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HOBSON
vocabulary,
with different
scripts-Serbo-Croat-is known as Bosnian, Slove
nian, Serbian, or Croat in what yet different friends, though no doubt with a
different political persuasion, persist in calling ex-Yugoslavia. We humans find
ithard tomanage this pull towards homogenization
and our urge to particular
ity. Itmay be that these move in cycles; it seems likely that a particular historical
era, one of unification, of loss of singularity in speech or dress, is coming to a
close inWestern Europe. We know that radio and television inBritain are much
more tolerant of linguistic variation than even twenty years ago. For theUnited
anyway, the relation between this tolerance and the dissolution, or
Kingdom,
rather, perhaps, the rebalancing, of class or race or geographical distinctions
would be worth exploring-I
haven't been able to find that it has been inves
tigated. But it could perhaps be the case that this pull to homogenization
is
cyclical: after the creation of nation states, perhaps the new Europe will allow>,
space formuch smaller cultures-Welsh,
Breton, Lombard, Basque, Catalan,
Modern Language Review, 102 (2007), xxix-xliv
( Modern Humanities Research Association 2007
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xxx
and
Statues andNormalization
I know not what. There
is perhaps
a subterranean
political
argument
at
brain physiology
of a polylingual
this, now that the living brain can be scanned. I have to admit here, however,
that I cannot find that the subject is being examined nowadays-I
merely know
a neuro-radiologist,
towhom I personally have cause to be extremely grateful,
who mutters 'That's a bit difficult for us at present' when I enquire.
But there is a cultural argument, which intermeshes with this possible phy
siological one, and makes it tomy mind farmore pressing than one of personal
intellectual advantage. This argument is that of linguistic relativity: thatwe are
shaped by the natural language we relate tomost closely in amost intimate and
'Users of markedly different grammars are pointed
complex way. To quote:
by their grammars towards different types of observations and different eva
luations of externally similar acts of observation, and hence are not equivalent
as observers but must arrive at somewhat different views of the world.'2 Thus
whose name is one part of the duo of linguist
Benjamin Whorf (1897-1941),
and scholar fromwhose work was developed what is known as the Sapir-Whorf
hypothesis. This hypothesis is a specification of linguistic relativity: itholds that
particular languages mould our experience in particular and each time different
ways. This hypothesis is not to everyone's taste, though to anyone who has lived
inmultilingual
it seems almost evident. Contrary to what many
backgrounds
claim, to my mind itwould be entirely possible to construct a philosophically
ideas3 which would not exclude the great
rigorous account of Sapir and Whorf's
hypotheses of Chomsky on the relation between linguistic structure and the
natureofhuman
intellectualprocessingof experience,and the 'species-specific'
language through its postulated shared deep structure. Indeed, some of the dif
ficulty that some nowadays have with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis seems tome
to derive from the frequently sloppy claims which have been developed out of
the pair's writings, and then from the conditions of transmission ofWhorf's
own ideas: he died relatively young, and it seems that only one article had been
1
Martin
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MARIAN
HOBSON
Xxxi
2 vols (Washington:
Indian Languages,
Government
Boas, Handbook
of American
See also An Encyclopedia
Indians, ed. by Frederick
Printing Office, 1911-22).
ofNorth American
E. Hoxie
(Boston, MA:
Mifflin,
Houghton
1996). I owe this latter reference to the kindness of
at Ann
Studies Program, University
of Michigan
Tiya Miles, Acting Director, Native American
Arbor.
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xxxii
ferentexperience.
So that the death of a language is the death of a way of processing the world:
the cultural loss of such an event is enormous. And we know that languages
are dying at the rate of about one a week. Even if it is hard to imagine how
that is known, or exactly what that means, grosso modo it seems to be true.
Ten years ago, with Michel
Jeanneret, I spent a while in a New Mexican
pueblo with a poet who was trying towrite a grammar of his language, Tiwa.
