ATTENTION

by Joshua Cohen

  I. DOUBLES, LAVATER, REDOUBLED DOUBLES, MAREY

  EVEN ART WAS AFFECTED BY typing, not just by the distinctions between media but by the distinctions within them too, with paintings especially ranked by degree of achievement—which determination was informed as much by technical difficulty as by a work’s institutional utility and social prestige—in hierarchies derived from the Renaissance but formally bolstered by eighteenth-century art salons and academies: Historical paintings were superior (but within that distinction, religious or mythological works were superior to renderings of more contemporary history); followed by portrait and genre or domestic-scene painting; followed by landscapes and still lifes. The less the painting depicted the human, the less it was respected; Italianate concerns for imitare, or the revelation of essential character, trumping ritrarre, or rote engrossment of the still and lifeless. It might be remembered, however, that the Renaissance developed this hierarchy only to put painting on an equal footing with the most inhuman and most static of art forms, architecture, in every column of which a sculpture resided.

  According to Pliny the Elder, the Greek painters Zeuxis and Parrhasius once held a contest to decide which of them was the master of realistic or naturalistic painting. Zeuxis painted grapes, which birds mistook for real and ripe and flocked to them, to peck. Parrhasius’s entry was apparently concealed behind a curtain, which Zeuxis demanded be tugged aside to finalize his victory, but the cloth was just whatever the Greek term is for trompe l’oeil.

  Ovid’s myth of Pygmalion, retold throughout the Enlightenment, unites two valiant if vainglorious desires: Pygmalion’s desire to bring his statue to womanly life is traditionally treated as climactic, but it’s his penultimate desire that remains the more relatable—the desire to make a statue of an ideal, an apparition of perfection (there’s no reason to work so hard for anything less than perfection).

  Another Ovidian myth: A man notices his reflection, falls in love with it, reaches for it, and upon merging with the water becomes a solipsist. To contemporize, turn the water into a mirror, which preserves an essential symmetry but reverses the clockface’s hands. The first contemporary Narcissus, the Narcissus of the cities: the double.

  The double is a paradoxical artwork: superior, inferior—an unreal and unnatural replica of you who is also more real and more natural than you simultaneously. The double poses a singular threat: You don’t have to fear the fall into solipsism (your double overturns the conviction of your singularity), but you don’t have to be scared of narcissism either (whatever you admire in yourself, you detest in your double); the danger does not lie with you anymore, but is rather completely out of your control. Your double can do what it wants, when and where it wants, leaving you only the choice of attempting to kill it or yourself (murder as suicide v. suicide as murder). Or another option would be to become othered yet again; to change your name and domicile, your family and friends and face, and become a third-party alterity by dint of guilt; because—as in the best double literature of the nineteenth century—your second self was not encountered in the reflection of an emporium window or in a carriage passing by but was willed, projected: Your double is your own fault, utterly.

  You’ve occasioned a rift within your supposedly unitary soul, perhaps with the help of a drug or intoxicant; your double, nurtured by that cleavage, escapes through that cleavage to explore its source and returns—if each of you is strong enough to survive without the other—to a reconciliation of your soul’s duality (Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 1886). Or perhaps you’ve engendered a double only to inhabit a socioeconomic class you the original cannot (Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper, 1881); or to have a career you cannot due to timidity or ineptitude (Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Double, 1846); or because of legal strictures or a general propriety (Edgar Allan Poe’s William Wilson, 1839). The generation of doubles—your resurrection of a personality that wandered into your life from the fogged woods of folklore only to wander out again in flashier clothing and whistling, spending money and time neither of you has, checking into grand hotels in every European capital under the alias of the doppelgänger, or sosie—is the conscious admission that every book’s protagonist is also its antagonist, an unconscious transference of every literate person’s suspicion of themselves.

  Before the age of twenty-five, there was nothing I would’ve found more improbable than that I would make even the slightest inquiry into, let alone that I would write a book about, physiognomy. At the time I was neither inclined to read about, nor make the even vaguest observations on, the subject. The extreme sensitivity of my nerves caused me, however, to experience certain emotions upon encountering certain faces, which emotions remained even when the faces had departed. I, frequently, formed an intuitive judgment according to these first impressions, and was laughed at, ashamed, abashed, and became cautious. Years passed before I again dared, impelled by similar impressions, to venture similar opinions. In the meantime, I occasionally sketched the face of a friend, whom by chance I’d been observing. I had from my earliest youth a strong propensity for drawing, especially for drawing portraits, although I had but meager talent and drive. By this practice, however, my latent feelings were gradually revealed. The various proportions, features, similitudes, and varieties, of the human countenance, became increasingly apparent to me. It happened that, on two successive days, I sketched two faces, the features of which bore a remarkable resemblance. This awakened my attention, and my wonder increased when I obtained certain proofs that these persons were as similar in character as in feature. (From Johann Kaspar Lavater’s 1775–78 Essays on Physiognomy)

  You are not just interior structures—your biochemistry—you are also your exterior forms. Not eidola, auras, phantoms, or specters just yet but your nose, your chin, your skull in its ancestral guises. This was the determination of Aristotle, revived by Renaissance art and again by Enlightenment philosophy, which translated the conceit into “hylomorphism”: the doctrine that things and even people exist primarily as the shapes by which they’re encountered; appearances not just predicative but predictive, fateful.

