REP108_05 9/17/09 11:27 AM Page 98

ANNE ANLIN CHENG

Skins, Tattoos, and Susceptibility

Why should modern architects who abhor ornamentation,

tattoos, and other sensual markings choose to think about the surfaces of
their buildings as “skins”? What follows is a story about a forefather of mod-
ern European architecture, a black burlesque star, and their mutual
romance over skin and cladding. This is also a story about how we read what
is on the surface.
Before we enter the unexpected conversation between Josephine Baker
and Adolf Loos—which reveals a passionate dialogue between the skins of
raced bodies and modern buildings—let us prepare ourselves by noting the
primacy of surface and the heuristic challenges that accompany it in the
early twentieth century, a preoccupation observable in philosophy, litera-
ture, art, and science. Even at a quick glance, we see that a fixation with sur-
face serves as a cornerstone for a host of modernist innovations in a variety
of disciplines: in literature, think of Oscar Wilde’s turn to superficiality and
Virginia Woolf’s description of life as “a semi-transparent envelope”; in art,
of the trajectory from Cezanne’s planar surfaces to Cubism to Andy Warhol’s
quip, “If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface”;
in architecture, of the continuity from Le Corbusier’s blank white walls to
the “surface talk” that dominates architectural debates today; in science, of
the accelerated development of scopic technology and the birth of what
Hugh Kenner calls “transparent technology”; and, finally, even in psycho-
analysis, of the reputed shift in Sigmund Freud’s approach to deciphering
trauma from an “excavating archeology” to a “surface archeology.” Of
course it can be said that all these shifts are not really moves to the surface
but in fact reconfirm the surface-depth binary (for instance, by reproducing
the surface as essence). Yet these engagements, even flirtations, with the sur-
face have also led to profound reimaginings of the relationship between
interiority and exteriority, between essence and covering. These imaginings
have in turn impacted the history of how racialized skin is seen, read, and
(de)valued. So what can surface (or skin) be or do if it is not just a cover?

A B S T R A C T This essay tells the story of the performer Josephine Baker and the architect Adolf Loos
as a way to track an unexpectedly intimate dialogue between the making of the so-called “denuded mod-
ern surface” and the spectacle of black skin at the turn of the twentieth century. This connection in turn
compels a reconsideration of the way we read (as) modern subjects. / R E P R E S E N T A T I O N S 108. Fall
2009 © The Regents of the University of California. ISSN 0734–6018, electronic ISSN 1533–855X, pages
98–119. All rights reserved. Direct requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content to
the University of California Press at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI:10.1525/
98 rep.2009.108.1.98.
REP108_05 9/17/09 11:27 AM Page 99

To answer this question, we have to overcome two conditions in contem-

porary critical practice: first, a philosophic history that perceives the visual as
deceptive; second, an epistemological history that thrives on a hermeneutics
of suspicion. As Martin Jay has demonstrated, although Western culture has
long been thought to be highly ocular-centric, its philosophical tradition,
from Plato to Lacan, has in fact harbored a deep suspicion, even denigra-
tion, of the realm of the visual and, by implications, the superficial.1 Today
the moral economy of the visual continues to exert its pull. Especially when
it comes to representations of women and racial minorities, the visual is
almost always negatively inflected and is usually seen as a tool of commodifi-
cation and objectification. And where the visual does get recuperated by
liberal rhetoric, this recuperation seems limited to gestures of idealization
or authentication. But neither vilification nor veneration can adequately
address the phenomenological, social, and psychical contradictions inhering
in what it means to be visible, especially for a subject at once all-too-seen and
not seen at all.
There is a similar sense of limitation in contemporary critical practice
focused on critiques of power, whereby the procedure of symptomatic read-
ing, driven by a hermeneutics of suspicion aimed at exposing ideology, has
ended up producing entrenched ideologies of its own. In his essay “Why Has
Critique Run Out of Steam?” Bruno Latour tells us that a hermeneutics of
nothing but suspicion has led us to the death of “the critical spirit.” 2 He con-
tends that, in the eagerness to expose hidden ideological contents, contempo-
rary criticism has replaced iconoclasm with more iconoclasm, reconstituting
the critic as the source of epistemological mastery who, in his words, “cease-
lessly transform[s] the whole rest of the world into naïve believers, into
fetishists, into hapless victims of domination” (243). Meanwhile, on the
other side of the fetishistic projections, critics are eager to posit notions of
individual agency or truth claims (what Edward Said once called “brute real-
ity”) as antidotes.3 Hence, not only is progressive critical authority being
shored up and perpetrators vilified, but so is the otherness of the “other”
being preserved even as it is decried. In this sense, a hermeneutics of suspi-
cion has accompanied and fueled the discourse of identity politics.
This paradox of recognition touches even, or especially, those racialized
intellectuals engaged in the construction of counternarratives that are some-
times narratives of self-identification in the service of the production of
academic knowledge. When Henry Yu reminds us that “the ethnographic
imagination lay in making a place seem strange and then gradually replac-
ing the confusion with knowledge that made the place and the people seem
familiar enough to be understandable and perhaps even admirable,” we are
compelled to ask whether race and ethnic scholars are free from the sway of
the ethnographic imagination.4 Indeed, if reification and objectification are

