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American Anatomies
Theorizing Race and Gender
By Robyn Wiegman Duke University Press
Copyright © 1995 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-9947-6
CHAPTER 1
Visual Modernity
Did that woman, could that woman, somehow know that here before her very eyes on the roof of the Drayton sat a Negro?
Absurd! Impossible! White people were so stupid about such things for all that they usually asserted that they were able to tell; and by the most ridiculous means, finger-nails, palms of hands, shapes of ears, teeth, and other equally silly rot.... Never, when she was alone, had they even remotely seemed to suspect that she was a Negro.–Nella Larsen, Passing 40-41
Under critique in this passage from Nella Larsen's Passing is the visible economy of race, an economy of parts that enables the viewer to ascertain the subject's rightful place in a racial chain of being. While not the only means for the articulation of racial essence, the visible has a long, contested, and highly contradictory role as the primary vehicle for making race "real" in the United States. Its function, to cite the body as the inevitable locus of "being," depends on a series of bodily fictions assumed to unproblematically reflect the natural meaning of flesh. But as Irene Redfield's meditation here reveals, the seeming veracity of flesh can fail to register itself, and it is significant that Larsen represents this failure by foregrounding corporeal signs that do not appear. Without these signs – without the significations attached to skin, hair, and palms – Irene is able to claim an implicit and highly privileged whiteness, moving with deliberate ease through the unofficial segregation of Chicago. The visible negation of "blackness," in other words, prefigures her racial indeterminacy, demonstrating how the "logic" of race in U.S. culture anchors whiteness in the visible epistemology of black skin. Such an epistemological relationship circumscribes our cultural conception of race, contributing above all to the recurrent and discursively, if not always materially, violent equation between the idea of "race" and the "black" body.
To interrupt this equation is crucial to the political articulation of an antiracist cultural critique, and scholars from a variety of disciplines have become increasingly attentive to the social construction of whiteness and the forms and privileges that construction entails. To unveil whiteness as its own racial specificity, however, does not necessarily explain the way race has been constituted as a visual phenomenon, with all the political and ideological force that the seemingly naturalness of the body as the locus of difference can claim. After all, does "the fact of blackness" (Black Skin, White Masks 109), as Frantz Fanon terms Western racial obsessions, lie in the body and its epidermis or in the cultural training that quite literally teaches the eye not only how but what to see? This question, framed by the contemporary archive of postmodern thought, sets up the investigative path of this chapter, which traces the visible economies that accompany both the "logic" of race and the broader legacy of modernity that has most powerfully disciplined the body across a range of specificities. While such specificities neither begin nor end with racial difference, it is evident that contemporary critics have only begun to elaborate the relationship between the emergence of modernity and the forms of race and racism that its emergence shaped.
Such an elaboration, of course, is in no way simple, entering as it does the highly contentious conversation about the meaning of modernity and its historical, philosophical, aesthetic, and political contours. While this chapter does not seek to settle such debates, it must nonetheless engage them in order to consider how the tensions within Western knowledge regimes give to race a shifting and often contradictory corporeal epistemology. In particular, I use Michel Foucault's discussion of the rise of the human sciences to analyze the way the visible has achieved a complicated methodological primacy since the late Renaissance, though it is toward the radically different notions of vision and visibility and of the body and "being" within this period that my conversation will turn. By placing race at the center of Foucault's examination of the discontinuities between "classical" organizations of knowledge (what most historians recognize as the Enlightenment), and their subsequent demise with the birth of "man" as an object of study in the early nineteenth century (what Foucault calls the modern), this chapter explores the reorganization of knowledge that underwrites the transformation from natural history to the human sciences. Through this reorganization, the human being acquires for the first time in history an organic body and an interior psychic depth, becoming the primary object of investigation and making possible a host of new technologies, institutions, and disciplines. Most crucially, the theoretical assumptions on which race is apprehendedundergo a profound rearticulation, a simultaneous strengthening of the corporeal as the bearer of race's meaning and a deepening of that meaning as ultimately lodged beyond the assessing gaze of the unaided eye. The epistemology of the visual that enables natural history is thus displaced (though not abandoned) by an emphasis on the organic nature of the body, on its invisibly organized and seemingly definitive biological functioning.
