Published Fall 2006
 
Who Wears the Mask?
(on Neil Leach's Camouflage [Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2006])
Camouflage has become one of the most characteristic traits of postmodern life. Immigrants, minorities, and refugees are pressured to assimilate to new cultural contexts; both stealth bombers and suicide bombers blend in with their surroundings; antennae and radio towers are designed to simulate trees; along the borders between Gilo and neighboring Palestinian settlements, barrier walls are painted to resemble the landscapes they block out; fashion and advertising continually manipulate the fine line between standing out and blending in; and biologists have begun studying the phenomenon of "urban speciation," in which insects and birds mimic and adapt to various aspects of urban environments. The work of scholars like Homi Bhabha and Judith Butler has demonstrated how hegemonic ideals of whiteness and heteronormativity depend upon the unsettling dynamics of "colonial mimicry" and "queer performativity." On the other hand, ideology itself can be characterized as a form of camouflage that veils the manufacture of consent behind a screen of misinformation, media distortions, and affective manipulation.
Camouflage has multiple genealogies spanning from military science to aesthetics, from biology to political engagement—or non-engagement. The term derives originally from the long history of siege warfare and the French camouflet, an explosive device designed to ward off enemy miners by making their tunnels collapse. While it has been tactically deployed by guerrilla fighters for centuries, the widespread use of camouflage by national armies did not commence until World War I, when modern warfare called for the formation of "camouflage corps" consisting of engineers and artists (such as Abbott Thayer, Frederic Waugh, Norman Wilkinson, and Louis Guingot) and the creation of uniforms designed to blend into the immediate surroundings of the trenches, as well as "dazzle ships" that deployed Cubist techniques to disguise their trajectory and speed. Gertrude Stein famously reported that Picasso, upon seeing a camouflaged truck during the war, exclaimed, "yes it is we who made it, that is Cubism." These defensive and aesthetic functions of camouflage had been debated since the British naturalist Henry Walter Bates first explained the phenomenon of insect mimicry in evolutionary terms in 1852 when describing a case of protective coloration in Brazilian forest butterflies. Was mimicry primarily a strategic defense mechanism, or does it serve loftier purposes? Or no purpose at all? Evolutionists tended to subscribe to the functional point of view, but a range of thinkers, including surrealist artists like Roger Caillois and creationists emphasizing the divine architecture of the world, insistently foreground examples of mimicry that have no clear defensive or reproductive function, where patterns in nature seem to follow Immanuel Kant's definition of the beautiful as "purposiveness without purpose." In political arenas, camouflage raises questions about the strategic utility of reforming the system from within rather than overturning it entirely.
Camouflage is thus ambiguously situated between the realms of violence and aesthetics, between ideology and the alternate forms of life that it represses, between defensive stratagems and a democratic processes of social leveling. This ambiguous situation motivates Neil Leach's sophisticated study, Camouflage, which surveys the treatment of camouflage and related topics like mimesis, mimicry, psychaesthenia, and performativity in fields as diverse as psychoanalysis, architectural theory, Marxism, and gender studies. Leach focuses his discussion on the significant spatial issues involved with camouflage, which he defines as a "mechanism for inscribing an individual within a given cultural setting" (240). An architectural theorist known for such books as Rethinking Architecture (1997) and The Anaesthetics of Architecture (1999), Leach elaborates on the complex processes of environmental blending between persons and the spaces they traverse and inhabit, as well as the specific relevance of camouflage to architectural design and the subjective perception of buildings. Leach frames the book as both an alternative to the Heideggerian (and in his view overly nostalgic) discourse of "dwelling," and a continuation of his earlier critique of the escapist formalism of postmodern building design in The Anaesthetics of Architecture. Whereas the earlier book argued that mere aestheticism results in an anaesthetic relationship to the world, Camouflage "attempts to reveal another side to aesthetics, and argues that it has a positive social role to play in helping us to relate to the world" (ix).
