Cult of the Body or... ?

Some days ago I was chatting with a friend, one with whom I have gleefully pursued debauchery with great gusto many times, and I wrote this:

i’m about to start a crazy gym schedule which i hope will temper my smoking

The response was:

really?

sounds horrible. sports, no smoking, body cult, self-improvement... eeewww

... & when you put it like that, it does sound pretty bad. The line from Fight Club wandered through my head: “Self-improvement is masturbation... now self-destruction...”

… & while these remarks were qualified by my interlocutor in what came next (he too is trying to cut down on smoking), I’ve found myself since then pondering the line between the Cult of the Body and … whatever might evade that classification. 

Surely one modality of the superego’s commanded enjoyment in this time in the west focuses on precisely this. There are many places where Žižek makes this claim, but I was just reading a bit of Susie Orbach’s book Bodies, and it makes much the same general point when talking of the rising generation’s expectation of plastic surgery and the government’s warning us of an epidemic of obesity...

[Orbach] Your body, all these phenomena shout, is your canvas to be fixed, remade and enhanced. Join in. Enjoy. Be part of it (1). [...] Our bodies are increasingly being experienced as objects to be honed and worked on (2). Putting the body on show and making it appear “attractive” are presented as fun, desirable and easily accessible. Body beautiful and the goal of perfectibility have been democratised. Invitingly set out as available to everyone in any country in any country whatever their economic situation, the right body is trumpeted as a way of belonging in our world today (3). [...] Whether followers of fashion or health trends or not, we take for granted that looking good, for ourselves, will make us feel good (2). 

Hence the proliferation of diets (paleo, blood-type, Adkins, raw food, juicing, etc), weight or resistance-based exercise regimes (body sculpting, visual impact muscle building, vertical fitness, core training) as well as ‘stretchy’ ones (bikram aka ‘hot’ yoga, pilates, dynamic stretching, etc) and much else. It’s not just that we might want to get in shape and be healthy and so forth, we have a quasi-moral obligation to eat organic foods, free range eggs, take fish oil tablets, have a consistent cardio schedule, focus on core training, and even to relax or meditate and we can aspire to join the realm of the elect if we manage to do all of that and get ripped as well. Behold the socially-approved abdominal muscles:

One page I skimmed by told me that the body part that women find most attractive on men is a tight and toned abdomen (that’s “the other six pack”). & men want both that and a bubble butt on women between the halves of which one might crack a walnut. Similarly body-obsessed attitudes are to be found in gay culture (though we do not see a fetish for “bears” reflected in Teenbeat or Seventeen magazines). Is the lesbian community immune from this? - I suspect not, rather I suspect local variation. Craigslist personals ads in the M4T (man for tranny) category stress being “passable” and HWP (height-weight proportionate). In fact personals ads give lots of examples of this sort of mandate with regard to the body, some even shaded with guilt, as here; “I don’t mean to offend, but I just don’t feel any attraction to heavy women” or “Athletic and toned men are what I find attractive, sorry fellas.” Some years ago I was using a dating site and found a seemingly very interesting woman with whom I had a variety of overlapping interests, but then I read the text about what she was looking for which specified that she took care of her body and expected the same, thus no men with a body fat index above 12% would even be considered (looking at her pictures, I somehow doubted that she was at 12% or less, but women’s and men’s bodies are different in this regard, so she seems to have applied an unclear rule of thumb).  

We’re all familiar with critiques of the images of beauty that we are fed and absorb through advertising, how the bodies presented there are such statistical outliers that to strive to reach that ideal will of necessity lead to failure, if not bulimia, anorexia and eating disorders. Here is a bit of old news dating back to “Jan 25, 2010” (the author is Emma Hall);

Ban on ads promoting ‘cult of the body’ planned to protect young viewers

IN SPAIN, ads for diet products, some beauty treatments and plastic surgery are now officially considered more dangerous for young people than commercials for alcohol. As European governments are trying to figure out how responsible marketers and media are for the obsession of many young women with weight and idealized beauty, Spain’s government is about to pass a law banning marketers from advertising certain beauty products and services “that encourage the cult of the body” on TV before 10 p.m.

