A NATURAL HISTORY PANOPTICON87natural history treaties. The shared reliance on the traced line rendered
animal bodies more “wordlike,” implicitly facilitating their assimilation
into discourse.
Linearity, in art historian Heinrich Wölfflin’s conception, implies that
the “sense and beauty of things is first sought in the outline” emphasiz-
ing the distinctness of the object itself.^42 Recession, which connotes
the depth of the image, is absent in many illustrations from this time,
for the classical optic of natural history had been dramatically short-
ened to single out the animal.^43 As a result, images predominantly
relied on the construction of closed forms, whereby a demarcated dis-
tinction between background and object formed “a self-contained entity,
pointing everywhere back to itself.” This construction contributed to
a sense of unity, revealing “the beauty of form through clarity.”^44 Thus
silenced, immobilized, posed, isolated, and flattened, animal bodies
became fully exposed to the objectifying gaze of the natural historian
(fig. 2.4).
This flattening operation can be problematized through a concept in-
troduced by human/animal studies scholar Ron Broglio, who stipulated
that according to a long continental philosophical tradition revived by
Cartesianism, animals are understood as intrinsically lacking “depth of
being”—the very quality that allows man to be self-reflexive and there-
fore cogitant.^45 Relegated to living “on the surface of things,” animals
have therefore become wholly accessible to man, but only on a surface
level.^46 On these grounds Broglio proposes to rethink our relationship
with animals, instrumentally adopting this very metaphorical and lit-
eral flatness. Taking animal and artistic surfaces as the main episte-
mological interface upon which the reconfiguration of human/animal
relations can be operated provides a productive point of departure.^47
The strength of Broglio’s proposal lies in its acknowledgment of the an-
thropocentric limitations intrinsic to phenomenology, and the possibil-
ity of crafting alternatively productive philosophical/artistic synergic
approaches that emerges from the awareness of such limitations. In this
configuration, art is positioned as a privileged human/animal interface
capable of “unhinging philosophical concepts and moving them in new
directions.”^48