Of Monsters and Milieus: Bacon and Canguilhem

This is an edited excerpt from Joan Copjec’s essay “Creative Mutilation: Of Monsters and Milieus,” from the volume Bacon Disfigured: Art, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis (Thames & Hudson, 2026), edited by Ben Ware.

Zoopraxiscopes and the Vitality of Error

Francis Bacon was fascinated by the photographs of Eadweard Muybridge. In this he was not alone; Degas, Duchamp, Sol LeWitt, and Hollis Frampton and Marion Faller, among other artists, were also highly influenced by these proto-cinematic images. Bacon’s tendency to construct series of paintings was inspired by the stop-action series of Muybridge’s photographs. The gaps between the images are critical. Unlike Etienne-Jules Marey, to whom he is often compared, Muybridge was uninterested in closing the gaps between the still photographs in order to create the illusion of a flowing river of time or a continuous space. Jonathan Crary accurately describes Muybridge’s agenda as

a dismantling of the apparent continuities of movement and of time … His work is one instance of a larger decoupling of empirical verisimilitude from a “reality effect” … No relations of causal necessity link the positions and sections that are presented in sequence, only an imprecise and disjunct sense of before and after … The breakthrough of Muybridge’s work in 1878 was its deployment of machinic high speeds for the creation of perceptual units beyond the capacities of human vision, and their subsequent abstract arrangement outside the terms of any subjective experience.1 

The pre-cinematic apparatus Muybridge invented—and to which he gave the name “zoopraxiscope”—was a rotating glass disc on which the photographs turned around in a circle. We actually see this apparatus in several of Bacon’s paintings, including Paralytic Child Walking on All Fours and Woman Emptying a Bowl of Water and Paralytic Child Walking on All Fours. We should also state at this point that Muybridge’s photographs were not limited to nude men and women engaged in activities that absorbed them fully or partially. It is well known that Muybridge photographed running horses and other animals. And, finally, but significantly——though this is a lesser-known or commented-upon fact——he also photographed disabled people, not unlike Bacon’s paralytic child.2 Physiological and morphological monsters swirled around on his zoopraxiscope with some regularity. As its name implies, this apparatus gave spectators a glimpse of life at work.    

Crary seems almost automatically to assume that the abstract components of the Muybridge machine—the gridded or black backgrounds he used and the undisguised breaks in movement—threatened modern life by packaging it into mechanized bits. The result: assembly lines to which living beings became tied and the reduction of temporality to clock time. While one cannot deny that capitalist forms of abstraction had begun to threaten modern life, it must be acknowledged that modern technology adds to life by injecting new ideas into life. Gilles Deleuze emphasizes the second alternative; he contends that one of his goals in The Logic of Sensation is to pay homage to Bacon as an artist who “in the name of an intense life, can call for a more intense life … an increasingly powerful Figure of life.”3 Fine; but we must remember that life is a contentious concept and that Bergson, one of its most famous champions in the modern era, regarded abstraction as a threat to life, even as he began to recognize technology, “means other than life,” as necessary for the prolongation of life.

A number of questions emerge in the interviews and elsewhere regarding the difference between abstract art and figurative art (or: representation). Bacon is unwilling to place himself on one side or the other, nor to acknowledge that the difference is worth contemplating. He sees his own work as a kind of solecism, as an art of painting in an age of modern technology, and he is mindful of the grammatical oddities his work creates per force. Yet he regards his work as participating, nevertheless, in the era in which it is made. He admits to relying on photographs of the people he paints either exclusively or along with his own eyes. To understand why he adopts this strategy, it is enough to attend to his response to one of Sylvester’s questions about his interest in photographs. Bacon responds, “I think one’s sense of appearance is assaulted all the time by photography and by film. So, when one looks at something, one’s not only looking at it directly, but … through the assault that has already been made by photography and film.”4 “Assault” appears twice in the response, emphasizing the capacity of photographs to create a surplus effect unavailable to our naked eyes. “Through the photographic image I find myself beginning to wander into the image and unlock what I think of as its reality more than I can by looking at it … Photographs are not only points of reference; they’re often triggers of ideas.”5 One must not miss the two key points in this reply: 1) Bacon “wanders into the images,” he places himself within the perceptual field; and 2) the phrase often used to describe Bacon’s artistic intent, to “unlock sensation,” is linked to what that intent produces—new ideas. Photographs do not lead necessarily to a deadening of life by capturing and stilling a part of it; on the contrary, they have the capacity to go beyond the inadequacies of our senses, to “bring life to shadows.”6