The story went on to discuss the spread of similar concerns within other EU countries.

Yet we are also treated to magazine spreads and documentaries that show us how some fat unhealthy so and so by going on a juice fast lost a huge amount of weight, felt better, looked better and also had a complete remission of a painful skin condition that had plagued him for years (I am referring here to the film Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead). And daytime television in “reality” mode actively celebrates those who - through whatever method - shed the pounds and get healthy and obey the superegoic command. 

[Orbach] We experience the wish for more perfect bodies as our own desire, as indeed it is, yet it is hard to separate out the ways bodies are seen, talked about and written about the effect of that on our personal perception of our own bodies and other bodies. The body has become a new focus in both women’s and men’s lives, no longer something secure or ordinary in itself (4). [...] Those who had previously paid little heed to fashion or health now find themselves caught up in attempts to make the best of themselves and to take responsibility for their health and well-being. The individual is now deemed accountable for his or her body and judged by it. “Looking after oneself” is a moral value. The body is becoming akin to a worthy personal project (5).  

This is a bind. No one seems to be arguing that smoking and eating McDonald’s every day, while avoiding exercise is good for you. But it seems that to begin to exercise or work out has a funny way of leading one into buying things (”enjoy!” says the superego). & of course it seems that most people would prefer to look better, be thought sexier, etc. Does anyone seriously ask what they find more attractive, fat or skinny? Undoubtedly there are those who prefer a bit more meat on the bones but increasingly aren’t such folks thought of as fetishists while others, seemingly the dominant group now, favor the tight and toned Hollywood “hard-bodies”? Fetishism here is nothing more than a function of distance from the norm.  

Uncool muscles.

& it is not simply fitness or strength which is at issue, but the right kind. Power-lifting is not thought sexy - too bulky. Sexy is lean and angular muscularity ala Tyler Durden is what’s in - and Rusty Moore, author of “Visual Impact Muscle Building” has a plethora of videos aimed both at making you spend $47 on three PDFs of his fitness plan and helping you to distinguish good muscle-boundedness from bad. “Curvy” for women has become a code-word for “heavy” and any roll at all at the waist, say when tying one’s shoes, is thought by some adolescent girls to indicate fatness. That this is nuts is something many know and yet knowing it does not seem to have much impact on the proliferation of such images as ideals. Here is a lovely example of the distinction between knowing and doing in ideology. It means little if we know, what matters is what we do - hence Pascal’s famous injunction to Kneel, whether one believes or not.

One of the most annoying things about both ex-smokers and workout fanatics is how much they talk about not smoking and working out. Ex-smokers are probably the worst, most self-righteous, most sanctimonious, etc. Not all of them of course, but enough of them to give that stereotype some grip. Fitness enthusiasts can be as talky - usually without the ‘tude of ex-smokers, but able to talk at great length about their dietary regimes and daily workout schedules, the best interval training, how much protein to take in on a work out day in light of one’s body weight and fitness goals, all of that stuff. I know, as I am sure I bored the hell out of many a few years ago when I staged my 1^st “Return to the Body.” 

So, now I’ll bore anyone reading this a bit in that over-mined vein, though I’ll try to be brief. In the spring of 2008 I was feeling sickly, tired, and out of shape. In my own estimation I didn’t look good. I availed myself of the rec center at school and did the physical evaluation they offer which measures lots of stuff but includes a fat index (I scored 23% at 210lbs). I went at it hard for 3 months. When I was done I weighed 168lbs and scored 17% on the fat index thing. But what seemed most important was that I felt great, I slept well, I had plenty of energy, I ate a lot but ate healthy, my intermittent skin problems mostly disappeared and I no longer snored. & as a sop to my vanity many people that I know commented on how good I was looking. 

