FETISH B: SACRED OBJECTS
The spectacle is not a collection of images, rather it is a social relation among people, mediated by images.
— Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle
There is a consonance of all things, a blending of all that we know about the material world and the spiritual. It consists for me of all the impressions, vibrations, heat, cold, taste, smell, and the sensations which these convey to the mind, infinitely combined, interwoven with associated ideas and acquired knowledge.
— Helen Keller, The World I Live In
I. Spectacle
In his treatise De Spectaculis (c.197-202 CE), Tertullian warns his fellow Christians that there are no innocent pleasures. He has in mind the Roman circus. “Wrestling,” Tertullian tells his reader, “is the devil’s own trade... Its very movements are the snake’s, the grip that holds, the twist that binds, the suppleness that eludes.”1 And even as their movements resemble those of a snake, the physical training wrestlers undergo deforms their bodies, reshaping them and “outdoing God’s handiwork.”2 Tertullian describes this remaking of the human body as facticii, the Latin root of the English term fetish, which later took on such varied meanings, equally entangled in the disciplines of anthropology, political economy and psychoanalysis. Tertullian’s wrestlers are fetishistic because they participate in a form of profane human fabrication, corrupting the natural contours of the human body, which is both the handiwork of God and made in the image of God.
Tertullian anticipates and counters the argument that because God is good and his creation is good, any use to which humans might wish to put nature must also be good. For Tertullian, idolatry and sin are grounded in the misuse or perversion of material creation, rather than any innate badness inhering in the materials themselves. He asserts, “You see murder committed by means of iron, drug, magical incantation: but iron is as much God’s creature as the plants or the angels.”3 Although nothing is innately evil, no bit of creation is so minor that it can be used merely in accordance with human desire. All natural materials, however lowly, have their divinely sanctioned use, and all other uses are profane abuses, fetishistic distortions. For Tertullian the devil is not so much a separate evil being, as a disordering drive, depriving the natural world of its link to the divine order that sustains it. In Tertullian’s words “For the world is God’s; what is worldly is the devil’s.”4
Tertullian holds that even the apparently harmless aspects of the circus correspond to idolatrous Roman beliefs. The red or white costume of the chariot driver originally stood for the white of Winter’s snow and the red of the Summer sun. However, “as pleasure and superstition gained ground together, some dedicated the red to Mars, others the white to Zephyrs, the green to Mother Earth or Spring, the blue to Sky and Sea or Autumn. But since idolatry in every form has been condemned by God, that form is assuredly also condemned which is consecrated to the elements of nature.”5 Once they become symbols of nature, colors become available for more explicit idolatry, standing in for various Roman gods. The mimetic, through simulation opens the way to dissimulation. To seem always undermines the self-evident truth of simply being what one is. And all images, in their semblance, have the habit of seeming rather than being. For Tertullian masks epitomize this treacherousness of semblance. He writes: “And then all this business of masks, I ask if God can be pleased with it, who forbids the likeness of anything to be made, how much more His own image? The Author of truth loves no falsehood; all that is feigned is adultery in His sight. The man who counterfeits voice, sex, or age, who makes a show of false love and hate, false sighs and tears, He will not approve, for He condemns all hypocrisy.”6 The prescription is to be as God made you, without disguise or deformation. If even iron has its proper, divinely sanctioned use, how much more the human face and body? To conform to type, to be self-identical, is to be close to God.
The spectacle of the Roman circus is so worthy of Tertullian’s condemnation because it gratifies the wrong pleasures, and in gratifying the wrong pleasures reproduces the wrong society. “You are too dainty, O Christian,” writes Tertullian, “if you long for pleasure in this world as well as the other — a bit of a fool into the bargain, if you think this pleasure.”7 There are two accusations here: first, that in the pursuit of pleasure the corrupted world is affirmed over the afterlife; and second, that a capacity to take pleasure in so worldly a spectacle as the circus exposes the superficiality of one’s Christianity. True Christians “no longer crave what they have emptied of meaning for themselves.”8 Belief in Christ is meant to orient one’s pleasures, indeed to produce a total way of living, thinking and feeling. As spectacle, the Roman circus produces a corrupt form of life, a social order aligned with the perversions of this world, rather than the divine perfection of the next.
