In Medias Res 16URL
9(16)#2 2020 |
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DOI 10.46640/imr.9.16.2 |
Željko Rutović
Ministarstvo kulture Crne Gore, Direktorat za medije, Crna Gora
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The Body: Narcissism of the Media
Puni tekst: pdf (289 KB), English,, Str. 2499 - 2510
Abstract
The popular media industry of spectacle with instruments of “seduction” produces “voluntary cosent” of man in acceptance, imitation and evaluation of distribution of corporate consumer culture. In this world man plays role beyond his ontological need and self-conscious realization of subject as thinking creature.
The aim of this paper is to problematize socio-cultural phenomenology of body transfiguration, impressions and experiences in opticum of consumerist globalization.
The new construction of “new” body is modeled on techniques of instrumentalisation, stereotyping and hybridization of narcissism as the primary reprezentational principle of such media experience.
Key words: body, narcissism, media, globalization, stereotypes, consumerism.
Introduction
In a world of transgression, in which numerous changes are happening rapidly and in which the principle and approach of ambiguity are favoured, we are all elements, particles of the same network of media industry. The uniform ephemeral glow of (entertainment) industry has abolished the traditional body as it existed up to that point, establishing the sensation of encounter with (one’s own) body. The postmodern body in the conflict between the erotoid and the tanatoid is in the shadow of the media industry. The modern-day body industry is a multimedia model of advertising-mental construction and a form of simulation of media-generated narcissism. It is simulation because of the lack as well as the surplus. Thus, the simulation is transformed into a media resolution that virtualizes the alleged catharsis. The industrial body becomes a stereotype or a starting point in processing the visual and linguistic discourse of representation of the body in the media text of postmodern culture. The theory of discourse as a theory of practice, that is, the way in which the language of the media defines the reality, helps us reflect critically on the reality and deconstruct it contextually through the model and ideal of beauty, which women are to strive for according to the media. This imaginary problem has generated a high-profit multi-industry with the task to correct and represent the body in accordance with the patterns, clichés, and the key of the media language. The media (self)-realization, in synthesis with the multidisciplinary industrial optics, “allows for” a description of the invisible – of someone who is not there. Instead of being the attention of human imagination, where the boundaries of everyday world disappear for a moment, the body of today loses its memory and becomes a mere physical object that surrounds us. The real space of dynamic sensitivity of the body is beyond the hidden areas of the human spirit. Such visualization/screening of the industrial body, in which there is no story, nullifies imagination and closes the possibility of diverse (subjective) interpretations. Thus the persona of the body is today reduced to mere polarity and a simple dichotomy on the line of the “either-or” formulation. The body industry provides a substitute for the copy that needs to become independent and materialized/realized in the image. The discourse of such an act is an evolution into a new, non-existent existence.
Today, industry uses the body to search for an ever-new identity and to explore different aspects of one and the same expression. Like in Brechtian irony, the “body” is offered a cure for transience.
In the industrialized body of the “looking good” value system, protection is sought and a psychological substitute is determined through the body, which has the (outwardly imposed) role. The psychological life of this representation ranges between the sexes with disintegrating body parts and a libido that is infinitely prone to competition. As Julia Kristeva notes: “If the woman’s body did not lack, Don Juan would be happy with this ‘Sex which is not Don Juan’.” The final, industrial body is produced as the very emblem of a man’s desire. Such a body is only and merely physically given and dominated by aesthetic standards imposed from the outside, which whenever they are reached, get quickly replaced by new and unattainable ideals and parameters. It is not accidental that, in order to encourage media literacy, the Australian government obliged the editors of magazines to indicate the altered photographs of models that were significantly processed or “photo-shopped”. The importance of this warning becomes clear given the global terror of the advertising industry, which claims that a woman whose physique does not correspond to the “Barbie mould” does not love her body, or rather that she is dissatisfied with it, and that it needs to be modified according to the norms of beauty “devised” for her by someone else. As an image of vanishing, the biological body of today is merely an offprint of an event that fades, both before our eyes and from our memory. What is embodied is the shape of the body as an “impossible encounter” with the “object” of desire.
