Pictures of the Body: Affect and Logic, opening, preface, introduction

Pi ct ure s of th e B od y L o gi c an d Af f ect James Elkins Revised January 2021 Preface, Introduction 2 This book is dedicated to Barbara Stafford. Preface, Introduction 3 Table of Contents Preface Introduction PART ONE • AFFECT CHAPTER 1 Membranes CHAPTER 2 Psychomachia CHAPTER 3 Cut flesh PART TWO • LOGIC CHAPTER 4 By Looking Alone CHAPTER 5 Analogic Seeing CHAPTER 6 Dry Schemata Preface, Introduction 4 Preface: On the History of this Subject In the last half century, beginning more or less in the mid-1980s, there has been a renascence of writing on the depicted body. Loosely following phenomenological accounts by Jean–Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and taking up threads from Robert Vischer’s theory of empathy and Jacques Lacan’s descriptions of the web of vision, writers have woven a more reflective understanding of what happens when a viewer encounters a represented body.1 The pictured body is no longer imagined as an immobile shape on paper or canvas—as a modernist problem in form or volume, or an opportunity for divine or historical narrative—but as a counterpart and figure for the observer. As my body moves, or as I think of moving, the body I behold also shifts, and as I look, I see myself being seen, and I return the represented gaze. My thoughts are entangled in what I imagine as the depicted figure’s thoughts, and my image of myself is mingled with the way I respond to the pictured body. Because the body intromits thought, important aspects of my responses to a picture of a body may not even be cognized: I may feel taller looking at an attenuated figure, or be thrown into a frustrated mood upon seeing a figure that is twisted or cramped. My own identity shifts subtly, and sometimes drastically, as I contemplate a represented body. The nature of my thought, my very capacity to form judgments, is in question: as Elaine Scarry emphasized in 1985, the act of beholding a 1 The relevant texts are Sartre, Being and Nothingness, translated by Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1966); Merleau–Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, translated by Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), and Merleau–Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, translated by Colin Smith (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962); Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho–Analysis, translated by Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1964), 91– 104; and Robert Vischer, Das optische Formgefühl (1872), in Drei Schriften zum ästhetischen Formproblem (Halle, 1927), and Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics 1873–1893, translated by Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomu (Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center for the History of Art and Humanities, 1994). For Sartre see also Hubert L. Dreyfus and Piotr Hoffman, “Sartre’s Changed Conception of Consciousness: From Lucidity to Opacity,” The Philosophy of Jean–Paul Sartre, edited by Paul Arthur Schilpp. The Library of Living Philosophers, vol. 16. (La Salle, Ill: Open Court, 1981), 233 ff. Preface, Introduction 5 body affects my ability to form propositions and to use language, and depending on the physical or ideological force of the image I see, my capacity to situate myself in relation to the image may be eroded.2 It was also in the 1980s that Mark Johnson suggested that thinking about the body is also thinking by means of the body, because the very structure of propositional logic follows in part from the experience of the body.3 At the same time, the represented body is taken as a sign of the real: it denotes identity, ethnicity, sexuality, and gender, and it invites the viewer to consider their own identity in relation to the body that is depicted, and to think of both their identity and the represented body in relation to the imagined or represented body of the artist. That entanglement of projected identities reaches through the work to the world, and back again. A large number of disciplines and methods have been converging on these ideas: at the least there is art history, feminism, gender studies, queer theory, varieties of psychoanalysis, phenomenology, studies of popular culture, histories of science and medicine, anthropology, contemporary scientific imaging, advertising, and contemporary art from performance to video games. Given this historically recent awareness it is worth bearing in mind that questions of embodied seeing were not an innovation of the late twentieth century, and that corporeal responses to pictures of the body go back to the origins of Western art criticism. Philostratus’s Imagines, written around 220 A.C.E., is a ready example. It presents itself as the record of a lecture tour of the paintings in a house outside Naples. As Scarry, The Body in Pain (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 279. Scarry makes her comments in reference to “concussive experiences” of pain and torture, but as I will argue, her observations have force in regard to many bodily representations. 3 See Johnson, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination and Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), whose account I will not be following here because it is too general—and too rational—to be of much help in accounting for pictures. Johnson does not cite Spinoza or the Stoics, and his book also has unacknowledged affinities with existentialism; see Alphonso Lingis, Libido, The French Existentialist Theories (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1985), 50–51. For Spinoza see Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza, Practical Philosophy, translated by Robert Hurley (San Francisco: City Lights, 1988). See also Drew Leder, The Absent Body (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); Jane Gallop, Thinking Through the Body (New York, 1988); Naomi Goldenberg, Returning Words to Flesh: Feminism, Psycho– analysis, and the Resurrection of the Body (Boston, 1992); and George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 2 Preface, Introduction 6 Philostratus describes each painting for the benefit of his admirers, he addresses himself to a ten–year–old boy, the son of his host. Stopping in front of a painting depicting the death of Menoeceus outside the walls of Thebes, Philostratus praises the wonderful way the painter has shown Menoeceus pulling the sword from his body. Philostratus would have been standing to one side of the painting, with the boy next to him and the spectators ringed around. “Let us catch the blood, my boy,” Philostratus says, “holding it under a fold of our garments; for it is flowing out, and the soul is already about to take its leave, and in a moment you will hear its gibbering cry.”4 To Philostratus, the Menoeceus is a painting that speaks, that bleeds, that is about to give up a soul. I imagine Philostratus making a gesture, as if to receive the blood, and if his rhetoric was strong enough his audience would have felt the boundary between painting and public begin to weaken.5 Strains of this kind of bodily response echo throughout the history of art and art criticism, and so does interest in what we now call constructions of gender. (Philostratus’s choice of a ten–year–old boy is not chance, and it has its effect on his monologue as well.) Yet it could be argued that the contemporary mixture of ideas has produced a new configuration of problems. The sometimes narcissistic “infatuation with different modes of body consciousness” has coalesced into a field of extraordinary conceptual complexity, and on some occasions the new amalgam of interests has almost become a discipline in its own right.6 Philostratus, Imagines, translated by Arthur Fairbanks (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), I.4, p. 19. 5 This awareness of the corporeal link between actual and painted body has been intermittent in Western history and criticism. In most illustrated versions of Philostratus, more conventional alignments of beholder and beheld forbid the possibility of blood flowing beyond the frame, and the blood spurts into a pool, or drips down Menoeceus’s body—in which case he becomes a figure for Christ. See for example Philostratus, Les Images, translated by Blaise de Vigenère (Paris, 1614), reprinted in the series The Renaissance and the Gods, edited by Stephen Orgel (New York: Garland, 1976), 24. 6 The quotation is from Jean Starobinski, “A Short History of Bodily Sensation,” translated by Sarah Matthews, in Fragments for a History of the Human Body, edited by Michel Feher, 3 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Zone Books, MIT Press, 1989), vol. 2, 369. 4 Preface, Introduction 7 If the conceptual groundwork for the study of represented bodies goes back to phenomenology and pschoanalysis in the first half of the 20th century, and if the first conceptualizations of the feld date to the mid-1980s, then the field was consolidated into a recognizable academic subject in the late 1980s and early 1990s. For its first retrospective collection, the journal October created a heading for “The Body” alongside more conventional topics. Rosalind Krauss, Leo Steinberg, Georges Didi-Huberman, and Michael Fried were among the writers who theorized and practiced the new concerns.7 At the end of the 1980s, a three-volume collection of essays on the body edited by Michel Feher, Fragments for a History of the Human Body, demonstrated this near-absolute lack of order. Feher’s contributors represent many disciplines and deploy incommensurate interpretive methods (Feher himself favored a Plotinian approach), and they make use of contradictory notions of such key terms as body and representation.8 The resulting disarray proclaimed the impossibility of a unified sense of bodily representations, as if to say that the body cannot be directly addressed because it is both more and less than a philosophic or physical object. The exhilaration of the better essays in Fragments for a History of the Human Body came in part from their newness: there was a certain joy in contemplating Krauss’s book The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993) can be read as an account of somatic involvements in the crucial moments of modernism. For Michael Fried see especially Courbet’s Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). Steinberg’s engagement with questions of the body is especially eloquent not in the book on Christ’s sexuality, which has a specific interpretive purpose, but in the meditations on Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon; see the reprint, “The Philosophical Brothel,” October 44 (1988), 8–74, with a preface on somatic criticism by Krauss. For Didi–Huberman see first Devant l’image: question posée aux fins d’une histoire de l’art (Paris: Minuit, 1990). 8 Fragments for a History of the Human Body, op. cit. Feher suggests that the genealogy of the “ethical and aesthetic conceptions of the psychosomatic link” that I have been adumbrating in this Preface are to be found in Plotinus. See Eric Alliez and Michel Feher, “Reflections of a Soul,” ibid., vol. 2, 46–84. 