ONEILL. Two Body Criticism - A Genealogy of the Postmodern Anti-Aesthetic

8/11/2019 ONEILL. Two Body Criticism - A Genealogy of the Postmodern Anti-Aesthetic

1/19

Wesleyan niversity

Two Body Criticism: A Genealogy of the Postmodern Anti-AestheticBody Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine by Barbara MairaStaffordReview by: John O'Neill

History and Theory, Vol. 33, No. 1 (Feb., 1994), pp. 61-78Published by: Wileyfor Wesleyan UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2505652.

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2/19

TWO BODY CRITICISM:

A

GENEALOGY

OF THE

POSTMODERN ANTI-AESTHETIC*

JOHN

O'NEILL

ABSTRACT

BarbaraMariaStafford'sBody Criticism 1992) s analyzed or its relianceupon mon-

strous bodies as the source of

an alternative o

the art historyof the Enlightenment.

A

counterculture f the flesh

caught in its own vision of skin

diseases, bumps, and

medical

pathologies s painstakingly eproduced s

the officialopposition

to reason's

body.

The

artestablishment

s

required

o

admitengravers,

artoonists,kaleidoscopists,

and

phrenologists.Critical

questionsare raisedregardingStafford's

use of iconology

and

genealogy, as well as

a

criticaldifference

ver

the question

of

the revolutionary

status

of

the postmodernaesthetic raced from the

camera

obscurato virtualreality

perception.

Today's body sciences

are unthinkable without an

extraordinary new comple-

mentarity of the visual, technical, and

theoretic arts. Whether

in dance or in

medicine,

in

the Olympics or the Art

Gallery, the body's

performances now

demand of

us an

ability

to

set

aside the

categories

of

division

and

subordination

that

once

set

the

body

below

the mind.

Today,

our

cultural

mind

is dexterous

or else

useless;

and

our bodies are

global

because our

prostheses

-

the

telephone,

the television, pharmaceuticals, food, and fashion

-

are likewise

global.I

For

centuries

we have believed that the mind's

expansion required

the

body's

aban-

donment.

To look

into

the

sun,

we

gladly

left

the rest of

our

senses to rot

in

the

body's

cave. The

hegemony

of the

mind's

eye

involved us

in

an

extraordinary

regime

of

sensory

subjection,

marginalization, and confinement. In this order

of

things,

we

divided ourselves

into higher

and

lower

beings,

fearing

ourselves

as men

fear

women,

as

adults fear

children,

as

mankind fears

animals, as

the

master fears the slave, as the

center fears

the

margin, as the

orderly

and

beautiful

fear the

disordered,

ugly,

and monstrous.

According

to

such

divisions,

we

arranged

our

dreams,

our

arts

and

sciences,

our

food and

politics,

our

gods

and

demons. For

centuries, then,

we have

lived in

a

cultural

order

whose

tran-

scendental vision

required

that the soul check

its

body

baggage

at

point

of

*

A

review

essay of Barbara Maria Stafford, Body Criticism:

Imaging

the

Unseen in Enlighten-

ment

Art

and Medicine

(Cambridge, Mass., 1992).

1. John

O'Neill,

Plato's Cave:

Desire,

Power

and

the

Specular

Functions

of

the Media

(Nor-

wood, N.J., 1991).

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3/19

62 JOHN O'NEILL

takeoffand not reallyexpect

o see

it

again exceptperhaps

n

some weightless

and purified orm whose angelictranslucencywould serveto

mirror

he soul's

brightness hroughout he cosmos.

To put things in this way, of course, puts them out of our way. Or so we

think as

though"today"

were

any

ess rhetoricalhan

"yesterday";

r

as

though

deconstruction nd

antistructuralism ere anythingmore than the necessary

tensions intrinsic o any practice,any ritual, or any categorization.

To

forget

this is

to

confuse

the

rhetoricof

inversion

with the

politics

of subversion.The

result s that in our

contemporary oncernwith deconstructive oliticswe may

well rattle the cultural

archive,reshuffle ts exhibits, rewrite ts histories, and

declarea permanent arnival and

yet

not exceed he

"play"

within

a

hegemonic

culture hat has defined tself through ts incapacity or shock. Meanwhile, t

is certainly he case thatwhatever he culturalmansionwe inhabitwe all feel

obliged

to

clear out its

basement,

to

display

ts

curiosities,

and

to

propel

the

energyspent upon such

rearrangementss futuristic

n the

extreme.

BarbaraMariaStafford's ecentattempt o revision he historyof invisibility

since

the

Enlightenment ffers

a

strenuous

example

art

books are

always

so

heavy of a genrewe may call body criticism,afterthe title of herbook. What

is truly strenuous n the

exercise s her effortto reconnect he body-text o its

visceral, skeletal, mineral, and microscopical mages,and to join the body's

literary, aboratory,and amusement ites into a single postmodern ultureof

visibility.

To

achieve

this,

Staffordneeds to

bring

to

light

the

very imagery

which the Enlightenment

uriouslyenough cast into darknessand oblivion.

Body Criticism, hen,

is an

assaultuponthe hegemony

f that

abstract mpiri-

cism

which, despite

its

self-proclaimedmodernity,

has remained ied to the

rational, mathematical,

non-art magery

of

cognition

that has ruled

in

geom-

etry, medicine,painting,

and literature

rounded

n

classical

non-visual

values.

The deconstructiveurnthat Stafford ocatesin the eighteenth enturyderives

from the observer's oss of

a disembodiedplace beyond the field

of

vision,

observation,

and

measurement.

Once the

privileged ubjectposition

was

lost,

the

hierarchy

of

rational/sensory, nside/outside, private/publicknowledge

and

perception

was

invaded

by

its own

margins.