De Spectaculis concludes with an account of the spectacle proper to Christian life: the Apocalypse. Artfully inverting the profanity of the circus into the carnivalesque violence of Revelation, Tertullian writes, “Here find your games of the circus, — watch the race of time, the seasons slipping by… Would you have fighting and wrestling? Here they are — things of no small account and plenty of them. See impurity overthrown by chastity, perfidy slain by faith, cruelty crushed by pity, impudence thrown into the shade by modesty; and such are the contests among us, and in them we are crowned. Have you a mind for blood? You have the blood of Christ. [...] Yes, and there are still to come other spectacles — that last, that eternal Day of Judgement, that Day which the Gentiles never believed would come, that day they laughed at, when this old world and all its generations shall be consumed in one fire. How vast the spectacle that day, and how wide!”9
The Apocalypse re-purifies the world, splitting it from itself so that it may become what, supposedly, it was always meant to be, recalling Tertullian’s earlier turn of phrase “For the world is God’s; what is worldly is the devil’s.”10 On Judgement Day this paradox is violently resolved. Worldliness is purged, and with it all idols, all fetishistic distortions, are wiped out. Only creation remains.
II. Perverted Nature
The concept of fetishism takes on renewed importance in the Christian-European encounters with Africa. Arriving as would be colonizers in the fifteenth century, the Portuguese established several trade monopolies along the western coast of sub-Saharan Africa. Many of the practices they encountered did not map neatly onto either the expected Pagan pantheistic or more familiar Islamic orders. The Portuguese used the term feitiiço to name the fabricated, portable objects they saw used for a variety of ends freely crossing between the spiritual, the philosophical, the medical and the social, from divination, to the treatment of physical ailments, to the cementing of commercial contracts. Feitiiço is reminiscent of the Portuguese feitio, meaning “made,” as well as a reference to witchcraft, as described by King John I of Portugal in his 1403 anti-witchcraft law Dos Feiticeiros. Both of these allusions suggest the skepticism and derision directed at African spiritual and social life. The power ascribed by Africans to these ritual objects was thrown in doubt by their profanely human “made” character, and the association with witchcraft suggested a violation of both the natural and divine order. Like Tertullian’s wrestlers, the Africans were seen as perverting nature to serve an incoherent — and possibly demonic — social order.
In the fifteenth and sixteenth century, the primary use of the term was in the context of commercial trade. African middlemen took on the pidgin adaptation, fetisso, as an expedient to describe a variety of commodities whose nature and valuation did not cleanly translate in the shift from an African to a European context. Some objects were produced exclusively for trade, made to mimic European notions of the authentically African devotional object. In the Afro-European context fetishism was never exclusively a matter of religion, from the beginning it was entangled in questions of commercial valuation and social organization. The term was adapted into fetisseros, or fetisheers, to describe African civic and spiritual leaders, and turned into a verb in the form of “to make fetiche” or “to take the fetische” to describe oath taking, marriage ceremonies, coming of age rituals, healing rituals, and other socially embedded practices. When the Dutch replaced the Portuguese in the seventeenth century as the dominant European presence in West Africa, fetisso in all its variants was key for communication across cultures in political and economic dealings. It was used by Europeans to both describe and insist upon the innate irrationality and incomprehensibility of African spiritual and social practices, which rendered them untranslatable except through this mercurial term; a measure of illegibility and incoherence was built into it.
The travelogues of European merchants and clerics left a lasting record of their impressions of West Africa. Willem Bosman’s New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea, first published in 1704 as Nauwkeurige beschryving van de Guinese Goud- Tand- en Slave-kust, is an early example, pushing beyond geographic description to report on cultural and economic conditions. After ten years working for the Dutch West India Company on the coast of West Africa, then known to Europeans as the coast of Guinea, Bosman ascended to the position of Chief Merchant, second only to the Director General. Bosman held his position for three years before returning to Holland and writing his Description. His account takes the form of a series of letters addressed to the board of directors of the Dutch West India Company, the purpose being to facilitate economic exploitation through a better understanding of prevailing conditions. The book opens with a map showing Guinea divided into the Gold, Slave, and Ivory Coast, each name corresponding to the dominant regional commodity pursued by European merchants. The economic purpose of Bosman’s account was recognized by Sir Alfred Jones, a Liverpool shipping magnate, who had the Dutch text translated into English in 1907 to promote trade between Britain and West Africa.
