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DE OCULTA MUSEOGRAPHICA: ESCAPING THE PAST

Museum Anthropology. Spring 2003 Vol. 26(1)11-20.
Sophia Vackimes
A discussion on the performative uses of occult signs and symbols as they occur in
modern times. On how the ulterior motives of science are disguised as to distract the
public from real purposes. And a view on how the monsters which once lurked in dark
corners of defunct institutions provide us with interesting insights onto the most modern
of scientific research.
The Setting
Museums have the crucial role in our society of creating connections between
the public, scholars, scientists and research institutions. They act as centers for
continuous education. In their role of public fora of science not only do they educate the
public on topics such as the history of electricity, the development of nuclear
accelerators or the accomplishments of the American space program; they also help
construct the religious aura, and mystical visibility that makes science into a quasi-
religious enterprise.
Even if at first we might think it counterintuitive, science and its history are often
displayed in museums in inverse relationship to what we would expect as the visual
exposition of the processes of rational thought; when alchemy is showcased, it is
currently acknowledged not as obscure and magical, but as a forum for the
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development of Cartesian and questioning, and while we would expect modern science
to be presented as a rational enterprise it appears embedded with religious mystique.
The imagologyvisual landscapewhich surrounds it, takes advantage of the
postmodern usefulness of historical amnesia, and however contradictory science and
religion might at first appear, the emergence of Western technology and its conceptual
supremacy are actually two sides of the same phenomenon (Noble 1998:9). That
science and its representations are not based on entirely rational premises or are free
from ideological constraint is not news to anthropologists, sociologists, or those in the
field of cultural critique. What is important to appreciate, however, is to understand the
value system cutting edge scientific advancement relies on, and how specific
messages are in turn conveyed to the public.
We have seen that museums are explained in scholarly texts as having an
ancestry rooted in cabinets of curiosity, also known as studiolo, galleries, thesauri, and
Kunst-, Raritaten- and Wunderkammern (Daston and Park 2001:265). During the
fifteenth century, these accumulations of natural specimens were of such intricacy,
wonder and rarity that they became status symbols in royal houses throughout Europe.
Philosophers of the time discussed their contents and discoursed on their great variety
of objects; the physical arrangement of such cabinets was often calculated to highlight
this heterogeneity (2001:267). Today, we are told, modern institutions have distanced
themselves from non-scientific arrangements; their capricious accumulations have been
superseded by precise order, clarity of purpose and knowledge.
The Human Genome Project is perhaps one of the most ambitious scientific
enterprises ever undertaken, and its results have been forecasted to literally and
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figuratively change the way that we think of ourselves as human beings. The
accomplishments of DNA research have received widespread attention in our society;
DNA has become focal point for scientific discourse, media news, and even popular
representation. Although such knowledge is initially scientific in nature, what the public
knows about it is shrouded in what Nelkin and Lindee term the DNA mystique (Lindee
and Nelkin 1995:201-202).
The Genomic Revolution was an exhibit that was created at the American
Museum of Natural History in New York City to celebrate the advances in research in
the field of genetics. It contained objects selected, described and arranged in a manner
aesthetically reminiscent of cabinets of curiosity. David Noble has written that [t]he
dynamic project of Western technology, the defining mark of modernity, is actually
medieval in origin and spirit (Noble 1998:9). If this is the case, Can we find evidence of
monsters and gargoyles lurking in the corners of this exhibit? Can we define how this
exhibits exhibitionary complex, came to be? Is that set of disciplinary and power
relations (1988:123) that Tony Bennett argues for being made visible to the museum
public?
Celebrating the Genome Project
In June 2000, scientists triumphantly announced they had deciphered the
human genome, the blueprint for human life (AMNH 2002) announced the press
release, the exhibit introduction, and the American Museum of Natural Historys web
site. This event, characterized as the most important scientific achievement of our era,
was to be showcased with an exhibit titled The Genomic Revolution, at the AMNH, on
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view in New York City from Fall 2001 to Spring 2002; its opening came in advance of
the 50
th
anniversary of the discovery of DNA by a few months.
The press preview that I attended as exhibit review editor for Museum
Anthropology, was bustling with excitement. Not only were we treated to a state of the
art exhibit preview, but also to a behind the scenes tour of the new cryogenics lab and
research facilities that would reaffirm AMNHs status as a prominent research institution;
it had been seen to lag in its scientific achievement as compared to research done at
major university and private laboratories; the museum was gearing itself for a new era.
