Corpus mysticum digitale (mystical body digital)?: on the concept of two bodies in the era of digital technology

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this article is to analyse the theoretical connotation of the idea of our digital body surviving the death of our natural body, advocated by such evangelists of digital afterlife as Bell and Gemmel. For this purpose, I will explore the seminal notion of ‘two bodies in one’ first analysed by Ernst Kantorowicz in his The King’s Two Bodies, which details the emergence of the legal concept by which the king has both a natural body and a mystical body (corpus mysticum) understood as the everlasting polity. To explore the possibility of applying this notion to ideas concerning the body in the digital era, I will elaborate on two additional concepts, namely, the concept of diarchy in traditional authority, as proposed by Rodney Needham, and Toyo Ito’s concept of the natural and digital body originating from his peculiar view of contemporary architecture. Through the method of abductive comparison, I will discuss the limitation of Bell and Gemmell’s concept of an everlasting digital body, and the intrinsic lack of institutionality upon which the very notion of the two bodies of the king relies. Finally, I will introduce the concept of the corpus mysticum digitale, a figure, which, in the time of the decline of the power of ritual, legitimises the dead as a collective entity that lives eternally, but anonymously.

Keywords:

• two bodies
• ritual
• Kantorowicz
• virtual body
• mystical body

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Jussen (2009) provides an overview of criticisms of Kantorowicz’s work, in terms of its methodology, constitutional semantics, the author’s rather arbitrary use of evidence and so forth. Kahn (2009) summarises Kantorowicz’s tacit argument as (1) the Christological origins of secular constitutionalism and (2) the importance of the secular religion of humanity, contrasted with the stance of his contemporaries, Carl Schmitt and Ernst Cassirer.

2 Kantorowicz’s pursuit of this concept of corpus mysticum is influenced by the work of de Lubac (2007), who traced the historical changes in the meaning of corpus mysticum, and sought to restore the Eucharistic origins of the essence of the church. Interestingly, the contemporary papal encyclical of Pius PP. XII, produced in his Pope Pius XII (1943), Mystici Corporis, seems to return to the original sense of corpus mysticum by manifestly distinguishing it from most ordinary associations in terms of its spiritual unity.

Inspired by de Lubac’s argument, de Certeau (1992) discusses the changing meaning (or absence) of the body in the transformation of the notion of corpus mysticum. de Certeau schematises the change from the union of the sacramental and the church, as contrasted with the historical body of Christ, to the subsequent combination of this historical event with the sacrament, both of which legitimise the church. According to de Certeau, this latter schema had the potential to endlessly expand the notion of the body of the church. However, eventually the liaison between the historical and the sacramental separated, which led to the formation of antagonising camps of Protestants and Catholics, thus collapsing the schema.

3 The cultural peculiarity of this concept is exemplified by the fact that it is difficult to locate an equivalent in other religions. According to Dr Ryusuke Kuramoto, the words used to refer to Buddha’s body (corpus mysticum buddhae?) usually refers to Buddha’s holy remains, which are now maintained in stupas, or relics, in various parts of the world (personal communication; see also Gombrich, 1988). In Mahayana Buddhism, the concept of the Buddha’s body dramatically transforms into what is known as the trikaya, or three bodies. This tripartite structure includes the dharmakāya or truth body, which embodies the enlightenment; the sambhogakāya or body of mutual enjoyment, a body of bliss or clear light manifestation; and the nirmāṇakāya or created body, which manifests in history (Williams, 1989). However, these ‘bodies’ constitute a transcendental conception of Buddha’s original body, and are not equivalent to the corpus mysticum that was later expanded to signify the church as well as other institutional entities.

Thus:

‘But, in its Christian guise, a common preoccupation or postulate, which excludes a priori any hasty generalisation into other religious traditions, affects it entirely. Christianity was founded upon the loss of a body – the loss of the body of Jesus Christ, compounded with the loss of the “body” of Israel, of a “nation” and its genealogy.’ (Italics in original) (de Certeau, 1992, p. 81; cf. Ginzburg, 2001).

