“Freedom, Equality, Beauty for Everyone”— Notes on Fantasizing the Modern Body

Laura Bieger

ABSTRACT

“Freedom, Equality, Beauty for Everyone”—these were the words of a recent advertising slogan of one of the world’s leading producers of purely natural cosmetics. Drawing on the emphatic creed of the French Revolution and capitalizing upon its iconic formulation of democratic values, the slogan captures a powerful double bind of modern culture that plays out with special force in its dominant mode of bodily production. For implied in this call for a radical democratiza- tion of physical beauty is the idea that one has to work for it; that universal beauty is, indeed, not given but the product of achievement; and that it takes commitment, for example by buying the right cosmetic products and using them with dedication and care. As something that one ‘has’ and cultivates rather than ‘is,’ the modern body is, indeed, a primary resource to gain recognition in a society of equals. In turning to material as diverse as Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Vitruvian Figure,’ Theodor Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, the godfather of body-building Eugene Sandow, the video-clip for Pink’s song “Stupid Girls,” the Madonna of the album Hard Candy, and the work of contemporary artists such as Vanessa Beecroft, Cindy Sherman, and Orlan, I argue in this article that the history of the modern body as a primary site in the struggle for recognition evolved from an immensely productive (and equally problematic) conjunction of the actual and the imagined body. But the call for universal beauty not only captures this basic constitution of modern bodily production. In promoting ‘natural’ rather than surgical enhancement, it also speaks to its latest installment: a mode of production that, in blurring the different ontologies of the material body and its virtual image, creates substantial problems for living in the bodies thus produced.

In a world in which we are judged by how we appear, the belief that we can change our appearance is liberating. Sander Gilman, Making the Body Beautiful Distortion is part of desire. We always change the things we want. Siri Hustvedt, The Blindfold

‘Having’ vs. ‘Being’: The Body as Capital

We live in bodies that are indispensable as capital.1 They are dressed and undressed according to latest fashion trends, decorated with jewelry, expensive watches, ties, make-up, piercings and tattoos, enhanced with vitalizing creams, pills, and injections, shaped by diets, exercise, and surgery. The clothes that our

1 The company referred to in the abstract is Yves Rocher; the slogan was used in May 2008. An earlier, substantially shorter version of this essay was published under the title “Schöne Kör- per, hungriges Selbst” in Der schöne Körper edited by Annette Geiger. 664 Laura Bieger bodies wear mark social position and individual style, while their physical features make claims about a good and healthy life. Our contemporary culture is obsessed with beautiful surfaces and effective display—demands that turn our bodies into stage and material, player and script of these obsessions. The body is thus predominantly perceived as something that one has. Its existential reality—the being-a-body that underlies and permanently challenges this having-a- body—is systematically bracketed as it contradicts the vehement imperative of our times to fashion and display our selves. And while it may seem tautological to say that ‘beautiful bodies’ are by definition adored and desired, the conjunction of being and having a body of which this truism is emblematic promotes a paradigm of bodily production in which the existential reality of the ‘material’ at hand is pushed back with special force and consequence. The body’s sheer appearance is rigorously drawn into the foreground—a transcendent surplus exceeding the body’s material confines, the ultimate destination of its beauty is to become an embodied image of itself.2 The purpose of addressing this problematic is not to investigate which specific bodies are assumed to be beautiful for whom and why; rather, I am interested in the cultural function of the ‘beautiful body,’ its material and symbolic value, and its mechanisms of production. The claim at stake here is not an exclusive but an ex- emplary one in the sense that not only do beautiful bodies evoke this image quality, but that they do so in especially poignant ways. To be perceived as beautiful, a body needs to be visible; it has to become an object of our gaze and is, in modern consumer cultures, inevitably fashioned for this purpose.3 From this perspective, the surplus quality of the beautiful body can be understood as an expressivity that is both inherent to and invested in this object of perception. The perceptive mode that this evokes within the viewer removes the beautiful body from its everyday existence and makes it seem detached, potentially sublime.4 Think of an actress in an evening gown on a red carpet. On screen she might have last been overweight, in a state of physical neglect, soaked with blood, sweat, and tears, distorted from pain or fear, and we might have admired her for her acting skills. As if to compensate for such cinematic ‘veiling’ of her beauty, the red carpet sets it center stage and lets it shine. Her perfect figure is brought out by the extravagant cut of her evening gown, her beautiful face is adorned by a flattering hairstyle, and particularly attractive parts of her body are highlighted with jewelry while her entire appearance is set-en-scene by means of self-asserting poses and a radiant smile. Through their effective positioning and display, beautiful bodies claim a heightened value. They do not only assume visibility, but they actively claim and affirm this visibility—in other words, they produce recognition. Not only ‘beauti-

2 The body as site of social and cultural production evoked here is drawn from Butler. When I talk about the ‘beautiful body’ I am assuming that both components—the body and its alleged beauty—are historically specific social realities. At the risk of being redundant, I will use quota- tion marks whenever I want to stress the image-quality of this construct. 3 For a more extensive discussion on the body’s relation to fashion see Bieger and Reich, as well as Vinken’s and Loreck’s contributions to the volume Mode. See also Entwistle’s landmark study on this topic. 4 The perceptive mode evoked here is drawn from Dewey. “Freedom, Equality, Beauty for Everyone” 665 ful bodies’ are visible in this specific way, but their desire to be adored and the resulting double removal of these bodies—from the existential realm of being-a- body and the practical dimensions of having-a-body—makes the mechanisms of their production especially tangible. And while their beauty often comes along with an aura of naturalness or givenness, it is not so much a gift as it is an arti- fact. Consciously dressed, deliberately decorated and put on display, the visibility of these bodies is enhanced through poses and gestures that have been studied in front of many mirrors. Modes of conduct have been habitually internalized or rigorously trained, and shapes have been adjusted by dieting, exercising, or by tucking and snipping away any undesired features. Creation and discipline, art and work, convention and self-expression intersect at their site/sight, and a substantial share of their appeal lies precisely in dressing these efforts in an appearance of ease and comfort. Yet immediately underneath this graceful surface lies an urgent (and often quite anxious) wish to have a body that suits one’s self. And while Georg Simmel’s ‘psychology of fashion’ invites us to consider that everything done to produce this body is driven by the contradictory yearnings to express one’s individuality and to belong to a certain group, underlying both of these strivings (and generated precisely by the paradoxical nature of this wish) is an even more fundamental longing to be seen and recognized. The modern body is the ‘natural’ currency to cash in on this desire.5

The Invention of the Modern Body

From the perspective of this ‘wish economy,’ today’s obsession with the body— the incredible amounts of time, energy, discipline, creativity, and pain that so many of us invest in it—can be seen as symptomatic of an immense yearning for visibility and recognition that is deeply inscribed into the uneven and constantly changing formation of western modernity. In its quest for individuality and self- expression, its belief in equality of opportunity and the freedom of choice, this ‘wish economy’ is driven by a logic of consumption that constitutes the body as an object of possession and design rather than that of a natural or fateful state of being. One’s place within this cultural formation, and the sense of worth that can be derived from having a place in it, is not given by birth or rank. It has to be achieved. Yet at the same time, the imperative to position oneself within this social order is inextricably linked to having an affirmable appearance; in other words, to assume a place means to be seen and acknowledged in them.6 The visibility of the modern body thus not only raises questions about what is being seen.

