In the book mentioned above (pp. 58-81), there is a particular paper which I consider absolutely important.
Its title is “La Chair est Image” (“Flesh is Image”) and it is written by Michael Houseman (École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris).
I will try to schematically resume here his argument, which obviously is much richer and clear than this abstract (with some comments by myself) permits.
The question of the body is typically European and Christian. Also, the image par excellence is the image of the body, in particular a body represented as an image.
Three main aspects form the basis of our conception of the body: the dualism (body/soul), the monotheistic creationism (“man” was created by God, but he/she is a degraded image of Him after the Fall in the paradise), and the idea of Incarnation. Through Christ, God takes a human shape (including a face, a fact unique in religion); Passion is the apex of this Incarnation. The flesh of man, corrupted by sin, has a possibility of redemption through the sacrifice of Christ, who, by Resurrection (glorious body), allows the return to the pure Adam’s original flesh.
So, there is an ambiguity, or duplicity, in the status of the body, right from the beginning of our civilization. In fact, if the body is an obstacle to the salvation (after the primordial sin), it is also the only way (through the body of Christ) that we have to overcome our condition and to recuperate purity. For instance, nudity, a sign of innocence in paradise, has become after the Fall a sign of shame and of lust.
God is beyond any image, any possible representation. He is the model, the prototype, the one who is inaccessible to sight. The image of the human body is in unconformity with that model. But, through the interface between God and “man”, which Christ represents (he is the image of conformity itself) a contact is made possible. By incarnation, the model becomes visible, the body and the image join together in some sort of harmony.
The Christianity is the community, the sum, of the believers as individuals, and it is as individualized bodies that they may converge to the model.
In this doctrine and practice – I add - we may see the seeds of modern individualism, the idea of subjects as individualized entities, so typical of our “culture” to the point that we see it as “natural” (i.e., universal), in a characteristically ideological bias.
Largely dominating in European “art” is the image of Christ, an image of conformity, the interface between “man” and God. In him, image and model coalesce, and the flesh is sacramental, not just a shadow as in humans.
From the Renaissance onwards, a fundamental shift occurs within this structure oriented towards the model. The transcendency of the model typical of the Medieval ages becomes progressively replaced by an immanent perspective, i. e., as an interiorized transcendency: bodily appearance starts being the revelation of the inner model. This dissolution of the transcendence of the model, its humanization, opens throughout the last centuries a room where “man” as an image of “perfection” may emerge. The asymmetric, hierarchical relation between model and its “mimesis” (the body-image) beings to dissolve, to become symetrical. The old distinction enters in a crisis: in a certain way, the difference of levels of reality disappears. On the other hand, ambiguities, or paradoxes inherent to these topics, do not. It is one of the reasons why – I believe – the face in particular, and the body in general, are still for us, today, so fascinating. They convey an enigma. They are paradoxical.
Actually, in spite of that leveling, according to Houseman, an ambivalence persists in European tradition vis-à vis the image: on one hand, it may give access to the model (the image of conformity, the ideal beauty, the glorious body – as expressed exhaustively in contemporary media, connected to aesthetic ideals, phantasms, medical order), and, on the other hand, it is the very impossibility of attaining that situation, because the image installs a distance in relation to the model: it is the image of the Fall, of decadence, of pain and of biological contingency. It is why Christ is the symbol of the Western, European image, because he is the sum of both aspects of the image, simultaneously man and god, suffering body (crucifixion) and glorious body (resurrection).
We may say – let me add this comment - that our imagery is still largely dominated, today, by the image of Christ, as we can see in many works of modern art.
So the flesh is simultaneously (another – or, if you want, the same - paradox, contradiction, or oxymoron) the manifestation of spiritual interiority (conformity of the image) and sexual (animal) obscenity (unconformity of the image, deformity, ugliness).
The fact that the idea of femininity – Houseman argues – conserves the double aspect of a maternal reality (the nurturing body, the primordial sign of peace and protection) and of a sexual one (the woman as ambiguity, as something not entirely trustable, as a source of fear) comes from the very ambiguity of the “mother” of Christ, in the sense that being a virgin she gave life to a person who was the incarnation of god himself, or his “son” (another figure of ambiguity, of course). It is more than obvious the symbolic character of all these “familiar” polarities, like father, mother, son, etc., studied by psychology, psychoanalysis, etc.