The

dermatological,

he

phre-

nological, the horoscopical,and

geological surfaces, expustulations

nd flesh

of the world

opened up

a new

perceptual

domainto the arts and

sciences

hat

Staffordtakes to be the

inauguration

of

the

postmodern

recombinationof

aestheticsand science at workin virtualreality,in noninvasive asersurgery,

and in

the

computerworkplace.

Stafford's

enealogy

of

body

criticism an

only

be

paraphrased

ith

consider-

able

injusticeaggravated by

the

problem

of not

being

able to

reproduce

ts

necessary

isual and

iconographic

ode.

But

sincethe

very strategy

of

genealo-

gizing

tself

metes

out

rough ustice

o the traditions t

abbreviates, isconnects,

and

reconnects,

we

must

rather be concernedwith the

overall

economy

of

knowledgewhich

s now

the scene

of numerous uchexercises

n

decanonization.

In

particular,

I

suggest

that the

"epistemological

reak" hat

generatesany



4/19

A GENEALOGY

OF

THE

POSTMODERN

ANTI-AESTHETIC

63

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Ci E~isiiiE-

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~~~~~~~IGUE

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Wila

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tae

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.325-.

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5/19

64 JOHN O'NEILL

particular genealogy

must

be compared

wherever possible with the results of

other revisions of roughly comparable data, discourses, and techniques.

The

benefit

of

this suggestion

is

that

it may do something to reduce the arbitrariness

that often characterizesthe genealogical method, making it difficultto overcome

its shock value. In the same regard,

I think it is necessary to question whether

the

genealogical reshuffling

of our epistemic moulds

in

fact erodes

the cultural

hegemony in which our arts and

sciences are embedded. For these reasons,

then,

I

will

attempt to bring several other cultural works to bear upon Stafford's

genealogy

of

body

criticism.

The

latter

is

constructed by

the

cross-reference

of

art and

science, specifically

of

medicine, psychology,

and

neurology,

and

their

counterpart images

and imaginary

in

the dermatological, phrenological,

monstrous, hermaphroditic, and hysterical bodies with which the eighteenth-

and

nineteenth-century

sciences became

preoccupied:

"The

experimental

artist

and

the

clinical

physician,

unlike

the

rigid logician

and the

measuring

calculator,

shared an

eye

for

gauging

the flux

of

passing

effects.

Both

were

obliged to judge

particular

embodiments

in

a

nonnumerical and

nonlinguistic

manner" (39-40).

Engravers, cartoonists, surgeons,

kaleidoscopists, paper marblers, characterol-

ogists,

from

Piranesi

to

Lavater,

all

explored

the

undersurface and

the

superfi-

cial

interface

for

a

non-metaphysical

truth

of things encrypted

in

a series of

diseases, faces, and ears, to capture the body-politic in the arts of anatomy

liberated from any classical model

of timeless proportions. Thus Lavatersought

to

locate

characters

in the

skull and

skeleton, bypassing feeling

and

emotion

for the

revelations

of a serialized human truth. These exercises involved a cu-

rious blend of neoclassical abstraction and the creation of systematic

inventories

of

fragments,

on

the

one

hand,

with

a Romantic

quest

for

the

underlying

enigma

of the

particular,

on

the

other

hand,

as

seen in the

dictionaries and

manuals

that

become

the

stock

in

trade of the

Enlightenment.

This

"intellectualization"

of the body's image, of course, continued the classical critique of the body:

By

its

virulent

purity,

he

absoluteness

f

its divisions

nto

black

and

white,

the detached

and

unentangled iagramperformed

mentaland

optical

disinfection.

Taut

and

super-

fluous

linesvisibly dispelledobscurityby strictlydefining

and

limiting

meaning.

The

analyticcomposition

was

the

equivalent

f

decontaminating

riticism.Both

systemati-

cally

annihilated

ensorydigression y hitting

he

mark

with

precision

and

clarity. 149-

150)

But

Stafford

is

concerned

to locate the places where the genealogy of body

criticism makes its

positive

critical

turn,

that

is,

where criticism

is not defini-

tionally

the

exercise

of

reason over

the senses but

rather

where the

sensory

orders came

into

their

own,

so

to

speak,

because the

inextricability

of

truth

and

appearance,

of

theory

and

practice,

required

new

ways

of

reading

the flesh

of

experience,

now

increasingly

urbanized

and

privatized, regular yet volcanic,

at once

seemly yet grotesque

if

peered

into

by

the

caricaturist or

by

the

psycho-

analyst,

the

novelist,

or the

criminologist.

But it

is difficult not to conclude that Stafford's desire to locate a major

critical turn

in

the

body

arts and sciences

remains

unfulfilled within the

epistemic



6/19

A GENEALOGY OF THE

POSTMODERN

ANTI-AESTHETIC 65

framework

he works to bring down. After all, paper

marblinghardlyover-

throws

the geometricorder anymore han gossip

overthrowsdisciplinarydis-

course-each is rathera

para-site han an

alternative estheticor a rival epis-

teme, as Stafford equires hem to be in orderto carry orwardher claim that

the

ephemeral s pregnantwith the postmodern.I

believe the same objection

must be

made againstthe criticalweight Stafford

assigns to "aberrations"f

all kinds

divine,

human, and

animal. She

is

well aware

that for the ancients

such mixtures nd monsterswere

rathercosmological

unities, that is, bounded

unities of creativeenergy, rather

than directions nto a third force. Yet she

presents

Romantic eading f suchgrotesques

n

order o

reconceive he mind's

embodiment

n

the postmodernars combinatoria hat

may

well

be benign

in

the operations f laser urgery ut,Ithink,are ess sointhe random onglomera-

tion of

the mass culturalmind and

its docile body.