7 Preface, Introduction 8 Tibetan medical manuals, African images of the afterlife, or medieval notions of the wandering womb. It may be that as the represented body has become a subject art historians talk about alongside the other subjects of the discipline, it has also become less coherent as a concept: it has turned into an amorphous repository for whatever escapes current methods and systems. That which is unassimilable, vague, without category or quality, is now diverted into the realm of the somatic. The rise of affect theory from c. 2000 to the present has contributed to the idea that bodily sensations and experiences are outside of rational representation. Performative gender and identity have themselves become the subject matter of art, overwhelming other sources of meaning. In all these ways the represented body has become the one place in art where no fixed order is possible. It takes on the interconceptual function of the region where, as Freud said, the demands of the body become ideas in the mind: the very spot where flesh becomes intelligible, where mute drives become signs. It appears that the represented body exists in a contaminated zone between the two, so it cannot properly be in full possession of its meaning. That, at least, is my understanding of the literature that has been produced on the subject of pictured bodies and viewer’s bodily reactions. Writers are drawn to the subject in part as the remaining refuge of deep affect—embodied perception, uncognized somatic reactions— unbridgeable interdisciplinarity, and inexpressible subjectivity in a discipline that can seem constricted by the harsh demands of philosophic methodologies. One purpose of this book is to resist that dispersion of ideas. I am interested in the conditions of representation of bodies in general—the ways bodies have been given pictorial form, and their varying relations to viewers—and I believe it is possible to find some order in the welter of images. This book is an aerial view of the subject, an attempt to gather works, terms, and theories, and to give some clarity to a field that is nearly incoherent. My grounding thesis is that pictured bodies are expressive in two largely opposite modes: some act principally on the beholder’s body, forcing thoughts about sensation, affect, pain, and ultimately death; and others act more on the beholder’s mind, conjuring thoughts of painless projection, transformation, and metamorphosis. I propose this framework as a way of bringing provisional order to a literature that grows less coherent with each passing year. Another thesis of this book runs counter to the opposition of what I will call “affect” and “logic,” undercutting it at every point: and that is the conviction—and perhaps, the structural necessity—that the depicted body must be intractable, that it must Preface, Introduction 9 escape all categories, all systems, all imposed orders, all systematic logic. I hope the general accounts of depicted bodies that I develop in these pages might find uses in the production, history, theory, and criticism of bodily images of all kinds—even while the particular explanations labor and finally break under the pressure of the conviction that the body is the most powerfully unsystematic object that we can know. The sense that I am wrong, and that the body is unencompassably strange and irretrievably unruly, will be a constant accompaniment to my ordered exposition: it could not be otherwise. This is an incarnation of the book Pictures of the Body: Pain and Metamorphosis (Stanford University Press, 1999). It was a latecomer to the academic conversations about represented bodies, and it had a different origin: it developed from classes I taught to art students at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. The idea was to show how contemporary art practice has deep roots in medical literature, and to give artists a resource for thinking about metaphors and leading concepts in current art that addresses the body. But the book I ended up writing had only a few references to contemporary art, and so it never quite found its public. It was read, instead, by historians of science, and to them it must have often seemed disconnected from their own current interests. This is the third rewriting of that book. A “second edition” is posted on academia.edu. This version is an attempt to remake those earlier incarnations into something more like what they should have been: a conceptual analysis of late twentiethand early twenty-first century visual art about the body. Underlined words are for the class at the School of the Art Institute. (Underlined words may appear on quizzes.) Grey text boxes are assignments for the class. Preface, Introduction 10 Preface, Introduction 11 I n t r od u c t i o n But how it abuses our senses and their “dictionary,” this pain that turns their pages! —Rilke’s last words9 Every picture is a picture of the body. Every work of visual art is a representation of the body. To say this is to say that we see bodies, even where there are none, and that the creation of a form is to some degree also the creation of a body. And if a splash of paint or a ruled grid can be a picture of the body—or the denial of a body—then there must be a desire at work, perhaps among the most primal desires of all: we prefer to have bodies in front of us, or in our hands, and if we cannot have them, we continue to see them, as after images or ghosts. This is a beautiful and complicated subject, the way our eyes continue to look out at the most diverse kinds of things and bring back echoes of bodies.10 According to the Stoic philosophy as it is given voice by Lucretius and Epicurus, we see objects because they shed “films” or “membranes” (membranae) that come floating continuously toward us through the ether.11 The skins are not abstract markers of a body’s limits, as in Leon Battista Alberti’s Renaissance perspective, with its geometric 9 Modified from B. Conrad, Famous Last Words (New York, 1961), 171. Portions of this book are distilled in chapter 4 of The Object Stares Back: On The Nature of Seeing (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1997). The approach there is less historically specific, and more geared to the phenomenology of sight in general. I think that bodies are both the primary objects of seeing, and the principal conditions for the possibility of seeing; The Object Stares Back puts those possibilities to work in a general account of vision and blindness. 11 Lucretius Carus, De rerum natura IV.28–96. 10 Preface, Introduction 12 forms defined by centric rays and polygonal outlines (circumscriptiones).12 They are not the theoretical apparatus of some geometry, or the equations of modern physiological optics. They are the echoes, the ripples, of bodies, and they carry the sense of body toward us together with the details of form. Writing in the 1st c. B.C.E., Lucretius says he is thinking of “something like skin,” and he compares the membranes to the “brittle summer jackets” of cicadas, the cauls or allantoides shaken off by newborn calves, and the shed skins of snakes.13 As Diskin Clay puts it, in Lucretius’s imagination the atmosphere is “fluid with films or cauls.”14 Lucretius is concerned that clouds, unlike all other mundane objects, are not solid enough to be able to shed those skins, and that point of difficulty in his theory shows his need to begin from bodies, and not just objects. A cloud can be rounded and discrete like a body, but it lacks two primordial attributes of bodies, firmness and skin. So Lucretius puzzled over clouds, which are visible and yet impalpable. The theory of vision that he shares with Epicurus reveals itself as a theory of bodies by the way it pauses over the idea of a body that is also weightless. Vision, in its deepest source and impetus—in its somatic origin (Quelle) and its rooted force (Drang), as Freud might 12 Circonscrizione in the Italian; see Alberti, Della pittura e della statua (Milan: Classici Italiani, 1804), 45. 13 Lucretius, The Way Things Are, The De Rerum Natura of Titus Lucretius Carus, translated by Rolfe Humphries (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), 120. Humphries also renders “films,” as do the editors of Lucretius, De rerum natura, edited by William Ellery Leonard and Stanley Barney Smith (Madson: University of Wisconsin Press, 1942), 526 n. 31. See further Karl Konrad Friedrich Wilhelm Lachmann, In T. Lucretii Cari De Rerum Natura libros commentarius (New York:Garland, 1979 [originally Berlin, 1855]), and note effugias for effigies, p. 215 n. 42. For a general introduction to the passage see John Masson, Lucretius, Epicurean and Poet (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1907), chapter 11. 14 Clay, Lucretius and Epicurus (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983), 119. Preface, Introduction 13 have said—may be the determined search for bodies.15 If I choose Greek and Roman Stoic philosophy as an antecedent for this idea instead of the 20th c. phenomenology of Merleau–Ponty, it is because Merleau–Ponty puts things in terms of “flesh” and “carnal being”: he is concerned with the identity of the body as a whole, while I am interested in its parts and particularities, and above all its appearance as a body, with a shape as well as a feel.16 Visual existence, in the account I will be developing, has to do with the apparition of specific bodies—skins in the shape of objects, or bodies, or parts. Epicurus is more exacting about the body than Merleau–Ponty (he is more aware of pain, and the body’s insistent complaints), and Lucretius is more precise than either. A picture of a body can never be anything other than specific: it cannot stand for touching, or fleshly existence, or identity, or any other general term of experience, unless it does so in its specific skin. 15 Freud, Instincts and their Vicissitudes, in Standard Edition, edited by James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1962), vol. 14, 122–23. See further Jean Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-analysis, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith (London: Hogarth Press, 1973). In a talk at the Johns Hopkins University (April 1994), Laplanche emphasized that his book is not intended as a dictionary, but as a way of raising questions about the Freudian corpus. 16 Martin C. Dillon, “Merleau–Ponty and the Reversibility Thesis,” in Merleau–Ponty, Critical Essays ([ ]), 86, quoting Merleau–Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, op. cit., 136; Eliot Deutsch, “The Concept of the Body,” in Phenomenology East and West, Essays in Honor of J. N. Mohanty, edited by Frank Kirkland and D. P. Chattopadhyaya (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1993). Preface, Introduction Here is a particular body, or part of one: a portrait of the Japanese philosopher Isaku Yanaihara, by Alberto Giacometti.17 It is part of the record of an obsession Giacometti had with this particular face and body—he painted Yanaihara over fifteen times, and paid for his airfare from Tokyo to Paris in the summers of 1957, 1959, 1960, and 1961—and because of that obsession, it is an exemplary portrait. It is labored, 14 Preface, Introduction 15 anxious, and uneasy: a half–gray halo rises up to the middle of the picture, marking the place where Yanaihara’s figure was once painted; but then he shrank, compressed by the intensity of Giacometti’s gaze, to the puny location where Giacometti left him. The little Yanaihara is a house of cards—a stack of black and white streaks, washed in pale white, and topped by a smudged brown nose that almost succeeds in looking solid. The painting’s surface is shiny and gently undulating, like the wood of a cult statue that has been caressed until it is smooth. Manifestly, the painting is a failure. Giacometti abandoned it, as he abandoned the other fourteen paintings in the series and the many drawings that he made at the same time. Nothing went wrong, exactly—but the body’s force failed to impress itself on the canvas, and what the canvas found could not hold the body. Something about this picture—and I mean to say by extension, all portraits— makes me pause, throws me into a state of intensified, unsatisfied looking. Part of what I want from any face is a speaking, moving response, and I can’t get it from a face that is painted. But is that enough to account for my restlessness? In another sense, perhaps more fundamental or prior to the demand for a living face, I want a face to behave as a face: to be complete, to be unified and distinct from what is around it, to be there before me without any uncertainty, to be clear enough to interpret, to keep some sensible distance from my own face. Yanaihara’s face fails on each of those counts. Despite Giacometti’s compulsion about distance and size (he insisted Yanaihara place his chair on red spots marked on the floor, and he moved his canvas up and down in small increments using pieces of clay), the face is neither near nor far, high nor low.18 The looming soft halo is the memory of a larger or closer Yanaihara, and the delicate armature of lines encloses echoes of smaller or more distant Yanaiharas. The figure emerges from its white background, and then melts back into it. There is no firm surface, no hard skull, no 17 See Thomas Minner, “Portraits of a Relationship: Alberto Giacometti and Isaku Yanaihara,” MA Thesis, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 1990, unpublished. Among published sources see Isaku Yanaihara, “Pages de journal,” Derriere le miroir 127 (May 1961): 18–25, and James Lord, Giacometti, A Biography (New York: Farrar Strauss Giroux, 1985). Yanaihara’s name is pronounced with the accent on the antepenultimate syllable. 