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Surface, Skins, Tattoos, and Susceptibility
Surface, Skins, Tattoos, and Susceptibility
Surface, Skins, Tattoos, and Susceptibility
A B S T R A C T This essay tells the story of the performer Josephine Baker and the architect Adolf Loos
as a way to track an unexpectedly intimate dialogue between the making of the so-called “denuded mod-
ern surface” and the spectacle of black skin at the turn of the twentieth century. This connection in turn
compels a reconsideration of the way we read (as) modern subjects. / R E P R E S E N T A T I O N S 108. Fall
2009 © The Regents of the University of California. ISSN 0734–6018, electronic ISSN 1533–855X, pages
98–119. All rights reserved. Direct requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content to
the University of California Press at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI:10.1525/
98 rep.2009.108.1.98.
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of power and what continues to grip our eyes and minds, however, are the
challenges presented by what I call visual pleasure in the contaminated
zone: how to read those murky moments of contamination when reification
and recognition fuse, when conditions of subjecthood and objecthood
merge, when the fetishist savors his or her own vertiginous intimacy with
the dreamed object and vice versa. In speaking of Josephine Baker and the
negrophilia that swept Europe in the 1920s, the poet and novelist Ivan Goll
observed in 1926: “But is the Negro in need of us, or are we not sooner in
need of her?”7 There can hardly be a more succinct self-diagnosis of Euro-
pean Primitivism’s need for and projection of the “racial other.” Indeed,
when it comes to a phenomenon like Primitivist Modernism, what contin-
ues to invite reading is not colonial ideology’s repressed content but its
expressiveness.
To read this expressiveness, then, presents not so much a challenge of
excavation as of attention. What would it mean to take that “need for the
other” seriously? And what would it mean to understand the “racial other” as
also needing otherness? One of the reasons I am so invested in the question
of modern surface has to do with its intimate relationship to the visualization
of racialized skin in the twentieth century. The European modernist aes-
thetic history of “surface” (that which covers and houses bodies) and the
philosophic discourse about “interiority” (that which has been privileged as
recessed and essential) provide the very terms on which modern racial legi-
bility in the West, what Frantz Fanon calls the “epidermalization of inferior-
ity,” is limned.8 But the relationship between the dress of civilization and the
“fact of blackness” may signal something other than antagonism or dis-
avowal. The perennial opposition between what is open and naked versus
what is veiled and hidden has been as important to the racist imagination as
it has to the critical intervention designed to decode it. For the racist, naked-
ness signals rawness, animality, dumb flesh and is repeatedly invoked,
socially and legally, as the sign of the inhuman and the other. For the critical
race theorist, that nakedness is deconstructed as an entirely socialized and
juridicized concept yet nonetheless reproduced as that which irreducibly
indexes skin’s visual legibility: “Look, a Negro!” (Fanon).9 What happens
when we challenge the most readily available terms for describing the body
fixed by that racist injunction?
Sometimes it is not a question of what the visible hides but how it is that
we have failed to see certain things on its surface. This essay does not (and
does not wish to) dictate a method of reading. Instead, it attempts to enact
a mode of reading called for by the inchoative communion between its
objects of analysis. I propose that re-approaching Primitivist Modernism
compels what might be called a hermeneutics of susceptibility, rather than
suspicion. By this I mean a reading practice that is willing to follow, rather
than suppress, the wayward life of the subject and object in dynamic inter-
face. Confronting these sites and sights of visual pleasures and exchanges
has meant that we, too, have had to read promiscuously: to step outside of
the moral economies of the visual, the categorical, and the critical; to be led
by and attend to what the “objects” have to teach us. In a way, that is what
the modernists did—and here I include both the subjects and objects of
Primitivist Modernism. Alongside acts of greed, misrecognition, and bor-
rowing, they also immersed themselves in skins not their own and, through
that inhabitation, constructed themselves as imagined subjects: a mutual
pedagogy of erotics.
Fabricated Nakedness
and Dreamed Coverings
In this account, walls are of secondary concern and really come into being as
an afterthought. Loos explicitly takes his ideas about the primacy of
cladding from the German historian and architect Gottfried Semper, who
believed that textile was the primary stimulus for all figuration in both archi-
tecture and art and considered the first art to be the human adornment of
the body on skin, beginning with tattoos and extending to clothing.11
This preoccupation with primitive cladding, however, will prove to be
something of a theoretical conundrum when Loos develops an allergy to
primitive arts, especially the tattoo. In his other most well-known essay, pithily
titled “Ornament and Crime” (1908), Loos summarily dismisses ornamenta-
tion in architectural practice. Labeling the nineteenth-century Secessionists’
penchant for architectural covering useless, pathological, degenerate, and
criminal, Loos compares such preferences to “the [childish and amoral] tat-
toos of the Papuan.”12 The march of progress is thus equated with the sup-
pression and erasure of erotic material excess, deemed to be the exclusive and
natural domains of sexual and savage primitives, such as (in Loos’s words)
“negroes, Arabs, rural peasants,” and, of course, “women and children” (101).
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This reading is consistent with the ideas of sociologist Georg Simmel, whom
Loos had read and who argued that the modern metropolis and its anony-
mous architecture are designed to protect men.19 Yet, looking at this room,
one wonders whether the distinction between interiority and exteriority—
as well as between femininity and masculinity—may not be as clean as critics
(or Loos) would prefer.
Loos explicitly named this room “Lina’s Room,” as if to underscore his
separation from this feminized space; yet his own unspoken presence (and
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FIGURE 2. Model of the Josephine Baker House by Adolf Loos. Photo: M. Gerlach,
Jr., c. 1930. Courtesy of Albertina Museum of Vienna, ALA 3145.
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Indeed, the Baker myth has always generated more visual and political
conundrum than current accounts of her can accommodate. As noted, she
was (in)famous for exploiting her nudity, yet key moments of exposure in her
films and photography are often impeded by literal and symbolic veils; that is,
the moments when she gets exposed are also often moments in which she
gets covered in everything from coal to flour to feathers. And in the sizeable
archive of her studio photographs, Baker’s nakedness never stands alone but
is invariably accompanied by two recurring tropes: shimmery gold cloth and
animal skin (figs. 3, 4). At a quick glance, one sees the expected Primitivist
conflation between animalism and racialized female sexuality. But looking
longer, the viewer might notice how the lighting and the mise-en-scène work
to conflate the different registers of surface planes. Baker’s black, airbrushed,
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and seemingly flawless skin, always greased and polished to a shiny, laminated
gloss, would repeat itself in her gleaming, sleek hair, which, in turn, would
echo the shimmery lamé seemingly pouring out of her body. The splendid
fall of silk would recover itself in the glimmering slice of thigh. The distinc-
tion between the organic and the synthetic blurs, rendering Baker’s skin as
prop, costume, and surrogate. Are we looking at ornamentation or cladding?
The effect I am describing has to do with what Bill Brown calls the “indeter-
minate ontology” of modern objects, the inability to fully separate the ani-
mate from the inanimate.30 Thus Baker appears in these photographs as
sculptural rather than fleshly, cut rather than voluptuous. Her outlined figure
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animality and refined, processed humanity. For if the animal has in the history
of Western intellectual thought been a category for contrasting against and
defining the category of the human, then we must note that the motif of the
zebra stripe, a stylistic synecdoche for animal skin itself, surprisingly, also draws
from the ideal of abstract mechanization and its implicit celebration of ideal
humanity. That is, the zebra stripes also typify the regularized, repetitive, geo-
metric pattern of the machine age. It is worth remembering that in the early
twentieth century the standardization required by mechanical reproduction,
rather than being thought of as antihumanist or a threat, was seen to reconcile
modernity with classical humanism. (Think of Walter Gropius’s campaign for
standardization and anonymous collectivity in the thirties, as well as the new
functionalism that revolutionizes the fashion industry at the turn of the cen-
tury. This is also the ideological backdrop for what J. C. Flugel in 1930 calls
modern men’s renunciation of style, paving the road for the popularization of
uniform clothing that serves as the ideological foundations for commercial
ventures such as the Gaps and Banana Republics of today.)35 Loos himself
employed the black and white geometric pattern in several of his projects, as
gestures intended to highlight stark simplicity in direct refutation of Viennese
opulence.36 Hence, the zebra pattern may be said to signal, rather than con-
trast with, the very idea of modernist abstraction.
But now, in the light of our discussion, we have to add a third term: that
this harmony between machine and human in fact turns on the necessary
and mediating presence of the animal, the zebra (and, I would suggest, the
racialized and feminized other). On the striped facade of the Baker House,
Modernism, machine, animal, and atavistic woman converge, not in opposi-
tion but in philosophical continuity.37 The animal, the human, and the
mechanical—the three foundational, distinctive categories that underpin
Modernism—themselves turn out to provide the preconditions for their dis-
tinction from each other, in a series of disavowals that are, however, perfectly
legible on the surface. In short, the categories of the animal, the human,
and the machine, while ideologically segregated, are stylistically identical.
It is thus at the level of style—the most apparent of styles—that we can wit-
ness the profound contact between Modernism and its others. What the Baker
portrayal of naked, racialized femininity shares with the facade of the Baker
House in the end is not only the ambivalent vocabulary of Primitivism but also
the historical, social, aesthetic, and philosophical problem of how to fashion
skin/surface, how to naturalize that which has been—can only be—funda-
mentally tailored or stylized. The “skin” of the Baker House reveals that there
is no such thing as a naked house just as there can never be a truly naked body.
To follow the dressing of this denuded surface is to reconceptualize Mod-
ernism’s monumentality and its implied project of self-mastery. If one narra-
tive about modern architecture is that it enacts temporal resistance—that is,
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The Skinny
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Notes
Some of the issues raised in this essay have appeared in different forms in pre-
vious essays: “Skin Deep: Josephine Baker and the Colonial Fetish,” Camera
Obscura 69, no. 3 (2008): 35–78, and “Psychoanalysis Without Symptoms,” dif-
ferences 20, no. 1 (2009): 87–101. But it is through Stephen Best and Sharon
Marcus’s encouragement that I come to reflect, in a more explicit way, on my
own critical practice in my preoccupation with Josephine Baker. I am grateful
to both of them for this opportunity to articulate the shifts in my reading prac-
tice inspired and demanded by this mercurial figure.
1. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French
Thought (Berkeley, 1993).
2. Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to
Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry 30, no. 2 (Winter 2004): 225.
3. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, 1973), 5.
4. Henry Yu, Thinking Orientals: Migration, Contact, and Exoticism in Modern America
(New York, 2002), 35.
5. Hazel Carby, “Can the Tactics of Cultural Integration Counter the Persistence
of Political Apartheid? or, The Multicultural Wars, Part Two,” in Race, Law, and
Culture: Reflections on Brown v. Board of Education, ed. Austin Sarat (New York,
1997), 221–28.
6. Twelve years ago, Wendy Brown had already cogently articulated the funda-
mental challenges and paradoxes of transforming self-reflective critiques of
power into institutional forms. See her essay “The Impossibility of Women’s
Studies,” differences 9, no. 3 (1997): 79–101.
7. Ivan Goll quoted in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, ed. Anton Kaes et al. (Berke-
ley, 1994), 559–60. Originally published as “Die Neger erobern Europa,” Die lit-
erarische Welt 2 (15 January 1926): 3–4.
8. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New
York, 1967), 112.
9. Ibid., 109
10. Adolf Loos, “The Principle of Cladding,” in Spoken into the Void: Collected Essays,
1897–1900, trans. Jane O. Newman and John H. Smith (Cambridge, MA,
1982), 66–67.
11. For Semper, the first architectural space is the open pen, made of woven skins
and other organic materials, and the first social institution is the open hearth.
See Gottfried Semper, The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings, trans.
Harry Francis Mallgrave and Wolfgang Herrmann (Cambridge, 1989); Wolf-
gang Herrmann, Gottfried Semper: In Search of Architecture (Cambridge, MA,
1984); and Joseph Rykwert, “Adolf Loos: The New Vision,” in The Necessity of
Artifice (New York, 1982), 67–73.
12. Adolf Loos, “Ornament and Crime,” in The Architecture of Adolf Loos: An Arts
Council Exhibition (London, 1985), 100.
13. The purifying “Law of Ripolin,” named after an opaque white coat of paint
favored by Le Corbusier, alludes to the imperative coat of whitewash that Le
Corbusier believed would make people “masters of themselves” by cleansing
the home of sentimental kitsch and the “accretions of dead things from the
past.” See Le Corbusier, “A Coat of Whitewash; The Law of Ripolin,” in The Dec-
orative Art of Today, trans. James I. Dunnett (Cambridge, MA, 1987), 185–92.
See also Mark Wigley, White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern
Architecture (Cambridge, MA, 1995) for a treatise on Le Corbusier’s relationship
to color and the gender politics therein.
14. See Sigmund Freud, “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego” (1921), in
The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Woks of Sigmund Freud (SE here-
after), trans. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London, 1955), 18:72. Also “Civilization
and Its Discontents” (1930/1929), in SE, 21:5–246. While there is no direct evi-
dence that Loos read Freud, there is still much to suggest that Loos was
acquainted with Freud’s work. Freud was quite visible in the print media begin-
ning soon after the publication of “The Interpretation of Dreams” in 1899; see
Marina Tichy and Sylvia Zwettler-Otte, Freud in der Presse: Rezeption Sigmund
Freuds und der Psychoanalyse in Österreich 1895–1938 (Vienna, 1999). Freud and
Loos also shared common friends, and both published in the Neue Freie Presse,
the New York Times of its era and place. Loos would also have seen favorable
mention of Freud in Karl Kraus’s journal Die Fackel, where a review of “Three
Essays on Sexuality” appeared in 1905. Finally, my gratitude to Leo Lensing for
sharing his knowledge of Vienna at the turn of the century and for pointing
the way to further research on the social world in which Freud and Loos circu-
lated.
15. Naomi Schor, Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine (New York, 2006).
16. Wigley, White Walls, Designer Dresses.
17. Beatriz Colomina, “The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism,” in Sexuality and Space,
ed. Beatriz Colomina (Princeton, 1992), 92.
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Josephine Baker: The Hungry Heart (New York, 2001), 5; Rose, Jazz Cleopatra, 19;
and Haney, Naked at the Feast, 20.
29. e. e. cummings, “Vive la Folie!” Vanity Fair (September 1926): xx.
30. Bill Brown, A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (Chicago,
2003), 137.
31. Ibid., 139.
32. William Rubin’s “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Modern and the
Tribal (New York, 1988) and Marianna Torgovnick’s Gone Primitive: Savage Intel-
lects, Modern Lives (Chicago, 1991).
33. Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar
Book,” in The Black Feminist Reader, ed. Joy James and T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting
(Boston, 2000), 60.
34. Cesare Lombroso, introduction to Gina Lombroso-Ferrero, Criminal Man (New
York, 1911), xxv. See also Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October 39
(Winter 1986): 3–64.
35. How is it that one of America’s most staple retail chains, ubiquitous in almost all
malls across the country, should be named after this violent history? Some read-
ers will undoubtedly recall the shift in the store’s clothing line in the late eight-
ies, when the original colonial nostalgia of the store became less politically
correct and less popular, and the company revamped itself and turned into the
successful retail chain that it is today by pioneering the concept of an upscale
but affordable, androgynous, and uniform style that champions the desirability
and elegance of mass-produced clothes. Suddenly, fashion turns from the
fetishization of the unique to the fetishization of the ordinary, producing that
oxymoronic idea of a signature style that boasts of no signature. In light of the
history we are tracing here, it becomes not ironic but revealing that the correc-
tion to colonial nostalgia should take the form of a new mass-produced and
mass-available sensibility, a new imperialism.
36. Consider the Villa Karma (1904–6); the Steiner Store (1907); the American
Bar (or the Kunster Bar, 1908); the Goldman Salatsch House (1911); the Manz
Store (1912); the Knize Salon (1913).
37. It is a topic beyond the scope of this paper, but Baker’s dynamic objectness also
draws from and speaks back to the philosophic tradition of aligning femininity
with machinery in the early twentieth century. She enacts a kind of “body
machine” that I would suggest adds a crucially different aspect to the history
delineated by critics such as Mark Seltzer, Martha Banta, and Jennifer Fleissner.
For a fuller elaboration on this point, see my book Second Skin: Josephine Baker
and the Modern Surface, forthcoming from Oxford University Press.
38. Shapira, “Dressing a Celebrity.”
39. Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hid-
den Grief (New York, 2000). If The Melancholy of Race can be seen as focused on
tracing unseen patterns of grief, then my recent interest in “surfaces” may
seem a movement in a wholly different direction. But one of the most gripping
aspects of the notion of racial identity for me has always been its recognition of
the fundamental instability between subject and object, between performance
and essence. As such, my Baker project extends and explores the implications
raised by my first book surrounding the challenges of reading a subject who is
at once too visible; the difficulties of locating agency in the face of a compromised
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subject; and the critical need to understand the possibilities of what I called at
the end of The Melancholy of Race an “ethics of immersion” in the face of melan-
cholic incorporation. Primitivist Modernism seems to me a preeminent exam-
ple of such immersion; a simply moralistic response would elide all the
possibilities of creativity and coercion that in fact operated on both sides of
that phenomenon.