At a dinner party on the premises of a pop-up museum to launch an exhibition by a certain artist, I found myself playing fourth wheel to three women of indistinct age.
Most of the guests were foreign, and the women in question all had different, if Americanized, accents.
At one point, one of them leaned in and jokingly asked whether I knew why, in the old stories, witches are nearly always said to come in threes. I answered that I didn’t, and she revealed that they don’t, in fact, appear in threes, but with three in front, no one ever thinks to look behind himself.
With that, a fourth was promptly heard calling over my shoulder, greeting the others like an old friend. They were now an image for the in-gathering of the four corners of the earth, the four directions mingled together in a single black-sabbatical cauldron.
What was remarkable about the women was that I could hardly make out anything about them. Their references were intelligible enough, but one was not distinct from the other, and I wasn’t able to tell their age or background.
They all wore the same face.
A post-ethnic, almost post-mammalian physiognomy. Lips inflated, mouth sucked in, cheekbones sharpened somehow, nose shaved down necromantically. The effect of so cosmopolitan a shopping around for features is curiously predatory. Uncharitable though it may sound, one gets the sense that everything and its opposite is being communicated at once in a naively confused gathering of contrasting ‘costumes’: This lowered to look imposing; that raised to look mysterious; this plumped to look luscious, that removed to look friendly.
‘Buccal fat removal’ reduces expression as it hollows out the cheeks to achieve the permanent sallow grimace, the emaciated scowl of a parodic patrician.
In the case of women specifically, we intuit a dis-harmonic convergence between two popular aspects of prevailing culture: hyper-sexualization and anti-femininity. The dynamic is the same according to which “sexual liberation and sexuality itself are (anti-erotically) marshalled as a weapon against old mores.” The impact of artificially exaggerated features deployed to gain attention and signal status is an example of postmodernity’s use of “openness” for punitive ends.
In particular, we are seeing the rushed breakdown and reinvention of what anthropologists refer to as somatic types, or canonical features, making up the beauty standard of a given society. We may think of the stock faces in Minoan wall paintings or Renaissance Europe; Japanese ukiyo-e or Yoruba head sculptures, but official culture has also, at times, celebrated the extremes of artifice as its somatic ideal, discernable as the hallmark of a terminal culture. Consider the fetishized piercing alterations to which Aztec and Mayan upper classes subjected themselves. Today, we are witnessing the realization of the most extreme possibilities of this tendency. As the surgical arts advance, never has the human canvas been so plastic.
Our current state, however, is not owed to technical, surgical advancement alone (that is only the means) but has a longer pedigree: “How frequently the nineteenth century has changed its preferred masquerading styles … how it has despaired occasionally when ‘nothing looks good on us’,” writes Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil. And of course, the carnivalesque masquerading is accompanied by invocations of the burdens and sacrifices of a new Lent to be imposed upon us soon (vis the vilification of everything from private car ownership to meat-eating).
The culture’s perpetual carnival manifests as an addiction to novelty or exotica, together with a generalized, sometimes unconscious, transhumanism, accepting few limits on how far the human form may be altered to meet fleeting psychological fixations. This transhumanism ultimately resolves itself into a terrible, austere parody of Lent: For if we reject the old moral strictures, why not also reject the old freedoms and sources of happiness?
Instinctively, we know the legitimate use of artifice should be to enhance and not efface. But how is this instinct to be grounded?
The traditional view was that the perception of reality as such will yield certain givens. A ‘square circle’ cannot be. To conceive of it is to torture reason just as the sadistic torturing of a man is a misapprehension of the man, who was not made for being tortured, and of our own feelings towards him, for we were not made to torture (or to self-torture).
The objection that a circle can never be square, by definition, whereas a man may indeed be tortured, just as another man may torture, precisely misses the point of proper theodicy: the human being can experience untruth, alienation from the rightful definition of things, as is the case when faced by an optical illusion, without this experience changing that definition. In St. Maximus the Confessor’s terms, we have both a gnomic and a natural will, where one (the gnomic will, the impulse of reasoning towards this or that object) is susceptible to disorder, while the other (the natural will) is ever oriented towards that good which is the inalterable and constitutive end of our being.
However we alter ourselves, we should take care not to obscure the image of the natural good in us behind a twisted likeness.