It was spoken only by about 3000 people. He found that the grammar varied
from family group to family group, and was proving impossible to write. To
myself, I concluded that he was in difficulty because he wasn't trained. But the
explained tome that the problem was real, and different: a language with so few
speakers is never stable, the peer pressure functions too erratically. There is an
inventiveness inherent in every individual and small group's use of language
and American
Culture
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in the
MARIAN
HOBSON
xxXiii
explain them.
ground thedifferences
betweencultures,theyallow us to think
we understand.
But understanding starts by 'seeing where the other person is coming from', to
use the interesting current piece of slang to express meeting a person halfway
in ideas, or at least claiming to-in my experience, it is usually a concessive
which is about to be withdrawn. The topological metaphor
is not accidental,
drivingthatdevelopment.
8
Eleanor
Bron
and Michael
Redgrave,
for instance.
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xxxiv
Statues andNormalization
STATUES
AS
STILL
LIFE
The subtitle to the heading above invites rebuttal: statues aren't still life, in the
normal sense of that term. No indeed. They are 'stilled life'. But the eighteenth
as if they were part of architecture,
century treated statues as if they were
in particular (of course, they often were just that). Statues have indeed trans
formed real life into amotionless universe, even when, as in some of the greatest,
they show effort and movement. But this transformation isn't one-way: for the
processes of that transformation are turned back onto real life,with important
intellectual effects, and it is that that I wish to sketch this evening.
Such a dialectic isn't surprising. As you know, one of themotors that drives
lished in I807, is a tension between the singular and the universal. Hegel has
picked on a constant thread in human thought, but one which is yet particularly
evident in intellectual activity at the end of the eighteenth century. For between
the 'particular' or the 'species' as
these extremes lies an articulating middle,
itwas also called in logical terminology. Now the end of the eighteenth cen
intellectual effort to clarify what that middle
tury sees a much-increased
is,
interpreted in straight biological terms. I want to suggest that
* the practice ofmeasuring Greek sculpture does not just influence ideas of
perfect proportion, of ideal human form, but also develops
ideas of the
mean in itsmain senses, of average and of common, or even banal;
* through statues, the represented human body is brought into a kind of grid
of possible variation and possible idealization where the species is thought
in terms of the particular; this happens much more clearly and effectively
in sculpture than in other art forms.
My argument runs: first, the normalization associated with proportion in sta
tues inflects comparative anatomy in a particular way; this is not very new,
though itmay have been studied a bit superficially. But more, an ideal sculpture
can come to represent man as a species, and is taken as more neutral and less
particular, more universal and less singular, than a representation of man in
other arts. And the last stage of this paper: in the I830S, with the great Belgian
themethods of generalization usual in sculpture are quite
statistician Quetelet,
explicitly adapted to the beginnings of statistics as a science. So I shall argue
that at the end of the eighteenth century within the golden mean of proportion
there is a tension between the mean as ideal and the mean as average and
common, which becomes a crucial point of articulation inQuetelet's work and,
incidentally, can be seen in the great artist Goya and the mad architectural
draughtsmanLequeu.
The great numbers of classical statues that had been discovered in Italy from
the early sixteenth century on had made of Rome a tourist dragnet, a source of
honest or not so honest pennies for a whole swarm of fakers, copiers, restorers,
makers of casts, and of course guides to what the visitors came to see. One of
the expressions of the cultural value of these statues is the publication of their
measurements.
This is a practice well established by the end of the seventeenth
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MARIAN
XXXV
HOBSON
Once one starts looking at drawings of the seventeenth and eighteenth cen
of classical statues are to be found.
turies, many depictions of measurements
was part of the training of artists, and a great
This may not be surprising-that
deal of care has been expended on showing this.9Most drawings are clearly
modular, arguing that thewhole statue is based on one particular measurement
of one particular part of the body, which is then to be found again as multiples
in the other body parts.
The earliest record of a measuring of a statue I have found in French culture
dates from i640 and has remained inmanuscript.'0 This manuscript
seems to
have been well known though not published. Its drawings are believed to be by
becomes famous because they appear
Poussin. Another set of measurements
on theMost Beautiful Figures
in a best-selling book: Girard Audran's Measures
ofAntiquity, of I683, a work reproduced many times during the next century,
and translated into several languages." Even more powerful dissemination oc
curred forAudran's
plates when they were used in Diderot and d'Alembert's
Encyclopedie for the article 'Dessein', in the volumes of plates published in I763
(Figure i).
Audran
was
still published
century, and
this type of
illustration
ofmeasurement,thoughof sculpture,seems toappearmost notably
in books on how to learn drawing-as
the Encyclopedie had produced
them
in its article on drawing. Audran's
book is in fact a series of engravings of
The reason for doing
classical sculptures with very detailed measurements.
this isworth considering: the preface to the book maintains
that different sets
9
Reed Benhamou,
inFrance
Public and Private Art Education
Studies on Voltaire
1648-1793,
and the Eighteenth
1993).
Century, 308 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation,
10
sur les originaux
avec Mons.
Erard
Fr?art de Chambray,
que j'ai mesur?es
'Proportions
mesmes
? Rome
l'ann?e 1640', MS Pc 6415 dated '30 mars
1678', at the ?cole Nationale
Sup?rieure
des Beaux-Arts,
Paris.
11
Girard Audran, Graveur
du Roy, Les Proportions
du corps humain, mesur?s sur les plus belles
figures de l'antiquit? (Paris, 1683).
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xxxvi
Statues andNormalization
..
1:~~~~~~~~~~
0~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
V~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~C
.:
4~~~~D
<,j oi,*4-1
'J-..
'
..i
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MARIAN
HOBSON
xxXvii
of measurements
are in circulation, varying on the one hand form country to
country and on the other according to temperament, and that these different
sets of measurements
belie the universality of ancient sculpture. Yet Audran
admits a tension: because personal temperament and individual singularities
are not allowed to appear, ancient art appears cold. Indeed, Audran says, there
has never been an individual man as perfect in all his parts as are some of the
ancients' figures.'2
of statues needs
et
'C'est dans ce sens qu'on peut dire qu'un Peintre se peint soy-m?me dans ses Ouvrages,
que le sentiment secret n? avec nous, et dont souvent on ne connoit pas la cause, est ordinairement
ce qui nous d?termine
dans nostre choix. Pour ce qui est du temperament,
il agit encore plus
en nous. Comme
c'est luy qui fait la distinction
la plus essentielle
?
d'un homme
puissamment
un autre, il a part ? tout ce que nous faisons. C'est dans ce sens qu'on peut dire qu'un Peintre se
& que le sentiment secret n? avec nous, & dont souvent on ne
peint soy-mesme dans ses Ouvrages
ce qui nous d?termine notre choix, & nous fait conformer
connoit pas la cause, est ordinairement
ses figures ? l'air des personnes
le plus de penchant'
pour qui nous aurions
(Audran, Pr?face
(unpaginated)).
13
Charles
Etienne
Briseux, Architecture
moderne, ou l'art de bien b?tir pour toutes sortes de
personnes, tant pour lesmaisons des particuliers que pour les palais
(Paris: Jombert, 1728). The great
Cuthbert Girdlestone,
that Briseux would
repay investigation'
specialist on Rameau,
'suspect[s]
sa vie, son uvre (Paris: Descl?e
Rameau:
de Brouwer,
and one
(Jean-Philippe
1962), p. ii2n.),
can only agree. Charles-Nicolas
concernant
Recueil
de
les arts, extraites de
Cochin,
quelques pieces
2 vols (Paris: Jombert, 1757-71).
See the bibliography
de France,
of Marian
plusieurs Mercure
The Object ofArt (Cambridge:
Hobson,
Press, 1982), for an account of the
Cambridge
University
publication
history of this last publication.
14
no. 1459 in the Ashmolean
Museum.
Drawing
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xxxviii
n. pub.,
elementare per gli studiosi della scultura (Florence:
Istruzione
See Franceses
Carradori,
1802).
16
theManners,
Customs, Antiquities, Paintings,
Lady Anne Miller, Letters from Italy Describing
to a Friend Residing
inFrance,
and MDCCLXXI,
&c.
of that Country, in the Years MDCCLXX
2 vols (London:
Edward
and Charles Dilly,
1777), 1, 386.
by an English Woman,
17
in The Novels
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice,
3rd
ofJane Austen, ed. by R. W Chapman,
Press, 1932), 11, 23.
edn, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon
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MARIAN
FIG.
2. Head
(Naples:
Nella
thought
Regia
to be
that of Augustus
stamperia,
1757-92),
HOBSON
from Le
Xxxix
antichitdi
V, PI. XLV, P.
i6i,
fi rmataApollonio A teniense
di Ercolano
entitled
Erma
esposte, 8 vols
di Doriforo
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xl
Measuring andNormalization
PETRUS
CAMPER
The measurement
of statues is applied to human beings by the great Dutch
doctor Petrus Camper, as you surely know. His work was not published during
his lifetime, though itwas well known, if only because he had toured giving
but in
lectures in which he discussed his ideas, not just in his native Holland
England, France, and Germany as well.
Camper was an artist, and a theoretician of art, but he was also an important
doctor. His work brought together ideas about the right angle from which to
draw faces in order to give a correct notion of their shape with an interest
in transformation of form, ideas that seem, for instance, connected with the
He
work nearly two hundred years later of the Scotsman D'Arcy Thompson.'8
say any more, I want to dispose of one idea: inwhatever way the posthumous
publication of his writings and engravings was interpreted, he himself was not
what we would now call a 'racist'. Again and again he says in his writings that
education, not race, is the key to class, that is, status in society, and he violently
attacks the slave trade. He is in fact a relativist: he was famous for not believing
that there was any stable beauty in any form at all.
My Figure 3 is an illustration of what Camper called the 'facial angle'. It
moves from amonkey to an orang-utan to a young black to a Calmuk, by which
is probably meant someone who could stand in for the whole of eastern Asia,
group of
although strictly speaking Calmuk at the time refers to a Turcoman
is showing is the different angle made by the line
Central Asia. What Camper
between the lower part of the nose and the ear-hole and the line passing through
the forehead, nose, and lips. This enabled him, he insists, to draw the relative
shape of different human heads accurately. He describes how he set up his
skulls to preserve, he says, 'the true form and relative situations of the parts'.
Now the perspective he uses is not the normal one used in drawing from a fixed
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MARIAN
'.. -
xli
HOBSON
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10,
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'14,4
~~~~~~~~~~~~4-.
cn
X
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~~~~~~~
N28?
y. . ,-.*.w
+-b-~* S
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.}
8 > >./,t *27! g
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e ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~CZ
. wt.,............
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...... s4
b.t-
xlii
Statues andNormalization
20
uvres compl?tes, ed. by Roger Lewinter,
inDiderot,
15 vols (Paris: Club
Voyage enHollande,
du Livre,
xi, 331-451
Fran?ais
1969-73),
(p. 424) (my translation).
21
uvres compl?tes, xin, 635-819
in Diderot,
?l?ments de physiologie,
(p. 670) (my translation).
22
to On Growth and Form, ed. by Bonner, p. xiii.
introduction
Gould,
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MARIAN
HOBSON
xliii
00
.-'g-~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~..
-~~~~~~~~~4
0o'ZCv.)
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.00 ~
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xliv
the chest of a statue: you can do this ten times over, and the result will be slightly
different each time (even ifyou are not trying to cheat- he worked on evasion
of the draft). If you did this a thousand times, supposing you had the courage,
then the average would certainly be very close to the real value. And moreover,
you would be able to evaluate the probable error of your measurements.
And
he concludes: all this shows us that things are as if all the chests that have been
measured had been modelled on the same individual, an ideal one, ifyou want,
but whose proportions can be found ifwe take the experiment far enough.
is an irony here: when seen as an average, the form behind every
There
form, the ideal of Greek sculpture, produces Quetelet's
homme commun. And
for some, this homme commun is indeed the stripped down, the average, the
banal. Some contemporaries called this idea 'the height of vulgarity'.
This is a kind of fable forour times if it is translated into the realm of language.
We need to protect particularity, and learning different languages can do this.
Cultures need to navigate between the extremes of extreme particularity that
is one kind of nationalism, and the universalizing
forces which seek to impose
one language, one nation, or indeed one God. Modern
Linguists can help.
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