Skins, Tattoos, and Susceptibility 99

REP108_05 9/17/09 11:27 AM Page 100

the dangers of paying too lavish an attention to difference, then we must

remind ourselves that the liberal gesture is not free from the domain of the
fetish and is not itself symptom free. I do not raise these issues as a critique
of, or an explanation for, the double consciousness built into the critical
stance of the racialized intellectual in race studies. Rather, I am interested in
confronting this duality in order to explore how our methods might be
revised so as to acknowledge both this investment and the double-edged
nature of recognition. For confronting the unseemly enjoyment of others
invariably brings—or ought to bring—one face to face with the ethical limits
of one’s own pleasures.
In spite of our cultivated impatience with identity politics and atten-
dant notions of essentialism, those of us working in a field or fields orga-
nized under identificatory rubrics continue to engage with identity politics
and its irresolvable contradiction: the fact that it both offers a vital means
of individual and communal affirmation and also represents a persistent
mode of limitation and reinscription. This is why identity-driven fields of
inquiry have acquired institutional recognition in the last fifty years and
continued to suffer from what Hazel Carby calls “cultural apartheid” as
well.5 We might say that this paradoxical state of affairs is the result of
larger ongoing institutional and cultural discrimination, which it certainly
may be, but if the mission of these fields has been to battle that marginal-
ization, then we must confront the prospect that the achievement of disci-
plinary status has not done the work it was meant to do.6 It is not that I no
longer believe in symptoms or their potential to signify, but rather that I
question whether we might imagine, in the future of humanist critical
practices, a hermeneutics beyond suspicion. When it comes to the history of
prejudice and discrimination, I am less concerned than Latour is that read-
ing for symptoms might produce, in his words, “illusions of prejudice”
where there are none, but I do take to heart his insight that all this reading-
for-what-is-underneath has produced a stable object/subject (reader/text)
dyad that not only is illusory but also has blinded us to what might be writ-
ten on the surface—a surface, furthermore, that may have more to yield
than identity categories.
All of this may sound like an odd line of inquiry coming from someone
trained in psychoanalytic thinking, but the symptomatic Freud has never
seemed as intriguing to me as the susceptible Freud. That is to say, in opening
up the radical indeterminacy of human desires and subjectivity, the psycho-
analysis that interests me attends to, rather than shuts down, the flexibility
and receptiveness of the subject and object gripped in narratives of power.
When it comes to a phenomenon such as Primitivist Modernism, for
instance, the ideological suspects—imperialism, colonial culpability, white
racism, chauvinism—are far from new. What remains vexing in the critique

100 R E P R E S E N TAT I O N S
REP108_05 9/17/09 11:27 AM Page 101

of power and what continues to grip our eyes and minds, however, are the
challenges presented by what I call visual pleasure in the contaminated
zone: how to read those murky moments of contamination when reification
and recognition fuse, when conditions of subjecthood and objecthood
merge, when the fetishist savors his or her own vertiginous intimacy with
the dreamed object and vice versa. In speaking of Josephine Baker and the
negrophilia that swept Europe in the 1920s, the poet and novelist Ivan Goll
observed in 1926: “But is the Negro in need of us, or are we not sooner in
need of her?”7 There can hardly be a more succinct self-diagnosis of Euro-
pean Primitivism’s need for and projection of the “racial other.” Indeed,
when it comes to a phenomenon like Primitivist Modernism, what contin-
ues to invite reading is not colonial ideology’s repressed content but its
expressiveness.
To read this expressiveness, then, presents not so much a challenge of
excavation as of attention. What would it mean to take that “need for the
other” seriously? And what would it mean to understand the “racial other” as
also needing otherness? One of the reasons I am so invested in the question
of modern surface has to do with its intimate relationship to the visualization
of racialized skin in the twentieth century. The European modernist aes-
thetic history of “surface” (that which covers and houses bodies) and the
philosophic discourse about “interiority” (that which has been privileged as
recessed and essential) provide the very terms on which modern racial legi-
bility in the West, what Frantz Fanon calls the “epidermalization of inferior-
ity,” is limned.8 But the relationship between the dress of civilization and the
“fact of blackness” may signal something other than antagonism or dis-
avowal. The perennial opposition between what is open and naked versus
what is veiled and hidden has been as important to the racist imagination as
it has to the critical intervention designed to decode it. For the racist, naked-
ness signals rawness, animality, dumb flesh and is repeatedly invoked,
socially and legally, as the sign of the inhuman and the other. For the critical
race theorist, that nakedness is deconstructed as an entirely socialized and
juridicized concept yet nonetheless reproduced as that which irreducibly
indexes skin’s visual legibility: “Look, a Negro!” (Fanon).9 What happens
when we challenge the most readily available terms for describing the body
fixed by that racist injunction?
Sometimes it is not a question of what the visible hides but how it is that
we have failed to see certain things on its surface. This essay does not (and
does not wish to) dictate a method of reading. Instead, it attempts to enact
a mode of reading called for by the inchoative communion between its
objects of analysis. I propose that re-approaching Primitivist Modernism
compels what might be called a hermeneutics of susceptibility, rather than
suspicion. By this I mean a reading practice that is willing to follow, rather

Skins, Tattoos, and Susceptibility 101

REP108_05 9/17/09 11:27 AM Page 102

than suppress, the wayward life of the subject and object in dynamic inter-
face. Confronting these sites and sights of visual pleasures and exchanges
has meant that we, too, have had to read promiscuously: to step outside of
the moral economies of the visual, the categorical, and the critical; to be led
by and attend to what the “objects” have to teach us. In a way, that is what
the modernists did—and here I include both the subjects and objects of
Primitivist Modernism. Alongside acts of greed, misrecognition, and bor-
rowing, they also immersed themselves in skins not their own and, through
that inhabitation, constructed themselves as imagined subjects: a mutual
pedagogy of erotics.

Fabricated Nakedness
and Dreamed Coverings

In his 1898 essay “The Principle of Cladding,” Adolf Loos (1870–

1933), one of the founding fathers of modern architecture and a Viennese
contemporary of Freud, attributes the origin of architecture not to struc-
ture or solid material, as might be expected, but to mobile surfaces: fabric,
even skin. He writes:
In the beginning was cladding [Bekleidung]. . . . The covering is the oldest architec-
tural detail. Originally it was made out of animal skins or textile products. This
meaning of the word [Decke] is still known today in the German languages. Then
the covering had to be put up somewhere if it were to afford enough shelter. . . .
Thus the walls were added. . . . [But] cladding is even older than structure.10

In this account, walls are of secondary concern and really come into being as
an afterthought. Loos explicitly takes his ideas about the primacy of
cladding from the German historian and architect Gottfried Semper, who
believed that textile was the primary stimulus for all figuration in both archi-
tecture and art and considered the first art to be the human adornment of
the body on skin, beginning with tattoos and extending to clothing.11
This preoccupation with primitive cladding, however, will prove to be
something of a theoretical conundrum when Loos develops an allergy to
primitive arts, especially the tattoo. In his other most well-known essay, pithily
titled “Ornament and Crime” (1908), Loos summarily dismisses ornamenta-
tion in architectural practice. Labeling the nineteenth-century Secessionists’
penchant for architectural covering useless, pathological, degenerate, and
criminal, Loos compares such preferences to “the [childish and amoral] tat-
toos of the Papuan.”12 The march of progress is thus equated with the sup-
pression and erasure of erotic material excess, deemed to be the exclusive and
natural domains of sexual and savage primitives, such as (in Loos’s words)
“negroes, Arabs, rural peasants,” and, of course, “women and children” (101).