Surgical Death-Mask and the Post-Modern Canon
At a dinner party on the premises of a pop-up museum to launch an exhibition by a certain artist, I found myself playing fourth wheel to three women of indistinct age.
Most of the guests were foreign, and the women in question all had different, if Americanized, accents.
At one point, one of them leaned in and jokingly asked whether I knew why, in the old stories, witches are nearly always said to come in threes. I answered that I didn’t, and she revealed that they don’t, in fact, appear in threes, but with three in front, no one ever thinks to look behind himself.
With that, a fourth was promptly heard calling over my shoulder, greeting the others like an old friend. They were now an image for the in-gathering of the four corners of the earth, the four directions mingled together in a single black-sabbatical cauldron.
What was remarkable about the women was that I could hardly make out anything about them. Their references were intelligible enough, but one was not distinct from the other, and I wasn’t able to tell their age or background.
They all wore the same face.
A post-ethnic, almost post-mammalian physiognomy. Lips inflated, mouth sucked in, cheekbones sharpened somehow, nose shaved down necromantically. The effect of so cosmopolitan a shopping around for features is curiously predatory. Uncharitable though it may sound, one gets the sense that everything and its opposite is being communicated at once in a naively confused gathering of contrasting ‘costumes’: This lowered to look imposing; that raised to look mysterious; this plumped to look luscious, that removed to look friendly.
‘Buccal fat removal’ reduces expression as it hollows out the cheeks to achieve the permanent sallow grimace, the emaciated scowl of a parodic patrician.
In the case of women specifically, we intuit a dis-harmonic convergence between two popular aspects of prevailing culture: hyper-sexualization and anti-femininity. The dynamic is the same according to which “sexual liberation and sexuality itself are (anti-erotically) marshalled as a weapon against old mores.” The impact of artificially exaggerated features deployed to gain attention and signal status is an example of postmodernity’s use of “openness” for punitive ends.
In particular, we are seeing the rushed breakdown and reinvention of what anthropologists refer to as somatic types, or canonical features, making up the beauty standard of a given society. We may think of the stock faces in Minoan wall paintings or Renaissance Europe; Japanese ukiyo-e or Yoruba head sculptures, but official culture has also, at times, celebrated the extremes of artifice as its somatic ideal, discernable as the hallmark of a terminal culture. Consider the fetishized piercing alterations to which Aztec and Mayan upper classes subjected themselves. Today, we are witnessing the realization of the most extreme possibilities of this tendency. As the surgical arts advance, never has the human canvas been so plastic.
Our current state, however, is not owed to technical, surgical advancement alone (that is only the means) but has a longer pedigree: “How frequently the nineteenth century has changed its preferred masquerading styles … how it has despaired occasionally when ‘nothing looks good on us’,” writes Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil. And of course, the carnivalesque masquerading is accompanied by invocations of the burdens and sacrifices of a new Lent to be imposed upon us soon (vis the vilification of everything from private car ownership to meat-eating).
The culture’s perpetual carnival manifests as an addiction to novelty or exotica, together with a generalized, sometimes unconscious, transhumanism, accepting few limits on how far the human form may be altered to meet fleeting psychological fixations. This transhumanism ultimately resolves itself into a terrible, austere parody of Lent: For if we reject the old moral strictures, why not also reject the old freedoms and sources of happiness?
Instinctively, we know the legitimate use of artifice should be to enhance and not efface. But how is this instinct to be grounded?
The traditional view was that the perception of reality as such will yield certain givens. A ‘square circle’ cannot be. To conceive of it is to torture reason just as the sadistic torturing of a man is a misapprehension of the man, who was not made for being tortured, and of our own feelings towards him, for we were not made to torture (or to self-torture).
The objection that a circle can never be square, by definition, whereas a man may indeed be tortured, just as another man may torture, precisely misses the point of proper theodicy: the human being can experience untruth, alienation from the rightful definition of things, as is the case when faced by an optical illusion, without this experience changing that definition. In St. Maximus the Confessor’s terms, we have both a gnomic and a natural will, where one (the gnomic will, the impulse of reasoning towards this or that object) is susceptible to disorder, while the other (the natural will) is ever oriented towards that good which is the inalterable and constitutive end of our being.
However we alter ourselves, we should take care not to obscure the image of the natural good in us behind a twisted likeness.
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