Life. Not reality. The two pose different questions, but they have a relation which Jacques Lacan characterizes succinctly: because of its precarious nature, “reality … only manages to affirm itself at the margins.” And “if reality is precarious, it is because life renders it so.”7 When Bacon speaks to Sylvester of his desire to “keep the vitality of the accident and yet preserve a continuity,” he is effectively elaborating Lacan’s argument.8 For, if photographs allow us to see what we could not see without them, it is not because they function like a pair of glasses by allowing us to see what was there before we donned them. The photographs unlock a new reality that collides with the old one. 

Life, Monsters, and the Milieu

While Bacon and Muybridge share a lack of interest in recording reality, my point is that this is not really the point. They both pushed the question of reality to the margins and focused instead on the question of life. Once this question is opened, the question of values, and thus of the milieu, begins knocking at the door, as many prominent biologists will tell you. Among these is the German biologist Jacob von Uexkuull (1864–1944), whose influence on French and German philosophers is considerable. Uexkull carefully distinguished between Welt (the universe of science), Umgbegung (the banal geographical environment), and Umwelt (the milieu of behavior proper to the living). It is the latter—and not the banal Umgbegung—that is of interest for understanding what is at stake in Muybridge’s photographs and Bacon’s paintings. Here is how Georges Canguilhem describes the relation between the Umwelt and living beings:

The milieu of behavior proper to the living (Umwelt) is an ensemble of excitations … [but to] act on a living being, a physical excitation has not only to occur but also be noticed. Consequently, insofar as the excitation acts on the living being, it presupposes the orientation of the living being’s interest; the excitation comes not from the object but from the living … A living being is not a machine, which responds to excitations with movements, it is a machinist who responds to signals with operations.9

The robust theorizations of the milieu, that territory into which the living extend themselves and thereby become social beings, allow us to see beyond Deleuze’s reading of Bacon’s paintings. I am not implying that Deleuze is unaware of or uninterested in this question of the milieu, only that he overlooks it in The Logic of Sensation.10 The assumption embedded in his argument is that the bare backgrounds in Bacon’s paintings merely block or displace banal geographical settings. What it fails to contemplate, however, is that the empty or black backgrounds suggest an Umwelt or, in Canguilhem’s terms, a milieu. My reading of the paintings is that Bacon’s Figures, his monsters, are not isolated. In fact, it is through their fraught habitation in a milieu that they become monsters. 

The central theme of the Figure’s isolation is introduced on the first page of The Logic of Sensation. Deleuze points out that there is a round area or ring, a contour, that surrounds the Figures and isolates them from all else. He refers to these areas as “places,” or “lieux,” almost as if to fend off the possibility of their being milieux.11 The round, oval, or curved areas often appear as furniture—chairs or beds, for example—that surround the Figures and yet, Deleuze adds, “they do not consign the Figure to immobility… [but constitute] an operative field.”12 What he does not say, nor even hint at, is that these contoured spaces take the shape of Muybridge’s zoopraxiscope, often visible in its original form in Bacon’s paintings. Of course they do not consign the Figures to immobility; they are borrowed from that famous “philosophical toy,” that pioneering apparatus of motion studies, the zoopraxiscope. Two questions arise from this: 1) How does Muybridge’s invention relate to the problematic of the milieu?; and 2) What is there to suggest that this problematic has any relevance to Bacon’s “operative field”?

