The Truth Machine (14 page)

Another criminal, the recidivist thief Agagliate, demonstrated no response to mental arithmetic and showed only a slight reaction when shown a revolver. Thinking about the electrical shock generator merely “flattened the pulse, to render it almost barely detectable at the apices.”
¹³⁶
In 1885, American psychologist Joseph Jastrow reported in
Science
magazine that the study “of the bodily or anthropometric peculiarities of these defective classes is getting to be a very favorite line of work.” “The sexual passion and the glass of wine modified the course of the pulse,” wrote Jastrow, “the money did so still more, and vanity the most. In short, criminals are a very vain class of beings.”
¹³⁷
The aim of these interrogations—superficially similar to those that would be asked by lie detector operatives forty years later—was not to elicit information
but rather to see if the questions caused the subject “emotions of any kind, whether he has real affection for those beings to whom normal persons are attached, but towards whom born criminals and the insane in general do not manifest love.”
¹³⁸

Transmission sphygmograph, 1882. All the lie detector's component parts had been invented prior to the beginning of the twentieth century. Charles Verdin,
Catalogue des instruments de précision servant en physiologie et en médecine construits par Charles Verdin
(Chateauroux, 1882).

One effect of the use of instruments that would later feature in lie detector discourse was the way in which they de-emphasized the operator. The scientist “who was elsewhere so insistent on his special ability to read the body,” was hidden from view.
¹³⁹
This machine-operative tension was particularly marked for graphical instruments such as cardiographs, ergographs, pneumographs, and myographs. As Étienne-Jules Marey wrote in 1885, “Not only are these instruments sometimes destined to replace the observer, and in such circumstances to carry out their role with an incontestable superiority, but they also have their own domain when nothing can replace them. When the eye ceases to see, the ear to hear, touch to feel, or indeed when our senses give deceptive appearances, these instruments are like new senses of astonishing precision.”
¹⁴⁰
According to Claude Bernard, the cardiograph was “a veritable living machine.” Its purpose was to yield a record unaffected by the prejudices of the observer, to bypass the ambiguities of language and speech altogether. As the body of the scientist receded, that of the suspect came to the fore, “imagined to tell its own truth.”
¹⁴¹

Enrico Ferri considered the sphygmomanometer to be useful “in the diagnosis of simulated disease” such as sham epilepsy. Ferri thought the instrument
could also assist in the identification of criminals, like “tattooing, anthropometry, physiognomy, physical and mental conditions, records of sensibility, reflex activity, vaso-motor reactions, the range of sight, the data of criminal statistics.”
¹⁴²
Instead of alighting on a single reliable indicator of criminal pathology, criminological discourse once again searched for a definitive answer to the question: “What is a criminal?” The multiplication of instruments devoted to rendering the invisible visible mirrored the multiplication of physical stigmata and also vexed the criminologists. Junior researchers complained about the proliferation of instruments and the difficulties in getting them to work. In detailing criminal anthropology's encyclopedic intensity, Gabriel Tarde's eloquence betrayed a decidedly unpositivist poetic sensibility:

Every instrument for measuring or which was known to contemporary medical science and to psychophysics, the sphygmograph, dynamometer, aestheseometer, etc., had already been employed by Lombroso for the purpose of characterizing in the language of figures or of graphic curves, singular arabesques, the manner in which thieves or assassins breathe, in which their blood flows, their heart beats, their senses operate, their muscles contract, and their feeling is given expression, and by this means to discover through all the corporal manifestations of their being, considered as so many living hieroglyphics to be translated, even through their handwriting and their signatures submitted to a graphical analysis, the secret of their being and of their life. In this manner he had discovered, especially by means of three sphygmographic tracings, that malefactors are very responsive to the sight of a gold coin or of a good glass of wine, and much less to the sight of a “donna nuda,” in a photograph to be sure.
¹⁴³

The list was ostensibly impressive but its superfecundity evidenced an anxiety deep in the heart of criminology.

Lombroso used instruments like the plethysmograph and the “hydrosphygmograph” to confirm the absence of emotion in the habitual offender. When examining a criminal, Lombroso argued, it was essential to ascertain “whether he has any real affection for those beings to whom normal persons are attached, but towards whom born criminals and the insane in general do not manifest love.”
¹⁴⁴
The “Volumetric Glove,” for example, tightly sealed, filled with air, and attached to Marey's tympanum, was used to ascertain if a person was a criminal on this basis: “If after talking to the patient on indifferent
subjects, the examiner suddenly mentions persons, friends, or relatives, who interest him and cause him a certain amount of emotion, the curve registered on the revolving cylinder suddenly drops and rises rapidly, thus proving that he possesses natural affections. If, on the other hand, when alluding to relatives and their illnesses, or vice-versa, no corresponding movement is registered on the cylinder, it may be assumed that the patient does not possess much affection.”
¹⁴⁵
In 1893 Arthur MacDonald described how Mosso's plethysmograph could examine the “sensibility of criminals.”
¹⁴⁶
The instrument was used to investigate a criminal's “nervous and physical nature,” his “mental depression,” or the ability of children to perform mental calculations. It did not detect the lie. The instrument was assumed to be irrelevant for studying criminals' “power of deception,” which was described under a separate heading in the article.
¹⁴⁷
In 1899, Lombroso wrote that Mosso's plethysmograph was able “without affecting the health and without any pain, to penetrate into the most secret recesses of the mind of the criminal.”
¹⁴⁸
The target of this work was the personological criminal type, not the lie.
¹⁴⁹

