Versión español

Cover of Puerto Rico en el mundo

It might seem strange to focus a reflection about the spirit of our time on the body. While ideas appear to be changeable and fickle, we see the body as so­mething given, fixed, unalterable in the presence of the changes that characterize human history. However, the body is a privileged register of the historical conditio­ns of our existence. Technologies and myths, religious beliefs and scientific knowledge, eating ha­bits and work practices converge to modify the body: its concep­tion, its functions and even its own materiality. It has been said that each era has the truth that it deserves, and we could add that each era also has the body it de­serves. In Greco-Roman antiquity the body worked gymnastics, sports and pederasty; in medieval times it was a temple of the Holy Spirit, a surface for flagellation and purifying abstentions. Later on, science conceived it as a ma­chine and subjected it to the laws and metaphors of mechanics and psychology. Capital turned it into an operative body, useful and dis­ciplined, and a consuming body, seduced and controlled. What can we say of Puerto Rican bodies at the dawn of the 21st century?

What image will substitute that shirtless well-built worker''s torso operating the wheel of progress that celebrated Puerto Rican modernity in the no longer existent factories of the Industrial Development Company? Or the blond with sunglasses, pouring Coppertone over her body, that transported us to the consumerist circuits of the prodigal north? In the century of our industrializa­tion -that still languishes- bodies are formatted in somewhat con­tradictory terms of economical productivity and consumer needs. On one hand, the capitalist so­ciety seeks to transform us into disciplined producers, able to control our appetites and desires, and make bodies useful for work. On the other, it seeks to turn us into useful consumers, eager to buy all it produces, and pushes our bodies to unrestrained desire and indiscipline. It wants us to be puritans when working but play­boys when buying; says Michael Featherstone.

In the 21st century, as we enter late capitalism, what new ways of subjectivization will tie our bodies to the evolutions of power? Will they be carried out in the ways built on digital processing anticipated by science fiction, which we already see in the substitution of identity cards with pictures or fingerprints for chips set under the skin, or bar codes with our socioeconomic profile, consumption habits and clinical history tattooed on our necks? If our bodies were spatially confined by school or factory walls during industrial capitalism, will they now be cy­bernetically tied or perpetually attached to information strea­ms? Such a tendency is already anticipated in cell phones, those electronic shackles that make our bodies continually available; in cameras that make us conti­nually visible and watched over; in credit cards and chips that will permanently tie us to pointless jobs because we are unable to pay off debts that reproduce like Medusa heads.