The Moment of Racial Sight

A History

Irene Tucker

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780226922935
• eBook ISBN: 9780226922959
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The Moment of Racial Sight overturns the most familiar form of racial analysis in contemporary culture: the idea that race is constructed, that it operates by attaching visible marks of difference to arbitrary meanings and associations. Searching for the history of the constructed racial sign, Irene Tucker argues that if people instantly perceive racial differences despite knowing better, then the underlying function of race is to produce this immediate knowledge. Racial perception, then, is not just a mark of acculturation, but a part of how people know one another.

 

Tucker begins her investigation in the Enlightenment, at the moment when skin first came to be used as the primary mark of racial difference. Through Kant and his writing on the relation of philosophy and medicine, she describes how racialized skin was created as a mechanism to enable us to perceive the likeness of individuals in a moment. From there, Tucker tells the story of instantaneous racial seeing across centuries—from the fictive bodies described but not seen in Wilkie Collins's realism to the medium of common public opinion in John Stuart Mill, from the invention of the notion of a constructed racial sign in Darwin's late work to the institutionalizing of racial sight on display in the HBO series The Wire. Rich with perceptive readings of unexpected texts, this ambitious book is an important intervention in the study of race.

ONE

Kant’s Dermatology; or, The Racialization of Skin

If, as we now know, the nineteenth century was to abound with fantasies of racial origin, Robert Willan, writing in the earliest years of that century, offers a fantasy of racial beginnings only a dermatologist could love. This fantasy, such as it is, commands little more than Willan’s glancing attention in the massive 1809 On Cutaneous Diseases, a volume that at once consolidated theretofore scattered writings on skin diseases into something like a professional body of knowledge and established Willan himself as the nominal founder of the nascent medical specialty of dermatology.¹ More pressing is his design, laid out in the treatise’s introduction, “to fix the sense of the terms employed, by proper definitions” and “to constitute general divisions or orders of the diseases, from leading and peculiar circumstances in their appearance: to arrange them into distinct genera; and to describe at large their specific forms, or varieties.”² Willan’s narrative of racial beginning is subsumed within his naturalist taxonomizing. He produces his tale as one instance among dozens of cases of icthyosis, a skin disorder “characterized by a permanently harsh, dry, scaly, and, in some cases almost horny texture of the integuments of the body, unconnected with internal disorder” (151).

Willan draws the case of Edward Lambert, icthyosis sufferer, from the written record, physician Henry Baker’s 1755 Philosophical Transactions:

[Edward Lambert] is now forty years of age; a good-looking, well-shaped man, of a florid countenance, and when his body and hands are covered, seems nothing different from other people. But except his head and face, the palms of his hands, and bottoms of his feet, his skin is all over covered in the same manner as in the year 1731, which therefore I shall trouble you with no other description of, than what you will find in Mr. Machin’s account, only begging leave to observe, that this covering seemed to me most nearly to resemble an innumerable company of warts, of a dark brown colour, and a cylindric figure, rising to a like height, and growing as close as possible to one another, but so stiff and elastic, that when the hand is drawn over them they make a rustling noise. . . .

. . . But the most extraordinary circumstance of this man’s story, and indeed the only reason of my giving you this trouble is, that he has had six children, all with the same rugged covering as himself. . . . It appears therefore past all doubt, that a race of people may be propagated by this man, having such rugged coats or coverings as himself: and if this should ever happen, and the accidental original be forgotten, ’tis not improbable they might be deemed a different species of mankind: a consideration, which would almost lead one to imagine, that if mankind were all produced from one and the same stock, the black skins of the negroes, and many other differences of the like kind, might possibly have been originally owing to some such accidental cause. (155, 156–57)

If fantasy is limned by a kind of contextual mobility, Willan’s dermatological version is determinedly earthbound. What we are invited to take away from the history of Edward Lambert is the importance of remembering the “accidental original,” but as I shall contend, the lesson of the “accidental” is not simply an insight about the fundamental contingency of racial signification. For Willan, I suggest, remembering this accidental original is at least as much about knowing that “Psoriasis and Lepra differ from Ichtyosis, in being but partially diffused, and in having deciduous scales” (151). That is, Edward Lambert’s story offers an account of the origins of racial difference precisely because it appears as a case within an elaborate descriptive taxonomy of skin and also because, as I shall explain, that taxonomy works to consolidate an emergent specialty of dermatology within a newly conceived field of anatomical medicine. To discover that the history of racial difference is inextricable from the history of writing about, examining, and treating skin is hardly to discover that racial signs are nothing but skin—skin, and therefore not signs. Rather, such a discovery suggests that, at the end of the eighteenth century and early part of the nineteenth, race comes to stand as a form of knowledge, to make visible individuals and the relations among them, specifically because the primary sign of racial difference in this period is the skin.

