For the next few weeks, thousands, hundreds of thousands, possibly millions will remember, laud, argue over, and grieve Michael Jackson. His death, like his life, was utterly mediated–broadcast live on national television, Twittered, Facebooked. We were able to follow the accretion of details and speculations (facts?) in real time, as the status of Jackson’s body was updated (he was dead, he was rushed to the hospital, he was in a coma, no, he was dead). His death even precipitated a rush of other celebrity death notices, hoaxes that mutated across the internet. That Jackson’s death should precipitate so much confusion and rumor is commensurate with his strange life.
Jackson was probably the first person in the world to live a truly mediated life. From the age of eleven, Jackson’s image, voice, and dancing body became the communal property of the modern (industrialist, capitalist) world. Written roughly the same time as young MJ’s rise to national prominence, Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle opens with the following salvo: “In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.” What was Michael Jackson’s life but a series of transmogrified spectacular representations? Not only did we hear the development of modern music through his records, or watch fashions change through his bizarre styles, but, most significantly, we saw in Jackson a mapping of spectacle culture on to the very body itself. Like his character who mutates in the iconic “Thriller” video, or the faces at the end of his “Black or White” video, Michael Jackson’s body slowly morphed before our collective eyes, mediated in print and video, discussed and mocked and puzzled over. A full accounting of Jackson’s eccentricities is neither necessary or possible here, but it’s worth pointing out that the man’s level of estrangement was of such an acute degree that, beyond attempting to remap the world (turn it into a Neverland) and reconfigure the flow of time (an attempt to reach an imaginary past), he remapped his whole body.
While he wasn’t the first celebrity whose body became a site of/for spectacle culture (Marilyn Monroe springs immediately to mind), Jackson’s corpus is undoubtedly the signal symbol of the mediated American Dream, the most hyperbolic example how the human body might mediate consumerist desires. As Debord also pointed out in Society, “The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.” The death of Michael Jackson is precisely not the death of Michael Jackson’s body, which will continue to live on, like one of the “Thriller” zombies, a spectacle absorbed and batted about by the spectacle culture. It will continue to exist as a rarefied nostalgic currency, for if we grieve the death of Michael Jackson, what precisely are we grieving if not a spectacular reflection of our own (mediated) development? Michael Jackson’s body (of work) will always be resuscitated as a nostalgic marker for at least three generations of Americans (and the rest of the world, really). I do not believe that most of us mourn the death of Michael Jackson; instead, we continue to participate in his spectacle (or, rather, the spectacle of him) as a means of prolonging our own vitality and placating our own sense of self. It is not the loss of Jackson that we might acutely feel but instead a demarcation upon our own mortal bodies, for if a changeling like Jackson cannot escape bodily death, what hope do we have? At the same time, paradoxically, participating in the spectacle of the death of Michael Jackson’s body partially alleviates (even as it subtly calls attention to) these anxieties. By affording Jackson (the illusion) of a certain immortality, we retain our own developmental, life-long investments in his spectacle, and, in turn, hope to secure our own bodies against the ravages of age, disease, decay, accident, gravity.
But what are the long-term costs of maintaining such grand illusions? As our society becomes increasingly mediated, are we arcing toward a more democratic and enriching series of personal connections, or are we fragmenting and disassociating into solipsism and self-reflexivity? Or, to return to Jackson, does his music represent personal connection and the transmission and articulation of genuine sentiment, or is it simply the glamorous reduction of crass popular culture? Is it possible to feel genuine empathy toward Jackson? Or has the spectacle of Michael Jackson’s body infiltrated our culture to the point at which any real, unmediated human response to his passing become an impossibility, an articulated fiction masking narcissistic nostalgia? Although these are not intended as rhetorical questions, I don’t suppose there are simple answers for them either. Ultimately, I think as long as our spectacle society exists, Michael Jackson’s body will continue to exist. And probably, as our culture ages–and this is scary–it will become a relic or monument to a simpler time.
In Bodies, feminist psychoanalyst Susie Orbach explores contemporary body issues within a global culture, arguing that bodies are “not in any sense matter of fact, the simple outcome of DNA,” but rather are the products of social and cultural construction. Orbach writes that her work aims “to bolster our resilience in the face of unprecedented attack and to bring sustainability to our bodies so that we can live with and from them more peaceably.” This goal is, of course, no simple task, as the course of Bodies demonstrates.
As a psychoanalyst, Orbach of course takes many cues from Freud, but in her introduction she clearly states the need to move beyond Freud’s theories (it’s all in your head) to an understanding of “the impact of contemporary social practices” — predominantly, in her book, the influence of a media-saturated, image-fueled Western culture on the rest of the world. At stake, Orbach claims, “is a transgenerational transmission of anxious embodiment.” In layman’s terms: we imprint our own desires and fears and hangups about the body–feelings generated in large part from our culture–onto our children.
To explore these problems, Orbach–like Freud–presents a series of fascinating case studies, including a man who elects to have his legs amputated in order to paradoxically feel “whole,” transgendered persons, and abused and neglected children. Orbach is particularly concerned with the drive toward “choice” — the concept that one might actively “choose” how one’s body is shaped, and, as such, she repeatedly engages the discourses of elective plastic surgery, modern weight-loss dieting, and eating disorders. Orbach confronts the reality that many of our “choices” are actually the products of “the new visual grammar” of mass media, the iteration of Photoshopped and airbrushed bodies that bombard our senses hundreds, thousands of times daily. She extends this problem beyond the West, to show the ways in which mass culture affects the psyche of the rest of the world’s denizens.
For Orbach, a future of genetic alteration toward the perfecting of a culturally-constructed ideal is a horrible nightmare. Instead, she argues, our “sturggle is to recorporalise our bodies so that they become a place we live from rather than an aspiration always needing to be achieved.” In order to achieve this, Orbach avers that we “urgently need to curtail the commercial exploitation of the body and the diminution of body variety, so that we and our children can enjoy our bodies, our appetites, our physicality and our sexuality.” Orbach’s solution returns to her concept of “transgenerational transmission” — namely, parents need to understand their children’s needs for caring adult responses, and the myriad ways in which these responses will inform the child’s attitude about his or her own body.
In the U.S., Bodies has been published as part of Picador’s BIG IDEAS // small books series and it’s a perfect fit for the series: an engaging and relevant philosophical text rooted in a central academic argument, but written in a style that will appeal to a popular audience without dumbing down anything. Like the two books of the series we reviewed last year, Steven Lukes’s Moral Relativism and Slavoj Žižek’s Violence, we might not agree with everything the author has written here, but we cannot deny that this is an enthralling and important discussion. Highly recommended.
Bodies is now available from Picador books.
Biblioklept 