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

Wesleyan University
Two Body Criticism: A Genealogy of the Postmodern Anti-Aesthetic

Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine by Barbara Maira
Stafford
Review by: John O'Neill
History and Theory, Vol. 33, No. 1 (Feb., 1994), pp. 61-78
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TWO BODY CRITICISM:
A GENEALOGY OF THE POSTMODERN ANTI-AESTHETIC*
JOHN O'NEILL
ABSTRACT
Barbara Maria Stafford's Body Criticism (1992) is analyzed for its reliance upon mon-
strous bodies as the source of an alternative to the art history of the Enlightenment.
A counterculture of the flesh caught in its own vision of skin diseases, bumps, and
medical pathologies is painstakingly reproduced as the official opposition to reason's
body. The art establishment is required to admit engravers, cartoonists, kaleidoscopists,
and phrenologists. Critical questions are raised regarding Stafford's use of iconology
and genealogy, as well as a critical difference over the question of the revolutionary
status of the postmodern aesthetic traced from the camera obscura to virtual reality
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).
62 JOHN O'NEILL
takeoff and not really expect to see it again - except perhaps in some weightless
and purified form whose angelic translucency would serve to mirror the soul's
brightness throughout the cosmos.
To put things in this way, of course, puts them out of our way. Or so we
think - as though "today" were any less rhetorical than "yesterday"; or as though
deconstruction and antistructuralism were anything more than the necessary
tensions intrinsic to any practice, any ritual, or any categorization. To forget
this is to confuse the rhetoric of inversion with the politics of subversion. The
result is that in our contemporary concern with deconstructive politics we may
well rattle the cultural archive, reshuffle its exhibits, rewrite its histories, and
declare a permanent carnival - and yet not exceed the "play" within a hegemonic
culture that has defined itself through its incapacity for shock. Meanwhile, it
is certainly the case that whatever the cultural mansion we inhabit we all feel
obliged to clear out its basement, to display its curiosities, and to propel the
energy spent upon such rearrangements as futuristic in the extreme.
Barbara Maria Stafford's recent attempt to revision the history of invisibility
since the Enlightenment offers a strenuous example -art books are always so
heavy!
-
of a genre we may call body criticism, after the title of her book. What
is truly strenuous in the exercise is her effort to reconnect the body-text to its
visceral, skeletal, mineral, and microscopical images, and to join the body's
literary, laboratory, and amusement sites into a single postmodern culture of
visibility. To achieve this, Stafford needs to bring to light the very imagery
which the Enlightenment curiously enough cast into darkness and oblivion.
Body Criticism, then, is an assault upon the hegemony of that abstract empiri-
cism which, despite its self-proclaimed modernity, has remained tied to the
rational, mathematical, non-art imagery of cognition that has ruled in geom-
etry, medicine, painting, and literature grounded in classical non-visual values.
The deconstructive turn that Stafford locates in the eighteenth century derives
from the observer's loss of a disembodied place beyond the field of vision,
observation, and measurement. Once the privileged subject position was lost,
the hierarchy of rational/sensory, inside/outside, private/public knowledge
and perception was invaded by its own margins. The dermatological, the phre-
nological, the horoscopical, and geological surfaces, expustulations and flesh
of the world opened up a new perceptual domain to the arts and sciences that
Stafford takes to be the inauguration of the postmodern recombination of
aesthetics and science at work in virtual reality, in noninvasive laser surgery,
and in the computer workplace.
Stafford's genealogy of body criticism can only be paraphrased with consider-
able injustice -aggravated by the problem of not being able to reproduce its
necessary visual and iconographic lode. But since the very strategy of genealo-
gizing itself metes out rough justice to the traditions it abbreviates, disconnects,
and reconnects, we must rather be concerned with the overall economy of
knowledge which is now the scene of numerous such exercises in decanonization.
