The Dioramic Imperative and the Incremental Taxidermy of the Self
Like most of us, I think, I was particularly struck by Wendy Brown’s chapter Specters and Angels, and have been thinking about the idea of hauntology since then. I went back and read Derrida’s piece on Marx where he introduces the concept. What a striking and new meaning the opening phrase of the Communist Manifesto takes when read in that light. A specter is haunting Europe — the specter of communism. If we are to follow Derrida and Brown it seems there are specters haunting us all; haunting and cloaking all epochs, all grand narratives, generations, and civilisations.
There is a computer game that is more popular in Japan than North America called Fatal Frame. Fatal Frame is not like other computer games where you chase and kill endless enemies with an impossible-to-carry array of weaponry and an endless supply of ammunition that happens to be lying around everywhere. In Fatal Frame the only tool or weapon you have is a camera. As the game progresses you can trade up to a better camera with a higher level of functionality. The purpose of the camera is to capture and repel ghosts. The scene of the game is an old mansion, and your character needs to traverse the dangerous nooks and crannies to rescue a lost sibling. The ghosts do not appear to you except through the view finder of the camera, and when you capture them on film you disperse them.
So I started to wonder: what technologies or techniques can we use to cause the ghosts and specters of hauntologies to appear? Or, more importantly, where can we look for them? Where do they emerge most clearly, even if that emergence or becoming visible or sensible is an accident, a by-product of some other process or technology, an unintended consequence of some other project, perhaps even a project that aims at the opposite, a project that does not seek to illuminate ghosts and spectres but to conceal and naturalise them? Perhaps we can call this capturing, whether intentional or unintentional, hauntography. I realize I’m pushing Derrida’s original and much punnier trope to its limit, but what the heck.
I was thinking about this concept as I read Donna Haraway’s essay Teddy Bear Patriarchy. I found the technologies behind dioramics and taxidermy fascinating, not so much for the representational techniques but rather for the total effect of capturing and displaying more clearly the auras and misty edges of these specters and ghosts that haunt the specific grand narrative Haraway so successfully teases out of the dioramas in the African Hall at the American Museum of Natural History.
Is there something unique and powerful in the technology of the diorama? Is the diorama more successful than other modes of representation at capturing and depicting hauntologies? Perhaps it is more dependant on the creator of the diorama, but these aspects all come together and provide Haraway the opportunity for a profoundly insightful close reading of the African Hall, its architecture, its displays, statuary and specifically, dioramics and taxidermics.
Certainly, Haraway’s essay is on theme for our class. There are many, many bodies in all states of health, decadence and relation to each other. It is the collection of bodies and their arrangement via dioramas into a representation of the collective subconscious of a society that forms the main focus. That is not to say that her text does not morph into a fabulous description of other possible dioramas through the drama and scope of the story of Akeley and his expeditions. The diorama, and its attendant technology of taxidermy, is a truly important and unique technology.
The history of the Diorama is lengthy. I have found reference to early dioramas still in existence from 15th century Italy. In particular the Sacro Monte di Varallo in Italy has some amazing preserved dioramas depicting biblical moments. They combine life-like, realistic bodies and scenes with trompe l’oiel painting to create the total illusions of the dioramic form. Of course, photographing a diorama with a flash kills the effect. But it is interesting to note work on this installation began in 1486, just fifty years after the first book to include a treatise on Perspective, ‘On Painting’, was published by Leon Battista Alberti. One can only imagine the effect of these dioramas on 15th century Christians, and one can only imagine how illuminating they might be for 21st century hauntographers like us.
Fast forward to France and England in the early nineteenth century. Dioramas were a fad and installations of them focused on the trickery they played on the eye to reproduce the sensation of presence. Whole buildings were dedicated to their presentation with specific lighting techniques employed to transform the image, and the process was patented in England in 1824. The master of the process was L. J. M. Daguerre, who of course went on to create the Daguerrotype process in photography.
The invention of photography, and eventually film, diverted the development and deployment of the diorama as public spectacle, but it continued to develop in service of the depiction of naturalistic settings and spurred on the practice of taxidermy. We know that hunting and collecting expeditions in the service of taxidermy and diorama production occurred as long ago as the early nineteenth century.
Haraway’s essay takes us to the twentieth century and the expeditions and creations of Akeley. Her reading of his works in the context of his epoch puts the focus on the desire to stave off the specter of decadence.
At the beginning of the essay she writes:
From the dead body of the primate Akeley crafted something finer than the living organism. he achieved its true end; a new genesis. Decadence - the threat of the city, civilisation, the machine - was stayed in the politics of eugenics and the art of taxidermy. The museum fulfilled its scientific purpose of conservation, preservation, and the production of permanence. Life was transfigured in the principal civic arena of western political theory - the natural body of man.
