Embodying genre: from Galton’s generic faces to Peirce’s embodied ideas

Abstract In the late 1870s, Galton implements and describes the technique of “composite photography.” This technique consists in overlapping several images of faces on the same photographic plate to obtain what Galton calls a “generic face.” The idea of composite photography appears in some of the crucial junctures of Peirce’s semiotic theory. Peirce uses the composite photograph as the image of the percept to explain how the “general” is a schema through which we organize the perceived. The paper shows how Peirce’s use of the metaphor of composite photography is linked to the question of the “embodiment” of the general.