With the democratization of the celebrity status (5.14) there is also a democratization of its bodily traits, understood here not as certain proportions between its parts but as its essence as the surface/flesh of the world (5.2). An example:
During a holiday in New York in the summer of 2015, my ex- partner and I stumbled upon a very particular ad at the 14th Street-Union Square Metro station. It was a horizontal billboard with a model wearing a bikini against a bright yellow background. The woman, who stood out for the almost supernatural perfection of her waist-to-hip ratio, was surrounded by the following message in bold caps:
ARE YOU BEACH BODY READY?
The syntax of the sentence struck us both as strange and it took us a few minutes to decode it.1 The trick is that the expression beach body does not refer directly to the subject of the sentence (you) but to a subject/object to whom the question is addressed. I explain myself further: instead of asking, is your body ready for the beach? or, even simpler, are you ready for the beach?, beach body renounces to assign the body to the individual it belongs to and instead assigns it to an amalgamation of the subject (body) and an object (beach), of an interior and an exterior. This tagline, syntactically speaking, represents the zone of indistinction between the inside and the outside of the world (4.5), that characterizes modern celebrity.
Image taken from: https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/3bozvh/beach_body_ready_protein_worlds_controversial/
The expression beach body ready belongs in the same category as Beau Brummell’s “favourite leg” (2.8), as it alienates the individual from its own body and treats it as something external to itself. Its operation is typified by Max Headroom whose externalized mind manifests itself as a space (5.2), for only a body that has been emptied could be perceived as external and alien. Nowadays the office worker is office body ready the spectator is ted-talk body ready, when you upload a picture or a video you are YouTube body ready or Instagram body ready and on weekends maybe family body ready. More than a person, the contemporary human behaves like an artifact to be activated (get ready) for this or that activity. An animal (zoē) trapped in the functional aspects of its relation with the world (5.3).
A couple of days later, when we passed through Times Square we saw the same ad, which had now swallowed the entire façade of a building. I could only think of Ballard’s “gargantuan woman.” Here’s a concrete expression of the third body of the King (1.14, 4.8).
- En efecto, una traducción literal al español es imposible. Lo más cercano sería algo como: ¿está listo tu cuerpo playero/de playa? ↩︎
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