Body/Medium

The body is, it seems, the primary medium available to humans: a means of perception— via the different senses; a means of experiencing space— due to the specific shape of humans (upright posture, frontal face, symmetry); a means of expressing things— such as emotions— with gestures and facial expression. And yet the body is not simply a medium. It can also be made into one, in situation-specific ways: when it becomes part of communicative actions, conveying markings, traces and signs, or in general terms information. And it can serve as a model for other media forms: by conceiving of themselves as bodies, political, social, and religious structures position themselves in a direct relationship to humans, and at the same time naturalize themselves.

Therein lies the special quality of this medium: it is simultaneously natural and artificial, a product of both biological processes and social and cultural formatting. The one is inconceivable without the other: the formatting is unthinkable without the substrate, which can be classed as natural, and this substrate is unimaginable without the refinements and conventions that are inextricably linked with the body. The fundamentally paradoxical relationship between nature and culture returns here— two sides that implicate each other, two options that are both mutually exclusive and mutually causative. Because just as the body seems to break open the discourse, by proving to be its external condition of possibility, it seems, conversely, to exist only within this discourse, surrounded as it is by conventions and attributions.

What this means for the Christian Middle Ages is that the human body is a primary medium, mediating between God and creation, the extra-sensory and the sensory world. The classic point of reference for this is found in the accounts of the Creation at the beginning of Genesis: man is the pinnacle of creation, created in God's imago and similitudo (Gen. 1:26); God's own hand has formed him, and God has breathed life into him (Gen. 2:7). But there is also the second account, which is actually older in terms of textual history: man is driven out of paradise, mortal, at the mercy of the cycle of growth and decay, his body exposed to pain and suffering. This requires an explanation. Did God change his mind?