Right now, I am in a much worse place than where I was when I started that in 2008. I weigh almost as much as I ever have (218lbs), I’m smoking 2 packs+ a day, I eat whatever, I sleep poorly, snore, wake up coughing sometimes, hack up smoker’s wads when I roll out of bed, feel tired and run down, I wheeze at night, my chest aches sometimes, my skin issues are re-emerging, etc. I look at me and I do not like what I see. So, I am about to do it again, another “Return to the Body” - this time hoping to do a better job than previously and to keep it up (my 3 months previously got me to a plateau of sorts and though I continued to work out until the horrible December of 2008 when I began staring into the abyss, no real physical differences seemed to manifest). 

My start date is Monday 15 August. 

But I’d rather not turn into a boring body cult monologist. Something which writing this post probably ironizes somewhat. But whatever. My pledge to anyone reading this… I’ll limit posts about all of this business to 2 per calendar year (with the next one coming only in 2012).  

Yet I know that there are some people I know that would dispute some of this (even if only in the privacy of their thoughts). They will argue, and it would be difficult to counter-argue, that not smoking is better than smoking, that health is better than ill-health, that it is in some sense ‘natural’ to find a body that is healthy and fit more attractive than one which isn’t, that we ought not to be blamed for our desires and so if our desires only include men with a six pack and women with tight and tiny asses - so be it. 

I’m reminded of a beatific moment from my childhood when, having just stared into the face of an elderly black man, fascinated by his wrinkles and white whiskers and the alert awareness in his eyes, I then flopped back down onto the backseat when my mother drove away and decided that everyone was beautiful if one really looked at them. I think I was 4 or 5 at the time. I didn’t test this maxim by epiphany, I just assumed it was so. & while I have enjoyed people watching, now and then, since I was small - this conviction has not faired so well. That, or the “beauty” that I though perceptible in all - by virtue of its radical difference from the static images of beauty that the culture industry soaks us in daily - has become something else... “common humanity” perhaps, or “compassion”...

Nowadays I am just as guilty as the culture at large in preferring slender, tight and toned - even as that preference impugns the body I inhabit. When I look in the mirror there are things about this body that I do not like, and that there is undoubtedly interference - both imaginary and symbolic - between my eyes and the plane of the mirror, doesn’t seem to matter much to my affective response. 

I plugged “cult of the body” into an academic search engine and found this: “Human, mutant, machine. On the relationship of body cult and genetic engineering” by Peter Ulrich Hein & Maria Eva Hein. New Genetics and Society, Vol. 19, No. 3, 2000

This pair of German academics give the following abstract for their article “The dichotomy of artificiality and naturalness in the cult of the body at the interface of art and everyday life—rejection and acceptance of genetic engineering.” - which strikes me as a curious abstract in a number of ways, but whatever. In their text they are interested in how cultural sources prefigure or frame ‘naturalness’ vs ‘genetic engineering’ and I’m not so interested in this question, though along the way they have some interesting things to say here and there. These authors also look at things like avant garde art as well as advertisements, kitsch and much else. Here are a selection of quotes:

[...] the modern role models of a so-called ‘normal’ or ‘natural’ person are largely nothing but fiction [...] —a fiction which is hardly aware of its fictitious character and is misunderstood as being natural.

The more nature is threatened as the basis of life, the more important it appears to assert it in the microcosm of everyday life, for example by healthy eating habits, fitness training and in the exhibition of ideal bodily measurements.

They propose 4 aspects of the body cult;

Firstly the cult of the beautiful body, a rather simplistic-naturalistic orientation; the cult of the artificial and virtual body, with which the reflection of the technical potential is moved to the sphere of fiction; the cult of the deformed body, which offers itself descriptively to critically in avant-garde art, in advertising rather more affirmatively, and finally the cult of the healthy body, where explicit statements against genetic engineering are uttered (319).

Writing of The cult of the beautiful body, Hein and Hein first recognize that many things deemed to be science fiction in the past are increasingly viable options in the present and that  “The ‘consumer-designed baby’ is a realistic option, the body designed and cloned in engineering by far no longer a figment of the imagination.” Next they observe that

[...] the production of the body as a commodity is experiencing a boom. Styling, bodybuilding and contouring serve to upgrade one’s own body. Role models such as athletes and models show an artificially tuned beauty as the instant customized ideal of style. Consumer-oriented medicine offers modifications of body shape, implantation technologies, skin transplants, the deep freezing of tissue, liposuction, plastic surgery of the sexual organs and muscle and breast implants made of silicone. Despite such large-scale surgical, chemical and medical manipulations of the natural aging process, body culture vies with the ideal of natural health and intactness. The old eighteenth-century saying ‘Nature is raised by art’ is old hat today. On the contrary: natural nutrition, healthy, natural living (diet), physical training (fitness), etc. are as much part of the body cult as artificial modifications for the involution of a nature-given body image (320). 

…I would dispute the claim of the body as a commodity here somewhat, but the general drift of this seems spot on. My issue with thinking of one’s own body as commodity is that in buying a Thigh-Master or going on some no-carb diet or whatever, the thing *bought* is the commodity - the Thigh-Master machine or the book on the Adkins Diet - that is where the profit comes from for the capitalist. The “body” that the purchaser is hoping to quasi-magically obtain does not circulate as such, it is only the desire for it which is preyed upon.

Gratuitous? Sure, but ain't they sexy?

Writing of images in magazines primarily Hein & Hein observe that;

What prevails, as expected, is in a most liberal sense erotic photography. Depending on target group and label, an average beauty and health ideal competes with expressive and experimental situations, where the frequent appearance of a doll-like stereotype in some campaigns and series of images cannot be overlooked. [...] The hypostatization of individual body functions within the frame of pornographic representations and cosmetic surgery signals a fragmentation of man as an optimizible modular system (320). 

Hein and Hein have a lot to say about body art in the avant garde, but I’ll leave that stuff (regretfully) to one side to follow the cult of the body insofar as it seems to me to parallel the popular consciousness of that notion.

... the cult of the threatened body is characterized by the vehement propagation of naturalness as the rescue from the pathologies of technical civilization—hence also from genetic engineering. The ‘scientifically secured’ prejudice is stationed on this level [...]

The cult of the beautiful body knows no genetic engineering, as far as we can see. People are free, attractive and strong without their own doing; including fitness and occasional assistance by means of plastic surgery. Compared with earlier, advertising has managed to relativize the image of the fashion doll and increasingly enacts self-confident charismatic types. It does not need to be emphasized that they thus create a virtuality of its own. The scepticism towards stereotypes present in the above-mentioned cult forms cannot be found here. Negation as a mode of differentiation is replaced by the new, demanding attention, which seems to prevalently serve criteria from the world of design (327-8).

If for Lacan, desire is, famously, the desire of the other - that is, if our innermost desires come to us from outside - how are we meant to understand the injunction that we ought not give ground on our desire? If to not give ground, means that we should not allow ourselves to swayed from obeying our desires it risks sounding like a superficial hedonism along the lines of, if you want it- just do it! But then if we think about where desires come from, we might ponder the ambiguity of “giving ground.” If a person is haunted by guilt because they have failed the desires of their parents and never became a medical doctor, even if, looked at from the outside, it seems that they have plenty in their life to be proud of and much to enjoy - the guilt here would be from having given ground, are we then asked to mark that as a mistake, as a failure to live up to “their” desire? It would seem that such a move would more fully lock analysands into socially mandated desire and thus psychoanalysis would be a tool of normalization and status quo maintenance. Yet neither of these answers seems to me to be correct. & to give ground might mean either to pushed from a course or to allow it push one, might it not?

Last night I found a text online and, probably because I ought to have been reading something else, I read a big chunk of Joanna Frueh’s Monster/beauty: Building the Body of Love. This book combines theoretical maters with anecdote and autobiography and ruminates a great deal about “beauty ideology” and the meanings that “beauty” has for women. I have a number of problems with some of its terminological choices, but that probably isn’t that important. What strikes me as interesting here is Frueh’s proposal of a counter concept to “beauty” as commonly posed (a perspective which she finds static and lifeless), namely “monster beauty.” & beyond this, I like very much her discussion of one’s body as creating and sustaining an “aesthetic/erotic fields.” Here are a few passages;

Women may be monster/beauties if we consciously depart from the idea that beauty is dependent on looks alone and instead create ourselves as aesthetic/erotic fields of simultaneously concentrated and resonant sensuousness. Doing so, we may begin to—or we may even finally— forget the anguishing “split between the dream [of beauty] and the observed physical reality” of ourselves. I am not suggesting that we forget the historical reality of that split or its effects on the bodies or the unconscious of women. Rather, because monster/beauty is a far more pleasurable condition than is the split state that stirs self-condemnation, I hope for our bodies themselves to forget the pain of beauty as a promise and an abstraction, so that joy, excitement, pleasure, humor, and comfort can fill us and pervade our aesthetic/erotic fields. As monster/beauties we can be hyperbolic, heretical, and heroic bodies, as are the body-builder, the mother and the stepmother, the teacher, the vampire, and the goddess Aphrodite. We can take pleasure in our beauty and be self-consciously erotic, while also understanding that the whole enterprise of aesthetic/erotic artifice is, to some degree, ridiculous. (Frueh 20) 

Monster/Beauty develops new modes of beauty that are visual. I agree with Phelan that “visual representation is ‘not all,’ “ because it marks a loss, in commodity culture, of the underasserted senses. For Pacteau, sight misrecognizes the beauty: she is the mother, perfectly inviting and comforting in a “sartorial skin” that is evidence of human beings’ “ ‘sublimation’ of touching into looking.” Monster/beauty reverses that process with a palpability essential to touch’s existence and operation. But I cannot betray the monster’s visual plenty through some theoretical sleight of hand. The monster’s purpose has been to show and be shown. Monster derives from the Latin monstrare, “to show”; and within the Western tradition, monsters are meant to be shown as warnings that visibly reveal unreason. Monster also derives from the Latin monstrum, “divine portent of misfortune.” The monster defies expectation, and therefore I use it as a symbol and agent of change. Monster/beauty heralds misfortune to beauty and its particular rationalizing of the human body into measurements, such as 36‒24‒36—the mantra of perfection in my adolescence—height and weight charts [...]. Monster/beauty deviates from the beauty ideal in which form, inflexibly ordered, is content; for monster/beauty shows off the more fully sensuous and intelligent content of soul-and-mind-inseparable-from-body. (Frueh 26)

Google>Image: "aesthetic-erotic field" ... I chose against the trend

Frueh is concerned in this text to assert and ethic of pleasure, specifically a pleasure taken in one’s monster/beauty as an antidote to the cultural mandates she and so many other find fault with. But there are also obstacles to such a path;

When damage exceeds pleasure as a primary mode of existence, pleasure stigmatizes the body. Lack of aesthetic/erotic failure is the “arrogance” that marks the body of pleasure as dismissible. Pleasure permits and exudes self-validation, but, [...] the body of pleasure, though powerful, cannot be granted outright authority. (Frueh 31)

There are moments when Frueh seems poised on the edge of recognizing jouissance as crucial here and not simply pleasure of one sort of another, but thus far in my reading, she has not taken that notion and its consequences on board. A few weeks ago, I had been emailing a good deal with another friend and I wrote to her about the plans to get back in shape that I mentioned at the beginning of this post. Here is some of what I said there (retooled slightly for inclusion here). 

I began be detailing both my obvious hedonism but then also my less recognized asceticism before writing...

Lacan talks about the möbius strip. Ignoring the specificity of his discussion entirely, I started to think of the two impulses above as being situated as the “opposed” sides of the möbius strip. That is, they seem “opposed”, but they are all one surface. If one could walk the möbius strip they would eventually reach the place they started but by going forward the entire time. Then I was thinking of Freud’s ‘principle of constancy’ which has to do with the level of excitation that the psyche tolerates. Freud speaks of it as if people want to maintain a sort of constant level of excitation, not too much and not too little (each of which would be a sort of displeasure). Presumably he recognizes that we want less excitation when sleeping than when awake and that how much we want varies as well during our waking hours, but that we have a sort of ‘range’ in which we operate and getting less or more is not to our liking. So, from there I began to connect this with certain ideas from Lacan, specifically about jouissance. It is neither pleasure or pain alone but something that is ‘beyond’ these - pleasure in pain, pain in pleasure. Think about marathon runners, we all know they ‘get off on’ the endorphins, but surely there is also a great deal of unambiguous pain as well. That they enjoy the endorphins is not enough of an answer to why someone would do this if we think of ourselves as pain-avoiding creatures. There are so many other examples. Have you ever met anyone who does nothing but speak about the calamities that are befalling them and who cannot stop talking about how they are suffering from this or that - have you ever thought that they are getting off on this litany of their unhappiness? That is jouissance, that “getting off on” something, whether it was horrible or a delight, drudgery or fascinating. We get that from things we like and those we don’t. If we then use Freud’s idea, that we have a ‘range’ which is where we tend to maintain ourselves, and what are desires and our psyche require is keeping that level, that of jouissance, within the acceptable range. Think of a love relationship that collapses and one of the pair, who had been just delirious with joy at his love is then just as “passionately” in despair. One could step back from the specifics of the person’s experience and see this as the psyche acting as a mechanism of sorts, keeping the level of excitation within the acceptable range. & now back to the möbius strip. The seeming difference of the two sides is only appearance, whether I am in hedonist mode or ascetic mode, I am mostly maintaining myself in the ‘range’ of jouissance, of “getting off on” something that I need. 

Thinking back to that shining moment of health and fitness in the late summer of 2008 - how I felt great and so forth - I find that Frueh’s idea of an aesthetic/erotic field of the body makes a great deal of immediate intuitive sense to me. & furthermore, it seems to me that discipline freely assumed can be productive of satisfaction and not simply submission to the superego’s command to attain the body beautiful. But I am not sure whether concepts like monster/beauty are enough - as concepts (thus as changes in consciousness, or knowing) are enough to fully resignify the doing such that it is not ensnared in the superego’s commands. 

So, the 1st question: how to do this “Return to the Body” without becoming an overt or covert body cultist and pawn of late capital’s lifestyle obsession?

Then the 2nd question: how to do this without the fantasy support that was so enabling in the past? 

. . . I know, that’s pretty vague unless you know me pretty well, but I’ll not be clarifying. Suffice to say that my previous “return” was wrapped up in a fantasy which I think was instrumental to my being so dedicated to it. That fantasy has definitely and fatally collapsed and I am uncertain about how the lack of such will effect my efforts this time around. We all need a fantasy I suspect.

…So, for those waiting for me to make some theoretical intervention in this - tough luck. I’m as lost as everyone else. I don’t want to be fat and soft, I want to be slim and tight. My libidinal attractions run similarly (if exhibiting variations too). I am as prone to fantasy as anyone else. I see and get the critique of all of this quite well, but that knowing does not seem to radically effect the doing that my body is engaged in (say, libidinal response which says yes, to the body on the left and no to the one on the right in the following picture without my intellectual appreciation of the critique this is susceptible to making one jot of difference).

I was provoked to write this rambling post by a comment that uncomfortably suggested my submission to the cult of the body, and yet I cannot exculpate myself from that. Even as imagining that the cult of the body has totally hegemonized the field of all desires regarding the body strikes me as wrong.

Susanne Sommers with the Thigh-Master

So, is there no room for thinking about a “Return to the Body” which has goals not overdetermined by these cultural forces? Is there a way to like or not like what one finds in the mirror that is not just another version of the internet site “Hot or Not” (a paradigm made use of by many dating website these days). Surely no one will despise me for wanting to be healthier, live longer, etc… right? But if I pony up for a thigh master or Hawaiian Chair or whatever, maybe you should. You should at least laugh. That said, their was an infomercial for the Hawaiian Chair which used to play at a Vietnamese restaurant I often ate at. Unlike the chair show in this clip, it was not powered, one had to make it move in those circles - I thought that looked pretty funny and maybe sort of fun.