5 In his pioneering fashion studies essay, Simmel addresses precisely this recognition-based tension between self-expression and group belonging when writing: “On the one hand, [fashion] caters to the need for social recognition, and thus to imitation; yet on the other hand, it satisfies the need to distinguish oneself, catering to the longing to be different, to change, and to stand out” (58; translation mine). 6 This modern cultural formation emerged hand in hand with the transition from a feudal- istic to a democratic social order. For an early account of this shift and its social and cultural ramifications, see Tocqueville. 666 Laura Bieger

It also asks how this seeing works, how gazes are placed and internalized, anticipated and posed for. Theodore Dreiser’s late nineteenth century New York of Sister Carrie is imagined as the quintessential setting of this modern ‘wish economy.’ Markers of social distinction are rigorously on display. In fact, they are assumed to affect the individual “like a chemical reagent”: One day of it, like one drop of the other, will so affect and discolour the views, the aims, the desire of the mind, that it will thereafter remain forever dyed. A day of it to the untried mind is like opium to the untried body. A craving is set up which, if gratified, shall eternally result in dreams and death. Aye! dreams unfulfilled—gnawing, luring, idle phantoms which beckon and lead, beckon and lead, until death and dissolution dis- solve their power and restore us blind to nature’s heart. (270) Besides staging the fantasy of a naturalistic environment acting upon the individual inhabiting it, this passage is striking in the ways in which it fathoms dynamics of distinction executed by this environment in terms of a ‘craving’ that immediately targets and thoroughly permeates the body. A few pages later, this bodily dimension is spelled out even further. Accompanying Carrie and Mrs. Vance, her fashionable neighbor, the narrator takes us along for a walk on Broadway. Al- though the body is not as explicitly addressed as it was in the previous passage, it is constantly evoked as an object of decorum and display—staged for the gaze, being stared at and thoroughly engaged staring back: To stare seemed to be the proper and natural thing. Carrie found herself stared at and ogled. Men in flawless top-coats, high hats, and silver-headed walking sticks, elbowed near and looked too often into conscious eyes. Ladies rustled in dresses of stiff cloth, shedding affected smiles and perfume. Carrie noticed among them the sprinkling of goodness and the heavy percentage of vice. The rouged and powdered cheeks and lips, the scented hair, the large, misty, and languorous eyes were common enough. With a start she awoke to find that she was in a fashion’s crowd, on parade in a show place — and such a show place! (285-86) The atmosphere of this scene is one of dense proximity. Overt exchanges of gazes and smiles and intimate scents and sounds diminish distances between individual bodies. In this sensually electrified environment, looks are not merely posed but rigorously anticipated and magnetically drawn into this space in which they are directed by rustling gowns and the tactile work of elbows in ways that create an almost physical presence of the narrated bodies. In fact, the passage ruthlessly exposes the decorated and consciously positioned body as a marker of wealth and material success. And as much as this scene dazzles Carrie, she cannot but notice—and feel degraded by—the superiority of her companion’s dress, her perfectly matching hat and the splendor of “the many dainty little things” that further enhance the other’s outfit. She “felt that she needed more and better clothes to compare with this woman” because in this environment her pleasing features alone were not enough (284). On the following day, Carrie awakes to the realization that her happiness depends on being an equal participant in this parade; that she had, indeed, “not lived, could not lay claim on having lived, until something of this had come into her own life” (288). Her career as an actress is the logical consequence of her desire for such a life, since it grants her a position “Freedom, Equality, Beauty for Everyone” 667 of heightened visibility within this dazzling environment of self-exposure and bodily display. Carrie’s story showcases the body’s function as a key player in the modern game of social positioning that I am interested in. In fact, it is the calculated visibility of Carrie’s body that allows her to claim a place in this environment. Engaging in this game, it sees, and it is being seen. In more general terms, the body thus constitutes the site at which impressions of the world enter a person’s imagination, become transformed into internal images, and are then externalized again—a dynamic that also (and somewhat self-reflexively) processes impressions and images of bodies. In this triadic function, the body is (1) a place of images, (2) a medium of exchange, and (3) the very material from which desired self-images are fabricated—images that we embody and externalize in order to be seen and recognized.7 Bodies we have seen in fashion magazines, on television, or on the streets and whose shapes, poses, and ways to dress are thus internalized and transformed into future versions of our own, more perfect body. Again and again, the physique of this body is altered to become more like these imaginary counterfeits as we attempt to match real and ideal body as closely as possible. Within the ever-changing formations of modern consumer culture, the body turned out to be so well suited for this conjoined game of image-production and self-positioning because it was fantasized as being genuinely democratic. On the level of the bare and naked flesh all human beings are the same. But this collective belief in equality does not erase dynamics of distinction; rather, it bears a precarious mix of liberation and threat. In fact, the modern democratic assumption of sameness/equality has the ironic effect of leveling individuality, thus turning social distinction and the active display of its success into irrevocable imperatives. The result is a permanent struggle to stand out from this ‘democratic sameness’ and to use one’s body (the most immediate and accessible material at hand) as a potential carrier of distinction. In a culture that simultaneously values individu- alism and equality, this struggle is fueled by two intersecting dynamics: (1) the tendency that some (for example, beautiful) bodies are collectively charged with greater worth and are thus more recognized than others, and (2) the continually growing array of practices and techniques to modulate and stage bodies according to those collectively fantasized and individually modified and pursued ideals.8

7 See Belting, Bild-Anthropologie 11-14. At the beginning of this section he writes: “We live with images and understand the world in images […]. From an anthropological perspective, humankind does not appear as a master of the image, but rather—something quite different—as ‘site of images,’ which occupy its body; it is extradited to the images of its own making while constantly trying to control them. […] Images leave no doubt how changeable its essence actually is. […] Uncertainty about oneself creates the tendency to see oneself and others in images” (11, 12; translation mine). The underlying assumption of this approach is that social orders inherently contain and are thus thoroughly structured by a particular visual field. See Mitchell 336-52; Schneck 18-23. 8 Within this same logic the body can also be used to create counter-images to prevailing norms and ideals, as in punk culture, for example. And yet I find it important to note that the unruly body’s break away from conventions functions within the reversed-but-same logic of ‘having a body’ in which individuals and groups are imperatively addressed to gain visibility and recognition through bodily self-fashioning and display. 668 Laura Bieger

While the practices and techniques to enhance and display one’s body have become increasingly diverse, two tendencies have fuelled their general growth: They have become more and more affordable and thus less refined to a social elite, and they have shifted from superficially decorating to profoundly shaping (and irre- versibly altering) the body. The historical moment to first shed light on the force of their convergence has already been mentioned: the rise of an urban-based consumer culture that took shape in the last decades of the nineteenth century. And while the fashion parades on Broadway described in Sister Carrie were clearly an event frequented by and staged for a cultural elite, and the bodies they displayed were dressed up rather than exposed (and altered for exposure), a new—quintes- sentially more inclusive and ‘democratic’—kind of fascination with the body took hold at the same time: bodybuilding. In order to get a better grasp of its significance in shaping and defining the modern body, I want to situate this trend within the context of a society struggling to come to terms with the impacts of modernization. The popularity of sports in the last decades of the nineteenth century has often, and compellingly, been inter- preted as an individual and collective effort to compensate for the ‘devitalizing’ effects of urban industrial life; to counter a sense of weakening, or even loss, of the body through shared sensations of physical vigor, speed, or skillfulness, either as a member of a sports team or (by means of imaginary extension) as a member of an audience visiting a sports event. To this longing to reclaim the body through ath- letic activities, bodybuilding adds a new and different theme, namely: the openly exposed and carefully staged pleasure of the practitioner to become an object of display.9 At first sight this mode of self-assertion may seem contradictory, especially if one keeps in mind that even though the turn-of-the-century vogue of athletics did not exclude women (the gymnastics movement, the dance craze, and the new beauty ideal of the flapper point in this direction), it was highly indebted to a crisis of masculinity. The collective urge to display the male body via sports can be seen as a direct response to the threat of emasculation posed by modern life. Bodybuilding takes the desire to be seen and recognized to a new extreme by bluntly displaying the vitality of the male body in the midst of an environment that threatens to emasculate it, thus actively toying with the risk of assuming the position of a ‘feminized’ object of the gaze. Yet at the same time, the obvious pleasure of being on display is legitimized by the sense of empowerment that derives from the practitioner’s ability to shape his physical features and display himself as object of his own creation. The first bodybuilding celebrity was Eugene Sandow. He began his career as a traditional strongman lifting weights in vaudeville shows and circuses, displaying his muscles along with his outstanding strength, but he soon began to shift his performance toward a more refined and ‘cultivated’ presentation of his body as a self-crafted work of art. To visually enhance this new strategy, he assumed poses of Greek statues and took these references as an excuse to drop layer after layer of

9 For the larger context addressed here, see Higham. Aspects of body engineering are discussed in Seltzer. To my knowledge, the most useful historical overview of body building is Böhme. “Freedom, Equality, Beauty for Everyone” 669 his garments, eventually wearing nothing but a small piece of leopard skin draped around his slender waist or the literal fig leaf covering his genitals. At his height of fame, Sandow posed as the ‘perfect man’ at the World’s Columbian Exposition and then used his celebrity status to give lectures, sell exercise books and nutrition products, and open fitness clubs across the country. Sandow was, indeed, the perfect idol of this movement since he was a ‘self-made man’ in a twofold sense: He had not only created his own and perfect body, but he had also capitalized upon it in his rise from being a poor immigrant to becoming a wealthy and respected citizen. The shift from displaying the dressed-up body of the fashion parades in Sister Carrie to displaying the un-dressed (and deliberately shaped) body of Eugene Sandow sheds light on yet another feature of this new body culture: an increasing investment in youthfulness. Sandow’s often stated conviction that ‘his muscles kept him young’ could only become an effective advertising strategy for his perfect body at a moment when youthfulness itself had become a new collective fantasy (Böhme 43). The interconnections between modern culture’s use of the body as material of self-realization and object of display with changing ideals of youthfulness are as obvious as they are indicative of the developments that will materialize over the course of the twentieth century. In fact, it has been argued that in the last decades of the nineteenth century, U.S. society had become a ‘filiarchy,’ a society ruled by ideas of progress and futurity that not only enabled the young to take on leading positions but also to define its values and beliefs.10 And while it is debatable whether this is an apt designation of the entire social and cultural formation at this time, or if the new investment on youthfulness detected here was not reached much earlier, its increasing significance as value-producing currency that—by definition—targets the modern body as the youthful body can hardly be overemphasized.11 Sandow’s case, and the increasingly body-conscious culture for which it stands, ties this modern fascination with the youthful body to the conviction that this body can, indeed, be achieved. It is precisely in this

10 Ostrander discusses the combined impacts of this ideal of youthfulness and the social reality of ethnic pluralism on American society, defining the emerging ideology of youthfulness (filiarchy) as “1. Rule by the young; the young as ruling class. 2. In a continually developing technological environment, a society which relies on the young to acquire the new skills necessary to maintain and further re-create the environment; a society, furthermore, where social values are in continual process of reinterpretation in relation to the changing environment and in their understanding of it, are superior to their elders in adaptability to the environment and in their understanding of it, and on that basis are qualified to act as authoritative exemplars of social change” (2). 11 In Europe, initial signs of this new currency are found when a shift toward seculariza- tion following the French Revolution liberated bodies from Christian conventions. The youthful body that emerged as a new ideal of beauty at this time was displayed in so-called ‘living images’ (tableaux vivants) of classical scenes that were put together by live, and often scandalously barely dressed, actors and actresses. These performances were so popular that they provoked not only an early classical fashion trend but also a related ‘social illness.’ Women aspiring to look like antique goddesses dressed in light materials to show their natural body shapes, and so fre- quently got ill that a name was coined for this ailment: the ‘Musselin disease.’ See Wolfe and Ra- schke 186; Jöhnk 75. I want to thank Annette Geiger for sharing her insights about the youthful body and its emergence in the history of European fashion that have informed these remarks. 670 Laura Bieger pairing of tenuous gift and hard-earned achievement that the dream of ‘eternal youth’ could become one of the most evocative and powerful of modern fantasies. Throughout the twentieth century, this fantasy has relentlessly challenged dress conventions, generated fashion lines and fitness trends, and more recently has produced entire arsenals of youth preserving goods and services ranging from anti-aging creams and Botox injections to skin-lifting, hair-implanting, and fat- eliminating surgeries, thus substantially altering the bodies in which we live. Of course, nobody has to use these practices and techniques, yet nonetheless their sheer availability turns visible signs of aging and ‘neglect’ into highly visible flaws that make imperative demands for individual positioning—even more so since these practices and techniques have become less elitist and less reversible in their results. And while earlier practices to pursue ideals of youthful vitality and physical vigor, for example by means of diet and exercise, have not disappeared, they are now accompanied and challenged by increasingly profound and lasting means to ‘improve’ the bodily physique. The evolution of the modern body that becomes tangible here progresses from (a) dressing the body to (b) altering the surface of the body to (c) altering its very structure. Techniques to realize the latter two stages range from ‘soft-morphing’ interventions like skin-lifting, fat-elimination, implanting silicon breasts, buttocks, and chins to ‘hard-morphing’ interventions that alter the structure of the skeleton by taking out the lowest rib to create a thinner waist or by inserting extra centimeters to the bones in order to alter a person’s legs.12 Needless to say, the demands posed upon and acted out through the body as this paradoxical site of virtual equality and practical self-enhancement have radicalized dramatically along with these developments.13 Today, beautiful bodies are not only indispensable capital, as the Yves Rocher advertising slogan “Liberty, Equality, and Beauty for Everyone” that inspired the title of this essay pseudo-revolutionarily confirms; they are also a democratically sanctioned good and thus a social obligation.14 Just

12 In borrowing the terms ‘soft-’ and ‘hardmorphing’ from digital image-making I don’t mean to downplay the physical reality of these surgical interventions. Rather, I want to draw attention to the digital logic that permeates and seems to partially rationalize and enable these bodies. The medical dimension of these issues is poignantly discussed in an interview with Sand- er Gilman conducted by Gabriele Riedle. Gilman mentions a recent case of a man who surgically removed a perfectly healthy leg for erotic reasons and uses this example to highlight and dramatize the ideological dimensions at work in constructing the beautiful body: “Twenty years ago, I would have taken such patients as examples to distinguish a psychiatric from a surgical case. Had someone come to me stating ‘I have never been happy with my left hand and want to have it cut off,’ I would have simply considered this person a case for the psychiatrist. But from an ideological perspective this patient has, of course, the same right to have surgery than someone who wants to have his nose altered or his penis amputated. The only difference is that, so far, our society has considered the desire for a hand or leg amputation as psychopathological” (78; translation mine). 13 Flusser, in a book-length essay of the same title, describes this development as a shift in the conception of human being from ‘subject’ to ‘project.’ 14 Obviously, this campaign plays with the not so subtle subtext that ‘they are the good guys’ who promise to make everyone beautiful not at the price of enduring plastic surgery but simply and soothingly by using natural cosmetics. “Freedom, Equality, Beauty for Everyone” 671 as every self-reliable person has the choice of moving out of poverty and having a good life, so goes the implicit logic of this claim: Everyone can—and should—have a beautiful body, which is assumed to be generally achievable through discipline and sacrifice. By the same but reversed rationale, those who donot have beautiful bodies have not sufficiently committed themselves to the goal of having one; bodies that are eccentric or physically neglected, and those that distort or challenge the norm, are not regarded simply as ‘not beautiful,’ but as ‘non-social.’15 Contemporary notions of the ‘beautiful body’ and the techniques and practices to achieve it are thus heavily inscribed with modern fantasies of (upward) mo- bility, boundless conquest, and the human capacity to assume the role of the creator. In a never-ceasing process of negotiation between the virtual image and the ‘imaginability’ of these bodies—the material shape and the ‘shapability’ of their actual physique—both the possibilities and the limits of this bodily production are constantly being redrawn. At the risk of stressing the already obvious, it should be added that these intersecting dynamics of body-as-self-production are closely tied to the evolution of capitalism. The radicalization of staging and engineering the body over the course of the twentieth century went hand in hand with an increasing internalization of body-altering techniques.16 Driven by a market-logic of technological advancement and capitalization, this mode of bodily production operates seamlessly within the ideological framework of late capitalism—with the consequence of turning the beautiful (image of the) body into the ultimate and yet increasingly hollow token of self-value.17 But since the affirmation that it pro- vides is temporary at best, the sense of worth thus gained needs to be continually reproduced and relentlessly displayed. The modern body incorporation of democratic notions of equality and the ac- celerating drive to stage and modulate the appearance of this body thus turn out to be two sides of the same coin. Together they generate a mode of bodily production in which ever new versions of the self are imagined, bestowed upon, and acted out through the body—a process in which the modern subject is substantially defined and valorized through the self-images that it achieves to animate and incarnate. The crave for recognition that keeps this engine running can only (if at all) be satisfied in brief and highly tenuous moments of ease provided by either accomplishment or amnesia.

15 A most recent ad of the budget sports-studio chain McFit is a powerful testimony to this lasting belief. Under the heading “Es ist deine Wahl [it is your choice]” it shows ‘beautiful bodies’ perfectly shaped by exercise and openly staged for display next to out-of-shape bodies hiding their failure under oversized garments. 16 One of the most recent developments of this dynamic is the equation of ‘beautiful breasts’ and ‘surgically altered breasts’ in advertisements of scantily dressed woman that deliberately display this ultimate token of female beauty as puffed up by silicone implants. Self-creation and economic investment thus triumphs over ‘natural beauty.’ 17 This interpretation of the conjunction of body and technology draws from Jameson. For a more direct address of the topic at hand, see Balsamo, particularly her chapters on bodybuilding and plastic surgery. Since Balsamo limits her discussion to the female body, I find it important to note that in our contemporary culture very similar dynamics are at work in the production of male bodies. 672 Laura Bieger

Individual Selves, Engineerable Bodies

Two things are necessary to perpetuate this productivity: the notions of the ‘individual self’ and the ‘engineerable body,’ which emerged side by side within the shifting grounds of Renaissance thinking. In fact, when approaching this epistemic correlation of self and body from the perspective of a cultural politics of recognition, it must be assumed that ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ features of the modern subject have been bound together from the very moment of its fabrication.18 The manifold interdependencies between the invention of the human psyche, resulting ideas about interiority as something that is at once highly individualized and collectively shared, and medical concerns with physiognomy as the hidden ‘interiority’ of the human body are a particularly pertinent case of this development. At no point in its history has the modern subject that took shape in the fold of these conjunctions been separable from the necessity to externalize itself. Consequent- ly, the modern subject is bestowed with the paradox to reconcile its interior (and presumably truthful) content with an externalized (and suspiciously inauthentic) image of the self—a paradox that materializes in the modern body’s need to con- solidate its existential reality with the task of being the primary material and stage for the externalization of the body’s achieved reality. Leonardo da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Figure” has captured this contradictory structure of the modern individual in an uncannily prophetic image. In the layering of ‘real’ and ‘ideal’ bodies—suggesting a continuity between them in the gesture of spreading arms and legs—the figure not only illustrates the perpetual production of self-images that is so deeply inscribed into the formation of modern culture; it also dramatizes the limits of the ‘real’ body by locking it into the rectangular confines of the square and juxtaposing it to the symbiosis of the ‘ideal’ body and the circle. In the suggested movement from the former to the latter, the figure stands as a hyperbolic expression of formal purity and elegance that may be unachievable in its aesthetic perfection, yet is posited as liberating in its will to reach out for the impossible. The ‘ideal’ features are thus imagined as the only possible and yet strictly imaginary vehicle to escape the confines of the ‘real’ body. Consisting of these two realities bound to one another, the modern body is depicted as an “inescapable prison and the portal to every conceivable flight of fantasy” (Mitch- ell 250). The narrative evoked by these two interlocking bodies is a version of the Kantian call for self-responsibility that thrusts the enlightened subject into the role of its own creator. Yet the figure also conceives the modern self as a hybrid being (part material body, part virtual image) that exceeds its material confines; in fact, it renders the genesis of the modern self as a perpetual movement from the virtual to the actual, from imagination to realization.19

18 For an elaborate discussion of this epistemic rupture see Foucault, particularly 226-423. Specific consequences for the development of the modern individual are the subject of van Dül- men. The medical fascination with the interior of the human body and its visualization occur- ring simultaneously is the topic of Jordanova. 19 Da Vinci’s insight into this irreconcilable tension might also explain his fascination and early experimentation with ‘flight apparatuses,’ which, as he hoped, might in a more advanced “Freedom, Equality, Beauty for Everyone” 673

The tension between these two states trapped in one body might be the cause for the figure’s surprisingly old and earnest (if not unhappy) face that asks to be read as expressing the difficult, potentially tragic fate of this being. Da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Figure” thus stands as a mise en abyme of the modern self-as-body formation. But how, precisely, are the real body and the ideal related to one another in this prophetic image? How does this relation capture the ways in which images of the self and images of the body are perpetually internalized and externalized, fantasized and realized? And how does the process captured here turn the inter- section of self and body into a highly productive, and at the same time highly precarious, site of the modern quest for recognition? I want to begin to address these questions with a leap to the present. If da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Figure” is the mise en abyme of the modern relation between self and body, “Stupid Girls,” a 2006 video featuring the pop music artist Pink, acts out the dynamics that it contains while actualizing them for our contemporary culture. The video is a direct commentary about today’s demands to have a certain body and put in on display. Opening with a scene that shows a small girl, about six-years-old, sitting in front of a television set flipping through the programs, the video exposes music television’s image-creating and image-circulating power to play it back against itself.20 After the introductory scene we see what the girl sees as she is zapping through the different channels. On each of them she finds a different role model, all played by Pink: a mindless shopping maniac, a tough career woman running for president, a woman on a date in a bowling alley who pulls the emergency trigger to blow up her breasts to an ‘effective’ size, a football player, an anorexic girl vomiting undesired food into the sink in the restroom of a nightclub, a Pamela Anderson look-alike in bed with a sleazy man, and another version of this woman playing ‘car wash.’ These scenes of (more or less) successful embodiment are juxtaposed with scenes in which the protagonist struggles to embody prevailing ideals of beauty by going to a tanning booth, working out in a fitness studio, or undergoing plastic surgery (here we see her right before the intervention, her naked body already marked for the surgeon’s knife). The basic plot line of the video is thus clearly constructed around the ‘individual self’ and the ‘engineerable body,’ whose various intersections produce the many versions of the main protagonist, all of which are presented as realizations of specific body ideals and lifestyles. And yet the ultimate point of this story lies not so much in the range of beauty ideals that are consecutively presented and rejected (being thin, being pretty, being sexy) but in the artist’s incorporating, staging, and parodying them by holding her own (with regard to these beauty ideals, highly imperfect) body against those ideals. stage be able to compensate for the shortcomings of the human body. In this sense da Vinci was also a pioneer in thinking about technological ways of enhancing the human body. 20 For decades, the music industry has been in a leading position when it comes to shaping and defining beauty ideals and fashion trends, a role further intensified through visually based formats such as music television, most significantly MTV and later Internet spin-offs such as YouTube, through which the availability of mainstream music videos has become close to immediate. 674 Laura Bieger

One may say that this staging of the artist’s (often almost naked) body simply repeats the modes of display and voyeurism that are common in many mainstream music videos, yet I prefer a reading in which this staging, through its blunt and obvious exposure, amounts to being more than a mere self-reflexive gesture. In scrupulously exposing her body as commodified material caught between assuming and resisting ideals, the video manages to articulate the double bind between the disorientation of who to be and how to look (and the weight that these questions put upon the protagonist’s body or take away from it) and the achievement of desired bodies. The tension thus articulated is punctured by what may be the only weapon against the reign of unachievable body ideals: humor. The shopping maniac runs against a glass door, the emergency-enlarged breasts grow way out of proportion, the woman working out on the treadmill loses her pants, the anorectic compliments the girl bending over the sink next to her for the amount of vomit she just produced, and the Pamela Anderson look-alike poses so extravagantly that she slips from the car she is washing.21 In each scene the artist plays a joke upon herself—and upon all those parodistically discredited ideals she luckily fails to accomplish. However, this strategy of comic relief is effective only because the protagonist is at once the creator of those changing bodies, its immediate victim (eventually, she has become an aged woman with a mask-like face devoid of any individual expression) and the one who regains a sense of agency by cracking a joke in the face of the absurdity and inescapability of the processes under exposure. Yet comic relief is by nature temporary, while the pressure to put oneself on display irrevocably remains.

Merging the Ontologies of Bodies and Images

If “Stupid Girls” actualizes da Vinci’s figure for our contemporary culture by showing some of today’s most common and powerful practices and techniques of self-as-body formation, it is particularly effective in this matter because it pro- grammatically subsumes image-circulating media such as (music) television into its visual politic of exposure.22 Part of the interplay of mediation and internalization of desired body images detected and ironized by the video is a focus on those moments of intersubjective negotiation that are part and parcel of this scenario. Often underlined by zoom-in camera shots that highlight specific body parts and by explicit gazes or gestures of the actors, women are depicted watching and ob- serving one another, comparing skin tones, breast sizes, amounts of vomit. The larger framework of the video—addressed by the little girl in front of the televi-

21 In the next sequence she takes a bite of her soap-soaked sponge, a sarcastic comment to the anorectic’s confession that she “had totally more than 300 calories today,” and the “say no to food” slogan revealed on the underwear of the woman on the treadmill after she has lost her pants. 22 This self-referential angle of critique becomes most explicit in the parody of the female protagonists in the hip-hop and the car wash videos, both cast in extreme gender stereotypes. Today, one may also think of new media forms such as fashion blogs, dating sites, and other social networks. “Freedom, Equality, Beauty for Everyone” 675 sion set (and by extension the audience identifying with the girl) and by the artist enacting the various roles and fantasizing herself in all those different bodies and identities—calls upon yet another dimension that is at stake here: the simple fact that somewhere in this scenario of self-as-body formation we become the object of our own gaze and look at ourselves through the eyes of others. In fact, every image of the self is permeated by these multiple dimensions of intersubjectivity; or, in Lacanian terms, nobody exists outside of the symbolic order. Every self-image that is realized and expressed through the body oscillates between various states of internalization and externalization. Time and again it is mediated by a process in which a desired appearance is imagined by merging impressions of our own body with those of others, while simultaneously seeking to realize this ‘ideal’ by means of modulating and altering the ‘real’ body and permanently comparing and attempting to synchronize the two.23 From the first moments of self-formation this process is incomplete and inconclusive; fortified by the modern imperative to strive for recognition, it can induce emotional states of restlessness, discomfort and self-estrangement that might keep the modern individual from feeling at home in his or her own body. And yet I think that this is only part of the story since the same process that causes this structural instability (and possible self-alienation) can also open up moments in which one encounters oneself (or rather, an image of oneself) and affirms what one sees. While these moments of affirmative self-encounter are by no means set apart from the collective imaginary in a supposedly hermetic psychic space, the intersubjectivity that permeates and structures them enters only as a fantasy; it is present as the imagined gaze of others.24 These moments would not exist without an on-going process of pictorial production that, in its oscillation between virtual self and actual body-image, permeates the existence of the modern individual. And while it doubtlessly produces severe tensions in the life-world of this individual, these tensions do not have to be experienced entirely as an irritation or a burden. They can, indeed, also be understood in terms of a productivity that is inherent to the constitution of the modern self and whose mental, imaginary side is a close kin to W. J. T. Mitchell’s notion of the immaterial and nomadic image. Along the same lines, its perpetual actualization in ever-new body-images can be read as corresponding to what Mitchell calls

23 Belting’s remarks about the exchange dynamics between inner and outer images can also be understood in terms of this more specific scenario of mediating body images. He writes: “[I]nternal and external representations, or mental and physical images, may be considered as two sides of the same coin. The ambivalence of endogene and exogene images, which interact on many different levels, is inherent in the image practice of humanity. Dreams and icons, as Marc Augé calls them in his book La Guerre des rêves, are dependent on each other” (“Image” 304). 24 This distinction is in the conceptual clarity here assumed practically impossible to sus- tain, since intersubjectively gained recognition needs imaginary processes in which the person seeking recognition relates a specific situation to him- or herself and internalizes the experience that has been made. This notion of ‘self-recognition’ is drawn from Winfried Fluck’s distinction of three types of recognition: recognition of someone’s existence, recognition of someone’s worth or dignity, and self-recognition as self-affirmation or imaginary self-extension. See Fluck, “Outlaws and Adventurers.” 676 Laura Bieger the ‘picture,’ the material carrier of the virtual image.25 The surplus generated by the modern self-as-body formation, and by beautiful bodies in particular, can thus be understood in terms of an immanent productivity arising from the permanent exchange between these two poles of pictorial production. In fact, this surplus quality can be read as lifting the virtual component off its material carrier and inserting it into the world of our imagination where it mingles and merges with other images, and from where it eventually sets out to be actualized again through a new material carrier, for example our own body. Mitchell only vaguely specu- lates what this kind of internalization and embodiment of images might lead to when he writes: We live in the age of cyborgs, cloning and biogenetic manipulation when the ancient dream of creating a “living image” is becoming a commonplace. Benjamin’s era of “me- chanic reproduction,” when the image was drained of its aura, magic, and cult value by mechanized rationality, has been displaced by an era of “biocybernetic reproduction,” in which the assembly line is managed by computers, and the commodities coming off the line are living organisms. (96) The most immediate and urgent question that Mitchell’s notion of images as “living organisms” raises when made applicable for our understanding of the historic conjunction of self, body, and image and its foundational function for the existence of the modern individual is: How does the body live as a “living image,” and how does one live in this body? Today’s most advanced and controversial practice of producing bodies that we can easily think of as ‘living images’ and images that are, in turn, ‘living organisms’ is plastic surgery. Its literal incorporation of images with their flesh-and-blood and most often irreversible factuality takes the modern logic of self-realization through the body to a current extreme.26 In his cultural history of ‘aesthetic surgery’ (as he calls it), Sander Gilman links the desire for surgical self-enhancement to the enlightenment ideology of self-realization and its belief in an egalitarian pursuit of happiness while stressing its evolution from a medical practice of eras- ing markers of social stigmata such as the criminalized ‘syphilis nose’ or racial markers such as a ‘Jewish nose’ to a practice of improving one’s appearance (see Gilman 17-28).27 His use of the concept of ‘passing’ is particularly interesting in

25 Mitchell writes: “Let us start again from the vernacular. You can hang a picture, but you cannot hang an image. The image seems to float without any visible means of support, a phan- tasmatic, virtual, or spectral appearance. It is what can be lifted off the picture, transferred to another medium, translated into a verbal ekphrasis, or protected by copyright law. The image is the ‘intellectual property’ that escapes the materiality of the picture when it is copied. The picture is the image plus support; it is the appearance of the immaterial image in a material medium. That is why we can speak of architectural, sculptural, cinematic, textual, and even mental images while understanding that the image in or on the thing is not all there is” (85). 26 At least as long as we stay on the level of actually applied practices. Current research in biotechnological engineering like cloning and genetic design is significant in undermining traditional assumptions about human nature, but as actual practices of self and body formation they are still far from being applied. 27 Gilman uses the term ‘aesthetic’ surgery to emphasize the development of this practice toward a self-chosen and non-restorative beautification of the patient’s body, which is by far the most common use today. I prefer the terms ‘plastic’ or ‘cosmetic’ surgery because it foregrounds “Freedom, Equality, Beauty for Everyone” 677 this context as it suggests that this kind of intervention gained its initial popularity because it could create a make-belief reality that allowed a person to assume a bodily appearance with which he or she could achieve a more comfortable social position. Quite contrary to the idea of a legitimate pursuit of happiness by means of surgical beautification, the notion of ‘passing’ draws attention to the authen- tic/artificial, true/false binarism with which this practice of self-realization itself has traditionally been stigmatized. Gilman’s final chapter, “‘Passing’ as Human,” points to a larger dimension at stake in the conjunction of the ‘individual self’ and the ‘engineerable body’ that materializes here, namely, what this means for our understanding of what is human. To what extent is this category tied to notions of ‘natural’ or ‘divine’ creation? And to what extent has the ‘engineerable body’ replaced (or at least unsettled) norms, values, and beliefs about the modern ‘human’ subject?28 An indication that these developments have reached a sensitive point can be seen in the various attempts to ‘naturalize’ the surgically enhanced body within the shifting scales of its engineerability. The vast and strikingly affirmative cover- age in woman’s magazines, the increasingly bold presence of advertising for surgical interventions in print media and public places (often accompanied by financial plans), and the international production of television shows such as The Swan, in which a television network casts a person and broadcasts his or her metamorphosis through plastic surgery from the moments of selection to the healed results of the intervention, clearly point in this direction. Most recently even children’s books have become part of this discursive wave of normalization. Building on the authority of a renowned plastic surgeon, and telling its Cinderella-like tale of the unhappy mother’s ‘magic transformation’ in a cute comic imagery held in a color scheme with lots of purple and pink, Michael Salzhauer’s My Beautiful Mommy aims to explain the procedure of plastic surgery to affected children, and thus—if it is successful in doing so—almost automatically turns this tale into a desirable future for the child itself. Besides the immediate function of naturalization, these normalizing discourses have the side effects of spreading knowledge, expanding the limits of what is shown and told, and—through a suggestive mix of the common and the exclusive—enhance the status of what is being negotiated as an object of desire. By its very nature, the body is such an object. Seen in this light, the increasing popularity of plastic surgery that became manifest in the late twentieth century marks not only a shift in the search for self-affirmation from the psyche to the body, but also from the immaterial to the object.29 the notion of modulating the body like a sculpture and thus also stresses the way in which the body becomes the (raw) material of this procedure. For a recent and comprehensive study of this topic, see Jones. 28 In this regard, concerns about the ethics of plastic surgery share much common ground with the cyborg debate and the debates about the social and cultural impact of biotechnology. Useful introductions into these debates can be found in both Hayles and Brodwin. 29 When seeking a way to enhance their sense of worth and happiness, more and more people are opting for plastic surgery these days rather than engaging in (and spending money on) psychotherapy. And yet the underlying principle remains the same; in both cases they are striving for self-affirmation and recognition. See Riedle 71-78. The increase of beauty-related 678 Laura Bieger

A closer look at this collective change of mind reveals how immediately this trend has been tied to the simultaneously increasing use of digital media in the planning stages of surgical interventions. The capacity of the computer-generated image to simulate the desired and already seamlessly ‘healed’ results on (an image of) one’s own body must have substantially reduced hesitations about such interventions.30 This moment of pictorial encounter with one’s ‘future self’ derives its suggestive power from a first actualization of the imaginary and desired body in another medium; as this happens, the compelling realism of the computer-simu- lated image creates a new, digitalized reality of the body—a reality in which it can be manipulated and transformed like the image on the computer screen. Techno- logical innovations like these not only create especially realistic images of bodies and body features, they also expand the horizon of the desirable body. The new images that they enable generate a pictorial surplus with the effect of relentlessly exposing the material body to ever new fantasies and desires of modulating it. On the conceptual level, this last example addresses the understanding of images implied here. In fact, I take images not to be secondary to and derivative of the world, but as a constitutive part of it. Rather than eclipsing reality, they provide a vital and indispensable mode of access to it. When brought to the issue of body- as-self-production and its role in the modern quest for recognition, the processes and dynamics at stake are understood as being genuinely permeated by and mediated through images. It should have become clear by now that I further assume acts of affirmation and recognition to constitutively imply acts of seeing, and that I understand seeing as a historically contingent practice with profound changes under the influence of, for example, technological innovations. In fact, when bodies become objects of perception, they cannot but be perceived through the lens of current technologies, media, and the images that they produce,31 which also means that an encounter with oneself as image, or rather through images, is not necessarily a moment of misrecognition or deception. If self and body are related to one another again and again in a pictorially infused and mediated process of identity formation as I suggest, these encounters are genuinely instable and volatile, and are thus, almost by definition, precarious for the person experiencing them. Yet such encounters are surgery in Germany since the mid-1990s underlines this point. By 2008, the number of reported interventions rose from 150,000 to 700,000; in the same time period, Germans spent one billion euros annually for beauty-related interventions. See Kullmann 48. 30 See, for example, Elmer-DeWitt. A reverse dynamic of this digitalized body-imagination can be traced through internet portals such as Facebook, MySpace, or Parship where many us- ers opt to post pictures of themselves that have been artificially smoothened and manipulated; obviously, such enhanced body-images conflict with the way these bodies are seen and desired. 31 For the general argument about the historicity of seeing, see Crary. The close interrela- tion between body and medium that becomes tangible there has caused Belting to suggest a re-thinking of the ambiguous relation of image and body. For him, the medium contains a twofold relation to the body: (1) we think of material carriers of mediation as the literal ‘bodies’ of images, and (2) media profoundly shape our perception of our bodies. In Belting’s words: “They [media] direct the experience of our bodies in the act of perception to the extent that we use them as a model to try out and study our self-perception as well as the externalization of our bodies” (Bild-Anthropologie 13-14; translation mine). “Freedom, Equality, Beauty for Everyone” 679 neither necessarily traumatic nor illusory in the sense of disclosing an impossible reality of the self behind its image. These assumptions about the ontological and epistemological status of the body-image-relation set this approach apart from all those models of identity formation that are founded in the Lacanian ‘mirror stage’; where this approach sees genuine productivity that can potentially lead to a positive self-relation (no matter how fleeting and tenuous), those other models see lack and misrecognition.32 This important distinction deserves further explanation. For Lacan, our sense of self is formed in the moment in which we recognize ourselves in the mirror—an approach in which identity formation is, at least partially, theorized from a pictorial perspective. But since images are held to be deceptive, this primal scene of identity formation is inherently traumatic: As we experience our body in the mirror as belonging to us and being ‘whole’ for the first time, we also perceive it across a distance, as removed and separated from us. And thus our self-formation is inscribed with the imagination of a body—our body—that is not only irretriev- ably removed, but also always already an abstraction. In the words of Dietmar Kamper: “The body remains the fragmented body. The whole body is not a body but an image” (45; translation mine). To reiterate the crucial point of this approach: Since the self is constituted by identifying with the body(-image) in the mirror, it is also and irreconcilably split along the lines of body and image. By the same token, the body that positions us in the world becomes an irrevocable site of alienation and exile, and identity becomes a state of latent or explicit paranoia. Because it is mediated through images (this model assumes a structural automatism that I don’t find fully compelling), identity is in principle pathologic. While I agree with the foundational instability of identity imagined by Lacan and with the unease that its restless and provisional nature can pose upon an individual, I refuse to think that this basic constitution needs to be thought of as categorically pathological.33 Instead, what is inscribed into the primal scene of self-formation as

32 In this landmark essay on the ‘mirror-phase’ Lacan writes: “The fact is that the total form of the body by which the subject anticipates in a mirage the maturation of its power is given to him only as a Gestalt, that is to say in an exteriority in which this form is certainly more constituent that constituted, but in which it appears to him above all in a contrasting size that fixes it and a symmetry that inverts it which are in conflict with the turbulence of the motions which the subject feels animating him. Thus this Gestalt—whose pregnancy should be regarded as linked to the species, though its motor style remains unrecognizable—by these twin aspects of its appearance, symbolizes the mental permanence of the I at the same time as it prefigures its alienating destination. It is pregnant with the correspondences which unite the I with the statue in which man projects himself, with the phantoms that dominate him, or finally, with the automaton in which, in an ambiguous relation, the world of his fabrication tends to find comple- tion” (95-96). This misrecognition of the Gestalt of the whole body seen in the mirror as our body rather than its image returns to haunt us in dreams of the fragmented body, indicating that we should, indeed, “start from the function of misrecognition that characterized the ego in all of its structures” (98). Althusser takes up this figure of thought in his influential essay to explain the subject-forming impact of ideology that he calls ‘interpellation.’ 33 This categorical pathologization of identity rests upon an understanding of images as being secondary and deceptional that many visual culture scholars contest as outmoded. Claims to redefine the status of the image and practices of seeing, and to reconsider their epistemological, cultural, social, political, and economic function, have been made under the labels ‘pictorial 680 Laura Bieger a lack that is at once constitutive and foundational in the Lacanian model can also be understood in terms of a drive that is not initiated by a need to compensate for something it is genuinely lacking, but rather as a productivity that is driven by the very impermanence of self and body—a productivity that obviously and maybe even parasitically lives off the modern individual and its craving for recognition, yet without axiomatically disturbing or traumatically wounding it. In both accounts we are dealing with a wish for recognition whose appetite for images can be satisfied temporarily at best. But whereas in the psychoanalytic model this wish is driven by a desire that operates from an initial moment of lack and a corresponding urge to compensate for it, the alternative drive is conceived rather as an affective desire for one’s production of self and body that is not generated by compensation but by the inherent pictorial surplus of a productivity that constitutively exceeds itself.34 From this latter perspective, the instable and nomadic constitution of identity is generic rather than pathological; it is at once formed and transformed. This generic ‘state of becoming’ is also and precisely where the modern imperative for recognition can best take hold. And while this imperative may very well be a demand that almost permanently mediates and in- filtrates the modern relation of self and body, the identities that it produces are not hermetic panic rooms. Rather, the constitutive open-endedness of their formation keeps them from freezing into stable images of the self. This also means that the perpetual interplay between self, body, and image is not, per se, a process of self- objectification and misrecognition, but that the images and positions consolidated in this interplay are always in motion. They are passed through, worn out, become distorted, vanish, and take shape again. And from time to time one might even fall out of them. Mitchell’s vitalistic understanding of pictorial production draws our attention to the uncontrollable and unpredictable (and in this sense anarchic) drive inherent to the modern self-as-body-production—a drive which I take to be fueled from two different directions: through the relentless generation of imagined and desired bodies and their perpetual and precarious effect to destabilize and challenge existing body formations, and through the body’s natural state of being a living organism that grows and decays. And while I certainly do not want to negate the extent to which this productivity can generate problematic image- and life-worlds, foreclose positive self-relations, and create claustrophobic, even traumatized bodies, I want to insist that these outcomes are not the result of a psychological or structural automatism that is indebted to a primal lack or a foundational state of woundedness. They are life-forms that are part and parcel of the texture of mod- turn,’ ‘iconic turn,’ or ‘visual turn.’ For a summary of this debate and its main concerns, see Mitchell 336-56. 34 Mitchell discusses these two wish economies in relation to the mode of pictorial production they enable (58-106). The alternative notion of desire I evoke here (and that is also used by Mitchell) draws on the distinctions made by Gilles Deleuze who writes: “For me, desire contains no lack whatsoever; just as much as it is not given by nature; it is part of a heterogeneous formation that is, first and foremost, functional; it is process contrary to structure or genesis; it is affect, contrary to emotion; it is ‘here-ness’ (individuality of a day, a season, a life), contrary to subjectivity; it is event, contrary to thing or person” (237; translation mine). “Freedom, Equality, Beauty for Everyone” 681 ern culture. Yet if an inextricable relation between image and body like the one posited here—be it pathological or not—is part of the modern condition, a crucial question remains: How does the body live as ‘living image,’ and how does one live in such a body?

‘Living Body-Images’: Wanting Desire, Love, Kinship, Destruction

I want to tentatively call this modern life-form the living body-image, a term that is not meant to designate a cohering reality of the modern body, but a striking tendency in defining the relation between self and body that concerns us here. This life-form is caught in a dilemma that constantly renews itself via a structural antagonism of its constitutive parts. It is inherent to the pictorial drive toward stabilizing an image. In Mitchell’s terms, the transformation of the nomadic and virtual ‘image’ into the confines of a material ‘picture,’ and as such, a drive that the body, by its very nature as a living organism, has to resist and attempt to reverse. In other words, being a living organism means something entirely different for the vitality of a body than it does for the vitality of an image. The structural tension at stake is founded on the level of the different ontologies of body and image, and as I have tried to show thus far, the circumstances of our time tend to favor the image-side of the modern body, and thus the forces that aim at freezing the body within the confines of a desired shape—like a film still of a fashion photograph—are strong. I mean this literally: The body-image is to a substantial degree an arrested body. It knows instinctively how it looks most favorable, and it has internalized a wide-ranging repertoire of poses to present itself. Display has become its ‘natural’ state, and the implications of this mode of being are quite profound. Bluntly put, the contemporary pairing of a naturalized hyperconsciousness of being-an- object-of-the-gaze with the potency of contemporary modulating techniques creates bodies that are better suited to be looked at than lived in. Difficulties in sleeping on one’s belly with breast implants, health problems such as permanent exhaustion due to silicon intolerance, or the need to learn how to walk again after having undergone leg-extension are just a few examples that come to mind— examples that all concern ‘successful interventions’ while the risk and reality of failure is, of course, always right around the corner. And yet, there is an even more immediate reality affecting the lives of these bodies that results from the ontological antagonism mentioned above. The pictorial drive of the image moves toward arresting the body not just on the level of a body consciousness, but also on the level of its material being. Diets and fitness programs attempt to confine it to certain shapes, Botox injections eliminate wrinkles by means of paralyzing nerves and unavoidably also freezing facial expressions, and while this injected poison immobilizes facial gestures for only a short time, the results of skin tightening face lifts produce similar effects that last substantially longer. The price for most alterations performed to create a beautified surface of the body is a tightening of this very surface and a loss of flexibility—a price that is most dramatically captured in the shift from wrinkle to scar. At the same time, all 682 Laura Bieger of these attempts to stabilize the body within the confines of a desired image are countered by the body’s natural state of being a living organism that, for biological reasons alone, can never stay the same. Diets and exercise plans must be changed in order to remain effective, Botox injections wear off, surgical interventions need to be repeated; one can hardly escape the impression that these bodies are caught in an irresolvable tension between attempts to freeze, and counter-attempts to distort, the image they are supposed to incorporate. Not surprisingly, this has also changed the way we look at bodies. We have learned to scan their features for signs of this struggle: signs of aging, treatments, or interventions. Does this tactile mode of looking mean that these bodies not only want to be looked at, but also touched? Mitchell suggests thinking of images in terms of their vitality instead of their meaning or their function and arrives at the following question: What do they want and need from us as their spectators? So let me ask with Mitchell: What do these body-images want from us? How do they want to be looked at and desired, and what does this say about their lives? I would like to conclude this essay by way of briefly discussing the four modes of image-spectator relation that Mitchell proposes as ways of approaching this question; and I want to do so by way of sketching four cases that paradigmati- cally stage and embody these different modes: The work of the performance artist Vanessa Beecroft shows how these bodies want to be desired; Cindy Sherman’s photographs show how they want to be loved; Madonna, with her 2008 album Hard Candy, shows how they want our kinship; and the life and work of the performance artist Orlan shows how they long to be challenged and destroyed. Case 1: A typical Vanessa Beecroft performance goes like this: About fifteen to twenty identical looking ‘girls’ (as Beecroft calls her models) in outfits like rhinestone bikinis paired with spike heeled sandals, army caps and high heels, tight sweaters and innocent-looking girls’ underwear paired with braided red wigs and high heels are grouped into a tableau vivant and put on display in the space of an art institution (the Guggenheim in New York, the ICA in London, the Italian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, the Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst in Leipzig, to name just a few).35 The models neither speak nor make eye contact with each other or with anyone else in the invitation-only audience. For the sake of the visual spectacle they collectively embody, they are “mute, alert, non-confrontational, expressionless.” In the mesmerizing beauty of their impact as a group they lose all individual traces, evoking a “potentially endless supply […] available for immediate mobilization” (Avgikos 106). The comforting familiarity of these bodies—one knows them so well from endless representations in our visual media that they almost seem banal—is countered by the inescapable immediacy of their vulnerable presence, a tension that is heightened by the staged proximity between the models and their audience. Willingly or not, the spectators are drawn into the scenario of display: As they stand close enough to touch these objects of desire, they are invited to just look and are cautious not to be caught staring.

35 A concise and insightful discussion of her works is given in Avgikos 106-09. The article is richly illustrated. For a broader overview see Geiss and Branca. “Freedom, Equality, Beauty for Everyone” 683

The visual imagery that is produced during these performances for wide cir- culation in the art world and beyond suggests that, despite the live encounter between models and audience, the camera is yet in a more intimate position. Its gaze gets closer, zooms in and lingers on body parts most spectators only timidly dare to brush over. The bodies on display in Beecroft’s ‘living images’ are at once un- resistingly present and uncannily remote. Their beauty involves the audience in a libidinal game of fort-da, absence and presence; these bodies want to be desired, and thus the only return they give is the longing to “have [them], take possession of [them], master [them]” (Avgikos 121). Yet when looking at the retrieved photographs later, it turns out that the camera did it better, and it is in this gap that the irretrievable distance between the bodies and their adorers becomes most pains- takingly clear—and these bodies are most overtly fetishized. Case 2: Cindy Sherman’s photographs play with a simple but effective formula: They all show the artist herself in different situations, genres, bodies, and identities.36 As her work progresses from the “Untitled Film Stills” series of the 1970s to her work on fashion and the “Fairy Tales” and “Disasters” photographs of the 1980s on to the “History Portraits” and “Sex Pictures” of the 1990s, her staged body and the persona acted out by it always constitutes the center of attention. We see her up close, shot from above, lying on an unmade bed in underwear and an unbuttoned male shirt, her body twisted, her mouth open, her eyes fixing an uncertain point on the ceiling; we see her in a short skirt and a coat slung around her shoulders, kneeling on a kitchen floor with an open bag of groceries in front of her, looking up at us with sturdy eyes, her knees spread open; we see her as a teenage girl with uncombed hair and moist and hollow eyes, her naked arms held close to her thin body which is covered only by a laced piece of underwear and shiny black sheet; we see her as an aged woman in historical dress posing for a Renaissance-style portrait while randomly exposing her enormous breasts. Sometimes we don’t see her at all until we start searching for her, our gaze carefully scanning an amorphous pile of mud and junk in which we discover seem- ingly disconnected parts of her body; at other times we detect such body parts in assemblages of sex toys. Insisting that these photographs are not to be read as self-portraits, Sherman uses her body to present herself in stereotypes and simultaneously challenge them by distorting her body or freezing it in the moment of a silent scream, creating the discomforting sense that we are witnessing a scene in which something has happened that escapes our comprehension. Cast into an aura of speechlessness, the body of these images becomes the sublime object of ideology, “the all, the total- ity, the incomprehensible. In short, it becomes an idol” (Mitchell 121). Or rather, the idol lies behind the picture; the represented body is caught in stereotypes, arrested, distorted, traumatized—and yet it points toward the idol. In order to liberate this ideal body outside the picture, it needs to be sacrificed within it, and it is precisely in this sense that the bodies we see demand our unconditioned love and worship.

36 For useful overviews, see Felix and Schwander, and also Loreck. 684 Laura Bieger

Case 3: While it may be not surprising to find Madonna’s body on this list, it might seem at least counterintuitive to find it not as the paradigmatic candidate wanting desire or love, but kinship (although, I should add, this is only one of the possible Madonnas I could discuss here). The image practice belonging to this spectator-object relation is not fetishism or idolatry, but totemism: a practice signifying the clan, tribe, or family, its literal meaning being “[s]he is a relative of mine” (75). Madonna has been around for so long that she has become an ex- tended member of the family; we know about her relationships and marriages, her role as a mother, her religious beliefs, her work-out plans and eating habits, the condition of her health, her struggle with her aging body. If totems are “familiar, everyday items, usually from the natural world, that have been found […] and have subsequently become foundational for identity” (122), Madonna’s thoroughly en- gineered and yet obviously aging body-as-totem not only manifests the familiarity of this body, but also its key role in a collective attempt for its naturalization. The aspect of identification is most important here; the excessive display of her desired bodies serves as a backdrop for generations of women struggling to figure out who they want to be. Taking us to the realm of ‘mimetic desire,’ totemism expresses the want of something because others want it; and to want this thing as a ‘tran- sitional object,’ an object of love and abuse, affection and neglect, from which there is something to learn and that—in contrast to the excessive clinging to the fetish—one will eventually let go.37 If there is something to learn from this body it can only be assessed by looking at it in all the shapes and formats in which we are exposed to it: We see it dancing in tight outfits in her videos, oversized and with a mask-like face on billboard ads for the H&M collection she designed in 2007, on the cover of her recent album and the polished photo-campaign promoting it, or in less polished, ‘stolen’ paparazzi shots and ‘real life’ pictures taken at social events on red carpets. The most ap- parent impression conveyed by all of these images is a hardening of her body, a tendency that is, willingly or not, evoked by the title of her album Hard Candy and its cover art showing off her muscular body as an achievement of will-power and discipline, but dressed in an outfit reminiscent of her earlier ‘soft candy’ days. At the risk of taking this analogy too far, I want to suggest that this process of hardening might be indicative of a ‘fossilization’ of this (collective) body, and as such, as the material image of a life vanishing and becoming extinct.38 Case 4: Since the beginning of her work on “The Reincarnation of St. Orlan” in 1987, the performance artist Orlan has dedicated her life to transforming her body for the sake of art.39 With a series of nine surgical interventions she aims at a complete metamorphosis, the creation of a new self. The provocative edge of her work lies not only in orchestrating and pursuing her own bodily transformation, but in turning the surgical interventions and the following processes of

37 The notion of ‘mimetic desire’ is taken from Girard, Violence and the Sacred, and the ‘tran- sitional object’ is taken from Winnicott, Playing and Reality; both are discussed in Mitchell 75. 38 The move from totem and fossil suggested here with regard to the ‘body-image’ takes up Mitchell’s reflections about this relation. See Mitchell 166-68, 177-87. 39 For a comprehensive account of this project, see Hirschhorn. For a brief discussion of this project and its place within a history of plastic surgery, see Gilman 219-24. “Freedom, Equality, Beauty for Everyone” 685 healing—those moments at which the body being made to incorporate a desired image is actually cut open, and then coping with the resulting wounds—into live performances and mediated spectacles. Insisting on local rather than general an- esthesia, she remains conscious during the interventions, reads psychoanalytical texts, or looks into the camera while the skin behind her ear is sliced open and lifted up before the eyes of her audience outside the operating room. Goals of interventions have varied from the realization of Western art’s ideals of feminine beauty—the chin of Botticelli’s Venus, the eyes of a Fountainbleau Diana, the mouth of Boucher’s Europa, the forehead of da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, and the nose of Gerome’s Psyche—to the use of liposuction to retrieve ‘material’ for related work such as collages of photo imagery on blood-soaked gauze and, most recently, the insertion of ‘horn’-like implants on her forehead. Orlan uses her body and its transformation to showcase the hidden sides and structural contradictions of the modern body-as-image, and it is not far-fetched to call her relation to this body—her own body—iconoclastic. “When [a picture] asks to be shattered, disfigured, or dissolved, it enters the sphere of the offending, violent, or sacrificial image”; such pictures—or, rather, such bodies—are offensive because “they take up residence on the front lines of political and social conflict. […] They make their appearances in these conflicts not only as causes and provoca- tions but as combatants, victims, and provocateurs” (Mitchell 74, 128). Orlan has specified such a front line when she called her work “a struggle against the innate, the inexorable, the programmed, Nature, DNA […], and God!” Much in the spirit of jouissance that Mitchell linked to this pictorial practice, she celebrates the iconoclasm acted out against her body as a source of self-empowerment: “I can observe my own body cut open, without suffering! […] I see myself all the way down to my entrails; a new mirror stage. I can see to the heart of my lover; his splendid design has nothing to do with sickly sentimentalities —Darling, I love your spleen; I love your liver; I adore your pancreas, and the line of your femur excites me.”40 Ending on this admittedly extreme note, I am not suggesting that Orlan’s case foreshadows the future of the modern body to a greater extent than any of the other cases presented here; I am also not saying that these four cases are the only scenarios to consider when thinking about the life of this body. What I am saying, however, is that the need to produce visibility and recognition, and to incorporate images to meet this task, captures the life of this body in the precarious fault-line of being-a-body and being-an-image. There is no doubt that Orlan’s way to negoti- ate the tensions deriving from this ontological antagonism is the most physically brutal and dramatic of the cases discussed. And yet I wonder how much it has already (in less excessive versions) become a much more common practice than we would like to believe. The less orchestrated but even more prominently mediated iconoclasm of celebrities such as Britney Spears and Amy Winehouse may point in this direction.41

40 Quoted from www.orlan.net. 41 Amy Winehouse’s death was looming but had not yet happened when I first wrote this closing line. From today’s perspective, turning to Lady Gaga would be another, more optimistic way of ending this final section. For a respective discussion see Loreck, “Küss mich, Küss mich.” 686 Laura Bieger

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