4 Many anthropologists working on traditional kingship have been inspired by Kantorowicz’s analysis, but tend to understand his as claims surrounding the separation between the person and the office of the kingship (Feeley-Harnik, 1985; Hansen & Stepputat, 2006). Huntington and Metcalf (1979) thus rearticulate that in the African Shilluck kingdom detailed by Evans-Pritchard (1948), the person of the king (reth) is only the vehicle of the office of the kingship and is called nyikang or an ‘immortal culture hero’ (Huntington & Metcalf, 1979, p. 165). Mayer (1985) also describes the two thrones of Indian kingship, where the royal throne contains dual aspects as both object and an institution (cf. Tomisawa, 1985). However, these anthropologists seem to miss the subtleties of Kantorowicz’s argument that the declining role of ritual during the Tudor era necessitated the invention of the legal fiction of the body political (cf. Fukushima, 1991; 2002; 2010).

5 Joining the genealogy of Japanese architects with global reputations, Ito has proven his worth as a theorist of contemporary anti-modern architecture, well known for his futuristic Sendai Mediateque. Since the completion of this building, he has been committed to exploring a new architectural principle, largely inspired by biology to replace the modernist theory of architecture.

6 Bell and Gemmel’s rather unsophisticated argument about a digital immortality achieved with the help of recording technology and interactive devices can be situated somewhere between practical arguments about how to deal with digital remnants on the web on the one hand (Baldridge, 2009; Carroll & Romano, 2010), and a series of hyperbolic claims from the diverse branches of the so-called transhumanism on the other. The claims of the latter extreme range from a technical singularity that goes beyond human limitations (Kurzweil, 2006) to the possibility of biological immortality (de Gray, 2013; Rose, 2013), to the uploading of our consciousness to a technological body (Koene, 2013; Merkle, 2013) and on to mind-cloning and its diverse consequences (Rothblatt, 2013, 2014; cf. Hansell & Grassie, 2011, for various criticisms of these claims). More sober, social science-oriented approaches examine the proliferation of such digital images as the interrelation between the self and the various aspects of its digital double (virtual identity, digital effigy, Internet doppelganger) (Graham, Gibbs, & Aceti, 2013, p .134). Waggoner (2009) analyses the relationship between self and avatar in terms of an emerging new self-identity, while Bollmer (2013) underscores its performative aspects imbued with the cultural sense of anxiety from fear of the failed presentation of the self. These approaches, while seemingly diverse, share a fundamentally mentalistic framework, represented by their pivotal adherence to the problematic concerning mind, self and consciousness. Even the occasional reference to the concept of body – such as that in Graham et al. (2013) on the distributed body through the web – is immediately subsumed within the problematic of the self and its diversification.

The focus of this article is sharply distinct from all these claims. In fact, none of the trio above was ever engaged in such a mentalistic argument. In fact, a question like ‘What is the consciousness or self-identity of the body political of the king?’ is thoroughly nonsensical in the context of discussing the institutional eternity of kingship. Rather, the pivotal concern of the authors above – especially that of Kantorowicz – was how the body may expand to the wider realm beyond its physical and temporal confines, especially to the realm where theology, laws and politics interface. Presupposing this extensive capacity of the concept of body – and its very specific mediaeval version (the corpus mysticum) – this article tries to pose a question about how such proliferating images of the body, including the avatars that Bell and Gemmel and others stress, can have any sort of institutional legitimacy, just like the churches and cities that were once identified as the extended version of the mystical body. In this sense, the controversy between Bell and Gemmel and Mayer-Schönberger is, albeit ironically, more adequate to my present concern than, say, Rothblatt’s (2014) theoretical fantasy about the future of these mind-clones.

7 Personal communication with C. Graham.