The Body as the Ground of Structuring Cultural Discourses and the Phenomenological Dimensions of Modern Body Modifications / Kültürel Söylemlerin Biçimlendirme Yerlemi Olarak Beden ve Çağdaş Beden Modifikasyonlarının Fenomenolojik Boyutları

Abstract

The body is the immediate ground and dimension of the relationship and reality experience that human has with the world. The fact that the body is an experience of holistic embodiment beyond being a pure organism that brings it to a passive object for discursive construction, giving it a strong agency. Due to this potential of agency, discourses (scientific or cultural, traditional or modern) tend to be embodied through modification to realize and naturalize themselves. But, in some cultural approaches, body modification is evaluated antipathetically and differently in terms of the criteria of traditionality and modernity within the framework of the dualist categories. These dualistic categories impose the value-additive reductions such as original and degenerate, positive and negative, meaningful and meaningless, collective and individual, just like Cartesian mind and body dualism. In this reductive approaches, traditional modifications are interpreted as original, while contemporary modifications are criticized as narcissistic and degenerate self-projects of the postmodern individual. In this study, which focuses on the tendency to criticize contemporary body modifications from the point of origin-based and symbolic cultural approaches and the problems that this tendency emerges, it is discussed why modification practices should be considered within the framework of a phenomenological approach

Keywords

• body
• body modifications
• modern primitivism
• cyberpunk
• phenomenology