Art History in a Digital Age

Barbara Maria Stafford
Good Looking: Essays on the Virtue of Images
Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1996

Literary theory has by now found a comfortable home in art history departments. Keith Moxey's recent effort to formulate a semiotically aware art history, one in which art historians "appreciate how language invests their practice with the values of the present," is indicative of the essentially linguistic nature of contemporary methodological debates in art history.¹ But for several years now, Barbara Stafford has been warning students of visual culture that this reliance on the linguistic insights of post-structuralism perpetuates a long-standing distrust of sensory experience in Western culture and threatens to collapse the unique phenomenal status of visual surfaces into a homogenizing, language-driven interdisciplinarity.

In Good Looking: Essays on the Virtue of Images , Stafford continues her critique of the logocentric denigration of vision,² a tradition in which she would include even critics of logocentrism like Jacques Derrida, whose skeptical deconstructions of linguistic meaning are thoroughly embedded in a Cartesian mind-body dualism that privileges logos as the site for the possibility of knowledge (even if that possibility ultimately results, as it does for Derrida, in the failure of knowledge). Stafford would instead have us recognize the body as a legitimate way of knowing, that is, as a "horizontal" mode of knowledge that is sensory and somatic, and privileges the fluid and metamorphic nature of visual surfaces; this is the alternative to the "vertical" linguistic paradigm of post-Enlightenment culture in which logic is the means of rooting out the meaning (or non-meaning) beneath deceptive surfaces. In her own words, Stafford is calling for "a paradigm shift of Copernican proportions" (23), and yet this book is anything but utopian. Far from stopping at abstract speculation about an alternative universe, Stafford's thinking is intimately tied to the practical needs of a computer culture increasingly mediated by digital imagery.

Good Looking consists of twelve "frankly polemical" (4) essays, which cover a wide range of topics. Unifying them is Stafford's return to the eighteenth century as a touchstone for understanding our own world, as well as a commitment to addressing the practical demands of making and viewing images in a digital age. Her interest in the role images now play in science, in medicine, and on the Internet is made clear in chapters like "Desperately Seeking Connections: Linking the Internet to Eighteenth-Century Laboratory Life" and "Medical Ethics as Postmodern Aesthetics." Other essays, such as "The Eighteenth Century at the End of Modernity" and "The Natural History of Design: Humbert de Superville and Postmodern Theory," have titles that point to Stafford's knack for looking to the past and discovering analogies for the present. In fact, one might say that the very reason she considers history a useful enterprise is the potential for discovering sameness rather than difference. According to Stafford, the widespread effort to uncover difference and disjuncture at every historical turn is a symptom of "postmodernism's negative dialectics" (61), in which academic energies are spent on proving that appearances, which may seem similar on the surface, are in fact deceptive. Stafford's own impulse, on the other hand, is a positive one, an "empathetic drive to find and fuse—without disfiguring—the likeness in unlike things" (203).

Stafford is not dismissive of the important work that poststructuralist theory has done to discover difference and deconstruct accepted humanistic truths; her criticisms are instead directed at an academic community that now seems to consider the establishment of difference and the uncovering of deception as ends in themselves. Stafford's desire for a positive art history is a result of practical concerns over the ineffectiveness of postmodern iconoclasm in providing any sort of intellectual or moral leadership in an increasingly visual world. If images are used poorly, it is because they are distrusted, and a continued denigration of phenomenal knowledge will have little to offer in the way of positive models for "good looking." As a defender of analogy, Stafford feels she has something more productive to offer the computer age. One of the virtues of digital imagery is its potential to create analogical knowledge: the computer screen is an environment of constantly changing visual juxtapositions, and it can thus encourage active looking by posing stimulating visual analogies. On the other hand, if used poorly, the computer screen can be a forum for the passive viewing of false identifications. Unlike analogy, which does not withhold unlikeness from the viewer, identification is a logical function that collapses phenomenal difference into linguistic sameness.

Stafford finds an interesting analogy for this contemporary crisis in visual knowledge in the eighteenth-century cabinet of curiosities. In France, such collections were in the early part of the century given over to displaying the phenomenal diversity of unclassified nature. But during the second half of the century, the organizers of these cabinets were confronted with the problem of balancing a rococo taste for visual stimulation with the rigorous logical patterns of neoclassicism. The more thoughtful solutions to this problem, such as that of Louis-Jean-Marie Daubenton of the cabinet du roi , struck a balance that encouraged viewers not to surrender themselves uncritically to the artificial order of logical classification, but to weigh the need for order with an awareness of visual diversity. And this is only one of many parallels Stafford finds between two periods with much in common, from the emergence of new visual technologies in the microscope and the computer, to the commercialization of vision through popular science demonstrations and home shopping on the Internet. The "heroes" of Stafford's book are those historical figures who can offer today's art historians models of good looking—figures like Daubenton, the printmaker Giambattista Piranesi, the entomologist René-Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur, and the nineteenth-century polymath Humbert de Superville. These are all individuals who exploited the richness of analogy and the virtue of visual surfaces, whether they were interpreting the ancient world like Piranesi and Humbert, or visualizing the natural world like Daubenton and Réaumur.

Stafford's own writing mimics linguistically her notions of what constitutes "good looking": it is a verbal cabinet of curiosities, a text juxtaposing different historical periods and diverse disciplines, written in a style that combines postmodern jargon, alliterative cataloging ("ambiguous apparatus, paradoxical presentations, tattered taxonomies"), and a fondness for aphorism. And all this is combined with a tendency to generalize. For example, the reader must simply accept Stafford's scenario that a great shift toward logocentrism occurred in Western culture between 1750 and 1800. That shift is not offered up for examination, but is there to provide the author with analogies for the present, a fact which demonstrates that a horizontal history of surface analogies inevitably depends upon the vertical interrogation of history. But then Stafford is not out to discover the way to do art history—her book is a critique of those theorists who would reduce the flux of visual surfaces to the stasis of linguistic method. Good Looking , then, is a book that sets up historical analogies in a non-linear, patchwork style that simultaneously refuses to "prove" those analogies; that is, it refuses to make analogy into identity.

But if Stafford's text, in its analogical style, is a verbal equivalent of good looking, then what does she do with the 100 images she reproduces in her book? The fact is that she has relatively little to say about them. Her comments, not surprisingly, rarely go beyond a brief surface treatment, even as the images cry out for closer reading. The effect of this is to construct a kind of competing narrative with her text; there is a tension between the viewer's desire to interpret an abundance of fascinating images, from an MRI of a brain to an eighteenth-century engraving of copulating toads, and Stafford's contentment with surface analogies. Whether this was intended or not, it adds to the interest of the text as a whole. Stafford's text is problematic, and richer for it: she asks us to treat the history of images in a fundamentally different manner than we are accustomed to, as a host of surfaces offering analogies for our own age rather than as deep riddles to be decoded; and at the same time her text and the images she reproduces make us aware that phenomenal knowledge must always be embattled with the effort to produce linguistic meaning. Stafford rightly challenges art historians to become designers, to play an active role in the exhibition and dissemination of images; yet art historians will always be writers, and must therefore find a way to produce linguistic meaning out of sensory knowledge. In other words, art historians must do nothing less than find a means of fusing body and mind, and Barbara Stafford's Good Looking is an original and provocative effort toward achieving just that.

Michael Gaudio

Notes

(1)  Keith Moxey, The Practice of Theory: Poststructuralism, Cultural Politics, and Art History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 5.

(2)   Her more recent works include Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991) and Artful Science: Enlightenment Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual Education (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994).