Hamad Butt, 'Regard', from Apprehensions, 1990.
In: Familiars: Hamad Butt. Published by the Institute of International Visual Arts, London in association with the John Hansard Gallery, Southampton, 1996,
pp. 41-43.
With photography as exemplar, of the representation of the visual truth, through the preliminary and continuing power of the 19th century discourses of medicine, psychiatry and criminal anthropology we have the pathologicalization of the identity of homosexuality, "written immodestly on his face and body... a secret which always gave itself away", as Michael Foucault notes in the History of Sexuality; thus we have the eruption of a hidden language (as far as it is readable, the inscription of deviancy is the revelation that is seen as a compulsive admission).
In this era of the profesionalization of the role of the medical seer, which as Focault has pointed out, increasingly privileged the position of vision and in particular the medic's diagnostic gaze in the grasping, and cataloguing of human disease, the physician's gaze must needs be clarified and intensified in order that the disease should give up its hidden secrets to the domain of the visual.
The power of the seer to envisage the truth is the basis scientific knowledge establishes for its authority. Utilising superior vision that the extraction of the (near) invisible requires is the regard to which the contaminated are expected to submit. An examination of the categorization "by 19th century medics, psychologists and sexologists [Lombroso and Ferrero's work in physiognomy, Havelock Ellis' 'deviant social types']", are compared by Martha Gever to "voyages of botanical discovery in the 17th and 18th Century when a new world of exotic flora and fauna was discovered by the early colonialist exploring the 'dark' continent - the other of western civilisation". [3] She continues, "the term 'exotic', sometimes used to describe a virus that appears to have originated 'elsewhere' (but 'elsewhere' like 'other' is not a fixed category) is an important theme that runs through AIDS literature". The fact that "one of the more extensive and visually seductive analyses of AIDS appears in National Geographic is perhaps further evidence of its life on an idealised 'exotic terrain', (National Geographic, June 1986)."
When the "exotic terrain" that the virus inhabits is human skin, as marked by Karposi's Sarcoma we have the unbearable irony of the "deviant social categories" made visible and notions of biological causes of deviancy receive the pathologizing medical and mythical twists of misapprehension. The pictured deviant is regarded as justifiably stigmatized. Sander L. Gilman has written on the iconography of disease that the syphilitic is "seen as isolated, visually recognisable by his signs and symptoms, and sexually deviant" [4] (See for example A. Durer, The Syphilitic, 1946). The "conflation of such images [in reference to previous image of melancholia] with the new disease of syphilis provided a vocabulary through which to understand, and thus limit the disease". Gilman thus points out how the further conflation of visual representations of AIDS is derived via the image of mental and physical isolation of contamination.
[Albert Camus in sketching the composition of The Plague speculates a chapter on illness where, "they noticed once again that physical suffering never came to them alone but was always accompanied by mental sufferings (family - frustrated loves) which gave it its depth. They thus realized - and contrary to popular belief - that if one of the atrocious privileges of the human condition was to die alone, an equally true and no less true image of this condition was that man could never die really alone." [5]]
At the suggestion of Paul Virilio [6], (who noted of contemporary images that the quality they embody as being "viral") we have the notion of communication equated with that of contamination, a sort of information by infection.
Thus in the mediated (media), or information society we are isolated in a state of pure seeing, by which he suggests that we are seeing without knowing, alone and not alone, since we are endlessly displayed (displaced).
With the representation of AIDS as disseminator of a viral contamination, necessitating isolation, the transmission of the first human retro-virus, as far as we know, has become the most virulent metaphor. Such terminology as used by Virilio, originated in medical discourse, [7] has accumulated the notions of computer viruses which lurk unseen, are able to disseminate misinformation, and whose origins are almost impossible to detect. Virus has become the distracted term of late 20th century life, annexing both human bodies and bodies of knowledge and communication. Thus Roberta McGrath [8] can assert of the slogan "Don't Die of Ignorance" that it has become apprehensively ironised at a time when information itself has become commodified, and knowledge is restricted.
In referring to the "multiple, fragmentary, often contradictory ways we struggle to achieve some sort of understanding of AIDS", McGrath points out, "the AIDS epidemic... is simultaneously an epidemic of meaning and signification", (where "epidemic" refers to the "exponential compounding of meaning").
Paula A Triechler proposed that we cannot "effectively analyse AIDS or develop intelligent social policy if we dismiss such conceptions [she has in mind, for example, the early 'hypotheses' of 'killer sperm' - since sperm is designed only to enter the female reproductive organs - sex as primarily a procreative act, thus the correct use of semen, no spilling of seed, etc. - it will endanger all others. This soon led to the thought that there must be a 'toxic cock' syndrome, and, of course, the 'fragile anus', with its complement the 'rugged vagina'] as irrational myths and homophobic fantasies". [9] She accepts that these fantasies and myths are part of the essential grasping people will do "to understand the complex, puzzling and quite terrifying phenomenon of AIDS".
And we may well desire with Susan Sontag to resist treating illness as metaphor, but still Sontag's assertion that disease can or should be viewed without metaphorical intervention withdraws the power and variety of apprehending what is available metaphorically. As Jan Zita Grover has noted "constructing less devastating ways of regarding illness is a matter of.... What the implications of current metaphors may be for various audiences and who benefit from the concepts most commonly at work in the media, medicine, politics and public health". Since the making of metaphor cannot be eliminated, we must examine what we have.
In Mythologies the Barthesian pen employs inoculation to persuade us the process of limited acknowledgement that is referred to here as apprehension, is that mythical narratives engage with evil. "If through the administration of a small dose of infectious agent, inoculation can prevent disease our stories may adopt the same principle to forestall the forces of darkness". [10] Let us say the desire to delay what is feared by the grasping of that fear, although in fact our grasp does not bring fear to any conclusion and even manages to suspend the whole of the evil eye.
Triechler comprehensively covers the rest of the "epidemic of signification", yet what is so remarkable is the dramatic symbol-inducing power of this illness and the migrating social consensus about its meaning. There is a continuum between popular and biomedical discourses that is played out in language.
[3] Gever, Martha. "Pictures of Sickness; Stuart Marshall's Bright Eyes". AIDS: Cultural Analysis / Cultural Activism. October Books. 1987.
[4] Gilman, Sander L. "AIDS and Syphilis: The Iconography of Disease". AIDS: Cultural Analysis / Cultural Activism. October Books. 1987.
[5] Camus, Albert. Selected Essays And Notebooks. Edited and translated by Philip Thody. 1970.
[6] Virilio, Paul. The Work Of Art In The Electronic Age. Block No. 14.
Autumn 1988.
[7] For recent examples: Harrison, S. C. Principles of Virus Structure and Wiley, D.C. Viral Membranes, both in Fields, B.N. (ed.) Virology, Raven Press. N.Y. 1985.
[8] McGrath, Roberta. "Dangerous Liasons: Health, Disease and Representation." Ecstatic Antibodies: Resisting the AIDS Mythology. Tessa Boffin and Sunil Gupta (eds.) Rivers Oram Press. 1990.
[9] Treichler, Paula A. "AIDS, Homophobia and Biomedical Discourse: An Epidemic of Signification". AIDS: Cultural Analysis / Cultural Activism. October Books. Winter 1987.
[10] Barthes, Roland. Myth Today. Mythologies. Translated Annette Lavers. Paladin. 1973.