There s an ambiguity n

Stafford's se of the term

"bodycriticism," eferring

as it does to both

the

hegemony

of

reason

overthe

sensesand

to

new

perceptions

of

embodied

experience

hat

constitutea critiqueof pure reason. This is less

puzzling

f

we

understand mbodiment s

an

assemblage f

discourses,desires,

techniques,and prosthetics

hrough which the body is

at once the site/sight

of

the institutions

hat produce he

complex

of

body

codes that

apportion

he

ratios of reason and sense.2Thus "the"body may offer the "sight"of both

discipline

nd

disorder,

buttheseeffectswillbe

codedfrom

different

nstitutional

"sites"

of

embodiment.

Stafford's

mployment

of the

terms

Neoclassicism

and

Romanticism

Mannerism nd

Baroque)

turns

upon the

shift

from the long

history

of the

Vitruvianbody to

artificial

nd

grotesque

novelties,

a

shift from

inner

essenceto

superficial

haracter,

rom the

individual

o

the series. What

is

problematic

n

her own pictorial

echnique,however, s the lack of any meth-

odology

to

ground

ts claim

to

have

salvaged

an

anti-aesthetic

hat is

the

genea-

logicalsource of postmodernvisuality.

In this

regard,

we

may

raise a further

question

with

respect

to Stafford's

deployment

of

images

and

text, namely,

what we

may

call the

iconological

question,3

r

how

do our

ideologies

hape

he

practices

hat definecertainratios

between

text and

images

n

the

arts, sciences,

and the

practical

arts

that feed

in

and out of the canonical

orpusof

images

hat

defines

any

cultural

period?

n

this

regard,

Stafford's onfrontation f

neoclassical

mages

with

the

iconoclastic

images

and fetishes of the

grotesque ayers

of

sickness,

insanity,

and

anality

is intendedto provokeart historianswith the subtextof their discipline a

subtext that she

regards

as the

progressive

ide of

a new

ratio of

visuality

in

the postmodernaesthetics

of

communication

echnologies

from

video

to

noninvasive aser

surgery.

Put

more

forcibly,

Stafford eems

o

be

arguing

hat

the real

history

of art

is

grounded

n

pain

rather han

pleasure

179-209).

Thus

she

rejectsLessing's

Laocoon

(1766)

on the

grounds

hat

it seeks

to banish he

poetics

of

pain

from

the

painterly

radition

of

heroic decorum even under

2. John O'Neill, Five Bodies: The Human Shape of Modern Society (Ithaca, 1985).

3.

W. J. T.

Mitchell, Iconology:

Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago, 1986).



7/19

66 JOHN O'NEILL

monumental suffering, placing the image under the hegemony of the text and

its doctrine of dramaturgical propriety. This same strategy excluded both phys-

ical and social suffering; it legislated against the imagery of disease and oppres-

sion:

The merelyaestheticwas to be suppressed y the aesthetic.Thenew Cartesian nalytical

method and the rigorism of an Augustinian Jansenism were also part of what became

the Neoclassical drive to wash language, art, and morals of the excess of liberty. They

were to be cleansed of showy ostentation and, most fundamentally, of the cosmetic

imagination. This condemnation of fleshly delights was precipitated by a fear of the

collapse

of

order.

The same

puritan phobic anxiety

of imminent

dissolution

underlay

the

view of

disease as

the

Adamic,

or

inherited, inability

to control the flux

of

reality.

(204)

We

might

say,

then,

that

Stafford

rejects Lessing's attempt

to

spatialize

the

body as a sculptural object

removed so far as

possible

from its

temporal

and

historical development. Lessing's desire to ground the distinction between

painting

and

poetry represents

a

retrograde

move

in

body

criticism achieved

through

the

repression

of

poetic

effects

in

painting

which

arise there

through

the

return

of

repressed

effects

of

the material

imagination

-in

the

serpent/

phallus that entwines the figure

of

Laocoon.

In

effect, the same

two

modalities

of

body

criticism

are

at work

in

Stafford's entire

argument

as are extracted

by

W. J. T. Mitchell4 in his specific analysis of the interweaving of gender and

genre

in

Lessing's essay:

Blurred Genres Distinct Genres

Moderns Ancients

Adultery Honesty

Monsters Beautiful

Bodies

Mothers

Fathers

French "refinement" English and German "manliness"

Emancipatory Body Criticism Repressive Body

Criticism

Here

I

think

we

have a device

for

"abstracting" Stafford's general argument

that allows us to

express

it

in

Mitchell's

more

precise

formulation

of its icono-

clastic status:

Lessing

rationalizesa fear of

imagery

hat can

be

found

in

every major philosopher

from Bacon

to Kantto

Wittgenstein,

fear not

just

of the "idols" f

paganprimitives,

or of thevulgarmarketplace, ut of the idolswhich nsinuate hemselvesntolanguage

and

thought,

the false models

which

mystify

both

perception

and

representation.By

literalizing

this iconoclastic

rhetoric-by applying it,

that

is,

to

painting

and

sculpture

rather than to

figurative

"idols"

or

icons-Lessing may help

us to

expose

some of the

dangers

hat lie hidden

n

our

iconophobia.

He

may help

us

to

measure,

or

instance,

the extent

o which

we have

madea fetish

out of

ourown iconoclastic

hetoric,projecting

the

very

dols

we claim o be

smashing.

An

idol, technically peaking,

s

simply

an

image

4. Ibid., 100. I

have added he two forms of criticism

n order to relate Stafford's framework

to

Mitchell's

iscussion.