As long as the “humanization of the father” proceeds, a correlative internalization (“intériorisation”) of the models occurs: the consistency of man shall be found in himself, the organic body is from now (Renaissance) on the translation of an inner model. This implies a divinization of “man” and, in last analysis, gives way to the modern, typically romantic, conception of genius: “the artistic interiority conceived as unlimited creative power”, Houseman writes (p. 69).
Therefore, the model of the body is not something that comes from God’s creation, but rather it exist as the “idealizing projection of an interior norm” (id., ib.).
Image is the interface of a hidden model (beauty, genotype, etc.) and the (biologically, socialy) contingent body. Modern (Western) subject is therefore a consequence of a long, endurable, Christian tradition. “Divine alterity installed itself in the very interiority of man under the form of an idealized image of the self.” (Id., ib, p. 70). In one of the most lucid texts that I have ever read, the author shows how, with Dürer for instance, “we see the passage from a self-portrait of the artist into a portrait of Christ as the artist’s portrait.” (p. 70).
It is evident, in all this matter, the importance of the portrait to trace the development of the underpinning conceptions/perceptions of each epoch, and throughout time: a sort of transformations within the same (ours) overwhelming “matrix”.
So, there is an affiliation, a hierarchic relation, between model and image. But the perfect image (that in conformity with the model) is very important, because it is an intermediate, it is from it that all the other images – crucial for the contemplation and salvation of the believers - come from.
This means that the primordial image (the image of Christ) must be in direct relation with him; it must be a true impression of his face: i. e., to be in a relation of similarity with the model, because this last one is the source of energy from where any effort will find inspiration in the way to perfection and redemption: for instance, in the acquisition of (how typically modern a myth!) the body’s beauty. The contemporary version of redemption may be in this kind of cult – my comment – often seen in the sense of a ladder, a series of steps higher and higher, as an ascent to salvation, perfection, imitation of the model. This one is the “spiritualization” of the flesh, playing with the idea of incarnation, the spirit made flesh.
The crucifixion (the supreme sacrifice) is the paroxysm of the pain, of effort, of agony, and it is very interesting (my comment) that we are so much obsessed by the image of agony (the liminal point between life and death, conscience and loss of conscience, individual solitude and loss into something beyond my capacity of control, the chaotic and the “other” in general, the unknown), also (very especially, so to speak) in the erotic sense: the moment of trance, “read” in the face of the other (our lover, for instance). Ascetics, “self- sculpture” (to use the words of Houseman – p. 76), search of eternal youth (to be forever young) are but the continuation, in our time, of a long tradition, whose ambiguities are well documented in the very iconography of sacred ecstasy (see Baroque statuary, for instance). This point interests me a lot, because in it coalesces a religious education that in a way has “made me”, and subjected me, but also because of the (illusionary?) capacity to understand all the myths (free love, and in general individual “freedom”) that that oppression developed as false “ways out”.
I mean, this is very important to understand how we main reformulate our discourse within the same ideology, the same ontology. Ideology is like Hydra: it has many heads, and its core is the “false impression” (the felt “deep conviction”) of being in possession of the truth, the “real one”. Indeed, doubt, distance from common beliefs that only self-reflection may provide, is the ultimate luxury: indeed still another version of the salvation, each one of us, in the Christian trend – as individuals - , pretending to be in the right way, whatever it may be.
Turning back to Houseman’s text, what we have in our time is the idea of the profane (beautiful, perfect) body as the way to access the “image in conformity”. More specifically, the nude (contrarily to the nudity, which may be purely sexual or opaque) becomes the spiritualization of the body, that is, the locus where all the contradictions dissolve: “sensibility and spirituality, matter and form, temporality and eternity, perception and idea” (p. 78). No surprise, then, that the nude appears as the way par excellence of the staging, or display, of the transcendence (the invisible) under the forms of the visible. Its contemplation promotes the spiritualization of the body. In that sense, the nude is in a situation of opposition to the desired body, to the nudity, to the eroticized object of sight.
This is why modern artists have largely exploited this image of the obscene, pornographic body, going into the self-portrait as a total auto-exhibition, to try to subvert the idealized nude. But, as Houseman seems to suggest, this may be a way of pursuing the same goal, the desperate trial to find an interiority at the very surface of the images, of searching the invisible in the very opacity of the exposed surface (or “skin”, if you want). Photography has been, since its discovery, a fantastic machinery revealing this obsession of the search of a “improbable coincidence between reality and the ideal” (p. 79) : the rejection of a model, of a hidden reality behind the surface, in order to reach a pretense unity (harmony, overcoming of contradictions or paradoxes) at the very “sur-face” of people and things. Epidermis would be our last phantasm of “interiority”, the process of internalization (“intériorisation”) typical of Europe in the moment of reaching a sort of exhaustion.