18 Yanaihara, “Pages,” op. cit., 21. Compare the parallel studies of bodies and space in Helmut Oehlers, Figur und Raum in den Werken von Max Ernst, René Magritte, Salvador Dalí und Paul Delvaux zwischen 1925 und 1938. Europäische Hochschulschriften, Reihe XXVIII, Kunstgeschichte, vol. 54. (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1986). Preface, Introduction 16 resistance. Even the brown nose, the most firmly finished passage, is spongy and damp. And the painting is fascinating because of those failures: I want it to be whole and articulated, I want it to occupy a reasonable place in its setting—and what are those demands, if not desires I have in regard to all depicted bodies, and finally to all form? Isn’t there a deep resonance between the desire for a tangible head and the desire for clear shapes of any kind? I would like to say that we prize distinctness and clarity, in objects as well as in philosophy, ultimately because we need distinct and clear bodies and faces. Looking at Yanaihara, I want a sureness about his form that I know the painting does not want to give, and Giacometti is successful to the extent that his work persuades me to give up that desire, and entrances me with uncertainties. It is not a pleasant kind of seeing, but a demanding and imbalanced experience, a kind of vertigo. The skull contracts into an uncertain flat grayish envelope of space. It shrinks—it continues to shrink as I look, like an afterimage slipping from my field of vision—and it trembles, like a tree flushed by a breeze. What problems, however provisional, are solved here? What impasse has been reached here that is not reached, or that is avoided, in some other more conventional portrait? We know from Yanaihara’s journal that an intense emotional drama ran alongside the demanding all–day posing sessions: Yanaihara had an affair with Giacometti’s wife beginning the first year that he posed. We know, too, that the artist and his model talked continuously during the posing, and then again afterwards in cafés, about existentialism and phenomenology, about the identity of the Other and the unsettling slight difference between one male and another, between a Westerner and a Japanese. But finally, even if the biographical details cannot find their places in the portrait itself, even if we can’t find a way to understand them as signs, say, of the disruption of the face, the portrait continues its incessant self–destruction. And it is that motion, the unremitting denial of the security of the body, that accounts for the queasiness, the trace of nausea, that the portrait elicits. I would read it as compelling evidence of a basic need for the face and the body. Assignment 1: portraiture. Either talk about your own work, or show another artist’s work, to explore these themes of instability. Preface, Introduction 17 First and second seeing When there is a body to be seen, we may focus on it with a particular relaxed concentration, a determined sinuous insistent gaze we reserve for bodies and faces. When the body in question is as fugitive as Yanaihara’s, we may sense that peaceful seeing on account of its relative absence: I am anxious when I try to see Yanaihara because I know and need the peace and the pleasure that can come from seeing a body. Let me call this first seeing, denoting the way we may look when there is a body to be seen, or part of one. In everyday conversation, first seeing is relaxed, or even languorous: my eyes rest in the eyes of the person I see, and my gaze slides and caresses their skin as it moves from place to place. Even if the face I see is frightening or repulsive—like some I considered in another book, The Object Stares Back—there is a certain repose in my way of looking.19 (In that book, I used these examples from a Polish book on cosmetics, where interrupted lines show the motions that are to be used in applying makeup: I thought that those lines also suggest the ways we look at faces, in repetitive, smooth, lingering, sometimes caressing, motions of our eyes.) 19 The Object Stares Back, op. cit., 186-93, 210-15. Preface, Introduction 18 A face, and perhaps especially a naked body, is a place of rest and meaning in a setting that commonly also contains boredom and meaninglessness. Everything— from chairs to light switches, landscapes to asphalt—is partly empty and dissatisfying in contrast to the repletion I feel when I see a body. Even if I am embarrassed or tense or if I am compelled to look against my will, I can still sense the relaxation, the correctness of my gaze when it falls on a body. The Portrait of Yanaihara is on the far edge of that experience, because it refuses to congeal into a firm continuous face, and because like all pictures it cannot move or reveal its true distance, shape, or size. Even so, the anxious irregular shifting in my gaze is not enough to annul the conviction that this is a face, and therefore my way of looking is fundamentally satisfied and reposeful. The world is full of scenes and patterns that contain no bodies. This is the more complicated, and more common, occurrence of second seeing: a restless, nomadic way of looking that begins when I fail to find bodies or body parts.20 Even the most narcotic 20 First and second seeing have affinities with the psychoanalytic concept of anaclisis, the misplaced desire for the pleasure associated with an original instinct of self–preservation; but there is an important difference, because in the anaclitic model desire seeks something that is irretrievably lost (i.e., the original scenario, in which the instinct for self–preservation created the first pleasure), whereas in this model the sight of the body must be considered as the aim (in the Freudian sense) of the desire. See Jean Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, translated by Jeffrey Mehlman (Baltimore: The Johns Preface, Introduction 19 objects—a deep twilight, the sight of a freshly made bed, a well–designed garden— provoke something of this more restless seeing. I do not mean that my eyes must flit from place to place, or that second seeing needs to have any determinate physical symptom. But I think that whatever is not a body inaugurates a restive intermittent search for bodily forms or metaphors. If I am alone in a garden, I will look around, meaning I will look at things in turn, at nothing in particular, at one thing after another. My eyes may be restive in both senses of that word: unruly, or else static and fixated. If a person or an animal (a non–human body) strays into my field of vision, I will immediately fix on it, by an unconscious reflex that cannot be denied. In the absence of bodies, I think we embark on a search for body metaphors—for bodily lengths, weights, colors, textures, shapes, and movements—and in that second search we tend to be easily satisfied, and content with the most obvious choices. A psychoanalyst tells a story about a little boy and his father, out for a walk in the woods. The boy squats down, shits, and notices that his excrement stands up “straight on end in the underbrush.” He is evidently amused and satisfied, and he proclaims, “Look, I made the Chrysler building.” The analyst wonders whether “such a joke uttered by a naïve child provides any hint as to what may be meant when a man in soberer and politer years dreams of making a tall building.”21 I have no argument with this line of reasoning, and I am not sure that we usually do much better with our metaphors. This is the sense in which upright buildings can be said to resemble upright people, or erections, or arms or noses or fingers. These rudimentary metaphorics do not usually occupy the conscious mind, but they are more than just reflexes: they are conditions for the comprehension of the world in general. Within second seeing, the Hopkins University Press, 1976). “Nomadic” is intended as an echo of Gilles Deleuze’s concept; see for example Deleuze, “Nomad Thought,” in The New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of Interpretation, edited by David Allison (New York: Dell, 1977), 142-49. 21 L. Kubie, “Body Symbolization and the Development of Language,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 3 (1934): 433. Preface, Introduction 20 moments when we locate body metaphors are secondary moments of rest, but they can never be entirely satisfying. Body metaphors are evanescent in our consciousness, and they dissolve under the slightest pressure of thought. That is why efforts to list them, such as Elaine Scarry’s list of the “bodily sources of culture,” are unsatisfying: they are true, but also too well articulated.22 The Chrysler building isn’t really much like a pile of shit, because it has a metallic surface and geometric arcs—but then when I seek to understand those arcs, they seem to require more body metaphors. They might recall, or (to put it more gently, since these phenomena are scarcely conscious) gain some of their meaning from the sweep of a forearm, or the arc of an iris. The metallic sheathing is like a perfect skin, and so on. Even to mention these kinds of metaphors is to think far too coarsely and literally about what it is to see a form like the Chrysler building, but they are normative examples of the continuous and swift search for body metaphors that constitutes the more mobile second seeing. Second seeing animates and directs everyday sight, and it is made explicit in painting. To D. H. Lawrence, Cézanne “terribly wanted to paint the real existence of the body,” and Meyer Schapiro has said as much by observing the figural disposition of Cézanne’s apples on their cloths and plates.23 The peculiar anxiousness of second seeing is a constant source of expressive power in the still lifes and landscapes. Stephen Bann praises Lawrence’s “deeper” realization that “it was the body that was in question,” and adds that “embodiment resided in the translation of the movements of the painter’s hand into the weave of interconnected brush marks.”24 That kind of equation, moreover, is only a surface residuum, a trace of the deeper dialogue between the painter’s body and the inhuman bodies of the objects he watched. As Merleau–Ponty knew, the object is in question throughout Cézanne’s work.25 In a sense he saw bodies as apples, but he also saw bodies as scraped impasto, as modulating earth tones, and as collections of fractured fields; it is difficult to begin to write a longer list of such terms or to reconstruct the bodily 22 Scarry, The Body in Pain, op. cit., 282. D. H. Lawrence, On Hardy and Painting, ed. J. V. Davies (London, 1973), 146, and Meyer Schapiro, “The Apples of Cézanne,” in Modern Art—Selected Papers (New York, 1978), 2 ff. 24 Stephen Bann, The True Vine, On Visual Representation and the Western Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 91. 25 The Merleau–Ponty Reader: Philosophy and Painting, edited by Galen A. Johnson (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1993). 23 Preface, Introduction 21 relations between them. Cézanne concentrates on the centers of his pictures and lets the margins fall away, in the manner of a portrait painter—almost as if each picture were the premonition of a body, which then appears in another guise, as a human form or as a tree, a boulder, a mountain, or even a principle of color or of fragmentation.26 Assignment 2: first and second seeing. Analyze your own work in terms of first and second seeing, or find another art practice to interpret. A way into these questions is provided by Balthasar Klossowski, known as Balthus, a painter who thought a great deal about Cézanne. He is not an unproblematic starting point for an inquiry like this one, because his best viewers are themselves often outside of mainstream concerns about modernist painting, and because of the relentless sexism of his subjects. (Balthus, Beckman, Schiele, and several other dissimilar twentiethcentury figural painters remain a common grouping in art schools and academies. Outside those settings they are often bypassed in favor of other genealogies.) But Balthus’s intensely and obviously sexual way of looking at the world is a helpful quality for the kind of introduction I have in mind here. His interests are highly specific: despite the protestations of his biographer Jean Lemayrie and his son Stanislas Klossowski de Rola, it is almost meaningless to deny he was both initially and finally an observer of adolescent girls.27 He saw them in ways that have to do with the exact demands of his desire: the paintings focus on the underpants, the top inch of the inner thigh, the hem of the skirt, the rounded forms of the vulva, the hair (especially when it is pulled or brushed), and the double arc of the tops of the breasts. His paintings of domestic interiors are precise demonstrations of the ways that it is possible—in imagination, or in a 26 For examples of Cézanne’s attention to the centers of pictures, see my “The Failed and the Inadvertent: The Theory of the Unconscious in the History of Art” International Journal of Psycho–Analysis 75 part 1 (1994): 119–32. 