Liquid Bodies, Forever Becoming
In last week’s post, we looked at how writing can be a sacred act, anchoring bodies that have become, as Angela Franks suggested, liquified in postmodernity.
After that post went to air, I began thinking that the post presumed, rather than explained, how we have come to change our conception of bodies from being “solid-state” entities conceive of bodies to being “liquified”.
One way into explaining this change hangs upon a theme that I have touched upon in my coverage of the topic of pornography. This theme is the metaphysical shift from one that emphasises actuality (what the medievals called “act”) to one that emphasises potentiality (what is called “potency”). In this shift from looking at the actuality of things to what they could become, we have at a metaphysical level, started to look at the underpinning reality of anything not on the basis of “being”, on the basis of “becoming”.
It is precisely this metaphysical emphasis on becoming that underpins a cultural phenomenon that Graham Ward identified in his Cities of God, and I explored in in Redeeming Flesh. This is the imperative to augment one’s body, in order that it might bear the capacity to fulfill that potential, whether through prosthetics, drugs, fashions and surgery.
The reason for drawing attention to this drive to augment the body, however, is the kind of body that has to be presumed in order that it might be fit for augmentation. Ward argued that, in order for the body to be capable of augmentation, it had to be a body that was devoid of significance, a body of “mere flesh”, to use Ward’s words. This reduction of the body to mere flesh, I suggested in Redeeming Flesh, is what opened the body up to endless horizons of becoming.
However, such horizons could only remain open insofar as they did not have any boundary, had no limit beyond which the body could not be. In order for the body to bear the capacities for endless becoming, it was also imperative that the body had not parameters within which it could actually be. The body thus had to remain amorphous and without substance, and also eternally subject to being pulled and prodded by the various technologies whose sole aim is to transgress any limit of being. Put another way, the body’s ability to being liquid, is premised upon its capacity to be liquidated (ironically, in the name of celebrating the body’s capacity for transcendence).
In the face of the postmodern extreme of liquidating the body, the temptation might be to swerve back to the other extreme of defending the body as a “solid-state” entity. This knee jerk defense actually undermines, rather than shores up, the defense of the body, since the defense of the solid-state entity is premised upon the same type of materialism that reduces the body to mere flesh. The way forward would be to defend the body as a paradox, a deposit of both being and becoming at once. This kind of defense cannot be premised upon a materialist or even a purely metaphysical defense of the body. Rather, it has to be premised upon anchoring the body upon another body that is in itself a paradox, a coincidence of the opposites of being and becoming. Only the body of the Incarnate Word bears this capacity, as St Bonaventure once argued, for the Word, both “born of the Father before all ages” and from whom the Spirit proceeds, resides between the Father (who is all generator) and the Spirit (who is all generated).
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