Skins, Tattoos, and Susceptibility Author(S): Anne Anlin Cheng Source: Representations, Vol

Home , Adolf Loos

Skins, Tattoos, and Susceptibility Author(s): Anne Anlin Cheng Source: Representations, Vol. 108, No. 1 (Fall 2009), pp. 98-119 Published by: University of California Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/rep.2009.108.1.98 . Accessed: 23/03/2014 18:21

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

University of California Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Representations.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 128.83.63.20 on Sun, 23 Mar 2014 18:21:12 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions REP108_05 9/17/09 11:27 AM Page 98

ANNE ANLIN CHENG

Skins, Tattoos, and Susceptibility

Why should modern architects who abhor ornamentation, tattoos, and other sensual markings choose to think about the surfaces of their buildings as “skins”? What follows is a story about a forefather of modern European architecture, a black burlesque star, and their mutual romance over skin and cladding. This is also a story about how we read what is on the surface. Before we enter the unexpected conversation between Josephine Baker and Adolf Loos—which reveals a passionate dialogue between the skins of raced bodies and modern buildings—let us prepare ourselves by noting the primacy of surface and the heuristic challenges that accompany it in the early twentieth century, a preoccupation observable in philosophy, literature, art, and science. Even at a quick glance, we see that a fixation with surface serves as a cornerstone for a host of modernist innovations in a variety of disciplines: in literature, think of Oscar Wilde’s turn to superficiality and Virginia Woolf’s description of life as “a semi-transparent envelope”; in art, of the trajectory from Cezanne’s planar surfaces to Cubism to Andy Warhol’s quip, “If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface”; in architecture, of the continuity from Le Corbusier’s blank white walls to the “surface talk” that dominates architectural debates today; in science, of the accelerated development of scopic technology and the birth of what Hugh Kenner calls “transparent technology”; and, finally, even in psychoanalysis, of the reputed shift in Sigmund Freud’s approach to deciphering trauma from an “excavating archeology” to a “surface archeology.” Of course it can be said that all these shifts are not really moves to the surface but in fact reconfirm the surface-depth binary (for instance, by reproducing the surface as essence). Yet these engagements, even flirtations, with the surface have also led to profound reimaginings of the relationship between interiority and exteriority, between essence and covering. These imaginings have in turn impacted the history of how racialized skin is seen, read, and (de)valued. So what can surface (or skin) be or do if it is not just a cover?

ABSTRACT This essay tells the story of the performer Josephine Baker and the architect Adolf Loos as a way to track an unexpectedly intimate dialogue between the making of the so-called “denuded modern surface” and the spectacle of black skin at the turn of the twentieth century. This connection in turn compels a reconsideration of the way we read (as) modern subjects. / R EPRESENTATIONS 108. Fall 2009 © The Regents of the University of California. ISSN 0734–6018, electronic ISSN 1533–855X, pages 98–119. All rights reserved. Direct requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content to the University of California Press at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI:10.1525/ 98 rep.2009.108.1.98.

This content downloaded from 128.83.63.20 on Sun, 23 Mar 2014 18:21:12 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions REP108_05 9/17/09 11:27 AM Page 99

To answer this question, we have to overcome two conditions in contemporary critical practice: first, a philosophic history that perceives the visual as deceptive; second, an epistemological history that thrives on a hermeneutics of suspicion. As Martin Jay has demonstrated, although Western culture has long been thought to be highly ocular-centric, its philosophical tradition, from Plato to Lacan, has in fact harbored a deep suspicion, even denigration, of the realm of the visual and, by implications, the superficial.1 Today the moral economy of the visual continues to exert its pull. Especially when it comes to representations of women and racial minorities, the visual is almost always negatively inflected and is usually seen as a tool of commodifi- cation and objectification. And where the visual does get recuperated by liberal rhetoric, this recuperation seems limited to gestures of idealization or authentication. But neither vilification nor veneration can adequately address the phenomenological, social, and psychical contradictions inhering in what it means to be visible, especially for a subject at once all-too-seen and not seen at all. There is a similar sense of limitation in contemporary critical practice focused on critiques of power, whereby the procedure of symptomatic reading, driven by a hermeneutics of suspicion aimed at exposing ideology, has ended up producing entrenched ideologies of its own. In his essay “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” Bruno Latour tells us that a hermeneutics of nothing but suspicion has led us to the death of “the critical spirit.” 2 He con- tends that, in the eagerness to expose hidden ideological contents, contemporary criticism has replaced iconoclasm with more iconoclasm, reconstituting the critic as the source of epistemological mastery who, in his words, “cease- lessly transform[s] the whole rest of the world into naïve believers, into fetishists, into hapless victims of domination” (243). Meanwhile, on the other side of the fetishistic projections, critics are eager to posit notions of individual agency or truth claims (what Edward Said once called “brute real- ity”) as antidotes.3 Hence, not only is progressive critical authority being shored up and perpetrators vilified, but so is the otherness of the “other” being preserved even as it is decried. In this sense, a hermeneutics of suspicion has accompanied and fueled the discourse of identity politics. This paradox of recognition touches even, or especially, those racialized intellectuals engaged in the construction of counternarratives that are sometimes narratives of self-identification in the service of the production of academic knowledge. When Henry Yu reminds us that “the ethnographic imagination lay in making a place seem strange and then gradually replac- ing the confusion with knowledge that made the place and the people seem familiar enough to be understandable and perhaps even admirable,” we are compelled to ask whether race and ethnic scholars are free from the sway of the ethnographic imagination.4 Indeed, if reification and objectification are

