|
Article Excerpt
From racial science to the freak show, the visual display of bodies has often been associated with objectification, biological essentialism, the discursive inscription of racial characteristics, and exoticizing representations of the "other." This has been particularly true of the anatomical gaze, which has quietly reproduced disciplinary, essentialized categories when directed at racialized, gendered, or criminalized bodies. In the past century, however, racism has taken a more subtle turn, often operating via a logic of "colorblindness" that disavows the perpetuation of structural inequalities. A biopolitical gaze has arisen that functions not so much to inscribe difference and discipline, but to universalize bodies in the service of managing biological life. At issue here is not how individual bodies are racialized, but rather how racialized distributions of health and harm are effaced as they give rise to new forms of knowledge and biotechnology.
Our essay considers a mass cultural manifestation of this universalizing medical gaze: Bodies ... the Exhibition, a controversial and well-attended international exhibition of chemically preserved corpses. The exhibition has toured since 2005 and is currently on view in 10 international cities including Barcelona, Buenos Aires, San Diego, Fort Lauderdale, New York City, and Washington, D.C. (www.bodiestheexhibition.com). (1) Whereas the panoptic power enjoyed by the particularizing and objectifying gaze has been well documented, Bodies provides an opportunity to explore the forms of identification, obfuscation, and control involved in more universalizing visual displays of human bodies. This essay will provide an overview of the exhibition's structure and literature, as well as a discussion of two of its enabling conditions: "plastination" technology and the utilization of unclaimed Chinese corpses. In order to understand how the gaze functions in a display that emphasizes the universal characteristics that lie under the skin, we draw on two bodies of theoretical literature: first, we consider how discussions of identification in the work of Jacques Lacan and Louis Althusser shed light on the exhibition's visual form-the particular ways in which it poses and displays its corpses; next, we move to theorizations of "biopower" by Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, which clarify how the exhibition contributes to broader transformations in health care and global capitalism. A final section connects the abstract, individual body on display at Bodies with the recent emergence of an enormous population of unregistered "floating people" in China's cities and peri-urban spaces in order to show how a model of social medicine based on "care of the self" not only neglects but indeed reproduces significant forms of legal and biological vulnerability.
The Spectacle of Public Health
To see is to know.
--Bodies ... The Exhibition
What makes a visit to Bodies feel pleasurable and illuminating, rather than ghastly-an experience of awe inspired by scientific advancement and the fascinating complexity of the human body, rather than an uncomfortable immersion among Chinese corpses absurdly posed, imaginatively dissected, and transformed into plastic? The exhibition deploys a range of visual strategies to cue visitors to experience the bodies as spectacle. This, in turn, manipulates viewers to identify both with particularly idealized bodies and with the social, economic, and technological forces that underwrite their display. In this section, we draw on Jacques Lacan's elaboration of imaginary identification in "The Mirror Stage" and Louis Althusser's concept of interpellation to unpack the specular dynamics underlying the slogan inscribed at the entrance to the exhibition: "To see is to know." What exactly is made visible in the exhibition of preserved corpses, and to whom? What kind of seeing subject is addressed by the arrangement, documentation (or lack thereof), and poses of these bodies?
Although Bodies advertises a correlation between vision and epistemology, the staging of the exhibits belies the extent to which vision involves affect and identification as well as knowledge. While individual galleries include multiple glass cases filled with specimens of body parts--a spinal column, a shoulder joint, a smoker's lung--, most also include one or two elaborately posed plastinated bodies designed to exemplify the beauty and complexity of the human form while also illustrating the interdependence of corporeal systems thematized by respective rooms. These idealized, partially dissected bodies are posed on pedestals as athletes handling footballs and basketballs to exhibit the movement of joints and the interdependence of skeletal muscles, or as a musical conductor wielding a baton to illustrate the workings of the nervous system. Nearly all the bodies of young or middle-aged men, these posed "specimens," are accompanied by didactic panels discussing positivistic properties of the body, and illuminated by spotlights that throw dramatic shadows across the walls. Compared with the carefully labeled body fragments displayed under glass, these freestanding individuals convey only a modicum of anatomical knowledge, and an excess of theatrical display. Poised to pitch a baseball, conduct a symphony, or shoot a free throw, they have been designed with a view to reanimating the dead, turning plastic back to flesh.
These idealized bodies, rendered superficially universal by the removal of their skin, recall the image of "the total form of the body" that Lacan theorizes in "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience." As a result of the "specific prematurity of birth in man," Lacan explains, the infant experiences its own body as a disintegrated, fragmentary site of "motor incapacity" (4, 2). The infant's mirror image, by contrast, holds up the promise of a total body, along with "the correspondences that unite the I with the statue in which man projects himself, with the phantoms that dominate him, or with the automaton in which, in an ambiguous relation, the world of his own making tends to find completion" (2-3). Lacan suggests that the ego is formed through a process of visual misrecognition in which the subject mistakenly identifies herself with her mirror image, and fantasizes that her body enjoys the remoteness of a fortress or stadium, the wholeness of a castle: "the armour of an alienating identity" (4). The lean, muscular, proportionate bodies on display offer just such an identity, mediated by the fortifying activities of Western sports and leisure.
Indeed, Bodies actively encourages its visitors to misrecognize themselves in the plastinated corpses on display. Thus, the didactic placards that accompany individual bodies encourage viewers to try moving their own body parts to feel the muscles, joints, and cartilage they are looking at: "Bend an ear toward your face and notice how it instantly regains its shape." This dynamic of mirroring is visually reinforced by two of the exhibition's most spectacular (and least anatomically informative) dissections. In the first, entitled "Brothers," a skeleton and a set of muscles stand face to face with hands conjoined, both leaning backwards so that they appear to be counterbalancing perfectly. The didactic informs us that these symmetrically positioned sets of bones and muscles come from the same body, and that they allegorize the interdependence of the skeletal and muscular systems. These mutually sustaining, mutually dissected figures, however, also illustrate the visual structure of misrecognition--along...
|
