The Mediated Self: Identity, Advertising & Eucharist

Last updated on: February 22, 2017 at 6:56 am by Matthew Tan

The Mediated Self: Identity, Advertising & Eucharist 2017-02-22T06:56:42+10:00 Matthew Tan

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In The Life of Brian, the titular protagonist wanted to remind everyone that “we are all individuals”. Because of that, nobody needed to listen or be an extension of anyone’s will, never mind his own. In so doing, Brian had articulated one of the central pillars of Liberalism: that everyone was fundamentally a self-contained individual, with no ontological link with anyone else except via the artifice of a contract voluntarily entered into.

To this, the crowd shouted with one voice: “Yes! We are all individuals!”…”Yes! We’re all different!”

In spite of the inherently Enlightened protestations of Brian, postmodern culture seems to be saying something rather different. Since Michel Foucalt’s conception of the “technologies of the self“, there has been a growing recognition – at least theoretically – that individuals, even in their conception as individuals, is mediated by something outside the individual self. This something could be clothing, uniforms, bureaucracies, social media profiles or even another person. So intimately connected are they to the conception of who we are that even articulating who we are is not possible without these mediating structures.

This is particularly acute in advertising, where our identity as consumers is not only bound up in having logos, but also in the images of the lives of the models on whom these logos are slapped. We do not just acquire a thing when a thing is bought, but imagine ourselves as becoming the person associated with the thing. However, as Aaron Riches and Creston Davis lay out in an essay entitled “The Theological Praxis of Revolution“, such a mediation is deceptive because, metaphysically, it is all occurring in the same level of being. The mediation here is exclusively immanent or temporal. Because of this, identity can only come about when one is articulated instead of something else. What this means is that, paradoxically, in seeking to articulate our own identity through that of a fully immanent stand-in, we seek to erase our own particular identity in order to make way for the model’s voice to speak on our behalf. It is a manufactured identity being articulated, and one that hundreds, if not thousands more want to emulate. Through this manufactured mediation, we paradoxically seek to assert our individuality, just like everyone else.

The kind of mediation that we see in the advertising model both articulates and fails to meet a fundamentally human need. It is a fundamentally human need to have one’s identity expressed through another because, made in the image of a Triune God who is both one and a communion, we are ontologically made for and in communion. Because of this, our identity will always be mediated through another, and the notion of expressing our self-contained, unmediated self will always be a fiction, one that advertisers and scores of other peddlers would be willing to disseminate for a price.

At the same time, however, this expression of one’s self through another is occurring on a different metaphysical register from the advertising counterpart. A mediation in communion is sacramental, and as a sacrament, the metaphysics of mediation is always analogical, where multiple layers of existence are operating in the process of mediation. Thus, mediation does not have to – and does not – occur on the same layer of existence. Because of these multiple layers of existence operating at the same time, mediation will not take place by the erasure of our particularity. We express our selves qua ourselves whilst simultaneously acknowledging our anthropological need to express ourselves – our logos – through the Divine and Incarnate Word.

This divine mediation is done most excellently in the Eucharist, where this union between the planes of being come to be fully expressed and present, in Christ, in the form of bread and wine. The Eucharist is a symphony of planes of existence that transcend our own, which is why when we receive the Eucharist, we can, as Augustine once said in Book VII of his Confessions, we can be absorbed by Christ and still not be obliterated in the absorption. In receiving the Eucharist we are, in the words of Christ’s voice in the Confessions, “changed into me”. The Eucharistic Christ is the divine stand-in for our own self, expressing our own self on our behalf. As he does this our own particularity, far from being obliterated, becomes more expressed than we can ever fully express ourselves, which is why Augustine described the Eucharist as both the “Body of Christ” and “what you are”.

It is because of this divine mediation, articulated in the Eucharist, that allows us to express our identity as Christians, not individually, but only through the mediation of the Body of Christ, in the Church, in the Sacraments, and in the community of believers present before us, who have gone before us, and whose presence yet lie before us.

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