Letter Ten of Bosman’s Description focuses on the Gold Coast, corresponding to present day Ghana. He tells his reader that there are many modes of oath-taking in the region, “so numerous, that I should tire you as well as myself with a Repetition of them,” and goes on to describe a “most Solemn and Obligatory” instance. Bosman implies that there is nothing to be understood from the specificity of these different methods, that in fact what this variety indicates is the arbitrary, slap-dash nature of oath-taking for Africans. Bosman is skeptical that an unstandardized process can have any meaningful relationship to the universal imperatives of law. His description of the the exemplary “Solemn” oath taking process goes like this:
Each priest or Feticheer hath his peculiar Idol, prepared and adjusted in a particular and different manner, but most of them like the following description. They have a great Wooden Pipe filled with Earth, Oil, Blood, the bones of dead men and Beasts, Feathers, Hair; and to be short all sorts of Excrementitious and filthy Trash, which they do not endeavor to mould into any Shape, but lay it in a confused heap on the Pipe. The Negroe who is to take an Oath before this Idol, is placed directly opposite to it, and asks the Priest the name of his Idol (each having a particular one;) of which being informed, he calls the Fetish by its Name, and recites at large the Contents of what he designs to bind by an Oath and makes it his petitionary Request that the Idol may punish him with Death if he swears falsely; then he goes round the Pipe and stands still and swears a second time in the same place and manner as before, and so a third time likewise: after which the Priest takes some of the mentioned ingredients out of the Pipe; with which he touches the Swearers Head, Arms, Belly and Legs, and holding it above his Head, turns it three times round, then he cuts off a bit of the nail of one Finger in each Hand, of One Toe of each Foot, and some of the Hair of his Head, which he throws into the Pipe where the Idol is lodged; all which done is firmly Obligatory.11
Bosman notes each detail, all the while suggesting the arbitrary or objectionable nature of these specifics. The various materials that make up the wooden pipe fetish are “Excrementitious” and “filthy Trash.” Bosman registers both his disgust, and his conviction that symbolic power should not be given to such profane and abject elements of nature, meaningless remnants fit only to be discarded. The ritualistic references to the body of the oath-taker, through the use of physical fragments (fingernails, toenails, hair), and the binding touch to head, arms, belly, and legs, meet with similar derision. For Bosman these allusions to the body are too lowly, not appropriate stand-ins for the legal subject bound by oath. Bosman’s disparagement is directed at both the civic process (Who would let themselves be bound by such an oath?), and the supposed misvaluation of nature. Lowly matter is ritualistically elevated, and the fetish is anthropomorphized, given both a proper name and the power to punish. Finally, Bosman condemns the aesthetic incoherence of the ritual: from the materials “which they do not endeavor to mould into any Shape, but [are laid] in a confused heap,” to the useless triple repetition of the swearing process. For Bosman these heterogenous objects and gestures cannot be unified by any reasonable signifying system.