Skins, Tattoos, and Susceptibility 99

This content downloaded from 128.83.63.20 on Sun, 23 Mar 2014 18:21:12 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions REP108_05 9/17/09 11:27 AM Page 100

the dangers of paying too lavish an attention to difference, then we must remind ourselves that the liberal gesture is not free from the domain of the fetish and is not itself symptom free. I do not raise these issues as a critique of, or an explanation for, the double consciousness built into the critical stance of the racialized intellectual in race studies. Rather, I am interested in confronting this duality in order to explore how our methods might be revised so as to acknowledge both this investment and the double-edged nature of recognition. For confronting the unseemly enjoyment of others invariably brings—or ought to bring—one face to face with the ethical limits of one’s own pleasures. In spite of our cultivated impatience with identity politics and atten- dant notions of essentialism, those of us working in a field or fields orga- nized under identificatory rubrics continue to engage with identity politics and its irresolvable contradiction: the fact that it both offers a vital means of individual and communal affirmation and also represents a persistent mode of limitation and reinscription. This is why identity-driven fields of inquiry have acquired institutional recognition in the last fifty years and continued to suffer from what Hazel Carby calls “cultural apartheid” as well.5 We might say that this paradoxical state of affairs is the result of larger ongoing institutional and cultural discrimination, which it certainly may be, but if the mission of these fields has been to battle that marginal- ization, then we must confront the prospect that the achievement of disci- plinary status has not done the work it was meant to do.6 It is not that I no longer believe in symptoms or their potential to signify, but rather that I question whether we might imagine, in the future of humanist critical practices, a hermeneutics beyond suspicion. When it comes to the history of prejudice and discrimination, I am less concerned than Latour is that reading for symptoms might produce, in his words, “illusions of prejudice” where there are none, but I do take to heart his insight that all this reading- for-what-is-underneath has produced a stable object/subject (reader/text) dyad that not only is illusory but also has blinded us to what might be written on the surface—a surface, furthermore, that may have more to yield than identity categories. All of this may sound like an odd line of inquiry coming from someone trained in psychoanalytic thinking, but the symptomatic Freud has never seemed as intriguing to me as the susceptible Freud. That is to say, in opening up the radical indeterminacy of human desires and subjectivity, the psychoanalysis that interests me attends to, rather than shuts down, the flexibility and receptiveness of the subject and object gripped in narratives of power. When it comes to a phenomenon such as Primitivist Modernism, for instance, the ideological suspects—imperialism, colonial culpability, white racism, chauvinism—are far from new. What remains vexing in the critique

100 R EPRESENTATIONS

This content downloaded from 128.83.63.20 on Sun, 23 Mar 2014 18:21:12 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions REP108_05 9/17/09 11:27 AM Page 101

of power and what continues to grip our eyes and minds, however, are the challenges presented by what I call visual pleasure in the contaminated zone: how to read those murky moments of contamination when reification and recognition fuse, when conditions of subjecthood and objecthood merge, when the fetishist savors his or her own vertiginous intimacy with the dreamed object and vice versa. In speaking of Josephine Baker and the negrophilia that swept Europe in the 1920s, the poet and novelist Ivan Goll observed in 1926: “But is the Negro in need of us, or are we not sooner in need of her?”7 There can hardly be a more succinct self-diagnosis of Euro- pean Primitivism’s need for and projection of the “racial other.” Indeed, when it comes to a phenomenon like Primitivist Modernism, what continues to invite reading is not colonial ideology’s repressed content but its expressiveness. To read this expressiveness, then, presents not so much a challenge of excavation as of attention. What would it mean to take that “need for the other” seriously? And what would it mean to understand the “racial other” as also needing otherness? One of the reasons I am so invested in the question of modern surface has to do with its intimate relationship to the visualization of racialized skin in the twentieth century. The European modernist aesthetic history of “surface” (that which covers and houses bodies) and the philosophic discourse about “interiority” (that which has been privileged as recessed and essential) provide the very terms on which modern racial legibility in the West, what Frantz Fanon calls the “epidermalization of inferior- ity,” is limned.8 But the relationship between the dress of civilization and the “fact of blackness” may signal something other than antagonism or disavowal. The perennial opposition between what is open and naked versus what is veiled and hidden has been as important to the racist imagination as it has to the critical intervention designed to decode it. For the racist, nakedness signals rawness, animality, dumb flesh and is repeatedly invoked, socially and legally, as the sign of the inhuman and the other. For the critical race theorist, that nakedness is deconstructed as an entirely socialized and juridicized concept yet nonetheless reproduced as that which irreducibly indexes skin’s visual legibility: “Look, a Negro!” (Fanon).9 What happens when we challenge the most readily available terms for describing the body fixed by that racist injunction? Sometimes it is not a question of what the visible hides but how it is that we have failed to see certain things on its surface. This essay does not (and does not wish to) dictate a method of reading. Instead, it attempts to enact a mode of reading called for by the inchoative communion between its objects of analysis. I propose that re-approaching Primitivist Modernism compels what might be called a hermeneutics of susceptibility, rather than suspicion. By this I mean a reading practice that is willing to follow, rather

Skins, Tattoos, and Susceptibility 101

This content downloaded from 128.83.63.20 on Sun, 23 Mar 2014 18:21:12 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions REP108_05 9/17/09 11:27 AM Page 102

than suppress, the wayward life of the subject and object in dynamic inter- face. Confronting these sites and sights of visual pleasures and exchanges has meant that we, too, have had to read promiscuously: to step outside of the moral economies of the visual, the categorical, and the critical; to be led by and attend to what the “objects” have to teach us. In a way, that is what the modernists did—and here I include both the subjects and objects of Primitivist Modernism. Alongside acts of greed, misrecognition, and bor- rowing, they also immersed themselves in skins not their own and, through that inhabitation, constructed themselves as imagined subjects: a mutual pedagogy of erotics.

Fabricated Nakedness and Dreamed Coverings

In his 1898 essay “The Principle of Cladding,” Adolf Loos (1870– 1933), one of the founding fathers of modern architecture and a Viennese contemporary of Freud, attributes the origin of architecture not to structure or solid material, as might be expected, but to mobile surfaces: fabric, even skin. He writes: In the beginning was cladding [Bekleidung]. . . . The covering is the oldest architectural detail. Originally it was made out of animal skins or textile products. This meaning of the word [Decke] is still known today in the German languages. Then the covering had to be put up somewhere if it were to afford enough shelter. . . . Thus the walls were added. . . . [But] cladding is even older than structure.10

In this account, walls are of secondary concern and really come into being as an afterthought. Loos explicitly takes his ideas about the primacy of cladding from the German historian and architect Gottfried Semper, who believed that textile was the primary stimulus for all figuration in both architecture and art and considered the first art to be the human adornment of the body on skin, beginning with tattoos and extending to clothing.11 This preoccupation with primitive cladding, however, will prove to be something of a theoretical conundrum when Loos develops an allergy to primitive arts, especially the tattoo. In his other most well-known essay, pithily titled “Ornament and Crime” (1908), Loos summarily dismisses ornamentation in architectural practice. Labeling the nineteenth-century Secessionists’ penchant for architectural covering useless, pathological, degenerate, and criminal, Loos compares such preferences to “the [childish and amoral] tattoos of the Papuan.”12 The march of progress is thus equated with the sup- pression and erasure of erotic material excess, deemed to be the exclusive and natural domains of sexual and savage primitives, such as (in Loos’s words) “negroes, Arabs, rural peasants,” and, of course, “women and children” (101).