It is this emphasis on race as a constituted "fact" of the body – as a truth that not only can but must be pursued beyond the realm of visible similarities and differences – that characterizes the methodological proclivities of the modern episteme, and it is under its disciplinary gaze that an elaborate discourse purporting the African's inherent inhumanity is most productively, though not originally, waged. In such a methodological context, which begins by generating comparative anatomy and its argument over the biological basis of social hierarchy, we can weigh the political stakes of Foucault's conversation about modernity. At the same time, we can explore, as I do in the final stages of this chapter, the various technologies of race that accompany the subject's newly formed epistemological centrality – technologies that produce, in Foucauldian terms, various cultural practices of subjection. I thus read the contestation over racial order and being as a central feature of the epistemic turn toward what we now call modernity, that process by which, in Foucault's words, "the mode of being of things, and of the order that divided them up before presenting them to the understanding, was profoundly altered" (The Order of Things xxii). In the disciplinary displacement of natural history by the human sciences, in short, race in Western culture is constituted as far more than skin.
The Eye of the Beholder
Although England had various sources attesting to the existence of dark-skinned people, from biblical narrative to ancient mythologies, it is not until the sixteenth century that the English and African are known to have come face to face. This meeting, now so embedded in the history of imperialism and so completely overdetermined by the legacy the "facial" figuration implies, pivots in nearly all accounts on the African's arresting "black" visage; as Winthrop D. Jordan notes, explorers "rarely failed to comment upon it" (White over Black 4). But simple commentary does not necessarily lead to the enslavement of a group of people based on the color of their skin, and it would be erroneous to assume that the program of exportation to be accelerated in the seventeenth century can be accounted for by the "fact" of a perceptible difference, as though the latter has substance enough to fully determine the former. As Jordan indicates, "English contact with Africans did not take place primarily in a context which prejudged the Negro as slave.... Rather, Englishmen met Negroes merely as another sort of men" (ibid.). Before the fifteenth century, in fact, "the question of the Negro's color can hardly be said to have drawn the attention of Englishmen or indeed Europeans generally" (12). By the late seventeenth century, however, color had become the primary organizing principle around which the natural historian classified human differences, and a century later, it functioned as the visible precondition for anatomical investigations into the newly emergent object of knowledge, "man."
How do we understand this broad scope of Western thought that began in earnest to define race as a visible economy in the sixteenth century and continued to confer upon it a central position in subsequent articulations of race, up to and including the present day? To answer this question, we must take seriously the notion of race as a fiction – as a profound ordering of difference instantiated at the sight of the body – in order to jettison the security of the visible as an obvious and unacculturated phenomenon. For what the eye sees, and how we understand that seeing in relation to physical embodiment and philosophical and linguistic assumptions, necessitates a broader inquiry into the articulation of race, one that takes the visual moment as itself a complicated and historically contingent production. In the process, we must rethink the seeming progression often attributed to the production of race in Western culture, where the initial sighting of the African's "blackness" functions as the economic and epistemological origin for institutions of enslavement, as well as subsequent delineations of difference based on cranial capacity and anatomical form. The history of the visible that undergirds these fashionings of race is not, as our assurance in the visible may often lead us to believe, always the same.
To accept race as a complex aspect of social formation and not as a visible truth is particularly difficult from within Western ideologies that render the body "natural" in its "different" meanings. Much evidence can be marshaled, however, to demonstrate that this naturalization, implicit in the equation between skin color and enslavement, is part of a late-flowering racist discourse in the Anglophilic West. As David Brion Davis notes in his far-ranging study, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, "slaves in most ancient societies were not distinguishable by skin color or other racial characteristics" (48). Instead their "lowly status" was indicated in other ways: by shorn heads, identification tablets, branding, and tattooing. Davis reads these visual symbols as part of a historical continuity of the corporeal logic of race: "in later centuries" he writes, "men would come to regard darkness of skin as a brand which God or nature impressed upon an inferior people" (49). But, while an imposed sign crafted by the master and a "natural" sign based on skin share the similarity of signifying inferiority, Winthrop Jordan's assertion that, prior to the fifteenth century, color failed to function as a perplexing and controversial aspect of human being weighs heavily here. To mark the body is not the same as being a bodily mark. Each involves a vastly different understanding of the substance of the body, regardless of the extent to which a visible decoding has been brought to bear. This distinction is important in arguing against the assumption that Davis makes of a vast continuity underwriting Western discourses on blackness, where the logic of the visible ascribed to the corporeal in ancient societies is simply updated in the equation between black skin and enslavement.