27 Lemayrie, Balthus, second edition (New York: Skira, 1982); Klossowski de Rola, Balthus (New York: Abrams, 1996). I do not doubt that Stanislas is correct in what he says about his father’s idea of women (basically, that they represent unattainable perfection), or about his artistic project (that it was increasingly hermetic). For additional material on Balthus, see Milton Gendel, “H. M. The King of Cats,” interview, Art News 61 no. 2 (April 1962): 36–38; Alice Rewald, “Interview with Balthus,” Gazette de Lausanne (8 December 1962); Michel Legris, “Si Rome n’est plus Rome,” Le Monde (11 January 1967), and “Entretien avec Balthus,” Le Monde (12 January 1967). The account I am developing here is parallel to Die weibliche und die männliche Linie: Das imaginäre Geschlecht der modernen Kunst von Klimt bis Mondrian, edited by Susanne Deicher (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer, 1993). Preface, Introduction 22 painter’s studio—to look up, down, or obliquely in order to see around obstacles. That kind of seeing is demonstrated in the most exhausting way whenever there are figures in the paintings, and it is present just as insistently in the few still lifes he painted. The obvious analogies are all here: the knife, thrust into the loaf of bread; the cloth draped in a double curve over the chair (exactly mimicking the pose taken by models in several paintings). And there are old–fashioned vanitas elements as well: the broken pitcher recalling the punctured hymen, as in Jean–Baptiste Greuze’s 18th c. paintings of lost innocence, and several rounded forms recalling hips, arms, and breasts. Balthus’s hot-house dramas are luxuries that Cézanne stifled, or rather that he never controlled or knew well enough to put in such obvious forms, and they are ultimately less interesting than the specific angles and encounters between objects. On the right, the stopper and a glass fragment nearly touch one another; they are neither horizontal nor upright, and they are not quite disposed so that we can see them clearly. Some of their curves are pointed toward us, and others away. They perform the same kind of half-hidden, ambiguous and sexually charged meeting that Balthus demanded of his models. The cloth bends forward, unfurling itself and almost touching the mallet handle. An entire dynamics of the eye could be written about Balthus’s still lifes, setting out the full range of conceivable orientations and views that determine the shapes of his desire. This particular still life is more eloquent on that account, because it resonates with the evidence of Balthus’s figure paintings: but any still life partakes of the obvious sexual and bodily meaning of knives and fruits, as well as this more hidden but precise geometry of the ways that the body can be seen. Still lifes are a common example of a bodiless genre suffused with bodily invitations and overtones, and landscape is another. Western landscape has long taken Preface, Introduction 23 meaning from parallels between natural forms and bodily contours—so much so that Chinese and other non–European landscapes are susceptible to specific kinds of misreadings as scholars attempt to see them in terms of the bodies they do not possess. John Hay made the provocative suggestion that Western pictured bodies (in the sense of solid, naked, politically charged representations) may have their analogues in the “convoluted, foraminate, complexly textured” rocks so ubiquitous in Chinese gardens and paintings.28 The rocks would then indicate a particular sense of the body largely foreign to Western meanings: they would have to do with shen, qi, and other Chinese concepts (roughly, “spirit” and “energy”), and they would evoke the body’s bulk, its gestures, its orifices and proportions, in oblique and unstable ways. Hay’s proposal opens a risky interpretive field, since in accord with Western habits of seeing it would be tempting to extend his observation to ordinary painted rocks and mountains that seem to depend so much on erasing the body’s specific forms.29 A painting by Dong Qichang, for example, may have a range of fractured and crumpled cliffs that do not respond to bodily readings. It could be argued that interpretations that locate the body in Chinese and other non–Western landscapes will not make significant 28 John Hay, “The Body Invisible in Chinese Art?” in Body, Subject, and Power in China, edited by Angela Zito and Tani Barlow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 42–77, especially 68. 29 Hay says only that the rock is “the classical image of the Chinese tradition,” parallel to “the Apollo or the Venus” (ibid., 68). Preface, Introduction 24 progress until we can better understand how Western response depends on the body; and for that reason I want to continue for the moment with the fundamental elements of the Western perception of pictured bodies. Balthus is again a good introductory example; in his painting The Cherry–Picker (1940), a woman is halfway up a ladder, provoking thoughts of voyeurism—her legs are together, and her skirt is lifted just above her knees; but with another few steps up the ladder, she will be overhead. Thanks to the hypereloquent sexuality of Balthus’s vision, the landscape itself expresses the same desire, so accurately that the figure is almost superfluous. Cherry–picking is always a matter of peering upward and craning the neck, and Balthus places a few cherries in the leaves just out of the girl’s reach. The whole scene is set on a steep hillside that accelerates into a cliff that brushes the very top of the picture—with a vertical Lombard poplar for extra emphasis—so that the viewer, or rather the voyeur, is entirely absorbed in the act of looking up. In other paintings Balthus mobilizes a more common convention, in which a woman lies in a landscape, and the hills undulate with echoes of her hips. The effect can be obvious and also overwhelming, as if the landscape were an ocean, and every hill a wave rehearsing the outlines of her body. If Western landscapes are imbued with these structures, the exception that proves the rule is the geometrized landscape. When Cézanne painted the curve of the Mont Saint–Victoire he tended to cut it into architectonic fragments, and in general he made sharp lines out of opportunities to represent gentle curves. In order to say that those Preface, Introduction 25 decisions are moves made against the body, it is not necessary to invoke the history of sexualized landscape back to Giorgione; it is enough to realize, as the pictorial logic itself reveals, that the Mont Saint–Victoire has a curved back, and that Cézanne has broken it. Balthus painted one extraordinary landscape according to these rules of negation: a view of the small town of Larchent. The picture is unmoving and empty, and the town’s few houses are regimented into an austere convocation of geometric planes. As in some of Cézanne’s landscape, there is nothing nearby. A field leads down at an indeterminate angle toward a quarry, and the town only begins in the far distance. The quarry has a pit and a central mound of tailings, and it is not a coincidence that Cézanne was attracted to the same two forms in his paintings of the Bibémus quarry. The heap is an attractive obstacle: that is, a body, or the faint echo of one. It is soft and truncated (in Cézanne’s paintings, the Bibémus quarry is more formidable, riven with impassable clefts and overhangs), and in the distance the mound is completed by the even more strongly figural shape of an old church. Larchent is painted in parsimonious late–winter colors, smothering any strong chromatic effect and putting a chill on Balthus’s accustomed Preface, Introduction 26 sexual heat. Since most of Balthus’s paintings are set in close, humid rooms, this is an unexpected act of asceticism, and the whole performance may be read as a quiet, effective silencing of the body. Bodily forms in abstraction These are some of the ways that a sense of body can be crucial even where there is no body or obvious body metaphor. Abstraction is only farther from the body if we say a body has to have certain naturalistic conventions such as a recognizable face, or an object recognizable as a face, limbs in a determinate order (though that order might not be the human one), opacity, adherence to gravity, or organic rather than sharp–edged contours. In general it is difficult to reform the body so radically that its fragments begin to operate, as Balthus’s brother Pierre Klossowski has said, somehow outside the circuit of possible desire and possession.30 But the possibilities are variable and not easy to pin down. Abstract pictures can resonate with a sense of the body more strongly and persuasively even than photographs or academic studies of the nude. The second seeing they initiate can be more engrossing than the obviously fruitless searches for a body in landscape or interiors. Abstraction, it could be argued, is virtually a discourse on the represented body, made all the more insistent by its obliquity. There is gesture, first of all: the marks in Jackson Pollock’s Grayed Rainbow, for example, are records of the exact bodily motions that made them, and they evoke the affects a viewer may associate with those motions. The drip paintings are about leaning, stooping, stretching, as well as all the things that Pollock’s contemporaries found amusing about the new technique: drooling, peeing, and stomping around. When Pollock discovered the drip technique in 1947 he was doing battle against his own Picassoid figures, trying to enmesh and overwhelm them in new marks; as Rosalind Krauss has emphasized, “what seemed consistently at stake was to do violence to the image.”31 The horizontal surface, and the awkward bending and reaching (and crawling, and tip–toeing) are all part of that purpose, and they leave their traces in the work. The all-over paintings 30 Pierre Klossowski, La rassemblance (Paris: Ryôan–ji, 1984), 83, discussed in Mario Perniola, “Between Clothing and Nudity,” translated by Roger Friedman, in Fragments for a History of the Human Body, op. cit., vol. 2, 236–65, especially 252. See further Klossowski, “Balthus Beyond Realism,” Art News 55 no. 8 (1956): 26–31. 