Fashioning the Body: Versions of the Citizen, the Self, and the Subject

Emily

Fashioning the Body

November 6, 2007

 

Galton’s Little Black Book: The Visual Deployment of Bourgeois Sexuality

Science extends itself as a neutral helping hand, as the voice of reason. Science, society tells us, is not affected by social, cultural, or political motivations. The numbers don’t lie, so we think. But what if the numbers are put on our bodies? What if science is measuring our noses, our foreheads, our ears, and our eye-width to determine what sort of person we are? What if science takes our picture and uses it to declare our degree of humanity, and furthermore declares our responsibility to not reproduce for the betterment of the species? Science is not neutral. The will to knowledge cannot wash its hands of cultural and social influences, nor of power relations implicit in those influences. Francis Galton’s scientific composite portraits during the latter half of the 19^th century serves as a telling technology of eugenics, specifically linked to the proliferation of the bourgeoisie in accordance to Michel Foucault’s analysis of the history of sexuality.

The science of phrenology and physiognomy, popular in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, was not neutral. Allan Sekula, in his essay entitled “The Body and the Archive” provides a detailed history of the two sciences, placing them in a critical survey. The data collected and presented about the body was not unbiased, although it certainly presented itself as objective truths. Phrenology and physiognomy stem from the belief that a person’s value could be determined from his or her face and head. Both sciences examined, measured, observed, and documented the human body in this light. In particular, the two sciences studied groups of peoples, dividing society up into races, genders, intelligence levels, morality, and class. Gathering information about groups of people based on social status, ethnicity, class, and or gender is not a practice free of power relationships. Yet this was a validated science of statistics. By the end of the 19^th century, cameras aided in the proliferation of phrenology and physiognomy as scientific studies (Sekula 347).

Before cameras, detailed hand-drawn or engraved images provided a visual to supplement phrenology and physiognomy. The visual image portraying conclusions regarding character was crucial to the studies of the body. The focus on the face and head gave way to images of persons’ facial traits placed within a value scale. An individual’s characteristics were forced into prescribed groups. Physiognomy, the study of the face, easily translated into photographic examination.

A light skinned boy with a particular nose shape or eye shape no longer owned his face; science usurped his very facial structure with the will to knowledge at its heels. French scientist Francis Galton in the late 1880s took this boy’s image, collecting his face by means of the camera. Multiple, formulaic mugshots of boys ‘like’ this one were compiled together to create one average face. The composite mugshot cannot be seen as an objective experiment; text accompanied the photos with titles that assigned a label, such as “the Jewish type.” Galton’s composite portrait of the “Jewish type” is one example of many cases he examined; he considered this ethnic portrait to be the most compelling (Sekula 371).

Documenting racial groups and other ‘types’ purported to be a rational scientific discursive practice. However, Galton’s eugenicist agenda revealed the tautology of his studies. “Galton sought to intervene in human reproduction by means of a public policy, encouraging the propagation of the ‘fit’ and discouraging or preventing outright that of the ‘unfit’” (Sekula 353). By photographing the so-called degenerates of society, Galton participated in the building sense of ruling and entitlement in the bourgeoisie. In addition to defining the abnormal, the immoral, the ‘unfit’ in relation to the ‘fit’ (the bourgeoisie, the white, the wealthy, the educated), Galton pushed a political bias that desired a utopian future, weeding out the weak links of society. One telling example of this was Galton’s study of the ‘criminal type.’ “His interest in heredity and racial ‘betterment’ led him to join the search for a biologically determined ‘criminal’ type. Through one of his several applications of composite portraiture, Galton attempted to construct a purely optical apparition of the criminal type” (Sekula 353). The use of composite photography was Galton’s essential addition to science, creating a visual reference for the subjects in question and those who were asking the questions.

This photographic examination was symptomatic of the will to knowledge in the modern age, and is representative of the period’s scientific practices and social relations. It must be noted that Galton was part of the bourgeoisie, the dominant class revolving around the commonality of wealth, whiteness, education, and power—the creators and perpetuators of modern science. To Galton and his colleagues, the ‘other’ or the abject person was a mystery to be solved, a scientific secret to be created and then discovered. The bourgeois scientists plagued themselves with questions like the following: What is it about criminals that make them commit crimes repeatedly? Don’t persons afflicted by tuberculosis look alike; can we avoid disease by recognizing a type? Aren’t people with dark skin of a lower intelligence? Surely all of these questions can be answered through the process of scientific data gathering: Measure the noses. Count the inches across the cheeks. Study the ratios. Observe how they all look alike when their images are layered in a composite portrait. The experiments represented the hegemonic ideologies of the time, emphasizing the superiority of the ruling white, male, wealthy class. Notably, phrenology and physiognomy created a hierarchy of races, placing ‘Athenian’ facial structures as the highest of intelligences and African faces far below (Sekula 367).

