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Skins, Tattoos, and Susceptibility Author(S): Anne Anlin Cheng Source: Representations, Vol 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 mod- ern 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, litera- ture, art, and science. Even at a quick glance, we see that a fixation with sur- face 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 psycho- analysis, 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 sur- face 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 mod- ern 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 contem- porary 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 denigra- tion, 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 read- ing, 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, contempo- rary 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 suspi- cion 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 some- times 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 read- ing 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 writ- ten on the surface—a surface, furthermore, that may have more to yield than identity categories.
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