8/19

A GENEALOGY OF

THE

POSTMODERN

ANTI-AESTHETIC

67

whichhas an unwarranted,rrationalpower over somebody;

t

has become

an object

of worship,a repositoryof powerswhich someone has projected nto it, but

which it

in fact does not possess.But iconoclasm

ypicallyproceedsby assuming hat thepower

of

the image

s felt

by somebodyelse;

what

the iconoclast

ees is the

emptiness,

vanity,

and impropriety f the idol. The idol, then, tendsto be simply an imageovervalued

(in our opinion)by an other:by pagansand primitives; y childrenor foolish

women;

by Papistsand ideologues they have

an ideology;we have a politicalphilosophy);

by

capitalists

who

worshipmoney

whilewe value"realwealth."The rhetoricof

iconoclasm

is thus a rhetoricof exclusionand

domination,

a caricature f the other as one

who is

involved n irrational,obscenebehavior rom which (fortunately)we are exempt.

The

images

of

the idolatersare typically

phallic(recallLessing'saccountof the

adulterous

serpents

n

ancient tatues),and

thus

they must

be

emasculated, eminized,

have their

tonguescut off by denying hem the power of expressionor eloquence.They

must

be

declared dumb," mute," empty,"r"illusory.Ourgod, bycontrast-reason, cience,

criticism, he Logos, the spiritof human anguageand civilizedconversation

is invis-

ible, dynamic, and incapable

of

being

reified

in

any material, spatial

image.5

Stafford chooses

to

document

the dirt order of the

eighteenth

century,

the

ravages of

the

skin and bowels,

the foul smells and

genital scourges

-

all

caught

in

the vivid imagery and

wild imagination of the day which located these evils

in foreigners, the lower classes, and even the impressionability

of the

womb,

unable to face the

intrinsic

irruptions

of

the

body

and the new aesthetic

they

called for:

A

physiologicalpreoccupationwith

disjointed surface,

or

spotted

and infected epi-

dermis,

rebelled

gainst

he intense ntellectualization

f the

idea

common

amongbody

critics.Rationalists

osmeticallyetouched,plastically econstructed,

nd

ruthlessly

or-

recteda depraved,blotched,and sexually begottenactuality.Body epicures,

on the

contrary, ystematically resented

ailed

pleasures

nd

durable

pains. Theyhighlighted

the compositional nd complexional

deterioration ccompanying

he

divisiveness

hat

was one of the wagesof originalsin. Corporeal ophistrydeliberatelydisplayed

he

wartsnside hemind,on the blemishedbody

of the

person,

and on the mortified anvas.

(229-230;my emphasis)

Here, then,

is the

corporealized genealogy

of

body

criticism. No

longer

con-

tainable

within

the

classical

corpus

of unified

knowledge,

it

irrupts

like the

lesions

upon

the

body's

skin and at

the same time

it

implodes

like

the nerves

and cellular

dance beneath the skin. Its scientific

apparatus

will

range

from the

kaleidoscope

to

the

microscope;

its art

will

marry

Romanticism and

Mannerism,

with

Baroque

and

Rococo

flourishes scrambling

the

unity

of

classicism,

flooding

the senses

with an unbounded

particularity

of

self-shaping

assemblies

that

her-

alded a post-Revolutionary society, that is, "that glad day when imagery and

an

imagistic intelligence

assumes its

rightful

and

constitutive

role

as

the maker

of both

particular

and

general

meaning

in

an

increasingly

visual environ-

ment" (339).

Yet

Stafford is very

much aware that

a

visionary society

also

risks

being

a

society

of

swindlers,

of

seducers

and

sophists.

She

in

fact

documents the

quackery

around the

spread

of

optical toys

that

still hold the

ignorant

spell-

5.

Ibid.,

113.



9/19

68

JOHN

O'NEILL

bound to this day. Of

course, these toys were both the product and progenitors

of

much usable science. Likewise, what was unintelligible about them was at

first released for the

amusement of an elite that

believed

it

could be trusted

with a responsible exercise of the pleasure principle in science and the arts. But

Stafford

argues that Descartes, Hume, Berkeley, and Diderot were all visual

epicures inasmuch as their

underlying

aim was to

try

to resist the irresistible

unmooring

of the

corporeal imagination

that would

eventually

result

in

a

new

community

of

vision:

This awareness ooks ahead

to the

late twentieth-century

pectacle

of

electronically

generatedphantoms

hovering

n

the windowlessand

high-rise

Platonic Cave. The new

Faustian con is a

radiantand man-made

deed.

Atemporal

n

its total

presentness,

t

remindsus of Berkeley's urelyopticalarray. t can swiftlydrawa complexcommunity

of

millionsof unique, ndividual umanbeings ogether

n

a just

cause....

The freedom

movement

n

Eastern

Europehas shown ust

how

contagious

are

those digitalized dols

flowing

across

repressive orders.They

are

powerful nough

o

tear

downeventhe

most

obduratewalls.

No

more

convincing

demonstration xists

that colored

beams

of

light

do not

merelyoppressand beguilebut,

whenhandled

responsibly,

lluminate he

night

in a way that wordscannot. (390)

Here one

is embarrassed

by

Stafford's

fall

into

televangelist.

The

spectacle

of

the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist

Republics,

or of incidents from

the so-called Iraqwar, are certainly produced by "responsible"media. But these

media are

responsible

to the

corporate

interests that own them. It

is

in

their

interest to proclaim

the rebirth of homo consumans

and of the reappearance

of

petty capitalism as "new

world

order,"

while

the

background

event is the

division of the

world

into

sectors

driven

by

an

ever-greedy globalism, already

festering

with

new

barbarisms.

