Posthumanizm jako projekt antropologii kultury wizualnej. Kilka obrazów ciała

Having seen the collapse of the basic axioms in the last decades—of human, body, nature, animal — we are forced to rethink their relations to reality, seen as objective and rational. As Aleksander Kmak argues in the chapter Posthumanism as a Project in Visual Culture Anthropology: Several Images of the Body, European philosophy was based on the paradoxical foundations of iconoclastic visual culture that didn’t recognise its own images and pictures but instead was convinced that the direct access to the domain of truth was indeed possible. Obvious differentiation between the reality and its picture is perhaps the best proof — and, of course, it’s not a coincidence that most often, it belittles pictures. Seeing in posthumanism the potential to transgress such anachronistic antagonisms which keep the critical thought trapped, Kmak perceives it as an iconophilic anthropology of a visual culture project that doesn’t set the truth of nature and the falsehood of representation in conflict any more. Instead, it creates more and more images and counter-images affirming their values without the necessary reference to the idea of objective truth and reality. Analysing some popular culture examples, the author proves how even in the age of advanced technologies the notion of body is still predetermined by the old antagonism of the truth and its image. Furthermore, it is shown how posthumanist, visual culture could intervene accepting the fact that the human body remains, from the moment of creation, a picture.