The cryogenics lab, was shown to the press only on the preview day, and is a resource
not available to the general public.
Considerations: Towards a Plexiglas Mystique
Whether they were steel, plastic bubbles, phone books, wire sculptures,
computer animations, flickering lights, slides, or cartoons shown on a monitor, dozens of
models of DNA were on display, but, the only time a visitor was allowed into direct
contact with the substance it turned out to be a hologram encased in a golden vial and
that was ultimately untouchable. Information was presented to the viewer at various
intellectual levels, designs, colors, and textures, but while repeated metaphors might
serve to define the museum going experience they can in fact be used to cultivate
stereotypes, and construct specific meanings (Lindee and Nelkin 1995:12). In the initial
section, having the blueprint of life (AMNH 2001:1), which initially seemed to be at
arms reach was absolutely tantalizing to a visitor. But, and as he tried to grasp the vial
encasing it his hand swept right through as the wondrous substance was ultimately
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untouchable, mysterious and ultimately ethereal. True DNA was nowhere in the exhibit,
and never actually materialized in this show; it was only through different interpretations
of its imaginary structure that the public could sense what it is. In its exhibitionary mode
it was effectively removed from human experience and chartered as mysterious and
elusive, though it makes up all living matter. Remaining accessible only to an elite, this
intangibility is integral component of the mystical construct (Lindee and Nelkin
1995:49) that obscures public knowledge of science.
It is a common stereotype that scientists work on obscure projects in total
isolation from the rest of humanity, be it novels such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethes
Dr. Faust and Mary Shelleys Frankenstein, classical films, plays or opera such as The
Golem, or the cheap thrills of commercial aculture notions of secrecy and magic are
continuously reinforced. Modern updates of doctors working in the Amazon jungle or
mysterious islands off the coast of Costa Rica basically exploit the same themes: and
common man is not a part of the process of discovery. But whenever necessary, these
same resources are used by the scientific establishment in order to safeguard their
vantage point. Scientists themselves invest themselves in an aura of hermeneutics
pursuing the mysteries of the universe with nearly religious conviction (Lindee and
Nelkin 1995:39) in an effort to gain public approval of their work. The metaphors they
utilize in explaining their projects are at times Holy Grail, (Brian Greene); The God
Particle (Leon Lederman), the mind of God, (Steven Hawking), etc.
Seeking to assure continued public funding of a long-term costly project, genome
researchers have been writing for popular magazines, giving public talks, and
promoting their research in media interviews . . .they call the genome a Delphic
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Oracle, a Time Machine, a trip into the future, a medical crystal ball (Lindee
and Nelkin 1995:7).
Lamentably the result is an ahistoricism that masks true scientific purposes
entering into the realm of the information bomb that deeply concerns Paul Virilio:
Science, after having been carried along for almost half a century in the arms
race of the East-West deterrence era, has developed solely with a view to the
pursuit of limit-performances, to the detriment of any effort to discover a coherent
truth useful to humanity (2000:1).
Imagery is confused with metaphors once belonging solely to the realm of
literature, science or even religion, while today they are all one and the same. And while
language categories might be the most permeable, and even permissible if used as
metaphors, it is in the realm of visual imagery that new conceptual boundaries are being
formulated. With the advent of new technologies, and I do not use the term lightly, but
rather in the religious context, new creeds and beliefs are being formulated; new
conceptual religions are being designed and in the name of science and techno-
science is gradually wrecking the scholarly resources of all knowledge (Virilio 2000:2).
This is enacted through what Milan Kundera explains as imagology. The conceptual
regime where ideology belonged to history, while the reign of imagology begins where
history ends (1991:129).
Imagology! Who first thought up this remarkable neologism? . . . It doesnt
matter. What matters is that this word finally lets us put under one roof something
that goes by so many names: advertising agencies; political campaign managers;
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designers who devise the shape of everything from cars to gym equipment;
fashion stylists; barbers; show-business stars dictating the norms of physical
beauty that all branches of imagology obey (Kundera 1991:127).