1.1. The language of the body
My body writes in language. My body hurts through language. Let’s call it a dream state, or the language of the body, as Kathy Acker writes (Bodies of Work). Indeed, does the body have a language, or what is the language of the body today? Acker states: The body does not lie. It does not lie because it does not have a language to lie. Does the body seek its own language, or does the language seek the body beyond its patriarchal definitions? The body both speaks and writes in its own language. The language of the body is not linear; it is fragmented and again unfinished. The body formulates a meta-symbolic representation of the text in its language. This language denies or confirms the body. The body as desire. The body as the order of the (sur-)real in which the body is (not) seen in the opposition between subject and object. The language of the body intervenes in both space and time. That language can be a (non-)arbitrary propaganda, a media story, or a new industry fetish. In its manifestation, this language is in the triangle of the media replica, the mimesis of patriarchy, and the inability to exist. Where is the body in all this?
The language of the body depends on construction – the construct of associations. When these links are broken, the association itself disappears. People read this suggestion of the language of the body in different ways. This leads to (un-)visible events that become an integral part of our reality. This process is continuously subjected to random contrasting of space behind and in front, through the (language of the) body. In this way, a place or places are formed that penetrate the narrative logic of the language, that is, the syntactic hierarchization of the system of communication – of being embodied in the language of the body.
The language of the body is a non-verbal construct for the projection of social roles, through which identity or imitation concepts are self-actualized, their content generating towards the acquisition of desirability, social inclusion, or emotional reflection. The bold language of the body transforms a person and extracts from him or her what is untouchable, tabooed, non-liberated, that which everyone carries within himself. According to the levels of imaginary roles, the non-verbal expression metamorphosizes, accentuates, and emphasizes the symbolism of gesture, movement, or space. Language is inseparable from space in this discourse. Space (re-)structures language, gives it new meanings, directs or synchronizes man and action. As such, language is always in space, as without space it does not exist and does not send messages. New spaces also address the new linguistic attribution of the body. Interaction between place and language is a social symbolism of assumed roles, concepts, and strategies. Displacement of the language of the body from space is the impossibility of representing being, i.e. social existence, which is ultimately not convergent even with narcissistic culture. The body is the space of space. As such, the body is a map of symbols, roles, and requirements. The body is a dichotomy of either-or, of conceptualizing or deconceptualizing space. Conceptualization of the place, through the body, is a question of the meaning of the body’s identity. The space of the speaking body (Hora – from the Greek verb horein – to assign place, content), as Julia Kristeva has put it, is a kind of original bodily pre-signifier. Thus, place becomes possible through the body. And the non-places (Marc Augé) acquire the intimate narrative character of the territory of the language of the body, revealed in space.
Essentially, the language of the body is a relationship, but only as a process. Through the language of the body, as an erotic process, an interpersonal relationship is possible. The language of the body as a machine for producing the new sense of the body merges thought and rapture, measure and ecstasy. But then again, the language of the body as a “visual machine” for producing the postmodern sense blocks many other possibilities. Hence, it has symbolic, universal, psychological, anthropological, and sociological meanings. But judging by the global universalization of the text of the language of the body, one would say that the body of today is following the esoteric advice of Baudelaire “sur le maquillage”. Whether painted, truly alive, moving or at rest, the language of the body is the starting point for reviving the body itself. The language of the body is Name. Not a Name among other Names, but a language that communicates and opens up to the Other. The language of the body is thus realized as a biological, ontological, and mythological text. Essentially, the language of the body is actually a script before the script. From the point of view of subatomic micro-communication, the language of the body is a continuous, universal, and permanent communication channel open to new reflections on the body’s representative role. The language of the body is in constant conflict between intimate sensuality and strong associative visuality of external expression. Such a body has long been “out there” in a new chapter of its visual history, which provokes, incites, and stimulates the meanings of visions and views of imaginative “play”. In the space of such visuality, that is, the projection of the self, the body is often separated/split due to an imaginary craving of the imagined connected text of space. That is why place-space and illogical movement often displace the language of the body into the un-read associativity of signs and meanings.