In particular, I suggest that the "epistemological break" that generates any
A GENEALOGY OF THE POSTMODERN ANTI-AESTHETIC 63
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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 characterizes the genealogical method, making it difficult to 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 Lavater sought
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, the absoluteness of its divisions into black and white, the detached
and unentangled diagram performed a mental and optical disinfection. Taut and super-
fluous lines visibly dispelled obscurity by strictly defining and limiting meaning. The
analytic composition was the equivalent of decontaminating criticism. Both systemati-
cally annihilated sensory digression by hitting the 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
framework she works to bring down. After all, paper marbling hardly over-
throws the geometric order anymore than gossip overthrows disciplinary dis-
course-each is rather a para-site than an alternative aesthetic or a rival epis-
teme, as Stafford requires them to be in order to carry forward her claim that
the ephemeral is pregnant with the postmodern. I believe the same objection
must be made against the critical weight Stafford assigns to "aberrations" of
all kinds -divine, human, and animal. She is well aware that for the ancients
such mixtures and monsters were rather cosmological unities, that is, bounded
unities of creative energy, rather than directions into a third force. Yet she
presents a Romantic reading of such grotesques in order to reconceive the mind's
embodiment in the postmodern ars combinatoria that may well be benign in
the operations of laser surgery but, I think, are less so in the random conglomera-
tion of the mass cultural mind and its docile body.
There is an ambiguity in Stafford's use of the term "body criticism," referring
as it does to both the hegemony of reason over the senses and to new perceptions
of embodied experience that constitute a critique of pure reason. This is less
puzzling if we understand embodiment as an assemblage of discourses, desires,
techniques, and prosthetics through which the body is at once the site/sight
of the institutions that produce the complex of body codes that apportion the
ratios of reason and sense.2 Thus "the" body may offer the "sight" of both
discipline and disorder, but these effects will be coded from different institutional
"sites" of embodiment. Stafford's employment of the terms Neoclassicism and
Romanticism (Mannerism and Baroque) turns upon the shift from the long
history of the Vitruvian body to artificial and grotesque novelties, a shift from
inner essence to superficial character, from the individual to the series. What
is problematic in her own pictorial technique, however, is the lack of any meth-
odology to ground its claim to have salvaged an anti-aesthetic that is the genea-
logical source of postmodern visuality.
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 or how do our ideologies shape the practices that define certain ratios
between text and images in the arts, sciences, and the practical arts that feed
in and out of the canonical corpus of images that defines any cultural period? In
this regard, Stafford's confrontation of neoclassical images with the iconoclastic
images and fetishes of the grotesque layers of sickness, insanity, and anality
is intended to provoke art historians with the subtext of their discipline
- a
subtext that she regards as the progressive side of a new ratio of visuality
in the postmodern aesthetics of communication technologies from video to
noninvasive laser surgery. Put more forcibly, Stafford seems to be arguing that
the real
history
of art is
grounded
in
pain
rather than
pleasure (179-209).
Thus
she rejects Lessing's Laocoon (1766) on the grounds that it seeks to banish the
poetics of pain from the painterly tradition 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).
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 merely aesthetic was to be suppressed by the aesthetic. The new Cartesian analytical
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 rationalizes a fear of imagery that can be found in every major philosopher
from Bacon to Kant to Wittgenstein, a fear not just of the "idols" of pagan primitives,
or of the vulgar marketplace, but of the idols which insinuate themselves into language
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 that lie hidden in our iconophobia. He may help us to measure, for instance,
the extent to which we have made a fetish out of our own iconoclastic rhetoric, projecting
the very idols we claim to be smashing. An idol, technically speaking, is simply an image
4. Ibid., 100. I have added the two forms of criticism in order to relate Stafford's framework
to Mitchell's discussion.
which has an unwarranted, irrational power over somebody; it has become an object
of worship, a repository of powers which someone has projected into it, but which it
in fact does not possess. But iconoclasm typically proceeds by assuming that the power
of the image is felt by somebody else; what the iconoclast sees is the emptiness, vanity,
and impropriety of the idol. The idol, then, tends to be simply an image overvalued
(in our opinion) by an other: by pagans and primitives; by children or foolish women;
by Papists and ideologues (they have an ideology; we have a political philosophy); by
capitalists who worship money while we value "real wealth." The rhetoric of iconoclasm
is thus a rhetoric of exclusion and domination, a caricature of the other as one who is
involved in irrational, obscene behavior from which (fortunately) we are exempt. The
images of the idolaters are typically phallic (recall Lessing's account of the adulterous
serpents on ancient statues), and thus they must be emasculated, feminized, have their
tongues cut off by denying them the power of expression or eloquence. They must be
declared "dumb," "mute," "empty," or "illusory.
"
Our god, by contrast -- reason, science,
criticism, the Logos, the spirit of human language and civilized conversation -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 physiological preoccupation with disjointed surface, or spotted and infected epi-
dermis, rebelled against the intense intellectualization of the idea common among body
critics. Rationalists cosmetically retouched, plastically reconstructed, and ruthlessly cor-
rected a depraved, blotched, and sexually begotten actuality. Body epicures, on the
contrary, systematically presented failed pleasures and durable pains. They highlighted
the compositional and complexional deterioration accompanying the divisiveness that
was one of the wages of original sin. Corporeal sophistry deliberately displayed the
warts inside the mind, on the blemished body of the person, and on the mortified canvas.