102 R EPRESENTATIONS

This content downloaded from 128.83.63.20 on Sun, 23 Mar 2014 18:21:12 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions REP108_05 9/17/09 11:27 AM Page 103

“Ornament and Crime” stands as a foundational text in the development of modern architectural theory, providing the basis for a long trajectory of modernist preoccupation with the idea of clean surfaces, culminating in Le Corbusier’s (Charles-Edouard Jeanneret-Gris) codified call for a coat of opaque whitewash on practically everything: the Law of Ripolin.13 These ver- sions of architectural anthropology bear close resemblance to Freud’s notion of human development and to its conflation of ontogeny and phy- logeny.14 For Freud, Loos, and, half a generation later, Le Corbusier, “man” becomes civilized—and his surroundings modernized—by renouncing primitive proclivities. The discourse of the “pure” modern surface thus produces a nexus of metonymic meanings—purity, cleanliness, simplicity, anonymity, masculinity, civilization, technology, intellectual abstractism—that are set off against notions of excessive adornment, inarticulate sensuality, femininity, backwardness. To this day, we uphold some of the most basic tenets of this ideal in our celebration of the “tasteful” (in our language, clothing, and everyday objects) as the sleek, the understated, and the unadorned. Scholars have observed the active part that gender plays in the history of modern aesthetic theory and the making of the modern denuded surface. In Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine, Naomi Schor addresses the key role of gender in the conceptualization of the modern surface as the culmination of aesthetic idealism. She in fact cites Loos as a prime example of the modern philosophic rejection of the feminized ornamental detail.15 In White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture, Mark Wigley also underscores the critical and fraught conversation with femininity in the history of the making of the modern white wall.16 What has been less noted are the ways in which race, too, has written its indelible traces on those modern surfaces. The history of idealist aesthetics, exempli- fied by the nonornamental clean white surface, is a history not only of sexual difference, as Schor and Wigley demonstrate, but also of racial difference. It is also, I believe, a history that foregrounds the failure, not the triumph, of these differences. As we have started to see, the racial fetish, metonymized as animal or Papuan skin in Loos’s work, provides the pivot on which modernist aesthetic values turn: essence versus veneer, plainness versus excess, utility versus waste, taste versus vulgarity. Yet that pivot—that skin—may be more expres- sive and more contagiously productive than this schema suggests. Although Loos’s buildings are known for their sparse and anonymous facades, the interiors often reveal a shamelessly extravagant penchant for the sensual delights of textile coverings, hangings, and other extraneous details. In 1913, Loos designed an extraordinary bedroom for his wife, Lina Loos (fig. 1).17 The entire room, including floor, walls, and furniture, is covered by fur and silk: a uterine dream of inverted animal skin.

Skins, Tattoos, and Susceptibility 103

This content downloaded from 128.83.63.20 on Sun, 23 Mar 2014 18:21:12 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions REP108_05 9/17/09 11:27 AM Page 104

FIGURE 1. Adolf Loos, Lina’s Bedroom, 1903. Courtesy of Albertina Museum of Vienna, ALA 2389.

Critics have mapped this contradictory desire in Loos onto a distinct split between (masculine and impassive) exteriors and (feminized and sensuous) interiors. As Alan Colquhoun puts it: Loos was making a conscious analogy with modern urban man, whose standardized dress conceals his personality and protects him from the stress of the modern metropolis. But, in Loos’s houses, once he has penetrated the external wall, this “man of nerves” is enmeshed in a “feminine” and sensuous complexity, full of those residues of cultural memory and association that have been banished from the building’s exterior.18

This reading is consistent with the ideas of sociologist Georg Simmel, whom Loos had read and who argued that the modern metropolis and its anonymous architecture are designed to protect men.19 Yet, looking at this room, one wonders whether the distinction between interiority and exteriority— as well as between femininity and masculinity—may not be as clean as critics (or Loos) would prefer. Loos explicitly named this room “Lina’s Room,” as if to underscore his separation from this feminized space; yet his own unspoken presence (and

104 R EPRESENTATIONS

This content downloaded from 128.83.63.20 on Sun, 23 Mar 2014 18:21:12 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions REP108_05 9/17/09 11:27 AM Page 105

presumably enjoyment) in that room surely gestures to a deeper intimacy with that uterine space. Thus, on the one hand, this room exemplifies the womblike nature of Loos’s architecture; as José Quetglas once prescribed: “All the architecture of Loos can be explained as the envelope of a body.”20 On the other hand, this “womb” is curiously inverted and ruptured, being laid over with displaced skins. (Is this room lush or raw?) Beatriz Colomina, who has produced some of the most intriguing readings of Loos’s work, has suggested that Loos’s interiors are in fact more theatrical than comforting, that they enact a tension between voyeurism and self-exposure.21 Let us add to that insight and observe that this tension is not only an “interior” tension but also one that takes place on Loosian surfaces of various kinds, disrupting the gender and racial segregation—as well as the structure-versus-ornament distinction—that rely on the schema of impassive outside and passionate inside. For what are the functions of those furs? Are they decoration or cladding? Is this room/womb designed to wrap around or stand in for the (female or male) body? We are encountering a, if not the, central tension in Loos’s theoretical writing: the heuristic problem of distinguishing unnecessary ornamentation from essential cladding. With Lina’s Room, that which is decorative appears also to be structural. And the feminized and the feral are not only not repressed but also spectacularly invoked. If we see the Loosian villa as an analogy for man himself, then this house is something of a double cross-dresser: a vulnerable man wearing his animalized femininity inside-out, which is in turn re-encased by the mask of impassive masculinity. Colquhoun’s phrase “man of nerves” now takes on a teasing doubleness: nerves of steel or exposed nerves? The problem, as we begin to suspect, is that the facade may not have banished those “residues of cultural memory” so much as reproduced them, nor has interiority been fully restrained from enacting surface activity. Modern architecture may in fact be quite naked—not in the senses of purity or transparency, as is traditionally claimed, but in the very material sense that it embodies a profound nostalgia for, if not a downright imitation of, the lost, originary, naked skin that has been renounced. Thus at the birth of modern plastic arts in the age of mechanical reproduction, the invention and sanctification of the newly minted, denuded modern surface itself bears the incrustations of a layered history of the imaginary and material presence of “primitive skin.”

