What is a Body Worth?
In the course of doing research on a project on pornography’s impact on embodiment, I had occasion to revisit Philip Goodchild’s Theology of Money.
Three things jumped out in the present round of research.
The first point concerned the abstractness of money. At first glance, this would seem pretty obvious, only with all of our talk about “cold hard cash”, we have been trained to attribute a freestanding objectivity to money, as if money could stand on its own two feet to assert itself onto the world and the processes occurring within. However, as Goodchild pointed out “money represents the values given by subjective choices” (87). As a medium of exchange, money has no inherent value, only the value that parties agree to attribute to it. The sheer subjectivity has two implications. First and most immediate, the combination of money’s exchangeability and subjectivity exposes money’s illusion of objectivity (Goodchild says it best when he notes that money’s “relativity of valuation signifies its objectification” [87]). Secondly, Goodchild highlights that what is autonomous about money is its exchangeability rather than its value. By this, Goodchild means that the only value that money can express on its own is the potential for exchange. In other words, money’s value comes as a potential store of exchange rather than actual.
Second, because money is seen as a function of subjectively imprinted values, a monetised environment thereby introduces an inherent relativity and subjectivity into what should be objectively existent things. As I pointed out in my course on Catholic Social Teaching to the seminarians, money introduces a privatisation into the world of socially and communally attributed values. What is “ours” now becomes what is “mine” and, when the world becomes seeped into this logic, it ends up becoming an incredibly fragmented world. This is why Catholic Social Teaching places such an emphasis on labour leading to the ownership of property rather than sheer monetary value, lest the worker’s relationship with the world of things becomes sundered in an increasingly monetised environment.
Third, the reason why I seem to belabour the first two points is that we have come to attribute monetary value to tangible things, thereby subordinating the latter to the former. When this happens, we end up abstracting tangible things. We do not look to things as valuable in themselves, but only in terms of their exchangability. Why this is a concern is because one of those tangible things we have become accustomed to monetising is the body, from negotiating wages to literally commodifying parts for sale, if not whole bodies both living and dead.
More than a thing, the body is the site of the expression of our personhood. However, what we have done is subordinate our personhood to its ability to be exchanged, thereby relativising the body’s glorious heft for the intangible lightness of a unit of exchange.
The thing is, as I argue in Redeeming Flesh, the body has already been exchanged, having undergone that exchange in the economy of salvation. There is a sense whereby, in place of our body, the Lord’s self emptying meant subjecting his body to the demands of subjective valuation, a path that leads unto death. In doing so, however, the Lord opens his own body to be engrafted by our own. This is not only a human participation in God’s own being, as the Church Father’s would have it. It also means that in Christ’s body, our own bodies become removed from the calculus of exchangeability. In singularity of Christ’s body, our own bodies take on a singular value that, because of its singularity, resists money’s demands of exchangeability and, flowing from that, the fluidity that such exchangability requires.
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