“As a double exception,” Lombroso and Ferrero wrote, “the criminal woman is consequently a monster.”
¹⁵⁰
The female offender was considered the exception that proved the rule precisely because she exhibited no degenerate stigmata. Whereas male criminals were believed to be pathological deviations from the normal, female criminals were considered invisible specters, “monstrous in their lack of deviation from the normal: they are a monstrosity in terms of criminal anthropology, the mythical creature at the heart of its labyrinth.”
¹⁵¹
Criminology transformed the normal woman into an entity even more dangerous than the born criminal. The result was the barely legible
potential
dangerousness of the normal woman, the effect of which was to construct woman as “both normal in her pathology, and pathological in her normality.”
¹⁵²

Criminology was one of many nineteenth-century discourses “determined to rend any and all veils of inscrutability, to bring women's secrets into the light of masculine inspection by whatever means necessary.”
¹⁵³
At the heart of the enterprise lay the mysterious enigma of woman, the carrier, embodiment, and essence of criminality.
¹⁵⁴
By the end of the nineteenth century many criminologists believed that only by solving the enigma of woman could criminality be confronted. Criminology's elevation of women as the chief conundrum for their discipline was a stark example of the ability of the human sciences to assimilate long-held cultural beliefs and widely articulated social values into a systematic empirical framework. But the positioning of
woman within late nineteenth-century criminological discourse was an important episode in the history of the lie detector for two reasons. First, the shift of attention toward the female body was accompanied by a move toward the investigation of the apparently inscrutable domain of the emotions, a domain that physiological instruments, it was hoped, would render visible. Second, as the central enigma of criminology, thought to possess an intrinsic but invisible guilt, the female body would provide the lie detector with an opportunity to become an indispensable new tool. One of the conditions for the lie detector's emergence was, therefore, the conceptualization of criminal woman as the quintessential problem of criminology. Another, however, would be the death of criminal man.

It is on our domestic hearths that we are taught to look for the
incredible. A mystery sleeps in our cradles; fearful errors lurk
in our nuptial couches; fiends sit down with us at table; our
innocent-looking garden-walks hold the secret of treacherous
murders; and our servants take £20 a year from us for the sake of
having us at their mercy.

—Alfred Austin (1879)

The lie detector could not have been invented in the nineteenth century. The first obstacle was that the lie had yet to be constructed as an unambiguously shameful act as well as a psychophysical property of the normal human body—an entity whose expression should occasion guilt in the ordinary person. The Victorians were animated by the polarity of truth and deceit, but lying was emphatically not construed purely as an attribute of the untrustworthy and vulgar classes.
¹
On the contrary, polite sectors of Victorian society considered the management of lying a valuable skill. Deception was a vehicle for socio-cultural transformation, while deceit generated certain forms of authority. A means of empowerment and for constructing selfhood, lying was culturally licensed, especially among the emerging class of bourgeois public intellectuals. The novelist Wilkie Collins, for example, attempted to incorporate dishonesty into the realm of the morally acceptable. Even toward the end of the nineteenth century the simple truth was only ambiguously attached to respectability. For criminologists, however, lying remained a cardinal trait of
homo criminalis.
Because the lie detector would come to rely
on the lie as a feature of normality, the instrument's invention was not thinkable until criminology had abandoned the born criminal.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century anxiety was widespread that crime was not being removed but rather displaced, but not back to the slums of the criminal underclass. On the contrary, the naturalization of crime produced the alarming possibility that criminality might lie within the heart of the character of the ordinary law-abiding citizen. The public was concerned that certain crimes—particularly poisonings, embezzlement, and fraud— might not be coming to light, these crimes apparently committed by the respectable middle classes whose implementation was facilitated by the semblance of propriety. The perceived decline of Mayhew's riotous and menacing underworld made public life appear more secure. But uncomfortable questions were raised about the corruptions concealed within respectable society.
²
The perception that street-level crime was on the wane directed middle-class attention from the unruly masses toward the reputable citizen. Hitherto hidden forms of criminality became sources of anxiety.
³
The brutal murder of a small child at an English country house in 1860 horrified the nation, in part because it initially appeared that the killer must have been a member of the upstanding household. The search for the perpetrator of the “Road Hill House murder” inspired a national “detective-fever” and encouraged hundreds of people to write to the newspapers, the Home Secretary, and Scotland Yard with their proposed solutions.
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“It is doubtful if public excitement ever rose to such a pitch in connection with a crime as that occasioned by the celebrated Road Murder,” wrote the
Sporting Times
nearly thirty years after the event.
⁵

The nineteenth century came to speak of crime and its punishments to a degree that was inversely proportional to their occurrences. Although gruesome punishment was gradually removed as a public spectacle, this led to an overproduction of images and narratives concerning crime and punishment.
⁶
As the nineteenth century progressed, the administration of the law was professionalized and individual testimony gave way to tangible evidence—embodied in the figures of the lawyer and the fictional detective.
⁷
Invisible threats appeared more frightening than perceptible, calculable ones. Novelists drew inspiration from the professional classes, the domestic family, and from their knowledge of morally ambiguous individuals. Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins followed the Road Hill House case intensely. A safer society had been created at the cost of a need for greater vigilance. A growing preoccupation with blackmail highlighted new concerns about the concealment of secrets.
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