Vanity

There’s a genre of early-modern painting called the vanitas, a paint­erly meditation on the ephemeral character of the things of this world. Art historian Svetlana Alpers (1989,103-9), talking about the crafted nature of Dutch painting, describes one such painting: a self-portrait by David Bailly. This particular representation, painted late in the art­ist’s life, shows Bailly as a young man holding a painting of himself as an old man, surrounded by a series of objects that represent the achievements of his life: visits to Italy, artists’ materials, and all the rest. These objects are, however, contextualized by others that insist upon the momentary and passing character of the artist’s life. So there is a skull, there are flowers which are starting to wilt and drop, and there are floating soap bubbles, beautiful but indeed ephemeral. And, to be sure, there is the juxtaposition of the portraits, young man, old man.

The vanitas subsists in a space of tension between the changing person and that which is unchanging and eternal. It plays tricks on, 42 Subjects or within, that tension. In depicting it, the painting also performs it in

its own specific way, specific, that is, to the artistic conventions of the seventeenth century. But if its modality is specific, the divide is not. In one version or another it criss-crosses Western representational forms, this division between, on the one hand, whatever is ‘‘personal’’ and, on the other, that which does not change. For we live with and perform it now, finding it for instance in many forms in our science and social-science writing. It is built into anthropological ethnog­raphy, which divides the scholarly monograph from the field notes or the poetry of the anthropologist.6 It is embedded in the conven­tions of scientific writing, where literary forms expunge the contin­gencies and construct a truth that emerges from somewhere outside the specific locations of its production.7 And it is performed outside the academy, in the division between the artist’s personal struggles or circumstances and the eternal character of his insights.8

How many times have you heard in conversation between social scientists that to write about oneself is self-indulgent? For, or so they say, it isn’t the person who goes and looks, the ethnographer, who is interesting. She may have quirks, and no doubt the fieldwork was messy and embodied, full of problems, hurts, illnesses, and failed love affairs. We all know this, but it isn’t important. Rather, it is what is seen, has been observed, that is important. What she reports on ‘‘out there,’’ to do with Japanese physics, the organization of a biochemical laboratory, or the performance of witchcraft, this is what matters. If we choose to write about ourselves and write ‘‘self-reflexive’’ ethnog­raphy, then at best we are getting in the way of what we should be reporting about, introducing noise. And at worst we are engaging in the self-indulgent practice called ‘‘vanity ethnography.”9

The social construction of vanity: that is the distribution being per­formed in such talk, which turns those who practice self-reflexivity into sites of self-indulgence and presses them to the margins. It is also a method, a performance, no doubt only one of many, that tends to return us to the modern singularity of the god-trick. Indeed, it tends to enact the god-trick and, as a part of this, constructs ‘‘the problem of the personal’’ in academic writing, performing the absence of the body from the representation of truth. One might also note, recalling the semiotics of the last chapter, that it rebuilds an ontology of sub­ject versus object, an object out there, prior, something that we may, if we are lucky, come to know.

Here is my sense. Sometimes, perhaps even often, this sneering at the personal is right because the complaints catch something that often doesn’t quite work when the personal is introduced into aca­demic writing, when the text starts toward ‘‘self-revelation.’’ But the complaint works, or so I suggest, because some versions of self-reflex – ivity precisely construct themselves as ‘‘self-revelations.’’ That is, they play on and further perform the divide between the personal and whatever it is that counts epistemologically, the reports about what­ever is said to be ‘‘out there.”

This poses a problem, or better a task, for those of us who imagine, following Haraway’s suggestion, that objectivity (if such there be) is situated and embodied. It poses us the problem of trying to find prac­tices of knowledge-relevant embodiment that don’t perform them­selves as ‘‘self-revelations.”