Canguilhem opposes the vitalist assumption that life and abstraction are at odds with each other. It is life itself that “pulls all the strings,” including those that produce technologies and abstract ideas. Knowledge is a form of life, not something that inevitably lags behind it. Abstract thought enables us to perceive possibilities we cannot see with our own eyes and to realize these possibilities in gadgets that function as new organs of perception. It is apparent from this that inventions are not constrained by laws of adaptation. Everything thus happens as if the relation between the individual and its milieu emerged as a theoretical concern as a result of the elimination of the contradiction between the empirical and the abstract.

Crary argues that the black backgrounds and grids against which Muybridge’s figures were photographed interrupted their continuous movement and severed the relations between foregrounds. This promoted an automation of perception and a mechanization of movement. That is, Muybridge’s invention contributed to Taylorism. Yet he confesses at one point that it is possible that these disruptive elements—black backgrounds and abstract grids—produced a “flashing up” of novel intuitions. It is easy to detect in this another echo, this time of Walter Benjamin’s reference to the “dynamite of a split second” in his famous essay “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility.” Rather than a deadening of life, these interruptions enabled possibilities unimaginable without them. Recently, film theorists have begun to uncover the connections between early cinematic apparatuses and biological conceptions of the milieu. As it turns out, Uexkull, whose work was known to Benjamin, was actively interested in the chronographic apparatuses of Muybridge and Marey, which he used as research tools for the development of his theory of the Umwelt.13

We leave these investigations to others, but hold them in mind as we return to the artistic pursuits of Bacon. In response to a question posed to him by Sylvester—“What do you think are the essential things that go to make an artist?”—Bacon responds not in general terms but with a list of his own peculiar passions, including a book he purchased which contained images of filters. Just filters, nothing else. What was it about them that fascinated Bacon? His answer: “The way they were formed suggested all sorts of ways in which I could use the human body [which is] after all … a filter.”14 Now, one of the concepts we associate with Benjamin is that of the stimulus shield, which protected the psyche from the onslaught of stimuli produced by modern life. This concept not only evidences the rise in importance of the living/milieu conflict, it also makes room for the unconscious amidst the smog of factories and the miles of assembly lines. Yet one should not confuse Benjamin’s filtering operation with the one to which Bacon gestures. For, although both propose that individual beings do not respond to all stimuli coming from their milieu, Benjamin’s filter protects, while Bacon’s selects.

To understand Bacon’s answer to Sylvester’s (rephrased) query—“What is essential to you as an artist?”—one has to return to the crucial Lamarkian/Freudian concept of die Not des Lebens (vital need) and Canguilhem’s gloss of it: It is not enough that stimuli occur, they have to be noticed. This insight did not have to be imparted to Bacon. He had it on his own. Throughout the interviews he states over and over in various ways that “it’s really a question in my case of being able to set a trap with which one would be able to catch the fact at its most living point … Suddenly there comes something which your instinct seizes on as being for a moment the thing you could begin to develop.”15 When Canguilhem asserts that a living being is situated at the absolute center of its milieu, the term “absolute” does not serve to pinpoint the position, but to qualify the nature of the center, which is absolute, a vital need, as distinguished from needs. Needs are universal; they are the brute necessities required for sustaining the life of the species. Need, on the other hand, is an irreducible value that compels individual living beings to select or seize those facts that comport with their need. Need does not reveal itself as something other than an urgency; it has to be found, encountered in the world by chance. In other words, the milieu can only be conceptualized by acting in it, by setting up, as Bacon does, small experiments, some of which will turn out to be generative.

In The Normal and the Pathological, Canguilhem writes, “A living species is viable only if it shows itself to be fecund.”16 By this he means to say that the individuals of a species should not be assumed to be interchangeable, but recognized as distinct de jure, each driven by an urgent need. To put it in terms appropriate to the work of both Bacon and Canguilhem, a fecund world is one that is not poor in monsters.