But while I make a case for understanding the development of Willan’s taxonomy of skin disease and the coincident emergence of a modern, skincentered model of racial difference as conceptually linked phenomena, I want to make clear from the outset that I am not simply suggesting that we ought to understand Willan’s division of skin diseases and the racial division of humans into peoples to be linked by straightforward homology. Rather, it is the particular capacity of the skin both to body forth effects of a prior cause and to function as an immediately visible sign at one and the same time—a dual capacity manifested by Willan’s taxonomy—that renders skin the locus at which an older conception of humoral, systembased medical knowledge is supplanted by a newer anatomical model of the body. It is this special status of skin as a kind of switching point in the history of the medicalized body that makes it an especially useful sign by which perceptions of human likeness and particularity are organized. Willan describes the skin conditions he organizes according to their “appearance,” both the way they look at any given moment and the process by which they emerge and develop (the process of their appearance). This doubled sense of appearance evokes a model of skin that is both immediately apprehensible and temporally diffuse, and the promise of skin, as Willan would have it, seems to lie in its capacity to reconcile apparently contradictory states. Skin’s peculiarly doubled aspect in the earliest years of the nineteenth century is partly the expression of its positioning as a meeting point of two different paradigms of the body, and in that regard, skin ought to be understood less as an object of knowledge in and of itself than as a structure for organizing knowledge. It is as a structure of knowledge that skin comes to solve certain problems that haunt Enlightenment thinking across a variety of disciplines and discourses.

There is a certain literal-mindedness in suggesting that the genealogy of modern race might be found within a history of skin. But if such literalism is understood to be a corrective to the sort of analysis that would see skin as a sign within the system of meaning that is race, then I do mean this project to be an intervention in the name of literalism. As I argued in my introduction, the particular marks of racial difference have generally been treated as either too natural or too cultural for analysis: Kwame Anthony Appiah sets aside the “visible morphological categories of skin, hair and bone” and, having done so, insists that there is nothing left “real” about race, while Michael Omi and Howard Winant argue that the force of these marks lies in their organization of a “racial etiquette.” These two accounts stand not as opposites or critiques of one another but as inversions, and their structuring centrality has meant these morphological categories have generally been treated as things to be read through rather than analyzed in their own right. The problem of race is understood to be the problem of an overburdened signifier; skin color, facial features, texture of hair are eminently evident, entirely visible physical qualities that ought ideally to be evacuated of significance beyond the merely descriptive.³ Even projects that work at the edges where the evidence of racial difference disappears—writing on passing is the most obvious example of this—implicitly assume the logic of racial self-evidence as the norm; the disappearance of such difference is argued powerfully to reveal the arbitrariness of the racial sign. Conceived within this paradigm, historicizations of race inevitably turn out to be histories of racial meaning, while theories of race disclose, over and again, the variety of uses to which the arbitrariness of racial signification can be put. Insofar as the significance of race lies in what it means, to read race knowingly rather than literally is to remain within a fundamentally linguistic racial logic.

Having been taught repeatedly that skin color doesn’t really mean what various cultures have come to say it does, we fail to notice that there is nothing inevitable about the fact that skin in particular comes to bear meaning, however unfounded that meaning might be, nor is it inevitable that such signs should come to seem self-evident by means of visible perception. Even when the processes by which certain relations come to be understood in racial terms are taken as the object of analysis—the study of the racialization of slavery is an obvious case in point—the attachment of racial value to particular aspects of human bodies is understood to function as an alibi for, or rationalization of, interests whose meanings lie elsewhere. The assignment of inferior status to black Africans sold as slaves is conceived, for example, as a means of justifying interests that are primarily economic.⁴ Once the particularity of skin as the sign of race can be shown to have a history, rather than standing as a mark of historicity or contingency in general, the histories that matter for making race need no longer be limited to those that are about what we already know race to be about, those social, economic, and political relations that racial signs at once name and hide.

This approach also allows us to understand the precritical, immediate feel of racial thinking, the peculiar doggedness of the epistemology in the face of our knowing better as something other than a form of irrationality. The constructionist, linguistic notion of race describes a racial logic and that logic’s critique in a single stroke: the immediacy and self-evidence of racial knowledge is understood to be a consequence of the naturalization of racial meaning, and the force of race can be undone by revealing the naturalized sign to be merely conventional. What such an approach assumes is that race is fundamentally of a piece with a variety of other cultural phenomena that appear self-evident only because those who apprehend their meanings have forgotten that they might have been otherwise. Such an approach fails to admit the possibility that perhaps the instantaneity and self-evidence of racial knowledge is not simply evidence of a generalized forgetting of race’s constructedness but actually describes what race does: renders people instantly and immediately knowable.

Once race is no longer presumed to function primarily as a structure of meaning, the terms within which we analyze it are likely to shift as well. Rather than ask how race has come to mean what it does, or show the degree to which the attributes we associate with a given racial sign came to be linked to that sign by happenstance or malign intent, we might ask what are the sorts of epistemological, political, or social problems race in its particular material forms comes into being to solve. If race is conceived as a response or a solution to a set of historically specific problems, then it might continue to be “useful” even as its logic is revealed to be constructed or historically contingent. The persistence of racial perception would then stand as evidence of that usefulness, rather than as a mark of irrationality or bad faith. Such an analysis would suggest as well that our habits of perceiving race are likely to be linked to and imbricated within social, discursive, and epistemological formations that at first glance seem to have nothing whatsoever to do with race.

Kant’s Time

During his lifetime and throughout much of the nineteenth century, Immanuel Kant was recognized as being the first thinker to isolate and privilege skin color as the primary marker of racial difference, as well as to theorize such a privileging. Charles Darwin, for one, lists Kant within the otherwise still familiar catalog of natural historians—Linnaeus, Buffon, and Blumenbach are some of the others—whose accountings of human difference influenced his own theory of race in The Descent of Man. Because the current tendency is to read Kant’s oeuvre primarily through his theorization of the aesthetic in his Critique of Judgment, his writing on race has often been overlooked entirely, or at least read in isolation from the body of his more well known work. By advocating a certain literal-mindedness in reading race, I mean to show the ways in which racial perception can be seen to have emerged as a method for negotiating some of the tensions internal to modern Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment models of subjectivity, including Kant’s. Because Kant’s analysis of the subject is so systematic, his writing becomes a particularly rich site for discerning these tensions. Because systematicity is a central element of his account of how subjects know the world and are themselves knowable, these tensions, if never fully articulated, can nonetheless be seen to animate and direct Kant’s oeuvre, particularly his late writing, even as they offer a framework for understanding fundamental contradictions of the Enlightenment writ large.

In this spirit, I want briefly to outline two of the radical transformations enacted by Kant’s critical philosophy, as well as to suggest, first, why the presumptions undergirding the knowing described by his philosophy might be threatened by Kant’s experience of his own process of dying, and second, how his articulation of a skin-based notion of racial difference might be seen as an effort to respond to such threats while keeping intact the fundamental structures of his philosophical system. I address all of these issues in greater detail below. Here I simply offer a map in broad strokes of the relations I see animating Kant’s thought, in terms that illuminate its engagements with various other contemporary efforts to render humanness legible, including modern anatomical medicine and racial perception. My account draws shamelessly on Jay Rosenberg’s wonderfully lucid Accessing Kant.

Kant’s critical philosophy breaks with the early analytical tradition out of which it emerges in at least two significant and interrelated ways. First, Kant’s writing insists upon shifting emphasis from a project of knowing the material world to knowing the limits of the capacity to know that world. This new form of knowing conceives of the existence of the material world—what he terms the “noumenal”—as a precondition for thought and thus adduces the existence of that world from the evidence of that thought. We know something exists because we can have thoughts about it. The reverse is true as well: the fact that subjects can have thoughts about a real, ongoing, and necessarily interconnected world stands as evidence of the existence of those subjects.⁵ For Kant, such mutuality of constitution of necessity has a temporal element as well. While skeptics like Hume worried that we can have no way of being certain that the images we perceive exist beyond the moments we perceive them—and in that sense no way of knowing whether they exist outside our heads, our fantasies—for Kant, establishing the realness of both the world and the subjects who know that world depends upon establishing the persistence of both through time. But the problem, for Kant, is this: although our many perceptual encounters occur successively, the simple fact that we must see one image before we see another tells us nothing about the temporal state of the perceived items in and of themselves. Here is where the mutually constituting relation of subjects and the object world Kant terms the “transcendental deduction” is crucial. Imagine, for a moment, a book on a shelf. Although we cannot, strictly speaking, experience the spine, the front and back covers, and the inside pages of that book at the same time, we nonetheless know the spine, covers, and pages to be part of the image we have of the book. They are all essential—in Kantian terms “necessary” or “lawful”—qualities of the book. How do we come to know this about books? We know because we experience a book’s spine, covers, and pages successively, as we pull the book off the shelf and turn it over in our hands. And how do we synthesize these successive experiences of disparate elements into the unitary thing we know as a book? We do it because we experience ourselves as persisting over time. It is our persistence as subjects that enables us to knit together the different elements, to know, even if we can’t quite experience, that they are all parts of the same thing. Our same persistence as subjects allows us to experience the covers and spines and pages of many books over time, and to understand those elements to be part of what makes a book a book, even as we understand the water stains or yellowed edges we encounter on some to be contingent, non-necessary qualities. And how do we experience our own persistence as subjects though time? We know we persist because we are able to experience the unchanging and essential qualities of the book.

So we can assemble all of the separately experienced elements of a book into a book because we persist over time, and we come to know we persist over time, that we are unitary selves, because we experience the unchanging thing that is the book. And so, too, do we assemble our experiences of the world as a thing that exists outside us. As Rosenberg puts it: “The conditions according to which the experienced world is constituted as an intelligible synthetic unity—that is, the conditions that entitle us to represent it as one mathematically lawful natural world—are at the same time the conditions by which an experiencing consciousness is itself constituted as a unitary self—that is, the conditions that make it possible for each of us to think of himself as one self-aware subject of many experiences.”⁶ But while a sense of our own persistence is a necessary condition for our understanding of the book as an object, it is not sufficient. For in order for us to see a book, we not only need to understand the back cover and the inside pages as part of the same object despite the fact they can only be perceived successively, we also need to know that other images we perceive as part of the same succession—the bookshelf itself, say—ought not to be synthesized along with our images of the cover and pages. We include some images we experience successively and exclude others because we have an idea of a book. In order for us to have such an idea, we need, Rosenberg explains, “Not just a sequence of representations, but the representation of a sequence.”⁷ We need a concept of time itself, and that concept needs to be “mind-independent”—that is, existing outside the sort of mutually constituting relations of sequentiality that link our experience of our own duration as subjects to our experience of the duration of the synthesized book. Such a notion of time allows us to understand the various elements of a book as not simply sequentially apprehensible images, but as images that constitute a book because they are caused or intended, which is to say, organized according to an idea. It is this quality of being caused or intended that allows us to distinguish between the kind of thing we are seeing when we see a book’s cover and the kind of thing we are seeing when we see a water stain on that cover. We do not extract the concept of cause from experience; rather, a notion of causation is the precondition for experience. In this context, as throughout his critical philosophy, Kant reasons backward, offering a description of the way things are as proof of conditions of possibility: we could not have experiences if causation were not true. Experience presupposes causation because both our continuity as subjects over time and the connectedness of our various images of the world to one another rest upon the presumption that the world acts in regular and lawful ways, that its various elements are the predictable effects of causes rather than simply random and unrepeatable accidents. Because we discover the presence of causation by way of the regularity and lawfulness of the world, it effectively does not matter when the causation takes place. All causation is effectively ongoing, made manifest by the world’s persistence and consistency.

But here is the crucial issue: in thus placing specific mechanisms of causation beyond the reach of knowledge, Kant also excludes the possibility of examining change that is itself lawful. His system requires, in other words, that we treat all versions of change like the water stain—as something that can happen to an object in the world, rather than a fundamental quality of that object. Kant engages this conundrum surrounding the legibility of lawful change—including, most pointedly, the aging and dying of the human body—in the third essay of The Conflict of the Faculties. In this piece, a comparative examination of medical and philosophical knowledge, Kant’s incapacity to think philosophically—in accordance with his critical method—as he is dying leads him to consider the ways in which the lawful changefulness that is the dying process might not be assimilable to the methodology of his critical philosophy.

Kant’s second departure, which I will discuss only briefly for now, concerns the use...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• One. Kant’s Dermatology; or, The Racialization of Skin
• Two. Paranoid Imagining: Wilkie Collins, the Rugeley Poisoner, and the Invisibility of Novelistic Ekphrasis
• Three. Picturing Utilitarianism: John Stuart Mill and the Invention of a Photographic Public
• Four. Observing Selection: Charles Darwin and the Emergence of the Racial Sign
• Five. Structures of an Instant: The Wire and the Institution of Race
• Notes
• Index