Rhetorical Twists and Magic Spells
The history of science is usually presented in abstract and simplified terms as
representing a set of disciplines dealing in abstract reasoning; devoid of mysticism, and
human error, while in the practice, and as presented to the public draws much from the
world of popular imagery, pulp fiction, and worn stereotypes of white clad dedicated
hermits in laboratories full of strange experiments. Scientists, shrouding themselves in
an aura of mystery, utilize particular cultural references/images craft public perceptions
to advance their professional standing and secure the future of funding for research
projects. They have not been shy in calling the genome project Delphic oracle, time
machine medical crystal ball fountain of youth, or secret of life, and while at a
certain level their justifications for doing so might be mere throwaway remarks, these
metaphors carry much of the impetus that the activities of the quintessential scientist,
Dr. Faustus, represents.
Dr. Faustuss personal desire to avert old age led the lonely alchemist in his
tower to tempt fate seeking the attainment of eternal youth, the essential preoccupation
among alchemists, also shared by modern practitioners of chemistry and genetic
engineering. The common stereotype is that Faustus derides both theology and religion
and flagrantly dedicates his ceremony to Satan (Haynes 1994:18). But the doctors
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activities were not absolutely evil, nor has modern science completely parted company
with a complicated ancestry. Alchemy is disregarded today in a discourse on the origins
of a chemistry that chooses to see itself in the light of positivism, but that in reality
shares in a continuum that carries the thrust of an unavoidable historical tradition and a
precise iconography. Its practice goes back over two thousand years; alchemy derived
from Chinese medicine, a tradition that held the principles of ying and yang at its core,
and later, absorbed and tremendously enriched by Islam, opposing forces were
primarily considered complementary. The Western tradition today owes much to
alchemists as scientific practitioners and as theologians, though historians often
overlook the fact that some of its most important thinkers as Dominicans Albertus
Magnus and Thomas Aquinas and the Franciscan Roger Bacon were alchemists.
Not only did these practitioners add a dash of Christian symbolism to the existing
brew of traditions in an attempt to make alchemy acceptable to the church; what
is more important, they introduced the idea of testing the postulates of alchemy
by reason and experiment (Haynes 1994:11).
In reference to the divine work of creation and the plan of salvation within it, the
alchemistic process was called the Great Work. In it, a mysterious chaotic source
material called materia prima, containing opposites still incompatible and in the most
violent conflict, is gradually guided towards a redeemed state of perfect harmony (Roob
1997:123) made abundantly evident in the aspirations and representations contained in
Genomic Revolution. The centenary religious preoccupations with salvation, immortality
and resurrection are still evident in ultra modern DNA discourse today. The
technological promise for the perfection of the human body, and the attainment of an
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extended lifetimethe beginning of immortalitywas the backbone of laboratory life ca.
1500, as it still is today. What are the modes of their representation?
Nanomanagement Of The Bizarre
Today, scientific research and its representation claim to be heir to the tradition
of logical positivism, a system that prides itself in the constant and increasing
construction of ever more nearly perfect logic in the philosophy of sciences (Harding
1986:211). Difference in nature has long been cause for philosophical reflection, and
science has pondered with such difference in various ways; while the pendulum
between rationality and obscurantism has constantly swung back and forth, but todays
science and its justification seem far from having a truly enlightened course of action.
Scientific knowledge is not the mere linear progression of peerless truth, but is in fact an
accumulation of items which singly and in combination add to the ever growing stockpile
that constitutes scientific technique and knowledge (Kuhn 1962:2), some items are
reified, and some are discarded to account for new paradigms. During the fourteenth
century, the philosopher Nicole Oresme wrote a treatise titled De causis mirabilium,
Reasons for miracles. In it he constructed a complex edifice explanations to account for
anomalous phenomena of all sorts and gave assurances that most marvels had natural
causes even if these could not humanly be determined (Daston and Park 2001:160). It
was theologically grounded that strange phenomenae could be understood only by God;
unassailable by mankind, medieval scientists dismissed wonders as uninteresting
minutiae. A tumultuous change came into these philosophical considerations as ancient
philosophical texts were discovered late in the fifteenth century after which philosophical
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positions were altered.
The once unexplainable anomalies quickly became the province of the
speculative realms of knowledge. The first Renaissance philosopher to take this set of
anomalies as causal mechanisms and place them at the forefront of science was Ficino
who was the principal Latin translator of the newly recovered texts of Plato and his late
antique followers as well as works by various authors of the hermetic corpus.
