142THE END OF THE DAYDREAMtermed the birth of man, as the essential moment in the history of hu-
manity, is the result of “the reappearance of language in the enigma of
its unity and its being as by a threat.”^14 It is therefore a detachment of
language from representation that enabled language itself to become a phil-
osophical problem—nothing is any longer naturally inscribed as a trans-
parent given, everything is open to question, and everything demands
speculation. This new epistemic modality had a major impact on the
crumbling of classical, positivistic certitudes. Most importantly, it altered
the relationship with visuality, which was linguistically defined by the re-
lationships between seeing and saying.
In “What Is Enlightenment?” Foucault discusses Baudelaire’s essay
“The Painter of Modern Life” as an example of the new conception of the
modern image.^15 Baudelaire’s essay exemplifies a break with tradition op-
erated through the heroization of the fleeting and the seemingly irrele-
vant through art.^16 The heroization of the passing moment was entangled
in a process of desacralization, one in which a “difficult interplay between
the truth of what is real and the exercise of freedom” appear to unfold.^17
This ontological liberation, or practice of liberty, as Foucault called it,
became the intrinsic feature of a modernity in which human finitude
could be produced. Baudelaire’s attack on the persistence of classical art
throughout the nineteenth century resolved in the refusal of rhetorical
classical forms: an epistemological break that positioned the artistic
sphere as the predominant, new site upon which the construction of man
in modernity could take place.^18 Within this context, Foucault’s concep-
tion of the aesthetic experience in the modern age can be understood as
simultaneously shaping the present while enabling a transformation of
the future. This new approach to art proposed new transformative pro-
cesses: a “transfigurative play of freedom with reality” that is traceable in
Horn’s work on birds.^19
TAXIDERMY AND PHOTOGRAPHY:
THE END OF THE DAYDREAM?Through the classical age, natural history was configured as a practice
concerned with the meticulous examining, transcribing, and cataloging