Housing Baker, Dressing Loos

In 1926, a middle-aged Loos met and designed a house for the icon of European Primitivism, the then young but already internationally celebrated Josephine Baker.22 The house was never built, but the design

Skins, Tattoos, and Susceptibility 105

This content downloaded from 128.83.63.20 on Sun, 23 Mar 2014 18:21:12 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions REP108_05 9/17/09 11:27 AM Page 106

FIGURE 2. Model of the Josephine Baker House by Adolf Loos. Photo: M. Gerlach, Jr., c. 1930. Courtesy of Albertina Museum of Vienna, ALA 3145.

remained notable in architectural history. The striking facade features alter- nating thirty-centimeter bands of black and white marble (fig. 2). In architectural criticism, this facade has repeatedly been described as “tattooed” or erotically marked.23 This rather idiosyncratic designation only makes sense when one understands it as a deliberate allusion to Loos’s own references to tattoos, with the implication that Loos, in designing for the “primitive” Baker, has lapsed into the very ornamentation that he abhors. Indeed, numerous commentaries about the Baker House have found this design to be unusual in Loos’s repertoire and have repeatedly described it without much critical reflection as “primitive,” “exotic,” or “African.”24 The claim suggests that the surface of the Baker House, instead of being blank, is markedly decorated and attention-drawing, hence feminized and regressive. The black- and-white pattern is also thought to mimic zebra stripes, a popular and stylized primitivist motif. Colomina’s critical studies of Loos have sparked renewed contemporary interest in the architect, leading to a body of scholarship that traces, from different vantage points, his ideological investment in the masculinization of architecture and this particular design’s fantasies about animalized femininity in the service of that interest. The possibility of Loos’s masculinist and

106 R EPRESENTATIONS

This content downloaded from 128.83.63.20 on Sun, 23 Mar 2014 18:21:12 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions REP108_05 9/17/09 11:27 AM Page 107

primitivist desires, therefore, needs no reiteration. But I propose that our reading should not stop here. The fact of Loos’s colonial desires should not blind us to the complications that they generate (for both the subject and object of Primitivism) or to the potential presence of other ghosts in the machine. To decode the Baker House as solely a “prurient setting” for imperial desire is to miss the fundamental and philosophic intimacy between modernity and nostalgia that structures the very relationship between black skin and modern surface that we have been tracing.25 Beyond seeing how the Baker House attempts to read Baker, might we not also see how Baker and her iconography in turn read the house? Can Baker’s skin recode what is written on the Baker House? To answer these questions, we have to revisit Baker’s own famed nakedness. Nudity and exposure were, of course, central themes in her iconography and theatrical repertoire. It is almost universally agreed, by conservatives and radical feminists alike, that Baker exemplifies the history of pseudosci- entific, ethnographic display of racial difference in the nineteenth century.26 But Baker-nudity is a peculiar business. When one looks at its surface, what one finds is not what one expects. She was known for her primitive femininity, yet on the night of her explosive debut at the Thêatre des Champs- Elysées in 1925, members of the Parisian audience were overwhelmed with both adulation and repulsion; moreover, they seemed terribly confused.27 The next morning, the Parisian papers puzzled over what exactly was seen: “Was she horrible, delicious? Black, white? . . . Woman, other? . . . Dancer, fugitive?”28 And the mystery did not abate. A year later, Vanity Fair continued the riddle with a meditation by e. e. cummings: “[She was] a creature neither infrahuman nor superhuman . . . a mysterious unkillable Some- thing.”29 Colonial ambivalence and disavowal would certainly explain the passions and contradiction of this reception but not the particular terms of its incoherence, nor do they fully account for this bewilderment at this particular time in history. After almost three centuries of European incursion into the “Dark Continent,” over six decades after the Emancipation Procla- mation in the United States, and a quarter of a century into the birth of artistic and literary Modernism (which had made much use of its attraction to so-called African imports), what we find at this theatrical enactment of the two most rehearsed sites of European conquest—the plantation and the jungle—is a moment of profound consternation. Moreover, it seems odd that this consternation, even if exaggerated or disingenuous, should be nar- rated specifically as a confusion of categories—categories of race, gender, and the human, to which imperial history ought to have lent some confi- dence, or at least the fantasy of certitude. We are seeing not the affirmation or denial of Primitivist Modernism but the failure of its own terms to inscribe its passions.

Skins, Tattoos, and Susceptibility 107

This content downloaded from 128.83.63.20 on Sun, 23 Mar 2014 18:21:12 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions REP108_05 9/23/09 11:35 AM Page 108

FIGURE 3. Baker, Paris. Photo: George Hoyningen- Huene. Courtesy Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

Indeed, the Baker myth has always generated more visual and political conundrum than current accounts of her can accommodate. As noted, she was (in)famous for exploiting her nudity, yet key moments of exposure in her films and photography are often impeded by literal and symbolic veils; that is, the moments when she gets exposed are also often moments in which she gets covered in everything from coal to flour to feathers. And in the sizeable archive of her studio photographs, Baker’s nakedness never stands alone but is invariably accompanied by two recurring tropes: shimmery gold cloth and animal skin (figs. 3, 4). At a quick glance, one sees the expected Primitivist conflation between animalism and racialized female sexuality. But looking longer, the viewer might notice how the lighting and the mise-en-scène work to conflate the different registers of surface planes. Baker’s black, airbrushed,

108 R EPRESENTATIONS

This content downloaded from 128.83.63.20 on Sun, 23 Mar 2014 18:21:12 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions REP108_05 9/23/09 11:35 AM Page 109

