Mirzoeff - Bodyscape: Art, modernity and the ideal figure

Your body is not itself. Nor, I should add, is mine. It is under siege from the pharmaceutical, aerobic, dietetic, liposuctive, calorie-controlled, cybernetic world of postmodernism. The body has become a central concern both in academia and the wider culture, providing one of the few points of direct contact between these often divorced spheres. After the scandal over Robert Mapplethorpes 1988 exhibition, the rise of new techniques of medical imaging of the body, and the dissolution of many of the norms of sexualized identity, the body question continues to gain urgency. Indeed, at all times of social uncertainty in the West, the representation of the body has been a key concern. The current moment is an amplification of the experience Walter Benjamin perceived in the generation who lived through the First World War: A generation that had gone to school on a horsedrawn street car now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath those clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile, human body (Benjamin 1968:84). Today the sky itself has changed, as a result of pollution, global warming and deforestation. Rapid and dramatic shifts in technology occur every year, not once a generation. In a world where change has become the norm, it seems inevitable that the body must change as well. Yet there is a sense, articulated by Benjamin, that if the body changes, then everything has been transformed. The body is at once the final point of resistance to the global imperatives of postmodernism and the first to be affected by them.

In recent years, there has been a rush to claim that such transformations have already occurred. Critical theorists have proclaimed the appearance of the body without organs, while technology enthusiasts have hailed computer environments as a new form of communication beyond the limits of the individual body. But it may be premature to announce such an epochal shift. The early Christian prophet Origen convinced his followers in the second century AD that the human body was about to be destroyed by God, and ever since messianics have waited on hilltops for such dawns, only to be disappointed time and again. It is thus more than coincidence that announcements of the radical transformation of the body as we know it have the flavour of Christian eschatology. In the early excitement over postmodernism, it seemed that some such millennial moment was at hand. Now the postmodern seems rather less dazzling, and rather more problematic. As the divisions between the developed and underdeveloped world sharpen, and as racism and nationalism grow daily, the philosopher Jean-Franois Lyotards gnomic comment that there is a certain sorrow in the zeitgeist once again appears closer to the spirit of the postmodern. In this sense, the postmodern is not so much beyond the modern as a crisis of the modern. The goals and methods of the modern period seem open to question as never before, causing some to seem transcended, others newly contemporary, and others simply beside the point. These tensions are exacerbated by the divide between the relatively few Western nations which might be considered postmodern and the much larger group of nations for which modernism and modernizing are still key issues. The purpose of this book is to pursue a series of historical investigations into the visual representation of the body to see how much it has really changed.