Body & Society

This article focuses on the philosophy underpinning the non-mainstream body modification practices of `Modern Primitives'. This subculture seeks inspiration in the body modification techniques and bodily rituals of so-called `primitive societies'. Establishing their prioritization of body, sexuality, community and spirituality as analytical links, the author shows that these self-perceived radical opponents of Western modernity nonetheless remain captured in its foundational discursive assumptions. The author argues that the movement's enthusiastic turn towards `primitivism' represents a particular identity strategy within the late modern condition. Drawing on colonial discourse analysis, the author argues that the primitivist discourse originated as an ideology within colonialism and has informed the construction of the Western self-image. Modern Primitives' notion of `primitivism' is seen as a postcolonial legacy of this tradition of `othering', which inevitably reproduces stereotypes of racialized people.

This article argues that tattooing and body piercing in modern societies cannot be naively innocent acts; such activities cannot recapture primitiveness, because they take place within a social context, where social membership is not expressed through hot loyalties and thick commitments. Body marks in primitive society were obligatory signatures of social membership in solidaristic groups, wherein life-cycle changes were necessarily marked by tattooing and scarification. Modern societies are metaphorically like airport departure lounges where passengers are encouraged to be cool and distant, orderly and regulated. The article is thus critical of recent attempts to discover and unearth Dionysian moments of creative tribalism in modern youth groups or working-class communities. Body marks are commercial objects in a leisure marketplace and have become optional aspects of a body aesthetic, which playfully and ironically indicate social membership. They cannot serve as charismatic entrance points to the primitive.

Recent years have seen a considerable resurgence in the popularity of tattooing and piercing, a development that some have dismissed as a fashionable trend. Others have argued that the relative permanence of such forms of body modification militates against their full absorption into the fashion system. Drawing on interviews with a variety of body modifiers, the article examines this debate, and notes that certain tattooees and piercees appear, in some respects, to regard their tattoos and piercings as decorative accessories. At the same time, however, such corporeal artifacts are approached and experienced as distinct from other, more free-floating products in the `supermarket of style'. Whether or not their meaning is fixed in these terms, tattoos and piercings are employed by some as a form of anti-fashion and as a way of fixing or anchoring the reflexively constructed self. In this sense they share both affinities and differences with other forms of contemporary body project.

While body modification might generally seem to take the form of denaturalizing a biological given, this article looks at the same practice as normalizing the always already unstable corpus. The dominant discourse of the post-Enlightenment relies on the notion of the centrality of the individual subject within the singular and separate body, where distinctions between self and other are secure. Against this the incidence of monstrosity in general, with its disordered crossing of the boundaries of the proper, offers a gross insult. I look in particular at instances of conjoined twinning to demonstrate that the body can only be regarded as one by a process of material and discursive modification, which nonetheless finally fails to efface the trace of the monstrous other that frustrates the closure of the self-same.

Postmodern culture is usually defined as an age of mechanical reproduction and mechanical degeneration characterized by the eradication of performative aura. This article argues that a crucial distinction should be made between the `anti-auratic' arguments of mainstream 20th-century cultural theory (discussed here in terms of the writings of Benjamin, Baudrillard and Virilio), and the regenerative auratic tradition in 20th-century avant-garde performance (discussed here in terms of the successive explorations of the multimediated body in the work of the Italian Futurist Marinetti, the French sound poet Henri Chopin and the Australian cybernetic body artist, Stelarc). If Baudrillard's and Virilio's most extreme hypotheses argue that postmodern technology reduces the body to the condition of the handicapped, Marinetti, Chopin and Stelarc all demonstrate how technological modifications of the body reinforce the impact of installation art and performance art exploring (and manifesting) individual identity. Significantly, the most interesting subtexts in Benjamin's, Baudrillard's and Virilio's arguments all qualify their accounts of the alleged `death' of aura, and in Baudrillard's case now emphasize the ways in which photography `rediscovers' aura.

In previous actions the body has performed with technology attached (the Third Hand- actuated with EMG signals), technology inserted (the Stomach Sculpture- a self-illuminating, sound-emitting, opening/closing, extending and retracting mechanism operating in the stomach cavity) and Net-connected (the body becoming accessed and remotely activated by people in other places). The body has been augmented, invaded and now becomes a host- not only for technology, but also for remote agents. Just as the Internet provides extensive and interactive ways of displaying, linking and retrieving information and images it may now allow unexpected ways of accessing, interfacing and uploading the body itself. And instead of seeing the Internet as a means of fulfilling out-moded metaphysical desires of disembodiment, it offers on the contrary, powerful individual and collective strategies for projecting body presence and extruding body awareness. The Internet does not hasten the disappearance of the body and the dissolution of the self- rather it generates new collective physical couplings and a telematic scaling of subjectivity. Such a body's authenticity will not be due to the coherence of its individuality but rather to its multiplicity of collaborating agents. What becomes important is not merely the body's identity, but its connectivity- not its mobility or location, but its interface....

