Abstract

Images are consuming the human-ness of the body. Present reconfigurations of humanity’s goals have targeted the human body as a malleable tabula rasa formed by the etchings of an image-based consumer society, the society of the spectacle. Sculpting the body as a medium of transcendence and idealizing its form as attainable perfection—the parameters of which come to us via Western paradigms of artistic beauty (from high art, to cinema, to commercial advertising)—are practices that drive us towards a very contested post-human realization. With the associated abandonment of ethical premises that once constituted the basis for social cohesion, Western societies are reformulating citizenship: social beings are defining their individual identities according to lego-aesthetics that, in fact, deny human individuality and encourage composite identities constructed on predetermined models of acceptability. Our virtual presentation (paper) will expose such practices, through a theoretical analysis of two different cultural texts: the first, a video commercial about plastic surgery (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ua3sm5NhJ3s&feature=related) and the second, an x-ray pin- up calendar(http://www.repubbica.it/tecnologia/2010/06/18/foto/calendari_ai_raggi_x-4945752/1/? ref=HRESS-2). These texts illustrate the processes of exposing and colonizing the “inner-self”. The video promotes plastic surgery for its potential to deliver the human body’s own while the pin-up eroticizes the female skeletal structure. These image-based constructions of reality have embarked upon phantasmagoria/immateriality as the body’s final destination. We will expose these contemporary practices and transformations of social perceptions and representations of the body, through a critical and theoretical analysis.