "little death" of the photographic pose, the hysterical body was the delayed, scandalous yield of trauma and frozen, recurring memory. As the lens frames and crops, so this body isolated its own parts and details by muscular acts of distension and contraction that made it into a series of broken instants and fetishized fragments. It came in and out of focus. It was an imprint, a specter of the past in the present, and a ghostly emission; like an emulsion its effluvia could be stimulated at will. It was a trigger mechanism; indeed it was an interior--a camera--that could be triggered to exteriorize itself in images.