He inaugurated a new strand of Latin philosophy that synthesized Neo-Platonist
ideas . . . he treated the marvelous properties of natural substances as products
of--and signposts to--the fundamental metaphysical structure of the universe,
conceived in terms of correspondences as emanation. . . a secret web of hidden
links (Daston and Park 2001:161).
During the next two centuries, the marvels of naturewhich previously resisted
explanation and demonstration were shifted from the periphery to the center (Daston
and Park 2001:160). That shift dismissed the importance medieval thinkers like Agrippa,
Bacon, and Paracelsus had given to common sense; the complex interrelationships in
the workings of nature were disregarded. Ficino retook and emphasized as object of
study the rarities/anomalies found in nature: his science derived all knowledge from
aberrations which would eventually evolve into a baroque scientific culture that
mediated the knotty theological problem of divine absence and presence (Stafford
2002:27). The holdings of collections of natural specimens of his time, with their strange
and exotic contents, reflected that same mode of thinking: the general could be derived
from the particular. What is important to recognize is that while collections once
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contained bones, tusks, amethysts, fetuses, and splinters from the true cross, they are
not as dissimilar from todays displays containing bodies riddled with disease, salmon
infused with strawberry genes, or children living in a bubble up to the age of seven. The
mode of collection is a conceptual matter that is not always apparent from the individual
objects a set contains: objects are but part of a mosaic configured around an
assortment of artifacts within a specific paradigm. As such, they become but a small
part of a larger cultural metaphor describing the workings of nature. In both cases, olden
cabinets of curiosity and modern exhibits that follow their aesthetic, we find indications
that current scientific knowledge is derived from the observation of what is considered
aberrant. Today much of genomic research is based on principles similar to those
developed by Ficino where induction and not deduction is the key to the deciphering of
DNA. Biological investigation . . . often begins with an upward synthetic process in
which objects and phenomena are thought to be parts . . . [a]s in a play by Pirandello,
they are characters in search of an author (Lewontin 2000b:80). Just as the Medieval
discussion on the resurrection of body parts such as fingernail cuttings or Christs
foreskin (Walker Bynum 1992) or a fascination for the collection of the teeth of saints or
splinters from the true crossfondness for the fragment is imminent, even though to
be parts things must be parts of something (Lewontin 2000b:80); a fact now relegated
to being a truism.
At The Genomic Revolution the visitor is faced with a multiplicity of displays and
statements asserting the nature of abnormal occurrences. Panels announcing genes
that can shut disease on/off with the ease illustrated are misleading. It is clear enough
that even though not all the information about protein structure is stored in the DNA
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sequence, because the folding of polypeptides into proteins is not completely specified
by their amino acid sequences (Lewontin 2000b:73); much information is left out from
the discourse. It is as if central planning has been replaced by local initiatives in a kind
of perestroika of the protoplasm (Lewontin 2000a:127). The inner workings of the
chromosomes are given the appearance of being independent of an organic direction
where havoc can be wrought upon the organism by any of 3.2 billion latently
treacherous circuits, which disregards that it is the whole organism that lives or dies . . .
[and] is the object of natural selection (Lewontin 2000b:76).
Research conveniently picks and chooses what knowledge to regard or disregard
and it does not accumulate all that is truth. Nobel Prize winner Barbara McClintock
showed over three decades ago that genes might be turned on and off but after that
their effect could depend on the orientation in which they were inserted in addition,
there was little to argue against the proposition that they acted merely by disrupting the
normal functioning of the genetic sequence they entered, and the fact that flip-flop
controls have only been discovered in few instances (Fox Keller 1983:188-189). The
prevalent genomic discourse, which is not solely unique to this exhibit, underscores the
perception that there is a strong possibility that an abnormal state of affairs can assault
the body at any time. The enunciation of a large amount of mishaps such as are: AIDS,
nicotine addiction, cavities, breast cancer, Alzheimers disease, cataracts,
schizophrenia, gum disease, brain cancer, prostate cancer, susceptibility to psoriasis,
lymphoma, autism, diabetes, or asthma as mentioned in the Choosing Our Genes
section emphasizes a notion ubiquitous to the genome discourse: every possibility
exists that the killer gene will imminently strike. Although an exhibit label for a
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chromosome acknowledges that [t]he genes identified here are just a fraction of the
total genes located on this one chromosome (AMNH 2001:27), the exhaustive
enunciation of genetic mistakeswhich can predispose us to disease is reified through
recognizable traits given equal discursive weight as disorders. Panel after panel, the
breakdown in characteristics follows these dry text samples:
CHROMOSOME 1
263 Million bases
Obesity, mild, early onset
Asthma, susceptibility to
B cell lymphoma/leukemia
Schizophrenia
Prostate cancer, susceptibility to
Measles, susceptibility to
Actin, muscle component
CHROMOSOME 2
255 Million bases
Melanoma, associated gene
Dyslexia, specific
Parkinsons disease, type 3
Deafness, autosomal dominant
Wrinkly skin syndrome
Diabetes mellitus, insulin dependent (AMNH 2001:27-33).
