The Tattoo Fashion
Aug 28, 2008
R.R. Reno
As the hot days of summer draw to a close, I find myself possessed of a full inventory of images. I certainly knew about the recent fashion of tattooing. But in the summer season of exposed skin, I found myself surprised by how widespread it has become.
Individuality—and everybody’s doing it. Hum. That pretty much sounds like the ethos of middle-class culture since the 1960s. Blue jeans and tee shirts. The Rolling Stones. Punctuating conversation with emphatic expletives. It’s a wave that has been crashing onto the beach for a long time now. Everybody tossing off the horrible, oppressive conformities of bourgeois culture—together.
Mass non-conformity has always been a fantasy, of course. In fact, by my lights, it’s the great and abiding fantasy of my lifetime. And it’s a fascinating fantasy, one well worth contemplating in its latest, flesh-altering form.
“There’s a real me that can’t be reduced to everything I’ve had to do in order to be successful.”
Every facet of their personal lives is assaulted with exhortations. Be sure to have protected sex! Don’t smoke! Avoid fatty foods! With so much of their lives sacrificed to the gods of health and success, is it surprising that they want to take a piece of their bodies and do with it as they please?
When we take a sober look at contemporary society, we can see that one of the main results of the cultural revolution of the last half century has been the demolition of soul-binding permanence. Marriage and family are the most obvious examples. It’s a simple fact: An astonishing number of well-educated and successful Americans delay marriage and forego children. They live a great deal of their lives without the weight of family responsibilities.
our postmodern culture of irony and critique works against permanence. The old binding loyalties of faith and patriotism are openly mocked. The ability of truth to compel the soul is reinterpreted by our culture of critique as an ideological ploy to mask and advance the interests of power. Thus we are taught that nothing rightly compels devotion of heart and mind.
So we are free, freer than any people have ever been in the history of humanity. The old bonds of commitment hang loosely about us. How this came about would require telling the complex history of modern western culture, but the current consequences are not hard to identify. A free soul is a slave of desires for success, desires for social acceptance, desires for all the goodies that our wealthy economy so efficiently provides, to say nothing of our primitive passions. Increasingly uncommitted—free from the limits of marriage, children, faith, devotion, and loyalty—we are more purely and more entirely defined by our social roles as productive workers and eager consumers, and by our passing desires for satisfaction and pleasure. Again, I ask myself, is it surprising that in an age with so few binding commitments postmodern men and women seek symbols of permanence etched into their bodies?
As the tide of impermanence rises, I’m fairly sure that the tattoo fashion will expand. The human heart hungers for permanence. We don’t want to be dispersed into endless possibilities; we want to be held responsible for being a particular person. Thus, absent strong cultural forces that encourage and enforce limitations on the will, in the coming decade we will see all sorts of strange self-mutilations and radical commitments of the body. Self-mutilation will provide a powerful symbolic compensation for our inability to commit and bind the soul.
R.R. Reno is features editor of First Things and associate professor of theology at Creighton University.
Individuality—and everybody’s doing it. Hum. That pretty much sounds like the ethos of middle-class culture since the 1960s. Blue jeans and tee shirts. The Rolling Stones. Punctuating conversation with emphatic expletives. It’s a wave that has been crashing onto the beach for a long time now. Everybody tossing off the horrible, oppressive conformities of bourgeois culture—together.
Mass non-conformity has always been a fantasy, of course. In fact, by my lights, it’s the great and abiding fantasy of my lifetime. And it’s a fascinating fantasy, one well worth contemplating in its latest, flesh-altering form.
“There’s a real me that can’t be reduced to everything I’ve had to do in order to be successful.”
Every facet of their personal lives is assaulted with exhortations. Be sure to have protected sex! Don’t smoke! Avoid fatty foods! With so much of their lives sacrificed to the gods of health and success, is it surprising that they want to take a piece of their bodies and do with it as they please?
When we take a sober look at contemporary society, we can see that one of the main results of the cultural revolution of the last half century has been the demolition of soul-binding permanence. Marriage and family are the most obvious examples. It’s a simple fact: An astonishing number of well-educated and successful Americans delay marriage and forego children. They live a great deal of their lives without the weight of family responsibilities.
our postmodern culture of irony and critique works against permanence. The old binding loyalties of faith and patriotism are openly mocked. The ability of truth to compel the soul is reinterpreted by our culture of critique as an ideological ploy to mask and advance the interests of power. Thus we are taught that nothing rightly compels devotion of heart and mind.
So we are free, freer than any people have ever been in the history of humanity. The old bonds of commitment hang loosely about us. How this came about would require telling the complex history of modern western culture, but the current consequences are not hard to identify. A free soul is a slave of desires for success, desires for social acceptance, desires for all the goodies that our wealthy economy so efficiently provides, to say nothing of our primitive passions. Increasingly uncommitted—free from the limits of marriage, children, faith, devotion, and loyalty—we are more purely and more entirely defined by our social roles as productive workers and eager consumers, and by our passing desires for satisfaction and pleasure. Again, I ask myself, is it surprising that in an age with so few binding commitments postmodern men and women seek symbols of permanence etched into their bodies?
As the tide of impermanence rises, I’m fairly sure that the tattoo fashion will expand. The human heart hungers for permanence. We don’t want to be dispersed into endless possibilities; we want to be held responsible for being a particular person. Thus, absent strong cultural forces that encourage and enforce limitations on the will, in the coming decade we will see all sorts of strange self-mutilations and radical commitments of the body. Self-mutilation will provide a powerful symbolic compensation for our inability to commit and bind the soul.
R.R. Reno is features editor of First Things and associate professor of theology at Creighton University.
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