31 Krauss, The Optical Unconscious, op. cit., 282, 284. Preface, Introduction 27 are compelling, in this regard, because they exhibit specifiable degrees of anger against the figure. Some continuous swoops are lazy, half-controlled gestures, and the kind of motion that made them would have been something gentle but imprecise, like strewing seeds. (In Greyed Rainbow, they are mostly white loops and strings.) That kind of motion, in turn, conjures informal relaxation, both bodily and mental. Other marks are more violent, and there are splatters, gobs of paint, and even hand– and footprints, that speak about less comfortable motions. It has been remarked that Pollock’s drips are perched between contours (that is, outlines, which could contain figural shapes) and areas that would be enclosed between contours.32 In one place they are a thin as lines, and in another as thick as color areas or objects, but they neither catch the light nor throw shadows, and they neither confine nor compose areas. At first glance, that modernist criticism might appear to be a recipe for avoiding the apparition of the body, and concentrating on the pure play of abstraction. With no way to be sure if a drip mark is an outline bounding a figure, or a thin figure with its own outline, it would not be possible to be sure of the vocabulary of figural metaphors. But the body has many voices and it can express itself through motions and ambiguous contours as well as disambiguated forms. There is no need to roughen the experience of the painting by trying to set out the bodily metaphors in any detail; it is enough to note that there are many kinds of gestures and associated emotions in the painting, and that the body is the vehicle of their meaning. If we do not think of the body—no matter how faintly or quickly—the gestural language remains inaudible. Abstract moments in all visual art also involve the body when they exhibit the shapes, colors, and feel of the skin. Like all oil painting, Grayed Rainbow takes place on a skin (the raw canvas is a skin, both in its thinness and its opacity), and the paint itself forms another skin with its smooth dry surface and potentially, or originally, viscous interior. It could be argued that Grayed Rainbow expresses more about skin than many illusionistic paintings because it does not yield information about what lies beyond the picture plane. Despite Clement Greenberg’s assertion of Pollock’s planarity, the painting’s “cuts” and streaks are wounds to the skin of the canvas, and they make the skin metaphor that much more insistent. 32 Michael Fried, Three American Painters (Cambridge: Fogg Art Museum, 1965), 10– 19. The theme is pursued from another perspective in my Pictures and the Words That Fail Them (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). Preface, Introduction 28 Gesture and skin are two modes by which the body is metaphorically present in abstraction, and another is scale. As Robert Rosenblum observed, paintings such as Grayed Rainbow can be ambiguously human-sized, microscopic (“atomic”) and macroscopic (like “galaxies”).33 Those two alternatives are more dramatic than my own experience of the painting—I’d rather say Greyed Rainbow offers an oscillating series of scales, all roughly human–scaled. The largest forms in the painting aside from the surface itself are the sweeping black curves that line up across the canvas. They are the painting’s principal surrogate figures, not because we need to think of them as figures, but because they are almost human–scaled and human–proportioned. I instinctively respond to them in that way, as if my whole body is an appropriate echo to each one of the forms. Still, Rosenblum’s observation is correct as a reminder that scale is an open question; and other times I find myself responding to small portions of the painting, thinking of the finer lines as plantlike shapes, or inadvertently constructing imaginary landscapes. Once again 33 R. Rosenblum, Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition, Friedrich to Rothko (New York: Harper, 1975), 203. Preface, Introduction 29 it does not matter in this context exactly how the scales operate (though it would be essential for a more involved reading of the painting); what counts is that the body is also immediately available through choices of scale. Assignment 3: bodies in abstraction. If your own work is abstract, analyze how bodies are conjured using scale, figure and ground, skin, and scale. Or choose an abstract artwork to analyze in those terms. Preface, Introduction 30 A fourth source of bodily metaphors in abstraction is provided by the distances at which I situate myself when I am looking at a represented body. The ordinary choices can be put schematically: myopic positions Deliberately overly close, scanning or inspecting the surface inch by inch. 2 figure mark positions The farthest positions from which it is possible to see individual painted marks on the body. 3 ground mark positions The farthest positions from which it is possible to see individual painted marks on the ground. 4 conversational positions The places where the painting comfortably fills the visual field, and possesses the same size–to– distance ratio that I sense in talking to people. 5 inferred center of projection The place where the perspective schema or other structural clue implies I should stand. 6 hyperopic positions Deliberately overly distant positions, from which large features of the painting cannot be seen. 7 anamorphic positions Positions deliberately too far to one side, so that the picture is willfully distorted. 1 Table 1. Some positions in front of representations of the body. Preface, Introduction 31 Normative distances are in the middle of the Table: if the representation strikes me as a bodily shape and size, I may unthinkingly stand at the same distance I would stand from a person when I am talking (number 4). The conversational distance is instinctive, and I sometimes find myself drawn toward it even in front of abstract compositions. Often, too, I may stand just close enough to see the marks that make the figure, or the (often larger) marks that comprise the ground (numbers 2 and 3). In some Renaissance paintings, those figure mark and ground mark positions are close to the panel or canvas, and they balance the more distant inferred center of projection, which is frequently a little farther away than I might care to stand (number 5). With painters like Raphael, the choices are quite clear: either I can walk close up to one of his paintings, and try to see how it was done, or I can stand back near the place specified by the perspectival or structural cues in the picture. The figure and ground mark positions are usually close enough to touch the painting, because they correspond with the distances from which the painting was made: and therefore they are also the distances I might occupy if I mean to touch another person. Piero di Cosimo is another typical example: there are implied positions from myopic inspections to conversational overviews, and viewers are invited to move between them. Then there are “improper” positions, which I call myopic, hyperopic (farsighted) and anamorphic (numbers 1, 6, and 7); each avoids the cluster of places that address the picture. The normative positions afford more or less intimacy and naturalness, and the improper positions are ways of spying on the painting, seeing it from places it does not Preface, Introduction 32 sanction. Anamorphic positions are surreptitious, and in that respect Balthus’s paintings are all anamorphic. Though I may position myself front and center before one of Balthus’s paintings, in imagination, and in accord with the picture’s logic, I am bending low, squatting, turning, or twisting myself to see something out of the corner of my eye.34 Hyperopic positions are essentially rejections, in that I refuse to be close enough to see (or talk to, or hear) the figure or the painting; and myopic positions are pathological or medical, and are beyond the bounds of common human intercourse. I can refuse a painting either by staying away from it, or by approaching and examining so closely that I do not take in the entire image. Assignment four: positions of viewing. Analyze an artwork using some of these categories of close and distant viewing. Needless to say, this list is only a sample of the possibilities. It is too coarse to explain what happens in front of an actual painting, and other media would require other ideas, other positions. But the table illustrates another way that the body can reverberate when it is absent, pushing me toward a picture, or pulling me away, in accord with rules that are ultimately derived from my interaction with bodies. When a painting disrupts the body as Pollock’s does, dispersing its forms to all parts of the canvas, cutting the work loose “from any analogies with the gestalt of the body whole,” then it refers even more insistently to the body’s lost wholeness, and to the “aggressivity and formlessness” of its repression.35 And when, in addition to that violent dispersal, the painting declines to observe the hierarchy of human scales, it provokes a vertigo of continuous unfocused displacement—as I walk back and forth, up to the painting and away again—and I am returned all the more insistently to the question of the absent body. Certainly gesture, skin, scale and distance are sources of bodily meaning in abstraction, and I might add a fifth term, the specific modes of looking that pertain to bodies. Grayed Rainbow has its own rules of looking: staring along and around the large black gestures, peering through and among the smaller ones, looking up and down, tying visual knots and flourishes by following the curving paths of the dripping paint. Some of those are modes of looking that I feel most strongly when I look at bodies: the caressing 34 In this respect the concept of anamorphosis need not be confined to viewing positions that are literally skew. Lacan’s theory implies as much; for discussion and further literature see my Poetics of Perspective (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 248-52. 35 Krauss, The Optical Unconscious, op. cit., 308. Preface, Introduction 33 motions are certainly bodily, and so is the motion of looking around or along, since it names the curvilinear motions of the eye that I associate with organic forms, and ultimately with the body. Other kinds of looking, such as the scattered surveys I make of the painting as a whole, or the kaleidoscopic feel of its lack of center, do not pertain to the body: they are the more anxious, less rooted kinds of second seeing, in which my eyes rove in search of bodily forms or echoes. Beyond these five categories I would not be sure where to go: Would it make sense to say that heat, texture, growth, or hue, are body metaphors in the same way as gesture or scale? Because I believe that the final source of visual meaning is the body, I would have no a priori difficulty in accepting new categories of picturemaking as signs of the body. But this is not an easy subject, and the relation between the terms is far from clear. The operation of the eye, or of scale, or of position in any given work can quickly pass beyond the power of analysis or descriptive language. For that reason it seems best to remain aware of the multiplicity and nuance of second seeing, and of the resourcefulness of the eye in locating body metaphors, rather than attempting to systematize the field into a taxonomy of bodily responses. Part of the skittishness or anxiety of second seeing may well be due to this exact conceptual disorganization: as we look from object to object in search of bodies that are not there, we also look from metaphor to metaphor, hoping to find one strong enough to rival an actual body in its solidity and permanence. Representation as bodily distortion With this extended prologue I arrive at the main subject of this book: an attempt at a general account of the pictured body. I have tried to speak as specifically as I can about individual images, in the hope of showing how general philosophic questions might meet the exactitudes of the pictured body. To that end it has been necessary to find guiding concepts and figures that could operate both as a philosophemes and as critical or historical terms capable of describing specific images. The literature is replete with general categories such as the ecstatic, grotesque, recessive, immaterial, or “dys– appearing” body, and with broad concepts such as the “denigration of vision,” scopophilia, visual culture, and “visibilization,” but they are more appropriate to surveys Preface, Introduction 34 of philosophic positions and cultural trends than individual images.36 Hybrid concepts that allow historical and critical nuance to play against philosophic clarity are more promising, and I want to introduce a few here as a way of opening the argument of the book. Distortion is such a term: it is connected to philosophic discourse on representation in general, and it is both elemental and specific in body images of all kinds. Claude Gandelman names one aspect of the equation between the represented body and distortion when he says the “reality of the body qua represantatio [as representation] is its essential distortion,” and I would argue that the opposite and correlative aspect is the bodily form toward which all representation tends.37 Any representation of a body involves distortion, because all representation is distortion, and conversely, representation works within a logic of the body, so that representation is embodiment: it produces and projects bodies. Hence I would posit a series of increasingly large domains, that might be imagined as concentric circles in a Venn diagram: innermost is pictures, which I am taking throughout this text as a synecdoche for all visual artifacts. Larger than the sum total of visual images is representations of the body, since there are also imaginary representations—representations that are not metaphorically embodied in the outside world, but remain literally embodied in the mind. Outside representations of the body are representations in general, or representation in the philosophic sense, because there are surely representations that do not involve the body—though I would be less certain that there are representations that we would not attempt to read in terms of bodily metaphors. And the largest category, the one I propose to elaborate, is distortion. As a logician would say, even though all representation is distortion, some distortion is not representation— 36 Scopophilia is explored in Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Deingration of Visition in Twentieth–Century French Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993); it was coined by Freud, Three Essays on Sexuality, in Standard Edition, edited by James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1962), vol. 17, 169. Most of the remaining terms are from Drew Leder, The Absent Body, op. cit. The ecstatic body has been invoked most recently by Gertrud Sandquist, describing Andres Searrano’s photographs. See “Body of Ecstasy,” in Andres Serrano (Oslo: Galleri Riis, 1991). 