“Cultural Autopsy”: The Inner Body in the Visual and Verbal Space of the Modern Westerner

Abstract

The paper reviews the main trends in the perception of the inner body in the western culture of the late 20^th – early 21^st centuries caused by its wide discursivization in the visual and verbal formats. Up until the late 20^th century the inner body was culturally marginalized and routinely associated with something incomprehensible, irrational, and dirty. However, postmodernism, with its clear somatocentric perspective, removed the old conceptual and discursive restrictions placing the inner body into the cultural limelight. Until recently the inner body was deemed to be part of the individual’s subjective reality which was supposed to be felt rather than understood.  It was mainly defined through negation, by listing the features it was devoid of. The crucial phenomenological properties of the inner body were unobservability, unsociability, uncontrollability and unverifiability. In total, these features shaped the irrational mode of the inner-body perception prompting its discursive representation through mythopoesis. These features lose relevance with the development and ubiquitous spread of technologies, which enable online visualization of the living inner body, perceptual replication of the processes which take place within its realm and control over the activities of the inner organs. In the modern world, it is no longer possible to see these technologies as something external in relation to humans and something which is artificially brought into their experience of embodiment, because they are an integral part of our everyday existence (P.-P. Verbeek). Objective knowledge is no longer juxtaposed to the felt experience forming a synthetic unity with it. An extra factor in shaping a new type of the inner-body experience is people’s forced immersion into new discursive practices when the inner body is widely represented in their verbal and visual lifespace.