102 R E P R E S E N TAT I O N S
REP108_05 9/17/09 11:27 AM Page 103

“Ornament and Crime” stands as a foundational text in the development

of modern architectural theory, providing the basis for a long trajectory of
modernist preoccupation with the idea of clean surfaces, culminating in Le
Corbusier’s (Charles-Edouard Jeanneret-Gris) codified call for a coat of
opaque whitewash on practically everything: the Law of Ripolin.13 These ver-
sions of architectural anthropology bear close resemblance to Freud’s
notion of human development and to its conflation of ontogeny and phy-
logeny.14 For Freud, Loos, and, half a generation later, Le Corbusier, “man”
becomes civilized—and his surroundings modernized—by renouncing prim-
itive proclivities. The discourse of the “pure” modern surface thus produces a
nexus of metonymic meanings—purity, cleanliness, simplicity, anonymity,
masculinity, civilization, technology, intellectual abstractism—that are set off
against notions of excessive adornment, inarticulate sensuality, femininity,
backwardness. To this day, we uphold some of the most basic tenets of this
ideal in our celebration of the “tasteful” (in our language, clothing, and
everyday objects) as the sleek, the understated, and the unadorned.
Scholars have observed the active part that gender plays in the history
of modern aesthetic theory and the making of the modern denuded sur-
face. In Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine, Naomi Schor addresses
the key role of gender in the conceptualization of the modern surface as
the culmination of aesthetic idealism. She in fact cites Loos as a prime
example of the modern philosophic rejection of the feminized ornamental
detail.15 In White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture,
Mark Wigley also underscores the critical and fraught conversation with
femininity in the history of the making of the modern white wall.16 What
has been less noted are the ways in which race, too, has written its indelible
traces on those modern surfaces. The history of idealist aesthetics, exempli-
fied by the nonornamental clean white surface, is a history not only of
sexual difference, as Schor and Wigley demonstrate, but also of racial dif-
ference. It is also, I believe, a history that foregrounds the failure, not the
triumph, of these differences.
As we have started to see, the racial fetish, metonymized as animal or
Papuan skin in Loos’s work, provides the pivot on which modernist aesthetic
values turn: essence versus veneer, plainness versus excess, utility versus
waste, taste versus vulgarity. Yet that pivot—that skin—may be more expres-
sive and more contagiously productive than this schema suggests. Although
Loos’s buildings are known for their sparse and anonymous facades, the
interiors often reveal a shamelessly extravagant penchant for the sensual
delights of textile coverings, hangings, and other extraneous details. In 1913,
Loos designed an extraordinary bedroom for his wife, Lina Loos (fig. 1).17
The entire room, including floor, walls, and furniture, is covered by fur and
silk: a uterine dream of inverted animal skin.

Skins, Tattoos, and Susceptibility 103

REP108_05 9/17/09 11:27 AM Page 104

FIGURE 1. Adolf Loos, Lina’s Bedroom, 1903. Courtesy of Albertina Museum of

Vienna, ALA 2389.

Critics have mapped this contradictory desire in Loos onto a distinct

split between (masculine and impassive) exteriors and (feminized and sen-
suous) interiors. As Alan Colquhoun puts it:
Loos was making a conscious analogy with modern urban man, whose standardized
dress conceals his personality and protects him from the stress of the modern
metropolis. But, in Loos’s houses, once he has penetrated the external wall, this
“man of nerves” is enmeshed in a “feminine” and sensuous complexity, full of those
residues of cultural memory and association that have been banished from the
building’s exterior.18

This reading is consistent with the ideas of sociologist Georg Simmel, whom
Loos had read and who argued that the modern metropolis and its anony-
mous architecture are designed to protect men.19 Yet, looking at this room,
one wonders whether the distinction between interiority and exteriority—
as well as between femininity and masculinity—may not be as clean as critics
(or Loos) would prefer.
Loos explicitly named this room “Lina’s Room,” as if to underscore his
separation from this feminized space; yet his own unspoken presence (and

104 R E P R E S E N TAT I O N S
REP108_05 9/17/09 11:27 AM Page 105

presumably enjoyment) in that room surely gestures to a deeper intimacy

with that uterine space. Thus, on the one hand, this room exemplifies the
womblike nature of Loos’s architecture; as José Quetglas once prescribed:
“All the architecture of Loos can be explained as the envelope of a body.”20
On the other hand, this “womb” is curiously inverted and ruptured, being
laid over with displaced skins. (Is this room lush or raw?) Beatriz Colomina,
who has produced some of the most intriguing readings of Loos’s work, has
suggested that Loos’s interiors are in fact more theatrical than comforting,
that they enact a tension between voyeurism and self-exposure.21 Let us add
to that insight and observe that this tension is not only an “interior” tension
but also one that takes place on Loosian surfaces of various kinds, disrupting
the gender and racial segregation—as well as the structure-versus-ornament
distinction—that rely on the schema of impassive outside and passionate
inside. For what are the functions of those furs? Are they decoration or
cladding? Is this room/womb designed to wrap around or stand in for the
(female or male) body?
We are encountering a, if not the, central tension in Loos’s theoretical
writing: the heuristic problem of distinguishing unnecessary ornamentation
from essential cladding. With Lina’s Room, that which is decorative appears
also to be structural. And the feminized and the feral are not only not
repressed but also spectacularly invoked. If we see the Loosian villa as an anal-
ogy for man himself, then this house is something of a double cross-dresser: a
vulnerable man wearing his animalized femininity inside-out, which is in turn
re-encased by the mask of impassive masculinity. Colquhoun’s phrase “man of
nerves” now takes on a teasing doubleness: nerves of steel or exposed nerves?
The problem, as we begin to suspect, is that the facade may not have ban-
ished those “residues of cultural memory” so much as reproduced them, nor
has interiority been fully restrained from enacting surface activity.
Modern architecture may in fact be quite naked—not in the senses of
purity or transparency, as is traditionally claimed, but in the very material
sense that it embodies a profound nostalgia for, if not a downright imitation
of, the lost, originary, naked skin that has been renounced. Thus at the birth
of modern plastic arts in the age of mechanical reproduction, the invention
and sanctification of the newly minted, denuded modern surface itself bears
the incrustations of a layered history of the imaginary and material presence
of “primitive skin.”

Housing Baker, Dressing Loos

In 1926, a middle-aged Loos met and designed a house for the

icon of European Primitivism, the then young but already internationally
celebrated Josephine Baker.22 The house was never built, but the design

Skins, Tattoos, and Susceptibility 105

REP108_05 9/17/09 11:27 AM Page 106

FIGURE 2. Model of the Josephine Baker House by Adolf Loos. Photo: M. Gerlach,
Jr., c. 1930. Courtesy of Albertina Museum of Vienna, ALA 3145.

remained notable in architectural history. The striking facade features alter-

nating thirty-centimeter bands of black and white marble (fig. 2). In archi-
tectural criticism, this facade has repeatedly been described as “tattooed” or
erotically marked.23 This rather idiosyncratic designation only makes sense
when one understands it as a deliberate allusion to Loos’s own references to
tattoos, with the implication that Loos, in designing for the “primitive”
Baker, has lapsed into the very ornamentation that he abhors. Indeed,
numerous commentaries about the Baker House have found this design to
be unusual in Loos’s repertoire and have repeatedly described it without
much critical reflection as “primitive,” “exotic,” or “African.”24 The claim sug-
gests that the surface of the Baker House, instead of being blank, is markedly
decorated and attention-drawing, hence feminized and regressive. The black-
and-white pattern is also thought to mimic zebra stripes, a popular and styl-
ized primitivist motif.
Colomina’s critical studies of Loos have sparked renewed contemporary
interest in the architect, leading to a body of scholarship that traces, from
different vantage points, his ideological investment in the masculinization of
architecture and this particular design’s fantasies about animalized feminin-
ity in the service of that interest. The possibility of Loos’s masculinist and

106 R E P R E S E N TAT I O N S
REP108_05 9/17/09 11:27 AM Page 107

primitivist desires, therefore, needs no reiteration. But I propose that our

reading should not stop here. The fact of Loos’s colonial desires should not
blind us to the complications that they generate (for both the subject and
object of Primitivism) or to the potential presence of other ghosts in the
machine. To decode the Baker House as solely a “prurient setting” for impe-
rial desire is to miss the fundamental and philosophic intimacy between
modernity and nostalgia that structures the very relationship between black
skin and modern surface that we have been tracing.25 Beyond seeing how
the Baker House attempts to read Baker, might we not also see how Baker
and her iconography in turn read the house? Can Baker’s skin recode what
is written on the Baker House?
To answer these questions, we have to revisit Baker’s own famed naked-
ness. Nudity and exposure were, of course, central themes in her iconogra-
phy and theatrical repertoire. It is almost universally agreed, by conservatives
and radical feminists alike, that Baker exemplifies the history of pseudosci-
entific, ethnographic display of racial difference in the nineteenth century.26
But Baker-nudity is a peculiar business. When one looks at its surface, what
one finds is not what one expects. She was known for her primitive feminin-
ity, yet on the night of her explosive debut at the Thêatre des Champs-
Elysées in 1925, members of the Parisian audience were overwhelmed with
both adulation and repulsion; moreover, they seemed terribly confused.27
The next morning, the Parisian papers puzzled over what exactly was seen:
“Was she horrible, delicious? Black, white? . . . Woman, other? . . . Dancer,
fugitive?”28 And the mystery did not abate. A year later, Vanity Fair contin-
ued the riddle with a meditation by e. e. cummings: “[She was] a creature
neither infrahuman nor superhuman . . . a mysterious unkillable Some-
thing.”29 Colonial ambivalence and disavowal would certainly explain the
passions and contradiction of this reception but not the particular terms of
its incoherence, nor do they fully account for this bewilderment at this par-
ticular time in history. After almost three centuries of European incursion
into the “Dark Continent,” over six decades after the Emancipation Procla-
mation in the United States, and a quarter of a century into the birth of
artistic and literary Modernism (which had made much use of its attraction
to so-called African imports), what we find at this theatrical enactment of
the two most rehearsed sites of European conquest—the plantation and the
jungle—is a moment of profound consternation. Moreover, it seems odd
that this consternation, even if exaggerated or disingenuous, should be nar-
rated specifically as a confusion of categories—categories of race, gender,
and the human, to which imperial history ought to have lent some confi-
dence, or at least the fantasy of certitude. We are seeing not the affirmation
or denial of Primitivist Modernism but the failure of its own terms to inscribe
its passions.

Skins, Tattoos, and Susceptibility 107

REP108_05 9/23/09 11:35 AM Page 108

FIGURE 3. Baker, Paris. Photo: George Hoyningen-

Huene. Courtesy Hulton Archive/Getty
Images.

Indeed, the Baker myth has always generated more visual and political
conundrum than current accounts of her can accommodate. As noted, she
was (in)famous for exploiting her nudity, yet key moments of exposure in her
films and photography are often impeded by literal and symbolic veils; that is,
the moments when she gets exposed are also often moments in which she
gets covered in everything from coal to flour to feathers. And in the sizeable
archive of her studio photographs, Baker’s nakedness never stands alone but
is invariably accompanied by two recurring tropes: shimmery gold cloth and
animal skin (figs. 3, 4). At a quick glance, one sees the expected Primitivist
conflation between animalism and racialized female sexuality. But looking
longer, the viewer might notice how the lighting and the mise-en-scène work
to conflate the different registers of surface planes. Baker’s black, airbrushed,

108 R E P R E S E N TAT I O N S
REP108_05 9/23/09 11:35 AM Page 109

FIGURE 4. Baker, Studio D’Ora, Paris. Courtesy Hulton

Archive/Getty Images.

