Communication’s drifts: the body as text

Abstract

The body is socially constructed as object and space of communication. Since modernity period the body has had a central importance in the western contemporary world as scenery of construction of the subject, naturalizing operations and practices of modification on its materiality, displacing its status of sacred for that of perfectible object. Several contemporary practices show that different corporal interventions gain presence and, at the same time, they are taking new forms defined by cultural processes that involve various aspects as the technological predominance and the advance of spectacle in daily life. The proposal of this article is to explore some senses and processes around the corporal modifications having as horizon in a time defined by the fluency, the patent that took out the company of telecommunications Nokia, of a system (in experimental stage) of vibrate tattoos that would synchronize with smartphones. It would appear in the horizon of senses the idea of the hybrid body, the transcendency of the human nature towards a technologically perfected body that links with the imperative of connectivity and with the overcoming of the limits of human body, corruptible and obsolete shell. This reflection is part of an ethnographic work developed with young tattooists in the capital of Neuquén's province, in Argentina.