a quarterly of art and culture Issue 28 bones CABINET US $12 Canada $12 UK £7 cabinet Cabinet is a non-profit 501 (c) (3) magazine published by Immaterial Incorpo- 181 Wyckoff Street rated. Our survival is dependent on support from foundations and generous Brooklyn NY 11217 USA individuals. Please consider supporting us at whatever level you can. Contribu- tel + 1 718 222 8434 tions to Cabinet are fully tax-deductible for those who pay taxes to Uncle Sam. fax + 1 718 222 3700 Donations of $25 or more will be acknowledged in the next possible issue, and email [email protected] those above $100 will be acknowledged for four consecutive issues. Checks www.cabinetmagazine.org should be made out to “Cabinet” and sent to our office address. Please mark the envelope, “See? Wishbones do work!” Winter 2007–2008, issue 28 Cabinet wishes to thank the following visionary foundations and individuals Editor-in-chief Sina Najafi for their support of our activities during 2007. Additionally, we will forever be Senior editor Jeffrey Kastner indebted to the extraordinary contribution of the Flora Family Foundation from Editor Christopher Turner 1999 to 2004; without their generous support, this publication would not exist. UK editor Brian Dillon We would also like to thank the Orphiflamme Foundation for a recent generous Managing editor Colby Chamberlain grant and David Walentas/Two Trees for their donation of an editorial office. Associate editor & graphic designer Ryo Manabe Art director Jessica Green Website directors Luke Murphy, Kristofer Widholm, Isaac Overcast, Ryan O’Toole $50,000 Editors-at-large Saul Anton, Mats Bigert, Brian Conley, Christoph Cox, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the $500 or under Jesse Lerner, Jennifer Liese, Frances Richard, Daniel Rosenberg, David Serlin, Visual Arts Monroe Denton, Hugh Raffles, James Debra Singer, Margaret Sundell, Allen S. Weiss, Eyal Weizman, Margaret Siena Wertheim, Gregory Williams, Jay Worthington, Tirdad Zolghadr $25,000 Contributing editors Joe Amrhein, Molly Bleiden, Eric Bunge, Pip Day, Charles The National Endowment for the Arts $250 or under Green, Carl Michael von Hausswolff, Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss, Dejan Krsic, Roxana Greg Allen, Spencer Finch, Tim Par- Marcoci, Phillip Scher, Lytle Shaw, Cecilia Sjöholm, Sven-Olov Wallenstein $15,000 tridge, Adam Rosenblatt & Amanda Editorial assistants Clem Blakemore, Heidi Solander The New York City Department of Levinson, Greg Rowland Cabinet National Librarian Matthew Passmore Cultural Affairs Fly-fishing consultant Joseph Grigely $100 or under Founding editors Brian Conley & Sina Najafi $10,000 – $14,999 Defne Ayas & Christoph Loeffler, The New York State Council on the Kodiak Bednarik, Heather Berlowitz, Printed in Belgium by the strong-backed men and women of Die Keure Arts Denise Bilbao, Thomas Carothers, Hesu Coue & Edward Wilson Kevin Denney, Laura Devendorf, Cabinet (USPS # 020-348, ISSN 1531-1430) is a quarterly magazine Stina & Herant Katchadourian Lisabeth During, Mia Enell & Nicolas published by Immaterial Incorporated, 181 Wyckoff Street, Brooklyn, NY 11217. Fries, Steve Fox, George Ganat, Carl Periodicals Postage paid at Brooklyn, NY and additional mailing offices. $5,000 – $9,999 Heaton, Howard Huang, Ladson Hin- The Danielson Foundation ton, David Kowalski, Jeremy Levine, Postmaster: Alyce Myatt, Christopher McCabe, Please send address changes to Cabinet, 181 Wyckoff Street, Brooklyn, NY 11217. $1,000 or under Beth Regardz, Gretchen Schaffner, Debra Singer & Jay Worthington Eric Schmid, Yael & Jacob Schori, Subscriptions Mono Schwarz-Kogelnik, Chloe 1 year (4 issues): US $32, Canada $38, Western Europe $40, Elsewhere $50 Town, Eva Ward, Emily Wilson 2 years (8 issues): US $60, Canada $72, Western Europe $76, Elsewhere $96
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7 Colors / Mauve 19 Haunted Mazes Shelley Jackson Joe Milutis Disappointment and opportunity Inside the labyrinth
10 A Minor History of / Odd Sympathy 27 Artist Project: Tree Drawings Joshua Foer Tim Knowles All together now 32 The Onion 13 Ingestion / More Shoes! More Boots! Implicasphere More Garlic! Peeling back the layers Jeffrey Kastner Werner Herzog’s gastronomic bet 34 Cyanea Arctica Louis Agassiz 16 Inventory / Wanted and Unwanted at Not unlike jelly the Zoo Clem Blakemore 36 Organized Water I’ll trade you a freckled duck for a spiny terrapin Richard Sieburth On Agassiz’s flowing prose
39 On Being the Right Size J. B. S. Haldane The scale of nature
44 tatlin, or, ruinophilia Svetlana Boym The avant-garde and the off-modern BONES AND
53 The Museum of the Dead POSTCARD: Bone-Setting Mannequin Robert Harbison Monochrome macabre bookmark: Bone Tower Eugene Von Bruenchenhein 58 Sacred Bones Mark C. Taylor What remains
64 Like a Hole in the Head Christopher Turner The trepanation-state
69 The Anti-Narcissistic Origins of Art Svetlana Boym Athena and the music of bones
70 The Fate of His Bones Colin Dickey Sir Thomas Browne and the craniokleptic impulse
73 Bone Play Michael Sappol & Eva Åhrén The anatomist’s games
76 Congenital Human Baculum Deficiency Scott F. Gilbert & Ziony Zevit The generative bone of Genesis 2:21–23
78 A Buried History of Paleontology Brian Selznick & David Serlin The remains of Waterhouse Hawkins
81 Cutting the World at Its Joints: An Interview with D. Graham Burnett Sina Najafi Comparative anatomy on trial
89 Artist project: Character Study Michael Paulus
93 Unnatural Selection: An Interview with the National Fish and Wildlife Forensics Laboratory Colby Chamberlain Crime and punishment in the animal kingdom
96 Marking Time Daniel Rosenberg Alexander Marshack and ossified time
101 Os Innominatum Thomas Zummer The self beneath the skin
Contributors Tim Knowles is an artist based in London. His work has been included in numerous exhibitions in the UK and abroad, including the Jerwood Drawing Prize and the Hayward Gallery touring exhibition You’ll Never Know. In 2007, Eva Åhrén is a historian working on the cultural and scientific history of he completed a series of new works in collaboration with the Royal Mail. He anatomy and the body. Her current research project is on displays, spaces, has been commissioned by the Contemporary Art Society and the Econo- specimens, and models in the anatomy museum of the Karolinska Institute mist to produce a new work for the Economist Plaza in February 2008. in Stockholm, Sweden. Joe Milutis is a writer, media artist, and assistant professor of art at the Louis Agassiz (1807–1873) was a Swiss-born zoologist and geologist who University of South Carolina. He is the author of Ether: The Nothing That relocated to the United States in 1846 and became one of the nation’s first Connects Everything (University of Minnesota Press, 2006). For more infor- great scientists. A longtime professor at Harvard University, he was also the mation, see
Colby Chamberlain is managing editor of Cabinet. Michael Sappol is curator-historian at the National Library of Medicine (National Institutes of Health), Bethesda, Maryland, and author of A Traffic Jim Chamberlain is a forensics specialist in multimedia at the National Fish of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth-Century and Wildlife Forensics Laboratory and an independent photographer. For America (Princeton University Press, 2002) and Dream Anatomy (GPO, more information, see
Colin Dickey is a writer based in Los Angeles. He is the co-editor (with Brian Selznick has written and/or illustrated many books for children, Nicole Antebi and Robby Herbst) of Failure! Experiments in Social and including The Invention of Hugo Cabret (Scholastic Press, 2007) and The Aesthetic Practices, and his work has appeared in TriQuarterly, The Santa Dinosaurs of Waterhouse Hawkins (Scholastic Press, 2001), which was Monica Review, The Journal of Aesthetics & Protest, and elsewhere. awarded a 2002 Caldecott Honor.
Joshua Foer is a freelance science writer. He is working on a book about the David Serlin is associate professor of communication and science studies at art and science of memory, forthcoming from Penguin. He can be reached the University of California, San Diego, and an editor-at-large for Cabinet. He at
Cathy Haynes is a London-based producer, editor, and teacher. She is co- Ziony Zevit is a professor at American Jewish University in Los Angeles. editor of Implicasphere, and initiated and co-produced Artangel’s “Nights of London” series of artists’ projects. For more information, see
Jeffrey Kastner is a Brooklyn-based writer and senior editor of Cabinet. columns
“Colors” is a column in which a writer responds to a Colors / Mauve specific color assigned by the editors of Cabinet. / “A Shelley Jackson Minor History Of,” a column by Joshua Foer, investigates an overlooked cultural phenomenon using a timeline. Contusions and confusions. Half-mourning and melan- / “Ingestion“ is a column that explores food within a cholia. Twilight and adolescence, home decorators and framework informed by aesthetics, history, and phi- homosexuals. Drag queen hair, cheap swag, braggado- losophy. / “Inventory” is a column that examines a list, cio. Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley (that “monstrous catalogue, or register. orchid,” said Wilde). Orchids, especially Cattleya labiata. All things orchidaceous, including the word “orchida- ceous.” Prose just shy of purple. According to Nabokov, time itself. A young chemist tinkering with coal tar, hoping to find a way to synthesize quinine to treat the malaria fell- ing British soldiers stationed in India, discovers, instead, a color. Mauve, the color of disappointment. But, “strangely beautiful,” thinks the chemist, and dips some silk in it, finds the color takes. He sends a sample to a Scottish dyer, who sees possibilities. The color lasts like no natural purple. And the ladies seem to like it. Mauve, the color of opportunity. It is 1856. Madame Bovary, who would have looked luscious in mauve, is about to poison herself in the pages of the Revue de Paris. A year later, Empress Eugénie will fall for the new hue—matches her eyes, she says. In 1858, Queen Victoria wears it to her daughter’s wedding and gives it her royal imprimatur. Cooked up in a laboratory by a scientist who thought, like that other earnest young scientist Dr. Frankenstein, that he was beating back death, mauve is the first artificial color. And like Frankenstein’s creation, mauve is vital but unnatural, a little monstrous. Even pestilential: “The Mauve Measles,” quipped Punch, are “spreading to so serious an extent that it is high time to consider by what means [they] may be checked.” Everyone is wearing it. And since skirts are enormous, and worn with crinolines, not to mention the unmention- ables, mauve unfolds by the yard (or the meter) out of dye-works across Europe. It is followed in quick succes- sion by other synthetic colors, also derived from coal tar: aniline yellow, aldehyde green, bleu de Paris. An entire industry foams up out of furbelows, demonstrating the power of both science and the female consumer. As Simon Garfield points out in his book Mauve (to which this essay is heavily indebted), by launching industrial chemistry, mauve will change the fate, not just of fash- ion, but of science, medicine, art, and war. It will also make the chemist, William Perkin, a very rich man. One does not necessarily think of a color as a commodity. Colors, the ancients reasoned, are qualities of objects, or our eyes’ subjective response to those
objects, not entities in themselves. They tinge and about it, simultaneously, an air of petulant retreat and dapple and pass on. Nonetheless, some ancients paid overweening assertion. “Pink trying to be purple,” sniffs high prices for one color: purple. So “Tyrian purple” is Whistler. Or the visited link, its vitality depleted. Mauve the name Perkin gives his new hue, referencing the is a “feminine” color, but not a yielding one. It is adult, dye eked out of the glandular secretions of tiny, spiny imperious. But its strength is ambivalent. Though pugna- sea snails in ancient Tyre to color the imperial robes cious, it is not candid. Like Victorian fashions, it stresses of Rome. But real Tyrian purple was the near-black femininity while repressing the frankly female. of dried blood. What’s more, Perkin’s color is cheap, This ambivalence is characteristic. Mauve is the but that’s mauve for you, the color of ostentation. The color of suspended choice and uncertain boundaries. name doesn’t take. Instead, mauve gets its name from a One of the few colors permitted to women in half- French flower, the one the English call mallow. (Though mourning, the period of transition between black crêpe Nabokov, licking his lips, would liken the color to an and the full spectrum, mauve signals the transition from orchid’s instead: Cattleya labiata.) despair to reconciliation. A transition that recapitulates Say mauve. It takes longer than most English the dye’s own emergence from a beaker of black gunk. words of its length. Long enough to lose heart part-way The association with death is not just metaphorical. Only through. We’re not quite sure how to pronounce its soft a few years after Perkin’s discovery, suspicions arose center: aw or oh. Mauve collapses in the mouth like a that mauve, and the other new dyes it led to, could raise chocolate truffle. Like a truffle, it tastes expensive, deca- real rashes, that the efflux of factories could poison vil- dent, imported. The word is to American English as the lages. And Pynchon traces an arc in Gravity’s Rainbow color is to American clothes. It enters one’s vocabulary from mauve to the dye industry, from the dye industry to late if at all, an adult word, with a tinge of the boudoir, IG Farben, from IG Farben to Zyklon B. and so it signals sophistication and a possibly unhealthy “Consider coal and steel. There is a place where attention to aesthetics. It’s a little too knowing (shades they meet,” Pynchon writes: “the coal-tars. A thousand of swimsuits to tempt Lolita: “Dream pink, frosted aqua, different molecules waited in the preterite dung. This is glans mauve”). It’s a little too French. Mauve signi- the sign of revealing. Of unfolding. This is one meaning fies over-refinement, the exhaustion of potency in the of mauve, the first new color on Earth, leaping to Earth’s making of ever-finer discriminations; that’s why “Code light from its grave miles and aeons below.” But was it Mauve” is the stuff of stand-up. A prose writer knows a new color? Surely mauve, the hue, already existed in she’s getting fancy—purple—when she uses mauve, nature—in the orchid, the mallow, the mauve. The glans, as she isn’t, paradoxically, when using purple. Mauve even. Except that, as Oscar Wilde writes, it is not Nature prose: the phrase gets a wink, unlike the prosaic purple, but Art—in the persons of Monet and Pissarro—that though it’s not always clear whether mauve avoids pur- creates the “white quivering sunlight that one sees now ple’s excesses, or fails to rise to its imperial pomp. But in France, with its strange blotches of mauve, and its either way, mauve is fey, rococo, mandarin (all decidedly restless violet shadows ... and, on the whole, Nature purplish words). It comes across as calculated, even reproduces it quite admirably.” Nature imitates art, and factitious. Decorative rather than forceful, it’s a crepe artists can’t paint nature mauve without mauve paint. In veil or piece of jet pinned on a sentence, not its muscle. 1856, the world changed color. Women and homosexuals wear the color, use the word. As colors go, that is a very recent birthdate, Code for gay until lavender took over, mauve is the which makes mauve, precisely, dated. The color of now gender expression shibboleth—the example most often became the color of then. But mauve came back in given of things real men don’t say. (Given by, frequently, the nineteen-eighties, and the eighties came back, are men themselves, though that would seem to strain the coming back, will come back any day now (time, like tenet.) “Man rule: We have no idea what mauve is,” mauve, is an alloy, not an element). Mauve is the past; woofs one blogger. the future is mauve. What is mauve? That pale violet that makes certain flowers seem to fluoresce at dusk, or the sullen, sullied rose of Victorian lampshades and mourning dresses? A cooler magenta, a gooier violet? Mauve, the color of ish, is defined most clearly by hedging negatives: not quite pink, not quite purple. It’s less a hue in its own right than opposite: Sir William Perkin’s original mauve dye, 1856. Courtesy the a diminution or intensification of some other hue; it has Science Museum / Science & Society Picture Library.
A Minor History of / Odd SympathY Benoit becomes convinced that any two snails that had Joshua Foer once mated remain forever in sympathetic contact, no matter the distance between them. Touch one, and its 1665 Lying sick in bed and looking up at two of his mate ought to move. Based on this principle, Benoit newly invented pendulum clocks hanging on the wall devises a pair of contraptions consisting of twenty-four above him, the Dutch physicist Christiaan Huygens snails glued to the bottom of a bowl, each representing notices something strange. Inexplicably, though the a different letter of the alphabet. Each snail’s mate is two clocks are located at opposite ends of the wall, their affixed, with a corresponding label, to a receiving device pendulums swing in perfect synchrony, as if magically that can be installed anywhere in the world. “Space was linked. Huygens rouses himself out of bed and attempts not considered by snails. Place one in Paris, the other at an experiment. He releases the two pendulums from the antipodes, the transmission of thought along their different positions and watches, awestruck, as they fall sympathetic current as complete, instantaneous and back into synch. He observes the clocks for hours on effective as in his room on the troisième,” writes Sabine end, moving them about his house, placing a bureau Baring-Gould in the 1889 book Historic Oddities and between them, putting them in different rooms, setting Strange Events. With the help of his friend Jules Allix, them on the backs of chairs. Perplexed, he pens a letter Benoit offers to demonstrate the snail telegraph to a to the Royal Society of London announcing his discov- noted journalist using transmitters at opposite ends of ery of an “odd kind of sympathy.” He suspects that the a room. “Evidently the snails were bad in their orthogra- pendulums somehow impart a force on each another phy,” writes Baring-Gould. “The whole thing, moreover, through the common wall beam to which both are was a farce, and the correspondence, such as it was, attached. It will take three and a half centuries before his was due to the incessant voyages of the inventor from theory can be experimentally confirmed. one compass to the other, under the pretext of supervis- ing the mechanism of the two apparatuses.” 1680 The Dutch physician Engelbert Kaempfer, on a voyage down the Meinam River in Siam, records one of 1897 Just as fireflies flash in unison, crickets chirp in a the earliest Western accounts of the coordinated flash- shared, sympathetic chorus that is the result of coupled ing of Asian fireflies: “A whole swarm of these insects, oscillation. The scientist A. E. Dolbear discovers that the having taken possession of one Tree, and spread them- rate of chirping is directly proportional to the outside selves over its branches, sometimes hide their Light all temperature. Hence Dolbear’s Law: at once, and a moment after make it appear again with the utmost regularity and exactness, as if they were N–40 T = 10 + in perpetual Systole and Diastole.” The synchronized C 7 flashing was a scientific mystery. When Philip Laurent writes about the phenomenon in the journal Science in where N is the number of chirps per minute and TC is the 1917, he argues that “for such a thing to occur among temperature in degrees Celsius. (The formula is applica- insects is certainly contrary to all natural laws,” and sug- ble only to snowy tree crickets. The more common field gests that it is not the fireflies that flicker in unison, but cricket is a less reliable thermometer.) the observer’s eyelids. Today, scientists have come to understand that the coordinated flashing of fireflies is an 1952 The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung introduces his example of the same sort of “odd sympathy” that caused theory of synchronicity, which holds that many of the Huygens’s clocks to link up. When conditions are right, experiences commonly deemed “coincidences” even things as mindless as pendulums and fireflies can are actually reflections of some deeper underlying join together in perfect concert, as if directed by a single dynamic—odd sympathies governing the universe. conductor. Steven Strogatz, a Cornell mathematician As an example, Jung cites a famous case of triple- who studies this phenomenon, known as “coupled oscil- synchronicity involving plum pudding: lation,” writes that “the tendency to synchronize is one of the most pervasive drives in the universe.” A certain M. Deschamps, when a boy in Orleans, was once given a piece of plum-pudding by a M. de Fortigbu. 1850 The “pasilalinic-sympathetic compass,” or snail telegraph, is the misguided invention of a charismatic opposite: Fireflies flashing in unison. From Nature, vol. 437, no. 7057, 2005. French occultist named Jacques Toussaint Benoit. Reprinted by permission from Macmillan Publishers Ltd.
10 11 Ten years later he discovered another plum-pudding a cacophony of individual clappers. When audiences in a Paris restaurant, and asked if he could have a begin to applaud, people clap rapidly for about twelve piece. It turned out, however, that the plum-pudding seconds before spontaneously (and unconsciously) was already ordered—by M. de Fortgibu. Many years removing every other beat, allowing each clapper to syn- afterwards M. Deschamps was invited to partake of chronize with the rest of the room. However, once the plum-pudding as a special rarity. While he was eating clapping slows by half, the total noise also decreases. it, he remarked that the only thing lacking was M. de To raise the volume, individuals tend to speed up their Fortgibu. At that moment the door opened and an old, clapping again and slip back into asynchrony. To main- old man in the last stages of disorientation walked in: tain rhythmic, coordinated applause, the audience must M. de Fortgibu who had got hold of the wrong address consciously avoid giving into this impulse. Individuals and burst in on the party by mistake. have to sacrifice their own enthusiasm for the sake of a unified sound. In their letter to Nature, the researchers 1968 Martha McClintock, a twenty-year-old Wellesley write, “This perhaps explains why in the smaller and undergraduate attends a scientific conference on the culturally more homogenous eastern European commu- Whitten Effect, the habit of “unisexually grouped” nities, synchronized clapping is a daily event, whereas female rats to synchronize their estrous periods. it happens only sporadically in western European and McClintock points out to the mostly male scientists that North American audiences.” the same thing happens among cohabitating coeds. The scientists, none of whom have heard of “menstrual 2000 The Millennium Bridge opens on the River drift,” think it sounds like an old wives’ tale and ask for Thames, connecting St. Paul’s Cathedral to the Tate proof that the phenomenon really exists. McClintock Modern. The 90,000 people who cross the bridge on its takes the scientists up on their challenge, and studies first day experience an unexpected side-to-side sway, 135 women in her Wellesley dorm. She finds that the leading authorities to close the bridge just two days average difference in starting dates of menstrual cycles after its opening. A Cambridge physicist immediately of close friends decreases from 8.5 days to 5 days over writes to the Guardian with an explanation of what had the course of a school year. The immediate cause of this happened: “The Millennium Bridge problem … has little “odd sympathy” is apparently the exchange of odorless to do with crowds walking in step: It is connected with chemical pheromones, though it is unclear why such what people do as they try to maintain balance if the synchronization might have evolved. McClintock’s surface on which they are walking starts to move, and is senior thesis is later published in the journal Nature. similar to what can happen if a number of people stand up at the same time in a small boat. It is possible in both 1975 The human heart beat is regulated by the sino- cases that the movements that people make as they try atrial node, a cluster of about 10,000 different cells that to maintain their balance lead to an increase in whatever mysteriously synchronize to create the heart’s electri- swaying is already present, so that the swaying goes cal rhythm. By imagining pacemaker cells as simple on getting worse.” The engineers had not anticipated oscillating electrical circuits consisting of a resistor and that the subtle lateral motion of walkers would syn- capacitor in parallel, mathematician Charles Peskin dis- chronize with the bridge in exactly the same manner as covers why their beating inevitably falls into lockstep. Huygens’s pendulums.
1997 More than 700 Japanese school children suffer 2002 A team of physicists at Georgia Tech sets out to epileptic seizures, vomit blood, and lose conscious- test experimentally Huygens’s hypothesis using two ness after a character in the popular television cartoon pendulums and precise laser trackers. They discover Pokemon explodes a “vaccine bomb” that causes the that the synchronization Huygens discovered was a screen to flash rapidly for five seconds. The photosensi- “mixture of luck and skill.” His two clocks, built by a lead- tive seizures are the result of synchronization between ing Dutch craftsman, had virtually identical frequencies the flickering light and neurons firing in the brain. Other and were loaded with just the right amount of weight for children suffer seizures when an excerpt from the show an “odd sympathy” to develop. is inexplicably re-aired on a television news report.
2000 Researchers studying audience applause dis- cover how a single rhythmic sound can emerge out of
12 theoretically indigestible are for the most part confined to the aforementioned realm of rhetoric, to art (witness the wounding poignancy of Chaplin’s boiled shoe in the Thanksgiving scene from The Gold Rush), or to border- line pathological attempts to garner publicity, as in the case of Michel “Monsieur Mangetout” Lotito, the French entertainer who has famously eaten bicycles, televisions, and an entire Cessna airplane. Yet in Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, a documentary from 1979 by Les Blank, the German director, in characteristic fashion, puts his own idiosyncratic spin on the concept: he cooks and then eats, in front of an appreciative audience, one of his own shoes (real leather, as opposed to Chaplin’s licorice) as a way of satisfying a bet lost to his friend and protégé, Errol Morris. In the mid-1970s, Morris—later to become the director of such celebrated documentary films as The Thin Blue Line and Fast, Cheap, and Out of Con- trol—had yet to find his true calling. A gifted musician who had trained as a young man to be a concert cel- list, he had left the conservatory behind and gone the familiar liberal arts route instead, studying history first at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and in graduate
Herzog samples a piece of his shoe, cooked with rosemary, school at Princeton and later, after dropping out there, garlic, and duck fat. Photo Nick Allen. Courtesy Les Blank taking up philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. Yet he ended up spending significantly less of his Bay Area time in class than he did at the Pacific Film Archive (PFA), the legendary rep house/hangout on the Berkeley campus. It was through the PFA’s then-direc- tor Tom Luddy that Morris met Werner Herzog. During Ingestion / More shoes! More boots! one of numerous hiatuses in his studies, Morris—who More garlic! by then had begun steeping himself in stories of social Jeffrey Kastner outcasts and deviants, without any particular sense of what might become of such research—had returned to The act of eating the inedible—especially when per- Wisconsin and done a number of interviews with the formed as the centerpiece of symbolic penance or notorious serial killer, grave robber, and cannibal, Ed ritual humbling—has a pedigree of sorts, if not in actual Gein. Herzog, who by then already had a dozen or so practice then certainly in language and the cultural films under his belt, shared Morris’s fascination with imagination. Whether eating one’s hat or one’s shirt, outsiders. Recognizing a kindred spirit—if not yet at crow or humble pie (in actuality, a complex corruption that point a professional equal—he even schemed with of umble pie, an indeed rather “humble” medieval dish, Morris to go in 1975 to Gein’s hometown of Plainfield, made from deer offal baked in crust and typically served where, armed with shovels, the two intended to pay a to the below-stairs staff), such conduct would seem to midnight visit to the local cemetery to surreptitiously turn all normative understandings of cuisine on their determine whether Gein, as legend had it, had disin- head. Instead of providing enjoyment and nourishment, terred his own mother in the course of his gruesome this peculiar brand of masochistic degradation is instead activities. intended to enact modes of penitence, to evoke pathos. Herzog actually made the trip, but Morris had It may stop short of actual physical harm, but it neverthe- second thoughts and, at the last moment, stood up his less manages to channel both private mortification and new potential colleague. Yet the next year, when Herzog public shame via one of humanity’s most necessary and returned to Plainfield to shoot some footage for his film uniquely personal activities. Stroszek, he unexpectedly found Morris there, living in Examples of individuals voluntarily ingesting the a rented room next to Gein’s old house and conducting
13 interviews with various townspeople, potentially as the American food industry was still loudly hawking the the basis for a future book or movie project. Despite unlimited virtues of the can, the box, and the freezer the younger man’s total lack of filmmaking experience, bag. In the restaurant’s kitchen, Herzog does the cook- Herzog invited Morris to join the Stroszek crew, cement- ing, while Waters points out potential ingredients and ing a lifelong, if frequently prickly, friendship between the serving suggestions. (I spoke to both Waters and her two. Morris used the modest payment he received for his long time Chez Panisse partner Patricia Curtan, and work to fund another speculative research trip (this time neither had any specific recollections of that afternoon to a town in Florida where insurance companies had beyond the basic events, although Curtan did recall the identified a suspicious number of locals “accidentally” whole thing as “a bit of a circus” given that it was going losing limbs in order to cash in on fraudulent claims) but on while the rest of the kitchen staff attempted to pre- when the two men’s paths crossed in Berkeley the fol- pare the evening’s service. And that the stewing shoe lowing year, Herzog learned that Morris had left that idea “smelled absolutely horrible.” The recipe, which was behind and had embarked on yet another. obviously nothing more than a spontaneous lark, was This time he had begun doing research for a film never written down, but Cabinet’s crack staff of kitchen on California pet cemeteries—the film that would even- testers has reconstructed it, based on the footage in the tually become his first, Gates of Heaven, and the one film. It appears on page 15.) around whose realization the famous shoe-eating bet In the end, the proof of this particularly unpalatable was made. The various characters involved all remem- pudding is not so much in the eating as it is in the telling. ber the specifics of the wager differently—in the Blank In the film, Herzog is shown on stage, before a table laid film, Herzog describes the bet as an attempt to encour- with ketchup, steak sauce, bottles of beer, and a vase full age a brilliant if unfocused friend to realize his potential, of cut flowers. But he is only seen nibbling a bite or two of but in a comprehensive 1989 profile of Morris by Mark the leather, which he cuts from the now slumping boot Singer in the New Yorker, Luddy remembers the bet as a using poultry scissors—instead, he is focused more on flippant dare from Herzog, as in, “if you ever manage to the impromptu lecture he’s giving about the necessity of actually make a film, I’ll eat my shoe.” Meanwhile Morris, perseverance in the pursuit of art. Later, backstage, as he who refused to participate in the film and is conspicu- gnaws another small mouthful of upper, he is more expan- ous by his absence from it, tells the New Yorker that the sive, connecting the act both to its traditional linguistic whole thing was nothing more than a publicity stunt meaning and relating it to his own lot as a filmmaker. cooked up, as it were, by Luddy. “Ever since I have been in contact with audiences,” Whatever the genesis, the event—as it unfolds in Herzog says in response to a question by Blank, “I have Blank’s quirky cinematic retelling—begins with Herzog wondered what the value of films was. I don’t know—it deplaning at San Francisco International on the day gives us some insight, but it doesn’t change people. … of Gates of Heaven’s April 1979 Berkeley debut (it had I thought film could cause revolutions or whatever and been shown first at the New York Film Festival a few it does not. But films might change our perspective of months earlier) and walking across the tarmac in a pair things. And ultimately in the long term, it may be some- of worn, brown leather shoes to the tune of an odd, thing valuable. But there is a lot of absurdity involved rollicking polka tune called “Old Whiskey Shoes.” Fol- as well. As you see,” he continues, gesturing at the lowing a sequence in a car during which Herzog muses glum-looking, half-eaten shoe on the table before him, “it on the relationship of gastronomy and the cinema—“I’m makes me into a clown. And that happens to everyone. quite convinced,” he says with a smile at one point, “that Just look at Orson Welles or look at even people like cooking is the only alternative to filmmaking,” and later Truffaut—they have become clowns. Because what we bemoans a recent realization that “for almost a year, I do as filmmakers is immaterial. It’s only a projection of had not cooked a meal,” when “a grown-up man” like light and doing that all your life makes you just a clown. him should in fact “not spend a week without having It’s an almost inevitable process. … It’s just embarrass- cooked a big meal!”—he ends up at the doorstep of the ing to be a filmmaker and to sit here like this. But thank famed Chez Panisse in Berkeley. heaven I don’t sit here for my own films, but I’m sitting Chez Panisse, a hangout for the movie people at here for a film that was made by a friend of mine. … To the PFA, also happened to be one of America’s most eat a shoe is a foolish signal, but it was worthwhile. And celebrated restaurants, co-founded by Alice Waters, the once in a while I think we should be foolish enough to do hugely influential California chef who began advocat- things like that. More shoes!” he laughs, his voice rising. ing for the joys of fresh local-grown ingredients when “More boots! More garlic!”
14 The gastronomic tableau at Chez Panisse, footwear included. Photo Maureen Gosling. Courtesy Les Blank
Chaussures Confit Brush dirt off soles of shoes. Unlace and stuff each inner Chefs: Werner Herzog & Alice Waters cavity with a whole head of unpeeled garlic, two peeled red onions, and several bunches of parsley. Season with 1 pair ankle-height leather shoes, well-worn a dozen or more generous shakes of hot sauce. Reinsert 2 heads of garlic laces and use them to truss shoes. Place the stuffed 4 red onions shoes in a large metal pot. Add equal parts liquid duck 1 bunch fresh parsley fat and hot water to cover shoe tops. Add up to a dozen 1 bunch fresh rosemary whole sprigs of rosemary and additional hot sauce Hot sauce (preferably a Mexican salsa picante like if desired. Salt to taste. Cook over moderate heat for Choula or Valentina) approximately five hours. Warm duck fat Serve, per Waters’s suggestion, as one would “a Water pig’s foot, with something like beans and chili and lots of Salt onions sprinkled on top and a little raw garlic and some spices like oregano or more rosemary.” Or, as Herzog actually does, straight from the pot in front of an audience, with the somewhat more pliant uppers cut into pieces with poultry scissors and washed down with cold beer and the soles discarded, because, as the director notes, “when you eat a chicken you leave the bones away.”
Adapted from Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, 1979
15 Inventory / Wanted and Unwanted at As comprehensive records of animals in captivity, con- the zoo temporary digitized studbooks enable zoos to monitor Clem Blakemore and manipulate their collections, satisfying both display preferences and breeding requirements. New stud- Rather like the classifieds buried in the back pages of a books, proposed for those species not yet covered, must newspaper, or the “Lonely Hearts” section of a maga- be endorsed by the relevant “Taxon Advisory Group” (or zine, official lists advertising surplus and sought-after TAG), and ought to include the full known history of that animals are maintained internationally by associations species in captivity. The data gathered by “studbook of zoos and aquaria. The lists have two roles. In one way, keepers” (zoo employees who take on the responsibility they function as a kind of dating service, of particular of maintaining and updating the record for each species) value to members of endangered species, that pairs should incorporate not only movements between institu- off “attractive and available” animals. They also imitate tions, but also births, deaths, and parental information. (vaguely tragic) rummage sales, allowing zoos to cast A well-kept studbook should therefore function off “excess stock”—undesirables who simply aren’t a hit as an up-to-date source of genealogical data for each with the visitors, or happen to belong to a captive popu- animal within the captive population of a species, includ- lation over-zealous in its reproductive habits. ing those deceased. Starting preferably with the original Printed here is the most recent list, as of publication, animals caught in the wild, these records vary in detail from the Royal Melbourne Zoological Gardens. Organized and geographic scope, covering national, regional or into two categories, the names of the species registered global collections. Demographic and genetic analyses in each are accompanied by their “vital statistics”: quan- drawn from a studbook’s data can be harnessed to tity, gender, age, and origin. The numbers noted on the increase the numbers of endangered species born into far left column reflect the male to female ratio; a third captivity. Initially employed as a means of selecting and digit indicates neutered or sexually unidentified animals promoting a limited number of characteristics benefi- whose matchmaking potential has yet to be exploited cial for the cultivation of domestic animals, studbook (usually birds or reptiles, which often require DNA-testing keeping has thus developed into a method of ensuring to confirm gender). The codes on the right of the Latin maximum genetic diversity within captive populations. nomenclatures signify three categories used to differenti- Financial and practical burdens result in the major- ate between wild, captive, and “unknown” births, as well ity of transfers taking place within one continent, and as between adult and juvenile animals; for some of the even nationally in countries with many zoos. Occasionally species bred in captivity, dates of birth are also recorded. institutions are able to send animals to establishments or Source details about each animal group in these dealers not affiliated with the regional regulating body, lists are drawn from data logged in “studbooks,” intimate such as permit-holding animal sanctuaries, but must in records documenting the private lives of every member these circumstances ensure the destination’s husbandry of a captive species. Historically, studbooks were used conditions are suitable for the species concerned. to register differences between individuals of the same Access to the lists of surplus and wanted animals is, in the species in order to improve livestock through selective United States, restricted to those working for accredited breeding. The first official record of this kind, set up in establishments; however, Melbourne Zoo, a member of England in the late nineteenth century, was the “General the Australasian Regional Association of Zoological Parks Stud Book for Thoroughbred Horses.” The genes of all and Aquaria, has been more forthcoming. With any luck thoroughbreds living today can still be traced back to the animals on their list, including the pair of wanted three “foundation sires,” stallions imported from the Common Death Adders and four unwanted Wandering Middle East in the late seventeenth and eighteenth cen- Whistling-ducks, will reach loving partners, or at the very turies: the Darley Arabian, Godolphin Arabian, and Byerly least appreciative new homes, safely. Turk. Later, in the 1930s, the practice was appropriated by zoos to help prevent the extinction of wild animals in Thanks to Sjoukje Vaartjes, Animal Records Officer, Royal Melbourne Zoologi- captivity; the first international studbook of this kind, for cal Gardens (Australia); Katherine Mcleod, Exhibitions Specialist, Bronx Zoo the European bison, was started in 1932 by Heinz Heck, (US); Harry Schram, Executive Director, European Association of Zoos and Aquaria (The Netherlands); Peter Dollinger, Director, World Association of Zoos the then-director of the Hellabrun Zoo in Munich. and Aquariums (Switzerland); Pierre De Wit, EEP-Coordinator for Humboldt Today, the coordinated management of zoo popu- Penguins, Zoo Emmen (The Netherlands); Christine Jackson, Zoo Registrar, lations is supervised by national, regional, and global Drussilas Park (UK); Emma Kenly, Press Officer, Zoological Society of London (UK); Alison Reiser, Communications, Bronx Zoo (US), and to Barbara Pacheco. associations, with which most major zoos are affiliated.
16 17 MAIN
18 Master of the Campana Cassone, Theseus’s Voyage to Crete, early sixteenth century.
Haunted Mazes childhood in the 1970s that the rediscovery of Haunted Joe Milutis Mazes led me to reflect on the ontogenic significance of these meanders through “Mr. Horror” (a maze within the I’m getting to the age where I’m finding things in junk humpback of a Quasimodo), “The Evil One” (a Satanic stores for which I didn’t even know I had nostalgia. One goat’s head), and the ironically titled “Best Seller” (a of these objects, Vladimir Koziakin’s Haunted Mazes, a maze within a book titled Secrets of the Occult). But is cheap Scholastic Press-type collection of mazes in the it only me who finds a little bit of himself in these gro- shapes of luna moths, Frankenstein heads, weird trees, tesque convolutions? This was magic mass-produced, and voodoo masks, expertly blended the prepubes- after all, and it thus ought to have some evolutionary and cent longing for the macabre with the opportunity for historical significance for us all, a phylogenic as opposed geeky sublimation, which in the 1970s was generously to an ontogenic haunting, if you will. afforded by a profusion of maze games. Koziakin’s small There was a minor publishing explosion of mazes volume, charming like a junior grimoire, held no small and maze games in the 1970s, from these chintzy ver- magic for me at the time. Mazes were such a part of my sions with orange or red sprayed on the edges, to the
19 our own mediated world of domestic reverie and phan- tasmagoria. As zoopraxiscopes, magic lanterns, and phenakistiscopes trained the eye for the explosion of cinematic perception, so too lava lamps, black light posters, disco balls, fiber-optic pom-poms, Mad Libs, and, most importantly, mazes, trained an inward vision suitable for the digital implosion to come. These were our philosophical toys. The maze is about going nowhere. It’s also about getting to the ultimate goal. That’s the philosophy of the maze, its infinity in a nutshell. It is a paradox as germane to the manic stasis of childhood as it is to the manic stasis of social networking and BitTorrent downloada- philia. But the paradox is a pragmatic one. The Christian labyrinth, like the one on the floor of Chartres cathedral , provided a space for pilgrimage when Christian violence abroad made travel inadvisable: “These French laby- rinths appear to have been called ‘la lieue’ or ‘Chemin de Jerusalem;’ they were placed at the west end of the nave, and people made a pilgrimage on their knees, fol- lowing the windings of the pathway to the centre, which is said to have been called Sancta Ecclesia or Ciel.”1 While these windings represented the path to salvation Cover of Vladimir Koziakin’s Haunted Mazes, 1976. through the world of sin, they were also an invitation to play, as in Easter resurrection dances; that their cho- reography was determined by the labyrinth’s pattern gives credence to the idea that these floor mazes were a surviving pagan mnemonic of a more ancient celebra- tory dance. This Christian maze of the medieval era was neither the origin, nor the apotheosis, of the maze’s early more glossy, coffee-table offerings—the kind you could development; it marks the historical point, however, find at Spencer’s Gifts, full of Escheresque Op Art defiles when its circuits become hardwired in the human mind and no “rated time limits.” You were supposed to trace as moral and allegorical—a pars pro toto for the world the latter more like you would an art object than an at large. obstacle course (if you could bring yourself to pencil There is too much mystery embedded in the earlier them at all). There were the electronic spin-offs, which, maze of the Greeks to decipher exactly what it meant, along with the paper-and-pencil mazes, drew us out of but it was definitely not a place of prayer and reflection. the sensorium of dirt and bruises and into the hermetic, What we do know of the Greek myth allows us to admire monastic interior. Atari offered up blind underground the design of Daedalus’s invention, the “circuit-bending” catacombs in its now legendary Adventure game, as of Theseus’s heroics, and the labyrinthine structure of well as the 8-bit hedge romps of its lesser-known car- the stories themselves that circulate through and are tridge Maze Craze. These games were always played generated by the labyrinth. It may have guided a dance in our house either to Wendy Carlos’s Switched-On when all was said and done, but it most likely started Bach, or old Thelonious Monk stuck unceremoniously off as an execution chamber—not a place you’d want into the mouth of 2-XL (an educational toy that we soon to wind up, ruminating on the mortal coil. Until Theseus discovered to be nothing more than an 8-track player slayed the Minotaur at its center, youths from Athens in robot drag). As we traced these paths, we started to were sent to die there on a regular basis. evolve technologically. Just as the nineteenth century The original violence at the heart of this myth had its proto-cinematic devices, so the 1970s had its is displaced and managed over time in a variety of proto-computer multimedia machines in the form of ways, as if the maze enfolds a trauma within itself. It’s toys that would take us out of the backyard and into fairly common to say that the medieval Christian maze
20 replaces the Greeks’ Minotaur with Satan, and Theseus It seems to me that hidden behind contemporary with Christ; consequently, a more personal struggle etymological distinctions is an attempt to tame mul- with one’s God replaces the historical and geopolitical ticursality, by way of denigrating multicursal mazes struggle (between Athens and Crete) that powered as merely “childish” versions of more sober, unicursal the labyrinth’s original form. But the labyrinth of the ones.6 Multicursality challenges meditative clarity medievals still circuits its meaning into the world. When with multiple versions, no clear centers, and a sense of Norman Klein calls the medieval maze “an abbreviated ambivalence and confusion. These complications, how- kingdom tiny enough to slip into your pocket,”2 I think he ever, are the point of the labyrinth. Even if we grant that is alluding to the fact that the Christian maze, as a per- labyrinth merely designates the one-path New Age laby- sonal simulacrum of the kingdom of God, is at the same rinth recycled from the medieval era, the object is still time the vehicle for the kind of stay-at-home imperialism haunted by a misrecognition. For even the medievals to which we have grown inured. One can even go so retained a sense of the unicursal labyrinth’s ambages— far as to say that the Crusades-era maze displaces the the equivocation at the heart of its windings, which the Minotaur—or Satan—onto the Islamic world; campaigns New Age version does not readily admit.7 Additionally, to control Jerusalem are the externality buttressing the the labyrinth that is the legacy of the medieval period is geopolitical architecture of Christian interiority afforded enmeshed in a circuit of analogies to such a degree that by the maze. The devotee is thus free to glory in a more it is impossible to map out all its symbolic equivalences abstract conquest, along the difficult but not dire path and their implications without ending up in the muck of towards a marriage of heaven and earth; torture, bureau- indistinction. This tendency of the labyrinth to connote cracy, and the sacrifice of youths are elsewhere. so much is part of what makes it an antithesis to sure- While one might be tempted to compare the his- ness, rationality, and clarity. Its structure is mystically torical loci of the labyrinth with the geopolitics of today, the analogy might be too hasty, too easy. Yet a recent Op-Ed in the Boston Globe has taken the opportunity to make wild connections between mazes and Iraq, and goes as far as to say that we merely need to change the maze into a labyrinth to get out.3 Taking the lead from Hermann Kern’s impressive but finicky study of the labyrinth, some commentators have tried to distinguish the term labyrinth from the maze by asserting that the labyrinth is unicursal (one path that winds into and out of the center) while the maze is multicursal (many paths with culs-de-sac).4 As evidenced by this Boston Globe piece, the influence of this newly invented distinction is deep. New Age writers have attributed so many magical powers to this idea of a meditational walking labyrinth without dead ends—based primarily on their interpreta- tion of the Chartres model—that, in order to protect the integrity of this magic, they have waged a campaign of terminological reeducation, whereby labyrinth initiates must not use the term labyrinth to convey anything other than the one-path, meditational design. To more subtle writers, this distinction does not stick. Penelope Reed Doob, for example, who starts her study of the labyrinth with a flat-out statement that mazes and laby- rinths are the same thing, writes that our focus on the essential multicursality of mazes and essential unicursal- ity of labyrinths is too narrow—a theoretical instance of “concentrating on , in the Scholastic sense: Roman mosaic depicting the battle between Theseus and the accidentia Minotaur in the labyrinth, ca. 275-300 CE. on attributes that are not absolutely necessary for a thing to be a thing.”5
21 congruent with the idea of a dark or enchanted forest; it can be.10 Gide was right to introduce the “hotchpotch is also a stand-in for earthly conundrum, brain fold, uter- of the brain,” since in some ways even the straight line ine canal, spiritual struggle, or psychosexual journey.8 becomes a-mazed with the introduction of human con- Its center: Mary, the alchemical rose, Jerusalem, prin- sciousness. cess, Minotaur, inner-self, lotus blossom. And of course Mazes or labyrinths, then, are not merely puzzles— there are the various rewards that the multicursal maze a word that, etymologically, means something placed holds out for its young adepts (pots of gold, pies and before you (Mid. Eng. opposaile).11 Rather, you place cakes, utopian wonderlands of bunnies and lollipops). yourself within them, in ways a Rubik’s Cube would Labyrinthine confusion is not merely an issue of its tortu- not accommodate; additionally, and most importantly, ous corridors, its solution not merely the cheese in the the maze is you. Your thoughts are “the house difficult corner. Labyrinth enfolds into labyrinth across times, of exit,” or laboriosos exitus domus (one fanciful origin cultures, and myths. for the word labyrinth).12 The mere act of placing Another sticking point seems to be this: if laby- yourself somewhere becomes challenged by an ever- rinths are only unicursal, why is it that one always says proliferating lattice that connects and confounds. In “the Cretan labyrinth” rather than “the Cretan maze”? Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, Rosa Coldfield (surely After all, Daedalus constructed such an intricate brain- named for the alchemical rose at a labyrinth’s heart) baffler that when Theseus threw his lot in with the other runs up a flight of stairs for seventy-odd pages, and ran youths of Athens in order to slay the Minotaur, he could up them in her mind for years more.13 Like Koziakin’s not do it without the help of Ariadne’s yarn; even though titular maze, the house is a deceptively unified entity, visual representations from the period show Daedalus’s infiltrated by the truth of amazement: creation to be unicursal, we usually imagine Theseus navigating a multicursal array of circuits. In what I think . . . I would enter—The face stopping me dead (not my is intended as a bit of humor, André Gide tries to rectify body: it still advanced, ran on: but I, myself, that deep this discrepancy in his novella Theseus by describing the existence which we lead, to which the movement of labyrinth of Crete as a simple unicursal structure—yes, limbs is but a clumsy and belated accompaniment like like the design we see on ancient Greek coins—but it’s so many unnecessary instruments played crudely and not the architecture that traps you; it’s the perfume. As amateurishly out of time to the tune itself) in that bar- Gide has Daedalus explain: ren hall with its naked stair (that carpet gone too) rising into the dim upper hallway where an echo spoke which I had noticed that certain plants, when thrown into the fire, give off as they burn semi-narcotic fumes. … I used them to fuel stoves which are kept alight day and night. The heavy vapours that emanate from them do not act merely on the will, which they send to sleep; they create an intoxication full of charm and rich in seductive errors, luring the brain into a vain activity as it allows itself to be voluptuously filled with mirages; … The operation of these vapours is not the same for everyone who breathes them in, and each person, in accordance with the hotchpotch his brain concocts for him, loses himself, if I may put it like this, in his own private labyrinth.9
While the actual space of Daedalus’s labyrinth is straightforward, the use of the term labyrinth here still implies the loss that only a multi-pathed space can really offer. If we say that labyrinths are only unicursal, and as such are better for us (like bran flakes or tofu), we above: Diagram of the labyrinth in the nave of Chartres Cathedral, have too much confidence that our own meditations a classic eleven-circuit labyrinth, ca. 1194—1220. will bring us easy peace and have ultimately underes- opposite: Bartolomeo Veneto, Portrait of a Man, ca. 1510. timated how confounding even the simplest meander
22 23 24 was not mine but rather that of the lost irrevocable conceived as unicursal, which is puerile—instigating might-have-been which haunts all houses, all enclosed a vain sense of Oedipal comfort “sought by the aban- walls erected by human hands, not for shelter, not for doned man wherever knots and concentrations are warmth, but to hide from the world’s curious looking formed throughout a vast incoherence”17—not the and seeing the dark turnings which the ancient young realistic, multicursal maze. This maze is the labyrinth’s delusions of pride and hope and ambition (ay, and love uncanny.18 too) take.14 Have I merely reversed a false polarity? Again, just attempting to untangle the paradoxes engendered here Many other modernist writers have materialized such makes any notion of a “true labyrinth” seem suddenly mental labyrinths, pointing out the inadequacy of uni- seductive and inevitable. So, while the unicursal laby- cursal data entry, which characterizes the technology of rinth may be regressive, I must admit that as what may the book. There have been, of course, hypertext writers be called a “spiritual technology” it can provide a tem- who have more recently sought to further accommo- porary center in a zone of eccentric drifting. A shared date this mental overload by simulating the multiplicity labyrinth is rarely a comfort, however: think of the uni- of labyrinthine consciousness through the technology cursal IKEA on a Saturday, or the tradition of leaving in of links. the center of the meditational labyrinth something that My ultimate point, however, is nothing so banal you would like to get rid of. A recent visit to one of these as, “Mazes help us understand the Internet.” If anything, walking labyrinths led me to the trash heap of other they might help us gird ourselves for the betrayals of the people’s crap: packs of cigarettes, a white plastic cruci- digital, like the betrayals of youthful magic, for which fix, a pink paperclip, a Halls cough drop wrapper, rotten sometimes we ourselves are responsible. The vast oranges, a matchbox for a spa in Vermont. Even though chaos of the Internet becomes simplified—for example, Kern, in what is to me more evidence of his over-particu- through the agency of a basic web portal tailored to our larity, emphasizes that the spiral is not a labyrinth, I think needs—and like the progression from Greek to New Age that Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970) is an example mazes, childhood to adulthood, our brain matter follows. of a unicursal, meditational labyrinth that avoids the This simplification is not necessarily a bad thing and, in well-intentioned but ultimately wrong-headed purities fact can help us organize and evolve, but simplicity can of the yoga-spa labyrinth. In the film documentation easily slip into dogma. I sympathize with the desire to of Spiral Jetty, in addition to seeing that Smithson lift the image of a shining, simple archetype out of the was reading W. H. Matthews’s 1922 book Mazes and mess of the labyrinth’s history, in the same way that I Labyrinths (it’s in a pile with other books on dinosaurs, understand people for whom the Bible is the book as sedimentation, and lost worlds), we understand that this struggling to overcome a particular brand of informa- classic earthwork was meant to be traversed rather than tion anxiety. Overloads of data and memory failures beheld, if only by Smithson and only temporarily. As an make finding oneself in the labyrinth (of the computer eccentric “site,” Spiral Jetty can only provide an absurd or elsewhere) a difficult task. If self itself is the labyrinth, or stop-gap centering. however, then one must take into account its infinite In the end, if we must hold to thinking phylogeni- intricacies and booby traps too; it is in fact part of the cally, or even teleologically, the Christian form of the monstrosity, what Bataille in his essay on the labyrinth labyrinth—linking sin to its disorienting paths, redeemed calls “the virulent madness of … autonomy in the total by the circular form that encloses it, “a maze both in night of the world.”15 For him, existence is either more bono and in malo[,] … [e]vil encompassed by divinely complex than or insufficient to the concept of being, perfect form”19—was historically superseded, even which the labyrinth embodies, tames, and turns into a though it now is held to be today’s “true labyrinth.” destiny. “A man is only a particle inserted in unstable As this Christian meditational maze gave way to love and entangled wholes,” he says, using the word particle labyrinths in the Renaissance, a new genre of maze to imply a quantum complexity. “This extreme instabil- appeared that in some ways would critique this encap- ity of connections alone permits one to introduce, as a sulation of evil meanders within abstract divine destiny. puerile but convenient illusion, a representation of iso- The woodcuts of Francesco Segala—an architect of the lated existence turning in on itself.”16 It is the labyrinth, sixteenth century and perhaps the first creator of the paper maze—are almost indistinguishable from Kozi- akin’s from the 1970s. If Bataille calls opposite: Woodcuts from Paduan architect Francesco Segala’s Libro de Haunted Mazes laberinti, 1500s. for laughter to traverse the networks of our labyrinthine
25 interconnections, these images perhaps had parodic the whim of the maze-maker,” and which is “technically simple but potentially intent. Instead of a divine circle with a cruciform center, more horrifying than the multicursal path.” (pp. 50–51) She reminds us that the maze is held within emphatically secular forms: a both unicursal and multicursal mazes have as their essence “confusion and frus- tration.” See The Idea of the Labyrinth, op. cit. dog, a jester, a crab, a pilgrim, a ship, a snail, a whale, a 11 Ernest Weekley, The Romance of Words (New York: Dutton, 1913), p. 59. man. 12 Doob, The Idea of the Labyrinth, op. cit., p. 96. Labyrinths and mazes call for two forms of identifi- 13 Amazement—if we want to give the word the more dire sense that Faulkner gave it—becomes a mental trap precisely when the nomadic genius for escap- cation: you as a dot traversing the intricacy of dilemma, ing danger and creating new paths, what Jacques Attali calls “the wisdom- and you as the whole that can be apprehended at once. legacy of nomads to their sedentary descendants,” becomes confounded by the You identify with both the path and the structuring form memorializing impulse of the sedentary. Jacques Attali, The Labyrinth in Cul- ture and Society: Pathways to Wisdom, trans. Joseph Rowe [1996] (Berkeley: of the path, in the same way that you conceive of a word North Atlantic, 1999), p. 17. in a paragraph. But the twist of Segala’s mazes is this: 14 William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! [1936] (New York: Vintage, 1972), instead of identifying with the sinful dizzied pilgrim on p. 137. 15 Georges Bataille, “The Labyrinth,” in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, one hand, and the static divine order that guarantees the 1927–1939 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), p. 174. destiny of your dizziness on the other, these two vantage 16 Ibid. points are collapsed into one. You make your way within 17 Ibid., p. 175. 18 T. J. Demos’s essay “Duchamp’s Labyrinth” explores the idea of an ethic of the form of a creature that also makes its way. These are homelessness as it relates to the diaspora of European surrealists during World mazes within the amazed, and as such, your destiny is War Two. In relation to Duchamp’s evocation of the labyrinth as a difficult object momentarily linked to a form that is also uncertain as to in his later, American work, Demos quotes Theodor Adorno: “It is part of moral- ity not to be at home in one’s home.” There is, then, a politics to the uncanny (as its destiny. You may be reminded, perhaps, of Koziakin’s we can see played out, for example, in the recent film Pan’s Labyrinth). See T. J. 1982 The Amazing Amazeman in Super-Maze Adven- Demos, “Duchamp’s Labyrinth: First Papers of Surrealism, 1942,” October, no. . I’m not sure whether the Amazing Amazeman is 97 (Summer 2001), p. 108. ture 19 Craig Wright, The Maze and the Warrior: Symbols in Architecture, Theol- to be pitied or if he is a genius of love and laughter. But, ogy, and Music (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 24. imagining him, one is brought back to the question that has always bugged archeologists: is the labyrinth a plan for a prison or instructions for a dance?
1 W. R. Lethaby, Architecture, Mysticism, and Myth (New York: Braziller, 1975), p. 150. 2 Norman M. Klein, The Vatican to Vegas: A History of Special Effects (New York: The New Press, 2004), p. 101. 3 James Carroll, “The Labyrinth of Iraq,” The Boston Globe, 10 October 2005. Available at
26 artist project: Tree Drawings Tim Knowles
The works presented on the following pages are part of a wider practice in which I utilize apparatuses, mecha- nisms, or systems beyond my control to introduce chance into the production of my art. The pieces here are from a series produced by trees, most of which are located in the Borrowdale and Buttermere areas of England’s Lake District. I attach artists’ sketching pens to their branches and then place sheets of paper in such a way that the trees’ natural motions—as well as their moments of stillness—are recorded. Like signatures, each drawing reveals something about the different qualities and characteristics of the various trees as they sway in the breeze: the relaxed, fluid line of an oak; the delicate, tentative touch of a larch; a hawthorn’s stiff, slightly neurotic scratches. Process is key to my work, so each Tree Drawing is accompanied by a photograph or video documenting the location and manner of its creation.
pages 28-29: Larch (4 pen) on Easel #1, The How, Borrowdale, Cumbria, 2005. C-Type print; ink on paper (detail). pages 30-31: Oak on Easel # 1, Stonethwaite Beck, Smithymire Island, Bor- rowdale, Cumbria, 2005. C-Type print; ink on paper (detail).
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The onion Implicasphere
Cabinet is pleased to present the fourth installment of our ongoing collaboration with the London-based Implicasphere, the unique theme-based periodical created by Cathy Haynes and Sally O’Reilly. Having pre- viously dug into the Nose (issue 22), pored over Salt and Pepper (issue 24), and tracked down Stripes (issue 26), in this issue Implicasphere peels back the layers of the Onion.
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Cyanea Arctica is suspended from the lower surface of the gelatinous Louis Agassiz disk. The horizontal curtain is itself connected with the disk, fastened to it as it were by ornamental stitches, The following description of a jellyfish by the Swiss-born which divide the whole field into a number of areas, Harvard University naturalist Louis Agassiz appeared alternately larger and smaller, now concentric, now in his 1862 book Contributions to the Natural History radiating, between which the organs already described of the United States. Agassiz’s descriptive prose was are inserted. admired by contemporaries such as David Thoreau and Waldo Emerson, but also later by modernists such Ezra Pound. A text by Richard Sieburth tracing the influences coursing through Agassiz’s text can be found on page 36.
Seen floating in the water Cyanea Arctica exhibits a large circulate disk, of a substance not unlike jelly, thick in the centre, and suddenly thinning out towards the edge, which presents several indentations. The centre of that disk is of a dark purplish-brown color, while the edge is much lighter, almost white and transparent. This disk is constantly heaving and falling, at regular inter- vals; the margin is especially active, so much so, that, at times, it is stretched on a level with the whole surface of the disk, which, in such a condition, is almost flat, while, at other times, it is so fully arched that it assumes the appearance of a hemisphere. These motions recall so strongly those of an umbrella, alternately opened and shut, that writers, who have described similar animals, have generally called this gelatinous disk the umbrella. From the lower surface of this disk hang, conspicu- ously, three kinds of appendages. Near the margin there are eight bunches of long tentacles, moving in every direction, sometimes extending to an enormous length, sometimes shortened to a mere coil of entangled threads, constantly rising and falling, stretching now in one direction and then in another, but generally spreading slantingly in a direction opposite to that of the onward movement of hair, encircling organs which are farther inward upon the lower surface of the disk. Of these organs, there are also eight bunches, which alternate with the eight bunches of tentacles, but they are of two kinds; four are elegant sacks, adorned, as it were, with waving ruffles projecting in large clusters, which are alternately pressed forward and withdrawn, and might also be compared to bunches of grapes, by turns inflated and collapsed. These four bunches alternate with four masses of folds, hanging like rich curtains, loosely waving to and fro, and as they wave, extending downwards, or shortening rapidly, recalling, to those who have had an opportunity of witnessing the phenomenon, the play of the streamers of an aurora borealis. All these parts have their fixed position; they opposite: A woodcut of Cyanea Arctica, by Alexander Agassiz, Louis Agas- siz’s son. From Elizabeth C. Agassiz and Alexander Agassiz, Seaside Studies are held together by a sort of horizontal curtain, which in Natural History, 1871.
34 35 ORGANIZED WATER knowledge in general, mere fossilizations of the “real” Richard Sieburth fish. (Was Pound aware that Agassiz made his European reputation by his bravura descriptions of dead fish from In his ABC of Reading (1934), Ezra Pound recounts the Brazil or of the petrified specimens of his Poissons fos- following Zen parable: siles?) The grad student says, “That’s only a sunfish.” The A post-graduate student equipped with honors and master retorts, “I know that,” and then asks the post-doc diplomas went to Agassiz to receive the final and finish- to show him what he’s got by submitting a description ing touches. The great man offered him a small fish and of the fish in question. The student’s first impulse is told him to describe it. purely academic and professional: he produces an ich- Post-Graduate Student: “That’s only a sunfish.” thyological description of the species, genus, and class Agassiz: “I know that. Write a description of it.” of the fish and has recourse to the appropriate Linnean After a few minutes the student returned with the binomials—description here merely functioning as an description of the Ichthus Heliodiplodokus, or what- expansion or declension of the learned proper name. ever term is used to conceal the common sunfish from Sent back to the drawing boards by the master, the vulgar knowledge, family of Heliichtherinkus, etc., as student returns with a four-page essay. Here we move found in textbooks of the subject. from mere description or naming into something far Agassiz again told the student to describe the fish. more “literary”—an experiment in writing, a measuring The student produced a four-page essay. Agas- or assaying of the natural object through the lens of lan- siz then told him to look at the fish. At the end of three guage. But even this falls short. “Agassiz then told him to weeks the fish was in an advanced state of decomposi- look at the fish.” And after three weeks of inspection and tion, but the student knew something about it. meditation (i.e. free from the need to name or describe instrumentally), the disciple achieves satori. True insight The Louis Agassiz (1807–1873) whom Pound revered into fishdom has at last been attained (or, more mod- was the Harvard professor of zoology and geology who estly, the student now knows “something” about this insisted that “a physical fact is as sacred as a moral fish)—even if this entails the “advanced decomposition” principle.” In other words, a radical empiricist or “magi- of the object of knowledge and, presumably, of its sub- cal positivist” (Theodor Adorno’s condescending term ject as well (which leaves us fish-flopping somewhere for Walter Benjamin) who understood that the truth between Wittgenstein and Heisenberg). inhered in the “luminous details” of the object or event This parable might serve as an introduction to the at hand and not in the abstractions that might ultimately preceding text by Agassiz, drawn from his Contribu- be derived from it. No ideas but in fish, to paraphrase tions to the Natural History of the United States (1862) Pound’s college friend William Carlos Williams. This at and reprinted in Guy Davenport’s The Intelligence of least is one way of reading the above parable. Louis Agassiz: A Specimen Book of Scientific Writings On closer inspection, however, this parable (like (1963). Davenport initially discovered the work of Agas- the fish in question) decomposes rather quickly when siz during his visits to Ezra Pound while the latter was one tries to figure out just how it might hold together incarcerated in St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, as a theory of looking, writing, or knowing—or, for that DC. Early in his captivity, Pound had supervised a small matter, as a “METHOD for studying poetry and good let- anthology of writings entitled Gists from Agassiz, or ters” (which is how Pound allegorically presents it in the Passages on the Intelligence Working in Nature, pub- first place). lished in 1953 as part of the Square Dollar Series edited The scene of writing it evokes breaks down into a) by John Kasper, the most politically gonzo of Pound’s the act of naming, b) the act of description. Two kinds American disciples, later convicted for anti-integrationist of naming occur: “That’s only a sunfish” (as if the object Ku Klux Klan activities in Tennessee. Agassiz also figures could be exhausted by a common noun). Or the fancy prominently in the paradiso of Pound’s late Cantos as a classical proper naming which taxonomists engage in visionary natural philosopher who had managed to deci- (“Ichthus Heliodiplodokus,” “family of Heliichtherinkus”) pher and transcribe the Book of Nature as lovingly as the in order “to conceal the common sunfish from vulgar Supreme Intelligence behind its script had intended it to knowledge”—this is the populist Uncle Ez talking to us be written and read. Ever the champion of lost causes, here, suspicious of the high-fallutin’ jargon that ema- Pound chose Agassiz’s Creationism (or Cuvier’s Cata- nates from beaneries and impatient with all “textbook” strophism) over Darwin’s Evolutionism for somewhat
36 the same reasons that he preferred Major Douglas to her bones become pliant, and her nails lose their hard- Marx in the domain of economics: largely because his ness. First, the slenderest parts of her body became Cantos are more interested in the spatial poetics of frac- liquid, her sea-blue hair, fingers, legs, and feet. (For it tal patterns of repetition (as discovered in nature or in doesn’t take long for the thinner parts to turn to water.) history) than in Hegelian models of temporal progress or Next her shoulders, back sides, and breasts all melted meliorist development. away into rivulets. Then water ran in her dissolving veins Despite the animus against representation and instead of warm blood, and there was nothing left of mimesis that informs his parable of Agassiz and the Fish, her to grasp.” Thus Ovid, describing the decomposition Pound revered the former not only as a Naturphilosoph of this sea-blue nymph into a jellyfish, and tracing her but as a great American writer (Ovid, Jean-Henri Fabre, metamorphic devolution into little more than “organized Remy de Gourmont, and William Henry Hudson were water.” among his other favorite “poets strayed into science”). In his description of his marine nymph Cyanea, In his view, just as Cavalcanti and Dante had brought Agassiz does the reverse of Ovid, gradually constructing the utmost precision to bear in describing the undescrib- this indeterminate floating circular disk of jelly into an able or in rendering visible the invisible, so in a text like ever more intricately defined object whose extensions the preceding one devoted to the giant jellyfish, Agas- in space and pulsations in time he unfolds before our siz managed to give shape and energy to a form of life very eyes. “Seen floating in the water” the description which in the eyes of one of his fellow Massachusetts begins (who is the observer here? is this a translation of transcendentalists seemed little more than “organized that permanent workman-like figure of French descrip- water.” tions, [l’]on voit?), before telling us that “Cyanea Arctica Jellyfish, together with turtles (snapping speci- exhibits...” This tendency of the real to “exhibit” itself mens of which his former student Thoreau sent him is precisely what links nineteenth-century descriptive from Walden Pond), were the two kinds of organisms practice to emergent practices of museology. Agassiz’s that most attracted Agassiz’s classificatory and descrip- great mentors and career models—Bernardin de Saint- tive interest upon his arrival in the United States in 1846 Pierre, Buffon, Lamarck, Jussieu, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, from the University of Neuchâtel in French Switzerland. Cuvier—were all associated with the National Museum The medusa (as he would have known it in Latin, or of Natural History in Paris, where he himself worked at méduse in his native French) described above—a giant the outset of his career in the early 1830s. With Prus- “arctic” version of the Cyanea capillata or Lion’s Mane sian funding (via Alexander von Humboldt’s patronage), jellyfish—was probably taken in the late 1840s during Agassiz subsequently set up a museum of natural one of Agassiz’s cruises off Cape Cod and Nantucket on history in Neuchâtel and later went on to found the the US Coast Survey’s steamship Bibb and then subse- Museum of Comparative Zoology in Cambridge (1860) quently examined more closely in one of the salt-water and to oversee the establishment of the Smithsonian tanks he kept both as part of his laboratories at Harvard Institute in Washington, DC. and near his home in East Boston. Despite his deep museological impulses, however, If one looks at this textual jellyfish as long and as Agassiz is committed to delivering a live specimen of closely as the grad student looked at the sunfish, it too the jellyfish for inspection in our imaginary aquarium. will tend to decompose—or, medusa-like, petrify the For someone who only started writing in English in the gaze of its intrusive observer. Take its name, for exam- late 1840s (one of his biographers describes his stage ple. Phylum Cnidaria (Coelenterata), class Scyphozoa, fright when having to lecture in English in a heavy species Cyanea. From the Greek adjective kuaneous, French accent before an audience of 1500 at the Lowell dark-blue or glossy-blue, as of a snake’s iridescent hues Institute in Boston shortly after his arrival in the New or the sea’s deep blue or the mournful veil of Thetis. The World), Agassiz’s command of the English participle same dark blue informs the name of the nymph Cyane (ongoing action, developing process) is quite remark- in whose eponymous pool in Sicily Kore was raped and able: he observes the disk of his jellyfish “suddenly abducted by Hades. So distraught was Cyane at having thinning out towards the edge,” “constantly heaving witnessed this violation of her friend that (according to and falling, at regular intervals,” its tentacles “moving Book V of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in Simpson’s recent in every direction, sometimes extending … sometimes translation) “completely consumed by her tears, she dis- shortened … constantly rising and falling, stretching solved into those waters whose great goddess she had now in one direction and then in another, but generally just now been. You would have seen her limbs soften, spreading slantingly in a direction opposite to that of
37 the onward movement of hair, encircling organs, which rian nymph, with its “onward movement of hair” and its are farther inward upon the lower surface of the disk.” “waving ruffles [of skirts?] projecting in large clusters” or The jellyfish here functions as an emblem of the beau- (now we move from fashion into the Louis Philippe inté- ties of anaphoric, participial construction in English, its rieur analyzed by Benjamin) displaying “elegant sacks” bunches “extending downwards, or shortening rapidly, which “might also be compared to bunches of grapes” recalling, to whose who have had an opportunity of alternating “with four masses of folds, hanging like rich witnessing the phenomenon, the play of streamers of an curtains,” dominated by a major “sort of horizontal cur- aurora borealis.” (Try translating that back into French). tain” which is connected with the disk and “fastened to The particular ing-ness of this jellyfish—all process, it as it were by ornamental stitches.” A description out of little product—can be seen and heard in the particular Mallarmé’s one-man zine, La Dernière Mode? What was constellation of short i’s that govern the first sentence that Hélène Cixous title? Le Rire de la Méduse? Perhaps, of the description—“floating,” “exhibits,” “disk,” “thick,” given Agassiz’s brave but futile attempts to peer into its “which”—and whose tendrils return in its final sentence: interior, this might be here translated as The Laugh of “is itself,” “disk” “to it,” “stitches,” “concentric,” etc. the Jellyfish. Graphically and phonetically, the medusa becomes audi- ble (and visible) as a participial tangle of short wiggly i’s. Not much capital “I” (or male) self there. As a specialist in description, Agassiz was a student of the great French tradition of naturalist writ- ers—above all, Cuvier—the very writers who taught a Chateaubriand or a Balzac (or a Flaubert) how to describe. (Robbe-Grillet, trained as an agronomist, is also in this tradition, as is Ponge—for which, see Philippe Hamon’s various works on the theory and history of description). What we see, momentously, in Agassiz (and what a nose for these things crazy old fascist sono- fabitch Ez had!) is the translation of this entire French tradition, via the French Swiss (but German-trained) Agassiz (born in Moitier, where Rousseau was lapidated by the locals) into the New England America of Emer- son and Thoreau—both of whom (see Davenport) he taught to look and write. As an exercise in comparative literature: place the Ovidian transparencies of Agassiz’s jellyfish against the girth and gravitas of Melville’s whale (Moby-Dick dates from 1851; Agassiz’s essay “On the Naked-Eyed Medusae of the Shores of Massachusetts in the Perfect State of Development” is published the very same year). Or: situate Agassiz and Melville against Michelet’s La Mer (ten years later, 1861). And then set these all aswim in Lautréamont’s Chants de Maldoror (1868) or Rimbaud’s “Bateau ivre” (1871) where the sea (“Je te salue, viel océan”) provides the deep archaic res- ervoir for the decompositions of surrealist metaphor. All of which we can already observe at work in Agassiz’s highly metaphorized jellyfish. Look at it long enough, and it turns into a weird Victorian item of apparel: “These motions [i.e. its erotic “heavings and fall- ings”] recall so strongly those of an umbrella, alternately opened and shut, that writers, who have described similar animals, have generally called this gelatinous disk the umbrella.” After which, it morphs into a Victo-
38 the onward movement of hair, encircling organs, which rian nymph, with its “onward movement of hair” and its On Being the Right Size proportional to the surface of the moving object. Divide are farther inward upon the lower surface of the disk.” “waving ruffles [of skirts?] projecting in large clusters” or J. B. S. Haldane an animal’s length, breadth, and height each by ten; its The jellyfish here functions as an emblem of the beau- (now we move from fashion into the Louis Philippe inté- weight is reduced to a thousandth, but its surface only ties of anaphoric, participial construction in English, its rieur analyzed by Benjamin) displaying “elegant sacks” The most obvious differences between different animals to a hundredth. So the resistance to falling in the case of bunches “extending downwards, or shortening rapidly, which “might also be compared to bunches of grapes” are differences of size, but for some reason the zoolo- the small animal is relatively ten times greater than the recalling, to whose who have had an opportunity of alternating “with four masses of folds, hanging like rich gists have paid singularly little attention to them. In a driving force. witnessing the phenomenon, the play of streamers of an curtains,” dominated by a major “sort of horizontal cur- large textbook of zoology before me I find no indication An insect, therefore, is not afraid of gravity; it can aurora borealis.” (Try translating that back into French). tain” which is connected with the disk and “fastened to that the eagle is larger than the sparrow, or the hippo- fall without danger, and can cling to the ceiling with The particular ing-ness of this jellyfish—all process, it as it were by ornamental stitches.” A description out of potamus bigger than the hare, though some grudging remarkably little trouble. It can go in for elegant and fan- little product—can be seen and heard in the particular Mallarmé’s one-man zine, La Dernière Mode? What was admissions are made in the case of the mouse and the tastic forms of support like that of the daddy-longlegs. constellation of short i’s that govern the first sentence that Hélène Cixous title? Le Rire de la Méduse? Perhaps, whale. But yet it is easy to show that a hare could not be But there is a force which is as formidable to an insect as of the description—“floating,” “exhibits,” “disk,” “thick,” given Agassiz’s brave but futile attempts to peer into its as large as a hippopotamus, or a whale as small as a her- gravitation to a mammal. This is surface tension. A man “which”—and whose tendrils return in its final sentence: interior, this might be here translated as The Laugh of ring. For every type of animal there is a most convenient coming out of a bath carries with him a film of water of “is itself,” “disk” “to it,” “stitches,” “concentric,” etc. the Jellyfish. size, and a large change in size inevitably carries with it a about one-fiftieth of an inch in thickness. This weighs Graphically and phonetically, the medusa becomes audi- change of form. roughly a pound. A wet mouse has to carry about its ble (and visible) as a participial tangle of short wiggly i’s. Let us take the most obvious of possible cases, own weight of water. A wet fly has to lift many times its Not much capital “I” (or male) self there. and consider a giant man sixty feet high—about the own weight and, as everyone knows, a fly once wetted As a specialist in description, Agassiz was a height of Giant Pope and Giant Pagan in the illustrated by water or any other liquid is in a very serious position student of the great French tradition of naturalist writ- Pilgrim’s Progress of my childhood. These monsters indeed. An insect going for a drink is in as great danger ers—above all, Cuvier—the very writers who taught were not only ten times as high as Christian, but ten as a man leaning out over a precipice in search of food. a Chateaubriand or a Balzac (or a Flaubert) how to times as wide and ten times as thick, so that their total If it once falls into the grip of the surface tension of the describe. (Robbe-Grillet, trained as an agronomist, is weight was a thousand times his, or about eighty to water—that is to say, gets wet—it is likely to remain so also in this tradition, as is Ponge—for which, see Philippe ninety tons. Unfortunately the cross sections of their until it drowns. A few insects, such as water-beetles, Hamon’s various works on the theory and history of bones were only a hundred times those of Christian, contrive to be unwettable; the majority keep well away description). What we see, momentously, in Agassiz so that every square inch of giant bone had to support from their drink by means of a long proboscis. (and what a nose for these things crazy old fascist sono- ten times the weight borne by a square inch of human Of course tall land animals have other difficulties. fabitch Ez had!) is the translation of this entire French bone. As the human thigh-bone breaks under about ten They have to pump their blood to greater heights than tradition, via the French Swiss (but German-trained) times the human weight, Pope and Pagan would have a man, and, therefore, require a larger blood pressure Agassiz (born in Moitier, where Rousseau was lapidated broken their thighs every time they took a step. This was and tougher blood-vessels. A great many men die from by the locals) into the New England America of Emer- doubtless why they were sitting down in the picture I burst arteries, greater for an elephant or a giraffe. But son and Thoreau—both of whom (see Davenport) he remember. But it lessens one’s respect for Christian and animals of all kinds find difficulties in size for the follow- taught to look and write. As an exercise in comparative Jack the Giant Killer. ing reason. A typical small animal, say a microscopic literature: place the Ovidian transparencies of Agassiz’s To turn to zoology, suppose that a gazelle, a grace- worm or rotifer, has a smooth skin through which all jellyfish against the girth and gravitas of Melville’s whale ful little creature with long thin legs, is to become large, the oxygen it requires can soak in, a straight gut with (Moby-Dick dates from 1851; Agassiz’s essay “On the it will break its bones unless it does one of two things. sufficient surface to absorb its food, and a single kidney. Naked-Eyed Medusae of the Shores of Massachusetts It may make its legs short and thick, like the rhinoceros, Increase its dimensions tenfold in every direction, and in the Perfect State of Development” is published the so that every pound of weight has still about the same its weight is increased a thousand times, so that if it is very same year). Or: situate Agassiz and Melville against area of bone to support it. Or it can compress its body to use its muscles as efficiently as its miniature coun- Michelet’s La Mer (ten years later, 1861). And then set and stretch out its legs obliquely to gain stability, like the terpart, it will need a thousand times as much food and these all aswim in Lautréamont’s Chants de Maldoror giraffe. I mention these two beasts because they happen oxygen per day and will excrete a thousand times as (1868) or Rimbaud’s “Bateau ivre” (1871) where the sea to belong to the same order as the gazelle, and both are much of waste products. (“Je te salue, viel océan”) provides the deep archaic res- quite successful mechanically, being remarkably fast Now if its shape is unaltered its surface will be ervoir for the decompositions of surrealist metaphor. runners. increased only a hundredfold, and ten times as much All of which we can already observe at work in Gravity, a mere nuisance to Christian, was a terror oxygen must enter per minute through each square Agassiz’s highly metaphorized jellyfish. Look at it long to Pope, Pagan, and Despair. To the mouse and any millimetre of skin, ten times as much food through enough, and it turns into a weird Victorian item of smaller animal it presents practically no dangers. You each square millimetre of intestine. When a limit is apparel: “These motions [i.e. its erotic “heavings and fall- can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mine shaft; reached to their absorptive powers their surface has ings”] recall so strongly those of an umbrella, alternately and, on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight shock to be increased by some special device. For example, opened and shut, that writers, who have described and walks away, provided that the ground is fairly soft. a part of the skin may be drawn out into tufts to make similar animals, have generally called this gelatinous A rat is killed, a man is broken, a horse splashes. For disk the umbrella.” After which, it morphs into a Victo- the resistance presented to movement by the air is overleaf: Marion Coutts, The Kingdom or Evolution, 2001.
39
gills or pushed in to make lungs, thus increasing the same principle to the birds, we find that the limit to oxygen-absorbing surface in proportion to the animal’s their size is soon reached. An angel whose muscles bulk. A man, for example, has a hundred square yards developed no more power weight for weight than those of lung. Similarly, the gut, instead of being smooth and of an eagle or a pigeon would require a breast project- straight, becomes coiled and develops a velvety sur- ing for about four feet to house the muscles engaged face, and other organs increase in complication. The in working its wings, while to economize in weight, its higher animals are not larger than the lower because legs would have to be reduced to mere stilts. Actually a they are more complicated. They are more complicated large bird such as an eagle or kite does not keep in the because they are larger. Just the same is true of plants. air mainly by moving its wings. It is generally to be seen The simplest plants, such as the green algae growing in soaring, that is to say balanced on a rising column of air. stagnant water or on the bark of trees, are mere round And even soaring becomes more and more difficult with cells. The higher plants increase their surface by putting increasing size. Were this not the case eagles might be out leaves and roots. Comparative anatomy is largely as large as tigers and as formidable to man as hostile the story of the struggle to increase surface in propor- aeroplanes. tion to volume. Some of the methods of increasing the But it is time that we pass to some of the advan- surface are useful up to a point, but not capable of a very tages of size. One of the most obvious is that it enables wide adaptation. For example, while vertebrates carry one to keep warm. All warmblooded animals at rest the oxygen from the gills or lungs all over the body in lose the same amount of heat from a unit area of skin, the blood, insects take air directly to every part of their for which purpose they need a food-supply proportional body by tiny blind tubes called tracheae which open to to their surface and not to their weight. Five thousand the surface at many different points. Now, although by mice weigh as much as a man. Their combined surface their breathing movements they can renew the air in and food or oxygen consumption are about seventeen the outer part of the tracheal system, the oxygen has times a man’s. In fact a mouse eats about one quarter to penetrate the finer branches by means of diffusion. its own weight of food every day, which is mainly used Gases can diffuse easily through very small distances, in keeping it warm. For the same reason small animals not many times larger than the average length traveled cannot live in cold countries. In the arctic regions there by a gas molecule between collisions with other mol- are no reptiles or amphibians, and no small mammals. ecules. But when such vast journeys—from the point of The smallest mammal in Spitzbergen is the fox. The view of a molecule—as a quarter of an inch have to be small birds fly away in winter, while the insects die, made, the process becomes slow. So the portions of an though their eggs can survive six months or more of insect’s body more than a quarter of an inch from the air frost. The most successful mammals are bears, seals, would always be short of oxygen. In consequence hardly and walruses. any insects are much more than half an inch thick. Land Similarly, the eye is a rather inefficient organ until crabs are built on the same general plan as insects, but it reaches a large size. The back of the human eye on are much clumsier. Yet like ourselves they carry oxygen which an image of the outside world is thrown, and around in their blood, and are therefore able to grow far which corresponds to the film of a camera, is composed larger than any insects. If the insects had hit on a plan for of a mosaic of “rods and cones” whose diameter is little driving air through their tissues instead of letting it soak more than a length of an average light wave. Each eye in, they might well have become as large as lobsters, has about a half a million, and for two objects to be dis- though other considerations would have prevented tinguishable their images must fall on separate rods or them from becoming as large as man. cones. It is obvious that with fewer but larger rods and Exactly the same difficulties attach to flying. It is an cones we should see less distinctly. If they were twice elementary principle of aeronautics that the minimum as broad two points would have to be twice as far apart speed needed to keep an aeroplane of a given shape in before we could distinguish them at a given distance. the air varies as the square root of its length. If its linear But if their size were diminished and their number dimensions are increased four times, it must fly twice increased we should see no better. For it is impossible as fast. Now the power needed for the minimum speed to form a definite image smaller than a wave-length of increases more rapidly than the weight of the machine. light. Hence a mouse’s eye is not a small-scale model of So the larger aeroplane, which weighs sixty-four times a human eye. Its rods and cones are not much smaller as much as the smaller, needs one hundred and twenty- than ours, and therefore there are far fewer of them. eight times its horsepower to keep up. Applying the A mouse could not distinguish one human face from
42 another six feet away. In order that they should be of basis. He has already more men on his pay-roll than their any use at all the eyes of small animals have to be much population. It is conceivable that a syndicate of Fords, larger in proportion to their bodies than our own. Large if we could find them, would make Belgium Ltd. or animals on the other hand only require relatively small Denmark Inc. pay their way. But while nationalization of eyes, and those of the whale and elephant are little certain industries is an obvious possibility in the largest larger than our own. For rather more recondite reasons of states, I find it no easier to picture a completely social- the same general principle holds true of the brain. If we ized British Empire or United States than an elephant compare the brain-weights of a set of very similar ani- turning somersaults or a hippopotamus jumping a mals such as the cat, cheetah, leopard, and tiger, we find hedge. that as we quadruple the body-weight the brain-weight is only doubled. The larger animal with proportionately larger bones can economize on brain, eyes, and certain other organs. Such are a very few of the considerations which show that for every type of animal there is an optimum size. Yet although Galileo demonstrated the contrary more than three hundred years ago, people still believe that if a flea were as large as a man it could jump a thou- sand feet into the air. As a matter of fact the height to which an animal can jump is more nearly independent of its size than proportional to it. A flea can jump about two feet, a man about five. To jump a given height, if we neglect the resistance of air, requires an expenditure of energy proportional to the jumper’s weight. But if the jumping muscles form a constant fraction of the animal’s body, the energy developed per ounce of muscle is independent of the size, provided it can be developed quickly enough in the small animal. As a matter of fact an insect’s muscles, although they can contract more quickly than our own, appear to be less efficient; as other- wise a flea or grasshopper could rise six feet into the air. And just as there is a best size for every animal, so the same is true for every human institution. In the Greek type of democracy all the citizens could listen to a series of orators and vote directly on questions of legislation. Hence their philosophers held that a small city was the largest possible democratic state. The English inven- tion of representative government made a democratic nation possible, and the possibility was first realized in the United States, and later elsewhere. With the development of broadcasting it has once more become possible for every citizen to listen to the political views of representative orators, and the future may perhaps see the return of the national state to the Greek form of democracy. Even the referendum has been made pos- sible only by the institution of daily newspapers. To the biologist the problem of socialism appears largely as a problem of size. The extreme socialists desire to run every nation as a single business concern. I do not suppose that Henry Ford would find much diffi- culty in running Andorra or Luxembourg on a socialistic
43 Tatlin, or, Ruinophilia epiphanic moment had in “prospect.”4 Yet they do not Svetlana Boym merely signal decay but also a certain imaginative per- spectivism in its hopeful and tragic dimension. Simmel The early twenty-first century exhibits a strange rui- saw in the fascination with ruins a peculiar form of nophilia, a fascination with ruins that goes beyond “collaboration” between human and natural creation. postmodern quotation marks. In our increasingly digital The contemporary ruin-gaze is the gaze reconciled to age, ruins appear as an endangered species, as physical perspectivism, to conjectural history and spatial dis- embodiments of modern paradoxes reminding us of the continuity. The contemporary ruin-gaze requires an blunders of modern teleologies and technologies alike, acceptance of disharmony and of the contrapuntal and of the riddles of human freedom.1 relationship of human, historical, and natural temporal- Ruin literally means “collapse” but actually, ruins ity. Rather than post-modern, we can call it “off-modern”: are more about remainders and reminders. A tour of it involves exploration of the side-alleys of twentieth- ruins leads you into a labyrinth of ambivalent preposi- century history at the “margins of error” of major tions—“no longer” and “not yet,” “nevertheless” and theoretical and historical narrative, tracing alternative “albeit”—that play tricks with causality. Ruins make us genealogies of modernity from Viktor Shklovksy’s diago- think of the past that could have been and the future that nal “knight’s move” to Tatlin’s spirals. never took place, tantalizing us with utopian dreams Looking back at the ruins of the twentieth century, of escaping the irreversibility of time. Walter Benjamin we see more paradoxical mergers: between suprahu- saw in ruins “allegories of thinking itself,” a meditation man state models and human practices, between on ambivalence.2 At the same time, the fascination with individual aspirations and collective pressure, between ruins is not merely intellectual but also sensual. Ruins ascending dreams and down-to-earth everyday sur- give us a shock of vanishing materiality. Suddenly our vivals. The ruin-gaze challenges the notion of the critical lens changes and instead of marveling at grand “originality of the avant-garde” (Rosalind Krauss) and of projects and utopian designs we begin to notice weeds the continuity of the utopian vision between the artis- and dandelions in the crevices of the stones, cracks on tic avant-garde and the socialist state (Boris Groys).5 modern transparencies, and rust on the discarded Black- Instead, it reveals the internal diversity of the avant- berries in our ever more crowded closets. garde, its singularities and eccentricities that proved to While half-destroyed buildings and architec- be as historically relevant and persistent as its visionary tural fragments might have existed since the beginning elements and collective utopianism. of human culture, ruinophilia did not. There is a historic distinctiveness to the “ruin gaze” that can be understood Ruined Construction Site as the particular optics that frames our relationship to Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International ruins. The ruin gaze is colored by nostalgia, but nostalgia, (1919–1925) was meant to be radically anti-monu- too, is not what it used to be. Its object is forever elusive, mental. As a manifesto of the architectural revolution, and our way of making sense of this longing for home is the Tatlin tower challenged both the “bourgeois” Eiffel also in constant flux. Tower and the Statue of Liberty at once. Moreover, it In my understanding, nostalgia is not merely anti- aspired to outdo Peter the Great’s urban ambitions with modern, but coeval with the modern project itself.3 Like a new attempt to score a victory over unruly nature. modernity, nostalgia has a utopian element, but it is no This tower of iron and glass consisted of three rotat- longer directed toward the future. Sometimes it is not ing glass volumes: a cube, a pyramid, and a cylinder. directed toward the past either, but rather sideways. The The cube was supposed to house the “Soviet of the nostalgic feels stifled within the conventional confines People’s Commissars” (Sovnarkom) and turn at the rate of time and space. The ruins of twentieth-century moder- of one revolution a year; the pyramid, intended for the nity, as seen through the contemporary prism, both executive and administrative committees of the Third undercut and stimulate the utopian imagination, con- International, would rotate once a month; and the cyl- stantly shifting and deterritorializing our dreamscape. inder, a center for information and propaganda, would At the beginning of the twentieth century, Georg complete one revolution daily. Radio waves would Simmel formulated a theory of ruins that resonates with extend the tower into the sky. Oriented towards the contemporary preoccupations. According to Simmel, cosmos, the monument did not merely defy the hierar- ruins are the opposite of the perfect moment pregnant chy of traditional architectural and sculptural styles, but with potentialities; they reveal in “retrospect” what this the force of gravity itself. The dramatically open spiral
44 left: Tatlin standing in front of the model of the Monument to the Third International, 1920 . Courtesy David King Collection. right: The model of Tatlin’s tower, being used in demonstration, 1 May 1925. Courtesy David King Collection.
shape of the tower represented the “movement of the of the Eiffel Tower by choosing the form of a spiral and liberation of humanity,” challenging the old-fashioned leaning to one side. figurative allegory of the Statue of Liberty. Yet uncannily, Tatlin’s monument was not free In fact, the tower embodied many explicit and from the “ruin’s charm” despised by revolutionary think- implicit meanings of the word revolution. The word ers and artists from Malevich to Guy Debord. Lissitsky came from scientific discourse and originally meant praised Tatlin’s tower for its synthesis of technical and repetition and rotation. Only in the seventeenth century artistic knowledge, old and new forms: ”Here the Sargon did it begin to signify its opposite: a breakthrough, an Pyramid at Khorsabad was actually recreated in a new unrepeatable event. The history of the tower reflects material with a new content.”8 The edifice in Khorsabad upon the ambivalent relationship between art and sci- was actually a ziggurat, a pyramidal structure with a flat ence, revolution and repetition. Shaped as a spiral, a top that most likely corresponded to the mythical shape favorite Marxist-Hegelian form, the tower culminated of the Tower of Babel, which in turn resembled the ziggu- in a radical opening on top, suggesting unfinalizability, rat at Babylon called Etemenenanki.9 So in its attempt to not synthesis. In fact, the tower commemorated the be the anti-Eiffel Tower, Tatlin’s tower started to resemble short-lived utopia of the permanent artistic revolution, the Tower of Babel, which was in itself an unfinished of which Tatlin was one of the leaders. He declared that utopian monument turned mythical ruin. Moreover, in the revolution did not begin in 1917 but in 1914 with an the case of the Tower of Babel, the tale of architectural artistic transformation; political revolutions followed in utopia and its ruination is mirrored by the parable about the steps of the artistic one, mostly unfaithfully. language. The Tower of Babel, we recall, was built to The art historian Nikolai Punin described the ensure perfect communication with God. Its failure monument as the anti-ruin par excellence. In his view, ensured the survival of art. Since then, every builder of Tatlin’s revolutionary architecture reduced to ashes the a tower has dreamed of touching the sky, though, of Classical and Renaissance tradition, and the “charred course, the gesture remained forever asymptotic. ruins of Europe are now being cleared.”6 The writer Ilya Every “functional” modern tower evokes this Ehrenburg believed that the tower was an answer to mythic malfunctioning of the original communication. all those figurative official monuments that he called Roland Barthes’s poetic commemoration of the useless- “plaster idiots,” including Marx’s “which as a tribute to ness of the Eiffel Tower could easily apply to its Soviet contemporary thought has been trimmed by an Assyrian rival as well. Barthes wrote that while Eiffel himself saw barber.”7 Tatlin’s tower sabotaged the perfect verticality his tower “in the form of a serious object, rational, useful,
45 46 men return it to him in the form of a great baroque From the very beginning, the Tatlin tower engen- dream which quite naturally touches on the borders dered its double—a discursive monument almost as of the irrational.”10 Much of visionary architecture, in prominent as its architectural original. The writer and Barthes’s view, embodies a profound double movement; literary theorist Victor Shklovsky was one of the few it is always “a dream and a function, an expression of contemporaries who appreciated the unconventional a utopia and instrument of a convenience.” Barthes’s architecture of the tower. For him, this was an archi- Eiffel Tower was an “empty” memorial that contained tecture of estrangement: its temporal vectors pointed nothing, but from the top of it you could see the world. It toward the past and the future, toward “the iron age of became an optical device for a vision of modernity. Tat- Ovid” and the “age of construction cranes, beautiful like lin’s tower played a similar role as an observatory for the wise Martians.”16 To cite Walter Benjamin, in this case palimpsest of revolutionary panoramas that included “modernity quotes prehistory.” The air of the revolution ruins and construction sites alike. functions as the project’s immaterial glue. Thus, Unlike the Eiffel Tower, Tatlin’s was never built. at the origins of modern functionalism in architecture The failure of its realization is not due merely to engi- is the poetic function as well as engineering inventions. neering problems and concerns about feasibility. The Describing the “semantics” of the tower, Shklovsky tower was both behind and ahead of its time, clashing speaks of poetry: “The word in poetry is not merely a with the architectural trends of the Soviet regime. It word, it drags with it dozens of associations. This work appeared as an incomplete theatrical set, not gigantic is filled with them like the Petersburg air in the winter but human-scale, a testimony to revolutionary tran- whirlwind.”17 Tatlin’s tower appears as a monument sience. Leon Trotsky wrote that Tatlin’s project gave “an to the poetic function itself. In its foundation, the two impression of scaffolding which someone has forgotten meanings of the word techne—that of art and of to take away.”11 In fact, it remained “a scaffolding” for future architecture. Tatlin, faithful to avant-garde “tech- nique,” left no professional architectural drawings of the tower, offering space for unpredictability and imagina- tion. Even the original model of the tower has not been preserved. Most of the few remaining photographs are from November 1920 and May 1925 when the model of the tower was paraded during Soviet demonstrations.12 In 1920, articles about the tower appeared in the Munich art magazine Der Ararat and caught the attention of the emerging Dadaists. “Art is dead,” declared the Dada- ists. “Long live the Machine Art of Tatlin!”13 Yet to some extent, the Dadaists’ celebration of the death of art via Tatlin’s spiral guillotine was an act of cultural mistransla- tion and a common Western misconception about the Russian avant-garde. By no means was Tatlin a propo- nent of machine-assisted artistic suicide, especially not at the time of the revolution when “the death of art” was more than a metaphor. Instead, Tatlin argued against the “tyranny of forms born by technology without the participation of artists.” His own slogans, “Art into Life” and “Art into Technology!”, do not merely suggest put- ting art in the service of life or technology, or putting life in the service of political or social revolution.14 Rather, they propose to revolutionize technology and society The Stalinist dream-tower. Artist’s impression of Boris Iofan’s by opening horizons of imagination and moving beyond winning proposal for the Palace of the Soviets. Though some mechanistic clichés and what Tatlin dubbed “construc- preliminary construction began in the late 1930s, the Palace was never built. Courtesy David King Collection. tivism in quotation marks.”15 opposite: Athanasius Kircher, The Tower of Babel, 1679.
47 technical craft—continuously duel with one another. hiding “between the tsar and the revolution,” Shklovsky Hence the tower is not merely an engineering is looking for the third way—the transitory and playful failure but an exemplary case study of constructivist architecture of freedom. He performs a double estrange- architecture. Architecture was imagined as archi-art, as ment, defamiliarizing both the authority of the tsar and a framework for a worldview and a carcass for futurist the liberation theology of the revolution. The “third way” dreams. This made it both more and less than architec- here suggests a spatial and a temporal paradox. The ture in the sense of a built environment. Revolutionary monument caught in the moment of historical trans- architecture offered a scenography for future experimen- formation embodies what Walter Benjamin called the tation and embodied allegories of the revolution. The “dialectic at a standstill.” The first Soviet statue of liberty most interesting examples of this “archi-architecture” is at once a ruin and a construction site; it occupies the were not built monuments but rather dreamed environ- gap between the past and the future in which various ments, models, or unintentional memorials. Shklovsky versions of Russian history coexist and clash. describes his own ludic ruin/construction site that lays a In Shklovsky’s view, Tatlin’s tower and other tran- foundation for the subversive practice of estrangement. sitional monuments to liberty become monuments to It is little known that Shklovsky was the first to estrangement, not to utopia. Estrangement is an exer- describe the Soviet Statue of Liberty in the same collec- cise of wonder, of thinking of the world as a question, tion of essays in which he reviews the Tatlin tower. In The not as a staging of a grand answer. Thus, estrangement Knight’s Move (1919–21) written in Petrograd, Moscow, lays bare the boundaries between art and life but never and Berlin, Shklovsky offers us a parable about the meta- pretends to abolish or blur them. It does not allow for a morphoses of historical monuments that functions as a seamless translation of life into art, nor for the wholesale strange alibi for not telling “the whole truth” or even “a aestheticization of politics. Art is only meaningful when quarter of the truth” about the situation in post-revolu- it is not entirely in the service of real life or realpolitik, tionary Russia. In 1918 in Petrograd, a monument to Tsar and when its strangeness and distinctiveness are pre- Alexander III was covered up with a cardboard stall on served. So the device of estrangement can both define which were written all kinds of slogans celebrating lib- and defy the autonomy of art. erty, art, and revolution.18 The “Monument to Liberty” was Hence, such an understanding of estrangement one of those transient, non-objective monuments that is different from both Hegelian and Marxist notions of exemplified early post-revolutionary “visual propaganda” alienation. Artistic estrangement is not to be cured by before the granite megalomania of the Stalinist period: incorporation, synthesis, or belonging. In contrast to the Marxist notion of freedom that consists in overcoming There is a tombstone by the Nicholas Station. A clay alienation, Shklovskian estrangement is in itself a form horse stands with its feet planted apart, supporting the of limited freedom endangered by all kinds of modern clay backside of a clay boss ... They are covered by the teleologies. wooden stall of the “Monument to Liberty” with four tall By the mid-1920s, the artistic climate in Soviet masts jutting from the corners. Street kids peddle ciga- Russia had changed significantly. In her diary of 1927, rettes, and when militia men with guns come to catch Lidiia Ginzburg, the literary critic and younger disciple them and take them away to the juvenile detention of Tynianov and Shklovsky, observed: “The merry home, where their souls can be saved, the boys shout times of laying bare the device have passed (leaving “scram!” and whistle professionally, scatter, run toward us a real writer—Shklovsky). Now is the time when the “Monument to Liberty.” Then they take shelter and one has to hide the device as far as one can.”20 The wait in that strange place—in the emptiness beneath practice of aesthetic estrangement had become politi- the boards between the tsar and the revolution.19 cally suspect already by the late 1920s; by 1930, it had turned into an intellectual crime. In the late 1920s and In Shklovsky’s description, the monument to the tsar early 1930s, Tatlin worked on another monument of is not yet destroyed and the monument to liberty is not avant-garde technology, the artist’s namesake—Letat- entirely completed. A dual political symbol turns into a lin (a neologism that combines the Russian verb “to lively and ambivalent urban site inhabited by insubordi- fly”—letat’—and the name of the author). If the tower nate Petrograd street kids in an unpredictable manner. represented a dream of the perfect collective, the In this description, the monument acquires an interior; new agora for the Third International, Letatlin was a public site becomes a hiding place. Identifying his an individual flying vehicle. A biomorphic structure, viewpoint with the dangerous game of the street kids somewhere between a costume and a vehicle, it resem-
48 bled the firebird from Russian fairy tales stripped to its the last fifteen years of work of the founders of the visual bare bones. Today, it looks like a vestige of a modern avant-garde, including Vertov and Tatlin who died in Icarus, a tribute to the dream birds and nonfunctional 1954 and 1953, respectively. What can an avant-garde machines imagined by artists since the Renaissance. artist make after his officially declared death? Since Tatlin hoped to have his projects sponsored by the Tatlin’s “postmortem” work consists—literally—of aviation industry, his essay on art and technology was nature mortes, in a brown and gray palette painted on introduced by an epigraph quoting Stalin: “Technology the thinly concealed surfaces of the old canvas or icons decides everything.” Only in Tatlin’s case, technology and of desolate rural landscapes on the backdrops of did not function according to the program. Neither a cel- Socialist Realist theater productions. At first glance, ebration of Soviet engineering nor a solemn statement these works seem untimely and in their technique of Russian cosmism, Letatlin was an intimate artistic resemble some of Tatlin’s earliest experiments with vehicle, a graceful monument to a dream, not a journey figurative painting before 1914. In my view, the belated into another world. There was nothing otherworldly or untimeliness of Tatlin’s still lives and landscapes speaks technological about Letatlin. Most likely it could not fly. obliquely of their time—the time of purges and war. Not in a literal sense, at least. Still lives are reminders of the other, non-revolutionary Letatlin and the tower belong to a very differ- rhythms of everyday life. They preserve the dream of ent history of technology, an enchanted technology home, of domesticated nature, and of a long-standing founded on charisma as much as calculus, linked to artistic tradition. Tatlin’s still lives are devoid of visual pre-modern myths as well as to modern science. What sensuality; they represent endless variations on the remains of Letatlin are the vertebrae of the wings, the same themes: wild onions and radishes, nondescript drawings that resemble those of Leonardo da Vinci. garden flowers, knives stuck into the browning flesh What remains of the Monument to the Third Interna- of not-so-fresh meat, a skull with an open book. These tional is an architectural skeleton in an old photograph. look like memento mori, foregrounding the fragility of Both unrealized monuments appear in retrospect even the most frugal domesticity.21 There is a subtle ten- poignantly anthropomorphic and interconnected. The sion between the ahistorical still lives and the dates on tower resembles the ruin of a mythical space station the minimal caption: 1937, 1944, etc. Still life was not from which Letatlins could soar into the sky. politically suspect and was one of the few remaining Tatlin’s artistic life from mid-1920s to the mid-1930s genres on the margins of Socialist Realism that survived is rich in contradictions refracting its time. He designed extreme censorship. Strangely, this was one of the favor- the coffin of Russia’s revolutionary poet Vladimir Maya- ite genres of prison art promising a temporary escape kovsky, who committed suicide in 1930. In 1931, Tatlin into a quieter plane of human existence. The maker of received the honor of “distinguished artistic worker” still lives excels in the art of minor variations, performing and in 1932 opened a solo exhibition, the only one in a manual labor of cultural memory. his lifetime, where the critics observed—erroneously, it Moreover, the closer we look at Tatlin’s still lives, seems—that Tatlin had moved from “art to technology.” the more they appear to be exercises in double vision, In 1934, the OGPU invited him together with other artists but not in a conventional sense of political double-speak. to observe the construction of the White Sea Canal, one Rather, there is a tension between the figurative flow- of the early sites of Stalin’s slave labor. After a few other ers and the abstract background. In the foreground failed attempts at designing public architecture, Tatlin are the sparse still lives, and in the background the gradually retreated from the artistic public sphere; he thickly painted planes from which the counter-reliefs did illustrations for Kharms and other children’s writers once sprung. These unspectacular and belated stage (before some of them disappeared during the purges) sets were abandoned by the biomorphic revolution- and worked on theater design. At the official “Artists ary Icaruses. No Letatlin would land here anymore; of Russia” exhibit (1933), Tatlin’s works were shown no foundation of a revolutionary tower can be laid on in a small hall dedicated to “formalist excesses” (a suc- this swampy soil of fear. Tatlin’s late works resemble a cessful predecessor of the “Degenerate Art” exhibition desolate “natural setting” in which the projects of the in Germany). Soviet critics proclaimed that Tatlin’s works avant-garde have turned into the ruins of the revolution. demonstrated “the natural death of formal experiments in art” and declared Tatlin to be “no artist whatsoever.” * * * What do artists do when they outlive their cultural relevance? In the Soviet case, we know very little about And yet, nevertheless, still … artistic works have their
49 Vladimir Tatlin, A Skull on the Open Book, ca. 1950.
own paradoxical lives.22 The tower remained a phantom meticulous analysis of Tatlin’s sketches and few pho- limb of the nonconformist tradition of twentieth-century tographs.23 Never realized as a radical revolutionary art, in paper architecture, conceptual installations, and monument, the tower came into material existence new design, opening up another conjectural off-modern as “artistic heritage.” In the post-Soviet remake of the history. Talin’s tower was not destined to exist in the tower, reconstruction and ruination of the revolutionary open space of the city. Instead, it acquired a second life ideals coincided. in many models built around the world since the 1960s. On the other hand, creative if unfaithful appropria- One could distinguish between faithful reconstructions tions of Tatlin’s project lead to a fascinating intersection and reflective appropriations. One of the most faithful between architecture and installation. Ilya Kabakov used replicas was reconstructed on the floor of the mosaic the spiral shape of the tower for his House of Projects, factory where Tatlin worked in the last years of his life. returning utopia back to its origins—not in life but in art. And the most recent Russian reconstruction of the Jane and Louise Wilson’s Free and Anonymous Monu- tower took place between 1986 and 1991 by a group ment, a project based on decaying post-war modern of young architects and designers who performed a architecture, produces flickering shapes of Tatlin’s
50 tower through a cinematic perspective. Similarly, in has compared Tatlin’s tower to the spiral lantern of Borromini’s S. Ivo della Sapi- some of Gordon Matta-Clark’s “cuts” through buildings enza and to the figura serpentina in the mannerist and baroque architecture. slated for demolition, Tatlin’s tower, the model of future 10 Roland Barthes, “The Eiffel Tower,” in The Eiffel Tower and Other Mytholo- gies (New York: Noonday Press, 1979). architecture, appears via negativa—in the shapes of the 11 Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution [1924]. Quoted in Troels Andersen, cut itself, which echoes the tower’s Babelian spiral. It Vladimir Tatlin, (Stockholm, Moderna Museet, 1968), p. 62. continues to haunt contemporary art like a specter of 12 The model shown in November 1920 is discussed in the Club Cézanne where Lunacharsky, Meyerhold, and Mayakovsky debated Tatlin’s projects. lost opportunities. 13 These slogans were proposed at the First Dadaist Fair in the summer of In these architectural and artistic projects, the 1920 by Grosz, Hausmann, and Heartfield. off-modern reveals itself in a form of a paradoxical 14 Vladimir Tatlin, “Iskusstvo v texniku,” in Vystavka rabot zasluzhennogo deiatelia iskusstv V. E Tatlina (Moscow-Leningrad: Ogiz-Izogis, 1932), p. 5. ruinophilia, and in the recycling of industrial forms 15 Anatolij Strigalev & Jurgen Harten, Vladimir Tatlin, Retrospektive (Köln: Du and materials. New buildings or installations neither Monte Buchverlag, 1993), p. 37. destroy the past nor rebuild it; rather, the architect or 16 Victor Shklovsky, “Pamiatnik tret’emu internatsionalu,” in Khod konia (Mos- cow-Berlin: Gelikon: 1923), pp. 108–111. the artist co-creates with the remainders of history and 17 Ibid., 110. collaborates with modern ruins, redefining their func- 18 The statue was erected by the sculptor Paolo Trubetskoi in 1909 on Zna- tions—both utilitarian and poetic. The resulting eclectic, mensky Square near the Nicholas Station, now Vosstaniia Square near the Mos- cow Railway Station. This is how Shklovsky introduces the story: “No, not the transitional architecture reveals a spatial and temporal truth. Not the whole truth. Not even a quarter of the truth. I do not dare to speak extension into the past and the future, into different and awaken my soul. I put it to sleep and covered it with a book, so that it would “existential topographies” of cultural forms. The off- not hear anything.” Ibid., pp. 196-197. 19 Shklovsky, Khod konia, op. cit., pp. 196–97. For a comparative analysis of modern gaze acknowledges the disharmony and the Shklovsky’s theory of estrangement, see Svetlana Boym, “Politics of Estrange- contrapuntal relationship between human, historical, ment: Victor Shklovsky and Hannah Arendt” in Poetics Today, vol. 26, no. 4, and natural temporalities. It is reconciled to perspec- Winter 2005, pp. 581–611. 20 Lidiia Ginzburg, Chelovek za pis’mennym stolom (Leningrad: Sovetskii pisa- tivism and conjectural history. Thus, the off-modern tel’, 1989), p. 59. perspective allows us to frame utopian projects as 21 Contemporary artist Leonid Sokov recalls that in the 1970s during the first dialectical ruins—not to discard or demolish them, but Tatlin exhibit since the artist’s death, various elderly women who worked in the mosaic factory or in the local theaters brought with them small pictures of rather to confront them and to incorporate them into our Tatlin’s forgotten still lives that the artist apparently gave them in exchange for own fleeing present. money and food. 22 Tatlin’s tower found echoes in another unbuilt monument of the twentieth century: The Palace of Soviets (architect Boris Iofan), which was supposed to The portions of this text on Tatlin’s tower are a revised have been built on the site of the destroyed Cathedral of Christ the Savior. In the excerpt from Svetlana Boym’s forthcoming book Palace of Soviets, the dynamic and open spiral is made static, turned into a ter- Architecture of the Off-Modern raced colonnade and decorated with a gigantic statue of Lenin. War interrupted , a FORuM Project Stalin’s architectural ambitions, relegating the Palace of Soviets to the realm of Publication of the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the “paper architecture.” A replica of the cathedral in concrete was built in 1998. Study of American Architecture at Columbia University. 23 The group included D. Dimakov, N. Debrin, I. Fedotov and E. Lapshina. Previ- ous reconstructions of the tower were made in Sweden (1968), England (1971), France (1979), and USA (1980, 1983). There was another reconstruction in Rus- 1 For more on the theory of ruinophilia, see my forthcoming article “The Ruins sia made by T. Shapiro, once Tatlin’s collaborator, in 1975 and 1980. of the Avant-Garde” in Andreas Schonle and Julia Hell, eds., The Ruins of Modernity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008). 2 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama (London: NLB, 1977), pp. 177–178. 3 See Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001). 4 Georg Simmel, “The Ruin,” in Kurt H. Wolff, ed., Essays on Sociology, Phi- losophy and Aesthetics (NY: Harper and Row, 1965), 262. “This is as it were a counterpart of that fruitful moment for which those riches which the ruin has in retrospect are still in prospect.” 5 I refer here to Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1985) and to Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond, trans. Charles Rougle (Princeton University Press, 1992) whose ideas shaped contra- dictory attitudes towards the avant-garde. 6 Nikolai Punin, Pamiatnik Tret’emu Internatsionalu, Proekt xudozhnika V.E. Tatlina (Petrograd: Otdel IZO Narkomprossa, 1921), p. 1. 7 Ilya Ehrenburg, E pur se muove (Berlin: Gelicon, 1922), p. 18. 8 El Lissitsky, “Basic Premises, Interrelationships between the Arts, the New City, and Ideological Superstructure” in William G. Rosenberg, ed., Bolshevik Visions, Part II (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan,1990), p. 188. 9 John Elderfield, “The Line of Free Men: Tatlin’s ‘Towers’ and the Age of Inven- tion,” Studio International, vol. 178, no. 916, November 1969. Siegfried Giedion
51 bones
52 above and throughout: The catacombs of Palermo. Photos Marco Lanza.
The Museum of the Dead chest and diaphragm. They’ve also kept their original Robert Harbison grime; in the shadows, the stark white flesh is almost black with it. Not far from our hotel in the center of Palermo is We’ve had a rich diet so far of Baroque churches Oratorio di San Lorenzo, a little Baroque church founded like this one, mostly decorated in that amazing flat bro- by one of those orders that looks after the unwanted cade of colored marbles that is a specialty in Palermo. dead. The space is crammed with plaster skulls and skel- In my memory, a conflation has occurred between the etons, mostly painted, but the last chapel on the right piles of meat and fish and plastic toys that line so many held what we had come to see: matching pairs of stucco of the streets and the fleshy marbling, resembling slices corpses by the sculptor Giacomo Serpotta, who could through a huge carcass, that stretch from floor to cor- impart life and motion to all kinds of unlikely entities, nice on the inner surfaces of churches. So, perhaps in an such as abstract Virtues and tired old scriptural stories. unconscious search for antidotes to clear the spiritual These are called skeletons in the guidebook, but at least digestion, today we have opted to see ruins of various half the flesh still clings to the bones, especially on the kinds in the less dense outer parts of the city.
53 I debated at unbearable length about whether cemetery that draws large crowds of living tourists. to come out at all. I feel like a ghost, and my first stop There are no tickets and no reductions for this visit was the local pharmacy where they gave me a remedy to the underworld. A fat, unspiritual, greasy monk just whose name I recognize, and fear. Sometimes one can takes the money and throws it into a basket with unex- be purged of an illness by the mere thought of the brutal- pected abruptness. A guidebook I buy later dresses up ity of the cure. the visit and, after a serious discussion of burial customs The texture of the inner core of Palermo was in different cultures starting in antiquity, talks about all opened up significantly by Allied bombing in 1943, many the artworks lining the stairs going down into the cata- scars of which remain. But the old outskirts are nonethe- combs. I don’t notice these important paintings. It seems less much more spacious than the core, though almost a minimal space, stripped bare of all pretense that what as dingy. The square with the Capuchin catacombs lies ahead is anything but grim. seems particularly unlovely and nondescript, and it I had formed the wrong idea about this place, makes me think of a piece of science fiction I read in the expecting the kind of ingenious novelties I’d seen at fifties, set in a future where the city has sunk into gray the Sedlec ossuary in Czechoslovakia, where bones squalor because the whole populace is indoors watch- are formed into recognizable objects, including huge ing an enhanced version of TV. chandeliers incorporating each of the 206 bones of the The most striking ornaments in the square are a human skeleton, heraldry, and obelisks—memorials couple of gaping holes on the far side of it, unmarked composed of exactly what they commemorated. In other doorways in an undecorated classical portico which words, a grotesque form of play that created illusions by someone with a ghoulish sense of humor has tacked presenting corpses as something else entirely. onto the stairway leading down into the weird indoor In Palermo, however, corpses are treated as characters in a play. Perhaps Walt Disney and Madame Tussaud were inspired by places like this, but the Capu- chin crypt will not remind you of their worlds, for in spite of all the talk about the great lengths the monks have gone to in order to create lifelike effects, it feels like somewhere that fell into disuse long ago. Most of the corpses are wearing clothes, it is true, many of them are sitting up, and whole rows of them are standing. But standing is only a mistake of vision: they are hanging from hooks, so their feet don’t normally touch the ground. And the clothes—there’s a kind of allegory in them. They are so dusty and so faded that the whole picture sinks toward something like mono- chrome. They remind me of a painter that a friend of mine knew who got the idea of painting indoors with the blinds drawn and the lights off. The results were extremely melancholy: muted colors, indistinct forms. At first the corpses in Palermo all look the same: stiff, emaciated, and vague in the features. Some of the attempts to keep them straight seem ludicrous. Monks come first, often swaddled in their habits like babies. Then priests; here ecclesiastical ranks are vigorously maintained. Bishops wear miters and more expensive fabrics. But clothes slip down on the shrunken frames and obscure the features, whatever might be left of them. One of the great lessons of the crypt is that clothes decay too; corpses decay first, and then the possessions they bring, becoming corpses of themselves in their turn. You would have to be an expert on eighteenth and nine- teenth century costume to make much of the shredded
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56 residues. Not quite true perhaps—as in a child’s draw- ing, you can tell what the clothes are trying to represent and can summon up the right kind of collar or waistcoat from a Daumier sketch you vaguely remember. The expressions remind you of Daumier too. Once they begin to turn their necks and stretch their jaws, you interpret the corpses’ strategically deployed spasms as interested looks or angry stares or cries of distress. They may be only crude imitations of character, but like a dog who can stand up or a horse who can count, these people hold your attention just because they can manage something like a smile or a pout. The spatial layout of the whole is exceedingly monotonous. It is a large simple grid with a few loose ends where corridors carry on from a junction to make a dead-end fifty yards further on. In fact, there are no rooms, only corridors, with corpses two deep if they are stand- ing, and three or more if lying along the walls. I turned a corner at one point and got a start: it looked just like one of the famous pictures of Auschwitz at the end of the war with listless emaciated figures lined up for the camera. The whole effect is more like a prison than a dwelling place for corpses, much enhanced by the metal cage extending the whole length along the lower tier, added for security reasons in 1979, according to the guide. So the corpses are much safer now from the depredations of visitors who might like to carry off little bits of them. In 1979, trumpets the guide, a general restoration took place. What could it have been like before? All the mummified skin on show, all the encouraging plump- ness, is fleshed out with straw, which often sticks out of necks and sleeves. The guide complains about fires, street repairs overhead, and, of course, the bombing, all of which have taken their toll on the corpses, but this seems a strange focus in a world where rottenness is really all there is. By the time I notice that my voice sounds pecu- liar, blurred, and throaty, it is too late. We have all been breathing the foul air for too long already, luckily without knowing where to look to find the colatoio or colander, where the soft matter drained away from the fresh corpse through stone slats, leaving the parts of the body which the dressers would be able to work with. Like the sanatorium in The Magic Mountain, this is one of those places where every casual visitor ends up a patient at the moment when the nervous joking stops and the infection sets in. Back above ground, the more loosely strung labyrinth of the suburban streets proves confus- ing in its own way and banishes the morbid thoughts arising from our visit to the dead, but my voice keeps its below-ground timbre for the rest of the day.
57 Sacred Bones that they may come to life.’ I began to prophesy as he Mark C. Taylor had bidden me: breath came into them; they came to life and rose to their feet. (Ezekiel 37:1-10) Throughout much of human history, bones have been associated not with death but with life. In many cultures, Where there is belief in reanimation, bones are people actually believe bones are the seat of the vital often preserved after the flesh has decayed and are principle or even the soul. As the locus of life, bones treated with special care. In some cases, they are have mystic powers ranging from cure and divination to given a separate burial or are preserved as objects of birth and rebirth. In the Hebrew Bible, Eve is born from worship. Adam’s rib: “bone from my bones” (Genesis 2:21–22). In It is not only human bones that are surrounded other biblical texts, bones appear to be conscious and with an aura of sacrality, but often the bones of certain even able to speak. The Psalmist declares: animals as well. Joseph Beuys, whose art draws upon and even reenacts spiritual traditions many regard My very bones cry out, as primitive, explains the abiding significance of ani- ‘Lord, who is like thee?— mals: “Why do I work with animals to express invisible thou savior of the poor from those too strong for them, powers?—You can make these energies very clear if the poor and wretched from those who prey on them.’ you enter another kingdom that people have forgotten, (Psalm 35:10–11) and where vast powers survive as big personalities. And when I try to speak with the spiritual existences of this The most important and widely held belief is that bones totality of animals, the question arises of whether one can be reanimated and therefore are essential to rebirth. could not speak with these higher existences too, with This conviction is especially common among people these deities and elemental spirits.”2 Though many ani- in northern Eurasia as well in parts of Asia and can mals have been venerated over the years, three of the also be found in the myths of Germany, the Caucasus, most important are cattle, deer, and elk. The myths and Africa, South America, Oceania, and Australia. Ancient rituals associated with a variety of animals are remark- civilizations in Iran, Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Ugarit ably consistent. Beuys continues, “There are many also believed in the reanimation of bones.1 One of the proscriptions against breaking or in any way harming most remarkable accounts of the resurrection of bones the bones of animals (especially bears, reindeer, and appears in the book of Ezekiel. other animals which are hunted); such bones are to be carefully collected and disposed of. They are buried, or The hand of the Lord came upon me, and he carried exposed in trees or on platforms, or wrapped in the bark me out by his spirit and put me down in a plain full of of trees or covered with stones, brush, and so on. Such bones. He made me go to and fro across them until I had practices are attested especially for northern Eurasia been round them all; they covered the plain, countless and North America.”3 numbers of them, and they were very dry. He said to me, All bones, however, are not created equal. In dif- ‘Man, can these bones live again?’ I answered, ‘Only ferent traditions, skulls, vertebrae, and shoulder blades thou knowest that, Lord God.’ He said to me, ‘Prophesy (scapulae) are believed to harbor special powers that over these bones and say to them, O dry bones, hear lend them ritual significance. The conviction that bones the word of the Lord. This is the word of the Lord God are living leads to the belief that they can communi- to these bones: I will put breath into you, and you shall cate. One of the bones used widely in divination is the live. I will fasten sinews on you, bring flesh upon you, scapula. The practice of scapulomancy (also known as overlay you with skin, and put breath in you, and you spatulamancy) is a form of divination that involves study- shall live; and you shall know that I am the Lord.’ I began ing the pattern of cracks and fissures in bones that have to prophesy as he had bidden me, and as I prophesied, been heated over an open fire. Though it dates back to there was a rustling sound and the bones fitted them- ancient Babylon and is still practiced from Asia and India selves together. As I looked, sinews appeared upon to Europe, one of the most intriguing instances of scapu- them, flesh covered them, and they were overlaid with lomancy is practiced by the Montagnais-Naskapi on the skin, but there was no breath in them. Then he said to Labradorean Peninsula in North America. Omar Moore me, ‘Prophesy to the wind, prophesy, man, and say to describes the ritual: it, These are the words of the Lord God: Come, O wind, come from every quarter and breathe into these slain opposite: William Noah, Shaman, 1972. Inuit stonecut and stencil.
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60 Animal bones and various other objects are used in body stripped of its flesh and names and numbers his divination. The shoulder blade of the caribou is held own bones. The shaman cannot experience rebirth until by them to be especially “truthful.” When it is to be he “becomes” his skeleton. employed for this purpose the meat is pared away, and Nowhere is the ritual use of bones more important the bone is boiled and wiped clean; it is hung up to dry, than in Tibetan Buddhism, where human skulls play a and finally a small piece of wood is split and attached critical role in Lamaist ceremonies. There is considerable to the bone to form a handle. In a divinatory ritual the evidence suggesting that these customs were adapted shoulder blade, thus prepared, is held over hot coals for from Indian practices in which Shiva as Ka¯palabhrta or a short time. The heat causes cracks and burnt spots Mahakals, the Great Destroyer, is frequently depicted to form, and these are then “read.” The Naskapi have a wearing a wreath of human skulls as a necklace. In the system for interpreting the cracks and the spots, and in Prabodha Chandrodaya, performed in 1065 C.E., one this way they find answers to important questions. One of the participants declares: “My necklace and orna- class of questions for which shoulder-blade augury pro- ments are of human bones; I dwell among the ashes of vides answers is: What direction should hunters take in the dead and eat my food in human skulls. … We drink locating game? This is a critical matter, for the failure of liquor out of the skulls of Bra¯hmans; our sacred fires are a hunt may bring privation or even death.4 fed with the brains and lungs of men mixed up with their flesh, and human victims covered with the fresh blood Cracks in bones, it seems, are hieroglyphs for those who gushing from the dreadful wound in their throats, are the know the code. The Montagnais-Naskapi read in the offerings by which we appease the terrible god [Ma¯ha cracks the topography of the territory where they hunt. Bhairava].”6 The skull used for wine and other libations The use of bones for divination is a common part offered to the gods is known as a ka¯pala. Through a long of many shamanistic rituals. Shamanism is, as Mircea etymological excursus, this word eventually issues in the Eliade calls it, an “archaic technique of ecstasy.” Since German kopf (head) and English cup.7 In one of the few bones can be reanimated, they play a critical role in the examinations of this practice, Berthold Laufer notes: ritual of the death and rebirth of the holy man. Eliade describes a pattern that is found in several cultures: Some of these skull-bowls are elaborate mounted and decorated, lined with brass or gilded copper and cov- The skeleton present in the shaman’s costume sum- ered with a convex, oval lid that is finely chased and marizes and reactualizes the drama of his initiation, surmounted by a knob in the shape of a thunderbolt …, that is, the drama of death and resurrection. It is of the symbol of Indra, which is in constant use in nearly small importance whether it is supposed to represent all Lamaist ceremonies. The skull itself rests on a tri- a human or an animal skeleton. In either case what is angular stand, cut out with a design of flames, at each involved is the life-substance, the primal matter pre- corner of which is a human head. These settings are served by the mythical ancestors. The human skeleton frequently very costly, being in gold or silver, and stud- in a manner represents the archetype of the shaman, ded with turquoise and coral.8 since it is believed to represent the family from which the ancestral shamans were successively born. … A simi- Since the efficacy of the rituals depends on the lar theory underlies the cases in which the skeleton—or quality of the skull, Lamas have developed an elaborate the mask—transforms the shaman into some other system of evaluation reminiscent of nineteenth-century animal (stag, etc.). For the mythical animal ancestor is phrenology. The shape, contour, and color of the skull conceived as the inexhaustible matrix of the life of the reveal whether the person was religious, wise, and species and this matrix is found in these animals’ bones. noble. For the karmic power of the skull to become effec- One hesitates to speak of totemism. Rather, it is a mat- tive, it must be prepared according to strict religious ter of mystical relations between man and his prey, procedures. In some cases, the ka¯pala appeared to be so relations that are fundamental for hunting societies.5 powerful that it became the object of worship. In addi- tion to using skulls to make ka¯pala, Lamas fashioned To complete the process of rebirth, the initiate must tambourines for religious ceremonies from skullcaps, experience a mystical vision in which he imagines his and used the thigh bones of criminals who died a vio- lent death to make trumpets that can both solicit and frighten demons. Commenting on these practices, one opposite: A nineteenth-century Tibetan depiction of the Lords of the Charnel Ground. Lama reports: “The people, at hearing of such trumpets,
61 cannot fail to be mindful of death. For the same reason we avail ourselves of bones of the dead for rosary beads. Finally, in order to be still more imbued with this melancholy and sad remembrance, we drink from the cranium.”9 Once again the ambiguity of bones is clear: they are a memento mori that also hold the promise of spiritual renewal. The figure of the skull also plays a pivotal role in the Christian drama of death and rebirth. According to biblical accounts, Jesus was crucified on Golgotha, which means “skull” in Aramaic. Though some commen- tators have argued that the crucifixion site was named Golgotha because of the skulls accumulated from previ- ous executions, a more likely explanation is that the rock formations on the hill resemble a human skull. From the earliest days of Christianity, skulls and bones have A Tibetan ka¯pala, eighteenth or nineteenth century. been objects of meditation, veneration, and speculation. It is not only Shakespeare’s Hamlet who finds lessons in a skull. In his formidable Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel goes so far as to claim: “The skull-bone does have in general the significance of being the immediate actuality of Spirit.” In Hegel’s comprehensive vision, the entire natural and historical world is the embodiment in the Vatican and Saint Paul on the Via Ostia, were or, in theological terms, the incarnation of spirit. The built over the graves of martyrs. In later centuries, this immaterial and the material are not separate and practice spread throughout Europe until basilicas and opposite but are alternative revelations of the same cathedrals eventually became necropolises where prox- reality. imity to the altar was determined by religious prestige and social rank. The church is literally built on the bones If now the brain and spinal cord together constitute of martyrs and believers. that corporal being-for-self of Spirit, the skull and ver- During the Middle Ages, these bones were often tebral column form the other extreme to it, an extreme on display. While most bones were remnants of anony- which is separated off, viz., the solid, inert Thing. mous believers and non-believers, some were purported When, however, anyone thinks of the proper location of to be the remains of martyrs. By this time, the custom Spirit’s outer existence, it is not the back that comes to of individual burial had, for most people, given way to mind but only the head.10 internment in mass unmarked graves. As the urban population grew and burial space became a problem, Here the philosopher who defines modernity echoes the it became customary to dig up the bones and display ancient shamanistic belief in the mystic power of bones. them in galleries and ossuaries called charnels or char- Christian faith and practice are not only bound to nel houses. Rather than a permanent resting place, bones by Golgotha. During the Roman Empire, Chris- graves became pits where flesh could rot—the faster, tians held worship services surrounded by bodies and the better. In the late Middle Ages, if the body had to be bones. To escape persecutions, Christians commonly transported, it was boiled to separate flesh and bone. In met around tombs and in catacombs to honor the dead. his monumental work, The Hour of Our Death, Philippe Since the burial grounds provided seclusion from the Ariès reports: “The flesh was buried at the place of vigilant eyes of the Roman authorities, these gatherings death, which provided an excuse for an initial tomb. The eventually became the occasion for full-blown religious bones were saved for the most desirable burial place services. Though the situation of the Christians changed and the most impressive monuments, for the dry bones dramatically after the conversion of Constantine, the were regarded as the noblest part of the body, no doubt association of religious ceremonies with the place of the because they were the most durable.” 11 Elsewhere Ariès dead can still be discerned in major churches and cathe- cites a Breton hymn that encourages the faithful to drals, which, beginning with the basilicas of Saint Peter ponder the bones stacked in charnels.
62 Let us to the charnel, Christians, let us see the bones specialized in the discovery, sale, and transport of relics Of our brothers… throughout Europe. Neither ambitious churchmen nor Let us see the pitiful state that they have come to… credulous believers and pilgrims seemed to care that You see them broken, crumbled into dust… many of these relics had to be fake. Listen to their lessons, listen well… Through the centuries and across cultures, what makes bones so powerful is that they last. When all “It was important to see,” Ariès explains. “The charnels else is gone, bones remain, and in their remains we see were exhibits. Originally, no doubt, they were no more traces of those who once lived. To our society obsessed than improvised storage areas where the exhumed with denying death by hiding it from sight and mind, the bones were placed simply to get them out of the way, fascination with bones might seem a morbid vestige of with no particular desire to display them. But later, after a primitive mentality from another era. Practices once the fourteenth century, under the influence of a sensibil- deemed holy now appear grotesque. But things are ity oriented toward the macabre, there was an interest in never so simple; bones continue to haunt us. Paradoxi- the spectacle for its own sake.”12 cally, we are always drawn to that which we struggle to When bones are not anonymous, their power avoid because the repressed never simply disappears derives from the lives of the dead. The belief in the mirac- but merely slips underground where it continues to pre- ulous power of bones eventually led to their veneration occupy those who claim to deny it. There is no escape as holy relics. The word relic derives from the Latin rel- from bones; their shadows prefigure our future. iquiae, which originally meant any mortal remains. In the Catholic tradition, relic eventually came to designate the This text is an edited excerpt from Mark C. Taylor’s saint’s body and objects that had direct contact with it photo-essay book Mystic Bones published in 2007 by during his or her lifetime. While clothing and items used the University of Chicago Press. in worship were important, the most prized relics were actual body parts like hair, skin, and bones. The worship 1 Joseph Henninger, “Bones,” The Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Mircea Eliade of relics is not limited to Catholicism; indeed, relics asso- (New York: Macmillan and Free Press, 1987), vol. 2, p. 284. ciated with the Buddha, Mohammed, and Confucius 2 Carin Kuoni, ed., The Energy Plan for Western Man: Joseph Beuys in America (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1990), p. 142. are also enshrined and adored. In whatever tradition it 3 Ibid. occurs, belief in the effectiveness of relics involves what 4 Omar Khayyam Moore, “Divination—A New Perspective,” American Anthro- might be described as “the metaphysics of presence” in pologist, vol. 59, no. 1 (February 1957), p. 70. 5 Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (Princeton: Princ- which physical proximity bestows benefits and provides eton University Press, 1972), pp. 159–60. protection. The martyr effectively inhabits the relic, 6 Mircea Eliade, Yoga: Immortality and Freedom, trans. Willard Trask (New which is capable of transmitting grace, virtue, and even York: Pantheon Books, 1958), p. 298. 7 Berthold Laufer concludes his highly informative article with the following life itself. As belief in the power of relics spread in east- observation: “Finally, there is a visible survival of the ancient custom still pre- ern as well as western Christendom, demand for them served in our language. German kopf (‘head’) corresponds to English cup (Ang- grew, and bones became big business. Their draw was lo-Saxon cuppe), both being derived from Latin cuppa (‘cup’). In Italian, coppa means a ‘cup;’ but in Provençal the same word in the form of cobs means a not only spiritual but also political and even economic. ‘skull.’ Latin testa refers to a pottery vessel or sherd, as well as to the brain-pain From the time of Charlemagne, no church could be con- and head. In Provençal, testa signifies a ‘nut-shell;’ in Spanish, testa denotes secrated without a relic. Competition for relics and the ‘head’ and ‘bottom of a barrel.’ In Sanskrit, ka¯pala means both ‘skull’ and a ‘bowl.’ This correlation is still extant in many other Indo-European languages.” prestige they brought frequently resulted in bodies being See “Use of Human Skulls and Bones in Tibet,” (Chicago: Field Museum of Natu- moved and even stolen. When the relocation of the ral History, 1923), pamphlet no. 10, p. 24. I have drawn many of the details of corpse was legitimate, it took place according to a ritual Tibetan rituals from Laufer’s informative study. 8 Ibid., p. 1. known as translation. By the fifth century, the demand 9 Ibid., p. 13. for bones and body parts was so great that the practice 10 G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (New York: of exhuming, dismembering, and distributing the bodies Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 200, 197. 11 Philippe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, trans. Helen Weaver (New York: Ran- of saints became widely accepted. Amputated fingers, dom House, 1982), p. 262. hands, feet, heads and, of course, bones circulated 12 Ibid., p. 61. throughout Europe. The more important the saint, the greater the power the remains bestowed. With increase in demand, supply became a problem, and a profitable market in relics emerged. In the ninth century, a group of enterprising entrepreneurs formed a corporation that
63 Promotional material for Amanda Feilding’s campain for parliament, 1979.
LIKE A HOLE IN THE HEAD very carefully,” she explains, “I had an extra drill in case Christopher Turner the other one broke down, which indeed it did. I’d gone into every detail.” On a Sunday afternoon in December 1970, Amanda When she finally managed to bore through to the Feilding drilled a hole in her head. “There was quite a dura mater, Feilding grinned triumphantly as a geyser lot of blood,” she warns me when I visit her for lunch at of blood gurgled from the half-centimeter-wide opening Beckley Park—Feilding’s moated Tudor mansion just and poured down her face, spotting the white tunic she outside Oxford—and sit down to watch the short film was wearing with carnation-sized stains. A reviewer she made of her DIY surgery. “It’s not a difficult opera- who saw Feilding’s film in 1978, when she showed it at tion,” she adds. Her pet African grey parrot nibbles her the Suydam Gallery in New York, reported that at the ear. “Drilling a hole in one’s head is really a nerve battle, climax of the operation several members of the audi- doing something which obviously every instinct in your ence fainted, “dropping off their seats one by one like body is against. In a sense it’s quite satisfying that one ripe plums.” can overcome one’s nerves to do it.” The film ends with footage of Feilding bandaging The film, titled Heartbeat in the Brain, shows her her head and mopping up the blood from her face with shaving her hairline, putting on a floral shower cap to water and cotton wool. She changes out of her bloody keep back her remaining locks, fashioning a mask out tunic into a colorful Moroccan kaftan and wraps a shim- of sunglasses and medical tape, injecting herself with a mering gold turban around her head to disguise the local anesthetic, and peeling back a patch of skin with bandages. Looking glamorous, bohemian, and elated, a scalpel. With a look of determined, almost trance-like she smiles goodbye to the camera and heads off to a concentration, Feilding then holds a dentist’s drill to fancy-dress party. her head and, pressing the foot pedal that operates it, begins to push its grinding teeth into the frontal bone. * * * Feilding was a twenty-seven-year-old art student at the time, and says that she was able to dissociate Trepanation (from the Greek word trypanon, meaning herself somewhat from the gory procedure by treat- “to bore”), the creation of a hole in the skull, is the oldest ing her head as if it were a piece of sculpture. She had known surgical procedure. Perforated crania up to 8,000 arranged her tools in a neat row on a table draped in a years old have been found in prehistoric sites all over the white sheet. “I’m quite cautious and I’d prepared myself world. Some of the holes, made by scraping away the
64 bone with a flint or obsidian knife until a piece could be the operation herself: “Not that I’m in favor of self-trepa- prised out, are the size of a man’s palm; other skulls nation,” she adds, “because I think it’s a ridiculous hoop have been pierced several times like a sieve. The major- for an untrained layperson to have to dive through, and ity of these apertures have soft edges, indicating that quite dangerous, which is why I’ve only ever shown my they had begun to heal and that there was a high post- film to small invited audiences. But at that point, it was operative survival rate. the only way to see if trepanation actually makes a differ- Archaeologists have speculated that the operation ence or not.” was performed as a religious rite, an initiation into the Although Feilding entertains all manner of ambi- priestly caste, or as a treatment for demonic posses- guity in relation to her operation, she feels it did have a sion—symptoms we might now diagnose as epilepsy, beneficial effect. “To my subjective experience I thought psychosis, or migraine. A hole in the head served as a at the time that it was rather like the tide coming in,” she mouthpiece to the gods, it was thought, or as a window explains, “I felt a certain peace, it felt like a return, like that would allow bad spirits to escape. I was rising in myself to a more natural level. But obvi- Hippocrates and Galen gave detailed and careful ously one can say that that was a placebo, one can never instructions as to how to best perform the operation, tell with such a subtle feeling.” which was used widely by doctors in the eighteenth and Feilding first encountered the idea of trepanation nineteenth centuries as a treatment for insanity, melan- at the age of twenty-three, when she met an eccentric cholia, and headaches, and remained common right up and handsome Dutchman named Bart Huges, who to World War One; a variety of gruesome-looking devices was an advocate of the benefits of the procedure. She evolved as surgeons sought to perfect a drilling tool. admits to having thought it “a bit freak” at first: “Bart However, in the mid-1930s, when the Portug- quite changed my viewpoint,” Feilding says, “opening ese neurologist Egas Moniz pioneered lobotomy—a up doors of science and biology to me. He was very char- procedure by which a deeper hole was drilled in the ismatic, we had a great love affair, and I was curious to skull so that the prefrontal cortex of the brain could be see if what he said was true.” mutilated using an instrument that resembled an apple corer—trepanation fell out of fashion and was relegated * * * to the realm of superstition. The theory behind lobotomy was that you could destroy the parts of the brain that Bart Huges trepanned himself in 1965. The operation caused psychotic delusions, and for his work Moniz took forty-five minutes, he later reported, but it took four won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1949, by which time hours to clean the blood off the walls and ceiling. Ten trepanation had become an almost extinct practice. In days later, at a public happening in Amsterdam’s Dam the course of the following decade, psychoactive drugs Square, he removed his bandages, which consisted of in turn began to supplant the even more brutal psycho- thirty-two meters of gauze that he’d painted with the surgery that had replaced it. words “HA HA HA HA” in psychedelic colors. When he Feilding wasn’t interested in performing the opera- visited a local hospital to obtain X-ray proof of his act, tion as an extreme form of body art, but because she he was interrogated by psychiatrists, who suspected he believed it would have a life-changing effect on her. She was schizophrenic. He was held against his will whilst hoped that a hole in her head would increase what she doctors performed three weeks’ worth of psychological terms “cranial compliance,” that alleviating the pressure tests. They were forced to release him when these tests in her skull would allow the heart to pump more blood to indicated he was completely sane. her brain, thereby giving her a new feeling of buoyancy. Huges, who had been a medical student but never “If you don’t have that expansibility,” she says of the graduated, was one of the first promoters in Europe prison of inflexible bone that most of us have for skulls, of the consciousness-expanding qualities of LSD. He “then the heartbeat pushes against the brain cells, believed that when mankind evolved to walk upright, which isn’t very good.” our brains drained of the blood with which they had Feilding tells me that she spent four years in previously been saturated. The limited blood supply was the late 1960s trying to persuade a surgeon to trepan now concentrated in the parts of the cerebral cortex her. They all refused, reluctant to do such a procedure that developed language and reason, but there was, he for its own sake without an indication. “If God had argued, an overall dulling of consciousness. “Gravity,” he wanted us to have a hole in our heads,” they told her, liked to quip, “brings you down.” He used to stand on his “He would have given us one.” So she decided to do head in an attempt to defeat it.
65 66 Huges came to believe that trepanation, by creat- groove from the previous operation and got going,” ing an opening akin to a baby’s fontanelle, would allow Mellen wrote in his memoir: “After some time there was the blood to freely pulse around the brain with every an ominous-sounding shlurp and the sound of bubbling heartbeat, thereby creating a permanent high. In an … It sounded like air bubbles running under the skull as eight-foot scroll articulating his ideas, Huges declared they were pressed out.” However, when he examined that those with holes in their skulls would be representa- the trepan it held an irregular sliver of bone, and when tives of the new species Homo sapiens correctus. he didn’t feel the expected difference in mood, he attrib- Huges’s foremost disciple was a friend of Amanda uted this to his having drilled through at an angle. The Feilding named Joseph Mellen. Mellen, who had been hole he had managed was evidently too small. educated at Eton and Oxford before he “tuned in and Three years later, Mellen armed himself with an dropped out,” met Huges in the hedonistic party scene electric drill and tried again. Once more, things did not of 1960s Ibiza, where Huges introduced him to LSD. go smoothly. This time the drill burned out and he had to He went on to describe himself as “a sort of John the bandage his head mid-operation and go downstairs to Baptist” and introduced Huges to Feilding in London in ask a handy neighbor to help him fix it. The repair took 1966. That summer Feilding helped Mellen drill a hole in an hour. his head, which served as a dress rehearsal of sorts for The next day Mellen resumed the operation, and her own operation. finally achieved success: Huges had lent Mellen the money to buy an antique hand trepan, even though he had used an elec- Steadily, almost imperceptibly, over the next four hours tric drill on himself, in the hope that Mellen would be I felt myself get higher and higher. I got higher than I able to prove that anyone, even those who lived in the had thought possible. I felt so light and free. It is very Third World without access to electricity, would be able hard to put in words the feeling of change, but I felt to enjoy the advantages of expanded consciousness. very relaxed, as if everything would fall into place now. However, the centerpiece of the drill was so blunt that Mellen struggled for two hours to get it into the bone, * * * a failure that was not perhaps helped by the fact that he’d steeled his nerves for the operation with LSD. He When Feilding returned from New York a few days after described his efforts in his unpublished memoir, Bore Mellen’s successful trepanation, she was persuaded Hole, as “like trying to uncork a bottle from the inside.” that he had undergone a change for the better. “The The book reads something like an unintentional comedy of errors. Mellen phoned Huges, who was in Amsterdam with Feilding, and he agreed to return to England to help. However, Huges was refused entry into the country (an interview he’d done before he left London had resulted in the unhelpful headline, “This Dangerous Idiot Should be Thrown Out”), and Feilding aided Mellen in his place, using all her might to get the point of the trepan to hold so that the teeth of the drill could find a grip. Mellen, again high on acid, took over the drilling until he blacked out. Feilding phoned for an ambulance and he was rushed to hospital. Feilding and Mellen began seeing each other after she separated from Huges—they would go on to marry and have two children together. Yet Huges’s influence continued to dominate their lives. The fol- lowing year, after Mellen had spent a week in jail for Still from Feilding’s film Heartbeat in the Brain, 1970. possession of cannabis, Feilding assisted him with another attempted self-trepanation. “I found the
opposite: Bart Huges trepanning himself, 1965. Photo Cor Jaring.
67 difference is very subtle,” she explains. “Basically, I put disappointing untrepanned or trepanned,” Feilding it that the neurotic side of the person has a little less laughs. “Just because someone is trepanned it doesn’t grip—because they’re higher, they have a little more mean that you like them any more.” bounce. The floor has been raised a bit, the balloon has In 2000, Feilding traveled to Mexico City to have a been blown up a little bit more. It doesn’t mean it cures second hole drilled in her head because she felt the one the neurotic bag, but I do think it lessens it slightly.” she’d made in 1970 with a dentist’s drill had closed up. Several months later, she made up her mind to trepan The surgeon, who she found after many closer to home herself, with Mellen on hand to film it. Learning from his refused, once again, to help her, performed the opera- mistakes, she performed what she describes as “a fault- tion with a hand-cranked trepan. “I would choose my less trepanation with a very neat scar.” self-trepanation any day,” Feilding says of his clumsy job, Feilding became a leading propagandist for the “but I felt incredibly well after having it, pleased to be benefits of trepanation. She stood for Parliament as me. But obviously a subjective difference is not enough an independent candidate in her local constituency of to convince anyone.” Chelsea in 1979 and 1983, campaigning on the sole “If it is a placebo effect, I’d love to know,” she says, platform that trepanation should be freely available on open to doubt. “Then one can just draw a line under that the National Health Service, doubling her share of the subject and see it as a kind of cultural artwork. I still have vote from 49 to 139 in the process (one journalist at the a burning ambition to discover what the truth is. But time asked whether these were gestures of support or from my own experience I think there is a change, other- protest, a way of saying that the country needed Mrs. wise I wouldn’t be bothering about it forty years later.” Thatcher about as much as it needed a hole in the head). Feilding and Mellen separated after twenty- eight years together; both of them persuaded their subsequent partners to be trepanned. In 1995, Feilding married Lord Neidpath, a former professor at Oxford who taught international relations to Bill Clinton. He found that the terrible headaches he’d suffered from all his life ceased after trepanation. Feilding is still a supporter of the procedure, and has started up the Beckley Foundation to commission research into the possible benefits of trepanation (the Foundation has also obtained permission to conduct the first study in thirty years of the effects of LSD on human subjects; it will test the neural changes brought about by the drug). She has funded the investigations of a scien- tist in St. Petersburg, Yuri Moskalenko, who is a pioneer in the field of cerebral circulation and has performed a battery of neurological tests on patients who have had their skulls opened in order to have cancerous brain tumors removed. Feilding believes his findings “provide incontro- vertible evidence” that trepanation does bring about real neuro-physiological changes. Whether those changes are beneficial or not remains an open question. Even within the tight knit circle of Huges’s disciples, not every- one has been so convinced: Huges’s own sister reported that trepanation had no effect on her at all. Feilding estimates that there are perhaps several dozen people alive today who have been trepanned. I ask her whether she envisages a utopia in which, one day, we all have holes in our heads and access to a higher plane. “On the whole, people remain just as
68 the anti-narcissistic origins of art having seen herself playing, she understood why Hera svetlana boym had mocked her. Athenian melody had no notation. It was the first Bone, O.E. ban, from P. Gmc. *bainam (cf. O.N. bein, performance art and did not survive. All was quiet in the Dan. ben, Ger. Bein). mountains: the birds were not singing—too busy tasting the hyperrealist grapes painted by another artist. The Ban, “public proclamation, legal control, common philosophers were at the symposium snacking on nec- boundary.” Main modern sense of “prohibit” is in part tarines and discussing the miseries of Eros. They paid from O.Fr. ban, which also meant “outlawry, banish- no attention to the little goddess of Sophrosyne and her ment.” Banal, adj. form of ban. Originally designating clumsy, teenage looks. Thus Hera’s slander remained in common things that belonged to feudal serfs, evolved history. through “open to everyone” to “commonplace, ordi- Even Ovid, a fellow artist, did no justice to Athena nary,” to “trite, petty.” and her bone art. “The sound was pleasing; but in the water that reflected my face I saw my virgin cheeks Tibia, Amer. Eng., lower leg bone, 1726, from L. tibia puffed up. I value not the art so high; farewell my flute!” “shinbone,” also “pipe, flute.” (Ovid, Fasti) Much is lost in translation. We don’t know what The original myth of the artist has no bones. Remember happened afterwards, but supposedly Athena threw Narcissus, that pallid youth with sensuous lips gazing away the flute, vowing that whoever picked it up would at his own reflection? Rien, cette écume, ripples on the be severely punished. It was Marsyas who found that surface, a pimple here and there carefully brushed out of flute and he paid dearly for challenging the god of arts, history. And yet the first mirror image produced lots of Apollo, to a musical contest. After defeating Marsyas, background noise and resounding echoes. Apollo, acting in a manic Dionysian fashion, ordered him I will tell you a different story, that of a tomboy flayed. Marsyas’s skin was hung from a tall oak tree, the goddess of wisdom and her unreflective arts. Once upon first monument to a dead poet. a time, a teenage Athena was wandering around the So the moment Athena fell for conventional femi- forest. She frolicked on the boundaries of the divine ter- ninity and narcissistic worries, she lost her curiosity, ritories, leaving a few graffiti here and there, memos of the pleasure of play and of her bone. Mirror stage her presence. “A—a was here.” turned deadly for the Athenian arts. But narcissistic This is when she stumbled upon a gorgeous self-reflection is only skin-deep. Bone art is about tibia lying next to the roots of an oak tree. It must have self-oblivion, co-creation with the winds, and notes of been a deer bone, either from an unrequited sacrifice gratitude to whom it may concern. Making art ruins your or a natural death. Bones outside the body support no make-up. Break a leg, as they say. The show must go on. frame; they are useless and, therefore, beautiful. The crooked tibia was polished by time and wind; Athena This is an excerpt from Boym’s forthcoming From X- made a few holes in it and began to make music. A teen- treme Intimacy, or Tales of Broken Bones. age girl taken out of her state of solipsism and instant messaging suddenly found harmonies and inspiration, breathing into the hollow tibia. The bone became a flute. Athena forgot all about bans and just played and played, blowing her cheeks, co-conspiring with the gentle winds. What happy time out of time it was, before she had to keep busy schedules, intercede with warring kings, and instruct vagrant heroes about the dangers of homecoming in the morning fog. But all happy stories are happy in the same way; the unhappy ones are more interesting. The jealous Hera saw Athena’s happiness and started to laugh at her. “Have you seen yourself? God, how ugly you look blowing into that filthy bone!” Athena ran to the spring on Mount Ida in order to view herself in the water; and
69 The Fate of his Bones Norfolk and Norwich Hospital Museum, which put it on Colin Dickey display. Over the next few decades, the church made repeated entreaties to the museum to have the skull The first half of the nineteenth century was the golden returned, to no avail. age of a practice that I call “cranioklepty,” or skull-theft. In response to a request in 1893, the hospital’s Throughout the nineteenth century, scientists and board, after a “prolonged and careful consideration of other interested parties became increasingly cavalier all the circumstances which pertained to the request,” about disturbing the final resting places of famous refused the vicar’s entreaty by a unanimous vote, citing men, collecting the skulls of the exceptional and the as their reasons: noteworthy.1 This lust for skulls came in part from the burgeoning science of cranioscopy, originated by That as there is no legal title to, or property in, any such Franz-Joseph Gall, and its more well-known offshoot, relic, so there can be no question that this and all other phrenology, a term coined by Gall’s protégé, Emile specimens in the Hospital Museum belong inalienably Spurzheim. The Enlightenment’s preoccupation with to the Governors. That no instance is known of such vision as a means to knowledge led to a desire to see a claim for restitution having been made after nearly how the brain functioned; for Gall and Spurzheim, the half a century on any museum, and were the Governors skull could act as a recording surface for the brain’s to yield to this request they might be unable to resist inner workings, mapping its contours and revealing how similar claims. That the presence in a museum of such aspects of personality were imprinted spatially in differ- a relic, reverently preserved and protected, cannot be ent areas of the brain. Given that cranioscopy had been viewed as merely an object of idle curiosity; rather it born at the University of Vienna (where both Gall and will usefully serve to direct attention to, and remind vis- Spurzheim taught), the disinterred skulls of Viennese itors of, the works of the great scholar and physician.3 composers—including Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, and Schubert—received special attention from phre- It was not until 1922 that the St. Peter Mancroft Church nologists interested in confirming the existence of the was finally able to rebury the retrieved skull. At time of “music bump,” the node on the brain that supposedly Browne’s second interment, the vicar recorded the age corresponded to musical genius. of the deceased as “317 years.” Viennese composers were not, however, the only ones to suffer this fate. The English doctor and 1 Instances of cranioklepty continued into the twentieth century—stories per- philosopher Sir Thomas Browne (1605–1682) stands sist that Prescott Bush (grandfather of George W. Bush) paid Emil L. Holmdahl as something of an icon in the history of cranioklepty, $25,000 to steal the skull of Pancho Villa in 1926, after Bush himself had stolen Geronimo’s skull in 1918 (both are supposedly housed in Yale’s Skull and Bones because of the anxiety he seemed to express about fraternity)—but it is primarily a nineteenth-century phenomenon, when phrenol- the desecration of his own final resting place. “But who ogy was at its height. knows the fate of his bones, or how often he is to be 2 Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia and The Garden of Cyrus, ed. Robin Robbins (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), pp. 91, 117. For another take on buried? Who hath the oracles of his ashes, or whither the history of Browne’s skull, see W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn. they are to be scattered?”, Browne wrote in 1658, argu- 3 Quoted in Charles Williams, “The Skull of Sir Thomas Browne,” in Notes and ing that “To be gnawed out of our graves, to have our Queries, series 8, vol. VI, pp. 269–270 skulls made drinking-bowls, and our bones turned into pipes to delight and sport our enemies, are tragi- cal abominations.”2 Because of statements like these, Browne might be considered the patron saint of stolen skulls, speaking for the collective indignity of all those whose heads were shuffled between museums, collec- tors, and anatomists throughout the nineteenth century. The “tragical abomination” visited upon Browne began in 1840 when his coffin in St. Peter Mancroft Church, Norfolk, was inadvertently disturbed while a vault was being dug next to his plot. Sensing an opportu- nity, the sexton George Potter absconded with the skull, later selling it to the surgeon Edward Lubbock. When Lubbock died in 1847, he deeded Browne’s skull to the
70 top: The skull of Sir Thomas Browne resting on two volumes of Religio Medici. The photograph, which appeared as the frontispiece to the 1904 edition of The Works of Sir Thomas Browne, was probably taken by Charles Williams of Norwich Hospital, around 1900.Thanks to James Eason. bottom: St. Peter Mancroft’s burial book, showing the reburial date of Sir Thomas Browne’s skull, and the “317 years” entered in the age column. Photo Tanya McCallin. Courtesy Norfolk Record Office, PD 26 189.
71 72 Bone play domesticated. Bones and gore threaten the purity and Michael Sappol & Eva Åhrén disinterestedness of science, the clinical detachment which came to be medicine’s defining professional ideal. Anatomy has been a controversial practice ever since Medical educators coped by setting up rules of behavior Andreas Vesalius and his colleagues founded the mod- in the anatomy hall. They demanded cleanliness and ern anatomical tradition in the mid-sixteenth century. decorum, and even, sometimes, respect for the dead. There was a great stigma attached to anatomical dissec- But over and over again, such rules went unheeded. So tion and, even worse, the display of human remains. what went on in the anatomy halls? What did medical The public regarded such activities as a deliberate students do? desecration of the dead, and this response disputed They played. With the dead. And as the flesh was the central premise of anatomical science. Anatomists gradually sheared away, they played especially with claimed to “shine a light on the interior of the body,” the bones, the skeleton. Bone play was, in part, a carni- and dissection became the key method through which valesque response to the professional requirement that physicians and surgeons produced scientific knowl- the medical student overcome personal sensibilities. edge of the body, as well as the privileged ritual that Like everyone else, medical students were brought up to inducted students into the medical profession. Anatomy respect and fear the dead body. Overcoming this deeply was praised as one of the exemplary sciences of the ingrained response can be difficult. For some students, Enlightenment. the first class in anatomy is a crisis, a test of suitability But anatomy was also a death cult. It invited us to for a medical vocation. Some break down, suffer pangs know ourselves through the study and appropriation of of nausea, disgust. Others warm to the task quickly, the dead. And asked its practitioners to put aside any become almost addicted. In either case, the dissecting qualms about dealing with the dead, to enthusiastically experience created, and was partly designed to create, mine their cadavers and search for knowledge within a sense of camaraderie around the shared experience them, with the same kind of relish that prospectors of anatomizing the dead, which was the shared secret searched for gold. Old anatomy halls often bear mottos of the cult of professional medicine, a ritual of mastery such as “hic locus est ubi mors gaudet succur- over death. It was a ritual that was accompanied by an rere vitae” (“this is the place where death rejoices in impulse to dramatize and fool around. In a picture from aiding life”) and “gnosce te ipsum” (“know thyself”). the early 1900s, Danish surgery students mock the And the study of bones, the stuff of which we are built, teaching situation by dressing up a skeleton in a white produced the profoundest knowledge of what it is to be frock and putting a bone saw in its hand and a cigarette human. In the old anatomy theater of Leiden, skeletons, in its mouth. Before modern ventilation and refrigera- holding flags with mottos such as these, were mounted tion, it was common to smoke in dissection halls, as a in a kind of parade, at once playful and awe-inspiring, way to disguise and cope with the stench. The fraternity around the perimeter. Obviously, the anatomical prac- of dissectors, which initially excluded women, was also tice of cutting into dead bodies and laying bare the a fraternity of smokers. bones was more than a scientific quest to discern the In late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century objective facts of the human body. America, such photographs became a sub-genre of pho- The medical profession in general, and anatomists tography. Medical students loved to ham it up before in particular, used the privilege to handle human bones the camera, with partly dissected cadavers or skeletons, as a kind of social power play. Before the age of body the remains often arranged in an “action” pose. Such donation, which commenced in the US around 1950, the photographs—reproduced in medical school yearbooks, cadaver was an unprotected human body. The remains novelty postcards, and souvenir placards—celebrated of convicted criminals and the indigent poor—people and mocked the medical college and human experience, who had few social or political resources to defend their and showed a playful, sometimes sadistic, indifference bodies in death—supplied the dissecting table. In the to any cultural, religious, or moral requirement to treat sanctity of the anatomy room, the medical student could the dead with respect and honor. The cadaver and the work his will, and, for the most part, had little to fear skeleton were medical property. from anyone looking over his shoulder (except for the professor, guardian of the anatomical cult). But death is powerful. Anatomical dissection has a opposite: Photograph from the dissection hall at the Academy of Surgery, Copenhagen, ca. 1910. Courtesy Medical Museion, University grotesque and provoking character: it has to be tamed, of Copenhagen.
73 Anatomy students, of course, were not the only century would be stunned: twenty-first-century people ones to make death icons, to take visual pleasure in seem to ponder their own mortality and the vanity of death. Bones proliferate in the realm of representation. life more obsessively than early modern people who Bony tomb sculptures, paintings, and funerary objects meditated on such things with the help of still lives or could curse enemies, or warn the living to repent of their figurines. Or do we? Maybe the abundance of manu- evil and respect ancestors. During the era of the Black factured bones have a kind of smoke-screen effect that Death and for centuries thereafter, satirical prints and helps us not to think about death. By sequestering death engravings featured skeletons stepping lively in a danse in the realm of art, pop culture, and kitsch, maybe we macabre that mocked the living or sadistically disrupted hope to attenuate the certain prospect of our impend- the everyday life of mortals. In the 1970s and 1980s, ing mortality: Death becomes just another disposable heavy metal bands featured skulls and bones on album consumer object, or conversely just another collectible. covers. The Aztecs and other Central American civiliza- Thus accessorized, we no longer get good representa- tions that were morbidly obsessed with death created tional service out of the skeleton as an inner self, which many skull and bone artifacts, some out of stone, some traditionally negated our individuality and pointed to out of war captives and ritual victims. our common identity and fate: there’s no possibility of Representations of the human skeleton are, how- transgression. If so, then the skeleton is gasping its last ever, probably more ubiquitous in present-day Western breath. Bone play is not as much fun as it used to be. culture. Whether visiting art galleries or going to the mall, it’s hard to avoid skulls and ribcages: you see them in art installations, on posters, T-shirts, umbrellas, and even baby bibs. A time-traveler from the seventeenth
Engraving by W. Swanenburg of the anatomical theater in Leiden, 1610. Courtesy Yale University, Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library.
74 A lithograph by Edward Hull depicting Death interrupting an author before his writing is complete, 1827. Courtesy The National Library of Medicine.
75 Congenital Human Baculum Deficiency Scott F. Gilbert & Ziony Zevit
The letter below, written by a professor of biology and a professor of biblical literature, first appeared in the American Journal of Medical Genetics in 2001. The let- ter and its references have been reproduced exactly as they appeared in the journal.
To the Editor: There are certain genetic diseases that affect 100% of the human population. One of these is gulonolactone oxidase deficiency [OMIM 420400], caused by a dele- tion on chromosome 8p21 [Nishikimi et al., 1994]. The lack of this enzyme causes severe connective tissue disease and makes us dependent upon dietary supple- ments of ascorbic acid. Another genetic condition, extending to 100% of human males, is the congenital lack of a baculum (os priapi; os penis). Whereas most mammals (including common species such as dogs and mice) and most other primates (excepting spider monkeys) have a penile bone, human males lack this bone and must rely on fluid hydraulics to maintain erec- tions. This is not an insignificant bone. The baculum of a large dog can be 10 cm long x 1.3 cm wide x 1 cm thick [Sisson and Grossman, 1953]. In rodents, the proximal segment of the os penis is formed by intramembranous ossification, while the distal region appears to be formed by endochondral ossification. The size of the rodent baculum is regulated by the posterior members of the HoxD set of transcription factors [Williams-Ashman and Reddi, 1991; Zakany et al., 1997] and appears to be induced by members of the TGF-ß and BMP families [Origuchi et al., 1998]. It has not been determined if the deficiency in human males is due to lack of paracrine factor expression in the genital mesoderm. Human bac- ula have been reported, usually in association with other congenital diseases or penile abnormalities [see Hoeg, 1986, Gelbard, 1988; Sarma and Weilbaecher, 1990; Vahlensieck et al., 1995]. One of the creation stories in Genesis may be an explanatory myth wherein the Bible attempts to find a cause for why human males lack this particular bone. Our opinion is that Adam did not lose a rib in the cre- ation of Eve. Any ancient Israelite (or for that matter, any American child) would be expected to know that there is an equal (and even) number of ribs in both men
and women. Moreover, ribs lack any intrinsic genera- Baculum of a gray seal. Photo Ryo Manabe. Collection tive capacity. We think it is far more probable that it Joshua Foer. was Adam’s baculum that was removed in order to make Eve. That would explain why human males, of all
76 the primates and most other mammals, did not have Saunders, Philadelphia. one. The Hebrew noun translated as “rib,” tzela (tzade, Vahlensieck WK Jr., Schaefer HE, Westenfelder M. 1995. “Penile ossification ), can indeed mean a costal rib. It can also and acquired penile deviation.” Eur Urol 27:252–256. lamed, ayin Williams-Ashman HG, Reddi AH. 1991. “Differentiation of mesenchymal tissues mean the rib of a hill (2 Samuel 16:13), the side cham- during phallic morphogenesis with emphasis on the os penis: roles of andro- bers (enclosing the temple like ribs, as in 1 Kings 6:5,6), gens and other regulatory agents.” J Steroid Biochem Mol Biol 39:873–881 or the supporting columns of trees, like cedars or firs, Zakany J, Fromental-Ramain C, Warot X, Duboule D. 1997. “Regulation of num- ber and size of digits by posterior Hox genes: a dose-dependent mechanism or the planks in buildings and doors (1 Kings 6:15,16). with potential evolutionary implications.” Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 94:13695– So the word could be used to indicate a structural sup- 13700. port beam. Interestingly, Biblical Hebrew, unlike later rabbinic Hebrew, had no technical term for the penis and referred to it through many circumlocutions. When rendered into Greek, sometime in the second century BCE, the translators used the word pleura, which means “side,” and would connote a body rib (as the medical term pleura still does). This translation, enshrined in the Septuagint, the Greek Bible of the early church, fixed the meaning for most of western civilization, even though the Hebrew was not so specific. In addition, Genesis 2:21 contains another etio- logical detail: “The Lord God closed up the flesh.” This detail would explain the peculiar visible sign on the penis and scrotum of human males—the raphé . In the human penis and scrotum, the edges of the urogenital folds come together over the urogenital sinus (urethral groove) to form a seam, the raphé. If this seam does not form, hypospadias of the glans, penis, and scrotum can result. The origin of this seam on the external genitalia was “explained” by the story of the closing of Adam’s flesh. Again, the wound associated with the generation of Eve is connected to Adam’s penis and not his rib. A rib has no particular potency nor is it associated mythologically or symbolically with any human genera- tive act. Needless to say, the penis has always been associated with generation, in practice, in mythology, and in the popular imagination. Therefore, the literal, metaphorical, and euphemistic use of the word tzela make the baculum a good candidate for the singular bone taken from Adam to generate Eve.
References Geldbard MK. 1988. “Dystrophic penile calcification in Peyronie’s disease.” J Urol 139:738–740. Hoeg OM. 1986. “Human penile ossification.” Scand. J Urol Nephrol 20:231– 232. Nishikimi M, Fukuyama R, Minoshima S, Shimizu N, Yagi K. 1994. “Cloning and chromosomal mapping of the human nonfunctional gene for L-gulono-gamma- lactone oxidase, the enzyme for L-ascorbic acid biosynthesis missing in man.” J Biol Chem 269:13685–13688. Origuchi N, Ishidou Y, Nagamine T, Onishi T, Matsunaga S, Yoshida H, Sakou T. 1998. “The spatial and temporal immunolocalization of TGFß1 and bone morphogenesis protein-2/4 in phallic bone formation in inbred Sprague Dawley male rats.” In vivo 12:473–480. Sarma DP, Weilbaecher TG. 1990. “Human os penis.” Urology 35:349–350. Sisson S, Grossman JD. 1953. The Anatomy of Domestic Animals. WB
77 An engraving of the iguanodon dinner party that appeared in the London Illustrated News, 7 January 1854. Reproduced with permission from The Crystal Palace Dinosaurs by Steve McCarthy & Mick Gilbert.
A Buried History of Paleontology Georges Cuvier, applied the techniques of comparative Brian Selznick & David Serlin anatomy in an attempt to determine what kinds of crea- tures would have left behind such enigmatic fossilized Fossils, the remains of long-dead organisms that once bones. Among Owen’s many scientific accomplish- walked the earth or swam its seas, form the skeletal ments, he is responsible for coining the word dinosauria structure of the science of paleontology. Humans cer- (“terrible lizard”). tainly contemplated and collected fossils long before Yet for all of the available examples of fossilized the term paleontology was ever coined: bones have bones, no one in the early world of paleontology had been used to prove the existence of everything from ever discovered a complete and intact fossilized skele- dragons to Cyclops to a race of gigantic men. But it ton. This lack of information forced Owen to extrapolate wasn’t until the mid-nineteenth century that people about dinosaurs’ size and shape from examples of teeth, began to understand what fossils actually were. British rib bones, and spikes, and to make educated guesses naturalists William Buckland and Richard Owen, fol- about their position in dinosaurs’ unique morphology. lowing the work of French zoologist and paleontologist In the late 1840s, Owen commissioned Benjamin
78 The invitation to the dinner held inside Hawkins’s iguanodon reconstruction in December 1853. Courtesy Ewell Sale Stewart Library of the Academy of Natural Sciences.
79 Waterhouse Hawkins, a British artist and amateur sci- entist, to build the first life-size sculptures of dinosaurs based on speculations by Owen and Gideon Mantell, the British paleontologist who had done the first work on iguanodons. Hawkins created them for the Great Exhibition of 1851 in Hyde Park, and after the close of the exhibition helped to transport them in 1852 to Sydenham, a suburb south of London, where an enlarged version of the Crystal Palace was rebuilt on what became Crystal Palace Park. The dinosaur sculp- tures were made of iron skeletons and fashioned from bricks and concrete, a hybrid form that evoked both the prefabricated steel-and-glass structures that comprised the original Crystal Palace as well as the brick and mortar of traditional English architecture. Hawkins imagined that visitors would encounter One of Waterhouse Hawkins’s iguanodon sculptures in Crys- tal Palace Park, Sydenham. Photo Michael Gilbert. his sculptures by moving through a series of islands in the park which, when followed, would simulate a walk through millions of years of prehistoric time. A pair of Hawkins’s glorious iguanodons, one standing erect while the other sits on its haunches, cozily resting one of its front paws on a little tree, still occupies a small island in the eastern quadrant of Crystal Palace Park. the shattered fragments in Central Park. To this day, the The standing iguanodon had a fleeting moment of fame skeletal remains of Hawkins’s American dinosaurs have when Hawkins transformed it into the venue for a pri- never been recovered, their iron and brick bones undis- vate dinner party for prominent naturalists of the day on turbed for more than a century and a half. New Year’s Eve in 1853. He positioned the mold for the In 1878, a decade before Hawkins’s death, the standing iguanodon sculpture beneath a striped tent, first complete skeletons of iguanodons were unearthed carefully removed the top layer to create an opening by two coal miners in Bernissart, Belgium. Examina- in its back, and inserted a dinner table complete with tion of the full skeleton revealed that the spike Mantell, china, silver, and candles into the open space. Owen, and Hawkins believed to be a horn was in fact In 1868, while traveling on the lecture circuit in a kind of thumb. Despite this paradigm shift, Hawkins the United States, Hawkins was invited by a group of never removed the spike or made any other anatomical scientists in New York City to build new versions of his corrections to his sculptures in Crystal Palace Park. Per- dinosaur sculptures for a museum of paleozoology that haps this was for the best. The dinosaurs remain as they was being planned on the eastern edge of the newly- were originally imagined, which at the time was cut- opened Central Park. Hawkins set up a workshop near ting-edge science. But now, to us, the dinosaurs seem the building site of the museum and began the labori- to represent a happy medium between the promise of ous process of assembling the skeletal components comparative anatomy and the fantastic tales of dragon of iron and brick. Work on the paleozoic museum skeletons and enormous men. To this day, the spike sits caught the attention of William “Boss” Tweed, the proudly on the noses of all the iguanodons that roam notorious figurehead of the city’s corrupt Democratic the parklands of Sydenham. political machine, who denounced the project (there was no apparent graft that could be had from an institution built around collecting fossils). Hawkins, a Londoner raised to believe in the virtue of making public declarations at Hyde Park Corner, held a dem- onstration in support of the museum during which he openly denounced Tweed. That evening, Tweed’s henchmen entered Hawkins’s studio and destroyed the dinosaur sculptures. Some believe that they buried
80 cutting the world at its joints: an the way back to the Bible, but when did these crea- interview with d. Graham Burnett tures become an explicit problem for natural history? sina najafi I was drawn to the case because I’m interested in prob- In the late eighteenth century, the emerging science of lematic and anomalous organisms. No question: whales comparative anatomy began to reclassify animals are weird, and they have long terrified sea-going peoples according to the organization of their internal forms and befuddled the learned. Moreover, they turn out to be and organs. Few animals proved as problematic for this a decisive organism around which to build the new tax- novel taxonomy as the whale. In his new book, Trying onomy of comparative anatomy in the late eighteenth Leviathan (Princeton University Press), D. Graham century. Taxonomy—the business of sorting things into Burnett, historian of science at Princeton University, categories—had been an important aspect of the study uses an early nineteenth-century trial over whether a of nature for a very long time. But during the period I’m whale was legally a fish or a mammal in order to investi- investigating in the book, a major transition was in the gate the implications of moving the most mythic of sea works. Out went systems based primarily on the external creatures into the same category as cows, mice, and characteristics of plants and animals, and in came tax- humans. Sina Najafi met with Burnett to discuss the onomy concerned centrally with the internal forms and book. arrangements of bones and organs. It may strike us as self-evident that the categories of living things ought to Your book is about a trial—what’s at stake? be based on their internal anatomical details, but in fact there are other approaches that make plenty of sense: Trying Leviathan centers on a trial that took place in you can use milieu, for instance (land animals, water 1818 in Manhattan, where a jury had to determine animals, sky animals; or, as Genesis puts it, beasts that whether a whale was a fish for the purpose of New York creep, fish that swim, and birds that fly); obvious external State law. This question had come up under a statute features, like color or, say, number of feet, work well too. requiring that all fish oil be inspected and taxed. A savvy The term quadruped (“four-foot”) was certainly the cate- merchant in New York City, one Samuel Judd, who had gory you would see most regularly in works of European three barrels of spermaceti in his possession (sperma- zoology through the seventeenth century. ceti is a waxy goo found primarily in the heads of sperm The shift to using internal structure, rather than whales), turned the inspector away, pointing out that, external characteristics, is going to re-align some key according to the latest scientific authorities, whales points in the taxonomic spectrum. Whales (and bats, weren’t fish, so he was off the hook for the fees. The interestingly) will be crucial in this respect. In their dutiful inspector, James Maurice, chortled (“Whales not external characteristics and mode of life, whales are fish? OK, wiseguy!”) and slapped the cuffs on him. The basically fish (if by that you mean, as people did, “a crea- issues at play in the trial—human taxonomy, oceanic ture living exclusively in the water”), but in their internal monstrosity, the interpretation of Genesis, atheistical anatomy they are pretty much indistinguishable from a French philosophy, power politics in the early Republic— big carnivore. And it was in moving the cetaceans out of turned a minor legal fracas into a major sensation. the category of fish and into the emergent category of For three days, the papers wrote about little else, and “mammals” that comparative anatomy had its triumph Maurice v. Judd would be the subject of endless jokes, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. scurrilous poems, double-entendres, angry Op-Eds, Did whales and fish all have fins? Sure. But when you got and backroom gossip for years to come. Before it was out your scalpel, you discovered that the whale’s “fin” over, the trial had become a pivotal test case not just for secreted the bones of a human hand! [see page 83] This whales and fish, but for comparative anatomy, natural wobbled the old certainties of natural order and implied history, and finally, really, for science itself in the US. new and troubling kinships. We don’t any longer hear The case makes a great story, but I am after bigger the word “breast” (mamelle in French) in “mammal,” but game: my aim, in the end, is to use Maurice v. Judd to people very much did hear that in the beginning of the look at changing ideas about natural order between Lin- nineteenth century, and it raised eyebrows. Much resis- naeus and Darwin, roughly between 1750 and 1850. The tance to the non-fish whale hailed from anxiety about trial opens an interesting window onto this large issue. this newfangled taxonomy: lots of folks agreed that there was something louche about organizing God’s Whales have always been highly symbolic, going all creation according to these intimate, bedroom details.
81 Sexual organs? What was wrong with nice, clean exter- homo according to this new taxonomic system, and it nal characteristics? has two hands, two feet, walks upright, and nurses its young?” That was an only slightly veiled allusion to the Had doing this with plants met with less resistance? sharp debates going on in New York State at the time about whether free blacks ought to be allowed to vote. You’re referring to the fact that Linnaeus’s botany, So the power of science to define the boundaries of the which had been enormously successful, had used as human was explicitly debated in the courtroom. its primary discriminant for categorization the num- bers and configurations of the pistils and stamens, Your book goes after theories of knowledge: you want the reproductive parts of the plant. Interestingly, Mary to show who knew what about whales in 1818, but Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman also how they knew it, and how they defended their from 1792 contains a diatribe against male professors knowledge. For this reason, your account of the trial is who would not permit women to study botany because structured around the various classes of people who of a lingering sense that it was inappropriate for them testify — each brings a distinct knowledge of whales to spend so much time basically counting flower- and their anatomy … penises, etc. So there were real questions well into the nineteenth century about the propriety of women’s At one point, one of the lawyers cross-examining a familiarity with these systems. scientific witness says to him, “You’ve mentioned three But in the trial it becomes clear that the primary classes of men: fishermen, artisans, and men of science. anxiety about moving whales into the mammal category There’s a much larger class, those who neither fish, derived from the worrisome implications of the new tax- manufacture, nor philosophize. Have you ever thought onomy for the position of human beings in the natural it worthwhile to pay attention to their opinion?” And I world. According to these systems, humans too were use that moment in the trial to set up a kind of human mammals (“quadruped” had conveniently maintained taxonomy that is at the same time a taxonomy of the dif- the distance between people and beasts). The idea that ferent kinds of knowledge represented at the trial. So in humans and whales were in the same category seemed separate chapters I take up what fishermen and whalers particularly grotesque and absurd to many people. knew about whales (they had a great deal of practical, It’s also worth pointing out that the question of intimate craft knowledge; what we might call “lay exper- who was authorized to speak on taxonomy in general, tise”); what artisans and manufacturers knew about and human taxonomy in particular, was very much at whales (these being men of affairs who dealt in whale issue in Maurice v. Judd. At one dramatic point in the products—oil, whale bone, all that sort of stuff); what the trial, one of the plaintiff’s attorneys says, “If you permit “philosophers” knew about whales (i.e. the compara- these natural philosophers to tell us that whales are not tive anatomists and professors of natural history); and fish, who is to stop them from coming in here with an finally, what “everyone else” knew about spouting sea orangutan and saying that the orangutan ought to be creatures. Here I am talking about ordinary New Yorkers, permitted to vote, because, after all, it’s in the genus with no particular stake in any of this.
The Edinburgh-based Knox brothers spent three years preparing this 83- foot blue whale, known as the Great Rorqual, for display in the 1830s. Draw- ing from The Natural History of the Ordinary Cetacea, or Whales (1837) by Robert Hamilton, part of William Jardine’s series “The Naturalist’s Library.”
82 I wanted to recover how each group understood a whale—or at least its bones. I also found records of a these animals: it is a little like the story of the blind men couple of instances of whale strandings in local waters groping the elephant; everybody had a different handle in those days. In several cases, enterprising showmen on the beast, and when they all started shouting in the dragged a stinking carcass up from the Jersey Shore or courtroom, it was deafening and strange. the Delaware River in order to moor it off Wall Street and charge people 25 cents for a peek! Much of the best material in the book deals with the lost worlds of natural history in New York City: the I love the description of the orchestra playing on weird underworlds of learning, centered around Broadway in front of a huge whale jaw and its six-foot bizarre public cabinets of curiosity, and downtown curtains of baleen. naturalist-hucksters… Right! A group of dubiously Italian crooners—the so- Yes, it is sort of like, “Psst, buddy, got a quarter? Wanna called Pandean Minstrels—set up nightly under the fresh see a naked walrus?” Digging this material up was really jaw of a North Atlantic right whale carted in from Long great. There were a handful of these proto-museums in Island, and played for the throngs that came out to wit- the city at that time, and in the era before P. T. Barnum ness this fantastic monstrosity. they aspired to some cocktail of entertainment and All that stuff is fun, but I also try to sift out the ideas enlightenment: whatever kept the money flowing. about natural order that were implicit in these public As I show, two of these collections held bits of whale displays. For instance, I can show that these cabinets skeleton in 1818, so I was able to figure out where a were arranged to reflect taxonomic categories that New Yorker who was curious could have gone to see were more or less sui generis. My favorite example is
A comparative anatomy of the hand from The Natural History of the Ordi- nary Cetacea, or Whales (1837), by Robert Hamilton. Diagrams C and D show the bony structures in the flippers of a dugong and a bowhead whale, respectively. Diagram E shows a human arm for comparison.
83 top: Captain Valentine Barnard’s depiction of a right (or perhaps a bowhead) whale, ca. 1810. Courtesy the Collection of the New-York Historical Society (PR-145 #76, detail). bottom: Captain Valentine Barnard’s depiction of a sperm whale, ca. 1810. Courtesy the Collection of the New-York Historical Society (PR-145 #76, detail).
84 the collection that filed its whale bones under “miscel- Absolutely. In fact, those chapters in Melville were laneous,” right next to a ten-pound hairball (taken out of what first drew me to the whole subject. It was in trying the bowels of a hog long resident on Spring Street), and to figure out where Melville was getting that stuff that an elaborate model of a French castle (complete with I stumbled on the records of Maurice v. Judd. I think it articulated troops), all carved from beef bones! In other is hard to read Moby-Dick in quite the same way after words, whales weren’t really fish, and they weren’t Trying Leviathan. For one thing, Ishmael’s definition of really quadrupeds. They were anomalies, freaks, or, per- the whale—a spouting fish with a horizontal tail—emerg- haps better, they were wonders. es as polemical in a very particular sense. But put all that aside. To be sure, most whale- Whalers also testify at the trial. What kinds of knowl- men called whales “fish,” but I can show that it’s even edge did they bring to bear on the case? stranger than that, since they didn’t even call all whales “whales.” It turns out that in the US in the 1820s and Two whalemen are called in to give testimony. 1830s, whalers pretty consistently referred only to Disconcertingly, they disagree with passion. One says commercially exploitable species of whales as “whales.” that whales are obviously not fish (he is a captain, and So you would have a whaleman writing in his journal, very proud to be a reader of the encyclopedia), and “lots of finbacks and sulphur-bottoms, but no whales,” the other says, “As far as I know, they’re fish and that which is incomprehensible to us because finbacks and is always how we talked about them in the industry.” sulphur-bottoms (i.e. blue whales) are the very whaleyest So to get at what whalers knew about these animals, of whales: big, huge, textbook whales. But they were to get at ideas about natural history in this expert com- whales that no one could turn into money in 1818. They munity, I spent a lot of time in whaling archives in New were too big, and too fast: they were unkillable. “Whale” England, reading logbooks. They’re curious texts. Some meant, in the technical sense, “money” to a whaleman, of them are pretty skeletal, just laying down wind direc- and under this analysis a finback wasn’t really a whale. tion, water currents, ship’s position and bearing—and, As for physiology, the whalemen, like any good of course, whales seen and whales taken. But others hunters, were very interested in what kept these crea- are expanded into something like commonplace books tures alive, since they hoped to kill them. So these or even diaries. Reading between the lines and doing guys had terms for specific points on the bodies of the a little hermeneutic voodoo, it’s possible to wrest from animal—what they called the “life” of the whale, for those texts some interesting insights into how whalers instance, which was a point on the center back above thought about their prey. Among other things, I show the fin that was thought to be the critical spot to hit that whalemen had not only an idiosyncratic account of with the lance in order to strike the heart—that were the cetacean systematics—a taxonomy for these animals, external mapping of internal physiological processes. and a sense of where they fit in the order of things—but also an anatomy and a physiology of some sophistica- What about the “men of affairs?” You deal here with tion (though it bore little relation to book-learning on what you call the “taxonomy of the market.” these topics). Sailors’ tactics for dismantling these huge creatures at sea amounted to a kind of elaborate dis- This is where things get juicy. It turns out that Maurice v. section, and you can see traces of that on the cut-lines Judd was by no means a funny little commercial transac- they drew on their pictures of whales: if you look closely tion gone awry. Rather, it was nothing less than a formal at the whales drawn by Captain Barnard, [reproduced test case in which two powerful and rival communities on page 84] , you will see these incisions traced in red in New York City were squaring off in a fight for domi- ink. In general, the whalemen’s nomenclature for the nance. I won’t try to talk through all of this craziness for features of the bodies was remarkably detailed, but your readers, but suffice it to say that there are some in almost precise antithesis to the concerns of formal heavy-hitters pulling strings behind the curtain. Whether comparative anatomy, since whalers were preoccupied you thought a whale was a fish or a mammal in New by just the external eight inches of “blanket layer” (the York City in 1818 was effectively like declaring yourself a blubber) on the animals. This was “superficial” anatomy Guelph or a Ghibelline! in a deep sense! This is entertaining and odd, but there is a larger point at issue: there has been a lot of scholarly work in In Moby-Dick, Ishmael has some dismissive things to the last twenty years on the place of natural history in say about bookish cetology, doesn’t he? the formation of American national identity. The gist of
85 Drawing of a whale’s head being hoisted upward, from the journal of Rodol- phus W. Dexter, kept aboard the bark Chili in the early 1860s. Courtesy the New Bedford Whaling Museum.
86 this stuff argues that natural history served as a power- gets lambasted by a character who is probably the most ful tool for “conjuring” the young nation: identifying, gifted lawyer in the country at the time, an ebullient defining, and codifying the distinctive American flora rhetorician and renegade Irish Jacobin named William and fauna is supposed to have served a crucial role in Sampson. I don’t want to spoil the story, but it is fair identifying, defining, and codifying the US as a collective to say that when Mitchill walks back across the green entity. My story swims upstream against much of this that afternoon the two buildings are a great deal farther analysis, because I show that the language of natural apart—in the collective imagination—than when he history was a deeply unstable language with which to started out. I argue the episode marks the termination try to articulate nationhood, precisely because it was of one vision of the relationship between learning and readily deployed divisively. It could split, as well as lump, political culture in the city: the New York Institution folds if you like. Take Maurice v. Judd, where, in the end, a a few years later, its lease is not renewed, and a different kind of regional biogeography of the early Republic—the kind of popular political intellectual culture emerges difference between Massachusetts and New York—can in its place. So there are implications for Mitchill’s failure, be spoken in the language of natural history, and ulti- just as there are long-term implications for Sampson’s mately decides the whole whale-fish controversy. rhetorical dash. I think it’s tempting for people who came of age during the “science wars” to see in a But this is a history of science, right? I feel we have figure like Sampson something of the radical social- wandered some distance from the science of whales. constructivist science-attacker, in that he comes in fight- ing the elite pretensions of formal scientific learning and In the end, the whole trial can be read, I think, as a turn- is willing to do pretty much anything to undermine the ing point for the history of science in the early Republic. purported objectivity and rationality of science. At the time of Maurice v. Judd, New York City had just gone through a period of substantial public investment In your book, much of what was at issue was changing in new institutions of learning, including fitting out a economies of judgment: the professionalization of massive palace of science and philosophy, the “New science is part of this story, but so is the codification York Institution,” just opposite the new, white marble of expertise in new social technologies, and the rise City Hall building—the City Hall that still stands, of which of new political economies that generate their own New Yorkers were very proud. This new set-up was sup- mechanisms for producing and authorizing knowl- posed to be a sort of Royal Society-type arrangement, edge. Talk a bit about the aftermath of the trial and home to scientific societies and public lectures, and it what it shows us about the philosophy of history. represented a vision of science as the handmaiden to governance. The whole thing was very Francis Bacon, a “Economies of judgment” is a nice phrase with which fantasy of knowledge and power locked in mutually ben- to capture the dynamics at issue. Like many historians eficial association. The undertaking was part of an effort of science, I’m concerned with the disjunctive, idiosyn- by a group of politicians to raise the intellectual profile cratic, and contingent character of the production of of New York, which had always been a little down- knowledge in particular situations. In the course of the at-the-heels in this department with respect to both trial, both Sampson and Mitchill offer explicit accounts Philadelphia and Boston. New York had a reputation of the place of natural historical knowledge in a republic. as a mercenary city: lots of trade, lots of fortunes being Sampson claimed very powerfully that in a democracy made, but no serious intellectual culture. courts make facts: some guy in a natty suit or a white The leading figure in this new institution, a coat showing up and saying he’s going to present some European-educated doctor/philosopher named Samuel facts that stand outside the agonistic space of cross- Latham Mitchill, was the lead witness for the defendant examination—this, in Sampson’s view, is anathema to in Maurice v. Judd. The founder of what would become democracy itself. Was he just grandstanding? I don’t the New York Academy of Sciences, and a published know, but it’s an extraordinarily radical position to assert ichthyologist (fish-scientist), Mitchill walked out the that all knowledge in a republic must be subjected to a back door of the New York Institution and crossed the “trial by ordeal” in the civic setting of raw democracy: green to the courtroom in City Hall where the trial was the jury room. held in order to teach everybody that whales were not fish. What happens next isn’t pretty. Instead of getting How is that connected to the question of plain lan- to lecture a docile audience of eager students, Mitchill guage, which comes up in the trial at various points?
87 Drawing of a sperm whale at the water’s surface, from the log of the ship Columbia, early 1840s. Courtesy the New Bedford Whaling Museum.
The epilogue looks at the aftermath of the trial and know everything that could be known about the charac- shows that Maurice v. Judd wouldn’t die. The case teristics but wouldn’t really care about any of them. In enjoyed an extended afterlife in a set of debates in the other words, science is a kind of knowledge that has no nineteenth and even twentieth centuries about the hunger, that needs no salary. This is a very powerful idea, proper relationship between science and society, and though who gains this kind of knowledge—we all get between scientific and demotic language. It turns out hungry!—is much harder to explain. The emergence of that the whole affair was reported in the news abroad this vision of disinterested knowledge is a central prob- and came to the attention of both William Whewell, lem for the historian of science. the master of Trinity College, Cambridge (an important philosopher of science), and John Stuart Mill, his admirer But isn’t this vision also central to the practice of his- and critic. Both of them were enormously concerned tory? Isn’t Trying Leviathan a disinterested book? with the language of science and with the logical struc- ture of scientific reasoning, and both of them used the I feel like you’ve slightly pinched me there, because I do problem at issue in the case—whether the whale was wink at Mill’s view as if we all recognize a kind of a move a fish—to exemplify different positions on the proper that is being made to elevate knowledge-production relationship between science and social organization. It out of the grubby, fleshy world of human beings, and up is hard to do all of this fast, but the core issue is really a onto the ethereal chessboard of reason. Do I understand version of the Sampson/Mitchill problem: Who should the appeal of this move? Its virtues? Yes. But anything tutor whom? When? Where? While Whewell was con- worth having is worth having both ways. After all, tent to let whalemen have their ways of talking about all we’re not angels, and if science is angelic knowledge, this and scientists (a word he himself coined!) to have it is, therefore, not our own. As a historian of science, I theirs, Mill ultimately stumped for convergence of usage, work to show how science is indeed ours: it is made by and his argument speaks volumes about the emergence human beings and has human fingerprints all over it. of modern science. Basically, Mill says, “Look, the kinds But I certainly don’t consider this an attack, or an effort of categories for which we should strive should be those to trivialize. On the contrary, it is an effort to show that that would be generated by a person who had the most these seemingly transcendent achievements are exactly complete knowledge of the objects that we need to human achievements—arguably the very greatest we categorize, and no particular interest in any of those have. characteristics.” That is, this fictionalized person would
88 Character Study Michael Paulus
Despite their wildly distorted human forms, the familiar cartoon characters pictured on the following pages are so commonplace in our contemporary culture that we have come to think of them in some sense as real, living beings. Given this, I thought it would be interesting to examine them as science does any living thing—stripping them down to their bare essentials; dissecting them, as it were, in an attempt to discover their true make-up. As a way to understand better these “individuals” on their most basic level, I rendered their skeletal systems as they would necessarily have to look if someone had, for instance, a skull comprising sixty percent of his or her body mass. Charles Shultz’s classic ensemble—and Charlie Brown, specifically, with his con- spicuously disproportionate head—provided the original incentive to investigate the origins of these entities.
page 90, top: Charlie; bottom: Lucy. page 91, top: Barney; bottom: Fred. All work from the series Character Study: 22 Skeletal Systems of Current and Past Cartoon Characters, 2004.
89
Animal skulls from the National Fish and Wildlife Forensics Laboratory’s collection of specimen samples, used by the morphology department to make species identifications. On top, a selection of primate skulls from the collection. At bottom, the skulls of a baboon (left) and a babirusa (right). Photos Jim Chamberlain.
92 UNNATURAL SELECTION: An Interview involved checking duck blinds or verifying hunting with the National Fish and Wildlife licenses. Terry Grosz ran the endangered species desk of Forensics Laboratory our Washington office, and he went looking for people Colby Chamberlain to examine the evidence that agents were collecting. He discovered that there wasn’t anybody who could forensi- Are they blood stains, or rust stains, or fruit stains, or what cally examine wildlife parts-and-products evidence and are they? That is a question which has puzzled many an come up with “species-source” identifications. The FBI expert, and why? Because there was no reliable test. Now Lab couldn’t devote their limited resources to wildlife we have the Sherlock Holmes test, and there will no longer investigations, and Smithsonian scientists weren’t foren- be any difficulty. sically trained as expert witnesses. Realizing that we had – Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet, 1887 to have our own crime lab, Terry started pounding on desks, pretty much literally, and here we are. Dr. John Watson first meets Sherlock Holmes in a chem- istry lab, establishing a connection between sleuthing What is the lab’s role in the investigative process? and scientific analysis that has persisted in the public imagination—as well as in practice. Holmes, the gifted KG: Generally we’re involved at the very beginning of amateur who clutters his drawing room with bubbling the investigation, when the agent has reason to believe test tubes, anticipates the forensic scientist whose a crime has been committed. There may or may not be study of evidence now forms the foundation of police a suspect; there may just be the wildlife equivalent of a investigations and successful prosecutions. Science and homicide victim, let’s say a dead grizzly bear, a headless the law, however, are ever-changing disciplines with walrus, a bunch of dead eagles or parts thereof scat- differing standards for determining the truth. Caught tered underneath an electrical pole. They might contact between the laboratory and the courtroom, forensics us when they have intercepted a shipment of caviar, becomes as much a task of translation as it is a method of shark fins, hides, or furs, and the suspect is unknown. analysis. In 1973, for instance, Congress drew upon the We have a number of agents who work covertly, and language of taxonomy to pen the Endangered Species we might assist by identifying things those undercover Act, which charged the US Fish and Wildlife Service with agents purchase while posing as a wildlife dealer. the protection of endangered animals from poisoning, commercial trade, and other newly defined violations. Ed Espinoza: That said, we do not do any of the inves- This law in turn introduced into crime labs a veritable tigative work. We provide information to agents and menagerie of new evidence—feathers, claws, hides, and assist them in a continuing investigation. When we bones. First assigned to a patchwork of forensics labs, receive evidence for analysis from our agents, their zoology departments, and natural history museums, questions tend to fall under three general categories: analysis of this evidence has since 1989 been centralized First of all, what did this thing die of? We have two veteri- at the National Fish and Wildlife Forensics Laboratory in nary pathologists who determine the cause and manner Ashland, Oregon, the only lab in the world for the investi- of death of the animal carcasses we receive. Secondly, gation of crimes against wildlife. In October 2007, Colby what is it? Can we tie this feather or bone to the family, Chamberlain spoke with four members of the lab’s staff— class, and order it belongs to? And finally, can we link its director Ken Goddard, its deputy director Ed Espinoza, together the crime scene, the victim, and the suspect? and two members of its morphology department, mam- mologist Bonnie Yates and ornithologist Pepper Trail. I take it, then, that it’s rare that the lab’s scientists are the ones doing the field work? In 1975, special agent Terry Grosz started petition- ing for a US Fish and Wildlife Service crime lab. What KG: Yes, TV shows like CSI do a bit of a disservice to the brought about the need for such a facility? public understanding of crime scene investigations.They combine a crime scene investigator, a detective, and a Ken Goddard: At about the time when the Endangered forensic scientist into one character. In reality, forensic Species Act was put into place, US Fish and Wildlife scientists stay in the laboratory, do not go out to scenes, game management agents were converted over to and let crime scene investigators collect all the evidence. special agents. They had to act more like investigators This allows forensic scientists to make far greater use of or detectives, and less like patrol officers, which had their time in the laboratory working with the instruments.
93 The typical forensics lab might have divisions for can see twelve thousand years’ worth of different ways ballistics, drug analysis, pathology, etc. What sort of in which animals have been used in the environment. additional divisions does your work require? That may seem far away from forensics, but it’s perfectly analogous: you take trace evidence and you reconstruct Bonnie Yates: We have all the typical forensics labora- what happened in the past. tory staff, such as geneticists, firearm examiners, and latent print examiners. What makes our laboratory a bit Pepper Trail: Morphology is a very classic science dating different is our morphology section. In most crime labs, back to the nineteenth century, so there’s a huge body they’re dealing primarily with one species, Homo sapi- of tested procedures, the primary technique being visual ens. They may occasionally identify some dog and cat comparison. Our identifications are critically dependent hair, but beyond that they need to seek out specialists in on having known specimen standards, which is our term feathers, or specialists in mummified frogs. That’s where for verified examples of known species. When we are our laboratory starts to diverge from a typical police lab. making our examinations, we are constantly referring to those curated standards, curated to museum-quality KG: In human crime, the species of a dog or a cat usu- degrees of data management. It is also essential that ally doesn’t matter, just that there’s dog or cat hair on we stay very current with the latest taxonomic deci- the scene. That, generally, is all that human forensic sions related to species, which are surprisingly fluid and scientists or detectives care about. In our case, whether changing all the time. In the last ten to twenty years, a crime has been committed or not is very much related the increased use of genetic analysis has led to a lot of to the species of the victim. It’s also related to when the rethinking of taxonomic relationships. Whether or not victim was killed, what time of day, what week, day of a crime has occurred can depend on what species the month. Was it hunting season? On what side of a name is attached to the victim. If the species name has fence boundary did the shooting occur? What weapon changed, the law may actually list the species under an was used? For example, my first case with the US Fish & old name. So we act as arbiters all the time between the Wildlife Service was to help determine whether or not a taxonomic specialists and the law enforcement people, Canada goose had been killed on the Congressional Golf and we try to give accurate information to both those Course by a golf club, because that would have been a constituencies. crime. I asked them if they expected me to draw a chalk line around a goose lying on a golf green. Having previ- How do you go about collecting standard samples? ously worked on homicide investigations, I thought this was a little off-the-wall. They then told me that part of BY: Often we get carcasses from zoos or from wildlife the problem was somebody had run off with the goose. refuges of certain animals. We keep them in our freezer Clearly, I was now involved in a very different type of and later put them into a colony of beetles that eat away forensic science. In this regard, I think the morphology the meat. We finish the process and then install the section is the enthralling part of our laboratory because bones. We might send the hide off to be tanned, and we have thousands of pieces and parts: hair, fur, feather, then it all goes into our catalogue as study specimens. claw, teeth, bone, skulls. The morphology team has to make sense of all that, knowing any evidence could have EE: Oftentimes it can be more difficult than that. For come from anywhere in the world. That’s a pretty incred- instance, when sturgeon was added to the listings of ible—and difficult—job to ask of our four morphologists. endangered species, Ken made two trips to Russia, first with the genetics supervisor of our lab and then with the Can you tell me a little more about what morphology chief of our law enforcement division to obtain sturgeon is and how it relates to your forensics work? standards, and came back empty-handed both times. Many times, the challenge to obtain comparison stan- BY: Morphology is the study of shape and how shape dards is greater than the actual identification work. defines an organism. Before coming to the lab, I worked in zooarchaeology, which is the study of animal bones KG: If we’re working on endangered species, by from archaeological sites. In zooarchaeology we use definition there are relatively few of them available as morphology to determine what we’re seeing. For exam- standards. Going out to the field to collect one can be ple, you could contrast a paleo-Indian site assemblage a tough thing. Shark finning is becoming a fairly sig- with that of white pioneers during the 1800s, so you nificant issue to us. If the sharks start appearing in the
94 CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered status of the evidence when it arrives here. We might Species of Wild Fauna and Flora) listings, we know that have evidence that arrives in a compromised condi- we’re going to have to come up with fin collections from tion because it was found in Florida, where it’s hot and some 427 species of sharks and rays in order to be able humid and bacteria and enzymes have digested the to distinguish between the microtome-thin slices of DNA chains. Ideally, all our evidence would come from shark fin that show up in the Asian medicinal markets. Alaska in the winter, where it’s frozen solid and all of the evidence characteristics are preserved. The often com- Are there limits to morphology’s ability to distinguish promised condition of our evidence is a big difference between species? I imagine identification becomes between forensics and other types of scientific research. difficult when you just have a few bone samples and you are trying to differentiate between, say, two What are the different ways in which you might ana- closely-related species of deer. lyze a piece of evidence that comes into the lab?
EE: It depends on the bone type. There are certain bones PT: Here’s an example that hasn’t exactly happened, but that are indistinguishable across families and others that is completely plausible. We could get in a large dead are specific to species. canid, that is a member of the dog family. We might first ask how it died. It goes through pathology for determi- BY: For example, rib bones are pretty nondescript. But nation of cause of death, and then over the course of teeth are extremely diagnostic. There’s a whole array the pathology exam, our pathologist finds a bullet. So of relative value to certain skeletal elements that could the bullet goes off to ballistics. We would also need to allow you to do identification. We do identification of ask what species it is. There are many hybrids between species, but we also do individualization; that is, match wolves and dogs, so species identity can often be a pieces of an animal back to a specific animal carcass. vexed question. A sample tissue will go to genetics. In Individualization carries a lot of weight in the courtroom addition, the skull may be prepared in our bug colony to because this is where you’re actually connecting the vic- be looked at by Bonnie, who is an expert in canid skull tim to the crime scene or to the alleged criminal. That’s identification. In the course of the cause-of-death deter- not done with morphology all the time, although it is mination, our pathologist could find in the stomach a possible. This is where genetics really shines. mass of hair, bones, and feathers. He’d send the feathers to me, and I would look at them microscopically to deter- Is genetics the area where the most progress in foren- mine what type of bird this canid had eaten. The hair and sics is being made? bones, if they’re mammal bones, would go to Bonnie, and she would identify the mammal component of that KG: You’re delving into a touchy issue among different meal. Those might suggest that maybe this animal was generations of forensic scientists. I’m from an earlier one poisoned as well as shot, that somebody shot it while it that puts a lot of faith in the examination of trace evidence was staggering around. So the stomach contents would and morphological structure. Some famous international also go to our chemist, and our chemist would look for labs have discarded their trace evidence examination pesticide or deliberate poisoning residue. So in one capabilities in favor of just doing DNA analysis. I think single case every analyst in the lab might be needed to that’s a mistake. There’s much more information to be make the complete analysis that the investigator in the gained from evidence than you get from just a DNA analy- field would like to get. And there’s really no lab in the sis. DNA sequencing is a powerful tool, no question about world like this one, in terms of the capability we have to it, but it doesn’t answer everything. For instance, DNA make that integrated analysis. isn’t useful for a broad unknown. If an investigator sends us a chunk of meat from a suspect’s freezer and asks us KG: And then you also have the conniving nature of our to run a DNA analysis to determine the species-source, suspects , who might have rigged the scene to make it that can be a difficult job, even if we have all of the rel- look like the wolf had taken down a calf, thus allowing evant databases … which we probably don’t. them to shoot it, or in fact the wolf had been baited into the scene with a still-born calf, so we have two interest- EE: Actually, I’d say that DNA doesn’t have any short- ing necropsies to perform and a story to unravel. It’s comings in terms of potential data information to be actually quite a bit of fun to work these cases, but you do gained. If anything, the shortcoming with DNA is the have to enjoy figuring out puzzles.
95 Marking Time examples (eventually hundreds of them) turned up.5 Daniel Rosenberg In 1870, its discoverers, the retired French magistrate, Edouard Lartet, and the English businessman, Henry Under the microscope the gray bird bone became a Christy, determined it to be “puzzling,” perhaps without “library”—which I sat “reading” and pondering for many any meaning at all, and deposited it in a museum.6 Even- days.1 tually, the Lartet bone found its way to the imposing Musée des Antiquités Nationales in Saint-Germain-en- In the summer of 1962, Alexander Marshack, a print Laye near Paris, where it was eventually to be joined by and television journalist, began collaborating with the equally perplexing Blanchard bone. And there it would astrophysicist Robert Jastrow of the Goddard Space sit, in a scholarly midden, abandoned to a rarely-opened Flight Center on a publication to help put the nascent US cabinet in a “musty … stone chamber” among “accumu- space program in historical context. As Marshack wrote lations of Upper Paleolithic materials, crowded under in his later book, The Roots of Civilization, the NASA glass with their aged yellowing labels.”7 One hundred project aimed “to explain ‘how’ man reached that point years later, Lartet’s description was still state-of-the-art. in science and civilization to make it possible to plan a In 1962, archaeologist Jean de Heinzelin took manned landing on the moon, and at the same time … to another try at the problem. Working on the shores of explain the modern scientific and engineering problems Lake Edward in central equatorial Africa the previous involved.”2 The work with Jastrow led Marshack to read year, de Heinzelin’s team had discovered the remains extensively about the origins of astronomy, mathemat- of an 11,000-year-old fishing village that they called ics, and the other sciences on which space exploration Ishango, replete with tools of all sorts. Among these arti- relied. Marshack widened his time frame further and fur- facts was a bone inscribed with notches not unlike those ther, ending up, unexpectedly, in the Paleolithic period. of the Lartet bone. De Heinzelin described the bone as This was how Marshack discovered the Blanchard “the most fascinating and most suggestive of all the bone, the Lartet bone, and all the others. At first encoun- artifacts at Ishango,” because it was so hard to interpret. ter, the bones were only pictures in archaeology books It was not obviously a fishing implement such as a har- and journals. Most of them were old; some, such as the poon, but “a bone tool handle with a small fragment of Blanchard and Lartet bones, more than 30,000 years old. quartz still fixed … at its head.”8 It may have been used, And many of them were old discoveries, as well. Some “for engraving or tattooing, or even for writing of some had been around as long as archaeology itself. The kind. Even more interesting, however, are its markings; Lartet bone, for example, was unearthed at the Gorge groups of notches arranged in three distinct columns. d’Enfer in the Vézère Valley in Southern France in 1865, The pattern of these notches leads me to suspect that very near the as-yet undiscovered caves of Cro-Magnon they represent more than pure decoration.”9 and Lascaux. The Blanchard bone, with markings similar What they represented, or whether “represen- to those on the bone from the Abri Lartet, was found half tation” was even the right term to use, remained a a century later in the same area, buried in an additional problem. But, after grouping and counting the notches, several thousand years’ worth of soil. de Heinzelin speculated that they may have been related In a crowded museum, the Blanchard and the to a kind of proto-mathematical activity. “In one of the Lartet bones would be easy to miss. Both are small, columns [the notches] are arranged in four groups … of about ten or eleven centimeters in length, easily fitting 11, 13, 17, and 19 … In the next they are arranged in eight into the palm of the hand. Both are heavily worked, pre- groups [of] 3, 5, 4, 8, 10, 5, 5, and 7. … In the third they senting a flattened surface covered with “a seemingly are arranged in four groups of 11, 21, 19, and 9. I find chaotic, haphazard pitting.”3 And so were these artifacts it difficult to believe that these sequences are nothing seen for many years: in general, they were interpreted as more than a random selection of numbers. … The middle a “perfect example of non-notational random marking,” column shows a less cohesive set of relations. Neverthe- as symptoms of “man’s urge to ‘decorate,’ or to his ‘need less, it too follows a pattern of a sort. The groups of three to fill an empty space,’ or to doodle in rare moments and six notches are fairly close together. Then [after] is of leisure.”4 For archaeologists and art historians, the a space, after which … four and eight appear—also close stunning representational cave paintings from the same together. Then, again after a space, comes the 10, after period and region held much more interest. which are the two fives, quite close. This arrangement For nearly a century no one attempted a thor- strongly suggests appreciation of the concept of dupli- ough analysis of the Lartet bone, even as other similar cation, or multiplying by two. It is of course possible
96 The engraved marks on the Blanchard bone. Courtesy Harvard University, Peabody Museum.
Marshack’s schematic of the engraved marks on the Blanchard Marshack’s drawing of the serpentine form created by the bone. Courtesy Harvard University, Peabody Museum. markings on the Blanchard bone.
Marshack’s schematic of the Blanchard bone marks laid out flat next to his own lunar schema for comparison.
97 that all the patterns are fortuitous. But it seems probable extra half-day that each cycle requires. Throughout his that they were deliberately planned. If so, they may rep- work, Marshack unwound the data extracted from his resent an arithmetical game of some sort.”10 artifacts and stretched it over his own notational frame. Ultimately, de Heinzelin was unable to establish a In fact, Marshack drew an explicit parallel between his governing pattern, but he was right, Marshack hypoth- own notational practice and that of his subjects. The esized, to view the marks on the Ishango bone as a kind rigid rationalism of his own approach—recounted in of notation rather than a decoration or a doodle. His a romantic language of discovery—was all that much error, Marshack argued, lay in assuming that the marks more evidence for the implicit rationalism of theirs: demonstrated such a high level of abstraction. Draw- ing on his research in astronomy, Marshack speculated Using a small, single-lens hand magnifier, and a that the notches could be read as examples of “lunar jeweler’s eyepiece I had bought for a dollar and a half, I phrasing.” He recognized that the series were much too began the examination. I turned the bone slowly in the irregular to represent actual celestial patterns. On the beam of a powerful lamp. It seemed hopeless. There other hand, with several key assumptions in place (a were all sorts and styles of marks in the pocking. Then, full moon can be observed on more than one evening; as I worked it back and forth in the light, it became it cannot be observed in cloud cover; data collection clear that there was something here that “made sense.” is sometimes faulty; artifacts are incomplete), they There were groups of marks that were made by a appeared to be regular enough to represent celestial hooked or arced stroke. Some of these were made by patterns as observed. Still, to anyone uninitiated, a fine, sharp point and others by a thicker point; some Marshack’s juggling of figures seems hardly less numer- of these arced from the right to left, others from left ological than de Heinzelin’s own. to right. Other marks had been punched without turn- After reading de Heinzelin’s article, Marshack ing, while still others had been made with a limited began to systematically compare similarly marked half turn, to form a bit of arc. … I put the bone under the bones, eventually arguing that a very wide range of somewhat higher magnification of the microscope examples, including the Lartet bone and the Blanchard and carefully, over many hours, turning the bone and bone, adhered to a lunar pattern. Early on, many shifting the lamp, examined and plotted the ‘ballistic’ anthropologists objected to the single-mindedness of print of each mark. … I did not know in which direction Marshack’s argument, which sometimes seemed to the ‘turn’ pointed, but having found a point of turning verge on obsession, an impression that was only height- the “chaotic” form took instantaneous shape. It was a ened by his enthusiastic, outsider prose. It seemed that serpentine figure composed of 69 marks, containing there was no set of markings from which Marshack, some 24 changes of point or stroke. … Obviously the applying his own schematic notational apparatus, could pattern was not random. It had been made on purpose. not extract a lunar cycle.11 It had been made sequentially. Even now, after clarifi- Marshack made no apologies for the rigidity of his cation, I knew it could not be ornament or decoration, technique. He constantly applied assumptions which he for any man making an ornamental composition 1 3/4 had, in his own words, “no right to make,” in order to test inches in size would not have used 24 changes of point them scientifically.12 And he constantly made either/or and stroke to make 69 close marks. It was inconceiv- decisions: we cannot imagine an artist changing stylus able. Besides, it did not look or feel decorative. It must, twenty-four times in the course of making sixty-nine therefore be notational. … The long work in New York decorative marks; we find twenty-four changes on the libraries now came to my aid. I would not have recog- Blanchard bone; therefore, the engravings on Blanchard nized this sequential pattern without that operation. bone cannot have been decorative in intent. Things that But, in addition, I had lived with the waxing and wan- seemed wrong to Marshack were “inconceivable,” and ing moon in thought so long, had been watching the a “feeling” of appropriateness combined with sugges- phases in the sky, and had played with the technique tive data were presented as if they carried the weight of simple notational systems so often, that I now felt at of syllogism. home with this odd, serpentine figure.13 At the heart of his method of interpretation was the curious lunar schema of his own devising, every bit Even where the data extracted from the engraved the rival of the Paleolithic notation systems in its tele- bones did not precisely match his schema, the vision graphic character. It laid out the series of days in an ideal of the maker seemed to match Marshack’s own vision lunar cycle, along with a bi-monthly leap day to cover the perfectly.
98 Of course, Marshack had explanatory tools to 2 Ibid., p. 10. Marshack’s first book was The World in Space: The account for the mismatches as well. In essence, Mar- Story of the International Geophysical Year (New York: T. Nelson, 1958). His shack argued that even in cases where the data for a research with Jastrow followed a few years later. 3 Ibid., pp. 44–45. given cycle were inconclusive, within a couple of cycles, 4 Ibid., pp. 45, 35. the moon count always caught up to where it ought 5 Ibid., p. 35. to have been. He also showed, through microscopic 6 Edouard Lartet and Henry Christy, Reliquiae aquitanicae; Being Contribu- tions to the Archaeology and Paleontology of Périgord and the Adjoining analysis (initially performed with a cheap jeweler’s Provinces of Southern France, ed. Thomas Rupert Jones (London: Williams and loop and then with a toy microscope) that the marks on Norgate, 1875), II, pp. 98–99, pl. XIII, figs. a and b. It was Lartet, too, who discov- these bones were made serially, in a clear order, and at ered the skeletons at Cro-Magnon in 1868. 7 Marshack, p. 43. different times.14 This aspect of Marshack’s argument 8 Jean de Heinzelin, “Ishango,” Scientific American, vol. 206 (June 1962), pp. came to be widely accepted and significantly influenced 109–110. academic archaeology. For Marshack himself, however, 9 De Heinzelin, p. 110. 10 Ibid., p. 110. these were not merely technical observations; they 11 Andrée Rosenfeld, “Review of Notation dans les gravures du paléolithique were the foundation of a larger argument about the supérieur,” Antiquity, vol. 75, no. 180 (December 1971), pp. 317-319; Arden cognitive and cultural character of prehistoric humanity. R. King, “Review of The Roots of Civilization,” American Anthropologist, New Series, vol. 75, no. 6 (December 1973), pp. 1897–1900; R. J. Gillings, “Review All of these artifacts, he said, were the result of “time- of The Roots of Civilization,” Isis, vol. 68, no. 1 (March 1977), pp. 137–139; factoring” activities. That is to say, they at once took Francesco d’Errico, “Palaeolithic Lunar Calendars: A Case of Wishful Thinking?” account of and worked themselves out through time. Current Anthropology vol. 30, no. 1 (February 1989), pp. 117–118; d’Errico and Marshack, “On Wishful Thinking and ‘Lunar Calendars,’” Current Anthropology, And the presence of such time-factored artifacts was vol. 30, no. 4 (August–October 1989), pp. 491–500; Iain Davidson, “Review of enough to demonstrate that in its fundamental cogni- The Roots of Civilization,” American Anthropologist, New Series vol. 95, no. 4 tive posture, Paleolithic humanity very much resembled (December 1993), pp. 1027–1028; James Elkins, “On the Impossibility of Close Reading: The Case of Alexander Marshack,” Current Anthropology, vol. 37, no. 2 modern “scientists who were planning the lunar and (April 1996), pp. 185–226. planetary shots of the space program.”15 Hence the 12 Marshack, 28. distinction throughout his work, between (scientific) 13 Ibid., p. 45. 14 Ibid., p. 18. notation and (artistic) decoration, and his emphasis on 15 Ibid., p. 24. finding the former seemingly everywhere in the Paleo- 16 Ibid., p. 35. lithic world.16 But in this respect, Marshack cut his either/or lines too deeply. In demonstrating that the Lartet and the Blanchard bones could be read as notational systems, Marshack neither demonstrated their confinement within the realm of reason nor their exclusion from the realms of doodling or of art. To the contrary, in his study of the Paleolithic world, he went a long way toward showing how mixed-up these categories need to be. And, given Marshack’s very dramatic emphasis on his empathy with his Paleolithic subjects, this above all is what we might have expected him to notice. Marshack’s intellectual itinerary from journalism to television to academic scholarship, his passion for the ossuary, and his penchant for literary and graphic invention, suggest a comparison that might ultimately have been more fruitful than that with a mythified NASA astrophysicist. After all, why shouldn’t the cognitive profile of humanity include all of the possibilities represented in Marshack’s own itinerant creative life?
1 Alexander Marshack, The Roots of Civilization: The Cognitive Beginnings of Man’s First Art, Symbol and Notation (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972), p. 148. Marshack published an earlier version of his central argument in Notation dans les gravures du paléolithique supérieur; nouvelles méthodes d’analyse (Boreaux: Delmas, 1970).
99 Photos Emeline Zummer, undated. Courtesy Linda Zummer.
100 os innominatum insertion of the photographic as artificial memory. It con- Thomas Zummer fers only a salient and exterior supplementarity. There is a second photograph, also taken by my pre-face aunt Emeline, this time in the house where I grew up, in One morning, by now almost twenty years ago, I Saginaw, Michigan. It’s around three in the afternoon, received a small package from my sister. She is two in my parents’ living room, and I am a bit older than in years younger, and we are very close. In the package was the previous photo. The composition is diagonal, and I an envelope containing a number of black-and-white am sitting on a couch that has been covered in plastic. photographs with a note explaining the circumstance There is an ornamental shelf, carved black walnut, above of their retrieval. She had been surveying the random me, and two framed images hang on either side of it. accretions of photographic stuff lying around our par- At the far end of the room, there is a fireplace. What is ents’ home when she came across a roll of 35mm film, not visible within the photograph is the large picture exposed and undeveloped, that had fallen behind one of window directly across from the couch I am sitting on, the drawers in an ancient cabinet full of papers, pictures, and a second couch, under that window. I am facing the and artifacts. The film was approximately twenty years camera, and my face is screwed up, not only because old, but appeared to be in a good state of preservation, of the flash of light, but also because I am annoyed. The so she developed the roll. Surprisingly, all of the images camera had startled me, interrupting my observation were legible, and it was this collection that she sent to of the events occurring outside, on the sidewalk, in our me. They were remarkable for a number of reasons. front yard. I had seen something through the window I have an uncommonly good memory, and I recall that was quite unusual in our neighborhood at the time, precisely the events enframed by these photographs. something which was, for me, absolutely novel: strolling They were taken by my aunt Emeline with an Argus C3 leisurely along the sidewalk, unaccompanied, were two 35mm camera (she had later given me that very camera) large black dogs, the first I had ever seen, and I was thor- in late summer, at my grandparents’ place on the shore oughly fascinated. Something in my countenance must of Lake Huron, in Arenac County, just outside the small have impressed itself upon my aunt, and she snapped village of Au Gres, Michigan. I am the subject of many a picture. By the time my vision cleared, the dogs were of these pictures; I was around three years old, and also gone. As I looked at the photograph of this event —an present were my mother and grandmother, and my image I had never before seen— I noticed that, just vis- infant sister. It was late in the day, what cinematogra- ible in the lower portion of one of the framed pictures on phers refer to as the “golden hour,” and the sand was the wall, to the right above the wrapped couch, were the cool; the water was calm, the sound subliminal and reflected heads of the two dogs I had been observing. musical. I was standing on a towel, a checkerboard pat- While this is, in exegetical terms, a triviality, one which is tern of green and white with a series of complementary both private, and accessible only through the testimony black lines. My pants were tan corduroys; my shirt a of a witness of unverifiable veracity, it also, in its minute pullover T, sky-blue, black, olive, and tan. I have a stone provisionality, touches upon certain philosophical issues in my mouth. It is a small, smooth, well-rounded green concerning memory, cognition and mediation that are of sedimentary stone, a form of littoral precipitate of which a broad and pressing import. I am still particularly fond (I also still have the stone). My What is opened to question is the relation, via the posture, I had noticed, is curious—I look as if I am doing traces rendered salient by an interceding technology, a three-year-old’s imitation of Max Schreck in Murnau’s that one has to one’s self, body, and memory, a species Nosferatu. Behind me, the boat hoist on the right side of re-cognition that takes place in relation to other forms of the image is home-made from welded angle iron, and of reflection. Technologies embodied as a stratum of painted forest green, one of a great many details which technical unconscious produce an artifactuality wherein come unbidden to memory. But what is most curious the distinctions between natural and prosthetic per- is that I was—as I am still—unable to suture this photo- ception are suspended. The somatic relation between graphic image to the order of memory of those events. images and sensations, especially where transmission I cannot “put myself into” the image, or think through it, and reception are coextensive in a “live” imaging of the such that it is bound to the same time and circumstance body (e.g., sonogram, but also television, radio, surveil- of remembrance. I am similarly unable to “consume” this lant, or online systems) are indistinguishable, even when image, to integrate and make it a part of me, to secure such evidentiary traces are superimposed with virtual, its prosthesis as my own, an invisible and unrecognized probabilistic, normative, or generalized models.
101 inter-face cinematic: we are haunted by images, traces of an When we cannot remember, sensory-motor extension elsewhere that we have made our own, domesticated remains suspended, and the actual image, the present fragments that we have compelled to enter into strange optical perception, does not link up with either a motor and familiar relations, differential economies of sense. image or a recollection image which would re-establish Presence deferred to an impossible proximity, but not contact. It rather enters into a relation with genuinely lost entirely. What happens when the phrasing, or pars- virtual elements, feelings of déjà vu or past in general (I ing, of such phantasmata appear as having already must have seen that man somewhere ), fantasies or the- taken place, where there is an anteriority revealed, atre-scenes (he seems to play a role that I am familiar brought to light, within the paradoxical necessity and with ). In short, it is not the recollection-image or atten- impossibility of the prosthetic? tive recognition which gives us the proper equivalent of the optical-sound image, it is rather the disturbances of sur-face memory and the failures of recognition. Recently, I have been having difficulty with my hands. —Gilles Deleuze This has taken form in the onset of an intermittent loss of feeling in the thumb and first two fingers of both Otherwise the recording can take place but remains hands. This numbness subsides readily, simply by mov- unknown. ing from a stationary position, and there is no apparent –Jean-François Lyotard diminution of fine motor control, but the effect is none- theless disconcerting. In exploring the possible reasons For all of its increasing sophistication, the camera, for this condition, I was prescribed a set of X-rays of mobile or static, remains an instrument of citation, a the upper thoracic region. The X-rays were surprising, “writing in/of movement and light” that secures only the and revealed an odd and hitherto unsuspected condi- most minute movement as it flashes by. Still, when we tion: there are two extra, fully-formed ribs in my upper see what a camera has recorded, there is nonetheless a thorax. Moreover, they both exhibit fully articulated reflex, hardwired within us, that perceives movement, double joints at the attachment, at C7/T1, with an and even reflection, as substance, a reflex which com- unusual inclination, crossing in front of the two ribs pels us to recognition in/for/as response to an other, an immediately below, to attach, in the common manner, artifactual other seen as having appeared either within to the sternum. The condition is unique. These unnatural the frame of the image or operating at its presumed supplements are likely contributors to the loss of sensa- point of origin. Facial recognition, for example, is one tion in my hands and fingers, a kind of spectral passing of our earliest unconscious accomplishments, and the in and out of sensation, due to the sudden appearance, camera intervenes in that, to present a technically repro- within, of an entirely unperceived register of the body. ducible shadow, an apparition of presence, one that operates at the same time as an index of loss. Benjamin’s post-face substitution of an “unconsciously penetrated space” A field of images, hybrid and heterogenous, variable where prosthetic perception introduces us (via the inter- and permeable, intimately linked to destabilized sub- cessionary technics of the camera) to an “unconscious jectivities, distributed and deferred in space and time, optics” (and to similarly unconscious impulses) but only configured as a demarcation or boundary—an inter- at a remove, a certain proximity outside the image or face—between two discrete registers, biological and scene, couples the compulsion to repetition with the technical, becomes porous and permeable. Within the promise of recuperation. There is, in this uncanny dou- diffuse materialities of these transformations questions bling of the camera’s unconscious optics with our own arise concerning the relation between bodies, systems, impulses, a technico-philosophical sleight of hand that and technologies. How does one begin to rethink this purports to secure the whole of the real, so that cinemat- relation without reversion to cumbersome robots, dumb ic perception is folded back into our own experience, an collectivities, or unwieldy cyborgs? How does one re- artificial memory, naturalized and subsumed, holding think the reflexive relations between body and image forth the proleptic promise of recall, even as its distur- without reinscribing the hard borders of monstrosity? bance circumscribes a doubled site of absence. How to think the economies, limits and extent of the What we thought were sensations have become prosthetic? In moving from the ubiquity of technical ghosts, transfixed in a flash, mere afterimages. There reproducibility to the inevitability of “ambient findabil- is a phantasmatic aspect in the naturalization of the ity,” where—and how—do we think of ourselves?
102 An X-ray of the upper thoracic region of Thomas Zummer. Courtesy Dr. Richard Bachrach.
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