37 Gandelman, Reading Pictures, Viewing Texts (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991), 74. Unfortunately Gandelman ties this to a programmatic interpretation of the map of cortical motor functions, which he says implies a “homunculus” in the brain; recent research has distorted the homunculus beyond recognition, and extended “humunculi” to other sense organs in other animals. Preface, Introduction 35 for example a broken leg does not represent itself—and therefore distortion encompasses all the other categories. It is common to argue the inevitability of distortion in all representation by appealing to the mathematical problem of projecting or otherwise mapping a sphere onto a plane. No such projection or mapping is possible without distortion, but maps are not simply distorted. Instead they are distorted in particular ways that are designed to preserve useful properties of the globe. Azimuthal maps retain the sense of direction, equal-area maps preserve areas, and conformal maps preserve angles and certain distances. In the same way, pictures of the body normally work to preserve certain bodily properties, so that distortion is usually local and specifiable. The danger is in generalizing as Gandelman does, and implying everything in representations of the body is equally within the field of distortion. Instead bodily distortion is both a condition and a property of representation but not the whole of it—and that is what allows the analysis of represented bodies to go forward without turning into an equation of holistic properties: a body’s reality qua represantatio is some distortion. Still more fundamentally, and not at all coincidentally, distortion is an attribute of the body itself prior to representation. We are pressed through the birth canal, we swell to Preface, Introduction 36 adult proportions, we shrink into old age. Our skin is elastic, and it is relevant that elasticity is the essential non–mathematical metaphor of topology, which has itself become a non–mathematical metaphor for conceptual distortions of all kinds. The skin is not elastic like rubber, but pinched folds do return to place—quickly in younger people, and then more sluggishly, until the skin appears to lose its elastic nature. Skin shrivels, stretches, hangs and wiggles. When it comes to talk about representing the body, distortion is the inescapable fact. Erwin Panofsky said perspective causes painters to distort their experience in order to represent it, and that representation was the chief purpose of perspective’s distortions.38 Like perspective, the histories of bodily canons and schemata can be seen as distorting moves against the inevitable unrepresentable qualities of bodily experience; and the histories of contrapposto, poses, gestures, physiognomy and the passions can be read as attempts to embrace those same experiences while also representing them. The vacillating attitudes toward distortion and the varying urges for and against representation would be a fruitful way to organize the history of the body, and this book could equally have been subtitled A General Theory of Distortion. But there are other words that might serve better in place of distortion. The word distortion comes from Latin torquere, to twist, and so the verb “to distort” means “to twist out of shape.” Yet not all representation is twisting, specifically. Another term is “deformation,” which comes from forma, beauty. The Latin deformis means ugly, and our English word “deformed” also carries this connotation; hence to “deform” is to make ugly. Much of what I will be considering has to do with this boundary between beauty and ugliness, and between what has form in this sense and what does not. These words are related to “disproportion,” “distention” (from distendere, to stretch), “dissolution” (from solvere, to loosen), “dissection” (from secare, to cut), “disruption” (from rumpere, to break), and “disjunction” (from jungere, to join). “Disfiguration” has some resonance in literary criticism, where the word “figure” or “figure of thought” does much more general duty as a near–synonym for “trope”; disfiguration is sometimes a good name for what happens in pictures when bodies are divested of their forms by being impressed into 38 “Die Perspektive als ‘Symbolische Form’,” Vorträge der Bibliothek Warburg 4 (1927): 258–330. Preface, Introduction 37 noncorporeal objects, dissolved into backgrounds, or shredded by broken light.39 Just as every occurrence of a linguistic figure is both a usage and a partial effacement or distortion of that figure, so each picture of the body is both a figure and its disfiguration. Because it has so many forms, distortion is not a word that can provide a skeleton key for questions of bodily representation. In the pages that follow it will appear as schematization, analogy, anatomy, dissection, projection, inversion, metaphorization, and many other names. But it is worth stressing the idea that a process that can sometimes adequately be called distortion is so fundamental, so universal, that it governs representation itself. In its guise as continual motion, distortion is the body’s quality of liveness, and it is also the essential property of representation. (And this may be one of the reasons why death, the state without distortion, is not easily susceptible to representation.40) The two appearances of distortion, in the body and in pictures, are related: they speak for the intimate relation between embodiment and representation. Assignment five: terms for distortion and representation. Use some of these terms, or others, to analyze what happens in your own artwork, or in someone else’s. Affect and logic Although words such as “distortion” and “deformation” are indispensable general categories, they lead to an unhelpful formalism. Instead of trying to create a topology of failed representation, I am going to opt for a distinction that employs topology in the service of a description of the bodily effects of bodily representations: the distinction between distortions that are felt, and those that are thought. A headache or a broken bone exist in two states: in one, we feel it, and often we cannot think of anything else; and in another, we think of it, and feel nothing. These two possibilities, never entirely separate, 39 In Quintilian and classical rhetoric “figure of speech” and “trope” were disjunct, while “figure of thought” coincided with some uses of “trope.” See Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetics, edited by Alex Preminger (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), s. v. “Trope” and “Figure.” 40 This is taken up in The Object Stares Back, op. cit., and in a different way, in the final chapter of Mieke Bal, Reading “Rembrandt”: Beyond the Word–Image Opposition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Preface, Introduction 38 are ways that the self encounters the represented body, including our own body as we sense it and represent it to ourselves. Either something that distorts the body feels, or it means. Affect in this book has a spercific meaning that is different from the one usuallt assigned to it in affect theory as it is exemplified by Brian Massumi. In his account, affect is the body’s innate response to the world, which takes place nearly instantly, before and without cognition. In more general terms, and outside Massumi’s account, affect theory has come to be the study of sensation, feeling, and emotion, as opposed to intellection. the meaning I am after is closer to that looser sense of affect, and in particular to the way that affect, when it is consciously experienced, is on the same spectrum as feeling and can therefore sometimes be intense and literally painful. Affect is the opposite of something I puzzle over, it’s the opposite of an intellectual engagement. At one end it is dully perceived moods, and at the other it is pain. In art, affect in this sense does not usually cross over into actual discomfort. Instead an affective artwork is one that elicits a nonverbal experience, a sensation or mood, as opposed to a cognized experience of the sort that I can articulate.41 Affect is a general state of sensation, a sensual monitoring of the body and what it sees, a care or awareness of its health and its current state, an attention to what are sometimes known as “raw feels.” When it comes to the body’s sense of itself, there is a neurological concept that is close to what I mean here, and that is proprioception (also known as cenesthesia and tactus intimus): the body’s internal sense of itself.42 Proprioception is among the body’s fundamental senses, even though it has not gained the canonical status of the five senses. When I number the senses that seem independent of one another, I count at least eight: there is sight, smell, taste, hearing, and touch, and there is also gravity (independent of the five, since it does not require touch), heat (independent, for the same reason: I do not 41 For that reason I will not be considering images that have to do explicitly with the theme of pain, but rather images whose sight causes pain (or some allied, but less intense, reaction). For a feminist account of images about pain, see Paula Cooey, Religious Imagination and the Body, A Feminist Analysis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), on Frida Kahlo. 