More than skin and bones, the body is a hotly contested item. Without it we wouldn’t exist, yet our efforts to transcend it, escape it and control it are as old as our species. Despite its seeming obviousness, the body is also a cultural construction, built and rebuilt in the image of each and every human culture. Our bodies are also battle-grounds in the millennia-long war between essence (body, emotions, nature) and ideal (spirit, mind, intellect). Opinions about it differ and invariably dictate our attitudes towards each other and towards our planetary abode.

As long as humans have been conscious, women have been equated with essence and men with the ideal. Wherever religions, philosophies and social organisations have arisen, men have claimed precedence.  In the ongoing war against nature, men have deemed themselves less enslaved to nature and hence more capable of rational thought; hence they have claimed the right to rule and govern. Within systems of global patriarchy, women, bodies and emotions have been tightly policed. Nature and her other creatures have likewise been deemed the enemies of reason and have been treated accordingly.
 

In the course of western history, the body has been viewed as an object of temptation, a tomb and a machine. Plato, the most influential Greek philosopher, saw the body as imperfect and subordinate to the intellect. Roman Stoics likened the body to a slave, a beast of burden and the sepulchre of the soul. Snt. Paul, deeply influenced by Plato and the Stoics declared in Corinthians, “I bruise my body and make it know its master”. Consequently, the Medieval Christian body was the site of plagues and temptations; the site of sin and the very essence of the fallen world. This attitude toward the body (and, by inference, toward women and nature) shaped the dominant attitude of the West. Nor did the body fare much better under the sway of other cultures: ‘Civilisation’, wherever it has occurred, has tended to be male dominated and deeply mistrustful of the flesh and all things associated with it, such as women and nature.

During the western Renaissance the body passed from the clutches of the church into those of the state. While the Greek ideal of the cosmetic body-beautiful was revived in art, Erasmus and other philosophers wrote about the social control of the body. The flesh was now increasingly privatised, regulated by law and subjected to codes of etiquette and public mores.

Under the dictates of the Age of Reason, the body also became on object of science. Descartes and other scientist/philosophers developed a new scientific-materialistic attitude toward the flesh, separating it irrevocably from the mind. Descartes’ famous slogan “cogito ergo sum” or “I think therefore I am” reflects the prevailing attitude: that existence is not defined by material essence but by the inchoate intellectual essence of ‘thought’. From the 18^th century onwards, western science has deemed the body to be mechanical and thoughtless; both nature and the body have become the subjects of scientific experiment. Governments, who have always conscripted bodies as cannon-fodder for warfare, started conscripting them as fodder for workhouses and factories from the early 19^th century onwards. While the starving and coal-smeared Victorian poor where exposed to gruelling 18-hour workdays and appalling living conditions, gentlemen poked at naked ‘savages’ displayed in cages and wrote treatises about the superiority of upper-class refined ‘white’ bodies. When inoculation laws were passed and enforced in the late 19^th century, nationalist-socialist agendas were being forcibly injected into the bloodstreams of millions.

From the modern period onwards, the concept of the body as machine was translated into the concept of society itself as a body and therefore as a machine. Urban environments mirror dominant attitudes about the body and modernist environments tend to reflect a disregard for human integrity and genus loci (the ‘life-force’ of the natural environment or ‘sense of place’). Even modern art has been reduced to wallowing in the plastic hassle of industrial malcontent, combining hedonism with brutal body-hatred. ‘Sick’ steel and concrete buildings and abstract conceptualisations have proclaimed the redundancy of feeling and the triumph of artifice. The modern body-social is junked-up on fast food, pills and alcohol. Inhuman council flats, sterile office blocks, and fascist strip malls hem it in on all sides.

In today’s age of computers and plastic surgery, the body is increasingly viewed as something to be altered and transcended. The 21^st century body is unstable, plastic and bionic – the host of AIDS, TV-game-shows and the potential site of microchip implants, pharmaceutical cocktails and corporate biotechnological agendas. Endless plastic surgery documentaries on MTV unmask the malleability of modern body and the increasing sense of urgency surrounding body politics. Artists, writers, scientists and engineers are increasingly rethinking and restructuring the body while Matrix trilogies and blockbusters reveal new social myths about the body’s destiny as the victim of industrial overproduction and nature’s destiny as something of the past.