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If the Middle Ages was a period in which the overcoming of partition and putrefaction . .
. was the image of paradise (Walker Bynum 1992:13), these instances illustrate a
similar mode of thinking. The pattern continues in likewise manner for 22 chromosomes
plus chromosomes X and Y; the probability of malfunction is turned into an absolute set
of toggle categories that mysteriously lurk in the organism threatening to trigger all sorts
of horrid outcomes preventable only through modern medical salvation/intervention. [I]t
is by no means true that every part serves a function (Lewontin 2000b:81), although
the message emphasizes that notion.
Modern Exorcisms
The conjuring of evil spirits the exoticization of the domestic (Bourdieu 1988:xi),
of the intimate, is not restricted to DNA discourse. It is prevalent throughout various
media as evident in advertising, info-mertials, and alarmist newscasts that constantly
turn the possibility of contamination, threat, and imaginary danger into distorted realities.
The power of images of decay, malfunction and contagion are such that no potent force
can then be applied to erase disgust or stigma (Rozin 2001:37), and they are sure to
be exponentially amplified when set within the realm of legitimate scientific data; data
which are however only one subspecies of scientific experience (Daston and Park
2001:236).
Modern science first developed by a meticulous isolating of particular causes and
their effects, particularly isolating them from metaphysical and moral principles. A
separating, disembedding process of analysis had to go completely counter to
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the kind of thinking which assumed the connectedness of everything in the
universe as pairs or as opposites of everything else . . . [the] tracing of immediate
cause and effect, are methods for decomposing experience. They are powerful
tools of thought because they break down the synchronous systems of relations
(Douglas 1992:51).
What happens to a public constantly told that its genes are all about malfunction?
Would the ideology behind the DNA discourse amount to public misperception and
disgust of its body? A group of sociologists considered a scenario where a subjects
were told they were about to drink a glass of their favorite juice, as a playful friend
dropped an inch long cockroach into it, or variations on the scenario where the subjects
were told that the cockroach was completely sterilized by heat or where only mention
of the cockroach having any contact with the glass was to be presented as examples of
the various possibilities in an experiment dealing with perceptions on contagion (Rozin
2001:32). What the researchers found was that:
There is a strong human tendency to respond more powerfully to negative than
positive events, such that many negative events produce essentially irreversible
psychological consequences (negativity dominance) . . . Since the threats of
contagion are ubiquitous, we manage life by ignoring them unless they are
particularly salient, through a process like framing (Rozin 2001:32).
The announced potential for gene malfunction through the exhibit is staggering, and as
repeated metaphors also serve to define experience, cultivate stereotypes, and
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construct shared meanings (Lindee and Nelkin 1995:12), exhibit curators, designers,
and script-writers collaborate in great measure to the propagation of alarmist messages
that are passed of as scientific knowledge. [W]hat developmental genetics has done is
to substitute a question that it can answer for one that it cannot (Lewontin 2000b:75).
The illusions of danger tightly bound in information packages called labels, panels, or
exhibits ultimately become assertions of the unbearable bleakness of being.