Camouflage contributes to disciplines beyond Leach's immediate concerns with architectural design. It is divided into fourteen brief chapters, the first thirteen of which are organized around enormous theoretical issues and prominent thinkers: Benjamin on "Mimesis," Adorno on "Sensuous Correspondence," Lacan on "Death," Kristeva on "Melancholia." Leach lucidly distills the writings of these theorists without sacrificing much of their complexity, demonstrating that each theoretical approach presents, either explicitly or indirectly, an elaboration of aesthetic perception as "a mechanism for overcoming alienation" (129). The very breadth and flexibility of Leach's concept of camouflage enable us to perceive unexpected resonances between architectural functionalism and ambient music, human sacrifice and postcolonialism, petrification and empathy theory, memory and nationalism. In addition to revisiting suggestive topics, like Roger Caillois's account of insect mimicry, Leach presents innovative accounts of familiar concepts like camouflage, melancholia, and narcissism. Leach's claim that architecture critically mediates our identifications with our surroundings stresses the need for interdisciplinary approaches that combine the lenses of psychoanalysis, critical race theory, gender studies, and cultural geography with both architectural analysis and design.
However, questions of power and historical conditions are largely glossed over by Leach's broad argument that "the urge to identify with our psychical environment is merely a manifestation of a larger desire to establish some connection with culture as a whole, and to overcome the threat of alienation" (9). What exactly is "culture as a whole," or "the lifeworld in general" with which "we" want to feel connected (10)? Camouflage depends perhaps too much on an exaggerated sense of the aesthetic agency and autonomy of architectural design.
It is by now a truism that architecture is the least autonomous of the arts in modernity. Architecture's public presence and its enormous costs require corporate, state, or private patronage, as well as government licenses, building insurance, and inevitable compromises with engineers and contractors. Leach's reliance on Adorno's distinction between art—which allows for dialectical tension and "critical dissonance"—and the hegemonic culture industry neglects to account for the conflation of these two levels in both historicist cultural criticism and many objects of popular culture (which can profitably commodify dissent itself). Camouflage risks detaching architecture from the spheres of power and ideology, counterposing its own forceful arguments about political structures like the panopticon and the Cretan labyrinth with a comparatively escapist account of the architecture of love. Leach's repeated transitions from death to life, from labyrinthine tombs and prisons to restorative wombs ("And if architecture is associated with death, it is also associated with life") rely too heavily on ahistorical categories of myth and (universal) subjective experience (221).
Camouflage often invokes the psychoanalytic studies of Julia Kristeva, whose celebration of religious love, or agape, grounds Leach's articulation of parallels between aesthetic, religious, and erotic forms of ecstasy and "conditional surrender" (237). Leach also draws on Kristeva's identification of the semiotic register as "a position before meaning," and thus prior to experiences of alienation and lack that other psychoanalytic thinkers associate with meaning. "Art, for Kristeva, constitutes a form of the Symbolic. It is not related to signification" (217-8). Leach somewhat disingenuously removes Kristeva's thinking about the semiotic "chora" from feminist criticisms of her tendency to essentialize the notion of maternity, as well as from Kristeva's own elaboration of the dynamics of "abjection" in Powers of Horror. Moreover, the history of architecture is characterized by a panoply of phallic towers, class- and race-based barriers, and hierarchizing subdivisions (servants' quarters, executive suites, front and back doors, white and "colored" facilities, nuclear-family homes, etc.). In addition, Leach's avoidance of Lacan's account of camouflage in terms of mimicry and spatial captation seems a glaring omission, not only because it would enable an analysis of architectural differences but also because his thinking about the Symbolic has provided points of transition, grounding, and contention for so many of Leach's theorists, from Caillois to Bhabha, Freud to Butler. Leach does provide suggestive commentaries on Lacan's discussions of narcissism and the death instinct, but he steers clear of the groundbreaking analysis of mimicry and the gaze in the second section of The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, entitled "Of The Gaze as Objet Petit a."
For Lacan, there can be no position before meaning, no "preverbal state of connectivity," and the plenitude promised by the object of desire (objet petit a) is defined paradoxically by its enabling absence (216). Lacan here describes the subsequent initiation into the Symbolic not in the essentializing and problematic terms of castration and the difference between the penis and the phallus, but rather in the field of vision characterized by a distinction between the human look and an all-seeing gaze that no eye can entirely inhabit or possess. Starting with examples in which we feel like we're being watched when no one else is looking, Lacan ends up with a description of camouflage that more or less parallels Leach's, where performative responses to the gaze comprise "the dimension by which the subject is to be inserted in the picture" (Lacan 99).