All

this

is,

of

course,

recorded

for us

in

the

privacy

of

our homes

where the difference between the

spectacles

of

war, sport,

sex, famine,

and

catastrophe

is

erased.

The

exercise

of

any analytic

or

verbal

intelligence in the home now converted to a video arcade would indeed violate

the pleasure

principle

of its

denizens. Meanwhile,

Stafford

misses

that

in

the

world of television it

is night all day long.

Overall,

I do not

think that Stafford's

"metaphorology"

can

carry

us

into

the

postmodern aesthetic.

It

invokes matters "out of

sight"

which cannot be

brought

into a new

senses

communes

simply through the device of a

picture

book that

is

hopelessly dependent upon

the word that it

disavows

in

solidarity

with

the postmodern

scene. By the

same

token, aesthetic discourse is incapable

of

analyzing the political economy that has emptied artof

any oppositional force

whatsoever. Modern art is

now

just

as dead as fast

food, and each celebrates

a

speechless

community

that

is the other side

of

the

postmodern scene

-

"the

phenomenal pool,"

the

"trompe l'oeil,"

the

"optical

alchemy"

of the new electric

"meta-tools" to

which Stafford looks for a

revisionist

history

of

perception

and

pedagogy

in

the

arts

and

sciences. Whereas Stafford

believes that these

innovations herald

a new polity, Stone considers

that the new prosthetics

(acoustic

transducers,

monitor

screens,

and interactive

video)

introduce

local

and

global

networks

(mirror worlds, matrices, cyberspaces) that have immedi-



10/19

A GENEALOGY

OF

THE

POSTMODERN

ANTI-AESTHETIC

69

:~~~~~~~~~A

_

-Nit.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

5,

*

A~~~~~~~~~~~~~~A~

JAW&~~~~IUR

00AThaaIu

JiceNtrlIpesos

nmrhcLnsae

aeaOsua

from

Ar

Magna

ucis e Umbrae 1646, .

810.Engravig. (Phoo take fromaffoAL

W55.



11/19

70 JOHN O'NEILL

ately

been colonized

by the corporate/military complex and its extensions in

psychology,

medicine,

and

education.

Moreover,

cyberspaces are just as

Cartesian,

gendered,

and racist as

their old world counterparts, as any view

of science fiction will readily confirm. What is at issue is generally a war between

the living and the "almost

living,"

that is, the command centers that aspire to

global if not intergalactic

intelligence but without old world, that is,

political,

spatial accountability.

The

result is that accountability claims break out on the

abandoned

frequencies of

nationalism,

ethnicity,

religion,

and the family where

we attack ourselves in the

absence of ethical and political institutions that

redistribute the embodied weight

of responsibility:

As virtualsystemsburgeon, t is critical o remember hat decoupling he body from

the subject s an act that is politicallyfraught.As we enter the era of virtualreality

systems

we should

be acutelyawareof whose

agendas

we serve.

At the

close of an era

of

a particulardefinitionof

individuality, onsciousness till remains irmlyrooted

in

the

physical;

he boundedsubject s a

refractory onstruct,quite difficult

o

dislodge,

and

it

remains he

object of force

in

a

time

when

politicalagenciesare as

enamoredof

force as they have been at any time

past. Before

we

can allow ourselves

o

forget

this,

the

decoupled ubjectmust possess a

different

orderof

agency

from that of the name

of a

"disappeared" entralAmerican,

called back

to

momentary ife by a graffitoon

a

public

wall.6

Stafford does not always see that the subjectivizing of classical abstractionism

involves a clash between two

moralities of

vision,

that is, between "seeing as"

and

"seeing

that."

There

is

a

certain moral

continuity

between neoclassical art

and the

mechanical

objectivity

claimed for

scientific

image production

inasmuch

as each could

claim

to be

disciplined

by underlying structures unavailable

to

sensory perception. While,

therefore,

the aesthetic

of

the

grotesque might

seem

to

prefigure

the

aesthetic

of the

microscope--and therefore to justify

the

clash

between neoclassicism

and

the

grotesque

-

in

fact the visual

dialectics

of

"seeing

that" and "seeing as" still remain a lively issue in the interpretation practices

of

the biological, medical,

and

physical

sciences

and

their

new

technologies

of

visualizing their working objects.

Moreover,

these issues

were

already

rife in

the

construction

of

sixteenth-centuryatlases

of

the body, plants,

constellations,

maps,

and

instrument

readings

where the

interpretation

of

notions

of

the

typ-

ical,

average, characteristic,

pathological,

and deviant was more

sophisticated

than a

simple

contrast

between the ideal

and the

ugly,

or between

the

rational

universal and the sensate

particular.'

Hence the introduction of

the

camera

obscura, x-rays, lithographs, and laser surgerydid not reducethe hermeneutical

task intrinsic

to these visual

prosthetics.

On

the

contrary, they expanded

the

socio-legal problematic

of

"evidence."

Without some sense of the modern

disciplinaryregime

of

visuality

-

its

inser-

tion into the

panopticonography

that

rules

the

ignorant,

the

sick,

and the crim-

6.

Allucquere

Roseanne

Stone,

"Virtual

Systems,"

in

lacorporaticns,

ed. Jonathan

Crary

and

Sanford Kwinter

(New York, 1992),

6'20.

7.

Lorraine Daston and Peter

Galison,

"The

Image

of

Objectivity," Representations

41

(1992),

81-128.



12/19

A GENEALOGY OF

THE POSTMODERN ANTI-AESTHETIC

71

inal - one is bound to overlook

the entire bureaucratic apparatus of the

file,

the mugshot,

the I.Q. test, and

the medical record that comprises

the serious/

series side of the funny and

familiar self-portrayals of Kodak-culture.

