Wojciech Klimczyk

The article presents the history of the notion of civilization at the stage of emerging civilizational pluralism. This presentation offers a critical reconstruction of civilizational essentialism, at least partially racist in character, which at the turn of the 20th century became the basic method for civilizational studies. In order to fully reveal the grounds upon which civilizational studies adopted “scientific” racism in the middle of the 19th century the text discusses the history of this research paradigm beginning from when the term “civilization” became prominent not only in moral but also historical and sociological analysis. On the one hand, this throws a clear light on the uncomfortable heritage of the discipline in terms of its mission to “civilize,” one that civilizational studies have faced until the present day. On the other, the article shows that the direction they chose in the times of social darwinism’s cultural triumph was not inevitable. In its shadow there have existed alternative civilizational studies with Norbert Elias as their early proponent. In order to develop them further one must not forget the history of the paradigm and hence this article is devoted to discovering the causes of the crisis in the colonial era of the Enlightenment idea of civilization, so important for Elias.

Chelsea Charms claims that she has the biggest artificial breasts in the world. She is followed by more than 270,000 users on Twitter. Charms gives interviews to the mainstream media. She also runs her own website. Although she has never used her body in hardcore pornography, she is nevertheless a kind of celebrity, very careful about her image, defined, obviously, by her enormous bust. Charms very clearly identifies herself with her breasts. In the media her breasts are presented as the essence of her personality. In a cultural sense, there is no difference between her image and her bust, allowing us to speak of a peculiar branding, with Charms’s breasts serving as a “logo”. In this article I analyse how the media figure of “the woman with the largest (augmented) breasts in the world” comes to life, in relation to Celia Lury and Scott Lash’s theory of the global culture industry and Hartmut Boehme’s take on the cultural role of fetishism in modernity. I attempt to deconstruct the “Chelsea Charms” brand in the context of contemporary image culture, which feeds on augmented bodies like no other. At the same time, I pose a crucial question: Does having an artificial body automatically lead to having an artificial identity or is the relation between the two much more complex, and by reconstructing it, can one can better understand contemporary strategies of identity building, even outside of this particular case? The answer is paradoxical: because of her curious character, Chelsea Charms can be seen as a model exponent of the culture of virtuality, which is based on the myths of individual agency, creative freedom, and plasticity of human existence, including the body. 

The article is the first installment in the series reconstructing the history of the idea of civilization seen as process and discussing its usefulness for contemporary civilizational studies. The first part of the text analyzes two roots of the term using the latin words civilitas and civitias. After pointing out ancient antecedents of the notion of civilization, the article analyzes in detail the civilizational discourse of the Enlightenment, emphasizing Victor de Mirabeau’s and Immanuel Kant’s contributions. This leads to the conclusion that civilization can on the most general level be defined as refinement of society by ordering it by law. In the process of attaining civilization, civil society, understood as a collective bonded by mutual respect and prefering peaceful regulation over violence, becomes the lawgiving subject. Even though civilization, as the cult of good manners, can become an empty formalism, mutual courtesy and respect are still necessary conditions for civil society’s existence. If we understand the process of civilization along such lines, it remains worthy of consant research, especially comparative studies, today.