Ideology Body Modification - Tattoo

This presentation will look at how this phenomenon has been addressed by individuals within the modded (i.e., modified) community. The explanations and justifications cited by members of this community to define, explain, defend, or laud their practices can be considered ideologies. An ideology is a worldview, a component of an individual or a group identity, a way of defining in-group and out-group, and a way of dealing with crises that confront matters of identity. Yet, an ideology also has the following components: it is articulated, conflictual, subjective, and public. In what follows, my intention is to explore how people with post-modified bodies1 strategically use their modifications in discourse; and to investigate how modification ideologies function. My intention is not to define a single and coherent ideology that can be applied to every modified person in the world, rather I will explore how some individuals within the on and off line community of www.bmezine.com (or the Body Modification ezine) use their modded identification in times of crisis. I say on and off line because although much of this community is virtual there is a good amount of these people that hang out together offline.

Much of this is evidenced on BME members’ IAM or personal membership pages and also in the proliferation of many local BME inspired events that range from ritual flesh-hook suspensions to bbqs and parties. It is also worth noting that the subjects of this presentation are either from the U.S. or Canada. I chose the examples used in this paper because they use themes that are common in the BME community and because I think they offer up interesting points of entry in considering the larger body-art modification community. For a thorough discussion of the post-modified body see Matthew C. Lodder’s web page to download a copy of his master’s thesis “The Post-Modified Body: Invasive Corporeal Transformation and its Effects on Subjective Identity: http://iam.bmezine.com/?volatile. In addition to the coining of the helpful phrase “post- modified body,” Lodder diligently and insightfully explores modification on its own terms as a personal choice, rather than as an indication of social malaise or personal pathology. This allows for an interesting analysis of the self, identity, and the body.


Ideology has several definitions and uses. This presentation relies heavily on sociologist Ann Swidler’s definition of ideology in her book Talk of Love: How Culture Matters, which explores how people use different cultural scripts or metaphors for their love relationships and how such usage alters in times of crisis. Swidler views ideology as a specific modality of culture in relation to empowerment (95). So before defining ideology, it will be necessary to briefly describe what she means by culture. Culture, for Swidler, is made up of the following: “[t]rained capacities to think and feel”; it helps to “internalize skills, styles, and habits”; it is used “to delineate group boundaries”; and “offers ideas and images that constitute a view of the world” (73-75). Most importantly is how culture works. The model she proposes is the “‘identity’ model. The fundamental notion is that people develop lines of action2 based on who they already 2 A line or strategy of action is best understood by reference to Swidler’s notion of culture as a repertoire or toolbox. In other words, it’s the culture one has internalized and uses in approaching everyday situations think they are” (87). This is of utmost importance in a discussion of body modification as an ideology. Especially, if we consider what has been said of postmodern identity as plastic and reflexive, no longer is identity ascribed, it is achieved or chosen. This makes for a more self-conscious sense of identity. The collective culture of body modification is loose and difficult to pin down, at times. Rather than offering up some systematic worldview, the general subculture revolves around identification. Since a self-identified and coherent culture of an explicitly named and self-referential “modified culture” is emerging (somewhere between parallel and collective behavior, see Bainbridge, p. 368-369), but not necessarily formalized and organized politically—in comparison to black, queer, or feminist culture, for example—the most obvious cultural marker is the modified body. Although, it can be argued that sub-groups within the larger modified body phenomena are clearly defined and self-aware: e.g., modern primitives. This lack of formalization—or status as an organized social movement—makes their subcultural identity of central importance, especially when that identity is put into question, or is used explicitly to pathologize one’s cultural or personal experience. Broadly speaking, Swidler likens ideology to a worldview. More specifically, she uses it in contrast to the terms of common sense and tradition. “An ideology is an articulated, self-conscious belief and ritual system, aspiring to offer a unified answer to problems of social action” (96). However, we must not be misled by the term system. It should not be understood so much as a logically consistent model—even Swidler admits Such as internalizing the concept of time, without such a cultural notion, how would one be able to navigate the corporate, 9-5 culture?; Lines of action are “ways actors routinely go about attaining their goals. … Culture affects action by shaping that repertoire of routine, natural styles, skills, and habits that together organize and sustain a strategy [i.e., line] of action” (82).