In his essay “The Problem of the Fetish IIIa: Bosman’s Guinea and the Enlightenment Theory of Fetishism,” William Pietz analyzes one of the anecdotes from the Description, finding in it an ideological condemnation of the African social order. This anecdote describes the serpent fetish found in Fida, situated in contemporary Benin, a favorite topic of eighteenth century European commentators on Africa. As Pietz notes, this particular story was repeated in numerous texts, including Charles de Brosses’ 1757 On the Worship of Fetish Gods, the treatise that coined the term “fetishism” and controversially proposed it as the origin point of all religion. The serpent fetish concerned the protected status of certain kinds of snakes in daily life, as well as their incorporation into ritual, and role in various myths. Bosman writes:
In the Year 1667, my brother Factor Mr. Nichols Poll (who then managed the Slave Trade for our company at Fida) Had the Diversion of a very pleasant Scene. A Hog being bitten by a Snake, in Revenge, or out of Love to God’s Flesh, seiz’d and devour’d him in sight of the Negroes, who were not near enough to prevent him. Upon this the Priests all complain’d to the king, but the Hog could not defend himself, and had no Advocate; and the Priests, unreasonable enough in their Request, begged of the King to Publish a Royal Order, and that all the Hogs in his Kingdom should be forthwith kill’d, and the Swiny Race extirpated, without so much as deliberating wether it was reasonable to destroy the Innocent with the Guilty. The King’s Command was Publish’d all over the Country. And in Pursuance thereof, it was not a little diverting, to see Thousands of Blacks arm’d with Swords and Clubs to execute the Order; whilst on the other side no small Number of those who were owners of the Hogs were in like manner arm’d in their Defense, urging their Innocence, but all in vain. The Slaughter went on, and nothing was heard but the dismal sound of Kill, Kill, which cost many an honest Hog his Life, that had lived with an unspotted Character to his dying Day. And doubtless the whole Race had been utterly extirpated, if the King (who is not naturally bloody minded) perhaps mov’d to it by some Lovers of Bacon, had not recall’d his Order by a Counter one, importing, that there was already enough of innocent Blood shed, and that their God ought to be appeased with so rich a Sacrifice. You may judge wether this was not very welcome News to the Remainder of the Hogs, when they saw themselves freed from such a cruel Persecution. Whereof they took particular Care for the future, not to incur the same Penalty. Next time I came to Fida, I found by the dearness of their Beasts, that there had been a very great slaughter of them.12
As Pietz notes in his analysis, Bosman has transposed his anecdote into a fable, full of ironical contempt for the African’s supposed belief in a magical reality where animals have the legal status of humans. The reader is positioned as a precocious child, who can read between the lines and in judging the protagonists of the story learn to choose reason over fantastic delusion. The villains of the piece are the manipulative priests who pressure the king into publishing his “unreasonable” order, unleashing mayhem in the hysterical population. The priests are agents of corruption, perverting the political authority of the king, and allowing power to be commandeered by the fetishistic forces of irrationality and disorder. The heroes here are the owners of the hogs, defending their property rights, and with them the cause of reason, which here, as elsewhere in Bosman’s text, are seen as natural allies. After much slaughter the king is convinced to rescind his order, “perhaps mov’d to it by some Lovers of Bacon.” The triumph of the “Lovers of Bacon” represents the triumph of the rational consumer, who has the correct relationship to pigs, understanding them as a bit of nature to be processed and eaten.13 In Bosman’s tale political power is best guided by the imperatives of production and consumption; these are the rational forces pushing back against the corrupting influence of the Feticheer priests. No doubt Bosman identifies with the world view of the “Lovers of Bacon,” and like them wishes to guide the king in the proper use of his authority. Finally, Bosman notes that on his next visit to Fida the price of meat had gone up, presumably because of a similarly baseless slaughter. With this anecdote Bosman emphasizes the economic consequences of the worship of snakes, casting fetishism as a mismanagement of natural resources, reeking financial havoc.
In Bosman’s Description the African priest, or Feticheer, is often positioned as a corrupt corollary to the self-interested, but honest merchant. Both pursue profit, as is only natural, but the priests “who are generally sly and crafty, encouraged by the stupid Credulity of the People, have all the opportunity in the World to Impose the grossest absurdities and fleece their Purses; as they indeed do effectually.”14 The objects and practices that make up fetishism, deployed by the priests, are seen as an elaborate hoax designed to fill the priests’ coffers, and produce a disordered, irrational society all the more vulnerable to manipulation. The destructive power of European economic exploitation is disavowed and projected back onto African spiritual and civic leaders. In another Bosman anecdote the wife of an African friend, a priestess in the snake cult discussed earlier, enters into a state of spiritual ecstasy — what de Brosses in his retelling calls “vapeurs hysteriques.”15 Of course to Bosman it is just another ruse. The priestess is simulating her condition in order to gain power over her husband and subvert the natural familial hierarchy of husband over wife. The priests gain by it too, charging for the cure of the wife’s imaginary malady. As Bosman tells it, one day the husband decides to put an end to his wife’s disruptive episodes, marching her down to the shore in sight of European ships. Thus threatened with being sold into slavery, the wife is instantly cured. In a mind-boggling reversal Bosman positions European slave-taking as a force for the cultivation of a moral social order. Fetishism is the spoke in the wheel, blocking the natural market forces that would produce a healthy economy and society. Bosman’s denigration of fetishism is rooted in frustration with the way in which it sustains indigenous African civic, spiritual and economic orders; and he is correct in seeing these as impediments to European economic domination. Through his descriptions Bosman aims to liquidate the very practices he describes.
