Invisible Body

Definition

The invisible body names the first of Ann C. Colley's three models of the body–interior relation, distilled from John Ruskin's autobiography Praeterita (1885): a mode of inhabiting interiors in which the body absents itself while the eyes act alone. In the intimate spaces of home, "the presence of the body is virtually absent"; as if "replacing metaphor with synecdoche," Ruskin "describes his younger self by focusing exclusively upon his eyes that reach out as far as they can and leave the rest of his body behind, unobserved and unmolested. Throughout his work, the eyes replace the physical body by standing in for it" (p. 69). To observe was enough: the child "moved through the rooms and interiors of home as inside a frame supporting a glass that hides the body in its dimness while allowing the eyes to peer through its dusk," a "protective invisibility that allowed him to observe without being engaged by anything other than himself. He existed as the spectator, not as the observed" (p. 69). The invisible body is thus spectatorship purified of exposure — vision without contact, mastery of the view without the vulnerability of being seen or touched.

The model has a temporal structure: it is recovered through nostalgia. "Part of Ruskin's nostalgia for his childhood is to return to the monastic invisibility that allowed him the privacy of his visual ecstasy" (p. 69) — the adult remembers the child's disappearing body as a lost privilege of observation.

Key Thinkers

• Ann C. Colley — names the model and reads it out of Praeterita: the eyes as the body's replacement, the disappearing into "supporting brackets" that "released his eyes," the adult's remembered "monastic invisibility."
• (Discussed, not yet paged — see log: John Ruskin, whose Praeterita is the model's text; the adult Ruskin of 1842 Champagnole, whose "entire delight was in observing" without being "noticed.")
• Maurice Merleau-Ponty — the counter-position Colley's footnote invokes: the invisible body is precisely thought "absented from body," against which Merleau-Ponty's "bodily situation" thesis defines itself.

Related Concepts

• Aesthetic Body — the model's opposite number: Pater's sensuous, permeable body that risks being affected, contrasted by Colley with Ruskin's sheltered invisibility (the wasp Ruskin only watched, and the wasp that stung Pater's Florian).
• Embodiment — the invisible body is embodiment's limit-case and its negation: the body reduced to an optical organ, the "disembodied observer" that the haptic turn (Pallasmaa's "device for a bodiless observer") critiques.
• Interiority — the invisible body's interiors are holding-tanks for vision: rooms entered to watch from, not to act within; the recesses of the drawing room that host the eye while the body hides.
• Perception — the model radicalizes the optic pole: perception as pure distance, the eye "peering through dusk" from behind glass.
• Memory — the mechanism of the model's recovery: nostalgia as the return to invisibility.
• The Drive-in House — the architectural descendant: Webb's driver, whose "Cyclopean line of sight" turns the building around a stationary eye — the invisible body engineered into a vehicle.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Bodies and Mirrors (Colley 1999/2006) — the source that names the model: "the eyes replace the physical body by standing in for it" (p. 69); "He existed as the spectator, not as the observed" (p. 69); "the monastic invisibility that allowed him the privacy of his visual ecstasy" (p. 69).

Open Questions

• Is the invisible body a condition of aesthetic perception (attention unbroken by self-consciousness) or its pathology (observation purchased by refusal of engagement)? Colley's reading holds both: "rapturous and riveted" ecstasy and a shelteredness that Pater's stung Florian exposes.
• The invisible body anticipates the disembodied eye of Cartesian perspective and the "architecture of the eye" (see truth-and-illusion, embodiment) — did the nineteenth-century child's drawing-room produce the modern bodiless observer, as Colley's note on nineteenth-century child-rearing guides (Steedman) hints?
• Can an interior be designed for the invisible body — the dark glass, the portchaise, the recessed window seat — and what would its critical politics be (surveillance, voyeurism, retreat)?