Body is reality. Il ruolo del corpo nella condizione postfotografica

Abstract

In a virtualized, hypermedia society, the postphotographic seems to reiterate a trend towards dematerialization, dissemination, and algorithmic codification, thus appearing to consign real bodies to ever-greater irrelevance. Drawing on a cinematic prompt from David Cronenberg’s 2022 film Crimes of the Future, this essay instead insists on the centrality of the body as a phenomenological and pulsional interface – even when it encounters increasingly immaterial digital and postphotographic technologies, with their uncontrolled proliferation of images, virtual environments, and simulated events. Of course, this is a hybridized body, foretold by Cronenberg himself through the narrative invention of the New Flesh – a kind of sci-fi horror version of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s notion of ‘flesh’ (chair). Yet despite all the contradictions and dialectics one may identify, the maxim flashing across the cathode-ray screens in Cronenberg’s film seems to point us in a clear direction: BODY IS REALITY.