FIGURE 4. Baker, Studio D’Ora, Paris. Courtesy Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

and seemingly flawless skin, always greased and polished to a shiny, laminated gloss, would repeat itself in her gleaming, sleek hair, which, in turn, would echo the shimmery lamé seemingly pouring out of her body. The splendid fall of silk would recover itself in the glimmering slice of thigh. The distinction between the organic and the synthetic blurs, rendering Baker’s skin as prop, costume, and surrogate. Are we looking at ornamentation or cladding? The effect I am describing has to do with what Bill Brown calls the “indeter- minate ontology” of modern objects, the inability to fully separate the ani- mate from the inanimate.30 Thus Baker appears in these photographs as sculptural rather than fleshly, cut rather than voluptuous. Her outlined figure

Skins, Tattoos, and Susceptibility 109

This content downloaded from 128.83.63.20 on Sun, 23 Mar 2014 18:21:12 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions REP108_05 9/17/09 11:27 AM Page 110

appears to be stamped on the photographic surface with the same sculptural intent as the gold cloth, the shadows, and other extra skins—in short, producing an oscillation between portrait and still life. We can read this “ontological democratization,” to borrow once again from Bill Brown, as another instance of the objectification of Baker, and my task here is not to deny or absolve that fact but to point out how that very process of objectification—even as it takes subjectivity from her—also invests the objects around her with subjectivity, which in turn provides a kind of cloak for her nakedness.31 In short, objectification can be a kind of clothing, too. It is thus aptly within the realm of photography that we see most powerfully how Baker iconography is built on the combination of the corporeal and the synthetic, a constant flirtation between artificial surfaces and organic skins. Baker iconography itself constantly invokes the slippage between skin and cloth, the real and the conceptual, the fixed and the itinerant. What makes Baker a particularly magnetic and intellectually stirring figure for modernists (especially architects) is not so much her sculptural quality in the tribal-art-object sense,32 but precisely her mobile and vibrant play with “skin” as cladding: a cover that is at once itinerant (transferable and borrowable) and inchoative (in the process of becoming). I am trying to suggest, perhaps counterintuitively, that it may be the plasticity of Baker imagery that renders it most resistant to consumption. That is, given that the most politically troubling aspect of Baker’s visual legacy has been its presumed acquiescence to the objectification of the racialized, female body, we may consider how Baker’s ability to meld into surfaces may paradoxically allow her image to offer a critique of misogynist and racist logic. It may even offer a critique of—or at least an alternative response to— the discourse of flesh designed to rescue that captive body from that history of objectification. Feminists and race critics have been invested in recovering the flesh that has been made into a “thing” and then devastated. If the captive black female body has provided a rich source of irresistible and destructive sensuality, turn- ing that body into a “thing” (being for the captor), then “flesh” with all its material fissures, tears, scars, and ruptures serves as a crucial and ethical reminder of the injuries inflicted on that body.33 I am alluding liberally to the work of Hortense Spillers here because it offers one of the most important and cogent feminist interventions into the discourse of the body as it inter- sects with the history of the black female body. For Spillers, this violent writing on the body reads like a tattoo: “These undecipherable markings on the captive body render a kind of hieroglyphics of the flesh whose severe disjunc- tures come to be hidden to the cultural seeing by skin color” (61). But what I want to explore are the ways in which Baker, especially in these images, suggests and enacts a different kind of bodily thing and a different kind of

110 R EPRESENTATIONS

This content downloaded from 128.83.63.20 on Sun, 23 Mar 2014 18:21:12 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions REP108_05 9/17/09 11:27 AM Page 111

inscription on the skin. For another noticeable aspect of these supposedly primitive images of Baker is how extravagantly flawless and unmarked her polished skin is. Her molten skin appears impervious not only to the kind of primitive tattoo detailed by Loos but also to the kind of marking identified by Spillers. This is, of course, not to say that Baker as a person and performer has not suffered racial markings but to recognize that her nakedness in performance might work to refute or even suture those ruptures. More crucially, it is a “healing” that draws not from some essentialized notion of prediscursive flesh but from the vocabulary, the cladding, of the plastic sense that we have been describing. It is the plastic sense lent to her figuration that turns her from a body suffering from or disguising the “hieroglyphics of the flesh” into a figure that stands resistant to them. In short, what renders these images not quite what Spillers calls “pornotroping” (60) is their sealedness. Let us then return to the facade of the Baker House, which begins to look less like an inscription about Baker than an inscription that aims to be like Baker. To begin with, we can reasonably claim that the facade is not tattooed at all. The smooth marble bears no marking, and the costly material’s presumed noble quality seems more impassive than regressive. The black and white colors, ingrained into the load-bearing marble, are decorative but not ornamental in the applied sense. Are we seeing ornament or cladding? And are we seeing black on white or white on black? In a sense, the aesthetic practice of the Baker House facade shares the logic of a similar logic of Baker photography: a recursion between objecthood and subjecthood, between background and foreground. If Baker’s theatricalized nakedness offers a complex business about how difficult it is to be naked, then so does the face of this house, designed to showcase this famous woman, itself embody a crisis about seeing—more accurately, a crisis about how to see. Moreover, these vertiginous zebra stripes bear a host of plastic and mobile significations. On the one hand, the zebra stripes lead us directly to a network of expected associations among animality, Primitivism, and criminality rehearsed well into the nineteenth century. For Loos, criminality and its outward sign, the tattoo, signify specifically a breach against civilization, progress, and the efficiency of mechanical production. This connection between racial degeneracy, criminality, and telltale marking was widespread in the nineteenth century. The anatomist-craniometrician Cesare Lombroso famously calls the criminal an “atavistic being who reproduces in his person the fero- cious instincts of primitive humanity and the inferior animal.”34 The notion of criminality is thus deeply tied to ideals of modern society and the civilization that it enforces, and the striped pattern connotes the outward signs of both primitive degeneracy and its enslavement or bondage by civil law. On the other hand, the zebra stripes may be said to embody the longing, rather than the opposition, between criminality and civilization, between brute

