Regarding the origin of the celebrity’s new body/surface:
In Egobody: la fábrica del hombre nuevo, French philosopher Robert Redeker argues that the food industry together with modern medicine and biotechnology have created a new type of body that has phagocytized the self—the cartesian ego—as if it were a “foreign body,” (in a way similar to how Max Headroom phagocytized his own mind, and viceversa):
The new body was initially a myth that emerged from the rubble of WWI and the climax of the iron and steel civilization. In 1932, Ernst Jünger represented it as the “figure of the worker.” However, the new contemporary body, the one that invades our screens and our streets, no longer resembles the stainless body promulgated by the fascists, the Nazis, the Stalinists. The body of totalitarian myth [...] is a body forged by politics. That body expressed the triumph of a political will. That body—of the athletes of the Berlin Olympic Games, of the parades in the Red Square in Moscow or the East German swimmers in the 1970s—was the anthropological and visible form of a dogma. An ideology made flesh, made muscle, made bodily energy.1
However, since the fifties, the body of the twentieth century’s political totalitarianisms underwent a second transformation that takes the same route of secularization that has led us from religion to the global market (1.16, 1.18, 2.2, 2.5, 2.12, 3.3.2, 4.13, 4.15). The intermediate stage of this mutation, the control of the body through science and medicine, has been approached by thinkers such as Georges Canguilhem and Michel Foucault.
Thus, according to Redeker:
the new contemporary body is not sculpted by political voluntarism and has developed at the margin of politics. Its currency should not be sought in political statuary but in advertising, in its posters, its advertisements, and its imperatives. Its ruling no longer comes from the church or the ideology of a party (whether communist, Nazi and fascist), but from advertising [...] Politics just plays a minor role there, it is only integrated in the form of a spectacle, that is, of entertainment.2
Este nuevo cuerpo publicitario es “plano” en comparación con el cuerpo forjado por la tradición occidental, pues en él han colapsado las ideas de yo, alma y carne en una sola entidad superficial que las hace indistinguibles: el cuerpo se convierte en vértice, en abstracción geométrica. Esta es la encarnación de lo que Herbert Marcuse llamó el “hombre unidimensional”, un hombre que a través de su completa inclusión en la sociedad industrial y de consumo se ha visto forzado a dejar atrás todas aquellas dimensiones que no son de utilidad para su manipulación. Atrapado en los aspectos funcionales y maquinales de la vida, este humano es presa de una forma de control sutil y constante que lo somete a las leyes del mercadeo y la publicidad.
Leave a Reply