To support this interpretation of the dioramas in the African Hall she builds a very deliberate and detailed body of supporting evidence by taking us through, quote ” the immediacy of experience and the mediations of biography and story telling” to the point where “we now must attend to the synthetic organs of social construction as they come together in an institution.”
The power of Haraway’s analysis for me lies in the truly brilliant and necessary detail of her totalistic reading of the space of the diorama and the object of taxidermy. Her feminism informs it, but I find it be a much more general reading of the technologies of power and their relation to bodies. We have bodies everywhere throughout this essay. The bodies of animals in various states: roaming in bliss, charging in defense of themselves and their families. Wounded and disappearing. Killed and inert, decaying, decomposing. Being salvaged, broken down and transported. Being reconstructed as life-like reproductions of increasing precision and realism.
There are human bodies as well. The body of the father, the mother and of children. There are bodies being protected and shielded by their technologies of travel and movement. Bodies being attacked, wounded, and convalescing. Bodies racked with disease. There are bodies being processed through machines. The Museum of Natural History and its African Hall is a machine with bodies entering in a degraded, decadent state and emerging as new, renewed in belief and purpose.
And there is the dead body of Akeley, so meticulously protected by the construction of the tomb, yet all for naught; his preservation thwarted by the looting of savages. How perfectly symbolic of the entire root fear so nicely encapsulated by Haraway in the final paragraph of her essay:
But in the 1920s the surrealists knew that behind the day lay the night of sexual terror, disembodiment, failure of order; in short, castration and impotence of the seminal body which had spoken all the seminal words for centuries, the great white father, the white hunter in the heart of Africa.
I find Haraway’s story-telling to be masterful and polished, but I also wonder about the power of the dioramic imperative itself, the need to depict our selves and our myths of origin as realistically as possible, and I wonder how the form of the diorama lends itself to such a potent evocation. Could it be that the diorama is the highest form of hauntographical representation?
It should be noted that dioramics and taxidermy are deployed in the service of the obverse reaction to the moment of terror Haraway describes. Instead of being matched in the service of a Nature to be conserved in the face of encroaching decadence, these technologies are equally deployed in support of the new operational simulations of post-war consumerism. Technology won the war, and it will save us now. Rather than support reconstruction and conservation of what is already of the past they are deployed in the delineation and representation of an ideal of the present where technological augmentation stands in contrast with the more pure, naturalistic ideal forms of the past.
In game shows like The Price is Right, trade shows, model homes, display suites, and the like we see dioramatic representations of the ideal of the present, replete with the happy female model, blissfully inhabiting the technological scene. Homemakers emulate the dioramic moment in their actual homes with a fanatical adherence to a regime of cleanliness. Plastic covers on the furniture. Plastic carpet runners. Everyone has a grandmother or great aunt who did that. Home as diorama.
Our museums now show the progress of our operational simulation through time. Here we sit in Victoria, the home of the highly nostalgic Miniature World, as well as the sophisticated timeshifting dioramas in the Royal British Columbia Museum depicting both naturalistic and technological settings. The quaintness of the domestic and industrial technologies in these “modern history” dioramas tells us the story of progressive technological advancement better than any. Our National Museum of Civilisation employs the same technique. The walk from east to west is done with the same timeshifting dioramics, the traveler finally emerging in an accurate present-day British Columbian Disneyland of First Nations Longhouses.
Then we have the extension and furtherance of the technological advancement dioramatic imperative in its next and final phase. Epcot Center. The world of tomorrow today in full dioramic expression. In the words of Walt Disney:
“EPCOT … will take its cue from the new ideas and new technologies that are now emerging from the creative centers of American industry. It will be a community of tomorrow that will never be completed, but will always be introducing and testing and demonstrating new materials and systems. And EPCOT will always be a showcase to the world for the ingenuity and imagination of American free enterprise.”
Then on to virtual reality and all possible futures. The expansion of the dioramic moment is not yet nearly finished.
And what of Taxidermy? Is it still operative today? One only need ask, with the perfection of the diorama in virtual reality and visualisation technologies, what is the only thing not living up to the promise? The human body itself of course. Enter the practices of incremental self-taxidermy. Joint replacement, glass eyes, hearing aids, hair replacement, breast implants, collagen injection, nips and tucks of all sorts, dental augmentations, fingernails, metal plates, prosthetics, and under heavy development we have powered exoskeletons, brain/computer interfaces and more.
These inorganic technologies we use to enhance and extend our bodies and their functions refer back to the original impulse of Akeley’s taxidermy. As an organism decays we gradually replace it with non-organic replacement parts, keeping only the organic parts that are essential to the organism. Then, one day we stand in awe and perhaps now horror of the remains of the body, or its disappearing, in the technological augmentation of life. We can anticipate the final moment of transformation as the last organic element of an augmented person expires and the perfect, preserved version remains. Close the doors and put up a window for viewing only.
