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.
[M]odern art still commonly refers to a rather narrow range of meaning and scope. It basically focuses on developments in Paris (Impressionism etc.) in the nineteenth century, and to selected Euro-American movements in the twentieth century (Cubism, Abstract Expressionism etc). But if we understand modernity as a socially transformative condition that was in force across much of the world from the nineteenth century on, how are we to understand artistic practices that were associated with these momentous changes?Iftikhar Dadi, Interview of March 26, 2012
The two world wars of the twentieth century were a product of the dislocations brought about of modernization in an environment where great power competition and the drive for hegemony were conducted primarily by violent means. Now that this era has passed in Europe and is receding in much of the Pacific rim, and hegemony achieved by force is no longer considered a legitimate ambition, the security requirements and fears of great powers should decline.Richard Ned Lebow, Interview of October 4, 2010
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.