Instead, we might consider it to be a set or collection of cultural signs that become a “unified answer” when engaged. Ideologies (especially, subcultural ones) are less coherent in themselves than made coherent as a result of being engaged around specific identity issues or power struggles. In her essay “Culture in Action” Swidler notes of ideologies that “rather than providing the underlying assumptions of an entire way of life, they make explicit demands in a contested cultural arena” (279). Underlying assumptions are left primarily to common sense and tradition. Common sense is “unselfconscious as to seem a natural … part … of the world;” and tradition presents itself as “fixed” and an “expected [part] of life” that “establish[es] expected forms of conduct, even when people consciously feel quite disaffected from those traditions” (96). For Swidler, then, ideology is not only an articulated system of signs, but also a self-awareness that coheres around a specific social problem. Her definition also implies an oppositional nature because it is contrasted with common sense, which Swidler derives from hegemony or the “dominant conception of the world” (94-95). However, she does little to infuse an explicit notion of conflict within her definition of ideology. Conflict will be important to our discussion, however, because it fosters a sense of crisis, which is needed to in order to help create the social space necessary to engage ideology. In An Introduction to Ideology, Marxist and critical theorist Terry Eagleton examines the origins of the term ideology and how it has been used in various ways since its springing forth from the head of Enlightenment thinker and French revolutionary Antoine Destutt de Tracy while imprisoned during the Reign of Terror. Eagleton addresses such a lack of conflict in the sociological use of ideology. Although, he agrees with the sociological point of view that ideology “provides the ‘cement’ of a social formation … which orients its agents to action” he emphasizes that such a usage “too often [has a] depoliticizing … effect, voiding the concept of ideology of conflict and contradiction” (222). Eagleton’s insight and analysis of the many faces of ideology will be helpful here. In addition to emphasizing conflict, Eagleton notes other necessary characteristics of ideology: it is subject and action oriented, universalizing, and naturalizing. Subjective is not to be considered synonymous with private. Ideology is subjective in that it is “subject-centered” or identity-based. The utterances “are to be deciphered as expressive of a speaker’s attitudes or lived relations to the world” or the dominant culture (Eagleton, 19). This could be considered an engaged subjectivity.

This quality of engagement points to the universalizing or “making public” quality of ideology. Universalizing, Eagleton explains, is the processes of making “values and interests which are … specific to a certain place and time” and projecting these onto “the values and interests of all humanity” (Eagleton, 56). I would like to nuance this term a bit, especially the “all humanity” part. First and foremost it is the tendency to engage the public. The immediate public, at times, may also be the lived world or universe, so that it could be considered “all humanity” as far as the subject is concerned. Secondly, the scope of the engagement will necessarily expand past the specific place, time, and individual because it is engaging the values and interests of the dominant society. A consequence of engaging the lived world is the tendency for proponents of an ideology to naturalize their interests. Naturalizing is an attempt “to identify [beliefs and interests] with the ‘common sense’ of a society so that nobody could imagine how they might ever be different” (Eagleton, 58). For purposes of this presentation, naturalizing has less to do with completely supplanting existing notions of what is considered natural or God given, than a re-alignment or re-framing of pre-existing notions of what is natural. The most important consequence of all these characteristics is that they are necessarily action-oriented. In Eagleton’s words ideological discourses “must be translatable … into a ‘practical’ state, capable of furnishing their adherents with goals, motivations, prescriptions, imperatives, and so on” (47). This action oriented-ness is also implied in Swidler’s reference to culture as influencing a person’s line of action by providing certain cultural tools, which incidentally shape what kind or type of action is possible. Finally, it is important to return to one of the points Swidler has made about ideology: that it is “articulated” or uttered. Swidler studies how people talk or articulate their positions on love and marriage. Beyond this talk, though, she also has a lengthy section on semiotic codes.3 Her description mostly revolves around behavior. Her study, taken as a whole, then, would tend to look at articulation as something both verbal and non-verbal (i.e., bodily or behavioral)4. Eagleton describes the discourse aspect of ideology as follows: Ideology is a matter of ‘discourse’ rather than of [mere] ‘language’ … It represents the points where power impacts upon certain utterances and inscribes itself tacitly within them. … the concept of ideology aims to disclose something of the relation between an utterance and its material conditions of possibility, when those conditions of possibility are viewed in the light of certain power-struggles central to the reproduction … of a whole form of social life” (223).

3 “A semiotic code is a self-referential system of meanings in which each element in the system takes its meaning not from its inherent properties or from some external referent, but from the meanings created by the code itself” (Swidler, 162). [e.g. normative gender: people are assigned gender based on genitalia and expected to act as either male or female and all action is understood within this framework , as well.]

4 In the book Semiotics for Beginners published both online and in print Daniel Chandler, lecturer in Dept. of Theatre, Film, and Television Studies at University of Wales, Aberystwyth, breaks semiotic social codes into the following categories: verbal, bodily, commodity, and behavioral.

Eagleton’s description of the discourse or articulation of ideology gets to the center of the conflictual aspect of ideology: power-struggle. This points to the understanding that discourses and semiotic codes are social constructs that constrain and facilitate power by defining proper and improper action. Considering these characteristics: ideology (especially an emergent subcultural one) is an identity-based and centered, self consciously chosen use of culture that articulates an active and conflictual engagement of the dominant culture. Although, this definition is useful, it is seemingly static. In other words, it seems that ideology is somehow always “on” or always on the tip of a subject’s tongue. It is necessary, then, to return to Swidler in order to nuance the function of ideology and view it as something that is turned “on” or engaged at certain times while turned “off” or not engaged at others. Swidler talks of settled and unsettled lives (personal) and periods (social). Her point is that “we cannot look to the characteristics of the ideology alone for a full understanding of its causal significance” (103). Rather, she wants to draw our attention to the greater social context. She posits that ideologies tend to be engaged in times of crisis. I want to extend her argument to include that the reality of unsettled times and crises is grounded primarily in the perception of individuals or groups, rather than primarily in material reality (Smith, 1998; for subcultural perception of outside threat p. 152; for perceptions and beliefs being “real in their consequences” p. 173). For material reality always needs to be perceived or interpreted in order to be understood. Perception is the lived experience of material reality and cannot be thought of in terms of being unreal and thus degraded as false (Eagleton, 22). So, it is exactly with this understanding of unsettled times or unsettling experiences both perceived and material that ideologies as defined above become engaged. That ideologies are self-conscious and articulated points to the interdependence between one’s identity and ideology. It is exactly over issues of identity and the body that body modification is engaged as an ideology in the larger Western context.

Identity is a common theme in the articles on BMEzine. There are many reader editorials that discuss crises that develop when their modifications confront social norms or vice versa. In one posting, a soon-to-be-modded high school student is annoyed and perplexed by his school’s policy, which mandates that bandages be worn over all facial piercings if students wish to avoid expulsion: [E]verybody has the right to do what they wish to their body. A nose ring should not affect anybody’s rights to anything. A tattoo should not have an affect [sic] on your future. By suspending and expelling our children from school due to their modifications, we are telling them that … they must change their appearance and look more “normal” to satisfy others, and not themselves. We, the students, do have ONE weapon,. This is a new act passed by Congress regarding freedom of expression in the form of things such as clothing, piercings, etc. The second is the good old First Amendment [or freedom of speech]. There are many things that make this excerpt interesting. One is that the student is identifying with the modded community even though he is not yet modded. This quality, if isolated, speaks to the power of identity within the body modification community. Within the framework set forth in this paper, it is evident that this student responded ideologically toward this attack on modified students. The student clearly articulates, an oppositional, subjective-engagement of dominant culture and attempts to naturalize body modification with rights language. For example, he states that “[E]verybody has the right to do what they wish to their body,” as well as a direct reference to the U.S. Constitution’s Bill of Rights.
Suddenly, this issue is not just about an individual or a group of students at a specific school, but about the rights of an entire populace organized or cohering around the issue of body modification. As an emergent ideology, body modification must still rely on the language of common sense and other traditions. The student borrows heavily from rights language and from the common-sense adage that people should be themselves. (Consider Carl Elliott’s references to scripts of authenticity yesterday.) This student’s articulation of a body modification ideology came about because the subject’s lived world (i.e., school) became hostile to his desire to become modified. This example represents how ideologies are engaged in unsettled times.