While they often remain skeptical towards essentializing tendencies in the notions of symbolic castration and jouissance, feminist film theorists and art historians like Laura Mulvey, Kaja Silverman, Jacqueline Rose, and Jean Copjec have further developed Lacan's analysis of how identification, desire, and power have structured the field of vision. A closer consideration of these critics would have helped Leach flesh out the ways in which gender differences fracture and hierarchize the "world" into different kinds of identificatory spaces. Leach's reticence concerning such issues is all the more striking in light of his decision to illustrate Camouflage exclusively with the photographs of Francesca Woodman, "many of which depict her seemingly absorbed by her environment" (x). Woodman's powerful, elegantly effaced self-portraits, almost always set in domestic interiors, hauntingly echo the mood and thematics of feminist texts like Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper," and Leach's silence about the photographer's suicide in 1981 (which coincided with the publication of her only book, Some Disordered Interior Geometries) seems to disavow the possibility that camouflage's promise of "connectivity" may be experienced unevenly across the lines of gender and sexuality. Moreover, the oppressive domestic interiors that characterize these and other works indicate that different subjects are prescribed different and often multiple "worlds" of various types and scales with which to identify.
Figure 1. Francesca Woodman,
from Space2, Providence, 1975-6.
Figure 2. Tseng Kwong Chi,
New York, New York, 1979. Lacan's account of the visual construction of identities has played an equally important role in the analysis of racialization, particularly in postcolonial texts like Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks and Homi Bhabha's "Of Man and Mimicry." Despite his passing discussions of voodoo and Chinese landscape painting, Leach refrains from considering the ways in which camouflage and architectural design might relate to the processes of racialization and colonialism, as witnessed by model minorities, "developing" economies, and the ambivalent subjects of artworks like Tseng Kwong Chi's self-portraits and Paul Laurence Dunbar's "We Wear the Mask." Urban architecture has played a significant role in maintaining these asymmetries by lending material supports to ghettoization, white flight, the attrition of viable nonsegregated civic spaces, and a prison system that renders racial tensions less visible. Leach's brief discussion of prisons focuses on inmates who become reluctant to leave the cells they have become comfortable with, and notes that Nelson Mandela lived in an exact replica of his prison bungalow after being freed; but he doesn't stop to suggest that Mandela's act may be viewed as a political statement, or that the agoraphobia of prison inmates reflects the desubjectifying effects of "civil death," rather than an instinctual "compulsion to return to the familiar" or Leach's dictum that "Nothing is alienating forever" (5, 4).
Regardless of his occasional blindness to gender and race, Leach's thesis about cultural camouflage as a way to "overcome feelings of alienation" raises questions about the forms and causes of alienation and about who experiences them. Is alienation a "feeling" to be cured by feelings of "connectivity," or a reality that calls for a more collective solution? Does a shared sense of alienation itself provide the grounds for alternative forms of collectivity? Can aesthetics and representation alone "overcome" alienation? Can architecture reconnect subjects to the world without addressing the alienation of labor? Who enjoys compensatory forms of spatial belonging such as nationalism and cosmopolitanism, and at what price? Does the transformation of building design—and the reconstitution of subjectivity through design—call also for larger structural, economic, and political transformations?
Leach's account would be usefully supplemented with the insights of cultural geographers like Doreen Massey and Neil Smith, who describe the contemporary world in terms of multiple, fractured environments and plural, often contradictory scales of experience and affiliation. Where Leach asks "what role the built environment comes to play in forging a sense of national identity," it seems just as urgent to ask what other types of identity—domestic, racial, sexual, or transnational—are recruited or obstructed by particular built environments. Case studies of architectural sites and buildings—which are surprisingly absent from this book—would help both to anchor Leach's claims and to provide a groundwork for contesting and expanding them, by showing us what the relational architecture that Leach calls for might look like. Still, Leach lays the conceptual foundations for a growing field, providing a lucid overview of theoretical perspectives that will be productively combined with more focused historical accounts like Roy Behrens's False Colors: Art, Design, & Modern Camouflage (2002) and case studies like the papers presented at a recent University of Northern Iowa conference on Camouflage: Art, Science, and Popular Culture (2006). Moreover, Camouflage will initiate and enrich conversations between cultural theorists and practicing architects while making a persuasive case for camouflage as a phenomenon that makes the difference between abstract space and experienced place. "Over and above any negative critiques within recent cultural theory, the concept of camouflage therefore points toward the important social role of the aesthetic domain as a means of reinserting the individual within society" (14). Leach's crucial lesson is that camouflage and its ambiguities can productively mediate between subjects and larger social formations—but it will be up to his readers to decide whether the arts stand "over and above" the critique of ideology, or whether and to what extent the two domains work in tandem.
Work Cited
Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1981.
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