The Performance of Power: Theatrical Discourse and Politics

The Artificial Eye: Augustan Theater and the Empire of the Visible

The Augustan Theater Artificial and the Empire of the Visible Eye JOSEPH ROACH In Robert Hooke's Micrographia of 1665, there is a fold-out plate nearly two feet long when it is fully extended. On this plate Hooke engraved the exhaustively detailed, superenlarged image of a common flea. This astonishing tableau, oft-reproduced as a milestone of scientific observation, could compete for laurels in the literary genre of the mockheroic . Jonathan Swift was not the last author to have found it all but inexpressibly revolting. Showing the public what a microscope could do, Hooke elevated to the status of academic wonder the previously invisible and indescribable surfaces of the everyday world. He captured what the naked eye could not see in a form that words alone could not express.1 The power of the microscopic sublime resides in the definitive articulation of its details. Its very tangibility resists allegorization. Hooke's rendering reveals each formidable flap of the martially armored thoracic segments. It luxuriates the busy liaison of six appendages rooted in hairy pods. Most alarmingly, it emphasizes the belligerent tilt of the proboscis, lowered in apparent determination to alight and to suck. To say that it resists allegory is not to say that it is without style. Its wonder, its alterity, and its threat reside in the immediacy of its rendering. Poised at the balance point between stillness and motion, the flea's attitude suggests the aesthetic design of the "pregnant moment," the instant in which the figures in a pictorial composition seem ready to leap into decisive action. In 131 132 Revealing Surveillance Strategies Robert Hooke, Micrographia, 1665, plate xxxiv. Northwestern University Photo Services. terms of theatrical history, the micrographic flea might be thought of as the inciting incident of a domestic drama ala Diderot and Greuze, a scene of everyday life enlarged into an imposing tableau of bourgeois crisis. As self-contained as the hyperenlarged specimen appears, its very impact as a graphic design refers the beholder to another kind of power. This is the power of the artificial eye that fixed the image of the flea upon the page. Behind the engraved image lies the scrutiny of the microscopic gaze. Behind that gaze operates the enormously successful optical technology of the late seventeenth century. It was this mature science of vision that opened newly discovered territories of the quotidian to graphic conquest . It enlarged the explorer's map of the visible world to delineate even the local topographies of vermin. A reproof to metaphysics, optics appeared to advance a science of what was really there to see. Hooke illustrates an insect, but he also stakes a claim to a realm of knowledge that is only possible within the limits of specialized instruments. These in- Augustan Theater : 133 struments create new knowledge by manipulating the scale of the objects they view. The micrographic image presents a paradox of scale. To appreciate it the beholder must alternate in wonder between a perception of its actual smallness and commonplace familiarity, on one hand, and its gigantic appearance , on the other. The effectiveness of Hooke's presentation depends upon micrography's power to construct and then to reconstruct a sense of scale in the mind of the viewer, whose imagination must oscillate between reassurance (by the small and familiar) and alienation (by the large and the strange). The technology Hooke deploys extends the beholder 's concept of the range of nature to encompass previously unknown varieties, replete with unprecedented features, opulent with the wealth of heretofore unimagined details. The visual discovery of these exotic new realms of nature and the dissemination of knowledge about them through graphic reproduction illuminate , I believe, the contemporaneous practices regulating the representation of intercultural encounters. These were marked by the ambitious collection and display of physical specimens, artifacts, descriptive accounts, and illustrations, gathered from the far reaches of empire and empire-to-be. Visual display and illustration impelled expansion of the system of classification known as natural history. Such an expansion might further be said to characterize the modern emergence of what Martin Jay, summarizing the antiocular theology of Jacques Ellul's Humiliation of the Word (1985), has termed "ocularcentrism." Through the manifold advances in the means of the production and reproduction of images has come the irreversible "privileging of vision." 2 At the same time, voyages of discovery and encounter further stimulated ocularcentric practices-as ways of dealing with racial and...