Interpretations of corporeality in the digital culture
This paper focuses on the ways in which text and corporeality interfere in computer-mediated communication, especially in the first stages of the development of the Internet. The idea of disconnecting the body from the subject represented a strong point of the ideology associated with New Media. The Internet has been considered a cultural mediator through which the differences that segregated humanity could be overcome, the central theme of this utopia being the apparent lack of corporeality in the digital communicational exchanges. In fact, the discourses that contain the idea of becoming free from our bodies “mobilize” the whole Western tradition of conceptual oppositions. The computer-mediated communication, especially the one based on text, was a proper environment for the re-assertion of the Cartesian ideal of the “pure mind”. Thus, the vocabulary of the emancipatory rhetoric of technology and the imaginary that the disembodiment had created are researched.
Keywords: body, textuality, digital culture, digital Cartesianism, computer-mediated communication, disembodiment
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