and seemingly flawless skin, always greased and polished to a shiny, laminated
gloss, would repeat itself in her gleaming, sleek hair, which, in turn, would
echo the shimmery lamé seemingly pouring out of her body. The splendid
fall of silk would recover itself in the glimmering slice of thigh. The distinc-
tion between the organic and the synthetic blurs, rendering Baker’s skin as
prop, costume, and surrogate. Are we looking at ornamentation or cladding?
The effect I am describing has to do with what Bill Brown calls the “indeter-
minate ontology” of modern objects, the inability to fully separate the ani-
mate from the inanimate.30 Thus Baker appears in these photographs as
sculptural rather than fleshly, cut rather than voluptuous. Her outlined figure

Skins, Tattoos, and Susceptibility 109

REP108_05 9/17/09 11:27 AM Page 110

appears to be stamped on the photographic surface with the same sculptural

intent as the gold cloth, the shadows, and other extra skins—in short, pro-
ducing an oscillation between portrait and still life.
We can read this “ontological democratization,” to borrow once again
from Bill Brown, as another instance of the objectification of Baker, and my
task here is not to deny or absolve that fact but to point out how that very pro-
cess of objectification—even as it takes subjectivity from her—also invests the
objects around her with subjectivity, which in turn provides a kind of cloak for
her nakedness.31 In short, objectification can be a kind of clothing, too. It is
thus aptly within the realm of photography that we see most powerfully how
Baker iconography is built on the combination of the corporeal and the syn-
thetic, a constant flirtation between artificial surfaces and organic skins.
Baker iconography itself constantly invokes the slippage between skin and
cloth, the real and the conceptual, the fixed and the itinerant. What makes
Baker a particularly magnetic and intellectually stirring figure for mod-
ernists (especially architects) is not so much her sculptural quality in the
tribal-art-object sense,32 but precisely her mobile and vibrant play with “skin”
as cladding: a cover that is at once itinerant (transferable and borrowable)
and inchoative (in the process of becoming).
I am trying to suggest, perhaps counterintuitively, that it may be the plas-
ticity of Baker imagery that renders it most resistant to consumption. That is,
given that the most politically troubling aspect of Baker’s visual legacy has
been its presumed acquiescence to the objectification of the racialized,
female body, we may consider how Baker’s ability to meld into surfaces may
paradoxically allow her image to offer a critique of misogynist and racist
logic. It may even offer a critique of—or at least an alternative response to—
the discourse of flesh designed to rescue that captive body from that history
of objectification.
Feminists and race critics have been invested in recovering the flesh that
has been made into a “thing” and then devastated. If the captive black female
body has provided a rich source of irresistible and destructive sensuality, turn-
ing that body into a “thing” (being for the captor), then “flesh” with all its
material fissures, tears, scars, and ruptures serves as a crucial and ethical
reminder of the injuries inflicted on that body.33 I am alluding liberally to the
work of Hortense Spillers here because it offers one of the most important
and cogent feminist interventions into the discourse of the body as it inter-
sects with the history of the black female body. For Spillers, this violent writ-
ing on the body reads like a tattoo: “These undecipherable markings on the
captive body render a kind of hieroglyphics of the flesh whose severe disjunc-
tures come to be hidden to the cultural seeing by skin color” (61). But what I
want to explore are the ways in which Baker, especially in these images, sug-
gests and enacts a different kind of bodily thing and a different kind of

110 R E P R E S E N TAT I O N S
REP108_05 9/17/09 11:27 AM Page 111

inscription on the skin. For another noticeable aspect of these supposedly

primitive images of Baker is how extravagantly flawless and unmarked her
polished skin is. Her molten skin appears impervious not only to the kind of
primitive tattoo detailed by Loos but also to the kind of marking identified by
Spillers. This is, of course, not to say that Baker as a person and performer
has not suffered racial markings but to recognize that her nakedness in per-
formance might work to refute or even suture those ruptures. More crucially,
it is a “healing” that draws not from some essentialized notion of prediscursive
flesh but from the vocabulary, the cladding, of the plastic sense that we have
been describing. It is the plastic sense lent to her figuration that turns her
from a body suffering from or disguising the “hieroglyphics of the flesh” into
a figure that stands resistant to them. In short, what renders these images not
quite what Spillers calls “pornotroping” (60) is their sealedness.
Let us then return to the facade of the Baker House, which begins to
look less like an inscription about Baker than an inscription that aims to be
like Baker. To begin with, we can reasonably claim that the facade is not tat-
tooed at all. The smooth marble bears no marking, and the costly material’s
presumed noble quality seems more impassive than regressive. The black
and white colors, ingrained into the load-bearing marble, are decorative but
not ornamental in the applied sense. Are we seeing ornament or cladding?
And are we seeing black on white or white on black? In a sense, the aesthetic
practice of the Baker House facade shares the logic of a similar logic of
Baker photography: a recursion between objecthood and subjecthood,
between background and foreground. If Baker’s theatricalized nakedness
offers a complex business about how difficult it is to be naked, then so does
the face of this house, designed to showcase this famous woman, itself
embody a crisis about seeing—more accurately, a crisis about how to see.
Moreover, these vertiginous zebra stripes bear a host of plastic and mobile
significations. On the one hand, the zebra stripes lead us directly to a network
of expected associations among animality, Primitivism, and criminality
rehearsed well into the nineteenth century. For Loos, criminality and its out-
ward sign, the tattoo, signify specifically a breach against civilization, progress,
and the efficiency of mechanical production. This connection between racial
degeneracy, criminality, and telltale marking was widespread in the nine-
teenth century. The anatomist-craniometrician Cesare Lombroso famously
calls the criminal an “atavistic being who reproduces in his person the fero-
cious instincts of primitive humanity and the inferior animal.”34 The notion
of criminality is thus deeply tied to ideals of modern society and the civiliza-
tion that it enforces, and the striped pattern connotes the outward signs of
both primitive degeneracy and its enslavement or bondage by civil law.
On the other hand, the zebra stripes may be said to embody the longing,
rather than the opposition, between criminality and civilization, between brute