The events of performance artist Stelarc serve as a mediation between the discourses of cultural and social theory, science and the tropes of science fiction, translating theoretical and narrative models of the `posthuman' into performative parameters of corporeal actualization. His cultural and theoretical bricolage elides borders, creating a dialogue with numerous discourses surrounding bodies, sexual politics, `becomings', and the tension between Cartesian and phenomenological models of the body. Do his `events' offer empowered alternative bodies, or are they representative of a reductionist objectification of the physical, psychical, political and social body to a l'art pour l'art sensibility; subordinating (hyper)reality, theory and ideology to the `pure' aesthetics of art, image and performance?

While portrayed by some as an exemplary proponent of our putatively optimistic posthuman future, many see Stelarc's work as being indicative of the apocalyptic dangers of untheorized approaches to incorporating technology into the body. This interview with Stelarc attempts to clarify the artist's position on many such issues surrounding his work.

Orlan and Stelarc both work with the body as the primary medium for their art and both, in their very different ways, are interested in redesigning the body. Their experiments depart radically from popular and traditional ways of imagining enhanced forms of human embodiment and, in a climate of intense speculation about the future of the body, their ideas offer some important provocations. As performance artists, Orlan and Stelarc explore embodiment through enactment in ways that evade the stock formulations of cultural anxiety and open up fundamental questions about the nature and meanings of the human body, questions that are too easily foreclosed by over-heated imaginings about the `posthuman' condition.

This article falls into two parts. The first, which serves as an introduction to the second, is a first-hand consideration of the significance of Orlan's Conférences to the reception and comprehension of both her earlier and best known works, the surgical Interventions, and to the most recent manifestation of her artistic project, the digitally-manipulated photo-works in the series that she has dubbed Self-Hybridation. It contrasts these latter works with intervening static works which took the Interventions as their subject matter and concludes that they somewhat ironically release Orlan from her self-imposed obligation to maintain a performative element in her work through the Conférences. The second part of the article is an edited transcript between the author and Orlan in which the Self-Hybridations are subjected to technical, methodological and technical analysis. Orlan refers them to her previous work, particularly the Interventions, discusses their cultural and art historical roots, and speculates on her future art projects.

This article proposes that the French performance artist Orlan, has, by undertaking a series of surgical interventions on her face and body, radically challenged current standards of beauty. By engaging with Judeo-Christian iconography, Greek mythology and French literature in her operations/performances, she has established an oeuvre that aligns her not only with corporeality and the abject body through images of the sacrificial, but also with aberrant body forms associated with the carnival. Although seduced by the rhetoric that surrounds the body in technology, she has turned to excess as a strategy against the benign and controlled nature of the screen, and the media's homogenization of body images. Her new identity, although not extreme, is a site of resistance in a society bent on eliminating forms that threaten the status quo.

Freudian and phenomenological approaches to subjectivity allow the existence of a residual core self. Recent work within cultural analysis and sociology has rejected such a residue. The writings of Judith Butler and Pierre Bourdieu are two cases in point. In the former case, this refusal functions to provide the possibility of reconstructable gendered identities. For Bourdieu, it confirms the primacy of the social. In both cases, the refusal is part of a case made against psychological essentialism. However, the campaign against essentialism may not be served by the rejection of all aspects of the autonomous embodied self. As a test of the implications of this self-denial, an examination is made of the shift in transsexual discourse from the early culture of dissimulation to current trends of openness and the transcendence of dichotomous models of gender. It is shown that the model of citation found in the work of Judith Butler works poorly in the early stage, but works well in the later culture if stripped of its contingent association with dissimulation. The culture of open citation is shown to be dependent upon external certitudes which duplicate, in potentially stronger terms, the very essentialism which the rejection of residual selfhood was first meant to defeat.

This article addresses keep-fit culture not as a collection of commercial images or as the product of broader cultural values, but as a set of situated body practices, that is practices taking place within specific institutions where these images and values are reinterpreted in locally prescribed ways and, to some extent, filtered. Relying on fieldwork, fitness gyms are revealed to be experienced as places with their own rules, pleasures and identity games. The ideal of the fit body is shown to be filtered from its wider, typically gender- and class-specific charges, transformed into a pure instrument of training, a machine which does not bear resemblance to the organic body of the changing rooms, an objectified utility which is beyond any social role specification. Social roles and their body requirements are both important for individual clients' structural chances to join the gym and locally neutralized or reduced to tension-release mechanisms. Similarly, the cultural ideals of a fit and toned body contribute to the legitimation of the gym; yet the actual capacity to train is less the result of the direct grip of culture, than the outcome of clients' adjustment to playing a particular game of involvement with and detachment from the mechanistic and abstract exercise body. Body definitions are not simply imposed on clients, but continuously negotiated and transformed.