Global enclosure in the dominant language of television has established a straight-line communication of an “eye-oriented” culture. Instead of opening one’s eyes, television has closed them, depriving man of a rational sense of the nature of communication of the language of the body. The language of the body does not question the language of the media. On the contrary, it is merely a replica of the media, materialized in an unquestioned key. The language of the body meets the requirements of the aesthetic and value standards of the media without a dialogue. Essentially, the body is a ubiquitous promoter of the media industry, and often its predecessor, which even by (un-)consciously stepping through the uninhabited places of the text of the body seeks new paths of media power and media existence.
1.2. The empty body
The post-postmodern, multimedia era of emotional hypocrisy has taken away the soul from the body by trying out a new concept of visuality. The staging of the movements of this new chapter of visuality, intended to provoke, stimulate, and enrich, essentially yields an “empty body”. Such a body is merely a currency of the provoked uniform aesthetics of the consume-centred media profile. Under the economic shell of the phenomenon to impress the “world of money”, the destroyed game of the body magic is lost and transformed into a new, problematic media frame, in which the body is packaged and visually distributed. Such a compound is not natural and often borders on bad taste. According to Eduard Spranger, personality types are shaped according to the value choice and value hierarchy, which in the context of this panel suggests that aesthetic favouritism and body promotion is the postmodern value substrate of dominant preference. In any case, the body is a passive object of the cloning and copying trend, which as such is strongly involved in creating a new multimedia world. The safety of the body privileged through the experience of sensual rapture, touch, and smell has obtained its visual equivalent of a “close-up” as a fetishized aspect of an essentially empty body. The body as an object does not signify anything, or more precisely, it only signifies absence as an expression of the unconscious in the visual field. The consequent question of this discourse is: whose is the desire, and for what? Is the observer led to reflect on the eroticism of the body, or is he unquestionably “offered” the knowledge of the limited expanse of the body as the highest form of visual construction? In this episteme, the truth about the (empty) body should be sought in a mix of different multimedia ideas and a mixture of elements in the game of truth and deception.
In complex discursive formations, perception of the body ranges from obsession to resisting the image. Here the biological determines the psychological, because the body is situated and connoted as the desire in/for the image under the label of fetishism. Laura Mulvey has pointed out the universal tendency of men to fetishize the entire body of a woman – as an attempt to make the totality represent the “missing” part. What can be seen is known/recognized as desire. The counterpoint is the “empty body”. The body is no longer an anatomical term. It is increasingly a socio-psychological term that transcends the social conventions of the opposition between the female and male roles. The postmodern reading of the text of the (empty) body, as a signified associated with a signifier, is no longer dictated by the anatomy of a man or a woman, but by the discursive system of the society. Reading the original bio-ontological body must be either male or female. Deconstructing the body in its visual plurality contributes to the exploration and shifting of the boundaries of the transmission of cultural codes in the global context of body perception. On the other hand, the focus of the body is on rethinking the diversity of women’s ideas and interpretations. Through the body, the representation of the female presence in the world is definitely transnational in nature. The transnational community imposes aesthetic principles as a series of multiplied hegemonic systems. The supreme principle predominates seeing the body in a transnational key. From the position of the media as a centre of perception, this discourse does not know binary oppositions such as West and East, progressive and regressive, traditional and modern, European and exotic.