Skins, Tattoos, and Susceptibility 111

REP108_05 9/17/09 11:27 AM Page 112

animality and refined, processed humanity. For if the animal has in the history
of Western intellectual thought been a category for contrasting against and
defining the category of the human, then we must note that the motif of the
zebra stripe, a stylistic synecdoche for animal skin itself, surprisingly, also draws
from the ideal of abstract mechanization and its implicit celebration of ideal
humanity. That is, the zebra stripes also typify the regularized, repetitive, geo-
metric pattern of the machine age. It is worth remembering that in the early
twentieth century the standardization required by mechanical reproduction,
rather than being thought of as antihumanist or a threat, was seen to reconcile
modernity with classical humanism. (Think of Walter Gropius’s campaign for
standardization and anonymous collectivity in the thirties, as well as the new
functionalism that revolutionizes the fashion industry at the turn of the cen-
tury. This is also the ideological backdrop for what J. C. Flugel in 1930 calls
modern men’s renunciation of style, paving the road for the popularization of
uniform clothing that serves as the ideological foundations for commercial
ventures such as the Gaps and Banana Republics of today.)35 Loos himself
employed the black and white geometric pattern in several of his projects, as
gestures intended to highlight stark simplicity in direct refutation of Viennese
opulence.36 Hence, the zebra pattern may be said to signal, rather than con-
trast with, the very idea of modernist abstraction.
But now, in the light of our discussion, we have to add a third term: that
this harmony between machine and human in fact turns on the necessary
and mediating presence of the animal, the zebra (and, I would suggest, the
racialized and feminized other). On the striped facade of the Baker House,
Modernism, machine, animal, and atavistic woman converge, not in opposi-
tion but in philosophical continuity.37 The animal, the human, and the
mechanical—the three foundational, distinctive categories that underpin
Modernism—themselves turn out to provide the preconditions for their dis-
tinction from each other, in a series of disavowals that are, however, perfectly
legible on the surface. In short, the categories of the animal, the human,
and the machine, while ideologically segregated, are stylistically identical.
It is thus at the level of style—the most apparent of styles—that we can wit-
ness the profound contact between Modernism and its others. What the Baker
portrayal of naked, racialized femininity shares with the facade of the Baker
House in the end is not only the ambivalent vocabulary of Primitivism but also
the historical, social, aesthetic, and philosophical problem of how to fashion
skin/surface, how to naturalize that which has been—can only be—funda-
mentally tailored or stylized. The “skin” of the Baker House reveals that there
is no such thing as a naked house just as there can never be a truly naked body.
To follow the dressing of this denuded surface is to reconceptualize Mod-
ernism’s monumentality and its implied project of self-mastery. If one narra-
tive about modern architecture is that it enacts temporal resistance—that is,

112 R E P R E S E N TAT I O N S
REP108_05 9/23/09 12:51 PM Page 113

FIGURE 5. Paris, France: Josephine Baker, 1927.

© Roger-Viollet/The Image Works.

modern architecture responds to modernity’s acceleration and change by

forging an idealist aesthetics as a means of battling the caprice of time and
fashion—then Loos’s own productions of “feminine” and “racialized” sur-
faces (fur, finely grained marble, water) in effect write against such conserva-
tion. The facade of the Baker House is tattooed, not because it bears the
symptom of masculinist desire, but because it wears the very traces of its
struggle, perhaps even its renunciation. It is on the surface of the Baker
House that Loos’s lifelong conflict between the call of cladding and orna-
mentation—between masculinized architecture and feminized, primitive
sensuality—comes to its most striking articulation.
Around the same time that Loos was designing this house, an intriguing
photograph of Baker was taken in Paris (fig. 5). In this image, Baker sports a

Skins, Tattoos, and Susceptibility 113

REP108_05 9/17/09 11:27 AM Page 114

distinctively modern dress in a black and white abstract geometric pattern,

with matching coat: pattern on pattern, stripes on stripes. For the French
press then, and for some critics today, this image symbolizes Baker’s sophis-
tication and triumph against her “jungle” image.38 For us, however, it is
impossible not to see the complex web of meanings interwoven into the sur-
face (and implied body) of that suit. Indeed, by the twenties and thirties,
such zebra patterns of black and white had come to embody the sign for
modern simplicity, dramatizing the tautology of civilization and its imag-
ined prehistories.
In the end, did Loos design this house in order to simulate Baker’s body,
whether in consumption or identification? Or has that already simulated
body preempted the house by wearing it?

The Skinny

The visual culture surrounding the racialized female body, a cul-

ture understood to be one of the most pernicious examples of the mas-
culinist colonial imagination, may tell alternative stories about the history
of power, shame, and exhibition. We might begin to locate these alternative
stories, not only by unearthing hidden ideology, but also by attending to
those stories’ utterances left on the surfaces of black bodies and white
buildings. The crystallization of “surface” as an aesthetic ideal at the birth
of the twentieth century holds profound philosophic and material connec-
tions to (not just disavowals of) the violent and dysphoric history of racial-
ized, ruptured skin. Yes, the taking in of the other in order to consolidate
the self has obviously invidious potentials, but it is also the very moment
when an unlikely and radical receptivity opens up, what I elsewhere called
the melancholic logic of racial identification.39
Trying to house and stage Baker’s body led Loos to an intricate concep-
tual engagement with the very notion of abstraction, a confrontation that
pushes back on the pressure points in his own theoretical work and high-
lights the intricacies and contradictions inhering in ideas of racial and sex-
ual surfaces. Offering up her “primitive nakedness” to the world, Baker
wraps herself with an early twentieth-century imagination about, and
rhetoric of, plasticity and cladding. In short, the story of modern abstraction,
so often thought to be about purification, in fact displays a fantasy of embod-
iment, and the story of intractable, racialized corporeality turns out to draw
from—perhaps even to rely on—the play and pleasures of abstraction. The
“body” of Baker is both more and less than the thing that we thought it. And
“it” leads us not to the separation of essence and appearance but to an ani-
mated relay between epidermal certitude and stylistic vicissitude in the mak-
ing of racial legibility.

114 R E P R E S E N TAT I O N S
REP108_05 9/17/09 11:27 AM Page 115

If, as I have been suggesting, racial contamination provides the precon-

dition and expression of modern style itself, then how we read “race” at the
site of the most racialized stage both demands that we reconsider what con-
stitutes the terms of the visible and alters how we think about the seductions,
effects, and materiality of racialized skin on display. Re-approaching Baker
has thus dictated what I called a hermeneutics of susceptibility, for it is only
in allowing ourselves to remain open to the contaminated intersection of
Baker’s and Loos’s fantasies (curious dreams of personhood that derive
from inhabiting the skin of the other or the self-as-other) that we can begin
to see Primitivist Modernism’s complex realignment of subjecthood and
objecthood and also its enduring challenge for contemporary critical prac-
tice. In the end, it is not a question of who is the fetishist and who the
fetishized, but rather one of how the racist, colonial imagination and its anti-
dote share a predicament of embodiment. If anything, the story of Baker
and Loos shows us that it is the crisis of visuality—rather than the allocation
of visibility, which informs so much of current liberal discourse—that consti-
tutes one of the most profound challenges for American democratic recog-
nition today.

