Coming Bodies

In the 1920s when the process of capitalist commodification began to invest the human body, observers who were by no means favorable to the phenomenon could not help but notice a positive aspect to it, as if they were confronted with the corrupt text of a prophecy that went beyond the limits of the capitalist mode of production and were faced with the task of deciphering it. This is what gave rise to Siegfried Kracauer's
observations on the "girls" and Walter Benjamin's reflections on the decay
of the aura.
The commodification of the human body, while subjecting it to the iron laws of massification and exchange value, seemed at the
same time to redeem the body from the stigma of ineffability that had
marked it for millennia. Breaking away from the double chains of biological
destiny and individual biography, it took its leave of both the inarticulate
cry of the tragic body and the dumb silence 'of the comic body, and thus
appeared for the first time perfectly communicable, entirely illuminated.
The epochal process of the emancipation of the human body from its theo-
logical foundations was thus accomplished in the dances of the "girls," in
the advertising images, and in the gait of fashion models. This process had
already been imposed at an industrial level when, at the beginning of the
nineteenth century, the invention of lithography and photography encour-
aged the inexpensive distribution of pornographic images: Neither generic
nor individual, neither an image of the divinity nor an animal form, the
body now became something truly whatever.

The Coming Community-G.A