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In Anthony Hecht’s poem ‘The Transparent Man’ (1990), a young woman dying of leukaemia in a hospital remembers how, as a child, she had played with a toy figurine. Through his clear plastic skin could be seen coloured organs and ‘the circulatory system all mapped out / In rivers of red and blue’ (71). Her memory of the transparent man is invoked by two things that occupy her mind: the thought that her own bloodstream carries a blizzard of white blood cells, and the perpetual sight, just outside her hospital window, of leafless trees that look like ‘magnificent enlargements / of the vascular system of the human brain’ (70). These trees are so familiar that she names them: one is Beethoven’s brain; another that of German astronomer Johannes Kepler.
Much less familiar are the undifferentiated trees in the distance, a dense forest of ‘great, nameless crowds’ (71). On this day in late November, American Thanksgiving, she anticipates how the snow will soon transform this ‘anarchy of granite mezzotint’ into a ‘deceptively simple’ black-and-white scene, which will trick the ‘self-satisfied’ eye into believing ‘the puzzle solved’ and the world comprehensible (71). But she is not fooled. Perhaps made wise by illness, she recognizes that it ‘takes a better eye’ to solve ‘such a thickness of particulars’—to truly see the trees for the forest (71).
‘The Invisible Man’, first manufactured in 1959 by the Renwall Toy Corp. of Mineola, NY, initially sold for $4.98
Corinna Wagner, Window, inverted transparency, waxed, on transparent Japanese washi, 2020
The principal elements of the modern will to transparency are here in Hecht’s deceptively simple poem: the supremacy of the eye (signalled by the innocuous first line, ‘I’m mighty glad to see you…); dissective ways of looking and of self-analysis; the desire for unobstructed readability of bodies, words, and things; and then, there is the over-confidence and misplaced faith that leads to misreading of evidence. The will to transparency rightly conjures Michel Foucault’s ‘will to know’; indeed, they are practically synonymous, for any modern quest for knowledge relies on a view of the physical world that is as unobstructed and unwavering as possible.
Before anatomy, the body was something of an undifferentiated form, much like the distant forest in ‘The Transparent Man’. The early modern explorers of the human machine changed all that when they mapped the body’s interior in anatomical atlases. They resurrected, as their unofficial motto, nosce te ipsum, or ‘Know Thyself’, an age-old aphorism that appeared on sixteenth-century anatomical fugitive sheets (their flap anatomies inviting readers to perform virtual dissections); on the walls of European anatomical theatres; in nineteenth-century American educational books; and continues to appear in the advertisements for Gunther von Hagen’s Body Worlds exhibitions.
‘Know thyself’ expresses a fundamental, perennial belief that the tangible, material body was a means of understanding less tangible, opaque phenomena such as character, intelligence, desire, or what Leonardo da Vinci termed il concetto dell’anima (the intention of the mind). As the dissected body was drawn, engraved, painted, and modelled in wood, wax, leather, and terracotta, it became part of a wider ocular economy. Renaissance artists, writers and philosophers adopted dissective or autoptic ways of looking at and representing the body and the self. Then, their eighteenth- and nineteenth-century counterparts continued to reimagine and re-present the relationships between the exterior and interior, surface and depth, the visible and the invisible. Anatomical realism, or what we might call ‘an aesthetics of transparency’ dominated visual and literary genres in this fairly long sweep of history. Realism or naturalism in the literary and visual arts reflected the prioritization of ‘truth to nature’, and later, objectivity, in medical anatomical illustration. (There would be something of a parting of the ways between anatomy and art in the late nineteenth century, when realism would give way to abstraction, at least partially).
The woman’s sign reads: ‘Nosce te ipsum. Knowe thyself.’ Thomas Geminus and Gilles Godet, Interiorum corporis humani partium viva delineation, c. 1559; anatomical fugitive sheet; Wellcome Collection, attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
Jane Taylor, Wouldst know thyself!, or, The outlines of human physiology: designed for the use of families and schools, 1858 Public Domain Mark
Corinna Wagner (photographer), Wax Anatomical Model, 2014, made in the workshop of Felice Fontana, Clemente Susini (artist), c. late 18th C, ‘La Specola’, Florence, Italy
The highest purpose of medicine will be accomplished ‘when the opaque envelopes that cover our parts are functioning only as a transparent veil that allows the whole and the relations between parts to be discovered’ (166). So pronounced the French anatomist Francois-Xavier Bichat, at the very end of the eighteenth century. Bichat captures the deeply penetrative, organizational, classificatory, interpretive medical gaze which, according to Foucault, revolutionized medicine. Equally, these words could as easily been used to describe the aesthetic, legal, or political gaze in this era. That image, too, of the transparent veil joined an arsenal of tropes that included windows, glass, gauze, knives, lights, the camera obscura (and later the photograph), which was deployed across discursive fields to capture modern transparent society.
Pat Mills, ‘Visible Man’, character from the comic 2000AD, created 1977; Kathryn Dowson, My Soul, 2013, from an MRI, illuminated glass laser etching
In his philosophical treatises on the evolution of morality, Friedrich Nietzsche used a similar image as Bichat, but to express doubts rather than hopes about the dream of a transparent body. We are incapable, he wrote, of ever perceiving ourselves entirely as if ‘displayed in an illuminated showcase’, for the functions of our own bodies remained at least partially unknowable, as did consciousness (‘Truth’ 247). Nietzsche’s impossible image of the opened and illumined body, pinned like a butterfly in a collector’s case, reflects our equally impossible relationship with language and image. Why impossible? Because just as the body was not fully realizable, so too were the mediums by which knowledge is produced and circulated: language and image. We use words—which Nietzsche defines as ‘image[s] of a nerve stimulus in sounds’—to make ‘the unreal appear as real’ (248). Such delusion extends as well to our perception of both external things and to ‘our inner world’ (Daybreak, 116). Fully transparent self-knowledge is impossible (a truth realized by the patient on the cancer ward in Hecht’s poem).
Kathryn Dowson, My Soul, 2013, from an MRI, illuminated glass laser etching
Biopolitical language and imagery, and the promises and problems of a transparent society, continue to inflect wider culture. It is a sign of our times that many forms of visual expression continue to incorporate glass, illumination, and photographic processes, as well as bodily fluids, anatomical imagery, and dissected and preserved animals. Only a very few examples include John Lekay’s crystal skull (Spiritus Callidus, 1993), Marc Quinn’s various blood sculptures of his head (Self, 1991-present), Katherine Dowson’s glass busts, modelled on the clear shells worn by patients undergoing treatment for head and neck cancer (Silent Stories, 2010) and the illuminated 3-D glass laser etchings of her brain (My Soul, 2013, above), and Eleanor Crook’s ceroplasty and her bronze, cotton, glass, silk and wax Santa Medicina (2019, below). These artworks express our ongoing negotiation of the seen and unseen, the real and the unreal, while they make transparent, to different degrees, the innermost, intimate parts of our bodies. In some ways, they summon Nietzsche’s fantasy of the glass-encased body.
Eleanor Crook, Santa Medicina, London Science Museum, 2019
Though the dream of transparency has perhaps never been untroubled, arguably it has turned distinctly nightmarish. We have more visual technologies than ever, from video surveillance to biometric security systems to social media, but we seem less able to discern between manipulated imagery and verifiable evidence. Similarly, we have access to countless sources of digital information, but have trouble discriminating between ‘fake news’ and documentary reportage that aspires to objectivity. And, there has been a weird reversal of Nietzsche’s caveat about the unreal appearing as real. Many people insist that valid, verifiable, material evidence like, say, X-rays of worker’s ravaged lungs, or recordings of corrupt politicians in action, or photographs of seas awash with plastic waste are not real. Ironically, though, these same people may be convinced by and deeply affected by images and words that they actually know are manipulated. It seems, then, that the maxim ‘know thyself’ might now be replaced by a line from John Berger: ‘the relation between what we see and what we know is never settled’ (7).
Berger, John, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin, 1972).
Bichat, Marie-François Xavier, ‘Essay on Desault’ (1798); qtd. in Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic [1963], trans. A.M. Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1973)
Hecht, Anthony, The Transparent Man: Poems (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990).
Nietzsche, Friedrich, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, ed. M. Clark & B. Leiter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
----, ‘On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense [1873]’ in Friedrich Nietzsche on Rhetoric and Language, ed. & trans. Sander L. Gilman, et al. (Oxford: OUP, 1989) pp. 246-257.
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