  The eighteenth century twinned this science of surfaces: The study of the individual by gesture and voice timbre, and by facial expressions, was pathognomy; the study of the unexpressed face, the resting visage deprived of its aspiration and disciplined training—which lets inalienable nature communicate unimpeded—was physiognomy, whose master was a Swiss poet, Lavater.

  Above are two plates from Essays on Physiognomy. In the plate at bottom right—following silhouettes, or “shades,” of Moses Mendelssohn, Georg Ludwig Spalding, Christoph Friedrich Nicolai, and Friedrich Eberhard von Rochow—Lavater, as if he’s exhausted famous friends, has left a record of himself.

  He writes:

  This shade, though imperfect, is readily known. It must pass without comment, or rather the commentary is before the world, is in this book. Let that speak. I am silent.

  But then to his shade’s immediate left is another, unlabeled, and the anonymity is not a typo.

  Of this figure Lavater observes only:

  One of the generally pleasing masculine profiles. Conceal the underside of the chin and a chance at greatness would be perceptible, except that greater variation in the entire outline is lacking, especially in the nose and forehead. The choleric and phlegmatic man is visible in the whole—especially in the eyebrows, nose, lower chin—as also are integrity, fidelity, goodness, and complaisance.

  Upon being called to attend to this unidentified figure, you wonder if this man—possessed of such “integrity, fidelity, goodness, and complaisance”—might be the friend Lavater wrote about in the paragraph originally quoted, “whom by chance I’d been observing.” But this just reinforces your confusion as to why Lavater chose to abandon his account of this man with whom he’d recovered his predilection for physiognomy in favor of an account of two sketches whose su
bjects might have borne a “remarkable resemblance,” but whose common character is similarly left without description—blank.

  * * *

  —

  THE DOUBLE IS THE DUPLICATED SELF, the progenitor of mass production. If all products of a certain use resemble one another, it’s because all means of production resemble one another, because all consumers are essentially disseminations of a single consumer, a phantasmagoria manufactured by advertisement in order that demand can manage supply.

  The double—even as vampire or werewolf—is humanized capital, an entity that before being taken as a demographic symbol by business represented a human straining against time; a way for its mortal original to work more, play more, produce more, consume more, without resorting to slavery or serfdom.

  In this sense the double becomes a fantasy of attention; the lawless or recklessly improper copy the personification of notoriety, which only an original can appreciate as fame. The press carries exploits not yours, but yours; reputation is protected by a mask, or by a totally ulterior alter ego whose chivalry or charity justifies any societal latitude or erotic indulgence: Baroness Emma Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel (1903) being the first book to turn an anonymous or second identity into a prerequisite of true heroism.

  To double yourself is to become a franchise, a genre, and it is no coincidence that the literature of doubles so seamlessly sequelizes itself, between the developments of photography (1820s) and film (1880s)—to the point of integration or a resingularity, with manipulated doubling or the sequencing of pictures bearing minute discrepancies being the very essence of the moving-picture medium. Germany produced much of this celluloid, though more credit might go to the French reaction: the appearance, between 1890 and 1900, of the paramnesiac terms déjà vu and déjà entendu, “already seen,” “already heard.” Painting, drawing—as in the physical drawing out of an inner persona—was paraphrase; but photography and film were quotation.

  Chronophotography of Facial Expression—With the camera we used, although it has only one purpose, a subject can be photographed at a near distance, and show no alteration in perspective, no matter the duration of the photographic series. At present, it is the only type capable of affording a series of photographs that shows in every detail the changes in facial expression, the various movements of the hands, and the different positions of the feet in walking. It would be interesting to follow in this way all the transitions between a scarcely perceptible smile and a hearty laugh, and to still the characteristic expressions of surprise, anger, and other emotions. The great difficulty is to find a subject capable of performing these various expressions in a perfectly natural manner. Most people would produce only a grin or grimace. Clever actors would no doubt be more successful in assuming the various emotional expressions, and the method might even be useful to them in their own work. But what chronophotography renders most perfectly is the movement that accompanies the act of articulation.

  […]

  Now from an artistic point of view. What is to be the outcome of this new method of reproducing the movements of speech?

  Painters, to date, have apparently paid no attention to the subject. In the most animated scenes, it is the general expression of the features that conveys an idea of what the individuals are supposed to be saying, and the same holds true in sculpture. Rude [see below] has twice attempted to represent, if not actual words, at least a cry of imprecation or command.

  We wanted very much to know what sort of expression a man’s features would assume when he uttered a loud exclamation. The attendant at the Physiological Station was the subject of our experiment. He was placed in front of the apparatus, and told to yell at us several times in succession at the top of his voice. The series of photographs thus obtained showed the periodic repetition of facial expression, but the muscles of expression were so curiously contracted that the appearance was rather that of an ugly grimace—and yet simply to watch him there was nothing extraordinary in the man’s expression. The peculiarity of the photographs was due to the fact that they stilled exceedingly fleeting expressions of the face—movements essentially of gradual transition, none of which were seen as isolated expressions.