III. Similitude
Bosman, writing in the long wake of the spiritual and political upheavals of the Protestant Reformation, saw the abundant use of sacred objects and rituals by the Catholic Church as a sign of corrupt pontifical power.16 Indeed, in his Description he often compares the perceived fetishism of West Africa to Catholic religious customs such as eating or abstaining from a particular food according to the religious calendar, or the procuring of indulgences. European obsession with the illegitimacy of West African spiritual practice can be linked to debates internal to Christianity concerning the capacity of earthbound images and practices to participate in the sacred. The accusation of fetishism evokes a materiality irredeemably cut off from the invisible order that ought to legitimizes it; these are Tertullian’s dissimulating wrestlers, failing to be as God made them, and Bosman’s abject oath-takers, failing to inscribe the body in the legal order. In both cases the regime of representation breaks down; it will not to stabilize and signify correctly. Before the Protestant Reformation, questions of signification and the sacred were raised by the iconoclastic crises that shook the Byzantine Church in the eighth and ninth centuries. Through its critique of representation, iconoclasm knotted together questions of faith and of power. In contesting the Church’s use of icons, the Byzantine Emperor challenged the Church’s temporal power, seeking to limit its reach to the administration of the next world.
In 752 the Emperor Constantine V wrote an iconoclast treatise formalizing the movement’s objections. He argued that the icon cannot faithfully represent its model — particularly Christ —because it is mere matter, while its model is spirit. Because it is essentially different in substance, the icon degrades and profanes the spiritual sphere it seeks to represent. In depicting Christ, the icon attempts to contain the infinity of the divine, falsifying it through circumscription. Further, if the icon claims only to represent the visible aspect of the divine, and this visible aspect is all that is venerated in the icon, then the icon amounts to no more than an idol, promoting the veneration of profane matter instead of spirit. According to the iconoclasts, the only legitimate devotional signs and acts were the Eucharist, because it shares in the very substance of Christ through the miracle of transubstantiation, and the sign of the cross, because it does not trespass on the unrepresentable nature of the invisible divine.
Under the pressure of these objections — and the accompanying, sometimes violent, erosion of their political power — the Byzantine Church developed a doctrine of the image and the icon, defending their use in spiritual terms. The most nuanced account of the iconophile doctrine comes from the Patriarch Nikephoros’ Antirrhetics written between 818 and 820 while he was in exile. Nikephoros grounds the legitimacy of the icon in the incarnation, Christ as “the word made flesh,” both fully human and sharing in the essence of the divine.17 Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection restore the possibility of salvation to human beings, not through the shuffling-off of the corporeal, but by promising the return of the flesh to its fully sacred Edenic state. The corruption of flesh that marks the exile from Eden takes the form of pain in childbirth for Eve, laborious cultivation of the land, and bodily shame. Christ’s resurrection both recalls the human relationship to the divine before the Fall, and anticipates the final reconciliation with God at the Last Judgement, when the faithful dead will be rewarded with bodily resurrection and eternal life. Here, eternal life promises not only the persistence of the immortal soul in harmony with God, but the triumph of flesh itself over death, illness, and deformation. The body is made whole, becoming what it was before the Fall, what is was always meant to be. The manifestation of spirit through the icon prefigures the redemption of the body that is to come. Far from making it illegitimate, the materiality of the icon is vital, insofar as it stands in for the materiality of the human body.