Notes

Some of the issues raised in this essay have appeared in different forms in pre-
vious essays: “Skin Deep: Josephine Baker and the Colonial Fetish,” Camera
Obscura 69, no. 3 (2008): 35–78, and “Psychoanalysis Without Symptoms,” dif-
ferences 20, no. 1 (2009): 87–101. But it is through Stephen Best and Sharon
Marcus’s encouragement that I come to reflect, in a more explicit way, on my
own critical practice in my preoccupation with Josephine Baker. I am grateful
to both of them for this opportunity to articulate the shifts in my reading prac-
tice inspired and demanded by this mercurial figure.
1. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French
Thought (Berkeley, 1993).
2. Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to
Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry 30, no. 2 (Winter 2004): 225.
3. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, 1973), 5.
4. Henry Yu, Thinking Orientals: Migration, Contact, and Exoticism in Modern America
(New York, 2002), 35.
5. Hazel Carby, “Can the Tactics of Cultural Integration Counter the Persistence
of Political Apartheid? or, The Multicultural Wars, Part Two,” in Race, Law, and
Culture: Reflections on Brown v. Board of Education, ed. Austin Sarat (New York,
1997), 221–28.
6. Twelve years ago, Wendy Brown had already cogently articulated the funda-
mental challenges and paradoxes of transforming self-reflective critiques of

Skins, Tattoos, and Susceptibility 115

REP108_05 9/17/09 11:27 AM Page 116

power into institutional forms. See her essay “The Impossibility of Women’s
Studies,” differences 9, no. 3 (1997): 79–101.
7. Ivan Goll quoted in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, ed. Anton Kaes et al. (Berke-
ley, 1994), 559–60. Originally published as “Die Neger erobern Europa,” Die lit-
erarische Welt 2 (15 January 1926): 3–4.
8. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New
York, 1967), 112.
9. Ibid., 109
10. Adolf Loos, “The Principle of Cladding,” in Spoken into the Void: Collected Essays,
1897–1900, trans. Jane O. Newman and John H. Smith (Cambridge, MA,
1982), 66–67.
11. For Semper, the first architectural space is the open pen, made of woven skins
and other organic materials, and the first social institution is the open hearth.
See Gottfried Semper, The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings, trans.
Harry Francis Mallgrave and Wolfgang Herrmann (Cambridge, 1989); Wolf-
gang Herrmann, Gottfried Semper: In Search of Architecture (Cambridge, MA,
1984); and Joseph Rykwert, “Adolf Loos: The New Vision,” in The Necessity of
Artifice (New York, 1982), 67–73.
12. Adolf Loos, “Ornament and Crime,” in The Architecture of Adolf Loos: An Arts
Council Exhibition (London, 1985), 100.
13. The purifying “Law of Ripolin,” named after an opaque white coat of paint
favored by Le Corbusier, alludes to the imperative coat of whitewash that Le
Corbusier believed would make people “masters of themselves” by cleansing
the home of sentimental kitsch and the “accretions of dead things from the
past.” See Le Corbusier, “A Coat of Whitewash; The Law of Ripolin,” in The Dec-
orative Art of Today, trans. James I. Dunnett (Cambridge, MA, 1987), 185–92.
See also Mark Wigley, White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern
Architecture (Cambridge, MA, 1995) for a treatise on Le Corbusier’s relationship
to color and the gender politics therein.
14. See Sigmund Freud, “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego” (1921), in
The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Woks of Sigmund Freud (SE here-
after), trans. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London, 1955), 18:72. Also “Civilization
and Its Discontents” (1930/1929), in SE, 21:5–246. While there is no direct evi-
dence that Loos read Freud, there is still much to suggest that Loos was
acquainted with Freud’s work. Freud was quite visible in the print media begin-
ning soon after the publication of “The Interpretation of Dreams” in 1899; see
Marina Tichy and Sylvia Zwettler-Otte, Freud in der Presse: Rezeption Sigmund
Freuds und der Psychoanalyse in Österreich 1895–1938 (Vienna, 1999). Freud and
Loos also shared common friends, and both published in the Neue Freie Presse,
the New York Times of its era and place. Loos would also have seen favorable
mention of Freud in Karl Kraus’s journal Die Fackel, where a review of “Three
Essays on Sexuality” appeared in 1905. Finally, my gratitude to Leo Lensing for
sharing his knowledge of Vienna at the turn of the century and for pointing
the way to further research on the social world in which Freud and Loos circu-
lated.
15. Naomi Schor, Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine (New York, 2006).
16. Wigley, White Walls, Designer Dresses.
17. Beatriz Colomina, “The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism,” in Sexuality and Space,
ed. Beatriz Colomina (Princeton, 1992), 92.