A photograph is a record, a document, an archive. It is a material presence that can outlive us all. A photographic portrait is an archive of the body, usually of the face and head. The face represents the self, the individual; but the face can also signify a “type”. If science says that the closer we are to Greek gods and their facial structures the more intelligent we are, all the better to be an Anglo-Saxon. If scientists say that one can tell what sort of character one is dealing with by studying his or her face, a face can betray. The face does not belong to the individual, particularly if the individual is placed in a category as “inferior.” It is important to know who is categorically inferior; society should be able to stop in the street and recognize the degenerates. This mentality established the motives behind photographing a variety of faces and grouping them into labels.

To say that the general will to knowledge and the age of modern science exuded from every pore of the social body and thus photographing classes of people was a natural next step does not adequately express the power relations in action. There are more layers to be discovered in looking at the photographers and the science behind phrenology and physiognomy in terms of sexuality. Concurrent with the photographic will to knowledge was the deployment of sexuality. The bourgeoisie invented and perpetuated “sexuality” as a mysterious secret of the body. Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality: Volume I, an Introduction provides an innovative analysis of the time period. The proliferation of science and the medicalization of the body is symptomatic of the will to knowledge, but the medicalization of sex reveals class-based agendas. That is, Foucault compellingly argues that the stringent attention paid to the body and its health and sexual activities reflects the bourgeoisie’s value placed on its own class body. This means both the physical bodies of those within the bourgeoisie and the bourgeois as a whole were placed under medical surveillance (Foucault 118-120).

Scientific and medical surveillance primarily served to guide the bourgeois body into successful survival. The individual bourgeois body belonged not to the individual, rather to the bourgeoisie as a whole group with a future. Here grew the hereditary-perversion-degenerescence system (Foucault 118). The threat of ruining one’s lineage for future generations emanated from not only scientists and the medical profession; the concupiscent preoccupation plagued society until a plethora of social fields now understood the importance of sexuality. “Psychiatry, to be sure, but also jurisprudence, legal medicine, agencies of social control, the surveillance of dangerous or endangered children, all functioned for a long time on the basis of ‘degenerescence’ and the heredity-perversion system” (Foucault 119). Not only a doctor would inform the individual to avoid perverse sexual activity, but so too would the law and other social institutions. The reason behind the controls on sexuality was not to purposely restrict pleasure of the individual, but to ensure the procreation and proliferation of the bourgeois class body as a dominant class (Foucault 125).

The great emphasis on heredity and sexual practices was born to protect the bourgeoisie’s future. Perverse sexual acts lead to the decline of a family line and were categorized as abnormal and immoral. Concern for spreading disease through one’s bloodline burgeoned from the fear of losing bodies in the dominant class (Foucault 118). Hand in hand with sexuality was the control of matrimonial alliances. Marriage should be procreative in the best way for the future of the class; here endogamy entered the picture. While Foucault mentions “endogamy” infrequently, the concept bears further examination and sums up his connection of sexuality and matrimonial alliances within the bourgeoisie. Endogamy is “the custom of marrying only within the limits of a clan or a tribe” according to the Oxford English Dictionary. Foucault references this in the following quote:

“[The bourgeoisie] must be seen rather as being occupied, from the mid- eighteenth century on, with creating its own sexuality and forming a specific body based on it, a ‘class’ body with its health, hygiene, descent, and race; the autosexualization of its body, the incarnation of sex in its body, the endogamy of sex and the body” (Foucault 124).

Marriage was the socially condoned vehicle for procreative sex. To ensure the bourgeois class’s existence, the class members were expected to marry within and reproduce with their equals and no one less. Endogamic practices were thus a form of eugenics, a racial, classist and moral cleansing of the bourgeois heredity.

The advent of the bourgeois class as an exclusive ruling group is directly related to the medicalization of the body with the purpose of, as Foucault describes it, “maximizing life” as such and controlling reproduction (123). The photographic practices of Galton and his contemporaries served this idealist bloodline cleansing, providing visual images of who not to reproduce with. The formation of the visual “unworthy” persons in the name of objective science can be argued to act as a guideline, a little black book of eugenics written for and by the dominant class.

To further explain how photography acted as a visual aid in the deployment of sexuality, the use of semiotics can be enlisted. The photograph—Galton’s composite faces of the ‘unfit’ as well as the ‘fit’—acted as a sign. The signifier was the physical representation of the individual (the photograph as an object), signifying the assigned value of human life. That is, a face of a criminal was both a paper photograph of a criminal, and a photograph that connoted immorality as a threat to the individual and the bourgeois class’s future.
The medium of photography in science, as previously discussed, was celebrated as the objective eye, the absolute rational truth. A camera cannot lie, just as science is based on facts, numbers, and promises to explain the world. While a camera still does not lie, it is only too evident that the scientific photographers made use of photographs in power-drenched technology of sexuality to service the continued existence of the bourgeoisie.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Works Cited

 

 

 

 

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Volume I. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Random House, 1978.

 

Sekula, Allan. “The Body and the Archive.” The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography. Ed. Richard Bolton. Cambridge: MIT, 1989. 343-389.