Anyway, Houseman argues that the modern program of genetics marks the last step of the process, a mythological step indeed. The AND, the “architect of life” (p. 79) is the ultimate version of the model’s thought: an inner model, but also an abstract one, because, as an image, it may be “read” – it the model of the phenotypic body (p. 80). And Houseman adds: “ The opposition between genotype and phenotype is the contemporary form of the model’s and image’s thought” (…) ; “The individual organism is nothing but a contingent sub-set of the genetic storage of the species.” (p. 79).
This particular point meets an idea expressed by Tim Ingold in his criticism to current genetics, when he writes that the “(…) organic form is a property not of genes but of developmental organisms”, and that “(…) there is no reading of the genetic code that is not itself part of the process of development (…). It follows that there can be no specification of the characteristics of an organism, no design, that is independent of the context of development.” (From complementarity to obviation: on dissolving the boundaries between social and biological anthropology, archaeology and psychology, Cycles of Contingency. Developmental Systems and Evolution (ed. Oyama, Susan et al ), Cambridge/Mass., London, MIT Press, 2001, p. 261). Maybe some of the insights of this author help to answer to some of the perplexities expressed in the final page of Houseman’s chapter, when he speaks about the disintegration of a thought based in the ideal of a “primordial” model in the very moment where it seems to impose its sovereignty everywhere.
So the reader starts to see more clearly why this subject interests me so much as a person and as an archeologist. Understanding the tradition to which I belong – its very particular and contingent ontology - in both plans, at least I may be able to avoid some interpretive “ingenuities” vis-à-vis myself and the others (my study’s object). Not to look from outside, replacing the myth of God’ s eye; but to open myself to the diversity of possibilities of interpretation, to its infinite complexity. In last analysis, let us say that this is an aesthetic of self-deconstruction, an ethics of precautionary suspicion.
Its title is “La Chair est Image” (“Flesh is Image”) and it is written by Michael Houseman (École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris).
I will try to schematically resume here his argument, which obviously is much richer and clear than this abstract (with some comments by myself) permits.
The question of the body is typically European and Christian. Also, the image par excellence is the image of the body, in particular a body represented as an image.
Three main aspects form the basis of our conception of the body: the dualism (body/soul), the monotheistic creationism (“man” was created by God, but he/she is a degraded image of Him after the Fall in the paradise), and the idea of Incarnation. Through Christ, God takes a human shape (including a face, a fact unique in religion); Passion is the apex of this Incarnation. The flesh of man, corrupted by sin, has a possibility of redemption through the sacrifice of Christ, who, by Resurrection (glorious body), allows the return to the pure Adam’s original flesh.
So, there is an ambiguity, or duplicity, in the status of the body, right from the beginning of our civilization. In fact, if the body is an obstacle to the salvation (after the primordial sin), it is also the only way (through the body of Christ) that we have to overcome our condition and to recuperate purity. For instance, nudity, a sign of innocence in paradise, has become after the Fall a sign of shame and of lust.
God is beyond any image, any possible representation. He is the model, the prototype, the one who is inaccessible to sight. The image of the human body is in unconformity with that model. But, through the interface between God and “man”, which Christ represents (he is the image of conformity itself) a contact is made possible. By incarnation, the model becomes visible, the body and the image join together in some sort of harmony.
The Christianity is the community, the sum, of the believers as individuals, and it is as individualized bodies that they may converge to the model.
In this doctrine and practice – I add - we may see the seeds of modern individualism, the idea of subjects as individualized entities, so typical of our “culture” to the point that we see it as “natural” (i.e., universal), in a characteristically ideological bias.
Largely dominating in European “art” is the image of Christ, an image of conformity, the interface between “man” and God. In him, image and model coalesce, and the flesh is sacramental, not just a shadow as in humans.