The processes of emphasizing the media fragmentation of the body or the corporeal correspond to the images of a complex multiple identity, at the heart of which is the central question to whom the body belongs: the individual, the media, or the society. The postmodern epoch has given a new trajectory to the body, limited by the proportions of the sphere of forms, i.e. the imposed “catalogues” in whose space the (pre-)set desirability is realized. The vulgar manipulation of corporeality, given through the form, invalidates the symbolic exchange of subjectivities. In such procedures, instead of the biological skill of maturation, the body turns into a melancholy of vanishing as a natural reaction and response to the unsustainability of the projected, the artificial. The language of the empty body has thus redefined the biological rhythmical nature of the rapture of the heart, secret, emotion, symbol... In the drama of the trapped body, the multimedia memory of illogical, overcrowded aesthetic scenes is recognized as an unquestioned and functional fact of new manifestation. Bareness, as a physical and spiritual expression of the cruelty of a world that does not support individuality, is merely a linguistic-stylistic abbreviation that reveals the mechanisms of encrypting new corporeality.
In the dimension of total visibility, we live a paradox where we no longer see anything. There is no longer a principle of credibility or reality of the body that would confirm its existence. The atavistic fear of biological finality and the megalomania of outward appeal have led to a cynical (re-)formulation of the body, which does not want to be questioned. A question is the beginning of a dialogue and the “empty body” is dominated by a monologue of the serial industry type. The culmination of the act is a fact by which the postmodern observer is consciously adapted to the (in-)authenticity and (un-)certainty of the “monologue of the empty body”. Formulating the fundamental questions of the body in a new way, in the widest range from cosmetic surgery to genetic engineering, where (not) accepting one’s own body also means (not) accepting one’s own limitation, makes us wonder with much existential anxiety – what is human body today? Does the postmodern body belong in its immanent capacity or is it merely a confirmation of the achieved media (self-)realization is a question of the qualities (and forms) of the modern world at the heart of which the corporate obsession with the body, eternal youth, and sexual freedoms prevents existence in the original “spiritual body”.
1.3. The utopian body
In 1975, Michel Foucault analysed the “medical view” as one of the components of the modern “societies of control”, which in the context of the Nietzschean idea of revaluating (all) values generates the deformation of the newly established postmodern phenomena. Almost forty years later, the market democracy again prescribes, practically dictates a desirable view of the state of our bodies. Objectively speaking, there would be nothing provoking in it were it not for the laws of the market, which knows/recognizes only its own interests in everything, even in the body. The vitalist demands of the “open” market ignore the fact that the care of the utopian body is (also) a matter of personal responsibility, personal morality... The media, numerous clinics, advertising agents, cosmetic and aesthetic surgery centres are each in their own way – but with the same goal – (re-)defining our view of our body as a “duty, obligation, and responsibility” of caring for one’s “perfect appearance and a perfect body.” Responsibility for a “body culture” that is displaced, or rather positioned in the formula of a utopian body, is not a publicly formulated ethical discursive plane of genuine concern; on the contrary, it is a mere paternalist and consumerist-capitalist currency that seeks to live at the costs of our body. The reality thus construed raises ontological questions about the status of the (transformed) reality itself, about the relationship between mind and body, more specifically about the relationship between life in the biological and life in the utopian body. If one keeps in mind that the body cannot be separated from the spirit, i.e. psyche, then the utopian body is essentially a disembodied body formatted on a virtual composition of multimedia self-deception.
By changing the operational mode of the optics of power, the space of media public also transforms the role of the body as a social-psychological and anthropological-biological category. The body, that is, the desire for its utopianism legitimizes the social character of that “fact” as a new relational entity in the social system of observation, exposure and exhibitionism, and the transformation of power. In the (re-)presentation of such a subject, the postmodern individual is most afraid to go unnoticed and invisible, notes the German sociologist Markus Schroer (2010: 461).