42 For proprioception see Oliver Sacks, The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat (New York: Summit, 1985). For cenesthesia and tactus intimus (the latter comes from Cicero’s translation of Aristippus), see Jean Starobinski, “A Short History of Bodily Sensation,” translated by Sarah Matthews, in Fragments for a History of the Human Body, op. cit., vol. 2, 350–70, especially 353. Preface, Introduction 39 need to make contact to feel temperature), and proprioception. This last names the way we know how our limbs are disposed without looking at them or touching them. It is the body’s internal muscular and organic sense of itself. Proprioception is not equivalent to the sense of touch, since the skin tells us about what happens in the outside world but also, independently and without any act of touching, it tells us something about the disposition of the limbs underneath. There have been medical cases in which proprioception disappears, and such patients report a faint sensation on the skin (they can feel the wind blowing against it, or the light brushing of objects), but there is a general helplessness about the body. The patients have to learn to look at their limbs to remain seated or to walk. If they lose sight of their bodies they tend to collapse, so that they can only walk while looking down, and they have to learn to sit by the tedious expedient of memorizing the motions and places of each limb. Grasping objects is difficult, since it is not easy to monitor the strength of the grip by eye: either the knuckles grow white, or the object slips from the fingers. The quality I am calling affect certainly has to do with this, though there is no reason to exclude the senses of touch, heat, balance, or even smell and taste in the same general category. Affect signifies that mode of awareness that listens to the body, and is aware of its feeling—whether that feeling is the low-level muttering of a body in good health, or the high pain of illness. Most of the time in looking at visual art I am concerned with simple things like the feeling of a turn of the head, or an eye that moves and focuses. Proprioception is apt because it denotes feeling that occurs in the body rather than bodily movements. I may not actually move in responding to an artwork, but I often feel something like moving—and proprioception names the sensation, or memory, or incipience, of motion. As in other transcriptions of bodily responses, it is important to be exact about these half–sensations. Looking for a long time at Balthus’s painting of the cherry picker, I may become aware of a slight tenseness in my neck as I think of straining to look upward. Those motions are mental: they don’t produce neckache or eyestrain, or Preface, Introduction 40 even, usually, the thought of them. Affect here is the delicate awareness of the thought of the viewer’s body and its relation to the artwork. Empathy is another term that may be implicated in this sense of pain. It was originally an Enlightenment term; Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis used it to describe the effect of a mother’s emotions on her developing fetus. Moreau’s argument follows a medieval model enjoining mothers to be careful of wayward thoughts. Just as we feel pain when we see pain, he claims, so the fetus can be malformed if its mother sees disfigured bodies or conceives disfigured thoughts.43 The Scottish philoospher David Hume’s sense of “compassion” is also an empathetic doctrine. When Hume sought to demonstrate the bodily origin of thought, he proposed the example of gout, which ravages both the body and the mind.44 Given these sources in medieval associative magic, medicine, and Enlightenment rationalism, it is curious that our current sense of empathy was coined as a connoisseur’s term, to describe a viewer’s reaction to paintings. Robert Vischer observed how formal arrangements in works of art elicited muscular and emotional reactions, and concluded that we are deceived into attributing those reactions to the object.45 This Einfühlung (“feeling-in,” empathy) is an “involuntary act of transference” that causes the viewer to think something is true of the object rather than of 43 Maupertuis, The Earthly Venus, translated by Simone Brangier Boas, with an introduction by George Boas (New York: Johnson Reprint Corp., 1966), 49–50. Maupertuis is discussed in Barbara Stafford, Body Criticism, Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), 315; see also my review in The Art Bulletin 74 no. 3 (1992): 517–20. 44 Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford, 1967), 276, 287, 319. This is discussed also in Stafford, Body Criticism, 188. 45 Vischer, Das optische Formgefühl, op. cit. Vischer’s doctrine, which is still insufficiently studied, posits Einfühlung as one of a series of concepts that describe the relation between felt reality and the mind. Preface, Introduction 41 himself.46 (Theodor Lipps, who exposited the theory of empathy most thoroughly, also used examples from the visual arts.47) Vischer noticed how the body “swells” when it enters a wide hall, and how it “sways,” even in imagination, when it sees wind blowing in a tree. Proprioception demonstrates that the body has sensation within and of itself, with only minimal input from the outside world. But empathic reaction can also echo forms and events in the outside world: the “swelling” elicited by the hall is felt inside my body, not as a force on my body. In conjunction with proprioception, empathy can help us understand how our bodies are partly our own, and partly owned by the objects we see. I want to try to avoid calling the opposite of affect “thought” or “meaning,” because I do not know how to place the moments when language begins to be attached to objects of experience. Instead I will be using a polarity between affect and logic. Often what is at stake in representations of the body that elicit thoughts, analysis, and logic, rather than visceral reactions, is a metamorphosis of the body. I do not wince when Picasso turns a face into a flower, as I do sometimes when Francis Bacon turns a head into a bloody stump. Do even the most convoluted and violent of Picasso’s creations, such as the ones T. J. Clark studied in his Mellon lectures, make me feel for the 46 C. E. Gauss, “Empathy,” Dictionary of the History of Ideas, edited by P. P. Wiener (New York, 1973), vol. II, 86. 47 Lipps, Raumästhetik und geometrisch-optische Täuschungen (Leipzig, 1897), and Lipps, Ästhetik, 2 vols. (Hamburg and Leipzig, 1903–06). Lipps’s text and his categories seem to me to be confused, and I will not be following them here. He posits three levels of empathy: one in which the viewer reacts viscerally to an object (feeling expansive upon entering a large hall, swaying like a tree), a second in which objects elicit intellectual reactions (as when I analyze the hall, and place it in a specific historical period), and a third in which humans elicit specific readings (as in physiognomy and the languages of gesture). (See C. E. Gauss, “Empathy,” op. cit., 86.) Preface, Introduction 42 represented bodies? I do not think so. Instead viewing a picture like this is like solving a puzzle. I see a cascade of hair at the upper left, and I deduce an arm must be supporting it; I recognize a face at the upper right, and I conclude that it belongs to a lionlike man. Gradually, the pieces fall into place: I see that the woman is holding up a mirror or hairbrush, and then I notice the man’s hand on the guitar, his splayed feet, the long curve of the woman’s body terminating in a tiny bundled foot, and two breasts (with hanging shadows) in the form of a face. Gradually I come to understand that it’s a picture of a man, playing a guitar while a woman listens while and brushes her hair. I do not feel much when I encounter such images, because I am too concerned with deducing and decoding—with solving a logical puzzle—and sometimes also too filled with admiration for the artist’s clever inventions, what the sixteenth century would have called “conceits” (concetti).48 48 In this respect Picasso’s drawing participates in the modernist equation between pictures and puzzles; see my Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles? On the Modern Origins of Pictorial Complexity (New York: Routledge, forthcoming). Preface, Introduction 43 Images that elicit the analytic side of seeing are mostly those that analogize the body, rearranging and substituting its parts for symbolic and allegorical purpose, and otherwise toying with it intellectually. Here a man is a lion, a woman’s abdomen is a face, her head is a vacuum cleaner, his arm is a machine part. Those changes are best called metamorphoses, logical changes, as opposed to the images I will associate with affect. Metamorphosis effortlessly alters the body into that which no living body can be. It is significant, and often unremarked, that in the classical literature metamorphosis is a painless matter. The changes the Roman poet Ovid describes in his Metamorphoses can be unpleasant experiences (Daphne did not want to become a laurel, as in this sculpture by Bernini), but they are not painful (Daphne does not scream in Ovid’s poem when she sees her fingers tightening into twigs, but she feels “numb and heavy”—the opposite of discomfort).49 The characters cry out because they are being unjustly punished or delivered from rape or death, or else they cry because they are leaving their lovers and the world of humanity. But they do not feel their transformations at all, except as impartial observers at the wonder of the moment. Actaeon screams, we assume, when he is turned into a stag and his dogs turn on him: but his pain, which we do not feel, is not on account of his metamorphosis. In Titian’s painting we do not feel his pain. Even the most extreme distortions can be painless if they are metamorphoses—a woman into a tree, or a man into a mixture of lion, paper collage, and rubber band. 49 Ovid, Metamorphoses, translated by Rolfe Humphries (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1975), 19. Preface, Introduction 44 I think this is an essential fact about the concept of metamorphosis: though it is sensual, it does not present itself as a matter of feeling. The idea of metamorphosis is odd, and it has never been clear to me what attracted Ovid to the theme apart from its poetic and narrative opportunities. But the answer may be connected to the painlessness of it all. Though every metamorphic distortion attracts our bodily sympathy to some degree, and though no painful distortion is without intellectual meaning, the distinction between affect and logic or metamorphosis holds because metamorphosis exists as an idea: we have the clear notion that bodies can be either broken or merely metempsychosed, and only one of those possibilities entails pain. In that sense the Metamorphoses is a poem of escapes, of demonstrations that transcendence is painless and dazzling. Preface, Introduction 45 It may be objected that this division is not the only organizational principle for the distortion in bodily representation. A prominent alternate would be the distinction between the organic in all its forms (the round, flexible, soft, wet, warm, asymmetric, and living) and the inorganic in all its forms (the geometric, hard, cold, dry, symmetric and dead). The two are Doppelgängers of each other. Joseph Wood Krutch has written eloquently on the disturbing difference between an ice flower, growing on a frozen windowpane, and the apparently similar frond of a fern.50 The ice flower is seductive because it looks like it is alive, though it also has the orderly and inevitable aspect of inorganic “death.” The organic/inorganic polarity is a generative force in many texts, from the later Socratic dialogues, where Plato’s love of mathematics begins to infect the Socratic moral questioning like an “unliving” virus, to books on chaos theory, where the newly discovered “chaotic attractors” appear as lifelike patterns found in nonliving nature.51 I avoid this way of ordering things partly because too much of what happens in visual art is organic, and the result would be a lopsided exposition of organicity; but a history of the pictured body could certainly begin with the opposition between life and inorganic “death.” 50 Joseph Wood Krutch, “The Colloid and the Crystal,” The Best Nature Writing of Joseph Wood Krutch (New York: William Morrow, 1969), 309–20. I thank Paul Hinchcliffe for this reference. 