116 R E P R E S E N TAT I O N S
REP108_05 9/17/09 11:27 AM Page 117

18. Alan Colquhoun, Modern Architecture (New York, 2002), 82–83.

19. Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903), in The Sociology of
Georg Simmel, trans. Kurt Wolff (New York, 1950), 409–24.
20. José Quetglas, “Lo Placentero,” Carrer de la Ciutat 9/10 (January 1980): 2.
Quoted and translated by Colomina, “The Split Wall,” 92.
21. Colomina, “The Split Wall,” 94.
22. A copy of the plans for the Baker House can be found in the Adolf Loos
Archive in the Albertina Museum of Vienna.
23. Diane Davis in “Signifyin’ Josephine,” Appendx: Culture, Theory, Praxis 4 (1999):
28–45, describes the skin of the Baker House as “fetishized” (34), while Farès el-
Dahdah and Stephen Atkinson, in “The Josephine Baker House: For Loos’s
Pleasure,” Assemblage 26 (April 1995): 72–87, also identify Loos as a fetishist and
explain the “daubing” on the surface of the Baker House as a direct reference
to Loos’s writings on tattoos (77). Susan R. Henderson in “Bachelor Culture in
the Works of Adolf Loos,” Journal of Architectural Education 55, no. 3 (2002):
125–35, describes that surface as “‘tattooed’ striations” that “express the tribal
roots of its patroness” (131). Elana Shapira, “Dressing a Celebrity: Adolf Loos’s
House for Josephine Baker,” Studies in the Decorative Arts 11, no. 2 (Spring/Sum-
mer 2004): 2–24, likewise links the Baker House facade to Loos’s ideas on crimi-
nality and tattoos (6). Finally, Ila Berman also references the connection
between this facade and tattoos in “Civilized Planes, Sexual Surfaces, Savage
Territories,” Appendx: Culture, Theory, Praxis 4 (1999): 7–27.
24. Ludwig Munz and Gustav Kunstler, Adolf Loos, trans. Harold Meek (London,
1966), 195; Joseph Rykwert, The Necessity of Artifice, 72; Panayotis Tournikiotis,
Adolf Loos, trans. Marguerite McGoldrick (New York, 1994), 95. These critics
describe the project as “African” without specifying what they mean by that
assignation. What is clear is that they reflexively associate the house’s exotic-
ness with its proposed client. Contemporary criticism of the Baker House con-
tinues this assumption. See Karen Burns, “A House for Josephine Baker,” in
Postcolonial Space(s) (New York, 1997), 53–72, as well as Colomina, “The Split
Wall.” Finally, the Baker House has also been associated with Orientalism,
another strand of colonial projection; see Kim Tanzer, “Baker’s Loos and
Loos’s Loss: Architecting the Body,” Center: A Journal for Architecture in America 9
(1995): 76–89.
25. Paul Groenendijk, Adolf Loos: huis voor/house for/maison pour/Haus für Josephine
Baker (Rotterdam, 1985), 36.
26. For a large segment of feminist critics, Baker indubitably references the figure
of the Venus Hottentot and the history of colonial ethnography. See bell
hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Toronto, 1992); Suzan-Lori Parks,
“The Rear End Exists,” Women: A Cultural Review 5, no. 2 (Autumn 1994):
11–17; and T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, “Cinematic Venus in the Africanist
Orient,” in Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives
in French (Durham, 1999), 105–18.
27. See Phyllis Rose, Jazz Cleopatra: Josephine Baker in Her Time (New York, 1989), 18–25,
and Lynn Haney, Naked at the Feast: The Biography of Josephine Baker (London,
2002), 59–62.
28. Pierre de Régnier, review in Candide (12 November 1925), quoted by Marcel
Sauvage, Les Mémoires de Joséphine Baker (Paris, 1927), 11–12. Also quoted with-
out documentation by biographers Jean-Claude Baker and Chris Chase,

Skins, Tattoos, and Susceptibility 117

REP108_05 9/17/09 11:27 AM Page 118

Josephine Baker: The Hungry Heart (New York, 2001), 5; Rose, Jazz Cleopatra, 19;
and Haney, Naked at the Feast, 20.
29. e. e. cummings, “Vive la Folie!” Vanity Fair (September 1926): xx.
30. Bill Brown, A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (Chicago,
2003), 137.
31. Ibid., 139.
32. William Rubin’s “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Modern and the
Tribal (New York, 1988) and Marianna Torgovnick’s Gone Primitive: Savage Intel-
lects, Modern Lives (Chicago, 1991).
33. Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar
Book,” in The Black Feminist Reader, ed. Joy James and T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting
(Boston, 2000), 60.
34. Cesare Lombroso, introduction to Gina Lombroso-Ferrero, Criminal Man (New
York, 1911), xxv. See also Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October 39
(Winter 1986): 3–64.
35. How is it that one of America’s most staple retail chains, ubiquitous in almost all
malls across the country, should be named after this violent history? Some read-
ers will undoubtedly recall the shift in the store’s clothing line in the late eight-
ies, when the original colonial nostalgia of the store became less politically
correct and less popular, and the company revamped itself and turned into the
successful retail chain that it is today by pioneering the concept of an upscale
but affordable, androgynous, and uniform style that champions the desirability
and elegance of mass-produced clothes. Suddenly, fashion turns from the
fetishization of the unique to the fetishization of the ordinary, producing that
oxymoronic idea of a signature style that boasts of no signature. In light of the
history we are tracing here, it becomes not ironic but revealing that the correc-
tion to colonial nostalgia should take the form of a new mass-produced and
mass-available sensibility, a new imperialism.
36. Consider the Villa Karma (1904–6); the Steiner Store (1907); the American
Bar (or the Kunster Bar, 1908); the Goldman Salatsch House (1911); the Manz
Store (1912); the Knize Salon (1913).
37. It is a topic beyond the scope of this paper, but Baker’s dynamic objectness also
draws from and speaks back to the philosophic tradition of aligning femininity
with machinery in the early twentieth century. She enacts a kind of “body
machine” that I would suggest adds a crucially different aspect to the history
delineated by critics such as Mark Seltzer, Martha Banta, and Jennifer Fleissner.
For a fuller elaboration on this point, see my book Second Skin: Josephine Baker
and the Modern Surface, forthcoming from Oxford University Press.
38. Shapira, “Dressing a Celebrity.”
39. Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hid-
den Grief (New York, 2000). If The Melancholy of Race can be seen as focused on
tracing unseen patterns of grief, then my recent interest in “surfaces” may
seem a movement in a wholly different direction. But one of the most gripping
aspects of the notion of racial identity for me has always been its recognition of
the fundamental instability between subject and object, between performance
and essence. As such, my Baker project extends and explores the implications
raised by my first book surrounding the challenges of reading a subject who is
at once too visible; the difficulties of locating agency in the face of a compromised

118 R E P R E S E N TAT I O N S
REP108_05 9/17/09 11:27 AM Page 119

subject; and the critical need to understand the possibilities of what I called at
the end of The Melancholy of Race an “ethics of immersion” in the face of melan-
cholic incorporation. Primitivist Modernism seems to me a preeminent exam-
ple of such immersion; a simply moralistic response would elide all the
possibilities of creativity and coercion that in fact operated on both sides of
that phenomenon.

Skins, Tattoos, and Susceptibility 119