Louis Agassiz's Animal Flowers

Abstract

This essay takes Louis Agassiz's research on jellyfish, primarily his 1850 `Contributions to the Acalephae of North America', as a site for exploring the ethical implications of a muddled scientific and aesthetic gaze. Using Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of sensory embodiment, as well as modern ecophenomenological perspectives, the author re-examines the human–jellyfish encounter that Agassiz narrates, with a concern for two different ‘dislocated bodies’: that of the scientist who would reduce himself to only his observing eye, and that of the frequently dismembered animal specimen. Agassiz's rhetorical negotiations of jellyfish as high aesthetic forms rather than high life forms (understanding them as creatures that, in an era of humanist ocularcentrism, cannot properly ‘look’, but are wonderful to ‘look at’) make this essay an analysis not only of the nineteenth-century disembodied gaze, but also of the figurative language that transforms animal into image.

Keywords:

• Agassiz
• ecophenomenology
• embodiment
• scientific rhetoric
• the gaze

Notes

Recent books of interest on Darwin and visual culture include Jonathan Smith's (2006) Charles Darwin and Victorian Visual Culture and Julia Voss' (2010) Darwin's Pictures. Also see the essay collections The Art of Evolution: Darwin, Darwinisms, and Visual Culture, edited by Barbara Larson and Fae Brauer (2009), as well as Endless Forms: Charles Darwin, Natural Science and the Visual Arts, edited by Diana Donald and Jane Munro (2009).

Karen Barad's (2007) discussion of the brittle star (a relative of the starfish), in Chapter 8 of Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, will be of interest to anyone wanting to read more on aquatic creatures posing challenges to the humanist sensorium.

Such descriptions are in line with certain nineteenth-century naturalistic conventions. John James Audubon's (1999) Ornithological Biography offers ample instances of similar figurative extravagance. Like Agassiz's lyricism over the moving jellyfish, Audubon writes, in his entry on the white-headed eagle, that it ‘glides through the air like a falling star, and, like a flash of lightning, comes upon the timorous quarry’ (239). Although this imagistic blend is somewhat disparate, Audubon does not take figuration to the quantitative excess that Agassiz does. Here the naturalist is content to stop at two similes.

See Christoph Irmscher's (2009) ‘Wonderful Entanglements: Louis Agassiz, Antoine Sonrel, and the Challenge of the Medusa’, for an in-depth examination of the role played by scientific illustrations in Agassiz's work with Antoine Sonrel (64). Illustration clearly has a major place in considering visual versus other sensory epistemologies.

This double bind resembles a knot in Heideggerian phenomenology, and a partial defence that has been mustered for Heidegger's assertion that the animal is ‘poor in world’ might look similar to a defence of Agassiz. Both, it could be said, strive to make the animal's alterity central, rather than reach the animal only through the human. Matthew Calarco (2004) suggests that Heidegger's attention to human/nonhuman difference could thus laudably challenge ‘metaphysical humanism’ while still adhering to ‘metaphysical anthropocentrism’ (29).