Skins, Tattoos, and Susceptibility 111

This content downloaded from 128.83.63.20 on Sun, 23 Mar 2014 18:21:12 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions REP108_05 9/17/09 11:27 AM Page 112

animality and refined, processed humanity. For if the animal has in the history of Western intellectual thought been a category for contrasting against and defining the category of the human, then we must note that the motif of the zebra stripe, a stylistic synecdoche for animal skin itself, surprisingly, also draws from the ideal of abstract mechanization and its implicit celebration of ideal humanity. That is, the zebra stripes also typify the regularized, repetitive, geometric pattern of the machine age. It is worth remembering that in the early twentieth century the standardization required by mechanical reproduction, rather than being thought of as antihumanist or a threat, was seen to reconcile modernity with classical humanism. (Think of Walter Gropius’s campaign for standardization and anonymous collectivity in the thirties, as well as the new functionalism that revolutionizes the fashion industry at the turn of the century. This is also the ideological backdrop for what J. C. Flugel in 1930 calls modern men’s renunciation of style, paving the road for the popularization of uniform clothing that serves as the ideological foundations for commercial ventures such as the Gaps and Banana Republics of today.)35 Loos himself employed the black and white geometric pattern in several of his projects, as gestures intended to highlight stark simplicity in direct refutation of Viennese opulence.36 Hence, the zebra pattern may be said to signal, rather than con- trast with, the very idea of modernist abstraction. But now, in the light of our discussion, we have to add a third term: that this harmony between machine and human in fact turns on the necessary and mediating presence of the animal, the zebra (and, I would suggest, the racialized and feminized other). On the striped facade of the Baker House, Modernism, machine, animal, and atavistic woman converge, not in opposition but in philosophical continuity.37 The animal, the human, and the mechanical—the three foundational, distinctive categories that underpin Modernism—themselves turn out to provide the preconditions for their distinction from each other, in a series of disavowals that are, however, perfectly legible on the surface. In short, the categories of the animal, the human, and the machine, while ideologically segregated, are stylistically identical. It is thus at the level of style—the most apparent of styles—that we can wit- ness the profound contact between Modernism and its others. What the Baker portrayal of naked, racialized femininity shares with the facade of the Baker House in the end is not only the ambivalent vocabulary of Primitivism but also the historical, social, aesthetic, and philosophical problem of how to fashion skin/surface, how to naturalize that which has been—can only be—funda- mentally tailored or stylized. The “skin” of the Baker House reveals that there is no such thing as a naked house just as there can never be a truly naked body. To follow the dressing of this denuded surface is to reconceptualize Mod- ernism’s monumentality and its implied project of self-mastery. If one narra- tive about modern architecture is that it enacts temporal resistance—that is,

112 R EPRESENTATIONS

This content downloaded from 128.83.63.20 on Sun, 23 Mar 2014 18:21:12 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions REP108_05 9/23/09 12:51 PM Page 113

modern architecture responds to modernity’s acceleration and change by forging an idealist aesthetics as a means of battling the caprice of time and fashion—then Loos’s own productions of “feminine” and “racialized” surfaces (fur, finely grained marble, water) in effect write against such conserva- tion. The facade of the Baker House is tattooed, not because it bears the symptom of masculinist desire, but because it wears the very traces of its struggle, perhaps even its renunciation. It is on the surface of the Baker House that Loos’s lifelong conflict between the call of cladding and ornamentation—between masculinized architecture and feminized, primitive sensuality—comes to its most striking articulation. Around the same time that Loos was designing this house, an intriguing photograph of Baker was taken in Paris (fig. 5). In this image, Baker sports a

Skins, Tattoos, and Susceptibility 113

This content downloaded from 128.83.63.20 on Sun, 23 Mar 2014 18:21:12 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions REP108_05 9/17/09 11:27 AM Page 114

distinctively modern dress in a black and white abstract geometric pattern, with matching coat: pattern on pattern, stripes on stripes. For the French press then, and for some critics today, this image symbolizes Baker’s sophis- tication and triumph against her “jungle” image.38 For us, however, it is impossible not to see the complex web of meanings interwoven into the surface (and implied body) of that suit. Indeed, by the twenties and thirties, such zebra patterns of black and white had come to embody the sign for modern simplicity, dramatizing the tautology of civilization and its imagined prehistories. In the end, did Loos design this house in order to simulate Baker’s body, whether in consumption or identification? Or has that already simulated body preempted the house by wearing it?

The Skinny

The visual culture surrounding the racialized female body, a culture understood to be one of the most pernicious examples of the masculinist colonial imagination, may tell alternative stories about the history of power, shame, and exhibition. We might begin to locate these alternative stories, not only by unearthing hidden ideology, but also by attending to those stories’ utterances left on the surfaces of black bodies and white buildings. The crystallization of “surface” as an aesthetic ideal at the birth of the twentieth century holds profound philosophic and material connec- tions to (not just disavowals of) the violent and dysphoric history of racialized, ruptured skin. Yes, the taking in of the other in order to consolidate the self has obviously invidious potentials, but it is also the very moment when an unlikely and radical receptivity opens up, what I elsewhere called the melancholic logic of racial identification.39 Trying to house and stage Baker’s body led Loos to an intricate conceptual engagement with the very notion of abstraction, a confrontation that pushes back on the pressure points in his own theoretical work and high- lights the intricacies and contradictions inhering in ideas of racial and sexual surfaces. Offering up her “primitive nakedness” to the world, Baker wraps herself with an early twentieth-century imagination about, and rhetoric of, plasticity and cladding. In short, the story of modern abstraction, so often thought to be about purification, in fact displays a fantasy of embodiment, and the story of intractable, racialized corporeality turns out to draw from—perhaps even to rely on—the play and pleasures of abstraction. The “body” of Baker is both more and less than the thing that we thought it. And “it” leads us not to the separation of essence and appearance but to an ani- mated relay between epidermal certitude and stylistic vicissitude in the making of racial legibility.

114 R EPRESENTATIONS

This content downloaded from 128.83.63.20 on Sun, 23 Mar 2014 18:21:12 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions REP108_05 9/17/09 11:27 AM Page 115

If, as I have been suggesting, racial contamination provides the precon- dition and expression of modern style itself, then how we read “race” at the site of the most racialized stage both demands that we reconsider what con- stitutes the terms of the visible and alters how we think about the seductions, effects, and materiality of racialized skin on display. Re-approaching Baker has thus dictated what I called a hermeneutics of susceptibility, for it is only in allowing ourselves to remain open to the contaminated intersection of Baker’s and Loos’s fantasies (curious dreams of personhood that derive from inhabiting the skin of the other or the self-as-other) that we can begin to see Primitivist Modernism’s complex realignment of subjecthood and objecthood and also its enduring challenge for contemporary critical practice. In the end, it is not a question of who is the fetishist and who the fetishized, but rather one of how the racist, colonial imagination and its anti- dote share a predicament of embodiment. If anything, the story of Baker and Loos shows us that it is the crisis of visuality—rather than the allocation of visibility, which informs so much of current liberal discourse—that consti- tutes one of the most profound challenges for American democratic recognition today.

