Figurative convergence between body and image

Abstract

Two themes, discussed from ancient times in Western philosophical thought, are analyzed: the body´s imagistic representation and its symbolic discursive capacities. The concept of ‘figurative convergence’ will be introduced and developed in the wake of the conceptual articulation of the themes within the general aesthetic theory of sensibility related to new technological media. The emergent dynamics of the body representation and the differences that digital media imposes to the idea of representation will be investigated. There is more than a mere contingent and anchored unique and exclusive relationship between medium and body in the representation of the latter by the former. The essay shows how both reveal structural dynamics of complementarity, related to the figure dominion or to the dominion of material constitution of the mediation processes. So that they may be theoretically conceptually scrutinized, these dynamics require a reformulation of the way body configuration has always been understood by the media as, for instance, in the case of artistic pictorial works. On the other hand, as occurs in the esthetic world of arts, the idea of ‘figurative convergence’ should also evidence suppression forms that attribute a post-figurative statute to the body.