The Body as Design Project in an‘Order of Pure Decision’. Transformable Bodies in Makeover Shows and Steven Meisel’s Fashion Photography

In a brief but suggestive article about risk and morality from 1993, French political scientist Francois Ewald coins what he somewhat catchy, but also illuminatingly, calls a contemporary order of pure decision, an order in which “the nature we are confronting today and that we have chosen as our partner is nothing other than our own double” (Ewald 1993: 225). ‘Nature’ is no longer a sacred objectivity we can refer to. The order of pure decision “can nourish itself only on its own values, and cannot rely on an objectivity that supposedly transcends it” (ibid.). Australian cultural studies scholar Jane Goodall (2000), in her elaboration on Ewald’s term, reasons that, evidently, ethics “comes to the fore as the only means by which we can steer a course through this order of pure decision” (Goodall 2000: 150). Everything, including the body, is transformable and negotiable, and each act – each act on the body – involves judgements and negotiations of a social and ethical nature.