For the iconophile, Christ is a figure of reconciliation, redeeming the human relationship to the divine through his hypostatic unity. The essence of Christ is similitude, double similarity to matter and to spirit. The icon is a testament to this similitude, and to the reconciliation it promises. Nikephoros positions the disavowal of the icon as a disavowal of Christ as incarnation. He rejects the iconoclast notion that if devotional objects are not identical and consubstantial with spirit, they are absolutely opposed and irreconcilable. The mystery of the holy trinity parallels the symbolic register through which the icon makes manifest the sacred. The three elements of the trinity, the father, the son and the holy spirit, are not equivalents of one another, not exchangeable referents for a single signified. Rather, there is an inherent unity and difference, a mutual determination built into their consubstantial relation.
Nikephoros does not claim that icons are consubstantial with the divine. Instead he argues that art should not be expected to reproduce its object at the level of substance; art is a form of imitation, of semblance, analogous but not identical to Christ as incarnation. In describing the icon’s form of imitation Nikephoros uses the language of causality. The icon’s relationship to its prototype is not merely one of visual resemblance, rather the prototype is the cause and the icon is the effect, called into being by invisible spirit. In foregrounding causality, Nikephoros creates an intimacy between the icon and the prototype; the icon is not an unmotivated sign, it emanates from its prototype. The resemblance of the icon to its source is the resemblance of a relative. Alluding to the father-son relation of God and Christ, Nikephoros writes “the relatives… depend on things other than themselves and change their relationship reciprocally.”18 The icon is not autonomous, it becomes what it is through its orientation toward the prototype. It solicits meaning rather than locking it securely away. For the iconophile the infinite divine is not circumscribed in finite matter, but rather inscribed over and over again through the ritual of veneration. The icon is empty insofar as its meaning is located outside itself, in its relation to the archetype: “Anyone who asserts that the icon does not concern a relation could no longer assert that it is an icon of something. The icon and the archetype are introduced and are considered simultaneously [just as the idea of son must always carry with it the idea of mother or father], the one with the other. Even if the archetype is absent, the relation does not in the least cease to exist.”19 The relation is a special form of absence; it makes contact, but cannot incarnate a presence.
Given this absence at the heart of the icon, strict codes governing its production and use are needed to sustain its contact with the divine, to suture the image to its prototype. Depending on the scene depicted, particular color schemes, vestments, or instruments of martyrdom might be specified, along with the position of the body, particularly the head and hands. As much as possible these specifications should be based on reliable written or pictorial descriptions. Subjects should face forward, with sacred figures scaled larger than human figures, accompanied by inscriptions naming those represented. Dionysius of Fouruna’s Painter’s Manual describes the proportional requirements for the depictions of the human figure:
Learn, O pupil that in the whole figure of a man there are nine faces, that is to say nine measures, from the forehead to the soles of the feet. First make the first face, which you divide into three, making the first division the forehead, the second the nose and the third the beard. Draw the hair above the face to the height of one nose-length: again measure into thirds the distance between the beard and the nose; the chin takes up two of the divisions and the mouth one, while the throat is one nose length. Next divide from the chin to the middle of the body into three measures, and from there to the knees two more; for each knee you take one nose length. Take again two more measures to the ankle bones, and from them to the soles of the feet one more nose length, and from there to the toe nails one more measure.20
The density of internal mathematical relations described here, calibrating the parts to the whole, create a mimetic relationship between the world of appearances and the invisible, latent, divine order. The standardization of representation minimizes individual expression and the gesture of the artist, as much as possible conforming to a universal type. If the human origin of the icon cannot be transcended, at least it can be stamped by a divine seal. Rigorous conformity to type acts as a buffer against accusations of arbitrary, and therefore profane, representation of the sacred; images are given an aura of necessity. Following Tertullian’s critique of the Roman wrestlers, the iconophiles want their representations to appear as natural God given forms, with minimal human embellishment or distortion. They want a pictorial law, a code of representation that will guarantee the inscription of spirit in earthbound image.