From the Renaissance onwards, a fundamental shift occurs within this structure oriented towards the model. The transcendency of the model typical of the Medieval ages becomes progressively replaced by an immanent perspective, i. e., as an interiorized transcendency: bodily appearance starts being the revelation of the inner model. This dissolution of the transcendence of the model, its humanization, opens throughout the last centuries a room where “man” as an image of “perfection” may emerge. The asymmetric, hierarchical relation between model and its “mimesis” (the body-image) beings to dissolve, to become symetrical. The old distinction enters in a crisis: in a certain way, the difference of levels of reality disappears. On the other hand, ambiguities, or paradoxes inherent to these topics, do not. It is one of the reasons why – I believe – the face in particular, and the body in general, are still for us, today, so fascinating. They convey an enigma. They are paradoxical.
Actually, in spite of that leveling, according to Houseman, an ambivalence persists in European tradition vis-à vis the image: on one hand, it may give access to the model (the image of conformity, the ideal beauty, the glorious body – as expressed exhaustively in contemporary media, connected to aesthetic ideals, phantasms, medical order), and, on the other hand, it is the very impossibility of attaining that situation, because the image installs a distance in relation to the model: it is the image of the Fall, of decadence, of pain and of biological contingency. It is why Christ is the symbol of the Western, European image, because he is the sum of both aspects of the image, simultaneously man and god, suffering body (crucifixion) and glorious body (resurrection).
We may say – let me add this comment - that our imagery is still largely dominated, today, by the image of Christ, as we can see in many works of modern art.
So the flesh is simultaneously (another – or, if you want, the same - paradox, contradiction, or oxymoron) the manifestation of spiritual interiority (conformity of the image) and sexual (animal) obscenity (unconformity of the image, deformity, ugliness).
The fact that the idea of femininity – Houseman argues – conserves the double aspect of a maternal reality (the nurturing body, the primordial sign of peace and protection) and of a sexual one (the woman as ambiguity, as something not entirely trustable, as a source of fear) comes from the very ambiguity of the “mother” of Christ, in the sense that being a virgin she gave life to a person who was the incarnation of god himself, or his “son” (another figure of ambiguity, of course). It is more than obvious the symbolic character of all these “familiar” polarities, like father, mother, son, etc., studied by psychology, psychoanalysis, etc.
As long as the “humanization of the father” proceeds, a correlative internalization (“intériorisation”) of the models occurs: the consistency of man shall be found in himself, the organic body is from now (Renaissance) on the translation of an inner model. This implies a divinization of “man” and, in last analysis, gives way to the modern, typically romantic, conception of genius: “the artistic interiority conceived as unlimited creative power”, Houseman writes (p. 69).
Therefore, the model of the body is not something that comes from God’s creation, but rather it exist as the “idealizing projection of an interior norm” (id., ib.).
Image is the interface of a hidden model (beauty, genotype, etc.) and the (biologically, socialy) contingent body. Modern (Western) subject is therefore a consequence of a long, endurable, Christian tradition. “Divine alterity installed itself in the very interiority of man under the form of an idealized image of the self.” (Id., ib, p. 70). In one of the most lucid texts that I have ever read, the author shows how, with Dürer for instance, “we see the passage from a self-portrait of the artist into a portrait of Christ as the artist’s portrait.” (p. 70).
It is evident, in all this matter, the importance of the portrait to trace the development of the underpinning conceptions/perceptions of each epoch, and throughout time: a sort of transformations within the same (ours) overwhelming “matrix”.
So, there is an affiliation, a hierarchic relation, between model and image. But the perfect image (that in conformity with the model) is very important, because it is an intermediate, it is from it that all the other images – crucial for the contemplation and salvation of the believers - come from.
This means that the primordial image (the image of Christ) must be in direct relation with him; it must be a true impression of his face: i. e., to be in a relation of similarity with the model, because this last one is the source of energy from where any effort will find inspiration in the way to perfection and redemption: for instance, in the acquisition of (how typically modern a myth!) the body’s beauty. The contemporary version of redemption may be in this kind of cult – my comment – often seen in the sense of a ladder, a series of steps higher and higher, as an ascent to salvation, perfection, imitation of the model. This one is the “spiritualization” of the flesh, playing with the idea of incarnation, the spirit made flesh.
The crucifixion (the supreme sacrifice) is the paroxysm of the pain, of effort, of agony, and it is very interesting (my comment) that we are so much obsessed by the image of agony (the liminal point between life and death, conscience and loss of conscience, individual solitude and loss into something beyond my capacity of control, the chaotic and the “other” in general, the unknown), also (very especially, so to speak) in the erotic sense: the moment of trance, “read” in the face of the other (our lover, for instance). Ascetics, “self- sculpture” (to use the words of Houseman – p. 76), search of eternal youth (to be forever young) are but the continuation, in our time, of a long tradition, whose ambiguities are well documented in the very iconography of sacred ecstasy (see Baroque statuary, for instance). This point interests me a lot, because in it coalesces a religious education that in a way has “made me”, and subjected me, but also because of the (illusionary?) capacity to understand all the myths (free love, and in general individual “freedom”) that that oppression developed as false “ways out”.
