Luc Boltanski

"Roland Barthes" | Iconoduel | "David Freedberg"

August 23, 2005

Excerpt from "The Fetus and the Image War" by Luc Boltanski
(published in Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion
and Art, pages 789), trans. Sarah Clift
In 1965, the photograph of an eighteen-week-old fetus enclosed in
the amniotic sac inside the womb was published on the cover of
Life magazine. Taken by Swedish phtotgrapher Lennart Nilssom,
this photograph is a milestone, and not only in the sense that it
was the product of a technological innovation. It also marks access
to the order of representation for a being who, up until then, had
evaded this order. As such, the photo prefigures the progressive
entry, some years later, of the fetus into a social order, which had
ignored it up until then, acting as if it didn't exist.
How is it then that the fetus made its entry into society? By virtue
of a series of technical, political, and symbolic operations which
imparted a weight and a presence to this practically absent being
that it had never known up until then, and through which it was
endowed with new qualities.
The work of qualification of the fetusthat conferred presence on
itwas, above all, the result of innovations which made it
accessible to the senses. With the development of medical imagery
and particularly of ultrasound, one can see the fetus in the womb,
follow its evolution, know its sex well before its birth and, in

certain cases, repair anomalies that it might be carrying. One can

also hear the beating of the heart (and record it). As well, the
development of cognitive psychology gives it capacities for
communication, capacities, which until then had not been
recognized as such. The parents are encouraged to touch it through
the abdominal wall, in a way to familiarize themselves with it and,
particularly in the case of the father, to allow him to get to know it.
The fetus has become "a someone."
However, it is not only in becoming accessible to the senses that
the fetus has entered into society in the course of the last thirty
years. Its recently acquired social presence is also the result of its
being placed at the center of two social conflicts or primary
importance, the first revolving around the conditions of its
destruction; the second around the conditions of its fabrication. In
the course of these conflicts, it acquired a new weight with regard
to practices, to techniques, to discourse, and perhaps above all, to
juridical decisions. In these conflictswhich continue up to our
timethe question of the representation of the fetus has occupied
a central place.
The first conflict was provoked by the decriminalization and then
the legalization of abortion in principle [sic] western countries.
The opponents to such measures made extensive use of the
photography of the fetus in order to support the position according
to which, to abort is to kill an unborn infant. They either used
photosthose of Nilsson or othersin order to celebrate the fetus
insofar as it represents human life in gestation, in the womb, or
they used photos of dead fetuses after abortion, often brandished
at anti-abortion demonstrations, in order to dramatize their
protest. Since from very early on, the dispute centered on the
question of knowing whether the fetus was a "person" or not, the

morphological similarity between the fetus and the infant that

would have come into the world if the fetus had survived was used
to prove that the fetus was indeed a person. Relying on the politics
of human rights, they also made the demand that the life of this
contested person be the object of protection on the part of the
State.
To counter these arguments and to reduce the emotional effects
that such photos could provoke, university academics with
affiliation to pro-choice movements (sociologists, philosophers,
jurists, historians of science, members of women's studies
departments, etc.) undertook to decode the rhetoric of the
opponents of abortion and to deconstruct the images that the latter
utilized. This endeavor led them to attempt to divest the fetus of
the presence and the status that it had recently acquired.
Academics who engaged in this undertaking made frequent use of
conceptual instruments borrowed either from the practice of
deconstruction in the literary or philisophical arena, or from the
new sociology of sciences. They took as their primary target the
realism that the users of these photos claimed as their authority
and, in so doing, adopted a constructivist position. They sought to
demonstrate that, far from being "real," these images were artifacts
and as a consequence were the instruments of an ideological
propaganda, either because they decontextualized the fetus in
isolating it from the womb (that is to say from the mother, whose
presence was excluded from the images) or because these photos
were the object of a technological coding (using electronic
microscopes and techniques of digital imagery). What is more, it
was argued that using artificial techniques in order to show that
which is normally hidden, in fact amounted to producing an
artifact.

Thus, the deconstruction of the images of the fetus triggered a

deconstruction of the fetus itself. In using elements connected to
the history of women and to the history of the sciences, these
researchers thus insisted on the "historical character" of the fetus.
Far from constituting a "natural being," eternal in its naturalness,
or a "creature of God," as affirmed, among the opponents of
abortion, who claimed religion as their authority, the fetus was,
according to these pro-choice advocates, "in fact" only "a product
of history."
More: A small index of (more or less) related textual excerpts...
"Luc Boltanski"
Posted by Dan at 01:17 AM

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Referenced in this post:

Amazon: ICONOCLASH: Beyond the Image Wars in
Science, Religion and ArtBruno Latour (Editor),
Peter Weibel (Editor)
Iconoduel: Never shake thy gory locks at me (a
compendium)