On his book Body Modern: Fritz Kahn, Scientific Illustration, and the Homuncular Subject
Cover Interview of July 05, 2017
A close-up
Before Body Modern, I had mostly focused
on the earlier history and cultural politics of anatomy. In A Traffic of
Dead Bodies (2002) I argued that, in the 19th century, under the influence
of mass-produced illustrated anatomical publications and popular exhibitions, the
American and European public began to develop an anatomical consciousness and
identity. People began to think of themselves as anatomical beings, endowed
with a geography of parts and boundaries and systems, which were archived as
illustrations in books and charts, and as specimens in museums. This anatomical
image came to stand as an “effigy of self,” a figural shadow identity, an icon
of the real “me,” even if most people had nothing more than a hazy knowledge of
the details. For anything more than that they deferred to doctors and surgeons
and scientists, who increasingly assumed a position of cultural, moral, and
even legal authority over the human body and embodied life.
All that was very modern in the 19th
century. But modernity is a moving target: what’s modern in one generation, is old-fashioned
in the next. When I came upon the mid-20th-century works of Fritz Kahn, that complicated
my story. Kahn argued that the older style of anatomical illustration, which
showed detailed images of body parts and systems, was no longer scientifically
or stylistically adequate for modern readers. A new type of image was wanted:
one that conveyed the latest findings of “modern biology” and could show the dynamic
forces at work in and upon the human body: a dynamic image that sparked the
enthusiasm of the modern reader.
Kahn’s best-known work, the life-size 1926
color poster, “Der Mensch als Industriepalast” (“Man as Industrial Palace”),
did exactly that. It visually explained the workings of the human body by
representing it as a shiny factory complex, full of electrical, mechanical, and
chemical processes operated by a force of little workers and managers.
Body Modern
argues that the homuncular image—in philosophy, a tiny person inside the body
or the mind is termed a homunculus—is a hall of mirrors, creates mirror
effects. In some incalculably cognitive fashion, we recognize ourselves, and
internalize the idea that political economies and arrays of technological
devices are inside of us, just as we are inside of the technological and social
arrays of the larger industrial world. The printed image becomes for us a
homunculus, an effigy of self.
We are shaped and influenced by an
environment that is full of representations of the human, and full of other
humans who are shaped and influenced by representations of the human, and who
carry those representations along with them, into all of their interactions.
And at the same time, we ourselves provide the same service for others: we are
simultaneously homuncular objects and subjects. The human is in the image, the
image is in the human.
Spontaneous generation is one of those wrong theories that clutter the basements of the biological sciences and that now look so very obviously wrong that it is hard to see how anyone could have taken them seriously in the first place. Why wouldn’t it occur to anyone that flies might be laying eggs that were too small for us to see? How simple would the crucial experiment be? What I have tried to do in much of my work is to turn this ‘obvious wrongness’ on its head—why, exactly, does it seem so obviously wrong?—and see what the new picture that emerges from that inquiry says about science and our belief in its results.Daryn Lehoux, Interview of November 13, 2017
It’s commonplace to say that humor is subjective, since what’s funny to you might not be funny to me. But humor is also a loaded concept. If you – or your people – have no sense of humor, or the wrong one, that means you’re less rational, tolerant, understanding, or civilized. You don’t get it. Or, worse, you lack something human. Modern Chinese debates about humor were very much caught up with these fundamental questions of value.Christopher Rea, Interview of October 26, 2016
A close-up
Before Body Modern, I had mostly focused on the earlier history and cultural politics of anatomy. In A Traffic of Dead Bodies (2002) I argued that, in the 19th century, under the influence of mass-produced illustrated anatomical publications and popular exhibitions, the American and European public began to develop an anatomical consciousness and identity. People began to think of themselves as anatomical beings, endowed with a geography of parts and boundaries and systems, which were archived as illustrations in books and charts, and as specimens in museums. This anatomical image came to stand as an “effigy of self,” a figural shadow identity, an icon of the real “me,” even if most people had nothing more than a hazy knowledge of the details. For anything more than that they deferred to doctors and surgeons and scientists, who increasingly assumed a position of cultural, moral, and even legal authority over the human body and embodied life.
All that was very modern in the 19th century. But modernity is a moving target: what’s modern in one generation, is old-fashioned in the next. When I came upon the mid-20th-century works of Fritz Kahn, that complicated my story. Kahn argued that the older style of anatomical illustration, which showed detailed images of body parts and systems, was no longer scientifically or stylistically adequate for modern readers. A new type of image was wanted: one that conveyed the latest findings of “modern biology” and could show the dynamic forces at work in and upon the human body: a dynamic image that sparked the enthusiasm of the modern reader.
Kahn’s best-known work, the life-size 1926 color poster, “Der Mensch als Industriepalast” (“Man as Industrial Palace”), did exactly that. It visually explained the workings of the human body by representing it as a shiny factory complex, full of electrical, mechanical, and chemical processes operated by a force of little workers and managers.
Body Modern argues that the homuncular image—in philosophy, a tiny person inside the body or the mind is termed a homunculus—is a hall of mirrors, creates mirror effects. In some incalculably cognitive fashion, we recognize ourselves, and internalize the idea that political economies and arrays of technological devices are inside of us, just as we are inside of the technological and social arrays of the larger industrial world. The printed image becomes for us a homunculus, an effigy of self.
We are shaped and influenced by an environment that is full of representations of the human, and full of other humans who are shaped and influenced by representations of the human, and who carry those representations along with them, into all of their interactions. And at the same time, we ourselves provide the same service for others: we are simultaneously homuncular objects and subjects. The human is in the image, the image is in the human.