I mean, this is very important to understand how we main reformulate our discourse within the same ideology, the same ontology. Ideology is like Hydra: it has many heads, and its core is the “false impression” (the felt “deep conviction”) of being in possession of the truth, the “real one”. Indeed, doubt, distance from common beliefs that only self-reflection may provide, is the ultimate luxury: indeed still another version of the salvation, each one of us, in the Christian trend – as individuals - , pretending to be in the right way, whatever it may be.
Turning back to Houseman’s text, what we have in our time is the idea of the profane (beautiful, perfect) body as the way to access the “image in conformity”. More specifically, the nude (contrarily to the nudity, which may be purely sexual or opaque) becomes the spiritualization of the body, that is, the locus where all the contradictions dissolve: “sensibility and spirituality, matter and form, temporality and eternity, perception and idea” (p. 78). No surprise, then, that the nude appears as the way par excellence of the staging, or display, of the transcendence (the invisible) under the forms of the visible. Its contemplation promotes the spiritualization of the body. In that sense, the nude is in a situation of opposition to the desired body, to the nudity, to the eroticized object of sight.
This is why modern artists have largely exploited this image of the obscene, pornographic body, going into the self-portrait as a total auto-exhibition, to try to subvert the idealized nude. But, as Houseman seems to suggest, this may be a way of pursuing the same goal, the desperate trial to find an interiority at the very surface of the images, of searching the invisible in the very opacity of the exposed surface (or “skin”, if you want). Photography has been, since its discovery, a fantastic machinery revealing this obsession of the search of a “improbable coincidence between reality and the ideal” (p. 79) : the rejection of a model, of a hidden reality behind the surface, in order to reach a pretense unity (harmony, overcoming of contradictions or paradoxes) at the very “sur-face” of people and things. Epidermis would be our last phantasm of “interiority”, the process of internalization (“intériorisation”) typical of Europe in the moment of reaching a sort of exhaustion.
Anyway, Houseman argues that the modern program of genetics marks the last step of the process, a mythological step indeed. The AND, the “architect of life” (p. 79) is the ultimate version of the model’s thought: an inner model, but also an abstract one, because, as an image, it may be “read” – it the model of the phenotypic body (p. 80). And Houseman adds: “ The opposition between genotype and phenotype is the contemporary form of the model’s and image’s thought” (…) ; “The individual organism is nothing but a contingent sub-set of the genetic storage of the species.” (p. 79).
This particular point meets an idea expressed by Tim Ingold in his criticism to current genetics, when he writes that the “(…) organic form is a property not of genes but of developmental organisms”, and that “(…) there is no reading of the genetic code that is not itself part of the process of development (…). It follows that there can be no specification of the characteristics of an organism, no design, that is independent of the context of development.” (From complementarity to obviation: on dissolving the boundaries between social and biological anthropology, archaeology and psychology, Cycles of Contingency. Developmental Systems and Evolution (ed. Oyama, Susan et al ), Cambridge/Mass., London, MIT Press, 2001, p. 261). Maybe some of the insights of this author help to answer to some of the perplexities expressed in the final page of Houseman’s chapter, when he speaks about the disintegration of a thought based in the ideal of a “primordial” model in the very moment where it seems to impose its sovereignty everywhere.
So the reader starts to see more clearly why this subject interests me so much as a person and as an archeologist. Understanding the tradition to which I belong – its very particular and contingent ontology - in both plans, at least I may be able to avoid some interpretive “ingenuities” vis-à-vis myself and the others (my study’s object). Not to look from outside, replacing the myth of God’ s eye; but to open myself to the diversity of possibilities of interpretation, to its infinite complexity. In last analysis, let us say that this is an aesthetic of self-deconstruction, an ethics of precautionary suspicion.
copyright voj 2007
About the author whose paper I have commented here: http://www.ivry.cnrs.fr/spafrican/chercheurs/mhouseman.htm
http://www.majorem.net/blog/rubrique.php3?id_rubrique=15
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário