Racial Aura: Walter Benjamin and the Work of Art in a Biotechnological Age
Literature and Medicine
Volume 26, Number 1 (Spring 2007) Special Issue: Genomics in Literature, Visual Arts, and Culture
pages 207-239
DOI: 10.1353/lm.2008.0011
Alys Eve Weinbaum, Associate Professor of English
University of Washington
[T]he meaning of racial difference is itself being changed, as the relationship between human beings and nature is reconstructed by the impact of the DNA revolution and of the technological developments that have energized it. . . . [W]e must try to take possession of that profound transformation and somehow set it to work against the tainted logic that produced it.
—Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imaging Political Culture Beyond the Color Line
In recent years, humanists, scientists, social scientists, and the popular press have argued that race is no longer a biologically meaningful category or concept. In view of recent genetic evidence about inherited traits, scholars and pundits argue, it is clear that the collection of purported essences and phenotypic traits that we have thought about until now and referred to as racial in character cease to index significant genetic differences and thus cease to exist as meaningful biological differences. Such assertions about what may most aptly be dubbed our “post-racial” moment represent the culmination of a larger cross-disciplinary consensus produced in the wake of the eugenics movement in the early years of the twentieth-century and the subsequent genocide of World War II. As the argument goes, nothing less than a move beyond race will enable a race-obsessed society to transcend the reportedly invidious idea of race, which advocates of post-racialism regard as responsible for racism. As critical race theorists such as Michael Omi and Howard Winant explain, the contemporary racial formation is undergirded by a liberal mantra that has proven instrumental in recent decades in dismantling affirmative action and a variety of other race-based social justice programs, the mantra of so-called colorblindness.
In its current incarnation as scientific “fact,” the colorblind position gathers renewed force: a colorblind, nay post-racial society, it is now argued, is achievable by subjecting the idea of race to the blinding light of genetic reason, or perhaps more accurately to gel electrophoresis, the laboratory protocol used to process DNA fragments so that they may be sequenced and analyzed. Indeed, ever since the announcement of the completion of the map of the human genome in June 2000, the case against race more often than not is presented in genetic terms and as definitively closed. As a headline in the New York Times rhetorically queried as early as August 2000, “Do Races Differ? Not Really Genes Show.” By 2003, Scientific American saw fit to announce on its cover that “Science Has the Answer” to the age-old conundrum of racial difference: race has no genetic basis. What concerns me in this article is that even as the hegemony of a colorblind racial project currently being expressed as a post-racial euphoria holds sway, the dominant understanding of race, newly energized by genomics, exists side by side with a culture that continues to renew its commitment to the idea of race through its practice of biotechnology…
…Currently, far from having transcended ideas about the reproducibility of race as a biological essence, we are witnessing consolidation of such ideas through their deepened geneticization and commodification. In infrequent cases in which white women have elected to use sperm from men of different races, their pursuit and purchase of exotic commodities can (though does not always) auger the infinite variety of forms that racism can and does take. Such wayward racial selections are expressly intended to produce interracial children, a (re)productive practice that is ultimately no more or less race conscious than that which aims to create a perfect “racial match.” In fact, even in those cases in which lesbian or queer interracial couples elect to produce mixed race children “reflective” of the racial composition of their relationships, we witness yet one more of the infinite forms that contemporary racial fetishism may take. In the case of surrogacy, when surrogates gestate embryos comprised of their own ova, their services and bodily materials become indistinguishable, and surrogates are thus selected by consumers based on the projected racial and phenotypic outcomes that the surrogates’ employment will enable. Conversely, as anthropologist, Heléna Ragoné demonstrates, in instances in which surrogates gestate unrelated genetic material, the racial differences between the surrogate and social parents are deemed less relevant. Far from contravening the dominant social belief in the genetics of race, this practice only further suggests its power: the race of the surrogate becomes inconsequential when she is reduced to a laboring body, a womb for sale. Once again, the racial connections that count are those that produce the veneer of racial continuity across generations. Apparently, in the context of a supposedly post-racial free market in genetic materials and reproductive services, even multicultural forms of reproductive reciprocity are fraught with eugenic undertones…
…II. Racial Aura
The idea that the same technologies that might potentially be used for liberatory, even anti-racist ends can and are all too often used to maintain oppressive social hierarchies is one whose examination has historical precedent in the 1930s. Amidst the rise of the Third Reich and just prior to the imposition of genocidal Nazi eugenic policies implemented in the name of “racial hygiene” and “race improvement,” Marxist theorist Walter Benjamin sought to understand how the new technologies of reproduction by which he was surrounded were altering both human sense perception and political consciousness. Although Benjamin’s now famous essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” examined film and photography and could not possibly have accounted for ARTs [assisted reproductive technologies] as they exist today, in this section I explore how and why Benjamin’s analysis of the cultural and ideological effects of the reproductive technologies by which he was surrounded is relevant to the analysis of the biotechnologies by which we are surrounded in our supposedly post-racial age. Although we can limn the paradox that confronts us—the simultaneous insistence on the obsolescence of race and the accelerated practice of racial distinction through the use of biotechnology—in order to theorize this paradox and, as importantly, to understand how it produces an array of cultural and ideological effects that alter our perception of race, reproduction, and kinship, a return to Benjamin is both timely and politically useful….
…In these and all his other portraits of the court, Lee’s racialized and animalized images put racial aura on display in the form of nineteenth century “scientific” ideas about hybridization and destruction of “purity” of form. In this way Lee’s images indicate the extent to which all modern discussions of hybridity are intrinsically racialized, whether or not race is explicitly foregrounded, for, by the middle of the nineteenth century, ideas about mixed progeny as “degenerate” and about “degeneration” as a consequence of “devolution” to a more animalized and, thus, less “civilized” and less “human” state were commonplace. Indeed, Lee’s work reminds us that in the largely uncontested “racial science” of the nineteenth century (that which preceded Davenport’s eugenic theories and from which he borrowed), ideas about racial mixing were sifted through ideas about the hybridization of species—human and non-human animals—such that interspecism and interracialism were virtually interchangeable. This was an especially powerful conflation in contexts such as American racial slavery, in which black people were regarded as less than fully human, as animal chattel. As the etymology of the term “Mulatto” indicates, rooted as it is in the word mule, the progeny of wayward reproductions across racial lines have a long history of portrayal as sterile beings, inferior blends of incompatible parts, be they donkey and horse or white and black.
In Lee’s images the monstrosity of mixture realizes its most robust expression in cross-species human/non-human animal mixture. However, lest the contemporary genomic resonance of Lee’s human/non-human animal hybrids be overlooked by viewers, in the gallery space in which Lee’s Judgment series was on display, his work was juxtaposed by curators with Catherine Chalmer’s photographic series Transgenic Mice [See Figure 4]. Chalmer’s portraits of creatures such as “Obese Mouse” and “Rhino Mouse,” blown-up so they appear the size of toddlers, depict actual scientific specimens produced by combining human DNA with mouse DNA. Such mice are used in research on a variety of human diseases, with the most well known one, “Onco-Mouse,” developed to study cancer. Although race is nowhere apparent in the manifest content of Chalmer’s images, the juxtaposition of Lee’s and Chalmer’s hybrids produces a synergy that racializes the mice and simultaneously geneticizes the hybrids that comprise Lee’s court. In other words, when brought together, Lee’s court and Chalmer’s mice manifest racial aura in the form of overlapping conceptions of mixture as monstrosity. By grabbing our attention and fascinating our gaze, these very different portraits collude to reveal the origin of the freakishness they depict in a combination of old, supposedly outmoded ideas about racial mixture and very contemporary ideas of transgenics—and this is the case, even as the post-racial consensus is consolidated by the genetic science that tells us that race does not exist…
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