Consequently to the raised issue, this relational discourse will also raise the question about the originality – immediacy of one’s physical existence in the world. If, then, one neglects or removes the ontological foundation of our givenness, then the body is only an object and an exhibition, which, in the desire and intention to be renown, cannot be known. The ubiquity of the body in the media space eliminates the order of knowledge as an experience of one’s own corporeality. The universally proclaimed new biopolitics of leanness seems seductive in its rhetorical mantra – healthy lifestyles based on a dietary regime, sports, and nutrition, leave no one indifferent... Accordingly, various global anti-aging organizations such as the European Academy of Quality of Life and Longevity, Institute for Longevity, or Institute for Extension of Life are inaugurated, but that is only the tip of the iceberg of the postmodern multimedia façade, which always accuses only YOU for having “neglected your body,” without regard for the regularity of bio-social laws! Speaking at the level of body care, François Cusset has said that health is no longer just a state of balance, but also an ideal encompassed by the term ‘form’, which has been in vogue in France since the early 1980s (2008: 23).
The policy of body care has becomes transnational and transcultural, as is, after all, the multicorporate global capital itself. Pharmaceutical giants and their partners are continuously developing a “responsible” stance aimed at internalizing control over the body as life politics, i.e. “biopolitics”. The culture of proclaimed care is so influential that in the US they have even introduced penalties for stubborn workers ‘who do not manage to achieve optimal weight’ (according to Cusset 2008: 23). The body thus programmed, or rather experienced, becomes both expropriated and extra-territorialized; it is a redistributive market unit for the media, the pharmacists, the fashion agents, and other management forms of sale of the measurable equivalents of consumerist culture. Targeted, multiplied action is proclaimed by means of advertising exhibitionism, which the French monthly Vital, by inviting a person to “become a personality” or to “realize” himself or herself, has summarized in the slogan: “Do you find it difficult to see your navel?”
From the time of ancient Greek civilization, where even religious ceremonies entailed competitions of bared, mostly athletic bodies, to the projection of modern-day models, the imperatives of desirability of the utopian body have remained the same. Incorporating such awareness into our physical field problematizes/generates issues of intellectual, emotional, and social development, as well as the development of creative potentials. The universally proclaimed context of the multimedia sociology of the body abolishes desire and experience, because the person is the observer of something that is and is not his or her own existence (D. Anzie).
Briefly, “thanks to” the technologized and mediatized existence in the realm of sensory amplifiers and virtual worlds, which have abolished the curiosity, exploration and struggle of existence, one cannot be a subject open to himself and others, to all his senses. The extensive desire to (self-)observe the body as the dominant form of (self-) presence in the age of multimedialism has turned into a negation of the very meaning of the body. By searching for utopian “identity dreams” through aesthetic-visual communication, the body in its (re-)design essentially positions itself in the finality of the sign as a materialized vision of conquering the imagined space of realized or materialized corporeality. The social “acceptability” of the utopian body does not only speak about the formal nature of the changed role of the body in space and time, but also and essentially about a structural change in the patterns of identity realization at the heart of which is the primacy of visualization. That is why, unfortunately, man is less and less a HOMO CREATOR.
1.4. Full body art
“I came up with the idea of having them paint me with drills that had felt pens attached to them. I stripped myself naked, although in local schools male models were forbidden to do that, only women were allowed... Both the professors and the students of that school painted over me. There were about three hundred people and each had one minute.” These are the words of artist Dragan Ilić about his performance Human Canvas, which he gave in 1979 for the students of the Brisbane’s College of Art. This radical performance, covered by all the local media, violated the law because the artist should not have been naked, but was eventually defended in court with the argument of artistic freedom. All professors were fired from the Brisbane college and a video of the performance is still to be found in the school’s records, says Dragan Ilić (2019).
The introductory words for the treated subject narrative will serve as a reflection and expression of artistic plasticization and the interaction between the artist and the body. In this spirit, let us start from the hypothesis that the body is an illusion. Conscious, unconscious, emotional, aesthetic, ethical, perceptive... or some other concept from the circle that self-defines illusion. Illusions change the experience, or rather dimensions – spaces, times, senses, and the sur-reality. The angle of observation transfigures the experience of the body. In the illusion, bodies are merged and separated, co-existing as oversized personalities.