Notes

Some of the issues raised in this essay have appeared in different forms in pre- vious essays: “Skin Deep: Josephine Baker and the Colonial Fetish,” Camera Obscura 69, no. 3 (2008): 35–78, and “Psychoanalysis Without Symptoms,” differences 20, no. 1 (2009): 87–101. But it is through Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus’s encouragement that I come to reflect, in a more explicit way, on my own critical practice in my preoccupation with Josephine Baker. I am grateful to both of them for this opportunity to articulate the shifts in my reading practice inspired and demanded by this mercurial figure. 1. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley, 1993). 2. Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry 30, no. 2 (Winter 2004): 225. 3. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, 1973), 5. 4. Henry Yu, Thinking Orientals: Migration, Contact, and Exoticism in Modern America (New York, 2002), 35. 5. Hazel Carby, “Can the Tactics of Cultural Integration Counter the Persistence of Political Apartheid? or, The Multicultural Wars, Part Two,” in Race, Law, and Culture: Reflections on Brown v. Board of Education, ed. Austin Sarat (New York, 1997), 221–28. 6. Twelve years ago, Wendy Brown had already cogently articulated the fundamental challenges and paradoxes of transforming self-reflective critiques of

Skins, Tattoos, and Susceptibility 115

This content downloaded from 128.83.63.20 on Sun, 23 Mar 2014 18:21:12 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions REP108_05 9/17/09 11:27 AM Page 116

power into institutional forms. See her essay “The Impossibility of Women’s Studies,” differences 9, no. 3 (1997): 79–101. 7. Ivan Goll quoted in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, ed. Anton Kaes et al. (Berke- ley, 1994), 559–60. Originally published as “Die Neger erobern Europa,” Die lit- erarische Welt 2 (15 January 1926): 3–4. 8. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York, 1967), 112. 9. Ibid., 109 10. Adolf Loos, “The Principle of Cladding,” in Spoken into the Void: Collected Essays, 1897–1900, trans. Jane O. Newman and John H. Smith (Cambridge, MA, 1982), 66–67. 11. For Semper, the first architectural space is the open pen, made of woven skins and other organic materials, and the first social institution is the open hearth. See Gottfried Semper, The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings, trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Wolfgang Herrmann (Cambridge, 1989); Wolf- gang Herrmann, Gottfried Semper: In Search of Architecture (Cambridge, MA, 1984); and Joseph Rykwert, “Adolf Loos: The New Vision,” in The Necessity of Artifice (New York, 1982), 67–73. 12. Adolf Loos, “Ornament and Crime,” in The Architecture of Adolf Loos: An Arts Council Exhibition (London, 1985), 100. 13. The purifying “Law of Ripolin,” named after an opaque white coat of paint favored by Le Corbusier, alludes to the imperative coat of whitewash that Le Corbusier believed would make people “masters of themselves” by cleansing the home of sentimental kitsch and the “accretions of dead things from the past.” See Le Corbusier, “A Coat of Whitewash; The Law of Ripolin,” in The Dec- orative Art of Today, trans. James I. Dunnett (Cambridge, MA, 1987), 185–92. See also Mark Wigley, White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture (Cambridge, MA, 1995) for a treatise on Le Corbusier’s relationship to color and the gender politics therein. 14. See Sigmund Freud, “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego” (1921), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Woks of Sigmund Freud (SE here- after), trans. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London, 1955), 18:72. Also “Civilization and Its Discontents” (1930/1929), in SE, 21:5–246. While there is no direct evi- dence that Loos read Freud, there is still much to suggest that Loos was acquainted with Freud’s work. Freud was quite visible in the print media beginning soon after the publication of “The Interpretation of Dreams” in 1899; see Marina Tichy and Sylvia Zwettler-Otte, Freud in der Presse: Rezeption Sigmund Freuds und der Psychoanalyse in Österreich 1895–1938 (Vienna, 1999). Freud and Loos also shared common friends, and both published in the Neue Freie Presse, the New York Times of its era and place. Loos would also have seen favorable mention of Freud in Karl Kraus’s journal Die Fackel, where a review of “Three Essays on Sexuality” appeared in 1905. Finally, my gratitude to Leo Lensing for sharing his knowledge of Vienna at the turn of the century and for pointing the way to further research on the social world in which Freud and Loos circu- lated. 15. Naomi Schor, Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine (New York, 2006). 16. Wigley, White Walls, Designer Dresses. 17. Beatriz Colomina, “The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism,” in Sexuality and Space, ed. Beatriz Colomina (Princeton, 1992), 92.

116 R EPRESENTATIONS

This content downloaded from 128.83.63.20 on Sun, 23 Mar 2014 18:21:12 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions REP108_05 9/17/09 11:27 AM Page 117