Indeed,

even Foucault's genealogy of the panopticon is limited by his failure to take

into account the developments

in photography that expand

the visual regime

of the panopticon by multiplying

the sites of surveillance

on behalf of the

sightless corporate institutions

that dominate

our lives:

We canspeak henof a generalized,

nclusive rchive,a shadowarchive

hatencompasses

an entire social terrainwhile positioning

ndividualswithin that terrain.This archive

contains ubordinate,

erritorializedrchives:

rchives

whose

semantic

nterdependence

is normallyobscured

by the "coherence"nd

"mutual xclusivity"

f the social groups

registeredwithineach. The general,all-inclusive rchivenecessarily ontainsboth the

traces

of

the

visible bodies of

heroes, leaders,

moral

exemplars,

elebrities,and those

of

the poor,

the diseased,the

insane, the criminal, he nonwhite,

the female, and all

of the otherembodiments

f

the

unworthy.

The

clearest ndication

of

the essentialunity

of

this archive

of

images

of the

body ies

in

the fact that by the mid-nineteenth-century

singlehermeneutic aradigm

had gained widespread restige.

This

paradigm

had two

tightly

entwined

branches,physiognomy

and

phrenology.

Both

shared he belief

that

the surfaceof the

body,

and

especially

he face and head, bore

the

outward

signs

of

inner character.8

Thus Stafford'slocation of physiognomy and phrenology as Romantic reversals

of

neoclassical

body types is off the

mark with

respect

to their

more proper

location

in the

nineteenth-century

body

archive

created

to

locate individuals

in the new urban mass

with

its

new

series

of

crime and disease.

Here the image

is

particularized

within a series.

But

the series

is searched

in order

to

keep apart

the social classes

whose

purity

lines are violated

by

crime

and

disease.

The

postmodern

counterpart

of this exercise

is to be found

in

the

iconography

of

AIDS, as

I

have

shown elsewhere.9

Rather than leave the impression that my differences with Stafford derive

from a

preconceived

stand on

either

the aestheticization

of

politics

-in which

I

see

only

darkness

-

or the

politicization

of

aesthetics

-

in

which

I

see

only

trivialization

-I

want

to

return to

the discussion of

a

particular

optical

device

as

viewed

by

Stafford and as

treated

by

Crary.10

The device

in

question

is the

camera

obscura,

or

optical

cabinet [see figure 4].

The

genealogical

issue is

how

to situate a

shift

in

the nature

of

visuality

with

an

eye

to the

Renaissance

in

one direction

and in another towards

such recent

developments

as

computer

design, animation, virtual reality, and magnetic resonance imaging. Where is,

or what

is,

the

body

in

the

midst of

its new

visual

prosthetics?

Is it

merely

amused

by

them

or is

it

entering

a

new

polity,

a

new

visual

regime

that

is

finally

both democratic

and

pleasurable?

The weakness

of

Stafford's

aesthetics is

quite

8. Allan

Sekula,

"The

Body

and

the

Archive,"

October

39

(1987),

10.

9.

John

O'Neill,

"AIDS as

Globalizing Panic,"

in

Global

Culture,

ed.

Mike Featherstone

(London, 1990), 329-342;

also "Horror

Autotoxicus:

Critical

Moments

in

the Modernist Pros-

thetic,"

in

Incorporations,

264-267.

10. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth-

Century (Cambridge,

Mass.,

1991).



13/19

72

JOHN

O'NEILL

0SIMPO

E

PORTRAITURE

PEtRSON.

A

L

AND

FA

M I

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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~--

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d-S{t'

R1

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CONSUMPTION

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I

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0

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L

IC-f~~f,0C

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Francis a/ton, Inquiries

into Human aculty and ItsDevelopment (London,

183).i

FIGURE3

Francis

Galton,

Inquiries

into Human

Faculty

and

Its

Development (London,

1883).



14/19

A GENEALOGY OF

THE

POSTMODERN ANTI-AESTHETIC 73

apparent once we close in on her estimate of the historical function of the

camera obscura. On balance, she regards it as an optical toy with potential for

a

"popular science" movement, underwriting the pedagogic myth of education

as "fun"but largely devoted to the manufacture of "reveries"for the average

household (373). Here, however, Stafford turns away from the complex issues

of

the regime of truth, of knowledge and ignorance, grounded in the new

visuality. The result is that Stafford's body criticism is incapable of anything

more than allusive extrapolations from one regime of visuality to another.

Moreover, she does not analyze the visual orders she opposes -Neoclassicism

and Romanticism -except as an aesthetic canon and its margins. Admittedly,

her concept of body criticism comes very close to grasping the subject of vision

as, let us say, both "subject-of' and "subject-to" a cultural apparatus that

includes, art, science, and technology. But in the end she is a futurist, a technolo-

gist, anxious to marry her arts to the postmodern pleasure principle in the

society

of the

spectacle

that she

believes democratizes

her elite

discipline.

