8PROLOGUEbut incorporated in a state of carnal immanence—one that connects the
representation networks of biopower relations that are contemporarily
urgent. Suspended between life and death, the indexicality of human
hair implicitly problematized authorial notions of artistic skills, labor,
and creative genius. By leveraging the immediacy of its material essence,
real human hair turned the ennobling into the grotesque, the fetishized
into the abjected, and the realistic into the visceral.
Degas realized that rules and conventions in art bare an inscribed ide-
ological root—they tend to sediment and naturalize. In the shock poten-
tial of materiality, he found a way to make representation abrasive. He
could no longer simply allude to an existing social reality but instead
opted to drag it in all its rawness into the exhibiting space for everyone to
see. It was the viscerality of materiality in Little Dancer that brought
bourgeois audiences face to face with the seamy side of the Opéra, its
recklessly exploitative nature, its ethically questionable operations, the
gender divide that limited social mobility, the unmanageability of under-
age prostitution, the burgeoning anxiety linked to venereal diseases, and
the objectification of those who are deemed inferior and thus made vul-
nerable by the very social systems that construct them—by implication,
to some, Degas’s treatment of Little Dancer suggested that this girl was
“born of a bad stock and subject to a corrupt environment.”^11 As a com-
mentator of the time noted: “No social being is less protected than the
young Parisian girl—by laws, regulations, and social customs.”^12 It is in
this sense that Little Dancer constitutes a materialization of behavioral
pathology in the classed society of fin-de-siècle Parisian culture.
To heighten the uncomfortable realness of his sculpture, Degas pre-
sented the 1881 version in a vitrine case. This was the first time in the
history of art that an artist had presented work in such a way. The display
modality emphasized the association of wax with anthropological and
natural history models, prompting the viewer to consider the deliberate
dislocation of institutional references to practices and discourses. Con-
ceptually, the glass barrier erected by the artist also inscribed the effigy
of the young girl within uncomfortable economies of desire—it con-
nected the sculpture to the eroticized emergence of mannequins in shop
windows, situating her as a commodity of the spectacle. Thus exhibited,
Little Dancer posed as a natural history specimen. No longer an individ-
ual, she represented the multitude of faceless and failed ballerinas whose