There is No Body
Photo by Anne Nygård on Unsplash
Now that I have established a bit of a rhythm at work here in the seminary, I have been able to set aside some headspace to revisit my attempts to writing a book manuscript about pop culture and spirituality. This has been coming out in spits and starts. I first dipped my toe into the subject in my book Redeeming Flesh, but this is my first attempt at a systematic theological treatment of the topic, with my first public foray being a presentation for PeaceTalks some years ago on the subject of the sacramentality of pop culture.
As a bit of a teaser, one of the arguments that I will put forward that before pop culture is about the dissemination of stuff, something else needs to be manufactured first. What is manufactured first is what I am calling the “popped body”, and this is the engineering of the body of the individual and transforming it into the body of a consumer. It is this body that becomes the platform for the displaying of the various products in pop culture. Indeed, the idea that pop culture would like to have us believe is that our body is being expressed through the various products in pop culture: the fashions, fragrances, cars and avatars whose logos cascade down our shopping centers like a thousand drops of a waterfall.
While all this may sound novel and innovative, this engineering of the body is actually playing upon something very old, and that is the relationship the body has with symbols.
The reason for my argument is that, as much as we would like to think otherwise, there is no body as such. This might sound counterintuitive, given all the naked bodies being thrown at us in program after program (and sometimes billboard after billboard). However, even those naked bodies are not bodies as such. Rather, what we have is a body as is represented to us, mediated to us by a veil of signs and symbols. According to this line of argumentation, even these naked bodies are themselves constructions given to us as representations, mediated by a curtain of signs and symbols.
I am relying on two sources that, at one level, seem like diametric opposites (and indeed at one level, they are). These are St. John Paul II and Judith Butler. Both have accounts of the body that take the body in different directions. However, there is one tantalising sliver of overlap, and that is both do not subscribe to a comprehensive and self-evident body, though in different ways.
For his part, John Paul II in his Theology of the Body, posits that the human person as an embodied reality is a mystery. One of his insights during his time under Nazi occupation is that totalitarianism works on a complete oversight of the person, especially of the body, wherein nothing escapes its gaze and control. Such a body is one stripped of mystery. Now, following his hero in phenomenology Max Scheler, it is true that John Paul argued the mystery of the person can be accessed through the portal of the body. Nevertheless, that access must be unlocked by the key of a theological lexicon. The theological language through which the meaning of the body is unlocked is found not in the body per se, but is handed down to us by divine revelation. However, because of divine revelation, the body in itself becomes heavy with meaning. What this means is that the body does have inherent meaning, but that would not be self-evident within a purely biological frame of reference.
Coming from a different starting point, Judith Butler’s Bodies that Matter provides another interesting insight into the body’s meaning. Unlike John Paul II, Butler would argue that the body has no inherent significance. Nevertheless, Butler does still say that bodies do indeed matter. Where it gets interesting is how these bodies matter. Butler argues that if a body does matter, what it is doing is signifying its significance. And it is these signifiers that are communicated to us through representation. These representations are the signs and symbols that cloak the body. Thus, Butler says, there is “no reference to a pure materiality except via materiality” (68), that is the materiality of the signifier.
In both accounts, a gap thus emerges between “the body as such” and the body that is meaningfully presented to us. In order for the body to mean something, it will constantly try to transcend its own materiality to establish some link between its flesh and the symbols to which flesh is given meaning.
Why this is relevant for my consideration of pop culture is that it relies upon an account of the body that cannot remain inert. Indeed, because of the gap that lies between its sheer materiality and its signification, it is always trying to transcend itself to establish its own significance, to itself and to others. To call pop culture “materialistic” would thus be a serious misnomer.
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