History As Through a Glass Starkly

            One year during my childhood, an exhibit opened at the Philadelphia Zoo that drew a lot of media attention. The exhibit contained a man, whom would go about the daily activities of that species: grooming and dressing in the morning, situating itself in a place of work and taking up the affordances of its office habitat, partaking of a meal, preparing for sleep at night, all for the edification and education of the patrons who would gaze upon this strange representative creature among the many other animals on display. At once, this spectacle spoke both Foucault's discovery of man as a uniquely modern object of study (Order and Things), and fully realized Mitchell's portrayal of the objectifying gaze of the European (Colonising Egypt): where the late 20^th century zoo would put man on exhibit, as an object in itself, the late 19^th century put Egyptian and Indian on display as representative in the same manner that ostrich and elephant were seen to be.

            Where Foucault traces a two-step transition that brings modernity to a disclosure of man as object of science, Mitchell provides an experiential basis for this transition: in the changing instrumentality of glass. Prior to the moment of interest to Mitchell, glass would have served largely either in a protective or utilitarian role: admitting light (natural or stained) to a building while keeping at bay other elements; facilitating the arrangement of garments or the finer tasks of grooming; shielding from grime while opening to examination (as for a clock face); or extending the reach or detail of vision. Yet, we see glass put to new uses in the mirrored cafe and wholesaler's warehouse (where rather than aiding in the fastening of a garment or use of a razor, here glass is deployed to extend space) and in the store displays (where instead of merely protecting items on display or helping one to see at a distance, glass now fixes the viewer before them—in the way a clock face never did—even as it encloses and walls off the viewed). It is notable that this is the same period that the technology of microscopes are significantly improved (Ernst Abbe, 1882), which unlike telescopes, require that the object of observation be arranged on a surface (also glass) for viewing, and the first consumer-priced camera (Kodak, 1888) came on the market (the camera, too, requiring in its production of an image a careful arrangement and momentary fixing of its subject and of the photographer both, in a way that neither the bearer of field telescope or even the painter with their easel had experienced previously).

            At the same time as glass now demanded an arrangement and fixing of both its subject and its gaze, so in this new relation to glass, a new spatiality is marked out. Glass now multiplies space, or more importantly for us, encloses it: for where the glass face of a grandfather clock unobtrusively kept dust from its hands, the glass display of the shop, or the glass lens of the now widely-available camera, bounded even as it arranged, in a way previously not common to the public view. Indeed, it is during this very period that we are given the ultimate marriage of an extensive space bounded behind glass, as experienced through Alice (1871).

            Thus, our Egyptians in the closing decades of the 19^th century are gazed upon by their European contemporaries, as if specimens under glass, but it is only a matter of time, as Foucault describes in his second movement of modernity--fully embodied in glass only during the early decades of the 20^th century--that the gaze would be turned upon the gazer, and as in that exhibit at the Philadelphia Zoo, man (rather than men-from-Egypt) becomes the object of study.

[An interesting side note: during the same decade that the Philadelphia Zoo held its exhibit of man, another event occurred at the same zoo that evokes the interplay of representation and objectification, and in particular, signifier and signified. One morning, those living in the greater Philadelphia area woke to the news that, during the night, a graffiti artist had broken into the zoo and tagged an elephant. Here, the representation of a distant land became a surface upon which a personal sign (the signature tag) was presented, even as it stood for a subject that refused the status of object, leaving his public mark clandestinely, himself absent from the public gaze.]