Stafford's

aesthetics

fail to situate

body

criticism

with

respect

to

the

society

of surveillance.'I While this may show admirable resistance

to

Foucault,

it

reveals the weakness of her romance with the media, even when she allies herself

with Baudelaire and Benjamin to revise the official domain of the visible open

to art historians. But Stafford's anti-aesthetic move here seems to me to have

fallen

prey

to

the essential distraction that Baudelaire and

Benjamin grasped

as the ungraspable, as the disorientation of the modern sensorium surrendered

to the

movement and mortality that are intrinsic to urbanism, industrialism,

and consumerism. Where Stafford forecasts a new political regime of equality

and

pleasure,

there

arises

on

the very same ground

of the new

visuality

a

regime

of

surveillance, of bodily and nervous discipline that once again overrides

the

romance

of

body criticism. Here

her lack of

any

serious consideration

of Marx

and Freud, for example, leaves Staffordunable to grasp the shift through which

the

camera obscura moves

from

being

a site of truth to an

apparatus

of

inversion

and

mystification,

of

ideology

and

the unconscious,

that

is,

the shift

through

which realism and

representation

become the effective

technique

of

postmodern

cave culture. As

Crary puts

it:

[T]he

camera

obscura

must

be

extricated

rom the

evolutionaryogic

of a

technological

determinism,

entral o influential

historical urveys,

which

position

it

as

a

precursor

or

aninaugural

vent n a

genealogy eading

o the birth

of

photography....

the camera

obscuraand the photographic amera,as assemblages,practices,and social objects,

belong

o

two

fundamentally

ifferent

rganizations

f

representation

nd

the

observer,

as well as

of

the

observer's

elation o the visible.

By

the

beginning

of

the nineteenth

century

he

cameraobscura s

no

longersynonymous

with the

production

of

truthand

with an

observerpositioned

o see

truthfully.

The

regularity

f such

statements

breaks

down and

the

photographic

amera

becomes

an

essentially

dissimilar

object, lodged

amidsta

radically

differentnetworkof statementsand

practices.12

11.

John O'Neill, "The Disciplinary Society:

From Weber to

Foucault,"

The British Journal

of Sociology 37 (March, 1986), 42-60.

12.

Crary, Techniques of

the

Observer,

31-32.



15/19

74

JOHN

O'NEILL

.....TQE....X..L

5

.

2......

-----....

IA~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~MON

0

D

ID.

'IO~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~'

FIGURE4

Comparison

of

eye

and camera

obseura.

Early

18th

century.

From

Crary,

Techniques

of

the

Observer,

49.



16/19

A

GENEALOGY OF

THE POSTMODERN ANTI-AESTHETIC 75

The technique of the camera

obscura

required the body's capture in

order

to render it the witness to a

transcendental field of representation-a field of

seeing without being seen,

whereas, as Sartre has shown, it is

in

the dialectic

of the seeing-seen that the ethics of truth and deception operate; only on this

level of reversibility can we

question the regime of specular power. This is

the

ground of body-criticism so finely explored in the work of Merleau-Ponty

which

I

have treated elsewhere in its

own right and taken up in studies of my own."3

Curiously enough, it is the lack of any such phenomenology of embodied

vision

that weakens Stafford's

aesthetics and, although

I

have recommended some

Foucault on this issue, the same

lack of phenomenology also accounts for

the

overwhelmingly pessimistic cast

of

Foucault's

body

criticism. It is

so insistent

upon the lack of any technical history in phenomenology that it degrades into

an

anti-vision

in

respect of any

emancipatory impulse.

As

I

see

it,

Foucault

ultimately surrenders to a sublime erasure

of

the self as master of its

own

dis-appearance

in

that

white

moment

of

death's

vision.

Here,

too,

the

post-

modern

anti-aesthetic succumbs to death

in

the

name of

pleasure, defying ordi-

nary intelligence.

Artists

and

their establishment critics

love

to

think

of themselves

as

radicals,

despite the obstinate fact that the critical arts are

heavily

institutionalized,

funded and marketed to contain them. Whether one looks at the foundations

that have underwritten Stafford's

book,

for

example,

or at the art market

that

has put Van Gogh permanently into the stock market, it is naive to

imagine

that

any exercise

of

reshufflingthe

pictorial

count

on

Neoclassical and Romantic

imagery

will

strike a body blow, so to

speak,

to the

art establishment.

Radical

genealogies

occur within

historical structureswhose

turning points

-

or

disconti-

nuities

-

constitute leaps into yet another institutional order. But here the socio-

logical question cannot be

ignored. The feudal order and the industrial order,

as Marx and Weber teach us, are not the disorders of one another. Rather,

the medieval order had its

own

disorders,

as Camille

shows

in

the case of the

art

margins

of

the medieval

text.

14

Here,

as

we shall see

later,

disorder functioned

to

confirm an order that entertained its

own

carnivalesque.

The

transition from feudalism to capitalism

did

not come out

of

the

margins,

gargoyles,

and

lechery

of

the

Middle

Ages. Capitalism, too,

has

its disorders.

But then

capitalism is

an

engine

of

disorder,

of

technological,

constitutional,

and

cultural

change

in which

every

other

order

must be

subordinated

to

the

expansion of profit. Thus, in the capitalist art market it is impossible for Van

Gogh

not to be marketed

as

an investment and owned as a

cheap

art

reproduc-

tion,

as a

lithograph,

a

postcard,

and now

as

a

completely

mimetic

oil

"original."

To

speak

of

a radical democratization

of

art

in

this case is to

ignore

the dual

economy

into which

art

is

split

as

two

forms

of

"non-art,"

that

is,

the multimil-

lion dollar "Van Gogh" on the

one

hand, and

the affordable

reproduction

on

13.

John

O'Neill,

The Communicative

Body:

Studies

in

Communicative Philosophy,

Politics

and Sociology (Evanston, Ill., 1989).

14.

Michael

Camille, Image

on

the

Edge:

The

Margins of

Medieval

Art

(London, 1992).



17/19

76

JOHN

O'NEILL

the other. In the one case, "Van Gogh" is disembodied art; in the other,

it is

a

universal

commodity

whose

price

is

always

within

reach.