This does not mean that the visible is not crucial, at all points, to the construction and perpetuation of Western racial productions, but that the distinction between an imposed mark (such as a tattoo) and the idea of difference as lodged in the skin must be understood in broader terms. Here, Foucault becomes especially useful, since his focus on the rise of natural history demonstrates a transformation in Western epistemological modes wrought by the economic, scientific, and religious upheavals of the late Renaissance – transformations that are in turn reconfigured by the displacement of natural history by biology in the nineteenth century. In particular, Foucault looks at the way natural history compensated for the loosening of religious authority by setting as its task the articulation of a comprehensive classification system of nature. The epistemological assumptions underwriting such a project demonstrate the demise of the "pre-classical" regime in which resemblances among phenomena were emphasized to evince the preordained unity between nature and the institution of God. But in the seventeenth century, Foucault argues, the "classical" mind disengaged from this activity of "drawing things together" and instead subjected every resemblance "to proof by comparison" (The Order of Things 55). Such comparison pivoted on "the apparent simplicity of a description of the visible" and in this, natural history's methodological reliance on rationalized vision was born (137). Visibility, in short, was no longer linked to the other senses as the eye was resituated "to see and only to see" (43).
In defining the characteristics of the rationalization of vision, Foucault discusses how the emphasis on comparison forged a structure of thinking that pivoted on two primary and exclusionary figures: identity and difference. Within this framework, relationships between entities in the natural world were investigated by relying on a disengaged process of observation, one that significantly carried with it a definitional range "restricted ... to black and white" (The Order of Things 133). Foucault's language here, his marking of the binary of black and white that structured the classical knowledge regime of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, is not simply a fortuitous metaphor for my own examination of the production of racial discourse, but it is an important description of the consequences of natural history's methodological reliance on rationalized vision. Such a reliance disavowed the binocular physiology of vision in favor of the authority of a singular eye that purportedly took its place in visual space suspended from the body, observing but not interpreting. The epistemological basis of natural history rests in this mathematical vision, as it provided the methodological certainty on which the natural historian established a clear and unambiguous description of "the system of identities and the order of differences existing between natural entities" (Foucault, The Order of Things 136). It is in this context, with the observer's neutrality seemingly guaranteed by the methodological emphasis on observation, that natural history's increasing interest in human classification must be approached, since it is here that the rendering of race as an epiphenomenon of skin is most damagingly drawn.
Of course, natural history was not alone in securing the process of vision to a highly ordered and regularized material realm. Indeed, its systematical understanding of vision and form was remarkably similar to what Martin Jay in "Scopic Regimes of Modernity") calls Cartesian perspectivalism (6). Jay demonstrates a relationship between the English Renaissance's aesthetic understanding of vision and the scientific perspective founded on the researcher's dispassionate eye, a relationship that outlines for me the broad context in which the African's definitive "blackness" came quite literally to be seen. Linked to the "objective optical order" heralded by the artistic theory and practice of the Italian Quattrocento, Cartesian perspectivalism is characterized as "a lone eye looking through a peephole at the scene in front of it ... static, unblinking, and fixated" (6, 7). The lone quality of this observing eye and its relation to an ordered exterior reiterates the scenario of observation within the classical episteme where vision constituted itself, in a feat of emotional withdrawal and bodily repression, at the radiating edge of the monocular eye. As Jay says, Cartesian perspectivalism was "in league with a scientific world view that no longer hermeneutically read the world as a divine text, but rather saw it as situated in a mathematically regular spatio-temporal order filled with natural objects that could only be observed from without by the dispassionate eye of the neutral researcher" (9).
The image of the peephole that Jay uses to describe the neutral moment of observation is a variation on what, by the Renaissance, had been known for hundreds of years: light passing through a small hole into an enclosed, unlighted space would cast an inverted image on the wall opposite the hole. As Jonathan Crary discusses, the representational relations underlying this phenomenon served not only as a central figuration of visual relations from the late Renaissance to the early nineteenth century, but were technologized in various instruments of observation sharing the same name: camera obscura. As an instrument "within an arrangement of technical and cultural practices," the camera obscura guaranteed for "scientists or artists, empiricists or rationalists ... access to an objective truth about the world" ("Modernizing Vision" 31). In tracing the dynamics of the camera obscura structure of vision, Crary significantly delineates the kind of epistemic break posited by Foucault in the early nineteenth century, where the disembodied vision of the classical episteme gave way to organicity and the study of the body was wrenched (however incompletely) from the rationalized visibilities of Cartesianism. But prior to this moment, as Crary notes, the Cartesian paradigm, for at least two centuries, "stood as model ... of how observation leads to truthful inferences about the world" (Techniques of the Observer 29).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from American Anatomies by Robyn Wiegman. Copyright © 1995 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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