The divine representational regime enacted by the icons also expresses complex, abstract social forces. Just like the West African practices derided by Bosman, the use of icons knots together the spiritual, the civic, and the medicinal. Baptism, marriage contracts, protection and healing rituals all insinuate the spiritual into the rhythms of social existence, and into the pleasures and pains of being a body. When images are invested with spiritual authority they become a powerful mechanism for wielding political authority — otherwise the use of icons would never have become a site for the power struggle between the Byzantine Emperor and the Eastern Church. Traditions of icon veneration, such as procession and invocations for protection in times of danger or distress, recall emperor veneration. A monopoly on how spirit meets matter becomes a monopoly on the earthly production of meaning. Spiritual legitimacy grants access to temporal power. The invisible order evoked by the icon is every bit as much the fundamental social relation as it is the spiritual hypostatic unity; functionally and symbolically, the two are inextricably knotted together. The sacred object is the object that reproduces social relations through an appeal to an invisible authority.
The icon may seem opposed to the photograph, insofar as one is stylized and constructed according to a strict code of representation, while the other is tied to the vicissitudes of real time and space. But the mathematical optics of the lens and the standardized time of the shutter subject photographic representation to an algorithm that exceeds human gesture, echoing the icon’s strict code of representation and veneration. Photography is a technical apparatus that harnesses the power of light to fix in place a mark, avoiding the mediation of the hand. The ability to crop, to freeze a single moment, to shrink or enlarge, and to fix a viewpoint suggest a kind of hyperreality, as though the static image reveals what is usually lost in the blur of experience. These manipulations of likeness give the photograph an uncanny ability to map or enforce desires, to act out in real time the world as made by dominating social forces. The hyperreality of the photograph lies in its capacity to collapse whatever space there may be between the visible and the social. In the mugshot, or the pantyhose commercial, these two dimensions are one. The web of relations that the image relies upon for meaning, for legitimacy, for power, are inscribed in it.
Many of the earliest uses of photography were driven by a compulsion to extract the universal from the particular. Photography seemed to promise both the objectivity of nature — writing with pure light — and the rational disinterest of machine vision. In Victorian England Francis Galton, a statistician and pioneer in eugenics, composited together photographic portraits to generate normative types for a number of categories, including “Men Convicted of Larceny (without violence),” “Consumption Cases,” “Phthisical (syphilitic?),” “The Jewish Type” and “Royal Engineers.” Galton produced his composites by collecting together portraits taken from the same angle, in similar lighting conditions, and then, in Galton’s own words: “I reduced their portraits photographically to the same size, being guided as to scale by the distance between any two convenient points of reference in the features; for example, by the vertical distance between two parallel lines, one of which passed through the middle of the pupils of the eyes and the other between the lips.”21 Finally each individual portrait is rephotographed successively onto a light sensitive photographic plate creating a single cumulative image. We can recognize in Galton’s process the same painstaking calibration of the part to the whole that we saw in Dionysius of Fouruna’s Painter’s Manual. If the math is right, the idealized type will emerge. In his published writing Galton’s portraits are shown alongside other statistical representations such as charts, tables, and diagrams. Thus situated, they become one sort of visual statistic among others.
From the beginning photography claimed simultaneously to pin down the visible, making it a fact among other facts, and to serve as a kind of metaphysical medium, manifesting invisible spirits and emanations. One of many photographers concerned with the supernatural, Dr. Hipolyte Baraduc used the camera to capture auras, including his own. Among his auracular categories were “vibrations of vital force,” “sparkling beads,” “lines of force,” and “hypnogenic points.” Presenting his work to learned colleagues in his 1897 tract Methode de Radiographie Humaine, Baraduc writes, “today the photographic plate allows each of us to to glimpse concealed forces, thus subjecting the marvelous to an indisputable control by situating it within the natural domain of experimental physics.”22 As Baraduc’s words make clear, for him photography is a technology of mastery, drawing the marvelous into the domain of human manipulation. Its apparent transparency is just as shot through with opaque social meaning and forces of domination as the icon or the fetish. Despite being the product of careful calculation and technical production, the photographic image seems to doubly outstrip the merely human: first by harnessing the power of nature in the form of light, and second by exceeding the known limits of perception — making visible the invisible. Its supposed transcendence of human perception and fabrication make photography the key to revelation, both sacred and profane. It inherits from other image-making techniques, including iconography, including the fetish, the problem of contact at a distance, of crossing the gap between appearances and the invisible order that presumes to sustain them.