The enunciation of data configured into scientific tool, as are charts, scrolling
screens with ciphers, countless diagrams, statistics, interviews and a plethora of models
constitutes a cartography of danger where prophecies of death are foretold. It is
necessary to map out the pathways of causal connections between
molecules(Lewontin 2000b:76-77). The possibility of falling victim to the ripple effect of
diseases triggered by malfunctioning genes simply asserts the reductionist position that
the body is a time bomb waiting to go off, in a manner akin to how contagion comes to
be a component of thought whenever there is danger or offensiveness lurking (Rozin
2001:33). A show either misconstructed or rigged, guarantees that judgment will be
made in favor of a science that promises to exorcise the body of its newly chartered
demons for subjects preference for medical-scientific, as opposed to more value-
laden accounts . . . seems quite widespread among educated people, at least in
Western culture (Rozin 2001:35). Postmodernism seems to return us to a dark age
where settings warn us about impending dangers (Sassover 1995:23); scientific
information then becomes merely a disciplinary convention, where the number
crunching does not matter; the idea of risk is transcribed simply as unacceptable
danger (Douglas 1992:39). The inevitability of the outcome, i.e. the perception of
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catastrophic health, is further reified at the polling station in the middle section where
once answers are given to the previously polarized yes/no questions the exhibits
rejoinder to anomaly is the rest of the world responded where any deviation from the
expected result is tacitly crushed.
Splicing the Monster
It then appears that aesthetically, and philosophically, medicine has never
departed from the study of aberrations, hence the fascination with morbidity and
monsters as typified in the exhibit. Already in 1560 Benedetto Varchi made a clear
distinction between marvels of nature and monsters. Monsters, up until his time, had
been natures way of playing but later, they were a foul and guilty thing . . . errors and
sins of whoever makes them, for Saint Augustine they became both individual
wonders and exotic species [were] equivalent signs of divine omnipotence (Daston and
Park 2001:175-176). After the seventeenth century, conjoined twins, children born
without brains, hermaphrodites, were deemed the direct result of human conduct, i.e.
moral infractions, and thus they were the roots of the disruption of social order. The
medical establishment had to intervene and correct human transgressions; it had to
eventually find a justification to wield a sword in the splicing of monstrosity.
Even though Girolamo Cardano, author of over two hundred books on natural
phenomena, and two encyclopedic works of natural philosophy, De subtlitate and De
rerum varietate, was temporarily able to make wonders cease by debunking their
rarity, and elucidating their causes (Daston and Park 2001:165), we appear to be back
to the past. On the surface it would seem that, as explained in the exhibit, genetic
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engineering is to set mankind on the path of a better life, freeing him from disease,
hunger, etc., however, the subtext proceeds along the lines of ancient bestiaries where
moral admonishments were made; what is worse, the whole matter is set within the
boundaries of bits reintegrated after scattering and decay (Walker Bynum 1992:253).
Abnormal occurrences, strange objects, portents, amazons, giants and dwarfs,
conjoined twins, and Cyclops, were chartered by theologians, philosophers, alchemists,
proto-physicians, and cartographers as well as by artists and printers onto the value-
laden imagology of the Middle Ages. The multiplication of monsters sprang at least in
part from the new technology of printing which greatly facilitated the spread of news
through pamphlets and brochures (Daston and Park 2001:180). Today at the climax of
the era of mechanical reproduction wonder is simulcast through various media such as
the Internet, television, photography, film and reclaimed as the province of modern
science, but heralded as key to the construction of modern scientific facts it
nevertheless draws from ancient formulas creating a climate of fear and obscurantism.
Once the smallest units of the body have been rendered mutable it is only a matter of
creating connections between the viewer and an assortment of victims in order to fix the
information and turn it into absolute certainty in the mind of the viewer.
Canguilhem holds that disease happens to man in order for him to not lose all
hope, and while that might perhaps have been the norm at some point in time, the
empathy mechanisms enacted today simply underline that infraction is the norm
(Canguilhem 1978:140). Monsters were exhibited in the Middle Ages for various
reasons, but overall, their infraction of the norms of nature has always made them
susceptible materials for moral exempla, a norm that has not altogether been
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abandoned in subsequent eras. That we might not want to recognize our amazement or
disgust towards the malformed in open society does not mean that we are not aware of
those who exhibit difference amongst us. Suffice it to say that deviation is poked at
when a very successful television series subjects a woman with a clef palate to surgery
in order to give her an amazing makeover, or when two pairs of conjoined twins were
continuously televised as newsworthy as I wrote this section of the book, or when just
about the same time a man who jumped into Niagara Falls, and survived became so
notorious that he was eventually hired by a Texan circus. Can we deny that we are
fascinated with the abnormal, with the liminal? The choice of sample subjects at the
Genomic Revolution was as nuanced as is possible in an era of political correctness,
but it nevertheless played on stereotypes widely spread in American society to make its
point: genetics are the promise for better, improved, perfect health, and of course, if at
all possible all anomalies should be eradicated, specially in the unborn.