The template of the “reality illusion” manifests itself paradigmatically (also) through the art technique of full body art, as work on the naked human body, by means of painted bodies, given artistic techniques, different colours, or colours similar to the human body. Simulating sameness, or projecting sameness, is a template for illusion itself. In the artistic composite of the “new body” we situate the imaginary settings, the limits of the performative, the power of the body, but no less the power of – thoughts. In this relational discourse of real-unreal body, the line of the body is explored, its in-finity. In a technical, artistic sense, the body is the emitter of the desired, perfect, utopian.
These artistic compositions, in our memories of our bodies and body experiences, and again not only our own, are detected as possible identity forms of our lifelines. These lines will range from pain, pleasure, consumerism, rituals, customs, lust, intervention on the body, to the mythologization of the body. Postmodern pluralism, whatever it may means in its praxis, perceives the body as a tool – an instrument in emitting the dichotomy of confirmation-contestation. Nothing in between. In this expanded field of art as a meta-narrative, life is displaced, replaced, and imaginated. Certainly it is a space of expressive languages of techniques and reflections on the self-experienced body as the avant-garde space of new visuality. Identity, gender, tradition, ethics, aesthetics, and freedom are the signifying maps detect corporeal spatiality. In this territory, the conceptuality of the body is deconstructed in a broader form, from ancient narrativity to consumerist banality.
Body art has its own history, evolution, conceptual forms of maturation, “growth” and the role of the body in this discourse. From the rudimentary drawings of our distant ancestors and the ritual exposures of the body to various myths and deities, through the aestheticization of the body as a form of attractiveness to the composites of radical constructs, the body is a distinctive, original, living human canvas of self-expression of artistic freedom.
We will wonder whether within the body punctum and the humanoid-robotoid trajectories, there are cognitions beyond the sensory cognitions of the world. From liberation to melancholy, where the world of the body is.
Body art is, among other things, a platform for political engagement, the radicalization of the body as an emitter of social policies, that is, the shaping of social identity and its transfer to a broader social discourse. As a canvas of political resistance, the body confronts and clashes, positioning itself as a showcase of political dramatization within which its visuality expresses an attitude, domination, and disagreement with the points of the body that in this literally “naked” corporeal way, radicalize the political discourse. Between the urban alternative of the body art scene and the language of the body in this performative form, there is a wide line of the human canvas within which there are intimacies, conflicts, contexts, attitudes, emotions, and resistances.
The physical essence, by this expression, abolishes the boundaries of the communicative, thus becoming itself a boundary. Illustrative-demonstrative statements are modules of variation in theme, intuition, subconsciousness, intention, and purpose in the realization of the message. Even in situations and places where the body is not a space for collective demonstration of the act, like in an visual expression of the standard setting of the artistic concept, it has a political meta-narrative.
Thus, in whatever way we may put it, from whichever analytical-observational plane we may situate the body, it is equally a traditional and a postmodern expression of artistic freedom, imagination, and play. Limited only by spirit and creation, the boundaries of the body are boundless variations within which the world of both ontology and gnoseology is positioned. Each artistically transferable point of the body is also a continuation of the line, like a prosthesis of human (im-)perfection. Body art thus disarms and liberates the body from biological bounds, directing it to new spatialities that become telling and artistically impressive. The sum of the individual points of a body thus painted is also a sum of collective experiences, pain, scars, the struggle of Eros and Thanatos, the survived yet even more non-experienced body. This new “revival” of the body seduces and translates into new experiences, asks questions and provokes answers.