  Let us place the series of photographs in a zoetrope and watch them as they pass in succession before the eyes, with the instrument turning at a convenient speed. All the strangeness suddenly disappears, and all we see is a man articulating in a perfectly natural manner. What does this fact imply? Is it not that the ugly is only the unknown, and that truth seen for the first time offends the eye? (From Étienne-Jules Marey’s Movement, 1894)

  Before French physiologist Marey developed chronophotography, images depicting consecutive thoroughgoing motions could be presented only discretely, in strips of stills that would be motioned—would restore their subjects to motion—through their attachment to a wheel that could be spun both in and against narrative order (fast-forward, rewind), to the edification of both scholarly and recreational squinting (the zoetrope, 1833; the phenakistoscope and stroboscope, both 1841; the praxinoscope, 1877).

  Marey’s chronophotography ventured to record various stages of movement on a single photographic surface (inspiring Eadweard Muybridge’s celebrated 1870s’ stop-motions, which proved Marey’s assertion that galloping horses spend intervals during which all four of their hooves are off the ground). Marey took his best photo trophies with an 1882 camera of his own design, equipped to take up to twelve frames per second in a single exposure. The lens itself was mounted between a butt and a sight barrel; the film was chambered up top; a trigger below—“a photogun,” as Marey called it—stilling a copy of motion whose life continued, flying, swimming, fluent, phaseless and unfazed.

  Motion provides attentional context; so too does proximity. What appears still from far away is far from still up close; emotional expression varies culturally, linguistically, generationally.

  For example, Rude. In the excerpt quoted above, Marey mentions François Rude (1784–1885), a sculptor celebrated for his La Marseillaise, also called Departure of the Volunteers of 1792, a relief completed between 1833 and 1836 that adorns the Arc de Triomphe, on the side facing the Champs Élysées (opposite Corot’s The Triumph of Napoleon). The sculpture depicts French citizens half stripped to the buff, half in Classical armor, being led into battle by the Roman personification of war, Bellona, and it’s her expression that Marey might be citing as “a cry of imprecation or command.”

  Taken in situ, passing through, passing under the arch—that might be the effect of Rude’s heightened immobile attempt at mobilization. But pried from context, isolated and brought nearer as bust, the sense you get is one of unalloyed shock—of a witness about to be stabbed or shot, about to be or already violated.

  10. DUCTUS INTERRUPTUS, TYPE-WRITE AND TYPEWRITE, WAVE-PARTICLE THEORY OF LANGUAGE, REACTION TIME

  (WRITING B)

  Ductus, in the sense understood by the Church copyists, means “flow”—the stylization of language on the page and in time. This flow, of the font of the hand, of its genic rhythms and ranges of motion, was interrupted by the font—by types, typefaces.

  Between handwriting and printing there can be no ligature—no connecting swoop or jot. Once hand-compositing—the manual ordering of printed texts, by the letter—gave way to mechanical means, and once the serif—the small upturns and downturns at the extremities of letters, a natural feature of handwriting, artificially reproduced in early printing—gave way to the sans serif, the ligatures went too: æ and œ, once conveniences, had become singularly distracting.

  While in Renaissance Europe, the hand conditioned the press, in Puritanical America the press conditioned the hand. The eighteenth century’s foremost formal hand was called Copperplate (John Hancock’s 55-degree-slanting calligraphy, as well as the relative cacographies of the Declaration of Independence’s other signatories), named after the etched copper plates from which handwriting
instruction “manuals” were made. The nineteenth-century methods of Platt Rogers Spencer (supple but intricate, based on leaf shapes, tree shapes) and Austin Palmer (spare and angular, based on utilitarian motions) were both intended to inculcate through rote practice good character by good penmanship. While Spencer’s, which was taught in primary schools, sought to improve students by the highest moral and aesthetic criteria, and Palmer’s, taught in commercial courses, sought to do the same for businesses, end-user results were the same: The democratic proliferation of standardizations precipitated the collapse of standardization, though mechanistic philosophies continued in technological iterations.*1

  Modern text is typically typed when it should be “laced” or “plaited”: Latin’s texo means “to weave.” Though the typewriter was invented by journalist Christopher Sholes, printer Samuel Soule, and lawyer (and inventor of the mechanical plow) Carlos Glidden in 1868, it’s not a coincidence that the only entity with the ability to mass manufacture the product was the sewing-machine division of Remington & Sons, who made the best rifles to ever target the West (a fact straight out of dime-fiction).

  Before word processing was for women it was for the disabled: Hans Rasmus Johann Malling-Hansen (1835–90), a pastor and head of an institute for deaf-mutes in Copenhagen, invented a skrivekugle, or “writing ball,” with the hope that his patients might be able to express themselves faster with fingers on buttons than with fingers in air (sign language), though his interest shifted toward commerce when the Nordic Telegraphy Company purchased a few units (including one equipped for Morse code). Its geodesic keyboard—the keys arranged in a dome of staggered rows—was supposed to allow the blind to type by touch alone (considerably more difficult on a flat keyboard).