But both

practices

belong to the same cultural apparatus

of the

bourgeois appropriation

of art.

The same dual economy underlies the larger cultural apparatusof the camera,

the television, computer, laser, video, and virtual reality systems.

The

biopsy

and

the military "surgical strike"

both have

body

referents

-pace

the

postmod-

ernists

-but

the benign violation in the first case is employed to cover the

violence in the latter case where bodies are not restored but either obliterated

or

else survive in a society whose food and medical supplies are cut

off. Thus

the new aesthetics of war

conscript

the

new

medical

aesthetics.

But

they

do

so

in a

body politic that

is

disciplined

to

withhold

body criticism,

or

else to

try

to ground it in the scene/seen provided by CNN.

It may be useful to explore another issue that

I

think

is

endemic

to

the

practice

of deconstructive genealogies -namely, their use

of

margins,

observations

and

the exclusions produced by the hegemonic cultural paradigm in any art

or

science. Here

I

want

to

show

the invocation

of the

margins,

while in

some sense

provocative, is not sufficient to create

a

post paradigmatic episteme

and

in

fact risks falling

into

aesthetic titillation

rather

than the

inauguration

of

a

revolutionary movement. Since the concern here is with the genealogical

method, I propose to use Camille's work on the margins of medieval art, men-

tioned earlier, which

in

form and content bears comparison

with Stafford's

work on eighteenth-century art. The difference is that Camille has

a

much

stronger grasp of the embedding of perverse practices

in

the regime of truth

which they mock but whose institutional sites -the monastery, cathedral, court,

and

city

-

they

do not shake.

Of

course,

it is in the

Middle

Ages

that the text

-its

page

and its

margins

becomes the

apparatus

of

the

rational-legal

discourse

that is the vehicle of

church and state. By the same token, there existed a double economy of order

and disorder, of the rational and the grotesque,

of

the stately

and

the

carni-

valesque, of high and low, of male and female, of human and animal.

Within

this

economy, however, the fantastic and

the

baboon-like

did not threaten the

hegemonic

order

but rather warned against the pride

of

mimetic rivalry so

little feared in the postmodern chaos:

That the term babewyncame to stand for all such compositecreatures,and not just

apes,

is

significant.

sidoreof

Seville,

he

authority

n

etymology hroughout

he Middle

Ages, traced he derivation f simius,or ape, fromsimilitude,notingthat "themonkey

wantsto imitateeverything e sees done."A beast that

was

kept as an entertainingoy

by jongleurs

and as

a

pet by

the

nobility,

the

ape

came to

signify

the dubious status

of

representationtself,

le

singe being

an

anagram

or le

signe-

the

sign.

The

prevalence

of

apes

n

marginal

rt

similarly sic]

draws

attention

o the

danger

of

mimesis

or

illusion

in

God's

createdscheme

of

things."5

Thus,

the late

fourteenth-century lady who opened

her

Book of Hours at Terce,

around nine

in

the

morning [see figure

51,

would have

found

herself

"simultane-

15.

Ibid.,

12-13.



18/19

A

GENEALOGY

OF

THE POSTMODERN ANTI-AESTHETIC 77

:

V

e~~~~~~~~~~T9

...

w i_ -R:w../r

.'

>9E~~~~~IGR

5

Magert'

Magis

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19/19

78

JOHN

O'NEILL

ously" in the

margin of the Holy Word which she embraced in order to be

heard by her Lord, yet sharing the

margin of this central

event with an ape-angel

pulling at God's

tail

-

of the word "Deus" while another

such creature

supports

herself on prayerful knees.

The genealogical

issue here is

what prevents the medieval marginal

humor

from subverting

the order that frames

it? Why can't we locate the political

unconscious here

in the baboon and

run with it into a postmodern

aesthetic

of mimetic violence and release?

Why are not women and baboons

medieval

signifiers of excess of sexuality and

textuality that carriesthe postmodern

scene?

Why didn't the

medieval imagination

rock the social framework upon

which

it elaborated its fantastic gargoyles?

Why didn't

medieval excrementality give

birth to psychoanalysis? These are difficult questions for the body critic who

restrains from runaway

genealogizing. They are especially

so for

feminist gene-

alogies, as the

work of Caroline

Bynum

shows.

16

We can no

more

make medieval

women the forerunners of modern

sexuality than we

can make medieval mar-

ginal art and comment the forerunner

of Mad magazine.

Nothing can be deter-

mined

from the "sight" of the grotesque and the

carnivalesque

inversions of

the social

and

sexual

order without

consideration of the "site"upon

which they

occurred

in

the

center

of

the town

or

village, namely,

in

the

public

realm

whose

power was sufficient to tolerate them.

Today,

the

center

is

everywhere,

as McLuhanites

are

so fond

of

proclaiming

in

celebration

of the postmodern ecclesia founded

upon

the dot

of

television.

For this reason, the center

is

bound

to fabricate

its

own

margins.

It

does

so

in a

continuous

flow

of

trivial, outrageous,

and catastrophic images

that swirl

around a

political

center

that

is

the

blind

spot

of

the

postmodern

aesthetic.

Because nothing shocks the bourgeoisie,

the shock

of

postmodernity

is sucked

into the dead center

of

late-capitalist

culture

like fast food, endlessly repeating

the mortification of its sovereign consumers. More work for body critics

York University

16. CarolineWalkerBynum,FragmentationandRedemption:EssaysonGenderandtheHuman

Body

in

Medieval Religion (New York,

1991).

ONEILL. Two Body Criticism - A Genealogy of the Postmodern Anti-Aesthetic

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Transcript of ONEILL. Two Body Criticism - A Genealogy of the Postmodern Anti-Aesthetic