18. Alan Colquhoun, Modern Architecture (New York, 2002), 82–83. 19. Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903), in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, trans. Kurt Wolff (New York, 1950), 409–24. 20. José Quetglas, “Lo Placentero,” Carrer de la Ciutat 9/10 (January 1980): 2. Quoted and translated by Colomina, “The Split Wall,” 92. 21. Colomina, “The Split Wall,” 94. 22. A copy of the plans for the Baker House can be found in the Adolf Loos Archive in the Albertina Museum of Vienna. 23. Diane Davis in “Signifyin’ Josephine,” Appendx: Culture, Theory, Praxis 4 (1999): 28–45, describes the skin of the Baker House as “fetishized” (34), while Farès el- Dahdah and Stephen Atkinson, in “The Josephine Baker House: For Loos’s Pleasure,” Assemblage 26 (April 1995): 72–87, also identify Loos as a fetishist and explain the “daubing” on the surface of the Baker House as a direct reference to Loos’s writings on tattoos (77). Susan R. Henderson in “Bachelor Culture in the Works of Adolf Loos,” Journal of Architectural Education 55, no. 3 (2002): 125–35, describes that surface as “‘tattooed’ striations” that “express the tribal roots of its patroness” (131). Elana Shapira, “Dressing a Celebrity: Adolf Loos’s House for Josephine Baker,” Studies in the Decorative Arts 11, no. 2 (Spring/Sum- mer 2004): 2–24, likewise links the Baker House facade to Loos’s ideas on criminality and tattoos (6). Finally, Ila Berman also references the connection between this facade and tattoos in “Civilized Planes, Sexual Surfaces, Savage Territories,” Appendx: Culture, Theory, Praxis 4 (1999): 7–27. 24. Ludwig Munz and Gustav Kunstler, Adolf Loos, trans. Harold Meek (London, 1966), 195; Joseph Rykwert, The Necessity of Artifice, 72; Panayotis Tournikiotis, Adolf Loos, trans. Marguerite McGoldrick (New York, 1994), 95. These critics describe the project as “African” without specifying what they mean by that assignation. What is clear is that they reflexively associate the house’s exotic- ness with its proposed client. Contemporary criticism of the Baker House continues this assumption. See Karen Burns, “A House for Josephine Baker,” in Postcolonial Space(s) (New York, 1997), 53–72, as well as Colomina, “The Split Wall.” Finally, the Baker House has also been associated with Orientalism, another strand of colonial projection; see Kim Tanzer, “Baker’s Loos and Loos’s Loss: Architecting the Body,” Center: A Journal for Architecture in America 9 (1995): 76–89. 25. Paul Groenendijk, Adolf Loos: huis voor/house for/maison pour/Haus für Josephine Baker (Rotterdam, 1985), 36. 26. For a large segment of feminist critics, Baker indubitably references the figure of the Venus Hottentot and the history of colonial ethnography. See bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Toronto, 1992); Suzan-Lori Parks, “The Rear End Exists,” Women: A Cultural Review 5, no. 2 (Autumn 1994): 11–17; and T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, “Cinematic Venus in the Africanist Orient,” in Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French (Durham, 1999), 105–18. 27. See Phyllis Rose, Jazz Cleopatra: Josephine Baker in Her Time (New York, 1989), 18–25, and Lynn Haney, Naked at the Feast: The Biography of Josephine Baker (London, 2002), 59–62. 28. Pierre de Régnier, review in Candide (12 November 1925), quoted by Marcel Sauvage, Les Mémoires de Joséphine Baker (Paris, 1927), 11–12. Also quoted without documentation by biographers Jean-Claude Baker and Chris Chase,

Skins, Tattoos, and Susceptibility 117

This content downloaded from 128.83.63.20 on Sun, 23 Mar 2014 18:21:12 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions REP108_05 9/17/09 11:27 AM Page 118

Josephine Baker: The Hungry Heart (New York, 2001), 5; Rose, Jazz Cleopatra, 19; and Haney, Naked at the Feast, 20. 29. e. e. cummings, “Vive la Folie!” Vanity Fair (September 1926): xx. 30. Bill Brown, A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (Chicago, 2003), 137. 31. Ibid., 139. 32. William Rubin’s “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Modern and the Tribal (New York, 1988) and Marianna Torgovnick’s Gone Primitive: Savage Intel- lects, Modern Lives (Chicago, 1991). 33. Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” in The Black Feminist Reader, ed. Joy James and T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting (Boston, 2000), 60. 34. Cesare Lombroso, introduction to Gina Lombroso-Ferrero, Criminal Man (New York, 1911), xxv. See also Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October 39 (Winter 1986): 3–64. 35. How is it that one of America’s most staple retail chains, ubiquitous in almost all malls across the country, should be named after this violent history? Some read- ers will undoubtedly recall the shift in the store’s clothing line in the late eight- ies, when the original colonial nostalgia of the store became less politically correct and less popular, and the company revamped itself and turned into the successful retail chain that it is today by pioneering the concept of an upscale but affordable, androgynous, and uniform style that champions the desirability and elegance of mass-produced clothes. Suddenly, fashion turns from the fetishization of the unique to the fetishization of the ordinary, producing that oxymoronic idea of a signature style that boasts of no signature. In light of the history we are tracing here, it becomes not ironic but revealing that the correc- tion to colonial nostalgia should take the form of a new mass-produced and mass-available sensibility, a new imperialism. 36. Consider the Villa Karma (1904–6); the Steiner Store (1907); the American Bar (or the Kunster Bar, 1908); the Goldman Salatsch House (1911); the Manz Store (1912); the Knize Salon (1913). 37. It is a topic beyond the scope of this paper, but Baker’s dynamic objectness also draws from and speaks back to the philosophic tradition of aligning femininity with machinery in the early twentieth century. She enacts a kind of “body machine” that I would suggest adds a crucially different aspect to the history delineated by critics such as Mark Seltzer, Martha Banta, and Jennifer Fleissner. For a fuller elaboration on this point, see my book Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface, forthcoming from Oxford University Press. 38. Shapira, “Dressing a Celebrity.” 39. Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hid- den Grief (New York, 2000). If The Melancholy of Race can be seen as focused on tracing unseen patterns of grief, then my recent interest in “surfaces” may seem a movement in a wholly different direction. But one of the most gripping aspects of the notion of racial identity for me has always been its recognition of the fundamental instability between subject and object, between performance and essence. As such, my Baker project extends and explores the implications raised by my first book surrounding the challenges of reading a subject who is at once too visible; the difficulties of locating agency in the face of a compromised

118 R EPRESENTATIONS

This content downloaded from 128.83.63.20 on Sun, 23 Mar 2014 18:21:12 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions REP108_05 9/17/09 11:27 AM Page 119

subject; and the critical need to understand the possibilities of what I called at the end of The Melancholy of Race an “ethics of immersion” in the face of melancholic incorporation. Primitivist Modernism seems to me a preeminent example of such immersion; a simply moralistic response would elide all the possibilities of creativity and coercion that in fact operated on both sides of that phenomenon.

Skins, Tattoos, and Susceptibility 119

This content downloaded from 128.83.63.20 on Sun, 23 Mar 2014 18:21:12 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions