Introduction

The program of Enlightenment was the disenchantment of the world; the dissolution of myths and the substitution of knowledge for fancy.

Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment

Entombed Enchantment: Historiography and the Heterogeneous

In our time, history is that which transforms documents into monuments. In that area where, in the past, history deciphered the traces left by men, it now deploys a mass of elements that have to be grouped, made relevant, placed in relation to one another to form totalities. There was a time when archaeology, as a discipline devoted to silent monuments, inert traces, objects without context, and things left by the past, aspired to the condition of history, and attained meaning only through the restitution of a historical discourse; it might be said, to play on words a little, that in our time history aspires to the condition of archaeology, to the intrinsic description of monuments.

Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge

This book grew out of a very personal dilemma: how to write about an idiosyncratic collection of modern discursive “curiosities” that for one reason or another had taken my fancy over the course of several years. Gathered primarily from my travels through art history, the history of science and, in recent years, critical and postcolonial theory, these curiosities seemed to share a common relationship to the discourses and regimes of vision; discourses that have increasingly come to be seen as characterizing and galvanizing our very understanding of Western modernity. Individually, each of these curiosities shone as a treasured item disclosing to me, their collector, a near-magical ability to reveal and illuminate something lingering there in the very structures of Western scientific knowledge; something like a shadow of forgotten ways of knowing and being, haunting the homogenized and transparent surfaces of a scientific modernity triumphantly proclaiming its own “Enlightenment.”

Whether appearing as strange historical antecedents to otherwise familiar modern forms of knowledge production (like the wondrous and singular objects in Renaissance curiosity cabinets), or taking the guise of modern modes of veneration supposedly outdated by scientific rationality (such as the mimetic qualities of the cenotaph), there was something about each of these curiosities that beckoned enticingly, holding out the allure of a more nuanced understanding of the structures of modern, post-Enlightenment rationality. Something appeared to be lying there in the slippages and ruptures of the otherwise seemingly smooth epistemological surfaces of this scientific rationality that threatened to reveal a gulf of ambivalence and unreason, if only my curiosities could be made to speak.

But try as I might, it seemed that the act of writing to the elusive nature of these curiosities was to destroy the very thing which had drawn me to each in the first place: their heterogeneity; their ability to defy taxonomic description; their ability to resist, if not the written word, then certainly the binding logic that would see them cohere as a clearly definable “argument.” Every time I attempted to proffer one of my curiosities as this specific historical antecedent or that modern sacred, the modes of theoretical expression or historical analysis at my disposal seemed only to turn each curiosity to stone. Stripped of the magic that had once enchanted them, my treasured modern curiosities came to appear as little more than ruined monuments; monuments rapidly being reduced to dust by the very tools of theoretical abstraction and scientific transparency that I was hoping to undermine.

This is the dilemma from which this book was conceived: the tools of critical analysis were, in fact, the very things I needed to critique. The historical archive that had thrown up my heterogeneous curiosities was the very thing that was encasing those curiosities in stone, making monuments of them, abstracting and disenchanting them so that they could be compared, contrasted, qualified, quantified, systematized, and temporalized—in a word: homogenized. The task that presented itself to me was one of reclamation: not of further historical details to place at the feet of modern historiography but, rather, of that certain indescribable thing—that heterogeneity—which lay encased within the crumbling monument that scientific rationality had made of the curiosity. What this book presents, therefore, is a specific “archaeology”; an “archaeology” of the visual, aimed precisely at redressing this modern proclivity toward the production of monuments.

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In a description of the psychological structure of fascism, Georges Bataille opposed a fundamentally bourgeois, “productive” constituent of society, whose most significant trait was its “tendential homogeneity,” with a nonhomogeneous, nonproductive element of society he described as heterogeneous.¹ Referring primarily to a division between those in possession of the means of production and those excluded from such means, interestingly enough, Bataille extended the reach of this description to include the very structures of thought and knowledge production of society itself. In this regard, scientific knowledge, by its very nature, was allied to the homogeneous elements of society: “compelled to note the existence of irreducible facts … the object of science is to establish the homogeneity of phenomena.”² Such were the circumstances of scientific knowledge production for Bataille that he declared those heterogeneous elements of knowledge to be subject to a de facto censorship; a censorship he likened to the description proffered by psychoanalysis concerning the exclusion of the unconscious from the conscious ego. Among those things excluded in this fashion, Bataille listed first and foremost the “restricted heterogeneous” elements of taboo and mana. Beyond these properly sacred things, Bataille also deemed heterogeneous everything resulting from “unproductive” expenditure: violence, excess, delirium, and madness—these were the elements of heterogeneity that surfaced in persons or mobs when the laws of homogeneous society were broken.

Although couched in the terms of an “intentionality” that would see science as being open to the vagaries of individual manipulation—the word “censorship” suggesting it to be little more than a bourgeois tool for the active, personalized exclusion of the heterogeneous from homogeneous society—Bataille’s work offers us the beginnings of a description of knowledge most apt for my present task. Since Bataille was convinced that science represented the dominant mode of knowledge production for homogeneous society, then it is possible for us to suggest that the exclusion of the heterogeneous is part of the very raison d’être of that knowledge. Yet whereas Bataille might wish to suggest that this “desire” to exclude the heterogeneous is an active means by which the bourgeoisie maintain their control over the means of production, I would prefer to see this so-called “desire” operate at the level of discourse, as a general condition of knowledge. In this regard, we can liken this discursive “desire” to Heidegger’s wider epistemological deployment of Husserl’s phenomenological understanding of perspective; Heidegger suggests that every effort at knowledge production is necessarily accompanied by a simultaneous and unavoidable act of concealment.³ In this manner, the production of knowledge is, from the very outset, but one side of a coin; the flip side of which consists of a process of masking and unknowing.

Inherent to the discourses of post-Enlightenment rationality, then, is a homogenizing tendency which is inscribed in the very structures of scientific knowledge production at the level of discourse. From this position we may proffer the claim that within the very discursive folds of scientific knowledge production there exists a series of repressed heterogeneous elements, covered and concealed by the supposedly transparent knowledge claims of post-Enlightenment thought. To continue with Bataille’s psychoanalytic analogy, we may further suggest that such repression is never fully complete. Thus, although scientific rationality would come to define its knowledge claims against a series of heterogeneous elements decried as mere superstitious irrationality (which itself was a brutally enforced homogenizing strategy), and proclaim its transparent surfaces to be free of the taint of the heterogeneous, such was not the case. For there, lurking in the very structures of Western knowledge itself, was the one thing rationality so desperately sought to expunge; repressed but not erased by the rationality of science. Only occasionally are we made aware of this repressed heterogeneity and the part our histories and sciences play in its repression, and then only through its periodic incursion into the homogeneous discourses of rationality. This book seeks to trace what Bataille might call the “vengeful incursions of the sacred.”

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In a book on political change in postsocialist Europe, Katherine Verdery makes the somewhat suggestive claim that “statues are dead people cast in bronze.”⁴ Ever since reading this statement I have been captivated by the chilling thought that within each statue, like a living soul made corporeal, lies the captive body of the person the statue is said to represent; our museums, parks, and city squares being veritable mortuaries of tortured and imprisoned flesh. Not only can it be said that this somewhat macabre image takes its very suggestiveness from one of the most enduring recurrences in modern times of the heterogeneous (namely, the mimetic ability of an object to stand in for the thing it is said to represent), but it also can be viewed as the perfect analogy for the theoretical problem this book is set to redress. In this instance, however, the imprisoned flesh of the dead body is that of a repressed heterogeneity; its bronze encasing is the discourse of history or, more precisely, a way of writing history which, to paraphrase Michel Foucault, is devoted to the production of silent monuments.

It is for this reason that my approach to the heterogeneous will be an “archaeological” one, by which I chiefly mean the unearthing of the discursive structures of scientific rationality through the tracing of specific genealogies. In this regard, I am taking my lead from Michel de Certeau’s reading (some would say, slight misreading) of Foucault’s use of the term, as expounded in The Order of Things and The Archaeology of Knowledge.⁵ Both authors explicitly pursue the genealogies that constitute their specific “archaeologies” from within the folds of discourse and without recourse to the generative logic of a knowing subjectivity, and thus, so too will I. Where I see the primary point of departure between these two authors on this matter, however, is in de Certeau’s refusal to predicate an archaeological detachment from the inert mass of past discourses to which such an archaeology applies. Not as strident as Foucault in his call for the comprehensiveness of those historical ruptures dividing discrete epistemes, de Certeau saw in Foucault’s work an unsettling new pertinence to the past precisely in its ability to linger in the otherwise seemingly inert document/monuments of historical analysis. Much like Bataille’s penchant for psychoanalytic analogy, de Certeau expresses this difference thus: “Beneath the cultural displacements there survive original wounds and organizing impulsions [poussées organisatrices] still discernable in the thoughts that have forgotten them.”⁶

Taking inspiration from this statement, it can be said that the present book represents the first step in an archaeology of the “original wound” that was the homogenization of knowledge production otherwise known as the Enlightenment; that near-heretical abandonment of the written texts of God in favor of the “visions” of humankind. Toward this end, three separate genealogies will be traced of what I consider to be the most distinct and historically immediate fields of modern visual culture: the collection, the body, and spaces; though, as we shall see, each has a tendency to fold into the other.

Visions of Modernity: An Introduction

The act of reading ruins and fractured objects needs some deliberately twisted linguistic devices that figuratively resemble the ruined space itself.

Vladislav Todorov, Red Square, Black Square

In a book that, to this day, never ceases to dazzle me with its almost magically conceived academic sleights of hand, Hillel Schwartz suggests that to write an introduction is to prophesy post hoc.⁷ And taking my lead from this statement, I can guarantee that this book will see the world renewed, in chapter 1, through the act of collecting the curious and wondrous objects of Creation; will have visions of tortured and broken flesh rising from the dissecting tables of anatomy theaters to stalk the discourses of medical knowledge in chapter 2; and will witness the spilling forth of a “pictorializing” geometry from the gilt frames of Renaissance panel paintings as a means of raising and venerating a panoptic god in chapter 3. But in many ways, these are things that have already taken place; they are, to paraphrase Walter Benjamin, the prescient dreams in which every epoch comes to see the epoch that is to succeed it.⁸ They are, in effect, my curious visions of modernity.

This is a book about vision. It is a book about the dawning of an age of modern scientific rationality that staked the worth of its knowledge claims on a transparency supposedly guaranteed by the visual. It is a book about the perceived ability of this scientific visuality to expunge all traces of difference, of heterogeneity, and of the sacred from its self-proclaimed “enlightened” discourses. It is a book about the visual disenchantment of modernity. And it is a book about the ultimate failure of these claims.

Thus, in many ways, this book is about much more than the persistent modern uncritical elevation of the visual. It is also a book about history and its ability to make monuments of people, places, and things. It is a book about the modern historiographic proclivity toward making such monuments magically disappear as if they had never existed. It is a book concerned with the repressed heterogeneity of modernity, and with finding alternative ways of writing about such heterogeneity without contributing to that very repression. In short, it is a book concerned with writing back against a way of making history which makes ruins of the past futures “envisaged” by the curious forebears of modernity.