In this article, I explore the differend between the body and the law, without conceiving the body as a material or natural object external to the rules of discourse. To do this I use Jean-François Lyotard's reflections on Franz Kafka's short story `In the Penal Colony' to reflect on the bodily mode of exposure to sensibility: that is, aesthesis. This exposure comes `before' the law and is radically heterogeneous to the binary organizations of discourse, and not simply its other. This exposure to sensibility is a bodily mode that offers an other freedom to that prescribed by the law, and consequently it is this first `touch' of sensibility which the law must eradicate. By inscribing itself on to the body through body modificatory practices, it brings the body within its normative structures. I draw out the parallels between kafka's story and the simulated human currently on display on the Internet - the Visible Human Project. In this project, we can witness the materialization of a techno-scientific ideal of the body. As a form of inscription, it reproduces a `complete' body according to the rules laid down within the discursive practice of techno-science. It can do this only by actively forgetting this vital exposure to sensibility which precedes and disrupts it. The aim of this article is to think the violence of the law over this bodily mode of aesthesis and to bear witness to the wrong it institutes.

Using qualitative data, this article makes a substantive and formal contribution to the growing academic literature on bodybuilding and the sociology of the body. Placing a question mark against existing knowledge claims, it argues theories ascribing bodybuilding to antecedent predispositions are not sufficient when accounting for the ongoing variable project of creating `the perfect body'. It is asserted that physique bodybuilding (as opposed to weight-training) in the late 1990s could be independent of the `masculinist imagery' of `the muscular body' alongside feelings of gender and personal insecurity, but is increasingly dependent upon an acquired `ethnophysiological' appreciation of `excessive' muscularity. This phenomenological argument, which asserts the agency of bodies in social processes, focuses upon male participants' spatially and temporally contingent heterogeneous body-projects.

In this article, I focus on the media's framing of non-mainstream body modification as a social problem. I demonstrate, through an analysis of a sample of 35 newspaper articles on body modification, that a mutilation discourse is one of the dominant frames of meaning used to make sense of body modifiers in the mainstream media. This framing, which effects the pathologization of body modifiers, utilizes the claims making of mental-health experts and relies on a gendered account of body modification as a social problem. While news accounts are a medium for presenting body modification to a large `community of speakers', I find that they have precluded the legitimacy of the claims of subcultural actors. I argue from a poststructuralist perspective that body modifiers' `claims from the underside' are subjugated by accounts that problematize body modification through the dominant discourse of the mental-health model. I suggest that this frame is problematic for its silencing of `underside' or marginal embodied knowledges, which include, for example, alternative accounts of female embodiment.

This article suggests that a parallel exists between the practice of tattooing and the injection of heroin as both activities are represented in a body of literature here called `Junk Narratives'. These texts include William Burroughs' Junky, Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting, Jerry Stahl's Permanent Midnight and David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. In these books, act and meaning, as in life, are inseparable: tattoos can be interpreted, but that they are tattoos, that they have been indelibly inscribed into the flesh, is also stressed. In these books tattoos are represented as, in addition to whatever specific interpretive significance can be attached to them, visible markers of the hatred junkies feel for their own bodies. It will be suggested throughout the article that the body in these texts is always a source of shame and horror. Tattoos in these books do not decorate a body, rather they visibly emphasize its pathetic corporeality: no flesh, no image. The central dynamic of these texts is toward the transcendence of the body by the injection of heroin, a use of the needle which mimics the practice of tattooing and stresses the subservient, inessential nature of the body.

This article is an investigation into the ways in which anatomico-medical bodies are produced through means of public mediation and spectacle technologies. The examples of `RealVideo surgery' (surgical operations broadcast live over the Web) and the early modern anatomy theaters, provide two instances where `the body' enframed by science is mediated via technology. Referencing the genealogical work of Michel Foucault, and through an analysis of the anatomy theaters and RealVideo surgery, this article attempts to show how such institutionally framed and legitimizing science practices do not simply produce `the body', but are rather involved in multiply articulating different types of technoscientific bodies. At issue in such instances are the ways in which practices and habits of reading, decoding and recognizing bodies are being reconfigured in the utilization of such technologies as the Internet and Web, and the possible modes of critical analysis which may develop from within such instances.