Body art is an equally provoking text that calls for a dialogue the perfect, beautiful body, shaped by civilization, as a premise of someone or something else, outside of the me-you, we-you relationship. In this relational discourse, body art also fights against the mediological forms of presenting its body as an enemy, an imaginary enemy in the imperfection of its proportions, dimensions, shapes, weight, and age. Body art, whether individual or publicly conceptual, can also be positioned in this discourse as a form of guerrilla warfare, a continuous action in response to the imperfection of the body. It is also a struggle against the various forms of mimicries of the all-modern age, in which alleged understanding and acquiescence are essentially indicative of misunderstanding and non-questioning. This is why body art is the focal point of the broadest, civilizational dialogue, of this subject matter and the ensuing, coexisting ones. Regarding the implications for a total mass-media possession of the individual – physical, spiritual, mental, voluntary, it is only natural that one of the motives for deconstructing these issues is in a time of universal seduction, complacency, and narcissism.
Body art communicates between nature, biology, sociology, intuition, and imagination. As a corrective mechanism of the field, more or less, this art form questions the cosmogonic trajectories within which we face challenges, the boundaries set by our bodies and set before our bodies. Against the whiteness of the human canvas, we self-define spaces of beginnings and new beginnings, as the always first steps of the body in meta-physical movement.
With this art form, the body is in continuous motion, both linear and nonlinear. Each point is an expression of a distant imaginary point that returns through some observational prism to the world of our imagined or long-experienced points, identifications with them, griefs and joys. The point of that punctum is never a soulless, static unit. On the contrary, as a creative charade of power within the imagination of the body, it is a vitalist energy that, through its unconcealed aura, collects other points of artistic as well as psychological imagery.
If, in scientific terms, body symmetry is an emblem of the biological elite, then body art can also be viewed as a compensation or equivalent to corporeal symmetry, and moreover, all artistic asymmetry will be seen or experienced as a targeted, engaged disruption of the order of idealized phenomena. Asymmetry as a rebellion, a provocation, a rejection of the clicheization and ready-made labelling of aesthetic concepts.
In its appearance and conceptuality, body art abolishes all genetic-biological constraints through variation of forms, within which it is nevertheless emphasized that there are no absolute symmetries, absolute perfection or order.
In the metaphorical sense, body art abolishes the space overflowing with the mediated body, space of all sorts of emptiness – spiritual, value, ethical, aesthetic... Outside of arbitration in the relations of respectable paradigms, it is only the question of intriguing broader social collage that, in this way as well, yearns for interaction and the organic unity of dialogical, explorative forms. Essentially, it is a striking call against the self-abolishment of man.
As an original unfettered freedom, this form of art is a mediated tenderness of poetic expression in which the dream is the art of discovery. In this act of revelation, we are witnessing the transcendental renewal of birth as innocence, chastity, purity, and the beauty of becoming. In these images, there freedom with which body art begins and ends is sublimated.
Bibliography:
Cusset, François (2008), Le man diplomatique, NIN, Beograd
Schroer, Markus, “Der Voyeur,” in: Diven, Hacker, Spekulanten: Sozialfiguren der Gegenwart, ed. Stephan Moebius and Markus Schror. Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2010.
Tijelo – medijski narcizam
Sažetak
Popularna medijska spektakl industrija instrumentima “ zavođenja “ proizvodi “ dobrovoljnu saglasnost “ čovjeka u prihvatanju, oponašanju i vredonosnoj distribuciji korporativno-potrošačke kulture. U tom svijetu čovjek igra uloge van njegovih ontoloških potreba i samosvjesne realizacije subjekta kao misaonog bića.
Rad ima za cilj problematizaciju socijalno-kulturološke fenomenologije transfiguracije, prikazivanja i doživljaja tijela u optikumu konzumerističke globalizacije.
Novokonstrukcija “novog” tijela modelira se tehnikama instrumentalizacije, stereotipizacije i hibridizacije narcizma kao primarnog prikazivačkog načela takvog medijskog iskustva.
Key words: tijelo, narcizam, mediji, globalizacija, stereotipizacija, konzumerizama.