51 For Socrates as a virus see Gregory Vlastos, Socrates, Ironist and Moral Philosopher (Ithaca, 1991), 107. For chaos theory see for example J. Gleich, Chaos Science (New York, 1989). Preface, Introduction 46 On the other hand, the pain/metamorphosis axis may also be the name of something even older and even more common in the Western conversation on art and visuality. It is, after all, the same problem that has also been written as the mind/body problem, or the difference between language and feeling, or logic and affect, or reason and instinctual drive. I choose logic and affect simply because they have more resonance in art theory in the 21st century. The terms are, I think, general enough to be interchangeable. From Empedocles and Pythagoras to Cambridge Neoplatonism and beyond, the body has been understood as an object that is mediated by the mind (or the psyche, or soul, or pneuma, or logos, or ratio). I am content in following that most ingrained of constructions, and equating or reducing my polarity of affect and logic to body and mind. My only contribution is the idea that reason, when it is transposed into pictures of the body, takes the form of metamorphic change, and that a sense of the body, when it is pictured, becomes a specifiable range of signifiers of sensation. Assignment 6: logic and affect. Analyze an artwork in terms of what parts of it make you feel something, and what parts make you think. The argument dissected In this book I have attempted to bring the enabling axis between affect (including pain) and logic (often meaning metamorphosis) into a more articulate contact with images by dividing the two realms into six categories. In doing this I am less interested in defending a precise classification than I am in saying something orderly and clear enough to be useful and susceptible to critique.52 The six categories are as follows: 52 A related classification (into twelve categories) is proposed in William Ewing, The Body: Photographs of the Human Form (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1994), 31; and a less similar taxonomy is used in L’âme au corps: arts et sciences 1793-1993, exh. cat., edited by Jean Clair (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 1993). The latter distinguishes “le thêatre d’anatomie,” “l’homme machine,” “l’homme électrique,” “le temps de la phrénologie,” “évolution et symétrie,” “l’homme prosthétique,” and “la drogue, les émotions, le rêve.” Preface, Introduction 47 In membranes (the concept of skin) Affect As psychomachia (the movements of skin) In cut flesh (the tearing of skin) Distortion By looking alone (bodies merely presented) Logic (Metamorphosis) By analogy (metaphoric substitutions) By schematization (geometric reductions) Table 2. Six categories of represented bodies. By the affect of membranes (the subject of the first chapter) I mean sensation evoked by certain ways of picturing the skin. Given its importance in images and in the body, skin is remarkably under–theorized. Questions of visibility, sensation, the dichotomy of inside and outside, smoothness, and identity all depend on skin. Chapter 1 explores the concept of pictured skin, extending it to a general theory of depicted membranes by drawing parallels between psychoanalysis and dermatology. Pictured bodies offer a range of solutions to the problem of skin: at one extreme there is nothing but skin, and the body is pure visible surface; and at the other there is no skin, and the body is surfaceless flesh. But skin metaphors, or their elisions, need to be present in order for represented bodies to be perceived as living or intact figures. That is true whether the artist is especially attracted to the skin (as in Lucien Freud, or Matthias Grünewald), or avoids it in such a way as to make it seem that the very idea of skin is being denied (as I’ll argue about Pontormo and Michelangelo). Between the two possibilities there are artists who use a wide range of metaphors—wax, oil, paper, glue—to imagine the pictorial form Preface, Introduction 48 of skin, and much of the first chapter is aimed at contemporary explorations of visual equivalents for skin and membranes. Skin is the starting place of the book and the fundamental possibility for images of the body, since it is what is visible before and apart from any further meaning. Psychomachia (Chapter 2) denotes sensation produced by the sight of bodily motion: either in contorted faces (as in the practice of physiognomy) or in bodies that are twisted and turned about themselves (as in the practice of contrapposto). It can be argued that the 15th and 16th centuries explored the majority of configurations of the naturalistically conceived human body, and that the Renaissance vocabulary of figural postures has remained in place despite attempts to rescind it by imagining purely frontal and non– Western figures. The same may be said of the abandoned discipline of physiognomy, which is as close as the West came to systematically describing the meaning of expressions. The two moth-eaten disciplines, physiognomy and contrapposto, are the subject of Chapter 2, whose purpose is to demonstrate the richness of their possibilities, and the futility of avoiding their histories. Chapter 1 concerns skin itself, and Chapter 2 explores skin that is put under tension. Last of the three classes in the general category of affect concerns skin that has been cut open, revealing the flesh beneath. Flesh has a different constellation of meanings than skin, some of them involving metaphors of liquidity, as if the body is a bag of skin holding a fluid interior. In general the invisible inside of the body has been considered too painful to represent, and few artists have made pictures of the opened body. Most of the history of cut flesh, therefore, takes place in medical illustration, and it is the story of an alternation between pictures that attempt to show the inner body in all its bewildering specificity (sometimes revolting, and other times dangerously seductive), and those that abstract what is found there in favor of comprehensible portions and simplified views. The incomprehensibility of flesh, and its close proximity with the inconceivability of death, bring the first half of the book to a close and raise the abstract question of the relation between the inconceivable and the unrepresentable, which forms the epilogue to this book as a whole. Logical and metamorphic change, the subject of the second half of the book, belongs to a different world of experience. Metamorphosis “by looking alone,” the subject of Chapter 4, concerns the effect of some photographs and other pictures that are not overt rearrangements or distortions of the body (that is, they are perceived as normative in regard to conventions of naturalism), but at the same time work to change their Preface, Introduction 49 subjects by turning them into types or specimens. What happens in such images can be as violent as what occurs when the body is willfully twisted or cut. Pornography, sexism, and racism belong here, among the representations that purport to be merely truthful, and I propose a connection between those kinds of images and the simple frontal pose that has long been central to Western picturemaking. Pictures such as Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, Watteau’s Gilles, and Velázquez’s portraits of the Infanta all participate in the same visual field as ethnological photographs used in racial research. The linking concept is the possibility of mere presence—the simple thereness of the body, which seems to need no narrative or other linguistic frame in order to express meaning. That assumption is a dangerous one if only because it puts the image at the mercy of its ideological context. The concept of mere presence opens the way to a revaluation of racist and pornographic images, since they become examples of a more general phenomenon—the desire to consolidate our sense of ourselves by comparison with a represented body. I suggest that the daily assessment of our image in the mirror is not different in kind from the comparisons afforded by fine art, by racist imagery and (in the realm of sexuality) of pornography. Each of those kinds of images can be considered as an opportunity for specific acts of self–definition, as well as a sometimes harmful reduction of the body for racist or sexist purposes. A second strategy that appeals more to the mind than to visceral reaction is “Analogic Seeing” (Chapter 5), denoting representations that create analogies for the body as a whole, or for its parts. Picasso’s drawing is an example when it turns a woman’s body into a spoon, her head into a dustbrush, her breasts into a leering face, and her left arm into jelly. It seems to me that analogic seeing is more than a formal game or a surrealist strategy, and that it underwrites much of our ability to comprehend bodies in general. Chapter 5 opens with a look at the workings of analogy in analytic cubism, arguably the most important and fruitful bodily metamorphosis in modernism; and it concludes with an attempt to describe what happens when analogies become difficult to locate, and the comprehension of the body itself is in danger. The assembled monsters that populate Greek myths and medieval bestiaries have probably seldom been frightening, perhaps because their obvious principles of assembly (man + horse = centaur) are screens that block out the greater terror, which is that monsters might have no comprehensible organization. Bodies of animals found in the ocean abyss, in plankton, in Cambrian fossils, and above all under the microscope provide the closest examples of Preface, Introduction 50 truly disorderly bodies, where the ability to comprehend by finding analogies fails, and the eye is thrown into a kind of confusion I call visual desperation. In linguistic terms, Chapter 4 is about the notion that it is possible to merely describe (that is, merely look) at a body, and Chapter 5 concerns metaphoric substitutions. The final Chapter completes the possibilities by inquiring into the reduction of writing to bare logic—or in visual terms, the attempt to deny the body its basic organic chaos, and to substitute either the rigors of geometry or the labels of language. In a way the ruleless or transgressive body that Bakhtin called “grotesque” is the inverted reflection of the linear simplifications that have been imposed by proportional systems from the Egyptians onward. In order to imagine a body as an object that can be adequately represented on a grid, or as a scale of head heights, its grosser functions and shapes have to be repressed; and for that reason the history of bodily schemata can be understood in terms of what it is not: each grid and scale erases some specific unthinkable bodily function by confining, repressing, and idealizing it in the name of an impossible perfection. As in the reduction of writing to logic, there will always be an expressive remnant that speaks, sometimes very strongly, about what is not being said. In the course of reviewing the major systems of bodily schemata, the last chapter approaches and finally opens a double question that runs throughout the book, and gives it much of its impetus: the nature of the unrepresentable and the inconceivable. What is unrepresentable might be so because it seems untoward, inappropriate, or illicit; but it may also be that a bodily form has no graphic equivalent, and therefore vanishes from pictures because it is taken to be out of the reach of representation. An eighteenth–century medical illustrator, for example, might omit the textures of mercury poisoning because he can find no way to represent them in a lithograph. Inconceivability, on the other hand, signifies whatever is utterly absent from the expected forms of the represented body, so that the body might appear complete to a certain set of viewers. Leonardo’s figures seemed replete to some of his contemporaries, as if the paintings contained the sum total of Renaissance artistic capabilities as well as a surplus—what Vasari, in another context, called “grace”—but in terms of contemporary art they can seem chained to a set of nearly immobile dogmas about proportion, motion, emotion, light, and texture. It is reasonable to think that Freud’s idea that Leonardo fantasized a penis shaken in his mouth would have been inconceivable to the artist, but the concept of inconceivability works outside the assumptions of metapsychology. Both inconceivability and unrepresentability are names for the necessary omissions—the blank stretches of Preface, Introduction 51 paper between marks, the gaps and missing portions, the blind spots that the artist doesn’t see—and as such they constitute all pictures. I have chosen to let them work quietly throughout the book rather than making them explicit, in order to avoid implying that the entire subject of pictured bodies can be reformulated as a negative question of lack. The unpredictable peculiarities of pictures belie that. Yet if every picture is a picture of the body, and if distortion is an adequate word for the means of representation, then pictures are continuous refusals and repressions of the body: they are ways of controlling the body by fixing an image of what it is not. The positive doctrines of the pictured body, in that respect, are nothing more than shores against its ruins, and the task of a history of the represented body is to say what has not been shown, and to explain why it is absent.