(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.
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 looks ahead to the late twentieth-century spectacle of electronically
generated phantoms hovering in the windowless and high-rise Platonic Cave. The new
Faustian icon is a radiant and man-made deed. Atemporal in its total presentness, it
reminds us of Berkeley's purely optical array. It can swiftly draw a complex community
of millions of unique, individual human beings together in a just cause.... The freedom
movement in Eastern Europe has shown just how contagious are those digitalized idols
flowing across repressive borders. They are powerful enough to tear down even the most
obdurate walls. No more convincing demonstration exists that colored beams of light
do not merely oppress and beguile but, when handled responsibly, illuminate the night
in a way that words cannot. (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 Iraq war, 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 art of 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-
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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 virtual systems burgeon, it is critical to remember that decoupling the body from
the subject is an act that is politically fraught. As we enter the era of virtual reality
systems we should be acutely aware of whose agendas we serve. At the close of an era
of a particular definition of individuality, consciousness still remains firmly rooted in
the physical; the bounded subject is a refractory construct, quite difficult to dislodge,
and it remains the object of force in a time when political agencies are as enamored of
force as they have been at any time past. Before we can allow ourselves to forget this,
the decoupled subject must possess a different order of agency from that of the name
of a "disappeared" Central American, called back to momentary life by a graffito on
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-century atlases 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 surgery did not reduce the hermeneutical
task intrinsic to these visual prosthetics. On the contrary, they expanded the
socio-legal problematic of "evidence."
Without some sense of the modern
disciplinary regime
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.
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 can speak then of a generalized, inclusive archive, a shadow archive that encompasses
an entire social terrain while positioning individuals within that terrain. This archive
contains subordinate, territorialized archives: archives whose semantic interdependence
is normally obscured by the "coherence" and "mutual exclusivity" of the social groups
registered within each. The general, all-inclusive archive necessarily contains both the
traces of the visible bodies of heroes, leaders, moral exemplars, celebrities, and those
of the poor, the diseased, the insane, the criminal, the nonwhite, the female, and all
of the other embodiments of the unworthy. The clearest indication of the essential unity
of this archive of images of the body lies in the fact that by the mid-nineteenth-century a
single hermeneutic paradigm had gained widespread prestige. This paradigm had two
tightly entwined branches, physiognomy and phrenology. Both shared the belief that
the surface of the body, and especially the face and head, bore the outward signs of
inner character.8
Thus Stafford's location 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).
72 JOHN O'NEILL
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Francis Galton, Inquiries into Human
Faculty and Its
Development (London, 1883).
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 Stafford unable 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 from the evolutionary logic of a technological
determinism, central to influential historical surveys, which position it as a precursor
or an inaugural event in a genealogy leading to the birth of photography.... the camera
obscura and the photographic camera, as assemblages, practices, and social objects,
belong to two fundamentally different organizations of representation and the observer,
as well as of the observer's relation to the visible. By the beginning of the nineteenth
century the camera obscura is no longer synonymous with the production of truth and
with an observer positioned to see truthfully. The regularity of such statements breaks
down and the photographic camera becomes an essentially dissimilar object, lodged
amidst a radically different network of statements and 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.
74 JOHN O'NEILL
.....TQ LE....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.
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 reshuffling the pictorial count on Neoclassical and Romantic
imagery will strike a body blow, so to speak, to the art establishment. Radical
genealogies occur within historical structures whose 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).
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 apparatus of 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 babewyn came to stand for all such composite creatures, and not just
apes, is significant. Isidore of Seville, the authority on etymology throughout the Middle
Ages, traced the derivation of simius, or ape, from similitude, noting that "the monkey
wants to imitate everything he sees done." A beast that was kept as an entertaining toy
by jongleurs and as a pet by the nobility, the ape came to signify the dubious status
of representation itself, le singe being an anagram for le signe- the sign. The prevalence
of apes in marginal art similarly [sic] draws attention to the danger of mimesis or illusion
in God's created scheme 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.
:
V:
e~~~~~~~~~~T9
...
w i_ -R:w../r
.'
-
>9E~~~~~IGR 5
Magert' Magis fro
CailIaeo h de
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 carries the 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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