Happily pregnant with her first child at age 25, Jordana Sontag says she was
clear about one thing: she wanted all prenatal tests available to make sure the
baby was healthy . . . But Jordana Sontag says no one ever mentioned the newly
available test for Canavan disease, a rare nervous system disorder . . . Jacob
Sontag was born with Canavan disease (AMNH 2001:39);
Janet Walsh grapples with having passed on Alzheimers genes to her children,
Andrew and Sarah . . . (AMNH 2001:38);
Sandra Pinder hopes that genetic testing will create a better future for her
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daughter Theresa and granddaughter Antonia . . . Knowing her predisposition to
FAP (familial adenomatous polyposis) Sandra Pinder had only one biological
child . . . (AMNH 2001:41).
George Canguilhem has criticized the workings of Western medical science as
being interested not in the silence of the organs (Leriche quoted in Canguilhem
1978:141) which is consequently the normal but in the ratification of the existence of
life through disease (Canguilhem 1978:140). The taxonomy of the body monstrous
reveals infractions to the norm (Canguilhem 1978:140) which banks on the display and
the existence of the negative, of the deformed, as contrasted against what is considered
culturally acceptable. Laws might be passed to force a general population into treating
the unsightly from insult and discrimination, but disgust and fear of the unknown are
hard to eradicate. Illnesses are portals for understanding of the role of chaos
(Canguilhem 1978:242); anomaly within the body, provides . . . the occasion to be
rule[d] by making rules, but in this sense the infraction is not the origin of the rule but the
origin of regulation (Williams 1996:110). The scientifically proven imminently vulnerable
pathological state of the body/subject, and the ominous risk of unpredictable disfiguring
assaults are lessons carefully taught to the museum viewer making him incrementally
vulnerable to otherworldly logic. The body is a model that can stand for any bounded
system; its boundaries can be represented as permeable and precarious, it is a matter
of ontological positioning. The functions of its different parts and their relation afford a
source of symbols for other complex structures (Douglas 1966:150).
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Conclusion: Displaying The Usual Suspects
The exhibit concluded with an extensive display of jars with specimens in
formaldehyde. Hundred of different animals were represented. However, this time,
instead of the medieval tropes of utilizing stuffed animals or plants hanging from
Kunstkammer ceilings, as usually was the case for the proverbial alligator, or the
bleeding pelican, here we are confronted with a grail for each creature in the form of
DNA specimens. Among the species found on view were hundreds of samples of
creatures traditionally considered visually attractive, as are various species of ginger,
arrowroot, fruit fly, lilies, cardamom, bananas, sugar cane, sea lilies, acorn worm, silver
dollar fish, domestic cat, various parrots, etc. However, the usual suspectsthose
creatures that have become the staple supply of objects found in cabinets of curiosity as
are the chambered nautilus, lynx, puma, jaguar, snow leopard, tortoises, Amazon
parrots, pythons, Honduran and Andean snakes, Octopi, coyotes, crocodiles, and
piranhas were also nanorepresented; that is monsters either as whole bodies or as
molecular structure are staple icons of museum exhibits.
As late as the beginning of the eighteenth century, a Paduan physician,
Alessandro Knips Macoppe, advised young physicians to form museums containing
numerous tokens of the past as well as exotic and monstrous natural objects (Olmi
1985:15). We have witnessed just that. The abundance of exhibits that deal with
curiosities, deformities, body parts in jars, and those museums that memorialize them in
various art forms all contribute to our present imagology. Medicine, and particularly
genomic research, is fundamentally exploiting the abnormal in order to benefit
fromand the camouflage is quite cleverthe simulacrum of progress. If [t]he history
88
of science is the story of the selective analysis of reality (Nelkin and Lindee 1995:11).
How the body is bound, limited, spliced, dissected, and illustrated is a matter of cultural
ontological assumptions. The effects of the [n]ew neurotic realism does not inform, but
contributes to a mounting climate of misinformation. Its increment is a path towards
ignorance that warns while destroying, paving the way for the actual torturing of the
viewer, effectively articulating radiographic triumph of a decadent transparency
(Virilio 2003:37).
89
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