This is of course an exageration, but I want to contrast the old-fashioned inorganic augmentation of the body as a practice of taxidermy with the newer promises of synthetic biology and stem cell therapy. The source of salvation and preservation has shifted again. Our quaint, inorganic technologies of augmentation and preservation and all their promise of cybernetic life are no longer seen as a salvation. They are, in their immanent and only reluctantly admitted failure, as melancholic as the video images of Barney Clark and his Jarvik 7 heart, or the lonely and directionless borg drone who has become separated from the collective.
This is the same emotion that pervades the diorama. A profound melancholy. And perhaps this is the great, unintended hauntographic capability of the dioramic and taxidermic form. It captures the adjunct specters and ghosts. For there are other layers of meaning. Like the Kirilian Aura, or Merleau-Ponty’s discussion in the Phenomenology of Perception of the “phantom limb”, the diorama allows additional animating spirits to emerge and be seen.
But we are at the end of the salvational form of augmentation and its increasingly unconvincing dioramic representations. In the face of newly-emerging technologies, cybernetics is exposed as nothing more than a monstrous crutch, and its no wonder Donna Haraway now prefers now to speak about dogs. Finding its expression in works like William Gibson’s Neuromancer, which was published the same year as Haraway’s essay, the cyborg is now a crippled organism, belimed by technology at the same time as it is enabled and mobilised. The borg can only be saved and made truly human by removing or at least hiding her technologies. From asexual cyborg to hypersexual seven-of-nine, we see the first reversal; going where no android has gone before, we see a machine-to-human transformation emblematic of the new shift. The new salvation now lies in the heart of the cell, the hermeneutics of the genome.
In conclusion I will turn to the most advanced and yet melancholic moment of dioramics and taxidermy I could find. In Steven Spielberg’s adaptation and completion of Stanley Kubrik’s unfinished project A.I. - a child robot is initially programmed with all the qualities we would like to exhibit ourselves and none of the others that form the reality of our spectrum of behaviour. The child/robot is constructed to replace a fatally injured human child, who recovers and displaces the robot, who then engages in a classic Homerian quest. When the quest for the Blue Fairy ends in disaster, and the child/robot is frozen for millennia in the ice, only to be discovered and resurrected by AI anthropologists and archeologists, he is placed in a diorama.
The future AI says to the child/robot David:
David, I often felt a sort of envy of human beings and that
thing they call ’spirit’. Human beings had created a million
explanations of the meaning of life in art, in poetry, in
mathematical formulas. Certainly, human beings must be the
key to the meaning of existence, but human beings no longer
existed.So, we began a project that would make it possible to
recreate the living body of a person long dead from the DNA
in a fragment of bone or mummified skin. We also wondered,
would it be possible to retrieve a memory trace in resonance
with a recreated body. And do you know what we found? We
found… the very fabric of space-time itself appeared to
store information about every event which had ever occurred
in the past.
The AIs watch the playing out of the final day of the child/robot and his taxidermically reconstructed human mother with the same interest as we look upon the dioramatic scenes of our own origins captured in the African Hall and elsewhere. The narrator explains:
And as the day wore on, David thought it was the happiest
day of his life. All the problems seemed to have disappeared
from his mommy’s mind. There was no Henry, there was no
Martin, there was no grief, there was only David.
And isn’t this exactly what the diorama with its resurrected creatures is supposed to evoke: the narrower spectrum of value valorized by the narratives it is intended to depict? But as we have seen it goes further, capturing and freezing itself and its impulse until the full story emerges and the hauntology becomes apparent. It is made all the more apparent when subjected to the intense gaze of a writer like Donna Haraway.
As an after word, for me the story of dioramics and taxidermy, and their ability to capture hauntologies, teaches us that, if we are to transform thought into an activism then it is less the essentialism of any particular model, metaphysics, teleology etc. than it is the lived practice of it. Undergirding a way of life with an analytical or metaphysical justification or tool means nothing if it does not translate into or reflect lived practice.
So it is for us when, in our thinking, we abandon the safe ground of essentialisms, myths of origins and grand narratives for an embrasure of ambiguous acts, absurd existence and uncertain outcomes. It is the practice that is the thing in the end. We are still faced each day, albeit in a less historically determined manner, with Lenin’s famous question, what is to be done? And at the end we all face the simple insight contained in the story of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount. There Jesus is reported to have spoken of false prophets, and counseling: by their fruits ye shall know them. I don’t ascribe any particular religious weight to this. Its just a simple and sensible formula for scattering the mists and auras of the hauntologies that cloak and embellish prescriptive thought of all sorts.
