Speculative Taxidermy

A NATURAL HISTORY PANOPTICON77

TRANSCRIBING ANIMALS: LIMITING

AND FILTERING

In The Order of Things, Foucault noted that natural history essentially
emerged as a system of viewing beings through a grid of knowledge.^3 The
discipline became one of the most prominent in the classical age,^4 a
historical period whose episteme involved a substantially deep reorgani-
zation of knowledge (1650 to 1800).^5 At that time, the most important
practices substantiating the register of truth in natural history involved
the careful observation of objects and the transcription into “smooth,
neutralized, and faithful words”: realism.^6
The emergence of new spatializations of visuality proposed by spaces
of juxtaposition such as herbaria, collections, and gardens was of defin-
ing importance to this new epistemological approach. These new spaces
inscribed an abstract atemporality residing in the neutrality of the rect-
angular page upon which plants were displayed according to the new
rules of clarity. There they could be juxtaposed, one next to another, for
the purpose of evaluating similarities and differences of morphological
traits.^7
From the essentially theatrical epistemic spaces of the Renaissance,
such as fairs, tournaments, cabinets of curiosities, and combats, to the
new cataloging spaces of zoology collections and botanical gardens and
herbaria, it appears clear that the epistemic shift from the Renaissance to
the classical age was demarcated by a reconfiguration of opticality.^8 The
relationship between the gaze and the object of scrutiny was substantially
reconfigured through the materiality of the new epistemic spatializations
of natural history. And the construction of new epistemological spaces of
visibility enabled natural history to form into a discipline dedicated to the
ordering of the nomination of the visible.^9
At this point we encounter the beginning of the exclusive epistemic
predominance that vision acquired through the classical age as a means
to filter new epistemic-empiricist approaches into the clarity of institu-
tionalized objectivity. In this way, a self-substantiating regime of visibility
came to define natural history’s epistemic language, one that essentially
produced knowledge through the rendering of lines, surfaces, forms, and
volumes on paper.^10 But most interestingly, this reductive representational
process was also characterized by the epistemic necessity of visually, as