The Nearness of Others: Searching for Tact and Contact in the Age of HIV

Accounting for Taste

Taste 193 AccountingforTaste The concurrent and mutually reinforcing appearance of modern sciences, the Reformation, and the gradual empowerment of the merchant class led Western culture to give birth to a new kind of Man. By “Man” I do not mean“male” but, rather, the new, universal self that was to become the centerpiece of Enlightenment philosophy grounded in secular reason. But as we know full well, the body of Man was far from abstract and universal, its corporeality stubborn and resilient. Drawing on Renaissance ideals of bourgeois balance and moderation,it was indeed male—­as well as Western, Christian, and, with the eventual appearance of new racial, medical, and sexual categories, white, healthy, and heterosexual. It was as though once we had opened up human bodies and stared at what was inside them, once we had shed light on what had been hidden till then as if under a rock, we were forced to establish a radical distinction between Man, a universal, abstract concept, and the messy particularities of his body. Bodies were opened before , of course, and their insides were stared at, only not with the same kind of knowledge-­ producing gaze. Was an autopsy ever used as the subject of a painting before Rembrandt’s 1632 The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp? I don’t know, but I doubt it. Despite the best attempts by deconstructionists, feminists, postcolonial critics, and others, the offspring of the Cartesian dualism of body and mind have been with us Westerners to this day, no matter how much the unpredictable messiness of our material and affective lives keep bearing witness to the vibrancy of opposite forces. Thinking premised on the existence of distinct categories continues to police our daily lives in many ways, multiplying and cleverly adapting to the specific demands of history so that its oppressive effects may not be perceived, and especially opposed, too clearly. The divisions between the public and the private and subject and object, the two-­ sex system that the historian Thomas Laqueur famously wrote about in his book Making Sex, parallel sets of supposedly distinct identities such as those defined by sexuality and race, and so on—­ all these modern sets of distinctions owe a serious debt to Cartesian thinking and its resilience in the texture of daily life. Of course, taxonomy and the principle of noncontradiction , for example, predate Descartes by centuries as tools for articulating knowledge and thought. But in their modern reinvention, these categories came about as new questions about the human body were being raised and different things were demanded of it. Simply said, they rest on 194 Taste an operation of disembodiment and are propelled by a desire for purity and a general fear of contamination, of which the contamination of thought by the corporeal remains the template. To be sure, I am painting a picture in broad brushstrokes here. No thinking ever takes place away from the material conditions of physical life, contradictory social interactions, and, more largely, history that inevitably make all thought impure and more open to play sometimes than it intended to be. Reminding us that “the word contagion means literally ‘to touch together,’” the literature scholar Priscilla Wald notes that“one of its earliest usages in the fourteenth century referred to the circulation of ideas and attitudes,” especially of the nefarious kind, and that “the medical usage of the term was no more and no less metaphorical than its ideational counterpart .” Fear of contact clearly predates modernity, as does the corollary idea that safe boundaries seek to guarantee the integrity of something we would now call identity against encroaching otherness and alteration.What we are facing today, however, constitutes much more than a simple reencoding of ancient fears, even if it is that too; fear of contact has become a foundational characteristic of the times rather than a mere attribute of them. When Wald specifies that, once, neither usage of contagion was a metaphor for the other, she implicitly indicates that no operation of disembodiment had occurred. When we call ideas contagious today, we intend to draw on disembodied disease connotations.In the fourteenth century,that shift was yet to happen.And one of these operations of disembodiment is my focus now: taste. Sometime in the eighteenth century, taste undertook a process of metaphorization and acquired a new meaning, shifting from the strictly gustatory (taste of and for food) to the aesthetic (taste for art). This becoming-­ metaphoric of taste was not an overnight event; such...